Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

On a different epic adventure, Elise and I discovered that bicycling across the United States was more about mental and emotional endurance than physical strength or stamina. We were in our early twenties then and falling in love in increments of roughly 90 miles per day. We're a week away from arriving back in Portland and those lessons are flooding back to us, even though they have been with us throughout the last two months of this odyssey. This has indeed been a long haul. We have two main set pieces remaining: visit the twin National Parks: Sequoia and King's Canyon; celebrate my grandfather's 99th birthday in the Bay Area. First, though, we had to cover about 10 hours of driving in two days to bridge the Grand Canyon to Sequoia/King's Canyon. In doing so, we added the last two states to our road trip list: Nevada and California, bringing out total to 30. (We've seen every state's license plate except for Hawaii but including the District of Columbia.) ...

On Sunday, after driving for nearly five hours and stopping at the Four Corners Monument (thus adding Utah to our state-count), we arrived at the Grand Canyon. With fading daylight, Lily and Henry were amazed and Ali lamented, "it's not a canyon, it's a mountain farm." I've never heard of such a thing but apparently it's neither good nor impressive, whatsoever. Four kids, four states Four kids, two grandparents, four states Two lovebirds, four states On Monday, we had a really good day of school. We introduced a bunch of new curriculum materials last week that had caught up with us in Austin. Today we introduced some more: Henry started a daily science program by covering a week's worth of fossils in about fifteen minutes. (I don't see how a teacher facing a classroom of 25-30 students stands a chance!) Lily started looking up the vocabulary words she has been highlighting in her reading using an online YA dictionary. She had so ...

Simply, Mesa Verde National Park is an extraordinary place and it has given us an extraordinary opportunity. Our purpose on this travel is to expand horizons and we have certainly done that here. We arrived here from Santa Fe on Friday afternoon, having driven from Santa Fe. It was really four drives in one: first, through the desert of northern New Mexico; second, descending from the plateau into Durango, CO; third, climbing out of the Animas Valley, through bright fall colors, to the entrance of the park; finally, winding up through the mountains to reach the Far View Lodge, so named because one can gaze upon Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. Among other things, the landscape lends itself to remarkable sunsets. In mid-October, this begins at about 6:30 and lasts for about an hour. I've always loved sunsets. I used to decorate my apartment with a dozen or more large pictures of ones I had captured. This was the first opportunity in a long time. Saturda...