This is my third and last day of work this week, and I am off again soon for another long weekend.  I didn’t start padding my holidays with long weekends until last year, maybe, or the year before.  I used to just work every day if I didn’t otherwise have plans, but now I’m taking advantage of the fact that I have some vacation days to burn.  An extra day on a three-day weekend makes a four-day weekend!  An extra day before Thanksgiving is a five day weekend!  (Math.)  It’s great.  I really feel like I am celebrating the holidays when I have a day at home to sleep in, sit around, do laundry, take the dog to the park, and maybe have an afternoon nap.  (Afternoon naps are one of the greatest things known to man.  Even the dog likes it- she will always settle down for a snore if I am snoring nearby, though she often needs to jump up at some point to bark furiously at a UPS truck.)

Anyway, four day weekend ahead.  This one will be less stressful since it’s all my family and not Jay’s, and there’s no travel.  Just family and friends, late nights, hanging out, too much food, and good times.

Jay has been subbing in on bass guitar for a local band on some Friday nights for the past month or so.  Did I mention I am dating a musician?  He is a really great bass player, and it’s a salsa band with a big following.  The dance floor is always packed by the end of the night with people who can really dance.  It’s cool to watch, though it’s not exactly my crowd.  I have dressed up for it sometimes, and other times just worn jeans, but either way, I feel like the odd duck in the bar.  I’m not about to get out on the dance floor alone, even if I did know what I was doing.  Which I don’t!  But so far I have been lucky enough to be joined by friends for at least part of the show, and we can chat for a bit while the band is on.  It still makes for a late night after a week of work, because they don’t finish until 1am.  Late nights and late mornings sleeping in afterwards!

Oh, so I just got back from my Tulsa Christmas.  The trip went very well and I had a really nice time.  Jay and I stayed downtown at a really nice hotel, which gave us some amazing deals for the holidays.  Comped parking and credit at the hotel restaurant, for instance, and it was a Priceline deal to begin with.  Nice!  The weather was warm, sunny and in the 50s.  If we hadn’t been so busy eating rich food, it would have been great for a walk!  I don’t know why we didn’t.  I guess we were busy with all the activities that come along with a holiday celebration, including food preparation and visitors and gifts and board-game playing and movie-watching.

We did take a driving tour of the neighborhoods in Tulsa where Jay grew up, and that was really cool.  This included Oral Roberts University- not because Jay went there, but because it is located in the general area, and is worth a drive-by for most tourists.  I think most people want to gawk at the praying hands sculpture, but personally I just adored the overwhelmingly retro-futuristic architecture of the campus.  How can something modernist be so ostentatious?  It was really amazing.  I would have loved to walk around there at dusk sometime, getting photos of the buildings at golden hour.  Really cool.  Of course, I think almost exactly the opposite of the mission of the university itself.  Not a fan, except of the architecture.

On Christmas Eve, we went to a megachurch for services.  Truly!  A megachurch is defined as a church that has an average weekend attendance of more than 2000 people, and this one had a sanctuary that seats more than 2000 people.  And the website lists at least six different services on a regular Sunday, including two held in the main sanctuary.  (The others are held in one of the other large locations on the campus- yes, campus- such as the smaller chapel, which only seats 500 people.)  I was pretty overwhelmed by the size of the sanctuary and the campus and the amount of people.  I have been to my share of rural churches, after all.  Maybe I should have been less vocally surprised, but it was pretty amazing.

I am interested that this church is not listed on the Wikipedia page for the largest churches in the United States, but it is a “non-exhaustive” list.  I am interested that four of these are in Missouri, but especially that one of them is in Ozark, Missouri.  Ozark only has a population of 18K (though it is in the Springfield metro area), and the Assemblies of God church has an average attendance of more than 8,800.  That is really amazing.

The church service itself, by the way, was very nice.  It was Methodist, which is a particularly non-crazy brand of Protestantism, and about 80% of the service was music.  That’s probably a conservative estimate.  There was a lot of music.  I really like that.  I like getting to sing traditional Christmas carols.  I like the candlelight traditions of Christmas Eve services.  It’s just pleasant and Christmas-y.

We did get home on Monday in time for the radio show.  It’s been a short week, but it’s been a busy one.

This weekend is my family’s Christmas events.  It will be pretty laid back, but does require a little bit of planning.  I have finished with gifts- they are wrapped and under the tree, ready to be packed up and taken north to my parents’ house.  Now is the time for planning food.  My mom took the reins this year and saved us a lot of back-and-forth negotiation on food types and delegation, so I already have my shopping list for the food.  It’s just a matter of heading to the supermarket at some point in the next couple of days.  There really isn’t even a rush, except that I thought I might make some cookies or fudge or maybe a cheeseball, and that takes some time.  We’ll see how that works out, though!  Lazy me on a weekend vacation.  But I’m looking forward to more holidays.  I like the holidays!

This is probably my last post of 2011.  I’ve already been writing 2012 on things for the last couple of months, thanks to a job that deals with finances.  We’ve been in the 2012 financial year since July, and I’m already planning through 2015.  Weird, huh?

2011 has been a good year, of course.  Some downs, but lots of ups!  Some great big ups!  I like the ups.  Some things are just in transition, and I’m hoping 2012 will bring closure.  We’ll see how it goes!  You never know about the future.  You just never can tell how it will work out, and I’d rather hope for happy endings than fast endings, in terms of closure.  2012!

Happy New Year!

I am trying to get myself into the mode of getting Christmas things done, because I have done little to nothing in preparation of presents and cards and all of it, and there are things to do.  I think I have the idea of the cards sorted this year.  Instead of making new ones, I have a stack of unused ones from previous years (going back to 2000) and I am going to use them up and send them out.  It feels right, actually.  I have been in a transitional state all year due to the house cleanout last spring and having the house on the market, and it seems right to use up the old cards this year.  Use them up and move on to new things next year with a clean slate behind me.  It feels very symbolic.  And, yes, it’s convenient, but actually it required vast amounts of time spent in reorganization last spring to have assembled the collection of unused cards all in one place.  So it really wasn’t easy.  I think I will put a sticker on the cards to say that I am using the old ones due to my current spirit/state of transition.  I doubt anyone would actually remember that I’d sent that card before, but I do remember.  And I love all the cards I’ve sent over the past few years, and I’m happy to revisit them.

I am not sure how motivated I am to spend time decorating my house for the holidays.  I am definitely not stringing lights into the trees this year.  I might put up one of the trees, maybe.  Time spent on my house in the next few weeks is better spent painting or fixing than in decorating.  But Jay is having a party at his house next weekend, and I might take some of my stuff over to his place to decorate there.  Outside lights, for sure.  Gotta light the house up- it’s kinda hard to find.

