Safe in Their Beds...

John is nestled in the down comforter, sleeping soundly in the basement cocoon of the house. I'm upstairs, sleepless, with my favorite blanket wrapped around my shoulders and the computer giving off a dull glow in the dark. And here we are: home.

We arrived a few days ago, just in time for a belated Thanksgiving with my family. We spent Thanksgiving proper with John's family in a rented house on the ocean in the Outer Banks. It was blustery, cold, and salty -- perfect for looking out the window and thinking fondly of the beach. We have spent the last few days hiding out, digging down, trying to staunch the vertigo from sudden inertia. The moment we arrived here, we were both hit with a tidal wave of exhaustion that I think we weren't expecting. After all, the final two weeks of the trip were practically motionless; quiet and relaxed. A pre-hibernation to foreshadow the little dent we make in the earth now.

We left the hustle-bustle of Nashville and headed to Asheville, where some friends of a friend of a friend graciously took us into their home just as the temperature in the mountains plummeted to "unbearable in a three-season tent." We met them at a Blackalicious show at the Orange Peel, the liveliest venue in the country as far as we can tell. Can the hippies ever dance. Alisha and Nicki, the aforementioned friends, led us back to their house and as quickly as that we had nearly moved in. We stayed four days, and were not easily convinced to leave. They are raising an amazing kid by the name of Elliot. He had the croup, so we got to play hookey with him. Mostly, this meant playing the Harry Potter board game, Slapjack, War, and Go Fish, and watching cartoons with the cats -- Lover and Gooey. We made chicken soup and drank tea all day. Wintery perfection. Our major excitement was finally snagging Chaco, who appeared in trap (empty of any treats, the poor curious creature) on day two. We walked him down to the creek with Elliot and set him free to become part of the food chain. Elliot was pretty impressed that he had come all the way from New Mexico. And come to think of it, so were we.

Asheville gave way to Duck. The hibernation deepened. John's family is tender, quiet, and introspective. The major excitements at the beach are the daily trip to the grocery store and making dinner, and neither shake you very deeply from your deserved recline. Occassionally Sunny Boy, the family motivator and a yellow lab, would demand a trip to the shore to chase birds and strut about with horseshoe crabs dangling from his lips. We ate salmon and clams and shrimp for Thanksgiving, and gave our thanks for each other and the safe harbor of family.

Driving into DC for the first time in five months brought about the frame shift that happens to all travellers -- the sudden sense that you were just here, perhaps even yesterday, and everything is as it was. And in the next instant, you are suddenly just as sure that a lifetime has passed, and you can't summon the feat of imagination that will label this place home. There's no way to sum up the trip without pretending it was simpler than it was for both of us. I think we both found a kind of happiness we hadn't previously had, and we're eager to hold on to it. Certainly, we can offer our thanks to everyone for following along, encouraging us, sharing your homes and beds, and perhaps also for allowing yourselves to be a little inspired.

We'll be in DC through January. After that ... we'll keep you posted.




Sunny and Stephen (John's brother), breaking a sweat




The Mayer Clan (from left: Dad Gerry, Mom Nan, Brother Stephen, and Man I Love)




"If I love Chaco, can I keep him?"

That good ol' mountain dew

As you might imagine, it's difficult to find the internet in Arkansas. In fact, it's difficult to find a gas station that will take a credit card. Apologies, then, for being remiss in updating.

After leaving Albuquerque, we headed north to Santa Fe -- a lovely, if very touristy, town. It made it to the list of possible places to move after this is all over with, mostly because of excellent food and incredible mountains (a feature we weren't really expecting in New Mexico, but the state turns out to be full of surprises). We headed to Taos and the Sangre de Christos mountains, north of Santa Fe after two days in the nation's highest capitol city. In Taos, we found a beautiful antique map of North America from 1877, which we picked up as a souvenier of the trip. We did some hiking up in the mountains (where the altitude really whipped us). It had already snowed up there, and at night was getting down to about 10-15 degrees -- we had to sleep huddled under our two sleeping bags and the down comforter, and were still freezing most of the night. We had to be in our tent by dark (around 5 pm), otherwise it got too cold to function. But it was cozy and wintry, and we upped our nightly sleep allotment to about 14 hours.

