Travels with Menominee

Goodbye, Cruisemaster!

2009-07-17T22:03:00.000-07:00

Living full-time in an RV agreed with Menominee and me, but Cruisemaster, our faithful RV, wasn't designed for full-time living and, at only 22 feet long, was really too small for us. So I dreamed about a bigger RV.

I shopped at used RV dealers but didn't see anything I really liked, until, at a dealer in Louisiana, I found an RV that would fit all our needs. The asking price was way out of our price range, but some haggling brought it down to something we could afford, and suddenly we had bought it! This 34-foot Allegro was ours!

We drove off, delirious with happiness for our new home. We learned to drive this humongous beast by trial and error, mostly error. For example, when the right rear wheels went off the road and were hanging in the air, we learned to allow plenty of room for right-hand turns. When we bashed the tail lights out of a parked car as we backed up, we learned that what's happening back there, 34 feet behind the driver, is very important. And when we scraped against a car at a gas station, we learned that what worked OK with Cruisemaster could be disastrous with Allegro. Much learning needed.

We toured the Gulf Coast from Louisiana across Mississippi and Alabama to the Florida panhandle, until it was time to head north. We followed Spring across Mississippi and bits of Alabama, Tennessee, and Arkansas, up through Missouri and Iowa. In Missouri we stopped in Hannibal, Samuel Clemens' home town on the Mississippi River, and in Iowa we visited Luther College, a lovely liberal arts college in Decorah. When we finally reached Minnesota, we had seen green grass, blossoming flowers, and young calves in the fields all the way.

The Adventure of the Newlywed in the Night

2009-04-23T23:59:00.000-07:00

The night air was warm and humid and pregnant with possibilities. As I relaxed in the RV, there came a knock on the door, which in itself is unusual. Then, even more unusual, a feminine voice said, "I'm sorry to bother you, but I need some help."

She was of medium height with straight hair, ordinary clothes, and not quite middle-aged. She continued that she was locked out of her mobile home, the one parked next to mine. And her husband was in Canada! Having no Watsonian companion, I was forced to deal with the situation solo.

(Here, gentle reader, please pause to consider how this situation might play itself out. Of all the possibilities, which do you think is most likely?)

She told me her name was Shirley and she had been married only two weeks. The mobile home was brand new and they had just moved in. She said that when she arrived home from work, she unlocked the door, dumped her purse and keys on the counter, and closed the door behind her to fetch groceries from the car. When she returned, the closed door was locked. She hadn't tried to lock it, hadn't done anything to lock it, but it was certainly locked now. And her keys were inside. That was her story, and for the moment I decided to take it at face value.

She borrowed my screwdriver and poked it at the door lock. Knowing that this would have little effect, I seized the opportunity to slip away and examine the mobile home, pointing my flashlight at the windows — all of them closed and locked. The place was sealed up as tight as a brand-new bottle of whiskey.

"What can I do?" she wailed. I decided not to take the heat on this one and calmly told her, "Call your husband. Tell him you're locked out." She accepted the cell phone I offered and punched in his number from memory. He answered. "It's me," she said, skipping the kind of endearments one might expect from newlyweds, and cutting directly to the matter at hand. "I'm locked out. [pause] Well, I don't know what to do. Send somebody out here to open the door!" She hung up and said, "He says he'll call the fire department and see if they'll come out."

A few minutes later I saw a huge truck pull into the RV park. At first I didn't recognize it in the darkness because the flashing lights and siren were turned off, but the long aerial lift ladder gave it away. I called out, "Shirley, your fire truck is here!" She giggled "My fire truck?" and waved at it. It slowly rolled to a stop in front of her mobile home and sat there, its powerful engine idling at a mild roar.

Three fire fighters climbed down — a silver-haired fellow in charge and two crew-cut rookies. Sadly, they weren't wearing their helmets, slickers, and boots, but were dressed informally, as if we had interrupted their card game or TV program. I watched them expectantly, ready to learn from these pros how to solve a problem like this. They examined the exterior of the mobile home. After several minutes of looking and conferring, they decided they could find no way in, aside from taking a fire axe and smashing a window, which they declined to do. They radioed for a locksmith.

By now a crowd had gathered to watch the proceedings. "She's locked out," I told them with an air of authority. I felt excited to be part of the drama, even if my part had been eclipsed by other players.

Twenty minutes later the locksmith arrived and picked the door lock in less than a minute. The door opened, Shirley walked in, got her purse, and paid the locksmith. The firemen drove away, their lights and siren still turned off. The excitement over, the crowd dispersed and Menominee took me for a walk.

Winter in the South

2009-04-14T18:25:00.000-07:00

The Gulf of Mexico

There's a small campground on Dauphin Island, a mile off the coast at Mobile, Alabama. We spent a week there, enjoying the warm weather, the relaxed atmosphere, and especially riding the scooter around the island. I found a little cafe that serves freshly-caught seafood, and really liked their seafood gumbo. There was a small grocery that had a huge hardware department and served as the island's general provisioner and DVD rental. The only local entertainment or excitement consisted of watching the ferry load and unload its cars. It was peaceful and restored us after our mad dash away from frigidity.

We resumed our travels, heading west across Mississippi and Louisiana, staying near the coast for warmer weather. But not too close — hurricane Ivan had damaged coastal Louisiana only three months before.

Texas

In Houston, we stayed with my college roommate, who graciously let us park Cruisemaster in his driveway. He regaled us with tales of Hurricane Ivan, the third most destructive hurricane to hit the US mainland. He had defied the evacuation warning and stayed home to mind his house. The hurricane made landfall at Galveston, breaching the seawall and devastating everything there, before moving inland, passing directly over Houston, and smashing lots of glass in downtown skyscrapers. He and his house survived the hundred-mile-an-hour-plus winds, with only a couple of holes in the roof where tree branches crashed down. He bought a chain saw and cut up all the trees that had fallen. Flood waters reached part of his back yard, but fortunately his house was on slightly higher ground and narrowly escaped flooding. He was without electricity, phone, or Internet for two weeks, and the crew that finally showed up to restore power had come all the way from South Carolina to help. We were glad he was alive and safe and in good cheer.

In Austin I met up with another college roommate who took me in his car for a grand tour of the area. It so good to connect after many years and catch up on what had happened to us, where we had lived and what we had done. He recommended the Texas Hill Country to us, so we headed there next and enjoyed the gently rolling hills. We relaxed and poked around the small towns there, Fredericksburg and Kerrville. I found good Texas barbecue throughout the Hill Country — in each new town, it was simply a matter of locating it. Yum!

Victoria is farther south and east, a medium-sized town we had visited briefly a year earlier. This time we decided to spend a month in Victoria and get to know it better. Its chief attraction for me was the tiny UU church with only a dozen or so attending on Sunday mornings, but nonetheless full of energy and good cheer. They took me in and made me feel welcome, not only at the services, but also for lunch afterward, for poker on a Friday evening, a barbershop chorus concert, and at a live theater production downtown, the musical "Do Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?" in which one of the UUs had a part.

I learned that the area is largely Hispanic, but not due to recent migration across the border — quite the opposite! Hispanics have lived in the Victoria area for many generations, tracing their ancestors back to original land grants, when Texas was part of Mexico. They are not dishwashers and gardeners here, they are prosperous middle class, respectable owners and staff of the town's businesses, the fabric of the town.

Next we spent a week on the Texas Gulf Coast at Rockport, just south of a whooping crane wildlife sanctuary. The whooping crane, one of the rarest birds in North America, is, of course, an endangered species. In 1941, there were only 21 birds living in the wild; today, about 250 birds make the annual migration from Canada to Texas. (There are also about 50 birds in a new breeding population that follow ultralight airplanes from Wisconsin to Florida.)

Molly Ivins once told a story about a Texas politician who went duck hunting and shot a whooping crane by mistake. A whooper, she observed, is about five feet tall. Your average duck, not so much. Do we want anyone in government who can't tell the difference?

I took a boat tour of the refuge, led by an avid birder, and saw more different bird species in one afternoon than I'd seen in the previous few years. Whooping cranes are shy birds, but we were lucky to get close enough to two pairs to observe them with binoculars and photograph them as they poked about in the mud looking for crabs to eat.

And then we began a slow retreat from our winter quarters, heading north and east.

Kentucky

2009-04-04T22:12:00.000-07:00

The weather was Indian Summer and the trees were ablaze with fall colors. As is our custom, we took the blue highways through the small towns, and were charmed by Kentucky's winding country roads.

I visited the very house where legendary Bluegrass founder Bill Monroe grew up, and heard stories of his brothers and sisters, parents and uncle, the instruments they played, and the music the family made together.

Then the Kentucky Repertory Theater sucked me in. They were doing Amadeus, the Peter Schaffer play which I had never seen, from which the 1984 movie was made, the movie I loved. So I went to see their production and loved it too, so different from the movie, excellent in its own way, and a production that could hold its head high in the Twin Cities.

We stayed a few days in Owensboro, a medium-small town isolated from the interstate highways and therefore our kind of place. The people were friendly, the traffic was light, the restaurants were pleasing. I visited the Unitarian church on Sunday morning and joined them for lunch afterward. I learned that, decades earlier, GE had had a big plant there which manufactured vacuum tubes for radios and TVs. Today, no tubes in radios, no GE plant in town.

Toyota builds Camrys in Kentucky, and I visited their factory. The tour was impressive, led by a PR pro who knew all about everything and took us around in the kind of tram you ride from the parking lot at the state fair. Each of us wore a $300 Sennheiser wireless headset to hear the tour's narration. We watched teams of workers assemble the cars and learned about the Toyota way of doing things. The factory was so spacious that there was plenty of room for our tram to drive through the assembly areas. It was a very pleasant experience, and I came away with admiration for Toyota and the way it runs its business.

A couple of days later I visited the Chevy Corvette factory, and the contrast was remarkable. Our tour leader was an intern from the local college who had some basic training but no depth of knowledge about the company, the car, or the operations. There was no tram — the factory was too crowded — so we had to walk around the plant. There were no earphones; the guide occasionally shouted something over his shoulder, which we couldn't hear. I learned very little about how Corvettes are made, but did come away with an impression of the way GM runs its business.

The final factory tour was at the Wild Turkey plant where they make Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey. The whole tour was quite informal, and our guide let us lean over the edge of huge vats and see the fermentation bubbles on the surface of the corn mash. The two-step fermentation, lasting a few days, was completely computer controlled, requiring only one person sitting at a computer monitor. Of course, the aging in oak barrels takes years, and most of the buildings were full of those barrels.

Kentucky has so many interesting places to visit! I ate lunch at Colonel Sanders' original cafe and museum, where he perfected his famous blend of eleven herbs and spices. He successfully ran this cafe for years before he started selling franchises and appearing in his white suit and string tie. I visited a state museum gallery honoring Duncan Hines, who recommended restaurants in the 1950s before he started his line of cake mixes.

We liked Kentucky and were enjoying it a lot, but further sightseeing was cut short by a particularly severe cold front sweeping down from Minnesota, so we fled south clear across Tennessee and Alabama with frigid temperatures nipping at our heels. We reached the Gulf of Mexico at Mobile, Alabama and watched the weather reports of temperatures in the teens where we had just been. But here on the coast the warm water kept the temperatures quite pleasant.

Autumn

2009-03-22T20:30:00.000-07:00

The huge ash tree that leafed out in May and wonderfully shaded the RV all summer long was also Menominee's favorite spot for sharpening her claws. But then its leaves yellowed and fell. Up and down the block, maple leaves turned bright colors and the lovely aroma of Autumn was in the air. Snow hadn't fallen yet, but it was just a matter of time until it did. We figured we'd better leave town, so we packed up, rolled the scooter aboard its trailer, and headed south.

Southward Bound

It was mid-October and travel was easy, as the weather was sunny, all the kiddies were in school, and we had the roads and RV parks pretty much to ourselves. We headed south across Minnesota, over to southern Wisconsin, and down into north-western Illinois. It was there that I felt a magnetic pull, the pull of Chicago, the really big city with more muscle and reputation than Minnespolis and Saint Paul combined. I didn't want to drive the RV into Chicago, of course, but I was fascinated by the possibility of visiting downtown Chicago again after many years.

By chance I fell into conversation with a friendly proprietor of an RV park. It turned out she had grown up in Chicago and gave good advice on where to catch a commuter train from the far suburbs right into downtown. I had only to drive a few miles to the park-and-ride and catch a train! The night before, I went online and planned it all, mapping out the route to the train station, figuring which train to catch, when I'd arrive downtown, and then which local transportation to use.

Chicago!

The next day, everything went according to plan. The park-and-ride, the modern, comfortable commuter train to downtown, a ride on the elevated train, transferring to a crosstown bus, the bus ride past the University of Chicago, (which brought back memories of my high school buddy who went there as an undergrad). I reached my destination, the Museum of Science and Industry, and strolled around the exhibits. Then I found what I had really come to admire, a most unusual and unlikely exhibit: an actual WWII submarine, nicely restored and displayed indoors.

Leaving the museum, I reversed the bus and elevated rides and got off at the Loop. There I strolled a few blocks back to the train station, people-watching as I went. It seemed to be scarf season, with many folks wearing them around their necks and tucked under their lapels, even though it wasn't that cold or windy that day. I figured it must be more fashion than function. A heavenly aroma sucked me into a popcorn store, where I bought a bag of special Chicago caramel corn (which I munched for days).

I caught the train and rode with a car full of workers commuting to their homes in the far suburbs. A young man in a suit fell fast asleep, and when we arrived at the end of the line he was still asleep. As a Minnesotan, I wanted to do a good deed and nudge him awake, but I decided instead to hold back and watch to see what the Chicagoans did: They ignored him and exited the car, leaving him asleep! By then it was dusk, and as I walked across the parking lot to the RV, I saw Menominee at the window, watching for me to return.

The weather forecast showed the season's first serious cold wave moving down from Minnesota toward Illinois. We hurried south ahead of it, ignoring all the rest of Illinois, fleeing straight south over flat agricultural land. The cold front was right on our tail but we beat it and landed over the border in Kentucky.

City and Country

2009-03-07T16:04:00.000-08:00

We spent most of our year far from cities. On the road, we are far more interested in what small towns and the countryside have to offer. Blue highways. Local restaurants. It was only in the spring and fall that we were parked in a Minneapolis suburb and had access to everything a big city has to offer.

I realized something about the amenities a city provides — it's more than parks, restaurants, and entertainment. It's also about the availability of what you want to acquire, whether it's a particular book, a pair of pants, a tech gadget — or a motor scooter.

Contemplate how easy you have it, if you have convenient access to every kind of store. Imagine how different your life would be if you lived far away from all of them. That's the way it is in much of the country, as we had found out on our travels around the US and Canada..

