Or… Who Moved My Cheese, says Agnes.

Sorry for the long time lag between letters.  Last time we wrote, we were in Arizona, visiting Rick’s mom and having work done on the coach.  We have now been all the way to the Coast, have taken care of our list of “must do” items in California, and have headed back to the East Coast.  By the time this is sent, we will be in Raleigh, North Carolina, visiting with our good friends Beth & John Lawton. 

The toughest part of going back into California is that there are so few ways to enter the state that aren’t uglier than sin.  We have a long list of places we never want to see again:  Barstow, Banning, and Palm Springs for starters. (I don’t care how efficient those wind machines are, they are pretty gross to look at, and I don’t suspect they are the “Windmills of Your Mind” that Michel LeGrand was thinking of.)  And the Sonny Bono Memorial Highway!  But we did get there, and one of our first stops was to visit Rick’s daughter, who had adopted our two cats, Agnes and Jeremy.  After a considerable amount of dithering, we decided we’d like to try to have the two beasties with us, and departed the next morning with two yowling lions hiding in the rear of the coach.  Jeremy is a lanky black and white, pretty mellow, and he has decided the best way to deal with the noise and motion is to sleep all day long.  But Agnes, a pretty tiger-striped tabby, is very full of herself, and very willing to let you know you have disturbed her and she doesn’t really appreciate it, at all, thank you anyway!  We have totally destroyed her life, changed everything she was used to, and dammit all anyhow.  But even she has finally adapted and they are now quite settled in their new home.  They definitely like it better when it isn’t driving down the road, but then, so do we for the most part.  Oh yes, they are littermates, and have always been with each other, so life really hasn’t changed very much.  But you wouldn’t know it to listen to Agnes!  We’re glad to have them, and it was a good decision.

We then spent a week in San Luis Obispo.  For those of you whom we didn’t have a chance to visit (and Frank, it was crummy; we just couldn’t get a spare minute), we apologize.  It’s not as if we wouldn’t have enjoyed seeing all of you, but we were pretty frazzled just trying to keep all our appointments.  Between us, we had 10 medical appointments, to say nothing of seeing our tax person, our financial advisor, and spending several hours underneath the house in Paso Robles, retrieving things we now had room for and really, really wanted to have with us.  Oh yes, and Rick spent over 5 hours at DMV, getting the coach, trailer, and motorcycle registered in the State of California.  It was a zoo.  Oh, and within 10 minutes of us arriving in town, I had sprained my ankle.  Thanks to Dr. Dave Bernhardt, good friend and excellent physician, I am slowly recovering. SUCH A STUPID THING TO DO.

Leaving SLO, we moved north, seeing a few friends and some of the family on our way toward Tahoe and Reno.  After visiting in that area, we began the trip eastward.  The day we left California we call Patooie Day; we felt like we’d been spit out of the state into Nevada.  And what a relief it was.  We love you all, but tried to cram toooooooooooo much into a short period of time (we didn’t even get to see all the family), and we were exhausted.  So we’ve now traveled pretty much straight across the country to North Carolina.

It was a beautiful trip, with very few areas that weren’t lovely.  April is a great time to be out and about.  We started with several days on Highway 50.  The northern Nevada desert is strikingly beautiful, and when it’s early in the year, it’s cool, with snow on all the mountains.  You stay above 5,000-6,000 feet the entire time, and it’s almost eerily quiet as you travel along.  This section of 50 is the Grand Army of the Republic Highway; but there’s at least one other (in Pennsylvania) so I guess it’s not unique.  It’s a wonderful road, and we’ve decided it’s the bestest way to get in and out of California.  You cross the Sierras through Placerville and Tahoe, and what can be wrong with that! 

After leaving Nevada, you cross the deserts of Utah (far less beautiful, except for a stretch where 50 joins with I-70 and runs through some of Utah’s wonderful red rock formations) and then into the Rockies, which we love.  We debated for quite awhile which road to take across.  Interstate 70 is better geared for struggling vehicles, and we weren’t quite sure how ‘arvey would take to the mountains.  But we dearly love the area around Montrose and Gunnison, further south, and by staying on 50 could go down through there.  The downside was we would be crossing the Divide over Monarch Pass, at 11,312 feet, higher than some of the other ways we could go.  We had been over it before, on the motorcycle, and it’s a splendid biking route, but our little beast?  We weren’t sure.  But we figure, what the heck, give it a shot.  And ‘arvey took that pass like it was next to nothing.  No trouble at all.  ‘Arvey is a real trooper.  We were quite fortunate that the weather was gorgeous, clear and lovely.  There was plenty of snow around, but the road was clear and we had a great time of it.  The top of the Rockies are so beautiful, we could have stayed for days, but there was a long trail awinding ahead of us, so we pressed on.  And of course all roads led downhill as we went eastward. 

