In the new Star Wars movies new space fighter girl finds old space fighter guy on small land in big water. The small land in big water scenes were made at a small land in big water in the old green country. This small land in big water is filled with small pretty water birds, so many, in fact that it was too much work to take them out of the movie . So, rather than taking them out of the movie, the movie people used a computer to change them into small pretty space birds. Mother, Sister, and Aunt visited “Old Space Fighter’s Small Land in Big Water”, as it is named by some people, as part of the old green country trip.

These lines were made by a dead really good teacher of really really really small stuff. The lines show what happens when really really really small stuff hits other stuff or balls of light. Sometimes, when bits of really really really small stuff or balls of light get close together they remember even when they go away from each other. Brother is learning about these things. The drawing also talks about sex is a funny way.

Not so hard to understand, but funny because Dad really does work hard and is doing good things that are on the paper. OK, sometimes water comes out of his mouth when he sleeps during the day.

Dad, Sister, and Brother ran in this running event with a team from the town where they live. The event is long and goes all day and all night even if there is rain or cold. The people take turns running. When not running, people get in big cars and go to meet the people who are running. People who live at the event place have food and drink for the runners. This makes everyone happy. Mother would not be happy running, so she looked at horses and stuff like that.

In an old drawing story about a small boy and his big cat animal, the boy would sometimes pretend to be a space man. Sometimes the story would be made in the West of our country, in a state with big rock things. And sometimes the boy, pretending to be a space man, would be in the state with the big rock things. Mother and Dad were at the same big rock thing as the space man was. They pretend to see the space man.

When Mother and Dad visited the West of our country they made a computer story. Dad would write on paper every day. Mother and Dad would take pictures every day. Sometimes, when computers could talk to each other (not very often in the West of our country) Mother would make the computer story from the pictures and the paper. Only two or three people could read the computer story because it was hidden with special words. Mother would give the special words to people, but that did not work out very well. So, now there are no special words anymore and everyone can read the computer story. This drawing is also about the old times when nothing happened unless there were pictures; today nothing happens unless computers are talking to each other!

* Only using the ten hundred most used words, like “Thing Explainer” does (https://blog.xkcd.com/2015/05/13/new-book-thing-explainer/), which we really like.

Great ideas are a dime a dozen, but it takes a lot of work to turn any idea into reality. My inspiration for this road trip was to complete the unfinished Grand Canyon business from 28 years ago, but also to “test drive” retirement. Would I go insane without my job and the career that I’ve been building since I started engineering school in 1976? Could Rosalind put up with me 24/7? Could I put up with her? A two-month road trip covering the great national parks of the West should provide some clues, if not answers. So, that was my great idea. The work to turn this idea into a reality was all done by Rosalind.

I’m sure I was only aware of a fraction of the preparation that she did, but here’s what I saw. Researching all the parks in Wyoming, Utah, and Arizona. Not just the well-known NPs, but lesser known NPs, BLM lands, and state parks. Reading magazines and web site to find the “10 best, don’t miss, bucket list <adventures> in <area>.” Getting us organized with a backpacking class at REI (where we learned how to buy stuff from REI), finding an endless supply of unique training hikes, organizing and shopping for food, making her own dehydrated backpacking meals (no industrial freeze-dried crap for us!). Creating a detailed road trip itinerary and making all the reservations well in advance. Somehow winning the lottery for “The Wave.”  If it were left to me, views would be enjoyed from the car. Meals would be enjoyed in restaurants. Rather than carrying 30 lbs. backpacks we would have added 30 lbs. to our butts. Having a plan is not a bad thing.

How did I do without developing automatic test equipment for two months? Didn’t miss it a bit. That was a little disconcerting. I did miss my colleagues and, perversely, the office drama. For that I’m looking forward to getting back to the real world.

What about spending so much time with my wife? She did get a little crabby sometimes, but who wouldn’t after hiking for 6 hours in the 100 degree desert? Or sleeping without a tent among the rattlesnakes and scorpions, hoping that it doesn’t rain? Or wading through murky water for two days straight. Or digging holes to poop in. Or pooping in a box. Or a bag. And then carrying it for three days. But she did all those things, which is awesome. My favorite part of this road trip was having Rosalind all to myself for two months. I didn’t have to share her with the health club, Target, Trader Joe’s, ERBA, the piano, or the bridge ladies. We saw some amazing stuff, but nothing was better than the inside of our little backpacking tent. I think that the retirement thing will work out fine.

