Fredericksburg and our last day

Our last day on the road! Not that there wasn't still more to see. We started out by driving into nearby Fredericksburg, VA, a small town with a very attractive historic business center of small shops. We walked along the main street and then stopped in at the James Monroe Museum on the site where Monroe had practiced law from 1786-1789, before becoming the fifth president of the United States. Monroe achieved an important role in American history via his negotiations with France, which led to the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, and his presidential proclamation of what became known as the Monroe Doctrine, which stated that the United States would not look kindly upon the interference of European countries in the affairs of countries in the western hemisphere - a doctrine used and misused by various American presidents over the course of American history.
The building was fairly small, but a docent took us around to the various rooms and brought the various objects to life by explaining them in the context of Monroe's life and accomplishments.

From there we continued on our way home via Rt. 301, which proved quite slow due to all of the traffic lights. We finally arrived home at 6:30 to a warm welcome by Ilana and Miriam, concluding my journey across America and this series of blogs.

Charlottesville, VA.

I was up around 7:00, as I usually am, in time to have a quick breakfast and some conversation with Lyn. Lyn finished her breakfast and was off to her job at the child care center. As she was finishing, Elise and Steve joined me and I had a second helping of breakfast. Shortly afterwards, we were on the road again. This time, northward bound towards home!

Not that we didn't still stop along the way when we came to someplace of interest. Our first stop was at Lynchberg, VA., where we stopped in the downtown area just long enough to browse the farmers market and buy some lunch which we consumed at picnic tables just outside the market.

We both had some vague forty year old memories of Charlottesville from our previous crosscountry trip as a very pleasant small town with either a large plaza (my memory) or a pedestrian street (Elise's more accurate memory). In any case, we decided to stop there and spend some time. We found the walking street which was several blocks long and wide enough to have stalls in the middle selling cloth and scarves and hats and similar items. The stores on both sides were primarily small eateries with outdoor tables, small book stores with both new and used books, and stores selling various works of art. All in all it was a very pleasant area to walk on a lovely fall day. I even ended up buying a hat from a nice Chinese lady at one of the stalls, who claimed she was parting with a $15.00 hat for just $10.00.

At the end of the day, we looked for a motel near Madison, but couldn't find anything under $60.00 - more than we were accustomed to paying. We decided to move on to Fredericksburg which was still more or less on our way home and did find a nice motel room for our last night on the road in our $40.00 price range.

Charlotte and Chapel Hill, NC

We're on our way to visit our friends Steve and Lyn in Chapel Hill, North Carolina - the last real stop on our journey. Along the way we stopped in Charlotte, North Carolina (not to be confused with Charleston, South Carolina or Charlottesville, VA. ) Charlotte is probably as representative of the new South as any city south of the Mason-Dixon Line. At least that is the impression that we got both from our brief visit into the city and from spending some time in their museum presenting a history of the Charlotte area from 1865 to the present. The city itself is very modern with several attractive skyscrapers. The museum shows the old South with its history of slavery and Jim Crow, but its emphasis is on the new South boasting the city's multiethnic population and its role as the second-largest financial center in the United States.

From Charlotte we continued on our way to Chapel Hill and arrived there around 6:00, in time for a very good supper and a very pleasant evening catching up with Lyn and Steve. They are friends of long standing whom we met at the Grand Canyon during our first crosscountry trip back in 1968. It has been several years now since we've seen them, but it's always pleasant to spend time with them, and this visit was no exception.

On the road East

Today was mostly just a driving day - the only day in the whole trip that we drove more than 300 miles in a day. We started off taking a scenic route on a very pretty two-lane rural road to Talledega, Alabama, which was somewhat larger than Montevallo and seemed reasonably prosperous. From there we took Highway I20 to Greenville, where we spent the night.

Montgomery and Montevallo, Alabama

  Montgomery is the capital of Alabama, and the area with the government buildings is quite attractive. The downtown shopping area is practically extinct, however. Where various stores once stood, there are now only empty buildings. We had seen other small towns in a similar condition, but Montgomery was the largest city we had seen so depressed. I don't think that this was the result of the current economic crisis. The desertion of the central city was too complete to have happened recently. Apparently it was, as with many other towns, a result of the growth of shopping centers in the area around the city. Harrisburg and other cities in central Pennsylvania were like this for several years beginning in the sixties but have since recovered to a large extent. Perhaps Montgomery will someday recover as well.

 The only other activity we saw in this area besides the Civil Rights Museum and the Civil Rights Monument standing beside the museum was an area where women were selling pies and cakes for the fight against breast cancer. We bought what we thought was a pie (but turned out to be a  coffee cake) as a house gift for my cousin in Montevallo.

The Civil Rights Museum was a very well-done history of the Movement. The most moving and interesting presentation in the museum was a hologram (like a 3D movie) of the bus incident with Rosa Parks which sparked the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King in Montgomery. To watch it was not at all like just watching a movie. It was like being on the curb watching the incident unfold on the bus before our eyes!



                                                                 Civil Rights Monument, Montgomery, Alabama

Outside the museum and just a short way down the street was the Civil Rights Monument. It consisted of a large metal disc on which was engraved the names of leaders of the Movement and those who had been murdered because of their involvement in the Movement. Most of the names were those which I remembered from living through that era.



Just behind the monument was a large wall, with water pouring down it in a perpetual waterfall. On the wall were engraved the words of Martin Luther King from one of his speeches: ". . . until Justice rolls down like waters and Righteousness like a mighty stream." I suppose we are still waiting for that day; prejudice and discrimination still exist, but at least the daily obvious humiliations of "separate and unequal" have been pretty much eliminated.



    The previous night I had called my cousin Harry who lives in Montevallo about 30 miles south of Birmingham to let him know that we were in the area and would like to visit him. Since we hadn't talked in at least fifteen years and had only kept track of each other through his sister who lived in Harrisburg, I  wasn't sure what kind of reception I would get. He was very pleased to hear from me, however, urged us to come visit and invited us to stay over at his house.



 Montevallo was a small town (about 4,000 people) when I visited there as a child in the forties and early fifties. I don't think it is much larger today. My mother's brothers had gone to Montevallo to open dry goods stores shortly after they graduated high school and my mother had followed them and worked in one of her brothers' stores after dropping out of college.

                                                                     My cousin Harry and Betty


My cousin Harry grew up there and now lives a quiet life in the same house he had continued to live in with his parents until their deaths. He had come to Harrisburg several times to visit his sister and once to Hawaii with a lady friend as part of a group, but he was quite content to remain in Montevallo most of the time. The house was immaculately clean and well-cared for and little had been changed since I was there as a child. Even the old dial phone was still there. One difference was that whatever was done in the house, he did. The days of a Black woman coming in every day to do the cooking and cleaning were apparently long gone. He mentioned that one couldn't even find someone to fill that role today. He plays tennis three times a week, attends occasional events at the college, knows most of the people in town, watches a lot of sports on TV, and goes out to eat or watches TV with his lady friend whom we met and liked. He also helps her deliver meals to homebound elderly. It's a quiet life, quite different from my own, but he seemed quite satisfied and comfortable with it. Who could ask for much more than that?

