Fire in the Valley

I heard something on NPR this morning that startled me:  the report of major fires surrounding Lake Chelan, in Washington state.  Why did that startle me?  Half of the west coast is on fire.

It startled me because I've been there.  In 2006, my husband and I drove to Chelan, WA to see what it was like, and to stay in a tiny resort called Stehekin.  I still have a T-shirt from Stehekin.  The trip was memorable for a number of reasons, mainly because a forest fire broke out just downwind of Stehekin, the day we arrived.  I wrote that whole experience up, with photos, in 2011:   The Flick Creek Fire

This afternoon I thought I'd look the fires up and see how bad it was - it looks bad.  I remember the area as bone dry in 2006 (when we were also having a heat wave); it's on what Washingtonians call "the dry side", east of the Cascades, which block rain coming from the Pacific.  Here's the official account, from a local TV station:

Wildfires raging near Chelan destroy homes

There are 5 active fires, 3 of them quite large.  The map below will dump you into an everything map (frankly it looks like much of both northern Washington and south and east Oregon is on fire).  Use the plus key to zoom in - you're looking for the group of fires north and west of the big empty area around Moses Lake.  The key fires are the Reach, First Creek, and Antoine Creek fires.  Squaw Canyon and Black Canyon are relatively minor but the Wolverine fire is huge, although it seems to be under control.  The northern tip of the Wolverine fire is right across the lake from Stehekin.  All these fires were started by lightning strikes.

Map of fires near Chelan

There's very little "there" there around Lake Chelan.  This undoubtedly looks worse than it is, but if you happen to live in that wilderness, evacuation could be a problem. There aren't roads, to speak of; if you want to go to town from the area around Lake Chelan, you take a boat, or a helicopter if you're rich. The official account from King5.com, the local TV station, sounds as though the firefighters have it pretty well under control, but there's a long list of evacuation and road closure information.  I trust they get it under control.

Photos from Carmel

I just got around to processing the photos I took while I was in Carmel for the Bach Festival.  Since I spent most of my time doing non-photographic things, they boil down to two groups - some shots of the Carmel Mission, interior and exterior (taken while waiting for the organ concert), and some photos of surf on the beach, just before I came home.  I learned on this trip that beaches don't appeal to me as much now as they did when I was 11.  Somehow the prospect of getting sand in everything made me take some long lens shots from the pavement edge and leave the soft white sand to the people who were willing to live with it!

The interior shots of the mission were very interesting, they have a lovely reredos (look it up!):



and the only statue I've ever seen personally of St. Joseph with the Holy Child instead of the Madonna:



The pipe organ is quite beautiful and visually very baroque.



When I got down to the beach, a couple of days later, it was a gorgeous day with a strong surf running, and I got some nice ocean shots.  I got a big wave just breaking:



and we mustn't forget the surfer waiting for his wave:



 

It was so gorgeous I was surprised there was only one surfer.  Feel free to check out the rest of the photos.

Dawdling Around Denver

We spent a few days in Denver, staying at the Castle Marne Bed and Breakfast in the upper Capitol Hill neighborhood.  This neighborhood is cool, very lively and urban, crawling with restaurants and coffee houses - and Castle Marne is also very cool.   It looks like a castle:

built of fieldstone with a round stone tower; it's been a Victorian home and a processing center for parolees, and several other things.  The interior is meticulously restored to its fussy Victorian greatness (that's a compliment, I like Victorian houses).  See more photos here.  They had the most delightful tea cozy I've ever seen:

The food was excellent, I really liked the staff, and it was a wonderful alternative to the corporate hotel (and it may even be cheaper, depending on the corporate hotel).  The weather was mostly nice, overcast but cool; we had one day that was overcast but 101 degrees!

Our first major excursion was an afternoon at the Denver Botanic Garden.  We didn't realize til we got there that they were having an exhibit of Henry Moore sculpture.  This meant that the gorgeous gardens were punctuated with huge abstract stone shapes:

I can never resist gardens, so I took quite a few photos, you'll find the rest here.  Take a look and rest your eyes.  I was especially pleased by the black-crowned night heron who posed for me in the Japanese garden:

 He posed for me several times and never even asked for a handout.

Green Deserts

You may have noticed this in the photos from Nevada.  All the deserts we crossed this year were really green, with lots of wildflowers ("lots" of wildflowers for a desert, that is).  We stopped at the Salt Wash Vista Point on Interstate 70 in Utah and took most of the photos in this gallery, Blooming Deserts in Utah. 

You say there's a lot of red rock showing?  It is a desert.  But we saw wildflowers like this:

and like this:

It was a long drive from Fallon to Fillmore, Utah - 448 miles.  Why Fillmore?  Take a look at the map of Highway 50 through Utah - we didn't have a lot of alternatives.  Fillmore had the most motels to choose from, and one of them actually had pretty good ratings. Given what the bed was like, I shudder to think about the others.

You can tell when you get into settled country in Utah, the sagebrush and creosote give way to irrigated fields, and you see buildings.  The water comes out of the Gunnison Bend Reservoir.  The first Utah town you come to on 50 is Hinckley, and we just rolled on through, it was closed, what there was of it.  By this time, though, it was around 6 in the evening and we were getting hungry, so we pushed on to Delta, which had something resembling a main street.  (It was Highway 50.)  A cruise up and down produced a choice of a soda fountain and the Rancher Cafe, part of the Rancher Motel-Cafe; everything else was closed.  Well, it was Memorial Day.  We took a chance on the Rancher Cafe and lucked out - the place is the local Chat 'n' Chew, I think we were the only tourists in there.  I had what I considered a good bowl of homemade chili (beans and meat, and not too spicy), and we chatted with the owner.  My husband didn't like his dinner as well as I did, sadly.  After dinner we drove on to Fillmore in the gathering dusk, past the mechanical irrigators spraying the crops.

