No, this is not The Return of Creature From The Black Lagoon – it is The Return of The Mother-in-law From Germany. Tickets are bought, travel plans are finished, reservations made for Jutta’s mid-May trip back to America. For the first time since she began visiting back in 1996, she will be traveling to the North Atlantic corner of the United States. Over the years Jutta has visited twenty-three of the fifty states primarily in the West but also some of the Southern states. This year she and I will meet up in Philadelphia and travel to St Michaels, Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay for a few days of sailing and rest while she gets over jetlag before Caroline joins us. Our road trip begins in historic Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and takes us west to Front Royal, Virginia for the one-hundred-mile drive south on the Skyline Drive National Scenic Byway to Swannanoa, turning east to Charlottesville, VA to visit President Thomas Jefferson’s home Monticello and then on to Montpelier and President James Madison’s home before visiting Fredericksburg, Virginia.

After taking the James River Plantations Drive to visit the Berkeley and Westover Plantations we will visit Jamestowne – the Colonial National Historical Park – and then Williamsburg. A lantern tour and concert have already been booked in Williamsburg while breakfast at the Old Chickahominy House has been put into the itinerary, too. Traveling north we’ll stop at Mount Vernon for a visit to President George Washington’s home and then we have three nights booked in Washington D.C. From the nation’s capital, we drive to New  York City to visit the Empire State Building for a nighttime view of the city, and then the next day we go atop the Rockefeller Center for a daytime view. Of course, we’ll be visiting Times Square and plan for a guided bike tour of Central Park. Our last day in NYC has us taking a ferry to Ellis Island to see the Statue of Liberty.

From here we head up to Buffalo, New York, and Niagara Falls along with a short visit with my Aunt Lillian, but by now this leg of the vacation is quickly coming to an end and so we’ll point the car south driving to Lancaster, Pennsylvania to tour a small corner of Amish America before boarding our return flight to Phoenix.

Back in Arizona, we have a traditional Hindu wedding to attend for our friend Rinku and her soon-to-be husband Yagnesh. A week later a short trip to Los Angeles has us visiting the Griffith Park Observatory – James Dean has always been a favorite of my mother-in-law – and then we’ll take her to San Pedro for a fresh fish lunch at Ports O’ Call. Santa Barbara is also on the list of to-dos with a five-day visit. Under consideration but not yet confirmed is a drive to Monterey, California.

We close out this trip with a drive to the small town of Pagosa Springs, Colorado for the 4th of July with an old-fashioned downtown parade followed by a rodeo and fireworks. The next day we are booked on the Cumbres & Toltec Railroad riding the historic narrow-gauge train through the mountains amongst the wildflowers.

Following this vacation, Jutta will have visited America for a total of 336 days and seen 30 states plus the District of Columbia. She has hiked in and out of the Grand Canyon, visited Death Valley a few times, snorkeling in the Florida Keys, strolled along the Appalachian Trail, dipped her toes into the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and the Gulf of Mexico, too. Jutta has enjoyed her visits to Washington’s Olympic National Park looking at moss and mushrooms in the rain forest and then walked on the glaciers in Montana before one of her many visits to Yellowstone. We looked up to the Presidents at Mount Rushmore and she helped drive across the Great Plains. She’s eaten beignets in New Orleans and visited Elvis Presley’s home at Graceland. My mother-in-law has been on a raft on the Colorado River, a steam train in southern Colorado, a fan boat in the Everglades, and the Ferris wheel at Disneyland. So for those of you who ask, and many do, how I can spend so much time with my mother-in-law – it’s easy with someone who enjoys herself as much as she does.