What’s it like being home?

That’s the question we’ve been asked the most over the past week and a half. And it’s a good question. Tough to answer, as it's "like" a lot of things. So far, for me it’s like:

- Watching Nan’s need to “nest” and reorganize the dining room, school room, bedroom, and garage—and being sucked into the nesting vortex along with her;

- Looking at a yard that could be the subject of a full-hour HGTV special titled “Hopeless Grass: Weeds Gone Wild”;

- A six-hour retreat as my first work meeting after four months;

- Watching our new little kitty slowly drop off to sleep, then slowly fall off the couch onto his head (...Nan lobbied for a "camper kitty" throughout the trip, but I managed to hold her off. Once we were home...well, the woman just can't be trusted in a pet store);

- Seeing Bentley get incredibly excited to see us when we went to pick him up, then watching him stand by the car to be sure we weren’t going to leave without him again;

- Being back at my desk at work wondering if I still remember how to do my job;

- Trying to put together a set of pictures to show people, knowing that looking at the pictures is more for us than for them…


Continuing in the spirit of lists, since our arrival home we’ve been chatting often about things from the trip that seem to be at least on the edge of miraculous if not quite worthy of a call to the Vatican. Here’s a partial list of the miracles, large and small, we’ve been discussing:

- Nan actually persuaded me to take a four-month trip. (On several occasions in the months before we left I said, “This will never happen!” and I meant it.)

- We traveled for the full four months without even considering cutting the trip short.

- Over the course of the trip we stayed in or at least passed through a full half of the states in the US of A.

- According to the odometer, we covered a few tenths over 12,407 miles, pulling a trailer for most of it. If someone built a few long, strategically placed bridges and we straightened those miles out, we could have gone about halfway around the earth.

- We didn’t have a single mechanical breakdown of any kind…not so much as a flat tire. If I wouldn’t have left the crank in the back of the camper during week 1, we’d have had a flawless trip. All the tools I brought and the advance preparation for disaster went thankfully unused.

- Aside from Nan getting a few days of something resembling the flu while we were in Alabama, and a couple of runny noses for the rest of us spread across the states, our travels were injury and serious-illness free. All the first-aid supplies and medications we brought were also thankfully untouched.

- Our kids get along so well, it’s astonishing. They are truly best friends. After four months on the road together, sharing an end of the camper, spending every waking and sleeping moment together, they returned home and are now taking turns sleeping in each others' rooms. As I type this, Kerby is sound asleep on the floor in Joelle’s room after a long, happy day playing together with their neighborhood friends.

- Both our kids love to read. They read so many books on the trip that we were looking for bookstores almost as often as we were looking for grocery stores.

- We have friends and family who like us enough to take care of our dog, our cat, our snake, our rabbit, our mail, and our house for four months. And everything is perfectly fine…

- I managed to get a surprising amount of work done while we traveled. Not needing much sleep is quite helpful. I was afraid it’d be impossible to get anything done, but thanks to my early-to-bed/late-to-rise family, things flowed easily.

- We’re still married and not even considering divorce.

…Those are the kinds of things that pass for minor miracles at our house. Alas, The Big Trip has come to an end, and we’re back at home happy as clams. We had such fun. Wonderful memories, great family time, and even some work along the way. For now, it’s time for all of us to get back to life and work—living the dream, as always!

Simon--The Legend with Knobby Knees

The Big Trip's Grand Finale - Minnesota and Iowa

Proving the truth of the old adage “Time flies when you’re having fun,” we’re on the way home. At this moment we’re in a motel in South Bend, IN, just down the road from Notre Dame University. We’ll cover the ground between here and Richmond in either two or three more days, depending on our mood as the days progress, then we’ll be back where this all started. It seems like we just left home, though it also seems like we left years ago. There’s unpacking to do, we’ve got to collect our animals from the wonderful folks who’ve been taking care of them, and we just plain have to get back to the real world after months of traveling around the country. Adjusting to life after a week’s vacation is hard enough—I have no idea how we’ll adjust after our four month odyssey. There’ll be yard work to do, mail to sort, calls to make. The water has to be turned back on, the camper and truck cleaned up, shopping to be done. And so many people to see and thank for their help…

The Big Trip wrapped up with about 10 days in Minnesota and Iowa hanging with my family, adding a couple days to meet Joelle’s biological sister who also lives in Iowa with her adoptive family. I see my family all too seldom these days, and it’s such a gas to have time to spend talking, hanging around, and catching up. I have a funny family, so there’s always lots of laughter going on. We also eat and eat. And we eat. For entertainment purposes only (or at least primarily), some of us took a trip to the great Mecca of capitalism, the Mall of America. We rode the rides and shopped some of the shops and, yes, did some eating. The kids had been talking about the MoA for a week before we went, so they’re always jazzed to go. It really is quite the place. I think our favorite new product (sold in several stores) is the giant beanbags that convert back and forth from even king-size beds to chairs/couches. You've gotta love that there are people out there trying to find new uses for their 70s beanbag chairs.

The toughest part of being back in God's country was seeing how much my mom’s Alzheimer’s has continued to progress. She still seems to be happy and enjoying herself, so that’s something…but all in all it’s hard to see her fading away a little at a time. A thousand cheers for my sisters who live near her and are doing the work of caring for her. Nan and I both choked back tears every time we visited…I’m sure they do the same far more often. It’s such a nasty disease, slowly robbing people of their memories and ability to think. Mom had pretty good visits while we were there, knowing that she knows us (even if she can’t remember our names) and chatting happily about whatever crossed her mind. Still, it’s hard to believe how much she’s lost. Whenever we can’t think of a word or lose our train of thought, my siblings and I all wonder if we’re in the early stages...

Alas, in the morning we’ll be hitting the road for another six or so hours. If we’re in the mood, we may pause in Bowling Green to see my grad-school alma mater, but otherwise we’ll have to keep ourselves occupied across the flats of Indiana and Ohio. We’d initially talked about saving some days to spend for touring across here, but this stretch of I-80 holds a limited number of hard-hitting tourist destinations. (The lyrics to the old John Denver song “Saturday Night in Toledo Ohio” keep popping into my head.) (Ok, you can stop laughing at me for knowing the lyrics to John Denver songs.) But we can take a break and tour if something strikes our fancy… We’ll see how it goes.

As things come to an end, I have to say a giant THANK YOU to Lindsey and Sue who’ve continued along at work without me. For no additional compensation beyond this paragraph, the two of them have had to simply add my work to theirs over the past four months. The good news is they’ve done so with their usual skill and efficiency. The bad news is that they’ve proven I’m mostly a figurehead. (I’m tenured, so I can live with that…) I can’t thank them enough for their support, as without them, we never could have left home.

I’m sure I’ve got more entries in me, but with just one more night on the road I’ll no doubt be sending the next one from home (once we get the cable turned back on). From Richmond to the Everglades to San Diego to Seattle and home again, it’s been quite a ride!

The View from the Ferris Wheel at MoA

Gift Shops of the Greater United States

I’ve alluded to this before, but my wife absolutely loves gift shops. And I mean loves them. I can walk through the door of the average gift shop, make a quick casual loop around an aisle or two (hands always in my pockets so as not to touch or break anything), and head back out happy as a clam. Not so with Nan. For her, each gift shop is a new and exciting experience. She can’t wait to see what’s around every corner. She talks about how so-and-so would want this or someone-else would love that, always handling everything that catches her eye. And she deliberates at length about buying things that seem so impractical to me I can’t imagine what she’s thinking. “Where would we put that?” “What would we possibly do with it?” “What is it and why would anyone pay that much for it?” …But such questions are annoyances. She has a vision for it, and I’m just being a poop. (I’m not a poop, in general, but I can definitely play that role.)

For the first month of our trip, the kids and I had smiles on our faces and wandered happily around the gift shops with Nan. By month two, we were getting bored with the shopping, but we humored mom’s interests as best we could. The third month we attempted a rebellion. We said we wouldn’t go in any more gift shops and that was final. Nan said that was fine, we could just wait outside. At the first gift shop, in she went and outside we sat. A few minutes later I was picturing some odd new piece of art or a set of matching Hawaiian shirts and couldn’t stand it anymore. So I grabbed the kids and in we went, setting ourselves up for another month of gift shops. Now that we’re in the fourth month, we’ve resigned ourselves to the gift-shop tour, and as I’ve accepted the inevitable I find I’ve learned a few things.

