Maybe my youngest son took to heart my love of birds when he started his window-washing business, naming it Birds Beware. Or perhaps it was just a catchy phrase. 

In any event, there are some birds, even in Colorado, that need to beware, not of crashes into mirror-like windows, but of my wrath.  The most notable are starlings.  The males are so black they look like patent leather.  And their eyes are a gleaming, devilish yellow.

When we moved to the old ranch where we lived for 35 years, it looked like the “Little House on the Prairie” but not nearly so romantic.  In a word, or rather, three for emphasis, it was dry, dry, dry.  Nothing grew there.  There’s a name for an area that’s almost a desert.  We moved into a one-room cabin built in 1914 in an “almost desert”.  The views, however, were amazing!  As we were fixing it up – adding a sleeping loft for the kids, carpet, windows, etc., our youngest then was two-year old David.  He’s now married to beautiful Sandra introduced in “What About In-Laws?”  David dubbed the little cabin our “cabin-house” as I mentioned in “An Homage to Feathers”.  That, naturally, stuck.

But with time, work and lots and lots of water (maybe “work” and “water” should be reversed) our little spot blossomed.  Since I started this story with birds in mind, I should mention that birds didn’t really take to the “cabin-house” much.  This was undoubtedly because our lonesome home became the Valley’s dumping place for all the stray cats in Colorado.  Since this blog is in the category of  “The Life in Our Lives”,  I’m sure I’ll get around to sharing multitudes of cat tales.  But for now, I’m sticking with birds.

 I loved birds then, too, but felt I would be doing them a dis-service if I attracted them with feeders only to provide breakfast, lunch and dinner for all the cats.  There was also the tiny deterrent of my boys using anything that moved for target practice with slingshots, BB guns, etc.  Somehow the cats tolerated the sport or were smarter than the birds in avoiding being shot at.  Or more likely, there were so many of the somewhat wild felines that we never noticed when one went missing.

But as the area sprouted new homes, and our trees became larger and the yard bigger, more flowers, etc., stray cats appeared less regularly.  With only two boys left at home, and one beloved cat named Peeve (my youngest came up with that since this black beauty was his “pet peeve”.), I felt it was time to encourage birds to make our home – theirs.  So I got the advice from my friend that I mentioned in “Feathers that Delight” and began putting bird-feeders everywhere.  I think the final count was twelve.  I tried to attract all kinds of birds with various types of feeders and foods.  During this time, as my youngest was entering middle school and second-to- youngest, high school, my husband and I were grief stricken by the thought of our child-rearing days reaching a conclusion.  We wanted to spend every last minute of it with our last two boys.  So we began home-schooling them.  We got a curriculum from Clon Lara in Michigan.  It included lots of  space for creative projects.  Both boys made great use of that in various ways.  The one related to my birds was that they each built a pond. 

To digress a moment: the youngest and his five-year old niece (my first grand-daughter) hand dug their little pond, spending an entire summer on the project.  Those two little people worked hand-in-hand diligently until there was a lovely (tiny) pond in our yard.  They even put in a tiny waterfall.  It was just too cute, landscaped naturally with a wooden bench next to it that my third-to-youngest had made in shop class at “real” school (as the older ones called their education).

Meanwhile, the older of the two youngest, Jacob, was watching and researching ponds on the computer.  That was a skill the youngest hadn’t quite mastered.  By the next spring Jacob embarked on his pond project.  He cajoled his Dad and I into renting a back-hoe and began tearing up the yard.  This was a bit disconcerting, but we were loathe to stifle his creative spirit.  We wondered at our leniency when he cut the natural gas line leading to our house and almost blew up the entire forty acres including our little family of four.

 I mentioned earlier that birds feed in different ways.  Some  like to perch when they eat, some like to eat from a flat surface, some pick their food from the ground, some eat up-side-down!  And of course some, like hummingbirds, eat in mid-air with wings flapping so fast you can’t see them.  They stick their long, thin and hollow beaks into the spout of the feeder (or in nature, the flower) to sip the mixture provided for them.  Accordingly, my feeders were all different, designed to appeal to the various preferences of the little feathered fellows.

