Rolling On

The Bird Whisperer

2012-01-15T07:16:00.000-08:00

Great Horned Owl, perched in Wauchula, FL, at sunset, with the moon rising full.

The park ranger knelt on the sand, under the trees in the darkness. Sheturned on a tape recorder and the click-click-click and then a screech criedout into the woods. There was silence. She played it again. Still silence.Played it one more time and we heard a response call from the woods around us.In another minute, three Eastern Screech Owls swooped among the trees overour heads. Now they answered almost immediately when the tape cried out.

Ranger Stephanie was beside herself with delight over thesuccess of her expedition. She had invited the campers in Little Manatee RiverState Park to come with her to “Call out the owls” – as she called it. Beforewe wandered in the woods, the ranger showed a slide presentation about the owlsthat lived in Florida. She talked about the Great Horned Owl, the biggestpredator in the park. She said she would not try to call him out that evening.If she did, no other owl would come for the Great Horned Owl will kill anEastern Screech Owl.

Late last year, while Jo and I were living in Wauchula, inthe center of the state, we had three Great Horned Owls in our resort. I’deven, in a great stroke of luck, been able to photograph one as he sat on a telephonepole with a full moon rising behind his body. The setting sun cast him in agolden light with this enormous disk of the moon rising in the east.

Ranger Stephanie had arranged a visit from an animal rescueoperator from Bradenton Beach. He brought out the Eastern Screech Owl, tiny,along with the Great Horned Owl and then he produced the Barn Owl, with itsflat, heart-shaped face. He explainedtheir range and what they are likely to eat. The Great Horned Owl is powerfulenough to pick up a cat and carry it off for dinner, he said. The Screech is alittle thing. He demonstrated how the Barn Owl uses its flat face as a dish. Hehas ears, one higher than the other, that are so sensitive that he can huntprey even when he cannot see the prey. He told us this had been demonstrated byblind-folding a Barn Owl. He still was able to locate and kill his food.

Jo and I were so intrigued by this mini-adventure that, thenext night, as dusk drew close to us at our campground site, I brought out ouriPad, with its Audubon book about the birds. The beauty of the electronicversion of the book is that you can click on a bird’s sound. I clicked on theEastern Screech Owl and its chatter spread out across the area. After three plays, I was attacked by a RedCardinal that swooped down on me, angry about the sound it was hearing. He (forhe was flaming crimson) sat on the roof of our motor home and, when I playedthe owl’s voice again, it sent him into another swooping frenzy.

I switched over to the voice of the Red Cardinal and thatbrought a female Cardinal out of the woods to perch in a nearby branch andsurvey the marketplace. Now the male Cardinal was in a bit of a pickle. He hadcompetition that he couldn’t actually see. So he returned to the branch, nearthe female, to chatter with her about not bothering with the unknown, unseen,competition.

We’ve tried this since then, and we always seem to be ableto call out the birds in the evening. Now I’ve decided to call myself the BirdWhisperer!

And Now, We Begin in Print

2012-01-05T13:20:00.000-08:00

So many folks wrote me kind words after I alerted them to the fact that my first book, Now, We Begin, was available as an eBook. After the congratulations, many said they would like to read the book as a printed version.Well, friends, your wish is my command!

I went back to the drawing board, for a printed version is a completely different kettle of fish.

Both ePublishing and Print Publishing have their up and downsides. eBooks require you to become a whiz at formatting and knowing all about hyperlinks and such stuff. Print publishing requires you to design the book in a completely different way. You need to become an expert at software like InDesign. All of it is a brain stretcher for old geezers.

But I set about learning (or re-learning, really) how to create a physical book that could be printed on paper with ink.That task came to fruition with the New Year!

After going through a series of frustrating rejections of my file from my online publisher because my design did not fit the parameters that I'd set up, I figured my way through the maze and was rewarded with an email from CreateSpace (my publisher) telling me I'd jumped over all the hurdles and my book now was up and available for sale at

https://www.createspace.com/3728363

In another 5-10 days, the book will appear on Amazon.com. Then, it spreads to Amazon in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and some other countries. The printed book is different in many ways from the eBook. The cover, for one thing, had to be changed because the picture of me perched on a sand dune in the Namib desert was simply too low a resolution for print purposes.

So I rummaged through my thousands of pictures, looking for something that would permit high resolution printing. That took me all the way to my favorite country in all the world: Bhutan. In addition, I was able to design many more pictures into the body of the book. Thanks for all the feedback - and for all the sales. It makes my day...and, maybe, my year.

Now, We Begin

2011-12-20T07:48:00.001-08:00

You're looking at the cover of my first book - published today!
It's been 18 years in the process of being born. And it has been a harrowing couple of weeks in working out the coding for electronic publishing. But it seems to be up and running at last.

This book had its genesis back in 1992 when I lost my job as publisher of the weekly papers I ran in Connecticut and New York. I thought the end had come. I was 52 at the time and it was simply impossible for a 52-year-old guy to find a job back then (sound familiar today?)

I set up my own two businesses creating a design company and getting my captain's license so I could charter out our 45-foot sailing ketch on Long Island Sound. Both of these business did pretty well. But I found I still longed to be immersed in journalism. So I applied for a fellowship to wander the world and become a mentor and journalism trainer. I got that. And that changed everything.

The book describes some of the adventures and cultural shock of that journey. It takes you to Namibia in southwest Africa, then to Cambodia and Vietnam. It also transports you to the roof of the world, Bhutan, as well as India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, even Borneo where I sat down to eat with former head-hunters whose shrunken skulls hung above me in the longhouse where we ate.

You can visit Amazon.com by pasting in

http://www.amazon.com/Now-We-Begin-ebook/dp/B006NYDO00/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1

or go to Smashwords.com by pasting in this link:

www.smashwords.com/books/view/113915

And you can sample the book or even purchase it if it takes your fancy. There are many pictures in the book.

I hope you’ll take time to check it out. It’s a real-life adventure story.

I encourage you to tell your own family and friends about it.

In addition, take a moment to write a review of the book on Smashwords or Amazon.

It also is possible for you to Gift the book to a friend at the Amazon site. In the coming two weeks, Now, We Begin will appear at iBooks (Apple’s site), as well as Barnes&Noble’s Nook site and on Sony’s site. In addition, I am working on creating a printed version of the book which won’t come out until next year.

It's time to WORK!

2011-10-21T12:32:00.001-07:00

Surrounded by palm trees, we've set up house under the clear blue October sky in Wauchula, Florida.

We are at work. Yes. We landed our rig in Wauchula, slightly west of the center of Florida and 50 miles east of the city of Bradenton. We have set up shop as Workampers at the SKP Resort (SKP stands for Escapees, get it!) Jo works in the office for a day and a half on the weekends, checking in travelers, sorting mail, etc. I work Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays. My job description is a pot-potpourri of doing a little electrical work (rebuilding circuit-breakers and plugs for the various sites), lawn mowing with a giant machine, pool water testing and helping incoming campers back their rigs onto the lots.

I work for the president of the co-op, a decent, mild-mannered fellow who hails from Michigan. Jo works for the office manager whom she replaces on the weekends.

We receive a small stipend for our work. But the best part is we get our site at no cost, along with free electricity and free laundromat.

This is a little village of 126 home sites. Some of the homes are mobile homes that don't more. Others are rigs like our's. A handful are ancient Greyhound buses from the '50s and '60s that have been converted to homes. I met up with the owner of one, his name is Swede, when I pulled the handle off my weed-whacker machine while struggling to get the motor to start. Swede was puttering in the workshop when I brought it in for fixing and he drove with me to his lot and rummaged in the basement of his 1956 Greyhound bus. He still drives the bus down from the north each year, although he says it's getting harder to do this as he and the bus get up in years. He eventually came up with a temporary solution to the weed-whacker by tying the pull-string onto a nail and then taping the nail to the plastic handle.

Down the road, next to the office, there's a couple who have a pair of skis screwed to the wall of their mobile home. He spends his day in the glassed-in Florida room keeping a checklist of who comes and goes. Why does he do this? No one seems to know. He just likes keeping tabs on everyone. He doesn't give the notes to anyone. Just sits there all day long, noting who comes in and who goes out of the resort.

Over in the back area of the park, we have two Sand-hill Cranes who commute in each autumn and spend the winter here. Last year, they gave birth to two chicks so it's going to be interesting to see whether they return from the north with their chicks this year. No sign of them yet.

We have three great-horned owls that hang out on the power poles and swoop silently in the night to capture their prey.

As one of our first projects in our new location, I have redesigned the front area of our rig, under the dash. We eliminated our old cathode tube TV a couple of years back, but found the new LCD TV, while thin and elegant, was thin on sound. So I installed a new sound system under the set, adding awesome bass and increased volume. The cats were thrilled by opening the hole behind the TV set and they took the opportunity to explore this great cavity before it was filled in with my new sound system.

A Navigator for the Ages

2011-10-05T12:02:00.000-07:00

Captain James Cook has insinuated himself into my consciousness during the past two years. While we wandered in Alaska, his name popped up in Anchorage and the coast south of that city. Cook Inlet, Turnagain Arm, and a dozen other names up in that remote part of the world highlighted the influence of Cook's voyages.

Then, we went to the end of the eastern part of the North American continent and Capt. Cook made his presence felt many times. He mapped the entire coast of Newfoundland and created charts that were so accurate they were used until just recently.

All of this created a hunger in me for more information about Cook. I remember learning about this great navigator back in school. It it was fairly scimpy in details. The easiest way was to visit Amazon.com and search for Cook biographies. There are a handful and I chose one by a rather stuffy Englishman, Richard Hough, who did a pretty thorough job.

Cook was born in Yorkshire, in the north of England. His father came from Scotland but crossed the border when he married. James took up the seafaring life aboard a coal-carrying boat that ranged up and down the east coast of England. He was essentially self-taught and he realized he wanted more than to be a coast wanderer.

Britain ruled the seas back then so he naturally joined the Royal Navy. It didn't take him long to make a mark with the Admiralty and the First Sea Lord ordered his captain to knock off the French in Quebec and Nova Scotia. That's where Cook began to latch on to the idea of charting the coast as well as the St. Laurence River. His charts are spectacularly detailed and accurate.

When he returned home, he took a wife, got her pregnant in time to be ordered off to sea in the HMS Endeavour for a circumnavigation of the world, via Cape Horn, Tahiti, New Zealand. He was ordered to find the southern continent which everyone thought was out there. He failed in finding Antarctica because there was just too much ice for him to push farther south than 70 degrees to find the mysterious land. But he discovered and charted the eastern edge of Australia. This voyage took more than two years and he kept his men free of the dreaded scurvy by requiring them to eat sauerkraut (vitamin C), along with fresh fruit as soon as he touched land like Tahiti or New Zealand.

The natives were a fairly tough bunch, of course, prone to eating their own. But the ladies were able and willing to meet the needs of the seamen when they, far from home, sought the favors of the chicks.
The girls had been infected by earlier French visitors to Tahiti, however, and the boys picked up a fair amount of the STDs of the time. Cook had had the ship's surgeon check all the men before they landed to be sure they would not infect the women. So there is an ironic justice there as the Brits moved in on the locals.

Cook returned home a hero, impregnated his wife again and the Admiralty sent him off on a much larger expedition. This one required that he chart the Pacific coast of North America after pushing as far south in the Pacific in yet another attempt to locate the southern continent. On his way to the land north of California, he happened to discover the Hawaiian Islands. He enjoyed those islands before moving north and east to chart the mainland all the way to the Bering Sea. He had hoped to find a passage that would either allow the ships to sail east across the top of North America, or west across the north of Russia. Can't get here from there, of course. But he surely kept trying.

Aboard the ship on this voyage was William Bligh, who was a master mariner in the sense that he often was used by Cook to locate channels and passages with a small sailboat where his large ship did not dare attempt to enter.

Bligh was a tough case even then and was pretty brutal with his crew – a sign of things to come when he returned years later as captain of the HMS Bounty.

On this third voyage, Cook seems to have gone through a fair large personality change. It is possible the endless thieving on the part of the natives throughout the Pacific ground him down (they were always stealing parts of the ship, hatchets, compasses, clothing. But it seems more likely there was a mental change caused by some vitamin shortage.

His temper flared too often, he turned to flogging which he had steered clear off in his earlier voyages. Anyway, when the Hawaiian natives stole some valuable material from his ship, he ordered them shot and when they swam out of range, he determined to take a party ashore and hold their king hostage.

It all ended badly when some of the Hawaiians (who generally seemed to believe he was the god Orono) decided to attack him. They hacked him to pieces on the rocky beach and then took his various parts and distributed them among the different villages and tribes.

It's a great, great story that does not end happily, obviously. His men negotiated with the king to retrieve as much of Cook as was possible and they gave him a decent burial at sea. Then they sailed their ships back to England – arriving four years after setting out.

Mrs. Cook had produced another kid in the meantime and lived on for more than 40 years.

His impact on cartography as well as discovery is for the ages.

High Drama on the Mountain

2011-09-27T05:54:00.000-07:00

Ian: Well, folks, we just survived a bit of drama that I never have experienced before.

Fiona: You're right, bro. We were driving from Virginia to North Carolina, according to the big folks. We were climbing up from the Shenandoah Valley to the Blue Ridge Parkway that runs down the spine of the mountains.

Ian: And I was sitting on the dash of the motor home, with my feet up on the windshield. I like to drive this way because I get support. Just as we reached 3,000 feet, there was a flashing sign. As you probably know, I can't read. But the parental units began chattering and I could feel the tension in the air.

Fiona: The sign, they said, warned of thick fog for the next 7.5 miles. As we came over the summit, there it was like a huge wet blanket. At first, visibility was about 100 yards ahead. It was downhill all the way now, so Robert geared down. We were traveling at around 55 miles an hour but that was too fast. He braked time after time.

Ian: Now, the visibility was down to 25 yards, maybe less. It didn't worry me because I have complete faith in the parental units to get us to our destination. But I could feel the tension. I might even say it was as thick as the fog. Robert had his lights on, of course, but he was quite whiny about the number of cars in front who had no tail-lights and they would come and go in the thick fog. They would be visible when they applied their brakes. But they would disappear again the moment the driver took his foot off the brake.

Fiona: Scary stuff this. The miles slid by and the fog stayed thick as a woolen blanket. We came down more than six miles and were around 1,300 feet before the blanket began to lift. You could feel the tension lift in our home as things began to clear. When we passed the tiny town of Bottom on Interstate 77 the fog had cleared and all our spirits had returned with the usual comfortable driving.

Ian: We all discussed the drama (well, we just listened) and the consensus was there should have been signs to ask drivers to click on their flashing lights which would have helped cars and the trucks and RVs that followed them down the mountain.

People in Glass Houses....

2011-08-26T15:01:00.001-07:00

Kite surfer skids across the water at the end of the day in Linkletter Provincial Park, PEI.

If you are into lists, things like 1,000 places you need to see before you die, The Bottle House in Cape Egmont, PEI, is one of those places. It's called “Les Maisons de Bouteilles” here because we're in the heart of Prince Edward Island's Acadian culture. L'Acadie has a long history of British abuse of the French people when the area was “conquered” and the French were forced off the land, ending up as far away as New Orleans, Louisiana. But now they're back and have rebuilt their history which they wish to share with everyone.

This is not a monumental structure. But it's pretty cool. Edouard Arsenault, a fisherman on this red-sandstone coast, decided in the late 1970s – after he retired- that he'd be the first recycler on the island. He built a six-gabled house by using 12,000 bottles and cement. He had wine bottles, booze bottles of all kinds, pill bottles, jars, all of them with their necks facing inward. The light sparkles through these bottles and visitors seem to like to push pennies and nickels and dimes into the bottles as they walk through the place. Edouard became the last resident keeper of the local lighthouse while he built and built.

After the house, he then built a chapel with approximately 10,000 bottles. Even the pews are built with bottles and wood. There's a beer bottle cross as well as an altar made of liquor bottles! Several couples have been married in this little chapel.

Edouard's sense of humor bubbles up in the tavern he next built. There's a huge central pillar with hundreds of bottles and Edouard held out some unique bottles which he used to display on the bar of this tavern. He collected more than 30,000 bottles for his architectural epic. Strange, strange place.

All of these building began to disintegrate in the 1980s because Edouard did not put down concrete foundations and the ground heaved in each spring thaw. So, after his death, the buildings were dismantled by local craftsmen and rebuilt with proper support systems. They are placed in beautiful flower, herb and vegetable gardens which is maintained immaculately.

We came down the coast to the Linkletter Provincial Park. The Confederation Bridge that links the island to mainland New Brunswick lies on the horizon. This is a spectacular engineering job eight miles long and constructed to resist the floating ice that flows through the Northumberland Straits between the two provinces, we watched a number of kite skid across the waves a lift off and be airborne for a few seconds as the gusts of wind picked them out of the water.

With a blustery breeze blowing across the Northumberland Straits, we watched and photographed a number of

Friday morning, we climbed the ramp onto the bridge. We scooted across and ended in New Brunswick for lunch. Our destination was the Magnetic Hill Winery in Moncton, where we parked for the night. We took the last of our Canadian cash and bought two bottles of wine. Tomorrow, in'sh-allah, we will be back in Maine.

This Canadian journey has been a delight in so many ways. The friendliness of the natives, the beautiful, petite farms, the well-manicured front lawns of the huge majority of homes, the misty bleakness of Newfoundland. We have come to love the character of the people. There is a pleasing openness, a lack of fear. We were here while one of their beloved opposition politicians died of cancer and it was moving to watch the great outpouring of grief and love for this man. We have come to enjoy the political climate in this place. Politics does not seem to be a blood sport up here and I say long may that continue.

We have been frequently stunned by the cost of living here, however. The taxes that are heaped onto EVERY purchase is between 14 and 15 percent. It is worrying that there is a 14 percent tax placed on top of the taxes that the federal government place on all fuel. And we have gotten tired of the endless fees to enter every place we have been. I say that in the full knowledge that any place in Canada seems to be in a better state financially than any place in the U.S. So there is merit to charging fees on everything to keep services solvent. But something in me admires how in Washington, for example, you can enter any museum or art gallery without fees and charges and taxes being levied. That, too, may change for us as we try to right our foundering financial ship.

But, all in all, this two-month voyage to the most easterly point in North America, 'way out into the Atlantic, as well as some of the spectacular sights and sounds of Canada will linger in our hearts forever.

We're glad you were able to accompany us on this journey.

Milk Run

2011-08-22T09:33:00.001-07:00

Theresa Hardy cleans the udders of one of her cows before attaching the milk suction system to the udders.

Ivan Hardy loves his cows. He and his wife, Theresa, welcomed us to their farm in Montrose, Prince Edward Island. They grow all manner of veggies and Theresa uses Facebook to alert the locals of her specials. But for Ivan, I sensed, it was all about the cows.

He has Holsteins and Guernseys and a French breed. Each cow has a personality that's much larger than the number that is stapled to their ear. We stood in the cowshed as the light began to fade on Saturday. A Guernsey-Holstein mix with a lovely chocolate-brown coat chewed her cud right beside us while Ivan explained how she reaches down to one of her four stomachs and brings back up some food which she then chews again before swallowing one more time. He held her head and she swallowed again and again. “That's the sign of a contented cow,” Ivan said as she worked happily on her cud.

Theresa had brought 10 of their 48 cows into the milking shed earlier while we spent time out in the field with Ivan and his daughter. They were wrapping the green hay in a tight plastic wrap in a long sausage – I call it a termite. This allows the storage of silage for the cattle without the risk of spontaneous combustion. That occurs when the moist hay is stored in a barn, without eliminating the air from the mix. His daughter recalled pulling hot hay from a barn in the earlier years and, as they hauled it out, the hay burst into flames.

Ivan and Theresa explained how they track the cycle of each of their cows with a huge clock-like device that is on the back wall of the shed. She showed us how No. 89 had been impregnated the day before because her number had come up on the “clock”. They have a man who comes around the farms with his assortment of semen. This allows them to choose the characteristics of the bull and the cow for the best chance of fertility, milk production and quality of milk.

The cows are allowed to go dry for two months before producing a calf. Then the first milk from mom is fed to the calf for four days after birth. This allows the calf to receive the mother's vital colostrum. After these days, Ivan said, it is okay to put the cow back into milk production and the calf can receive colostrum that has been frozen and stored from other cows.

The calves, which were in a different part of the cowshed were in stepping-stone ages. It will be more than a year before they are ready for impregnation which begins the milk production cycle.

Ivan and Theresa feed the animals a rich mix of grains, silage and even dulce, a seaweed collected by horses on the shores of the North Cape of Prince Edward Island. They have just started with the dulce and already are finding the benefits as the cows get minerals in a more digestible form.

After dipping each udder of a cow in an iodine solution, Theresa cleaned off the udders and attached the suction system which immediately begins to pull the milk from the cows. It is pumped into a stainless pipe and fed into a huge steel container where its temperature is brought down from 102 degrees to 50 degrees. A tanker arrives every other day and the milk is tested and analyzed before being trucked off to the south for separation and processing.

Ivan took over the farm from his father. He has doubled the acreage to about 200 acres now. He remembers, when growing up in the 50s, that it was the end of the horse era on the farm. His father bought a 40 horsepower tractor and that mechanization changed everything, he said. I asked if they use their own milk and Ivan said they buy their milk from the store. We laughed as he explained Theresa likes to drink skim milk and it's easier to just buy the milk in a carton.

This was our second farm visit through Harvest Hosts, the new group that makes these visits by RV owners possible. Our respect for the hard, hard work of this family is without bounds. This is a tough way to make a living. It's a 24-7 operation, with no days off. But if you love your cows there are rewards.

Earlier in the day, we had driven to the North Cape, another end of the road, where we stood among some of the largest windmills in the world. These behemoths were rotating steadily in the brisk south wind. There is a low-range but very definite thrumming vibration as these windmill blades whipped around. I'd heard about this noise level but its the first time we've gotten close enough to experience the noise. It would take some getting used to if you had to live with it 24 hours a day.

Tight Little Island

2011-08-18T15:38:00.001-07:00

Darkening sky hangs over a Prince Edwards Island farmhouse.

Back on another ferry – this time we crossed over the water to Prince Edward Island – and this time it was actually free! The 75-minute voyage to the island costs nothing. You pay when you leave the province. We came in on the eastern side of the island and drove to a perfect little campground that had a spot for us that perched us on a cliff overlooking Seal Cove. The crash of the waves spooked the cats. But they adjusted. They always do.

Everything about PEI is in miniature. We plot our course on our computer and when we measure the distance to the next stop it turns out to be only 28 miles away.

Tuesday morning broke with fog and rain. We took our time in leaving this lovely spot. And our trip up-island took less than two hours. We came to Red Point Provincial Park, again on the coast. We drove the car, coated in red dirt now, past fields of potatoes, to East Point which is exactly that – the most easterly point of the province. This is a unique place for three different currents converge off the point, the Northumberland Straits, The Atlantic and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The waters off the point were a roiling maelstrom of competing waves tumbling over each other. It looked like a sailor's nightmare.

On our way back to the campground, we stopped at a beach that touted itself as the “singing sands”. No siren song was heard, though. We were told the sands were too wet. When conditions are right, the sands chirp and chatter as you walk along.

East Kings is a bump in the road, so small it doesn't even get mentioned on a large, detailed map of the eastern section of PEI. But we arrived at East Kings' Community Center at 8 p.m. for a ceilidh on Tuesday night. And what a ceilidh it turned out to be. Three hours of music from about eight or nine groups – and tea and biscuits and jam at the intermission. A group from the Catskill Mountains of New York, a guitarist from Ontario, local talented fiddlers, an Irish player of the bodhrain, a fiddler from Brooklyn, NY, a piano player and her guitar-playing husband from West Charlottetown, PEI, two singing ladies called Ding and Dong (they were retired telephone company workers!) and an exceptional local group playing a mandolin, banjo, base fiddle and guitar. Wow. All this for $5! It truly doesn't get better.

We have joined a new group, called Harvest Hosts. This makes farms and vineyards available to us throughout North America. We are invited to park in the farmyard at no charge and, in exchange, we are invited to buy a bottle of wine or maybe a few pounds of potatoes or peas or blueberries.

Our first experience came on Wednesday and Thursday when we visited Shepherd's Farm in PEI. Finding it was the hardest part. I stopped two times along the way, asking directions. But we arrived at the end of a tarred road and drove into the farmyard.

Everyone was away except for Daniel, the 12-year-old son of the house. He showed us where we could park alongside a barn. Water, electricity and a sewer dump were there. He told us his dad was teaching a class in organic farming in Charlottetown and wouldn't be home until late. Then, he said, they were planning on taking off for a fishing trip on a friend's boat.

Jo and I roamed the farm. It has turkeys, chickens, rabbits, pigs, lambs and beef cattle – all of them organically fed. It was very quiet, apart from the bleating of the sheep and lambs and occasional cattle sounds.

On Thursday morning we met with Steven Cousins, the farmer, and his wife Cindy. This is one incredible couple. They have a certified organic farm and he leads the certified farming group in the province. He presented us with the gift of a bag of new PEI potatoes, then took us up to the fields and gave Jo a bunch of garlic, lettuce and a tomato. We then picked our fill of raspberries. Daniel, as well as the other Cousins children, Hannah and Naomi, own parts of the farm and each have responsibilities for their portions. Daniel owns the raspberry patches and sold us two pints. He also owns the pigs, meat chickens and a handful of geese. He won't continue with the geese, he told us, because they are pretty hard to raise.

Daniel has some young workers in the raspberry field, picking away. He pays them from his profits and the raspberries are then sold in town. Steven Cousins has focused on producing foods that can be sold to high-end restaurants. He said they particularly like his small PEI potatoes. But he also sells chocolate mint, orange mint and many vegetables. In addition, he raises sheep and sells the meat to local restaurants.

This introduction to Harvest Hosts program was a winner and we look forward to stopping in at another farm in the northwestern tip of the island in a couple of days.

Whisky Galore!

2011-08-11T16:36:00.000-07:00

Glenora Distillery gets its water for the whisky (it's called the 'water of life' in the Gaelic) from this clean-running stream right outside the front door.

There's only one single malt whisky distiller in Canada and we were standing in the still room, sampling the 10-year-old product. It tasted okay, though I'm certainly no aficionado of single malts. My only previous experience was at the home of a Florida couple in Bradenton. Our host, Tom, had found the “perfect” single malt, he said. And he wanted to share it with us. Talk about casting pearls before swine! I tilted the glass back after the proper swirling and sticking my nose into the top to capture the aroma. I remember it being a smooth, well-developed, mature taste.

Glenora's 10-year-old single malt was more astringent, with a bit of a hint of licorice. It also lacked color but that's probably because it was pretty young. They were offering a fill-your-own 750 ml bottle in the gift shop where you could turn a spigot on a whisky barrel on a 20-year-old version. But that would cost $400 for the bottle.

Glenora last year won a 9-year legal battle with the Edinburgh-based Scotch Whisky Association attempting to stop Glenora from using the word “Glen” in its name. The association said that glens are only to be found in Scotland and this inference of Scottish-ness was put on the label to fool people into believing the single malt was Scotch. The distillery had fought this piece of nonsense all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada which dismissed the case without merit and told the Scotch Whisky people they had to pay the costs of the court action which probably made those Scotsmen smart.

Glenora , as a result of the win, brought out a limited edition of their whisky, calling it “Battle of the Glen” which, I thought, was a smart piece of marketing.

Ceilidhs are a dime a dozen on the west coast of Cape Breton... well, not exactly a dime. But they still are a cheap form of entertainment, ranging from $5-8 for tickets. A ceilidh is a get-together for music, usually in a kitchen, a church basement or a local fire hall. We have been taking advantage of the plethora of ceilidhs. There's been one each night within driving distance of our campground in Port Hood.

Tuesdays was in Mabou Village Hall. All the performers were named Beaton, even though they were not closely related. A step-dancer named Beaton showed up from Alberta. The guest fiddler was a young student who had come home to Mabou to visit with his parents. The mom and pop fiddle-piano player, also named Beaton, were the mainstays although the guest fiddler was quite extraordinary. He composed his own tunes, including one to honor his mom and dad who were there celebrating their 31^st wedding anniversary.

Wednesday night we drove south to Judique to the Celtic Music Interpretative Centre. And this took us into a completely different setting. This was much more like an authentic Scottish ceilidh, where the fiddler and the piano player sit and play their jigs and reels and Strathspeys. The audience sat around them as though this all was happening in a kitchen. After a few minutes of music, a group of folks got up and began to dance a reel and the whole affair took on a life of its own. While Shelly Campbell played her fiddle, folks from all over danced with abandon.

Jo and I got into conversation with an old man named Neil from Mississippi. He told us a great story about how he met his Canadian wife when he sailed into Halifax in 1952. They fell in love but then he was posted to Korea and they drifted apart. She ended up meeting and marrying someone else. He ultimately did the same. They each lost their spouses in the later years and she visited some friends from Cape Breton down in Memphis, Tennessee, in the early 2000s. They told her about this wonderful man she should meet and she actually called him because she recognized his name.

“She said when she called 'are you the Mr. Neil who sailed into Halifax in 1952?' he told me as the music played in the background. “I told her I was the same person. It was like my ship came in again.”

They met and the old flame was rekindled. They married each other in 2007. The rest is history.

And to wrap up Cape Breton, on Thursday we attended a local ceilidh at the local museum.

There was a moving and beautiful piece of fiddle music played in memory of a dead mentor by one of the musicians that brought tears to the eye. Then a couple of old miners from Port Hood strummed on their guitars while singing about going down the mine shafts no more. The evening was topped off with hot tea and oatcakes.

Failte Oirbh La Mor a' Chlachain

2011-08-07T04:34:00.000-07:00

When you're a MacNeil of Barra, they start you young on the music.

Over the hill we came and then across a little cable ferry that could carry just six cars at a time. We passed through villages with their names in the Gaelic, tucked away in the Bras d'Or Lake of Cape Breton. This is Scotland in miniature – and because it it so condensed so is the culture. It's thick with the clans.

We climbed the hill to the 50^th anniversary of Highland Village Days in the village of Iona.

And, oh, what a sight and sound mosaic we found. The Gaelic in the headline of today's blog means “Welcome to Highland Village Days”.

The McLeans were here, as well as the Mackenzies and the MacDonalds, and the Gillises and McLeods of Dunvegan. The MacNeils of Barra, dozens of them, were all there, along with the Campbells and the McKinnons and most of these folks spoke the Gaelic as either a first or second language. An old woman sat beside us on the hill and she only spoke the Gaelic.

We were surrounded, enveloped, in a cocoon of Scottish fiddle music, pipes, piano, supportive guitars as well as Scotland's mouth music, which is known usually as a-capella. What a feast for the ears and for the soul of a Scot. We settled in for four hours of joyous sound and sights.

The presenter of the various groups slid effortlessly between the Gaelic and English as he explained the roots of each group. “Cuirm-chiuil Ghaidhealach bho 1962” which means “a Cape Breton tradition since 1962”. He also had the skills necessary to fill while the sound man re-miked the stage so the different acts could be heard well. The presenter, Joe Murphy was his name, had the skill to launch into Gaelic mouth music – singing in the old language while he maintained repartee between the members of the audience who enjoyed heckling him in the Gaelic.

We watched the MacNeil family – mom and dad and their four daughters – as they sang, fiddled and played the piano. The youngest of the family, perhaps two years old, held a tiny fiddle with her feet and sawed away until she got bored. Then she crawled over to mom on the piano and mom deftly picked her up onto her lap. The kid then placed her hands atop mom's and “played” along with mom to the delight of the crowd.

Iona is the home of a Highland Village re-enactment from the 1840s. It is celebrating 50 years of supporting the culture. Below the Iona Village Center was the Rankin School where children can choose the Gaelic or French as their second language. A group of the kids entertained us with waulking songs in which they imitated the ancestors in sitting around a wooden table, working the wool whiling singing in the old language.

When I watched a Campbell, a MacDonald and a MacNeil take the stage and play together it flashed me back to days in tribal Namibia when I despaired at the tribalism of that country. But I made peace with it in the full knowledge that I had come from just such a tribal society – perhaps we all have - where the clans of Scotland defined lives for hundreds of generations. Back, 320 years ago, the Campbells had betrayed the MacDonald to the English in Glencoe and that resulted in a massacre that still is remembered. But here was a Campbell and a MacDonald playing tunes together. If they can do that, surely the Oshiwambo and the Damara of Namibia can find their way to work together, I thought.

