Mariah and I arrived home about two weeks ago. It was a glorious thing to return home after our extended absence. Harry was even more handsome, Braveheart was extra adorable, my car was remarkably comfortable, our home was oh-so-inviting, and our beds provided us with our best night’s sleep since early June. Dorothy summed up this feeling best at the end of the Wizard of Oz when she said: “Oh, but anyway, Toto, we’re home. Home! And this is my room, and you’re all here. And I’m not gonna leave here ever, ever again, because I love you all, and – oh, Auntie Em – there’s no place like home!”   And yet, although we were exhausted and relieved to be home, within 23 hours of returning, Mariah, Harry and I left for Philly. We went so that we could enjoy Hannah’s final performance of “The Winter’s Tale” for Shakespeare in the Park. Alongside a few thousand other theater goers, we were captivated by the performance. We were also thrilled to see Rebecca’s newly decorated apartment and spend time with her while we were in town. When we finally left Philly and returned to Cape Cod, I unpacked, repacked, and turned around again within 48 hours to drive to upstate New York with Sarah for an especially beautiful family wedding (while Mariah and Harry attended Pops by the Sea). And then….then….we came home….and turned around again 26 hours later when […]

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Mariah and I spent the last few days of our summer adventure enjoying day trips while using Sarah’s apartment as our home base. It was hot in California. Remarkably hot. 109 degrees in the shade hot. And yet, everyone seemed to be going about their business as if the heat was merely a minor inconvenience. We spent the better part of Wednesday at Universal Studios. They don’t take themselves too seriously at Universal. It was relaxed, not too terribly crowded, and they strategically positioned huge misting fans throughout the park which effectively cooled their visitors down. We had a great time. In the evening we attended a sold out performance of the LA based Groundlings sketch comedy troupe. This storied improv theater is known for training and launching the careers of dozens of nationally recognized comedians including: Laraine Newman, Phil Hartman, Melissa McCarthy, Jack Black, Will Ferrell, Ana Gasteyer, Lisa Kudrow, Kristen Wiig and many more recognizable talents. By the time we saw the performance, we were exhausted, but it was an awful lot of fun nonetheless. During our final full day in California, we packed our bags, shipped some stuff home and then Sarah showed Mariah and me around CalArts. Most of the the other graduate students and undergraduates had not yet returned to campus, but we were able to see a good amount of her campus and facilities anyway. The most interesting thing we saw was their sublevel. […]

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Depending on your age and/or your knowledge of 20th Century American history, you may recall that President Richard Nixon secretly taped conversations that occurred in the oval office during his presidency. His longtime personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, claimed to have accidentally erased a portion of an 18 1/2 minutes gap in the tapes that might have been incriminating to her boss. It troubles many people to the point of an obsession, to know that this portion of history has forever been lost. With that cautionary tale in mind, I wanted to avoid leaving a three day gap in our 55 day cross-country narrative. Accordingly, to the best of my recollection, here is a belated description of the three action-packed filled days missing from our blog.   The gap in our narrative begins on Friday, July 10, when Mariah, Harry, and I departed Jensen, Utah to tour Dead Horse Point State Park. We then enjoyed a twilight drive through Arches National Park. The following day, on Saturday, July 11, we toured the Ancestral Cliff Dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park with a park ranger. That night, we drove to Monument Valley, Utah and slept in a more-primitive-than-we-expected Navajo Hogan in Oljato, Utah. On Sunday, July 12, we had an incredible private tour of the Navajo Nation Monument Valley Park before driving to Kokopelli’s Cave. The view from Dead Horse Point looked very familiar to Harry and me as it is one […]

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Sequoia National Park is the second oldest National Park in the United States. As the name suggests, there are a number of groves of sequoias in the park, and they are all beautiful beyond imagination. The park literature correctly characterizes these clusters as “cathedral-like”. The most famous tree in the park is the 275-foot-tall sequoia they have named General Sherman. It is believed to be the world’s largest living tree on the planet and is estimated to be more than 2,200 years old with a circumference at ground level of nearly 103 feet. Of course,  I was awed; I can’t keep a six-inch basil plant alive in my kitchen for more than a few weeks. The hundreds of other sequoias within the park are every bit as fantastic as the ones with names. In the aggregate, these trees annually drop many hundreds of thousands of tiny cones from their branches. The teeniest of seeds from these cones can grow to become sequoia trees. The next generation of sequoias is visible on the forest floor ranging in height from young trees that are several feet tall and diligently growing with each passing year to saplings just a few inches tall. Who knew a baby tree could be so adorable?    The park is co-managed by the National Park Service with Kings Canyon National Park. Together these two parks encompass an incredible range of habitats. Within their borders the elevation ranges from […]

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After leaving our yurt in Big Sur, we stopped in Mountainview to visit Jeffrey, Sarah’s friend from UPenn who works at Google. He couldn’t have been sweeter. The weird thing we noticed immediately, however, was that the Google campus appeared to be inhabited almost entirely by Asian and Indian males. Recent WSJ articles have addressed the lopsided staffing demographics of technology companies. Our brief visit supported their observations. It was disconcerting to see such a large company with few staff from huge segments of the workforce in their employ. Mariah, Sarah, and I posed in front of a Google Street View Car with Jeffrey, visited their Beta Visitor Center, and pretended to ride the bicycles Google employees use to move around the campus. It was an interesting and also a little cult-like environment. (Think Stepford Wives, but replace the Caucasian wives with Asian and Indian husbands.) From Google we drove to San Francisco to stay two nights at the Westin St. Francis on Union Square, a beautifully located, grand, and historic hotel. (It is decidedly unyurtlike.) Our first stop in San Francisco, based on Betty Penn’s recommendation, was The Walt Disney Family Museum, located in Presidio Park. We stayed at the museum for several hours and were still unable to absorb all of the information presented about Walt’s incredible life. The exhibits traced his story from birth to his early drawings and animation, through his lifetime of countless brilliant ideas, […]

