Postscript

Sunday, July 29. Home at last

We flew home last night, arriving in Boston in a driving rainstorm.  We were met at Logan by our daughter Beth, who drove us to Gloucester and then fed us a hearty meal, which we shared with son-in-law Simon's cousin George, his wife and two sons, all just arrived from Manchester, England. We spent an early evening fruitlessly comparing the relative virtues of east-to-west five hour jetlags and west-to-east three hour ones.  We decided there was no virtue either way.

Priscilla the Prius, who toyed with the idea of staying in Bellingham, is coming home by truck instead, bringing Carmen the Garmin with her. Both deserve a long rest.

Now to mow the lawn, collect a month's worth of junk mail, renew the newspapers, and get to the beach.

We hope you enjoyed the travelog.

Sunday, July 22

Sunday, July 22: Port Townsend to Bellingham: 78 Miles           

A cloudy day with occasional drizzle. We checked out of the motel at 8:45 and boarded the ferry to Whidbey Island at 9:15. It was a short, half-hour ride and an easy drive from there to Bellingham, where we arrived at our son Tom’s house at noon. There he was, with Deb, Molly, and Abby, three birds, two cats and a snake to greet us. Deb and Abby were pitting and slicing thousands of cherries for drying – a chore I vividly remembered assisting in four years ago. Didn’t volunteer this time. Joy, Tom and the girls walked over to our B&B three blocks away, while I drove the car. There we met Ricci, our host at the Canfield House, an immaculate Victorian in which we have a canopy bed and our own bath. Very clean, very comfortable, very convenient. Ricci has a pot of spices boiling on the stove for atmosphere, and that will take getting used to.

Saturday morning, as I was driving north toward Port Townsend, I experienced an unexpected heart problem. I have been living with atrial fibrillation (an irregular heartbeat) for more than 25 years. Normally this means no more than an occasional skipped beat (and a daily pill to minimize its irregularity and another to thin my blood to prevent coagulation), but something wasn’t working. I pulled off the road, took a few deep breaths, and checked my pulse. It was very fast. I didn’t feel like fainting; the sensation was more like being underwater. Not a good omen. I soon  recovered, we had lunch, and I felt fine while Joy and I took turns driving the rest of the day.

But we decided it wasn’t worth the risk of driving home for another week or ten days after our visit in Bellingham, and then having the same experience or worse on some remote country road in the Dakotas.  So we made reservations to fly home next Saturday. Faithful Priscilla will stay in Bellingham with Tom.

So the trip is over. 4750 miles, including perhaps 500 miles of side trips.  22 days of hard (and not so hard) driving, in temperatures ranging from the 50s to the 100s, through broiling sun and driving rain, gusting winds and calm. The country is vast and bountiful, the people we met friendly and interesting. We saw great museums and exciting works of art. We were in awe of the courage and determination of the emigrants who followed the trails west, and of the patience and resilience of the native American peoples displaced, attacked, and abused for generations. We saw many extraordinary natural phenomena and missed many others.

But we had a wonderful time. 

Our Travels, July 1 -  22, 2012

Saturday, July 21

Saturday, July 21: Vancouver, WA to Port Townsend, WA. 196 Miles           

A beautiful day, and a beautiful drive up the east side of the Olympic Peninsula. At some point in the day, about 25 miles north of Olympia, Washington,  we reached the westernmost point of our round-the country trip. Toast us with champagne, if you must!

A Geoduck (eww!)

We left our Vancouver motel at 9:30 and headed north, first on I-5, full of cars, then on US 101, slightly less full of cars, and finally on WA-20, full of cars and motorcycles. But we bowled along, through tall stands of fir and tamarack (aka hackmatack), very different scenery from the day before. We followed the shore of the Hood Canal, a deep channel west of Puget Sound, and home of a large (and controversial) Trident nuclear submarine base. We stopped at the Geoduck Restaurant for lunch at about 2, where we sat on a deck overlooking the Canal and a broad mudflat (the tide was way out). We could see a clammer here and there (not gathering geoducks, we were told, which are plucked from deeper water. Geoducks -- pronounced “gooeyducks,” if you don’t know them -- are huge clams with alarmingly long and large necks. Ugly, but thought to be edible).  We had a salmonburger (Joy) and a Reuben (me).

At the Geoduck Café

Joy struck up a conversation with a pleasant woman busily sketching at the next table. She turned out to be a fellow artist, traveling with her photographer husband. Almost every other customer was a motorcyclist, clad in black leather festooned with patches proclaiming his or her warlike outlook (though dated; all the sentiments seemed to date from the Vietnam era, with a strong emphasis on gittin’ them POWs back again and declaring that “these colors don’t run”). Yet mixed with these macho messages were peace symbols. And the motorcycles, all mammoth Harleys, were impeccably maintained and glistened with chrome. A lifestyle experience we seem to have passed up.

View from the Aladdin

At 3:00 we checked into the Aladdin Motor Inn in Port Townsend,  a three-story motel right on the waterfront, with an unparalleled view: sailboats gliding in and out of the nearby marina; the Port Townsend-Whidbey Island Ferries chugging back and forth, and far off, beyond a green peninsula two miles away, and Puget Sound beyond that, the distant snow-capped peaks of the Cascades. Quite a sight. (But we waited in vain for Mts. Rainier and Baker to “come out”).

We took a walk on the beach, and then went out to a delicious but expensive dinner at “Fin’s,” an excellent seafood restaurant downtown. We sat out on the deck and shivered in the 65 degree temperature – astounding after all the days we’ve experienced in the 90s and even 100s. I went back to the car for a fleece vest; Joy managed without, and we enjoyed a delicious meal by the shores of Port Townsend Bay, accompanied by the shrill exclamations of dozens of screaming gulls whirling overhead – fussing about a nearby eagle, we were told by our waitress – as the day came to a close. We were both happy. And happier still when we were back in our warm motel room. 

Friday, July 20

Friday, July 20: On the Oregon Trail: Hermiston OR to Portland OR to Vancouver, WA. 196 miles.

A tiring but inspiring day. We left Hermiston at 9:30 after the usual motel breakfast, and got back onto I-84, which soon dropped down to parallel the Columbia River, following the course of Lewis and Clark and the emigrants who followed them on the Oregon Trail.

