White Sands Trip, ca. 1962

Albuquerque 2nd Ward Deacons' Quorum, ca. 1962

I saw this photograph numerous times in my mother's photo collection when I was growing up.  It shows my oldest brothers Roger and Robin with their deacons' quorum and its advisor, Vern Payne (who, 50+ years later, is now the Albuquerque Temple president), in about 1962.  What piqued my interest in it recently was President Payne's mentioning it after giving us copies of the photo from the stake adult temple trip that I wrote about in February.  I decided to dig it out of Mom's photos and scan it into a .jpg file, specifically for the purpose of seeing how many of the kids Vern could identify.  (Vern suggested that I send it to my brother Roger, as well, to see how many people he remembered.)

Anyway, between the two of them, we were able to identify most of the kids, and I've labeled them in the attached copy.  I remember a lot of these guys: (1) Gary Iverson lived down the street from us on Love Avenue (and later was married for a while to my friend Ken Foley's sister Carolyn); (2) Chris Hill, a non-Mormon, was a friend of Roger's who used to come to our house a lot (Roger says he still has e-mail contact with him); (3) Earl Capps lived several streets east of us (his brother Dave and his family lived in our ward as recently as 8-10 years ago); and (4) Jim Done (pronounced "dohn") and Ray Sego were around for a number of years.  Note that there are two kids that neither Vern nor Roger could identify, and neither could remember the Kemp kid's first name.  I'm guessing the blond kid to Robin's left is Steve Tuttle, inasmuch as Vern remembered there was a Tuttle kid in the group and the one who was Robin and Roger's age was named Steve.  (Years later, I knew his younger brother Mike in the 11th [singles] Ward, where he met and married -- and later divorced, I understand -- a girl named Elaine Peterson.)

Vern tells an interesting story about the trip.  He was in law school at the time and was working nights at Romney Produce to make ends meet.  The trip to White Sands happened on a Saturday after Vern had worked two straight nights and had attended classes in between on that Friday; needless to say, he hadn't had a lot of sleep.  The group drove down in two cars, the other one being driven by Muriel "Mike" Iverson, Gary's dad (who presumably took this photo).  On the way back, Vern got a speeding ticket in/near Tularosa, the fine for which he didn't have the money to pay.  The local justice of the peace was going to lock him up until he came up with the "bail," and it was only after Vern was able to get someone to wire the money down that they were able to continue on their way.  And then they ran into a blizzard and icy roads, making the trip much more of an adventure than anyone had reckoned.

Not too many years later, Vern became the chief justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, and one of his responsibilities was to exercise superintending control over the state's justices of the peace (or magistrates, as they were later known).  He says he ran into the JP one time who'd threatened him with jail in 1962, who in turn recognized him and looked self-conscious about how the tables had turned in the intervening years.  (I guess they both got a laugh out of it in the end.)

Oh, yeah....

"They comin' to America"

1. Immigration "reform".  The new immigration "crisis," consisting of unaccompanied minors (most from Central America) crossing the U.S.-Mexico frontier, once again highlights the need for greater border security.  It's well-known that Hondurans and Guatemalans who cross Mexico en route to the U.S. aren't treated very well by the Mexican populace, and, given the reported involvement of drug cartels and gangs, one can only imagine what's happening to children who are making that journey.  However, the U.S.'s taking them in, on the pretext that their lives would be in danger in their home countries if they were sent back, is ultimately stupid in the extreme.  One, the only reason people, especially pitiable minors, keep seeking to cross the border is that they know there's little chance of being deported.  (And we ask why there's such a flood?)  And, two, why isn't the U.S. trying to encourage the governments in Mexico and Central America to institute reforms that might actually provide security and opportunities for employment to their peoples?  It's a comprehensively wrecked region that relies on (a) illegal immigration to the U.S. as an escape valve to prevent civil unrest, and (b) remittances of U.S. dollars from indocumentados as a large percentage of its overall economy.  It's almost getting to the point where the U.S. may as well annex Mexico and Central America -- as the European Union has effectively done with economic basket-cases like Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland, and Portugal -- for the drain they've become on American resources.  There are few countries in the world most of whose residents couldn't be considered "refugees" under the standards we're trying to use for people from south of our border.  Which leads me into my next topic....

