Mark & Georgie

July 21- August 21, 2008

2008-08-25T23:35:00.000-07:00

Monday, July 21, 2008 We drove to Ellis Army Base to tour the Blackhorse OPFOR library. This is the elite Army group who act as the opposing force to train Army and other military units going to Iraq or any other war zone. These guys are the best of the best and train the other units on what to expect and how to combat it. They receive information from the men “in country” and use that information to revise their teaching. Tom Clancy wrote about this group in one of his books. He wrote the book with Tommy Franks, who lost his leg in Cambodia but stayed in the military and showed everyone up at PT even with his prosthesis. Mark has covered the story in his photos. We spent a lot of time in the back rooms of the museum seeing the artifacts not on display. The head of the museum, Neil Morrison, spent a couple of hours with us. When we mentioned that we wanted to tour Goldstone Deep Space Facility, he thought he could get us in even though the tours were full. However, the girl who handles the tours was on vacation so he couldn’t fit us in.

Tuesday, July 22 – Mail came in early this morning. In the afternoon we went into downtown Yermo to mail the mail. Then we took a ride out Ghost Town Road and ended up at Calico Ghost Town. This was started by the developer of Knott’s Berry Farm to authentically recreate all of the silver mines that were in this area in the 1880’s to 1910 or so. We walked through one of the mines. Let me tell you, tunneling through that mountain with hand drills and hand carts to remove the debris was hard work. The only advantage was that the mines were about 76 degrees and the outside temperature was about 110 degrees! We pretty much saw everything we wanted to in an hour…

Wednesday, July 23 – We left Yermo and headed up I15 toward Las Vegas. There is so much desert. So dry. So flat. So hot. We arrived at Las Vegas RV Resort, but there was a little confusion finding it since we THOUGHT we were headed to Holiday Resort. They just changed their sign out front today and there was no sign and no street number. That made it just a little difficult to find! We spent a lot of time watching Hurricane Dolly tear up Port Mansfield. Luckily, we didn’t have too much damage. We lost the T-head part of the pier at 529 North Shore. Home Port has some shingles flapping and we lost a piece of siding. All in all, we did OK for a Category 2 storm that stayed over Port Mansfield for about 8 hours!

Thursday, July 24 – We decided that I probably should go back to Port Aransas while Mark is at Oshkosh. John is tearing his hair out with all of the problems getting Blue Heron finished. Mark went to the Apple Store and had a great time! He upgraded to a new operating system and bought another meg of RAM. I worked on paperwork and called the engineers for Home Port and Blue Heron about 6 times. Still no satisfaction… Same thing on the insurance. How frustrating.

Friday, July 25 - I did paperwork.

Saturday, July 26 – Paperwork and getting ready to leave. We drove down the Strip to see where our next campground is and just to see the lights!

Sunday, July 27 - Left very early to try to catch non-rev flights. Mark to Chicago to go to Oshkosh. Me to fly to Corpus and home for the week.

Monday, July 28 to Sunday, August 3 – Mark in Oshkosh. Me in Port Aransas helping John get the condos finished so we could sell one on July 30. Mark flew back to Las Vegas on Sunday (non-rev) and picked up the car. I flew to Houston. Spent the night at Brian and Kathy’s because Emily was sick. Walkers came over to visit and left Sarah.

BE PREPARED: The following has 272 photos!

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Monday, August 4 – Sean and Ashlyn came to Creighton’s and picked us up to go to the airport. Tried to go swimming, but swimming pool was closed.

With Sarah and Ashlyn, this is what we did for the week:

Tuesday, August 5
We moved the motor home to Circus Circus KOA
We went swimming (to motor home is only a few feet from the pool and playground)
We went to Circus Circus and saw the rides and then watched a couple of circus shows

Wednesday, August 6
We worked on our Hoover Dam project
We went to the pool
We went to Circus Circus to the rides and rode the rides as many times as we wanted to!
We went to Treasure Island to see the pirate show, but it was cancelled due to rain.
We went to Paris! to see the Eiffel Tower and walk around

Thursday, August 7
We filled our Hoover Dam project with water and made a reservoir and saw how the turbines get the water to make electricity.
We went to the pool.
We went to the Venetian and had a gondola ride with Pia (a girl from near Siena, Italy) as our gondolier.
We went to New York! New York! For dinner and to walk around and see New York.
THEN, we went to the “World’s Largest Gift Store” and bought our souvenirs.

Friday, August 8
We went to Hoover Dam and saw a movie about how they made the dam, saw the diversion tunnels and the power plant with the big turbines. Then we went out to the viewing area and saw the dam. It was gigantic and made up of a lot of huge blocks of concrete.
We went to see the Treasure Island Pirate Show and this time we got to see it! Sarah and Ashlyn thought it was awesome!

Saturday, August 9
We made sleeping bags for the monkeys. We put each monkey’s name on her sleeping bag.
We went to the pool.
We tried to take a nap.
We went to see “O” Cirque de Soleil at the Bellagio.
After the show we watched the beautiful fountains TWO times.

Sunday, August 10
We slept really late.
We went to the pool.
We went to Madame Tussaud’s to see the wax figures. We took lots of pictures. Ashlyn says it was cool!

Monday, August 11
We expect to:
Go to Circus Circus again for the rides
Swim at the Mirage with the Clarks
Go to the Mirage Buffet for dinner
Walk through Caesar’s Palace to see the talking statures

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Tuesday, August 12
Sarah and Ashlyn and I flew to Houston. Sean picked both girls up and drove Sarah to meet Heather. I just got back on a plane and flew back to Las Vegas.

Wednesday, August 13 – We got organized again and made plans for the coming weeks. Talked to Bob Clark who left to drive back to Port Aransas with Harrison.

Thursday, August 14 – We took a helicopter ride to the Grand Canyon. It was an EcoStar 320 and sitting inside it was like sitting in a glass room! The pilot sat in the left front seat and there were 2 paying passengers along side of him in the front. In the back were 4 people in a row. Everyone had a good view. We took off from the general aviation airport in Las Vegas and flew part of the way down the strip. Then we headed off toward the Hoover Dam. Flew over it and the new bridge they are building so that they can stop vehicle traffic from going over the Dam itself. We entered the Grand Canyon and flew down the river to the right side of the middle. The Hualapai Indians own from the middle of the river to the south. The National Park Service has jurisdiction from the middle of the river north. The Hualapai Indians charge an entrance fee for each person and then allow the helicopters to fly in and land about 300’ above the Colorado River and 6000’ below the canyon rim! The helicopter company has a picnic area set up with camouflage netting over top for shade. They have picnic tables set and each copter carries in a try of veggies and dressing, croissant sandwiches, sodas, water, champagne and plastic glasses and plates. It was a really nice little picnic. Then we all walked around and took our photos. We flew out via a different route and flew back over Meadview. The town of Meadview was laid out with streets and lots for houses in the 1940’s. The war was over and people were looking for a place to build their dream house. Transportation was still inconvenient for most people and the lots were sold sight unseen to people who thought they were buying a lot right on Lake Mead. The town is definitely in the middle of nowhere. There are NO stores, NO services. They do have electric and water and some kind of sewer service. There is no way to get down to Lake Mead. However, it is becoming a retirement area for people from the north who like the milder winter weather in Arizona. When we came back to Las Vegas we flew over the strip and took lots of good pictures. Landed and went back to our motor home.

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Friday, August 15 – We left Las Vegas and the 112 degree weather behind and just headed north. We stopped when we got to Fillmore, Utah. We knew we were far enough north when the air conditioners actually shut off for a while!

Saturday, August 16 – We drove on to Provo, Utah. I got the mail so that took care of the rest of the day!

Sunday, August 17 – We went to Church at a Latter Day Saints (Mormon) church. Interesting service… The four hymns were very slow and sleepy. There is not a sermon by a pastor but instead members of the congregation talk for about 15 minutes each about their life and their thoughts and how their religion has affected their life. We drove up one of the canyons past a nice waterfall with a nice park. Then we drove on to Heber City. Nice drive.

Monday, August 18 – We stayed again in Provo and drove to nearby Orem to see the Leonardo Da Vinci Exhibit. A company in Italy has taken Da Vinci’s drawings and made working models from them. There was one drawing that a model could NOT be made of – it simply would not work. It was all VERY interesting. especially since we are currently listening to “Leonardo Da Vinci – The First Scientist”!

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Tuesday, August 19 – HEATHER’S BIRTHDAY Today we drove all the way up to Salt Lake City. (About another 60 miles!) After we parked the motor home we drove west out toward Magna and Copperton to see the world’s largest open pit copper mine. In the 1850’s the Bingham family was farming in the area and found copper, gold and silver. They told Brigham Young (no relation to them) about it and he told them to ignore the minerals and instead concentrate on growing food for the huge number of people coming into the Salt Lake area. They did as they were told. Then about 10 years later someone else came on to the land and “discovered” the minerals. They mined them and as word got out LOTS more miners came. About 1900 a mining engineer came to the site and thought that he had a way to get the scattered minerals out of the ground in an economical way. (The minerals got into the rocks when veins of copper, silver, gold and a few other things forced their way through the rock. Then the steam and water filtering through the rocks took small particles of the minerals and scattered them throughout the rock. The concentration of copper in this rock is about 1%. In order to recover it economically there had to be a process where they could take out ALL of the rock, crush it, recover the copper and dispose of the left over rock. They decided that the only way to do that was not with underground mines but by making an open pit. There are veins of copper, etc. that the engineers have located by taking core samples. The non-mineral bearing overburden is removed, loaded into trucks and trucked away. The rock that contains at least 1% copper is loaded into trucks and taken to the ore crusher inside of the pit itself. This rock is crushed to soccer ball size and transported by a series of 3 conveyor belts 5 miles through the mountain (in a tunnel) to a stockpile on the other side of the mountain. This rock is crushed again and again until it is as fine as face powder. It goes to the smelter and is mixed with water and chemicals and sloshed around. The copper binds with the air bubbles on the surface. The surface bubbles are removed and are dried. The dried granules are 85% pure copper. They are further refined until there is a slab of copper that is 99.5% pure. (The slosh from the first process is sent back to the “slosher” to be processed again to get any copper that may have been hiding.) This slab then goes to the refinery where the slab is “hung” on a rack in water with a stainless steel plate on either side. The water is electrolyzed to send the copper particles from the slab onto the stainless steel plates. The copper removed from the stainless steel plates is 99.9% pure and ready to be shipped to the end users. The copper mine is now owned by Rio Tinto Corp which is the same Corp that owned the Boron Mine we went to in Boron, California, on the way to Barstow. The Visitor’s Center was first class with lots of very good information and displays.

Wednesday, August 20 – FAITH’S BIRTHDAY We drove east to drive up the Little Cottonwood Canyon and then the Big Cottonwood Canyon. The Little Cottonwood Canyon goes past two HUGE ski resorts and ends at the second one, Alta. The ride was really beautiful. We could see so many ski runs and ski lifts. In the town of Alta the road ends, but there is a tourist information booth at the end of the paved road where a representative asks you “if you know where you are going” and gives you information about the unpaved 3 mile road ahead. There are lots of hiking trails and beautiful flowers and pretty mountains. We THINK that the unpaved road itself is the ski slope in the winter time. We drove back down the same road to the Snowbird ski resort for lunch and marveled at the way the ski resorts have turned themselves into summer destinations for people to come out in the summer, take a tram ride, climb the rock climbing wall, jump on the jumpolenes, shop in the shops, etc.

Then we drove up to the Big Cottonwood Canyon to where it ended at another ski resort. This one is not as sophisticated as the other two but they are working on it. We decided to try a side road over to Park City where some of the Olympics were held. It turned out to be unpaved for quite a while, but it wasn’t too bad. From the dirt road we came to a huge construction site with TWO huge tower cranes. They have built a 4-lane road from the resort up to the top of the mountain where there are ski slopes. They are building a 20 story condo time share for the ski resort. We thought we were in the middle of nowhere, but we were actually on the far end of the beginning of somewhere. As we traveled further we came to other apartments, houses, condos that must be the living quarters for those who want to use the ski slopes. We never saw any ski slopes or lifts, but they HAVE to be there for that many people! We drove through Park City and then back to Salt Lake on I-80.

We drove around downtown Salt Lake for a while looking at the city again. We spent some time here in 2002 and saw everything downtown then.

Thursday, August 21 – Left Salt Lake City and headed to Montpellier, ID. However, we decided to stop and leave the motor home at a Pilot Truck Stop and just take the car and go to Promontory Point to see where the Transcontinental Railroad lines were joined. It is really 20 miles from anywhere! The site is the Golden Spike National Historic Site run by the National Park Service. The visitor center and the movie were so-so. But, some of the displays were quite informative. Outside of the visitor center are the railroad tracks with a recreation of the special railroad tie and the commemorative spikes. Also, there are faithful recreations of the two locomotives that were actually at the ceremony linking the two railroad lines on May 10, 1869. In 1900-1904 the railroad began a major improvement campaign to remove 12,000 degrees of curves, 45 miles of track and the uphill climb through the Promontory Pass. These improvements detoured around Promontory Summit and that line was used only for local traffic. In the early 1940’s the unused track was taken up and reused for the war effort. SO, the track we are looking at here with the recreated railroad tie and the recreated spikes and the recreated plaque and recreated locomotives is hopefully in the correct place. It is so interesting that the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific had already passed each other building their track. They ran parallel tracks for 250 miles! However, finally, in April, 1869, the government forced the two railroads to negotiate a place for the rails to meet. They chose Promontory Point and set up the joining date as May 8, 1869. However, Durant’s train on the Union Pacific line was held up for two days, so the actual ceremony was held on May 10, 1869. The museum in Sacramento, CA, was the best museum we have been in to tell the Intercontinental Railroad story. This was still a great place to visit. We got to see the original rail beds and the parallel rail beds of the two lines. “The Big Fill” was visible. It was where the Union Pacific decided to fill in the space between two hills while the Central Pacific decided to build a trestle bridge across the same area. The Big Fill took 500 men two months using hand carts to fill in the space. Incredible.

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Since we didn’t get as far as we intended, we just went to a different KOA in Bingham City instead of continuing on to Montpellier, Idaho! We don’t want to travel too many miles in any one day!

June 26- July 30, 2008

2008-08-25T23:32:00.000-07:00

Thursday, June 26, 2008 - Jackie’s sister Mary Ann died this morning after fighting cancer for about 9 months or so. She was in so much pain…

We drove south to Santa Clara to the Silicon Valley to visit the Intel Museum. Intel was as good as Microsoft was bad. I really enjoyed learning about the beginning of the silicon semi-conductor chip. Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore were two of the eight original developers of Fairchild Semiconductor. But they decided to leave and start their own company in 1969. When Moore told his co-worker, Andrew Grove, that he was leaving to do a start-up Grove wanted to come along. They decided the “Moore-Noyce” (noise) wouldn’t be a good name so the used NM but quickly decided they needed a better name. All of the ones they could come up with were already taken so they ended up buying the Intel name for $15,000.

In 1965 Gordon Moore made the prediction that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years. This has become known and Moore’s law and it seems as though it is now treated as an absolute rule rather than the prediction that it started out as. However, Intel has kept up that pace for 40 years…

Basically, silicon starts out as sand but becomes a liquid. A “seed” is dipped into the liquid and grows into a big cylindrical shape. That is then sliced into wafers. They started out with wafers 2” in diameter, moved up to 3” and now use 12”. A transistor is like a “switch” that either allows electrical current through (1 in the binary code) or it doesn’t (0 in the binary code). The chip is actually an accumulation of transistors with different pathways to carry a signal that opens or closes the transistor. There are lots of layers, each with a different property, on the chip that are laid down and then some sections are removed to make the transistors and the pathways. There are LOTS of chips on each silicon wafer and they are all made at the same time with the different layers. When they are totally finished they are tested and cut apart either by a laser or a diamond saw OR the wafer is scored and broken into little chips called “dies”. The die must be “packaged” in order to be used. The package is what we often see. We very seldom see the chip itself.

The actual “layering” of the wafers is done in “clean rooms” of “fabs” where there is ONE dust particle per cubic foot. The average hospital operating room has about 1000 dust particles per cubic foot and a regular room has about 1 million. The workers were “bunny suits” to keep all street and body contamination out of the air and contained in the suit. The wafers are transported from place to place in a FOUD that is moved by overhead track. The process takes about 6 to 8 weeks.

In 1994 Intel found a problem with their Pentium chip but determined that it would never pose a problem for most people. This was a HUGE public relations nightmare because no one wanted to have a defective chip in their computer! Intel changed course and said it would replace any defective chips.

In 1991 Intel decided that they needed to advertise their quality directly to the consumer. The came up with the distinctive 5 note jingle and “sounds” that everyone now associates with “Intel Inside”. Intel pays part of the advertising for the companies that use their chips if the company will include the “Intel Inside” and the jingle. It is one of the most recognized brands in the world.

Intel originally used numbers to identify their chips. But then someone else called their chip the “486 chip” also. Intel took them to court but was told that you can’t patent a number. Therefore, when they developed the chip that WOULD have been the 586, the called it the “Pentium” instead because they could patent that name.

Moore and Noyce started out with about 18 employees in 1969. Within two years they had an office in Geneva and a manufacturing plant in Malaysia. In 2007 they had 95 employees, but now they have about 80,000. The plant that we visited today will actually be closed in 4 days and the manufacturing moved to China.

There was so much information and it was all presented in such a good format.

On the drive back to the motor home we got to experience some real California traffic.

Friday, June 27 – Went shopping for groceries for kids. Did paperwork.

Saturday, June 28 – We went into San Francisco. Drove around Golden Gate Park – not so impressive… Drove down Lombard Street and around the Piers. Headed home in ALL of the traffic.

Sunday, June 29 – Left at 6 AM to drive to LA to pick up Brian and Abby and then Rachel. Went to the beach just down the street from the airport.

Monday, June 30 – Went to the La Brea Tar Pits. Really interesting. Tar (oil) seeps through the ground throughout this area (there are lots of oil wells pumping oil nearby) and between 40,000 and 11,000 years ago the mammoths and dire wolves and big cats roamed this area. They would once in a while get stuck in the tar in the tar pit when they came down to the water to drink. About once a decade there was a mass event where the animal who was stuck in the tar was attacked by predators who themselves became trapped in the tar. There are SO many bones in the pit that they have kind of gotten tired of digging them all up! Right now they dig in Pit 91 during the summer when the graduate students come to dig in the tar to see what they can find. They used to look for all of the big bones of the big animals, but now they are particularly interested in finding the tiny little things in the tar. Then we went to the Warner Bros Studio Tour. Most of the time was spent in the “towns” and the sound room. The TV shows are filmed mostly in front of a live audience. Lucy was the first show to be filmed before a live audience because Desi said that Lucy didn’t perform well without an audience to bounce her jokes off of. It was fun, but not as good as I remember the Universal Tour being… Abby particularly liked the museum with the upper floor dedicated to Harry Potter! After we left Warner Bros we took hundreds of pictures of the Hollywood from every different angle!

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Tuesday, July 1 – We spent almost the whole day at Venice Beach/Muscle Beach. I think the girls enjoyed the weird people but mostly they enjoyed the beach and the water. Poor Brian was so cold but he stayed in the water with the girls!

Wednesday, July 2 – We left to drive north to San Francisco. We wanted to drive along Route 1 but it was closed north of Morro Bay due to the tremendous number of forest fires – 1400 at one time! We planned on taking two days to drive to SF but ended up making it in one day. Brian was happy to get to the motor home to do his wash and have a day of rest before he had to work again.

Thursday, July 3 - We drove over to Muir Woods to see the redwoods. Mark and I walked the path and Brian and Abby and Rachel took a hike up a path. Rachel had on her “wheelies” and was having a lot of trouble walking up the steep path until Brian wondered why she was so worried about falling. When he saw that she still had the wheels in her shoes, he took them out for her and she had fun after that! The land for Muir Woods was purchased by a man who wanted to save the redwoods from being used for timber. His wife was not happy that he had spent a lot of money to buy and protect trees because she could think of a lot of other things to buy with that money. However, when she saw the area she changed her mind and agreed with her husband. When the government agreed to accept it as a National Park, they suggested naming it after the man who was donating it. He said No, John Muir was the inspiration that prompted him to save this area and he wanted to name it after John Muir.

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Friday, July 4 – Mark drove Brian to Oakland to catch his flights for the next 3 days. Then we closed up the motor home and drove over to Petaluma KOA. Wow, what a spot we had at a super campground! The girls went to the petting zoo, swam in the huge pool, watched movies in the rec hall, did fabric paint of pillow cases that were imprinted with a design and said Happy Camping, went on a hay ride, went to an ice cream social… They loved watching the movies (I Love Lucy) in the back of the motor home on the drive from Vallejo to Petaluma. We went to the Petaluma Fairgrounds for fireworks and dinner. We thought there would be rides and there weren’t. It was a celebration of the 150th birthday of the city of Petaluma. We went way too early. Also, we needed more clothes and blankets, but the fireworks were really great!

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Saturday, July 5 – We just did things around the campground.

Sunday, July 6 – We drove to the Sterling Winery for a cable car ride and a not-so-great tour of the winery. The girls were truly bored. The most interesting thing we learned was that the grapes are crushed with their skin on and the seeds left in to make red wine. However, for white wine the same grapes are used but only the juice of the grape is fermented to make the wine.
We stopped at the Petrified Forest on the way home and that was a little better. Three million years ago a volcano 7 miles to the east erupted and knocked all of the trees down facing away from the blast toward the southwest. Water laden with silicates in the ash seeped down into the gaps left behind by decomposing tree fibers, replacing the wood cell by cell with crystallized silica until the entire tree became stone. In 1871 Charles Evans (Petrified Charlie) found the first stump of petrified wood while leading his cows in the meadow. In 1914 Ollie Bockee purchased the property and developed it charging 50 cents admission. She used the money to pay college students to excavate more trees each summer. They discovered many of the world’s largest petrified trees.
The best part for the girls was the swimming pool when we got back to the campground.

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Monday, July 7 – Now this was a fun day! We left early to go to San Francisco. First we drove down Lombard Street three times, then the girls and Mark walked down once, then we found a street just as steep but with no curves and we went down that twice! We parked and walked on Fisherman’s Wharf. There were a total of 5 sea lions on the rocks so Mark made sea lion noises so the girls could get the effect! We had shrimp for lunch. Then we walked down to the boat to Alcatraz. It didn’t start off that great… The movie did not run continuously so we would have had to wait 15 minutes for it to start again. Fifteen minutes is an eternity when you are 9 or 10 and waiting for something! The ranger told us that we picked up our audio tours at the top of the hill. The “top of the hill” was 30 stories above where we got off the boat. We walked up the sloping roads to the top, met a lady with an audio tour and asked her where she got it. She said down at the bottom. I said “Where the boat comes in?!” and she said Yes. So, with a lot of grumbling from two little girls AS WELL AS MOM MOM, we walked back down the hill. Then the people told us, No, you get them at the top of the hill. So, with more grumbling we walked back up the thirty stories to find a place at the bottom of the BUILDING where we got our audio tours. However, it was all worth it in the end because the audio tours were great. There were a few prisoners and guards who spend time at Alcatraz doing the narrating. We ALL really enjoyed the tour. Abby was particularly interested in the few people who MAY have escaped. No one knows if they did or not since they were never heard from again.
After Alcatraz we went back to Fisherman’s Wharf and found a great souvenir store with inexpensive souvenirs. Then we drove (with many detours…) to Twin Peaks to look down over the city of San Francisco. It really is a great view – but everyone was freezing with the wind whipping around the top of the mountain.
We drove down the mountain and back into SF to ride the cable cars. The ride was $5 per person one way. Wow. The wait for the return trip was so long that we watched the men turn one of the cars around on the turntable (which isn’t so new to kids anymore since Thomas the Tank Engine does it!) and then took a taxi back to where we left the car. Our driver was Chinese and we asked his opinion of a good, cheap Chinese restaurant for dinner. He took us to one only ½ block from the car. Abby didn’t know what to order because she always goes to a Chinese buffet. Rachel only wanted egg drop soup. We decided on a chicken corn chowder for Abby, PLAIN egg drop soup for Rachel and shrimp fried rice for all of us to share. Mark order his own dish. It turned out that the soups were for 4 people and Rachel’s egg drop soup had other things in it. Actually it was delicious, but I just removed the extra veggies from Rachel’s and she liked it. Everyone ate plenty. We walked uphill to the car and drove back to the campground with 2 very sleepy girls.

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Tuesday, July 8 – We stayed around the campground. The girls went to the craft time and did fabric paint on pillowcases. They were the only two there for awhile and there wasn’t any supervision. But then a mother who is a teacher came with her daughter and they all just painted together. The girls did a good job but Abby wasn’t finished when it was time for dinner. She went back after dinner and finished her pillowcase and then the girls went by themselves to watch Alvin and the Chipmunks on the big screen TV in the rec hall. They loved being by themselves! They had Mark’s cell phone to call us to walk them home when the movie was over, but I went down early with a flashlight because I wanted to check on things… Again, they were the only ones watching the movie so they had a private showing!

Wednesday, July 9 – We had to catch up on the journals, swim, play, eat lunch. Brian and Kathy and Sam were coming in the afternoon to stay with us for the rest of the trip. But, Mark decided we needed to go find this magnetic hill just a few miles away. So we took off to find it. No one near there had heard of it, but they knew another one about 10 miles away. So we took off for that one. We couldn’t find it either. Mark stopped 2 police cars at change of shift and they gave us directions. We still couldn’t find it. Well, it was a nice ride but we were 20 minutes from the campground when Brian called and said they were there! We got back, Sam saw the petting zoo, Andy Icks looked through the motor home, some people went swimming, we had dinner, walked down to the Rec Hall to see Enchanted, came home and went to sleep.

Thursday, July 10 – We left to drive towards Yosemite and our campground outside the park in Groveland. The kids went swimming and Brian and Kathy drove very curvy and hilly Rt 49 to Oakhurst to get their rental car. When they got back we set up the tent and roasted marshmallows over a charcoal fire. We weren’t allowed to burn real wood because of the high fire danger. Note: wood fires make better marshmallows then charcoal fires.

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Friday , July 11 – We drove to Yosemite intending to drive the road to Lee Vining but instead decided to go to the Yosemite Village and Half Dome. Good choice. The girls and Sam were really tired of rocks, mountains, trees, waterfalls, rivers… Boring trees, boring mountains, boring waterfalls. We took the kids and Brian and Kathy did a hike. The kids were less bored when we all stopped for ice cream!

