May 24: Depart Cupertino, CA, Wednesday morning; Drive to Santa Clarita, CA, (or Newhall, depending on which name the locals prefer to call it...)
Planned to start in the morning, about 9-10 am. Left at about 11:15. No surprise. We rarely operate on time... Arrived in Newhall at about 6 pm, after a detour finding the right road to Pachecho Pass and a gift stop at Casa de Fruita on 152. The reservoir east of the Pass was about 10-15' below full -- the highest I've seen it in about 20+ years. There were some 20-foot trees with their trunks submerged by the water. They haven't see this much water in a long time, either! [added, 05.27: cruising Interstate 5 was interesting: no trucks seemed to be going anywhere over the posted 70 mph! I set the cruise control for 69 and slowly passed virtually every truck we encountered. Of course, the Lexuses and Cadillac SUVs and other own-the-roadies and lunatic kids blasted by at upwards of 80 mph, (estimated) but it was a really peaceful drive, for the most part. Climbing The Grapevine was not a problem, either, even though the multi-thousand-foot elevation change is pretty rapid, and accompanied by a serpentine path to the summit. I got pretty good at shooting pictures and driving at the same time...] A few potty-stops for the dogs (and us) and the auto-nav system brought us to within about fifty feet of Greta's home. Good job, Prius! Dinner with Greta and Terry at Rattler's. Great ribs and prime rib, according to us. Off to bed and ready for a whole day of visiting the next day.

May 25: Visit with Claudia's cousin Greta and some other relatives from that area.
Slept in (as is my habit) and had a whole day of talk and nap, catching up on the latest. Greta is wonderful; one of the best cousins anyone could ever hope for. Dinner at Hometown Buffet: good food, wide selection, nice price ($10 a person, plus tax!). More great talk; we tipped the cleaning folks and were the last folks out of the door. Nice folks, all around. Off to Greta's for more chat, one last dog-walk before bedtime, and a few minutes to update the TravelBlog and the itinerary spreadsheet for the car, and it's off to bed. 400+ miles on tap for tomorrow. We'll share the driving, tomorrow, unlike yesterday, the 24th, and we'll see how close the nav system gets to finding our hotel tomorrow night.... bye for now...

May 26: Drive to Surprise, AZ. Overnight at Windmill Inn Suites; check their website; they are way dog-friendly!
Nav system took us right to the hotel. Other than some rubbernecking delays on I-10, the ride was smooth. Truckers are still running under the speed limit by at least one mph, and more in some spots. None of them is about to get a ticket on this Memorial Day Weekend, but lots of auto drivers are being pulled over, and many are doing lots of stupid things that should earn them at least one ticket.
Nice hotel, and very convenient to good fast food and restaurants, including the China Sun "All You Can Eat Super Buffet" for about $9 per person. For a change, I ate sparingly and got to sample many different dishes. I filled up on two kinds of soup and big soft drinks. Very important to keep hydrated here in 104 degree outside ambients and a "can-the-humidity-really-go-below-zero?" climate.

May 27: Visit with Leon and Harriet. Leon is an ex-boss of mine and important friend.

Got to sleep in just a little, and motored off to Leon's house in Surprise, arriving just after 11 am. Got the Grand Tour of his very beautiful and spacious house, and had a delicious lunch put together by his wife. They've been in the area for several years and know the tricks to living in a desert environment. Met a friend of theirs, Elaine, and her border collie, Pita. Took our dogs and met her at a huge, well-designed doggie park, and got to know them. Great people and great dog, too. Golf courses all around; building like crazy; incredibly lousy timing of traffic signals and overabundance of

Dinner with Leon and Harriet, and lots of good talk about desert life, good and bad people at HP [you mean Mark H. (no, not Hurd) is a vice-president?!!?], and "what kind of moron would ever cut Joe C. from their payroll?!?!, etc... Great dinner, then back home to walk the dogs one more time before bedding down before the next leg of our journey, tomorrow morning.

May 28: Drive to Las Cruces, NM and overnight at Best Western, just off I-10.

My wife, the WeatherWitch, did it again... Yesterday at the dog park, we saw lots of high cirrus clouds, a sure sign of a change in the local weather. Later, a very strong wind gust blew through the dog park and we were pelted with seed pods being flung off the trees. Today, the morning in Surprise was no longer the 92-104 degrees F that we'd seen two days earlier as we entered AZ, but practically balmy. Maybe 80-85, but with a nice breeze. The breeze turned into a tailwind for much of the trip, and on stretches that I'd swear were slightly uphill, we were cruising at 50-75 mpg, much as we were in

There are a lot of very beautiful and very different kinds of scenery between the Phoenix, AZ area and the southeast corner of New Mexico. Layered hills and mountains, hills and mountains built of huge boulders; flat land from horizon to horizon, ringed with craggy and sharp-peaked hills. Mountain range behind mountain range behind mountain range. And one of my favorite parts of the west: the weather. We saw two very large thunderstorms develop, one to our south and one to our north. We could see virtually exactly where the rain started and stopped for each one. The occasional lightning bolts were usually cloud-to-earth and strong and bright. The delay of the thunderclaps told us that the storms were at least several miles away, though very little of the noise penetrated the Prius, whether on the road or stopped.

