travel goes on the back burner......again

This would normally be the time that I would be listing the potential trips that we were considering for this summer. That, however, is not the case. It seems that a lot of things have happened over the winter that put a lot of things in jeapardy. In the fall, I got sick. I was diagnosed with c-diff. I had not had any antibiotics which makes it hard to contract. As I started to recover from this, other things got worse and I started to develop abdominal pain and began to lose weight. I had a bunch of tests and ended up in the hospital where they redid some of the tests I had over the last few days.

The doctors found a swolen area in my pancreas and could see that my bile duct was clogged up. They performed an ERCP on Christmas Day to open the bile duct and put a stent in it to keep it open. They sent me home and I came back in a couple of days for an Endoscopic Ultrasound. The results of all this was that they found a mass growing in my pancreas that they expected to be cancerous.

They sent me to the Lahey Clinic down in Burlington MA to see a surgeon who would perform surgery to remove the tumor. He spent a lot of time with us and drew lots of diagrams on the paper on the exam table and explained the benefits and risks of this surgery. They refer to this surgery as a whipple (sp?). The goal is to remove the gall bladder, a portion of the small intestine and 2/3 of the pancreas. As it turned out, they did all of the operation but the removal of the part of the pancreas. The tumor was wrapped around the blood vessels that run through the pancreas. These blood vessels cannot be removed or replaced so the operation was not successful.

Following a long recovery period for the surgery, we have now moved on to the next round of treatment. I will undergo an intense radiation treatment with 5 treatments over 2 weeks and then move on to chemotherapy for what looks like 6 months. Looks like Alaska will have to be put off once again. I will get back to Alaska...really.

I guess that my trips will be short and pretty much confined to Maine and New Hampshire. I will work on that as time goes on. I just wanted y'all to know what was going on with me. It was a long winter. I could do close to nothing during my recovery. I did manage to keep on with the turkey suppers but on a limited basis and watched a bunch of movies and read a bunch of books.

I hope I can work on the camper during this treatment even if it is at a reduced basis. I do have some repairs that need doing and I still don't have my firewood for next year delivered. that will need to be stacked when it arrives. I also have to restack what is left as the piles fell over during the winter.

Well, that is my story and unfortunately I am sticking to it. Hope y'all have a great spring. Clayton

just biding my time

This has certainly been a non-traveling year. We had some tax problems that kept us at home for the travel season. It was really disappointing not to travel but actually fun being in Maine for the summer.

My 89 year old mother decided that she wanted a screened porch on the front of her house. for the last several years she has kept a couple of lawn chairs at the head of her driveway but that is not a great place to sit. Her neighbor on that side keeps his yard looking like an old fashioned dump with crap piled up all over the place. It is not a pretty sight. She got to thinking about camp and the screened in porch she and my father had there. They pretty much lived on that porch for the summer and she longed for a structure like that.

She hired a 74 year old carpenter who does enough to keep out of trouble. He took the job with the idea that we would work with him. That would reduce the labor costs and provide him with help for the hard/heavy parts. Since we were home for the summer, that worked out really well. The porch came out really well and we all had fun building it (and I wasn't responsible for the design and overall schedule).

We spent a long weekend with some friends from church on a windjammer cruise out of Rockport Maine. We were on the Schooner Timberwind. The boat belongs to the daughter of a friend of ours (and her husband) Bob and Dawn. We had a marvelous time. The weather was spectacular and there was good wind except for about 1 hour. We were dead in the water long enough for lunch to be served and we then drifted out of the wind shadow and got back to sailing.

The first night out, we anchored off Isleboro and went over to Warren Island State Park where we had a lobster bake: lobster, corn, hardboiled eggs, hot dogs, hamburgers and many other snacky and deserty things. The food on the boat was Dawn's doing. The food was spectacular. We had fresh hot bread and rolls along with cinnamon rolls and one goodie after another. I have never had so much good food on one weekend. On saturday, we actually took water onto the deck the wind was so good. The only downside was that the bunks were under the deck and if you were on the outside next to the hull, you felt like you were in a MRI machine. The deck was close to the bed. I did get used to it but it was certainly disconcerting at first.

After having a great time there, the next weekend we dug out the tent which we haven't used since we bought the motorhome and went to visit Cheryl's neice's lot on a pond up near Mooshead. We had a nice time but did get rain the last night and had to break camp with everything wet. Other than that the weather was marvelous and we had these huge campfires using wood from the lot clearing. There were a couple of families of loons on the pond. They would swim by periodically with the babies riding on mama's back one time and in the water another. We listened to their wailing cries each night and early in the morning.

The next week Cheryl's cousin's husband died. He was the same age as me. That will really define your mortality. We wanted to go up for both the wake and the funeral so we packed up the camping gear once again and headed up to Mount Blue State Park. We got in but had to take a site for one night and then move to another for 2 more. We had planned to stay one more day but that would have meant moving once again as our site was reserved and although there were a lot of empty sites, ours was reserved and we would have had to move again. Once again we had great weather but had to break camp in the pouring rain. I guess that helped us make up our mind to leave.

That about covers the summer. It was a good summer but we had day after day of 90 plus temperatures and high humidity. Overall, it was a great summer but really to hot to do much.

Well, that is my review of the summer. We have been talking about what to do next summer. A return to Alaska would be nice but it may be too much money after this year. It may take a couple of years to get everything straightened out. We will most likely either go South to Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas and maybe even Georgia (to see our home campground) or head up to the Maritimes of Canada.

Well, got to go mow the lawn. The cooler weather and some rain have brought the lawn back to its prolific growth rate. We have had a nice summer visiting with my mother who rarely sees us in the summer.

This is the best time of the year. The warm days and the coolish nights. It got down into the low 40s last night. I went out and brought in my Christmas Cactus. Today I took out the A/C in the dining room and plotted out a plan to get more plants near the window there. My mother has a basil that someone gave her that is looking for a home. I will provide it. I want to get a small rosemary too although I have 2 pounds of rosemary that I bought so it should get nicely settled in before I need to use it.

I guess I miss writing on my trips as I have said goodbye a couple of times yet find something else to write about. I am really going this time. Bye

Clayton

arrgh! I have too much to do to hit the road early!!!!

Hey! Guess what? Its spring and time to make some decisions about this travel season. Originally we planned to head back to Alaska catching Oregon and Washington on our way. It was an ambitious trip catching Cheryl’s last 2 states in the US and my last Canadian Province (Northwest Territories). That would have left Cheryl with one province left (Newfoundland/Labrador) which we would have picked up next summer when the plan was to spend the travel season in the Canadian Maritimes. The Alaska trip was planned for 6 months so it was ambitious.

Well, all of that has changed. We have ignored everything around the house since we have been traveling so we have a long list of things to do/fix. We started to build a shed in the fall. It was one of those deals where we thought we could build it in a week or two at the most. Like everything else, that was way too optimistic. We worked for a month and then I fell off the roof and with Thanksgiving and the church fair immediately afterwards, we never did get back to the shed so that was our first project of the spring.

Of course even that has now changed. We decided to put a new floor down in the dining room so we visited Lumber Liquidators and picked out a floating click floor. We had a basic schedule for installing the floor and the first day went right according to schedule. We removed all of the baseboard and ripped out the rug and the pad, pulled up the tack strip and cleaned everything up. Then the first big rain storm came. The wind caused all kind of bizarre things and quite a bit of water came in around the door. Following problems several years ago, I pulled apart the outside of the door around the porch and rebuilt it sealing everything up. It seemed to resolve the problem but now that the carpet has been pulled up, water is still coming in somewhere around the door. I am going to pull the doorway apart again and figure the only way out is to take the door completely out and completely reinstall it using technology that was not available when the house was built 15 years ago (15 years…..really?). To back that up, I researched it through the “Ask this old house” website. Norm wrote a piece in response to a problem like mine and recommended that the homeowner completely take the door out and reinstall it replacing it if necessary.

I didn’t mean to go into that kind of detail but you get the picture. That should be a one or two day project but I am planning on a week. I have to deal with the porch as well.

We haven’t had a summer at home for a long time either so we have to figure this out. We had planned to do a spring 2 month trip down to Virginia but even that is in doubt. The 3 huge rainstorms we have had this spring have done some damage here that needs to be dealt with before we play. I lost some pieces of shingle along the edge of the room by the dormer. I had a leak in the front of the house that put rain along my living room ceiling (even though there was no water in the upstairs?). and I had some dampness around both of the doghouse dormers in the front. I also want to upgrade the electrical system in the camper so we can have ac electricity even when we drycamp.

As it stands, the only thing we have decided for sure is that we will decide after we get a handle on all of our projects. The nice thing about being retired is that we can decide anytime and we can go anytime. That about covers all of that. This last storm has now ended. I hope it is the last one. I can’t stand any more rain. We have had floods 3 times so far when we usually only have 1 flood every 3 to 5 years.

Well, that is my update. Back to work…..ok, I am watching the World Series of Poker – Europe. More when we decide what we are goin

trolley, backstroke, chargrilled oysters, breast stroke, beignets, sidestroke, cafe au lait, crawl, trolley, backstroke, dive.....rescue

This trip is starting to take a toll on us. We may not be “running” from one thing to another but we are continuously moving. It was near 10 when we woke up this morning so we are off to a really slow start. We headed up to the Trolley Stop Café for breakfast. When we stepped out of the condo, there was a car parked on top of the brick planter. It had been put there by another vehicle that was firmly implanted in the side of the first car. No one was hurt but at least one group of tourists will finish their vacation in a rented car.

There was one police car on the scene but at the Trolley Stop, there were 4 more having breakfast. It must be a popular spot because several more including some officers showed up before we left.

We had a great day yesterday. No rain! We started out by heading over to Café du Monde for beignets and coffee for breakfast. It was pretty quiet there. We actually got there about 11 so they were between rushes. We walked along the shops in the French Market and then we headed over to the Lee Circle and went into the World War II Museum. We had heard this was a “must see” and we weren’t disappointed. We started off with the film, a large screen history of the war. It was very good and was narrated by Tom Hanks. I have been exposed to the history of WWII but have never realized the “real” story. It truly was a “world” war. There weren’t many people in the world that were not affected by it. The casualty counts I have mostly seen were strictly military counts. When you see the total casualty counts including the civilian counts, it is staggering. They listed the total WWII casualty count as 65,000,000 including military and civilian.

