An aid to long-distance driving

I neglected to mention last night that as we sped westward from St. Louis over I-70, frankly not one of America’s most photogenic interstate highways, Greg and I were kept engaged by the audiobook version (complete and, ahem, unexpurgated) of Lolita, recited by Jeremy Irons in his trademarked buttery baritone. I would not have thought that Nabokov’s prose would have lent itself to this treatment, but the delivery is superb and the language enchanting. We’d actually begun to listen considerably earlier in the trip, in Virginia or North Carolina, but I had forgotten how, ah, explicit the narrative becomes early on, and by the end of disc three our avuncular ears were burning and we tacitly agreed to save the rest for this stage of the trip. Priggish of us, I know, but still...

So yesterday disc 8 (of ten) wound up at some propitious point (stopping for fuel; pulling into town...it’s a blur) with Humbert, his nymphet snatched from her sickbed by his mysterious double, setting out in search of them. It should make for a nice transit of Nevada’s austere, oddly lovely basin-and-range terrain as we set out on the final leg of our 10,000 mile trip.

Edit: We reflected before the end of our trip that Jeremy Irons’ reading was a critical element. Both of us agreed that an audiobook Lolita would not have worked with David Sedaris as Humbert.

Hunka hunka burnin’ blog

Every narrative arc must eventually descend (unless it stops in mid-air like Deadwood), and so the Great 2010 Careaga/Fleming Family Roadtrip and Traveling Circus speeds to a close—but not without a recapitulation. We would not, unlike the producers of Deadwood, do that to our loyal if far tinier audience. As so often before, your correspondent pleads fatigue (we have just driven from St. Louis to Ely NV in 36 hours, and are a tad tuckered) and begs your indulgence for the infelicities and incoherencies that will necessarily pop up in this tale

Friday 6 August - Huntsville

Within half an hour of our arrival Cousin Midge made us welcome with the delivery of a couple of extraordinary fruit baskets, cunningly made up to look like flower arrangements and consisting of grapes, melons, apples, pineapples, kiwi fruit, mangoes and strawberries. We fell upon these immediately—I fortunately remembered to take a single photograph before more than a few pieces of the brothers’ basket was consumed—and noshed on the leftovers from our ice chest during the drive to St. Louis the following day. In the evening Midge took us all out for some authentic Southern BBQ. The sauce was to die for and the portions were generous—so generous, indeed, that I could’t finish my slab of ribs, and sent the last third home with Midge’s son Joey, a decision I selfishly repented of the following day. After dinner we swapped family stories, and I’m afraid some of our more outlandish Careaga antics might have startled our Fleming cousin, but of course the star of these anecdotes remains our ferocious grandmother Dana, who still gets herself talked about seventeen years after her departure from this life, and who has left an impression so vivid that I confidently predict that Fleming descendants yet unborn will still be talking about her at mid-century.

Saturday 7 August - Adieu to Dixie; o’erarching ambitions

From Huntsville we drove up I-24 through Tennessee (reasonably lush and scenic) and into Kentucky (less lush and scenic until we left the Interstate), actually transiting both states without once stopping the car (save, of course, by way of observing lawful signs and signals). Although we technically left the precincts of the old CSA behind us when we crossed over from Tennessee, we had the sense (could it have been from the signs directing us to the “Jefferson Davis Memorial?”) that if the state of Kentucky remained nominally part of the Union during the War of Southern Obstreperousness, its heart wasn’t really in it. At Rand’s happy inspiration we took a side-trip through the rather quaintly-named “Land Between the Lakes,” a peninsula bisected north-south by a very scenic byway called—wait for it—“The Trace.” We were half expecting to see a goddamn hobbit race across the road.

