TRAVEL IS LIKE A BOX OF CHOCOLATES ...

I was thinking of this analogy recently: an opportunity to travel, like chocolates, is enticing at first, but after a time, travel, like overdosing on a boxful of chocolates, begins to make you a bit nauseous.

I've been on the road since May 9, when I left California for Joe Walvoord's wedding and my graduation. A month and a half of living out of a suitcase later, I was hugely relieved to finally arrive back "home" in LA this past Friday. I subtracted my initial mileage from my final mileage and found my tires had covered over 8,200 miles of American highway!

After leaving Michigan (see last posting), I returned to Urbana a second time, my main goal being to print out four immaculate copies of my dissertation to be bound. Several days later, I was on the road to a recommitment ceremony in Frisco, Colorado (June 5) then doubled back to South Dakota to see cousin Jane's new Dutch goods store in Sioux Falls (June 9), then returned to Colorado to pick up a suitcase I'd forgotten at the house of old Aramco friends, the Adams, then headed south to Santa Fe, then west back to Los Angeles (June 17), where I'm temporarily a houseguest (yet again!) till my trip to the Big Island of Hawai'i this next Tuesday as my reward for completing my 11-year doctoral program! (I’ve been planning that get-away since February!)

To recap:

URBANA - I breezed back into town, quieted down finally from all the commencement madness two weeks earlier, and promptly started - once again - to print and compile all 308 pages of my dissertation (including tables, figures and CD-ROM) in bindable form, then photocopying three extra copies so that, in addition to myself, three of my committee members could have their own bound copy (professors stack dissertations they have served on on their shelves like trophies). It took parts of three days. Finally, Friday, May 27, the four copies were ready to take to the binder's for about $30 each. While in town, I also visited the U-of-I Alumni Office (I am one now) and Career Office for a little networking before leaving, then drove west like a madman to get to Frisco, Colorado by Sunday, June 5 for some Urbana friends' second wedding. (The couple had eloped the first time; no family members had been given advance notice to be at the ceremony.)

COLORADO - I felt very virtuous that I managed to arrive in Denver by late Saturday night after another 14-hour trek across the Plains (see posting on first trip east to Wisconsin). I woke Sunday morning expecting the ceremony in Frisco to be at a comfortable time later that day, say, 11:00 am. When I checked my date book, I was horrified to find it was to start at 9:00! Even speeding as fast as the curving mountain roads would allow, I couldn't make it from Denver on time. Major disappointment. I finally decided I just couldn't make it, and went back to bed depressed. All that way for nothing. Later that morning when I woke, I reconsidered: surely after all this effort it's better to arrive late than not at all? So, I called. The ceremony was over, of course, but they were happy to hear from me and touched, I think, that I had made such a super-human effort to be there on the day. The home "reception" was to go on all afternoon, so they invited me up anyway.

In the end, I'm glad I made the effort. The couple, Ray & Heidi, was the same pair that had volunteered their country house for my graduation party May 15. A bunch of relatives on both sides were there, including a number I knew well. I almost feel like adopted family in some ways (I had stayed with the bride's parents in Trinidad, Colorado on my way out from California originally.) By the time I got there, the unknown relatives were on their way out, and I got to enjoy being with the core family members at the end of the festivities - more relaxed and really the best time of day on such occasions. The next day I visited another couple, old Aramco friends of my parents just west of Denver up in the mountains before heading back east to pick up where I'd left off.

SOUTH DAKOTA - Since I was sick of both highway 70 through Kansas AND highway 80 through Nebraska, I decided for my sanity I had to take an alternate route back to the Plains. So I headed straight north from Denver towards Cheyenne, Wyoming, turning immediately east into the Nebraska Panhandle. I had plotted a couple of stops on my way to break the monotony: Chimney Rock, the most visible landmark to those on the Oregon and Mormon Trails, and Wounded Knee, SD, the site of the last battle between Indians and the US government on a frigid winter's day just after Christmas in 1890. (Over 120 Sioux men, women and children were shot down in cold blood - "cold" literally, since the corpses froze into their final position in their death throes and were carted away like unbending tree stumps.) Travel continually amazes me as I discover how mixed the modern world truly is: at one of the ramshackle souvenir stands across from the Wounded Knee cemetery, I met two very friendly Lakota Sioux sellers, one of whom asked if I spoke Swedish (an odd question) since his wife had noticed my last name "Sundberg" was Swedish. Turns out she was from Sweden, and their long-haired little boy spoke English with an odd accent that I came to realize was Swedish, not Sioux! Wounded Knee is very poorly marked and is located on the Pine Ridge Reservation, one of the poorest reservations in the US. (One of the sellers told me that before Bush, unemployment was 92%; since Bush it's now 96%!) Pine Ridge was the site, too, of a tense armed stand-off between Native militants and the FBI in 1975 - 85 years since the Wounded Knee Massacre.