The next morning we drove through Fillmore looking for breakfast.  The fast food joint next to the motel (Larry's Drive-in) did not appeal, but we found a family-style restaurant by the other freeway entrance.  Driving through Fillmore was odd - there were very few business establishments on the main drag, and a lot of beautifully kept houses, on huge lots.  And nobody on the road or out in the yards, at 8 AM, the place was empty.  I don't know where these people work.  I know where they eat breakfast, though, and so did we.

Breakfast over, we hit the road for Denver.  The drive took from 9 AM until 8:30 PM, but we stopped a couple of times, once to spend almost 45 minutes taking the photos in the gallery, and of course for lunch and dinner (dinner in Vail, very civilized after all the desert pullouts, even indoor plumbing).  If you've never driven through the red rock country in southern Utah, you really can't imagine it - Interstate 70 plunges between nearly vertical red rock cliffs rising (at a guess) 2,000 feet above the highway.  You're climbing steadily, but it looks like you're going down into a canyon.  It's overwhelming.  Sorry, I didn't get any photos of that stretch - the angle was impossible.  But this is a must-see for people who like road trips. 

The Rockies, of course, were green and beautiful but we just wanted to get on to Denver so we didn't stop for photos.  More about Denver in the next installment.

Driving Across Deserts

I've written about this before, on our 2008 vacation, and I think I described the experience well, so I'll just refer to my earlier post, called Basin and Range.  We drove Interstate 80 in 2008, which is a pretty busy road, all told.  On this trip we took Highway 50, and it isn't called "The Loneliest Road in America" for nothing. 

Highway 50 doesn't have the stately ballet of long-haul trucks and cars that I described in 2008, because it has almost no traffic.  On Interstate 80, you're usually in sight of at least a couple of semis and one or two other cars; on Highway 50, not.  So driving this road is a different experience.  You don't take 50 if you worry about breakdowns, or the fact that there's no cell phone service.

Note:  the photos in this post are just a sampling of the pictures at my SmugMug site, in the gallery called Crossing Nevada. You can see them all larger there, too.

Between Fallon, Nevada and the Utah line, there are exactly three towns, Austin, Eureka, and Ely.  However, 47 miles out of Fallon, where Nevada highway 361 peels off to the south, you'll pass Middlegate Station:

I wouldn't call it a town.  I'd estimate the population at maybe 10 (I found a 2006 post that estimated 19), plus some transient bikers and pool players.  This photo shows about 70% of Middlegate Station:

The rest of it is a motel, a gas pump, and a rusty propane tank.  And some abandoned vehicles. 

In all these photos, observe the crowded, built-up neighborhood.  Don't laugh too hard at Middlegate Station - it was a Pony Express stop.  Highway 50 was the Pony Express route.

It's 112 miles from Fallon to Austin, 70 miles from Austin to Eureka, and 77 miles to Ely - total driving distance 259 miles, and then it's another 70 miles to Garrison, just over the Utah border.  So for 329 miles, this is what you're looking at:

This may be why I tend to fall asleep on long desert trips.  I woke up when we stopped in Austin (pop. 340).  Highway 40 is the main street.

Since it's one of the only places in 329 miles with gasoline and rest rooms, everybody stops in Austin, including this elegantly turned-out biker dog we met at the gas station:

Between Austin and Eureka we passed the most interesting thing on this part of the trip:  the Sea to Shining Sea bicycle ride across America.  They were riding from Austin to Eureka that day, and we passed them on the road. All these guys are veterans and some of them are disabled, we passed at least 3 recumbent bicycles being propelled by the riders' hands and arms - and being "covered" from normal traffic by everything from other riders on normal bikes, to a SWAG wagon, to a local cop car.  We originally planned to stay in Austin the first night, but it was full of the Sea to Shining Sea riders, so we had to rearrange the trip.  I didn't get any pictures; I do occasionally take photos of mountains out the car windows but not of anything small and close like a guy riding a bicycle. 

My husband tells me we drove through Eureka (pop. 1,103), but I must have been asleep.  I remember stopping for lunch at the petroglyph site, where I took this:

I was awake driving through Ely (pop, 4,041), but I'm not sure why; this was the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, and the place was empty.  And empty is what the whole day continued to be, although we did get a glorious view of Wheeler Peak:

On the Road Again

Our vacation this year involved a lot of time on the road.  We began by driving from Oakland to Denver in 3 days.  The scenery was nice, because for this trip you don't take the infamous Highway 80.  We took California route 88 over Carson Pass.

Our trip to Carson Pass went through the Delta, always very pretty, and up into the Sierras, where there was still snow under trees and on north facing slopes above about 6,000 feet.  It looked like this:








More photos of Carson Pass are available at my SmugMug site.  The problem with all this snowy beauty, we discovered when we stopped to take these pictures, was that the only public loo in the entire pass was still buried under 7 feet of snow.  We couldn't even get back to the vista point where it sits.  Fortunately it wasn't that far to the Kirkwood resort, which is open year round and has public bathrooms. 

We had lunch at Caples Lake, which was just beginning to thaw - it's at 7,800 feet.

Caples Lake, I learned on this trip, is part of the East Bay Municipal Utility District holdings - it's the reservoir on the Mokelumne River - and therefore, my husband tells me, is "my water."  I responded that it's the water I drink, which is not the same thing at all.  We sat by the lake in the sun and it was very peaceful - not much traffic on Highway 88.