Reaching St. Louis by mid-afternoon we navigated toward the city’s most conspicuous landmark (fairly easy to find by eyeball, which is fortunate because Eleanor tried to take us through a baseball stadium that had not been built back when she took geography) so that Kinsey could photograph and ascend the Gateway Arch. Parking was secured nearby and out of the sun. I might mention here that while St. Louis was indeed warm and humid by our Left Coast standards, the day’s weather once again fell short in sheer oppressive loathsomeness of what the previous day’s predictions had led us to dread. To my dismay, entry to the facility involved the kind of “security theatre” we associate with airports and courthouses. Being unwilling to have my third tiny Swiss Army knife confiscated in as many years, I grumpily told my comrades to go on in and meet me afterward, but Kinsey prevailed upon me to return to the car and leave my keychain there. She even accompanied me, which is good because in her capacious bag she turned out to be carrying a ten-inch Bowie knife, a blackjack, half a kilo of Semtex, a compact grenade launcher and a pint of raw ether. We returned from the parking garage after ten minutes with a lighter step and lighter spirits as we cleared the checkpoint without any unpleasant scenes.

I actually liked the informative 40-minute film documentary on the origins of the arch a bit more than I enjoyed the actual ascent. It was quite an engineering feat (and rather cheeky of architect Saarinen to throw out the design and leave it to others to figure out how to actually build the damn thing), and watching the old footage of its construction brought me back to an earlier stage of my career when I knew a great deal more about the steel industry than I remember now. By god, we had a manufacturing sector in those days, and an economy that stood on a foundation rather less evanescent than the recent model of selling each other houses with imaginary money borrowed from China. How on earth did things get so screwed up in a few decades?

Sunday 8 August - One, two, three, many Careagas!

Following a much-needed stop at a coffeemonger and another, also much-needed, at a laundromat, we set out from our motel in Fenton, a St. Louis suburb that bills itself as the “City of Parks”—industrial and business parks, to judge from the precinct in which we overnighted—for the reunion with our Careaga and Careaga-derived cousins, rather by way of bookending the Fleming period of the trip last month. Along the way, and still in Fenton, we stopped on the site of a Catholic orphanage where our father, as a plump-faced and bereft tyke of six, was parked for a year following the unexpected death of his young mother at the end of 1927. The orphanage is long gone, but a church now stands on the spot, which was, we gather, out in the sticks eighty years ago, but has now been surrounded by the town. We took plenty of photos for der Alte.

Following Cousin Pam’s lucid directions we found the celebration without difficulty and arrived on time. Cousin Pam and her husband, Jack Weber (a raconteur and a gentleman) have a lovely house on a ridge overlooking an unspoiled valley outside of town. We liked the “ridge” part because the sultriness of the day was significantly ameliorated by an intermittent breeze throughout the afternoon. It turns out that our visit was by way of being a seed crystal that drew relatives from all over the state, some of whom had not actually got together for some years. We didn’t realize we possessed that kind of box office draw. Jeanne and Greg both learned some family history (Pam and Cousin Linda are both by way of being custodians of the saga) and scrutinized photos and documents. I had meant to do some of the same, but lost track of time over the course of the afternoon chatting up Jack W, who had some quite captivating stories to tell, and rather let the afternoon get away from me. To my other cousins: I’m sorry I let slip the opportunity to talk to you at greater length, but as Bogie might have said had he lived in the present century, we’ll always have Facebook.

Monday 9 August - And now we are two

Up at 5:30 for breakfast at the hotel (this time wisely skipping the house specialty, sawdust quiche) so that Jeanne and Kinsey could be delivered to the airport in time to do their star turns at TSA’s Security Theatre before returning to Folsom, where Jeanne was expected back at work and Kinsey is shortly to begin school (in which undertaking I am confident she will so distinguish herself that among the faculty her term papers will come to be known as “Kinsey Reports”). Greg and I then turned our eyes west to our night’s destination in…Denver. There was, however, one large obstacle.

Kansas.

We will sum up our impressions of “The Sunflower State” (at least as seen from a speeding car on I-70) in the form of a series of proposed mottos for the state license plate:

KANSAS: 430 Miles of Nothing in Particular

KANSAS: Between You and Where You Want To Be

KANSAS: In Your Way

KANSAS: B-O-O-O-R-I-N-G!

Heavily caffeinated, and alternating turns at the wheel, we raced across the state and into eastern Colorado, or “Greater Kansas,” as we dubbed it. As we approached Denver the skies darkened and, as they had already done a dozen or more times during the driving portions of our vacation, opened up with a great downpour. This time, though…

I opened the window a few inches and stuck my hand out. “My God!” I exclaimed. “There‘s cool air out there!” It was true. For the first time in two weeks rain was falling on us that was actually less warm than human fluids. We were back in the West.

