A while back Peggy and I were driving north from somewhere, maybe San Diego, when we drove past Hearst Castle and came to Piedras Blancas. It was full of sunbathers, somewhat weight challenged— and nude. Naturally we had to stop and break out our cameras.
NEXT POSTS: On Friday, we will visit Ghost Ranch in New Mexico to wrap up the Georgia O’Keeffe series. On Monday we will start a new one as we look into the strange eyes of shamans and check out other petroglyphs.
Last summer when I was traveling down Highway 395 through Nevada and California, I discovered an excellent exhibit on Georgia O’Keeffe at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. It encouraged me to visit the places she had lived in New Mexico as one of the focuses of our Southwest trip last fall. Peggy, who likes O’Keeffe’s art as much as I do, readily agreed. In November, before Peggy and I climbed on Amtrak and made our way east to Virginia, I did two posts on Georgia and her time in Taos. In the first (go here), I featured relevant photos I had taken at the exhibit in Reno and then photos that Peggy and I had taken of the Church of St. Francisco of Asis church in Taos, a church that O’Keeffe had painted and her friend Ansel Adams had photographed. In the second (go here), I featured Mable Dodge Luhan, the famous art patron who persuaded Georgia to visit Taos, and the 1000-year-old Taos Pueblo, which O’Keeffe also painted and Adams photographed.
Today, we are going to visit O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiu, New Mexico. When she first visited her the place in the mid 30’s, it was an old Spanish-Colonial compound that was basically in ruins. But she fell in love with it, and according to Georgia, a particular door. She had to have it. Acquiring it took ten years, which she did in 1945. It was up to her friend, Maria Chabot, working as the general contractor for four years, to turn it into a home. ”It took six months just to get the pigs out of the house,” Chabot would claim. O’Keeffe lived in the house up until 1984 when ill health forced her to move to Santa Fe where she died in 1986 at the age of 98.
Peggy and I signed up for a tour of the home and studio with Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. It started at the O’Keeffe Welcome Center in Abiquiu and then progressed up to the house. We were allowed to take photos outside but not inside. (I suspect that’s to encourage people to buy the tour instead of just going on-line.) One of the more interesting items inside was a piano that Georgia bought so Ansel Adams could play when he came to visit her. We learned that he had trained as a classical pianist instead of a photographer. The house and surroundings inspired a number of her paintings including the door that had originally attracted her, which she painted some 20 times. Another focus, the cottonwoods growing in the Chama River Valley that her house overlooked, she painted 24 times
NEXT POSTS: On Wednesday it’s time for another photographic essay. This time I will post photos of some quite humorous elephant seals Peggy and I found on the beach near Hearst Castle in Southern California. On Friday, I will conclude my Georgia O’Keeffe series with a trip to Ghost Ranch, about 15 miles north of Abiquiu where Georgia also lived and painted.
On Wednesday, I took you for a ride on the Alaska Railroad from Anchorage to Fairbanks. We were on our way to attend the 2016 World Ice Carving Championships.
We were lucky to arrive in Fairbanks to see the carvers at work and then see their finished works of art. They were impressive, to say the least.
NEXT POST: On Monday I will have Georgia on my mind again as I return to O’Keeffe’s home in New Mexico and finish up the series I started before Peggy and I took off across the country on Amtrak.
There is great beauty in Alaska. I worked there from 1983 to 1986 as the Executive Director of the Alaska Lung Association. One of my jobs had been to lead 100-mile backpack trips as fundraisers to support the organization’s activities. (Not many executive director do that.) In addition to raising money, the treks provided me with an opportunity to explore some of the state’s more remote corners and vast wilderness areas.
In March of 2016, Peggy and I returned to ride the Alaska Railroad from Anchorage with our son Tony and his family to attend the world championship ice carving contest in Fairbanks. Tony was flying helicopters for the Coast Guard out of Kodiak at the time. The train trip reminded me of just how beautiful and wild Alaska is. We were fortunate to travel on a clear day that provided great views, including Mt. Denali. In Fairbanks, it was exciting to watch some of the world’s greatest ice carvers at work and see their completed sculptures. Today’s photo essay will reflect the train trip. On Friday, I will show you the ice carving contest.