2. Eventual disintegration of the United States.  Several conservative commentators, notably Mark Steyn and Pat Buchanan, have written about the inevitability of the breakup of the United States into smaller, regional nations.  As Steyn notes in his book After America, much-smaller countries than the U.S. (e.g., Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia) have broken up into numerous pieces when their central governments fell apart, simply because the economic, social, and cultural interests of their component parts, to put it mildly, didn't align.  The deepening concentration of regulatory control in federal agencies, not to mention the existence of America's own economic basket-cases-in-the-making (cf. California, or New Mexico without a federal teat to suck on), is eventually going to render it impossible for there to be any real "governing."  And certain states or regions will simply conclude that it's no longer in their interests to remain in the Union; judging from present business conditions, I'd say that process will probably begin with a new "Republic of Texas."  I don't even foresee a second American civil war to preserve the Union -- what military commanders will order attacks to preserve a dictatorial, faceless conglomeration of statist bureaucrats? -- although there almost certainly will be multiple regional wars with atrocities galore.  The LDS Church may well have to engage in a "literal gathering of Israel" (in Utah and environs) out of sheer desperation.

3. My weird "encounter" with Steyn.  While I'm citing Mark Steyn, I may as well write about the strange sort of "cyber encounter" I had with him a few weeks ago.  Steyn is selling gift certificates on his website as a means of generating funds with which to mount a defense in his libel lawsuit against climate-change poobah Michael Mann.  Feeling sympathetic to his cause, I bought a $25 gift certificate but with no intention of using it -- essentially, I donated the money to him.  I sent him an e-mail saying I'd thought about sending the gift certificate to a liberal friend but didn't do so because I thought my friend would use it.  Instead, I requested that Steyn re-post one of my favorite articles of his, an essay on the song "Bridge Over Troubled Water" and how it ultimately drove a wedge between Paul Simon, who wrote the song and later wished, when it became a huge hit, that he'd sung it, and Art Garfunkel, Simon's friend and partner who actually did sing it.  Well, Steyn re-posted the article, but with some weirdly derisive comments aimed at me: (1) he seemed irritated by what he probably regarded as the overly "cutesy" tone of my e-mail; (2) he took pains to note that he hadn't been taking "requests" for old articles for a couple of years (and didn't I know that?); and (3) he referred to me as "Ken," even though my real name was right there on the page, which of course is always a deadly demeaning give-away.  (Would he have been kinder to me if I'd bought a $100 gift certificate instead?)  The hurt I felt wasn't enough to kill my enthusiasm for reading Steyn's commentary -- I agree with him on too many issues, and he's too wickedly funny -- but it made me wonder if the aforementioned liberal friend's having called Steyn a "miserable weasel" (or words to that effect) wasn't more descriptive than I would have thought.

4. Growing up in the 60s and 70s.  I sometimes reflect on what it was like to grow up in the 1960s and 1970s, when there were severely limited entertainment options and sources of news and other information.  How would my grandkids fare now with no video games, no Internet, no cellphones, three or four television channels, only newsprint and broadcast news to rely on for knowledge about current events, music that came on vinyl and magnetic tape only, and no Blu-ray players (or home movies at all, outside of what the networks decided to air a few times a week, usually late at night)?  I remember the spring of 1974, when I was still in ninth grade in junior high school.  The school I attended experimented with offering recreational programs on Friday afternoons, and I elected to participate in bowling.  A friend and I, always finishing early and left to hang out at the bowling alley until the bus returned to the school, would bum quarters off a girl he knew to play "Pong," the very first, very rudimentary video game.  We thought "Pong" was cool, but neither of us could have imagined the sophisticated video games we have today.  When I was a child, everyone played outdoors with the other kids in the neighborhood.  Later on, I spent a lot of time alone, shooting baskets in our back yard and playing guitar in my room; however, indoor entertainment was pretty hard to come by for someone who didn't constantly read books.  If I'd known then what I know now, I would have read a lot of books, and my parents probably would have been concerned that I was spending too much time indoors.  How times have changed!

