Stop the World and Let Me Off

Is that an old country song?  Wow, I really need to stop the world right now. I don’t know if it’s peri-menopause or if I’m just going gaga in my old age, but I just can’t seem to get a handle on things right now.  Here I’ve had a week with mornings to work on course prep while Emma’s had this class, and I’m having the hardest time focusing.  I used to be such an efficient person.

The house is still a wreck from unpacking all the shells, rocks, driftwood, etc. from our vacation.  There seem to be lots of little things I’m supposed to handle that I forget or that take up an inordinate amount of time.  After 50 million emails back and forth with Delonghi Customer Service (non-service would be more accurate) I have finally mailed off the espresso maker to a service center near Detroit late this afternoon.  That removed one large box from the kitchen table, but it seems like the minute I remove an item, another family member puts something new on that very surface. Aack!!

I have a good friend who has asked to have a birthday party at our house.  Of course I said yes –what else could I say?  But I don’t want to do this.  She means to have this party on our “grounds”, but of course people will need to be in the house sometimes. So not only do we have to have the pool cleaned, lawn mowed, weeds wacked, but also all the crap in the kitchen, living room, and on the stairs “to go up” cleaned up as well.  Really, I’m having trouble just keeping up with things like laundry and vacuuming.

Myself, I’m rather a minimalist.  When I lived by myself, I simply didn’t have much stuff.  If I hadn’t used it in a while, I pitched it.  Can’t say I ever missed anything I’d pitched.  Then I married an amazing pack-rat, and we had a daughter who takes after her father.  My house is stuffed with stuff that isn’t mine, but is somehow strung out all over the place.  I feel like I keep bundling things into their space (her room, his office) and somehow it crawls back out.

Sometimes I seem to be able to handle this, but this is not one of those weeks. What I wish right now is that time could stop, and I could be alone for a few days to get everything in the house straightened up.  Maybe even enough time to sit down in a clean, calm, house and string some beads together.  Or maybe just re-string the neurons in my head. Assuming they’re still there.

Structure

I crave structure.  And I'm craving it right now.  Summer has been great, relaxed, but I'm tired of it!

Thank goodness school (for me and the kid) starts in a month.  We've downloaded Emma's school supply list --she's moving into Upper Elementary this year, so her list has some more grown-up things on it.  A calculator!  Those cool marble-cover composition books (don't they just make you want to write?) and a spiral-bound sketch pad of art-quality paper.  No more crayons.  But, 48 pencils!!  And that doesn't include pencils for drama, Japanese, music, etc.  Can you tell I love shopping for school supplies?  We'll go soon, so we don't have to fight the crowds that pile up near the starting date.

In the meantime, Emma is signed up for a week-long, morning class at the local Discovery Museum called "Girls Science", where they're going to dissect a heart, and meet real women scientists in the community.  Seems like a great opportunity, and I get two solid hours of prep-time each morning next week after I drop her off!  Yeah!  I have a long list of things that need to be done before August 22nd.

Beans!

Today Emma and I went up to our church in the morning to help pick the bean harvest.  One of our members started a small church garden for a food pantry in our area called Caritas (not affiliated with the Catholic food pantries of the same name).

In general, Ray takes care of the garden, and does most of the maintenance and harvesting.  We are a small UU congregation of about 50-some people, and altogether there are about 15 children of various ages.  Diana and Cher, moms of Zoey, asked Ray if Zoey and a friend could help pick the bean harvest, weigh out the pound portions, bag them, and then bring them to Caritas.  So Ray sent an invitation to all the parents, and several of us met at the church this morning to pick beans.  It was already 90 degrees, with what felt like about 200% relative humidity, so it was a hot job!

Then we drove the harvest to Caritas, and the director gave us a tour and talked about what they do.  In addition to being a food pantry, they also collect and distribute clothes.  They told us how they sorted the clothes, and were only looking for gently-used items, and clothes that were still in fashion.  They have a room set up as if it were a clothing store, with clothes on shelves and hangars, and they use the term "shopping" for their clients.  The director talked about preserving the dignity of the people who came to them for help, about how some people were experiencing generational poverty, while others were experiencing situational poverty, how they talked with each person (or family) to see what their needs were and if they could refer them to other services, such as local job centers.  They allow a family to get a four day supply of food, but only once a month.  They are open weekdays, with clothing available in the mornings and food in the afternoons.  They never see the same clients twice a month, and yet they are serving at least 25 clients each day in the food pantry alone. 

