Despite our best efforts to go where the weather suits our clothes, an unexpected heat wave drove us out of Salida. We rolled north 40 miles to Buena Vista, population 2,617. Kat found a VFW Post offering water and 30 amps for $10 a night, open to the public. The juice would let us run our A/C when needed, and while camped in a white water Mecca we hoped to raft the Arkansas River.
Read More
Two summers ago we enjoyed several weeks in Arizona, the land of blue skies, no rain, and few clouds. While pulling near Tucson we witnessed a dozen or more tandem parachute jumps. Kat became inflamed with the idea of trying this. It is immoral to encourage lunacy, yet that crazy streak is one of the things I love about her. We agreed that she should do a tandem jump when the time is right. Now in northwest Arkansas, waiting for warmer weather in Santa Fe and Colorado, the time feels right.
Read More
Wednesday we said our good-byes and Pink passed while we stroked her and told her the stories of her youth. Then she was gone to a kindly veterinarian’s euthanasia.
Read More“I am John Palmsley of the IRS Audit Department. You must call me today to explain certain criminal allegations. If you do not call now, I do not think I can stop local authorities from arresting you. “
Read More
Brave is the man who first ate an oyster, and were he alive today, he’d regret advertising their flavor. Once common and cheap, they’re now getting a bit pricey. Oysters can be fried, put in all kinds of soups, baked with a creamy mushroom or crab sauces, or prepared a hundred other ways. But none are better than a just-opened salty oyster with a little horseradish and lemon red sauce.
Read MoreToday, while at Wally World prospecting for dinner (I found a deal on spinach and ricotta ravioli!) the muzak broke into the Christmas mode. They played The Beachboys doing “Little Saint Nick”, as cheerful a carol as one can imagine. I’ve always enjoyed that song and I know the lyrics. So I began to sing along. This is one of Mike Love’s leads, and although in younger days I could also cover Brian Wilson’s high falsetto, today I’m a middle and lower register singer. And unlike my Kat, I feel no compunction about making as ass of myself in public, especially where nobody knows me. So I sang out, mezzo-forte, and in my ear, right on key:
Read MoreThe USA leads the world in mass shootings. To which the NRA replies “Guns don’t kill people: people kill people.”
That’s technically true, but guns make it too easy to kill people.
Read MoreI have struggled to understand Trump’s appeal. I see no evidence on his campaign website of any real plan to govern, nor even one new idea. This morning a rationale for his poll ratings came to me in a flashback to the climactic scene of Network. Howard Beale, an aging night-time network anchor about to lose his job concluded his show with a spluttering rant.
Read More
We had to cross highways twice each way, both giving the engineer an opportunity to play his blues music on the steam whistle. Every engineer tries to invent a signature riff, as whistles are capable of varied tones, attacks, and slurs.
Read More
Two days ago a big, polished RV rolled in and parked across the road from us at Shenandoah’s Big Meadows campground. The kernel of news here is that it was navigated by a reader and frequent commenter. The Mayor was talking camp telecommunications with some pop-up people two sites down when she noticed a young lady looking at the Red Sled and Kat’s Cradle with marked curiosity. When Pink and I emerged from the ‘Stream for walkies, this gal strolled over with a big smile (yo dog, that don’t happen every day) asking “Jackson?” “Yes! How did you know?
Read MoreIt turned out that Clark and Deb reside in Hilton Head Sun City, a huge development populated by the retired and the long since retired. Del Webb built this and many similar new home subdivisions for seniors all over the warm states. Many were named Sun City;
Read MoreThursday we bought fifty live Little Neck clams from Bulls Bay Seafood for $3 a dozen. I went to a fair degree of trouble creating a classic Clam Linguine, shells and all, right there atop the pasta. I used bits and pieces of recipes to accommodate missing ingredients, but it turned out more than good enough to serve Salvatore Tessio, may he rest in peace.
Read MoreDon’t buy your tickets on-line: there’s a $5 per ducat “service charge” and you can’t tell which seats are shaded and which are in lethal full sun. No, buy them at the box office after you have noticed which foul line already has shade.
Read MoreThe Army made me an infantryman, and motivated me to the point I was slavering to kill old Victor Charles and use his blood as war paint. That motivation evaporated once I got there and noticed that so many of us were going to replace KIAs, or worse.