That summer I would never be able to relate the number of trips we made to a river property.  A friend gave us access to this spot where we collected thousands of river rocks.  The two boys and I took our pickup down to the Valley floor day after day after day.  I became more buff  than I’ve ever been what with heaving large rocks into the pickup and then unloading them at home.  We lined the rocks over the pond’s plastic bladder until there was none of it showing through.  The final size was about 15′ by 18′.  We landscaped all around it with flowers and bordered those with lava rock, which was plentiful around our acreage.  For the waterfall, we traded pallets of river rock for beautiful, natural lava rock at a local nursery.  The last rock was heaved into place and the last flowers planted on August 18, 2000.  That’s significant, because my third-to-youngest was getting married that evening right by the pond.  Whew!  Finished in the nick of time!

Within the next couple seasons, I was enchanted that a huge flock of birds made our spot their home. They’d splash in the ponds, chatter in the trees and swoop from feeder to feeder.  With each summer, their numbers grew.  It began to seem like an infestation rather than a pleasant sanctuary.  I was becoming increasingly concerned that there were no little mountain blue birds, sparrows, wrens, chickadees or other birds native to Colorado visiting my bird-friendly retreat.  My “Birds of Colorado” manual assured me that I’d provided the necessities to attract  many varieties of  feathured creatures.

When my second oldest son and his family moved in with us while their house was under construction, I became alarmed.  The once enchanting birds began to swoop and target my two little grand-daughters!  I needed to research what was the deal with these “bird-turning-to-monsters”.  Turns out these were dreaded flying beasts feared and detested by most dedicated birders!  Starlings!  They were notorious for kicking  friendlier birds out of their nests, protecting their property, even killing other bird’s children!  Or stomping on their eggs!  Horrors of horrors. 

Again my knowledgeable bird-friend came to the rescue.  She said I wouldn’t have to kill any (though my murderous juices were at full strength).  I’d only have to scare them away with a BB gun or slingshot. The beasts would communicate to one another this was unfriendly territory and infest another home.

 This project was appealing to my target-hungry sons.  As well, my city-bred nephew was visiting at the time, and was enthralled to be in the west shooting  things.  He even used my outdoor tiki torches for practice.  He actually hit one which I only discovered later.  As I filled it with kerosene, it kept leaking out the tiny hole.  My boys reluctantly tattled on Evan, but I’m sure only to escape blame themselves.  This activity was good for Evan as it kept him from brawling with his sister.  We never found any bird-bodies to confirm he’d actually killed one.  Maybe he hid them well.

As the nasty creatures abandoned their now unfriendly home, they often left behind their babies.  This confirmed the depravity of the loathsome fowl.  Sadly, my lovely little grand-daughters would gather the little orphans up and try to nurse them to adulthood.  Fortunately they never succeeded.  Far be it for some odious starling to really think my home was his!  I did feel a smithereen of guilt watching my little darling girls trying to undo the results of my wrath. 

Gradually, as the starlings left, desirable little feathered friends began to tentatively venture into my sanctuary.  It was delightful.  Occasionally a starling would poke his beak into the area.  I kept little piles of rocks here and there to ward them off with.  I’d run screaming like a banshee, throwing rocks as I ran.  It had the desired effect, and soon many wonderful, well-behaved flying creatures made their home – mine.

As it turned out, Chloe became a “round robin”.  I’m referring to the old game where something is passed around and around.  I don’t quite remember the objective of it – just the passing around part.  And that’s what we did with Chloe.  He was too time-intensive for anyof us to handle for more than a couple of months.  But we all loved him while we had him and looked forward to his next visit.  Chloe is alive and well today, at the ripe old age of 27!  He’s finally found a permanent home with an older widow who probably feels about him much as my Nana felt about her Pretty Boys.

Chloe never learned to talk, but did he ever have a repertoire of other talents and tricks!  One of the most annoying was his insistence that the entire household wake up when he did – with the birds.  We lived, at this point, with six boys in 1000 square feet of space.  Any bird yelling his head off was going to be heard by everyone.  I tried all the tricks – putting something over his cage so it would be dark untill I removed it, trying to keep him up later at night (that usually worked with kids, but birds must be smarter.  They know when they want to start their day no matter how long they’d been up the day before.)  By the end of several months of having the entire family up at dawn, I was ready for Chloe to move on to his next victims. 

