United States

52 hours in the colony

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Steve keeps referring to Puerto Rico as “America’s biggest colony” even though I know that’s politically incorrect (both literally and socially). But I’m used to him being provocative. What we agree on is how weird it felt to be in a place where all the residents are entitled to carry US passports, but everyone speaks Spanish, and the capital city looks like Havana would probably look had Cuba not been governed by brutal Communist dictators for the past 65 years.

For our visit, I brought along the article that appeared in the New York Times last month: “36 Hours in San Juan.” Steve and I actually had 52 hours, all of which we spent in the oldest part of this oldest European city in the Western Hemisphere. A vast metropolis surrounds the old town, but I know nothing about it, except that our ride from the airport felt like we were back in the US.

Judgments based on such limited exposure are bound to be pathetic. Still, I’ll share four of my strongest impressions.

— San Juan’s old town looks great, particularly considering that two monster hurricanes (Maria and Irma) rampaged through 7 years ago, leaving in their wake apocalyptic destruction. The hurricanes knocked out all the power and shut down nearly all the digital and physical highways. However, from our vantage in the old town (an Airbnb just down the street from the 500-plus-year-old cathedral), we saw no remnants of that disaster. The Puerto Ricans cleaned up and have rebuilt their lives, and today throngs of tourists are strolling among the brightly painted buildings, shopping, consuming prodigious amounts of rum, and gobbling down ice cream.

Our Airbnb filled the second story of that purple building.
The view from our balcony. Those steps down the block on the right ascend into the Cathedral.
Within it, this tomb provides evidence that Juan Ponce de Leon failed to find the fountain of youth.
I loved the plethora of tree-shaded benches…
…and interesting street scenes.
Day and night

— The temperature hit 90 both weekend days, with so much humidity sweat dripped from us like drops of rain. This was a good thing. Old San Juan was so pretty and lively, had the weather been excellent, I might have felt tempted to move here. But not with weather like that.

— We ate four meals in restaurants (two lunches and two dinners), and all of them were better than anything we ate in the Lesser Antilles. There the food was solid but unexciting. Not so in San Juan.

The “Japanese omelet sandwich” I had for lunch the first day.
That little street cafe was so good we returned for dinner.
The line for ice cream at Anita’s.

— The town’s biggest attraction — El Morro — belongs on any list of the Most Impressive Forts in the World.

It occupies a strategic point at the entrance to San Juan’s magnificent harbor.

Sir Francis Drake tried (and failed) to overcome it. A second attempt by the British navy at the peak of its imperial power ended with the English slinking away in defeat. Today the United States park service shows a film there that nicely recounts the history of Puerto Rico and the role played in it by El Morro. The only bad thing about our visit was that Steve forgot to bring along his National Park Pass (which we would have allowed us to enter free).

The price of forgetting that Puerto Rico is part of the United States.

Now, once again, we have no need for it. Yesterday afternoon we took the 40-minute flight on JetBlue from San Juan to the Dominican Republic, second largest island in the Greater Antilles.

The hitchhiker we picked up on the way back

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The idea for this road trip was to see the great sights of the Southwest we’d somehow missed. To make our drive to Austin for the eclipse a kind of mop-up tour. We might undertake other road trips elsewhere sometime, but we could close the atlas on at least this quadrant of America.

Nice try. Spending time in the ruins of Chaco Canyon (above) and among Sedona’s red rocks; jouncing through Canyon de Chelly and ogling fake aliens in Roswell all rewarded us richly (as I recorded in my earlier posts.) We also fared well on the drive back, even if White Sands National Park somewhat underwhelmed me.

Hiking in the blinding white landscape made me want to dig out the eclipse glasses.
Still, it was interesting to see all that snow-white powdered quartzite even if the dunes’ size didn’t match others Steve and i have visited in the Sahara or Colorado or even just west of Yuma.

In contrast, our morning in Carlsbad Canyon far exceeded my expectations.

We hiked in through the cave’s original opening, following a path that went down 75 stories.
It may not be as colorful as some caverns, but the vast size and baroque variety of its decorations dazzled me.

