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A Holiday Letter 2023
Today or tomorrow is Epiphany and if I see a Spanish bakery I’ll try to get the special loaf. If you get the Baby Jesus you are supposed to host the midwinter party.
I’m camped at an off road vehicle camp outside of Santa Clara. I spent last night here and it was great. All the off-roaders leaves before dark. Yesterday there was a class or group or something but it was a bunch of 4-5 year olds rising motorbikes and 4 wheelers around the giant parking lot. Pretty adorable.
I found some good hiking today and went on a heritage trail and a visitors center that had displays on the indigenous folks. Big time weavers. I also hiked to a little waterfall and also climbed up into the hills.
For the holiday season which is wrapping up now I often do an annual recap. I’ll do so now even though I’m way behind on my epic road trip narrative. I’ll probably abandon the play by play of campsites and activities.
2023 found me living in Leavenworth in an apartment in the old Jewish Temple and working as the Executive Director for the Alliance, a domestic violence and sexual assault shelter and program. In January I joined the Executive Board of the Leavenworth/Lansing Chamber of Commerce as the Second Vice Chair.
I submitted a corrective action plan for our certification site visit and the Alliance was granted provisional accreditation. We spent most of 2023 improving sexual assault services and staff training which. We had our targeted site visit in the Fall but we had not received a response before I left in November.
In the spring I slipped on my stairs and hyper-extended my knee. I also learned my knee was a mass of degenerative garbage. I was on crutches and missed a few days of work. It was a real low for me. I had gotten back to 280 pounds, what I weighed when I graduated high school but I’m not 17 anymore.
I started losing weight which accelerated when I learned I may have cirrhosis of the liver. It’s actually more common in obesity then alcohol use. I weighed myself in San Diego and I’m down to 239. I can definitely feel the difference.
I continued to go back to Columbia most months for the Columbia Men’s Book Club. We’re chugging along in maybe our 15th year. I also took a trip to Hays, Kansas because of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Egv3IBkBH6Q&pp=ygUaNDkgd2luY2hlc3RlciBoYXlzIGthbnNhcyA%3Dwith with John but 49 Winchester cancelled their show 30 minutes before doors opened.
I went to Harry’s house for Easter and hosted Thanksgiving at John and Flow’s. After Thanksgiving I moved the last of my things to Columbia and cleaned out my apartment. I’d left the Alliance under my former Grants Manager who became the new ED, which made me proud as she is young and off to a great start in her career.
John and Flow and I flew into Maine and went to the Down East, mostly Bar Harbour and Arcadia National Park. It was cool but a lot of traffic and the color was limited.
I left on an Epic Road Trip and have been doing Van Life. I went to Big Bend NP and really enjoyed it. Saw my first javelina and bobcat and a ton of road runners. Great hiking and met Rey who showed me a pictograph and a mortar site by a tank. We heard a mountain lion yowl and found a ton of worked stones.
I also went to Carlsbad Caverns and camped a night with a traveling novelist. I visited Ray, who I met in my epic road trip 2 years ago for Solstice and had a great Yule fire. I also picked up a hitchhiker and took him to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.
New Years found me in San Diego reuniting with Steve my best friend in grad school who I hadn’t seen in 25 years. Great visit and I have almost 2 more months for this leg of the trip as I work on my book. I outlined chapter 5 tonight. Going to turn in now and hike in a new spot tomorrow and plan on staying at a Walmart outside of Fresno tomorrow for the rain.
A Holiday Letter 2023
Today or tomorrow is Epiphany and if I see a Spanish bakery I’ll try to get the special loaf. If you get the Baby Jesus you are supposed to host the midwinter party.
I’m camped at an off road vehicle camp outside of Santa Clara. I spent last night here and it was great. All the off-roaders leaves before dark. Yesterday there was a class or group or something but it was a bunch of 4-5 year olds rising motorbikes and 4 wheelers around the giant parking lot. Pretty adorable.
I found some good hiking today and went on a heritage trail and a visitors center that had displays on the indigenous folks. Big time weavers. I also hiked to a little waterfall and also climbed up into the hills.
For the holiday season which is wrapping up now I often do an annual recap. I’ll do so now even though I’m way behind on my epic road trip narrative. I’ll probably abandon the play by play of campsites and activities.
2023 found me living in Leavenworth in an apartment in the old Jewish Temple and working as the Executive Director for the Alliance, a domestic violence and sexual assault shelter and program. In January I joined the Executive Board of the Leavenworth/Lansing Chamber of Commerce as the Second Vice Chair.
I submitted a corrective action plan for our certification site visit and the Alliance was granted provisional accreditation. We spent most of 2023 improving sexual assault services and staff training which. We had our targeted site visit in the Fall but we had not received a response before I left in November.
In the spring I slipped on my stairs and hyper-extended my knee. I also learned my knee was a mass of degenerative garbage. I was on crutches and missed a few days of work. It was a real low for me. I had gotten back to 280 pounds, what I weighed when I graduated high school but I’m not 17 anymore.
I started losing weight which accelerated when I learned I may have cirrhosis of the liver. It’s actually more common in obesity then alcohol use. I weighed myself in San Diego and I’m down to 239. I can definitely feel the difference.
