Oct 26

All right. We've been home over a month now and it's time to quit moping! There have to be journeys that don't involve an ever-changing vista out a front window, so I need to figure them out.

One thing I have noticed is that the light is beginning to change from direct over-head summer light to slanted autumn light. Not that autumn is in any hurry to get here, but that's California for you. I wandered around the yard with camera in hand and found that a hydrangea I had given up on was actually blooming - not the dinner plate sized clumps of flowers you usually expect from a hydrangea, but still blooming and the late afternoon light was coming through the petals. I don't have a green thumb, so often I give up on something too easily.

"You don't want to grow? Hah! Off with your head!"

But being gone all summer, things I might have yanked out by the roots have had a chance to get their second wind and actually start a come-back. There is a certain virtue to inattention. Some things do better without all the fuss. Which reminds me, I did put the orchids that haven't bloomed out in front before we left. Maybe I should go see what they got up to this summer.

The things that I can always count on to grown without much attention from me are the mandarin orange trees. Our winter supply of vitamin C is assured. Gerry and I talked seriously about the idea of moving to be near the kids, but we've changed our minds for a number of reasons, not the least important of which is that we wouldn't be able to have mandarins in our yard if we went anywhere else.

Journey's End

We’re home. Actually, we have been home about a week, but I have been completely reluctant to admit it by writing the words. We had a lovely, if far too short, visit with our girls and the darling grandchildren and headed down the final stretch of road to Sacramento. And we came back from good jacket and fleece vest weather to hot. Hot. HOT! Damn HOT! Which just annoyed me to an astounding degree. I think one thing that kept me from admitting we were home again was that it was cheaper to run the air conditioning in Cleo than to try and keep the whole house at a tolerable temperature so we’ve been sleeping out there instead of in the house, so I could think of this as being just another camping spot. But now we have shown our faces and our church family knows we’re here and all of a sudden we have calendars again. So, yes, we’re home.

People ask us if we would do this trip again.

Yes, absolutely! We had a great time. Each day was a wonderful adventure, even if the adventures were measured in small bites, like a grand view of a glacier or a mountain top, or a glimpse of a wild creature. Now I just have to try and find the small adventures here, which I will admit is going to require that I banish this “bah, humbug” attitude I’ve had for the last week.



I’ve been thinking about the lessons learned from this four month-long adventure.
1. Even in the wilds of the Yukon there are grocery stores, so don’t take along so much food.
2. When cleaning up after driving through construction in glacier country, acknowledge the fact that the dust is EVERYWHERE and just start by vacuuming the ceiling and work down.
3. Don’t take fancy clothes. They never leave the closet.
4. Those parkas with fleece liners were a god-send, so I’m glad our little spend-thrift daughter bought herself two of them and left them behind in the closet for me to find. They were little nuggets of gold.
5. Not having a schedule was the best thing we did on the trip. We got to have experiences we would have missed completely if we’d had reservations.
6. After talking to people who were doing this trip in a caravan, never go on a caravan. Ever. To anywhere. They were all lovely people, but see item 5. No Schedules.
7. Find out from the locals where the best-kept secrets are and then go there. We saw the bears on the Kenai River because I talked to the young girl who was had gone fishing with her dad; I met a wonderful artist I’ve admired for years; found a really neat quilt store out in the depths of the woods; had a private marine wildlife cruise while taking the water taxi from Homer to Seldovia and then met some delightful locals there who were proud to show off their town.
8. People are friendly and helpful everywhere, especially if you’re wearing a smile and say nice things about their homes.
9. Canadians and Alaskans love dogs.
10. Being some place where the sun shines all night long is interesting, and accommodating for it isn’t all that hard, but eventually, I missed the stars.

Going back and looking at my photos, some of my favorites were the ones taken out the front window. I’m already thinking about the next adventure. I find myself very much in sympathy with Captain Jack Sparrow when he said at the end of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie,

“Bring me that horizon.”

Sept 12 - Boardman, OR

We did have stars last night. The Milky Way was a bright ribbon of light across the sky and the constellations were crystal clear. It’s been a long time since we had stars. The river again today is almost glass smooth. Across the river on the Washington side there are vineyards, but where there’s no irrigation there’s nothing but dried, brown dirt and scrub.

We were out washing Cleo, her first good bath in a long time, when all of a sudden we heard bagpipes. Someone listening to Scottish music? No, someone making Scottish music. At one of the camp sites down a little from us there was a piper warming up his bagpipe to get ready for a party in town where he was playing. There’s something about the pipes. People who like them immediately head toward them, and people who don’t start grumbling and go inside. Gerry is one of the latter, but my outlaw Scots-Irish ancestors left me the “likes bagpipes” gene and so I went to join his audience. He says he’s going to change out of his regalia after the party and go over to a little bandstand at the very end of the park and play this evening. I will go. Gerry won’t.


