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Canmore, Alberta, in Canada, has been our home for about six weeks, from early September to mid October 2023. Canmore is a town of about 15,000 people just outside the boundary of Banff National Park and about 50 miles west of Calgary. Surrounded by tall, steep mountains, every direction you look is stunningly beautiful. We both agree that it is the most beautiful place we have ever visited. Our house is in a great location — about a ten minute walk from the downtown area, with many restaurants and tourist shops, and down the block from our house is the Bow River Trail. Within less than a five minute walk we can be surrounded by beautiful mountain and river scenery. We have enjoyed walks along the Bow River Trail almost every day we have been here. Click on the first photo in each block to view larger images in a slideshow.

There are at least two herd of elk that wander around Canmore. We see them every few days. We have seen them along the Bow River Trail and in front yards around town, where they like to munch on the lawns. One day at dusk we saw an entire herd on the soccer field across the street from our house. They are huge, spectacular creatures and we keep our distance, as it is mating season and the bull elk can be very aggressive. In addition to the elk, Charlie spotted a black bear right on the outskirts of downtown. It was a small bear, not much bigger than a large dog, and it was minding its business, paying no attention to the people around.

The town of Banff is about a 20 minute drive to the west of Canmore, within the park boundary. We visited it a couple of times to explore the old town. There is a small but pleasant botanical garden on the grounds of the Banff National Park Administration Building.

Andy and Heather came to visit for a week in late September. When we picked them up in Calgary we spent a few hours at Studio Bell before heading up to Canmore. Studio Bell is home to the National Music Centre and the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. We learned that many famous musicians were Canadian, and we caught up on some of our Canadian favorites, such as k.d. lang. We both were struck by the broad influence of Randy Bachman on Canadian rock music and rock music in general. Bachman was a founding member of The Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. We also discovered the Women are Persons! Monument in Olympic Park in Calgary.

Andy and Heather enjoyed their time in Alberta and they both said they would like to come back sometime and spend more time. We took several great hikes while they were here and explored lots of beautiful scenery.

One of the joys of spending early autumn in Canada is seeing the advent of fall color. When we arrived in early September everything was green, but as the weeks went on we saw more and more spectacular fall color, mostly yellow from the aspen trees.

During August we spent a couple of weeks in Sacramento to take care of some medical appointments and to switch out our summer clothes for fall and winter clothes. Then we set out for our next home in Canmore, Alberta, Canada, just outside Banff National Park. We had planned to travel through Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, but due to the huge fires in the Kelowna area of BC, the BC government was encouraging people not to travel through the area. So, we took a more easterly route. We began by driving across Nevada on U.S. Highway 50, dubbed the “Loneliest Road in America.” There are only a few very small towns on a 250 mile drive, so it is indeed lonely and isolated. It traverses the typical basin and range topography of North America’s Great Basin. Much of the desert scenery seemed unseasonably green for late summer. Click on the first photo in each block to view larger images in a slideshow.

We considered going through Glacier National Park on our way to Canada but Glacier has become over-touristed and very crowded, and we know that we prefer the less-visited parks. So instead, we spent a day in Great Basin National Park (GBNP) near Ely, Nevada. This park encompasses a beautiful area of desert and mountain scenery around Wheeler Peak, elevation 13,065 feet, the second highest peak in Nevada. From Wikipedia, “The Great Basin is the largest area of contiguous endorheic watersheds, those with no outlets, in North America. It spans nearly all of Nevada, much of Utah, and portions of California, Idaho, Oregon, Wyoming, and Baja California.” Great Basin National Park is very isolated and there were few visitors there. In the Visitor Center we mentioned to the ranger that the desert seemed unusually green and we wondered if that was an effect of Hurricane Hilary, which had passed through Nevada a couple of weeks before. But she said that the desert had been green all summer as a result of the atmospheric river dumping record rain and snowfall last winter.

A highlight of a visit to Great Basin National Park is Lehman Caves, discovered by settlers in the 1880s and developed into a tourist destination throughout the 20th century. We took a ranger-led tour of the caves.

We spent two nights in Ely, Nevada, a pleasant but very isolated small town in east-central Nevada, near the Utah state line. We stayed in a funky little hotel that had a small casino attached – no table games, just a few slot machines. That’s typical in rural Nevada, not at all like Las Vegas.

