Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Hawk and I have finished planning our first "real" retirement trip. I quote real because while we have taken all of two trips since I retired just over a month ago, neither of them really took advantage of the fact I'm retired

• Our trip to visit her parents last week we planned before I retired, before I was 100% certain of being retired by that point. It fit within the normal working stiff schedule of weekend to weekend. I figured I'd take a week off for it if I was still working. I had no other time off planned since the start of the year.


• Our wildflower trip earlier in March was only a weekend-sized trip. We could have done it while still employed, going on weekend. The only difference being retired made was that we traveled Wed-Fri instead of Fri-Sun, enjoying fewer crowds at the parks we visited.

Anyway, my first real post-retirement trip is planned now, for later this month. And it's to... Ohio.



Yes, the Ohio that's best summed up by this classic clip (above) from The Simpsons.

So, what's in Ohio? I mean, that we care about? Waterfalls! There are waterfalls in Ohio, and that's why we're going.

I was inspired a few weeks ago when I clicked through a news article with a title like, "Here are 5 places to visit in the Midwest that aren't soul-suckingly bleak!" One of them is a state park outside of Columbus, Ohio, with a bunch of waterfalls. We used that as the kernel of an idea to find several days worth of fun hiking we can do in the region and booked a trip for 6 days.

We fly to Columbus next week Thursday.

Spring Family Visit Travelog #12
Back home · Sun 5 Apr 2026. 10pm.

We're back home from our week of visiting Hawk's parents in Pennsylvania. No, it didn't take us until 10pm (the time shown above) to travel. We walked through our front door just before 6:30pm. And then we promptly turned around and went out to dinner.

After the affront of being handed a packet of Heinz salsa at an airport eatery Hawk declared, "I want good Mexican food tonight!" So we went to dinner at one of our local favorites, La Fiesta.



(This is actually a picture from months ago, but we ordered the same things... minus the margarita.)

After dinner Hawk was wrecked from sitting in the airline (and airport) seats for several hours. We came home, and she sacked out on the sofa while I puttered around sorting through the mail and unpacking my suitcase. I thought about going for a soak in the hot tub tonight— yes, the hot tub is fixed after months of being out of service!— but lazed out and stayed in.

Spring Family Visit Travelog #10
Getting ready to leave · Sun 5 Apr 2026. 9am.

Today we fly home from visiting my inlaws in Pennsylvania. And this trip has been almost nothing like I planned. Not that I had strong plans; I left things flexible knowing we'd need to play it by ear. But still I came in with a range of expectations... and it's been unlike any of those.

First, and simplest, we didn't go anywhere other than Hawk's parents' place. We'd thought maybe we'd spend a day seeing my mom and youngest sister, or a day visiting our nieces, but none of that worked out. The three nieces I reached out to about meeting up with never responded. Sadly that's what happens most of the time.

Spending the whole week with Hawk's parents wasn't bad. It's just more... limited... than what I hoped for.

So then there's what we planned— or expected— with Hawk's parents. Those plans were largely dashed. I mean, we spent the week with them. In a way that was the most important element of the plan... but it was also merely the baseline.

There were no fancy meals. Hawk's mother is too weak to cook. She can barely even walk to the kitchen, with the help of a walker. I didn't expect her to cook up a storm... but after 30 years of visits where she's practically lived in the kitchen seeing that all her guests are well cared for, it's a different experience being in her house with meals being completely DIY.

Like I said, though, we knew she wouldn't be cooking for us. At least not more than a minimum. We figured we'd take her out to dinner a few times instead. Except even that was a bridge too far. She didn't have energy to leave the house. She gladly stayed home by herself while the rest of us joined family friends for holiday dinner.

Beyond issues of enjoying meals together— again, always a defining aspect of visits to my inlaws— Hawk and I expected that we'd help her parents with preparing to move. Yes, we're already past the first step on the line of "You really need to move out of this house." They've accepted that they need to move out. So we figured we could help them 1) look at retirement homes in the area and 2) clean out the house, especially the basement, in preparation for moving sometime in the near future.