The Columbia River Gorge is a phenomenal sight. Geologists think that it was caused by a series of massive floods perhaps as much as 15,000 years ago, created when gigantic glacial dams in what is now Montana burst, sending towering walls of water from Lake Missoula downstream at up to 80 miles per hour, scouring out the gorge, flooding most of eastern Oregon, and scattering huge glacial erratic boulders over a vast area. 

Dams built in the last century have changed the appearance of the river valley since Lewis and Clark and the Pioneers that followed them saw it, but in many places it remains much the same. It is amazing to visualize the challenges these men and women faced.

At the attractive visitors’ rest stops the State of Oregon has built every 90 miles or so, there are interpretive displays illustrating the progress of the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery and the emigrants, with quotations from their journals and letters, and maps and drawings illustrating the vicissitudes they faced.

One of the emigrants complained “we faced hed (sic) winds” day after day, and we can attest to the fact that they are as strong as ever. The westerly “hed” winds we drove into must have been blowing 25 knots or more, to judge from the whitecaps on the river, and driving westbound was a challenge. Poor Priscilla, accustomed to getting 45 to 50 miles per gallon through most of our trip (and 99 miles per gallon for the half hour drop from the Grand Canyon to the valley below), was barely getting 35, and laboring at that. The only people enjoying the wind were the dozens of windsurfers we saw from time to time on the river below, zipping around like dragonflies, at unbelievable speeds.  And  hundreds of great white wind machines that lined the crests on either side of  the gorge for mile after mile were spinning and pirouetting in a giant ballet.

We arrived in Portland at 1:30, and scouted out my sister Nell’s condo and her daughter Sara’s house, in the southeast section of the city. Nell was back in Maine, but we were curious about where she lived, and it looked very nice from the outside. Sara was at work, so we asked a man we encountered in Nell’s condo complex where we could find a good place for lunch. He steered us to “Bread and Ink” on Hawthorne Avenue, which is a marvelous and hip (if not Hippie) street, with funky shops, a huge Powell’s bookstore branch, second hand shops, restaurants and bars.

Bread and Ink had a nice menu, and we each splurged on an irresistible dish: breaded and fried Pacific oysters, huge and delicious, with aioli sauce and salad. Our efficient and comely waitress was a startling sight, wearing a black T-Shirt with short sleeves that showed off her magnificent tattoos, covering both arms from waist to shoulder and beyond, and shiny black tights that were very tight indeed. A short black waitress’s apron provided a necessary touch of modesty, for there was no skirt or other pants to do the job. But this was pretty standard dress for the neighborhood –at least for the young women who could get away with it. 

We shopped for some gifts and a book we had been looking for (at Powell’s – an enormous enterprise that I suspect is dwarfed in size by its parent store in Downtown Portland), and we each had an ice cream cone at Ben and Jerry’s before stopping to see my niece Sara, now home from work, and her son Nathan.

We left for our motel in Vancouver, WA, across the Columbia River, at 4:30, just in time to be stuck in the Friday night homeward-bound rush hour. As soon as we had crossed the Columbia River and entered Washington, however, the traffic eased. We checked into our Quality Inn at about 5:30. Despite its tacky neighborhood of fast food restaurants and gas stations, the motel is set back from the highway in a leafy glade, and our second-floor room is delightfully quiet. We’ll sleep well tonight.

Thursday, July 19

Thursday, July 19: On the Oregon Trail, Boise, ID to Hermiston, OR. 248 miles

Off at 9 am on a cloudy day, trading a Comfort Inn next to a busy airport for another next to a truck stop and a stockyard!  But our new overnight digs are among the most comfortable yet (for a standard motel), and the stockyard is not in business!

It was a tiring day, only 248 miles, but it took about 6 hours, with stops. And the route had a lot of steep, winding mountain roads. Still it was lovely country all the way. And we were following the route of the Oregon Trail! (historical markers sprinkled all along).

Deadman's Pass

At one rest stop we turned off to follow a side road to a scenic overlook called Deadman’s Pass.  It was a beautiful sight, but we were unsettled by the sight of a pickup truck (with New Hampshire plates, of all places) parked with no one around. For some reason we both felt it was a little creepy, and didn’t stay long after taking a couple of pictures.

Then it was on to a six-mile downhill 6% grade, with frequent 180° switchbacks and impressive ramps for runaway trucks. None ran away, but there were a lot of trucks on the road today, many of them double and triple rigs. Huge, roaring things.  

We pulled into Hermiston at 2, and Joy promptly flaked out for a nap.  We then walked across the baking asphalt between rows of semitrailer rigs to an A&W Root Beer shop where we both ordered root beer floats – aka Black Cows. Very satisfying.

Joy and a Black Cow

Tom Too

Dinner at a great Mexican restaurant in Hermiston (which is more than a truck stop). Chile rellenos for both of us. We were rewarded with a double rainbow as we left the restaurant. Surely a good omen for tomorrow, when we will head for Portland.

Wednesday, July 18

Wednesday, July 18: Logan, UT to Boise, ID.  289 miles.           

We were up at 7, and off by 8:30 after the usual motel breakfast (coffee, juice, yogurt, waffle (me) and eggs (Joy). 

A Spraying Mantis at Work

Southern Idaho, from the Utah border to about 30 miles west of Twin Falls, is a lush and lovely landscape of rolling hills, small farms, green meadows, giving way to larger spreads with great rotating sprinkler systems (we’ve dubbed them “Spraying Mantises” for their profile: long bodies -- actually multiple thoraxes, sometimes as many as a dozen segments, ending with an uplifted head) tracing great green circles on the land.  But from then on almost to Boise the land is brown and uncultivated. For mile after mile the ridges south of the highway have sprouted dozens of gracefully turning wind turbines, but north of the highway the stubbly grass and sagebrush were black from recent fires which had spread over many square miles. Whether the fires were intentionally set or accidental wasn’t clear.

