Scene Along the Road 5: Serendipitous Encounters
One of the joys of being permanently on the road is knowing that you’ll never know who you’ll encounter—what wacky adventure, trial, or magic moment will reveal itself or where any of these will pop…
You Make the Road by Walking It (or Talking It?)
Sometimes direction of travel is self-evident. In alternate moments a small nudge, a chance meeting, or a wrinkle in time opens up doors onto undiscovered roads. My brother, Bryan, texted me one day as we…
Oatman Massacre: The Bones Still Speak
A cool wind blows from east to west across our lonely mesa, impeded only by scattered low-lying creosote bushes and straggling steadfast saguaro, and a volcanic rock field spread helter-skelter to the horizon sustains a…
Campground Characters
When you nose into any campground you pass through a veil of probability. There are multiple layers of consideration: location; privacy; facilities; feng shui of view; positioning of solar if necessary; proximity to hiking, biking,…
Scene Along the Road 4: Winds and Tracks of Time
Zephyros Ah, Joshua Tree! We find ourselves again at a favorite boondocking site, just adjacent to the National Park border, with the I-10 corridor’s blistering fast cell and data connection. Every iteration is a learning…
“Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, What’s the Supremest Species of Them All…?”
Mirror: “Humanity’s ego reigns extreme, but beneath your feet lives some supreme.” “Say what?!” A short stroll here, in the Anza Borrego Desert, remnant dried sea from a distant past, reveals a landscape pockmarked with…
The Gastronomical Time Machine
by Ruth What do you do when you’ve visited a town several times a year for over 20 years, after having grown up there? You find a theme to fill your days, that’s what. And…
Two for 2; and Exploring 1.61803
Two months have now passed since the passing of Gyp, and we are crossing into the outfield of two years’ exploring a life of enchantment on the roads less traveled, hence the blog post title.…
Cycling full circle, life and death in the eternal NOW
We arrived back to home base, one cycle completed, and you will not be bored with numerical mileage and travel details. Doctor visits, and “home base” business, most complicated from the road, would fall into…
Meeting with some of the oldest living things on earth
August 10, 1952: Patricia Huber was feeling very uncomfortable. She was a few days, or perhaps hours, from giving birth, and her baby’s kicking and rolling about was tempering her tolerance for the event soon…
The Ancient Ones: Mesa Verde, Hovenweep, Slick Rock Country, and Living on the Edge
Many of us have what we call our “home base,” and for us it is the Southwest. Moving west through Colorado, we watched the terrain shape shift from peaks and rolling plains to rocky red…
Traveling through bendable time on steel rails
As one who has always encouraged his students to build upon the knowledge previously imparted, these numbers should look familiar―37.2691273,-107.8825162―but if clarification is necessary, refer to our last post, Boondockin’ the Old Spanish Trail. (Authors…
Boxes
by Ruth I hate boxes. No, not the cardboard kind that Kitty plays in. I mean those boxes people put you in (and you put them in) the minute you put a label on something.…
Boondockin’ the Old Spanish Trail
What better opportunity to free ourselves from the unrelenting crush of summer excursionists flowing in and around us, like red corpuscles along arterial trackways, than to disengage into a ten-foot-wide opening in the highway fence.…
“Where ya from?…” Redux
We posted this short video clip a number of months ago—how time does slip by—but it seems appropriate to once again revisit it as an icon to our response that seems to pop up inevitably…
Real Time Savannah Adventures: Part 2
“When you enter through the portal, you may never return the same.” Savannah’s siren call echoes in your mind and body, a sinister syncopation matching the growing intensity of our truck’s windshield wipers. A veil…
Scene Along the Road 3: Severe Storm Warning
by Ruth Tornado warnings brought our tiny cavalcade of one to a halt outside of Hutchinson, Kansas (“Hutch” to the locals). We were headed for a nearby campground, but thanks to our NOAA weather app,…
Scene Along the Road 2: Rules of the Road, Writ in Sand
I glance into the driver’s rear side view mirrors…spot check the rear trailer video camera…all clear. One second later a vehicle passes on the left as fast as a blink of the eye, and gone.…
Oglethorpe’s Savannah Vision: Part 1
Savannah, Georgia is a stunning gem of a city that has as its progenitor a man that set in motion a cascade of events placing this locale apart from any city in America, perhaps the…
Disney World: not for the weak-hearted
