Posted on August 15
Since we took our big 31-day road trip last September, Linda and I have heard from many people who followed our adventures at this blogsite or through the National Kidney Foundation. That was quite heartening, partly because we did some cool things we wanted to share with family and friends, and partly because we wanted to enlighten people we don't know about the possibilities of traveling successfully on hemodialysis.
Well, we're hitting the road again soon, so it's time to return to this blog and invite all of you to come along with us again. We leave a week from Saturday, on August 24, and will return on September 16. Our departure is one week earlier than it was last year, and we're staying on the road one week less. We admit that we were dragging on the final week of last year's trip. We had had too many restaurant meals, too many hard motel beds, and too many long drives. So we'll push ourselves a bit less this time.
A bit. We still have an ambitious itinerary with a fair amount of exploration. Last year we focused on the southwest, spending ten days in southern Utah and northern Arizona. This year's main target is Wyoming, one of my favorite states, a vast landscape of mountains, forests, and range land. It is the most sparsely populated state, with fewer than 500,000 residents; it is 10th in square miles and 50th in population. That's more than wide open enough to attract us. I've seen a fair amount of it, especially the two big parks in the northwest corner, but Linda and I will be traveling some areas I've never seen before.
Wyoming is also sparse in terms of dialysis centers, with fewer than ten in the entire state. As I began planning this trip and contacting dialysis centers, I quickly ran into problems. One key to my goal of spending the most time in the Yellowstone/Grand Tetons/Jackson Hole are was getting dialysis in Cody. Located 50 miles east of the east entrance to Yellowstone, Cody is a terrific little town with a trio of wonderful museums (my favorite features the Western art of Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington) and a summer rodeo (we might catch the final night). It also has the only dialysis center in that quadrant of the state. So when the nice lady at the dialysis center explained in June that the center was moving over the course of the summer and they weren't accepting visiting patients at this time, it was a big setback.
If Linda couldn't get dialysis in Cody, the nearest centers were well over 100 miles away. To the east--the direction we'd be coming from--was a center in Sheridan, about 150 miles away. To the southeast--the way we'd head when we left the Tetons--was Rock Springs, closer to 200 miles distant. In theory, it would be possible for Linda to have dialysis on the way in to Cody and again on the way out, though that would leave us just three days in between for Yellowstone and the Tetons. I didn't want to rush through that area. I wanted to do what we did last year around Lake Powell and the Grand Canyon, namely take the time necessary to explore the side roads, the different views, the special places that can emerge as the most memorable of the trip.
There was another problem which arose when I called the centers in Sheridan and Rock Springs: they are open only on Monday-Wednesday-Friday. Linda's normal days are Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday. It appeared that if we wanted to travel in Wyoming, we'd have to switch her dialysis days. Another alternative would be to have dialysis in South Dakota before heading west into Wyoming, but calls to centers in the Rapid City area only helped me learn that there were no chairs available in that area. I was told that there are a lot more dialysis patients than there were a year ago, making it more difficult to allocate chairs for visitors. Suddenly the whole itinerary was in danger of collapsing like a house of cards.
We decided to commit to a Monday-Wednesday-Friday dialysis schedule for the whole trip. It will actually be better for her at the start of the trip. We're leaving, as we did last year, right after her Saturday morning treatment, and instead of having her "stretch day" on Monday, she'll have dialysis that day and won't have a stretch day until the following Sunday. The inconvenient part will be the end of the trip. If she has dialysis on our last Friday on the road, she can't wait until the following Tuesday for her next treatment back in Cooperstown. So she'll have an extra dialysis treatment on Saturday, making two days in a row that will start with a five-hour chunk of life-saving.
It was time to get on the phone with Davita, the company that runs the majority of independent dialysis centers around the country. They were tremendously helpful in making last year's trip go smoothly, but I hadn't called them yet because they don't operate any centers in Wyoming. The only place last year where Linda had dialysis somewhere other than a Davita center was in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where the center is operated by FMC, their competitor.
Once again, the call to Davita was a long one, as we had ten treatments to discuss and officially request. He got right on the phone to centers in western South Dakota. That was the tough one. We knew her first two treatments would be in Wisconsin, where we're visiting friends. But we had found nothing between the western border of Wisconsin and someplace in Montana to be named at a later date if that turned out to be the only possibility.
He called eight or nine centers and called me back twice, first to tell me what the two or three possibilities were (90 miles in different directions from where I really wanted us to be), then to tell me which one has a chair for Linda.It's in a little town called Rosebud, on the Oyate section of the Pine Ridge Reservation, near the site of the Wounded Knee massacre and uprising. Last September we visited the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, and this time we'll be in Sioux territory. That should be interesting.
With the first week taken care of, we moved on to Week Two, beginning on Labor Day, September 2. Ideally, we could get dialysis in Cody Monday and Wednesday of that week. We could get there sometime over the weekend and not have to be to the next destination--somewhere else in Wyoming--until Friday. That would give us a good amount of time in the Tetons. To that end, I had sent a copy of the blog from last year's trip to the woman at the Cody center, so she would see how serious we are about doing everything we can on our travels. Davita found a chair available in Bozeman, Montana. That could work, though it would be 100 or so miles in the wrong direction. The first 45 miles of the drive, from the north entrance to Yellowstone and Gardner, Montana, is one of the most spectacular in the northwest, with Jim Bridger Canyon winding through a valley spread out on both sides of the road. We could make a loop up there, west a little, then south and back into Yellowstone through the west entrance.
That call was about three weeks ago. As I write this, the second Friday treatment site remains uncertain. By the time the Davita agent talked to the center in Rock Springs, they had no chair available. Same in the little center in a small reservation in the center of the state. Casper might have a chair. They wanted to wait until closer to the requested date to make it official. So we're optimistic about that. Meanwhile, a few days ago, I called my friend in Cody, who told me that they haven't even made their move yet. Now they're not sure what the timetable will be, which means she can go ahead and do what she wants until they tell her otherwise. What she wants is to set aside a chair for Linda on the first Monday and Wednesday in September. Now we're all set. Except for Casper and the last two sites on the trip.
That was the main part of the puzzle, and with dates and places set, I could move ahead with the rest of the preparations. That's an obvious key to travel on dialysis: take care of the dialysis first, know where those time and place commitments must occur, and build the rest of the itinerary around it. With eight more days of planning available, I'm sure it will all fit into place by the time it matters--and we'll be on the road again!
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Posted by Linda on August 21
Well folks, off we are again. I can't believe it's been a year since our last adventure, but it has. I'm really excited to be off again, to meet old friends and new ones. I've been really busy getting ready to leave, lots to do. I'm having my kitchen and dining area painted while we are away, so emptying out the rooms has been busy work. Yes, I am taking pickles with me again this year, sweet bread and butter pickles, to pass out along the way. I made 30 pints of pickles, I enjoy making and giving them away. We will be on the road for 3 weeks this year, just the perfect amount of time to be away, I missed so much of the beautiful autumn in upstate N.Y. last year, I selfishly didn't want to miss this year. Well off to pack some stuff,I expect a perfectly wonderful trip this year, thanks to my Super Husband and all his planning. Stayed tuned for some hopefully fantastic, fun-filled adventures with Travels with Dialysis.
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Posted on August 25
A Long Day But a Good One
It's almost 9pm Central time, and we're getting settled into our room at the Comfort Inn in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. About 500 miles and 12 hours ago, we were getting ready to leave last night's motel room in Ashland, Ohio, and we had no clear idea of where we'd stop tonight. It's all part of the adventure.
Linda has her first dialysis treatment of this trip tomorrow in Waupaca, which is about 100 miles from Fond du Lac. A few days ago, the last time I talked to the folks in Waupaca, they presented us the option of having dialysis first thing in the morning, arriving at the center at 6:30am. Although that's the time we're hoping for on the last two treatments of this trip, I didn't like the idea for tomorrow. It would have forced us to drive all the way to Waupaca today, and as you can see from the way things turned out, that would've been too much driving. So I went for the 11am arrival time instead. This way, we don't have to get up early, and if we hit the road by 9am we'll be just fine.
I planned today's travels as a three-part trip. First we traveled--more or less--the Lincoln Highway for the first 240 miles. We did 100 or so miles of the Lincoln Highway in Iowa last year and thought it would be a more interesting option than taking the interstate all the way from Ohio through Indiana to Chicago. We were a bit disappointed in the part of Highway 30--established in the 1920s as the first cross-continent highway and named after Abraham Lincoln--we drove today. We thought it would take us through a lot of small towns, much like another cross-country route, Highway 20, which is two miles from where we live. Highway 20 goes through a little town every five or ten miles. It isn't as fast as an interstate, but you get to see what places look like where people actually live.
Not so on Highway 30 going through central and western Ohio. Apparently nobody lives there, because we only got as close to a town as the highway sign pointing to the local road going to the town. All we saw were corn fields, soybean fields, and. . .well, that was about it. Way in the west of Ohio, we saw the largest array of wind turbines we've seen anywhere. We happen to find them diverting to look at, not to mention the sensible way to harness power for the future of humanity.
It was more of the same as we crossed Indiana, lots of corn and soybeans, with a few more towns within sight of the road, and eventually I-90 and the industrial eyesore of Gary and points west. Then we were on the outskirts of Chicago and Part 2 of today's plan. I didn't know how long it would take to get through Chicago, but however long I imagined it might take, it was nowhere as bad as the reality. I thought we'd get a break by traveling through Chicago on a Sunday afternoon.
But the people in charge of the roads around Chicago decided that the weekend--the entire weekend--was the best time to throttle traffic on the Dan Ryan Expressway by closing two lanes. So it was that it took us more than two hours, more like two and a half, to go 20 miles from the south edge of the city to somewhere near O'Hare Airport. It was brutal, not to mention 94 degrees, but fortunately our little Toyota does not believe in overheating even when going bumper-to-bumper for more than two hours with the air conditioner on.
There's only so much you can do to get through more than two hours stuck in traffic. We tried. We listened to the last part of the White Sox game, and happened to be stuck right next to the ballpark when the game ended. Even though we heard the last out on the radio, we weren't ready for what felt like something dropping out of the sky onto the car's roof. No--it was the fireworks they set off after winning the game. Next up was music, a Bob Seger CD with a lot of favorite songs.
That didn't get us through the whole ordeal either. So we wound up having Linda read to me. Ordinarily I read to her almost every day, and we've been reading a terrific novel, the sci-fi classic Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. We're about three-quarters of the way through and wanted to find out what happened next. Earlier in the day, just after escaping Ohio and entering Indiana, we stopped at a rest area, set our lawn chairs under a shady tree, and read for 30-40 minutes. Having Linda read to me was a treat. She did four or five pages and. . .a miracle! Traffic started moving.
It was nearly 6pm by the time we got moving and entered the third part of the plan. This called for getting to Milwaukee and stopping someplace after that. We wanted to bite off part of the drive to Waupaca, and we did accomplish that, since Fond du Lac is about 50 miles north of Milwaukee. Now it feels very good to be relaxing. Linda is stretched out on the bed and says she isn't moving until morning, when she'll write her first on-the-road blog. I don't blame her. So it was a long day but a good one. Except for getting caught in the seventh circle of Hell on the way through Chicago, everything went smoothly. We had good music, good literature, a good meal along the way, some baseball, and a comfortable room not too far from where we have to be in the morning.
And in the afternoon, Linda gets to meet my ex-wife--won't that be fun!
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Posted by Linda on August 26
It's almost like I was here before, I'm sitting in a Comfort Inn somewhere in Wisconsin writing my Dialysis blog. The last two days spent on the road I was able to see lots of corn fields and soy bean fields as we crossed over Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, very lovely scenery, although it's very flat country, very green and very lush. My first treatment is this morning, I expect it to go smoothly. I'll let you know. I'm more excited about visiting Judy, my husband's ex-wife, after dialysis this morning, I'm looking forward to meeting her. Judy has suffered recently from a horrible auto accident, she is recovering, and I can't help but feel a good dose of Gabriel and meeting me will help in her recovery. I sure hope it will anyway. I want to send a big hello to all my friends and family who I hope are reading this, I wish you all were with me sometimes to share the trip. I can tell you one thing I'm happy about is the weather. It's hot and nicely humid, I love this weather and hope it keeps up. Driving west with the sun streaming in on my legs, is heavenly. The high yesterday was 94, Yipeeeee. Well that's it for now I'm off for another cup of coffee, to kick start my day. Love to all and lots of hugs.
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Posted on August 27
Here we are, in the middle of the latest Midwest heat wave, which was interrupted yesterday morning by a massive thunderstorm in east-central Wisconsin. That's where we were at the time, driving Linda to her first dialysis treatment in Waupaca. The lightning in the distance was spectacular, the deluge of rain not so much fun for driving. It was pouring when we dashed into the dialysis center, but by the time Linda got out a few hours later, it was 93 degrees with 137% humidity. Wunderbar!
While Linda was having dialysis, I drove the 30 miles to Redgranite, our destination for the day. The motel wouldn't let me check in early, and I headed (literally) around the corner to visit my ex-wife, Judy. Linda, in her last blog, mentioned Judy's recent car accident, but I'm sure you'd rather hear the story of how this person is still in my life to begin with. I could write a book about my friendship with Judy, so this will be the much-abridged version.
Judy and I got married on my 30th birthday, in 1981. We were opposites attracted by our proximity in the poker room at the Bingo Palace, where I had my first employment in the poker industry. I guess we were unconventional from the start--we ran away from Las Vegas to get married elsewhere. The marriage lasted three years; the only thing we truly had in common was the ability to make each other laugh and laugh and laugh. We still cared about each other but simply realized that we were not going to make each other happy.
So we became friends, and the friendship endured. We could entertain each other, but had the luxury of not being responsible to or for each other. We could have our fun and say "see ya." She also became my "family." Both my parents died while we were married, and Judy became the person who knew me and understood me best, and who wanted most for me to be happy. For the next decade, we often traveled together and sometimes lived together, platonically. I left Las Vegas in 1995, about the time she got involved with her husband now, Tom, who had worked for us when we were part of the management team at Sam's Town in the late 1980s.
Tom gave up poker dealing to become a truck driver, and in 1997 they moved to central Wisconsin where he was from. They've gotten stronger and stronger over the years, and Tom has really come through in taking care of her and everything else since her accident last month. She has found a contentment she was never able to find in Las Vegas, and the current Judy is the best version yet. Until yesterday, I hadn't seen her since 2002, so when we planned to make the first stop of our trip in Redgranite, it seemed like it would be nothing but a happy reunion.
Then she had that accident, a head-on collision in which she escaped damage to her brain, face, or spine, but pretty much broke everything else. She was in an induced coma for much of the first week, had a tracheotomy to help with breathing, reconstructive knee surgery, and more. All of her ribs were broken, which concerned me for our visit. Inevitably, I make her laugh, and I was afraid that I would crack her up--literally. But her ribs have healed, and I was happy to hear her laugh robustly more than once.