When you look at individual events and the civilian casualties, you can understand how this number got so high. You can start off with 11,000,000 killed in concentration camps. We have been exposed to the idea that the Nazis killed 6,000,000 Jews but that was only half of the total number. The atomic bomb at Hiroshima killed 80,000 in an instant and many more over time. Nagasaki was not as high a count but still significant.

The debate still rages over our use of the atomic bomb but this museum had pictures of other Japanese cities that were firebombed before we turned to the Atomic Bomb. Casualty counts in these bombings were often over 100,000 people yet the Japanese lack of defenses and the total destruction of whole cities weren’t enough to force their surrender. 2 atomic bombs made them give up. One plane, one bomb, the total annihilation of an entire city did what hundreds of planes and thousands of tons of bombs could not do.

We finished up there and headed back to the trolley as we realized that it was 4:30 and we had used up most of the day (the lighted portion at least). We headed back to the condo and changed our clothes, took my medicine and headed off to the St. Louis Cathedral for the evening Christmas Concert. Tonight is John Boutte, a well known Jazz Singer (around here at least). He did his Christmas concert with a string quartet and his guitar player. He mixed well known Christmas carols with songs of his own. At one point, he told the audience that these Christmas Carols were much harder than they looked. With Jazz songs, he could “fool around with them” but with Christmas Carols, he had to play them pretty much straight up and for him that was difficult.

He was very good but it took some getting used to on my part to enjoy his singing. As much as I like all kinds of music, this was not something I was very used to and it took about half the show for me to get so I really enjoyed it.

After the show, we wandered about Decatur St looking for something reasonably priced and interesting to eat. We talked to some people in the business of selling tours and some other people we met along the street and decided that we wouldn’t wander up to Bourbon St. tonight. Instead, we headed down to the Riverfront Trolley and decided to head out to Canal Street and see what was going on out there. We waited what seemed like forever at the trolley stop with the cold wind coming off the Mississippi. Finally, the trolley appeared and drove right by us. It was going in the wrong direction but there were only 2 stops left and we were looking for a place out of the wind. NOT HAPPY!

A few minutes later, he did return and stop for us. We rode out to Canal and then walked across the street to Harrah’s Casino. We walked around for a while watching the gamblers playing but the games were too steep for us ($10 and $15 minimums). John Besh has a restaurant in the casino but the prices started in the high $30 range with most meals in the 40s and 50s so we passed. We spied a Starbucks in the corner and when we got there discovered that there was a Fuddruckers right next door. This Fuddruckers was not up to the quality of any of the others that we have been to. I had the half pound burger but it was pressed so thin that it was dry. I have never had a Fuddruckers burger that was dry (until now). That was pretty much the end of the day. We took the trolley back to the condo and that as they say was that.

Well, now we have had breakfast and will head out to finish our walking tour of the Garden District. Tonight, the Christmas concert is the Ebenezer Baptist Choir so we can expect some lively celebration of the holiday. They do not seem to have these shows on the weekend so this is the last one we will be able to see. I will miss them. They have been a lot of fun.

The finish of the Garden District walking tour was a lot of fun except for the rain. It started raining as we left the condo. We finished the tour and saw a lot of magnificent houses. One of them was the “Sinclair” house that we saw on the Christmas Tour. Another was Ann Rice’s house (former). She sold her holdings in New Orleans when she moved to Southern California after her husband’s (Stan) death several years ago. We saw another house she owned earlier in the week. That house had been bought by Nicholas Cage. We heard afterwards that he had sold it and bought another in another section of town. Included in our tour was the house where Archie Manning lives and raised Payton and Ely. We also saw a house that the tour book says is owned by John Goodman. It is a large beautiful house compared to the Mannings which is nice but not mansion quality.

The tour ended at Commander’s Palace where we planned to have lunch. That didn’t work out. They told us that they had no openings anytime today. Not a huge disappointment. It is a famous place here in the Garden District but we figured that with the economy and the fact that it was 2 pm on Thursday, we shouldn’t have a chance. The upside was that this gave us the chance to return to the Acme Oyster House to grab another one of those chargrilled oyster plates.

First though we crossed the street from Commander’s Palace and ventured into a cemetery. Cemeteries here are very different from anything we are used to. The graves are above ground. The claim has been made that this is due to the high ground water in New Orleans (the city proper is below sea level after all). We met a man who works in the cemetery. He was there to coordinate activities for a funeral and was waiting for the flower car while he spoke to us. We noticed that the vaults were not very big and that there were, in some cases, a dozen names listed on them. My first question was how do you get all those people in there?

He gave us some history of the cemeteries in New Orleans and said that the idea that they were above ground due to the ground water was wrong. Yes, there is high ground water and this does cause problems with caskets being pushed up to the surface but the water is not the reason that everyone is buried above ground. Actually, they aren’t. Many of the graves are only raised a foot or two and have a dirt or loose stone surface. He told us that the cemeteries in New Orleans were “French Style” Cemeteries with the vaults above ground.

He kept looking for the flower car and finally took us several rows deeper into the cemetery and showed us a vault that he was working on. Each of these raised vaults has 2 sections. After a year or more, they open the oldest vault section and place any remaining bones in a bag which they push back into a rear corner of the vault. They then clean out the vault to prepare for another casket. They only use wooden caskets and no one is embalmed so everything rots pretty quickly. He told us that much of the casket and body are decomposed after a year or two. They keep any bones that haven’t decomposed in bags in the rear and use the vault again.

This came as quite a surprise to us. We had never heard of any such thing. It was interesting and after a while, we returned to the main road into the cemetery to find that the flower car was already there and unloaded. They keep detailed records of who is buried in each vault. Not everyone puts markers on the vault so several more people can be buried there than the markers on the vault list. (Tell me that isn’t interesting!)

Lunch at the Acme Oyster House consisted of another plate of those delicious charbroiled oysters and a glass of wine. We saw our waiter from the first visit and he came over and talked to us for a bit before running off to wait on other customers. We looked around and decided that the charbroiled oysters must be one of their most popular dishes. About ¾ of the tables had a platter of them.

After lunch, we did some shopping around Decatur Street. Some of it was shopping and the rest was ducking raindrops. After wandering through several stores, we realized that it was nearing 5 pm. There wasn’t time to return to our room and get back in time for the Christmas program so we decided after much deliberation (yeah right) to head over to Café du Monde for coffee. As we ordered coffee, we also ordered beignets (was there ever any doubt?). Following coffee, we headed over to the church for the concert. The rain had gotten a lot worse but we arrived there reasonably dry after taking as many sidewalks with overhanging balconies as possible.

The concert was by the Ebenezer Baptist Church. The problem was that the combination of rain and heavy traffic kept many of the participants from getting there on time. They had a 5 piece band but started with only drums. One of singers led the choir but at the time they stated there were only 8 members present. During the hour, an organist, a keyboard player, the real leader and a few more singers showed up. At first, they sang acapella (I am assuming different songs than they had programmed. As they added members, the songs got livelier. The concert turned out to be pretty good but wondered what it would have been like if they had all been there.

We wandered up to Preservation Hall to see what was going on there but found it closed. 2 nights we found them to be closed due to the weather. This was not the only place either. We ran across several places that just didn’t open. Probably a good move because the weather really beat down the crowds in the “Quarter”. The “hawkers” who try to drag customers into various establishments had few people on which to concentrate. One of the early nights we were there, the crowds came out in spite of the weather but as the week went on, they got fewer and fewer.

Time is running down. We have only one day left. We are happy with what we have done here but we did skip a bunch of things due to the weather. We had wanted to take in one of the swamp tours and drive down to the gulf but that just gives us a reason to return.

Friday Morning!! Our last day in New Orleans! This will be pretty much a lost day. We have done a lot of shopping but little buying. We have a very short list of things we want to pick up but this is the day we set aside to do it. We grabbed the trolley and headed into the quarter. We decided to take all three trolleys (St. Charles Street, Canal Street and Waterfront) and go directly to the French Market. We got off at the Market stop and found ourselves right across the street from Central Market so our decision was made: muffuleta for breakfast. It was around 11 and it was amazing how busy the market was. This time we took time to look around after we ate.

We didn’t see anyone buy anything but muffuletas either time we were there but upon looking around saw that it was a rather interesting definitely Italian market. It would be nice to have access to a market like that here especially with all of the ethnic and regional products that they stocked (not to mention the muffuletas). They even had the red tins of amaretto cookies so famous on holidays in Italian homes (they even had large bags of the cookies to refill the tins).

They have their area where they make the sandwiches but it has high walls around it so you can’t see in. There are also signs forbidding anyone from trying to photograph the area where they make the sandwiches. When you dismantle the sandwich, you wonder what all the secrecy is about.

We left the Central Market and wandered through the market and many of the shops around it. We bought some stuff and decided not to buy other stuff that we intended to get, like beignet mix and Café du Monde coffee and pralines. It just seemed that it would not be the same drinking chicory coffee in Maine.

We ended our stay with one last visit to Café du Monde. This time, we only split an order of beignets as we were still full from the muffuleta but needed one more fix. They brought us our very strong coffees and a plate that looked like Sunday River after 2 feet of new powder. I am sure all of my doctors will be glad when I leave this place.

We took the trolley back to the condo and dropped off our goodies then got back on and headed deeper into the district. We went to the coffee shop near Anne Rice’s (former) house and bought a couple of gifts there. We also had one last cup of coffee there also. There is one table that sits in a bay window. We had joked on our previous visit that this table was the primo table in the place. You sat right out by the sidewalk but were protected from the weather. It was empty so we grabbed it and slowly sipped (yet) another cup of coffee watching the world outside.

We returned to the condo and started to pack everything up in preparation for the trip home. The weather was a big question mark. There was a large snowstorm working its way up the east coast. It was expected to drop a lot of snow in the Carolinas, Virginias and DC. It looked like it might be gone by the time we hit the area. It seemed like we should not have as much stuff as we had when we came but of course that didn’t work out.

We got up at 3:30 and dragged everything out to the elevator. We called to have our car brought around and then packed it (in the rain of course) and headed out. Cheryl set up the computer and it guided us out of town flawlessly and we began our trip home. We planned to stop in Washington DC to visit Ivy and Andrew and, of course, Madeline but as we travelled towards the east coast, the weather reports and travel reports got worse and worse. As we got closer, I called Ivy and she said they had 10 to 12 inches already and were expecting more than 20. They were telling everyone to stay at home as they couldn’t keep the roads clear.

