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.

Broken down in Vegas

To summarize, our year-long circuit of the country took us across the lower US states through Texas and Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle and down into the Florida Keys, then back up along the East Coast through the Carolinas and the New England states into Canada all the way to Prince Edward Island, then back down to Maine and across upstate New York and Vermont to Michigan's Upper Peninsula and down through Wisconsin and across Iowa and Nebraska to the mountains of Colorado and the parks of Utah.

And finally it's time to head back to Santa Cruz.  Our first stop on the way home (Am I allowed to call Santa Cruz home, when we no longer own a house there?) is at the Las Vegas RV Resort.

Our motorhome has three slideouts.  Slideouts are extensions which at the touch of a switch slide outward to create more interior space or inward when it's time to hit the road.  The biggest slideout on our coach has been balky for some time, so I took the opportunity to call in a repair technician to see if it could be fixed.  Unfortunately, that guy wasn't too knowledgeable, and by the time he left, the motor that moves that slide had stopped working entirely.

This isn't good.  It's unsafe to drive a motorhome with any slide extended, as this one is, not only because of the increased width but because the rear-view mirror on that side of the coach will be blocked.  And believe me, driving a big rig without being able to see what's on your right and left would be suicidal.

So we're stuck here until we get the slide back in.  Luckily I found a mobile mechanic with slideout expertise.  He was able to determine that the slide motor's gearbox had seized up and had to be replaced.  He ordered parts from the manufacturer but it will be several days before they arrive.

And so we're stuck here in Las Vegas, Nevada.  Will there be enough going on in this town to entertain us until we are roadworthy?

The internet and brochures from the campground office tell us that there are casinos and restaurants in Las Vegas!  Who knew?  So maybe we won't be bored by our forced time here.

The Las Vegas strip was about twenty minutes away from our campground.  We drove there one afternoon and found space in the parking garage of the Venetian Hotel and Casino.  We spent several hours exploring the shops and restaurants of that one hotel/casino and were struck with the absolutely incredible amount of money that had been invested in building and developing it.  One could take an indoor gondola ride if so inclined.  (Nancy and I passed.)

The interior architecture radiating from the casino area was impressive.

There were five or six restaurants in the Venetian catacombs that looked awfully enticing, including some headed by celebrity chefs.  Nancy is not a professional shopper, but if she were, high-end stores lined the walkways for what seemed like miles.

And when we stepped outside, there were many other casinos visible along the street as far as the eye could see.

On the following evening we returned to the strip, and this time we used Uber.  We've always found Uber to be dependable and reasonably priced, and the Vegas version was no exception.  On this visit we chose Caesar's Palace as our focus.  Google tells me that it isn't the largest casino/hotel on the strip, but it looks truly enormous from the outside, and the interior goes on and on.  But as fancy as Caesar's was, we were less impressed there than we had been by the Venetian.

We walked along the crowded streets past casinos and stores of all kinds and restaurants both fancy and modest.  Teams of bosomy "models" in skimpy and spectacular dress asked men to pose with them (and who knows what else).  Vans drove by advertising girls who would be sent to your rooms.  One difference we noticed from our previous visits to Las Vegas was the absence this time of hawkers handing out brochures of lovely young ladies available for massage and other services at your hotel.  I suppose the city fathers had decided to outlaw such activity as beneath the dignity and morality of that great city.  (Not the service, just the sidewalk advertising of it.)  We dropped into several other casinos, including Paris Las Vegas (which seemed a bit faded), but ended up back at the Venetian for dinner.

After extensive study, we selected Bouchon, whose executive chef is Thomas Keller, the owner and chef of Napa Valley's French Laundry and the legendary Per Se in New York City.  It's a beautiful venue on an upper level of the Venetian.  This is the opulent hallway leading to the restaurant.

And this is Bouchon itself.

Our table was outside, looking up into the sky .. although no stars were bright enough to be visible in competition with the Las Vegas lights.  Bouchon, unlike Keller's flagship restaurants, is meant to represent simpler French bistro fare.  I'm sorry to say that the food, wine, and service were more good than great.  Still, it was a lovely and enjoyable evening.