All of this information inspired a great conversation during our ride home.  One of the things Emma said to me was that all of the clients we saw during our tour were either black or dark-skinned.  That was a whole conversation in itself, referring back to the generational vs. situational poverty, and the value of federal programs like Head Start in helping children grow up and move themselves out of poverty. The area we live in was a manufacturing center until the 80's, when the manufacturing started moving out of the country.  Rockford, IL has been economically depressed since then, with a public school system that was taken over by the State because it lost a segregation lawsuit.  It's a very divided community --in fact, when I first started teaching at the college, one of the secretaries talked about going to a downtown festival, but how after about 10 p.m. it "got very dark".  I was confused (of course it's dark after 10 p.m.) until someone explained to me that the white people went home then, leaving mostly blacks downtown.  (I grew up in Ann Arbor, MI, which by city ordinance was a nuclear-free zone back in the 70's. I have deep bleeding-heart-liberal roots.) 

While we were there, we got a volunteer application.  They are currently only open during weekdays, but Emma and I are hoping to get in some volunteer hours before school starts up again. 

Home

Home would be nicer if we didn't have so much humidity :-)

Today was spent unpacking, doing laundry, grocery-shopping, getting the dead bugs off the bumper of the car (the guys at the car wash had to scrub!!), re-claiming a goldfish, paying some bills that showed up in our accumulated mail, and unpacking souvenirs, including way too many shells and rocks!  I think we (well, Emma) brought back enough rocks and sand to create a beach in our yard!  But they do look and feel very cool. We've also tried to sneak in some time to look at the photos and video we took toward the end of our stay.  Rob filled up two 4GB cards, so he has lots to go through!

Here is a short (1:28) video of California Hwy 299, which was a little scary to drive.  We're just not used to these blind curves here in the prairie!

Driving Home

What were we thinking, packing five days of driving into four?!!  We're all going stir-crazy, and we still have two more days of driving to do!  We're hooking up with I-90 today, so we'll have South Dakota and Minnesota, rather than Nebraska.  I hope it helps us stay awake :-)

Shopping for Souvenirs

During our exploration of Old Town Eureka, we took some time to shop for souvenirs. 

Before we left home, Rob and I decided to give Emma a $50 souvenir budget. Then, we decided $50 would be appropriate for us as well. It’s been a good way to make us all think about what we purchase, and Emma has to do some simple math to keep track of where she is with her souvenir money.  We agreed to some exceptions: if we buy things for other people, that doesn’t come out of our budget, and Rob and I wanted to bring home a Christmas ornament as a family memory, which also didn’t come out of our budget.  We found our ornament as we traveled the Avenue of the Giants, and Emma found a letter pin made of redwood to bring home to her best friend.

Driving through the first few States, we concentrated on free souvenirs:  coasters or take-out menus from restaurants, pamphlets about areas we were visiting.  We’ve continued to collect these as we moved into more interesting areas, along with ticket stubs from park entrance fees, tours, etc., and Rob and Emma will put together a trip scrap book later.

Emma’s first purchased souvenir came at Antelope Island, where she bought a small stuffed buffalo.  Even at 10, she loves all her stuffed animals, and many of them are associated with memories of places or people.

Our first evening in Eureka, we walked around Old Town after most of the shops were closed –this gave us a chance to look in windows and find places we wanted to visit later in the week.  One of the places I noticed was a bead store, so I spent a fair portion of my souvenir money on beads for earrings and other stuff.  While Emma normally enjoys beads as well, she didn’t find much at this particular bead store.

 Talisman Beads in Old Town.

 My choices.

Emma did, however, pick up two pair of fancy earrings from a Native American woman who set up a stand that day in the Old Town plaza.  There were hundreds of earrings hung around a table, most for $5.  She had a great time looking through them and picking out her favorites.

In a store called Many Hands we found lots of locally-made stuff:  earrings, pottery, scarves, paintings on shells, etc.  I found a great pair of earrings and a mug:  I only bought the mug, though.  Emma found a beautiful scarf, but it cost significantly more than she had left in souvenir money.  She was a bit disappointed, but got over it gracefully, and I had Rob stay in the store as Emma and I moved on, so he could buy it and we’ll give it to her as a gift for her birthday. 

