Best Western Adventures

Series 6

MISSO NATION

Heading southeast after passing The Peninsula, we see Horse Mountain on our left, and it is time to start looking for the turnoff to "Misso Nation".

This is the name used to refer to the little ranch of David Porter Misso that he has called home since June 1st, 1974. He is our friend and a local legend. Always a gamble that he's not home--he has not until recently had a telephone in his house and it's about a 50% chance of seeing Misso, since there is never a pre-visit phone call to insure he is home. This time he wasn't, so while leaving a written note for him on his door, what luck!, Misso makes his way down his driveway. Another 5 minutes and we wouldn't have seen him.

Dave Misso has been a friend of the family for as long as my husband remembers, and has been a father figure to my husband himself. Misso has worked for the school in Tulelake for decades, and countless children have grown up remembering him for his unique personality and the way he makes them laugh.

Locally, he is also known for his political involvement and outspokenness. He writes a monthly newsletter, "VINTAGE MISSO", that is mostly dedicated to his ideas on politics and popular culture which he sends to hundreds of households all over the country, perhaps the world. We get our copy monthly and read the updates on what the "Democraps" and "Republicants" are doing lately, as well as what happens to be on Misso's mind regarding celebrities and popular figures. Misso is not afraid to tell the world what he thinks, even though often it may be in the minority view or not fit easily into any category. He tends to favor the Libertarian or Independent party candidates, and in recent years has been running for local political offices.

He is a Vietnam veteran ('70-'71) who supports the soldiers who serve, even though he might not support the war effort itself. The VINTAGE MISSO always includes the latest count on the number of American troops who have died in Iraq.

He is also one of the most well-read people I have ever met, and his library is museum quality. He has arranged the texts by subject and category. I could spend hours reading over here and am always a bit envious of his collection, especially when I saw the section to the right. He has Kerouac, Kesey, Tom Robbins, and Hunter S. Thompson volumes lined up together. I had read all the books he had by those authors except Thompson, whose "Gonzo journalism" is emulated in Misso's writing. Seeing this shelf has inspired me to read more Thompson.

Misso writes over 200 letters a month, and has had letters-to-the-editor published in several prominent magazines, most recently National Geographic. My husband enjoys collecting the magazines and having Misso autograph his copy.

Technicially, we should refer to his as Reverend David P. Misso, since he has been an ordained minister since 1976. He has officiated at over 100 services, including many of my husband's family's, and recently performed his first same-sex union (allowed by recent California same sex marriage ruling). Since we had our marriage in Texas, he did not officiate, but contributed a lovely poem for the service which we still have a copy of.

He also, until very recently, continued to live "off the grid", without electricity or a running toilet. In the past few years, Misso Nation has experienced some changes, and we no longer have to use the compost toilet when we visit.

We always drop by when we are out in the area, so of course we made no exceptions on this trip. There is always a walk around the inner perimeter to see the latest additions to the farm and engage in outdoor activities. This time Misso gave Kaleb a bubble blower and they spent some time making bubbles.

Although we just dropped in on him, Misso spent a couple of hours with us visiting. We have lots of memories visiting him here. There is always something special about it, whether it is eating hamburgers under a shady tree, hanging out in the sweat lodge late at night, or lighting the candles on his Christmas tree.

Speaking of Christmas, he has dressed as Santa Claus for over two decades, visiting children at homes, schools, and indoor/outdoor functions throughout the Klamath Basin. In fact he once performed a Christmas marriage dressed as Santa, and he officiated a ceremony dressed as Richard Nixon on a Halloween night, with the entire attendence (husband and wife included) dressed in various costumes. Only Misso!

THANKS FOR A GREAT VISIT, MISSO, AND WE HOPE TO SEE MORE OF YOU SOON!

Best Western Adventures
Series 5

LAVA BEDS NATIONAL MONUMENT MUSINGS

After having lunch in Klamath, it was time to head out to see my husband's family. We decided to take the long way home, though, after agreeing to do some light geocaching and visiting with friends along the way.

We were on the southwest edge of town when we decided this, and we headed out to our favorite road in town, Hill Road. Hill Road runs roughly north to south, starting along the western edge of Klamath Falls, OR and running all the way to the Lava Beds National Monument in Modoc County, California.

The reason I say that Hill Road is our favorite is because there is this little red farmhouse on the California side that we used to always say we wanted to live in. We used to drive down that road and wait, wait for it, then "oh, there it is, there's our house!" as we would pass it. Every time I would have visions of homesteading on that little piece of property, and my husband would start extolling its virtues. We were always so busy looking on the left hand side of the road at "our house" that we never noticed what was on the right hand side.

Today, though, we had our GPSr, and I was tracking geocaches. We had already made one find on the northern end of Hill Road, and here we were, passing "our" house, as I see that we are coming up on another geocache, one entitled Yet Another War.