But then, against the city's advantages you have to balance the roar of power mowers, the snarl of weed whackers and power edgers, the sirens of emergency vehicles, the shriek of airplanes right overhead, and barking dogs.

The Adventure of the Gas Refrigerator

2008-12-03T19:28:00.000-08:00

RVs come with a special type of fridge that doesn't need electricity — it runs on propane gas, so it can keep running while you're driving down the highway or parked overnight somewhere without electricity. That much is actually quite handy. However, a gas fridge is fussy — in order to function, it has to be nearly perfectly level, and since it's attached to the RV, that means the RV must be quite level. So each time the RV is parked, it must be shimmed with boards under its wheels until it's nice and level (a real pain).

The fridge built into the RV was as old as the RV itself, 29 years, so it was pretty amazing that it still worked, continuing to perform for us. Until, one June day, it quit. After having a fridge for a year, it was a bit of a hardship not to have one, since we couldn't keep milk or cheese, and I was forced to drink warm beer.

What to do?

When a gas fridge stops working, one option is to replace it with a new one, but they're expensive — over a thousand dollars. Even having the old one rebuilt would cost over half that, if I could find someone who knew how to do it. It would cost much less to replace it with an ordinary electric refrigerator, but that would work only when we were stopped and plugged into electricity, not when we're driving down the road.

I scoured the web for other ideas and came across one, an "iceless" ice chest — just like a regular camping ice chest, except you don't fill it with ice, you plug it in to twelve volts and it gets cold. This seemed like a possible solution, since it would run off the battery when we were on the road, and plug into an adapter when we were parked. I searched Minneapolis stores but couldn't find it, so I investigated ways to order it and have it shipped. I was about to order it when I stumbled upon one.

One July afternoon I was wandering the aisles of the Pamida discount store in Two Harbors, and there it was, sitting on a shelf in the camping department, the very brand and model I'd picked out. It was the last one in stock, and it was (marvellously) marked down for seasonal clearance. After the cashier took another 10% off because it was Tuesday, it was ours for a pittance. It has worked flawlessly for us ever since, keeping cold all the milk, cheese, yogurt, beer, and apples we could want, on the road and when we're parked. Without propane and without all that levelling!

The old fridge

Then there was the question of what to do with the old fridge. It could just be left in place, built into the RV, but it takes up a lot of space that could be put to better use. Unfortunately, it's big and heavy and awkward to handle, not to mention totally fastened to the RV with screws. Back in the Twin Cities, my friend Judy was optimistic about the project and willing to help with it.

One Saturday afternoon we removed all the screws we could find and tentatively wiggled the fridge. It moved an inch, so it was loose and we knew we could get it all the way out. By this time it was 4:30, and the recycling center would close at 5:00, so I suggested waiting for another day. But Judy was optimistic that we could make it, so we decided to make a mad dash for it.

Now, the fridge being loose, we didn't want to make any high-speed maneuvers that might topple it onto the floor, so we gingerly drove thirty blocks south on surface streets. We arrived at ten minutes to closing time and got in the door, which was good. We paid the $15 recycling fee and got a receipt, which was also good.

Then we drove over to the drop-off spot where some men were working. They explained that they were prohibited from entering the RV to help us with the fridge, so it was up to Judy and me! We picked up the fridge and staggered with it down the aisle and around a sharp corner to the RV's door, but it wouldn't fit through.

At this awkward moment, they informed us that since this was a gas fridge, we'd have to pay another $15, so I did. By now it was 5:00 and they were officially closed, and the situation looked glum, but we were in the door and had paid the proper fee. What would happen next?

Thankfully, they didn't kick us out, and were actually quite accommodating. They peered in through the door and suggested unscrewing the trim around the front of the fridge, so we did that. No luck. Next they suggested rotating it ninety degrees and it just barely squeezed through the door! They lifted it down, put it on a forklift, and drove it away. We waved goodbye to it and breathed a big sigh of relief. Many thanks, Judy!

Autumn in Minneapolis

2008-11-22T17:20:00.000-08:00

When Labor Day had come and gone, and after thousands of convention Republicans had left the Twin Cities, we returned for the month of September. The weather was beautiful again, we settled back into the comfortable life parked in a suburban driveway, and Menominee resumed her quest to find mice.

One day, Menominee wandered away. Now, she's a good cat, and isn't inclined to run away from home, but she is interested in exploring. And I'm not a bad kitty dad, either — Whenever she goes out, I buckle her harness and attach her leash. This time, her leash was anchored to a stake in the ground, but evidently the leash slipped off the stake, and in the middle of the afternoon she wandered off, trailing her leash behind her. I wasn't too concerned, as I figured she was still nearby and would be easy to find. I walked up and down the block, calling her name and talking to her, without luck. Then I did it twice more, with the same result. When it got dark, I gave up and decided to wait for morning.

About 11:30 pm I walked out the door into inky blackness, in sandals and shorts. I felt something... it was fur rubbing against my ankle. Without even looking down, I knew Menominee had returned. There she was, minus her harness and leash. Probably her leash had caught on something, so she wiggled out of her harness and left leash and harness behind. And now there she was, her tail in the air, pleased to have gone exploring, proud to have found her way home, hungry and thirsty, ready for bed, happy to be home. I was happy too.

One of the high points of September was taking the motorcycle driving test. I made an appointment and showed up at a DMV site where a course was laid out on a parking lot. One by one the examiner tested the applicants, explaining how to ride through the maze, what to do, where to stop. We gave it our best shot, and although it was a difficult test and I didn't make a perfect score, I did pass, and am now officially a Minnesota-licensed motorscooter rider.

Summer in Northern Minnesota

2008-11-07T20:16:00.001-08:00

Midwestern summers are hot and humid. By July, Minneapolis was becoming uncomfortable, so we headed north to Lake Superior, way up in northeastern Minnesota and not all that far from the Canadian border.

Our first stop was Two Harbors, a small town on the lake, where we found a private campground we liked so much, we stayed for a month. Two Harbors has a decent grocery, a good hardware store, several restaurants, and enough local people that tourists don't obscure the genuine character of the town. I walked out to the end of the breakwater between the harbor and the lake, and one day toured an old, retired tug boat, the Edna G, with its coal-fired boiler and steam engine.

Next we spent a week in Grand Marais, an even smaller town, even farther north on the lake, whose principal business is tourism — it has the kind of restaurants that tourists can afford but locals can't, souvenir shops that sell fudge, and a picturesque bay that draws tourists like a magnet.

Our last stop was Duluth, an old and busy terminal for Great Lakes shipping. I walked along Canal Street, visited Duluth's iconic lift bridge, and toured the William Irvin, a retired Great Lakes freighter that had seen decades of service.

The scooter came right along with us, pulled behind the RV on its tiny trailer. Wherever we stayed, I really enjoyed the convenience of using the scooter to buzz into town for lunch or shopping.

Springtime in Minneapolis

2008-11-01T19:39:00.000-07:00

We spent two glorious months, May and June, in a southern suburb of Minneapolis.

Green was everywhere. In spring and summer, Minnesota's default color is green. The grass, the trees, the shrubs, the flower beds, the vegetable gardens, all lush and green. (It was a welcome sight for us, having spent the previous six months in the southwest looking exclusively at the earth tones of sand and rock.)

Menominee spent many enjoyable hours patrolling the shrubs in the yards, proving time and again what a Great Hunter she is.

We marvelled at the magnificence of an apple tree in full bloom.

We saw baby ducks and geese paddling in the lakes.

Especially, there was the bliss of riding the new scooter. The scooter turned out to be ideal for buzzing around the city and ran perfectly, right from the start.

Now we needed some way to bring it along with us on our travels. So we ordered a trailer kit on the web, and eventually seven cartons of steel parts arrived. They provided many days of amusement with wrenches (like a giant Erector Set) to get it assembled into a tiny trailer with just enough room on it for one motor scooter. Exactly what we needed!

Minnesota

2008-06-04T19:04:00.001-07:00

When we crossed the border into Minnesota, it felt momentous to be back. Eleven months. 24,000 miles. That's a long time we'd been away, and a long, long road we'd traveled.

We started noticing familiar sights and sounds — cardinals singing in the trees, Canada geese honking overhead, mosquitoes, metered on-ramps, tornado warning sirens, and all the familiar stores where we used to shop. Tulips were blooming, the grass was green, trees were beginning to leaf out, and all the snow had melted. Springtime is a beautiful season in Minnesota.

We stayed overnight in a campground in a far suburb, far enough out in the sticks that it abutted a woods. I unhooked Menominee's leash and let her roam a little way into the woods. When she became very still, I looked where she was looking and saw a chipmunk frolicking around, unaware of her presence, and a little naive about the dangers of the woods. Menominee saw her chance, pounced, missed, and chased it. The chipmunk dashed helter-skelter with Menominee right behind her — it was like watching a Tom & Jerry cartoon! Then Menominee caught the chipmunk, brought it out of the woods in her mouth, set it down and played with it. The chipmunk kept trying to run away and Menominee kept knocking it down with her paw. Finally, the chipmunk became desperate and began attacking Menominee! It bared its tiny teeth and lunged at her! Menominee was momentarily taken aback, giving the chipmunk just the opportunity to dash over to a tree and up it to safety. The chipmunk's survival strategy had worked, and the Great Hunter had learned another lesson.

Casting about for a place to stay, we found RV parks neither conveniently located nor affordable, and we ended up in the driveway at a friend's house in a near suburb. It turned out to be convenient and friendly. Ideally, we wanted to park the RV there and get around by some other means. Such as a motor scooter.

So we shopped for a Yamaha Vino 125, the scooter we had tried to buy last June, when we couldn't find a salesman to buy it from. This time, shopping at a different dealer, we found a friendly, middle-aged salesman who walked over to us and struck up a conversation — a salesman who liked scooters, enjoyed selling them, and wanted to sell me one. So I bought it from him! My dream of owning a motor scooter had come true! The blue Vino 125 was mine!

Eastward and Northward

2008-05-15T15:37:00.000-07:00

The Texas Panhandle

Crossing the Texas Panhandle, we stopped in Amarillo for a meal at a Route 66 landmark, the Big Texan Steakhouse, famous for its beef, its old-time decor, and its sassy attitude. They offer a free 72-ounce steak (that's four and a half pounds of meat!) to anyone who can finish it in one hour, and for every six who have tried, five have failed. They brag, "This ain't no franchise or chain," and will even pick you up at your hotel in a stretch limo with a longhorn bull's horns mounted on the hood! I chose a modest portion of prime rib and found it delicious. Recommended.

Oklahoma

After watching so many miles of desert, cactus, and tumbleweed, our eyes were soothed by the green grass, green bushes, and green trees of Oklahoma. Our travels followed historic Route 66, the U.S. highway that once ran from Chicago to Los Angeles, a single ribbon of asphalt that guided so many migrants to California. Route 66 is still remembered and celebrated across Oklahoma.

At one RV park, we parked next to a small travel trailer which turned out to be occupied by Jeb, a 76 year old man in well-worn bib overalls who grew up on a farm in Arkansas and had a lifetime of experiences working outdoors, including drilling for oil in Texas and harvesting timber in Oregon. His gentle drawl and and the stories he told about himself were delightful.

We noticed that we were entering Tornado Alley, famous for the number of tornadoes each season, and were headed for Oklahoma City, which has been hit by more tornadoes than any other city. But this wasn't tornado season, and we made it out of the state without seeing so much as a funnel cloud.

Iowa

The curious thing about Iowa was that the price of mid-grade gasoline (89 octane) was actually less than regular (87). As we drove across the state, I kept my eye on the prices at gas stations, and mid-grade was always less, usually by ten cents a gallon. Now, this seems to somehow contradict a law or nature (dusk comes after sunset, not before), or at least a business rule (you put the scoop of ice cream on top of the cone, not the cone on top of the ice cream). After some web research, it turned out that Iowa mid-grade gas contains ethanol, but regular doesn't. Why? Good question.

As we continued north, we got closer and closer to the Minnesota border.

The Arizona–Utah Border

2008-05-02T19:01:00.000-07:00

Bright red mountains, bright red dirt. This is Ed Abbey's territory — sunbaked, windswept, harsh, and unforgiving. Have you read about it in his Desert Solitaire ? Or The Monkey Wrench Gang ?

At a small, desolate Utah state park campground, as we were taking a morning walk across the sand and scrub brush, Menominee suddenly leaped and caught a lizard — her first! She's a Minnesota cat, and didn't grow up learning about lizards, but somehow her hunting skills include lizard-catching, subduing, and playing. The legend of the Great Hunter lives on.

Continuing east, we came to Four Corners Monument, where Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico all meet at one point, at right angles. You can walk right up to the very point, stand on top of it, with parts of your body in different states, and pose for pictures. Nearby, friendly Navajo Indians sell jewelry, pottery, and made-to-order Indian Fry Bread.

Cartographic trivia: The monument's location was set by an early survey which determined the state boundaries. Decades later, the survey was found to be in error. What to do? The Supreme Court ruled that the incorrect survey results would continue as the legal boundaries between the states!

We checked the weather forecast and found that Colorado was too cold and snowy for our taste, so we continued east across New Mexico.

Nevada

2008-04-25T21:59:00.000-07:00

Way down in southern Nevada, on the border with Arizona, lies Hoover Dam. It creates Lake Mead, supplies water to Las Vegas, and produces electricity for Nevada, Arizona, and Southern California. It was a huge construction project (the largest concrete structure in the world at the time), built in the depression of the 1930s. Laborers flocked to the project, even though the work was hard, summer temperatures were extreme, and wages were slim.

Lake Mead is currently only fifty percent full, and has been dropping ten feet a year since 2000, due to reduced flow of the Colorado River, which in turn is a result of diminished snowpack in the Colorado mountains. If the drought continues, Las Vegas will soon suffer a severe water shortage, and Lake Mead — the largest man-made reservoir in the U.S. — will dry up entirely by 2021, according to researchers.

Political trivia: The dam was originally named Boulder Dam, after a planned location in Boulder Canyon. The name stuck, even when the project was relocated to Black Canyon. Then, as construction began, the name was changed to Hoover Dam to honor then-president Herbert Hoover, who had played an important role (as Secretary of Commerce) in getting the project started.

But Hoover lost the 1932 presidential election to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, quickly removed Hoover's name from the dam and reverted it to Boulder Dam. It was fifteen years later, after Ickes had retired, that Congress, by near-unanimous vote, restored the name Hoover Dam, the name by which it has been known ever since.

California

2008-04-25T21:57:00.000-07:00

Early in April I arrived back in my home town for my high school class's reunion and was delighted to be there. It was three days of joyous partying, eating, drinking, reminiscing, taking photos, and posing for photos, accompanied by music from our high school years. It was a blast.