We drove home with the golden sunlight sparkling on the lake. What a day it was.

Now we drive across Cape Breton to the west coast – it's only a short distance – where we will camp on the water's edge and explore more of this rich culture. I feel as though I have come home.

The Farthest East

2011-07-30T13:47:00.001-07:00

The darkening sky does not bode well over Signal Hill in St. John's, Newfoundland.

We were standing on the farthest-east point of land in North America: Cape Spear. A cold blast of air sent chills through us but here we were, a year after being at the farther-west point, Anchor Point, Alaska. And to make the moment special we had a pod of humpback whales feeding just offshore. One massive mammal did a full breach, rising straight up and curving into a dive back into the deep with a huge splash. Another humpback seemed to lie sideways in the cold Atlantic, raising one enormous flipper which he/she waved at us. The other whale pooped while swimming inshore, leaving a gigantic trail of brown stuff in the water.

Cape Spear light was built in the 1830s. Gun emplacements were built to repel German subs in World War II.

We looked westward and could see Signal Hill, at the entrance to St. John's Harbor. This stone building on the horizon was used in the early days to spy out approaching merchant ships. The word then would be signaled to the wharves of St. John so the stevedores could prepare to quickly offload the cargo.

Today, Signal Hill sits in the gloom of a heavy black cloud, with wreathes of fog on the surrounding approaches.

St. John's is a real city – one of the very few in the entire province. This is the seat of government and there are universities and much industry here. We were even able to find replacement batteries for our RV. One of our 6-volt batteries lost a cell and we endlessly were filling the battery with distilled water to no effect. As a result, we have not been able to dry camp for the entire stay in Newfoundland. But now we are rebuilt and ready to live away from the electric grid.

One strange occurrence worth mentioning: Last Sunday, I stopped at a gas station for my final fill-up of gas on the island. I filled the RV's tank to the brim – I thought. $336 worth of gas. We drove up to Trinity and I noticed our gas gauge did not register that the tank was full. I sagged and thought “just another electrical issue.” So I checked fuses but they were fine. So I prepared to drive and calculate the number of miles. The next day, however, we drove back down the peninsula and I noticed the gauge had actually dropped a little, making me believe the gauge was actually fine. I pulled into the gas station and went inside. I explained my dilemma and asked if there was any possibility that the gas pump did not actually pump gas.

The lady behind the counter rolled her eyes and said, “You're the missing link!”

“Excuse me?” I said.

She explained the pump had failed at 3:30 pm on Sunday and they had a discrepancy of money paid for about 270 liters of gas – my non-existent gas. She was profusely apologetic. I was just delighted that I had stopped in. She told us to go ahead and fill up and I found I could only fit $325 worth of gas into the almost-empty tank. She refunded the $11 difference and then presented me with a bag containing two Irving Gas tee shirts and two water bottles.

Saturday's weather broke for the better in the afternoon and we headed for Quidi Vidi Village, a unique place in our experience. The village has its own entrance from the Atlantic Ocean, through a 30-foot-wide cut between vertical rocks. When you pass through the cut, you are inside a quiet haven where storms cannot reach you. A sailboat had just come through this little cut and was tied up at the Quidi Vidi Brewery docks.

We visited the brewery and bought a sixpack of one of the smoothest ales I've every experienced. One of their beers is made from the purest water from icebergs.

We walked the rocky shore and marveled at the variety of colors in the flinty rocks. Then we wound through the narrow streets (9 feet wide in places) before heading back to Paradise, where our rig is located.

Serendipity

2011-07-27T06:55:00.001-07:00

Dinghy scoots along the headland at Trinity, Newfoundland.

Serendipity: An aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident

I'm a huge believer in serendipity when it comes to living life. By this, I mean you make a decision to go one way and everything changes, usually for the better.

That's what happened today. We did a favor for a friend in Maine. We'd offered to go to the little town of Trinity in Newfoundland after listening to our buddy Gayle talk about her genealogical search for ancestors in which one relative was born in Cuckold's Cove, now called Dunfield, which is next door to the town of Trinity. We offered to stop by the museum in town to see if we could find anything for Gayle.

We came into town late on Sunday and were depressed to learn the only campground was 'way too small to accommodate our rig. We had to retrace our tracks to the main road and then head for a provincial park that was five kilometers up a washboard-like gravel road. We arrived at the park tired and, thankfully, there was a site available. It turned out to be one of the best campgrounds we have discovered in Newfoundland.
Early on Monday, we set out in the car for Trinity and discovered a jewel. It is the quintessential little harbor town built into the shoulder of the hills surrounding Trinity Bay. Each house has been preserved and was painted tastefully and individually. Everywhere we turned there was a pleasing view. The sun was coming over the big Anglican church in town, creating a biblical sparkle when I captured it creeping out from behind one of the crosses on the roof of the church. A woman worked lovingly on her rock garden and we stopped to chat. She and her husband recently retired from the U.S. diplomatic service. She had been stationed in Denmark, she said, and that country has an intricate ferry system. They liked what they saw when they came across on the ferry to Newfoundland and life eventually took them to the waterfront of Trinity. They bought a beautiful house there and now she gardens here in the summer and returns to Washington, D.C., for the winter.

We visited the town's museum and the young girl said we were in the wrong place for genealogical information. She spoke in that extraordinary dialect that seems to be old-fashioned Irish-influenced English. She pulled out a map and showed us where we should go. We did. Then we met a young-ish man on the third floor of a Georgian-style brick building which houses the archival collection of the Trinity Historical Society.

We told him our mission: Find the relatives of the Morris family which dated back to the 1700s in the Trinity area. He said not a word, but leaned over a file cabinet and, after a few minutes, said “Here he is...along with all of his relatives.” I gasped and asked how it could be that easy. “We have fanatics who love genealogical research,” he said with a laugh. “They have worked on every family in town.” Then he added, “Most genealogical researchers tend toward the fanatical.”

While he was photocopying the multiple pages he suggested that we return to the museum and ask the girls there to allow us to photograph the ship's bell on the second floor. This bell was all that's left of the Effie M, a ship built by the Morris family in Trinity that went down with all hands in 1907 right offshore in a nasty nor-Easter. A Morris was among the dead and his daughter, we discovered received a payment from the government of 20-pounds for several years. We made our way back and the young girl took me upstairs where she showed me the bell and the story of the destruction of the Effie M.

So our little side trip ended up being a highlight of our journey.

We drove around the harbor to the lighthouse so we could photograph the town from across the water. While I photographed, a little sparrow-like bird with a fluffed-up chest kept harassing me, probably because I was too close for comfort to her nest.

We headed north to the end of another road which took us to Elliston, which proudly claims to be the “Root Cellar Capital of the World” in case there is a competition for such a title. We think root cellars are wonderful devices but we certainly wouldn't make a trip to a town to look at the outside of root cellars. What they ought to be promoting are the puffins that live on islands so close to shore you can sit on the rocks and watch them nest and throw themselves in the most ungainly way off their island and fly with their red legs straight behind them. There are more than 2,000 pairs, all of them mated for life. They produce one egg per couple per year and everyone was sitting on their nest area, awaiting the arrival of junior.

Meanwhile black-backed gulls, herring gulls and kittiwakes all fly around and stand in a threatening way very close to their nests, hoping to grab an egg or even a chick.

We had a great lunch in an old fishermen's meeting house where the menu offered a Jigg's Dinner. This meal seems to be unique to Newfoundland and is described thusly: Salt beef with turnips, potatoes, carrots and pease pudding. It triggered in my memory having eaten pease pudding as a kid back in Scotland. But I couldn't place what was in it.... so I asked the waitress. She explained it as green peas that are boiled to a pulpy cream and poured over the dinner. We didn't order it!

We ended up in Bonavista, where we found The Matthew, a full-size replica of John Cabot's ship that brought him and his crew of 20 men to New Found Lande in 1497.

Cabot was an Italian, Giovanni Caboto was his name, and I couldn't understand why the English king would pay him to sail west on behalf of England to find a new route to Asia. We went through the entire exhibit and visited aboard the ship without this being explained. So I returned to the front counter and posed the question to the woman there. “No one has ever asked this,” she said.

She fumbled for an explanation and we eventually uncovered that Caboto tried to get a ship financed by the King of Valencia in Spain. No go. So he took his family to Bristol, England, where he gained English citizenship and, because he was known as an outstanding navigator, King Henry IV backed him for the trip west.

So this peninsula which we would have passed by on our way east to St. John's, the capital, turned out to be a treasure trove of rich experiences. Serendipitous.

On Tuesday, we stopped at the little town of Dildo on the Avalon Peninsula. Dildo has little reason to exist if it didn't have that name. Jo refused to be photographed under the cut-out of Capt. Jack Dildo down on the waterfront. “It's a guy thing,” she explained.

Now we have just arrived in St. John's. It's raining again.... but we feel good about making it all the way across the province. We have another week to explore the Avalon Peninsula before catching the long ferry back to Nova Scotia (that's a 17-our ferry ride through the night).

A Sailor's Story

2011-07-23T12:19:00.001-07:00

The Abigail Anissa lies alongside at the little town of Durrell.

Gordon Webb and his wife, Sharon, are born and bred Newfoundlanders and live aboard their 48-foot cutter-rigged sailboat in the little town of Durrell, east of Twillingate. Gordon built the boat in his backyard over a period of 16 months and he did all of it from plans in his head. That's right. Gordon could see the boat in his mind's eye, he told me after he invited us aboard.

In a strong Newfoundland accent he explained he had gone into the woods with his chainsaw and cut the ribs for the vessel out of hardwood juniper. He shaped the elbows of wood with his saw and then went to the lumberyard and bought his planking of Newfoundland spruce.

We saw his boat while we were snooping around the harbor and approached the couple who were sitting in the sun.

He told us he and his wife live aboard the Abigail Anissa and it only costs $150 a month for the slip, including the water and electric. He isn't planning to sail her away to the warmer climate of the south, he said. When we stepped aboard, we found his main cabin had a home-sized wood-burning fireplace with a slab of stainless steel as its hearth. He uses a refrigerator from an RV motor home that runs off propane or 12-volt or 120 volt AC. And he even installed a washer and dryer.

The boat is rustic below, but it is practical He has two steering stations, one up at the stern, one down below when the weather is Newfoundland-ish.

He and his wife had just taken her out in the early morning because today was the first day of the three-week personal cod-fishing window. You are allowed to keep 15 fish per boat and Gordon said he caught his limit in two hours. He planned to go out every day and catch his limit, he said. He has a freezer ashore where he can store the cod.

Jo wanted to know why we have been told all the cod are gone if this is not the case. “There's more cod out there now than there ever was,” Gordon said. What's going on, Jo asked. “Ah, these do-gooders want to leave all the cod for the seals to eat,” he said with disgusted laughter.

He has no winches aboard to help him trim the sails so that must be a feat of strength. But he does have a John Deere diesel engine under the floorboards and when he opened the hatches to show me the ribs he had cut, there was no water in the bilge.

As we chatted about his exploits, he pointed out the bowsprit of a boat in his brother's backyard, up on a hill across the harbor. He invited us to drive over to take a look. That vessel also was built of wood and is covered in fiberglass. It has a hinge on the mast that allows his brother to lower it and place it all the way back, hanging off the stern. He won't launch until next spring, Gordon told us.

I asked if he and his brother were competing but he said not. “We both just love boats, he said.

Passing the Tickle to Twillingate

2011-07-23T05:06:00.001-07:00

Tour boat noses past one of the many bergs in Iceberg Alley.

Twillingate is at the end of a road. All our roads seem to end and you then have to turn around and retreat. But, to get to Twillingate, you pass through some wonderfully-named places.... like Virgin Arm, and Shoal Tickle, Main Tickle, Eddie's Cove, River of Ponds, Robert's Arm. There are so many fun and funky names in this province that I want to linger and taste them all.

We've been through Deadman's Cove, Parson's Pond (settled by the Parsons, of course), we've passed Hungry Hill, Dildo Run Provincial Park (just down the road from us), ignored Camp Boggy, and probably won't reach Roundabout, Mutton Bay, or even Path's End.

This special place, with its own language that's almost impenetrable has left a lasting impression for its total friendliness and openness. We haven't met a single grouch. Everyone wants to chat and all the women in the stores call you “love” or “sweety”.

In Twillingate, we kept coming north, through just awful fog and arrived at the only campground in town. A young boy bid us “Good day” and figured out where he could position us and our rig for two nights. His grandfather came into the office and said he had put us in an awful site and re-figured a better spot for us at the top of a hill, overlooking the Back Bay. From our front window, we can see an island with little icebergs bobbing by.

This is Iceberg Alley. The Labrador Current comes south, along the northern coast of Newfoundland and there is a constant stream of the bergs, all of them broken off the Peterson Icefield. There are a couple of tourist boats in the town that ferry people out around the bergs. We, on the other hand drove up the road a little to Sleepy Cove where we pulled off the road and came upon a huge berg, pointed and blue that drifted along ever-so-slowly. We met a couple from Greece, New York, who told us they were with a group of six other rigs in the campground and spend about seven months of the year on the road. While we chatted, a Minke whale breached and blew offshore.

They were flabbergasted by the high cost of food up here. We have generally stopped sucking in air when we visit the markets. Boneless chicken breasts at $10.39 a pound, Maxwell House coffee at $7.39 a can, butter at $5 a pound, Cool-Whip is $4.99. Gas, of course, is out of this world: $1.37 per liter. I have stopped converting to the cost per gallon – but it's north of $6. All things are expensive because everything must be shipped to the island.

We are finding water in some of the campgrounds is tea-colored and needs to be boiled. So we take on good water in our internal tank when we find it and use that instead of contaminating our tank with the colored water. Problem is these towns are so isolated they have few resources and the natives have acquired immunity to the bugs in the water – very much like in Africa and Southeast Asia.

Labrador's Siren Song

2011-07-19T14:03:00.001-07:00

These totemic stones are the hallmark of Labrador's Inuit people.

We answered the siren song of Labrador. How could we not? It beckoned to us from across the Straits of Belle Isle, dark, forbidding, barren. But how could we not take the ferry across to this remotest of places?

Even though it is part of the Province of Newfoundland-Labrador, it stand apart and alone. There are only 22,000 humans who live in this triangle of rock that is 293,000 square kilometers. And 16,000 of those folks live in two towns – Goose Bay and Labrador City. The huge majority of humans are Inuit and Innu.

What Labrador has in the extreme is 750,000 caribou – the largest herd on Earth.

There are very few roads: one comes in from the eastern edge of Quebec and is gravel for 300 kilometers. The other is the road we traveled from the ferry. The boat dropped us off in Blanc Sabon, Quebec, and we drove the only tarred road east to Red Bay.

This place feels so remote. We stopped so I could photograph a pastoral scene of a dinghy tied off in a lake, with a lonely house on the shore. The silence grabs at you and announces itself. There is utter quietness. Perhaps an osprey screes overhead. But it is perfectly peaceful.

The snow lies still in the crevices of the hills and it is CLEAN and white. For there is no pollution here. No people, no pollution. It's simple.

Jo and I made our way through tiny fishing communities – mostly descendants of the Scots, Irish, English and French. The little settlement of Red Bay, where the road changed to gravel, was a whaling outpost, settled by the Basques of Spain in the mid-1500s. We visited a Canada Parks interpretative site and discovered the government had found the remains of a Basque sailing ship of around 3,000 tons capacity at the bottom of Red Bay. The archaeologists spent years excavating under water, using hot-water suits that allowed the drivers to stay down twice as long as if using dry suits. Hot water was pumped down to them and circulated through their suits to remove some of the chill from the near-freezing water.

And then we discovered Paul Comparelli and his daughter, Jo, who had just arrived from British Columbia after driving his Russian-built Ural motorcycle and sidecar across the gravel road.

Paul is a bit of a character. He loves his bike, even though he says it is a piece of crap. He says he has had to rebuild almost every piece of it. Formerly it was all-Russian. Now it has Taiwanese tires, Toyota alternator, Italian brakes, and a couple of German tires, too. He says he only get about 10,000 kilometers out of a set of tires, so he carries a spare tire and a spare wheel and tire, as well as all their gear. His original Russian tires gave him 2,000 kilometers, he said.

They stay in motels along the way and he decried the $151 a night it cost him to stay the previous night in a Labrador hotel in the back of beyond. Paul and Jo came over on the ferry to Newfoundland and were planning to scoot south and head for a motorbike rally in Pennsylvania in another week.

Viking Sagas

2011-07-16T15:35:00.000-07:00

They tell of the Sagas, when men were men and women were to be feared.

When Clayton Coulbrooke was a small boy, living in L'Anse aux Meadows at the very northern tip of Newfoundland, his mother would tell him to play outside. He and his buddies would climb over the old Indian ruins, he thought they were, and pretend to be killing Indians. In the little brook that ran through the land, he said he would take a pitchfork to catch the salmon as they ran up the stream.

It was 20 years later that a Norwegian couple, came to his village by boat (for there were no roads here then) and began excavating the ruins. They dug for several years but were hard put to find the definitive item that proved this was no Indian mound but a village settled by the Vikings.

But Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad persisted and she had her “Eureka” moment. She came upon a small bronze pin, used by the Norsemen and women to fasten their clothing. By this time (1974), Clayton was old enough to be a helper and a digger on the site and he remembers Anne finding the pin. “She tried to put into a context we fishermen would understand,” he said. “She said it was like landing the biggest salmon.”

That pin is the lynchpin to the Norse site at L'Anse aux Meadows. Clayton walked with us on the boardwalk over the bog, explaining each of the indentations in the peat ground. He showed us the largest home and workshop, built and used by Leif Ericsson, he believes.

Leif was the son of Eric the Red who left Norway and settled in Iceland. Later, because he was a bit of a troublemaker – well, actually he killed a few fellow Norsemen – he was told to clear out of the settlement in Iceland and he sailed his open boat to the west and found Greenland which he named with a fetching name to try to entice other Norse lads to come over and join him. They did and the Sagas report he got into more trouble and set out and sailed a bit farther west, across what is now the Davis Straits to Labrador. He was blown south and seems to have made a landing on the northern tip of Newfoundland.

There were a handful of women who made the journey, all described in The Icelandic Sagas. Several voyages were made 500 years before Christopher Columbus sailed his ocean blue. The belief is this lonely outpost was only a way-station for the Norsemen for about 10 years. They pushed south to a place where grapes grew, hence their reason for calling the new land Vinland. There is no possibility that grapes grew in this cold, inhospitable piece of rock. Quite amazingly, though, butternuts (the size of walnuts) have been uncovered here in the houses. They can be found down in what is now Connecticut. In addition, a special kind of flinty stone which is only found here has been located in Saybrook, Connecticut. There is no proof, however, that Leif and the boys made it all the way down there. It is possible that the indigenous Dorset people, now extinct in these parts, traded their chips for butternuts. Who knows?

We sat in the rebuilt houses whose six-foot-thick walls of peat kept the chill out and listened to the re-enactors tell of the early days. The women sat by the fire and knitted on a single needle while Bjorn told the stories of the journey. I asked him about the women, their role, and what mark they made. He smiled and told me about one who was an illegitimate daughter of Leif who became a leader in her own right. She was one tough chic, by the sound of it. When trouble brewed between the 25 men and the five ladies after three years in the settlement, this woman ordered her husband to slay the ladies. He wouldn't do it (would you if you were sitting out at the end of the world on a piece of rock with a bunch of stinking men?) so she took up her sword and slew them all by herself.

We visited the forge and learned that the Vikings made iron nails from the ore that is found about a foot down in the peat. They smelted 10 kilograms of ore into 1 kilo of iron at 1200 degrees C and used their new nails to replace their rusty nails on their open sailboats. Only a single “new” nail was found on the site of the forge. But numerous broken and old nails of Norse iron ore were found at the boat shop they built.

The site is the only authenticated site for Norse presence in the new world. I met up with Clayton after the tour and complimented him on bringing the site alive. He beamed and said, “You've made my day.”

Later in the evening, we returned to the peat houses for a Sagas and Shadows program in which other re-enactors recounted the sagas by firelight and entertained us with the long-ago stories. The little hut was filled to overflowing from folks who came from across the world - China, Japan, France, Spain and even one from Newfoundland.

An Iceberg Inundation

2011-07-15T15:41:00.001-07:00

This massive iceberg has drifted into entrance of the harbor at Griquet, NL

Mr. Taylor is a thin, spare man. He's a bit deaf. But he is Newfoundland-friendly, which is to say he made us feel welcome in his little cove at Griquet.

I met him on the stony beach and bid him good day. “And good day to you, sir,” he replied. I complimented him on the beauty of his little cove but he said it was beautiful until the storm came through last fall. “Then all the wharves were washed out... even some of the houses were moved inland by the waves,” he said.

We talked about the storm and he told me his wharf was in ruins. His boat sat high on the stones. “But a boat is no good without a wharf,” he said grimly.

Mr. Taylor told me he was a retired fisherman. “I caught the cod,” he said. And he added “When times got hard and the cod disappeared, I caught crab.”

We talked about the enormous iceberg that occupies the entrance to the cove. Jo and I had seen it on the way in with the motor home. Now we were back in the car for a photographic visit. “It's been here a week,” Mr. Taylor told us. “I think she be aground out there.”

He had seen us wandering among the rocks, looking for a good angle to shoot the massive berg and he, being nosy, I suppose, thought it worth his time to come on down to the beach and meet with the folks from away. As always, the little encounter enriched our stay.

We drove down a dirt road and came upon a young boy squatting beside a box on which were 20 pairs of mittens, knitted caps and socks. We asked him if these were his work and he told us “Nah. It's my Nannas's.” He also told us he had taken the boat out to the nearby icebergs and had bags of the pure ice in the Igloo cooler beside Nanna's socks. Quite enterprising, I thought.

The bergs are quite astonishing. We had planned to take a boat to go in search of them. But they are so numerous and so spectacular hiring a boat seemed pointless. So we just drove down the coast to St. Lunaire and then to Quirpon and photographed to our heart's content.

They are utterly spectacular great blue-white behemoths. Some are serrated on the top. Some are flat-topped like an aircraft carrier. CBC Radio alerted us a couple of days ago to a iceberg on the east coast of Labrador that is six times the size – wait for it! - of Manhattan. It broke away from the Greenland iceshelf and is slowly drifting south along the Labrador coast. This is all tied to global warming, of course. I doubt we will see this monster because they move pretty slowly. But it would be a spectacle.

Climbing North, Ever North

2011-07-15T07:58:00.001-07:00

Gros Morne National Park on a better morning.

Gros Morne National Park looms grimly through the mist of a damp day on Newfoundland's west coast.

Gros Morne is a National Park as well as being a World Heritage Site. It's because in the early, early years of this planet's gestation glaciation laid bare the bones of the Earth and a rare chapter of the Earth's history is exposed – an ocean floor upturned, the deepest layers on top – a wondrous example of plate tectonics. Now I don't normally get that excited by plate tectonics – and I am not exactly orgasmic over this park. But it is interesting and – particularly – it is photogenic, always a plus for me.

We came to Gros Morne on a dreary, drizzling day. It was difficult to see much of the plate tectonics. But the gloomy scenery is quite reminiscent of Scotland on a summer's day. Low strands of clouds rolled down the mountains to the sea. Fisherman pushed their sturdy little wooden boats through the placid water to collect their catch.

We'd come here to Newfoundland on the short ferry – a seven-hour ride that began at 4 on Monday morning. We'd parked the rig at the ferry terminal on Sunday afternoon and settled in to wait. There seemed no point in going to a campground and leaving at midnight! At 11 at night, however, strange clicking sounds emanated from our refrigerator. I was asleep but Jo woke me. I checked the voltage in the rig and it told me we were at a dangerously low 9.4 volts, hence the protesting fridge. I turned it off, then started the generator, all the time trying to figure what was going on to cause this. I brought the batteries back up to 13 volts by 3:30 when we boarded the ferry, an enormous vessel named Atlantic Vision. She is is 700 feet long and her job seemed mostly to carry dozens of tractor trailers across to the island. She can carry 702 passengers. We drove aboard on one of the lower levels while trucks boarded on a ramp above our rig.

We spent the crossing dozing in and out of sleep, arriving in Port aux Basque at 10:30 in the morning. We drove for an hour and decided to call it a day at a campground. Then, I set about pulling my batteries out of the rig. I have an automatic battery filler because of the inaccessibility of the batteries and because of their weight when moving them. When I pulled this apart, however, I found the filling system had failed to pump water into one of the cells in the rear battery. I topped everything off, figuring I probably have fried that battery.

Then we took a hike through the woods along the river at the campground. At every turn in the trail was an inspirational saying that amused and calmed our nerves. We were in bed by 8 p.m. and slept for 12 hours.

Newfoundland is a wonderful mixture of green mountains – similar to Vermont – but much lonelier. There are fewer people on this island – 522,000 – than in the state of Vermont – but it must be 20 times larger than that state. Moose seem to be doing quite well, however. Four moose were introduced to the island in the early 1900s and they've been working hard so there are now more than 200,000. Don't even ask about the inter-breeding in this population!

Lots of signs warn us to save a life – our own!

Thursday dawned bright and crisp and clear – 42 degrees. Not a cloud visible. The Gulf of St. Lawrence is a rich azure and visibility seems to reach forever. We drove the only road north. This route did not exist before 1968. Before that time the little fishing villages we pass through were isolated and could only be reached by boat. We came through the national park and were able to see Tablelands which was invisible and much closer yesterday. Now the rugged rock structures stand bold on the water's edge. Off to our right is a fjord with rocky escarpments rising 2,000 feet from the water. You can take a boat ride through the fjord if you are willing to hike 3 kilometers each way through the bog.

As we climbed farther north, we found people growing potatoes in little garden patches in peat alongside the road. There were numerous scarecrows and the rich peat made for ideal gardening. These patches seem endless miles away from the little settlements.

Now the gulf between Newfoundland and Labrador is narrowing. It's possible to see the low, dark Labrador coastline in the distance. As we go even farther north, that will eventually be just a few miles across the straits.

We came to rest at Torrent River where Atlantic salmon make the run up the river to spawn and rest before doing their return visit to the ocean. These guys are quite different from the Pacific salmon we watched spawn and die in Alaska last year. They are capable of making the freshwater-saltwater transition up to five or six times in their lifespan. Just like the Pacific salmon, though, they have a hard-wired instruction that demands they return to their natal stream.

We visited the Torrent River Fishway and met an informative young woman with a Newfoundland accent that was a struggle to understand. There was a definite hint of Irish in it, along with colloquialisms that defined her as a Newfie. But as she spoke we learned of the fight to bring the river back after loggers virtually destroyed the spawning grounds of the salmon.

Now 5,000 fish make the trek upstream each year. Happily, we were there for the journey. A fishway - or fish ladder - encourages the salmon to make their way around the massive 100-foot-high waterfall they'd try to climb. This takes them through a 34-step-program where they can climb and rest, climb and rest.

When our guide took us underground, we came into a large room with two 10-foot-wide windows that let us view the salmon as they reached the next to the top ladder. Some of them were 40-inches long. Some were 20 inches. A few were showing the wear and tear of the journey and had sustained cuts and gashes on their flesh.

Our guide said the fish gather in great schools in the straits offshore. They know they must make it back to the stream of their birth. But there is a great gathering in which fish seem to line up for each of their birth streams. Then they depart and head inland. Each river is lined with fishermen who are using fly rods only. The salmon will not eat once they enter the fresh water, our guide told us.

So why would they be tempted by the fly on the rod? "We think it is more an annoyance to them than anything, ya-know," she said. "They kind of lash out at it and sometime get caught. But, mostly, they don't get caught and manage to make the journey home where they spawn and linger, still not eating, for weeks before they decide to make a dash for the ocean again. They come down the waterfall backwards (tail first), our guide told us. Then they gather offshore and head out for as far away as Scotland, France and Spain before returning the following year.

In the evening, we drove over to a beautiful little village named Port aux Choix where we wandered a quiet path through a place called Philip's Gardens on the top of a cliff. Lichen, ferns, junipers, bunchberries, wild strawberries, buttercups by the millions - maybe billions - welcomed us in the warm evening air. It was a perfect way to end the day.

Back at our campground, we met our neighbor, an accountant/home builder (interesting combination, I thought) from St. John's, Newfoundland. He was settling in around his campfire outside his new 43-foot motor home. He told us he had bought it in Orlando, Florida, and had recently driven it north to his home. Now he was out on a 2-week fishing trip and decided to park on the banks of the Torrent River.

Miners of the Deeps

2011-07-09T15:03:00.001-07:00

Getting a feel for life in the mines, all these visitors have cricks in their necks.

The miners went down to the sea in Cape Breton. And they continued on down, 600 feet below the sea floor before their carts carried them six miles off the coast to the coal face. That's where they worked for 12 hours a day.

We went down the dripping wet, dark mine shaft on a dreary, foggy Saturday, recreating their daily toil. We were clothed in hard hats and a black smock and our guide was an old miner, Sheldon Gouthro. He'd spent 32 years working under the sea – miners of the ocean deeps, he said they were called.

Sheldon prepared us before the journey down. We were at the Miner's Museum in Glace Bay. Our shaft had been created to give us a genteel taste of that early hell. We paid for the privilege. Sheldon told us the collieries in Cape Breton produced millions of tons of coal until the shafts took the miners so far under the Atlantic Ocean that it became prohibitively expensive - not to mention unsafe – to get the coal out and pump safe air into the mines. They all have been closed for 35 years now in the Glace Bay area.

We started out slowly enough, walking down a slope in a tunnel that was six feet high. My hard hat scraped the roof which was coated with dripping water. When we turned a corner and went through a barrier (used to channel the fresh air below), the tunnel dropped to five feet. There were seams of coal all around us. Sheldon reminded us the lighting is new. Back in the day there were no lights – except for the lamps on the miners' heads.

This colliery recreated conditions in 1932. It was grim. The men would slowly make their way to the face back then, hauling in their own water and lunch bucket and tools. They had to pay for their own powder to blow out the coal seam. The only thing they didn't have to pay for, according to Sheldon, was the canary in a cage. The mine owner provided the canary so he could protect his investment. The canary would sing – a good sign – and the miners would hold it as high on the roof of the tunnel to where the methane gas would rise.

If it kept singing, they would set about extracting the coal, digging with picks and shovels, loading the carts that were pulled by pit ponies – small horses that had been rounded up on Sable Island offshore. They'd been wild for 200 years and their growth was stunted. The miners loved those ponies, Sheldon told us. They were sent down the mine and they stayed there until they died.

The men would return to the surface after their 12-hour shift. They would make their way home to the company-owned houses on which they paid rent. All their food and clothing was bought at the company store. If – or when – they were injured in the mine, the company would send an inspector to the house and tell the miner to find a replacement for himself in the mine or he and his family would be thrown out of the company-owned house. As a result, sons as young as nine years old would be sent down the mine. No girls or women were allowed down there because the miners believed a woman in the mine was bad luck. From what I heard, I would say it was good luck for the women that they weren't allowed down.

This journey was a powerful journey for us. My back was killing me as I stooped for more than an hour in shafts that got as low as four feet 10 inches. We pulled off to the side on our way back to the surface and Sheldon sat us down around a bed of flowers. There was a rose bush, some succulent plants and a number of colorful flowers. He said a German miner, early in the 20^th century, had received permission from the mine owner to grow flowers down in one of the mines and the miners had helped him by using their helmets to carry down the topsoil. The bed was fertilized by the horse manure from the ponies. The recreated bed of flowers was illuminated by fluorescent lamps but I don't know how the early flowers were able to get light.

Through a Curtain to France

2011-07-08T13:53:00.000-07:00

These French-speaking maids gather around a window to chat between chores in Louisbourg, NS.

Louisbourg likely is unknown to most of you. It now is a quaint little fishing village on the outer edge of Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. Back in its day - that would be 1713 to 1758 - it was a money-making machine for those who lived here. They mostly were French, Spanish, Portuguese fishermen. And they relentlessly fished the cod: 30 million pounds of it every year.

