Puerto Vallarta

Here is my post about Puerto Vallarta.  I don’t know what happened with that last one.  It wasn’t Vallarta.  It was Mazatlan.  Except for the last picture of me standing on a malacon (malecon? malicon?)  That was taken on the malacon in La Paz.  I just did spell check and it doesn’t know how to spell malacon either.  Does anyone have a dictionary?

I just talked to Jay on the phone.  He was surprised.  He wanted to know where I was.  He thinks he’s so funny.  But I needed to ask where we stayed with the Robles in 1966 or 67.  He said it was probably near Barceria just north of here.  We must have stayed with them for 2 or 3 weeks.  We stayed in their boat house on the beach where they stored their dugout canoes.  That was where the scorpions dropped out of the palm leaf roof down onto where we slept.  Luckily nothing got us.  I might try to go there tomorrow if I can.

The top picture is a side street right off the beach where, possibly, I drank out of a spigot back when.  I really remember that because I knew I shouldn’t because it could make me really sick but I was so thirsty.  So I took pictures of several side streets to show Jay to see if he remembers.  He remembers an amazing amount of stuff from back then.  It was really great talking to him awhile ago, to have him remind me of the sequence of things, how we got here (he rode on the running board of a truck to get here!  It’s a wonder he didn’t fall off and get hurt.),  where we went first, where we came here from, (Tepic), so much. 

The next picture is the church and the last the malacon along the bay.

Our ship is docked across the street from Wal mart and a mall that has a Starbucks in it.  I bought a liter of water at Wal mart this morning.  It was only one dollar as opposed to nine dollars here on the boat.  And then went next door to the mall for the first real espresso I’ve had since I left Fort Collins, Colorado on the second.  Tomorrow we leave for Cabo in the afternoon.

Puerto Vallerta

Mazatlan is still here, as hectic as ever. I got an email from Jay reminding me of the places we visited and the beaches and hotels we stayed at when we last visited this town almost fifty years ago. All our old haunts were still there. Not that we ever had ‘haunts’ exactly, but the cathedral and zocalo were still in the same place, and Maxine and I didn’t have any trouble getting a taxi driver to take us to the old Mercado. He told us it was 110 years old, so it obviously was the same one we visited in 1966. It is the greatest market place, a huge space full of the essentials for a Mexican family and then some. Lots of raw meat on display, which is always an eyebrow raiser no matter how many times I see it. The first time we were down here so long ago I saw what I thought must be dog, skinned and turning on a spit, but have since figured it must have been goat. No doubt, a miscommunication. Probably, JAY didn’t misunderstand. I just love this place. It’s so MEXICAN. We should have probably have spent more time down there around that old Mercado where there was so much crowding bustle and jammed traffic (no lights! What’s up with that!) but it kind of overwhelmed us, I think. Anyway, we went back to the ship.

I jumped in the pool then showered and was just in time for the afternoon tea. I had a cucumber sandwich and a fruit tart. Two days ago they served scones and clotted cream. I still don’t know what clotted cream is but it was really good, kind of like whipped cream, but heavier.

I’m going to the computer workshop at 5:30, as soon as we set sail, disconnect from the dock, throw off the ropes, push off; whatever it’s called. Set sail sounds most cool but, of course, we don’t HAVE sails. This young kid from South Africa teaches these computer workshops every day and they’ve been MOST helpful. He’s all about Windows 7, which, of course, is what I have on my laptop and I am not at all familiar with. At 5:30 it’s just for people with questions, but I want to know about the program he mentioned called Windows Live Writer. It’s supposed to be for doing all the work for your blog without being ACTUALLY ON your blog then down loading later, which would be really great for me right now since I don’t have an internet connection most of the time. Everything is all ready to go including pictures.

I was going to try to take a video of this string quartet that plays every evening, which we listen to every evening, but discovered my camera doesn’t have hardly any sound. Maxine took a video but I don’t know how it turned out. Last night they played several songs from, I believe operas, that were really familiar, and soooo good. I wish I could have gotten at least one of them on my camera, but it would have been a waste of time. I would have tried to remember what they were called but it was Italian or something, and there was no way I could have remembered the name. But anyway, too bad you can’t hear them.

