I am writing this from our home in Ponce Inlet, Florida.  After driving about 15,000 miles between the motorhome and the car we arrived home on Sunday, September 21.  We left home on May 6, so the journey lasted about four and one half months.  This post is mostly to acknowledge the two great travel companions I had at my side through the whole thing; Daisy, our Border Collie, and my bride, Joan.

My liberal friends just roll their eyes and call me crazy when I say this, but my very favorite thing to do when I am driving long distances is to listen to conservative talk radio.  And my favorite bag of wind is Rush Limbaugh.  However, as you travel the vast distances that we did it is hard to keep Rush tuned in.  I have a phone app to show me the closest Rush stations, but  it is not always accurate and requires constant fiddling with the radio.  Consequently, for most of this trip I resorted to my second favorite thing, and that is listening to classic country music from the 40’s through the 70’s on Sirius satellite radio. Joan is the musician in our house and plays several stringed instruments.  I know nothing about the music (I only can play the radio, but I do that well), and when I say I like classic country music I mean mainly the lyrics.  I  find that the titles of the songs and/or the actual lines in the songs relate to so much that is going on at different times in my own life.  And for my  money, the greatest song title ever written anywhere is “If I Said You Have a Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me?”  Really that works on so many levels!!

At almost 67 years of age when I hear Roy Clark sing “Yesterday When I Was Young” I start wondering how did I get to this point so quickly.  Wasn’t it just yesterday that I was relating to the John Conlee song “I’m On the Back Side of 30”??  Or when I hear Loretta Lynn sing “Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ With Lovin’ On Your Mind”, I remember Joan giving me the same advice when I was headed out for a night with the boys.  Quite frankly though I never understood Loretta’s or Joan’s attitude on that score!!

Tom T. Hall did a song wherein he sings “There’s only three things in this world that’s worth a solitary dime–that’s old dogs and children and watermelon wine.”  I’ve never had watermelon wine, although I would like to try it.  And I’ve never been much into children until we had one of our own.  And now that there are grandchildren that takes things to an entirely new level of caring. In that song Tom T. goes on to say that “old dogs care about you even when you make mistakes”.  On this trip Daisy celebrated her tenth birthday, so, unfortunately she qualifies as an old dog.  The joints are getting stiffer and the movements slower.  And when I blasted into that cluster of buzzards on the road at 60 mph it was terribly obvious to all three of us that I had made a huge mistake.  But when I got stopped and bent down to put Daisy’s leash on her to take her outside to get the glass out of her coat she licked my hand.  Just to show me she did still care about me.

Waylon Jennings had a song about Luckenbach, Texas that starts out with the lyric “There’s only two things in life that make it worth livin’—that’s guitars tuned good and firm feelin’ women”.  As I said above I know nothing about musical instruments and that includes guitars, tuned or otherwise.  But I met what would become my own little hardbody in March or April of 1969.  I was in my second year of working in the college dormitory cafeteria.  Since most people who worked there only lasted weeks or a few months at best, I was kind of a big cheese on the wait staff.  Not the biggest cheese, but I was still pretty cheesy.  When Joan was hired toward the end of that school year, and I saw her big blue eyes and long brown hair, I thought she was just about the cutest thing I had ever seen.  So did the rest of the guys there, but I moved quickly, and we dated several times before school was out for the summer.  And then we headed our separate ways with promises to write.  Neither of us did, not even once.  But in September we started up again, and by Christmas we were getting married, which we did in June, 1970 after a nine month courtship.  She was 20 and I was 22.  That’s the way we did things yesterday, when I was young.

Sometime between age 20 and almost 65 women stop being CUTE.  This has happened to Joan too and now the term I use to describe her is LOOKER.  Joan is a looker.  I looked up the word in my Funk and Wagnall’s and they give it two definitions;  first, it is someone who looks at things.  Secondly though, there is an informal definition that describes a looker as a very attractive person.  My wife qualifies in both regards, and I will add that if she were a dog, she would be a Pointer.  You’ll see what I mean in the following photos from our trip.

 

Joan looking at the Badlands 

 

 Joan looking at me and ignoring beautiful Muncho Lake in British Columbia

 

Joan looking at something! 

 

 Joan looking up close at a glacier

 

Joan looking at Homer, Alaska

 

 Joan looking at another glacier near Valdez, Alaska

 

 Joan looking at the attractions in Stanley Park, Vancouver, British Columbia

 

Things are looking up for Joan 

 

Joan looking at Crater Lake in Oregon 

 

 

Joan looking at a fumarole in California 

 

 Joan looking at a Sequoia tree (nice socks)

 

 Joan looking at Grand Canyon (nice socks)

 

 

 

Joan looking at her huge piece of pie (so much for the hardbody) 

 

 

Joan looking at Tuzigoot ruins near Cottonwood, Arizona

 

 Joan looking and pointing at Saguaro near Tucson, Arizona

 

 

Joan looking at totems in Stanley Park, Vancouver, British Columbia 

 

 Since this was a blog about going to Alaska and returning this is the final post.  I have had a good time writing it and if you have hung with me this long on it you must have enjoyed reading it as well.  If we’re all in relatively good health next summer we hope to make another trip.  But this time it will be a “historical” one up the east coast and proceeding on into the Canadian Maritime Provinces and swinging into Quebec before working our way south again.  If I decide to do a blog on that one I will give you the opportunity to subscribe as you did to this one.  Goodbye for now and thanks for reading.