Thursday October 23 (Muriel)

We drove west from New Orleans in rain, crossing the Mississippi and on through southern Louisiana. Much of the way the highway was elevated above lush vegetation and dark waters below us. By the time we entered Texas the rain ended. Lunch was in low, flat eastern Texas. We could see signs of destruction from the 2008 hurricanes: a few damaged roofs, fallen trees at the edges of forest, and damaged billboards. What we saw was nothing like the damage to New Orleans from Katrina, but we did not visit the areas that took the brunt from this year’s hurricanes like Galveston or High Island.

As we drove south toward Houston, traffic became awful. We pushed on to San Antonio for the night. It had been a very long drive, and we enjoyed walking from our motel to a delightful Sushi restaurant for dinner.

Friday October 24 (Muriel)

Today’s drive was even longer than yesterday’s in miles, but fortunately traffic was light. Most of the time the speed limit was 80 MPH and most vehicles traveled at the limit. We drove west, through the Hill Country of Texas. It was surprisingly attractive. We had expected boring flat miles “of miles and miles”. We wondered at the strata along roadway cuts. Although we often were going up and down significant grades, the strata in most places were perfectly horizontal, as if laid down by a monstrous WPA make-work project for unemployed stonemasons. We tried to figure out how the strata could be so horizontal in mountains. Since we were zooming along at 80 MPH, the question obviously didn’t slow us down much. For much of the day, oaks covered much of the land we passed. Gradually the terrain became more arid after I-10 turned northward.

By the time we reached El Paso we were driving through fairly lush Chihuahuan Desert. Since we had made excellent time and gained an hour when we entered Mountain Daylight Savings Time while still in Texas, we drove into Franklin Mountain State Park for a spectacular view of El Paso and part of Mexico.

We continued driving north to Las Cruces, New Mexico. We went to an authentic New Mexican restaurant, where we lovers of hot food did not think to ask how hot the food we ordered would be. The “carne adovo” was so hot that Allan could eat only a bit of it and I, the asbestos-mouth, left half of mine. We were strongly (spicily?) reminded that traditional New Mexican food is much hotter even than most spicy ethnic foods served in California.

Saturday October 25 (Muriel)

We decided to look for New Mexico chili powder to bring home. We drove through the commercial areas of several dismal towns in southern New Mexico in unrequited search of chilies.

Giving up on chilies, we drove to the eastern unit of Saguaro National Park. The park was beautiful, much more so than we recalled from an earlier visit to this half of the park. Southern Arizona had an unusually wet late summer and early fall, so the plants were green and lush. We poked along a very scenic 8-mile loop road, stopping at many of the view spots and reading the informational displays. We took a mile long loop trail a ranger recommended and were very glad we did. Between the drive and walk we saw Curved Bill Thrasher, Verdin, Black-throated Sparrow, Gila Woodpecker, Cactus Wren, Greater Roadrunner, Say’s Phoebe, Phainopepla, and Northern and Gilded flickers. This was more than we expected to see on a hot afternoon. We were well aware that the rhythm of our trip tended to get us to good bird habitat in the middle of the day, rather than prime birdwatching times near sunrise or sunset.

Afterwards we drove into Tucson, to the home of our long time friend Ishwara.

Sunday October 26 (Muriel)

We went with Ishwara and some of her friends to an organic farm southeast of Tucson. We didn’t do much picking, since a hard freeze (27F) had ruined much of their fall crop, even their tomato plants growing in a greenhouse. We enjoyed talking to the interesting farm owners who had moved from Chicago to be farmers in the desert. After buying some of their still good produce, our two-carload group went to lunch at cowboy-country eatery.

Monday October 27 (Muriel)

Allan and I left our friend’s home and drove to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, northwest of Tucson, adjacent to the western unit of Saguaro National Park. We had never taken this route to the Desert Museum and thoroughly enjoyed it. Again the desert was spectacular. The day was too hot and windy for the Desert Museum to be at its best, but we spent a pleasant morning there. Its new exhibit “Life on the Rocks” was a treat.

Leaving the Desert Museum, we drove through more beautiful desert, then back onto I-10 and to a hotel in northern Phoenix. We went to the hotel’s happy hour and decided we were not in the mood to go out to dinner. Instead we ordered calamari and wings, feasting in the lounge and watching a very soggy World Series game on TV. We weren’t sure whether the game or our fellow game watchers were more interesting.

Back in our room, we turned on the TV to discover the game was finally suspended because of rain. We both got to work on updating/posting our trip journal.

Tuesday October 28 (Muriel)

We were picked up in the morning by Allan’s cousin Lois, who had moved to Phoenix a couple of years ago. She took us to the Botanic Garden. The monarch butterfly display and the desert plants were lovely. We enjoyed catching up with Lois but dragged in the heat. The three of us were joined by David, another Kotin cousin, for lunch at a Cuban restaurant. We chatted so enthusiastically and long that the restaurant staff commented on it.

Lois returned us to our hotel for a few hours down time, returning to take us to dinner at a local restaurant. We plan to significantly shorten the time between our visits with her.

Wednesday October 29 (Muriel)

Today was the last day of our twelve week journey. We left Phoenix fairly early and drove to L.A., stopping only for lunch and gas until we reached Malibu. Picking cup some dinner at our local grocery store, we went home to the daunting task of unpacking and organizing our stuff.

We were glad to be home. Twelve weeks is a long time to be on the road, although some of our stays were too brief and we had to forgo visiting some very appealing locations that were fairly near our route.

Concluding Thoughts (Allan)

I hope to find time to write—mostly for Muriel and me—a more extended reflection on the trip. But in the meantime and while memories are still relatively sharp, I would like to make some observations on our voyage of discovery.

First the numbers (about which Muriel says I am too fixated). We were gone 85 days. We drove 12, 620 miles. We visited 32 states and provinces, four in Canada and 28 in the USA. We stayed in 44 cities, in 15 of which we visited family or friends. My guess is that we walked perhaps 150 miles and I know we ate too much.

It was “the trip of a lifetime” both in the good sense that it was a completely unique and enriching experience and in the other sense that we have neither the energy or inclination to do it—at least in this format—ever again.

Like the greedy child in a candy store, we really did try to take in too much. This continent is so vast and varied that, in retrospect, trying to “loop it” in only twelve weeks was really presumptuous. As I look back, we saw so many wonderful sites but had too little time to savor many of them. The need to move every few days both added to the stress and limited the opportunity to deepen our appreciation of what we saw.

Perhaps one of the best things about the trip was the unplanned and unexpected treats, which though rarely awe inspiring, were all the more special because they were unplanned and unexpected. Among them were

• the botanical gardens in Fort Bragg,
• the Duck Soup restaurant on San Juan Island,
• eating buffalo burgers in Buffalo Montana and pulled pork in Weldon North Carolina,
• the street sculptures of Rapid City and Sioux falls,
• being witnesses at the wedding of two strangers in Sioux Falls,
• finding the best restaurants in both Charleston and Calgary by accident while walking,
• the beauties of the north shore of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin and Michigan
• the special beauty and fantastic fall colours seen as we drove along Georgian Bay in Lake Huron between Sault Ste Marie and Toronto along with a delightful unplanned stop in Parry Sound.
• and definitely the richness and pleasures of visiting South Dakota, a phrase which, prior to this trip, would have probably provoked a smirk at best.

The cities that stand out as places to revisit are Montreal, Quebec and Savannah, all of which are great walking towns steeped in history but still functioning as vibrant communities not museums. The sea islands of Georgia also deserve more time and exploration.

Contrary to a few cynical comments to the contrary, spending much of twelve weeks in a car with one’s spouse is not a recipe for divorce. If anything, the trip drew us closer together in the joint appreciation of how terribly lucky we are to enjoy so many of the same things at much the same level of interest and commitment. To have a wife who is, in additional to all else, a wonderful travelling companion is good fortune indeed.

