Caspar pages

On a sunny Sunday afternoon In Palermo, I went out seeking water and yogurt for Rochelle. After more than an hour backtracking people carrying shopping bags, dodging raucous motor scooters, stumbling on uneven payment, and stepping around piles of trash and dog shit, I found myself at the end of my string...

For inveterate travelers like us, it's never long before the next trip starts hatching itself. Often, even before the last trip has ended! Planning for this trip began at least eight years ago, when the foundations of our world were altered (for the better) by three nights at the Merrie Monarch Festival in Hilo, Hawaii...

So little time, so many changes! The pre-departure countdown is ticking in the background, and the list of Undones still seems endless, but we know that Thursday morning will find us bidding cats and dog Goodbye and heading north on the Next Adventure...

Home again, home again, jiggedy jig. Pi the Cat recognizes us, and all's well in our world. Now, about Trip Planning and Prius Driving. As I have gotten older (and, arguably, more experienced as a traveler) I have come to the conclusion that there are two styles of travel: spontaneous, and well-planned...

Excitement is building. Most all the client fires are out, the homestead is looking tucked, and we're putting our traveling tools together.  This trip covers a lot of familiar and beloved territory...

Rochelle drove us home, through the back roads north of Colusa, and across to Williams for a to-go sandwich from Granzella's. As we headed into the Coast Range's foothills, we saw smoke from the Valley Fire that wiped out Harbin Hot Springs and a goodly part of Middletown...

Our internal clocks are catty-wampus. We awoke this morning before sunrise in Montréal, wide-eyed and as rested as we were going to get. The hotel offered breakfast starting at 5, so why not go see? It was lamentable, as expected, and our flight promised breakfast, but by then we'd be four hours into our travel day...

I'm really just working on upgrading the display characteristics of this hoary old travel-log software. Look, it's responsive ...but it doesn't really work if you try to look in with a phone. Tough noogies!

Having our sister-in-law Sharon Elkan visit turns us back into the travel mode, and the trips to fetch her from STS (Sonoma County Airport) and return her there offers us an opportunity to indulge during one of California's most beautiful seasons: when the grasses are at its tallest but still green, the fruit trees and Buckeyes in bloom, and the inland heat has yet to escalate...

As always, the month before we travel is a time of particular attention to our surroundings – widely agreed to be nicest place in the world. While the world around us appears to be spiraling downward, here nothing much has changed since we arrived 50 years ago!   The reason we are here, have been here for this amazingly change-full half century, is the unspoiled, unadulterated nature...

One week before our trip, and I'm still enthralled by this place where we live. This has been a curiously warm and fog-free August ...not that I'm complaining! Global Weirding is definitely changing the climatic regime: big rains in May, followed by super-abundant understory and meadow growth, especially where a history of grazed cattle has broadcast European weed seeds, as on our Headlands, where the grass tops human height...

Every Friday, April through October: Mendocino Farmers Market. Our friend Sakina is the market manager, and most of the farmer-vendors (after half a dozen years) are friends too...

Rochelle celebrated her 74th natal day today ...or, rather, we celebrated HER. For me, pretty much the whole day was spent in the kitchen (and at the computer devising the card below) doing what she mostly does every day...

While we were away, the wave action pumped some sand into the Caspar Beach lagoon's mouth, and so there's a bunch of water there. That's going to make getting to the beach a shoes off affair...

Autumn is upon us – began this week, and the usual pre-Winter hustle has begun amidst luscious Fall weather. Lila's Maples are making glorious colors (as is the Poison Oak on the Headlands...

As ever, the days before a trip become the yardstick by which our next adventure is measured. If we live in the best place in the world (and we think we do) why would we travel? This question is particularly notable in this time of Sheltering in Place while the spectre of SARS-CoV-2 peers over everyone's shoulder...

After Hawaii, the ten lanes of freeway and the hassle of construction in The City are a little shocking. Staying safely with the flow of traffic down the backside of the hill above Sausalito on US 101, vehicles on every side, we notice we're going over 70 mph; kudos to Cali drivers in contrast with Hawaiian traffic where every second vehicle is a tourist...

Sienna made a spectacular Sunday Dinner. Michael baked the usual lemon poppyseed cake.

Last day at home, and out to lunch at Trillium in Mendocino, Rochelle's favorite lunch-out spot, so's not to make any dirty dishes. We're away tomorrow morning, not exactly first thing...

Up and anxious early: big travel day ahead. Down to breakfast 5 minutes too early, but the Abigail's staff fussed over us, and presented us with today's breakfast menu, even including the weather forecast for the day...

We drove home Sunday, choosing highway 253 through Boonville over our usual Comptche road . . . so we could lunch at Pennyroyal.  Says here, a good trip should “enhance our experience of our home place” and that happened this time, in spades...