. . . with Joe & Elaine as they travel the USA and the World.
We drove to Las Cruces, NM to spend Thanksgiving with Elaine’s family. Sister Caroline & husband Gary hosted at their house. Also present were sister Cindy & husband Bill, sister Ann & husband Russ, and brother Greg & wife Mona.
On Wednesday we all visited White Sands National Park. Well, all but Bill and Cindy. Bill was suffering from too much chili the night before. Here’s a few pics.
So, just rambling . . .. . .
I was getting tired of the old format, so here is the new one – functionally the same but in a simpler design. I like it. For now at least. Feel free to disagree and comment.
We’ll be hitting the air/road just over two weeks from today. We are heading back to the UK for four weeks. If you’ve followed our other UK trips, there won’t be much new. We fly into and out of Heathrow, and once again we will pick up a Peugeot at the airport. We will revisit Craster in Northumberland for seven nights, staying in the same cottage overlooking the North Sea for our third year in a row. Elaine and her friend Dorothy will be doing daily walks to Dunstanburgh Castle. Then it’s on to Cromer in Norfolkshire, a new area for us, where will stay in a lighthouse cottage for seven nights during the UK’s annual school break. Then it is back for a week in Whitby – we loved it last year. We stayed in a lighthouse cottage a couple of miles outside of town. This year we’ll be in a condominium on the West Cliff with a great view and short walks to restaurants and pubs. Finally we return to Oxford for three nights after having stayed for two nights last year. There’s more to see! Oxford is only an hour’s drive to Heathrow, so it makes for a convenient final stop.
What IS new on this trip is how we are getting there. Normally we overnight in Boston and then fly the following night on a red-eye to the UK. This time we will overnight at JFK in New York and take a morning flight from JFK to Heathrow arriving in the evening. We’ll spend a night at a Marriott at Heathrow before picking up our car and heading to Craster. The blog will be active during our trip, but the plan is to update every other day rather than every day.
Most of you know that I am no longer on evil Facebook. I deleted my account in protest over their privacy transgressions. While I miss interactions with friends, I do not miss the advertisements, Facebook’s constant (misguided) suggestions about new friends, and the overwhelming depressing posts about how much people love/hate you know who or how much they love their right to own assault weapons or anti-aircraft guns. #deletefacebook #damntheNRA #guncontrol
Surprise! We liked our Dingle (Ireland) Christmas and New Year’s last year, we are doing it again this coming Christmas. Same apartment, same general time frame except we will stay two extra days. While we enjoyed our four unexpected snow days in Boston at the end of last year’s trip, we will skip that possibility (and added expense) this year. Instead of an overnight in Boston at each end of the trip, we are taking British Air from Phoenix non-stop to London (Heathrow) with a short connecting flight to Dublin. We’ll spend a night in Dublin at each end of the trip.
“Enough of Dingle”, you say? Well, no! Although not yet booked, we plan to go back once again at the end of April 2019 for a six week stay. Same apartment. Hopefully by then I will be an Irish citizen for real. (I’m applied based on my grandparent’s Irish birth and await government approval. Why? Because I can. Oh, and no, I am not giving up my American citizenship. #dualcitizenship)
Oh, after the UK and before Christmas, we will be doing a road trip. Well, mostly road. We’ll fly to Portland, Oregon where will spend a week at the beginning and another week at the end of the trip in our favorite condo in Depoe Bay. Between those two weeks we will drive east to visit Glacier National Park (Montana) and Couer d’Alene (Idaho) and then west again for a week in the Seattle Area. 35 days in all.
We are home again (as of last Saturday). Thanksgiving in Las Cruces was fun – GREAT food. The ride home was uneventful. Here are a few follow up pictures from the day after Thanksgiving starting with the family picture and then a gallery.
Click on the gallery below to bring up a scrollable window that shows the complete pictures — (the gallery preview you see show just thumbnails of the pictures)
Next up: Maybe some pictures of Elaine’s September trip to Ireland, Definitely pictures from our Christmas/New Year’s adventure in Dingle, County Kerry, Ireland – we arrive in Dingle on 12/23 for ten days.
