We move into an apartment in Ashland, Oregon

During a year of exploring the country from sea to shining sea we came across lots of towns and cities where we could live happily.  And if one of us had a job in Burlington, Vermont or Fredericksburg, Texas or Newport, Rhode Island, or if there was family in Portland, Maine or Asheville, North Carolina or Fort Collins, Colorado, we could move to any one of those without regrets.  As it turns out, we are probably unemployable, and our family connections are limited to Nancy's brothers and sister back in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.  (We won't totally rule out Pennsylvania and New England, which have their own positives.)  But we are free to select a landing site based on whatever bizarre Wilson-specific characteristics we choose.

One of our favorite options turned out to be Ashland, Oregon.  It's in a pretty part of the country and has a charming downtown.  There's a college there - Southern Oregon University.  The restaurant scene is an exciting one.  The Oregon Shakespeare Festival runs there from March to October.  The natives are friendly.  The weather is not nearly as nice as in the Santa Cruz area, but it's not as harsh as in most of the country.  Ashland has the significant draw of being closer to our friends in Santa Cruz than most of the other contenders.

And so we left Napa and after two days' travel - me driving the motorhome and towing our pickup truck and Nancy following in our sedan - pulled into a storage facility where we'll be leaving our motorhome for as long as we stay in Ashland.  We loaded up our car and truck with items we'd need immediately and headed the few miles to Ashland, where the landlord's representative Bob let us into our rental unit and filled us in on Ashland lore.

We're staying in the first-floor apartment of the DeLauney House, built around a hundred years ago in the craftsman style.  We rented it on the basis of some photos on the internet, and while it isn't our dream palace, the fact that it was furnished made it practical for the four months or so we'll be staying in Ashland.  And it's in a very nice neighborhood.  (That's our Tammy Faye strutting her stuff at lower right.)

Our new home is rather spacious - two fair-sized main rooms plus a decent kitchen (including a vintage but functional Wedgewood stove) and an excellent laundry room.  The decor is old-fashioned, with some charm and doo-dads from days gone by overflowing every shelf and table.

There was a small TV set carrying very basic cable, so as television addicts we bought a nice 43-inch set at Costco and arranged to receive an upgraded cable package plus streaming capability.  (The prices on electronics these days are amazing.)

The weather has been cold and rainy.  Over the first few days we ferried supplies from the motorhome and found drawers and cabinets to put them into.

Downtown Ashland is within easy walking distance of our apartment.  It is especially beautiful during the holidays.

Tammy Faye had a visit with the very likeable Dr Bialasik at the A Street Animal Clinic, just a few blocks from our apartment.  We located the grocery stores and other retail establishments where we'll be shopping.  I made an appointment with a local internist to follow up on my medical issues.

We are slowly getting used to having a home not sitting on wheels.  Our year's adventure was truly wonderful, filled with exciting experiences we'll remember always.  It is satisfying, however, to have a home base, with the opportunity to meet people, make friends, explore this fascinating area in detail, and try to form conclusions as to whether this is where we'd be happy long term.  So far we're loving it.

Napa

Our plans have solidified.  We've rented, sight unseen (except for photos), an apartment in Ashland, Oregon, for four months.  Ashland is the site of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and a place we've visited several times before.  After a year of scouring the country for places to live, it remains one of our favorite towns, and we'd like to give it a test run.

But before we headed up there, we spent a week in wonderful Napa Valley, at a campground we've enjoyed before.  We had an excellent dinner in Napa town at a restaurant that was new to us - Angele.  And we loved our lunch at Market in the nearby town of St. Helena.  Below is the massive fire mahogany bar there - imported in pieces from Europe and reassembled.

Several times over the past few years we've made reservations for lunch in Santa Rosa at St. Francis Winery, and we did it again on this trip.  It's a special experience.  Sixteen or twenty guests are seated at semi-circular tables, and four or five courses are served, each with a paired glass of wine.  Hostesses describe each course and each wine before they are brought out.  Elegant and fun.  To be honest, the food, while very tasty, wasn't as delicious as in visits past, but it was beautifully presented, and one wine in particular, an old-vine Zinfandel, was spectacular.

