In Our Own Way

When you've gotta go, you've gotta go.

John

Closing Up Shop!

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[Caption: our complete route, from Tallahassee, Florida, in June 2021 to Jacksonville, Florida, in October 2022… by way of points north, west, and back east. The jagged blue line shows the actual driving route; there are also a handful of smooth purple arcs, representing plane flights we took to visit our Florida and New Jersey families a few times.]

As you probably know via other channels, The Missus and I eventually — in late 2022 — completed our meandering back-and-forth across the country. I apologize if you’ve been hanging in suspense since the last post, now almost two years old!

It’s hard to say exactly why I stopped updating this travelogue, aside from the exhaustion of travel itself. Post-Las Vegas, we spent the month of June tooling around the Grand Canyon and California (Joshua Tree, San Diego, Santa Monica, San Luis Obispo, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Yosemite National Park, Lake Tahoe, Petaluma, Eureka and the redwoods). From there, we pretty much headed east without too much dawdling (Reno, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne WY, etc., all the way through to Nebraska, Missouri, Tennessee, and Georgia). We finally landed back in North Florida in mid-August, nominally staying with family there until the first week of October… and beyond.

(I say “nominally” because The Missus became very sick — not with COVID, thank the gods, but still — for a couple weeks, starting just a few days after we arrived in Jacksonville. And I headed off to North Carolina that first week of October to scout out the area for a place where we could comfortably spend our retired years more or less at a merciful standstill.)

Anyway, it turns out that my “johnesimpson.com” Internet domain is starting to run out of space. Because I continue to need more space for my main blog, called Running After My Hat, I am going to be shuttering this In Our Own Way section of that domain (as well as a handful of other test/experimental blogs I’ve set up in the neighborhood since 2008).

Translation: if you want to hang onto the record of the first part of our trip, you’ll need to figure out some way to do that. (I still haven’t made up my own mind about how to do it for myself — probably just save copies of the email messages which subscribers received.)

The timeline for the shutdown is fuzzy, but I expect I’ll do that sometime in May, possibly June. I’ll post one more update here in the meantime, just as a next-to-the-last-minute notice. And then In Our Own Way will — like its two principal characters — will head for the sunset!

Thanks so much for reading!

Movement, Again — and Upcoming

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Photo 1 caption: the view west from a park called “The Trails of Summerlin Village,” in the northwest of Las Vegas proper. The Stepson’s house “in Las Vegas” technically is located in a Vegas suburb called Spring Valley. But the gigantic ZIP-Code-spanning development known as Summerlin lies all around. I visited a lot of the parks in Summerlin over the last five months — and now that the daily thermometer is flirting with three digits, I’ve done so, especially, early in the day. The building in the foreground is somehow associated with — I think — a Baptist church up at the street level. The street in question lies between this vantage point and the mountains.

As some — many? most? — of you know, we will finally be putting Las Vegas in the rearview mirror a week from today. We’ve got reservations at various places, doing various things, and mostly in California, for the next month. Here’s the general itinerary for now:

  • Grand Canyon
  • Joshua Tree National Park — and, knock on wood, and meeting up with The West Coast Nephew!
  • San Diego — the Zoo! and a behind-the-scenes “safari”! laundry!
  • Santa Monica
  • San Luis Obispo — and, after leaving, the Hearst Castle and elephant-seal viewing in San Simeon!
  • Carmel-by-the-Sea
  • Yosemite National Park — including a guided tour and, for me, a photography course “in the footsteps of Ansel Adams”!
  • Lake Tahoe — including a guided tour!

From there, we’ll be doubling back towards the Pacific for a brief stopover with The Missus’s cousin and a drive up the rest of the way to Redwood National Park. Then eventually we’ll point the car east and north, to drive eventually aaaallllllll the way back, via some route, to someplace yet unknown. Key destinations, if all goes well:

  • Yellowstone National Park
  • The Badlands of South Dakota
  • Mid-Wisconsin (a sort of genealogical side-quest for The Missus)
  • Possibly a little jog north in order to skate between Lakes Superior and Michigan, then down the coast of the latter
  • …and then, yes: ?????

I like to imagine that I’ll update you all here more often than I did during the (sometimes chaotic) first leg of the year(ish)-long road trip. But I’ve imagined — and promised! — that before. So for now let’s just say, y’know: stay tuned!

Intermezzo: February 2022

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Photo 1: Looking over into the foothills near Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, just a little to the northwest of Las Vegas; shot taken from highway 159 outside the RRC itself. (You can click the image for a larger version, especially if you want to save a copy on your computer.)

It’s been just about exactly two months since you — whoever you are — would have heard from us via this blog. But I didn’t want you to think it had, y’know, died on the vine… any more than the road trip itself has! (After all, we’ve still gotta somehow get the car back across the country…)

Our Las Vegas stay has been longer than planned, through no one’s “fault” and not really from inertia, either. Of course there’s still the lingering pandemic — Delta, Omicron, and whatever variants might be out there, sniffing like jackals around the margins of our peace of mind. Also, I had a cataracted lens in my right eye removed and replaced a couple weeks ago, with the possibility of having the left eye done, too, in another couple weeks. So we’ll be here into March, anyhow.

