What?! No Pictures??!

My sincere apologies for the tardiness of the previous post, and lack of pictures: I realize that reading my posts without pictures is like being tarred without feathers! But Blogger.com seems to have gone completely off the rails: nothing seems to work. I tried uploading pictures numerous times over a three day period, with no luck. I finally gave up and tried posting w/out pics, which worked, but then I couldn't edit the post, to explain the lack of pictures!
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Well, it looks like the problem was with my network; I replaced the lightning-struck wire with fiber optic line, and everything works, so the final post now has pictures.
Thanks for hanging in there this long... you all are real gluttons for punishment!

Jiggetty Jig!

It’s tempting to skip out on typing up this one last entry, ‘cause our trip is so… two days ago, man, but Carroll says I owe our faithful blog followers some closure, so I’ll give it my best shot. Hopefully this will ease the transition for both of you!

Carroll’s parents will be greatly relieved to learn that all the money they invested in her education at Northland College was NOT wasted after all: on this trip we visited 16 of her schoolmates, and managed to freeload seven nights of lodging and meals! Big thanks to our generous hosts: Jessie Cargas in Rosebud MO,

Donna Engleson and Alex Alvarez in Flagstaff,

Gus Smith and Joy Meeker,

and Steph and Jim Wargin, in Wisconsin,

and Donna Spreitzer and Scott Mabury in Toronto!

And a tip of the hat to our drive-bys, Tom Lund and Magi Malone, Binner Rahn, Tim Doyle, Bentley Brehm, Laura Highland, Linda Rise, and Andy Noyes: it was great to see everyone, even if we couldn’t manage to mooch anything off you!

Speaking of mooching, we also invited ourselves to stay one night with Carroll’s Nantahala Outdoor Center friends, Bob and Charlotte Karls, in Colorado. The two nights we spent with the Grahns don’t really count as mooching. More like Grand Theft Laundry! Anyway, now that we’re home, we’d love to return the favor and have people come mooch off us! And we don’t even mind if you didn’t go to Northland College! Heck, if you’ve read any of this blog, you’ve more than paid your dues! Come stay for a month… that’s the least we can offer in the way of reparations!

The final week of the trip went pretty smoothly and for the most part according to plan; Pictured Rocks

and Sleeping Bear Dunes were beautiful, and our high-speed midnight auto tour of Toronto was exhilarating… (sorry, no pictures due to white knuckle grip on door handles!) By the time we reached Niagara Falls, the weather was sultry enough that we actually found ourselves thinking wistfully of the temperature at Cedar Breaks!

For those of you with inquiring minds, the total trip was 8366 miles, in 43 days. We were able to average just over 21 mpg, so it took 398 gallons of gas, for which we paid an average of $3.94. (HUGE thanks here for the generous grant from The Maxwell Grandchildren’s Travel Foundation, which greatly eased the angst at every fill-up!)

We’re also counting ourselves very fortunate, because the van made it home before the transmission quit altogether. By the last week, it would not shift out of 2^nd unless we put it in neutral, turned off the engine, and restarted it, to re-boot the transmission computer, which we assume must run on a Windows operating system!

The real measure of the trip’s success, though, is that Carroll and I are still married! (Not to each other, but…) And Robin and Sam got enough map-reading experience that we’re confident they’ll be able to find their way home once Customs releases them from quarantine. We told them to take showers, and to stop using their shirts for napkins, but no-o-o-o…

I’ll sign off here, with a thank-you to all the folks who posted comments and/or emailed us, and an apology for not being able to respond directly from the road. We loved hearing from you, but our schedule was so full, and wifi so limited, that we just couldn’t manage two-way communication. It was great to get comments, though, if only to know that someone was reading the blog! So thanks, and I sincerely hope no one ends up with PTSD* from this!

(* ”Post”-Traumatized Senility Disorder)

Your Humble Scribe,

Buzz

Whirlwind Tour of the Midwest

A couple of tightly packed days of visiting friends from Carroll’s college days (and even one friend from high school!), and a couple of late nights of driving, but by golly, we’re still on our schedule! When I first plotted it out, I kinda figured the itinerary would just give us a loose guideline, so we wouldn’t forget any of the more obscure places along the way, but it turns out we’ve stuck surprisingly close to it, and now that we’re in the last week, we don’t have a lot of wiggle room left to improvise anyway, so we’re just going with it.

Thanks to the magic of cell phones, we were able to crash a graduation party for someone we had never met, in Owatonna, Minnesota! We had almost given up hope of getting to see Carroll’s college roommate Binner on this trip, due to conflicting schedules, but she happened to be there, literally within sight of the highway as we were driving by, so we made an unscheduled stop, and the kids even got a little trampoline fix out of the deal!

Then we had a few leisurely hours on Lake Minnetonka with Carroll’s high school classmate,Terrell (and husband Greg) before we piled back in the van for our second late night drive in a row, this time to the Ashland, Wisconsin area, where Carroll went to college.