Alas they didn't have energy even to participate in such tasks. Cleaning out the basement requires their active participation, at least to act as deciders. "Keep this, toss that, hold the other thing for now." Triage. But even that was a bridge too far. We tried doing a few cleanup tasks without their supervision, like throwing out expired food from the fridge... but even that resulted in hard feelings! Well, at least Hawk's brother did get her dad to look at one retirement home option. But it seems they did only a cursory look and left with lots of major questions still unanswered. All these will remain tasks for another time.

Speaking of "another time", we're already planning out next trip! MIL's birthday is in late May. We'll sit down with her today and try to map out her treatment schedule to determine which dates would be best for the next visit.

Spring Family Visit Travelog #8
Around at the house · Fri 3 Apr 2026. 4pm.

Today we're doing more cleanup inside my inlaws' home. It's not that we're throwing out piles of old newspapers and vacuuming up dust bunnies that have gone feral. As I mentioned yesterday, my inlaws have pack-rat tendencies but not the fill-the-house-with-crap type. Their hoarding is mostly limited to food. Despite being a pair of empty-nesters in their 80s, they have two refrigerators and a chest freezer... and all three are absolutely stuffed with food. (And there's a large pantry, too. Bigger than mine at home. Also stuffed.)

We see their problem as twofold:

• First, their habits come from times of scarcity. Both grew up in families molded by the economics of the Great Depression. Their parents ingrained in them never throw anything away that might still be useful, never throw away food that someone could still eat. With MIL especially this lesson is etched deep because her parents struggled to rebuild after bankruptcy when she was young.


• Second, they have a shopping problem. The scarcity mentality thing we've recognized for years. But by being here with them this week, and going on errands with them, we've seen that they're shopping all wrong. Again, they're a pair of 80-something empty nesters. They don't eat a lot even on a big day. And right now, due to her illness, MIL is barely eating solid food at all. Yet when they go shopping they go to warehouse stores (like Costco, but they're fans of BJ's) and buy huge packages of things. Loaves of bread, two at a time. Cheese by the pound. Chips? Huge bag. Cookies? A huge box. It's one thing to shop like this when they have house guests for a week, but they're doing it for themselves. For example, FIL wanted some peanut butter. He bought a three pound jar. If I were buying peanut butter for myself I'd pick the smallest jar, probably 12 oz., and still fret that it'd go stale before I finished it.

So today Hawk, her brother, and I are doing their parents the favor of stripping the crud out of their multiple fridges and freezers. We're throwing away all the leftovers from who-knows-how-many weeks ago, the cheeses and other dairy with "best-by" dates 2+ months ago, and all the fruits and vegetables that have gone squishy with age. We are not asking the parents "Do you want to keep these?" We're throwing things straight in the trash.

In just their first pass today Hawk and her brother filled an entire trash bag. They took it straight out to the bin outside the garage to make it less likely their parents would go snooping through it and pull things back into the refrigerator. 😨 I made a mistake with a cleanup pass I did before lunch.... I threw things in the kitchen trash can and didn't take it outside. When we got back from lunch there were questions, "Why did you throw this in the trash?" (The answers were things like, "That mayonnaise expired 6 months ago!") They went picking through the trash can to try to save food. 🤢

Spring Family Visit Travelog #6
Seeing a doctor · Wed 1 Apr 2026. 1pm.

The wound I have from surgery on the back of my head 30 days ago has been healing on-pace for the most part. Well, until last night. Last night as I was laying down for bed I noticed a small lump near the last remaining stitches was sore and felt swollen. It was the first time since immediately after the surgery it felt like that. "Hmm, I'll text the doctor in the morning and aim to see her early next week," I thought. ...Early next week because we're visiting family 2500 miles away this week.

