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