Category: travel

Our first stop at Petrified Forest was the Crystal Forest, shown above in black and white. It’s hard to get a sense of scale looking at the image- but it may help to know that the blackish chunks near the bottom of photo are cut petrified trees, perhaps two feet in diameter.  They are everywhere.

And here is what the inside looks like!

We spent about an hour walking the trails of this area. It is eerily beautiful and definitely otherworldly.

We found our way here without looking for it. It’s pretty startling when your cell phone gives your location as Bucket of Blood Street! We were just driving around Holbrook and found our way to the railroad station; that’s when I looked at my app for directions and discovered what street we were on! Of course the name refers to an infamous bar fight when Holbrook was a cowboy town. By the way, I did NOT take this photo- I meant to, but got distracted.

Here is one of the photos I did take on Bucket of Blood Street. I was attracted to the sight of the daytime moon over the roofline of this old building, which now seems to serve mostly as a site for AA meetings.

We have been slow to explore our new (to us) state of Arizona, but managed to have a little getaway in the town of Holbrook a few days ago. Our goal was to visit the nearby Petrified Forest National Park (we did), but we also enjoyed the town of Holbrook itself. Our motel was right on the main drag and was like a time capsule of the 1960’s (although with a big screen TV and other modern touches). In the next few days, I’ll post some shots from our excursion to the Petrified Forest.

With the birth of Baby Caleb and now our vacation with our daughter’s family, I have had no time for blogging. Here is a photo from our 2016 visit to San Francisco.

BTW, the blog title is a play on words- see if you can figure it out!

I was going through shots from last year’s surfing competition at Huntington Beach and found more blogworthy photos. Here’s a view of the crowd. Notice the photographer wading in the surf with her big lens! How fun that would have been (I was on a pier without my big lens).

While in Southern California a couple weeks ago, we went with our son and his wife to visit the Nixon Presidential Library. I loved it- and I am a Democrat. I had never been to a presidential library before and was very impressed by the quality of the displays and how balanced was the portrayal of this controversial president. I grew up in a Republican family in a time when we (well, most of us) still trusted the government and believed that things were only going to get better and better. I remember how devastated my parents, particularly my mother, were by the events of Watergate. At the time of Nixon’s resignation I was hugely pregnant with our first child and had been glued to the television during the hearings. It was fascinating to see the artifacts of Nixon’s childhood and presidency- AND the Watergate scandal.

The photo taken above is outside Nixon’s childhood home; it was closed while we were there because of a wedding.

 

 

It’s hard to find a spot without palm trees in Southern California. Even this somewhat minimalist shot includes the ubiquitous palm.