Ten Years Ago Today

It was sunny outside on Tuesday.  Mom told us all to finish our oatmeal, and then come to the living room so she could tell us something.  We kept prodding her for information because she seemed so serious, we thought we were in trouble.

We finished our oatmeal and went into the living room, where she quietly told us that two tall buildings in New York had been hit by airplanes, and collapsed.  With people inside. 

I recall trying to imagine being inside the building, feeling it crumble.  I couldn't; I tried to imagine being on the ground, knowing my family was in there.  I couldn't.  We recorded it in our Book of Centuries.

Where were you that day?

I remember laying in bed that night listening to my radio, picturing in my mind the firefighters and iron workers climbing through the dusty, mangled metal.  I remember when they pulled some men out, and I remember waiting for them to find more.  Hoping against hope.

What is your vivid memory from that day? 

Quick Breakfast: Yogurt Parfait

Dear briskly bustling people who have lots to do,

Seafoam and I threw these yogurt parfaits together when we were still in Illinois, heading off to an early morning baking session with the mysterious Mrs S.  They are simple and scrumptious!

I especially love this treat after a workout session, or when I have to go somewhere early in the car - it's pretty portable!

Yogurt or protein smoothies are my favorite after-swim snack!

A clean locker is a happy locker.

Navy Wife Breakfast: Yogurt Parfait

Greek style plain yogurt
Honey
Granola
Chopped fruit or berries (I used Bartlett pears)

Fill a cup or bowl 1/3 with the Greek yogurt.  Drizzle with honey (more if you like it sweeter, less if you like it tangier).  Cover thickly with granola; top with fruit to fill the cup.

Enjoy!

Bonus Yogurt Tip!


A delicious way to eat yogurt in the summer is to throw the single-serve containers in the freezer.  Frozen yogurt, anyone?

Here's to high-culture living,

Mrs H
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No Room at the Inn

Dear gentle reader and staunch supporter,

There we sat, the faithful Seafoam and I.  We had pulled off I-90 at Wyola, a dinky exit just inside of Montana with nothing but a cattle-guard and an arrow pointing back up towards the interstate.  

We whipped out our trusty map and our handy AAA tour guide.  We started calling hotels in Hardin, a town about an hour northwest of us, and the first one we reached told us they were booked up. 

Hmm, I thought.  If they were full, chances were something big was going on and everyone else was booked up, too.  So I asked, "Is everyone else booked up, too?" 

I like to make notes on my maps - what time it was when I crossed borders or
passed through large cities, et cetera.  In a GPS-guided world, I love real maps!

The receptionist was apologetic.  "Everyone is in town for the fair in Billings; it starts tomorrow." Billings was another 45 minutes west of Hardin, almost two hours from us.  "I'm guessing," said the receptionist, "that the next town that might have an open room is Columbus."  Columbus was yet another 37 miles past Billings.

We called Columbus, and the hotels there informed us that there was no room at the inn.  "Try Big Timber!" suggested the cheery voice on the other end of the line.

I chuckled to myself.  I didn't mind having to push farther into the night; it was just getting a little ridiculous!  Big Timber was over 80 miles past Billings - a cumulative 188 miles from where we were sitting!

I called a motel in Big Timber, finding the number in my helpful guidebook.  The grandma who answered assured me that she had two rooms left.  "Everything's full up out here," she said, "what with the fair, and the Sturgis run, and the oil spill crew."  I didn't even know there had been an oil spill.  "Our regular office burned down, so we have a temporary office in the motel.  Just knock on room 13 real hard when you get here," she said, "which should be about 1:30 AM, if you're coming from Wyola."

By now, it was a quarter to midnight.  I slammed the tour guide closed, wadded up the map and crushed it in Seafoam's lap, and snapped off the overhead light.  "Seafoam," I said, "she just gave me Montana driving speeds, not legal driving speeds.  Two hundred miles in an hour and a half?"  The 150-horsepower Kia roared majestically up the hill back onto the Interstate.  "We'll make a run for it!" I said.  "You're not tired, are you?"

Montana speeds?  ... Yes, yes they do.

Seafoam was full of energy, as usual.  "Heck no!" she said.  "We have husbands waiting to see us!"

The speed limit was 80.  "I don't see any cops," I said wickedly, as the other car in Montana blasted by. I took that as a challenge.   "We have a lot of ground to cover - let's push it!"  I set the cruise control at a shocking 85.  "Ha!" I said with a devilish grin.

As we sailed through the black night under a spreading wave of stars, we rolled down our windows and leaned out, screaming the words to a pop song as loud as we could.

Today I swear I'm not doin' anything, nothin' at all!

We powered through Billings by 12:30, but Kami was starting to succumb to the siren song of the Sandman (I know, I'm mixing my myths, but that happens late at night).  She curled up against the window and fell asleep and I turned on a CD.  

