For this warm weather, I open up the house in the morning to let the cool night air in. I open windows and the door to the patio. This morning, the quiet of a Saturday morning at home was interrupted with chirping and tweeting and thumping from the living room. I ran out there to find one frightened and frantic bird flying around the living room with a cat in close pursuit.

There is a happy ending to this story. The bird flew behind the stereo speaker in the corner of the room and I grabbed the cat and got her out of the way. A dish towel thrown over the bird allowed me to pick it up and take it outside where it flew off into the trees.

Now, a few hours after the excitement, all of the cats in the house are still looking around the living room for the bird. They can smell it.

Finally home and a real computer. It’s nice to be home in my own bed and with my own files. I haven’t moved my digital presence totally onto the network so my own files and desktop and organization are not portable. It feels comfortable to be home.

I’ve sorted through the pictures and the main groups are up. This is a long, catch-up entry with descriptions and pointers.

First is the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (pictures) which were, well, smoky. The haze is a natural phenomena and the park is full of hills, trees, camping, water falls and streams. A previous blog post was from Mingo Falls and later in the day we hiked in to see Laurel Falls (pictures). We hiked the mile to find a small falls filled with people. Some had obviously packed everything for a day of picnicking and splashing with the kids. A nice hike in the woods, though.

Just outside the park is Tuckaleechee Caverns (pictures). This is an old fashioned, family owned cavern roadside attraction. An easy walk through the well paved cavern with interesting rock formations.

For a little historical South, we stopped at The Hermitage (pictures). This is the farm Andrew Jackson retired to after service as the president of the United States. It’s back in the time before secret service and security details. It’s just a farm although, these days, they make a big deal about the slaves who lived there and made the farm work.

Keeping with the presidential theme, the next stop was the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site (pictures). Wikipedia has a concise description of the history of this monument. In our cynical age, it is hard to comprehend the adoration a log cabin received. Eventually, it was enshrined in a granet monument.

The next stop was to downtown St. Louis with a visit to the Arch. If you were following the news at that time, you would know that the central U.S. was surviving record floods and tornadoes. We weren’t sure the arch park would be open but it was completely operational although some of the pictures do show the Mississippi overflowing it’s banks onto the sidewalks. The trip up the Arch was bizarre. You get into these claustrophobia attack inducing little pods which then click and clunk as they take you to the top. Once at the top, you are in a small arched room with TINY windows to peer out over the city. It is clear that Disney was not consulted when they built it.

A lot of driving brought us to Jewel Cave National Monument (Wikipedia explains that a “national monument” is declared by the president without requiring the approval of Congress.) This gigantic system of caves now has an elevator for us softies to casually tour the underground. There are still people squeezing through the caves but we get to walk through the cool 56 degrees on concrete and aluminum walkways and enjoy the formations. It was hard taking pictures because the lights they used had widely different temperatures. That, and my little digital camera doesn’t have a flash that goes more than a few feet. Some pictures did turn out.

Out of the ground and over to Yellowstone National Park (pictures). It was an amazingly beautiful day — cool temperatures, bright sun, blue sky filled with white clouds. The park was showing itself off. Bison grazed (and clogged the roads) and the rush of melting snow filled the streams. Beautiful.

Well, how do you top Yellowstone? With a nuclear reactor, of course. Pictures. In the 1950’s, a small reactor (”Experimental Breeder Reactor 1″ or “EBR-1″) in the middle of Idaho proved that nuclear reactors could create their own fuel (”breeding” plutonium) and generate electricity efficiently (output more than goes in). The DOE keeps the building open in the summer with tours by informed but otherwise very bored employees.

Up the road is an area of lava formations in the Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve. Pictures.

After 9476 miles, we are finally home. Whooo hooo!!! The bad news is the of bills and weeds to contend with. I will be uploading the rest of the pictures and videos and adding some more commentary the next few days.

It looks like We have made it through the bad weather in the middle of the country. The stop at the arch in St Louis meant some extra driving around since the road along the river was closed. Flooding because of the high Mississippi River. there have been many flooded fields along the highway with rain still coming down.

We spent the night in Kansas City. The night was windy and the tornadoes occurred to the west of the city while we sleep peacefully in our beds. Thursday morning was cool (65: the coolest weather we’ve had since touching California) and the front had moved to the east leaving us to travel north behind all the bad weather.

The plan is to move quickly with long driving days so we can get home next week. We are getting tired of traveling around living out of suit cases. The boys also remembered things they would really like to do on the 16th (Monday) so we are looking at driving 11 hour days to make it home by then. It will be nice to sleep in our real beds after this trip.