A few minutes later—we’d decided by this time to press on to Golden, the other side of Denver, so that we’d be spared the worst of the morning traffic—a van two lanes away began sliding out of control, almost colliding with another van, which fishtailed as it braked and as the first went into a full spin. Fortunately both vehicles stopped (the first one by now pointed bass-ackward on the freeway) without striking one another or anyone else, although I can’t speak for what may have happened after they disappeared in the murk and rain behind us. Although neither car was ever closer than twenty yards to us, a collision between them would likely have set off a nasty game of rush-hour billiards from the unpredictable consequences of which we might not have been exempt.

In Golden that night (safe and sound) Greg retired early and Rand paid a visit to his cherished friends Frances and Morris R, who plied him with wine, hummus, cheese, salmon and edifying conversation. He thanks them for improvising such gracious hospitality on inexcusably short notice, and is confident they understand he’d do the same for them.

Tuesday 10 August - Monuments and memories

We made a side trip to the implausibly tiny and remote Colorado community of Glade Park, where a high school friend I hadn’t seen in over thirty years owns the general store. Access is via the “Colorado National Monument," a federally-run scenic attraction featuring some rather breathtaking geology (so breathtaking, indeed, that the feds have within living memory attempted to make the residents pay seven dollars a pop for the privilege of driving to their own homes. The government lost that one in court). It was a pleasant if necessarily abbreviated visit, the one disappointment being that friend TJ no longer makes her legendary beef jerky, regarding which I had formed the most exalted expectations. Retracing our route to the park entrance, we then drove through nearby Grand Junction, a rather ugly, formless, sprawling slurb, spent the next few hours crossing Utah before reaching the garden spot that is eastern Nevada (actually almost lush compared to its neighbor) and our final night’s fraternal lodging here in Ely, where I type in the motel room while Greg, in the casino across the street, is (I devoutly hope) making back our expenditures to date. And so to bed.

Above: Wonderful “Edible Arrangements” fruit basket, only slightly gnawed upon at this point

Cousins Jeanne and Midge post-BBQ, Huntsville

Greg and Jack Weber on Pam & Jack’s ridgetop grounds

Rand and TJ in the Glade Park Store, a century-old business

Weather; scenery; things to eat

We beat our estimated ETA for Huntsville by an hour—because we forgot we’d be crossing back to Central Time at the state line. To propitiate the cosmic weather dudes (who did not altogether forsake us in Atlanta, showing up in the latter afternoon with some serviceable breezes to ameliorate the heat) we are again hiding in our rooms for a few hours until we rendezvous with Cousin Midge this evening.

Northern Alabama is prettier than expected, and our route has taken us through what I gather are some of the higher elevations in the state. Billboards seem far scarcer, at least between towns, than they were in Georgia. With Jeanne at the helm we rolled through a couple of dramatic squalls in the last hour before Huntsville, including about five minutes of rain so vehement and blinding that we’d have gratefully pulled off the road had there been some practical place to do so. That front appears to have missed the city, regarding which we have yet to form an impression save that it is on the warm and humid side.

We betook ourselves to the streets of Atlanta yesterday evening, wandering about in the “Centennial Park” from the 1996 Olympics, where a musical fountain played the 1812 Overture and the theme from Chariots of Fire to the slack-jawed astonishment of onlookers, and then to “Atlanta Underground,” which we earnestly exhort our readers to miss on their next visit, and where we had in a “sports bar” possibly the least distinguished meal of the expedition to date, and I’m including fast food joints here. Sated, or at least put off the whole idea of solid food for a while, we headed back toward our stark but inexpensive digs, traversing along the way a pretty tree-lined block designated “historic” and featuring three or four promising-looking eateries, all of them closed.

This morning Greg found us a quite serviceable breakfast place, “Rise and Dine,” at some distance from the Motel 6, which was pleasant because the drive took us through several green and stately residential precincts. All this was amply documented by Kinsey, who has now taken over 2700 pictures since the seventeenth.

