Friday, 30 October 2009
On a lark (haha), we stopped and did a quick walking tour of the remains of the mission San Juan Capistrano. I didn’t notice any swallow nests, except for a display on them.
Not surprisingly, the part of the grounds that I found most interesting were the ruins and the little bits of covered archaeological excavations.
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
I know you probably heard the travel news of the day (alternately, the infrastructure deterioration problem of the day): San Francisco has another bridge closed from parts failure.
Fortunately, we didn’t plan to cross that bridge today, but we did plan to cross the Golden Gate—southbound. And this is what we encountered. Southbound lanes were squeezed to two, and the other four lanes were a flood of cars coming out of downtown. We made it just fine through the funnel of four-lanes-to-two, since out here people drive right up to the funnel before reducing lanes—smoothly and graciously—none of that get into the reduced lanes a mile back from the funnel, then frown at those who don’t also line up far from the funnel (if that makes sense).
We also wandered a bit through the decommissioned Presidio, very fascinating, but that’s a story for another day.
Thursday, 15 October 2009
The sky had been pretty darned clear, extending from horizon to horizon as is common in the west, then, as we were arriving at Fort Laramie, the historic fort not the town, the clouds appeared overhead. So we toured the parade ground and open buildings under dramatic swirling greys, catching a few drops as we scurried for the car after checking out “Bedlam,” the boarding house (if I recall correctly) that is the oldest standing historic structure in Wyoming.
This ruin may also have merited the moniker Bedlam, but is properly called the administration building….
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
…you’d be home by now!
Viewed under homogeneous blue-grey skies, sod house life struck me as rather tedious and grim. In sunshine: perhaps not so much.
This sod house in far western Nebraska is open to the public, with an interior bare of accoutrements and even wall stucco/plaster, and thus hominess. The walls appear to have had two thick layers of sod, but the outer one has mostly eroded away—or maybe it was just double along the lower part of the wall, for buttressing?
As to the roof, it’s been updated, as traditional sod house roofs are no picnic and take lots of maintenance (and leak when it rains). I love that they put enough soil on the metal roof so it looked more like a soddy (although some has washed off), and prickly-pear cactus have colonized it.
Tuesday, 13 October 2009
Is this an “Only In America” place?
A building decorated annually with murals made of food?
The Heartland contrives some interesting promotions, then perpetuates them for generations.
You may recognize this building from this historic photo; it’s the Mitchell Corn Palace, originally the Corn Belt Exposition. For more info, try WikiPee or their own (cringe) website.
Monday, 12 October 2009
Quite a combo: the quartzite outcrops in the (almost) tallgrass prairie. This is at Pipestone National Monument.
The pipestone is a band beneath a quartzite layer. Both settled out of a long-gone sea. The coarser sands formed into the quartzite, while the finer clays became the pipestone. If I have it right….
Anyway, they still sell the little turtle figurines you may remember from when you visited aeons ago (as I did), but the modeling style has switched to angular. I assume the rounding took too much time, so the artists now just saw out the figure and sand the sharp edges a bit, then move on to the next stone bit.
The fresh snow that came through this morning was mostly melted by the time we walked the Pipestone trail, but the remaining bits of white and the heightened color of the well-watered lichens (both greys and not-greys) made it spectacular, even under pewter skies. The picture makes it look nicer than it was.
Thursday, 8 October 2009
Whatta treat! Today we returned to the Hurricane River mouth and Au Sable Point Lighthouse area, this time walking down to the light. Eastbound, we went along the beach for a ways, until the waves chased us back to high ground. We also checked out the shipwrecks. Fun!
Sunday, 4 October 2009
We took a purposeful touristy wander down the Garden Peninsula, to explore the Fayette Ghost Town, which was abandoned by 1900. Or at least, the iron processing the company town was established to do left in the late 1890s, and few people could have stayed in the dwindling community very long after that. This town was so tony they had a race track! We were fascinated by the limestone cliff on the north side of the harbor mouth and by the silvering piers that held up the docks, as much as anything.
We made a dash north from Fayette to Kitch-iti-kipi, and made it into the park before it closed, and rode the second to the last raft trip of the day. F. counted thirty-five lake trout languidly enjoying the cold waters. I thought there was more algae/plantlife in the spring than I’d seen before, but maybe it was the slightly overcast light. A very special place; its charms are difficult to describe.
We were sustained for these excursion by lunch at the Three Seasons Restaurant, on the east side of Manistique. I had whitefish (don’t know if it was from Lake Michigan or Superior), and we shared a pasty as an appetizer. Very yum.
We played footsie with rain all day, and our timing turned out to be impeccable. We had hoped to make this a Lake Superior day, but our decision to head south instead turned out to be per-fect!
Tuesday, 15 September 2009
So, the big photo is from Monday, when I was downtown and basking in civic duty. There’s quite some historic controversy, apparently, about the statue of the female on top of the capitol dome.
The statue stands between 15 and 20 feet high, depending on how she is measured, weighs about 1,800 pounds, and is made of copper.
The little picture to the right is the 3-D version of Georgia’s capitol as rendered in Google Earth. I haven’t yet explored the collection in the gallery “Historic Places 3D Tour,” but it may be included. Oddly, there is no “National Registry of Historic Places,” the way it’s noted by Google. Instead it’s the National RegistER of Historic Places.
Or perhaps I’m nit-picking.
Sidenote: Finding a Notary Public (in today’s modern, digital world)—not so easy, especially if your bank is closed.
Tuesday, 1 September 2009
We’ve been purging over the last two days. Purging the cottage, that is. I won’t go into details about what has been removed, but it’s almost all junk, and The Guru managed to stack the back of the Explorer full, and we drove it to the “Transfer Station.” They weigh you, your vehicle, and the junque before and after you dump, and that’s how they charge you. We dumped 200 lbs—which cost $14 and change—and we are so happy to be rid of it!
This exercise once again reveals some of the contours of the back, or utility, porch (not yet swept in this photo). The blue cabinet was always called the canning cabinet by Mom, but we never did canning up here, so we only had empty jars and the like in it. When she and Dad lived here year-round, I’m sure it was then stacked carefully with multicolored full Mason jars—food for the long winter, you know.