Hey Mom . . .

This past Friday evening when we spent time with our friends Scott & Peg, our conversation included the topic of books. Scott told us that he's read 300 books in the past three years as Peggy, his wife, worked on her Ph.D. So we asked Scott to tell us about some of his favorites.

Of course when reading that many books, it's hard to single out a small handful of them as the favorites, so he responded his favorite is always the one that he's just finished. Scott did talk about several . . . Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins. That launched all of us into talking about favorite books.

I mentioned two of my favorites, Faithful Travels: A Father, His Daughter, A Fly-Fishing Journey of the Heart by James Dodson and Hey Mom, Can I Ride My Bike Across America by John Seigel Boettner. Scott & Peg had never heard of them, so when I got back home I found both on the book shelf and took a quick photo of each and sent a text with those photos to Scott & Peg.

This morning Peg sent me a text asking whether I thought "Hey Mom . . ." would be a good book to use with her upcoming autumn geography class "Canada and America." Well that question started a dialogue about the book and we sent several texts. I grabbed the book and began reading pages and found copies of correspondence I had with the author back in the early 90s when I used the book with several of my classes. Then I stated looking for recent Internet links and found several.

So this book has certainly had the most focused portion of my attention today and Mr. Fun and I have talked about our memories of bicycling the Oregon and California coastline during three different summers. One summer we bicycled from Eugene, Oregon to San Francisco in a two week period and two other summers we pedaled from San Francisco to home in southern California. All three of those trips are good memories.

With the temperature rising to 93 degrees today, it was much better to be talking about bicycling than to be out on the pavement pedaling.

Good night from Southern California.
Rosie (& Mr. Fun), aka Carol