Family, Friends and Food

I know I haven't written in a week but I have just been simply too busy with family, friends, and food (too much food) this week. I was barely able to squeeze in dialysis, but I did. Tuesday's dialysis in Oklahoma City was pretty uneventful and went smoothly. They got me below my dry weight and I felt great. The people at the center were very professional and very nice. Right after dialysis we met family Gabriel didn't even know he had until recently, the daughter and granddaughter of his cousin Valerie in Cincinnati. We met them for dinner at a nice Italian restaurant in Oklahoma City (it seems everything we do revolves around food), and they were wonderful people and I really enjoyed meeting them. We drove that night after dinner for a couple of hours and spent the night in Sallisaw, OK, which has 9,000 people and 29 churches, our first notch in the Bible Belt. One night later we were in Memphis, where we had to wake up at 4:30AM to get to dialysis on Thursday, my birthday. Memphis was not my favorite city, the dialysis unit however was a very pleasant atmosphere, again an uneventful treatment. I slept through most of it including when they delivered flowers sent by my daughters and signed by my grandsons Eric, Ethan, and Nate. A pleasant surprise and a beautiful bouquet. Right after dialysis we had a great barbecue lunch at Corky's in Memphis, where we also ate dinner the night before. It was the first time I had dry-rubbed ribs, and they were the best. That afternoon we drove to Nashville, which I really liked. We parked in front of the Ryman Auditorium, once the home of the Grand Ole Opry, and yes, Neil Young performed there too. I loved Nashville, the vibrancy, the party atmosphere that it supplied, a musician everywhere you walked, carrying a guitar case. We enjoyed driving around the city and getting a feel for it, a feeling of welcoming comfort. The next day we got to Cincinnati and finally met Gabriel's cousin Valerie. What a sweetheart! We hit it off immediately. If she weren't family we'd instantly be friends, I could tell. She fixed us the most wonderful home-cooked meal that tasted better than anything I'd eaten in a week. It was so much fun that we stayed up talking until well after midnight even though we had to get up at 5:30 to get to dialysis, my last dialysis treatment on the road. I hated waking her up in the morning to say goodbye, but she insisted. It was goodbye but not forever. We'll be in touch and visiting each other again. My last dialysis treatment Saturday morning in Cincinnati was -- I hate to sound like a broken record -- uneventful. I want people to know that the entire dialysis experience on this trip went smoothly. A couple of minor glitches but nothing that couldn't be dealt with, and I would encourage anybody on dialysis to travel. Don't be afraid. It requires planning, yes, but it can be done. We've proved it!

And Then There Were Four

And now just four days remain. We’ve been on the move the last few days, covering five states in three days: New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Tennessee. In Oklahoma we met two previously unmet cousins for a great dinner, the prelude to meeting my first cousin Valerie in Cincinnati later today. In Arkansas we got a tour of the incredible John Rogers Photo Archive, the largest photo collection in the world (and growing more massive all the time, including the recent addition of over 1,700 linear feet of images from the Miami Herald. In Memphis we did something we’ve been looking forward to all trip: eating real barbecue. We solicited opinions all over the country about where to get the best barbecue, and the vote was split between Rendezvous and Corky’s. Corky’s was a more convenient location—not far from where Linda had dialysis—so we went with that for dinner on Wednesday. We liked it so much that we went back for lunch yesterday. Though Linda loved the dry rub on the little rack of ribs she devoured, we wound up buying four bottles of their original barbecue sauce to take home. And the lemon icebox pie was delicious, too. So Corky’s gets our vote if you’re taking a survey.

It was very muggy when we got to Nashville yesterday afternoon, temperature in the high 80s and humidity no doubt higher, so we didn’t walk around the “music city” center of town. But I did find a parking spot in the shade across the street from the Ryman Theater, where Linda could be reasonably comfortable while I bopped around the area taking photos. There was a bluegrass festival going on, and I got several good shots of musicians old and young lugging their instruments to various gigs and events, from an elderly man with a banjo case slung over his shoulder to a 20ish kid and his bull fiddle case. Along Lower Broadway is a string of clubs where country music was pouring forth from every doorway, with the bands on stages just inside the front door to lure passersby inside. It reminded me of Bourbon Street in New Orleans, and even though I’m not a country music fan, my soul was gladdened at so much music being made in public in the middle of the afternoon.

We drove around Nashville for an hour or so, taking in some of the neighborhoods as well as the Bicentennial Park with its terrific views up the hill to the state capital. Nashville captivated us in a way that Memphis did not. In the latter city, we drove out to Graceland but weren’t up for a big walking tour and didn’t feel like paying $10 for parking just for a glimpse at the mansion. We saw his two airplanes from the road, but wound up getting much more enjoyment from a nearby neighborhood (including Tranquil Lane) with some beautiful stone work and mailboxes embedded in brick.

It was rush hour when we left Nashville and it looked like we’d get stuck in a big traffic jam, but I guessed right on taking Rosa Parks Boulevard as an escape route, bypassing the worst of the jam and getting on I-65 heading north. We drove about 100 miles and have stopped here in Cave City, Kentucky, where it rained all night but we didn’t care. After the long drives of the past few days, I slept ten hours, and Linda outdid me. We had skipped dinner but didn’t care, still stuffed from Corky’s. It rained all night and I heard thunder on and off, but Linda didn’t hear a thing. We must have needed the rest, and now we’re geared up for the final push—a relaxing day today with my cousin in Cincinnati, Linda’s final dialysis “on the road” tomorrow morning in Cincy, followed by a full-afternoon drive to reach our friends Jan and Judy Finkel for more relaxation in western Maryland. That will leave the final day on Monday, as we begin October by finishing what we began the first day of September—the greatest trip we’ve ever taken.

One Week To Go

Today Linda and I begin the final week of our 31-day odyssey. One week from right now, she'll be finishing her first dialysis back in her home unit at Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown. Right now she's getting dialysis in Oklahoma City, the eighth of ten centers we're visiting on the road. Her final two treatments--in Memphis and Cincinnati--will both start very early in the morning, around 5:30am. Won't that be fun!

It has been a long trip, and I'll admit that we're starting to feel it. The last two days were long ones on the road, as we covered 900 miles between Williams, Arizona, and Oklahoma City. We did take the time for a one-hour detour on Sunday to drive through Petrified Forest National Park and the Painted Desert, the last parks we'll visit. That was far from the last of the great scenery; all the way across New Mexico on I-40, we saw red rocks, mountains, verdant hillsides, and desert flora. I know that the most scenic parts of New Mexico are not on I-40, but it more than sufficed for our Sunday drive.

Yesterday we began in Santa Rosa, NM, and soon enough were in Texas, crossing the panhandle with a stop for lunch in Amarillo before finishing up in Oklahoma. The theme for the day was wind, a strong, not crosswind for the past day and a half, blowing south to north at 20-30mph. The trees along the highway were bent against it, and by the end of the day my hands were sore from gripping the steering wheel more tightly to guard against gusts. A few times we drove through clouds of dust, and though we were hardly the Joad family in our air-conditioned Toyota, we could get a feel for what it must have been like in the 1930s "Dust Bowl" as unrelenting wind blew the dusty earth every which way, scattering citizens along the way. This is not a place where we could live, we agreed. The people are friendly enough, but the flat land and steady winds don't capture us the way the colorful geology of the southwest did.

So the mission for the last two days was to make the 900-mile trek and give us a chance to relax today. The only thing on our schedule today is dinner with two cousins I've never met--the daughter and granddaughter of the cousin I've never met either. Friday is our day to meet my first cousin Valerie, and by then we'll be old friends of the family, or the side of the family that was missing from my life for about 30 years.  Does it count as a reunion if you've never met? Whatever you call it, we're looking forward to the dinner before continuing our eastward, home-bound journey.

How tired are we after more than three weeks on the road and no home cooking in two weeks? The other night, after checking into a motel in Santa Rosa, we wanted to do some laundry. We took the clothes and detergent over to the laundry room and loaded everything up. I put seven quarters in the washer and headed back to the room while Linda played with the clothes. We gave the washer a half-hour, and then I went back there to move everything over to the dryer. But no. Linda had forgotten to push in the coin slot, so the washer never started. I started it, gave it a half-hour, and went back to put everything in the dryer. So far, so good. I even put the seven quarters in the dryer's slot before returning to the room to wait it out. But I couldn't get the dryer to start. I pounded the buttons again and again, but nothing. So I hied myself to the motel office to break the news that their dryer wouldn't start. The clerk was very helpful, promising to get the maintenance man to unlock the motel's private laundry room so I could dry our clothes.

About the time I got back to our room, I remembered. . .yeah, I forgot to push the damn coin slot in. It worked like a charm once I made yet another march over there and pushed the coins in. The dryer started, and I raced back in time to see the maintenance man unlocking a door. I apologized for disturbing his evening rest, but I was laughing by the time I got back to our room. "It's a beautiful thing," I told Linda, "to have a marriage between equals." Yes, equally brain-dead after all those days spent wandering the infinitely fascinating but very hot (100+ degrees on three different days) southwest. Now we're looking forward to the fall color and the football weather which will no doubt greet us on our return to central New York.

We still have plenty to do on the road, including Linda's birthday on Thursday, various cousins, a weekend with our friends Jan and Judy Finkel in western Maryland, and a final stop next Monday on the way home to visit more friends near Harrisburg, PA. If the saying is true that you can have too much of a good thing, then we'll just have to take our chances this final week. We're just about full to the brim and have had a fantastic time, but physically it's starting to catch up to us. But at least we don't have to do any more laundry.