You come off Carson Pass into the Carson Valley, go up to Carson City where you pick up U.S. Highway 50 to Fallon, then east on Highway 50 across southern Nevada - "the Loneliest Road in America."  There are signs all along the road that say so, if you define "all along" as "in the 3 inhabited areas you pass between Fallon and Ely." We've driven Highway 50 before, it's about as desolate as you can imagine.   Normally, the irrigated pastures outside Fallon would be the last green green we'd see for quite a while; Highway 50 is desert, unmitigated.  But this year all the deserts were very green.

I'm always fascinated by the unmarked dirt roads that lead away from the highway into the distant hills - who goes there, anyway?  I'll talk more about the desert later, when I have some more photos up.

Random memories of New York

Checking some incidents in my travel diary, I found this note from one of our subway trips, which I just have to share verbatim:

Our trip down was enlivened by a young man (18? 23?) who spent the entire trip tying his yellow Spongebob Squarepants tie in a full Windsor, without bothering to button his collar or tuck in his shirttail.

Energy Bars

When you're traveling, the food you get to eat can be very variable.  We spent last weekend in Yosemite Valley, which limited our dining options; we mostly ate at the Ahwahnee Hotel, which is Very Good and Very Expensive.  When we came home, however, we had to decide what to do about lunch, since Jim wanted to come home via Crane Flat and Big Oak Flat (I forget which road that is).  Frankly, along that route at this time of year, you can't even rely on an open convenience store until much later in the day than we wanted to eat.  


We were in Curry Village when we decided to get something we could eat sitting in the car, by the roadside somewhere, which meant that "lunch" was "something we can buy in the store at Curry Village."  Jim had the remains of a sandwich from the day before, and he ate that; I decided to get a couple of energy bars.  


They didn't, of course, have any of the ones I like; I've tried both Luna and Clif Bars, and I'm not impressed.  (I like the energy bars Kashi makes.)  But I like peanut butter, so I chose something called "thinkThin," in the "chunky peanut butter" flavor.  This was the strangest energy bar I've ever eaten.  It had no flavor.  It didn't taste of anything; not peanut butter (certainly not chunky peanut butter, since it had a very uniform bland texture), not the chocolate which appeared to coat it.  No flavor at all.


A look at the label (I should have done this first) explains it.  The first ingredient is "protein blend (calcium caseinate, whey protein isolate, soy protein isolate)," followed by glycerin, and sugar-free chocolate coating.  (Maybe that explains the lack of chocolate flavor.)   They claimed it was flavored with "sea salt" but I couldn't taste any salt, either.  In other words, this is sort of "essence of food" without any of the usual characteristics of food like scent, flavor, or texture.  It said it had 8 grams of fat (probably in the chocolate) but I couldn't taste that either.


I ate the thing because it was what I had, and I assumed it had some nutritional value.  It's supposed to help you lose weight.  A diet of those things would drive you to a double cheeseburger with a chocolate milk shake in sheer frustration.  When we finally found an open convenience store, I bought a pair of Reese's Cups, and finally got my peanut butter fix.

Driving in the Desert

I recently did the "cross-Sierra shuttle" for my husband, who wanted to climb Mt. Whitney:  I dropped him off in Kings Canyon, then picked him up 9 days later in Lone Pine, on Highway 395.  In the meantime, I drove to Las Vegas to visit my sister.

During that week or so, I drove something like 780 miles, maybe 680 of it through the desert, in three separate sessions.

Driving through the basin and range country always fascinates me.  You have a long way to go, and the traffic is often quite light, so everybody drives as fast as they can - I drive as far over the speed limit as I think I can get away with, so I'm regularly passed by people who think they can get away with more.  The immediate roadside whips by, but there's nothing on the immediate roadside except sagebrush, and the occasional dead truck tire, so you focus on the landscape.  The road can be anything from a 2 lane highway to Interstate 15, and you share it with a steady procession of big rigs. The traffic all moves at roughly the same speed; occasionally a car passes a truck, or a truck passes a truck, at a relative speed difference of maybe 5-10 miles an hour.  It's all very stately.

The landscape is flat, with mountain ranges rising on both sides, anywhere from 5 to 30 miles away; the road trails across the middle of the flat part, and eventually vanishes into a notch.  You have a lot of time to watch the mountains rotate past you in slow grandeur. 

Occasionally you pass a highway turnoff, which leads to a dirt road, which leads over a low hill to - who knows?  A ranch?  An abandoned mine?  Once in a while the dirt road will lead to a solitary house, a mile or two back from the road, with a couple of outbuildings, surrounded by empty desert.  It's hot as the seven hinges of Hades - I don't think I saw a temperature below 95 on my car thermometer the entire trip - and you wonder how they can possibly live in that bare building, with no shade trees.  There are no shade trees, of course, because there's no water for them, which leads you to wonder where the people in the house get water.  It seems a little outside the range of the Alhambra man.

Driving through the basin and range country makes you feel very small and fragile.  The mountains are huge, and they loom over you.  If you ever took geology, you may remember what an alluvial fan is - you can see a lot of gorgeous examples of them.  The rock colors are beautiful and subtle.  All you can think is, I hope the car doesn't break down, I hope the air conditioner holds up.  Between Tehachapi and Barstow there is one settlement (I hesitate to call Kramer's Corners a town) that's right on the road (Highway 58) - you pass the towns of Mojave and Boron, but they're off the road a mile or five.  I stopped in Boron to find a rest room; I didn't see a building taller than one story (how would you keep the second story cool?).  The town seemed to huddle under the lash of a furnace-hot wind; and yet, the people were friendly and helpful, I saw an antique store, they have a museum to the twenty-mule team era.  They didn't have a gas station that I saw; they must drive to Kramer's Corners for gas.  What must it be like to live in a blast furnace?