Footprint of the Spraying Mantis

We stopped to pick up a couple of sandwiches at a huge Oasis truck stop, the Garden of Eden, (in Eden, Idaho, of course), where any traveler’s knickknack you could imagine, from jewelry to camping gear to T-shirts to coffee mugs to condoms to scented fir trees to hang from the rear view mirror was for sale, and you could eat at dining area with fake palm trees and rock walls, indoors. Stairs led down to a lower level (marked “Truckers only”) to an area where truckers could shower, exercise, and nap. Gas was expensive ($3.99 a gallon) but the Prius doesn’t drink much or often.  

Snake River Bridge, Twin Falls, Idaho

We drove on to Twin Falls, where we crossed a high suspension bridge and then took a winding road down to a public park on the banks of the Snake River. Until we started down we hadn’t realized we were in a canyon, with high cliffs on either side. Or that the Perrine Bridge at Twin Falls was a mecca for BASE (Building, Antenna, Span, Earth) jumpers, sport parachutists who like to jump off  not-so-high objects using steerable sport chutes. They jump from the middle of the 486-foot high span and land on the ground below.

After a nice lunch and a walk around the park we stopped at a visitor information center, where parachutists were busy repacking their chutes and comparing notes with each other. One was lying on his back with his leg in an inflatable cast; he had wrapped a riser cord around it in his last jump, badly lacerated it on landing. He had no plans to jump again soon. And we didn’t stay to watch his companions jump either.

We arrived at our motel at the Boise airport at about 4:30, glad to put our feet up. We’ll go out to dinner and get to bed early. Off to Pendleton, Oregon, tomorrow. 

Tuesday, July 17

Tuesday, July 17: Fillmore to Mt. Timpanogos, Salt Lake City, and Logan, Utah           

Mt. Timpanogos

We set out from Fillmore on I-15 at 9:30 am, with a destination of Logan, UT for the night, but an urge to go off the prescribed route to explore something identified on the map as Timpanogos Cave National Monument, up in the hills northeast of Provo. It wasn’t in the hills at all, but way up in some serious mountains. As we climbed up US 189 toward  Heber City, we spotted the sign for the turnoff just in time and made a left onto a narrow winding road that climbed and climbed. We passed Sundance Resort (no sign of Robert Redford), and climbed and climbed and climbed. Priscilla the Prius did nobly (we had shut off Carmen the Garmin to keep her from being upset at our deviation from the road to Logan). After about 25  miles of threading numerous switchbacks we finally reached a pass and started down (no caves in sight). Though we were at 8,000 ft. by now, Mt. Timp (the locals call it) loomed high above us still, at 11,750 feet. There were snowfields here and there on its steep slopes, not much higher up than we were.

A mountain biker pulled into the trailhead where we had turned off the road to catch our breath to unload his bike as we were wondering whatever happened to the cave. He assured us it lay ahead, but if we wanted to see it, there was a 3-hour wait for a tour. This soured us considerably on caving, and when we finally reached the cave site any remaining enthusiasm was gone. Dozens of cars jammed the parking area, with hundreds of would-be explorers waiting in line. We drove on. It had been a two-hour detour, but with fabulous mountain scenery all the way.

The Mormon Temple

Then we traded one spiritual experience for a decidedly different kind, as we turned off the highway once more to visit the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City. It was something else. We were not allowed to enter the Temple or the Tabernacle, but did take a brief tour of the visitors’ center. An amazing sight. On the main floor was a large tabletop model of Jerusalem as imagined in 33 AD, with panels where you could push buttons to light up the supposed sites of numerous events in Jesus’ life. On the floor below were life-sized dioramas of Old and New Testament scenes. Patriarchs did pious things.  Ethereal music played from hidden loudspeakers. Earnest young people with name tags, often with flags of their nationalities (Cao from China, Annette from Australia, for instance) attached, were conducting tours and answering questions right and left. 

The Prophet Isaiah

We had mixed feelings about it all. On the one hand we were appalled by the lavish expenditure of money (all those LDS tithes) on such opulent, garish displays. On the other, here were all these devout people wandering about with smiles on their faces, many of them from far away on a pilgrimage of sorts, coming at last to visit the holiest of their shrines, which many of them may have waited half their lives to see (and had gladly chipped in their10% to help pay for). They needed the opulence, and the many displays of the religious events they had heard preached to them, to feel fulfilled. Two skeptical heretics from Gloucester were lost in the crowd.

Jerusalem, 33 AD

Incidentally, on the car parked in front of us on West Temple street was only the second Romney sticker we had seen on our entire trip (and we had seen only one Obama-Biden 2012 sticker, though Obama 2008 stickers were on almost every Prius we’ve encountered in more than two weeks. Should we conclude that voters in both parties are apathetic this year? And that Republicans don’t drive Priuses)?  

We missed two Utah landmarks we might have wanted to see: One was the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, west of Cedar City, where Mormons, disguised as Paiute Indians and possibly acting under the direct orders of Brigham Young, massacred 140 emigrant pioneers in 1857 (you can read all about it in Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven; there’s a monument there now, maintained by the LDS. 

The other was the “Spiral Jetty,” a coil 15 feet wide and 1,500 feet long, created out of mud and rock and extending out from the shore into the Great Salt Lake. It was built during a period of drought by Robert Smithson in 1970, but the runoff from melting snows each year has generally kept it invisible, totally submerged. Too bad.


We drove on, arriving at the Comfort Inn in Logan at 4:30, tired but edified.

Monday, July 16

Monday, July 16: Zion National Park to Fillmore, Utah (169 miles)

After a late breakfast in the Quality Inn complimentary breakfast zoo (coffee, ersatz orange juice, scrambled eggs, waffles), we checked out, left our car in the lot, and took the free shuttle bus to the Zion Park Visitor Center, where we boarded another shuttle bus for a tour of the canyon. Cars are not allowed on the roads, but the free shuttle buses run every five minutes; you can get off and on again at any one of the ten trailheads and other stops along the way. The 6-1/2 mile long road runs almost the length of the canyon; there’s a mostly level 2 mile long paved trail at the end of the road that even geezers can negotiate with ease (so we thought). The trail runs beside the Virgin River, which carved out the canyon millennia ago, and periodically floods dramatically. The canyon walls, which rise almost vertically, gradually narrow to a slit, which can only be accessed by wading upstream (we didn’t try it). The cliffs rise as much as 2,000 feet above us, and are a favorite for advanced rock climbers (though we saw none this hot day; they prefer spring and fall). 

