That’s how Tracy excused me when I suddenly jumped up and left our weekly Zoom trivia game. Go Team Donner Party! Just without me for a bit. There was a whale within sight, and I had to grab the binoculars to watch it surface. This was the third majorly wonderful wild animal spotting in a […]
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Am I on Vacation?
If you’re lucky enough to have been able to take a vacation, you know that the whole point is to be away from regular life. You want to be physically away, in a new place, where you can forget about your usual worries, where you get out of your routine, where normal life is suspended. If you’re lucky […]
Peering at the Ocean, Peering under Rocks
Damn this cold and wind. I feel like I haven’t been truly warm since this past fall in Death Valley, and even then the temps dropped as soon as the sun lowered. I know we’ve had warm—even hot—days intermittently, but we seem to carry the cold with us, and the ever-present wind. Here at Sonoma […]
Naked River Nymphs & a Shoe Hoard
I like to base my posts on a theme, or a story, or even just an explanation about an aspect of life on the road. Anything to avoid the “We’re here, and we did this” pattern, which becomes mighty monotonous after >400 posts. Sometimes life is simply random, however, and I can’t knit a pattern out […]
Photos from Los Padres/Big Sur
Here are the missing photos from my previous post about our week near Big Sur. The land between the highway and the ocean at our Plaskett Creek campground is owned by the National Forest Service, and they lease it to cattle farmers. So it’s divided by barbed-wired fencing for occasional cattle, but when walking paths […]
Goodbye San Simeon, Bring on the Music Game
Today is our final day at San Simeon State Park; tomorrow we take a short but dramatic drive up Highway 1 to a new (to us) state park in the Big Sur area. We’ll have no cell signal at all there, so I thought I’d post while I can. For the last of our week here […]
Beauty and the Stress
My friend Whit shared a NYT article with me yesterday about the contrast between the shiny social media portrayal of #VanLife and the sometimes-miserable day-to-day reality of constant life and travel in such a small space. You guys know this is a multi-layered theme for me here. It’s easy to make fun of the trendy […]
We Are All Caricatures of Ourselves
When we were in Texas, I mentioned this quote (by my sister’s friend), referring to Texans. The sentence in full—that I love so much—goes, “Texans are caricatures of themselves and they don’t even know it.” It turns out you can find people and places that exemplify caricatures all over the country. Texas is just an […]
“Where the Kelp Meets the Sycamore Tree”
This exactly describes where we’re camped at our first California State Park campground by the ocean: Leo Carrillo State Park, directly west of LA at the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains. We walk under the bridge with this mural (imagine dolphins jumping up to meet bald eagles, all painted by children) to get to […]
Lola’s La Jolla
This is Lola. Lola is a good friend. When we were first camping near her part-time home of San Diego, the only spot we could find was in Laguna Mountains, where she drove up to camp in a tent beside the trailer in the cold to visit us. Lola loves La Jolla. Now that we’re […]
