Barry is "Home Free"

Odessa, TX   March 21, 2017

This is a day on the Excellent Tourbus Adventure that shall not soon be forgotten but rather than being of the “shall not be spoken” – “shall not be mentioned” variety it will be shouted to the rooftops and to whoever will listen that I have the greatest Sweetie-Pie in the whole entire world! For several years now I’ve been following an a cappella group that I first saw on a show that aired on NBC called “Sing Off” that I don’t think is even on television anymore.  Home Free competed in and won the fourth season of that show and I’ve been in love ever since.  I’ve downloaded all their albums and every time they post a new music video Barry becomes a conscripted viewer.  Love them.  Just sayin….

Flashback to Christmas morning  2016 and guess what?!!?  I’ve got tickets IN MY HAND for HOME FREE in a benefit performance in Odessa, TX.  All I’ve gotta do is get there and, nope, that’s already arranged, too!!  And, now, here I am.  I didn’t have any idea what to expect.  Their music videos are pretty great but they just kinda stand there and sing – incredible singing - usually in great locations, and they are really cute but still I just didn’t have an expectation other than I knew I was going to hear some really great music from the mouths of really talented guys.

I am here to tell you that boy by howdy I was just blown away by their concert!  From the very first song to the very last curtain call they just outdid anything I could have imagined.  Their beatbox voice, one of the founding members of the group, Adam Rupp is I-N-C-R-E-D-I-B-L-E – sounds beyond weird for me, a woman of a “certain” age to be raving about a beatboxer but wow, just wow!  The other founding member of their group Tim Foust is their bass singer and his vocals vibrated clear through your chest – like subsonic whale language or something.  Well, this is going off kilter here and not sounding at all like what I want you to know about this experience.  They entertain, chat,

This is a picture they took that night and had everyone post to Facebook.

engage social media, dance, and in general provide a world class performance that threatens to turn me into to some kind of Senior Citizen Home Free Groupie and ain’t nobody that wants that! 

For those of you who know me, and knew my mother, you’ll get what a BIG HAIRY DEAL this next bit is – their pre-finale, finale song was – wait for it – How Great Thou Art!!!! I mean REALLY?!!?  I just couldn’t believe it.  Their finale was Ring of Fire in which the bass nearly vibrated my eardrums out.  I L-O-V-E-D every single minute of it and think you’d need to search high and low to find a man that would buy not only you a ticket but one for himself, one for my beloved big brother and one for his wife my wonderful sister-of-the-heart, too.  Then he took me to Texas on an Excellent Tourbus Adventure and let me watch birds until my eyes popped out and we got through the whole entire trip without much swearing or yelling.  And then we got to have this kind of great time and the trip isn't even over yet!

Update on the Excellent Tourbus Adventure.  We enjoyed the grand circle tour of Tucson’s Oro Valley as we made a misguided, albeit game attempt to follow the IPhone’s confidently voiced instructions regarding the location of the University of Arizona’s Biosphere 2 project.  Try as we might, we just couldn't maneuver the Polar Prince (Barry’s new Ford F-150 with heated, cooled and massaging front seats) through the backyards of the million dollar desert homes blocking our path through the hills and canyons of this Sonoran Desert wonderland.  Dead end after dead end finally convinced us (and by “us” I mean “him”) to go back to the highway and perhaps look for the usual roadside attraction signs that seem to inevitably arise when there is a (Wow!) roadside attraction…

All this to accomplish a long-time wish to walk in the footsteps of Pauly Shore with a visit to what Barry continues to insist on calling the Bio-Dome.  For those of you with a similar heart’s desire, just follow SR 77 way out into the desert and you will, in fact, encounter the promised Roadside Attraction indicator signs.  It is quite an operation and we made our way into the visitor’s center, purchased our Senior Discount (ugh..really?) tickets and were whisked away by very enthusiastic senior citizen docents to tour Biosphere 2.  The complex is absolutely incredible and in an Exit Survey taken after our tour it was nearly impossible to answer the prompt to name our favorite exhibit.  And yes, for those of you with the compelling desire to know, parts of the 1996 Pauly Shore movie, Bio-Dome were filmed right on site. 

Our tour began with a 5-minute presentation by an entomologist from the University who presented on the charisma of bugs and their misaligned reputation among humans.  Did you know, for instance that bugs make up approximately 80% of all species on earth and represent the most bio-diverse and helpful of the world’s species?  You probably didn’t really realize how important this information and presentation would be – I know I sure wish I’d paid better attention – I mean it was only 5 minutes of my life and it was an information–packed, creatively clever presentation – and I really, really do wish I’d paid more attention…

After watching a 20 minute video on the history and mission of Biosphere 2 (can anyone tell me where or what is Biosphere 1?) we schlepped along with a tour group now joined by the single, over-arching goal of investigating the purpose of this multi-million dollar wonder of modern engineering – in fact I gotta tell you this thing ought to be on that show – its that amazing.  We trekked up and down stairs, through air locks and across platforms to view the tropical ocean, the rain forest, the tropical desert and down, down into the bowels of the complex to view the GIANT swamp coolers and enormous biomechanical lung that provide the life support for this world within a world (cause Biosphere 1 is our world – Planet Earth and Biosphere 2 is this man-made, genius engineered world within the world).

I’m not always a fan of spending tax money on figuring out how to live on Mars or determining what dung beetle can roll the most poop but I have to say this complex, which appears to be wholly privately funded, does a great job of explaining how each of these things and a million more of its research projects are critically important to each of us right now and, perhaps even more importantly, will significantly enhance our ability to survive the Zombie Apocolypse.  