This morning the situation changed. I awoke after a night of tossing and turning (which may have been purely coincidental) and found that the swollen lump had burst. There was a crusty mess of pus, probably dried sebum, near the stitches on the back of my head. "Early next week I'll see my doctor" became "I'm going to urgent care today."

Fortunately there are plenty of urgent care clinics near Harrisburg. The area seems to be a medical Mecca for central Pennsylvania. Unfortunately my time at the clinic was spent mostly on 1) waiting, 2) negotiating payment, and 3) providing medical history. The PA who finally saw me spent all of about 5 seconds looking at the wound and saying, "Yup! It burst." 🤣

Well, the good news was that the incision area and the stitches are all fine. That wound is all closed up. What burst was some kind of growth, like an abscess. It didn't look infected, the doc said, though she gave me a prescription for an antibiotic for a week to be sure and said to come back if it gets worse.

Meanwhile, I had texted the dermatologist who performed the surgery back in California. Without needing to see me she sent in a prescription for an antibiotic, too. The same one. 🤣 I explained what happened on a phone call to her assistant 30 minutes later, and we made an appointment with her for Monday morning, when I'm back in town. Hopefully today's events have just been a fire drill— a fire drill with a scrip for antibiotics. I'll know more when I see the specialist on Monday.

Spring Family Visit Travelog #4
At the house · Sun 29 Mar 2026. 10pm.

We arrived this morning to visit my inlaws for the next week. One thing we knew we'd confront right away is MIL's health situation. Though she's in her 80s and has contended with a variety of (non-terminal) health conditions for many years she's remained very sharp, maintaining the home and the household finances, and as mobile as pain from the not-willing-to-work-as-a-team parts of her body allow her to be. But that's different now.

She's still mentally sharp, but mobility, even around the house, has taken a nosedive. She sits in her armchair most of the day and all night. (She can't sleep lying down for reasons.) She's in pain, has low energy, has little appetite, and can't swallow and eat most foods. And because she's still mentally sharp everything is actually harder. She is aware every minute of the day how adult things she used to take for granted that she could still do even in her 80s, she now cannot. Every minute she's confronted by a fresh reminder of disability.

FIL is dutiful as her caretaker. He's in his 80s, too, and is in worse shape than she was, pre- this cancer, but is earnestly doing the best he can. The challenge is he's close to worthless at housework. He needs detailed instructions on where to find things, what to do with them, and how to pack them away when he's done. MIL is fine with giving instructions. She's a very exacting person, so she's accustomed to it. But unfortunately this creates a dynamic where every mundane household thing, dozens of times a day, devolves into a game of Twenty Questions. MILs is constantly having to answer questions, 'What do you want?", "Where is that?", "How to do it?", etc. And combine that with the fact that FIL is hard of hearing, with a hearing aid that only works about 50% at best, and MIL can't speak very loudly, and "Twenty Questions" turns into more of a Laurel & Hardy "Who's on First?" farce. Repeated a dozen times a day.

It might be funny if it weren't so infuriating.

Spring Family Visit Travelog #3
near Harrisburg, PA · Sun 29 Mar 2026. 9:30am.

I slept not a lick on the red-eye flight we took overnight to Baltimore. I had hoped to get maybe an hour or two of sleep, but it was not to be. I was never tired enough to overcome the discomfort of sitting in an airline seat in coach.

As I looked over the timing for the rest of our trip I figured we'd land at 5:40am, have luggage and the rental car by maybe 6:20am, then drive first to a Wawa (a regional convenience store chain) near BWI airport for breakfast and road-trip snacks before the ride to Harrisburg. That'd have us hitting the road in earnest at 7am— which I could see by checking my weather app was approximately sunrise. "At dawn, we ride," I chuckled to myself. Then I noticed the temperature forecast showing in the app... it'd be 30° at sunrise. That's 30° Fahrenheit, not Celsius. "At dawn we ride... But first we freeze," I corrected myself. 🤣🥶

Well, the schedule unfolded like I expected. Our flight was better than on-time; it was actually a bit early. We got a good pick of cars at the rental depot. We're driving a Nissan Rogue this time. It's got heated seats. We bought food at the Wawa as the morning twilight sky brightened around us and hit the road in earnest at 7am. It was a smooth, 90 minute drive up to Harrisburg.