Just across the highway from that St. Francis Winery is a large housing development called Oakmont.  A friend of ours, Tom Jorde - met through the book club I used to be a part of - and his wife Mary Anne recently bought a beautiful home there overlooking one of two golf courses, and we arranged to meet him to show us around.  He was enthusiastic about the opportunities at Oakmont for socialization, clubs, exercise, and activities in general.  Oakmont is a restricted community.  That is, at least one of each home's residents must be over 55 years old.  We don't want to be around old people exclusively ... but let's face it, that is our demographic.

Oakmont is in the Sonoma wine-growing area, next door to Napa Valley, and I have to admit that living in a wine-centric region could be pretty sweet.  Nothing lovelier than fields of grape vines in the fall.  A world-class restaurant scene.  Unless we fall madly in love with Ashland, we may decide to rent a house in Oakmont in the spring and see how we fit.

We leave Santa Cruz

More installments of the Wilsons' Farewell Tour:

On Tuesday we enjoyed a fine dinner at Hollins House with Howard and Sue Schwartz and Dave and Donna  Horne.  The Schwartzes have a second home on Orcas Island, Washington, and the Hornes have one in Big Sky, Montana, and we hope to visit both of those exciting sites in the coming year.

On Wednesday Mark Bright, the buyer of our Ben Lomond home, treated us to dinner at the recently opened Angler in San Francisco, of which Mark is part owner with his partner, the brilliant chef Joshua Skenes.

What a restaurant!  Right on the Embarcadero, there are views of the Bay Bridge and the impressive buildings lining the San Francisco Bay waterfront.  The menu is extremely high-end and focused on seafood.  We were served elk tartare, an untraditional Caeser salad, tuna tartare, and tiny abalones ... and my favorite course was deep-fried rabbit with an amazing seasoned red crust.

Mark is the wine director there, and he served us several delicious glasses.  Even though opening night was only a couple of weeks earlier, the restaurant was full, and most of the customers were hip young people.  We fit right in.

Truly, the San Francisco scene seems like another world compared with the RV parks we've been living in.  I guess we could get used to that lifestyle but it would be a sea change.  We're very grateful to Mark for letting us spend a bit of time in his universe.

On Thursday, back in Santa Cruz, we had dinner with Ray and Sue Brown at Eric's Deli, a more modest establishment.

On Friday we attended Mark Wainer's photography show at the Blitzer Gallery in Santa Cruz.  Over many years he has developed amazing photoshop techniques for altering the photographs he has taken to produce images that are half photography, half original art.  There are images of flowers and neighborhoods and photographs taken during his recent trips to Iran and the Altiplano region of South America.  Innovative and beautiful.  Do yourself a favor and visit his show, which will run for several weeks.  You'll be impressed.

Then on Saturday Mark Bright and his wife Tingting celebrated the coming birth of their first child, a son, by hosting a fancy lunch in the drawing room/living room of our old homestead in Ben Lomond.

Most of the guests were heavy hitters from San Francisco.  A local chef cooked several great courses for us.  Tingting looked beautiful in an elegant blue maternity dress.

Still hungry, that same evening we had a very tasty dinner in Aptos at the home of Harry and Norma Domash.

Our visit to Santa Cruz was exciting, and exhausting.  Several pounds heavier, we packed up our motorhome, retrieved a few items from our storage unit in Scotts Valley, and left Smithwood's RV Resort in Felton, one of our least favorite campgrounds, and headed up to one of our favorites, Napa Valley Expo RV Park.  I drove the motorhome, towing our pickup truck, and Nancy followed in our new car - a Genesis G-80.  (Look it up.)  We'll spend a week here exploring Napa and the wonderful surrounding winelands and restaurants.

Santa Cruz lifestyle

We've been greatly enjoying our time in Santa Cruz, even though our RV park is sucky.  No internet, no Verizon phone service, no DirecTV satellite access, no streaming video.  You'd think we were in some Mississippi backwoods.  Luckily they do offer decent cable TV, so we're able to follow what's going on in the world, I can watch the Warriors and Sharks, and Nancy can enjoy her Lifetime movies.  While here we're taking advantage of the medical, audiology, grooming, and optometry services we're familiar with from when we lived around here.