NEXT POST: On Friday I will show you photos of the world championship ice carving contest in Fairbanks. The sculptures were amazing. You won’t want to miss them.
I figured the Devil had to cook with ghost peppers, and that got me excited. I like my food spicy hot and it doesn’t get much hotter. A tiny bit goes a long, long way, even for me. Lacking that, I thought I might at least find a churning, boiling sea like you find at the Devil’s Churn. Instead, I found a quiet, bucolic scene. Crooked Creek flowed peacefully out to the ocean.
But wait a minute, I thought. The Devil is sneaky, right. Maybe Crooked Creek was indeed crooked. Maybe it tricked people into crossing and then sucked them under with quicksand. With this in mind, I went seeking other subtle reminders of the Devil’s presence.
NEXT POST: The Wednesday Photo Essay. Four years ago in February, Peggy and I went for a ride on the Alaska Railway from Anchorage to Fairbanks with our son Tony and his family. Join us as we check out Mt. Denali and attend a world championship ice carving contest.
The American River flows right through the heart of Sacramento, California and is one of the community’s greatest assets. I spent a lot of time there when I lived and worked in the city. It was where I escaped to when I needed a touch of the wild, which was often. It was a rare week when I didn’t hike of bike there at least once. And there were times when I was there almost every day. Later, when I became interested in photography, I often carried a camera. There were birds and ducks and geese and jackrabbits and cottontails and turkeys and deer and foxes and coyotes and skunks and raccoons and otters and squirrels, and rattlesnakes (on my) to photograph.
And there were flowers. Fields and fields of them. Enjoy. Happy Valentine’s Day!
MONDAY’S POST: We are going to visit the Devil’s Kitchen. Are you ready?
I was up on a cliff studying one of Washed Ashore’s sculptures made out of ocean trash when I heard the statement. It was a classic. The perfect senior moment! “Excuse me ma’am,” the young woman called, “do you know there is no dog on your leash?” I turned quickly. At 76 going on 77, I take notes on such incidents for future reference. Yes indeed, a bent, elderly woman was walking down the pathway holding a leash that was strung out behind her— without the dog. She turned, glared at the leash, muttered something, and stared back down the trail like Clint Eastwood on steroids. There came Fido (the name has been changed to protect the innocent), who was equally old in dog years, about 30 feet down the path, tottering along with no obvious desire to catch up. I could almost hear him chanting “Free at last, free at last,” as he stopped to smell the dog pee and dream of his puppyhood days.
With the help of the young woman, Fido was soon recollared and the three went on their way. As did I. But I wanted to write down the story down before it wandered off like Fido. And since I was still hanging around Bandon, I decided to show you more rocks today instead of the American River flowers I promised. I am sure you are excited. Plus, Friday is Valentine’s Day, the perfect day for flowers.
NEXT POSTS: I promise flowers for Valentine’s Day. On Monday we will visit the Devil’s Kitchen. Scary? We’ll see.
I dropped Peggy at the airport in Medford on Friday. She’s off to spend a couple of weeks in Virginia on grandkid duty while their parents make a quick escape to Mexico. “Please come Mom,” Tasha had requested while Clay had sent her first-class tickets. Hard to ignore that appeal. I was invited as well, but having just spent Christmas and New Year’s back east, I opted for a solo trip in Quivera the RV over to the Oregon Coast with plans for making my way south to Redwood National Park in Northern California.
That’s what I am up to now as I put this post together. I decided what better time to write about our coming travel/blogging plans for the year than when I am out traveling. I’ve just spent the past three days in the small coastal town of Bandon, which has some of the most impressive rock formations on the Oregon Coast. They make up several of the photos for today’s blog.
