Recent Junkets, Boondoggles and Happenings
Short Coastal Cruise January 2020
This was an unheard of short cruise for us. We’ve never done a really long one, but with one exception we’ve never done one less than a week. It was round trip San Francisco, so easy one for us to do. It went down the coast, stopping at San Diego and Ensenada. I booked this…
Teton National Park
We wanted to see moose, so we went South from Yellowstone to Teton National Park where we’d heard the moose hang out. We stayed at Gros Ventre Campground, and that was very nice. We totally got our moose-wish taken care of.
Yellowstone
We did an early morning wildlife tour to Lamar Valley in the yellow bus below. Isn’t that the cutest thing? Tour was great. We got to watch a big, black wolf for a long time through binoculars. Too far away to get a photo but it was a lot of fun watching him strutting around…
Glacier National Park
Glacier is astoundingly beautiful. Not sure what I was expecting, but Glacier exceeded whatever that expectation was. We got some rain there, but it was mostly nice weather. We stayed at Many Glacier Campground in this park. Getting to the campground took some patience, persistence, and sense of humor. There were plentiful potholes, many of…
Mount Rushmore
The day we went to Rushmore was very cold and very windy. The cold part worked out fine for me, since there’s a bucketload of stairs to climb to the overlooks. I can huff up bucketloads of stairs much more successfully on a cold day than a hot one, and there were definitely backloads of…
On the Road
They say that getting there is half the fun. Not sure I agree with that, but on this trip getting there was at least a quarter of the fun. We saw some truly amazing sights. Day Two Back on the road, cat on my lap. It was a perilous journey, but we made it to…
Sierras 2019
In July of 2019, we went on a camping trip to the Sierras. We spent three nights at Eagle Lake, followed by three nights at Almanor South campground. Eagle Lake Best campground ever! I thought so last year, and this year verified it. It’s run by the US Forestry Service, and they keep it up…
Royal Princess 2019
I think of this trip on the Royal Princess as “the cruise where we had the big, fat cabin.” We’ve always booked lower-end cabins (because we’re not rich and I’m cheap), but this time we had a mini suite. The king of all mini suites. There’re four of these on Royal Class ships, all forward…
Return to Bodega Bay
We had such a nice time last year that we decided to return to Bodega Bay for another camping trip. Last trip, we stayed in the Bodega Dunes Campground, which is a State of California campground. This was okay, but there aren’t a lot of sites in that one that would work for us. Is…
Alaska Roadtrip on the Dalton Highway
Day Two
Return to the Dalton Highway After an unspectacular breakfast at Coldfoot, we bailed back into the van to continue our trip on the Dalton Highway. There was a lot of catching up on things, people telling how they spent the evening, how they slept, and how they did not see the Northern Lights. Our comment…
Other Nonsense
Multi-tasking
Do you ever – ever – do only one thing at a time anymore? I’m not sure I do. If I’m doing something, I’m thinking about something else. If I’m doing something else, I’m doing another something else at the same time. I doubt this works all that well, but I can’t seem to figure…
Why You Should Never Clean Your Office
I work from a home office. Really, I do work from a home office. And that home office is nearly always some unholy sinkhole of cluttered awfulness. There’re stacks on stacks. The stacks have married and bred little stacks. About 10 years ago, the cat took over a large portion of my desk and won’t…
The Cosmic Nut Roll
Most people have some kind of theory about where everything came from and where it’s going. Probably, for most people, this involves some kind of creation by some kind of higher power and some kind of universal destination, also guided by that higher power. I’m not a religious person, but I still have a theory….