Yes, it's the Memorial Day Weekend, but where the speed limit was 75 today, I set the cruise control to 66 and trucks passed me at a very slow rate, probably overtaking us at no more than a few miles per hour. Still the loonies in the pick-'em-ups and luxo-cruisers blasting by at differentials of 20 mph or more, but generally a quiet drive day. Sometimes, no cars in the rear-view mirror at all, for a mile or more back.

Crossed the Continental Divide and the Rio Grande River today. Managed to snag a few shots of the river, but the Continental Divide locator is a sign marked with elevation, and it surprised us, so we missed the photo. Poo...

By the time we reached Las Cruces, by the way, the outside temp was about 82, and later, leaving the restaurant next to the hotel, we stopped and agreed in amazement at how perfect the temperature was... it felt like the mid-70's or so, with a gentle breeze blowing. Of course, it may rain before sunrise, too...

May 29: Drive to Fort Stockton, TX and overnight at the Best Western, just off I-10

An easier (shorter) drive today. There must have been a nice tailwind, again, because the Prius, even with its little tow-friend, turned over 37 mpg for yesterday's fill-up and showed about 41 mpg, average, for the 285 miles we did today. Left NM, crossed the Rio Grande into Texas, and saw some more different land. Wide expanses as flat as a board. Craggy mountains. Mountain ranges where I didn't know they even existed. Now I understand why the course of the Rio Grande from El Paso and southeast is the way it is. There's a doggone mountain range just south of it, in Mexico! The poverty of the shacks perched on hills just across the river from El Paso is very striking. EP appears to be a fairly well-to-do town, and with a large population, it seems to go on forever across the basically flat land. There are some hills, and ups and downs on I-10 near there, but it still boils down to being a drainage basin into the Rio Grande, and there aren't a lot of tall mountains on the US side.

As we went further east and south, once again we were treated to views of storm clouds to the north and south of us, but not more than a dozen raindrops hit the windshield. That disappointed me, because we've been killing quite a few bugs with the windshield and the front of the car... including one swarm of large brown things that pelted the front window like a small hailstorm for about half a second. The windshield, on average, won.

Again, most drivers, including truckers are very polite, and I like to signal them with flashing hi-beams that it's safe to pull back into the right lane. Most of them still wait another truck-length or so for extra clearance before pulling in, so we don't get to "draft them" for better mileage... Many flash their directionals or 4-way flashers to say "thanks," and that's a nice touch, too.

Oh, and most of I-10 in Texas is smoother than most of I-10 in Arizona, but just a little. And quite a bit better than in CA. We've already seen two or three 10-20-mile stretches of the highway where the westbound lane is being completely reconstructed. You can see the re-bars poking out of the poured concrete. When these stretches occur, the highway department shunts the westbound traffic over to the eastbound lanes, and we're often stuck with just one lane running at a posted 55 mph for ten or more miles. But people take it pretty much in stride, and when the shunt is over, and the road widens back to the typical two lanes each way, cars and trucks just go back to the speeds they were doing. On most of today's stretches, outside of the shunts, the limits were 75 for cars and 70 for trucks during daylight hours, and 65 for both at night. I set the cruise for 60-65, enjoying the tailwind, lower air resistance, and higher than expected gas mileage for nearly the whole day.

I also took a lot of photos over the past few days, as I drove. Many cloud formations, rock formations and mountains [and flatlands] were just very, very pretty. I'll try to upload and link a few into each respective section when we're staying in one place for more than one night.

May 30: Drive to San Antonio, TX and overnight at Marriott's Residence Inn.

Wonderful drive. Texas between Fort Stockton and San Antonio is much greener and forested than either of us expected. It's nearly all uplifted sea-bed floor, and most of the road cuts for I-10 show the layering of the ancient seabeds. No rain or thundershowers today or tonight, unlike what was predicted for today, though it has been more humid as we've approached and arrived at San Antonio.

The hotel is close to downtown and a short walk to grassy areas to walk the dogs. We strolled past the Alamo, and down some stairs to the river loop in the middle of town, where there are tons of shops and restaurants. Dinner was steaks at Boudro's, and the filet was great [Claudia's] and the rib-eye was very good [Alan's... Chile's is still the record-holder for flavor and quality, imnsho]. Back to the hotel, walked the dogs again, and was happy to find another LAN-connection for my pc. I have not been able to send email when connected wirelessly. Oh, well, things to do in the future... like figure that out....

May 31: Drive to Spring, TX, home of Mike and Ilona and their 4 kids: dear friends of ours who moved to TX from CA last year.
The nav system in the car didn't know about some major surface street renovation going on near he city center of San Antonio, so we spent about twenty minutes zig-zagging through some run-down neighborhoods, trying to get past the detours. Finally, a few miles from the Spurs' statium, be broke out into smooth pavement and I-10 was not too far away.