I wasn’t such a wimp that perhaps one obsession of Chloe’s would move me to disinherit him.  But he had a compulsive need to shred paper.  This wasn’t just the old newspaper.  He had a taste for my favorite novel of the moment, my Bible, wrapped presents waiting for the next party, unpaid bills that remained unpaid cause they disappeared into the shredded pile and ended up plunging us into credit check after credit check.  And speaking of checks, those too.  Not to mention paper money.  Not just the boys’ monopoly money, but the real green.  The boys found all this shredding entertaining until Chloe went after their homework.  Too bad we didn’t have Chloe when identity theft became such an issue – we would have had our own shredder for all important documents we didn’t want to throw entact into the trash.  But that wouldn’t have worked, because Chloe was an indiscriminate shredder.

Chloe loved the trash.  He thought he owned it.  When he was picking through it, if anyone got within a couple feet of him, he went balistic – chattering and hacking like someone who just inhaled helium. 

 Chloe’s favorite place for “down time” was under my blouse.  He’d plant a foot on each of the convenient protrusions of a woman’s anatomy and poke his little head out the top of the blouse.  He’d stay there during my housecleaning, bike rides, attempted naps since I was worn out from rising at 6 each morning.  Basically anything I did Chloe was content to stay nestled in my bosom observing.  My husband had real jealousy issues with the bird’s favorite perch. 

Mostly it was sort of sweet having the little feathered appendage to my body peeking out at everything.  Untill he’d decide he wanted to nibble at my earrings or clean my teeth.  That just was a bit over the top, and he’d be banished to his cage.

Chloe had some redeeming qualities.  One was he was potty trained.  I never managed that very well with my kids.  One was four before the bathroom took on any meaningful use other than at bath time.  But when I got Chloe out of his cage first thing in the morning, he’d perch on my finger, I’d take him to the sink, he’d stand on the edge of the garbage disposal and do his thing right down the drain! 

Chloe must have longed for a mate, because he loved the song “Pretty Woman” and would dance all day to that song.  His dancing was hysterical – always good for a laugh.  He’d move up and down to the music.  But the way it looked was as though the feathers sort of stayed still and something inside was going up and down.  Every now and then he’d nod his head to the right and left or get it going up and down.  But he was always right with the beat.  This was somewhat of a compensation for his not talking.

Chloe also liked to perch on my finger and be held up-side down.  That was a good party trick when we had people over.  Another people-pleaser was watching him clean the wiskers of the dogs.  He’d perch on their heads or on the floor when they were reclining there and just draw those wiskers right through his beak.  It must have not hurt, because he never got his head bit off.

In thinking about birds, it’s amazing how many things come to my mind about these precious fluttering fellows.  We once had a golden eagle perching on the old telephone wire poles around our ranch.  One day I saw a dozen or so cars at the end of our long driveway.  It was a dirt, almost one-lane country road with little traffic.  I was concerned there had been an accident.  But instead they’d all collected there to watch the giant eagle perched by the road.  I’d spend hours watching, waiting for him to fly from wherever he was perched.  He was nothing to look at while still, but when he took to flight, the sun would glow through his feathers.  It looked as though his wings were crafted with golden coins.  It was a marvel to watch.  One of my sons was sitting outside by our little pond and watched the great bird swoop to the water and capture a snake in his beak.  Astonishing!

Another family legend involved a young hoot owl.

We came home late one night and saw something laying in the driveway.  We stopped and found an injured hoot owl.  He’d been shot in the wing.  We were outraged and cared for him until the next day when we got him to the vet.  They were wonderful with him, and he recovered from his wound.  They always let us visit him during the recovery process and actually named him after us – Koski.  He finally was fit enough to be reintroduced into the wild.  So the wild-life rescue group was working with him, re-teaching him to fly.  After one such exercise, he dropped dead.  It happened that a blood clot had formed in the injured wing and broke lose.  We came in to visit him, not knowing this had happened.  The vet took us to the back  where Koski lived and to our amazement which quickly turned to horror, opened a refrigerator. He was “on ice” waiting to be stuffed and placed in a museum.  It was somewhat traumatic to learn of Koski’s demise in such a way.

As I sit here and consider the birds in my life, I feel as though feathers are dancing in my mind.  It’s a very pleasant sensation that I’m going to go sleep on.  I’ll continue with feathery experiences soon.