We decided to postpone our visit until January and as it worked out, that was a good plan. We got hung up in Virginia and lost 7 ½ hours sitting on the interstate while they removed abandoned cars from the road and plowed it. By late afternoon on Sunday (the day we were supposed to visit) we hadn’t even gotten to the road we would have taken to get to DC. We should have arrived in good old SB in the mid evening and finally arrived at 2:30 am which pretty much ruined us for the next day.

The trip was fun in spite of the weather both there and on the return. We enjoyed the food and the people we met. The French Quarter is pretty much like any other tourist trap we have been to except it is more decadent than anywhere else. People wander the streets with drinks in hand. The area is noted for its music but frankly some of the best music we heard was on street corners (with the exception of the lady with the squeeze box who either couldn’t sing or sang in a traditional style that I was not familiar with. The food was great and we met many wonderful people. The Christmas House Tour was marvelous and our walking tour through the Garden District was fun in spite of the rain. Seeing the area where Anne Rice lived and wrote all of those marvelous books was a thrill. Talking to some of the locals who knew her and liked to talk about her eccentricities was fun. Picturing her driving around NO in a hearse and showing up at her book signings riding in a coffin in that hearse was certainly information that I never had before. Seeing some of the buildings that were characters in her stories. Seeing the Manning house where Archie Manning raised his family including Payton and Eli (Colts and Giants respectively).

We didn’t get into the 9th Ward or any of the places that still show the marks of Katrina but due to the weather, we never took the car anywhere and these places were not on the trolley lines. The Charles Ave Trolley has only recently been back to full use. While we took the Canal Street Trolley to both ends, we never did take our local trolley to the end. We wanted to but just never got around to it.

Well, we are home now. I got 2 new books on Alaska in anticipation of next summer’s great adventure (camping in Alaska and the Yukon and the definitive book on sport fishing in Alaska). Hopefully, that will happen but the one thing I have learned in the past is to take things as they come. Maybe we will, maybe we will go somewhere else. For the meantime, I have a shed to finish and friends to visit and cook for. We are looking forward to a few months of peace and quiet at home with the only excitement being turkey suppers. BYE for now!!!!

clayton

into each rainstorm some really good food must fall

Hi again! Another day, more bad weather forecasts. The fog is back this morning. Some of the ferries have been docked and the roads are full of cars crawling with little visibility. It is expected to get worse as the rain will return this afternoon with torrential downpours again tomorrow. This is starting to screw up our plans. We planned to head over to the French Quarter today with a 3 day trolley pass but if the rain is supposed to be as bad as the forecast, we probably won’t go tomorrow. I guess we could buy a one day pass and then see what happens the rest of the week.

There is supposed to be a great D-day museum down the street that we could do tomorrow if we don’t leave the district but time will tell. Breakfast will be first and we will decide as we eat.

The news here is interesting. It is pretty much all weather related and Saints related. The sports report here was nearly 10 minutes long and involved nothing but the Saints. Highlights, interviews and commentary. They are really excited about the Saints but if you look back over their history it is pretty much like being in New England before we got our first Superbowl….Yawn. They don’t even mention any other sports here, just football.

Of course, the tour books were wrong. There is now a 5 day trolley pass as well as a 3 day pass. The one day pass still exists but you have to buy that one on the trolley. I took the planning out of the equation by buying the 5 day pass. Now we can use it whenever we want even if we just want to wander off for coffee.

Early morning and we are off to the French Quarter. It is fun to wander around when the only people there are cleaning and prepping for the new day. The rain held off for quite a while. We took the trolley over to Canal Street (there are 3 trolley lines; St Charles Ave, Canal Street and Riverfront). The turnaround for the Charles Ave Trolley is right across Canal Street from Bourbon Street. We walked down Bourbon and found a couple of places open offering bargain breakfasts. There were also a few bars open but they were pretty much empty. We zigzagged through the quarter and ended up down by the Mississippi at Café du Monde. This is a must visit place in the quarter and home of the beignets and strong New Orleans coffee with chicory. Both the coffee and the beignets lived up to expectations. The beignet is a French doughnut. It is rectangular and fried bit of pastry, 3 to a dish and positively smothered in powdered sugar.

It is said you can tell everyone who has been to Café du Monde by the powdered sugar residue on their clothing. I was more the rule than the exception. They were delicious and I look forward to future visits while we are here. During our visit, some musicians started to arrive on the sidewalk (right next to our table). They played a mixture of jazz and gospel music and were quite good. It was funny because the first 2 to arrive were the singer/trumpet player and the trombone. After they started playing a guitar showed up and just worked in followed shortly by a base drum/cymbal. Later on a large horn (bigger than a French horn and smaller than a tuba) came and worked in. The singer had a couple of CDs that he hawked between songs. They were quite good and the donations backed that up.

While we were allowing Mother Nature to wash the sugar off our sweat shirts, we wandered through the shops along the street and into the French Market. The shops were interesting (in one they were making pralines, the broken pieces provided as samples were delicious) and had the usual line of souvenirs although they were New Orleans things). Cookbooks are big here because this is really a center for food. There is a much larger local cuisine difference here than just about anywhere I have been.

We were trying to figure out which part of the quarter to hit next when the skies opened up. We sought refuge in the Cathedral of St. Louis. We had planned to go there in the evening for a Christmas concert but this gave us a chance to look it over without the crowds. It is billed as the oldest continuously operating Catholic Church in the country. It doesn’t look it. It looks brand new and shiny and bright. It must have been through a recent major renovation as it was beautiful. When the weather cleared up a bit, we wandered into the heart of the quarter and found the Gumbo Shop where we had lunch.

The gumbo was dark brown, thick and really flavorful. I had the crab and shrimp and Cheryl had the andouie and chicken. Check another food off the list of New Orleans favorites. We checked out a bunch of shops. Saints fever has run rampant down here. Just about every store sells Saint’s souvenirs and every marquis says GO SAINTS. It brings back memories of our first Super Bowl. These people love their team (and have never had much else to cheer for since the Battle of New Orleans…and I’m not even sure about that).

It started to rain harder and we figured that if we were going to head to the Quarter that evening, we should head back to the condo for a bit of a rest. We are still figuring out the trolleys. We had a couple of hours rest and a nap and just before 5 we headed back to the quarter for the concert. The trolley ride was fine until we got to Canal St. At that point, we saw police cars with their lights going across the trolley tracks down the street (in the direction we needed to go of course). We waited for about 10 minutes and nothing changed so we headed down a side street.

We arrived at the Cathedral and heard the choir singing. I thought they must have moved up the concert or something but we went in and found some seats. It seems that they were just doing a sound check and we were a half hour early. Eventually the concert started. The boys were wonderful. They sang a mixture of songs with some religious songs and the rest Christmas songs. They also have a really big organ in the church. There were 3 songs that were played on that organ. Now, these songs were meant to showcase the organ and the player so they were technically difficult and not particularly melodious. There was a little girl in the row ahead of us that was totally bored every time the organ played.

When the show ended, we left the church into a torrential downpour. One woman trying to hurry through the rain, fell over the 2 steps leading down from the church to the courtyard. These steps are small but they are there and if you don’t realize they are there you can take a pretty bad tumble. Another person fell right after her in the same place.

We scurried up the street and worked our way back to Bourbon St. The rain picked up force as we moved and by the time we got to Bourbon, you could hardly see where you were going. We had thought about going to the Preservation Hall for some Jazz but they closed (I assume because of the weather as they had a band scheduled). We watched some really bad Karaoke at the Cat’s Meow, ducked into a jazz club that hadn’t started to avoid drowning and finally found refuge in a pizza parlor. The pizza was exceptional (sorry La Festa) but the dry place was much more important. After a while, the rain lightened up (just a little) and we made a dash for the trolley. Of course, the trolley wasn’t near and we hid in the entry way to a Lady Footlocker. Eventually, the trolley showed.

Meanwhile, we met a young (compared to us) woman who was here on vacation. We talked to her and had a great time (while freezing because we were soaked). We compared notes on where we had been and were we each thought the best places were. She was from Austin, TX so we talked about that too. We enjoyed Austin a lot when we were there. As it worked out, she was staying in the same condo we were, on the same floor just 2 rooms down. Small world?

We dried out, had a drink and settled in for a quiet night. We opened the curtains and watched Mother Nature’s fireworks show. The lightening was wild and went on all night (we didn’t watch it all night). The thunder woke us a couple of times but we slept well. This morning, we wandered down to the next block and had breakfast at the Trolley Stop Café before heading back into the city. The rain continued to be heavy but we didn’t want to give in. We decided to go to the IMAX Theater and see what was playing. The trolleys worked out well and we didn’t have to stand around in the rain….at least until the end. When we arrived at the end of Canal st., the rain was really heavy. We got off and headed quickly to the IMAX Theater. They had 4 films rotating throughout the day. They were all educational type films (one of which we had already seen) and they wanted $24 each to get in (for a 45 minute film?). I think their concentration was to get you to buy combination tickets where the more events you buy, the cheaper each item was (the IMAX film was $24 but if you bought a zoo ticket, an Insectariums ticket and an aquarium ticket, the combined cost was only $32 each.

We left and headed across the street to Riverwalk, a mall along the Mississippi River. By the time we got in the door, we were totally soaked, even worse than the night before. We wandered around the mall for a couple of hours until the rain let up. We had coffee and watched the traffic on the river; barges, ships, tugs and ferries.

We then headed back out and caught the trolley along the riverfront. We got off down at the French Market and headed for the Central Grocery, famed for the muffuleta sandwich another of the foods on the New Orleans list. The sandwich is huge, made on a loaf of bread shaped like an extremely large hamburger roll a good 10 inches or more across. There is little choice (other than take it or leave it). You can buy a whole sandwich or a half sandwich and if you buy the whole one, you can have it cut in half or quarters. None-the-less it has an olive salad complete with pickled cauliflower, carrots and other veggies along with the resolute, salami, mortadella and cheese. We bought a whole cut into quarters and commenced to demolish the entire sandwich. We wandered around Decatur St and caught the Canal Street trolley. We rode the trolley all the way to the other end. We wanted to see more of the city. It was a nice ride but there was nothing special until the end when we were surrounded by cemeteries.