First, I’ve learned that gift shops sometimes contain local jokes or information that everyone in the area knows but that are new to us tourists. I’ve chuckled at things like SLO being the widely-accepted and even bragged-about moniker for San Luis Obispo and at t-shirts in Seattle that sported slogans like “To Err is Human—to ARRRR is Pirate” and a ripped off logo for “ARRRbucks Coffee.” We’ve seen information for art shows and vegetable festivals and celebrations of local heroes or people in need. We’ve chatted with gift-shop employees and owners about must-see attractions and the best local restaurants and the life of running a gift shop, and we’ve found that some of the local color is definitely for sale or casual review in gift shops.

Second, I’ve learned that gift shops reinforce the local stereotypes as best they can because that’s what we tourists really care about. We want to buy cheesy replicas of the Golden Gate Bridge or a street car in San Francisco, a pot covered with cactus art in New Mexico, a small plastic pair of cowboy boots in Texas, and the jawbone of an alligator in Florida. Why do we want those things? Did I fall in love with cacti in the desert? Did I have to kill an alligator with my bare hands to save a member of my family in Florida and want to be reminded of my heroics? Do most people in Texas work as cowboys? Are a bridge and some street cars all there is to San Francisco? No to all those questions—but it’s the stereotypes and the well-known attractions that we tourists want to see, want to remember, and want to show off to others saying “Look! We were there!” This stuff isn’t endlessly immortalized in gift shop after gift shop just to keep China’s manufacturing sector fully employed; we tourists really WANT to buy it. And we do so, with joy in our hearts.

And finally, I’ve learned that both gift shops and the people who visit them vary widely in their mindsets. Some gift shops are as cheapo as they can be, providing as many chintzy plastic objects as they can squeeze onto their cluttered shelves. Some mix the cheapo stuff with some better, more interesting stuff—like books, objects that might be considered actual art by local artists, indigenous food, and substantive information about local history or sites. And some gift shops are high-brow, with only nicer things that cost significant money but you can understand why people might pay it. We’ve been in some very nice shops with impressive furnishings, aged wine from local vineyards, clothing that doesn’t have off-color slogans printed on it, excellent educational materials, and one-of-a-kind art objects. And just as gift shops vary, so do their patrons. There are “Lookers” (I’ll admit it—I’m a looker) (so to speak) who wander in, make a quick pass through, then out they go. There are the “Hopefuls” who head in excited at the prospect of buying something or, better, of getting their parents to buy them something. And there are the “Shoppers,” the people who are always on the lookout in every shop for just the right thing for self or other. You can hear them walking around saying, “I LOVE that!” or “So-and-so would LOVE that! “ or “Don’t you just LOVE that?” And the truth is, I often do. I mean, who wouldn’t want a plastic street car, some miniature cowboy boots, a pot with a cactus painted on it, and an alligator's jawbone?

Reprise: Sitcoms in Real Life

A week or two ago I wrote an entry titled "Sitcoms in Real Life" during which I relayed the story of a remarkably patient younger woman listening to an elderly woman jabbering on and on about fish tacos in a deli on Fisherman's Wharf (“Fish tacos are interesting. I think they’re interesting—do you think they’re interesting—fish tacos? I’ve heard of fish tacos lots of times. I’ve never had one, though. I’ve never even seen a fish taco. Have you ever had a fish taco? I’d like to try a fish taco sometime. Do you think they have them here? Fish tacos? I’d like to try one…”). That entry and that woman may not have changed your life, but as of tonight they changed mine.

There we were, ready for dinner, seated in a Sheridan, WY, restaurant called "Olivia's Kitchen" ("Fine Mexican and American Food"). I have a tendency to go with burritos or enchiladas in these kinds of places, but there it was at the top right on the second page of the menu: "FISH TACOS." The description was a little vague, but it seemed to involve tilapia, tortillas, and coleslaw. What's not to like? So in honor of the woman from Fisherman's Wharf who was obsessed with fish tacos, I placed my order. The verdict: It was delicious! Three pieces of fish were cooked perfectly, with each laid on its own double-thick tortilla. On top of each piece was a good-sized spoonful of the spiciest coleslaw in history. Tasty, but flaming hot. So while the bad news for my camper-mates is that I won't likely be a pleasant partner in our small space later on this evening due to the hot coleslaw, the overall combination of tacos, fish, and slaw were excellent.

So I'd like to hereby thank the old lady with the fish-taco fixation for changing my life even just a little. And I encourage you all to push out there on the edge and take the big risk... Try the fish tacos!

I could definitely live here...

Nan and I have had a lot of funny conversations about the places we’ve visited over the past few months. One of our running themes is usually kicked off by Nan saying “I could live here!” and me chuckling about how she's said that most places we've visited. She’s been enamored with many of the cities we’ve seen, campgrounds we’ve stayed at, and lives we’ve observed. And while I’m not as “easy” (so to speak) as she is, I’ve found more than a few places I think I’d enjoy living as well. Here are just a few of the possibilities:

We all very much enjoyed Orlando, particularly the way our friends, the Williams family, live it. They’re right at the back door of Disney, and they’ve found that Disney is wonderfully supportive of home-schooling and just plain a lot of fun. Epcot provides no shortage of learning opportunities and programs, as do other Disney properties and resources. The weather was cold when we visited but is usually nice, and we found much to love as we meandered around the town and its suburbs.

As I mentioned in my Grand Canyon post, I was particularly taken with Williams, AZ, mostly for its small-town feel near such a big natural attraction. Bandon, OR, where our friends the Carbieners have taken up residence (and who treated us like royalty when we visited), was also wonderful. Both towns were beautiful, small, and made me feel like I could walk the streets without a care in the world. Bozeman, MT, and Sheridan, WY, also gave us the same kinds of big/small feelings. And San Marcos, TX, seemed like another place that mixes well attributes of both big and small towns, and we enjoyed it a lot, though having friends there talking up its virtues may have biased us a little. It’s worth noting, however, that in all of these towns we've seen relatively few non-white people. As a bi-racial family traveling the country, we’ve been surprised at how segregated things seem to be. As but one example, Easter Sunday we went to the First Presbyterian Church in Spokane, WA, and found it to be a terrific blend of contemporary and traditional. A genuinely inspirational and engaging service. But counting Kerby and Joelle, there were 4 total non-white faces in a packed house of hundreds of the worshiping faithful. As we've traveled, it's made us wonder if race relations are improving in our country or if we're just better at finding ways to separate ourselves enough to be comfortable. It's also helped us appreciate our own at least somewhat diverse neighborhood. (By the way, “Frank’s Diner” in Spokane was one of our favorite restaurants. It's in a converted train car, the food is good, the service excellent, and the ambience fun…)

Anyway, Malibu was (big surprise!) absolutely beautiful, and living anywhere around there along the ocean coast would be both breathtaking on a daily basis and financially preposterous. In general, California weather has been the best on our trip, but this has been such an odd weather year it’s hard to tell overall if we’d have enjoyed the winter/spring months as well elsewhere. The southern states are all so hot through the summer, and I’m not a huge fan of really hot weather… Of course, I admit to still missing living in Duluth, MN. I’m not sure I’m tough enough to move back up there, and I know Nan’s not a fan of even the idea of spending winter in the great white north, but there’s a quality of life in Duluth that I haven’t seen anywhere else.

I think the winner of the “place where we’d most like to live” contest, among the cities and towns we’ve visited so far, is San Luis Obispo. SLO (the acronym is both funny and a nice description of how things seemed to operate) appears to combine in just the right quantities attributes of a big town with a small-town feel. A few weeks before we visited we read somewhere that every Thursday they hold a Farmer’s Market downtown. So we planned our visit to include a Thursday night, and it turned out to be a lot of fun. At 5:30 the police close one of the main downtown streets, and all kinds of vendors and restaurants and musicians and causes set up booths. Politicians roamed the streets drumming up votes (we Virginians were a disappointment) while individuals set up tables hoping to add signatures to their petitions (my favorite was a totally stoned guy working to legalize marijuana). Various organizations that support the poor were represented, including one that really caught our attention--the Lifewater.org group. They used a number of creative methods to draw people in and inspire a sense of the importance of providing fresh water for the 1 in 8 human beings who live without it. (Check out their website!) There was also food food food, from fresh produce to giant BBQ sandwiches to ethnic foods of many types to mini-donuts and churros. And we ate plenty… Kerby joined a bucket-drumming group for a few minutes, Joelle loved the bubblegum alley, and I had an enjoyable conversation with a couple of CA Highway Patrolmen about the 55mph limit for all vehicles towing trailers (as though anyone in CA drives the speed limit...). All in all, there were a ton of people at the kind of event that many towns hold once a year, but here it’s a weekly thing that people attend in droves. We liked it a lot, and we loved touring the town, hanging out at the beautiful campground, and seeing memorable things in downtown shop windows--like a set of 4 well-dressed manikins, each holding a pair of binoculars as though looking through them at us…yet the manikins had no heads. Odd but amusing.