From there, we headed west to Chaco Canyon -- an area where one of the major civilizations of the southwest was rooted. There we visted Pueblo Bonito, the largest building in the U.S. before the advent of structural steel -- 600 rooms, 4 or 5 floors high, elaborate masonry -- and built between 850 and 1150 A.D. It was *amazing* -- even more so because you can walk through all the rooms and sort of pretend like you're discovering it for the first time. A friendly ranger, obsessed with the astro-archeological events that the Chacoans constructed in the canyon (they think, anyway -- things like shafts of light that shine in patterns around the equinoxes), took us up to watch one of these events at sunrise. We were standing on 1000 year old walls, on the third floor of the ancient building ... it was pretty amazing.

Here we also met a new friend, whom we picked up in the desert. Strangely enough, his name is Chaco. He's been with us for over a week now, and eats insufferable amounts of our food, though he hasn't figured out the food box yet. The third morning with us, we woke to find that he had stockpiled our "fancy nut" mix in John's left shoe. After that we bought the mouse traps. We caught him yesterday for the first time, and he's got the cutest little mexican mustache that points straight out to the sides. But it was raining, and we let him go right next to the car, and we woke up this morning to find that he must have run straight back in -- the Doritos had been raided.

So, with Chaco in tow, we headed north and east into the mountains of Southern Colorado. There, we visited the Great Sand Dunes -- the highest dunes in North America. We climbed a 650 foot dune (which was probably the most difficult hike we've done). It was worth it for the 360 degree views of the dune field, the 14,000 foot mountains next to us, and the endless valley stretching south into New Mexico. We ran down the slipfaces of the dunes, which were incredibly steep and incredibly fun to descend -- the sand makes a sucking noise as your legs slip in up to your calves, and avalanches of sand run down the face from each footprint -- and each step carries you five or six feet down the slope.

Then began our rapid trip across the Texas panhandle (the worst smelling state so far -- cow shit and gas pumps, echgr) and Okalahoma (where we went to our first WalMart ever in Carrie Underwood's hometown). We angled for the Ozarks. In some of the more rural drives we've done (*seriously* Deliverance country), we passed huge encampments of hunters (it's elk and deer season) in the mountains there. We passed a local restaurant actually advertising Fried Catfish and Froglegs for lunch. And they have the crookedest roads you've ever seen -- there's not a straight road in the whole state. Our second night in the backwoods, we found the Ozark Folk Center, which happened to be hosting the final festival of the season -- bluegrass. It turned out to be an excellent show of five groups from all over the south, but one of the strangest experiences of the trip. The audience was uniformly ancient. And -- totally surprising for a bluegrass show -- unequivocally silent. There had been a lot of pre-show requests for gospel (every band mentioned this and played at least half their set as gospel), and the only enthusiam the crowd showed was for the men to reach up and pull off their hats for the gospel songs. Polite clapping and the removal of hats. It was either the most discriminating crowd I've ever been a part of, or the most repressed. I thought it was pretty good bluegrass, but maybe my standards are too loose...

Anyway, here we are in Music City. Nashville. Tennessee. The weather is shit -- that good old east coast November rain. Our trip ends in less than a week. We're in denial about that, but beginning to look forward to what's next -- turkey, mostly. And even thinking a little more seriously about where we'll be moving, and how to move, and when to move, and ... There's a lot of unanswereds. One thing we're pretty sure about is that we'll miss this way of life -- sleeping out, sleeping long, never seeing the same thing twice in a day. We've come up with some easy coping mechanisms -- making pancakes on the propane stove, camping in the back yard, sitting in the car on Sunday afternoons to listen to This American Life.

Quick warning for those on the east coast: we plan on having a party when we get back. Not sure where or when, exactly. We're looking forward to seeing everyone -- we're having a lot of pangs of missing folks. Oh, and we'll be back in DC the day after Thanksgiving (although that weekend will mostly be family time). Best, J and H.

Born again

After leaving Sedona, we camped for the night in a ponderosa pine forest by the name of Tonto. Ponderosa forests smell spicy like any other pine groves, but if you sidle up close and breathe in deeply, the bark smells sweetly of vanilla.
The next day, we crossed into the state where I was born. New Mexico surprised us from the outset. We entered from the west into the vast expanses of Gila National Forest, as seen below.




We quickly reaped further rewards after spotting signs for the San Francisco Hot Springs. We pulled off onto a dirt road and found, instead of the hot springs we expected, a trailhead. A quick calculation indicated that the 1.5 mile hike to the springs was possible before the sun set (around 5pm now), and off we went. We followed a rudimentary map through cactus-filled hills, down into a river canyon. After some misadventure and directions from a local, we found three small shallow resevoirs created by rock dams. The springs were sitting just alongside the river, each progressively warmer. We were alone in the late afternoon, and we able to take baths in the river after a good soak. Here's John lounging in one of the pools, the river just beyond the rocks.