Saturday, July 12 – Brian and Kathy left at 5 AM to drive to the starting point for the hike up Half Dome. They had 4 PBJ sandwiches and 4 bottles of water. There were lots of people on the trail. When they finally go to the point where the chain railing goes up the mountain Kathy decided she had gone far enough. Brian kept going to the top. But, since they were short on water he didn’t take any with him. Boy, was he thirsty when he got back down. They heard a girl say she would be fine if she just had something to eat and since they did not want any more PBJ they traded for a bottle of water. Then they met some folks with a water filter and filled some of their water bottles with filtered water from a stream. They were pretty tired and looking forward to a shower when they got home!

Rachel and Abby and Sam and Mark and I went to Jamestown (Jimtown) to do some gold panning and use the gold sluice. We were all told to put on boots and given a bucket and shovels to go into the stream to dig the dirt that we would pan. The boots didn’t last too long, the water shoes were more to the kids’ liking. It’s a real good thing we had Mark along or none of us would have panned much dirt! There were SO many rocks and big rocks in the river that you couldn’t dig through them to the dirt! Mark finally started throwing rocks out of the way to get a hole to dig in. The man at the site was really good at teaching us how to pan. Even Sam got into it. Put dirt in your pan, face the ridges away from you, swish the pan in the water 1-2-3 times and then shake the pan. Swish it again in the river 1-2-3 times. This SHOULD get rid of almost all of the dirt in the pan. Actually, we were all so paranoid about losing a piece of gold that we really had to swish our pans 4 or 5 times before we looked for the specks of gold. Everyone found a speck of gold in their pans. Rachel found three. The man panned for gold for himself when there were no paying customers and he had found about $60 worth that morning. Mark dug us some more dirt and we moved downriver to where he set up a sluice for us. The sluice is supposed to do all of the work that the panner does with a pan. You just take handfuls of the dirt and drop it on the top end of the sluice and the running water from the river does the “sifting”. The sluice is much smaller than I expected – about 3’ long and the body was about 1’ wide with a wider mouth at the top. There is a piece of carpet lining the bottom of the sluice with wooden ridges running across. The specks of gold are caught in the carpet by the ridges. Then the carpet is removed from the sluice. The material is put into a gold pan and the contents are panned for gold. We have quite a few specks of gold in our sluice –about $15 worth. No bad, for the $165 fee we got $15 in gold! We all poured a lot of dirt into our sluice but the kids lost interest and had much more fun playing in the river and pouring water on themselves!

We all went to the local ice cream store for ice cream and a milkshake. The kids really liked that!

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Sunday, July 13 – Brian and Kathy and Abby and Rachel left to go horseback riding. They actually rode MULES and were not pleased when they had to be behind Brian’s mule. Apparently it had quite a problem with gas… But they had a good time! Sam and Mark and I left to take the road to Lee Vining. Sam had his book on tape and his transformer and fell asleep not too far down the road. Good thing, he wouldn’t have really enjoyed the boring trees, boring mountains and boring rivers that Mark and I really enjoyed! The ride was really magnificent. Again, Sam’s favorite part of the day was the stop for ice cream!

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Monday, July 14 – We packed up the motor home and Brian and Kathy left in their rental car to drive through Yosemite to the Mariposa Grove of redwood trees. Kathy didn’t get to go to Muir Woods and we all wanted her to see the redwoods.
Since the road was not good for the motor home, we took a longer but less mountainous route with the kids. Again they had a great time laying in the back bed watching I Love Lucy, Robin Hood and Rin Tin Tin! They got to watch about 8 ½ hour movies! For a treat we stopped at a McDonald’s with a playground for lunch so that they could run around for a bit.
We were heading to our “primitive” campground in the mountains. Island Park is run by the Army Corps of Engineers and has no sewer, no water and no electric. I thought it would be fun anyway because our campsite was right next to the reservouir/lake… Well, it would have been right next to it if the water level had been about 50’ higher!! The hike down to the water was a long one, and there really wasn’t any place to swim. We opened all of the windows to let the air into the motor home and started dinner. We carried all of the food and drink up to the picnic table and sat down to eat AND THEN THE BEES CAME TO EAT WITH US. We were all spending so much time swoshing away the bees and Sam was scared of the bees that we finally picked everything up and carried it into the motor home and ate dinner inside! We played a few games of Uno and then decided to go to sleep. It was about 90 degrees but there was a great breeze blowing. So it was hot, but the breeze was good. Everyone remembered what it was like to grow up without air conditioning and sleep with the breeze blowing over you, no covers-not even the sheet, and turning the pillow over to get the cool side. We are survived the night and even got some sleep!

I had picked a campground as close as possible to the place where we were going to go white water rafting so we wouldn’t have such a long ride to or from the raft trip. The next closest campground with full hook-ups was about 1 ½ hours further away from the raft trip and, as it was, we were still 1 hour away!

Tuesday, July 15 – Brian, Kathy, Sam, Abby and Rachel all packed up their suitcases so that they could leave right from the rafting trip to head to Los Angeles. Their flight is at 8 AM so they have to be there tonight. We figured we would leave early to swim in the river and eat lunch before the trip. We were supposed to be there at 11:30 but we arrived about 10:30. We walked to the raft pull-out area and the kids swam a bit. The water was not cold at all! It had rained the night before in the high country and the water was now hitting the river so it made the river warmer. We had lunch – Sam was again afraid of the bees. Then we waited and waited and waited for the safety talk and the bus to the starting place. We finally got on the bus at 1 PM. I think they tell you to be there ½ hour early because no one thinks it could possibly take as long as it does to get to the place. We rode in the bus about ½ hour to get to the put-in point. After another little safety talk we got into our rafts, practiced a few things and began paddling to our first rapids! Rebecca, our guide, was very good and kept the kids changing places from the middle to the front of the raft. She let them take turns riding the bow with their legs hanging on the outside. Sometimes they rode the rapids that way – just like riding a bronco! There were SO many rapids and the river was flowing so quickly that we didn’t have to paddle much at all. There was never any time to get bored. We all did a “high five” with our paddles after a good rapids run. We got out of the boat to jump off a rock into the river and we also swam in a circular eddy that kept us going around in a big circle. The kids and Brian were shocked when I jumped in to swim in the eddy too! But that was something I had never done before so I wasn’t going to miss that chance! The last rapid of the ride was the Rooster Tail and it was great! Mark almost flipped out of the boat! They take pictures of you in this rapid and they were so good that Brian and I just bought the whole CD! Then, Sam started screaming and crying. It seems that a bee stung him. He is so afraid of bees that Kathy wasn’t sure if he was really stung or just scared, but we think he did get stung.

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With that ending everyone headed back to the cars to change our of their bathing suits for the trip to LA. Mark and I drove back to the motor home, got showers, decided that we really didn’t need to spend another night without air conditioning and closed up the motor home and headed for the nearest campground with full hook-ups, Visalia, about 1 ½ hours away!

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Wednesday, July 16 – We figured since we were so close we probably should go to the Sequoia National Forest. More twisty, turny roads. We drove to the lodge for a tea and coffee and while we were inside it started to pour and thunder and lightning and then it started to hail. We had to wait about ½ hour before Mark could run out to get the car! We drove through the southern part of the park and walked the hike down hill to the General Sherman Tree, the largest tree in the world. It was very well marked, the hike was nice. The tree was certainly big, but when there are so many big trees it is hard to get a sense of something just a little bigger than something near by!

Thursday, July 17 – Everyone made the flight to Houston. Kathy drove Rachel half-way to meet Heather. We drove on to Bakersfield to get our mail and FedEx package for the sale of Unit 6 at Home Port.

Friday, July 18 – I worked on the mail all day. Mark went to get some motor home supplies.

Saturday, July 19 – We left Bakersfield to head to Las Vegas. There really wasn’t anything we wanted to see in southern California that we hadn’t already seen on previous trips. We figured we would just take our time getting to Las Vegas and stop and see things along the way. We stayed at the KOA in Yermo, just 4 miles north of Dagget where Vance worked on the solar one project. We saw the Borax mine off to the north and a sign for a visitor’s center and took the exit to go to it. However, when we got there it looked like we were not supposed to enter so we turned right and headed into the town of Boron. We visited the Twenty Mule Team Museum in Boron. It had some good displays but didn’t give enough information about the mining of borax which was the whole reason the town existed. The lady there suggested that the Visitor Center at the Borax Mine was a good place to visit. We unhooked the car and took the car back up to the Mine and this time we went in anyway. They did have a Visitor’s Center built way up the hill on a mountain of overburden removed from the mine. They charge $2.00 per auto to enter and donate all of that money to local charities and a scholarship fund for the Boron High School. Very good idea. The Visitor’s Center was all we hoped it would be. The was in introductory movie, then the drapes in the back of the room opened to allow you to look out on the mine and see all of the activity. The displays inside were very informative and answered all of our questions. The borax is always in combination with some other stone. When it comes out of the ground it first goes to a crusher that grinds it into 6” stones. Then it is carried on a conveyor belt to a secondary crusher that grinds it into gravel size. Then it goes into something like a centrifuge that mixes the gravel with water. The borax is dissolved out of the rock and floats on top of the water. The leftover rock falls to the bottom and is carried away on another conveyor belt. The borax is then carried on a mesh-like conveyor belt that blows air down through it to start the drying process. Then the borax goes into dryers much like our home dryers (but much bigger) and is dried to almost a powder. That is it. It is ready to either be put into bags to be shipped or loaded into rail cars to go to ships to be bulk loaded. Borax is used in hundreds of things from making ceramics fire better, to computer chips, to laundry detergent, to wall insulation, to fiberglass, to plastics, to lowering the temperature of gold so it can be worked easier, to making Corning glass products able to withstand temperature changes. About ½ of this plants production is used in the US and ½ is exported.

The twenty mule team became the symbol for Borax. Borax was discovered in the Harmony Mine area, Furnace Creek in Death Valley, in 1881. Mr. William T. Coleman was a salesman for the Borax King, Francis Smith, and Mr. Coleman quickly purchased the entire area to mine Borax. However, the mine was 162 miles from the nearest railroad in Mojave. In order to get the borax to the railroad to be transported around the world, Mr. Coleman and Ed Stiles, a mule team driver, came up with the idea to hitch a 12 mule team and an 8 mule team together. The term “20 mule team” is somewhat misleading because actually the two animals closest to the wagons are almost always horses. The other 18 are mules. But everyone says “20 mule team” anyway. John W. S. Perry, superintendent of the Harmony Borax Co., designed and had built the wagons needed to transport the borax. They were 16’ long, 4’ wide, 6’ deep, weighted 7,800 pounds. The front wheels were 5’ tall and the rear wheels were 7’ tall. Each wheel had a steel tire 8” wide and 1” thick. A train consisted of two wagons and a water wagon holding 1,200 gallons of water for a total weight of 30 tons. The mule team was hitched to single trees and double trees that hooked into an 80’ chain which ran the length of the team and fastened directly to the wagon. The “skinner” (driver) held onto a 120’ “jerk line” that he would jerk to make the mules go right and a give a steady pull to make the team go left. The mules had to be able to respond to their name and shouted orders. In order to turn a corner, the closest 3 pairs of mules to the driver actually stepped over the chain and pulled at an angle to the direction of travel to keep the chain pulling the wagon going straight and not allowing the wagon to tip over or go off the road. This is called the Dance of the Mules. The route was 162 miles with absolutely NO house or shack or anything along the way. The temperature in the summer was between 136 and 150 degrees. One stretch went 60 miles without water. The 20 mule team could cover 16-18 miles per day. The mine workers went out to “build a road” and set up steel water containers a day’s drive apart. They couldn’t use wooden tanks because when they were dry they would just separate and become unusable. The drivers would use the water on their way over the trail with the borax. Then after they dropped off the borax at the railroad they would fill up with water and food and hay and drop some off at each stop on the way back to the mine. That way the driver and team always knew that there would be water and food at certain locations. The Twenty Mule Teams only transported the Borax this way for five years before the railroad came to the mine. Mr. Coleman’s Harmony Mine eventually went bankrupt and Francis “Borax” Smith purchased the company.

In the 1920’s the deposit of borax near Boron was discovered. It was so rich in borax that the company closed all of the other mines to work this mine. They tunneled into the mine to remove the borax until 1957. Then the company made the decision to turn the mine into an open pit mine. That way they wouldn’t have to leave so much borax behind to hold up the ceilings of the mines. The pit is not 2 ½ by 1 ½ miles and they have supplies of borax down to 1400’. There is plenty of borax to keep mining for years and years.

A VERY interesting stop!

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Sunday, July 20 – Mark went to church. Then we went to the Dagget Museum – which apparently has not been open for the past 4 years since someone broke in and stole their stuff. Vance’s picture used to be in there explaining the procedures at Luz’s Solar One solar plant. We drove past Solar One and the big tower is still there but the plant hasn’t worked in the past 5 years. We also saw Solar Two but we couldn’t tell if it was still working or not. Then we drove back down Hwy 58 to Kramer Junction to see the currently working FPL Solar Collectors. We couldn’t get in but we did get some photos. Mark and I were both surprised at how large the reflectors are. It was cloudy and rainy (in the desert!!) while we were driving around so the reflectors were all facing down. We tried to follow the electric wires to see where the energy produced went into the grid. The only thing we found was a large transformer station near the intersection of the only two roads for miles. We went through rain and the desert absorbed the rain for a while. Then it started to pool up on top of the dirt. We didn’t see any water in the Mojave River yet…

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June 14-25, 2008

2008-08-25T04:17:00.000-07:00

June 14, 2008 – We left early to drive across the mountains to Route 101 on the western coast of California. The road was really twisty turny with short curves. A sign on the side of the road warned “No trailers longer than 32’ from king pin to rear axle”. It was about 80 degrees when we left Redding early in the morning and about 83 degrees a little more than half-way across the mountains. We stopped for a picnic lunch and then continued driving. On the west side of the mountains the temperature started to drop and it was 60 degrees by the time we got to the coast! Most of the road doesn’t really go along the coast, but when it does it is very scenic with all of the rocks, waves and driftwood. We watched a so-so movie at a Visitor Center and then went to the Lady Bird Johnson Grove. Lady Bird Johnson dedicated this grove of redwood trees in 1969. There is a really nice 1 mile trail that is just long enough and just short enough to really enjoy. There is a pamphlet with explanations for each of about 15 stops along the trail. Other than the very flowery “artsy” prose it was very informative. There were quite a few people on the trail and you could walk it quickly or take your time. All in all, very nice. We drove the alternate scenic route instead of following Highway 101 along the east side of the National Park. Then we took the alternative scenic route off of that road and ended up on a dirt road right along the coast! The GPS told us to take a right turn to get back to the main road and we ended up on the road to a prison! We drove on to Crescent City to spend the night. Mark was fascinated with the Curly Redwood Motel across the street from the restaurant where we ate dinner. It was made completely with the curly redwood from ONE redwood tree 18’ in diameter providing 53,000 board feet of wood. Curly redwood happens when a redwood tree is damaged somehow and the wood starts to grow in swirls instead of straight. Once it starts, the whole tree becomes “curly”.

Sunday, June 15 – We rode around the Crescent City harbor and marveled at the jetty made with concrete “jacks” to keep the jetty in place during tsunamis. Lots of crab boats, crab pots, seine fishing nets. The lighthouse was interesting. Driving back south along Highway 101 we saw surfers out in the waves and also people in kayaks riding the waves like surfers. We drove into Eureka and saw some really well renovated old houses. After lunch we headed back over the mountains and stopped to see the old LaGrange Gold Mine. They built 26 miles of ditch, pipe and trench to bring water from a lake to mine the gold. Then they used water pressure to actually disintegrate the mountain and run it through the sieve and take out the gold. They took $3,500,000 worth of gold out of the mountain while the mine was operating. Eventually the gold was gone. Then they used the 26 miles of pipe and the “monitors”, called “monsters”, to build the new highway from the middle of the state to the coast. All very interesting. We drove past Whiskeytown Lake and saw lots of people enjoying their weekend in and near the water with boats and floats. We drove back to the motor home.

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Monday, June 16 – We went to Wal-Mart to do some shopping and then picked up the mail and did paperwork.

Tuesday, June 17 – We drove east to Lassen Volcanic National Park. It was only about 50 miles or so from the motor home. We entered the Park at the north end, stopped at the Visitor Center. The Visitor Center was actually the old home and museum of Mr. and Mrs. B. F. Loomis, who photographed the eruption of Mount Lassen in May 1914 after waiting with his camera ready for 2 days. The Loomis’s lived in the area and photographed the mountain until they died. They established a Museum in honor of their 20 year old daughter who died and displayed all of their Lassen Peak photos and “things” in the Museum. It is now used for the Visitor Center and the Ranger Station. There were 2 pretty good movies about the area. Also, there were some neat displays about plate tectonics. One of them said that the oceanic plate was 37 miles and the continental plate is 134 miles. We are assuming that they meant “deep” because they certainly are not that long… We drove on the Park road with a few stops for scenic photos along the way. The trail to Bumpass Hell is about 3 miles round trip, but the trail just opened for the season the day we were there so they were suggesting that you do the trail with hiking boots AND ski poles. We decided NOT to take the trail… However, that is really the best place in the park to see the fumaroles, mud pots and “geysers” so we didn’t get to see them. There is one more place where you actually drive BETWEEN 2 boiling mudpots. One is more visible then the other. One just vents a lot of sulphuric steam. The smell wasn’t too bad, but other people were complaining. The whole drive was very interesting, but there really wasn’t that much to see… We drove back to Redding on a route further south than the road we came over on.

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Wednesday, June 18 – Worked on Sonny’s IRS papers. Mark changed the nozzle on the Hydro-Hot water heater. The electric was finally hooked up at Home Port in Port Mansfield!

Thursday, June 19 – This was a very different afternoon! We learned how to ride Segway’s and then did a 2 hour tour of the Turtle Bay Exploration Park, the Sundial Bridge, and Caldwell Park. We were both surprised at how quickly we learned how to balance and ride the Segway. These were the new Segway I-2 models with a post that you just leaned on to steer right or left and go faster, slower or stop. If the POST moves left, so does the machine. If you lean forward, you go faster. If you lean back and “dig in your heels” you slow down or stop. It became very easy very quickly and was lots of fun. After that we drove just about 15 miles north to see the Shasta Dam and Lake Shasta. It is the “second largest dam in the US” but it doesn’t tell us second in what way – concrete used, electricity generated, water held back, …

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Friday, June 20 – Betty and Joe’s Anniversary. We left Redding and headed WAY down I-5 for 70 miles to Orland, which is just off of I-5 west of Chico. Mark had been reading about things to do in this area and found the Yo-Yo Museum and read that the Championships were being held on Saturday. What he didn’t read carefully was that they were being held in Minnesota! We didn’t find that out until we were happily set up in our campground for two days, so we decided we would just explore Chico and the area anyway!

Saturday, June 21 – We headed east to Chico past miles of olive trees. Some of them were darker green than others. We stopped to look at them but they all had green olives. Each limb had LOTS of olives growing on it. They can be picked by hand or by a machine that vibrates the truck of the tree and the limbs are “beat” with a stick to make the olives fall off. Black olives and green olives are the same olives, but the black olives are riper than the green ones. Once the olives are picked, they must be either “processed” or pressed within three days. If they are pressed, the olives are ground by grinding stones that take the flesh off of the olive and discard the pits. What remains is pressed. If they olives are not fully ripe, they will not have a satisfactory amount of oil in them. They are turned into olives that we eat by being processed with brine according to various formulas. The olive tree is about 2500 years old as determined by carbon dating in the Mediterranean. They were introduced to California in the late 1700’s by the Spanish. Olives are usually harvested in November.

We arrived in Chico and found that the Chico Museum didn’t open until noon. So we walked around town, visited the Yo-Yo Museum and were entertained for an hour by the salespeople and the customers in the Yo-Yo section of the store. We ended up buying a “good” yo-yo for the kids (and Brian) to try to use. I couldn’t make it work any better than a 99 cent yo-yo! We had lunch and walked back to the Chico Museum – only to find that it really was closed for renovations! The lady in the Chamber of Commerce kind of forgot to mention that when we told her we were going there when it opened at noon! So, we went to the Bidwell Mansion instead and it was GREAT. John Bidwell came to California on the FIRST wagon train. He actually lived every part of the California history through the wars with Mexico, John Sutter’s camp and businesses, actually carried the first gold found on Sutter’s land (or in California for that matter) to Los Angeles and send the news of the gold strike to the world. He found gold on the Feather River near Chico, established a town on the Bidwell Bar, got tired of gold mining and bought 28,000 acres of land to start farming. He realized that if he grew things he would need a market to sell them so he set aside part of his land for a town and gave away plots of land to anyone who was willing to build a house, a school, a church or any public building. The ranch/farm was on the Little River and so the area became known as El Rancho Arroyo Chico, shortened quickly to Chico. John Bidwell ran for governor of California 4 times but was defeated every time, mostly because he refused to play the game of politics and promise something that he could not deliver OR promise other people favors if they would lend him their support. He also ran for President of the US once. He did get elected to represent California in the US Congress. There he met Annie Kennedy in Washington, DC, and decided she was the only woman for him. He was about 50 years old at the time. Four years later Annie and John were married and she moved with him to California. They were especially concerned about the Indians who had been displaced from their own land and set aside some land for about 250 Indians to live and work at jobs on the ranch. Annie set up a room inside their house specifically to bring the Indian women and girls in and teach them how to sew. While she taught them to sew she also taught them about Christianity. John Bidwell came from Chataqua County in New York from a farming family. He recognized how good the land was in this valley and tried all kinds of different crops and trees. He grew prize winning wheat, set up a mill to grind it into flour, had the general store, and did just about everything. He really did see what needed to be done to prepare for the future. They donated lots of land for public parks. After John’s death (of a sudden heart attack working in the fields when he was 80 years old) Annie had to work hard to keep the finances in order after the set-back they had suffered just before John’s death. She sold off some more of the land and got their finances back in order. Then she gave the City of Chico 2200 acres of land for a city park. She said that if she gave it away she would never be tempted to sell it for monetary gain. She died 18 years after John.

We still were looking for interesting things in the area, so we drove about 30 miles to the Oroville Dam and Lake Oroville. The dam is an earthen dam, but it does have a concrete core at the base. It has a lot of concrete other places too, but they still call it an earthen dam. The spillway was the size of an 8-lane highway! In the Visitor’s Center we met a ranger whose family is from Palestine, TX… The regular movie that they show Visitors wasn’t playing because they were doing a training video for a new worker. We watched the rest of that video about the town of Oroville, and then we watched a very informative video about Ishi. Ishi was the very LAST surviving Indian in the area. There had been rumors of Indians in the hills, but no one had ever seen one until one day some surveyors saw an Indian spearing fish from rocks in the river. He ran away but they found where they lived. No one was there except for a very feeble old woman. The next day when they came back the camp had been deserted and there was no one there. A couple of years after that, an Indian came walking into town. No one knew quite what to do with him so they put him in the jail to keep him safe. Then a couple of professors from the Anthropology Dept of the college came to see him with their list of Indian words. They were able to converse slightly. They took him back to the college and he lived in the Anthropology Building. An Indian never says his own name, so he couldn’t tell them his name. They named him Ishi, taught him that name and we pleased when after he learned it he never said it aloud again. This made the professors think that he had totally taken the name as his own. He showed them all of the Indian ways to do things. He even took them back to his old Indian home and they camped as Indians for a month while he showed them how the Indians lived. A couple of years later he died of TB. All of this is very famous because of the tremendous amount of knowledge the professors were able to gain from this one man. They felt that he was very wise, very patient. He thought that two of the best things the white man ever invented were matches and glue.

We wanted to drive over the dam to the Recreation Area. We were both amazed at the boat launching ramps on the far side of the dam! They are so steep and so long. There are hundreds of boat trailer parking spaces. Of course, some of them end up under water if the water lever behind the dam gets high… The pictures will tell the story.

So, we had a great day even without a yo-yo championship!

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Sunday, June 22 – We drove to the West Sacramento KOA and set up for 3 nights.

Monday, June 23 – We drove into Old Town Sacramento and started our day at the Visitor Center. The Wells Fargo Museum was right next door and we spent an hour in there. It was great! There were pictures of the Pony Express riders and maps showing where they rode, their “horse change” stops, their “rider and horse change” stops and the end of the line. There were 190 stations in the 196 mile route. They used 500 horses and 50 riders. They carried 20 pounds of mail in their specially made “saddle cover” that had four compartments. The Pony Express used young men and boys aged 14 to 24 who were small, short and couldn’t weigh more than 125 pounds. They actually liked orphans best because they wouldn’t have any grieving parents to explain things to if the rider got killed. However, only one Pony Express rider was ever killed. More outpost attendants were killed, but only one rider. The mail could go from Sacramento, California, to St. Joseph, MO, in only 10 days. It cost $5 to send ½ ounce in the 1850’s – a lot of money. But it opened up the country for communication. The Pony Express started in April of 1860 and ended in October 1861. On October 24, 1861, the telegraph lines were completed and messages could be send instantly, which made the Pony Express obsolete in only 18 months. Two days after the completion of the Overland Telegraph Line the Pony Express ceased running! During its operation, the Pony Express took in $90,000 at a cost of $200,000.

Ben Holladay had sold the originators of the Pony Express the mail route contract that got them started, and after the Pony Express ended Holladay bought back some of the way stations they had set up. In 1866 Wells Fargo purchased the Pony Express assets along with the remnants of the Butterfield Stage that Holladay owned for $1.5 million. Wells Fargo then provided armored car service and mail service via stagecoach in combination with their already established banking and financial services. They were so dependable that writers would often instruct their readers to “respond by Wells Fargo Express”. Wells Fargo transported people inside their coaches and valuables and mail in the locked “treasure box”. They continued to use the Pony Express logo until the business was sold in 2001. There are hundreds of stories about the drivers, robbers and passengers of the Wells Fargo stagecoaches.

After that we did a walking tour around the city Old Sacramento with a “doctor from the period” dressed in 1950’s clothing. We learned a lot. We saw the offices of Stanford, Crocker, Hopkins and Huntington who, along with Charles Wilson, were the ones who gave Theodore Judah the money he needed to build the railroad along the route that he had determined. Judah had the whole route mapped out, but after a falling out with the “Big Four” he traveled to New York to get other money to build the railroad. He got typhoid fever crossing Panama and died in New York. The Big Four hired another man to build the railroad and got it done. Irish and Chinese laborers were indispensable in the building.