This was the capital of the French colony of Ile Royale back then. It was the most eastern part of New France and included Ile Royale (now Cape Breton Island, Ile St.-Jean (Prince Edward Island) and the Magalene Islands. Today, France can lay claim only to the St. Magdalene Islands, just south of Newfoundland.

England liked the cod just as much as France. And even though she was battling the Scots back in 1745, she was a powerful nation that could battle on two fronts (do you begin to see the Iraq-Afghanistan-U.S. linkage?) back then.

She sent a flotilla up to the enormous fortress that had hundreds of cannon, all facing the sea. But the English slid their fleet around behind Louisbourg and came at the fort through the back door. No cannon back there because the French thought no one would dream of attacking from overland.

The English sent all the French home with honor the first time. Then they agreed to hand the fortress back after a few years. The French learned nothing from the experience, though, and set about making more and more money from the cod fishing again.

And the English came back and did the same thing again. Through the back door again. This time they send the French packing without honor and they took apart much of the fort, using the wood, the doors, the windows, the slate roofs for their own buildings down in Massachusetts.

Now the cod is no more. So the fortress at Louisbourg essentially disappeared.

We came to the fortress and our minds boggled at the size of this place. This is the largest national historic site to be reconstructed in North America.

The work began in the early 1960s when the coal ran out in Sydney, to the north. The government stimulus plan retrained the out-of-work miners as carpenters, stone masons, and other craftsmen. Then they set about restoring this site. They have excavated about a fifth of the old fortress - but the rebuilding job is impressive. They spent $25 million over 25 years. The miners got work and we got a treasure-trove of history.

Re-enactors, dressed as French soldiers, are everywhere and will gladly share their experiences with you.

Jo and I settled in for a discussion with one on the ramparts. She told us about her lot in life. (Of course, there were no female soldiers back then!) She said she had been living in France, without a job so this opportunity seemed like coming to the promised land. She signed on for six years, was given a pay of 9 livres per month. But she soon discovered that 7.5 livres were deducted from her pay for her quarters and food. This leaves just enough for a bottle of bad red wine each month.

She said she works 24 hours on and 48 hours off. This allows her to work for the fishermen in her off hours. But the officer who arranged the extra work keeps most of the money she makes because she is illiterate and doesn't really know how much she makes. At the end of her six years, she needed to re-enlist for another six years to pay off her debts. Because people generally lived to be about 35, they usually could only manage about two six-year deals before they died.

Another man, a fisherman, explained how he doesn't think about doing better in life. "I only think about surviving," he said. He says he was born to be a fisherman and he has no aspirations to anything other than that. Now I was beginning to understand India's caste system. You don't fight being an untouchable for that is what you know you are!

The merchants in Louisbourg made a fortune. They traded in everything - from silk to cocoa, to shoes, to spoons, to cloth. The little people didn't do so well, of course.

I love this re-enacting business. It allows you to step through a curtain in time and see the world through a different lens.

The previous night we attended a concert in Louisbourg Playhouse which was fairly close to being a ceilidh- that Scottish speciality in which people sing, play and dance their jigs while a party atmosphere prevails. This event had some woefully lame comedy skits which proved once again how hard it is to write funny material. They should have stuck with the singing and playing and dancing. That was wonderful. One girl, named Erin, had a quirky smile and was an expert at playing the box. That's right. She sat on a wooden box that had a microphone inside it. She made that box talk and reverberate in ways you would not believe.

One of the perks of the concert was intermission where tea and oatcakes were served. Mmmmmm!

Hair-raising Entertainment

2011-07-05T09:56:00.000-07:00

The blue light and the smoke casts an eerie air to the Tattoo in Halifax.

Gerald and his wife Ellie sat on the concrete steps outside Halifax's Metro Center, awaiting the opening of the doors for the International Tattoo. (A tattoo is defined as a signal on a drum, bugle, or trumpet at night, for soldiers or sailors to go to their quarters. But it is much, much more than that. More about it later.) We joined them after a pretty good dinner at Maxwell's Plum bar where we enjoyed fish and chips.

Gerald and Ellie are natives of Newfoundland, where we head in another week. They love their island, even though they no longer live there. Their children are scattered to the world: Alberta, Australia, as well as Nova Scotia. So they have come off the island after Gerald worked at the pulp wood mill for many years. “It was a good living,” he said. “Mostly because of the union.” He said he made newsprint for the Daily Mail in Britain, as well as The New York Times and the Washington Post … “and that newspaper down in New Orleans with the funny name; what is that name?” he asked. I suggested The Times-Picayune. “That's it,” he said with the smile. “I can't tell you how many times I slapped a label on a roll of newsprint for the Times Picayune.”

He waxed eloquent about the good old days on Newfoundland when the villages were isolated – with few roads - and only had oil lamps. “People would choose their village when they came on the island depending on where they came from in Scotland or England or Ireland,” he said. “There was a bad class system back then, though,” he said. He's not a big fan on the English. “The manager of the pulp mill, an Englishman, expected us to stand when he entered the room for a meeting,” he said. He and the other managers were above themselves, he said, but that is pretty much gone now.

Gerald's father was a fisherman. He would get the two boys up at 3 in the morning, Gerald said, and they would launch the boat for fishing the cod before anyone else in the village. “It was a point of honor,” Gerald said. In those early days, they would throw back the crab or the flounder they caught in their nets. They were worthless, from his father's point of view.

He and Ellie said the island is doing well financially now, despite the demise of the pulp wood mill. “We have the oil off the east coast of Newfoundland now,” he said. Now the biggest worry is keeping the icebergs away from the oil platforms. He said men will attach the cables to the bergs and try to pull them clear. Otherwise, the platforms have to be moved.

The doors of the Metro Center opened and we left the old couple who were joined by two of their grandchildren from Australia who were visiting for the summer.

Inside, we settled in for a night of music and dance as 1,700 performers from all over the world – Estonian, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Denmark, the U.S., as well as countless bands and an excellent 150-voice choir from Canada – entertained us for 2.5 hours.

My experience with military tattoos circles around the spectacular one on the esplanade in front of Edinburgh Castle in Scotland. This was a gentler, less militaristic affair – more in keeping with the quieter, less macho character of Canada. This is not to say it wasn't exciting. The massed pipes and drums, as well as brass bands made the hairs on our arms stand straight up. But there was a more youthful element – tumblers from Denmark, brilliant cyclists from Germany, as well as twirling young people on hoops.

But what lives on is the spectacular finale, when the floor of the hall was filled with all the performers. Because we had chosen July 4 – America's Independence Day – for our visit, and because the U.S. Consul General for Nova Scotia was present, the U.S. National Anthem, sung and played in unison by so many performers was a sound to bring tears to your eye. And that was topped quite easily when they morphed into “Oh Canada” an anthem that is easy to sing and is exquisitely moving.

Then the lone highland piper took up his lonely call (the very definition of “tattoo”) from the highest point in the arena. Amazing Grace was just that. His pipes stood alone, but then the melody was picked up by the other massed pipes, followed by the choir. Memorable.

We returned to our campground in thick, wooly fog. But we were warmed inside by the spectacular event.

Now we have edged along the eastern shore of Nova Scotia. This is an unpopulated land. We are only an hour east of Halifax, but there is little but woods and water. As we sit in our new campground, we can hear the plaintive call of the loons on the lake. This is heaven.

A Bore that's Worth the Visit

2011-06-30T11:48:00.000-07:00

A Great Blue Heron is about to be overtaken by the tidal bore at Moncton, New Brunswick.

The tidal bore on the Petticodiac River in Moncton, New Brunswick, is not boring. The water comes in twice a day, racing around the elbow of the river with a wall of water pushing hard against the down-flowing stream. It fairly races along, with birds riding it like surfers.

Jo and I were there at the appointed hour on Thursday morning. There is a place called Bore Park where you see the sweep of the tidal bore. We were surrounded by a busload of French-speaking lst or 2^nd grade students, along with a couple who were visiting from New Zealand and who were proudly showing their currency to a Moncton native. The money actually had windows in it which, to my view, was unique.

Anyway, as the bore came in, the Canada Geese that had been riding the wave decided it was enough. They swam to the muddy shore and waddled up the bank.

Suzanne, a perky young woman from the Moncton Museum, told us in alternate French and English the history of the area, along with the lore of the bore. It comes in because Moncton is at the head of the Bay of Fundy where the largest tides in the world are to be found. The water rises up to 50 feet twice a day and that results in awesome currents. Jo and I had sailed the Bay of Fundy back in the summer of 2003. It was wonderful to sail with the tide – we made 13 knots in our sluggish little boat.

Suzanne explained how the Acadiene French were pretty friendly with the local Mic-Mac Indians. But they refused to swear allegiance to the French king. Nor, when the English arrived and took over, would they swear allegiance to the British king. The price: all their homes were burned and they were shipped out. This explains why Louisiana is loaded with “Cajuns”. Lots of them found their way into the deep South of the U.S.

The previous evening, we visited Magnetic Hill to experience the wonder of putting our car in neutral on an apparently level surface and having it roll along backwards, gaining speed until it climbs a hill backwards. I'd asked the woman at our campground whether or not it was worth the visit. She sagely suggested we go there after 7 p.m. and get in without paying. “It eez a how-you-say optical illusion,” she told us in her French-accented English. She was right. It is not really worth paying $5 to experience. But it was fun to see the car take off on its own on an apparently flat road. We couldn't figure out the illusion even after letting it happen to us three times.

PS: I have received a response from Don and Terry, one of our fellow-travelers, about how lucky we were with the $60 charge from Verizon for our use of Canadian cell towers. While they were in the northern U.S., near the Canadian border, they were regularly using the cell towers without knowing it. Their monthly bill was $1,200! Happily AT&T let them off the hook after they howled.

Internationally challenged

2011-06-29T07:50:00.000-07:00

A bronze cast of a French settler on the banks of the St. Croix River welcomes you to the early settlement.

Vital information for travelers: When you use Verizon's Mi-Fi modem (as do we) there's a green light on the device. When that device switches to blue, however, its a signal that you are connected to an international cell signal. Well that will never happen while you are traveling in the U.S., of course, you say. But that would be wrong!

While we were west of Machias, Maine, (many miles from the Canadian border) and after we moved to Calais, Maine, the light was blue. We, of course, had no idea of the meaning of the blue light special. What it means, we learned, is we were hooked up to Canadian cell service because the cell service in Canada is much more powerful than in the U.S. because of fewer regulations. During those three days we uploaded and downloaded 33 megabytes of information for which Verizon wished to charge us $60.

We received an email from Verizon which informed us of our usage of Canadian cell towers. I called them to challenge this and the best they were willing to do was provide me with 50 megabytes of data for an additional charge of $30 for one month. They were totally unwilling to remove the charges.

We are currently in a delightful, hidden campground east of the village of Penobsquit in New Brunswick. The campground is owned by a couple from Newfoundland. They are hard-working and very friendly. But they have no wi-fi here. When we pulled up to the office, there was a note on the door: “We are out and about. Please call us on the walkie-talkie that is hanging from the door knob. The woman arrived after I called. She was bubbly and welcoming. When we told her we are on our way to Newfoundland she exploded with enthusiasm. She and her husband had come from there seven years ago. She was full of information – particularly when we told her we would be on the island for about a month.

On Sunday, we had driven to the very eastern edge of Maine, just south of Calais. Just to the east, in the middle of the St. Croix River which separates the modern U.S. and Canada, is the island of St. Croix, first settled in April 1604 by French folks aboard the Bonne Renomee. The ship was led by Samuel Champlain, one impressive exploring captain. He dropped off the settlers on the island and they began the task of setting up shop, trading with the local Passamaquoddy Indians for furs. There's a U.S. National Historic Site to mark the event.

Their leader chose the island but failed to understand the importance of fresh water, of which there was none on the island. Water had to be brought over from the mainland. The natives were friendly, visiting the island to fish for alewives and shellfish. Everyone seemed to get along well, the French trading hatchets, beads, rosaries, and tobacco for the furs they trapped.

Acadia, as the settlers called their new land, was on the same latitude as their native France so the visitors assumed the climate would be similar. Wrong. They soon discovered they were quite unprepared for the severity of a harsh North American winter. In addition they came down with scurvy and almost half their number died.

In the following spring, they decided to leave the island, deciding that water is actually pretty important to survival.. Champlain moved them as far south as Cape Cod in Massachusetts. But the settlers found nothing they liked. They returned to St. Croix, dismantled their houses and moved them to the mainland of Nova Scotia at Port Royal.

Jo and I drove up to Calais to scout the town. Sunday is a pretty quiet day in this little town and the only place we found open was a museum that was a dreary little place – clearly a piece of federal pork that Sen. Susan Collins managed to bring to the community. There were great, empty rooms with very little history visible. The only thing that worked was a tidal pool with all manner of sea creatures – starfish, urchins, snails and slugs. It's a perfect example of congressional funding that is a total waste of taxpayer money because the funding starts something but there is no funding available to fill the space with useful material.

Going Downeast

2011-06-24T12:32:00.000-07:00

A fisherman's house clings to the rocky coast of Maine at Harrington Bay, east of Bar Harbor.

Two sets on friends came back into our lives in one day this week. Nothing can improve on that.

We met up with old workmate Jose Azel and his wife for breakfast in Portland, Maine. We have not seen them for three years and there was much catching up to be done.

Then we climbed back aboard our rig and pushed north and east to the little town of Newport, Maine, where we found Rick and Gayle Perlmutter – old sailing buddies from the 1970s. There's nothing quite so fine as walking back in on a warm and solid friendship and picking up the threads again.

Rick is an astonishingly good cook who seems to turn his talents to new styles of food each time we meet. This summer, he has been dabbling at mastering the art of Mexican cuisine. He has done just that and we were the lucky recipients of some spectacular taste treats. Rick and Gayle built their wooden home, with soaring ceilings, on the edge of lake Sebasticook. As a result, they are visited by all manner of birds – from hummingbirds to downy woodpeckers.

Gayle, in the meantime, has become passionate about genealogy and has traced her roots back and back and back. She told us part of her family tree resides still in the little town of Trinity, Newfoundland. This is right beside Dildo Cove, and we have promised to check out the little village when we make it to Newfoundland next month.

I took advantage of their local knowledge and went to their dentist in town to have a new crown re-cemented into my mouth. It had fallen off while I ate lunch a few days back. The dentist did a fine job of making me whole again.

Rick and Gayle headed off for work before we arose on Friday morning. We had a leisurely breakfast and then slowly backed out of their homestead and filled up with gas in Newport before pushing on to Ellsworth, where we parked and visited the L.L. Bean Outlet there. Jo took the wheel and took us along the magnificent, rocky coast of Maine, past deep-cut bays and east of Schoodic Point where the natives tell you “the real Maine begins.” We have sailed this rock-strewn coast, of course, but this was a wonderful way to see it from the land.

Our navigation software told us to turn right onto a dirt road which supposedly would take us to our chosen campground in Harrington, Maine. But the road ran out in the front yard of someone's home. We had to unhitch the car from the rear, then back out and regain Route 1 where we found a sign on the highway that guided us down another road – this one tarred – to Sunset Point Campground. Oh, bliss.

Here we sit, on the banks of the Harrington River which flows into Harrington Bay. And that touches Pleasant Bay, which, in turn, connects with the Gulf of Maine just east of Petit Manan Island.

When we sailed this bold coast in the summer of 2003, much of it was shrouded in thick fog each day. We remember straining our eyes and brains to make out any lobster boats working the shrouded waters ahead of us. I would be glued to the navigation computer to keep me off the rocks while Jo stood at the bow, peering out into the fog. It was exciting voyaging and felt oh-so-good when we would stop for the day, pulling into a cove and dropping anchor. Nothing tasted quite so fine as the Dark and Stormy (rum and ginger beer) that we'd sip while the cormorants fished around us and fish hawks and gulls screamed overhead.

Friendship

2011-06-24T12:29:00.001-07:00

Two sets on friends came back into our lives in one day this week. Nothing can improve on that.
We met up with old workmate Jose Azel and his wife for breakfast in Portland, Maine. We have not seen them for three years and there was much catching up to be done.

Then we climbed back aboard our rig and pushed north and east to the little town of Newport, Maine, where we found Rick and Gayle Perlmutter – old sailing buddies from the 1970s. There's nothing quite so fine as walking back in on a warm and solid friendship and picking up the threads again. Rick is an astonishingly good cook who seems to turn his talents to new styles of food each time we meet. This summer, he has been dabbling at mastering the art of Mexican cuisine. He has done just that and we were the lucky recipients of some spectacular taste treats. Rick and Gayle built their wooden home, with soaring ceilings, on the edge of lake Sebasticook. As a result, they are visited by all manner of birds – from hummingbirds to downy woodpeckers.

Gayle, in the meantime, has become passionate about genealogy and has traced her roots back and back and back. She told us part of her family tree resides still in the little town of Trinity, Newfoundland. This is right beside Dildo Cove, and we have promised to check out the little village when we make it to Newfoundland next month.

Rick and Gayle headed off for work before we arose on Friday morning. We had a leisurely breakfast and then slowly backed out of their homestead and filled up with gas in Newport before pushing on to Ellsworth, where we parked and visited the L.L. Bean Outlet there. Jo took the wheel and took us along the magnificent, rocky coast of Maine, past deep-cut bays and east of Schoodic Point where the natives tell you “the real Maine begins.” We have sailed this rock-strewn coast, of course, but this was a wonderful way to see it from the land.

Our navigation software told us to turn right onto a dirt road which supposedly would take us to our chosen campground in Harrington, Maine. But the road ran out in the front yard of someone's home. We had to unhitch the car from the rear, then back out and regain Route 1 where we found a sign on the highway that guided us down another road – this one tarred – to Sunset Point Campground. Oh, bliss.

Here we sit, on the banks of the Harrington River which flows into Harrington Bay. And that touches Pleasant Bay, which, in turn, connects with the Gulf of Maine just east of Petit Manan Island.

When we sailed this bold coast in the summer of 2003, much of it was shrouded in thick fog each day. We remember straining our eyes and brains to make out any lobster boats working the shrouded waters ahead of us. I would be glued to the navigation computer to keep me off the rocks while Jo stood at the bow, peering out into the fog. It was exciting voyaging and felt oh-so-good when we would stop for the day, pulling into a cove and dropping anchor. Nothing tasted quite so fine as the Dark and Stormy (rum and ginger beer) that we'd sip while the cormorants fished around us and fish hawks and gulls screamed overhead.

On Leaving Vermont

2011-06-21T05:49:00.000-07:00

This picture, shot by Jo, should pretty much be on my tombstone since it is the perfect representation of my life under the rig.

“Oooh! That can't be good.” The words came from grandson Graham when he saw me stop the rig moments after pulling out of the driveway in Colchester, Vermont. The accursed red light for the emergency brake was flickering.
He was right. It wasn't a good thing. I put some more fluid into the reservoir (yet another trip of squirming under the rig). The light went out and we pulled away. Five minutes later, however, the flickering light was a solid light. We were on the expressway south.
Decision time: Do I stop on the interstate or do I push on for 10 minutes to the only RV repair shop in Burlington? We chose the latter. We arrived at Peter's RV with smoke plumes pouring from under the rig. That got their attention!
I had visited the place earlier, seeking some regular maintenance and they'd refused to help unless I could wait four weeks. I'd even written a letter to the pretty awful local newspaper in which I made a pitch for hiring more help to turn this recession around – and to serve customers better.
Now they had to deal with my emergency – and they did. When the emergency brake cooled down sufficiently (two hours), a mechanic slid under the rig. He filled the reservoir with my brake fluid and asked me to start the engine, put the rig in gear – and definitely keep my foot on the regular brakes. I did and he was sprayed with brake fluid for a grey relay switch. When he disconnected this switch he found the tiny O-ring was broken. This O-ring had leaked when my son in law and I had changed out the heavy-duty actuator on the brake system back in May. We had made a 30-mile trip to replace this tiny piece at an auto parts store. The salesman said it needed a metric O-ring which surprised me on an American-built relay switch. But we installed it and it was the wrong size.
The mechanic installed a new O-ring and I asked for two spares. No leaks. So we scooted south and east and came to Northwood, New Hampshire. We had been to this tiny but delightful campground a few years back. The place has room for 20 rigs, all nestled in trees around a pond filled with croaking bullfrogs and trout that leap for flies in the setting sun. This is one of our favorite campgrounds in New England.
Now we head north to Saco, Maine. This takes us to the seacoast just south of Portland. This is the city we left aboard our sailboat, Quiet Passage, almost 11 years ago.

Up in Vermont

2011-05-27T08:21:00.000-07:00

After a great visit with daughter Lynn and family in Kent, Connecticut, where our son in law, John, did yeoman work helping with the fix of our emergency brake system, we headed north to Vermont.

Our first afternoon in Vermont, we were under a tornado watch. The sky turned black at 5:30 in the afternoon and hail the size of Kennedy half-dollars banged on the roof of our rig. It was so loud we could barely talk.

This all passed in half an hour and the sun popped back out. Very strange feeling. But the torrential rains returned later in the evening and we had horrendous lightning through the night.

We have already set to work, doing fixes on furniture at daughter Stephanie's home. Jo is baking banana bread. Stephanie and our two grandchildren head for Italy in eight weeks to join son in law Alex in Trento, up in the Dolomite Mountains of northern Italy.

Jo came down with what turned out to be shingles and we found an urgent care place in Colchester, VT, that treated her after the Memorial Day holiday. This painful immune-system illness has resulted in blisters that feel like tiny needles pricking her abdomen. Happily, there now is a drug for the treatment of shingles and she is on a week-long regimen of this. So we expect great things soon!

A Hail Storm.... in MAY!

2011-05-21T14:15:00.000-07:00

Yes! We drove through the town of Kent, across Camp Flats Road through a rain storm (George Washington passed along this tiny road back in the good old days). As we climbed the hill, we saw long trails of white stuff along the road. I thought these were the downed blossoms of cottonwood trees. We pulled over and Jo opened the door. Hailstones. Millions of them the size of corn kernels. Welcome to Connecticut in late May. Summer is a month away.

We came north two weeks ago, stopping off outside Baltimore for a remarkable wool festival. I have never seen so many sheep breeds... all the way from Karachol (from the Mideast and Africa) to St. Kilda miniature sheep from a tiny island 'way west of Scotland's Outer Hebrides. There were Scottish black-face sheep who sported pretty impressive curling horns. And there were angora sheep that gave up their priceless fleece to the shearing every six months.

As we headed north from Baltimore, we calculated the best and cheapest places to stop to fill the gas tank. We stopped in New Jersey - always a cheaper place than New York or Connecticut. But we damaged the extending step at our side door when it jammed up against the curb at the filling island. We tied it up with a shock cord and then sailed across the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan. Now that was a tactical error. Sunday afternoons, you might think, traffic would be slow. Not so when we deal with Manhattan. We were trapped in stop-and-go traffic for two hours.

Our emergency brake red light began to warn me - again - that it was losing fluid - a fearsome warning in this no-lay-by highway through New York City. We made it out of the city and when I parked and squirmed under the rig, the fluid reservoir was empty. I topped it off again, cursing this awful piece of engineering.

We ordered replacement parts for the step and for the actuator on the emergency brake and I have managed to get the steps working again. Now, we await the rebuilding of the actuator to see if we can put this menace of a brake system to rest again. Then our plan is to drive north to Vermont to visit with our daughter, Stephanie, before she heads off to join her husband in Italy where he has taken a new job.

Leaving Today

2011-05-04T06:12:00.000-07:00

The Governor's Palace is in the background as this carriage passes by in Williamsburg, VA.

American history and current events collided on Monday when Jo and I stepped back in time on a visit to Williamsburg, Virginia. There we were, walking on cobbled streets of earliest America. Outside on this perfectly balmy day the Twitters and news channels were dissecting the death of Osama bin Laden. It was a good day.

We crossed the bridge of time into Colonial Williamsburg. I liked the plaques embedded in the bridge, telling us with each step we passed through the building blocks of our own history:

"1776. You are a subject of King George"

"1790s. Your latest news is more than one week old"

"1865. You know people who own other people"

Colonial Williamsburg was brought to life in the 1920s when John D. Rockefeller provided the funds for a vision by a local minister who believed this old town could become a showcase for America's early history. They pulled it off.

Carriages, pulled by teams of horses, sauntered along the streets. Women with bustles and linen clothing stopped to talk with us about life in their town.
We stepped into the Governor's Palace, built in a show of power by the Brits. Lord Dunmore, the governor was not at home. But his entrance hall was pretty impressive. Hundreds of Scottish swords (Dunmore came from outside Glasgow in Scotland) were arrayed on the wooden walls. Several hundred muskets and pistols were arranged neatly to intimidate visitors.

A servant of his lordship, in character, walked us through the palace which took 14 years to build. He explained there was a party planned for the evening, hence the scurrying up and downstairs of the maids. I sidled up to the manservant and asked politely about the delicate state of King George's mental health back home in London. He was a little startled but recovered quickly. "His majesty has his good days and his bad days," he said. "We in the colonies feel he might live another three months." His majesty, as you probably know, went bonkers and had to be removed from the throne.

When we stopped by a carpenter working a spokeshave as he created cedar shingles, I wanted to know what he did with the mountain of shavings that piled in front of him. "Oh, we just throw it out. We have no real use for it," he said. I remarked that that seemed to be the very start of America's wasteful, throw-away culture and he smiled and said, "We have endless woods, sir. We will never run out." Yeah. Right.

In the smokehouse, we came upon a Negro slave who was pulling the sides of salted and smoked pigs out of the brick smokehouse. He explained the process of salting and then slow smoking that cured the meat. We were impressed with the almost lifelong storage of meat this permitted. But it also was a lesson in how important salt was in this process. That's where the tax on imported salt caused a hullabaloo among the Americans who still, at that time, thought of themselves as Englishmen.

Six hours of wandering through the town made me realize the huge improvement in my creaky back. A knitting friend of Jo's, back in Florida, had hooked me up with her husband, a doctor of osteopathy, who relieved my pains and freed up my muscles with his remarkable hammer. I call him "Ray the Hammer" because his incredible tool opened up my painful back muscles and gave me renewed hope of remaining functional. But it was more than the electronic hammer that he used on me. He also had the remarkable ability to lay his hands on my knotted muscles and feel the causes of my pain.

We ended the day outside the Raleigh Tavern on Duke of Gloucester Street. There we heard from a local newspaper publisher who was pushing the causes of independence for the colonies. The Virginians were not big fans of the Massachusetts terrorists, freedom fighters, insurgents (however you might wish to describe them). But they stood with them in protest over the import taxes demanded by England. They stood as one, men and women alike, by refusing to wear the finer cloth you could only buy from England. Instead, they began wearing clothing made from the coarser homespun cloth they could spin and weave on their own. It brought home to me, again, how history repeats itself. Gandhi did exactly the same thing when he taught Indians to give up the fine cloths of England and to spin their own cotton and weave their own cloth as part of his push for independence from the British Empire in the 1940s.

The next day, we rolled north to the outskirts of Washington and luxuriated in the welcoming warmth of old friends Richard and Jane in Fairfax Station.

Now we sit on our hill at Lake Fairfax County Park. Because we are a stone's throw from Washington, we are enjoying excellent television reception on a rainy day. This is the only city we have ever come through where it is possible to receive programs over the airwaves from Russia, Japan, China and even Al Jazeera English language TV.

The Pesky Love Bug Menace

2011-04-28T07:57:00.000-07:00

We started our summer journey on April 26 and it was a bit of a slaughter. We drove to the east coast of Florida, cutting an ugly swath of destruction coast to coast. Millions of pesky love bugs gave up their lives on our windshield and the front of our rig. After we traveled for an hour through the flatlands, past the hundreds of thousands of cattle grazing and sleeping under any available shade, we had to stop and scrub off the black bugs that obscured our vision.

These love bugs seem to be unique to Florida. We are told they are visible in Louisiana and Mississippi but we've never hit them there. They have the delightful habit of seeking out a mate in mid April. The male attaches himself to the rear of the female and the two of them fly off on a wild copulating ride that always seems to result in death. Somewhere, though, some of the little critters manage to survive and produce more offspring so this ritual might be repeated in the coming year.

When we sailed in Florida, we'd have hundreds of these bugs fly onto our boat. But that doesn't kill them because the boat was traveling around 6 miles an hour. Sixty miles an hour is a different story.

So we'd done our part in reducing the pesky population. We are told the best way to get the carcasses off the rig is to spray the rig with WD-40 lubricant before setting out. Now that we are in Hobe Sound, on Florida's Atlantic coast, we might just do that before heading north in another couple of days.

Here's what Wikipedia says about this phenomenon:
Lovebug flights can number in the hundreds of thousands. The slow, drifting movement of the insects is almost reminiscent of snow fall except the flies also rise in the air. Two major flights occur each year, first in late spring, then again in late summer. The spring flight occurs during late April and May, the summer during late August and September.

Flights extend over periods of four to five weeks. Mating takes place almost immediately after emergence of the females. Adult females live only three to four days, while males live a little longer.

This species' reputation as a public nuisance is due not to any bite or sting (it is incapable of either), but to its slightly acidic body chemistry. Because airborne lovebugs can exist in enormous numbers near highways, they die en masse on automobile windshields, hoods, and radiator grills when the vehicles travel at high speeds. If left for more than an hour or two, the remains become dried and extremely difficult to remove.

Their body chemistry has a nearly neutral 6.5 pH but may become acidic at 4.25 pH if left on the car for a day.[1] In the past, the acidity of the dead adult body, especially the female's egg masses, often resulted in pits and etches in automotive paint and chrome if not quickly removed. However, advances in automotive paints and protective coatings have reduced this threat significantly. Now the greatest concern is excessive clogging of vehicle radiator air passages with the bodies of the adults, with the reduction of the cooling effect on engines, and the obstruction of windshields when the remains of the adults and egg masses are smeared on the glass.

Goat-sex man pays four cows

2011-03-29T09:11:00.000-07:00

King Sitentu Mpasi in the Kavango region of Namibia

This is a strange story you'll never read about in your local newspaper. I thought you should hear about it, though. I pass this along because I have met one of the people involved. Chief Sitentu Mpasi - called King Mpasi when I was around in 2007. I advise you to keep reading to the end for a case of "That's more information that I actually needed."

A 20-year-old man who was ordered by village elders to pay six cows as punishment for having sex with several goats at Namutuntu village in the Kavango Region of Namibia has so far only managed to pay four cattle.

The culprit, identified as Joseph Kangungu Ngongo, was brought before an Ukwangali Traditional Court hearing on January 22 at Simanya village.
The village’s senior headman, Matheus Nyambwe, said Ngongo paid four cattle and a N$500 admission-of-guilt fine that will go into the coffers of the Ukwangali Traditional Authority.

The headman said of the two remaining cattle, one would to go the leader of the Ukwangali Traditional Authority, Chief Sitentu Mpasi, while the other one goes to the owner of the violated goats at Namutuntu village.

The complainant, Anton Mukunga, told the traditional court that he had on two separate occasions found human footprints coming out of his goats’ pen as he opened the gate to allow the animals out for grazing.

He said he never suspected theft because no goats were missing.

However, when he went to take out the goats for grazing the third time, Mukunga said he saw clothes hanging on a pole in the pen. Upon closer inspection, he saw a naked man having sex with one of the goats inside the pen.

The man ran away naked when he realised that the owner of the goats had spotted him but he was caught by villagers.

During the traditional court hearing, Ngongo pleaded guilty to bestiality. He said he had tried out several goats before marking the hoofs of the animal that satisfied his sexual needs the best.

A brush with royalty

2011-03-13T13:40:00.000-07:00

King Henry VIII stands between us at the Tampa Bay Renaissance Faire. The real Henry Tudor is pictured at right.

I've met two kings in my life. In Africa, I spent a pleasant enough morning with King Mpasi, up on the northern border between Namibia and Angola. On Saturday, however, I met up with King Henry VIII. Henry struck me as the most authentic king. This is not to say Mpasi was not an impressive character. Maybe it was the see-through, mesh T-shirt that made him “un-kinglike”. Maybe it was that I had to teach him how to use an asthma inhaler – for which he was extremely grateful. No matter, the guy who carried off the title with authentic gravitas definitely was Henry.