For that matter, what must it have been like to cross those deserts, not in an air-conditioned car at freeway speeds, but on a horse, making maybe 20 miles a day (horses can go faster than that but they have to have water)?  Or in a Conestoga wagon behind a span of oxen (10 miles a day)?  Terrifying and beautiful. 

A Night Out in Las Vegas

First, let me say that Carlos Santana was great:  wonderful band, awesome rhythm section (all three of them), fine lead singers, and of course the man himself on lead guitar.  Santana is the most relaxed performer I've ever seen on stage, leading to a continual game of "where's Carlos right now?" as you look for the velvet shirt, the cap, and the red electric guitar.  He wanders around and stops to play wherever he is when his next lick is due, occasionally exchanging a high five with another musician.  And the lighting designer is a damn genius.  You couldn't really see Santana clearly from halfway back, but the video monitors did continual close-ups of him (and the others) - his face is mellow and warm, and totally focused on his music. 

Now let's talk about the venue:  the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino.  The concert was in "The Joint," their performance venue (recently upgraded, according to the web site).  I agree with their hype about the sound system and the lighting, both were excellent; but the web site raves about "seven VIP luxury suites and a prestigious VIP level." Don't think this implies any sort of luxury for the schmucks down on the floor.  We sat in folding chairs (cheap folding chairs), locked together to make a row.  Worse, the peon who numbered the chairs in our row (in chalk, by hand, on the underside of the seats) couldn't count; our tickets were for seats 4 and 5, and the seats in our row were numbered "3 4 6 7...," so they effectively sold us a non-existent seat. The ushers on the floor finally got everybody settled in, and the seats really were quite good, except for the six-foot dude in front of me who spent almost the entire concert standing up and grooving.  Fortunately the two video monitors gave a continuous if disjointed view of the stage action.

I brought earplugs with me.  I can't imagine why I didn't think to take them to the show.  I think my hearing has largely recovered.

No place that seats 4,000 people can realistically be described as "intimate."

I give points for effort to the casino staff on the ground, but my overall impression of the place was of poor maintenance and tacky patrons.  The bathrooms were dirty; one of the handicapped stalls in one bathroom had been out of order so long they'd removed the door and were using it to store cleaning supplies.  The other "handicapped" stall was barely wide enough for a walker or wheelchair, and had not been cleaned since someone puked in there, despite the fact that the restroom had an attendant.

Now for tacky patrons:  I've never seen so many cheap hookers - obviously cheap hookers - in one place in my life, even on earlier trips to Las Vegas.  (We usually go to shows in the higher class casinos.)  Even on MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland.  Waiting for the valets to retrieve our car was a runway show of the latest in 5 inch stiletto heels, micromini skirts, and push-up bras.  Oh, and thongs.  They had a sign on the door saying "dress code after 6 PM."  Given what we saw before, during and after the show, I shudder to imagine how people dress before 6 PM!

Another plus for the casino staff on the ground:  when the valet captain saw my sister's walker, she jumped our ticket to the front of the line, saving us probably 40 minutes.  But the valet staff was edgy in the extreme, and tonight - 2 days later - we found out why.

They were being busted.  The police raided the casino that night:  narcotics and prostitution, in an area somewhat oddly called "Rehab" ("the ultimate Vegas pool party").  As we tried to drive away (it must have taken us 10-15 minutes to clear the casino driveway), we saw medical techs, and assumed somebody'd had an accident; but we also saw a K-9 unit, which isn't usually dispatched to an accident.  But it sure is dispatched to a drug bust!

Mendocino

I feel a great sense of accomplishment - I've finished something! Specifically, I've finished weeding, tweaking, and posting the photos I took over the long weekend we spent in Fort Bragg last November, to celebrate my husband's birthday. They're all now available at my site on SmugMug, in 7 separate galleries.

It's amazing how many photos you can take in 3 days with a digital camera. I didn't post all of them, either, but I think I posted the best. I may post one or two more photos of the Point Cabrillo Fresnel lens, but the best of them are up.

I have to be honest - I decided to go with SmugMug, which is paid, when I could have put up free galleries at www.karenivy.net. SmugMug lets me put a few photos up at a time; with the galleries, I pretty much have to do the whole thing at once. Doing photo galleries on the web site is just more work.

Enjoy the photos.

Pioneer Basin

My husband is about to go backpacking again, this time in the vicinity of Mammoth. In fact, he's going in at McGee Creek, then over McGee Pass, eventually to Big McGee Lake. (You think Mr. McGee lived around here??)

He was looking at all this on Google Earth last night and showed me an area called Pioneer Basin, a high-altitude valley in the eastern Sierra, which we both agreed was misnamed. The peaks surrounding this basin are: Mount Crocker. Mount Hopkins. Mount Huntington. Mount Stanford. The obvious name for this valley is Robber Baron Basin, although Railroad Cartel Valley might do.

Greenwich Village

One of the first places we went in New York was, of course, Greenwich Village. I have to confess, here, that my mental images of the Village stem from a book called The Butterfly Kid, a stoner alien invasion fantasy written in 1967 by one Chester Anderson, who is also the narrator of the book. The book is theoretically set in "the future" - actually, probably about now, and of course there is no resemblance! But I enjoyed The Butterfly Kid enough to buy a second copy when my first one began to fall apart. Believe me, the Village in that book is Very Strange.