It’s a tradition of ours that we bet $21 ($3 at a time) in the Megabucks slot machine whenever we are in Nevada. Megabucks is a network of slot machines tied together all across Nevada, with a progressive jackpot of at least $10 million. Megabucks is a standard $1 slot machine, but the caveat is that a player must bet the maximum ($3) on a spin to be eligible to win the jackpot. Once the maximum bet is made and the reels are spun, landing “MEGABUCKS” symbols along the payline on each of the reels is what it takes to win the hefty prize. Our largest win was $1,800 a few years ago in Reno, but this time we won about $100. We win just enough money often enough to keep us playing. That’s their hook, right?

Ely has a very nice little railroad museum and we spent a morning looking around. It is very informal and they let you go into the working shop where workmen are performing maintenance on steam locomotives. A cat named Dirt lived in the shop for 15 years until his death in January 2023. The museum is a relic of the Nevada Northern Railway which served the Ely area throughout most of the 20th century when there was a large copper mine and smelter there.

From Ely we traveled through Utah, Idaho, and Montana to reach the Canadian border. We made a brief stop in Butte, Montana, an old copper mining city, to view a huge open pit mine that operated in the mid-20th century. Since it closed it has filled with water that has seeped in, creating an environmental hazard that is continually addressed due to the leached minerals. Just outside Butte we saw Our Lady of the Rockies, a 90-foot statue built in the likeness of Mary, the mother of Jesus, that sits atop the Continental Divide. Just before we crossed the Canadian border we stopped at a rest area for lunch and we spied a little bat in the ceiling of our shelter, taking his daily nap. Before heading up to Canmore we spent a day in Calgary, the major city in southern Alberta. Calgary is a pleasant city, with parks and walkways along the Bow River, which flows down from the Rockies. They even have a botanical garden inside a downtown shopping mall, undoubtedly a welcome respite for folks during the long, cold Canadian winters.

After our day in Calgary we headed toward the mountains to check into our house in Canmore, our home for the next six weeks. We’ll have more on Canmore and Banff in subsequent blog posts.

After almost three months in the South we left North Carolina in late July to return to California. We took our time because there were people and things that we wanted to see along the way. We first headed to Des Moines, Iowa, to visit family there. Our route took us through West Virginia, a beautiful mountainous state, and we had some of the best Thai food of our lives in Charleston, the state capital. One of the fun aspects of travel is finding little gems in unexpected places. The next day we spent a couple of hours in Kettering and Dayton, Ohio, where Carrie lived in the late 1950s and early 1960s before her family moved to California in 1964. We found the houses where she lived, now surrounded by tall trees that were seedlings when she was a girl. In Des Moines we visited the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden, which has an indoor conservatory that is especially popular on cold winter days. Click on the first photo in each block to view larger images in a slideshow.

When we left Des Moines we spent an afternoon in Hamilton, Missouri, a visit that Carrie has been anticipating for a long time. Hamilton is a small town (population 1,690) about sixty miles northeast of Kansas City, but it is remarkable because it has been transformed into a quilter’s tourist mecca. Downtown, only about three blocks long, has been taken over by the Missouri Star Quilt Company. There are a dozen fabric shops downtown, all owned by Missouri Star, and each shop has a different theme, such as batik or seasonal holiday fabrics. Missouri Star has completely revived the economy in Hamilton and the surrounding area since its founding fifteen years ago. Hamilton is also the hometown of J.C. Penney. The small house where he grew up is preserved just off the main street downtown.

We spent a day in Kansas City so we could visit the National WWI Museum and Memorial, billed as the world’s most comprehensive WWI collection. We both learned a great deal about the war, the events in Europe that led up to it, and the later events that led to US involvement in 1917. But before visiting the museum we had lunch at Arthur Bryant’s Barbeque, arguably the most famous barbeque restaurant in the United States and a key player in the Kansas City-style barbeque tradition. There are photos on the wall of visiting dignitaries such as Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, and John McCain. The food was great and the place was already crowded at 11 AM on a Sunday, likely due to a Royals baseball game that afternoon.