When my oldest son was about ten or twelve, I thought my four boys needed a little “fluff” in their lives.  They were outgoing and “manly” for little fellows, being encouraged by one another in their masculine pursuits.  My little parakeet was, of course, named Pretty Boy.  I enlisted the aid of all the boys to help me in repeating the same phrase over and over to him so he would mimic us.  Of course, the phrase they came up with wasn’t near as sweet as Nana’s.  It was something like “Howdy mates!  I’m Pretty Boy.  All aboard.  It’s now or never!”  Sadly our Pretty Boy didn’t have the level of intelligence Nana’s did, as he never repeated our phrase.  I secretly think my sons undermined my attempts to train him – probably changing the phrase when I was out of ear shot. 

What to do?  I had to have a talking “Pretty Boy.”  So I bought a cassette (I suppose today, if it’s considered “animal friendly”, it would be a CD).  It was specifically choreographed to train a parakeet to talk.  My family (and I) got very tired of the high-pitched little ditty on it – quickly.  We all were reporting dreams each morning revolving around a looney old toothless witch in the forest running around screaming in high tones, “Hi.  Hi.  Hello.  Hello.  What’s your name?”  And of course, Pretty Boy’s name was not mentioned on the tape – so my little guy was definitely not going to learn his name. 

Now what to do?  I had a double tape player, so I bought an identical tape, put them both on to play consecutively.  Pretty Boy would get a double dose of the addled old ladie’s chant – but only when we were leaving the house long enough that it would be over when we got home.  My boys wondered how I’d feel if Pretty Boy actually learned to mimic what he was hearing.  My theory was that once he learned how to say anything, I could teach him a new vocabulary easily.  (I should have known from my experiences with my sons as they learned to talk that that wasn’t going to work.  They said, and still do, pretty much what they want, and not necessarily what I want to hear.)

My Pretty Boy got pretty old, which was a feat in itself since we had lots of kitties and various puppies through the years (not to mention the snakes, iguanas, goats, lizards and turtles) who would probably have loved a, to them, “chicken dinner.”

We passed into the early years of home computers.  Our living-room was the activity room in our house – mainly cause it was the only room other than the kitchen and bedrooms and one (yes, one!) bathroom (and that doubled as the laundry room.).  So the large computer and printer was squeezed into our midst.  We’d originally moved into this 24′ by 32′ ft. cabin.  We put a loft in, which housed our first three boys and a friend of mine.  Her bed and a crib for the youngest boy (its legs were removed cause the loft was a-framed and wasn’t high enough to stand in, much less accommodate the height of a crib.) was at one end of the room.  That was divided by a curtain, and the other end had one twin bed with a mattress under it we pulled out at night for the two older boys.  Our bed was the couch downstairs, a hide-a-bed.  It was, for lack of a better word – cozy.  

Continuing to digress from Pretty Boy:  it may seem strange that a friend lived with us.  But it was a necessity for me.  Besides the fact that I loved her dearly, and still do, we had to cook on a camp stove.  I was pregnant with number four and the propane made me nauseous.  So Sue (we called her as my three-year old did, “Sa-hue”.) did all the cooking.

But that was our beginning in the “cabin-house”, again a three-year old’s nomenclature.  As time passed we built an addition with bathroom (previously it was the out-house and local hot springs for toiletry), kitchen and bedrooms.  It was with all this amazing extra room and a fourth son beginning to display early signs of high testosterone levels that inspired Pretty Boy’s addition to our lives – the earlier mention of “fluff”.   And the two older boys, now young teenagers, “needed” to have a computer to keep up at school.

It could be asked the relevance here to Pretty Boy.  This is the point in his life that I thought he was going to pass from our lives.  We had put him through a lot:  the awful witch-lady, confusing language lessons from many different family members, cages and aquariums with scary and threatening other creatures, prowling cats, growling dogs, cramped living quarters – to name a few (don’t want to embarrass my sons with accounts of their pranks designed to variously upset any living being - from mother, to Sa-hue, Dad, each other, Pretty Boy – well, you get the point.  There were, by now, five of them! – boys.).

Poor Pretty Boy!  Each day I was convinced numerous times throughout the day he was dying.  It was because he kept doing that “death rattle” I’ve heard people do right before they die.  “Ratatatatatatatatat!  Ratatatatatatatat!  Ratatatatatatatat!”  However, he clung to life voraciously. 