I rolled down the windows. 

I slapped myself in the face. 

I sang loudly. 

I stabbed a Quality Inn pen into my leg.  

Road signs became a thing of the past as we ascended the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.  My blurred eyes scanned the roadside for anything indicating how many miles remained until Big Timber, but nothing appeared to give me any signs of hope.  

I couldn't remember my mileage at the last sign for Big Timber, but in my foggy mind I thought maybe it was another 50 miles.  I saw an exit for Graycliffs indicating lodgings were available, and we staggered off, trolling down the hill onto a tiny one-lane main street.  Four buildings lined either side, and a shrimpy RV park nestled to one side.  Criss-crossed over the street were strings of bobbing white lights, gently swaying in the night breeze.  Not another car or person was in sight.  There was no hotel that I could see.  

Reawakened by my interesting but fruitless side excursion, I logged back on to the interstate and seconds later, passed a sign telling me that Big Timber was 10 miles away.  I cheered internally.  

We limped in to the motel parking lot by 2:30 AM.  I checked in and woke Seafoam up.  She wobbled into the room and took one look at the colorful quilts on the bed. "This is very festive," she mumbled.  

She promptly fell asleep.  I, on the other hand, didn't.  

Mrs H

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Barney Fife Nips It in Wyoming

To all my law-abiding friends,

Wyoming is a great state.  I love Wyoming.  It's the first state where women could vote, and earned the nickname The Equality State (or, equally awesome, the Cowboy State!).  Even though it's landlocked, I wouldn't mind living there.  And though you Alaskans may be surprised to hear this, Wyoming is actually the least populous state.  Its largest city, Cheyenne, is also the capital - and home to about 60,000 people.  The entire state population is about 560,000.  By comparison, New York City, the densest city in the US, is home to about 18.9 million.  I prefer my elbow room!

Now, I told you trouble was a-brewin' for us in Wyoming, so read on.

We reached the good cowboy state by early evening.  We had a long haul before us, as we wanted to stop in Montana for the night.  We had just over 200 miles to cover before resting, and allowing for gas stops and the chip-seal roadwork that seemed to dot the countryside, we had around three and a half hours of driving ahead.  I reckoned we'd stop at about 11:00 PM.

As we started to cover the open range, the speed limit went up to 75.  This was nice, but apparently it wasn't fast enough for the other pioneers trying to cross the grassland; they all blew past me at an easy 90 MPH.  After an hour and a half of this, I decided I'd up the ante and roll at a daring 80.  I hadn't seen anything but taillights for the last sixty miles, and even the semis were passing me at my speed.  I set the cruise control and sat back, ready to polish off the remaining miles in peace.

Even though we were climbing the foothills by this time, everything went downhill real fast.

It started with my trusty companion.  Seafoam was desperate for a bathroom stop.  The next town was about 25 miles, and she reckoned she could just make it if we didn't slow down.  This reminded her of a story (most everything reminds her of a story).  She started telling me about an incident on base where she and her husband had been accosted by a belligerent cop for no reason -she was standing outside the public restrooms waiting for her spouse, and the cop insisted they must have been doing something illicit inside.  As she told me this, I happened to glance in my rear-view mirror.  Over the folded quilt and suitcases and the stuffed Jelly Belly shopping bag, I could see the twirling blue lights of a state trooper car.

"Um," I said eloquently.

As we were on a remote highway with virtually no traffic and nowhere to stop, it was about a mile before I found enough shoulder to pull over on.

Seafoam was crossing and uncrossing her legs and bouncing anxiously.  We were only twelve miles from our bathroom stop.

Barney approached our car slowly.  He bent down on Seafoam's side and peered in the window through shiny aviators.  "Do you know the speed limit here?"

"Oh, 75, 80," I said, handing him the requisite paperwork.

He frowned.  "It's 75, and you were going 82."  He marched back to his vehicle.

Seafoam was rocking the little Kia with her agitated movements.  "Oh boy!" she squeaked.  "I hope we don't get a ticket!  I hope he hurries up!"

He took his time.  Eventually he came back with a blue slip of paper.  "Here's a warning," he said.  "We don't like it when people speed out here."

Barney sets 'em straight (click to laugh!)

Two NASCAR racers rocketed by at 90MPH, my car swaying in the aftershock.  "Okay," I said.  "Thanks so much."  I hung the blue slip on my air conditioner to remind myself not to speed.  We got back on the highway, I set the cruise control at a religious 75 and, two hills later, Seafoam declared she could not wait any longer and we pulled over.

"Watch out for rattlesnakes," I suggested.

"You're joking, right," she laughed.

I obviously wasn't, and she gasped in horror.  I guess they don't have rattlers in Maui.