I liked Greenwich Village. We arose from the subway to find ourselves looking at (a) a pickup basketball game, and (b) a garden, locked and walled, with a plaque commemorating a long dead pub where Eugene O'Neill used to drink. This seemed appropriate. Like the rest of New York, Greenwich Village is very dense; but it isn't very tall. Most buildings were about 5-6 stories, with some 10-15 story exceptions; no skyscrapers. There is no space between buildings here - that would be wasteful. We strolled through the Washington Mews (converted stables, and not always very completely converted either) and Gay Street (a name which predates the current usage). Gay Street is curved, and lined solid with 5 story dwellings.

It was a warm, sunny afternoon, and Washington Square (a central location in The Butterfly Kid) was boiling with people and dogs of all ages. Also pigeons. I sat on a bench to rest, and a woman near me yelped, and complained that a pigeon had just shat on her leg - I think that's the first time I've ever seen that happen. We passed a group of folkies with a bass fiddle added to the usual guitars, singing Good Night, Irene - all the people sitting and listening were singing along softly. A few yards farther along we passed a 5 piece jazz combo playing some extremely hot licks, especially the sax player; they were surrounded by a small intent crowd. The fountain was full of kids; the lawn was littered with sunbathers in bikinis.

Being in the Village, we thought it appropriate to go and look at the Stonewall Inn, and the monument to the Stonewall Riots in Sheridan Square. One memorial statue was wearing an old LinkSys router for a hat; by the time we left, a maintenance man had removed it, but I got a photo. The entire memorial is viewed with grim disapproval by the bronze equestrian statue of Gen. Philip Sheridan, at the other end of the square. I wonder what he disapproved of before they installed the Stonewall statues.

We wandered around looking for a place to eat; I don't know why this is always so hard in a strange town. I have an Internet enabled phone, and I used Google maps to try to find a place near us, but every one we went to look at had something we didn't like, or was closed; in the end we wandered down a street and saw sign reading Home. We looked at the menu, it looked interesting, we went in and dined; the food was good, rather in the Alice Waters style.

Walking around New York City

In every novel I've read set in New York, everyone is always hailing taxis, and God knows 5 out of every 7 cars on the New York Streets are taxis; but with a couple of exceptions, we traveled the Big Apple by subway (and, once, by train) - we got unlimited MetroCards. We traveled by subway, and of course we walked; I thought my feet were going to fall off the first couple of days. We stayed in the Essex House hotel (now the Jumeirah Essex House), on Central Park South, so we had several nearby subway stations to choose from.

Subway stations in New York have stairs. There may be an occasional dark, hidden elevator; there are no escalators. There are stairs, often several flights, but separated - you think you're done with them and then you find another flight. I haven't climbed so many stairs since we visited London in 1996 and the Tube people were repairing all the escalators in Victoria Station.

New York is beautiful. The buildings are beautiful; unexpectedly among the glass towers, you find a 5 or 10 story gem with delicate architectural details. The houses on the side streets go up 4 and 5 stories, and come right out to the sidewalk, except for an area to access the basement - yards, if any, are in back. God help you in New York if your knees go out.

Our first morning there, we were looking for a place to have breakfast (I never eat breakfast in a big city hotel, there's always a cheaper place a block or two away), and I suddenly realized I was looking at Carnegie Hall! Now explain to me why I took a couple of photos, but never bothered to find out what was playing there and whether we could get tickets. I haven't figured that out.

So where did we walk? We walked through midtown to Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall. The decorations on the buildings are astounding - gorgeous bas-reliefs (not painted), bas-reliefs painted in brilliant colors, decorative designs just painted on the wall. We saw the Prometheus statue, and more statuary around the skating rink (converted to a restaurant for summer) - and, we saw a procession of Fox News supporters, marching around Rockefeller Center, waving signs advertising their patriotism, and suggesting that Keith Olbermann should be sent to Guantanamo Bay. I never did find out what he said.

We paid to go to the Top of the Rock and see all of southern Manhattan Island, spread out on a brilliant sunny day. Rockefeller Center is gorgeously, outrageously Art Deco, which I adore. The observation platform is protected by the usual suicide barriers, ten foot panels of thick scratchy glass - conveniently spaced just far enough apart to fit a 50 mm camera lens between the panes! Only on the very top level, which is a setback (so you can only fall about 8 feet), can you see and photograph over the glass panels.

I'm doing a new thing with photographs, we'll see how it goes. I've signed up for SmugMug, and here's a link to a photo gallery with some of my New York photos. If you like them, check back - I'm nowhere near done uploading!

Touring the East

Having ranted (see last post), I want to share some of the oddities I noticed while traveling. We did an urban vacation this year - New York City and Philadelphia, separated by a few days in Cape May, NJ.

Given that it's almost impossible these days to get rare meat from a restaurant (they're all terrified of being sued for salmonella), why do the restaurants in the Atlantic coast states turn their air conditioning down so far you could hang meat in the dining room? They can't be afraid of it going bad, they've cooked it through. The weather was very muggy while we were there, mostly too warm to carry a jacket; and I'm still surprised I didn't catch a chill from the air in those restaurants.

This being the first time I've ever driven through New Jersey and Pennsylvania, I had my first experience with Wawa. If you've been there, you know. It seems like a perfectly competent convenience store chain; but the name floored me. If you go to their web site and look at the Milestones section, you'll see the history and it actually makes sense: wawa is a Native American word for a Canada goose in flight. I foolishly assumed that Wawa, Pennsylvania was named after the firm, but I was wrong.

I was also startled to find that a dominant provider of gasoline in New Jersey is: Lukoil. When we drove down the Garden State Turnpike from New York to Cape May, Lukoil had the concession at practically every turnpike rest stop. With all the noise we hear about the U.S. energy companies, how did a Russian firm get to be so wide-spread in New Jersey? Wikipedia tells me that Lukoil bought Getty Oil in 2000 and rebranded some of the stations. I kept looking for Pikov Andropov.