I kept thinking from the name that this one was going to be in the Lava Beds itself, and was named for the Modoc-Indian Wars that happened out here (see the story about Captain Jack). . However, it was instead at a place my husband had never noticed before in all the years he had spent living out in this area, Camp Tulelake, where German POWs were held during World War II.

There is a more well known camp in nearby Newell, CA, which housed Japanese prisoners. Some of those prisoners, who refused to answer a loyalty questionnaire in 1943, were moved to this facility. A year later, this site housed around 800 German prisoners. Originally, though, and for the longest duration, it served as a Civilian Conservation Corps camp. Most of the original buildings have been razed but this area is maintained as a National Historic Site.

After this find, we passed through the wildlife refuge and into the Lava Beds. Ahead of us loomed "The Peninsula" which lays across the highway from the Japanese internment camp in Newell. On the face of the long straight front of this is a white cross, visible from the highway. It is a reminder of the several Japanese prisoners who, facing a life without honor, flung themselves down the cliff face to their death during this time.

We like to think these things would never happen in this country again, things like the "Trail of Tears" and the forcing of Native Americans on to reservations, and of forcing American citizens who happened to be of an original nationality of the countries we were fighting in World War II to live in harsh, punitive conditions in remote areas of the country. Many of these prisoners had their property stolen from them, and although after the war the government allowed the citizens to apply for compensation, by then the IRS had destroyed the tax records that allowed them to prove their claim.
But then, today we have Quantanamo Bay. We have prejudices and discrimation against people who appear to us like Taliban. A cousin of my close friend, whose family had to flee their native Iran when the Shah was overthrown in 1977, told me a story recently about being taken into custody and harassed by police officers in College Station because they suspected he was working with "the enemy". I only hope we can continue to maintain an attitude of tolerance and acceptance without losing our vigilence against the people who really intend to do our country harm. It is well that we keep in mind the text written on the plaque that stands in front of the abandoned Tule Lake Relocation Camp in Newell:

"Tule Lake was one of ten American concentration camps established during World War II to incarcerate 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, of whom the majority were American citizens, behind barbed wire and guard towers without charge, trial or establishment of guilt. These camps are reminders of how racism, economic and political exploitation, and expediency can undermine the constitutional guarantees of United States citizens and aliens alike. May the injustices and humiliation suffered here never recur."

Geez, I didn't mean to get all bogged down in historical information here. It was just the close proximity of the Lava Beds to both a political injustice reminder and the historical remnants of an Indian war got me thinking, you know? It sure is beautiful out here, though, and someday I want to come back and explore more of the caves and trails in the Lava Beds National Monument. This day and this trip, however, we were on to further adventures down the road.

Best Western Adventures

Series 4

BEND BUGS

We finally reached Bend around 11 pm. This night, we had no trouble with our reservations. I volunteered to bring up the suitcases and when I came back in the hotel room, all three dudes were fast asleep on the beds, fully clothed. It looked like they had just fallen down on the beds. I didn't blame them. After so much traveling and so little sleep, I was pretty worn out, too.

That morning is one of the brightest memories of the trip, a little glittering moment to hang on to. I wish I had taken a picture to remember it by but it really was such a mundane thing that seemed so awesome to me. It was an open window in the bathroom, and smelling, feeling that cool, crisp mountain air, and seeing the Three Sisters, still covered with snow, in the near distance. The above picture is the closest approximation, courtesy of Flickr.
I was so eager to use a computer that I got up before everyone and raced down to the hotel lobby so I could log my (four) finds from yesterday and virtually drop my travel bugs before someone else picked them up. The APE cache gets hit about five times a day, so travel bugs and geocoins will move very quickly there, and the owners of such items are typically very concerned about accurate movements and mileage.

After everyone had their fill of fruit, muffins, and orange juice, it was time to do a little geocaching before leaving town. My husband was getting really antsy to get to his hometown, so I took another hit in the interest of time and scaled back to the bare minimum caches I wanted to get before leaving town.

The main geocache I wanted to get to was called Area 51. The reason I was particularly intrigued by this one is because our first travel bug reached its mission by being placed in this cache. I talked about this in my "Travel Bug Feature #1" blog entry. Our travel bug actually sat in this geocache for over six months before being picked up about six weeks before our arrival by Reeking Marauders, who said they were taking it to Idaho and then back to Bend. This picture is a view from the geocache that was uploaded by another finder.

The cache was actually an ammo can hidden in a rocky outdropping on top of a little hill in a very odd location. Only the littlest one wanted to go out looking for it with me, but he got freaked out by his surroundings and wanted to be carried up the hill, and boy, was I really feeling the effects of my mountain hike the day before. My legs felt like jello as I was carrying that two year old up the mild hill.

I was hoping to find some travel bugs, but the ones that were listed in the geocache were actually not really there. This is exactly why it is important to log trackable movements quickly and accurately. Even so, I left one of the geocoins I brought from Texas there.