She just got home last Friday after nearly five weeks in the hospital. Her sister has come from Oregon to take care of her so Tom can go back to work. She is using a wheelchair around the house--the recovery from the knee surgery will take 12 weeks--maneuvering it with one hand since her other arm is currently out of commission (shattered collarbone and severed nerves). I spent about an hour and a half with them, and it was a good visit. She's on assorted painkillers and other medication, causing a dreaminess that is enhanced by the beatific feeling of someone who has just escaped death.
But the visit ended abruptly when she needed to lie down and needed medication. Her pattern is to feel her best in the morning and gradually feel the pain and discomfort more and more as the day wears on. We had figured on another late-afternoon visit with Linda joining us, but when I called later, Tom said that Judy wasn't up to visitors. So we're going to see her for awhile this morning before heading to our next destination at the western edge of Wisconsin. This will be a good visit, I'm sure, not the extended time we figured on spending with her before the accident, but good nonetheless. And then we'll head west.
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Posted on August 29
We Can Stand the Heat
The last part of today's 519-mile drive reminded me a lot of our drive across Nebraska last year. That day, we spent the whole afternoon slogging through 102-degree weather to get to Scottsbluff, with the sun's brutal glare in our faces. Today it got up to 100 around 4pm, just as we arrived in Mitchell, South Dakota--not all that far from our route across the Nebraska. We spent an hour in Mitchell at the Corn Palace--more on that shortly--and had a two-hour drive left to tonight's stopping place in Pierre. During the drive, the temperature ranged between 99 and 102, and even the air conditioning didn't keep us from feeling damp. It's nearly 9pm as I write this and it is still 94 degrees here in Pierre. Except for the first day of the trip (today is day #6), it has been in the 90s every day, with more heat ahead until we get to the Rockies sometime this weekend. But we can take it.
It was hot on the Mississippi River boat trip yesterday as well, close to 90 degrees, but there was shade on the boat and it didn't drain us. The 90-minute trip (including a dinner of Domino's pizza and refreshing beer) was quite enjoyable, starting at the confluence of three rivers: the Mississippi, the La Crosse, and the Black. No ballpark there, however, just plenty of water and lots of trees (none indigenous to the area). We went up to Lock #7 on the Mississippi, where a large riverboat was waiting to be lowered to the level where we were (see photo below). Earlier, we had passed an overturned boat that had failed to slow down as it reached the lock, sending 11 passengers hurtling through the channel (all survived).
It was hot on the Mississippi River boat trip yesterday as well, close to 90 degrees, but there was shade on the boat and it didn't drain us. The 90-minute trip (including a dinner of Domino's pizza and refreshing beer) was quite enjoyable, starting at the confluence of three rivers: the Mississippi, the La Crosse, and the Black. No ballpark there, however, just plenty of water and lots of trees (none indigenous to the area). We went up to Lock #7 on the Mississippi, where a large riverboat was waiting to be lowered to the level where we were (see photo below). Earlier, we had passed an overturned boat that had failed to slow down as it reached the lock, sending 11 passengers hurtling through the channel (all survived).
We met a fellow from Oregon on the boat whose father is in the Army Corps of Engineers and worked on many of the large dams along the Columbia River. He wondered what the name of this dam/lock was. The answer: #7. There are 27 locks along the Mississippi, starting in Minneapolis, and only the two southernmost ones have names. He was disappointed to learn that the folks in the Midwest didn't have the inspiration to name things. Here's a photo of us taken on the boat:
We were so comfortably in La Crosse that it wasn't easy to leave, but we had lots to see, though not much of it along the southern edge of Minnesota traversed by I-90. Minnesota may be the "land of 10,000 lakes," but I think we saw only one or two of them in the space of about 300 miles. South Dakota is much more interesting, especially the stretch between Mitchell and Pierre. Parts of it seemed completely covered by vast fields of sunflowers. On the north side of the highway, the bright yellow flowers faced us (and the sun); on the south side, not as much yellow was visible, as the flowers faced away from us to drink in the sunlight. The acres and acres of sunflowers were a glorious sight.
Then there was the Corn Palace, a different way of highlighting nature's abundance. Begun in the 1890s as a way of putting Mitchell on the map, it has succeeded in providing a unique, strange, and wonderful spectacle to visitors. Every year, the exterior of the building (which is currently utilized mainly as a site for college and high school basketball and volleyball--a women's volleyball team was practicing during our visit) is remade, using corn. I say "remade"; the exterior is a series of murals (newly designed each year) made from all parts of corn cobs. Here's a shot of the entrance:
Everything except the minarets, turrets, and wording is corn. It costs over $130,000 a year to redo the building (there are permanent murals along the walls of the sports arena), and it takes most of the spring and summer (the Indian corn is the last to ripen). Here's a closer view of the mural on the left:
That gives you some idea of the design, but you need a closer view to appreciate the intricacy of design and construction. Try this:
That's a lot of corn, folks! I hope you like the photos. When we did the blog during last year's trip, I couldn't figure out how to place photos in the blog, so this is a big breakthrough for me. Now that we're about the start the most scenic part of the trip, I'll try to let images speak for me a little more.
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Posted by Linda on August 30
6 a.m. in Pierre, S.D.
It's early Friday morning as I write this blog. I just drove down to McDonald's for my coffee fix, a large coffee, so I'm good to go all set to write my account of the last couple days. This motel is great but offers no free breakfast, like the others have so far. Great room though, very powerful air-conditioning.
So let's start with dialysis on Wednesday in La Crosse, Wisconsin, a very large, 34-chair, state of the art unit, professionally staffed. I had a very good treatment, uneventful just the way it should be and the way I like it.
When Gabriel picked me up, we went back to Mike's and we all met Mary Ellen at the local coffee shop for coffee and smoothies. Mmmm good. Then on to the river boat ride on the Mississippi. That was a blast, I really enjoyed the boat ride, it was a great time.
I really hated to leave the Hauperts' hospitality, but on the road we go. This road was long and filled with cornfields, soybean fields and sunflower fields, lots and lots of all. This country is so beautiful and so productive, you have to see it to fully appreciate it. So today hopefully going to Wall Drugs, the largest drugstore in the U.S., they have had billboards up for the last 300 or so miles. I'm going to get a cup of coffee for 5 cents, yes 5 cents, maybe I'll get 2 or 3. More to the point I hope to get my first look at the Badlands and site of the Battle of Wounded Knee. I'm very excited. More to come. Lots of hugs.
So let's start with dialysis on Wednesday in La Crosse, Wisconsin, a very large, 34-chair, state of the art unit, professionally staffed. I had a very good treatment, uneventful just the way it should be and the way I like it.
When Gabriel picked me up, we went back to Mike's and we all met Mary Ellen at the local coffee shop for coffee and smoothies. Mmmm good. Then on to the river boat ride on the Mississippi. That was a blast, I really enjoyed the boat ride, it was a great time.
I really hated to leave the Hauperts' hospitality, but on the road we go. This road was long and filled with cornfields, soybean fields and sunflower fields, lots and lots of all. This country is so beautiful and so productive, you have to see it to fully appreciate it. So today hopefully going to Wall Drugs, the largest drugstore in the U.S., they have had billboards up for the last 300 or so miles. I'm going to get a cup of coffee for 5 cents, yes 5 cents, maybe I'll get 2 or 3. More to the point I hope to get my first look at the Badlands and site of the Battle of Wounded Knee. I'm very excited. More to come. Lots of hugs.
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Posted by Linda on August 31
The Badlands
Posted by Linda on August 31
The Badlands
What can I say about the Badlands in South Dakota, Freakin' Awesome. My first look at the scenery blew me away. What a wonderful thing nature is, this planet of ours is spectacular. At first glance you think you are possibly on Mars, the rock formations are so majestic and the stripes of different colored rocks so intense. The experience for me was strangely spiritual, one I'll never forget. Seeing the Badlands made me forget I had just left dialysis.
That was a great experience too, it was on the Rosebud Reservation, part of the Sioux nation in S.D. Great people, very friendly, professional, super treatment. I'll let Gabriel go into a little more in depth in his blog about the dialysis center. He has some great pictures to share, so stay tuned. I wanted to mention the difference between the two dialysis centers I have visited on reservations. The center last year in the Navajo Reservation, located in Tuba City, Arizona, was so impoverished, with wild horses and packs of dogs running in the streets. Bleak is the word that comes to me to describe the area. The center was very adequate, the staff very professional. Perhaps the landscape made all the difference this time, South Dakota being way more green and welcoming as opposed to the desert. In both cases there was heat, yes, heat--the car said it was 110 degrees when we got in after dialysis after being parked in the lot. It did drop into the 90s after we got moving, but still.
I was struck by how the staff at Rosebud seemed to really care for and honor with ceremony all their patients, living and deceased. There was a collage of photos in the lobby of all their patients with details of their lives and families (the idea I am taking back to my unit, and hope they implement). We ended the perfect day with a stop at Wall Drugs in Wall, S.D., a huge tourist attraction. They sell everything you can think of, books, jewelry, leather goods, boots, sunglasses, stuffed jackalope heads, yes even drugs. They had a nice cafe inside where we ate a late supper of chicken fingers and a hamburger, but best of all was the coffee, yes as advertised 5 cents a cup and great coffee at that. I had a dimes' worth.
Well, that's all for now. Let me tell you guys what happens now that I have finished my blog. My wonderful husband edits it, yup he goes through it and makes coherent, well punctuated sentences. I say why be married to a super wordsmith and not get all the good benefits. That's all for now, lots of hugs.
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Posted on August 31
A Long Day But a Great One
Yesterday was a long one, with 13 hours on the road from the time we left Pierre, S.D., to the time we pulled into our motel in Rapid City. Those cities are only about 250 miles apart, but we took the scenic route. First we revisited the fantastic sunflower fields we had discovered on Thursday, to take some photos. Linda dressed appropriately--all in yellow--and I took a couple of photos where she's hard to discern in the field of head-high flowers. We call it "Where's Linda?"
She had dialysis on the Rosebud Reservation, a 100-mile drive from Pierre. The hill descending into the town of Rosebud was lush with green growth, a much more welcoming sight than the barren Navajo Reservation we visited in the Arizona desert last year. It briefly made me think life could be good there, though I was assured that more than 75% of the residents there live in serious poverty, with only the business owners doing well.
I'm posting photos below of the memorial quilts that cover the walls of the dialysis unit. When a patient dies, they create a quilt as a memorial. The elderly woman who has done the most quilts was in the chair next to Linda. They're quite beautiful to look at, and a wonderful way to remember members of the dialysis "family" that all units have. They were kind enough to let me take photos of the quilts, though of course I couldn't take any photos showing patients. (See photo now on Facebook.) They have about three dozen patients there, and Linda referred in her blog to the display in the lobby. Each patient's photo is there, along with his/her number of children and grandchildren, favorite tv show, and favorite meal. The emphasis on children is part of the Sioux tribe's dedication to its children more than anything else.
Once we were liberated from the dialysis center, we headed for the Badlands, which I had visited only once before, on my first cross-country trip in 1970. On that trip, the Badlands were the first sign I had of the magnificent geological wonders of the West, and it changed my life. I was awestruck on that trip as I saw many of the famous national parks I'm trying to share with Linda on this trip along with last year's, and that's why I wound up spending 30 years living in the West and criss-crossing the always fascinating terrain. So I was glad to share this with Linda.
She was blown away by it and told me it's the most spectacular place I've taken her to yet. That's a strong statement considering that last year, we saw the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Zion, the Arches, and more. But I could see her point. This was like driving through the heart of my favorite park, Bryce, but not on a rim road as at Bryce, but right down in the middle of the pinnacles and colorfully eroded rocks. I remembered all the canyon-like features below the road level from my 1970 trip, but had forgotten how much of the splendor is alongside you on the road.
We spent nearly two hours in the park yesterday, all the time watching a massive, dark storm to the west. We talked to people today who were stuck in that storm and had to pull over, but all we saw were the brilliant lightning bolts in the distance and wondering if the dark clouds above us were going to open up as well. We felt a few drops but that was all, and know we were very lucky. Perhaps our new friends at the Rosebud dialysis center were looking out for us, having helped us map our route to and through the Badlands. At the last viewpoint, we saw two bighorn sheep in the field below, and after making a turn into an unpaved road came upon another half-dozen, including several rambunctious lambs. (See photo now at Facebook.) A great capper to the first of the Western wonders on this trip.
I hadn't been to Wall Drugs before and we were hungry, so we stopped there. The place became a thriving business in 1931 when the founder of a struggling store began giving away "free ice water" which lured travelers inside. I partook of some free ice water with my dinner while Linda enjoyed ten cents' worth of coffee--and then, of course, we spent another $60. I wonder how that works. But we did need that pair of binoculars (when we moved to Cherry Valley seven years ago, we put all the important stuff in one carton, including the binoculars, and haven't seen that carton since), and the uncensored edition of Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage, not to mention a great present for one of Linda's grandsons. How convenient that all of that stuff was at one place!
Now it's Saturday morning and we're about to head out for a day of exploration. First stop is Mount Rushmore, 25 miles south of here. From there we'll go to Devil's Tower in northeastern Wyoming. I've never been there--one of the few famous places in the West that I've managed to miss--but have this strange compulsion to go there. Then we'll head west, toward Cody, though I suspect we'll wind up spending the night around Sheridan. It's going to be a great day wherever we wind up. We'll catch you again then.
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Posted on September 1
Wonders of Wyoming
I'm writing this on Sunday morning, the start of September, our "birthiversay" month because it includes our wedding anniversary and Linda's birthday. In the last two days, we have seen four amazing places, two man-made, two natural. On Friday, it was the spectacular Badlands followed by that monument to human excess, Wall Drug. Yesterday, it was the magnificent Mount Rushmore followed by the Devil's Tower. Today we'll spend a good deal of the day at Yellowstone, breaking the tie in favor of natural wonders.
It was in the 90s again when we got to Mount Rushmore, and Linda made it as far as the restaurant which was used in "North By Northwest," planted herself at the table where Cary Grant sat just before Eva-Marie Saint pretended to shoot him, enjoyed some coffee, and let me continue onward.
I took the .2-mile hike down to Gutzon Borglum's studio for this photo of his original design, which was much grander than the final version.
The hike up wasn't nearly as much fun, and I was soaking wet by the time I rejoined Linda. The monument is spectacular, and I hadn't seen it since 1970. The surrounding area has become so heavily commercialized that I dubbed it Tackytown. If you go there, close your eyes until you see the whites of the presidents' eyes.
We took a scenic route from there to Devil's Tower, avoiding Rapid City and the interstate and going west on Rt. 16 into Wyoming and north from there. The amazing thing to me about DT is that there is nothing else around there. There is nothing even vaguely resembling that kind of formation, which sits in the middle of nowhere. You bop along the barren range land, round a curve, and there is this enormous monolith surrounding by nothing at all.