We hadn’t done it in over 30 years, neither of us, so we rolled into Disney’s Fort Wilderness Resort and Campground for a week’s adventure…now, “rolling in” is an understatement as the Disney Dream Machine…
Scene Along the Road: 1
“One call ya’ll!” “Truck injury? Call: 800-Lawyer-Up!” How about this one: an image of a Mohawk-haired professional wrestler and the caption, “Are you asking for it? 800-ASKGARY.” Or the voracious and dangerous female sharks: “Ever…
Caliginous Cacophony
Spoiler Alert! If you’re reading this on a cellphone, and consequently not seeing the photos, you’re missing out—find a bigger screen! We open the silver door and step out into the warm moist night, Gyp…
No Truck: No Texas, and Going Postal in America
No truck, no Texas: If you aren’t driving a truck in Texas you are less than human, or at least not a true blood, and I’m not talking your run-of-the-mill, half-ton, maybe-weekend hauler. You’ve gotta…
Galveston Island and the Bryan Museum
We slowly meandered east and up along the south Texas coast line hugging the Gulf of Mexico’s warm waters, and serendipitously chose Galveston Island as our place of refuge and discovery for a time. We…
NOLA: It’s about the food
by Ruth The trouble with writing an ongoing blog is, well, you can easily get sidetracked. We got sidetracked by New Orleans. Those of you who know us well will not be surprised. Between some…
Finding the Blues
For those of you who are enjoying this blog and have not checked out our 2013 blog: Black Cat Bone and Mojo: Finding the Blues, click on this link to travel with us on our…
Nothin’ says Amurica like the rodeo!
Seeing a rodeo was big on our bucket list, and Rodeo Austin—our San Francisco-away-from-home in the middle of the conservative melting pot of the Lone Star State—would be the host. We’ve been talkin’ ’bout goin’…
One short story, above 25 stories, above 40 centuries, on the bottom of the ocean, 265 million years ago…or…
Long roads: short thoughts I wake in the middle of the night to the sound of the wind beating our aluminum trailer skin, and crack an eye to watch it blow through curtains, carrying memories…
More Roadside America: The Great State of Texas
By Ruth Who knew there were so many roadside oddities to see, not only in this country, but just here in Texas? Let’s begin with Marfa Famed for the Marfa Lights (which were explained years…
Smiling Seniors Siren Saga
Picture, if you will: An RV park that appears on the shimmering horizon, beckoning you to an oasis of organization and security from the wilds of BLM camping. Tanks are in need of dumping and…
Downtown Drug Deal?
Ruth and I drove into Tucson to celebrate a long lost connection with my brother Bryan, his wife Karri, and their son Joshua, at the popular downtown Mexican eatery, La Poca Cosa. We arrived a bit…
Arizona Reprised: Ajo (Part 2)
The town of Ajo, as mentioned in an earlier blog post, sits close to the border of Mexico, and takes its name, it is said, either from the Spanish word for garlic, or perhaps from…
Arizona Reprised: The Desert Museum (Part 1)
In recent past blog posts I mentioned that a few places would be revisited for special mention. One of these is the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, which I had briefly described as one of my “favorites.”…
Inside a T. rex, The Historama!, and what is The Thing?: Getting lost in Roadside America
By Ruth Webster’s dictionary defines kitsch as: “Something that appeals to popular or lowbrow taste and is often of poor quality.” Well, YES! But what Webster’s doesn’t tell you is that, when it comes to…
Ajo, Sonoran Desert, and The Border Patrol
We barreled down the long desert highway, wipers straining against wind and rain gusts, holding tight to the center of the road against the onslaught of semis streaming from Mexico, our 8-foot wide trailer on…
Quartzsite, Arizona
Driving into Quartzsite, one is at first struck with the specter of a vast hive of humanity’s industry: the ebb and flow of foraging, building, prospecting, constructing, provisioning, transitioning, connecting with new and old friends,…
Anza-Borrego Desert and Borrego Springs: The town out of time
The Anza-Borrego Desert is a 600,000 acre gem hiding in plain sight, nestled deep in the valley west of the Laguna Mountains and framed north and south by the Santa Rosa and Vallecito mountain ranges.…
Hello, and we’re back!
A few of you have commented that you haven’t heard from us in a while. We were in San Diego, celebrating my parents’ 70th wedding anniversary, and got caught up in all the partying—well, as…
Joshua Tree evacuation
Don’t be concerned. No story of danger awaits you, dear reader! Just a play on words… Ten glorious days boondocking—or sometimes known as dry camping—here has gifted us with extreme solitude amidst the sharp borders…
“Where Ya From?”
Perhaps nothing epitomizes the theme of our travels better than this clip from the original Magnificent Seven, staring Yul Brynner.