Jay and I head up to northern Iowa tomorrow for Thanksgiving in the small town where his parents grew up together.  He is from Oklahoma, but they are from Iowa.  I am really looking forward to it.  I always love traveling, but traveling for holidays is particularly great.  And I am imagining that this is a pretty perfect location for Thanksgiving, though we will see if my imagination meets up with reality.  We’ll be back on Friday, so it’s not a very long trip.  But I get to travel for Christmas too.  I like filling my holidays with hours and hours in the car.  Seriously, I do!

After that, we’ll still have the whole weekend.  And then it will be the last few days of November, notable because my birthday is in there.  And then, my friends, it will be December, and I will be officially behind on Christmas.  Officially.  Yuck.

It’s been a long two-week stretch since I had a weekend free because I traveled over last weekend for the library conference in New Orleans.  It’s a full two days of work with two days of traveling.  So I am looking forward to the weekend even more than usual.

The trip went well, overall.  I was traveling alone for the first time, with a full roster of meetings to handle on my own, and that all went fine.  I wasn’t really concerned that it wouldn’t go fine.  I’ve had plenty of experience with it at this point.

Otherwise, the trip was fun.  I got in early enough on Friday that I could run over to the Backstreet Cultural Museum before my first meeting, which was really important to me.  It was a hike to the museum in hot & humid weather, but I was so glad I made the trip.  The founder of the museum, Sylvester Francis, was there and basically gave me a personal tour, which was great.  I loved seeing the Mardi Gras Indian costumes in person.  They are beautiful, but I am glad I am not the curator in charge of preserving those costumes through the years.  It must be quite a trick.

My hotel was on Canal Street at Bourbon, and was quite swanky, very pleasant.  Bourbon Street was a complete pain in the ass except for the brass band that played on the corner near the hotel, and I ate one dinner at the Red Fish Grill on Bourbon (blackened avocado with most of a loaf of French bread- holy shit, it was delicious), but mostly I avoided that area.  I would also get agitated as I neared the French Market area, so except for one trip to Cafe Du Monde (poorly timed, as it was too miserably hot to really enjoy a plate of beignets, and it immediately started pouring rain when I wanted to leave), I wandered in the French Quarter, but in the calmer and more arty areas.

Food was generally a problem, as the City of New Orleans obviously officially considers fish to be part of a vegetarian diet.  I have been thinking about eating fish now and then, as it would generally make things easier for me as I am currently dating a carnivore, but when it came down to it while looking at the menus posted outside the restaurants, I just couldn’t follow through with it.  The closest I could get was Caesar salad, which is usually made with anchovies in the dressing.  I know it’s there in the abstract, but I’m not really tasting it, so I can handle it.  Eventually I may work my way beyond this.  We’ll see!  Anyway, other than the blackened avocado, I had a wonderful breakfast at The Original Pierre Maspero’s restaurant at Chartres and St. Louis.  I’d seen a big long line outside this restaurant on Saturday night, full of people who looked like they knew from New Orleans cooking (not just librarians and tourists), so when I walked by it the next morning, I decided to stop.  The vegetable omelet was fantastic, but the grits, the GRITS.  Holy hell, deliciousness.  I tried to recreate this meal the next morning at my hotel restaurant before my flight home, and it was a giant failure.  The omelet was okay, but the grits were basically Cream of Wheat.  Dear Mr. Pierre Maspero, you know from grits.

But I had bread pudding twice.  Life is pretty grand when you get to eat bread pudding twice in one weekend.

On Sunday, David Simon and his wife gave a keynote address after the Public Librarians Association handed out their annual awards.  I was waiting outside the auditorium more than an hour before the event started, even though there was really no line.  So I got a great seat, and was early in the line when they did a signing afterwards.  I generally hate book signings, because I always feel stupid talking to the writer while I get my book signed, but I feel a need to get a book signed anyway.  So I waited in line and came up with something interesting to talk about, which was my recent visit to the Backstreet Museum.  And, score!  He did perk up and look interested, and that was great.  Apparently the museum was on a recent episode of Treme, an episode I still haven’t seen, so I either came off as a nerd who didn’t do the assigned reading or as a nerd who read the bibliography ahead of the reading.  Oh well!  Anyway, I walked away with a signed book and a feeling of not being the biggest dork on the planet after talking to one of my idols, and that is a job well done.

The flight home was fine.  I arrived early in the evening and even managed to finish three books on the trip.  I am very proud of myself for this, and even more so because they were all books I bought prior to the trip and not on the trip, which is my usual MO.  Dumb!  And one of those books is the Columbia One Read selection for 2011, so I’m ahead of the game there too.

And now it’s been a long week since.  My allergies were killing me after I got home, but I seem to have pulled through.  I finally had a house showing last night after weeks of no showings at all (other than the open houses).  I have a few things going on this weekend, but it’s not really packed to the gills.  It will be fun and pleasant, except for the weather, which will be hot as hell and twice as humid.  But yay for three-day holiday weekends!

But I will fill you in.  The full story is that I am going to New Orleans next week, and I’ve been pretty excited about this development because I watch Treme, the HBO show set in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which is directed by David Simon (also of HBO’s The Wire, Generation Kill, and The Corner).  Well, I’d seen all of season 1 and have been watching season 2 when I can, because I don’t have HBO or even any kind of television anymore.  And I love the show, and wanted to go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras this year because of it.  The soundtrack has been on constant rotation on my iPod and my Pandora station is almost always set to Dr. John, seeded with some brass bands and other New Orleans music.  It has been a big deal for me for the past year.

So, my trip to New Orleans is for the American Library Association Annual Conference, which will keep me running most of the time.  I have to make a lot of appointments and attend a lot of meetings, and it just is a full weekend of workdays between two weeks of regular work.  (I don’t know why they schedule it over a weekend, but they always schedule it over a weekend.)

I have been irritated with myself in the past for missing speakers and author events (hello, it’s a library conference; there are a lot of speakers and author events), so I was trying extra hard to stay on top of the announcements by the publishers and other vendors as to who is coming and when, so if I could make it, I would try to fit in.  Dan Savage, for instance, is speaking at the opening session.  I like Dan Savage; I’ve read all his books except the newest one, and I’m a huge fan of the It Gets Better Project, and think he’s a stellar outspoken dude (even though I don’t really agree with all of his opinions in his weekly column, which is OK).  I know I will have to queue for an hour to see Dan Savage, and it might be worth it.  (But I have to choose between him and the Backstreet Cultural Museum, and it’s not an easy choice.)

Anyway, I was going through the list again today and noticed TO MY SHOCK that David Simon and his wife, writer Laura Lippman, will be speaking at the ALA Conference next weekend.  DAVID SIMON!

I am very excited.

This is exactly the kind of thing I overlook usually, but if I’d missed him out of pure negligence on my part, I would have never forgiven myself.  Never!  To see David Simon speak in New Orleans right now would just be fantastic.  All I have to do is rearrange my schedule, upgrade my badge, and make sure I am in line an hour early to see him.  But it is totally worth it.  Totally.  I just paid $50 to upgrade my badge and it’s just to see David Simon speak, honestly.

