I wonder if our blog still works?

This is a test to see if I should reactivate Travelinfam and if it will work.  You know, Vietnam and Cambodia await!

Finally, a description of the last day of trip

Okay, so I'm finally taking a moment to update you on the arrival in Berkeley.


We left Winnemucca extra early -- maybe 7ish -- as we were excited to get going and arrive in our new home. Throughout the trip, our faithful servant, Vanessa (Vanessa is our name for our GPS) had done a pretty darn good job of getting us where we were going. She had a few problems in Chicago, as the tall buildings blocked her signal. Plus there was the time we were just about to get on the entrance ramp to the highway, when she suddenly told us to drive another mile ahead, and upon us doing so, she promptly told us to make a u-turn and head right back to the same entrance ramp. But overall, she had been an incredible help in navigating.


One of Vanessa's fine features was that she kindly tells us an estimated time of arrival. Often she is off by a bit, but usually she is in the ballpark. So, when, as we left Winnemucca, she told us our ETA was in just 3 1/2 hours, at around 10:30 a.m., we were thrilled. I had figured the trip at about 5-6 hours, and we were thrilled at the prospect that my figuring was wrong and Vanessa's was right.


It was not to be. I'm not quite sure just what Vanessa had for breakfast, but she shouldn't have it again. The trip took about 5 1/2 hours. It was actually a bit funny because toward the latter part of our drive, for each minute we drove, Vanessa would just extend our ETA by another minute. It was as if we were getting nowhere though we were driving 70 miles per hour.


Well, anyway, it was a beautiful drive going through the mountains as you cross into California. But, frankly, we were done with sightseeing at this point, and just wanted to get "home".


When we arrived, Josh was there to greet us, and he had many nice treats for us. He had stocked the house with delicious foods, planted us a wonderful herb garden, fixed the broken garage door -- lots of pleasant surprises! And, as we set about beginning the unpacking of all the "stuff" the movers had delivered, he even made us both lunch and dinner! Thanks, Josh.

So, we are now here in Berkeley, setting out upon this new life. Excited. A bit nervous, Certainly disoriented. But, here, and getting started.

The trip, we hope, will provide us lots of nice memories -- right now, life is enough of a blur so as to obscure the trip really (maybe that's why I'm just getting to this final entry).

The trip took us a total of 4512 miles, across America and then some. As this picture demonstrates, our car collected 4 million splattered bugs (okay, it's an estimate). It was not always easy for our family to get along in such close quarters for a 3-week period, but we managed. We saw sights that were new, exciting, beautiful, magnificent, strange and mundane too. We got a sense of how large the country is, and how much it is varied in so many ways.

It was a good trip. Now the real journey begins.

I've been bad!

Sorry for not getting back to the blog since we arrived. We've been madly unpacking. I will give it my very best effort to do a sort of wrap-up post in next couple days. Thanks for your patience.

We made it!

We made it to Berkeley! We will update the blog soon with more, but wanted to let everyone know.

Yellowstone Pictures

As promised, here are a few Yellowstone pictures, beginning with this cascade.

Geyser Basin

Where we took our river swim

Elk

Nice river scene

Can you spot the moose? We could just see it's head above the tall grass.

Bison

Petrified tree

Stayed in Winnemucca

Well, if there had been any question as to whether we would stay in Winnemucca, I settled it by locking the car key in the trunk! Other than freaking me out, it was not such a big deal -- we called AAA and they took care of it.

So, after our car was rescued, we went looking for what Winnemucca has to offer. Mostly that would be two-bit casinos, motels and hole-in-the-wall restaurants.

But as avid blog readers may remember, Winnemucca does have one nice feature. a significant Basque culture and a number of Basque restaurants (they claim to have more Basque restuarants per capita than anywhere else in America).

We had dinner at Ormachea's, the reputed best one. It was great fun -- we had their sampler dinner and got to taste a wide variety of specialties. It was very homey feeling and the food was tasty if not dramatic.

Tomorrow it is on to Berkeley!

Day 20 Winnemucca, NV

Here we are in Winnemucca and "A" is saying let's keep going and be in Berkeley by tonight. We could, but we've driven 6 hours already today, and the idea of 6 more hours is less than thrilling. I think we're staying the night, but we'll see.

Here's A Museum For You

We loved seeing a sign as we passed through Idaho for the "Jefferson County TV and Pioneer Museum". It turns out that it is just what it sounds like -- apparently Jefferson County says it was where television was developed.