Finally, the two overwhelming general impressions we take from our trip is that we live in a huge and varied country with an effectively infinite number of fascinating places and people. For all its tribulations and problems, ours is a wonderful nation.

Equally impressive is the scenery—natural and urban—of our neighbor to the north. Canada is a fascinating country, like the US but still different, that we want to get to know better. The Canadians are wonderful hosts and, in some ways—like national parks, roads, and public restrooms—their country works better than ours.

To all of you who have followed our journey we thank you for your attention and hope that we have inspired you to see new places and people as well.

We walked across the street to the Charleston Visitor Center.  We waited in a long line with lots of fellow tourists and eventually we purchased tickets for a historical tour of Charleston.  As on several recent occasions, we were surprised to find so many tourists on a weekday in October.  The 90-minute tour was excellent.  We learned much about the history and architecture of the area.  The only negative was that we couldn’t see very far upwards because of the window design of the small bus.

We opted to leave the tour at the covered market place rather than returning to the visitor center.  We thought we would buy some sweet grass baskets from their weavers decided they were way too pricey.  After exploring the market we picked a nearby restaurant that looked particularly nice.  It was.  We enjoyed she-crab soup with parsnip foam, followed by small but oh-so-rich servings of pork belly with maple sugar beans, topped with fried leek.  It was a good thing that we had a fairly long walk back to our hotel after the feast.

We drove around much of the area we had seen on tour, getting better views of some of the buildings.  We walked through a waterfront park along the Ashley River, seeing diving Brown Pelicans and Common Grackles flying over the river.  A second-winter Laughing Gull posed for us, which identification we figured out back at our hotel.

It began to rain, so we scurried back to the car and drove back to our hotel.  By the time we freshened up for dinner, the rain had stopped.   We walked a few blocks to an interesting restaurant that specializes in unusual Asian-influenced modern cuisine.  By the time we left the restaurant it was raining again.

Thursday October 9 (Muriel)

We began the day with a drive to Magnolia Plantation, driving through a lovely alee of ancient Virginia live oaks, magnolias and other trees, beautifully festooned with Spanish moss.  We took a tram ride with a naturalist driver, largely on former rice fields that had reverted to swamps and ponds coated green by duckweed.  We saw alligators, ranging from foot long babies to oldsters the size of blown monstrous truck tires.  Birds included Common Moorhens, egrets, a Great Blue Heron, Wood Ducks, and an Anhinga.

WILDLIFE SEEN AT MAGNOLIA PLANTATION  (The middle photo is NOT a log)

Then it was time for a tour of the plantation house which was smaller and less fancy than we had expected.  The columns and piazza (porch) were painted white, the outside walls were rough mud-colored stucco.  The guide was informative.  We learned that this was a working plantation house.  In its heyday the owners also had an elaborate home in Charleston and a summer home in the mountains of South Carolina.

The tour finished, we took a walk through the gardens on the Ashley River side of the house.  We spied many Northern Mockingbirds, as well as a Carolina Wren and a Northern Cardinal.  We bought lunch at the outdoor café, which we ate at a picnic table in a covered area.  We practically had to fight off hungry peacocks and peahens during lunch, and watched horses and a donkey in the adjacent field.  It began to rain, soon very hard.  We watched Guinea Fowl scurry for cover under trees, and the bolder peafowl were joined by their shyer friends under the roof of our eating area.   The less tame peafowl were careful to stand under the shelter of picnic tables, while the bolder ones seemed to know the roof of the entire enclosure would protect them from the rain.

Grateful for bringing umbrellas, we headed back to our car.  The drenching rain continued.  We decided to leave and head for town.  As we drove, the rain stopped altogether.  I felt like an idiot for chickening out so quickly, but wasn’t willing to drive back.  We returned to our hotel, parked, regrouped, and walked less than a block to the Charleston Museum.  By the time we got there, it started to rain again.

We explored the historical section of the museum, learning about rice farming in the Carolinas, the role of Charleston in the American Revolution and Civil War, the geology, geography, and Native American tribes of the area.  When the museum closed at 5 PM, we walked back to our hotel, through puddles but not needing our umbrellas.

We walked to a restaurant specializing in South Carolina dishes.  We dined happily on specialties like fried green tomatoes and shrimp on grits.  We packed our suitcases as thoroughly as possible so we would be able to leave early the next morning.

Friday October 10 (Muriel)

We left Charleston right after breakfast and headed south, beyond Savannah, for Jekyll Island, GA.  We needed to register for the Colonial Coast Birding and Nature Festival at the Jekyll Island Convention Center in time to take our boat cruise of the Altamaha River Delta.  We registered, got directions, and drove about one-third of the way back toward Charleston to the dock at the delta.

After a quick lunch next to the dock, we boarded the JP Morgan with about 30 other birders for a cruise of this huge delta and its islands.  While we waited for the boat to leave the dock, a Great Blue Heron stood atop a post, the long skinny tail of a fish sticking out of its mouth.  Every now and then it would unsuccessfully try to swallow its catch the rest of the way, eventually flying off with the tail still protruding.

We learned that the Altamaha River System, which we had never heard of, has the largest flow of any river system east of the Mississippi.  This is flat, flat, low country.

We could see whitecaps on the open Atlantic, but even where we saw no land between us and the Atlantic, there were sandbars, separating the delta from the turbulence of the open ocean.  For long stretches we saw no birds, but there were large numbers at some of the undisturbed beaches.  Some beaches that were undisturbed by humans were bare of shorebirds because Peregrine Falcons lurked.  Highlights were a single Wood Stork standing in shallows before flying off, large flocks of Black-bellied Plovers, Red Knots, Marbled Godwits (rare in the east), Ruddy Turnstones, Royal and Caspian Terns, and a look at a resting Peregrine.  There were some smaller terns, but we did not see them well and could not hear the leader’s identification of which were Common and which were Forster’s.  On a tall tree on the mainland, a pair of Bald Eagles posed, already preparing their nest for December nesting.

BIRD PHOTOS FROM THE J.P.MORGAN  (Wood Stork, 2 Flocks of Oystercatchers, one larger than the other)

Other Sitings

We drove back to Jekyll Is., pleased that the forecast thunderstorms didn’t happen during our outing.  Thunderstorms and showers were forecast for the entire birding festival.

Saturday October 11 (Muriel)

We wandered the grounds of our motel, finding Mourning Doves and a Collared Dove, as well as Red-bellied Woodpeckers and Blue Jays.  Then we set off to tour Jekyll Is. on our own.  It is one of Georgia’s Golden Isles, one of the four that are accessible by car.  Jekyll Island is green and flat, attached to the mainland by a long causeway and bridges.  In the late 19^th century, the island belonged to a group of millionaires, including ones named Goodyear, Gould, J.P. Morgan, Pulitzer and Rockefeller.  After World War II, the millionaires sold the island to the State of Georgia for use as a state park.

In addition to a convention center, there are quite a few hotels, a small mall or two, perhaps 1,000 homes clustered into small neighborhoods, and a historic district of old millionaires’ “cottages” – all on land leased from the state.  There is a parking/entry fee of $3 per day.  Apparently the funds from the fee are used to provide an outstanding level of maintenance of the open space.  There are open grassy areas, forests of mixed broadleaf and pine trees, all heavily draped in Spanish moss.

We drove to the north end of the island where we parked and wandered out onto a fantastic beach of white powdery sand that we could walk on without our feet sinking into it.  A family used a along net to catch shrimp and mullet, standing in the water to hold the net.  They filled several coolers with their catch, apparently replacing bottles of beer with fish in one.  Brown pelicans dove.  Laughing and Ring-billed gulls and terns fished in the water and grabbed tiny fish from the family’s net when it was pulled onto the beach.  We enjoyed watching a gull try to swallow a small flounder that was not cooperating.