I have a lot of picture processing to do when I get home. There are many panoramas to build from pictures and I have videos of some things that I thought would be better as video than still snaps.

We drove through Iowa today to get up to South Dakota. One the of main differences between here and the Southern states is the lack of billboards. Most of the south has zillions of billboards along the road. Even better, since the road service planted trees on both sides of the road, the billboards are on large green poles (large to withstand hurricanes) 50 to 100 feet in the air. What a visual mess.

Abe birth place Originally uploaded by MisterBlue There is a national park with a monument to the log cabin that Abe Lincoln was born in. Inside the building you see here is a log cabin. The laptop I was borrowing died so it will be a while before U get more pictures up.

Mingo Falls Originally uploaded by MisterBlue Today driving through the Smokey Mountain National Park. It looks a lot like home except for the humidity and that it is kudzu climbing the trees and not ivy.

We are finally moving westward. A lot of time was spent getting to the east coast so the trip back will be a lot quicker.

After New Orleans, we spent a few days in Walt Disney World. The place is special, amazing and expensive. I think I’m getting tired of the parks like Walt did. Not that he came to dislike them, but he was ready to move onto something new. I am starting to get that feeling about being there — time to find something new. In that vein, the pictures I took are of some of the many flowers in bloom and the crowds — things people don’t usually take pictures of.

From WDW, it was to the far coast and the Kennedy Space Center. This has been duded up with rides, multi-media presentations and gift shops — oh, and high entry fees — to make it a Disney-like experience. There are some rockets also. The bus tour takes you between fenced off places to peer at the launch pads, old Saturn rockets and modules being assembled for the international space station. The simulated shuttle launch ride was disappointing. The best presentation was the one about landing on the moon. Some pictures.

Up the Florida coast to Palm Coast. Tonight we’re in Byron, Georgia. On the way there, the Fountain of Youth beckoned. On the northern shores of Florida is where Ponce de Leon came ashore looking for the Fountain of Youth. The natives told him that an island existed up north (he was the governor of what is now Puerto Rico at the time) with such a mystical fountain. On that spot today is a tourist attraction and a well said to be the remains of the once bubbling fountain. I sampled but, sadly, I don’t feel any younger. But we visited the planetarium (with the oldest, manually operated planetarium system in the nation) and wandered the grounds until exiting through the gift shop, of course. Pictures.

After a night in a funky little bed-and-breakfast in the town of Taos, New Mexico we visited the Taos Pueblo. Just outside the town of Taos are Indians living more or less (less actually) as they have for hundreds of years The century old pueblos are lived in an maintained with as few modern additions as possible. They, of course open their houses to sell jewelery and trinkets to the tourists.

From New Mexico, we drove across the south end of the rockies traveled through Colorado before making it to Texas. What better indication of Texas-ness than Cadallic Ranch outside Amarillo. From Amarillo, we drove through the traffic jams of Dallas and southward into the heat and humidity of Houston.

We just happened to be at the Johnson Space Center when the space shuttle Discovery launched. On the plus side we watched the launch on the IMAX screen with commentary from one of the astronaut team. On the minus side, the mission control tour was unavailable because they were busy. This place wasn’t what I expected at all. There was the science side of the space program (the tram tour) but, when you walk into the building you are confronted with this gigantic jungle gym type of thing. We’re talking kids climbing and bouncing all over a brightly colored structure that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with space flight. The only connection I can see is it relates to astronaut training. Back in the back are some displays of space suits and a full sized mock up of the nose of the space shuttle.

We spent the night in Sulfur, Louisiana (it smelled of sulfer that night too — I blame the oil refinery close by) and the next day drove across the state to the city of New Orleans. We took a walk through the French Quarter of that city and ate some Cajun food. The boys were unimpressed with the shops and bars. They thought that, since it was set up as a party town, you need your buddies and a buzz to enjoy the place. Can’t argue with that. What did get their attention were the beignets from Cafe du Monde – warm donut-like pastries smothered in powered sugar was worth a thumbs up.

Tonight we are in Pensacola, Florida before diving into the central area of that state and finally to Walt Disney World.

There are some more pictures up: Taos Pueblo, Cadillac Ranch, Houston Space Center and New Orleans .

We’ve gone over 4000 miles so far and we’re about to start our third week. We’ll need to get a move on if we’re going to make it back in our alloted time.

We are in Taos, New Mexico tonight — an upscale artist’s town who’s central area is awash in galleries. Most of today was driving across Colorado from Durango. This meant some time in tree covered mountains as we crossed the continental divide. We got up to 10,000 feet before again dropping down into the desert.