We were picturing the tour guide, though, if it were just about the history of TVs and pioneers:

"Well, over here we have the RCA XL100. She's a beaut, isn't she? Developed back in 1959, she was the first color TV. Oh, and here we have a depiction of a typical covered wagon as used by the pioneers. Now, the pioneers didn't actually have TVs, but if they did, they sure would have loved a good ole RCA XL100!"

Strange museum. Stranger blogger.

Day 19 - Salt Lake City

We are in Salt Lake City. Just as we did in Chicago, we chose a downtown hotel, looking for a little urban fun. What a disappointment! As I think Gertrude Stein once said about Oakland, "There's no there there."

You can say this, at least SLC was well lit and quiet -- well-lit by the blazing 101 degree sun and quiet because virtually nobody seems to exist in this downtown. I have never seen so few pedestrians in a city -- it was like a ghost-town. Perhaps that is because more than half the stores are shuttered closed!

We did find a very nice Vietnamese Restaurant and a super independent bookstore. When I complemented the manager at the bookstore on her store, she bemoaned that it was hard to stay in business under the circumstances in this downtown.

She said that when she was a kid, she used to love to go downtown and it was thriving, but that the city's leadership had decided that what was needed was to build 2 malls on either corner of downtown, maybe two miles from one another, and that had killed everything in between. She said that there was talk of now building 2 more malls downtown, right across the street from each other, but that they would connect the two with an elevated walkway, assuring that no one ever walk on a street! What a shame.

We did walk to one of the malls at the edge of town. What a disappointment. Just like a suburban mall, with a zillion chain stores and not one single independent shop. Oh, except they forgot to enclose it, so you could fully enjoy the 101 degree heat.

We are not SLC fans. On the positive side, we stayed at a very nice hotel, feel refreshed for our next drive, and we are just 2 days from reaching Berkeley!

Days 17 & 18 -- Yellowstone (pictures later, sorry)

We spent the last two days in Yellowstone National Park, at the Old Faithful Snow Lodge -- the junior partner to the grander Old Faithful Inn.

We had fun in Yellowstone and it was beautiful, but for a variety of reasons, it may have been less than the sum of its parts.

What we liked:

We had fun seeing wildlife. Bison, including one quite close-up; Elk, beautiful; Moose, only saw one lying down from a bit of a distance -- kind of a disappointment.

Old Faithful. Despite it's Disney-fication (complete with a long and winding multi-lane access road to it's huge parking lot), it was really impressive. We saw it blow 4 times (since our hotel was so close, we could walk over in the evening when the crowds had thinned and the temperature was cooler), and it caused us to ooh and aah each time. We also liked the camaraderie that developed with other tourists as we waited for it to blow (it is not perfectly regular, so you usually end up waiting 15-30 minutes). We talked to a radiologist from New York, a family from Israel, and a family from about an hour from our house in Berkeley (they had a teenage daughter who mistakenly took a picture of her foot instead of Old Faithful -- her brother made sure to tease her on that one!)

Other things we liked were some truly beautiful scenery and swimming in a "warm" river (okay, Laura barely got in, I waded, and "A" swam).

Here's what made it less than ideal. "A' especially, but all of us to some extent, felt really cut-off from civilization -- no internet, barely any buildings (shopping, etc.), hardly any decent food even. Too much driving each day -- we had been driving so much for the last many weeks that it was hard to have to drive for hours each day in the park. Our lodge was fine, but way less pleasant than the one in Grand Teton. Too many crowds -- and I hear it gets worse as the summer progresses.

We must sound like whiners, and perhaps we are. And we did enjoy our time there, but less than we might have hoped. I will try to post some pictures in the next couple days.

Brrrrrr!

I keep forgetting to mention the temperature in the park. Each day has been a high in the 70's, which is delightful, although 2 days ago the wind was so strong that it felt much colder.

At night though the temperature plummets into the 30's! When we go to bed our room is comfortable but each night I wake up in the middle of the night freezing and have to go turn on the heat. Then, when I get up early and head to the lodge lobby to use the internet (as I am right now), I scramble to find warm clothes and a fleece and get dressed without waking Laura and "A". I go out to walk the quarter of a mile to the lodge from our room, and even dressed warmly, it is freezing.

We brought our winterish coats on the trip, but they are buried in the trunk and I haven't retrieved them. Maybe it's time to rethink that strategy!

Talk to you in a couple days.

Grand Teton Photos

View from Our Hotel Room Picture Window

Laura and "A" on yesterday's hike

A grouse (?) we saw while on our hike

View while eating lunch at Jenny Lake Lodge

Prize-winning photo of the Grand Tetons (okay, so we awarded it to ourselves!)