What wrecked our “Adios, Southwest!” Plan was listening to the audio version of House of Rain, a kind of detective story written by a naturalist/adventurer/desert ecologist named Craig Childs. Driving east through the Indian reservations, we’d consumed a more classic mystery – one of the Hillerman stories starring Navajo tribal police officers. But I had also downloaded House of Rain hoping finally to learn about the Anasazi people (aka Ancient Puebloans). I knew vaguely they had lived in cliff dwellings in the area where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah come together. The subject of House of Rain was who they were and what became of them – just what I wanted to know.

Visiting the Heard Museum in Phoenix and Flagstaff’s Museum of Northern Arizona and Canyon de Chelly and Chaco gave us droplets of the answer. But listening to Childs on the drive home was like jumping into a roaring flood.

He starts with Chaco. We’d just been there – barely a week before, and yeah, the scale and the height of its elaborate complexes had impressed us. But Childs is as familiar with the place as if he’d grown up there, and he made it come alive, explaining what it must have been like when under construction, more than a thousand years ago. He communicates the wonderment of what these folks accomplished, chopping down trees from forests more than 50 miles away and erecting buildings that remained the tallest in North America until skyscrapers began to sprout in Chicago. Then they built a dazzling network of roads radiating out from the heart of it, and they communicated over long distances with a complex signaling system. All these things happened at a time and place that in my mind had always been just…. blank. Childs filled it.

The Anasazi disappeared from Chaco around 1200 A.D., and what happened to them is the mystery explored by the book. It’s a dense, complex story I’m glad I listened to for all those hours – reading it on paper would have been daunting. I won’t try to summarize, just say that what Steve and I heard made us marvel at our ignorance and stoked a curiosity to see more: Mesa Verde or Aztec Ruins or the pueblos where the Anasazis’ descendants still live today.

Will we get there? Not soon. In less than a month, we’ll fly to Miami, a launching point for a visit to a region Steve has begun referring to as Ground Zero for Where All the Trouble in North America Began: the Caribbean. Our plan is to spend time staying mostly in exchange houses and Airbnbs on Grenada, St. Lucia, Dominica, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica. Stay tuned for details of how that one works out.

Adios, Austin

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Day 17. Austin to Carlsbad, New Mexico. 454 miles, 8 hours, 55 minutes (including stops).

Our Austin stay lasted almost a week, and we packed in a lot, enough to get a real feel for the place. Not counting the eclipse, which seemed more celestial than tied to any spot on earth, my favorite Austin experiences were…

1) the barbecue (see above). It was a shock to realized I’d never had Texas barbecue before. And a bigger shock to learn how delicious it is. How did it take me so long to discover this?

2) Catching a performance at Esther’s Follies, an institution on the ultra-lively Sixth Street. Mixing fast-paced extremely topical comedy skits, music, and big-stage magic, it felt like a weird combination of vaudeville and Saturday Night Live. We laughed a lot.

3) On Sunday morning, we visited the wildflower reserve established by Lady Bird Johnson. Its big vistas…

… dazzling close-ups…

… and everything in between filled me with happiness.

But now we’ve left Texas behind and will tackle two national parks in the next two days. Up tomorrow: a visit to the largest underground chamber in North America.

Our lucky star

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Chasing eclipses is dangerous. The risks aren’t physical but emotional. Traveling anywhere to experience this particular outdoor activity — brief as it is — requires planning and making commitments months or even years ahead of the actual event. If after all that the weather doesn’t cooperate, you can wind up seeing only a fraction of what you’d dreamed about. You could feel devastated.

Steve and I chose to chase Monday’s big American eclipse in Austin mainly because this part of Texas is reputed to have something like 300 days of annual sunshine. (Also, neither of us had ever been to Austin before.) When my iPhone weather app began forecasting Austin’s eclipse-day conditions 10 days ago, my heart sank to see all the clouds. I told myself conditions could change and did my best to put it all out of my mind.

The forecasts got harder to ignore once we arrived here. We’d decided to view the eclipse at a big organized site in Waco (about an hour and a half away, on the centerline, with a consequently long span of total darkness.) But rain had appeared in Waco’s forecasts for Monday and Tuesdays, and by Sunday afternoon, it looked like violent weather — thunder and lightning, huge hail, maybe even a tornado or two — could rip through the area some time Monday afternoon. (Totality would begin at 1:38.) The thought of getting stuck on a freeway in post-eclipse traffic with a Texas tornado spinning toward us was scary enough to make us all consider staying in Austin, even though the moon would cover the sun for only a minute or so (versus more than 4 minutes in Waco). We finally resolved to wait and see what Monday morning brought.