We had full-credit dinner at the home of dear old friends Mark and Nancy Wainer, and later visited Mark and Tingting Bright (who bought our house) at the old homestead in Ben Lomond.  We had dinner at the home of Don and Hilda Hodges, our oldest Santa Cruz friends, who we met at the apartments on Western Drive on the day we moved in there in 1975.  I attended a book club get-together I used to be part of.  Nancy had lunch with her friends Deanna and Marlene, and coffee the next day with Allan Hughes.  We attended our old buddy Ray Brown's excellent quintet concert at Kuumbwa and visited with Ray and his family there.

Downtown, with Vince and Joyce LoFranco we watched an excellent game that our Santa Cruz Warriors managed to lose in the last few seconds.

Jim and Cathy Helmer were our neighbors for many years in Ben Lomond, their home on the other side of a path through the woods from ours.  They had us up for dinner at their place and we had a great time reminiscing.  The next day Nancy and I attended an open house in Ben Lomond that Joyce and Gordon Rudy, the realtors who sold our house, threw for locals and clients.

We're still members of a dinner/gourmet club and had a delightful evening with lively political discussion at the Aptos home of Paula and Norbert Beneke with Laina Farhat and Micky Holzman.

Pat and Liz O'Grady, who we had visited during our road trip at their summer home in Maine, hosted us for dinner.  Their massive but incredibly sweet nearly-200-pound Newfoundland, a show-stopper wherever they go, was a perfect gentleman, as always.

I know this makes for boring reading for everyone except Nancy and me, but this blog serves as the diary for our travels, and a posting like this helps convince us that we really did have a life when we lived in Ben Lomond.

Santa Cruz

Laziness, a sense of finally being back home, and a touch of travel fatigue are the best explanations for why it's been so long since I added a new post to this blog.

As I mentioned before, there were no reservations available in RV parks around here for the days surrounding Thanksgiving.  Our friends Jen and Sammy found a very generous neighbor of theirs in Scotts Valley with a large graveled area just behind his home, and we parked the motorhome there and moved into the home of Linda Lord, who is on a scuba diving vacation in Mexico and offered to let us plop down there with Sophia and Tammy Faye while she's gone.

We drove down to the Santa Cruz Garden Mall and walked along what we've decided is one of the coolest shopping neighborhoods in the country.  It was kind of exciting to walk into the Santa Cruz bookstore, which was there before we came to town lo those many years ago.

If you look closely you'll see a street musician next to that iconic sculpture of a famous saw player outside the bookshop.  That guy wasn't great but a couple of other street performers that day were first class.

It still saddens us to observe that the Cooper House, a lovely, massive, and distinctive brick building, is no longer there.  Damaged in the 1989 earthquake, it was torn down - unnecessarily, I suspect - and replaced with a conventional commercial building.  Progress, you know.  Before that, a very good jazz band - called "Warm", I believe - played almost daily in the front patio of the Cooper House surrounded by an outdoor lunch crowd and the street passersby.  Santa Cruz was even more magical in those days.

I took this back-home opportunity to make various dental and medical visits among providers I know.  Those important maintenance checkups are not so easy when you're traveling in unfamiliar lands, which has been our situation for the past year.

I had a nasty episode of high fevers, chills, and body aches which necessitated a bit of medical workup but seems to have been one of those many unnamed viral illnesses - not the flu - lurking about.

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with Mark and Nancy Wainer, bought a car, and have a number of dinners and get-togethers with friends scheduled for the coming weeks.  We'll be moving back to Smithwoods RV Park in Felton in a couple of days, and then on December 9 will drive to one of our favorite campgrounds, in one of our favorite areas - Napa Valley - for a wild week of wine and food.

Return to the motherland

Driving west from Las Vegas, we stayed one night in Barstow, and one night in Bakersfield.  It occurred to me that a first-time traveler heading to California on this route through the desert must have been saying, "This is the magical land of opportunity?  Where are the surfer babes?"

At least Barstow had a nice sunset.

Finally the terrain began looking familiar as we moved between rolling hills and beside vineyards and approached Paso Robles.  We stayed there for three nights in a nice campground we'd used before.  We enjoyed a casual dinner at Pappy McGregor's and especially were impressed with a glass of Tolosa No-oak Chardonnay.