Maybe the most amazing part of the tour was what I think they called the Giant Lung, which is exactly what it sounds like.  It is deep in the basement and this picture doesn’t even begin to do it justice.  The room is HUGE, bigger than HUGE really and has an immense disc suspended from the ceiling with attached legs.  It is surrounded by enormous rubber bladder-like things that allow the building to breathe.  It was explained to us that without this structure the building would explode due to the build-up of gases caused by the near-total seal achieved in the engineering.  The last demonstration of the marvel was a group yelp that echoed again and again and again – I’ve never heard anything like it other than to tell you that even the quietest conversation echoed through the cavernous space like the feedback of the announcers microphone in an old-school baseball stadium. A-M-A-Z-I-N-G! 

Getting out of the room was liking walking against hurricane
force winds on the bow of a ship! Wow!

We exited the formal tour (no more hand holding or guided explanations – and this becomes important in about 3 more minutes) and entered the self-initiated portion of the exploration.  We especially enjoyed the Mars Sustainability Project, which showed me, for the first time ever, the real benefits to some of these NASA projects that I’ve never really gotten behind.  It was amazing to peruse the living space of the original inhabitant scientists in the Closed Biosphere Project where they lived for 2 years!  And, at the end of the tour they even provided cookies! 

Wow! Cookies, cool!! Of course, after such a long, hot and arduous journey of climbing, crouching, stepping and listening a cookie absolutely seemed in order and I bee-lined my way right over to the plate of offerings.  Now, I will here admit that I noticed only the cookies – not the display accompanying the cookies – not the signage over the cookies – and certainly not the fact that Barry (the King of All Things Cookie) had moved in the complete opposite direction of the cookies… Assuming he had simply failed to notice the cookies (I mean, hey, you’ve been following along our travails, I mean "travels" as we’ve managed to get lost getting anywhere, right?) well anyway, I assumed he didn’t see the cookies so with my cookie firmly entrenched in my mouth, I picked up a second cookie which I graciously offered my cookie-loving and "supportive" husband…He firmly declined and in response to my wounded “I was being thoughtful with my cookie gathering” look he walked over and pointed to THE SIGN:  

OH! Chocolate "CHIRP" Cookies!!!

Not too many legs stuck in the teeth...

And that folks, this is how we roll...

We're Two For Two...

Hello one and all from the Excellent Tourbus Adventure 2017 Edition!  It is day three of our travels and we are now two for two on the destruction of RV Park Habitat in our travels.  There is no commentary solicited or welcomed in this latest turn of events, I've already said everything in my head that any of you could ever add....

This little trip consists of a mad dash into the heart of Texas to fulfill the wonderful Christmas gifted by the Tourbus Captain.  I am in possession of tickets to see Home Free in a "benefit" concert for the Midland Texas "Opera House."  If you haven't heard of them check out this link to their youtube site - I think they are wonderful and even better, Barry LISTENED to my heart's desire and I get to see them!

https://www.youtube.com/user/HomeFreeVocalBand  

From "beautiful" Midland, home of the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush (a Commander in Chief now looking pretty good in today's political landscape) we will head south into the land of drug runners and Coyote to explore the area of Big Bend National Park.  This, of course, is all considering a HUGE assumption on my part that both I and the motorhome will arrive in Big Bend intact, and, this may be a little more than any of us should be assuming considering the "events" of the last few days...

So we set out on the 15th full of hopeful anticipation and good will and drove ourselves as far as beautiful Bakersfield.  All appeared to the going just fine, no hostages were taken along I-5, we drove straight into the RV Park without the usual we are lost sightseeing tour and we arrived during daylight hours (the result of the lack of a "we are lost" sightseeing tour).   We dined in the fancy in-park restaurant and returned to the rig prepared for a lovely evening when BAM! BAM! BAM! came the knocking of a hell-bent, rabid woman from the rig parked directly across the road from us.  She drug Barry by his collar (I was cowering in the back of the rig) to see the carnage inflicted, she insisted, by us on her unsuspecting Dodge Caravan MiniVan.  Now, I ask you, do we have to take this seriously -- I mean really?? -- a minivan??  We were both oblivious but the evidence was on her side and we gamely accepted responsibility for the wide swing of our tail end -- after all I've been accused of that on multiple occasions.

After a one-night stand in balmy Indio we moved on toward our next destination agenda in Tucson, Arizona.  Things did not bode well when I realized that Barry had abandoned the Tourbus navigation device in favor of his cell phone navigation and, compounding the issue he kept arguing with it muttering, "This can't be right...what the hell?? and where is this taking us?"  Sure enough we were deposited right into downtown Tucson at, you guessed it, RUSH HOUR!  For heaven's sake? Really? What did I ever do to deserve this fresh hell?!!?  So, sure enough round and round we go with Barry insisting that the navigation can't possibly be right and me (only in my head, of course) thinking we were never going to exit this crazy merry-go-round of testosterone-fueled insistence, and I was going to have to knock him out and assume the wheel of this misbegotten adventure.  We finally (calmly and lovingly) reached the conclusion that he was going to have to listen to me give the turn-by-turn directions (HORRORS!!) and did make it into the park, albeit the unintended park.  Upon arrival we discovered we made reservations for the EAST Rincon RV Park instead of our preferred WEST Rincon RV Resort Park.  No problem really except these are narrower back-in sites and...

So...when I ask Barry over our delicious and beautifully prepared dinner under the stars whether he had pulled that bush out of the ground by its roots with the motorhome he acknowledged that he indeed had done exactly that but we would not be talking about it or anything else until he had time to "relax."  So...this morning after surreptitiously exiting the rig to memorialize the defunct bush in pictorial form I asked, "Are you sure that was you that ran over that bush, it looks pretty dead."  His deadpan response? "Oh yeah, I'm sure. I had to pull it out from under the motorhome and put it back on top of its hole."

All righty then.