I don’t think he’ll be doing a signing (and it’s been a long time since he’s written a book, to be honest, even though I’m sure he considers himself a writer, first and foremost), but I will bring a bag with DVDs and Sharpies in case I can cajole one or maybe a photo.  That would be awesome.  Ugh, it’s just fantastic luck and coincidence.

I don’t have to recap much, since all my tweets from Twitter are on here.  Suffices to say, the trip went pretty well.  Everyone got there in one piece, including the people and the cats and the dog and the cars.  I flew home and was exactly on time for my weekly trivia night.  However, it was a long weekend- the driving was slow, the food was terrible, and I spent two nights sleeping on the floor in Tracy’s new, empty apartment with insufficient clothing and bedding for the temperatures in Portland in September.  Novice mistake!

I can say now that I have driven through Idaho and Utah.  Both were amazing.  Utah more so, because there were mountains and red rock and we stopped for a bit at Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake on a gorgeous day.  Idaho was so much flatter than I expected, and there were dust storms and construction on the highway, but it was an experience!  I have seen so much of Wyoming this summer between going to Yellowstone and coming home (via a different route) and now I-80 all through the southern edge of the state.  I love Wyoming!  It is not what I thought it was, but it is beautiful there.

Other than the empty apartment, Portland was a lot of fun.  Tracy’s place is in a great location.  We had Thai food twice, which was great for me because I love Thai food.  The first time it was okay, and the second time was AMAZING.  So that made up for the bad food on the road.  We didn’t tour around too much, but I had a nice time in general.  I like to see how people live in cities, not just see the sights.  I definitely got that experience by helping Tracy find a Trader Joe’s, checking out a Fred Meyer, and driving around.  I did make Tracy go through a little section of northeast Portland around Grant Park, where many of the Beverly Cleary books were based and where she lived.  There are statues of Henry Huggins, Ribsy, and Ramona Quimby in Grant Park, and there is a map of the neighborhood on the wall of the Hollywood branch of the library.  We also drove around that neighborhood a little bit, and now I want to reread some of the Ramona books.  (We don’t speak of the movie around these parts, just fyi.)

Now I’m home, and my fridge is empty and my laundry is stacked up and the weeds are high.  I have a weekend of work ahead of me, some of which will have to be put off because I am booked for part of the weekend already!  Some friends and I scheduled a float trip several weeks ago.  If it doesn’t rain and the river isn’t too high after the rain today and tomorrow, we should get to go!  I am looking forward to it, though I would like some extra time to recover from everything and get caught up.

In case you have been sitting in anticipation of a follow-up to my last post, I did not end up buying any shoes or boots.  I am sorry if I caused you any sleepless nights.

I guest blogged over at CoMO Whine and Dine today. I have been reading that blog for awhile. Long ago, I had the idea of writing a blog about being vegetarian in Columbia, but did not get it off the ground. Since they were looking for new participants over there, I decided I should be one of them as I have a different perspective as a vegetarian. I will submit a few more guest blogs in the next few weeks and see if it’s a good fit. Like I need a new place to write, right? I don’t have enough blogs already.

Last week was a long and crazy week. I started it off by seeing Winter’s Bone with a couple of friends. It’s been at Ragtag for weeks and weeks now, which goes to show that Columbia loves it some local films. It is set in the Ozarks of Missouri and was filmed near Springfield. It also has done pretty well with critics and festivals: a 95% Rotten Tomatoes rating, a score of 90 on Metacritic, and it won the Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Film Festival. I hate to say all that and then say that I didn’t love it, but… I didn’t love it. I thought it looked pretty authentic, but there were a lot of parts that didn’t ring true for me. It was okay. It was spectacular for a Missouri film, let’s put it that way.

On Tuesday, I volunteered at the Missouri River 340 race.  I really, really enjoyed myself.  I signed up for it on a lark.  I like to volunteer, and I don’t know anything about river races or kayaks or canoes or even boats.  It turned out to be a great time.  I learned a lot.  I volunteered in an overnight shift, and the weather was perfect on a night with a full moon.  The racers would appear around the bend of the river, only visible by their headlights or the small LED lamps on their boats.  I just thought it was the coolest thing ever, and I cannot wait to volunteer again next year.
I took the picture above on the river with the light of the full moon. I think it turned out really cool.

On Wednesday, I played my weekly trivia game and then went to see the Carolina Chocolate Drops in concert in front of the Blue Note.  The concert was free, so there were a lot of people there just hanging out with drinks, talking in circles.  I had to be pushy to get to the front where I could actually hear the music over the chatting.  That was particularly annoying, because CCD are exceptionally talented musicians and it was kind of wasted in that environment.  But once I was close enough to hear, most of the people around me were really into the music, and it was a good show.  I’m only disappointed that it took me awhile to push through to the front.

Here, you should listen to this.  This is awesome.  I actually, embarrassingly enough, don’t usually love instrumental songs, but there aren’t lyrics worthy of this tune, honestly.

I love the hell out of the CDs this group has put out, but they were fantastic live.  Really amazing.

On Thursday, I was heading home from work when I got rear-ended at a stoplight, pushing my car into the car in front of me.  It caused a bunch of damage to my car, some of which I suspect is mechanical, not just cosmetic.  So I get to haul it around town for appraisals and estimates and eventually have it actually fixed.  I had a rental car over the weekend, but I returned it last night and borrowed one of my dad’s cars.  I am much less fearful of doing something stupid in Dad’s car than in a rental.  That didn’t keep me from calling him in a panic today at lunch when I thought all of the oil had drained out of the car in the PetsMart parking lot.  (It hadn’t.)  Anyway, fun times are being had, car-wise, in my life at this time.

I spent the weekend mostly exhausted and hanging out with family.  Tracy was in town for the last time in a long time, so we partied appropriately.  I had to clean my house in a hurry on Sunday morning, but that’s for the best.

This is a short week because I leave on Thursday night to go to KC, and on Friday I will accompany Tracy and her three cats and her parents and their dog to Portland, Oregon, by car caravan.  I am ambivalent about this trip.  On one hand, I love road tripping and I like to help people move in a self-satisfied sort of way.  Tracy is particularly bad and I am particularly good about shoving her cats into cat carriers and dealing with their harmonized yowls of discontent on car trips, and I have scars to prove my skills.  I offered, long ago, to help with this move, though I think I was thinking more in terms of moving her to, say, Cleveland or Pittsburgh and not Portland, Oregon.  It is a very, very long car trip to make with three unhappy cats.  Not to mention the ex-wife and former in-laws and a dog who has never, ever liked me.  So that’s the other side of the coin.  I will get to drive through Utah and Idaho, which I am excited about, even though it will just be interstate highway.  And there will be roughly 36 hours in Portland next week, which is great in itself.  And, ambivalent or not, I am doing it.  I leave on Thursday.

