After Oregon and Ann’s sisters, we made our way south and east. Our route was very fluid, which is the way I like it best. I’m happiest when the plan is largely unplanned, and chance has a chance to work. In a word, serendipity is permitted to be the guide.

A circle of long-ago friends had converged on Palo Alto, California in the salad days of the tech and dot-com boom. They’ve been mostly out of touch, but through facebook we’d reconnected in that pleasant, vague way the social nets work. Doug Kalish had graciously invited us to “drop in” when he’d noticed we were hosting up in Oregon, and so, arriving in California, we did.

Doug was a good friend of my brother (seniors when I was a sophomore in high school), and his wife, Donna,  a classmate of mine, and the best friend of a girl I dated back then. That girl, Vicky Reich, lives in Palo Alto, too,  and hearing that we were visiting, stopped by  with her husband, David Rosenthal, to say hello after the zesty fish tacos Doug and Donna had whipped up for our dinner. Meeting Donna’s sister, Debbie, added to the party. It was great fun to re-connect! ; to see how much and how little life has changed us all;  to see the achievements of truly good people leading fine lives.

The next morning after a breakfast frittata and a bracing walk with Doug, we packed back up and drove north and east to Yosemite National Park. Yosemite proved to be a difficult park to enjoy that day, in part because of its size,  and because it was a “free day”( very crowded!), but also because we got a late start on our way, and had scant time to explore. The dryness of the season, and five years of California drought made for a parched view of Yosemite’s splendors. Feeling frustrated, we climbed out of the valley taking the eastern route at dusk into nightfall, and found a room at Bishop, CA. In the dark, we’d blown on past several points of interest Doug had recommended. The obvious remedy to those omissions and the poor job we made of seeing Yosemite is to return and hike them properly some day soon.

From Bishop, we took Hwy 266, a back road route up and over the mountains that define the western boundary of Death Valley.  This was a twisty and challenging two lane road, and every other car we saw seemed to be a jeep. The landscape was dry, but not barren, and certainly not without bright colors. The road was lined with yellow blossoms of what looked like eastern ragweed to me, but is probably something else. The geology was volcanic, with magma cores, and lots of basalt and obsidian formations. In the distance were bands of rich reds interspersed with white and sand shades.

Driving along we read to each other from ‘Little Heathens’ by Mildred Armstrong Kalish, a gift from Doug written by “Millie”, his mom. It’s rather wonderful; a memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm during the depression. It’s full of details so very similar to my own mother’s stories of childhood in Oklahoma in the same years.

On our way, we took special note of a small cluster of stone block ruins that flashed by on our left as we descended into the heat of Death Valley, itself. Traffic and a sharp curve prevented us from stopping, but we were able to identify the place as Palmetto, Nevada, a twice-failed ghost town from the silver rush days of the territory. Started in the 1860’s, the town was stripped away and moved as the silver ran out. With new silver claims discovered in 1903, the town was rebuilt, but failed again in a few short years.

Our route carried us south, through Las Vegas, where I idly wished for a ‘Museum of Fear and Loathing: A strange and savage commemoration of Hunter S. Thompson’. Alas, there is no such place. We stopped briefly on the shore of Lake Mead, but never caught as much as a glimpse of the Boulder Dam. We finally pulled off of I-40 and on to Route 66 at the town of Seligman, Arizona. Seligman’s special charm derives entirely from the famous road it clings to.

We found an inexpensive room at the Romney Motel. It was clean, and provided everything we required, and offered a discount at Lilo’s Grill, a wonderful family dining experience just five minutes by foot from our digs.  After supper, as we started our walk back, we found the “blood moon eclipse”  rising on the horizon directly in front of our path. It was a fine dessert to top our day crossing the desert.

I’m posting from Jacksonville, Oregon under a waxing moon up a ridge overlooking pine and sage forest. This is the home of one of my sisters-in-law and her husband. It is her birthday and we are having a slow food meal, extended courses of Asian food lovingly prepared by Gary, my brother-in-law. Ann’s family is warm, talkative, and close. Opening Meg’s presents should be hilarious. It’s nice to hang out with them.

The camper which sheltered us in such style over the last two months has been turned over to its new owner, a nice woman from Burlington, Washington. We gave the keys to her in a parking there, and hit the road south on our way to visit with Ann’s three sisters in Bend, Ashland, and here.