We drove to Las Cruces on Tuesday for a Weiler family reunion at Thanksgiving. We took the old route through Globe, Safford, and Duncan AZ before joining up with I-10 in Lordsburg, NM. More scenic and no traffic at all. Nice ride. Takes a bit longer, but I hate I-10 from Phoenix to Tucson. We stopped for a picnic lunch in Duncan. Not much there except a decrepit jet plane.
We are staying at the Hllton Garden Inn in Las Cruces, just five minutes from Caroline’s house. Nice hotel. Nice junior suite.
Click on the gallery to bring up a scrollable window with complete pictures and captions – the gallery preview below shows just thumbnails of the pictures without captions)
So, last week we did an overnight trip to Winslow, AZ for dinner. More about that in a minute. Winslow, AZ, located along the famous Route 66, was made famous by the Eagle’s song, Take It Easy.
Click on the gallery preview to bring up a scrollable window that shows all the pictures full size
The gallery preview shows only thumbnails of the photos.
Two years ago the City of Scottsdale debuted its new Western Spirit Museum of the West in a brand new purpose-built building in Old Town Scottsdale. Figuring it was about time we visited the place, we made it on today’s day trip. Owned by the city and run by a non-profit organization, the Museum self describes its vision as “celebrating the West and its importance by informing, educating, inspiring, and engaging museum guests. Western Spirit offers high-quality exhibitions, educational programs, and community outreach addressing regional history, particularly as reflected by the arts and the dynamic cultural exchanges that have marked the transition of the Old West into the New West.”
The building itself is beautiful – very modern and eclectically designed. Inside you will find everything from movie posters from westerns over the ages to sculptures, paintings, prints, saddles, spurs, memorabilia, and collectibles. They have a beautiful outdoor sculpture garden and an auditorium where we watched a brief introductory film about the concept behind the museum. We were impressed enough on leaving to convert our admission costs into an annual membership. I’ll let pictures do the talking, using captions to add to the information.
Click on the Gallery to bring up a viewing window where you can scroll through larger versions of the pictures with captions.
Here’s a repeat of one of the photos in the Gallery showing perhaps the highlight of Western Spirit’s collection:
The book is a first edition of the chronicles of the expeditions of Lewis and Clark. The tomahawk is the actual one found next to the dead body of Captain Meriwether Lewis. As he traveled down the Natchez Trace on his way to Washington, he died of gunshot wounds and possibly a slit throat. His family always contended he was murdered, but his cohort Clark and his friend Thomas Jefferson accepted the more common explanation of a suicide. “The presentation style pipe tomahawk carried by Captain Lewis is deemed one of the most historically significant objects of American history. Lewis carried this tomahawk during his great exploration up the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean and back from 1804-1806. The pipe tomahawk is no mere utilitarian tool designed for daily use. Rather, it was crafted to reflect the status of its owner and for use as a tool of diplomacy with Native Americans. Diplomatic relationships were often cemented by smoking tobacco, and as an Army officer schooled in encounters with Native Americans, Lewis would have been well aware of the war-peace symbolic dualism of the pipe tomahawk.”
At the beginning of the gallery, there are several shots of a sculpture by Dave McGary, and there are numerous more sculptures by him in the museum. Back when we lived in Boston, Elaine, who adores McGary’s work, bought a sculpture by him which holds pride of place in our great room here in Scottsdale. It is pictured below.
So, you can post to a WordPress blog by sending an email to a special address specific to your blog. Usually I compose the mail on the WordPress site.
This is a test of posting by email.
Hope it worked.
PS: I won’t give you the email address.
Check in tomorrow for the kickoff of the UK/Ireland adventure.
10 days until we leave for Las Vegas to get on the plane to London for our UK and Ireland adventure. A map of the trip and the initial planning was discussed here. Planning is now complete. We have made the final payment on our Renault automobile; we have booked all our hotels and B&B’s; the ferries to and from Ireland are reserved and paid for; and we even have a couple of sight seeing stops and restaurants on reserve.
