Cosumne Gal

Just when I thought I might get a minute or two to read Janet Evanovich's book 16 in the Stephanie Plum series, I see that Wonder Woman is celebrating her 69th birthday by changing her outfit. I guess this means I have to get busy and start sewing.

What do you think Beverly, is this going to work? I think the leggings make WW look like she has a big butt.

The Monday Game Night gang held their last regular meeting for the rest of the summer last night.

Courtney, Gwynessa, Daniel, Travis, Bob and Jonathan gathered to play board games and wish Gwynessa farewell for a while. She's on her way to a summer job in Italy.

Technically, the gang could still get together, but G is their driving force. She's been supervising Bob, Travis and Jon since kindergarten. The dudes, including a couple more who are not in this picture, connive to rewrite the rules, and try to be rebellious. Sometimes I think she even lets them get away with that. But we'll have to see if any of them can take over the job of planning Monday nights in her absence.

I guess the team won't be going to the Board Game Olympics this year.

Most years I find myself vaguely depressed after the vernal equinox. "The days are getting shorter," I think, "and I haven't done anything."

Not this year, This year the vernal equinox found me with a grin still on my face. I went to Hawaii with Jon and Bob in November, to Texas with Merlene in March, and spent 2 weeks traipsing across the states with Katherine just recently. Now I'm perfectly happy to stay home for a while and tackle some household challenges.

Our new year at work starts on July 1. I won't be retiring this year, but I will only be working 4 days a week (32 hours). I decided to take Wednesdays off. It will mean less money, but I don't need a lot. I don't want a motorhome, a don't want to go on cruises, and luxury is not my style. It's important to me that the few things I require - a car, a computer, a camera - all WORK. I have a Toyota, a Mac and a Canon, and so far they've been workhorses.

Living in an older home is also a challenge. It requires constant tinkering that I can't do myself. If I'm home on Wednesdays, maybe I can deal with repair people.

Maybe I can get back to watercolor, or sewing, or reading. Maybe I can clean my own house - NO, not that. I'm not spending my time pushing a vacuum cleaner.

Times are also changing for Bob. After a year of being "on call" for two or three different jobs, of sometimes having no hours a week to work and other times having 7 days, it appears he will finally have one regular 40-hour a week job. I won't jinx it by saying much about it yet.

One thing I'll be doing on Wednesdays is researching a trip to Maui in November. Anyone want to go? So far Bob and Jon are with me.

Were you up at the break of dawn this morning? I was. It was poultry sale day in Roseville.

Roseville is a city to the north of where I live. It takes 30 minutes to get there at dawn on a Sunday, otherwise you can count on spending at least an hour trying to thread your way through the traffic. It is the home of the Roseville Auction, probably one of the biggest permanent fleamarkets on earth. Well, the part of Earth I know, anyway. There used to be a big livestock market and auction there as well, but as far as I can tell only the poultry auction survives. It’s every first and third Sunday.

I have been known to show up on the wrong Sunday and no one else was there. Sigh. It’s so tough being old sometimes.

I haven’t been to the auction in quite a while, we haven’t had excess birds since Bob stopped showing a few years ago. Then he raised a couple hundred chicks a year to get maybe 20 that were showable.

This morning as I drove around the corner, my heart sank. The cages weren’t set up in their usual place. Oh no! Did I show up on the wrong Sunday again?


No, there were other old geezers waiting in line. (A lot of the people who still raise poultry are old geezers.) The auction had just moved its cages into a nearby building.

Usually I drop off the birds and make skid marks getting out of the parking lot. I can’t stand the idea of “abandoning” animals we’ve carefully raised to whatever fate awaits them. More about this later.

But this morning the whole set-up didn’t seem so depressing, so I parked and took a look inside.


There were 6 large cages with chicks that were about 2 months old.


Near that were bunnies, maybe 2 dozen of them, all breeds and ages. Hmmm. We had bunnies once. They ran loose in the Mutt Pen. That was fun. Oooooh! Those two little grey lops are sure cute! I wonder how much they’ll sell for?

There was an older fellow standing nearby, so I asked him, “What is the procedure here for buying?” I had only sold animals there before. He explained it all to me, then we got into a conversation about pigeons. He had brought pigeons to sell. I love pigeons.


The fellow showed me his pigeons, then showed me a pair someone else had brought. They were exquisite. He said, “That’s a real dandy pair of birds!” Yes, they were. I really needed them.