We camped at the trailhead that night and were treated to the most incredible show of stars yet. We even left the rain fly off to better appreciate the view, although the temperature dipped near freezing that night (the fly holds in a lot of heat and makes camping in the cold a lot more manageable). We met a crazy lady from Colorado, who was so lonely she couldn't bear not to speak for about two hours straight. But she fed us homemade banana bread and yummy Colorado apples, so we liked her just fine. Next day, we headed south and east, stopping at a state park called City of Rocks. Here, in the middle of the desert, an outcropping of rocks rises up smoothed into alien shapes that resemble some impossible ancient city. John scrambled up some of them.




Later that afternoon -- an uncelebrated Halloween -- we arrived in south central New Mexico at one of our most anticiapted destinations, the White Sands desert. The desert sits in the middle of the White Sands Missile Range, where the first atomic bomb was detonated, and adjacent to an Air Force base and numerous other places where scary things happen. We were treated to a viewing of the Stealth fighter jet, and the next morning we received an 8 AM wake-up call from one of the missiles they were exploding on the range (from 30 miles away it sounded like it was happening under the tent). To say the least, it was a strange place, no less so because of what we were there to see -- the snow white dunes of the gypsum desert.




It looks exactly like snow, and like snow drifts, the dunes here can move remarkably fast -- up to 30 feet in a year. They move so fast that most life can't survive. We went for a ranger-guided walk at sunset and learned a lot about the unique ways that life forms have adapted -- including, incredibly, some cottonwood trees (which are normally found along rivers with abundant and constant water sources). They don't know for sure how the trees stay alive, but hypothesize that the trees are able to collect fresh rainwater in pools just above the alkaline watertable, which the roots can draw from in dry spells. The desert gets 8 inches of rain a year.

Another unique life form is this plant, which collects water from the sand (the sand acts as a sort of sponge for water) around it's roots, which then hardens and crystalizes the gypsum. It's able to create pedestals, which hold the sand in place even as the dunes move around them. Inside the pedestals, the temperature is a constant 77 degrees, through the 110+ degree summers and winters that cool to below freezing temperatures. The desert's animals--including mice, owls, and foxes--mostly live in these monoliths.




It's hard to resist taking a few glamour shots in a place like this.






It's also hard to resist having a little fun. We grabbed a tarp from the truck for a little sledding.




The next day we decided to drive to Albuquerque, where I was born, to meet my godparents before they left for a trip to Europe. I hadn't seen them since I was a toddler, when they and my parents were very close friends. John, my godfather, did his residency with my father, and Mary Ann and my mom were constant companions. They were there for both mine and my brother's births. We an excellent, if hurried, visit and got to learn a bit about how my young parents lived their lives.




We spent some time today driving along the old Rt. 66, which stretches through the southern part of the city as Central Avenue. It's lined with old motels possessing decadent vintage neon signs. We also sported through old town, the original settlement of Albuquerque, founded in 1706 (celebrating it's tricentennial next year!). It's full of tourist shops now, including some high-end galleries that have incredible Native artifacts -- pottery, rugs, baskets, etc. Since we'll be visiting some of the pueblos later this week, we refrained from spending any money. In the afternoon, we met up with Matt, and old friend of Johns' from DC, who took us on an incredible hike at Tent Rocks, about 1/2 hour north of town.



We had to almost run to the top in order to get out of the park by closing time at 5, so we did the 1.3 mile ascent in about 20 mintues. We hiked through the weird formations you see in the pictures, to this view at the top.




This is looking out over the Jemez mountains from the top. You'd almost never know that both Albuquerque and Santa Fe are both within about 30 miles of here.

Back to the Present

So while Hanna whiled her days in San Diego, I was visiting with these two characters, my dad and nephew in Charlottesville. Valdemar is 4 and visiting my parents from Copenhagen where he lives. The whole family was in town, brother, sis-in-law, nephew, other brother, mom, dad, dog and cat. The whole clan in one place never happens so we celebrated Thanksgiving a little early and Valdemar helped my dad carve the turkey. Intrigued, but not quite sure we should be doing that to a bird.





Upon my return we said goodbye to Pete, Toni, and San Diego and headed for Las Vegas where absurdity reaches its zenith. This is the view from our hotel room at the Monte Carlo where we stayed two nights, gambled away a bunch of money reserved for entertainment, and saw a psychedelic topless light show ... thing. We learned the Vegas way that expecting to win money in Vegas is like expecting to sleep with the stripper at the strip club. Generally, not going to happen, although there are the lucky few.