We also liked that the town seems to be geared around its downtown and its countless small merchants rather than some Wal-Mart-anchored strip-mall off on the highway. We’ve passed an incredible number of Wal-Mart/Home-Depot/PetSmart combos as we’ve crossed this great land. Over and over again they appear. Yet when we visit towns like SLO, or Bandon, OR, or Sheridan, WY, it’s clear to see that most of us who base our communities around the same chain stores have traded a sense of community to save a little money each month. (“Save Money, Live Better”…Makes you wonder.) The words of the German tourists we met in Chokoloskee, FL—the ones who were disappointed to see that all the stores in the US are the same no matter where you go—have rung on in our ears, because they’re too often right. We’ve found it a joy to see places like SLO that work to hold onto their community through some creativity and an ongoing commitment to just plain being who they are rather than to being just like everyone else.

On the whole, one of the things our whirlwind trip around the country has done is show us that there are lots of wonderful places to live. And home is what you get used to—your roads, your neighborhood, your Wal-Mart…I mean stores, your weather. For us, we’re happy in Richmond. It seems pretty likely, because of my job and Nan’s family, that we’ll just keep hanging out in the commonwealth until we retire and decide to become snowbirds, traveling and camping. Assuming we don’t strangle one another or get hit by a bus or win the lottery in the meantime. But once we do have the chance to travel longer-term, it seems likely we’ll be returning to some of these places to stay for extended periods of time. A few months here, a winter there… And we’ve been enjoying the opportunity to do some advance scouting of the various possibilities.

Where's Waldo - Find Nan at the SLO Farmer's Market


Kerby Joining Bucket Busters at the Farmer's Market


You've got to love a good Bubblegum Alley

"I have flying monkeys and I'm not afraid to use them"

Every place we've visited during our travels has been different, unique in its own right. But this place is—well, it's more different than most. We’re in Myers Flat, CA, Pop 200, Elev 204. It's about halfway up the "Avenue of the Giants" in the land of redwood trees. And some of the sights around here are truly breathtaking. The Eel River winds through, flowing along right behind our campsite. We spent hours this morning walking along the river skipping rocks and looking for pieces of jade. The campground is a bit rough, but with some TLC it could be a really nice place. Unfortunately, fixing it up would mean it’d no longer fit into the neighborhood. Yes, the river is on one side, but around all three other sides is a neighborhood of mostly dilapidated single-wide mobile homes decorated with rusted-out cars, junk galore, and appliances of all types, refrigerators being the most popular. (Remember the three most important things when buying real estate: Location, location, and lack of rusted-out cars, dead appliances, and trashed mobile homes.) Yesterday we especially appreciated the guy (and it had to be a guy) in the place next door to the campground who blared away at full volume several hours of the old screaming acid-rock music from the 70s and 80s with, unexplainably, Sheryl Crow and Kid Rock’s song “Picture” repeating about every 30 minutes.

A few posts ago, when we were visiting the Grand Canyon, I wrote about how much I liked the little town of Williams, AZ. As we moved along we found that Nan and I both liked San Luis Obispo, too. In part, I liked Williams because it had such a nice small-town feel. S.L.O. felt a bit bigger, but it still felt “small” in some ways. Some small towns remind me of the town of “Grady” in the movie Doc Hollywood. That movie, and towns like Williams, make small-town life seem just plain wonderful. It’s like they bring us back to the old days we’re sure must have existed—times when the world was safe and simple and people cared about one another. Well, Myers Flat, CA, ain’t Grady. The town is an easy walk from our campground, so we headed in to explore and let Nan get a cup of coffee in the coffee shop on the corner. We expected a little tourist town; what we found was…different.

Honestly, it’s kind of a grumpy little town, with maybe a dozen total buildings on main street, a little more than half of them occupied. The Laundromat is closed, there’s a former restaurant sitting vacant not far from a small post office that has limited hours during the week and literally one business hour on Saturday (9:00-10:00am). There's an inn that looks pretty nice, though we saw only one car there. There were a couple of stores selling a surprisingly eclectic set of things--one that sells unusual tie-dye clothing, does embroidery work, has a tanning salon, and carries a small handful of redwood-tree-related souvenirs. Two doors down is a store filled with antique dolls and clothes and china teacups. Next to that is a store that sells handbags and scarves, and next to that is a market with a limited supply of overpriced groceries that does what it can to spare people the ride over to Garberville. The coffee shop, our walking-trip’s destination, has a sign behind the counter that says the owner serves sarcasm for free. And we found that to be true enough. When we walked into the store he came in behind us. Turns out he was just sitting in his pickup out in front waiting for business. (When we left, he went back out again. Door open, no radio on, no phone. Just sitting out there in his truck for reasons we couldn’t see.) He made a crack about Nan’s coffee choice that would have insulted her if she had thinner skin.

All of the stores, including the coffee shop, have signs posted that say "No Public Restrooms!" …Clearly there are lots of people stopping in just to pee. There’s a trashcan outside the market that sports a big sign that says "NO CAR GARBAGE." We saw “No Whining” signs and "No Parking" signs and “No Trespassing” signs and "No Sniveling" signs (in the coffee shop, near the no-sarcasm sign--and on another wall was the flying-monkeys sign mentioned in the title). In general, there seemed to be a lot of things you’re not supposed to do in this small town and lots of warnings not to mess with the people in it. Don’t park in their spaces or ask to use their johns or whine about things you don’t like or leave your garbage in their garbage cans. Just shut up, spend your money, and go along your way seemed to be the message.

But wait—the odd observations continued. For instance, across the side-street from the coffee shop is a house with all manner of junk covering the front yard, piled all over the porch, oozing around the sides of the house...everywhere. And cats. Lots of cats. (Including one sitting on an obviously dead refrigerator on the porch.) Nan and the kids are suckers for cats, so they paused in front of the driveway to pet a friendly one. Suddenly the passenger door opened on a car sitting in the driveway and a woman scowled out saying "No picking up the cats! Someone came by and picked one up, then drove off with it! You can pet them, but no picking up the cats!" Then she shut the car door again. (What's up with people sitting in their cars?) Two doors down from her there was a dog laying on the shoulder, barely out of the traffic lane, in front of the town’s saloon/liquor store. He appeared to have been hit by a car and was looking pretty rough. I wondered if he was still alive or already a goner—and if he was a goner, why was no one doing anything about getting him away from in front of the saloon? Were they just planning to keep driving over him? As I approached the dog to see if he was alive or dead the scruffy old thing rolled over, looked at me, then went back to sleep on the warm pavement. There in the road. In front of the saloon. (I’m going to guess his name is “Lucky.” It’s obviously not “Rocket Scientist.”)

Just a few more yards down the road from the saloon is a very nice, tastefully decorated wine-tasting place for the wines of the local vineyard, adjacent to a fancy, fairly expensive restaurant. (Here?!) And next to that is one of the four drive-thru redwood trees in the area. Now we’re talking! So we walked back to the campground, got the truck, and drove through a redwood tree with no more than an inch of clearance on either side of the truck’s folded-in mirrors. After that we hiked around in one of the gorgeous redwood forests you always see in magazines, and we’re going back to do more hiking tomorrow.

Ultimately, this is a quirky, depressed place nestled among stunning forests with trees that are the largest and most beautiful in the world. As always, we chatted with a few nice people today, including a couple from Quebec who are on a year-and-a-half long bike trip around the US (making our little four-month venture seem puny by comparison—especially when the hardest thing we have to do is crank up the top on our little rolling home away from home). The locals seem unhappy with the decision by the CA government to shorten the state park season and to leave the closest park closed for the entire summer. The parks bring the tourists, and now the diminished tourist season will only be about six weeks long, starting after the weekend of the 4th and ending with Labor Day, without the most popular park. And that won’t likely be enough to keep all these shops in business. ...Maybe they have the right to be a bit grumpy, all things considered.