Then Rob had to go here:

 Emma and I walked back to the North Coast Co-op to buy some more plums and a much less expensive scarf she’d found there earlier in the week.  We walked back to the record store, and still had to wait a bit for Rob.  He loves his record stores, and our love of music is one of the things that first brought us together, so I try hard to give him time.  One of the things he likes to do is take photos of the inside of the records stores he visits, and last year Rolling Stone contacted him for permission to use one of his photos in an article they were writing on the best independent records stores in the States.

While I was waiting for him, I took a couple of photos of other places on the block:

I just thought the colors here were kind of cool.

Everywhere we went, nasturtiums brightened places up. As you can tell, the record store had been pushed out of the touristy and pricey section of town --they had just moved to their new location and were so pleased that Rob had found them.  They have no idea how hard he searches for record stores!

Day 8: Agate Beach, Day 9: Eureka’s Old Town

Sunday

We were going to take it easy yesterday, just taking an afternoon ferry ride around Humboldt Bay.  We started the day going to Ramone’s for coffee and pastries, and while there, Rob read about a place called Agate Beach, a bit north of Eureka, where you can find agate pebbles on the beach (hence the name . . . ).

Emma loves rocks, so this was very exciting for her.   Low tide was around 2 p.m., so we figured we’d head up to the beach and then come back to Eureka for the 2:30 ferry ride.  We found the beach by noon, but the next time anyone looked at a watch, it was 2:30.  We decided to catch the ferry ride another day. 

We didn’t really find a lot of agates, but we did come home loaded down with cool rocks polished smooth and shiny by the waves. 

 

 Rob and Emma, being overtaken by the waves on Agate Beach.

Some of our wave-polished rocks.

 Emma's hands covered in sand. The sand here was a combination of many colors, rather than just white or just black. I brought some home to use in class --it will look very cool under a microscope.

Some other stuff Emma and Rob found to take home from the beach.

Then we took some time to soak in the bungalow's hot tub surrounded by the flowers.

Monday

We took two tourist rides today:  one in a horse-drawn carriage, and one on a boat.  Both turned out to be great.  Marty, the man giving the carriage rides turned out to be from our part of the States, with a daughter just graduating from UW-Madison. He’s made the same drive we did many times, and we laughed about taking Hwy 299 through the mountains.  Emma loved being in the carriage, and Marty was really pleasant and informative as he gave us a 20 minute tour of Old Town. I asked him whether the town’s name had anything to do with the gold rush, and he told us that it was named Eureka because the inlet from the ocean is so small that it took 300 years of searching the coastline to find it. He was really sweet with Emma, and she got to feed Barney, the horse, a carrot at the end of the tour. 

Then we took the Madaket Ferry, a retired ferry that now gives tours of Humboldt Bay.  The captain was absolutely hilarious!   He has obviously spoken his spiel many times, and he told us a lot about the history of the bay, the businesses surrounding it, the lumber industry, industrial barons of the past, and a local Native American tribe, but he would sneak in jokes and comments with a slight political slant. He knew a lot about the shorebirds as well, his favorite being the brown pelican.  They were spectacular to watch, as they dove into the water. One of the islands in the bay is one of the last remaining egret rookeries in the States, and the presence of osprey nests is important because it indicates the bay waters are clean.  And he pointed out the seagull nests, but told us that the babies in the nest wouldn’t be seagulls –they would be bagels.  

 Emma, standing in the bow of the Madaket Ferry.

We also did lots of walking in Old Town, visiting all sorts of shops.  We each have a $50.00 souvenir budget for the trip, and we’ve all bought some small things at places we’ve visited, but saved most of it for Eureka.  In addition, we mailed postcards today at the post office, and for a late lunch chose one of the many seafood restaurants so that Rob could sample the main catch from Humboldt Bay:  oysters.  I don’t like seafood, and with Emma’s peanut allergy, we’ve kept her away from shellfish, so we split a non-seafood entrée. 

Yet another great, but relaxed, day.  Tomorrow will be our last whole day of vacation --on Wednesday we'll have to get things packed up, since we need to leave early Thursday morning.  We're driving home in four days, rather than five, so each day will contain more hours in the car.