I glanced at the chickens, a motley collection today except for Katherine’s Rosecombs and my Dominique bantams. Didn’t need chickens. But....what’s that? BABY GOATS!!! Three baby goats, the long-eared kind like Justin was, the sweet kind, not ornery like That Goat. I neeeeeeded one. At least one. And That Goat would appreciate some company. The babies were a little young, but I could probably get goat milk from Laura up the road, wouldn’t Bob love raising a baby goat?

It was 7:00. The auction would start at 9:00. I went to sit in my car and finish the cup of coffee I’d brought with me. My faithful car, the one that just packed me for 6300 miles across uncharted territory. My haven of safety and sanity. I closed the door and the car said, “Are you crazy? Get the hell out of here, quick!”

So I did. I went to Denny’s and had this nice greasy breakfast.


Soon my brain was back in the sanity zone. To pay penance, I decided to go to work (yes, on a Sunday) and put in 4 hours so Monday would start a little better.

This photo, taken as a mobile phone promotion near Hyde Park's Serpentine Lake in London, ran in the SF Chronicle on the 16th. (Photo: Peter Macdiarmid / Getty Images).

So now I'm confused about how the English perceive dignity. Are these people dignified because they're wearing top hats?

And how does one ascertain whether a person is upper class? In California the upper class are usually the rich, but they may have become rich yesterday when they won the Lotto, or they might be rich like Paris Hilton. It's hard to look up to people like that, just because they have more money.

On the other hand, they don't walk around with their fannies hanging out.

YP, I wasn't seen hanging around bikers in Moab. I did get some pictures of an interesting one, though. The first time I spotted him the lady who was riding on the back of his bike had just taken off her yellow plastic rain outfit and headed for the bathroom. I took this picture while he waited.


I told Katherine it would have been fun to listen to the couples' conversation. I imagined it went something like this: "If you EVER get the idea to drag me out in the weather on this god-forsaken motorcycle again, you'll be hearing from my lawyer, you dirty whatsis!"

And he answered, "Honey, it's just a little water."

The next time we saw them, it was in Moab. They were just leaving the gas station we pulled into.


What a gutsy lady! It was still rainy and she was still right there with her guy. I doubt they were married, don't you?

Katherine also has doubts about my dignity, just because I stop and talk to guys on motorcycles. So how would you dignified types ever find out any real-live information? Look it up on the internet? I used to be shy and retiring too, until I went to Texas and spent some time with Merlene. Now I'm born again. Hallelujah! A born-again biker babe! You won't catch me on one of those things in a rainstorm, though. And my brother would testify that I'm better at steering one myself than riding behind someone, I can't seem to make myself lean the right way. He used to yell at me about that.

Mitzi, nice to hear from you. Are you available for breakfast Saturday? I'm dropping the car off at Elk Grove Toyota at 8, it will be there for a couple of hours at least. YP, if you show up we'll buy you breakfast too.

End of the trail: dropping Katherine off in Wilton.

Everyone has things they learn to do when they travel. Here are some things that worked for us on this trip.

We took a cooler and kept lunch items in it. The ice lasted a day or so, we kept it refilled using hotel ice machines. We only had to buy ice a couple of times. I eat mostly salad for lunch, but I also had some cut-up cauliflower and bell peppers for snacks. Katherine took peanut butter and jelly. There are lots of roadside rest and picnic areas to use and they're much more scenic than a fast-food parking lot.

Most hotels we stayed at had a hot breakfast included in the room price. This not only saves money, but also time, and there was always a bowl of apples or yogurt so we'd grab a snack for the road as well. If you pack a couple of bags of microwave popcorn, that's good for late snacks.

We had lots of maps, but the GPS came in handy, too. It's especially valuable for finding things like the closest Toyota dealer, or your favorite hotel in the area. It's not always entirely accurate, but overall it worked well for us. My iPhone has a GPS function, too, but that didn't work if there was no ATT service in the area.

We learned to appreciate "travel centers" like Love's, Pilot, and TA. They had the cleanest restrooms, cheapest gas, and almost everything else we needed on the road - coffee or iced tea for me and keychains for Katherine.

We always looked for hotels with free WiFi. The laptop I used always connected pretty well, but Katherine's has an older airport card and sometimes didn't work. The goal was to be able to download pictures at night and keep up on our blogging. That was a hard goal to accomplish.

If you can't sleep well in a hotel room, try turning on the fan to the air conditioner. The constant sound blocks out some of the more annoying noises. Katherine took her own pillow. I took my favorite little quilt.

