When we travel I find things that amuse me. Here are a few from our recent trip to the Northeast.
There was a sign for “Maple Springs.” Gosh! I thought, they must not just tap sugar maple trees! They actually have a place where it comes out of the ground from a spring.
In Boston they do not have manhole covers, but “raised casting ahead.” I had to watch to see what it actually referred to. I guess in this day and age the sign at home would be reworded “Worker hole cover ahead.”
On Peter Pan bus line do they sing “I gotta crow” and serve peanut butter?
Peter Pan
And they must kill lots of pigs though I saw not one pig farm up there. Everything is this ham and that ham. Chatham, Eastham, Hingham, Dedham, Waltham, Framingham and last but not least wearing pig skins at Wareham!
At home the engineers are installing “Roundabouts” to replace intersections. In New England they are called rotaries. Go figure.
I learned that “Plows use caution” means there is a bridge overpass coming up on the road.
How about this one? Took me a long time and Bob’s help to figure it out!
Refers to dump trucks in construction area. Who knew? Not me! Actually the sign we blew past on the freeway in Massachusetts only said “Body down” and had me totally stumped!
As Bob wrote in his travel journal regarding Days 27, 28, 29 and 30 (of our miles long adventure). “We left Nashville and headed towards Townsend where we had rented a small cabin in the woods – a final stop in a familiar and loved area.We had not been here in 3 years. The ride was easy and the start of the Appalachian Range was welcomed. Far different than the Rockies, but the lush forests and green valleys were delightful. The redbuds were beginning to bloom and the dogwoods were in full flower.”
Some ask us why we go back so often? For us, wildflower hunting is similar to seeking shells on an Atlantic Ocean beach. The trillium are fairly obvious. Southern Appalachian are very large. Wake Robin is similar to Sweet Betsy trillium to me. Yellow is know as Yellow Wake Robin! I just know it is erect and easy to see in a passing car! But the Jack in the Pulpit, not so much. I find myself as we hike looking for the leaves or the curve of the neck on the Jack. The violets in purple, white, lilac and yellow show themselves. The Dutchman’s Britches are not so obvious as they look like the Squirrel Corn. One has to look closely to see the ginger pots under the Ginger leaves. And the Little Brown Jugs must be discerned, too. Yellow Bellwort grows high on Rich Mountain Road. Spiderwort is the rock clinging one I believe.
Most elusive are the Lady’s Slipper. As I wrote earlier, we found pink that had not opened yet. One clump of lovely yellow were sweet. Sadly, people dig them up (stealing from the National Park) thinking they can take them home to grow the. These lovelies have very particular growing needs. So we tell almost NO ONE where we have seen them. A Ranger at Sugarlands Park Office told us that about 3 miles up Sugarland trail they burst out in abundance after the fires a few years ago. Sadly, that is too much hiking for me.
Fire pinks, crested dwarf iris, showy orchid, wild geranium, fringed phacelia, squaw root, and the list goes on! Such Fun.
Bob wrote about the Good Friday drive along Tremont Road following the Middle Prong of the Little River , “So much rain had fallen that it was more full and rapid than we had ever witnessed. It was violent, frenzied, untamed, wild, and raging. It reminded me of the Niagara rapids below the falls. Water careened along its banks and exploded over the rocks. Waterfalls disappeared except for the ones coming down the sides of the mountain that were barely contained. And it was LOUD! Everything in the area was a soft green and dripping. Giant Trillium sat and listened to Jack preach to them and the rocks above. It was glorious. Who said rainy days are not fun? And we only put 60 miles on the car.”
The next day was only 46 degrees but the rain had stopped so we were up for another hike. Bob’s journal continues “Easter Saturday – the day between the grief and the glory – we drove to Tremont and the Middle Prong Trail. We love this trail as it closely follows the Middle Prong of the river and builds to a crescendo with a cascading waterfall. The joy for me is walking a small path that leads to the crest of the falls. Water rushes towards it and explodes over the top of the boulders below.”
On Day 31 we drove home to Ohio. 7,000 miles, a month on the road sitting side by side in the Toyota Camry Hybrid. We were still friends and still smiling. I imagine you might be tired about reading reports of this adventure. We have not tired of telling it though. There are likely more details in my blog and his travel journal than we could recite to you today, in person, without notes!