Day 6 & 7: Relaxing in Eureka, Ca and driving the Avenue of Giants.

Waking up in the bungalow, even though we didn’t have anything to eat for breakfast yet, was really nice.  It was a bit cold until I found the thermostat, but that was better than too hot.  The garden around the bungalow is beautiful, and each time you walk up to the door there is a heavenly scent.  I think it’s the nasturtiums.

The first order of business in the morning was coffee.  I’m very serious about my coffee, and having only one good cup of coffee in five days was hard!  We drove down to Old Town Eureka, and found a place called Los Bagels –a Mexican bagel place.  Kind of strange, but the latte was good.  (However, we’ve since found Ramones, also in Old Town, and they’re better.)  Next we went to the Lost Coast Food Co-op, for some expensive but very tasty groceries –lots of fresh fruit!

We spent some time figuring out what we wanted to do with our six days in Eureka, and decided the next day we should drive down the Avenue of the Giants, and then head back to the coast to Shelter Cove to see the black sand beach. We have had the most amazing weather so far –although the natives call it hot, we’re finding the mid-sixties to be ideal exploring temperatures.  It was a bit warmer in the Redwood Forest, but still perfectly pleasant.  It has been wonderful to experience Emma’s experience of things like the Redwoods and the coast.  She’s so amazed at all these new sights, it makes the whole adventure even more fun.

 

 Emma and Rob in front of a Redwood tree.

A look up --my photo skills can't do this view justice.

 

 

These two pictures are on the coast at Shelter Cove.  Lots of basalt rocks.

As we drove from Shelter Cove to the black sand beach, we stopped to look at Seal Rock, which lived up to its name.  These were the first seals Emma and I had ever seen. Such cute faces when they looked up at us. Rob got out his SLR camera and long lens, and got some good close-up shots.

I found the black sand beach truly beautiful --almost surreal.

 

My toes, in the black sand. 

Rob and Emma found some live starfish stranded on the beach.  We got a picture before they threw them into the waves.

Day 5: Winnemucca, NV to Eureka, CA

By the time we drove out of Nevada, we were getting tired of looking at desert mountains.  It seems awful to admit it, but the mountains were getting boring! 

Our GPS died on the way out of Nevada --it would still show the map and locate us just fine, but when we tried to route ourselves from Winnemucca to Eureka, it wanted us to go via Salt Lake City, and had a time of 27 hours! The traffic in Reno was difficult only because up until then we’d basically been the only car on the road, but we managed to find our way off of I-80 and onto a smaller highway into California the old-fashioned way, with our road atlas.  I’m actually a map-geek, and look at the map all the time, regardless of the GPS.

We had a late lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Susanville, CA, and got directions from the owner to the road we were to take into Eureka.  As we left, the owner said “You have 150 miles to go, and it’s a windy road!” (One of the things I’ll always remember from this trip is how everyone we’ve interacted with (except Bryenne) has been so friendly and kind.)

So, she wasn’t kidding.  We’d already driven through a couple of mountain ranges before lunch (I was driving, Rob was gripping the passenger seat and wondering out loud if I wasn’t going too fast), but this was very different.  It wasn’t a freeway, so it was two-way traffic, just one lane in each direction. The turns were much tighter, at 55 mph, with other drivers who were much more familiar with the road whizzing past us (when there was a passing lane) at 65 mph.  It took about triple the normal time it would take to drive 150 miles, and Rob was absolutely exhausted by the time we got into Eureka at 10 p.m.  I’m sure you’d get used to this type of driving if you did it often, but coming from our flat prairie lands, it’s quite nerve-racking to never know what’s behind the next curve.  Also, we were driving through absolutely stunning mountain vistas, but Rob couldn’t take his eyes off the road. He stopped at a pull-out on one of the mountains we drove over, and I got this photo of the Trinity River in its valley far, far below!

 The Trinity River Valley. Not a great photo, but it does give a sense of how high we were.

This is an image I grabbed off of Google maps, showing the nice straight road :-)

When we finally got to Eureka, we were so grateful to find the bungalow we’d rented, drag our luggage in, crawl under down comforters and close our eyes. 