I have some pictures from the last few days up — that part takes a while to upload. I also have many, many panoramas to put together when I get back home. I have included some of the individual pictures for the panoramas some of the time because some of the views are amazing. There are now pictures up for Natural Bridges National Monument, Newspaper Rock, Monument Valley, Four Corners and Mesa Verde National Park.

I’m missing everyone. Hope you are enjoying the progress and the pictures. Tomorrow, its off to Texas.

My last entry wasn’t very talkative. I’ll add a little more today.

The days in Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon National Park was a cool and cloudy day for this part of the world. That’s one reason the pictures of Zion National Park don’t do it justice — the bright, gray sky didn’t help my little digital camera. But try to imagine shear, red rock walls rising on each side of you for hundreds of feet. An amazing place even with the occasional rain.

Bryce Canyon National Park is mostly overlooks and hiking trails. The pictures are from the overlooks and show the unbelievable formations. Bryce is high enough that we enjoyed small snow flakes rather than rain drops. The temperature didn’t get below freezing but the wind was mighty cold.

After Bryce Canyon, we stayed at a Rudy’s Lodge and learned something about the tourists we were sharing the parks with. There are LOTS of Europeans here visiting the wild west. Bus loads (literally) as well as many cars of people speaking German and French and Italian and many other languages are everywhere. Those euros must be going a long way these days.

Today we drove from the national parks in the south west corner of Utah to the national parks in the south east corner of Utah. The weather is still being cool for this time of year so the temperature is in the 70s and the sky is full of clouds. We visited Arches National Park and took lots of pictures.

Driving around Utah enjoying the National Parks. We stopped at Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon National Park. There are pictures up of both (Zion and Bryce).

I didn’t mention them, but there are also pictures up of Lake Havasu City and Hoover Dam.

Time for an update — I don’t get to a computer and I seem to think of Twittering a message when I am driving and that’s not a good idea.

From Anaheim, we drove east amid 18 wheelers and large pickups pulling boats. It rained on us while leaving LA and a few times on the road. We didn’t see any of the tornadoes that happened that day and we missed to flooding, but there is a lot of rain falling on the desert down here and that’s usually good for at least one flood.

Like I said, there were lots of boats on the road. It seems that the Spring is time for the annual migration of boats from LA driveways to the wet recreation areas along the Colorado River. We spent the night at one of these — Lake Havasu City. This town is on Lake Havasu (of course) and is just a little south of Needles. I know that town because it’s always in the weather news as the hottest city in the country. Despite the summer heat, there are a lot of people living down here with subdivisions spreading across the desert and up the hillsides.

The main attraction in Lake Havasu City, besides the lake and water activities, is the London Bridge. This is the London Bridge of “falling down” fame that was carted from England to the deserts of the US and now spans one end of a small bay. You can drive across it and walk and boat under it. The development directly associated with the bridge is a little sad, though. There are some flourishing hotels and a few restaurants, but, around the visitor’s center there are boarded up buildings and the ‘theater and pub’ is closed and boarded. The ‘British and American Friendship Garden’ is dead and long removed. Some of the buildings have ‘improvements coming’ signs on them but that’s the only sign of advancement. The bridge itself looks good and seems to be in fine health.

Driving around we notice little differences between the states. As I Twittered before, unlike in Oregon (where alcohol stronger than wine is only sold in state licensed liquor stores) California Costco’s sell hard liquor — think Costco sized bottles of vodka. Maximum road speeds vary by state (75 in AZ, 70 in CA) and one noticed coming from CA to AZ is gas prices — CA is consistently over $4 per gallon while, just across the boarder in AZ, the prices are in the $3.60 to $3.80 range. It’s not the state gas taxes – I looked. Utah, which has gas taxes 1.5 times the CA gas tax still has $3.80 gas.

After Lake Havasu City, we drove north and stopped at Hoover Dam. Impressive feat engineering. We took the tour and visited the tunnels and generator room. The visitor’s center is very grand and they keep reminding you that is wasn’t paid for by tax dollars — the dam supports itself by selling power and charging visitors fees.

It was threatening rain at the dam and we watched lightening flicker in the skies overhead. Our drive from there north to Zion National Park was a wet one. It rained and rained and rained here in the desert so the hillsides are green with new growth.

We are finishing up with some last time in Disneyland and will head inland tomorrow. I’ll be glad to get out of this crowded park. The weather hasn’t been too bad and, by normal DLand standards, the crowds are actually light. It’s still a lot of people and a lot of lines. Tomorrow Arizona and some more outdoors.