So you have to wonder how it got there. At the Visitor Center is a display showing various theories about its origins, including several proposed by geologists, but nobody knows. Least of all the man standing next to me, a 50ish fellow wearing a Marines cap, who assured me that "the problem with these theories is that they're based on the Earth being millions of years old. But the Bible tells us that the Earth is only about six thousand years old." He went on for another sentence or two which I didn't catch because I was trying to think of something to say that would not cause him to punch me in the mouth. What I wanted to say was, "Why do you even leave your house? The real world must be a difficult place for you." Instead, I simply looked him in the eye, said "uh-huh," and walked away. And I lived to be a smart-ass some other day.
We drove across a good chunk of Wyoming after that, generally heading toward Yellowstone. At Buffalo, we got off the interstate and turned southwest for a fantastic drive across the mountains, down into a long valley, and into the tiny town of Ten Sleep. I wanted to get a room there so I could title this blog "Two Sleep in Ten Sleep," but Linda persuaded me to keep going, so we wound up in Worland. Now it's time for the 150-mile drive to Yellowstone and a night's rest in Cody, where we'll be staying the next three nights (or perhaps four).
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Posted on September 2
Cody and Yellowstone
Yesterday was Yellowstone; today is Cody, our home from yesterday through Wednesday. We began yesterday with breakfast in Greybull, Wyoming, in a cafe with equal-sized sections for smokers and non-smokers. We couldn't remember the last time we've eaten in a place where people could smoke, and yes, we noticed the smoke where we were sitting. We got to Cody around noon, checked into our motel room, and quickly continued on to Yellowstone, 53 miles away on a spectacular drive that includes the Buffalo Bill Reservoir. In June 1976, after finishing the first (long) draft of my first (bad) novel, I pitched a tent in the state park along this reservoir, spent my days on a lounge chair editing, and went into Cody in the evening for a square meal. So this place brings back a lot of memories.
Yellowstone National Park was a mixed bag yesterday. I'll confess that I much prefer the Grand Tetons, where I'll take Linda tomorrow. The day was hot and hazy, temperatures in the high 80s, and a few small fires in the park added smoke to the sky that increased the haze. This hurt the views in the north part of the park near Tower Falls, where the wide valley vistas were rather indistinct in the sunny haze. Here's a good shot up Upper Falls:
The other thing spoiling the view was the prevalence of dead trees. A couple of days ago, leaving the Mount Rushmore area, we saw a lot of dead pines that were attacked in the last year by pine beetles, devastating the forests. But that was nothing compared to what we saw in Yellowstone, especially the drive to the lake from the East entrance. High sloping hillsides were piled with fallen trees, strewn haphazardly like discarded matchsticks. Wildfires are always a problem in the western states, as the recent devastation near Yosemite reminds us, but the evidence will be there for many years to come in Yellowstone. Lots of dead trees still stand like abandoned sentinels of latest danger, but we saw so many fallen trees pointed at us that we were sure one would untangle itself from brush and impale our little Toyota.
The big plus was the wildlife. We didn't see any moose -- I have promised Linda a moose sighting on this trip -- but we did see a thousand or so buffaloes. We saw one herd of 200-300 on the way in and the same herd a half-mile away on the way out six hours later. Other times, they were right along the road, and the funniest sight of the day was a park ranger using his vehicle to herd the big adults off the road when they lingered too long and tied up traffic. We got lots of great photos, including one Linda took out the window of a huffing male just a few feet away. After we passed an estimated thousand head of bison for the day, I was reminded of a visit to Yellowstone a long time ago with Judy, who, late in a similar day as I gestured toward yet another cluster just off the road, said, "If you point out another fucking buffalo today, I'll scream!"
We also saw elk, pronghorn antelope, mule deer, hawks, a trumpeter swan, and more. I can't get enough of wildlife in the wild, and Linda feels the same way. I'd rather spent an afternoon looking at buffalo than at Old Faithful; in fact, that's what happened yesterday, as we never did get to the big geyser. We weren't crazy about the sulphur stench of the Mammoth area and kept driving past the fulminating features that so many other people apparently savor. Lakes, mountains, trees, animals. That's all we ask. And we'll see plenty of that tomorrow in the Grand Tetons, starting of course with about a 130-mile drive from Cody through Yellowstone. Where's that moose hiding?
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Posted by Linda on September 3
Coffee With the Boys
Yep, I haven't written since I had coffee with George, Tom, Teddy, and Abe. My first look at Mt. Rushmore was awesome, so massive, George I think was the most impressive, so dead on in the details. I hope everyone has the chance to see it. After Mt. Rushmore we headed on in to Cody, WY, a nice little town where we plan to stay for a few days, our base camp to Yellowstone, where we spent all day on Sunday. What can I say about Yellowstone? Mmm...Absolutely beautiful , a huge expanse of incredible landscape, majestic mountains, scenic lakes and lots and lots of buffaloes. I was happy to see so many buffaloes roaming in large groups all over the place. On the way out of the park, the park ranger was actually herding them out of road with his SUV so traffic could pass. It was a magnificent trip to Yellowstone on Sunday, and we are heading back through there to the Grant Tetons today. I can't wait.
Yesterday I had my first dialysis treatment in Cody, and all went well, once we found the unit. The treatment was in the local hospital, so we stopped in on Sunday to find out exactly where it was (they usually put the dialysis unit in the back, in the least germy part). We were told they had moved to their new location (we were told all summer that they were in the process) a few miles away. Okay good, we now knew where to go. Wrong, we were misinformed, we showed up on time at the new unit, nobody was there, so back to the hospital we went, not a soul around, what? It was Labor Day. Gabriel finally found someone in the Emergency room, who gave us directions to the unit, at the opposite end of the hospital, of course. We made it and I had a wonderful treatment. The nurses were very apologetic and sweet, and very professional. I go back tomorrow, and we know where we are going this time, yippee.
While I was at dialysis my super husband did laundry, ran errands, and had a good lunch at a Chinese buffet (which he loves and I stay away from, too much salt). After the dialysis I was starving, so we went to get a bite, then walked around Cody. We watched a show, a gunfight on the street in front of the Irma Saloon, that was a hoot. I'm sorry I got ahead of myself. I left out our trip Monday morning to the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, which was great. I'll let Gabriel tell you more about that in his blog, he's so much better at describing all the details than I am. Lots of hugs for now.
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Posted on September 3
As Fantastic As Ever
It's Wednesday as I write this, and Linda is having dialysis, her second at the hospital in Cody, WY. I have two days to write about, since we've been on the go so much that I haven't had time the past two evenings to write. I hope to catch up here.
We spent Monday morning at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center here in Cody, which I remembered well from my travels here in the 1970s. There were four connected museums on the site back then; now there are six, and we did justice to several of them in a little less than four hours. The one I was most anxious to share with Linda was the Whitney Gallery of Western Art (yes, that Whitney family, which includes a couple of current members Linda knows from her previous life in Saratoga Springs). We saw dozens of fine works depicting all aspects of Western life: cowboys and Indians; horses, cattle, and wildlife; and the magnificent settings in which those various beings lived, struggled, and survived.
From the early, sweeping landscapes of Albert Bierstadt to a 2013 piece titled "Tonto's Dream" which depicts the current influence of casinos on Indians' welfare, it was all there. So is a reproduction of Frederic Remington's studio (see photos currently on Facebook, soon to be here) in New Rochelle, NY, where the most prolific and well-known Western artist churned out paintings and sculptures during the day and dispensed eloquent discourse in the evenings. Here is "Tonto's Dream":
My favorite Western artist is Charles M. Russell, who is well represented here along with late-19th century giants like Henry Jackson and Thomas Moran. The sculptures in particular have a dynamic quality with dramatic interaction between people and animals; one, with cowboy and horse almost wrapped around each other in mid-turn, is humorously titled "Dirty Dancing." The largest paintings depict battles, including one of the Battle of Big Horn in which Custer is highlighted in a nearly golden glow at the painting's center while Crazy Horse almost has to sneak onto the canvas at the lower right.
That seems to be the only thing missing from the various museums here, including the Plains Indian Museum--that is, some sense of the massive genocide of Native Americans perpetrated by the forces implementing the invading force of "manifest destiny." The Plains Indian Museum has strong exhibits on native crafts and lifestyle, but treats it as if it existed in some kind of historical vacuum. Oh, there's a little indication here or there of how and why the Indians weren't allowed to continue their noble and picturesque traditions. But it is not central to the story being told here. Recently I visited the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, and believe me, you can't leave there without knowing about the Holocaust.
Defying demographics, Linda was interested in the Colt Museum of firearms, which contained about 1,500 different kinds of guns and rifles, while I was not. I went instead to the newer Natural History Museum instead and spoke with a couple of volunteers who confirmed my impression that the exhibits are long on aesthetics and short on historical perspective. Then Linda and I joined forces again to check out the Buffalo Bill Museum, devoted to Bill Cody, a native of this town and the proprietor of one of the greatest shows in show-biz history. Most fascinating was the film of his "Wild West" show from 1911-12, which included 400 horses, numerous elephants and other animals, and about 700 cast members including cowboys and Indians, not to mention Annie Oakley. What a show that must have been! Buffalo Bill's presence is still strong in Cody, where the social hub is the Irma Hotel, built by Bill for his daughter Irma, and where another business proudly boasts that it was founded in 1967 by Bill's grandson.
We'll be taking in more of Cody later today after Linda is done with her dialysis, but now I must turn to yesterday's expedition to the Grand Tetons, my favorite place in the country. I've been there at least a dozen times, but this was the first visit for Linda, so naturally I wanted to show her everything at once. But mainly I wanted to take her to Jenny Lake, one place where I just sit idly for the rest of my life and do nothing but stare at what was in front of me. I did take her there, and we did plant ourselves in our lawn chairs for more than two hours while I read to her, finishing up our latest shared novel (Stranger in a Strange Land--this morning we started a new one we picked up at Wall Drug, a new, uncensored edition of Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage). Here's our spot:
The thing that distinguishes the Grand Tetons from anyplace else I've visited is that the mountains rise directly from the edges of the half-dozen lakes running the (north-south) length of the park. The most scenic of those is Jenny Lake, with Mount Moran (12,605' high) and is distinctive glacier just to the north and the three Grand Tetons (Grand Teton itself is 13,770' high) to the south. We stopped along the road on the east side of the lake and looked across at the Hanging Canyon area, a gap in the mountains where you can hike to Inspiration Point (as I did several times years ago) or further into the mountains. Hikers passed by every five or ten minutes, and some apologized for momentarily blocking our view as they took photos ("That's okay," I'd tell them. "It's the only decent place around here, so we don't mind sharing it."). We could've stayed there much longer than we did, but we had places to go.
Mainly, we had to get back to Cody, a three-hour drive. We had left Cody at 9am and didn't get back until 8:30pm, so it was a good, long, full day. After looping around Yellowstone Lake and south into the Tetons, we began our stay there with a picnic lunch at Colter Bay, where we're renting a cabin for tomorrow night. Predictably, we spent much of the drive through the park looking for moose. Someone said one had been spotted behind the Jackson Lake Lodge, so we checked that out; magnificent view, but no moose. No sign of life in the Willow Flats, where I've always found moose at some point in each visit. No sign of moose anywhere during our sublime afternoon in the park.
So we headed back through Yellowstone, and as we curved back around Yellowstone Lake and came around a bench, two oncoming cars flashed their high beams at us. In a national park, that means only one thing: slow down for an animal in the middle of the road. It was a moose! It sauntered along the shoulder on Linda's side, and after we stopped (with several vehicles stopping behind us), it moseyed in front of us to the middle of the road for a moment. I scrambled for the camera and the batteries (which I'd removed because they were running low), had a lot of trouble finding the damn batteries, and by the time I did, the moose was scrambling up a hillside on the other side of the road. That's why I didn't get any good photos of the bull or its massive antlers. That is too bad. But it wasn't as important as Linda's joy at seeing it. She was thrilled beyond even her anticipation. I promised her a moose sighting on this trip, put it in the brochure and everything, and nature has delivered. Thank you.
Earlier this week, I wrote about two days which each combined natural and man-made wonders. That was true again these past two days--first the artwork and other treasures of the Cody museums, and yesterday the splendor of the Grand Tetons. Today is another Cody day, and tomorrow we'll be back in the Tetons, with a likely detour on the way there to check out Old Faithful. And so the varied delights of this trip continue.
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Posted on September 6
More Wyoming Wonders
Sorry about the two-day gap in the blog. Last night we stayed in a cabin at Colter Bay in the Tetons, and it didn't have a tv or internet access or any suggestions of the late 20th century. The public computer in the office automatically times you out after twenty minutes, and that wasn't enough to consider a blog. Now we're in Casper, Wyoming, almost in the middle of the state, and Linda is at dialysis. She's doing fine now that we've left the high altitudes of Yellowstone and the Tetons, which affected her a couple of times.
The last two-plus days have continued our record of uninterrupted fun. Wednesday we stayed in Cody, logging a total of 21 miles in the car. After a fine breakfast, we went to a city park and started Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage. We're one-fourth of the way through it and are hooked by Grey's powerful writing as he unwinds a plot involving characters with great moral issues as well as strategic problems. While we sat there, the local high school let out for lunch, and we watched the newly freed students race across the park to the fast-food places on the main drag. One of them unleashed the quote of the week, after a classmate made the mistake of uttering a profanity: "Shut your fucking mouth! You're a goddam Mormon!" That pretty much sums up the cultural dynamic in Cody, Wyoming.
Linda was craving a small steak and sought the advice of someone at the hospital where she got dialysis. We followed that suggestion and had the best restaurant meal of the trip, at the Wyoming Rib and Chop House. Linda got a 10-ounce filet, and I had salmon cooked over a cedar plank. Both were perfectly cooked and delicious, and Linda savored every bite of it, even the three she shared with me. We combined to tackle the biggest baked potato we've ever seen, two or three pounds' worth, as big as Richard Dreyfuss' mashed-potato sculpture of the Devil's Tower in "Close Encounters." We went ten rounds with it, but lost on points.
From there we went to the local Albertson's, which had everything we wanted for our planned Thursday picnic in the parks, and dropped the food off at our motel room refrigerator. Talked a bit with a quartet of Australians who had their Harleys shipped to the States and have been on the road more than six weeks. Now that's quite a way to explore a foreign country! One of them has been here before and is serving as their guide, and we tried to help him talk his mates into spending a couple of days around San Francisco in order to visit Muir Woods if nothing else. I hope they make it.
We finished the evening by driving eight miles out to Buffalo Bill State Park to take in the sunset. The sky was huge with billowing clouds and it promised to be a colorful sunset. We pulled up our chairs to watch, and I took a half-dozen photos, some of which I am now able to share with you.
