Oh, I’m in love with this new recipe. I knew I wasn’t very happy with my last batch of gingerbread. That was probably 3-4 years ago, and I’d not made it since because that last time the cake was just too firm and dry. I think I bought some from Whole Foods a couple of years ago because somebody told me theirs was really delicious. And yes, it was, but I knew I could figure out how to make it better. Indeed!

All I had to do was go to my trusty Cook’s Illustrated site. I have an online membership, so I can look up their recipes anytime. It’s an annual fee, though, so I try to use it frequently, to make it pay for itself! As usual, when the chefs at Cook’s Illustrated put their heads together, they figure out how to make the problems go away. Here’s what they had to say on the header notes about this recipe:

Ground ginger, grated fresh ginger, cinnamon, and ground pepper ensured our gingerbread recipe tasted like ginger. Dark stout, heated to minimize its booziness, added a bittersweet flavor to our gingerbread, and replacing butter with vegetable oil allowed the ginger flavor to shine. To keep our gingerbread recipe from sinking in the middle, we incorporated the baking soda with the wet ingredients and roughed up some of the batter to strengthen the flour, giving our gingerbread a more sturdy texture while maintaining its moistness.

Now, around our house, we don’t even keep beer on hand, let alone Guinness stout! So my DH went to the store for me and ended up buying one honkin’ bottle of stout, about half of which got thrown out. But, oh well. I don’t like the stuff, and neither does he. There isn’t anything all that unusual about the recipe other than the combining of ingredients in a certain order AND the gentle rapping of the batter on the counter (to burst air bubbles in the batter) before baking. All of the steps created a wonderful cake. The pilgrims would be proud!

Actually, I made this cake to use the gingerbread in a trifle – a pumpkin gingerbread trifle. That recipe will be up tomorrow. It was fantastic, I must say.

What I liked: the texture (soft and tender); the taste (spicy with a bit of heat); the height (higher than some); the staying power (kept for about 5 days sitting on the counter, sealed up in a plastic bag). And the fact that there was no sinking in the middle. None!

What I didn’t like: gosh, nothing. I’ll be making this recipe again. And again.

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People in lots of places in the Northern Hemisphere are already experiencing much cooler weather, like it’s fall, of course. But in Southern California, uh, no. No fall. No cooling temps. The hottest part of our summer usually is in September and October. I sort-of have a date-goal, that by about Halloween our weather has begun to cool down, at least at night. But until then, it’s still lots of sunshine, no rain, and plenty of air conditioning going on in my house.

So, summer salads are still on my dinner menus, maybe twice a week, and on menus at most restaurants. Here in California, salads are on the menu at restaurants year ‘round. Which is why I went to a Phillis Carey cooking class recently that was all about salads. Main dish salads. And they were, each one, delicious. Worth making. Like this one.

She took some of the usual ingredients of a Nicoise salad (potatoes, Kalamata olives, green beans, hard boiled eggs) but instead of tuna (canned tuna if you’re eating it in France, maybe seared ahi if you’re having it here in California), which is the usual protein in a Nicoise, she used big, gorgeous shrimp. What a great concept. Then she paired it with a mustardy lemon olive oil dressing. Do use fresh lemon juice in the dressing – and add more if it isn’t lemony enough. That’s an essential flavor.

What I liked: absolutely everything about it. Even down to the capers on top of the egg. Loved the dressing too.

What I didn’t like: nothing. Deliciousness in every bite.

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It was just a few weeks ago – I was a real neophyte when it comes to Comeback Sauce. So much a neophyte that I’m like a dummy falling off an okra truck, if you get my drift. In other words, I’d never even HEARD of it. My ears perked up at the phrase. Actually, I was watching the Nate Berkus Show, and he had two of the stars on his show from The Help, and they did a cooking segment with Aaron McCargo, Jr. of the Food Network. Aaron had made a sauce and one of the guests said “oh, it’s something like Comeback Sauce.” Huh?

So, within half an hour I’d gone online and researched all about the stuff. What it is, is a cross between a remoulade sauce and Thousand Island dressing. The common denominators of nearly all of the recipes are: mayonnaise, ketchup, chili sauce, lemon juice and pepper. And sometimes Worcestershire sauce. I visited half a dozen Southern websites, and yes, I found a few boring-looking-sounding versions. Mostly they were equal quantities of mayo and ketchup and a ton of finely ground black pepper. None of those appealed to me, so I kept researching. I looked in my meager Southern cookbooks (no recipes for it there). But finally, I clicked on an online search result for Deep South Dish, a blog just chock-a-block full of Southern down home recipes. And sure enough, Mary had a recipe for a much more sophisticated version she calls Mississippi Comeback Sauce. She and I had a several-day email conversation about it and I promised to let her know once I made it. She also said it was fine if I put her sauce up here on my blog.