By then, the weather predictors seemed to be suggesting any violent storms would not take shape until late afternoon. So we piled into our van and headed north, under skies that still looked unfriendly.

The outlook began to brighten about a half hour later. Tiny patches of blue sky appeared, illuminated by glimpses of sun.

By the time we reached the parking lot at Baylor University, site of our Eclipse Over Texas tickets, it almost felt like a sunny day.

With four hours to go until totality, we walked a little over a mile to the Dr. Pepper Museum in the center of town, where we learned that too many other eclipse-chasers had had the same idea.

The sun was blazing by then, but the line crawled. After a while, we gave up and returned to Baylor’s eclipse-viewing area. The crowd was growing.

We found our friends Donna and Mike, who had driven in from Colorado.
The sky still held promise.

I didn’t mind the two-hour wait for totality. Steve and our friend Leigh braved horrendous lines to buy some of the overpriced food-truck offerings. (Event organizers had forbidden bringing in any picnic fare.) I chatted with Donna and Mike; the people-watching also was amusing.

Like so many others in the crowd, I kept an anxious eye on the sky.

The moon sliced its first thin piece out of the sun around 12:20. You could see this marvel through your eclipse glasses, but as I’ve learned from previous total eclipses, no immediate impact on the earthscape is detectable. On Monday, it took at least another 30 minutes for the light to strike my eye as colder, somehow deader than normal. This sense intensified as more and more of the sun was lost.

The scene went from looking like this…
…to this.

In those last few minutes, I felt a surge of pure joy. Forecasts be damned! The fragile crescent of remaining sun faced no threat of obliteration from mere clouds. We would see everything as it slipped behind the moon and the world chilled and dimmed, abruptly. Thousands of us simultaneously dropped our cardboard glasses, tilted our heads back, and gaped. People cheered. Some of us screamed.

I noticed different things, this fourth time of viewing a total eclipse. Dark as the sky became, I saw no stars, only Venus and Jupiter. (I have no idea why it would have appeared less dark in Texas than in some of my previous total eclipses.) Even without a telescope or fancy camera and lens, we all could see a glowing orange protuberance at about the 4 o’clock position of the orb: solar flares that someone later said were likely the size of a couple of Earths and more than 10 million degrees.

Something about that perfect alignment — the sun, the moon, my brain, surrounding by the cold gloom of space — electrified me. Then the burst of the first bit of sun re-emerging, more dazzling than anything on earth.

En mass, the crowd scrambled to gather our possessions and begin streaming to the parking lot and shuttle buses. Even though the sun would continue to be uncovered for another hour, mundanity was fully restored.

We tore back to Austin at 70 miles an hour; no traffic ever materialized. It was just one more miracle, one more thing to add to the deep sense of wonder and gratitude.

Trent slept through totality. He didn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

Canyon del Muerto

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A few days before we set off on this road trip, my friend Kris told me a story about how she almost died in Canyon de Chelly. On their first visit to the renowned Navajo landmark, she and her husband had journeyed to the tourist office and hired an official guide, then had a marvelous experience being driven by him through both Canyon de Chelly and its extension, Canyon del Muerto (Canyon of Death), a name dating back to when the Navajos endured great suffering as the US government seized their lands.

On a return trip to the canyon, Kris and Rich found the tourist office closed. So they hired a freelance guide who picked them up in a battered Suburban and drove them into the canyon, where the vehicle promptly stalled in a river crossing. Its reverse gears appeared to be broken, and the driver/guide eventually shouted that everyone had to abandon ship through the few doors that functioned. Kris said it wasn’t difficult to slog through the water to dry land, where they watched the Suburban sink — and disappear — into the quicksand in which it had bogged down.

The moral of her story, Kris told me, was that we should only hire a trustworthy guide. But because Steve and I had arrived in Chinle so late Saturday afternoon, we settled for arranging a four-hour tour through our hotel. I reflected that we might be doing what Kris had warned us against. But we’d had little choice.