 

We returned from the head of the trail by foot and shuttle bus, stopping at the Zion Lodge for a salad and a beanburger. There we had a pleasant conversation over lunch with a Belgian couple making their first trip to the US. (Comparing notes on our individual car travel, we each learned that the other had named their GPS. Ours, as you readers know, is Carmen (the Garmin); theirs, a TomTom, is named Katje and speaks Flemish. He told us how Katje says “recalculating” but Flemish is not easily learned in one setting and I soon forgot).

By then it was 2:30 or so, and we were still in Zion National Park, needing to get back on the road for a couple of hours. So we set off for the north, heading up I-15 toward Salt Lake City, and stopping at 4:30  after 169 miles in the little town of Fillmore, which brags that it was the first capital of Utah. The speed limit on I-15 is 80, and everyone does that and more. Scary.

We checked into a comfortable Comfort Inn, had a swim (our first on the trip) in the motel’s indoor pool, and went out to dinner. The choices were few: Burger King, Larry’s Drive-In, and the Hong Kong Kitchen. We settled for the Burger King, where we each had a fish sandwich (BK Big Fish) which cruising shipmate Ron Magers many years ago persuaded me was the best fast food bargain in America. He was right then, and he is still. The strange brown square objects in our hamburger buns were real fish, tasted like haddock, and quite likely were caught by Gloucester fishermen, packed by Gorton’s, and sold to Burger King. It was perfectly cooked, juicy and delicious.

The Burger King in Fillmore was a piece of Americana. If Edward Hopper were alive, he’d have painted the scene in this one. 

Sunday, July 15

Our Trip So Far: Gloucester MA to Zion National Pak, Utah - 3,068 Miles
(letters do not quite correspond to daly posts)

Sunday, July 15: Grand Canyon to Zion National Park

This was a day when we just had to sing "This Land is My Land." What a country! From the Grand Canyon, which we left around 9:30 am (PDT)  to Zion National Park, where we arrived around 6:30 pm (MDT), it was just one beautiful day. Almost impossible to describe the absolutely gorgeous landscape we drove through all day.  From the Grand Canyon we dropped down 2,000 feet to Cameron, AZ (where we spent some time and money at a wonderful trading post and visited a museum quality gallery of Navajo and Hopi crafts), then drove north on US 89 to Page, AZ, the Glen Canyon Dam  and Lake Powell, then Kanab, Utah and on into Zion.

The scenery was extraordinary all the way: brilliant red cliffs, buttes like flags with alternating stripes of red, yellow, white, and purple; cliff walls where the red strata were horizontal, adjoining lighter buff strata that were tilted at a 45 degree angle. We would climb  for miles up a steep grade and look out at a flat plain, with the less grand but still startlingly deep gash of the canyon carved by the Colorado river;  the enormity of the Glen Canyon Dam (was that the one Harrison Ford slid down to escape Tommy Lee Jones? -- no, that one urned out to be in North Carolina, but the image came to mind anyway); the blue-green of Lake Powell, a sudden shift from towering red cliffs, sagebrush, sand and stunted junipers to a startlingly bucolic rural landscape, with green grass, fenced paddocks, and horse farms.

Panic stop in the tunnel

And then finally the amazing -- and hair-raising -- drive into Zion National Park itself: pitch-black tunnels with peeks at towering mountains through sudden apertures,








and then a long series of switchback roads going back and forth, back and forth,  down, down, down to the canyon floor far below. No guardrails, white knuckles on many a steering wheel as our long string of cars made its way down. But everyone seemed to make it, and we pulled into our Quality Inn, just outside the park gates, at 6:30. A nice supper (crusted mountain trout and creme brulée) at the Spotted Dog Café across the street, where we were buzzed by a dozen hummingbirds enjoying the restaurant's strategically placed bird feeders.

I'll put in some more pictures with tomorrow's post.

Joy at Dinner. You can't see the hummingbirds, but they're there.

Saturday, July 14

Saturday, August 14:  Gallup to Painted Desert, Petrified Forest and Grand Canyon

It’s all true: the landscape of the Southwest is gorgeous, and the natural wonders beyond belief! Whether looking at those wonders or just the amazing weather, your eyes tend to pop  out of our head as you round a turn in the road or, emphatically, as you get your first sight of the Grand Canyon.

We checked into a rather sumptuous room at the Yavapai Lodge in Grand Canyon National Park a few minutes ago, and we can handle the luxury. 

But to begin at the beginning of the day: we had a good breakfast at the funky El Rancho hotel (though another guest who was examining the dozens of autographed movie star photos on the balcony insisted “You shoulda gone to Earl’s”) and checked out about 9:30, heading west on I 40/ US 66. (Route 66!) About 70 miles west of Gallup, we pulled into the Petrified Forest National Park, which includes the Painted Desert in its northern portion. The Painted Desert is particularly spectacular as you come upon it suddenly, after driving through a more monochromatic countryside. The petrified wood was amazing to look at, and there were even more and better petroglyphs than we’d seen yesterday, but we didn’t need to stop for every sight of another ancient petrified log. Amazing, though, to see the pieces scattered around the landscape like so many logs of freshly sawn wood, even though they were millennia old.

The one downer of the day was navigating through Flagstaff on the way to the Grand Canyon. Traffic was slow and dense, and our frustration was complicated by technology. I wanted to follow the straighter route prescribed by Google Maps; Carmen wanted us to bypass Flagstaff and take a longer route. She was right, of course, but it took her a long time to recognize what I was trying to do. “Recalculating, recalculating” was her constant refrain as I kept ignoring her frantic cries for us to turn back to Route 40. At last she gave up. I could have turned her off, of course, but was sure that at the next turn she would see the error of her ways.