It’s really been a summer of trips for me.  I am very happy about that.  13 states, and three of them new to me.  Very exciting.  I love to add states to my “States I’ve Visited” list.  I have a definite goal of seeing all of them.

So that is the plan for Labor Day.  And then it’s September.  Actually, it will be September tomorrow, right?  Where does the time go?  It will be September tomorrow, and I am busy every weekend in September and most of October and then it will be Halloween and then it’s the holiday season.  Ugh.  (My sister-in-law has already started Christmas shopping.)  I do not understand why it goes so quickly.

I finished my trip reports from the trip Out West yesterday and cleaned up the formatting this morning, but I still owe you this, a description of my trip to DC over the weekend.  Maybe you don’t care.  I don’t care if you don’t care.  I write these so that I can remember later how the trip went.

It went well!  I had a good time.

I left on Friday, June 25, on a shuttle bus that runs between Columbia and the airport in Kansas City.  You can take a similar shuttle to St. Louis if you’d rather fly from there, but I like to fly Midwest Airlines to DC.  It has a direct flight to Reagan National Airport, which has a Metro stop, which makes it easy to get into and out of the city.  My boss and I took the same shuttle and same flight, but we stayed at different hotels.

My hotel was the posh and historic Mayflower, located on Connecticut Avenue.  I used to walk by it all the time when I lived in DC, so when I had the chance to stay here (at a comparative rate to the other conference hotels, and cheaper than the place where my boss stayed), I thought it would be pretty cool to experience that side of it.  And it is a nice hotel.  My room faced Connecticut Avenue, but it wasn’t much of a view.  The room itself was nice, but the wi-fi was expensive.  I only really took advantage of one amenity- the mail slot in the elevator lobby of my floor, through which I could drop postcards and watch them fall through the glass shute to the mail box on the first floor.  I LOVED this.  I tend to send postcards as I travel, and there is a slot like this in the movie Miracle on 34th Street, and I went out of my way to get stamps so I could mail things through this slot.  It was very exciting.

We arrived late on Friday afternoon, too late to get to the conference center and check in for the conference.  Oh well.  I had made tentative plans to have dinner with Tracy (who was in town for the weekend), Tracy’s parents, Tracy’s sister, her sister’s wife, and their baby, but there were last minute cancellations.  Tracy and her sister and sister’s family came down and met me at my hotel, and we all walked over to eat dinner at Malaysia Kopitiam, a restaurant on M Street that has a nice selection of vegetarian items, including vegetarian duck and goose.  I tried the veggie goose, and it was great.  Yay!  The variety of vegetarian food on the East Coast is amazing.  After dinner, we walked up to Dupont Circle and around for a little while.  This was my first time meeting Tracy’s sister’s baby, who is five months old.  He was pretty cute, of course, and loved being in the middle of all the people and traffic in Dupont Circle on a summery Friday night.  He was enthralled.

We said good-bye fairly early, and I walked back down to my hotel as they took the Metro home to Rockville, Maryland.

I had plans all the next day at the American Library Association conference, which was held at the DC Convention Center.  My hotel is a good distance from the convention center, but I decided to walk anyway instead of taking the Metro or one of the hired shuttle buses that are routed around to the various conference hotels.  It was a nice walk but hot as blazes.  Not humid, just hot.  I wore a lot of layers to avoid freeze-out since everything indoors was air conditioned to the point of freezing.

It was a reasonable conference day.  We had a lot of vendor meetings scheduled, plus breakfast and lunch at hotels in big ballrooms where the meal is catered in exchange for viewing a presentation by a vendor on new products or new information about products we already have.  I like to go to those because it’s fun to chat with other people at the table beforehand.  For dinner, one of our vendors took us to dinner at a restaurant in Chinatown, Zengo.  It didn’t have a lot of vegetarian options, but the ones they had were wonderful and I will give extra points for very delicious tofu cheesecake.  That’s hard to pull off.

After that, I was glad to get on the Metro and head to the hotel.  The Metro was full of Ghana soccer fans, excited after the big win against the US soccer team in the World Cup.  The game had been televised on screens throughout the conference center earlier in the day, but it isn’t really something that interests me.  Glad that it excites other people, and I thought it was cool (in a worldly city sort of way) that there were proud fans of other countries’ teams attending festivities for the games in the city.

I was thrilled to discover that we had the morning off on Sunday.  I try to fill up mid-afternoons first, and was under the impression that I’d filled up our Sunday, but when we looked at our schedule, we discovered we weren’t due anywhere until early afternoon.  Woot!  I called Tracy and we all made another plan to get brunch at Soul Vegetarian, a stop we love to make every time we can make it.  Their vegan brunch is fantastic.

I woke up early on Sunday anyway, and went over to the National Geographic Museum, which I’d never seen before.  There aren’t a lot of DC museums that I haven’t visited, but this is one I’d always meant to see.  I was kind of surprised that it wasn’t much of a museum.  There were two rotating displays but I could find no permanent display, which I think is a disappointment.  I would have liked to see some kind of thing on the history of the National Geographic Society, about world travel.  I read Worlds to Explore a few years ago- some things out of that would be worth attempting in exhibit form.  Oh well.  Too bad.  One of the rotating exhibits was about Leonardo Da Vinci (link to the NatGeo page on the exhibit), which only barely interested me- I didn’t even make it all the way through.  The other was called Design for the Other 90%, which I did like.  It was a display of different designs created to improve access to water, energy, education, housing, communication, etc., for those who live in developing countries or who are underserved in a developed country.  It was very interesting, though I thought it was poorly designed itself.  I didn’t understand how some of the innovations worked, and felt that the video about the exhibit was poorly edited, jumped around, didn’t use its time wisely.  But oh well to that as well.  I did like the topographic map of the Grand Canyon that hung on the ceiling above the elevators in the lobby.  That was pretty cool.  So, I give the National Geographic Museum a C+ overall.  The gift shop was neat.  I found a lot of stuff that I just loved.

After the museum, I took the Metro to the Shaw/Howard University stop and hiked up the hill to Soul Vegetarian, which is on Georgia Avenue across from Howard University.  They were getting ready for the DC Caribbean Carnival at the Banneker Recreation Park along my route.  That was pretty cool to see, though I could only spy through the fence.  When I got to Soul Veg, they were still locked up even though they were supposed to open thirty minutes earlier.  That is the way that place goes, especially on Sundays.  But they let me sit upstairs in front of the air conditioner and eventually Tracy’s family showed up, we ordered and ate, and it was awesome.

Tracy’s parents were able to drop me off at the convention center later so that I could go to my afternoon meetings, which went well.  We got everything accomplished that we set out to do.

When we were done, I was going to take the shuttle bus back to my hotel but was hit by the impulse to seek out a bookstore.  Don’t ask.  For some reason, I never manage to find anything I want to buy among the cheap books for sale at the ALA conference publisher’s exhibits, but I’m always led to impulsive expensive purchases at nearby bookstores or at the airport later.  It’s a sickness.