Travel-wise, we have a full year planned. 2020 started with our trip home on Amtrak from Washington DC, which I’ve already blogged about. This is trip number two. (Although it’s sans-Peggy, I’m counting it.) In late March, we are taking off for a 16-day cruise focusing on the Panama Canal. Peggy lived down there in 70’s for a while in her life before Curt. It is where Tasha was born. She has been wanting to get back there for a very long time. When I mentioned the possibility of the cruise, she jumped on it. Peggy’s sister Jane and her husband Jim are going along. In addition to Panama, we’ll be making stops in Costa Rica, Columbia, Nicaragua and Mexico.
We plan to kick off our backpacking season with a 40-mile trip down the Rogue River trail. It is beautiful in spring and makes an ideal beginning of the season hike. Peggy turns 70 this year and wants to make sure she celebrates properly. She also wants to explore more of the Pacific Crest trail through Oregon this summer as well. I’ll plan a 70-mile trip to go along with her years and my 77. We also have a 7-day kayak trip planned.
The biggie in celebrating her 70th, however, is a 7-day Rhine River Cruise from Amsterdam to Bern. We’ve invited our children and grandchildren along and, needless to say, they are excited. We will be in the middle of our trip when Peggy has her birthday on July 5th. Afterward, we will pop over to France to spend several days with Peg’s brother John and his wife, Frances.
We have tentative plans to return to Burning Man this fall. That, of course, depends on our ability to get tickets in the BM lottery, never a sure thing. Throw in the fact that we will be in the middle of the Panama Canal with iffy internet connections when the lottery takes place, I am not optimistic.
Peggy is off on another cruise in September, this time with her sister Jane from San Francisco up to Victoria, BC, a girls’ trip. I’ll take advantage of it to drive Quivera south down through Santa Cruz, Monterrey, Carmel and Big Sur. I love that area and have been escaping down there since the 60s and 70s, when I used to camp out along the road in my VW van. It’s as close as I ever got to being a hippie.
October will be time to jump in Quivera and do another month-long exploration of the Southwest. This time we want to include Death Valley NP, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, Zion NP, Bryce NP, Capitol Reef NP, Canyonlands NP, and Arches NP. (This may be news to Peggy, grin.) After that we will be traveling east to spend the holidays with our kids. We are contemplating using Amtrak again, following different routes. Does that sound like enough for the year? Do you think I will have adequate material to blog about? Heck, I still have lots from last year? I never seem to catch up. Do you? And then there is the book I am writing…
I’ll conclude with a note of parental pride, if I may. Our son Tony just received the Coast Guard’s second highest award for coordinating the massive rescue effort the Coast Guard undertook in the Bahamas during Hurricane Dorian. The storm was a devastating category five hurricane with record-setting winds of up 175 mph. He and his fellow Coast Guard helicopter pilots spent 5-days more or less without sleep on the ground and up in the very dangerous air. The Commander of the Coast Guard and the Secretary of Homeland Security awarded Tony with the medal.
NEXT POST: It will be time for my Wednesday Photograph Essay. This time it will be mainly flowers I photographed along the American River Parkway in Sacramento, California.
He was a large man in his 50s with a tattoo covered body, an ex-con who had found the Lord, a smoke jumper with a serious twitch who seemed to have made a few too many jumps. She was a petite, attractive, college graduate going for her PhD in economics with a desire to work for the federal government. It would have been hard to find two more opposite people. They were our dinner companions on Amtrak one evening. Amtrak’s policy is to seat four people to a table. If there are four of you traveling together, fine. If not, you are seated with strangers based on when you arrive. The smoke jumper had arrived first, and then us. The student last.
She had been seated next to the smoke jumper and eyed him nervously every time he made a serious twitch in her direction. With reason. He told us one of his twitches had caused him to dump a pint of beer on the man sitting next to him at dinner the night before. He liked to talk and we were a captive audience. Not that I objected, he had interesting stories to tell, but Peggy and I did what we could to involve the student in our conversation. She’d manage a few words before he jumped back in. She was just returning from an economic conference in Washington and was on her way home. Turns out she lives in Medford and works during the summer at an up-scale restaurant in Jacksonville, one we like to go to.