Day 16 -- Grand Teton National Park, 2nd Day

No photos right now, though I have an absolute beauty I want to post -- "A" is hogging up the laptop, so I'm using the lodge's guest computer and can't upload pictures.

We had a nice first half of our day -- going on a nice hike. Then we had lunch at Jenny Lake Lodge -- the nicest inn in the park. We might have wanted to get a room there, but at $900 a night (!!!), we thought better of it.

Lunch was delicious -- trout for Laura, Smoked Salmon sandwich for me, and a gourmet tuna sandwich for "A". Perhaps it sounds mundane, but they were quite the culinary artists.

Then, believe it or not, I had a PJA-related conference call that took an hour and a half and was quite intense. I have not been able to go out of town once in the last number of years without business issues dogging me. Oh well, nothing to worry about, but it led to a weary period which was finally eliminated by the fam coming and sitting in the nice lobby and listening to a nice pianist -- like something from a bygone era.

Don't expect to blog until Friday (though I may sneak in the photos early tomorrow before we leave). It's off to Old Faithful Snow Lodge in Yellowstone for next two days, then on to Salt Lake.

Things That Make No Sense

As we travel through the country, we've laughed a number of times at the things in life that make no sense. Here are a few:

In our Grand Teton Lodge, the grand lobby has a huge 100 foot by 25 foot window overlooking the Tetons, and there is a ton to do in the park. This is a picture taken from the lobby...

Yet, at any hour when you walk in to the lobby, there are dozens of people, who moved heaven and earth to get to this spot, who are busy at work on their laptop computers! (Now, I'm one of them!)

In one of our hotels, there was a nice hot tub. But be careful, as this sign says, the spa hours are strictly enforced! Uh, just what were those hours again?

We thought we were seeing things. Notice the price of regular is listed second at $3.09 and Super gasoline is listed first for only $2.99. We thought this was a trick, yet, as it turns out, many, many gas stations in South Dakota shared this practice. We are guessing that it has to do with an ethanol subsidy which allows them to charge less for the ethanol-enhanced Super vs. the non-ethanol-enhanced regular.

Day 15 -- Grand Teton National Park

We have arrived at Jackson Lake Lodge in Grand Teton! It is a beautiful park lodge. Most of our trip, we have been pretty moderate with our choices of hotels, with most of the hotels costing less than $100.


For a choice few locations, primarily Chicago, Grand Teton, and Yellowstone, we decided to splurge. Mind you, I really mean more of a mini-splurge than what we could have done -- you can pay more than $500/night in some of these park lodges!


Our splurge is for a "cabin" with a wide showcase window directly facing the Grand Tetons. It is beautiful. I had to put cabin in quotes, because it really is much nicer than a basic cabin -- quite nice.


Anyway, enough about the hotel for now. We drove from Cody about an hour to the entrance to Yellowstone. You have to drive through part of Yellowstone to get to Grand Teton from Cody.


The drive from Cody was breathtakingly beautiful -- incredible rocky mountains where the rocks seem to hang just above and about you, pristine streams and rivers, snow capped mountain peaks.


Once inside Yellowstone, it became a bit less pleasant for a while. First, there was the line-up of cars waiting to get in. After we waited through that, we were met just inside the park by a construction project on the access road -- the kind of project where you shut off your engine and just wait and wait.


I tried to be a happy camper, but ultimately became a grouch -- especially once we decided to open our cooler and have a snack while we waited. Our jar of roasted red pepper spread had opened up and had spread all right, all over everything in the cooler. Great, just great!


My sour mood started to drag the others down, but soon enough we got it together and were on our way.

We didn't do a huge amount of sightseeing in Yellowstone, but did stop to take the following pictures of thermal pools in a geyser basin:










We also noted a tremendous amount of the trees in Yellowstone had been lost to the forest fires of a few years ago:


Once in Grand Teton, we headed for the lodge and were treated to some magnificent views. Again, the pictures don't really do justice.



After checking in to our lodge and having a bit of a rest, we went out in search of some wildlife. We had seen a moose off in the distance from our lodge window, and were hoping for a closer spotting. We had no luck with the moose, but did see several buffalo and then saw a mother bear with her three cubs as we passed in the car. They were close, and we were going slowly, so we got a really good look -- no pictures though, sorry.

Our final destination of the day was the town of Jackson, to stroll their shopping streets and have a nice dinner at a restaurant that is more our style than what we've been having -- Thai! Upon leaving the restaurant, we had one of those travel moments that just seem so unreal -- we heard someone calling "A" by name, here in Jackson, Wyoming! It was one of her teachers from SRV, Dawn, who was here on an educational program. What are the chances, yet these things happen so much more often than you would expect. It was great to see her -- what fun!