Sunday (Easter) morning, I’d felt reassured by the sight of our vehicle, a 10-passenger Pinzgauer army troop carrier built in Austria with 6WD and three locking axles. With only one other passenger besides us in the vehicle, there was plenty of room for Trent (garbed in his cape, of course.) The driver/guide, Fernando, had grown up in his grandparents’ hogan, deep within the canyon, so that also reassured me. Scattered clouds hinted that rain might be coming, but as we entered the canyon, it was still dry and bright.

Canyon de Chelly isn’t as overwhelming as the Grand Canyon (what is?), but it quickly became clear its sandstone walls present an extraordinary mixture of color and form. Near the entrance, they start out low…

…but they soon rise to a thousand feet in height.

Moreover, this is very much a living landscape. Fernando told us only one family lives in it year-round.

This is their home.

But members of another 70-80 households return each spring to their properties. Somehow they coax crops of corn, beans, squash, melons, stone fruit, and more from the riverbed.

Here’s another homestead. But nobody was there on Easter Sunday morning.

Beyond the current inhabitants, the canyon also holds fascinating evidence of the Old Puebloan peoples who lived here until roughly a thousand years ago. Fernando stopped at at least a half-dozen spots to point out the remnants of dwellings and paintings and other rock art left by the Anasazi ancestors.

We penetrated deeper into the rough terrain, and around noon the sprinkles started. The temperature dropped and the wind intensified, so soon the sprinkles turned into sleet. Or was it snow? It was hard to tell. Most of my attention was focused on staying as warm as possible. Fernando handed out blankets, and I tried to get Trent to snuggle up to me under one. He looked pretty miserable.

On a nice day, we all might have hiked more, taking time to savor the fantastic landscape and all the history that had unfolded within it. But as we headed back, all I could focus on was how little feeling I had left in my fingers or toes.

Fernando dropped us off at the hotel a little after 1, and I staggered to our room on what felt like lifeless stumps. Stripping off my boots and socks and gloves, I remember puffing out little breaths and doing a fair amount of moaning as I soaked my feet and warmed my hands in the tub. I shivered hard for an extraordinarily long time.

When the shivering had mostly subsided, Steve and I downed hot pozole and coffee in the lodge’s cafeteria and agreed we wouldn’t have missed seeing the canyon. I wouldn’t say the price was almost dying of hypothermia. But I’d come closer to that than I ever hope to get again.

Change of plans

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Road trips have their drawbacks. You assume all the work of moving yourself through the world, work that you would otherwise delegate to taxi or Lyft or Uber or bus or private drivers. Or tour companies. Or airline pilots. Or train engineers. Doing it all yourself is tiring.

The greatest allure of road trips, however, is that it frees you up to shape your itinerary, literally moment by moment. Need a bathroom break? Stop for the next one down the road. Want to check out that funky museum? Put on the brakes and pull over.

In the last few days, I’ve had several reminders of how valuable this flexibility can be. First, it enabled us to wimp out on our plan to camp in Chaco Canyon. In order to have more time in the canyon, I really had wanted to camp in it because there are no hotels within a couple of hours of the canyon floor. But by this past Wednesday afternoon, our Weather apps were telling us that heavy winds would be howling through Chaco Canyon Monday night, and the temperature would plummet to 30 F. Nightmarish visions troubled both Steve and me. He saw us dying of hypothermia. I didn’t think that was likely, but a miserable evening and night seemed certain. In the morning, we agreed we should make alternative plans, as bad as we felt about hauling all that camping gear with us FOR NOTHING! Our only other fixed investment was the $10 fee for our spot at the Gallo Campground. I could cancel that reservation online, and it was easy to develop an alternative plan: Monday we could drive to Chaco, see as much as possible, then spend the night at a hotel on Route 66 in Gallup, New Mexico.

Saturday morning gave me another reminder. We spent Friday night in the breathtaking Flagstaff second home of friends from San Diego. Sadly, they weren’t there, but staying in their place was a wonderful base for visiting the Museum of Northern Arizona (impressive!) and then taking a quick tour of the 128-year-old Lowell Observatory.

Yesterday morning we didn’t pull out of our friends’ Flagstaff driveway until 9 am. And once on the highway, it quickly became clear my plans for the day were…. naive.

Months ago, sitting at my desktop computer, looking at maps of places I’d never been, I’d imagined it would be reasonable to drive from Flagstaff onto the Navajo reservation (bigger than all of West Virginia), then take a detour onto the 2,532-square-mile Hopi reservation contained within the Navajo lands before continuing on to Monument Valley, then finishing up the day in Chinle, located within the reputedly magical Canyon de Chelly.