One of my (Dan’s) childhood memories is of a family road trip from Illinois (where Mom and Dad were in grad school) to Pennsylvania (where Dad’s parents lived). I looked forward to stopping at Sinclair gas stations because of Dino (a.k.a. Bronty), their green Brontosaurus mascot.

I even got a small plastic Dino once, which looked something like this:

We’ve never seen a Sinclair gas stations on the East Coast, but now, here in Wyoming and Utah, 50 years later, they are all over the place! Who knew?

The deal with Dino is that thousands of years ago, as we know from “The Flintstones” (who coincidentally had a pet named Dino), dinosaurs and people happily coexisted. For some reason the dinosaurs died out, their bodies piled up and turned to oil, we pump the oil out of the ground, and turn it into gasoline to fuel our SUVs. All just as God intended.

Upon visiting Dinosaur National Monument (days 16-18) we learned that this whole Sinclair/Flintstones story is a total fabrication. Sinclair’s motivation in this fiction was clearly to sell gasoline. I don’t know what the creators of the Flintstones were thinking. Here’s what really happened:

• 4,500,000,000 years ago: Earth formed.
• 3,000,000,000 years ago: Dead bacteria and plankton start piling up on the bottom of the ocean floor, and eventually turn into oil. (The whole dinosaur/oil thing was a Sinclair marketing fabrication.)
• 66,000,000 years ago: The dinosaur extinction.
• 300,000 years ago: Humans first showed up on Earth. Missed seeing the dinosaurs by quite a bit.
• “Brontosaurus” wasn’t even a kind of dinosaur at the time of the Sinclair marketing campaign. But people liked the name and Fred liked his brontosaurus burgers, so it kind of stuck as a synonym for Apatosaurus.
• Brontosaurus had a long snout. The Sinclair version of the Brontosaurus has the wrong kind of head.

As if all this wasn’t enough to burst my bubble, Sinclair gas stations now sell cute fluffy stuffed dinosaurs, rather than the iconic plastic Dinos.

Our road trip is planned around seeing the sights, but we are meeting lots of people along the way. Some people strike us as particularly awesome for one reason or another. (We’re sure that everyone is awesome in their own way, but maybe we just aren’t talking long enough to discover their awesomeness.) We meet people at campgrounds, on the road at various stopping points, and on the trail and in the back country. Since a lot of our nights are spent in campgrounds, you would think that we would have lots of stories of awesome campground people. This is not the case.

One thing that we learned early on is that we are not “camping”. In order to “camp” you need a “camper”, honey. Since we only have a tent, we are “tenting”. Campers (the equipment, but I suppose the people also) come in various sizes from gigantic-humongous to quite small and cute. The larger the camper, the less likely we were to meet the occupants. Why would anyone ever want to step out of a climate controlled motorized McMansion into the nasty hot/cold/windy/sandy/wet/dry/snake infested outdoors? Tenters are a minority in the campground world, so just due to the small population we didn’t run into many of them. Therefore, at campgrounds we mostly met inhabitants of the small and cute campers, who were all very nice but not particularly awesome. Demographically the campground population is 90% really old retirees, 9% families with bratty pre-school kids, and 1% other. I imagine that if we were at the campground in the middle of summer that there would be a fair percentage of families with sulky teenage kids. Just as well.

On-the-road is the most diverse group. Anyone we meet on the road has gotten out of their vehicle for some reason. They are not necessarily campers (or tenters), they could be locals doing their thing.

In the back country we’re all tenters of course, except for the super awesome sleep under the stars people. The back country is surprisingly white – I would even say whiter than Boxford, if you could imagine.

We exchange names and sometimes contact info with some of the people we meet, but mostly not. My estimates of age decades are based on appearances and stories. If you see your name here and you are older than I estimate, chalk it up to your youthful good looks. If you are younger than I estimate, that is a reflection of your advanced wisdom.

