LaJolla Shores

The birthday weekend was fabulous.  We went to Petco Park on Sunday and watched the Padres squeak out a 3-2 win against the Angels in 13 innings.  The game was pretty boring through the first nine innings, as both teams stranded many runners and neither could put a string of hits together.  Things got interesting in the bottom of the eleventh, when the Padres got a double with no one out, and the runner was advanced to third on a sacrifice bunt.  At this point the Angels manager pulled his left fielder in favor of an extra second baseman to play the hole between first and second, because any ball hit out of the infield would very likely score the winning run.  With one out and a runner at third it seemed like the perfect opportunity for a squeeze bunt, one of the few highly exciting plays in baseball, but it didn't happen for some reason, and instead the next two batters struck out.  Then in the bottom of the twelfth with a man on first, the Angels shortstop rather obviously dropped a line drive and immediately picked it up for an easy double play, but the umpire correctly called the infield fly rule, over the objections of the Angels manager.  Finally, in the bottom of the thirteenth, with two out, the Padres manager sent in the next night's starting pitcher as a pinch hitter, which was pretty odd, but then he got a single, which was even odder.  On a full count, the next batter hit a long single to left field, and of course the runner at first was running with the pitch.  Now the bizarre eleventh inning substitutions proved fatal for the Angels, because the second baseman playing left field bobbled the ball, and the base runner scored from first.  Truly a game to remember.

On Monday we went to the San Diego Safari Park (aka Wild Animal Park) in Escondido, and did the photo safari.  This involves climbing aboard a truck, which nowadays is fortunately outfitted with a canvas canopy, and driving out to feed the giraffes and the rhinos (see photo above).  I've done this several times before, but it's always a thrill to see those big beautiful eyes and long lashes up close and personal.   Not to mention that 10" prehensile tongue, which extends to gently extract whatever food you're holding in your hand.  Quite amazing, really.  As an extra bonus, we saw a baby rhino (4 months old) wallowing in the mud and then trying to climb up on its mother's back (with some success, I might add).  Our tour guide Lee had an interesting caution as the giraffe approached:

"Remember, she doesn't really like you.  She doesn't dislike you either, she basically just likes the food.  But she doesn't like being petted, and may knock you away with her head if you try it.  Since her head weighs several hundred pounds by itself, this might not be a very pleasant experience."

The prudent person follows advice such as this.  In any case, if you've never done the photo safari, I can heartily recommend it -- well worth the price.

In thinking about Lee's advice later, I wondered to what extent that statement also applies to so-called domesticated animals, like our dog Jake for example.  He wags his tail and gets excited when we walk in the door at home, but does this mean he's happy to see us, or perhaps only that he hopes to get something, such as food, or his ears scratched? Let's face it, animals are basically inscrutable, and even though it's easy to convince oneself that they have the same sort of feelings we do, I think there's a lot of anthropomorphism involved here.  

That night, we had a fabulous birthday dinner, featuring a musical review/roast by my three daughters and some great hot-club guitar.  Many thanks to Cherie for organizing a great birthday celebration!

Our final organized event was a tour of the Salk Institute, a famous architectural tour-de-force designed by Louis Kahn.  My main problem with this building, as well as many other mid-century buildings, is that I really detest raw concrete as an exterior building "finish".  I think it's intrinsically ugly.  Perhaps this comes from spending twenty years or so in the world's ugliest building, Evans Hall, which looks like it was built in East Germany in 1955 and then transported to the UC Berkeley campus.  Or maybe Evans is only the second ugliest, exceeded only by  -- you guessed it -- the Art and Architecture building on the same campus.  Raw concrete is an appropriate exterior finish for bunkers, blockhouses, and prisons.  It should be outlawed for use on any non-penal institution intended for human habitation.

However, leaving aside the aesthetics of raw concrete, the design is quite interesting.  The "blockiness" is broken up in many ways, for example by the use of so-called "negative space", which I think means something like enclosed but visibly empty space.  The central courtyard, which is (fortunately) laid in travertine and not raw concrete, is quite splendid.  But the most appealing aspect for me was the obvious attention paid by Kahn to the needs of the building users.  There is a full height "pipe floor" between each floor of lab space which holds heavy equipment such as low-temperature refrigeration and supply lines for various chemicals and gases for the labs below as well as the usual mechanical gear which is often located above a false ceiling in a standard office building.  The lab space itself is just a set of long rectangular bays which look like they can be easily partitioned into individual labs or offices and just as easily reconfigured.   I think some architects tend to lose sight of the "form follows function" dictum.  This doesn't simply mean that a research institue should look like it houses scientists.  It means that the primary purpose of a building is to provide for the needs of its occupants rather than to enhance the greater glory of its designer.   It looked to me as though the Salk Institute meets this standard.