The Drive to Cody

So, here are the pictures I promised you from the drive from South Dakota to Cody, Wyoming -- more beautiful than the photos tell. (I guess you can see that I do have internet access in our Grand Teton lodge).

Day 14 - Cody

We drove to Cody, Wyoming yesterday -- one of our longer drives of the trip at about 6 hours. And a good chunk of it was not highway driving, but rather winding through the mountains of Bighorn National Forest.

It was a beautiful drive. I have a few photos, but they are in the camera in our Cody hotel room, while I write this outside the main hotel office in the early morning hours. I don't want to go back and wake the fam, so you'll have to wait on the pictures.

Anyway, in addition to being a beautiful drive, it was also a bit taxing both for me as the driver and for "A" and Laura as the "Don't-Get-Sick-Despite-The-Winding" passengers. Accordingly, when we got to Cody, we mostly wanted to rest and didn't really take advantage of what Cody has to offer -- mostly the Buffalo Bill Museum.

Instead, Laura napped while "A" computed and I read. Then, we walked around Cody's main street looking at shops and tasting samples of buffalo sausage, etc. We had an early dinner, a soak in the hotels oversized hot tub, and went to bed early. Hopefully that will give us plenty of energy for our next four nights -- the first two in Grand Teton National Park and the second two in Yellowstone.

It is conceivable that I won't be blogging for all that time, though I'm hoping for at least brief internet access at some point.

One final word about Cody -- which sort of sums up what Cody is like. The "hotel" we are staying at is called Cody Cowboy Village. Hee-Haw!!

Day 13 -- Spearfish Continued

Well, I previously wrote my impressions of Spearfish, so I won't add much here, except to say that we did end up going to the play from which the old movie "gaslight" came. It was fun. "A" gave it 3.5/4 stars. Laura and I enjoyed it too, but the level of the production was somewhere between high school and community theater -- in fact about half the cast were local high school students playing adult roles.

We also drove into the Black Hills, which, like so much of what we've seen, were quite beautiful. Pictures of some waterfalls we saw are below:

Day 12 -- Badlands

Okay, so this is yesterday's news, but here goes.

We drove just 3 hours to get to Badlands National Park, so we had plenty of time to enjoy the park. As the following photos show, it is quite other-wordly and dramatic:

Here are two of me taken by Laura (yes I do exist):

We went on some beautiful and stark hikes and saw lots of wildlife including Bighorn Sheep, Prairie Dogs by the dozens ("A" would desperately like to have one as a pet!), a Rattlesnake (heading away, luckily), and pictured below, a bison:

We really enjoyed out time in the Badlands.

Sorry for the lack of posts/ We're in Spearfish

I am sorry we have been out of blog touch for a couple of days, but we had no internet access while in Badlands National Park. The same will probably happen again when we go to the other national parks in a couple of days, so don't worry (parents, this means you!).

I will post separately about our Badlands experience in a bit hopefully, but in the meantime, thought I would jump ahead to the town of Spearfish, which we are now in, on the western edge of South Dakota.

I wasn't expecting much, other than perhaps some pretty Black Hills scenery nearby. But the town itself was not expected to be very nice. So far, I am happy to report that I was expecting too little.

We pulled into town around lunch time and headed past the highway entrance conglomeration of the usual -- KFC, Subway, Ruby Tuesdays, etc. -- and went into the center of town, Main Street (what else?).

I had read, with a bit of a sense of foreboding as a Jew, that right around Main Street in Spearfish was the locale for one of the significant tourist attractions in Spearfish -- the Black Hills Passion Play, as in the Passion of the Christ. I guess I'm not expecting a synagogue in these small heartland towns, but I do get a bit edgy when the displays of Christianity share too much with Mel Gibson's work.

Anyway, with that as my expectation, I was more than impressed with downtown Spearfish. We had lunch at a Berkeley-cool coffeehouse called "Common Grounds" (sandwiches complete with sprouts and avocado!), visited the large and well-stocked natural foods store, noted that a "Sustainable Living Festival" is taking place in town, and found out about getting tickets to the "other" local play in town -- Angel Street (better known by it's movie title of "Gaslight").

I'm not sure I would want to live in Spearfish, but it actually is a nice place to visit!

We are in the 13th day of our 21 day journey, and about 2/3 across the United States. It really is a beautiful country, and we still have perhaps the highlights of Yellowstone and Grand Teton ahead of us.