5. My guitars.  I have acquired quite a few guitars over the years.  Now that Darren and Cait have returned from Taiwan and will leave shortly for California, we'll have fewer instruments in the house; however, here's a list of what I have: (1) Alvarez acoustic guitar; (2) Squier II Stratocaster (black with white pickguard); (3) Mexican Fender "Classic 60s" Stratocaster (Inca Silver with lime-green pickguard); (4) Squier Stratocaster (black with a mirror pickguard and a humbucking pickup in the bridge position); (5) Squier '51 (yellow with a black pickguard); (6) Epiphone Les Paul Standard (cherry red with cream-colored pickguard and gold-colored hardware); and (7) Ibanez 12-string acoustic (black with no pickguard).  With the exception of the Mexi-Strat, all of my guitars were made somewhere in the Far East (Japan, Korea, China, or Indonesia); I don't really even aspire to own an American-made guitar.  Kids today have a wide variety of inexpensive options when it comes to buying good guitars and amplifiers -- when I was young, most far-eastern imports were cheaply made, played poorly (no matter how you tried to set them up), and sounded terrible.  I recently bought a pair of noise-cancelling headphones and hooked them up to my "Epi" Les Paul and old "red face" Line 6 Spider 210 amplifier, with the latter on the "insane" setting with the chorus on and a little digital delay.  The stereo sound coming through the headphones is something that people, even professional musicians, would practically have killed for in the early 1970s -- but which I can get with fairly cheap equipment now.

6. My ongoing physical deterioration.  Every time I have to take a break from the gym (the last one being my recovery from hernia surgery), I come back just a little less capable of vigorous exercise.  My recent "5.4 mph for 30 minutes = 2.7 miles" treadmill regimen, which was a comfortable workout before the layoff, is now quite strenuous for me, and I'm not sure it will ever get any easier.  I do need to lose weight -- and to that end I've recently taken the baby step of switching from regular soda to diet soda -- and of course I get older every day, but there seems to be more to it than that.  Yesterday, July 18, I hiked up the La Luz Trail (from the bottom to the upper tram terminal) with Darren and Cait.  I did pretty well, and we did the whole distance in exactly four hours, later riding the tram down after having lunch at the restaurant; however, I felt horrible after we were done.  Usually I feel exhilarated after a hard hike in the Sandias, but this one only reminded me how rapidly I'm deteriorating.

7. Mischa the dog.  Our miniature pinscher, Mischa, who's diabetic, blind from cataracts, and requires twice-daily insulin injections, has understandably aged way beyond her ~9 years.  I've begun to regard her as almost a kindred spirit, inasmuch as chronic illness has taken a huge toll on both of us.  I don't fawn over her, but I've taken to petting her for a few minutes after giving her her night-time insulin, and it's clear she relishes the attention.  I don't know how much longer Dorine and I will feel that Mischa's life is worth preserving -- if she's clearly suffering, even we will ultimately decide to euthanize her -- but I think she and I understand each other.

8. The Eubank Chapel.  The Eubank Boulevard LDS meetinghouse in Albuquerque, which was first dedicated in 1966, holds a lot of memories for me.  I haven't attended church in that building (except for stake conferences and baptismal services) since the Indian School Road building, which we still attend, was dedicated in my senior year of high school in January 1977; however, I spent a lot of my childhood and adolescence at the Eubank building, and thus it's the one I remember most vividly.  It's where I was baptized, attended Primary, played numerous "junior" basketball games, explored the underground system of "tunnels" with my deacons' quorum (once even crawling through an air-conditioning duct across the ceiling of the gym), became infatuated with Dorine when I was 13, first made out with a girl (not Dorine) when I was 14, rehearsed with the "band" some of us tried to put together in the 1974-75 time-frame, sang in the ward choir (primarily to be around the girls), spent a scary night with a couple of friends (complete with what we thought were evil spirits), often went to play pickup basketball with friends (sometimes even entering with keys that we'd come by -- I shan't say how -- which my dad invariably confiscated on the sly while I was asleep), attended stake dances (many with live local bands, some of which were pretty good), and pulled more than a few pranks (e.g., locking shut all the upright pianos in the building with a key from an armoire that we had at home -- funny how the powers-that-be knew to come to me when someone urgently needed to use a piano for a wedding rehearsal!).  I confess to being a bit of a rogue in those days, but I was actually one of the least-wild boys in our ward.  (For the record, I also had a fair number of genuinely spiritual experiences at the Eubank chapel as I grew up.)