We arrived at Gus and Joy’s house around 11:00 PM, succeeded in arousing them from a sound sleep, and went promptly to bed. Their hospitality was quickly rewarded when at 1:00 AM, Sam threw up in bed, all over their heirloom bedspread! We were very impressed with what gracious hosts they were when they feigned indifference about the bedspread. Little did we realize the diabolical plan they had for exacting their revenge!

After lulling us into complacency with a gourmet breakfast, they suggested a field trip to look for tracks and other signs of wolves, and to see if we could map the location of a wolf with a radio tracking collar, to get a feel for what Gus does with his Northland students. This seemed innocent enough, and fit nicely with Sam’s fascination with wolves, and Robin’s interest in science generally.

So off we drove into the harmless-looking Wisconsin woods. A little way in, Gus stopped and pulled out what he said was an antenna for picking up the signals from wolf tracking collars. The high-pitched whine of the static it emitted sounded suspiciously familiar, but it wasn’t until our next stop that I recognized the sound for what it was; the device was actually a mosquito density detector!

Realizing we had been had, we swatted furiously, kept a stiff upper lip, and bravely studied what Gus said were wolf droppings, though by this point I was pretty sure they were probably mosquito droppings! Either way, it was awe-inspiring to see first hand the evidence that we were sharing the woods with deadly predators!

Back at their house, we had lunch and readied ourselves to move on to our next stop. As we pulled out of the driveway, Carroll and I both found our eyes welling up, and were reminded just how much we treasure our friendship with Gus and Joy.

Yellowstone: the Sequel

In hindsight, I now see that my last post might have left the impression that the only thing Yellowstone had to offer was buffalo chips. Though it certainly had those in abundance, we did see some other things, including:

Some places where water came out of the ground

Some places where ground came out of the water

Some things that were brown

And some things that were white.

We actually had a little more time in Yellowstone than we had planned, because we were originally thinking we might spend some time around Jackson Wyoming, but Robin got fresh with a dance hall girl there,

Which resulted in a nasty gunfight

So we had to hightail it out of town!

As I type this, we are racing pell-mell across southern Minnesota, feeling the first inklings of eagerness to be home again. A few more adventures to look forward to, I’m sure, but it feels like we’ve probably seen the last of the below-freezing weather; we actually had to buy ice for the cooler yesterday, for the first time, and when we pulled into Blue Mound State Park last night at 11:30 last night, we encountered our first BUGS of the trip. We almost felt like we were already home!

Holy Burning Buffalo Chips, Batman!

Our whirlwind pace and the fact that we spent the last 4 nights in Yellowstone, where there’s not even cell phone signal, much less wifi, accounts for the gap in posts here.

We had an absolutely divine 2 nights at the palatial Grahn Estate, overlooking, (or should I say looking down on?) the twinkling lights of Salt Lake City, from the lofty heights of Mount Olympus. (No joke there… that’s the actual name! I guess they must have named the place in Greece after it!) Anyway, it was a good chance to catch our breath, take showers, do several metric tons of laundry, stock up on food, and most importantly, visit with Carroll’s sister Jo and husband Allen. We highly recommend planning a stop there any time you’re west of the Mississippi; the spacious accommodations, and sumptuous cuisine complemented by a variety of delicious home made wines, will make almost any amount of detour worthwhile. As an additional incentive, if your long drive has resulted in a windshield covered with particularly tenacious, dried-on bug smears, they have some 6-year-old home made banana wine that is guaranteed to (dis)solve your problem! Just be careful not to spill any on the painted portion of your vehicle!

From there we headed for the Tetons and Yellowstone, stopping on the way at the Oregon Trail Museum in… Montpelier…Idaho! Turns out it's not a coincidence: Brigham Young named it to commemorate his hometown in Vermont. Anyway, we learned at the museum that kids on the Oregon Trail would have had to collect a bushel and a half of buffalo chips every day, for their mother to burn as fuel for cooking. So of course, we HAD to try burning buffalo chips at the earliest possible opportunity!

This came on our 2^nd night in Yellowstone. We had discovered an area of the campground along the river that seemed to be the preferred hangout of the local bison herd; we had no trouble collecting our bushel-and-a-half! Back at our campsite, we set to work, striving for authenticity by using the barest minimum number of twigs and tinder necessary to get the “chips” to reluctantly ignite. Then followed frantic, vigorous blowing and fanning to keep the “fire” “burning”. I use these words with some hesitation, because “fire” implies flame, and “burning” implies heat, neither of which were in any way evident. Smoke, however, was a different matter altogether! Huge, copious, billowing clouds of pungent, (OK, acrid), smoke blanketed the area downwind, obscuring even our nearest neighbors from view. After an hour or so of continuous feverish effort, our clothing was thoroughly saturated with the distinctive aroma, and we had a whole new respect, not to mention sympathy, for the pioneers!

At about this time, we noticed our downwind neighbor staggering through the cloud toward us, eyes red and cheeks tear-stained. He held out a store-bought firestarter log and a cardboard box. Stricken with guilt and remorse, I apologized profusely, and promised we would put out the “fire” right away. To his tremendous credit, he remained utterly gracious, and even went so far as to claim (between coughing fits) that they hadn’t been bothered at all. He did, however, insist that we keep the firestarter log, just in case, saying “It’s just better if you have a flame!”