But when we felt rain drops, we realized that the clouds above us were getting darker, and the yellow-orange prelude to the anticipated sunset was all the show we were going to get. It got dark pretty quickly, so we headed back to our room for the night.
We were up early yesterday morning and hit the road not long after 7am. It was a three-hour drive to our Yellowstone target--Old Faithful. Along the way we saw a bull elk with enormous antlers cavorting at the edge of Yellowstone Lake, and two buffaloes who confounded traffic by sauntering up a long hill in the uphill lane. It's a curving road, and to pass you had to squeeze to the left edge and hope nobody was coming the other way. That was a 15-minute delay, but it wasn't as funny as Tuesday evening on that same road, when four buffaloes strode downhill as if they had spent a tough day entertaining tourists and were headed for the nearest pool hall. They had even read the guidelines about facing traffic if you're a pedestrian. When we left them, a big bus not far behind us was heading toward the curve they had almost reached, and we flashed our high beams at three vehicles coming up the hill and subject to come around a curve and find four buffaloes and a bus coming at them. The buffaloes really do own that park.
Our arrival at Old Faithful was timed well, and we had only a twenty-minute wait before the eruption. I took only two still photos but got most of the show on the movie option on my camera. I think that might be more entertaining than the cliched stills. It was a relatively short eruption, but we weren't sticking around for the next one. We had other places to go. First we stopped at the Lewis Lake picnic area (near the southern edge of Yellowstone) for our picnic lunch, and got within two bites of finishing before it started to rain. But as we headed south, we left the rain behind us, and the rest of the day was beautiful.
Yes, we went back to the same spot we had stopped at two days earlier. We set up our lawn chairs and spent two hours there in that beatific spot, reading Zane Grey. By doing that, it meant we wouldn't be going to Jackson Hole, about a 45-minute drive south of our spot. That's each way, so it was either my favorite place in the country--a place I don't know when I'll visit again--for two hours or a quick tour of Jackson Hole. We enjoyed our reading very much.
It was 4:30pm by the time we checked into our cabin, built in 1930 and just fine for our purposes. Took a brief nap and headed for dinner at the restaurant in Colter Bay. It was a more expensive menu than we anticipated, since we weren't all that hungry. The best thing was the appetizer sampler, which included spare ribs, honey habanero chicken wings, fried pickles, and potato wedges, served with three dipping sauces that were very tasty. But the high point of the meal was the #2 quote of the week. I won't tell you where Jeff is from, but after spending two summers at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, he's finishing his summer in the Tetons as an assistant waiter. That means he does a lot of schlepping and pouring water. The water in western Wyoming is the best I've ever had, and I was quite thirsty after the long day. I went through about three glasses of water in five minutes, and Jeff was slow keeping up with me until he realized the problem. "They got no business," he told us, "givin' a grown man a child's glass." But he kept filling it and filling it, and we were buddies by the sixth or seventh glass. Linda and I had a lot of questions for him about working in the national parks, and he said he might give it up after this summer. "I'm a house painter in real life," he said, "and I'm going to be moving to Texas and probably work full-time. I'm a Republican and I'm going to live there with all the other right-thinking people." He chuckled and added, "I don't even look left when I'm driving." He could sense that we might be the type who didn't look right when we drive, and added that "this is what makes this country so great, that we can think different things." End of that discussion.
After a relaxing evening in our cabin, we ended Thursday with a ten-minute excursion to the darkest place we could find, to see the brightest sky I've seen in a long time. Many times, I've seen huge night skies in the West, and though we couldn't see the whole sky from this area filled with tall pines, this was one of the best ever. The Milky Way looked thick and mysterious, and only the night chill kept us from staying out there much longer.
Daytime temperatures were in the 80s or higher during our Wyoming thus far, but it got cold in the woods at Colter Bay last night, and it was 47 this morning when we hit the road at 7:30am. This was our first excursion in the Tetons before noon, and it made a huge difference. The mountains are on the west side of the park, and at their best when catching the morning light. No glare, but rather the crisp outlines of the imposing, proud mountains against the blue sky. I took a few photos at Colter Bay and then we headed for--of course, our favorite place by Jenny Lake. We stopped at the Jenny Lake Lodge for a light breakfast of bagels and cream cheese, then took that one-way road that leads along the eastern side of the lake. We lingered at our reading spot for a few photos which I think are the most spectacular we've taken on the trip so far. Somehow, Jenny Lake was perfectly still long enough for me to take photos with full reflections of the mountains. Fantastic!
Then it was time to head east on the 250-mile drive to Casper. The Tetons remained in view through our mirrors for about 25 miles, and it was tough to say goodbye to them.
But right now I have to finish this up and join Linda. She had a very good treatment today, is feeling chipper, and is the first of our twosome to head for the whirlpool tub at the Casper Marriott Courtyard. Life is good, and tomorrow we head for Colorado, though not before paying homage to our friend the jackalope. Stay tuned for that story!
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Posted on September 8
A Tale of Two Tales
We're leading off with a photo this time. Here's Linda in Douglas, Wyoming, standing in front of the big jackalope sculpture in a park in the town center. The jackalope was created in the 1930s by a pair of taxidermist brothers in Douglas. They got home late from a roadkill expedition and tossed everything into their storeroom. The next day, they saw a pair of horns lying next to a jackrabbit and thought, "What the hell--let's combine them." Voila! The jackalope.
We didn't hear about jackalopes until about five years ago. That winter, Linda had a pair of surgeries on her legs, called femoral bypasses. They did the right leg first, and during the six-week wait before they did her left leg, we watched a compilation of Pixar short films. One of them, titled "Boundin',"was about a lamb who was vainly proud of his fine coat and would do joyous dances to celebrate his beauty. One day, a hand reached out and grabbed his leg, and off-screen he went. Shortly, he was bounced into a puddle, completely shorn for the first time. He was mortified and slinked back under cover, until a "great American jackalope" passed by, saw him, and said, "Hey, kid, why the mope?"
The lamb detailed his nightmare shearing and said the other animals were mocking him. The jackalope, "the sage of the sage," assured him that he could do something better than dancing. "You can bound," said the jackalope, and showed him how to bounce his feet off the ground and float twenty or thirty feet above the ground. Thus enabled, the lamb was in his glory again. In the spring, he held out his left leg for the people who would sheer him, but he didn't care. He could bound.
The story seemed perfectly in synch with what Linda was going through, having had one leg ripped open (48 stitches' worth) and about to have the other one done. I was her jackalope, helping her maintain a perfect attitude, and as we watched "Boundin'" before leaving for the hospital for the second femoral bypass, she held out her left leg, knowing she would re-bound from the surgery. Ever since then, we have watched "Boundin'" any time Linda is about to endure some medical procedure and indignity, and it cements her determination to overcome all obstacles.
Only a month ago, I discovered that Douglas is the "jackalope capital," and when it turned out that Linda would get dialysis in Casper, only 50 miles from Douglas, we had to make a pilgrimage there. Here is a photo of two "great American jackalopes" to commemorate the visit:
From Douglas, we headed south to visit friends in Firestone, Colorado (about 20 miles from Boulder). Linda hadn't met Tim and Julie before, since they had been living in Australia for a year when Linda and I met in 2002. The connection between all the facts in the previous is the second of the "two tales" I mentioned in the title. And it's a good one.
I've known Tim for close to 30 years, since he moved to Las Vegas. In 1997, having learned the hard way that most women (like most men) in Las Vegas are crazy, he went looking for his true love on the internet. Over Thanksgiving weekend, he made contact with a woman named Julie from Darwin, Australia. They hit it off immediately, to the extent that the day after Christmas, Julie flew to Las Vegas to meet him, having quit her job and sold everything. They were married about six weeks later, and this year celebrated their 15th anniversary. Late in 2001, they moved to Australia, where his Microsoft expertise was in great demand and he worked for a number of years for the government, becoming a dual citizen along the way.
From the first time I visited them in Las Vegas, I could tell they were one of the coolest couples I knew. I thought, "Jeez, if Tim could find his soulmate halfway across the world, I should be able to find someone." Thus inspired, I did find my soulmate a few years later on the internet. We celebrate our seventh anniversary a week from today. Meanwhile, Tim and Julie moved back to "the states" earlier this year, so they had to be part of this trip. We arrived early yesterday afternoon and had a great day with them--they're as cool together and as much fun to be with as they were the last time I saw them--and we'll spend today here as well before heading to Cheyenne tomorrow for dialysis and the first day of this trip spent with people we also visited on last year's trip.
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Posted on September 10
Time To Head East
It's Tuesday morning and time to head east. We've had three days of much-needed relaxation with friends. Our weekend in Firestone, Colorado, with Tim and Julie was terrific. Linda and Julie hit it off from the start and spend much of Sunday afternoon shopping, and Tim and I watched a good chunk of three ballgames, so it was a win-win arrangement. After a dozen years of separation, the friendship picked up right where it left off, so it was a great two days. We also helped them inaugurate their new grill; the steak and salmon dinner was delicious.
We were on the road at 5AM yesterday because Linda had to be at the dialysis center in Cheyenne at 6:15. I enjoyed the 75-mile drive because the speed limit was 75 and I got to drive 80, tootling through the darkness with a Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young CD. Linda had dialysis in that center on last year's trip, so I knew exactly where to go. We pulled into the parking lot right at 6:15--and saw a sign on the door saying they had moved. Sweet! Two phone calls, one detour, and 15 minutes later, we pulled into their new building. Nothing to it.
We spent yesterday with Mike and Helen, whom we visited last year. Perhaps you're wondering why we spent eight days in Wyoming, dropped down into Colorado for the weekend, went back into Wyoming, and will now be going through a good chunk of Colorado to start the seven-day trek eastward to home. Mike and Helen were in Chicago this weekend for his son's wedding. Our rendezvous in Cheyenne was a fine day full of story-telling and ceaseless conversation. Helen, the director of the Wyoming State Museum, just took off for a meeting to prepare for her budget meeting later today with the governor. Good luck on that one.
Only yesterday did we finalize the arrangements for Linda's dialysis on Friday. It took a lot of phone calls, some often-elusive patience, and some maneuvering, but she does have the "first-shift" time we've been requesting all along. Now all that remains is the extra dialysis session she'll need before we get home. If you have followed this blog, you know that we had to shift her regular schedule for this trip because of the scarcity of dialysis centers in Wyoming. She'll go back to her regular schedule a week from today in Cooperstown.
Shortly we'll be hitting the road (9AM) for a drive of 500 miles or so to the middle of Kansas, where she has dialysis tomorrow. And who knows what else along the way.
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Posted by Linda on September 11
Friends
I've become lazy with my blog, please forgive me. Gabriel is so much better at keeping up with our travels. I've been enjoying all our friends so much I haven't logged too much time on the computer. I really enjoyed Tim and Julie in Colorado who I just met and fell in like with. They are so much fun to be around, I wished we lived closer. Then on to the Wynes, Mike and Helen in Cheyenne, Wy., the conversations so interesting and time spent together wonderful, I wish it could be longer. My dialysis everywhere has been great, the least important part on my trip so far, only three treatments left. Dialysis is just a bump in the road compared to all I've seen and all I've experienced. The western part of the United States is amazingly beautiful and all the friends I've been able to see so sweet. I am having the best time of my life. Hugs for now.
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Posted on September 12
Two Louisvilles, Two New Friends
It's Thursday night as I write this, and Linda and I are in Louisville, Kentucky. Linda is due at the nearby dialysis center at 6:30AM, and we drove over there tonight to make sure we don't find ourselves wandering around lost at 6:29AM. While she's at dialysis, I'll be getting a tour of the Louisville Slugger Museum from former Hall of Fame colleague P.J. Shelley. That will make a fine morning, after which we'll drive two hours to Cincinnati to spend the rest of the day with my cousin Valerie, whom I met for the first time on last year's trip.
On both of these trips, nearly all of the people we've spent time with were friends of mine. Linda had met some of them, but many friends were new to her. Yesterday, for the first time, we rendezvoused with people I had not met before, and it was cool to add two more names to the list of people we want to visit again in our further travels. Tina and Rob live in Louisville, Kansas, about 15 miles from Manhattan ("The Little Apple"), where Linda had dialysis, and afterwards we joined them for dinner and spent two delightful hours with them.
Tina is Linda's stepdaughter from her previous marriage, originally from upstate New York, and Rob hails from Arizona. I think Louisville, Kansas, is about halfway between those places, which is only fair. They've been married for 17 years; Linda and I celebrate our seventh anniversary this coming Sunday. Linda hasn't seen them since the 1990s, so this was a special reunion for them. There was lots of catching up to do, since their family is huge (Linda has six older brothers and about 20 nieces and nephews). I had photos of Linda's three grandsons on my camera, and Tina got a kick out of those. Rob and I hit it off, too. The whole two hours was a Good Thing. We had doubled back from Cheyenne to take I-70 home in order to make this reunion possible, and it was well worth it.
Meanwhile, Tim and Julie have been home-bound after flooding closed off the street they live on, caused by severe rain that started Tuesday night. We passed through those same storms Tuesday afternoon, when we drove from Cheyenne to Salina, Kansas (an hour from Manhattan). We thought we'd get hammered directly by the massive dark clouds ahead of us as we left Colorado and headed into Kansas, but instead we hit several intermittent cloudbursts. Every time the rain pelted us, the temperature plummeted, making for a strange yo-yo effect on the car's temperature. In less than an hour, the temperature went from 95 to 69 to 90 to 77 to 94 to 70 to 87 to 76 to 93. Crazy! But at least we weren't stranded by a flood.
That drive was over 500 miles, and so was today's drive from Independence, Missouri, to Louisville. I think we've had enough of those by now. We'll have a six-hour drive on Saturday after dialysis, and close to eight hours on Monday to get home the western part of Maryland. We're past 5,000 miles for the trip, so we'll wind up somewhere over 6,000 miles. I wonder how long our next road trip will be.