Toward the interior was dense woodland, with areas of dead wood between open beach and the woodland.

Small crabs scurried, almost invisible on pieces of dead wood.  A small Blue Crab on the white sand stared at us.  The white sand extended to the calm water.  Beyond the blue water we could see more low land, tall bridges, and a few industrial looking installations.  Beyond all of that was an edging of thunderclouds.

After exploring the beach as far as we could go before being blocked by a stream crossing the sand, we tried birding along the adjacent wooded bike path.  We saw a few Carolina Chickadees, lots of Northern Mockingbirds, grackles, a Baltimore Oriole – and fled to the car for bug goop when mosquitoes began to feed on us.

We drove to the south end of the island, looking at the huge Victorian “cottages” of the millionaires in the historic district, and on to a picnic area.  We parked and again walked out onto a white sand beach.  We walked beyond a point to an area with large numbers of Pelicans, Royal Terns and Black Skimmers.

We watched fiddler crabs with one small claw and one huge one scurry over the sand.  We spied other small crabs, perhaps female fiddlers, scurry into holes centered in volcano shaped mini hills of sand.  Eventually we drove toward the convention center, finding lunch at a restaurant on the way.

IMAGES FROM THE SOUTH END OF THE ISLANDS (Mixed flock, Skimmers, Blue Crab)

At the convention center we visited some of the displays and watched a between show demonstration by a bird rehabilitator with an un-releasable Bald Eagle.  We attended a seminar on Birds, Tides, and Marshes.  The focus of the seminar was on the tremendous habitat changes that will occur in this very ecologically rich area if the mean sea level rises the predicted 12 – 14 inches over the next 100 years.

We cleaned up for the banquet dinner.  We found ourselves at a table with friendly, interesting people.  Pete Dunne was the keynote speaker, talking about the 24 most important changes to birding.  I found his presentation on Alexander Wilson at SFVAS’s centennial banquet much more appealing.

We left the convention center, stepping into a very wet world.  There was water at least an inch deep everywhere, although the rain was tapering off.  The rain stopped altogether before we were back at our motel, but we needed to run the windshield wipers because the outsides of the windows kept steaming up.  We sloshed from our car to our motel room through around two inches of water.

Sunday October 12 (Muriel)

We were back at the convention center at 8:15 to travel with the group participating in the field trip to the Altamaha Waterfowl Management Area.  We caravanned about a half hour to the location.  Through the morning the weather kept changing.  At one point we endured a drenching rain that soaked through our pants.  Fortunately the weather was warm, so we were not chilled, and our nylon pants dried quickly.  For our pains we saw female Indigo Buntings, a Yellow Warbler, Red-winged Blackbirds, Boat-tailed Grackles, Tree Swallows and had excellent views of Palm Warblers.  There were some coots and Pied-billed Grebes, and a greater number of Common Moorhens on the ponds.  We saw Bald Eagles, an Osprey, a Merlin and a Northern Harrier.  We saw one Sora and heard many more of them.  We heard what was identified as the call of a Clapper Rail.  We got decent looks at a couple of mature Little Blue Herons and a Tri-colored Heron.

Much of the time we were surrounded by swarms of gnats.  Slathered with bug goop, Allan and I each received only one mosquito bite.  However our legs itched with largely imaginary bug bites.  Our itches increased after one of the guys in the group stepped into one of the many ant hills along the dikes.  The ants swarmed up his legs.  Fortunately they were small black ants, not the fire ants that also have their hills here.  He only got a few bites that weren’t too nasty.  We decided to leave the group when we got back to the cars.  It was well after 1:00 by that time.  We were tired and hungry, as well as itchy.

We headed a short distance to the town of Darien for an enjoyable seafood lunch with typical old south trimmin’s.   My crispy flounder was delicious and Allan was delighted with his fried blue crabs.  Afterwards we drove back to our hotel, rested and caught up with computer stuff.  We decided to nibble on nuts and apples from the car rather than going out for dinner.

We drove north, intending to stop at a former plantation, now nature preserve.  A drenching rain and the place being closed on Mondays meant we drove straight to Savannah.  By the time we got there the skies were blue and clear.  We checked into our hotel, had lunch, and took a trolley tour of Historic Savannah.  The driver-guide was dramatically entertaining – and informative.  We learned that the weather had been dreadful here for the past week, but it was now lovely:  warm, clear, and humid.

After tidying up at our hotel, we walked down the 40 foot elevation change to the nearby riverfront and wandered past shops selling tourist stuff.  It was pretty boring, so we took an elevator up to a restaurant a bit before our reservation time.

Tuesday October 14 (Muriel)

We set off on foot to explore Historic Savannah.  As we learned on yesterday’s tour, the old city was laid out with 24 squares/parks.  Twenty of them still exist and one is being rebuilt.  Most have been resurrected beautifully from run-down condition since 1955 and the historical restoration movement.  There are beautiful old trees, most trailing long beards of Spanish moss.  The restored squares also feature monumental statues, along with an occasional fountain or the grave of the Native American Chief Toma-Chi-Chi.  A few squares have not been fully restored but are still pleasant.

SQUARES OF SAVANNAH

We toured the Mercer-Williams House, the setting of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.”  It was fascinating, both for its architecture and its history.  I am enjoying the copy of book that I bought in the gift shop after the tour.  The book is not only a good read, but it’s full of good historical stuff about Savannah.

Afterwards we walked to Mrs. Wilke’s Boardinghouse Restaurant, a Savannah “must.”  We stood in line for about 45 minutes with many other tourists and a few locals until we and the rest of a table-full of hungry folk were allowed in.  Once we were settled at a table with about a dozen others, about 20 dishes of various foods were placed on the table.  We were instructed to pass the dishes clockwise.  The platters and bowls were passed around, we filled our plates, and we emptied our plates.  We briefly met fellow tourists from Ohio and wherever, a local and almost local.  A tray of banana pudding was passed around with instructions that when we finished desert, we were to take our plate in one hand, our iced tea glass in the other, and then deliver them to the sink on our way out.  It was a very different, social and tasty dining experience, with some of the tastiest cooked vegetables I have ever eaten.

We walked to the city market but found only a few restaurants (in which we had zero interest at this time) and fewer stores.  We walked back to our hotel and rested our tired feet before walking to a nearby restaurant for dinner.

Wednesday October 15 (Muriel)

We took a tour of the Owens-Thomas house, a lovely home built in 1818.  It was a beautiful home in the regency style, which Allan and I now know something about.  Very unusual for its time, this home was built with two water closets (indoor toilets and sinks), as well as a bathroom (with two tubs and a shower) in the basement.  Even before planning to visit this house, we had taken pictures of the outside of it during our wanderings yesterday.

Being gluttons for historical home tours, we then took a tour of the Davenport house, a substantial but more modest home that the Mercer-Williams and Owens-Thomas houses.  The Davenport house was the first house to be saved by then budding historic preservation movement in 1955 from the wrecking ball.  We enjoyed the history more than we admired the building itself.  Perhaps the fact that it was built by a builder who designed it without the services of an architect was telling.

We headed to an attractive restaurant with Tiffany glass lighting for lunch.  We decided touring two historic houses in a day was all we could take.  We walked to the waterfront for a boat tour of the port of Savannah.

SAVANNAH WATERFRONT AND PADDLE WHEEL FROM ABOVE

It was pleasant but unexciting.  Afterwards we wandered the waterfront some more, returned to our hotel, and headed to dinner at a restaurant a few blocks away from our hotel.