You Have To Take Chances in Las Vegas

Life is full of gambles, no certainties, you take a roll of the dice, just one more card, just one more spin of the wheel, but taking that chance is life. Without that chance what would life be like, I'll tell you: BORING. Kidney failure was not something I would have bet on, or even wished for, but it was the hand I was dealt, so I play the cards I was dealt. I always say kidney failure is what I have, not who I am. I am going to continue to draw cards till they run out, I hope it takes a long, long time. Now onto my last dialysis treatment on Saturday in Las Vegas. I was in awe of the size on the unit, 40 chairs, a DaVita unit. There are also 18 more in Vegas along with a few Fresenius units and a few hospital units. Of course Las Vegas is the largest city I have been in so far on the trip (approximately 1.5 million people). At first I kind of felt like a cow in a large milking parlor, they go down the row and stick the needles in and hook you up, it was all done with care and professionalism, but nevertheless, quickly and without much personal attention. I felt safe and secure, just not like a welcomed patient, but with so many patients I can see how that would be the case. I had an uneventful treatment, just like I like them. I did notice lots of posters and art work around the room, indicating that the patient is first and foremost and special and so on, put I didn't feel any of the camaraderie between staff and patient that my home unit has.Now that is special, and I miss my home unit a lot. I have had good, even great experiences on the road, but there is no place like home. I miss all my dialysis buddies too. I'll be home soon. Love to all♥♥♥

Just Like Old Times

We've visited many places on this trip where I've spent a lot of time in my life, but none as much as Las Vegas, where I lived for 14 years (apparently I broke two mirrors). Linda and I spent nearly a week there in 2004, doing most of the tourist things like casino-hopping, gawking at the Fremont Experience light show, and joining thousands of other tourists in wandering up and down The Strip, trying to take it all in. This time we spent 44 hours there, and except for one joyride up and down the length of The Strip and a bit of gambling, we avoided the touristo routine. We stayed at Sam's Town, where I worked for several years, did our minimal gambling there (we lost a combined $42—I finished 19^th out of 40 players in a hold’em tournament, and Linda fed some slot machines), ate a couple of meals in the casino, and enjoyed our room very much. On the tourist front, it was a satisfying two days of sanity.

Our dinner Friday night was our main reason for coming to Las Vegas at all this time around. Since we were in the middle of nowhere (Cameron, Arizona) for our anniversary last Saturday, I wanted to have a special, official anniversary dinner consisting of my favorite restaurant meal ever, with my two best Las Vegas friends and their wives. We rendezvoused around 6PM at the California Hotel downtown for dinner at the Redwood Bar & Grill, where I first had their lobster thermidor in the 1980s. It's the most scrumptious meal I've ever had, and it was as fantastic as ever last night. It included a huge amount of succulent lobster-tail meat (Linda estimated that it was a three-pound lobster) covered in a rich, mouth-watering cream sauce with sherry and mushrooms. I took my time savoring each bite of it, and when the lobster vanished I soaked up the remaining sauce with a piece of bread. I didn't want to miss a molecule of that taste.

We were joined by my old friends George and Stew, whom I've known for more than 30 years. I've known George since 1980, when we worked at the old Bingo Palace, my first poker job. I met his buddy Stew a year later. They had come to Las Vegas in 1975 from Pittsburgh and, except for a year or so that George spent in Hawaii in the mid-1980s, they've lived there ever since. George worked mainly in the poker industry, while Stew got out of poker early on and has been an investment broker ever since. For many years we played a table-top baseball game for which I created the cards. Four of us (the fourth, Tim, moved away in 2000, five years after I left LV) would gather on Friday evenings to play 36-game seasons (six or nine games a week) about which I could easily and might someday write a book. Most of the time our lives were chaotic and our relationships unstable, and some of those diceball nights were group therapy as much as anything else. The four of us have now tallied ten marriages, but we have all gotten it right this time around. This dinner was the first time Linda and I met George's wife Angela and Stew's wife Lori, so it was a happy occasion all the way around. For the record, Stew and I had the thermidor, Angela had a lobster tail, the others had steak, and everything was terrific. It was a meal we'll remember for a long time, a festive reunion (I hadn't seen Stew since the 2004 trip, or George since he visited us in Cooperstown in 2008) and a fine anniversary celebration.

We have other shared interests besides baseball, of course, and I was happy to join both Stew and George in their favorite extracurricular passions during this whirlwind stay. Later Friday night, I joined Stew at a bar not far from Sam's Town for some karaoke. Stew is the most fanatical Moody Blues devotee you can imagine, in fact the most fanatical devotee of any musical group I've ever known. He's seen them in concert a couple of dozen times, has met them on several occasions, and raised his son Alex to revere them as well. Stew is also a terrific singer who has performed dozens of Moody Blues songs in public (billed as Moody Stew), and was part of a professional karaoke troupe that performed regularly at the old Showboat Hotel. His rich baritone is especially suited to the songs written by Justin Hayward, and his rendition of "Nights in White Satin" is particularly moving. When Linda and I were here in 2004, Stew regaled us to a personal concert, singing about 20 Moody Blues songs to us, a cappella.

Last night Linda asked him to perform her favorite Moody Blues song, "Questions," but unfortunately felt too tired after dinner to stay out, so I took her back to the room at Sam's Town before joining Stew. Plan B worked: I filmed him singing "Questions" on our digital camera, so Linda got to watch his performance later. It was as wonderful as ever. After that, we waited more than an hour at the karaoke while other singers (most of them very good) performed, before I got to film Stew singing the song I requested, another early favorite, "The Actor." He said afterwards that he never sang it better, and I agree. Fantastic!

Next March, Stew is going to live out his greatest and longest-standing dream. The Moody Blues are staging a five-night Caribbean cruise for their fans, and Stew and Lori will be going. There will be special concerts, a private dinner with the band and their families, and other MB-related events. Stew was ecstatic when they purchased the tickets, but he was beside himself a few days later when he received an e-mail informing him that there will be a MB-only karaoke night on the cruise. "Brush up on your 'Nights in White Satin,’" the e-mail advised, and Stew just about fainted. His #2 daydream in life has been to sing "Nights" for Justin Hayward, and he will have his chance. He can hardly wait. He'll also have a chance to go for daydream #1. For two decades he has been an avid off-road camper, traveling primarily to remote areas of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. I joined him for one of those five-day trips in 1998 and will never forget the incredible panoramas, not to mention the adventure of camping in a place that few other people have ever visited. Stew is going to ask the Moodies to join him at the Grand Canyon. He knows they have an interest in the US Southwest, and he truly is the best person to take them out there. If they joined him for just one weekend, they'd find abundant inspiration to write enough songs to fill a CD. Good luck on that one, Stew! It was a joy to see him still pinching himself over the possibilities.

Linda and I had a tough night Friday night. You've read about the miscalculation in her dry weight at Thursday's dialysis, and Friday night she paid the price, being unable to breathe comfortably (from excess fluid that wasn't dialyzed on Thursday). She hardly slept at all, and I didn't do much better, partly from concern for her and partly from my own battle with acid reflux, triggered by the thermidor and the one drink I had before dinner. So we were both shaky when I took her to dialysis at 6:30 yesterday morning. Nevertheless, I was raring to go when George picked me up at 7am to dabble in a little golf.

I'm a lifelong duffer whose only discernible skill is putting. George is a legitimate golfer who has had a single-digit handicap on and off, has traveled to Scotland to play St. Andrew's and the other great courses there, has attended the Masters, and has notched a hole-in-one. I haven't played golf in a long time but I can still putt, and Las Vegas has long had one of the world's best putting-only courses. Located at the Angel Park golf club, the course used to be 18 holes but has been whittled down to 9. The holes are difficult, ranging from 50 feet in length to over 100, with many undulations, sweeping hooks, and even sand traps. It's a tough course, though two or three of the remaining 9 holes are fairly straight putts of 50-60 feet.

The sprinklers were still going on the 1st hole when George and I started playing, and we had to duck the water in order to move along. We played the 9-hole layout four times, and did better with each round, especially after I woke up and regained some kind of touch. I'd say par for 9 holes would be 20 or 21. George, a fierce competitor who doesn't give anything away, played solidly throughout, scoring 20-19-19-20. In his middle two rounds, he made 3 on the 1^st hole and all 2s after that. We joked that we’d keep playing until someone made a deuce at the 100-foot opener. (We both did in the fourth round.) I shot 24-21-23 in the first three rounds, but had my best stretch of putting ever during the final 9. I played every hole in two shots to score an 18 and gain my lone 9-hole victory. I put several of the long approach putts within two or three feet, and made a 12-footer to keep my streak of deuces going (I finished with 12 in a row). That felt good,  beating George but even more so for making so many good putts on a tough little course. Best of all, we got to spend a few hours together, reminiscing, philosophizing, and competing.

Linda had a good dialysis treatment during which they got her dry weight a little below its normal figure, setting her up for a comfortable weekend. We were both very tired from too-little sleep, however, so after we reached Williams, Arizona, late yesterday afternoon, we decided not to hurry up to the South Rim of the Canyon for another look. We rested instead before two long days of driving to get to Oklahoma City (900 miles distant) for Tuesday's dialysis.

This morning we had another treat.  We had breakfast in Flagstaff with Stew’s son Alex, who was only 12 the last time we were in the vicinity. He’s an impressive young man who has inherited the family’s musical skill and then some. Stew’s father was a classical pianist and composer, and young Alex anchors the bass register of every choir and singing group on the campus of Northern Arizona University. As Stew told me the night before, “I’m a good amateur, but Alex is a pro. He could be a pop singer, an opera singer, anything.” Alex confirmed that professors have told him as much, but he wants to teach at the high school level so he can help young people through music. You have to admire a 20-year-old with that combination of talent and purpose.

Breakfast with Alex was a great post-script to the Las Vegas visit, which was a tribute to my past, to 30 years ago when I first became good friends with Stew and George. Everybody is doing fine, and the reunion was as delicious as the thermidor. You can’t ask for much more than

Dialysis in St.George, Utah, and a Couple of Problems

I am taking Coumadin, a blood thinner, if you take it you already know that you must moniter your blood levels, with a test called a PT/INR. A normal reading would be between 2 and 3. I had my PT/INR drawn on Tuesday in St. George at dialysis. I went to dialysis on Thursday morning, and when I showed up I was told by the head nurse that my reading came back 11. Dr. LeCates (my prime nephrologist) was trying to reach me to tell me to go immediately to an ER, as it is lethal, at those numbers you could bleed to death. Another PT/INR was drawn and sent stat to the lab., it came back very normal, as it happened I was given Heparin (usually administered during treatment, to prevent clots) before the first PT/INR was drawn, causing a high reading. I didn't panic because I felt it was a bad reading, however everybody involved was a little worried. Dr. LeCates called me at dialysis that morning laying out a plan if the test came back with high numbers. Up until now on the TRIP OF A LIFETIME my dialysis treatments have gone very smoothly, I just wanted you to know there is a fly in the ointment once in a while. One more little problem, I had a very new nurse stick me Thursday. She did a wonderful job. We discussed my weight gain (2.4. kilos) and decided to take me down and additional .5 to get me under my dry weight, which is what I prefer, but instead I came off the machine 1.2 kilos over. I think she put the numbers in the computer wrong, just another little glitch in the works. Oh well, like Gabriel is fond of saying, all days are not created equal. Of all the things that could go wrong, this is nothing. I did not anticipate any problems on this trip and I don't buy into trouble before I have to, that's how I keep my cheerful disposition. Now onto Las Vegas, that's another blog, stay tuned. Love to all. ♥♥♥

From the Sublime To the Ridiculous

Linda and I have completed Part Two of our 31-day trip, the part I've thought of as exploration. On September 10, we saw our first red-rock canyon of the trip--Glenwood Canyon in central Colorado--and began traversing various parks in southern Utah and northern Arizona. In nine days, we saw Arches NP, Dead Horse Point State Park, Monument Valley, Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell, both rims of the Grand Canyon, Zion NP, Bryce NP, Cedar Breaks National Monument, Snow Canyon State Park, and points in between that were also breathtaking. We saw elk at the South Rim, Navajo in Tuba City, bighorn sheep in Zion, a zillion German-speaking tourists wherever we went, a flock of about a thousand sheep in Cedar Breaks, a mining operation at the otherwise barren Dead Horse Point, and buffalo in two spots, and read half of Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang while in many of the settings in the novel. And a whole lot more. We can hardly believe we did all this in the past nine days.