Our Uber ride back to the campground was memorable in that our driver, Huntington, talked honest-to-God non-stop during the half-hour drive to the campground and regaled us with the story of an intoxicated lady who as he described it "went number one" on her seat, which was disgusting to the passenger who followed her.  Ah, Las Vegas.

Zion National Park

Zion National Park is different from the other Utah national parks (and Grand Canyon National Park) in that most of its tourist areas are on the floor of a great canyon, with majestic sandstone walls and peaks rising above them.  Maybe that's why it remains our favorite national park.  In fact, our campground, the Zion Canyon RV Park, just outside the national park, has probably the most awesome setting of any campground we've ever stayed in.

Even at this time of year - after school was in but before winter weather got established - the park was very crowded, and wait times for shuttle buses - which were the only way to explore the park - were long (partly because the yearly highway maintenance was underway).  This photo is taken from the area of the Court of the Patriarchs and shows the kind of scenery that lines the roads.

At the last shuttle stop we got out and hiked the Riverside Trail, which took us alongside the Virgin River.  At the start of the trail was a sign giving an estimate of the danger that day of flash flooding, which can potentially pose a danger to hikers.  I found it interesting that the danger indicator had a padlock on the bottom, to prevent jokers from moving it.

On the day we hiked, the pretty Virgin River was modest in size. but - as we learned from the voiceover during our shuttle ride - had in fact carved the canyon over millions of years, and even today periodically swells to flash flood volume and is capable of reshaping the landscape.

The trail took us to the Narrows, so named because it's the narrowest section of the canyon.  It leads eventually to some of the most spectacular and beautiful sights in the park, shown on many of the tourist brochures, where the colorful walls are only feet apart.  It's a popular hike for folks who rent boots and are prepared to ford the stream in places.  That wasn't us on this day.  Flash floods can appear almost instantaneously and have supposedly even killed hikers in the past, but that wasn't why we didn't go in.

A hike we took on another day was along a lovely trail that took us to the Lower Emerald Pool.  This is a little waterfall that feeds that pool.

We continue to love Zion Canyon.  I'd kind of forgotten how magnificent it is.

Capitol Reef National Park

Six years ago we went on a motorhome trip to Utah and Colorado and toured three of Utah's five national parks - Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Arches.  That trip was chronicled on this blog, but you'd have to scroll WAY back to read about it.  This time we completed the set.  Last week we traveled to Canyonlands, and we planned to visit Capitol Reef National Park before going back to our favorite from last time, Zion.

On the road from Moab, just before turning off onto the road that would take us to Capitol Reef, there was a sign: "No services for 100 miles".  That gives you an idea of how sparsely populated the area is compared with most of the nation.

This was high desert country.  And when our GPS told us we were still about 30 miles from the national park, we began seeing fascinating and majestic rock formations of various colors lining the road.  What was remarkable was the variety that random chance, through the actions of water and wind erosion and land upheavals, had yielded.  All the way to the park's entrance we were saying to each other over and over, "Look at that!"  While the landscape around our previous stop, Moab, looked like what we saw in old western movies - and in fact many were filmed there - this area made us think of a science fiction dreamscape.

We stayed in a very nicely run campground a few miles from the national park.  One drive from there took us to Gooseneck Canyon, where we looked down on a trail where at one point we saw some intrepid hikers far, far below.

Here is Nancy looking up at petroglyphs - carvings made by prehistoric Native Americans into a rock face.

Capitol Reef's "scenic drive" was a ten-mile road featuring one magnificent formation after another.

The road surface was pockmarked, with lots of exposed rocks, and the ride - at least in our pickup truck - was bone-jarring, but the scenery was amazing.

At the end of that road was a hiking trail that Nancy and I took to the end - a mile each way - along a dry river bed.