In the previous entry I neglected to mention, speaking of fast food joints, that somewhere outside of Macon yesterday we stopped at a “Chick-fil-A” for poultry-premised sandwiches, and while I was discarding the styrofoam integument I noticed a sign—could it have been an actual plaque?—commending the restaurant (which, I should mention, also has a sign in the window proudly proclaiming that none of the chain’s outlets conduct business on the Lord’s Day) for its courage—its courage—in arranging for its exterior electric signage to flash the message “Happy Birthday Jesus” on Christmas day. “Wow!” I exclaimed, perhaps a shade too loudly, “What kinda brass ones does it take to come right out and say ‘Happy Birthday Jesus’ in central Georgia? And in, you know, in public and all?” I was prepared to enlarge on the subject, but by this time Greg had already pumped up the air pistol, hit me with a thorazine-tipped dart and hustled me out to the car.

Above: Never on Sunday. A Chick-Fil-A poultry-derived sandwich

Marching through Georgia

The mysterious High Sheriffs of Comparatively Clement Weather who have cast such a beneficent eye on this undertaking since we left the West appear to be taking a day off. News reports suggested that unmediated Atlanta would be unendurable today, and our brief experience of the motel parking lot bear these out. We have accordingly retired to our rather austere rooms in this Motel 6, parked ourselves near the (also) rather austere air conditioners, and await sundown. Fortunately Atlanta was always conceived as a layover and not a target: no ties of friendship or consanguinity detain us here, and while the city is undoubtedly pocked with must-see features of a cultural and/or historical character, the fact that none of us can bring any to mind serves as a further disincentive to aggressive exploration in the heat of the day.

We followed Interstate 75 from Bradenton, and what we noticed most from the minute we crossed the state line is that Lady Bird Johnson might as well never have lived as far as one could tell from the volume of outdoor advertising. I was put in mind of these lines from Ogden Nash:

I think that I shall never see

A billboard lovely as a tree.

Indeed, unless the billboards fall

I’ll never see a tree at all.

Tomorrow, on to Huntsville in neighboring Alabama, where we anticipate that the HS of CCW will again find us not.

Tales of Three Cities

I. Boston: Literally Little Italy

After four days in New England we departed on Wednesday after emotional farewells with with our aunties and cousins. Cousin Thea was sensibly still asleep on her midweek day off, so I forbore to wake her when Greg and Scott came by at 6:45 to spirit me away; the hurried note I left for her in the kitchen was a poor expression of gratitude for her many kindnesses.

We'd spent much of the previous day in Boston, arriving by commuter rail from Lowell early in the afternoon. After a bit of aimless wandering, and some wilting in the generous humidity, we ducked into an air-conditioned tavern for some lunch and some cooling adult beverages while we plotted our next move, which was in the event to place ourselves in the hands of one of the many tour operators haunting downtown. We took an “on-again, off-again (certain restrictions apply*)” tour that included a spin around the harbor and an hour stay at the Charlestown naval shipyard, where Grandfather Fleming worked during WW II.

Following the tour we set off to the “North End,” which proved in the event a delightful little Italian district of winding streets and enticing aromas. Alas, lunch was still too recent to make dinner a realistic proposition, so we merely knocked around the neighborhood for another couple of hours absorbing the local color, both ethnic and historic (e.g., the Old North Church and its weathered nearby burial ground, and Paul Revere’s charming pied-à-terre, the latter locked up tighter’n a drum by early evening) before taking the commuter train back to Lowell. In the course of that ride we sat near a young man who talked business (marketing, heaven help us) volubly and at high volume to a friend or colleague before he was obliged to take a call from his mother. Thereafter his conversation consisted of soft grunts at longish intervals.

*Among the unexpected restrictions: at one point we were commanded, while awaiting the arrival of an “on again” tour bus, to line up in the sweltering sun rather than under the shelter of a nearby shade tree. When we politely protested, and explained our reasoning, we were told to go pound sand and again directed to stand in line under the glare of a Beantown afternoon. The “Silver Trolley” does not receive our custom again.