We drove across Kansas the next day and spent the next night in Colby, Kansas, a small town in the western part of the state, where we had another culinary surprise – a really great taco truck. Who knew you could get great tacos in Kansas? The next day presented us with a new adventure, the first in our travels – a flat tire! We were turning into a gas station in Aurora, Colorado, and hit a horrendous pothole, which blew out the sidewall of the left front tire. Fortunately there was a tire store just across the parking lot so we were back on the road with a new tire in about two hours. But to make the story weird, just ten days later in Fresno we hit another pothole and blew out the sidewall of the same tire. In almost 150,000 miles of driving we had never had a flat tire and now we had two in ten days. The guy in the tire store in Fresno told Charlie that if it happens again he should buy a lottery ticket.

The next day in Colorado we spent the morning in Colorado National Monument, just outside Grand Junction in western Colorado. We enjoyed a morning hike among the beautiful red cliffs, before the day got too hot to enjoy.

The next morning we spent some time at Cedar Breaks National Monument in southern Utah. That day happened to be our 49th wedding anniversary, and we had visited Cedar Breaks on our honeymoon, along with Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks.

When we returned to California we visited our friends near Paso Robles, where our car had been stranded by a flash flood last winter. We retrieved a few of our belongings that still remained, and we experienced a small earthquake while we were there. The San Andreas Fault is about fifty miles to the east, and it continues to shift every now and then.

 

 

We were in the American South from mid-May through late July. We spent about a month and a half in Raleigh, North Carolina, and another month around Atlanta, Georgia. Our friends in Raleigh took two vacations while we were there, so we watched their dog, Kip, and their house while they were gone. During their second vacation we also watched their daughter’s dog, Reggie. Kip is a little two year-old Havanese and he loves to play. Reggie, on the other hand, is a fourteen year-old pit bull mix and he loves to sleep most of the time, as old men are prone to do. Click on the first photo in each block to view larger images in a slideshow.

Our friends live in a beautiful section of Raleigh called Five Points. It is about two miles north of downtown and many of the houses were built a century ago. We enjoyed frequent walks through the neighborhood to admire the beautiful houses and gardens. As spring turned to summer, however, we often curtailed our walks due to the oppressive heat and humidity. Believe it or not, the large skeleton pictured below was also a yard staple on our walks in Roseville, CA.

One of our favorite places in Raleigh was the North Carolina State Farmers Market. It is a huge permanent open-air market with roofs to keep out the sun and rain. We went there several times to stock up on fresh produce. We especially enjoyed the beautiful, tasty, abundant tomatoes in the summertime.

We also spent a month around Atlanta. Both of Charlie’s parents were from Atlanta so he still has lots of extended family there. We enjoyed many family visits while we were there. We rented a townhome in Smyrna, a northwest suburb, and we enjoyed walks on nearby trails. The trailhead for the Silver Comet Trail was only about a mile from our house, so we visited it frequently. It is an old railbed that has been paved and repurposed as a bicycle and pedestrian trail. It is well-used throughout the week, but especially on the weekends. A bit farther away was the Cochran Shoals Trail, part of the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area. The trail goes right along the banks of the river and is very scenic. We also enjoyed walking in nearby Heritage Park, which has several wooden walkways to get over the marshy areas in the forest.

A different sort of trail that we also enjoyed was the Atlanta Beltline Trail. Another repurposed railbed, it goes through the older urban heart of Atlanta. In one interesting spot it goes right by the old Sears Roebuck warehouse and the old Ford Factory, which have been repurposed as retail, residential, and business centers. Many new condominium buildings have sprung up near the Beltline Trail.

Charlie’s dad grew up in a section of Atlanta called Inman Park. About two miles east of downtown, it was Atlanta’s first suburb when started in the 1880s, but now it is squarely in the urban core. Charlie would visit his grandmother there when he was a kid on trips to Atlanta in the 1950s and 1960s. At that time Inman Park had become somewhat run down and many of the grand old houses had been subdivided into apartments. In the decades since then the neighborhood has been gentrified, and its glorious old mansions have become some of the most desirable residences in Atlanta. We visited Inman Park several times just to walk around and enjoy the neighborhood. On one occasion we also visited the historic old Oakland Cemetery and found Charlie’s grandfather’s grave.

One day we visited the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park. We had been there on a previous visit to Atlanta but we wanted to see what’s new. The park contains interesting historical exhibits on Dr. King’s life and on the Civil Rights movement more generally. It is located in the neighborhood where he grew up and it includes the house where he was raised and the old Ebenezer Baptist Church where he preached. The park is well worth a visit if you are in Atlanta.

