IT’S USUALLY me (or once upon a time it used to be me) setting out alone on one of the motorcycles. This time blondie rides shotgun. She’s terrified of motorcycles so we’ve hijacked the kids’ travel van. Our destination is north by northeast. That’s the extent of the non-existent planning we’ve done.
My guess is she’ll soon be missing granddaughters D1D1 and D1D2, missing the neighborhood, missing those favorite seats in the house where she burns through books, this room here, that one there, by the woodstove when it’s raining, out on the front porch where she can see the wildflower gardens getting a start, or up in the poplar and maple leaves on the treehouse porch out back.
I guess we’ll find out. Likely to get on the road Monday, I think.
Last weekend I didn’t know Jonny was planning to be in Vermont until he was there. He installed lights in the pine ceiling and connected the rough-in wiring to the solar battery bank. Now you can walk up the stairs, hit a switch and have lights.
That’s huge! No more headlamps. A great leap forward in livability.
His buddy Dan knows what’s what with electricity. Dan was planning to set up the circuits in the panel one of these weekends. Sunday he finds out Jonny’s up there working on overhead lights, he flies to Vermont and calls for a lift from a rural airfield 20 miles away.
Jonny went up for a flight. He and Dan spotted the property by the red roof on the lean-to, my usual haunt.
So now the panel’s in service. By swapping out a cable, you can power all the circuits in the building either by the solar collectors or the gasoline generator.
Iron piggy when I was up there a few weekends ago to finish taping the walls and roll two coats of paint. It got rainy and cold that night.
Oh, about Dan flying up… file this under no good deed goes unpunished: the starter on Dan’s plane gave up the ghost Sunday. He left the 1965 Mooney m20c parked on the airfield and hitched a ride home with Jonny in the travel van.
Things are fairly well battened down here. In recent days I knocked out a bunch of 2024-25 firewood with the splitting ax, the sledge & steel wedges.
A storm-felled maple from our neighbor’s property…
Working on more out back. This is a maple I took down a few years ago. Not a big tree.
Here’s a big tree… My buddy Will Stenger dropping a beetle-killed ash in Pennsylvania.
I picked up the van at the family construction company today, Jonny and Adam’s place. I see where they took out an ad on a glass for a local bar & grill. I promptly found a nice stout in the fridge, figured I had better run a quality control test on the glass before an amateur got hurt doing it.
Technically early, 11 a.m., but that’s two hours later than happy hour at my brother-in-law Gary’s auto body shop in Maine. Whenever I show up there after breakfast I leave the motorcycle parked until after lunch.
While I was up at Jonny and Adam’s place today my friend Robyn texted me a Big Sky pic from Montana, captioned “Another day at the office.”
Robyn on her dirt bike. Handy transportation—not to mention fun!—on a 12,000-acre ranch.
What else…? Just regular life…
I went through the irrigation system last week. Took the garden sprinklers out of the ground and ran 700 feet of soaker hose instead. Installed six new hose bibs, each in a separate valve can. This approach should conserve quite a bit of water, I think. I’m going for windproof water delivery to the roots instead of spraying it in the air.
Once the wildflowers take off, you won’t even see the soaker hoses snaking along the ground.
On the scribbling front, I did a write-through last week on both the daily and Sunday Phantom scripts that Mike and Jeff are working on. They’re both set for material through summer’s end.
They’re filing terrific art every week. What a pleasure it is to work with pros who get this one-of-a-kind character published seven days a week since 1936. If the strip happens to go away tomorrow, we three will no doubt remain friends for life.
Mike’s working a little ways over the horizon on the Wrack and Ruin series. I’ve been writing it as a work-in-progress for over two years now, staying one chapter ahead of him. I’d be happy to write this narrative uninterrupted for another two years, easily could, the material’s there, but there’s a logical break coming up at the end of chapter seven. I think we’ll switch gears there and explore the fallout from the series in discrete episodes starting in 2025.
It’s been a heavy lift for Mike. My script, formatted in Final Draft, the industry-standard screenplay software, came in at 465 pages. That’s a helluva lotta drawing and inking on a single narrative thread.
Actually, while I’m writing this I’m listening to Mike on the live Pencil to Pencil podcast he hosts every Wednesday at 8, with fellow artists Jamar Nicholas and Steve Conley.
So about getting out of town for a while: We’ve made house- & cat-sitting arrangements so the place will be looked after. I think Pam will have a good time. We won’t be out for months, maybe 2 to 3 weeks. I’m sure they’ll flash by.
We have a couple of “maybe” destinations. I’d like to see the Cape Breton Highlands in Nova Scotia again. If we get up around there, I think we’ll likely hop the ferry over to Newfoundland, see the icebergs moving south into the Atlantic via the Labrador Sea.
In closing, here are two videos. Like all my videos, if you’ve seen one minute, you’ve seen ’em all.
There were seven deer browsing out back a few weeks ago. I never did get all seven in the frame, but I was happy to see the one-eared doe still around. I wasn’t certain she had wintered. She’s the grand dam of the herd. She’s been around at least six years that I know of.
This was a few weekends ago, the iron piggy bound for Vermont. Blue sky and sunshine! The last of it for a while. It was days & days of a cold spring rain after that.
Tony DePaul, May 10, 2023, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
Hey Tony, by now you’re on the road. Two wheels or four, really doesn’t matter, especially when you have your significant other with you! Drive safe, and thanks for the air-time of me felling the Ash. I am in the process of removing two large Pin-Oaks at my place; it kills me to take them down but they are more than 50% dead and I figured I’d remove them while I still have it left in me to put on a pair of spikes. Talk to you when you get back.