The next day we drove to the Tolosa Winery on the other side of San Luis Obispo, and sitting outside on their patio adjacent to the fields of grape vines, we did a tasting of Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs.  Suddenly we felt that we were back in the California of our dreams.  The Chardonnays were very good and one of the Pinot Noirs was in the running for the best example of that wine we'd ever tasted.  Sixty-five dollars for the bottle, but we laugh at expense.  We'll save it for a special occasion, such as the next time we eat dinner.

We took the opportunity to explore the town of San Luis Obispo a bit further.  It has a charming downtown with many interesting restaurants.  SLO was named the happiest town in America a few years ago (Santa Cruz, I believe, also held the title for a year.)  The wonderful Cal Poly University is there, and most of the throngs on the streets of downtown were young college students.  We could see ourselves choosing worse places to live.

And so finally, after very nearly a year on the road, we returned to Santa Cruz.  Our campground is Smithwood's RV Park in Felton, which is under beautiful redwood trees but has the disadvantage of no Verizon service and no in-camp WiFi, so we have no internet service.  How did anyone survive before Al Gore invented the internet?  One consequence of that is that I've been unable to post blog entries for several days.  I'm writing this now in the clinic's Scotts Valley parking lot after my pulmonary emboli followup appointment with my primary care physician, Dr. Jim Telfer.

Incidentally, Tammy Faye, our little dog with the splenic hemangiosarcoma, seems to be doing okay, except that she has spells of loud coughing during the night that last up to an hour straight, making it difficult for human sleep.  Last evening Nancy gave her some drops that supposedly are derived from the marijuana plant, and she slept right through, more or less.

Our current problem is that our campground reservations extend only through Thursday, and all the campgrounds are full through Thanksgiving weekend.  Our friend Linda Lord has generously offered to let us stay at her home, but we have to find a place to store the motorhome for several days or a week.  I suppose we could park it near Costco with the other motorhomes there, if that's still allowed, but somehow that doesn't seem to be the smartest idea I've ever come up with.

Halloween in Sin City

Downtown Las Vegas is historic Las Vegas, the site of two of the oldest casinos in the city - El Cortez and the Golden Nugget, both of which are still operating - and the first Las Vegas hotel.  It's several blocks of amazing excess, bright as day in the middle of the night.  The Fremont Street Experience is a four-block-long pedestrian mall there of restaurants, stores, and music stages, all covered by a barrel vault LED canopy of absolutely enormous size, billed as the largest video screen in the world, on which spectacular light shows are played nightly.

A Halloween celebration was scheduled there, and party animals that Nancy and I are, we couldn't miss it.  It was crowded, with lots of street performers competing for the partygoers' generosity.

Many of our fellow attendees were in costume.  We came as a couple of hicks from California.

Some of the women were scantily clad.  I spied the first pasties I'd seen since my misspent youth as a medical student in New Orleans.  Three live bands played, with the sound level cranked up to painful.  As the evening wore on the crowds became like Mardi Gras in New Orleans, meaning that moving through them was a painstakingly slow process.  An assault on the senses, but fun.

Downtown Las Vegas is also the site of the Mob Museum, a very well done exhibit about gangs and famous criminals and organized crime in America, with emphasis on its Las Vegas manifestation.  Here I am in a model of the electric chair in Sing Sing.

It's surprising and a bit embarrassing how many famous criminals we are familiar with - from John Dillinger to Lucky Luciano to the late great Whitey Bulger and many many more.  Certainly we remember more crooks than political figures from those times.  We probably have Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola and other great filmmakers to thank for our obsession with history's bad boys.

The first luxury hotel on the Las Vegas Strip was the Flamingo, built by the gangster Bugsy Siegel, who fell into financial difficulty and began skimming off the top, which led to Meyer Lansky and his fellow investors (allegedly) having him whacked.  Many of the hotel/casinos were mob-connected through most of the city's history but the gambling industry is better regulated today.

The slide motor parts for our motorhome arrived today, and Jeff the mobile RV mechanic made our slide functional, so starting on Sunday we're on our way back toward Santa Cruz.  Hooray!  We stayed in Las Vegas ten days, much longer than originally planned.  It's an interesting place, to say the least, but we're ready to move on.