After Linda's dialysis this morning in St. George, Utah, we went to Snow Canyon, a small state park which combines an amazing number of geological features in a relative small area: sandstone red rock, limestone white rock, black volcanic lava, petrified sand dunes, and plain old desert with patches of sagebrush. We found some shade in a picnic area and read Abbey for an hour before saying goodbye to the neatness of Utah and heading southwest for a couple of hours to Las Vegas. The temperature reached 102 on the drive, and at 9pm it's still 88. Not too bad considering that back home in upstate New York it was 50 degrees and rainy yesterday. Linda says it might be very tough to go back.

It's hard to imagine two locales more different than Las Vegas and, well, almost anywhere we've been for the past nine days. And it didn't take long to compile a fair amount of fresh evidence about the strangeness of this city where I lived for 14 years (1980-1995, with one year off for an extended research visit to the library at the Baseball Hall of Fame). As tourists this time, we're staying at Sam's Town, where I worked on and off from 1987-1994. I visited the (relocated) poker room where I worked and was proud to see that they are still running the promotion I helped create a quarter-century ago. One employee from our original 1987 crew is still there; as the day shift boss, I hired him as a dealer, and now he's the day shift boss. Tomorrow morning I'm going to go in there and scare the shit out of him, the ghost of hold'em past.

After a meal at Sam's Town, we went for a three-hour drive around the city, starting with Sunrise Mountain to the east, from which we looked down at the sprawling city as the sun set and its light was replaced by the colorful sweep of Las Vegas neon. Then we headed downtown and took the long drive down Las Vegas Boulevard and the whole length of The Strip. We passed a dozen wedding chapels, including a couple where an Elvis impersonator will perform the service, and thousand of tourists wandering around in a neon daze as they craned their necks at the ever-growing number of monstrously huge casinos. Linda likened it to Times Square, except that the people in New York seem to be going somewhere all the time, while people visiting Las Vegas spent a lot of time looking lost.

We saw three things which, to me, sum up Las Vegas' supremacy in the realm of indulging any excess. First was the woman we saw seated upon a rolling walker at Sam's Town, watching a friend of hers play a slot machine. The woman was a burly 75-year-old with white hair knotted atop her head, wearing a short leopard-print sundress with spaghetti straps which kept slipping down, a shell necklace, and black sneakers and socks, and drinking a glass of red wine. She looked like Barney Rubble in drag. The natives didn't give her a second thought.

Second was a small church building on East Charleston Boulevard. On the door it is identified as the Living Faith Assembly, God's Family Church, where "Our purpose is to love God and glorify him thereby." The lights were off this evening and nobody was inside the building, but there was a steady stream of cars entering the parking lot. Why? Because attached to the outside of the church is a Wells Fargo Bank express ATM machine. That explains why the information on the door includes the assurance that this church is "non-denominational." Yep, they'll accept any denomination there: fives, tens, twenties, or hundreds.

Last up was the business establishment in downtown Las Vegas whose marquee caused us both to do a triple-take. It is called the "Heart Attack Grill" and it proclaims "Over 350 lbs? Eat here free." Underneath that generous offer is this tempting come-on: "Ask about our liposuction lottery." We really don't want to ask, thank you. But that's Vegas. Any compulsion, obsession, or self-destructive behavior will be encouraged, aided and abetted. This may even be the last bastion where smoking is allowed in a public place, providing me with a nostalgic chance to inhale the stench of a cheap cigar in the cheap slot-machine area. No problem. Just come inside--and bring all those denominations with you.

On Wednesday we were transfixed by the delicate orange-white pinnacles of Bryce Canyon, the towering ridges of Zion, and many other natural wonders. One day later, I found myself trying to figure out how a new casino like the Cosmopolitan can stay afloat. Someone bought the property next to the massive Bellagio and decided that the only way to compete was to build something even more massive. They also realized that the only color not used yet for a mega-casino's primary color was kelly blue, so that's the color of the horizontal bars of neon 30 or 40 stories up or however tall it is. That's how it goes in Las Vegas, where immediate visual gratification is supreme, and once you are on the premises they'll do everything they can to keep you there. Sam's Town, a quaint Western-themed neighborhood casino when I first set foot in it 30 years ago, now has a McDonald's, a Subway, a Dunkin' Donuts, and several other fast-food places right on the premises, inside the casino, in addition to its own dining establishments.

No, despite the efforts of the Living Faith Assembly, I don't think I'm going to find God in a desert of neon where a 400-pound man can get a free lunch. I'm much more likely to find divinity in the marvels of the Utah and Arizona canyons which took millions of years to create magnificent vistas.

Ass Kicked by Altitude

I started today with an early dialysis at 6:15AM in St. George, Utah. The dialysis treatment went swimmingly. My dialysis nurse was very sweet, his name was Jason, and he took very good care of me. This was a not-for-profit unit called Dixie Dialysis which offered tons of accommodations I'm not really used to, such as Jason bringing me coffee and cookies, and providing lidocaine, a numbing agent. Like most hemodialysis patients, I use licocaine in cream form, which I put on about an hour prior to the cannulation (insertion of the two needles) in order to prevent pain. It's a real asset. I have my own tubes which I apply, but Dixie Dialysis also supplies licocaine for patients in the form of a tiny shot under the skin. The only thing I didn't like was the chair, which was too big for me and left me with a sore back since I had to sit in it for more than four hours. After dialysis we went for a nice lunch at the All-American Classic Diner in Cedar City, Utah. Then we headed UP to Cedar Breaks National Monument. It was beautiful, and once again I was in awe of the sights around me, the huge rock formations and the millions of beautiful trees, including cypress, scrub pine, aspen wearing their fall colors, spruce, and many more. However, by the time we climbed to the park entrance I had started to feel the effects of the elevation on my circulation. My entire left side became wobbly and weak. No pain, just the circulation being somehow stymied by the elevation. My left side feels like it doesn't belong to me. It has happened several times on this trip and I shrugged it off as the heat or being hungry, the effects of medication, or post-dialysis fatigue. But I finally realized today that it's just the elevation that effects me. When we reached the summit of 10,420 feet, having climbed from an elevation of just a few thousand feet, I felt my worst, my weakest. At that point Gabriel made the decision to descend, which we did quickly since it's a very steep road going up and going back down. I immediately felt better with each foot of the descent that was behind us, and by the time we got to our motel at Parowan I felt 100% fine. It was pretty obvious that going up that high that fast kicked my ass, and going down made it all go away. Just a heads-up to my fellow dialysis patients that are flat-landers that they have to watch out when they visit higher elevations. I guess I won't be moving to the Rockies! I hope that people are coming away from reading this blog with a better understanding of dialysis, and I hope that dialysis patients come away with a greater desire to travel, to live, to experiment. Don't be afraid. Do it! That's the message I want people to get from this blog.

Ebb and Flow on the Road

As I've noted before, not all days are created equal, and within each day of travel there is an ebb and flow, a succession of events which break in your favor or against you. On our way to the North Rim (Grand Canyon) Lodge yesterday morning, we saw a woman sitting contently in the rocking chair on the porch of her cabin. We said hello, and the next thing we knew we were getting a tour of the cabin (very nice, especially the fireplace) and comparing notes on our trip for 15 minutes. She was from Iowa and part of a tour that had originated in Denver on a bus owned by an Idaho company. They had spent the past two weeks touring many of the same southwest parks we're touring; her favorite was Zion, which we were to see later in the day. She noted the big plus of the bus tour--no responsibility or effort on her part regarding driving or logistics--and the big minus--that they had to go where the bus took them and leave when the bus left even if they wanted to spend the rest of the day where they were. For instance, she noted the ride of several hours to the Bullfrog Marina, one of the commercial monstrosities created by the invention of Lake Powell, a waste of time for her because all they did was look at a marina they weren't going to use, have dinner, and stay overnight. It sounded to us like an instance of the tour company making a deal with some pals at the marina to bring a busload of tourists there every so often. Linda and I have enjoyed making our own route on this trip. But we're subject to the ebb and flow, and yesterday was a great example of that.

Just meeting the woman from Iowa was a matter of chance. When we arrived at the North Rim the night before (just in time to catch the last 20 minutes of light on the canyon and a spectacular sunset) after a long day of driving, Linda didn't feel like walking the 50 yards or so from the nearest parking lot to the lodge, so I used the bus access to drop her at the door before parking myself. But yesterday morning she felt like walking, and we met that woman on the way. After I walked out to the two main viewpoints below the lodge to take some fantastic photos of the canyon in the morning light, we decided to have breakfast there. The large dining room overlooks the canyon, and Linda asked the host for a window seat. He demurred, saying he had just seated a party of ten in the area covered by the waiter whose table would be ours. Linda didn't buy that, protesting "You mean he can't handle two more people? Or you can't have someone else wait on us?" We got the table with the wonderful view--and that's what we paid for, because the waiter was a goofball who eventually abandoned us for 15 minutes after leaving the check, the coffee was weak (as our friend had warned us), and the buffet breakfast was so-so; Linda did better by ordering eggs, ham, and hashbrowns off the menu. But what a view!

