Drawn the Road Again

Category: Country Mouse

  • 40-watt bulbs

    40-watt bulbs

    Every year I head north to the Skagit Valley to catch the tulip fields in bloom. If you’re looking for good travel weather, spring is a tricky time of year in the Northwest. But if you manage to get there on a rare sunny day, you’ll be in for a treat. The whole valley lights…

  • Ka-bloom

    Ka-bloom

    The Tailor and I visited Big Bend in mid-April, our best chance to catch the cacti in bloom. When we got there, a park ranger warned us not to get our hopes up. He told us they’d been experiencing a record drought—the park had only received about three inches of rain, total, over the past…

  • Desert oasis

    Desert oasis

    This place really felt like an oasis, after driving for over sixteen hours—the last three in a raging West-Texas lightning storm—to get here. When the Tailor and I pulled in after one in the morning (an interesting quirk about Van Horn, TX: it’s lies about one mile inside the Central time zone, so we lost…

  • On a mission

    On a mission

    Someday I’ll get to all 21 missions along El Camino Real, but for my first-ever mission visit, I had to choose a starting point. Who wouldn’t pick the one used in an Alfred Hitchcock film? And one starring Jimmy Stewart, no less! I mean, come on. Though you’d never know it from the sun and…

  • Crack of dawn

    Crack of dawn

    Hitting the road two hours before sunup is never exactly my favorite way to travel. But with a cup of strong coffee, some loud sing-along music on the stereo, and a worthy goal to shoot for… …it can be well worth the effort.

  • Have sketchbook, will travel

    Have sketchbook, will travel

    You know when you’re on a road trip, and you see a highway billboard that says something like, “World’s Largest Two-Headed Calf, Exit Now!” and you consider stopping, just for a moment? And then your spouse looks it up on the map, and you discover that yeah, it’s this exit, plus maybe another 140 miles…