I considered taking him to the vet, but it was difficult just keeping up on doctor’s appointments for the boys.  Plus, though I knew Nana’s parakeets lived long and hearty lives, I felt Pretty Boy had been through more than hers and it had aged him considerably.  (As it had me.)  Plus, he was really no “spring chicken” anyway.  He must have been five or six.  It was getting confusing to remember ages at this point.  In addition, I was getting a little annoyed at the “death rattle”.  We had 1,200 square feet with eight people living in it, trying to co-exist with the boys’ countless pets (did I mention hamsters, mice, rats, guineapigs, rabbits?).  Did I need to hear “ratatatatatatatatat” through-out the day?

On top of all that, I never got over Pretty Boy’s lack of response to my efforts to educate him.  By this time, he’d escaped on numerous ocassions as well.  I couldn’t expose my ruthless feelings to my sons to just let him “go for it”.  (”Go ahead, Pretty Boy, see if you can survive the mountains, winters, coyotes, hawks, owls,” I secretly thought).   So, with the objective of teaching my sons compassion, I was obliged to always run like a “chicken with its head cut off” with a huge butterfly net waving in the air after my precocious Pretty Boy.  He wasn’t looking so pretty anymore and my memories of my Nana were getting a bit morose. 

But wait!  Pretty Boy becomes famous in the annals of our family history.  But only because my oldest son got his wisdom teeth pulled and had a nasty recovery.  What could this possibly have to do with a parakeet, you wonder?

On with the story.  Michael had to spend many days at home.  What better way to idle the hours away than fiddling around with the computer and ancient printer.  I didn’t like him to do it when I was around (this was “pre-internet-porn” time) cause the printer made this awful “ratatatatatatatatatatatatat. ratatatatatatatatatat” noise.

You guessed it.  We re-named Pretty Boy, “Printer”, and we all lived happily ever after. 

But wait again!  There’s an addendum to this tale.  And it, too, relates to birds and language – more or less.  By the time we had our seventh son, we also inherited a pair of love birds from my brother (Printer had, by now, sadly, passed on.).  My brother and his wife had actually succeeded in coaxing this pair to reproduce!  That outed talking in my book – by a long shot.  Of course that (reproducing) was something I could readily relate to.  Then too, I’d never heard that love birds could be taught to mimic, so I wasn’t trying.  Little did I expect that, instead of teaching a bird anything at all – Taco and Bell taught my six-month old son to whistle!  And whistle he did – before he ever talked.  I guess there’s always something to learn from our “feathered-friends.”

As I mentioned, birds feed in different ways.  Some  like to perch when they eat, some like to eat from a flat surface, some pick their food from the ground, some eat up-side-down!  And of course some, like hummingbirds, eat in mid-air with wings flapping so fast you can’t see them.  They stick their long, thin and hollow beaks into the spout of the feeder (or in nature, the flower) to sip the mixture provided for them.  Accordingly, my feeders were all different, designed to appeal to the various preferences of the little feathered fellows.

Back to the robin.  Have you ever seen a wren or an eagle pulling an entrenched worm from the ground?  How about a king fisher?  How about a robin fishing or chasing down a mouse?  I know I’ve never seen one at my hummingbird feeder!  (Although I have seen birds at it that aren’t hummers.).  It only makes sense animals have food preferences.  We do.  I love garlic and my husband hates it.

My same friend who got me going on birding (I’m, regrettably, still an absolute novice) told me that when you start to put feeders up and keep them filled regularly, the birds communicate that information to one another.  Pretty soon all sorts of birds will be visiting.  They’ll eventually nest in your area and return year after year if they’re migrators – or stay all year if they aren’t.  (And that too was news – I thought all birds migrated.  We always look for a robin as the sign spring is coming, but I discovered they all don’t migrate.  So they may have been spending the whole winter hanging around.  Then one day we spot one, probably in January, and think “Wow – spring is here!”  Duh. “Humans!”  those robins are thinking.)

I experienced my friend’s observation the last fall we lived in our old mountain home.  I’d been in Ohio at the Cleveland Clinic with one of my sons who’s had horrible and chronic headaches since he was two.  We thought a doctor there was going to help us.  It turned out he didn’t.  But good things happened while we were there anyway.  We went to my nephew’s wedding, I got to be in my Mom’s home, that I’d been raised in, for the last time. Of course, that was bittersweet.  I sobbed as we pulled away to head home for Colorado.  But I was able to glean many things I knew my Mom would love having in her new (my) home. 

