Travels with Kari

Pack packed, beard sheared, bus fuss, and rail trail to Napa set for Monday 5/28 and the 555walk. I'm a ready teddy, keen-eye Jedi. Once again Daddio Mike boards a bus--AMTRAK this time--as the first "non-virtual" step in yet another adventure. Spring in California and a leisurely bus journey from San Luis Obispo across the hills to Hanford, north by rail through the verdant Central Valley, and along the living (or perhaps dying) delta/bay to Martinez for the bus to Napa Wine Train Station.

I'm reminded of a great first bus trip in February-April, 1977, when Kari "missed" nine weeks of school, as we boarded a late-night Greyhound (Gordon Lightfoot's "it's a dog of a way to travel" still rings in my ears) in San Luis Obispo for an overnight land voyage on the beginning leg of a sixty-three-day odyssey to Coral Gables → Boston → SLO. Total for all tickets--$150.00; the case of Moctezuma Dos Equis that Kari's mom, Marilynn, won from the senior pediatrician in her office, who bet that we'd return in a week as no father could successfully take such a trip with a ten-year-old daughter--priceless.

So now we've planned and mapped and measured and selected and the jaunt begins. And like war, all plans will be modified by necessity and choice soon after the first few steps. When I undertook another sixty-three day journey in 1977--this one an 800-mile sea kayaking voyage up the Inside Passage--my brother wished me well with a quotation he'd read in John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley:

"Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.  And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle  that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us."

And so, we've each chosen a great travel partner, and hope that some of you, too, will join us in walking and celebrating Kari's health, courage and strength. She knows full well, as do I, what Amelia Earhart means when she writes that:

"Adventure is not for novices. It is not for scatterbrains. It is for people who have wanted to do a certain thing, who have wanted it for years...and who finally, concentrating on that above all other beckoning thoughts, have carried it through."

So in spirit and step with John Muir, we acknowledge that "there are tides and floods in the
affairs of men, which in some are slight and may be kept within bounds, but in others they overmaster everything," as we continue with our "California Dreaming."