After this, we drove north through the center of Bend to one last cache, one called Travel Bug Village. I was hoping to grab some more travel bugs to bring back with me to Texas. There were about six trackables listed in the cache on the website, but only three in the cache when I found it. I was disappointed that none of them were ones that I could really assist on their mission. I took two of them anyway, one that wanted to go to California then Florida (gee, should have had this one two months ago, right?) and another that wanted to see the great mountain ranges of the west.

I had planned on taking Highway 20 east out of town, heading straight for the in-laws. My husband, however, had other plans. He really wanted to head straight for Klamath Falls, the town he considers home and where most of his family and friends live.

I had not planned on taking that route, and therefore, had no caches loaded for this leg of the trip, but I decided to roll with it and instead concentrate on a food fantasy. We lived outside of Klamath Falls for a year, and then actually in town for two years, and I missed some of my favorite Pacific Northwest eateries. We had been having this running conversation about these places, the places you never see anywhere else, and I thought good and hard about which one I wanted to have lunch at.

Two or three hours later, we were sitting in Abby's Pizza, having lunch with my husband's best friend, his new wife, and the children. And boy, was it good.....

Best Western Adventures

Series 3

THE CROSSING OF THE COLUMBIA

After hiking for three hours doing the APE cache, we were all starving. No one had eaten since "brunch" that morning. We headed for the first food place we saw, a Burger King in Cle Elum. If anyone finds themselves headed east out of Cle Elum, don't do what we did. I don't even know what we did but somehow we had no choice but to go west on I-90 and it took a few miles to get turned around.

I had wanted to grab some caches in Ellensburg, but we missed those exits, too, and by then we really just needed to make up some time. We could tell we were getting closer to Yakima, WA, when we started seeing camoed Humvees traveling on the other side of the highway. Yakima boasts a large Army training center, and as a matter of fact, when we lived in Oregon, my husband was sent there for his annual training. It is a high desert area, so he remembers it being hot during the day and cold at night.

Yakima was completely different than I thought it would be. We get our apples at work from Yakima, so I had this impression of it as a shady orchard type area of Washington. That couldn't be farther from reality. I saw no trees in our visit to Yakima, nor much shade.

We stopped at a rest area near the training center and I found the cache there, near an overlook into a gaping canyon. My hair was blowing so wildly that it was hard to keep it out of my eyes to search for the cache. Luckily it wasn't hard to find - there was nothing to hide it behind. I also found a benchmark about 100 feet north of the cache, but since the website shows the nearest benchmark as 1.3 miles west, I have no idea how to log this benchmark find.

Heading south from Yakima towards Highway 97, we stopped through the town of Toppenish, which has a strong Native American history. The town boasts 55 murals on various buildings celebrating the history of the Native Americans. These pictures were on the side of the gas station we stopped at to try to get some beer. My husband wanted me to take a turn at the wheel while he chilled out. Apparently you can't buy beer in Toppenish. Must be a (high and) dry county.

Continuing south on 97 headed for Bend, OR, where we dream of living someday, we could see several mountain peaks to the right. We were having an ongoing debate about which mountains they were, until we saw this sign:

That kinda cleared things up for us. Turns out I was right about all of them except Mt Adams. That was the one mountain I didn't recognize, mostly because I had never heard of it before.

My favorite view of this trip was seeing Mount St Helens.

At this point, we started to descend into a valley and lose elevation. The sun was beginning its slow descent, and so was the eighteen wheeler in front of us. He must have been a rookie driver, because he was riding his brakes the entire time going downhill. We really enjoyed smelling his brakes burning, and kept playing leapfrog with him the way down into the Columbia River valley.
Suddenly, on the left side, we could see the Columbia River, running west towards Mt Hood.
We drove on into, and then over, it, and just like that, we were in Oregon. It felt like coming home.

Best Western Adventures

Series 2

THE GREAT A.P.E. EXPERIENCE
somewhere near Snoqualmie Pass, WA
July 23, 1:40 pm

There are two ways to approach the Project APE geocache, otherwise known as Mission 9: Tunnel of Light. Most people take the Hyak tunnel to the cache, which involves walking 2.3 miles one way through a spooky dark old tunnel and then about a half mile further up an old gravel road from there. I decided not to approach it from that direction because even though it sounded cool, we had two young children with us who could not walk that far. Maybe if we had a stroller with us for the littlest one -- but my husband vetoed that idea and said we could just stick with my alternate plan, which was to take the Annette Lake trail.

One of the recent loggers of the cache had stated in his log that the cache was only 0.9 miles from his parking spot at the Lake Annette trailhead. Sure enough, when we parked at the Asahel Curtis parking lot, the GPSr read "0.9 mi" from Mission 9. The oldest child had already begun whining because he wanted to get to his grandparents, and we were kind of stressing because we had been unsuccessful in our attempts to buy a Northwest Forest parking permit.

"Oh come one, it's only 0.9 miles, it's not that far, let's just hurry on up there."