New Orleans has pretty unique cemeteries. All of the graves are above ground. Some people are buried in mausoleums and others are buried in graves that are built up from the ground.

Once back at the condo, we rested (I took a nap again) and when I woke, we were late starting out for the evening’s Christmas Concert. We got there in time. The concert tonight was by the Franklin Street Baptist Church. They brought a Men’s Chorus of 35 members and a mass chorus of 40 members along with a 4 piece band (drums, guitar, bass and keyboards). The men’s chorus was on first. They had an amazingly strong voice and sang 2 songs. Then it appeared that they went off the program as the director went over to the band and talked to them before returning and moving people around. He scavenged microphones from the group that was set up to capture the singing and handed them to individuals. I am sure he had the sound guy scurrying as it took a while for the hand helds to come up loud enough for individuals. They sang 2 songs in this configuration that were his own arrangements as they included pieces from several Christmas and religious songs intricately woven together to be outstanding. Their last song brought tears to your eyes it was so good. They got a standing ovation even before the song was over.

The massed choir had a tough job to overcome the men’s choir but they did. Their last song was the kind of song that you think of when you think of this kind of music. The chorus sang the song and a soloist belted out main and counter melodies in the vein of Aretha Franklin. This entire show was spectacular and moving. The audience was on their feet clapping along with the music and you could feel that great stone basilica moving to the beat. They finished the evening with both choirs singing and including the audience in the song. The woman announcing sang the solo with it and the audience sang with enthusiasm. With more than 60 people in the combined choir, the sound was big and strong…maybe even too big. It was a great evening and very different from the boy’s choir of the night before with their 21 much smaller voices.

I did wonder at one point, how big a church congregation do you have to have to have 2 choirs of such size. There were also many people from the Franklin Street Baptist Church in the audience. How big???

Afterwards, we wandered the quarter. We checked out several clubs with music and settled on a club with a blues band playing. We went in and paid $19 for 2 drinks (always higher when a band is playing) only to have the band pick up their stuff as soon as our drinks were delivered. It was still early and this band was a warm up of sorts, probably playing only for tips just to get seen. I though they were pretty good but didn’t hear too much by them.

The waitress said the main band would be setting up and starting to play early because the first band left early. There were only 3 people in the audience and that included Cheryl and I.

As soon as the band started to set up, people started to wander in and by the time they started playing, there were about 25 people there. With the weather and the fact that the quarter doesn’t get rolling too early, that wasn’t bad.

This band was a blues band too. They were good but people joined in and played a couple of songs and rotated out. There were always 4 or 5 people on stage but they varied as time went on. I have never seen that before. Interesting.

We left after a while and sought out something to eat. We settled on the Acme Oyster House. This was a busy place when most of the restaurants in the quarter were empty. Earlier, we passed by the place, there was a line out on the sidewalk waiting to get in. This was the only line at a restaurant we saw the whole time we were here (so far). I had red about the place in my tour book. It is reputed to have good food at a reasonable price.

We were taken into a back room and placed at a long table. There were several of these long tables with 2 or 3 groups at each table kind of like Durgin Park in Boston. We looked at the food in the room and perused the menu deciding to split a plate of char grilled oysters and split a crawfish po boy. In memory of my year in Norfolk VA, I ordered a single oyster shooter (a shot glass with a raw oyster filled with vodka and hot sauce. I always said I was a social raw oyster eater and would only eat them when the people around me decided to order them in a group. I have had them a few times lately on my own but I wanted to try this. It was quite good. I have even gotten so I can chew them a couple of times. Cheryl watched saying that to her raw oysters are a spectator sport.

The char grilled oysters were great. I watched Paula Deen make these at her brother’s (Bubba) restaurant and have always wanted to try them. Definitely worth waiting for. They put the oyster on a half shell directly on the bbq grill. They cover it with butter and wait for the butter to get bubbly before they add grated Romano cheese and let that get bubbly as well. They serve it with rounds of French bread to soak up the butter.

As we were winding down from that treat, they brought us our po boy. They even cut it in half and served it on separate plates. They fried crawfish tails just covered the entire plate. There was no way you could get them all in the sandwich so once you finished the sandwich, you had a half plate of tails to eat by their lonesomes. Best meal we have had since we got here.

We walked out of the quarter and caught our trolley back to the condo. We had a real cowboy driving this one. He was fast and really whipped around the corners. We were back in no-time.

I got up this morning and there was no rain falling. Imagine that? New Orleans without rain…unheard of.

Well, I guess I will close and upload this. Then I think we will hop on the trolley and head for Café du Monde for some more beignets. Can’t stay away from them. We really had to force ourselves to find a real restaurant last night because it was really tempting to just grab a plate of the little French treats (especially since Café du Monde is right across the park from St. Louis Cathedral). My patience has now run out and beignets are definitely on the horizon.

I am truly sorry about this continued talk about the wonderful food here but that is one of the things that New Orleans is all about. Food that is totally different from anywhere else we have been. I wish we could send all of you a plate of beignets and a cup of the strong chicory coffee or a plate of those marvelous grilles oysters. But alas, it is like watching Emeril on TV when he says he wishes you could all have smellavision so you could at least smell what he is cookin’. It Ain’t gonna happen. Bon Appetite!

Well, they ran through the briars and they ran through the brambles and they ran through the bushes where a rabbit wouldn't go!

Well, here we are again; hurtling southwest on the interstate system. We are taking a short sojourn to New Orleans. We have a timeshare that doesn’t get a lot of attention since we bought the motorhome. We are not willing to give it up as we won’t always have the motorhome.

We were notified by RCI that we were approaching the limit we could bank one of our weeks so we figured that we should take a short trip and use up the delinquent week. After some consideration, we decided to go to New Orleans. We were going there following our visit to Texas but Hurricane Gustav had other ideas and arrived on the day we were scheduled to get there so we missed out.

Cheryl Needs 3 states to complete her sweep of the US. Louisiana is one of those 3 states. In fact it is kind of out there all by itself so this seemed to be a good destination. There were not a lot of available spaces but we found one in the Garden District; a small studio apartment so we grabbed it and started planning.
Since we have plenty of time and wanted to stop in DC to visit Ivy, Andrew and Madeline, it seemed to be a slam-dunk to drive. So now, here we are 600 miles away from home headed down I-81. We are presently in Virginia and plan to stay in Tennessee tonight. That will put us somewhere near ¾ of the way there. We can’t check in until 4 PM so we have plenty of time.

We were up at 3 and out of the driveway at 4. The world is a quiet place that time of the morning. Traffic started to pick up on 495 and really got thick as we approached Hartford. I decided, at that point to take the route through New Haven and over the George Washington Bridge (recommended by the nav system). The traffic was decent until we reached New Haven and started along 95. We encountered a couple of slowdowns and then came upon a northbound accident that closed the entire northbound side of the highway and brought the southbound side to a gawking standstill. We lost at least a half hour there and another half hour in the slowdowns.

With the large amount of truck traffic, we decided to take the lower level of the GW. Again a mistake, the traffic there was pretty insane with cars weaving in and out and a SUV broken down in one of the 3 lanes. The truck traffic on the upper level is much more disciplined and easier to deal with.

After crossing the Hudson we headed towards the Jersey Turnpike. We stopped at the first Plaza for gas and a bite to eat. The Jersey Plazas are among the better turnpike areas to get gas. Connecticut and New York have greatly inflated gas prices while Jersey is much cheaper. I always fill up at home where I better control what I buy and then hold on for Jersey where the prices are reasonable. The breakfast food available is another story but then road food is often a “take what is available” event.

We hit the road again, passed through the EZPASS lane at 50 mph (why do we have to slow down to 10 mph at home?). I hadn’t studied the route very carefully on the computer before we left so I was surprised when the computer told us to exit after just a couple of exits: the adventure was underway!

We followed 78 over to 81 and headed south on 81. I had 2 choices at the start. I could go the way I went or I could have gone across 84 and found 81 near Scranton, PA and headed south. The Nav system chose the GW bridge as the best route and I am sure it was the shortest but definitely not the quickest. Usually, I take the Scranton Route but that is definitely better with the motorhome. With just the car, I thought it would be fun to take the route we did (and the traffic building up to b e heavy going into Hartford helped me make the decision (and it was still wrong)).

Well, eventually we cleared the busy roads and settled in to some serious driving. We watched the price of gas drop as we went further south. Each tank has been cheaper than the tank before it. We just entered Alabama and saw a gas station advertising $2.31.

The distance to New Orleans is just under 1,600 miles. I set a goal of 900 miles in the first day and we stopped at 797. We stopped at a Super 8 around 7 Pm. Decent place considering all we wanted was a place to sleep and take a shower. 2 double beds that weren’t all that comfortable but I never sleep well on the first night anywhere so it was pretty good. One of the Public TV stations ran a nice piece on Peter, Paul and Mary that was entertaining and eventually put me to sleep.
4 AM and back on the road again. We drove through Chattanooga (didn’t see the choo choo) and were soon (nothing on this trip has been soon) crossed into Georgia briefly before entering Alabama. We are presently sitting at 1176 miles down and 415 to go. We stopped at the Alabama Visitor Center and met a gentleman with a very thick accent who took great pleasure in telling us about his visit to Maine.
He worked for a company that used potato products from a company in Presque Isle and went to visit the factory. When he spoke a sentence, you had to hesitate for a bit and let what he said develop in your mind before you understood it. It’s a good thing he talked slowly.

We should hit Birmingham in an hour and a half then another hour and a half to the Mississippi border. More later. Hey, it’s later! As things go, we did 900 miles yesterday so we could have an easier day today and get here before it was too late. As hard as the 900 miles were yesterday, the 680 miles today went off like a charm. Like yesterday, we left at 4 am. The difference was that we had to kill time as we were too much ahead of schedule.

As near as I can figure, the miles in the Northeast with all the traffic and the lower speed limits made the driving difficult. Today, we had almost no traffic and the speed limits were 70. It was a little more difficult as it started raining in the late morning and poured most of the time. The entry into New Orleans was so rainy that you could hardly see the road ahead. We took I 10 across Lake Ponchatrain. The high point of the bridge was in the clouds and you couldn’t see more than 300 yards into the lake.