We left now fairly familiar Savannah.  What we had seen of the Low Country of South Carolina and Georgia was more delightful than we expected.  We now headed east toward Birmingham, Alabama, where our daughter and son-in-law settled almost two years ago.  About half way, we stopped in Atlanta at a Trader Joe’s, to replenish our car supply of almonds and to get some goodies to take to Rhandie and Richard’s home.  We found a Zaggat’s-rated take out place in the shopping center for lunch there.

We continued to Rhandie and Richard’s home in Trussville, AL, one of Birmingham’s many suburbs.  Leaving the Interstate, we drove through several suburbs.  The area was very green, featuring homes on very large lots, with lots of grass and wooded areas.  There were several commercial areas and occasional small industrial developments.  After reaching Rhandie and Richard’s home, we settled in for several days of catching up.

Friday October 17 (Muriel)

We spent a quiet day visiting, doing laundry, shopping, and refilling prescriptions at a Costco.

Saturday October 18 (Muriel)

Allan and I seem to be bringers of rain on this trip.  When we woke up, it was raining.  The night had been cold and wet.  Whereas the trees had been mostly green with just a few hints of fall color, now some of the trees were quite colorful.  Trees that had been entirely green were now showing tinges of color.

The rain stopped by midmorning.  The air was crisp and clear, the sky blue.  The four of us drove to Vulcan Park in downtown Birmingham.  There an enormous statue of Vulcan, god of the forge, stands on a tower at the top of Red Mountain.

Before taking an elevator to the top of the tower, we visited the adjacent museum.  It had fascinating displays about the history of Birmingham and the production of steel.  The displays brought out the poverty of rural Alabama before World War II and the hardships of working in coal and iron mining and the iron industry.

It was heartening to see that the displays discussed racial issues and history in an evenhanded and positive manner.  Likewise, the visitors to the museum, like the staffs of restaurants and stores and their customers, were integrated.  There was also an inlaid geology map of the area showing the coal and iron that created the city.  I photographed the group standing on that map.

We tried to visit the Birmingham Art Museum, but there was no parking available because of Homecoming at the adjacent UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham).  Instead Rhandie and Richard took us on a tour of the woods on their almost 4-acre property.  It was almost a bushwhacking.  Vines clung on many of the large trees and to each other.  Way too many of the vines resembled barbwire for our comfort.  We got trapped by the “barbwire” vines a few times but emerged from the walk without injury.   Allan took a photo in the woods.

Richard and Rhandie took us out to dinner at a wine restaurant in a large upscale shopping center.  Again, we were pleased to note that the restaurant staff was integrated, as well as the customers.  Other than varying degrees of Southern drawls heard, you wouldn’t notice we were in the Deep South.

Sunday October 19 (Muriel)

We said goodbye to Rhandie and Richard and headed to New Orleans.  We drove southwest through Alabama, stopping – with some trepidation – for lunch in Meridian, Mississippi.  Our only knowledge of this city of some 39,000 was the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers — other than the recommendation in the AAA guide of a buffet restaurant.  The food was good, with outstanding vegetable dishes, and again we found an integrated restaurant staff and customers.  Since this was early on a Sunday afternoon, many of the customers were dressed up in church going attire.

Short of reaching the gulf coast, our route turned west and took us into Louisiana.  Soon we were crossing the eastern side of Lake Ponchartrain on a very long causeway and bridge.  For the first time on our trip we saw smokestacks (from oil refineries?) belching brown smoke and soon spotted New Orleans ahead of us.  We saw only a couple dirty smokestacks, but suspected they were responsible for the smog visible in the city.

We checked into our hotel in downtown, a couple of blocks from the French Quarter, relaxed a while, and walked to the French Quarter in the dark.  We had to cross the street several times because the sidewalks were closed for construction in many places.  (We were to learn later they were closed for repair of Hurricane Katrina damage.)  As soon as we crossed Canal Street, we were in the French Quarter on Bourbon Street.  The blast of sound almost knocked us back to our hotel.  Amplified music bellowed from every doorway.  Crowds of people filled the sidewalks.  A crowd of young adults stood around admiring the wildest jazzed up car I have ever seen.  Its most memorable feature was a lovely neon sign in the open trunk that announced, “Bar Open.”  There were restaurants, bars, costume shops, and lots of people.

We found our way to one of the restaurants recommended by our hotel, where we chatted with a few tourists and a waiter who had not been in New Orleans much longer than we had.  He was from Michigan, attracted by the warmer winter weather and opportunities to do volunteer work.  I enjoyed crayfish etoufee , and Allan a combination of typical crayfish dishes.

Arriving in New Orleans after a long drive was the beginning of a strange experience for me because of my prior trips to New Orleans. I had actually been to New Orleans on three prior occasions, the first of which was in the early 1970s for a single day at a business meeting and has largely faded from memory. The second was at a business conference in the late 1990s which was really quite pleasurable but which I attended without Muriel. The third and clearly the most traumatic was a visit in April of 2004, just six months after Hurricane Katrina. I served as a volunteer on a recovery consulting team. I spent a week in the city, accomplished very little other than to be traumatized by what I saw. At that time I concluded that the problems created by Katrina were almost insurmountable, not because of the damage of the Hurricane but because of the gross failure of both the political and physical infrastructure of New Orleans that Katrina revealed. It was therefore with some trepidation that I came back to the city but I knew I wanted Muriel to see it and to visit the bayous and swamps around it which are alive with interesting wildlife.

We arrived almost to dark and after checking in to a hotel asked for a nearby inexpensive restaurant and made our first of several forays into the French Quarter. Our hotel was about three blocks away. We walked down Bourbon Street and were almost overwhelmed by the noise and color and raucousness. Clearly, New Orleans had fully recovered in this part of the French Quarter. We were bombarded with sensations ranging from strip clubs to jazz joints to restaurants and souvenir shops of all sorts. We went to a fairly plain restaurant in which we had had our first of several forays into New Orleans cooking including gumbo, jambalaya, dirty rice, crawfish, shrimps and other items.

Monday, October 20 (Allan)

As we have done in many cities in the past, we elected to take a bus tour of the city as a starter to a three day visit. In this instance, we consciously chose a tour labeled City and Katrina Tour since it not only covered several interesting parts of the city but also went out to the areas damaged by Katrina.

While we saw many charming areas, some of which were photographed and labeled below, the most traumatic but interesting part of the trip was to visit the Ninth Ward which was the most heavily damaged area. -s

SOME SCENES OUTSIDE THE NINTH WARD (The third shot is for movie-stage fans)

The contrast between this and my prior visit in 2004 was very dramatic in the sense that all the debris have been cleaned up. There were many occupied houses but they were still only a small minority of the total number of houses. What was particularly depressing, however, was the fact that the vast majority of houses were still unoccupied and still showed major damage from Katrina, as is also shown in the photos below.

SCENES OF KATRINA – A House Unrepaired, Where a House Was,  A  Cityscape Contrast

All in all, the comments by our tour guide and our visual experience suggested that my initial impression that New Orleans was a dysfunctional city remained largely correct. The repairs to the city had been physical and only in some cases quite recent. For example, only within the last year has the aquarium opened and all of the major hospitals in downtown New Orleans remained closed. One of the Catholic orders has in fact created a rather large urgent care facility to attend to the poor who are injured or ill. This facility opened about two weeks ago.

It is manifest that except for the real work done by the Corps of Engineers in repairing the dikes and levies, much of the infrastructure repair has yet to be accomplished.

At the same time, the high ground that was not terribly flooded by the hurricane—know locally as “the sliver by the river” which consists of most of the Garden District, the French Quarter, the City Center and a few other areas has now been largely restored and remains vital and quite beautiful.

After our tour, Muriel was exhausted and we basically rested for the afternoon and went out for dinner to a restaurant on Bourbon Street called the Red Fish. I mentioned this because we did in fact had red fish at Red Fish Café as well as had some crawfish delicacies and were thoroughly enjoying the cuisine of New Orleans. Amazingly the restaurant was even noisier than Bourbon Street.

