In My Words: Kimberly Burton Allen, Writer

Celebrating Chris's birthday On the penultimate day of our cross country trip home, we stopped on the western edge of NJ to stay with our friends Gregory Anne and Mark. Mark runs a large estate comprising 400 acres, quite a bit of which is farmed. At this time of year, of course, all the fields are fallow. And full of game. Sydney: Oh Oh Oh My God. Let me the heck off this leash, I have WORK to do!!! There's something moving in there... And when she couldn't beg a trip outside (no way was she being let off the lead; she'd chase something into the next county), she was camped in front of the lovely French doors staring at the Great Outdoors. All over her face: Can I live here forever? Just wait, we told her. We're almost home. So the following day, on the first sunny day since we left California, we drove the final few hours to Southampton, arriving early afternoon. After we unloaded the car, I walked Sydney on a lead the perimeter of the back garde

Spotty Internet service and good company have interrupted my good intentions to post a daily update. When we say that we have on six or seven occasions driven between California and Long Island, Chris and I often get asked whether we have taken the “blue roads” – those highways “off the beaten track” to explore the small towns and lesser-known byways of this great country. Wind farm outside of Palm Springs And the answer has been, for the most part, no. On our way from Southampton to Laguna Beach, we are eager to get there…and on the way home, we need to get back. So generally we don’t stray too much from the main roads when travelling from one coast to the other. This trip, however, has been somewhat different. For a start, because we routed through Palm Springs, we chose to take a route that wound us up through Yucca Valley but then were forced to detour through the Mojave Desert Preserve , through undulating waves of Joshua trees before connecting with I-15 just wes

Doing my best to channel Steinbeck's "Travels With Charley" here. Under the heading of "What I Did on My Summer (winter) Vacation" -- Chris and I adopted a dog. The thinking was that if we found our next dog while we were on sabbatical in California, we'd have some time to bond and train and accustom it to us before we returned to New York and the usual madness of bed and breakfast life was underway. So with this in mind, we again drove cross country so that we'd be able to transport a dog back without the potential trauma of air travel. So six weeks ago today, we adopted four-year-old Sydney from a rescue in Baja California, Mexico, and she is a love. She's some form of mixed breed incorporating--possibly--Australian Shepherd, Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, Pointer, and who knows what else. She's little--24 pounds--about 16 inches at the shoulder. She's continually on the prowl for lizards and things she can flush out of the