[Update 6/19/16: Here is a photo of the Eubank Chapel when it was new in 1966 and there was virtually nothing around it.]

2014 World Cup

Wondo's Whiff

I watched quite a bit of the recent FIFA World Cup soccer tournament in Brazil.  There were some pleasant surprises -- (1) the U.S.'s advancing out of its "Group of Death" with Germany (the eventual winners), Portugal, and Ghana; (2) Costa Rica's winning its group (beating Uruguay and Italy and tying with England) and then advancing to the quarterfinal playoff round by beating Greece; (3) Mexico's doing well in its group (beating Cameroon and Croatia and tying with Brazil with some great goalkeeping from Memo Ochoa); (4) Tim Howard's stellar goalkeeping for the U.S. against Belgium, which singlehandedly kept the U.S. in the match (which, in turn, the U.S. would have won if Chris Wondolowski had netted a practically wide-open, point-blank shot near the end of regulation time -- see photo); and (5) the 7-1 shellacking that Germany administered to Brazil in the semifinal round (not exactly "pleasant," but notable for the jaw-dropping porosity of Brazil's defense).  As usual, however, the tournament had its share of disappointments, too, particularly: (1) the highly questionable penalty kick given to Holland in the final minutes of its playoff match with Mexico; (2) the fact that the U.S. based so much of its offensive strategy on having a muscular "target" striker, Jozy Altidore, then didn't have a similarly physical player in reserve when Altidore went down early in the first game with a hamstring tear; (3) that so many "knockout" games ended in unsatisfying (if dramatic) penalty-kick shootouts; and (4) poor refereeing that resulted not only in bad calls but also in violent play and injuries (cf. Neymar's fractured vertebra in the Brazil-Colombia quarterfinal).  Nonetheless, the tournament came off without any major issues (i.e., protests, acts of terrorism, half-finished stadiums, bad public transport, inadequate lodging, etc.), and it's fair to say the best team, Germany, won the Cup.

This World Cup raises the perennial question where the U.S. men's team goes from here.  Once more, the U.S. qualified comfortably out of the CONCACAF region, and on this go-round three of the four CONCACAF teams in the tournament advanced out of group qualifying into the final 16 teams.  However, it's getting to be anticlimactic for the U.S. to get that far and not be able to win a game (or two).  I can't help questioning Jurgen Klinsmann's leaving Landon Donovan and Eddie Johnson -- experienced players and proven goal scorers -- off his 23-man roster.  (Donovan is still, even at age 32, the greatest soccer player the U.S. has ever produced, and Johnson would have been the physical, athletic presence the U.S. needed in the middle after Altidore's injury.)  Some of the younger players had proud moments in the tournament, especially John Brooks, Julian Green, and DeAndre Yedlin, but the Belgium game was very winnable and the firepower just wasn't there.  I guess we'll see where Klinsmann takes the team in the next four years; I can't wait for the next round of qualifying to start!

Trip to NYC and New England, June 12-21, 2014

Statue of Liberty from the ferry

View down from the pedestal

Dorine at the Statue of Liberty

Me at the Statue of Liberty

Ellis Island

Outside our hotel, Times Square

Checking out Liberty's backside

Southern tip of Manhattan

Trinity Church, Broadway & Wall St.

Times Square at night

Subway platform

Outside Manhattan Temple

Outside Manhattan Temple

Central Park

Walking around the Met

"Now I understand..."