Gas for most of the trip was $2.50 a gallon. In California, Arizona, and Nevada it was about $3.10. It was highest in Needles, $3.70 a gallon. I guess that's because they have you trapped there and people will pay a lot to get out of the place. Those of use who live in California sometimes dread driving on long trips because the gas prices and traffic here are so extreme. Once you get out of here, however, the roads are wonderful and prices are reasonable. There's a lotta nuthin' between California and the midwest, though. I think everyone should see it at least once, then next time fly and rent a car. I LOVED driving my RAV4, but when I went to Texas in March Merlene rented a brand new Dodge Caravan, and that was very comfortable.

The RAV4 got 28 miles per gallon. We drove at 75mph a lot, on cruise control. In fact, I learned to use cruise control on this trip. I can't use it in California, there's just too much traffic.

You don't need to take everything you own with you. You can buy t-shirts and sweatshirts everywhere, so you'll never run out of clothes. Take a half empty suitcase and fill it up along the way.

When I've traveled before, I remember stopping at mom-and-pop restaurants for dinner. I regret to report that most of them have gone out of business. Even Pope's in Shelbyville is closed - didn't get any country ham on this trip. You're mostly going to see chain restaurants, unfortunately. My favorite is Cracker Barrel, probably because we don't have them in California.

Drury hotels are nice, your room comes with lots of free things, but there aren't a lot of them. We ended up looking for Hampton Inn a lot because I like their beds and they are consistently good quality.

When we left Moab, it was overcast. We went through Wellington up to Salt Lake City. It was a lovely, scenic route that would have been more enjoyable if it hadn't been hailing at the top of the 7,000 foot summit. I pulled over at one point, when the hail had built up on the road and I was concerned it might get slippery. It was 41 degrees. The weather was stormy all the way to Nevada. This picture of Katherine on the salt flat in Utah, near the border, looks like it was taken in Antarctica.


Towns are few and far between in Nevada. When we got to Elko it seemed too early to stop for the night, so we kept driving toward Winnemucca. Then I remembered Battle Mountain. I told Katherine that when I'd been on this route in 2001, I saw a big billboard near Battle Mountain. There was something interesting about the town, but I couldn't remember what it was. Maybe it would be fun to stay there for the night.

There were only 3 motels in the scroungy little town. We picked the least offensive one. It was $45 a night, with free WiFi. The little lobby seemed to double as a living room for the lady behind the counter. The main decoration was an ancient ivy plant that covered an entire wall. I hadn't seen anything on our short drive through town that explained why I remembered this town as "special."

Our room was decent, though this was the first time we'd ever seen a sign like this in the bathroom.


It reminded me of my brother's first apartment, where the kitchen curtains were filthy because they were right by the kitchen table and the guys used them as napkins.

We went to dinner at a family restaurant/casino nearby. There were 3 waitresses. One was an older lady who seemed like a dignified rancher's wife, maybe working to help support the family. One was lanky and awkward, like Verna in Mel's diner. She had a raggedy pony tail and an unfortunate pair of huge bunny teeth, which were hard to ignore because she was chewing a wad of gum as if it were a carrot. The other waitress was very round and a little slow. It was like walking onto the set of a sitcom. The dinner was not very good, we had questions about the bill, and when we left we were grumpy.

"Let's look at this as an adventure," I told Katherine, "we've had a great trip, and this is like all the bad stuff we missed is concentrated in one place, on one day." I was still trying to remember what had fascinated me about the town.

Back at the motel I got online and googled "Battle Mountain." Uh oh. Now I remembered. In 2001 the town was designated "Armpit of the World." Every year they have an armpit festival. How appropriate.

When we left without delay the next morning, the skies were bright and clear. There were only token clouds floating off over California in the distance.

This is a rough map of the trip, so you can see the route we took. The little dips are our side trips, to Sedona, to Santa Fe, and to Moab.

In addition to blue Hyundais, we also looked for mountain goats. This was the only one we saw.

We took a lot of pictures in the park. These are some from my camera. Please note that Katherine took the ones that are lovely, mine all have a bit of road in the foreground because I took them from the car. I was driving while Katherine was shooting all 3 cameras. Sometimes I would pull over and roll down the window and take my own. And sometimes I'd wait in the car while Katherine hiked out and took pictures from the trail. My hiking is subpar, I have to watch my feet so closely, I don't see much else. So sitting in the car suits me fine.