Texas continued to be very pretty, with more and more oil pumps [what I call the "grasshopper" kind] bobbing up and down in fields just off the highway. I caught a glimpse of one just off the westbound lanes that looked like it had been put through a miniaturizing machine: it could not have been more than five feet tall! It looked like a machine that had been made for a medium-scale railroad layout. So cute!

As we got closer to Houston, traffic picked up in both directions, but the greenery of the fields and trees didn't stop. There were many grain fields and corn fields on both sides of the highway, and many, many RV dealers, selling everything from boats to small trailers to 5th-wheel models to full-blown diesel-pushers. And where many cities had "auto row" dealership after dealership along the main road, Texas seemed to have "RV row" more than occasionally.

Texas also has roadside signs that read, "Drive Friendly," and west of Houston, this seems to be the case. Once we got onto the major roads around Houston, that seemed to be honored in the breach. Just like LA and the Bay Area we left, drivers thought nothing of cutting across two lanes of traffic to make their exit, or passing on the right in exit lanes to get a one car-length advantage in the slow lane. One guy tailgated me for a few miles when he didn't make the cut trying to pass on the right before the entrance ramp ran out of room, and then he changed lanes several times trying to get ahead of me. He didn't win... I ended up in the faster lanes, even if I changed lanes.... Just like home.

Exit ramps are something else, too. Looking for one exit we needed to take, we discovered the sign for it a bit late and had to beg our way out of the slow lane into the exit lane... after passing about a quarter mile of other cars backed up for the same exit! That does wonders for the guy behind you in the slow lane, when you have to slow to a stop to make the merge to the right. Then, as we got out on the exit ramp, the next turn was a right turn, and once again, a merge across three lanes, so now we're going from a virtually-stopped exit line of cars, across two lanes of 40-mph-plus traffic barrelling down to the same intersection's traffic signals. Whew!

The Prius' update to the nav system DVD is still about a year behind in mapping, compared to the reality of where roads are. We phoned for directions to Mike and Ilona's house after we just could not find any road in the nav system that seemed to come close to their address! As we made the multiple turns to get to their house, the little nav arrow on the screen left the marked roads and followed all of our turns, thanks to the GPS. Unfortunately, the arrow ended up in the middle of a blank space with no indicated roads. I'm tempted to mark the final location for the nav and then ask it to take us from here to New Orleans, and see what it does. I think it's a shame that the nav maps are so far behind the road-reality.

Well, we finally made it to our goal, and their house is just as big and wonderful as it was a year or so ago at our last visit. About seven rooms, and at least one bathroom for each. House-envy, all the way! They're doing some construction on the house right now, so we get to see a team attack the back yard every morning to drop trees into holes, cut flagstone to cover the patio, sheetrock the underside of the new roof overhanging the patio, and so on... They're doing good work, and like good contractors, don't panic when [reasonable] changes need to be made.

We're staying through Saturday night, so when we drive to New Orleans on Sunday, we might have a better shot at a motel room, and maybe not as bad traffic as if we'd left on Saturday morning. We also get to spend more time with the family. When they lived in south San Jose, we had a tradition that developed over several years, called "Thursday Night Pizza" and that's what we're doing tonight. Gotta go for now... the pizza delivery guy just rang the front door bell.
Friday night was a treat on us: Mike and Ilona dropped most of their kids at a local school/church organization for a "Parents' Night Out", which is essentially about 2-4 hours of day care at night, and run by volunteers two Fridays a month. The organization makes some money and the parents get "quality time," kid-free. Their eldest has a slight flu, so we took her along to dinner, which was the first real "grown up" dinner out she'd been to. While she didn't partake of some of the more exotic foods we tried [including fried alligator... it was great!], she did get to have a new experience: waiting for food to come, very much unlike the usual kids' instant delivery at McD's and the like. She weathered it pretty well, and tried a few new tastes. It was a nice treat to share this new experience with her. We went to Babin's Seafood House, on 17485 Tomball Parkway, Houston, 77064 [281-477-9300]. Sorry for the commercial message, but the food was very good and portions were more than ample! Desserts are great, too. Then back to the school to collect the kids and head back to M&I's homestead. Mike and Ilona got their first ride in a Prius, too, from the school to the restaurant and back. It performed well and I got to demonstrate some of the nav system bells and whistles, as well as the "low fuel" indicator, that beeps in the sound system, flashes a warning on the nav screen and blinks the last bar on the fuel gauge's digital display. We'll refuel when we hit the road Sunday. It's still got about 20 miles left in it, and I've got a two-gallon emergency gas can in the trailer...

Friday afternoon, landscapers drove up and dropped several dozen... no, make that several score... of buckets of plants and trees, and Saturday morning, Mike and I, with Ilona directing, moved the pots around the house to lay out the new decoration scheme [Mike did it, actually; I just helped a little.] I checked some of the weather on-line for the next legs of our trip. We'll probably run into some rain and thunderstorms in the next few days, but most are just rainstorms blowing in from the Gulf, and not major fronts. Also, there aren't any hurricanes in the Gulf, either, thank goodness and the Weather-Witch capabilities of my wonderful wife! Gotta keep that mojo working for the next two weeks, at least, until we're relatively safe, inland, in NC.