But this led me down New York Avenue, where eventually I found a bookstore but not what I wanted.  I got on the Metro and went the wrong direction on the Red Line and ended up getting out at Union Station, where I made another impulsive decision to go up in search of ice cream or something cold.  I got a smoothie, and then decided to walk around for a little while, since I hadn’t been on the Mall yet.  I ended up walking from Union Station all the way to the Smithsonian Metro stop on the Mall, past the US Capitol and several museums and through the tents of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which was mostly closed for the day.  In total, it was about 4.5 miles of unplanned walk in nearly 100 degree weather, only made possible because DC ISN’T THAT HUMID.  I’m just saying.

I was heading right for the Metro elevator when music from one of the folklife festival tents caught me, and I made another impulsive decision to sit down and enjoy it for awhile.  It was traditional hula music with hula dancers as part of the Asian Pacific Americans program (one of the three programs that they choose each year for the event), which I have never seen live (as I have never been to Hawaii).  I really enjoyed it.  It felt like such a DC experience, wandering around among marble columns and discovering a cultural festival between monuments to old white men.  Really cool.

Eventually I was getting hungry again (even after the amazing Soul Veg brunch), so I metro’d north to Dupont Circle, where I ate dinner at Thai Chef, an old favorite that has not aged particularly well.  I was a little disappointed.  The staff was not very pleasant and I was sorry to see that they no longer would serve my curry dish in a little boat-shaped bowl.  Too bad.

I was pretty tired when I headed back to the hotel, and I didn’t realize how early it was until I was already nearly asleep.  It was a nice evening.  Exhausting.

The next morning I was due to another breakfast at a big hotel for a vendor.  The speaker was author Marilyn Johnson.  It went over pretty well.  And, after that, we were done with the conference!  My boss headed out to make a flight, hoping that incoming thunderstorms wouldn’t keep her from getting back to mid-Missouri (but they did).  I stopped by the conference for a few minutes to graze the exhibit floor one more time, and then took the shuttle bus back to the hotel where I checked out.  I walked around the block to pick up my rental car, and then I was off!

The plan was to stay with Tracy’s sister and her family in Rockville for the next two nights, see some old friends, and eating some good food before heading back to Missouri on Wednesday afternoon.  But I wasn’t due in Rockville until at least mid-afternoon.  And I love to drive around places that I used to frequent, to see how they’ve changed or whatever.  So I headed north to the Maryland suburb of Laurel, where I lived for a couple of years between 2002 and 2004.  It is a bit of a drive, though some people make the commute every day.  I actually lived in Scaggsville, and the area was pretty rural then.  There were cows and farms within five miles of the house, and I appreciated that.  Green space is important to me.  But a lot of it has been sold and developed in the past six years.  They were working on a bypass in that area which has drawn a substantial amount of businesses and McMansion neighborhoods.  I think the area has a new name that sounds better to potential homeowners than “Scaggsville”.  Anyway, it’s different.  I drove up to Clarksville to Roots Market, which has been there for nearly ten years, I think.  It was an outpost of health markets in an area that didn’t have a lot of health market stuff, but it has done very well.  I like to collect reusable grocery bags with the names of my favorite health markets on them, so I bought one at Roots along with some interesting ready-made vegetarian food.  Then I went south into Montgomery County towards Rockville, stopping to eat my lunch at a park.  It was all good.

By mid-afternoon, after a stop at a bookstore (where I was successful in locating an impulse book purchase), I was at Tracy’s sister’s house.  We spent most of Monday afternoon and evening chatting, playing with the baby, watching Jeopardy!, and eating vegetarian Chinese food.  It was a pretty good time.

On Tuesday, we bummed around for most of the morning, and then I headed back up to Laurel (via Greenbelt) to have lunch with an old friend/work colleague.  I hadn’t seen her in several years so we had a great conversation, playing catch-up.  When she had to head back to work, I drove up to Baltimore for no good reason except to drive around.  I just love to drive around.  At one point, I drove past the school that was used in the filming of season 4 of The Wire.  I am a huge fangirl so that was a super big deal for me.  But that was the only landmark from the show that I passed.  And then I needed to be heading back to DC because we had plans to meet up with other old friends for dinner.  I was a little concerned that I was leaving Baltimore too late, and that I might get stuck in traffic, but I managed to get from Baltimore to Rockville in less than forty-five minutes, which must be some kind of record.  Even Google maps doesn’t think I should have made that kind of time.

Dinner was with two old friends who married in 2006 and had a baby in 2009.  I used to know these friends quite well but we hadn’t seen each other in a few years.  This was my first time meeting the baby, who is now 14 months and quite the cutie-pie.  Their lives have changed completely since the last time we met, so though it was whiplash for me to see them as Moms, they have been living that way for quite awhile now!  Tracy’s sister’s baby is about nine months younger, so they will make good playmates eventually, when that age difference isn’t so major.

We bummed around again on Wednesday morning before I packed up my car to leave.  Before I headed to the airport, we met up with some other friends and had vegetarian Jamaican food for lunch.  I was later leaving for the airport after that than I would have wished, but again I didn’t encounter any traffic and made it to the airport with time to spare.

One bizarre thing happened at the airport.  They had announced the flight and I was standing around waiting for my row to be called when I noticed a guy walking around.  I recognized him immediately as my cousin’s bandmate, whom I have met a few times but don’t know well enough to approach.  So I just stood there, amused, until I happened to turn around and see my cousin, the guy himself, right behind me.  We both did a double-take and then hugged and chatted until we could board the plane.  It was a very weird coincidence, since it was a small regional flight from DC’s Reagan National Airport to Kansas City and they were on their way back from Europe.  But the band has always been based out of Kansas City, so it’s only weird that it was the same mid-week mid-afternoon flight, out of all the flights that either of us could have been on.  A fun coincidence.

My parents picked me up at the airport, which was totally sweet of them, because I didn’t have to wait around for the shuttle to pick me up much later in the evening.  I arrived home much sooner than expected, which was welcome.  I had to return to work on Thursday morning!

It was a pretty good trip.  I am only hitting the highlights here, but it was a pretty good trip.

• First Leg
• Second Leg (Part One)
• Second Leg (Part Two)
• Third Leg
• Fourth Leg

Technologies Used:

I used Twitter (link to my account) to comment on things as they happened.  This was unusual, as I am not really a Twitter user (I follow other people, but up until the trip I posted tweets rarely).  I tended to use Facebook (link to my account) and update my status that way, but I wanted to feel free to post as many inane tweets as I wanted without feeling like I was overwhelming uninterested Facebook friends.  The entire point of Twitter is to post inanities, so I sent a link to my Twitter account via Facebook for any friends who were interested and then left it at that.  I posted one Facebook update the whole trip.  Everything else went on Twitter.  I set up my blog so that all of my tweets would record as blog posts, so if you are a casual follower of my blog, you could see what I’m up to without actually having to go sign up on Twitter to follow me there.

