MaryAlice Musings and More

  yes, Bubbles here..we are off the train...friends picked us up...our house is very nice...we went out to dinner and had a great time.  getting off the train was like walking into another world.  our porter, Mary was great and made our trip quite easy and good.  we have made it all across the country and now we are here and today starts basketball and we are on vacation.  it is an amazing thing to feel as if you are on vacation and we are.  i have lots to say and you can see by the picture from last night's supper we are not in Maine anymore!  More later, have a good good day.

This is Bubbles here, I am feeling a little sad. I had decided to do a play by play as we climbed up, up, up the mountain range.  MaryAlice was enjoying the views so very much, and I was too. I thought that I was going to talk about all of the animals that I have seen since we got on the train.  There have been some exotic ones:  Ostrich, Llamas, even a Yak.  There have been lots of cows and cattle most of them out in big big stretches of lands, but some were in feeding lots,  there were even a really big herd of bison in a feeding lot.  There were some brand new babies with the Mom's I mean really brand new babies.  While I was thinking and remembering the animals that I saw and did not see, we began doing a very slow very winding climb up the mountains.  We kept climbing up, farther and farther up, and around and we kept going through lots of little tunnels.  I forgot about writing about the animals and began sharing what I was seeing, kind...

  Wow, wow and we haven't even made it into the mountains yet, I can see them in distance and they are all snow capped.  We are just now pulling into Denver, Colorado.  MaryAlice had such a good time driving through the midwest, Illinois and Iowa and as it was getting dark I think we crossed into Nebraska.  You can see for miles and miiles and miles, first the flat fields of Illinois, then dthe little tiny rolling in Iowa.  It was daylight when we crossed over the Mississippi River, there are very historical towns along the river and we saw some really old beautiful buildings.  When you look out and see some trees you know that there is porbably a house there as well, protected by the trees and surrounded by rich dark farmland.   Mary is our porter, and she is really funny, and boy does she keep us all in line.  That is a good thing because we are on the train for a long time and we all have to take care of what we use.  We slept good la...

  Wow, it is a beautiful morning.  I had the best perch last night, and MaryAlice slept for a good 7 hours straight.  I got to watch the sun rise while it was so very quiet except for the blowing of the horn and the rolling of the car wheels as we made it through New York and Ohio.  We are in Indiana right now.  MaryAlice has some new church friends who just moved to Maine from Indiana, so she was thinking of them this morning.  I can tell the MaryAlice is happy, she is from the midwest and it feels like she is moving towards home.  She is moving slower and is enjoying looking out the window.  We already saw deer, some fun birds and lots of open spaces.  When Margaret and MaryAlice went to breakfast she was talking about the open spaces, we are going to see lots more open spaces, big sky, and vastness.  There is very green grass here, but not any buds on the trees.  We are still in the eastern time zone, but we will redo an entire h...

  Oh my,  I has been one year, 2 months, and 12 days (but I am not counting!) since I left for a long trip.  I have been planning this trip for the last 4 months.  For some of you who I have not met,  my name is Bubbles and I use they/she pronouns, I got to be with my person, MaryAlice after Myah (MaryAlice's Granddaughter) gifted me.  MaryAlice loves to take me on trips, and when she does I love to blog.  I have missed blogging, and I am happy that now I get another chance to share my trip with you.   We (MaryAlice and her friend Margaret) drove in Margaret's new car from Houlton to South Portland yesterday.  It was snow, sleet, rain, slippery spring weather all the way from the top of the state to south of Portland.  But we made it!   This morning, we got picked up and went to the Portland Transit Station and got on the Concord bus. It was grey, foggy, rainy all the way down.  I love to ride on the bus, I love when ...

  Well, itis being quite a trip.  Yes, this is Bubbles,  we are both fine  and I haven't really been able to think about what I might like to write about so I have just been going along for the ride and enjoying the view.   I can hardly remember what I last blogged about.  We were in the Driftless Land of south western Wisconsin.  We are still in Wisconsin, but we are in Madison, Wisconsin, also known as the MadCity, Cheeseheads and Badgers.  More people live here than in Portland, Bangor, Augusta and lots of little towns, over 282,000 and I don't know how many of the 164,000 students that go to the University of Wisconsin are included in that number.  MaryAlice has both an undergraduate and a graduate degree from UW, she is an alumni, and a long time ago   Dick Wagner (it is so sad that he died in 2021) and MaryAlice were the first co-chairs of the UW-Madison GLBTQ Alumni Association Group.  She has been thinking about D...

  It is the third day of the New Year, and we are still nestled into the Dome Home in Vernon County Wisconsin.  I was so happy to just be watching and taking in all that was happening as MaryAlice visited many of places and saw many of the people that she knew as a young woman. I love my perch from the purse or backpack, this morning as I am looking out the big triangle window to the east there is "sparkle snow" tiny little snowflakes that are just lit up in the sunlight.  It is not going to make the ground any more covered with snow as the sparkling flecks seem to disappear even before they hit the ground.   We haven't taken many pictures but here is one of me hanging out in the window at Maybe Lately's where we had lunch yesterday. We were in Viroqua, WI (that is the town where Sasha was born) and we had all the Bader Women and Peg together for a really good visit that traversed many decades and appreciation that we were all together.  As you can see, I h...