Tuesday, October 21 (Allan)

We spent of much of the morning walking around. We walked through the French Quarter all the way to Jackson Square which is the central park of the French Quarter, then to the shore of the Mississippi River.

New Orleans French Quarter is amazingly photogenic with many beautiful houses, streetscapes and the heavily photographed but still quite remarkable Jackson Square which is kind of the hub or downtown of the French Quarter. In the center of the square is a statue of President Andrew Jackson. It was erected in honor of his commanding the U.S. troops that saved New Orleans from British attack.

Some of what we saw can be seen in the photos below.

One interesting side light was the fact that Muriel was sufficiently taken with the flowers and plantings hanging from the wrought iron balconies that she thought we might want to do that on the balcony of our deck at our condo in Malibu. I totally endorse this not only because I like the look but because it will create more space on the deck which is now heavily occupied by potted plants.

We had coffee at Café du Monde which is the original prototype of Starbucks of all time. Since we were going on swamp tour in the afternoon we elected to have beignets with our coffee and skip lunch.

Our swamp tour was remarkable as much for the fact that we drove to it on our own without stress or incident than for the tour itself. After really stressful navigations of Boston, New York and DC, we were able to drive easily to the suburb of Westwego for a swamp tour.

We saw again many alligators and some lovely birds, some of which are shown below. Unlike our experience in South Carolina, these alligators were truly in the wild and it was more gratifying to see them on logs in the swamp than on platforms in local pond-like areas as we had on the earlier plantation tour

The pilot/narrator was a local Cajun who was less of a naturalist than he thought he was. When he saw a family of Common Moorhens swimming in the bayou, he told us they were Purple Gallinules and how fond he was of eating them. (This was a minor gaffe probably meaningful only to our birdwatcher readers, but we thought he should have been able to properly identify one of his favorite foods.) The trip was fun but not inspiring. We saw many egrets and herons, but few other birds. The only songbirds were crows. At the birding festival on Jekyll Island, we heard birders from coastal Georgia remarking about the many unusual birds they had been seeing in their yards, apparently because this year’s hurricanes Gustav and Ike had moved them from the Gulf Coast. We assume these hurricanes were the cause of the dearth of songbirds in the bayou.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect was his commentary on the ongoing and modestly recovering small scale shrimping and fishing in his community. He actually checked some of his lines on the trip. This trip highlighted the damage wreaked by Katrina but also the resilience of the natural environment and the Cajun community that lives and works within it.

SCENES FROM OUR SWAMP TOUR

That evening, at the recommendation of the sales lady in a shop at which we bought some costume jewelry, we ate at a locally popular restaurant called Muriel’s. Muriel had never eaten at a restaurant called Muriel’s and I am sure we had never seen one. In this instance, we did ask about the origin of the name Muriel’s. After several inquiries, we finally found out that the silent money partner who financed the restaurant some eight years ago had at one point in his life a woman of whom he was deeply fond named Muriel and he named the restaurant after her. More information was requested but not available, although the hostess gave us a copy of the menu and a write up of the restaurant’s mischievous ghosts.

We saved and have reproduced below a copy of the menu proving that there really was a Muriel’s restaurant.

By the way, the food at Muriel’s was quite good. We walked there in the dark and my navigation left something to be desired because we were walking on a street to the north of the one that Muriel’s was on and we overshot by several blocks. We were aided by a local artist type (I infer that from the fact that he was carrying a painting) who saw us trying to puzzle out our map under a street light and gave us excellent directions.

All in all, it was a thoroughly delightful day with beautiful weather in two very different parts of the city.

Wednesday, October 22 (Allan)

On this occasion, we spent the day visiting the Aquarium and later walking around the city. The Audubon Aquarium of the Americas (named after the Audubon Nature Institute, which is a nature preservation association in New Orleans) is a remarkably good instructional aquarium.

I had recalled a prior visit very fondly with a sense of discovery and wonder at the interior recreation of outdoor habitats. It was destroyed by Katrina, although its staff managed to save its penguins and other creatures. On this occasion, the aquarium had just reopened about eight months ago and clearly had reopened somewhat “on the cheap”.

While the educational and child oriented exhibits were superb, the quality of finish was still a little bedraggled in some spaces. The dining facilities were limited to say the least. I could not find anything I wanted to eat and Muriel had a grilled chicken sandwich which she assures me was somewhat better than well flavored cardboard. It is clear that the aquarium is still on its way back, Muriel got many pointers about how to explain things to children in her nature walks.

We also took a few photos including a close up of a very genial looking manta ray

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We also visited the IMAX theater where we saw a wonderful but alarming and saddening production entitled “Hurricane on the Bayou”. It included some beautiful footage of the wetlands and the bayous as well as key message on loss of wetlands and their importance. In a hurricane, every three miles of intervening wetlands lowers the storm surge by one foot. When you apply that formula to the thousands of wetlands removed by reclamation and channeling, you begin to see how Katrina could wreak such havoc. We acquired the DVD of the film and hope to show it to our Audubon and RCD friends.

Following our visit, we walked back to the hotel and ate at another gourmet restaurant near Jackson Square that evening.

In retrospect, New Orleans was a delightful city to visit, holding aside the very real issues raised in my mind by Katrina. Muriel was also somewhat shocked by the remaining damage. My sense of New Orleans as a city still trying to find itself at the core levels of redevelopment and strategic planning did not change even from my visit four years earlier.

The Big Easy remains a wonderful place for a tourist in an uncertain city in terms of its viability for the full range of its citizens.

Muriel’s New Orleans Comments

It’s no wonder that so many people want to remain in or return to New Orleans! It is so charming, beautiful, artistic, diverse and tolerant. There is a great sense of fun and joy, with an undercurrent of poverty, danger and decay. But it seems so vulnerable to repeat destruction on the scale of Katrina’s.

Maybe the traffic situation is revealing of New Orleans today. There is much less traffic than you would expect in such a dense city, probably because many people have not returned. Certainly the tourists are a small fraction of what the many hotels can handle. Except for a few drivers of muscle cars, drivers are polite. Pedestrians ignore the traffic signals and often step in front of moving traffic. Drivers stop politely for them, probably because they realize they would kill someone otherwise.

Even in downtown and other areas above the flooding, many buildings were badly damaged. For example we saw a skyscraper whose top stories had been blown off and are still missing. Some of the damaged buildings are being repaired now, five years after Katrina. Others continue to rot away. In the low-lying 9^th Ward, there is so much desolation, but significant rebuilding. Does it make any sense to rebuild here where future flooding seems so inevitable? Probably not, but how can people not rebuild?

When it was time to leave Montreal we got into our car for the first time since arriving at our hotel here.  The Lady of the Dashboard helped us navigate our way out of town, taking us on freeways and through tunnels.

Eventually we were in the countryside, driving through flat countryside.  The terrain was flat, full of tidy fields with frequent patches of woods that displayed striking fall colors.  There were scattered farm houses and frequent villages, some of which had large industrial or commercial areas.

We arrived in Quebec mid afternoon.  It didn’t look all that different from Montreal, although less compact and with fewer highrises.  That is, not until we got into our hotel room on the 16^th floor.  We looked down at the walls of the old city and into the old city and the harbor along the St. Lawrence.  Wow!  We set off on foot for the old city.

VIEW FROM OUR HOTEL WINDOW

We crossed through the old city wall through a gate that looked like part of Cinderella’s Castle in Disneyland.  We passed shop, after shop, after restaurant after shop, all in lovely old buildings.  Eventually we were walking through old residential neighborhoods in light drizzle.  It reminded us of wandering through neighborhoods of Bruges in drizzle in July of last year, except that it was much hillier.  Among the pristine, centuries old multi-story houses we walked past was one where a woman was watering flowers in window boxes through open windows.  The scene was picturesque, but more eye-catching were the statues of a bride and groom suspended over a doorway, skulls and similar goodies decorating the front of the building.  It will be Halloween in just over a month.