II. Mensches Take Manhattan

From Cousin Thea’s rustic New Hampshire dacha we headed for our night’s lodging in Jersey City, stopping for breakfast at Chet’s Diner in Northboro (?) MA and making an unscheduled stop at Mystic Seaport, a scenic little theme park of a town, in Connecticut. With an abundance of neither time nor funds we skipped the paid admission (too bad, in a way, because the sailing ship Joseph Conrad, on which der Alte trained during his brief stint [pre-USMC] as a merchant marine cadet, was docked in the paid area) but availed ourselves of the well-stocked gift shop, where Rand, who had up to this point rather been letting down the side in this respect, purchased his first souvenir tee-shirt.

With young Kinster at the wheel now we proceeded on to Jersey City via Manhattan, at one point overruling Eleanor, our onboard GPS-based navigation thingum, when she directed us onto the Henry Hudson Parkway. “Recalculating,” she replied sullenly, plotting her eventual revenge, which she was to savor nicely chilled—but I anticipate myself. Our hotel was in a slightly seedy section of Jersey City (if there are posh districts of the town we contrived to miss them), but conveniently close to the Port Authority train into Manhattan, and thence, once having settled ourselves, we ventured without Jeanne, who begged off pleading exhaustion and a lowered resistance to crowds.

With just six hours to take in Manhattan we could scarcely give first-timers Kinsey and Scott a comprehensive tour, particularly since Greg’s impressions were fourteen years out of date and Rand’s twenty-seven, but we wandered around sundry parks and squares, through packed streets bustling with low-end storefronts and sidewalk vendors, past awe-inspiring architecture old and new, to Times Square, to Radio City Music Hall (breaking from our rambling for long enough to enjoy a nice dinner in the theatre district), through Central Park, to “The Dakota” and “Strawberry Fields,” via cab to the Chrysler Building, and finally, via a series of Turkish baths cunningly disguised as subway stations (ah, but the cars themselves are air conditioned: how unimaginably awful the waits would have been without that in prospect!) back to the PATH terminus for the ride to Joisey City. And the evening and the morning were the eleventh hour.

III. Byzantium on the Potomac; Après moi, le déluge

We rolled through the grimy industrial suburbs of northern New Jersey and only gradually noticed that the passing scenery was starting to take on a bucolic (OK, comparatively bucolic) character during the hour or so we approached northern Delaware. An untimely sneeze caused Rand to miss our transit of that state, and before we knew it we were in Maryland heading for Baltimore as traffic thickened around us and the skies darkened above. As we crawled around Baw’mer a couple of premonitory raindrops spattered our windshield, following which the clouds disgorged a volume of water approximately equivalent to a January’s worth of rainfall in Northern California. Greg, at the wheel, was steely-nerved as he steered us through the onslaught; the same cannot be said, alas, of Eleanor, whose behavior started becoming erratic as she developed an arbitrary preference for congested surface streets over freeways and, as we drew near our motel in Alexandria, for obscure airport service roads over broad city thoroughfares. We finally had to disconnect the poor thing over her piteous protests (“I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission”) and proceed to our destination under manual control with advice from The Great Gazoogle delivered over the magical team of Greg’s iPad and Rand’s magic MiFi card. Just as we arrived, the weather really went berserk, drenching the entire party as we sprinted across the twenty feet between our parking spot and the motel office.