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Leftover business: if you have followed this blog, you know about the problems I've had posting photos. According to my computer guru, this is because we have stayed most of the time in cheap motels where everyone is on the wifi at the same time, using up bandwidth that doesn't leave enough for us to post photos. I corrected some of that problem in Colorado, posting photos on three of the blogs. This morning I've gone back to the last August post, "A Long Day But a Great One," and posted two photos of the beautiful memorial quilts at the dialysis center in Rosebud, SD. Just in case cyberspace swallows those up, here is another photo I took that day of two memorial quilts, created to honor fellow dialysis patients who have passed on:
Another ongoing issue has been the difficulty in arranging Linda's final two dialysis treatments: today and tomorrow. Part of the problem was that we requested "chair times" at the start of the day, which are less available because most units put regular patients in those early times. Another problem was that centers can't guarantee times until no more than a week ago before the requested date (in case they have new full-time patients). A third problem was that DaVita, the dialysis conglomerate which has been extremely helpful on both of our trips in finding centers for Linda's dialysis, dropped the ball a bit on these last two requests. They are in Louisville and (tomorrow) Cincinnati, two large cities with at least 20 dialysis centers apiece. Instead of contacting all of the possible centers to find one that could accommodate Linda, they contacted one at a time and waited for that center's response before going on to the next one. As a result, when I talked to DaVita on Tuesday, they had still contacted only six of the Cincinnati centers. Only when I told them to check every center within 50 miles of Cincinnati did they make that comprehensive effort. The result was that by Wednesday morning, they had found a center for her. That completed our arrangements--only three days ahead of the treatment. We didn't get a definitive time until Monday on the Louisville center where she's getting dialysis right now. So there has been a lot of stress and anxiety the past three weeks about making sure that Linda got the dialysis she needed, when she needed it. But the ending is happy, and that's all that matters today. One final note: as you may have noticed, Linda hasn't written a whole lot about her dialysis treatments on this trip. This is a good thing because it means that nothing has gone awry and the dialysis has been a relatively minor factor in our enjoyment of this trip. But before we get home, I will write another blog summarizing the dialysis issues she has faced in the past three weeks. So if you have followed the blog with an toward learning about dialysis and have been distracted by the travelogue, stay tuned. I'll have a few things to say before we're done. Thank you all for your support.
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Posted on September 17
Then There Were None
Linda and I got home late yesterday afternoon and were very glad, even though it landed us in the coldest weather we've experienced since March (it was 32 degrees when I drove her to dialysis this morning). We were tired and ready to be home. In fact, even though we spent 24 days on the road compared to last year's 31, we did wear down again by the final week. Maybe the next driving trip will be 17 days. Hmmm, I can think of places we could cover in 17 days. . .
Under other circumstances, we might have headed straight home once we crossed the Mississippi. That was last Thursday, and we could have been home in time for her regular Saturday dialysis in Cooperstown. But two important things kept us going. One was that I had gone to a ton of trouble to secure 6:30 AM chair times for her in Louisville on Friday and in Cincinnati on Saturday. The other was that I had done that in order to reprise the final three days of last year's trip. We knew how much fun that would be, and we didn't want to miss it.
I'm happy to report that our anniversary weekend was everything we expected, and then some. We spent Friday with my cousin Valerie, who lives in Mason, just north of Cincinnati. She worked in the Reds' front office from 1990-1994, was laid off during the strike, and doesn't care for the Reds any more. In honor of her birthday (three days earlier) and our anniversary (two days hence), or perhaps because Yom Kippur was about to start, Valerie served a wonderful array of Jewish-American delicacies: bagels with cream cheese and lox; corned beef, pastrami, and Kosher salami on rye; two kinds of herrings; three kinds of spreads; and more. We had all we could handle putting a dent in that on Friday, and took more with us for the long drive on Saturday.
I didn't even know Valerie until I got a note from her after my "Jeopardy!" appearance in 2008, wondering if we were first cousins. We are, and finally met at the tail end of last year's trip. She's a delight and a sweetheart, and groaned at so many of my puns that I was worried we'd have to call paramedics. A retired bookkeeper, she keeps extremely busy--doing terrific needlepoint designs; playing Mah Jongg; visiting her kids and grandkids (in Oklahoma and Pennsylvania), and serving as an official in the community theater. Our visit this year was longer than last year's by two or three hours, but it was still too short. We're going to find a way to spend a few days together sometime. Here's a photo of Valerie and me:
Thanks to the early dialysis on Saturday, we were able to make it to our weekend rendezvous with the Finkels in time for dinner. I've known Jan and Judy for more than a decade now, and they are very dear people to all who know them. They live in a beautiful house in the woods in the western corner of Maryland, and we went through West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia again to get there. Jan's father signed the deed on the place six days before Jan was born, and it was the family's summer retreat for decades until he retired from teaching. Now they're the only year-round residents on their road.
Our only time together on Saturday was a magnificent dinner during which Linda got to enjoy the raw oysters which she had been craving since we went to that restaurant last year. I had tempura coconut shrimp with an orange marmalade sauce, followed by blackened salmon with a honey lemon sauce, one of my best meals on the trip. Jan and Judy let us recover on our own after dinner, which we needed. On Sunday, our anniversary (and three days after theirs), we spent most of the day together. That included two more meals, one an encore of raw oysters for Linda. After the big meals in Maryland, I felt as if I had gained ten pounds, but according to the scales this morning, I gained just two pounds or so on this trip. Nice work!
The Sunday highlight was the 90-minute boat ride on Deep Creek Lake. It was a gorgeous afternoon, warm in the sun, a cool breeze, and sparkling blue waters. With Jan at the wheel, we toured a lake we shared with a lot of boaters, checking out the unnecessarily huge mansions, the dam and bridges, the party being thrown at a lakeside resort to celebrate a triathlon race held there on Saturday, and three spiders who had lurked in the canvas cover before taking the final boat ride of their lives. Here's a photo of us on the boat, followed by views of skipper Jan and Judy:
We counted down the days on the final week of the trip, finally reached one, and hied ourselves home. Every day on the way home was special, especially those last three. Thank you to all the people who hosted us, put us up and put up with us, to make this trip as terrific as last year's: Judy and Tom in Redgranite, WI; Mike and Mary Ellen in La Crosse, WI; Tim and Julie in Firestone, CO; Mike and Helen in Cheyenne, WY; Valerie in Cincinnati; and Jan and Judy in Oakland, MD. You are all special people and great fun to be with. We couldn't have done this without you--and we wouldn't have.
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Posted on September 17
The Dialysis Part of the Trip
As those of you know who have followed our blog throughout the trip, Linda did not write very much about her ten dialysis treatments in nine different centers. What she wrote in her last blog sums up her overriding attitude: "Dialysis is just a bump in the road compared to all I've seen and all I've experienced."
I do want to write something here about our experience with dialysis on this year's trip. This is mainly for people with a personal interest in, or great curiosity about, dialysis, and I'll put more effort at distributing this post to those people.
From my standpoint as chief logistics officer, this was a tougher trip to plan than last year's even though it was shorter by one week and two dialysis treatments. I learned last year that there's only so much you can plan in advance--basically just the cities--because centers (rightly) won't commit a chair to a traveler more than a week or two in advance. So I spent less time working on dialysis arrangements before we left, and I could've done more in that regard.
Specifically, I could have made it clearer to DaVita, the excellent dialysis conglomerate which operates the majority of this country's centers, just how important it was to get the earliest possible "chair time" for Linda this past Friday and Saturday. We had picked Louisville and Cincinnati for those last two visits because there were at least a couple of dozen dialysis centers to choose from, increasing Linda's odds of getting an early time somewhere. Instead of canvassing all the centers and letting them know about Linda's request, they sent out one request at a time. As a result, it was four days before the Cincinnati treatment before they got the message that we didn't care if we had to drive 50 miles, we needed that early chair time. Wednesday morning, a center was found, three days before we would arrive.
Incidentally, there was good reason for Linda to have dialysis on consecutive days. Her normal days are Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday, but because most of the centers in Wyoming (where we spent nine days) operate only on Monday-Wednesday-Friday, we decided to put her on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule for all three weeks of the trip. The drawback was that it would leave her with an extra "stretch day" from Friday the 13th until her treatment this morning, the 17th. One stretch day is enough for her to handle (predictably, it is the most likely day of the week for the little symptoms to manifest themselves, such as nausea and shortness of breath). That is why she has never missed a treatment in nearly six years on hemodialysis. So we arranged for the extra treatment on Saturday to put her back on her Cooperstown schedule.
Linda had a little different experience in each of the ten centers on this trip, but the one constant was that her dialysis treatments went smoothly. There were a couple of times when cramps persuaded the nurses to curtail her treatment by 10-15 minutes, and one time when her blood pressure got too low just before they were going to release her. She remained an extra ten minutes or so until that stabilized.
Not surprisingly, her "dry weight" was the toughest thing to get right. A quick explanation of dry weight if that's a new term: the essence of kidney failure is that the kidneys no longer process the fluids you take in, so you need to connect to a machine that does that processing. Between treatments, whatever the patient drinks stays in the body, adding weight that is carried around until the fluid is processed out during the next dialysis. The dry weight is what you should weigh after the treatment. The amount of weight added in between treatments can vary, and because that function of the machine has to be programmed in before treatment begins, it's something of a guessing game as to how close you'll be to your ideal dry weight. They don't know until they weigh you just before you head out the door.
If they don't get the dry weight down far enough, it means that it will take less fluid intake to give that bloated feeling which is relieved only during dialysis. If they lower it too far, it can whack out your blood pressure. Linda's treatments were solid in that regard, as her weight after a session was never more than .5kg away from her. That's a big reason why she felt so strong and comfortable during the trip, and why dialysis was only a bump in the road for her. When you get a "bad" treatment, you can real rotten until that next treatment, which is more of an ordeal. Linda felt good going into the treatments, and better coming out.
She did, however, have a little problem with altitude. The same thing happened a couple of times last year when we traveled to altitudes approaching 10,000 feet, but she was also coming off leg surgery and taking a post-surgery medication that also contributed a lot to her discomfort. Still, Linda's doctors cautioned her about doing too much at altitude, as dialysis and heart patients are at greater risk. She is both of those, all right, and since she has had two bypass surgeries on her left leg, that is what affects her the most at altitude. It happened first at the Upper Falls of the Yellowstone, which is somewhere over 8,000 feet, when she had trouble walking. Her leg was weak and wobbly, and after half a dozen steps she went back to the car while I took photos and roamed a bit. The same thing happened to her at Bryce Canyon last year.
That was the only thing that gave her trouble. She owes a ton of credit to her doctors and nurses at Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown, and to all the nurses who took care of her on the road. (I don't think she was seen by any doctors, which was fine by us). Nurses are a special breed, and there are no dilettantes among dialysis nurses in particular. Wherever Linda went, she was treated as a guest, not a passerby.
I'd like to finish with some brief items concerning the various things Linda experienced in dialysis centers around the country, the things that made each treatment unique.
And that's why we hope our trips will inspire people with dialysis to get out and explore the world. Of course it doesn't have to be super-ambitious trip like the two we've taken. It isn't difficult at all to arrange a week's worth of dialysis treatment and to have them go off without anxiety or misadventure. Live! That is Linda's message, at home and on the road. But especially on the road. Get out there and get the most out of life, the way we do.
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Posted on August 31
A Long Day But a Great One
Yesterday was a long one, with 13 hours on the road from the time we left Pierre, S.D., to the time we pulled into our motel in Rapid City. Those cities are only about 250 miles apart, but we took the scenic route. First we revisited the fantastic sunflower fields we had discovered on Thursday, to take some photos. Linda dressed appropriately--all in yellow--and I took a couple of photos where she's hard to discern in the field of head-high flowers. We call it "Where's Linda?"
She had dialysis on the Rosebud Reservation, a 100-mile drive from Pierre. The hill descending into the town of Rosebud was lush with green growth, a much more welcoming sight than the barren Navajo Reservation we visited in the Arizona desert last year. It briefly made me think life could be good there, though I was assured that more than 75% of the residents there live in serious poverty, with only the business owners doing well.
I'm posting photos below of the memorial quilts that cover the walls of the dialysis unit. When a patient dies, they create a quilt as a memorial. The elderly woman who has done the most quilts was in the chair next to Linda. They're quite beautiful to look at, and a wonderful way to remember members of the dialysis "family" that all units have. They were kind enough to let me take photos of the quilts, though of course I couldn't take any photos showing patients. (See photo now on Facebook.) They have about three dozen patients there, and Linda referred in her blog to the display in the lobby. Each patient's photo is there, along with his/her number of children and grandchildren, favorite tv show, and favorite meal. The emphasis on children is part of the Sioux tribe's dedication to its children more than anything else.
Once we were liberated from the dialysis center, we headed for the Badlands, which I had visited only once before, on my first cross-country trip in 1970. On that trip, the Badlands were the first sign I had of the magnificent geological wonders of the West, and it changed my life. I was awestruck on that trip as I saw many of the famous national parks I'm trying to share with Linda on this trip along with last year's, and that's why I wound up spending 30 years living in the West and criss-crossing the always fascinating terrain. So I was glad to share this with Linda.
She was blown away by it and told me it's the most spectacular place I've taken her to yet. That's a strong statement considering that last year, we saw the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Zion, the Arches, and more. But I could see her point. This was like driving through the heart of my favorite park, Bryce, but not on a rim road as at Bryce, but right down in the middle of the pinnacles and colorfully eroded rocks. I remembered all the canyon-like features below the road level from my 1970 trip, but had forgotten how much of the splendor is alongside you on the road.
We spent nearly two hours in the park yesterday, all the time watching a massive, dark storm to the west. We talked to people today who were stuck in that storm and had to pull over, but all we saw were the brilliant lightning bolts in the distance and wondering if the dark clouds above us were going to open up as well. We felt a few drops but that was all, and know we were very lucky. Perhaps our new friends at the Rosebud dialysis center were looking out for us, having helped us map our route to and through the Badlands. At the last viewpoint, we saw two bighorn sheep in the field below, and after making a turn into an unpaved road came upon another half-dozen, including several rambunctious lambs. (See photo now at Facebook.) A great capper to the first of the Western wonders on this trip.
I hadn't been to Wall Drugs before and we were hungry, so we stopped there. The place became a thriving business in 1931 when the founder of a struggling store began giving away "free ice water" which lured travelers inside. I partook of some free ice water with my dinner while Linda enjoyed ten cents' worth of coffee--and then, of course, we spent another $60. I wonder how that works. But we did need that pair of binoculars (when we moved to Cherry Valley seven years ago, we put all the important stuff in one carton, including the binoculars, and haven't seen that carton since), and the uncensored edition of Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage, not to mention a great present for one of Linda's grandsons. How convenient that all of that stuff was at one place!
Now it's Saturday morning and we're about to head out for a day of exploration. First stop is Mount Rushmore, 25 miles south of here. From there we'll go to Devil's Tower in northeastern Wyoming. I've never been there--one of the few famous places in the West that I've managed to miss--but have this strange compulsion to go there. Then we'll head west, toward Cody, though I suspect we'll wind up spending the night around Sheridan. It's going to be a great day wherever we wind up. We'll catch you again then.
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Posted on September 1
Wonders of Wyoming
I'm writing this on Sunday morning, the start of September, our "birthiversay" month because it includes our wedding anniversary and Linda's birthday. In the last two days, we have seen four amazing places, two man-made, two natural. On Friday, it was the spectacular Badlands followed by that monument to human excess, Wall Drug. Yesterday, it was the magnificent Mount Rushmore followed by the Devil's Tower. Today we'll spend a good deal of the day at Yellowstone, breaking the tie in favor of natural wonders.
