June 9

Great ride to Hiram.  Lots of back roads, temps in the 70s, only about 2 1/2 hours away from Mt. Vernon.  I went to Hiram to visit Robin Shura.  She is the daughter of Tad and Carol.  I went to Kenyon with Tad and met Carol not long after I met Tad.  Like Pete and Linda in Houston, Tad and Carol were high school sweethearts who figured out early on they wanted to be together for life.  Tad and Carol have two great kids.  Brian and his wife are in San Jose, California, and Robin is nearby, teaching at Hiram College.  Actually, it's Dr. Tad and Dr. Robin.  He taught college math and she teaches sociology.  Anyway, she is one of the young, highly intelligent people who like me, and I ask again, what's the matter with the rest of you?

Robin is also just a few weeks shy of being a momma.  This did not stop her from fixing me a great dinner, including an apple pie because she knows from her grandmother, Helen, about whom more in a later post, that I love apple pie.  And when John, the almost dad got home, he grilled chicken and we had that, pasta salad and Tad's recipe for baked beans.  Small wonder I worry about putting on weight.  Before dinner, though, we toured the campus. Very nice with well-integrated architecture for a small, liberal arts school of about 1100 students.  Then we went on a short sightseeing drive.  Robin showed me the small hill that separates the Ohio River drainage from the St. Lawrence drainage.  Very cool.  Follow the drainage on the south side of the hill and you end up at the mouth of the Mississippi.  To the north, flow into the Great Lakes and wind up entering the Atlantic.  The portage between two rivers in these drainages was quite short here.  In this same area, we went for a short walk in some very nice sedimentary rock formations full of trees and ferns and poison ivy.  So we got out of there.

On the way back to the house, which I hereby name Robin's Nest, we stopped off to see Raphael, a Spaniard, whose wife taught at the college, and who has taken over an old church and converted it into a bakery.  He saw Robin, came down a flight of stairs to greet her, brought us back upstairs where we visited while he prepared a dozen loaves of cinnamon bread.  After he popped them in the oven, we went back downstairs where he took a number of loaves out of another oven, and offered us the last remaining cinnamon bread loaf from his previous batch of four hours earlier, all the while complaining about taxes in a Spanish accent.  He was just going to give the bread to me, so I waited until he started back up the stairs, plunked some cash down next to some other loaves, and we left.  He keeps goats at his house, delivers baby goats, and has offered Robin his professional services should she want him to assist with her delivery.  He bakes only on weekends and sells loaves about as fast as he can take them out of the ovens.

In addition to knowing wonderfully crazy Spanish bakers, Robin's Nest has a dog, John's, and a cat, Robin's.  Both took to me.  In fact the dog, Max, figured he could pass as a lap dog - he ain't one - and spent a fair amount of time sitting on me.

I have not met John before - haven't seen Robin in 10 years - but I think Robin done good.

Robin's Nest.

Max the dog and Spud.