As we talked about the day, we found the trees brought us some perspective. We saw one that had fallen a number of years ago, and the tree had roughly 3200 growth rings. If each one equals a year, it was already over a thousand years old when Jesus walked the earth, and it’s not until you reach the outer inch or so of this giant that you get to when the thirteen colonies were being established or when the first people decided to found a little place called Myers Flat, CA—or Richmond, VA, for that matter. There are other trees around that are a thousand or even two thousand years old, and plenty more that are much smaller now but that will grow and grow over the centuries ahead, still standing long after people have forgotten what “blogging” was. The flying monkeys sign, and the people chuckling at it, will be long gone, as will the refrigerators and coffee shops and old dogs in front of saloons---yet these trees will still be standing, making someone new feel brief and small. So in that light we'll shut up, spend some of our money, enjoy the trees, and move on...to Oregon, next.

Near the Campground...


My Wife Looking Small

Sitcoms in Real Life

I wrote what I thought was a poignant post about a family event relating to marine life, but upon further review it seemed to be making fun of a helpful albeit Napoleonic park ranger, and there was some question as to whether Nan’s budding relationship with a seal might constitute a violation of the federal Marine Mammal Act, so I decided the better part of valor was to keep that one to myself. Instead, I’d like to take a few moments to apologize to writers of sitcoms everywhere. For years I’ve muttered “I’m so sure that’d happen…”and flipped off the TV during those preposterously dumb, obviously contrived scenes that seem to be inserted in sitcoms just to create opportunities to add canned laughter. I now apologize, because the last few days in California and especially San Francisco have provided an ongoing set of sitcom-esque scenes. They'll likely lose something in the translation, but just the same, here are a few examples:

- At our last campground, Kerby and I headed into the bathhouse for showers. There were three separate showers, and he and I took the back two. The hot water blasting away was making it pretty steamy in there, but I could still smell smoke drifting in from a campfire at one of the nearby sites. It smelled like they were cooking something good, and I shouted to Kerby over the shower-wall, “It smells like Bar-B-Que in here!” Without missing a beat I heard a man’s voice call out from one of the biffy-stalls, “I’m pretty sure it’s nothing I’m doing in here…”

- While I was checking into our campground here on the ocean just ten minutes from downtown San Francisco, two older guys came into the office to check in behind me. They were obviously traveling together, driving their huge RVs. The one guy said, “Did you notice coming through the toll booths at the Golden Gate Bridge that there were wide lanes and narrow lanes for paying the toll?” The other guy said he’d noticed. The first guy said, “I didn’t, and I wound up in a narrow lane. As I pulled out, a post pushed my right-side mirror flat against the window. I couldn’t see a thing!” The other guy said, “I was wondering what you were doing. You started cutting across lanes and cars were jamming on the brakes all over the place. I’d never seen you drive like that—and I don’t think anyone else had seen that kind of driving either. Well, at least you had your signal on...like always.”

- At Fisherman’s Wharf we sat and ate big bread-bowls of clam chowder, enjoying a nice lunch in a restaurant. After we finished eating, I waited at the table with our stuff while Nan and the kids headed off for a restroom break (adhering to our family traveling-motto "Never pass up an opportunity to pee"). Sitting there, I couldn’t help overhearing a conversation between an older woman with an obvious hearing problem and a younger woman who was proving why, when you look up the word “patience” in the dictionary, you find her picture. The older woman was going on like this: “Fish tacos are interesting. I think they’re interesting—do you think they’re interesting—fish tacos? I’ve heard of fish tacos lots of times. I’ve never had one, though. I’ve never even seen a fish taco. Have you ever had a fish taco? I’d like to try a fish taco sometime. Do you think they have them here? Fish tacos? I’d like to try one…” And on and on it went. I so wished I had a fish taco handy...

- It’s San Francisco, and of course you’ve got to ride a street car in San Francisco. So we figured out where to board, got our exact change ready, and waited a few minutes for one to come along. The first car that turned up had a big “Board in the rear” sign, but as we approached the rear doors we saw the car was packed with people. We decided to wait a few minutes for another one. After just a few minutes, a second pulled up, and as the doors opened Kerby and Joelle immediately jumped on at the rear. As soon as they entered, the doors shut literally right in our faces and the engine revved as though it was taking off. For a second Nan and I were on one side of the doors and the kids were on the other and we just looked at each other---our own variation of a scene that’s been played out on a thousand sitcoms. As the stunned-moment passed, Nan pounded on the door and I looked ahead wondering how many blocks I was going to have to run through traffic before it’d stop again. Fortunately for me and the nearest cardiologist, as I looked ahead planning my run to the next stop I saw that the front door was open and we were supposed to board via the front on this car. Dopey tourists. So we hopped on, paid our dough, and had a herky-jerky ride on A Streetcar Named Defibrillator down The Embarcadero.

- And finally, from some suspect reports via Nan, I’m not above filling the role of a stereotypical sitcom character myself. Nan has been telling me for weeks that I sound like a sitcom dad on vacation. According to her, as we drive along on our various adventures, I’m apparently maintaining a running monologue about things like our gas mileage, how windy it is, how bumpy it is, how long it’ll be before we get there if the traffic gets better or worse, how many road signs we’re seeing for one thing or another, how the sun always seems to be shining in on my side as we drive… An ongoing driver’s monologue that she occasionally thinks is hilarious and that occasionally annoys her into telling me to stuff a sock in it. Of course, she’s doing her own stereotypical-character thing. The kids and I are consistently making comments about how, on her behalf, we should have titled our trip “Gift Shops of the United States—Trying to Visit Them All!”

So that’s my apology to sitcom writers. We at times feel like we’re making our own sitcom as we go, but I suppose that’s normal when life is as odd as it’s gotten to be these days. Anyway, in the morning we leave San Francisco and head north to the giant redwoods. We’re living in serious denial about the approach of April, but it’s coming whether we want to admit it or not. Just the same, I think we’ll continue to enjoy every last minute of March…

Morton


Some Bridge (We rented tandem bikes and rode over, back, and around a bit just for the experience...)


My Wife and Her Crab-Legs

49er

I started to write a philosophical blog entry about turning 49, but it was sounding whiny and making it seem like I think I’m getting old rather than just having a birthday so I canned it. Suffice it to say I had my birthday a few days ago and spent the most memorable part of it on the back of a horse named “Tank.” Tank, I, and the rest of the family (mine, not his) were led around a series of trails by Kaitlyn, a kind young woman riding a whitish-colored horse and facing backwards until my neck started to hurt in sympathy for her. Obviously this wasn't the first time her horse had walked these trails, and it's a good thing. He made plenty of twists and turns while she was facing backwards talking with us, making me wonder at times if it was her or the horse leading our trip. Either way, it turned out fine and we all made it back to the stables before dark.

The kids are taking riding lessons back home, and we said we’d try and find someplace to go riding along the way on our big trip. We figured Texas would have all kinds of riding opportunities, but we couldn’t find anyplace that was reasonable and open when we were. So we kept looking, across Texas into New Mexico then into Arizona. Finally, just a couple of miles from our campground in the suburbs of San Diego, we found a place that does trail rides. We wanted the kids to have a chance to really ride, and to ride for a good long while, so we dedicated the afternoon of my 49th birthday to riding. And off we went, following a winding trail through a nature preserve, with Nan’s horse (“Stanley”) being a big pain in the oats. He kept stopping to eat and wouldn’t go again until he was good and ready no matter how bossy Nan tried to be. But the rest of us had been assigned trusty steeds who behaved themselves well and did what we asked of them—namely, they went where we wanted them to go and they went there calmly. Slowly. Casually.

It turned out Tank and I were especially well matched. On this particular day we were both happy to mosey along going nowhere fast. And I enjoyed that he’s a horse who eats as he walks, dropping his head and grabbing mouthfuls of whatever was available, stripping whole branches of their leaves or ripping out large clumps of grasses and flowers without missing a step. At times he’d have three feet of weeds complete with roots and dirt clods hanging from his hay-hole as he ambled along, chewing and walking, chewing and walking…an impressive blend of function and form. My kind of horse.