We did get into the city with little trouble even though the computer seemed to be sending us on a wild goose chase in a circle over the roads we needed. In retrospect, it was just dealing with the plethora of one way streets and we did end up at the right place (even though the name on the building was different than the name on all our paperwork?) They explained that the resort was the right name but it is owned by Wyndham hotels who wanted their name on the marquis. It worked out although we had to unload the car in a downpour. We didn’t take long but we were soaked by the time we finished. We were better off than the people who came later. They couldn’t park close and there were more of them so they ended up getting really wet.

We got everything up to the room and got somewhat settled. The room is nice. It is called a studio which means a one room apartment. The literature said that we would have a queen sized bed with a mini kitchen with a toaster oven, a microwave and a mini fridge. As it turned out, we got a king sized bed, a 2 burner stove, a small apartment sized fridge and a microwave looking oven which has way too many buttons and a metal shelf. I will figure that out later.

We headed out to find something to eat. We were directed to a place called Igor’s. It is billed as a bar, grill, pool room and Laundromat. We sat in the bar; we could see the pool tables and didn’t go looking for the Laundromat. We had our first Hurricane, one of the signature drinks of New Orleans (a fruity concoction). It was pretty good but I am glad that is out of the way and I can get on with trying other things out. We met a bunch of people in the bar. They were all curious where we came from and we had fun eating the chicken nuggets (not traditional NO food) and drinking our hurricanes.

Afterwards, we decided to take a walk down the street. We got as far as the corner of our building and stopped watching the people trying to get across the street. It seems that the street beside our hotel had 6 inches of water in it. We decided that tomorrow would be early enough to explore. We did find a store that had food and alcohol but the prices were outrageous so we returned in vain. Time to just relax and get over our 1600 mile drive. I think the Celtics are playing on TBS tonight but after an extensive effort, it seems that we don’t have TBS on our TV. There wasn’t much on and we were really tired so we went to bed at 8:30 hoping for a better day in the morning.

Well, it’s morning. It isn’t raining but the news is full of the aftermath of yesterday’s storm. There were areas of the city that got more than 5 inches of rain yesterday. New Orleans is largely below sea level. The levees that failed during Katrina have been rebuilt and are much stronger. The city is kept dry by a lot of pumps that pump the water out of the city. One pump failed and a gate was opened to relieve the pressure (I am not sure how that all works). The gate eventually failed and they could not close it when the rain let up. They ended up closing up the space with large metal plates. It sounds pretty bad but they seem to take it in stride down here.

The weather is cloudy and foggy. They keep telling us it is warm and humid. The temp is in the 60s but it is really humid making it a little uncomfortable. I’ll take it; it’s better than 30 deg and windy any day. We had a quick breakfast here (toast and egg salad) and coffee. We bought a pound of coffee and had it ground specifically for this trip. We left it in a bag of Christmas presents.

Fortunately, there was enough coffee here in the room for a couple of mornings.
We decided to do the walking tour of the Garden District that was in our tour book. We headed out and walked a block in the wrong direction before we realized it. We turned around and headed for our first stop. This is the area where Ann Rice lived and made famous with her books. I have read all of Ann’s books and look forward to spending some time in the same places that she has made famous in her books.

She has since moved to Southern California following the death of her Husband Stan. The walking tour that we have is heavy on references to places she lived, owned and hung out so it will be fun to check them out. Our first stop is the Garden District Book Shop and the adjacent Coffee Shop. It was a nice walk and we settled into the coffee shop like we owned it. We felt immediately at home. The proprietor was really friendly and we talked for some time before we got our coffee and scones and settled in with the other customers. The place fit like a kid glove.

Afterwards, we moved up into the main part of the building where there were several shops including the book store which was the only place open. This was the book shop where Ann Rice held her first signings for each of her published books (actually it was just around the corner from her house). They had all of her books in stock including signed copies. Her latest book was there as well a book of her memoirs that I did not even know existed.

Freshened by coffee, food, a book store and a couple of Ann Rice locations, we headed down the street. The houses here are magnificent. There are many large houses in the style that we northerners identify as plantation style homes. We found one house that looked like a house but was listed as a church (former). It started out as a Catholic church and then became another denomination. It figured into one of Ann’s books and is now owned by Nicholas Cage. There was also a huge mansion that had a “corn” fence around it. It was wrought iron and shaped like stalks of corn.

As we were walking down the street, we came across a herd of “Red Hats”. We talked to them a bit and one of them asked if we were interested in the PRCA Christmas House Tour. They had 2 tickets that they had bought early for 2 people who ultimately could not attend. It was a good opportunity and the tickets were deeply discounted so we bought them and headed off to the closest house. These are houses that people live in. They are decorated for Christmas and open their doors for tours to make money for charity.

The first house we came to was not on the tour but is owned by the Ladies Opera Guild who maintain it as a tourist attraction. It is a beautiful house and is rarely open to the public. It was open free today so we started there. These buildings were exceptionally beautiful while obviously lived in. Some had visible children’s play rooms and kitchens with “stuff” visible in the glass doored cabinets and desk areas. One house owned by the Sinclair’s was certainly the equal of some of the Newport Mansions. It had recently been “down to the studs” renovated. It is incomprehensable how much money must have been spent on this house. It was the star of the show and had the biggest line.

Since we had started late and began in the middle, we decided to skip house # 6. This house was quite a ways out of the way and in the opposite direction so we skipped one. There were 8 total with the addition of the opera ladies house, we visited 8 houses….OK, 2 of the houses were one house (?). They were originally 2 neighboring houses that were bought by a single person who built a beautiful huge kitchen between the buildings joining the houses and making a single dwelling. It was a unique building but did reduce the advertised number of houses to 7 actual (no complaints, just interesting).

We then crawled over to Buster’s Soul Food Restaurant and split a Hot Shrimp Salad and an Oyster Po Boy. The salad was good but the Po Boy was delicious. The oysters were well fried and nice and crispy. I threw a little hot sauce over the oysters before adding the pickle, tomato and lettuce. MMMMMMM

It was a busy morning (and early afternoon) so we decided to leave the very loud Saint’s fans to their game (and drinks) and return to the condo for a nap. Cheryl worked on some things and I took a rather long nap. I am still suffering from the drive. Tonight, we took a nice walk along St. Charles Avenue in the other direction. We checked out the restaurants, clubs and bars. We stopped at Lucky’s for a drink and discovered that it was owned by the person that owns Igor’s where we ate and drank last night.

This time, we had the Bloody Marys. They were tasty and moderately hot. The garnish was pickled green beans. The drinks were really good but the menu was the same (exactly) as last night so we finished our drinks and continued our journey. We passed some really nice places which we weren’t in the mood for and some lesser places that just didn’t float our boat. We did see a Burger King (I did not drive 1600 miles to eat in the same places we have at home) and eventually a KFC (same note). Then we found Voodoo BBQ (voted best BBQ in NO). While it was good, I would not consider it the best of anything. It was pretty good but the meat was a little skimpy and the roll was not as fresh as it could have been. Such is the curse of the cook. It is hard to buy things that I make myself without critizing them (mine is better).

Now we are back in the condo and thinking that it may be getting close to bedtime. The weather for tomorrow is not good. They are talking about rain tomorrow and another siege of flooding rains through Tuesday. I guess we will just have to wait until tomorrow to figure out what we are going to do. I think I will upload this. Hope you are all doing well.

Merry Christmas.

Just because you live in Maine doesn't mean you can't be a Cowboy!

Hi again. I have been home for a month now and realized that I had some unfinished business. We didn’t have any signal at Fishing Bridge Campground so this chapter of our trip never got sent. Here is the missing already written section. A short time (hopefully) later I will write up the last and final chapter. A couple of interesting things happened on our trip home and those will be covered in the next section. For now, here is chapter 10.

Time is growing short. This is Tuesday morning and we leave Monday morning for home. It doesn’t seem possible that we are in the portion of this trip where we have to start making lists of the things we haven’t done and plan out our final days here to see as much as we can. Once again, we will not do everything we wanted to but then do you ever?

Today we go up to Roosevelt Corral and take a horseback ride ending up at the cowboy dinner. That was a real ball last time and we couldn’t get the horses. We are taking a kind of slow day but have some things that we need to do on the way. We didn’t check on the buffalo carcass yesterday so we will today. It is on the way. We also need to find some computer connection so we can make arrangements for Stan’s flight home so we may stop at Mt. Washburn (where we saw the coyote 2 days ago) as we had pretty good cell connections there and should have computer connection. We didn’t think of it yesterday when we were at Old Faithful actually doing some computer and phone connections.

We had a nice day yesterday. We got up leisurely since we had the early morning banzai run looking for the early morning animals. We spent the day walking amongst the geysers of the Old Faithful Geyser Basin. It was quite crowded. I talked to one person who had been here 8 years ago and was bemoaning the crowds as being way bigger. It was hard to walk around in some areas. We started out with a closeup of Old Faithful. We got there early and got seats in the front row (where else?). A lot of people got there early to get good seats. At the last minute, just before the eruption, hundreds of people showed up and jammed their way into the front area standing between the rows and in front of the people who had been there for half an hour.

We spent the rest of the day walking around the geyser basin and checking out all the different pools, geysers, vents and streams. It was a nice day. If you were taking pictures (which I always am) people would walk right through your picture or even stop in front of you and take pictures of their own. Occasionally, someone would realize that they had done that and apologize and some people would even stop until you had finished but the large majority ignored everything but their own interests and just stood in front of you.

One tragedy in the making concerned Morning Glory Pool. This pool has been a beautiful pool that showed up in all of the pictures of the park and had a post card of its own. According to the ranger, people have been throwing things into the pool and have blocked some of the passages causing the water to not flow correctly thereby killing the beautiful blue color of the inner pool and leaving it a murky green. It is still pretty but the park doesn’t know what to do to fix the problem and they are afraid that they are going to lose one of Yellowstone’s premier attractions.

I had hoped to take in more than one basin but when the dust cleared, we only got one basin in. The ranger talk last night was named Hook Line and Sinker and was about the history of the park and its fishing attraction primarily the cutthroat trout. It was interesting and they had a lot of old pictures of the park. In the early days of the park, the fishing was the premier attraction and drew sportsmen from all over the country. Of course, they abused it and caught hundreds of fish just to catch a lot of fish in a single day.