It was in the 90s again when we got to Mount Rushmore, and Linda made it as far as the restaurant which was used in "North By Northwest," planted herself at the table where Cary Grant sat just before Eva-Marie Saint pretended to shoot him, enjoyed some coffee, and let me continue onward.
The hike up wasn't nearly as much fun, and I was soaking wet by the time I rejoined Linda. The monument is spectacular, and I hadn't seen it since 1970. The surrounding area has become so heavily commercialized that I dubbed it Tackytown. If you go there, close your eyes until you see the whites of the presidents' eyes.
We took a scenic route from there to Devil's Tower, avoiding Rapid City and the interstate and going west on Rt. 16 into Wyoming and north from there. The amazing thing to me about DT is that there is nothing else around there. There is nothing even vaguely resembling that kind of formation, which sits in the middle of nowhere. You bop along the barren range land, round a curve, and there is this enormous monolith surrounding by nothing at all.
So you have to wonder how it got there. At the Visitor Center is a display showing various theories about its origins, including several proposed by geologists, but nobody knows. Least of all the man standing next to me, a 50ish fellow wearing a Marines cap, who assured me that "the problem with these theories is that they're based on the Earth being millions of years old. But the Bible tells us that the Earth is only about six thousand years old." He went on for another sentence or two which I didn't catch because I was trying to think of something to say that would not cause him to punch me in the mouth. What I wanted to say was, "Why do you even leave your house? The real world must be a difficult place for you." Instead, I simply looked him in the eye, said "uh-huh," and walked away. And I lived to be a smart-ass some other day.
We drove across a good chunk of Wyoming after that, generally heading toward Yellowstone. At Buffalo, we got off the interstate and turned southwest for a fantastic drive across the mountains, down into a long valley, and into the tiny town of Ten Sleep. I wanted to get a room there so I could title this blog "Two Sleep in Ten Sleep," but Linda persuaded me to keep going, so we wound up in Worland. Now it's time for the 150-mile drive to Yellowstone and a night's rest in Cody, where we'll be staying the next three nights (or perhaps four).
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Posted on September 2
Cody and Yellowstone
Yesterday was Yellowstone; today is Cody, our home from yesterday through Wednesday. We began yesterday with breakfast in Greybull, Wyoming, in a cafe with equal-sized sections for smokers and non-smokers. We couldn't remember the last time we've eaten in a place where people could smoke, and yes, we noticed the smoke where we were sitting. We got to Cody around noon, checked into our motel room, and quickly continued on to Yellowstone, 53 miles away on a spectacular drive that includes the Buffalo Bill Reservoir. In June 1976, after finishing the first (long) draft of my first (bad) novel, I pitched a tent in the state park along this reservoir, spent my days on a lounge chair editing, and went into Cody in the evening for a square meal. So this place brings back a lot of memories.
Yellowstone National Park was a mixed bag yesterday. I'll confess that I much prefer the Grand Tetons, where I'll take Linda tomorrow. The day was hot and hazy, temperatures in the high 80s, and a few small fires in the park added smoke to the sky that increased the haze. This hurt the views in the north part of the park near Tower Falls, where the wide valley vistas were rather indistinct in the sunny haze. Here's a good shot up Upper Falls:
The other thing spoiling the view was the prevalence of dead trees. A couple of days ago, leaving the Mount Rushmore area, we saw a lot of dead pines that were attacked in the last year by pine beetles, devastating the forests. But that was nothing compared to what we saw in Yellowstone, especially the drive to the lake from the East entrance. High sloping hillsides were piled with fallen trees, strewn haphazardly like discarded matchsticks. Wildfires are always a problem in the western states, as the recent devastation near Yosemite reminds us, but the evidence will be there for many years to come in Yellowstone. Lots of dead trees still stand like abandoned sentinels of latest danger, but we saw so many fallen trees pointed at us that we were sure one would untangle itself from brush and impale our little Toyota.
The big plus was the wildlife. We didn't see any moose -- I have promised Linda a moose sighting on this trip -- but we did see a thousand or so buffaloes. We saw one herd of 200-300 on the way in and the same herd a half-mile away on the way out six hours later. Other times, they were right along the road, and the funniest sight of the day was a park ranger using his vehicle to herd the big adults off the road when they lingered too long and tied up traffic. We got lots of great photos, including one Linda took out the window of a huffing male just a few feet away. After we passed an estimated thousand head of bison for the day, I was reminded of a visit to Yellowstone a long time ago with Judy, who, late in a similar day as I gestured toward yet another cluster just off the road, said, "If you point out another fucking buffalo today, I'll scream!"
We also saw elk, pronghorn antelope, mule deer, hawks, a trumpeter swan, and more. I can't get enough of wildlife in the wild, and Linda feels the same way. I'd rather spent an afternoon looking at buffalo than at Old Faithful; in fact, that's what happened yesterday, as we never did get to the big geyser. We weren't crazy about the sulphur stench of the Mammoth area and kept driving past the fulminating features that so many other people apparently savor. Lakes, mountains, trees, animals. That's all we ask. And we'll see plenty of that tomorrow in the Grand Tetons, starting of course with about a 130-mile drive from Cody through Yellowstone. Where's that moose hiding?
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Posted by Linda on September 3
Coffee With the Boys
Yep, I haven't written since I had coffee with George, Tom, Teddy, and Abe. My first look at Mt. Rushmore was awesome, so massive, George I think was the most impressive, so dead on in the details. I hope everyone has the chance to see it. After Mt. Rushmore we headed on in to Cody, WY, a nice little town where we plan to stay for a few days, our base camp to Yellowstone, where we spent all day on Sunday. What can I say about Yellowstone? Mmm...Absolutely beautiful , a huge expanse of incredible landscape, majestic mountains, scenic lakes and lots and lots of buffaloes. I was happy to see so many buffaloes roaming in large groups all over the place. On the way out of the park, the park ranger was actually herding them out of road with his SUV so traffic could pass. It was a magnificent trip to Yellowstone on Sunday, and we are heading back through there to the Grant Tetons today. I can't wait.
Yesterday I had my first dialysis treatment in Cody, and all went well, once we found the unit. The treatment was in the local hospital, so we stopped in on Sunday to find out exactly where it was (they usually put the dialysis unit in the back, in the least germy part). We were told they had moved to their new location (we were told all summer that they were in the process) a few miles away. Okay good, we now knew where to go. Wrong, we were misinformed, we showed up on time at the new unit, nobody was there, so back to the hospital we went, not a soul around, what? It was Labor Day. Gabriel finally found someone in the Emergency room, who gave us directions to the unit, at the opposite end of the hospital, of course. We made it and I had a wonderful treatment. The nurses were very apologetic and sweet, and very professional. I go back tomorrow, and we know where we are going this time, yippee.
While I was at dialysis my super husband did laundry, ran errands, and had a good lunch at a Chinese buffet (which he loves and I stay away from, too much salt). After the dialysis I was starving, so we went to get a bite, then walked around Cody. We watched a show, a gunfight on the street in front of the Irma Saloon, that was a hoot. I'm sorry I got ahead of myself. I left out our trip Monday morning to the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, which was great. I'll let Gabriel tell you more about that in his blog, he's so much better at describing all the details than I am. Lots of hugs for now.
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Posted on September 3
As Fantastic As Ever
It's Wednesday as I write this, and Linda is having dialysis, her second at the hospital in Cody, WY. I have two days to write about, since we've been on the go so much that I haven't had time the past two evenings to write. I hope to catch up here.
We spent Monday morning at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center here in Cody, which I remembered well from my travels here in the 1970s. There were four connected museums on the site back then; now there are six, and we did justice to several of them in a little less than four hours. The one I was most anxious to share with Linda was the Whitney Gallery of Western Art (yes, that Whitney family, which includes a couple of current members Linda knows from her previous life in Saratoga Springs). We saw dozens of fine works depicting all aspects of Western life: cowboys and Indians; horses, cattle, and wildlife; and the magnificent settings in which those various beings lived, struggled, and survived.
From the early, sweeping landscapes of Albert Bierstadt to a 2013 piece titled "Tonto's Dream" which depicts the current influence of casinos on Indians' welfare, it was all there. So is a reproduction of Frederic Remington's studio (see photos currently on Facebook, soon to be here) in New Rochelle, NY, where the most prolific and well-known Western artist churned out paintings and sculptures during the day and dispensed eloquent discourse in the evenings. Here is "Tonto's Dream":
My favorite Western artist is Charles M. Russell, who is well represented here along with late-19th century giants like Henry Jackson and Thomas Moran. The sculptures in particular have a dynamic quality with dramatic interaction between people and animals; one, with cowboy and horse almost wrapped around each other in mid-turn, is humorously titled "Dirty Dancing." The largest paintings depict battles, including one of the Battle of Big Horn in which Custer is highlighted in a nearly golden glow at the painting's center while Crazy Horse almost has to sneak onto the canvas at the lower right.
That seems to be the only thing missing from the various museums here, including the Plains Indian Museum--that is, some sense of the massive genocide of Native Americans perpetrated by the forces implementing the invading force of "manifest destiny." The Plains Indian Museum has strong exhibits on native crafts and lifestyle, but treats it as if it existed in some kind of historical vacuum. Oh, there's a little indication here or there of how and why the Indians weren't allowed to continue their noble and picturesque traditions. But it is not central to the story being told here. Recently I visited the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, and believe me, you can't leave there without knowing about the Holocaust.
Defying demographics, Linda was interested in the Colt Museum of firearms, which contained about 1,500 different kinds of guns and rifles, while I was not. I went instead to the newer Natural History Museum instead and spoke with a couple of volunteers who confirmed my impression that the exhibits are long on aesthetics and short on historical perspective. Then Linda and I joined forces again to check out the Buffalo Bill Museum, devoted to Bill Cody, a native of this town and the proprietor of one of the greatest shows in show-biz history. Most fascinating was the film of his "Wild West" show from 1911-12, which included 400 horses, numerous elephants and other animals, and about 700 cast members including cowboys and Indians, not to mention Annie Oakley. What a show that must have been! Buffalo Bill's presence is still strong in Cody, where the social hub is the Irma Hotel, built by Bill for his daughter Irma, and where another business proudly boasts that it was founded in 1967 by Bill's grandson.
We'll be taking in more of Cody later today after Linda is done with her dialysis, but now I must turn to yesterday's expedition to the Grand Tetons, my favorite place in the country. I've been there at least a dozen times, but this was the first visit for Linda, so naturally I wanted to show her everything at once. But mainly I wanted to take her to Jenny Lake, one place where I just sit idly for the rest of my life and do nothing but stare at what was in front of me. I did take her there, and we did plant ourselves in our lawn chairs for more than two hours while I read to her, finishing up our latest shared novel (Stranger in a Strange Land--this morning we started a new one we picked up at Wall Drug, a new, uncensored edition of Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage). Here's our spot:
The thing that distinguishes the Grand Tetons from anyplace else I've visited is that the mountains rise directly from the edges of the half-dozen lakes running the (north-south) length of the park. The most scenic of those is Jenny Lake, with Mount Moran (12,605' high) and is distinctive glacier just to the north and the three Grand Tetons (Grand Teton itself is 13,770' high) to the south. We stopped along the road on the east side of the lake and looked across at the Hanging Canyon area, a gap in the mountains where you can hike to Inspiration Point (as I did several times years ago) or further into the mountains. Hikers passed by every five or ten minutes, and some apologized for momentarily blocking our view as they took photos ("That's okay," I'd tell them. "It's the only decent place around here, so we don't mind sharing it."). We could've stayed there much longer than we did, but we had places to go.
Mainly, we had to get back to Cody, a three-hour drive. We had left Cody at 9am and didn't get back until 8:30pm, so it was a good, long, full day. After looping around Yellowstone Lake and south into the Tetons, we began our stay there with a picnic lunch at Colter Bay, where we're renting a cabin for tomorrow night. Predictably, we spent much of the drive through the park looking for moose. Someone said one had been spotted behind the Jackson Lake Lodge, so we checked that out; magnificent view, but no moose. No sign of life in the Willow Flats, where I've always found moose at some point in each visit. No sign of moose anywhere during our sublime afternoon in the park.
So we headed back through Yellowstone, and as we curved back around Yellowstone Lake and came around a bench, two oncoming cars flashed their high beams at us. In a national park, that means only one thing: slow down for an animal in the middle of the road. It was a moose! It sauntered along the shoulder on Linda's side, and after we stopped (with several vehicles stopping behind us), it moseyed in front of us to the middle of the road for a moment. I scrambled for the camera and the batteries (which I'd removed because they were running low), had a lot of trouble finding the damn batteries, and by the time I did, the moose was scrambling up a hillside on the other side of the road. That's why I didn't get any good photos of the bull or its massive antlers. That is too bad. But it wasn't as important as Linda's joy at seeing it. She was thrilled beyond even her anticipation. I promised her a moose sighting on this trip, put it in the brochure and everything, and nature has delivered. Thank you.
Earlier this week, I wrote about two days which each combined natural and man-made wonders. That was true again these past two days--first the artwork and other treasures of the Cody museums, and yesterday the splendor of the Grand Tetons. Today is another Cody day, and tomorrow we'll be back in the Tetons, with a likely detour on the way there to check out Old Faithful. And so the varied delights of this trip continue.
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Posted on September 6
More Wyoming Wonders
Sorry about the two-day gap in the blog. Last night we stayed in a cabin at Colter Bay in the Tetons, and it didn't have a tv or internet access or any suggestions of the late 20th century. The public computer in the office automatically times you out after twenty minutes, and that wasn't enough to consider a blog. Now we're in Casper, Wyoming, almost in the middle of the state, and Linda is at dialysis. She's doing fine now that we've left the high altitudes of Yellowstone and the Tetons, which affected her a couple of times.
The last two-plus days have continued our record of uninterrupted fun. Wednesday we stayed in Cody, logging a total of 21 miles in the car. After a fine breakfast, we went to a city park and started Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage. We're one-fourth of the way through it and are hooked by Grey's powerful writing as he unwinds a plot involving characters with great moral issues as well as strategic problems. While we sat there, the local high school let out for lunch, and we watched the newly freed students race across the park to the fast-food places on the main drag. One of them unleashed the quote of the week, after a classmate made the mistake of uttering a profanity: "Shut your fucking mouth! You're a goddam Mormon!" That pretty much sums up the cultural dynamic in Cody, Wyoming.
Linda was craving a small steak and sought the advice of someone at the hospital where she got dialysis. We followed that suggestion and had the best restaurant meal of the trip, at the Wyoming Rib and Chop House. Linda got a 10-ounce filet, and I had salmon cooked over a cedar plank. Both were perfectly cooked and delicious, and Linda savored every bite of it, even the three she shared with me. We combined to tackle the biggest baked potato we've ever seen, two or three pounds' worth, as big as Richard Dreyfuss' mashed-potato sculpture of the Devil's Tower in "Close Encounters." We went ten rounds with it, but lost on points.