  This picture is the first picture that was on MaryAlice's camera on January 1st 2024.  This next picture is the last one that MaryAlice took for 2024. I am pretty happy to be able to do the "Bubbles Blog" for the last blog of this year.  Usually I live in MaryAlice's car, and that means I have been on a lot of roads, and car ferries, and a few parking lots and a couple of drive-ins.  This trip from Maine to Minnesota on the train (well a bus first) with stops in Chicago and then another train so that we are now in Vernon County Wisconsin has been my first not in the car trip!    So the first picture of this year was driving home from Presque Isle, where there had been a Pride Aroostook New Year's Eve Party.  That was a fun way to start the year.  The next picture is from a window in Marcia's dome home looking out to her long, down the hill driveway.  There is no snow here, and there has been no sun either.   Since getting to Minne...

  MaryAlice, Sasha, "Auntie Kim", Myah and me went to see the Minnesota Frost this afternoon.  We were four of the 8,726 fans that game to watch the game against Montreal Victoire.  Governor Tim Walz was also there with his family, and he got one of the biggest applauses when they showed him on the jumbotron.   It was really fun to be at the game.  The skating was so very good, the game moved very fast, and it was too bad that we fell short.  I would for sure be a season ticket holder if I lived in the Twin Cities, but maybe I will take the bus down to see the Boston Fleet sometime this season.  The fans were great, lots of kids, lots of girls in their hockey uniforms, and lots of girlie music that sounded just right.  MaryAlice is a big hockey fan and she was cheering and making lots of sounds at the near misses and the whiffs that happened every once in awhile.   Amazing to see such support for the team and the league, there were ...

Wow, it was quite the holiday.  This was the biggest tree (the one pictured above) that I have ever seen in a house, it was beautiful and the celebration was even better.  We had a really good time on Christmas Eve.   I loved watching us drive through Stillwater, and seeing the lights reflecting off the St. Croix River. For those of  you who do not know, Stillwater is the "birthplace" of Minnesota, of course that is the colonizers story but we won't go into all of that because it is not the right day.  I just had to remind myself and you of that and also let you know how beautiful it is there.  This is a place where there are very old houses, not as old as in Maine, but pretty darn old and the ones that are standing are cared for and so beautiful.  It was a good night near Marine on St Croix and we came home full and happy.   Oh my, food, family, stories and fun.  Christmas Day we stayed home and people came to see us, Harlow and Myah go...

  I think I took a pretty good "selfie" of myself last night when I hopped into bed.  I did not go on a train or bus or car yesterday.   I didn't even walk out of the house.  I just enjoyed being with my family and friends.  MaryAlice has checked out how the house is doing back home, all is good.  It is a little colder there (by about 20 degrees) and it is snowing well it is almost sleet out there and it is very grey.  The snow is supposed to end soon and I hope all the roads will be good because we are going out for lunch today with Terry.   Having a very quiet morning, James and Sasha are at work, Sasha got called in and James is having his almost last day before retirement from the Tribal police force.  He is looking very very happy.  Myah is still sleeping.  I had a very good sleep and am enjoying just checking everything out, MaryAlice knows this house well, but this is my first time.  I love all the decorations ...

  Bubbles, here!  I am not on a train.  I had a lot of fun on the train,  I really enjoyed looking out the window, and I liked the way the train sways just a little as it goes down the track,  AND I am glad that we are off the train.  We had a long day.  There is almost always something when you that is not quite as scheduled when you ride on the Amtrak, and we had switching problems (that might seem like a global problem but I think it was about who gets to go on what tracks in the railroad world) in Ohio, and we had to stop a lot.  I liked that we were on the train on the Winter Solstice, it was warm and cozy in our little car and we just kept heading west.  I thought that we would not see any more of the great lakes, but we did move along on the tracks very very close to Lake Michigan, and you could see the Chicago skyline for a long long time before we got there.  We rode through miles and miles and miles of industrial parks, the fur...

  Bubbles here, we are 40 minutes from Elkhart Indiana.  We have gone through Massachusetts, New York, (maybe a bit of Pennsylvania I haven't looked at the map) Ohio, and now Indiana.  I woke up this morning thinking about what I might blog about, it is very fun that MaryAlice has turned the keyboard tapping over to me, I might get used to this task.  It is Winster Solstice and I will be spending most of the day on the Lake Shore Limited.  It was really cool early this morning in that soft light at the beginning of the day we were traveling right next to Lake Erie, I mean there was nothing but the railroad track bridge and the water at times.  It was beautiful and a little scary.  I was glad that I was not too close to the window, it made my stomach have little hiccups.  After we got on dry land we went for breakfast, I got to go along with MaryAlice and she took this really nice picture of me at the table.  We had to walk through our sleeper...

  Usually MaryAlice is the one who blogs about whatever she wants to blog about, but she has let me be a "guest blogger" so here goes.  My name is Blogger is I came to live with MaryAlice in 2022 after Myah crocheted me together and sent me to her Grammas house.  I have been living on the dashboard of her car until one day ago, when I was taken out of the and attached to her backpack.  I get to go on a trip with her to the midwest of the USA and I am going to share my stories from this trip that we are taking.  Hang on, it is going to be a ride.   We are just riding through Framingham, Massachusetts right now.  We have a little roomette on the Amtrak Train - The Lakeshore Limited.  It is really fun to see the cars that are stopped on the street and to hear the train whistle as we slowly inch our way through the little town.  We just stopped, this is our first stop out of Boston, we are picking up more passengers, but it doesn't seem like...