Assuming you enjoy reading all of this kind of extraneous trivia I bring you on this-here blog, you’ll need to humor me now as I explain a bit about the history of this sauce. It’s Mississippi born and bred. There is no wikipedia entry for it (at least not yet – Mary, you ought to start one!). I found an article written in the Clarion Ledger (the daily newspaper in Jackson, MS) back in 2001 which documents (sort-of) what they know about the sauce. It seems that it originated in a Greek restaurant called The Rotisserie in Jackson, Miss. a long time ago. It’s mentioned in newspaper archives back in the 1920’s and 30’s. But the sauce came into its own at The Rotisserie, and within a few years all of the other Greek restaurants in Jackson also had it on their menus too, or at least it was served in all of these other restaurants. Originally it started as a salad dressing. As time went by the restaurants began using it as a universal sauce – a dip for fries, a condiment to be served with onion rings or fried mushrooms, a dip for crudités. Eventually the sauce spawned to other non-Greek restaurants and it even became a side dipping sauce for french fried dill pickles. According to Mary, the sauce can be used on EVERYTHING. Sure, it can be a salad dressing if you enjoy the thousand island variety. I might use less of the ketchup if I were using it for salad dressing.

So, the other day I just had a craving for a BLT. Rarely does that kind of food craving take over – not that I don’t like BLTs, I do, but I try not to eat much bread if I can help it. We won’t talk about the fat in the bacon, or the mayo! Just the bread! In this case I just couldn’t help it. My DH made a trip to a little local bakery that makes lovely, thin-sliced soft white bread. While he was gone I decided to whip up the Mississippi Comeback Sauce according to Mary’s recipe. I used it to slather on the bread, and made the sandwiches with gorgeous heirloom tomato slices, Trader Joe’s thick-sliced bacon and some lovely purple-green-leaf lettuce. Here’s the photo:

The dark/black part in the photo at right is the purple lettuce. Under that the tomato, and the bacon on the bottom. You can barely see the Comeback Sauce slathered on the top and bottom slices of bread. But it’s there. And it was delicious. I should have toasted the bread. Just plain forgot!

Mary suggests it on a fried bologna sandwich, as a dip for fried green tomatoes, fried oysters, boiled shrimp or fried shrimp. None of those things are regulars on my dinner menus. Well, maybe some kind of shrimp, but not fried. There’s a restaurant here in our local area called Nieuport 17 that serves a luncheon dish – I think they called it Open Faced Shrimp and Avocado Sandwich. It’s a thin slice of bread, slathered with remoulade, topped with big halved shrimp slices, thin slices of avocado and a little bowl of remoulade on the side and a lemon slice to squeeze over the top. I’ve not been there for years for lunch (it used to be a great place to take customers) but I’ve been a fan of that sauce for years anyway. Now, the switch to Comeback Sauce should be an easy transition. Thanks, Mary!

What I liked: how easy it is to make; it’s really tasty. Yes, it’s a bit peppery, but not overly so. It’s tangy and tart at the same time. I can see it being a great drizzle on top of summer sliced tomatoes.

What I didn’t like: nothing at all.

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While we were in Maine, we spent a half day at a beautiful gardens, the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens located just out of Boothbay. It’s a really spectacular setting with lovely walking trails clear to the water’s edge (down a couple hundred feet in elevation), and even though we visited it at the cusp of winter, it was still beautiful.

There’s a photo of our group of friends. Jackie (far left) and Don (far right) are good friends from here in
California, where we live. We found out they were going to be in Maine at the same time, so we agreed to meet at the Gardens for lunch and a walk through it. In the middle are Lynn and Sue, from Denver way now (used to live here, but they moved last year and we visited them in June). They were with us for 2-3 days of our trip. My DH, Dave is 2nd from left, and Dinny, our dear friend from England, is 2nd from the right.

Oh, and last but not least, here was a really lovely home with some red foliage out front. That was taken near East Boothbay.