The Last Lap

It's nearly 1,000 miles from Santa Fe to San Diego via Flagstaff, Needles, Barstow, and Escondido. The first 500 took us across the high desert to the Flagstaff KOA, with a stop at the Painted Desert, shown above, and the Petrified Forest. These were separate National Monuments the last time we were here, but they have since been combined into Petrified Forest National Park.

At most national parks, the routine is very similar.  You manage to find a space in the overcrowded parking lot, bypass the teeming gift shop, restaurant, and visitor center,  pick a trail, and  begin walking.  After at most a quarter mile, the crowd magically disappears and you get to enjoy what the park was set up to protect.  Oh yes, and 90% of the people you encounter on the trail are speaking German.  But the Petrified Forest is truly American in that almost everything is visible from the car, or at worst from 100 feet or less from the car.  This is fortunate, because that day the temperature was in 90's with a strong wind.

At 7,000 ft., Flagstaff was cool, pleasant, and piney.  We remembered the KOA from '95 when we had stopped there in another RV with the kids who were then little.  The big difference between that trip and this one is that on this trip, we have a pretty strict schedule dictated by the need to take possession of our rented house in LaJolla on the 18th.  It's much more relaxed when you're on the road with no time constraints.  We would have liked to spend more time in the Smokies and in the Santa Fe area, but that will have to wait for the next trip.

Setting out the next morning for the final 500 miles, we soon found ourselves descending from the Western Plateau into the Mohave Desert.  And as we did so, the thermometer climbed accordingly.  At Needles, CA we scored a fairly impressive 103F.  But I remembered (barely) the last time I had been in Needles, which I think was in 1962 or thereabouts.  It was a midnight in August, and the temperature was 110.  During this crossing, the desert was hot, windy, and monochromatic for the most part.  As we refueled at Ludlow, which consisted of two gas stations, a restaurant and a motel, I found myself wondering why it was there, and how that had come to be.  But there was no time for contemplation, as it was quickly back to fighting the wind gusts again.

At Barstow we finally abandoned I40, our constant companion for the past two weeks, and turned south on I15 towards Escondido.  You might wonder why Escondido was on the itinerary.  That was a late addition, prompted by the fact that there is a big RoadTrek dealer there, at whose service center we spent most of yesterday getting our propane system fixed, as well as some well-deserved routine maintenance for the vehicle.  One of the things I learned on the trip is that modern diesels use something called DEF, which is one of those TLA's (three-letter-acronyms) that the diesel cognoscenti know all about.  It stands for Diesel Exhaust Fluid, and it's used for emission control.  Who knew?  But when the DEF light came up on the dash, we looked it up in the manual.  We're supposed to go 10,000 miles between refills, but we only got 5,000. That left us trying to get across the Mohave desert with the mercury at 105F wondering if the engine was going to quit on us or what.  A bit of suspense there, but we made it to the Escondido RV resort without a hiccup.  Our last RV park of the trip proved to be the fanciest one.  We luxuriated in the hot tub and the 80 degree temperature.  And, after 6+ hours with Holland RV service the next morning, we arrived at our rental to meet with the landlady at the appointed time of 4PM, with all of five minutes to spare.  The Pacific Ocean never looked cooler, calmer, or more relaxing.

The Land of Enchantment

Northern New Mexico sits high on the western plateau, mostly above a mile in altitude.  And for some reason, the "high desert", as it's called, is much more colorful and interesting, at least to my eye, than its low counterparts, like the Mohave. There's more vegetation, and more color to the rocks and soil.  And of course, the temperature is much more pleasant in the summer.  We left Midge and John monday morning, and after a refueling stop at the nearest Starbucks, headed north to Santa Fe -- only a short hour away.

But it took us an additional hour or more to find our campground once we got off I25, because our GPS led us unerringly to an empty field.  After a few additional failed navigation attempts we called  the campground office and talked to a very friendly woman (everyone in RV-land is very friendly) who couldn't figure out where we were either, and wasn't all that good at directions.  We finally discovered that we were over a mile away from Rancheros de Santa Fe.  Go figure.  After our little contretemps in Nashville, I was beginning to wonder if that golden voice was really an evil trickster.   Maybe I just need to update the map data in the GPS, who knows.

Anyway, having finally checked in at the Ranchero, we made our way to "downtown" Santa Fe, where I executed a spectacular parallel parking tour de force in a shady spot right in the center of town.  This piece of good luck nicely balanced our earlier bad luck with the GPS, and brightened the day considerably.  After living in the Enterprise for 10 days or so, I think I now know what living in a closet must be like, except that there's no picnic table outside the closet door. But the tradeoff is that you can actually park it like a car, almost.