Day 4: Salt Lake City to Winnemucca, NV

We planned our second short drive for this day, partly because I wanted to stop somewhere in the Bonneville Salt Flats.  However, since it was such a nice short driving day, Rob suggested that we also visit the Bingham Canyon Mine, which is the deepest open-pit mine in the world, mining mostly copper but also gold and molybdenum.  I had actually been there before, during my field camp course, but that was in 1989, I think, and the mine is significantly deeper now.  (I just told Rob that little nugget and his response was “You’re old!”.  Yeah, I was 26 at that time.  That was almost 22 years ago!)

However, getting to the mine took more than a half hour of driving, and it wasn’t in the direction of Nevada.  The mine is really impressive.  The visitor’s center allows you to look down into the pit, and see the tiny trucks down at the bottom.  The trucks look really tiny (much smaller than Hot Wheels cars), and it’s even more amazing when you read that those trucks are actually two stories tall:  the drivers have to climb a full flight of stairs to get into the “cab” of the truck, and then the bottom half of the stairs folds up.  These trucks rumble up fairly regularly, and in between them is another truck, just as large, spraying water on the road they travel to keep the dust down.  The ore rock has only traces of the elements wanted.  Each truck carries five tons of rock up, but only 50 lbs of that will eventually be extracted and used.  The rest is dumped outside the mine.  In addition to the large pit, what you really notice is all that waste rock.

 This is what you see as you approach the mine, and we're still about a half hour away from it.  This is all the rock they don't want.  They've basically removed a mountain, and dumped it outside the hole.

 This is the pit itself.  You can't see it unless you can zoom in on the image, but there are two-story trucks and a processing center down there.  You can't even see the people unless you use binoculars.

After finally heading toward Winnemucca, NV after lunch, we got to the salt flats after about an hour of driving.  There is a rest stop right in the middle of them, where you can actually walk off into the flats, which we did.  It’s a strange landscape and you end up feeling kind of sticky and thirsty.

 The Bonneville Salt Flats.

The minute we crossed the line from Utah to Nevada, we saw our first casino.  Every stop, even just truck stops, have casinos associated with them.  Rob and I have just never had the urge to gamble, and don’t really understand how anyone can find it interesting, so we just made fun of all the casinos. 

The worst part of the day was late that evening, when we finally got to Winnemucca and found our hotel. After all the time getting to and from the mine, we arrived around 10 p.m.  Apparently we had not read carefully enough when we booked this hotel –it was actually connected to a casino.  When we finally figured this out (after driving around the building a time or two, looking for the hotel entrance) we parked and went in.  The room was full of smoke and people sitting at slot machines.

When we checked in, the girl behind the desk (Bryenne, pronounced Brian) seemed surprised to see that we had a child with us.  They had over-booked, so they’d moved us to a room with one king bed rather than the two queens we’d reserved.  She said she’d get a roll-away bed up to us “as soon as possible”.  A half hour later we called down –and got another “as soon as possible”.  A half hour after that, Rob went down to the front desk and offered to bring the bed up himself.  “Brian” said it was against policy.  A half hour after that Rob, Emma, and I went down to the front desk and asked to speak to the manager. I was pissed, and I can be really aggressive when I’m pissed. (Me:  bad cop, Rob:  good cop.)  After some aggressive questioning, it became clear that “Brian” had known from the start that there were no roll-away beds available, and she was trying to avoid letting us know. Her method of dealing with this problem was to hope that we’d go away. What I really wanted to do was slap her silly, except she was already pretty incompetent, so it probably wouldn’t have changed her much. After we spoke to the manager (and he discovered there were no roll-away beds –surprise, surprise!), our only option was to have Emma sleep with us.  I made sure we were not charged for the night.  Between the seedy clientele, the incompetence of “Brian”, and worrying about waking Emma up, I didn’t sleep too well that night. 

We all agreed that Utah was great, but Nevada had no redeeming features. 

Day 3: Laramie to Salt Lake City

We chose a shorter route for this day so that we could visit Antelope Island, in the Great Salt Lake in the late afternoon.  The drive from Laramie to Salt Lake City was so incredibly beautiful –driving through huge red canyons with snow covered mountains in the background.  We stopped at the “welcome” rest stop in Utah to stretch our legs, enjoy the view, and take some pictures. 

