Passing the Past

  It’s a down day for us again. We’ve (Lydia) put up mylar window coverings against the desert sun and done a bit of organizing. A lazy day for us, but our daughter is on her second day of the drive from Spokane to meet us here. She is a very busy woman with a…

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Old Friends: Bar Nunn

Old Friends: Bar Nunn   A 50-year high school reunion is a meeting of survivors, a time to compare notes and see how well you’ve handled life. I went to it with some reluctance mixed with an excited interest. Up to the minute I got in the registration line at the hotel, I was saying…

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Looking for America

    On their album “Bookends”, in the song “America”, Simon and Garfunkel described how everyone on the road had “gone to look for America.” It was a sweet sentiment, but not exactly true. It seems to me that at that point in time, 1968, we were really looking for who we were, and, we…

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Taking the backroad

Taking the backroad: One of our goals as we travel is to get off the main drag, avoid the standardized restaurants and markets that are the mainstay of the highway traveler, and to find the towns and scenery bypassed by the freeways of the last century’s transportation explosion. Often, our choices lead us into bits…

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Home: taking it with me

    We’ve packed for a lot of trips in our life together. Long trips to Jamaica and England. Shorter trips by train across America to Vermont, Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Colorado. Car or camper trips to Glacier and Monument Valley. Our epic trip on Hwy. 20 from Newport, Oregon to its other…

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Snacks

9:00 AM in Phoenix and we’ve only been up a few minutes. We had to wake yesterday at 2:00 AM to catch our flight from Eugene. Arriving, we caught a shuttle to the car rental center, upgraded to a Camry, and wandered around Phoenix until we found our resort. I think we were addled by…

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Standin’ and Staring

  I think that it was in Sometimes A Great Notion that Ken Kesey talked about the “standin’ and starings”, a condition endemic to people of the Northwest once the holidays are over and the long days of rain have set in. It is a condition somewhere between a hypnotic state, severe depression, and Zen…

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Quiet Time

It’s a grey day on the south coast. If you’re an Oregonian, you know what I mean without explanation. The sky is overcast in a high grey dome. It has been misting, though now the mist has turned to a steady drizzle. A slight fog has drifted in so that even the air is grey.…

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Coastal Storm

The rain began as I got ready for bed, a few polite taps on the roof, a cluster of knocks as larger drops fell from the cedar in our site, released by the first gusts of the wind off the ocean. By the time I closed my book and put my head down the comforting…

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Developing a Coastal Lifestyle

  We have begun to develop a rhythm here on the south coast. It is Sunday morning. It rained steadily all day yesterday, but today pale blue sky appears between patches of high, grey clouds. Water still drips from the Spanish moss that dangles from the tips of the evergreen trees around our camp. My…

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