Our next adventure was a seven day flight to and around New England to pick up some of the places we missed on a previous adventure there. It is nice to be approaching 49 years of marriage completed and still enjoy one another’s company. May all of your journeys be joyous!
Have you driven across Texas? There was not time on our Spring 2019 adventure to explore the southern cities of Texas or Gulf Coast. Basically when we finished with the Bluebonnets we were ready to travel to our annual or semi-annual adventure of hunting wildflowers in the Smoky Mountains.
Did I mention DYC?
We saw these yellow flowers in the distance in Texas. Did I tell you this already? Well, it bears telling again for a chuckle. We asked a guy who looked like he might be a local farmer what that crop was we were seeing this distance in this photo. He said, “Oh that is DYC.” We asked what is DYC. He explained, “Damn yellow cross-pollinators.”
We found Texas basically a boring drive, though we did spot much more of the DYC on our journey. We hurried across the state traveling about as many miles as we could manage in a day, heading for Tennessee.
Saddened recently to hear about the shootings in Midland and Odessa where we had traveled. Five people were killed and 21 others injured, including three law enforcement officers. The violence in this country is sad and startling. I will never get accustomed to it.
We delighted to reach Smoky Mountain National Park. We had rented a cabin for several days to collect our wits after so many weeks on the road. Decided on the first day to attempt our longest hike, uncertain if we could make it to the Lady Slipper area after Bob’s illness and my continued deterioration from arthritis. We made it! We only saw one clump of Yellow Lady Slippers. Photo by Robert Dutina
Robert M Dutina
Did you notice the tendrils down the sides of the Lady’s Slipper?
Robert M Dutina
We also went to the area for pink Sippers. Unfortunately we were too early to see them open.
Photo by MollyPhoto by Molly
Since I could not enjoy full blooms on Lady Slippers, I did delight to say Hi there! to this little guy all covered in dew.
Drop Thy still dews of quietness, Till all our strivings cease; Take from our souls the strain and stress, And let our ordered lives confess The beauty of Thy peace.
John G. Whittier
Basically our visits to the Smoky mountains have this effect upon me!
On a recent trip to Salem, Massachusetts we visited the “House of The Seven Gables” I loved the book when I was required to read it in school. I re-read it before we departed for points east.
Could not resist sharing this photo with you after my last post entitled “French and Chinese “
Look at the details on this storage chest!And yet another set of Mahjong symbols!
When my husband took me to Paris I went alone into a linen shop to try to buy us some washcloths while Bob went to a different shop. I could not make the men in there understand what I was shopping for. I had extremely limited French in my memory bank. Finally my husband joined me in the shop. He explained to them in his many years of French lessons what we needed. He has laughed every since at my pantomimes in that shop. When we checked into our accommodations, the desk clerk tried his best every morning to get me to greet him with Bonjour! or other phrases. From the time I exited the shop, I was French language numb (and dumb). Could not pull out a single expression I might have known. Using public transportation I realized I could not determine what they were advertising AT ALL. I just shut down.
Now I am learning the Chinese game Mahjong online. I saw women playing it in a Satellite Coffee shop in Albuquerque, New Mexico. When I recently got bored with Scrabble I decided to try it for free. Turns out it is a matching game.
The challenge in my mind comes in trying to name the tiles I am matching. My mother used to use La Choy chinese canned foods and we especially liked the fried noodles. So I call one tile green noodles!
Do you remember these?
Then there are red noodle piles with what I call Running man, North, South, East, and West. There are tiles like dominoes only marked with six logs, or dots or dashes. Even six logs bent in their stacks. The same with two, three, etc. One game has owls. The one on my iPad looks like peacocks or phoenix.
There is a banner with an arrow. An arrangement of circles with crank handle up or crank handle down. Season and flower symbols. I am probably not even close to their original meaning, but hey! a girl has to do what a girl has to do.
I have no idea how the women gathered in that coffee shop were playing it. The online version has the tiles in differing patterns and layers. Fun game! and the levels are challenging. Give it a try.
Perhaps I ought to write to that hotel manager/desk clerk and let him know my made up language for Chinese! Nawh, probably not!
Do you remember the old commercial jingle for margarine, “Everything’s better with Blue Bonnet on it!” We found that was true when we toured Texas. We had never seen blooming Bluebonnets. Before we left Ohio I was so excited when I found out we would arrive there in the perfect window of time to see them bloom! And that we did!