The problem with having taken the previous day off with Midge and John now manifested itself.   Almost all the Santa Fe museums are closed on Monday.  But -- good luck again -- the Georgia O'Keeffe museum was open.  We spent an enjoyable few hours looking at some of her beautiful works, and then repaired to the excellent Cafe Pasqual's, which by yet another bit of luck, was half a block from the parallel-parked Enterprise.

The next morning we set out on the Taos Scenic Loop:  The "high road" out, and it was definitely high, not to mention narrow and winding, and then the "low road" back.  The Enterprise has a "tiptronic" automatic transmission, which I thought was a pure frill until we were descending a particularly steep, narrow, and winding section of the high road.  I was able to downshift and use compression braking, which was a very good move, seeing as how the vehicle weighs in at a hefty 9,000 lbs.

It was a scenic and interesting day, with the cultural highpoint being a visit to the Taos Pueblo, a World Heritage Site.  And then, as we turned a corner wandering through Taos, what to our wondering eyes should appear, but a Nambe store and eight beautiful place-settings on sale. Happy Birthday Cherie!

Where the Wind Comes Sweepin Down the Plain

We got to the Oklahoma City KOA after a long, 466 mile day from Memphis, with a stop for lunch at an Arkansas state park near Fort Smith.  Unfortunately, we developed a problem with our propane tank there, and we've had to shut it off.  So no stove or hot water, except what we can heat in the microwave.  We'll try to get it fixed in San Diego.

I have a low tolerance for equipment malfunctions -- especially brand new equipment.  Thinking about the relative complexity of the vehicle systems in the Enterprise, as opposed to the camper systems, only increased my irritation.  For example, there are probably over 20 different computers in our Mercedes turbodiesel, not to mention a vast array of superbly engineered mechanical components, all of which have performed flawlessly, while a simple propane system has malfunctioned.  Go figure.

Dinner in Oklahoma City was at the fabled Cattlemen's Cafe, which we'd heard about from our daughter Katie, as well as from roadfood.com -- an invaluable resource for cross-country travelers.  We both ordered the T-bone, which was excellent, but of course in classical American tradition the portion was enormous.  We ate part of it and had the rest in Amarillo the next day for lunch.  Unfortunately, it wasn't only the portions that were enormous.  The majority of the diners seemed to be equally oversized.  There was a group of extremely obese people at a nearby table, and I found myself wondering if the floor joists had been sized for such a concentrated load.

This reminded me of a wedding I had attended not so long before.  The couple and most of the guests were twenty-somethings, but I was dismayed to see how many of those twenty-somethings were obese.  Shortly after that event, I had occasion to watch a documentary about Woodstock which used a lot of footage actually shot at the event.  In 1969, among all the hundreds of twenty-somethings shown in the movie, I didn't see a single obese person.  Not one.  We've come a long way since then, and in a very unfortunate direction.

The next day was even longer, as Interstate 40 joined the old Route 66  and we made our way across the remaining half of Oklahoma, the entire Texas panhandle (see the previous post), and half of New Mexico, arriving at Midge and John's adobe palace late in the day. They have a large adobe house up on a hill on the outskirts of Albuquerque with a great view of Sandia Peak and most of the valley, shown above.  They also have two standard poodles, and Midge is allergic to non-poodle dogs, so Jake had to hang out in the Enterprise for the duration of our two-day stay.  We were originally planning to just stay overnight, but John is a first-class wine pourer, so after staggering off to bed, we awoke the next morning somewhat under the weather and decided to have a day of rest.  And it was sunday, after all.

It's a Long Way to Tucumcari

369 miles from Oklahoma City, to be precise.  And then it's another 176 to Albuquerque, where we're stopping for the night with Midge and John.  No doubt you've heard the old saw about rolling up the sidewalks at 10 PM?  In Tucumcari, they apparently roll them up at 2 PM, as we discovered trying to find something open that served coffee.  We were finally directed to the CircleK, which is the New Mexico version of WaWa.  Having just Trekked the western half of Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle, we desperately needed some re-fortification, even though our struggle had been enriched several hours earlier by the 19 story cross in Groom, TX  (pop. 587) shown above.  I had been looking forward all morning to seeing the largest cross in the world, but this was not to be.  Wikipedia later informed me that it was outranked by several others around the world, and was actually only no. 3 in the U.S.  Too Much Information can be a sad thing.

However, the cross provides an excellent segue to our next commercial break:  Why is there religion? I feel that this question has not received the attention it deserves.  There are several standard answers:

1) "It gives people comfort."  Big deal.  So does heroin.  You can't tell me that one of the biggest features of human life, crossing all cultures and extending back into pre-history, exists simply because people like it. (footnote: See Marx for more on this particular view.)