My grandarents  and the families of two of my uncles had lived in Montevallo. As a child, I had gone there with my parents every summer to visit them, first by train and later by car. I have very pleasant memories both of the time I spent there with my mother's family and of the trips there. I remember clearly the clickety clack of the train, playing Uncle Wiggly  (a board game) with my sister, and looking out the window at night at the lights of the towns we passed. On the car trips, we often stopped along the way to look at scenic highlights. I especially remember the Luray Caverns and the Natural Bridge in Virginia. I also remember the hilly roads in Maryland on Route 11, where my sister and I invariably threw up from car sickness. 

 I had not been to Montevallo for at least thirty years and maybe more. I wanted to see my grandparents' house (if it was still standing) and just walk around some of the area where I had spent those summer days of my youth.
My grandparents' house was still there. Aluminum siding had been added and it actually looked a lot better than I remembered it from sixty years ago.

 Downtown Montevallo had not changed much, except that several of the storefronts were now empty. It wasn't as bad as Montgomery, but it wasn't good. The town's lone movie theater where whites once sat downstairs and Blacks sat in the balcony was gone. The local college where my mother had attended for a year was still there. The name had changed from Alabama College to Montevallo College but the biggest change was that when Elise and I took a short walk through the central part of the campus, there were black students setting up for some kind of a picnic with loud rap music - a scene which would have been unthinkable in the forties or fifties.


I was told that the public schools had also been integrated. What used to be the black school was now the junior high school for both races. When I walked past the high school athletic field around 5:00, there were a number of students playing at various unorganized games - not only a mix of blacks and whites but also a mix of girls and boys. My observations were inevitably pretty superficial, but just walking by it seemed that blacks and whites, girls and boys, were interacting pretty freely with each other and did not generally divide up by race or gender.

Until I was a teenager - or perhaps later - I thought that my mother had grown up in Montevallo, but this was not actually the case. She was actually born and raised in West Blocton, an even smaller town than Montevallo, about half an hour's drive away. I wanted to see it, and Harry offered to drive us there.



      Signpost in West Blocton

The town had never been very large. It was originally the commercial center for the town of Blocton, whichwas a company town for a nearby mining operation long closed.  According to a plaque in front of the courthouse, in 1910, the town had fifty-five thriving businesses, and various religious institutions including a synagogue. Now, however, the town had obviously fallen upon hard times. The two blocks of the business area consisted almost entirely of empty storefronts, some with signs still indicating the nature of the businessesthat had once occupied them. There were no more than two or three stores still in operation. The synagoguewas long gone. Apparently my grandparents' house was still there, but Harry wasn't able to locate it. 

We went out with Harry and his friend Betty for a very pleasant dinner at a Chinese restaurant, then returned to his house and went to bed.

At church with Kent

The next morning, Viviane had to work, but Elise and I went with Kent to church. Kent told us, "The service usually lasts an hour, but if you want to leave earlier, it's O.K.. I usually sit in the back myself and often leave before the service is over."  The service began with a few lively hymns presented by a quartet of teenagers and a small band. This was followed, however, not by a usual church service but by a simulcast from New York City of a sermon being delivered by one of Reverend Moon's daughters (who is the minister of the New York church), which we watched on a big screen. The sermon was devoted to a presentation of the qualities necessary to make a marriage successful and was not so different from what might have been presented by a good marriage counselor. Kent explained that the simulcast was a relatively new procedure and that they would eventually return to services led by local ministers.

On the way back to his house, Kent took us on a drive and brief walk through downtown Mobile, which was pretty quiet on a Sunday morning..

After lunch we were on our way again, off to Montgomery Alabama.  We spent the night in a motel just outside Montgomery.

Visiting in Mobile - Reverend Moon's community

on the beach in Biloxi, Mississippi 

Our goal today was to reach the home of Elise' cousin, who is a member of the the Reverend Moon community in Mobile, AL.

We drove most of the way on Interstate 10, which is a great route for getting from one place to another. You can do the speed limit of 70 miles an hour and probably a bit more without much concern about getting stopped. Of course, it's also pretty boring, with mostly flat land on both sides and straight road in front. As we left Texas and entered Mississippi, we moved over to Rt. 90, which is considered a scenic byway and also winds through small towns and hamlets along the way.




We made the change just in time to get into Biloxi, where we stopped at a Waffle House and Elise bought an egg sandwich-to-go for breakfast. The restaurant was just up from the beach, so we took Elise's sandwich and my folding chair and went to have breakfast by the Gulf of Mexico. The beach was very wide and immaculately clean. We also had the beach to ourselves; evidently Biloxi residents don't go to the beach in October. It was a beautiful breakfast.

After Biloxi Rt. 10 was not much of a scenic byway - just a series of traffic lights and the standard highway commercial establishments.





                                                      Elise, Benny, Kent, Jeannette, Milt

 We reached Elise's cousin,Viviane, around 1:45 and spent most of the afternoon just talking and catching up .One of the subjects we talked about was their membership in the Reverend Moon community in Mobile.Viviane has been involved with this group since she was in her twenties. She was married to someone chosen by Reverend Moon in a ceremony in Madison Square Garden with about 1,000 other couples. I think their marriage has not always been ideal, (but then again, whose is?) but they did manage to raise four lovely children, all of whom are doing well and are still involved in their community, and whatever their marital difficulties may have been, they seem to have settled into a good relationship.

They mentioned that this year for the first time, Reverend Moon told the people assembled for the marriage ceremony that they should pick their own partners this time. I would imagine that this was probably somewhat traumatic for those expecting to simply have someone chosen for them, and Elise' cousin didn't know the actual process by which couples were paired up; that was disappointing since I would really like to know just how it was done. Couples could also meet, fall in love, and get married in the traditional way (which involves parental permission and involvement).

Later in the afternoon, we went to a wedding celebration of a young couple in the community, which was held in a large yard at the house of the girl's parents. We were introduced to many of the people, including the woman minister of the congregation. They all greeted us warmly and were easy to talk with about the things people usually talk about at first meeting. They were happy to answer any questions we had about their community, but there was no attempt to convert us. We had planned to stay for just five or ten minutes, but ended up staying an hour - long enough to enjoy some food from the buffet.

We went from there with Viviane's husband Kent to see sunset an old fort on Mobile Bay, and then back for dinner and more talk.

Volunteering in New Orleans

It is with sadness that I must inform any of you still persistent enough to be reading these blogs that my netbook, on which most of these blogs have been recorded, is no longer functioning. It is my hope that the source of the trouble is a problem that might be easily remedied by those who know about such things, but in any case it will have to wait until we get home. In the meantime I will continue to write these blogs whenever I have access to a computer (as I do now at Viviane's), but be not surprised if I fall several days behind. It is simply a result of technical difficulties and not because we have fallen off the end of the earth.

And now onto one of our most interesting days of life on the road. One of the best things about having Elise along on this trip is that she is an inveterate reader of brochures and travel guides about upcoming places and events. At the New Orleans Welcome Center, she found a booklet about New Orleans which included 25 things one could do there for free. Item number 25 was, "Volunteering to help at a rebuilding project in New Orleans." I knew that parts of New Orleans still remained to be rehabilitated after the flooding from  hurricane Katrina  five years ago and was not surprised that there were projects helping with this, but I hadn't considered that we might actually be able to spend a day on very short notice involved with one of these projects.
The article didn't mention the name or number of any specific project, but after thinking about it for a moment, the lady at the Welcome Center did come up with the name of a project that she thought might be able to use our help. The project was located in Chalmette which is a near suburb contiguous to New Orleans where all of the homes had been either washed away or made uninhabitable by twelve feet of water and sludge from a nearby oil refinery that was also damaged by the hurricane flood waters.