Henry, the second of the Tudor kings, strolled around the Tampa Bay Renaissance Faire, holding forth in regal form. All his vassals bowed and scraped before him. They remained bowed until he acknowledged them and bid them arise. He reigned just shy of 38 years from 21 April 1509 – 28 January 1547.

Henry was the reason Jo and I had driven north to spend time in his kingdom.

After he discovered me he reached out and gave me a bear-hug. For Henry is a long-lost friend and former reporting/writing colleague. He is a massive man, quite realistic in terms of the royal fellow who went through six wives.

Jo, not realizing that Henry stays in character no matter what, hugged him and said, “Oh, Michael. It is so good to see you.” “My lady, you know me not,” said the king. “For I am Henry Tudor.” And so he stayed, chatting with us in early and quaint English, carrying us back to those pre-Elizabethan days. We were constantly interrupted by passersby who asked to be photographed with him. He gladly acceded to their requests, always addressing them with regal bearing and asking that they place their left hand above his raised right hand. He entertained the assembled masses while his yeomen stood by with their pikes.

The king also had a chamberlain whose job it was to keep him moving along. We walked through the faire together, but the chamberlain stepped up to the king and asked if he would be willing to perform a marriage ceremony for a betrothed couple. Henry was on his way to knight some worthy commoners but he veered off and made his way up to the couple, Jennifer and Alan. They were dressed in medieval costumes, with their two daughter in long velvet dresses.
Henry stopped at the entrance to the chapel until a vassal could raise a fluttering banner, permitting him entrance with having to stoop.

The to-be-married couple approached and were given in marriage by a white-clad knight. Henry proceeded with consummate skill to perform the ceremony. Bride Jennifer had tears on her cheeks as she sealed the ceremony by placing a ring on her beloved's finger.

After the deed was done, King Henry signed the papers to make the marriage official (Michael, as I recall from the mid-seventies, became an ordained minister in one of these mail-order preacher legitimizers). Then he proceeded along the path to make knights of men.

The faire was a melange of beautiful girls in high-waisted corsets that did much to accentuate the positive protrusion of their breasts. Men looked suitably rugged in their leathers and plain kilt. A number were warlocks and sprouted petite horns on their foreheads.

There was every kind of activity: palm reading, men diving into mud, camel riding, brawny men – and equally brawny women – throwing a metal weight. The women threw a 14 pound one, while the guys threw a 28-pounder. On the advice of the king, Jo and I made our way to the rat-catcher's show with Emrys Fleet. We had been told this was a former copy-boy from the 1970s at The St. Petersburg Times although I could in no way recognize him. He'd given up on newspapering in 1979 and turned his full attention to being a faire performer. This was one funny dude. He was daring in his willingness to out-wait his audience till they got the joke – and then got the audience to laugh at itself. His polished, laugh-filled act confirmed for me that he made the right decision to take the route of performing.

We sauntered over to the Scottish-Irish games area for lunch. I quizzed a vendor about the quality of his haggis since I'd recently bought an inferior version of this Scottish delicacy. He assured me his was the best haggis to be had in Florida. He even offered me a forkful and it was just enough to encourage me to order a haggis and chips platter. Mmmmm. Now that puts hair on your chest.

An Auspicious Day

2011-02-11T08:14:00.001-08:00

Feb. 13, 1961. I boarded a Boeing 707 with only six other passengers in Scotland and headed west…leaving my homeland with my two cardboard suitcases for my journey to a new life and a new world. Fifty years ago today. It’s a significant date in my life.

I had made my decision to leave my job as a weekly newspaper editor in the north of Scotland because I felt confined by a union shop that insisted I could only do certain things in the production of a newspaper. I chafed under this when the union went out on strike – a strike I didn’t believe in. So I began looking around at the world’s possibilities.

I met a sea captain in my regular bar in Inverness, and he told me he would be sailing to South America in a few days. Did I want to sign up as crew? It was an exciting possibility but I hesitated and the ship sailed. At around the same time, I received a letter from the Hong Kong Police Department, offering me a position as sub-inspector of police in Hong Kong. They offered the position based on the simple fact I was British and white. That, in their view, automatically qualified me to supervise a bunch of Chinese policemen. Silly, silly people.

It was an intriguing offer for the lure of Asia was strong in my heart. But I also knew I’d be a lousy cop because my genetic makeup made me constantly question authority. And then the National Union of Journalist’s newspaper in Britain ran a story on its front page which told about a small daily newspaper in New Hampshire that was seeking to employ a British journalist in a reporting position. Pay would be $75 a week. Since I was being paid $20 a week I applied along with (I learned later) 284 other British journalists.

The paper’s editor picked an English guy, Larry Masidlover, who worked on Fleet Street in London. They liked him (even though ultimately they had a problem with him because of his unwillingness to bathe!) Three months later they decided to hire another Brit. I was chosen and three weeks later, I had received my green card and had bought my one-way ticket. Age 20.

Back in those days, if you were British you were considered a desirable immigrant and there was no impediment to getting into the U.S. so long as you had a job.

When I arrived in Logan Airport in Boston, I was met by the newspaper’s managing editor, Ray Brighton. He shook my hand but I sensed a moment of hesitation as he looked at me. “I can’t let you leave the airport without shaving off your beard,” he told me. “New Hampshire isn’t ready for a beard.” I stopped in my tracks. New Hampshire wasn’t ready for a person with a small Van Dyke beard? That made no sense to me. I had grown the beard in a desperate attempt to look older than my 20 years. But Ray was adamant. I negotiated with him that he would pay for the shave. We stopped into a barber shop in the airport and the barber made me acceptable to enter New Hampshire.

Fifty years on I have my beard. It’s much, much greyer now. And, I’m also happy to report that Ray Brighton grew a beard in the late 1960s. So America can change. America did change. And it needs to change much, much more.

In 50 years, I have lived through America’s golden years, as well as its darkest hours. I was a reporter in Rochester, N.Y., when President Kennedy was cut down in Dallas. I watched my managing editor marshal his newsroom resources with quiet skill moments after the news flash announcing the president's death. It was on my watch that Rochester, N.Y., riots erupted in 1966 and I went into the ghetto with a Canadian reporter and was spat upon and rocks were thrown as we made our way into the heart of the war zone. I had just put the newspaper to bed, as we called it, and had gone home when Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. It was the only time I ever issued the order to "Stop the presses." I drove back downtown in Rochester to remake the newspaper that night. I was the editor in charge the night Apollo astronauts circled the moon and sent back the astonishing picture of earth-rise with the blue marble of earth rising above the grey moonscape. I remember the struggle of convincing a group of union engravers that I wanted to remake the front page with the earth-rise picture covering the top half of the front page.

I still think of my decision to come west as the most important decision of my life. All good things have sprung from that fork in the road.

I would not have met my bonny Jo.

We would not have produced two beautiful and talented daughters and, now, they have produced four grandchildren.

I would not have had the agony and ecstasy of working on some of the best newspapers in the U.S. – as well as some of the worst.

And I would not have been able to work with some of the finest writers, best editors, world-class photographers, designers who have worked in the U.S.

I would never have met my first news editor, Bob Norling, a brilliant, irascible editor who loved to stir the pot and make The Portsmouth Herald better every day.

Nor would I have been touched by sparkling, raw talent like Bill Duryea, now national editor of The St. Petersburg Times. I gave him his first job as a reporter and then manager editor of our principal weekly newspaper in New Milford, Connecticut.

How would I have found the sparkling writing talent of Michael Marzella, with whom I worked in St. Petersburg and, later, at The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His prose was poetry. His ability to grab a reader and illustrate bizarre concepts like the history of bricklaying or the creation of a time capsule entertained and dazzled readers. He is a diamond.

And I think particularly of the utter unmitigated brilliance of Jose Azel, a young Cuban-American photographer whom I hired for The Miami Herald. He was a diamond in the photographic firmament - and remains so to this day, running his own photo agency.

My particular friend, Richard Curtis, my assistant newsfeatures editor at The St. Pete Times, grew into a design giant as the managing editor of photography and design at the founding of USA Today.

The best - definitely the most courageous - journalist I have ever worked with is Gwen Lister, editor of The Namibian. I worked with the people in her newsroom three separate times for a total of more than 10 months. She is without peer as a leader, an ethical, moral force in her country. She has been imprisoned, her newspaper has been fire-bombed. But she pushes ever onward. She is respected by her readers as is no other journalist I have ever met. And she has trained black men and women to be excellent in their craft. My beloved black brother, Oswald Shivute, has been my primary teacher to the ways of his people. He has been the door-opener to the horrors of apartheid, to HIV-AIDS, to the raw brutality of unjust tribalism. I love this man for opening so many doors for me on my journey into the heart of Namibia. And I have great admiration for a brilliant white reporter, Maggi Barnard in Swakopmund, on Namibia's west coast. She was the one who introduced me to the cultural shock of a black enclave called the DRC, outside of her pretty town. The poverty and humiliation of life in that township was so overwhelming to me that I could not get out of the car to talk with the people. But Maggi wouldn't let me shrink back from this. The next day, she gave me a sheaf of used paper and we returned to a kindergarten in the DRC. I gave the used paper to the teacher and the teacher introduced me to the children and then their mothers. The dam was broken. My eyes were opened to the spirit of those who lived in abject poverty but who retained the sense of pride and self.

At the top of my list, though, is a petite Burmese woman, Hla Hla Htay, whom I taught in Cambodia. Hla Hla was shockingly shy but made of titanium. She was strong 'way beyond her 95 pounds. I received a call from the news agency Agence France Presse bureau chief in Bangkok, asking if I knew of any Burmese journalist who might be a candidate to run their bureau in Yangon (Rangoon). I said I was thoroughly impressed with the strength and brain-power of this diminutive woman who was currently in the journalism class I was running in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I arranged for Hla Hla to meet with the bureau chief when she passed through Bangkok on her way back home. I sat down with Hla Hla in my office and spent hours teaching her how to interview for a job with a western news agency. I taught her about eye contact, about projecting competence and self-assurance - all of it counter-intuitive to Hla Hla who was astonishingly shy. She set out for the interview and the bureau chief gave her the job on a trial basis. Her pay jumped from $50 a month to $1,000 a month. Hla Hla is still out there seven years later and I had the pleasure of being able to look at her pictures of Aung San Suu Kyi when she was released from house arrest earlier this year.

All of my work years were preparation for becoming a teacher/mentor/guide to journalists in every corner of the world – perhaps the most worthwhile endeavor of my life.

Had I not struggled to make newspapers better in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Connecticut, I would not have had the training to go into the most interesting places in the world – Bhutan, Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Borneo, Nepal, Singapore, Colombia, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Namibia.

When I flew to Bhutan, tucked into the snow-covered peaks of the Himalaya, I remember the editor of the only newspaper in that country, Kinley Dorgi, tell me about auspicious moments. He saw everything through the lens of auspicious moments. I had brought him a book called China Wakes by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryll WuDunn. Kinley had just read a review of the book that very morning in his precious copy of The Economist. “This is an auspicious moment, Robert,” he told me.

So Feb. 13, 1961, is my auspicious day. It is that moment Robert Frost wrote about in “The Road Not Taken”. This is what he said:

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

Not many have taken my road. But one has. I gave Lisa Schellinger, a new graduate back in 1981, her first job as a rooky reporter in Warren, Ohio. Today, Lisa remains my friend and she followed my path by going out into the world to give of her skills. She has taught/worked in Fiji, Cambodia, Afghanistan, among other places. She still is making all the difference in Afghanistan where she is a guide/mentor in the creation of a news agency, as well as creation of a school.

Now we look forward to new adventures. You may remember the Monty Python skit in which they are making fun of the Black Death in England. "Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead," was the cry onstage. A skinny guy in a white nightshirt is thrown onto the death cart. "I'm not dead, yet," he calls out. And so it is.

Just making numbers work

2010-12-14T13:44:00.001-08:00

Documentary which takes viewers on a rollercoaster ride through the wonderful world of statistics to explore the remarkable power thay have to change our understanding of the world, presented by superstar boffin Professor Hans Rosling, whose eye-opening, mind-expanding and funny online lectures have made him an international internet legend.
Rosling is a man who revels in the glorious nerdiness of statistics, and here he entertainingly explores their history, how they work mathematically and how they can be used in today's computer age to see the world as it really is, not just as we imagine it to be.

The End of the Road

2010-11-11T10:03:00.000-08:00

This grizzly met us on the road in Yukon Territory.

It's the end of the road... for the time being.

We have pulled into the heart of Florida. There are an additional 14,512 miles on our odometer at the end of our journey. Add an additional 4,417 miles we drove our car along the way. Twenty thousand miles is not a bad adventure for one year. But it really isn't about the miles.

So much of this odyssey took us to vistas and worlds we have never before discovered. Texas wildflowers along the 1,000 miles of interstate that hustled us across that vast state... winds blowing so hard we had to put down our leveling jacks to keep the rig from rocking and rolling while we were parked in New Mexico....the bizarre world of Roswell, New Mexico, where alien conspiracies seem to pop up at you around every corner.... The glory of Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks in Utah...the crispy clean and antiseptic Mormons who greeted us in Salt Lake City....the re-enactment of the joining of the east and west railroad tracks to make transcontinental travel relatively comfortable in Promontory, Utah.... the spectacular waterfalls along the Columbia River in Oregon.... the snowstorm we drove through in Mt. Rainier National Park in Washington state...the love affair with Vancouver, British Columbia... the endless miles that are British Columbia (so large it's like driving from Miami to Maine)....Yukon Territory and its iffy roads but gorgeous territorial parks.

Then we made it to Alaska, a world unto itself. The people there see the world through a quite different prism from those who live in the lower 48 states. Everything about the state is record-breaking. The mountains, the glacial rivers that are milky blue, the incomparable wildlife. We'll never forget the shivers that went up and down our spines as Denali uncovered her snow-covered peak to reveal herself to us for three and a half hours late one night. We'll treasure the plethora of bald eagles that allowed us to get up close and personal with them at Anchor Point State Park in the Kenai Peninsula. And the glaciers.... ah, the glaciers. They're receding at such an alarming rate that we were both depressed and also elated that we were able to see them in our lifetime. But we do fear for this exquisite part of our world being lost to our children and, particularly, to our grandchildren.

We wept at the awesome culmination and death of the thousands of salmon in a natal stream west of Juneau, as we watched the writhing and dying fish struggle in their final ecstasy to fulfill their hard-wired instructions that, before they die, they must make their way home to spawn and then to die. It was beyond the ability of words to capture this final act as we watched thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of these fish reach their goal and drop their eggs before lying bruised and broken in the shallows of the stream, awaiting the end of their life.

The exquisite joy of watching a grizzly bear pass through our campground on the shores of the inland passage at Haines, Alaska, and then, in the dawn of the next day, to meet the same grizzly as we drove our rig to the ferry for our 1,000-miles journey south. We will treasure our encounters with the Tlingit and Athabaskan Native Americans who welcomed us on our journey south, permitting us to park in their campgrounds and sharing their cultural traditions.

The K’san Indian in British Columbia who offered us a newly caught salmon, along with the outdoors man in Slana, Alaska, who offered us a fully-cooked salmon that had been left over from the wedding of his daughter. We loved so much of the experience and these things will live on for the remaining years of our life's journey.

We've been delighted to have you come along on this journey. I have uploaded a “Best of the Journey” photo album and you are welcome to visit that. Enjoy.

It's All About Serendipity

2010-11-01T06:22:00.001-07:00

Federal troops fire their canon at the Creek and Seminole Indians southwest of Lake City, FL.

Serendipity is a wonderful thing. We drove across the Florida line on Sunday morning. Temperature was 75 degrees. Full sun. Ah. This is why we're here. We looked down the highway to choose a campground for the night and settled on the insignificant O'Leno State Park, just south of Lake City.

And that made all the difference in the world.

When we checked in (it cost only $9.90 for our slot), the ranger told us about Alligator Days that were about to begin. This is a re-enactment of a battle in the Second Seminole Wars against the Seminole and Creek Indians who lived in the area back in the 1830s.

The battle was scheduled to start in an hour which gave us time to get parked, have some lunch, and wander over to the battle.

Booming canon announced the start of the proceedings. Indians – who looked awfully white to me – whooped and yipped as they crept through the pine scrub, shouting their taunts to the US soldiers, pioneer militia and settlers and reenacted the Sept18, 1836, Battle of San Felasco Hammock. I checked into the demographics of the recent census and Native Americans now only account for 1.6 per cent of the population. But they looked good, with some awesome face painting, superb top hats and lots of rawhide clothing.

The battle pushed back and forth, with U.S. Officer, sucking on his pipe and shouting orders to his men to advance with their muskets, then to report back on the location of the Indians in the hammock. The big gun then opened up and cleared out the recalcitrant Indians. In the meantime, the audience, often made up of the fighters' wives – wearing period dress – photographed the proceedings with their digital cameras.

The festival also included Native American musicians and dancers, a drum arbor with dance ground and tee pee camp, as well as traders selling historic replicas, handcrafted arts, manufactured souvenirs, and food.

All of this was a great way to return to our home base – we still are 322 miles out – and we are delighted to be back. This has been a wonderful journey down the eastern edge of the country. We spent much time in the cradle of the Civil War. We took in the Appomattox Court House in Virginia, where the war ended with the surrender of Gen. Robert Lee.

Farther north in Virginia, we spent a day at the home of that American genius, Thomas Jefferson. Monticello is perched on the top of a high hill, giving views of the Blue Ridge mountains. He had a thousand acres and 200 slaves up on that mountain, helping him grow the crops and even making iron nails. The entryway to his home has a complex clock that run along the front wall and shows not only the time, but the day of the week.

When we entered Georgia, we met up with friends we'd made while living in Cambodia back in 2003-4. Then we connected with one of my proteges from early journalism days. She and her husband now shuttle back and forth to Afghanistan where she created an Afghan news service that supplies unbiased and credible journalism in that beleaguered country for embassies, CNN, BBC, many of the U.S. TV networks, as well as newspapers inside the country. She is rightly proud of her “baby”.

We drove with them to the little town of Jasper, GA, for dinner and visited her photo exhibit in an office building on the main street of this little town. The picture of the Afghan man in his turban hangs in the front window and already had created some trouble for the locals. Someone had called the local radio station to complain about the afront to their community of having this turbaned man's picture in the center of their town!

Lisa decided to replace the picture with one of a fresh-faced Afghan girl because Hallowe'en was a day away and that might prevent the building from being egged or even having the glass broken. Ah, what a wonderful world we live in!

A Day of Death

2010-10-20T16:34:00.000-07:00

President Lincoln meets with Gen. McClellan on the battlefield at Antietam to order a final push against the Rebels. McClellan ignored his commander in chief.

Tuesday morning broke for us, but bleakly. Mist hung in the hollows on the northern edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains, up in the panhandle of Maryland. The cutting breeze made us wrap an extra layer of warm clothing around us as we ventured out onto the battlefield at Antietam.

It provided a fitting sense of chill at this the site of the ultimate day of death on the battlefield in all of our history.

Twenty-three thousand men died or were wounded on that one day, Sept. 17, 1862. It did not matter whether they were from the North – the Federals – or the South – the Rebels. They came together on that fateful day and faced thousands of cannon balls, muskets and rifles. And they fell in the Cornfield, on Bloody Lane, at the Middle Bridge that crossed Antietam Creek which ultimately joins the Potomac River.

Gen. Robert E. Lee brought his southern troops north, because he'd been winning the war to that point. He wanted to hurt the North and perhaps get the recognition of the European countries – particularly Britain – that the South was a separate country.

Gen. George B. McClellan believed Lee had many more troops in the area that his Union forces. He was wrong. He was a timid man, a good planner, loved by his men, but a lousy leader.

He sat in an overstuffed arm chair, overlooking the battlefield. The ladies and gentlemen of Washington had driven out to watch this decisive battle and they tittered and swooned at being so close to the star of the show. McClellan loved the adulation and played to the crowd while his men fell, and fell, and fell.

More than 10,000 men fell in the first three and a half hours after dawn broke on Sept. 17. By dusk, the battle was over. It was effectively a draw. The sounds of crying and groaning and begging calls for water could be heard all through the night.

The germ theory of infection was unknown back then. Surgeons operated on wounded soldiers in unsanitary conditions with unsterilized instruments. An amputee had a 65 percent chance of surviving surgery - but a 90 percent chance of dying from infection.

Jo and I drove and walked the fields, passing the 96 monuments that have been placed where the men fought and died. Only one monument honors soldiers who fought for both the North and the South. This was erected by the State of Maryland – a border state – because it had men who served on both sides.

It was chilling and sobering to linger along the split-rail fences and feel the presence of the spirits of so many souls. Sharpsburg, MD, would be a difficult town to live even now, I think. There is a sense of endless loss in the place.

We stopped in at a little tavern for lunch but there was no energy in the place. We returned to the field and spent an outstanding half hour with a park ranger who talked us through the strategy of Gen. Lee. He explained the power of the terrain, the way Lee moved his troops, the lack of coordination of the Federals as they came up the hill and were sliced in half by the cannon.

He also told us that five days after the battle, President Lincoln issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The document became final on Jan. 1, 1863, and gave the war a twofold purpose – reuniting the country and freedom of four million slaves.

Lincoln came here to the battlefield and to the many hospitals that were set up in an attempt to save the wounded. He spoke with men of the South as well as Northern soldiers. The war would continue for another two-plus years because of the ineptness of McClellan's lack of follow-through on that day in 1862. Lincoln replaced him but the blood continued to flow on both sides so that, by the end of the war, 600,000 men had been killed or wounded.

Spinning Across New York

2010-10-17T07:48:00.000-07:00

Friend Jody Hyman spins with her drop spindle at the Rhinebeck, NY, Wool Fest.

Here's the scene: Dutchess County Fairgrounds in Rhinebeck, New York. Hundreds, nay, thousands of crunchy-looking women in their knitted hats and hand-warmers and shawls and knitted or woven dresses. This is the Sheep and Wool Festival. Surely, men were tagging along. There were even a few men spinning and weaving. But this was clearly a woman’s event.
The women of all ages were there to buy yarn, or fleece, or roving (the cleaned and washed wool). They were there to buy the contraptions that make spinning and weaving and knitting and crocheting easier.
We watched a contest of drop spindle spinners alongside a spinning wheel contest. The object was to spin the longest yarn in 15 minutes. Jo's friend Jody Hyman, a prodigious spinner and basket maker who is a master of the drop spindle, took second place. The drop spindle is the world's simplest tool. It looks like a top that you would spin on a table. But in Jody's hands it came alive as she hanked on a piece of raw wool and set it a-spinning. She produced 15 yards of yarn in 15 minutes. A younger woman pulled out the stops and produced a fraction more yardage in that time.
On the more mechanized section, a buxom lady sat beside her homemade spinning machine and fairly made it hum. It had been constructed of PVC pipe and it vibrated and bucked as she spun her heart out. When her son would put his hand on the machine to reduce the vibration, she would mutter, “Keep tyer hands off!” Across from her was a male spinner with a handsome cherry wood spinning wheel who seemed to be making awesome yardage. And closer to me was a German woman who constantly complained of the low-quality fleece she was trying to spin. No matter. The PVC lady won and the German lady took fourth place.
Dutchess County is in the Taconic range of high hills. They are at their absolute peak in terms of color as the sugar maples take on the scarlet and gold of the last breath of summer. We took up residence in a New York State Park down the road from the festival. We were ensconced in a wooded glade, peaceful beyond belief. But cool... quite cool. So we ran our propane heater in the evening before retreating under our down comforter.
Now, on Sunday, we begin our trek south.

Draco Malfoy is Dead

2010-10-04T05:06:00.000-07:00

John carries the captured Draco Malfoy out of the hen house while Cassy recoils from the bird's evil eye.
I bring you great news. Draco Malfoy, the rooster ruling the hen house at grand-daughter Trisha's place in Kent, Connecticut, is dead.

Malfoy (named after one of the evil characters in the Harry Potter series of books) was a bit of a wicked bastard. He pecked me at the back of my knees when I went into the hen house to pick up the daily dozen eggs. He chased Trisha and terrorized her to the point she was unwilling to do the daily chores in the hen house. But his days were numbered when a farmer up the road said he was planning to slaughter 100 chickens and would be happy to include Malfoy in the batch.

Our son in law, John, entered the hen house at dusk on Sunday. He had learned the art of grabbing and controlling the rooster: you lay him on his back and he immediately quietens. He slid him into a borrowed cage and Malfoy, when released, set up an awesome squawk while jabbing his beak through the cage. But it was too late. Now Malfoy's hours were numbered.

The farmer asked Lynn if she wanted the dressed rooster back for dinner. She wasn't that keen. But when the farmer said it would cost $5 either way, she decided she'd bring home the carcass. We ate Malfoy but found him to be a skinny bird... no breast meat to speak of, and dark meat that was almost black. But he tasted pretty good.

2010 Journey

2010-10-03T14:29:00.001-07:00

Click here to view this photo book larger

So, How Much Did It Cost?

2010-09-21T07:55:00.000-07:00

Our rig, parked in the repair facility in Mobile, Alabama.

A number of our blog friends (mostly those who have an RV) have asked me to share details about the cost of our trip. Even though we have not finished the entire journey (we have about 1,350 miles to go before we return to our roost in Palmetto, Florida, for our winter stay) we thought it might be of interest to you to see the breakdown.

We have pretty exact costs because, first, we budgeted what we expected to spend and, second, we track every expense with Quicken on the computer.

This accounting does not detail costs of eating since we would eat no matter where we are. We do delineate the costs associated with campgrounds for overnight or longer stays.

Repairs were hard to budget - but we guessed we would face fairly extensive costs because we have a 12-year-old rig. I had actually budgeted $2,500, so we blew that budget because our repairs were a bit more extensive.

Travel, by the way, includes loading our rig and car and ourselves aboard the Alaskan ferry system. It also includes costs associated with repairs when we had to leave our rig overnight and take a motel room. It also includes costs of travel to Mayne Island, off Vancouver, when we visited our friends from Namibia.

The cost per mile is the simple calculation of dividing the total expenses by the number of miles driven. I did not attempt to calculate the miles per gallon because it is impractical. When we dry camp we run the generator and that uses gasoline from the fuel tank. So any calculation of mileage would be incorrect because that unknown amount of fuel cannot be deducted from the amount used to drive the rig. I might mention that, in addition to the cost of the gas for the rig, we also bought $330 worth of gas for the car. And we drove 2,500 miles in that car, separate from all the towing miles which, happily, do not register on the odometer. Only the tires and the dings on the front of the car show the real wear and tear on the car.

Journey to Alaska Costs
Gas $4,741.04
Overnight $2,594.94
Repairs $4,829.94
Propane $166.86
Tolls $37.25
Travel $2,735.78
Other $41.67
Total $15,147.48

Miles Traveled 12,413
Cost per Mile $1.22

On the Home Stretch

2010-09-08T08:37:00.001-07:00

There is nothing quite so pleasurable as stopping and resting after a voyage of many months. And so we are. We have been languishing in Vermont with daughter Stephanie and her family. We're parked in their side yard and at last have found a mechanic who was able to diagnose and order the parts to repair the emergency brake system on our RV.

The miracle, to me, is that I have been able to nurse this rig across the whole of north America, from Haines, Alaska, to here in Colchester, Vermont. It has meant many stops and much scrunching under the rig, pouring transmission fluid into the emergency brake reservoir. This allows the dying pump to activate and release the emergency brake when I put the rig into gear. Without that fluid, the pump would be unable to disengage the brake. Now the parts are ordered and will be installed next Wednesday. Then we'll head south to daughter Lynn's house in Kent, Connecticut.

While we've lingered in Vermont, we have celebrated birthdays of our grand kids, as well as Stephanie's mother-in-law and ourselves. I took our grandson, Graham, to see comedian Bill Cosby at the state fair last Sunday. Graham is a huge fan of the reruns of the Cosby Show. The comedian now is 73 and, as Graham noted, “he's pretty fat.” I enjoyed the show much more than did he because Cosby's 90-minute live show is nothing like his old TV show.

Graham Bertoni (right)
He is a master or the pain of growing up – at least, what growing up was like 60 years back when parental brutality was more the accepted norm. This is so far outside the understanding of an eight-year-old boy today and Graham sat with an unknowing smile on his lips while we watched Cosby's riff on parental beatings, teacher beatings, and assorted other abuses of small people. It's a different era.

Isabella, who has just turned 12, is an aspiring and talented singer. She presented three half-hour concerts at the state fair in which she sang and played her keyboard for the entertainment of the general public. Imagine the excitement when a woman approached after a performance and asked for her autograph.

Isabella

Jo has been sewing, as well as practicing her portable spinning wheel. And she knits like Madame DeFarge, creating socks in many splendored colors.

We spent a wonderful time in the middle of Michigan with two people Jo and I have come to cherish. Mary and Merve Parsons live in our RV Resort in the wintertime. But they scurry north each year and set about tilling their garden. They raise an astonishing range of crops - from potatoes to beans, to tomatoes of all varieties, to Indian corn, peaches, apples, cherries, squash, watermelon, carrots, beets. And the list goes on. Mary then cans much of this so they have a year's supply of food. Their knowledge base of this natural world is both inspiring and quite awesome. It reminds both of us of the very best of America. They embody that take-care-of-yourself ability that is sliding away with the years.

Then we passed back into Canada one more time to visit with my sister, Rose. She was widowed a couple of years back and it was heartening to see how she is reinventing herself and coping with her new world.

Our journey to Alaska will go down as one of the great adventures of our lives. It was hard work and it was physically challenging for us both. But we are so glad we persevered. We will never forget the encounters with grizzlies, bald eagles, orcas, humpback whales, wolves, caribou, moose, Dall sheep, goats, and a dozen other creatures great and small. But, as inevitably always is the case, it was the people with whom we interacted that leave the lasting memories. So many native Americans, the Russian Orthodox priest, so many settlers who have carved their spot in the wilderness, so many people who lent us a hand of friendship both on the land and aboard the ferries on our way south.

We have another 2,000 miles ahead of us before we park our rig on Florida's west coast for the winter months. So the potential is there for more adventures. But we are already thinking about 2011.

Thanks for coming along with us on this adventure. We hope you have gotten some unique glimpses into a rarely visited land.

Where the Buffalo Roam

2010-08-13T07:42:00.000-07:00

Meet Dakota Miracle (left) and Dakota Legend, both are true albino buffalo.

We're in the bread basket of America – Bismarck, North Dakota. You drive across the prairie – traveling in an ocean of corn, wheat, and sunflowers. There's something special about a billion sunflowers lined up to the horizon, all of them facing the rising sun like little soldiers awaiting orders for the day.

We have stopped at A Prairie Breeze Campground and the temperature is 98 degrees. We long ago left the rolling hills of Montana and came on Monday to Theodore Roosevelt National Park in Medora, North Dakota. It's a small national park, with a beautiful campground ($5) and we enjoyed the experience of being surrounded by a herd of 350 adult buffalo and a similar number of calves. On the road into the park, we passed numerous prairie dog towns. These are communities, identified by humps of burrowed out dirt, where the prairie dogs spend their days worrying about being picked off by coyotes or owls, or other wild life.

They usually sit at the highest point of their individual mounds, always keeping an eye open for danger. They set up a chatter when your stop to photograph them and, if they feel threatened, they make a dive for their burrows. They're very similar to meercats.

The buffalo just browse and wander at will. President Teddy Roosevelt lived in the western part of North Dakota (known as The Badlands) back at the end of the 19th century. He was a cattleman and had two farms.

We learned his neighbor was a Marquis de Mores who considered himself a great buffalo hunter. During the winter of 1881-82 this fellow reportedly killed more than 5,000 buffalo in southeast Montana. There must be a special place in hell for this kind of wanton killer. In his memoirs, later in life, he had the decency to write he wished his “aim had not been so good.”

While lingering a moment on this wanton destruction, I learned more about the train trips to kill buffalo. Back in the 1880s, people were invited on these excursions to shoot the buffalo from the train windows. The object was to kill the buffalo for their tongues. That was all that was taken from the dead animals which were left to rot on the prairie. More than three millions buffalo were slaughtered in this way in a single year.