There are only two places to drive to the north edge of the canyon: the lodge and Cape Royal, a 20-mile drive from the lodge. That was our next mission, a winding road that took us through an area ravaged by a 56,000-acre fire in 2006 whose evidence is still quite visible. Only the aspens seem to have rebounded well, and there were some vivid views of green and yellow aspens flourishing at the base of burned-out patches of forest. Linda nodded off during the drive; she has had trouble on non-dialysis days because her morning medications (which mainly combat high blood pressure, the original cause of her kidney failure) make her drowsy for an hour or two (on dialysis days she takes those pills before dialysis and can sleep them off in the dialysis chair). By the time we got to Cape Royal, she was knocked out and stayed at the car. She couldn't have done the hike to the canyon rim anyway because of the distance and the rugged rocks by the rim. So she waited while I took 45 minutes to walk first to the ledge above Angel's Window and then to the Cape Royal overlook, taking about two dozen photos of the spectacular views from the North Rim. [I still haven't worked out a way to post photos on these blogs, but someday I will be able to insert the images that fit the text; I'll let you know when that happens and hope you'll revisit these blogs to see what Linda and I have been talking about.]

When I returned to the car, Linda was sitting in a lawn chair behind the car and reading. I showed her the images I had captured, and then we took off for points north. She slept a little more but it didn't matter because the first 50 miles were on a road she had seen the day before, and she was fully revived by the time we got the Jacob Lake and a fresh road. Our next target was Hurricane, Utah, where we stayed last night, a 20-minute drive from this morning's dialysis treatment in St. George. The question was how to get there. We had the traditional choice of going north to Utah Highway 9, which would take us through the southern tier of Zion National Park, from east to west, with Hurricane about 20 miles west of the park entrance. Or we could do an end-around, turning west at Fredonia and coming into Hurricane from the south, bypassing the park. We chose the latter because we wanted to get to our motel and grab a bite to eat before tackling the park. I knew we could cover the Highway 9 section of the park later, and we'll also be traversing 9 tomorrow on our way back from Bryce Canyon to St. George, where we'll spend tomorrow night before Linda returns Saturday morning for dialysis at the same center where she is right now. Does that sound complicated? Multiply that by 31 and you'll get an idea of the ebb and flow of logistics on a long trip like this. You give something up now to get an advantage later, or vice versa. Sometimes you get a break, and sometimes you don't, but even in the latter case it can work out well.

That's what happened yesterday. It took a little longer to get to Hurricane than I expected, plus we lost an hour on the clock, going from Pacific time in Arizona to Mountain time in Utah. Our meal in Hurricane stretched out a little bit as well, and on the road to Zion we were stalled for more than ten minutes because of road constructions. That was distressing because it was already after 6pm and, with sunset coming at 7:30, our time in Zion would be limited. I'm pretty fanatical about catching the sunsets in national parks as often as possible, and until the long line of cars finally began to move, I wondered whether we'd be able to do anything besides find one place at which to station ourselves to catch the fading light on a natural wonder.

It was nearly 6:30 by the time we entered the park, and I was unhappy to learn that you now have to take a shuttle bus along the main north-south road in the park which features the most scenic and well-known areas. That figures. I haven't been to Zion since the 1990s, and things have changed in the more popular parks, where decades of pollution from automobile exhaust finally prompted officials to limit traffic in the most popular areas (we saw it at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon as well, and I know it is also now the policy at Yosemite in California and Denali in Alaska) to commercial vehicles. Anyway, the only thing we could do was traverse Highway 9 along the southern edge of the park. That was the ebb.

The flow was the views, even more spectacular than I remembered. Because I've always like Bryce Canyon more than Zion, I've tended to discount Zion in my memory, but seeing it with Linda, feeling her excitement at the massive cliffs and rocks, made it all the more wondrous for me last night. We quickly found a number of places with views of already colorful formations that would be even more spectacular in another half-hour as the sunlight faded. That gave us a little time to explore, and I decided to go a few miles to the east to show her Checkerboard Mesa, one of the main viewpoints not on the now-restricted main park road.

We almost made it to Checkerboard Mesa when we saw several cars pulled onto the shoulder. When you see that, it's usually because of a wildlife sighting, in this case mountain goats. I counted 13 of them on a steep mesa, and we marveled at their remarkable balance as they roamed the orange-and-white crags of the mesa. I regretted not having my camcorder (I haven't used it for years, but why didn't I bring it on this trip? Dummy!) to film them delicately stepping along the slope, took some pictures, and then got an alert from a passing motorist that there was a ram near the road just around the bend. Indeed there was. Just below the road were nine more goats feeding, presided over by one alpha ram who monitored the tourist foot traffic as the other ate. One female didn't mind the presence of a dozen or so people along the shoulder of the road, wandering up to within ten feet of us to munch on shrubs. Meanwhile, the group of 13 had moved within view on the mesa across the road, and suddenly they broke into a sprint. We spectators couldn't believe how rapidly they moved on that steep slope, racing a couple of hundred yards before perching on a little promontory overlooking the spot where the other nine were feeding. Enthralled, we stayed there snapping pictures from point-blank range, with four females now right below us, until the ram started making his way up the hill. Then it was time to get back in the car.

By the time we made it back to the area that had been bathed in sunlight, the light was gone. We had sacrificed the sunset for the sight of 22 mountain goats. That was a fine bargain in our minds. Ebb and flow. We'll remember those goats much longer and much more happily than one more lousy sunset on a stinkin' piece of rock. So it goes on the road. When you travel, you give yourself a chance to make memories like that, and we've accumulated a lifetime of such memories, with nearly two more weeks to go. What's next? We can hardly wait.

Very Grand Canyon

I know I haven’t written in a couple of days and you’re anxious to follow what’s been happening on our trip. So I’ll start with the dialysis portion. I had dialysis Saturday again in Tuba City, AZ, on the Navajo reservation. It was an eye-opener. The staff was very competent and my nurse treated me beautifully, and I had a more than adequate dialysis. They left me a little under my dry weight with no complications, which made me very happy. The thing that most interested me about the dialysis unit in Tuba City was how impoverished the whole community was. It made me very sad to think that the Native Americans have suffered so much and continue to, and it’s reflected in the way they’re living today. It was a large dialysis center, I think with 28 chairs, and all but two were filled with Native Americans, who have a large incidence of kidney failure caused by diabetes. All my fellow dialysis patients were cheerful and friendly and accepting of me although, as my nurse on Thursday, Sammy Manymules, said to me, “We don’t see too many of you guys.” Now on to the awesome part of this weekend, our trip to the Grand Canyon. It’s called Grand for a reason. The views are spectacular. They leave me without words, but I’m going to try. What I felt when I first gazed upon the wonder of it was how insignificant I really was, how we all are. At the same time I can’t help but feel that it brings out the poet in everyone. I only wish that everybody that I care about and love—family,friends—will one day get to see what I saw today. I feel so small and insignificant because the sheer size of it is so daunting, the expanse of the canyon, the hundreds of millions of years it took to be created by the mighty Colorado River. You and I are merely a blink of the eye in the larger scheme of things. It makes me feel not so bad about turning 57 next week. So stay tuned—tomorrow will be another day of magnificence and beauty, wherever we go.

A Very Happy Anniversary

Ten years ago today, Linda and I met for the first time. Six years ago today, we got married. I don't know what took us so long, since we were what a friend calls "lovebirds" from the very first. Not coincidentally, these have been the best ten years of my life, and this cross-country trip, which has reached its halfway point today, is certainly one of the high points of this wonderful decade.

We've spent the last couple of days exploring "Abbey country," the starkly spectacular southwest desert whose untarnished beauty Edward Abbey tried to protect from the forces of commercial development. He'd be pretty horrified to see what has become of his beloved desert. I wish I could figure out how to post photos on this blog to show how the Glen Canyon Dam has ruined Glen Canyon. The park brochure acknowledges that the dam was created "out of controversy and compromise," and you can buy three books by Abbey and two about him at the park bookstore. But they don't mention, for instance, that the compromise included the complete inundation of the town of Hite and other places where people lived until Lake Powell filled in much of the canyon after the dam opened in the 1960s. They do tell you that the shoreline of Lake Powell is greater than the entire Pacific coastline of the United States, which gives you an idea of how much property which residents used to look at and enjoy has been sacrificed to power boating, wave runners, and other development. The most prominent invasion, of course, is the hydroelectric power plants fed by Lake Powell and utilized by five states. Several transformers tower above the dam, with power lines stretching across the canyon and the shadows of the bridge criss-crossing the canyon walls. I took a lot of pictures at Glen Canyon Dam, and very few of them are pure desert. The signs of development are everywhere in what you see around the dam and the lake. No wonder Abbey wanted to blow it up.

Part of yesterday's pilgrimage was a drive out to Lee's Ferry, the launch point for river-running trips on large rafts which traverse white-water rapids to give customers views from the bottom of the Grand Canyon and other natural wonders. There we met a nice couple from Washington named Rick and Kathy, who were about to embark on a 22-day trip that would wind up on Lake Mead near Las Vegas. It sounded like a good deal at just $50 a day per person, with food and other supplies provided (though they had to bring their own booze).

Rick, it turns out, is related to a baseball Hall of Famer, Dave Bancroft, an infielder on John McGraw's championship teams of 1921 and 1922. Rick told us that when Bancroft was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1971 at age 80, his wife wouldn't let him go. She was afraid he'd flirt with all the young women in Cooperstown that weekend. It seems silly to think that such a concern would prevent a man from attending the greatest honor of his life, but perhaps she knew him better than I do. And her fears weren't irrational. There's a long tradition of Hall of Famers making mischief with female Hall of Fame staffers, including one legendary figure who's been known to call down for this or that woman to come to his room, where he greets her at the door naked.

Anyway, we were glad to see Lee's Ferry and some of the other sites Abbey wrote about. Now, as we continue to read him, we'll have a better idea of what he meant and why it was so important to him. Reading Abbey does bring out the anarchist in me, I'll admit. The night we arrived in Page, we had an annoying experience at a Burger King, and I promptly posted an anti-BK tirade on Facebook and sent the folks at BK an angry e-mail, assuring them that I'd never give them any of my business again. I got a reply yesterday, thanking me for my feedback--and promising to send me a coupon for a free Whopper. That's about what you'd expect from a big company like BK or the mega-developed who have covered a canyon with water to cash in on the boating craze, or the company that's tearing up the ground around Moab to make potash for farmers halfway across the world. They'll pay you a little lip service, but won't give you real service unless you're willing to part with cash.

