more influences

Days and months are travellers of eternity. So are the years that pass by. Those who steer a boat across the sea, or drive a horse over the earth till they succumb to the weight of years, spend every minute of their lives travelling. There are a great number of ancients, too, who died on the road. I myself have been tempted for a long time by the cloud-moving wind — filled with a strong desire to wander. . . .

Basho(1644-1694) Translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa
(The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches

Among my many probably ephemeral ambitions as i travel through retirement is to learn how to compose haiku hence i quote from one of the japanese masters Basho.

My first trip is now taking form. It looks like i will leave DM on August 21st
and pass thru Denver on 23rd then spend a couple of days in Rocky Mtn Natl Park
before continuing west thru Utah and Nevada. I hope to stop in Great Basin Nat'l
Park, Lassen Volcanic Nat'l PArk and Redwood Nat'l Park before driving up the oregon coast into Washington and then stopping at MT Ranier. Nancy will be flying to Seattle on September 7th so I just need to be there to pick her up then. Otherwise
i'm pretty much "winging it". By the way I learned from CarTalk that the term "winging it" was derived from the theatre. Actors on stage who didn't have all thier lines memorized would rely on queues from prompters behind the curtains in the wings.
The unplanned aspect of this trip leads one to expect many errors and wrong turns. Error I learnt from Least-Heat Moon comes from the middle english word erren which means "to wander about" such as a knight errant. It came to mean "going astray" and then evovled into mistake which is derived from the old Norse and once meant "to take wrongly".

The annals of scientific discovery are full of errors that opened new worlds . . . If a man can keep alert and imaginative, an error is a possibility, a chance at something new; to him, wandering and wondering are part of the same process, and he is most mistaken, most in error, whenever he quits exploring.
~ William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways: A Journey into America (1982).