2) "Without religion, there would be no morality."  To any non-believer, this is without doubt the most offensive explanation.  Regarding this particular idea, Kurt Vonnegut said it best:

"A humanist is a person who believes that it is possible to lead a decent life without either the promise of a reward or the threat of punishment after you are dead."

Indeed, it is highly arguable whether the net effect of religion on humanity has been an increase or a decrease in moral behavior. Here's Steven Weinberg, a nobel laureate physicist:

"With or without religion, good people will do good and evil people will do evil. But for a good person to do evil --- that takes religion."

No need to go into detail here, a few notable examples may suffice:  the crusades, the inquisition, the holocaust, 9/11 ...

3) "People need to believe in something bigger than themselves", or words to that effect.  Now we're getting somewhere.  But we're still begging the question, which is:  Why do people have this need?

Let's call this attribute of humanity the Propensity to Believe -- PTB for short.  And by "belief" I mean religious belief, aka faith, as opposed to evidence-based belief.  Believing that the sun will rise tomorrow doesn't count.  What people really want to do, it seems, is to believe fantastic things, supernatural things, things not only unsupported by any evidence, but often contradicted by a mountain of evidence.

So, why does PTB exist?  Any human trait this powerful and pervasive must have evolutionary significance.  Which means that PTB is genetic, and because it is so pervasive, must at some point  have conferred a survival advantage on those who inherited it.  And what advantage might that be?   My theory is that PTB enabled a superior form of social organization in primitive societies, namely theocracy.  In most primitive societies that I know anything about (admittedly not very many), the ruler is either a god or at least speaks directly to one.  And because his subjects have PTB, they believe it when he tells them that his commands must be obeyed because he is divine or is relaying instructions from above.  In a battle between divinely inspired troops with PTB on a mission from God to kill the enemy on one side, and on the other side a non-PTB force who are wondering why they should risk their lives to kill some people they don't even know, which side is likely to prevail?

But now, by way of contrast, let's talk about evidence-based belief, aka skepticism, whence cometh my pen name.   I think many people misunderstand the word "skeptic", confusing it with "cynic".  There's no connection at all, really.  A cynic doesn't believe in anything, or at least tries to claim that he doesn't, whereas a skeptic is happy to believe in whatever it is, provided that there is more evidence in favor of it than there is against it.  So skepticism is all about basing belief on evidence, rather than on emotion or on what some authority has told you to believe.  The phrase "question authority" is a skeptical statement.  The question to be asked is "What's the evidence for what you're telling me?  Why do you believe it, and why should I?"

That's the executive summary, but really it's more complicated.  Most skeptics understand that there are degrees of belief.  In order to believe something strongly, the evidence in favor must be strong.  Not only that, as additional evidence arrives, it must be confirmative.  If, on the other hand, contradictory evidence appears, this weakens the belief, and if enough contradictory evidence accumulates, the skeptic will discard the original belief, and may actually adopt the opposite, or some other alternative belief which is better supported by the totality of the evidence.

So, how do we measure degrees of belief?  If you're either a gambler (which I'm not) or a Bayesian (which I am), you use odds.  Now, for the quantitatively challenged, don't panic.  This is not Statistics 101.  Let's just say that, in principle at least, a Bayesian assigns a positive number to a belief, which we can think of as the betting odds favoring its truth.  A value of 1 means there's no more evidence in favor than there is against, so he's neutral.  A value greater than 1 indicates belief, while a value less than 1 indicates disbelief.  The larger the odds, the stronger the belief.   When new evidence arrives, the Bayesian computes something called the "Bayes factor" by a formula which we need not discuss here, and multiplies the prior odds by the Bayes factor to obtain the new odds, which are called the "posterior odds" if you want to know.   The point is that if you strongly disbelieve something,  (prior odds close to zero) you need a large Bayes factor (strong evidence in favor) in order to push your posterior odds above 1.  In common parlance:  "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

Let's take an example.  Should you believe that aliens have been visiting the Earth since 1947 in flying saucers?   The prior odds are heavily against this.  After extensive unmanned exploration of the solar system, no extraterrestrial life of any kind has been found, much less any highly advanced intelligent life.  That would leave interstellar travel, which is basically ruled out by the theory of relativity except for a few nearby stars, which show no signs of any habitable planets.  So, what about the evidence in favor?  It is quite poor actually --- mostly unconfirmed anecdotal "sightings" of UFOs,  some even more unlikely anecdotal accounts of "abductions", and a few blurry photos.   Hardly extraordinary evidence.   Conclusion:  the posterior odds remain very low -- the UFO hypothesis is and always has been highly improbable.  