But this is staggering country: huge skies; huge stretches of open scrubby land. Once we were rolling, it quickly became clear no one could squeeze all that activity into a day. We made a quick decision to abandon the Hopi side trip and head straight for Monument Valley. We arrived at its visitor center around 1 pm, gobbled down the sandwiches we’d brought with us, then set off on the driving tour through one of the world’s most famous landscapes.

Had we never seen it before? Of course we had! In countless Westerns! But never before in person, we realized, incredulous. In fact, Steve and I struggled to accept we’d never been in this Indian nation before. How had we overlooked it? Even if you’d never seen one of those Westerns, the sight of Monument Valley’s weird monoliths sculpted by time from the red rock, was commanding. The unpaved road on the touristic loop drive made the 15-mph speed limit seem aspirational, still after jouncing over it for an hour and a half, all I felt was gratitude.

But once again we’d miscalculated. We had planned to drive from Monument Valley to the Canyon de Chelly visitor’s center and there book a tour of the canyon for tomorrow. We’d forgotten, however, about the one-hour time-zone diference between Arizona and the Navajo Nation. The wind was also whipping the dust into a frothy curtain that at times forced us to drive as if we were in a heavy fog.

By the time I walked up to the reception desk of our hotel, the Thunderbird Resort, it was already after 5 pm.

To my relief, I was still able to book a 9 am tour through the canyon for today — Easter Sunday! More crazy wind is scheduled, and my phone says there’s a 20% chance we’ll get rain. But a trained Navajo guide will be behind the wheel. That should be a nice change of pace.

On the road again

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Day 1. San Diego to Phoenix. 357.7 miles; 6 hours, 55 min (including all our stops along the way.)

I’ve done a lot of reporting from Abroad in recent years, but it’s always been my intention to include adventures At Home too, and today we set off on a big one. Steve and I hope to see the upcoming total eclipse that will slice across a big part of North America April 8. Because of its perennial sunniness, northern Mexico is probably the best place to chase it, but we figured the logistics of traveling there might be too complex. So we opted instead to head to Austin, Texas, a city neither of us has ever visited, and a reasonably sunny place most of the time.

We could have flown. But we wanted to include Trent, the 16-month-old pup we’re raising for Canine Companions for Independence. We’ll have to send him off to CCI’s professional trainers on May 10, and we’re already dreading saying goodbye to him. Emboldened by our recent driving/camping experience in Zimbabwe, we decided to reach Austin by driving (and even camping one night, in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico). That would allow us to visit American wonders we’ve heretofore missed — and take Trent along for the ride.

Preparing for three weeks on the road was more complicated than I initially expected. Steve and I got our clothes into the carry-on suitcases we take everywhere. But we have also crammed a duffel full of canine gear — NOT including Trent’s portable kennel. Or his 20-pound bag of dogfood. Or the dog bed on which Trent is napping at the moment in the back of our Ford Escape, as I write this in the front passenger seat. We have another duffel full of gear for our camping night. That bag is much bigger than the doggy duffel, but it’s not big enough to hold our tent and two sleeping bags. They take up their own space.

Here’s most of the camping gear, laid out on our dining room table.

Being that it’s a road trip, I also filled a separate bag with shoes and knee braces and other miscellany. And another one packed with all our bathroom supplies (nice BIG containers of shampoo and conditioner and toothpaste instead of those measly 3-ounce TSA-approved ones.) We have not one but two picnic cooler bags AND a grocery bag full of essential food (ground coffee! food for Chaco Canyon!) AND a shopping bag full of our oranges. And a case of wine. (It could get pretty cold and windy in that canyon.) There’s more I can’t remember but hopefully won’t forget to reload along the way.

Here’s part of it this morning, ready for loading in the vehicle.
The view looking in one of the rear doors, after loading.

We keep reminding each other this is America. If we’ve forgotten something, there are Walmarts and CVSs and Family Dollar stores where we can get whatever we need. I’m a little more worried I may not acquire as many stories as I have found in more exotic locales. Today’s a good example. We’ve covered this ground many times before, and it wasn’t exciting on our maiden drive many years ago.

