Home run

Yes, Gina finally roped me in to coming home. Our last day we drove from Scranton, PA to Belgrade.

A summary of our trip, numbers and favorites:

Miles traveled in the car: 11,014

MIles per gallon: 24.0 (the bikes on the roof probably cost us 2 mpg)

Number of states visited: 26 

States where one or both of us rode bikes: 18

Favorite bike rides: Zion National Park and Long Canyon, Escalante Staircase National Monument

Favorite hike: Grinnell Glacier, Glacier National Park 

States where we spent the most time: Utah, Idaho, New Mexico

Favorite places: southern Utah, South Dakota

Favorite hot springs: Payette River, Idaho 

Unexpectedly good: Bicycle ride around Shiloh battlefield

Unexpectedly bad: I-81 through Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania...zillions of aggressive trucks!

Places we want to go back to: Allegheny bike trail from Pittsburg to the C&O canal trail in Maryland

Taking the waters

Gina and I left Hot Springs, AR two days ago. It's located in a geologic cleft in the Ouachita mountains from which hot water gushes out of 47 springs. It's a town caught in a time warp....prohibition, bootlegging, gambling, gangsters and hot baths.

Economic activity surrounding the baths was robust up until the end of WWII. The US military had a convalescent hospital here and sent men here for decades. Doctors advised patients with arthritis and other ailments to come take the waters. The bath houses were busy along with the casino and, during Prohibition, speakeasies and  booze. Al Capone stayed in our hotel when he was in town. Major league baseball teams had spring training camps there. After the war the military closed the hospital. The baseball teams moved to Florida. The casino was shut down in 1967. The Park Service preserved bath house row and leases space in them. Here's one of the bath houses with the old military hospital in back.

Gina and I stayed in the old Arlington Hotel, a 470 room behemoth with a rooftop hot tub (big enough to fit 25 people!) and two heated swimming pools, one cascading into the other. Wow, a lot of free hot water feeding the pools straight from the forest covered hillside. We were the only ones up there until a couple from Louisiana came. Check out this construction...looks like something in an 1880’s photo. It connects the roof of the hotel to the springs coming out of the hillside.

Those are magnolias in front of the hotel...must be nice in spring.

Bill Clinton's mother moved here with Bill was three. He grew up and graduated from Hot Springs High School. We left Hot Springs yesterday and visited the Clinton presdiential library in Little Rock (a hagiographic look at his political career) on our way to Memphis. 

We pulled in to Memphis for ribs and blues on Beale Street...we weren't disappointed...

We camped at Chickasaw state park and visited the Shiloh battlefield today. Now we are headed north alog the Natchez Trace. More later.

Hanging in New Mexico

We are staying in John and Mary Benziger's apartment in Santa Fe after a scary episode. 

Wednesday morning I got the go ahead to resume taking the chemotherapy drug Dasatinib. I had my blood checked at a clinic in Utah on Monday and even though my platelets are still low (94,000) the doctor in charge of the clinical trial doesn't think it's due to the drug. This makes me uncomfortable, not knowing why my platelets are below normal. Anyway, I took the first dose Wednesday morning as we headed out of Albuquerque to the Jemez mountains. After a soak at a beautiful hot spring near Jemez Springs we found a great campsite at Fenton Lake state park, high up on Jemez mountain. We bought some warm sleeping bags at REI in Albuquerque and we are prepared now for temps down into the twenties. By the time we pulled into the site, about five hours after taking the drug, I wasn't feeling too good. Within a few minutes I was feeling terrible, then the shakes and chills started. Two hours later, after getting sick to my stomach and passing out in bed I crawled out of the van. We decided to head down out of the mountains and back towards Albuquerque just in case I had more trouble. Nothing like a brief, violent chemotherapy episode to remind you what it's like!

Today, two days later, I feel pretty good. I'm supposed to take this drug daily until June so I'm hoping I tolerate it well. I've been taking it on and off for almost a year, but getting back on to it after two months off it was rough for a day. How come the second and third days have been so much easier? I don't know, but I'm happy!