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Lately I’ve been on a roll making Aarti Sequeira’s recipes from the Food Network. On this particular show she made a vegetarian meal (a fruit salad, a lentil and rice dish [the main course] and this eggplant salad). They all sounded delicious. I had a beautiful eggplant in my refrigerator which needed to be used (given to me by a friend, Roberta, from her garden). With just one relatively small (globe type) eggplant, I knew it was going to need some additions to make it stretch to serve more than just the two of us. We’d invited a friend over for dinner, so I needed enough to serve 3. That’s just about how much this made, half of the below recipe. Maybe it could stretch to serve 4, but that would be it. The regular recipe would serve at least 6. In the Indian language this dish is called Baingan Bharta. I’ll never remember that – that’s why it’s just “Indian Eggplant Salad.”

This recipe has a significant amount of onion in it. And it’s mixed up at the end with Greek yogurt. And oh gosh, is it ever fantastic. The sweetness that comes from long, slow cooking of the onion, the eggplant, which is roasted in a 500° oven for about 45 minutes, and a few Indian spices. I can already tell you I’m going to be very unhappy when the little bowl of this is gone. I scraped the big frying pan clean with my finger to get the last little bit of residual eggplant.

The onions are cooked in peanut oil until they’re really golden brown. Not burned – watch that carefully – but nicely golden in color. Then you add in the roasted, peeled and cubed eggplant. Add in the spices last (garlic, turmeric, ground cumin, fresh cilantro, salt and pepper – – and if you can handle the heat, add in a serrano or jalapeno pepper).  It’s cooked very briefly, then you add the Greek yogurt (I used Fage non-fat – make sure you DO use Greek yogurt – it’s strained and quite thick – regular yogurt would make this dish far too thin) and it’s finished. You can serve it while it’s warm, or cool to room temp. It has the consistency of Greek yogurt (obviously) but the eggplant is very soft, and so are the onions.

What I like about it: the textures – soft (the eggplant, onions and yogurt), sweet (the onions), spicy (turmeric and cumin) all in one bite. It’s easy to make too, although it does take more than an hour to bake and prepare everything. Next time I’ll be making a double batch. It’s that good.

What I didn’t like: not a single thing. You do need to like soft food, though. Because the eggplant is thoroughly roasted, it’s almost a mush, but not quite. There isn’t anything chewy or crunchy here. A lovely side dish to serve with something more substantial. I served it with Tandoori chicken and Aarti’s lentil-rice dish you’ll read about in a day or two.

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What better way to use leftover pork chop meat than in a soul-warming soup with onion, carrots, celery, garlic, ginger, lemon grass, some Italian sausage, flavorful broth and garnished with fresh, crispy raw radish slivers and cilantro. And laded onto a nice piece of bread (underneath the soup). Yum!

Do you despair sometimes with what to do with leftovers? I certainly do. And pork roast is right on the top of my list. My choice is always to have just enough pork roast or chops for that one meal. But, alas, I don’t always plan quite that well, and I suspect you probably don’t, either. In this case I had a big pile of pork chop meat – it was beautifully tender and still pink inside. We’d already had the actual pork chops for a company meal, then two more evenings I’d reheated them. So I was fed up with having that kind of preparation. What to do?

Well, I went to Eat Your Books and searched through my own cookbooks to see what kind of recipes I could find. I didn’t want to continue to cook the meat – it was premium quality meat, tasty and juicy. See in the photo how nice and pink the meat is – perfectly tender. You don’t want to cook it hardly at all! So I needed some quick – flash – prep. Soup. That was it. I’d make soup. I read through all of the pork soup recipes I could find. Nothing quite seemed to fit. Parts of one and ingredients from another, an idea began forming of a mélange of flavors. Yes, I had a little bit of Italian sausage in the freezer too. Dave went to the market and got some fresh Napa cabbage and some radishes. And I made a delicious soup. Perfectly rounded out with flavor from the sausage, the cabbage, the onions, celery and carrots. I added in one of my favorite Penzey’s products, their soup bases  (both pork and chicken), some sugar snap peas as well. I cut the pork chop meat into little slivers (see photo) and just barely heated it in the hot soup then poured it over a piece of toast in the bottom of each bowl and garnished with the radishes and cilantro. Delicious!

What I liked: it’s a low-calorie soup, for one. Delicious flavor too. And I now have a fantastic recipe for using leftover pork (roast or chops) that will become a regular part of my menus. The textures are great (with the raw radishes sprinkled on top) too. Other than the fat in the meat itself, the only other added fat were the 2 T. of oil to sauté the onions and celery.

