AreWeThereYet2K15

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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