Plans

Heya folks. Sorry I have been really lax in my posting lately. I can't really give a great reason why... so I won't even try.

We have been biding our time and slowly preparing for our departure from Santa Fe which will occur in about 4 weeks. Our days have been long ones full of house cleaning and organizing, reading, walks and talking about this crazy world we all live in. And of course Billy has been doing a lot of painting as usual.

We have been watching the news about the California wildfires and in particular about the fires burning in and around Big Sur (since that is our destination for this fall.) It seems as though the back country will be greatly affected but that the immediate area to our campground has been protected and saved from the fires.

When we leave here our route will take us back up through Monument Valley which I am very excited to visit again. I will get to spend my birthday there which will be a very peaceful and beautiful place to spend it. After that we are going to stop off in Zion National Park for close to a week. It will be our first visit to this park. Then we shoot up and across Nevada on "the loneliest highway" all the way to the Lake Tahoe area. I am actually kind of interested in seeing the ghost towns along this stretch of land in northern Nevada. I have a few FSA (Farm Security Administration) photography books with images dating from the 30's and 40's depicting the mining boom and the whole wild west scenery of the area. A few of the towns we will drive through on HWY 50 used to be hugely populated (albeit with poverty stricken peoples), bustling places of trade and business and now there are maybe a couple hundred people (if that) living in these towns. I hope to capture my own series of photos in these ghost towns as we pass through.

Once we have hit California we will creep down through the Sacramento Valley and into the Carmel area and eventually land in Big Sur where we are set to stay for a minimum of 3 if not 6 months. We are SO looking forward to arriving there (which will be in mid to late September.)

So that is pretty much our plan. If anyone has any suggestions for this route feel free to lay them on me.

I have been doing a lot of reading lately and I would like to recommend the book "What is the What" by Dave Eggers. It's a story relaying the life of a Sudanese Lost Boy. Whether you are familiar with these boys from Sudan or not this book is well worth picking up for more reasons than I can even say. Another interesting thing I can recommend is a documentary titled "I Like Killing Flies." Get it. It's hugely entertaining.

I am currently reading "The Air Conditioned Nightmare" by Henry Miller. Anyone want to read it along with me? I just picked it up this afternoon so feel free to dive in and let me know if you are on board. I would love to have a few people to chat with about it as I go along. And yeah... I came back in and edited this paragraph after I realized I had named the book as "The Refrigerated Nightmare." Sorry Henry.