Given Amtrak’s policy, we never knew who our meal companions would be. Dinners were more formal and we had to sign up for specific times. There was even a real table cloth! It was paper for breakfast and lunch and you could show up any time during meal hours. The seating policy remained the same, however. Usually, we ended up seated with couples. Once we spent a delightful meal with a lesbian couple. Another time it was with a Russian who owned shoe stores in New York City and was on his way to set one up in LA. “I have too many brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles and other relatives in New York,” he told us. He was looking to escape. To keep the conversation going during another meal, I started telling stories about my encounters with bears. Soon, all of the surrounding tables and two of the waiters were listening in.
I have to say the food was quite good. One of the items on the evening menu was a small, tender steak, cooked to perfection. It became my go-to meal. I had steak for every dinner! Since all meals were included for those of us who had sleepers, why not? Had I been paying the $35 Amtrak was charging for the steak, I’d have been down in the less formal café car eating hamburgers and hot dogs along with most of the coach passengers.
While meals took care of our social life, going up to the observation car and staring out the windows at the passing scenery (or sitting in our rooms watching the passing scenery) was our major entertainment. We also read and I got some writing done. I had a horrendous cold on the way back and isolated myself most of the time. I’m glad we were traveling pre-coronavirus; Amtrak might have kicked me off the train or my fellow passengers stoned me.
As for the future of Amtrak; it seems bright. They had their best year ever last year in terms of passengers and revenues. Train travels seems to be on the upswing. No surprise there, given how much fun air travel is. One of the folks I follow in Europe told me that some European trains were going to add sleepers, which they had dropped a couple of decades ago.
A disturbing trend on Amtrak is that the company may be taking lessons from the airlines. We were served prepackaged airline food on our trip between Chicago and Washington DC. It had the same bland, inedible quality of something you eat to avoid starvation.
I had a disconcerting conversation with our car attendant on the Coastal Starlight. The train was famous for a club car that came straight out of the glory days of rail travel. People would take the train just to experience it. Amtrak still has the car, but they no longer include it on the Starlight. The attendant told me that Amtrak was trying to standardize the service on its various trains. Apparently, the car was too special. With the airline food in mind, I had replied, “Ah, you mean increasing profits by reducing service.” Were narrower seats and added costs for everything in the future? He hadn’t commented but did get a strange look in his eyes.
Regardless of what Amtrak might do to its service, the relaxing feel of train travel combined with its unique view of the world as it passes by and the fun conversations with strangers will bring me back to experience the clickety-clack of the rails again and again.
Today I will feature photos Peggy and I took on our return trip across the country. The trip took us from Washington DC to Chicago, Chicago the LA, and then LA to Sacramento.
NEXT POSTS: On Monday I am going to write about our travel plans for this year, which translates into what I will be blogging about. There are fun things like cruising up the Rhine River and going through the Panama Canal. Wednesday’s photo essay will be on the beauty of the American River as it flows through Sacramento. Hiking and biking its many trails are what kept me sane the years I lived in the city.
The last time I slept in a bunk bed I was sharing a one bedroom apartment with two classmates, Cliff and Jerry, at Berkeley in 1964/65. I was on the bottom bunk then, as well. My memory includes one particularly wild night. It was our first weekend back at UC. Cliff had brought home a small wooden barrel of tequila from Mexico where he had spent the summer in a Spanish language immersion program. For some insane reason, the three of us decided we had a solemn responsibility to drain the barrel to kick off our senior year. It was not our best decision.
Jerry promptly fell asleep and started snoring. Loudly, if I remember correctly. He had the regular bed. I spent 30-minutes staring at myself in the bathroom mirror in a semi-hallucinatory state fascinated by the fact I couldn’t stop drooling. When I returned to bed, Cliff, who had the top bunk, talked unceasingly. He wouldn’t shut up. Since neither Jerry nor I was listening, I assume he was talking to himself. I’d grunt on occasion. Finally, I lifted up my leg and kicked his mattress. Down came Cliff, mattress and all on top of me. After we had untangled ourselves, we laughed until we were hoarse and then put Cliff’s mattress on the floor for the rest of the night. I think he was still talking when I fell asleep. Damn, did we have headaches the next morning!