It's terribly unfortunate that we saw this sign on our way out of town, since we always like our cold beer with dirty girls. After two days in the hazy reality of Money Town, we were ready to skip the bikini bull ride. Our misfortune.





Can you sum up two days in Vegas better than this face?





After leaving Vegas, we stopped for the night outside of Laughlin, NV, a strange little town on the flaccid Colorado (below both the Hoover and Davis dams, it sort of peters to a limp). Mohave County Campground: perhaps the most American campground we've found, and the starting point for possible future road trips if we can convince some grant panel to give us money to study the oddities of the semi-permanent itinerant campgroung movement. These places generally rent by the day, week and month--and there's tons of them in the southwest where people set out for when the weather in the rest of the country turns sour. Next to us on one side was the skullmobile, which you see pictured. A decorously tatooed native couple and their racoon-chasing cat lived here. On the other side of us was a woman who looked like a textbook small town stripper, with her two-year-old, Meredith. They pulled up after dark, in a dust storm of cursing, mostly about lost love and misspent money. They seemed to have just moved there from another similar facility nearby, and were living in two house-sized tents. Further on down were seven Mexican guys, who drank a lot of beer, slept in the same tent, played what sounded like circus music at top volume, and were gone at the crack of dawn -- we think migrant workers saving a buck on housing. We were the only folks there for just the night. Compounding the oddity on our first night back in "nature", sometime in the middle of the night a giant casino boat steamed past our tent with lights blaring and the bingo caller's voice ringing off the rocks.





Yesterday, in the middle of our continued journey east through NV and AZ, we decided to detour up to the Grand Canyon, only about an hour north. We were initially met with rain and cold (one of our water jugs burst from the freezing overnight temperatures -- a marked change from the desert climate of the last week), but we woke this morning to watch the sun rise in clear skies. (The sun rose at 6:45, a sure sign of changing seasons, as the last time we woke for the sunrise in Maine, we had to be up and at 'em by 4:30.) A gorgeous sight turned spectacular when we got to see fog pouring over the lip of the south rim, pooling into a cloud just inside the canyon. Probably most of you have been to the Grand Canyon (John had already seen it as a child), but we were both struck (I for the first time, and he anew) by the immensity of it. It almost leaves you feeling flat, as your brain tries and fails to process the depth, width, breadth, color, and infinitely changing aspects of the spectacle. Morning was the best time to see it, though, as the deep shadows reduce everything to large, simple shapes and you can skip the dizzying feeling of being inadequately equipped to appreciate something so incredible.





John takes in the sunrise.


So, we left the Grand Canyon this morning, and find ourselves now in Sedona, AZ. It's a bit of a loopy town, but it's one of the most beautifully appointed. It sits in the bottom of a deep canyon, with the alien red rock formations of the southwest for neighbors. We're moving east and south, heading for the White Sands Desert in New Mexico. We chose to skip Utah, for reasons of time, but may make it all the way north through New Mexico and into Colorado before continuing east. We're full tilt again after kind of a lazy, meandering month among family and friends. We hope to make the most of the rest of the trip, and avoid the automatic shut-off we had begun to feel in San Diego. Voila. We're finally caught up.

We're almost caught up...

Here's some photos from the last two weeks -- San Francisco, Monterey, none from LA unfortunately, and San Diego. Next post: the sun sets behind us.

Here we are in San Francisco (the Golden Gate bridge is actually behind us, but since no one was around to take our picture we had to do that annoying couple thing where we hold the camera ourselves -- forgive us)


This is a photograph of a Hanspree "lifestyle television" at their U.S. flagship store, which just opened in San Francisco. Although addicited to TV, I secretly hate it. This company is fast becoming my nemesis, as it makes me want desperately to own one of everything it makes -- included stuffed animal TVs. The woman at the store was quick to point out that their TVs are NOT marketed to kids, but instead to adults who want an "emotional connection" with their electronics. That would explain the Cinderella TV on a foot-high pedestal that only infants can see standing up.


At the world famous Monterey Aquarium -- jellyfish


Hanna tries to call up one from the deep in the Shark Myths exhibit at the aquarium


Foggy sunset, Big Sur


Route 1 makes you sick


Elephant seals! (They look dead, but they're actually tanning.)


