Ann’s parents choose Cascade Lake State Park for the site of a rare convergence of Ann with her two brothers and two nephews. We engage in hiking, badminton, fishing, horseshoes, kayaking, campfires, many good meals, and a sustained effort at a family photo. Bridge Family Portrait 1 I made a timelapse video of some of…

This project began with a sad irony – a Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation website dedicated to curing paralysis had become paralyzed itself. My browser froze for four minutes the first time I tried to load it. Fortunately there are cures for this type of paralysis. Marker clustering was the primary treatment, backed up by…

We need to head into town for supplies, and the weather cools down for us and gives the desert some water. Originally we decide we’ll stay at the fanciest RV resort in Saint George to see what that’s like. It may be a long time before we do this again. I won’t enumerate everything, but…

The dirt road is bumpy, and we have to pull over a few times while Ann scouts side roads, but we find a spacious place to camp with a couple of small junipers for shade. Dad and Sarah’s dogs are thrilled to be free to run through the sage brush. We end up about a…

When we see the throng of tourists with kids waiting for tickets, we nearly turn around. Did we end up at Disney land somehow? The Line Thankfully we persevere, and the crowds disperses a bit once inside. There is a reptile lecture featuring a live gila monster and rattlesnake scheduled shortly after we gain entry,…

On the menu today: a cornucopia of cactus. There are many other attractions at the Tucson Botanical Gardens, like a butterfly house that is important to the world migrations of some species of butterflies, but we’re hungry for cactus. With biological diversity in decline, it feels good now and then to just blow your mind…

On our way home from a short climbing outing in the darkening night, I notice the airbag light come on in the truck. As I puzzle over that, the speedometer and all the other gauges flatline. I puzzle more and consult Ann. The headlights start to dim, and we pull over but leave the truck…

This is a long drive, 985 miles in some remote terrain, but it has never failed to show me something new. We’ve left our stuff and our Subaru, so we can drive together with a mostly empty trailer. This helps us make a lot of miles, for us, well past the “NEXT SERVICES 109 MILES”…

We didn’t originally have a trip to Idaho for Christmas planned. But there have been factors at work, with more details to come, that would require us to once again free ourselves of our indoor accoutrements. Our bed, my chair, the loveseat, some kitchen things, etc. We figure it won’t be too much since we’ve…

I got a nice email asking me about Santa Fe hikes: Every Christmas we come to Santa Fe – it is the greatest escape from our lives here in Dallas, TX. We always like to go walking/hiking and as I was researching I found your wonderful site. But I was overwhelmed by the amount of…