Arizona

2008-04-18T19:19:00.000-07:00

South of Tucson is the Titan Missile Museum, the only Titan missile silo open to the public — a real 1960s missile silo with a real Titan missile (sans fuel, sans warhead) in it. A guided tour takes you underground to the control center, which was staffed 24/7 and was always ready to fire the missile if the order from the president ever came (and thank goodness it never did). They even demonstrated how to launch it — one officer turns this key over here, while simultaneously another officer turns that key over there. Then there's the walk down the underground tunnel to the silo itself, where you can look in and see the Titan, poised for takeoff. The missile is huge — a hundred feet tall, ten feet in diameter — and the payload was a nine-megaton atom bomb, the largest used in a missile, targeted somewhere in the USSR. You can understand the part Titans played in the Cold War's "balance of terror" or "mutually assured destruction" policy which successfully kept us and Russia from firing a single missile.

Heading north, we drove Interstate 19 and noticed that the road signs show distances in kilometers, not miles!

East of Flagstaff we came upon the Arizona Meteor Crater. Have you visited it? Even heard of it? No? Well, it's worth seeing, because it's four thousand feet in diameter, and five hundred feet deep. In human terms, there's room for 20 football fields in its bottom, and if the Washington Monument were placed in it, the top would be level with the crater's rim. They figure the meteor was 150 feet wide, weighed a million pounds, and came screaming out of the northeast sky at 40,000 miles an hour when it impacted with the equivalent of a 20 megaton bomb. Formed fifty thousand years ago, it's quite well preserved, with little erosion (this part of Arizona has little precipitation) and no glacial bulldozing (Arizona wasn't overrun by glaciers as Minnesota was). Recommended.

New Mexico

2008-04-06T21:31:00.000-07:00

Carlsbad Caverns

I've wanted to see the Carlsbad Caverns for a long, long time. My parents never took me there as a kid, and none of my own travels had taken me close — until now.

The Carlsbad Caverns are way down in southeastern New Mexico, and, in my opinion, are a real gem of the National Park system — well presented, well preserved, well staffed. You follow a path that leads down, down, into the huge mouth of the cave, enter the cave, and gradually leave daylight behind. Ahead are the famous stalactites and stalagmites, softly lighted for your viewing pleasure. On and on you walk, with something new around each bend in the path. Finally you arrive at the Big Room, which really is big — a quarter of a mile from end to end, with a high ceiling — and it feels so astonishing to realize that you are there, seven hundred feet underground, in such an enormous cave filled with such amazing stone formations. When you've had enough amazement, they let you ride an elevator back up to the surface.

Roswell

Why did I visit Roswell? To see the UFO museum. You see, on a summer day back in 1947, something landed in the desert outside Roswell. A rancher found the wreckage, and brought people to see it. The local paper reported on the front page that a UFO had landed. The Air Force took charge, cordoned off the area, confiscated all the wreckage, and whisked it away for examination. The official announcement was that it was just a weather balloon that had crashed, but people who had seen the wreckage (and even handled it) said it didn't look like a weather balloon to them. Then everything about the investigation was classified Top Secret and anyone who had seen the wreckage was visited and sternly warned never to talk about it. No one has been able to pry loose any information from the government — even though it's been sixty years since it happened. So the big question remains: Why the secrecy? What did they find that they still can't release to the public? Roswell folks continue to believe that it really was a UFO, and folks everywhere else believe the "weather balloon" story and chuckle about the whole affair.

Alamogordo

White Sands is home to the Air Force's missile test range, where missiles have been launched since right after World War II, when captured German V2 rockets were shipped there for examination and testing. There's a nice space museum with lots of artifacts from the missile and space programs. A photo on display captures Dr. Werner von Braun at the moment of his surrender to the allies at the end of WWII, and he's relaxed and smiling. A full-size model of Sputnik, the size of a basketball, is pretty underwhelming today, although it was quite something in 1957, when Russia put it in orbit. (You remember, don't you? The Missile Gap, the Space Race?)

Feeling well rewarded for the time we'd spent in southern New Mexico, we wandered off toward Arizona.

A Romp Across Texas

2008-03-18T10:44:00.000-07:00

We left behind the Midwestern snowbird's winter nesting grounds, the Rio Grande Valley, and set off on a tourist's romp across Texas.

Heading north along the coast, we came to Corpus Christi, a city with its own aircraft carrier, the Lexington. Launched during World War II and long since retired, it's now a popular tourist attraction. I walked its decks, climbed its stairs, toured its bridge, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience, knowing that thousands of sailors and pilots had been there before me — this wasn't Disney, this was real.

We stopped for a couple of days in Victoria, a thriving medium-sized inland town. On Sunday I attended the only UU church there, where twelve of us sat and listened to a recording of a sermon that had been delivered twenty years ago. It was an interesting sermon, about Michael Servetus (take-home point: he was burned at the stake by Protestants, not by Catholics) and afterward we turned our chairs into a circle and discussed. The members, although few, were friendly and welcoming, and I joined them later at a benefit lunch where we all ate wonderful soup and talked some more.

Near Edna we stayed overnight in an RV park nestled up against a forest, and before nightfall a half-dozen deer came out to feed. Menominee took interest in the deer, instead of sensibly watching from a distance — she walked directly toward them! The deer took one good look at her and ran back into the forest!

When we reached Houston, the Real Big City On The Coast, we enjoyed the hospitality of my old college roommate, Andrew. For two days he and I talked and talked about our old classmates and professors, and one afternoon we ventured onto the Rice campus. The familiar old buildings were still there, but we were perplexed by all the new buildings — new, that is, since we graduated forty years ago! One evening we went to an Italian restaurant where I ate, for the first time, Saltimbocca, which (Al Sicherman once wrote) translates "jumps in the mouth." I didn't notice any jumping, but my mouth did savor the rich mushroom sauce over veal and spinach.

This was late February, and already the azaleas were beginning to bloom. On the road west, the grass beside the roadway was green, wildflowers were budding, birds were singing, and cows grazed with their calves.

In Lockhart I had lunch at Smitty's Barbecue, where you can see the fire that smokes the meat and the barbecue is authentic Texan — it's served without sauce, so you can fully appreciate the flavor of the meat. Another day I had a wonderful lunch at Friesenhaus, a German restaurant in New Braunfels, a small town settled by German immigrants beginning in 1845. Over in the tiny town of Shiner, I toured the brewery that makes what some say is Texas's finest beer, Shiner Bock.

San Antonio is a big city with a charming old downtown. As we drove around, sightseeing, I spotted the famed Riverwalk out the window and longed to walk it myself. But there was no place to park the RV on the narrow streets, so we just continued driving around. (Perfect occasion for a motor scooter — ride downtown on the scooter and park it easily. I still want a scooter!)

Then we left civilization behind and headed west on a long and desolate road. As I gazed out through the windshield at desert and sky, hour after hour, I pondered the similarity with the pioneers who passed this way long ago — we both carried our belongings and lodging with us and sat up front, doggedly following the trail west. Besides, the road I was on was probably built on their trail.

We were headed for southern New Mexico.

Texas — The Rio Grande Valley

2008-02-29T09:03:00.000-08:00

After hundreds of miles of lonesome roads, we came upon a fertile valley, a series of small and large towns strung like pearls on a necklace — the Rio Grande Valley, way down at the southern tip of Texas.

The average high temperature here for the winter months is around 70°, which we found hopeful, but we experienced wide swings every few days, from the fifties to the eighties. It all depended on which way the wind was blowing, whether we got cool, dry air from the north, or warm, most tropical air from Mexico.

The valley is a major winter destination for Midwesterners — most of the license plates we saw were from Minn, Wisc, Ill, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri — and Midwesterners are greeted with signs of "Welcome Winter Texans!" There are lots of RV parks here competing for winter visitors with heated pools, Jacuzzis, and free WiFi Internet. I enjoyed the variety of restaurants, from national chains to local cafes serving Texas barbecue. We were glad to have the benefit of large supermarkets and major retailers we hadn't seen in weeks — the likes of Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, and Home Depot. Being in this welcoming valley among friendly Midwesterners felt good, so we lingered there for a month.

It was in our RV park there that Menominee climbed a tree for the first time. She felt frisky one warm night, out late under a full moon, and right before my amazed eyes she jumped up on a tree trunk and climbed it to the first branch, high above my head. She seemed quite unfazed, as if she climbed trees every day, but I worried how to get her down. I had no ladder; where could I borrow a ladder late at night? Then I waited a while and what do you know, she got bored and came down, all by herself, with a modesty that belied her achievement.

I researched UU churches and found two congregations, one each in Brownsville and San Juan. I went to the one in Brownsville one Sunday and liked the minister there. Next Sunday I went to the other one and was surprised when I walked in and saw same minister, who turned out to work half-time in each church.

Brownsville was the southernmost point of our adventure, 26 degrees of latitude, which is south of everything in the continental U.S. except the tip of Florida. That's 30 degrees (or 2,000 miles) south of our northernmost point in Canada, last August.

From here, of course, we headed north.

Texas — Big Bend National Park

2008-02-20T14:25:00.000-08:00

You may never have heard of Big Bend National Park, off in southwestern Texas, far from any city, nestled in a bend of the Rio Grande river. It has pretty mountains, and Texans flock here, even in mid-winter.

The Rio Grande, which means "big river" in Spanish, is surprisingly small here because water is removed upstream in New Mexico and El Paso. Being narrow and shallow, it would be easy to wade or swim across, but of course crossing the river into Mexico is highly illegal and would result in your being caught, prosecuted, fined, and thrown in jail, so no one does it. It's even illegal to do business with a Mexican who swims over to the U.S. side bearing tourist trinkets for sale (your trinkets would be confiscated). As we all have heard, patrolling our borders is a top priority these days.

I stayed in an RV campground and drove around the park sightseeing each day. I enjoyed a couple of good meals in the park lodge's nice dining room, where I first tasted and came to like Shiner's Bock, a beer brewed in a little brewery in a little Texas town.

It was in the lodge's lobby that I overheard a woman talking — she was so loud, I couldn't tune her out. "When my daughter grew taller than me, she mouthed off and said she didn't have to listen to me any more. I grabbed her and threw her against the wall and she looked at me, terrified. After that, my word was law." I paused and reflected on this description of domestic violence. How typically Texan, I thought — the legacy of the state's legendary past, from the battle of the Alamo to child abuse today. But I was wrong. If I had been paying better attention, I would have noticed that the woman's accent was not Texan. Further listening revealed that she lives in Maple Grove, Minnesota! So much for easy stereotypes and hasty conclusions.

Just north of the park are three unexpectedly distinguished little remote towns. Alpine and Marathon each has an independent bookstore on its main street. So excited was I to see one that I parked the RV, went in, found three books I wanted to read, and gladly bought them at full retail price. The third town, Marfa, not only has a swanky independent bookstore but its own public radio station, as well as mysterious lights in the night sky which some people have seen. (I'll have to come back in warmer weather to look for them.)

Driving down a state highway, I came upon a ranch with a small roadside shack selling barbecue. Food lover that I am, I pulled off the road and parked the RV. Simultaneously, the rancher came out of the house and over to the shack. He turned out to be a happy, garrulous Texan who joked as he sold me some barbecued beef. (Having trouble opening a plastic bag, he remarked, "I guess you have to be smarter than the bag.") He introduced me to his new ranch dog, Blackie, a stray who had shown up just the previous week. A medium-sized mongrel with plenty of pep and a happy disposition, he had already made himself at home on the ranch.

We continued down the two-lane highways east and south toward the Rio Grande Valley.

Western Texas

2008-01-30T13:04:00.000-08:00

Crossing from New Mexico into Texas, we immediately found ourselves in El Paso, a city of over half a million people. There was only one UU church, and it had less than a hundred members — one gets the feeling that these UUs are special, in their isolated outpost. Since we were there on a weekend, we went to their Sunday service (topic: Animal Rights; take-home point: Jeremy Bentham) where we met some friendly people and went with them to brunch at a Mexican restaurant.

The state of Texas is enormous. It's about 800 miles tall and 800 miles wide. For comparison, Minnesota is about 400 miles tall, so just think of how far it is to drive across Texas. Not many people live out in Western Texas. These are the wide open spaces, where the wind blows hard and we saw tumbleweed blowing across the road ahead of us. Some days, we'd drive miles and miles until we came to a little place with a gas station and a cafe, and if it had an RV park too, we rejoiced and stayed overnight.

Van Horn (pop. 2,000) has a lot going for it, located on Interstate 10, the main east-west highway for hundreds of miles. But all up and down the main street are vacant buildings and sites where buildings have been torn down. The place is withering away, part of the great migration from rural to urban.

We headed up to Pecos, just because it had a supermarket and because we liked the name. The name is shared by the river, made famous by Judge Roy Bean, "the law west of the Pecos." When the first railroad was put through Western Texas, outlaws made it difficult for the workers, and Bean was appointed judge to help civilize the territory. He was an uneducated bartender who held court sessions right in his barroom, and was famous for his drinking and thieving as well as his legal decisions.

From there we drove south through the part of Texas that actually has mountains, clear to the Mexican border. We stayed in the small town of Presidio, and although it's on the U.S. side of the border, you wouldn't know it. It exemplified what we'd observed in other border towns in other states — You don't have to actually go to Mexico to experience it, just visit a small border town on the U.S. side. The culture somehow leaks across the border — All the restaurants serve Mexican food, Spanish is heard more often than English, and if you leave the main street you find yourself on a dirt road, patrolled by a small skinny dog running loose.

The RV park in Presidio had an interesting tradition. Each afternoon at 4:00, fire crackers were set off and everyone headed to Happy Hour at The Lounge, a simple outdoor seating area. Beverages were bring-your-own and hors d'oeurves were pot luck. It was about the most interesting event in town.

From there, we headed southeast, bound for Big Bend National Park.

Arizona

2008-01-09T15:56:00.000-08:00

Leaving California, we entered Arizona at Yuma, way down south on the border with Mexico. A local laughed, "It never rains in Yuma, it just sprinkles a little," but our first night there, two months worth of rain fell overnight. We were drenched by the downpour and buffeted with winds that rocked the RV. It was a tropical storm that came up from Mexico and continued northeast directly to Minnesota, where it provided the first big snowfall of the season.

Another night, in a state park, a burro wandered through our campground. A burro is also called a donkey or an ass, and has been a beast of burden for thousands of years. Burros living wild in the desert are descendents of pack animals used by prospectors and other early settlers.

North of Yuma, in Quartzsite, we paid to park on barren land where RVs formerly parked for free — the feds now require a permit to park there, on what is unimproved public land anyway. Snowbirds flock here by the thousands to enjoy the mild winter weather and the huge permanent flea markets, but we were too early for the high season and were just as happy to find the place comparatively empty.