From there we went to the local Albertson's, which had everything we wanted for our planned Thursday picnic in the parks, and dropped the food off at our motel room refrigerator. Talked a bit with a quartet of Australians who had their Harleys shipped to the States and have been on the road more than six weeks. Now that's quite a way to explore a foreign country! One of them has been here before and is serving as their guide, and we tried to help him talk his mates into spending a couple of days around San Francisco in order to visit Muir Woods if nothing else. I hope they make it.
We finished the evening by driving eight miles out to Buffalo Bill State Park to take in the sunset. The sky was huge with billowing clouds and it promised to be a colorful sunset. We pulled up our chairs to watch, and I took a half-dozen photos, some of which I am now able to share with you.
But when we felt rain drops, we realized that the clouds above us were getting darker, and the yellow-orange prelude to the anticipated sunset was all the show we were going to get. It got dark pretty quickly, so we headed back to our room for the night.
We were up early yesterday morning and hit the road not long after 7am. It was a three-hour drive to our Yellowstone target--Old Faithful. Along the way we saw a bull elk with enormous antlers cavorting at the edge of Yellowstone Lake, and two buffaloes who confounded traffic by sauntering up a long hill in the uphill lane. It's a curving road, and to pass you had to squeeze to the left edge and hope nobody was coming the other way. That was a 15-minute delay, but it wasn't as funny as Tuesday evening on that same road, when four buffaloes strode downhill as if they had spent a tough day entertaining tourists and were headed for the nearest pool hall. They had even read the guidelines about facing traffic if you're a pedestrian. When we left them, a big bus not far behind us was heading toward the curve they had almost reached, and we flashed our high beams at three vehicles coming up the hill and subject to come around a curve and find four buffaloes and a bus coming at them. The buffaloes really do own that park.
Our arrival at Old Faithful was timed well, and we had only a twenty-minute wait before the eruption. I took only two still photos but got most of the show on the movie option on my camera. I think that might be more entertaining than the cliched stills. It was a relatively short eruption, but we weren't sticking around for the next one. We had other places to go. First we stopped at the Lewis Lake picnic area (near the southern edge of Yellowstone) for our picnic lunch, and got within two bites of finishing before it started to rain. But as we headed south, we left the rain behind us, and the rest of the day was beautiful.
Yes, we went back to the same spot we had stopped at two days earlier. We set up our lawn chairs and spent two hours there in that beatific spot, reading Zane Grey. By doing that, it meant we wouldn't be going to Jackson Hole, about a 45-minute drive south of our spot. That's each way, so it was either my favorite place in the country--a place I don't know when I'll visit again--for two hours or a quick tour of Jackson Hole. We enjoyed our reading very much.
It was 4:30pm by the time we checked into our cabin, built in 1930 and just fine for our purposes. Took a brief nap and headed for dinner at the restaurant in Colter Bay. It was a more expensive menu than we anticipated, since we weren't all that hungry. The best thing was the appetizer sampler, which included spare ribs, honey habanero chicken wings, fried pickles, and potato wedges, served with three dipping sauces that were very tasty. But the high point of the meal was the #2 quote of the week. I won't tell you where Jeff is from, but after spending two summers at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, he's finishing his summer in the Tetons as an assistant waiter. That means he does a lot of schlepping and pouring water. The water in western Wyoming is the best I've ever had, and I was quite thirsty after the long day. I went through about three glasses of water in five minutes, and Jeff was slow keeping up with me until he realized the problem. "They got no business," he told us, "givin' a grown man a child's glass." But he kept filling it and filling it, and we were buddies by the sixth or seventh glass. Linda and I had a lot of questions for him about working in the national parks, and he said he might give it up after this summer. "I'm a house painter in real life," he said, "and I'm going to be moving to Texas and probably work full-time. I'm a Republican and I'm going to live there with all the other right-thinking people." He chuckled and added, "I don't even look left when I'm driving." He could sense that we might be the type who didn't look right when we drive, and added that "this is what makes this country so great, that we can think different things." End of that discussion.
After a relaxing evening in our cabin, we ended Thursday with a ten-minute excursion to the darkest place we could find, to see the brightest sky I've seen in a long time. Many times, I've seen huge night skies in the West, and though we couldn't see the whole sky from this area filled with tall pines, this was one of the best ever. The Milky Way looked thick and mysterious, and only the night chill kept us from staying out there much longer.
Daytime temperatures were in the 80s or higher during our Wyoming thus far, but it got cold in the woods at Colter Bay last night, and it was 47 this morning when we hit the road at 7:30am. This was our first excursion in the Tetons before noon, and it made a huge difference. The mountains are on the west side of the park, and at their best when catching the morning light. No glare, but rather the crisp outlines of the imposing, proud mountains against the blue sky. I took a few photos at Colter Bay and then we headed for--of course, our favorite place by Jenny Lake. We stopped at the Jenny Lake Lodge for a light breakfast of bagels and cream cheese, then took that one-way road that leads along the eastern side of the lake. We lingered at our reading spot for a few photos which I think are the most spectacular we've taken on the trip so far. Somehow, Jenny Lake was perfectly still long enough for me to take photos with full reflections of the mountains. Fantastic!
But right now I have to finish this up and join Linda. She had a very good treatment today, is feeling chipper, and is the first of our twosome to head for the whirlpool tub at the Casper Marriott Courtyard. Life is good, and tomorrow we head for Colorado, though not before paying homage to our friend the jackalope. Stay tuned for that story!
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Posted on September 8
A Tale of Two Tales
We're leading off with a photo this time. Here's Linda in Douglas, Wyoming, standing in front of the big jackalope sculpture in a park in the town center. The jackalope was created in the 1930s by a pair of taxidermist brothers in Douglas. They got home late from a roadkill expedition and tossed everything into their storeroom. The next day, they saw a pair of horns lying next to a jackrabbit and thought, "What the hell--let's combine them." Voila! The jackalope.
We didn't hear about jackalopes until about five years ago. That winter, Linda had a pair of surgeries on her legs, called femoral bypasses. They did the right leg first, and during the six-week wait before they did her left leg, we watched a compilation of Pixar short films. One of them, titled "Boundin',"was about a lamb who was vainly proud of his fine coat and would do joyous dances to celebrate his beauty. One day, a hand reached out and grabbed his leg, and off-screen he went. Shortly, he was bounced into a puddle, completely shorn for the first time. He was mortified and slinked back under cover, until a "great American jackalope" passed by, saw him, and said, "Hey, kid, why the mope?"
The lamb detailed his nightmare shearing and said the other animals were mocking him. The jackalope, "the sage of the sage," assured him that he could do something better than dancing. "You can bound," said the jackalope, and showed him how to bounce his feet off the ground and float twenty or thirty feet above the ground. Thus enabled, the lamb was in his glory again. In the spring, he held out his left leg for the people who would sheer him, but he didn't care. He could bound.
The story seemed perfectly in synch with what Linda was going through, having had one leg ripped open (48 stitches' worth) and about to have the other one done. I was her jackalope, helping her maintain a perfect attitude, and as we watched "Boundin'" before leaving for the hospital for the second femoral bypass, she held out her left leg, knowing she would re-bound from the surgery. Ever since then, we have watched "Boundin'" any time Linda is about to endure some medical procedure and indignity, and it cements her determination to overcome all obstacles.
Only a month ago, I discovered that Douglas is the "jackalope capital," and when it turned out that Linda would get dialysis in Casper, only 50 miles from Douglas, we had to make a pilgrimage there. Here is a photo of two "great American jackalopes" to commemorate the visit:
From Douglas, we headed south to visit friends in Firestone, Colorado (about 20 miles from Boulder). Linda hadn't met Tim and Julie before, since they had been living in Australia for a year when Linda and I met in 2002. The connection between all the facts in the previous is the second of the "two tales" I mentioned in the title. And it's a good one.
I've known Tim for close to 30 years, since he moved to Las Vegas. In 1997, having learned the hard way that most women (like most men) in Las Vegas are crazy, he went looking for his true love on the internet. Over Thanksgiving weekend, he made contact with a woman named Julie from Darwin, Australia. They hit it off immediately, to the extent that the day after Christmas, Julie flew to Las Vegas to meet him, having quit her job and sold everything. They were married about six weeks later, and this year celebrated their 15th anniversary. Late in 2001, they moved to Australia, where his Microsoft expertise was in great demand and he worked for a number of years for the government, becoming a dual citizen along the way.
From the first time I visited them in Las Vegas, I could tell they were one of the coolest couples I knew. I thought, "Jeez, if Tim could find his soulmate halfway across the world, I should be able to find someone." Thus inspired, I did find my soulmate a few years later on the internet. We celebrate our seventh anniversary a week from today. Meanwhile, Tim and Julie moved back to "the states" earlier this year, so they had to be part of this trip. We arrived early yesterday afternoon and had a great day with them--they're as cool together and as much fun to be with as they were the last time I saw them--and we'll spend today here as well before heading to Cheyenne tomorrow for dialysis and the first day of this trip spent with people we also visited on last year's trip.
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Posted on September 10
Time To Head East
It's Tuesday morning and time to head east. We've had three days of much-needed relaxation with friends. Our weekend in Firestone, Colorado, with Tim and Julie was terrific. Linda and Julie hit it off from the start and spend much of Sunday afternoon shopping, and Tim and I watched a good chunk of three ballgames, so it was a win-win arrangement. After a dozen years of separation, the friendship picked up right where it left off, so it was a great two days. We also helped them inaugurate their new grill; the steak and salmon dinner was delicious.
We were on the road at 5AM yesterday because Linda had to be at the dialysis center in Cheyenne at 6:15. I enjoyed the 75-mile drive because the speed limit was 75 and I got to drive 80, tootling through the darkness with a Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young CD. Linda had dialysis in that center on last year's trip, so I knew exactly where to go. We pulled into the parking lot right at 6:15--and saw a sign on the door saying they had moved. Sweet! Two phone calls, one detour, and 15 minutes later, we pulled into their new building. Nothing to it.
We spent yesterday with Mike and Helen, whom we visited last year. Perhaps you're wondering why we spent eight days in Wyoming, dropped down into Colorado for the weekend, went back into Wyoming, and will now be going through a good chunk of Colorado to start the seven-day trek eastward to home. Mike and Helen were in Chicago this weekend for his son's wedding. Our rendezvous in Cheyenne was a fine day full of story-telling and ceaseless conversation. Helen, the director of the Wyoming State Museum, just took off for a meeting to prepare for her budget meeting later today with the governor. Good luck on that one.
Only yesterday did we finalize the arrangements for Linda's dialysis on Friday. It took a lot of phone calls, some often-elusive patience, and some maneuvering, but she does have the "first-shift" time we've been requesting all along. Now all that remains is the extra dialysis session she'll need before we get home. If you have followed this blog, you know that we had to shift her regular schedule for this trip because of the scarcity of dialysis centers in Wyoming. She'll go back to her regular schedule a week from today in Cooperstown.
Shortly we'll be hitting the road (9AM) for a drive of 500 miles or so to the middle of Kansas, where she has dialysis tomorrow. And who knows what else along the way.
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Posted by Linda on September 11
Friends
I've become lazy with my blog, please forgive me. Gabriel is so much better at keeping up with our travels. I've been enjoying all our friends so much I haven't logged too much time on the computer. I really enjoyed Tim and Julie in Colorado who I just met and fell in like with. They are so much fun to be around, I wished we lived closer. Then on to the Wynes, Mike and Helen in Cheyenne, Wy., the conversations so interesting and time spent together wonderful, I wish it could be longer. My dialysis everywhere has been great, the least important part on my trip so far, only three treatments left. Dialysis is just a bump in the road compared to all I've seen and all I've experienced. The western part of the United States is amazingly beautiful and all the friends I've been able to see so sweet. I am having the best time of my life. Hugs for now.
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Posted on September 12
Two Louisvilles, Two New Friends
It's Thursday night as I write this, and Linda and I are in Louisville, Kentucky. Linda is due at the nearby dialysis center at 6:30AM, and we drove over there tonight to make sure we don't find ourselves wandering around lost at 6:29AM. While she's at dialysis, I'll be getting a tour of the Louisville Slugger Museum from former Hall of Fame colleague P.J. Shelley. That will make a fine morning, after which we'll drive two hours to Cincinnati to spend the rest of the day with my cousin Valerie, whom I met for the first time on last year's trip.
On both of these trips, nearly all of the people we've spent time with were friends of mine. Linda had met some of them, but many friends were new to her. Yesterday, for the first time, we rendezvoused with people I had not met before, and it was cool to add two more names to the list of people we want to visit again in our further travels. Tina and Rob live in Louisville, Kansas, about 15 miles from Manhattan ("The Little Apple"), where Linda had dialysis, and afterwards we joined them for dinner and spent two delightful hours with them.
Tina is Linda's stepdaughter from her previous marriage, originally from upstate New York, and Rob hails from Arizona. I think Louisville, Kansas, is about halfway between those places, which is only fair. They've been married for 17 years; Linda and I celebrate our seventh anniversary this coming Sunday. Linda hasn't seen them since the 1990s, so this was a special reunion for them. There was lots of catching up to do, since their family is huge (Linda has six older brothers and about 20 nieces and nephews). I had photos of Linda's three grandsons on my camera, and Tina got a kick out of those. Rob and I hit it off, too. The whole two hours was a Good Thing. We had doubled back from Cheyenne to take I-70 home in order to make this reunion possible, and it was well worth it.
Meanwhile, Tim and Julie have been home-bound after flooding closed off the street they live on, caused by severe rain that started Tuesday night. We passed through those same storms Tuesday afternoon, when we drove from Cheyenne to Salina, Kansas (an hour from Manhattan). We thought we'd get hammered directly by the massive dark clouds ahead of us as we left Colorado and headed into Kansas, but instead we hit several intermittent cloudbursts. Every time the rain pelted us, the temperature plummeted, making for a strange yo-yo effect on the car's temperature. In less than an hour, the temperature went from 95 to 69 to 90 to 77 to 94 to 70 to 87 to 76 to 93. Crazy! But at least we weren't stranded by a flood.
That drive was over 500 miles, and so was today's drive from Independence, Missouri, to Louisville. I think we've had enough of those by now. We'll have a six-hour drive on Saturday after dialysis, and close to eight hours on Monday to get home the western part of Maryland. We're past 5,000 miles for the trip, so we'll wind up somewhere over 6,000 miles. I wonder how long our next road trip will be.