Today is one of those day's when Linda's dialysis time is not very convenient. We wanted to go to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon today, but having to arrive at the dialysis center here in Tuba City, AZ, at 12:30pm didn't leave us enough time in the morning (the park is 90 minutes southwest of here). She's be done around 5pm, meaning we'd have to haul ass out to the park to catch what we could in an hour of daylight. We're staying tonight in Cameron, about halfway in between, and to catch the sunset, we wouldn't get back to Cameron until 8pm or so, not the best time for dinner if you ate breakfast at 9am and skipped lunch. Linda likes the leisurely pace we've maintained the last few days, so we're going to go straight to Cameron and stay there, enjoying an anniversary dinner in the restaurant of the lodge. We'll go to the South Rim early tomorrow morning, spend a few hours there, and head to the North Rim, where we're staying tonight. And if we don't cover everything we want to at the South Rim, we have the option of returning there on the first day of our eastward retreat, which begins one week from today. Flexibility rides again!

Fantastic, Funny, and Not So Funny

Yesterday (Wednesday) was our first full day of exploration, and probably the best day of the trip so far. It was a day-long feast of spectacular scenery, preceded by a tasty appetizer on Tuesday, when we drove from Grand Junction to Moab (Utah) after dialysis. I’ve been to Moab many times but have seldom approached it from the east, and had never taken State Highway 128 before. I guess the only reason I missed it before was to make it such an unexpected joy this time. The locals call it “the river road” because it skirts the Colorado River, a 45-mile drive from I-70 to Moab that winds around and through red-rock canyons that are a stirring prelude to the rest of southern Utah. After several miles of this scenery, we were pulled over to take photos when a van stopped alongside us. A woman wondered what part of New York we were from; she and her husband were originally from Syracuse (90 miles from where we live) but have moved to a tiny town in one of the side-canyons off Rt. 128. “The view is even better once you pass those rocks,” she said, and she wasn’t kidding. Once we passed the Fisher Towers area the view got better and better until the road and river were merely narrow wedges in between towering orange cliffs. I had wanted to go out to Dead Horse Point for the sunset because it had been highly recommended by a friend who ought to know, but we stopped so often on 128 that the last light had already passed by the time we reached Moab.

We didn’t get to Arches National Park until 11am yesterday, and didn’t leave until nearly 5pm. The first time I visited Arches was 1970, a year before it was converted from a National Monument to a National Park. First established in 1929, it was doubled in acreage from roughly 36,000 to 70,000 acres by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 and soon after was made a park. That brought more protection and more development, enough to appall Edward Abbey if he were still alive, as he spent two summers as a park ranger there in the late 1950s, camping in a government trailer near Balanced Rock, which is still the most popular attraction in the park. It was a warm day, around 80 degrees, but fortunately the 50% chance of thunderstorms never materialized. We hit every stop, every side road, and every viewpoint, and it was all magnificent, with so many improbable rock formations that were the work of about 200 million years of water and wind erosion. After awhile, everywhere you look you see faces in the rocks, or animals (Ex., the famed “double arch” looked to us like two long-beaked birds fighting over a worm), and sections of the park have names like “Fiery Furnace,” “Devil’s Garden,” and the “Garden of Eden.” The last spot is where we stopped for over an hour, enjoying a cool breeze through the car windows as I read a couple of chapters of The Monkey Wrench Gang to Linda. Later, we found a very comfortable patch of shade under a tree near the Devil’s Garden and read another chapter. At Fiery Furnace we talked with a park ranger who, like Abbey, was a philosophy major in college who fell in love with the southwest and is building a makeshift home in order to stay around Moab a long time. That sounded like a great idea to us.

After a quick late-afternoon jaunt back into town for a bite to eat, we made the 40-minute drive out to Dead Horse Point for the sunset. It more than lived up to its billing, with an endless valley of red, orange, beige, and (as the light faded) purple and a meandering section of the Colorado River below. We were enthralled by the views and spent an hour out there before the light went away. However, we were also horrified to see plenty of evidence that Abbey’s worst fears are being realized—that this pristine and uninhabitable desert is nevertheless being desecrated by the forces of “progress” who value exploiting natural resources over preserving them. The endless power lines along Hwy 191 (the main north-south road that goes through Moab and heads south into Monument Valley) were bad enough. The oil wells along the side-road of Hwy 313, marked only with a sign reading “pioneer drilling” but operating under massive wattage of artificial light after the sun set, while ominous-looking oil tankers snaked their way through the desert, were distressing, though not as much as an evil mining operation, authorized by the federal government, right along Hwy 191. Most disturbing of all are the two potash evaporation ponds visible from Dead Horse Point. Operated by a company called Intrepid Potash, which boasts that it supplies nearly 10% of the US demand for potassium-related products, the terraced evaporation ponds process water to extract potash (potassium chloride), and the fact that they are part of the same panorama as the much-abused Colorado River makes it all the more monstrous. It’s bad enough that the industrial world feel compelled to rip up the earth; do they have to do it in the shadow of one of the most magnificent natural wonders in this country?

On a lighter note, we did have our funniest experience of the trip that morning in Moab. After Linda savored her Eggs Benedict so much, she lingered over her coffee while I went to pay the bill. As I waited, a couple came along, with the man standing next to me and his wife going over by the door. The cashier, Akif, appeared and asked me if I enjoyed the meal. “Very much,” I said. “My wife really liked the Eggs Benedict.” He turned to the woman by the door and said, “I’m glad you enjoyed your breakfast.” “I did,” she replied, pausing ever so briefly, “but I’m not with him.” A chagrined Akif grew red-faced as he apologized for the mistake, while the woman moved over to stand next to her husband. “Of course,” she mused, “this is Utah, after all.” That cracked all of us up, and she hurried out the door, still laughing. Her husband turned to me and said, “I can’t take her anywhere.” Well, the truth is that he can and should take her everywhere. They’re like we are; Linda and I make our own fun and laugh at everything (except potash, I guess), and we’ll enjoy every place to which we travel. As we’re doing on this trip.

Elk Steak and Eggs Benedict

I’m going to start with my dialysis treatment yesterday, Sept. 11. I received the treatment at Grand Junction, CO. I will rate the treatment a 5-kidney treatment, the best. They were wonderful. It was a large, clean, bright, cheerful unit, and the staff I dealt with, Pam and Gracie, were kind, gentle and very competent. After being trapped in the car for about 3½ hours on the drive to dialysis, I was anxious to get the treatment over. I was tired of sitting, my butt was asleep. I am determined not to talk only dialysis, so let me tell you about the elk steak I had for dinner the other night in Steamboat Springs. Karolynn cooked the elk perfectly (not overcooked, medium rare is the way to do it), and it was scrumpy (my word for delicious), served with some fresh corn on the cob and a crispy, fresh salad of different lettuces, tomatoes and onions, just great. I found out I loved the elk steak, and I hope I can find some in upstate NY. I can now check another item off my to-do list, since this morning I had for the first time ever eggs Benedict. I never would order it before because I don’t care for poached eggs, or more to the point, a runny yolk. I find, however, the older I get the braver I have become, and I was determined to try eggs Benedict. It was GREAT, the eggs and Canadian bacon, the English muffins all topped with perfect hollandaise sauce, I will certainly order again if I ever get to Brennan’s in New Orleans (which Gabriel has told me about), maybe in a couple years. They must have good dialysis available there. I’ll let Gabriel tell you about the fabulous day we had at the Arches National Park in Utah, what a day! I spent most of the day in awe and speechless (don’t laugh). Stay tuned for more.♥♥♥

The Most Spectacular Drive So Far

Linda is having her dialysis in Grand Junction, CO, as I write this, at a very fine DaVita center. As I walked in to visit her, wearing one of those white paper coats they give you to protect patients from infection, a grizzled man two chairs down barked at me, "Hey! Come here!" I did. "You a doctor?" he asked. "I wish," I replied. (Linda said I missed a great opportunity to say yes and see how far I could go with it.) He grilled me with questions for a couple of minutes before chirping, "My name is O'Flaherty--I'm a German Jew!" I said, "I can call that bluff and raise--I'm a Russian Jew who married an Irish woman!" That passed muster with him. "Oh, you're all right then," he growled, reminding me of Walter Brennan in "To Have and Have Not" telling Lauren Bacall she's all right when she beats him to the punch answering his favorite line: "Was you ever bit by a dead bee?" Having passed his test, I went over to Linda's chair, and a moment later a Native American, also a stranger to the unit, entered for his dialysis treatment. "Hey!" the grizzled man yelled at him "Are you in Indian?" That was a rhetorical question, since the young man had brought with him several feather headdresses. Linda and I talked with him; he's an Ogallala Sioux who makes those prayer feathers. Two were made from owl feathers and the other, spectacularly colored, was made of macaw feathers from Brazil.  I wonder how many prayer feathers we'll see at Linda's next two dialysis treatments, which will be at Tuba City, AZ, on the Navajo reservation.

This has been a great day already. We left Steamboat Springs around 8am for a 200-mile drive, taking Highway 131 south through Yampa and down to I-70. The two-lane road wound through valleys, ranches, and red rocks, but the high point was seeing about 100 vintage cars heading north for a rally that our friend Terry is also attending somewhere in eastern Colorado. It was a fantastic array of cars, including the little red one going uphill whose driver saw us just a couple of hundred yards ahead of him but went ahead and zipped past a slower vehicle anyway, darting into his own lane with twenty yards to spare. Welcome to the Wild West, folks!

I was eager to take Linda through Glenwood Canyon, arguably the most scenic drive on any interstate highway. The canyon runs for about twenty miles, mostly east of Glenwood Springs, and was especially magnificent today with sprays of yellow aspen in the hills. The road seems tiny at the base of the high, red-rock canyon walls that tower over the Colorado River, which runs alongside the road. It's a spellbinding road, and Linda was appropriately blown away by it. The only negative is that there's only one rest area along that stretch of road--that is, no safe spots along the shoulder where you can pull over and gawk at leisure--but I did take five photos at that rest area.

We got to Grand Junction a little before noon, about 40 minutes before Linda's starting time, and found a picnic table in the shade where we had a bite to eat before going to the dialysis center. Soon after she began her treatment, a thunderstorm passed through, with lightning and heavy rain. It has been raining lightly on and off ever since, and that's the forecast for Moab, UT, where we're heading as soon as she gets out of here. I wanted her see the day's last light tonight  in Arches National Park just outside of Moab, but you need sunshine to get the full effect, and it's iffy whether we'll catch good light. She'll be out of here by 5pm, it's a two-hour drive to Moab, and the sunset is at 7:32, so we at least have a chance at that spectacular view if the sky cooperates. Maybe we should have our new Ogallala-Sioux friend say a prayer for our rain-free travels. But this is already a great day thanks to that morning drive and everything else going smoothly.