Sunset at the Coronado Hotel's beach, where we celebrated our 4 month anniversary of the trip with pricey scotch


Hanna chatting with a statue at the San Diego museum of something or other


Playing Bacci at sunset (Hanna, brother Pete, and Pete's gal Toni). We went camping--our first time with other people!--on the beach just up the coast from San Diego.


Pete goes surfing in the morning. We watch from the cliffs.

Backtrack part deux... Up the coast from the other side.

It is true, I am in Charlottesville, VA now in the comfort of my home with my parents, my brother, my sister-in-law, and my nephew Valdemar (my eldest brother Paul is coming in a few minutes from Copenhagen where he lives with my sister-in-law and Valdemar). I guess this trip is not just about our life as it happens in the company of each other, but what happens in our individual lives as well. This visit from the Danish part of my family is a once-in-a-never occurance, and something that I couldn't miss being a part of (heightened by the announcement of another niece or nephew on the way). So this is why I have parted ways with my love and companion for a few days and here I am oddly transported back to the East Coast by way of an 8 hour flight (rather than the four months it has taken us to drive there). Wierd.

Anyhow, I wanted to tell anybody still reading about an experience of LA that was at once completely unexpected and gratifying in a way that made me wonder: "Why dont more cities have something like this?"

We arrived in LA in the afternoon and spent much of the day between Malibu and Downtown, back to Malibu and back to downtown. For those who haven't been there Malibu is one of the nearest beach communities to downtown LA and it takes about an hour on the 12-lane freeway to get there when traffic is moving. It takes about two hours when it is not moving as we experienced coming back from the beach. The 12 lanes of pavement (large enough for a gigantic parade to walk down one side) was packed with brakelights taking the place of the sunset. We pulled off and decided to wait it out in a parking lot, rather than the defacto parking lot of the freeway. This happens daily and is the result of the fact that according to our host, Chuck: "Everybody in LA works someplace else".

When we got home from the beach, it was completely dark. It happened sometime while we looked at pumpkins in the parking lot and now we were ready for our next adventure. We were invited and enthusiastic to join "The Midnight Riders" with Chuck and friends. At ten thirty that night 8 of us set out on 8 bikes to seek out a monthly gathering of cyclists whose goal is to: 1) ride cycles 2) get together with as many other cyclists as possible 3) apolitically take over some streets of LA for a few hours 4) have a hell of a good time. We ride bikes and were happy to see others who do it too. We got a late start so had some catching up to do. Our first ten miles were spent with the 8 friends following Chuck towards the route. Eventually we found a couple of elderly stragglers who made our crew number 10. We knew we were getting close to the peleton when we saw a couple of flat tire repairs on the side of the road. And then it happened. Like a dream come true, we rode up a hill and the decible level increased exponentially and we were greeted by the backs of approximately 450 cyclists of all shapes, sizes, ages, experience, riding every sort of bike imaginable down the middle of the street amidst celebratory car horns and cheers of enthusiasm from the crowd. We rode ten more miles with the crew at a much slower pace as we finished out the ride at a "Dead Theater" in downtown. (Each ride has a theme, this one was "Dead Theater" so we rode 20 miles to 18 theaters around the area.)

This experience was a joy. It would have been such no matter where it occured, but in the midst of the car-culture-craziness that leads to 12 lane highways being clogged beyond capacity for hours each day, it felt like winning a battle with humor in the middle of the belly of the beast. LA is not known for its cyclists, perhaps it should be. Or, perhaps we should all take a page from their book organize every cyclist we know and do the same thing in whatever city we live. The key to this seemed to be laughter and good manners, as we all laughed at those who showed anger (rather than hitting their cars with our fists as I have been known to do) and thanked those who stopped with smile.

Midnight Riders. Midnight riders.

Backtrack

For the first time in four months I recognize a vaguely remembered feeling: boredom. Insidious beast. John and I celebrated the four-month anniversary of the trip with a glass of expensive scotch at the Coronado Hotel here in San Diego two days ago. Today, he left for Charlottesville, and here I am, alone in my brother’s apartment, clocking in 10 hours on the computer looking at job listings, hotel listings (Vegas, baby), blog listings, and finally, The OC episode guide. It’s a cheap throwback to working in a cube eight endless hours of the day. Being stationary for so long (six days now, and five more to go until John flies back here to me) has created a drag effect. Which isn’t to say we haven’t had a wonderful time in SD, but … well, being in one place for a week is reminding me that we’ll soon be back in DC, for an unknown number of weeks. The trip is officially only 4/5 over, but in our mental landscape of America, it’s a lot closer to the finish. Perhaps you see more than you’re capable of taking in, so you stop taking things in. Perhaps I’m just a bit melancholy. Or perhaps, realistically, we’re just shifting back into the necessary headspace to end this thing. In any case, some combination of factors (nasty hangovers included) left me without the energy and curiosity that have been the hallmarks of daily existence on our journey. Time to give myself a kick in the pants. We begin with some overdue photos, if our dallying hasn’t lost us all our readers altogether.