 I-80 west in Utah, starting into the canyon leading to Salt Lake City.

Rob and Emma at the rest stop in Utah.  Behind them is the drop into the canyon, and the red cliffs on the other side.

Antelope Island is the largest island in the Great Salt Lake.  There is a causeway from the shore, so you can drive to the island.  Just before we got to Antelope Drive, Rob pulled over to a gas station so we could clean the windshield of bugs, in case we wanted to take photos out the front as we were driving.  After paying the park fee, we started down the causeway, and within seconds we started to hear what sounded like rain drops.  Million –millions—of tiny bugs died on our windshield as we crossed that causeway.  Even Rob had to laugh after a while.

Because it was already evening, we just rolled up our shorts and pants and waded in the lake, instead of changing into swim suits.  As you walk out on the sand/mud beach, the brine flies, sitting on the mud,  move away from you in waves –it’s actually very cool if you can ignore for the moment that they’re bugs.  As we waded farther in, Emma reach down with both hands and scooped up a tiny red thing.  As we all bent to look at it we realized it was a tiny red shrimp!  The farther we got out, the more there were –tiny red and brown shrimp.  Rob managed to get a macro photo of Emma holding one in a scoop of water.  That and some brownish-yellow algae is all that there is –it seems so dead compared to a regular lake, but it’s not really –the algae and shrimp are the beginning of the food chain for all the incredible birds on the island.  

 Emma and Rob out in the Great Salt Lake.  It's shallow here forever (as you can see from other people in the background).  There were lots of flat quartzite rocks in the water, so they spent a lot of time skipping rocks, as well as looking at the shrimp and the gorgeous sky.

After we’d finished wading, we lumbered back up the long sandy beach (I did most of the lumbering –my hip was not happy with me), and washed the salt off our legs at the outdoor showers.  Then we took a drive around the rest of the island.  There is a buffalo ranch on the island, but we didn’t see any buffalo.  The island is named for the antelope, but we didn’t see those either.  I think especially the antelope stay away from the road.  However, Rob spotted two enormous birds down by the shoreline, so we pulled over and scrambled for the binoculars.  They were cranes –as large as whooping cranes, although they were brown and grey with the red head.  We haven’t figured out what they were yet –we visited the Crane Foundation last summer (in Wisconsin), and we have Whooping cranes and Sandhill cranes that migrate through the wetlands down the road from our house, so we’re pretty familiar with the different kinds of cranes.  We’ll have to do a little research.  There was also another group of shorebirds there – the American Avocet.  We also saw the banded gneisses on the south end of the island, which is a rock, not a bird (for the geologist in me). 

 This is the gneiss --beautiful banded rocks that have been metamorphosed through an ancient collision between two continents.

The causeway, looking across the lake toward the shore.

It would have been nice to hike away from the road on the island, but it was 9 p.m. local time before we left the island, so we found a diner for a quick dinner and then headed to the hotel for the night. We have to keep reminding ourselves that we can't see and do everything in this vacation.  :-)

Day 2, July 4th

On our second day of driving, we drove through Nebraska.  And through, and through, and through Nebraska.  Wow is that state big!!  And boring along I-80, unfortunately.  The only thing interesting was the incredible number of cows we saw. (One of the activities in Emma’s travel books is “cow-counting”, and we all had a good laugh about how impossible that would be in Nebraska –you could never keep up!)  And they are all grazing right next to the growing feed corn that will be basically force-fed to them during the later part of their sad lives.  I’m not a vegetarian –I really like a good steak, and I don’t feel sentimental about killing domesticated animals that really wouldn’t exist if people didn’t raise them for food.  But I do feel that all animals deserve to be treated humanely, and seeing the sheer number of cows just kept bringing CAFO’s to mind.  We don’t eat a lot of meat in our house because we only eat grass-fed bison and beef.  We almost don’t eat chicken anymore because the way they’re raised is just as bad, but the “organic” ones don’t have better lives, just less chemicals.  We do occasionally get good poultry from the farmer’s market, but good meat is expensive so it’s a small part of our diet.  Sorry to get preachy. Driving by all those cows made me think about how much beef people must eat regularly –I just can not find adequate words to express the sheer number of cows we saw.