At one point there was a sheer face with six individuals' names and a 1911 date carved into it thirty feet or so from the canyon floor.  I guess as long as it's early enough - and this was long before the area because a national park - it is designated a historical feature rather than graffiti.

When, tired but happy, we returned to the trailhead Nancy made a pit stop at a little toilet building, and when she came out she said, "That's the nastiest bathroom I've ever used.  There wasn't even any toilet paper!"

And so we began our uncomfortable drive back along that primitive road.  About a mile into it, Nancy cried out, "I left my phone in that stinky toilet!"  Afraid of having her phone fall out of her back pants pocket while using the facilities, she had put it on the top of the empty metal toilet paper dispenser and forgot to retrieve it.  We turned our pickup around, made our way back, and Nancy was relieved to find her phone still there, visibly, at least, no worse for the experience.

Before this trip I hadn't heard much about Capitol Reef, and I don't think it's visited as much as the other four - partly because it's relatively isolated, partly because its charms are not as easily displayed photographically on tourist brochures.  But it turned out to be one of our favorite national parks.

Canyonlands National Park

Wounded but not broken, we pulled our motorhome into a campground in Moab, Utah.  This is high desert country, not our favorite kind of landscape scenery, but the snow-covered tops of the La Sal Mountains in the near distance were quite beautiful.  Their sharply-pointed peaks suggest that those mountains are quite young, geologically speaking.

We had visited Moab six years ago, and it's grown a great deal since then.  This may be the offseason, but traffic is heavy, and the locals will probably be relieved when the tourists leave in a few weeks.

My watch - a cheapie - stopped, and I looked for a shop that could put a new battery in.  But there were no jewelers in town - shocking for such a tourist mecca.  Then we realized that the visitors here were young and fit, many of them wearing backpacks, ready for hiking and climbing adventures.  Few old moneyed folk who would toss away big bucks on a bauble.  Finally a gentleman from the Netherlands at a tourist center told us that the local drug store performed that service.  A lady at Walker Drug and General Store opened up my watch, found that that particular battery size was on order, and asked that I call on Wednesday to see if it had come in.  When she replaced the back, the watch started working again, so I'm in business, temporarily.

Moab is the jumping-off place for two national parks - Arches and Canyonlands.  On our 2012 visit there, we went deep into Arches National Park, the one that is closest and has the more spectacular individual formations.  This time we traveled to Canyonlands National Park, which is about an hour's drive away.  Six years ago we were in Moab in late spring and the weather was uncomfortably hot, but this time there was a chill in the air - it got down to below freezing last night - and it was much more pleasant for exploring the scene.

From the road we hiked to Mesa Arch.  The other national park in the area, Arches National Park, has many arches that are much more spectacular.  (Maybe that's how it got its name.)  But the distant views from Mesa Arch were great.

At the end of the paved road was Grand View Overlook, with spectacular views of what nature has wrought.  The huge canyons below were formed by the Colorado and Green Rivers over millions of years.   (Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona was also created by the actions of the Colorado River as it flowed south to the Gulf of California.)

I read that most of the rocks here were carried from elsewhere and that there are twenty or so distinct layers that the rivers cut through - sandstone and shale, mostly.  Plus there were earthquake upheavals along the way, and both wind and water erosion.  In other words, the geology is incredibly complicated.  The Grand Canyon in Arizona has steep walls and is therefore more picturesque, but the vastness of Canyonlands is jaw-dropping as well.

Here's a little senior beefcake at the canyon rim.

On Wednesday the watch battery had arrived at Walker Drug and General Store, and it was inserted into my watch.  Now I'll be able to maintain precise timing on our tight vacation schedule.

Tragedy in Carbondale

Tammy Faye, one of our two little dogs, the reddish-brown one we suspect of cocker spaniel and poodle parentage, has developed a funny cough.  She has been having episodes, mostly at night, when she makes a series of harsh, almost musical sounds; then she's fine.  She's not overly active, but then she never has been.  She eats, walks, and sleeps as usual, and the cough is not exacerbated by exercise, food, or anything else we've been able to identify.

