Dad and I both woke up in the middle of the night. He was uncomfortable because his hand had swollen up. Not so much painful, but I guess noticeable. It really looked swollen. I'm like, "oh, shit". We were so close to getting this man home and in the care of his doctors. What if …

Continue reading West Coast Road Trip, Day 14: Reno/DFW/RDU

Off to Reno today for our last stop of seven. As we'd been planning this, it hadn't occurred to me to worry about this, but more than one person had said, "driving through the mountains in December? Beware of snow!" This journey included the Donner pass, after all. But I'd been checking the weather and …

Continue reading West Coast Road Trip, Day 13: SF to Reno

Dad and I both had trouble sleeping and got up around 5:30 am.  No big deal but we didn’t have a flexible schedule.  One nice thing about our San Francisco hotel room was it has a little sitting area where Dad and I could both sit and read or surf the internet. We had coffee, hung …

Continue reading West Coast Road Trip, Day 12: San Francisco

It was going to be a rainy day, so the plan was to do a Big Bus tour in the morning and a museum in the afternoon. We didn’t have much to do until 10:00, so got up, got ready.  Went downstairs for breakfast and it turned out they had a whole big buffet something …

Continue reading West Coast Road Trip, Day 11: San Francisco

Merry Christmas! If I'd been travelling with someone other than my father, I would have made a real effort to put something Christmassy on the agenda, but I knew he wouldn't care and it was better just to leave it alone. But I did wish him "Merry Christmas!" when we got up. And we called …

Continue reading West Coast Road Trip, Day 10: Santa Cruz to San Francisco

This day was kind of a bust, unfortunately, except it still met the baseline of 'hey, new places to see' and 'let's putz around doing fun things'. Got up, got cleaned up, got the inn's free continental breakfast.  Headed out. It was raining pretty hard.  We went to the drugstore, then the gas station.  Dad …

Continue reading West Coast Road Trip, Day 9: Monterey to Santa Cruz

Woke up in San Simeon, absolutely beautiful day, not like the day before. Had breakfast at the hotel's restaurant, same place we had dinner. Packed up and off to Hearst Castle. They offered several tours, but made it clear that the basic tour (the "grand rooms") was the easiest in terms of stairs - but …

Continue reading West Coast Road Trip, Day 8: San Simeon to Monterey

Morning: we got up, packed.  Dad was a little light-headed, due to his blood pressure meds.  (oh, good, another medical thing we have to worry about - but he just stopped taking that one med and was mostly fine thereafter). I went down to the cafe and got him a bagel and me a breakfast …

Continue reading West Coast Road Trip, Day 7: LA to San Simeon

This was our last full day in Los Angeles. We had several museums still undone, but basically decided to do one thing today. We chose the Autry museum.  I also wondered if there was such a thing as a driving tour of LA sites, and a little internet research showed there was, led from an …

Continue reading West Coast Road Trip, Day 6: LA

So... first thing when we got up was 'how did you sleep?'. He actually slept OK, although had to get up probably to use the bathroom and take more Tylenol. But once we had coffee in hand, the big discussion was "do we pull the plug on the trip or not"?  Dad was feeling pretty …

Continue reading West Coast Road Trip, Day 5: LA