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I met Gary Breschini, an archeologist who has worked with Native American artifacts for forty years.  After all those years of combing through digs, researching and writing, he says he finally has the knowledge necessary to tell the story of a people who came from Alaska south along the coast, making colonies on the Pacific Coast all the way south to the tip of Chile.  Now that's when the Americas were truly a new world.  

Gary Breschini, Ph.D. in anthropogy and archeology, standing near three books he co-authored with the Monterey County historian Mona Rae Gudgel and his wife.

I was privileged to be invited to see the temperature-and-humidity-controlled room in which the Monterey County Historical Society maintains the many records -- court, newspaper, tax assessment, insane asylum -- entrusted to its care.

These are the tax assessor's books, which record the making -- and breaking -- of Monterey County residents' American dreams.  Until the 1950s or so, the county assessed personal as well as real property.  These books show families coming to the county and becoming incredibly wealthy, and other families arriving wealthy and watching it evaporate.

These books, and six others like it, are the only records that the Monterey County Historical Society is forbidden to open.  These books can only be opened with a court order.

Outside the Monterey County Historical Society office, where I met Gary and Mona and saw the special records vault, I saw the County's memorial to the 105 men it sent to the Phillippines in World War II.  They ended up in the Bataan death march and only half the men returned.  The way they fought and died for their country, and the price paid by survivors as well, must never be forgotten.

This half-track behind bars commemorates the men of Salinas, the city that lost the highest number of men per capita in the Bataan death march.

Then I went to the National Steinbeck Center and had a thrilling time.  I spent $42 on two books, two postcards and a metal water bottle.  I was SHOCKED.  But the books were $16 apiece - "Winter of Our Discontent" and "America and Americans."  I want those two books and I want them from the Steinbeck Center as lifetime mementos of my trip.  Now I have to trudge all over the country with them.  But they'll be good company.  I'm also carrying Eudora Welty's "The Optimist's Daughter," which won a Pulitzer.  I'll be visiting her home and museum in Jackson, Mississippi.

A map of Steinbeck's route as he researched "Travels with Charley."  Maybe I need me a cute dog or maybe a cat to take on the Greyhound bus and name my book after, do you think?