Jo and I attended an evening lecture and slide presentation by a park ranger who spoke about Roosevelt's dynamism and how he overcame huge odds – he was so asthmatic as a child that he could not attend school. His wife and mother died within days of each other of typhoid (mom) and a condition developed at childbirth (his wife). But his sister, after a year, connected him to an equally dynamic woman and he quickly married her and produced five more children.

He was a maverick politically and the Republican Party never did take to him. They thought, stupidly, that they should tuck him away as a vice president to McKinley. McKinley won the election, then promptly was assassinated so Teddy took over the reigns.

He was presented with a brown bear cub by an admirer but he asked that the cub be released. This got some press and a woman made a stuffed bear which she sent to him, asking if he would permit her to make these bears and call them “Teddy” Bears in his honor. He gave the go-ahead and that's how we now have a teddy bear culture.

We struggle with the dichotomy of Roosevelt being a great conservationist and, at the same time, a great white hunter who made numerous trips to Africa and shot elephant, rhino, cape buffalo and many other creatures. Many of these were stuffed and now are displayed in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

On our way back to the RV, we walked through the campground and passed a cluster of campers who pointed a flashlight to the ground. There was a sizable rattle snake, coiled, rattling and really angry about being disturbed. Jo and I later sat outside in the rich darkness at our site and watched the milky way, along with the space station and other assorted heavenly bodies passing overhead.

Thursday, Aug. 12
We stopped along the highway to visit the National Buffalo Museum in Jamestown, North Dakota. This is the home of the legendary white buffalo, White Cloud, born on July 10, 1996 on a private farm in Michigan, ND. She has been certified a true albino buffalo and is revered as a sacred animal by the Lakota native Americans.

White Cloud gave birth to her first calf, Princess Winona, in July 2000. It was brown; she had three more brown calves through the years. On August. 31, 2007, White Cloud gave birth to her fifth calf, an albino! This calf, a bull, was named Dakota Miracle. The herd at the museum truly became legendary on May 31, 2009, when a third white calf was born to one of the herd's brown buffalo.

Unfortunately, it was raining and blowing a gale when we stopped by the museum. We were able to enjoy the exhibits – but the sacred buffalo were hiding down in the hollows and washes. They all are allowed to roam freely so we were unable to visit with these remarkable creatures.

It was a superb opportunity, however, to learn more about the traditions of the Lakota peoples. We learned, for example about White Buffalo Calf Woman. She came to the Lakota people a very long time ago. She met with two Lakota scouts and appeared out of a white cloud on a sunny day. When she stepped out of the cloud they saw she was the most beautiful women they had ever seen.

Then one of the scouts, being foolish, had bad thoughts and spoke them. But the other said, “That is a sacred woman; throw all bad thoughts away.” When she came still closer, they saw she wore a fine white buckskin dress, that her hair was very long and that she was young and very beautiful. And she knew their thoughts and said in a voice that was like singing: “You shall go home and tell your people that I am coming and that a big tipi shall be built for me in the center of the nation.” The braves did as they were told and the people built the tipi and she came in four days.

As she came into the village, there came from her mouth a white cloud that was good to smell. Then she gave something to the chief. It was a pipe with a bison calf carved on one side – to mean the earth that bears and feeds us, with 12 eagle feathers hanging from the stem – to mean the sky and 12 moons. These were tied with grass that never breaks.

“Behold,” she said. “With this pipe, you will be bound to all your relatives. Nothing but good shall come of it. Only the hands of the good shall take care of it and the bad shall not even see it.”

The woman stayed with the people four days and nights. During this time, she showed them how to prepare the pipe.... then she showed the men how to smoke it. Thus the pipe came to our people.

The sacred woman then took her leave, saying, “Always remember how sacred the pipe is, and treat it as such. I am leaving now but I shall look back upon the people,” and she promised to return in time of need.

She walked in the direction of the setting sun, and then she stopped and rolled over four times. The first time, she got up and became a black buffalo, the second time a brown buffalo, the third time a red buffalo, and the fourth time she rolled over she became a white buffalo. This buffalo walked on further, stopped, and after bowing to each of the four directions of the universe, disappeared over the hill.

This story has been passed down by the Lakota (Sioux) Elders.

Going-to-the-Sun Road

2010-08-07T16:10:00.000-07:00

One of the most photogenic spots on the highway. The tiny island is Wild Goose Island.

Going-to-the-Sun Road that carves its way through Glacier National Park in Montana is a bit of an engineering marvel. It also is a magical mystery ride that unfolds one vista more dramatic than the next when you travel its 50 miles.

We set out in our Honda (vehicles larger than 21 feet at not permitted on the road and you learn why very quickly). The road clings to a cliff wall, carved in the 1930s. There are rocky overhangs that jut out about 10 feet above your head. This is not a highway for the faint of heart. But those who go are rewarded well.

We wound our way up from the valley floor. At our first picture stop, however, Jo tripped on her handbag strap when she left the car. She cut her hand on the gravel quite deeply and skinned her knees as well as bruised and bled at her eyebrow. The hand wound was the deepest and dirtiest. Her handbag, however, seems to contain everything from coins to screw drivers to wet-wipes and bandages (go figure!). We got her cleaned up as well as could be done, and decided we would stop and talk to a Ranger at the Logan Pass Visitor's Center for some real first aid.

The journey begins with you looking up in awe at the spiking rocky peaks. Eventually, however, you are driving among them and, when you reach Logan Pass, you are halfway up the mountains at 6,646 feet. This is the Continental Divide. Now you can look across the valley far below and see the glaciers that are receding so rapidly in this part of the world that climatologists say all will be gone by 2030. So get your tickets now. This stuff will not last! During the last Ice Age, of course, there were glaciers here that were 5,000 feet thick with ice. Those days will not return until man has departed this planet, however.

The Ranger at Logan's Pass checked Jo out to understand why she had collapsed. He felt better when he determined the issue was klutziness and not related to an older person having a spell of some kind. He gave her an alcohol pad, neosporin and band-aids and we were on our way.

On the other side of the pass, you descend to a hairpin curve that sucks the air right out of your lungs. One moment you are virtually kissing a cliff face of sheer rock. They next you have reversed direction and you feel as though you are hanging out on the edge of a precipice – which you are! MacDonald Lake, at the bottom of the valley provided respite. Lots of people played in the cold water aboard canoes and rubber rafts. We lunched there and decided prudence dictated that we not reverse our journey on this remarkable road. We decided to drive around the southern edge of the park and out into Blackfeet Indian country.

Many of the neat homes have one or two tepees in the back yards. This would be where the young Indian kids sleep out in the summer months.

On our way south from Alberta on Friday, we passed a little town called “Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump”. We didn't drive the 20 kilometers to the town because we were trying hard to get across the border into Montana. But a check on the Internet showed this is a UNESCO world heritage site. This is where Blackfeet used to drive the buffalo over a cliff to their deaths in the days before the white man came and farmed the prairies and indiscriminately shot millions of buffalo for their hides from the window seats in trains crossing the prairie.

Bad and Good News

2010-08-03T23:09:00.001-07:00

If you have a float plane in Ketchikan, you can park it at the municipal lot.

Some good news – and some bad news. We were in a campground in Hazelton, British Columbia, last night and a young First Nation man named Keith (of the 'Ksan people) offered us a sockeye salmon he had just pulled out of the Skeena River. She (for that was her gender) measured about 14 inches and weighed around 7-8 pounds. I initially said thanks, but no thanks. Jo then asked if he would clean it for us and he said he could do that. We agreed on a price of $10 which seems like a pretty good bargain for sockeye ($12 a pound in the local market).

Keith asked for a filet knife which we don't own. I offered him our handy-dandy Ginsu bread knife which he spurned. Jo found a Heinkel knife which was sharp enough to do the job and he cut off her head and scooped out the entrails. I handed him my $10 Canadian and told him we'd think about him when we ate the fish.
We cut it up into six thick steaks so we have three excellent meals in our future. That's the good news.

Bad News is we have developed a nasty drip-drip of brake fluid from our emergency brake system. This is one of the poor pieces of design on our rig. While we were in Alaska, we left a campground with the brake on and didn't notice the warning light for just under a mile. We stopped, re-set the brake and the light went off. But it came on every time we stopped thereafter. In Haines, Alaska, before we boarded the ferry for the first of the five legs of the journey by ferryboat, we found a mechanic who discovered the brake fluid had splashed all over the undercarriage. He topped up the reservoir and the light went out. I thought we were out of the woods. But two days later, the light stayed on when I moved the gear into drive.

Since then, I have spent a fair amount of time on my back under the rig, topping off the fluid while getting lots of it in my hair.

When we arrived in the large city of Prince George, BC, today, we visited the GM dealership and they said they'd have to order the switch that is probably broken from Vancouver and it won't come until Thursday. For that privilege, they would have to charge $99.80 for shipping. The part, they said is $89. I had already found the part on the Internet for $33 so that stuck on my craw. I told them I'll wait until I get back across the border and get the $33 part shipped to me somewhere in Montana or South Dakota. In the meantime, I'll be bathing my head in dripping fluid. Who said this was the easy life?

We thoroughly enjoyed the ferry experience – although I can't say I can recommend driving on and off the ferries at low tide. It seemed that every departure but one occurred at low-low tide. The ferry people do a wonderful job of placing blocks of wood on the ramp so you don't rip the rig apart when your rear end trails on the metal ramp. And they are very good about guiding you when you back up 50 or 60 feet into the bowels of the ferry boat (scary stuff that!).

But the traveling down the marine highway is definitely to be recommended. It was a real treat to get off at these tiny little Alaskan towns like Sitka, Wrangell and Ketchikan and explore the local aboriginal culture. Most of these towns are essentially aboriginal so it is a great way to meet the local folks in their home (and real) environment.

I even was able to help one Tlingit woman replace the flat tire on her tattered old car.

In Russian Alaska

2010-07-29T10:12:00.001-07:00

Arrival of these two cruise ships adds more than a third to Sitka's population.

Sitka's radio station began the morning news with the most important news first – just like a real radio station should. “Two cruise ships will arrive in Sitka this morning, Zaandam and Radiance of the Seas. They will bring 3,645 passengers ashore.” People with money were about to arrive. Get your sweatshirts and caps and Alaskan knives and Russian Orthodox gee-gaws out on the sidewalk. The tourists are coming. The tourists are coming.

We drove downtown on a beautiful Chelsea morning. Clouds wreathed the extinct volcano that is the backdrop to the town. But the sparkling sun showered the harbor with diamonds on the water. Delicious.

And in came the tourists. Sitka is too small to permit a cruise ship to dock. So the enormous ships parked out in Sitka Sound and ferried their passengers ashore. The difference between Tuesday and Monday in the little town was the difference between night and day. Sitka has 8,969 souls and was humming with activity. On Monday, we basically owned the town. We could park and walk at will.

We were able to visit St. Michael's Cathedral because the tourists were in. What opulence! Pretty much every wall was tarted up with silver and gold iconography. This is the former Russian capital of Russian America. The cathedral was consecrated in 1748. It was designed by Bishop Ivan Veniaminov who came here in 1834. This fellow truly was a renaissance man. Not only did he create a Russian-Aleut dictionary while working as a priest in the Aleutian Islands, he started another dictionary for the Tlingit aboriginals when he arrived here. He was a carpenter (constructed his own throne, plus lots of furniture in the Bishop's House which we visited on Monday). He also was a self-taught mathematician. Ninety percent of the congregation in the cathedral today is Tlingit.

The bishop was canonized as Saint Innocent in 1977.

On Monday, we'd visited the Bishop's house, a large but plain structure. It is the best preserved of four Russian structures in the western hemisphere. We then walked through the Sitka's National Historic Park where there is a collection of totem poles. Each tells a story about a Tlingit clan which was explained to us by using our cell phone. There is even a totem with a white man at the top. This totem story tells a story of thievery of shell fish and other goods. It was carved so the wrong could be righted. Was it? Doubtful.

Many of the stories of the poles dealt with the raven, which is considered the trickster who plays with men's lives. There are carving of whales, orcas, bears, frogs, as well as the topmost part which often shows a man in what looks like a top hat. They are actually the watchmen of the clans. The top hat get taller and taller as the watchman gains in stature.

We boarded Columbia for the next leg of our voyage south. Because this was an overnight leg, we got a berth so we could sleep in comfort. Some of our fellow passengers were much more rugged. They set up their tents on the rear deck, holding them down with duct tape.

We awoke in the middle of the night when we docked in Petersburg. Then we were off, through Wrangell Straits, arriving at 7:45 a.m. On time.

Jo was the first vehicle off, aboard the Honda Fit. I was not to lucky. I was the largest rig aboard and the crew had me back up about 50 yards with one inch to spare on each side of the rig. Just a little stressful!

We parked in a Tlingit-run campground to the south of the little town. Wrangell is too small to receive and handle cruise ships and, as a result, calls itself “the true Alaska.” Well, maybe. There were little kids on the waterfront, selling garnets they are allowed to chisel from the rock face across from the town.

The town has about 1,800 people– down from 2,550 in five years. “The young people leave here and never return,” one local woman told us when we visited the petroglyph beach. This is a place where 8,000-year-old petroglyphs (carvings in stone) are lying on the beach between high and low tide marks. They are thought to have been created by the people who came to Alaska before the Tlingit Indians.

Just north of the petroglyph beach is Dead Man's Island. Back in the 1800s, Chinese workers at the local salmon canning factory were taken there when they died. Their bodies were pickled in brine and placed in wooden casks before being shipped back for burial at home in China. All of this is described in great detail by James Michener in his must-read novel, “Alaska.”

In the evening, we drove and hiked to Nemo Point, south of town. We had the place to ourselves and the perfection of the peaceful scene left us breathless. We sat 2,000 feet above Zimovia Straits and watched the fishing boats shuttle back and forth in the sparkling waters below. There was not a sound to be heard at this height – not even a bird. Jo maintained a soft chatter – mostly to alert bears of our presence - but none appeared.

We managed to get into Chief Shake's House on the waterfront on Thursday morning. This is a Tlingit tribal house. The carvings inside were extraordinarily good (see photo album). Happily, Chief John, a Tlingit who also is of the Wolf clan, spoke with us about the traditions. He also showed us a traditional Tlingit canoe he himself had carved 15 years ago. Beautiful workmanship and lines to this little vessel.

Death in the Afternoon

2010-07-25T20:04:00.000-07:00

This female sockeye salmon finds the perfect spot in her natale stream to place her eggs.

The end is near for the hundreds, no, thousands of sockeye salmon in the creek that runs into Gastinaeu Sound, Juneau.
There is something exquisitely sad in the watching of this death and life drama play out. The salmon congregate in the stream, flicking their tails as they burrow to create a safe place to drop their millions of eggs. They are spent. They are surely at the end of their cycle for the dorsal fins are ragged, there are cuts and breaks on their mouths. But there is this sense of divine destiny in the air. They have this final mission: return to the stream of your birth – your natal stream – and lay the eggs that will allow the cycle to continue.
They left this precise stream two to five years ago. They found the great Pacific and wandered through the ocean. This came after they had been born in the stream and absorbed their yolk sacs. After emerging from the gravel they fed on tiny aquatic insects. Chinook, coho, and sockeye salmon spend one to three years in fresh water before migrating to the ocean. Pink and chum salmon migrate directly to the ocean after emerging from the gravel. The young salmon are called “smolts”.
Now the sockeye had made their return. Think about the shock to their system as they make the transition from life in the salt water to life in the clear, fresh stream that roars down from the mountains that make the dramatic backdrop to Juneau. They have long since stopped eating. Now they have one task and one task only: spawn.
The eagles and the gulls stand on the banks of the stream and wait and wait and wait. They surely know from where their next meal is coming.
When the salmon has spawned and the eggs have rested in the comparative safety of the stream bed, the male sockeye moves in and fertilizes. Then they die. It is that sad and that simple. They have completed the life cycle. They gasp on the bed of the stream, they lie on the bottom, letting the fresh water pour over them. And they die. Hundreds of thousands of them just die.
It is moving and sobering to watch this scene play out. There is no joy here. But there is a sense of “mission accomplished.”

The night before we left Haines aboard the Matinuska, the oldest ship in the Alaskan ferry system, we were alerted to something on the beach in front of our RV by a tap on our door. A Grizzly Bear was wandering on the beach. He was young, looked to be about 500 pounds in weight and walked and ran at a frightening speed. He'd stand on his hind legs, rising to an intimidating height of six or seven feet. Then he'd run again. Even though the sun was set, I grabbed my camera and tried to photograph this bear. The result is interesting, to me. Because of the long exposure I was lucky enough the create an impression of the bear.
The following morning, we drove to the ferry and there he was again, crossing the road in front of us. He stopped, gave us a look, then trundled on down the bank at the side of the road. This is one of the things that makes this the trip of our lifetimes.

It's about FREEDOM

2010-07-22T22:03:00.000-07:00

Dave Stancliff and his teenage musicians entertain us with stories about Alaska at the Tok RV Resort.

Dave Stancliff was our entertainer of the evening. He is a guitar-playing-songwriter and story-teller about all things Alaskan. We were in Tok RV Park and his concert was part of the services offered. Tok is 90 miles from the Canadian Border and is a key crossroads since this is where you have to decide whether to head for Anchorage or up to Fairbanks. He was accompanied by three high schoolers - Jenny on the fiddle, and brother-sister team Huff and Holly.
Jenny told us the schools never close because of weather in Tok. But, when the temperature drops below minus 30F, the kids are allowed to skip school without it counting against them. But she said she'd gone to school earlier this year when the temperature was minus 73F. This may explain why she was school valedictorian at graduation this year.
They entertained well enough but Dave's stories were what enthralled. He explained why he has spent the better part of his 60 years in Tok. “No taxes, no law enforcement, no laws so you can't break any. We're free.”
Jo fretted about this after the concert. She couldn't figure out how anyone could live without paying taxes. But it was clear there were no services in Tok. But she persisted. “Who is paying the teachers, building the schools and fixing the roads?” So we decided to stop by the office on our way out on Tuesday morning. The woman behind the counter was quite happy to answer Jo's questions. “We decided not to vote ourselves into a borough,” she said. “So we have no town officials, no building inspector, no police, nobody who wants to 'help' us.”
In answer to the next question about schools, she said the state pays. “But who pays the state?” I asked. She looked at me as if I were an idiot. “The oil pays, of course,” she said. Same goes for the repair of the highways. Because Tok is unincorporated, the state has to maintain the roads. What about the state police? Same answer. State pays.
So if you, by now, are getting aboard your SUV and heading north to live free, I'd recommend against that. While the country is spectacular and the wildlife is unmatched, we're not over-enthused about the run of the mill Alaskans we have met. Obviously there are exceptions, but we have found them to be self-centered and very much looking to pick a fight with anyone who believes the federal government can actually do anything worthwhile. The Alaskans we've met – many of them – remind me of branch office workers I've worked with over the years. When you're cut off from the mother ship an inevitable sense of second-class citizenship seems to built and you are quick to look for slights and the sense that the main office doesn't really care much what happens to you. Everything bad happens in the lower 48 states, from many of their points of view. Finally, they drive with such foolishness, ignoring double yellow lines on the two-lane roads, that it is a miracle there are not more deaths from rollovers. And there's hardly a road sign that hasn't been shot out with bullets.
But life is pretty free. It really does live up to its license plate logo: “The Last Frontier.”

On our way to the border on Tuesday, I was fiddling with our computer navigation program when Jo, who was driving, slammed on the brakes and said, Oh my God! Oh my God. Oh my God.” By the time I looked up, a female moose and her calf were ambling onto the highway 15 yards ahead of us. Jo swerved and brought the rig to a halt. I grabbed my camera. But mom and her calf decided they had enough of this and quickly scooted back down the hill and into the trees.

We decided to revisit Kluane Lake, one of our favorite spots in the Yukon Territory. Amazingly, our first campsite was vacant and we moved in. A Swiss couple and their grown son arrived by van and set up their tent beside us. There are warnings about doing this between mid-July and September because this is bear country and the soapberries are out right now - a favorite of the grizzlies. They had flown into Yukon (Whitehorse, actually) from Zurich and rented the van.

The campground view was just as - if not more - spectacular. much of the snow is off the high peaks. But the wreathing clouds on the mountains made the place mysterious and cozy.

We arrived at Haines on Thursday afternoon. Haines is our departure point on the ferry system. Our car and rig are coated in dirt from the gravel road we traveled for 100 miles from the U.S. Border into Canada. I call this the 100-miles-of-hell highway. It is bone-jarring and hard on the vehicle. The only solution is to drive at 25 miles an hour. And that doesn't keep the dirt down. But it doesn't ruin the rig.
We parked on the waterfront in Haines and licked our wounds. The car didn't start when we unhooked it from the rig: our first real casualty. We jump-started it and then ran it for a few hours to charge the battery.
We head out aboard the ferry on Saturday morning and will make stops at Juneau, Sitka, Wrangell, Ketchikan and leave the ferry when we reach Prince Rupert, British Columbia, on Aug. 1.

Free Fish

2010-07-19T19:25:00.000-07:00

The fish wheel spins in the river and scoops up salmon that are trying to head upstream. The buckets dump the fish (lower, center) into a box alongside the wheel.

The fish wheel is a perpetual motion machine. The Copper River propels it. We received permission from Angus DeWitt, the grumpy Athabaskan native on whose property the wheel is located, to drive through and look at the wheel. As we stood on the bank on a drizzly evening, the river roared through on its way to Valdez. The salmon, heading upriver to spawn and die, have to run this gauntlet. There's an immature – but enormous – eagle perched on a fallen tree halfway across the river. He's waiting to see what he can collect.
The roaring river hits the baskets in the wheel and propels them, scooping up anything that is trying to pass upriver.
I made my way down the slippery bank and looked into the box at the side of the wheel. There were six salmon lying in there. I retreated to the bank and waited two minutes. A salmon appeared in the rotating wheel. It ferociously tried to find its way out of the scoop. He fell, twisting on the way down, and fell onto the wheel support system. It took him a second to wriggle off the wood and back into the river. Whooo! Close call. Two minutes later, the same thing happened. Two minutes after that, however, a salmon ended up in the scoop and didn't move fast enough. He ended up being caught in the box. Another few minutes passed and yet another salmon was picked up but escape death by performing a wonderful leap that took him to freedom.
The wheel is owns by someone other than Angus (which probably accounts for his grumpiness). You are welcome to pick out a fish (you are permitted 250 salmon per year). But you must report to a Ranger station to show a fin, along with the permission you have received from the wheel owner to collect fish. The Ranger will contact the owner to verify you have his permission.
We came here to Slana, in the middle of the wilderness on the road between Glenallen and Tok, on a visit to Brian and Jean Johnson's little cabin. Seven years ago, Brian had bought the shell of a cabin and five acres of land from a homesteader. The cabin housed the local preacher and was one room. He set about living in the plywood box while he strengthened the structure. He added insulation and then added log facing to the cabin. He built an attic bedroom and installed a couple of support beams to carry the load.
Brian said when he showed Jean the original cabin/hut she stood there and just laughed. But they have carved a beautiful little home in the wilderness. Life took a step toward modernity two years ago when the electric grid came through. Till that time, they had been living with a loud and heavy generator. “It was tough to get that started in the morning when the temperature was 30 degrees below zero,” Brian said. They would drag the generator into the cabin and warm it in front of the wood stove. Then they could get it to start. They found if they bought a smaller generator, they could start that after storing it inside the cabin. The heat from the exhaust would then be pointed at the larger generator and that would eventually unfreeze it. So the arrival of the electricity was an enormous boost for them.
The couple said moose wander into their front garden regularly. The female moose have a nasty tendency to snap off the birch trees. They do not bother to munch on the lettuce and potatoes the couple grown.
Brian explained how he and his wife benefit each year from the Alaskan Pipeline fund. He said they each receive around $1,250 per year. This changes, depending on the flow of oil and has been as high as $2,500 per person. You must own property in Alaska and stay in the state for a minimum of six months and a day to reap this benefit.
We parked on a gravel pull-off space at the front of the house and were sitting in the living room when Steve, a neighbor, stopped by. He offered the couple some salmon that left over after he'd married off one of his daughters the previous day. We received a whole, cooked salmon which we chopped up and stored in our freezer. Steve is a trapper and artist. He told me he runs two trap lines, usually between late October and April. “I'll run one trap line one day, the other the next day,” he said. He traps martens, fox, wolf, mink. He says he find the meat of these animals is not that tasty, although he is partial to beaver. “Tastes like high quality beef,” he said. His wife makes hats from the pelts and they make jewelry from the teeth.
The previous day, Saturday, we'd driven to Wrangel-St. Elias National Park. This is a huge wilderness – 12 million acres and the park abuts the Kluane National Park in Canada. The place is pristine with huge mountain ranges and endless glaciers. But it is not very accessible – only two roads lead into the park. One of them is prone to being closed by washouts. This happened to be the case when we headed down the Nabesna Road. It had washed out and was closed.
We hiked through the boreal forest with a park ranger and learned much about this largest organism in the world. It extends across all of Canada,, from Newfoundland-Labrador, crosses into Russia and China and ends in Scandinavia. Many of the trees are white and black spruce. In addition, quaking aspen is a major player in the forest. We learned about the “drunken forest” caused by the tilting of shallow-rooted evergreens because of the permafrost. We came to appreciate the fragility of the permafrost. If you melt it, it can never be restored to the original state. Parking lots, and highways do a great job of destroying the permafrost – hence the roller-coaster ride in mainland Alaska where the permafrost heaves and sags because of the highway heat.

Monday, July 19, 2010
We drove north to Tok, a small crossroads town 90 miles from the Canadian border. We checked at the visitor center and discovered the road farther north, to Chicken, was opened this morning. But we've decided not to push our luck by driving this ragged road after the washouts we'd read about earlier in the week. We'll head for the Canadian border and retrace our route to our favorite campground of the entire trip at Kluane Lake. Then we'll head down to Haines, Alaska.

Land of Giants

2010-07-16T15:50:00.000-07:00

These are just a couple of the giants...from the Alaska State Fair.

We're in the Matanuska Valley, northeast of Anchorage. This is the vegetable garden for all of Alaska. But not just ordinary veggies, of course – whoppers. Here's a list of some of the records set for vegetables grown here:

35 lb. Broccoli
28 lb. Brussel Sprouts
127 lb. Cabbage
19 lb. Carrot
18 lb. Leaf Lettuce
83 lb. Rutabaga
569 lb. Winter Squash
168 lb. Watermelon
22.75 inches for the longest bean
16.75 feet for the tallest Sunflower

And it goes on and on. The reasons for this richness in the soil: glaciers. They macerated the rocks and created deep topsoil.

But the real story about this valley occurred in 1935 when President Roosevelt's administration colonized the valley by shipping 202 families from Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota here. They generally were farmers on the dole during the Depression. They were suffering through the worst drought in U.S. history. And they had nothing to lose when the government asked for volunteers to colonize this valley.

They came west by train, then north by ship. They initially were housed in tent villages built by the Civilian Conservation Corps. They were allowed to draw lots to receive their 40 acres of land. The deal included a house with between one and three bedrooms (depending on the number of children they brought with them), piped in water, a chemical toilet, and a repayment schedule that seems like a bargain to us: 30 years to pay back the government $3,000.

Amazingly, only 40 per cent of the families stayed on. Many buckled under the wilderness conditions, and the lack of medical support when their children began to die of measles and pneumonia. Eleanor Roosevelt eventually pushed hard for a hospital to be built for the colony. It's an interesting story of pursuing the American dream. There now are three of the original colonizers who continue to live today.

While I'm writing about records, you might as well indulge in some others about Alaska:
Alaska's coastline total 33,904 miles.
The U.S. Bought Alaska from Russia for 2 cents an acre... total cost: $7.2 million.
Alaska contains the northernmost (Point Barrow), westernmost (Amatignak Island) and easternmost (Semisopochnol Island, across the International Dateline) points in the U.S.
And Alaska's capital, Juneau, is the only capital in the U.S. With no road access; a boat or plane is the only way to get there.

A Map at Last

2010-07-15T10:12:00.001-07:00

In response to requests from our travelers, here's a map that shows our route through Alaska. We headed north to Fairbanks, came down to Anchorage, spent much time in the Kenai Peninsula. We sailed out of Seward and are now heading north and east. We arte in Eagle River, northeast of Anchorage.

If you click on the map, you'll enlarge it. If that doesn't work, Right click and choose "Open in a new tab". That should allow you to enlarge.

You might be interested to know we have had to have a major change in route on our way to Haines, Alaska. We'd planned to drive to Tok, then up to Chiucken and across the Top of the World Highway to Dawson City and down to Whitehorse, Yukon. But the road beyond Chicken was washed out in numerous areas after the river rose 20 feet on Saturday. There are a number of RVs trapped up there right now. So we will go to Tok, then head down to Haines Junction and on to Haines, where we are booked on the ferry system. It will cut 550 miles from our adventure.

Laughter in the soul

2010-07-13T18:02:00.000-07:00

This Humpback calf came alongside to entertain and explore before we came up close and personal with the Northwestern Glacier.

We were floating in the very center of Northwestern Fjord, in the Gulf of Alaska. The captain of our vessel, Alaska Explorer, had taken the engines out of gear. Now he put one forward and one in reverse and the vessel spun on her own axis. As he did this, I held my camera and recorded the majesty of the scenic panorama as it passed in front of my lens. I was laughing inside...laughing in the soul, you might say, for this was a wondrous moment. He allowed me – and the 121 other passengers to experience that sublime moment that comes but once or twice in a lifetime. This was that time.

The mountains surrounded us. The sky was cerulean blue, not a cloud was to be seen. As the boat pivoted, one glacier after another appeared in my viewfinder. The peaks were coated in snow and ice. Behind the peaks lay the Harding Icefield, all 334,485 acres of it, concealing mountains that lie under several thousand feet of ice. The glaciers, even though they are retreating at an alarming rate, are sky blue. And they are always on the move.

The captain, when we had pulled up alongside Northwestern Glacier, stopped all engines and said simply, “This is the time when I let the glacier speak to you.” And she did. She groaned, she rumbled, she belched and she let go of her ice which came crashing down, calving into the fjord. The kittiwakes, floating on the bergy bits teetered and floated along unperturbed. The harbor seals, great sausages of sleek fur, lay basking on the floating ice, the sun warming them, they in all their glory on this perfect day.

Before we had reached the fjord, we'd come down the Gulf of Alaska and had come upon a mother humpback whale and her year-old calf, “a 2010 model” our captain called the calf. The calf was exceedingly curious. He leaped from the water and then made his way over to our stopped boat. Mama lay back, allowing him to explore. He gave us such a show, rolling, breaching, popping straight out of the water, newly-grown barnacles on his jaw.

We poked into one cove after another, each a treasure trove of wildlife and birds. /a mother otter lay on her back with her baby on her belly. Sea Lions basked high on a rock, the bull surrounded by his harem. He bellowed his displeasure as we stood off at about 50 yards while the sea lions basked in the building tide. Black oyster catchers, with enormous red beaks nested among the pebbles on one beach. Horned puffins, as well as tufted puffins fluttered like bats. They both are members of the Alcid family. This species come to land only to nest. Then they produce their young and head out for three years . They propel themselves through the water with their wings which are quite different from other species of birds. Their wing bones are solid to provide more strength for “underwater flying.” When they fly they always flap their wings. The moment they stop flapping, they begin to fall.

Jo and I befriended an Indian couple aboard our vessel, he from Mumbai, she from New York City. They had two delightful daughters and had flown to Anchorage and then rented a small motor home. He worked at Microsoft in Seattle and she was an independent entrepreneur who had started her own wholesale and retail business on the Internet. He was determined to catch salmon and/or halibut and to fly to Kodiak Island to see the Grizzly Bears catching their salmon.

The weather deteriorated as the afternoon wore on. We were back in the Gulf of Alaska and the waves rose along with the swells. The captain did a fine job of minimizing the impact by working toward the windward shore so we were less subject to the unpleasant effects of the sea. But it also was good to return to the harbor, tired but uplifted by the extraordinary experience with nature at its best.

Close Encounters with Eagles...and Finding Glaciers

2010-07-11T16:14:00.000-07:00

Jo stays warm in her arctic parka while viewing Exit Glacier in Seward.