Memphis, TN

I didn't really know what to expect at Graceland, other than a lot of commercialism, I suppose.  But the 14 gift shops totally exceeded my expectations.  The mansion itself was surprisingly modest.  If not for the portico in front, it could have passed for a somewhat extravagant 50's ranch-style house.  The number of gold (or were they platinum?) record awards was amazing.  I think it was over 100.  But perhaps the most impressive, or perhaps I should say extravagant, exhibit was the "Lisa Marie" which was Elvis' private four-engine jet.  It was a Convair 880 -- a late 50's vintage competitor to the Boeing 707.  It had a living room, dining room, bedroom, and 2 bathrooms, but the high point was the 24-carat gold seatbelt buckles.

Anyway, we did our pilgrimage immediately after arriving at the Memphis KOA (which was located 10 miles away in Marion, Arkansas) by taking a succession of three different vans to get to Graceland.  Upon arrival, we saw that there was an RV park across the street.  Live and learn.  The next morning, after a leisurely camp breakfast, we drove into Memphis to the Civil Rights Museum.

I had forgotten that Martin Luther King had been assassinated on the balcony of a motel in Memphis.  It turned out to be the Lorraine Motel, which is now part of the museum.  The exhibits brought back many memories of the names of various southern towns: Selma, Montgomery, Little Rock, as well as people:  Ralph Abernathy, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, Orville Faubus, Bull Conner, and many others.

It's tempting to dismiss the history of segregation in America as some sort of aberration arising from the aftermath of the Civil War, but I'm afraid that's wishful thinking.  In fact, the US has no monopoly on racial discrimination.  There are examples all around the world.  I think it's all about a predisposition to think in terms of "us vs. them".  Anyone who looks, talks, or acts differently from "us" is one of "them", and "us" people who all look, talk, and act alike must oppose "them".  Why this is so, I really couldn't say.  Just one of those difficult things about human nature that we need to recognize and try to control.

But here's a possible explanation:  it's an evolution accelerator.   "Us vs. Them" encourages people to have lots of wars.  So instead of having to wait for natural events to kill off the weaker, less clever people, we do it ourselves, thereby greatly accelerating the survival of the fittest.  Just tossing out a random thought here.

After a sobering hour or two at the museum, we rushed back to the Peabody Hotel in the nick of  time for Cherie to catch a glimpse of the last duck waddling out of the lobby and into the elevator. Afterwards, we walked up to Beale street and had some ribs and music at BB King's Blues Cafe.   Next stop, Albuquerque.

The Athens of the South

Nashville is apparently known locally as "The Athens of the South".  Which is why, as the story goes,  it was decided to build a full-scale plaster replica of the Parthenon, of all things, at the Tennessee Centennial exposition of 1897.   Although it was only intended to last six months, the locals were so taken with the Parthenon that they didn't tear it down as planned.  And after 20 years, as it was falling into serious disrepair, they rebuilt it out of concrete.  It is claimed to be as historically accurate as possible, up to and including the giant gold-plated statue of Athena seen above.  Having visited this edifice, as well as that other iconic Nashville institution, The Grand Ole Opry, I can safely say that our trip has now reached the Apogee of Americana.

We arrived in Nashville at the end of a day which began with an 11-mile bike ride through Cades Cove, a beautiful scenic valley in the Smokies.  We had thought of this as little more than an invigorating shot of morning exercise lasting less than an hour, but that proved to be a slight miscalculation.  We are used to riding our ultra-lightweight skinny-tire road bikes, but for this trip we acquired a pair of cheap camp bikes which are much heavier and have fatter tires.  They are great for riding around camp and running short errands, but on the road, let's just say that they provide a much better aerobic workout.

Our friend Vaughan, an old colleague from the Berkeley math department, had recently moved to Vanderbilt, and bought a house in a gated community of Nashville called "Sugartree".   However, our GPS navigator doesn't understand about gated communities, and so it cleverly brought us to the back gate of Sugartree, which is for "residents only" as we discovered while sitting there waiting in vain for it to open.  GPS navigators, like almost all present-day technological marvels, are a two-edged sword.  Mainly because they don't possess that uniquely human quality we call common sense.  Or at least, not yet.  So it's usually a good idea to take their advice with a grain of salt.  This is harder to do in a totally unfamiliar city, especially when you're tired and have driven a few hundred miles in sweaty bike shorts.