So, without further ado, here is our list of five star awesome people so far:

At campgrounds:

• (None yet)

On the road:

• Volunteer couple (80s) at Wildcat Guard Station (80s). We talked a long time about little known sights in Utah. The husband presented us with a carved wood miniature shovel that he had made, inscribed with the year and the name of his guard station, in recognition of our interest in their state.
• The Jenny Lake (Grand Tetons NP) back country rangers (40s) who made sure that we were well instructed in the local bear protocols, helped us lighten our backpack load (we didn’t need to carry as much water as we had thought), and assured us that we had chosen an appropriate route for our experience level.
• Elaine (60s), jack of all trades at the Cowboy Inn in Escalante, rearranged the room assignments so that we could have two nights after our planned back country hike. Listened to our stories after the hike, and then gave us excellent suggestions for local day hikes.
• Rayden (20s) at Escalante Interagency Visitor Center, spent about an hour with us helping to plan our back country hike. And then another half hour the next day helping to modify the plan to address some additional worries.
• Couple from Pennsylvania (50s): sold their house and most possessions. Touring the country in their mini-van with their dog for the foreseeable future. Living at Airbnbs.
• Hiker (80s) with an REI tour (Capitol Reef and Escalante). His 5^th year doing the same tour!
• Sadie Hansen (20s), working the ice cream counter in Iowa. We talked with her about her family’s dairy and our Richardson’s back home. She insisted that we take some complimentary milk with us so we could see how much better theirs is. (http://www.hansendairy.com)
• Lynette and family for taking care of us for almost a week.
• Clerk at McGuckin’s (an iconic hardware store in Boulder) who tried to help us figure out how to fix our 30 year old Coleman camp stove, rather than pushing a new one.
• Two motorcycle dudes (70s): leather chaps, etc. Matching baby blue BWMs. (DAR: “Maybe they’re brothers.” RAR: “They’re not.”)

In the back country:

• Two fearless Australian ladies in sandals, skirts, and hippie jewelry (40s). They arrived at our campsite separately from different trails; one of them had just waded alone through a waist-deep pool not knowing how deep it was. Plus, they had just come through a canyon wall passage that we wimped out on. (Next time we’ll do it!)
• Mark, Matt (30s), and Caroline (20s). Met for the first time at the visitor center and decided to hike in the back country for three days together. Caroline also gets fearless points.
• Dean, Russell, and any other river guides on the planet. These people love what they do and have the best views from their offices.
• Red Jeep dudes (40s) who picked up RAR’s errant camera from a sand bank, looked at some pictures, drove ½ hr. down a dirt road until they found the subjects in the pictures (us, of course), to return the camera! (We’re still paying back that karma.)
• Four ladies from North Carolina. Dispersed camping in UT for three weeks. Only had to pay for a campground once. $10.
• Mountain biker (30s) on the “WE” (Whole Enchilada, bike trail to Moab). Stopped to share his map with us as we were cluelessly trying to find Haystack Mt.
• The Sheriff and his posse, looking for someone or something between the middle and the edge of nowhere in Southern Utah. Big pickup trucks, cowboy hats, guns, badges. Look like they’ve never been to a Dunkin’ Donuts. Ever.

What do you talk about when trapped in a car for two months with the woman you’ve been married to for 34 years? Hopefully you can avoid that question with audio entertainment!

Today we finished “Dear Bob and Sue” (audio book), a travel log written in the form of a collection of e-mails from Matt and Karen Smith chronicling their visits to all 57 national parks (with an appendix for the most recent addition #58, The Pinnacles, which we have visited many times). The book was recommended to us by an IRL hiker in the White Mountains, and it seemed appropriate for our road trip. I usually don’t go for “books on tape,” but I made an exception for this one.

Otherwise it’s mostly music. I have at least two days of Madonna, and although I would be happy to have that on an infinite loop for two months, Rosalind would be taking the next plane back home before the first day was over. (Same for me and her Billy Joel.) We figured that since we are going out West that country music would be appropriate, and something new for us. Sirius XM has a half dozen country stations. “Bluegrass” and “Garth” were OK, but got old pretty quickly. “Outlaw” and “Highway” were unpleasant. We listened to “No Shoes” for a day. Apparently “No Shoes”: Kenny Chesney :: ”Parrot Head”: Jimmy Buffet. According to the WSJ, Gillette Stadium is some sort of spiritual home for Kenny, and he sells out a few shows there every year. Go figure. The music was nice, but the frequent chats with No Shoes Nation citizens was annoying. We settled on “Willie’s Roadhouse.” We have a soft spot for Willie Nelson since his rendition of “As Time Goes By” was the first dance at our wedding. As you might suspect, Willie likes country music from the 60’s and 70’s. For the more up to date country music we listened to Erin Rae’s Tidal playlist of up and coming women country artists a couple of times. By now Rosalind is getting tired of country music, but I’ll sneak it back in later.

What about good old AM/FM radio? Not much available in the middle of Wyoming except for televangelists.