We arrived at the Park at about 4:00 pm (PDT), gleefully swooping through the “prepaid” line to flash our Senior Park pass, which has saved us hundreds of dollars of entrance fees so far, and will continue to do so. We followed the signs to Mather Point overlook, found a parking space in an appallingly large sea of cars, and followed a trail through thick shrubbery, turned a corner, and MY GOD THERE IT WAS! Bursting out before us, almost too huge to grasp at first. The colors! The distances! The great depths right below our eyes!  The spiky towers and minarets of stone rising out of the canyon floor! We could see a hawk circling half a mile below us, a tiny patch of white water where the Colorado River was visible, and the North Rim, ten miles away, where perhaps an equal number of tourists were staring back at us.

The Grand Canyon in All its Glory

And there were indeed lots of tourists, speaking Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Dutch, Swedish, and even English. The click of camera shutters was a thousand crickets chirping. We had read in the AAA Tourguide that if you visit in summer, you’ll be griping about the crush of tourists for years to come. On the contrary – we felt exhilarated by the fact that so many people had come from so many places to stand in awe at what is unquestionably the most spectacular and spiritually moving sight in the US and perhaps the entire world.  

On the way back to the car we passed an intense group of earnest Creationists, possibly a family, sitting at a couple of card tables under an awning, trying to pass out religious literature, explaining how Noah’s flood had done the whole thing (personally, I tend to subscribe to the theory that it was Paul Bunyan with his axe, or maybe a furrow plowed by Babe, the Blue Ox. I bet the Navajo, whose land abuts the canyon, have a more inspiring legend). The throngs passing by tended to give them a wide berth. A little boy in the group was looking confused and agitated, possibly dismayed by the rejection or indifference shown by so many passers-by to the indisputable facts his parents had taught him.

We checked in at the Yavapai Lodge, and found our room, a rather elegantly outfitted but more or less standard motel room in a two-story cabin a few hundred yards away.  Publicity photos on the website had shown elk grazing outside the window, but it seemed unlikely, given the armada of cars and buses parked all around, that many elk would really want to take the trouble. A so-so dinner at the nearby Canyon Café, where I returned with laptop after dinner in hopes of sending out the last two days’ blog posts (it was the only place with wi-fi)  while Joy stayed at the room. Couldn’t get a strong enough signal, or more likely the computer was trying to do too much at once (trying to stream gorgeous photos of cliffs and canyons from the iPhone to the iCloud to the MacBook at the same time as it was attempting to upload my purple prose.  So back to the cabin and a book, and soon to sleep.

Friday, July 13

Friday, July 13 Santa Fe to Gallup, NM           

The day started with a surprise: I was sitting at the desk by the window in the study at the back of the house, checking email, when I looked up into the eyes of a large coyote, about 20 feet away, just coming around the corner of the house. My iPhone was in reach; I picked it up, glanced down to click on the camera app, looked up, and the coyote was gone. I turned to the other window on the SW side of the house; no sign. It had just disappeared.  Was it a ghostly apparition from the past? More likely it was a coyote on its morning trash rounds, looking for open garbage cans.

Coyote (not the one I saw)

We left Santa Fe at 10:30, headed for Gallup, at the suggestion of Ralph Bransky. An hour later, a short way out of Albuquerque, we turned off at a sign: National Petroglyph Monument. The landscape, which had been tawny sandstone bluffs and sagebrush desert, was now dominated by black lava hills, the spawn of a volcanic eruption millennia ago. Over the centuries, for whatever reason, travelers and inhabitants had marked the rocks with symbols: stars, spirals, animals, the outline of a hand, complex astronomical diagrams. To see them we had to clamber up a steep trail through the jagged rock, to the top of a small volcanic mesa. It was 95°, and while we made it to the top, we were both affected by the heat and felt we’d seen enough petroglyphs. We did see a roadrunner, however, no doubt to complement the coyote.

Message From an Anasazi Astronomer?

We drove on toward the west, hurtling along Interstate 40 at 75 mph. The hills grew steadily bolder, great red sandstone cliffs rising higher and higher above the land. The mesas grew ever higher and broader, each surrounded by a skirt of fallen rock that had peeled off the cliff faces over time.

At 4 we pulled into Gallup, and checked in to the amazing El Rancho Hotel (at Ralph Branksy’s insistence – and he was dead right). A Holiday Inn it’s not, and that’s why it is highly sought after. The hotel, built in 1937, and now owned  by a Native American, has three stories of rooms, laid out in a curving arc. The interior walls are brick inside and out; noise from neighboring rooms is nonexistent. Each room is named after a Hollywood star of the 1930s: ours is a corner room named for Rosalind Russell (we had a choice of her or Alan Ladd; no contest. Other rooms are named for Doris Day, Betty Grable, Betty Hutton, William Bendix, Humphrey Bogart, Katherine Hepburn). Supposedly they all stayed at the hotel at one time or another; the landscape is familiar to anyone who grew up watching cowboy movies of the 1930s and ‘40s.  Once Technicolor came along, the flaming red cliffs and deep blue sky would have been irresistible to any director of a good shoot-em-up.  In fact, I thought I recognized some of the landscape from old serials. 

The king- and queen-sized beds are modern, but everything else in the rooms  has a 1930s feel. The bathroom is lit by a pull-chain light over the sink; it has white hexagonal floor tiles. The dresser, desk and bedside table (there’s only one) are 1930s maple. We love it. 

And the lobby! Two stories high with a large Navajo-motif chandelier, Navajo rugs and wall hangings, heavy oak furniture, and a pair of stone staircases with railings and balusters of varnished tree limbs curving up to a balcony half-way up, with doors leading off to the curving corridors. And there’s an old-fashioned human-operated elevator leading up to the second and third floors. If you want to use it you have to find the desk clerk.

Lobby of El Rancho

We had a good Mexican meal in the dining room. We had been urged (by Ralph) to go down the street and “eat at Earl’s” but we were feeling pooped, it looked like it might rain, and the food was very good.

Thursday, July 12

Santa Fe

We spent the day touring galleries and the New Mexico Museum of Art. The galleries, both at the"Railyards" and downtown were all of high quality, with interesting and often provocative art on display. The Railyards galleries -- and there were more than a dozen of them -- were all in converted warehouses by the Santa Fe Railroad tracks, and had large rooms, very high ceilings, and great lighting, all of which made it possible to display quite large canvases. One gallery had dozens of Judy Chicago paintings, including a series of canvases at least 8 feet square, depicting excessively macho males. Very powerful stuff.

