We flew back from Athens through Paris to Virginia, and stayed a few days to see my godmother, who had flown down from Montreal to see us. We took off in the very-packed Outback and headed straight to Chicago, where we stayed with our friends Matt and Jeff in their fabulous apartment. Our eastward trip had visited the South of the country, so we wanted to go back visiting the North.

My college friend Craig had moved to Milwaukee, so we hopped up to spend a few days with him. It's worth checking out the Milwaukee Art Museum, it has some very nice things. Also, it helps to have a good sense of direction in Milwaukee.

Our northern route was cut short because we wanted to visit friends in Colorado and in Arizona. We'll visit the Northwest some other time. In Denver we stayed with our friends David and Kate and their son Aiden. Denver sports the Black American West Museum, where we bought a book for Jennifer's mother Sylvia, who is a historian specializing in the history of black people during the California gold rush.

We had less time than on the eastward trip, and that made for a significantly less memorable vacation, but we did stop at Meteor Crater in Arizona, a 4000-foot diameter crater created by a meteor 50,000 years ago.

Our friend Alex's parents, Bill and Niki, had just moved to Scottsdale and built a house there, so 10 of us got together to see them and the house. It's practically a resort in the desert, with two guest houses and a pool. It's a perfect place to sit around and relax. Our biggest effort was making personal pizzas in Bill's imported pizza oven from Italy. We've since all gone back twice, it's becoming a tradition.

We left the oasis, spent a night with our friend Alina in Pasadena, and returned to San Francisco. We stayed at Elke's apartment (a.k.a. "The Crack Shack") for a few weeks while finding a place to live. We settled on a loft in Potrero Hill. Lofts started out being light-industrial warehouses that had been converted to large one-room apartments, but they became so fashionable that people started "purpose-building" them, as they say in England.

Shawn, my friend and co-worker from PDI, had just started working for a start-up company called Kaleidescape, so I went to work with him there. As I write this it's been over a year and we're about to release our first product. Jennifer returned to the Berkeley Extension program for interior design as a full-time student. And thus ended our one-and-a-half year trip away from home. I'd recommended it to anybody.