All posts tagged: Random DJB Thoughts

The Streaks Continue!

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What a month for baseball! During August, I’ve seen four major league games in four different cities and was able to cheer four home teams to wins. For the Nationals, they are on a ten game winning streak. Five of the last six have been by walk-offs. Last evening those two streaks converged. Candice and I had tickets for Thursday’s late-afternoon game between the Nationals and  Arizona. The Nats came into the contest having won 9 in a row, including a terrific walk-off win the night before. We arrived early enough to pick up our Ian Desmond bobble-heads (Desmond is the one to the right of catcher Wilson Ramos in the photo at the top of the post) and with great anticipation for another magical evening. But while picking up the Desmond bobble-head was easy enough, the Nats needed someone to pick up their offense.  They hit well enough – until a runner touched second base.  Then the Diamondback pitchers all turned into Cy Young. Twice the Nats left the bases loaded, for crying out …

Lunch in Claremont with Claire

Observations from the road: The “Thankfulness edition” at the end of our “Not all who wander are lost” tour

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Tuesday, August 19th (and day #19) – is the last one of the cross-country Not All Who Wander Are Lost tour. Later this morning I’ll be flying home.  I can’t wait to see Candice and Andrew (who leaves for his senior year in college on Friday morning).  But I also want to put a wrap on the wonderful two-and-a-half weeks Claire and I had on our exploration of this amazing country we live in. It has been an experience I’ll never forget. I’ve had several parts of this series where I’ve thrown together random thoughts that I’ve entitled Observations from the Road.  For those who want to see them in order, you can find them here as: The First Edition The Central Time Edition The Prairie Edition The Jeez, Montana is a Big State Edition The We Made It (Well, In One Sense) Edition The On the Edge Edition So this grouping of random thoughts wraps up the Observations From the Road posts as well as the series on our cross-country tour.  I’ve entitled it …

We Made It (This Time for Real)!

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We made it!  And unlike James Dean we didn’t have any Highway 46 crack-ups. Claire and I completed the driving part of our cross-country tour (both the width and the length portions) on Sunday – the 17th day of our journey – when we pulled into Claremont around 7:30 local time.  We’ve put approximately 4,500 miles on the rental car and have been through 13 states. I’ll write more about this segment of our travels later, but I did want to capture one bit of Americana from Sunday’s drive.  As we were tooling down California Highway 46 between Paso Robles and Lost Hills, we passed The James Dean Memorial Junction.  Hmmm, I thought, I wonder if this is where James Dean died in his car crash. Sure enough, a couple of miles down the road we came to a store and gas station with a huge likeness of the famous 1950s actor pointing to the entrance. The Atlas Obscura (who knew such a thing existed), provides this background for the junction: The California junction of …

Eating Our Way Cross-Country

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Whatever mind came up with the idea of Dungeness Crab Tater Tots with Crème Fraiche…I like the way that mind works! Careful readers will have noted that Claire and I are eating our way cross-country on the Not All Who Wander Are Lost tour. Heck, you don’t even have to be that careful…we’ve been all over the food.  We’ve gone local with dollar hot dogs at Progressive Field in Cleveland. We carbo loaded in Chicago. Don’t even get me started on the cheese and cream in Wisconsin.  One of the highest read posts of this series has been the You Want Nutrition…Eat Carrots! note from Madison. Once we made it to Seattle (how did we do that without exploding?!) we went vegan at Plum Bistro. Suffice it to say, we’ve eaten local and we’ve eaten well. Last night, at the wonderful Chalkboard restaurant in Healdsburg (thank you again Yelp!) Claire and I thought to actually take pictures of each serving of the small plates we were splitting for dinner. The Crab Tater Tots were what …

Redwoods and Coastlines…The Main Course

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Wednesday’s visit to see California’s redwoods and coastline turned out to be the appetizer.  Beautiful as it was, it couldn’t hold a candle to today’s visits to forests, coasts, and wine country. Thursday – the 14th day of our cross-country tour – was the main course. As is the case with much of the best cuisine of California, it did not disappoint. Claire and I left Eureka around 9 a.m. and headed south on Highway 101.  About 45 minutes into the drive we stopped for gas, and as fate would have it the manager had come out to fix the printer on our gas pump. When he saw our license plates he struck up a conversation, and finding out we were traveling cross-country, he immediately said, “You have to drive the Avenue of the Giants route.  This is the old road that criss-crosses 101, and in slightly more than 30 miles it has many of the huge redwoods in the region.” Oh my…was he ever right. And are we ever glad we took his advice. …