Fast forward 56 years to now for my second bunk bed experience. This time on Amtrak. Peggy had top honors. Our tiny sleeper was about five feet wide and seven feet long. It started as two comfortable chairs facing each other. Large windows provided great views from our double decker roomette. There was barely, and I do mean barely, room for our two day packs and two small suitcases. When we were ready for bed, the car attendant came to our room and set it up. Our two chairs became the lower bunk and the top bunk was released from its attachment to the ceiling. The whole process took about three minutes.
The bottom line of all this, of course, is how did we sleep. There were three factors. The first was the comfort of the beds. No problem there. The second was their width. Given all of the times that Peggy and I have slept in small backpacking tents, they felt roomy. The real challenge was adapting to the moving train. First there was the clickety-clack of the wheels passing over the joints in the rails. It was repetitive, however, and soon disappeared into the background. I thought of it as noisemaker to lure me sleep.
The train’s swaying was another issue altogether. We didn’t have a problem coming across the Sierras. Trains go slowly when they climb and go down mountains. It’s on the flats that the engineers put the pedal to the metal. It’s where they make up for lost time. I can imagine one engineer boasting to another, “I made it across there in an hour!” with the other responding, “Ha, it only took me 59 minutes.” For the most part, the swaying is like the clickety-clack. You get used to it. But there were instances when I was reminded of being on a ship during a really bad storm or hitting heavy turbulence in a jet. There were three particularly bad situations: when the train was traveling over rough tracks, when it went over a poorly maintained road crossing, and when it went around a corner faster than it should.
During the day, it wasn’t much of a problem, assuming you had something to grab onto if you were out and about. Sleeping was a different issue, as we learned our first night. The attendant had worked his three-minute magic and we had settled down for a long winter’s sleep across Nevada when the train hit some rough track, traveled over a poorly maintained road crossing, and went around a sharp curve— all at the same time— fast. Wham! Peggy was thrown into the netting designed to keep her from rolling off the bed and I was thrown into the side of the train. “That does it!” I head Peggy mumble loudly as she scooted across the bed, climbed down from her bunk, and slipped into mine. Remember how I said the bunk was roomy. That’s for one person. There was simply no room for the two of us. We had to sleep head to toe. I slept with Peggy’s feet and she slept with mine. I’m not sure which of us got the better deal.
Traveling between Chicago and Washington DC we were upgraded to a bedroom. It came with a double-sized bed that was comfortable for the two of us, a sink, and its own bathroom! We didn’t have to use the communal facility. While our bedroom wasn’t large by any stretch of the imagination, it felt palatial in comparison to our roomette. A small shower even provided a bath assuming you didn’t mind washing off the toilet at the same time. Recommendation: Choose a time to bathe when the train isn’t swaying.
We had one other configuration. Amtrak had supposedly upgraded its roomettes with a restroom. We had one returning home on our route between Chicago and LA. The toilet that snuggled up to the bottom bunk, sort of like you might see in a prison cell. It was inches away from my head when I was is bed. That was not okay. To add insult to injury, Amtrak had removed the communal restrooms from the car. We had to go on a three-car hike to find a real bathroom. Our attendant told us that the company had realized the error of its ways and was no longer building the roomette restrooms. What a surprise.
All in all, while I’ve had a bit of fun with this post, we slept in relative comfort, especially if you compare it with trying to sleep on an airplane. Even the coach seats on Amtrak are wide, comfortable, and fold back far enough to create a half-way decent night’s sleep.
My photos of the trip today include our journey from Sacramento to Washington DC, minus, of course, the pictures we took while crossing the Rocky Mountains that I shared in my last post. Enjoy.
For my next post, I am going to experiment with a photo essay. (It’s called what do you do with your 80,000 plus photos.) The post after that I’ll feature our Amtrak trip back to the West plus eating on the train, which is all about meeting strangers.
The Bush Devil Ate Sam is an important record and a serious story, yet told easily, and with delightful humor. This is one of the most satisfying books I have ever read, because it entertained me thoroughly AND made me feel better informed. —Hilary Custance Green: British Author... Click on the image to learn more about my book, the Bush Devil Ate Sam, and find out where it can be ordered.