HALLOWEEN SCENES  (Whole building and detail)

SCENES FROM OLD QUEBEC (Narrow Streets, Gate, Chateau Frontenac, Mural)

SCULPTURES ON THE STREETS OF OLD QUEBEC

(Enlarge to see what is under the chairs)

We continued wandering, returning to the commercial streets.  We passed Catholic and Anglican cathedrals, the town hall, the fantastically elaborate Frontenac Hotel, and other public buildings.  Eventually we were above the old city walls, passing through the park below the Quebec provincial parliament building, with its beautiful gardens and statues.  We returned to our hotel to clean up.

Cleaned up, we walked back to the old town to dinner in an outstanding restaurant.  We had excellent meals in trios of related items.  Fluffy and Thumper, forgive me, but one of the trios I enjoyed were an appetizer of three forms of liver of lapin (rabbit).  This was followed by a trio of game meats from the environs of Quebec.  It was a lovely and sumptuous meal, which we hoped we counteracted by walking back up through the old town, past the town wall, and up to our hotel.

Sunday September 28 (Muriel)

In the morning we set off through light drizzle and chilling winds.  We wandered back into the old town and turned left into Artillery Park.  The drizzle lifted and the wind was blocked as we wandered downhill, passing old cannons, barracks and other historic military buildings.  The military buildings were much more attractive than their modern versions.  We left the park and soon were walking down a road to the lower town, the old commercial and shipping area of the old city.

We found a beautiful starkly modern fountain in front of Victorian era railroad buildings.  Turning right, we wandered through streets with stores and restaurants in the lower old city.  We found ourselves at a museum celebrating the 400^th year of Quebec City where we watched a film about “The Face of Champlain,” one of the founders of Quebec. The film was 3-D, very French, and very weird.  It was engaging, although we learned much less history than we expected.  We wandered the attractive museum, looking at assorted artifacts and interactive displays.  Deciding we preferred to spend our limited time here on broader approaches and the feel of the living place, we headed out along more of the commercial area.

We lunched at the Restaurant Lapin Saute – again forgive me, Thumper and Fluffy.

Then we puffed up many steps to the upper old town and walked up through the old town, through the gate, toward the Plains of Abraham where the British forces defeated the French in 1759.  Because of the British victory there, Britain took control of Canada.

We returned to our hotel in the late afternoon, exhausted.  It began to rain, and we elected to have dinner at a hotel nearby, rather than trudging to the old town through the rain.  Since the rain stopped while we were having dinner, that may have been a mistake.

Monday September 29 (Muriel)

The skies were partly – only partly – sunny in the morning.  We had to pick up a misplaced credit card at the Lapin Saute, so we headed directly for the stairs to the lower city.  Down the stairs and to the restaurant we went.  They correctly checked Allan’s ID before returning the card.  Then we panted back up the stairs to the upper old town.  We stopped for a bit of souvenir shopping and found something I had been looking for.  Allan noticed a terrific purse with shoulder strap for me, so I now have my birthday present from him.

We got back to the hotel, finished packing, retrieved the car and set off toward Maine.  The countryside southeast of Quebec City was much hillier than it was to the west.  The fall colors were fantastic!  We stopped for lunch in a restaurant in an old windmill that was painted vibrant orange.  Actually the food was excellent and the interior décor was surprisingly attractive and tasteful.

FALL COLOURS IN CANADA

Eventually we crossed the border into Maine, by which time light rain was falling.  The fall color continued to be amazing as we drove through very hilly countryside, along fairly wide rivers.  Allan had scheduled a critical conference call and there was NO cell signal.  We finally got a signal in the very small town of Moscow.  After a boring and slightly surreal  hour stop during which I listened to a complex negotiation of a ground lease in Los Angeles amidst the growing dusk of the north woods, we continued south.  It was dark for the last couple of hours or our drive to Freeport, ME, home of L.L. Bean.  Tomorrow would be my chance to try on clothing at the largest and one of the few outlets of my favorite clothing catalog.  Meanwhile, we had a very late dinner at a pizza joint across from our motel.

Tuesday September 30 (Muriel)

We spent most of the morning in the clothing building of L.L. Bean’s flagship store in the shopping mecca of Freeport.  It was a great opportunity to try on styles that otherwise we can only see in catalogues or on the web, although there was no way that even this huge store could carry all of the items the company carries.  We both augmented our travel/casual wardrobes.  We wandered through some of the other outlets and on to lunch.  We ate lunch in an old tavern where an 1820 agreement separated the state of Maine from Massachusetts.

We spent the afternoon on the road to the home of friends in Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston.  Driving through Maine and briefly New Hampshire was pleasant.  Once we were in Massachusetts, the road widened, tollbooths became frequent, and traffic increased hugely.  Most drivers were fine, but a surprising number of them seemed crazy.  Some enjoyed speeding into the fast lane, passing us in lane 2 and then the cars in lanes 3 and 4, in order to get to their exit at what must have been at least 20 miles over the speed limit.  Others barreled up to about 3 feet from our rear bumper, cutting around us, and slowing down to our speed or even less once we were properly terrified.

We got to our friends’ home with the help of Our Lady of the Dashboard.  Our friends had left their front door unlocked, as they were at Rosh Hashanah services and a special dinner gathering afterwards.  Newton, a community of large Victorian homes on large lots, they assured us, is one of the safest communities anywhere.  Door locking is optional.  We went into their house.  We weren’t sure which bedroom we would occupy, so Allan spoke to our host on cell phone.  Our host said the front bedroom.  We couldn’t figure out which, so we left our suitcases and computers at the top of the stairs and went to our car for more stuff.  On our way back in, a woman introduced herself as Nancy.  We said something like “Oh, we didn’t know there were other houseguests.”  Nancy replied that this was HER house.  She was very kind, assured us Allan did not look like an axe murderer, and told us our friends’ home was two doors down.

We moved our car to the right driveway, hauled our stuff down the stairs and over to our friends’ house and up the stairs, and went to dinner at a seafood restaurant.  After we returned to our friends’ home, Nancy knocked on the door to be sure we were OK.  Or maybe she wanted to be sure the invaders of her home were for real.  We chatted a bit with her.  She left.  We settled in and waited for our friends to get home.  They did.  We had a pleasant visit and settled in for the night in the right house.

Our car was almost 1,000 miles overdue for its very major 90,000 service.  We rushed out without breakfast to take it to the closest Lexus dealer, a 10 minute drive away.  Even with the help of the GPS, we were so confused by the Boston area streets and poor signage that we missed a crucial turn.  We ended up on the turnpike by mistake.  Not only were we ripped off $1.50 for a one mile drive in the opposite direction of what we wanted, it took us half an hour to get to the dealer.  The big 90K service was a very time-consuming, expensive proposition.  We explained to the service manager that we would really appreciate if we could get our car back later that same day.  He promised to do all he could and to phone us in the late afternoon to let us know when we could get our car back.

We got a brand new Lexus sedan as a loaner.  It drove beautifully and still smelled of new leather.  But it did not have a GPS!  Allan was going to have to navigate the old fashioned way through the wilds of Boston and vicinity, aided only by road map, scribbled notes of what the employees of the dealer were kind enough to advise us, and Allan’s having a few recollections of the area from his college days.  Major streets in the Boston area meander around.  The intersections very often are not at right angles.  There are Y’s and circles, 4-way, 5-way, 6-way intersections, and sudden stretches of one-way street that are almost always the wrong way for your purposes.  There are very few raised directional signs except on freeways.  The traffic circles don’t label the streets for their exit spokes.  The turn arrows painted on the roadways must have all been last painted at least ten years ago.  It’s impossible to distinguish between a right-only and a right-or-straight-only until you are about a foot from it.  Street signs are often missing – or hidden behind foliage.  Vehicles are often double parked, occasionally triple parked.  The drivers are reasonably courteous when off the freeways, although they fairly often make weird maneuvers to contend with the weird conditions they encounter.