Mazatlan

Here I am in Mazatlan and finally being able to work on my blog. Of course, I don't have anything to say since I already wrote emails. I'll write more in Puerto Vallerta tomorrow because I'll be there two days. There should be an internet cafe close to the dock, I hope.

winter trip to warmer climes

My sister, Maxine, has invited me to join her family on a cruise to the Sea of Cortez, so we will be leaving tomorrow for San Diego to board the cruise ship amsterdam there.

winter trip to warmer climes

It's snowy and cold here in North Park but my sister Maxine has invited me to join her and her husband and daughter on a cruise to the Sea of Cortez, so I'm leaving tomorrow for San Diego and the cruise ship, Amsterdam. I will have more to say later, I expect.

header

On my way down to Albuquerque, it's 465 miles, I took some pictures of the mountains along the way. I cropped one of Mt. Elbert, or one of those fourteeners in the Collegiate range, and used it for the header on my blog. The picture started out really big and screwed up but I was working on it at Joe's house and he saw me having a fit about not getting it to come out right, so took my laptop and fixed it for me. I watched him do it, but there's no way I could repeat whatever he did. Anyway, I wanted to describe where that picture was taken. I don't know how many fourteeners, mounntains that are 14,000 feet or higher, in the Collegiate Range but there are a lot. It's a really spectacular drive.

Visit to my son, Joe, and Amanda

I had a nice long visit with Joe and Amanda. Too bad my grandsons weren't there, but they went to a concert in Santa Fe with their mom and back to Taos. Friends are getting to be a big thing in their lives, to the exclusion of others... like grandmothers. that's OK. I got to spend more time and attention on Joe and Amanda instead. Still, Jojo's dog, Diego, missed him. Because of that, I had a dog that was really hard to shift sleeping in my bed while I was there.

It was HOT in Albuquerque. 96 degrees yesterday. there's a public swimming pool close to Joe's house so we went swimming a lot. Walden may be really back of beyond, but at least it's cool here.

southwestern heat

The Arkansas River was running bankful. I saw lots of rafters parked along the highway getting ready to float the rapids on my drive down through the San Luis Valley on my way to New Mexico. Snow melt from the Collegiate Range was running off in a lot of small creeks and rivulets. the Rio Grand here in Albuquerque is almost out of its banks and muddy brown. It made the long trip down through Colorado along the Continental Divide pretty interesting to experience springtime in the Rockies like that. At one point I thought the runoff looked about to wash over the highway.

snow

Coming home from our trip back east, it was a shock to return to the barrenness of winter. The Aspen in front of our house had no small emerging leaves, the ground was still covered with brown dried grass. It was COLD.
We got home late Saturday and I went to Laramie Monday to run Melodie and Ken's bookstore..... and it snowed all day. What is WRONG with this place!!!!!!!!!!!! It's almost summer!

cheese soup

At my sister, Dorothy Ann's, house, she made cheese soup for us one night. It was sooo good. I found out the recipe, and when I was staying at Melodie and Ken's when I ran their store for them for a couple nights, I made that soup. However, I decided to get already grated cheese rather than chop it up myself. I cut the recipe in half and it was still way to much soup for one person. The only thing was, I used cheddar cheese instead of velveeta. This is because my family makes fun of me for liking velveeta cheese so I try to be more gourmet. In this case, it's just WRONG! It was much better with velveeta, so if DA is reading this, your soup was better than mine.

home

Left Iowa Saturday. Drove all day. 90 degrees across Nebraska then snowed on crossing the state line from Wyoming into Colorado. Ahhhh... home. What I want to know is, why do we live in such a godforsaken place? It snows the year around,for heaven's sake!!! Today I'm watching the kids' bookstore while they take time off to visit friends in Grand Junction. Snowed pretty good yesterday but at least it didn't stick. I got pictures but I'm blogging in the store and don't have my laptop hooked up to download pics in, so I'll put them up Thursday. (If I get around to it.) I need to be more conscientious about this blogging thing if I'm going to do it. It's kind of fun.

headed home

We are in Iowa at my sister's house right now. We left Greyling yesterday at noon and got here at midnight. We were going to return by way of Wisconsin but Jay found out Brit and Alex planned to fish the AuSable tuesday and wednesday so he couldn't stand to miss out on THAT! So we went back to Canoe Harbor to camp for another couple of days and got caught in a big wildfire south of the road. Well, it didn't reach our campsite, but it was pretty exciting there for awhile.

I got more pictures of gravestones for my family tree. My great grandparents are buried north of here about 60 miles, so we went up there and I found out some accurate dates and names, which I now know I didn't have. The one name, my great grandmother Eckels, is important because she was a remarkeable artist and I have two of her works hanging on my walls so I feel more of a connection to her than I would otherwise. What I want to know is, considering how good she was, where are some other of her works? I am trying to trace some of her other descendents to find out if anyone else has any of her pieces.

