Bon voyage hug...

Sue and I joined her son to watch his daughter's end-of-school-year choral recital Monday night, and I got this picture of them in the rosy light of dusk. It was a bon voyage of sorts, because tomorrow she and I leave for a road trip to CALIFORNIA. It's where she was born and grew up; most of her siblings still live there. We'll make a tour of their homes, one in northern CA and the others in the drought-stricken central valley near Sacramento. Then we'll drive over to sizzling Fresno to visit my friends Devorah and Sofia (temperatures 100F/38C), and then back home, entirely in the spirit of iconic American ROAD TRIPS.

On our first night out, we'll stay in a yurt in a state park near Bandon, Oregon. And then it's nine days in California. This three-minute Muppet Movie video gives you not only the spirit of the thing, but the scenery as well. The scenery in the video is exactly the scenery we'll be driving through.

California here we come,
the pie-in-the-sky land,
palm trees and warm sand...

but no Studebaker. We're renting a Toyota because neither of our cars is up to the drive. I think it'll be sort of a combination Five Easy Pieces, On the Road, and Michael, with a slight flavor of Thelma and Louise (but with a much happier ending).

And big news for Oregon: a federal judge decided yesterday that all people in Oregon have the right to marry if they want to. A huge win for civil rights. YES!