But, even though the tweets were already in my blog, I couldn’t ignore them as I wrote the trip report, so I integrated many of them into the text.  I also integrated notes that I’d made, written instead of tweeted because of lack of cell service.

The pictures that I included in the blog post were all made with my iPhone.  This may sound strange since the entire trip was planned around real photography, the kind I do with expensive cameras and lenses and tripods and filters.  Why would I bother with the crappy, low-quality iPhone pictures?  There are two reasons.  One is that I discovered Hipstamatic this spring, and I’ve enjoyed it.  It is an iPhone app that makes crappy, low-quality iPhone pictures look like crappy, low-quality film photos, but in a good way.  It adds vignettes and filters and colors that make the blur and noise of the camera phone look vintage and arty and interesting.  So it’s fun to play with that.  The second reason is that I’ve always disliked hauling out my big camera to take pictures of things that are really not worthy of a good camera photo.  The big camera is bulky and a thief-magnet; the iPhone fits in my pocket and would be there anyway.  It’s not worth it to me to use the big camera if the light is poor, or I’m just interested in the architecture, or it’s a self-portrait.  Self-portraits, specifically.  I like to take them so that I can put ‘I was there’ images on Facebook like everyone else, but I hate the vanity involved in setting up a shot of myself with a tripod and timer when I’m dressed in grubby hiking clothes and look like I’ve spent the last week in a car.

I can also upload iPhone photos to Twitter and Facebook and Flickr and email from my iPhone, and I did do that a lot.  The Hipstamatic images look decent enough to integrate into the blog post without having to wait to process the ‘real’ images, which will probably take months.  On my trip to California in 2008, I only used a real camera and I really never went back and illustrated those trip reports with the images when I finally finished them a year later.  So it was nice that I was doing the iPhone photos for this reason as well- instant gratification.

As for all the photos I took with my big camera, of course I have not finished them!  But I have started them, and that is very exciting.  I started processing pictures last week before I left for DC, and I hope to get work done on many more in the weeks to come as my computer is up and running at home (for the most part).  It will take a long time to get through them, as I took more than 8200 photos (this total does not include iPhone photos).  But you can keep track of the ‘real’ images as I upload them to my Flickr photostream here, or you can see them all (including some iPhone photos) in chronological order here.

Some of my favorite iPhone apps used on the trip:

• Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter (I’ve tried several Twitter apps, and the new official one is my favorite).
• WikiTap is my favorite Wikipedia browser
• Hipstamatic, for making cheap iPhone photos look arty
• Road Trip LE, for tracking gas mileage
• The Weather Channel, for hoping that there would soon be sunshine
• And Clock, Weather, Messages, Notes, and Mail.  Even though Clock could not always be relied on, especially in weird Western Nebraska.

I didn’t really use the Maps app that much because I had a real road atlas and also GPS in my car.

I integrated custom Google maps into the blog posts again.  I did this also for my 2008 trip to California.  I am a custom Google map fan!  They are fun to make, even though it can sometimes be a tempermental little program.  I enjoy making them when I’m planning the trip, and I enjoy tracking where I was afterwards by making an official record of the journey.  In the Google maps, I used special icons to denote where I slept each night, where I stopped for photos, where I stopped for lunch, and that kind of thing.  You can open those links in Google Earth and probably have a pretty good time exploring, if you’re into geography like I am.

I also integrated plenty of Wikipedia links for more reading on specific topics.  I like Wikipedia for its concise and interesting summaries.  You can scroll to the bottom of the Wikipedia entries for links to the sources that are cited throughout, which are (by the rules of Wikipedia) authoritative sources that might provide lots more information.

Looking Back

I was concerned at the time that the weather situation that I encountered in Yellowstone was going to make me look back on the trip with only a sense of frustration, especially after the meltdown at Old Faithful which caused me to skip a lot of the most famous geyser and thermal features in that part of the park.  But that hasn’t been the case.  Certainly I have not forgotten that part of it, but it was just part of the trip (like a similar meltdown in North Bay during the 2008 California trip; I get cranky after a few days on the road, especially if things are not working out), a low that made the high points that much higher.

When I review the maps of the journey (and I can’t seem to get Google maps to combine all four of the Google maps into one so that you can see everything at once), I don’t think of the low points.  I think of driving through Nebraska and Montana and Wyoming, and how much I loved loved loved those landscapes.  I was so taken with the West in that way.  I had heard good things and still I had underestimated how much I would love it.  I simply remember thinking that I could easily have taken a vacation to just western Nebraska and eastern Montana and Wyoming, skipped over all of the national park stuff, and had a blast.  Next time I won’t doubt myself when I start planning routes.  The further off the interstate it is (while still being a navigable stretch of paved road, because strange gravel roads make me nervous when I’m far away from the familiar ones of mid-Missouri), the more I will love it, especially at sunrise and sunset.  Scenic Byways are.

When I think of Yellowstone National Park, I don’t immediately think of the rain.  I think of the pretty sunny afternoon that I had on Yellowstone Lake, or the colors of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, or the the spectacular evening light in my beloved Lamar Valley.  I think of driving along mostly quiet roads in the north and east sections of the park, far away from the congestion of the southwest corner.  I think of the wildlife, not the thermal features.   I think of the neat modernist cabin at Canyon Village, not the hot and dim room at the Old Faithful Inn.

When I think of the Grand Tetons, I think of the clouds swirling around the jagged teeth of the peaks, the sound of the Snake River in the valley as the sun set behind the mountains.  I think of feeling relieved and grateful for a beautiful blue sky and puffy clouds that made wonderful landscapes on my last days of the trip.  I think of a solitary walk along a mountain trail, chattering marmots, and a bear wondering about the contents of my pick-i-nick basket.

I think of Thermopolis and the smell of sulphur at the hot springs where I soaked next to locals and tourists alike on a cool cloudy spring day.  I think of Dubois and the Wind River Canyon, a place to which I would happily return anytime.

I also think of things I missed, but in a good way.  I didn’t see Missoula or the Bitterroots or Paradise Valley, even though they were all on my list of things to see.  I didn’t see the Great Falls of the Missouri River or the Gates of the Rockies.  I didn’t see Idaho or Glacier National Park.  And I want to see all of these.  Already I’m planning future trips to northwest Montana, and on to the Canadian Rockies, Banff and Jasper parks, Salt Lake City, the parks of southern Utah, the Four Corners, the Grand Canyon (but the less touristy parts), west Texas.

If I’d had an extra week, or an extra month, or even an extra half a day, it would still not have been enough.  If there’s anything I really learned on this trip, it’s that I do not ever get tired of driving and seeing things (as long as I’m off the interstates).  I do not get tired of my car.  I do not get tired of eating from coolers.  I want to get experienced with camping so that I can make trips like this but even cheaper, though I do not dislike staying in cheap mom & pop motels (built in 1953 and still advertising Color TV).  I do not get tired of driving through landscape that other people avoid, ignore, or detour.  I do not get tired of listening to music.