The old city of Sacramento is right at the confluence of the Sacramento and the American Rivers and was prone to flooding. In 1850 and again in 1852 the city was flooded. In 1853 a project was proposed to raise the entire city by 12’. It wasn’t until another flood in 1862 that project took hold. A brick retaining wall was built completely surrounding every street in the city. Wagons of dirt were brought in, the level of the streets were all raised 12’, new wooden sidewalks were built, first floors became basements, second floors became first floors and new doors were put in. Since the retaining walls were under the streets, there will still empty spaces between some of the buildings and the retaining walls. If you weren’t careful when you walked around the raised city, you would go off the edge and be 12’ lower. Eventually the residents built arches from their buildings to the retaining walls and put plank sidewalks over these archways and the unfinished holes were covered up. There is at least one café in town that is open to the street but the dining is on the bottom floor, 12’ below the street level. It is great because you can really see how it all was done…

In addition to the flood of 1852, there was also a fire that burned down most of the city. The original structures had been built of wood and canvas (sometimes from ships that sailed up the river and then had no crew to sail back down the river because they all jumped ship to go to the gold mines!). The few brick buildings in town were just fine, so everyone rebuilt with brick or stucco and used ingenious ideas for fireproof roofs. One building used brick and mortar, sand and metal to make their roof fireproof.

As an aside, parking here is exorbitant. You would think you were in New York City or Boston! The parking garage, which is very nice and very convenient, costs $1.25 per half-hour for the first 2 hours and then $1.00 per half hour after that – for a maximum daily charge of $13.00! Wow!

After the tour we went to the Railroad Museum. This is not a plain old railroad museum. It is devoted to the history of the Transcontinental Railroad and they do a great job of presenting the information! They have lots of big trains too, including a great setup of a dining car and sleeping car that actually rocks and has sound effects like you are really moving on the train!

Some interesting facts:

Standard time was started because the railroads had to have a set time to run. Agrarian time was normal with farmers getting up when it was light and going to bed when it was dark – whatever time that might be. But the railroads needed to have a more precise time. So, a signal was sent along the telegraph lines and at that precise moment every train station set their clock to 12 noon and that became the official time.

There were actually 2 golden spikes commissioned for the final spike for the Transcontinental Railroad and they were made to order for a friend of Leland Stanford. This has always been a mystery, but then a second spike was found in an attic and the rumor was confirmed. The friend had given the first spike to Stanford to take to the ceremony and it was hastily engraved with the date. The second spike was later engraved properly with the correct date. Since the anticipated date and the actually date were 2 days apart, the first spike was engraved at the site. The second spike was engraved later well after the actual event. There is a receipt showing the TWO spikes were made for the man’s order.

Crocker was one of the original businessmen involved in the project, but then he resigned so that he could be a contractor and make lots of money from the project during construction.

The railroad was operated like a monopoly and there were quite a few law suits against the Big Four for monopolistic practices. Nothing really ever happened…

We came home, got the mail, took care of it, watched Faith’s video of India, and went to sleep!

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Tuesday, June 24 – We started out the day at the Heidrick Ag Center looking at LOTS of old tractors and farm equipment and trucks. Quite a collection! The Fordson tractors were made by Ford & Son, who couldn’t use the Ford name because someone else was already making tractors using the Ford Tractor name…

We went to the Leland Stanford Museum but didn’t take the house tour. We read the information available, but this isn’t the best place we’ve been for information…

Then we drove a few blocks to the Sutter Fort. Now, that was well done.

John Sutter (who left Switzerland as Johann) moved to a city in Switzerland other than the home of his family and was unable to find good work since he wasn’t part of any guild or brotherhood in the new town. He married and had a child and then 4 more kids. He heard all the stories about America and left his wife and children in the care and sailed for America. He traveled around the United States, sold supplies in Missouri for a few years and eventually heard about California so headed there on a wagon train across the Oregon Trail. Every time he met a person of some importance, he would get a letter of introduction from them and use those letters of introduction to get loans to purchase supplies. When he got to Portland he tried to get a boat to San Francisco, but all of the boats were full. So he took a boat to Hawaii because people said you could get to San Francisco easily from Hawaii. He spent six months trying to get to San Francisco, but he spent that time getting more letters of introduction. When he did finally get to San Francisco he was able to use those letters to again get credit to purchase supplies. He decided that instead of digging with a shovel he would sell shovels! He got a land grant of about 50,000 acres from the Spanish on the condition that he was able to get 12 families to settle in his “town” and that he protect the Spanish empire from the encroaching Americans. Sutter “impressed” the Indians of the area and using the Indians and some laborers he brought with him from Hawaii he built the adobe Sutter’s Fort with 18’ high walls 3’thick. In 1841 he expanded his fort when he purchased the Russian Fort for $30,000 using a note that he never repaid. He dismantled the fort and brought the materials, livestock and equipment back to expand Sutter’s Fort. He wanted to establish his own trading post/city/kingdom and be the beneficent ruler of all of his people – and make money. His settlement was called New Helvetia. He raised sheep to spin wool to weave blankets to sell to every settler who needed one. He grew every kind of vegetable, raised cattle, planted wheat and started a mill to grind flour. In 1844 his son came over to help him run his business and was soon followed by Sutter’s wife and other 4 children. In 1846 the United States “acquired” California but Sutter had helped so many American immigrants that even though his fort was “Spanish” he was protected by America. Sutter used to give food and lodging to anyone who came by. He figured that they would buy their supplies from him and be customers as long as he treated them right. John Bidwell, who we were so impressed with in Chico, worked for Sutter as his right hand man for a couple of years. He was Sutter’s chief clerk and then handled the moving of the materials at Fort Ross to Sutter’s Fort.

In 1847 Sutter decided that lumber was in such demand he should have a saw mill. James Marshall had the same idea, but Sutter had the money and Marshall had the ability to do the work so they formed a partnership. On January 24, 1848, as James was checking the sluice to make sure that there was no silt in it, he found some nuggets of gold at the bottom. Marshall took the nuggets to Sutter’s Fort and closed the door to show them to Sutter. Sutter checked some books and found out how to test the nuggets to see if they were really gold – soft between your teeth, reacts in a certain way to an acid,… They determined that it WAS gold. They tried to swear all of the employees to secrecy, but the word leaked out and the gold rush was on.

All of Sutter’s employees, including John Bidwell, left him to go hunt for gold in the mine fields. Thousands of squatters swarmed over his fields destroying and stealing his crops and cattle. In three years Sutter was ruined. He spent the rest of his life trying to get either the state or the federal government to compensate him for the damage done to his lands. He died during a trip to Washington DC in 1880 never winning any compensation.

It is one of those kind of sad stories in American history. Sutter did so many things right and had so many good ideas and wasn’t afraid to do what it took to make things happen. Unfortunately, things just happened TO him that he couldn’t anticipate or change. Very interesting.

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Wednesday, June 25 – We left Sacramento and drove all 53 miles to Vallejo! We will leave the motor home here while we drive to Los Angeles to get Rachel and Abby and also Brian.

June 2 - June 13, 2008

2008-06-15T18:23:00.000-07:00

Monday, June 2, 2008 – Another day of paper work. Mark got the oil changed and the tires rotated and balanced.

Tuesday, June 3 – We finally left Aurora RV Park and drove 240 miles south to Gold Hill/Medford to the KOA. We pulled in about 4:30 PM and didn’t even bother unhooking the car because we are going to a different RV park in the morning for a week.

Wednesday, June 4 – We settled in at a very nice place with a very good weekly rate, Cyprus Grove RV Park, just off the Interstate.

Thursday, June 5 – We drove through Gold Hill and up to Crater Lake. The roads were not too bad but there was lots of snow when we got into the National Park and the road into the Park from the north was still closed for the winter snow. Along the way we stopped at a park with a trail along the Rogue River where it goes through a 25’ wide canyon. Now THAT was a sight – all of that water rushing through a 25’ wide gorge. We walked along to the beginning of the gorge just listening to that rushing water was neat! All of the buildings (including the bathrooms) have “snow tunnel” entrances where a covered walkway is built from the parking lot into the building so that people can get from the plowed parking lot to the building in the winter. Some of these “snow tunnels” still had snow on them while we were there. This area gets 540” of snow a year – that’s 45 feet of snow! We watched a pretty good movie at the Visitor’s Center about how they clear the roads around the Lake for summer traffic. They have a copper coil imbedded in the road that the snow plows can follow so that they don’t go off the road and over the side of the cliff. The rim road around the lake was not yet cleared when we were there. The second movie is about the lake, but they haven’t done as good a job with that movie as they should have… After the movies and a walk around the Visitor’s Center we drove up to the Lake to have lunch in the Lodge with a view out over the Lake. It’s a real good thing we didn’t wait much longer to view the lake. We got a couple of pictures, looked at the sides of the lake, talked about the snowfall, then watched a small cloud form over the lake. Within 5 minutes the entire area was completely clouded over and we never saw the lake again. If you looked straight down from a cliff, you MIGHT be able to tell you were looking at the water in the lake. BUT, the reflection of the trees in the lake itself was so good that you couldn’t be sure if you were seeing the lake or the trees! Someone described the “snow” as a freezing mist and that is exactly what it was. It was like being in heavy fog but all of the water droplets were frozen and moving with the wind. We drove as far as we could around the lake, looked at what we could see, and then started the trip home. We arrived home much earlier than we had anticipated because we spent so little time actually looking at the lake!

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Friday, June 6 – We left early and headed north on I-5 to Roseburg to take the Umpqua Scenic Byway past a bunch of waterfalls. It was an unusually nice day with sun and clouds and basically no rain. (Now it DID rain off and on during the day, but most of the day was nice…) The first thing we saw was the Colliding Rivers at Glide. This was really neat. The Little River came from the right and the Umpqua River came from the left and then made a 90 degree turn. The Little River met the Umpqua River head on and they made quite a turbulent spot. The entire area was fairly small and the rivers just boiled up before continuing downstream. Very interesting

Just past Idleyld Park we saw some kayakers and I jumped out to take their picture. Later in the day, on the return trip down the road, we met those kayakers and they recognized us as having taken their picture. They gave us email addresses and we sent them the 6 or so photos that we took of them on the river. Their return email said that they did the north part of the river the next day but spent way too much time in the water instead of in the boat and decided they were too tired to safely continue further down the river!

We say Deadline Falls which was neat, but more of a huge rapid. Further down the road we stopped at a park where people were fishing for salmon. The salmon come back up this river between May and September to spawn and each fisherman has his own idea where the best fishing for these salmon are. Some fish in the pools below the falls, some fish just below the falls, some fish above the falls.

The next waterfall was at Susan Creek and was probably the prettiest. We walked back an easy .8 mile trail to a 50’ fan type waterfall. The setting was absolutely gorgeous and the walk was nice. You could continue on to some Indian mounds, but that trail was rated as “difficult” which didn’t appeal to Dad’s foot or to me at all! It would be a great place to have a picnic in the summer – if it ever gets hot here – because it was so cool and peaceful. We actually saw 7 people total along the trail up and back. Wow, a population center! Mark got such a kick out of seeing signs along the road that say “Congestion” whenever there might be another car stopped to see something!

The Steamboat Falls at Steamboat Campground was MY kind of hike! You could see the falls from where the car was parked! It is a 25’ block type fall and was good.

We decided to check out Toketee Falls even though the trail was rated as difficult. But we were saved from having to make a decision about taking the trail because it was closed. The snow storm in January 2008 had felled trees across the pathway and crushed the steps of the trail. The penalty for being on the trail was $5,000 fine and 6 months in jail. That made the decision NOT to take the trail very easy! No one else was around.

We DID take the “difficult” trail up to Watson Falls because I didn’t know ahead of time how MANY steps there were. It was worth it though, the Falls is 272 feet tall and flows over the edge of a basalt tongue of lava that stopped right there. It has cut down through the lava just a little bit as it falls over the cliff. It falls into a pool at the bottom that is filled with rocks and the noise of the falls and the water flowing over the rocks is fantastic. Lots of downed trees cross all the way over the river and make it very picturesque. We saw one person parked in his car like he was stopping for a rest…

The next falls was the Whitehorse Falls again located in a campground and just a few feet off of the road. This was a punch-bowl type of waterfall but not very impressive… We saw 2 people at this Falls.

The Clearwater Falls was just a 30’ fall onto moss covered rocks in a pool below. Very easy walk. Interesting topography where the ground is either covered with water or not depending on how much water there is. We saw two people here also.

We tried very hard to find Warm Springs Falls but after driving 10.7 miles on paved and dirt roads we never found the falls. We followed the directions and found the roads, but never found the falls! Lemolo Falls was on the same road but since the 1.7 mile trail was rated as difficult we didn’t take the extra 5.2 mile logging road to get to it.

Then we drove into the village of Diamond Lake and saw the largest camping area we have ever seen. It must have gone on for 2 miles with camping spaces on 3 or 4 levels all along the lake. It was very nice and very well set up, but the maintenance people had their hands full getting all of the felled trees and limbs picked up and off the road for the summer campers. It WAS open for camping, but the temperature was about 25 degrees and there was plenty of snow still on the ground. LOTS of people had their boats there for fishing in the lake.

We drove back to Roseburg and spent the night there.

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Saturday, June 7 - We left in the morning to drive to the west coast at Coos Bay. Since we had to drive through the mountains it wasn’t anywhere near a straight line but it was a good road. After we arrived in Coos Bay we watched them load wood chips into a big ship. Bulldozers pushed the chips into piles for a pipe to suction them into the hold of the ship. The man who came out to tell us not to take any more photos told us that we shouldn’t miss the drive out to the coast and Shore Acres Park. He was right. Beautiful scenery. Sea Lions barking on the rocks. Beautiful flowers. After you drive out to the end of the park you have to retrace your steps to get back to a road leading anywhere else. We drove all along the coast down to Gold Beach but there was only a short stretch of road that gave us a view of the ocean. Oregon calls this a Scenic Byway, but I think it should be called a ¼ Scenic Byway since you drive for miles and miles with the only view being the trees directly along side of the road. You can’t see the mountains, the valleys or the ocean! We were going to drive down to Crescent City, but after the disappointing long drive through trees we decided to cut across from Gold Beach back to Gold Hill and the motor home. Gold Beach was a neat little place, certainly a tourist town.

The GPS didn’t really prepare us for the road back to Gold Hill… I had been driving so Mark mapped out the return trip. I was watching the GPS and how many miles to the next turn because I couldn’t wait to get off of the road we were on. Finally, we got to the turn and then the GPS said 34 miles to the next turn and this new road was even WORSE! On some parts of it, the road was actually missing – it had actually slid down the hillside. That’s OK though; the road crew marked it with painted white lines so we would know where the road was missing! In other places the road wasn’t actually missing, it had just sunk down about a foot or two. These areas were also helpfully outlined with white paint… Then in some places the road was not paved at all… Then in some places the road was barely one lane wide… This was quite a road. There were no signs warning of what was ahead. I hope no one was foolish enough to try to drive a motor home on this road. However, I am sure the log trucks managed to get up and down them just fine. Compared to some of the logging roads leading off of this NF3 (National Forest Road 3) the loggers would have thought they were on the Interstate when they got back to this road! I was so happy to finally get into town. We stopped for dinner and then drove on home! After we made it safe and sound, I was actually glad we made the trip. It really was an experience.

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Sunday – June 8 – Mark went to church. I read a book.

Monday – June 9 – We drove 40 miles south on I-5 to Medford to tour the Harry and David’s packing buildings. Harry and David have that really good fruit that is sent out as Fruit of the Month Club. It’s really expensive, but also very good! We saw one of their pear orchards for which they are famous. The trees grow only about 12’ tall and give fruit for about 35 years. After 30 years or so, they cut all of the trees, plow it under and plant all new trees. They don’t mix the age of the trees in any one field. They have expanded and expanded their business and have built new buildings here and there to accommodate different parts of the business. We walked through a huge building and watched them pack the boxes and baskets with pears and cherries. They have a huge mail order business but they also do a lot of business supplying the discount stores like Costco and Sam’s. There are three or four cafeterias for the employees. Everyone gets paid by the hour AND by the piece. They have an hourly wage, but if they exceed a pre-determined number of whatever they are doing they get extra pay for each one over the required number. (It doesn’t sound like they get penalized if they don’t make the required number… I guess they just lost their job after a while or get reassigned to a different job to see if they can do better!) It was a very good tour.

We got back to the motor home and got the mail. So then I spent the rest of the day taking care of bills, etc.

Tuesday – June 10 – We headed east again and went to Eagle Point to see the Butte Creek Mill. It was fun talking to the owner and learning that he used to work “in a suit and tie” (selling Cannon and other camera equipment) and dabbled in antiques as a hobby. He had met the man who ran the Mill while looking for antiques. He called the mill owner about antiques a few years later to learn that the man had just put the Mill on the market due to health reasons. The camera man and his wife came down two days later to look at the mill. His wife said “Wouldn’t it be neat if we owned it?” and two days later they made an offer on it. Neither of them ever intended to leave their 7,000 sq ft house in Portland OR their job! The camera man had to agree to sell some of his beloved antiques in order to buy the place. They took it over 3 ½ years ago, advertise on the internet, sell stone milled grains on the internet and by catalog and in their on-site store and have yet to make a profit! He also opened an antiques store next door to the mill. He had a “miller” who worked with the previous owner for 18 years and he depends upon him totally to make the mill work. It was really a perfect example of what new blood can do to an old business. He has a video tour for everyone as they come in, sells coffee and pastries to visitors, has opened the areas so that visitors can see all of the milling operations including where the water comes down to turn the turbine for the water power to turn the grinding stones, packages the grain just perfectly, sells the grain for a small fortune, and generally provides a great experience. Of course, we didn’t spend a cent there but then we are certainly the exception!

Then we drove on through the mountains down the Klamath Falls, which has no falls… We drove past huge lava flows just off the highway about 100’. In Klamath Falls we visited the Favell Museum which is basically a history museum of the area. I felt that it was rather unimpressive except for the thousands of arrow heads displayed in every manner you can imagine.

We discussed whether or not we would find a motel in Tulelake, near the Lava Beds National Monument. We decided that there MUST be something there and drove on. Well, we ended up in a bed and breakfast as the only choice! We also got the last room out of three!

We drove into the Lava Beds National Monument so that we could get some literature to read at night so we’d know more about the area when we visited it the next day. We drove about 10 miles after entering the park before we got to the Visitor’s Center! We got our information, learned about the Ranger Talks on Wednesday, drove back out of the park a different way past the petroglyphs. We couldn’t really see the petroglyphs on the wall, so we figured we had to take the “trail 500’ ahead”. I walked partway up a very steep hill and Mark walked further. When he didn’t come back right away I figured he must have found something good to see so I started climbing again… When I met him on his way back, he said “no”, he had stopped when he saw another hill to climb. The next day at the Visitor’s Center we asked about the trail. They said that the trail didn’t lead anywhere, you saw the petroglyphs on the wall right where you park you car! Fun.

We had dinner at a local restaurant and talked to some local people. In the late 1800’s the lake, Tule Lake, was “drained” and the bottom of the lake was used for farmland. A dam, a dike and lots of irrigation canals have turned the lake bottom into some of the best farm land in California. That is until 2001, when some fish was going to die if it didn’t get more water so they told the farmers that they couldn’t have any of the water and sent it all down the river for the fish! The lake bottom turned into a dust bowl and the farmers were devastated. Some were able to find work elsewhere to keep their families in food and clothes and homes, but some have never recovered… The couple that we talked to live just over the state line in Oregon, ½ of the land they farm is in Oregon and ½ in California. I asked them about their income tax and they said that up until a few months ago they had just leased the land from his uncle but the uncle had just died and now they owned the land so they didn’t have any idea who they paid income taxes to and how…

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Wednesday – June 11 – We had a great breakfast at Fe’s B&B. Fe is from Mindinow, Philippines, the same as Elizabeth and Emy. We talked about workers and she has a sister who wants to work in the US. I gave Wendy her phone number, maybe we can work something out…

We drove past the old Tulelake Japanese Segregation Camp from WWII. Many Japanese families were sent here, but after a short while they turned this camp into one for the “bad” Japanese who wouldn’t take the oath of allegiance to the US. Many of the families didn’t want to pull up stakes and move again, so they stayed here also. Each family had a room 20’ by 20’ in a barracks that was 20’ wide and 100’ long. As the building of the camp ramped up after the national decision to put the Japanese in camps, a new 100’ long barracks was built every ten minutes. (I assume that does NOT mean it was built in 10 minutes, I assume it means that they were building so many one was completed every 10 minutes. (I DO have to question this statistic but it is straight from the movie…) There is a plaque on the highway. Some of the buildings are still there although most of them were sold off to the people (mostly veterans) who “won” homesteads after the war was over. The guard tower is still there somewhere, but we couldn’t find it…

The lava beds area is the old home of the Modoc Indians. After the settlers started coming through this area along the Oregon Trail they weren’t all that happy to see Indians living here. The government “removed” the Modoc Indians up to Klamath and put them on a reservation with the Klamath Indians. However, the Klamath and the Modoc were historic enemies and the Modoc couldn’t stay there. Under the leadership of Kientpoos (known to the whites as Captain Jack) they moved back to the Lava Beds/Tulelake area and demanded a reservation of their own. They were prepared to leave; they just couldn’t live with their enemies the Klamath. The Bureau of Indian Affairs again moved them to the Klamath reservation. They again moved back to Tulelake. On November 28, 1872, the Bureau of Indian Affairs sent the Army to move the Indians “by force if necessary” back to the reservation. However, the Modoc were on their native ground here and knew it well. Look at the photos of the area called Captain Jack’s Stronghold and imagine the Army trying to fight Indians hiding in the lava beds here. One “splinter” Indian group led by Hooker Jim killed 14 settlers in retaliation for an Army attack. When they came back to the main Indian group Captain Jack reluctantly took them back into the group because he figured their presence endangered the rest of them. Over 300 Army men and volunteers tried to drive 50 Modoc warriors and their women and children from the stronghold to return them to the reservation. In January 1873 the troops anticipated a quick victory but were instead soundly defeated and lost their weapons, ammunition and wounded. In April 1873, there was supposed to be a meeting to negotiate a truce. However, Hooker Jim and another Indian shamed Captain Jack into a plot to kill the peace commissioners. Frank Riddle and his wife, Toby, were to be the interpreters and Toby warned the Army officers of the planned ambush. The Army men met with the Indians anyway. Captain Jack again requested their own reservation. When the Army refused Captain Jack drew a revolver and killed General Canby and another Indian killed Reverend Thomas. (General Canby was the only General killed by the Indians. Custer was NOT a general when he was killed by the Lakota in 1876.)

Four days later the Army was able to cut the Modoc off from their water supply. Two days after that the troops captured the Stronghold only to find it empty. Nine days later the Army set off to track the Indians and was soundly defeated again. Then the Indians were defeated in their surprise attack on the Army and the Indian, Ellen’s Man George, was killed. Ellen’s Man was a great Indian strategist and was extremely well liked by all of the Indians. After his death they all began to quarrel among themselves and headed west in separate groups. The Army was out looking for Captain Jack but found Hooker Jim and his band. Hooker Jim and his men offered to track down Captain Jack for the Army. Captain Jack finally surrendered on June 1, 1873, and the Modoc War ended. Amnesty was granted to Hooker Jim and his followers. Captain Jack and the others who killed officers in the peace talk ambush were hanged. The Modoc were exiled to the Quapaw Agency in Oklahoma.

We walked around Captain Jack’s Stronghold and imagined the Indians hiding here from the Army. We don’t think you could ever find anyone who didn’t want to be found in this pile of rocks!

We left Captain Jack’s and drove back to the Visitor’s Center for an 11 PM Ranger Talk. Amy did a great job with a slide show down in the Mushpot Cave all about the geology of the area as well as a little history. It was a great 1 hour talk!

We ate our packaged lunch at the Visitor Center. The nearest restaurant is 30 miles away! Then we visited Mammoth Crater to see one of the original volcanoes that didn’t really erupt but just slowly oozed lava through previous lava tubes and over the top of the crater. It was a beautiful day and a beautiful view. Then my cell phone rang! Cell phone reception was here and there all over the park when you got high enough!

Then we drove to Fleener Chimneys to see the splatter cone of aa lava. As the erupting globs of molten lava piled up on each other they left a 50’ deep chimney in the center.

We went back to the Visitor’s Center to meet the Ranger for a guided tour of one of the caves called the Catacombs because it has so many levels and so many side passages. The entire cave is 6,903 feet long and parts of it are only 1’ high. The Ranger was explaining that it was 45 minutes in and 45 minutes out and that you had to “duck walk” for about 20’. Dad was worried about his foot and I was just worried about dieing in a cave! Then he told us we needed “bump hats” and we would have to buy them. We decided NOT to go. Then, since it seemed that we were the only ones there to take the walk except for one boy about 9 years old and his grandfather, he told us that he would lend us “bump hats” and he would tailor the walk to accommodate Mark if he had trouble. So we went. It was actually Mark, me, the 9 year old boy, his grandfather, and another boy about 10 or 11 whose mother/grandmother handed him over to the Ranger at the entrance to the cave. After reading about “cave diving” in Reader’s Digest I have decided that I really don’t think it is wise to be down in a cave… I kept giving Mark a chance to say that his foot was bad and he couldn’t make it, but he just kept saying “I’m fine” so I had to keep going… Anyway, it was a GREAT walk and a GREAT talk by a GREAT Ranger guide. We might have spent 45 minutes going in but we walked then he talked then we walked then he talked and it was VERY easy. At the end, the Ranger (who was from A&M and Clemson!) and the two young boys wriggled their way up a slope and through a ONE FOOT high hole into a room called the Igloo. It was a great fun thing for the boys and the other three of us had great fun standing where we were and watching the boys! So I have accomplished ONE more thing that I thought I might not want to do and enjoyed it immensely!

(We spent some time talking to the Ranger, who couldn’t believe that we were affiliated with BOTH of the “wrong” schools – UT and USC!)

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Dad’s foot was bothering him a little, but he said it wasn’t bad…

I drove and we headed home. We drove back most of the same way we came, but then took a little different route for the last 50 miles or so. Got back to the motor home, had a late dinner and planned the next trip!