Efficiency Isn’t the Point

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One could look at today’s itinerary for the Not All Who Wander Are Lost tour and think that our main goal was to go from Point A (Seattle) to Point B (Portland) as quickly and efficiently as possible.  But those who think that way miss the point of our cross-country trip. We avoided most of Interstate 5 – the main line between Seattle and Portland – and struck out from Gig Harbor, Washington, to get to Astoria, Oregon on the coast via the crooked road. And think of what we would have missed had we taken the straight and narrow way. Why, we wouldn’t have known that Montesano, Washington is the home of the Tree Farm.  (It says so right on the sign.) We would have missed the fact that South Bend, Washington is the Oyster Capital of the World. Given the amount of “working forests” one sees in this section of the state, I suspect this is where America’s supply of paper is produced. And who knew that McCleary, Washington will be celebrating the …

Montana Landscape

Observations From the Road (The “Jeez, Montana is a Big State” Edition)

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On Friday morning, as we began our second week on the Not All Who Wander Are Lost tour, Claire and I drove the 20 miles up from Fort Peck to Glasgow, Montana where we reconnected with U.S. Route 2.  Now mind you, we had driven two-and-one-half hours in Montana the day before just to get to Fort Peck – which is in the eastern part of the state.  So imagine our surprise when we clicked on the Google maps direction finder to head west to Glacier National Park from Glasgow and the young lady on the smart phone who has become our traveling companion says: Go west on U.S. Route 2 forever. Well, I may be exaggerating a bit. It was actually something like 259 miles. But after a long day of driving through Montana’s plains along the original Hi-Line (New York City’s High Line is late to the party), it seems like forever. This Hi-Line refers to the northernmost route of the Great Northern Railroad and U.S. 2, near the Canadian border. But, as …

With Liz and Dave at the Twins game 08 05 14

Main Street, baseball, and rhubarb crisp (?)

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Main Streets and baseball. What could be more American? More  importantly, can you have a bad day when these two things converge?  Not in my book. But how did the rhubarb crisp replace apple pie?  Well, you’ll just have to read on to find out. We began our first Tuesday – Day 5 on the Not All Who Wander Are Lost cross-country tour – in tiny Spring Green, Wisconsin. For a town of 1400 (I love town signs that post the population), Spring Green had much to offer.  The downtown has a variety of interesting shops and services, and my friend Oakley Pearson – who drives through this area each year on his way home to Minnesota – recommended the Spring Green General Store for breakfast.  Claire and I took him up on that recommendation, and after a great bowl of oatmeal (see, we can eat healthy food), we’re glad we did. Business was hopping with a great mix of patrons. I stopped by one table to tell the guy wearing the 1952 Vincent Black …

Hillside detail at Taliesin

A remarkable afternoon at Taliesin

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Some days on the road are magical. Yesterday — spent at Frank Lloyd Wright‘s Taliesin — was one such afternoon. Our cross-country road trip includes a couple of places that are clearly what one could tag as a busman’s holiday. Thanks to the generous offer of my good friend Jeff Grip of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Claire and I were met at Taliesin – Wright’s Spring Green, Wisconsin, home – by Effi Casey, a member of the Taliesin Fellowship; a graduate of the architecture school at Taliesin; the widow of the long-time dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, Tom Casey; and an accomplished violinist who serves as the Director of Music at the school. We were also joined for the afternoon by Floyd Hamblen, a member of the Taliesin Fellowship who serves on the faculty of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, is a practicing architect, and lives year-round with his family at Taliesin. I’m pictured with the two of them inside Effi’s home on the grounds, known locally as …

Inside the Bean

From the silly to the sublime

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Today we played tourist in Chicago – a great city with way too much to see in one lifetime, let alone one day. Work takes me to Chicago three or four times a year, so with the exception of a 90-minute architectural tour taken by boat on the Chicago River – something everyone should do once (or more) in their lives – I turned Sunday over to Claire’s interests. We left Aunt Susan and Cousin Zoe’s home in Evanston and took the CTA ‘L’ train into the city.  When we stepped out from the below-ground station at Lake, Claire started looking around and said, “This feels like New York.” What she meant as a first time  visitor was that the crush of people, the canyon walls of buildings, and the energy felt like a big city. The pep in her step was quickly evident, as we headed out to Millennium Park. Why Millennium Park?  Because what self-respecting tourist to Chicago these days doesn’t want to take a selfie at Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (or – …