At this point we were uncertain what we were seeing.
I was familiar with Virginia Bluebells as seen below. The bluebells also grow in Ohio, but not Bluebonnets as far as I know. We were constantly mixing up the names.
So Bluebonnets are actually closer to purple in the overgrown yard above. But when we got closer they were seriously dark blue!
We drove 35 miles south from Dallas to a tiny place called Ennis, population about 18,500. Not much to Ennis but it is famous for a Kolache Depot Bakery shop in the gas station! Of course, we had to sample their wares! Tasty 🙂 We followed the Ennis Y’all app for a map of attractions. Some fields were easier to find than others. The long horn steer were the hardest to find. Here are Bluebonnets with Apache Paintbrush.
Don’t know of any place in Ohio where you can see wildflowers growing WITH cactus!
And leaving the best for last, here are two of my very talented husband’s photos of the steer and the bluebonnets!
Yeah baby! Those are some long horns! Hanging right above my computer!
From Pioneer Plaza we drove over to the art museum. We are captured every time someone says Impressionists. Gotta go see what we might be missing. Not really impressed about that part of their collection, but did see a few things that I liked. There was a landscape that did an amazing job of capturing the light. Rather mesmerizing.
And there was this plaster sculpture photographed below. I am an Associate at an Episcopal Convent. Twice a year they offer us a silent retreat. I find it refreshing and invigorating to my spiritual life when I can actually get quiet and stay in that listening mode for a few hours. I had to send this image to them. I love it! It was designed originally for funerary purposes. But I loved it for a reminder to keep silence.
To me the silence at the Convent brings LIFE
When we stepped outside of the museum another figure caught my eye. It was so unusual and the background so noisy and complicated! We have had fun researching the work.
I sensed the man was in contemplation or meditation and with the crane, skyscrapers, stop light and traffic below that effort at contemplation would be, as are most efforts at contemplation, challenging. It is actually part of the Nasher Sculpture Center, across the street from the Dallas Museum of Art. The title is La Llarga Nit , which means the long night from the poem Ausias March to Vicent Adres Estelle .
The sculptor is Jaume Plensa. You Tube says “According to the artist, this work was inspired by Catalan poet Vicent Andrés Estellés, who wrote that it is the responsibility of the poet to watch out for the whole community. “
Another site says ” Throughout his career as a sculptor, Jaume Plensa (Barcelona, 1955) has drawn on spirituality, the body and collective memory as the primary sources which tie together his visual artwork. ” He has works all over the world and has done many versions of the sculpture we saw. Bob wants to see one of the ones that light up. I found the images below online.
So as I researched this blog I scrolled through some of the other works by James Plense. Something looked familiar about one of his other works. Voila! Here is a photo I snapped from the car as we were at a stoplight in Seattle, Washington.
It is called the Meeting of the Minds, Mirror and located outside the Allen Institute for Brain Science, 615 Westlake Avenue North. I had no idea at the time what the building was called or represented.
Even this blogger learns new things when she researches what she is trying to say and show!
Accustomed to seeing Angus cattle, as we drove towards Dallas, we now saw Brahman steer in some fields and even longhorns! We began the day going to the Pioneer Plaza to see the Cattle Drive statues. (Reminded me of the Land Run of 1889 sculptures by Paul Moore in Oklahoma.) This is the second most visited tourist site in Dallas. Each sculpture was created by Robert Summers of Glen Rose, Texas in 1992. They were cast at Eagle Bronze Foundry in Lander, Wyoming. There are 40 steer and 3 cowboys. There is a plan to add more cattle. The day we were there we actually saw 4 cowboys!
They say the steer were cast larger than life, but when we saw a live one it looked this large to me!
Somehow I only captured two of the cowboys. Go figure! Actually I discovered that we missed one that was off to one side, beyond a stone wall. First photo is from online and shows what we missed. The remainder are my photos.
I love how Robert Summers captured the movement of the horse!Yes, you can actually walk among them 🙂
Was he resting, overseeing or just watching? Cattle drive positions do not include him. His equipment right down to his pistol were impressive.
And then we met cowboy #4! A young man who told us he used to herd cattle on horseback with his father in Mexico. Here is his photo as his girlfriend snapped his picture!
I was impressed that he could clamber up and down the statue without flinching.
