What to do, what to do? I wondered as I sat down. Get my Nook out? I know! I’ll practice my selfies!
What do you think? Is this a good picture of me? Am I improving?
“Improving? Peg, I don’t have anything to compare it to,” you say.
Well, let me fix that for you. Here is a shot from one of my first selfie sessions using the bathroom mirror.
Who knew taking pictures of oneself - hence selfies- takes practice?
I quickly became bored with that and I really hate pictures of myself anyway so I turned to people watching instead.
People were crossing the road and congregating on a little island.
Taxi stop? I wondered. I used my camera to zoom in on the sign, a trick my dad used to do. SMOKING AREA it says. Wow. Look how far from the entrance they make the smokers go to smoke -- and I used to be one of those!
I turned to my left and watched this gal foraging among the landscaping. What is she doing? I wondered. Her head comes up and I see she has a cigarette in her mouth. There, by the trashcan, at the entrance to the airport, is a sign declaring: NO SMOKING. I guess some people just think they are special.
I didn’t wait very long before Patti pulled her Buick to the curb in front of the bench where I sat. I stood and grinned from ear to ear. It has been much too long since we’ve gotten together. She climbed out and came around the car, her arms open wide in greeting. She was as happy to see me as I was to see her and we giggled like school girls as we hugged each other. She popped the trunk - all these newfangled cars have buttons you can push to release the latch on the trunk- and we loaded my luggage. Climbing in, buckling up and pulling from the curb, we chatted, catching up on each other’s news, never stopping as we made the one hour drive to her house.
I just love Patti and Lee’s home. I love everything about it from the open, airy layout to the décor to the landscaping. But my two most favorite things are the patio with its old-timey collection adorning the walls…
…and her California Pump with it’s soothing sounds as the water tickles and plays on a sandstone rock that her husband Lee had found for her. Although dry when he found it, it has a basin that appears to have been created by hundreds or maybe even thousands of years of water dripping onto it.
It’s just perfect.
“Peg, what’s a California Pump?” you ask.
I know, right! I asked Patti the very same question and you know what? She laughed at me - not in a mean way though, in an amused way. “That’s not what I said,” she told me. “I called it my California inspired pump with a cowboy twist,” and she laughed again. Isn’t it funny how we don’t always hear what’s being said?
And that is why this pump will always and forever be her California Pump in my mind.
The next couple of days were spent visiting and preparing for the trip. On one of our expeditions into town to buy supplies, Patti gave me a lesson on using and understanding her GPS, affectionately named Betsy.
Patti, bless her heart, had our trip completely planned out. I can’t imagine the hours she must have spent researching and plotting the best routes, making reservations for all our nightly stops and programming everything into Betsy. She’s truly an amazing woman.
On the morning of our departure I met Lori. To be honest with you, I had met Lori once before. She came with Patti to our last family reunion five years ago, but with so many people there, I barely remember her. In essence this was the first time I was meeting her and now we would be spending three weeks together traveling in an RV.
Lori told me later that she was a little worried about traveling for such a long time in such a confined area with someone she didn’t know, but I wasn’t worried about that at all.
“You are what anyone needs you to be,” Mary Ellen, my old boss at Curves told me once. At the time we were having a discussion on a client complaint. “I know you weren’t rude to her, I never worry about that at all. Sometimes it’s just a personality thing.”
My only worry about the trip was driving the RV. I reassured myself with lots of self-talk though. Women drive RV’s all the time. If they can do it, so can I! Women even drive semis too and they’re way bigger than an RV.
As a matter of fact I drove Mike’s truck, Big Red, a Ford F-550 from Missouri to Pennsylvania once. So, okay, I was following Mike as he led in our RV and having him as a marker gave me a lot of confidence - still, I did it!
Mike was very supportive in this whole endeavor. From holding down the fort, here in Missouri while I was gone, to driving the RV. “You can do it Peg, just remember not to get too close to the gas pumps when you pull in and watch your tail swing when you pull out, you don’t want to sideswipe a pump. And you have to slow way down for turns. And don’t worry about trying to go fast because of traffic, they’ll wait for you or they’ll go around,” was his advice.
Upon meeting Lori we talked about driving the RV. “How was it to drive?” I asked. She had driven it from the rental place to Patti’s.
“Not bad. I already drive a truck and I’ve pulled trailers before, how about you?”
“I don’t drive all that much but I can do it,” I stated confidently. Then, in my mind’s eye and in the blink of an eye, I relived driving Mike’s Big Red. “But when it comes to things like construction zones, I just close my eyes and go!” I said it as a joke but I guess I didn’t inspire a lot of confidence there because Lori said, “It’s okay, I’ll drive.”
Fine by me. I didn’t want to drive anyway, but just to be clear, I didn’t really close my eyes. Not literally. I figured out where my driver’s side tire needed to be so I was inside the lines and when it came to the construction zones that’s all I focused on. I didn’t dare glance at the construction barriers.
Lori is a take-charge kind of girl and I was happy to let her take charge. My job was to be navigator. I told Lori right up front though that I’m not a very good navigator. It’s beginning to look like I’m not going to much use on this trip, doesn’t it?