What I didn’t like: gosh, nothing, really. If I had Texas toast, that would have been nice – what I had was tender white bread, so I put one slice cut in half and double stacked. Or a nice thick piece of French bread would probably be ideal (that’s what I put in the recipe ingredients below).

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If you’ve never been to Newport, Rhode Island, you’re missing a real treat. In nice weather, it’s gorgeous. A small town, really, right on the Atlantic Ocean. And many sailors claim it’s the most beautiful sailing harbor in the world. Perhaps so. It can get wickedly cold and it snows some there in winter (I wouldn’t advise going there in the winter months), but in the shoulder seasons it’s really beautiful. I used to live there when I was 14-17. I wrote up  a post about this some time back. If you’d like to read that part, click HERE. It’s about cranberries, but it’s also about Newport.

I was surprised how much I remembered about the town, about how to get around it. I drove right to the first house (apartment) my parents and I lived in. Back in 1955, the day after moving in, we had a gigantic snowstorm that brought 5 feet of snow and we were snowed-in for 4 days. Everything shut down. As a kid, it was all very exciting. We didn’t have hardly any winter clothes, so we bundled up in layers until we were able to buy some during our 2nd week living there. I built a snowman, and we drank many cups of tea and cocoa trying to keep warm.

Here are the photos I took last week when we were there – top photo is the Chastellux estate, owned by a wealthy family. When we lived there it was owned by Mrs. Lorillard Spencer. I don’t know about now . . . The bottom photo is the former stables, converted into two apartments (we lived upstairs, entered through the door just to the left of the garage door).

It looked just like it did when I lived there. Fortunately, after raining all day getting to Newport, it cleared up (albeit very gusty winds both days) enough for us to enjoy the sunshine. Dave just loved looking out at the big sailboats anchored all over the harbor. We drove around Ocean Drive, the beautiful 2-lane meandering road that goes all around the southern curve of the island. I took just one picture along the drive, as there are almost no places to pull over or stop.

We also stopped to visit The Breakers, the fantastically ornate Vanderbilt mansion (a summer residence). I remembered visiting it when I was a teen, but Dave had never been to Newport, so it was all new to him. He was quite impressed.

No picture taking allowed inside, so these were the few I took outside. It was blowing like crazy out there, but beautiful nonetheless. We drove up and down lots of the gorgeous country lanes in Newport, looking at the homes there. And I managed to drive right to the second house my parents and I lived in there. We had two delicious dinners in Newport. One of the nights I ordered a lobster roll. Oh my goodness, was it good. So I had lobster twice on our trip. Altogether delicious.

Then, on one of the days I drove right to the Newport Creamery (actually we ate breakfast there as well). It was and is an institution in Newport. When I lived there in the 50’s it was the teenage hangout, and their reputation was all about ice cream, particularly the “Awful Awful.” Can you imagine a name like that for a milkshake kind of thing? Crazy. Coffee was the most popular flavor back then (now it’s available in many flavors). So I did have to order one – a small one, and with Dave and me sharing it, it didn’t last long. But it brought back lots of nostalgic memories.

And lastly, Dave just had to walk out to the famous local yacht club, the Ida Lewis (named for a lighthouse) Yacht Club. (There is also a branch of the New York Yacht Club there, but it’s all very highbrow and we knew we wouldn’t be invited to enter, even though we’re members of a yacht club in San Diego.)

There’s a photo of the long, long walking ramp going out to the Ida Lewis Yacht Club. Dave wanted to buy a baseball cap from there, but alas, the yacht club had closed up for the season the day before. Too bad.

That ends my travel and photo diary for this trip. The next day we flew home. So here’s one more fall leaves photo. Not a very good one, but we didn’t see many good ones.

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When you look at that photo do you think warm, balmy breezes, bathing suits and beach towels? Or brisk wind and promise of whitecaps? The first night we were in Maine we visited a restaurant (just behind me where I’m standing taking this photo) right on the water in East Boothbay and I’d bet it was about 45° and windy. A few days later we visited the same restaurant for breakfast (the photo above, their last day of the season) and it was closer to 80°. What a difference . . .a . . day . . makes. A day or two anyway. We did have rain several days of our week in Maine. Hard enough that we didn’t really want to go outside much. And then there were a couple of days of very warm, summer weather. Indian Summer, right?

