I "had" to take a vacation that year, to avoid losing my accrued leave before the end of the company's fiscal year.

So I embarked on a semi-planned grand road trip on the 18th of September, with my only guideline being to avoid, to the greatest extent possible, the dreaded "Eisenhower roads". For those of you who had forgotten, or are too young to have read about it in My Weekly Reader, these are the Interstate Highway System, which allow the traveller to traverse our great country at nose-bleed-inducing speed without actually seeing anything other than truck stops and rest areas.

I had two general goals in mind:

1. To visit friends in Seattle and Spokane, Washington
2. To see as many National Parks and Monuments as possible along the way

I set out with Chewy and Spot, my two high-energy canine companions, but after travelling up U.S. 395 and 6 to western Nevada, it became obvious that Chewy was NOT going to enjoy the trip, and therefore, neither would Spot and I. So, after spending the night at the Sand 'n' Sage Motel in Hawthorne, I turned around and headed back to San Diego, where the dogs were placed in the care of Gary and Carol of Animals R Us, my extremely capable petsitters.

Note that I called this a trip down memory lane, since that's what it turned out to be, as I visited and passed through all sorts of places I had been in the past, from 1965 on. For instance, in addition to visiting Seattle, Spokane and Bozeman, where I had spent significant chunks of time, I stopped at the spot where I lost my cat Sylvester in 1972. That was in Idaho, on the west side of Lolo Pass, along the Clearwater River, and it took me about 36 hours to coax him back into the car to continue our journey from Courtenay, British Columbia to Grand Forks, North Dakota.

I never got the total travelogue completed, but here's a collection of 136 photos taken by my old Olympus 2000Z digital camera.