Driving Home

The middle of April and time for Toby, Tulip and me to drive back to Rhode Island.



But first, with our old friends John and Betsy Blue, we visited the brand new wing of the Nixon Library: The Watergate Wing. We all remembered so well the slow unraveling of the Nixon presidency as Woodward and Bernstein published incriminating story after story in the Washington Post. John gleefully discovered this license plate in the parking lot: Nixon knew all along about the break-in and the cover-up.




Then a Sunday morning brunch in the back yard with the Burbank gang and Sam's cousin Spencer. (Impossible for me to take a photo without people eating.)





It was a hot day and a great idea to bring the ladybug sprinkler over from Burbank. Kids a bit hesitant to run through it, but the parents showed them how.

Then time to say goodbye to our wonderful California kids and grand kids. We've loved our sojourn in LA: seeing old friends, having a respite from the harsh weather back east, loved incredibly being near Sam and family.




It was breath-taking to drive through the canyons of Utah--helped not feel so sad to leave S&J, M&M.




Tulip was a good traveler--luckily she loves to drowse.




She revived a lot when we stopped at the Green River in Utah, where Sam went on an Outward Bound camping trip when he was a teenager.




But then back to sleep again as Toby and I barely made it over the snowy Vail Pass in Colorado, dodged tornadoes in Missouri (we didn't see any--we were ahead of the storms by a day or two), drove through the endless plains of eastern Colorado and Kansas, and eased into Pittsburgh to stay the night with our ever-hospitable friends the Woodwards in their home there. The next night we stayed with the Harrises near Princeton, then, on Easter Sunday, arrived back home to Barrington--and to a spring just starting, small green shoots and daffodils and forsythia blooming--my favorite time of year--and to the anticipation of soon seeing our Panama gang--and meeting Simon Orion!