There's No Place Like Home

We are home. It was a long day, but we finally arrived here at 8 p.m., missing the opportunity to go to the San Francisco Symphony by about 3 hours. Fortunately I had foreseen that this might be a problem and so had arranged for a friend to take my ticket. With that accomplished, I was free to take my time and not push it too much heading home.

I actually slept all right last night, but for some reason, all I had to do was get behind the wheel of the car and Peggy was asking me if I was OK to drive even before we got on the freeway. Maybe it was because I decided not to make a pot of coffee first and so was flying caffeine-less.

But whatever, as we approached Solvang, less than an hour up the road, I decided it might be a kewl place to stop for a coffee break. As it turned out, it was one of Peggy’s most expensive cups of coffee. Solvang is a little Danish village stuck out in the middle of nowhere and a favorite of tourist buses. It offers a little bit of everything--mostly Danish crafts, but also things from Europe, Indian art, and the usual tsatskes that you find in souvenir shops.

We started off with coffee and a bear claw at Solvang’s most popular bakery (or so the sign said ). Both were excellent. While I was finishing up my coffee, Peggy went off "for a minute" to check a store. Half an hour later she was back with some GSP stuff ("German short hair pointer") and a lead on another store which might have more of same. We traipsed down to that store, did indeed find more GSP stuff, bought that, and then made a significant dent in a store that features Indian crafts. Oh yeah--we also checked out the sale at the Izod store and Peggy took advantage of the slashed prices.

We finally got on the road again, though it was by now nearly lunchtime.

Peggy photographing the James Dean Memorial

W set the CD player to cranking and cruised up the road to Lawsuit music (Peggy hadn’t heard the band before; she probably won’t again either), and then lots of John Denver which got us as far as the Harris Ranch, where we bought some steaks to bring home, and picked up some snacks for "lunch." We sat outside by a fountain and ate muffins and drank coffee. Peggy informed me she’d bought more snacks which she would dole out at appropriate intervals if she felt I was getting too sleepy.

Many miles and many potato chips later, we finally turned our wheels from I-5 onto I-80 with the next stop Davis. Kimba was very pleased to see us and Walt was in San Francisco.

The car got unpacked, the telephone messages listened to, and then we sat on the patio reminiscing about the week and marveling that we’ve now been together for almost all waking hours for nearly 3 weeks now and we are still friends, we are still laughing, and nobody has had any short temper at all. Given that we are now at the halfway point of this trip, we figure this is a pretty positive thing.

Finally Peggy went off to bed and I turned on the computer and picked up my 70 e-mail messages and started to ease back into "normal." I promised the psychologist that I’d fax him a report tonight so he’d have it first thing in the morning--and around midnight when I went to do that, discovered I hadn’t typed it yet. So I’m back to normal with a bang and though I intended to be in bed and sleeping soundly by now, it looks like I’ll be transcribing again for the next hour.