Found the places for reservations for Sunday, Monday and Tuesday nights, before we take the right turn to lower Florida and Boynton Beach. Looks like that part's going smoothly, thanks to Claudia. XOXOXOXXO June 5: Drive to Baton Rouge, LA, overnight at La Quinta Inn... The "pet friendly hotels" in New Orleans don't want dogs bigger than about 20 pounds, so our forty- and fifty-pound dogs are not welcome. Our money will be left elsewhere. Note: joining the La Quinta Inn "frequent roomers' group" gives you discount rates, too...

Well, Texas surprised us again: very green and tropical from Houston east. Many trees, and tall ones, at that, on both sides of the road. Several rivers and more and more greenery. Crossing over into Louisiana left some construction on I-10 behind and brought more in front of us. Many stretches are being converted from blacktop to at least a thick base of concrete, and widened from two lanes each way to what looks like it will be three, a blessed relief for travelers on this road anywhere near the bigger towns and cities along it.

Louisiana brought a drop in road conditions in general, although it did get greener and greener, the further east we traveled. The road in many places comprised slabs of concrete which had settled at the joints. The joints, unfortunately, were just a few carlengths apart, leaving the ka-bum-ka-bump-ka-bump rockinghorse ride that I haven't felt since New Jersey in the 1960s and 1970s. Smooth spots were welcome relief when they happened. Oh, by the way, some complete moron in Texas figured out that grooving the roads sideways, across the pavement, not along it in the direction of travel, has some wonderful value which happened to be lost on me. Maybe the rain runs off the road faster. What they've apparently never done is drive on the road themselves: when your car's tires hit this kind of pavement, they produce a "whoooooo" or "wheeeeee" high-frequency whine which is extremely annoying and tiring to the driver and passenger. After ten or twenty minutes of "eeeeeeeeeeeeeee" in your ears, you long for the relative silence of plain old flat pavement.

Further on, we got to some bayou country of Louisiana. Lakes, inlets, bayous, and rivers and some real swamps with hundreds of trees growing out of a shallow lake. I tried to get some pictures of them; if any come out ok, I'll upload and link them here.

Then we noticed clouds thickening ahead of us and to the north. Then they thickened to the south in front of us. Then they let go with rainfall that I've only seen once before in my life, while driving West from NJ to CA, just west of Chicago. Teeming rain. Smashing rain. Rain the the windshield wipers on high speed could not come close to competing with. For a few minutes, I even pulled off the highway onto the shoulder to see if it would abate. When it let up a little, I got back onto the highway, but everyone had dropped their speed for the conditions. With speed limits posted at 65 or 70, we ranged from the mid-50s to as low as 40 at times. Other than a few idiots trying to "get there first," everyone was pretty polite and calm about it. Some miles further down the road, we saw three cars which had gone off the road within about 100 feet of each other: one into the center median, which was, fortunately, wide, but dropped ten or fifteen feet to the bottom, where a lot of water had collected; the other two were off the right side of the road, and about ten feet below road level, and two cars had stopped on the shoulder to help them. Another few miles down the road, an emergency vehicle was racing back to the scene. I doubt that anyone was seriously damaged, but probably bounced around and scared silly by the experience.

Onward into Louisiana. More rain, on and off, crossing high bridges over lakes and finally, the Mississippi River. Couldn't see a danged thing. Heavy rain on both sides of the bridge, let alone the middle, made it virtually impossible to see the river itself. We caught some glimpses a few miles later as we got closer to our hotel, but that was it. Maybe some other time... :)

The hotel is very comfortable and roomy enough, and the people are friendly. The rain finally paused after one last wild downpour after we got our stuff moved in for the night, so we walked across the street, literally, to have dinner at TJ's Ribs. The portions were nice, and not too huge; the ribs were delicious, as was the barbecued shrimp with rice pilaf and the desserts, too. If you call the manager, Joseph Costello, at 1-225-383-7427, they can ship the ribs and sause to you by air freight overnight. No minimum order, Joe told me.... Lots of sports memorabelia, too, and they say they're the "Home of the 1959 Heisman Trophy," though we didn't see it or ask where they kept it... Maybe next time.

June 6: Drive to Tallahassee, FL; overnight at La Quinta Inn North.

Yep, that worked. LONG drive: 441 miles. Much of which was done in more teeming rain. The rest of Louisiana was pretty flat, very green, and led into Mississippi, which was more of the same, and then Alabama for the short stretch around Mobile Bay. The only notable and memorable parts of LA is that the rest stops were much poorly built and kept up than in TX, and that, like the lack of pet-friendly hotels in LA, the rest stops are pretty non-pet-friendly, too. As I took our dogs for a quick pee-stop at one of them, a gendarme of the Rest-Stop Police of LA drove up, rolled down the passenger's side window, and announced, "Ya can't have pets in this area... ya gotta take them over there [pointing a hundred feet away from the rest rooms for humans], or across the highway from there." There was no "highway" near where he pointed, just one of the driveways of the rest stop. I apologized to him for my ignorance of the local rules and led the dogs to the area with the prominently-positioned fire hydrant. [don't they know anything about female dogs???] It was even extra-silly, since Shiloh had already relieved herself on the grass near the humans' rest rooms, on a sloping piece of land that led down to a swampy green pond near the rooms. Sad.