We eventually found our way to the main gate, got to Vaughan's new house, showered, changed, and were picked up and taken out to dinner by John and Susan, the charming parents of our Oakland house-sitter Kim.   John is a colleague of Vaughan's at Vanderbilt, which is basically how Kim wound up house-sitting for us in Oakland, but that's another story altogether.  So, after a great dinner with our new friends, we fell into a deep night's sleep.  Which ended abruptly at 6:15 am when the non english-speaking workmen rang the front doorbell.  They had arrived to replace Vaughan's roof, which had been damaged in a recent hailstorm.  Having no luck getting back to sleep with the hammering on the roof, we arose to begin our day of Vanderbilt, Parthenon, and Grand Ole Opry.

After a tour of the Vanderbilt campus and the Parthenon, thanks to John, we had some mid-eastern takeout with Vaughan and departed for the main event, the Grand Ole Opry.  This takes place two or three nights a week in a modest 4,400 seat auditorium located on the outskirts of Nashville in a shopping mall.  Where else?  The show is broadcast live on the radio: WSM 650 AM  and now Sirius XM, making it the longest continuously running radio program ever.  There were a half-dozen or so different acts, and between each one a commercial for Bass Pro Shops, The Cracker Barrel, and so forth.

For my money, the show was completely stolen by "Little Jimmy Dickens", a 4' 11'' 91-year old who wore a black sequined cowboy suit and white boots, and claims to be related to Charles.  Jimmy's guitar strap has the word "Tater" sewn into it in large letters.  I could even read it from my distant nosebleed seat.  He opened with a number from "my most recent album, which was released in 1963" and closed with "Good Old Mountain Dew", which for some reason I actually knew.  In between, we were treated to some excellent stand-up:
     
"I went to the doctor the other day 'cause I couldn't hear a thing our of my left ear.  Well, the doc shines his little flashlight into my ear and says, "Jimmy," he says, "it's no wonder.  You've got a suppository in your ear."
"Well, thanks doc.  Now I know what happened to my hearing aid."

I suppose that joke also premiered in 1963, but I hadn't heard it before. It sent me into a giggling fit which I had to do silently because the next performance was underway.

Country music seems to be almost exclusively about Love, in particular Lost Love, Unfaithful Love, and Unrequited Love. In that, I suppose it's not that much different from the rest of popular music, except that you can often understand the lyrics, especially if you're good at southern accents.  To be a country music singer there seem to be at least two prerequisites:  you have to be Caucasian and speak with a pronounced southern accent.  In fact, as far as I could see the 4,400 audience members were entirely Caucasian.  But of course my knowledge of country music and its singers is virtually non-existent, so you must give these observations their due weight.  And in all honesty, I really enjoyed the show, especially Little Jimmy.

Perhaps the true high point of the evening occurred afterwards, when Vaughan and I went out in the Enterprise to buy a few supplies at the all-night supermarket.  There was a uniformed guard outside who kindly let me park in front while Vaughan went in.  Mike and I got to talking, and it turned out that he had just gotten an autograph from Travis somebody -- I forget the full name -- which he showed me, and allowed as to how he had also sung for Travis the country song he had recently written.  As Vaughan returned to the Enterprise, Mike volunteered to sing it for us as well, and so he did.  Sure enough, it was about Unrequited Love.  The perfect end to the perfect day.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Raleigh was a quick overnight with Gene and Cathy, with whom we go back quite a way.  A few years before we met them, we had moved to Pennington, NJ.  Pennington is a village of about 2 sq. mi. and a population of 2,000.  But it somehow manages to sport no less than five (5) churches.  All Christian, of course.  Having moved from the People's Republic of Berkeley, CA, we were finding our environment somewhat foreign.  But one fine day when our daughter Katie was in the third grade, she came home with a little friend she had made  named Sarah, who was wearing a Meher Baba teeshirt.  Aha!  We had to meet her parents, and we did.  They moved to Raleigh seven or eight years ago and started up a water-purification business.

I admire Gene greatly, mainly because he is everything I am not.  As we were driving to dinner last night in his 12-year old Subaru, I asked him how many miles it had.  "180,000, but I had to put a new engine in it last year." He had found one cheap at a junkyard.  Gene, who has a PhD in Geology, dropped out of college and opened a automobile repair shop at the age of 21.  And as expected, he currently has a massive home improvement project in progress.   The kitchen is being doubled in size, a laundry room has been added, several walls have been removed, and so on.  But he did admit that he was going to have to hire someone to help him finish the kitchen.

Being a mathematician, my practical skills are somewhat limited, to say the least.  In that, I take after my Dad, who was about the only person I've ever known who was less handy than I am.  But I will admit to a flush of pride after I assembled a bike rack and installed it on the Enterprise last week.  All by myself.   With that extension, we measure about 25 ft.  Longer than your average parking space, to be sure, but we're still able to park in most parking lots.  This gives us a degree of mobility not enjoyed by most RVers.  Not to mention the gas mileage.  We're getting around 18 mpg so far, and that's driving 70-75 on the highway.  On the flip side, interior space is at a premium.  Sort of like below decks on a small sailing vessel.