My favorite section - impressionists

Bethesda Fountain

Resting at the Met

F.A.O. Schwartz

Portals

Plaza Hotel

Foyer at the Plaza Hotel

Mystic, CT

F.A.O. Schwartz

Taking a walk in New Canaan, CT

Irwin Park, New Canaan, CT

Alyssa, Jared, and Ruby

Irwin Park, New Canaan, CT

Dorine with Ruby

"Togetherness"

The Breakers, Newport, RI

Dorine and Judy at the Breakers

Mike at the Breakers

Rosecliff, Newport, RI

In the yard at Rosecliff

Panoramic shot of Rosecliff

At Flo's Crab Shack, Newport, RI

"Plimouth Plantation," MA

Outside Old North Church, Boston

Street shot in Boston

Old North Church, Boston

New Hampshire sunset

Alyssa and Jared's retreat in NH

Crescent Lake

Sam at the Chowder House

Alyssa and her kids, Kennebunkport, ME

Mike and Judy, Kennebunkport, ME

Foraging through tide pools

"Sisters"

Dorine holding Ruby, Kennebunkport, ME

Jared loves his lobster

Me holding Ruby in Kennebunkport

Eli with a "practically prestige" plate

Nebble Lighthouse in Maine

Period actor playing William Brewster

Inside of Old North Church, Boston

Boston Common

Central Park

Central Park

Josh

Faneuil Hall, Boston

Aboard the Mayflower II

Plymouth Harbor

Mayflower II

Angel Moroni in Manhattan

Old State House, site of Boston Massacre

Wampanoag Bark House

Mike talking to "Pilgrim" woman

"Plimoth Plantation"

Entrance to "Plimoth Plantation"

Plymouth Rock

Paul Revere House, Boston

Salty Dog, Boston

Dorine with the Nebble Lighthouse

Panoramic shot of Maine seacoast

Dorine and I traveled with Mike and Judy to the Northeast, which entailed my visiting six states I'd never been to before.  It was a pretty full and thus tiring vacation, but it was all fun.  We flew out of Albuquerque late on Thursday the 12th on Jet Blue's red-eye to JFK in New York City.  As I feared, I got little or no sleep on the flight, so the next day was a bit of an ordeal for me.  Upon arrival at JFK, we took a train, and then the subway (at rush hour with all our bags, of course) from Queens into Manhattan, where we'd booked a single room for two nights at a Courtyard Marriott hotel near Times Square.  Luckily, the hotel let us check in early (albeit in a "handicapped" room), so we were able to drop off our bags and go get breakfast at Junior's, a famous Broadway eatery, before getting back on the subway to the southern end of Manhattan.  There we caught the ferry to the Statue of Liberty (and to Ellis Island, although we chose not to get off there).  Of course, the Statue of Liberty is an American icon, and it was fun for someone who'd never been to NYC to see it up close and go up inside the base to the "pedestal" level (it's difficult to get tickets to go up to Liberty's crown, so that's as far up as we went).

After returning to Manhattan via the ferry, we walked past Battery Park and west toward Wall Street and the site of the new WTC building that's going up.  We ended up in the TriBeCa neighborhood (famous for its recent "gentrification") and had lunch at the Amish Market before taking the subway back to our hotel.  All of us were zonked at that point, so we lay around the room for several hours.  We finally got up and rode the subway back downtown and walked a ways to Chelsea Market, an old Nabisco plant that has been reinvented as a sort of food court and indoor mall.  We looked around and had dinner there, then rode back to Times Square to see the lights and visit the M&M store.  (On the way back to the hotel, Mike and I stopped off at the Duane Reade store on the corner, one of several trips there for sundries.)