The New Dog

My sister has always loved dogs, and her husband (surprise!) also loves dogs, so they've never had less than 2 dogs, usually 3, and I think once they had 4. Patton the boxer died recently, much to everyone's dismay, (a great way to go; he went for a walk with my brother-in-law, chased some critter away from the neighbor's chickens, turned and looked at my brother-in-law and keeled over), so they were in the market. Since they're both suckers for a stray who needs help, the new dog (like all their dogs) is a rescue dog; what's unusual is that the new dog is a Doberman puppy, about a year old. They've never had a Doberman before.

So, here's Duke:


Duke's previous owner lost his job, and stopped buying dog food so as to feed his 3 kids; the scraps left over for the dog weren't enough. Also, he left the dog tied alone in the yard all day, which attracted the attention of Animal Control.

The rescue people called my sister, and they've had Duke about a month now. They're stuffing him madly, but you can still count most of his ribs and all of his vertebrae.

He's a nice puppy, if understandably a little nervous about being left alone. He also thinks he's a lap dog, which can be trying when the dog stands over 3 feet high and weighs around 65 pounds. Wait until he fills back out; his projected adult weight is 80-90 lb. That's a lot of lap dog! Due to a total lack of training, he was a little pushy when they got him, but even in the few days we were there he was getting much calmer and responding much better to commands.

But the funniest thing about Duke is the way he looks when he curls up to sleep; he looks like a Swiss army knife:

Officially they're "fostering" him, but I think he's going to stay.

Holiday Travels

We drove to Las Vegas between Christmas and New Year's, to visit my sister and brother-in-law. From our house this is about 550 miles one way, and takes between 10 and 12 hours depending on how fast we drive, how often we stop, and whether we stop for a meal. We could fly, but then we'd have to stand in lines, sit in uncomfortable seats with no leg room, and put all the fluids and gels in a quart Ziplock bag. On the other hand, flying only takes about 4 hours. You pay for everything in either time or money, and this time we decided to pay in time.

We got some payback for the decision, too. As we came over the Altamont Pass, around 9 AM, we saw a (now) very rare sight: the Sierra Nevada mountains. The air was clear enough to show a full view of the snow-capped peaks, and the Central Valley between. This doesn't happen much these days; if you can see the mountains at all, it's usually over a haze of smog. We watched the mountains all the way across, and down Highway 99 as far as Fresno; by then it was early afternoon and the daily cloud bank was covering up the mountains. It's much more interesting to drive down 99 than to take I-5; 99 goes through towns. Before 99 became freeway bypasses, it had the Oranges - big round orange buildings by the roadside, from which people sold (originally) fresh orange juice; but the last Orange is now gone. Driving down 99 lets you see what life in the Central Valley looks like now.

I'll do some other posts on the trip, but for now I want to mention 2 other things I saw that charmed me:

I saw a roadrunner cross the road in the red rock country west of Las Vegas. It looked astoundingly like the one in the cartoons.

Coming back up I-5 on December 30, at 6:48 in the evening near Patterson, I saw a meteor. I was staring blankly out the passenger window, and a bright light streaked across the sky and vanished in a small flare of more bright light. No, I didn't get a photo; we were driving in a car at 65 MPH, and apart from the meteor it was black as the inside of your hat, not the ideal situation for low-light photography.

Coming back up the central valley, we had no more views of the Sierras. We could barely see the side of the road. OK, that's an exaggeration, but if you've never driven past Bakersfield on a damp winter day with no wind and an inversion, you really can't envision how bad it is. I estimate maybe half a mile visibility at the worst. When you read that the Central Valley has the worst air quality in the country, think about driving through a thin brown soup, which blurs out the power lines paralleling the road.

By the way, a road trip for you California types: if you're coming back from Nevada over the Tehachapi Pass, heading for I-5, don't cut straight over through Bakersfield. Endless stop lights and town traffic, believe me. Go north on 99 to highway 46 and cut over to I-5 through Wasco. No traffic to speak of, only 3 lights, and you get to envision Cary Grant running down the rows of orchard trees, because Wasco is where North by Northwest was filmed. It hasn't changed much since then, either.

Mendocino

It hasn't all been politics lately. My husband and I went to Mendocino the other week, to celebrate his birthday; and I didn't even take the computer. No connectivity for three days. We drove up the coast on Highway 1, because it was clear and sunny; we stayed in Ft. Bragg, in Weller House, which used to belong to a lumber baron in the Good Old Days, and which is distinguished by the ballroom (paneled and ceiled entirely in redwood) on the top floor.

We spent 2 full days just poking around the Mendocino coast: we walked around Cleone Lake in MacKerricher State Park, and later poked through the park's fabulous tide pools. Even with a digital camera, it's remarkably hard to get a reasonable still shot of a hermit crab in a tide pool, because the only thing you can see about them is that they move. Next time I'll have to try video; I think my new camera can do video.

The next day we spent the morning in the Mendocino Coast Botanical Garden, wandering around checking out the fall plantings and trying to see some of the 4 species of hummingbirds that frequent the place. We drove into Mendocino and had lunch at the Cafe Beaujolais, then hiked out to the newly restored Pt. Cabrillo light station. They have an inn there, too. On a sunny warm calm day, what a wonderful way to spend an afternoon, to walk out to the point, gradually getting better and better photographs of the Fresnel lens. If you've never seen a Fresnel up close, on a sunny day, you've missed a treat - they shine like jewels in the light station tower. What a place this would be to stay if you want to be "away from it all", and yet you're just outside Mendocino.