One day we went to visit Charlie’s cousin in Pine Mountain, Georgia, near Columbus and directly adjacent to Callaway Gardens. We spent part of the day in the Gardens and got to see the Butterfly Center, Discovery Center, and Memorial Chapel, along with lots of beautiful forest scenery. And just as in Austin, Texas, there was a Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Garden.

Our travel has been curtailed somewhat by the Covid pandemic, but now that conditions have improved we’re beginning to move around again. Here is a summary of our past six months. We’ll probably have more frequent posts moving forward.

December began back in Sacramento so Carrie could have long-awaited knee replacement surgery. She had an excellent orthopedic surgeon at UC Davis and he used a minimally-invasive robotic technique. Hence, her recovery was quick and complete, and her surgery seems to have been a success. Within a couple of months she was largely back to normal and was free of the knee pain that has plagued her for the past several years.

We spent the winter and early spring in Sacramento and enjoyed frequent walks in the area. With the abundant rain in Northern California this year the rivers were flowing up to their banks. We also paid a short visit to Palo Alto and we were able to walk around the beautiful Stanford University campus. We had spent a couple of weeks in Palo Alto catsitting in 2021 but the central campus was closed at that time due to the pandemic so we appreciated the opportunity to see it this year.

The winter rains created quite an adventure for us! In early March we spent a couple of weeks catsitting for our friends, Sue and Leo, while they were on vacation. They live out in the mountains west of Paso Robles, CA, near Lake Nacimiento. On the night of March 10 a huge storm came through and washed out the only road between their house and Paso Robles, so we were stranded. Fortunately, we were able to get a boat ride across Lake Nacimiento on March 13 and we rented a car in Paso Robles and returned to Sacramento. But our car was stranded and we were not able to retrieve it until a road detour was completed on April 21.

Once we retrieved our car we began a leisurely three-week drive across the country, with the ultimate goal of arriving in Raleigh, NC, to dogsit for our friends, Chris and Reed, while they are on vacation. We began with short visits with family and friends in Las Vegas and Tucson. We then headed east into Texas and spent a couple of days in Big Bend National Park. Big Bend is one of the most isolated national parks in the lower 48 and the solitude and desert scenery are wonderful. Big Bend sits along the Rio Grande at the border with Mexico, and Mexico has created an adjacent national park to protect a huge piece of the Chihuahuan Desert.

We traveled eastward to Austin, Texas, to spend a week visiting Carrie’s brother and his wife, as well as our niece and nephew and their families, all of whom have relocated to Texas in recent years. One day we had lunch at the Salt Lick BBQ in Driftwood, TX, one of the great barbecue restaurants in the Austin area. We then spent the afternoon at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, a beautiful botanical garden operated by the University of Texas.

We traveled eastward again through northern Louisiana and we crossed the Mississippi River at Vicksburg, MS, where we spent most of a day at the Vicksburg National Military Park. Vicksburg was the site of an extended Civil War military campaign in 1862 and 1863 that resulted in a Union victory and complete control of the Mississippi River by Union forces. This victory freed up the river for Union commerce and effectively split the Confederacy in half east to west, ultimately leading to their downfall. General Ulysses S. Grant’s battle plan is considered to be one of the most ingenious in military history and it cemented his place in American lore. It is very interesting to tour the battlefield and realize how close the enemies were to one another. There was a great deal of gruesome hand-to-hand combat in the Civil War.

We’re now in Raleigh, NC, and we’re watching Kip, a delightful and playful Havanese dog. We’re in an older section of Raleigh, only about two miles north of downtown, and we’re enjoying walks through the tree-shaded neighborhood with lots of stately old homes. We’ll post more as we travel around.

We haven’t done a blog post in about eight months so this one will bring us up to date. We began the 2022 spring in Sacramento and enjoyed walks in the city and in the Effie Yeaw Nature Center. In late April we traveled to Tucson to house sit and pet sit for friends. On the way we spent a day in Joshua Tree National Park, near Palm Springs. We had enjoyed hiking in the park many years ago when we lived in Southern California so this visit brought back fond memories. Joshua Tree National Park has many spectacular rock formations as well as the namesake Joshua tree, the world’s largest Yucca. The day of our visit was chilly and windy, not uncommon for the high desert. Click on the first photo in each block to view larger images in a slideshow.