We have a friend who owns a house near Boothbay, and she very generously offered to let us use her cute-as-a-bug Victorian house. She lives in San Diego and visits her house a few times a year. Thank you, Nancy, for letting us enjoy the Maine countryside and coast for a week. Here are some photos:

Clockwise from top left: the backyard (Dave is sitting in one of the rocking chairs reading a book); the quaint and cute nautically themed kitchen, the barn (where a family of chipmunks lived underneath and frequently darted back and forth in the yard) and the family room where we spent many hours reading, sipping cups of hot tea, and watching television. Mostly the Weather Channel.

Clockwise, from top left: the view from the kitchen table; the ultra-green grassed backyard; the formal living room including a very baby grand piano; and another shot of the kitchen table where we also spent many an hour plotting our travels in the area.

We took jaunts in every direction. North to Camden. Oh, what a cute town that is. Including a stop at Camden Cone, a miniscule ice cream stand, a favorite of Martha Stewart (she always orders Maine Blueberry). It was drizzling some of the time there; I didn’t even lug my camera as we darted in and out of the cute local stores. We ate dinner twice at a place in Boothbay Harbor called The Thistle Inn. One of the best restaurants on the whole trip, according to me. Very innovative food, and just full of flavor. We cooked dinner in on three of our nights. I made the the Risotto with Turkey Sausage (and corn, leeks, spinach) for us all.

West to Brunswick, where Dinny and I visited the Bowdoin College’s art museum, to see an Edward Hopper exhibit. THAT was really interesting. I studied Hopper’s work  back when I was in college (Art History), and knew there were stories to tell about his art, although he’s known as a realist. Learning more about his art career, and his eventual success painting lighthouses in Maine, was enlightening. This one is my favorite – at least my favorite of the hundred or so paintings on exhibit. I like the colors, the sky, the angles. This one, called Captain Upton’s House was painted toward the end of his life. Watching a 30-minute video about his art at the exhibit, we learned that he and his wife (also a painter, but she eventually took over managing her husband’s career) would conjure up stories about the people who appear in some of his paintings. Apparently some museum has all of her notes when they were in the process of creating one of his “people.” Like this one:

One of his more famous paintings, this one’s called Nighthawk, shows 4 people sitting in a New York diner at night. I remember studying this one in college and as students we had to make up stories about the people, to explain what we thought Hopper’s purpose was with each character. Those are called allegorical, yet Hopper maintained that he didn’t paint with allegory in mind. It’s just that in order to paint faces or postures, he thought it helped to visualize a person before he set paint to canvas. The video we saw also alluded to the fact that Hopper wasn’t happily married, but there was no further explanation.

This has nothing to do with Edward Hopper. It’s a wall of a house near where we stayed. The folks who live here have a real sense of humor. That’s a painted wall. Or a painted garage door, I suppose it is, although I don’t think the door opens at all.

That’s it for today, folks. More stories in a day or two . . .

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Because we live in a huge state (California) that’s nearly a thousand miles north to south, we were surprised each time we so quickly crossed from Massachusetts, to New Hampshire, then seemingly just a few more miles and we were in Vermont. Then into New York too. And back. I don’t remember where I took that photo, but you can see some of the trees have lost lots of leaves already (from the tropical storm). I think this was in Manchester, VT. A charming town, if you haven’t ever been there. It’s rural, yet pretty, quaint and also upscale if you shop in the small downtown big-name stores. It’s the home of Orvis. And the Vermont Country Store. And a small designer outlet mall too. We didn’t shop at all except at the bookstore (below), but the shops sure were attractively built to blend into the local architecture.

We visited a gorgeous book store there, called Northshore Books. It was a big store, and just full of nooks and crannies of interesting books, large and small. I wrote about it some days ago but couldn’t upload this photo. You had to walk over this as you entered the store. So cute! So true!

We allowed ourselves two nights and one full day to explore the country roads everywhere in the area of Manchester. To Dorset. East Dorset. Or was it West Dorset? Ludlow. Londonderry. Our friend Dinny, who lives in Nottingham, England, felt right at home with all those names. We drove to Woodstock VT too, and it’s there that we saw the most damage from the tropical storm. Dinny had never seen a covered bridge. She had no idea what we were talking about, then we spotted one.