Gina and I are excited to explore Santa Fe. Here is the view from Mary and John's apartment last night...

Yesterday, we had tea with Sandy Colt's sister Carola and her son Jimmy. They live a few blocks from John and Mary's apartment...

We were lucky to arrive in Albuquerque during the annual Balloon Fiesta. What an amazing, beautiful event...more than 500 balloons participate. We got there at dawn and saw a dozen balloons go up on Dawn Patrol, to test the winds. The balloons glowing in the dark....on and off like fireflies. At 7 am, the mass ascension began...

Here is a picture of Gina in psychedelic mode...could I get a hot air balloon made with her picture on it?

We'll be in Santa Fe until Monday...it's a great place to hang out, relax and wait out the early winter cold front that dropped snow on the surrounding mountains last night and a cold wind today. Sunday night we've got tickets to see Jake Shimabukuro ( an almost well-known ukelele player that Gina heard about on NPR) at the Kimo Theater in Albuquerque...then it's off to Texas, Oklahoma and points east.

The road past Zion

We are camped at the confluence of the Dirty Devil and the Colorado rivers wondering why we are the only ones in America to have chosen this campground. Tens of thousands of people wandering around after the closure of the national parks yet nobody here. Perhaps its the fact that camping today is dominated by RVs and this campground doesn't have water or electricity or sewage hook-ups...just beautiful cliffs and canyons with the Dirty Devil river flowing around a horseshoe bend far below...

Our journey here was a continuing ramble. We spent two nights in Seattle, touched the Pacific Ocean on Bainbridge Island (the location for the book Snow Falling on Cedars) and decided the cold rainy weather was not us....we are sun seeking hedonists! A major storm was predicted and our plans for camping on the Oregon coast evaporated. 

We drove south towards Portland and then back across Oregon. The cold at night was making camping a little uncomfortable so we hatched a plan to flee to southern Utah, an area we had visited 30 years ago and loved. After camping stops near Pendleton, OR, Twin Falls, ID and Ely, NV we landed in Great Basin national park. We had never heard of this park and decided to go in and hike. Turns out there is a grove of Bristlecone pine trees located at 10,400 feet. I have always been intrigued by these ancient trees. So, we drove to the end of the road at 9,600 feet (what a view!) and hiked in a couple of miles (yes, another cheater hike!) to see them. Some were more than 3,000 years old!!

We drove on to Cedar City, UT and spent the night in a motel there so that we could get to Zion national park early the next morning.  We were lucky to get an excellent site...

Took an amazing bike ride up Zion canyon...no cars are allowed, just shuttle buses. The ride back down was like a dream.  

The next day we wanted to hike the canyon narrows but the rangers told us the park is closing, the trails are closed and we had to leave by 11 am. Of course this was upsetting...we thought about chaining ourselves to the fire grate but instead we packed up and left.

Since then we have been wandering about in the desert, staying on land owned by America's largest landowner, a somewhat suspicious organization known as the Bureau of Land Management. They allow camping on their land as long as you are at least 50 feet off the road and they prefer you camp in places already despoiled by previous campers. So, we headed in on the Skatumpah road late one day and found an area that met their requirements...and ours too.

Here is our site the next night...thats Gina playing her guitar again...this is in the Grand Staircase of the Escalante national monument...

Just a short bike ride away we found a beautiful slot canyon and decided we needed to find more slot canyons in the neighborhood.

Here we are in the slot canyon known as Spooky...

This one got so tight you had to walk sideways for several hundred yards!

A cold snap, with lows around 30 degrees was predicted so we booked into the Boulder Mountain Guest Ranch for two nights. We took an amazing hike down into another set of slot canyons...

 There was no trail...the owner of the lodge told us to go to the road leading to the dump, park and head over the cliff and down into the canyon. Gina and I parked there, looked down into the canyon and I could see doubt creeping in. Fortunately, Sara showed up with her 11 year old daughter Sasha and her friend Olivia. We had met them at the lodge. Turns out Sara is an experienced rock climber and she led us down into the canyon...unforgettable!

Well, that brings us to today, camped all by our lonesome down here...dawn looked like this...