But I do miss my dog and my home, and it’s still nice to get back to everything.  So I have to agree with this, which William Least Heat-Moon quotes in Roads to Quoz, and which I loved so I tweeted it at the end of my trip:

I should like to spend the whole of my life traveling abroad, if I could borrow another life to spend afterwards at home. – William Hazlitt

Click here to see the map of this leg of the trip!

This is the final leg of the trip.  Here are links to the First Leg, Second Leg (Part One), Second Leg (Part Two), and Third Leg.

The road, US Highway 26, climbs up into high country on its way out of the Tetons and into the Wind River Range. At one point I got out of the car to stretch in an area that still had a foot of snow on the ground on June 9. But then I started heading down and reached the town of Dubois, Wyoming.

I was not really prepared to hit such beautiful landscape outside Dubois, I’m sorry to say. I’m not sure what I thought I would see in central Wyoming, but what I saw was gorgeous. I love mountains, but I love ancient, eroded mountains even more, and it was so clear as I headed east that I was going through what must have been a spectacular range of ancient mountains. In and immediately around Dubois, they were eroded so that striations of red and white rock were easily visible so the hills looked striped. As I continued east, more colors were visible, and against the blue sky and green grass, it was quite amazing.

I continued east until the town of Shoshoni, where I turned north to Thermopolis, Wyoming, in a quest for Hot Springs State Park. Thermopolis is home to the ‘world’s largest mineral hot springs’. I had never been to a hot springs, and wanted to try it. I thought it would be a neat end to a visit to an area with so many thermal features.

But if I was not prepared for the pretty area around Dubois, I was really not prepared for the Wind River Canyon, through which the road between Shoshoni and Thermopolis cuts. I drove it at about twenty-five miles an hour, trying to pull over for any cars stuck behind me, but so entranced by the rocks that my mouth was just constantly hanging open. It was gorgeous. And there were signs, estimating age of the rocks, pointing to specific outcroppings. I was fascinated. Again, I have no idea how people live in that area without being regularly overwhelmed by the geologic history.

Thermopolis was a nice sized town and clearly had been making a tourist attraction of the hot springs for the past hundred years. In the state park itself, two waterparks operated on either side of a dour-looking, institutional State Bathhouse. The waterparks looked like they’d been built no later than 1940, and lots of families were entering and leaving carrying water toys. The State Bathhouse, on the other hand, looked like a place where someone might be locked up in a rubber-walled room and forced to take, at the hands of a cruel nurse, baths in a gleaming white-tiled bathroom. Guess which one I chose? The State Bathhouse, because it was free and looked serious about the idea of mineral springs.

The guy at the desk when I walked in was quite friendly, and when I had proved that I had no idea what to expect, he launched into a routine about what was available and what was not, and how it all worked. It was a free twenty-minute soak in either the outside or inside pool, both of which involved water of 104 degrees. They would rent me a bathing suit and a towel. Separate sign-in sheets for men and women. Women’s changing room to the right, please.

This is exactly the kind of thing I don’t tend to do on my own, but that was exactly the reason I’d come. I’d never soaked in a hot springs before, and I wanted to do it. I had brought a bathing suit and towel all this way just for this purpose (though I’d have been up for another swimming opportunity if it had presented itself, which it did not), so I pulled it out, went back in, signed up, and got changed.

The whole place smelled of sulphur. It had smelled of sulphur at Mammoth Hot Springs and in the geyser basins, and the smell had kind of overwhelmed me there. I rather thought it stunk, actually. But the smell here seemed more medicinal than unpleasant.

The water itself was very warm, hotter than any jacuzzi I’d ever been in. I could sit with water to my chin, but only for about half the time. Then I needed to pull the top half of my body out into the cool spring air, because it was too hot to endure for the whole twenty minutes. There were a number of people in the pool, but it was not full. I was interested in the mix of tourists and locals. Clearly I’d hit there at lunchtime when a few locals came to take a regular soak at the hot springs. They were chatty. It was pleasant.

I probably left the pool a couple of minutes early, but it was very hot in the water and I couldn’t quite bear it. I rinsed off the sulphur water and changed into normal clothes. I felt extremely relaxed, like after a good swim or a massage.  Outside, the cool air (probably in the mid-fifties) felt wonderful, and even though it looked like it might rain, I grabbed a picnic table and had lunch there at the state park, and then walked around for awhile.  Nearby, they’d created a travertine hot springs by diverting the hot water in a fountain on a platform in the park, where it made itself a natural travertine cone.

It was right about 1:00pm when I left Thermopolis, but I smelled of sulphur for the rest of the day.  And the feeling of relaxation lasted as well.  I’m so glad I made that stop.

But it was time to head south.  It was time to get serious about the drive, because the goal was to make it to Scottsbluff, Nebraska, by the end of the day.  I headed south again (through the Wind River Canyon, and I stopped a couple of times this time, but the weather was cloudy and the sun was high, so pictures were not really optimal) to Shoshoni, then east on US Highway 26 to Casper, Wyoming.  The highway there was only two lane, like in eastern Montana, but the speed limit is 75 and there is not much in the way of traffic.

The snow-capped Rockies are still in my rearview mirror.  Not for long!  On to Casper and Cheyenne. -2:35pm, June 9, 2010.

Mid-Missouri felt very far away there, but I was on target to be home the following evening.  The landscape here was still very strange- lots of sagebrush and buttes, and the valleys were enormous.  I loved it.  For a hundred miles I followed a huge storm system to the northeast.  I could see it in the distance, lightning and all.  It was really amazing.

Amused by Casper signs directing me to “Midwest”.  Okay, yes, that’s generally the direction I want to go. http://yfrog.com/4bnczdj – 4:37pm, June 9, 2010

Oh shit.  Midwest is a town in Wyo AND it’s in the opposite direction of the Real Midwest.  Sorry, Casper.  At least I spelled your name right.  - 4:46pm, June 9, 2010

After the above little mixup in Casper (which, luckily, I corrected quickly), I got on I-25 and the drive to the Nebraska/Wyoming border did not take very long.  I was either listening to the book Roads to Quoz by William Least Heat-Moon or rocking out to oldies and Motown, depending on the mood.  I could still see the giant storm system to the north and east.

I stopped for gas in Torrington, Wyoming, and here there were fresh puddles on the pavement.  I turned on the radio to discover that there were tornado warnings in the immediate area, and I considered stopping in Torrington for the night.  This probably would have saved some hassle and it’s not that far from Scottsbluff, Nebraska, but I was still hoping to make it to Scottsbluff for sunset.  So I drove right into the back of the storm system.