Anyway, back to our trip.  Early in his narrative, Steinbeck remarks at some length on the almost universal reaction he got when telling people about his trip.  "Oh, I've always wanted to do that!  I'm so envious!  I wish I could come along!" And so on.  And guess what?  Fifty some-odd years later, I'm getting exactly the same responses.  It's some sort of Jungian fantasy about The Open Road, or something.  I refer you to one of my favorite books, "The Wind in the Willows" and the tale of Mr. Toad and his caravan.  And of course there's also "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."  Why this theme is so universal,  I really can't say.  Maybe it's actually in Jung. But if it isn't, it should be.

As I write this, we're camped beside a beautiful stream in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  Not a freight train within miles.  Seventeen dollars for two nights (with the senior discount), as opposed to $92.50 for two nights with the freights.   My misguided right-wing friends who are so enamored of the efficacy of the profit motive might do well to ponder this comparison.  The reason the RV park was located where it was, sandwiched in between the railroad line and a main highway rather than beside an idyllic stream, is because that kind of land is cheap -- who else would want it -- and that enables the owner to make a profit.  Nobody's making a profit here, so the campsites don't have to be cheek by jowl either.  Quite a contrast.  Speaking of contrast, in order to even get into this park we had to run a two mile gauntlet of garish commercialism called Gatlinburg, TN.  And this scene is repeated at almost every popular national park.    My point here is not so much to sing the praises of socialism, but simply to point out that free enterprise, private property, and the profit motive are not a panacea.  There are some facets of life which are not well-served by the profit motive; preserving and enjoying the beauty of nature being one of them.  There are other examples: fire-fighting, police work, the courts and the rule of law, health care and education.  Well, that's about it for now.  Tomorrow we're back on the grid after two whole days with no cellphone or internet!  See you in Nashville.

Williamsburg, VA

Somehow, we actually got on the road yesterday.  It wasn't just that we were leaving for six months -- we also have tenants coming in for the summer, so Cherie felt obliged to do a lot of Cleaning Out and Putting Away.  And then the Enterprise isn't all that big, in fact it barely qualifies as an RV.  "Class B motorhome" they call it.  Anyway, many choices had to be made about what to take and what to leave behind.   This is actually a very useful exercise, because you realize early on that most of your stuff is just that: "stuff".  In fact, we still have unopened boxes in the basement from four years ago when we moved to Princeton.  I have no idea what's in them, but Cherie claims to know.  Anyway, you can guess just how critical whatever it all is to our daily lives.

We took the Interstates all the way down, stopping for lunch once we cleared the Beltway.  Arriving at  our lovely tree-shaded campsite, we were feeling quite relaxed until a five-minute long freight train blasted past us on the track next to our site, which we hadn't yet noticed.  Until then, of course.  I always wondered what it would be like to live next to a railroad track.  Now I know.  Ah, the joys of the road.  In my limited experience, I've found that camping is often an exercise in rolling with the punches.  So we buttoned up the van, turned the fan on high, and put in the earplugs.  Not so bad, really.  There were two or three freights, but they were much shorter than our introductory experience. Enquiring about train times from the campground manager, we discovered that Amtrak comes by once in the morning and once in the evening, that the freights are unpredictable, but not to worry because they don't sound their horns after midnight.  Oh, well in that case,  no problem.

Having heard about Colonial Williamsburg for years, I was curious.  Was this going to be a Disney-esque theme park,  or an actual preserved historical site?  Turned out to be a bit of both, actually.  Most of the buildings have been "re-created" i.e. rebuilt to look like what we think they really looked like.  However, there were lots of real craftsmen (and women) making things by hand, like shoes, clothes, wrought iron pieces, etc.  For the most part, the craftspeople seem to have learned their crafts by apprenticing to older Williamsburg craftspeople -- just like it happened long ago.  This strikes me as rather quaint, and also genuine.  The most fun was the tour of the Governor's "palace", which was just the residence of the colonial governor of Virginia.  We were put in a group with about twenty fourth-graders from Fairfax county.   The only adults were us and the four teachers.  It's been quite a while since I've been exposed to the excitement and enthusiasm of 10 year-olds.  The high point came as our guide was explaining that a smaller room next to the grand ballroom was often used to play cards during a ball by people who didn't want to dance.  A hand shot up:  "Did they play Texas Hold-em?"  Now with a high-school group this would clearly have been a joke, but here the questioner was quite serious, and the guide answered very matter-of-factly without even cracking a smile.  She was really good.