Enjoying the relaxed drive (hah), we found our way from the dealer in Watertown, past Harvard, and to University Park, a large mixed-use development next to MIT.  I sat in on Allan’s fascinating meeting with the Boston-area head of the development and learned a lot about city planning issues.

After the meeting, we walked in light rain to a restaurant in the development.  While we enjoyed our first food of the day, the rain became a downpour.  We found out how to get into the parking structure where we had parked the loaner car without going out of doors.  By the time we left the parking structure the rain was over, although there were deep puddles on the streets.  Allan did a masterful job of navigating us back to our friends’ home with only a few unplanned detours.

The service manager phoned to say we could pick up the car at 5:00.  I interrupted visiting with our hostess and doing laundry.  Allan again managed to navigate us back to the dealer, this time avoiding the unwanted detour onto the turnpike.  Our bank account much leaner, we returned to our friends’ home with help from the GPS.  We enjoyed going out to dinner, our friends doing the driving.  They think driving in Boston is much more pleasant than in L.A.  I guess it’s what you’re used to.

Thursday October 2 (Muriel)

We had a leisurely morning before setting off for Newport, Rhode Island.  This town is famous as the location of summer “cottages” of the super rich of the late 19^th century.  The central area and wharves today are full of facilities for tourists.  Despite this being a Thursday afternoon in October, the place was swarming with tourists.  After a disappointing lunch in a restaurant that was crowded at 2 PM, we drove past the famous “cottages” on the hillside overlooking Narragansett Bay.  None were quite as huge as the Hearst Castle, but a few came close.  We decided we were more tired than interested in touring the palatial “cottages” and headed for a motel in West Warwick, RI, between Newport and Providence.

We spruced up and drove into Providence, where we met my cousin Barbara for dinner.  She and I are less than a year apart in age and lived across the street from each other in Chicago for a goodly chunk of our childhoods.  The only times I had seen her in recent years were a couple of times that I tagged along with Allan when he taught at an executive training session at Harvard.  While he taught, I took a train from Boston to Providence to have lunch with Barbara.  We enjoyed a long chat over dinner, catching up with over two year’s events.  Then we drove back to our hotel.

Friday October 3 (Muriel)

We drove west and south through Rhode Island and Connecticut into New York.  We went through the Bronx and over the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey around 5 PM on this Friday afternoon.  The traffic was not really as horrendous as we expected.  We settled in a hotel in Ridgefield Park, NJ and headed to Teaneck. Perhaps it was the traffic or maybe the oppressive feeling of being in really big cities, but we took virtually no pictures.  Allan did capture a Hudson River view as we crossed the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey.

Maitland and Doris Hardyman’s son Hugh and his wife Susan had just bought their first house and were settling in there with their toddler, Leia.  Maitland and Doris (of Port Townsend, WA) were visiting as well.  We enjoyed seeing our friends in their comfy new home in a very pleasant neighborhood.

Saturday October 4 (Muriel)

We drove over a totally confusing maze of freeways to Howard Beach, in Queens, where we met Allan’s cousin Nina and her husband John at a restaurant for lunch.  We met John for the first time and had our first visit with Nina in many years.  After a delightful visit, we headed back over the maze of freeways, aided of course by the Lady of the Dashboard.  To our surprise, the fairly long trips each took under an hour, although we spent $18 on bridge tolls for the round trip.

After brief down time at our hotel, we picked up some dessert at a local supermarket and wine at a liquor store.  Then we returned to Hugh and Susan’s home for dinner and another visit.

We left our New Jersey hotel fairly early, having been warned the highways would jam mid morning with vehicles heading for a NY Giants game at the nearby stadium.  We beat the jam and headed for Washington, DC.  We drove south by southeast through New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland, the cool, rainy weather becoming warm and sunny.

The Lady of the Dashboard had us get off boring old I-95 well before we reached Washington.   On the Washington Parkway, Allan spotted a sign for the National Wildlife Visitor Center.  We decided to check it out, and found ourselves heading through the woods for the Patuxent Research Refuge.  I had visited the refuge on a guided field trip during a National Audubon convention over ten years earlier.  It’s the place that coordinates bird banding programs.

The visitor center building was closed for remodeling, but we wandered some of the nature paths.  It was wonderful to be walking through a natural area after spending our time in cities.  Near the entrance to the Goose Study Path, we found a young man taking pictures of something near the ground.  He had seen a snake spring on a frog.  We had interrupted the snake’s attack.  We waited a bit, and the large tan frog, bleeding from his back end and leg, turned around and faced its attacker.  The gray snake with lengthwise pale lines sprang and grabbed the frog by the forehead.  The snake was less than an inch in diameter, while the frog was at least 5 inches wide.  We watched the slow motion dance, fascinated.  Very gradually the snake’s mouth reached around more of the frog’s head, as the frog’s eyes gradually closed and then disappeared into the snake’s mouth.  The frog did its best to claw the snake with its rear legs.  A young couple joined the audience.  Eventually Allan and I decided to tear ourselves away from the slow-motion drama and look for birds.  We saw a number of waders, including an immature Little Blue Heron, an Eastern Bluebird and Field Sparrows.  We saw our first Northern Mockingbirds in over a month and realized that on our way from New Jersey we had again begun to see Turkey Vultures above the highway.  Except for a few flocks of robins, the only birds we had seen since South Dakota had been crows, European Starlings, House Sparrows and gulls.  We found a snake enthusiast who identified the snake of the drama as a Garter Snake.  He explained that Garter Snakes are neither venomous nor constrictors, which is why the drama was so slow moving.

We drove to our hotel in central Washington without incident.  Having skipped lunch, we enjoyed happy hour in the hotel and walked to a pleasant dinner in a nearby Thai restaurant.

Today marked the end of our second full month on the road.

Monday, October 06, 2008

We walked to the Foggy Bottom (shades of old spy novels) Metro station.  We figured out how to buy tickets and took the metro to the Capital Mall and Smithsonian Museums.

We spent much of the day visiting the new National Museum of the American Indian, a museum devoted to telling the story of the Native Americans of all of the New World, more accurately the native peoples of the entire Western Hemisphere, since native Hawaiians were included in at least one display.  This is a tremendous task.

The NMNA, which is housed in a lovely modern building, tries to tell the story of the native peoples from the perspective of the Native Americans themselves.  Some displays emphasize commonalities among all Native American cultures, while other displays tell the stories of specific cultures.  Every statement is attributed to an individual who is quoted.  There is no mention of the Los Angeles region’s Chumash or Tongva whatsoever, apparently because the museum focuses on larger tribal groups.  We enjoyed a multi-media film presentation and some of the displays, although we found the lighting made viewing difficult to impossible.  Reflections were often more visible than the displays.  There was no information about the relationships or migrations of the various groups or of the language families.

We had lunch in the Native American Foods Café, where the cafeteria was divided into food from various regions.  It was a great idea, the food descriptions appealing, and the food was not bad.  Unfortunately the café didn’t have its act together, with poor service, items that were supposed to be ready in 5 – 7 minutes indefinitely, and water dispensers that didn’t work.

IMAGES OF AND IN THE NEW NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

After fairly thorough explorations of the NMAI, we walked to another part of the Smithsonian, the Freer Gallery.  We viewed some of its Asian artifacts and its James McNeill Whistler paintings.  Then we headed back to our hotel via the Metro.  En route to the Freer we passed the Smithsonian “Castle”, the first permanent museum to be built with Smithson’s gift.

