Well, I guess that's it. I made the final push last night. I realized we were within striking distance of the city and that to spend a night in Philadelphia would be kind of silly. So I made a big left turn and came home. There will be one more entry to the travel blog after this one, which will be sort of a recap and cover coming home and what that's been like. But for now, here is a brief account of our last rainy day on the road...

It rained and it rained and it rained and it rained. Then you know what happened? It rained. Finally, somewhere in Maryland, it stopped raining for a minute, so we pulled over and took our daily walk. We stopped at a gas station/food mart/lunch counter and parked in the back. Then we walked up into the steep, muddy woods behind the building, foraging through some thorny bushes until it opened into a large field. Another field of long grass, this time very wet. As we started to cross the field, it started raining lightly, but we went on anyway. The field became more wild and weedy as we went on. There was a single roll of hay, about 8 feet tall, on the far end of the field. As I plodded slowly across the field, stepping high in a vain attempt to keep my feet dry, Loona the dog ran around me in wide circles.

As we reached the end of the field, I noticed that she wasn't running anymore. She was standing stock still, shoulders hunched and head low with her tail curled behind her. I recognized this as being her hunting stance. But what was she hunting? I could only see empty, green field in front of her. Now, she's not the smartest dog in the world. I wouldn't put hunting nothing past her. But usually she figures out it's nothing after a few seconds. Here she was really dug in. As I got closer, I tried to follow her line of vision and I saw it. A beaver was standing in the grass, stock still, like it had been stuffed. It was trying not to move or breathe, hoping that Loona would forget it was there. As I got closer I could see that the poor beaver was frozen in a very awkward position. It was almost like a cartoon. He had seen the dog and started to turn away to run but the dog had clocked him so he was frozen in this left-leaning, twisted sort of "turning to go" position. Amazingly, I managed to photograph it, though I was far away so these are blow-ups. Might be a bit blurry.

After about a minute of this stand-off, Loona started to approach the beaver very slowly, placing each paw carefully. The beaver continued his bluff, though, not moving. I could almost hear him whistling and going "Hmmm hmmm. Nothing here but us grass!"

In this shot you can actually see his right eye and you can kind of tell that he's looking away from Loona. The balls on that beaver, man. Loona got all the way up to him, nose to nose, before he broke into a run. She chased him through the field, around and around in figure eights, at one point getting a paw on his back!

But He was too quick. He made it to the woods just in time. Loona pounced around the woods, sticking her nose here and there till, inevitably, she forgot what she was looking for and trotted away. She came up to me like "Hey, what's up?"

Yet again, we began a day believing that nothing would happen. That I would have nothing to tell about and nothing to show pictures of, and yet again I was wrong. Wild Kingdom right before my eyes. Although I think if Loona had to hunt to survive, she would last about a week, poor dog. We walked a little bit further but then I heard this noise coiming from the woods at the far end of the field (actually, the end that we stared at, which was now the far end) I looked over and saw that rain was falling heavily there and was making it's way toward us. I realized that we'd have to actually walk into the rain to get to the car. So we took one last picture in front of the haystack, I tucked the camera into my jacket and we walked to the car where I changed into dry clothes. We filled up the navigator one more time, programmed the Neverlost computer for our West village apartment and pushed on into the bad bad weather for New York City. That's where we are now. Loona is sleeping on the floor behind me. I think it's kind of a shock for her to go from eight days of this...

To this...

But in about an hour, my wife and baby land at Kennedy airport. I'm going to pick them up in the Navigator and we're going straight to our house upstate, where Loona has two acres of open land to patrol. So don't feel bad for her.

As for the future of this weblog, after today it's no longer a travel log. Like I said, I will make one more entry, probably in a day or two, that will be longer and sort of a re-cap with lots of un-posted photos from the whole trip and of today in the City. And after that... Well, I don't really want to let it go so I am going to try to continue this weblog as just a weblog. I will keep taking pictures and hopefully it will inspire me, as it did on the road, to make some small thing happen every day so I can share it with you for the remainder of this month of waiting. Waiting to find out what my future is.

That's all for now, my friends...

Thanks for reading,