This morning I asked the clerk at our hotel desk for a phone book so I could look up the project's phone number, but he didn't have a book which included Chalmette; however, when I explained who I was looking for, he said, "Oh, I know about them. We deliver ice cream to them." He then looked them up on his computer and gave me their phone number. When I called them a little after nine o'clock,  there was no answer, so we decided we would just drive out there and hope to talk to them in their office. Even if we didn't get to talk to them or weren't accepted on such a short-term basis, we would at least get to see something of New Orleans after the flood besides the French Quarter.

As we drove through Chalmette, we did not see any collapsed homes, but we did see a lot of vacant lots. When we arrived at the office of the St. Bernard Project, we were warmly greeted by the young man behind the front desk. A brief conversation revealed that he was, like myself, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania - although his graduation date was considerably more recent than my own. He thought that they might, indeed, be able to use us that day and called out the volunteer coordinator from some back office to speak to us. She said that yes, there was a house being rehabilitated that could use our help today, unskilled as were. She then took a few minutes to give us some background about the project and how it was started by two volunteers who came down from Washington, D.C.; they saw how great the need was beyond what the government was doing, went back and raised some startup money from their friends, and then came back to New Orleans and started this project.

We  punched the address of the house where we would be working into our GPS and away we went. Along the way we saw many houses that looked in pretty good condition, at least on the outside, and a lot more vacant lots.

When we arrived, it was explained to us that the flood waters in Chalmette had reached twelve feet high and that every single home was either washed away or made uninhabitable. Some of the vacant lots were sites from which houses had simply been swept away. Other houses which were beyond repair were torn down by the government and the material removed from the site.
Many houses, however, were still standing but in various states of disrepair. The outside of the homes might still appear to be in good shape, but the insides had been completed gutted. The government gave people money to compensate them for their lost homes, but it generally was not enough to rebuild the home. Some homes had been completely rehabilitated by families who had the resources to do this and families were living in them again. Others, however, had simply been gutted but not repaired. Many people chose not to return and sold their houses to the government. If the home is repairable, it will eventually be rebuilt and sold to another buyer.

 The home where we were sent, however, is one to which the original homeowner is intending to return once the work is completed. It will be one of over three hundred houses that have already been rehabilitated by this project. In addition to the forty homes on which they are currently working, they have a waiting list of another 130 homes. The project is also in the process of developing a mental health program to help those in need of psychological help as a result of Katrina and of the more recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

We were given a one-page summary about the homeowner of the home on which we would be working, and I am including it below in its entirety because I think it gives a better picture of what these people have gone through than anything I could describe:

         Reflecting on the progress of her home, Karen G. says, "Every time I go there and see a little
         bit more done, I cry and ask myself, 'Is this real?'"
         Far from the months following Katrina when she could only look at her home from the outside    
         because she was too paralyzed with grief to go inside, Karen's life is starting to take shape
         again.
        "It's amazing the way things just fall into place sometimes," she says.
         It took Karen six months to gather the strength to see her home after Katrina. Her home in
         Chalmette was also one of the properties affected by the Murphy Oil Spill from a neighboring
         plant, and when she walked in after all those months, the oil covered every inch. Even her
         wedding dress, 12 feet high in the attic, was stained.

        What was most difficult for Karen was the sense of losing her position in life that she had
        worked so hard to achieve. After she and her husband divorced, she bought him out of the
        mortgage, returned to college and eventually landed a job at a law firm to support her
        daughter. She worked at the law firm for 23 years before the storm. She was securely on her
        own and happy.

        After the storm, Karen says she remembers asking herself, "How do I get my life back? I
        couldn't see any way that I could get started again. It was hopeless. I thought it would never
        happen, and then it did."

       After relocating to Gonzales, La. with her parents for a few months, where they eventually
       chose to stay instead of returning to New Orleans, Karen returned to her home city. She
       rented an apartment in nearby Kenner and eventually a place closer to her home in Chalmette.
       She received some assistance from the federal Road Home Program, but like 75 percent of
       recipients, it was not enough to hire a contractor to completely rebuild her gutted home. Karen
       felt paralyzed about where to turn next, when a co-worker referred her to the St. Bernard
       Project (SBP). With SBP's efficient rebuilding model, Karen's assistance can be utilized, along  
       with  volunteer labor, to rebuild her home.

       Karen vividly remembers seeing the first busload of volunteers working in her home and
       feeling a rush of mixed emotions to see work being done on her dormant house.
       "The first time I saw anything done on my house, it was such a shock," she says. "It's still
       unbelievable because I never thought it would happen."
       The outpouring of support from volunteers still overwhelms Karen. She remarks, "I wouldn't be
       in this hopeful situation without all of you."

       Not only is Karen ready to finally be home, but her friends and neighbors have patiently been
       waiting  for her return. With two of her original neighbors home, she says, "They're just so happy
       and waiting for me to be back, too."

When we arrived at the house around 11:00, there were half a dozen people already at work sanding and plastering, a few younger people in their twenties, a couple people roughly in their forties, one black man and a couple women in their sixties. Quite a mix! The supervisor was a young woman who had been a translator for the deaf in upper New York State. She had come to work on the project for short periods of time during the last few years and finally decided to stay. Like many of the workers for SBP, she received a modest stipend from Americorps which enabled her to support herself. In the meantime, she met her fiancee and is intending to relocate here permanently and eventually return to her former profession. She was well organized and put us right to work. I did ceiling sanding first and later plastering. The plastering turned out to be a real learning experience, since it took more skill than I had anticipated. By the end of the day, we were tired and dirty, but it had been a very satisfying day!




 

 We just happened to arrive on a day when another of SBP's houses had been completed and we were invited to attend the "Welcome Home Party" for the family that was moving in. At the end of our work day, we drove over to the home where the celebration was being held. There were about twenty-five of us, mostly volunteers.

                                                                  homecoming celebration, New Orleans, LA

The director of the program made a few brief remarks along with the social work director and the case manager who had worked with the family. There was a quintet of singers from a nearby college who sang a song, and a ribbon was cut. Then everyone went into the house for cake and punch. It was all very nicely done and obviously a very exciting experience for the mother and her daughter who were moving into the house.

For us, it was time to move on. We got as far as Slidell, just outside New Orleans, and took a room in a motel. Except for the fact that the doorknob came off in my hand and we had to use the plunger to flush the toilet, it was quite a nice place except for the fact that the refrigerator could only be plugged in by first unplugging the TV, and the bulb of the lamp beside the bed lay on its side rather than in the socket. Well, we have had some very pleasant motel rooms, and as the saying goes, "You can't win them all."

