Road Trip!

Oh I love a road trip! The house is upside down as we prepare to leave on midsummer's day. We need to neutralize the house as other members of my fella's family will be taking up residence in the summer. That isn't so difficult - we didn't bring too much stuff and we can put most of it away somewhere. We took down the table that I use for a desk that was in the dining room and set up my computer on a small table in the laundry room where I'm working today. There is a window looking out on trees but it is behind me not in front of me so that is different...but other than that it is no big deal. The dryer is going as I write this with the small thump thump of the wool balls I put in instead of those despicable dryer sheets. It is pouring today and I simply have too much laundry to do to wait for a sunny day. I am thinking as I write here about Stephen King who wrote for many years in his laundry room. May it shine on me like it did on him!

I will attempt to finish this attack on Bright Angel so I can get it off again to my reader - she stopped reading it so I could go in and do some major jigging around. I feel pretty pumped about it so far. I have about fifty pages to finish and think I'll be done tomorrow if nothing stops me. In between bouts of writing I 'll clean and pack.

We leave early Saturday morning (have you ever wondered why Saturday gets a capital but morning doesn't?) and will travel to Red Bay, Labrador. I'll post later on my Labrador site - Sojourner - the route and recent pictures so check there from time to time if you are interested. Red Bay is a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of the Basque Fishing Museum etc... We stay there one night and then take the ferry from Blanc Sablon to St. Barbe on the island of Newfoundland. There we will travel down the coast staying one night along the way (hopefully near Gros Morne National Park) and then taking the ferry from Port Aubasque to North Sydney, Cape Breton - then zoom down to home (about 5 hours to Prospect) hopefully stopping on the way to see dear buds of ours.

Bright Angel is a book about a road trip. I grew up having at least one road trip a year - often more. We moved every couple of years (daddio being an air force guy) and when we weren't moving we still hit the road to stay in little motels ($6 a night would be an expensive one) or camping with our trusty tent trailor. I love road trips - I like starting early in the morning. I like plaid cooler bags (alas none available) and a thermos of coffee. I like pouring over maps and stopping to take pictures. I like wildlife and towns I've never been to. I adore motels and roadside attractions. I particularly love doing it with my fella - he's a polymath which makes him an ideal travelling companion. I say 'what kind of wildflower is that?' or 'when was this place settled?' and he tells me. He is my own google guy.

 here is a pic of the family station wagon at the Great Divide.

In Bright Angel there are three parts to the trip the main characters go on. They travel by air from Nova Scotia to New Mexico and then they travel from Albuquerque to Santa Fe by car down the lovely Turquoise Trail. Then they stay in Santa Fe for a bit before another road trip to the Grand Canyon. I've done a family road trip to the Grand Canyon so I know how it feels to come upon the most magnificent hole in the ground ever. I remember my mother's look of dismay and her comment 'they should put a fence around this' and my dad's 'Well, you've seen one Grand Canyon you've seen them all'. I can even remember what my mother was wearing (a folkloric skirt popular in the fifties) and carrying (a hand-tooled purse from our road trip to Mexico). I remember all the roadside attractions we went to from Colorado to California and there were a lot of them. All handy.

I wonder if this trip will make it into a novel? For sure it will make it into a poem or two.
See you on the other side - my next post will be from Nova Scotia!