Last blog: On The Way Home (outside Des Moines, IA). I wasn’t sure whether I’d add anything more to this blog, but today we met Peggy Bender at a Starbuck’s inside a Target in Kearny, Nebraska, and this deserves a few words. How to explain that within minutes we were sharing our life history (well, some of it) with this total stranger, and vice versa. Many interesting convergences: Peggy a former Franciscan nun who studied at St. Xavier in Cincinnati (my best friend, Paul, an ex-Jesuit; his best friend, Bill - who I knew very well - an ex “Jebbie” from [View Full Entry]

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Last week of sightseeing. Sunday, October 05, Eureka. By now I suppose some of you are wondering how we find being on the road, just the two of us, in a small car, for miles and miles, weeks and weeks. We left home at the end of August, about 5 ½ weeks ago, and we’ve now covered over 6,000 miles. I don’t think the housekeeping details of traveling are particularly interesting on the whole, but I will admit that it’s somewhat of a challenge to keep organized, focused and most of all, energetic when you’re so much on the move. So [View Full Entry]

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Monday, September 29: Mountain country. Lake Tahoe. We’ve spent the weekend hiking in the mountains surrounding Jan and Denny’s home outside Tahoe City. Saturday we hiked 11.5 miles, up to 8400’ (climb of 1800’). Jan and Denny’s buddy, Al, has a GPS and could tell us almost anything we wanted to know about the route and where we were on it. But I astounded Al, and myself, by guessing how far we had come within .01 miles! The hike was a little tough on my joints but they responded very nicely to a couple of Vitamin N’s (naproxen=Aleve) and a hot [View Full Entry]

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Museum-going: Our first adventure was at the Exploratorium, the fabulous science museum with hands-on exhibits that actually work! I never got off the second floor, absorbed in huge exhibits on “life” (from cell structure and DNA to … everything else) and “sound.” (Just heard on NPR that one of the people who developed the Sound exhibit just won a McArthur award, and hooray for him!) Along with several kids who were so interested they practically lay on the table where it took place, I watched the fascinatingly revolting dissection of a cow’s eye (by a most dispassionate teenage kid; “…thinking of [View Full Entry]

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September 16: We enjoyed two hikes further up the coast (even though, after flirting with us briefly, the sun pulled the covers up and went back to bed). One hike took us to the intersection of the San Andreas fault and the creek that comes out at Ft. Ross, settled in 1812 by Russians who came down from Alaska looking for sea otters (pelts) (which they hunted up and down the coast to extinction) and food for their Alaska settlements. Once the otters were gone, and they found that coastal lands were not agriculturally rich, they sold out to a rancher [View Full Entry]

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Sept. 9. Back from Sonoma - a diversion from our intended foray into bike-riding. We were headed for the bike shop in Sebastopol. After lunch yesterday at Alice’s Restaurant there (served by Alice herself, aka “She Who Must Be Obeyed”), we scoped out bike rentals in that town and set our sights on a ride today. But the fog that has returned to the coast persisted inland today, with a slight drizzle to boot. So we headed for Sonoma on a more gustatory expedition. We drove through ranches, orchards, and vineyards - in sun! Sonoma has a pleasing central plaza and [View Full Entry]

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Sept. 4, Thursday: Cliff Cottage, Bodega Bay, CA. My aunt and uncle, Patsy and Ed McKeown, treated us to a wonderful overnight in SF (well, Piedmont, across the bay and in the middle of Oakland). Patsy is my mother’s remaining sister and therefore particularly dear to me. But both of these folks in their 80’s are sharp as tacks, Ed is particularly great with maps and made sure we had the right ones with us. Better yet, they will probably join us one of these days for a “day in the country”, or on the coast, as the case may be. [View Full Entry]

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August 30, 2008. Estes Park, CO We’ve put 1116 miles under the wheels in two days, and it’s not easy to make a tour of I-80 across the plains - without much of a stop - interesting. But one serendipitous “symmetry” did come to me as we turned onto I-55 from LSD and I realized that this, the first part of our journey, was along the route of the old Illinois and Michigan canal. And that just two months ago, we had ridden our tandem across New York State on what remains of the old Erie Canal. These two canals and [View Full Entry]

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