Just a quick 20 mile run from our hotel and across this bridge and we are in Sausalito

We woke up this morning rested and ready to see some sights.   Charlotte registered for her convention here at the hotel where we are staying and then we had breakfast.  Later and fuller, we headed north about twenty miles north across the bay to our favorite little town in these parts, Sausalido.  It is a beautiful little town that sits across the bay from San Francisco and is just a big collection of shops and bistros where you can spend the entire day and not see all of the unique little stores.

I just had two things to buy for sure, that was the two suprises for my grandsons.  They kinda left it open with just a few instructions.  The first one was when they called they said, “No teeshirts PawPaw”!  Ok, so with that in mind, I set off to find something that would suprise them.

I’m getting on the plane in the morning early and flying back to Dallas to be there for the convocation for the coming school year and am coming back to San Francisco the next day in time for the convention banquet on Friday night.  So I can take the suprises with me. ( I hope I can get them through TSA!) I’m leaving it there and let you guess what I may have picked up for them!

OK all you virtual hitchhikers, where do you think we should stop here before we pull out of town and head north to Montana?  Let me hear from you!

After buying out the display cases, Charlotte gets the salesgirls escort to the truck!

Larry looks just like the old guy on the tee shirt who was actually the founder of Le Vingue Winery. He even uses a walking stick the same!

Charlotte will drink any wine as long as it’s Muscato!

What do you think the fare is?

OK Mrs. Douglas, this could be you!

This was my choice for a second car, after the old truck of course!

Charlotte like the way the Jaguar made her feel!

Well, we said goodbye to our cousins and pulled out of Paso Robles heading north.  Soon the temperature was dropping from almost 100 back down to the 60’s as we turned toward the west and headed for Carmel By The Sea to drop in on our old buddy “Dirty Harry” (Clint Eastwood).  To our surprise, there was a classic car show down through the middle of town and it was awesome! So we parked the old truck and did a little car shopping today.  We couldn’t decide between the Rolls Royce and the big Jaguar.  I took a video of when they fired up about 6 Shelby Cobras on the square.  It was awesome!

After doing a little shopping, we packed up our loot and headed the truck north again towards San Mateo.  We arrived in our room here and were settled in by 6:30.  All in all, it was a great day!  We have traveled almost half of the projected distance of the trip.  So you virtual hitchhikers still have a ways to go!

Cousin Larry, Charlotte , and myself out for a little afternoon matching of wines with cheeses and chocolates. It was a rough assignment but somebody had to do it!

OK all you virtual hitchhikers, everybody out of the truck!  It’s getting to smell kinda funky in here after 8 days on the road with you guys!  Or maybe it’s just me.  Anyway, I think I’m gonna roll down all the windows and run this thing through one of these automatic car washes.  With the temperature outside at 110, it shouldn’t take long to dry out and we can be ready for another 1500 miles!  Yesterday was one of those “timeout days”.  You know after you’ve been on the road for a while, you just need to stop and take a time out to get all the necessary things out of the way.  We did all the laundry and ironing during the really hot part of the day.  We did manage to venture out for a light lunch downtown but were soon back in our really nice room taking that “nap of the retired”..  Man that is becoming the favorite part of my day!  Then as the sun went down and things began to heat up, we made it over to Larry and Myra’s place to eat some awesome ribs and potato salad. It was all washed down with a great red wine (we are surrounded by wineries)!  We stayed until everybody was ready to turn in and tried to catch up on years of conversations we had missed out on.  What a great feeling to re-connect with a family member that has been out of your world for so long!  I really love these people!  We are already planning our next meeting trip.  These are just too much fun!

How do I divide this key lime pie and still get the biggest piece?

We arrived here in Santa Cruz at around three in the afternoon and went straight to the Pacific Blue Inn where we would be staying for two nights.  After getting everything into our room, we headed over to the sailboat piers where my cousin Larry and his wife Myra have their 5^th wheel parked.  It is a really nice trailer with pop-outs.  We had a great dinner of homemade burritos prepared for us by Myra.  We also had a nice bottle of wine that I had bought Larry for a bet I lost to him during the March Madness college basketball games.  I bet on Baylor when they were playing Kentucky! What was I thinking????  But beings the good sport that he is, Larry wanted to share his winnings with us by serving us some really good wine.

We are staying in a place called The Pacific Blue Inn.  I t is really nice and they have a special breakfast cooked to order that will blow your socks off!  The pop-overs they serve you are home-made and are to DIE FOR!

Santa Cruz is an old hippie town.  You can see all kinds of old VW microbuses parked at the beach with the surfboard racks on top.  The city doesn’t allow any franchise food joints in the city limits.