We quickly cleaned up and took a taxi to the offices of the International Economic Development Council.  Allan was active in its predecessor organization in earlier years.  After a tour of the offices, we had dinner with the director, an old friend of Allan’s, at a nearby restaurant.  En route to the restaurant with Allan’s friend Jeff we did some unplanned and rather unusual birdwatching as shown below:

Tuesday October 7 (Muriel)

We headed south through Virginia and into North Carolina where we stopped for lunch at a buffet style restaurant that specializes in vinegar pulled pork, a specialty of eastern North Carolina.  They also had red-sauce (sweet tomato) pulled pork and other southern specialties.  Delicious.

Our next stop was a South Carolina visitor center where we got information from a helpful staff.  We stopped at Santee National Wildlife Reserve shortly before sunset but enjoyed strolling along its lawn with large trees festooned with Spanish moss, reading plaques about Revolutionary War battles there, and views of the setting sun.  It was too dark to positively identify the birds we glimpsed, but we enjoyed the setting and the chance to stretch our legs.

After 520 miles of driving for the day, we got to our hotel in the historic section of Charleston, SC.  The driving had been fast and pleasant, except for some stretches in Virginia where we encountered an intimidating number of homicidal truck drivers. Less exhausted than we were after some drives on the trip covering fewer miles, we had an excellent dinner at a seafood restaurant less than a block from our hotel.

Grateful for help from Our Lady of the Dashboard (GPS), we navigated the two or three miles to the Walker Art Center.  We enjoyed the lovely modern building and a special exhibit about the architecture of Eero Saarinen and sampled various displays of modern art.  Tiring of that, we strolled outside to the sculpture garden across the street in a spacious park.  Unfortunately we had no camera with us, but Allan “cheated” using the camera in his cell phone for the photos below.  The museum required me to check my purse and Allan hadn’t brought one along.  Many of the modern sculptures were outstanding and all were interesting.  One scene was especially striking:  a colorful sculpture-fountain shaped like a huge spoon, titled  “Spoonbridge and Cherry,” was installed in the center of a large grass lawn, with a couple dozen Canada Geese behind its pond.  The impressive Minneapolis skyline was outlined against a clear blue sky beyond the closer scene.  The only note that was not absolutely perfect was the difficulty of walking on the grass to get near Spoonbridge due to mighty volunteer efforts by the geese to fertilize the lawn.

We returned to the art center and lunch on its patio at its Wolfgang Puck restaurant.  Yes, we were back among some of the big city charms we had left behind in Los Angeles.

Next stop was the Mall of America.  Imagine stretching Topanga Plaza to 78 acres and four stories, with a family theme park in its center.  Next to the theme park is a LEGO imagination center.  There is an aquarium in the basement, but we only visited the four above-ground stories of the mall and missed some of the attractions.  We eventually found a replacement car charger for my cell phone as our only purchase other than a couple of small non-fat lattes at the Starbucks.  Our main motivations in going to this mall on steroids were for Allan’s business knowledge, a bit of curiosity, and the fact that the mall is near the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport.

Allan has to be at a major business meeting in Los Angeles tomorrow and Friday morning.  We drove from the ultra mega mall to the airport, where I dropped him off.  He will sleep downtown, not having time to go home.  The lady of the dashboard enabled me to find my way back to our hotel where I visited the hotel happy hour for about half an hour, did laundry which was much more complicated than it should have been, and dined on leftovers from lunch and a banana from breakfast.   Checking Allan’s flight on the internet, I learned his flight left almost an hour and a half late.  He’s going to be pretty short on sleep.

Meanwhile, I hope to find things to do tomorrow that I can walk to or otherwise get to easily.  Then Friday I will drive to Milwaukee while Allan flies there after changing planes in Minneapolis.  I’m none too happy about this arrangement, but we’ve been gone 6 of the 12 weeks we plan to be touring, and Allan promises this is the only time he’s going to leave me dangling.

Thursday September 18 (Muriel)

I spent the morning watching news of the financial crisis on CNN, on my computer doing email, and deciding what I wanted to do that wouldn’t involve driving.  In the early afternoon I got directions from a hotel clerk to Mill City Museum.

It was a pleasant walk of probably less than a mile to Mill City Museum, built in the ruins of an old flour mill located along the Mississippi River next to the falls that once powered the mill.  With about 20 other visitors, I took the Flour Tower tour.  We boarded and sat in a huge industrial elevator which moved up and down between floors, each of which had a dramatic multimedia presentation about some aspect of the mill’s history, from around 1880 until it was abandoned by General Mills in 1965.  In its last decades it turned out 2 million pounds of Gold Medal flour daily.  It was destroyed in a fire long after it had been closed.  It certainly makes a lovely ruin and contrasts dramatically with the nearby black, starkly modern exterior of the Guthrie Theater.

After a few minutes to enjoy the view from the top story of the building, I hurried to a scheduled one-man re-enactment of Franklin Steele, a founder of Minneapolis and builder of its first lumber mill and of the first bridge over the Mississippi anywhere.  Of course, the Mississippi is relatively narrow in this area.  Finally, I watched another entertaining and informative offering, a film “Minneapolis in 19 Minutes Flat.”

Before, between and after all of these, I got to play with unusual interactive displays that demonstrated things like how water wheels and turbines work with water flow and how to control water flow, and watched a demonstration on how flour dust explodes.  I ambled out the back door to the grassy bank of the Mississippi.

I learned about the different kinds of wheat and the kinds of flour they make and figured out that most of the grain elevators Allan and I saw on our drive through southern Minnesota to get to Minneapolis must have held … have you guessed it yet? … wheat.

Visiting the Mill City Museum was a delightful and entertaining way to get a feel for the history of Minneapolis.  I walked back to the hotel taking a slightly different route than I took to get to the museum.  It was afternoon rush hour, the streets, many of them one way, were very crowded, there were traffic directors at several of the intersections, and I walked a few blocks too far at one point because of ignorance of what streets cut through to where I was.  It’s a good thing I decided to walk.

Friday September 19 (Muriel)

I loaded my stuff into the car and headed southeast to Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  The Lady of the Dashboard gave me a bit of trouble when I first got onto the freeway system but behaved herself the rest of the day.  After about half an hour on the road I was in Wisconsin.

The terrain was fairly similar to southern Minnesota’s.  The landscape was very green.  There were rest stops every 50 miles, some with excellent displays about the area.  One rest stop even had displays about Wisconsin rest stops.

Highway signs about gas stations were less useful.  I decided to wait until the eastern edge of Madison before buying gas.  I passed through Madison and into countryside much faster than I expected.  There were no services for quite a while.

The first time I followed a sign off the highway to a gas station, the station was so new it wasn’t open yet.  The second time, I found no gas station at all.  The Lady of the Dashboard thought from my turning off the highway (please excuse my attributing thought to a GPS) that I intended to take an alternate route, so she sent me along a series of county roads for many miles.  It was a fascinating detour, but not so relaxing when my main concern was to not run out of gas.  The local roads were excellent.  The farms were surprisingly small, based on how frequently I passed farm houses.  The houses and barns were surprisingly large and well maintained.  Even the fields were beautifully manicured.  After many miles I found myself driving through a very upscale exurban lakeside community.  Then, just before I got back to the highway, two gas stations appeared.  The gas tank got filled.

I checked into a motel about 5 miles from the Milwaukee airport.  After a pleasant dinner at a restaurant across the street from the motel, I spoke to Allan by cell phones while he changed planes in Minneapolis.  We decided I wouldn’t pick him up at the airport.  Some time after midnight, after I went to sleep, Allan arrived by taxi