So, our journey up the Lake Annette trail begins. We are barely into the trail when I first ask my husband if we should still do this, or if he wants to wait with the youngest one, whom he is helping up the rocky trail. Already I can see the trail is more than we had anticipated, with an uphill climb along a rocky trail with numerous switchbacks. We aren't really prepared for this kind of journey, but he urges me ahead.

"Come on, it's only 0.9 miles, we are already here, let's do it!"

He tells me to go on ahead with the oldest, and he will take it slow in the rear, helping the youngest over the rocks and carrying him when needed. We cross over a bridge in front of a waterfall. The forest changes slightly, and then we cross through a greenbelt area, and then the forest changes again. I wish I knew more about trees so I could describe the difference. I would say one was an old growth forest and another was new growth. Each switchback would take us far out to another side, and then back, and none of our movements up were making any difference in the distance (remember, GPSr's only read "as the crow flies" to each waypoint). My husband would call my cell phone, "How far now, babe?" and my disappointed reply was always "We're still 0.9 miles!" I would call him to see if he thought we should back out - we didn't have enough water with us, I was worried about the children, worried it would become too much for him to carry the little one so far - but each time he urged me to "press on, we're fine, we're doing it, keep going". We had to stop for breathers because already the older son was complaining that his legs were tired, or his lungs were hurting, he needed breaks. Still my husband had not caught up to us on the trail, until the last bit.

Halfway up the trail, reception was out on my GPSr, so I had no idea how far we were, which was probably for the best. I had gotten tired of seeing the needle not changing. However, once we got to the break on the trail, which let us out on a gravel road, my husband wanted to know if he needed to start looking for the cache. I had no idea, but I thought we needed to travel east along the road now. So we began walking and I was looking for clear spots in the trees, a spot of sunshine, so I could get reception back on the receiver.

Finally I got it back, and the compass showed another 0.65 miles to go! My husband took the receiver from me and began running down the road, doing recon. He was worried we might lose reception again at a critical point, and our progess was being hampered by the kids at this point. The youngest child loves wildflowers, and he had to stop and touch (and taste) every flower he saw. The other one was tired already.

So my husband went ahead and made the find, but then he left the cache in its hiding spot so that we could all make the find on our own. He came back out into the road and waved at us so we knew how far to go. It looked like it was way down the road, but al least knowing there was an endpoint was reassuring. I started a race with the children - "let's all run to Daddy!" and even the little one was running and laughing.

We finally got there, and I saw what looked like a normal ammo can lying under the "cacher's tell", an unusual pile of rocks and wood. I began to pull it out and that is when I realized this was no ordinary cache. It was, in fact, the largest ammo can I have ever seen!

The kids and my husband immediately started going through the bugs and trackables while I took pictures of my travel bugs, my Project APE coin with the one that lives in the cache, and the original logbook from 2001, open to the first entry. I wanted to discover all the trackables in the cache, but the kids were throwing them around here and there so I just started trying to put them back in the baggie and put things back in the can. I dropped a travel bug and geocoin I was carrying, plus one of my own, and took two coins and a travel bug from the cache. Then we made sure every item was back inside the can and then slid it back in the hiding place, which was just right there off the road, and put the rocks and wood back in place, making sure every part was concealed so that the cache would be safe from muggles (muggles: geospeak for people who are not geocachers and may steal or damage the geocache if they accidentally find it).

It was now 3:45 pm, and we began our trek back to the car. The little one was very sleepy now, so my husband picked him up and carried him the entire way down the gravel road, back to the trailhead, and all the way down the mountain trail back to the car. In flip-flops, no less. He deserves some kind of medal for that one, and I made sure to make his vacation as stress-free as possible after that. We got a laugh as we went down and he would ask "how much farther?" and I would casually answer "oh, only about 0.9 miles!" It was the punchline that never ended on this journey.

We were passed along the trail by more uber-hikers, carrying trekking poles and wearing expensive breathable, lightweight clothing, and carrying nice hiking packs. We were woefully inadequately prepared for our journey, but it turned out to be okay. It only took us 45 minutes to get down the mountain and back to our car. At 4:30 pm, we reach our car, with no ticket on the windshield or any other issues from not having the correct parking permit. We began driving out of the area, passing the most scenic waterfall coming off the mountain ahead as we drove along. We were only one hour out of Seattle now and needed to make up some time on the road in order to reach Oregon, and Bend, by the nightfall. I had bookmarked about 30-40 caches for this part of my journey, but I let us pass most of them by, only getting two more along the road when it was handy to stop.
On our journey through Washington State, I was reminded of something my father had said to me when he helped me move from Texas to Colorado.

"If it doesn't work out here, you can always remember this as some kind of grand vacation."

At the time, the comment made me angry, because my parents had been very concerned I would not be able to make it on my own so far away from them. I thought it expressed doubt in my ability to take care of myself. Sometimes, though, when I describe my time in Colorado, it does sound like some kind of grand vacation that didn't work out, although maybe not for the reasons they were worried about.