Ultimately, riding a horse named Tank was the perfect way to celebrate my birthday. Nan never knows what gift to get me, and I’m never really sure what kind of celebration I’ll be in the mood for until the big day arrives, so overall I'm usually a big birthday-pain-in-the-fanny. But this year I got to join my family in pretending to be cowboys riding the open range lands of California, riding long enough to feel like we’d been somewhere but not long enough for me to need hip surgery to straighten my legs. Perfect!

And, of course, afterward I followed Tank’s example of eating whatever’s available and horsed down a giant piece of chocolate cake. Happy birthday to me… It was a fine one! And to make it even better, we’re following it up with a few days camping on Malibu Beach, where the temps are supposed to be in the 70’s with lots of sun and sand.

Wyatt, Morgan, and Virgil Earp, with Doc Holliday

Kerby: "I don't like that they call it 'Sin City'"

On our way from the Grand Canyon to San Diego we somehow found ourselves in Las Vegas. Truth is, we didn’t want to do the 8+ hours on the road to SD all in one day, so we figured we’d stay overnight someplace like Barstow, CA. As we drove across Arizona on I-40, we saw signs telling us Las Vegas was 115 miles away, then 90---and suddenly Barstow wasn’t seeming like much of a draw. We'd been thinking Vegas was further out of our way than 90 miles. So we pulled off at the intersection of I-40 and Hwy 93 and did some quick internet searching. (You’ve gotta love having the internet in your pocket these days.) The famous “Circus Circus” Casino, hilariously billed as "kid friendly," had rooms with perks for $39—cheaper than a Motel 6. It’d just be one night, it’d be an experience, and the alternative was Barstow. So we went for it.

On the way you can't miss the Hoover Dam, which was wonderfully impressive. We were surprised at what a tourist attraction it is. So many people stopping and touring and shooting pictures. Quite the chaotic scene. And then came Vegas. And Vegas is…well, Vegas.

As if this isn’t apparent to anyone within 100 feet of me, I’m a nerd in more than a few ways. My momma raised me with good, meddling morals, and to this day I struggle with being places like New Orleans’ Bourbon Street and the Vegas strip. I feel like I’m not supposed to be there—and while some people find that feeling exhilarating and it inspires them to fits of rebellious wildness that include serious drinking and tattoos and other things I won't mention on a g-rated blog, it just makes me feel guilty. I felt guilty as we checked in, I felt guilty as we hung around the hotel, I felt guilty as we checked out the casino… While walking our way down the strip, we stepped over countless small paper ads scattered for unknown reasons on the sidewalk, with each piece of paper showing a scantily (or not-at-all) clad woman advertising something, though I couldn’t tell what. With Nan and the kids present, I couldn’t bend over to examine them more carefully (to determine the product being advertised, of course), but just the same, I felt guilty for being there, with those ads.

Would the kids be corrupted forever by our short visit to Vegas? No, and neither would I. But I just can’t bring myself to let go and have fun. I’d be the perfect character for one of those movies where I’m somehow trapped in a cross-country venture with a woman of ill-repute who eventually corrupts my morals in an endearing way and we fall in love and live happily ever after (or at least until my nerdiness reasserts itself and she takes off with the bartender from “The Scurvy Dog Bar and Grill” down the street from where we’d no doubt be living. But I digress…)

We’d planned to gamble a set amount, something else that makes me feel guilty when I consider the world’s needs, but then decided we’d spend most of our intended gambling money on a gift I can’t describe here lest its recipient find out what we bought. Suffice it to say, we were left with about $20 total to use in testing our luck, and about half of that we let the kids spend in what turned out to be a pretty good lesson in losing. They put about $8 in quarters into various attempts at winning and wound up with 10 rubber balls and 11 Tootsie Pop suckers. (At the end, they wished we’d have just given them the $8 to spend at Target.) Nan and I dropped our few dollars into the slot machines, winning only enough to keep us going for a while longer than held our interest. In retrospect, we should have dropped it into something like lottery tickets that could have paid off in a big way if they hit, but it was an interesting experience just being in a big-time casino so we aren't complaining. We also enjoyed the Circus Circus circus acts (going every 15 minutes), the buffet dinner (which left us stuffed like turkeys), and the swanky room (which the kids said beat the Motel 6 and Travelodge by a mile, though to me a motel room is a motel room). We saw famous casinos while walking the strip at night (if 8pm constitutes night) and enjoyed all the excitement and people. And then we got up and made the drive to San Diego. Here, in a nice state park on a reservoir, we’re more in our element and I don’t feel like quite as big a nerd or at all guilty. We can hike and build fires and write blogs and not have to feel like we’re corrupting our kids.

I think today’s school work will have a lesson or two on honesty to try and neutralize the effects of Vegas. I mean, what’s parenting if we can’t pass on our nerdiness and guilt to our kids?

The Grand Canyon

I’m not sure how to talk about Grand Canyon. I don’t know how to convey in words something so large and beautiful and terrifying (even with the railings, we were all a bit nervous getting out toward the edge). We read about how it came to develop and we saw it from a wide range of viewing areas. We looked down and out and across, and we wondered what we’d have done a few hundred years ago if we’d have ridden up on our horse to one side of the canyon wanting to get to the other. “Jump, Trigger, Jump!” just wouldn’t cut it. And we heard people speaking languages from across Asia and Europe and New England expressing awe at what they were seeing. (How do you say, “Wow!” in Japanese or French or German or Spanish?) And we worked with the kids on earning their “Junior Ranger” badges, learning something about the canyon, the rock, the history, and the wildlife. But in the end, we’re just like everyone else who visits the Grand Canyon then is stuck trying to share what they’ve seen. “Wow! It’s amazing!” And there you have it.

It’s also clear that you can’t capture it in pictures either. But that doesn’t stop us from trying, especially in this era of digital-cameras. Everywhere Nan and I would stop (to shoot the same pictures) a dozen other people would have their cameras pointing in the same direction taking the same pictures. And so have millions of others across the years. Some have tripods under giant cameras attached to 18-inch long lenses with polarizing filters and extended hoods to block the sun’s glare. Others held up cell phones or cameras so small you could put four of them in the same pocket. Some took great time and care with each shot, while others just whipped the camera out and fired away. At one point I told Nan that we should all just skip taking our own pictures; they should have a set of pictures available at the visitor’s center and we should each pick our favorites on the way out. She said, “I think they call those ‘postcards.’” Good point. Then we agreed that we all want to take our own pictures hoping for a miracle shot—and because we want evidence that we had been there ourselves.

I’m sure Nan and I will both be posting pictures that look alike, as will everyone else who was there at the same time we were… But so it goes. WE were THERE! The weather was beautiful though a little bit hazy and the crowds were thin. We’ve heard that if you come during the summer you often have to stand and wait for a space at the best viewing areas because the crowds are so large. That was definitely not the case for us. Plenty of people, but no lines even as sunset approached. We attended an interesting ranger presentation on California condors and found only about 15-20 others there with us (rather than what I’m sure is a huge crowd on the weekend during nice weather). And the kids had a fine time tromping around in the snow and occasionally peeking or throwing snowballs over the edge. Like most parents we were afraid to let them get too close, but in truth, we’re both clumsier and dizzier than they are, so there was probably more risk that we’d stumble and clod-hop our way into the abyss than that they would.

The little town of Williams, AZ, where we’re staying is one of my favorites so far. Nan has said she would like to live in about 80% of the places we’ve visited, but I’ve only seen a few that inspired me to price the real estate—and this is one of them. We hiked the historic downtown area (this used to be a Route 66 town) yesterday, and later we visited a nice little park on a beautiful lake just a few miles outside of town. There are parades and events and four distinct seasons and horses and a train that blows through during the day and at night to remind you there’s a world out there somewhere. And I’m sure there are tourists galore during the spring, summer, and fall leaving their dollars behind to support the shops and motels and restaurants. All this right at the foot of the mountains and 50 miles from the Grand Canyon. What’s not to love?

Anyway, we were here! And now…California, here we come.

Seriously? Here?