Kate, Ann’s youngest sister, is a professional wrangler and horse trainer in Bend.We spent half a day visiting her ranch there. She works in wild horse rescue, and is perhaps the most passionate person about her work I’ve ever met. Every horse she introduced us to was saved from slaughter and the meat packers. (Yes, horse meat is processed hereabouts, for shipment to Europe, mostly.) She is an amazing person.

Sue is Ann’s sister in Ashland, and we lunched with her earlier today, and had the fun bonus of meeting her granddaughter, Ellie, and her mom Gretchen who we hadn’t seen since her wedding three years ago. Many family smiles and hugs were traded over soup and melted cheese sandwiches. Sue is a healthcare professional and educator, with hundreds of patients indebted to her for her skill.

It’s of more than passing interest that there are three mountains overlooking this region, called The Three Sisters: They are called Faith, Hope, and Charity, and they grace western Oregon’s horizon in a line. Ann’s three sisters- Kate, Meg, and Sue, and their families, are beacons for Ann in this region, the heartland of her tribe in the west.

The wished for endgame to our summer-into-autumn on Orcas Island has happened: This morning we found a buyer for The Clipper motor home, and will turn over the keys in TWO DAYS. This was fairly sudden. We didn’t really expect to find a buyer, but Craig’s List and the posters we displayed here and there have been more effective than we expected. I’ve fielded some ten inquiries, and shown the camper three times in just a week.

Yesterday morning, I had a nice chat with a young woman who said to expect a call from her mom later on, and, indeed, her mother rang me up and we chatted for almost an hour about the features and finer points of The Clipper. She rode out this morning from the mainland on the earliest ferry, with daughter and grandson in tow, and graciously listened to my pitch.  Fifteen minutes after that, she put down a deposit on a fair price, and said they’d come back for it on Monday. Pow, just like that! So now we are cheerfully eating everything in the fridge, and thankful that I thought to pick up packing cartons the last time we visited the grocery store.

The road home will take us into Oregon so Ann can visit her sisters, then on into California and Nevada. We expect to see a friend or two passing through Arizona, and will make our way to Plactidas, New Mexico to return our borrowed station wagon. With luck and good weather, we hope to spend a day seeing friends at a Balloon Rallye near Albuquerque. And then it will be time to pack the Comanche, and begin the flight across the south to make our way home to Georgia.

It’s been an amazing time, hiking and serving other hikers here at Moran State Park. I’m very grateful to the Friends of Moran for the chance to do all this, and to Ann for finding the opportunity, as well as encouraging me to jump on board.

As I write this, we are 11 days from leaving Orcas Island. The time has flown by, and we still have a lot to do before we leave. Primary among those items is the decision on how to dispose of the RV if we don’t sell it between now and then. (Day before yesterday, we listed it on Craigslist and posted notices on bulletin boards all over the island.)

We know we can store it here for a reasonable fee, but then what do we do? Try to sell it from afar? Come back and retrieve it? In many ways, selling it before we go makes a lot of sense because that would tie up loose ends, but even then, in my daydreams, I’m trying to find ways to come back to the island. (Family reunion? Retirement? This has been an awesome–in the best sense of the word, full of awe–experience.)

Orcas Island is a phenomenal place. The people–undoubtedly tired of the 800,000 tourists who come traipsing through here each year–have been uniformly gracious and friendly. The scenery–no matter where you look– is spectacular. The lifestyle is thoughtful and mindful, rather than the mindless rushing about of regular life. Crime is almost nonexistent. The arts flourish here. There are no chain stores (well, I did see a NAPA Auto Parts) and, compared to most of our lives, that is no drawback at all.

Stationed up here on top of the mountain, the weather is a little cooler and wetter than I’d like–but I hear it’s warmer and sunnier down at the bottom, so maybe that’s not as much of a drawback as it seems. (We’re looking at five days of cold and rain coming up–naturally, on our days off when we’d like to get things done.) I’d like to do more running–flat, road running, not this trail running nonsense that eats up my knees, both inside and outside–and I’ve seen several gravel paths running through and near town.

I feel a sense of community with this place. I don’t know how well it would stand up to day-in, day-out, year-round living, but I sense it would be abundantly pleasant. Even allowing for the “grass is always greener” effect, it’s far better than the mindless existence so many of us settle for.

But I am only one half of a couple, and it takes two to make things work. I think Elliott agrees with me on much of the above, but perhaps not enough to drop everything and move. And moving might destroy the dream. There are tough decisions to make. What I’d like to do is grab all the people I care about and move them here with me too–but that daydream is unrealistic.

Home is where the heart is, and part of my heart will always be here on the island, no matter where I’m living.