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!

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.

[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…