The economy isn't being kind to the tourist industry here. We walked into Cafe Beaujolais and got a table, no reservation; I remember when you had to reserve 6 weeks out. We drove into Mendocino at 3 in the afternoon and got a parking place on the main drag. None of the restaurants we ate in was full; the Rendezvous Inn and Restaurant in Fort Bragg, where we ate Thursday night, had only 3 tables full, and the food was fabulous - this place is Zagat rated #1 in Mendocino County for food. The Rendezvous dining room is also fully paneled in redwood - another lumber baron leftover. An added treat: we could walk to it from Weller House.

Saturday night we got a surprise. Remember the ballroom on the top floor of Weller House? The manager of Weller House is a tanguera - she dances the tango for fun. And Weller House was the site of an evening of tango, with a couple of local people providing live music. This isn't the exhibition dance in Tango Forever, which I haven't seen - this is people who dance the tango for fun. They must have had 15 or 20 couples, too, some of whom came a considerable distance - it was quite an evening. The women who danced that night had the most sculptured calves you could imagine, tango is really good for the leg muscles! Most of them wore 3 inch heels, too. In fact, most of the women dressed up for the tango, in elegant cocktail dresses; the men, I'm afraid, were more casual. I saw one guy take off his running shoes and put his leather soled dancing shoes on over his white athletic socks. Sigh. The men generally danced very well, but style? No so much.

I watched them dance for most of an hour, just watching feet. The patterns are hypnotic.

Lazy in Las Vegas

I'm visiting my sister again. It's cooler than the last time, only in the middle 90's. The tortoises are stumping around the yard; the dogs got out today and ran who knows where, and we all scrabbled around yelling for them until they came back. It's dangerous for loose dogs - people drive way too fast on these roads.

With nothing else in particular to do, I accompanied my sister to her scheduled visit to get her hair and nails done. I didn't realize when I signed up for this that it was going to take three and a half hours; I love my sister dearly, but even I admit that she's "high maintenance." With a slight advance warning that it would take "all afternoon," I took a book.

As we approached the shop, the noise stunned me - the salon is right under the final approach path to McCarran International Airport. I mean right under - landing planes go over the front door maybe 200 feet up; you can read the letters on the fuselage. My sister says she waves to the pilots. The noise is unbelievably loud - I can't even estimate the decibel level. It completely freaked me out. However, this was where we were bound.

I hadn't realized how early the appointment was, and hadn't had any lunch; so my first move was to ask the desk girl to recommend a place to eat. She suggested a local lunch shop across the parking lot, and I tried it and found it good; and then I returned to the salon and settled down in the lobby with my book.

After not very long in the lobby, the smells began to get to me. This salon does everything chemical to hair - bleach, color, extensions, you name it - and they do nails, which means nail polish, nail polish remover, and whatever they use to glue on those long talons. Most of the chemical activity happens farther back in the shop, but the odors waft out to the reception area pretty regularly.

I read a couple more chapters of my book, and decided that the combination of airplanes and smells was more than I wanted to spend several hours in. I hunted up my sister, who was having something I didn't ask about painted on her hair, and told her that I was going to find a coffee shop to wait this out, and to call my cell phone when she was ready to leave. Going down the sidewalk, her "nail lady" stopped me and recommended a bar nearby where I could sit and read, because all the lunch places close early.

I should have seen this one coming. This isn't the Rive Gauche. Bars, especially in Las Vegas, do not expect people to sit and read; bars expect people to sit and (a) drink and talk, (b) play video poker, (c) watch ESPN, or (d) all of the above. None of these activities requires reading lights; the place was dark as a cave. Fortunately, it wasn't especially hot today, and they have a shaded outdoor patio, so I sat, drinking soda water, long enough to finish my novel and two short stories.

Part way into the third short story, I realized it was after 3 o'clock; no word from my sister, but the sun was coming around onto the patio. I wandered back to the salon, dodging from shade to shade (I forgot to put on sunscreen), and found my sister having her hair blow-dried by a man whose hair looked like someone was blow-drying him. I resettled in the lobby and read another short story, and then she was ready to go.

I still can't quite believe this, but she claims she'd never noticed the smells until I mentioned them. I'm also delighted that a freak of genetics means that I'm going gray gracefully, and slowly - all I get from my hairdresser is a very careful haircut.

Road Food

NB: I actually began this post at the beginning of July and got distracted; so here it is in full.

Dining on the road is always an adventure, and a risk. When we're on the road, we always get too much salt, and usually too much fat, compared to what we cook at home. Neither of us can stand the chain restaurants any more, so our solution while traveling is to ask the B&B host, or the desk girl at the motel, for a local restaurant they like. This produces mixed results, although on this trip we never had to resort to a chain.

The awful meals, at least for my husband, began in Elko, Nevada. I've concluded that Elko is just not a good place for Jim to eat; on an earlier occasion he got actual food poisoning, on this pass he merely got a tough, fatty steak full of gristle. The desk girl at the motel had referred us to the restaurant in the casino down the road, saying it was, "Pretty good." I guess it depends on what else there is. I've learned that I do better, eating on the road, if I order some kind of salad with chicken in it, and dressing on the side; I did that, and it wasn't bad.

Our next memorable meal was in Wendover, where we stopped for lunch before crossing the salt flats. We had a choice of casinos to eat in and not much else; so we picked the Peppermill.

It was like eating inside a pinball machine. Because of the slots, it sounded like a pinball machine; and of course, in standard casino mode it had no windows. What it did have were mirrored black glass interior walls, accented at unpredictable spots by neon tube lighting, reflecting off all the other black mirrors. You literally could not tell where the walls were, or the ceiling. And on the walls, where you'd expect paintings or posters, they had frames with live action video loops of various scenes. The food wasn't bad as the joint in Elko, but the ambience was surreal. I went to U.C. Berkeley in the '60s with some people who would have paid serious money to get stoned inside that place.