We continued on our legal-limit way and made it to the Montana border by 11:30PM.  We pulled off the highway at Wyola (just a rancher's exit - there is no actual town there!) at a quarter of midnight and, using our trusty AAA guide, called a hotel in Hardin, the next large town and about an hour northwest of us.

And then we discovered we wouldn't be stopping any time soon.


Mrs H

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Stones and Trails and Prairie-Dog Tails

To the readers that gather in close,

As I mentioned in my last post, something Very Terrible happened when we got to Wyoming, and it involved just a little bit of law-breaking.

But we'll get to that.

Seafoam lines up magnets of all the states she'll have visited by the time we
finish our US tour

We stopped at Badlands National Park, one of my favorite places in the world.  They were called mako sica by the Lakota, les mauvaises terres a traverser by the French, and tierra baldia by the Spanish.  All of these names mean, more or less, "bad land" or "waste land".

When you walk on to the crunchy white sand of the badlands, the silence weighs in on every side.  No animals chirping, no wind blowing, as the rocky steppes rising on every side block out noise with their enormity.  Moments before, you were surrounded by billowing grass and more locusts than you could shake a honeyed stick at, but now all you can see is white walls, white rocks, white canyons, white gullies.  The badlands are full of fascinating geological history and paleontology, including fossilized camels and rhinoceros-looking creatures.  But ancient days were hardly yesterday for these stones; time seems to hang suspended as the rocks sit silently, patiently, waiting.

The Badlands ... there is no place like them!

 Waiting for you to die on them, parched to death and burned by the scorching sun.  So much for poetry...

Badlands - Then and Now... Can you spot the difference in the following two pictures!?

I tried to recreate an old family photo, but something was lacking ... 

like my ten hundred siblings!  This is from a family trip several years ago.

I feel like I am on the Moon when I am here

I stumbled across a quote from Frank Lloyd Wright, and it summed up my first impressions of this beautiful, dreadful land perfectly: 

"I was totally unprepared for that revelation called the Dakota Bad Lands.  What I saw gave me an indescribable sense of mysterious elsewhere."

I know what you're thinking - Og-la-la!

We moved on through the Badlands, joining thousands of the Sturgis riders on our South Dakota tour as we stopped at Wall Drug, trekked up to Crazy Horse (which looks exactly the same as it did six years ago, which is exactly how it looked thirty years ago), Mt. Rushmore (I suppose in all fairness, this rock looked the same, too), an old homesteader museum, and a prairie dog town.

Over the years, the Black Hills have hosted Indians, trappers, gold rushers, and tourists.  They are so densely forested, they remind me of home!

There were hundreds of bikers at Wall Drug!

There were hundreds more as we headed into the Black Hills to visit Mt Rushmore

The bars were bulging with them!

Epic Mt Rushmore pic fail ... well, at least we got two faces on the picture

The update on Crazy Horse is ... still the same!

The Crazy Horse monument has been under construction since 1948.  It is on privately held sacred Indian land, about 17 miles from Mt Rushmore; the statue and the heritage museums below were commissioned by the Lakota tribe.  While the monument seems to be progressing slower than a woman with back labor, the museum and shopping 'plex have expanded enormously over the years.  If completed, this statue would be over 641 feet wide and 563 feet high, making it the largest non-religious statue in the world.  (Ironically, the previous world-record holder is the Russian Motherland statue, or Родина-мать зовёт! which I visited the same year I saw Crazy Horse for the first time.  If you've seen Enemy at the Gates, then you are already familiar with the hill in Volgograd on which this behemoth of a woman stands.)  If you stay for the evening, you can enjoy a lovely laser light show where they use lighting to illustrate history in the Black Hills.  Since the monument will probably never be completed, you might as well enjoy the laser show (we didn't stay for it this time around).  And I have to admit, it is cool to listen to the music while sitting in the pitch black mountains with the sound echoing off the cliffs around.

Seafoam was fully enamored of the furry prairie dogs...

What's funnier than somebody from Hawai'i seeing prairie dogs for the first
time?  I don't know, it would be pretty hard to top this. 

By the time we reached the exit for Devil's Tower, another wonderful national monument, we didn't feel like stopping any more and trucked right on by, heading up and out to Wyoming.  We hoped to shoot straight as an arrow and make it home by Saturday night, giving ourselves two more days to drive through Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Washington.  

Honest Abe takes a break from splitting fence-rails

But we were anxious to see Montana by nightfall, and that is where our trouble with the law began ...

All I can say is, so much for the Equality State!

Mrs H
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In Which the Road Trips Never Cease!

Dear far-flung friends,

The last time we talked, I was in Illinois.  Several states have gone by ...

Sometimes, when you live in a hotel, you don't have a bowl...
 It's okay to make salad in a skillet!

