We’re heading back to Oregon today. We’ll need one motel stop in Santa Nella, California, then make it to Gold Beach by tomorrow night. It’s been a great trip and I’ve been able to do lots of magazine work thanks to my laptop and the ability to keep in touch via internet with editors, writers, and staff for both the print issue and internet site. We’re in pretty good shape going into the two-week print issue deadline period.

We logged about 6500 miles on this three-week trip. The energy show was a big success, and the get-togethers with Lenie’s relatives and my daughter Annie’s family were very enjoyable. But I’m anxious to get home. I’m not a natural travelling kind of person, preferring instead to stay at home and enjoy my place in the Oregon mountains.

My magazine batteries have been thoroughly recharged from the energy show in Wisconsin. I have a better understanding from meeting many readers first-hand of how important BHM is to a lot of people, and I’ll do my best to keep the quality of content high. Plus, I have a lot of thoughts I need to explore in future writing. For example, I can’t get the plight of Bradford Metcalf and thousands of other prisoners out of my mind. Every time I drove by a prison on this trip, and there are many prisons in this “land of the free,” I thought of all the average Americans who are locked away on convictions that I believe are not justified. I travel freely for 6500 miles and they languish in prison.

BHM, in my mind, is basically a magazine about freedom, garnished with lots of self-reliance information. But it’s freedom we are all really after. Hard core criminals and violent people need to be locked away, but not Americans who have technically violated laws but who are really no threat to society. Sixty percent or more of our prisons are loaded with drug offenders. Our prisons, in my opinion, are the modern gulags. But how do you get reform for a prison system that is now the livelihood for hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats and guards who administer them. This giant bureaucracy makes its living by incarcerating their fellow countrymen. Unbelievable!