At the end of April we arrived in Dove Mountain, just outside Tucson, to house sit and pet sit for Jim and Pam, the parents of Andy’s fiancee, Heather. We sat for them last year so we already knew their dog, Rox, and their cat, Trill. But now they also have a new kitten!

Tasha is a Russian Blue and she is full of kitten energy. She has learned a lot from her dog brother Rox, and runs to greet us at the door with him. Her best dog feature, though, is playing fetch with water bottle caps. She can do this for a long time and finds caps all over the house to continue the game. It was a pleasure to enjoy their pets for a month.

We sometimes enjoy touring real estate open houses just to see the types of home design in the area. We visited the Sam Hughes neighborhood, an area of historic early 20th century homes just east of the University of Arizona near downtown Tucson. One house had several murals painted by Ted Degrazia, a famous Southwest artist.

We knew we would be spending a lot of time in Arizona this year so we purchased a membership to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum so we could go as often as we wanted. The museum is part museum, part botanical garden, and part zoo.  It is arguably the best attraction in the Tucson area. It is also adjacent to Saguaro National Park, which we also enjoyed in conjunction with our visits to the museum.

At the end of May we traveled back to Sacramento. In early June Carrie had hip surgery at UC Davis Hospital to repair a hip replacement that she had 22 years ago, now wearing out. Because it was a revision they did not have to cut any bones, just resurface the ball and socket. Hence, her recovery was quick, uneventful, and complete. We spent most of the summer in Sacramento, enjoying daily walks, usually in the morning before it got too hot. We were also able to visit Andy and Heather several times in Oakland, a fairly easy drive from Sacramento.

Late August saw us back in Tucson to house and pet sit once again while Jim and Pam’s younger daughter was married in Indiana. The weather was still hot but it was also the end of monsoon season so we got to enjoy several spectacular thunderstorms. Tuscon receives much of its rain through these summer thunderstorms, and the desert comes alive with seasonal greenery and fuzzy green grasses covering the hills. We had a break from house sitting in the middle of September so we went up to Flagstaff, Arizona, for a few days to explore and to enjoy the cooler weather in the mountains. Flagstaff has several nearby National Monuments and we visited Walnut Canyon (home to ancient cave dwellings) and Sunset Crater Volcano.

At the end of September we again traveled back to California, first with a brief stop in the Bay Area. We are spending much of the fall in Placerville, in the Sierra Nevada foothills about 50 miles east of Sacramento. Placerville is an old and historic gold rush town in a very scenic area, where the oak trees give way to evergreens. We enjoy walking on the bikeway/walkway that meanders through the nearby hills. Our house is very near Apple Hill, which is dotted with farms where you can pick your own apples. We are fortunate that this fall has been wildfire and smoke free.

Gold was discovered in 1848 in Coloma, only about ten miles from Placerville. We took a short day trip to the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, where you can see the actual spot of the first discovery as well as preserved historic buildings and mining tools from the gold rush era. On a longer day trip we went over to Lake Tahoe a couple of days after the first snowfall, once the roads were cleared. We enjoyed seeing the spectacular mountain scenery in the snow. Lake Tahoe is certainly a national treasure.

We left sunny Tucson in November 2021 and returned to California for the holidays. We had planned a number of holiday gatherings but with the omicron variant raging we limited our plans. We celebrated an early Christmas with Andy and Heather in Oakland and we visited friends near Paso Robles and family in Camarillo during December but otherwise we kept to ourselves and remained healthy.

During early December we stayed in a beautiful little craftsman bungalow in Martinez, along the Sacramento River delta near its exit into San Francisco Bay. Martinez is one of the older towns in California and it was once home to John Muir. We enjoyed walks around the old downtown and along the wetlands that border the delta. Click on the first photo in each block to view larger images in a slideshow.

We traveled south for the Christmas and New Years holidays and did some petsitting for friends in Ventura while they were in Italy. We watched a little dog and two cats. We enjoyed the warm weather, the abundant palm trees, and walks along the beach path in Ventura. No matter how far we travel, Southern California always feels like home.

