Guest blogger coming up, maybe

Well first, the guest blogger thing. My nephew the artist Nathan is heading for New Zealand in the middle of January, and I invite him to blog his trip here on my travel blog. So watch for that.

Me? I haven't been traveling much. We made the move and we settled in. We had the anniversary trip, previous post, and if you want to know the truth we actually had a fight as we were leaving Santa Barbara and hardly spoke all day on the train ride home. After 50 years! Yes, fights still happen. But that evened out, as it always does. (Of course I was right, by the way.) That's the nice thing about 50 years. You've put in so much time, you put these things in perspective.

Well we have been to Sacramento and Petaluma, the week before Thanksgiving. Even though I swore I would not travel I-5 again, we took the car. Had a good time with dear friends in Sacramento and dear kids/grandkids in Petaluma. Traffic jam on the way home on the 210 through Pasadena and east that we could have done without. Then Thanksgiving the next weekend in Palm Desert with sister-in-law and four nieces. And that's about it for the road, except to look for an independent bookstore which required going all the way to Del Mar.

Have I mentioned that Southern California is everything I remembered from my kid days? We had a spate of serious rain (some folks even got flooded) but mostly it's been lovely. It's my climate and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

Okay, next trip is the Sacramento/Petaluma thing again, NOT driving, and I will report on what it is like to take the Amtrak bus to Bakersfield from LA and then up the Valley on the San Joaquin. I go first and spend two nights with Judy (sometimes known as Eeyore) in Sacramento and then catch another train and a thru-way bus to Petaluma, and meet up with the old guy there. We'll be spending a week at sesshin, which is a Buddhist retreat, in Santa Rosa and then another weekend with the kids before training home.

This is probably boring in the planning stages, but maybe there will be adventures to report. And we are talking about going back to Bequia (St. Vincent and the Grenadines) for three weeks in May, when the off-season hits. So you'll hear more about that. Frequent flyer miles and off-season rates, a very reasonable way to go. Now that we live in Lotus Land we don't have to escape in the winter. Thank you very much.