This, however, this moment, I felt that line and understood it. I didn't know what the result of my interview in Everett was going to be, but if it didn't work out, I would always remember this as some kind of grand vacation. Driving down I-90 in the mountainous area, I felt such bliss. I was absolutely happy listening to Bob Marley on the radio and surrounded by such natural beauty. Getting the APE cache....well, that was just the icing on the cake, a very fancy icing that you know will cost you something (in this case, time, and more caching), but a memory to look back on and savor. Finding this cache....it was rich, and it set the tone for our grand vacation.

Best Western Adventures

Series 1

No Room at the Inn

Everett, WA

Late night arrival

Long wait for bags and car

Call the hotel to say

We are on our way

"What's that you say?

You gave away our room?

No more rooms left?"

As a matter of fact

All the rooms in Seattle and Everett are gone

A fact we learn from stopping at one, two, three, four, five hotels "You'll have to go to the Casino. They still have rooms."

Twelve miles up ahead
Stuck in odd midnight traffic jam

Roadwork under the light of the moon
Take the last room at the last hotel

Sometime after midnight

Late night Kid Fest

Can't get no rest

Early to rise

Early to interview

Then the wait makes me late

Long interview
Tired

Taco Time tacos three times the cost!

In this town, everything is
Oregon, here we come

Leaving Everett in the rear view

Going, Going, GONE!
And they're out of here!
The bags are being packed. Reservations are being made. Preparations being completed. To-do lists checked off.
In just a few days, we are leaving for an action-packed family adventure, Pacific Northwest style. Internet connectivity will be sporadic where we are going, so it will probably be about two weeks before any stories or pictures will be posted. I can't wait to share this adventure with everyone.
First stop: Everett, Washington for a job interview. If the money is right and they are willing to wait some months, I will probably accept the job offer. We really feel like this is the direction God is taking us in and fully expect to be moving to Washington State at some point in the near future. Our friends know how long we've been talking about moving out that way; now let's see if I can hit that home run to get us out of the ballpark.
Second stop: The A.P.E cache! Oh yeah, baby!
For those non-geocachers out there, the A.P.E. geocache is the "Holy Grail" of caching in the continental United States. In 2001, when geocaching was in its first year, the movie Planet of the Apes came out. As part of a marketing promotion, the movie trailers would display, at the very end, a set of coordinates that lead one to a very special geocache filled with lefover props, costumes, and effects from the movie filming. These were known as Project A.P.E. caches. There were fourteen original Project APE caches, but there is only one still active in the United States, and it happens to lay along the highway that we (ahem) "need" to take to get from the Seattle area to southern Oregon, home of the in-laws. This cache requires a hike along a trail in the Cascades, pictured above. Once the find is logged online, a geocacher gets a very special electronic icon. Let's see if we can get this little guy on our profile!

After this, it will be a long road trip through central Washington and Oregon to the in-laws in New Pine Creek, on the California border. We will probably stop overnight in Bend, OR, which is the little town my husband loves so much. There will be much geocaching. I have about 170 caches bookmarked for this trip, including some very old caches near the in-laws house, and covering three states. In fact, my husband is quite suspicious that this trip has less to do with the job interview and the family visiting and more to do with adding to our player stats!
After spending a week with family, perhaps in and out of Klamath Falls where we used to live, we will be criss-crossing our inbound path on a shorter outbound road trip to Portland, OR. On the way, we will pass by the town of Goverment Camp, at the base of Mt Hood. There are some cool caches out that way.
Oh, and on the way, along the stretch of highway that we (ahem) "need" to take back, just happens to lay the site of the very first geocache ever placed. In May of 2000, Dave Ulmer hid a bucket in the woods southeast of Portland and started this addicting game that has drawn, last count I heard, 1.5 million players, with 1000 new people joining the site every day. The "Original Stash" is no longer there, but there is a plaque at the site commerating the occasion with an ammo can nearby. This is a cache find itself and happens to be the most logged cache in the world, with, as of today, 1933 logged finds. I want to grab this one while in the area and add my name to the list, as well as the other nearby cache, the Un-Original Stash. Check out this path you walk along to get to it. It is so beautiful!
Currently I am a bundle of nerves. I am so excited to be making this journey through an incredibly beautiful part of this country. I am very worried about flying. My aerophobia has increased to a point where I can only grip the seat handles, break out in a cold sweat, and pray the whole time, and I can't look out the windows anymore. I am a little anxious about the job interview, only because so much seems to rest on it.
Mostly, though, I just can't wait to start following the needle on my compass through cool mountain paths like this one, hunting ammo cans filled with travel bugs.
I will post updates as soon as I can get them out there. Can't wait!

AGGIE ENGINEERING

It's a soft sunny summer evening in suburban Spring, and couples are sitting in chairs in open garages watching the world go by. I jog by one of these houses and a man nods at me.

"That's a pretty good idea you got there."

