We left Ventura and drove up the coast along California Highway 1 through Big Sur. Both the weather and the scenery were glorious. The road is pretty windy, with lots of high cliffs, so the drive was slow. Trying to get to our destination outside Santa Cruz before dark, we didn’t stop to to take photos.

The next day we visited family in San Martin and spent the night at a campground in Morgan Hill. Our plan had been to drive up the coast for the rest of the week, stopping to see family along the way. But with the virus danger, we decided to cut the trip short and head straight for Whidbey.

We drove as far as Redding the first day and camped just north of the city. It rained overnight, which meant snow in the mountains. The next morning we checked the Caltrans Web site, which said they would be checking vehicles to make sure they were carrying chains to travel north on I-5. We drove back into Redding, went to an auto-parts store, bought chains, and then headed back up I-5.

Just south of where we camped there was a huge back-up for the “chain check.” After about an hour, we reached the checkpoint and the cop just waved us through. No look in our vehicle to see if we had chains, not even a “do you have chains?” question.

Once we were past the checkpoint, we sailed along, as there was no traffic. The road was clear, and we didn’t encounter anything more severe than a little snow and sleet mixed with rain, though the snow-covered trees were beautiful. I’m not sure what the point of the huge back-up was.

We spent a night at campground outside Eugene and drove on to the island. On a trip that had a fair amount of rain, our last day had great weather, with spectacular views of the mountains: Hood, St. Helens, Rainier, and Baker, plus the Cascades and Olympics.

We either fixed our own food or ate carryout, except for one dine-in lunch. We washed our hands a lot. We’ve been home for a week, safe and sound in our house, except for a couple of grocery-store trips and one trip to the post office.

Final trip statistics:

• Miles traveled: 4,208
• Average speed: 56 mph
• Days on the road: 17
• Actual driving time: 74 hours, 39 minutes
• License plates seen: 47 states (all except Rhode Island, North Dakota, and Hawaii), seven Canadian provinces (Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec, and Saskatchewan), and two Mexican states (Chihuahua and Sonora)

 

We made what for us was a mad dash across the South to reach the Pacific Ocean: 2,946 miles in 12 days.

After our two nights in Selma, Ala., we headed down to I-10 and across Louisiana and East Texas. We went through Del Rio and then on to Fort Davis, where we spent two nights with our friend Dedie Taylor, who seems to know just about everybody in Fort Davis and Marfa.

Dedie took us the Chinati Foundation, an art museum created by Donald Judd, a minimalist artist who abandoned New York for Marfa. Chinati occupies an old military base. We went through two large buildings that contained 100 large boxes in milled aluminum created by Judd. The boxes are all the same size but each one is different, and many of them produce optical illusions that have you looking from different angles to figure out how he did it. Chinati also has 15 even larger concrete installations by Judd marching across the landscape. We also went into some rooms that created unusual effects using light. Chinati has works by several other artists that are available on guided tours.

After a lovely visit with Dedie, we got back on the road, driving through a dust storm and then a rainstorm to Lordsburg, N.M., where our campsite was a sea of mud, and then on to Quartzsite, Ariz., where it was drier. Yesterday we drove across Southern California in another rainstorm and arrived at a Ventura County campground on the ocean.

We are taking a day here to rest up and enjoy the view. Then we will be heading up the coast, visiting family along the way. 

We arrived in Selma on Sunday afternoon, just as the jubilee was wrapping up and the politicians were heading out of town.

This year marks the 55th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, when sheriff’s deputies attacked civil-rights marchers and drove them back from the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River.

This past weekend the town marked the anniversary. You probably heard about it on the news. Joe Biden got a warm welcome, and people turned their backs on Mike Bloomberg. Lots of Presidential candidates joined the march across the bridge, and U.S. Rep. John Lewis, who was injured in the 1965 march, gave a stirring speech in which he urged people to honor the memory of the march by voting. 

We missed it all by a day. We wanted to stop in Selma on our trip west, but we didn’t know this was the weekend of the jubilee, as they call it here. We couldn’t find a place to stay on Saturday night, so we came on Sunday, driving past a long line of cars leaving after the event. 