Thursday – June 12 – I worked on getting the electric turned on in Port Mansfield (AGAIN!!) and then we headed north on I-5 to see the Applegate Trail Interpretive Center. After the first few wagon trains came over the Oregon Trail and down the Columbia, people were talking about an alternative route to rafting the Columbia. The two Applegate brothers had BOTH lost their nine-year old sons in the Columbia River trying to get to Oregon City. They decided to try to find an alternative route going south toward California and then east over the mountains. They DID find a route and met settlers on the Oregon Trail at Fort Hall, Idaho. They talked some of the settler’s into trying their new route. They kind of neglected to tell the settlers that they had come only along a path that a horse might be able to follow and that they would have to build or clear the road for the wagons… So Jesse Applegate and the eldest sons of the settlers took off ahead of the wagon trail to blaze the trail for the wagons. After a while the man who had come over with Applegate and was leading the wagons found a note from Jesse on a tree. He said that the road was too hard to build and he had gone back to Oregon to get more people to come and help build the road! The settlers were more than a little upset and wanted to hang the leader. After they realized that he was the only one who knew the route through the mountains they decided NOT to hang him and to elect him their leader instead. They did make it through to Oregon and the route WAS a little better than rafting the Columbia but it was longer. One source said that 3,500 people traveled the Applegate route in 1853 alone. It was undoubtedly geographically the BEST route up from California because Interstate 5 follows it most of the way today! The Museum was VERY well done. A woman made it her life’s work to collect the history of the area and her daughter and son helped her to make this museum. Unfortunately she died about 6 months before it opened. The son greets people at the door with a memorized talk that is great. Unfortunately he has some speech impediment that makes it hard to understand all of his words. That is a shame. I listened to it twice to try to get it all because it was so interesting. He really knows his facts about the area. The stage coach line came about 20 years after the wagon trains and the trains came about 20 years after that. Any towns that had been on the stage coach line and were passed up by the train just became ghost towns. Any town that the railroad came past grew larger.

Friday – June 13 - We left Gold Hill this morning and drove south on I-5 about 200 miles to Redding, CA. We are at the Redding RV Park and will get ready to explore a new area! We have been seeing Mount Shasta from all different angles and today we drove right past it so it is now in our rear view mirror!

May 21- June 1 Oregon

2008-06-06T23:26:00.000-07:00

Finally got back to Oregon on May 21 and picked up the car and the motor home on May 22! We’re ready to see Oregon but the rain keeps coming down. Nothing has changed since December except it is not as cold!

Sunday, May 25 –We headed off to Portland to visit the Japanese Garden and the Chinese Garden. The Japanese Garden was really spectacular. It is set in a backdrop of 120’ tall trees which insulates it from anything outside. Every time you turn you get a different view. It was just a beautiful setting and a beautiful garden. The Chinese Garden was equally impressive but in a different way. The best thing about the Chinese Garden was the tour guide. She was so upbeat and fun and she gave us such wonderful facts and insights! The city of Portland teamed up with a sister city in China, Souzho, to work together to put a garden in each city. Souzho got help with a rose garden in their city (Portland is known for its roses…) The people backing the drive for a Chinese Garden had little money and no idea where they could get the land for the Chinese Garden. The local Natural Gas Company had two city blocks in downtown Portland that it was using for parking lots. They offered to lease the land to the group for a Chinese Garden for $1 per year for 99 years. The city block is .8 acre but when you are in the garden it feels like a sanctuary. It doesn’t feel small at all. It is laid out like a wealthy landowner’s estate in China with covered walkways, a study room, meeting rooms, etc. They imported both materials and workers from Souzho to build the garden. It is very well done…

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Monday, May 26 – Mark tried to fly but the weather was too bad. As an aside here, we left Oregon in December because it was cold and rainy for the entire 3 weeks we were here. We came back in May and it is still cold (although not AS cold) and rainy. When Lewis and Clark were here for the winter of 1805-06 they wrote in their logs that they were here for 106 days. On only 12 of those days was there no rain. On only 6 of those days was there sunshine. Nothing has changed in 200 years!

Mark came back home from the airport and there was an email from Jim Hill talking about the Portland Underground. Mark looked it up, called the number and booked us on the tour for 3 PM this afternoon! We dropped off some Home Port printing at Office Depot and drove into Portland. We were only one block away from the Chinese Garden we visited on Sunday! Underneath a large part of the city of Portland is a second world of basements that were all connected to form a pathway from the river back about 5 blocks into town. These pathways provided a haven for nefarious ne’er-do-gooders to make people vanish into thin air. They used trap-doors (dead falls) to get people from the bars down into the basements so they could be held until the men could be sold as deck hands to the ships leaving port and the women could be sold into “white slavery”. The area is supposed to be haunted and the guide did a good job of telling that side of the story. (He is a paranormal investigator so he “knows what he is talking about”.) It was a very interesting look at life in Portland in the 1850’s to 1941.)

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Tuesday, May 27 – Mark went flying. When he got back I picked up my printing.

Wednesday, May 28 – We went to the End of the Trail Interpretive Center in Oregon City. This was where the wagon train trail actually ended. People came here to register their land claims. This is such an interesting aspect of our nation’s history. After the fur trappers couldn’t make money trapping any more, they settled in the Oregon area with their Indian wives and took up farming. In 1843 the current settlers (mostly trappers and missionaries) got together and agreed on the Organic Act setting up the method of measuring land, the necessity of having ownership recorded in Oregon City and authorizing married couple to have 640 acres of land at no cost. (This was equal to one square mile.) The US extended its authority to include the Oregon Territory in 1849 and selected a Territorial Governor to make sure that the Organic Act did not include anything that the US Constitution would not allow. The only thing the Oregon had to change was its ability to mint gold “Beaver” coins since the US Constitution reserved this right for the federal government. In 1850 the US Congress passed the Donation Land Act of 1850 which voided all previous land grants while at the same time took into account the current ownership of the land. It granted every white citizen over 18 years old ALREADY LIVINIG IN OREGON 320 acres of land (a half section) and to every married couple ALREADY LIVING IN OREGON 640 acres of land (a full section) with half of the land in the wife’s name. (This was a first in the US.) They were required to live on the land and work it for four years. Settlers arriving in Oregon before the end of 1850 were given the same amount of land under the same rules. Settlers arriving after 1850 were given half as much land as those arriving before the end of 1850. After 1854 there was no longer any free land given away. The price then was $1.25 per acre with a maximum of 320 acres. The price rose steadily and the number of acres allowed decreased in the following years. A total of 7,437 land grants were issued under this 1850 law.

Thomas Jefferson outlined a surveying system that was adopted in the Land Ordinance of 1785. The “Willamette Stone” was set in 1851 at the intersection of a line between Vancouver and California and a line from the Pacific Ocean to the Snake River. This is the point from which all measurements in the survey were measured. The survey of Oregon City was completed in 1852. As you can imagine, there were many disagreements about where one person’s land started and another person’s land ended…

It seems that when the family finally reached Oregon City it was the beginning of winter. They could either stay in Oregon City for the winter and look for their piece of land in the spring or they could leave right away and hope to find the best piece of land still available before the rest of the people started looking in the spring. After the settler located the land he wanted, he would mark it our in some way (chop a tree with a certain mark, build a building, make a big pile of rocks, etc.) and then go back to Oregon City and tell the land man the description of his piece of land. Remember, then they had to live on the land and farm it. However, if their “business required them to be absent from the land for up to two years” they could pay $5.00 a year instead of actually occupying the land.

Most of the people in the wagon train started the trek from Independence, Missouri. They came from lots of other places TO Missouri, then got all of their supplies, formed groups and started the trail. There were some books available describing the trails and the trip. These were usually dependable, but some were written by men who had never left the cities and were really a work of fiction. They left Missouri as soon as the grass was tall enough to feed the oxen and horses and mules. They wanted to leave early enough to arrive in Oregon before winter set in. There were certain points along the way that tradition held must be reached by a certain date in order to arrive in Oregon before winter. Independence Rock had to be reached before the 4th of July. The trek was 1,941 miles (assuming, of course, that everyone walked the dotted line in the sand that marked the exact trail!) and was expected to take 180 days. Toward the end of the wagon train era (just before railroad travel became available) the trek was cut down to 140 days because it was so easy to just follow the trail of all of the wagon trains that had gone before. Very few black people came across on the wagon trains. Some groups specifically forbid black people to be a part of the group.

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Fascinating.

Thursday, May 29 – We left the motor home and drove south to Coburg, OR, to visit the Monaco Coach Company and see the factory where motor homes like ours were built. The plant was not working at the time. The workers all had one week off (without pay) because of the lack of orders for new motor homes due to the increased price of diesel fuel. The painting of the coach seems to take more time than anything else. The do really fancy paint jobs at this factory.

After that we headed east toward the Three Sisters Wilderness Area and the city of Sisters. This is part of the Oregon Scenic Byway system. We continued on through the Ochoco National Forest to Dayville. Absolutely beautiful drive. We stayed overnight in Dayville in a unique little motel. We were lucky that they had one room with a private bath… Grandma Etta would love this place!

Friday, May 30 – We headed in to the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. This area was covered by layer upon layer of lava flows and lahar (mud flows from volcanoes). The bottom layer used to be the bottom of the ocean and is approximately 100 million years old. There are then up to ten different formations of deposits above that totaling 3 miles in thickness. (In Yakima, WA, the lava flows are 15,000’ deep.) The “John Day Formation” is about 18 million to 39 million years old. (By the way, John Day was a settler who left the main group to set out on his own with another man. They got lost, then met up with Indians who took everything they had including their clothes. They were later found by other settlers where a river flowed into the Columbia. That river became known as the John Day River. Since the river was named John Day at the mouth, that means that the rest of the river is also the John Day River. John Day actually was never within 100 miles of the John Day Fossil Beds! The colorful exposed rock (browns and beiges) is the John Day Formation. These exposed rocks give a 40 million year fossil record of plants and animals. There is a research facility at the Sheep Rock Unit Visitor’s Center and you can watch the researchers removing the fossil from the surrounding rock. (This is not an exciting thing to watch…) We really enjoyed the loop ride around the area.

We drove on to John Day city and visited the Kam Wah Chung Interpretive Center. There were a lot of Chinese in this area because of the gold mining. Doc Hay and Lung On were two Chinese men who bought a building, set up a doctor’s office and a business establishment. They were so well respected that even after the rest of the Chinese left, these men remained and carried on their businesses.

We drove past Sumpter and the Sumpter wood fired locomotive train and the old Sumpter gold dredge. The most interesting thing was the miles of dug up land that the dredge had worked. There were mounds of stone debris from the dredge covering acres of land.

We drove into Baker City and got a hotel for the night.

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Saturday, May 31 – Vance’s Birthday. We got an early start and went to the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center outside of Baker City. It was better than the one in Oregon City but we could only stay until 11 AM. Outside of the Center was a trail that you could follow to see the actual ruts in the field from the original wagon trains. (We didn’t have time to take that trail…) Then we had to drive 2 ½ hours over to the Idaho side of the Snake River and drive the windy private road up to the Hell’s Canyon Dam. We arrived at the landing site for the jet boats of Hell’s Canyon Adventures. We had a really great 2 hour ride down the Snake River north of the Hell’s Canyon Dam. We stopped for a short shore excursion. (Mark didn’t go because of his broken foot!) Our driver showed us a huge rock with painted drawings on it that he said were about 2000 years old. He told us a story about an elderly lady passenger that they brought to this site with a tour that stopped here for lunch. The lady walked around a little bit and then said she was going back to the boat because she “wasn’t supposed to be here”. The crew talked with her and asked her what she saw that bothered her. She said she was a Nez Perce Indian and her grandfather had told her many stories. One of them was about this place. She said she recognized it because of the “rattlesnake rock”, the “bear rock” and the paintings. She said that she was sure there would be a “wolf rock” further down the shore and as the boat passed it she pointed it out. She said this was the place that the young boys were brought to undergo the ceremony before being sent out to see their “vision”. They would have nothing to eat, nothing to drink and no sleep for 24 hours. Then there was the ceremony and then they would go off into the mountains until they saw a vision. (It didn’t take long to see a vision after three days of no food, no water and no sleep!) Then when they came back their vision was recorded. The lady said that no women were ever allowed to be in this place. See the photos for pictures of the rattlesnake, the bear and the wolf. The trip was altogether worth every penny. The scenery was just what we wanted to see and the power of the jet boat fighting its way back upstream was fun!

We drove back over the same road to Route 84 and headed north. We spent the night in Pendleton, OR.

Sunday, June 1 – Heather and Ronnie’s Anniversary. We left early again and headed west on I-84 toward the Columbia River Gorge and Mt. Hood. We enjoyed seeing the gorge again with its fantastic geologic formations. We turned south on Rt 35 at Mt. Hood and headed into the Mt. Hood Recreation Area. We had sun and the drive up to Mt Hood was beautiful. As soon as we passed over the top of the mountain and were on the west side of the Cascades it started raining again. Oh well, we had two very nice days on the east side of the state!

We headed toward Oregon City again and back to the motorhome. Then I started on this story, which took forever. We really had a great trip!

September 14 - 25, 2007

2007-09-30T11:40:00.000-07:00

Well, we are back in the motorhome. We flew from Philadelphia to Spokane, WA, on September 14. On the 15th we took Molly Habel (Jennifer’s daughter) and 3 of her friends out to dinner. On the 16th we drove around Spokane and walked the Spokane River Walk. It was a beautiful day and we just enjoyed the park-like atmosphere of the River Walk. There is an old carousel that has been beautifully restored with its original calliope put back into working order. It is inside a building built especially for it. The music from the calliope is heard along the River Walk and sounds really great.

We had to wait for our mail to arrive, but while we waited we learned a lot about the area. The entire southeast part of the state has been formed by many Ice Age Floods. These are also called the Missoula Floods or the Great Flood.

First, there were many volcanic eruptions that laid down lava to a depth of about 6,000 feet across Idaho and all the way to the foot of the mountains in Washington. If the lava cools quickly, it is just a porous rock. If it cools slowly it forms into 5 sided columns of porous rock. When you look at the sides of the cliffs, you can see that sometimes the top part is just porous rock and under that there are columns of basalt. You can see that in lots of our photos.

About 15,000 to 13,000 years ago, an arm of the glaciers came down into Montana near Missoula. As it advanced, it completely blocked off the Clark Fork River. The water flowing up the river had nowhere to go and just backed up to form a HUGE lake containing 500 cubic miles of water. Eventually the ice dam holding back the river couldn’t contain the water any longer and the water breached the ice dam. It is believed (because no one can really remember…) that the entire Lake Missoula emptied itself in 48 hours. As the water made its way to the Pacific Ocean it scoured the land breaking away the basalt lava and tearing up anything in its way in its rush to the Ocean. As it tore away the basalt it carried the broken-off pieces along with it until the current slowed down enough to let them drop onto the bottom. Also, since the raging water had broken apart the glacier damming up the river, there were huge ice flows with huge boulders frozen inside. As the ice melted and the current slowed, these huge boulders were dropped to the bottom and just stayed there. (Some of these rocks are granite from Canada. These rocks that are not from the local area and are just sitting there all by themselves are called “erratics”.) This same “ice damming the river” process was repeated dozens of times with the new water tearing away more and more of the cliff walls until the cliffs are 400’ to 500’ high.

In addition to the Clark Fork River being dammed by an glacier, the north flowing section of the Columbia River in Washington state also was blocked by a glacier. The River overflowed its banks and found a new route to the Pacific Ocean. It flowed through this alternate river bed for a long time and created the canyon that is now known as the Grand Coulee.

When the next Ice Age Flood from Glacier Lake Missoula broke through the ice, it had the nice Grand Coulee river bed path to follow for part of its trip to the Ocean. There is one section south of where the Columbia was blocked near Grand Coulee Dam known as the Dry Falls. This is where the basalt had been worn back by the water flowing over a cliff making a waterfall that undercut the cliff so that it moved back 20 miles from where it used to be. This Dry Falls is 3 ½ miles across and 300 to 400 feet deep. When the water from the Ice Age Floods went over the falls the water was 400 to 500 feet deep. That made for a 700’ to 900’ waterfall. The water was so deep that there really was no actual falls, there was just a “dip” in the running water.

All of this water got bottled up trying to get through the mountains. The only way to the Ocean was through the Columbia Gorge, the river bed of the Columbia River, which is the border of Washington and Oregon. The water was so backed up that it formed a lake in the northwestern part of Oregon and dropped all of the good basalt top soil that it scoured off the ground in Washington onto the Willamette Valley of Oregon.

Now that you know the geology of the area, you’ll be able to understand our absolute fascination with the rocks, cliffs, erratics and river beds of this area.

On Tuesday, Sept 18, we drove south to the Tri-Cities area of Richland, Pasco and Kennewick to see what we could learn about the Hanford Site. Before 1942 Albert Einstein had written a letter to FDR about the German scientists coming to the US and the possibility of using uranium and plutonium for bombs. During 1942, after Pearl Harbor, the US Government was looking for a place that was about 600 square miles, near a city of 10,000 people, had few people living on the site itself, and had an abundant supply of water and electricity. The Government identified an area north of Richland that had only 2 small villages and 1500 “head” of Indians and fit the other requirements. In December 1942 the residents of the 2 small villages, the Indians and any farmers and ranchers in the area received letters from the Government telling them they had 30 days to vacate their premises and get off the land. They were given payments based on the Depression Era values that had been in effect in the 1930’s. Lots of people were unhappy with the amount of their payment, but it was the War atmosphere and people wanted to do whatever it took to win the war. (In the last 20 years or so, people have sued the Government for more appropriate payments and many have won more money.) In March of 1943 the first buildings were going up on the Hanford Site. The small town of Richland saw a building boom as the Government built housing for the people who were pouring in to work at the Site. (Architects designed 26 different houses, duplexes and multi-family buildings and named them “A”, “B”, “C”, etc up through “Z”. These houses were only rented to workers during the time the Site was active. Later they were sold to the people living in them or put up for sale to the public. We drove around the area and saw LOTS of the houses that have either been remodeled or left exactly like they were.) The Grand Coulee Dam had just been completed and power lines were run to the Site. “B Reactor” was built and the process of turning Uranium 238 into Plutoniam 238 was started.

I KNOW that this is a very simplified explanation of what occurs, but I am not a scientist. The Uranium 238 is formed into pellets or into slugs and many of these are put into the middle of a double walled tube. Water flows in the hollow space in the tube around the outside of the pellets or slugs. These tubes are placed in a specific pattern in blocks of graphite drilled with holes for the tubes. The uranium is then bombarded with neutrons that sends all of the atoms running around bumping into each other. When they hit each other hard enough they change into Uranium 239, then into Neptunium 239 and then into Plutonium 239.

(Jim and Brian, if you read this please do NOT fall off of you chair laughing!)

(As an aside, Uranium contains 99.28% Uranium 238 and .72% Uranium 235. In Oak Ridge, TN, they separated the Uranium 235 from the Uranium 238 in a very complicated process based on the very slight difference in weight of the two. This Uranium 235 was used in the bomb Little Boy. The Oak Ridge site also developed and tweaked the Plutonium making process used at the Handford site.)

The plutonium itself is separated out by processing chemically and in a centrifuge. The plutonium was then carried IN SOMEONE’S BRIEFCASE to Los Alamos to be first tested and then actually used in the bomb Fat Man.

However, now that they have made and removed the Plutonium, there is a LOT of radio-active waste water as well as the spent uranium fuel cells. All of this has to be stored somewhere because they don’t have any place yet to dispose of it! The original tanks that stored the waste were single walled tanks and there was some problem with them leaking. New double walled tanks (steel, then concrete with small air channels for cooling, then steel) have solved that problem and NONE of the double-walled tanks show signs of leaking. There is hope that a new process (new to us, the French have apparently been using it for years) that turns this waste into a glass that can be stored safely for 1 million years will be approved soon. Then the waste will be turned into glass and trucked to the Yucca Mountain in Nevada. (The people in Nevada are not real happy about this…)

The last reactor that was built (in the 1950’s) was designed so that it could also produce power for the Site itself. It wasn’t used for long, but it was very efficient when it was in use. The reactors use a LOT of electricity. They were getting it from the Grand Coulee Dam until the Bonneville Dam came on line. Then they generated enough power themselves with the power plant (completed about 1963) in conjunction with the last reactor that they could actually put some power back into the grid.

There has not been any Plutonium produced at the plant since the 1980’s. However, they still employ thousands of people to maintain the site, monitor the waste tanks, and work on the vitrification process.

We went to this museum (CREHST) that had so much information on the internet. When we pulled up to it, Mark said “This CAN’T be the place!” because it looked more like a run-down VFW Hall. However, we went in anyway and paid our $2.50 admission. WOW, what a place. We couldn’t see and read and understand all that we wanted to in one afternoon, so they marked our ticket so that we could come back again the next day! The men who work the front desk are all retired workers from the Hanford Site and know it inside and out. They are SO happy to share everything they know with someone who is interested. We rate it a “10”.

When we left the Museum we drove out Route 243 which actually goes through the Hanford Site. We could see some of the buildings off in the distance, but the land sure is a lot of nothing. Once a year they have public tours of the Site. They are in October, but we won’t be there then…

Washington is definitely DAM country. The mightly Columbia River has at least 14 dams along it route from British Columbia to Oregon and the Pacific. It is wonderful the way the power plants can use the water to generate electricity, spit it out the bottom of the turbines and send it on down the river to be used again at the next power plant! Talk about a renewable energy source! The largest dam is the Grand Coulee Dam but it is a “peaking dam” so it only produces power when it is needed, not all the time. If power is needed in the grid, they flip a switch and are generating power within 20 seconds! We got a tour of the power house in the new section of the dam.

The Dam was first proposed in the 1920’s as an irrigation project. In the 1930’s FDR asked Congress to approve it as a power project as well. He managed to get it financed by making it part of the WPA projects instead of asking Congress for money for a dam. FDR was a firm believer that the GOVERNMENT should own the dams and generate the electricity, not big businesses. Before the irrigation part could begin, the War made the need for power in the Northwest for manufacturing war material the most urgent need. After the war the irrigation project was again a priority. There are now 2,300 miles of irrigation canals irrigating 500,000 acres of desert. “Desert” is the key word. As you drive along, where the land is irrigated it is green, fertile, beautiful farmland. If you look 50’ past the fields, where there is no irrigation, it is simply desert. Again, the photos will show that “Water is everything” when it comes to farming.

We visited three dams along with the fish ladders at two of them. Grand Coulee does not have a fish ladder or any way for the young fish to get to the ocean. However, the rest of the Columbia River is quite concerned about getting the baby salmon out to the ocean and getting the adult salmon back to spawn. During the 5 months or so that the salmon come back upriver to spawn, there is actually a live person sitting at a computer watching the fish go up the fish ladder for 16 hours a day counting the number of each species of fish! I don’t know if fish aren’t allowed to go through for the other 8 hours or if they extrapolate their data to fill in that missing time… There are fish nets at the underwater entrances to most of the power plants to divert the young salmon to tubes along the sides of the dam. There they are counted and sorted by size. The largest fish are allowed to fend for themselves and continue downstream braving other dams and other predators. The smallest fish are actually pulled out and transported in either huge barges or tanker trucks down to the river below the last dam so that they have a better chance of making it to the open ocean to grow to adult size.

We drove along Route 2 to Wenatchee, WA, and then on to the Bavarian Village of Leavenworth. It reminded us of Fredicksburg, TX. Nice quaint shops. What impressed us was that every building went along with the Bavarian theme, including NAPA Auto Parts and McDonalds. Most of the design work to make things look Bavarian were actually just painted on the buildings. That is a really inexpensive way to create an atmosphere without a lot of rebuilding. (See photos) Someone there asked about accommodations during the “off season” and the Visitor Information lady told them there was NO “off season”.

On Sunday, Sept 23, we drove to Chelan at the south end of Lake Chelan. This is a glacier formed and glacier fed lake that is about 60 miles long, 1300’-1400’ deep, and about 1 mile wide at most points. At its deepest point the bottom of the lake is about 350’ below sea level! It is so deep that the lake never freezes. The mountains are up to 10,500’ high surrounding the lake. We took a flight-seeing ride in a Beaver seaplane with a pilot who REALLY gave us a great tour. We flew up the lake and over the mountains to see the glaciers, Mount Ranier and the valleys formed by the creeks running down from the mountains. On the west side of the lake you can drive about 1/4 of the way up the lake to 25 Mile Creek State Park where the road then winds its way inland for a while. Further up the west side we saw a Lutheran Retreat that is about 11 miles up into the mountains from the river and is accessible only by a dirt road from the river. It is an old copper mining camp that was “donated” to the church when it was no longer profitable in 1957. On the east side of the lake you can drive only as far as the unincorporated village of Manson, about 1/5 of the way up the lake. In the late 1800’s a “Native American” named Wapato settled the spit of land that juts into the Lake at its narrowest point. (This is also where the glacier the formed the lake ended as the Ice Age ended and the glaciers retreated.) The state recognized his right to the property when the area was settled and he had the right to lease all of his land with 99 year leases. There is other private property in the area, but most of the land is leased from the Wapato family.

We followed a creek valley down from the mountains and approached Stehekin at the north end of Lake Chalen. With a beautiful landing we taxied up to the dock and had 1 hour to wander around the village and visit the Visitor’s Center. Then we picked up 3 more people to fly back down to Chelan. There is a dam at the south end of Lake Chelan, but it is really not used to dam up the lake. It is only used for flood control and, if there is enough water, to send a powerful stream of water through an underground pipe down to the Columbia River to run a small power generating plant. The authorities are releasing enough water through the dam right now to lower the lake level by about 1 ½ inches each day in order to prepare for the spring snow melt.

We stayed in Chelan on Monday so I could do some sewing projects and Mark could do a few projects on the motorhome.

Tuesday, Sept 25, we left for Twisp and Winthrop. Winthrop is a very small town that has cooperated in making their very small downtown section look like a Western town. It was a fun place to walk around for 10 minutes or so. Since neither Mark nor I are really into shopping, it didn’t take us long to walk the streets! We picked up our mail today.

We went to the local airport to visit the Smokejumper base. This Methow Valley site is the “birthplace of smoke jumping”. In 1939 the Forest Service wanted to find a better way to fight forest fires. Parachuting was NOT well-known at the time. In fact, there was really only one place in the country where it was being done with any kind of regularity and safe record—Eagle Parachute Company of Lancaster, PA. The military didn’t use parachutes; it was not a sport; nobody did it. Congress didn’t like the idea of using parachutes to jump in and fight forest fires, so they searched for the most rugged terrain in the country and settled on the West Cascades in Washington. Parachute jumpers from Lancaster came to Washington and made a series of jumps to show how it could be done and trained some of the forest service workers how to parachute in. In 1940 there was a call for smokejumpers to fight a newly forming fire and one of the original men from Lancaster and one newly trained forest service firefighter jumped from a Stinson airplane to fight the fire. It worked, and a second base was established at Missoula, MT. Additional bases have been added where there is danger from forest fires. There are a TOTAL of abut 400 smokejumpers in the US. They are very proud of themselves and how fit and self-sufficient they are. Their training (according to the smokejumper who gave us the tour) makes the SEAL training look like boot camp.