We fought our way through Salt Lake City commute traffic to Brigham City, where we gave up and found a motel. The desk girl referred us to Maddox's Fine Food, down the road in Perry, and we ended up getting probably the best "American home cooking" I've ever had in a restaurant. My diary reads: "Bison and local open range beef, Idaho trout (Yum!), fresh homebaked everything (rolls, cornbread fingers, pie), two kinds of homebrewed root beer, birch and sarsparilla" (this is Utah - coffee and tea were not offered). It was a family owned place, and full of families, we were almost the only table that didn't have at least 3 generations and 3 children. "Local open range beef" means the slaughterhouse was at the bottom of the hill. Honest, it's almost worth driving to Utah to eat there; and if you're in the vicinity, it's absolutely worth a detour.

In Paris, Idaho, the next day, we stopped at "the local place." Paris is a few blocks strewn along the main highway toward the Tetons, and this little joint was right across the street from the (really impressive) Mormon Tabernacle, which we toured. I'm always interested to try the local place, but it's a crapshoot, and Jim rolled snake eyes. I had a hamburger, which was edible, but he decided to try the specialty of the house, which was chicken with something they called "Huckleberry fire surprise." I didn't try it; but he reported that it was simply awful, and didn't finish it.

Once we got into Yellowstone, our dining options became severely limited. You can't just drop in and eat at the restaurant in any of the hotels because they book 24 hours in advance; and you're at least 2 hours (on relatively bad roads) from anywhere else. So the first thing you do after checking in is book all the nights you want to eat there. We stayed 5 nights, and we ate at Yellowstone Lake twice and Old Faithful twice, and the first night we walked over to the gift shop and ate fast food at the lunch counter because it was the only thing that didn't require reservations.

I'd say we batted 500 in Yellowstone. Our first formal meal was at the Old Faithful Inn, and I've described the snowstorm that enlivened that evening in another post. The food at Old Faithful was good, but I couldn't focus on it because I was wondering how we'd get back to sleep. It didn't help that we'd gotten lost in the Old Faithful grounds and spent most of 45 minutes walking around in a snowstorm. But the food was OK. The next night, though, we had reservations at Yellowstone Lake Hotel, and we returned in late afternoon to find that the power was out. The story at the desk was that they had blown a transformer. I've described that meal elsewhere also; it really was one of the worst meals I've ever had.

Apart from those harrowing incidents, the food in Yellowstone was quite good, and the breakfast buffet was reliable if a little heavy on the fat. Eventually we set out for Bozeman and then Missoula, and on to Glacier. One of the things we no longer do when we're traveling is eat lunch in restaurants; Paris, Idaho was an aberration (and the exception that proves the rule!). We get bread, and almonds or cheese, and fruit, and we just eat that by the road somewhere.

From Bozeman onward I found myself eating cayenne pepper in various dishes that hadn't said they contained it. In fact, in Bozeman, Jim and I actually switched dinners. I really can't eat a dish with too much pepper. In Missoula we had a dubious deli meal in a little semi-vegetarian grocery, mostly fascinating for the meeting of a local non-profit board at the next table, discussing where they were going to get volunteers and how they could meet the city council's funding deadline. The next night we went to a restaurant at a golf course, notable for a fabulous view of the valley and a clientele whose average age we lowered by at least a decade. Food was OK.

Many Glaciers Lodge is like the hotels in Yellowstone: if you're there, you eat there, because that's all there is. I suppose we could have driven in to Babb and eaten at the Cattle Baron Supper Club, just outside the park boundary; but we didn't. The food at Many Glaciers is just so-so; you go for the view, not the food. The Yellowstone hotels set a higher standard on food. As part of our bus tour, we had a very nice lunch at one of the commercial lodges on the Blackfoot reservation.

Coming home, we stopped for the night in Sandpoint, Idaho, and there we stumbled into a world-class meal at the Sand Creek Grill, right on the lake - a restaurant in the style of Alice Waters, with fresh local everything.

Our greatest disappointment was the Columbia Gorge Hotel, in Hood River. We stayed there a few years ago and had wonderful food (if the 7 course breakfast was a little much) and fabulous service, in a legacy luxury hotel. So we stayed there again and found that someone is building "Columbia Gorge" condos on the lot next door, the excellent service has disappeared, and there are huge flat-panel TVs in every room except the dining room, including the lounge, which last time had a talented singer/comedian doing live entertainment. Now they have ESPN. The room drains were stopped up and they couldn't unstop them. And the experienced serving staff in the restaurant had been replaced by beautiful boys who can't handle a complicated order, and can't tell skim milk from 1% (and don't realize that the customer can). Sic transit gloria mundi. They still have their views, but they won't have their reputation very long at this rate.

They were so bad that we chose to find another restaurant for our last dinner in town. That was my next unexpected encounter with cayenne pepper, which the restaurant, the Stonehedge Gardens, chose to put in the house salad dressing. I complained about it and they just said, "Oh, we always do that." They advertise as a high-end restaurant, but all I remember about them is that they put too much pepper in the salad dressing and didn't give me a choice.

Our last stop was at our old friend, the Wolf Creek Inn. It's a restored stage stop near Grants Pass, Oregon, run by the Oregon Parks Dept., with about 8 rooms; and the food was reliable and excellent as always. My only problem with the Wolf Creek Inn isn't food - when they built that enclosed staircase to the second floor, suitcases were smaller than they are now...