Last Day of Part One

Linda and I are relaxing comfortably in Steamboat Springs, CO, the last day of "part one" of this trip. I call it the "hurry up and relax" phase, or the visiting phase, because except for one day, we've seen friends every day on the road so far. Thank you to everyone who has joined us for meals or hosted us along the way so far: Steve and Mary Ann in Cleveland; R. J. in Des Moines; Mike and Helen in Cheyenne; Andy and then Terry and Noel in Boulder; and now Karolynn in Steamboat Springs. There was also the dialysis center in Lakewood where a sign proclaims "May all who enter as guests, leave as friends," which was the case.

Steamboat is especially beautiful right now, the mountains vibrant with skinny Colorado pines and yellow aspens. I've been coming to Steamboat since the 1970s, when my grad school friends Karolynn and Jim moved here. On one of those early trips, I bought a dark blue Stetson at F.M. Light & Co., the Western outfitters who have been here since 1905 and have signs about every quarter-mile along the highway for 50 miles in both directions. We checked out F.M. Light yesterday and Linda bought straw cowboy hats for two of her grandsons. The time has certainly flown.

Jim, a fine photographer, is in central Africa right now in search of wildlife, but Linda got to cross two items off of her own wildlife wish-list. Not far from Denver we passed a buffalo herd "reserve" (fenced in) and I took two photos of them. Later in the day, further north, she saw antelope for the first time. Now the big target for the trip is moose. In addition, Karolynn cooked elk steaks for us last night, another first for both of us. It was delicious, especially with a sauce made with shallots, red wine, and lingonberry preserves. Karolynn has a great front porch where we ate dinner last night and breakfast this morning, and where the late-afternoon strawberry daiquiris of old have been replaced by margaritas. It will be tough to leave tomorrow morning, but we'll be off around 7:30 am to get to Linda's dialysis in Grand Junction a little after noon.

I'm calling the second part of the trip the "exploration phase." Starting tomorrow and for the next ten days, we'll be covering a relatively small area, just a few hundred miles from Moab to St. George in Utah, plus another hundred or so miles south into Arizona. We'll see at least a half-dozen national parks and national monuments--Arches, Canyonlands, the north and south rims of the Grand Canyon, Bryce, Zion, and Cedar Breaks, plus the Glen Canyon Recreation Area, maybe Natural Bridges, and more. We'll be reading Edward Abbey's The Monkey-Wrench Gang, which we started the other day, an impassioned novel blasting all encroachment of "civilization" and economic development on the starkly beautiful deserts of the southwest United States. We'll stay two nights in Moab, two nights in Page, AZ, in the shadow of the Glen Canyon Dam that Abbey blew up in the sequel to TMWG, and our anniversary weekend at the Grand Canyon. It's going to be a great ten days, so come along with us.

Steamboat Springs Colorado

I thought Boulder, CO was beautiful, but now I want to move to Steamboat Springs.  Well, let me begin with my dialysis treatment last night in Lakewood, CO. It was terrific, a big thanks to Corrine and Bailey, my nurses (they get a rating of 5, the highest possible). I also met a few wonderful women that were also there for dialysis, which was nice to see, because my home unit and until now on the road I mostly see men. I adore my dialysis buddies home, so a big shout out to Harry, John, Louie, Sterling, Woody, Fred and Frank, I miss you guys,  but I'll be back soon. Hang in there.  Anyway, they got me down to below my dry weight, for my stretch day, which I was thrilled about.  This morning we headed to Steamboat Springs from Denver, where we spent the night (at a Motel 6, hard to do after staying with the Heftys at their place).  Got to Karolynn's house in Steamboat at about noon, after seeing some awesome sights driving up into the Rocky Mountains and all their glory. I was simply awestruck with the  beauty around me, incredible.  I wanted to mention that I am spreading pickles (bread and butter pickles, which I made before I left) all over the west, at dialysis centers and to friends, anybody I meet. It's a blast.  Love to all.♥♥♥

I Love Boulder, Colorado

I've been in the Boulder area now for 2 days, and I love it.   The foothills of the Rocky Mountains.  So beautiful. First on all we met Andy, Gabriel's college chum from Colgate, who has a quaint music store called Albums-on-the-Hill, in Boulder, for lunch. Andy took us to lunch at The Sink, a great place where both the POTUS (which I just learned  is the acronym for the President of the United States) and Guy Fieri ate recently.  A big deal and real surprise for me, since I am an avid fan of both.  The Sink is full of character, and murals and graffiti cover the walls and ceilings.  Andy is a great host, willing to tell all about Boulder and its history.  We then walked around the city, with lots of little shops and lots to see. Boulder is alive and vibrant, due to all the youth, the home of the University of Colorado.  Then on to stay and visit with friends just outside of Boulder, Noel and Terry.  Their home is gorgeous. I didn't want to get out of the shower, the most incredible shower ever, so nice.  But even better Terry has the greatest collection of  vintage race cars.  The most wonderful of all is the '59 Aston Martin, DB4GT,  the most beautiful green. I am now waiting for Terry to take me for a ride in his '66 Shelby.  See pictures soon on Facebook. I am able to enjoy this time fully because the dialysis treatment I received Thursday was great. I had a little fluid overload, which Gabriel told you about, but they were able to get me to 2/10 of a kilo under my dry weight. They get 4.5 kidneys.  Way to go. Thanks to Ralph and Joyce. So, I'll let you go for now, I'm going for a ride in a Shelby! ♥♥♥

PS: Just got back from the ride. Amazing! What power, to go through those gears and feel the torque, the rumble of the engine. I was fascinated by the seat. They keep you snug for the turns. It's just so much power, I can't describe it. So far it's the highlight of the trip.

A Good Day To Be With Friends

In the "tips" column I wrote last month, I noted that not all days are created equal, and you have to deal with the tough days when they come along. I wouldn't say that yesterday was extremely tough, but it was the toughest day we've had this week, because Linda didn't feel her best.

She had dialysis Tuesday and by Wednesday afternoon was experiencing some shortness of breath. This happens sometimes between dialysis treatments because of the "dry weight" issue. You dialysis patients already know where I'm going with this, and I'll try to explain it simply for those of you hoping to learn something about dialysis from this blog.

Some dialysis patients have a very minimal kidney function but far from enough to survive without dialysis. Linda has no kidney function, so any fluid intake stays in her body until the next dialysis treatment. It has nowhere to go, so she has to limit her fluid intake to roughly 50 ounces a day. That's a reasonable amount under most conditions. At an average dialysis treatment, she will have 5-8 pounds of fluid removed, and the "dry weight" is her basic weight that is what she ought to weigh after dialysis. The nurse has a formula to work with during the dialysis to achieve this weight, but there is some guesswork involved, and you don't know how close you are to your dry weight until the treatment is over and you get weighed.

After her dialysis on Tuesday, she weighed about 2.5 pounds above her normal dry weight. Then we took that long drive in 100-degree heat, and the dehydration caused her to drink a little more. Being boxed in in the car (i.e. not mobile) only made things worse, and (as was pointed out by her dialysis nurse at yesterday's treatment), eating restaurant meals increased her sodium intake. Sodium enhances fluid retention, and the physical presence of that much fluid presses on her lungs, causing shortness of breath.

This shortness of breath happens occasionally on her "skip day." Dialysis patients are on either a Monday-Wednesday-Friday or Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday sequence. That extra day (Monday, for her) puts an extra strain on the system, and she has to be extra careful with diet and fluid intake, to minimize the quantity of harmful chemicals (for her, potassium, phosphorous, and sodium) waiting to be dialyzed.

She had a bad night Wednesday, and neither of us slept much. The only way for her to be comfortable in that condition is to be vertical, which makes sleep difficult. To make things worse, instead of her normal early-morning dialysis time, she wasn't scheduled for treatment at the Cheyenne center until 4:30pm. When we got up yesterday morning, she called the dialysis center to see if she could get an earlier time, but they were fully booked and said they'd call if a patient didn't show up. Dialysis patients occasionally take a day off for pressing business (or a stubborn refusal to yield to the disease by showing up every damn time they expect you to), so it was an unlikely scenario. Indeed, she wound up having to wait until 4:30.

Linda wasn't in pain, and being on her feet and moving around helped. In the afternoon, she went on a shopping spree at Pier 1 Imports with Helen, who took the day off from her job as the director of the Wyoming state museum. That was good for her because the shopping distracted her rather than sitting around thinking about how much longer she'd have to wait before feeling fine again.

Dialysis professionals understand that some patients are more informed than others, and know their bodies better than nurses or even doctors can. So when we arrived at Cheyenne's Fresenius center and started doing the paperwork, it took only a couple of minutes for them to acknowledge Linda's advice that she needed to have extra fluid taken off to get down to her dry weight. I knew she was in good hands, and she was. She'll blog about the center and the treatment itself, but the key thing they did was something that might not have been done in her home center. When a center has three "shifts" of patients a day, it's important to keep on schedule so that you don't have a ripple effect of making later patients wait extra time to get on. In this case, Linda was part of the day's final shift, and her nurse told her, "Why don't we just keep you in the chair until everyone else is finished?" That way, she'd get extra time and a better chance to lose that extra weight. Normally she is connected to the machine for three hours and 45 minutes (this time varies from patient to patient). Last night, they kept her on for a full four hours, and it made a big difference.

When I picked Linda up, she weighed about a half-pound under her normal dry weight, and she felt great. They had taken 4.5kg off her, or about 10 lbs. That was the extra weight she had carried around since Tuesday. I've actually over-simplified this. It isn't simply a matter of arithmetic, and during the treatment itself a key issue is blood pressure. If you take off too much weight, it can cause an unwanted drop in blood pressure. This is just one of the ways in which dialysis is a tricky business. But the folks at Fresenius did a great job with her last night, and now we're primed to head down to Boulder for the start of four days in Colorado.