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Yesterday, with Sarah at the wheel, we left Hearst Castle and San Simeon, late in the afternoon and drove to Big Sur along Highway 1. This is the scenic road that follows the coastline of the Pacific Ocean all the way from Orange County in the south to Mendocino County in the north. For significant portions of our drive, the road was quite narrow and twisty, with just one lane in either direction. I was thankful we were heading north, as the inside lane seemed marginally safer than the outside lane. Notwithstanding the many anxiety-provoking hairpin turns, Highway 1 certainly deserves its reputation as one of America’s great drives. The views of the Pacific Ocean from the highway were amazing. Our destination was a property called “Treebones Resort” which is nestled against the Los Padres National Forest about 60 miles south of Carmel-by-the-Sea. It was created by a former SVP of Design at Mattel Toys and his family. I had reserved one of their sixteen yurts for Mariah, Sarah, and me to spend the night. (Yes, a yurt.) Our yurt was a dome-topped, round structure, with fabric-draped wood lattice walls that were covered with sturdy white vinyl. It was set on a platform, perched on a bluff, and outfitted with varnished pine floors, a skylight for stargazing, two queen beds and a futon with plush bedding, a little sink, a few electric light fixtures, French doors, and a porch for […]

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We returned our rental car yesterday with 9,062 Van Sciver miles on the odometer. When we add the 379 miles we put on on our Suburban before picking up the rental in Philly – Mariah and I have traveled 9,441 miles together on this trip, so far. We will be cruising in Sarah’s car for the final leg of our trip. We didn’t take a direct route between coasts, but we sure chose an interesting one.  Since entering the Golden State of California, I have been amazed by their mess of a highway system. In particular, Los Angeles and the nearby towns are connected by an insanely complicated system of highways. It is utter madness. My theory is that they hired a brilliant city planner who developed a practical and clean set of highway plans to move the necessary volume of cars from place to place. Then, an unbelievable series of bizarre events occurred. As a result, the team of engineers responsible for constructing the roadways accidentally built the highway system based on the flip side of the approved plans. Inadvertently, they followed the random scribbles of their brilliant city planner’s three year old child that had been scrawled in purple crayon on the back side of his approved plans. There is no other possible explanation for this chaos. Yesterday, we took a day trip into Hollywood and walked along a section of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It is […]

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Mariah, Sarah, and I visited the San Diego Zoo today because in San Diego all visitors are pressured to go to their zoo. On a perfect day, I am the wrong person with whom to go to a zoo. I mentioned this in a mid-June blog post when Mariah and I went to the Atlanta Corporate Recognition Park (or as it is facetiously called by the locals “The Atlanta Aquarium”).  I find animals in captivity to be deeply disturbing. Nonetheless, today was my second time submitting to the San Diego Zoo’s not so subtle pressure. I succumbed more than a decade ago when Harry and I foolishly thought that visiting the zoo with all four of our daughters on a blistering hot Father’s Day was an inspired plan. A wise person learns from other’s mistakes; a fool from his own. You read it here: On Fathers Day stay away from places that target market to non-custodial dads.  Today in drought-stricken California, shortly after we arrived, it rained and rained and rained some more at the San Diego Zoo. Tropical Storm Dolores had arrived. At first, everyone thought it was novel and exciting. People stuck their tongues out and tried to taste the rain. That phase lasted for about five minutes. Tops. Then everyone realized that they were getting soaked. Many purchased clear ponchos and danced about in the rain. That phase lasted another five minutes. Or less. At this point […]

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We were greeted by a police officer and cruiser yesterday morning when we tried to check out of our hotel. Evidently, one of our hotel neighbors used a fraudulent ID and credit card when they registered. This jerk then spent the night before stealing the television from his room on his way out. Our check-out was delayed significantly as the desk staff tried to address this situation. As a result, I am feeling FAR less guilty about occasionally taking the little shampoos and soaps I have not used during my hotel stays for later use. On our way to San Diego, we drove by the area where the fire had crossed the interstate. Several lanes were closed and traffic was backed up, because of the ongoing clean-up efforts. It was unsettling to see the vast blackened areas on both sides of the highway. The area smelled of the strong chemicals that were used to suppress the flames. Harry sent me a link to some of the news coverage of the fire. It is quite disconcerting to realize how close we were to driving through the area ourselves. Thankfully, no one was injured. Here is the link:  http://www.aol.com/article/2015/07/18/terror-on-interstate-15-as-people-abandon-cars-flee-fire/21211002/?icid=maing-grid7%7Chtmlws-sb-bb%7Cdl3%7Csec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D-203462047  Shortly after we finally were able to check out of the hotel, our phones buzzed again with another emergency warning. This time we were being cautioned about flash floods. Within minutes the skies opened and it poured. Drenching sheets of rain accompanied us […]

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