Enjoy! And if you get the chance, visit the park for yourself. We were never disappointed.

If Sedona has vortexes of power, Arches park is one giant vortex. You can sense its great psychic power the minute the first cliffs are in sight. I would have expected strange things to happen there, and was looking for an alien.

In this case, a legal alien. I read a wonderful blog, Yorkshire Pudding, written by a fine fellow from England. In a stroke of weirdness, his daughter Frances, who is a student in the U.S., was in Moab the same day Katherine and I were there. He told us Frances was traveling in a blue Hyundai.

This is the first photo I took in the park. At precisely 9:31. I didn't notice the car was in the photo when I took it, but when it passed it was bright blue! And there was an "H" logo on the front of it. How exciting!

A few miles further, we passed several cars with "H" logos - they were Hondas, not Hyundais. How disappointing!

Then we finally saw a Hyundai - not blue though - and saw that the Hyundai logo is an italic "H".

I don't know if the logo on the car above was italic or not. But there is a possibility this could be Frances' car.

It would have been a lot more fun to have found Frances herself and taken pictures for her dad, but we had fun looking for her.

I'm filling in some blanks from the trip. We had 3 cameras with us. Two of them were Katherine's, one a big monster and the other a small (but high quality) camera that was always in her hand. She just sent me these from the small camera. She may be working on her photos for days.

At Leanin Tree, we were allowed to take photos of the sculpture, but none of the framed works in the gallery.

So we had fun. Feeding the buffalo...


...and discovering a lifelike snake, before we entered the gallery and had to act like tasteful, mannered patrons of fine art.

We arrived home safely today (thank you Katherine, Rav4, Cap'n (also Duane and Fonzie - private joke) for all your good help and good times.

Bob took good care of everything, but there was a wind storm yesterday and today it's very hot, so I'm outside watering everything. Have pictures to process and some unwinding to do, feeling great and ready to tackle the world.

XOX

We started this mornin' with a visit to the Leanin' Tree western art museum in Boulder, Colorado. I had been there many years ago with my friend Jean Haugsten. The museum is quite a bit bigger now, with quite a variety of western art. I marvel at some of the huge oil paintings. I would never be able to paint anything that large, my eye would just not handle it.

It was a cloudy day again. By the time we started up the mountains west of Denver it was drizzling. We saw some buffalo near the grave of Buffalo Bill.


I had snickered at the Tennesseeans who call their Smoky Hills "mountains." "They need to see the Sierras," I thought.

Well, the Sierras are nothing compared to the Rockies. It was definitely a white knuckle driving day.


The speed limit on Hwy 70 is often 75. That's way too fast for me on a road that has ups and downs and turns, a lot of truck traffic, and a few drop-offs. Oh, and the longest tunnel I've ever seen, too.


But some drivers had it worse than I did in my cozy little RAV4. Like the fellow on a Ducati motorcycle. I don't know how he managed to keep his visor clear, it didn't have wipers. And there were times when the puddles were pretty deep. When we got to the bottom at the other side of the mountains, we pulled over to get gas, and there was the Ducati guy, so I had to ask him all my questions,

He said he has to wipe the visor clean with his hand. "Aren't you afraid to let go of the handlebar?" I asked. I mean, it's one of those kind that you have to lean over to hang onto. He said it wasn't easy, that the trip was pretty scary. His knuckles were not only white, they were also blue. It was 48 degrees at the top of the summit. Just a note, this was a young fellow. I don't think old guys ride Ducatis.

The Colorado River runs parallel with Hwy 70 for much of the way. The river is high. Linda, I'm assuming you use ditch water from the Colorado to irrigate your crops? If so, it looks like there will be plenty this year. We must have been somewhere near your place today, I thought of you.

We were held up for an hour in a construction zone on Hwy 70. This was the third extended wait we had on this trip. In California, they never make people wait that long, the drivers simply have no manners. Anyway, that put us late getting to Moab. When we turned down Hwy 128 it was already 7 p.m. Katherine was driving, the Cap'n and I were passengers.


It was a little scary after the freeway, this was a two-lane road through the desert with no other traffic in sight. It was 45 miles to Moab. Frankly, it reminded me of every scary movie I've seen about aliens. After a few miles of rolling hills, we crossed a river and the scenery suddenly changed. It was the Colorado River again, running high through the most beautiful canyon country I've ever seen. Around every turn in the twisty, windy road there was a view even more spectacular than the last.