Baton Rouge and Bourbon Street, New Orleans

I started the day with breakfast in the motel breakfast room and got into a conversation with a man who was working in the area as an auditor of some kind of program. He had been a marine and had served in Afganistan as a sniper shortly after nine-eleven. He seemed pretty low-key about his involvement and said being there wasn't really so bad. I couldn't help wondering (although I didn't ask) how he must have felt as a sniper the first time he killed one of his targets. I know from my own limited experience in the army that soldiers are trained mentally as well as physically to be able to kill in a combat situation, but still....

While we were talking, the manager of the motel was in the room and completed a phone call which obviously left her upset. When we wished her a good morning, she blurted out that it wasn't really a good morning because she had just heard from her daughter that they had placed their child in a residential setting because he was so difficult. When I spoke to her a little later just to say that I hoped things would work out all right, she explained that the boy was 13 and strong and even his medication didn't really enable him to maintain control. She also talked about loving the boy because he was her grandchild. I was reminded of all of the parents of autistic, retarded and emotionally disturbed children I had worked with over the years. I left feeling very sad for her and also grateful that I had been spared such an experience in my own family.

  Our first stop for the day was Baton Rouge - another lunch stop that turned out to be much more interesting and time-consuming than we had anticipated. We started off with a trip to the 27th floor of the state capitol building, the tallest state capitol in the country. From there we had a great view of all of Baton Rouge and the Mississippi River.

Louisiana State Capitol, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

We then went down to the basement for lunch in the cafeteria. There was an interesting mix of people. Both black men and white men wearing suits and ties, workers wearing prison uniforms, as well as well-dressed women, also both black and white, who may have been legislators or working for legislators. I was told that there is still a lot of separation between the races in Louisiana, but for a state in the heart of Dixie that was still very segregated when Elise and I did our crosscountry trip in 1967, they've obviously come a long way.

We then went across the street to see some murals at the capitol annex. There were captions explaining the murals. One of the captions explained that originally one of the former governors (I forget his name, but it wasn't Huey or Earl Long) had been painted into one of the murals, but after he was convicted on charges of corruption (or maybe murdering his wife, I can't remember which), the artist redid the mural and omitted the picture of the offending governor. On the opposite wall, however, there was a display which lauded the accomplishments of the very same exgovernor. Not very consistent, but I suppose it does very well represent the human condition. Good and evil are not necessarily easily separated.



Grounds of Louisiana State Museum, Baton Rouge, LA



 We then went across the street to the Louisiana State Museum. On  the grounds of the museum, there was an interesting piece of metalwork of a horsedrawn cart. The building itself was large and impressive  with one floor devoted to the history of Louisiana and one floor devoted to Louisiana's musical culture and heritage. The most interesting display on the history floor was a film of Huey Long when he was a senator, giving a speech in the Senate. The speech was impassioned and full of waving arms and dramatic turns of speech, while five senators sat on a platform in back of him, completely deadpan and without moving a muscle. It was quite a contrast.

On the third floor were displays as well as recorded music of all of the different styles of music that had originated or been popular in Louisiana.

We eventually reached our goal for the day - New Orleans. The first motel we tried offered us a small, windowless room that was exceedingly ugly. Although it was already 6:00, we decided to try at least one more place in hopes of something more cheerful at a reasonable price, and sure enough for an extra $15.00, we did find a motel that provided us with a small but pleasant room overlooking a courtyard with a swimming pool. Not too many people seem to go swimming in the middle of October, even in New Orleans, but it was pleasant to look at.

The motel was at the edge of the French Quarter and in the evening we made the obligatory trip to Bourbon Street. We had been there twice before, once for Mardi Gras and once when it wasn't. We were curious to see to what extent the French Quarter had recovered from Katrina, and as far as we could tell, it had recovered pretty completely. The stores were all open, the bars all had live bands, and the streets were full of tourists. Most of the music venues were simply too loud for us. My theory is that we are old enough not to have had our hearing damaged by listening to very loud music from an early age, so that music at a certain volume is actually painful. We did, however, find one restaurant that had a trio playing music that we could enjoy and later another outdoor patio where we ordered a beignet and a coke and listened to a trio with a great banjo player. The trumpet player was also a singer, and the group played jazz versions of songs we generally knew at a volume that was enjoyable. For the information of those of you who don't know what a beignet is, it is a piece of dough covered with powdered sugar. It may be a New Orleans specialty, but I would prefer a good donut any time! There was also a karaoke place which had some pretty good singers as well as a couple doing some of the sexiest dirty dancing I can remember. All in all it was an OK evening, but I think I have now had enough of Bourbon Street and don't need to go again.

Beaumont, Texas and Lafayette, Louisiana

Just a word about Vivian's dogs before moving on. She has three. One little one who follows her around the house and two large ones that often also have the run of the house but during our visit were kept in their own room which was built especially for them and is just behind the kitchen. She obviously cared a lot about the dogs and they were good company for her living alone in this big house.

I think dog owners, however, are sometimes like smokers used to be. They assume that everyone will love their dog(s) as much as they do and don't hesitate to expose guests to dogs they would prefer not to be exposed to. This was not the case with Vivian and we appreciated it, especially since Elise has had a fear and dislike of dogs ever since she got bitten once long ago, and I have dog-related allergies. The small dog was extremely well-behaved and unobtrusive. From what we saw of Vivian with the large dogs, they were also well-behaved and well trained. It added to the pleasure of our visit that we could stay with Vivian and not be concerned about the dogs.

Beaumont, Texas wasn't on our list of places to visit, but it was in our path and turned out to be a good place to stop for a tasty lunch of chicken fricassee. We also found out that there was a museum there honoring Thomas Edison which seemed interesting from the write-up we read, so we added it to our list of places to see. (This is why our trip keeps getting extended.)   I remembered that Edison had done most of his work in New Jersey, so I was surprised to find a museum honoring Edison in Texas. Evidently, however, the power company that funded this museum thought it was a good idea.
The museum wasn't very large but it was quite interesting. The number of inventions that Edison developed, patented, and marketed, including the light bulb, the movie projector, and the phonograph, was quite amazing and really transformed the world we live in.

Our final stop for the day was Lafayette, Louisiana. Lafayette is famous for being in the heart of Cajun/Zydeco country. Once we settled into our motel, we made a couple phone calls and found out where there would be Cajun/Zydeco dancing on a Wednesday night and off we went.
When we arrived, we both remembered that Randole's was the same bar/restaurant/dance hall that we had gone to during our last visit to Lafayette at least 20 years ago. Now as then, there were about 40 people, mostly in their sixties but a few older or younger, all white, and mostly but not all local people, all dancing to music by a live Zydeco band. We joined them and had a really good time dancing.
I didn't hear anyone with a French accent, but I did have a brief conversation with a man with a Dutch accent, who was like us, just passing through, and had stopped off to dance. To paraphrase an old subway poster, "You don't have to be Cajun to enjoy Cajun dancing."

Sign in the Beaumont restaurant: "Beware of pickpockets and loose women. N.O. PD" (New Orleans Police Dept.)

Visiting in Houston, Texas

Today we are off to Houston to visit Vivian, loosely related to us as the sister of a deceased sister-in-law, but someone whom we have known for a long time and liked. The road to Houston was straight as the proverbial arrow with only slightly rolling hills to break the monotony. It was four lane divided highway but not limited access, so the speed limit was only 70 mph instead of 80 mph like on the limited access highways. You really have to be driving fast to violate the speed laws in Texas!