After the holidays we settled into a small house for the winter. It is in Citrus Heights, an eastern suburb of Sacramento. It is only about a year old and it is very comfortable and stylish. We are still being careful with Covid so we keep to ourselves for the most part, enjoying daily walks in the area. We are hopeful that Covid will subside soon and we can enjoy more travel later in the year.

We have visited Tucson many times and we were happy to return in October to petsit for friends who were going on vacation. Rox is a friendly little cockapoo who loves to go on walks and check out all the places where other dogs have been. Trill is a black cat with a white patch on her front. She got her name because she likes to be scratched while she eats and she makes a trilling purring sound while doing so. While in Tucson we also got to visit with friends and family, and we had an early Thanksgiving dinner in early November. Click on the first photo in each block to view larger images in a slideshow.

We were in Tucson for Halloween and many of our neighbors decorated their homes and yards.

Our neighborhood was near the edge of the desert and there were lots of great walking spots nearby. Walks near the end of the day often featured spectacular desert sunsets. The fall weather was perfect for walking.

Our neighborhood was located at the base of the Tortolita Mountains and we were a very short drive from the Tortolita Preserve. This 2,400 acre park has set aside a beautiful undisturbed habitat for native desert plants and wildlife. The Sonoran Desert is naturally verdant, with large stands of saguaro, cholla, palo verde, mesquite, and other desert plants. The preserve has an extensive trail system and Charlie enjoyed hiking there on many occasions.

Saguaro National Park has two separate units on the outskirts of Tucson, one on the east side and one on the west side of the city. Both preserve spectacular stands of saguaro cacti. We visited both the east and west units on separate days and enjoyed some of the trails through the beautiful desert.

Tohono Chul is a desert botanical garden on the north side of Tucson. We enjoyed walking through their desert gardens and we had brunch at their restaurant. We sat outside and the local bees were very interested in our food.

We left Grants Pass, Oregon, in mid-September en route to Walla Walla, Washington, for a couple of weeks of petsitting for a dog and a cat, arranged through TrustedHousesitters. But first we spent a couple of days around Portland to do some sightseeing. On our first day we crossed the Columbia River into Washington to visit Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, the site of a huge volcanic explosion in 1980. The area of destruction is impressive and we were fortunate to visit on a clear day when the entire devastated area was visible. On the drive to the mountain we passed through acres of Noble fir trees planted to replace those harvested in logging operations decades ago. Click on the first photo in each block to view larger images in a slideshow.

On our second day around Portland we headed west along the Columbia River to Astoria, near the river’s mouth at the Pacific. There we visited Fort Clatsop, part of the Lewis and Clark National Historic Park. The Lewis and Clark expedition spent the winter of 1805-06 at the fort before they headed back east in the spring. A replica of their fort has been built at the site, and it is impressive to see how crowded and rough the living conditions were. Of particular interest was a salt production facility about 15 miles south on the Pacific shore. A small crew spent about two months at this location boiling and evaporating saltwater to harvest salt for the trip home.

We had never visited Walla Walla so it was an adventure to spend a couple of weeks getting to know this lovely town. If your image of Washington is of evergreens and temperate rain forests, well, Eastern Washington is nothing like that. The region consists of arid semi-desert but with ample water in the Columbia River Basin to support agriculture. Wheat has been a major crop over the years but during the past few decades a vibrant wine industry has emerged in the Walla Walla Valley. There are over a hundred small wineries in the region and it has become a wine destination. We didn’t do any wine tasting ourselves but we enjoyed taking drives in the countryside to see the vineyards and wineries.

We stayed in a house in one of the beautiful older neighborhoods in central Walla Walla, a great neighborhood for walking. The well-kept old homes and mature trees reminded us of our old neighborhood in Woodland. We were petsitting for a dog and a cat. Genji is a Shiba Inu, a Japanese breed known for their intelligence and independence. He is ten years old, around our age in dog years, and we got along splendidly. He enjoyed morning and afternoon walks in the neighborhood and he would make his presence known if we encountered another dog, making sure that our territory was protected. Tiger Lily is only a year old so she still has some of her playful kitten characteristics. One of her favorite tricks was to hide in the bushes and playfully pounce on Genji when he returned from his walk. Genji, for the most part, just ignored her.