The storm system was ginormous and was dumping an amazing amount of rain.  It was also moving at roughly 40mph.  The rain was so heavy that I could barely see to drive, and I ended up pulling over on the shoulder for fifteen minutes until the storm got ahead of me.  I then literally followed the storm at about 35mph, slowing whenever I drove into harder rain, and in that way I followed the storm system into Scottsbluff.  It was kind of a crazy experience.

I hit Scottsbluff right at sunset, but the clouds were not quite pretty.  I drove through the monument area and sized it up, but I would have to return at sunrise.  It was pretty late at this point, and I had not yet found a hotel for the night.  I talked to my mom on the phone and to Tracy, and then finally started to get serious about a hotel.  I didn’t think it would be a problem.

I was wrong.  I stopped at two places, and both were full on a Wednesday night at 9:00pm in a town not on an interstate.  Very strange.  I headed towards the north side of town and stopped at a chain hotel which was also full and I had an irritating conversation with the clerk.  I simply asked if there was something going on in town that would be the reason that the hotels were all filled up, and the woman rudely told me that she “didn’t talk to the other hotels in town so how would she know?”  I was tired and this pissed me off, because I was asking if there was a convention or something else big going on, and she should jolly well have a clue about her own [small] town’s happenings.  It is her job, after all.  But I didn’t get rude, and then she made some comment about insurance adjusters and storm chasers and told me to try another hotel across the road.  So I did.  In this one, I could barely fit into the lobby because it was filled with two burly guys and a woman with a large video camera.  I quickly assessed that they were being filmed for a reality show or documentary of some kind, which didn’t interest me so much as irritate me, especially since there was no one behind the registration desk at the hotel.  When it became clear that this hotel was also full, I decided to head in the opposite direction of the storm and backtrack, possibly to Torrington if necessary.

Luckily, I found a room at a hotel in Morrill, which is a very small town in Nebraska near the Wyoming border, but which seems to get good business from people who work on the railroad that goes through town.  I am not sure if I got the last room or not, but it seemed that way.  I was very pleased not to have to backtrack all the way back across the Wyoming border, and I set about doing my backups and eating my dinner while watching weather radars on my computer as another storm system was heading in our direction.

I have had a weird obsession with tracking storms since I moved back to Missouri in 2006, not out of interest but mostly out of fear.  I am terrified of being hit by a tornado.  The fear has lessened slightly in the past few years, but it is still there.  I no longer wake to every single thunderbolt or drag my comforter into the bathtub at a sign of a tornado watch, but I do like to track weather radars on local news websites.

I was also having trouble with my cell phone clock.  Western Nebraska should be in Mountain Time, but my cell phone was telling me that it was an hour behind Mountain Time, which was frustrating.  I wanted to set an early alarm to get to Scottsbluff soon after sunrise, but I had to do some math to make my alarm (I had been using my cell phone as an alarm clock for the whole trip) work correctly.

So when I finally went to sleep, it was with my laptop open to the weather radar.  I was feeling some anxiety about both the thunderstorm and the fact that I wasn’t confident in my alarm clock.

At some point in the night, probably when an early alarm went off that was clearly too early, I knocked my laptop off the nightstand and it crashed to the floor.  When I picked it up, it was making weird sounds.  Even my sleep-addled brain knew this was a problem, but the computer seemed to still be working. (It wasn’t. The hard drive was corrupted and I spent the rest of the next week getting everything back online. I’m still working on it. But! I had backups! As I’ve mentioned throughout this story, I was making backups as I went, so I didn’t lose any of my photos despite the fact that the hard drive went down for the count.)

I finally accepted an alarm that went off around dawn, and I was able to get my shit together and check out of the hotel.  It was a beautiful morning with clear skies.  I headed right back over to Scottsbluff, Nebraska, where the road goes straight through a break in the buttes.  I had a really good time shooting at the Scottsbluff National Monument, but I didn’t stay around long enough for the monument offices to open so that I could drive the road to the top.

Pretty morning in Scottsbluff after a night of thunderstorms.  Excited to finally see the buttes here after planning for so long! – 9:04am, June 10, 2010

And it was a lovely morning for it- blue skies against red rock and green grass. – 9:04am, June 10, 2010

I was feeling pressed to get on the road east towards home, and I still had a few more stops to make.  Chimney Rock is outside of Scottsbluff on Nebraska Route 92.  I did not stop at the Chimney Rock park site, but took pictures from the best angle I could find.  Then I continued on to Bridgeport, Nebraska, where I stopped for gas and ice before taking a little trip south, out of the way, to view Courthouse and Jail Rocks, of which there was not really a very good view from the road.

I knew it was starting to get late, and I had about twelve hours of driving ahead of me (with the time change), so it was time to get serious now that Scottsbluff was behind me.  I would get to stay off the interstate only for a couple of hours as I followed US Highway 26 southeast to where it joined up with Interstate 80 at Ogallala, Nebraska.  US-26 is a scenic road that follows the paths of the Oregon Trail and the Mormon Trail.  Such a pretty road!  Nebraska, your scenic byways are very scenic.  I am a fan.

But when I hit I-80, the scenery went bleak.  I guess it probably follows the Platte River Valley for a good while, and it is flat and not very interesting.  I was really disappointed that I didn’t give myself an extra half day so that I could have stayed off the interstates all the way through Nebraska.  I missed where the sagebrush flats and buttes of the West give way to the rolling countryside and farmland of Iowa and Missouri.  I enjoyed so much the geology and landscapes of my trip up until this point.

But I needed to get serious, and interstates are serious driving.  For hours and hours, I drove across Nebraska, listening to music and the Heat-Moon audiobook.  It was not unpleasant, but it felt long in a way that none of the rest of the driving had felt (okay, possible exceptions made for other interstates I drove, such as I-90 from Billings to Bozeman or I-25 in Wyoming; interstate highways suck).

Yay, Lincoln, NE at rush hour! -5:01pm, June 10, 2010

I crossed the Missouri River at Nebraska City, the only time I crossed it on my way home to Columbia.  After all of the Lewis & Clark book and the Missouri Headwaters experiences and thinking of it every time I crossed one of its tributaries (the Yellowstone, the Gallatin, the Madison, etc.), I was excited to cross it here in my own territory.

In Missouri!  It was 39 degrees in the Tetons yesterday morning.  It is 80 degrees here in MO.  http://yfrog.com/mh2baj – 6:20pm, June 10, 2010

I decided to take the northerly route across Missouri via US Highway 36 to Macon and then south on US Highway 63 instead of the interstates through Kansas City, which felt out of the way, though I think it would have been slightly faster.  I enjoyed seeing north Missouri in its pretty summer glory.  It felt lush and green after the mountains and valleys of the West.

At about 10:30pm, I drove into my garage at my own house.  It was weird and strange and new in that way that things can be when it’s been awhile since you’ve seen them.

Home!  4362.7 total miles, seven states, 13 days, nine motels, and every meal eaten out of coolers except one.  It was an awesome trip. – 10:46pm, June 10, 2010

It was.  It was an awesome trip.  I had a wonderful, wonderful time.