Let The Adventure Begin

The days are full this summer – Chamber Music Concerts, construction projects around the house and yard, harvesting from our garden, running – and there has not been much time for posting to this blog.  I am not even sure that I have any readers aside from my faithful proofreader Martha.  But I continue to update it from time to time when we have completed a race, celebrate a holiday or anniversary, discover new adventures in Atlantic Beach over the winter, or when we are going on a long trip.  

It is the latter that will be the subject of this blog during the month of August, a road trip in our Mini Cooper to the western United States that we began planning in January and that will begin a week from now.  Like our “Mini Takes the States” adventure in 2016, we will be traveling light and driving a little over 300 miles most days, beginning with a Mini rally in St. Ignace, Michigan (“Mini on the Mack”), where several hundred Minis will cross the Mackinac bridge.  From there, we will be on our own, just the two of us, as we explore those places we missed in 2016, mostly National Parks, including New River Gorge, Cuyahoga Valley, Indian Dunes, Theodore Roosevelt, Yellowstone, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Arches, Monument Valley, Mesa Verde, Garden of the Gods, Pikes Peak, and Natchez Trace.  We outlined the adventure months ago, but in the meantime Martha has found interesting places for us to stay each night and exciting adventures along the way.

These past two weeks we have been preparing and packing and reminiscing about that 2016 road trip that took us even farther out west, all the way to the Pacific Ocean.  We are seven years older, but our Mini is newer, has fewer miles than the last time (and run flat tires), and is surprisingly comfortable for a tall man like me.  And we have, I think, become more experienced travelers, unpacking each night and packing up quickly and efficiently the next morning.  We sometimes say to each other (in a British accent) what our wonderful Tour Director Steve Morris asked each morning during our trip to the UK, “Have a little think now:  Do you have everything?  Phones?  Chargers?  Wallets?”  We have gotten pretty good at having a little think.

Just as on our road trip in 2016, our trip to the UK in 2019, and our trip to France last year, this blog will fall silent for several weeks.  But I will take notes, day by day, and write it all up when we return.  There is so much to see!  As Tennyson wrote:

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

Let the adventure begin.