                                                      heron in Houston city park

Vivian lives in a beautiful house in a a very rich neighborhood and she took us on a tour. One of the houses had its own small zoo including a monkey house with plenty of room for the monkeys to do whatever it is that monkeys do. We also went to a very large park with a lake. At lakeside we saw a family of nutria. (I had seen nutria before and knew they weren't otters or beavers but I couldn't remember the name; I asked a young woman nearby and she said that in Spanish they were called nutria - just as they are in English.) There was also a beautiful white heron standing not far away away at the edge of the lake. The park was also highly utilized. There were lots of joggers on the jogging path and several soccer games going on on the various soccer fields. Whatever happened to baseball?

We then spent a very pleasant evening together just talking family business and history.

LBJ and a day in Austin, Texas

Even though we missed the museum located at the LBJ Ranch as well as most of the ranch itself yesterday, it turns out that the LBJ Library and Museum in Austin is actually the best source of information about the life and presidency of LBJ. The museum also contains information about Ladybird Johnson and a video tour of the White House narrated by Ladybird.

 I remembered quite a bit about the Johnson presidency, the Great Society as well as the Vietnam War. Even so I was surprised at the number of programs which Johnson initiated that have made us a better and a more decent society -medicare, medicaid, environmental programs, more than 60 bills to improve education, the list goes on and on. Because Johnson knew both the people and the process by which things got done in Washington, he certainly has to be considered one of our most competent presidents. The Viet Nam War was not only a tragedy for the United States but also a personal tragedy for a man who used his position so effectively in so many ways to leave the country at the end of his presidency better than he found it, and ended up being practically driven from office because of a war that almost all of his advisers both military and civilian initially considered a worthwhile endeavor. I suppose that for all of us, myself certainly included, with the best of intentions so many things beyond our control happen to us in the course of a lifetime that we rarely end up at the age of 60 where we expected to be when we were 21.

                                                       tallest building in Austin, Texas 

After the museum we drove to downtown Austin and just walked along 6th Street enjoying the good weather and the great architecture, both old and 19th Century. Austin bills itself as "the music capital of the world," and 6th Street has a number of music venues along the three or four blocks of 6th Street. It reminded me somewhat of Nashville in that respect. We stopped in one of the restaurants for a Tex-Mex lunch of a burrito with beef, shrimp, and fish all rolled into one with a good sauce on it - pretty tasty.

At around 6:30 we drove down to the lakefront and arrived just in time to take the boat cruise around the lake, which featured watching more than half a million bats fly out from under the bridge over the lake and fly off for their evening meals of moths and other insects. Like at Carlsbad Caverns, it was quite a sight.

Afterwards we went back to downtown and wandered in and out of a few of the music bars. One was too loud, one was an open mike bar with performers generally not as good as one might hear at Open Circle in Philadelphia, and finally to another place where two guys on two pianos played requests and encouraged the audience to sing along. We were tired by then and we weren't properly dressed for the too-strong air conditioning so we didn't stay long, but it did seem like fun.

Texas roadsigns: Drive Friendly
Don't Mess with Texas - $1,000 fine for littering

Fredricksburg and on to Austin, Texas

I started my day with a brief  chat  with the motel owner, who was out with his wife sweeping up the acorns from the oak tree."How long have you had this motel?" I asked him.

"It's been two years now."
"Where were you before?"
"I was in Florida."
"What brought you here?
"The economy there got very bad."
"And things are better here?"
"Yes, and my wife and I do everything ourselves (to cut expenses)"
Just one more casualty of the bad economy but making the best of a bad situation.
I decided to make the most of a good situation and went next door to the donut shop. I was happy to find that although their selection of donuts was limited, they also had fresh croissants. I bought two and brought them back to the motel.

Our first goal for the day was Fredricksburg and the large museum there about WWII in the Pacific. Unlike most of the towns where the main street of the town was also the highway through the town, Fredricksburg was not ugly. On the contrary, the six blocks of the business district were quite attractive. Fredricksburg had evidently been settled by immigrants from Germany and many of the restaurants on this strip still featured German food. In addition to the restaurants, there were many shops selling all kinds of arts and crafts materials from inexpensive tourist items to an exhibit of beautiful blown glass items that did not even have prices attached to them, so that looking at them was more like being in a museum than in a gallery. There were also small parks and a couple small museums on this strip in addition to the large WWII museum. A few of the buildings also remained from the 19th century. The streets were crowded with tourists, so that it was a little like New Hope on a Sunday afternoon.

One might wonder why a major museum about the war in the Pacific would be built so far from the Pacific Coast, but there was a reason - Admiral Nimitz, who was the admiral in charge of the naval war in the Pacific was born in Fredricksburg. At the War in the Pacific Museum we were informed that it would take at least 3 hours to see everything - more time than we had available if we were to get to Austin that day. After hemming and hawing a bit, we decided to pay our money and see what we could in an hour or so. It was, indeed, quite a museum, with a detailed account in words, pictures, and films of the events leading up to the war with Japan and the various battles that took place. The part I found most interesting was  the story of developments in Japan prior to the war, including an attempt by some in the military to assassinate the emperor. We gave short shrift to much of the military history and did manage to see most of the museum in about 45 minutes.



longhorn cattle on LBJ ranch, Johnson City, Texas



Then it was off to Johnson City to see the place where Lyndon Johnson was raised. When we got to the museum at his ranch, the two park rangers were just leaving. We nicely informed them that all of the promotional material about the museum said that it was open until 5:00, and it was now only 4:00. They then nicely informed us that Texas was on Central Time not Mountain Time and that it was now actually 5:00. Who knew? We didn't. It was quite a surprise! In any event, we had to acknowledge that they were entitled to close the museum even if we did think it was only 4:00.

Since we were there already, we did a short walk into the ranch where they had fenced in some deer that were common in the area and also some longhorn cattle; I was also surprised to learn that these cattle were actually living wild on the prairie when settlers arrived. They were descendants of cows that had been abandoned or lost by earlier Spanish explorers.

Our last stop of the day was Austin. We arrived at our motel at about 6:00 (Central Time) and settled in for the evening.

Sonora, Texas

The original intention was to do this trip in ten weeks. Not enough time. I reached Los Angeles in seven weeks because I had to, but it meant leaving out some things that I really wanted to see - like Yosemite, for example. Coming back, it soon became obvious that our trip would last at least twelve weeks, and now it seems that thirteen weeks is a more realistic likelihood. No matter which way we go, there are things of interest to see that we didn't know about but which we don't want to miss once we find out about them.
 
  Today, our "find" was Sonora, Texas. We originally chose it because it seemed to be the town where we were most likely to be after a day of driving.



Main Street in historic Sonora, Texas  



We did indeed arrive at Sonora at 4:00 pm and pulled into a budget motel, where a nice Pakistani gentleman showed us around and assured us that we would be safe and happy at his motel. Indeed, the room was newly painted a bright green and yellow which made it quite cheerful, and outside the room was a huge tree with spreading branches. I had never seen a tree quite like it before and although the owner told me that it was an oak tree, I had my doubts since the leaves were different from any oak I had ever seen. I looked it up on my netbook and learned that it was indeed a Live Oak.

