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Constant Readers,

I have been back home (sweet home!) in Davidson, N.C. for over a week now, so it's time to wrap up my Road Trip Summer 2009 travel blog, and send it to archives where it will live on for the future reference of posterity (mine if no one else's!) at blogs.davidson.edu/roadtrip (which can be reached geographically on the Davidson homepage by clicking News, then Blogs). But first, some notes:

• I am, unsurprisingly, a couple of shades of tan darker than I was in June, in spite of SPF 85 ritually slathered on every day on the road. (I was especially diligent about my ears, so that I will not have to wear Band-Aids on them when I am an old man. Not a good look.)

The sun-protective Tilley hat I left town with on June 13 turned out to be too floppy for an open car at 75 mph, so I did the baseball-cap-and-bandanna thing most of the way. Additional tip for those without auto AC: A bandanna (pictured) dipped in icy cooler slush helps keep a body cool on those long summertime hauls. Dodger wore sunscreen, too, on the pink parts of his delicate l'il snout. Here at the moment of our return to Davidson, his cruise control is still set on "Squirrel!" (July 24, photo by Bill Giduz '74)

• I am greatly enjoying preparing all my own food, in my own kitchen sweet kitchen. Nothing out of a can shall cross my lips, and lots of fresh summer fruits and vegetables shall cross them often. (That last week of hard driving put me over my annual limit of drive-through gut-bombers and Beanee Weenies in a tent. Hellooooo, farmer's market!)

• At my office sweet office, I'm adjusting to sitting at a desk again (I am up to a half-hour at a time without jumping up and running in circles like the dog), to central air-conditioning (my hands and feet got cold the first few days), and to long pants (creased khakis instead of wrinkled camp shorts that smell like gasoline and antifreeze).

• My laundry is done, my friends are hugged, and the Comet sits quietly in the rain under a cheap spun-bond cover from the WalMart in Flagstaff, Arizona---just until I can figure out how to zip back up the rear window that came completely aloose from the canvas in a high wind on Route 66 near Tulsa. That was a full day, I recall.

Way back in May, as I planned this transcontinental voyage, Carol Higham, adjunct assistant professor of humanities at Davidson and a good buddy, piqued an academic interest in my yen to, as Horace Greeley is purported to have said, "Go West, young man." Okay, I'm only somewhat young, and Greeley is not the original author of the quote. The important thing here is that Carol told me about her new Western U.S. history textbook, Conquests and Consequences, co-written with William H. Katerbery of Calvin College. Even more important, she brought a laser-printed galley proof to my office, for me to pack along in the trunk of my Comet. I could picture the stack of sheets blowing off a campsite picnic table in Colorado, so I paid Central Services in the college union a buck fifty to wiro-bind it.

Oof. By the time I had made it through all the storms of south central Missouri in my leaky old Comet ragtop ("Dodger, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore!"), I was very happy to have gotten two last Davidson invitations for lodging on my way homeward. Thanks to Curtis Bickers '93, for a redux of my westbound visit to his gracious Memphis home. And big thanks to my dear, fun and funny classmate Linda Cassens Laforest '85, who had called me up on a rainy, Motel 6 kind of a day earlier in the week to ask when I was coming through Oak Ridge. O, happiness! Dodger and I were plumb tired of Motel 6 by now: Kingman, Ariz., Gallup, N.M., Goodland, Kan., Lawrence, Kan., St. Robert, Missouri... Nice as it is to see that dog-friendly sign from the interstate, it's not home. For instance, I would never have such a thing as that bedspread in my home. Please. Come to think of it, I would never have that bed, either. Ah, well. Motel 6 is, like WalMart, what it is: When you need it, it's exactly what you need, but when you're done, you don't want to just hang out there. So anyway.