Lots of freight trains and pretty clouds.
Mostly road views like this.

My posts in the upcoming three weeks may be terser than normal. I’ve resolved to write more only when we run into something extraordinary. How often will that happen? Finding out is a big part of why we travel, both abroad and at home.

The land time forgot

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Here’s the biggest thing I’ve learned from this road trip. If you’ve grown tired of today’s world, if you’re drowning in the digital flood, twisting in the social-media tendrils, overcrowded and over stressed, you might be happy living in the far-northwestern stretches of California (where we spent the five days from Saturday to Tuesday). It felt like we got there in a time machine, rather than our aging Chrysler van. We passed through stretches in which we were more informationally isolated than we were in the Congo, earlier this year. No (T-Mobile) cell phone service; wi-fi that simply didn’t work, even though it was supposed to. We walked Dilly down sections of Highway 101 — the main road connecting the coastline to the rest of the world — when no cars passed us for minutes at a time. Town signs often reported populations in the hundreds; five-digit ones were rare. Buildings in the centers of these villages remind me of those from my childhood. Or maybe my grandparents’ childhood.The coastal vistas were as beautiful and empty as any I’ve seen anywhere.

“Why don’t more people live here?!” I asked Steve, several times. (I had trouble retaining his answer. It made sense but at the same time seemed incredible.) It’s hard to get to these parts, he pointed out. The rugged Klamath mountains cram right up to the coast. Carving roads through them (then maintaining them), looks to be a brutal task. Nor is it easy to make any kind of a living. Even pot-growing, once the economic engine in these parts, reportedly isn’t what it used to be since legalization. Tsunamis can strike at any time and wreck havoc. Then there’s the weather — gray, sodden, and dreary for much of the year. In the height of summer, we enjoyed some sunny spells, but the daytime highs rarely surpassed 60. Nights, the temperatures dipped into the 40s.

For all those reasons, I wouldn’t relocate here. But none of those factors dampened our pleasure in visiting. They in no way interfered with the great thrill accessible here: the chance to spend time with old-growth redwood trees.

Redwoods can be found all the way from Santa Cruz north to the southern reaches of Oregon. Many of them look stately, tall, impressive. But the vast majority — something like 95% —are relatively young specimens that reached for the sky only after the woodchoppers plundered their forebears. To the loggers who found their way to California in the wake of the Forty-Niners, the massive old redwoods were as good as any gold. Did those guys realize they were destroying arboreal gods that were already massive when the last Roman bastions fell? Did they reflect that what they sawed and chopped and floated out to sea to become house frames and fence posts was standing, shading, exhaling oxygen when Jesus was newborn?

I have no idea. But in California’s far northwest corner, in Redwoods National Park, the last few ancient redwoods still thrive. These are trees as tall as a football field is long; too wide in diameter to be spanned by a couple of adult humans. They’re the tallest trees on the planet, and while only half the age of the bristlecone pines, they still feel older than God.

We hiked at their feet, and I couldn’t stop exclaiming childishly, inarticulately: “Wow.” The forests are cool and shady. The ground underneath is springy and soft. The path ahead of us invariably looked shorter than the trees were tall. The scented air invigorated me, and the sculpted shapes surrounding us often stopped us in our tracks.It’s a landscape that competes with the most breathtaking anywhere, I think, and yet it rarely shows up on lists of the natural wonders of the world.

Steve and Dilly and I spent two nights in a cabin in Klamath, then three more in another isolated redwood grove in Mendocino. We didn’t exclusively hike in the redwoods. We found a path to a eerie solitary beach. We spent an afternoon exploring a canyon whose walls are coated with ferns. We got close to wild elk. Another morning we hiked up the mouth of the Big River.We resisted paying to drive through one of the touristic tree wonders.But we drove the Avenue of the Giants, where the huge trees crowd so close to the road people put reflectors on them as a warning.

Then Tuesday we headed south along Highway 1, skirting thrilling precipices (no shoulder! No guard rails!)……until we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and were back in Civilization. We slept in Santa Cruz last night and will spend our final night on the road in Santa Barbara. All that will be anticlimactic. Those hikes through the otherworldly, timeless woods were the climax.