It really didn’t take long for our personalities to mesh. It probably took Lori longer to get used to me than it took for me to get used to her. I’m used to being a helpmate but she wasn’t used to having a helper, she was used to doing things for herself. I kept at it though and eventually wore her down. Before the trip was over, she didn’t think anything of asking me to make a bite of lunch while she drove, or fill her coffee cup for her. But having said that I have to tell you that Lori was a good boss and traveling companion. She hardly ever got mad at me, even when I screwed up. “It’s okay,” she said more than once. “This thing can go around the block.”
“Really, Peg?” you say. “Even with a GPS?”
Well, I warned you, didn’t I? I would call out the turns and merges to Lori. “Turn right in 500 feet,” but when there are two roads close together, it’s hard to know which is the right one.
“Why didn’t Lori just listen to the GPS?” you ask.
Lori finds the GPS voice to be very annoying and distracting so I watched the GPS and gave Lori as much notice as I could as to what was going to happen. “We won’t have anything for 345 miles,” I’d say and we would relax a little and chat. Or just be quiet. The silence between us was never uncomfortable and we never turned any music on. In fact the only time we had the radio on at all was to listen to the weather band.
Oh. My. Gosh! The rain! I think the whole first week of our trip was spent driving in the rain, and we were a little worried about tornados too. And if that wasn’t enough for Lori to deal with we had miles and miles of bad roads and oodles of construction zones. Any one of those things on their own would be enough for a novice RV driver to deal with but just imagine what it was like when all three were combined!
Yeah.
And just for fun, let’s throw egocentric people into the mix. You know the kind I’m talking about. Everyone else has merged into the proper lane and are all creeping along and you get this one person who thinks he’s special and deserves to be at the head of the line so he passes everyone up and expects someone up ahead to let him in. You know the guy I mean? We’ve all seen him and if you are honest about it you will admit it even kind of pisses you off a little too.
We are all waiting our turn, he should wait his turn too!
Well, it happened to us on this trip. Lori saw him coming. The Texas semi driver ahead of us saw him coming too and he wasn’t having any of it. He steered his rig into the other lane to block the advancement of this ignoramus and when it became apparent that Dumb-butt was going to pass him on the shoulder, Texas pulled onto the shoulder too!
“YEAH! YOU GO!” Lori cheered for the brash semi driver. “You tell him that you don’t mess with Texas!”
I don’t know how our median driver didn’t lose control in the rain soaked grass but I totally expected him too.
Lori doesn’t like to ‘fly blind’, so to speak. She needed to have a general idea of where we were going so after dinner at night or in the morning over coffee she would check our itinerary and compare it to Rand McNally.
Betsy is way cool though, she tells us things that a map just can’t tell us. She will tell us the speed limit, how fast we are driving and how many lanes there are at our turn or merge and which lanes are okay to be in.
“Betsy says there are going to be five lanes at our turn and we can be in any of the three right lanes,” I’d tell Lori and she would start to change lanes and I would wonder why she didn’t just stay where she was.
“You have to be over there,” I’d say as we got closer to our turn.
“Peg, you have to say right or left. I don’t know what ‘over there’ means.” Lori was so patient with me. “And you said ‘right three lanes’.”
“Sorry. I meant left…the other right!” Crap! I admonished myself. I always confuse right and left if I don’t think about it. I’d have to watch that from now on and I did. I consciously made myself slow down and think about whether it was right or left and didn’t just blurt out the first one that came to mind.
Honestly though, navigating was seriously cutting into my picture making. (I might be a little obsessed.)
Road pictures, pictures I snap as we travel down the road, can be a little hit or miss. They can be blurry if my camera doesn’t focus quickly enough or I can get a pole or vehicle in a bad place or I can miss the shot all together. And there are a few things you can count on seeing in my road pictures. Dwellings are one of them.
“I wonder what those round houses are for?” I don’t remember if Lori asked the question, or if I brought it up for conversation.
“I think they might be for ceremonies,” I said.
“Maybe it’s their houses,” Lori countered.
There were a lot of them, that’s for sure.
Now that I am home, I Googled it. Turns out we were both right, according to the website I found.
“The hogan is a sacred home for the Diné (Navajo) people who practice traditional religion. Every family -- even if they live most of the time in a newer home -- must have the traditional hogan for ceremonies, and to keep themselves in balance.”
Graffiti is something else I’ve been photographing for a few years now. I like to see if I can figure out the message. Sometimes the graffiti shows a very talented artist and are really beautiful and sometimes the message is perfectly clear.
Cows are a favorite of mine and something you will find in lots of my road pictures, especially if they are in the water.
My mother is the one that got me into cows-in-the-water photos. She took one a whole lotta years ago that was just perfect and I’ve been trying to capture one of my own every since then.
I have been on many of the eastward roads Lori and I traveled and there are barns that I’ve photographed more than once.
I took this photo in August of 2009.
And I took a picture of the same barn on this trip, May, 2015.
I got a lot of good photographs from this adventure and I’ve had some of them up as my desktop photo, but this next one has stayed up the longest and is up there still. It is, of course, the skeleton an old billboard.
I took the photo because it’s just the kind of stuff I photograph, but when I saw it on my computer I immediately thought of the story of the crucifixion of Jesus and the two thieves. One thief went with Him to heaven and the other remained unbelieving even unto death.
The first leg of our adventure was a fast dash to Pennsylvania with long drive days and many miles to travel. We had an appointment with the movers and we had to have Momma packed and waiting.
Until next time, let's call this one done.
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