Our wandering path
Yoga, Zen, biting flies and f-bombs
Tom preparing for yoga practice under some welcome shade.
It was really the fault of the flies, not me, that I lost my Zen state.
A Father’s Day nod to the past: Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie
On Father’s Day, instead of waffles and eggs, we opted for a hike through the tallgrass prairie preserve in Tom’s native Illinois, one of his longtime dreams.
On the road: Abandoned Manter school
The road to Manter, Kansas, is lined with wheat fields.
In Manter, Kansas, just over the Colorado border in the southwest corner of the Sunflower State, the only paved road is U.S. 150, which parallels railroad tracks and grain silos.
On the road: Bailing hay
Tyrel Reed, of Reed Farms, chats during a pause of working his hay fields near Lamar, Colorado.
In a hot hay field about 10 miles west of Lamar, Colorado, in the southeast corner of the state, Tyrel Reed, 28, was baling hay. Fast.
The Great Sand Dunes: A mirage come true in Colorado
The Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in southern Colorado materializes like a mirage at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
Driving toward the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, you start to see tan ripples at the base of towering, snow-covered mountains, like a mirage wavering on the edge of your consciousness. Are they really there?
They are.
Grand Canyon’s North Rim: A stunning surprise
Buffalo, including calves, graze on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
We have viewed the Grand Canyon from the South Rim, rafted through it on the Colorado River, but never seen it from the North Rim. What a stunning mistake.
The push-pull, stay-go life on wheels
Me, Nancy, Nate, Mom and Tom at Nate's graduation from Barrett, The Honors College, at Arizona State University.
On the road again, feeling that push-pull, bittersweet emotion of leaving after a month-long stop at “home” in Arizona that was filled with love, celebration, reconnection and inspiration.
Glimpse: Beauvoir, Gulf breezes and contemplation
Beauvoir, which means beautiful view in French, was the last home of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.
One of the exhibits at Beauvoir, in Biloxi, Mississippi, the last home of Jefferson Davis, calls him “America’s son.” This is more than a little jarring to a Yankee because Davis was president of the Confederacy, leading the South’s effort to secede from the union and, after his defeat, was imprisoned as a traitor.
But here, where some refer to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression, and where there is a lot of defensive explanation that it was about states rights, not slavery, Davis is a hero.
New Orleans: Storms, survival and reunions
Tom and I with Robert Indiana's Love sculpture at The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
They probably should make you show your passport to get into New Orleans. It’s so wonderfully unique that it should have its own national borders: The French Quarter, the music, the food, the cocktails, the streetcars, the Gulf, the swamps, the Cajun culture, all overlaid with the bittersweet sense of the fleeting nature of life, losses, survival and renewal after Hurricane Katrina, now more than a decade ago.
Our guides here were Dave and Judy Walker, longtime friends and former colleagues at The Arizona Republic, NOLA citizens since 2000, and until recently, journalists at the Times-Picayune. Dave was the television writer, former president of the national Television Critics Association, and has written for TV Guide and other outlets. Judy covered homes and gardens, then food, and has written several cookbooks, including Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans (with columnist Marcelle Bienvenu), a work of love envisioned after readers lost all their clipped recipes in the storm. Judy still writes her food column at NOLA.com and Dave has a new gig at the famed National World War II Museum. We hadn’t seen them for maybe 15 years, and were excited for the reunion.
Glimpse: The Whitney Plantation – Wallace, Louisiana
Live oaks at the plantation's main entrance, which faced the Mississippi River.
Across the south, there are numerous restored plantations preserving and celebrating the opulent history of excess and privilege of the white owners. The Whitney Plantation is the only one that tells the story from the viewpoint of the enslaved people who worked there. The plantation, which cultivated and processed sugar, is less than an hour from New Orleans on historic River Road in Wallace, Louisiana. Its French Creole raised-style main house built in 1803 is described as one of the finest surviving examples in Louisiana. Many of the original slaves on the plantation came from the Senegambia region of West Africa and are honored on memorial walls. Our guide showed us the slave quarters and described the work of a sugar plantation, a dangerous operation that used sharp machetes to chop the cane and huge pots to boil it down to crystals. Slaves who were cut or burned, which happened frequently, usually would develop infections and die. She described the “punishments” they received for different infractions – whippings, beatings, brandings – which also often caused infection and death. The guide also discussed the shift when the African slave trade was outlawed and owners forced enslaved women to have as many children as possible to replace lost slaves. The plantation, on the National Register of Historic Places, was used for several scenes in the 2012 Quentin Tarantino film Django Unchained. The gift shop has books of slave history and interviews conducted by the Federal Writers Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration, in 1937-40. On a wall, visitors share their reaction to the plantation with sticky notes, including one that recalls a poem by Aeschylus that Robert Kennedy used in his speech announcing the assassination of Martin Luther King:
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.
The visitor concludes: WHAT YOU DO HERE IS IMPORTANT, underlining it three times.
Nomads and the civilised look at each other with disapproval and misunderstanding. Why would anyone want to wander the wilderness and live in a tent? Why would anyone want to live in a box and obey unnecessary masters?
Ali, Mostly we’ve found people think it’s really cool. Many tell us they dream of being able to wander the world. Are you a nomad?