Even though we missed the festivities, we marked the anniversary in our own way. We went to the Selma Interpretive Center, run by the National Park Service, at the foot of the bridge. They have knowledgeable park rangers and terrific exhibits on the history of the marches. (There were three: the Bloody Sunday march; a second march, led by Martin Luther King, that turned back at the bridge because of a federal court order; and the final, three-day, 50-mile march that went all the way to the state capitol in Montgomery under the protection of Alabama Nation Guard troops nationalized by LBJ.) Five months after the events in Selma, LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act into law. 

We also visited the National Voting Rights Museum, a private facility on the other end of the bridge. It too had excellent exhibits. As we drove across the bridge, some young people were holding up signs supporting candidates in Tuesday’s primary. One said, appropriately, “Vote or die.”

Selma is a city of 20,000 people, 80 percent of whom are black. It calls itself “The Queen City of the Black Belt,” but it was obvious that the town has seen better days. It has quite a few nice houses, many in the southern style, but many were boarded up or in varying states of disrepair. It was sad to see. I guess civil-rights tourism is not enough to build an economy around. 

One thing I wondered was whether any consideration had been given to changing the name of the bridge. Edmund Pettus was a Confederate general and reportedly a top leader of the Ku Klux Klan, not exactly someone who should be honored. There was a push at the time of the 50th anniversary to rename the bridge, but it went nowhere because the bridge is such a symbol of the civil-rights movement. Lately there has been some talk of naming it for John Lewis, but even he doesn’t want that.

If you go to Memphis, you’re supposed to go to Graceland, so we did.

I was expecting something really over the top, but it’s not. The original house, while nice enough, appears to be like many other large homes of that era. Of course, Elvis added on a lot of extensions and other buildings.

We took the basic mansion tour, for which you are given an iPad with earphones, which guides you through the various rooms, with narration by Lisa Marie Presley, among others. If you want a tour guided by a human being, you have to pay big bucks for an “ultimate VIP tour.” We skipped that, as well as a chance to see the inside of Elvis’s airplanes. We picked a good day to come, as there were no lines. Based on the size of the visitors’ center, it looked like it would be a zoo in tourist season.

The decor may have been trendy in the 70s when the house was built, but it seems pretty tacky now, with shag carpet not only on some floors but at least one wall. My favorite was probably the billiard room, where not only the walls but also the ceiling are covered in fabric. Then there was the “jungle room,” whose name speaks for itself. The TV room had three sets, which Elvis put in after he heard than Lyndon Johnson had three in the Oval Office so he could watch all three networks at once.

Of course, Elvis came from modest beginnings — a couple of years ago we visited the modest one-room house where he was born in Tupelo, Miss. — so Graceland was a huge step up for him and his parents.

The “trophy building” is now a museum, which houses furnishings no longer used in the house, home movies, Elvis’s collection of law-enforcement badges and patches (he was a cop groupie), documents, photos, and home movies.

The tour ends in the meditation garden and cemetery where Elvis, his parents, and his grandmother are buried.

After we left Graceland, we went to a local emergency room, so I could get my back X-rayed. It turnned out nothing was broken, so they just gave me some muscle-relaxing pills, which made me kind of dopey (or even dopier than usual, as some would say).

Because of that, we didn’t get to do as much as we had hoped in Memphis, especially on the music front. Our second night we did go to place called Lafayette’s Music Room, where we saw a group called the Memphis All-Stars, made up of local session musicians. They played a variety of music, mostly Motown and R&B, and were excellent.

On our last night we had a very good dinner at restaurant called Felicia Suzanne’s, just around the corner from our hotel.

Then it was back on the road for the final two days’ trip to North Carolina. Because I was still doped up on muscle relaxers, Robin did all the driving. We stopped for one night at a motel east of Knoxville and completed our journey the next day.

The final tally:

• Miles driven: 4,014 miles
• Actual driving time: 76 hours
• Average speed: 53 miles per hour
• License plates seen: 47 states (all except Delaware, Hawaii, New Hampshire, and West Virginia) plus the District of Columbia and four Canadian provinces (Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec).

 

 

 

We arrived in Memphis, dropped Teddy at his kennel, and headed to our downtown hotel. It turned out to be restaurant week in Memphis, so the two restaurants nearest the hotel were both booked, but we found a table at a a place called the Majestic Grille, located in an old movie theater a few blocks away. The food was good and they were playing clips from old black-and-white movies, either silents or talkies with no sound, on a screen above the dining room.

