Archive for April 17th, 2011

Miles and miles of open range! Click on any image to enlarge.

17 April 2011. I’m sitting in the Gage Hotel White Buffalo Bar awaiting one of their widely acclaimed margaritas. It’s a beautiful building—exposed vigas and latillas. And aptly named, with an albino bison head on the wall. Oddly, the Celtics are on the TV—playing the Knicks.

I started out from Alpine this morning around 9 am, after posting yesterday’s blog outside the Holland Hotel (because Bread & Breakfast didn’t open until 8 am.) Then at B&B a filling breakfast of scrambled eggs, grits, toast, and (splurging) a cinnamon bun!

The Bread & Breakfast Café. Good food. WiFi.

16 April 2011 (posted the next morning). For the first time on the bike trip, I spent part of the afternoon reading—in a town park, shaded by some nice trees with an ideal temperature of perhaps 72. Finding the right book was a challenge. It had to be both thought-provoking and lightweight. I bought Oliver Sacks’ Oaxaca Journal, about a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico with the American Fern Society to study ferns.

Long ago I read Sacks’ much better known The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and loved it. It may help me understand what makes engaging writing about a place, and how to provide an outlet for his interests that extend well beyond one’s primary work—in Sacks’ case, neurology, for which he is so well known. I too am very attracted to ferns. So far the book is very engaging (and small!)