And speaking of those freezing temperatures, along the way we saw temps as low as 28° F as measured by the car's air intake thermometer. When we arrived at 8:30 it was still only 33°. Compare this to just two weeks ago in California where it was 30~32° Celsius. Welp, we left summer behind in early March, had two weeks of spring, and now it's winter.

Lately we've been dining out at California Pizza Kitchen as part of our regular rotation. It's kind of a blast from the past for us as I don't think we ate at a CPK together for 20 years. It used to be a thing we did on the regular, especially when we lived in Los Angeles (the chain's home) 20+ years ago. But then through a combination of moving back to Silicon Valley, where there wasn't a CPK close to us, and the chain itself seeming to shrink the number of restaurants, and... oh, yeah... the fact that Hawk seldom wants to eat pizza, we didn't set foot inside a CPK for years.

A few years ago a new CPK opened up just off Lawrence Expressway, a few miles away from our home. For a while we never went because, again, pizza wasn't an "us" thing. But then I got Hawk to humor me once or twice when I had a jones for it. She grinned and bore it through eating pizza a few times. By the third time or so she decided, "Screw their pizza, I'm getting a salad"... and a wonderful thing happened. She found their salads are really good!

That put CPK back into the mix. Now it's a sit-down restaurant not too far from home that we can both agree upon because there are things on the menu we both definitely like. But what really got it into part of our regular rotation was the Costco connection.

The Costco connection? Is that like The French Connection? Yes, it is! And it's even better because it's pizza (and salad), not heroin, and you don't have to survive an epic car chase through the streets of Manhattan to get it.

The connection is that Costco sells CPK gift cards, 2 x $50, for $80. That knocks up to 20% off the cost of dining at CPK. Together with the menu having dishes we both genuinely enjoy, the 20% discount has made CPK one of our regular haunts again.

Oh, and why did I mention the CPK is just off Lawrence Expwy? It's because the Costco is on Lawrence, too. In fact it's just 1/2 mile from the restaurant. One evening a few weeks ago we drove to Costco, bought 4 of these gift cards (two packs of two), and promptly drove straight over to CPK to use one for our dinner. 🤣

So now not only is dining at CPK part of our regular rotation, but so is buying their gift cards when we shop at Costco.

I've been thinking for a while about writing on the topic of "Why I haven't bought an electric vehicle (EV)." Recently that topic came up on a Discord my partner is active in. Except it wasn't people sharing a thoughtful self-examination of why they have or haven't bought an EV, it was smug self congratulation, "I bought an EV and I am so pleased with my choice that I cannot imagine why any other person has not bought an EV unless they're morally defective or plain stupid."

That kind of high-functioning idiocy, being smart enough to figure things out except when they involve questioning your own assumptions or grasping the consequences of your own actions— including, "Huh, I'm being really insulting right now, could that be the reason people are responding harshly to me? Nah, it's gotta be because they're mean, toxic, stupid people and so I should block them."— is sadly prevalent in that community and why I dropped out of it a few years ago. But anyway, the question worthy of thoughtful self-examination remains: Why haven't I bought an EV yet?

Let me first clarify things that are not the reasons why I haven't bought an EV:

1. I am not unaware of EVs, how they work, or where/how they present possible economic savings for their owners.
2. I do not dismiss EVs as "clunky", "quirky", "slow", "unreliable", or "woke".
3. I am not a climate change denier.
4. I'm not poor. Inability to buy one is not the reason.