It was starting to look as though we might have to confine our visit to the DC metro area not merely to leafy Alexandria but to our modest rooms at the Travelodge, but an hour later the storm had petered out and the sun was shining, so we girded our loins and strolled half a mile to the nearby rail station and rode into Washington, emerging at the “Federal Triangle” station, and thence to the National Mall, where we variously inspected or favored with our passing glances the Washington Monument, the World War II Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial (regarding which it occurred to me that it might be a nice gesture to record the names of all the Vietnamese who perished by the force of American arms during the same period, but a moment’s reflection persuaded me that this would be impractical, since a comparable treatment would require a wall seventy feet at its highest point and stretching nearly the length of the Mall) and the FDR Memorial, this last being visited by Greg and Scott only, and proving farther away than our cheap not-to-exact-scale tourist map suggested. When they rejoined us after the better part of an hour we decided to catch a bus down Constitution Avenue to the center of town, where both eateries and DC Metro stations might be expected to be thicker on the ground. As we waited for a scheduled bus, clouds swiftly congealed anew overhead and opened up on us, so a quick Plan B, involving two taxicabs, was improvised. We agreed to rendezvous at the Capitol, where the brief storm conveniently dissipated. Although we had all been soaked during the few minutes before we flagged our taxis, everyone was in good humor about it, because what with the walking through the heat and humidity we’d each of us been feeling slightly oppressed. The magic of evaporation as we dried off in the newly cooler air post-cloudburst cheered everyone up, and we strolled to the magnificently-restored Union Station retail complex for dinner and a ride home.

This morning Scott departed by air back to California (demands of work) and the rest of us soldier on to Greensboro NC, where we’ll pass the night, and from the ride toward which—somewhere north of Richmond at the moment—I post this update.

Above: Expedition staff photographer Kinsey G in Times Square

Technically not a reunion

We sprinted from Greater Indianapolis to Greater Cleveland yesterday, beating our ETA by five minutes and arriving at the University Heights home of Cousin Roger just before one o’clock. None of us had met Roger before: he's a retired policeman (Shaker Heights: he was on hand for the excitement when they had their police station blown up there in 1970) and the senior member by some years of this generation of Careagas. He and his wife MarnyJean and sons Clay and Brett (who design and manufacture jewelry in precious metals! —that Careaga "art" gene is a persistent one) could not have been more gracious. MarnyJean served us a lavish lunch of salmon quiche, a salad with exotic greens and bits of chopped mango, and a wonderful concoction called "Scotch eggs," which I'll attempt to duplicate upon return to my own kitchen and after suitable research. A shout-out to our Cleveland cousins, and thank you again for your many kindnesses. We look forward to connecting later in the trip with the St. Louis contingent of the clan.

This morning we depart Buffalo, where we overnighted, stop by—let me check my notes—Nigeria Falls, apparently quite the regional tourist attraction, where several abandoned bank accounts from sundry equatorial despots await us, before crossing New York into Massachusetts, and thence to the ancestral Fleming precincts of Greater Boston this evening. Billerica, here we come!

Roger’s Version: L-R: Clay, Brett, Roger, MarnyJean

We Five

L-R: Greg, Scott, Jeanne, Rand, Kinsey

Monumental Folly

Day the fourth: We rose early for a serviceable breakfast (accompanied, unfortunately, by anaemic coffee) and betook ourselves to the Mt. Rushmore visitor center, a considerably more elaborate facility than I remembered from my 1991 visit. My friends know that I am ordinarily scornful of American iconography, but there was a lump in my throat as I gazed up at the familiar visages: James Mason…Cary Grant…Leo G. Carroll…Martin Landau. We lingered for an hour and then hit the road, Rand at the wheel and Greg riding shotgun, east across South Dakota on I-90. The state’s set designers appear to have blown their budget on the Black Hills, because the scenery was pretty thin thereafter, but we did make a side trip to Mitchell SD to see the aptly-named “Corn Palace,” which looks like something a chamber of commerce might come up with if you spiked the punch with acid at the Rotary Club dinner.

After a longish day on the road we have arrived by mutual arrangement in Omaha, where we are chilling out* while waiting to touch base with Cousin Dave, a resident of this city, with whom we had made tentative (perhaps too tentative) plans to dine this evening. Tomorrow, on to Indianapolis, or rather a suburb thereof, provided the weather doesn’t interfere.

*“Chilling out” in that the room originally assigned to the men of the party lacked functional air conditioning, or even ventilation. We are native Californians all; we don't do the heat-and-humidity thing.

Above, upper: The Great Stone Faces. L-R: Mason, Grant, Carroll, Landau.

Above, lower: The Corn Palace. I am going to turn this into such a San Francisco in-joke when I get it into Photoshop.