There was a large cavern not too far from Sonora, and we had intended to see it, but we were too late to do this. We had arrived early enough, however, to drive the mile or so into the center of Sonora and take a look at the town. We picked up a walking tour brochure of the town and off we went. The highway was the main street through the town and it was filled with the usual conglomeration of auto repair and sales places, gas stations,restaurants and miscellaneous commercial establishments. Nothing special.

There was a sign pointing left to the historic district. We took the turn and it was almost like something out of Twilight Zone. We had been whisked back into the nineteenth century. We were now on a wide street with small shops on both sides, many of them in refurbished 19th century buildings. The shops were all closed and we were the only ones on the street. Reading our walking tour brochure, it seemed that the town's main claim to fame was that it was the place where Will Carver, a member of Butch Cassidy's gang of bank and train robbers, was finally killed. The various buildings on the walking tour generally had some loose connection to his fatal visit to the town. There were also some other killings referred to. It seems that the town has been cleaned up quite a bit since the nineteenth century. Progress ain't all bad.

The town visitors center was closed. There was a sign up that because of the economic turndown, the center would now be closed on Saturdays. There was also a notice posted about a memorial dinner for George Wallace. GEORGE WALLACE??!! I knew we were in the South and that much of the South has still not conceded that it lost the Civil War and that the reconstruction period is over, but GEORGE WALLACE?! - whose main claim to fame as governor of Alabama was a final unsuccessful effort to block integration at the University of Alabama? If there was ever anyone in the US better off forgotten than George Wallace, it's hard to imagine who it might be. In  all fairness to Sonora, I must acknowledge that George Wallace is a fairly common name; perhaps the dinner was to honor some other George Wallace.  I certainly hope so!

The town courthouse was a beautiful nineteenth century building with a large attractive lawn in front of it. The lawn contained three historic stone markers - one honoring veterans of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, one honoring veterans of WWII, and one honoring a citizen of the town who was killed while leading his Confederate troops in a minor battle of the Civil War. There were also some large cardboard posters touting the local high school football team. On the fence facing the sidewalk, there were small posters honoring the early settlers of the town, apparently written by their descendants. One of them referred to the harsh conditions overcome to get there, including defending themselves against "savage Indians." I suppose being overrun by foreigners and displaced from one's homeland would tend to make the Indians rather savage, but I can't help wondering how an Indian would feel reading that description. Probably less surprised than I was.

Another poster referred to two brothers, each of whom fought on a different side during the Civil War.
The town also had what seemed from the outside like a rather large library. Even small towns like Sonora all seem to have a public library well furnished with computers. We are still a literate people.
We finished our tour of Sonora by driving around the residential area.
Although it was starting to get dark, few of the houses had lights on. Where was everybody? The other noticeable thing was that almost every house seemed to have a pickup truck or two parked either in the driveway or in front of the house.

Carlsbad Caverns

Elise and I spent a lazy morning just hanging around our cabin. Actually, we were out by 11:00, and since we never seem to get out much before 10:00 anyway, it wasn't such a lazy morning.
 

Carlsbad Caverns, Carlsbad, New Mexico



 We drove to White's City, which is the last human habitation before the Carlsbad Caverns. The town was named after the teenager who discovered and first began exploring the Cavern and who eventually became the Carlsbad Caverns National Park's first superintendent.                                          

The "town" consists primarily of a gas station, a gift shop, a motel, and two restaurants, one of which was already closed for the season. We had lunch at the restaurant, including a really delicious slice of apple pie, and then drove on to the Caverns.

We were early enough to buy our tickets for the 2:00 guided tour and also have time to browse the museum before taking an elevator more than 700 feet down to the floor of the Caverns. The elevator is an engineering marvel in itself and was at one time the third longest elevator in the world.

The cave was one of Mother Nature's more creative and fantastical efforts, with all sorts of strange figures and shapes - a little like Bryce Canyon but with a ceiling. As usual, the Park Service ranger who led the tour was excellent. At one point he turned off his lantern and all of the lights in the area of the cave where we were sitting, so that we experienced the total darkness of the Caverns. He also had a great suspense story of the time John White's lantern went out while he was exploring the cave and had wandered away from the lantern. He had only three matches to find the lantern and get it lit. Otherwise he would not have been able to find his way out of the Caverns. The first match turned out to be a dud; nevertheless, he did manage to relight his lantern. Even though we, of course, knew the happy ending of the story in advance, the story was still a well-told cliffhanger.



Latino supermarket, Carlsbad, NM

 Before dinner, we needed to do a small food shop and decided that we would take a break from Walmart (not that there wasn't one in town), and we did our food shopping at La Tienda, a Latino supermarket. In addition to a much greater variety of Latino foods than we would have found at Walmart, they also had a whole aisle of large pinatas displayed high on one of the walls.

UFO's and bats

I don't remember having heard of Roswell, New Mexico (but then there are a lot of things I don't remember and haven't heard of), but that doesn't mean that Roswell isn't famous. Just outside of Roswell in 1947, a flying saucer is reputed to have crashed and three bodies of small humanoid figures to have been recovered. The event was immediately hushed up by military authorities, but in the meantime, there have been a number of people peripherally connected to the event who have either testified to having seen physical evidence of the crash or to having had some connection to the coverup.

In the meantime Roswell has become the center for research into Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) sightings around the world, and we visited the museum which is part of this center.
  

Milt at UFO Museum, Roswell, NM 

In addition to displays related to the testimony of various people connected to the event in 1947, we also viewed a very professionally done docudrama which interspersed interviews with people connected to the event in 1947, with dramatizations of possible key elements of the event. It was a very stimulating morning and certainly left one with the feeling that we may, indeed, have been visited by beings from a more advanced civilization in outer space.

From Roswell, we continued our way south to Carlsbad Caverns and took a cabin in a campground just south of the town of Carlsbad. For $40.00, the cabin included not only the usual appurtenances but also a microwave, a refrigerator, and a TV/DVD player with the privilege of choosing one free DVD to watch.

We arrived at this campground in time to settle in, relax and read for a bit on the front porch of our cabin, and then take off for Carlsbad Caverns.

We arrived at the amphitheater in front of the cave entrance at 6:00, just in time to see 500,000 bats (the number is not a misprint) emerge from the cave in waves and then spiral off into the distance in search of their evening meals of moths and other insects within a 30-40 mile radius. It's hard to believe that there would be enough insects even within a 30-40 mile radius to feed half a million bats, some of whom consume up to half their weight in insects every night, but apparently there are. We watched swarm after swarm of bats emerge from the mouth of the cave for over half an hour. The number then slowed down with pauses of several minutes between groups of bats heading off to the southeast, where there was water and consequently more insects. We left shortly after that, but the ranger told us that the exodus of bats often lasts for as long as two hours. A couple hours before sunrise the bats return to hang upside down in one room of the cave during the day until the next evening. In November, the bats begin a flight to Mexico where they winter before returning to Carlsbad in the spring. This flight of the bats was one of the most amazing sights I have ever seen!