If you are thinking about a trip that would put you into this area, you need to consider stopping here.  You can Google them at Blue Pacific Inn.  You will not be sorry!   The stores and markets are local.  Really it’s a pretty neat idea because you can find some really unique things.  The top speed in town is 25 and there are bike lanes on all streets.

We went to a place last night called The Crow’s Nest that had a really nice view of the ocean and the lighthouse there on the sea wall.  When the fog began to roll in, the temperature dropped to 56 and the light jacket I had packed only because Charlotte made me was feeling pretty good!  Heading back to the room last night, we drove down a stretch of beach and we counted over 10 big bonfires burning with parties going on around them.  I kept waiting for Frankie and Annette to run by singing something from one of the Beach Party films.

Tomorrow we will meet my cousin after breakfast and head on down south about 120 miles to Paso Robles for a wine and food tasting event and a tour through the vineyards.  Sounds good to me! Let’s get in the truck!

Well, we climbed into my old truck, waved so long to Dwight and Buck, and headed west towards the coast and Santa Cruz. (Hey!  That sounds like a good kickoff line for a new Eagles song!!)   We had about a five hour drive ahead of us and it was a beautiful day.  Just the perfect setting for some great sight-seeing and reflecting.  Charlotte and I began talking about how we like the time we are spending behind the wheel.  It is allowing us to actually experience a little of Americana instead of just gripping the armrests of a 767 at 38,000 feet, breathing everybody’s recycled breath, and hoping the TSA was doing a good job that day when they packed you into that “airborne cattle car”.

As we crossed the state on I5, we passed beautifully kept fields, orchrids, and vinyards of everything you could imagine.  I started passing an 18 wheeler pulling a double trailer.  As I got closer and passed him,  I could see he was carrying roma tomatoes in these deep open trailers.  I must have passsed 50 or more double trailers just like him full of those beautiful tomatoes.  We passed 18 wheelers loaded with nothing but garlic, onions, and several other vegetables.  The bounty of food produced by this land is staggering!

And looking down those beautifully kept, perfectly straight rows that seemed to be miles long, were laborers bent over, harvesting the crops.  Looking at those laborers, my mind went back to when I was about 11 years old and I was in Mitchell’s Grocery  there in Monahans with my mama.  Now Mama loved grapes.  She always had a grape arbor at home and she loved to eat them.  Well, our poor little vines there in Monahans couldn’t produce what was demanded by my mama and my brothers so she had gone to Mitchell’s to get some more grapes.  I remember walking beside her pushing the grocery cart over to the fruit counter.  There were no grapes.  In fact, there were very few fruits of any kind.  Mama asked Mr. Mitchell where were the grapes.  Mr. Mitchell said, “Ms. Bill, (that’s what he called my mom), haven’t you seen the news?” (we didn’t own a TV).  He said, “there is this guy out in California named Ceasar Chavez who has caused all the workers to go on strike and not pick fruit.  So we won’t have any grapes until that strike is over.”

So at the age of about 11, I first heard of Ceasar Chavez in a very personal way, he had taken my mama’s grapes!  Looking down those rows at those laborers, my thoughts went back to Ceasar Chavez.  Here was a man who had no formal education, never owned his own home, and never made $10,000 in a year for his labor.  Yet, with his passive, firm leadership he brought giants to their knees and made them do what was right for his fellow laborers.  And 1200 miles east of him, an 11 year old boy heard his name and never forgot this was the man who had the power to take food off his mama’s table.  Where else but in America?  God, I love this country!

Man, you have to keep both eyes open when you’re out on the road!  I’m not talking about defensive driving, I’m talking about defensive gas shopping!  We packed up the old truck and headed out of Williams after spending the night there after the Grand Canyon tour.  Our normal pattern has developed as follows: as we leave town, we stop and fill up the truck, check our mpg against the truck computer and head out back on the road.  Well, you can imagine my suprise when I pulled into the gas station there in Williams and looked at the price at the pump.  It was $3.99 a gallon!  I had seen gas signs along I 40 before getting to Williams of $3.25.  Beings I still had almost a half a tank, we headed back out on the Interstate going west.  We hadn’t gone 20 miles until the gas prices were back at $3.25!  Making an extra $.74 a gallon must be sweet!  They can’t say it’s because of delivery charges because stations east and west of Williams have the same price!  After doing a few quick calculations, I was tempted to cancel the rest of the trip and buy a gas station here in Williams!  If you filled up 100 trucks a day like mine (and they have that much traffic there easy), that’s $1,500 a day profit on top of what gas stations are already ripping you off for!  I’m just saying, a man can still get scalped out here in the west!  Driver beware!