Downtown Walla Walla has been rejuvenated in recent decades with the rise of the wine industry. It was featured by Sunset Magazine as one of the best small-town main streets in the West. It was fun to stroll around downtown and peer at the shops, restaurants, and tasting rooms that cater to the tourists. It seemed like there are at least two dozen tasting rooms in the downtown area, augmenting the tasting rooms at the wineries around the region.

Whitman College is a well-regarded liberal arts college in Walla Walla. It has an array of sculpture displayed throughout the beautiful campus. We spent part of an afternoon strolling around campus and admiring the sculpture.

Pioneer Park is Walla Walla’s main city park. It has a large aviary with a variety of birds from around the world. The aviary was very impressive for a small city like Walla Walla.

We made several short day trips around the Walla Walla region. Just outside of town is the Whitman Mission National Historic Site, a National Park Service facility documenting the history of a mission settled in 1836 by Marcus Whitman, a physician and Christian missionary. Whitman and his party made friends with the local Cayuse Tribe and for several years their outpost was a welcome stop for settlers traveling along the Oregon Trail. But by 1847 the Cayuse suspected that Whitman was trying to poison them and they killed him along with about a dozen of his group. The backlash to this killing among Americans in the eastern states led to immense cruelty toward Native Americans in the coming years, and also led to the establishment of the Oregon Territory to help the federal government control events in the Pacific Northwest.

The historic site also chronicles the life and culture of the Cayuse and other local tribes. The Cayuse were somewhat nomadic, moving every few months to take advantage of seasonal food supplies. A park ranger demonstrated how the Cayuse would erect their tipis at each new location.

Mill Creek runs through the center of Walla Walla and the city has established a network of bicycle and pedestrian trails that extend well out of town. We enjoyed walks along these trails, often seeing water birds along the way.

On several days we drove around the region and admired the beautiful vineyards and wineries. Most of the wineries are fairly new and many have tasting rooms with striking modern architecture. The local community college offers programs in viticulture and enology to supply an educated workforce for the local wine industry.

When we left Walla Walla we drove south through Eastern Oregon, one of the most sparsely populated regions in the United States. The drive south through Pendleton and Burns offers lots of beautiful scenery. We stopped at Lake Abert, near Klamath Falls, and we were struck by the low water level. Evidence of the continued drought is everywhere in the western states.

After spending over a year in California hiding from the pandemic we decided to head north to Southern Oregon in mid-August to spend a few weeks in Grants Pass. But first we set aside a day to visit Lassen Volcanic National Park near Redding, CA, a park that we had enjoyed on a visit about ten years ago. As luck would have it, however, Lassen was closed to visitors due to the massive Dixie Fire, so instead of heading east to Lassen we headed west into the Trinity Alps. We began with a stop in Redding to walk across the Sundial Bridge. This beautiful pedestrian bridge across the Sacramento River has an unusual single-tower suspension design. As with everywhere in Northern California that week, the sky was very smoky from multiple wildfires. After lunch we drove west into the mountains, stopping first at the Shasta State Historic Park. The park contains the ruins of the gold rush town of Shasta. We then drove around the nearby mountains and saw lots of beautiful scenery, somewhat obscured by smoke. Click on the first photo in each block to view larger images in a slideshow.

We rented a house on the outskirts of Grants Pass, Oregon, on a small bluff overlooking the Rogue River. The house was spacious and comfortable, and it was very peaceful to see the river out our picture window every day. It was a perfect place to hide from the pandemic. The river is popular with tourists and every day we would see boaters, kayakers, and fishermen. Several times a day we also saw jet boats from Hellgate Jetboat Excursions, which departed from a dock in the center of Grants Pass about three miles upriver. We never rode in a jetboat ourselves but the folks in these fast boats looked like they were having a good time.

We enjoyed daily walks, as we do everywhere we go. There were beautiful walks around our semi-rural neighborhood, and we also enjoyed walking in Tussing Park near the center of Grants Pass. Tussing Park has a pedestrian bridge high over the Rogue River to connect the two shores. It was smoky for much of our time in Grants Pass so we especially enjoyed the rare clear days.

We took a day trip to Jedidiah Smith Redwoods State Park near Crescent City, about a two hour drive from Grants Pass and just across the California state line. This park is managed jointly by California State Parks and by the National Park Service as part of Redwood National Park. We enjoyed hiking in the beautiful, lush redwood forest and marveling at these huge, ancient trees.