We're off!

We're off!

We started yesterday morning and motored south to Mineral Point, Wisconsin, where Laura lives. This is the first leg of our jouney which will culminate in Christchurch next week.  So it is going to be a slow start.  lolly laughed yesterday morning as we got underway and I said, "2.4 miles and only 15,000 to go."

Mineral Point is our favorite small town anywhere.  About 20 years ago, while returning from a visit to my sister's place in Galena, Illinois, we stopped here for lunch and walked around town.  Something of an artists' colony, there are many galleries along the streets.  First settled by Cornish miners in the mid-18th century that had come to dig the lead and zinc out of the ground, there are many of the original stone, miners' cottages around thetown with a focus on the row of building along Shake Rag Alley.  We loved the town and its ambiance on first sight.

About five years ago, our daughter Laura working for Lands' End moved from their Stevens Point facility to their headquarters in Dodgeville.  We suggested she look for housing in Mineral Point as it was nearby (seven miles) and we had found it so charming.  So she moved from Point to Point and has been here ever since.  She started in an apartment in an old bank building, later moved to a little frame miner's cottage on Cedar and recently took up abode in a small house outside of town on a farm.

We have visited her many times since that move and the charm of the town just grows on us more and more.  We have come for the Cornish fest in the fall and had a delicious Cornish dinner, have been a couple of times to events at the Shake Rag Arts Center and have for the past few years made this our Thanksgiving spot.

Laura is already prepared for Christmas.  She put up her tree and decorated her house so we could have an "early Christmas" before we left.

Here are some more shots of her new house ready for the season.

Biding our time

It seems something of a dilemma.  We have several days yet before we commence out travels -plenty of time to get everything organized -but I am having the constant feeling that I will forget something.  True, I have left several chores to the very last minute, but what fun is leaving without that last minute panic.  The summer lawn and garden equipment is still waiting to be put to rest in the barn, Loki needs a bath (he has found a lot of interesting things to roll in this past week, including a porcupine that was too slow to get out of the way of a corn picker), I need a haircut and there is a lot of planned packing to do.  And that’s only the things I can remember right now.  Every time I sit down, Spirits of Things Undone swirl around my head to disturb my tranquility.

This week as a substitute for what has become our traditional Thanksgiving trip to Laura’s house for dinner and a visit, we opted to stay home and help prepare food for Zion Lutheran Church’s holiday dinner.  We peeled potatoes on Wednesday and helped with serving turkey and fixins’ on Thursday.  We also ate our dinner there with a hundred other gray-hairs.  It was  fine, but nothing like having the house permeated with the smells of roasting turkey and baking pumpkin pie.

Our worst Thanksgiving was in 1974. We had just moved to Canada that summer and had halfheartedly celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October.  When the real Thanksgiving rolled around, I was in Morden, Manitoba, meeting with some angry farmers about the provinces plans to get into the cattle breeding business.  The best I could do was order a hot turkey sandwich with a side of mashed potatoes.  It would have been tolerable, but it was served with a beef-based gravy.  At home, Lolly managed an even less festive repast.  She and the kids went to McDonald’s.  In subsequent years we ignored the fact that the 4th Thursday of November was a work/school day and did our Thanksgiving, regardless.

Getting ready to TRAVEL!!!



In just over a week we will push off on an adventure that will take us to the other side of the world, leaving winter behind and all the duties associated with Winter in the North.  Our menagerie of pets will be farmed out or cared for , the plants will be watered, the mail will be collected, the bills will be paid and the house will be cared for sans heat, sans lights, sans everything.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Our son, Bob, bundled up his family last March and hauled them off to New Zealand to a new career and a life adventure for him, Alison and the children.  Now they reside in Christchurch enjoying earthquakes, learning a new language ('Ave ye seen my dick? = Have you seen my deck?) and eating fish and chips with greater regularity than cardiac health would dictate.

New Zealand happens to be in the southern hemisphere and is not really that far from the South Pole where Scott had a rather unpleasant winter camping experience.  New Zealand is inhabited by Englishmen, pretending it is just like England, but with all the seasons backwards and aboriginal people, the Maori, who are similar to the Tahitians except they wear some really nasty tattoos.

The trip presents some real challenges.  We have not traveled this far together before.  Will we get blood clots in our legs on the 14 hours trans-Pacific flight?  When we lived in Canada, I was a fairly proficient smuggler bringing in large jugs of gin and whiskey and a years supply of children's clothing from Sears in Fargo. But this is a different era and a different country.  And flying!!!  It is a world of the past where the security girl pulled my Buck hunting knife out of my carry on and said, "Whoa, That's big!" and then tossed it back in!  Now you can't even carry on a nail file or a Gillette razor or shaving cream (!).  And you really have to be careful what you have in your underwear!  And no liquids.  I think you can carry on a 3" by 5" piece of moistened sponge that you can suck on to prevent dehydration.

Well, air travel isn't what it was, but I guess that's progress.  People used to "dress" when  they traveled by plane ( train or ship, for that matter) but now everyone looks like Greyhound passengers that got on at Folsom.  More comfortable, I guess.

At this point there really isn't much to say about this trip except that it is our intention to go.  It will involve driving, flying from Madison to SFO, a few days in SFO and then a long -mostly at night- trip to Christchurch via Aukland.  If I can remain unconscious most of the way and be spared the in-flight movies, I think it won't be too bad.  We'll see.