Read MoreOnions, peppers and sausages are necessary for gumbo, but the real test of one’s manhood is the chicken chase. 500 plates of gumbo requires maybe 30 chickens to make a hearty one, but if a dozen is all you have that will have to fly.
Read MoreWe’re enjoying another slow week in Campbellsville, and I have decided to read or re-read some classics. It is possible to experience too many of the great books too soon in life. I suspect that I did. … I say this because forty or so years ago Gatsby did not impress me.
Read More“You think you blocked enough *!@#%^! driveway with that *!@#%^! trailer”? I am a chicken at heart, but his words blew up my adrenaline: “I don’t think I heard you right.” He repeated his sentence word for word, which might mean he wasn’t drunk, but his words steamed me even more.
Read MoreBryce is one of our smaller National Parks, but the shuttle system is excellent and there’s plenty to do and see. We will leave Monday after a five day stay at Bryce’s North Campground ($7.50 per night with your America the Beautiful pass). We took in the views from all the major overlooks, made […]
Read MoreIf anybody reads us hoping to encounter interesting literature without paying for a subscription to either The New Yorker or Mad Magazine, this post and nearly all of our others will disappoint you. This one is meant for the handful of frequent RV’ers in our audience, to each of whom we feel a duty to help on that rare occasion when we think we can. We owe so much to the RV blogs Watson’s Wander, Aluminarium, and Wheeling It: it feels good to be able to give something back.
Read MoreBesides not having a street address, my other concern with boondocking is dirt roads. Your rig gets absolutely filthy and every dirt byway contains sections of road with enough washboard to loosen your fillings. If it rains exiting can become a real horrorshow.
Read MoreWhen you were a kid trying to draw something involving the American West, you always drew a saguaro cactus with two arms on the paper in green Crayola
Read MoreThe past few days we’ve camped on a Corps of Engineers park called Canyon Lake. It’s about 25 miles southwest of San Marcos, the birthplace of Baseball Hall of Famer Greg Maddux, and workplace of Aquarena Springs’ inimitable Ralph the Diving Pig. The water is a deep blue thanks to its limestone floor and 50 […]
Read MoreIt’s over 500 miles from Mandeville to Austin via campgrounds with electric hookups. The first leg this year is Mandy to Ville Platte’s Chicot State Park. The trees are still bare; the weather forecast was dead on: rain and a hard freeze with sleet. No wonder we have the campground to ourselves. It’s the […]
Read MoreMy dreams too often are disturbing. They involve problems I didn’t have twenty or thirty years ago, but could have. They put me in situations impossible yet plausible. They make me doubt my own sanity.
Read MoreI’ve never had an original thought. I’ve never written an original sentence. And to lift an idea from Kurt Vonnegut, I will never write Beethoven’s 10th symphony.
Read MoreOn our last night in Sault Ste. Marie I just knew my gambling luck was going to change. There is no way to reconcile this belief with an intellectual acceptance of the Monte Carlo Fallacy. Nonetheless, I am fully capable of holding mutually exclusive ideas as equal truths. We did visit the casino. I played […]
Read MoreYou see roadside memorials in nearly every state, but Montana uses them to teach a message. The state pays for and installs the identical crosses, but people are allowed to adorn them with flowers, teddy bears, or Miller Lite six-packs as they like. The message goes on the official state highway map: “Learn from those […]
Read More“I figured it out! The power drill: it was one of Diane’s cats. He urinated on our bedspread, not once, but two or three times.”
Read MoreYellowstone is the world’s first national park and perhaps the only land in the USA that has never been fenced or farmed. It has mountains, clear rivers, deep lakes, four kinds of conifer forest, valley meadows, and is the world’s most active geothermal site. Wildlife abounds. It’s the geothermal features that make this place famous. […]
Read MoreWe camped Monday in the Newton Creek campground, 14 miles from Yellowstone’s East gate. We chose a sunny site alongside the cold, clear and noisy Shoshone River. This will be our base of operations for our forays into the eastern part of the ‘Stone. The moment we arrived I noticed fresh buffalo chips on […]
Read MoreHighway 15 starts the trip from Marion Lake to Lawrence, Kansas. US 15 ended for us at US 40 in Abilene. A couple of miles before 40 stands the Eisenhower Library. We have previously visited the George H. W. Bush library in College Station, the LBJ Library in Austin, and Clinton’s in Little Rock. We […]
Read MoreAs you may or may not know, I sure love thunderstorms and neon signs….
Read More
Life on the Blue Highways 