Lake Superior

This is our campsite in Munising at sunset. I have to say this is so cool! I am sitting in our trailer that you see right there, just after I took that picture, and am blogging at the table inside. It has electricity and WiFi. We hardly know how to act. Also, we have had our first experience of the fabled insider-traveler-camper-helpful I-don't-know-what-to-call-it person. Another older couple staying here came by and asked if we needed any help and gave us all kinds of advise and came over to help us get our heater started and told us they used to have a popup and knew all about them and told us the best place to park our trailer and said anything we needed just ask. I was agog. I thought, "This is what you hear about when you hit the road after retiring and join some insider fraternity of retired people traveling the country."

By the shores of Gitche Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water, stood the wigwam of Nokomis.

So, anyway, we are camped on the shores of Gitche Gumee, and that picture is of the shining big sea water that Jay said if I took a picture of the sun just as it disappeared below the horizon I might get that green halo that you sometimes see and a digital camera can capture. I don't know if I got it but it was a little green in the picture before this but it won't download for some reason.

We drove over to Marquette a while ago and I saw the oddest thing. All the mail boxes along the highway had barriers around them, or at least a panel on the side of them. What do you think that means? Jay thought that had something to do with snow plows, but I don't know. I keep remembering those kids in "Stand By Me" driving around with a baseball bat and smashing mailboxes.

It was supposed to be sunny today!!!!!!!! I have to tell you, this Michigan weather is starting to get to me! It was drizzling as we pulled out of Dave Loup's driveway. I should have taken a picture of all his old trucks in front of his house and his old cadillacs in back. His household is such a guy place. He uses bike parts as decoration on his walls. In a kind of a perverted way it's sort of cool. He has definitely integrated into the backwoods thing of the U.P.

We are now on Lake Superior in the little town of Munising. (It's pronounced like musing, except with a ni stuck into the middle of it.) It is cold and windy off the lake so we have decided to find a campground with electricity so we can turn on our electric heater. The gas heater in our camper is difficult and we tried to get it going over on the AuSable and it wouldn't do anything. Mark has a camper like ours and he told Jay how to start it, but just in case, we're getting electricity. the campground is just on the edge of town on the lake so we like the sound of it anyway.

Tomorrow we have reservations to go out on a boat to see the Pictured Rocks from the lake, the only way to see them according to Dave Loup. Since they are way down the side of big bluffs facing the lake that sounds like the best way to see them. Also, it is the place where husbands push wives off the cliff, so it doesn't sound like the kind of place where I want to go over to the edge to peer over trying to see stuff on the sides! (Not that I feel in danger, or anything.)

Upper Penninsula

I'm trying to get these pictures arranged the way I want and instead they're going all over the place and I've got TWO of the same one which I didn't want at all!!! I'm just going to have to leave it because it won't go away. Whatever!!!!

Ok. I'm sitting in a Burger King in Manistique in the Upper Penninsula writing this because Dave Loup, who we are visiting up here in the North Woods of Michigan, doesn't have wireless. What is up with that? He is so backwards. Backwoods. He is. He lives on Indian Lake and has wolves killing deer across the road from his house. I did not remember that he was so outdoorsey. He has raised his 2 sons by himself since they were about 5. For those boys it must have been an ideal childhood. Housework seems to have been very minimal but dirt bikes, snow machines, cars, boats, fishing, bicycles, etc. etc. are apparently still major.

This is really the north woods. We love it. Mostly nothing but the great lakes and timber everywhere. They have bear, deer and wolves. Since the wolves were introduced, not as much deer. It's flat with lots of water everywhere. Way more trailer houses than in Traverse City. A lot of trailer houses. Only once did we think we had seen some militia men out at where the Platte River runs into Michigan Lake and people canoe there, but Mark said they were border patrol from Canada. For a second I thought it was a couple of tea party people or something wanting to promote controlling our borders. (Which I don't object to, but still...)

I wondered about the militia crazies in Michigan since you hear about them in the news, but Mark seemed to think itPeninsula issue here. Well, not much. I don't know about the Upper Peninsula. We plan to go camping up at the Picture Rocks on Lake Superior tomorrow. After that we'll probably start heading back

Upper Penninsula

We spent the weekend in Traverse City with Jay's brother Mark and his wife Julie. Traverse City has a lot of water and Mark and Julie showed us a ton of it. Very interesting. We went to Sleeping Bear Dune, which we are standing on in this picture. I have lots more pictures but am not sure how to download a whole file of them. That would be a good thing to know how to do. A picture is worth....... anyway, I don't have a lot to say about our time there, except we enjoyed the town and area, and Mark is a REALLY good cook. He is a chef, after all. We had never visited them and Traverse City together so it was fun, even though the weather was dreary. It's been pretty dreary the entire time here in Michigan but everyone says, "Oh Well. That's Michigan."