So what is/are the reasons I haven't bought an EV?

Let's start with this one:

1. I'm not in the market to buy a car.

I haven't bought a car in 5 years. I don't expect to buy one for at least another few. That's the main reason I haven't bought an EV— I haven't bought any car recently.

Related to that is....

2. I don't see the advantages of an EV as so compelling I'd replace an existing car prematurely.

One of the big wins people cite in switching to an EV is the savings in gas. Well, the price of gas is not killing us. We drive our vehicles very little on a regular basis. Hawk hasn't had a daily commute for two years. I haven't had one since 2018. If one or both of us were commuting us was commuting 50-60 miles a day, 4-5 days a week? Sure, the gas savings would add up fast. But right now our regular driving works out to less than 10 miles/day. Add in occasional road trips and our cars have been logging only 5,000 miles/year recently.

I'll note, also, in the "costs to refuel" ledger, the people who are most excited about pocketbook savings are people who can charge their EVs for free at their place of work or school. I don't have the benefit of using OPM (Other People's Money) to run an EV.

The other dimension of savings people talk about is savings to the environment. That one's hard to quantify. But qualitatively one thing we consider is the impact to the environment of having a whole new vehicle manufactured for us.

Also related to #1, above:

3. EVs that matched my desires/needs haven't existed.

The last car I bought, 5 years ago, was a sporty convertible. I really wanted a convertible. We really wanted a convertible. There are no EV convertibles. If there were we'd have seriously considered one.

Our other car, now going on 15 years old, is a 4x4 SUV. We use it for real off-road stuff. EV SUVs capable of real off-road stuff haven't existed until the past few years. The few that have come out— Tesla Cybertruck and Rivian R1— are bigger than what we want. They wouldn't even fit in our garage. Plus, it's unclear how capable they really are in off-road situations that aren't staged for cameras. I'm really curious to see how the new Rivian R2 pans out, as it's more the size of vehicle we'd want. I'll watch how it tests in real-world situations.

Then there's the problem of refilling. I know that charging stations are way more prevalent now than, say, 10 years ago. I know people are doing coast-to-coast drives in EVs. But I also know from thinking about it myself, and having this verified by friends who are actual EV owners, that it takes a lot more planning to do a long distance road trip with an EV. You can't just pack a bag, hop in the car, and go, trusting that there'll be a filling station pretty much wherever you need it, that you can get in and out of in 5 minutes.

"Filling station wherever you need it" is especially an issue with trips offroad or just to remote areas. The gasoline infrastructure is built out well enough that even small towns that don't have a stop light have at least one gas station. I know, because in the past year I've stopped in several of them to buy just a few gallons of gas. EV charging was nowhere nearby.

I got hit with a new type of phone scam last week. At least, I'm pretty sure it's a scam.

A man speaking solid English with a Texas accent identified himself as "Deputy [Some common name]" with the Santa Clara County Sheriffs Department. He explained that he was contacting me over my failure to appear for a jury duty summons. He conveyed that this was a serious matter. He stated my legal name, phone number, and full address to demonstrate the info he had.

Right away my Spidey sense was tingling, "Scam!" But mostly because I have a pending jury duty summons— with a date in December.

I chose to play along, as I allowed it's possible this wasn't a scam but was merely an actual sheriff's deputy making a routine call based on a mixup of names and dates in a spreadsheet somewhere.

"I didn't receive a summons," I explained.

The so-called deputy explained that that didn't matter and repeated that this was serious.

"Who's the sheriff?" I asked. I figured a simple quiz would separate the real McCoy from scammers.

The "deputy" repeated his name.

"No, who's the sheriff of Santa Clara County?"

The man on the phone balked and re-directed. I could've gone another round with him on this impromptu quiz, but at this point I was getting tired of wasting his time— and mine.

"Get lost, you fucking scammer," I said as a hung up.

Follow me to see if I'm arrested this week! 🤣