Made it to the La Quinta hotel on the second try. The nav system was a bit confusing on where to turn, so it took two extra U-turns to find the right driveway. By which time the car decided it was low on fuel, and would indicate it with a beep, a message on the nav screen, and a blinking box on the fuel gauge. We got unloaded and the room set up and walked the dogs, then hiked to the opposite end of the hotel to a wonderful restaurant where we enjoyed some of the best stuffed crabcakes and pork chops we've tried in a long time. For very reasonable prices, too.

Note Change Here:
June 7: Drive to Ocala, FL; overnight at Hilton.

Made reservations this morning for the La Quinta in Ocala. It appeared on the map that taking I-75 down from I-10 would save nearly 100 miles' driving by cutting across FL more diagonally than going all the way to Jacksonville on the coast, then driving south on I-95. Got the reservation and took off.

Filled the tank across the street from the hotel, and put more gas in than all but one time before on the Prius: about 12.2 gallons. Got 12.9 in, once before, and that's pretty good on an allegedly-13-gallon or so tank! But I always top it off with an extra gallon or so, so I don't have to refuel as often. 400 miles on a tank is not a big challenge, even towing the trailer.

A relatively short 184 mile jaunt, and the weather had cleared up! Very pretty drive, with gently rolling hills, with just a little up and downhill, unlike western TX. Horse country. Wide, expansive farms on both sides of the Interstate, and very green and beautiful.

Not too many moronic drivers here [we expect them in FL, due to the geriatric predominance, and their likelihood of them driving 50 mph even in the right lane of a 65-70 mph six-lane. That and the lawn maintenance guys that almost killed us last time we were on I-95, when they merged at us with no warning or directional signal, and looked pissed when I blew the horn and slammed on the brakes.... ah, but that was a year or two ago...

By the way... Decided to not refer to the morons by any derogatory ethnic or age-ist pejorative... they're just DWBD: Driving While Brain Dead. But today we found a new category: the idiots who own the road and don't care what happens to you because they can't see you anyway because of the deep-dark tinted windows in their cars. Many luxury SUVs like that; many fancy pick-em-ups, too. Why do they tint the windows so dark? DWV: Driving While Vampires. Or Zombies. Or Both: call them Vampbies or Zompires; whatever. They don't see you, so they don't need to worry about directional signals, arbitrary lane-changes, tailgating in any lane, etc. Real pains...

But the trip was safe and dry, anyway.

Then we got to the La Quinta off 220 in Ocala. "Sorry: small dogs only: under 25 pounds!" "But the book says medium dogs accepted," we protested. No dice. They'd apparently had a bad experience with some medium-sized dogs, and lowered the limit. No arbitration or negotiation. The rule-sticker-by-er did offer to print out the names and addresses of four hotels along I-75 that did accept larger dogs. Two were several exits back up I-75, and that was not a nice direction to have to go. One was another exit or two further south, but the most appealing one was about 200 feet further down the driveway: a Hilton. For about $20 more per night, less a Triple-A discount, we got to be surrounded by staff who owned and loved dogs. One of the guys behind the counter, from Ohio and Kentucky, told the story of rescuing four Golden Retrievers he and an ex-girlfriend had found basically "on the side of the road." Even the porter/bellhop was friendly to our dogs, and they liked him back, in return. Nice folks, nice room, a short walk to one of several restaurants for dinner, and we're very happy campers. Can't really understand the La Quinta decision, though: no alternative but to toss your confirmed, reserved customer out, or send them to the competition a short walk away. Oh, well, the connection here is a LAN, even though it's only 10 Mbps and slower than any wi-fi's the other hotels offered, it's ok-fast, and again, I can send and receive emails.

June 8: Drive to Boynton Beach, FL , where my brother Nathan, sister-in-law Roselyn live, and to which most of my home town of Somerville, NJ, seems to have retired. Hi to Herb Foxman, Bernie Levin and everyone else! Save a dinner date for us! ... Holiday Inn, Congress Avenue, Boynton Beach, FL, for a three-night stay.

Well, we confused the heck out of the Prius' nav system today. It stopped talking to us, and we need to dig out the half-inch-thick manual for just the nav system to see what's wrong. I'm more and more pissed at Toyota the lousy human interface of the nav system, and i'll be writing about that elsewhere on my site. Enough complainin' for now....

Left Tallahassee at a reasonable hour, and the skies were clear! Yay, sunshine! It did get cloudy during the day, and there was one short rain squall, and a few drizzles, but nothing like the days before. Oh, have you watched the weather news recently? There's a storm brewing near Cuba, but hopefully it will not head our way. Looks like some of the places we left behind might get smacked, though. Hope all's well for everyone there in the weeks to come...