We slept in the next morning until after 10 am (which didn't feel that late since we were still on New Mexico time).  Mike needed something to eat, so he ordered a cheeseburger from a food vendor parked a few feet down the street from our hotel; the man misunderstood Mike and fried him up two cheeseburgers, so I ate the second one -- a darn good burger!  We took the subway uptown, first seeing the Manhattan LDS Temple, going up the elevator to look around the meetinghouse located on one level of the building,  We then walked across Central Park; seeing such sights on the way as Bethesda Fountain and the José de Creeft "Alice in Wonderland" sculpture (which I knew mainly from Linda McCartney's having taken photos there of the Jimi Hendrix Experience circa 1968).  We ended up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the one thing I had asked to add to our NYC itinerary.  We went to the "European Painters" section, first looking at a lot of old portraiture (e,g,, Rembrandt, Reubens, Velásquez) before moving on to the impressionist collection (e.g., van Gogh, Matisse).  When one considers how much just one or two of these paintings would fetch on the open market, it's absolutely mind-boggling to think what the entire collection is worth -- literally tens of billions of dollars, if a price tag could be put on it at all.  New York is obviously a great city, but it would be an amazing place just for the Met!

Later, we went and had a late lunch (of overpriced sandwiches) at a deli called "E.A.T.", and then we walked up to F.A.O. Schwartz, the famous (and utterly unique) toy store.  Then we walked around the corner to the Plaza Hotel (which reminded me of my favorite Hitchcock film, 1959's North by Northwest), where we took a few photos in the sumptuous foyer/lobby.  Finally, we rode the subway back to our hotel, where we got ready to go see The Lion King at the Minskoff Theater.  Mike thought a visit to NYC wouldn't be complete without our seeing a Broadway show, and in retrospect I agree wholeheartedly -- the show was fantastic -- although I was pretty shocked when I found out later what he'd paid for our tickets.  (In fairness, I knew on some level that seats in the middle of the center ground-level section, roughly level with the stage, had to have been super-expensive.)  After the show, we went back to Junior's for a late dinner -- if you can call 1 am "late" -- having to wait an hour for a table.  (Their cheesecake, I must say, was the best I've ever had.)

The next morning, Sunday, we woke up early, packed up, and walked to Grand Central Station, where we caught a train to New Canaan, Connecticut, the town in which Mike and Judy's daughter Alyssa lives -- or at least lived, since they're in the process of moving to Texas -- with her husband Jared and five kids.  (We had to transfer trains in Stamford and only barely made our connection to New Canaan.)  We attended church with Alyssa and Jared, and, in sacrament meeting, Mike and I stood in the circle as Jared gave a name and blessing to Ruby, their baby.  (I hope I wasn't being too irreverent when I thought of an alternative lyric for an old Rolling Stones song: Hello, Ruby Tuesday / Daddy hung a name on you.)  Later, Jared grilled steaks for a Father's Day dinner, and that evening we went and walked around Irwin Park there in New Canaan.  As a surprise gift, and to keep us from having to sleep on air mattresses that night at their house, Alyssa and Jared booked rooms for us at the Hotel Zero Degrees down the road in Norwalk.  (I loved the hotel and its unique personality and post-modern decor!)  As we were to meet up again with Alyssa and Jared at their "retreat" home in New Hampshire, we borrowed Alyssa's minivan, and Mike drove for the remainder of the trip.

On Monday, we went to Rhode Island, stopping at Mystic, CT on the way and having lunch at an ice cream parlor there.  We had booked a suite at a Residence Inn in Middletown, adjacent to Newport; however, since they wouldn't let us check in early, we drove immediately to Newport for our activity for the day -- touring a couple of old summer mansions of mega-rich people.  We saw both the Vanderbilts' palatial "The Breakers," as well as Theresa Fair Oelrichs' (the heiress to the Comstock Lode fortune) "Rosecliff," which was featured in the 1974 film of The Great Gatsby starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.  Later, we checked into the hotel and drove back to Newport to eat at Flo's Crab Shack, which had great fish and chips.  I think we pretty much crashed that night.