But we decided to have her evaluated by a veterinarian.  Nancy had been unable to get her in at the vet school in Fort Collins, but once we were staying at a campground in the relative sticks of Carbondale, the local vet's office had an opening.

Dr. Ben was a very nice young man who sat on the floor as he examined Tammy Faye.  He found nothing much on physical exam but took a chest X-ray.  He showed us the film and pointed out that the heart appeared to be slightly enlarged and possibly pressing on the trachea.  But he also noticed an ominous finding - a possible abdominal mass, rather large, in the area of the spleen.  At first he suggested going to an ultrasound specialist in Denver or Salt Lake City, but Nancy said that she would be unable to stand waiting, so he arranged to have an ultrasound study done at 11:00 the following morning at a clinic near our next campground stop in Grand Junction.  Needless to say, we were distraught.

We arose early the next morning and drove our motorhome to Grand Junction.  Because that clinic provides medical care for horses as well as dogs and cats, there was a parking lane for horse trailers that we were able to park our motorhome in while we completed the paperwork.  We left Tammy Faye with the clinic, checked in at the RV park, and anxiously waited there for our 3:45 appointment that afternoon to discuss the ultrasound findings.

Dr. Boyd, a gentle, sympathetic lady vet, explained that the study showed what was almost certainly a splenic hemangiosarcoma, a malignant tumor that appeared to have already spread to the liver.  She told us that an oncologist could offer several treatment options, but that they were ordinarily only effective short-term at best, and she didn't recommend going that route.  (I'm sure that she offered that option because some pet owners will try everything to save their beloved animals, but Nancy and I are determined not to put our little family members through a treatment process that might be miserable for them, with little chance of success.)

Dr. Boyd informed us that life expectancy after this diagnosis was in most cases measured in a few months, and the most likely scenario was that this tumor would partially rupture at some point, spill blood into the abdomen, and cause significant pain.  In most cases this initial rupture would not be fatal and the symptoms would gradually improve, but would be followed by further ruptures.  I asked her if this were her dog, at what point would she consider euthanasia, and she said that she would do so after the first rupture episode, in order to spare Tammy Faye further misery.

The cough, she said, was most likely unrelated to the tumor and might be cardiac in origin, so she prescribed Enalapril, an ACE inhibitor.  I can't help thinking that perhaps it would have been better if the X-ray hadn't been taken and we wouldn't have learned of the cancer, but at least this way we will be able to give Tammy Faye extra love and extra treats for as long as she's with us, and we'll be better prepared to handle things when she gets worse.

The humans in the Wilson household are devastated.  Luckily, Tammy Faye is unaware of her fate and remains the sweet, happy dog she has always been.  I know that she has enjoyed this motorhome trip enormously and that with all the attention and walks she and Sophia have received this has been one of the happiest times of her life.  That is comforting to us, but only a little.  We've become reluctantly accepting of our own mortality, but it's hard to deal with that of our dear little dogs.

In the Colorado mountains

The road to our next campground took us into the high Colorado mountains.  With snow falling, our slow but steady motorhome reached as high as 12,000 feet of elevation.  We passed the roads to the ski areas of Keystone, Breckenridge, and Copper Mountain, and later looked down on the magical villages of Vail, which were then showing good Colorado color - splashes of the orange-tinged yellows of Aspen trees among the evergreens and condominiums.

Finally the road descended to the more reasonable altitude at Glenwood Springs, and then from Carbondale we drove to our KOA campground on Crystal River in the shadow of Mount Sopris.  That's Mount Sopris below, partially obscured by clouds.

This is one of the prettiest RV parks we've stayed in, especially with its nice fall colors.

As I stepped out of the motorhome, the retractable steps hadn't fully deployed, and I landed awkwardly and hurt my left knee.  Damn!  I had always felt younger than my stated age, but after the last two weeks, with my pulmonary emboli and now my sprained knee, I wondered if I was almost ready to be put out to pasture.  I found the knee brace I had been given in North Carolina, applied it, and soldiered on.  Presumed initial diagnosis: quadriceps tendon strain.

