FE. On, from Boise in Idaho, the drive is first on the open road and under the big sky, then winds up and down over a mountain pass to the town of Pendleton in Oregon, famous for hosting the Pendleton Round-up, one of the oldest and largest Rodeo events in the USA.

There, the Tesla chargers are conveniently located next to the Wildhorse casino, owned and operated by the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation.

Finally, we arrive at the Best Western and park next to a familiar car. Willard is here! He was driving from Maryland to Kazumi and Evan’s wedding in parallel with us. We drove mostly along US I-70 and Willard was to north of us, visiting friends and sites off US I-80. Rarely has eastern Oregon seen a Massachusetts license plate parked next to a Maryland one.

I had looked forward to seeing Willard, and hearing his “great” jokes. Here he is enjoying one of his own.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, he cracked up so much BEFORE delivering the punch line, he couldn’t talk, so the joke was a bit lost on us. After much prodding we learn that the end of the joke was that the last name of the guy in question is Sphincter. I leave it to you to guess his first name (hint it is the last name of a famous anthropologist).

RN: BTW, Willard is his last name. In grad school at UCSD, my friends called each other by their last names, so I was “Nishi” and there was a “Zieg”, “Weeks”, “Raper”, “Roberts” and “Zimmerperson” (actually Zimmerman, but we chose to neuter his name). Oh yes, there was also a “Poole” whom we called “Poulet”, and then switched to “the Captain” (go figure out which comic strip that came from).