Here’s s my mom picking grapes in Grandpa Dixon’s garden in Spokane – soon to be jelly



Here we are making apple cider on the antique cider press with Aunt Heidi and Uncle Stacey’s grapes and apples



Between Spokane and Portland, we drove west along the Columbia River (it more or less forms a border between Washington and Oregon), stopping in Columbia Hills State Park on the WA side to camp one windy night. This photo gives a good sense of the high desert climate of eastern and central WA (betcha didn’t know it looked like this in the Pacific NW). It’s sweepingly gorgeous, and a little daunting.



After Portland (where we stupidly didn’t take any pictures), we made our way to the coast and began our descent along the Pacific. Here are the Oregon dunes, some of which reach up to 400 feet high, grabbing at the ocean.



After hiking through subtropical rainforest and climbing over the expansive dunes, we came to this beach (see below). It was littered with disembodies jellyfish, like little gooey eyeballs.


The beach is so flat here that the water creeps up the sand for hundreds of feet beyond where thes wave break.



Lumberjack John in the redwoods (under Paul Bunyan’s left foot). Now we're in California.



This is a very big tree (over 20 ft. in diameter and formerly 368 ft. high – the top fell off a few years ago and now it’s something like 250 ft.)



These trees are about 300 ft. tall



Spotlight on Brinkman



Sexy Beast #2



Here I am trying to relive the successes of my youth. This is the beach just past where Route 1 first meets the ocean, and where we met Dusty Miles. John’s a pretty ace shot, eh?



Here are John and his aunt Pat, extended family member #1!



John and Pat on the cliffs over the ocean

Next up: San Francisco, LA, and San Diego.

Grr Technology

So it appears that somewhere into the ether we have lost the post about hanging out with the extended Neuschwander family throughout Washshington and Oregon so as we are now in San Francisco, I will try to backtrack for a moment and recreate our list of family fun...

1. Visited "Aunt Debbie" just outside of Seattle and had a great visit to the city as well as to her kindergarten class where we got to show the kids on a big map-rug all of the places we have been admist calls of, "my grandma lives in Michigan!"

2. Went to Debbie's cottage on the river near Leavenworth, WA where we relaxed, ate good food and undertook the drive and hike to Hart's Pass. This was immensly emotional and important as it is where Hanna's Father was celebrated and remembered following his death when Hanna was five. Neither she nor Debbie had been to this service or spot, so Randy's good friend Bill Arthur regailed us with wonderful and humorous stories of the hijinx he shared with Randy while he led the way up the ridge line.

3. Continued east to Spokane where family really runs deep. We stayed for the long side of a week with Hanna's grandparents on her father's side (Dixon and Bonnie) who showed us a great time and kept us well fed with produce from Dixon's amazing garden where he grows 11 types of grapes, 7 tomato varieties, and 6 garlics. They shared stories and jokes and lots of laughs for a while.

4. Used the tools of the family to make apple cider, grape jelly, and salsa which we canned and are enjoying still.

5. Hanna's uncle Stacey gave some sweet lovin to Brinkman and he is running well for the help.

6. Were surprised by a visit from Hanna's mom, Jan, who flew out from DC to stay for a few days making it a real family experience.

7. Went north to Chewelah, a small town north of Spokane where Hanna lived for a couple of years. I went rock hunting and am taking care of a magnum eye cut still. (know what that is?)

8. Went to "Nannie's Farm" (a farm owned by Hanna's great grandmother, where Hanna's father's generation really grew up). The current residence where all out elk hunting, so we camped on their lawn.

9. Visited a wedding palace (really it was a palace where weddings happen) owned and run by Hanna's uncle Rob and aunt Becky. Great for all of us as we got our fill of fireside chats, catching up with long lost cousins, and god.

10. Fell in love with Portland.

11. Visited great aunt Lurlyn and uncle Jack in Salem, OR and compiled even more Neuschwander family history.

12. Left family and went to the Oregon coast (wild, undeveloped and beautiful) and then Northern California.

13. Had a great visit with John's aunt Pat in Bodega Bay (more on another post).

14. Are now leaving San Fran after a few days touring the bay area and staying with John's friend Eleiza and are headed to Big Sur and the Monterey Aquarium.

still no computer so no pictures but more soon.