There in the bottom photos you can see the uprooted trees. We went across the covered bridge (fortunately it was high enough that the rising waters didn’t damage it) and took photos of the river’s edge. Below is a photo that hardly shows the damage at all.

We did visit Fort Ticonderoga, having never been in that part of the country before. We took a quaint little ferry (we were the only car on it) across Lake Champlain (quite narrow at that spot).

It was cold, blowing and some mist in the air on the short ferry ride across. The fort is just on the other side. I didn’t go inside (Dave did) because it was raining lightly. And my foot hurt that day.

The grounds of the Fort were quite beautiful. I think the Fort is owned by a private family who bought it in 1809. I did snap a few photos.

The road less traveled. Probably not worthy of a painting, but I thought the view was pretty.

You can see why the Army thought this was a safe and defendable location on the lake. We drove down to Albany, NY to pick up our friend Dinny who flew in from England to go with us on most of this trip. That all went well – she was waiting for us in the airport lounge and we were off and running within a few minutes. We zipped back to Vermont.

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This is most likely the prettiest tree photo I took on our leaf-peeping trip.

Now that I’m home, and CAN upload photos, it’s as if I need to start at the very beginning of our trip, 3 weeks ago, and begin telling you about it. I won’t bore you with day by day photos – but will give you some of the highlights. On the last day of our vacation a very kind gentleman explained to me why we saw such poor changing leaves. He said it was because when Hurricane Irene hit the east coast some weeks ago, it brought lots of salty, wet air onto the trees. Trees don’t like salt, so the leaves not only blew off during the hurricane (tropical storm), but those left on frizzled and died rather than going through their usual cycle of colors. That story made sense. Don’t know if it’s true or not. We did see some leaves – mostly in Maine, but the trees seemed quite sparse but I didn’t exactly figure out that most of the trees really didn’t have as many leaves on them as normal.

Nearly 100% of the trip planning falls to me when we travel. I enjoy it, but after years of making short and long trips, I’ve learned that we want to travel at our pace – sometimes it’s a fast one – other times we take more time. This trip it was the latter. The more I read about things to do and see in New England, the more days I added on to our journey. Our first stop was Lake Winnipesaukee. I did upload a couple of photos from there, but they were very small and fuzzy because I tried to increase their size after I uploaded them (bad idea). I’ve now uploaded the full sized ones if you’re interested, you can click back to that post to see them. It rained while we were there, so the photos aren’t the best. The Lake, however, is certainly beautiful. And huge. Mostly private property, it’s hard to see the lakeside except in a few places. We drove all the way around the lake – that takes hours if you make any stops along the way. The rain reduced to a drizzle a couple of times so I did get out and take some photos.

Both photos were taken from our hotel room or across the street from it in Meredith, NH. One of the few places you have lake access. I noticed all the Adirondack chairs everywhere. And just a few leaves changing color across the way.

We spent 2 nights in Meredith because I wanted to have a full day to drive all around the lake. On the NNE side of the lake there’s a house called Castle in the Clouds. Built in 1914, the house was the very forefront of home building in its day (craftsman style). A shoe manufacturer, Tom Plant, built it when the lake was still quite remote. We took a tour and learned all about the history of the house and the families who have owned it.

There are exterior photos. Notice that the house is all built of rock.

The home isn’t gigantic – probably about 4,000 square feet maybe – but that was huge in 1914. The grounds are beautiful (often used for weddings).

We headed north from there, up to Conway and North Conway, then on up into the White Mountains. I allowed us an extra day there so we could criss-cross all the highways in that part of the state, hoping for lots of changing trees. The only place we saw them was on the Kancamagus (pronounced Kank-ah-maw-gus or just “the Kank”), but it was absolutely pouring buckets as we drove through it. It’s a 26-mile stretch of curvy highway. I was gripping the wheel tightly through there as the roads were slick.

We stopped at the Cabot Creamery (cheese fame) and shopped a little bit. A very large tour bus was also sharing the parking lot with us (as well as another 20 or more cars) and as we were leaving the bus headed down the steep slope of driveway and as it reached the road and began making a wide-sweep turn, the read end of the bus hit the steep driveway and stopped it dead in its tracks, completely blocking the road from one side to the other. Fortunately after 10 minutes or so some kind bystanders began directing traffic – and we were able to sidle past the bus and head out the other direction. Thank goodness for the GPS – it guided us another way – maybe even prettier than the highway we had been on.

More tomorrow . . .

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