Next to messing about in boats, there may be nothing quite so enjoyable as lingering by the banks of a river, watching fishermen casting for their fish. And it matters not whether the fish are there or choose not to take the bait. We sat by the side of the Russian River, on the Kenai Peninsula, watching this scene and transported by the dreams of all the fishers who lined the banks and who took to dories. This is the time the salmon will make their run upriver. The salmon are downriver in Soldotna, a fisherman told me. But they haven't found their way up the icy turquoise-colored glacier river yet.
We'd planned to stay the night alongside the river. There's a primitive cable ferry here that will haul you and your gear to the other side of the racing river – it flows at around 6-7 knots and the ferry is hauled back and forth on its cable while the skipper strains at the wheel to keep the boxy vessel pointed into the roaring stream.

We had come up from Anchor Point, the most westerly point in them North American continent that is serviced by a highway. The point is at longitude 151.83746 degrees west of Greenwich, England. We had come to that place not to check off the “most westerly point” but to spend time up close with Bald Eagles. We were not disappointed.

Jo and I first wandered through the underbrush, alongside the Anchor River. We rounded a bend and there was the river. More importantly, there were the eagles. They had caught their own salmon and they took turns tearing at it and gulping down the rich meat and roe. They were surrounding by a haranguing retinue of gulls and crows, all of them hollering and yakking trying to claim their piece of the action. The eagles were silent since they owned the salmon. And they had no intention of sharing their catch. I walked the bank and they watched me. I tried to get close so I could capture the moment. The eagles worked with me and I was able to capture the feeding frenzy.

After supper, we wandered to the beach and found a whole new batch of eagles cleaning up the halibut guts that fishermen had left on the shore.

I worked my way along the stony beach, closing with a particularly handsome bird. He just stood on the sand offering himself to me. It reminded me of years ago in Africa when a klipspringer, a small antelope, stood in the cleft of a red rock face. He waited for me to work my way up the rocks so I could photograph him in the cleft. When I showed that picture to one of the reporters later and told him how the klipspringer had awaited me, Christoff Maletsky looked at me and said simply, “He offered himself up to you, Robert.” Christoff, of the Damara tribe, had grown up in the area where I'd been photographing and he knew the animal life intimately. So I experienced the same sense while working with the eagle.

He permitted me to gently approach him. I had started out 50 yards away. I edged slowly up the beach, trying not to disturb him. He looked at me with those awesome eagle eyes. He projected the sense that he could see me from 50 miles away. When I stopped about 10 feet away, I sensed he was getting a little nervous. Perhaps I was pushing into his personal space. Ten feet, though, is close enough. When you are that close, you can see the enormous talons. You can see the hooked beak. You can sense the massive power of the bird. I never felt in danger. But I did sense he could do with me what he wished with those talons and beak.

He allowed me to photograph him so his entire head filled my viewfinder. And then he turned his back and waddled along the beach for about 10 feet before opening his wonderful wings and lifting off with the greatest of ease. Now that was a moment as close to perfection as I have ever experienced.

Sunday, July 11
We've moved again, this time to Seward. What a drive this was. You come south between jagged peaks that are part of the Harding Icefield. There are too many glaciers to count – and all of them receding at record rates.
We parked on the edge of Resurrection Bay, in the city of Seward, and immediately set out for Exit Glacier. This is one of the few that are reachable on foot. We hiked into the Kenai Fjords National Park, passing many Japanese tourists who seem to take great delight in always photographing themselves at every outlook area. There must be something in the national character that demands to record their presence. We watched a father endlessly shoot his wife and two precocious children. When I offered to take his camera and photograph him with the whole family, however, he said, “No thank you.” Whatever.

Because we do not expect to come this way again, we have booked passage on a boat tomorrow for a 9.5-hour journey to Northwestern Fjord.

On Wings of Eagles

2010-07-06T11:34:00.000-07:00

This is a composite picture of the many Bald Eagles flying over the Ninilchik River area.

Hello. Ting Lee here. Just wanted to give you the lowdown on what I've been doing during the past seven months.
Today will be one of the more memorable of my life. We are, I'm told, on the banks of the Ninilchik River on the Kenai Peninsula. I got my first exposure to the giant bird you know as the Bald Eagle. Not just one.... but seven of them flew over, swooping and looking very menacingly at me. Now, I'm no fancier of bird flesh – I mean, I always get excited when I see birds chattering away – but these birds are 'way out of my league. They are huge. They have enormous talons. They do have a funny cheep that they make and it seems too small for their size. They were drafting on the uplifts from the cliffs at the mouth of the Ninilchik River. I'll never forget these birds.

Robert and Jo went into a church in Ninilchik that had been built by the Russians back in the 1800s when their fur traders sailed this coast. They met up with a man dressed in black, with ringlets hanging from his head. I didn't get into the church – unseemly for a cat to be in a church, the parental units said. But the man explained why the Russian Orthodox cross has two crosspieces on it, the lower one tilting up to the left. “This is pointing to the good thief on the cross beside the Lord Jesus Christ,” he said.
Robert asked about the congregation and the man explained there are only 20 people now who worship in the church. The services are mostly in English, although the older members like the Slavic tongue to be used, the priest said. “But all who lived here in the past come and are buried here when they die,” he said.

Robert said he noticed there were three new graves, in the cemetery. The cemetery is completely overgrown with weeds, so the 20 members of the congregation seem to have lost their need to maintain.

The man explained that the church leadership now resides in Long Island, New York. There are no ties to Russia since the Communist Revolution of 1917.

The parentals left me in the evening and returned to the mouth of the Ninilchik River. There, they spent the evening photographing more Bald Eagles. They said the eagles land on their prey like lions. All the gulls makes way for the eagles but are not happy to do so. They skulk around in circles and cry out their annoyance – very similar to hyenas at the water holes of Namibia, Robert says.

Two juvenile eagles and their papa landed together on a spit of land off the river mouth. They worked at tearing the discarded entrails of a halibut between them. Then, they split up and the mature adult flew off down the stony beach where he landed and offered himself up for a great portrait.

In the meantime, the fishermen, in their sturdy aluminum craft, headed back toward the mouth of the river. There were more than 65 boats crowding the mouth of the river, waiting for enough water to permit them to enter. A couple of boats edged in but immediately ran aground. One smaller boat came through, creating a giant wake and he rocked the stuck boat off the bar. But mostly the others had more patience and just waited for the tide to rise enough to permit entry around 10:30 at night.
There they unloaded their catch – halibut and salmon – into plastic containers. These were weighed then iced at the dock and loaded into a truck for transportation. The young girl who shoveled the ice and moved the boxes seemed to have the hardest job in the world. Her dad ran the forklift.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010
This morning we arrived in Homer, Alaska. This is on the most southerly spit of land on the Kenai Peninsula and is the halfway point, more or less, of our journey. Now we will head north and east after a few days.
We now have traveled 7,055 miles.

Slip Sliding Away

2010-07-01T08:47:00.000-07:00

This bergy bit is a breakaway piece of the Portage Glacier on Portage Lake, Kenai Peninsula.

This is your final warning: Get to the Kenai Peninsula as quickly as possible. Please don't wait another year. It might be too late.
We are on the northern edge of the peninsula – just a hop-skip-and-jump for Anchorage, 50 miles to the north.
We drove alongside Turnagain Arm, perhaps one of the prettiest drives in all of Alaska. It was named in 1778 by William Bligh of HMS Bounty fame. Bligh served as Capt. James Cook's Sailing Master on his 3rd and final voyage, with the aim to discover the Northwest Passage.
Upon reaching the head of Cook Inlet, Bligh was of the opinion that both Knik Arm and Turnagain Arm were the mouths of rivers and not the opening to the Northwest Passage. Under Cook's orders Bligh organized a party to travel up Knik Arm, which quickly returned to report Knik Arm indeed led only to a river.
Afterwards a second party was dispatched up Turnagain Arm and it too returned to report only a river lay ahead. As a result of this frustration the second body of water was given the disingenuous name "Turn Again".
The place is just crawling with glaciers. But the end is in sight. The glaciers here are in full retreat and what we saw will not last much longer. But what we saw is simply incredible.
We arrived on a dank, dismal day with low clouds shrouding the snow-covered mountains. We camped in the Chugach National Forest amid alders with their fluttering leaves. The mountains rise up in front of our RV through the mists.
We made our way by car to the nearby visitor's center and became immersed in the world around us. When we watched the movie of the Portage Glacier, we were inspired – but, at the movie's conclusion, the screen rose up, the curtain parted and we all sat before a glass wall that looked across Portage Lake. The glacier which had been visible when the center was built just a few years back, and which was designed to be the star of this presentation, has retreated around the side of a mountain and is out of sight.
We were a little depressed at this. But after a good night's sleep we decided to investigate. We hiked two miles up a path, gratefully wearing our anti-mosquito equipment. We arrived at Byron Glacier which, while retreating, also is a spectacular sight. The blue ice is a thick carpet for the underwater stream that pours down the mountain under the ice. We trekked onto the snowfield and photographed the beauty of it all.
Then we headed by our car through a tunnel that had been built in 1942 to permit supplies shipped into the port of Whittier to get inland. This tunnel, which run 3.5 miles through a mountain, now has been modernized so cars, RVs and trucks, as well as trains share the passageway. Trains go first. Then east-bound vehicles, then trains heading west, followed by vehicles. It's a toll road that is actually paying for itself. We arrived in the little town of Whittier which isn't much to write home about. There is an impressive harbor with lots of heavily built sailboats and powerboats. Many fishermen come through the tunnel, dragging their boats behind them. And the fishing is just beginning as the salmon is beginning to make their run back upstream to spawn. They are running two weeks late this year for some reason. So we are just at the start of this wondrous journey.
As we returned through this tunnel, the sun welcomed us on the Portage side. Not a cloud in the sky, spectacular visibility. We again visited the visitor center and listened to the recordings of the aboriginal people, telling about the subsistence lifestyle. We also heard recorded stories of a gold miner who was attacked by a Grizzly Bear. He was badly mauled but managed to roll away while the bear collected her cub. But then the bear made one more attack on the old man before leaving him. He then had to walk 20 miles through the mountains to Seward to get medical help. They don't make 'em tougher than that.
We listened to a geologist who had been walking and taking measurements on Portage lake when the massive 9.2 earthquakes his Anchorage in 1964. The quake continued for more than four minutes – a lifetime in quake history, since they normally last around 30 seconds. He said the frozen lake began to buck under his feet. Water disappeared under the ice, then returned and pushed through the frozen lake. He and his men scrambled for their lives and were rescued later in the day. In Anchorage that day, the quake was so violent that a subdivision on the south side of the city fell 30 feet and hundreds of homes disappeared. We had walked the path to this subsidence. There is a cliff there now and low wetlands where homes used to sit.

On Seeing Denali...The "High One"

2010-06-27T13:40:00.000-07:00

This Grizzly sow and her cub seem to have found some tasty treasure in this tree.

And on the third day of our visit, our patience was rewarded when Mt McKinley – or Denali, as she is known to the Athabascan people who refer to her as the “ High One” - allowed the cloak of clouds that almost always cover her to fall away. There she stood, all 20,320 feet of her. She rises more than 18,000 feet above the lowlands of Wonder Lake – a greater vertical relief than even Mount Everest.
But, on Friday afternoon, three days after we had arrived at Denali, she showed herself to us.
In the meantime, we had not wasted our time for we had the privilege of seeing five Grizzly Bears, a Lynx, Moose, five Wolves, a Coyote, a Golden Eagle, Snowshoe Hares, Caribou, too many Dall Sheep to even count and, perhaps, the most amazing thing of all: dozens of tiny Arctic Squirrels that are quite unique among all the animals. In the numbing cold of Denali's winter, their body temperature drops to 27 degrees F. Their hibernation is so complete that their blood actually freezes. But they return to life in the spring. Quite remarkable.
When you come here, you are not permitted to drive through the six-million-acre park on your own. This place is so huge it is larger than the state of New Hampshire. This is a preserve, created in 1917 to protect the Dall Sheep. It is necessary to travel on a shuttle bus or to walk into the wilderness. The road is 92 miles long. And the place only begins to yield wildlife when you go beyond the first 20 miles.
We packed our lunch, took a bus,and headed out. Our driver, John, described the park's history, as well as the flora and fauna. He mentioned Lynx but said it was highly unlikely we would see one of these reclusive animals. It was the first animal we saw! Passengers are asked to shout out “Stop” when they see an animal. One man did and when John stopped the bus and asked what he'd seen, he said, “I think I saw a Lynx.” I thought to myself, “Sure you did.” But there she was in the underbrush at the right side of us, slinking along, not that happy to be in our sight. I was unable, in the crush of people aboard, to get a picture but we both saw this massive cat.
But that was just the beginning. We watched and photographed a sow Grizzly and her two or three year old cub as they collected berries about half a mile from us. She even did something John said he'd never even known a Grizzly could do: She climbed a tree to get something that appealed to her. The Grizzly is not designed to climb trees like the Black Bear. Her claws are just too massive and long. But there she was.
We had been warned not to expect Dall Sheep to be too close to the road. These creatures are at their happiest when they cling to an almost vertical face of rock. But we came upon a bachelor group that had decided they'd take up residence on a knob of rock that was ridiculously close to the road.
Moose languished in ponds. They are so large, it would take the pelts of five Grizzlies to cover their bodies.
An Arctic Timber Wolf loped onto the road and looked at us insolently before jumping down the bank and making its way to the Savage River where he joined his mate. What an experience we had. Caribou were everywhere, the bulls and their enormous antlers are still covered in mossy fuzz for another five weeks while they continue to grow.
The next day, we visited the kennels at the park where a ranger explained this is the only national park to have teams of dogs that pull sleds in the wintertime. When the Denali road is closed with the first snows, the dogsled is used by the rangers to cut trails in the park for snow-shoers and skiers. They also are used to haul garbage out of the park – garbage that was placed there by miners back in the 1900s. A twelve-dog team can easily pull 1,300 pounds of material. We were invited to pet the Alaskan Huskies – very friendly dogs that are mutts in that they are a mix through the years of wolf, and all manner of other dogs so that they are bred for long legs, narrow feet and great stamina.

I found this Inuit myth in the kennel:

“The earth split in two and the men and the beasts were separated by a profound abyss. In the great chaos of creation, birds, insects, and four-legged creatures sought to save themselves in flight. All but the dog. He alone stood at the edge of the abyss, barking, howling, pleading.
“ The man, moved by compassion, cried, “Come”, and the dog hurled himself across the chasm to join them. His front two paws caught the far edge. The dog certainly would have been lost forever had the man not caught him and saved his life.”

Later in the day, as we made out way south by 100 miles, we decided to make another foray to view Denali. And there she was in all her pristine glory, with wreathes of cloud moving down upon her. A UFO-type cloud, with a mushroom top, hovered off to her south and the majesty of the moment was breath-taking. We lingered for three hours as we watched the weather work its way back and forth around the mountain and we were able to photograph the mountain and her surrounding foothills with the setting sun until 11:30 at night.

Sunday, June 27
The rains came in the night and that wrapped it up for Denali. We drove south to Wasilla, Alaska. This is the home of Simple Sara, the former governor of the state who has the remarkable ability to see all things in terms of black and white.... no grays.

Striking Gold in Fairbanks

2010-06-23T21:37:00.000-07:00

This is the result of our panning for gold at El Dorado Gold Mine.

The truck driver was lonely and wanted to chat. He lives in a man house, he told us. It has seven rooms with three bunks to a room. He misses his wife and his granddaughter and he says, “Money isn't everything.” But it surely helps him.
He told us his story as we sat outside the wi-fi connection at the Border City (Alaska) RV Park. He said he works between 10 and 16 hours a day. He is paid $34.75 an hour for the first eight hours and gets time and a half for anything over that. His lodging is paid for, as well as three meals a day. Tomorrow (Sunday) is steak night, he said with relish. When he heads out, driving his gravel truck, he is given two massive sandwiches for his lunch break.
“The only thing I have to pay for is cigarettes and toothpaste,” he said. So the money is useful. He has paid down half his mortgage on his home back in Edmonton, Alberta. But he still misses the wife and granddaughter.
“Last winter,” he told us, “I just packed up and went home for the dark time. Who needs the money that bad?”
I had asked him earlier in the conversation if he is paid by the shift or the season, or what. “Oh, no. We're all union up here. We're Teamsters. We get paid by the hour for every hour on the job.” And the job includes maintaining his rig. But he'd still not convinced that the money is worth it. “I sure miss that granddaughter,” he said as we left him.

Sunday, June 20
We're in Delta Junction, the official end to the 1443-mile Alaska Highway. The Alaska Pipeline – four feet in diameter, comes through Delta Junction on its way to Valdez, 240 miles to the south. When we parked at a little RV park on the outskirts of this town of 800 souls, there seemed to be no one at the park office. A sign directed me to the next door down and I knocked. A woman's voice called for me to come in. A woman in her 80s sat ensconced in heaps of papers and other debris. I asked about staying the night and she said, “It's $17. Pick any empty site.” She filled out some paperwork for herself and I handed over the cash. I asked if she was English because I detected a slight accent. “I'm Australian. Came here with my husband in 1966. He was Norwegian and I guess he felt Alaska was similar to Norway,” she said. We chatted for a while about Alaska and Australia and then I went back to our rig and picked a level site.
It was a little low at the rear wheels so I switched on our handy-dandy hydraulic jacks and began raising the rear of the rig. Suddenly I had a pink stream of hydraulic fluid gushing from behind the front wheels of the rig. I'd blown a hose. Happily, I was able to retract the half-lowered jacks on the rear. I fretted for a while, then called our road support system. They told me it was not a huge deal, that the driving would be in no way impaired.
We drove to the little town's gas station to see if someone in town could help us with the problem and were told the only guy would be Andy McNabb. We stopped by the Visitor's Center to ask for directions and the 20-something girl behind the desk, suggested I try 24-Hour Collision and Towing. “They taught Andy everything he knows,” the girl said. Sensing a slight conflict of interest, I asked if she was related to the folks at 24-Hour Collision. “That's my dad,” she said. Ah, a little bias here, I thought. But I thanked her and left with the numbers for all of the repair operations in town.
Next morning, I called 24-Hour and the girl's mom told me they could not repair the rig. She suggested I call Andy McNabb, which I did. Andy said bring it in and he could fix it. We did and he did in an hour. We had pinched the hose on one of our mighty hops over the jack-rabbit road into Alaska. We were on the road and on our way to Fairbanks inside the hour.

Fairbanks on Mid-summer's night. The perfect place. Sun sets at 12:47 a.m. And it rises at 2:57 a.m. Length of day: 21 hours, 50 minutes and 13 seconds.

I should mention there is no car or SUV or truck with Alaskan plates up here that does not have a pigtail of an electric plug hanging out the front grille. Every vehicle – EVERY vehicle – sports these to heat the engine block during the heartless -40 degree days that await in the cruel winters. To make life tolerable, you can purchase a device that switches on your vehicle's engine when the oil temperature drops to a specific temperature. The car runs for 8 minutes, then turns itself off. That's technology you won't need most other places.

Tuesday, June 22
We went off on the tourism trail today when we took passage on a stern-wheelers and cruised the Chena River, down to where it joins the mighty Tanana River. At the confluence, you could clearly see the chalky white Tanana meet and swirls its way to the west with the relatively clear Chena. It looked like coffee creamer was mixing with the coffee-colored water. Salmon that were born seven years ago and made their way downstream for they journey to the Pacific would return to the Chena, among other rivers and we marveled at their ability to find their way home to within 50 feet of where they started out – even though the rivers have changed course during their time of travel.

Along the way, we stopped along the river at an Athabaskan village where we were treated to the culture and the lifestyle of these people. We learned, interestingly, there is no word for “goodbye” in the Athabaskan tongue. It is just a word that has no place since it would indicate you'll not return. “Good luck” is used instead.
We were treated to a display of the superb parkas, made by the people. The best of these use wolverine fur because human skin will never freeze when it is covered by wolverine. In addition, caribou, ermine, arctic fox and beaver skins are used.
The boat was nearly full, including many busloads of people who had come up by cruise ship to Skagway and were then moved north and west, via railroad and buses. These folks would travel to Denali National Park, then Anchorage before flying home to the U.S.
We met, also along the riverbank, with the husband of one of Alaska's great mushers – a woman who had three times won the Ididarod Race from Anchorage to Nome. Susan Bucher died recently from cancer after running the 1,000-mile race a total of 17 times. Her husband spoke to us from the bank after demonstrating how he harnesses his dog team to an all-terrain vehicle and exercises them by flying through the bush at 23 miles an hour.

Wednesday, June 23
We continued on the tourism trail by heading out of town to the El Dorado Gold Mine. This is an old mine that you reach by train. We passed through a permafrost tunnel where a miner explained that the safe thing to do is to scrape and dig up the permafrost in the winter months. You drag the frozen dirt to the surface and stack it until the summer months. This is because the permafrost can be carved in the wintertime but if you expose it to the summer heat it will become mud and the mine could collapse.
The miners always are searching for the bedrock where the lode of gold might have found its way.
The old style mining was incredibly destructive to the environment, of course. Streams were rerouted and the mined permafrost was hit by steam that was generated by cutting down all of the fragile trees (fragile because it takes years for a tree to grow up here on a permafrost landscape.
We pulled into the sluicing area and watched demonstrations of panning for gold before being handed our dirt and a pan. Our job was to work our dirt out of the pan and find the grains of gold. Sure enough, I found $25.20 worth of gold and Jo managed to pan $10.10 cents worth. We proudly went to the gold doctor and he was happy to sell us a locket into which we could pour our gold dust. Now that's tourism of the highest order.
We drove back to Fairbanks and visited the amazing Museum of the North at University of Alaska. Very dramatic architecture. Inside, we were able to see only a tiny portion of the museum before power failed and we were required to wait in the lobby. We waited and waited for an hour. Still no lights. So we abandoned this adventure and asked for our money to be refunded.
Before the lights went out, though, I discovered that Aleuts in Alaska were removed from their homes in the out islands of the Aleutian chain of islands when the Japanese bombed Dutch Harbor in 1942. Dutch Harbor, as some of you may know, is the home base for the current crab fishing fleet that is featured in the weekly TV show “Dangerous Catch.”
We decided to head on south from Fairbanks because of the beautiful weather. We want to see Mount McKinley at Denali National Park. We made the 140-mile journey in good time and pulled into an RV campground just north of the entrance to the park. There we met up with two couples also from Florida. I asked them why they are following us!

If this is Kluane Lake, we want to stay forever

2010-06-19T16:42:00.000-07:00

Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, is a modern little city of 25,000 people on the banks of the Yukon River. We are in a place called Caribou Campground, on the outskirts, and I am inside a log hut in the campground, lighting a fire and stepping back 155 years.
The hut, built of spruce logs and chinked in the gaps with moss, is offered up by the owners of the campground to help you experience the lifestyle of the early settlers. It is 12 feet wide by 8 feet deep. There are a couple of windows in one corner, and a collection of early stores on the shelves. The firewood is there to encourage you to build your own fire. I get it crackling and the cabin begins to warm up. I sit there, thinking about those early settlers. There's a typed story on the wall that tells about Joe, the pioneer who came up from Seattle back in 1857. He was a loner. But he had a dog named George.
“Joe traveled all by himself. He carried a rifle, a couple of traps, a good knife, some tinned meat and coffee. He'd heard of the countless prospectors up in Dawson City, north of here, the hard job they did and their inability to deal with sudden wealth. He'd heard the only people getting rich in Dawson City were the owners of saloons, the guys selling eggs (one single egg at that time cost $4.00), the prostitutes and the gangsters. No. This was not what Joe was looking for. He wanted to head north to the Yukon to find solitude.
“Joe was a mountain man and not a very outgoing person. The only company he deeply enjoyed was his dog, a mutt. They say his name was George. Joe loved to discuss all sorts of things with his pal, who was a very good listener.
“It took him a long time until he found his place to stay, where he could live peacefully, without being bothered with too many human beings. He lived off the land; he hunted, fished and he collected 'fruits of the north'.”
The crackling fire lulled me and held me in that web of memories. My book fell out of my hands as I sat there by the fire and I dreamed of those early pioneers who defined courage and a willingness to step off the edge of our known world.

We drove into downtown Whitehorse for dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. Then it was time to do some grocery shopping and then a quick trip back up the road to the campground.

Next day, we wandered through Whitehorse again. This is an interesting enough place, though its interest seems to be less so today than 100 years ago. The stern-wheeler, SS Yukon, sits of the hard along the Yukon River. She'll never move again. When you listen to Canadian Radio, much of the talk is about characters from the past. Today, the town is like so many other places – just getting along. There are lots of aboriginals on the streets. All the others seems to be trying to get tourists to part with their dollars.

Friday, June 18
We rolled north and west on a drizzly day. The mountains to our south are shrouded in clouds. The elk look at us cheekily from the side of the road. One female stuck out her tongue when I stopped the rig to get her picture.
We came to Kluane Lake, halfway between Whitehorse and the Alaskan border, and decided to call it quits for the day. We pulled into a Yukon Territorial campground and found the best site was just being vacated. We took up residency, paid our $12 and watched the view steadily improve as the afternoon sun cracked through. Jo and I went for a hike along the lake and learned we are in a rain shadow area. Only 210mm falls at our campground. Up in the mountains to our west, however, 2,200mm falls each year.
The mosquitoes seem to like this rainless area and they were so thick we felt we could be lifted on their wings. We have invested in a new clip-on device with a fan that throws out a mosquito repellent. IT WORKS! The five million mosquitoes circled around us but none ever landed. Now there's an endorsement.
This area, we were told by the interpretative signs, did not have ice covering it during the ice age back 12,000 years ago. The Elias Mountains, to our west, are a totally different story. They never lose their ice. This is the beginning of the Bering Sea land bridge which allowed our ancestors to make their way across from China, originally Africa.
The Tlingit people who live here now have trails through these mountains. In addition, they have much to teach us about the wild plants that are useful sources of vitamins and nutrition.
We watched as the crystal-clear lake became still and reflected the peaks to our south. What a glorious place this is. We reveled in the beauty and peacefulness. We took another walk, with the sun still riding on our shoulder at 10:30 at night. The still water provided a perfect reflection of the mountains and I was able to get pictures that'll stay with me for the rest of my life.
We did note a sign on our way into the campground that warned tent campers not to camp in July and August because bears will be here in numbers then. They apparently like the soapberries that will be ready during that time.

Saturday, June 19
We came back to the US after a horrendous ride over a heaving highway that shook us and the springs on our rig. The permafrost offers up massive resistance to man's efforts to lay a road over it. For the first time in weeks, we faced a real duel with the highway. We came up on our first rock-n-roll piece of road when we came down a hill. There were warning flags on the side, but we were unprepared for the severity.
The up-and-down motion was like a roller-coaster. We desperately fought to bring the speed of our RV down to 20 miles an hour while we rocked back and forth. Then we found we could maintain 20-25 miles an hour with occasional bursts of speed to 40 when we could see the road ahead. We learned how to navigate by watching the solid yellow line in the center of the highway. As you looked on down the road, it became clear that trouble waited ahead when the yellow line began to buckle and twist. Not a lot of fun.
When we stopped at a rest area, we met a couple in a rental car who had flown from Denmark to Calgary, Alberta. They were driving to Fairbanks and back to Calgary. They shared our wonder at the staggering mountains that stand above us. “We have nothing higher than 500 feet in Denmark,” the Dane said with a laugh.
When we arrived at the US border, a young border agent welcomed us with a smile and asked how we were doing. “Well, pretty much surviving,” I told him and he laughed. “We have the road built this way to keep out the riff-raff,” he said with a laugh.
As soon as we cleared the border, we decided to call it a day and we pulled into an atrocious park that did offer electricity and water, along with rutted pull-through areas and dripping faucets.. We washed down the rig and the car and then tried to realign our spines, hoping that tomorrow will be a better day.
We now have driven 6,150 miles since Florida.

Finding Paradise in the North

2010-06-15T15:47:00.000-07:00

This caribou wanders up the side of the hill, alongside our RV. He couldn't decide about the danger of crossing the highway.

Two nights.... two of the prettiest campgrounds we've ever stayed in. The town of Sikanni Chief (it's so small you pass it without noticing it exists) has a river at the bottom of a terrifying down-spiral of highway. We were in 2nd gear and braking hard all the way down. When we pulled into Sikanni River RV Park and got out to register, there was a nasty smell of burning brake lining issuing forth from all four wheels.
The lady at check-in told us she was full but we were welcome to pull into a dry-camping site that was right alongside the river. We checked it out and decided it was the best site in the whole park. The soothing ripple of running water lulled us in the evening. We ran our generator for 90 minutes so we could watch a movie. But the red streaks of the setting sun still lingered in the sky at 11 at night.
There was large animal scat among the river stones and we surmised it was elk. Jo was convinced it would show up in the early morning and she checked at 4 a.m. But no. So we rolled on out at 8 in the morning and began climbing on the loneliest road in the world, it seems. There are no people here, except for gas line workers. They seemed to be housed in deadly mobile home blocks that are jammed together in little clusters every 40 or 50 miles.
Half an hour into our journey, we came across a huge male moose, ambling across the highway. We pulled over to let him pass and, as we moved along, we came to his mate who had been hit and killed about 100 yards up the road. After morning tea break, we came alongside a healthy female elk. She eyed us casually, then wandered into the spruce and balsam trrees at the side of the road.
We arrived in the town of Fort Nelson at 11 on Sunday morning. Last chance to get gas for 355 kilometers, we were warned by a road sign. We stopped and paid $1.239 a liter – that's only 23 percent more than in Hope. It is so remote up here that folks can charge anything they like for anything.
Onward. Jo chose Summit Lake Provincial Park as our stop for the night. What a great choice it is. We are coming through the northern edge of the Canadian Rockies now and we are parked in an Alpine meadow, on the shore of an emerald green lake. Our backdrop is the Rocky Mountain range, snow-covered and jagged. I maneuvered the RV so our million dollar view is visible through the front and side windows. It is nothing short of breath-taking. The weather is sunny, but in a matter of five minutes it changes to rain in gusty wind. Then it is back to bright sun again. Later, as we sat in the cozy RV, the mountains disappeared and we were hit by sleet.
When the provincial parks lady came by to pick up our $16 for the campground site, she told us she has never known such winds to blow up at Summit Lake. Now she tells us. She did say she saw lynx spoor the other morning and she has been bothered by lots of bear. She also pointed out a beaver house 200 yards away from us. She said she is having a terrible job breaking up his dam every few days because it is causing the lake to rise.
Our rig just passed the 55,000-mile mark on its odometer. When we bought it just over three years back, it only had 29,600 miles on the clock. So I think we are getting some pretty good use of our home on wheels.

Monday, June 14
We awoke to howling winds and wondered if it was smart to head on. But we rationalized that the winds were higher because we were so high – 4,377 feet. They would be less in the valley. And so we set off.
This proved to be the case and it didn't take long for us to forget the crisp outside air when we came upon out first Stone Sheep. These are peculiar to northern British Columbia and the Yukon. They have huge eyes and are powerfully built. They showed no fear as we pulled up alongside them on the highway. They seemed more interested in sucking the salts or other minerals from the asphalt.
A few miles farther on we came upon our first caribou – a handsome fellow with a gorgeous rack. He seemed to want to cross the road but was too nervous to make the trip over until after we passed him by.
We crossed Macdonald's Creek, named after a Cree Indian who helped the Corps of Engineers figure out the best route for the Alaska Highway in these parts. Mountains still towered above us to the right and left and we marveled at the endless vistas and beauty all about. We fairly whooped with delights as we approached Liard Hot Springs and came upon a herd of Buffalo. They were heading south with their calves and passed right alongside our stopped rig while we photographed them. We turned a corner in the road and came upon a ptarmigan mother and her brood of chicks, pecking away at the side of the road.
We arrived in Liard Hot Springs Provincial Park and picked out a site that was level and near the springs. After lunch and a nap, the sun came out and we hiked on a boardwalk to the springs. We changed into our bathing suits and stepped into the 110-degree water. It smelled a little of sulphur – but not bad. We found we could move around in the springs and change the temperature of the water by sitting nearer to a small waterful of cold water. Then, if we wanted to cook a little, we found an underwater bench that allowed us to sit nearer to the bubbling water that was coming up from the earth's mantle. Delicious. We chatted with the other travelers and met a couple of ladies from Yuma, Arizona, and Denver, Colorado, as well as a couple who had driven up, for the first time, from Vancouver. They could not believe the size of their province. It is huge. It seems to be the equivalent distance of driving from Florida to Connecticut. We are very close now to the border of Yukon Territory. That's when we pass the 60th latitude.