The upside of the road we took?  Beautiful Monarch Pass; the downside?  You come out in Pueblo.  What’s to be said about eastern Colorado?  Pretty dreary, after those lovely snowcapped peaks.  But there sure are plenty of people living there, so they must think it’s just fine.  The most distinctive feature we saw in eastern Colorado was that the telephone poles are shorter on the left side of the road.  Then in Kansas, the short poles are on the right side of the road; hmmmmm, is there some meaning here?  (“Buy short,” the stockbroker said.)   Actually by eastern Kansas we had dropped down a little further south than US 50, and found a very pretty area along Highway 166 in the very south-eastern part of the state that we can highly recommend.  We spent a night in Medicine Lodge, camped in their city park, which was beautiful, quiet and serene.  And the town was all you could have hoped for in small town mid-America:  wide streets, trees in bloom, friendly people, clean and nice.  We could go back there again.

A formula for you:  one watertower plus one grain elevator = one small mid-western town.  We saw zillions of them.  But all the way through the mid-West, the dogwood and azaleas were in bloom in the towns and along the roads, and the further east you get, the greener it is.  Missouri was coming into bloom, and by then you are back in the land of the billboards claiming VASECTOMY REVERSAL SERVICES, 1-800-whatever, so who could ask for anything more!  We traveled on the Robert B Docking Memorial Highway, the Duncan Hines Highway (in Kentucky), the Major Mark C. Dodd Memorial Highway, and then, in North Carolina, the Sam Hunt Freeway and the John Motley Morehead III (not II, not IV, but III) Freeway.  Such a country we live in!

Chetopa, Kansas says they are the catfish capital of the Country, although we’ve seen that claim made several times before, so who knows; and there we also found a store called The Wizard of Odds – over 35,000 items for sale.  Tried so hard to get Rick to stop, but noooooooooooo.   In southern Missouri, going through a Mennonite area, we were intrigued by one neat innovation.  The highway we were on had a grassy median down the middle, and down the middle of it was a gravel path for horse-drawn carts to ride.  Clearly marked not for autos; pretty cool, I thought.

Pretty un-cool was the path we had inadvertently chosen to get over the Mississippi River where it divides Missouri and Kentucky.  We crossed it at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers; this is the place where Lewis and Clark camped, by the way, at Fort Defiance.  As it turns out, to get between those two states, you cross each of the rivers separately, on very old, very narrow, very high bridges.  I closed my eyes, I held my breath, I took a gulp, and Rick steered very carefully and gently and got us across.  We had just finished going over the second bridge when here came this humungous truck; we were soooo lucky! 

But Kentucky is gorgeous and lush, one of our favorites; we went through Paducah and Pulaski County.  This may ring a bell; Pulaski County is where the sheriff was just murdered by (probably) someone running for office against him.  We saw many signs expressing condolences to the family and his associates.  The day we passed through Somerset was the day of the funeral.  A very sad time.  I will say the entire area took those elections very seriously.  We saw multitudinous signs for each and every candidate for zillions of offices, including Jailer (4 people running, as far as we could spot).  So interest is very high, and tension, too, apparently.  East of there, we traveled a stretch through the Daniel Boone National Forest, which was lovely and cool.  We do indeed like Kentucky.

One cool sign in Kentucky, along a stretch of freeway that was torn up for improvements (one can only hope!):  “Whoa, Baby, Whoa; Leave the Racing to Horses.”  Pretty neat, don’t you think?  Actually, roads are torn up everywhere.  This is no surprise.  We’ve been told for many years that the Interstate system is falling apart; we built all these cool roads (sounding the death-knell for hundreds of small towns in the process, of course) and then have done little to keep them going since.  They are wearing out, and there are so many more of us now than there were 50 years ago.  But…..I digress.

So now we are in North Carolina, a beautiful, tree-filled state.  We were last in Raleigh in 1998 and are delighted to be back.  This is a wonderful area to visit, full of life and cultural opportunities.  We’ve been to an exhibit of Appalachian coverlets that was simply stunning, and had plans for outdoor concerts that we abandoned because of thunderstorms.  (North Carolina is also the home of JB’s bottom priced discount house.  It’s along the road a couple of hours out; JB has the cheapest cigarettes in the world, along with “Linens Up the Wazoo,” not to put too fine a point on it.)  Something for everyone, even a couple of local baseball teams, the Carolina Mudhens and the Durham Bulls (remember Susan Sarandon and Kevin Costner, with Tim Robbins as the young pitcher?)  We hope to get to a game while we’re here.  When we leave Raleigh, we intend to head toward the coast, and explore the Outer Banks.  This will be new for Rick, although I was there in the late 80’s.  There have been hurricanes since my trip, so I don’t know what to expect.  We’ll let you know!

Our best wishes and love to all; again, we had hoped to see many more of you while on the West Coast, but it was not to be.  Another time.

Rick and Kathy

See more photos from 2002-2003

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