The park tried to bring in sport fish from around the country to attract even more fisherman. This didn’t work so well and led to some disasters. In some of the smaller lakes, the introduction of other types of trout let to cross breeding and some hybrid fish. The Lake Hotel hired professional fishermen to keep the hotel’s dining room in cutthroat trout. All of this led to the establishment of fish hatcheries. 20,000 cutthroat trout were caught and their eggs forcefully removed. These fish were raised and sold around the world and the country. None of these fish found their way back into the parks waters.

As you would expect, the catch began to deteriorate. The fishing arm of the park service blamed it on the predatory animals and the osprey, bears and pelicans became the park’s enemy. One year, they organized an egg stomp out on the island where the pelicans nested and raised their young. Half of the parks birds and their young were destroyed. It wasn’t long after that that scientists with no axe to grind proved to the park management that this was not in the least bit true and the animals were off the hook. As we all know, the real problem with the fish was over fishing and more care about the fishermen than the fish or their future.

I don’t want to give you the whole story, you need to come here and see this place for yourselves. It is magnificent. Eventually, the park got the fishing under control (they discovered that Fishing Bridge (a popular place to fish because the fishing was always good) was actually the spawning grounds for the cutthroat trout). Now Fishing Bridge is known affectionately as the No Fishing Bridge and the cutthroat trout have their spawning grounds back.

This park has a long history of saving species. At the end of the great buffalo extinction there were 23 buffalo remaining in Yellowstone. There had been a lot more but poaching in the park decimated the herds. The army was brought in to put an end to the poaching and the rebirth of the buffalo began. The army did some good things but they also abused other aspects of the park.

At one point, the wolf was totally exterminated in the park to “save” the other animals that the public liked to see. It wasn’t long before the imbalance in the park’s ecosystem began to show and the decision to return the wolf to the park began. Now with the wolf back, the ecosystem is in much better balance and the visitors have another predator to search for.

Well, that about covers that. I’ll see you again tomorrow. Top thing on my list when I get home is to get the heater in the camper fixed. I haven’t used it since the first trip to Alaska and it no longer works. We wake up each morning to temperatures in the 40s. Kind of reminds me of the ice storm power outages of last fall.

Today is the day I have been waiting for since arriving. We have our horseback ride and cowboy dinner this afternoon. We stayed in bed late and got a slow start saving our energy for tonight. We decided that it was time to do something about Stan’s airline ticket out of here. That gets a little difficult since we do not get any computer service or cell service here in our campground. We did get good cell service when we were on that parking lot up on the side of Mt. Washburn so we planned our trip up to Roosevelt Corral to stop at the site of the buffalo carcass and to stop on Mt. Washburn to get Stan a ticket online.

We drove over to the post office and I got my envelope full of bills (oh great!) from my mother and Stan mailed another package of souvenirs home. His glasses didn’t show up nor did my medicine. We headed up the road and soon arrived at the carcass site. We didn’t go there yesterday. The 2 days before that, there was little damage to it. We were all waiting for the big predators to discover it. Yesterday, we headed out to another section of the park so when we arrived today all that was left seemed to be the hide and some other unidentifiable scraps. A woman we met there said she had been there late yesterday and the carcass still seemed intact. Wellllll, today it was pretty much gone.

We did observe a coyote wandering the hillside and speculated that it was the same one we had seen other times we had been there. It hunted up and down a couple of the hills catching and eating several small animals. Then it circled around by the water and when it reached a certain point, it turned up the hill and went right for the carcass. There must have been something left as it nosed around the pelt and found enough to eat to keep it busy for several minutes. We left and headed up the road.

Just around the corner, we ran into yet another buffalo jam. There were several park rangers diligently working to keep the traffic moving but every time they began to succeed, buffalo would wander into the road and walk down the middle of it. We lost about 45 minutes there. People were taking pictures from their cars, from the sun roofs of their cars and from the road outside of their cars. One couple had pulled into a turnout and was sitting on a blanket on top of their pickup truck. The males were getting more serious about the females coming into heat and had paired up. They followed the females around showing off for them and growling and making sure other males didn’t intrude on their territory. The females did not seem to be impressed and pushed the males away whenever they got too close.

I’d like to say soon we were on our way but it wasn’t soon in fact it was way too long. Buffalo had ceased to be the prime interest of our trip after spending a lot of time in the middle of buffalo herds both here and in Custer. We eventually broke loose and headed up Dunraven Pass. We were moving along pretty well noting several instances of cars stopped to photograph buffalo along the road.

I came around one corner and noticed out of the corner of my eye a small herd of bighorn sheep lounging on a prominence of rock about a hundred feet above the road. We slowed and took some pictures and continued on towards Mt. Washburn.

Once we got to the mountain, we turned onto the dirt road and ascended. Once at the top, we set up the computer and had all kinds of trouble logging on. The wireless modem kept telling us that it was logged on but all attempts to gain websites came back with the message telling us that no connection was possible. Eventually, I just turned everything off and started over. This time it worked and we looked for several choices of flights. Cody was the closest airport but all of the flights out of Cody started at $600 and went up to $1100. We found a possible flight from Rapid City but could not get the program to let us in. We were running out of time so we packed up and headed to Roosevelt Stables. Everything work out well and we were there about 15 minutes early (you cannot predict how long it will take you to get anywhere since the traffic is such a dynamic problem).

We had paperwork to fill out and bathrooms to visit and soon the wrangler was calling us together to give us the mandatory safety talk (as well as how to handle the horses). There was nothing about seat belts and tray tables so I figured that we really were in the old west. One of the rules was NO CAMERAS ON THE HORSEBACK RIDE. That was the only disappointment of the trip but I understand the issue. You have a moderately large group of people (many of whom have never ridden) on horses; the last thing you want is these tenderfeet leaning over the side ignoring the horse to take pictures (I know I would do that). So they took our cameras away from us and loaded them into one of the wagons so we could have them at the dinner.

The ride out was a little tame. It was fairly flat out through the sagebrush and over into the valley. The horses tried very hard to dominate you to let them do whatever they wanted but most of us carefully kept them in line. One of the don’ts was “Don’t let them stop to eat. Whenever they try, pull their heads up and give them a good kick in the sides.” My horse (Dooley) was careful to follow my lead whenever he tried to eat. He would respond to my little coaxes with the reins. A couple of times, he would see a patch of grass that just looked too good to pass up and would make a fast hard move towards it forcing me to take the reins in both hands and pull straight up while kicking him in the side. I always forced his head up but most times, he came up with a mouth full of something. The first time he made the big move, he almost took me with him. That was the only time; later I was waiting for him.

Stan rode Winston and Cheryl rode Big Ed a huge palomino horse. Cheryl always seems to draw the biggest horse in the stable. She always is curious as to why she always gets a big horse and I always draw a smaller horse. The explanation usually is that they give her a gentle horse and I being bigger (and potentially stronger) am given the more spirited horse that is traditionally harder to ride. They obviously don’t know how much of a creampuff I am unless of course you cut in front of me on the road.

Dinner was just as good as I remembered it from 3 years ago. Rib eye steaks (or chicken) with potato salad, cole slaw, corn muffins, beans (a multi kind of beans), a corn dish, soda and apple crisp for desert was the fare of record. Oh, did I mention the cowboy coffee? They had these great pots of coffee over the wood fire. This coffee was really good with the appropriate amount of grounds in each cup. Near the end of the evening, the singer gave us the recipe: equal amounts of water and coffee boil over the fire for 2 hours and serve it when the spoon you put into it dissolves (nah, it was much better than that).

There was a western singer there (better than the guy 3 years ago) and a good time was had by all. 3 years ago, the horseback riders rode back in the wagons but this year we rode back on the horses. This part of the ride was the best. We climbed up a big hill and rode along a ridge. We descended and crossed the road to finish the ride. This was a much more challenging ride than the ride down. We got to use the things we had learned and practiced on the first half of the ride. The horses behaved much better and if you weren’t careful, you would think you had mastered horseback riding.

OF course that wasn’t true, you just felt that way. I have ridden 4 or 5 times now and I still feel that the horse could lead me whenever he wanted. It was really fun though.

We returned to the mountain top and finally got Stan’s airline ticket straightened out. He will ride with us to Rapid City and we will stay over night. We will drop him off early in the morning and make a serious effort to get home. My birthday party has returned to its original date. Sandra has swapped work days with someone who desperately needed another day off badly enough to take Sandra’s shift. Now the pressure is on to get home for the 30^th.

Rapid City fits in pretty well with our “travel” schedule. When just driving, we try to get 500 miles per day. We usually come close and sometimes get as many as 600 miles. That should get us home on the day before my birthday. Hopefully there won’t be any problems.

Well, I am tired and smell something like a horse (I won’t say that of the people around me BUT!). Showers in the am then we will figure out what to do. We only have 5 days left!

Yellowstone out!

Grand Tetons back at ya!

Another great day. Not as cool as it has been in the morning but still cool. Yesterday, we ran the heater in the truck as well as the griddle on the stove. This morning it was not cold enough for that. We got up late had breakfast and hit the road. The post office was a let down today; no packages for anyone. Stan called about his glasses and was told that they had been mailed so we should see them this afternoon or tomorrow morning (with our reputation for getting back late, tomorrow morning should be the best bet).

We headed for Jackson Hole and the Grand Teton National Park. This is one of the prettiest drives around. The mountains are very large and jagged. They are the youngest mountains on earth and have not had time to erode.

Our animal list is growing smaller. We only have a few separate animals although we would like to see more of some of the others. The biggies we have left to see are the moose and the grizzly bear. We would like also to see some more male elk. We did see one but it was in the trees and we didn’t get a clear look.

It is a fairly long drive to get out the southern entrance to the park. We left the park and were soon in the middle of a construction zone. It seems that there are a lot of construction projects around here this year. This was slow going as there were a lot of motorhomes and the road was quite rough. Eventually this ended and we set out on asphalt. We were getting along and got near to the place where we had seen a moose in the water 3 years ago. There was a moose in the same body of water. She was on the back side of the pond this time and was feeding on the bottom. She was feeding in water that seemed to be over her head. When she went down, she was completely under water and when she came up only her head showed. When she went down, her back would come to the surface and arch like someone surface diving.

A short distance down the road, we found traffic signs and a large crowd of people and several rangers. We couldn’t see what they were looking at so we stopped and asked the ranger directing traffic in the other direction. She told us there was a grizzly bear feeding on a carcass. We parked along the road and took the hike back to the action. There was a rail fence and behind it right next to some bushes was an elk carcass. The grizzly was in the bushes eating and standing guard over the elk.

