I like to cook, but I am no chef. Basically, I just like to eat; it follows then that what I like to cook is what l like to eat.

A contingent of Carol’s family recently headed off to Portland, Oregon for the holidays. Since I had made a couple of train trips there, I was asked to recommend places to go and sights to see. As the experienced reader of this blog may have immediately discerned, I had precious little to offer. Outside of the famous Powell’s bookstore, there was the historic landmark of the city’s Union Station, which I was aware of only because that’s where I had disembarked from Amtrak. There was the homeless encampment surrounding the station, the motel with the iconic 1950s era sign, where I stayed quite cheaply, and a sports bar near a strip joint that had been located within walking distance from the train station.

“Goodness, it’s already quarter to ten,” Carol recently observed one morning. Yes, my love, time flies, I replied with my inner voice, especially when we don’t get out of bed until quarter to nine. I didn’t see the need to call attention to the lateness of the morning that we’d finally slithered out of bed. In our defense, it was an unusually late a.m. hour to get up, given that we’d gone to bed around that time the previous p.m. Needless to say, retirement has been one of the easiest “life events” which I have embraced with the enthusiasm and energy of… a three-toed sloth.

I recently got a new eyeglass prescription. Two things had happened to my eyeballs. All of a sudden, I needed reading glasses, first for ingredient labels and the small print on prescription bottles, and then for reading regular text. The second thing was that I could see farther better without my previous near-sighted correction than with it. Thinking this trend might be leading to x-ray vision, I put off a visit to the optometrist for awhile. When I finally made the appointment, the doctor casually told me that it was normal for vision to flip from near-sighted to far-sighted, “especially as we age.” My dream of x-ray vision in time for the summer beach season was dashed upon an horizon I could now see more clearly, even without glasses.

Reporting back from an enjoyable holiday, and I can happily state that Carol did not buy me a Lexus for Christmas. I did not buy her one either. In fact, we are trying to sell the one she owns.

What you crave in reading a travel narrative is the unexpected, a taste of fear, the sudden emergence by the roadside of a wicked policeman, threatening harm.

Ever since she’s been able to walk, talk and spurn, my youngest granddaughter has regarded me with a mix of antipathy, chagrin and disdain.

Carol and I boarded Amtrak’s #59, still known as The City of New Orleans, on a Monday, but not in the morning. There were eleven cars. There would be three sets of only two conductors each for the trip to New Orleans. There were 218 passengers. The train no longer carried mail. In short there wasn’t much still in common with Arlo Guthrie’s ballad, except this: Guthrie released his version of the song in 1971, and the cars we were riding in dated back to the 1970s.

Carol and I have been living in our little 55+ community for more than a year, and I’m happy to say we haven’t met anybody there yet. On the other hand, we’ve spent about seventeen weeks of that year traveling and meeting scores of friendly, outgoing people that we’re never going to see again. For that reason, those are the very people I like to call my friends.

When traveling, I don’t like committing to much in advance. I don’t make hotel accommodations until I know what train I’m arriving on, and I don’t know what train I’m arriving on until I know what city we’re going to next. And I don’t know what city I’m going to until…well, you get the idea: when contemplating tomorrow on the road, I prefer waiting until today has more or less become yesterday.