We have a connection in Saskatchewan with my friend Terry, whom we met almost two years ago in Memphis. Terry lives near the city of Prince Albert, SK and he has a boat on Waskesiu Lake in Prince Albert National Park, so our week-long stay in the park gave us opportunities for a few convenient musical meet-ups.
Continue reading “Prince Albert National Park: Waskesiu Lake Blues Cruise”
The purpose of this post is mostly to document an off-the-wall problem (and the solution!) as well as a few other things we’ve figured out that might be useful to someone else following a similar path through RV-land, or troubleshooting a Dodge-Mercedes-Freightliner Sprinter. A couple of our regular readers may actually find parts of it fascinating, and I am certain that others absolutely will not, but that’s not why it’s here. It’s kind of tech-y and arcane, and that should be enough for you to sort yourself into the appropriate group and either continue reading or move on.
Continue reading “Electricity, gremlins and this year’s upgrades”
The last time I wrote about Dana and Muffin, we’d just visited with them in Eugene and I talked about how they’d helped to inspire our conversion from ordinary folks into camper-owning road warriors. Here’s kind of an update to that.
As the summer and September end, we had our final visit in CA, after which we will be truly eastward bound. From Yosemite, we headed up to Tahoe City to visit my cousin Pinky and her husband Peter.
In the early 1940s my grandparents bought a cattle ranch on the San Francisco peninsula, in the Santa Cruz mountains west of Palo Alto, off of the California 35, which is also known as the Skyline Boulevard. My mom and her sisters and brother moved to the ranch at relatively young ages and did most of their growing up there. Eventually my grandfather left the ranch to pursue other ventures, while my grandmother decided to stay put and established on the ranch a nursery specializing in California native plants.
On our way back north, we stopped in Chico to visit David and Trudy. Dave is Katy’s brother and also Pete’s. Here in the Central Valley of California, folks grow food. Fruit, nuts, rice, cattle, and more. No surprise then that our sightseeing tour had a focus on food, with even some eating thrown in, and there were other aspects, as well.
Coming into California for me is kind of like coming home, since I was actually born here. I still have many connections to friends and family in this state, so we have some serious traveling ahead of us. Let us begin…
Continue reading “Sacramento, Santa Rosa, Redwoods, Bodega Bay”
My mother’s sister Gerda lives on a cattle ranch in southern Oregon, and has done so for close to all of her adult life. The ranch has been her family home since my uncle Hawk took it over from his uncle Buck and my aunt has been running the place with her family for decades. She is an honored cattlewoman and has been a strong matriarch of the family and the family business.
There is a certain ethereal plane of friendship where you can pick up a conversation as though you’d just left the room for a few minutes, even after a gap of several years. This is how it feels when I get back together with Dana, my roommate from college, and his wife Muffin, both of whom I’ve known for a few more than forty years.
For that reason, alone, our visit was wonderful. Food and conversation, catching up, exchanging stories, just hanging out and visiting with old friends like these were still the old times. Fantastic! I’m not going to make this post about that, though.
Last October in Memphis at the Blues Guitar Unleashed (BGU) Live gathering, several of us jammers stayed at the Tom Sawyer Mississippi River Campground in West Memphis, Arkansas. Among that crew were Michael (known as Stringbreaker on the BGU forum) and his wife, Kat. Michael and Kat live in Moab and they told us we should stop by if we were ever passing through there. Ding ding ding!
Continue reading “Jamming with Stringbreaker”