Transit of Mordor

From Whitehall we barreled east on Interstate 90 across Montana today, Jeanne taking the helm for the first few hours and her daughter, who did yeoman work at the wheel, for the rest of the way, including side trips to the Little Big Horn battle site (where monuments erected in different eras variously explained that US troops were "clearing the area of hostile Indians" and that the other side were "defending the Cheyenne way of life." You pays yer wampum and you takes yer choice, sez I) and Devil's Tower, the impressive basaltic column not far from the South Dakota Border. This evening we bed down, to the accompaniment of distant flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder, in Keystone SD in what would be the shadow of Mount Rushmore were it still daylight.

A good portion of the day we spent traversing the Land of Mordor, formerly known as Wyoming until we rechristened it this morning in recognition of kindly, avuncular, nakedly sinister Dick Cheney, its favorite son. Throughout the afternoon the weather grew increasingly fraught, its baneful aspect being augmented at one point by what appeared to be clouds of dark, oily smoke rolling and roiling across the highway in front of us, black against the grey thunderheads. This proved in the event to be not smoke but thick clouds of coal dust from...an open pit mine? Impossible to tell, but the particulates lent an appropriately stygian element to an already infernal landscape.

The weather was worrisome, but it actually struck ahead of us. As we left the main route for the side trip to Devil's Tower we passed through the Mordorian hamlet of Moorcroft, which looked as though it been thrashed to within an inch of its existence (trees down; foliage and debris littering the streets) minutes earlier. The damage was impressive enough that we wondered if it hadn't been caused by a small tornado, although online investigations conducted from the car suggest that it was rather a violent, very fast-moving thunderstorm. It never laid a glove, or a hailstone, on our little expedition, and although the sky continued to glower at us intermittently throughout the remaining miles to our destination, everyone is now safely bedded down. Tomorrow: on to Omaha!

Above: At the Little Big Horn cemetery, early collateral damage in the war against junk email.

In enemy territory

Four states in one day. This evening we post from Whitehall MT, a flyspeck of a town in the Mountain Time zone, having followed the Columbia River gorge from The Dalles, stopped in Spokane to pluck Sis from the airport there, cut across the Idaho Panhandle and finally stopped for the night in this quaint burg, which seems characterized by a faltering local economy (to judge from the number of boarded-up establishments in what passes for the commercial district) and a thriving species mosquito that attacks at dusk in large numbers and with great ferocity. The picture above sums up the spirit of the place, and didn't those fine revolutionary sentiments sound more stirring forty years ago from the left, and don't they seem creepy now, o my auditors and only friends? Another long day, another abbreviated entry.

No, really

Alas, it's late and I've driven all day, so expect no prodigies of wit or style at the outset. From a "Super 8" motel in The Dalles, Oregon, a few hundred yards from the mighty Columbia River and just a few steps from a stairwell faintly redolent of powerful insecticides, I tender greetings on behalf of our party of four: brothers Rand, Greg and Scott, and niece Kinsey. Sister Jeanne has lingered in Folsom to be on hand for the birth of her seventh grandchild, and thanks to the miracle of modern cellular communication we were kept informed at intervals throughout the afternoon of the progress of cervical dilation: four centimeters, seven centimeters, nine...oh, sorry, too much information? At somewhere around 8:30 this evening little Tyler Gibson entered the world, and we are advised that mother, grandparents, father and son are all resting comfortably and considerably relieved about it.

We elected to leave Interstate 5 at Weed CA and take the more lightly traveled Route 97, greatly to the consternation of our onboard navigation system, which tried for miles to talk us into turning around, and then sulked for hours, occasionally snarling "Soft left in 800 feet" (where the obviously impractical alternative was a rutted cowpath) while withholding advice at a couple of ambiguous forks in the road. Fortunately it is still the glory of human intelligence, or some human intelligences, to be smarter than automated subroutines. The scenery of central Oregon is far less lush than along the western highways, and along some stretches downright arid, but possessed of an austere beauty, particularly along the last fifty miles—we were too busy admiring that stretch to take pictures, unfortunately.

Jeanne flies into Spokane and joins the expedition there late tomorrow morning as the Careaga/Fleming siblings set forth on the 2010 "Aunties and Cousins World Tour." Better-crafted entries to follow, I hope.