As we traveled from Odessa, TX, to Carlsbad, NM, we stopped and had a wonderfully gas-producing lunch at a little Mexican restaurant in Pecos, TX. Namesake of “Pecos Bill,” that legendary character who shot out stars, occasionally rode mountain lions, and truly loved "Slue-Foot Sue," we found Pecos-the-town to be somewhat less…legendary. It squats, flat as a pancake, in the midst of a desert that could easily be the set for one of those movies where you see some sweaty fool trapped under a relentless sun staggering around whispering “water…water” through his cracked lips until he falls face-down in the dust. ("Cue the buzzards.") Heading north out of town on an endlessly straight, two-lane highway, I found myself glancing up on occasion looking to see if buzzards were circling our own mini-caravan, then back down at the temperature display on the dash…Whew—still 61 degrees. Gotta love towing a trailer through the desert in February!

As we drove on for miles and miles, with sand and cacti galore for scenery, I couldn’t help but envision a family (like ours, in my head) a few hundred years ago who’d risked it all to come to the new world, purchased a wagon to carry their meager possessions, and headed west to settle on their own land. I can imagine the wife (whose voice sounds, not surprisingly, a lot like Nan’s) saying with building intensity as the horses slowed to a stop, “Seriously? Here? We did all this, we came all this way to stop Here? HERE?!!!!”

As I mentioned back in maybe my second blog entry, everywhere we’ll go on our trip, someone calls it home. Including Pecos, TX. And the few people we saw in Pecos seemed right at home. We received lots of pleasant smiles and hellos from people in the Mexican restaurant, suggesting the people there were happy and glad to see us tourists. But still… Why would someone have stopped there, in the era of no air conditioning and no bad TV westerns to romanticize it, and made it home? The heat, the tumbleweeds, the lack of water, the absence of arable land, even the occasional poisonous snake… (“Here?! We’re going to live HERE?!!”)

I’m sure that with thousands of people reading my blog entries, word will get out about these comments and I'll wind up getting some nasty emails from the Pecos Chamber of Commerce and possibly the mayor---assuming the Pony Express can carry emails (rim-shot). But before the Pecosians try and blow sand up my shorts, I have to admit that I’ve asked these same kinds of questions often about my own home of origin--Minnesota. After freezing off various parts of their respective anatomies during that first long winter, why didn’t Laura Ingalls Wilder and family load up the wagon at the earliest sign of spring and head south, thanking God that they survived the cold and were blessed with sense enough to look for a more temperate climate? Whatever the reasons, they stayed put. And so did the citizens of Pecos. They stayed in the desert and to them it became home. So if the chamber of commerce and the mayor want to send me nast-e-grams, I’ll deserve them, because home is wherever you’re from—hot or cold, north or south, sane or not. God bless the people for whom Pecos, Texas, and the desert highway between there and New Mexico, are home.

(Still—Nan’s voice rings in my ears. “Seriously? HERE?” I can imagine myself climbing down from the wagon to survey our new land and Nan quickly grabbing up the reins. “Yah—giddyup” she’d yell, and off she and the kids would go at a gallop, looking for someplace reasonable in which to plant roots. And there I am, running behind yelling “Wait! Wait for me!! AT LEAST DROP A CANTEEN!”)

Mixing Up Our Days

There really are a lot of interesting places in this great country of ours. Places that make you laugh, wonder, cry, be inspired, look away… We’re just wrapping up our Texas Tour, leaving the Dallas/Ft. Worth area tomorrow morning. We’ll do a driving day, going as long as we feel like toward Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, then stopping at a motel for the night. Then it’s two nights around the caverns, followed by three nights by White Sands, and it’ll be time for the run to the Grand Canyon.

As usual, a few sentences like that convey our trip logistics but they aren’t the experience. In a quick look back at my blog entries, I can see myself trying to slice off pieces of our trip and convey them via words and pictures, but I can tell I’m not succeeding. Not really. I just plain don’t think it’s possible to describe days and weeks like these. Take the past three days, where we’ve mixed everything from a spiritual event to bull riding to junk shopping to great moments in American history…

What we’ve found is that our kind of traveling is creating days that are strangely mixed. We read, do school work, then walk through Grand Prairie’s “Trader’s Village” (which is also our campground, if you can believe it), easily among the world’s largest yard/junk-sales, walking for blocks and blocks until we’re lost, buying things like a $2 wallet, an ear-brassiere (or at least that’s what we called them when I was a kid), roasted corn, and the purchase of purchases: A Magic Chef that Nan just used to make coleslaw and salsa to go with our burgers for dinner. Then we find ourselves finishing up a history lesson on the pilgrims on our way to downtown Dallas, where we tour the Sixth Floor Museum, a truly touching presentation of the story of President Kennedy’s life and death. Or we meet up with a Richmond alum who has, since her college graduation, gone on to complete seminary and is now serving as one of the pastors for the First Presbyterian Church in Arlington. She’s gracious enough to spend the day with us, taking us down to the historic Ft. Worth Stockyards where we see cowboys herd cattle down the street, Kerby rides a mechanical bull, Joelle sits atop a saddled steer, and we all taste our first ever fried pickles. (By the way, I’m proud to have several former students who are now in ministry positions, and we’re looking forward to seeing another when we get to Los Angeles.)

Now as the day ends and tomorrow we head toward yet another of the United States, the wind is blowing like gangbusters outside, at times shaking the camper hard from side to side and frequently blowing out the pilot light for the water heater. In the calm pauses between gusts I can catch an occasional whiff of marijuana coming from the huge camper parked next to us. (They’re a rough-looking group of five or six guys from Arkansas, all dressed in camouflage clothes when they arrived—we could hardly see them [rim-shot]. Fortunately, they’ve been quiet and polite, as has everyone here…. Not sure what this group is hunting for in February around Dallas, but I didn’t want to seem like a smart-arse by asking.) I’m still feeling full from the giant piece of fish I was served for lunch at The Press Box in downtown Dallas and from the hamburger I had for dinner, and I’m certain I need to eat better over the next few weeks or there’ll be a lot more of me coming home at the end of our trip than there was when we left. And I’m looking forward to ending this burst of blog-writing energy and getting back to reading a book I’m not yet sure I like.

Maybe other people would craft a trip like this with more structure, more organization, less of a hodge-podge of daily experiences. Not us. We’re loving just going with the flow and seeing the strange way days and weeks come together. We asked the kids tonight if they were enjoying the trip—if they liked the balance of going and staying, being busy and just hanging out—and they said they were having a great time. They really are a game couple of boogers. And Nan said she’s liking it, too, and not yet looking forward to all the hustle and bustle of being at home. And I’m with her. We know we’ll be home soon enough, back in our familiar house with our pets back and friends and family (at least some of it) around, but for now we’ll keep mixing up our days and wondering what we’ll see next.

Addendum: It took me two days for us to get internet through which to post this. In the meantime, we’ve again demonstrated our winter-weather making skills. In addition to bringing record lows to normally warm places, last night we brought 6 inches of snow to Odessa, Texas, and on into southeastern New Mexico. It’s snowing until noon, so in the interest of keeping our show on the road and out of the ditch, we’re motel-ing it for another night. It’s supposed to be warm sunny tomorrow, so we should be back on the road to somewhere bright and early.

(The Sixth Floor Museum on JFK in Dallas)


(Kerby's Ready to Ride...)


(Joelle on "Pecos Bill")


(Nan and Reverend Marian Trying Fried Pickles)

Keepin' it Weird for Ya

The great state of Texas… We’ve been here about a week, and we’ve been having such a grand time that neither Nan or I have done a blog entry. Truth is, I was working on an entry about our camper biffy (for all the non-camper-owners out there) but it wasn’t coming out very well so I’ll keep working on it, and Nan’s written an entry or two but the campground’s internet connection is slow and she’s having trouble getting pictures to upload. She says she’s going to get one done today, so I'll do the same. Here are a couple of observations as an update...

Yesterday, as we walked up Congress Street in downtown Austin, there was a woman dressed in an outfit appropriate for any beer-filled Octoberfest celebration. She was clapping her hands to the beat of a song she was loudly singing, giving her solo musical performance some real heart and volume. As we approached, she smiled and yelled “Just Keepin’ Austin Weird For Ya!”, then on she sang. We later found out “Keeping Austin Weird” is a campaign the locals have embraced. My own life experience suggests there’s plenty of weird around pretty much everywhere without the need to intentionally create more, but if they think they’re becoming too normal who am I to argue? We loved that lady’s enthusiasm, and we repeated her line often during the day that followed. For instance, while shopping in the Whole Foods flagship store (the thing’s huge), I turned around thinking Nan was behind me and, doing my best Tom Hanks/Polar Express impression, said directly into the face of a long-haired man, “Well? Ya Comin’?” The guy just looked at me for a moment, I mumbled “Just keepin’ Austin Weird For Ya…” and quickly went on my way. Like I said—plenty of weird in this world without intentionally creating more.