Hey Will. No worries, you’ll be climbing trees when you’re 90.
Saw your message come in while camped on a beach in Canso, Nova Scotia. Will get on the road for Cape Breton within the hour.
Do you think you have enough gear packed on your bike?Holy shit man……..Bob
Hah… you know me, I’m always packed for cross country. Plus I had a couple of gallons of paint aboard, paint pan, rollers, etc.
I remember that time we stopped to pick up a six-pack in Valemount, and then two or three six-packs and you said wait this is gonna turn into half a case before you know it. I said that’s fine, buy a full case, buy two cases——it’s a Harley! You shook your head and said, “Pfft… Deckers…” I laugh about that every time I think of it.
(For readers who don’t ride, “Decker” is the Canadian term for heavyweight touring bikes that will carry whatever endless load of stuff you might want to stow aboard. The heavier they are, the better they go.)
Happy trail to you and Pam. I love the pine ceiling and lighting. Looks like you’re in the home stretch for this project. Please keep the pix coming.
Will do. Thanks for reading, Ellie.
Aaaaah, to be back on the road again, even if on four wheels, is a great feeling of freedom. Am sure Blondie will enjoy traveling with you once again.
Cuba was a fascinating place, can highly recommend it to put a different perspective on how one views politics and people.
Bueno! Did the Cubans speak your Colombian/Panamanian Spanish or does their dialect vary much?
RV trips can be enlightening. That from one with miles on the tires back in the day. Have a fabulous trip. My only tip: Bring one of the big blue jugs of spring water.
All the best. Enjoy the ride.
Hi, Alix. Three miles from the building site in VT there’s an old stone church (now the town food pantry) that has a spring. We collect our drinking water there. There’s often a line, people filling up 50 plastic milk jugs. I’ll grab a photo next time.
I would love to see that operation. Fresh water springs are a favorite thing. Growing up on a spring-fed lake, with smaller springs for jug filling, it was such a pleasure to collect earth water, or feel a cold spot when swimming. Great photos. Thanks for posting them.
Just realized I rode by the church in that riding video. It’s on my right at 17:58
You can see the stone water well they piped the spring into.
Howdy friends! The road trip with Pam sounds delightful. I’m looking forward to hearing the details as y’all adventure. You’re in the loop on my ATL life. Still seriously thinking about a week on Tybee this summer. I am building a great list of stories best told in the evening. Safe travels! Muah 😘
Thanks, man. Give our regards to Tybee if you get there.
I’d heard about your trip together…sounds like fun. Enjoy the destinations as well as the “getting there”. The Vermont abode is looking comfy. I’ve enjoyed reading of the trips to get it up and running.
Thanks, Cynthia. The place is in the home stretch, really. Eduardo says he’ll be available to help this summer. All that’s left on the interior is flooring, woodwork and a couple of doors. On the exterior it’s just siding and trim coil.
Have a wonderful time together!
Robert
Thanks, Robert. She’s into history down to the smallest detail, so I think if we get to Newfoundland she’d enjoy seeing L’Anse aux Meadows, where the Norse landed way back when. I was there on the Arctic bike in 2015, posted a few pics here. https://www.tonydepaul.net/lanse-aux-meadows-to-channel-port-aux-basques/
We just returned from an adventure. Patty and a couple of her lady friends decided to go on a float trip on Utah’s San Juan River. I opted out, but she convinced me I should drive out with her and poke around Southwest Colorado’s narrow gauge railroad country while she was on the river. It was a different experience for me. I was used to sharing my experiences with Patty and it kind of hurt not to have that. On the other hand, I didn’t worry that I was leading us into something she might not be as wildly excited about as I was. Given the choice, I prefer to have my adventures with my wife. There is something about sharing. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.
Kudos to Patty on that one, Jim! That’s cool. I’ve spent some time on the San Juan River, the New Mexico end of it. Pam had an aunt and uncle in Navajo Dam.
The Navajo Dam is famous in narrow gauge circles. It flooded out a significant portion of the D&RGW mainline and the railroad had to build again on higher ground. Back in the early ’60s it was still a common carrier working railroad so that made the relocation the last new common carrier narrow gauge line constructed in the United States. I guess that’s one of those little factoids only a narrow gauge railroad enthusiast would know or care about.
Interesting! Pam’s late Uncle Sheldon was a great talker, loved people, and was one of these guys you shouldn’t talk to while he’s driving, ’cause then he turns to you and nobody’s minding the road anymore, not even that quite narrow road over the earthen dam. I had a vision of us and his pickup tumbling down the side of the dam for a dozen rolls or so and ending up in the water.
“Grand dam”? Are you sure about that?
Hey! Long time, Kathy. Glad to hear from you.
Yeah, dam of the herd, I believe. No dame, she 🙂
Glad you are on the road again – even with 4 wheels. Candis and I left Washington on May 8th, hopping to make a lap around the States and lower Canada. We are in Needles, CA tonight after riding in the rain off and on for 7 days. I am usually a V Strom guy but this trip is on a Can Am Spyder. So far I am impressed. Should pass your part of the world around the first of July. We will beep and wave if we spot the Iron Piggy.
An engineering feat, the Can Am. If you’re going to three wheels, two up front seems to make more sense than one. But I don’t know, never been on a Can Am or a trike. Ride safe out there, Robert.
Bet you two will have a blast. So neat you are heading out together. Thanks for the updates. Nothing to report from Houston… just another day in our swamplot, living the dream.
haha… swamplot…