Today we will leave to drive to Darrington to visit Aunt Betty Bryson and then on to Arlington to visit the rest of the Brysons. Then we will visit the western part of Washington state!

We sure are enjoying this life of travel!!

Photos: http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLandingSignin.jsp?Uc=x2eavjj.36flrhof&Uy=dmn16i&Upost_signin=Slideshow.jsp%3Fmode%3Dfromshare&Ux=1

http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLandingSignin.jsp?Uc=x2eavjj.54nar4fz&Uy=pdemah&Upost_signin=Slideshow.jsp%3Fmode%3Dfromshare&Ux=1

http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLandingSignin.jsp?Uc=x2eavjj.asz6h03j&Uy=j3qs1d&Upost_signin=Slideshow.jsp%3Fmode%3Dfromshare&Ux=1

August 12-20, 2007

2007-09-05T06:56:00.000-07:00

Sunday, August 12 - We drove from Belle Fourche directly north into North Dakota then turned east on the Interstate to Bismarck. We parked at a nice KOA just 1 mile off the interstate.

Monday, August 13 – We drove north to Washburn, ND, to visit the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center. It was OK, but not as great as the one we visited in Great Falls, MT! Then we went to the nearby rebuilt Fort Mandan. They have recreated the camp that Lewis and Clark made that first winter with the Indians. Unfortunately, the original site is now under water as are the original Indian villages that they traded with and visited and partied with. But a volunteer takes you to the Fort and gives a nice talk that gives lots of good personal information about the everyday life of the Corps of Discovery during that winter. (If anyone has not read or listened to Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage I can’t recommend it highly enough!)

Tuesday, August 14 – My mail arrived yesterday so this was a work day. Mark took the Jeep to have some warranty work done on it. We went to see the movie Hairspray with John Travolta and, more importantly, Troy Bolton…oops, Zac Eafron. We REALLY enjoyed it. I even laughed out loud!

Wednesday, August 15 – WOW, what a day! We left early to go north again to take a tour of the Falkirk Mine. The photos and Mark’s captions will give a better story, but this is an open pit lignite mine. Lignite is the least efficient of all the kinds of coal but the power plants in this area are all set up to burn lignite to make electricity and synthetic natural gas (I’ll get to that next…). This entire section of the state is rolling hills with some small steep hills and hay fields EVERYWHERE. However, under those beautiful rolling hills lies a seam of lignite coal that dates back 57 million years ago. The original ground level has been worn away by wind, rain, glaciers, etc. so that this 57 million year old layer is now about 100’ or so below the present ground level. Big D-11 Caterpillar bulldozers scrape the top soil and vegetation from the top of the land. This top soil is trucked to a spot where it is stockpiled for later use. (Each pile of topsoil must be marked with the exact location it was taken from so that it can later be returned to the same place.) These bulldozers also make a flat “bench” from which a HUGE crane uses a drag line to dig out about another 90’ of dirt. This is complicated. The drag line digs out the dirt from the area to be “mined” next and uses that same dirt (NOT the topsoil, just the “overburden” dirt that covers the coal seam) to fill in the huge oblong cavity next to it where the coal has just been mined from. The area being worked just moves along the coal seam this way with the land already worked being “reclaimed” as a new mine is dug. (I’ll get back to this later.) The coal seam is really a long bed of coal that is actually a layer that was laid down from the blowing plant life 57 million years ago and compressed and heated for millions of years. It’s more like a layer of sedimentary rock than it is a “seam” of coal in a mountain, but they call it a seam. After the coal seam is exposed, the big “ripper” on the back of that D-11 Cat is lowered into the coal and rips up the coal about 8’ deep in a checkerboard design. Then a big Caterpillar “wheel loader” takes a 40 ton bite of the ripped up coal and loads it into a 160 ton or a 200 ton hopper truck that drives to the tipple and opens the doors in the bottom and unloads the entire load in about 20 seconds. The lignite coal from this mine then goes through 2 crushers and then into a storage tower. The nearby electric generating station has a conveyor belt that runs directly to it from the storage tower so that they can continuously get the coal they need to power the plant. The coal from this mine is high in sulphur and low in sodium and the coal from the mine a little further south is just the opposite. Since the power plant doesn’t want their coal to be high in either, they get coal from both mines and mix them together to get the right composition for burning in their plant. The mine safety is overseen by a special group that is about 10 times as strict as OSHA.

Back to the filling in of the old mining sites. There are SO many regulations for what the land must be like when they are finished mining it. They must have exact topographic measurements for what the land looked like before they started mining it. After they take out about 15’ to 20’ of coal, of course the land will not be exactly the same height as it was. This is kind of OK. The overburden that has been removed is now “fluffed” since the years and years of compaction have been undone. They fill the land back in and grade it with bulldozers with GPS coordinates set in to get all of the hills back in their proper places. Just running these huge machines over the ground compacts it again but not quite as much as it was. Even after taking about the 15’-20’ of coal, the ground is only about 3’ lower overall than it was but with all of the same contours. Drainage is one of the big worries. Every inch of reclaimed land must have the same drainage pattern as it did before it was disturbed. So now they disc it to get it “uncompacted” and ready to be planted again with hay. The local farmers “rent” the land for exactly what the property taxes are on the land and plant the hay. (The mining company is not allowed to make any profit on the farming part of the reclamation project, so they can ONLY rent the land for the cost of the taxes.) The farmers have to keep meticulous records of crop production using GPS to measure yields in each field for years. After the farmers have had at least 10 years where the average of those 10 years is better than the average crops yields of the surrounding farms (3 of those years must be in the most recent 5 years), then the mine can sell the land. Usually, the same farmer who sold the land does NOT buy it back. Usually, when the farmer sells the land to the mine he retires and gets out of farming. SOMETIMES the farmer will just “rent” the land to the mining company but the mining companies do not like to do that. If they don’t own the land they are not allowed to “mix” the top soils from the different sections of land. They have to be sure that Farmer John gets back his same top soil 15 years from now. That is way to much trouble for the mining companies. The areas around the mine are gorgeous! The hay fields are so pretty and the farmers are farming them just like the untouched lands a few miles away.

We were SO lucky with our tour! Mark got to ride in one of the big 160 ton bottom unloading trucks. Another man on our tour got to ride in the same truck while it was being loaded with coal and driven to the tipple and unloaded. Then, since they were having a special luncheon that day, the crane with the huge drag line actually stopped working for the lunch hour. Usually, they have the trainees come up during the lunch hour to get their learning time while the actual crane operators have lunch. So the crane operators told our tour guide to take us up to the crane and let us look around – NOT in it, just around it.

And when we finished the tour it was only NOON time!

Then we had an appointment for a tour of the Great Plains Synfuels Plant. There is only ONE plant in the US that turns lignite coal into synthetic natural gas and a couple of plants in South Africa. We toured the one in the US. I can’t explain the entire process because it is all a secret, but essentially the plant receives lignite coal from the mines AND electricity from the generating station nearby. They use the electricity to power the equipment and the coal to put into the “gasifier” that turns it into synthetic natural gas PLUS a lot of byproducts. These byproducts are just as important as the synthetic natural gas – anhydrous ammonia for fertilizer, naptha to add to gas, xenon gas, krypton gas, carbon dioxide which is piped to Canada and used to make their oil drilling process more efficient, and a few more. The synthetic natural gas is sent about 35 miles in a pipeline to a natural gas pipeline and then is mixed in with the natural gas and sent to homes and businesses from North Dakota to Texas. After the gasification process is complete, synthetic natural gas is virtually identical to natural gas. It is a great idea. Unfortunately, the group that decided to buy the equipment and build the plant in 1984 only ran it for ONE year before they went bankrupt. The price of natural gas dropped so low that they couldn’t make enough money selling the gas to pay for the process. Since the Dept of Energy had guaranteed the loans for the construction of the plant, they stepped in and ran it for 4 years until a buyer could be found. They lost money too. When the price of natural gas started to go up and the plant was set up to efficiently produce the by-products, it became profitable. They don’t give any figures, but they give the impression that they make plenty of money with the process now. VERY interesting.

Thursday, August 16 - We had to have a special order part installed on the Jeep, so we didn’t leave the campground until early afternoon to drive to Medora, ND. Again, beautiful fields of corn and hay. Then the Badlands would just appear. Then beautiful fields of corn and hay again!

We got to Medora in time to see the Medora Musical which has been playing for 42 years. Before the show we went to, surely one-of-a-kind, a “pitch fork fondue”. They put rib eye steaks and NY Strip steaks on the tines of a real pitch fork and then put them in these huge cauldrons of oil and actually fondue them for 4 minutes. There is a buffet dinner and your choice of steak. It was good and fun! Then as the sun set, the Musical began. There are two LONG escalators that go down into the canyon to the seating area. The stage and seating area were renovated about 10-15 years ago to greatly increase the number of seats and add rest rooms and concession stands down at the seating level. The backdrop for the play is an old town that moves off to either side on a track so that you can see the hills behind the set. They use real horses and a stagecoach on stage. There is a loose story behind all of the singing and it was all fun. The weather was agreeable so that helped since it is all done outside.

Friday, August 17 - The entrance to the Theodore Roosevelt National Park is right smack IN downtown Medora. We spent about 3 hours riding around the 37 miles scenic loop that makes the park so easily accessible to everyone. There are plenty of hiking trails, but it’s nice to be able to see the scenery even if you don’t want to take a hike. This is really another area of “Badlands”. They seem to spring up here and there in both South and North Dakota. They were called the “Badlands” because you couldn’t grow anything there and you couldn’t get any food or water if you happened to be lost or stuck there. The photos will give a better story than I can. The basic geology is that the layers of sand, dust, mud, plant life, sand, etc were laid down over millions of years. At some point the lignite coal actually caught fire inside the earth and burned with such intensity that it heated the surrounding rock and turned it into brick-like “scoria”. This rock that had been burned was much harder than the softer sandstone and mudstone so as the other rock was eroded away the harder rock was left. It appears as though all of this rock that was washed and weathered away flowed west and filled in the valleys to make the beautiful fields we passed along the way. In some of the photos you can see the harder layers of rock either on top or in the center of the buttes. Some of it is very picturesque. All of it is interesting.

At 4 PM we went to a one-man play called “Bully” where Teddy Roosevelt talked to us for about 45 minutes of spell-binding acting. He told a lot of stories in the words that Teddy Roosevelt must have used in written letters to friends. It was VERY good.

Saturday, August 18 - We left Medora and headed west into Montana. Again, the fields were just beautiful. Hay is almost all that we saw but, my goodness, did we see a lot of hay. I think in Montana they must not talk about how many people there are per square mile but how many square miles they have per person! We stayed overnight in the Pilot Truck Stop. Noisy, but we are just driving through so it is easier than finding a campground. And they haven’t been any Wal-Marts!!

Sunday, August 19 – We drove Route 2 through the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. When we were driving we did not know we were in the Reservation and Mark and I looked at each other and said how much the fields had changed in just short time. No longer were they beautiful fields full of hay with no weeds in sight. Instead, the fields looked unkempt, full of weeds, not harvested. There were a lot more homes than we saw before, but they were trailers with junk yards in front and on both sides! Then we looked on the map and saw that we had entered the Reservation. I guess we should have known when we passed what looked like an old saloon but had a big sign that said CASINO. I’m not discussing any cause and effect here. Just stating facts.

We drove around the south side of Glacier National Park. They were fighting about 6 fires in the area when we drove through and the smoke obscured any view. We could see that they were mountains but could not see any definition to them. The drive was easy without much twisting or climbing. We arrived at West Glacier (obviously on the west side of Glacier National Park) and parked at the KOA Kampground there.

Monday, August 20 – We left early for a tour on the red bus. In the 1930’s the park got red touring buses with fabric tops that roll back to better view the mountains for taking the tourists through the Park. In 1999, after they had about 1,000,000 miles on them, there were questions about the safety of the buses (as well as the brakes and the steering). The owners turned the buses over to Glacial Park, Inc., and Ford Motor Company then donated about $6,000,000 worth of work and parts to put the 33 frames on new chassis, reinforce the bodies, install gas/propane engines and build a climate controlled garage to store them for the winter. After two seasons being rebuilt, they are now back on the road taking tourists through the park again. You CAN drive your own car, but it looked like most people tour in the red bus. There were also a good number of people riding bikes up the mountain and a few motorcycles. That would not have been a problem except that it was 40 degrees, rainy and the wind was blowing 15-50 mph!! Now remember, we have the top rolled back for better viewing!! IT WAS COLD!! There is only one main road through Glacier National Park although there are a few unimproved roads that go a short way into the park from around the park. The mountains and glacial valleys were very interesting. There are only about 6 glaciers left in the park and if you have seen glaciers in Alaska these are not much of a glacier… Some of the peaks rise up 4000’ above the 1000’ deep glacial valley lakes and are really impressive. Glacier National Park gets about 500” of snow each year. But the drifts cover the road to a depth of about 100’. They have signs about 100’ above the road for the bulldozer drivers to use as a guide when they clear the road in the spring! The Visitor Centers must board up completely since they are COMPLETELY covered with snow. If you fly over one in the winter, you can’t even find it. Once the sun came out everything looked MUCH prettier. The gray clouds didn’t do much for the scenery. The tour we took was a 9 ½ hour trip from the west side of the park to the east side and north a bit and then back to the west side. The driver put the top back over for some of the ride but when it was open it was COLD.

Tuesday we are driving to Libby, MT, to get our mail and spend one night. Wednesday morning we will be driving to Spokane, WA, so we can catch a Southwest flight back to Port Aransas for 10 days or so. Then we will fly to New York to watch Siena while Faith and Leon go to a wedding in Holland. Then we will visit Grandma Etta for a couple of days to hear about her trip to Norway and Holland. THEN we will fly back to Spokane and continue our trip.

Photos: http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=x2eavjj.3a1tpb4f&x=0&y=-6xv7y3
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http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=x2eavjj.1ns97t0v&x=0&y=7wki78

August 8-11, 2007

2007-08-13T09:46:00.000-07:00

OK, here are the details of our trip from August 8 through and including August 11. I know it's long. If you don't have the time to read it, feel free to use the delete key! Photos will follow. Mark is doing the captions on the photos now instead of me so they should be a lot funnier!

Wednesday, August 8 – We drove into Sturgis, SD, for the Harley Davidson Motorcycle Rally. We saw bikes EVERYWHERE in the area, not just in Sturgis! It reminds me of Sixth Street in Austin! Lots of characters. LOTS of motorcycles. There are shops selling everything a motorcyclist needs: leathers, beer, patches, tattoos, beer, parts, beer, t-shirts, beer, tattoos, beer, hats, beer, saddle bags, LED lights for the cycles, beer, sheepskin covers for the seats, motorhomes and trailers to haul cycles, … I really had a good time in the tattoo parlors because they had SO many artists working on people at one time and they let you just wander around and look at what they were doing. They were REALLY busy. I took some pictures of one guy getting his tattoo and he later came up to talk to us in another tattoo parlor so we asked some questions. The fine lines in the tattoo are done with the small electric tool that only has 1 needle. When they do the shading and filling in they use a head with 4 or 5 needles to spread the ink out. The ink goes down through at least 2 layers of skin in order to have the color stay there and not fade away as the skin replaces itself. The guy whose photo we took was in the chair for 3 hours because he was having an old tattoo redone to be incorporated into a new tattoo that was more original. His old tattoo was too common and he didn’t like it anymore. He said that the skin doesn’t bleed while they are doing the tattoo, but that afterwards it “oozes” so they have to cover it with gauze for a few days. I’ll let the pictures tell the story. You just can’t believe how many motorcycles there are.

Wednesday night we went to the Crazy Horse Memorial Light Show. Crazy Horse was a Lakota Sioux Indian war chief who led his first war party before he was twenty. He fought fierce battles to save the Indian’s lands, including helping to defeat Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. He finally surrendered to the army, but in 1877 he left the reservation without permission to take his sick wife to her parents. The army arrested him and he went peacefully until he saw that they were taking him to the guardhouse. He began to struggle and one of the arresting officers bayoneted him in the back. Before he died, a white man asked him “So, where are your lands now?” He pointed to where his people used to live and said, “My lands are where my dead lie buried.” In 1947, the Lakota chief invited Korczak Ziolkowski (a sculptor who had won first prize at the New York World’s Fair in 1939) to build a monument because “My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know the red man has great heroes also.” Korczak age 40, worked with Gutzom Borglum on Mount Rushmore for a couple of weeks but couldn’t get along with him and quit. (Lots of other people couldn’t get along with Borglum and quit also…) He found a mountain and designed a statue of Crazy Horse riding his horse and pointing with his arm out straight toward his lands. Korczak married Ruth then and had ten children. (Seven of the children still work with Ruth on the project.) He, like Borglum, always had trouble finding enough money to continue the work. Twice he turned down $10 million in federal funding in order to keep the project private. The Lakota Indians have a very ambitious plan for the entire area with museums, a university and a medical training center. So far, the face has been carved and lots of the mountain has been blasted away for his pointing arm. If you look at the photos, the open section under where his arm will be is 10 stories high. The laser and light show was interesting but not all that great.

Thursday, we (and a lot of motorcycles) went to Hill City to see the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research. This is a group of scholars who didn’t want to work for universities but wanted to dig and assemble their own way. As a group they found the dinosaurs Sue and Stan and a bunch of others. Sue is the most complete dinosaur ever found—and the US government actually stole it from BHIGR! What a story. I won’t go into it here, but if you are interested here is the website http://www.wmnh.com/wmssz000.htm or http://www.bhigr.com/pages/info/info_sue.htm (on this one be sure to go through the 6 sections under Sue T. rex Story to the upper right on the screen. Sue is now in the Field Museum in Chicago. These people find the fossils and then make the reproductions that appear in most of the museums around the world. Their “museum” was quite a collection of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures, but the best was their collection of stones and quartz formations!

After we left the BHIGR we drove the windy roads through the beautiful scenery of the Black Hills through Custer State Park. The Black Hills were formed when molten rock pushed up through the limestone and sandstone of what used to be part of the inland sea. The limestone and sandstone have weathered away and the black rock is exposed in lots of places. It really is a very pretty ride. As soon as you get past the small geographic area of the Black Hills, the countryside opens up again into rolling grasslands.

Friday, August 10 – This morning we drove down to Hot Springs, SD, to the Mammoth Site. WOW! As I mentioned, this area used to be all limestone and sandstone from the inland sea. Water would seep through the ground and form caves. This was especially true in this area because there were hot springs and the hot water dissolved the stone even more quickly. Eventually, about 26,000 years ago, the underlying rock had been dissolved so much that it couldn’t support the ground above and the ground fell into the cavern creating a sink hole about 65’ deep and 120’ by 150’. The sink hole filled up with water from the springs and the Columbian Mammoth and the Woolly Mammoth and other animals came to the sink hole looking for water and vegetation for about 350 to 700 years. But, the steep sides of the sink hole were lined with slippery shale and the animals couldn’t get out of the sink hole after they had finished drinking. So they died and lay on the bottom of the sink hole. The bones were covered with layers of silt, sediment and mud until the “mud plug” was level with the surrounding ground. After that, the soft limestone and sandstone eroded away while the harder “mud plug” remained. In 1974 a bulldozer was excavating this high ground to level it for a housing development when a mammoth bone was exposed. Scientists came to investigate the site and determined that it was a major fossil find. The developer worked on other areas of the project while the scientists did their thing. When the incredible extent of the find was known, the developer sold that area to a non-profit group for exactly what he had paid for it as long as they kept everything they found in the area as well as a few more “strings” to help the area. At first the excavation work was only done in the summer and the bones were all covered with dirt for the winter to protect them. Finally, in 1986 a building was constructed over the entire site so that it would be protected from the elements and working the site would be easier. They knew the boundaries of the sink hole because the red limestone around the sinkhole showed the undisturbed ground. As long as the building was built on the red dirt, the entire sink hole was inside. They have built a perfect set-up for visitors to view the area and see the excavations. They keep adding to the building and the amenities to make it better. Grandma Etta was here in 1987 or so and she didn’t see a lot of the things we saw today. As you can see in the photos, most of the excavation is being done around the edges of the sink hole. That is because that’s where the bones are—the animals died as they were trying to get out of the sink hole. A very interesting fact is that the bones are NOT fossils. They have not been fossilized but are still just bone. They are very fragile. Our guide didn’t know WHY they weren’t fossilized, but thinks it is because the mud didn’t seep into the bones and just covered them up.

All in all, we just can’t believe all of the terrific things there are to see and do in this area. If anyone is looking for a place to spend a week, this is it. Within 50 miles in any direction you can find an interesting place to spend a day or a half-day.

We are now in Belle Fourche, about 50 miles northwest of Rapid City, SD.

Saturday, August 11 - Deadwood is an old gold mining town that has been rebuilt and/or preserved as an old western town…except for the plethora of gambling halls! Well, I don’t know, maybe that IS authentic. There were no brothels though. The last one closed in 1980 (really!). It was a fun place to spend a half-day or so. If you like to gamble, you could probably spend a week. Deadwood was the location of an HBO TV series for the past three years. I was told that they ran out of money to do year four. I know my brother knows all about the town because of the series!

Photos: http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=x2eavjj.9gxn0wmn&x=0&y=-7ibtcy

http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=x2eavjj.6jghtsq7&x=0&y=8s6wpp

http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=x2eavjj.6ceakhv3&x=0&y=x8im8g

August 6-7, 2007 Trip Log

2007-08-13T09:44:00.000-07:00

Monday, August 6 – It is interesting how all of Wisconsin and all of Minnesota were beautiful corn fields and soy bean fields from the east side of the state to the west side of the state. Just as we crossed the border into South Dakota we noticed that there was very little corn or soybeans and now everything is hay or wheat. It’s like the farmers all got together and said “Let those eastern fellows have the corn and soybeans!”

We drove to Mitchell, SD, to visit the Corn Palace. In 1892 the city fathers wanted to put Mitchell on the map and prove to the rest of the country that the northern plains were NOT, as Lewis and Clark had said, good only for grazing buffalo. They built the original corn palace to showcase all of the crops that could be grown in the rich Dakota soil AND to entice settlers there. The first Corn Palace was a 100’ by 66’ wooden structure and they decorated the inside and the outside with corn cobs cut in half and nailed to the building. By 1905 it had become such a success that it had outgrown it’s present building and they built a new Corn Palace that was 125’ by 142’ and decorated with corn cobs. In 1921 the current building (140’ by 200’) was built entirely of brick and steel to eliminate the threat of fire posed by the wooden building. It is used as a convention center, for basketball games, proms and dances. The corn is specially grown for the Corn Palace with seeds that have been specially selected for the color of the corn on the cob and it is all grown by one man. They try to change the decoration every year, but sometimes drought or the World Wars interfere and they leave the same pictures up for 2 years. The corn cobs are sawed in half and affixed to the building with staples. Tar paper is put up on the side of the building and the pictures are drawn on the tar paper showing which color corn goes where. They start in the middle of August to take down the old corn and put up the new. When we were there they were waiting for word on whether there would be new corn going up next week or not. It takes about 275,000 ears of corn sawed in half at a cost of about $100,000 each year it is done.

Tuesday, August 7 – We stopped at Wall Drug in Wall, SD. The billboards start about 300 miles away, just like South of the Border. Wall Drug was famous for its many billboards in the 50’s and 60’s. Their billboards said “Free Ice Water” and folks flocked to their store. This all started in 1931 during the depression. Folks were heading West because of the dust bowl and the economy. Business was bad at the local drug store, so they started putting up signs tha said "free ice water - Wall Drug" and the rest is history. It looks like Wall Drug has bought up all of the town and turned it into a series of souvenir stores and restaurants. It is all very quaint and fun. We were at least 100 miles from Sturgis and there were bikers all over the place!

We drove to a campground south of Rapid City, SD and went to the night time show of lights on Mount Rushmore. We got there early enough to see Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln in the daylight. At dark there was a very nice Park Ranger talk, a movie made by Discovery Channel. Then the faces were lit up and they played the National Anthem. All of the vets then were invited down to the stage to lower the flag, fold it and tell their names and service. It was a very nice, patriotic program.

Gutzon Borglum picked the site for the Monument and decided on the faces to be used by 1927. Originally Jefferson was to be on Washington’s right, but there wasn’t enough stone for his face so Borglum moved Jefferson to Washington’s left. Then Jefferson’s face was being carved when a major flaw in the rock turned up right through Jefferson’s nose. Borglum changed Jefferson’s face to look up more and to face more to his left. This put the flaw in a less noticeable place on his right cheek and lip. At first, Borglum didn’t intend to use dynamite but he quickly changed his mind when he found out just how hard the granite was and how little he could get done in a day with hand chisels. He designed a “pointing” machine that used a steel pole above the president’s head with a protractor-like plate around the top of the head. The scale model was measured with distance and angles, then the distance was multiplied by 12 while the angles were kept the same and those measurements were applied to the mountain. This gave them the reference point for blasting. After the general shape appeared, they drilled a series of holes to just about the finished depth and used hand chisels to refine the sculpture. The eyes were made by carving the iris deep into the eye socket with the pupil a projecting shaft of granite. The job took 14 years, but only six years were actually spent on the carving. The rest of the time was spent trying to get enough money to finish the project. Eventually, Congress paid for $836,000 of the approximately $1 million needed. Borglum died before the heads were completed, but his son Lincoln finished the job. The original design called for the presidents to have partial bodies, but Lincoln finished their hair and Lincoln’s collar and said he thought they looked fine the way they were and that nothing more should be done to his father’s work.

Photos: http://www.kodakgallery.com/Slideshow.jsp?mode=fromshare&Uc=x2eavjj.6rps9v3j&Uy=t52eg5&Ux=0

August 3- 5, 2007 Trip Log

2007-08-06T11:12:00.000-07:00

Friday, August 3 – We drove about 6 miles off the main road to find Bluebird Campground. And what a find it was! I have never heard of a live-in bar before. When I checked into the campground, it was easy to see that the Rec Hall was actually a bar. The motorcycles parked out front with people who didn’t say Hi when we pulled up should have been a tip off… We pulled into our camping space, about 100 feet from the Rec Hall and set up the motor home. About 5:30 to 6:00 PM, a lot of cars starting coming into the campground. There are a lot of permanent trailers set up and only a few transient spaces. About 6:15 everyone was walking around greeting their neighbors with cigarettes and cans in foam koozies. It was like the whole campground was a big outdoor bar. By about 9 PM the bar (excuse me, the Rec Room) was hopping with Karaoke Night. The adults were INSIDE the bar and the children were all dancing on the patio OUTSIDE the bar doors. I’m pretty sure the singing could have been heard 6 miles away at the main highway. It might not have been so bad if the singing had been a little more on key… The music continued until 1 AM, when I was finally able to go to sleep. Gosh, I can’t wait until Saturday night!