Balloon Fiesta and cable car ride

 

balloon fiesta, Albuquerque, NM

 There are many advantages to traveling with Elise including the fact that she is constantly finding more places to go and things to see that I might have missed on my own, but one thing that has always irked me is her extended negotiations with room clerks at motels to get the highest room with the best view furthest from the road. These are just things that don't matter to me. Clean sheets? Running water? Maybe, but not necessarily, a microwave and refrigerator?  Good enough. I'm satisfied. I don't need to check out three different motels and wait out these negotiations. I have to admit, however, that this time it was worth her efforts. After checking out three different rooms, she finally settled on a room on the third floor with a view of the Balloon Fiesta, and although yesterday there wasn't much to see, today there was. We also broke out the binoculars, which I have carried all the way from Philadelphia and not yet used.

 Between our location and the binoculars we had a wonderful view of at least 50 brightly colored hot air or helium balloons that ascended within close view of us. We could see the balloons in full living color and some of them came close enough to us so that with the binoculars we could actually see the people in the baskets below the balloons. The highlight was one red balloon shaped like a huge heart with the word Skyheart written on it. We had never seen anything like this scene, and it was really an excitement, as one balloon after another came within view.

After the balloons had all drifted away, we drove to a peak of the Sandia Mountains slightly to the east of Albuquerque and took a cable car ride to the top, over 10,000 feet high. We had a great view of the mountain looming before us on one side and Albuquerque spread out below us on the other. We walked around a little while at the top and observed the ski slopes which are covered with about nine feet of snow during the winter. I also saw more of the trees with beautiful yellow leaves and found out that they were aspens and not beech or birch as I had previously thought.

 There was a bit of a mystery connected with our tickets for the cable car ride. Although Elise purchased the tickets with her credit card, the tickets came printed "10-07-10/senior/Milt. How did they even know my name? We couldn't figure it out until someone explained to us that Milt was short for military rather than Milton. Apparently, the senior discount and the military discount were the same so both were printed on the ticket. It was comforting to know that there was at least a certain amount of rhyme and reason still left in the world.


 

view from cable car, Sandia Mts.

From there it was off to Roswell. Our real goal was the Carlsbad Caverns further south but we knew we wouldn't get there today and settled on Roswell as our goal for the day. We arrived there around 6:00 and after Elise's usual motel negotiation,  settled on a room at a local motel.

 We found out that there was the New Mexico State Fair in town and went to see it that evening. We ate an Indian burger (a hamburger on two slices of Indian frybread), walked past all the carnival rides and games, did a quick browse through the big hall with booths touting various local politicians and things for sale, spent a little more time in a hall featuring a model train display and displays by various schools, community service institutions and health centers, and finally sat ourselves down at an outdoor stage where a fairly entertaining magician was performing magic tricks, primarily for the kids.

We took a raincheck on the comedian that was to follow the magician and called it a night.

A day in Albuquerque

 Our motel room was on the third floor and faced the area where all of the balloons from the big Balloon Fiesta were supposed to ascend at 7:00. We were at our window at 7:15, and over the next half hour or so did see about a dozen balloons take off. It was interesting but the balloons were too far away to see well and there were only a dozen of them - many fewer than we expected. After a half hour or so the balloons were gone and it was time to move on.

My next stop was car maintenance, not nearly as colorful as balloon ascension, but necessary My car has been doing well, and I want to keep it that way, so I made a trip to the nearest Jiffy Lube to change my oil and filter. I had never used Jiffy Lube before, but they were quick, courteous, and thorough, and I was back at the motel by 9:00.

                                             petroglyphs on mountain, near Albuquerque

Our next stop was a mesa on the western side of Albuquerque where Pueblo Indians had scratched petroglyphs (pictures or symbols depicting various places or events in their lives) on the rocks. Viewing the petroglyphs involved a steep climb over a rocky path to the top of the mesa, but it was worth the climb. We saw quite a number of petroglyphs, and at the top of the mesa one of the park rangers was available to answer our questions and tell us more about the various drawings we had seen. The specific meanings of most of the petroglyphs are often not known. Current Pueblo Indians may know some of the meanings, although the same symbol or figure might have a different meaning for different groups of Indians, but they generally consider these drawings secret and sacred, so even if they know, they ain't necessarily tellin'.

We went from there to the Old City section of Albuquerque, a colorful area of small courtyards branching off of the main street, with stores selling food and various Indian and other crafts. Most of the products were made by local artisans, but a few of the cheaper items did bear the label, Made in China.
We had lunch outdoors at one of the large plazas where a band was playing, and for dessert one of the best pieces of baklava with which I have ever had the pleasure of indulging myself. It had just come out of the oven and it was full of nuts and a light honey -delicious!

We then spent a good bit of the rest of the afternoon in a small park with a bandstand in the center, which brought back memories of trips to Mexico and the Zocalo which is always the center of activity in the town. And just like in Mexico, the park was surrounded on three sides by small shops selling local crafts. In many cases the person who had made the articles was also selling them from a small stand outside the shops. I suppose that the main difference between this park and the Zocalos in Mexico is that here one could shop at leisure without being pressured by people who needed whatever sales they made on a given day just to barely feed and shelter themselves and their families.




high school band in Albuquerque

On the fourth side of the park was a church. Elise briefly visited the church, and then we browsed through the shops but mostly just sat in the park listening to the various musical groups, including a group of about 8 or 9 high school students dressed in Mariachi outfits and singing songs in Spanish.

 It was a very pleasant day, and we didn't mind that we had neither the time nor the energy left to see the other places we had planned to visit in Albuquerque.

A day in Los Alamos

The morning dawned somewhat chilly but sunny and beautiful. As we drove off towards Los Alamos, the temperature rose to a very comfortable 70 degrees. The area through which we drove was also very beautiful with a plain on one side and mountains just behind that. As promised, the last few miles to Los Alamos were very winding as we crossed the mountain range in front of us, but we arrived safely in late morning.

Los Alamos is a very attractive city, which was built almost from scratch during World War II. There was only a ranch school and a few farms in the area, all of which the government bought up, displacing those who were living there. There were no poor people since everyone in town needed a  government clearance to be there, and were either related to the Manhatten Project or were providing some kind of service to these people. Even today, we had to pass through a checkpost at the edge of town before we were admitted. I guess we didn't look very dangerous, since the lady in the booth just wished us a good day and passed us through, but I doubt if there are any other towns in the US that have a similar checkpost.

Today, there are a fair number of attractive shops and eating places as well as attractive housing and two interesting museums, but defense department research still seems to be the major industry of the town.
We visited both of the museums. The Los Alamos Museum had exhibits that began with prehistoric people who had lived in the area and went forward to the Manhattan Project, including an especially interesting section on Robert Oppenheimer, who originally headed the project and eventually lost his government clearance during the McCarthy period.
The second museum, larger and more modern than the first, had a large section, which included an 18 minute film, on the role of the Manhattan Project in the defense of the United States and a smaller section on other government research (e.g., the Hubble Telescope) that has less military relevance. It was, all in all, a very stimulating morning.

After lunch we were back on the road on our way to Albuquerque. Most of the drive was on Interstate 25, with a speed limit of 75 miles per hour - quite a change from yesterday. This was the week of the Balloon Fiesta, where hot air and helium balloon enthusiasts from all over the world come to fly their balloons. This is quite a major event which draws thousands of people and hundreds of balloons, so we looked forward to seeing some of them take off next morning. We also spent most of the evening planning other things we would like to do during a day in Albuquerque.