We had a great time on our visit to San Antonio. Oddly enough, we found that seeing the Alamo is more educational after you watch a little 15-minute presentation at “The History Shop” across the street. Phil Collins (weirdness returns) narrates the presentation of a scale model of the Alamo, describing the battle and its participants. Later we visited the Hall of Horns at the Buckhorn which features things like 15 foot tall Irish deer (more weird), had people throw beads to us from party-boats on the mobbed Riverwalk in a pre-Mardi-Gras celebration (a little weird), and ate wonderful Mexican food (nothing weird there).

(The most familiar view of the Alamo)


(Kerby meets Jim Bowie)


In Austin, in addition to seeing the lady who was keeping Austin weird we had a nice walk along Town Lake on a path filled with joggers and dog-walkers and cyclists, all there in the middle of a workday. (Who are all these people—academics on sabbatical? Don’t they have jobs? Weird). We rode the Zilker Zephyr, a kiddie-train at Zilker park that we honestly enjoyed (weird family). We explored the Splash! exhibit that explains where the water comes from that feeds Barton Springs, in which swam lots of shivering souls who don’t mind the 68 degree water (cold and courageously weird). And we toured the Texas State Capitol and learned, among many other tidbits, that Texas has been in some fashion part of 6 countries—Spain, France, Mexico, The Republic of Texas, the US, and the Confederate States. It’s the only state to have been its own country (possibly weird…certainly unusual…and it explains at least in part the great state-loyalty among Texans and why students from Texas always have the Texas flag up in their dorm rooms while students from other states often have trouble picking their states’ flags out of a line up). Finally, we did a driving tour of the University of Texas at Austin (plenty of weird there) and ate at Stubbs’ BBQ (not weird, as it’s rated by several publications as the best BBQ in Austin). We also had the chance to spend some added time with Meagan (a not-weird Richmond alum), her husband Richard, and their very cute new baby, Gideon, and we found ourselves as we left feeling a bit like baby Gideon seemed to be feeling—stuffed, happy, and ready for bed.

(Who IS this lady?)


(In the Texas State Capitol...)


We’ve been staying in San Marcos, TX, (halfway between San Antonio and Austin) at one of the nicest campgrounds we’ve found so far. Our campsite overlooks the San Marcos River, and all the amenities here are clean and in great repair. There’s a heated pool we’ve been swimming in, lots of dry kindling around for fires, a great laundry room (in which I’m writing this while our laundry spins), individual bathrooms with continuously hot showers…all of which is unusual in combination. Pecan Park is quite the place! Courtesy of some wonderful friends, we had an amazing tour of the brand new headquarters of McCoy’s Building Supply Company (based here in San Marcos and source of my hat collection), and we took a tour of one of their stores as well, giving me lots of time to grunt like Tim the Tool-Man Taylor (yes, I’m weird) and cook up excuses for buying more tools. We had dinner with the McCoy family and continue to believe they’re the nicest people on earth.

(Campfire Night)


(Honking the Horn on a Forklift at McCoy's HQ)


We could definitely spend more time around here, but all the eating out has been killing our budget (not to mention ballooning our waistlines) and there’s still lots of month left. Today we’re going to work a bit, pack up a bit (the longer we spend somewhere the more our stuff tends to expand), and tour San Marcos a bit more. The weather has been beautiful (60s and sunny), and that’s supposed to continue for the rest of the week. Dallas is next, then we head toward Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands in New Mexico.

So that’s the weirdness update. We've found weird here, but honestly, no more than anywhere else despite at least one woman's efforts to raise the level. Mostly we've found interesting sights, good food, and fun people. And we feel like we could move here...though I suspect in the July heat we'd wonder what we were thinking. Anyway, if I can get the entry on the biffy flushed out, I’m just weird enough to post it.

Keep it weird!

60 Seconds on the Perfect Evening

It’s cool out, probably around 50, and very still. We’ve got a campfire going, lighting up our part of the dark, and we’ve roasted our hotdogs and made our s’mores. A raccoon keeps coming up and mooching food off the soft touches in the family, while grumpy ol’ dad keeps saying “It’s a wild animal—stop feeding it!” as though it’s not standing on its hind legs doing everything short of playing the banjo and singing show-tunes to earn its handout. The crickets and frogs are chirping away in the bayou swamp that’s just a few feet from our campfire, and Nan and the kids are laughing about some story Kerby and Joelle are both trying to tell at the same time.

We’ve seen so many wonderful sights and still have many more to see, but it’s moments like these that we’d most like to bottle and bring home. And since I was just bringing some food in off the picnic table (so Rocky doesn’t make off with it when we aren’t looking), I thought I’d try and send a bottle out to you via the blog. Hope you get it.

Well, there’s a fire burning away out there without me...


(Here’s Rocky the Mooching Raccoon along with a picture of our campsite here at Sam Houston Jones State Park in Lake Charles, LA. First, water and electric are usually behind your camper in campgrounds, but not here for some odd reason, hence the hose going across—and second, yes, we really are that close to the swamp.)

Someplace you really ought to visit and some thoughts on the weather

Someplace you ought to visit

On our last full day in Alabama we visited the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and we were sincerely wowed. This place does a remarkable job of capturing the pains and the struggles and the achievements of heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Shuttlesworth, Ralph Abernathy, Rosa Parks, and the countless others who were hosed or beaten or bombed or jailed or even killed in the civil rights movement. It’s a place filled with exhibits and videos and speeches and news reports. And memories and questions and sorrows and joys. It captures well the countless individual and collective acts of courage through which our country was changed and our own little Johnson family was, decades later, made possible. Yes, there’s still much more rights and respect work to be done today, but the progress made from the mid 1950’s to the late 1960’s was tremendous due to the sacrifices of so many.
Honestly, this really is a place you ought to visit....

(They don’t allow photography inside, so the only pictures I have are from the park across the street. The BCRI is the brick building in the rear of the shot with Kerby and Joelle in the window near the children being sprayed by a fire-hose. The sculptures and artwork inside and out are wonderful, as the statue with the dog, cop, and protestor shows…)





The Weather

Not surprisingly, we’ve gotten a lot of comments and questions about how we’re coping with the bizarre weather. (Typically, the questions go something like "So--have you frozen your arses off yet or what?") By all reports, Richmond is facing yet another ice/snow storm this weekend, and it’s still not really the “usual” Richmond snow season. Clearly, this is an odd weather year. Fortunately, we haven’t been facing snow or ice here in the deeper south. If we do face such a thing, we’ll undoubtedly head for a motel or other warmer venue to wait it out. Just the same, we continue to inspire bouts of cold weather and major rainfall everywhere we travel. During our nights in southern Alabama it got below 30 for the low temp for two nights, and one night it rained like a herd of cattle, dumping well over an inch on our little home on the gravel. But the worst part was the wind. There were moments that night when I wondered if we might actually tip over. We spread our weight around the camper as best we could and kept ourselves calm by continuing our nightly Harry Potter reading—-though I wound up hoarse after a while from having to shout over the roar of the wind and the relentless rain drumming on the roof and canvas.