Highway 90, running from Rapid City to the Twin Cities, is one of the emptiest major highways I have traveled on in the US. Even cows are sparse. South Dakota has less than 1,000,000 people, and most of those seem to be centered either in Sioux Falls or Rapid City. Cousin Jane (who I went to High School with in Pella) and husband Gary have been South Dakotans now for over 15 years. After teaching music in various area schools, and with both kids safely grown and out of the nest, Jane has realized her long-standing dream of opening her own shop – De Hoek - to sell Dutch treats and souvenirs. (Unlike Holland, Michigan or Pella, Iowa, Sioux Falls has had no Dutch novelty store.) I always liked the idea but was a bit concerned that such a niche market might now make it in a less Dutch-American city. But I was pleasantly surprised to find she had picked an ideal location for foot traffic - the corner of 10th Street and Phillips – a new window shopping, entertainment mecca. In the warmth of the spring months, the street even sprouts outdoor tables and chairs – including De Hoek. I parked my car and was immediately treated to a view of Jane and some college-aged helpers in Dutch costumes chatting with customers sitting at the outdoor tables in the June sunshine. Inside, the store was attractively decorated with antiques and Dutch goods on shelves: Delftware, wooden shoes, chocolate, Douwe Egberts coffee, bags of drop (licorice). The most encouraging thing, though, was the steady stream of window shoppers popping in and out, checking out the fresh bakery, picking through the imported items. With all her community contacts, Jane also attracts colleagues from church and school and seems to know half of the people who stop by! Her overhead costs are helped too by the enthusiastic (unpaid) labor of her kids Matt and Mary Jo and other college friends who volunteer time in the store. I’m optimistic about the future if she can attract regular lunchtime café customers from the local businesses in the neighborhood to bring in the steady income that merely selling ethnic novelties can’t.

Before beginning the long trek back to California, I decided to make just one more stop: the Weiss’s in Orange City, Iowa. Ray and Dorothy had been missionaries and good friends of my mother’s whom we visited in Bahrain almost yearly in the 1960’s. In fact, Ray is the only person who knew both Dad (in Los Angeles) and Mom (at Central College in Iowa) before they got married! They had two daughters, too, childhood playmates who were the same age as Ann and I. I don’t think I had seen the family since the 1970’s. So, not being sure when the next time I would be in the area would be, I decided I had to visit – especially since neither Ray or Dorothy are getting any younger. They put me up on very short notice with very gracious Middle Eastern hospitality, and I joined them at their local Reformed church the next morning, where the sermon was on the Third Commandment: “Thou shalt not take the Lord thy God’s name in vain.” Not exactly scratching where I normally am itching. “Gosh” and “Oh, my God!” are not phrases that particularly trouble my sense of ethics! Oh, well. Calvin would have approved, I suppose. Then, in some jarring change of gears, I participated in a very 21st-century consumer religiosity in the all-age summer Sunday school, where we followed a gesture song led from the big screen by kids on film and played an I-will-not-fear-with-Jesus card game with mixed adults and children. (I wonder what dour Calvin would have thought of that!) J

Then, it was time for all good things to come to an end, and I was back on dreaded Interstate 80 through Nebraska on my way back to Denver (where I had left one suitcase by accident my first time through). Then it was south to New Mexico, where I decided to quit the day a bit early and stay over in Santa Fe. (I was tired of passing through this historic city trip after trip enslaved to some deadline that didn’t allow a stop-over.) I decided to splurge one final time on a picturesque old mission-style hotel a block from the old plaza and spent most of the remaining sunlit hours walking the surprisingly intimate city streets, taking pictures and eventually grabbing an Indian dinner (the New Delhi, not the Sioux kind!).

When I crossed the Colorado River into Needles, California after sunset last Wednesday, I felt like I was “home” at last! I missed the recent Yucaipa earthquake (I was still over the mountains in Barstow), something everyone south of the mountains was buzzing about when I finally arrived Thursday in San Bernardino on my way up the mountain to see Aunt Helen in Crestline for a day. (OK, one final-final visit!)