On the road to Los Alamos

Today we drove to the Aztec Ruins National Monument. The ruins have been mistakenly called Aztec (the Aztecs lived in South America), but it is one of the largest sites anywhere of Indian ruins. Some of the ruins have been reconstructed and others are from the original buildings and are in fairly good condition. We were able to walk thru the site and see the buildings up close.

In the afternoon we drove on to Cuba, NM, which was a small and very rundown town. The same could be said of the motels available there, so we decided to move on to Los Alamos. Instead of taking the long four-lane highway, I decided that we would take the scenic route through the mountains.

This turned out to be quite a trip. The first several miles were indeed quite scenic - a narrow road with pine and aspen forests on one side and meadows and pastures with grazing cows on the other. The leaves of the aspen trees had turned yellow and were beautiful. At one point the cows crossed the road in front of us and we had to stop and wait for them.

After about 15 miles, however, the macadam road ended and we found ourselves on a dirt road with a fair share of ruts and potholes. My speed slowed to about 20 miles an hour, often less.
Eventually, the road again became macadam. That was the good news. The bad news is that the road was now covered with more than an inch of white sleet. Fortunately a truck or two going through had left a track of clear road on which I could drive. Since there were also heavy rain showers,  some fog, and lots of curves in the road, progress was slow and it was getting dark. And we still had more than 30 miles to go to reach Los Alamos, including a few miles at the end reported to have even more severe curves and turns than we had already seen. We had to consider the possibility that we might have to spend a very cold night parked in the car by the side of the road - not an inviting prospect.



rainbow outside La Cueva ski lodge



Fortunately, my guardian angel who seemed to be napping on the job, woke up, and there around the next curve was La Cueva Ski Lodge - a restaurant, a general store and several rooms for rent. At this point we were prepared to pay almost anything to get off the road and have a nice warm place to spend the night. Fortunately, we were between tourist seasons and rooms were available. We ended up in a very nice room with all the amenities of a good motel (including heat) and also including a large selection of VCR's for a mere 85 dollars (plus tax). As a bonus, we had just finished bringing things in from the car when we saw a beautiful double rainbow right in front of our room. It was almost biblical - like Noah coming out of the ark and seeing a rainbow sign that all would be well! So in the end we spent a nice cozy evening watching "Jurassic Park" on a DVD and dodged the bullet of a cold night on the road. Whew!

Mesa Verde at last

My Toyota Prius seems to prefer being out West. From Philadelphia to Los Angeles I was getting 45-46 miles to the gallon, but since I've started back, even though I'm carrying more weight now that Elise is with me, I've been getting 51-52 miles to the gallon. I don't have an explanation, but I'm not complaining.


                                          view from KOA cabin, Cortez, New Mexico

I must also acknowledge that I have become a regular customer if not necessarily a fan of two businesses that are at least politically incorrect. One is Walmart - it's one stop shopping, the prices are cheap, the service is good, and they're everywhere.

 The second is KOA. As a place to camp in a tent, it is definitely not the place to go as I think I mentioned in a previous blog, but as the nights have gotten colder, we have been staying in KOA cabins and finding them a fairly good compromise between creature comfort and enjoying the outdoors. The cabins are pretty basic - a bed (we provide the bedding), a desk, night table, a couple of chairs and WIFI which is usually but not always free. There is also usually a laundromat available. There is a picnic table in front of the cabin and a swing on the porch of the cabin. You have to trundle over to the public bathrooms, which include showers, when the need arises. The price is about the same as a cheap motel, but the most important thing, as compared to sleeping in one's tent, is that the cabin contains a heater - a great advantage when the temperature is dropping into the high thirties at night. The major advantage over a motel is that one can eat out at the picnic table for both breakfast and dinner. The price of food from the supermarket is much lower than eating restaurant meals and it is just generally a more pleasant experience, since the site usually comes with a view of the beautiful scenery through which we have been driving for the past several days. There is some of the  feel of camping with less of the discomfort.

Finally, just a word about camping in America in 2010. If you have no interest whatsoever in this topic, you can skip this paragraph. First, I will acknowledge that there are still a fair number of people camping in tents. I think, however, that there are fewer than there were during our trip 40 years ago. The campground industry is not very interested in tent campers. They are interested in RV's(recreational vehicles;i.e., campers and trailers). For every campground we pass on the road that provides for tenters, there are at least one or two that provide only for RV's. Even most of the campgrounds that provide space for tents are filled mostly with RV's.
These RV's are generally driven by retired people who are on the move. Some come to a particular place and stay for a week or more while visiting the surrounding area; others are traveling long distances either to see the country or to visit children and grandchildren. There may be a recession in America; there are certainly many older people hurting financially; but there is also a population of older retired people who are well off and have the energy as well as the financial means to take to the road in one of these RV's.

We spent a lazy morning around our cabin and didn't get out until almost 11:00. We started with a visit to the Cortez Cultural Center. We wanted to find out if a convention in town this weekend for Indian trading post traders would be of interest to us. At first it seemed that it would just be a trade convention really designed for the traders and not for the general public. There was, however, an exhibit on the wall at the rear of the Cultural Center with quotes from long time trading post operators and newspaper articles about the trading posts which were more interesting than I had anticipated. The trading post operators evidently once held a unique niche in the life of the Indian community. They were the Indians primary contact with the outside world. While some traders apparently exploited the Indians with whom they dealt, others developed close relationships, both financial and personal with their Indian clientele and helped them to navigate the white world around them. Now, however, this is a dying institution. Indians come and shop at the same Walmarts as do their white neighbors, and they have other sources for marketing the arts and crafts they create. The trading post has been reduced to just one more outlet for the sale of Indian jewelry and pottery. Instead of going to the convention, however, I settled on purchasing a CD of trader stories, which Elise and I will listen to in the car.

                                                     ladder to cliff dwelling of Indians

We then took a lunch break. We passed up a new restaurant serving Mexican food and ended up at a more modest but also more local "home cookin'" place. As soon as we were seated, the "chef" a tall black man with a haircut like mine and a soft southern drawl, put down a sample of his barbecued beef  - the special for the day - on our table. He explained, "This comes with baked beans, my grandma's secret recipe - special. I also make a great brisket, but I'm sold out of that." The beef was, in fact, delicious, and I immediately ordered the "special" on fry bread,which is an Indian bread which is sort of a cross between regular bread and funnel cake. We'd had it before at the Pow Wow in Panguitch, so I knew I would like it - which I did.

Our next stop (at last) was Mesa Verde National Park. the park itself was located on a large mesa and was  more green than any of the other parks we had seen (I guess that's why they call it Mesa Verde - duhhh).

                                                        cliff dwellings of prehistoric Indians

 The main feature of the park, however, is not the scenery but the fact that there are considerable remains of the cliff dwellings of Indian groups who had lived there during the 12 and 13 hundreds. We took a half hour tour with a park ranger to the Cliff Palace which was a major site for this prehistoric community of Indians. To get there we had to go down a long series of steps.  On the way out, we climbed ladders similar to the ones the Indians had used to reach their village. The park ranger explained various aspects of the life and culture of these people and it was an interesting and educational experience.

Afterwards we took a short walk on another trail and saw other cliff dwellings from a distance and also looked down into Soda Canyon, so named because of the white color of the rocks.