(Measurement lesson: 0 degrees is the equator. 90 degrees is the north pole. Each degree of latitude equals 60 miles. Each minute of latitude equals 1 mile. And there are 60 minutes in a degree of latitude. As a result, when we pass 60 degrees of latitude, we are 5 degrees higher in latitude than Edinburgh, Scotland. That means we are 300 miles farther north than that city. New York City is at 40 degrees north latitude, so it is 1,200 miles south of where we are.)

Tuesday, June 15
We passed a brown bear this morning on our way to Watson Lake in Yukon Territory. The road was rough, with lots of frost heaves. In one section, it had been completely torn up by the road crews and we were stopped for 15 minutes while they moved traffic through from the other direction.
Watson Lake's claim to fame – and it really is fame – is the signpost forest that has been erected by RV-ers at the western side of town. There are about 72,000 signs in the forest, mostly with the names and towns of the people who have stopped by and left their mark. Some are poignant, like Cindy Barber's, from Florida: “Lord, please let me get back home.”

John and Eva Wood of Grandby, Texas, on their sign said “Where Jesus is Lord'. We found one special sign: “In Loving memory of Precious, world's most traveled cat and cherished traveling companion 16 years who bailed out on the Alaska Highway Mile Marker 404-422, May 1997. Loved, missed and never to be forgotten.”

We wandered through this wilderness of signs, many of them taken from hometown highways in addition to old license plates from every state. Quite amazing. The forest was started back in 1942 by Carl K. Lindley, a U.S. Army soldier who put up the first sign in 1942.
Later we wandered over to the Northern Lights Centre, where we watched a display of the Aurora Borealis which we won't see in person since it doesn't get dark enough in the summer months. We now have light for 22 hours each day.

Dawson Creek: Mile "0"

2010-06-11T18:04:00.000-07:00

Passersby photographed us under the Mile "0" sign in Dawson Creek, BC

A batch of unemployed firemen came up to Hope, B.C., from San Francisco 155 years back. They came by canoe up the Fraser River. Based on what we saws of the Fraser, it must have been awfully quiet back then. Today, this week, the Fraser is a roiling, angry river that whirls its way down to the Pacific. The firemen stopped on an island across from Hope and they idly panned for gold in the gravel there. Eureka! They started to pull out nuggets from the gravel and the rest is history for this quiet little corner of the world.
Thirty thousand gold miners descended on Hope and built their tatty shacks along the river. They never did find the mother lode. But they took lots of gold out of these parts. The Indians were friendly, not knowing what lay in store for them. They traded for metal axes, rifles and other goodies. But the white guys did what they always have done: they grabbed the Indian lands.
Now Hope is a peaceful place that makes its reputation from outstanding chainsaw carvings. There are about 60 carvings all over town and the quality of work is world-class.
We left the town in a pouring rain. Jo and I dithered back and forth about which road to take to the north. Advice from our friends suggested we go the Provincial Highway No. 5. It is essentially a limited access road through the mountains with limited pullouts. Our book about driving to Alaska suggested Route 1, which runs up the Fraser River Canyon, through Hell's Gate and on northward. It is much narrower. While we were unplugging the rig at our First Nation campground, we still had not decided. Then, when we pulled out onto the highway we had to decide to go right to PH5 or left onto Highway 1. We went left. As Robert Frost said about coming to where two paths diverged in the woods, we took the path less traveled – and it made all the difference.
The rains disappeared. The sun broke through and we came through this delightful highway with only one incident while Jo was driving. An oncoming truck pushed her over to the edge and I saw my life flash before my eyes as we came within two inches of touching the rock face at the edge. We came out onto a high plateau at Cache Creek. This is described as desert-like. But the farmers here have spent a fortune on irrigation and the fields were thick with healthy alpha-alfa and other crops.
We rested in Cache Creek for the night and met up with a pair of campers from North Carolina. They described their adventures thus far: coming farther west than us, through Nevada and California. We told them we'd see them along the route north.
Tuesday morning, we awoke to blissful sun and headed out for Williams Lake. Lots of construction along the highway.
We came to 100 Mile House. Now, you might imagine this is a lonely outpost in the wilderness. But no. It was at one time, of course. Now it is a thriving little town, with gas stations and three supermarkets. Along the route, we see ranches that are named 103 mile Ranch, 108 mile Ranch. 100 Mile House used to be a way station for fur trappers coming down to trade their catch. Now it services anyone with a need.
We came to Chief Will-Yum's Campground on the outskirts of Williams Lake and were delighted to stay again at native American RV parks. We perched on a hill overlooking the lake. The chief sells gas below the camp.
Now we are beginning to experience the long twilight of the north. There's still light in the sky at 10:30 at night. And dawn breaks awfully early.
We parked at Prince George, one of the few places we will see coming and going on our trip. Prince George is a city of 80,000 and has all the supplies anyone would need. We drove right on through, since we are as well equipped as we can be. We climbed through the Canadian Rockies and ran into slow traffic because of construction on the highway. But to park in a rest area with the vista of the Rockies out our side window is really something special. We are high in the mountains and we look down on a pristine lake with Douglas Firs covering the little islands in the lake. We had this million dollar view to ourselves before descending into Chetwynd to the east.

Friday, June 11
Chetwynd looks like a million other little towns in North America. But some smart guy thought about holding a chainsaw wood-carving contest each year and the place has built a reputation for quality work. As a result, chain-saw wood-carvers come from Japan, Germany, Slovakia, as well as places like Connecticut, Oregon, Massachusetts and British Columbia.
We are lucky to have been able to stop on Day 2 of the 4-day contest. As a result, we were able to watch the carvers working away on the initial shaping of their designs as well as photograph the results from earlier contests. It really is quite astonishing to see the amount of detail and expression these guys are able to coax out of the trunk of a tree. You can see the work at our photo album site.

We drove for an hour to Dawson Creek, which is designated as Mile “0” on the Alaskan Highway. This 1,543-mile road was built in eight months back in 1942 when the U.S. realized it needed to protect its Alaskan frontier from the Japanese who had already landed on some of the islands near Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian chain. The Army Corp of Engineers brought 11,000 men up to Dawson Creek and rammed the road through in record time. It was essentially a winter road because, with the melting ice of summer, many of the bridges were knocked out. But this remarkable feat opened up the Alaskan frontier. They continued to strengthen the road during the next two years and made it an all-weather highway.
Dawson Creek is a funny little town. It used to have a population of 400 before the highway was built. Now there are thousands of people here. Lots of supply stores to cater to the needs of the travelers. You see license plates from all over the lower 48 states. Prices are ridiculous, however. A small bottle of Goslings rum goes for $32.99, instead of the $13 I've seen it for in Florida. Wine is prohibitively expensive. Even boxed wine sells for $45 up here.
We are in a campground that calls itself Mile “0” even though it is actually one mile up the road. It is full because there's a caravan of RV-ers leaving in the morning on a guided journey to Alaska. These tours costs around $8,000 per RV and are designed to give comfort and support to those who are nervous about making the journey from the more populated south. But many folks are just like us. They are striking out on their own and we expect to see them along the route.

Falling in Love with Vancouver

2010-06-06T15:23:00.001-07:00

Bald Eagle protects its dinner at the side of a country road on Mayne Island, off Vancouver.

Okay, folks. Cards on the table. We've pretty much fallen in love with Vancouver, British Columbia. This is a world-class city...Not only is it spectacularly beautiful, being nestled under the mountains to the north, it is utterly international, very clean, with great, great parks, beautiful trees, green, green, green because of the dampness. Maybe that's the only downside to Vancouver: There's rain on a daily basis. Not lashing, grinding rain. More like a misty rain that feels pretty good on your skin.

Jo and I have driven and walked the city. We have wandered through the amazing parks with laburnum trees that are totally coated in yellow, dripping blossoms. We have talked to the giant Redwoods and towering Douglas Fir trees. But, as always, it is the people who are the standouts.

We were on Granville Island last week and had wandered through a thousand shops filled with aboriginal art. We were beginning to sag and ordered a lunch at the Indian food booth. I took my buttered chicken and lentils and rice and veggies and nan to our little table, then I left to get coffees. When I returned, Jo was chatting with a woman of our age who asked to join us in the crowded eating area. Emily had emigrated from Newcastle, England, a year before I came to the U.S. She'd come directly to Vancouver in 1960 and had lived on the main street back then. “There were so few cars, only one every few minutes came by our house,” she said. Believe me that is not the case today.
Emily said she and her husband had lived in a VW bus for two years before coming over. They had land-trekked from England to the continent and had made the overland passage through Europe and Asia to Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and ended up in India. This is an impossible land journey today because of the strife.

Vancouver is very much an Asian city today. No matter where we walked or drove, we were conscious of being in the minority. Everywhere you look are Koreans, Japanese, Hong Kong Chinese, Filipinos, Malaysians and Indians. The population of Hong Kong Chinese is so high the city sometimes is called Van Kong or Hong Couver.

Jo and I are staying with friends who originated in Scotland. Scott works for a security firm as their top salesman. His wife, Linda, is a teacher. Both have retained their Scottish accent. They live in luxury in one of the best parts of the city in a seven-bedroom home. Our rig is parked on the street outside, probably bringing down property values as we linger here.

Their two sons and daughter have been giving Ting a workout. In addition, this is her first experience of living in a real bricks and mortar home, with stairs and wooden floors that allow her to slide at will. She is in the best physical condition of her life with all the exercise.

We left her in the rig on Friday and Saturday while Jo and I took off on an adventure aboard the ferry system for two days. We cruised the Straits of Georgia, through the islands and came to Mayne Island where by the greatest coincidence in the world, we met up and stayed with my old landlord from Namibia in Africa. Frank and Helga Zellner are retired now and enjoy life on this lovely island. On a drive around the perimeter road, we came upon a massive bald eagle, eating the remains of a baby deer that had lost a battle with a car or truck. The eagle hunched over the deer to protect its food supply from two turkey vultures who seemed to think they should get in on the action. I left the car to edge closer and the vultures took off, followed by the eagle, which spread his enormous and powerful wings and flew off to hover overhead until we drove off. Beautiful sight.

As we returned to the mainland, the sun had burned off all the clouds that have been shrouding the massive mountains range behind Vancouver. Our panorama view of the snow-covered peaks was breath-taking as we cruised across the straits.

Scott told us, when we got back, that he'd gone out to the RV to bring in Ting for some play time with the kids (and him!). She slipped between his legs, however, and escaped into the street. She disappeared under the rig and Linda said her life flashed before her eyes as she imagined having to tell us Ting had been lost to traffic. The cat eventually came back out from under the RV and Scott pushed her back inside it and locked the door. Enough was enough.

On Sunday, June 6, we left our Scottish-Canadian hosts, bundled up our cat and headed east to the town of Hope. B.C. where we parked for the night in a First Nations campground. This is how Canada refers to aboriginal Indians. We parked on the banks of the raging Fraser River, roaring along at about 10 knots. Our rig faces the river and we are in an idyllic spot.

Now that we have headed out from Vancouver we are at that part of the journey where we think we have come a long way. But it is just a tiny part of the journey we now face as we climb north into the wilderness of British Columbia and the Yukon Territory. It reminds me of the quotation from Sir Winston Churchill: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Tomorrow, we head north. North to Alaska.

Raining on Mt. Rainier

2010-05-24T15:03:00.001-07:00

The snow lies dark and deep on the foothills of Mt. Rainier, Washington.

Washington state is damp. The locals call it liquid sunshine... not a bad approach to making the silk purse out of the sow's ear. Our visit to this beautiful state has taken us through tall Douglas Fir trees – so tall they seem to touch the sky. We parked in a city park, amid thick, bushy birch trees and cottonwood trees.
Amidst the rain showers, a watery sun breaks through and we decided to take advantage and drive to Mt. Rainier National Park. It's 72 miles away and we take the little Honda on jaunts like this. We started at 177 feet above sea level. But it was a climb all the way to the east. The rains came and went and came again.
We passed through Mossyrock – well-named since most of the rocks and trees here are coated in moss. We came to Ashford and were warned this was the last place to purchase gasoline before entering the park. But our trusty little Honda sips gently from the gas tank and we drove on.
One of the great, great advantages of being of a certain age is you can purchase a lifetime pass for $10 which provides free admittance to any of our national parks. Since the less aged must pay between $15 and $25 to enter this should go down as the best $10 we have ever spent.
Mt. Rainier is the fifth National Park, signed into being by President McKinley back in 1899. The mountain stands at 14,471 feet. We never did see it because of the snow and the low clouds as we ascended.
We came to Paradise where the visitor center is located and greeted sturdy young things, outfitted in snow shoes or cross country skis who were heading out on the trails. We, instead, visited the movie theater where the majesty of Mt. Rainier unfolded before us. This is an active volcano which currently is sleeping. It still spouts steam through vents but there has not been a major eruption in 73 years. Back then 30 feet of cement-like mud descended on the highway.
Mt. St.. Helens, just 35 miles down the chain, celebrated its 30th anniversary of exploding and moving millions of tons of mountain, as well as millions of trees and mud. We actually were able to view Mt. St. Helens on our way back to the motor home because the clouds parted and revealed the angry face of the mountain.
As we climbed to Paradise, we passed the 3,200 foot elevation and that's when the snow began. The mountains within sight were thickly coated while the packed snow alongside the highway was six to eight feet high. Mt. Rainier gets 680 inches of snow on an average year. It had a record snowfall in 1976 – 1,120 inches of snow. That number is correct.
We saw some deer munching on the endless quantities of moss. They looked at us with no fear. There also are brown bear, mountain lion and mountain goats.

Earlier in the week, we had driven through the Columbia River Gorge on the Oregon side (The river separates Washington and Oregon states.). Now we are traveling in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark who passed this way in 1804-5. We camped in a state campground among the moss-covered giant trees. Then we drove the car to a variety of massive waterfalls along the highway. The river had many dams to produce hydro electric power. Mountains rise straight up from the water's edge and our journey was three days of glorious views.

Monday, May 24
We ventured into Seattle, through its maze of rough roads and flying, aggressive traffic. We made our way to Pike's Market where much of the food of the city is sold – particularly the fresh fish. It's a contact sport, in many ways: You choose your fish, a salesman in orange overalls grabs it and shouts to his mate behind the counter. The mate returns the call, repeating the order (e.g.: Four pounds, fresh halibut”) and the salesman flings the fish through the air. It always is caught with a flourish by the behind-the-counter guy and a cheer erupts from the dozens of tourists. Good entertainment.
Our wanderings took us through an international city of food and crafts: Pakistan, Nepal, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Poland, Russia. All the ethnic food you could ever wish to sample.
Seattle is a difficult city in which to walk because so much of it is on the steep side of hills. But the city fathers have brilliantly designated the downtown area as a “free” bus zone. This means you can walk, hop on a bus, get off and walk, then hop on another bus. The drivers are helpful about guiding you. If you have a bike, you simply lower a device on the front of the bus and clip your bike on before climbing aboard. And it doesn't cost a penny. We were both mighty impressed as this keeps cars off the city streets.

We have now passed the 4,000-mile mark in our journey. Add 1,100 miles for the driving we have done in our trusty little Honda. We are less than 150 miles south of Vancouver, British Columbia and plan to be there on Saturday morning.

In the Footsteps of Giants

2010-05-17T13:05:00.000-07:00

Two sets of tracks define a relatively flat area of the trail, where wagons would run along side by side.

“There is no obstruction in the whole route (to Oregon) that any person would dare to call a mountain.”
Missouri Gazette, 1813 (This would represent the first indication of the decline and fall of newspaper reporting accuracy)

“The hills ware dreadful steep … locking both wheels and coming down slow got down safe oh dear me the desert is very hard on the pooor animals going without grass or water for one night and day.”
Helen Marnie Stewart, 1850

I'm with Helen in spirit as she and her family made the 2,100-mile trek along the Oregon Trail. Jo and I stood Sunday at the Snake River in Glenns Ferry, Idaho, looking across to the trail, still etched by the thousands of wheels that brought the prairie schooners down the hill and to the side of the river where the people had to make a decision: cross the swift-running Snake, using three islands in Idaho as stepping stones; or continue along the edge and into the desert where there was no food for their oxen.
Half of the trail trekkers crossed the river at this point. The rest pushed on, half of them losing their lives in the desert. There is said to be a grave every 80 yards of the trail. Ten percent of the 200,000 who set out never made it. Many lost all their goods in the river as their wagons were swept away in the roiling current. But still they came. The Shoshone Indian people saw them coming. They saw the dust of 1,000 Euro-Americans walking alongside their wagons.The wagons were something they had never seen before. And they saw oxen, something they had never seen before. And they helped them across the river. They showed them where the safest places were to ford. And the new Euro-Americans thanked them and befriended them. And then they took the Shoshone lands.
The Conestoga wagons used in the East were far too large for the Oregon trail. So the emigrants used smaller rigs, called “prairie schooners.” From a distance, their white covers looked like sails. There was no room to ride in the wagons.
There is an enormous emotional pull when you walk in the tracks left by these people. Perhaps it is because I am an immigrant, too. But I could feel the will, as well as the pain and the sickness and the daily struggle.
Overlanders got up at 4 a.m. The men hitched the teams and the women cooked breakfast over a buffalo-chip fire. The wagons rolled out at 7 a.m. At midday, they made an hour's “nooning” stop to rest livestock and eat a lunch of leftovers. At 5 p.m., the wagons rolled into a circle – not for protection from the Indians, but to form a corral for livestock. The men tended the stock while the women cooked a supper of cornbread. Beans. Fried meat, gravy, and coffee.
In the “Emigrant's Guide to California,” Joseph E. Ware advised emigrantrs tro supoply their wagons with the following items for a partyy of four:
824 lbs. Flour
200 lbs. Beans
725 lbs. Bacon
75 lbs. Coffee
135 lbs. Peaches or apples
25 lbs. Salt
160 lbs. sugar
200 lbs.lard
pepper
bicarbonate of soda
tin polates
spoons
coffee pot
camp kettle
knives
Total cost of these items in 1842 was $220.78

Isom Cranfill wrote these words in 1846:
“We arived at the uper crossing of Lewis River at 11 O'clock a.m. & commenced prepareing waggon beds to ferry over the River (verry Hot). We Ferryed Eleven waggons and their loading over the river. The wind blowed Severely in the forepart of the day & waves run too high to navigate the River. It was not quite to high in the Afterpart of the day & we Sucseded in Giuting over Safe & r\Riged up at 4 o'clock & set out on our journey.”

Shoes were a major problem for emigrantrs on the Oregon Trail. Mary Ellen Murdock Compton wrote in her diary of wearing out nine pairs of shoes along the route. The emigrants learned to barter with the Native Americans for moccasins.
One man turned terrible misfortune into a valuable commodity. Catherine Haun in 1849 tells how the man had a leg amputated following a rattlesnake bite. Rather than become a burden to others in his wagon train, he learned to mend boots and shoes while riding in the wagon.

The diaries of those to made it through bring this epic voyage alive.

“Father...died at the second crossing of Ham's Fork. We had two wagons, so mother had the men take the wagon bed of one of them and make a coffin. She abandoned the running gear, ox yokes, and some of our outfit, and we finished the trip in one wagon.”
Elvina Apperson Fellows, age 10 in 1847

“I would make a brave effort to be cheerful and patient until the camp work was done. Then starting out ahead of the team and my men folks, when I thought I had gone beyond hearing distance, I would throw myself down on the unfriendly desert and give way like a child to sobs and tears, wishing myself back home with my friends and chiding myself for consenting to take this wild goose chase.”
Lavinia Porter, 1860

Jo and I drove along Interstate 84 into Oregon, now called the Oregon Trail Highway. Our trek is a puny effort. It may be many miles longer. But it surely does not come close to standing shoulder to shoulder with those who came before, some 160 years ago. There are tears in my eyes as I look out across the rolling hills of eastern Oregon and see the deep-etched tracks that remind us of the five-month-long journey from Missouri to Oregon.

Of Golden Tablets and Golden Spike

2010-05-15T07:44:00.000-07:00

The angel Moroni blows his golden trumpet from the highest spire at the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City.

Thursday, May 13, 2010
We've lingered in the Salt Lake valley of Utah, surrounded by snow-covered peaks on our east, south and west. Two reasons for the lingering: We wanted to poke around into the beliefs of the Mormons and this is Ground Zero; 2: we have been struggling with a recalcitrant indicator light problem on our rig. We've been blowing fuses for a few days and needed to root out the cause.
While a mechanic endlessly worked at tracing the fault in our wiring, we took off in the car (and the cat) to poke around the Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Oh, silly me. I actually thought we could walk into the Temple. No. We were met by a man dressed entirely in white (white tie, white shirt, what suit, white socks, white shoes) who was named Elroy. Elroy asked if he could help us and I asked if it was permissible to enter the Temple. Only if we were members of the church, he told us. Clearly, by our attire, we didn't match the look. Elroy suggested that we walk around the corner and wander to the visitor's center where we would meet two women - “there will always be two of them,” he said – and they would take care of our every need.
With the cat in her red bag, we wandered past three beggars into the visitor center. And the women were there, in groups of two. They each wore a badge along with a flag of their country of origin. I noted flags of Singapore, India, U.S., The Maldives. We greeted them but they did not pounce so we wandered through the center where there was a diorama of Jerusalem of 2,000 years ago. We took an escalator upstairs to a round room, painted with the heavens. In the center of the room was a larger-the-life marble carving of Jesus. He stood there with hands outstretched while a disembodied voice spoke on behalf of God, telling all in the room that “This is my beloved son.”
Dozens of families stood before them stature to have their picture taken. As we sat on one of the comfortable couches we watched as the pairs of women knelt in front of couples to answer their questions.
Still, no one came to us and we descended two floors to a series of dioramas that explained the belief systems of the church. We also took in a movie that did an impressive job of explaining the church's outreach to the poor and the unemployed. We picked up a pamphlet the explained the testimony of the Prophet Joseph Smith. This told his story of being 14 years old and his struggle to choose a Christian sect with which he could worship. He could not choose, but stumbled onto the Epistle of James which reads, “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God … and it shall be given unto him.”
Joseph decided to give it a go and he went out to the woods behind his home in upstate New York. After he was enveloped in darkness and he felt he was struggling for his life, two personages appeared to him and one said, “This is my beloved son. Hear him.” He asked which sect he should follow and was told not to follow any of them for they were an abomination to the lord.
Four years passed and Joseph was much abused and persecuted because he told of his vision. He slipped into “many moral errors.”
But he lay in bed one night and asked for forgiveness and to find out how he sat with God. This was a big night for he was visited by an angel named Moroni who gave him key information about the gold tablets he eventually would uncover and translate. The rest is history. Joseph took his flock west, always under attack from people who didn't like Mormons and what they stood for. They settled in Salt Lake and created a city and a religion that has grown and spread across the world.
Jo and I remember being in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, during the Water Festival. More than a million people had come in from the provinces for the festival and we wandered among them on the waterfront. The booth that was most popular, above all the food and drinks and snake charmers and clothing stalls was a tent in which members of the Church of Latter Day Saints showed a movie about their outreach to the poor of Cambodia. It always was filled with people who watched and listened.
We wandered back to our car, passing banks of tulips, jonquils, iris, pansies and petunias and poppies. A nice little stream channeled its way beside the sidewalk.
We received a welcome phone call from the mechanic, saying he'd located the bare wires that had been the cause of our shorting turn signal problem. Now we were able to head on. We came north again, marveling at the beauty of the snow-covered mountain ranges rising all about us. We came to Ogden, Utah, to spend the night.

Friday, May 14
We drove across the northern edge of the Great Salt Lake, on a two-lane road, and came to the Golden Spike National Historic Monument at Promontory, Utah. This is the place, back in 1869, where the continent was connected by railroads from the east and the west. Leland Stanford brought along a golden spike which was driven into the wood to secure the final rail.
There's really not much to Promontory. But each day, replicas of the two steam engines from the east (No. 119) and the west (Jupiter) come out of their train shed and meet on the track.
The site exceeded our expectations because of the arrival of the trains, sighing with that lonesome steam whistle as they approached the historic site, and because there is an excellent museum on the site. More than 10,000 Chinese workers dug their way through the Sierra Mountains to get the Pacific leg on its way. Their digging progressed at eight inches per day during the first two years. This can only be compared to our modern goal of sending a man to the moon and bringing him home safely.
We headed out for Idaho after the visit, driving alongside the Sawtooth Mountains which look exactly as they should with a name like that. They were covered in snow but our highway was clean and dry.
Distance traveled thus far: 3,340 miles.

Welcome to Zion and Bryce

2010-05-10T08:28:00.000-07:00

Court of the Patriarchs, showing Moses, Isaac and Jacob.

May 6, 2010
We crossed the desolate Arizona landscape, through bleak, tired Navajo and Hopi Indian reservations with cheap homes and endless collections of broken-down trucks and cars in the front and back yards and found little to stop for. When we came to Winslow, we parked in a Walmart lot and found, as the afternoon wore on, that a community of 14 motorhomes and trailers and assorted other RVs joined us in the lot. They ranged from simple boxes added to the back of a truck to a Prevost deluxe motor home with all its gaudy marble floors and $2.5 million pricetag. We never could figure why someone who can afford such a rig would opt to sleep in a Walmart parking lot. But it takes all kinds. Probably the owner would say, “How do you think I was able to afford such luxury if not by watching my pennies.”
In the night, Interstate 40 was the scene of a deadly truck crash. It closed the highway shortly before midnight and, when we awoke and turned on the TV news, the road was still closed. But we were promised it would open at 6:30 a.m. Oh, I should mention, that Arizona does not recognise Mountain Time as a standard and it moves its clocks forward an hour to Pacific time. Because we planned to be in the state for just two days, we didn't change our internal clocks, since Utah and Mountain Time still beckoned.
The highway north of Flagstaff, Arizona also was closed in the evening because of wildfires that had jumped the highway and created zero visibility because of the billowing smoke.
On Friday morning, we set out on Interstate 40 and rolled west for 45 miles before coming to a parking lot on the highway. The road remained slow, slow, slow. After half an hour, we came upon the wreck.
One of the tractor trailers, 53 feet long, was peeled back like a gigantic sardine can. The driver in that truck had died. The other truck was torn apart, though not quite so badly.
After getting past this, the road opened up and we made Flagstaff in less than an hour. We turned north and climbed for several thousand feet before summitting at around 7,800 feet. Then we descended to the town of Page, the site of the dam at Lake Powell.
The road got narrower and rose again into Utah. Now the landscape changed again – this time we were surrounded by multi-colored rock mountains. Ochres, bright orange, yellows, brown and even green (from copper) stratas entertained us. But we were tiring and when we found the turn-off to our campground called Lutherwoods, we were more than ready to stop. It is positioned midpoint between Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks. What we didn't realize is that Lutherwood, run and owned by the Lutheran Church, is three miles up a gravel road at 7,550 feet. We made our way over several cattle grids and found, on arrival, we were the first people to visit this year. We were welcomed by the camp host who had arrived the day before from Las Vegas.
We washed the red dust off the car and motor home. Then we wandered over to a herd of deer that had come down from the snow-covered peaks to munch on the green grass 100 yards from our rig. They looked just a little nervous as I sidled up to photograph them. And when they caught my scent, they scattered but slowly wandered, munching, back into the juicy green area.

Saturday, May 8, 2010
Brrr. We awoke to a chilly 26 degrees. The external water system had frozen. But we were able to use the internal tank on the rig to get water for tea and coffee.
We set off for Zion National Park, 36 miles from our home on a hill. We had read some National Geographic material about the park. But the place took our breath away. You feel you are in a spiritual, holy place. There is something quite comforting and protective about Zion. We drove in from the east, passing along a winding road that threw vista after vista at us as we came around each descending hairpin curve.
You come to the canyon floor and above you, thousands of feet above you, soar the majestic wonder of Zion. Great monoliths of sandstone rise up from the valley. Some are 5,500 feet above sea level. It fairly takes your breath away and you are humbled by the majesty of the place. There are no superlatives in our language that provide adequate descriptions.
The place has been inhabited for 15,000 years by the people who came 'way before the Pueblo Indians. The Paiutes lived here before the Mormon scouts came down from Salt Lake City. The word was sent back that a river ran through the canyon and farming was possible. Brigham Young sent several families south to colonize the place. They showed the Paiutes how the Book of Mormon described the Indians as the lost tribe of Israel and they bought the story. They lived in harmony with the new settlers.
I asked a ranger if Brigham Young ever visited the place and he told me the prophet was uncomfortable that the lead missionary had taken up tobacco growing (learned from the Paiutes) and it was not okay with Mr Young that this man should be smoking the weed. So Brigham Young called the place “Not Zion”. But that didn't stick.
No one in Washington would believe such a special place existed. Paintings were sent back but they were thought to be the work of a soaring imagination. When the photographs arrived, showing the astonishing rock formations, the government was moved to make the place a National Monument. The classification National Park came at the turn of the last century.
Jo and I used the propane-powered tram to carry us through the park. We could step off at one of many stops and hike the special places before returning and boarding again.
At Angel's Landing, we spent time with a ranger who told us about two condors that have been relocated to Vermillion Cliffs, about 50 miles south of Zion. She said she had seen them soaring over the park with their 9-10-foot wingspans. As she spoke, Jo scoured the sky overhead and quietly announced one of the condors was there. It soared several thousand feet above Angel's Landing. And the landing stood almost a mile above us. But Jo spotted her condor. There are so few condors in North America that each is identied and carried a number.
We caught the tram to the most northern stop, the Temple of Sinowava where we sat beside a 1,000-foot-high waterfall and ate our picnic lunch as the Virgin River gurgled beside out feet.
There is a 1.1 mile tunnel, blasted through one of the mountains, which we passed through in our car in total darkness. This had been built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. As the tunnel turned on its journey through the mountain, we would come to enormous windows, blown out of the tunnel and showing another mind-blowing vista. This was definitely an E-ticket ride.

May 9, 2010
Now we came to Bryce Canyon National Park. It is about 80 miles from Zion. But there is a completely different feel to the park. At Zion you are at the bottom, looking up and the majesty. At Bryce, you are on the canyon rim, looking down. And the view is different because the canyon is constructed of different kinds of rocks. They are much softer here and they have eroded in a strange and mystical way, leaving thousands of sentinels almost like the stone soldiers that were buried in China.
I was chatting to one visitor and he said he felt Zion of the male while Bryce was the female. There might be something to this for Bryce has a softness while Zion is formidable and massive.
We have no electricity in the national park but the price certainly is right: $7.50 a night. We can only run our generator until 8 at night. So we slipped off to bed at 9 p.m. And huddled under the comforter until 8 on Monday morning when we could put the generator on again and run our gas furnace.
Snow is forecast tonight so we have that to look forward to.

Of Petroglyphs and Pueblos

2010-05-05T16:11:00.000-07:00

Meet Romeldo Shadduck, a Pueblo Indian who was sent to the Indian Boarding School in Albuquerque when she was 12 years old.

