It’s been awhile since I’ve put words on a page, words to miles, to adventures.  Let’s see how this goes….

This was to be the season without the BIG TRIP.  Apart from an annual pilgrimage to Cape Cod and some day trips, this was to be the year to hunker down and spend those resources on SERIOUS things like car and leaky roof and ailing heater.  And I did that…for awhile.  This has been the first Spring that I have not traveled in years.  I’ve been itchy being so homebound but spring is the best time to be in the periwinkle palace of EP–birds singing madly, doors and windows flung open, flowers brazenly unfolding in the garden.  The long days around solstice yield daisies and lightening bugs and cathartic rainstorms.

I’ve been spending these May/June 2018 days painting with oils;  workshopping a play; acting in another workshop of a new play; home and garden improvement tasks; getting medical appointments taken care of; binge-watching The Americans; seeing and learning with friends; riding bikes with Christopher and taking walks around the neighborhood.  A lovely easy flow of art making uh…

Ok, so it is 6:39 AM and the machines have started in my creekside splendor.  The Dinosaurs are awaking from their slumber–dinosaurs with the name DEERE written on them in the forms of back hoes and dump trucks and stampers and peckers and yes, there is a drill called a pecker.  This major engineering event has been going on as well–a sewer replacement project that installs a sewer line UNDER the creek out back and beneath the alley directly behind my house.  This is a bigger drama than what I want to attend to here, now–a drama of saving a tree, calling a lawyer, and chatting daily with engineers and foremen and supervisors out back named Hank, Reuben, and Joe. A drama of LOTS AND LOTS OF NOISE THAT WILL CONTINUE into the near future as they work their way from my backyard to the neighbors’.

Then there is the car….stick with me here because all of this leads to the road trip.  I bought an SUV with only 15,000 miles on it a few weeks back.  It has a moon roof.  It has blue tooth.  It has enough room for camping gear.  It screams road trip.

So like the responsible fiscal manager I am, I did a comparative cost analysis of what it would be to fly to Colorado to visit family around the fourth of July or to drive.  The cost was about the same–driving one way.  Ah, yes, I have to drive back.  But the car! and the noise out back! And the adventure of painting my way through middle America!  So here I am, heading out midday today and launching this blog of my adventure.

I hope to drive around seven hours today starting midday and get into Ohio–Cambridge or Zanesville.  Hopefully, I will bring you along with me on this blog…….