Category Archives: Uncategorized

A Photog’s Eye on Western New York

Taking a cue from Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbs fame) I long ago abandoned belief in linear time. So you won’t necessarily see it reflected in this blog. During the point in our journey that we were in western New York, we had the good fortune to be near Rochester where our friend (and former B&B guest) Rob Boger and his partner Kevin Richardson live. Rob was kind enough to serve as our local guide for many of our excursions—and just happens to be an astonishingly talented amateur photographer as well. Here a a few of his terrific shots from our exploration together.

Our first excursion with Rob was to Letchworth State Park, just a few miles from our campground. Rob’s shot here of one of several waterfalls that plunge into this massive canyon makes it clear why this place is called the Grand Canyon of the east.

We also had the good fortune to be nearby when the New York State Balloon Fest filled the skies over Danville, New York. This is my favorite of Rob’s shots during the “glow” that took place on the first evening of the fest.

Our tour of Rochester with Rob included (of course) the George Eastman estate (and the adjoining International Museum of Photography). Just when I thought I was over touring the fabulous homes of rich people, I was riveted by the story that unfolded here of this brilliant man who made photography accessible to everyone. This was his conservatory.

The other highlight of our Rochester Tour was ARTISANWorks, a 40,000 square foot renovated factory building, home to half a million wildly eclectic works of art, including this key covered eagle.

We weren’t with Rob when he spotted this field of sunflowers on the way home from our last lunch together. But it was too cool not to include.

A Halloween Treat

Our Day at the Supreme Court

A Fond Look Back at Galveston

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Just down the road from Galveston is the Butler Longhorn Museum that tells the story of these remarkable creatures. Dave hanging here for a second with The Duke.

A flawlessly framed beach view from the elegant lobby of historic Hotel Galvez.

I’m not an amusement park guy, but Pleasure Pier was a delight just to look at from the seawall at night. This photo is courtesy of the Galveston tourism folks.

And at the Lone Star Flight Museum, this is the bomber referenced in the story.

There are more than 20,000 historic structures in Galveston that have survived the hurricanes that pummeled the island over the years. A bit about why in the story.

It was spring when we were in Galveston and the cemetery hadn’t yet been mowed. From a little neglect..something beautiful.

This month I had the chance to share one of the early adventures in our trek with the readers of Country Roads Magazine. I made the case for why one would choose Galveston as a beach destination over the prettier beaches on the Florida panhandle. Here’s one of the arguments from my story:

“…while lots of beach resorts offer aerial views of the waters below from parasails, but how many offer you a birds-eye view from a vintage WWII bomber?”

You can read the others HERE.

And here are some of my favorite pix from that visit that didn’t make the online edition.

Sensational Saugatuck

This was my favorite view of the harbor.

This was my last drive in the early morning light into Saugatuck. Down the winding road through Campit, the campground that was our home for the month…shafts of fog-filtered light dappling the lovingly tended seasonal campsites, my favorite of which had vintage trailers surrounded by landscaping worthy of full time homes. Past the Hambone Café where over the course of the last month I suspect I ate dozens of blueberry pancakes, topped with house-made blueberry sauce. Past a string of u-pick it farms from which the blueberries for those pancakes came and where now the peaches are ready for plucking. Past the flea market where we scored a tiny rattan elephant to accompany us on our journey. The perfect souvenir from this stop. Past rows and rows of towering blue spruce that make me feel like it’s always Christmas here.

We had the stunningly designed outdoor patio at Zing all to ourselves the morning I had this amazing Dutch pancake.

Past the restaurant Zing, where we’d have their patio all to ourselves on Saturday morning for a brunch, because as our server observed “Nobody in Saugatuck gets up before noon.” On past the turn for Douglas, Saugatuck’s twin village where we’d hang in the town park drinking cider from the local mill and listening to bands at the Thursday night town social. And where we’d pick up our mail. After our first visit the postal workers knew who we were and made us feel like locals. Then across the bridge over the Kalamazoo river covered in mist from the morning chill. (Yes my southern peeps, it’s chilly here on August mornings.) Past the most beautiful farmer’s market I’ve ever visited, where every booth was an art installation created from local produce and where I bought my first Armenian cucumber.

Even the public bathroom was part of Saugatuck’s art colony vibe.

The streets of downtown are lined with shops and restaurants housed in bright bungalows.

I’ve been to lots of farmer’s markets and never seen Armenian cucumbers before.

It wasn’t until that last morning that I finally saw the historic chain ferry inching its way across the harbor.

Past the harbor boardwalk lined with the boats of the beautiful people, and finally to my favorite morning hangout, a coffee shop that roasts its own beans and bakes its own scones. It’s hard to imagine how our next stop could be as magical as this one.