I was unable to drive our little pickup truck because pushing in the clutch was too painful, so the next day Nancy drove us up the road that leads to Snowmass and Aspen, where we had skied so many years ago.  We stopped in the charming little town of Basalt.  Ah, the memories from way back in the early 70's when as young squirts we drove a primitive little motorhome from southern California to a campground in Basalt (since closed) which we used as a base for skiing Snowmass and Buttermilk.  We remember fondly those incredibly cold winter mornings in our poorly insulated motorhome when we argued over whose turn it was to crawl out of bed and relight the pilot light on the propane furnace. 

Basalt has undergone dramatic further development over the years but is still gorgeous, and if we were ten years younger we might seriously consider moving there. 

We drove on to Aspen, which is where the rich and famous have played for many years.  We loved it back in the day and especially have fond memories of dinners in the Parlor Car Restaurant and the Ute City Bank.  The Parlor Car is long shut down and today Nancy could buy haute couture in the Ute City Bank building, were she so inclined.

We walked up to the tourist booth in the center of Aspen.  I said, wouldn't it be fun if it's the same lady we talked with when we visited six years ago.  And it was!  She was visibly six years older, as are we, most likely.  She is a long-time resident and in fact had worked in both of the restaurants we mentioned above, and our guess is that in this sky-high real estate market her home is paid off but she needs to supplement her income with this job. 

She suggested a lunch spot nearby - Meat and Cheese - which was classier than its name suggests.  We enjoyed our sandwiches and especially a wonderful Napa chardonnay from John Anthony Vineyards, which we weren't familiar with.  We asked the manager how that wine happened to be on their menu, and it turned out that he had met John Anthony at one of Aspen's amazing Food and Wine Classic events, which cost around $1700 per person for three days of bacchanalia.  (Shall I put you down for several?)  We told him that we would visit that winery on our next trip to Napa and let Mr. Anthony know about our experience in Aspen.

Aspen is still something special.  Fun to stroll by the upscale shops and wonderful restaurants.  Shame that the price of housing has become even more astronomical and beyond the reach of mere mortals.  Unfortunately I failed to take adequate photos of the Aspen scene except that here is a view of one of the ski runs, waiting for snow, at the end of a pretty street.

Driving back to our motorhome, I was struck by the sheer beauty of Colorado.  It may be second only to Alaska in scenic splendor, at least for those of us who are most moved by spectacular mountain views.

Boulder and Denver

Golden is not far from two larger cities - Boulder and Denver - and we explored each of those a bit.

Boulder we had visited about five years ago and at that time were impressed by the youth, slimness, and physical activity of its citizens - to the point that Nancy and I worried that we were just not a fit for the town.  But we loved its big and beautiful Pearl Street Pedestrian Mall, which boasted outstanding street performers and wonderful restaurants and shops.  This time we found it a bit less exciting, though still quite nice, and enjoyed a very tasty dinner there.

A day later we drove to Denver, which is only about eleven miles from Golden.  In the past we had avoided Denver, partly because it always seemed to be shrouded by ugly brown smog.  And the internet tells us that Denver is still the 11th worst city in America for pollution - though it is improving.  On this day there was some haze but less than expected.

It happened to be the day for Denver's annual Zombie Crawl, and some of those critters had spilled over to the downtown pedestrian mall we visited.

There were on the mall, of course, street performers.  The one who seemed to be pulling the most cash from the passersby was a swami with no visible means of support.  I think I know how the trick was done.  How about you?

In our opinion Colorado does downtowns better than any state we've visited, and we love the ambiance of a good downtown.  In fact, it's almost a must-have for us.

On our last day in Golden we drove to the nearby town of Broomfield, home of Anthem Ranch, a "master planned community" - that is, a series of neighborhoods built by a developer that also include some facilities - swimming pools, country clubs, restaurants, shops, tennis courts, and so on - that can be used by its residents.  There are a lot of those developments across the country.  Some of them are age restricted - meaning that residents must be over 55 years of age - and some are not.  We don't believe that we'll end up in one of them, but life is unpredictable, and the concept behind them has some appeal.