This is the view out our door here at Boardman.

Sept 11 - Boardman, OR

What a difference in terrain we’ve had in the past 3 days. For the past 3 months we’ve been in country defined by ice. Glacial valleys ground out in graceful U-shapes, rivers eating away at hundreds of feet of glacial silt deposits. We could look across a valley and find the terminal moraine of an ancient ice field, or the lateral moraines that had been carried along by a river of ice. This is the valley on the west side of the Canadian Rockies where the Columbia River forms where we were yesterday morning.

Now, just a day from country formed by ice we are in territory that was forged by fire. The landscape is flat, with the horizon far, far away, and vast fields of wheat or hay spread out as far as we can see, broken only by outcropings of black basalt from the old lava flows that once completely covered this part of the country to depths of a hundred feet or more. It was an almighty lot of lava that came bursting up out of the ground those tens of thousands of years ago.

We’re staying two nights at Boardman, one of our favorite camp grounds. It’s right on the Columbia River where I-84 turns west to run along the length of the river to Portland. The river is quite thoroughly tamed with a series of dams and locks, so it’s more like a lake, and absolutely calm. The sunset was spectacular, and we will have a full compliment of stars in the sky in another hour.

Sept 10 - Back in the USA

We drove down the Columbia Valley through thick pine and fir woodlands toward the border. It felt very strange not to have my copy of MilePost open on my lap. How did we travel without it before? It has been a wonderful traveling companion and I miss it. We made a last stop at a Real Canadian Superstore to spend the $29 Canadian I had left in the “Canadian money” billfold. Got out of there with 60 cents left over, so I did pretty good.

We crossed the border at Eastgate and it was a breeze. We answered all the questions and the border agent waved us through. Immediately we noticed a change. Instead of sparsely populated woods, there were ranches with wide hay fields all mowed down and baled. And cars! They all of a sudden appeared in every direction and by the time we got to Sandpoint we were in traffic that just got denser as we approached Coeur d’Alene.


Lake Pend Oriele (pronounced Ponderay, which is what they named one of the towns.)
We spent the night at an RV park west of the and instead of the sound of burbling creek or the lapping waves of a lake we were lulled to sleep by the sound of a steady stream of vehicles on the freeway. We aren’t out in the wilds of anywhere any more.

Sept 9 - Addendum

I wish I had a waterproof camera. We walked over to the hot pools, which are about 200 yards from the RV park. We had seen a steady stream of people headed that direction, all dressed in their bathrobes with towels slung over their arms, so we dressed like the natives and went to join them. There were a lot of locals and some Germans, all about our age. (The little girl running the ticket booth asked very delicately if we were buying adult tickets which are $10, implying that we might be buying the senior tickets for over 65s, and when we told her we weren’t 65 yet, she gave us the senior price anyway. Cute girl.) So, we were gently heating up, having a desultory discussion with a couple next to us, when a group of about a dozen high-school boys arrived.

“Oh, dear, there goes the peace and quiet,” our neighbors moaned. Pretty soon they all trooped out of the dressing room, 10 of them clad in the rental suits, which looked like they were made of tyvek. Under the watchful eye of the other two young men, slightly older, they all trooped over to the diving board and proceeded to start up the high dive, one at a time. One of the older guys asked everyone to give a round of applause to the rookie members of the local high school ice hockey team, there for their freshman initiation. They had to jump or dive off the board and the best display of each round got to sit out the rest of the festivities. So here are all these old people, lined up along the wall of the hot pool, watching these cute boys strut their stuff. All of a sudden it was a party. Everyone was laughing and cheering on the boys. An impromptu judges’ panel sprung up, with people yelling out their numbers for the various dives, cannonballs, and spectacular belly flops. They did relay races, danced, did a choreographed version of “I’m a little tea-pot” and did a lovely job of making everyone there laugh. Such a deal! For a mere $9 each, we got a good hot soak and entertained thrown in for good measure. And the camera? Oh, yes, they were very cute boys. I would have taken a few pictures.

Sept 9 - Lake Louise to Fairmont, BC

The sun was peeking around the clouds this morning and it was calm, so we zipped over to Lake Louise for the mandatory reflections photo. As we were standing there, we heard a loud boom and saw a big cloud of ice crystals from a large chunk of glacier that had fallen off the mountain at the end of the lake. Cool!

Then we drove over to the other lake, Moraine Lake, for some shots there. The mountains at the end of Moraine are more dramatic, but the sun had decided he’d done his duty for the day, so the skies were dark and threatening by the time we got to the lake.

We considered staying, decided we were cold (it was 32 when we woke up this morning – that’s zero for you centigrade people) so we packed up and crossed over the mountains to the eastern side of the Canadian Rockies to a place called Fairmont Hot Springs. We’re going to parboil ourselves and then head for the border tomorrow.