California California California (sung to the tune of the OC theme song)

Those of you who know me well will not be surprised to learn that I left my laptop on a counter in a Kinko's in Salem, OR. Happily, FedEx and Kinko's are now one, so they are mailing the cursed thing to my brother in San Diego, where we plan to arrive a week or so from now. Until then, no photos. Which is a crying shame, because we have some good ones from the Oregon coast, including sundry sequois sempervirens (the coastal redwood behemoths), as well as northern California. Sans photographs, here is a picture in words of our most recent adventures:

We left Salem and headed for Albany where my great-grandmother's farm is (though it now belongs to one of my father's cousins). My father and his various siblings and cousins more or less grew up on the farm, spending every summer of their young and adolescent lives there. I had also been there many times when Nanny was still alive, and recall that it's most prominent feature was the spider-ravaged fruit cellar where you were locked if you misbehaved. My father bought the farm from Nanny before he died and intended, I think, to live out his days there. Being as such the place where I could possibly have spent my own young and adolescent summers (and winters and the rest of many years), it's an interesting excercise in the many worlds theory to return and see what my possible life would have looked like. My grandmother's sister June lives down the gravel way, and we camped on her lawn (the gang was out elk hunting, so we had the place to ourselves) and listned to the owls cry dusk and watched the sun set over the stalwart row of redwoods that break the wind off the fields. All in all, a possible childhood to relish.

We decamped from Albany on Sunday and aimed for the coast of Oregon, 60 miles to the west. You may have heard it from other, more reliable, sources but the Oregon coast is the most beautiful in America. Foresight left the vast majority of it in state hands, and the rest--due to strict zoning and building laws--is hardly developed (a far cry from the misery of the Atlantic coastline). It's misty, foggy, craggy, and fearsome. We stopped for a hike out to the Oregon Dunes, which reach heights of up to 400 feet and feature the complex and delicate growth of hardly coastal grasses. We ran from "sneaker waves" -- one in every few hundred that race past the tide line and steal inattentive creatures out to sea. Just inland of the dunes is a strip of subtropical rainforest, in which John spotted lots of slithery things. The hike was beautiful, emerging as you do from one of the rarest microclimates in the world--where the thick canopy of the forest chokes out the sun--into the bright, open world of sprawling sand beasts and gnarly ocean.

We started the working week off with our arrival in the redwoods. The story of the preservation of the redwoods forests is unique, and easily discovered by a trip to see the giants, which we encourage. Loads of very good writers have described being among the redwoods and feeling a religiousity descend on them, and indeed being among them was like being a cathedral. But we felt that the most apt approximation of their character and stature was captured by Peter Jackson in the Lord of the Rings movie (I'm not a Tolkein geek, so I don't remember the names of the giant tree guys who come to the rescue of the wizard, but you know who I mean). Some of the trees are more than a thousand years old (some almost two thousand), and are the tallest living things on earth (taller than the Statue of Liberty, though not living is a good marker of the height of these behemoths). The oldest came to exist around the time Christ was born, before Shakespere, before Columbus, before Napoleon, and long before us, and they have stood through earthquake, flood, fire, and gale. Walking through the forest and looking up, it feels like the sky has receded many miles higher than it was the last time you checked. They are beings that extinguish human egotism and embellish the goodly human insticts--like reverence and wonder--at the same time. We set up our camp just next to a stream in Elk Prarie State Park, back in a dark, damp corner of the forest that never sees enough sunlight to dry out.

The next day we thought we'd take a four-mile hike through the forest to the ocean and the "gold bluffs" that sheer up out of the water. At the beach we saw a herd of elk, a magnificent male among them, his antlers in relief against the ocean, feeding on the coastal grasses. Our hike then turned epic as we opted for a longer route home, and fourteen miles later we were back at camp, tired and sore and sorry indeed, but ready to enjoy a fire and a jug of good Oregon beer we picked up in Hood River at the Horsefeathers Brewhouse.

We slept through the dampness only to find that it had gotten to Brinkman in a bad way. When we piled in to leave, we found that his poor engine was flooding every time we turned the key. We spent an hour or more, with input from various passersby, tinkering and trying to figure out what was wrong. Just as we were about to give up and call AAA, John gave him an abusive crank and he sparked to life. We surmise that the condensation from the damp forest (and no sunlight to evaporate the moisture) just soaked the engine through. In any case, we were off.