Well, once our truck was filled up with the “cheap” $3.25 a gallon gas, we continued west.  Leaving Arizona and entering California was a huge change in scenery.  Arizona was all green and the pastures were beautiful.  going into California the ground turned brown , then bare with nothing growing on it almost all the way to Edwards Air Force Base.  Then we got into the foothills and the scenery began to change again.  Soon citrus farms and grape vinyards were on either side of the highway as we began to descend into Bakersfield.

We only stopped once on the road to get a bite to eat so when we checked into our hotel in Bakersfield, we thought we would go get something and take it back to the room.  Charlotte was wanting ice cream so we stopped at a store and she settled on a Dove Bar.  You know the one you get at 7-11s for $1.19?  Well amigo, not in California!  The clerk scanned the bar and said, “That will be $4.72.”  I thought Charlotte must have picked up something else and put it on the counter but, no, that ice cream bar was the only thing there!  Leaving the store, I was trying to stop the bleeding in my mouth where I had  bit a hole in my tongue trying to keep from saying something that would probably require bail money, which given this California exchange rate, has got to be pretty high!  I was secretly thinking to myself that for that much money I could get a decent hamburger which is exactly where I went.  I pulled into the drive through at Burger King and ordered the Whopper.  The total came to just a hair under $10.00.  As I pulled away from the window with the salty taste of my now lacerated tongue in my mouth,  I was torn between buying the gas station in Williams or a Burger King franchise in Bakersfield.  It’s funny how you just have to experience some things personally to understand them.  How many times have I listened to Buck Owens and Dwight Yoakum sing about walking the streets of Bakersfield?  At least a thousand.  But I never once questioned why they were walking and not riding.  Now that I have lived a little of the Bakersfield experience it is perfectly clear.  After eating a Whopper and a Dove Bar, they didn’t have money for gas!

Well, we learned something new this morning at 5:30 a.m.  I learned that Williams, Arizona operates on what they call Rocky Mountain Pacific Time.  Now the way I learned this was, when we travel, no matter where in the world, I always keep my watch on good ol’ Texas time.  So, this morning when I woke up at 7:30 Texas time, I assumed we were still in Rocky Mountain Standard Time and it was actually 6:30 here locally.  So I woke up the little missus and informed her it was time to get up and get ready for breakfast and then get on the train for the Grand Canyon.  She rolled over and mumbled something to the effect of “What time is it here?”  I told her my calculations and she mumbled, “Are you sure?”  With more than a little sarcasm in my tone I informed her I would call the front desk and double check just to make her happy.  You can imagine my suprise when the front desk told me it was 5:30.  I asked the girl at the desk if she was sure and she also offered just a touch of sarcasm in return saying she didn’t need to use a “lifeline” and that was her final answer. I put down the phone and told Charlotte she didn’t need to get in a rush, we still had a little extra time.  I would act as her snooze alarm for a while more.

We did eventually get ready and went over for breakfast and then down to the corral by the train station to witness an early morning gun fight where the bad guys lost again and the sheriff saved the day.  Then we climbed up in the “Chief”, that was the name of our club car on the train.  It was the last car on the train and had a nice observation deck on back where you could go out and watch the scenery go by in the fresh air.  Seating was great with overstuffed sofa and chairs for a great ride plus our car attendant, Katie, who kept your glass full and the snacks at the ready.  We met some nice couples on the way and enjoyed making new friends.  We both made the observation that all the people riding in our car seemed to be about our age.  With no grandkids to keep up with, we all had time to enjoy getting to know one another.  It was a great two hour ride at the blazing speed of about 40 mph.

Arriving at the Grand Canyon, we made the climb (unassisted) up to the El Tovar Hotel and Hopi House on the canyon rim.  They had lots of handmade rocking chairs on the big porch of the hotel and after the climb up from the train, I figured out why.  We landed in a chair and rested a little before going to see the first and most important reason for being there.  I bet you thought I was going to say the observation areas on the canyon rim.  That would be the wrong answer.  We headed straight for the gift shop (or as I affectionately call them, tourist traps).  There we began snatching everything remotely interesting as possible gifts for those back  home from the racks and shelves and throwing them on the counter with my trusty plastic wompum card on top. We sure didn’t want them to run out before we could  load our arms up with all the “good stuff”.

After shopping the store dry, we headed out for the scenic outlooks of the canyon.  I was not prepared for the sight I saw.  I had taken several geology courses while getting my degree at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, TX. (Go Loboes!)  I felt I had received a pretty solid knowledge base of basic geologic activity.  I was not prepared for the site that met me on the canyon rim.  The activity of the Colorado River to dig such a hole in the earth blows my mind!  I was, am, and will always be amazed at this truly amazing site.  I just wish I could have been there when the first humans came upon this site.  I bet that was an interesting conversation!

