My Network Administrator Prevented Blogging

You know how your computer sometimes gives you an error message that ends, "If this problem persists, contact your network administrator." My network administrator is Michael. When we get to a new hotel, he's the one who figures out how to connect us to their padlocked wi-fi. If there's a problem, he takes care of it.

But last night, he failed me for the very first time and couldn't get me internet access in our friends' home. So you all went blog postless and almost did tonight as well. Luckily (?) for you, Hurricane Sandy is disrupting our travel plans, so I had to have access to cancel a couple hotel reservations and make new ones to keep us out of the storm for a couple days. We'll reassess depending on how widespread the power outages are on Wednesday.

We are having a great time in St Louis. Good friends, good food, almost no driving, and beautiful places to hang out. What could be better? 

That's all I have tonight. Hope those of you reading on the eastern seaboard are prepared for whatever ends up coming your way. Stay safe. We're hoping to get to western PA before the storm really arrives and then stay put through the worst of the driving conditions. I'll keep you posted unless all of PA loses power!

Getting Closer To St Louis

So, of course, part of me is excited about living in Pennsylvania, near my folks and other family, a lot of old friends both from high school, college, general life, and Ashokan, and near the big, wicked city that I do love (in moderate doses). But another part of me is sad to have left Crescent City friends and California family. While talking with a Crescent City friend today, I realized that I'm dealing with this by not thinking as much as I should about house-hunting in Pennsylvania and other details that indicate the permanency of this sojourn across the country. Right now, I can close my mind and think of this as a really great vacation. After all, we stopped at a Lewis and Clarke interpretation site this morning and we're staying in a cool old hotel on the Missouri River tonight.

And tomorrow, we'll arrive in St Louis where we can show Darcy our old house and school and favorite places. That is the most vacation-y part of the trip, and we will stop driving east for 48 hours of old friends in our old city. With any luck, the time with old friends will remind me that leaving  a place with great people doesn't mean that the great people leave your life. It just means that they're a little further away.

There's an anthropological term for people who aren't biologically related to you, but play the role of family in your life: fictive kin. I have gathered fictive kin wherever I've gone in my life and it makes for a richer, more meaningful existence. And just as my uncle isn't any less my uncle if he's on the other side of the country, neither do the ties of fictive kinship lessen with distance. 

It's a good thing to keep in mind during transitions.

Arches!

We crossed another time zone today. We have been out of our house for eight nights. Driving 350-400 miles a day since then. We're tired. And so, I am especially grateful for the amazing natural beauty of Arches National Park, which needs no captioning:

Hickison Petroglyphs

As mentioned yesterday, one of our stretch breaks along the "Loneliest Highway in America" was at the Hickison Petroglyph site. I had read about it as one of the few possible stops during that drive and it couldn't have come at a better time. We were all ready to get out of the car. There were beautiful views and beautiful lichen (if you didn't already know, I'm a huge fan of lichen and I know I've posted lichen pictures on this blog before, but I can't find them):

In this picture, as you can see, I've combined the view and the lichen...clever, huh?

If I was more ambitious, I'd get the pictures from today off the camera and show you all the mind-blowingly beautiful scenery in and around Arches National Park. But my child is asleep, my husband is well on his way to asleep, and I'd like to get there, too. Tonight, we are all sleeping in Denver, after a lovely visit with our friend Gretel for dinner. Last time we saw Gretel, she had her lovely dog Tule with her and they got a mention in this blog post about Darcy and animals (Gretel, there is a picture of Tule).

Tomorrow, we drive the rest of the way across Colorado and much of the way across Nebraska. It's been a lot of driving and I have to say that I am looking forward to TWO NIGHTS in the same place. Two more long days and one very short day of driving left until we hit St Louis and stay put for 48 hours!

Moab!

We made it safely to Moab while it was still light yesterday, but the internet was so slow last night that I skipped posting. This is a cheat: I am post-blogging for yesterday.

Top photo: Darcy and Salmon with the kokanee at the stream bank viewing windows. Most of the kokanee in this stretch of stream were spawned out and dead, unfortunately, but we saw plenty of live ones in the stream. Bottom photo: Darcy and Michael on top of the scenic viewpoint at Hickison Petroglyphs off Route 50, the loneliest road in America.

Honeymoon Nostalgia

Here's the thing: We're driving across the country. Our stuff is in a million different bags. We try to stay organized, but the emphasis is definitely on the TRY. So I managed to bring the card reader for the camera but not the cable in from the car. In other words, no NEW photos tonight. Lucky for you, today was in part about a little nostalgia visit to Lake Tahoe, where Michael and I went for our honeymoon almost exactly seven years ago and I had Michael put a couple pics of that on the desktop for me a couple days ago.

As a theme for our honeymoon photos, we took the salmon Michael gave me from Katmai with us and posed him in many pictures. The same salmon came with us this time and recreated a number of them, but due to the lack of cable, you only get to see the originals:

This is the time of year that the kokanee salmon (miniature sockeyes descended from sockeye introduced to Lake Tahoe in the 1940s) spawn in Taylor Creek. The forest service has a great streambed viewing area, but today, we had much better views of the kokanee from above than below.

From Lake Tahoe, we drove the "Loneliest Highway in America" (Route 50) almost all the way across Nevada. We're in Ely, NV, for the night, with Great Basin National Park on tap for a morning visit, followed by a drive to Moab, UT, the base for visiting Arches National Park. Saw lots of great stuff today -- so sorry I can't share the photos!

Michael's Day

The shortest route between Crescent City and Pennsylvania goes through southern Oregon to meet up with Interstate 80 at Winnemucca, NV. That is not the way we are going because Michael has some issues with leaving California without seeing the Sierra Nevada mountains (I know there's some redundancy in that phrase; just want to be clear). So we dipped south along I-5 and then across to Lake Tahoe where the granite peaks are naked and the air is crisp and scented by Ponderosa pines.

To make the day truly Michael's, we stopped in Chico to visit the Sierra Nevada Taproom so Michael could inhale the smell of cooking grains, try several different beers, and we could all eat a delicious, but crazy-big meal. He peered through windows into rooms full of hops, saw lots of copper kettles and pipes, and bought a couple new beer glasses. You'd think I didn't just give him a new pint glass a few weeks ago.

Unfortunately, we arrived in Lake Tahoe too late to do much except enjoy the heated pool, eat some leftovers for dinner, and hop into bed. But we have big plans for tomorrow. Darcy thinks it's hilarious that we can walk to Nevada, so we'll do that. Then we have big plans to see the kokanee salmon before heading out after lunch.

No photos tonight -- sorry about that! I could have given you a picture of the perfectly-poured pint of beer Michael enjoyed at lunch, but I decided not to.