Mr H was given orders to California, so he got on a plane and left the lovely Land of Lincoln.  He went with another seaman, whose wife, the intrepid islander Mrs T, had been staying in the hotel on base with me.

Mrs T is what we call ... Special. Unique. 

The intrepid Mrs T, whom I shall call Seafoam for now, and I loaded all of our belongings into my little Kia with the help of the mysterious Mrs S.  I wouldn't let Mrs S carry anything heavy because - yes - she is expecting!  This bit of news sent us wives a-fluttering and now we are all anxiously awaiting news of the little package.

Freddie the Cat, on the other paw, was singularly unimpressed by his lady's news.

Our husbands flew out by eleven in the morning on a bright, sunny day, and Seafoam and I hopped into the car moments later and got outta Dodge.  We left behind the original Mrs P, who remained in the hotel for a few more days before returning to Iowa, and the mysterious Mrs S, who lives off-base and will still be in Illinois for another year while her husband goes to school there.

The car was very cozy

Seafoam grew up on an island ... she's never been on a road trip! I knew
she had to have the real experience! 

We had an urgent first stop as we left Illinois and entered Wisconsin, pulling into the Jelly Belly warehouse less than an hour after leaving Chicagoland.  Trust me, it was urgent, and it was necessary!  How could we go on without our elixir vitae!?

Nothing gets my happy heart racing like the open road ahead ... and that book
on the dash, called "The Next Exit", I would recommend to anybody else who
drives old-school without a GPS!  My mom gave it to Mr H and I.  It details what
is off of every exit in America (Arbys? Rest area with bathrooms?) and also how long
the interstates are that criss-cross each state ... and so much more!

We had a good day driving, getting texts and phone calls from our husbands as they landed from their various flights in Dallas and California (they were on different planes, with different layovers).  The bubbly Seafoam is an unending wealth of witticisms and mischief, so she kept me thoroughly entertained as we stopped for gas, burgers, gas again, who knows how many times we stopped for gas, and then finally rolled into Mitchell, South Dakota for the night.  Although we weren't necessarily tired yet, I didn't want to blow through Bismark in the night for two reasons:  for one, I wanted her to see the Corn Palace in the morning light.  For two, there isn't much of anything after Mitchell for another two hundred miles!  I've made this trip with family many times before, and my memories of the Dakotas primarily consist of rolling grassland, Presidential faces in stone, and more rolling grassland.  These memories have been thoroughly confirmed.

Seafoam sends her husband a picture

We found a small sod Inn for the night. 

 My dad insisted that we stop for the night at a hotel, not some random rest area, and paid for the hotel himself.  Thanks, Dad!

The Foam was more or less awake as we got ready to leave in the morning

We left in the morning after a solid night's rest, ready to hit some tourist sites.  I had a list of places I wanted to nail down in South Dakota, starting with the Corn Palace.  (I know, you're probably surprised there are any sites in SD at all, but I promise you there are some good ones - including one of my very favorite National Parks!) 

We drove a few blocks across town to the Corn Palace and parked across the street, rolling down the window to take a few pictures in the fresh, crisp sunlight.  As we snapped shots and sipped coffee from the continental breakfast at the hotel, the sound of high-pitched howling broke into our peaceful moment.

"Wahh!! Awwwaayyyee!!"

No, it was not the Arikara war cry we heard screeching through the air.  It was a boy of about seven years old, his fair hair long and curling to his shoulders, wearing a loose blue t-shirt and casual long shorts.  His dad was trying to soothe him but the boy would not be soothed, shaking with sobs and roaring to the sky.

"She was just a mean old lady!" he gasped, his skinny chest heaving with puerile indignation.  He was standing beside our car as his mom and sister stood in the street (don't worry, there aren't many cars in South Dakota) waiting for the drama to unfold.  "She - she walked past us outside the store, and she said," he had to inhale through his tears before he could articulate the bitter words of injustice, "she said hi girls," his voice rose to a scream, "and I'm not a girl!"

Seafoam and I stuffed our fists in our faces to muffle our laughter as the tragic quartet passed in front of us, the boy utterly grieved by his humiliating experience, still wailing like a soprano banshee.

We had the unique opportunity to ride through South Dakota at the same
time as the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally ... it was entertaining but also
a little bit of a headache!  There were about eighteen million cyclists on the
road and at every scenic stop, which is nerve-wracking when you can't see
out of your side and rear windows!  

We had a long way to drive, and several more states to eat up before we made it to the Pacific Northwest where we would R and R for a few days, repack the car, wash laundry, visit with family, and head down to California. No time to mourn gender misidentity, we fired up the engine and started off down I-90, heading west ...

But what happened in Wyoming that almost kept us from reaching our destination in time? I can hardly bring myself to tell you ...

California or bust!

Mrs H
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