No More Long Drives For Awhile

After yesterday's grueling drive in 102-degree heat, today's arrival at the more leisurely, friends-visiting portion of the trip was quite welcome. We began the day in Scottsbluff, NE, and spent the morning at the Scotts Bluff National Monument. At the Visitor Center, we watched a fine 12-minute film on the Oregon Trail migration which confirmed our impression of how brutally difficult it was for the pioneers to cross the prairie midsection of the continent. One traveler reported that he could've crossed the country with his eyes closed, just following the trail by the smell of the dead bodies of people and animals along the way. Most of the pioneers packed all their belongings on their "prairie schooners" and discarded half of it along the way because it wasn't necessary and the weight overburdened the oxen, mules, and horses pulling the wagons. One wrote that if he were doing it all over again, he would've started with an empty wagon and picked up provisions along the way. On the other hand, the trail became a sort of public library; you'd pick up a book off the ground in Illinois, read it, and leave it along the trail in Nebraska for someone else to read. Add it all up, and it's an amazing saga in American history. Those people knew there was a better life somewhere, and if it didn't happen in their lifetimes, their descendants might still be better off for their sacrifice. That kind of selfless spirit would be a big help if it could be rekindled today.

From Scottsbluff to our next stop in Cheyenne, WY, was a little over a two-hour drive, much of it along Rt. 85 in eastern Wyoming. We had thought Nebraska was barren, but then we saw Rt. 85. We drove it for 80 miles and see about ten ranch houses and a couple of dozen head of black Angus cattle. Until we were within a dozen miles of Cheyenne, we didn't see two houses within a mile of each other or any sign of civilization. Think about that. We were a dozen miles from a state capital and saw no trace of society. "Capital of what?" I wondered. But Wyoming has always had a grip on me since my first trip there, though I've spent most of my Wyoming time along the western edge, specifically the Grand Tetons.

We're spending a couple of days in Cheyenne with our friends Mike and Helen, whom we met in Cooperstown ten years ago, the year they were married. Helen was attending the very fine museum studies program run by the New York State Historical Society, while Mike, a long-time newspaper reporter and editor from Seattle, took those two years to volunteer at the Baseball Hall of Fame library. He began his volunteer work a couple of months before I began working there. Mike and Helen are a fine couple and we're happy to hang out with them until we head for Colorado on Friday morning.

Mike is notable in that like many accomplished men, including the likes of Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice, Peter Gammons, Vin Scully, Harry Caray, and most recently Tim McCarver, he has a plaque hanging in the Hall of Fame even though he was never elected. Mike's plaque celebrates his unprecedented volunteer work, 3,200 hours primarily spent photocopying approximately 300,000 pages of material. This is a vital part of the library's preservation process. The clippings files include thousands of newspaper articles from decades ago and even from the 19th century, and the acid in the old newsprint decays to the point where if you pick up a clipping from 1905 it quite possibly will crumble in your fingers. So you need to take those fragile items, get them onto a copier, and copy them onto acid-free paper which will endure for much longer. That's what Mike did every day for 20 months, along with other work at the library. When he left in 2004, they made a plaque posted above the copier where he did his work. At the bottom of the plaque, Mike is rightly identified as "a true Hall-of-Famer among volunteers." Linda and I are proud to be his friend and delighted to enjoy his and Helen's company for a couple of days.

A Hot Time in Nebraska

Yesterday was sort of a heat-addled blur for us. After Linda's dialysis, we got out of Grand Island at noon and had a drive of about 320 miles to Scottsbluff. The temperature in the afternoon was never below 94 and for much of the drive it wavered between 100 and 102. Even though we blasted the air conditioner, we were heading west into the sun and its heat drained us anyway. What a perfect way to appreciate the suffering of the people who followed the same route more than 150 years earlier--in covered wagons. The drive up Highway 26 to Scottsbluff follows the old Oregon Trail, and we have no idea how they made it.

We stopped at a rest area near Sutherland and talked with an elderly woman at the information desk who told us that when she was young she met a 97-year-old woman who had made the crossing in the 1860s. That woman buried three children along the way, but through incredible will-power she endured. What else was she going to do. They averaged less than two miles a day on the 2,000-mile trek along the bumpy planet to the outer reaches of the country's "manifest destiny," without knowing what they would face along the way. So I guess we do have some idea of how they made it: they had to be intrepid, tenacious, resourceful, optimistic, tough-minded, and dedicated. Linda could have done it.

Scottsbluff was a landmark on the trail because of its tall, rocky buttes and odd formations which made it a place where friends and family could meet. We arrived in time to shower and drive out to the National Monument as the sun set behind it, a spectacular sky to end the day. The park closed at sunset so we just missed entry, but parked on the road for a half-hour to take in the earth-toned bluffs. We'll be heading back shortly to explore the monument before heading to our next stopping point, Cheyenne, Wyoming. We are hardly pioneers, but can take our wearying drive of yesterday and multiply it by a thousand to get some idea of what those people did to make our country grow.

My First Dialysis of the Trip

Well, if you read Gabriel's blog you discovered the bit of trouble we had finding the dialysis center this morning, just a minor glitch.  Gabriel was a little upset to think his directions were not accurate but he recovered soon enough.  The DaVita dialysis unit in Grand Island, NE was very good. I'm going to use a 1-5 kidney scale to rate the units as I go along. Consequently today's unit gets a 4. My nurse, Tami, was very capable and canulated me quickly, aptly and without causing me any discomfort (I have a nerve near the venous site that is sometimes hit). I am very used to and comfortable with all my family at my home unit at Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown, NY, but I look forward to meeting other dialysis caregivers in other units on this trip.  Everyone today was very professional and quite nice.  The biggest difference I noticed was the cleanliness. I guess I would say the DaVita unit was messier than I am used to--not dirty but messy and cluttered.  In all fairness this particular unit is moving into a new and larger facility soon, so I think that issue will resolve itself. I was most impressed with the attention paid to infection control.  Always a good, good thing.  I am happy to report I went on, on time, always a bonus when you have to sit 4 hours tethered in a chair.  The other plus was the chair was cozy and heated--yes, it had a heating unit built right in.  Nice. Unlike my Bassett unit, no frills were had at the DaVita unit, no linen, no blankets, no pillows, no ice, but all in all a very pleasurable experience.  Just like I expected it would be.  Love to all my readers from Scottsbluff, NE.

What a Way To Start a Day

When Linda began hemodialysis in 2008 at Bassett Hospital (now Medical Center) in Cooperstown, she was working at the hospital so they made her the first person hooked up in the morning so that she would lose as little work time as possible. That meant we had to be there at 6am, which meant setting the alarm for 4:30am. So it seemed fitting that her first dialysis treatment on this trip called for her to at the dialysis center (in Grand Island, NE) at 6am. No problem--we were tired enough from yesterday's drive that we fell asleep fairly early, slept relatively decently, and even set the alarm for 5am.

We were ready to roll at 5:45 for what my directions said was a 15-minute drive. The problem was that I had two sets of directions (taken from Mapquest--the second set made after we got the early "chair time," starting from our motel instead of coming in from the east). It wasn't until I looked at the directions that they seemed to contradict each other on whether we should head north or south on Highway 281. Why the confusion? Because one set had us going north for three miles and then making a U-turn to go south.

Then we pulled out of the motel and were forced to turn right to get onto what we were sure had to be the right highway. It was, but there were no signs telling us whether we were going north or south. We went several miles in pitch blackness before feeling pretty sure we were headed in the wrong direction. Fine. Linda  grabbed the cell phone to call the dialysis center. It was now 5:55 and we were due there in five minutes. We suddenly felt old and panicky. The voice of the woman who answered was pretty faint and Linda had trouble hearing what she said, but we gathered that we did indeed need to turn around. Linda thought she heard that the last key bit of information was that the center was just past the "Pump 'n Perk," which sounded like a perfect name for a place where you could grab some gas and a cup of coffee.

Once we got turned in the right direction, it was just a matter of time. The "Pump 'n Perk" turned out to be the "Pump 'n Pantry," which doesn't sound as apt as the way Linda heard it the first time. But we found the DaVita dialysis center, and then it was only a matter of banging on the door for a couple of minutes until someone came to open it for us. That was a very friendly nurse named Tami who is attending Linda right now as I write this. They have a dozen chairs there, and Linda was the second person to be put on. Good news:  they allow visitors. We've been told that not all centers allow visitors (Bassett does), because of the ever-present risk of infection for patients. When they're being hooked up to or "taken off" at the end of the several-hour dialysis session, they're especially prone to infection, but the last patient at this center gets hooked up at 8:30, so I'll be going back around 9 to spend the last hour or so of Linda's session with her. That's a plus. It gives me time to post this entry, catch up on some e-mails, and pack up the car.

The car needed gas after I dropped Linda off, but I didn't go to the "Pump 'n Pantry." I had spotted another station along that main road which had a lower price, so I stopped there instead. Now this place does have the perfect name: "Git 'n Split." I kid you not. I did, and I did.

So we've learned one on-the-road lesson already: if you get to your dialysis location the night before an early chair time, do a dry run. Find the center when there's no pressure instead of panicking first thing in the morning.
********************
PS: Several people have informed me that they've had trouble posting comments on this blogsite. I'm sorry that I'm not blog-savvy enough to fix that or tell you how to work around it. If there's something you want to let us know, please e-mail us at gschechter@nycap.rr.com. Thanks to everyone for your support and good wishes.

The Longest Day

Day 3 was probably the longest driving day of the trip, 535 miles, starting in the Quad Cities (Rock Island, IL, to be specific) and ending in Grand Island, NE. We arrived at 8pm, feeling pretty tired after driving over 1,000 miles in two days. Linda has to be at the dialysis center at 6am, which means the alarm clock is set for 5am, which means that she's resting and will post her next blog tomorrow. Good news when we got to the room; it has a coffee pot and coffee, so we won't have to go looking at 5:30 am for the coffee she needs to feel human in the morning. When she gets a chance she'll tell you how tough it was to get coffee in Iowa.

It was a long day but a good day which ended with a 20-minute rainbow as we covered the last stretch of the drive into Grand Island. Road work in the Quad Cities caused us to take a roundabout way to I-80, but did afford us a view of one of the strangest things we're likely to see on the trip. As we passed through LeClair, IL, we spotted a large "For Sale" sign on a large building up on a hill. A closer look revealed that it was the LeClair Welcome Center. I've been searching to the punch line to this joke all day. Is this a sign that local governments are in such financial trouble that they can't afford to pay the bills on their own building? Are they no longer interested in welcoming people? Or did they dispense so much welcoming good will that they simply ran out and couldn't keep going? Very strange. That reminds me that I can't put off sharing the "Line of the Week" so far. That came from Linda yesterday, when discussing her dislike of camping: "For me, roughing it means driving with the windows down."