It took a while to find a room in Moab. When I checked my email this evening, I discovered that Yorkshire Puddin's daughter Frances is in Moab tonight too!

There may be vortexes in Sedona, but this whole area seems much more enchanted to me.

Remember the great Armadillo Hunt? Never did find one that wasn't squished beyond recognition. But today we found something else we were looking for - antelope!

We spotted a bunch of them fairly close to the main highway and took the RAV4 on a dirt frontage road to get closer.

Katherine brought out her big gun.


I had my much smaller Canon (like cannon, get it - hoho). And we shot away. These are mine, Katherine's are sure to be much better, if she ever catches up with downloading her pictures.



Tomorrow we're going to the Leanin' Tree art gallery in Boulder. That's the company that makes the beautiful western-themed cards. They display the original art pieces. Then we'll head toward The Arches, and then back up toward Salt Lake City to catch Hwy. 80.

We found this store in Cheyenne and were delighted to be able to shop in a store for real cowboys. There were even some dirty old trucks parked outside of it.


What? What kind of cowboy would wear a pink shirt?


What kind of ranch gal would wear this?


Maybe the ones who patronize this place right across the street.

Cheyenne is a big hub for Union Pacific railroad. This sculpture is called Iron Horse.


It's the first horse I've ever seen that had a license plate on its butt.

The skies on the trip through Nebraska, Wyoming, and Colorado today were huge. They changed dramatically from one hour to the next. This morning we had mostly blue skies and fluffy clouds.


At noon the sun barely shone through clouds, looking through the top of the RAV4.


In Cheyenne, the storm clouds started to show up.


It was raining just outside of Denver.


I saw a lot of really nice hay getting rained on today. Ouch.

Tonight we're in the middle of Nebraska, in Kearney. So far there has not been a mile of road that isn't within sight of a corn field. But Nebraska is not what I thought it would be. It isn't just flat as a pancake with no trees (so far). The corn fields are on low rolling hills, and are separated by groves of trees. And right now everything is green, green, green. It's lovely. I had heard that it was desolate, but I find I prefer being able to see long distances, compared to the southern states where the forests are so dense.

After we left California, we didn't see much crop land until Oklahoma. All those fields were corn and short winter wheat. Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, South and North Carolina, Kansas, Iowa are all the same. There are a few small hay fields, but I saw mostly corn.

The U.S. grows 10 billion bushels of corn a year, almost half of the 23 billion bushels grown in the world. And corn production exceeds any other crop by two times.

Americans consume an average of 50 pounds of high fructose corn syrup a year.

As I sleep in this cozy hotel tonight I am surrounded by a reason why so many of us are fat.

We grow corn at home in Sloughhouse, too, but mostly sweet corn that people cook and eat as a fresh vegetable. When field corn is grown, it's alternated with other crops. I don't understand how corn can be grown year-after-year around here.

I'm shocked at how few crops are grown across this country compared to grain corn. I have still seen only a couple of farm stands on this trip. It's even hard to find decent fruit and vegetables in the supermarkets outside of California, even though it looks to me like those things would grow elsewhere if they were planted. Right now most of the produce seems to come from foreign countries.

I think I've tracked down one reason corn is overgrown (in my opinion). Today in the relatively small town of Kearney, we passed this elegant building. What do you guess it is?


It's a bank. Corn must be profitable, there doesn't appear to be any other industry in this area.

Don't know where we're headed in the a.m. Maybe we'll let the GPS lady pick a place. Does it have a random setting?

After a couple of days in Tennessee, this is where I am tonight:


In St. Louis, Missouri. We can see the famous arch right from the hotel window. The hotel is downtown, though, and driving to it was a fright. The GPS kept trying to send us the wrong way on one=way streets. When you don't turn the way the GPS lady says, her voice gets very crabby. You hear "turn right, turn right, turn right ... reconfiguring." And "reconfiguring" comes across in a disgusted tone. The GPS lady is quite often disgusted with me.

Katherine was at the blade show in Atlanta, then went to Monteagle, Tennessee to an engraver's event for a few days. I was in Lewisburg visiting old friends Bea and Jack, who used to live in California. This is Bea greeting me at the back door.



This is Bea and Jack at lunch at Shoney's.



And this is Angel, one of their 3 little dogs.



I would have brought all 3 home with me if I could have sneaked them into the car.

I would have brought Aunt Bea, too. It totally gripes me that she's clear on the other side of the country.

Tomorrow the plan is to be in Nebraska.