The next morning we headed for the National Civil Rights Museum, which is located in the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was shot 51 years ago. The motel came upon hard times after the assassination and was going to be torn down, but a group of local citizens saved it, and it is now a museum, affiliated with the Smithsonian, that tells the story of the civil-rights movement. We spent several hours there.

The exhibits are extensive, starting with slavery and going forward to the King assassination. It also has some exhibits that deal with more recent events and movements, but those seem sort of added on. There are more exhibits across the street in the boarding house from which James Earl Ray is said to have fired the fatal shots, but we didn’t make it over there.

I can’t possibly describe all the exhibits, so I will concentrate on one I thought was among the most interesting, having to do with the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, a voter-registration effort that became known as Freedom Summer. The reason I liked the exhibit is that it had lots of documents and artifacts, including an organization chart of the Council of Federated Organizations, the group that spearheaded the effort; a calendar; a typewritten “Security Handbook” for dealing with the often-violent racist response; and, most telling, an FBI missing-persons notice for Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, the three civil-rights workers who were murdered.

The museum also deals, of course, with the assassination. A wreath hangs on the balcony where Kind was shot. The two modest rooms that he and his associates occupied have also been recreated.

After we left Santa Fe, we dropped down to I-40 and headed east. The forecast said cold weather was coming in, but we thought we could squeeze in one more night of camping, so we stopped at a KOA just east of Amarillo, Tex.

The afternoon and evening were pleasant enough, but the wind picked up and at 4 am we were both wide awake as the vinyl upper sides of the camper shook in the wind. Realizing we weren’t going to get any more sleep, we broke camp and got back on the highway, making our way through the dark, sleet, and freezing rain, mostly just us and the 18-wheelers.

Around 7 we decided to stop for breakfast and pulled off at a truck stop with a Denny’s somewhere west of Oklahoma City. We settled in and ordered a hot breakfast. Just as I went to the restroom, the power went out. Fortunately, I had a flashlight in my pocket, so I found my way back to our table and the lights came back on.

The lights went on and off several more times and then went off for good. We were about give up when the waitress said she did have some hot oatmeal, so we ate that and headed back onto the freeway.

We encountered three wrecked semis, one overturned, one jacknifed, and one just off the road. We finally got through Oklahoma City and decided to stop for lunch. Outside a McDonald’s, with my usual gracefulness, I slipped on some ice and fell. After that we made it without further incident to our motel in Van Buren, Ark., just outside Fort Smith.

My back still hurt from the fall, but we had survived another drive across Oklahoma. (Some of you may recall that a few years ago we drove across Oklahoma in a sleet storm with single-digit temperatures.) From Fort Smith, we headed on the Memphis, our last major stop.

From Navajo Lake we headed down to Santa Fe to visit our friends Dan and Susanne and Susanne’s sister Sharon.

Our first night they served us a wonderful home-cooked meal. The second night we went to The Shed, one of Santa Fe’s iconic restaurants, which has been serving authentic New Mexican food since 1953. Both meals were great and a nice change from camp cooking.

In between meals, we went up to Museum Hill, home of four superb museums and a botanical garden. We spent a few hours in the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, which houses a huge collection of Native American art, artifacts, and jewelry.

The museums surround a courtyard, which has some outstanding sculptures. Photos were not allowed in the museum, but the sculptures were fair game.

After our visit to Zion National Park, we turned east, driving through a bit of Arizona, then back up into Utah, where we passed through the southern part of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, before entering New Mexico and ending up at Navajo Lake State Park.

Navajo Lake is a reservoir created by damming the San Juan River. It has a huge marina. We spent a day in the park just taking it easy.

 

For the last part of our visit to southwestern Utah, we moved on to Zion National Park. It’s another beautiful place, but we were only able to see part of it.

Because of the high volume of tourists — the campground was full even in early November — private vehicles are now banned from the north end of the park. Instead, the Park Service runs shuttle buses. The catch? No dogs allowed on the buses. Since we had Teddy with us, that meant we couldn’t go, so we were limited to the southern quarter or so of the park.

Even so, we got to see some nice scenery and took the one hike where dogs are allowed. Maybe some day we can come back sans pooch.

 

Our base for exploring Bryce Canyon and Escalante was Kodachrome Basin State Park, which lies between the two.

The park was named by the National Geographic Society because of the green foliage and red rocks. The Society got permission from Kodak to use the name.

On our last day we decided to explore the park itself. It proves again that it’s hard to beat Utah when it comes to rocks.