But somehow, I suspect it will.

Beyond American Gothic

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Sultry Night

I did a double-take. Yep, that was indeed a naked man right there on the wall in the middle of the Tipton library. Remarkably progressive for this small farming town near our campground in Iowa. And a remarkable example of how Grant Wood’s artistic genius has been given short shrift by the pop culture focus on his famous pinched-faced farmers.

Wood spent most of his life just down the road from where I grew up. He taught at my alma mater, the University of Iowa from 1934 to 1941. And yet, like most folks, I knew little about him other than that he painted American Gothic.

This gigantic homage to Wood’s best known farmers is touring Iowa at the moment.

And what a far cry from those farmers the one in this lithograph of Sultry Night was. American Gothic always seemed like a caricature to me, something this farmer clearly is not.

Grant Wood’s self portrait.

The library has one of a very limited edition of these prints because when it was produced in 1939, the postal service banned it from being mailed to customers as obscene, so only 100 were ever sold.

Spring Turning

Much of Wood’s work depicted the land that surrounded him, like this painting that so perfectly illustrates the serene beauty of the farmland in the part of Iowa where I’m from—something I tried in vain to capture with my camera while we were there.

Daughters of Revolution

But there were a few other notable departures from the expected. Like this piece Wood called Daughters of Revolution, where he depicts the founding fathers as cross-dressing members of the DAR standing in front of a recreation of Washington Crossing the Delaware. Imagine how that went over in 1932.

There is wide speculation that Grant Wood was gay. I can only wonder what his body of work would have been like had he been let out of the closet.

Pigs. Corn. Equality.

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It was Dave’s first trip to the Iowa Capitol too.

“Well it’s about time,” the tour guide quipped when I explained that although I grew up in Iowa, lo these many years later, this was my first time to see its state capitol building.

The dome is just as impressive from the inside as from the outside.

And what a palace of a statehouse it is. 330,000 square feet of marble floors, hand-painted frescos, Italian tile murals and hand carved woodwork. All topped with a huge dome covered in 23 karat gold leaf.

Dave and I looked at each other and had exactly the same reaction: How did they convince a bunch of frugal farmers to do let them build this?

One of the panels from the display in the State Historical Museum detailing Iowa’s long history of social justice.

At the state historical museum next door, there was a particularly inspiring exhibit which reminded me that, besides frugality, Iowans have another core value:

A long history of social justice.

In 1839 when a Missouri slave owner came to retrieve a slave from Iowa, its supreme court ruled “No man in this territory can be reduced to Slavery.” The U.S. Supreme court later overturned that ruling.

In 1869 Iowa was the first state to admit a woman to the bar.

My alma mater The University of Iowa was the first public university to grant a law degree to a woman (1873) and to an African American (1879), and the first to put an African American student on a varsity athletic squad. It also had the first female college newspaper editor in 1907 and was the first state university to recognize an LGBT student organization.

There was at least one moment of frugality in the capitol building. Iowa got a great deal on this bronze after it was rejected by Illinois officials for their capitol because it was too scantily clad.

In a case before the court in 1868, the Iowa Supreme Court held that “separate” was not “equal” and ordered an African-American admitted to the public schools. This effectively integrated Iowa’s schools 96 years before the federal court decision, Brown v. the Board of Education in Topeka, did the same thing.

The first permanent mosque in North America was built in Cedar Rapids.

In 1939, while most of the world still turned its back on Jews attempting to flee the Nazis (including the U.S. government) the tiny Quaker community just down the road from where we’re camped this trip created a hostel that took in 186 refugees.

Yes, Iowa’s first ladies were all clones. At least the dolls depicting them are, in this display of inaugural gowns at the capitol. The display was First Ladie Billie Ray’s idea, and the dolls were all cast from a mold of her face. The real Billie Ray is the one with the fur and the saucy hairdo.

And of course, four years ago the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that the state’s constitution did not discriminate against any of its citizens, including same sex couples—making it one of the first states to embrace marriage equality.

And so it is that while we’re on this stop of our journey—Dave and I have chosen to exercise that right. We were married this afternoon in the historic Johnson County Courthouse.

We Have Seen the Future

Mountain Musings

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Awhile back I posted a note to Facebook about how delighted I was that Jerry Yester, formerly with 1960s rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful, was playing the piano at a restaurant where we were dining in Eureka Springs…which is near where Jerry now lives.

“Wow what a has-been,” responded one of my Facebook buddies. A cruel remark from someone who really isn’t. It made me realize how easy it is to buy in to assumptions embedded everywhere in our culture.

The band you once played in isn’t at the top of the charts anymore. And now you play piano for a small, but equally delighted audience near your home in the beautiful Ozark Mountains. Is this life any less deserving of admiration? I think not.