Saturday, August 4 – We drove around the town of LaCrosse, WI, which is situated along the Mississippi River. The Black River and the LaCrosse River both flow into the Mississippi at this point. There are 2 locks near the city. It was raining or drizzling all day, but it didn’t interfere much with our sightseeing. We went to a bluff, Granddad’s Bluff, 590’ above the town for an overview of the area. Then we went on a 1 ½ hour paddlewheel boat ride on the Mississippi. We learned that the Mississippi deposits 150 million tons of sand at the Mississippi Delta every day! That is enough sand to fill a railroad train 150 miles long with sand each day. Wow! The settlers began trying to make the Mississippi a navigable river since the 1850’s and people are still working on it today. There are lots of islands in the river caused by the build-up of all of that sand. However, those islands are also easily broken down by the force of the moving water. We drove north along the river for a while but the best view is really from the road above the bluff or the railroad track which runs right along the river. Saturday night must be just good ol’ country music from a real band in the bar. Much better than last night. Of course, the rain muffles the sound a bit too…

Sunday, August 5 – Wow, you just can’t believe how beautiful the corn fields and soy bean fields are throughout Wisconsin and eastern Minnesota. The corn is tall and straight and perfect. The soy beans are full and green. The farmers must be happy with this year’s crop.

OK, you are going to think we are really hard up for things to do and places to see. Today we went to the SPAM Museum in Austin, Minnesota. SPAM is made by the Hormel Company and they have a museum next to their headquarters building. They really treat it like a FUN place. There were lots of spoofs on SPAM and its use. Cute, fun, entertaining and we learned something. Do you know that Hawaiians eat more SPAM per capita than the residents of any other state? Since SPAM was first canned, more than six billion cans of SPAM have been shipped and (presumably) eaten. The military used it for almost EVERY meal during WWII and the Korean War. By the time of the Gulf Wars they had developed some MORE (Meal Ordered Ready to Eat) meals that were a lot more varied. Jay Hormel, the company’s founder’s (George Hormel) only son finally found a way to use the shoulder portion of a pig when he formulated SPAM. Did you know that the saying “Living high on the hog” refers to the fact that the best cuts of pork come from “high” on the top of the pig and were used to feed the officers in the army while the enlisted men ate the cuts of pork from lower on the pig? One of the things they had was a video of the Monty Python spoof of SPAM. Faith, you probably know about that. Maybe Heather and Brian do too.

Then to make the day even more special, we drove to Blue Earth, MN, to see the 60’ tall Jolly Green Giant. My life is now complete. SPAM and the Jolly Green Giant all in one day!

We are having FUN!

Photos: http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLandingSignin.jsp?Uc=x2eavjj.3e9jp94f&Uy=i1ml1u&Upost_signin=Slideshow.jsp%3Fmode%3Dfromshare&Ux=0

June 10 through August 2, 2007

2007-08-06T11:07:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, June 10, we drove from the Wal-Mart parking lot in Bradford to Wal-Mart parking lot in York, PA. The ride through northwestern Pennsylvania really was beautiful. So many trees! Nice rolling hills. Some dairy farms.

We stopped at the Pennsylvania Lumber Museum along the road in the middle of nowhere. They had some very nice displays of lumber cutting, saw mills and leather tanning. The most interesting though was the information about the Civilian Conservation Corp. As we drive along the road throughout the entire United States, there are so many times that we see a great project that was done by the CCC and we always thought we should know more about the CCC.

President Franklin Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corp in 1933 during the Great Depression to alleviate the tremendous unemployment during that time. In general, only unmarried young men between 19 and 23 were accepted into the Corp. Some exceptions were made for WWI vets. The Corp was directed by Army generals and really was run like a military installation. The men had uniforms and very strict rules. However, they were fed well, clothed, had warm beds and covers and the camaraderie of other young men. Regular workers were paid $30 per month and were required to send $25 of that to their dependents. (Since they were unmarried men, we suppose that meant their mothers and siblings.) Later that amount was changed to $22. Leaders were paid $45 per month, and assistant leaders were paid $36 per month. All of the CCC projects were natural resource projects. In the late 1930’s the leaders recognized the need for education of the men, so each man was authorized to receive up to 10 hours per week of advanced education after their normal work days. The CCC ended in June of 1942. Most of the men still in the CCC either joined the military to fight the war or were able to find jobs due to the build up for WWII.

I really believe that the CCC was one of the best governmental projects ever proposed. The men were not unemployed and out on the streets getting into trouble. They were fed and clothed when many in the country were not. They were able to support those at home and not be the burden of another mouth to feed. They did a lot of really lasting projects that have made the US a prettier place. And, the CCC made the men feel useful instead of helpless when jobs were non-existent. It wasn’t welfare, it was work.

We spent the night in the Wal-Mart parking lot in York, PA. On Monday morning, June 11, we drove into Hanover through the craziest connection of back country roads you can imagine! Mark really believed that his GPS had gone crazy. We walked through a very well presented self-guided tour of the UTZ Potato Chip Factory. They make more than potato chips, but that was the principal product of this facility. It started in the founder’s kitchen where the wife fried the potato chips and the husband went out on a route and sold the finished product. Of course, it grew and then grew again. They now make about 100 different kinds of potato chips, pretzels, corn tortilla chips and popcorn. They produce over 15,000 pounds of potato chips per hour. It takes 4 pounds of potatoes to make one pound of potato chips. As you can imagine, they grow a lot of potatoes and corn in the area! In order to have enough potatoes to keep the factory running, they start buying potatoes in Florida as soon as the crop comes in. They keep buying up the eastern coast as the crop comes in until they are buying the potatoes in Canada. In the fall they keep buying potatoes but start filling their potato storage rooms so that they have enough potatoes to keep the plant running (and people munching) throughout the winter until the potatoes are ready again in Florida.

After that tour, we drove to the Family Heirloom Weavers in Red Lion, PA. This is one of the few remaining textile mills in the US. They are a small company with only 12 employees but they make carpets and textiles for museums and refurbished houses. Do you remember when we visited the Lincoln home in Springfield I commented on the very loud, very busy, clashing carpet in the drawing room? These people made that carpet from a scrap that was found in the Lincoln house! We saw some more of it there! They do the recreation with the stipulation that after they do all of the “punch cards” needed to make the machines weave the designs they can sell it to other people too. It was supposed to be about a 20 minute tour. Dad and I spent almost 2 hours with the owner and he was thrilled to have people who were SO interested in everything to show around. It was a really interesting tour.

We drove northeast to Pine Hill Campground in Kutztown, PA. On Tuesday, June 12, we left to go to a tour of the Mack Truck plant in Macungie, PA. The sign on the door said “No Walk In Tours-Reservations Must Be Made In Advance”. So Dad called on his phone to try to make “advance reservations”. They told us the first available tour was June 19. But we were talking to the lady in the gift shop and she told us that some Cub Scouts were coming on a tour in a half-hour and maybe we could tag along. They came, we did and we enjoyed the tour! The most impressive part was the machine that puts the tire on the rim, puts the air in the tire, balances the tire and sends it off to be put on the truck in 15 seconds! Everything else was like the other tours we have taken…

When we left Mack Truck, we drove into Easton, PA, on the Delaware River. We expected to see a plant making Crayola crayons, but we found something a little different. It really was a 3-story hand’s on activity for kids. There were about 2 million kids there (well, it sounded like that many…) on school trips or just with their parents. We DID learn how crayons were made at a very good demonstration. They slowed the machines down a lot so that you could actually see them do their job. The second and third floors were devoted to the Canal System of Pennsylvania. We really learned a lot. Did you know that when the canals needed to cross ravines they built a bridge as an aquaduct to have the mules tow the boats across a kind of “water bridge” rather than follow the contour of the mountain up and down? They used suspension bridges and arch bridges. The Canal might have run alongside of a river, but it wasn’t actually IN the river. It was kind of like our inland waterway, but much narrower. The canals were basically private enterprises but the government was involved somehow. The government usually gave the land rights to the private developer and he then built the canals, the gates, the locks and could collect a fee from all who used it. The last Canal system closed in the 1940’s! One portion of the Lehigh Canal has been preserved in Easton and we were able to see the tow path and take some pictures. They have a Canal Boat that takes tourists for a ride with the mules pulling the boat along the canal just like in the 1800’s.

Wednesday, June 13 and Thursday, June 14, 2007 We drove to Dorothy, NJ, and spent 2 nights in the campground there. We went with Betty and Joe to the lawyer, ate at the White House, visited Grandma Etta.

Friday, June 15, 2007 – We drove up to Raquel and Dan’s house and parked the motorhome there.

Saturday, June 16 – Drove to Baltimore to fly to Corpus to spend some time in Port Aransas.

Sunday, June 17 through Monday, June 25 – Port Aransas (Went to Port Mansfield with John and Alan Wilson on June 19. Went with Bob to Social Security office on Wednesday. Met with the pool guy on June 21.) Flew back to Baltimore on Monday, June 25.

Tuesday, June 26 through Thursday, June 28 – drove around all of the shore towns along the Delaware River in New Jersey.

Friday, June 29 – Drove to Whippoorwill Campground to set up the motor home for the coming week.

Saturday and Sunday, June 30 and July 1 – Visited with Mom and Betty and Joe and their kids

Monday, July 2 – Drove to Philadelphia to meet Rachel and Abby and Kathy and Sam. Drove to New York City in a rental car and our jeep. Checked into our hotel. Went to Faith’s house. Played at the playground, the small water park and the BIG slide. Went to dinner at a good pizza place. Brian arrived later that night.

Tuesday, July 3 – We took the double-decker bus ride around the lower part of New York City. Had a picnic lunch at Rockerfeller Center.

Wednesday, July 4 – Went to the Empire State Building, had a picnic lunch in Central Park (with a light drizzle), walked to the Museum of Natural History, took the double-decker bus ride around the north end of New York City. It rained so hard we all had to sit inside on the bottom. Fireworks that night first on the New Jersey side of the roof of Faith’s apartment, then on the New York side of the roof of Faith’s apartment. Colleen and Decklan were there.

Thursday, July 5 – Took the boat to the Statue of Liberty. Had a picnic lunch at the Statue. Took the boat back. Went to the dancing fountain and all kids and Brian got soaked wearing their clothes. Went back to the hotel to go swimming.

Friday, July 6 – Went to the big slide to try it with wax paper. Rachel and Abby and Brian and Mark and I left about 2 PM to drop Brian off at the Newark airport to fly to Orlando to work on Saturday. We continued back to the motor home. The girls went swimming at Whippoorwill. Then we went into Sea Isle to see the fireworks that they had been unable to do on the Fourth of July.

Saturday, July 7 – We all (Toccis and Creightons and Vincents) went to the beach. Then we ALL went to the Ocean City boardwalk. Rachel and Abby had Junk Night. The littler kids got to go on rides all night. Then Ocean City did the fireworks display they had been unable to do on the Fourth of July.

Sunday, July 8 – We ALL went to church with Grandma Etta for the installation of the new pastor. Afterwards we went to lunch then the beach. Then dinner at Grandma Etta’s. Faith and Leon and Siena drove home late at night.

Monday, July 9 – Rachel and Abby and Mark and I left in the motor home to drive to Watkins Glen, NY. The girls swam in the pool at night.

Tuesday, July 10 – We went to Corning Glass Museum. Katherine Baumgardner is a docent there and took us on a tour. Mark showed her my quilt while I took the girls to “blow” Christmas tree ornaments. We got back to the motor home and the girls went swimming again.

Wednesday, July 11 – We drove to Ithaca to see the town and the school. Had lunch at the Dairy Bar. Went to the Children’s Museum: scream machine, levers at playgournd, talking tubes, bee hive, lots of fun things.) Back to the campground and swimming again!

Thursday, July 12 – We walked the 800 steps and 1 ½ miles through Watkins Glen. I’m not sure the girls got a lot our of it, but they at least saw the rocks, the trees, the river, the whirlpools, etc.

Friday, July 13 – We drove into Canada to the Niagara Falls Campground and set up. Then we went into town to see the Falls and the IMAX movie about the Falls and the daredevils. THEN we watched the fireworks over the Falls and the colored lights on the Falls. The girls have seen enough fireworks (5 times in a week!) for a while!

Saturday, July 14 – We rode the Maid of the Mist. Walked behind the Falls. Took the bus to walk beside the rapids downriver. Went to the Butterfly Conservatory. Took the bus back up the river. Rode the incline railway. Went home and went to sleep!

Sunday, July 15 – We drove to Sudbury and set up the motor home.

Monday, July 16 – We went to the Dynamic Earth Center to take a tour of an underground mine. The girls panned for gold and LOVED IT. We went back to the gold panning exhibit at least three times. They also LOVED playing in the play area where you could load the foam “coal” into the coal car, dump it, transfer it to another car, dump it, transfer it up to the top platform and start all over again! They played there for about 1 ½ hours total!

Tuesday, July 17 – This was our long travel day. We left early, put the girls back in the bed to sleep (so of course they stayed awake!), and drove and drove and drove around Lake Superior. We stopped in Sault St. Marie to show the girls the locks and how they worked. Scenery was beautiful! Very uneven shoreline with trees right down to the water. Some very pretty beaches. We had a campground reserved but just couldn’t make it there before dark so we stopped at a different campground. The girls were out playing at the playground at 10:05 PM and it wasn’t even near dark.

Wednesday, July 18 – We drove to the Panorama Amethyst Mine and the girls had great fun digging for their own amethyst. We took a walking tour down to the mine…not a great tour but better than nothing. About 10 miles of dirt road to get TO the mine, then 10 more miles of dirt road to get OUT. The car and motor home were really dirty. We entered the US and stopped to skip stones and wade in the water of Lake Superior. Drove through Diluth and on to the campground for the night.

Thursday, July 19 – Drove to Grand Rapids to go to Ruttger’s Sugar Lake Lodge for the Johnson Family Reunion. We were able to park the motor home in a big parking area just outside of our rooms. Worked out well. Resort was perfect. Rooms were perfect. Weather was perfect! Walkers and Mark and I went to the Showboat performance on the Mississippi River Friday night. It is only performed 3 weekends a year. We all enjoyed it!

Friday, July 20 – Mine tour of the Hill Annex Mine. Pie and ice cream “social” afterwards. Wonderful museum that we didn’t have enough time to explore. Drove to see Aunt Beatrice’s old farm (niece Sally and Bill Schwartz live there now) and visited her old cabin on the lake (daughter Nancy lives there now). Then lots of talking and water sports.

Saturday, July 21 – Games on the lawn. Lunch at the townhouses. Group photo on the lawn. Dinner at the townhouses. Prepared bills for everyone. Pictures and videos in the meeting room. Bonfire after.

Sunday, July 22 – We had a light rain but we had NO outdoor activities planned! Brian and Kathy and Sam and Abby left for the airport about 10 AM. Everyone else went to Brunch at 10:30. Sarah stayed with us. Walkers left for Minneapolis to the indoor water park. Vincents left for Minneapolis so Faith could fly to Austin and Leon and Siena could fly to NYC. We left about 3 PM with Sarah to drive to Oshkosh, WI, for the air show. Crossed into Wisconsin and spent the night at a Wal-Mart. Bought a wagon to pull Sarah at the air show.

Monday, July 23 – Checked in at Kalbus Country Harbor Campground outside of Oshkosh. NOT a pretty site like last year. I was disappointed.

Tuesday, July 24 – Mark and Sarah went to the air show. I did paperwork. Mom’s trip to Norway was finally confirmed so I finished arrangements for that trip.

Wednesday, July 25 – Mark went to the Air show alone. Sarah watched Tom Sawyer while I finished up some paperwork. Then we went to the Paine Mansion to see the Fashions in Film display. Sarah loved all of the fancy dresses. She colored dresses and a man’s outfit and glued them over a hanger like clothes to hang in her closet.

Thursday, July 26 – Mark and Sarah and I all went to the air show. Then we had dinner at Sarah’s favorite place, Taco Bell.

Friday, July 27 - Mark went to the air show alone and saw the fatal crash after the Air Races demonstration. Sarah went swimming in the lake and then we sewed. She told me exactly what kind of top she wanted (instead of the pattern we had with us!) so we made it. Then we made shorts to go with it. Also we made a purse for her to wear over her shoulder from a pattern Heather sent along.

Saturday, July 28 – We all went to the air show again. Then we came home and packed and sewed a purse like Sarah’s for her friend, Lauren.

Sunday, July 29 – Sarah and I left early to drive to Chicago to fly to Houston. Heather met us at Kathy’s and we visited there and I returned Sarah. I stayed overnight at Kathy’s.

Monday, July 30 – I got my mail at the Seabrook Post Office, had lunch with Sean and then flew back to Chicago. Drove back to Oshkosh and arrived about 9:30 PM or so. Talked to the people who want to buy Pottery Aransas for ½ hour or so and that delayed my arrival home.

Tuesday, July 31 - Paper work all day.

Wednesday, August 1 – Paper work most of the day. Port Mansfield transfer papers UPS’d to Brian and Kathy. Then we went to see the Harry Potter movie.

Thursday, August 2 – drove up and around the Door County peninsula to see the area between Lake Michigan and Green Bay. Some very secluded areas along the lakeside. Also some very pretty but very small beaches. Lots and lots of trees!

Photos: http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLandingSignin.jsp?Uc=x2eavjj.1ok9qlrz&Uy=-5f9bhu&Upost_signin=Slideshow.jsp%3Fmode%3Dfromshare&Ux=0

May 30- June 9, 2007 West Virginia to New York

2007-06-11T05:32:00.000-07:00

After our encounter with the campground on May 30, we drove up Route 119 to Sutton, WV, to a nice, flat, open campground but still with huge trees. This was a huge Days Inn that is so special it is actually a Days HOTEL and it has a campground directly behind it. It is set up especially for BIG RIGS so we were very happy!

On Thursday, May 31, we drove BACK down to where we really wanted to be and visited the longest arch bridge in the US. (It used to be the longest arch bridge in the world, until the Japanese built a longer one…) It is a bridge over the New River which is really the oldest river in the US still flowing in the very same stream bed it has always been in. Even with uplifts and mountain building, the river has not changed course. Interesting…

West Virginia is really like stepping back in time. Until very recently, when the Interstate Highways were built, people were separated by mountains and valleys and streams. The railroads brought some civilization to the area in the late 1800’s. But since the railroads were first built to transport the coal, that really only allowed the people who lived near enough to the train tracks to leave their home, walk to the train and take the train ONLY to where ever it went. If the train was not near enough for you to walk to, you might go your whole life without ever leaving your area. When the roads WERE built, they were windy, narrow and steep with lots of hairpin turns. We drove down the old Route 82 (in the Jeep of course) to follow the road to cross the New River before the Interstate Bridge was built. We wove our way down the side of the mountain, crossed an old bridge and wound our way back up the mountain. It took us about 30 minutes to go the same distance you would go in less than 1 minute on the new bridge!

Driving through West Virginia is beautiful. It is just a long series of mountains and valleys with a river thrown in here and there. They have dams built to provide lots of water recreation areas. (Well, that is probably not the reason they built the dams but that is the end result!) The trees are HUGE. We guess they are about 120” to 150’ tall. There are trees EVERYWHERE! Anyone who says America doesn’t have enough trees needs to come to West Virginia! We drove BACK up to Sutton for the night.

On Friday, June 1, we just spent the day doing business work in the motor home at the campground.

We drove back DOWN the road on Saturday, June 2, to go to White Sulphur Springs to the Greenbrier. What an interesting story!

The Greenbrier was started in the 1830’s for people to come to “take the waters” from the White Sulphur Springs. The original hotel was built as a private home in 1835 and 5 US Presidents summered there before the beginning of the Civil War. In the 1880’s the corporation that owned the railroad bought the property and used it as a plush hotel to bring tourists in on railroad junkets. In the 1940’s the whole complex was used as a military hospital. Eisenhower was quite familiar with the hotel and stayed there often. At the beginning of the cold war the US leaders were quite concerned about the safety of Congress should the US be attacked by a nuclear weapon. In 1956 the leaders of the House and the Senate (including LBJ), after having had conversations with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company, (who owned the
Greenbrier) sent a letter asking the Company to cooperate with an architect they were sending to discuss a “matter of vital importance”. (See photo) Remember, the US leaders were very familiar with the property both because it had been a military hospital and because Eisenhower and others had been guests there many times. Plans were made for a new West Virginia Wing of the Greenbrier that would provide hotel rooms, a conference center and exhibition rooms as well as a hidden shelter for Congress. Excavation for this complex began in 1958 (see photo) and there was nothing hidden from plain view of anyone driving by. The Government and the contractors felt that the “best kept secret is a secret in plain view”. The entire cost of the West Virginia Wing AND the underground facility was paid for by the US Government. As far as anyone knew or was concerned, they were building an exhibition center. There WAS an exhibition center and it WAS underground beneath the West Virginia Wing. But a large portion of the underground area of the building was a “nuclear fallout bunker”. (It was not a bomb shelter because it could not take a direct hit, but it COULD survive a nuclear blast from 30 miles away.) The bunker is buried 720 feet into the hillside beneath the West Virginia Wing and separated from the hotel by 20 to 60 feet of dirt. There WERE exhibition rooms and conference rooms under the hotel also. Anyone who was down there attending a conference was not aware that they were not seeing the entire complex. There are 4 entrances protected by blast doors (see photo). Some of these blast doors were actually kept open and the convention attendees walked through the deftly camouflaged doors to get to the exhibition rooms. The facility totaled 112,544 sq ft with 44 separate locations and 153 rooms on 2 levels! The dining room that would have been used by Congress if they were in attendance was actually used by the conference attendees. In the NON-Public areas, there were beds for each member of Congress plus one aide for each member. (Wives and families would have been staying upstairs in the West Virginia Wing breathing all of the nuclear fallout unaware that their husbands –or wives-were being housed below them!) There were two auditoriums that were used as conference rooms, but if anyone had counted the seats they would have discovered that one conference room had exactly the right number of seats for the House of Representatives and the one had exactly the right number of seats for the Senate. There were 2 main entrances that the Congress would have used in an emergency. Just inside each of those entrances were special decontamination areas where the Congress person or aide would have disrobed, showered and been given new clothing. All old clothing would have been burned. The facility has a communications area, telephone access to the outside world, a television production area in case Congress needed to make announcements to the outside world. There were 18 bunkrooms with 60 beds each (30 bunk beds). The leaders of the two Houses had individual beds but still were 2 to a room. There was a clinic with a pharmacy that was kept fully stocked at all times and the drugs were rotated to always have the most up-to-date and fresh drugs. There was a 60 day stockpile of food stored in one tunnel AND THE FOOD WAS CHANGED OUT ROUTINELY TO BE SURE THAT IT WAS ALWAYS IN DATE! The power plant was 3 generators each with a 14,000 gallon diesel fuel tank. There were three 25,000 gallon tanks of fresh water along with water purification systems. There was an incinerator that would burn ALL waste (including a dead body if there happened to be one). The generators and the incinerator were vented up through the mountainside behind someone’s house who was told that it had to do with the steam power plant in the hotel.

There was a select group of technicians called the Forsythe Associates who ostensibly worked for the Greenbrier, but their real job was to keep the bunker in a constant state of readiness in case it was needed. They did actually repair TV’s and telephones in the Greenbrier, but only as a cover for their real job. This facility was maintained in a constant state of readiness for 30 years! On May 31, 1992, the facility was exposed in a Washington Post article. The day after the story was published, the facility began to be phased out. In July 1995 the lease between the Greenbrier and the Government was ended.

The Greenbrier spent a number of years deciding what to do with this facility next! They thought about a Casino, but the town wouldn’t hear of it. They finally decided that with the blast doors and the security of the whole area they would use it to store data and documents. Of course we don’t know WHOSE data is stored there, but there are probably some computer servers and data storage for lots of huge companies.

This is a VERY ritzy place. The rooms are about $300-800 a night. A cup of coffee is $5.00. We didn’t spend too long in the hotel after the tour…

Mark and I were commenting that there must not be ANY farm land in the whole state after our ride the day before! We made our return trip further east than we had traveled the first 2 days and we did see some very nice farms and farmland (see photo). However, there were still lots of VERY tall trees.

So, we drove BACK up the road to Sutton and stayed overnight again behind the Days Hotel. On Sunday, June 3, we headed north on Interstate 79 to Washington, PA, and stayed at our favorite campground (WalMart) just off of the Interstate. Again, it cost us more than any campground would after we went grocery shopping!

On Monday, June 4, we left the motor home in the WalMart parking lot and drove back into West Virginia toward Wheeling to go to a toy and train museum. It was interesting, but reminded me of Grandma Etta’s house… We drove in the country to visit a house that a businessman had donated to the City of Wheeling with the understanding that the City would maintain it and use it for the public. The City has turned it into a nice “artsy” area with a lodge, golf course, ski lift, garden shop, museum and glass museum.

On Tuesday, June 5, we again left the motor home in the WalMart parking lot and drove past Wheeling to Moundsville to visit the old West Virginia Penitentiary which was ordered closed due to inhumane conditions in 1995! It took the prisoners themselves 9 years to build it in the 1880’s (no machines, just hand quarrying the stone and laying the stone). It took paid workmen 30 years to add an addition in the 1940’s… Prison is not a nice place. It was really depressing. After that tour we picked up the motor home and headed up to Erie, PA. Check your US map. Pennsylvania really does have about 40 miles or so of land along Lake Erie. I guess New York and Ohio felt sorry for them and gave them a little bit of waterfront between the two states.

On Wednesday, June 6, we did a lot of paperwork and then drove out to Presque Isle which is a peninsula into Lake Erie from Erie, PA. It was a gorgeous beach with tall trees right up to the beach sand. At the water’s edge were zillions of very small rounded stones instead of beach sand. We found lots of “skipping” rocks and brought a bunch with us for when we have Rachel an Abby!

On Thursday, June 7, we drove east toward Westfield, NY, and the Chautauqua Lake area. This is GRAPE country. Welch’s started here in the 1920’s. There is an area 2.6 miles wide and 50 miles long that is the best grape growing land in the US. It has something to do with the soil and Lake Erie covering the land ages ago. We have photos of the grape vines and a photo of a grape flower. The flower is actually the bunch of grapes before the grapes ripen. There should be a close up photo of the flower for you to see in the photos.

The countryside was nice rolling hills, not mountains, and the little town at the north end of Chautauqua Lake reminded me of the town in Lake Placid. The lake really is beautiful. We visited Tom and Jane Welch who summer in Chautauqua. They took us in their boat to the other side of the lake and we had lunch in a restaurant there. It was a simply beautiful day on the lake!

