Category: Travels
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Pacific Northwest Interlude: The Legendary Pumpkins of Washington State
We’re sitting beside Commencement Bay in lower Puget Sound, enjoying a brunch with friends. This is not a “brunch” in the way that the word is thrown around so often these days. We’re provided with Mimosa’s that just keep coming like the tide and enough oysters and shrimp to drive a Maine shell fisherman turn…
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Pacific Northwest Interlude: A Song. A Journey. A Metaphore and a Memory
Sitting at the kitchen table, I can see my daughter, Erin and her husband watching a mute TV while a song is playing on an iTunes mix. Bob is a musician. He plays the drums and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of most kinds of music I could ever run across in my lifetime. I…
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Travels 10: The Good, The Sad and the Ugly
Venus goddess of love that you are. Surely the things I ask can’t be too great a task. –Frankie Avalon I’ve just walked to the hedge of cedars and watched the sunset. As usual, Venus is the evening star…leading us westward…like something Biblical. Our clocks are set to Pacific Time. We’ve crossed the Great Divide.…
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Travels 9: Climb Every Mountain
[NOTE: I am fully aware that you have come to expect the very best Blogs that your server can buy. Great pride is taken by me, the author of said Blogs (herein referred to as posts) to deliver the best to you, my dear readers, the observations and comments of weary but determined traveler. Each…
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Travels 8: A Land Of Ironies
I am entering a time and a place of strange ironies. I am warm and dusty…sneezing, really, on the Interstate, yet the snow of the eastern slopes of the Rockies are facing me. I’m having trouble making a legal u-turn to get the R-Pod facing in the right directions, yet I can park IN THE…
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Travels 7: Somewhere in the Black Mining Hills of Dakota
My lands are where my dead lie buried. –Chief Crazy Horse My last post was written with a sad heart. Pine Ridge Reservation will bring down even the most optimistic of people. I have to say that I slept well and was not delivered of dreams, either of blue-eyed prairie women or sad-eyed Sioux. I…
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Travels 6: Catching a Dream at Wounded Knee
Yesterday, I told a woman she had very pretty blue eyes. We stopped for gas in Laurel, Nebraska, and within thirty minutes, half the town knew we were there. I was stopped at a light and a guy in a black pick-up Ford asked if I was on the way to the classic car auction.…
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Travels 5: Oh, Pioneers!
The great American Poet and Literary Goddess of the Prairie, Willa Cather, once said: “I was raised by a tooth-less bearded hag…I was schooled with a black strap across my back…but it’s alright now, in fact it’s a gas.” Hold on, I don’t think that was Willa Cather. No, after rechecking my sources, I find…
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Travels 4: Blue Highways
Someone I’ve been searching for appeared before my eyes today and it wasn’t very far from Herbert Hoover’s grave. We had just crossed the Mississippi River. The Mother of North America Rivers. Say what you want about the Hudson, Rio Grande or the Missouri; Big Muddy is what rivers are all about. Yes, the…
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