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"More, p'ease!" #1

 Going on a trip is not
just going on a trip.  There is

the mail
the dog
the newspapers
the alarm system
the trash can
and the birds.

While we are gone, the birds will have to become seed prospectors,
packing at a mountain of grain.
There would be no one to fill
the hanging feeder.

We are back now, and the seed block, not so rectangular as it was, has become a balancing rock, certain to fall to another side:  slowly, I hope, to allow strategic retreats.

We hitched up the little Casita we bought last summer, which we have several times taken on short and long trips, to travel to Northern California, to meet Eliza and Elliot and Daniel, and with them, to skip up the coast, then into Oregon, finally to Ashland, and then home again.  And we did.  Home again.

Our first day was northwest up through Arizona, and across the state border into California, to Needles.  We had thought it might be nice, after a long winter in Tucson, to thaw a bit, at 111 degrees F., on the edge of the Mohave Desert.

We thawed before the Casita cleared the driveway.

 It is a long, long way from a Joshua tree to a redwood tree, but it is beautiful all the way, and between.  Whether it is recognizing how suddenly the conditions for saguaros or Joshua trees begin and end, or seeing how delicately plants adjust to small and smaller amounts of water, edging snail-slowly to where they can survive, a long trip causes one to appreciate that climate-tampering is a blind-man's game.











We had about 1500 miles to go before we met Daniel and Eliza and their daughter, Elliot, so we drove, not madly, but with purpose, for three-and-a-half days, stopping when appetite and necessity and fancy struck us.  Fancy was frivolous, appetite was random, but necessity was demanding.  One cannot delicately explain to our juniors how comforting it is to be followed always by a small camper with a working toilet and holding tanks, so I shall not do that.

Lunch called to us one day at Lodi, so we took a side road away from the truck stops and biscuits and gravy to a vineyard.  It might not have been an award-winning vineyard, judging by the glass I had for lunch--a red potion with a cute name--but it did have handsome guests; not least Malta, well-behaved at the adjacent table.

Malta was the most decorous diner in a surprisingly boisterous lunchroom.  She said nary a word--a hopeless task, anyway, in an enthusiastic room, among whom were feral children and a tableload of women wearing tiaras, exchanging toasts and hilarities.  

Not far from our first meeting place with the Hubbard-Chen family a-budding again, we stayed at a campground more alive with young families and crew-cab pickups than any place we have yet seen.  

They had a petting zoo, and a fierce tribe of what appeared to be domestic rabbits on-the-run, comfortable even in the midst of a rubber-tired town of trailers and leashed dogs.  Dogs were strictly forbidden to run free:  the rabbits strolled, lazy-hopping where they willed.  

The next day we were to meet our grand-daughter, and--incidentally--her parents--in Westport, California, which was not really a town and not really a port, either, but where Dan and Elliza had rented a house for a couple of days, so we did that, getting up leisurely and late, with time to spare.  




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