After convincing Gloria, the name I've given to the synthesized voice of the nav system, that we really wanted to go down I-75, things went pretty well. Then, we got tired of the stop-lights' timing in all of the small burgs along the way, so we set out eastward, "off-route." Gloria didn't like that, and it took some smacking around to get her to stop telling us to make U-turns and other turns to try to get us back on the route we'd originally entered. Finally, Gloria gave up and shut up. Now, she won't even tell us when a turn is coming up on a route we actually want to be on! More smacking around is scheduled for tomorrow.

The ride through most of the central spine of Florida was quite beautiful. The clouds were, again, putting on a great show, and we saw wonderfully green farms and lots of horses, especially north and south of Ocala. We switched over to the Florida Turnpike, a toll road, to get to Boynton Beach faster, and while it wasn't as picturesque as the smaller roads through the towns, the scenery wasn't all that bad.

Afer we moved into our hotel room and were getting ready to go to my brother's house, I did manage to enter our hotel's location and my brother's address into a sort of "favorites" list in the nav system, so that, by pushing one of two selection buttons, the course, Scotty, is "laid in" and off we go. We're about 5 miles away from their house, and Roz told us tonight that we're in the same hotel they stayed in when they were waiting for their house to be finished. The folks at the hotel are quite pet-friendly, and were surprised when Claudia told them that they were the only hotel in Boynton Beach that accepted dogs of medium size. Quite a nice change over last night!

Spent the evening with my brother and sister-in-law. They've lived here in Boynton Beach for about six years, now, and have gotten fairly well adjusted to the climate, and have, as I alluded to above, met tons of friends they knew from back home in Somerville, NJ, who've moved down here, too.

Roz fixed a nice dinner, suitable for guests who are arriving and you're not sure when they'll get there. The dogs were very good in the house, too. Nate and Roz have had dogs before, so the only worry was from Roz, who feared she'd get to like Shiloh too much. Shiloh cooperated by being a pest and looking doe-eyed at anyone who had food near their hands or face... we ignored her pleas.

Back to the hotel to log on, check email and the closing stock prices, and update the TravelBlog.... Well, it's way past our usual bedtime, though Claudia's been under the covers for over an hour already, and I'm still typing away. Off to bed with me, too. It's already Thursday, here, though I should get to sleep in a bit....

And dinner with Herb and Bernice and Roz and Nate will be Friday night!

June 9-10: Boynton Beach, FL, vistiting with and sharing stories and photos with Roz and Nate.
Oh, and did you happen to notice the TV recently? Tropical Storm Alice just left the west coast of Cuba, heading, probably, for the Louisiana coast or the Florida Panhandle [read: Tallahassee]. We dodged that bullet by just about a week... Thunderstorms [which we're used to by now] and wind are the forecast for these two days. Hopefully, by the time we're ready to hit the road for the north, we'll be following a weakening storm...

June 11: Drive to Savannah, GA, and overnight. And that's about how it happened, less a few details. At about 467.5 miles on the tank, an interesting [and fairly wonderful] thing happened that gave us an extremely good feeling for having undertaken this trip in the Prius. As we were driving along, the low-fuel indicator light came on. Normally, this is not a surprising event; on this leg of the trip, we were running into some crosswinds, and fuel mileage was a bit lower than I'd expected. I figured that we had another twenty miles in the tank.

Suddenly the engine stopped. No sputtering, no hesitating; one instant we were doing about 65 miles per hour; the next second the engine was off. Deceleration. Nothing under the gas pedal. Fortunately, no cars tailgating, either!

Now, here's the wonderful part. As the car decelerated, down to about 30-40 miles per hour, I discovered that if I stepped on the gas pedal, the car actually responded with some acceleration, albeit weak. I discovered that I could pull off the road, which was tricky, since the engine had quit in a construction zone with the large orange-and-white plastic barrels along the side of the road. I could drive between them and pull forward about 50-100 feet to a safe and convenient place to stop.

The dashboard, of course, lit up like a Christmas tree, with red "!" lights and "check engine" lamps both on the dashboard and on the nav system screens.

Conclusion: out of fuel. The Prius protected itself from out-of-fuel damage by cutting the engine off entirely and quickly. The energy in the propulsion battery was still available, and let me drive the car to a safe place. A conventional powerplant car can't do that, and you've all seen the danger and confusion that occurs when a car stalls and is stuck in a traffic lane.

A hybrid won't do that. If you run out of gas, you can still drive safely off the highway to a safe place. Think about it.

So.... I opened the trailer, got my spare gas can out, and put about two gallons of gasoline into the tank. I put the the spare tank back into the trailer and got back behind the wheel and tried restarting the Prius. After a few seconds, the engine started, and a few seconds later, all of the warning lights went out. The low-fuel box on the fuel gauge was still blinking, but now we felt good about getting to the next exit and a gas station. Again, fortunately, the next exit did have a gas station and it was very close. Less than about five miles to the pump. And pump I did. I filled the Prius as much as possible and refilled the spare tank, too, of course. While we were stopped at the station, we also saw an adorable young girl, maybe eight years old, walking a daschund puppy about the size of a medium sub sandwich. Its tiny legs were prancing as it tried to keep up with the girl, and the two were quite a sight. Claudia was walking Biscuit and Shiloh during the fueling, and she got to talk to the girl for a while. A good time was had by all.