Headed for Phoenix, but still many miles away, we noticed a huge white cloud rising into the sky. We drove toward it and found that it came from the Palo Verde nuclear power plant, the largest such facility in the country, supplying enough electricity for 4 million people. All the other nuclear power plants in the country are built on large rivers, lakes, or oceans, to supply them with their enormous need for cooling water. This plant, in the middle of a desert, is the only nuclear power plant in the country to cool its reactors by evaporating water. Each day it takes in 55 million gallons of water and turns it into steam, which is what we saw climbing into the sky. The facility is located only 40 miles from Phoenix, and only one mile from the nearest public school. One fervently hopes that no nuclear incident (remember Three Mile Island and Chernobyl!) ever takes place here.

One day, while pumping gas into Cruisemaster, a fellow wandered over and introduced himself. "I see by your license plate you're from Minnesota," he said. Turned out he was from Burnsville and had moved to Arizona a couple of years earlier. He was unhappy with the move, complaining about lack of employment, and, of course, the heat in the summer.

By the time we reached Tucson, cold weather had arrived — frost on the ground! We hurried on, leaving to another time to visit Bisbee and the surrounding area in Southern Arizona.

New Mexico

Because the weather continued cold in New Mexico, we decided to postpone visits to the Carlsbad Caverns, Roswell, and White Sands, and instead headed directly south into Texas.

Happy New Year

2007-12-30T11:19:00.000-08:00

We took a few weeks vacation from blogging. Had Thanksgiving dinner at the home of a high school classmate, and Christmas dinner at an RV park potluck. We're in Texas now, and will resume blogging shortly.

Best wishes for the new year,
Jim & Menominee

California — Desert

2007-11-26T12:36:00.001-08:00

Menominee loves the desert. We went for walks in the desert and hikes among some big boulders. Menominee had never seen boulders that large before, but she sized one up, leaped onto it, and walked right up its steep surface. Later, she walked back down. (Of course, she does have the advantage of full-time four-wheel drive.) When Menominee walked around a boulder and pulled her leash taut underneath, somehow it got trapped there. I tugged and tugged, but couldn't free it. So I disconnected Menominee from the leash and left it under the boulder! It awaits anyone who wants to try to solve the puzzle of loosening it.

Menominee is a real connoisseur of sand — digging in it to test its consistency, rolling in it as often as the mood strikes her, and of course using it as a bathroom. ("World's biggest litter box.") Most sand doesn't make much noise, but I noticed a type of desert sand that makes a squnching sound as I stepped on it. If I listened closely, I could hear Menominee's paws making tiny squnching sounds as she walked across the sand!

During the week, when the campground was nearly empty, we enjoyed the silence of the desert. Far from any traffic, the only sounds were the occasional call of a bird, howl of a coyote, or the faint sound of an airplane so high you couldn't see it. One day we were surprised to hear the unmistakable sounds of someone playing a bagpipe far, far away.

The desert weather was delightful, with clear blue skies and friendly temperatures. At night the sky was very dark and the stars sparkled beautifully. One night, examining the sky with binoculars, I saw a curious object that looked more like a gray cloud than a star. When I checked on the web, I learned that it's a comet named Holmes.

We spent several days in a campground in Southern California's Joshua Tree National Park. The Joshua Tree is a tall, odd plant that is adapted to life in the desert. (Photos at right.)

Cruisemaster — The Window Incident

2007-11-17T09:41:00.000-08:00

We were driving down a San Diego freeway when suddenly WHAM! glass showered down on my head. Menominee, who had been asleep above my head, jumped for her life. A window had broken — how, we'll never know, although we didn't find a brick with a message attached. The wind whistling in continued to blow glass down on me.

We turned off at the next exit and examined the situation. The window was at the front of the RV, directly over the cab, and fortunately, it was safety glass, so the pieces were like pebbles, with no big knife-like pieces.

Our RV directory listed an RV repair shop about ten miles away, so we drove there slowly on surface streets. The owner took one look and said "Sorry, we can't help you. Tempered safety glass is impossible to get." Then he quietly recommended a plastics store a few miles away. Turned out to be a good recommendation — they were familiar with RV windows and had the skills to make a plastic window to fit. Unfortunately, it was 4pm on a Friday. Fortunately, they were open Saturday mornings.

I covered the window with a piece of cardboard and liberal amounts of duct tape, to keep insects out and Menominee in. We camped that night on a nearby street and the next morning we parked in front of the plastics store and got to work — digging the old glass out of the frame (work gloves and a screwdriver), removing old adhesive from the frame (razor blade), cutting a piece of cardboard to the exact size (carprt knife), and giving the cardboard to the guy at the plastics shop, who was very nice, offering suggestions and a cup of coffee. He cut the plastic, it fit perfectly, I glued it in with lots of silicone window caulk, and he charged me half the estimate. Whew! Happy ending! There are nice people in the world!

The new window has held up fine so far, but still awaits its first real test, when it rains. I'm pretty sure I used so much silicone caulk that it won't leak.

San Diego — After the Fires

2007-11-09T10:29:00.000-08:00

We relaxed up on the Central California coast while over a dozen wild fires burned down in Southern California. Days after the winds had died down, hundreds of fire fighters contained all the fires and we ventured back into San Diego county. The air was still a little hazy with smoke, a reminder of what had been.

We returned to the campground on the ocean we had evacuated from the previous week. Although there had been a warning that the fire upwind of here might be unstoppable until it reached the sea, it was five miles short when the ferocious winds died down and the firefighters contained it. The campground and seaside communities were spared.

Sunday morning we attended services at the UU church in Escondido, where one of the fires had destroyed many houses. The subject of the sermon was "Hope," which was the message the congregation needed that morning. It seemed nearly everyone there had been affected by the fire, one way or another — personally, or had neighbors who had been affected, or were active in relief work. One person I talked to felt fortunate that the fire had stopped half a mile from her house. Another said gravely that the fire had come with a quarter mile of hers.

The newspapers were full of stories about the fires. Were they prepared when the fires started? Yes, the Santa Ana winds had been predicted days in advance, which gave local and state government time to mobilize fire fighters and equipment. However, preparations were inadequate, as no one had foreseen the number or ferocity of fires. Only five water-bomber planes were ready to take off when the fires started, far too few to make a difference. A day later, other planes and crews, sitting on the runway ready to fly, couldn't take off because of bureaucratic red tape.

The winds fanned the flames so quickly that the fires overwhelmed all efforts to fight them, in the air and on the ground. Fire fighters were reduced to trying to save one house at a time, and then, after success or failure, moving on down the block.

And yet more people want very much to live here, and many new houses are built every year, in this area threated by persistent drought, horrendous fires and, of course, world-class earthquakes.

California — San Diego and the Fires

2007-10-27T14:23:00.000-07:00

The deserts were becoming uncomfortably hot, and in accordance with out trip policy — go where the weather is likely to be nice — we headed for the ocean. We spent the night in a state park campground right on the beach north of San Diego. Next day was Sunday and I visited the UU fellowship I'd belonged to, back when I lived in this area. It had changed — new buildings built, old buildings remodeled, new minister, new faces. I chatted with the few people I could find who remembered me from back then.

The weather was gorgeous, bright and sunny with winds from the east. But by late afternoon we noticed smoke blowing in the air, and a phone call from a friend prompted us to listen to the news on the radio. Two wildfires had broken out and were growing, but they were so far away (dozens of miles to the east) that I wasn't worried and went to bed.

By next morning, the situation was very different. The air was thick with smoke, nearly blotting out the sun. Now the news said that new fires were burning, one of them just miles from us, and the strong easterly winds were blowing it in our direction! Yikes! Surely, though, we would be safe at the beach? Maybe not — the news said that the fire might be unstoppable until it reached the ocean. Then came the order to evacuate. We wasted no time in packing up and leaving. The campground, full the night before, was quickly emptying. We got on the road and headed north, away from the fires. We were fortunate that the freeway, Interstate 5, was moving smoothly, and by afternoon we were far from San Diego county and all the fires burning there.

We spent the night at a state park campground in Huntington Beach, in the Los Angeles area. We spoke with others in the campground and it turned out that they, too, were refugees from the San Diego area. That location worked fine for a day, but then the air became smoky again, this time from new fires in Orange and LA counties (more than a dozen altogether). We weren't afraid of the fires, but we didn't want to breathe smoky air — very bad for the lungs — so once again we traveled north, stopping for the night north of Santa Barbara and moving the next day to the coast at Pismo Beach.

Fires like these are no stranger to Southern California. Vegetation is dry and very flammable, even more so because of the extended drought here in the west. The hot, dry winds — locals call them Santa Ana — blow from the east with gusts to 60 mph, fanning the fire and blowing it forward faster than fire fighters can stop it.

I'm reminded that decades ago, Minnesota suffered similar wildfires — for example, the Hinkley fire if 1894. Circumstances were similar: Prolonged drought making vegetation very dry and flammable, and strong, strong dry winds fanning the fire to burn hot and spread rapidly.

It is a humbling experience to flee the fury of nature, when, as Garrison Keillor has said, "Nature is making a serious attempt to kill you."

California — LA and the Desert

2007-10-22T19:35:00.000-07:00

Heading south, we bumped into Los Angeles and our one encounter with it was a disaster. They closed Interstate 5, the freeway we needed to get to LA, for several days! When we laboriously navigatged the detours, an LA motorcycle officer gave us a ticket for turning left! Disgusted, we withdrew from LA and never returned.

North of LA the land is desolate mountains and desert, stretching to the Nevada border and beyond. We poked around and explored some interesting back roads north of Ojai, then headed for Lancaster Victorville, and Barstow. The weather was gorgeous — blue skies, highs in the seventies — and the desert landscape was gorgeous too — in its own way, of course. (See Driver's View photo at the bottom of this page.)

Actually, most of California is desert. Oh, the northern coasts get rain, and the mountains get snow, but everything else receives surprisingly little precipitation. The great central valley that stretches for hundreds of miles up the middle of the state, Sacramento, Los Angeles, San Diego. All technically deserts, by amount of rain received. Irrigation has made California what it is today. Without irrigation, there would be no California fruit or vegetables, no LA, Hollywood or San Diego. Rent Jack Nicholson's great movie "Chinatown" (in which he wears a band-aid across the bridge of his nose) for an exciting story about California water.

California — Down the Coast to Big Sur

2007-10-11T19:17:00.000-07:00

Next night we were back on the Pacific Ocean in Bodega Bay, staying in Doran Beach State Park (Recommended), located right on the bay, complete with flashing lighthouse and hooting fog horn. Menominee loved the sandy campsite — rolling in sand, digging in it, peeing in it — and we took long walks exploring the dunes.

Then it was southward on Highway 1 to Point Reyes National Seashore. Although it's close to San Francisco, the park is surprisingly rural and rustic. The road, I swear, hasn't seen new asphalt since the Truman administration, but drive over the hills to the west side and the Pacific Ocean lies spread before you, stretching into the mist at the horizon. A cold wind blew in off the ocean, pushing fog over the road and up the hills, so we didn't stay to sunbathe.

We spent two nights in a state park campground over on the sunny side of the the hills. The park is only about a mile from the San Andreas Fault, infamous for its ferocious earthquakes, but we felt nary a tremor.

Then it was time for the big push. We pumped lots of gas into Cruisemaster and headed over the hills and down the highway toward San Francisco. We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, slithered through the western outskirts of San Fran, and rejoined the coast on Highway 1, which continues to hug the ocean down past Monterey and Santa Cruz.

South of that lies Big Sur, about 90 miles of desolate coastline reached by a very curvy two-lane road carved into a steep mountainside. If you dare take your eyes off the road, you can see spectacular views of the waves hitting the rocky shore hundreds of feet below. You also cross the historic Bixby Bridge, which was built of concrete in 1932 and — despite all the earthquakes since then — still safely carries traffic. (Compare that with a certain steel bridge built in the 1960s which recently fell into the Mississippi.)

The big tourist attraction along the Big Sur coast is the Hearst Castle at San Simeon (Recommended), built by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (the Rupert Murdoch of the U.S.). He used his enormous wealth to buy European antiquities — from trapestries and paintings to whole fire places — ship them to San Simeon, and build a castle around them. Julia Morgan was the architect, civil engineer, interior decorator, and landscape designer who turned Hearst's dreams into reality. The project evolved over decades, as Hearst was always coming up with new ideas. His wife lived on the East Coast; he and his mistress, beautiful starlet Marian Davies, hosted lavish parties for Hollywood celebrities at the castle.

From this opulent cathedral to wealth we retired in our RV to a state park campground ($18 for the night).

California — Sacramento

2007-10-05T16:07:00.000-07:00

Driving across Sonoma and Napa valleys, we passed field after field filled with carefully arranged grape vines growing in impossibly dry dirt. The sun was bright and the air was hot and dry as we made our way to Sacramento, the state capital.

Sacramento is a lively, growing city with clean streets and sidewalks, winter weather that seldom dips below freezing, and hot summers (over 100°, but it's a dry heat). Sacramento is also a city of big trees, which are beautiful but kept blocking the satellite signals our GPS needed to direct us. It became confused, uttering such complete nonsense that we turned it off and navigatged by the seat of our pants. After a bit of driving around, we found Mary H. and Brian at their cheerful duplex apartment. We sat in the shade sipping cold drinks while Menominee explored the back yard.

Next day, Mary and I went to see the State Railroad Museum (Recommended). It's in a beautiful building displaying about a dozen shiny, fully restored engines and cars, which we wandered around at our leisure, reminiscing over train-related events from our childhoods, talking with the volunteer interpreters, and catching the last half of a narrated tour. We walked through a Pullman car (the kind with upper and lower berths that you see in old black-and-white movies), sat in the cab of a million-pound steam locomotive, and viewed the solid gold spike that's a duplicate of the one driven to complete the transcontinental railroad.

One evening we went to a delightful restaurant called the Tower (Recommended), which served delicious food (I had Korean BBQ ribs) outdoors under trees in the warm air. We sat and ate and talked and it felt like we were in paradise. California is like that.

Napa

Leaving Sacramento, we stayed overnight in the town of Napa and Sunday morning I found the UU fellowship there. The minister welcomed me at the door and after the service several members of the congregation chatted with me and invited me to their potluck picnic in a park. Well! How could I resist? I stopped at a grocery for chips and salsa and had a great time with the very happy and friendly people at the picnic.

Northern California

2007-09-26T20:15:00.000-07:00

We followed I-5 south into California and the little town with the strange name, Yreka. The origin of the name isn't reliably known — it may come from an Indian word, but another possibility emerges when you spell it backwards and add a "b." We were in the area known locally as Jefferson State, because citizens have for decades wanted to create a new state from counties in northern California and southern Oregon — rural counties that had more in common with each other than with the distant metropolitan capitals that governed them. They never succeeded, of course, but the name lives on.

By now the coastal weather forecast had improved considerably, so we headed west over formidable ranges of mountains on curvy and narrow state highway 96. We missed the turnoff for the coast and continued on and on down the highway. Eventually (the next day) we made it to the Pacific Ocean at Arcata and swung northward on U.S. highway 101 along the coast as far as Crescent City.