2 by Bernard Chaet

To our pleasant surprise, we came upon a painting by our friend Bernard Chaet at the Lewallen Gallery in the Railyards. Chatting with the owner, Ken Marvel, we learned that he had had several shows of Bernard's work, that he had visited Bernard and his wife Ninon Lacey in New Haven, and that we could see much more of Chaet's work at his downtown gallery.

We had a delicious lunch at the "Vinaigrette" restaurant, which was very popular, with people still lining up for tables at 1:30. It featured virtually nothing but salads, and they were good.

Teresa's head

After lunch we took ourselves to the Downtown gallery area, where we spent a pleasant hour looking at dozens of Chaet's canvases, with the help of Teresa Engeltjes, a charming and statuesque (6'1") Dutch woman. The paintings were gorgeous, of course, and included some quite early ones. I took a picture of Teresa for Joy's "back of the heads" project.

Next stop was the Santa Fe Museum of Art, which had a small but excellent selection of permanent and  changing exhibits, including a few Georgia O'Keefe's.

Santa Fe Museum Courtyard in the Rain

We had a 4 o'clock date with Toby and Ralph Branksy, friends of our Gloucester friends Joan and Lynn Swigart, but just as we started to leave the daily afternoon thunderstorm arrived. Of course our raincoats were in the car, several blocks away, so we waited awhile in the museum's pleasant courtyard for the rain to clear. Eventually it let up enough for us to make a run for it. I had a hat; Joy grabbed a tabloid newspaper flyer and held it over her head.

We found the Branskys' house, in a canyon in the hills, with some difficulty, because Carmen the Garmin seriously let us down, getting the streets all wrong (usually when we've disagreed, I've been wrong and she right. Not this time).  We were supposed to stop by for a brief drink, but to our mutual astonishment it was 7:30 by the time we got up to leave. We will stay in touch and hope they can come east for a visit in the fall.

Tomorrow we are off to the west, to Gallup NM on Friday and then to the Grand Canyon on Saturday.

Wednesday, July 11

Bandelier National Monument and Los Alamos

We made a late morning start on an expedition to Bandelier National Monument and a side trip to Los Alamos, driving north and west through gorgeous high desert scenery, and arriving at the town of White Rock at about 11:00. Because of a disastrous fire and flood in 2011, automobile traffic to the park was banned,  so free shuttle bus service from a dedicated parking lot in White Rock was provided instead.

Cave Dwellings

The park is named for a Swiss anthropologist and archeologist, Adolph Bandelier (1840-1914), who visited and studied the site in the 1880s. It was made a national monument in 1916. It features a dramatic geological setting, with towering cliffs on both sides of a canyon and a fascinating anthropological site, where Anasazi peoples lived from about 1150 to 1450 AD, in a large village on the valley floor and in dramatic cliff dwellings, where the inhabitants lived in caves and in structures several stories high, pinned to the cliff. Winding stone walls, kivas and what once were “apartments” with common walls are spread out over a large area in the valley.  Archeological digs are still continuing.

Joy and I went on a hot 1-1/2 mile walk along the valley floor, at one point climbing a steep series of steps to explore caves high on the cliff wall. When we’d stop to rest we were stunned time and again by the extraordinary scenery: jagged pock-marked rocks rising suddenly from the valley floor, majestic mesas rising high above us and stretching out into the distance. We were glad the walk was no longer than 1-1/2 miles, however.

The Rio Grande from White Rock

We rode the shuttle bus back to White Rock at about 3:00, then drove a mile to an observation point high above the Rio Grande. A dizzying drop to the river far below, and a view of mountains and plains that stretched a hundred miles or more.

Then it was off to Los Alamos, with rain threatening from time to time. On the advice of a guide at the Chamber of Commerce Visitor Center, we unwisely went to a Mexican restaurant for lunch. The burritos we both ordered were pretty bad. We had to take them outside to eat because the floors inside were being mopped with a detergent strong enough to make the eyes water. We sat at a table under an overhanging ledge and watched the rain come down.

We made a brief visit to the Bradbury Science Museum, a creation of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the descendant of the Manhattan project team under J. Robert Oppenheimer, that had developed the first atomic bombs there. The museum was somewhere between a joke and a disgrace: in an exhibit purporting to show the early history of the project, visitors were first given a simplistic video presentation of the origins and course of World War II, with an emphasis on the high number of casualties suffered by the American forces concluding with the inevitable message that without the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki many more American lives would have been lost. No mention of the efforts of some, including Manhattan Project scientists, to persuade President Truman to set off a demonstration blast in Tokyo Bay in hopes of persuading the Japanese to surrender; and no description or photographs of any of the damage to the two cities or the huge loss of life. They were only Japanese, after all.

Another exhibit included mockups of the first two atomic bombs, “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” and the evolution from them to more powerful and versatile weapons. We decided to leave before touring the rest of the exhibit, but if there was any attention given to the issue of non-proliferation, of other arms control efforts, or to the effects of nuclear weapons, they were not in evidence. The whole sense of gee whiz was augmented  by the inexplicable number of mind games scattered around the floor, where players could move blocks or sticks or other objects around to accomplish – what? We didn’t stay to look.

All in all, the entire museum seemed to be aimed at teenage boys and dedicated to the proposition that war is heck. Take a look at its website for an idea of its concept and message: http://www.lanl.gov/museum/index.shtml.

Back to Santa Fe to pick up a steak and a potato for dinner, to get lost in the winding streets for awhile, and finally to arrive back at Nancy’s in time for a shower and dinner at 7.  The steak was delicious.

Flora at Bandelier

     

Tuesday, July 10

Another day in Santa Fe

Another day of gallery and museum-hopping.  First, however, Vickie came by to fix a broken roller-shade (the big kind, that is pulled up and down with a beaded chain) that had mysteriously jammed in the down position), and helped us demystify the “charcoal” grill feature of the gas stove.

