100 Days: October 2015

Once back from our L.A. babysitting gig, I drove west to pick up Karin at Cincinnati, with stops at museums and attractions along the way.

Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh has Art and Dinos for one ticket

Andrew Carnegie funded much of the paleontology at Dinosaur National Monument

I finally got to the Air Force Museum in Dayton. This space-sled came in second to the backpack EVA units chosen by NASA

Just before I met Karin at CVG, I visited the Creation Museum down the road in Kentucky.  It's very well done -- no money spared -- explaining natural evidence in a manner consistent with scripture. For example, if you have fossil evidence of dinosaurs, they must have co-existed with Adam and Eve, as depicted below:

The Grand Canyon must have been created by the Flood. Mount Saint Helens made huge changes to the landscape in minutes, so the 40-day flood could have done amazing things.

The flood also explains evidence for continental movement:

There's a nice free zoo, with camel rides:

But dinosaurs remain the key to the story!

Karin and I started back toward SoCal, with a stop in Kansas to see some unusual rock formations:

In Kansas, I finally saw sorghum growing.  This has been a mystery for me since we were taught about it (and bauxite) in fifth grade Geography,

Sorghum is a relative to corn and they just stack it in huge piles at railheads:

We crossed over into northeast New Mexico and stayed overnight in Raton.  Something lit up in dim memory and I googled to find out that it's a good place to view the iridium layer deposited worldwide by the asteroid strike 65+ million years ago:

We visited the Natural History Museum and Petroglyph site in Albuquerque:

Karin reads about the K/T extinction caused by the asteroid strike.

We met a friendly kitty guarding ice caves near the Bandera Volcano west of Albuquerque

Nice stop at the Petrified Forest:

And we closed out the month in Holbrook, AZ on Halloween:

100-day Trip: September, 2015

I drove across southern Ontario from Windsor to Niagara Falls.  Though I had seen the falls often from the air, I had never been there on the ground.

The Canadian side has some of the most wonderful tourist schlock I've ever seen.

Even plenty of dinosaurs!

And yes, the falls are spectacular!

I visited daughter Abigail who is on the Geography faculty ("not your nerdy kind of Geography, Dad") at the "University at Buffalo".  (Still "SUNY Buffalo" to some of us oldsters.) Her whirlwind tour included one of the Frank Lloyd Wright houses in the city:  

Next was a stop for the Vintage Festival at Lime Rock. I finally met Dave Nicholas, who runs the http://www.barcboys.com/ vintage racing website.  I had given him all of my negatives from the era, some of which are posted on barcboys.  I realised recently that I first went to Lime Rock the second year it was in operation.

Dave Nicholas

Dave had a great weekend, winning all four of the Group-1 events in his yellow "Honey Bee" MGA.

And back in New England, I got to serve as sternman on Judd Fischer's lobster boat.  

I handled more lobsters in two hours than I ever had before.

Judd's torpedo-stern wooden boat was built by Willis Beal of Beal's Island, Maine.

Karin and I had to fly back to L.A. to babysit her grandchildren for almost three weeks. They moved to Manhattan beach from Paris just three months before.

Pearlene at a school fair.

Clyde helps Pearlene view opals at the Natural History Museum

100-Day Trip: August 2015

I picked up Karin at Salt Lake City. (I'm getting good at "stealth" boondocking in airport economy lots.)  We had a great visit camping in Bob Lutnicki's driveway in Park City, in time to see the finish of the Tour of Utah bicycle race:

We visited her college friends in Driggs, Idaho and spent four days in Yellowstone and the Tetons, meeting other Wells College friends for supper to compare notes in three different lodges in the area.

We saw three geysers. The most impressive was the Beehive, very near Old Faithful

No bears but plenty of other critters.

Hayden Valley traffic

Sally, Karin and Hanley at Lake Lodge, near Fishing Bridge 

I dropped Karin off at SLC and headed for Dinosaur National Monument, on the Colorado border

The Monument is near Vernal Utah, which has an excellent museum and several street dinos:

Vernal also has over 200 huge petunia plantings:

Also nearby is Nine-Mile Canyon famous for the "Hunt" petroglyph.  My favorite is this combination of pictograph (in color), 19th-century graffiti and the "Pregnant Bison" petrogryph

Over the Rockies west of Estes Park. The Cruiser ran fine more than two miles up:

I enjoyed driving across the mid-West avoiding interstates as much as possible. In Wisconsin, I camped at the EAA museum in Oshkosh

EAA houses one of the few remaining Mosquito fighter/bombers (thanks, Kermit Weeks!); my Godfather flew these as navigator in WWII. Navigators were colloquially know as "Alligators".

Driving through Columbus, Wisconsin, I glimpsed one of Louis Sullivan's "jewel-box" banks down a side street.  A couple of turns yielded the rewards of driving a small RV on back roads, plus having taken Vincent Scully's modern architecture course at college.

 

100-Day Trip! Start: Nevada and Utah

July 24th I left Jojoba Hills for a ~100-day trip in the RV. I planned to be back in SoCal early November, in time for the NHRA drag race finals at Pomona.  Intending to skip Interstate highways as much as possible, I started over the San Jacinto / Santa Rosa mountain pass to Palm Desert.  The temperature in the Coachella valley was 117, so I continued north to Barstow for an In-'n'-Out burger for supper.  Next a short stretch of I-15 past Zzyzx to Baker CA and the Alien Fresh Jerky outlet.

They were closed for the night so I was unable to determine if Aliens were the proprietors or the ingredients. I boondocked overnight at the Escapee's Pahrump NV park, then headed out toward Tonopah to start trying to understand the Nevada "basin and range" geology. But a few miles out of town I saw a sign for Death Valley.  Why not?  I'm not on a schedule, after all.

Death Valley was hot, though not as hot as Palm Desert

And it is low, as my GPS attested.

And Zabriskie Point is spectacular; better than the 1970 Antonioni movie:

I was glad to have a 55-gallon gas tank, which lets one drive farther for cheaper gas.  Even at 10 MPG.

San Andreas Chase

In June, Karin and I drove along the San Andreas fault starting in Redlands, then west along the south edge of the Mojave Desert and into the Carrizo Plain National Monument to see Wallace Creek. It crosses the fault and has been displaced 400+ feet over the last 4000 years: a little more than one inch per year.

While we might have expected a huge gaping rift in the earth, spouting sulfurous fumes, the fault instead looks rather benign. And one inch a year adds up over a few millennia.

On the way, we found ourselves on "Petroleum Highway": Route 33 around Taft and Fellows:

In 1914, California produced 38% of the nation's petroleum. It's down to 8% now.

California Rt 25 is a beautiful drive, though we had to reach it via a one-lane dirt road from Parkfield, known as the most instrumented (for earthquakes) town in the world.  These monuments model movement along the fault since 1931.

The highway has some beautiful views:

The rustic dirt road yielded interesting geology:  ribbon chert

We stopped in Hollister and parked practically on top of the Calaveras fault, part of the San Andreas system. This is a "creep" fault, which gradually distorts features in its path like this curb rather than jolting them periodically:

We were glad that the San Juan Bautista mission didn't collapse while we were in it:

After a quick stop in Davis to drop off some stuff for Dylan, we drove into the Sierra to follow Route 49 south through gold-rush mining towns: Angels Camp, for example, home of the frog-jumping contest. Winners have plaques installed on the sidewalks:

Right on main street there's also a wonderful museum and rock-shop run by self-taught geologists Pam and Russ Shoemaker.