Posts

Showing posts from May, 2022

The Last Blog Post

Image
There are four weeks remaining on this trip but it’s over for me. After the horrific shooting of 19 children and two brave teachers in Texas I can no longer write anything lighthearted or complimentary about this country.  It may be beautiful to look at but it seethes with an anger and violence that stains us all. Thank you everyone for reading my blog and for your wonderful comments and observations.  I still haven’t figured out how to respond to them but know how much they mean to me. Here are some photos of the places we’ve been since Niagara Falls.  We’re in the Badlands of South Dakota now, heading to Montana, Glacier National Park, Banff, and down the Okanagan Valley before crossing the Cascade Mountains to Port Townsend, the place I used to call home.   Stay well everyone, and hold on to your loved ones. Pippa Sunrise on the Lower Peninsula, Michigan. Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Dakota. Pelicans from the photo above.  Yes, pelicans. Lake Huron...

The Falls

Image
You know how things always seem bigger when you’re young?  You go back as an adult and your childhood home is actually small and cramped. That steep mountain that your brother biked down and ended up with some impressive stitches from is now just a hill.  Well, somehow Niagara Falls got bigger.   I took the girls there when they were young and we did the Maid of the Mist boat ride and got duly soaked and seasick (me) but I don’t remember being able to get so close to the top of the Falls.  I’m sure they didn’t build this ridiculously close viewing walkway in the last 25 years so perhaps I wisely kept my small offspring away from it.  It’s terrifying. Oh sure, why not? Since 1850 an estimated 5,000 bodies have been recovered from the base of the Falls.  Some were suicides, some were accidents, and some were failed daredevils. We’ve all heard about those incredibly stupid people going over the Falls in a barrel, but the first person to do so and survive was a...

Westward Ho!

Image
It turns out I am woefully ignorant about a lot of American history.  And British.  I vaguely knew there was a war in 1812 - Tchaikovsky wrote that Overture after all,  and it was all cannons and crashing cymbals and such - but actually there were TWO wars in 1812.  The British/French one and the British/American one.  Oh, wait.  I just googled the 1812 Overture and that was written to commemorate the Russian/French war.  So THREE wars in 1812.  I’m also woefully ignorant about European history then. And that seems about right because at school we had two choices when it came to History - European or Australian - and I chose the latter because there were only two hundred years of colonial history to learn about, as opposed to two thousand, and I was lazy. Anyway, 1812 was a very busy year.  The Americans had already won their Big War of 1776 but the British had been a bit sulky about it.  They’d been preventing American ships from free t...