"Works pretty good!" I say. I jog on down the street, around the corner, then another corner, and yet another. A blonde woman in a sundress is unloading a pack of children from a minivan. She notices me coming and stops a moment.

"That's a nice piece of engineering you have there!" she says with a smile.

"It works pretty good." I say.

"Looks like it. That's a good idea!"

"Thanks! I like it."

Such a simple solution for a complicated problem. Who knew a leather dog leash would prove to be the thin line between procrastination and proactivity?

When I am in the "exercise zone", I always feel very frustrated with people who make excuses for why exercise doesn't fit into their life. I found myself in the position where I was making the same kind of excuses over the past year.

As a former girl jock, I always exercised because I wanted to. As a side benefit, it may have improved my appearance and given me inner and outer strength, but it was always motivated by the desire for activity and enjoyment. Exercise was something I wanted to do, not something I had to do. I haven't ever seen exercise as something imperative to my health until just this past year.

During my first pregnancy, I gained forty pounds, and due to life situation and a battle with depression, it took me three years to gain the inner fortitude to shed the baby weight. It took about a year of hitting the gym and counting calories, so I didn't want to let that hard work go. I had finally got to a weight lower than when I met my husband and was in a good place physically when I got pregnant again. This time I was determined to keep the weight gain to a minimum and get back to pre-baby shape as soon as possible afterwards. I exercised up until the last month of my pregnancy and began an exercise program a month after my baby was born.

It was going great the first six months or so. I worked nights and my husband worked mornings, so I had time to go spend two hours at the gym or run with the dogs most days of the week. I spent most of my children's waking hours with them, so I had no guilt about leaving for "My Time" spent exercising. I was halfway to my goal of reaching my pre-baby weight.

About a year and a half ago, I switched jobs, and now I have a one hour commute through rush hour traffic both ways. I spent eleven hours of my day five days a week away from home while somebody else is raising my kids. It is a great job and I don't regret the opportunity, but I have to accept some losses. From the time I get home until bedtime, I have four hours to spend with my children. I am not about to spend one or two of those hours in "My Time". That is way too much guilt for me to deal with. Our time together is always much too short and punctuated with homework, dinner, playtime, baths, and bedtime stories.

Between this guilt, the end of breastfeeding, and hitting the over 30 metabolism slowdown, I was beginning to feel the effects. Then my husband switched jobs and suddenly he was frequently working out of town or late hours, and getting out of the house for exercise became a remote possibility. We got rid of our gym membership because we just weren't going anymore. The dogs became lawn ornaments and had dim memories of what leashes were for. Suddenly, my clothes were getting tight, and only a quarter of my wardrobe was actually wearable.

This was becoming a problem. Through it all, I became increasingly concerned about my heart and the state of my health. I realized I was becoming one of those people I could never understand. I was making excuses for why I couldn't fit exercise in.

I tried to start dancing at night again (don't laugh, I swear this was responsible for at least twenty pounds I lost when my husband was in Iraq), but the stereo was broken and I am probably the only girl in the twenty first century without an Ipod. I tried running alternate sprints, jogging and walking from mailbox to mailbox while my children played outside, but the toddler wanted to join me and, well, he toddled. He either cried about being left behind or fell down and got ow-wies. I tried jumping rope but after having two kids...this just doesn't work (right, Rachael?).

Then I started thinking. I might not have gotten an engineering degree, but I did go to A&M. I should be able to come up with a system for running with my kids, hands-free. The toddler has no patience for the stroller anymore. That's out. He does love to ride in his red wagon, though. Who can run while pulling a red wagon with one hand, though? Of course, you could say, why run, just walk with it. This goes back to the argument Dr Boynton and I used to have about whether or not you burn the same number of calories walking the same distance as you do running. I still say no. It is fun, but it takes me twice as long and I swear it does nothing for me. I need to get my heart rate higher than that.

I experimented a few times before I got it just right. Drop the loop end of the leather dog leash through the handle of the wagon, run the clip end through the loop, then pull this tight across the waist until the end of the handle rests snug up against the lower back, then fasten the clip to the closest length of leash and there you are, hands-free. This way I can use my arms and keep my body aligned the way I need to to get a good strong push while I run. The older child can ride his bike alongside us.

I started doing this a few months ago when my husband was out of town, and it made me feel empowered. It made me feel like I was strong enough to get up and stop making excuses, that I could find a way to exert power over my own body, my own life. It made me feel free again. Now I am in the zone, trying to beat my best times on the courses I set through my neighborhood long ago, when the dogs and I used to run during my lunchtimes.

I might be tied up, but I am no longer tied down. "Yeah!" my little one says when I ask if he wants to ride in the wagon. "Whee!" he yells when I go fast. Together, we go into the suburban night. Together, we are free.

Whee!

WASHERS

Yesterday morning on the Rob Ryan show, they were talking about the game of washers. Rob Ryan was saying he thinks that game was invented in Texas, and there is some kind of washer tournament coming up that he was trying to put together a team for.