Although California has a huge population, the northern coast — from suburban San Francisco to the Oregon border — is sparsely populated, which suited us fine, as we enjoyed the small towns and relaxed beach and ocean atmosphere. The highway goes right through Redwood National Park and we marveled at the ancient and stately trees. We remembered that their continued existence was not assured during Ronald Reagan's term as governor of California — he wanted to open the redwood forests to commercial lumbering, famously saying "If you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all."

South of Eureka, highway 101 takes an inland route, but state highway 1 offers an alternate route that runs right along the coast, so we chose that. The road winds up and down the sides of coastal mountains, offering a new ocean view at each curve in the road. At Fort Bragg, we stopped for lunch at Sharon's Restaurant (recommended), in a charming cottage at the water's edge, and enjoyed crab cakes on oriental slaw. (Thanks to Mary H. for pointing us down Harbor Drive to a pocket of good restaurants at the dock.) The next day we were hungry when we came into tiny Elk, Calif., and stopped at the rustic and somewhat countercultural Queenie's Roadside Cafe (recommended). There I ordered homemade corned beef hash, freshly prepared to order, and pronounced it the best I'd ever eaten. Farther south in Bodega Bay, I stopped for lunch at a fish shack called the Spud Point Crab Company for a bowl of their award-winning clam chowder ($7, recommended), full of seafood that comes off the fishing boats right across the street, and, to my palate, seasoned to perfection.

Washington and Oregon

2007-09-26T20:05:00.000-07:00

Now we are migrating with the season, headed south with the birds.

Washington

We departed Whidbey Island by loading Cruisemaster onto the ferry to Port Townsend, and when the ferry landed we continued south through Washington. The weather was uncomfortably warm in the interior of the state, so we headed west toward the coast, which turned out to be overcast and chilly. Too hot, too cold. Checking the weather forecast on the web, we foresaw clouds for the next few days all the way down the coast into Oregon and California, so we made a decision to steer, not for a particular feature or attraction, but for better weather, which we found inland, east of the coastal range of mountains.

Oregon

We skirted Portland and continued south to McMinnville, a small town with an interesting aviation museum. I spent a few happy hours there, wandering around and looking at the planes, but the major thrill was the Spruce Goose, the one and only original, beautifully restored and displayed. This was the plane conceived during WWII, when supply and troop ships were being sunk on their way to Britain. This airplane was planned to be so huge that a fleet of them could replace the ships. Metal was scarce during the war, so the plane was made of birch, cut to shape, bent, and laminated with glue. The plane was so large that it had eight propellers, each driven by a 3000 horsepower engine.

Critics doubted that such a large wooden plane would ever fly, but it did make one test flight, piloted by Howard Hughes, the man who had championed it, overseen its design and construction, and personally paid for millions in cost overruns. But by that time the war had ended, and the test plane turned out to be the only one constructed. It is to the Evergreen Aviation Museum's great credit that it obtained, restored, and displays this historic airplane.

Farther south, we passed through Corvallis and Eugene and decided to hop on I-5 in search of reliable sunshine, finally finding it in Grants Pass, Medford, and Ashland. When we stopped in Medford to inquire about a public Internet connection, the Visitors Center gravely informed us that the city library was closed due to lack of funds. We could only gasp in disbelief. The excellent public libraries in Minnesota must not be taken for granted, for if the money isn't there, a library cannot remain open, and politicians whose only priority is cutting taxes are not to be trusted when it comes to libraries or bridges.

Washington — Whidbey Island

2007-09-18T20:24:00.000-07:00

The ferry from Vancouver Island navigated through fog and mist to deposit us in Washington state. All we had to do was show our U.S. passport twice, answer questions about where we'd been and how long, what we were carrying, and open our fridge for inspection, to a border officer wearing a black uniform, black boots, and black gloves.

We drove down Whidbey Island to visit an old Minneapolis friend, Ann G., who now lives in Coupeville, a tiny gem of a place. The village is cute, located on a hillside, with shops, restaurants, and a mussel farm down in the water at the cove. The local cuisine is seafood, including just-caught mussels, clams, and salmon. We had outstanding dinners at Christopher's (recommended) — I had the seafood stew, Ann had ravioli with prawns (under $20 each).

One evening we drove farther down the island to an old movie theater that was showing a documentary, "The Real Dirt on farmer John," the funny true story of a misfit Midwestern Scandinavian farmer who floundered for decades before finding the right niche in the world for him and his farm. Another day we parked at the dock and took the ferry over to Port Townsend, Wash., a gem of a place, with restored old buildings, a used book store, and (naturally) restaurants. We had seafood at Fins and pronounced it delicious. (Recommended).

The weather was sunny and pleasant, and at night the sky was so clear we could see the Milky way. Blackberries grow wild in the northwest — imagine not having to plant, cultivate, water, and worry about winter protection! When Menominee took me for walks, I always kept an eye out for blackberry bushes, then picked only the big, plump, ripe and juicy berries, the ones just waiting to be picked and popped into your mouth. (Recomended)

An island is insulated from the hubbub of the mainland. Most people seldom have a reason to come to Whidbey Island, which makes it sparsely populated, relaxed, and friendly. I'm still smiling about the friendliness of the happy locals there. (I want to go back.)

And yet, it isn't all heavenly, even on Whidbery Island.

The island lacks major culture -- professional live theater and music, museums, galleries, colleges and universities -- as well as access to large stores and a major airport. Seattle is 60 miles and one ferry crossing away, so it's like living in Hinkley and yearning for the attractions of the Twin Cities (and taking a ferry where the 35W bridge used to be).

It isn't all peace and quiet on Whidbey. A naval air station is located at the northern tip of the island, and navy planes swoop low over the island taking off and landing.

Our visit featured ideal weather -- sunny and warm -- but the island also experiences clouds, fog, rain, some snow, and plenty of wind.

Whidbey Island's only source of fresh water is from wells, and the water is full of rust, so people don't drink it or wash clothes in it.

Port Townsend is lovely to visit on foot, as we did, but if you bring a vehicle, you've got a parking problem.

We happened to be there in blackberry season. The rest of the year, they're just thorny bushes.

Canada — In Conclusion

2007-09-18T20:21:00.000-07:00

Things cost more in Canada, but we got by.

Canadian money looks funny.

Canada is metric, but it isn't difficult to make do.

Canada has a marvelous system of Visitor Information Centres which we used and really appreciated.

Canada is a bilingual country but everybody understood our English.

The Canadian accent is no barrier to communication.

They still have Mounties but they no longer ride horses.

We enjoyed our trip across Canada. If you enjoyed reading this blog, maybe you, too, will want to visit Canada one day. Happy travels!

Canada — Vancouver Island

2007-09-14T10:53:00.000-07:00

We left Vancouver and drove north to catch the ferry at Horseshoe Bay, which turned out to be a lovely hamlet with a restaurant called Trolls, where I had a delicious seafood lunch at a reasonable price. (Recommended).

The Ferry

If you've never ridden a ferry, it's fun. On foot or bicycle, it's easy and cheap. In a vehicle, you have to line up and pay a lot of money, then line up again and wait until it's time to get on the ferry. When the vehicles in front of you start moving, you follow them across a ramp and onto the ship and park where they tell you to. Then you can leave your vehicle and wander around, admiring the view, buying something to eat, or going out on the deck to feel the wind in your face. When the voyage is over, you follow the vehicle ahead of you and drive off the ferry back onto land. We saw cars, motorcycles, pickups pulling vacation trailers, RVs of all sizes, even a big truck with semi trailer. The cost is based on the size of the vehicle and the length of the trip. For an ordinary car, it's about thirty cents a minute, but for Cruisemaster it was more like a dollar, because of extra height and length.

Vancouver Island

The ferry took us to Nanaimo, on the east coast of Vancouver Island. Although we had hoped to immediately discover a Garden of Eden, Nanaimo was a busy port town, so we headed north up the coast in search of smaller towns and bucolic beauty. We spent a few days meandering through Parksville, Courtenay, and Campbell River up into the wilderness of Sayward and Telegraph Cove. It was a lovely drive through deeply green mountainous countryside with cool, damp sea air. We had wanted to drive over to the west coast of the island to see the Pacific Ocean and maybe spot some whales, but cold, rainy weather there deterred us. Instead we headed south to Duncan, where I took a tour of the Merridale Apple Cider Mill, a small operation that grows its own special apples (varieties grown in England especially for making cider) and turning them into specialty apple cider. The tasting at the end of the tour was well worth the price of admission (free, recommended). Finally we arrived at Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, at the southern tip of Vancouver Island.

Victoria is the San Francisco of Canada. It has history, class, charm, fine old buildings, bracing sea air, a wharf, lots of tourists, and plenty of good restaurants. You could spend days walking the streets, admiring the buildings, and visiting the museums and gardens.

I'm always delighted to find a neat small town on the outskirts of a large one, and I'm glad I found Sidney, a northern suburb of Victoria and a gem of a place. It's really small, just the right size for strolling around, yet has half a dozen little bookstores, delicious restaurants, and good chocolate. I had a fine dinner at Beacon Landing (recommended) and found artisan chocolate ice cream in a little chocolate shop on Beacon St. (recommended).

The time had come

We had been in Canada for more than two months, wending our way in a circuitous route from Ontario to British Columbia. Now the time had come for us to return to the United States. Passport in hand, we headed for a different ferry, one that would take us from Vancouver Island to Washington state.

Cruisemaster's Further Adventures

2007-09-11T14:59:00.000-07:00

Cruisemaster, our RV, had been performing faithfully since Minnesota. Then, between Vancouver and Squamish,...

Bam!

We suddenly heard a curious noise. Every time the right front wheel went around, it went "Bam!" I stopped, got out and looked underneath but couldn't see anything unusual, and couldn't imagine what could be wrong. I started up again and tentatively tried driving slow, which produced Bam!...Bam!...Bam! Then I speed up a little, and got Bam!Bam!Bam! It didn't stop, but it didn't get any worse either, so I decided to try to drive, gingerly, to a garage. I got quizzical stares from pedestrians and bicycle riders, but nine slow miles later, I pulled into a nice Midas Muffler shop. The kind people there took me right in, diagnosed the problem (a small scrap of metal caught in the disk brake) and sent me on my way — for free! Thanks, Midas!

The Steps

When you opened the RV's side door, you could flip down two folding steps to make it easy to step down to the ground. The steps had a nice, uniform, rectangular shape. I always remembered to flip them up before driving away from a camp site, until one day in Squamish. They were still down when I crossed a narrow bridge, and I heard a horrible scraping sound from over there where the steps were. When I stopped to look, I found that the steps were no longer rectangular but were swept back into a streamlined shape, and they no longer flipped up. In short, they were magngled beyond repair, so I spent a while on the ground with a wrench removing the steps and disposing of them in a dumpster. I never really liked them, anyway (sour grapes!) but until I figure out what to do about it, I really must remember to exit the RV carefully, as that first step is now a big one... all the way to the ground.

The Brakes

The brakes had performed perfectly during our long crossing of the flat prairie provinces, but here in mountainous B.C. I noticed some changes. The brake pedal started feeling a little soft and very slowly descended. Then came the time I stepped on the brake and the pedal went right to the floorboards. Yikes! Further tests showed that the brakes worked Ok most of the time, which was fortunate, since we were in mountainous territory and it was a couple of days before we could get to a town with a mechanic. Feeling a surge of loyalty to Midas after their splendid service earlier, I stopped at a Midas and they replaced the master brake cylinder, only this time they charged for their work.

Cruisemaster is 28 years old. For a vehicle this age, we have to expect things like this will happen and take them in stride.

Canada — Vancouver

2007-09-03T18:35:00.000-07:00

Vancouver is a big urban area, a city surrounded by suburbs, with more people than any place we've been since we left the Twin Cities two months ago. It's in a beautiful setting, with mountains all around and the ocean lapping at its feet. (Well, not the ocean itself, but a sound the connects to the ocean, the same way Puget Sound connects Seattle to the ocean.)

Coming after all our travels across the prairies and the mountains, it was a bit of a shock and a pain, having to deal with freeways and lots of other drivers on the road. Plus not being able to find places, even with the help of my GPS. I had figured that the GPS, hooked up to my laptop PC, would make it easy to navigate around cities, but no. When I typed in the name of an RV park, it never heard of it. So I typed in the exact address, and it still couldn't find it. (Thanks, Garmin!) So we had to navigate the old fashioned way, looking at a map.

I took the light rail downtown and walked around, looking at the buildings and people. Gas Town, China Town, small neighborhoods but interesting. As I walked past the public library I noticed employees on strike, so I chatted with one for a few minutes. They'd been on strike for five weeks, their main issue being wage equity between men and women workers. (Amazing, isn't it, that it's still being fought, thirty years after we had our consciousness raised about equal pay for equal work?)

I rode the passenger ferry across to North Vancouver, just for the fun of it, and noticed the ferry was clean, well designed for fast boarding and disembarking of passengers, and well run. Their first light rail system was constructed decades ago, and they liked it so much they built a second. Trains run every few minutes and carry lots of passengers. The trains are automatic — there's no human driving involved — and they were built elevated (in the suburbs) and underground (downtown) so a train never crosses a road, completely eliminating any chance of a train colliding with a car. (If only Minneapolis had done that along Hiawatha...)

I also went to the fair, which happened to be running in Vancouver, but it turned out to be nothing like the magnificent Minnesota State Fair — it was more the size of the county fair in Owatonna. To my delight, they had the same kind of hucksters selling slicers and dicers, pots and pans, and miracle mops. They also had corn dogs and mini donuts, but no milk booth and no chocolate chip cookies. (Later I went into a shopping mall looking for the Canadian equivalent of Mrs. Field's cookies, but they didn't have any. Canadians don't know what they're missing!)

Vancouver is what you would get if you moved Minneapolis to the west coast, and you would gain beautiful mountains, cooler summers, warmer winters, and an ocean. And you'd lose the mosquitoes. There's a lot to like about that.

Squamish

Soon tired of the big city, we headed up the coast to Squamish (and no, that isn't a misspelling of "squeamish" as my spell-check thinks). It's a small town with a curious past: It was founded over a hundred years ago during the mining and lumbering booms, but its only access to Vancouver was by water. It was only fifty years later that a road was built and Squamish had better access to Vancouver.

We enjoyed the small-town atmosphere and Saturday farmer's market, which included arts and crafts and massage as well as fruit and vegetables. But now Squamish has two colleges, and in 2010, Winter Olympic events will be held just up the road at the Whistler ski resort. Property values have already risen dramatically, and development has been in strip malls and subdivisions up and down the highway. Can Squamish retain its small-town charm? I sure hope so.

