Day 79 -- June 18, 2003 -- Wednesday

We extended our visit today with son Ryan in San Francisco. We spent the day helping Ryan with his exploding business. We were telephone tour reservation agents for the day. Our job was to handle the 350 calls that rang into voice mail while the lines were busy with other callers.

This is one wild deal. Ryan specializes in San Francisco and Hollywood, but he has recently expanded to Orlando and San Diego, and is expanding to handle tours in most major tourist destinations in the country within a year or two. He'll need more phone lines.

If you want great tours in San Francisco, go to www.alcatraz.us. For Hollywood, it's www.hollywoodtours.us. For Orlando, www.Orlando-Tours.com. For San Diego, www.sandiegotours.us. For everything nationwide, see www.unitedstatestours.us.

We did our weekly radio show at 7:11 am with Dan McGrath of EX-103 in Palm Springs, California.

I didn't take a single photograph today, but I did add to the web site what I feel are the best quality photos from the last month. Click here to see the best of the new photos -- page 3. Here are the best photos from the first two months of the trip -- Page 1 and Page 2. The Trip Scorecard has been updated as well as our nominations for the Best & Worst of the trip and the running rating of the pie we eat.

Thanks to Kevin Fricke for producing a map that shows our route. See the Itinerary page. The two loops around the country are shows. Click on each of the "routes" to see the routes we are traveling.

The PT Cruiser was repaired. We shipped 44 pounds of accumulated stuff back to Atlanta today.

We received the following poem from a great college friend, Jack D. Kennedy:

America, I Love.....

I confess
I get so nostalgic
For a way of life
That slowly disappeared
Today I hardly recognize our country
Who'd have thought
That it could happen here
Time was folks said grace
At family dinner
And every school day
Opened with a prayer
Now we've got
Political correctness
The ACLU in on a tear
Way back when
We all spoke the same language
Back when we kept lunatics
Away from our shores
When did we decide to start this new age
Where the old ways
Just don't matter anymore
Once we were united
From sea to shining sea
With guidance from above
America, I love.....
The land you used to be

Jack D Kennedy

America is still a fabulous place, but I do agree with Jack's sentiments that it's a shame we have lost so much of what America used to be. This has been a strong theme we have felt again and again on this trip. We love the land America used to be.

The Daily Journal of Round America:

Each day, we collect our thoughts on a web page just like this. We drop in some of the photos from the day. Our goal with the Daily Journal is to write about the towns we visit, the sights we see, the people we meet, and the pie we eat. We write about where we are, where we've been, and where we are going, but we also make observations about what we've seen and done as well as about life in general.

You can follow our travels from the Daily Journal section of this web site. Other pages of interest include the running report of "vital statistics" on the Trip Scorecard, our nominations for the Best & Worst of the trip, as well as a rating of the pie we eat. If you'd like to see information for a specific state or town, click here, and then click on the state of interest and the full itinerary is shown.