I've never played washers, but I know what he is talking about. My memory took me back along the path of association to the dusty little town of Alpine, Texas, where pronghorn antelope graze on the hills surrounding the campus of Sul Ross State University, where my boyfriend of years ago was a student. It was evening, almost twilight, and we were standing on a hill in this backyard of a friend of his. My boyfriend was slowly and carefully tossing the little silver washers, about the size of a quarter, at a target at the other end of the yard. He was explaining to me how the game worked, and how he and his friends would come out here and play, and then I saw it, the dark cloud that passed over his face as he struggled to get a grip on his emotions.

This thing has happened and it cannot be undone.

The day before this, I had come home from college to spend my birthday weekend with my mom. She and I had gone out for barbeque, and we were just laying out the fixings for sandwiches when the phone rang. It was my boyfriend's father, and I could tell from the tone of his voice that something was wrong.

"There's been an accident," he said. My heart lept into my throat. "Noah's okay, but he's in the hospital." Then there was a pause. And? But? What? Then I thought of the giddy phone conversation the night before, how one of our high school friends had come to Alpine to visit Noah, how they were so excited about their plans to drive to Mexico the next day, this day...

"How's Brandon?" I asked.

"Brandon died."

I dropped the phone and walked off a few steps, hand over my mouth. My mother, hearing the clickety clack of the reciever on the ground, looked up. "What's going on?", she asked, as she came over to me. I couldn't talk, though, and just gestured to the phone. She got on the phone and there was a lot of "yes, yes, of course", and then she tells me to grab my things, that Noah's parents are coming to get me and we are driving to Alpine now.

We drove all night, the four of us packed in that little car under the stars. His mom and brother slept in the backseat while his dad and I tried to stay awake. I am sure I was driving them crazy singing along to the Indigo Girls, and finally when I hit a skunk in the wee hours of the morning and not only stunk up the car but got guts on the tires, they had it with me driving. We ran low on gas as the sun was coming up and waited in Fort Stockton at the only gas station along the highway for two hours before the man came to open the place. He wasn't surprised to see us at all, so I am sure he was used to customers doing that same thing (it is a desolate piece of highway).

We got to the hospital in Alpine mid-morning. As we walked in, I knew, I could tell, this experience changed him forever. His journal lay on a table in the hallway when we first walked in, and I flipped through the last few pages, and what he wrote in there brought agony to my heart. He was in the bed, bare-chested, but still wearing the torn and bloody jeans from the wreckage. I wasn't sure what to say to him, so I just curled up on the bed next to him, laying my ear in the hollow of his chest where it had always fit so perfectly. We used to lie in each other's arms like that all the time, and I would listen to his heart beat inside his chest and it felt like an extension of my self. This time, I was expecting it to sound different somehow, like the change he had gone through in his soul would be evident in his body. It sounded like the same old heart, and somehow that comforted me, made me think he was still there.

That day, he kept trying to bring the framework of his former life over his life now. He showed me his dorm room. This was only one month into our freshman year and we had been burning up the phone lines staying in touch, but we hadn't really gotten to show each other our new lives. He introduced me to his friends. We ate lunch in the campus cafeteria.

On the way out of the cafeteria, we ran into a woman who had been the first one on the scene of the accident. She happened to be an EMT as well, so that was helpful, only there was nothing she could do. While Noah turned away to talk to someone, she asked me how he was doing. She told me about driving up to the wreck, of seeing Noah running into the road in those same torn and bloody jeans to flag her down. He was asking her with desperation in his voice to please come help his friend. She had gone over to Brandon, but knew immediately it was too late. He had suffered a traumatic brain injury and had died on impact. The others who had been in the car with them had all suffered catastrophic injuries as well, and were life-flighted to the nearest major hospital. The details she gave are seared into my memory and created a visual picture for me of those desperate moments.

Later that afternoon, we are driving to his friend's house whose backyard we were playing washers in. We were still trying not to talk about it, try not to dwell on this recent tragedy, and we were singing along with the radio when "Spirit in the Sky" came on. I still can't really listen to that song without that connection, and tears welling up in my eyes.

So we are out there in the yard, and Noah is throwing the washers, and stops, realizing that this life he is showing me is now a past. There is now Before the Accident and After the Accident, and this moment is somewhere in between, the transition. I see the anguish in his face and it kills me inside.

"What can I do for you?" I ask him. "How can I help you?"

At first he gives me a one word answer, and it doesn't make sense.

"Time" he says.

"You just have to give me some time to get over this."

Of course. We were young and time went on forever. I could give him that. During the darker moments, later on, when he was self-medicating and pushing me away, I wondered. How much time is enough? I really wanted to know. I wanted someone to tell me. How much is enough? He went to counseling, took medications, but still he struggled, and we struggled. He was like Humpty Dumpty, and I was not all the Kings horses and all the Kings men. I was just a girl.