Kansas is a very, very long state, even at 75 mph steady, in a hefty crosswind. Happily, Jesus is everywhere. I missed my favorite shot of Him, plainly and exquisitely painted onto a billboard poking up out of the greening summer bounty of the earth with no verbal interpretation, just a very happy and welcoming, hippie-style Jesus holding a stalk (whatever) of wheat and smiling at me. I liked that Jesus. This more personalized Jesus, below, which I did manage to capture on pixels, runs a close second, even if the godsmack message and Photo-Shopped halo, not to mention the blood-red ray of---something?---shooting off of His---heart?---are a bit much for my tastes.

Turns out my buddy Ricky has been up to a good deal since 10th grade, as have I, so we shared all about that and then some in Taos, relatively late into the evening, for a coupla guys approaching---only approaching, mind you---middle age. Our dogs kept us out of trouble on the town, and next morning, we headed up to the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the southernmost Rockies range, where Ricky knew a nature preserve with hot springs. Okay, it was a "naturist" preserve, and if you had ever told me in 10th grade that thirty years on I would be hiking up a mountain anywhere with anybody wearing nothing more than Nikes and a fresh goatee, I would have slapped you. But that I did, hike up that mountain to the bubbly mineral spring pool in my birthday suit. My congenital Southeastern orthodox Presbyterian upbringing makes it seem unseemly to share more, except to note that it was a family-oriented occasion.

Sadly this morning at 6 a.m., I bid adieu to the ACE Hotel and Swim Club on Palm Canyon Drive, and began loading up the car for the blistering 220 miles to the Needles, Calif. Motel 6. As is my custom, while approaching my 67 Mercury from a distance, I scanned the pavement under the ol' girl for unfamiliar puddles. Uh-oh. Driver's side gasoline hose leak on the firewall, rubber must have disintegrated in the heat. Not a thing you want to have to fix yourself in the 115-degree desert, so off to the Vista Chino Shell station I was, with John Gilmore '69 and my new best friend Antonio Romualdo to the rescue. Soon enough, I was comfily ensconced in Antonio's plumaria-scented garden, for a bonus day in Palm Springs.

We ended our San Diego stay, a petite week, by one more festive visit to Dog Beach before heading up the coast. Sure enough, exiting the accursed I-5 to the Pacific Coast Highway, we saw signs to Doheny Park and Laguna Beach, and the Beach Boys started belting out "Surfin' Safari." I did not plan it, honest, my playlist did it on its own. I kept the volume a tad down for fear of being considered uncool by California standards, but beefed it back up when I saw a restored woody with a rehabbed surfer at the wheel headed back down PCH to Doheny. What are North Carolina license plates in Orange County, Calif. worth if you can't play your tourist music as loud as you want, hmm? Anyway, I put some 20-year-old ghosts to rest in Laguna, then got caught in Pageant of the Masters traffic, thence sucked up toward L.A. before deciding to barrel east on the 10, to the welcoming hospitality of John Gilmore, M.D. '69 & Cie in Palm Springs.

I thought I had already been as hot as I had ever been in my life. Not so. My most recent 48 hours in the desert were it. In Blythe, Calif., 20 years after my first summer evening there, recounted in "The Comet" entry, it was still triple digits at bedtime two nights ago. Next morning, a cut shaving latened my departure til after 10, so by the time we got to the part about climbing from desert sea level to 4,000+ feet in eastern San Diego County, it was the hottest part of the desert day.

By Flagstaff, I was jonesing for me some cheap consumer goods from the global supply chain, so I could not leave that town without visiting their Wal*Mart. I got some Fruit of the Loom sweats (it had not occurred to me while packing at 90 degrees that parts of my summer might be chilly), some detergent and Clorox (I had it in my head that I had to do laundry at Grand Canyon Village, even though I was not yet out of clean underthings), two cans of Beanee Weenees, a Butterfingers kingsize, and a shrink-wrapped, spunbond car cover, the cheapest they make. I had decided that, for the four weeks remaining of my busted ragtop odyssey (see previous entry), I'd be better off throwing a cover on it at night or when it rained than trying to find someone to help me repair a top that, in fact, needs to be replaced.