A hot time on the old ranch

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This summer marks my 30th anniversary as a home-exchanger. It was 30 years ago that Steve and I first traded our house in San Diego, that time for a spacious ground-floor apartment in a cool stone building in the most chic neighborhood in Paris. It had a private garden that opened onto a larger shared green space. After that we were hooked. Since then we’ve done almost 20 exchanges all over the planet.

When our sons no longer wanted to accompany us, we started traveling in places where home-exchanging didn’t work as well (e.g. much of South America and Africa). But I got interested again for part of our travels last fall in New Zealand. For this current road trip, I also looked for promising trading partners.

Over the years, I’ve developed a sense of when it’s worth gambling on a house trade. When I saw the listing for the place where we’re staying now, my sensors tingled. The photos on homeexchange.com suggested the house would be impressive, and it was located on what was described as a 75-acre ranch near Cottonwood, in the far northern section of the Sacramento River Valley. I corresponded with the owners, and we reached an agreement: They would stay in our house for a week, while we occupied their ranch house for five days.

Some house-trading partners are like me, compiling bulging guides to their homes and neighborhoods and cities. The ranch owners fell at the opposite end of that scale. I finally pressed the wife for a few crumbs of information, like, would they be wanting us to take care of any animals? She replied that if we would feed their two resident horses, she and her husband would appreciate that.

When I told friends about our upcoming trade, one or two warned that the temperatures in mid-July in this part of the state were certain to be blistering, and as we left Reno, I quailed a bit at the forecast: highs of more than 100 degrees every day.

The forecasts have proven accurate. When we reached the ranch gate around 5:30 Saturday afternoon and opened our van doors to key in the code, the heat smacked me with a brutal force.

True, it’s a dry heat. But it’s so hot the dryness doesn’t seem to help much.

Stepping outside every afternoon and early evening since then has felt like walking into a boiler room. Happily, thanks to two key strategies, this hasn’t dampened the intense pleasure we’ve experienced in being here.

The first has been to escape to some of the higher realms nearby. At Lassen Volcanic National Park (where we spent Saturday afternoon), it was warm but pleasant. We passed all of Monday near frosty Mt. Shasta and in the cool mists of the McCloud River and Burney waterfalls.

One view of hulking Mt. Shasta, from the ranch property

The second strategy has been to engage in most of our outdoor activities during the cool, pleasant mornings. Every day, Steve and Dilly and I have fed hay and a scoop full of pellets to Madonna and Bingo, the two horses.

Madonna, the sorrel mare, is the mother of mischievous young Bingo. He lives in a corral, but she gets to roam the property.

Although she feeds herself on the property’s grass, she comes around for a scoop of pellets.

Steve grabs a “flake” of hay.

Then he puts it in Bingo’s feeding trough.

After doling out this breakfast, with the temperatures still in the 70s, we’ve hiked along the Jeep trails that lace through the property.It’s a magical place filled with oak trees…manzanita……and other native flora. Near the house, we can there’s a pond ringed with emerald grass.On the afternoons when we decided not to venture out, we’ve hung out in the sprawling, baronial manor house. A swamp cooler protects the interior from the heat. (To my surprise, this system works as well as any air-conditioning unit and apparently costs a fraction of the price to run.)

The entrance is impressive. All of it is.

Here’s just a part of the enormous grassy lawn behind the house.

We’ve caught up on email; taken naps. I’ve written two blog posts.

I’ve reflected on the fact that never before in my life have I felt so removed from other people. Other ranches adjoin this property, but the house is situated far from any section of the perimeter. You have to walk for several minutes to reach the closest part. A gate and electrified fences guard the entire boundary of the property; I could take off all my clothes and hike the hillsides naked, feeling secure that I’d enjoy as much privacy as I do in my bedroom back at home. This thought shocks me.

We’re packing up now. In an hour or two we will drive off to the redwoods on California’s chilly northernmost coast. I couldn’t find a trading partner there, and if I had, it probably would not have been amazing. But over the years, several, like that first Paris apartment, have been. We’ve lived in a 300-year-old apartment in Venice just a short stroll from the Rialto Bridge. We’ve lived in a suburban American-style house in Tokyo just blocks from the insane electric crowds in Shibuya plaza. We’ve occupied a country house surrounded by its own stream and forest smack in the middle of Ireland. Our time on this sweltering ranch is totally different from any of them, but it will rank on that most delicious list.