I was just a girl who was going to school many many miles away from him, and who was meeting new people and experiencing new things. I was a girl in a new life that became my life that he had little part in. Four years went by while we saw each other less and less, while the phone calls petered off, while we grew apart in our seperate cities with our seperate friends. No matter how much I had loved him, it was not enough to conquer time, time spent apart, time spent healing. Time was not on our side.

A few years ago, Noah and I were talking about that time, and he answered the question that no one knew the answer to until after it was over - how much was enough time? Turns out it was about eight years, he said. That's how much time he felt it took before he started putting his life back together again and moving forward.

Now it's been almost fourteen years since The Accident, and Noah is back in Alpine. I hope he is throwing his washers now and not trying not to think about it. I am sure he has other things to think about now. But I think about it, I think about us, and how we were like one of those perfect throws that falls in the dust just short of the target, and everyone says "ooo, that was so close." And we were. Before that time. A part of me will always love him, and he will always be dear in my heart, and my memories of him make me smile, like the song we once said was ours.

Think of me, think of me fondly

When we've said goodbye

Imagine me, once in a while

Please promise that you'll try

FOURTH OF JULY Let the fireworks begin....

Our July 4 holiday we spent the evening hanging out with the neighbors The kids had a lot of fireworks.

I was experimenting with the camera Some kind of timing issue. Little one got scared.

The man across the street kept talking.
He had a lot to say.
He didn't want to stop
The next day I told my husband
how ole Steve was talking so much the night before.
My husband says, "Oh yeah, I forgot to warn you, ole Steve likes to talk."
"Kinda like someone else I know,"
he kidded, and then said he knew that it would be a showdown between the two champion talkers.
"That's why I wasn't saying anything"
he says,
'I was just gonna put you next to each other
And
Just
Watch
the
Fireworks. "

Grateful Dead founding member

Bob Weir talks about Neal Cassady

in this recent interview...check it out....

http://www.motortrend.com/features/consumer/112_0806_grateful_dead_bob_weir_celebrity_drive/index.html

Excerpt from page 3:

On the road (or streets of San Francisco) with Neal Cassady

One memorable trip of a different sort occurred during the halcyon days of San Francisco's psychedelic era in the 1960s. Weir recalls with fondness some time he spent in a car with Neal Cassady, an icon of the Beat generation.
Cassady was friends with fellow Beat legend Jack Kerouac, who wrote the seminal American novel, "On the Road." The book, in Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness style, was based on their travels, with Cassady as the wild driver Dean Moriarty. In the 1960s, Cassady also drove the bus for author Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.
Beyond being the tale of a great American road trip, "On the Road" has become a bible for countless artists, poets, and musicians, including Weir. Cassady inspired Weir to write two Dead songs -- "Cassidy" and "The Other One" with his lyrics, "There was cowboy Neal at the wheel of the bus to never-ever land."
"Truman Capote says of Kerouac's writing, 'That's not writing, that's typing,' Weir laughs as he mimics Capote's high-pitched voice. "But it rang my bells. It inspired me to leave home for good -- to pursue music. Cassady was quite a figure in American history. Jack Kerouac became enamored of Neal Cassady and rightly so. I won't call him a saint, but he was something."
Neal Cassady. Photo courtesy Herb Green
While "On the Road" had a profound effect on Weir, when he met the book's hero, he wasn't so much starstruck as he was intent on taking it all in. "I got over it pretty quick because every moment was new and fresh," Weir says. "I wasn't busy thinking this was a big deal; I was busy just in wonderment of what was happening."
The depiction of Weir's drives with Cassady sounds familiar to Kerouac fans -- like a page ripped right from the book. Cassady drove a maroon 1964 Oldsmobile F-85 with a V-8 named George, while Weir rode shotgun, careening through the streets of San Francisco. The car belonged to Sue Swanson, a high-school classmate of Weir's, who became the first Deadhead and worked on and off for the band for 30 years.
There was a superhuman quality about Cassady when it came to driving through crowded city streets that amazes Weir to this day. "He defined the term synchronicity -- he was at all places at all times and right here at the same time. I used to ride around the city with him in San Francisco, and he could drive through rush hour traffic at 55-60 miles an hour, never stopping for a red light, never stopping for a stop sign, the wrong side of the street, on the sidewalk, all that kind of stuff. Never hit anything. And he could see around corners."
Long before "multitasking" became vogue, Cassady was king of multitasking in the car. "And all the time he was driving, he had one hand on the wheel, one hand feeling up his girlfriend in the middle seat, and one hand playing the buttons on the radio," Weir says. "What he would bring on the radio -- it was a dialogue with what was going on in my inner voice, and he was aware of all that."
It raises the question of whether he learned a thing or two during those drives with Cassady. "Yeah, I learned something from him," he replies. "The radio had a dialogue with my inner voice. He'd punch the buttons and stuff would come out and it was coherent. Deep stuff."