There are some pictures for our drive through Big Sir and the visit to Hearst Castle and some more snaps of Disneyland. I reversed the order of the trip pictures so the newer ones show up on the first page.

Dland Originally uploaded by MisterBlue Guess where we are.

As I mentioned in the Twitter to the left, we drove into LA last night. It was really LA as we experienced freeway traffic jams on a Sunday evening. Amazing. It’s in the 80’s and a little humid with not a cloud in the sky. At this very moment, I’m sitting beside the pool at our hotel while the laundry goes around — a necessity of travel.

After SF, we stopped in Monterey to visit the Aquarium and eat lunch in their touristy Fisherman’s Wharf. The aquarium had a lot of amazing displays of fish and plants but the activities were all geared to young children. So we came, we oggled, we exited.

The next day was a visit to Hearst Castle. When I have 200 million dollars to spend on a house, I hope mine is this magnificent.

The rest of the day was spent driving down the California coast — beautiful, beautiful, beautiful: the sea lions basking on the beaches, the white waves crashing against the rocks and the blue, blue ocean.

We just finished stomping around San Francisco. We left Reno Thursday morning thinking we’d drive down to Yosemite. It wasn’t long before we ran across and informational sign saying Highway 120 was still closed for the winter. Sigh. Rather than drive all the way around and spend many hours getting there, we decided to drive directly to the San Francisco bay area.

Driving from Tahoe to SF means driving on I-80. Besides the temp being 102, this entails driving at 75 MPH on an 8 lane highway with cars shoulder-to-shoulder and bumper-to-bumper. It’s insane! This went on all the way across the central valley. There must be millions of people in central California and they must all be in their cars.

We counteracted the highway experience by ending Thursday in Muir Woods National Monument. This is a small patch of redwoods that was saved in 1904 and it is one of the last samples of the gigantic trees that covered northern California when it was first settled. Beautiful, gigantic trees.

Friday we hiked around the Marin park which is across the bay from San Francisco. This afforded us wonderful views of the bay and SF. We also explored many of the bunkers and old military constructions that are scattered about. We finished off the day by diving into SF and having dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf before driving Lombard Street.

Pictures are now available at http://pics.misterblue.com/v/20080500-Trip/.

I really don’t know what is going on with gas prices — in two days here in California I’ve seen prices between $4.06 and $3.61. It can’t just be the price of oil.

Bridge over the bay Originally uploaded by MisterBlue It is 90 in San Francisco. Here doing the tourist thing.

The phoned entry for Reno didn’t work yesterday so today I’m using a sad Internet connection. We stopped in Reno because we can get $30/night rooms (casinos are good for something). Once hanging out close to cheap rooms and massive buffet’s, we can drive up to Tahoe and hike and photograph the high altitude lake beauty.

Reno is an odd town. Growing by leaps and bounds. There are clearly the very rich (Jags and Mercedes abound and there are houses on the hills that, from 10 miles away, are clearly massive) and the very poor. The people aren’t friendly in the saying ‘hi’ as they pass by way. But there is also an acceptance of the divides in money and people. It seems they keep the ‘inconsequential’ and ‘real’ separate. One is a show girl in the casino and a mom at home and those worlds are separate and everyone accepts that. That acceptance seems to go for money and position as well.

Another thing making Reno ‘ok’ is a temperature of 70 with white clouds in the blue sky. I’m sure it is a different town when it’s 100.

We drove up and around Lake Tahoe. I will have some pictures up when I get some bandwidth but it was beautiful as always. We visited several of the lookouts and we threw a few rocks into the lake. The Tahoe area is getting developed so t’s not like you’re out in the woods.

Tomorrow (Thursday) we will be driving to Yosemite for another day of nature before diving into San Francisco.

Out of Oregon Originally uploaded by MisterBlue Made it into California. We made a dash out of the local area and, at the moment, we are looking to be in Lake Tahoe tomorrow. The road has been clear and the temperature about 65.

Getting ready for the road Originally uploaded by MisterBlue I’m packing and getting ready for a road trip. After working for many years at one place, my work gives a sabbatical to spend refreshing and preparing for another many years of working. Over the next few weeks, I am packing my family and possessions into a van and driving around America. I will be using my phone to post daily notes from the road as well Twittering in the sidebar.

We did a similar trip 15 years ago. I found, on an old backup, the web pages I created to record that trip. Check out the original Trip Around America. That’s from 1995 so appreciate the hand wrought HTML. Hey, back then the drop shadow on the GIF of America at the top of the page was Hot Stuff.

Like I said, I will be posting more as we travel. We’ll see how far we get this time — now the boys are grown and they will have opinions on where we go and what we do.