During the course of the afternoon, I realized that I have some sort of negative emotion about re-creations and replicas.  I find myself wishing that I could see the real thing, rather than paying much attention to what I'm actually looking at. That's why Rome was such a great experience.  Cherie and I went there (I for the first time) in 2007 and our hotel was right across the plaza from the Pantheon.  I just looked out the window, and there it was.  The exciting thing was the idea that the building had been in continuous use for 2000 years.  A replica could not have that effect.

Well, the third freight of the evening having just rumbled by, I think it's time to turn in.  Tomorrow we head for Raleigh, NC to visit some friends.

Princeton, NJ

Welcome to "Travels with Cherie", who is pictured above, along with our traveling companion Jake and our RoadTrek RS Adventurous, which we have variously called "The Trekkie", "The Enterprise", "The Camper", or just "The Van".  Personally, I think I prefer "The Enterprise" since what will follow will certainly be an enterprise of sorts.  BTW, I'm using the future tense here because we haven't yet set out.   Meanwhile, we're anxiously trying to figure out what to take and what to leave behind, for space is quite limited as we have already discovered, and you too may discover if you read along with us.

Before we get to "where are we headed, and why?"  let me briefly introduce the travelers.  Steinbeck fans will doubtless have noticed a certain similarity of title.  This is because I think his travels and ours bear a certain similarity of purpose.  However, while his companion was his faithful dog Charlie, mine is the love of my life, my best friend, and wife of thirty years, Cherie.  Our dog Jake, faithful though he is, will be a minor player on this trip.  Cherie is, by far, the luckiest thing that has ever happened to me, or that ever will happen to me -- just so you know.

So, here's the first of possibly many digressions I will make on this blog that have nothing to do with the trip.  It's sort of like commercial TV.   Even when the show is a good one (and I hope this one will be) you realize that they've gone to all the trouble and expense of putting on that good show so that you will watch their commercials and buy their products.  While that's not completely true here, I doubt that I'll be able to resist the opportunity to hawk my views on philosophy, religion, and The Meaning of Life as we go along.  So, for our first commercial break:

I've often remarked on how common it is for lucky people to fail to properly credit their good fortune.  Instead, they delude themselves into thinking that they're exceptionally astute decision makers, or that they have brilliantly foreseen whatever lucky event is was that came their way, or that they are incredibly talented in some (or many) ways, or whatever.  You get the idea.   I think this is symptomatic of a general human failing:  fear of randomness.  We don't like the idea that the world is a random place, but it most certainly is.  To paraphrase FDR: the only thing of which we can be certain is uncertainty itself.  In fact, the Earth itself is, with very high probability, an accident.  "But," complain the intelligent designers, "How could such a beautiful place with such wonderful, intelligent people living on it, possibly have just been an accident?

To understand this, I invite you to conduct the following thought experiment.  You are shown a video of a volunteer flipping a coin 20 times and getting heads every time.  Then you are asked whether you think that could have possibly happened by chance.  Being well-versed in the laws of probability, you quickly respond "No way! That would be better than a 1,000,000 to 1 shot. Someone must have designed that coin to land heads up."  But then you find out that the actual experiment consisted of 5 million volunteers each being videotaped flipping a fair coin 20 times, and that you were shown one getting 20 heads.  Uh-oh!  Math whiz that you are, you now realize that it was a virtual certainty that at least one of the volunteers would get 20 heads, because the odds in favor of that are better than 100 to 1.  So what happened here?  You were a victim of an extreme example of what is called "selection bias".  Instead of being shown a randomly selected example, in which case your original conclusion would have been valid,  you were shown a carefully selected video in which the rare event actually happened.   And of course the actual volunteer in the video you saw would very likely have been convinced as well that someone had designed his coin to come up heads every time.  But he would have been wrong.

Now keep in mind that  there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, and there are billions of galaxies in the Universe.  So even if we assume that the chance of a star chosen at random having planet like the Earth by accident is very very tiny, the chance that somewhere in the universe there would be such a planet is much much higher.  So, is the Earth just a random planet, or is it an example of extreme selection bias?   Obviously the latter, because if the rare event hadn't happened here, we wouldn't be here speculating about how it might have happened.

And now, where are we headed, and why?  Well, I'm turning 70 in three weeks, and we've rented a beach house in San Diego for the week of my birthday and invited our extended family to join us.  So we're about to hop aboard The Enterprise and head for San Diego, with a few stops along the way, of course.  We thought it would be a good opportunity to see some Americana that we've heard about but never seen.  We'll be spending the better part of the summer in California, and then towards the end of the summer, the real road trip will begin.  Our plan, such as it is, is to wander somewhat aimlessly through the western US and Canada.  The trip out to San Diego is really just a warm-up.  So stay tuned.