We ended the day driving through the Laramie mountains and having a great evening meal in Laramie.  We had about a 25 minute wait for dinner, which gave us just enough time to explore the railroad yards behind the town, where you can climb stairs to a train trestle and walk over the many train tracks.  You got a nice view of Laramie, and a rather different view of train cars.  Just as we were about to walk down, a train came rumbling in.  Even though the Laramie Mountains were the first mountains Emma had ever seen, standing on the trestle and watching (and feeling) a train move underneath her was her favorite memory of the day. 

We had a great dinner and great waiter at the Altitude, and then crashed for the night.

Thank god Laramie is a college town; I was in need of a decent coffee.  When we left the next morning, we stopped at Coal Creek Coffee.  The guy who took our order had the most infectious smile I’ve ever encountered, and not only did I get a fantastic latte, but they “practice” (as the girl who made my latte said) latte-art.  She created a beautiful peacock with the foam and coffee swirls –I wish I’d thought to take a picture, but I was too busy swooning over the taste.

We heard lots of fireworks, and could see some through our hotel windows, but since we get to see those at home each year we weren’t too concerned about missing the show.

Today we left Illinois to the west, for the first time.  We dropped south on I-39 and where it met I-88, Rob looked south and saw skydivers!  We watched several as they came down, did an elegant turn and landed.  Then I looked up through the sun roof and found lots more floating above us.  They were high!  That sport is not for me, but it was so much fun to watch them come floating down.  Soon the plane that had dropped them swooped down in front of us as well. Rob did a good job of keeping us on the road while all our eyes were on the sky.

As we started through Iowa, we drove by a place with this sign.  I guess the people in Iowa just take it in stride, but I was both amused and a bit appalled.  There’s kind of an ewwww factor here, I think.

We drove all the way through Iowa, and the very western quarter was actually quite pretty, with the rolling hills that I assume are called bluffs, given the city name of Council Bluffs.  And I learned that Cedar Rapids is so named because of the Cedar River –who knew?! 

So we’re in our hotel in Omaha, NE.  It’s that mentally-tired but not physically-tired kind of evening.  But I think I’m ready for bed.

Getting Ready to Travel

So, on Sunday we're heading out for a couple of weeks.  We're actually driving to California --5 days out, a week to stay, 4 days back.  Phew!  It will be an adventure, I'm sure.  Emma is incredibly excited to be traveling to new States, to see mountains and an ocean. 

We're a family of writers --Rob has kept a great travel journal for each of his adventures, Emma writes several journals simultaneously, and I use the computer mostly.  So, part of our travel prep has been to find just the right paper journals for Rob and Emma.  Here's what they found:

This one is Emma's journal, along with a pen conveniently fit in the colored elastics that are part of the cover.  (The yellow flower tops a pen --my mother's day gift that Emma made at school.)

And here is Rob's journal.  When he chose it, he asked Emma what she thought, and apparently she said "It's  . . . um . . . kind of boringish.  But daddy-like."

Earlier, I purchased these from Gandanke.

And they inspired Emma to create this:

She made one of these for me, and one for her.  For Rob, she made more of a travel journal, and called it "The Geek's Uniques".  I'm not quite sure why --maybe she's heard him call himself a math-geek once too often?  In the journals she made, she decorated all the interior pages, many with doodle-starters and places for us to record our meals, or the State we're in at the time.  This occupied her for quite some time (although she talked through the entire process, of course).  She also came up with a fun idea --we are each going to collect things along our travels that we can use to create a diorama of one of the places we're visiting.  So, one of us has the black sand beach at Sheltering Cover, another the Red Wood Forest, etc.  She ruled out the Bonneville Salt Flats as a very boring diorama.  We'll bring all our pieces home, then create the diorama.

We also found some things that we hope will help pass the long hours in the car.  The American Girl company makes some nice things for kids Emma's age --I'm not usually into large companies, but there are several things I like about this one, including their selection of books for girls that focus on self-esteem, changing bodies, friendships, etc.  Plus they support an organization that helps LGBT kids --and they didn't back down from that support when some conservative groups tried to force them to end their support by starting a boycott. 

She also has a kids atlas, so she can follow along our route on the map.  Really, she's one lucky kid, huh?

So, now we just have to pack.  Just pack, that's all.  :-)