From a distance, Anthem Ranch looks like a huge hive of similar-looking homes on a barren landscape.  We drove to the sales office in its interior and were told that the current section under development was indeed an over-55 community, so that all the homes were ranch-style (meaning one floor and no stairs to the upper floor that might be problematic for the elderly).

We were directed to the model home next door.  It was a three bedroom, 2100 square feet house and had an open floor plan, extremely high ceilings, a high-end kitchen, a sumptuous master bedroom, and two fireplaces in the living section.

A bonus for me was that down a long flight of stairs was a huge basement which I would be able to convert into a home theater.  The design and finish of the home were excellent, and we could imagine ourselves living quite happily in such a space.  Except that it was kind of in the middle of nowhere (though it did have nice views of distant mountains), and the price - $615,000 - seemed high for a home that was packed tightly among so many similar structures.  So our search continues.

Golden, Colorado

Remember when Coors was kind of an exclusive cult beer?  After its 1873 founding in Golden, Colorado by Adolph Coors, a German immigrant, it was available initially only west of the Mississippi, and it wasn't distributed to all 50 states until 1991.  And remember those commercials in which the spokesman told us it was the Rocky Mountain water that made the beer special?

We're currently set up at a campground in Golden, where Coors is still brewed.  Golden is a pretty little city at the base of the Rockies, with a nice downtown shopping and outdoor restaurant area, and Clear Creek - carrying that fine mountain water - runs through it.

The Coors Brewery offers tours of its plant there in Golden.  Nancy and I waited in line for 45 minutes until a shuttle took us up to the incredible buildings within which the magic is accomplished.

We began by proving that we were over 21 by showing the gatekeeper our driver's licenses.  Truth be told, Nancy's is expired, and her attempts to get a new one from the California DMV have failed - but I don't think the lady looked too closely, and she was allowed to accompany me.  It was a walking tour of the facilities, and considering that we had been in line for so long, somewhat boring, partly because not much was going on.  I suppose the brewing of beer isn't a seven-days-a-week activity, because we saw only a few workers on the floor.  But maybe the hops mash was working away in the insanely huge copper-topped vats we looked down upon.

At the end of the tour Nancy and I - along with fifty or so of our best friends - were given the opportunity to indulge in up to three glasses of free beer each.  Nancy drank a Blue Moon, and I had a Killian's Irish Red.  (In 2004 Coors merged with the Canadian giant Molson, and the corporation is now officially Molson-Coors Brewing Company, producer of a number of different brews.)

On another day we drove to the Buffalo Bill Museum and Gravesite, up on Lookout Mountain.  Buffalo Bill Cody (not to be confused with a contemporary of his, Wild Bill Hickok, who was killed at Deadwood) was a frontier cowboy of the old West, a Pony Express rider, a gold miner, and a soldier in the Civil War on the Union side.  He became well known for his skill hunting the buffalo that were so common on the plains at that time.  A number of books were published featuring him as the hero of largely fictional exploits, and that made him a very famous man.  Later in life he put together an enormous show of cowboys, Indians, and horses - Buffalo Bill's Wild West  - that for many years toured the US and eventually even Europe.  But as famous as he became, he had trouble paying his bills and eventually lost his show to creditors.  Apparently show business wasn't the path to riches in those days that it is now.

Bill was buried on Lookout Mountain, one of his favorite places on Earth because it looked out upon the mountains and plains of the old West.  The mountain views up there are indeed awesome, but today it also overlooks Golden and Denver down on the plains.  A museum dedicated to his life stands near his gravesite and contains an amazing number of truly beautiful vintage posters advertising his Wild West show, along with guns and saddles and other paraphernalia from the show, and costumes that were worn by Annie Oakley, Calamity Jane, and Sitting Bull, who all appeared in the extravaganza, and of course Buffalo Bill himself.