The ranger there told us that some wolves had brought the elk down but the grizzly was in the neighborhood and immediately toook the carcass away from the wolves. The bear had been sitting on this carcass for 3 days and there seemed to still be quite a bit of it left. The bear was not a big one; the ranger estimated 200 lbs probably making it a yearling. Grizzlies can grow to 400 to 700 lbs. Every once in a while, the bear would make an appearance. Once it came completely out of the bushes, walked around for a while and returned. You could see its face over the elk and just before we left, it came out again to chase some birds off the carcass.

We continued down to Jackson Hole stopping periodically to take pictures and ooh and ahh over the Tetons. Jackson was a busy town. It had changed considerably over the 3 years we had been away. One business was closing after 62 years. They have been having a going out of business sales since May and would close at the end of the season.

We headed back to Yellowstone and upon arriving in the area of West Thumb; we found some elk out on the roadway with the usual elk jam of traffic. People were running through the woods trying to get pictures. I am amazed that there are not more accidents between the elk and the people. People run right up to them.

We drove into the West Thumb Geyser Basin. 3 years ago, Cheryl and I had a close encounter with a whole herd of elk so we thought we would try that again. Dusk was beginning to settle over the park as we turned into the parking lot. Over by the woods on the side we saw several elk working their way into the basin. One was the male that we had seen on the road. He had a moderately large rack. There were several females and youngsters and one other male, a yearling with a small velvet covered rack. We watched them for quite some time. Eventually people found them. The large male had walked over to a fenced in area and was grazing. People went right up to the fence barely 5 feet away and started snapping pictures. One man let his little daughter sit on the fence with nothing between her and the elk while he took pictures. A Japanese man tried to climb over the fence (the elk was still 5 feet away) but changed his mind halfway across. I do not understand people. They have no fear of these animals who could do them great bodily harm.

Dilemma of the day: If someone stupidly gets close enough to an animal to get attacked, is it required of those that stayed safely away to risk their own bodily injury to save them?? Fortunately that decision wasn’t necessary.

Well, back at camp after a long day’s drive. Supper is cooking, Cheryl is cooking it, I seem to have developed a sinus problem and am just going to take something for it and lay on the couch. See you tomorrow.

I slept a lot last evening and therefore did not sleep all that well. I was stuffy but not nearly as bad as I had last night. I have kept taking the medicine and hope tonight will be better yet.

We had a late breakfast and headed down to the post office. Stan’s glasses came but my medicine (for which I authorized special overnight shipping) was still a no-show. I figured that I would go back when the afternoon delivery came in.

When we left the post office, we headed across the parking lot to the Yellowstone Lake Hotel and got coffee. We sat on the benches on the front porch for a while and then walked down to the lake and sat on benches right on the water. It was a beautiful sunny dry cool day. The sun felt really warm on the body and the coffee tasted good. As we left to return to the parking lot, Stan saw a poster for a photo safari that peaked his interest.

We left Lake and headed for the Marina. We were interested in checking out both the lake boat tour and the boat rentals. The tours were sold out for today but we started thinking about tomorrow. They had a pretty wide open schedule tomorrow so we booked the first tour of the day; 9:15. They do not take reservations for the boat rentals so we figured that we will take the boat tour first and then if our interest is on the increase after that we will rent a boat for a couple of hours. We sat by the water and went over our options for the rest of the week since Stan was really interested in the photo safari and we still have to go up to the Lamar Valley on our last animal search of the trip.

We settled on the boat tour and rentals tomorrow (Friday) then the Lamar trip on Saturday. Stan will take the Photo Safari on Sunday (5:30 to 11 with breakfast provided) leaving us with Friday afternoon and Sunday afternoon available for whatever we feel is the most important. Sunday has to contain some time to ready the ship and the troops for transport on Monday AM. We hope we can get an early start on Monday and drive over to Rapid City. If we get there in a reasonable time we might try to redo the Mt. Rushmore evening ceremony that we got rained out of.

While Stan was signing on for the Photo Safari, Cheryl and I took a swipe at the gift shop. We bought some t-shirts and on our way out found some other things that we just had to buy so we returned to the register and cashed out some more. I had joked with the man at the cash register when we went through the first time about the amount of change I had in my pocket. I paid for part of the first items with change and joked with the guy that I wasn’t going to leave until he took all of the change including a bunch of pennies. When I came back the second time, I started with the change and when the smoke cleared, I had no more change.

Stan took a walk along Fishing Bridge and part of Yellowstone Lake. Cheryl and I decided o over to the Lake Lodge for lunch but when we got there, we discovered that the lodge cafeteria was closed from 2:30 to 4:30. That didn’t make us real happy but we left and headed back to the Marina to see if there was anywhere to eat there. Finding none, we headed for Fishing Bridge and found a lunch counter in the back.

We looked over the menu and tried to order hamburgers but were told they would only cook them well done. Once again (this is by far not the first time for this puppy) we told them that well done was not satisfactory so we ordered the beef brisket sandwich. GOOD CHOICE! The brisket was nicely cooked and when mixed with the BBQ Sauce provided a delicious meal.

We headed back to the camper with the express desire to sit out on our deck and soak up some sunshine. Just as I got settled, I remembered that I still had to return to the post office before it closed to check on my medicine again. I jumped in the car and headed over to lake arriving at the 5 minute to closing mark. Alas, no mail. Exasperated, I drove back to Fishing Bridge and stopped at the pay phone and called Medco. After a bit of time, I talked to someone there. We went through all of the information and he told me that UPS had been trying to deliver the package for 2 days.

After much discussion, he called UPS and put me on the phone with them. I talked with UPS for quite some time and learned all of the reasons why this whole thing didn’t work. It seems that the delivery went to some universal park mail system and no one would take the package. I gave all of the information that they mail mistress gave me to give them telling me that this system is foolproof (I ain’t seen a system that couldn’t be cobbled up). No one would accept the package so it went back to the UPS site at Bozeman, Montana. The UPS elf tried to contact Bozeman but didn’t have a working phone number (??).

She said she could email the information to Bozeman and the elfs at Bozeman would call me to make the arrangements. “Did I have a phone number where I could be reached??”

“Actually, no. There is no cell phone reception around here.” I gave her the phone number of the pay phone and she said they would call me within the hour (it took about a half hour). They agreed to change the address on the package and deliver it to the campground. I crossed my fingers for luck and thanked her profusely.

Back at camp, we prepared for the next day. We went to the ranger talk. The ranger was a school teacher in Seattle. He taught science in high school and was a ranger here for 37 summers. He talked about Yellowstone Lake. He talked about the lake itself and the volcanic eruption and glaciers that created and sculpted it. He was really interesting and it was obvious that he must be a really good teacher. We heard from another ranger that the seniors fought to get into his classes when most seniors are only interested in sliding through their senior years. He told us he was leaving to back to Seattle some day next week and would get home the day before school started. As much as he loved teaching kids in high school, he loved Yellowstone more and did not want to lose a day that he could spend here.

As his talk went on, he noticeably kept looking towards the sky. At the end of the talk, he told the audience that this was a special night. The sky was so very clear and the stars were so bright that he wanted to run a special impromptu talk on the constellations. He told the people that were interested to follow him down to the beach and told everyone else thanks for attending his lecture. Just about 90% of the attendees headed for the beach. Those smart enough to bring along a flash light stood to the side and lit the path for the rest of us who were confident enough of the path to dare do it without a light. When we all reached the beach, he said that he figured about 50 people would come to the beach not everyone at the lecture (he even hinted that we had picked up a few more people on the way).

He used a bright green laser pointer to point out the constellations and told stories about them (the pointer didn’t really reach the stars but there was enough moisture and dust in the air to show a green line in the direction he was pointing). I live away from town and get more stars than you see in town but this was spectacular! Every star was bright and crisp and the spiral of the Milky Way was clear as can be. We saw the big dipper just as it looks from our front door (except waaaay brighter).

We headed home from the lecture and went right to bed. We got up, had breakfast and set about to make a lunch. Our plan was to take the lake tour when the marina opened at 9 and then to rent a motor boat and explore the lake ourselves.

The tour was ok. Not much better. It was a one hour tour. The boat came out of the marine, rode across the front of the Yellowstone Hotel passing by the lodge, gas station and general store the passed by the oldest ranger station in the world, sort of checked out the Yellowstone River outlet (over to Fishing Bridge) and took a loop around Stephenson Island and returned to the marina. We got coffee in the store and sat out watching the boats come and go.

Then we rented our boat. It is an 18 foot aluminum boat with a 40 horse motor; basic but nice. They gave us the usual lecture (common sense) and told us where we could go and not go. This is a very large lake and we had a very small area to explore. It was just about the same area as the tour took us except that we did get some area beyond the Island. A chop had begun to develop but it wasn’t bad. We headed out to a point of land that demarked the furthest left we could go then headed for Steamboat Point across the lake which demarked the other right side boundary.

We passed along the island disappointed that the 2 moose that had lived on the island all summer had swum to the shore 2 days before. We had hoped to see the moose but that won’t happen now. We missed everything. The Obamas were here last week but only for a couple of hours and over at Old Faithful. We may have seen Martha Stewart but weren’t close enough to know for sure. We saw this boat with a bunch of people on it and inquired as to its availability. We were told that it was a park service boat that was used to gillnet the lake trout and it was never used for civilian rides. The people on the boat certainly weren’t park service people. Later we heard that Martha Stewart was in the park and went out on the park service boat. Coincidence?? I think not!

I did question why they would take Martha S. on a gillnetting boat. Gillnets do not require any bait?

Along the far shore, we were sheltered from the wind. The water was calm as glass so we turned off the motor and prepared for lunch (they would not allow us to beach the boat to have lunch). We drifted in the warm sun, got lazy and almost fell asleep. Eventually we fired up the motor and headed down the shoreline. Cheryl took a turn at the wheel and drove her first (but I am sure not her last) boat. We found a large rock formation in the water that was covered with birds. I had thought it was another of the park’s rental boats fishing but as we got closer, Cheryl pointed out to me that it was a rock. We avoided it…big time. If you damage the prop on the boat, you pay for it. I certainly didn’t want that. We had what looked like a brand new prop (the fin under the prop was broken in half so I assume that the original prop was destroyed too).