I found a place to connect my computer in Grayling, Michigan at the McDonalds where I was able to get an espresso also. However, I haven't been able to download the picture I took of Jay and Brit sitting around having a cup of coffee before going fishing. I did download it on Facebook though, if you really want to see it. I'm going to try to take a picture of them fishing in the Au Sable before they quit so Brit can go back to Ann Arbor. It has been raining everyday since we've been here, tho it clears up part of the day anyway. We're going to Traverse City in a couple of days. We may go to eat at Gates Au Sable lodge for our 44 th anniversary tonight. We always try to eat Mexican, since it's Cinco de Mayo too, but we may not do that this time. We decided against Taco Bell.

We are following the oil spill in the gulf as much as we can. Jay has more of a grasp of the technical difficulties that might have led to the accident and what might be needed to plug the spills. He's tried to explain these things to the rest of us with more and less success. Joe and Melodie probably understand how that is working. Jay can get really technical, really fast, when it comes to talking about drilling for gas and oil.

Also, Jay and Brit are trying to follow the RedWings' games, but since we just have our little radio and the reception isn't too great out here in the `North Woods' (I love saying that!) they had to listen to the Wings get their socks beat off in the dark around a camp fire last night, with a bunch of static making it all worse. Oh well. I didn't notice anyone having a lot of sympathy for me when the Avalanche lost in the first round!!!

I suppose I had better sign off and head back out to our camp in the Canoe Harbor Camp Ground in case the fishermen are quiting fishing.

Today we went down to Hillsdale, Michigan, about 50 miles southwest of Ann Arbor. Jay lived there when he was 6 years old and that is where Brit was born. The school he's standing in front of in the picture on the right is where he went to school in first grade. The church is where J. Edgar Edwards, their dad, was the minister. The middle picture is the hospital where Brit was born. It wasn't that interesting a town, I didn't think. Neither did Jay particularly. But seeing where they lived and did things was very interesting. The church was really beautiful with amazing stained glass windows. We saw the movie theatre where Jay saw a Roy Rogers movie. He remembers being disappointed that there wasn't more shooting and fighting. I guess they have corrected that now though, because on the sign out front was an announcement that there was going to be an 11th Tea Party there at 5:30 this evening. Michigan has a lot of Militia groups here so I guess it figures.

back in Ann Arbor

We left Athens this morning... after having a WONDERFUL!!! cup of espresso at Dan and Joan's daughter, Merideth's, house. (I don't know. Did I spell Merideth's name right?) She had the fanciest espresso machine. Very shiny and big. We really liked it.

We also saw Joan's horse, Clue, yesterday. He has been semi-retired out to pasture, as a school horse. He's a good looking quarter horse, a sorrel with a white blaze and one white front stocking. He wears rubber shoes on his front feet so he doesn't take his shoes off with his back feet. I wish I had thought to take a picture of him, but I forgot to take my camera. I'm still just getting the hang of this blogging thing.

While driving around the seriously hilly and treed countryside around Athens, Jay and I felt like Loretta Lynn in Butcher Holler or something. I didn't expect southern Ohio to be so lush and pretty.

I still need to discuss my genealogy foray into my grandparents' hometown of Huntington, Ohio. It was so really productive. I found out more than I expected. It was a really rich source of material... pictures, history, stories. The library in Wellington had a lot of books and maps on local history and the librarians knew stories about the people and events of the 19th century, which is what I'm mostly interested in since my grandparents left when they got married and moved to Iowa, about 1900. I have some pictures I'm going to upload here, but it's late (We got here to Brit and Vicky's after 5 pm) and Brit and Jay are watching the Red Wings game which is kind of distracting.

Michigan

Here's Neil with Eva. She is SOOO cute! She is a very good baby, and so happy. Everyone loves her and wants to hold her, including me. We had a great reunion... Mark and Julie came down from Traverse City and Rhonwyn and Brian flew in from Miami.

Athens

Here I am sitting in the old school house at one of the small desks. This school is in the town of Huntington. I don't know if Grandma or Grandpa Eckels went to school at this one because there were several small schools scattered around the township. One of them was called Chapman school. Maybe Grandma went there.