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Leftover business: if you have followed this blog, you know about the problems I've had posting photos. According to my computer guru, this is because we have stayed most of the time in cheap motels where everyone is on the wifi at the same time, using up bandwidth that doesn't leave enough for us to post photos. I corrected some of that problem in Colorado, posting photos on three of the blogs. This morning I've gone back to the last August post, "A Long Day But a Great One," and posted two photos of the beautiful memorial quilts at the dialysis center in Rosebud, SD. Just in case cyberspace swallows those up, here is another photo I took that day of two memorial quilts, created to honor fellow dialysis patients who have passed on:
Another ongoing issue has been the difficulty in arranging Linda's final two dialysis treatments: today and tomorrow. Part of the problem was that we requested "chair times" at the start of the day, which are less available because most units put regular patients in those early times. Another problem was that centers can't guarantee times until no more than a week ago before the requested date (in case they have new full-time patients). A third problem was that DaVita, the dialysis conglomerate which has been extremely helpful on both of our trips in finding centers for Linda's dialysis, dropped the ball a bit on these last two requests. They are in Louisville and (tomorrow) Cincinnati, two large cities with at least 20 dialysis centers apiece. Instead of contacting all of the possible centers to find one that could accommodate Linda, they contacted one at a time and waited for that center's response before going on to the next one. As a result, when I talked to DaVita on Tuesday, they had still contacted only six of the Cincinnati centers. Only when I told them to check every center within 50 miles of Cincinnati did they make that comprehensive effort. The result was that by Wednesday morning, they had found a center for her. That completed our arrangements--only three days ahead of the treatment. We didn't get a definitive time until Monday on the Louisville center where she's getting dialysis right now. So there has been a lot of stress and anxiety the past three weeks about making sure that Linda got the dialysis she needed, when she needed it. But the ending is happy, and that's all that matters today. One final note: as you may have noticed, Linda hasn't written a whole lot about her dialysis treatments on this trip. This is a good thing because it means that nothing has gone awry and the dialysis has been a relatively minor factor in our enjoyment of this trip. But before we get home, I will write another blog summarizing the dialysis issues she has faced in the past three weeks. So if you have followed the blog with an toward learning about dialysis and have been distracted by the travelogue, stay tuned. I'll have a few things to say before we're done. Thank you all for your support.
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Posted on September 17
Then There Were None
Linda and I got home late yesterday afternoon and were very glad, even though it landed us in the coldest weather we've experienced since March (it was 32 degrees when I drove her to dialysis this morning). We were tired and ready to be home. In fact, even though we spent 24 days on the road compared to last year's 31, we did wear down again by the final week. Maybe the next driving trip will be 17 days. Hmmm, I can think of places we could cover in 17 days. . .
Under other circumstances, we might have headed straight home once we crossed the Mississippi. That was last Thursday, and we could have been home in time for her regular Saturday dialysis in Cooperstown. But two important things kept us going. One was that I had gone to a ton of trouble to secure 6:30 AM chair times for her in Louisville on Friday and in Cincinnati on Saturday. The other was that I had done that in order to reprise the final three days of last year's trip. We knew how much fun that would be, and we didn't want to miss it.
I'm happy to report that our anniversary weekend was everything we expected, and then some. We spent Friday with my cousin Valerie, who lives in Mason, just north of Cincinnati. She worked in the Reds' front office from 1990-1994, was laid off during the strike, and doesn't care for the Reds any more. In honor of her birthday (three days earlier) and our anniversary (two days hence), or perhaps because Yom Kippur was about to start, Valerie served a wonderful array of Jewish-American delicacies: bagels with cream cheese and lox; corned beef, pastrami, and Kosher salami on rye; two kinds of herrings; three kinds of spreads; and more. We had all we could handle putting a dent in that on Friday, and took more with us for the long drive on Saturday.
I didn't even know Valerie until I got a note from her after my "Jeopardy!" appearance in 2008, wondering if we were first cousins. We are, and finally met at the tail end of last year's trip. She's a delight and a sweetheart, and groaned at so many of my puns that I was worried we'd have to call paramedics. A retired bookkeeper, she keeps extremely busy--doing terrific needlepoint designs; playing Mah Jongg; visiting her kids and grandkids (in Oklahoma and Pennsylvania), and serving as an official in the community theater. Our visit this year was longer than last year's by two or three hours, but it was still too short. We're going to find a way to spend a few days together sometime. Here's a photo of Valerie and me:
Thanks to the early dialysis on Saturday, we were able to make it to our weekend rendezvous with the Finkels in time for dinner. I've known Jan and Judy for more than a decade now, and they are very dear people to all who know them. They live in a beautiful house in the woods in the western corner of Maryland, and we went through West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia again to get there. Jan's father signed the deed on the place six days before Jan was born, and it was the family's summer retreat for decades until he retired from teaching. Now they're the only year-round residents on their road.
Our only time together on Saturday was a magnificent dinner during which Linda got to enjoy the raw oysters which she had been craving since we went to that restaurant last year. I had tempura coconut shrimp with an orange marmalade sauce, followed by blackened salmon with a honey lemon sauce, one of my best meals on the trip. Jan and Judy let us recover on our own after dinner, which we needed. On Sunday, our anniversary (and three days after theirs), we spent most of the day together. That included two more meals, one an encore of raw oysters for Linda. After the big meals in Maryland, I felt as if I had gained ten pounds, but according to the scales this morning, I gained just two pounds or so on this trip. Nice work!
The Sunday highlight was the 90-minute boat ride on Deep Creek Lake. It was a gorgeous afternoon, warm in the sun, a cool breeze, and sparkling blue waters. With Jan at the wheel, we toured a lake we shared with a lot of boaters, checking out the unnecessarily huge mansions, the dam and bridges, the party being thrown at a lakeside resort to celebrate a triathlon race held there on Saturday, and three spiders who had lurked in the canvas cover before taking the final boat ride of their lives. Here's a photo of us on the boat, followed by views of skipper Jan and Judy:
We counted down the days on the final week of the trip, finally reached one, and hied ourselves home. Every day on the way home was special, especially those last three. Thank you to all the people who hosted us, put us up and put up with us, to make this trip as terrific as last year's: Judy and Tom in Redgranite, WI; Mike and Mary Ellen in La Crosse, WI; Tim and Julie in Firestone, CO; Mike and Helen in Cheyenne, WY; Valerie in Cincinnati; and Jan and Judy in Oakland, MD. You are all special people and great fun to be with. We couldn't have done this without you--and we wouldn't have.
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Posted on September 17
The Dialysis Part of the Trip
As those of you know who have followed our blog throughout the trip, Linda did not write very much about her ten dialysis treatments in nine different centers. What she wrote in her last blog sums up her overriding attitude: "Dialysis is just a bump in the road compared to all I've seen and all I've experienced."
I do want to write something here about our experience with dialysis on this year's trip. This is mainly for people with a personal interest in, or great curiosity about, dialysis, and I'll put more effort at distributing this post to those people.
From my standpoint as chief logistics officer, this was a tougher trip to plan than last year's even though it was shorter by one week and two dialysis treatments. I learned last year that there's only so much you can plan in advance--basically just the cities--because centers (rightly) won't commit a chair to a traveler more than a week or two in advance. So I spent less time working on dialysis arrangements before we left, and I could've done more in that regard.
Specifically, I could have made it clearer to DaVita, the excellent dialysis conglomerate which operates the majority of this country's centers, just how important it was to get the earliest possible "chair time" for Linda this past Friday and Saturday. We had picked Louisville and Cincinnati for those last two visits because there were at least a couple of dozen dialysis centers to choose from, increasing Linda's odds of getting an early time somewhere. Instead of canvassing all the centers and letting them know about Linda's request, they sent out one request at a time. As a result, it was four days before the Cincinnati treatment before they got the message that we didn't care if we had to drive 50 miles, we needed that early chair time. Wednesday morning, a center was found, three days before we would arrive.
Incidentally, there was good reason for Linda to have dialysis on consecutive days. Her normal days are Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday, but because most of the centers in Wyoming (where we spent nine days) operate only on Monday-Wednesday-Friday, we decided to put her on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule for all three weeks of the trip. The drawback was that it would leave her with an extra "stretch day" from Friday the 13th until her treatment this morning, the 17th. One stretch day is enough for her to handle (predictably, it is the most likely day of the week for the little symptoms to manifest themselves, such as nausea and shortness of breath). That is why she has never missed a treatment in nearly six years on hemodialysis. So we arranged for the extra treatment on Saturday to put her back on her Cooperstown schedule.
Linda had a little different experience in each of the ten centers on this trip, but the one constant was that her dialysis treatments went smoothly. There were a couple of times when cramps persuaded the nurses to curtail her treatment by 10-15 minutes, and one time when her blood pressure got too low just before they were going to release her. She remained an extra ten minutes or so until that stabilized.
Not surprisingly, her "dry weight" was the toughest thing to get right. A quick explanation of dry weight if that's a new term: the essence of kidney failure is that the kidneys no longer process the fluids you take in, so you need to connect to a machine that does that processing. Between treatments, whatever the patient drinks stays in the body, adding weight that is carried around until the fluid is processed out during the next dialysis. The dry weight is what you should weigh after the treatment. The amount of weight added in between treatments can vary, and because that function of the machine has to be programmed in before treatment begins, it's something of a guessing game as to how close you'll be to your ideal dry weight. They don't know until they weigh you just before you head out the door.
If they don't get the dry weight down far enough, it means that it will take less fluid intake to give that bloated feeling which is relieved only during dialysis. If they lower it too far, it can whack out your blood pressure. Linda's treatments were solid in that regard, as her weight after a session was never more than .5kg away from her. That's a big reason why she felt so strong and comfortable during the trip, and why dialysis was only a bump in the road for her. When you get a "bad" treatment, you can real rotten until that next treatment, which is more of an ordeal. Linda felt good going into the treatments, and better coming out.
She did, however, have a little problem with altitude. The same thing happened a couple of times last year when we traveled to altitudes approaching 10,000 feet, but she was also coming off leg surgery and taking a post-surgery medication that also contributed a lot to her discomfort. Still, Linda's doctors cautioned her about doing too much at altitude, as dialysis and heart patients are at greater risk. She is both of those, all right, and since she has had two bypass surgeries on her left leg, that is what affects her the most at altitude. It happened first at the Upper Falls of the Yellowstone, which is somewhere over 8,000 feet, when she had trouble walking. Her leg was weak and wobbly, and after half a dozen steps she went back to the car while I took photos and roamed a bit. The same thing happened to her at Bryce Canyon last year.
That was the only thing that gave her trouble. She owes a ton of credit to her doctors and nurses at Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown, and to all the nurses who took care of her on the road. (I don't think she was seen by any doctors, which was fine by us). Nurses are a special breed, and there are no dilettantes among dialysis nurses in particular. Wherever Linda went, she was treated as a guest, not a passerby.
I'd like to finish with some brief items concerning the various things Linda experienced in dialysis centers around the country, the things that made each treatment unique.
- Overall, the best dialysis experience was in Rosebud, SD. Last year, she had dialysis on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona and found it disheartening because of the overt poverty in that desolate place. This year we visited the Rosebud, a Sioux tribe. The center itself is painted a striking shade of turquoise:
- The first thing we saw when we walked into the Rosebud center was a big display on one wall with an explanation of the importance of family and children to their tribe. Each patient's photo was there, about three dozen of them, and for each we were told how many children and grandchildren they have, their favorite television show, and their favorite family meal. It's a great way of reinforcing what dialysis patients know, which is that they are all in this together, a community of people helping each other get through it. At another center, we saw another set of patients' photos; this was a "Transplant Hall of Fame" showing the smiling face of one of the unit's patients who had a successful transplant.
- The Rosebud unit was relatively small (Louisville and Cheyenne had more than twice as many chairs, for instance), which made for a more intimate relationship with the nurses. Two of them, a woman named Rita who has won a national award for nursing skill, and her son, Justin, were particularly friendly. Meanwhile, I had a good conversation with George, one of the transporters who drives patients to and from their treatments. Many of them come from a good distance away, since dialysis centers are scarce in South Dakota and Wyoming.
- The other great thing about Rosebud was the memorial quilts. When a patient passes on, a quilt is made to honor him/her. Linda happened to have her treatment in the chair next to the old woman who has created the majority of those quilts. They hang from the skylight and the walls and are quite beautiful, as these photos show:
- The treatment that went least smoothly was in Cheyenne. They're in a large, new center, and Linda was in the first shift. But there was a problem with the machines--all of them--and the staff was scrambling around to overcome it. One of the chemicals that is circulated through the machine along with the patients' blood was misbehaving, and it was taking a lot of time to fix. In fact, even after Linda and I arrived at last year's location of that center, found a note giving the new address, and were a half-hour late, she still got there before they were ready to hook her up to the machine. When she did get the treatment, staff members were still distracted even after the mechanical problem was solved. Because of the early delays and emergency precautions, both patients and staff might have to be there very late, which is no good for any of them. So she reported feeling a little like a head of cattle being tended to briefly and impersonally. It was not necessarily a coincidence that this was one of only two centers where I wasn't allowed to visit Linda during the treatment.
- Of course it was the crisis mode that caused it; her treatment there last year was perfectly fine. But she was in such a hurry to get out of there that she left her earphones behind. When we arrived home a week after the treatment, the earphones were in the mail. So we'll be sending a thank you note to the folks in Cheyenne.
- One of her treatments (I won't say where) began late in the afternoon. She doesn't like that; she prefers it first thing in the morning so she doesn't have to sit around all day thinking about going. But this time it couldn't be helped. During her final half-hour, she was one of only two patients, but four nurses were still there. During the hour I spent there reading to Linda, the reading was frequently drowned out by the hysterical laughter coming from the nurses' station. It sounded like a drunken sorority party. All four nurses were young, with nobody to rein them in.
- At Louisville, she was the only white patient that morning. Nearly all of the other patients were men (a general tendency we think we detected was more men on the early shift and more women on the second shift), and nearly all of them spent the whole time giving the nurses a hard time. Whether it was the urban spiel or complaining about the needles or generally haranguing everyone around them, there was constant talk, and Linda found it very entertaining. She did run into a couple of patients like that on last year's trip (I remember hearing one yell "Hey!" to get the doctor's attention as he consulted with another patient), but not a whole room full of them.
- Linda felt that the best cleansing she got was at the center in Manhattan, KS. She couldn't be specific and it's hard to define. Some days you feel better after dialysis than on other days. That was the day she felt the best after her treatment.
- She had two treatments in only one place, Cody, WY. I had put most of my pre-trip logistical efforts into getting her a chair at Cody, where the center was in the middle of moving and wasn't accepting "travelers". Thank you to Ruth for letting me persuade her commit to giving Linda a chair time no matter what. In fact, they had an open house at the new unit two days before our arrival, resulting in much confusion before her first treatment as nobody realized that she still needed to go to the old unit for her dialysis. We were a half-hour late for that appointment, but received golden treatment from the whole staff. If she hadn't gotten dialysis there, we would have had to go to Bozeman, MT, once or twice, meaning that much less time in the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone, the highlight of our trip.
I think that's all. The dialysis truly was just a bump in the road for us. Nothing stood in the way of the fun we had on every day of this trip. That's why we looked so happy on the final day.