We stopped to see the award-winning photo gallery and bookstore Photo Eye, run by Vickie’s husband Rick. Several extraordinary photographers were on display, one we particularly enjoyed: Julie Blackmon, whose “Summer Mischief” series of very large photos depicted complex and amusing stories: "High Dive," showing people throwing Barbie dolls off  a balcony while others look on from below; “Sharpie,” a little girl lying on the floor in sheer ecstasy, having just drawn a large dark stick-figure image with a Sharpie pen on a costly damask covered sofa; a street scene ("Olive and Market"), with several people walking on the sidewalk, a dog crossing the street, a flock of birds and an airplane overhead. One suspects a bit of Photoshopping was employed (can’t imagine “cue the birds, cue the dog, cue the plane” to get them all in the right place at the same time). While amusing, they are all beautifully composed.

Another artist, John Chervinsky, showed a series of trompe l'oeil compositions, "Studio Physics:" He would photograph a still life composition -- a bowl of bananas, a Venus de Milo statuette, a dozen oranges scattered about, then create a smaller painting of a segment of the photo, then place the painting over the original photo, matching the part he had painted to the photo, and photograph the combined image again. 

In another gallery (Verve, owned by Nancy’s son Wilson) was a display of dark and fascinating work, “shadows of the Dream,” by Misha Gordon: large black-and white prints showing ranks of somber people, sometimes completely covered in hoods, or zebra-striped, or sitting naked in boxes on tiers of benches. Contrasting these was a brilliantly colorful slide show of street scenes, often fragments of doorways, windows, building façades,  by Jeffrey Becom.

I photographed the backs of several heads of people in both galleries for Joy to paint when she gets home (her “Heads Project” has now produced over 100 of them -- see for yourself on her web site, www.joyhalsted.com).

Then it was off to a delicious lunch at an Italian restaurant, i Piatto.

We ended the day at the Georgia O’Keefe Museum, a must-see for anyone visiting Santa Fe. The current exhibit, running from May 2012-May 2013, is entitled “Georgia O’Keefe and the Faraway: Nature and Image” and includes many scenes from her travels around New Mexico, still lifes of flowers and fruit, and photos of O’Keefe at work and play. The Museum’s many galleries can display only a small portion of her work at a time (its collection runs to more than 3,000 paintings, photos, and archival items) so they have chosen to change most of the exhibit every year.   An extraordinary and unique artist, shown in an intensely moving exhibition.

Back to Nancy’s for dinner, a hot tub, and bed.

Monday, July 9

Mon July 9: Santa Fe                       

Vickie, Nancy’s neighbor, who looks after Nancy’s house when she is gone, stopped by after breakfast to see if we needed anything, and gave us many good tips for places to go. It’s going to be hard to fit in all of her suggestions and everyone else’s, but they all seem too good to pass up.

So our first stop was the Museum of International Folk Art. An absolute must for anyone visiting Santa Fe. We were pleasantly surprised to learn that our admission fee (4 museums, 4 days) of $40 was waived because I am a veteran. Got to play that card more often!  

Our hands-down favorite exhibit of the Folk Art Museum was the extraordinary collection of more than 100,000 objects put together by architect and designer (and folk art fanatic) Alexander Girard. A large exhibition space is devoted to his collection, which displays, in one tableau setting after another, little stories from the various cultures from which he obtained his artifacts. A Mexican village scene, for example, might include a wedding in one spot, a street performance in another, a funeral procession, a policeman locking up a bandit, another miscreant in jail. A huge ceramic or silvery cathedral would loom over the scene; a colorful train would be pulling into the station where a crowd of people would be standing on the platform looking for their arriving relatives. All these people would be no more than 4 or 5 inches high, and there would be hundreds of them. And that would be only one tableau of maybe thirty or forty, showing folkways of  cultures from around the world. And interspersed among these scenes would be displays of needlework, colorful fabrics, and tools and ordinary but interesting utensils Mr. Girard had collected over many years.

Mexican Village Scene

There were other great exhibits, of course, ranging from Andean folk art to Javanese shadow puppets to West African ceramics and metalwork. I wasn’t aware that the little metal body parts and other objects called “Milagros” are not just a Mexican phenomenon, but are found around the world, used for the same general purpose: religious offerings to thank the appropriate saint for help in healing an ailment or disfigurement, or for more cheerful purposes like buying a car or a house, or finding one’s true love.

Before we left the museum for lunch we stopped to see the poignant “The Art of Gaman,” an exhibit of crafts and artwork produced by ethnic Japanese who were rounded up at the outset of World War II and imprisoned in the many internment camps set up by the shameful order of President Roosevelt immediately after Pearl Harbor. The Japanese word “Gaman” means “to bear the seemingly unbearable with dignity and patience.” An apt description of the many works we saw.

We had an excellent lunch in the museum café, sitting outside on the broad plaza separating the Folk Museum from the Museum of Indian Art (though eying some extraordinarily dark clouds from time to time, anticipating that we might be driven indoors by a thunderstorm). The plaza was covered with tents and awnings, being set up in preparation for this coming weekend’s International Folk Art Market, a popular annual event that we will miss.

Apache Dancer

After lunch we spent an engrossing two hours touring an exhibit in the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture entitled “Here, Now and Always,” tracing the history and culture – and stamina -- of Southwest Native American tribes before, during and after the Spanish conquest and then adapting to the occupation by the United States. A moving and sobering presentation, greatly facilitated by a docent who was a marvelously knowledgeable and tactful interpreter for a subject that required a lot of both.

The obligatory trip to the Museum gift shop ended our visit.

Our four-museum pass will get us into the New Mexico Museum of Art and New Mexico History Museum, which we may try to squeeze in on Wednesday.

The skies finally opened up as we arrived at an Albertson supermarket for needed supplies. The folding umbrella I had carried in the glove compartment for five years was good for a last 100-yard sprint through the cloudburst before it gave up the ghost. A replacement was for sale in the supermarket.

One last stop, at REI, for a new pair of shoes (Keen sandals) for me and then home for supper (broiled sockeye salmon with asparagus and rice).

A trip to the hot tub and then bed at last.