We had arranged to have lunch in Des Moines with R. J. Lesch, a fellow baseball historian I've known for ten years. All of us arrived at 12:30 pm at the Iowa Machine Shed, a tribute to Iowa farmers which we enjoyed very much. Linda tried chicken fried steak for the first time after being deprived of her anticipated Eggs Benedict yesterday in Cleveland. For some inexcusable reason, the restaurant there didn't serve their normal Sunday brunch menu yesterday, so that treat still lurks for later in the trip. We had a fine time with R. J. and hit the road around 2 pm.

After backtracking about 20 miles, we headed north to Ames, where we turned onto the Lincoln Highway. I wanted to drive at least some of this historic cross-country road this month, and we're very glad that we did. We covered 160 miles, about half of it on a two-lane road, going from Ames to just north of Omaha. It felt good to get off the interstate ribbon for one afternoon on the westward haul, and we traversed a lot of Iowa farm country and small towns that seemed especially sleepy on Labor Day. We saw field after field of brown corn stalks so dry we figured the whole state could go up in flames with one match and 3mph breeze. But the soybean fields, acre after acre, seem to be doing well, and we liked those bright yellow flowers atop the stalks. Linda was taken with all the trains hauling coal into the middle of the farming country (I counted 140 cars on one train) and with the enormous granaries. Driving across Iowa made us more acutely aware of just how precarious it is for a farmer trying to forge a livelihood while at the mercy of a fickle climate. They've had it rougher than usual this summer, and we'll all be paying for that.

We rejoined I-80 just west of Omaha for the final two-hour push to Grand Island. It feels good to be on the road ahead, cruising along on good conversation and good music. Today we listened to a fine assortment of CDs: a Leo Kottke CD with 12-string guitar and no vocals, Ella Fitzgerald and the Irish Tenors with glorious vocals, and Justin Hayward's fine solo effort, "A View From the Hill." Good music makes a long drive seem not so long, and it definitely helped today. Finally got to the room, connected to the internet after some difficulty, and found assorted messages and comments from many friends on our blogs so far. We hope you'll continue along with us on our travels, and Linda will have a report tomorrow on her first dialysis treatment.

Having the time of my life

So far what I've seen of America I am delighted with.  The people, the sights, the weather, everything.  The only sight I've witnessed which me unhappy were the completely dry fields of crops, especially the corn fields, due to to the drought.  It is really a shame.  The Rock and Roll hall of fame is a real treat, I hope everyone gets a chance to see it.  Gabriel did an incredible job describing our time there, I don't have much to add.  Tomorrow starts the beginning of the dialysis portion of my trip so stay tuned to see how I fare. Off to cross Iowa. Love to all.

Grateful For the Dead

We started off Day 2 with a big treat, a visit to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I've been there once before, several years ago, but it was Linda's first visit, and we only wished we could have spent twice as much time there. We arrived a half-hour before they opened, giving us time to stroll around the courtyard in front of the museum and take in the fantastic display of artistic guitars. [Unfortunately, I've been unable to upload images to this blog, but they are posted at our respective Facebook pages.] There are several dozen pieces of artwork on these large sculpted guitars, many depicting Cleveland scenes but also including guitars devoted to Superman, Big Bird, Woodstock, Cubism, the Beatles, and plenty more. All spectacular.

The first thing we caught in the museum was highlight footage from induction ceremonies and acceptance speeches, which make you realize how many of these great musicians made glorious music despite despising each other. For instance, Jeff Beck noted that he had a "love-hate" relationship with Rod Stewart: "He loves me, and I hate him." Next we watched some of the performances by electees, but Linda didn't get to see her beloved Neil Young's concert footage; she had to be content with the excerpt from his induction speech in which he acknowledged that even though he looked pretty morose, "things have been good for me for a long time."

The best thing these days about the museum is the special exhibit on the Grateful Dead. We've never been big fans of the Dead (the only time I saw them live was the performance they conceded was one of their worst ever, at Woodstock, when technical problems plagued them and they basically spent 90 minutes tuning up), but it's hard not to be after seeing this exhibit. Instead of being overwhelmed by success (unless you count Jerry Garcia using his wealth to buy enough heroin to kill him), they turned themselves into a sweeping corporate empire, making themselves the most marketed band of their generation. The curators did a great job with the exhibit, which featured many internal documents as well as myriad examples of how the Greatful Dead went about the business of rock and roll. My favorite part of the exhibit was the recording of Neal Cassady doing a "spoken rap" in 1967 with the Dead jamming in the background. We read Jack Kerouac's On the Road a few months ago, and after hearing Cassady ramble for a few minutes, we had a much more vivid idea of how he sounded and behaved during his travels with Kerouac. Even if you've been to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame before, it's worth another look just for that exhibit.

We were running out of time when I decided the one other thing I had to share with Linda was the Jimi Hendrix exhibit on the ground floor. There are more than a dozen items of Hendrix clothing and costumes, including a couple that would qualify as "puffy shirts," along with several guitars and handwritten song lyrics. I had forgotten the collection of drawings he made as a teenager, when he was considering a career as a commercial artist. They included a quartet of drawings for some sports magazine showing football players from several of the schools that played the University of Washington in his hometown of Seattle: Berkeley, USC, and my favorite, the Oregon Ducks, which he labeled as being from "Ugene" [sic] Oregon. There's some talent and charm in those drawings, but all in all he made the right career choice--up to a point.

We spent over two delighted hours in the museum, then had a great lunch with Steve and Mary Ann Johnson before heading west. Even though we didn't leave Cleveland until 2pm, we made it to the Quad Cities, somewhere over 400 miles, by 9pm Central time. A long drive, but a smooth one, almost as smooth as the terrain in western Illinois. Tomorrow we head through Iowa, where I'm afraid we'll see further evidence of the drought which has left field after field of corn brown and lifeless, and into Nebraska, where Linda will have her first dialysis treatment of the trip.

Cross One Off the Wish List

We've made it neatly through the first day of the trip, driving just less than 400 miles from Cooperstown to Mentor, Ohio, just east of Cleveland. A lot of people take the New York Thruway via Buffalo to make this trip, but I've always preferred the Southern Tier route, taking I-88 from Oneonta to Binghamton and there onto Route 17, which links with I-86 and goes almost directly west to Erie, PA, and then into Ohio. The four lanes are carved through endless rolling hills and woodlands with scarcely any sign of civilization. We saw plenty of green against the blue skies, except for the ever-present bright yellow goldenrod. Even billboards are pretty scarce on 17, and the first signs of modern society was the billboard that appeared almost immediately after we crossed into Pennsylvania, trumpeting one of the many businesses along the border that are willing to sell fireworks to anyone willing to use them in another state.

Apart from seeing the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame tomorrow morning, Linda is looking forward to crossing a big item off her culinary wish list for the trip. She has wanted to try two things for the first time--eggs Benedict and grits--along with genuine heartland barbecue. The barbecue will most likely be served in Memphis and the grits somewhere else in the final, eastward week of the trip. It looks like she'll have her Benedict tomorrow, as our friend Steve Johnson has recommended a restaurant that features an "Irish Benedict" with Irish bacon. So she's excited about that.

Today she got to live out another long-held wish for something she had never done before:  give someone the finger. Yes, my mild-mannered dove, who would never wish ill on another human being (don't worry, she would harm a fly--she hates flies), has often expressed her desire to find out what it would feel like to give someone the finger, and likes to tell the story of a missed opportunity a couple of years ago when another driver honked at her for taking more than a half-second to react when the only red light within six miles turned green. Well, she had another good chance today, and she didn't blow it.

We were bopping peacefully along the highway, listening to Neil Young singing "Heart of Gold," when I pulled into the left lane to follow a black SVU making a pass. But the driver, instead of making the pass, slowed down to hover almost next to the right-lane driver. For a long moment, all three of us were going right around the 65mph speed limit, and finally the driver in front of me inched just ahead and. . .lingered again. I wasn't in a particular hurry, with my cruise control set at 70, but I wondered why that driver refused either to speed ahead so I could go faster than 64 or to pull into the right lane so I could continue on unimpeded. This impasse lasted two or three long minutes, until I had enough room to scoot over to pass that SUV on the right.

But no. The passenger, a man, gave me the finger as I pulled alongside, and the driver, a woman, zoomed ahead to cut me off from passing her. Game on. I won't burden you with the details, but we spent the next 20-30 minutes playing tag, passing and re-passing, boxing each other in behind slower vehicles, and generally screwing with each other. All in good fun, once we evened up the fingers. As I passed them while in the left land, I asked Linda if she would do us the honor of giving the driver the finger. She did so with a flourish, gusto, and a sweet smile. Next time you see her, ask her how much she enjoyed it. Let's just say that the Irish Benedict will have to be very tasty to be the highlight of her weekend.

Okay, if you're keeping score, we appear to have two drivers vying to see which could be the bigger asshole. Let's turn to a professional for the tie-breaking vote. One of the times I got boxed in, the vehicle we were passing was an 18-wheeler. The SUV pulled even with the front of the truck and slowed enough to stay in that spot, now going a few miles under the speed limit. I pulled behind her and honked the horn--leaned it for a good 15-20 seconds. She didn't move. I let that horrible horn sound fly for another 15-20 seconds, figuring that either she'd pull ahead or the noise would piss off the truck driver enough that he'd do something about it. He responded by pulling ahead far enough for me to zip in behind him and pass the SUV, starting the cycle again. A few minutes later, we were in the same spots, and again I unleashed that long braying horn for as long as I could stand it, two or three more times. Shortly after that, I dropped back a bit and watched the truck driver cut off the SUV three times, twice in the fast lane and once in the right land when the SUV pulled over.

At that point, the woman probably decided that I was even crazier than she was, and she fell back a good quarter-mile behind us. As we passed the truck driver, I asked Linda to give him a big smile and a thumbs-up. He responded with the same. Case closed. Neil Young was singing "Don't Let It Bring You Down." We didn't. Tomorrow we get to drive past Chicago, and who knows what vicarious entertainment that will bring. But I do know that there's one less item on Linda's bucket list, and it was everything she hoped it would be. Good for her!

(And if you happen to know the woman who drives a black SUV with the Ohio license plate #EQZ-1576, tell her to get out of the way next time.)