I digress from my bird story.  When I got back to Colorado after being gone a month or more, all the feeders were, naturally, woefully empty and had been for awhile.  So one of my first chores was to go around and fill them all.  I had about seven or eight.  As I was doing it, about halfway through, I heard all this bird chatter whereas a few moments previous all was silent.  Soon the trees and bushes were alive with the happy flutter of birds!

It’s amazing the delight these winged creatures bring to the life of my Mom – and myself along with countless others.  It’s of no surprise to me that the Bible says that not one small sparrow falls to the ground without our heavenly father knowing it.  That’s as it should be.

For me, on a train, it’s impossible not to reflect on my childhood.  My Mom had four children in four years, the oldest a boy, then me and then identical twin boys (who made life nothing if not interesting through-out their childhoods).  My dad attended Carnegie Tech and we had no car.  So when Mom wanted to see her parents in Illinois, it was the train that got us there.  Back then there wasn’t the luxury on the rails there is today.  Or maybe you just needed more money to access it than we had.  In any event, my memories are of a large picnic basket Mom juggled along with all the other paraphernalia involved in traveling with four toddlers.  Included in the ever-receding haze of my memory is look-alike towheads causing every sort of mischief that can be achieved on a train.  I was a good little girl who stayed in my seat with my hair in sausage curls, holding and comforting my Tiny Tears baby doll, who was just as appalled at my little brother’s outrageous behavior as I!  My older brother was a covert participant to all the shenanigans, surely always ready with a whispered suggestion like “pull the fire alarm and then run like crazy!”.

The clickety-clack jarring of the ride always served to relax me to the point of sleep when I wasn’t being poked, prodded, hair pulled, baby stolen, pinched, tickled, provoked, teased – driven downright crazy! 

But if sleep did come, my dreams would float back to the iron horse of the Indian Days.  How those simple, earth-loving people must have been dumbfounded to see this huge smoke blasting, swift giant snaking through their hunting grounds!  The thought of them in pursuit on their little paint ponies shooting arrows at this fear-inspiring intruder leaves me with a hollow stomach.  How the iron horse changed their lives, and the lives of all mankind forever.  Now things, and more things, including weapons, could be swiftly transported to the masses and opposing armies.  People got used to and finally expected services and materials they would have never dreamed of in the years before the railways steamed into their towns, disgorging their treasures. 

I guess thinking about the impact of the railroads made me wonder when they actually got their start.  I was amazed to discover that the earliest known version of such an innovation was in 600 B.C.!  It was called a wagonway and was used to transport boats across the Isthmus of Corinth in Greece.  There were grooves in a limestone path that served as rails for the wheels of the wagons to rest in.  They were pulled by men and animals.  By 1500 horses pulled wagons filled with ore and coal on wooden rails.  The first steam locomotive was patented in 1784 and began being used in 1804.  By 1830 there were 39.8 documented miles of rail in the U.S.  Just ten years later that distance jumped to 2,755 miles.  Twenty years after that, in 1860, there were 28,919.79 miles of rail.  In 1869 the golden spike was driven in near Ogden, Utah, marking the trans-continental reach of the feared iron horse.

Since 2000 there have been about 25 accidents involving freight trains.  Probably a couple of the most notably tragic was the death of Miss Deaf Texas and that of an 18 year old football player.  The young woman was killed by the snowplow on a UP freight train as she was walking and texting her parents.  The engineer repeatedly sounded his horn, but of course she couldn’t hear it.  The young man was crossing double tracks in Indian Orchard, Massachusetts.  He avoided the first train and was hit by the second.  The most lethal accident killed 26 and injured 135 in 2008.  A double-deck train ran a red light and hit a UP freighter head-on.

Today, the only inter-city passenger train in the U.S. is Amtrack.  Of course, there are countless rail systems in cities all around the world, some underground – subways.  Now those I hate.  I don’t like being underground for any reason.  Even the tunnels our romantic train ride whizzed us through left me a little shaken.  Driving in Italy, where getting from point A to point B is a straight line whether you go through mountains or over deep ravines on massive bridges is a nightmare. 

However, tunnels aside, riding the rails is still my favored method of travel, though I haven’t done a cross-country or even over-night trip.  I hope that’s to come in the near future.