And below, just beyond the park, what is said to be THE official horse of Texas!
Yeah, I know, out of focus!
You get the idea? Mobil, then Exxon Mobil Oil in Texas and beyond.
When we woke in Odessa Texas we knew we had a long day of driving to reach Dallas by nightfall. We amused ourselves with the images we passed. The “oil grasshoppers” we saw were in many colors over the miles: white, beige, yellow, black, orange and black, blue and yellow, red and white.
In case you are unfamiliar with this breed of grasshopper!
There were many horses, also. We saw one group that was stunning with black manes and brown coats. There were five of these looking gorgeous under the trees on the edge of a green field , waiting for a dark, drippy rain cloud to pass over. We passed too quickly for me to get a photo.
We passed huge wind farms. They turbines looked like an invading alien army. The Stanton Wind Project contains 80 General Electric wind turbines with an estimated annual energy capability of 440 million kW hours.
In this area we also saw our first bluebonnets!
Orange Apache Paintbrush
This for sale sign marked the house as overgrown. Look at the flowers out front though! We began seeing them in the highway median. At one point when the blue were mixing with the orange I made Bob stop so I could see what the orange flower was. Looking it up on line I learned the name. We wondered if Lady Bird Johnson had influence in getting these planted along the highways in her 1965 Highway Beautification Project?
There were also safety signs along the road with photos of a longhorn cow reading things like: “Text later …you herd me” and “I’ve got a beef with speeders.”
The Big Spring Refinery that “has the capacity of turning sweet and sour crude into highly refined products, from clean gasoline and petrochemical products to jet fuel and ultra-low-sulfur diesel – a cleaner, more-efficient fuel that offers an immediate answer to the concerns about greenhouse gas production and global warming.” Be that as it may, the place was eerily weird. flaming safety towers, acres of storage tanks, refinery plant after refining facility.
I saw one abandoned factory called the “Rogers Delinted Cottonseed Co.” Had never heard of that one. If I understand correctly, they processed cottonseed there using chemicals such as both sulfuric and hydrochloric acid, then neutralized the action of the acids with soda ash, lime or anhydrous ammonia. In 1984 the plant closed. In February, 2000 signs were posted warning of contamination and in 2002 the land received a hazard ranking system. In May, 2006 due to remediation actions the land was restricted for use of the property to commercial – industrial (non-residential). Yikes.
On our way to Las Cruces we saw large pecan groves and processing plants. I had no idea this area was a top producer! Just south of Las Cruces you are suddenly in the middle of the world’s largest family owned pecan orchard. The farm produces between 8 and 10 million pounds of nuts a year from over 180,000 trees, about 48 trees per acre. The Stahmanns own this. One son moved to Australia, made success with orchards, and they became the largest pecan producing family in the world!
We made our way towards the outskirts of El Paso. Ate at a local chain we had never heard of in Ohio, Don Carbon’s. They had such huge portions we ate leftovers for two days! I had chicken fajitas with rice and charro beans. The counter clerk could not explain the beans to me. Had never tried those beans so I took a chance. SPICY!!
It was my idea to see El Paso again. I did not remember passing through all those many years ago when we made our way from Fremont, California to Ohio. The next morning we visited the Keystone Heritage Center with desert botanical plants and a wetlands walkway. We so wished the plants had been identified better!
THE WETLAND HAD VERY LITTLE WATER.
The portion of the “wall” we saw at the border was just as ugly as imagined. Rusty iron and so unwelcoming.
Not at all like the Statue of Liberty sentiment that I had grown up believing. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” taken from an 1883 sonnet by Emma Lazarus. I understand the need to welcome people legally. This wall looked to me as if we are no longer welcoming even the legal immigrants.
Actual border crossing area into Ciudad Juarez
When we got out of downtown and the road began to be elevated we could see the Rio Grande river and the many homes in Juarez. The many colors of the houses reminded me of Florida! As we left town we went through an immigration checkpoint.
Travel the rest of the day featured an area of scrubland where the main feature was the oil industry. Derricks, pumps, refineries, trucks and trains. We were glad to get to our hotel in Odessa. Our memory of driving Texas in 1971 was if we had a rope we could have fastened the steering wheel on the VW van to just drive along the straight boring road across the state. Pretty much the same now!
Treasures in Plain Sight, A Christian Blog 