Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

The Crazy Horse Monument The scale model of the monument- 1/300th the size The seventh and eighth generation grandsons of Crazy Horse Artifacts from the Crazy  This will be the last post about the trip we took. As I mentioned previously, it means more to us than to anyone else reading this. I did want to share one of the more memorable parts of the trip though. While we were still on the Lincoln Highway in Wyoming we stopped at one of the rest areas and spoke to a rather interesting fellow. He was sporting a long white beard and carried a Diamond Willow walking stick. Unlike the generic travelers that you see most everywhere, you could tell he was a character and he had an air of knowledge about him. I was drawn to his t-shirt. It showed Mt. Rushmore, which was on our list of places we wanted to visit on this excursion down south. Unfortunately, the buffoons running the government couldn't get their act together and the government was shut down, which of course mea...

The Payette River, Idaho Shoshone Falls, Idaho Falls Idaho Shoshone Falls/ Snake River Momma  Jan at Shoshone Falls    I thought I would spend a little time in the next few posts speaking about our trip. Obviously it means much more to me and Jan than to anyone else, so I won't go on and on, but we don't make it out of Alaska too often so when we do get a chance to go it's a kind of big deal. We left Juneau and flew to Seattle and on to Boise Idaho where we rented a car. I wasn't about to rent a car in Seattle- way too busy for me. When we got to Boise we waited for our luggage which never came. Hey... I just remembered that Alaska airlines has a policy that if you have to wait more than twenty minutes for your luggage they'll give you a twenty dollar credit or refund or some such thing. What the hell? Where's my refund? Those sapsuckers owe me forty dollars- twenty for Jan and twenty for me. It's not the first time they'v...

  We began our trip several weeks ago by boarding the Alaska Marine Highway ferry, Aurora.   I dropped back to the cafeteria to grab a cup of coffee and watched with amusement as one of the officers posted the menu. I've had clam chowder before, and I've certainly eaten Rock fish, though not grilled. I have to admit though, I've never tried Beef Strokenoff. Sounds like something you might find on the menu of a brothel in Las Vegas or some such thing. When I saw that I had to do a double take. Then I started doubting myself, thinking that perhaps using a "g" instead of a "k" was wrong. I know that I've forgotten a lot of things as I've aged, but this is definitely the wrong spelling. Perhaps the officer was Russian and was spelling it the way she pronounced it, who knows. In any event I agree with a friend who, after she saw the menu, said, "I think I'll stay with  the cheeseburger.

     I'm painfully aware that I haven't done a post here for several weeks. The fact of the matter is, I was on a vacation. I needed to go south to visit my mom and see how she was doing, so we turned it into a road trip of sorts. We flew into Boise and drove around Idaho for a few days, then across Utah and Wyoming to visit my daughter Camille. From there we went to Custer, South Dakota. Unfortunately, the elected officials whom we voted on to run this country are so incompetent and partisan that we were unable to visit one of the places that I had my heart set on visiting- Mt. Rushmore. It wasn't a total loss though. I thoroughly loved the Black Hills of South Dakota and we visited the Crazy Horse Monument and museum. We watched the seventh and eighth generation of Crazy Horse perform several native dances and it was a pretty impressive display. If you ever wonder about a great place to visit I would highly recommend Custer. The area is beautiful, ...