Really, wind is the hardest thing. If it’s windy, we’re much more likely to need to fire up the “big heater”--the propane heater built into the camper. Mostly we just run our little electric heater and it keeps us comfortable. Runner up to the wind for potential misery-production is the all-day rain. Tonight we’re in New Orleans, and it’s been raining continuously since early last night. All night. All day. And all evening… Non-stop soaking rain. There are puddles everywhere outside, and we’ve talked off and on about how likely the camper would be to float… I think it’d float pretty well, though probably not for long. The others thing it’d leak like a sieve and just fill with water. God willing, we’ll never have to find out. I will say that I’ve been impressed with how well our camper does in the wind and rain. It’s been literally POURING out there for nearly 30 hours, and we’re dry as a bone from stem to stern. Gotta hope that continues. Anyway, for the day we’ve just holed up in here nice and dry, venturing out only to the bathhouse for a shower, and truth is we’ve had a nice time of it. Lots of quality family time. The good news is that tomorrow it’s supposed to clear up, so it’ll be back to the French Quarter for some more sightseeing. I’ll blog about that and add some pictures soon…

So to answer the questions about our frozen arses and how we’ve been dealing with the cold, wet weather--during the day, we wear layers, keep our jackets handy, and try to keep active. At night, we bundle up and snuggle in, with our heaters doing what they can to keep us comfortable. The kids are in fleece snug-sacks Nan made, with another fleece blanket under them and two more on top. Both wear hats and tend to cover their heads while they sleep. On really cold nights (below 30) we all wear long-johns under our jammies, hats on our heads (I've got this great ninja-looking ski-mask that never fails to elicit laughs from Nan...but it's nice and warm so I can live with the ridicule), socks on our feet, and slippers, too. And the truth is, we tend to sleep like logs. With just the electric heater on through a 35-degree night, it’ll probably stay right around 60 in here (though colder at floor level). Not exactly warm, but tolerable. Just the same, the nightmare is waking up in the middle of the night and needing to “make dew.” The dew-room seat feels mighty cold at night, so it’s decision time: Do I have to go that bad? How long is it until morning? If it’s something like 1:30am, you get up and go; 6:00am, you hold it; somewhere in between and you need to make a decision. Is it worth getting up or can this be ignored while I get back to sleep? We all seem to make that decision in our own way and for our own reasons… I’ll leave it to you to decide what you’d do. On nights colder than around 30-35 degrees we add the propane heater, with the thermostat set low, to the electric heater's usual good work. The electric heater helps keep the temp more steady, and it keeps the propane heater from running as often. When the propane heater kicks on it really warms the place up fast, but working alone on a cold night it can drain a whole lot out of a 20- pound tank of propane. It also turns off completely when the thermostat trips, so it’s warm-up fast, cool-down fast, repeat. The electric heater evens off the ups and downs some.

The only real warm days we had were in Florida, and we all wound up with a pile of bug bites. Honestly, I’m not minding it being cool, but it’d be nice if we could see the sun more often. Tomorrow through Sunday are supposed to be partly cloudy to sunny, and we’re all looking forward to that. Beyond Sunday, who knows what the weather will bring.

So there’s our life with the weather. Not what we expected when we planned the trip, but we’re resilient and it’s been manageable. Here’s hoping we soon stop inspiring places to set record lows and avoid major ice/snow storms for the duration…

Here's the view out the side window of the puddles forming from the rain rain rain

Spin

I raise the issue of “spin” for two reasons: First, I’m writing this on the first of four nights we’ll be spending at “The Woods RV Park and Campground” in Montgomery, Alabama; second, over the past two days we’ve spent a little time at “The World of Coke” and the “Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site.”

1. The Woods: As I sit here in “The Woods,” just a hundred or so feet from “the lake” (a VERY small man-made fishing pond), the sounds of nature abound. For instance, there are the natural sounds of Interstate 65, pulsing with traffic literally one block away, similar to the natural sounds of highway 80 which is just a couple hundred yards away in another direction. Obviously there’s a busy hospital not far up the road, as ambulances with sirens wailing have been going by every 30 or so minutes all evening. To find “The Woods” you exit I-65, go one block east on highway 80, then turn right onto a road/driveway inserted between an Arby’s and a gas station adjacent to a Popeye’s chicken restaurant. As you enter “The Woods,” you see an office building in front of a large, completely cleared field that's surrounded by a thin stand of trees on all sides. The field contains maybe 100 water/electric/sewer hook-ups, each next to a nice, level, gravel RV site. Because the kids were there when we checked in, we were given a site near the playground—a sun-bleached kiddie-play area with a couple of small slides and a tiny playhouse/fort. With the rides and excitement of Disney still ringing in their ears, the play area wasn’t enough to even draw the kids over for a look. So instead we made a fire in the tire-rim-fire-pit and we poked sticks into it—cooking our “hobo packs” for dinner on the coals as we poked—listening to the traffic whiz by, the sirens wail, and, oh…have I mentioned the train? It’s a few blocks away in yet another direction, and the whistle blows with enthusiasm at some nearby crossing. Whenever a siren or loud truck sound would draw our eyes up from the fire we’d see the beautiful view from “The Woods”—a view I’ve captured and tried to convey, in all its wonder, in the picture below. True moment: About halfway through watching our dinner cook on the fire Kerby looked at me and said with sincerity, “I LOVE this campground!” “You do?” I said, thinking he may be kidding. He wasn’t: “I like that if we want we can just walk right over to Popeye’s or Pizza Hut or McDonald’s or Wendy’s or Arby’s!” he said, pointing at each. “And the Popeye’s chicken smells really good. Can we get some tomorrow?”

How did we wind up here? you might ask (though if you’ve been reading earlier entries you know we’re mostly using the force as we make our travel reservations). Aside from it being very well located for our planned tourist attacks, here’s what we knew about the place from The Woods’ website:

"Is it time for you and your family to take that vacation you've been planning for so long? Are you ready to get away from the hustle and bustle of your stressful work schedule? If so, visit us at The Woods RV Park & Campground LLC, where you can relax and leave all of your worries behind! We understand the value of a well-earned vacation. That's why we do our best to help you get the most out of your vacation. We do this by maintaining our campground to perfection and offering a wide array of campground utilities. We believe that our customers should be able to relax in the cleanest environment possible. In addition, our RV park provides an excellent area to make your stay enjoyable. Whether you want to relax and enjoy the benefits of modern technology or want to feel completely in nature, The Woods RV Park & Campground LLC has what you're looking for!"

Now THAT’S spin. My favorite line is “…or want to feel completely in nature.” The only way I can think of that you could feel completely in nature here would be to lay at the bottom of the pond with your eyes closed, though I’m pretty sure you’d still be able to hear the train and probably the traffic under the water. In truth, this is a fine place for a stopover if you've got a big RV and you're going somewhere else, but it's a real stretch of the imagination to see this as a naturalist's vacation destination.

2. The World of Coke and Tuskegee: With Atlanta’s Stone Mountain mostly closed yesterday, we opted to head into downtown Atlanta for a tour of “The World of Coke.” We paid our $50 for tickets and proceeded to immerse ourselves in a truly impressive multi-hour live commercial for Coca Cola, including spending considerable time tasting beverages from around the world. (Turns out I’m partial to the Asian beverages, though the British version of Sprite was quite tasty.) The kids had a good time seeing all the old Coke memorabilia and hearing the story of Coke and watching the 4-D movie about Coke’s secret formula and just generally developing a personal commitment to a bazillion-dollar beverage that makes you belch like a cow and can dissolve 16-penny nails. As we left, buzzing with sugar and caffeine from all the taste-testing, I did indeed feel like we’d been spun. And we paid for it, too. We paid to hear how Coke has changed the world and how it’s a part of our lives and how it makes our memories special and how its invention was on par (at least) with the discovery of electricity and the polio vaccine and sliced bread and the moon landing. Then today we went by a far less impressive exhibit—the Tuskegee Airmen Historical Site—and saw a much shorter film that didn’t require 3-D glasses and didn’t make our chairs shake, and we read some interesting information about a group of what my kids persist in calling brown people who in many cases gave their lives in service to their country. People who were the first ever African-Americans to serve as pilots and communications officers and bombardiers, and who became a crucial part of our nation’s effort to defeat Nazi Germany during WWII. People who broke barriers and created opportunities, and who came home decorated war heroes only to face continued racism and discrimination and even lynching. Coke knows how to put on a show. The Tuskegee historical site was fine but it was no World of Coke. But, of course, spin isn’t everything. “The real thing?” Personally, I appreciate a good glass of Spite, but after seeing both of these sights I’ve got to go with the Tuskegee Airmen as being the real thing. No spin required.

And so with a few minutes on my hands, I found myself sitting here thinking about spin tonight after everyone had gone off to bed. Thinking about how with some spinning-creativity we can make sweetened bubble water an icon and perhaps the most recognized product in the world. About how spin can make a few acres of gravel a block off the interstate in a rough part of town sound like a blissful, wooded, tree-filled state park. About how little time, attention, and spin we find being devoted to people who gave Lincoln’s “last full measure” in service to their country. And about how it turns out their service wasn’t entirely in shooting down enemy planes, but also in setting precedents that fostered the ongoing change in our country that now, decades later, has allowed Nan and me to have two beautiful brown children who are here a few feet away, sleeping peacefully despite the fact that I can literally, as I type this, clearly hear the highway traffic, a siren, and a train whistle all simultaneously…in The Woods.