Between Squamish and Vancouver there's a mining museum. We stopped and I toured the copper mine — the tour actually takes you inside the mine and they demonstrate how mining trechniques changed through the years, from hammers pounding drills to compressed air machines. (Recommended.)

The drive between Vancouver and Squamish is incredibly scenic. The road rises as it hugs the mountainside, and you get views out over the sound to steep mountains, some with snow on their peaks, rising majestically from the water. To my eye, it's right up there with the sights of Jasper and Banff parks.

Canada — British Columbia

2007-08-27T18:41:00.000-07:00

When you leave the Banff and Jasper Parks driving west, you drop down out of the Rockies into the interior of British Columbia, which has several more mountain ranges and valleys, although none to match the grandeur of the Rockies. We stopped in Radium Hot Springs for lunch, but decided against taking the waters. We passed through small town after small town, rarely big enough to have a supermarket. It got warmer and drier and the ground got dusty, which was a big plus for Menominee, who loves to roll and squirm in the dust — so far, she says, Canadian dust is her favorite. The dryness — drought, actually — was also evident in forest fires, whose smoke we saw. For a whole day we drove north to escape smoke from fires burning down in Washington — the sun filtered to a dull, bloody, red disk, and twilight was a vivid peach.

As we drove south and west, crossing barren stretches, we aimed for Nelson, where mail from the US awaited at General Delivery. Nelson is a neat place, an authentic old town with Victorian buildings (it's where Steve Martin's film "Roxanne" was shot) that has survived its roots in mining and timbering and become a lively place to visit. It's located next to a narrow lake in the valley between two steeply wooded mountains — kind of like a Scottish loch or a Norwegian fjord — and its downtown area is alive with organic restaurants, street musicians, and a Tarot card reader. (Its spriit is the closest to Uptown Minneapolis we've seen since we left the Twin Cities.)

South of Lytton we stopped and indulged in the Hell's Gate tram ride ($11) down into the Thompson River canyon where the rock walls narrow and the river flows swiftly (twice the flow of Niagra Falls, they claim). The tram ride was fun, the salmon in the cafe was delicious, the gift shop enticed us to spend thirty dollars, and the walk across the suspension bridge was free. (Recommended, because it's a welcome relief from the tedium of driving across barren stretches).

In Minnesota, the spare water just sits in lakes, over ten thousand of them scattered everywhere. Here in BC, the water is confined by the mountainous terrain to run down into the valleys in streams and rivers into lakes. Some of the lakes are pretty big, great for recreation; some were created by hydro-electric dams, including the Bennett Dam west of Fort St. John, which I toured. So powerful are its ten generators that it alone supplies a quarter of BC's demand for electricity — and of course, it doesn't pollute. Yay hydro-electric!

Eventually, as we worked our way near Vancouver, dry and dusty gave way to a more pleasant, humid air, and we realized, as early explorers must have, that we were smelling the sweet breeze from the Pacific Ocean.

Canada — Banff National Park

2007-08-22T22:25:00.000-07:00

The best way to approach the Rocky Mountains is from the east, where they appear on the horizon and capture your interest as they steadily rise and expand until they extend from as far as you can see to the left and right, their craggy peaks growing larger and larger until finally you're driving up into them and they rise all around you.

The mountain air was clean and dry. Enjoying good weather, with blue skies, little white clouds, and agreeable temperatures, we drove around and admired the mountains. These are the Rocky Mountains, same range as in Colorado, but the huge advantage here is that you're in narrow valleys within the mountain range, so you have mountains and peaks all around you, some forested, but many craggy with bare rock, and all of them rising way up.

Both Jasper and Banff Parks have wildlife, and all the tourists enjoy seeing bears, mountain goats, bighorn sheep, elk, moose, or caribou up close. The easiest way to spot them when driving around is to wait for a traffic jam: If a dozen cars are stopped in front of you, look around to see what they're looking at. We saw goats, sheep, and caribou that way.

The town of Banff is a ritzy place. Lots of hotels and lodges, fancy shops with designer clothing, and good restaurants. I seriously considered making a reservation at the Restaurant Beaujolais for their Table d'Hote Dinner (three courses at a fixed price of $69 Canadian, that's $65.50 US). You get to choose each course, and I had my eye on the Tasting of Pacific Salmon Three Ways for the first course, although the Cruisse de Grenouille Croquantes (Crispy Frog's Legs) sounded intriguing. For a second course, perhaps the Lobster Bisque en Croute, or the Alaskan Crab Crepe, or (if feeling very daring) the Alberta Wild Boar Civet (whatever that is), with black cherries, choux rouge and creamy polenta with sage butter. And for the third course, the Brome Lake Duck Breast and Leg Confit with maple-nut chutney, or maybe the Rack of Lamb Provencale au Jus. Oh, my head swam with the glory of it all!

As it happened, I was distracted by the restaurant at the top of the gondola lift, where their two-course dinner was a more affordable $28. I had their Curry Soup (delicious, almost as good as the Cambodian restaurant on University in St. Paul) and Beef Rendang (luscious -- the equal, in my estimation, of the Peninsula in Minneapolis).

It began with the gondola ride, a swift eight minutes up 2,500 feet, and at the top, the incredible 360 degree view of all the mountain peaks so close at hand. Then a relaxed meal at the restaurant, the ride down the mountain, and, to cap it off, a soak in the adjacent hot mineral spring pool. The water is 40 Canadian degrees, which is 104 US degrees. No one is swimming laps at that temperature — everyone is just relaxed and blissed out. This pool is a great leveler — no matter what country you're from or how much money you've got, each of us is just a human in a bathing suit enjoying the same water.

So, if you should find yourself in Banff one day and want to give yourself a treat, I recommend any of these establishments. Dinner, $69 or $28. Gondola ride, $25. Hot springs pool, $10. The mountain views — priceless.

Lake Louise is ritziest of all. The town consists almost exclusively of fancy lodges and hotels. The grand hotel is situated on the edge of the turquoise lake facing the incredible mountain and glacier. Its history dates back to the first railroads, when it was built as a resort to lure the wealthy to enjoy the scenery in style and comfort. After walking a bit on the trail around Lake Louise, I stopped in the hotel and had a bowl of soup and glass of beer in the pub ($20). It was delicious, but I thought it overpriced, so I stole several of their paper napkins. Next time I want to have dinner in the hotel's main dining room.

Jasper, by contrast, was much more family oriented, with lots of fast food joints, although, aftrer poking around a bit, I found tasty and innovative dinners at Dangerous Dave's and at Fiddle River, with entrees around $20.

In both parks we heard foreign languages spoken — French of course, since this is a bi-lingual country, but others too, such as German. We chatted with a woman from Holland, and saw tourists of color, or from the Orient, or wearing Islamic clothing. The beauty and splendor of these parks draw people from far, far away. (Have you been here yet?)

Next time I want to drive the Glacier Highway between Jasper and Lake Louise and tour the glaciers in the special glaciermobile. That is, if the glaciers are still around, next time I visit. (The Crowfoot Glacier, for example, has already lost one of its toes, and the other two are melting pretty fast.)

Menominee

2007-08-17T10:01:00.000-07:00

Menominee, my cat and traveling companion on this adventure, is doing well. She has relaxed into the driving phases of our adventure, and now sleeps while I drive. She lives for the payoff at the end of the day, at the camp site, which she considers her domain, her territory to explore, her hunting ground. She has now caught a total of four small, furry, mouse-like critters, and is convinced she's a might hunter (and who am I to disagree?). We are thinking about trying a catch-and-release policy with her mice.

Jumping
Menominee soon noticed where I stored her food — in the cupboard along the ceiling over the couch — and began planning ways to reach it. The most direct means is for her to jump into the cupboard when the door is open, so I simply blocked it whenever it was open. But she also figured out that all the cupboards over the couch are connected, so she could jump into any open door and work her way over to her food.

One evening I accidentally left one of the cupboard doors open and sat on the couch watching a DVD on my laptop. Because the lights were off, I didn't notice her leap from the dining table four feet into the open cupboard, but I found out soon enough when, unable to secure a foothold in the cupboard, my ten-pound cat fell three feet onto my stomach. I told her I didn't appreciate that, but she offered no apologies, instead nursing a bruised ego because her magnificent plan had failed.

A few days later she made use of a five-inch diameter hole in the face of the same cupboard — where a loudspeaker had once been. She jumped from the kitchen sink up two feet, left two feet, and forward two feet (for a total jump of four feet) and somehow landed with her front half in that small hole, leaving her hind quarters dangling in mid-air, up near the ceiling. It was a sight to behold! With her front paws she got traction among the cabinet contents and hauled her rear half in. What a cat... Some cat!

The Bird Call Incident
To pass the time while driving the prairies, I tried (usually in vain) to find a radio station, then put on a CD. One day I put on a CD of bird calls, intended as instruction for bird watchers. To hear the CD clearly (from the speakers back in the RV) I had to turn the volume up pretty high, and began listening to the various songs of the cardinal. Soon Menominee was on the driver's seat back, touching my shoulder with her paw to get my attention, and then meowing in my ear. This is unusual behavior, some kind of communication, so I took her seriously and examined the situation. Loud bird calls. Maybe hurting her ears. Maybe she thinks they're coming from really, really big, scary birds? Huge birds right here, in the RV? Whatever. I put the bird-call CD away and Menominee calmed down.

Canada — Jasper National Park

2007-08-14T17:48:00.000-07:00

As we approached Jasper, the weather was beautiful (see photo of magnificent cloud). We found a campsite in the campground near the town of Jasper and settled in. The next day was totally overcast and cool, so we spent the day driving around the park. Unfortunately the mountains and lakes weren't very pretty in the monochromatic light -- all in shades of gray. We drove all the way up to the hot springs pool, but by the time we got there it was cold and windy, so we didn't go in. Later, in an Internet cafe, I checked the weather forecast, which was for cloudy, rainy, and even colder for the next five days. Uf da! Here we were in the most beautiful parks in Canada and the weather was absolutely lousy! Then a sudden realization: We have no schedule -- we can postpone the parks until later, when the weather is nice. So we bailed right out of Japer Park, drove east, and headed for lower elevations farther south, hoping it wouldn't be quite as cold there.

That took us back in Alberta, north of Montana, in cowboy country. The highway we were on is nicknamed "The Cowboy Trail." We saw men in cowboy hats, and on the news stand, there were magazines like "Canadian Cowboy" and (I am not making this up!) "Cowboys and Indians." There were lots of shops that sell saddles and other horse gear, but the one that caught my eye had a sign, "Chiropractor available -- walk-ins welcome." Yes, after a rodeo, a cowboy just might need some attending to.

Two days later, we were camped in Red Deer, midway between Edmonton and Calgary, when the cold wave bottomed out at freezing temperatures overnight. We came through OK, thanks to an RV park that provided electricity to our electric heater, which we left running all night. What a weather oddity -- freezing temperatures in August, in the same province where a heat wave had us sweating and panting a couple of weeks ago!

Next day we explored Red Deer, the first town of any size we'd visited in weeks. It was a joy to have a selection of large grocery stores, hardware stores, and an actual big chain bookstore -- Chapters, a Canadian imitator of Barnes & Noble, including the inevitable Starbucks. I tried to buy a copy of "Are We Rome?" but they didn't have it. The clerk who helped me (a guy nearing retirement, reminded me of MPR's Tom Keith, without a bow tie) was a history buff, and we chatted about the similarities between ancient Rome and modern U.S., and then got off onto Islam, which he thinks will conquer Europe by the end of the century. An interesting exchange!

We rather liked Red Deer, not because it has any jewel-like qualities, but because it's big enough (80,000) to have the amenities that smaller towns lack, yet small enough that people are relaxed and friendly.

Canada — British Columbia

2007-08-07T16:31:00.000-07:00

British Columbia, which is directly north of Washington state, is beautiful. Soon after we crossed the border, we noticed the difference: bigger hills than we'd seen in weeks — more like mountains. Terrain that makes use of the vertical dimension pleases the eye. Seeing a mountain range on the distant horizon evokes desire, snow-capped mountains (in August!) inspire wonder, and sheer walls rising into the sky are simply awesome. We were pleased to be in BC.

Our first stop was in Dawson Creek, an old crossroads that became the starting point for the Alaskan Highway in 1942, and thrives today as a vibrant community of 10,000. They have the first bookstore I'd seen in weeks, and I quickly went in, chatted with the proprietor, and bought a book (Jack London, "White Fang.") They also have the best restaurant I'd eaten in in weeks, the "Legendary White Spot*, Since 1928." (Recommended) Who would have suspected that they'd be serving sweet-potato fries with chipotle mayonnaise way up here? We excitedly enjoyed this interesting little hub, visiting the Alaskan Highway "Mile Zero" sign and taking a picture of Cruisemaster next to it. So progressive is this community that they provide free Wi-Fi Internet access, not only at the visitors center but also throughout downtown, and we indulged in lots of emailing and web surfing.

The Alaskan Highway enticed us to follow it for 43 miles north to Ft. St. John, which proved to be the northernmost point in our adventure, 56.3 degrees north latitude, according to the GPS. We felt the tug of the Yukon and Alaska, but that road is a long one and we decided to leave them to another adventure. We left the Alaskan Highway and began our journey south through beautiful scenery to Prince George, which bills itself as "Capital of Northern British Columbia" and advertises itself in a slick 38-page travel guide as a jewel of a place. (Thereby setting expectations so high that disappointment is likely.) The setting is nice — a river runs through it and pine-forested hills surround — but the stone proved to be fake. Oh, they have their Walmart and Home Depot, but downtown has decaying buildings, vacant storefronts, and street people. The Visitor Center gave us false information — the Cariboo is not actually open for lunch on Saturdays — and the Waddling Duck pub served pretty-good food for above-average prices with below-average service. (Although I suppose that people living up here could be delighted with any restaurant that isn't franchise fast-food.)

In the evening, we had an excellent chat with neighbors in the RV park, a couple from Vancouver who were quite happy to talk about BC, Vancouver, Jasper, and beer. It was our first extended conversation with native Canadians and we enjoyed it very much. They warned us that the road from Prince George to Jasper is a long drive through beautiful wilderness, and they were right..

*I later found out that the White Spot hasn't been in Dawson Creek since 1928 — it's a chain that started in Vancouver — but the food was still a treat.

Canada — Alberta

2007-08-01T09:11:00.000-07:00

Soon after we crossed into Alberta we came to Cold Lake, a boomtown with "help wanted" signs, new subdivisions, and high housing prices. It had its amenities — a bank, two supermarkets, a bookstore (although we couldn't find it) — and we enjoyed our overnight stay in the nearby Provincial Park campground. We continued westward and northward to Lac la Biche, where we stopped at the library to access the Internet, and met two happy, gregarious, and helpful library staff. They were soooo accommodating, trying my laptop on three different networks until I could check my email. (Thanks, Candice!) Later we spent the night in Blueberry Hill RV Park in Athabasca, although we couldn't find any blueberries (too early in the season for them — at the end of July!) .

