As mentioned, we plan on getting back to some of the fun things we did in Death Valley when we were there a few weeks ago, but since that is taking me a little more time than I thought to get down digitally, I thought I would throw a quick one in here.

Death Valley was extremely desolate, yet incredibly beautiful. A lot of people thought we were crazy for going there in October – they were pretty sure it was going to be way too hot. But we were frankly surprised by mild temperatures, high 80’s during the day and mild high 70’s during the nights. We even had a little rain on the night we arrived, something not seen that often in Death Valley. Little did we know, it was going to get a lot worse.

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After a very nice 8-day visit to Death Valley, Sandy and I took off and headed for Zion National Park on Sunday. We had a wonderful time in Death Valley – in fact it was so wonderful, we pretty much did something fun every day and there was little time to write. What extra time we had was spent cooking, imbibing and enjoying the week that Sandy took off from work. So, some D.V. entries are definitely coming, but I thought I would try to catch up to now, now, and get to what happened before, later. Make sense? So here is a little story about our first hike at Zion.

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As we’ve spent the last few days tooling around Los Angeles, one can’t help but be overwhelmed by the endless sea of people, cars, houses, businesses and stuff. Lotsa stuff. Not that we don’t all live with that each day, just about anywhere we happen to call home, but the sheer size of it all down here and the way it has spread outward brings one word to mind – Sprawl!

So, that is the theme of today’s blog. I hope you don’t mind if I just kind of let the narrative of this one sprawl a bit. Perhaps I’ll start in one area and just kind of let it spread out and go wherever it naturally (or unnaturally) wants to flow. Bear with me, would you? If not, you can go straight to L… A.

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It’s Tuesday morning and I am sitting outside on a picnic table by the banks of the Kaweah River. There isn’t much water, but given that there was no water a couple of days ago, I guess I can’t complain. There was some rain here on Sunday when we arrived and that was just enough to freshen up things a bit. It is very beautiful. Bird noise. The sun is cresting the peaks to the East.

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One sweet dream
Pick up the bags and get in the limousine
Soon we’ll be away from here
Step on the gas and wipe that tear away
One sweet dream came true today
(Be bop ba deetin’ do – do wha ah ah ah ah ah)

Okay, so that last scat part is my ragged interpretation of whatever it is that Paul McCartney belts out at the end of that phrase. I listened to it numerous times, but it defies syllabication. Maybe someone else can do better? Help me out, here!

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