I continued to go back to Columbia most months for the Columbia Men’s Book Club. We’re chugging along in maybe our 15th year. I also took a trip to Hays, Kansas because of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Egv3IBkBH6Q&pp=ygUaNDkgd2luY2hlc3RlciBoYXlzIGthbnNhcyA%3Dwith with John but 49 Winchester cancelled their show 30 minutes before doors opened.
I went to Harry’s house for Easter and hosted Thanksgiving at John and Flow’s. After Thanksgiving I moved the last of my things to Columbia and cleaned out my apartment. I’d left the Alliance under my former Grants Manager who became the new ED, which made me proud as she is young and off to a great start in her career.
John and Flow and I flew into Maine and went to the Down East, mostly Bar Harbour and Arcadia National Park. It was cool but a lot of traffic and the color was limited.
I left on an Epic Road Trip and have been doing Van Life. I went to Big Bend NP and really enjoyed it. Saw my first javelina and bobcat and a ton of road runners. Great hiking and met Rey who showed me a pictograph and a mortar site by a tank. We heard a mountain lion yowl and found a ton of worked stones.
I also went to Carlsbad Caverns and camped a night with a traveling novelist. I visited Ray, who I met in my epic road trip 2 years ago for Solstice and had a great Yule fire. I also picked up a hitchhiker and took him to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.
New Years found me in San Diego reuniting with Steve my best friend in grad school who I hadn’t seen in 25 years. Great visit and I have almost 2 more months for this leg of the trip as I work on my book. I outlined chapter 5 tonight. Going to turn in now and hike in a new spot tomorrow and plan on staying at a Walmart outside of Fresno tomorrow for the rain.
Ambling Around Down East
I keep hoping to get regular about writing posts but being on vacation I may just do it. It’s day three of vacation and I am starting to settle in. Being relaxed and away from work and getting lots of exercise, eating fresh seafood and seeing really cool stuff is good for my state of mind.
My ex-neighbor Rich picked us up at 4:30 bless his heart and we had smooth flights. We changed planes at JFK and that is a long terminal. When we arrived in Bangor and took our rental car to our Motel in Trenton. It’s really cute, they have a pen with a couple sheep and goats. There is a nice view of a bay and a little mountain across the airport we abut.
We slept in so arrived with the crowds and had traffic jams and had to skip many things because there was no parking. We did get the lay of the land and saw cool stuff at Otter Bay and some other area with granite rocks going down to the bay. It was sunny and t-shirt weather. I slipped and fell on some slick spots but no harm was done.
If I haven’t mentioned it I blew out my knee in March and was on crutches for awhile. I’ve been focusing on being more active and building my capacity back up for about 2 1/2 months. The first 2 months it was just walking though I got up to a lot of 7 mile days.
I moved my big plant from my apartment back to my house in Columbia and just getting it down a flight of stairs kicked my ass and made me realize how puny I’d gotten in Leavenworth just walking.
I’ve been working on it moving steel bunk beds a couple of days for work, loading my van with books and furniture and helping Rich move has gotten me in a pattern of a full body workout. I got some of that on our first full day at the park where I was doing some climbing around on the rocks.
There were some nice overlooks and places to walk around on the rocks. I slipped and fell more than once navigating on the wet rocks. I’ve worn the tread off some key spots on my Chacos I learned. We also added a second loop after dinner and after a traffic jam that kind of made it not worth it even though it’s a pretty cool site we checked out a lighthouse.
The next day we headed back to Acadia, more informed and a bit earlier and we did the loop again stopping at different sites. We walked some on a carriage trail and took a bit of a side hike on a cool trail. We’ve been limited on what we can do as one of us can’t walk far or tackle tough terrain.
The fog was in so not much on the scenic outlook. It did thin the crowds.
Day three we had planned a whale watching trip. Took us awhile to figure out parking and find a spot with the traffic. We were paying and discussing what we were going to do when we learned to check and see if it were cancelled, which it was.
We went to the Abbe Museum instead. It had a all collection of artifacts but some really nice stuff and contemporary and neat contemporary exhibits that have some cool stuff.
We grabbed breakfast at the This Way Cafe and it was excellent. The Ploughman’s Plate was popular with a boiled egg, pickles, mustard, maple link sausage, candied walnuts, and some chunks of cheese all local. I wanted that too but I had a good feeling about the hash which was billed as homemade. Sure enough it was the ground kind and not fried meat and potato chunks that most places bill as hash.
Good time to mention the food. We tried to go to Helen’s the first night but the crowd scared us off so we got cold cuts and such at the store near our house. The. Next night we went there early. I had the halibut which was ok but a bit underpriced. I had a bite of Flow’s lobster roll and some of John’s clam strips. All pretty yummy.
Last night we went to a lobster barbecue place and I had a lobster tail but got some pulled pork French fries to share. Wish I would have gotten the barbecue. I probably won’t get a lobster roll.
Tropical Storm Phillipe gave us a rain day today and tomorrow. This morning we went to Cordelia Stanford’s house and grounds which are now a bird sanctuary and nature center. She’d had a nervous breakdown and started photographing birds to recover and became an ornithologist.
We saw some raptors, a nice looking red tail hawk and a black vulture stood out. The timid looking great horned owl was a sight as well. We took a stroll in the woods and a boardwalk and saw a lot of mossy woods and fungi.
The house was closed so we couldn’t see her photos.
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