And we were on our way, again.

We changed our reservation from the La Quinta in downtown Savannah to one just off Interstate 95 and a bit before the city itself. This was a long haul day, so we were happy to get to dinner and bed. We asked the hotel's receptionist about good local places to eat, and she suggested Love's, a seafood place about three or four miles away. The nav system found it for us after we missed one of the turns the hotel person gave us, and when we saw the signs for Love's it was interesting: just off a 2-lane road that was being reworked into a 4-lane, I think, and barely even a frontage road.

Cars everywhere: in designated parking places, along both sides of the road in no pattern at all. Our little Prius ended up just about fifty feet from the entrance, and we walked past a full-blown Hummer parked near the front of the restaurant.

They said that they could seat us within a half hour, so we walked down to the banks of the river that bordered the restaurant's property. Signs cautioned against throwing rocks into the river, because that's where they "farmed" the catfish they served. We dutifully obeyed the mandate.

After we walked around the property a bit, we saw that the restaurant was much bigger than we'd thought: the "smoking section" was under a huge tent along the front of the building, outside the entrance. The main building had a glassed-in porch area, where we were seated, overlooking the lawn and the river, and very large seating areas behind another set of windows ringed with lamp-strings went on for many more feet. I estimated a serving capacity of several hundred people, at least!

Hetty, our waitress, was cheerful and very good, helping us with some advice on our selection. We went with the catfish, and the spices and sauce on them were wonderful, probably the best I'd ever eaten. Even the veggies were done just right and had great flavor. Highly recommended, if you're ever in the area or passing through on I-95.

June 12: Drive to Raleigh, NC, area, home of Claudia's son Brian, daughter-in-law Yonit, their son Coby, and a big extended family, and other dear friends in the Chapel Hill/Carrboro area. Hi, Jim, Myrna, Pat and Judy! [...and Jamie, Julia and their twins!]

We made it! We arrived at about 5:30 pm, after a 6.5-hour stretch of good weather, sparse rain, and continuing green and river-crossing driving. We're staying at the apartment of Yonit's grandmother. We'll use it as a home base while we're here. It's just a mile and change from Yonit's mom's house, and not too far from their home, either.

First up, get some supplies for the apartment: oranges, bread, milk, cereal, other staples, and, of course a cable modem to replace the one that had been removed. Next issue: buy a piece of coax to hook the modem to the cable outlet: something I didn't think I'd need to bring along. No problem: Radio Shack is about another mile or two down the road. Plenty of malls nearby.

6.13: more supplies along with the coax and some other goodies. A pair of night-lights that we can use here and on the road, for one. I discovered that one of the things lacking in most hotel rooms is a night-light. Pulling the drapes for privacy in many rooms makes the room completely dark, and climbing over sleeping dogs, etc., at night for a bathroom break can be challenging, at best. Now, we're set for the trip home. Yeah, silly me, but still, quite practical.

Brian's birthday today, so we took him and Yonit's parents to dinner to celebrate. The Melting Pot, "a fondue restaurant", 3100 Wake Forest Road, Raleigh, NC, 27609; 919-878-0477; email themeltingpot @ nc,rr,com [change the commas to dots before mailing, to thwart spammers], and www.meltingpot.com. They're expanding a lot across the US, and if they keep the quality as high as we experienced, you'll love it!

6.14: Afternoon and evening with Jim and Myrna in Chapel Hill, near Carrboro. Our dogs got along with their dogs and cat(s) [I only saw one of their cats]; and a very nice dinner made by Myrna. One of their grandchildren, Jacob, was being baby-sat by them today, and he's a dear. Jim and I took him home to his moms, and got to do a car repair for their daughter, Jamie. Her Jeep, with something like 170,000 miles on it, had suddenly taken to not starting; just making some clicking noises under the passenger-side dashboard. But when this happened, the entire car cut off. No lights, instrument panel; nothing. Initially, we thought it might be a corroded contact under one of the many under-hood relays, but Jim traced it to a bad connection of the negative terminal of the battery. He removed the clamp and its bolt, cleaned everything off and reassembled it with several washers to improve the contact pressure between the clamp and the terminal. The car started as if it were summer. [it's pretty much like summer here...]. The local mechanics had not been able to diagnose the problem, though they thought it might be a bad battery connection. A new clamp should do the trick as a more permanent fix.

Back home to the apartment late, walked the dogs, and settled in to a long night's sleep. Weather forecasts are for decreasing humidity, but continued high temperatures, around 90. We seem to have left all kinds of harsh weather behind us as we've traveled, from tropical storms in the Florida Panhandle to scorching temperatures from Arizona to Florida. By Friday, it should be nice here. We make no guarantees as to what the weather will be like after we leave this area. :)

6.15: No plans for today, so we took the day off. I fought with the wireless link in the apartment, and we're still trying to get the cable modem reactivated. Lounged around and watched the market and the news and some shows on the sci-fi channel and others. Dinner with Brian at one of his favorite places, an all-you-can-eat restaurant where you choose the food, buffet-style, and they grill it, Japanese style, in front of you on a 6- or 8-foot diameter grill. Delicious, and inexpensive.