Then we drove on to Jamestown and had dinner with Tim and Jan Stowell and Stephie and Harry Kolb. You all remember the name even if you didn’t meet them. Grandma Etta and Grandfather met them at Juniper Springs and they became lifelong friends. We haven’t seen them in ages and we had a great visit over dinner.

On Friday, June 8, we had to get the windshield replaced in our car because the crack from a stone months ago was getting to the point where we couldn’t ignore it any longer. So I worked on the Johnson Family Living Tree for the Reunion ALL day and Mark got the windshield replaced.

Today, Saturday, June 9, we left Erie and headed to Panama, NY, to see the Panama Rocks. This area used to be sea islands of sand and gravel when the inland sea extended to Utah, about 300 million years ago. The Rocks are sedimentary rocks from an ancient river delta and are made up of small flat oval stones naturally cemented together. (See Photo) The area was uplifted about 165 million years ago and there was a lot of fracturing of the rocks. The Ice Age of about 10,000 years ago compacted the rock and then the water action since then has created deep crevices and alley passageways. This ridge of rock is about ½ mile long and there is an easy trail along both the lower and upper parts of the Rocks. The whole area is covered with trees, ferns, mosses, etc. (See Photos). We met a group of adults and kids trying to get the kids to climb up a crevice in the rocks. Dad and I laughed because our grandkids (and our kids!) would have just grabbed hold and climbed up. These kids were so tentative and scared… There are some good photos of the climb out of the passageway. During the 1800’s outlaws used this area to hide from the law. Then honeymooners came to visit the secluded areas. The area is privately owned and has changed hands quite a few times. It was really an interesting area.

Then we headed on to our favorite campground again in Bradford, PA.

And that is the end of this week!

One of the things I meant to tell everyone happened along the Interstate in South Carolina… We were driving along at a snail’s pace because of what we assumed was an accident up ahead. About 4 vehicles in front of us was a flat bed truck with one new red van on it. We all went along very slowly for about 20 minutes before we could see that there WAS a minor accident up ahead of us but that the cars were both off the road in the median strip and there were police there. The flat bed trailer in front of us pulled over to the left lane, then onto the median strip. Since we were only moving a few feet at a time we watched as the flat bed truck began to unload the new red van to replace the “used-to-be-new” red van that had been in the accident. The people were unpacking all of their stuff from the van in the accident to load into the new van. I thought, “Now THAT is the way to get a replacement car!” Just call up the new car dealer and have him send out a brand new van just like the one that just got smashed up!...

http://www.kodakgallery.com/Slideshow.jsp?mode=fromshare&Uc=x2eavjj.9n2bmqff&Uy=-ij4rce&Ux=0

May 25-30, 2007 Charleston to West Virginia

2007-06-04T06:20:00.000-07:00

We left Charleston and drove to Simpsonville, SC, because that was the only campground we could find that had a space available for Memorial Day Weekend! It turns out that we arrived on Friday night, the opening night of “Freedom Weekend Aloft” air balloon races and carnival. We went to watch the balloons go up but, of course, we have no idea where they landed! Kathy would have hated this campground! There were chickens and roosters and peacocks all making noise in the morning.

Mark has been suffering lately from “Connectile Dysfunction” http://www.ifilm.com/video/2819659
so we went to the Sprint and Verizon stores to compare their wireless internet pc cards. He is now quite happy with his new Sprint USB connector that allows him to connect to the internet almost everywhere!

After that we drove to downtown Greenville, SC. What a beautiful downtown area and a great park right in the middle of downtown. See the photos and read the captions to get the story.

Mark really wanted to drive the Skyline Drive and I REALLY did not want to drive it in the motor home. So on Sunday we drove around the mountains in the Jeep and did part of the Skyline Drive. We stopped at the Forestry Center and learned about how Vanderbilt hired the first forester to plan his estate. It was a beautiful day and we enjoyed our drive through the mountains. Captions on the photos tell the story.

Monday, May 28, we left to drive to Wythville, VA, to a nice campground just 1 mile off of the interstate. Today is Abby’s birthday!

On Tuesday, we drove some crazy mountain roads (even the GPS wasn’t sure where they were!) through Bluefield, WV, and on a really back road up to the Pocahontas Coal Mine. I won’t tell you all about the mine tour because the captions on the photos tell it all. We REALLY enjoyed the mine! Then we drove to the town of Bramwell to see the houses where the owners and managers of the mines lived.

On Wednesday we headed north to where we THOUGHT we were going to stay near the longest span arch bridge in the US. (It used to be the longest in the world until Japan built a longer one…) However, we were having trouble finding a campground in the mountains that could take our 40' motor home and provide water, sewer and electric. Mark finally got one campground on the phone and asked if they had a site for tonight. The girl said "Sure". So Mark asked if they had water, sewer and electric. The girl said "Sure". Mark asked if they could handle a 40' motor home and the girl said she was sure they could. She said there was one tight turn but other than that it was OK. She said she would check with the owner and call us back if the 40' motor home could NOT make it. She didn't call back. We turned off a fairly good mountain road onto the road to the campground. I thought, "This isn't too bad". Then the road turned into a very roughly paved road about 6' wide and full of deep potholes. THEN we came to the sharp left turn. We had unhooked the car from the motor home when we first entered the road, otherwise we could have never made the turn. But, Mark is a very good driver and made the turn. The campground owner had been expecting us and directed us to a "nice level sight". Mark pulled up into the trees and we looked around. There were no hook-ups for water or sewer or electric. We asked the owner about it. They have no hook-ups in the whole campground. It turns out that the girl was telling us that they had water, sewer and electric to their house! Great!! So we very carefully backed out and went 50 miles up the road to a REAL campground that is set up for big rigs! What a trip.

I’ll save the next couple of days for the “rest of the story”.

PHOTOS TO FOLLOW. BE SURE TO READ THE CAPTIONS ON THE PHOTOS. THEY TELL THE WHOLE COAL STORY. http://www.kodakgallery.com/Slideshow.jsp?mode=fromshare&Uc=x2eavjj.2n9ovyjv&Uy=-aalj51&Ux=0

Picture Posting

2007-05-30T07:55:00.001-07:00

May 19 - 24, 2007 Savannah to Charleston

2007-05-29T13:42:00.000-07:00

On May 19 we and about a million other people visited Savannah. We took a bus tour in an open air bus. Savannah has 6 “preservation districts” but the only ones I heard mentioned were the Historic district, the Colonial district and the Victorian district. They all looked pretty much the same to me… Just across the street from the regulated historic district, since the restrictions do not apply there, someone had painted their house a bright pink with purple and other bright colors. Most of the original buildings of Savannah were destroyed by fires or the big earthquake of 1886.

In 1732 James Ogelthorpe was given a charter by the King of England to start a colony between Charleston and St. Augustine. England wanted a buffer zone to protect the very important colony of Charleston from the Catholic Spanish in Florida. While still in England, Ogelthorpe drew up a plan for the city streets, 24 parks and locations for the important buildings. When the colonists arrived in 1733, they started building the city right away. The city has either kept up or renovated 22 of these original parks. For some of them they had to purchase the land, remove the buildings and recreate the parks. They will never recreate the other two parks because there are City buildings built on them!

When the Charter was granted, there were Four Prohibitions included:
n -- There were NO Catholics allowed in the colony. (The Catholic Spanish in Florida were the enemy.)
n -- There was to be NO hard liquor. Wine and ale were allowed.
n -- There were NO lawyers allowed. (This wasn’t really practical since legal work was required…)
n -- There were NO slaves allowed. (This was not practical when it came to running the plantations and growing the crops. The way the colonists solved this problem was to “rent” slaves from their South Carolina neighbors just across the river.)

The City is very proud of the fact that Juliette Gordon Low, the women who started Girl Scouts, was born and raised in Savannah.

Savannah calls itself the “third most haunted city in America” after Charleston and New Orleans. (However, Google calls it the 5th most haunted city after New Orleans, Galveston, Gettysburg, Key West, Savannah and then Charleston…)

On Sunday, May 20, we drove out to Tybee Island to see the Fort, the beach and have a picnic lunch. It was a very interesting little barrier island. There was a lighthouse just off the beach, public parking near the lighthouse and the beach, and a small restaurant just off of the parking lot. The fortifications of the fort were spread out along the shoreline.

We just dropped into Fort Pulaski on the drive back to the mainland from Tybee Island and it was a great stop! We heard a lot about how the Yankees had landed on Tybee Island after the Confederates had taken up positions upriver one mile in the best fort ever built, Fort Pulaski. The Confederates felt safe because smooth bore cannon could only fire about 700 yards, 1000 yards maximum. What the Confederates DIDN’T know was that the Union Army had rifled cannon. The Union offered the Confederates a chance to surrender, which they did not do. Therefore the Union began to shell the fort from a mile away and the new rifled shot began to bore through Fort Pulaski’s heavily reinforced walls. By noon the second day, the rifled shots had opened a hole into the Fort and a shot landed very close to the ammunition room. Confederate Commander Olmstead surrendered the Fort after only 36 hours of battle.

It was neat that we saw the fortifications on Tybee Island first and then toured Fort Pulaski. While we were there they had a musket firing demonstration. The Ranger gave an excellent talk and an excellent presentation. It was especially fun since we only turned in there to see what it looked like and had absolutely no expectations!

After leaving Fort Pulaski, we headed to Hilton Head Island just to see it. Incredible! Anyone coming to Port Aransas from Hilton Head (like Becky Corder did) would be in shock. The island is COVERED in huge trees. They come together to form arches over most of the roads. However, the south end of the island is privately owned. If you don’t live there they charge you $5 to get in. Then you can drive down to the lighthouse built especially for tourists and spend you money in the shops around the lighthouse, also built especially for tourists! The boats at dock there would take you breath away. You can even go sailing on the prior America’s Cup boat, the Stars and Stripes.

On Monday, May 21, we drove to John’s Island, just southwest of Charleston. On Tuesday we went to the Middleton Plantation. The plantation was used for rice farming for quite a while after the owner was given a bag of rice by a ship captain and was told to plant it and see if it would grow. When it grew very well, Mr. Middleton imported slaves who knew the rice growing business and it worked very well until the salt water from too many hurricanes flooded the fields and ruined them for rice growing. They mined phosphate from the river for a while, but that too ended. In the early 1900’s the plantation was inherited by the husband of the last owner with the stipulation that if he remarried the plantation went instead to a distant cousin. He remarried, and the distnt cousin and his wife inherited the plantation. They were living with his parents in Charleston and were thrilled with being given a house…until they saw it. It was in a terrible state of disrepair and the wife lamented “We’ve been left a white elephant!” They did work on it, but now it is owned by a non-profit corporation that has house tours, guided tours describing the rice growing, garden tours and craftsmen of the period working in the outbuildings.

On Wednesday we went to the only tea plantation in North America. They actually grow the tea, cut the new growth off the top of the hedge-like plants, “wither” the leaves for 18 hours so that the leaves lose 20% of their moisture, grind the leaves to a pulp-like texture, fluff up that pulp and lay it 2” on a “drying bed”. It then dries naturally for 50 minutes before going into a dryer that uses heat to further dry it for 25 minutes. The dried tea leaf is then sifted through 2 different sifting hoppers to remove any twigs or debris. Then a machine that uses static electricity further removes any debris from the tea leaves. After this last purification, the little tiny tea particles are put in plastic tubs and shipped to Bigelow Tea Factory and put into tea bags and packaged as American Classic Tea. That American Classic Tea is the tea served in the white house. We spent about 3 hours watching the entire process from picking to packing. Most people spend about 25 minutes there…

Then we drove to Kiawa Island. They were having the Senior PGA Tour there. We took some pictures of some good looking houses…

On Thursday we toured Charleston. This time we took a bus tour where last time we had a walking tour. The walking tour was better. We covered a little more ground with the bus tour, but you didn’t feel as much a part of the history as you did with the walking tour. I won’t tell anyone the history of Charleston, because we have all been here and heard it! There is one interesting tidbit of information: When the Union forces recaptured Fort Sumner, the Union commanders wanted to have a ceremony to celebrate. They really wanted President Lincoln to come down the “rededicate” the Fort. However, Lincoln’s advisers decided that the trip would be too dangerous so Lincoln stayed in Washington and went to a nice safe theater to see a play…

We are in a wonderful campground that has just enough trees and just enough open space. It is a great place for a big rig.

Photos will be coming shortly!

May 16-17 St. Augustine, Florida

2007-05-21T10:40:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday and Thursday, May 16 and 17, we visited St. Augustine, Florida. St. Augustine is the oldest city in the United States, founded in 1565! Ponce de Leon actually landed in St. Augustine in 1513 but it took 50 years and 6 attempts before a settlement actually became established. (Ponce de Leon was 4'11" tall which was tall for a man from Spain at that time and he was a good six inches taller than most of the men on his ship. The tour director pointed out a life-size statue of him in the square and I laughed because I thought it was a joke. It wasn't. He was SO little!) Spain felt that they needed this area colonized to protect their interests in the Americas, Asia and and Europe. In 1565 Spaniard Pedro Menedez (who made a huge fortune as a privateer capturing foreign shipping for money) sailed to "La Florida" (the flowers) to expel the French Protestant Huguenots who had arrived in the area in 1564. After a battle the French surrendered and were told to either become Catholics or die. Most of them died. The Spanish believed that they controlled the whole North American coast from the Hudson Bay to the Florida keys, and they did for a while. But they couldn't combat fires, hurricanes and the advances of other European nations. Eventually they surrenered the coastal areas above Florida to other European nations. Spain continued to rule Mexico and Peru.
In 1670 Charleston was settled and challenged Spain's control of the area. From 1672-1695 a massive fort was constructed using coquina (shellstone). (This was mined from an island across from the settlement and is like a big concrete block made of seashells. It gets harder the longer it is exposed to the air.) In 1702 the British tried to take the fort but only suceeded in burning down the town around it. Four Spanish warships arrived to help defend the city and the English burned their boats and fled overland back to Charleston. The Spanish rebuilt the city. There were many attacks after that and the city lived in fear of being captured. In 1740 another English army attacked the city and the ships blasted the fort for 27 days. However, the coquina seemed to just absorb the cannon balls and suffer no real damage. After 38 days the English gave up and returned home. In 1763, at the end of the Seven Years' War (French and Indian War), Spain traded St. Augustine to the English in return for Cuba, which the English had captured during the war. Most of the Spanish in St. Augustine left for Cuba. After the Revolutionary War, from 1784 to 1821, the Spanish returned to Florida after the English left but we unable to control the activities in the city. In 1819 Spain finally gave up and turned the colony over to the United States in return for the US assuming responsibility for $5,000,000 in claims of American citizens against Spain. This was the end of Spanish rule in St. Augustine. In 1821 the Spanish flag came down from the fort for the last time. The city was 256 years old. Not everyone was happy with the agreement with Spain. One Congressman argued that Florida was a place of swamps, insects and reptiles and NO one would want to settle there. The Seminole Indians of the area resisted the advance of American settlers into their territory. The US wanted to relocate the Seminoles to reservations in the west. When the war ended in 1842, many Indians were relocated. But many also hid in the swamps and stayed in Florida. Florida didn't participate too much in the Civil War, but it did seceed in 1861.
In 1869 Florida guidebooks touted the health benefits of the warm weather of Florida instead of the northeast winters. Henry Flagler, a partner of John D. Rockefeller in Standard Oil, came to St. Augustine for his honeymoon with his second wife. He decided to develop the area into a first-class winter resort for rich northerners. He wanted the land that a church was on, so he offered to build the congregation a brand new large church free of charge if they would give him the land under the old church. They did, he did. Then the Baptists asked for the same thing. He told them he wouldn't build them a church for free, but he would give them the money to build it. However, since it was right next to the church he wanted to build for him to worship in, the Baptist Church couldn't have a bell in their bell tower. In 1888, at a cost of $250,000 Flager build the Ponce de Leon Hotel with rooms for 450 guests. Rooms were $20 a night. But you couldn't book a room for just one night. The hotel was open only from January to March and you had to book the entire time at $20 a night. They were always full. It was the first hotel to have electricity, but the guests were afraid of being electrocuted when they flipped the switch to turn on the lights. Flagler solved this problem by having employees whose only job was to turn the lights of and off for the guests. Flager then went on to build the Alcazar hotel, which was only $2 a night, but had lots of activities for the guests including the largest indoor swimming pool in the world at the time, a bicycle practice yard and tennis courts. By contrast, the Ponce de Leon didn't have those amenities. People just socialized and would "see and be seen". A competitor built a beautiful hotel just across the street from the Ponce de Leon and the Alcazar. However, he was never able to get it opened because all of his furniture (which was being shipped on the railroad that Flagler was an owner of) seemed to be lost and no one could find it. The hotel owner ran out of money, sold the building to Flagler, and the furniture was located within a few days and delivered to the new hotel... Tourism is certainly still alive and well in St. Augustine!
The city has done a very nice job of keeping some of the original buildings. However, most have been destroyed by fire once or twice or three times. St George's street is very quaint and full of shops of all kinds. There is an Old Florida Museum there which is a little bit hookey but we still learned a lot. The colonists used to stuff big fabric bags with Spanish Moss to use for beds. All that is fine, except that chiggers live in the Spanish Moss. That is where the saying "Don't let the bed bugs bite" comes from. When the settlers got together to all pitch in for a "bee" they always had food and dancing when the work was done. Everyone would put their "hoe down" and have a dance. Since they didn't dance all that often, sometimes an overzealous partner would dig their heel into their partner's shin--a Shin Dig. Settlers coming into Florida came in buggies drawn by horses. The drivers would crack their whip to keep the horses moving, thus "Florida crackers".
We sure enjoyed our time here and we learned a lot. We go on to Savannah on Friday.

November 2006- May 15, 2007--Really!

2007-05-16T06:00:00.000-07:00

Well, the last time we wrote about our travels was months ago! We got to Grandma Etta's in Florida just before we flew home for Thanksgiving. Then we all went to Disney World. Then we had Sam and Hannah for a very fun week in Nettles Island. Then we flew home for Christmas and to help Heather move. Then we drove the motor home to Kissimmee so Mark could fly at the Kissimmee Airport and get his instrument rating. That took almost a month. But that was fine with me because I got to work on my quilt the whole time he was flying! In February we flew home for, we thought, a month so I could do everyone's tax work. However, we decided to go ahead and furnish 5 condo units we had for sale so that we could rent them out for short-term summer rentals. That meant that we had to stay for an extra month in Port Aransas. After Easter and the soon-to-be-Annual Spring Birthday Bash in Houston (since 3 of the 4 kids now live in the Houston area!), we finally flew back to Florida. We had the motorhome in storage in the same campground where we had camped for the month of January, so we got it out of storage and put it back on a different site in the same campground. Then I got to help with the long-arm quilting on my quilt. One of the campground owners teaches quilting and quilts on her long-arm machine both for residents of the campground and others in the area. It was VERY exciting to finally finish it--I started in 2004!

Mark drove with Grandma Etta back to New Jersey after we all visited with Aunt Mary in Ormond Beach. Then he flew back to the campground. (Love those free tickets from Brian!!) It is really quite ironic that on Sunday, May 13, we drove down to Fort Pierce and Grandma wasn't even there! We went to the SEAL Museum there.

Here is a short history of the SEALS. In 1941-1942 Draper Kauffman talked the government into setting up a training school in Fort Pierce to train Underwater Demolition Teams for the upcoming war. At first there were only 6-man commando teams, but these grew to become 100 man Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT). The Seabees (Navy engineers) constructed barriers and obstructions on the beaches and in the water for the UDT's to learn how to demolish them. In late 1942 the Army Scouts and Raiders came to Fort Pierce to train with the UDT's. After training in Fort Pierce, the UDT's went to Maui for further training.

In November 1943 a battle in the Pacific on the island of Tarawa taught the UDT's that they needed MUCH better reconnaissance and MUCH better maps before the troops came ashore. The training procedures were changed and with additional reconnaissance before the troop landings the results began to improve. The UDT's really had their work cut out for them in Normandy and proved their worth.

In 1962 a new, better, more elite group of UDT's started training to be Navy SEALS. These men trained for 6 extremely hard months. For one of those weeks of training, known as Hell Week, they were on the go constantly for 6 days with a total of about 4 hours of rest or sleep. They have a slogan for that week, "The only easy day is yesterday." The wash-out rate is extremely high. But for anyone who makes it through, they are regarded as the toughest of the tough.

New vehicles have been developed to enable the SEALS to arrive even more stealthily than ever before. The SDV (SEAL Delivery Vehicle) is an all black underwater craft that can open and disgorge the SEALS for their reconnaissance and return them to their ship. There is also an ASDS (Advanced SEAL Delivery System) that rides atop a submarine and enables the SEALS to arrive and leave without anyone knowing they were even close.

Probably every one but me already knew this, but Rudy Boesch was an enlisted man for 45 years and 3 months and a SEAL for most of that time. He competed on Survivor--but you probably know how that turned out. I don't...

We drove up A1A instead of taking the Interstate and then back to our campground.

On Tuesday, we finally packed up and left that campground that felt like home. We came in January and left in May--but we were home for 2 of those months.

We headed to Polk City to visit Fantasy of Flight for a second time. It was just as great as it was the first time. I know Sean would love the B-17 that you can walk through and pretend that you are in the war.

We are now in St. Augustine, Florida, which neither of us has visited in about 50 years! We are happy to be "back on the road again"!

A few pictures will follow when Mark gets to hook up to the Internet!

Editor's Note: They also had 5 grandkids in Port Aransas for the week of Spring Break!

November 9 - 12, 2006 Cross-Country Bi-plane Trip

2006-11-13T10:58:00.000-08:00

Flight was fun.

Flew 6 hours at about 125 mph with an indicated airspeed of 90 mph
and ended up in northern OK at dark. Turbulent...so since I flew the
whole thing (Jim took off and landed) I had to really concentrate. I
had to have him take the stick when I had to change charts because
the plane would end up in a 30 degree bank or dive etc.

The next morning we only had 125 miles to go but it took us over 2
hours as our ground speed was only 60mph or so because the front had
passed and we now had a really turbulent headwind as well as just
above freezing temps. The cars were passing us! It was very cold,
and sitting in an open cockpit plane with those temperatures gives
you a real appreciation of the early air mail pilots.

We landed at the repair place that we were flying to and Jim just got
out of the plane and headed inside to the wood stove in the office.
The plane we flew is a Great Lakes and was mfg. in 1976 but is
exactly the same as the original that was designed in 1927. The
repair service has been working on only these planes since the middle
70's. They have a grass field and it is really like back in the
1920's. By the way, the reason we flew it there is that the fuel
tank in the upper wing was leaking out of the bottom of that wing and
lots of fabric was loose and corrosion problems from being down here
so long. OSHA has no jurisdiction as far as we know, and anyway, it
is in El Dorado, Kansas alreadyl

The cockpit is so cramped that I could only take 2 changes of
underwear, a toothbrush and toothpaste along with charts, clipboard
and GPS. I had the same clothes on for 4 days.

I enjoy the planning, flying, scenery etc. but would rather do it in
a plane with windows!

This side picture is this kind of plane, but Jim's plane is Orange with blue trim and much prettier than the one in these pictures. One of those is attached too.

This story pretty much captures what flying one of these is about.
http://www.russellw.com/biplane_trip/default.htm

October 12-16

2006-10-18T13:23:00.000-07:00

I wanted to keep this section separate since it deals with Brian's flight over the Air Force Memorial...

On Thursday, Oct 12, we met Brian in Washington. After dinner we went to the World War II Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial. It was a BEAUTIFUL night to walk around and look at the monuments.

On Friday there was a “rehearsal” for the ceremony that would take place on Saturday. We went to the south parking lot of the Pentagon and watched the practice. It was another beautiful day! After that Brian met up with us and he got to visit inside the Pentagon! We were showing him our photos and the video of the “rehearsal” and an armed guard came up and asked us if we were taking pictures of the Pentagon! We explained what we were doing and showed him the photos. Then we all had a great conversation for about 15 minutes! After that we walked up to the Air Force Memorial and met up with Grandma Etta, Aunt Betty and Uncle Joe. We talked and talked at their hotel while we waited for Faith and Leon and Siena to get there. Then we had a nice dinner together.

On Saturday, Oct 14, we took the subway to the Pentagon metro stop and walked the very short distance to the Pentagon South Parking Lot for the Air Force Open House and to get seats for the Dedication Ceremony. We got to walk into an Osprey through the back “door” and out the front. We were allowed to spend as much time as we wanted and to view the cockpit. Ditto for a big CH-47 helicopter. They had 40,000 chairs set up and expected 60,000 people in the South Parking Lot. The really important people were actually up at the Monument for the ceremony. There were lots of big screens and lots of speakers so that we could see and hear the Dedication Ceremony very well.

When it was time for the fly-over, an Air Force Officer read a dialog while the Air Force Band played music written especially for this ceremony. It was VERY VERY well done! The first plane to fly over was the PT-17 Stearman, and it took FOREVER to get across! The other planes followed as the officer read the appropriate words. The planes were:
T-6 (WWII trainer) and T-6A (current propeller driven trainer); B-17 and B-24 (WWII bombers); C-47 (cargo plane which flew “over the hump”); B-2 (WOW!! Stealth Bomber that is almost invisible on the horizon); then the best of them all, the C-17 (which needs no explanation!); then a flight of 4 fighter airplanes (P-51 WWII fighter, F-86 Korean War fighter), F-15 (Desert Storm fighter) and the F-22 (newest fighter). After that the Thunderbirds flew over in a 6 plane diamond formation which was beautiful. Then, after the President “dedicated” the Memorial, four Thunderbirds did a “high bomb-burst” with smoke and a fifth plane went up the center through their smoke. The purpose of this was to imitate the actual Memorial which is 3 beautiful silver metal spires that look like the upwards flight of an airplane. The whole ceremony was great!

After the ceremony we walked up to the Memorial to go inside. We were not allowed inside on Friday. Inside there are marble walls with inscriptions and quotes from Air Force officers. There is also a bronze 4 man “Honor Guard” with each man being 8 feet tall. All of the Air Force Medal of Honor winners are listed on another marble wall. The spires are definitely the focal point of the whole Memorial!

Brian flew away after his fly over to do “low levels” in the Appalachian Mountains and then some more training in South Carolina so we didn’t see him again.

On Sunday, Oct 15, we flew back to Columbus to come “home” to our motorhome.

We sure are proud of Brian and really enjoyed the weekend. We were happy to spend time with Grandma Etta and Betty and Joe. And we sure LOVED spending time with Siena and Faith and Leon!!