On the way back in, we found a log floating in the middle of the lake and pulled it into the boat. We continued back doing the “Top Gun” buzz of the Yellowstone Hotel. Of course, when you have to stay 300 yards off shore, it looses something. The people on the deck by the water didn’t even know they were being buzzed.

When we arrived at our slip, the girl on duty tied up our boat and remarked: “Oh, you brought me a log!!” She seemed happy that we had cleared the lake of this obstacle but offered no medals or free meals.

Afterwards, I headed away from camp to get a picture I have been coveting since we got here. It is a picture of a small evergreen tree on a little tiny island off the shore. I clambered over the bankings and driftwood and got my picture then returned to camp. After supper, we headed over to the ranger talk and heard all about the family of birds that contains ravens, crows, jays, magpies and nuthatches. She told us all about these birds without ever once using the word “Nevermore” or mentioning Edgar Allen.

We got up early today and headed up to the Lamar Valley. This is the only section of the park we haven’t covered. In fact, in three trips here, I have never been there so off we went. First we had to maneuver through the biggest buffalo jam we have yet seen. The buffalo were coming out of the woods down a steep banking and collecting on the road. A ranger in a car with the siren blaring was trying to drive them off the road. As soon as he went by, they would return to the road. Unfortunately, he had a large number of them running down the road trying to get away from the noise. Those of us in cars were a little worried that the bison would turn on us to relieve the frustration brought on by the ranger. It did not seem like the best solution to the problem.

One female was running down the centerline between rows of cars looking over her shoulder at the ranger car and was coming right at the front of my car. At the last second, she turned, saw me and almost fell over trying to avoid a collision. It was mayhem on roads and the trouble was created by the rangers; protectors of the wildlife. We ran into a similar situation in Custer and eventually all of the buffalo came out of the woods, crossed the road and began to graze in a large field. Believe me, no one minds being held up by a buffalo herd, especially when you are in the middle of it and the buffalo are no more than 2 or 3 feet away.

Lamar valley is a really nice drive. There are vast open areas with trees and some of the most beautiful rivers you could imagine complete with an overabundance of fly fishermen. If you ever saw the movie “a River Runs Through It” you would appreciate the type of rivers that abound here. Part of the park in this area is actually in Montana and that is where the movie was filmed (if I remember right). We saw a few animals but nothing new. We met up with some birders who tried to point out a sand crane (I don’t think that is the Vlasic Pickle Bird) but they had big spotting scopes and we had measly binoculars and could not find them.

We drove out the Northeast Gate of the park and drove through a couple of small towns that seemed to specialize in guiding fishermen and outfitting them. We did find a small café that advertised trout on the menu so we did what every tourist should do…bought the trout. It was pan fried just like I remembered doing as a child and was just a delicious. They served it with a nice salad and eventually brought us some homemade white bread that was equally as good.

It brought back memories of my childhood. We used to camp in places that were out of the way (and I mean out of the way). My favorite thing to do was sometime we were there, I would get up early and take the boat and go out fishing. When I got back, I would clean and scale the fish, wrap them with bacon then cover them with aluminum foil and drop them into the coals of a fire I had built. I would also make biscuit dough and put that in aluminum foil and cook it in the fire. I would then get everyone up and hand them a plate with a foil packet of fish and a packet of biscuit.

Well, we ran into another buffalo jam on our way back and were delayed. We are back now and will clean up the leftovers of the last 2 days for supper. Tomorrow is our last day and I am sure that getting ready to go will take up much of it. I do hope to get out for one last tour but I may not. I have not felt well the last several days. I think the altitude is getting the best of me and some sinus problems are making everything worse. One good thing about getting on the road is that I will be able to upload this. 12 pages are too much for one chapter. Bye

Ok, I haven’t had much of a chance to upload anything here. We have no signal!!! None whatsoever! Nada! That is why this section is so long. I apologize, I don’t like it either but what can one do??

Our time here is at an end. Stan is out taking the photo safari. He was up at 5 and out by 5:20 so we climbed back into bed and napped. Once we got up, we made coffee and breakfast and started to get everything ready to leave tomorrow. The addition of an extra person and a stay of 2 weeks with basically no rest days left everything in somewhat of a mess so this morning was a good time to get it back into shape. As we usually do with company, we gave Stan the bedroom in the back so he could have a place of his own. We lived in the front section which is also the living room, kitchen and dining room. The bed clothes went into the cab when we weren’t sleeping and my clothes went into the entertainment center leaving Stan with a closet and 2 drawers. I will continue to live out of the entertainment center on the way home rather than move things around again.

We had to reorganize things. I had 2 pair of cowboy boots, 2 pair of sneakers (one good, one for wet muddy days) and a pair of hiking boots (I had a second pair of hiking boots as I had bought a new pair and have not yet used them). Cheryl had sneakers, hiking boots and one pair of cowboy boots. She kept the sneakers for the ride home and we stored everything else under the back bed along with all of the literature and maps we picked up along the way. Now that the time is done, I am anxious to get home. I do enjoy the drive and the feeling of being on the road. We have a good time counting off the miles and the states. Watching the navigation system march us across the computer screen. I installed the Delorme software upgrade for the trip home. I was reluctant to run the program while we were driving out and didn’t know just what would happen to my library of routes. Last years upgrade had some things that people didn’t like and I didn’t see the bulletin boards about this years upgrade.

I like all of the changes they have added since I bought my version in 2006. I pretty much know where I am going but it is always nice to see your progress. That has always been a problem as mile markers go down heading west and south letting you know just where you are in each state. North and east are problems though as you start at mile 1 and there is nothing to tell you where the end is. It has improved. If you have a good road atlas, it will give you the exit numbers which now in most cases are the mile markers of that exit. The interstate system has been changing the exit numbers to reflect the mile markers. You have probably noticed that on the Maine Turnpike.

The nav system also helps when you have a bunch of turns in a short time. The screen tells you what your next turn is and the turn after that as well as how many miles and how long. The screen can be set to different scales. I like a fairly small scale. The computer then shows you all of the towns, lakes, rivers and roads along the way and you can follow them on the road. You can also use it like the smaller dash mounted units to find your way to places you don’t know how to get to. I usually look up the directions at home and then leave the computer at home. In the motorhome, I have a table set up in between the seats for the computer. Both Cheryl and I can see it and use it. In the car it is very difficult. My computer is very large and there is no where to put it except on the passenger seat or on the passengers lap (that is also the person we refer to as the navigator so I guess it is appropriate).

Well, we made it through the day. The deck is cleaned off and everything put away, the interior is cleaned up and everything stored away and we are about as ready to go as we can be.

Stan came back from his photo safari so excited it was fun to watch. Not only had the guide been a photographer that has spent his last 12 summers taking tourists on photo tours but he helped his “guidees” to better understand the art of photography and also great insight on how to use their cameras. Stan had not had his camera very long and the guide showed him a lot about how his camera worked and how to use it. They saw a lot of different animals. The guide seemed to know where everything could be found and took them to a lot of places. Only 4 people signed up for the tour so everyone got the personal touch.

After he told us all about his photo session, we drove over to Old Faithful for one last time. We got there just in time to see it erupt then walked over to the Old Faithful Inn. We had an “End of the Trip” celebration and imbibed in their lunch buffet. The menu was a little limited and basically the same price as the buffet so we buffeted. They had a soup du jour and a buffalo chili with great huge chunks of buffalo and no heat whatsoever. They had a nice salad bar with spring greens but NO ONIONS. The salad bar also included cole slaw and macaroni salad (both good). For entrees, they had a rice pilaf, bbq shredded chicken (on a 7 grain roll if you wanted one) and pan fried trout (it was not pan fried but institutionally prepared but still very good). They had tartar sauce but it didn’t show up until after I had finished eating, excellent corn muffins (that were only replenished as we were finishing up (didn’t stop me from trying them...excellant. Warm and moist…the lateness of the corn muffin made sure that my butter was nice and soft). There was a very nice apple crisp for dessert. All in all a great meal and Jeff, our waiter from Texas (with the accent to prove it), and a very nice Bulgarian college graduate keeping us in water made the meal a true enjoyment.

Then we conducted some business over the phone and called my mother to see how everything back home was doing. She told us another tale of woe about how hot and humid it was. She does not like the hot/humid weather but is glad she has air conditioners. She has been using them throughout this heat wave. We told her that it had been 61 when we drove over but had increased all the way to 75….everyone was complaining about the heat.

During dinner we talked about the things we missed when we were on the road (the hot humid weather was not one of them). Tuttle’s corn came to the top of the list along with seafood. The rule of thumb is to never repeat NEVER order seafood in the middle of the country. Trout is not seafood but locally caught and delicious, obviously not to be included in the rule. Corn is not revered around the country as a table vegetable like it is back home. Yes, you do find some farm stands that sell corn but they are few and far between and no matter how much they are revered there, their corn does not hold a candle to either of the Tuttles (Red Barn or Riverside Farm).

Things are winding down around here. The summer people are leaving one by one to return to their jobs. Many of them are teachers (who else can take the summer off to go off to the woods). We find many rangers that have been here for many years. Many of them leave at the last minute because they just don’t want to leave. It is easy to love this place. I first came here in 1984 with Marianna, Ivy and Brad. We had a bad experience as a grizzly attacked a camper in our campground the night we arrived. We woke in the morning to see the rangers carrying guns and a large bear trap on a trailer. We tried to sleep in the car but that didn’t work; 4 people in a car when you can’t open any of the windows makes the air pretty stuffy and no one slept much. The next night, Marianna and I slept in the tent and the kids slept in the car but unlike the other times they slept in the car, they were restless, kept calling out and opening the door. We left after 3 days and finished our vacation in Jackson Hole where we were comfortable sleeping on the side of a hill amongst the motorhomes.

At night, we would hear the wolves howling on the other side of the hill listening to them come towards the hill then move to the top of the hill before heading back out into the wilderness.

3 years ago, Cheryl and I spent 6 days here on our way back from Alaska. We had a wonderful time but didn’t have a car requiring us to break camp every day and drive the camper around the park. We knew we had to come back so this time we came for 2 weeks. Guess what? It still wasn’t enough. We didn’t take much time away from touring but continued to come up short. I guess the only way to handle this is to become rangers and come here for the summer. Sometime.