There will be some new gear and technology making the trip with us:
The cottages we are renting in Northern Ireland and South Wales do not have wi-fi. It’s really a pain to have to run out to Internet Cafes or other connected commercial sites (like Starbucks, MacDonalds, and Tourist Offices) to check email and update the blog. So we will be trying a new device on this trip: a TEP Pocket Wifi. I have reserved one and will pick it up at London Heathrow (rather than have them FedEx it to me to arrive one day before we leave for Europe). These devices get mixed reviews, but the bad reviews tend to be from people who are trying to max out the device’s capabilities. I will be using it for fairly limited and very reasonable purposes. Hopefully it will work as advertised and save annoying trips to the local internet cafe.
I have abandoned my trusty old Canon Powershot A710 IS point-and-shoot camera. I am not sure why as it was a reliable friend for a lot of years and took most of the photos you have seen on this blog, our old travel blog, and our (lately unused) photo repository. I guess I just want to keep up with technology. So I have a new Canon G16 camera. (Actually it’s not entirely new as I used it for my photos on the Oregon trip in June.) The G16 is still technically a point-and-shoot, but it’s a connoisseur point-and-shoot with added capabilities. I was a long time SLR camera user back in my younger days and the new digital SLRs are remarkable, but they are just too big to make them convenient to tote along wherever you go. Aside from a lovely case and an extra battery, there are no other accessories that I want or need.
If you’re interested, you can read a review of the camera here. I love this camera! And I love the case that I bought separately (described here) too! One feature that I demand in a camera is a viewfinder, and they are increasingly difficult to find. This camera has one. It’s true that the view through the viewfinder is not through the lens like the view on the LCD screen that you usually use, but it is close enough (especially with editing software so readily available). The problem with the LCD viewer, no matter how good and bright that it may be, is that it is difficult and sometimes impossible to see in bright sunlight. That’s when the viewfinder becomes invaluable. My new case is a SNAPR 20 from Black Rapid. It’s wicked!
Many of you know that I have a new cell phone number. I also have a new cell phone. It’s the delightful and highly acclaimed Motorola Moto G. With some trouble I managed to get an unlocked dual-sim card version from an Australian web site that shipped the phone to me from Hong Kong. Remarkably, after ordering it on one Friday afternoon and immediately receiving a FedEx tracking number, I began to track the shipment. On Saturday morning it was picked up from the warehouse by FedEx in Hong Kong. On Sunday it arrived in the USA. BY 2 PM on Monday it was in my hands.
If you’re interested, you can read a review of the camera here. I love this camera! And I love the case that I bought separately (described here) too! One feature that I demand in a camera is a viewfinder, and they are increasingly difficult to find. This camera has one. It’s true that the view through the viewfinder is not through the lens like the view on the LCD screen that you usually use, but it is close enough (especially with editing software so readily available). The problem with the LCD viewer, no matter how good and bright that it may be, is that it is difficult and sometimes impossible to see in bright sunlight. That’s when the viewfinder becomes invaluable.
The phone has become my day-to-day US cell phone with a sim card from H2O Mobile (which uses the AT&T network). I don’t use my cell phone a lot, and I refuse to pay $50 and up a month for service. With H2O, I buy $25 worth of credit every four months, and that is plenty for my needs. I am just using it for phone calls and texts. I don’t use it for heavy data and internet usage unless it is connected through wi-fi. I have a second sim card installed that has both a US and a UK phone number associated with it. That will be what I use on our upcoming trip. I put $25 worth of credit on it, and that will easily get us through the trip for the occasional calls for restaurant reservations and the very infrequent calls back to the USA.
Elaine needed a new suitcase. She decided to go first class and get one that will last (with a lifetime warranty). She bought a Briggs and Riley Endeavor Series 24″ bag and a matching B&R carry on. My Kirkland (Costco) suitcase has been a workhorse and probably would have lasted through this year’s trips. But I liked what Elaine got, so I got one too. (I got just the suitcase, not the carry-on as I am happy with my Tumi carry-on for the time being. The Endeavor Series has been discontinued by B&R, so we got about 20% off the price. One reason it is being discontinued is a major plus in our minds: it is the old two-wheel drag-along type, not the new in-vogue twister type. The four-wheel twisters seems much more likely to break. Even with free repairs under the lifetime guarantee, it would still be a major inconvenience it the wheels broke mid-trip.
