Just got back from some time in Death Valley. My mom and I were hoping to catch some of the wildflowers. We missed the peak season but still saw many thousands of little purple and yellow blooms littered across the oceans of bubbling ochre sand. Here are some of the more choice images. I was […]

Greg and I are on the last day of a short cruise that took in several stops in British Columbia. Today’s the last day, and it’s a “sea day,” a day when the ship doesn’t dock anywhere. Today in my Gospel reading, I happened on Mark 6:30-32:
Then the apostles gathered to Jesus and told […]

Once again, I’m attempting the difficult maneuver of getting a hotel coffeemaker to yield a satisfactory cup of tea, this time in the Hampton Inn outside Chicago. Greg and I are on one of our occasional quick trips here to enjoy goddaughter time and catch a little of that Chicagoland swank, if we can get […]

Well, I’m back in the lower 48 states — or “outside”, as I’ve heard the Alaskans refer to it.
Things I’ve learned:

On an Alaskan cruise, the scenery is really the star. Our ship sailed down narrow inlets most of the time, and mountains rose up on either side of us. On our last day, the captain […]

I try to do one thing on a cruise that I’ve never done before and have some reason to think I’ll never do again. This time it was riding on a dog sled.
We did this yesterday in Skagway. It was one of the excursions that Carnival offered, and once I saw it I just had […]

We’re on Day 3 (or 4?) of our Alaskan cruise, so I knew this morning that we must be in Juneau. But we opted to get a windowless inside cabin on the ship, so I didn’t have any idea how it would look.
Turns out it looks like this:

It’s very pretty in a Great Northwest way […]

This will be my fifth cruise, and so I’m used to the fact that you spend the first couple days getting lost. I counted it as a victory today when I found the gym. I had followed the signs but always ended up in the wrong place. Today when I finally broke down and asked, […]

I’m aboard the Carnival Spirit heading for Alaska. Another cruise for us, this one carrying a certain hope of spiritual enrichment because I’m traveling with an Orthodox group and hoping to see some glimpse of the Russian Orthodox history of Alaska. I may be dreaming that I could do anything like that on an Alaskan […]

(Going through old blog drafts, I found this one that I never posted. So, even though I can’t even remember now what I was doing in the Albuquerque airport … waste not, want not.)
Going through the Albuquerque and Los Angeles airports, I was glad to note that artsy types have put in installments to heighten […]

The short cruise I went on ended last Friday, and I’ve got some photos and a drawing of Santa Catalina. Sort of a mini-travelogue, I suppose.

The cruise went to San Diego and Ensenada as well, but for some reason, Santa Catalina ended up being the most photogenic stop.I just had forgotten how pretty it was. […]