On Tuesday, we had breakfast at the hotel (they had waffle irons!), then drove up to Plymouth, Massachusetts. There we toured the "Plimouth Plantation," which has mock-ups of both the Pilgrims' 1627 township and the Wampanoag Indian tribe's summer village (featuring houses made of bark or reeds).  It was very educational to talk to the actors playing period Pilgrim roles; for example, we learned the difference between "Puritans" and "Separatists."  ("Puritans" remained aligned with the Church of England but desired to practice the "pure" faith, whereas "Separatists" believed adamantly in the separation of church and state; both obviously were driven to the New World for religious reasons.)  The Wampanoags dressed in period costume but did not act, instead providing mini-lectures on various aspects of their culture and history.  The tour package also included a tour of the Mayflower II, which is at anchor in Plymouth Harbor.  (Not a very large ship!)  Again, period actors provided a lot of history: I hadn't realized just how few of the Pilgrims survived the first winter and were alive to commence a settlement in the spring  We also saw Plymouth Rock, which isn't impressive and barely seems to have any symbolic importance anymore.  We had dinner there in Plymouth at KKatie's Burger Bar before driving back to Rhode Island for our second night at the Residence Inn.  (We did take a short walk to a Walgreen's to buy a "Lightning" cord for Dorine's iPod, so that we could upload photos to Facebook.)

On Wednesday, after breakfast and checkout, we drove up to Boston and toured portions of the "Freedom Trail" there.  We saw the Boston Common, the Granary Burying Ground, King's Chapel (the burying ground and the church), Old South Church, Faneuil Hall, the Old State House (the site of the Boston Massacre in 1770), Paul Revere's house, and Old North Church (of "one if by land, two if by sea" fame).  In between some of the sites, we had lunch at the Salty Dog, another seafood restaurant.  In the afternoon, we drove on to New Hampshire, first stopping in Exeter, where Dorine and Judy have Folsom family roots, and ending up in Wolfeboro, where Jared and Alyssa have a very nice home fronting Crescent Lake.  We spent the next three nights there, with Alyssa coming up that night with four of her kids and Jared coming up the following night with their daughter Mia.

Thursday was our only "down" day of the trip, something I appreciated greatly.  We did drive into Wolfeboro for a little shopping and to get ice cream; Mike, Dorine, and I walked the two miles back to the house along a path that once was a rail line.  I should have taken a kayak out on the lake that afternoon, but I didn't feel much enthusiasm for water sports

On Friday, we all drove to Maine, as Judy and (especially) Dorine wanted to see the seacoast there.  We had lunch at The Chowder House in Kennebunkport; the kids had a lot of fun poking around tide pools near the restaurant.  Then we drove on to the Nebble Lighthouse, located on Cape Neddick near the town of York; it's easy to see why Maine is famous for its lighthouses!  (I thought of the 1956 film of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel, which of course is set on the coast in Maine; I still get irked to think how badly Gordon McRae treated Shirley Jones and how little his spirit had to do, years after his death, to get off the hook for being such a jerk and thus enter Heaven.)  Later that afternoon we drove back to Wolfeboro for the final night of the trip.

We had to leave pretty early on Saturday in order to ensure that we arrived at JFK in time for our flight back to Albuquerque; it's a pretty long drive from New Hampshire to NYC, and we didn't know what the traffic would be like.  I know lots of people, accustomed to greenery when they drive cross-country, disparage the desert landscapes of the Southwest; however, dense foliage butting up to the right-of-way isn't particularly interesting to a New Mexico native.  Give me the Southwest anytime!  We left Alyssa's minivan at JFK inasmuch as Mike and Judy's son Aaron and his wife Tia were flying out to NYC that night from ABQ and would use the minivan to drive to New Hampshire; later they were to drive a car to Texas for Alyssa and Jared. They drove Mike's Lexus to the ABQ airport and parked it there, and we met up with them upon our arrival (shortly before their departure) and exchanged car keys.  Thus we arrived home fairly late on Saturday night the 21st.

It was a great trip and we got to do a ton of things!  Dorine and I owe great thanks to Mike and Judy, who shepherded us around, and to Alyssa and Jared, whose putting us up for four nights (one in Connecticut and three in New Hampshire) greatly defrayed our trip expenses.  Now that we've taken our three big vacations (Red River in April, Mexico in May, and NYC/New England in June), I've about tapped out my accrued annual leave.  Our 30th wedding anniversary is coming up in December, however, and we'll surely be planning something then.