We followed the coast down to California passing through more redwood territory until we came to Highway 1, the infamous deathtrap that people with sportscars like to call "scenic." In fact it's both scenic and dastardly, with tight endless switchbacks tailored more to German engineering than Japanese. Brinkman--a brutish rather than a fancy creature--set himself to the challenge heroically and didn't once carry us over a cliff. The first 25 miles of the road takes you over the Coastal Range to the ocean, and passes through what people have variously described to us as "straight hillbilly country," "Mexican mafia bandejo land, man," and "where they grow all the marijuana." Intensely wooded, with little more than KEEP OUT signs to indicate a human presence, it didn't feel like a place you'd want to contract engine troubles. Perhaps the most forebidding of all were the few broke-down shacks we did see--replete with decaying, moss-covered roofs and collapsing foundations--in which people were actually living. Eventually, though, the road shoots you straight out of Deliverance hell and onto the ocean cliffs, which it follows on a knife edge down to San Francisco, 150 miles to the south.

We camped at the first place we came to, the cheapest state beach in California (at $10 a night), according to a fellow we judged to be knowledgeable since he lived in his van. It was perhaps also the friendliest. We parked about 25 feet from the edge of a cliff, looking out over uncountable billions of gallons of ocean, and set up our tent as close as we could to the chasm (that turned out to be about four feet). Within minutes, an older couple from San Jose had befriended me (John was fetching firewood). They were two months on the road and sweet as pie. When John didn't return soon, I left them and went to fetch him and his load. Enroute back, we were flagged down by the man who lived in his van, who needed a jump start because his car battery was an egg (to hear him tell it, but it seems more likely to us that it kept dying because he was running a heater, radio, and DVD player off of it, and hadn't moved the car in a few days). He offered us a beer for the help ("Don't run off now"), and we sat with him and his dog and watched the stars light up, and then the moon set, and then Mars. "Dusty Miles" is how he introduced himself, and his dog was Roscoe Resin. He moved between the coast and the desert, selling jewelry he had taught himself to make, and seemed pleased with his current state of affairs. He told us he used to "dream about doing bad things to people who'd hurt me and shit, but now I dream about jewelry, man." And concluded, "This stuff heals your soul." Despite the fact (or perhaps because of it?) that he'd clearly spent a lifetime smoking pot, he was intesely friendly and we greatly enjoyed his company. By the time we got back to the camp, the old folks from San Jose had worked themselves into a worry over where we'd dissapeared to for so long ("Jumping Joseph and Mary, you kids nearly drove us to drink!"). We visited for a long time the next morning, and offered them a can of our salsa to smooth things out.

After playing on the beach for a half hour, only to be disturbed away by the corpse of a dead sea lion, we headed back to Rt. 1 for a few hours drive to Bodega Bay to visit John's Aunt Pat. And after a few pit stops to let our churning stomachs settle and take in the equally amazing scenery, we made it to Pat's bungalow on the beech where we now rest and relax. We have enjoyed lots of talk of animals and the universe's harmony that we are indeed feeling everyday and John is relishing the opportunity to really get to know more of his family . You might notice that this is the first that we have seen of John's family and that has nothing to do with not loving those that are out there but rather from the fact that he comes from a family quite the opposite as Hanna. John has one aunt and one uncle, a close nit immediate family and no cousins or grandparents. Inspired by Hanna's love and closeness with her family has inspired John to seek out more fully those of the clan that are still around. We are enjoying day two of our visit to Bodega Bay and will head on Saturday for the Bay Area and then onto points south. Pictures will follow when technology to do so arrives.

We promised and we deliver.

This little rock caused us a big headache after it lodged into our tire and then road on top of our car for 1500 miles until Sears could give us a new one. All is well now.




Back on the road, we were happy, though a bit dirty. It took us a bit more than a week to find a shower again and Hanna's daily hairstyle kept us well entertained.




Thankfully, we made it to Prince Rupert where we got on this ferry that took us on a 15 hour cruise of the fjords around the Queen Charlotte Islands.




This was our first Pacific sunset as we came out of the cover of the islands just as the sun met the horizon.

15 hours on a ferry, gives you some time to look into each other's eyes...





After a few ferries, we made it to Washington and went right to the coast. Here we are walking through the woods for a few miles before we come to this view...




Seals kept us entertained, and awake, with their barking all around the islands out there.



And the sunset was amazing as we had a camp under this giant pine, lighted with a fire from the driftwood on the beach.