6.16: Morning off, except Claudia's going out for some shopping. Tonight we go to Jim and Myrna's, then go over to Pat and Judy's to see them and their two Goldens, and see if our dogs want to go swimming in the creek behind their house. We'd traveled together [sans dogs] to an Elderhostel trip to Sedona, Arizona, in April.
Wonderful afternoon with Pat and Judy and Jim and Myrna and our [total of] six dogs [or was it seven?]. From a fourteen-year-old golden to a two-year-old, plus our mix, Biscuit, we all went down to a stream that cuts across behind P&J's property. It's part of a community parkland owned by the homeowners around it, and it was a treat! Biscuit is a non-water-dog, and never did more than sip some water from a pool downstream, but the Goldens relished the whole experience. Fetching and retrieving sticks thrown into the stream's pond areas, stealing sticks from each other, jumping and splashing and swimming, they all loved the time. Our Old Golden, Shiloh, ran around like a puppy, more bouncy and springy than I'd ever seen her before. She definitely didn't want to leave, and now that she's familiar with the area, we'll probably have trouble keeping her dry on the next visit.
Into Chapel Hill, I think it was, for dinner. A great restaurant we'd eaten at last time I was here was packed, and couldn't take a group of six [the dogs stayed home], and there was another party of six waiting to be seated before us! We decided to try another place across the street and down the block a bit, and it was very good, yet not crowded. Back to P&J's to gather our respective dogs and head home. The nav system took us home, and I realized that the route to P&J's is many turns easier than to J&M's! In addition, the nav plotted a route from Jim and Myrna's to Pat and Judy's which was way different from the route Myrna led us on, so one day I'll see if the nav system's route really is shorter than Myrna's. Keep in mind that when I followed Myrna from their place to P&J's, she assured me that I wouldn't have any trouble keeping up with her, as she drives "slowly."
Not.
This is a bit reminiscent of the time we drove from Cupertino to see J&M when they lived in Bandon, OR. Myrna had said, "cross the bridge and go a mile or two and make the left turn," etc.... We discovered that a "Myrna Mile," as it came to be known, was roughly 5.2 "regular" miles.... :)... but we found their place anyway.

7.09: Ah, well, it's been a week or two of house hunting and visits with friends and relatives.
We've looked at about two dozen homes on the web and on our way to see about a dozen in person. We're impressed with how nice many neighborhoods are, how wooded they are, and how much house we can get by selling our home in California. We have a realtor in California working to get our home ready for sale and we're working with another here in Raleigh to get us into homes to have a look inside. Many houses that look good as you drive by or read about on the web are very different inside.
We met the owner of one of our top picks today. Really nice guy, moving to South Carolina so he doesn't have to drive down every Monday and back every Friday. Something about enjoying his family and the home he redesigned and rebuilt. It includes a 10' square kids "playhouse" in the back yard, modeled after the main house. And I really liked the three-car garage. The woods in the back yard were nice, too, though the lot sloped steeply away from the house. The owner had trucked in 12,000 tons of soil to create a terraced back yard [!]. And now he was moving. He didn't want to include the little red Porsche in the garage, either....
Then we went to look at a little abode I'd chosen to look at, maybe five or ten miles away. Only about 6000 square feet of living space, with what amounted to three small apartments, with kitchens and baths, above the four-car garage. [!] About an acre and a half of land, including a separate shed with a garage door and drive-up ramp, complete with electricity. Downside: built in 1978, with a lot of inside decorations that we'd want to replace, like most bathroom sinks, baths, etc.
The property is about 1.5 acres, enough to subdivide, build another dream house on, and sell the first one. Including its semicircular driveway with electrical gates, rear decks with spa, basement room with kitchen and fireplace, etc., etc., etc. All for a bit more than half the selling price of our California house.
The realtor that let us into the house kept saying "wow!", as did the other three of us visiting. It was a jaw-dropper.
But it would require lots of work to bring up to today's standards, even after the previous owner's full kitchen remodel with Corian®, stainless appliances, and so on. Wow, again.
We've got another list of houses to see next week.

Now comes some more decision points: if we sell the CA house and come back here to buy, do we fly back and ship our cars or take another cross-country drive back here to NC? Can we leave our two dogs with friends here to babysit them until we get back, or drive them twice again cross-country and bring our cat out on the final east-coast tour? Yikes! Drive or fly? Ship or drive?

If we find "the" house to buy and buy it, should we drive back to CA at all, or just fly back, ship everything to NC and fly back, or if we don't find the "right" house here, do we drive to CA, pack the house up and then store it all while we drive back to NC [with cat], and then rent an apartment in the Raleigh area while we continue shopping. Decisions, decisions...

Further Updated, 02.16.06: We put an offer in on a house and it was accepted. We're starting our drive back to California on Tuesday morning, July 07.19, rather than Thursday the 21st, to get the house ready sooner to put it on the market.

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