October 2-11

2006-10-18T13:09:00.000-07:00

Here is the next installment of our travel log:

Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana
On Monday, Oct 2, we went back to the Lincoln Home area to watch 2 movies at the Visitor’s Center. Then we left Springfield, IL, to head east to Bloomington, Indiana.

JUST A NOTE: Wisconsin was beautiful with lots of corn fields and soybean fields and farm houses with lots of silos. We saw quite a few dairy cattle out in the pastures. It was just great to ride throughout the countryside and see the scenery. When we crossed the border into Illinois, the corn fields and soybean fields got larger and flatter. We didn’t notice any dairy farms but it sure is easy to see why the United States grows enough food to feed so much of the world. In Wisconsin the farmers were just starting to harvest the corn and soybeans. In Illinois the harvest was in full swing and the ride was beautiful!

Along the way we saw what looked like a mountain of corn kernels. Mark turned off the highway and followed roads until we found the mountain. We stopped and walked around and talked to the man supervising the operation. We were at the Niantic Crop Service. Since they do not have enough capacity in the storage elevators for all of the corn that comes in during these next few weeks, they receive the corn from the farmers, weight it, dry it if necessary, then take it out of the storage elevators and truck it over to this huge mountain of corn. There are big plastic pipes under the corn to suck the air down. After they fill up the space allocated for the corn mountain, they will cover it with a white plastic tarp for the winter. Those pipes inside suck the air down and help the tarp stay tightly on the corn. The corn will then be processed evenly throughout the year so that it provides a steady supply to the people who use the corn in our food. They had 2 of these areas set up ready to receive the corn mountain. Each area was 3 or 4 hundred feet long and over 100 ft. wide. The corn was piled 30 ft. or higher.

Today was one of those days when the motorhome is really great. After we stopped to see the corn mountain, we made lunch while we watched the corn shoot off of the conveyor belt and the rest room was right there in the motorhome! There was no need to find a restaurant or a bathroom!

Again we camped at our favorite campground…

On Tuesday, Oct3, we rented an airplane and pilot to fly us over the many limestone mines in the area. We really wanted to have a tour of one of the quarry/mines, but ALL of them told us that their insurance would not allow it. The flight was good and we got some good views of the mines/quarries from the air.

Then we drove to our favorite campground on the Indiana border town of Richmond.

Ohio
On Wed, Oct 4, we continued on to Dayton, Ohio, to the Enon Beach Campground. These sites were definitely laid out before the advent of 40 foot motorhomes…but Mark did it and we are parked here for a few days. We just took the rest of the day to make phone calls and catch up on this travel log.

We spent Thursday, Saturday and Sunday at the Air Force Museum in Dayton. The Museum is made up of 3 big hangers with a huge “silo” at the far end. The first hanger is devoted to the beginning of flight in the late 1800’s starting even before the Wright Brothers. It continues through World Wars I and II. There is SO much history presented and SO much to read. There are SO many airplanes but even if you don’t like spending lots of time just looking at airplanes there is PLENTY to read and look at. We spend about 10 HOURS in just that first hanger! The next 2 hangers had lots of airplanes but not all that much to read about the Korean War, the Viet Nam War and the Cold War. The “silo” at the end had some ICBM’s and some really great displays about flights and parachute jumps above 100,000 feet.

On Monday, Oct. 9, we went to Carillon Park in the southern part of Dayton. It is a village of old houses and recreated houses. We went just to see the original 1905 Wright Flyer III and the Wright Brothers’ recreated Bicycle Shop, but there was so much more to see and learn that we spent the entire afternoon! We learned about Mr. Deeds, Mr. Patterson and Mr. Kettering who were involved in National Cash Register and Delco and General Motors. Their stories are intertwined and very interesting.

On Tuesday we took the day “off” and I sewed and read and Mark read and studied his Instrument Flight course.

On Wednesday we left for Columbus, Ohio, so that we could park the motorhome and fly out of Columbus on Thursday to go to Washington, DC, for Brian’s fly-over during the dedication of the Air Force Memorial.

September 23-October 1

2006-10-05T11:20:00.000-07:00

Hi Everyone, Here is another week of our travel! Please let me know if I should take you off of this list. I really don't want to bore ANYone!

Just a quick note. Our fancy motorhome has a button on either side of the bed that you can hold in for 3 seconds and it turns off all of the lights in the motorhome. Dad just loves to leave a bunch of lights on, get in bed, hold the button in and watch all of the lights go out! He just grins and enjoys it! Now that we have everything working correctly we really love this motorhome. We can't find anything that we would change or anything that we need that is not in it! (Well, maybe a fax machine but that is not the motorhome's problem...)

Chicago
On Saturday, Sept. 23, we again took the train into Chicago this time to go to the Museum of Science and Industry. We took a taxi from the train station to the Museum and we couldn’t go in the front entrance of the Museum because there were LOTS of emergency vehicles parked all along the front! There was a Hostage Rescue Truck, a Bomb Disposal Truck, trucks with antennas and cameras 30’ in the air, ambulances, and police cars! We wondered if we were really going to see the Museum or not… However, inside the Museum was a temporary exhibit of the Drug Enforcement Agency and these emergency vehicles were there for just the day to be an added exhibit to the DEA exhibit! There were lots of good exhibits. All of them were pretty short so they were very good for kids… There was lots to do there. We rode the bus back to the train station for a change. The weather was VERY ominous. In fact, we heard on the news that the day before Chicago had a huge hailstorm and flights were cancelled. We had no problem back in Tinley Park!

Moline, Illinois
On Sunday, Sept 24, Mark went to Church and then we closed up the motorhome and drove to Rock Island KOA just outside of Moline, IL. We drove along the Rock River and the homes with huge lawns going right down to the river with their boats in their back yards were really pretty!

On Monday, Sept 25, we did a little paperwork and then headed to the John Deere Pavilion in downtown Moline. Outside of the Pavilion (which was a really big showroom type building) there were big John Deere tractors on display. Inside, there was a big combine as well as some more big and small tractors. Also, there were lots of touch screen computers with maybe 12 or more 3 minute videos about things to do with farming today or in the past—precision farming using GPS, harvesting soybeans, how a combine works, etc. It was EXCELLENT! Probably not good for little kids but it was excellent for any adult who loves to learn things! We spent 5 hours there! Across the street is a Museum for OLD tractors. I was too busy learning all of the stuff in the Pavilion but Mark went to that Museum.

It appears as though Moline IS John Deere. They have SO many huge buildings throughout the city that I am sure a very large percentage of the residents work for John Deere or are supported by those who do.

On Tuesday, Sept. 26, we visited the Rock Island Arsenal located on an island in the middle of the Mississippi River between Moline and Bettendorf, Iowa. When Mark was in the Army he used to prepare shipping authorizations for DCM rifles to be shipped back to Rock Island Arsenal to be rebuilt and stored. In the 1860’s this was a Confederate Prisoner of War camp. After the war the government decided to make it into an arsenal and armory. An Arsenal stores guns and ammunition and an Amory develops and makes the weapons and war supplies. When the buildings were first being built, there were a lot of Confederate war supplies, like cannonballs, left over from the war. The commander at that time had the craftsmen make the metal hinges, gates, railings, etc. for the shop from this metal in order to save money on supplies. The arsenal geared up production for each of the wars and developed a lot of the items needed by the soldiers—including helmets, mess kits, trench and bayonet periscopes, rifles and pistols. One of the really interesting details was the amount of gear needed by the army to support the artillery and cavalry. During one year for the First World War the Armory manufactured 118,000 sets of harness for horses.

We rode by the John Deere Parts Distribution Center (beautiful building in a beautiful setting) and the John Deere Medical Center. We stopped to see a fantastic collection in the John Deere Administration Building. The mural along one wall is actually a 100’ long “shadow box” of old stuff associated with John Deere. Very nicely done.

Wednesday, Sept 27, we drove from Moline to Peoria and stayed in our favorite campground, Wal-Mart.

Peoria, Illinois
Thursday, Sept 28, we drove out of the Wal-Mart Parking Lot right on the driveway to the Caterpillar Tractor Plant. It took Mark 6 days of calling to arrange this tour so it’s not readily available to everyone! There were NO photos or cell phones allowed. We watched them assemble the big D7, D8, D9, D10 and D11 Cat Tractors. THEY ARE HUGE! Most of the parts are made in other buildings in the same Caterpillar complex (about the size of downtown Port Aransas) and brought to the “track tractor assembly plant” to be assembled. The machines are all “barefoot” (before their tracks are put on) and are transported from station to station. The smaller machines are transported on a track-like conveyor system which pulls the tractor along on a platform at a set rate. Each work station works on one tractor for 23 minutes as it slowly moves through that station. At the end of the 23 minute period the tractor has arrived at a new work station and those workers take over the assembly. The BIG tractors are transported on a bigger platform that a special mobile platform lifts and moves from station to station. I don’t think these stations are timed… More and more parts are added at each station with JIT (just-in-time) delivery of those parts. At each station is a “doghouse” shaped rack with all of the parts needed at THAT station for THAT SPECIFIC tractor. The tractors are transported on the carriers until they reach the station that puts on the tracks. (One track for a big tractor weighs about 4,400 pounds.) After the tracks are put on, the tractors rumble through the plant on their power. Now that’s a sight! Most of the parts are already painted as they are assembled, but when the tractor is finished the WHOLE thing goes into a 300’ long paint tunnel. First anything that is not to be painted must be covered with masking tape and plastic, then it moves forward and everything is sanded, then it moves forward to a wash station to get all of the sanding dust off, then it moves forward to the “primer” section, then on to the final painting stage. It is inspected at the end and either approved for having decals applied or sent back for touch-up paint. After the decals are applied the tractor is ready for shipping. (It has already gone through NUMEROUS detailed check-lists as it progressed through the stations.) The big tractors need to have a lot of their parts removed so that they can fit on a tractor trailer or a railroad car. The big D11 needs 5 tractor trailers to haul it and all of its components.

The tour was excellent. But as with some of the others, it would have been MUCH better if we had an extra hour or two to actually watch all of the assembly…

Springfield, Illinois
After the tour we drove to Springfield, IL, and stayed at Mr. Lincoln’s Campground.

Friday, Sept 29, we went to the new Lincoln Museum which opened in the spring of 2005. It was VERY well done with nice exhibits of Lincoln’s early life in a log cabin and later life in the White House. There were 2 good movies dealing with his life. One was EXCEPTIONAL in that a hologram was projected onto glass walls that separated the “Lincoln Library” from the audience. When it started a man came out and talked to the audience and I couldn’t believe that they could have a live person come out for every show. I kept looking and looking trying to figure out if he were a real person or not. The only way I finally figured it out was when his body started to fade away… I really wanted to see it again just because it was so well done! There were lots of exhibits with lots of reading and lots of details. There were also touch screen computers with about 100 small stories of Lincoln’s responses to various questions. We were totally engrossed in the displays for over 5 hours. A very telling section was political cartoons that appeared before, and during his presidency. If you think things are rather low class in our present political environment, you have no idea what transpired back then! It might be interesting to search Google to see what was printed back then.

On Saturday, Sept 30, we visited the Lincoln Presidential Library, which is really only for research and not for visiting… It too is new and very nicely done. After that, we drove to, of course!, the Museum of Funeral Customs. It was an interesting compilation of undertaking and embalming information but just a little bit weird also. They had a recreation of Lincoln’s casket and quite a bit of information about the train route taken from Washington DC to Springfield with Lincoln’s body.

It was right near the cemetery where Lincoln is buried (finally) in a large monument. His body was moved quite a few times before finally being place there.

On Sunday, Oct 1, Mark went to Church and then we drove into town to visit a 4-block area that has been restored to what it looked like in 1860. The house that Mr. Lincoln lived in before he left for Washington as the President has been restored to exactly what it looked like then. There are newspaper articles and sketches that appeared in numerous publications to show how everything looked and they have done their best to recreate it. The Lincoln’s sold most of their furniture and rented out the house fully intending to return to Springfield after Lincoln’s Presidency was complete. Some of the original furniture that the Lincoln’s used has been re-acquired. The photos show that some of the choices for carpet and wall-coverings in the 1860 would probably not be well accepted today… The photos also show a lot of the other houses that have been restored. Only 3 of them are open for the public to tour the insides.

September 20-22, 2006 - Chicago

2006-09-24T07:30:00.000-07:00

We are in a campground west of Chicago in Tinley Park. We are about 1 mile from the train station for the train that runs into Chicago. It is $8.00 round trip and takes about an hour so it seems better than driving and trying to find a parking place.

We took the train into Chicago on Wednesday, Sept. 20 and walked along the lake to the Field Museum. Look at some of the captions on the photos for info about the walk. The Field Museum was started a little before 1900 by the Marshall Field family of department store fame. This new bulding, which looks just exactly like a museum SHOULD look, was built in 1923.. Some of the original display cases made in 1902 are still used. They are magnificent. They remind me of the way the Smithsonian used to look... The animal specimens were quite extraordinary.

We visited the King Tut Exhibition which is traveling around the world. There were LOTS of employees to watch people and advance the crowds. They did a very good job of keeping the flow moving and not allowing too many people in each room at any one time. King Tutankhamun (Tut) became King when he was about 9 years old in about 1334 BC. His father (at least they think it was his father...) had eliminated all gods except the sun disc. The people were not happy about it. When the father died, and the boy became King Tut he reinstated the gods in their rightful positions of worship. However, King Tut only lived for 10 more years. He died at the age of about 19. Recent (last 5 years) CAT scans have revealed that he might have died from an infection from a knee injury. His death was very unexpected and they had to find a tomb to bury him in since he hadn't had enough time to finish his own tomb! He was buried in a small tomb that hadn't been meant for him but was available, probably the tomb that had been prepared for his advisor.

The audio tour that was an option told us how a body was mummified...something I always wondered about. The heart, liver, stomach/intestines and lungs were removed from the body. They were placed in 4 separate jars called canopics along with salt to dry them. The canopics were then placed in the tomb. Then (lovely...) the brain was removed by pulling it through the nose with a hook. It was disposed of. For some reason they thought it would be bad for the body to be buried with it... The thoracic and abdominal cavities were filled with herbs, spices and bitumen and then sewn closed. The body was placed in salt for 40 days. Then the body was wrapped in hundreds of yards of fine linen the had been soaked in cedar and other oils. In between the layers of linen were herbs, spices and valuable ornaments either from the body's previous life or for its afterlife. Each layer of cloth was kept in place with gum arabic to seal the body from the atmosphere.

King Tut's body had an elaborate mask over it. Then it was placed in a series of three nested coffins with the innermost one being the most elaborately decorated. These were placed in a sarcaphogus which was then surrounded by 3 nested "shrines" (wooden cases).

Also in the tomb with him were boats to carry him to the afterlife--by the way, he would only travel to the afterlife in the dark of night. There were also many shabtis--small carved figurines with Chapter 6 of the Book of the Dead carved or painted on them. These figurines were instructed (through the verses) to perform all of the work and duties of the mummy in the afterlife. This way, all things were taken care of for him and he could just enjoy his afterlife without working. (Anybody want a shabtis?)

The exhibit was very well done, but I sure would have like to have seen more about the search for the tomb and the actual excavation. About the only real info given was that the man who was paying for the expedition, Lord Carnarvon, was disappointed with the lack of progress and was about to withdraw his financial backings. On Nov 26, 1922, Howard Carter, the expedition leader, was directed by a boy water carrier to a "split" in the earth that was actually the stairway down to King Tut's tomb.

On Thursday, Sept 21, we again took the train into Chicago and this time went to the Navy Pier. It was used for training during WWI and WWII. About 15 years ago or so they began a renovation of it with shops, food, amusement park, ballroom, conference center, etc. The amusement park has a 150' tall modern replica of the 240' tall, wooden, very first Ferris Wheel that was exhibited at the (I think) 1903 World's Fair. The original Ferris Wheel held about 40 people in each gondola. It was the largest hardened steel axle ever made up to that time. Can you imagine the trouble Ferris had getting the first group of people into one of those gondolas?

One of the things they added to Navy Pier was the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, built like the original theaters where Shakespeare was performed in England. The seating goes around 3 sides of the stage and no seat is more than about 12 rows from the stage. We got tickets to see Hamlet that night and our seats were right on the center row 5 seats back. The show was almost sold out so we don't really know how we got such good seats... It was an excellent show with excellent acting. We didn't get out until 10:30 and had to catch a cab and then the 10:50 PM train. We made it. I'm sure glad because the next train was an hour later!

In between the Pier and the show we took a double-decker bus tour of Chicago. It was only OK.

We are spending today catching up on paperwork and these travel logs!

You probably have at least a week until the next update!

September 9-19, 2006 - Wisconsin

2006-09-22T17:27:00.001-07:00

Wisconsin Photos

We left the Green Bay area and drove south of Milwaukee toward Racine, WI on Sept 9. We camped at a Yogi Bear Jellystone Campground. This is the second time we have stayed at one, and it makes us feel very guilty not having any grandkids with us to enjoy all that they have to offer! For those of you who are wondering, most campgrounds for a 40' motorhome in a pull-thru space charge about $30-35/night. I remember the days of $10/night being high!

We spent a couple of days doing paperwork and getting those last travel logs sent! On Tuesday, Sept 12, we had SO much trouble with the "lo dc" on the motorhome that we called another (6th!) repair center and drove the motorhome in for service. This time we only had to drive 10 miles down the road! Well, we finally found the right guy. This repairman started at the very beginning and had Mark work with him to isolate the problem. Within an hour they found that the ground from the batteries had never been tightened and was not making a connection. He tightened and tightened and tightened. It has now been 10 days and we have not had another problem!! Before that we sometimes didn't go 1 hour without a problem! Burlington RV near Racine, WI, if anyone wants to remember that name!

TREK Bicycles Assembly Plant
On Wednesday, Sept. 13 (the day of Brian's interview with Southwest!) we drove to Waterloo, WI, to tour the TREK assembly plant. They really had a lot of good stuff that they COULD have told us and a lot of good things to look at but the tour was very uninformative. The only way we got info was to ask the question! We saw the bikes Lance Armstrong rode in the Tour de France. A lot of the famous bike riders ride TREK bikes. They ride stock bikes, no fancy specially made bikes. You can order a bike (if you have lots of money to spend) made exactly the way Lance's bike is made. TREK does, however, make changes to the bike's design when Lance requests it. However, those changes stay in the line and are put on all of that model bike. The bikes can be ordered made entirely of carbon fiber, or a combination of carbon fiber and aluminum, or all aluminum. The carbon fiber is made in a mold and then two halves are put together. Where they are put together, they need to be sanded down to have a smooth transition. (They said they can't tell us about the carbon fiber -- it is proprietary information.) Threaded aluminum inserts are put into the carbon fiber to attach other parts of the bike. The more carbon fiber in the bike, the more it costs, but the lighter it is. They seem to think that there is a huge difference between a bike that weighs 15 pounds and a bike that weighs 18 pounds. One of the completely carbon fiber bikes was on display for us to pick up. I could pick it up with one hand and hold it with NO trouble for a long time. The bikes are not fully assembled in Waterloo. They are sent to another factory for wheels and final assembly.

Circus World
We continued on to Baraboo to Circus World. It is a tribute to the Ringling Brothers Circus. The Ringling Brothers grew up in Baraboo and the circus wintered there until they figured out that if they wintered in the east they could get to the lucrative eastern cities faster in the spring. There were 5 Ringling brothers involved in the circus and they never had a partnership agreement. Each did what he was best at and the others accepted what he did. (That sounds a little too-good to me but they say it is true...) They started with a small circus and continually bought out other circuses until they became big enough to buy out even Barnum and Bailey. They did a very nice job getting the story across and giving you a feel for each of the brothers and for circus life in general. The best part was their collection of circus wagons. There are a lot of beautifully restored wagons on display in a huge building. Their restoration division works on circus wagons now as they become available. As an aside, the winter quarters after Baraboo were in Sarasota, Florida. There is a Ringling Museum there also, but it is a museum of art that John Ringling collected. His home is adjacent to the museum and well worth a tour. Because of the financial success of their circus(es) the Ringling brothers became wealthy. However, when the depression hit at the end of the 1920's they lost everything. (From Mark)

Wisconsin Photos

GM Assembly Plant, Janesville, WI
On Thursday, Sept 14, we drove to Janesville, WI, to tour the GM assembly plant where they assemble the Tahoe, Suburban and Denali. The "attaching" part has a lot of robots to do the work. Most of the final work is done by real people. We were impressed (maybe not quite favorably) by the lack of a real "frame" for the car. The frame is really only stamped sheet metal. It would have been a WONDERFUL 2 hour tour, but they only spent 1 hour and took us by tram car. We didn't really have time to watch the processes.

We drove home through Lake Geneva. This is a really nice lakeside resort with a beautiful lake, homes around the lake, boats on the lake, park between the road and the lake. Lots of golf courses and other resort type activities. See photos.

Frank Lloyd Wright designed Administration Building at S.C. Johnson Co
On Friday, Sept 15, we drove to Racine to the S.C. Johnson Co. They have a tour of the Administration Building that was designed and built by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1939.

He designed it so that as your job increased in importance you not only moved up an invisible ladder but your desk location showed your new increased importance. All of the clerical workers are in the center of the bottom floor of the building. As an employee advances, he moves to the outside of the bottom floor, then to the second level which looks down over the workers on the first floor, and then to the top floor which looks down on all of the employees on the two floors below. There are no cubicles and the desks are all just lined up in the open area. On the edges, there is a little bit of separation from the center area with a little more privacy. The outside walls are round glass tubes laid on top of each other to let in light but not provide a "distracting view" of the outside! As with many architectural wonders, the roof has leaked for many years. Finally they built a new roof over the whole building and built a new ceiling inside so that when you look up you get the same feeling of light that you would have from F L Wright's original roof. We weren't allowed to take any photos of the building. You can see some comments on the photo of the Research Tower next to the Administration Building.

Frank Lloyd Wright also designed the office desks and chairs. (See photos) The desks look very practical and useful. The four legged chair also seems very comfortable and useful. However, as I have noted in the photo of the chair, the original three-legged chair was not so practical.

It is interesting that S. C. Johnson only makes consumables. Everything they make will be used up and you have to buy more to replace it. Good thought...

Case/IH Plant, Racine
On Monday, Sept 18, we went for a tour of the Case/IH plant in Racine. This was a three hour tour that really let you see everything! It was at least a "9". We saw where the castings that make up everything on the tractor such as frame, transmission, hydraulic pump, hydraulic valves etc. are machined by computer to exact tolerances. (The engines come from Cummins and are made elsewhere) We saw the assembly of the tractor and lots of its parts. The employees were very friendly and eager to explain to us what their job was. The body of the tractor (that the cab sits on) is incredibly strong, heavy and well made--not at all like the frames for the cars at the GM plant! We watched them build wiring harnesses, install windshields, install seats, check and align the doors, put the cab on the frame, put the roof on the cab. We got to see and actually WATCH most of the assembly process. There are lots of "inspection points" along the line so that any defects can be discovered and remedied before the bad part is enclosed and too hard to get to. Great tour!

After that we closed up the motorhome and headed south toward Chicago. We spent a night at a Wal-Mart parking lot so that we could be absolutely certain that our "lo dc" problem was fixed. We had no problem. That is a great relief!

I'll start the Chicago portion in a new email!

Love, Georgie

June 30-July 7, 2006 -PhotoBlog> Rachael & Abby in St Louis Hannibal

2006-09-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

1. Motor Home and St. Louis Arch

2. Becky Thacher's (McDougals) cave, Mud Volleyball, Carnival

3. Paddlewheel, Pete the Horse, Swimming Center, Campfire

4. Hannibal carnival, mud volleyball finals

5. Lover's Leap, Fireworks, Dancing at the Concert

6. Abby, Rachel Photos Cahokia

June 4-12, 2006 - Oklahoma and Arkansas

2006-09-15T09:53:00.000-07:00

Hi Everyone, We are in Hot Springs, Arkansas. This has been a National Park since the 1830's (yes 1 8 3 0 ' s) when the Federal Government decided to preserve the Hot Springs for everyone. Now NO one can go into the baths unless you pay $20 or so! Oh well... Dad and I went for a therapeutic bath and massage today. They do it just like they would have in the 1940's and acutally use an old bath house building. You can wear a bathing suit if you want to, but no one did while we were there. The men bathe on the first floor and the women on the second floor. You undress in a private room and the attendant wraps a towel around you. They run the special Hot Springs water from the Hot Springs mountain ( that is located right behind where the row of bath houses used to be) into a private old-fashioned tub in a separate little cubicle. You soak in the 102 degree water for about 15 minutes. Then you sit in a sitz bath with really hot water that soaks your lower back for about 10 minutes. (Dad said it REALLY felt good on his back.) Then you go to a steam cabinet or steam room, just like the old pictures show. They close you in the cabinet with just your head sticking out and they wrap the towel loosely around your neck to stop any steam from inside the cabinet from escaping. They usually keep the women in for 5 minutes but Dad said the men stay in a steam room for 10 minutes. Then you go to the "needle shower" for a few minutes. This is a shower where all of the water comes from small nozzles on pipes that run veritcally from your knees to your neck and 3/4 of the way around your body. Kind of like a whirlpool shower... Then you go lay on a table with hot towels on various parts of your body and a cold towel around your face. You relax there for about 15 minutes. Then you go in for your massage. Yep, I did it. All of it felt good except when they worked around the base of my neck and my upper back. Dad said ALL of it felt good to him!

The National Park has preserved the old bath houses that were in use up until about 1980. After the 1950's people stopped coming for the baths and started using medicines instead so the business really died down. The Hot Springs used to run along the street in front of the bath houses. In the 1890's (or so) they built arches to cover the springs with a concrete roadway and built a really nice promenade along the front of the bath houses. There is only one bath house operating on Bath House Row now, but there are a few hotels in the area that offer the baths and the massages. We went to the original one since we wanted to see what it used to be like. There is a really nicely restored bath house that the National Park Service has as a visitor center. There are a couple of informative movies and you can walk through all of the old areas. There was a gym with exercise equipment designed in the late 1800's/early 1900's. The bathing rooms and waiting rooms were very opulent and reminded me of the old Roman baths. Stained glass windows, lots of marble, solid wood doors on the dressing rooms. It was all first-class for the time.

After we did that we drove through the Ouishita National Forest area again (it continues from Oklahoma).

We are going to a Science Center tomorrow that I hope is neat. Then we are leaving to head to the Bufalo National River area north of Hot Springs.

Email me back about what is going on in your life this week!

Love, Mom and Dad

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