Yep, at around lunch today we were “standing on the corner in Winslow, Arizona” taking each others picture with “Easy”, the bronze statue of a ’60ish figure with a guitar.  “The corner” is right on Route 66.  The building behind the statue has a mural painted on it and you can see the girl in the flatbed Ford slowing down to take a look at you.

As I stood there, lost in the nostalgia of the moment, the thought crossed my mind of what a crazy world we live in and what crazy quirks of fate, circumstance, luck, karma, whatever you want to call it, come and completely reek havoc with all that is logical and normal.  I mean look here at Winslow, Arizona.  It is just another one of the many of small towns that became ghost towns almost overnight when the Interstate Highway System came and all traffic bypassed them.  One day literally thousands of cars and trucks that had been going through and stopping in their town stopped doing so.  They were gone for good.  Just ask my grandsons.  They can tell you how a little town just down the road apiece call Radiator Springs fell victim to the Interstate and only Lighting McQueen could save it. KaChow!

Winslow was already settling into oblivion and would have gone softly into the night but for two artists living over 500 miles away.  Jackson Browne had written the first verse of a song he titled Take It Easy.  He showed it to his then neighbor and friend, Glen Frey (lead vocalist for the Eagles).  Frey immediately liked the song and told Browne he wanted the Eagles to record it.  But the song had only one verse and Browne said he just didn’t have the time to finish it right then.  Frey finally talked Browne into letting him, (Frey) finish the song and record it.  Finally Browne agreed.  Frey took no time in writing the second verse which started out with,” I’m standing on the corner in Winslow, Arizona”.  The Eagles recorded Take It Easy and released it as their first recorded single on May 1, 1972, over 40 years ago.  It went to number 12 on the Top 100 National Chart.  It was  placed on almost every album the Eagles recorded and became one of their best known songs.  Rolling Stone Magazine has said it is one of the 100 songs that changed Rock and Roll.  It also changed Winslow, Arizona!  Several cottage industries have popped up to supply all of us die-hard Eagle fans with all sorts of paraphanailia!  But here is the part that drives me crazy.  Why Winslow?  Why not Flagstaff, or Phoenix, or Tombstone, or Sedona?  OK, I’ll have to say Sedona probably wouldn’t have worked.  That just doesn’t sound right.  But do you get my point?  Because some guy who may or may not have ever been to Winslow puts it in a song, this little town will continue to have cars leaving Interstate 40 to get on a strip of Route 66 that takes them into Winslow where they can “stand on the corner”.  And you can say what you want, but after 40 years “Take It Easy” still kicks butt!

OK, we are snugly tucked away into the Grand Canyon Railroad Hotel where in the morning, we will board the Grand Canyon Railroad for a trip to and around Grand Canyon and return to the hotel.  We will be in the “Pamper Me Silly” club car,(no kids allowed) for the royal treatment trip.  Now that’s what I call roughing it!  Someone pass me another stem of bubblely!

Well, we just got back to the room after watching Navajo dancers on the town square.  It was really nice.  The guy that played the drum and did the “vocals” explained that there are over twenty different Navajo dialects in New Mexico and each one can’t understand the other.  Maybe it’s because they relied on smoke signals for so long that they just never got around to standardizing their language.  I don’t know, maybe someone out there has a better idea.  Let me know.  I think the group we saw were “southern” Navajo because every-other-word he sang during every one of the dances was “Hey ya’ll!

Before anyone out there gets their feathers ruffled thinking I’m making light of their culture, just “simmer down now” and let me finish.

Of all of the cultures involved in defending America in armed conflict, none can claim more heros from the number of participants than the American Indian.  I walked through a memorial garden by the court house honoring local war heros.  There were Congressional Medal of Honor recipients, and don’t forget the famous “Wind Talkers” who confounded the Japanese by speaking Navajo during the battle for Iwa Jima.  In fact, the head of Allied communications during the battle said Iwa Jima could not have been won without the Navajo communicators.

Don’t forget about Ira Hays, the American Indian Congressional Medal of Honor  recipient who was one of the men raising the American flag on that island.

I saw something today at that courthouse I had never seen before.  Right under the Stars and Stripes flying from the top of the pole on top of the courthouse was the MIA (Missing In Action) flag that is flown by veteran organizations as a reminder that we will never forget those men who are still “missing” in combat.  What a great gesture from this county government of support for their missing heros.

I really wasn’t planning on Gallup being that big of a deal when it comes to sights to see or famous people but was I ever suprised!  No wonder we are the greatest nation on earth, how do you place a price on this kind of commitment from these people for the preservation of our freedom and way of life!  If this trip is about seeing the best of America, I think I just did!