Ever northward and westward, we came to Slave Lake, and, while looking for a camp site, we got stuck in some soft dirt. Soft, as in Very. Soft. Dirt. Stuck, as in up to the hubcaps on the right side. We couldn't go forward, couldn't go backward. Stuck, but good. What to do? It was four in the afternoon, the sun was hot, flies were buzzing, and there was no breeze. I walked around Cruisemaster, surveying the situation, when a Canadian came by and stopped. He offered to pull me out with his Jeep, but before we could hook up, another Canadian came by with a better idea: use his Caterpillar bulldozer. With great clanking sounds he brought the bulldozer around, hooked up Cruisemaster with a very heavy chain and slowly, slowly, pulled us out and we were freed. Whew! What an adventure! What kindly Canadians! To calm down, I needed some serious comfort food, so I bought and ate an entire 350 gram (3/4 pound) bag of chocolate chip cookies, washed down with two cans of beer. (Burp.)

From the place names in all the provinces we've driven through, we see that French explorers and traders once lived here, and that Native Americans (or First Nation, as they call them up here) have lived here for a long time.

Checking the GPS at Slave Lake, I found that we were just above 55 degrees north latitude, which is ten degrees (about 720 miles) north of Minneapolis, sixteen degrees (1150 miles) north of Washington DC, twenty-one degrees (1500 miles) north of Los Angeles.. More dramatically, this is the same latitude as Hudson Bay — if we had driven northeast from Minnesota, by the time we had gotten this far north, we'd be in the water at Hudson Bay. More dramatically yet, we are north of most of Canada's population, north of most of North America's population, north of most of the world's population. We're way far north, we are!

Even this far north, the terrain has lakes, trees, and crops (including canola). But we have the definite feeling that we are near the edge of civilization, as we pass through isolated hamlets, some with a gas station and maybe a cafe, few with a grocery or library. We see few cars on the road and notice that campgrounds have more oil-field workers than tourists. We are getting tired of the prairie and are ready for the scenery to come.

Canada — Manitoba and Saskatchewan

2007-07-25T19:36:00.000-07:00

Manitoba

We went over the border into Manitoba, our second province, directly north of North Dakota. Here the landscape changed from mountainous dense forest to agricultural plains and deciduous trees, and my GPS told me that we are at latitude 50 degrees north, which is five degrees north of the Twin Cities.

There's a crop being grown here that mystifies me. It looks for all the world like a weed, yet it's grown in huge fields for miles and miles. It's green, short — maybe eighteen inches high — and is topped with small yellow flowers. What's disconcerting about it is the sickly greenish-yellow color that fills your field of view — that and the smell is enough to give you a headache. The stuff smells like the intersection of agriculture, pesticide, and oil refinery. It definitely isn't wheat, but what is it? A Visitor Information Center provided the answer: It's canola, that cooking oil that's good for you, and you can tell from its very name (can + ola) that it comes from Canada.

We sailed through Winnipeg, verified its existence as a city, and kept going north of town to spend the night at Bird Hill Provincial Park, the huge park that hosts the Winnipeg Folk Festival. (Why, you might ask, didn't I plan to be here during the festival? Because it took place two weeks ago, and getting here for it would have required planning and reservations and rushing... in other words, not in the spirit of this adventure.)

I really wanted to find that accessory for my PC, so next day I turned on my GPS and asked it to find "Best Buy." It found two of them in Winnipeg, so I told it to plan the route to one of them. I easily followed the route from the park, but when the GPS announced that the destination was on the right, I saw only a Wendy's. Thinking I must have missed something, I drove a bit further and around a corner and asked it to route me there again. And it took me right back to the same Wendy's! (Humph! Thanks a lot, Garmin!) I turned the GPS off and headed for a Staples office supply I'd spotted visually and easily bought the accessory there for $20. One of the advantages of a city: stores with stuff you want in stock.

At a stoplight, I glanced at the lane to my left and was astonished to see a Yamaha Vino motor scooter, the very same model I had considered buying last month. Impulsively I smiled and said "Hi there, how do you like your Vino?" The rider turned to me and rattled off all the things she liked about it, and as the light turned green, sped off with "Love it! Highly recommended!" Sigh. I still want one.

Feeling hungry, I stopped at a McDonald's for lunch. In the men's washroom I discovered there was no soap. I looked for the little sign, and there it was, "...please tell the manager immediately." I found the manager standing talking with a customer. "Excuse me," I said politely. "There's no soap in the men's room." To my surprise, the manager, a short, dark-haired fellow, shot me a withering look and sneered, "I'm on my lunch break." Hmmm. Not the level of customer service I'd expected, and I seriously doubt that any management training seminars will change his surly character.. Then too, the campground's staff had seemed stressed and anxious. Am I just noticing the difference that a city makes? In any case, it was time to exit Winnipeg, and we headed west.

Manitoba's terrain is remarkably similar to Minnesota's: agricultural prairies in the south, wooded hills in the north. By driving northward, and gaining altitude, I hoped for cooler weather, but unfortunately that was not what we found. A heat wave extended far and wide, and we were unable to escape it. The weather was grimly similar to the Twin Cities, hot and humid. The best we were able to do is find a forested campground in a provincial park and relax until nightfall — say, around nine PM — when a cooling breeze brought us around.

Next day we continued northward to a village with the lovely name of Swan River, and stayed at a private campground. Did some shopping in the morning, including a visit to a Manitoba liquor store. It was a lot like any other liquor store, apart from its minuscule size, tiny selection, and high prices — eight dollars for a six-pack of Labatt's, nine dollars for the cheapest bottle of wine. The library offered Wi-Fi Internet access, but for some reason I couldn't get the access to work with my laptop — why is it that technology installed to help the public can be so temperamental?

Saskatchewan

Next day we drove yet farther north, turned west, and crossed into Saskatchewan, our third province, due north of Montana. The terrain was still agriculturally cultivated prairie dominated by that sickening mystery crop, and the weather still hot and muggy. I had originally suspected that driving across the prairie might be boring, but little had I realized how far north it extended, or how obnoxious it would be. We finally stopped for the night in Tisdale, a lovely name (doesn't it evoke tea and crumpets, or maybe a semi-soft cheese?) for a small prairie town with a municipal campground. Although Internet access was available at the library and an Internet cafe, both were closed on a Saturday morning. (The Internet never sleeps, but apparently access does.)

Next day we passed through Prince Albert, a city only slightly larger than Moose Jaw, and continued fleeing northward to Prince Albert National Park, the northernmost in the province. We spent a quiet night in one of the campgrounds, although the mosquitoes there were the most numerous we'd encountered. In bed, I fought off several attacks, and as I fell asleep, I heard an actual humming chorus of mosquitoes coming, thankfully, from the other side of the window screen. In the morning we discovered the lakeside village of Waskesiu, a tourist destination of lodges, cabins, restaurants and Wi-Fi hotspots — Saskatchewan's equivalent of Minnesota's Grand Marais.

We continued northward and westward but the heat continued — one afternoon it hit 33 Canadian degrees (that's 90 US degrees) and we really felt it. Sat in the shade in a provincial park campsite and waited for nightfall, when a little rain fell and the temperature came down — the heat wave had broken at last..

Menominee has been a remarkably good traveler, considering that she never naturally took to rides in cars or RVs. She seems to understand that this time it's different — We're on an adventure together, and the RV is her home. So she has learned to relax when we're on the road, even napping sometimes. When we stop, she's curious to look out the window and see what's there, and of course if it's our camp site for the night, she's ready to go out the door and explore it. She really loves the outdoors, and especially the forested outdoors, with its trees, shrubs, grass, insects, and small furry creatures. When she caught a small mouse-like animal one evening and played with it, she was one happy cat, and the next day she had a noticeably improved attitude about the adventure.

Canada!

2007-07-22T10:33:00.000-07:00

As you approach Canada, northbound on highway 61, there's a point where you crest a hill, and the elevation gives you an incredible view to the north. It's picture-perfect and says, "Ahead lies Canada — It's wonderful!"

At the Canadian border, we were met by rather stern border guards. We were grilled about our nationality, residence, purpose of trip, and contents of the RV. Menominee was required to show her certificate of vaccination (thanks, Dr. Julie!) and I had to go indoors to meet with an Immigration Officer. I pleaded "eight-week vacation" but he seemed suspicious that I might have other designs. Eventually, almost grudgingly, he allowed us in. Whoo-hoo! We're in Canada now! As we approached Thunder Bay, we heard thunder overhead.

Western Ontario

After a night camped in Thunder Bay, we headed west on the Trans-Canadian Highway. Suburbs give way to wilderness, and I mean real wilderness. The highway goes along the border of Quetico Provincial Park, the wilderness that is neighbor to Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area. The road is two lanes of blacktop heading west past dense forest. There are no cars in front of you, none behind you, as far as you can see. It's just you and the wilderness, which is deep and dark and gorgeous and enticing, but you can't go in — there are no roads into the wilderness. You can't even stop, because there's no place to stop. No scenic overlook, no rest stop, not even a turnout for a side road, and the shoulders are so narrow, by the time you'd pulled off the road, you'd have tumbled into the ditch. You just gotta keep going, on and on, watching the beauty go by.

Nearly out of gas and daylight, we arrived at Atikokan, a village of cheerful people, one campground, and one Internet cafe. (In short, perfect!) It was here that I first heard the "eh?" expression used by a Canadian, and it didn't make me laugh! It seemed perfectly normal and natural, a grammatical construction as understandable to me as to him.

Another day of driving past rugged forests brought us to Fort Frances, across the border from International Falls, MN, and Rainy Lake — yes, the weather was a bit rainy. Had dinner at a KFC and discovered that the Colonel uses a different recipe up here in Canada — very mild — and there's no choice of original, crispy, or grilled. Well, here I am, living like a Canadian!

Mosquitoes? Yes, Canada has them too, and they aren't much different from Minnesota's, although I did see one that was big enough it looked like it could be growing feathers. We like to think of Canada as a purer, better place, but, as a tourist brochure suggests, Your vacation will be more enjoyable if you use insect repellent. Menominee loves to hunt and catch and eat moths and dragonflies, and I had hopes that she might hunt mosquitoes too (and earn her keep). But no, she ignores them. I held a dead one under her nose; she sniffed it and turned away — unappetizing, I guess.

Our radio reception to this point had consisted of Minnesota Public Radio throughout Minnesota, and even after we crossed into Canada we could pick up one MPR station or another (Houghton, Bemidji). But as we headed north and left the border behind us, we found slim pickings. Usually there were one or two local stations playing popular music, but CBC wasn't always there — it makes no attempt to cover all of Canada. Makes you appreciate the way MPR and NPR cover their territories.

Still in beautifully wooded hills, we stopped for the night at Caliper Lake Provincial Park, a real gem out in the middle of nowhere.(Recommended) I guess its secret is being far enough away from civilization to keep out the riffraff, because on this July weekend the campground was only a third filled. Quiet, peaceful, on the shore of a pristine lake, and at sundown the call of the loon. The following night we stayed at Rushing River Provincial Park, whose hundreds of campsites were nearly filled by families with kids. Evidently it's close enough to Winnipeg that the city folk like to come here for vacation.

Next day we explored Kenora, population 16,000, picturesquely located on the northern shore of Lake of the Woods (yes, the same Lake of the Woods of Minnesota repute — it extends way up here). Little Kenora has obvious potential for excellence but unfortunately the town government is going about it in the wrong ways — for example covering downtown with parking meters and building an ugly concrete parking ramp. Sigh. I found an electronics store here and inquired about an accessory for my PC, but they didn't have any. Asked also at the WalMart, but they didn't have any either. (Makes you want to order it on the Internet, doesn't it?)

The North Shore

2007-07-16T13:23:00.000-07:00

Split Rock
Dropping down from Ely to the North Shore, I headed for Split Rock Lighthouse. Ah, Split Rock! Its beauty arouses the spirits of artists and photographers. I hadn't been there before and was looking forward to it. This summer holiday weekend it was full of tourists from everywhere, the ticket sellers were completely dysfunctional, the 20-minute introductory movie had lousy production values, and the lighthouse itself was, frankly, pretty rinky-dink. Run by the State Historical Society, I give it high marks for preservation, barely passing for operations.
Northward on highway 61, I found a private campground and rented their last campsite for three times what I'd paid in Ely, with their enthusiastic assurance that it was "the last available campsite on the whole North Shore!" Sheesh. With planning, I could have avoided these holiday crowds, but then, planning is what this adventure is NOT about.

Grand Marais

Next day I finally made it to the sanity of Grand Marais. What a gem! Located on a natural harbor on Lake Superior, the town's distance from the Twin Cities keeps out the riffraff and their bratty kids--you have to know about Grand Marais, be willing to drive the distance, and then spend some time there. It's small enough that it's charming and easy to walk around, but large enough to have the desired amenities. For example, The Angry Trout restaurant (Recommended) serving freshly-caught fish with delicious accompaniments and an attractive presentation, indoors or out on the deck, around $20. At the more plebeian Blue Water restaurant, you can get a huge filet of fried, home-battered walleye for $10 while looking out at the harbor from the second-floor windows. Then there's Sven and Ole's, which I enjoyed more for the atmosphere than the pizza. I stayed at the huge, modern, well-run Municipal Campground (Recommended).

The Stalled-Engine Incident

Having packed up the RV and pulled out of the campsite, I got all of 100 feet across the campground before the engine sputtered, died, and refused to start. While I glumly stared under the hood, a campground employee came over to commiserate. In a nice episode of male bonding, we examined the facts and agreed it (a) was fuel related, (b) wasn't flooded, so likely to be (c) the fuel pump or (d) a clogged gas line. This being Sunday, I decided to stay another night at the campground (which had the advantage that I could sample more restaurants), This wonderful person (who moved here from Minneapolis thirty years ago and teaches high school science the rest of the year) chained me to the campground pickup and towed me over to an empty campsite, then pushed me back into it while I steered. Gosh, the residents up here are good people!

For the rest of the morning I watched a parade of end-of-the-holiday-weekend campers departing the campground in their dinosaurs — humongous RVs, bigger and more powerful than Greyhound buses, with very upscale features. For example, I watched one stop, and with a soft hiss of air the door opened, and steps automatically descended to the ground, so the wife could drop some trash in the Dumpster. But driving a dinosaur wasn't enough — most pulled their full-size SUV behind. Talk about a carbon footprint! Talk about the increasing gap between the haves and have-nots.

Monday morning I called a tow truck to haul my Ford RV over to the Chevy dealer (the only car dealer, and largest garage in town), where they kindly took me in, diagnosed a faulty fuel pump, locally found a suitable replacement, installed it, and sent me on my way, all in the same afternoon. Of course, it cost upwards of three hundred dollars, but man, the feeling of relief was worth it.

