Caroline I finally departed on 6/20/01.  It just took a lot longer than anticipated to get all the preparations done and get all caught up from being away in Europe.

Most the items had to do with last minute car preparations.  I didn't want the car to be an issue.  Since we are likely to cover something like 6000 miles, maintenance seemed like a reasonable thing to spend a lot of time on.

On this trip we are trying to relate things that you might not see on a normal tour of someplace.  We figure you've all seen plenty of National Geographic and Discovery Channel.  We are looking for the more offbeat and bizarre things that you are less likely to run into on your journeys.

You can read the pages in the order that we traveled, or you can do them in any order you like.  However, the order that we traveled is;

Eureka ® North Coast ® Canada ® Rocky Mtn Parks ® Great Plains ® East Coast ® Heading Home

All the images are links.  You can click on the images to get the larger picture.

Socks, the celebrity puppet of Pets.com fame, was a birthday gift from June & Dave.  Caroline has adopted it in much the same manner as Mick & Jim's Rhinos, or Linda's garden gnomes.  It has become an integral part of this trip.  For the record, this was not my idea.

As we headed north, we decided that a trip through the wine country cannot happen without some wine tasting along the way.  We dropped into Healdsburg to have a nice picnic lunch in the town square.  Then we headed for Seghesio to sample the vin.  Socks got to try some too, after which he headed out to the vineyard to try and enact a Solstice ritual with Caroline.  But I caught him in time.  He's better behaved now.

We also managed to try some vin at Canyon Road Winery, which seems to be closely aligned with Geyser Peak.  They have some goodies worth sampling, we can attest.  We liked them much better than the Seghesio wines which we thought were way overpriced for the quality.  But that's just our opinions..