We do need to be back in Florida in the middle of April, for a handful of medical/dental appointments… but at this point, we’ve no idea if we’ll drive there, or fly. Consult your favorite Magic 8-Ball for a non-hazy answer!

What we’ve been up to in Vegas

Start by forgetting whatever you might be thinking about the city as a sybaritic destination. We’ve been to the Vegas “Strip” — where the biggest hotels, casinos, shopping, and entertainment venues are located — exactly twice: once, for a pre-Christmas dinner date; and once, to return/exchange a couple of Christmas gifts at a store whose only local outlets are on the Strip.

So once you’ve forgotten that, what’s left?

Pretty much the same as for any other household in winter 2022 (assuming the household is in the USA, and assuming its occupants are being veeeeery careful, pandemic-wise). The Stepson, alas, must continue to work at home; he does this for many hours, every day of the week (but not so much on Sundays). As for The Missus and I, well, there’s plenty of reading; plenty of TV; plenty of electronic gaming of one kind or another… We do one or two Instacart orders a week, order meals delivered about as often, go for walks around the neighborhood…

But then I started thinking about this blog, and how to kick-start it a little. And I realized there are stories about our 2021 road trip which many (most?) of you have not yet heard or read about.

So that’s what’s coming up. Watch this space! And, for a refreshing change, I’ll see if I can justify your continued attention here. 😉

Arrived!

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[Images above: on the left, The Missus’s rolling log of places and dates we visited (and, often, places where we ate); on the right, our fitfully maintained log of the odometer readings at various locations along the way. (Note that the latter covers two time spans: one for each of the cars we’ve made the trip in so far.) The term “Grand Adventure” is entirely The Missus’s.]

We got to The Stepson’s place in Las Vegas more or less on schedule: Wednesday, December 15, 2021, at around 4:45 PM. I can’t say we were delighted that morning to pull out of the resort in Sedona, Arizona — we’d loved it there — but, again, at least we were more or less on schedule.

If you do the math, then, you’ll know that we’ve now been here for four nights. At some point in the next few hours, I am assured, we’ll be heading out to pick up a tree for the living-room corner. And then, who knows, we’ll link hands and sing a chorus or two of O Tannenbaum, or perhaps just cue up a Die Hard movie. (We have already watched National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, so that’s out of our system for now.)

Hope you’ve all been able to survive recent months with a minimum of anguish and heartbreak. The gods know there’s plenty of both out there — no reason at all why you should be adding to the pile.

Now getting ready to look ahead to Road Trip (excuse me — I mean Grand Adventure) 2022… because somehow, we have to get both ourselves and the car back across the country to get on with the rest of our lives! 🤨 And in the meantime, I’ll try here to fill in some of the gaps as we made our way to the Nevada desert…

A New Series: Nits and Peeves (#1: Soft-Drink Vending Machines)

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Image 1 caption: Andy Rooney, and a fairly typical jibe of his

You may remember Andy Rooney. He was the white-haired, unruly-eyebrowed curmudgeon who offered cranky weekly commentary on “60 Minutes,” years ago. He didn’t always use this exact phrase, but in my mind, his remarks always opened — in his characteristically nasal, whining sort of voice — with, “Did you ever wonder why…?”

I’ve thought about Andy Rooney quite a bit while we’ve been on the road. Sooo many people and situations behave in ways and for reasons completely alien to me, and often annoyingly so (milk-of-human-kindness though I try to be). Know what I mean?

Consider, for example, vending machines. Specifically, for my purposes here, the sort of vending machines with a glass front — so you can see the contents, but must actually deposit money in order to get something: a bottle of water, a can of tea, a, well, a Yoo-Hoo or whatever. (Aside: we do not drink Yoo-Hoo.) It seems fair trade, right? Make your selection, pay your money, get the product.

Until going on this trip, I never thought much about these vending machines. Since then, though, I’ve noticed them quite a bit, and not merely out of curiosity. Here’s why — and I direct your attention to the photo below:

Image 2 caption: two rows of bottled water and other drinks in a vending machine.

Imagine that you yourself have stocked this vending machine. Proud of yourself, probably. It all looks so, well, so neat, eh? All the bottles and cans are leaning the same way, at about the same angle. And you’ve even been clever enough to turn the bottles of Gatorade (bottom right) upside-down, so they don’t get jammed by the coiled wire which dispenses them when their number is selected.

Now imagine that you are a consumer, with the need — at least the intention — to get a very specific sort of water out of the machine. You can see you’ve got, uh, five bottles of Saratoga and two bottles of Pellegrino to select from. Nope. You don’t want any of them. You might or might not want that oddball one, though — the one in slot #45.

The question is: what is it?

The only way to identify it is to, well, to buy the damned thing so you even know what it is you’ve just bought.

Andy Rooney would have understood.

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