Scattered Thoughts . . .

Our visit earlier in the day to The Palace of Fine Arts was beautiful and, honestly, I could have spent another few hours there just shooting photos of the gardens, architecture and wildlife.  I am drawn to classic architecture and this architecture is classic, immense and not something you see often on this continent.  Additionally, there was plenty of wildlife to capture in images all day long as well.   The environment, as a whole, was peaceful and comfortable while the weather was sunny and beautiful especially since we were still mostly accustomed to the snowy, wintry weather we had departed just a week earlier.  Unfortunately, our time in San Francisco was very limited since this was just one city of many we visited during our long cross-country journey by rail.  We had a lot to fit into two short weeks so there was no lingering to be done during any of our sightseeing excursions.  Before long, we needed to get going.  We had one more thing planned for our day after walking a

This is just a quick blog entry to write about some recent lousy health.   Since most people assume all is well when they hear nothing about health issues, I try to remember to write about some of these issues every now and then because all is not well with my health.  This is one of those times. Thinking back, this started with some mast cell issues for a week or two after we met some friends for dinner.  Quite often, just an afternoon and early evening out on the town can severely impact my health for a few weeks.   Then I had some significant spinal issues after removing some snow from around the house and the roof.  Actually, I am still trying to recover from the spinal inflammation and pain. Now I'm dealing with an annoying cold.  Unfortunately, a cold agitates and angers my already over-active mast cells which compounds and prolongs the cold and brings on all sorts of other debilitating symptoms.  A cold also makes my breathing issues worse and I've had a lot of brea

Note:  I found this blog entry about the very beginning of our cross-country rail journey in my "Drafts" folder long after I had already started writing about this trip so this entry is not in chronological order with the rest of my entries about this trip.  Chronological or not, it is now finished and published. I've been very undecided about how to tackle writing about such a long trip while sharing some of the photos I shot  (I plan to share only a select few of the 8500+ photos) and even a few video clips.  For now, I decided to write mostly chronologically.  If some other topic pops up in the middle of a different topic, I may stray from this plan.   In the months leading up to this rather complex trip while planning for this once in a lifetime cross-country journey by rail, we knew that we would be traveling for a minimum of two weeks.  The plan was to squeeze in as much as possible in this relatively short period of time.  Any delays, any weather problems an