Sunday, July 8

Sunday, July 8:  Uptop to Taos and Santa Fe, NM

We left Uptop reluctantly at 10:00, after a huge breakfast and much enjoyable conversation with Sam and Deb, heading down the gravel road to Route 160 and Fort Garland.

From there it was about a 2 hour, 100 mile drive to Taos, through beautiful country with a mountain range on either side. We were in the Carson National Forest, on the broad rift valley between the Sangre de Cristo Mountains on the east and the San Juan Mountains on the west. Sagebrush and stunted grass covered the plains. Much of it was posted as “open range,” with signs warning motorists to watch for wild horses and elk. We saw two bands of horses, but no elk.

On the Road to Santa Fe

We ate lunch at the Bent Street Café and Deli. Great veggie sandwiches and a lovely woman playing soft guitar music, mostly to an enchanted little girl at the table next to ours. Throngs of tourists. Many awful galleries and schlock shops but two quite nice galleries too.
We found ice cream cones at the Chocolate Shop, and beat our retreat from busy Taos at about 4:00, Joy driving (white-knuckled and unhappy) through gorgeous scenery with the Rio Grande on one side, towering mountains on the other, and angry drivers tailgating her as we swooped around curves and plummeted down steep grades. I relieved her at the wheel, but we were soon down on the level and approaching Santa Fe, through a landscape dominated by Indian casinos.

We threaded our way through the heart of old Santa Fe, following Carmen’s instructions, and arrived at about 6:00 at Nancy Scanlan’s gorgeous house on Wilderness Way, in the hills southeast of the city. 95 miles from Taos. 

Our Home Away from Home

July 7 – Garden City, KS to "Uptop", CO

We left the Garden City Comfort Inn at about 8:30, after a big breakfast, our destination Uptop, a “ghost town” in the Rockies, west of Walsenburg, Colorado, that had been bought by two friends ten years ago. They had advised us earlier to stay south to avoid driving head-on into smoke from the wildfires around Colorado Springs, but at a tourist information stop in Lamar, CO, we were advised to go even farther south, not because of the smoke but because the 73 miles of  route 50 between La Junta and Walsenburg would be too dull, in his view. He told us to go south  instead and take Route 135 to Trinidad (80 miles), and then to take a scenic loop drive (another 82 miles) through the foothills, winding up in La Veta before heading up into the mountains to Uptop. This added about 2 hours to our trip, but it was well worth it.

We saw the last of Kansas and entered Eastern Colorado with a long and mostly lovely drive across wide open plains, rising slowly in elevation as we approached the Rockies. Cultivation (mostly sorghum and wheat) gave way to grazing land that went on for miles without a building or another car in sight. Low shrub vegetation and a few stunted trees, but most of it was pale gray grassland  As we approached Trinidad the road began to thread its way through long rolling flat-topped table lands, more trees appeared, and at last we rolled into Trinidad, a sizeable town. All the way the temperature kept dropping, from the mid 80s down as low as 57. Quite a contrast to the 100s we had been living with for the past four days.

We stopped in Trinidad at another tourist information facility, where we replenished our water bottles and were given a brochure describing the scenic loop road we were to take to La Veta. We looked for a place to eat lunch (salads picked up at the Wal-mart in Lamar) and settled for a shady spot under Highway 25, before setting out. The scenic loop road was called, quaintly, “The Highway of Legends,” but what the legends were was not explained. Carmen, our normally helpful GPS, was quite upset by our route choice and kept trying to steer us back to the main highway, the only way she thought we should go to La Veta. We finally shut her off. And the Prius was unhappy with the  high altitude.

Our scenic drive started out inauspiciously, passing through fairly unattractive suburban streets, then past an array of abandoned coke ovens and then through an active coal mining operation, with ugly bare black hills and mountains of coal. Eventually, as we began to climb, we entered more rugged open terrain, with giant rock outcrops, sparkling  clear blue lakes, and spectacular vistas of distant peaks, all made more dramatic by a succession of forbidding dark clouds that swept through, sporadically unleashing short-lived torrents of drenching rain. 

Headquarters of "Uptop"

We reached Uptop a little after 3, after a long winding climb up a gravel road and were greeted enthusiastically by Dianne (“Sam”) and her sister Deb, whose log house stands in the middle of what was once a railroad depot and then a logging camp. They bought it ten years ago, christened it “Uptop,” and have been refurbishing it ever since.

The site was first developed by a railroad pioneer, William Jackson Palmer, Head of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, who set out in 1871 to build a narrow-gauge railway from Denver across the Rockies. the line ran from Walsenburg to Fort Garland, carrying freight and passengers up a steep grade with sharp switchbacks -- one called a “muleshoe” for its shape). It was a big success, but only for a couple of years, until the railway decided it was a nuisance to have to transfer all freight from the cars of a standard gauge 4’ 8 ½” line to those of the narrow gauge 3’ line and then back again, and more costly than it would be to tunnel through the Rockies elsewhere, which they soon did. So the life of the narrow gauge line was short. The tracks were pulled up. The roadbed remained as a useable wagon trail and eventually an automobile and truck road, “muleshoe” switchback turn and all.

Over the years the site had been a logging camp for a while for cutting and shipping timbers to nearby mining operations, and subsequent uses had included an Inn, a Tavern, a schoolhouse, and a Catholic chapel. The two sisters bought the 600 acres of land from the last owner; the decrepit buildings were thrown in for free.  Sam and Deb have turned the former headquarters of the logging company into their own home, and refurbished the Tavern to create a function hall and meeting house, with a comfortable apartment at one end.  The Depot has been turned into a museum, and the chapel is open for all passersby to visit. Last year a couple in their 90’s renewed their vows there on their 60^th anniversary, riding there on horseback from Kansas. The old Inn still stands but is unusable, as are several other structures.

All in all, it’s an amazing place, and the two owners have done extraordinary things to it. They recently persuaded the Department of the Interior to declare it a national historic site; Interior Secretary Salazar and Colorado’s two Senators and Governor all came to Uptop for a ceremony commemorating its new status.

There are plans to improve the museum, and perhaps renovate another building or two. Sam and Deb would like to install solar panels for electricity, but the need to retain the historical nature of the site may complicate that plan.

Deb and Sam, Queen and Mayor of Uptop