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1 week ago | 
tomryan.substack.com | Tom Ryan
Let’s begin this weekend with some joy, shall we? Goodness knows the world could use it. I want to bring smiles today because the following three letters are the chapters revealing our visit to Mississippi in December. What had begun as a simple quest to William Faulkner’s home and grave in Oxford became the most profound days of our five months on the road. I was incapable of writing about it at the time because my head and heart had to come to terms with our experiences.
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1 week ago | 
tomryan.substack.com | Tom Ryan
Greetings from the lush green mountains of New Hampshire. It’s Bike Week up here. The roar of packs of motorcycles is a regular refrain. Thankfully, they don’t impact us all that much. Most of the crowd vacillates between the Lakes Region and North Conway. But now that the rain has ceased, and the temperatures will warm this week, we’ll see more of them coming by the house on the way to the Mount Washington Auto Road. This is one of the set points of summer.
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2 weeks ago | 
tomryan.substack.com | Tom Ryan
Yesterday was one of those sing-song June days where the sun was warm and the breeze cooling. The feasting black flies and mosquitoes were swept away by the wind, at least for a few hours, and the river had a healthy flow after this weekend’s rains. The sky would have been a perfect postcard background if not for the haze from Canadian wildfires. They’ve polluted New England’s air for the past week. The smoky sky was not all bad, though.
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2 weeks ago | 
tomryan.substack.com | Tom Ryan
A quick check in to let you know we are keeping on. It’s been a busy week of vet appointments and test results. We also switched to a new groomer, which is not easy to find in the Mount Washington Valley. It’s the best Samwise and Emily have looked post-spa day in years. Tomorrow, I’ll catch you up on all the results and let you know about our superb new groomer. It’s incredible to think that last weekend marked Samwise’s ninth anniversary here.
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3 weeks ago | 
tomryan.substack.com | Tom Ryan
Thanks to your votes on a couple of images, the complete set of framed photos for Founding Members is complete. The list is a fine baker’s dozen, down from last year’s nineteen. For the first time, Atticus and Will have entered the catalogue. There are even individual shots of those two. At the top of this post is one of two scenes captured during a dawn hike at the Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada. It has become one of our favorite stops on recent coddiwomples.
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3 weeks ago | 
tomryan.substack.com | Tom Ryan
One gift of a long road trip is the unknown. You have a plan to move from here to there unencumbered by preconceived plans and stops. It is a Zen pilgrimage—if you allow it to be. Moving down the road through places you’ve never been, dust is wiped from your soul, and it expands. To travel is to grow. It is freedom. It makes you want more of it, to delve deeper, to drink life in gulps of gratitude. That’s what Nebraska was to me. We only had a single day, and it was a long one, but now I want to return.
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4 weeks ago | 
tomryan.substack.com | Tom Ryan
The Samwise & Emily Founding Photos have been chosen, except for two. I would love your opinion on deciding the final framed photos. Although these are for Founding Members, the vote is open to all readers. And who knows, you may even be choosing a calendar image, too. Here are the options for autumn in the White Mountains. You can only choose one. Founding Members have their choice of frames: black, white, or wood. The other vote is for your favorite slot canyon photo. Choose one.
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4 weeks ago | 
tomryan.substack.com | Tom Ryan
“To those devoid of imagination, a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.” ~ Aldo LeopoldWe always leave the buffalo and the American West after an early morning visit along the dirt back roads of Badlands National Park. On most of our coddiwomples, we exit the park on the east end and merge onto I-90. And so began four dreadful travel days along that concrete corridor.
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1 month ago | 
tomryan.substack.com | Tom Ryan
Summer never feels right without a bear or three. Thankfully, the season has now been blessed. It was Samwise who noticed them first. It was dawn, and a mother and her two yearlings picked and poked through the foliage. We had a good view of them until we neared them, and they slipped into the dense greenery. This isn’t the best video because Mother Bear did not want to hang with us, which is actually a good thing. She gave us a few huffs and snapped her jaws at us as a warning not to come closer.
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1 month ago | 
tomryan.substack.com | Tom Ryan
The dismal, gray clouds and mists are gone. It’s been a long time coming. How we celebrated the stunning greens and the hopeful blues and skies dotted with the postcard-worthy clouds. It’s finally getting a little warmer, and now the black flies are joining the mosquitoes. Summer is finally here! Even if the crowds are not—as long as you don’t count Story Land or North Conway. Yesterday, outside of Grant’s Shop & Save, we encountered Lloyd from the Bartlett VFW.