The noted blues legend Henry Gray is in his eighties now and still tours. But when he’s not, he’s happy to play piano at the Piccadilly Cafeteria in Baton Rouge, where I often had lunch. He does so because it gives him a much pleasure as it did the patrons.

The audience was very much in on the joke and applauded riotously when Jeerk performed their encore dance routine using walkers.

When we made not one, but two visits to Branson during our stay here in southern Missouri, there were several comments about the place that all “the old people go to,” where the shows were “schmaltzy.”

And yes we did attend a magic show, where the final illusion had as its big reveal a giant mock-up of the stone tablets with the ten commandments (and where the magician invited the audience back on Sunday morning to hear him preach.)

But we also saw a very talented young Swedish rock band, (who happened to be astonishingly good tap-dancers as well.)

Dave pauses for a photo-op before heading in for his chicken fried steak dinner.

And yes, we did eat chicken-fried steak at the restaurant with the giant rooster out front. But we also dined at a mountaintop restaurant on the stunningly beautiful campus of College of the Ozarks, on campus-raised pork medallions served over polenta made from cornmeal ground in the campus gristmill, and garnished with vegetables grown in the campus greenhouses.

Student operated gristmill on the campus of College of the Ozarks.

And yes, there were a lot of old people there. Old people who despite the need to use a cane, or a walker or a wheelchair—were out having the time of their lives.

As we slowly evolve into a society that embraces equality for all, and as important as I believe the current struggle for marriage equality to be, I’m reminded that ageism remains deeply imbedded deep in our culture, and that we must be ever vigilant in our quest to end it as well.

Through the Eyes of a Newly Minted Texan

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One of the things I love most about Dave is his insatiable curiosity. I’m also curious, but in a cursory “isn’t-that-interesting-as-I walk-by-and-take-a-picture-with-my-iphone” kind of way.

Dave digs in. And I can always trust that while I’m in the gift shop at the end of my lightning tour of any museum—looking to see if they have those finger puppets of historical figures—Dave will come tug me on the sleeve and guide me back for a “best-of” tour with his selected highlights from everything I missed.

This is where Texas began.

Which is why we spent four hours at the San Jacinto Monument. Where, thanks to Dave’s dedication to detail, this newly minted Texan got a full immersion course in my new state’s riveting history.

Little kids. Big monument.

As cool as the view was at the top of the monument, I was equally riveted by the impressions left by ancient creatures in the limestone used to build it.

The lesson actually begins on the drive in. To reach Texas past, you drive through its iconic present, surrounded by one tank farm after another. The monument itself, even at 567 feet tall, is hard to pick out amidst the forest of refinery cracking towers in the foreground.

It was here that Sam Houston defeated Santa Anna, because a Dave tells me in one of his tug-the-shirt-come-back-here-and-see-this sessions, “Santa Anna was a complete idiot.”

“Well actually he was arrogant,” Dave continues. “He knew that there was a force of Texans in the area, but je could not conceive that they would ever attack and defeat him.”

Deep breath: Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón.

One afternoon Santa Anna let his troops take a siesta. No sentries. How stupid is that? Houston and his troops sweep in. The battle lasted twenty minutes. Soon thereafter Texas is a nation unto itself. (Fun fact: When Texas was admitted as a state, it negotiated the right to fly its Lone Star flag at the same height and size as that of the Union—a right Texans proudly exercise to this very day.)

Santa Anna ran away from the battle and tried to blend in dressed as a common soldier. Wikipedia says that he was found hiding in a swamp. But Dave’s version is more fun, which goes that when the Texans began rounding up the Mexican soldiers they noticed that they addressed one among them as El Presidente. Oops.

But here’s the part that amazes me. Despite the fact that Santa Anna wiped out everyone at the Alamo when they wouldn’t surrender, and then when those he defeated at the next battle did surrender, summarily executed them all anyway, he was spared by Houston, and sent off to Washington, lived in exile and actually once met with President Jackson.

AND THEN, twice returned to Mexico, twice attempted to regain his status as dictator, and was twice more exiled. But somehow, after repeatedly pissing of one nation after another, never faced a firing squad. Amazing.

The amazing raisin de-seeder.

Also amazing was this little machine that took the seeds out of raisins back before botanists had crossbred the seeds out of grapes.

Hey, I have eclectic interests.

Fabulous Fifth Wheel

Living large in a little footprint.

Category Archives: Uncategorized

A Photog’s Eye on Western New York

A Halloween Treat

Our Day at the Supreme Court

A Fond Look Back at Galveston

Sensational Saugatuck

Beyond American Gothic

We Have Seen the Future

Mountain Musings

Through the Eyes of a Newly Minted Texan