Naniboujou

Leaving Grand Marais the next morning, I headed to Naniboujou Lodge for lunch. I had long heard about it, read about it in newspaper and magazine articles, and was fascinated with the lurid history of its magnificent wooden structure, way up there on the Gunflint Trail. Heck, I'd never even been on the Gunflint Trail before, so it was time. I gassed up the RV and with great expectations headed up the Trail. Wide and smooth at first, after a few miles it became a narrow old blacktop road with bumps and cracks. Ten miles went by. Twenty. I began to wonder how far up the Trail the lodge was. Of course, I could have looked it up before I left, but isn't it more fun this way? Twenty five, thirty miles. It was odd, I thought, that the lodge wasn't mentioned on any of the signposts. I pulled off the road and walked into an establishment. The jolly fellow behind the desk laughed and told me, "You're on the wrong road! It's on highway 61." Driving back downhill, I wanted to believe him, yet the thought nagged me that the Naniboujou could be just a few miles higher, and he was sending me on a wild goose chase.

An hour later I pulled off highway 61 into Naniboujou's parking lot. The structure was a lot less magnificent than I'd expected, and its location on the shore of Lake Superior baffled me. But the dining room was open and its ceiling was decorated more garishly than any sane person could imagine. The food was wonderful — the French onion soup was luscious, even the side salad was exceptional — the atmosphere just right, and the price not as much as you might fear (lunch under $15). (Recommended)

The Clock

2007-07-16T13:21:00.000-07:00

When I bought the RV, it came with a clock on the wall, which I rather liked. Cheap, battery-operated, kept good time, a convenience. Then one night, in the quiet of a campground, falling asleep, I became aware that the clock ticked so loudly that it dominated everything — it ruined the camping experience with its loud TICK, TICK, TICK... I couldn't fall asleep. Enraged, I arose in the dark, ripped the clock off the wall, felt around in its innards and pulled its battery out. Ahhh... blissful silence, and sleep. (Eliminating ugly man-made sounds is quite satisfying, actually.)

The Three-Way Continental Divide

2007-07-16T13:17:00.000-07:00

At a rest stop I read this thoughtful inscription:

A drop of water falling here in the Giants Range, a rare three-way continental divide, may flow north into icy Hudson Bay, east into the Atlantic Ocean, or south into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

From the north slope of these very old granite ridges, streams flow into the Red River of the North, through Lake Winnipeg, and into Hudson Bay in northern Canada.

Creeks and rivers on the south slope flow into the St. Louis River, enter Lake Superior at Duluth, and eventually reach the north Atlantic through the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River.

On a western spur of the Giants Range the great watershed of the immense Mississippi River system gathers the flow from a maze of streams and swamps as the legendary river begins its winding course from Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico, more than 2500 miles away.

Lying as it does near the center of the North American Continent, Minnesota marks the transition between eastern woodlands and westgern prairies and between northern coniferous forests and rich grain-growing lands of the mid-nation. It is a land of dramatic differences, tied to the world through three great waterways that originate in these rocks and streams.

Hello? Hello?

2007-07-08T07:43:00.000-07:00

Hey, out there! Is anyone reading this blog? No Comments, so I guess not. Unless I see some Comments, I'll assume nobody's reading, and I'll quit writing.

How to leave a Comment: At the bottom of each post is the line "Posted by Meadowlark..." Click on the word comments at the end of that line. Then you'll need to log in, using your Google user name and password. (And if all this is too much, just send me an email.) Thanks.

Where's my....?

2007-07-05T19:24:00.000-07:00

Frustration built these first days on the road because I couldn't find anything. To understand the situation, consider my method of packing. It was actually part of my method of vacating the apartment, which involved triage of my supplies and possessions into boxes for (a) the Dumpster, (b) the local thrift shop, (c) giving away, (d) storage, or (e) taking along in the RV. So the stuff for the RV got thrown into boxes without any organization whatever, and looking for something I needed meant searching through all the boxes in the RV until I found it, assuming I could find it among all the other stuff. But, I assured myself, things will eventually get sorted out. It's wholistic. It's all an organic part of the Adventure. It thumbs its nose at the tight-sphincter rules at the apartment complex Ive escaped from.

Here's an example. The first day out, I couldn't find a belt. Now, a belt in an important item — without it, my pants wouldn't stay up. I tried grabbing the waist at the side and hoisting it, but that proved uncomfortable, not to mention it must have looked weird. Then I found a better approach, in which I placed the back of one hand in the small of my back, as if I were trying to look suave. That worked better, but even that was too much, so I took a length of nylon camping cord and used that as a makeshift belt... worked fine! A few days later I found a belt and the crisis was over, but it wasn't until two weeks into the trip that I discovered the other belts I'd brought.

The Adventure Has Begun

2007-07-05T19:09:00.000-07:00

Lift Off!
Saturday was crazy, moving my furniture out of the apartment into the neighbor's, loading the last stuff into the RV, cleaning my apartment, returning the keys, then, finally, in the afternoon, getting in the RV with Menominee and leaving the apartment complex for the last time. We had met our deadline — Saturday, June 30, the last day of the month, the last day to be out of the apartment.

A couple of errands and we were on the road! Drove aimlessly on back roads, generally northward, to get out of the city heat. Crossed the Mississippi at Anoka, made it to Cambridge by early evening, and decided to stop there. A kindly manager at Cub Foods gave permission to stay overnight in parking lot. Whew! Time to start decompressing!

Next day, it was still hot and humid as we drove northward. By the time we got to Jay Cook State Park, just short of Duluth, it had cooled off, so we spent the night there. Gosh, it got cold! In the middle of the night I had to find a warm blanket and huddled under it the rest of the night. It occurs to me that the coldest July 4th in the continental U.S. just might be in Duluth.

Continuing northward, Hibbing beckoned, so we slanted over in that direction. By the time we got there, I was really hungry for lunch, so we stopped at the Hibbing Visitor's Center. There, a nice little white-haired lady was generally cheerful as she resisted my attempts to extract a recommendation of a restaurant for lunch, directions to it, and the location of a Caribou Coffee shop. But we finally found Zimmie's and had a delicious lunch there. (Recommended.) Turned out that Caribou Coffee was on the highway outside town near the new Lowe's and Walmart, a spot the Visitor's Bureau lady probably had never visitied. Bought dessert and got the first free Wi-Fi Hotspot of the adventure! Whoo hoo!

Potica
In Hibbing they make potica. It has nothing to do with politics or poetry, and is pronounced po-TEE-sah. It's a "traditional European-style sweet bread," deliciously sweet and tasty, and I enjoyed it for breakfast and dessert. You can walk into a Hibbing grocery and find potica in the freezer, $9.95 for a pound, made by Sunrise Bakery. In the Twin Cities, you might be able to find it at a specialty shop.

Ely
We had had no difficulty leaving any of the places we stayed until we got to Ely, which turned out to be so nice that we spent three nights there. Clean, dry air, nice temperatures, low humidity, pines all around... ahhh! Many of the people there looked outdoorsy, tanned, fit, relaxed, happy. The high point was an Independence Day parade through town, featuring the town fire engine and a squad of Girl Scouts portaging canoes. The International Wolf Center was interesting too. Returned again and again to the Front Porch Coffee Shop and Internet Cafe (Recommended) for free Wi-Fi (with a purchase). Stayed in Fall Lake campground (Recommended) in the National Forest a few miles east of town, where Menominee loved to go outdoors on her leash and explore the campsite. It was here, in campsite 40, that she stalked and chased her first National Forest brown squirrel. A scooter would have been wonderful here, riding the few miles from the campground to Ely.

Rustling

2007-07-05T19:07:00.000-07:00

One afternoon, as I walked up to my RV parked on the street, I heard an odd noise coming from it — a brief rustling sound. Curious, I walked around the RV, listening. As I came round the back to the passenger side, I heard it again. I opened an access panel for the fridge and found a lot of dry leaves. Hmmm. Some kind of nest? I cleaned the leaves out and climbed the ladder up to the roof to check the roof vent. The rustler had chewed a hole through the plastic big enough to enter! So I went to the hardware store for some steel mesh and screwed that over the whole vent. Let's see the rustler chew through that! (Makes me glad I have a really good squirrel hunter along with me.)

Second Vehicle IV: A Ray of Hope

2007-06-25T19:23:00.000-07:00

Hmmm. Maybe a motor scooter isn't such a bad idea after all. I surf the web looking at scooters. Honda has nothing that really fits my situation, but Yamaha does: the Vino 125. Bigger engine than a moped, but smaller than a motorcycle. A practical compromise — enough power and speed for my needs, no more.

So I pay a visit to the Yamaha dealer in South Minneapolis, find the Vino and sit on it. Feels good! Looks good. Seems like a pretty good match for the Travel Adventure. I talk with a young salesman, Pete, (all names have been changed) who is amiable and helpful, and go home to think about it.

How would I bring this thing along? A carrier rack for the back of the RV is out of the question for anything this heavy — it would pull the back of the RV down. So I search for trailers. They come as fancy as you could want, upwards of thousands of dollars, but I want something small, simple, and appropriate to the task. Finally, I find one for around $500 shipped, but it would arrive as a box of parts and have to be assembled. When would I have time to do that? In the hot sun? Does this make any sense? I decide to think about it.

A couple of days later, I am struck with a Ray of Hope. Suddenly, it does make sense! Yes, I can do it! Yes, this is it! Yes! Yes! Yes!

Inspired, I revisit the Yamaha dealer, where I find that Pete is out sick that day, and Ralph can help me, but he's with another customer right now. OK, I sit on the Vino some more and wait. And wait. And wait. I go looking for Ralph and find that he's still in animated conversation with his customer, and shows no sign of acknowledging my existence on Planet Earth. So I inquire at the desk if someone else could help me, and follow Stu to his desk.

Stu is an amazing sight. It's only June, the season has barely begun, and already he's bored with selling motor scooters and motorcycles. He leans back in his chair, puts his hands behind his head, yawns, and answers my questions, but has no intention of selling me a Vino. I leave.

What's wrong with this picture? Don't they want to make sales? Don't they want to make money? Why would they brush off a person with a credit card in his pocket, ready to buy? My friends clued me in later. I don't fit the profile of their customers. I am, after all, a senior citizen.

Second Vehicle III: Reality Check

2007-06-18T14:57:00.000-07:00

1. Bicycle. When my bicycle was stolen in St. Paul a few years ago, I said "Good riddance!" I hadn't been riding it ayway, so that simply concluded my lifetime of bicycling. Since I'm not in shape to ride a bicycle and it wouldn't be of much use for a day trip or going for help, it isn't really a good choice, which is too bad, because it's the easiest and cheapest option.

2. Moped. Next step up from a bicycle, and certainly better than pedaling, but how do you carry one? Google says racks are available to mount in a hitch receiver, but my RV doesn't have one of those. (I think my ancient RV was built before the hitch receiver was invented.)

3. Motor scooter. Ha ha, very funny. I had one of these when I was a teen and have always associated them with youth. Do I want to ride one as a retiree?

4. Small car. The possibilities are many, including a Geo Metro or a VW Golf, but the most interesting suggestions (thank you Riley) were a Porsche or a Mazda Miata. I leaned toward the Miata, due to better expected reliability, apparently towable with four tires on the road (if it has a manual transmission) and advantageously light weight for towing. (Dreams of riding around with the top down, admiring the Canadian Rockies...)

Reality check: Towing a car requires a class 3 or 4 hitch, meaning it's got heavy steel connections to the RV chassis. I looked at my RV hitch — it's just bolted to the bumper! D'oh! So towing a car would require fitting the RV with a big, expensive new hitch and outfitting a Miata with expensive towing hardware. Plus finding and buying a used Miata. Too much, too much.

Second Vehicle II: The Possibilities

2007-06-18T14:51:00.000-07:00

Over several days, the possibilities danced above my head.

1. Bicycle, carried on a rack on the back of the RV, as I have done before, so I know it works.

2. Moped, carried on a rack on the back of the RV? Don't know about this.

3. Motor scooter, carried how? Rack? Trailer? Don't know about this.

4. Car, towed behind the RV. I've never done this, but have seen cars being towed behind RVs.

Second Vehicle I: The Seduction

2007-06-18T14:46:00.000-07:00

It hadn't occurred to me. It came in a friend's remark, "Gee, wouldn't it be nice to have a second vehicle along?"

Sure, it would be great. It would let me park the RV in a nice spot and be able to go to town for groceries or take a day trip. If I got stranded in the RV, I could go for help in the second vehicle.

It would be fun. It would add to the pleasure of the adventure. It would be the frosting on the cake.

Sightseeing in Minnesota

2007-06-03T17:17:00.000-07:00

Starting to daydream about the trip.... beginning with Travels Across Minnesota to the North Shore. I must stop by Grand Marais and the Gunflint Trail.

What else to see in Northern and Central Minnesota? Your suggestions are welcome! In fact, I'm soliciting your ideas and suggestions. Please tell me about your favorite spots, restaurants, scenic overlooks, and fun things to see on a vagabond journey between Minneapolis and Grand Marais. (Leave a comment here, or go to my Profile and click Email.)

One Month to Launch!

2007-06-01T14:58:00.000-07:00

Only one month left before setting off on the trip. So much to do....

Ripped out the aging car radio from the RV, now preparing to install a new Pioneer radio/CD player I bought on the web for $95. Tore up the old carpet (chartreuse shag, heavily saturated with 1970s nostalgia and cigarette smoke from the previous owners) and will soon lay down some new carpet I obtained for free from the Magic Dumpster in my apartment complex.

Framing the Concept

2007-05-20T18:39:00.000-07:00

Today's NY Times brings the news that this summer's vacationers are "ditching their shoes and seeking out destinations that shun the gloss and polish of their everyday lives." They want "more authentic experiences than a five-star resort can offer them. This is completely about immersing yourself in a particular culture."

OK, I can go with that. This summer, I want to immerse myself in Canadian culture.

"They find that they want to immerse themselves in something they can't quite put their finger on. They want to be African or be Moroccan, a they see it."

This summer, I want to be Canadian.

The Main Idea

2007-05-07T17:09:00.000-07:00

The main idea for the upcoming travel is John Steinbeck's wonderful book "Travels with Charlie in Search of America" in which he and his dog drove around to see what they could see and meet who they could meet.

The similarity is striking: I'm single, have a pet and a small RV, and the three of us are setting out on an adventure around North America. We'll start in Minneapolis and head north into Canada, or at least that's the plan so far. Hope to get everything together by the end of June.

Getting the RV Ready

2007-05-06T23:44:00.000-07:00

The front turn signal on the passenger side doesn't work and it looks like a bad contact on the socket, so I soldered a new ground wire to it.