On The Road 2009: Epilogue - The Road Continues...

In a way that last post was a fitting conclusion to this journey. What more is there to say? The journey, this journey anyway, is almost at an end and in a way found its culmination and conclusion in my time at Cascabel in the Arizona desert... but I thought I'd make one more post to tell you what happened from there in outline, take a bit of a retrospective of the time of this journey and then to say "Thank you" to the many people who helped along the way and made this journey possible.

From Cascabel I headed back down the dirt road to Benson having breakfasted with Pearl, David and Daniel who run the Cascabel Hermitage Association (mesquite flour pancakes and prickly pear syrup!) and made my way west once more heading for the New Camaldoli Hermitage on the Big Sur coast. Before getting there I procured a new tent in Tucson and spent a couple of nights at the Plaskett Creek campground about 8 miles south of the monastery - arriving at sunset and putting up the tent for the first time in the gathering darkness - I think I made an OK job of it!

The week at New Camaldoli I was once more in one of the hermitage trailers, this time called "Doxa," a much larger trailer than last time and with a bigger deck. So I spent the week reading, soaking up the stunning scenery and participating in the liturgy with the monks. Yesterday, I left there heading north to meet up with my wife, Christine, who was flying into San Francisco - hence the picture at the start of this post at the Golden Gate Bridge taken just a couple of hours ago. We have a couple of days here to enjoy San Francisco and the Bay Area (currently sitting at a "hot spot" outside Starbucks in Sausilito), then we begin the drive north back home to Vancouver.

Along the way north I stopped off at Bixby Canyon, the site of Kerouac's crisis that he wrote about in Big Sur...

So now for a little retrospective in pictures of these past couple of months "on the road." I have taken literally hundreds of pictures, many of them I've put on my facebook page, and it's difficult, maybe impossible, to adequately review this time in just a handful of images, but it is something I want to do because of the contrasts I've been through - from the snow and ice in the north to the heat of the desert... so here goes:

From The Beaches at Toronto...