Thoughts On Travel, Books, And Life
It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that I have been writing this blog for a whole year. When I started it, I had no idea where I might go with it or how often I might write it. All I knew is that I didn’t want it to become a divisive platform.
As you know, each week has been something different. As you also know, I love writing about history, books, travel, and just quirky things about life. Thank you for bearing with me. Continue reading “My One-Year Anniversary”
After feeling under the weather this past week, I’m just going to make this short and sweet with two of my favorite pictures.
One of the photos that brings back so many good memories is from our trip to White Sands National Park in June, 2019. We had arrived there during the afternoon when the temperature was soaring past 100 degrees. There were gusts of wind at times. After trudging up a few sand dunes, we decided to leave, get some dinner, and then return in the cooler evening for the sunset. Continue reading “Wind, Sand, and Stars”
I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I knew there was a good chance that there wouldn’t be much left of the Weedpatch Camp aka the Arvin Federal Government Camp. But Tom and I decided to locate it last week on our return home from a funeral near Bakersfield.
No one knows which people group created them or why they did, but the Colorado Desert contains unusual renderings of ancient people and animals. UC Berkeley asserts the renderings could be at least 1200 years old. Continue reading “The Mystery of the Intaglios”
For anyone familiar with the town of Quartzsite, Arizona, people living a carefree, itinerant lifestyle might come to mind. This little desert town of less than four thousand residents is 125 miles west of Phoenix, but boasts over two million visitors a year. Most of those visitors live in vans or RVs.
Quartzsite, in fact, plays a substantial role in the Academy Award-winning film Nomadland (Best Picture, 2021) based on the book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder. (The book is well worth reading.) Continue reading “Hi Jolly and the Town of Quartzsite, AZ”
Continuing our trip from a couple of weeks ago…
After spending time at Delgadillo’s Snowcap Drive-In in Seligman, AZ, we went on to Flagstaff where we stayed overnight. The next morning we traveled about 20 minutes north of Flag, as the locals call it, to the Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument and the neighboring Wupatki National Monument. The two parks are connected by a scenic, thirty-five mile loop road.
While Sunset Crater is closed to hiking, we were able to hike the trail to view Lenox Crater, which is nearby. The volcano erupted about a thousand years ago. The crater is a depression filled with cinders.
Here are a couple of pictures from our hike.
Then we drove along the loop road to Wupatki National Monument and were amazed by what we saw. “Wupatki” means “tall house” in the Hopi language. It is a multistory pueblo containing over a hundred rooms and even a ballcourt.
After the eruption of the Sunset Crater between A.D. 1040 and 1100, many Pueblo people moved into the area because of the volcanic ash, which helped improve the farming of maize and squash. The soil also retained water more easily after the eruption.
Based on archaeological research, it is estimated that 85 to 100 people lived at a time at Wupatki. Over the years, perhaps as many as 2,000 people lived there. By A.D. 1250, the pueblo was permanently abandoned. The volcano had quieted down and Native Americans simply moved farther out.
So after visiting Wupatki, we drove down the road to another pueblo named Wukoki, which was equally interesting.
It is thought to have housed two or three families at a time in A.D. 1200. It is smaller than Wupatki. With its three stories, it gives the impression of a tower-like structure.
I can’t believe how many times we have passed through Flagstaff and not even stopped or known about these national monuments. If you are passing through, be sure to go north off of I-40 to take in these interesting treasures.
The Happiest Place on Earth may just be Delgadillo’s Snowcap Drive-In in Seligman, Arizona, a town of only 776 residents as of the latest census. Last week Tom and I stopped in at Delgadillo’s on our way to Flagstaff. Seligman, by the way, is a railroad town on old Route 66, just north of I-40. Continue reading “Delgadillo’s Snowcap Drive-In”
A couple of Saturdays ago Tom suggested that we watch airplanes at Clutter’s Park, which is south of LAX. The park, according to what Tom had read, is an airplane enthusiast’s haven off of Imperial Highway. Tom loves taking pictures of airplanes, so he hoped this would be a good place for photography. Continue reading “Clutter’s Park”
After viewing some amazing metal sculptures in Galleta Meadows on Sunday, our Borrego Springs adventure continued last Monday as we hiked the Palm Canyon Trail in the Anza-Borrego State Park. On paper, it looked like a pretty easy walk. But as the morning progressed, it became more challenging, mostly due to the heat factor. It was 90+ when we exited the mostly shadeless trail around 11 am. Continue reading “Palm Canyon Trail and Slot Canyon”
Most of us would expect to find a wide array of art pieces in museums, not outdoors. But this past weekend, Tom and I saw a large number of metal sculptures in a widespread area near Borrego Springs, a small desert community eighty-five miles northeast of San Diego. Continue reading “Sky Art at Galleta Meadows”