Monday, May 3, 2010
“Each of these rocks is alive, keeper of a message left by the ancestors.....There are spirits, guardians; there is medicine.” Pueblo Elder William F. Weahkee said this about the thousands of petroglyphs we found today in the Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We stood on a lava field, a hawk spiraling down from the mesa above. Some of the glyphs are recognizable as animals or people. There are crosses and other mysterious markings on the black rocks.
As we climbed the mesa, we came upon two native Americans. One was blind and was being helped up the rough and rocky path by his friend. It was the first time they had come to the glyphs. We chatted with the sighted Indian and he told us he was descended from the Anasazi. He guided his friend's feet on the tricky path while he told us about how the Anasazi believed that aliens from another planet came to these parts thousands of years ago and merged with the Anasazi. “My grandfather believes this,” he said, almost defensively. I told him anything is possible in this beautiful land.
No one really knows what these glyphs are all about. They have deep spiritual meaning for the Pueblo, Navajo and Dine Indians. The glyphs are said to be understood by the Pueblo people. But they believe it is not appropriate to reveal the meaning to those of us who are not of them.
They are thought to be about 1,300 years old. Some of the glyphs are actually more modern, placed there by Spanish shepherds who grazed their sheep on the mesa. But the early crosses, with a cross within another cross are by the Native Americans. The Spanish shepherds created more simple imagery.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Today was Ting Lee's date with destiny. We found a vet in Albuquerque, via the internet, who agreed to spay her before she comes into heat. We dropped her off at 7:30 am. And then went wandering around Albuquerque for the day.
First stop was a traditional breakfast at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. I had huevos rancheros, with eggs, beans, lettuce, tomatoes, toast and tortilla while Jo dug into a heaping plate of blue corn pancakes, served with pinon butter. The butter had pine nuts in it and she raved about the taste treat.
We wandered the exhibits and learned about the 19 Pueblos of New Mexico. But, as always, the place came alive when we came upon a tiny and old Pueblo woman, Romeldo Shadduck, (her father had been given the name Shadduck by Presbyterian man from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, she told us.
Romeldo told us she had been sent to Indian boarding school when she reached the 7th grade. She graduated from Indian School and was sent on to college where she earned a degree that permitted her to teach other Indian children.
“I still live in the adobe house of my ancestors,” she told us proudly. “It has six rooms now because my brother added two rooms.”
Romeldo's brother made it high into the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Her oldest sister, who is 96, also was a teacher and is about to be given an honorary doctorate. I asked this lovely old lady, in a gentle way, how much younger she is than her sister. Romeldo was not about to give up her age, however. “Oh, I am much younger. I was the fourth child. My sister was the first child,” she said.
Jo wanted to know if the people at the Indian School had tried to change her into a white American but she said it was a good experience for her. “Everyone had to speak English,” she told us. “But that was because the children all spoke different languages.” She said she speaks the Puebloan language of her mother. But she does not speak the language of her father, who came from another tribe. As a result, she spoke English when she spoke with her father.
She was extremely proud of the fact that she still lives in her adobe home today. I asked if it has electricity and water and she said these were added many years back. She said the adobe style of construction is rarely used today. “It's all sticks now,” she said. Many of the buildings here in New Mexico are built in the adobe style. But they are constructed of concrete and steel. Romeldo's home is of the original mud and straw.
We wandered into Oldtown, where there's a square, surrounded by Indians selling their turquoise necklaces and silverware. We found a quiet plaza off the square and sat in the shade, listening to three Indians playing soothing music on pan flutes, along with bamboo wooden flutes and guitar.
When we picked up Ting, exhausted, late in the afternoon, the vet handed her over and said she was in good spirits and looked very strong. She now weighs 5 lbs 4 oz. She gave us a plastic conical collar to keep her from reaching her stitches. But that proved to be unusable in our motor home. She immediately slid beneath the driver's seat and got her collar jammed which resulted in huge wails of distress. So we decided she would have to learn to live without the collar and without trying to nip at her stitches.

Wednesday, May 5
High winds were forecast for this afternoon. So we decided to make a short 120-mile jog west to Gallup, New Mexico. We came to Red Rock Park, run by the city of Gallup. We now are surrounded by the Navajo Indian reservations.
Our campground is as advertised – backed right up to enormous red sandstone rocks. There's a natural structure a couple of miles behind us called Church Rock that towers over everything and seems to be in the shape if a trident of rocks. We visited the museum at the park and got to study some quite spectacular sand paintings, done by the Navajo. There is one, Bears and Soft Talkers, which took eight days and nine nights. It measures about 30 inches square. At the center is black darkness and the gray face of the sun and the white face of the moon, both with feathers and rainbow bars. The bears each have four tracks. Soft Talkers each wear headdresses of eagle tail feathers and owl feathers. Their wrist bands, knee garters, and sashes are of rainbows. The moccasins are of the black clouds The painting is entirely hand done out of pulverized colored sand.

Meeting the Pueblo People

2010-05-02T07:04:00.000-07:00

The 13,101-foot high mountains above Taos welcomes us from a graveyard in Las Truchas.

We're parked on the high desert, north of Carlsbad, New Mexico. The wind is howling... 45 miles an hour continuously with gusts hitting 65 to 68 mph. This is totally crazy. In all our travels we have never experienced anything like this.
We're in a dust storm and a fine coating of dessert sand coats everything inside the motor home – including us. The act of opening the door takes both hands.
We're staying at an Escapees Club park and we love being around these people. They truly are like us – mostly live aboards who gave up on most of their possessions so they could roam North America.
When we drove up to the entrance, the campground hostess came out of her little office and rang a large bell several times. This was to alert the camp that a visitor has arrived. After giving us a welcoming hug, she signed us in. While she did that a number of the neighbors stopped by to offer their own welcome.
In the afternoon, we gathered in the community hall for refreshments. Jo and I were introduced and were invited to speak about our travels....very welcoming people.
The blowing wind was so violent that we had to lower our motor home jacks to keep the rig from rocking so violently. At one stage we thought the rolled up canopy might break free and we needed to tie it down with our plastic ties.
The winds settled down in the late evening and we slept well. But we'll never forget this experience.

Friday, April 30, 2010
We awoke to a silent morning. Rabbits silflayed on the verge beside the motor home and cattle stood in the high desert with an electric fence separating them from us.
We said our goodbyes to our hosts and headed ever-uphill toward Roswell where we parked at the Visitor's Center. The lady who chatted with us gave us lots of information, then suggested we let her photograph us beside the aliens that populate everything in Roswell (the evidence is in the New Mexico photo album).
Roswell's reputation is built around a young cowboy who saw a UFO crash into the desert outside Roswell back in 1947. Initially the U.S. Army agreed it was a UFO. But then they circled the wagons and said it was a weather balloon. Of such stuff endless conspiracy stories are woven. We went to the UFO museum in town and spent an hour being inundated with more info than I need about UFOs.
Next overnight stop was the tiny crossroads of Vaughn, NM. We started the day at 3,100 feet and the empty road rose before us, slowly, inexorably upward. As we came to the crest of the hill for Vaughn our GPS told us we has passed 5,984 feet.
When we settled into El Rancho Camp, Jo wanted to cook some brownies. But the recipe for high altitude brownies requires that you reduce the water, add flour and remove an egg. They came out beautifully.
Vaughn must be loved by someone, just not by us. As Gertrude Stein once said: There's no there when you get there.” That's Vaughn.
Santa Fe, the state capital beckoned us the next day. The morning started at 33 degrees, a shocking difference of 60 degrees from Carlsbad. The deer were with us again on the naked hills. There are no trees, hardly even a scrub bush on the way to Santa Fe. And the hills continued to rise before us. We reached 7,024 just as we entered Santa Fe. We pushed on north to a campground that took us closer to Taos.
After we were settled in and had lunch, we left the RV and motored on the high road to Taos. What an incredible ride this was. We soon drove through the snow line, about 8,000 feet. We stopped in the village of La Trampas and visited one of the finest surviving 18th century churches in New Mexico. The town was established in 1751 by 12 families from Santa Fe.
We arrived in Taos late in the afternoon and when we tried to enter the Pueblo of Taos (the traditional and cultural center of the Pueblo peoples we were told visitors could only stay another 45 minutes. The man still wanted to charge us $10 each for the privilege. We thanked him but decided 45 minutes was too short a time to spend in the pueblo. So we made our way back to the town of Taos and wandered the art shops.
I chatted with a swarthy Pueblo woman named Jocelyn in one of the galleries. I asked her is she could help me understand the displayed carving called “Red Menace,” a little Pueblo man, painted totally red. He carried a rattle and wore a breech cloth of blue cloth with stars on it. She said the story stemmed from how the Pueblo people would fight other tribes. The man was a Pawnee brave and during a skirmish the Pueblo people had beaten the Pawnee. “This allows us to take from them anything we want,” Jocelyn told me. “So we took his song and his dance.”
She explained that this permits the victors to make a fool of the vanquished foe. She pointed out that the rattle was made from a tin can, not the usual gourd. “It's like we are diminishing him,” she said.
I asked her if a white man, or a Spanish person came to the pueblo if he would have been taken in and provided hospitality. “Probably,” she said. “Because the people would know they would not be endangered by just one person from the outside. But, she said, the Pueblo people had a sophisticated system of runners who passed the word from pueblo to pueblo about passing peoples. So the people in the pueblo would be well aware of any stranger long before he got to the pueblo.
It snowed lightly as we made our way back to our RV.

Combing the Caverns

2010-04-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

The Big Cave in Carlsbad is the size of 5 or 6 football fields.

As a foreign-born person, I never really “got” the Alamo story. I might not even have heard the Alamo story. But it is an emotional and memorable place and we both enjoyed our visit there.
Since most Americans probably know the story, you can skip ahead. This is mostly for our readers in Japan, Namibia, Scotland, Canada, England, Vietnam, and Cambodia.

Originally named Misión San Antonio de Valero, the Alamo served as home to missionaries and their Indian converts for nearly 70 years. Construction began in 1724. In 1793, Spanish officials secularized San Antonio's five missions and distributed their lands to the remaining Indian residents. These men and women continued to farm the fields, once the mission's but now their own, and participated in the growing community of San Antonio.
In the early 1800s, the Spanish military stationed a cavalry unit at the former mission. The soldiers referred to the old mission as the Alamo (the Spanish word for "cottonwood"). The Alamo was home to both Revolutionaries and Royalists during Mexico's 10-year struggle for independence. The military — Spanish, Rebel, and then Mexican — continued to occupy the Alamo until the Texas Revolution.
San Antonio and the Alamo played a critical role in the Texas Revolution. In December 1835, Ben Milam led Texian and Tejano volunteers against Mexican troops quartered in the city. After five days of house-to-house fighting, they forced General Martín Perfecto de Cós and his soldiers to surrender.
On February 23, 1836, the arrival of General Antonio López de Santa Anna's army outside San Antonio nearly caught the Americans by surprise. Undaunted, the Texians and Tejanos prepared to defend the Alamo together. The defenders held out for 13 days against Santa Anna's army. William B. Travis, the commander of the Alamo sent forth couriers carrying pleas for help to communities in Texas. On the eighth day of the siege, a band of 32 volunteers from Gonzales arrived, bringing the number of defenders to nearly two hundred. Legend holds that with the possibility of additional help fading, Colonel Travis drew a line on the ground and asked any man willing to stay and fight to step over — all except one did. As the defenders saw it, the Alamo was the key to the defense of Texas, and they were ready to give their lives rather than surrender their position to General Santa Anna. Among the Alamo's garrison were Jim Bowie, renowned knife fighter, and David Crockett, famed frontiersman and former congressman from Tennessee.
The final assault came before daybreak on the morning of March 6, 1836, as columns of Mexican soldiers emerged from the predawn darkness and headed for the Alamo's walls. Cannon and small arms fire from inside the Alamo beat back several attacks. Regrouping, the Mexicans scaled the walls and rushed into the compound. Once inside, they turned a captured cannon on the Long Barrack and church, blasting open the barricaded doors. The desperate struggle continued until the defenders were overwhelmed. By sunrise, the battle had ended and Santa Anna entered the Alamo compound to survey the scene of his victory. All the male defenders were killed. The women and children, hiding inside the mission were kept alive and used by Santa Anna to send a warning to the other Americans.
Santa Anna called the massacre “a small thing.” But it was that watershed moment that drew the Americans together as they answered the cry, “Remember the Alamo.” It took only a few weeks for Santa Anna's army to be beaten and for Texas to achieve independence from Mexico.
When we arrived at the Alamo, it was cool and early in the day. Cactus were flowering under the trees. We entered the sanctuary and were regaled by a fine story teller who spoke about the story of drawing the line in the sand.
We then wandered down to Riverwalk, an urban work of art. Back in the 12920s, San Antonio saw the possibilities of creating cool walking areas along the river in the heart of their city. It is just a wonderful place to wander and sample the Mexican food, along with the arts and crafts of the area. We sat and had lunch under a bridge after taking a cruise along the river. Brilliant urban design.

Monday, April 26, 2010
We rolled west and came to Junction, another crossroads in the Texas hill country. Keeping the “Look- for-the-historical-marker” rule in the forefront of our mind, we paused when we found this:

“The Killing of SAM SPEER. On Dec. 24, 1976, a band of Indians killed Sam Speer, only 17 years of age, who was driving in horses near here. A 50-caliber gun his brother was using failed to fire. This was the last Indian murder in Kimble County. Speer is buried in the North Llano Cemetery.”

We drove on and pulled into a city park that we'd learned offered free overnight parking. And so we took up residence on the banks of the South Llano River, just below the dam. We parked under the cottonwood trees and listened to chirp, chirp, chirp of the grackles and the non-stop rush of water as it flowed over the dam. We walked over in the evening to visit with a fellow camper. He and his wife spoke only German, however, so we had a hard time communicating.

On now to Fort Stockton, Texas. This town is the beneficiary of the work of a New Mexico artist who has created an outstanding piece of art. He fashioned a Cavalry patrol on the outskirts of the town, carved out of sheets of steel. When we rode over in the late afternoon, the 10-foot-high silhouettes stood on the desert and seemed life sized because of the distance. I even got up the next morning, hoping to capture them in the rising sun – but no luck. The sun rose above the mesas (flat-topped mountains) about 35 degrees away from where the patrol stood in the early morning light.
We drove north on the Pecos Trail, a lonely two-lane road that headed us toward New Mexico. Lots of oil wells. In the town of Pecos, we passed where Judge Roy Bean practiced his unorthodox version of law west of the Pecos back in the 1880s. We crossed the state line and our times changed to Mountain Daylight Savings time. Now the cat will give us an even harder time since she refuses to acknowledge the existence of time zones. She still believes it is Eastern time. As a result, she thinks it is entirely reasonable to rise at 5 a.m. in our new time zone.
We parked in Carlsbad, in 90 degree, low humidity weather. We drove to the National Park and entered the caverns. You take an elevator down 800 feet which allows you to enter the Big Cavern. This was discovered by a cowboy back in 1913. He built a wire ladder and slowly (with the help of a single lamp) explored this massive complex. When he told folks in Carlsbad about the wondrous sights, they refused to believe him. But he persevered and eventually managed to get a photographer down into the cavern. The lighting of the pictures might have been one of the great technical achievements because of the size of this place. None-the-less, when people saw the pictures, they were wowed... and the crowds started to want tours.
Now that it is a National Park, it is possible to go on self-guided hikes which we did. If you are up for crawling on your belly, or slithering down or up steep grades with the help of a knotted rope, you can accompany a ranger. We did the self-guided tour which lasted almost two hours. The caverns run for more than 113 miles and many are still unexplored.
In the evening, we drove to the Living Desert State Park where we listened to a concert (mediocre) before going on another hike in the gloaming of the setting sun to view native plants and even some of the local wild life. I was particularly on the search for the agave cactus since I now use agave to replace sugar since being diagnosed with diabetes in December. The Pueblo and Apache Indians in these parts cooked the mescal agave plant for their rituals – and still do. The highlight of the evening was to watch a full moon rise, blood red, over the sparkling lights of Carlsbad.
Mileage traveled from start: 1,815 miles.

Deep in the Heart of Texas

2010-04-23T11:34:00.000-07:00

This is the story of Three-Legged Willie. He lived in Anahuac, TX.

Alabama released us after we drove west, discovered there was a problem with the new brakes. We pulled into a campground for the weekend and licked our wounds. Then it was back to the repair place when they opened at 6:30 a.m. on Monday. They determined one of the rotors was warped and tried to sell me a new one. I pushed for them to grind it. They didn't have the equipment to do that, but found a brake specialist who did the job in an hour.
We were released around 5 in the afternoon and were determined to head west to Mississippi. We made it over the state line and then got into a parking lot on Interstate 10 for more than an hour. We got off as soon as we could find an exit.
As we rolled west the next day (Tuesday). I thought about the four things we would remember about Mississippi. Jo thought and said, kindly, she would remember the poor people in the RV park who left for work at 5:30 in the morning. She thought the parking lot on the highway was something to forget. I'll always remember the guy who walked through our RV resort as dusk fell. He was shouting, “Come back here, you black nigga. Come here.” I popped my head up from the sofa and discovered he was not berating his girlfriend. He was shouting at his black dog that wouldn't respond to his command. And I'll remember that when I plugged in our electrical cord, the safety device I carry warned me there was an open ground at the power pole – just a little bit on the dangerous side. This is why we carry this expensive piece of equipment. This is the third time it has protected us.
We found the most amazing little city campground in the town of Lafayette, Louisiana, on the western side of the state for our next stop. We found it with our mapping software. The park, in the center of the city, had about 30 sites and provided electricity, water and a sewer dump. We parked in a leafy glade and relaxed to the happy singing of happy birds.
In the morning, we headed west, across the Texas border and came to the mouth of the Trinity River where we pulled in to a hardly-used campground in the old Mexican town of Anahuac. There used to be a fort here. Now it looks like so many hundreds (thousands) of one-horse towns which make you question their reason for existence.
We did find an historical marker which talked about a man named Three-Legged Willie. His real name was Robert McAlpin Williamson. He had a withered leg and strapped a wooden prosthetic device to it, hence the name. He became a judge in the town and when a ruffian was brought before him, the thug pulled a Bowie knife and told the judge, “This is the law.” But three-legged Willie pulled his revolver and told him, “This is the constitution which overrules the law.”
Houston is 45 miles wide and is the most labyrinthine city in terms of flyovers and over- and under-passes. It is a stressful ride to fly through the city on highways that can carry 10 lanes of traffic one way. But we squirted out the other side after an hour. We pulled off the highway (what have they done to the rest areas?) for lunch and then made our way to an auto parts store to replace the flasher on our turn signals. Then it was onward, down Interstate 10 to the west. Jo is beginning to panic for her bird books all end their coverage in the center of Texas. She has been having a great time discovering new species (to us) and I know there's a stop somewhere in San Antonio where we'll be buying a book about western birds.
The highways are coated in multi-colored spring wild flowers...just beautiful. These were encouraged by LBJ's wife, LadyBird. And they improve the long and winding road.
By the way, we are 1,200 miles into our journey thus far.

Languishing in Mobile

2010-04-16T15:13:00.001-07:00

A barefoot print in the sand at Topsail Beach, Florida.

We arrived at the supreme RV resort we have found in our three years of traveling around the U.S. Topsail Beach Reserve State Park is a pristine campground. Not only does it have full hookups, including cable TV, we have a trolley that drives us out to a white sugar-sand beach on the Gulf of Mexico. The city of Destin lies on the horizon, with its high rise condominiums. But we are in a beautiful spot and we are grateful to have found this place – with the help of friends Chuck and Judy who stopped in last year on their way back from the west coast of the U.S.
There's evidence of native American life here, with a large mound opposite the park entrance. The natives used the area for fishing, hunting and camping. Then the white guys came and began to exploit the huge stands of long leaf pine trees by tapping them for their turpentine. The turpentine was used to maintain the wooden sailing ships used to transport goods and people. Chippers carved cat-face patterns on the trees and inserted a metal strip to allow the sap to flow into clay pots. The scars can still be seen in many living trees in the park.
Before we got here, we spent a night in a Flying J parking lot. Flying J is a chain of fuel stations, mostly used by truckers. Many RVers fill up with fuel and park for the night. I doubt we'll try it again. The trouble with truckers is they run their rigs while they sleep because they need to refrigerate their cargo. As a result, the chattering engines made life a little to loud for us. But it's all part of the ride. The price is right, since there's no charge.

On to our date with destiny in Mobile. We checked in with a trucking repair facility and were handled with sweet, gentle, southern charm. Marty, the lead man, brought his computer to our rig and after he punched in the year and type of chassis, the computer told us two ABS sensors on the left side – one front and one rear – were inoperative. He called the manufacturer who priced the two sensors and we told Marty to ship them in overnight via air from Chicago.
We pulled the rig over to a parking area of smashed and damaged trucks and, after the facility closed for the night, we moved over so we could plug into a wall socket to enjoy the comforts of electricity.
Being trapped in such a place provides the possibility of learning something about people we don't normally meet. I enjoyed a year-old Truckers News magazine which reported on jobs in the industry for couples in which you are paid $2,000 sign-on bonus, plus $1.45 per miles traveled, along with a guarantee of being able to drive 3,000 miles per week, plus full health-dental insurance paid by the company, plus 401K retirement package.
We spent a pleasant evening and fully expected to be on our way on Thursday because Marty said it would take two hours to do the installation.
Thursday at noon arrived and Marty knocked on our motor home door. He apologized profusely, saying the people in Chicago had shipped out the two sensors by truck, not air, and they would take five to seven days to get here. I expressed frustration and he asked if I wanted him to order them to be sent overnight by air one more time. I said to go for it that we were committed by this time. He went away, apologizing, and said it would be done.
Jo and I locked up the rig and drove the car south for 50 miles to Dauphin Island on the Gulf of Mexico. There was a sharp east wind blowing and we were amazed to see all the stilt homes on the island were most empty. The waves were crashing on the shore, however, and spraying the luxurious homes with salt water. All of the homes are at least 10 and often 15 feet above the ground. But the ground – or sand – is only four or five feet above sea level. It seems insane that people are permitted to build on such exposed land where destruction by hurricane can only be a matter of time.
We came back toward Mobile and stopped at a seafood restaurant that had been filled with patrons on our way down to the island. Now it was empty and we enjoyed one of the best fresh catfish and hush puppy meals I recall.
Marty pulled off the wheels in preparation to install the new ABS sensors and had the terrifying “oh-oh” when he saw behind the wheels. The ABS sensor had melted – actually melted – and that meant he had to find the cause. It was revealed in the calipers and brakes pads. One pad was actually loose and could have popped off the axle. Prudence suggested that he check each wheel now. And that resulted in discovering that three of the four brake calipers were damaged and all four sets of brake pads needed to be replaced because of uneven wear.
Now, I could hear the ca-ching of the money machine going into high gear. I asked him to price all of this, including new calipers on all wheels. Back he came in another hour to let us know the bad news and the information that he found everything except one caliper in Mobile. The final unit would have to be brought in from Pensacola, Florida. I offered to drive to Pensacola (it's only 40 miles away – to retrieve the missing part and he said he thought he could get it delivered by Greyhound bus by 7 o'clock the next morning. We said go for it... And then we set out to find a motel room for the night since it would not be possible to live inside the locked up bays. So now we're living in the lap of luxury at a nearby Days Inn – breakfast included.

The Green Flash

2010-04-10T10:37:00.001-07:00

Powerboater brings his boat into the blazing sun at Dunedin.

There it was. The green flash. The blood-red sun, sinking fast into the Gulf of Mexico tinted the sky to peach and its edge, jelly-like, sank swiftly into the water. As the last limb of the sun slithered beneath the surface of the water, a rippling green flash emanated from the final rays. That's the first time we have seen the green flash since those idyllic days and nights in the Bahamas back in 2002.
Our neighbors on the beach along the causeway to Honeymoon Island outside Dunedin were oblivious to the phenomenon. A young girl squealed with delight as she caught a catfish and hauled it up on the shore. Her dad, speaking to her in Spanish, grabbed the line and put a pliers into the fish's mouth to retrieve the hook. He then tossed the fish back into the Gulf. Her mom chattered away on her cellphone but stopped long enough to grab a picture of the kid with her fish before continuing with her conversation.
Earlier in the day, Jo and I had strolled the sponge docks at Tarpon Springs. We were in a smorgasbord of Greek kitch, cruciform fish bones, Greek flags, baklava cheese cake, Greek urns made in China, but the saving grace was a harpist who sat in the shade of a tree along the docks. She played soothing music to the tourists who strolled in the bright spring sunshine.
The following night, we set out for the causeway to photograph the green flash. But it was not to be. We waited in similar conditions and the sun sank in the west. But no flash. So we have no picture of the event. But we did have a moment when a motorboat powered its way into the bloody sunset and it made a beautiful picture.
We headed out on a rainy morning, Friday, making our way north. Our anti-lock brake system warning light switched itself on our dashboard. We experienced this problem last year but it sorted itself out. This day it refused to get its act together so we called our emergency RV technician service and the sharp young woman said not to worry in the short term. She then asked where we would like to make an appointment to get it fixed and we told her Mobile, Alabama, since we plan to drive through there in the middle of next week. She called back in a few minutes and said she'd made an appointment for us with a technician. She provided the address and phone number.
We parked the night at a strange little campground: Neverdunn RV Resort in Lake City, Florida. It was a little out of the way and we regretted having to travel down a pock-marked gravel road. But the destination was worthwhile.
There were four peacocks and peahens on the property, along with goats and an enormous rooster who seemed to wear trousers because his feathers were designed to cover his legs. He strutted around as though he owned the place. The grounds were filled with azaleas in full bloom and there were huge, dripping bundles of wisteria at the entrance to the tiny swimming pool. Two clay alligators, one wearing a bra, the other in men's wear, welcomed you into the pool.
The lead peacock, named Samson, roosted in the large tree next to our rig for the evening. He flew up onto a van's roof, then flew the final 15 feet up into the tree. Initially, he spent an inordinate amount of time shouting at passing cars and I thought the unpleasantness might put a damper on our evening. But, as soon as night fell, Samson settled down and we didn't hear a peep out of him for the rest of the night. He had come down from his roost by the time we awoke on Saturday morning.

Cutting the Umbilical Cord

2010-04-03T17:01:00.000-07:00

Bald eagles nest in Honeymoon Island State Park, Dunedin, Fl.

Our traditional way of leaving on a voyage – whether by boat or by land – is to unhook from our safe harbor, rolling up the umbilical cords that tie us to the land, and then we move away just a few miles. It has always been thus. When we left our RV resort in Palmetto, we did the same.
We crossed the Skyway Bridge, over Tampa Bay, on a glorious day and spent the afternoon and evening with old cruising friends in Seminole, Florida, just 20 miles away.
There is something relaxing about heading out without making a giant leap that first day. So we lingered with Tom and Tracy and spent the night parked in their driveway. Then we headed north another 20 miles to the town of Dunedin, Gaelic for “Edinburgh,” where we have taken up residence for a week.
This provides a comforting decompression period before we set off on the long haul to the west and north.
I have begun reading Hemingway once again...something I haven't done in 35 years. Oh, what a wordsmith. Spare language. No fancy, flowery phrases. I was so enthralled with one little piece that I offer it up to you. Here, he changes his staccato style as he describes a bullfight. See if you enjoy the flavor and the richness:

“The first matador got the horn through his sword hand and the crowd hooted him. The second matador slipped and the bull caught him through the belly and he hung onto the horn with one hand and held the other tight against the place, and the bull rammed him against the wall and the horn came out, and he lay in the sand, and when he got up like crazy drunk and tried to slug the men carrying him away and yelled for his sword but he fainted. The kid came out and had to kill five bulls because you can't have more than three matadors, and the last bull he was so tired he couldn't get the sword in. He couldn't hardly lift his arm. He tried five times and the crowd was quiet because it was a good bull and it looked like him or the bull and then he finally made it. He sat down in the sand and puked and they held a cape over him while the crowd hollered and threw things down into the bull ring.”

Anyway, Dunedin is a nice little town on the Gulf of Mexico, north of St. Petersburg. We're here because we received a certificate for a bargain rate for a week at the resort we are in. We met one of the neighbors this afternoon and they were bemoaning the fact the the rate this year is 25 percent higher than it was last year. When I told them we were staying the week for $99, they couldn't believe it. Their rate is $50 a night.
We will visit the Greeks in Tarpon Springs (8 miles north of here) and will drive out to Honeymoon Isle State Park, as well as enjoy the enormous swimming pool in our park. Jo also plans to sit in on a knitting group and I'll attend a wood carving club on Tuesday since I found this to be a wonderfully portable hobby. I bought some cypress knees (little knobs of wood) via the Internet and I've been carving them into strange little men.

Rolling on to the West

2010-03-10T08:34:00.001-08:00

Jo and I have spent the last three months cooking up our plans for “The Big One.” We have mapped out our strategy to drive our rig about as far as is possible in North America.

April 1 wraps up our winter stay in Palmetto. The plan is to head west and then north, all the way to Alaska. It is just about impossible to make the trip more distant because we are heading from the southeastern edge of the U.S. to the farther places in the northwest.

Getting your arms around the distances involved in this trip is tough. When you superimpose the state of Alaska on the lower 48 states (above), you see that Alaska reaches from sea to shining sea. So, when we get to San Francisco in California we still face an additional 5,700 miles of travel through Washington and Oregon, then British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory in Canada. Then we enter Alaska.

Our motor home may be stressed in making this expected journey of 16,000-plus miles in a single trip. But we feel if we are going to make this voyage, it is better to do it now than wait for a better time.

After we reach the farthest point, Denali National Park, and then explore Anchorage and the Kenai Peninsula, our plan is to put the rig and our car aboard the ferry system that is the lifeline to the little towns on the coast which have no roads leading into them. We'll cruise south and stop off in Juneau, the capital, Sitka, Wrangell, Ketchikan and then come back to the highway system at Prince Rupert in British Columbia.

I was worried about the possibility of stopping in some of these wayward towns and I wrote to them, asking if there is space to park our motor home. The friendliness and helpfulness of the various people who responded to my questions makes us anxious to meet them. They seem genuinely keen to have us visit their little towns on the outer edge of the continent.

When we get off the ferry in Prince Rupert, it will be the first week in September. Then we plan to head south and east toward Banff and Jasper and Glacier National Park in Montana. Thereafter, we'll roll across the U.S. Until we come back into Canada again in Ontario. After visiting my sister, Rose, We'll drive up the highway that lies along the northside of Lake Ontario until we come to Vermont to spend time with daughter Stephanie and her family. We'll linger for a little while in Kent, Connecticut, with daughter Lynn and her family before rolling on south again to get back to Florida by November.

We look forward to packing all of you into the motor home. There's plenty of room for you. You just have to be able to tolerate a precocious kitten who seems to believe she is descended from some Himalayan tiger.

Celebrating Mardi Gras in Rubonia

2010-02-28T15:45:00.000-08:00

Young woman draws a beer from the tap on the rear of a Volkswagen.

It wasn't exactly Mardi Gras in the New Orleans style. But it was a wondrous affair that crossed all kinds of cultural boundaries.
Rubonia is not really a town so much as it is a way of life. It is just down the road from where we park our RV motor home for the winter. Every time I drive through Rubonia, I liken it to driving through the north of Namibia. First, it is totally black. There are chickens that strut in the road and there invariably is an old oil drum off to the side of the road with three or four black guys crouched around the fire that is inside the drum. There's something pleasant and quaint about Rubonia. It is quite reminiscent of the early years of Florida's development. It's just a crossroads on the old Route 41.
The official "Terra Ceia-Rubonia Mardi Gras Parade" began in 1980, when a small band of friends, the "Crewe of the Mystic Rainbow," assembled a few makeshift floats and marched their parade through the sleepy little town of Rubonia in honor of Luann Topp's birthday. In 1995, after 16 years of ever-larger crowds, loads of mirth, and no major problems, Luann was confronted by County officials demanding permits, liability insurance, security, etc., etc., etc. Because neither she nor any of the "disorganizers" of the parade were wealthy, Luann decided she had to bow aside.
In 1996, urged by the residents, the Rubonia Community Center agreed to host the event, and the tradition then continued under the sponsorship of the United Community Centers organization. But the event grew larger and became more costly, and after the 2006 event, the UCC decided to pull out. Luann Topp ("Ruby Begonia"), Bill Burger of the "Crewe of the Awed Fellows," and Mr. James Gordon, "mayor" of Rubonia, stepped
forward to create the "Rubonia Mardi Gras Trust" to raise the money needed for the festivities. And that brings us to today.
We carried our chairs down the road to the sound of raucous music and sirens. Police cars moved back and forth along the highway and there were sheriff's deputies riding along on their horses.
At 2 p.m., the parade started. It was an eclectic collection of home-made and commercial floats. Mostly we were surprised as the cultural diversity of the participants. There were black bikers, driving by on their tricked out Harley Davidsons. Then there would be a float with folks aboard throwing Mardi Gras beads to the cheering crowds at the side of the road.
The pictures in the photo album tell the story better than most words could.
You'll probably chuckle at the cars that are designed to rise at the front, lifting wheels off the ground. Those were driven by Hispanic folks. The white folks were aboard the floats, tossing the countless bead necklaces and baubles to the crowd.