Mom and dad took a couple of trips to Mexico in 1969 and 1970. The second trip was with Walt and Lupe Sullins.
None of these are interesting to me. Out-of-the-way Mexico has no draw on me. I got itchy looking at the scenery. About the only picture that interested me was laundry day:
The first 44 pictures have individual notes written on them. I wasn't interested enough to transcribe them. If anybody needs to know details about any of them, just ask.
But for completeness, here they are, all 99 of them (one slot was empty).
My first morning in New Mexico gave me a bit of scenery that I really hadn't counted on. Snow!
Here's my little Southern California car's first encounter with precipitation.
I got to use its heated seats for the first time.
I needed to get a scenic panorama of the cliffs around Los Alamos. I ended up at the Clinton P. Anderson Scenic Overlook on the main road into town. Here we see (I think) Los Alamos Canyon and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I wish Blogger would leave my pictures at their full resolution. If anybody wants to see higher resolution versions of the panoramas, just ask.
Here's a picture of picture of the mesas just to the right of the center of the panorama. The Sangre de Cristos are behind the clouds. This picture isn't one of the shots that went into the panorama. I zoomed in on the mesas more than in the panorama.
Snow is pretty but I don't think I want to live where it you expect it to happen. I suppose it is nice to experience once every 20 or 30 years.
Since I'm in a panorama frenzy, here is a picture of Burnt Mountain behind the house I grew up in. There were a lot more trees when I lived in Los Alamos.
Oh, look! There's the start of a new forest in the foreground!
And to continue the frenzy, here's one more panorama from the Painted Desert. I named this picture "Kachina Point" and that's the name I gave to a picture in my Petrified Forest post. The two pictures aren't showing the same place. One has got to be Chinde Point. I'll figure it all out some day.
Mom and my new car demanded that I take a road trip. I obeyed them last week. The car got a bit more than 52 miles per gallon on the way to Los Alamos but only 51 mpg on the way home.
On the way to New Mexico, I stopped for the night at the Motel 6 in Holbrook, Arizona. I got up the next morning and headed over to the south entrance of the Petrified Forest National Park. The winter hours went into effect that day so I had to wait until 8:00 to get in.
I took pictures.
Here is an obligatory picture of petrified logs along the Long Logs Trail. I passed a man who had his very serious camera on a tripod set to take a picture of the end of a log. He was woking on his shot for a long time as I approached and was still working on it as I headed back to the car. I took artsy close-ups, too, but I won't bother you with those. Mine didn't take an hour each.
One of my favorite gadgets is Photoshop Elements' PhotomergeTM Panorama feature. You take many pictures that overlap a bit and it pastes them together into one, long picture. I should have read the tutorial about how to use it most effectively. I should have shot in portrait orientation rather than landscape. I sometimes used a tripod but didn't for this picture. It's a kind of amphitheater with petrified logs strewn around. Click on it to enlarge it. (Blogger limits the size of the pictures. The original is much larger.)
I drove up to the Crystal Forest. This is the view of a hill you see as you approach the Crystal Forest's parking lot. It struck me as pretty. (What in the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert isn't pretty?)
Here are petroglyphs on the Newspaper Rock. I wish doo-doo heads wouldn't add their scratchings to it.
I took some more panoramas in the Painted Desert part of the park. I used the tripod to keep the camera facing the same altitude for each shot so it worked better than the Long Logs shot. Here is the view from the Lacey Point overlook.
And here is the view from the Kachina Point overlook. I used an additional wide angle lens and aimed the camera into the valley rather than at the horizon. The wall at the bottom of the picture either is straight or curves around the parking lot. It doesn't really bow away from us.
The trip through the park is a great way to spend four hours and only ten dollars. Everybody should do it when they have the opportunity.
We spent a couple of nights on The Queen Mary while on the road last week. You've seen what I ate there and you've seen what we did during the day between the nights on board. There's not much to tell about the rest of our experience in the hotel.
Here's another picture I took of the ship while passing it on our way to Catalina. The window I had to shoot through wasn't perfectly clean and had the sun shining on it.
Wikipedia has a better picture from about the same point of view.
In my earlier post, I pointed out the general area of our room. We checked in at the desk near the bow and had to hike to our room near the stern. It's a looooooong hallway. This picture from in front of our room taken with my phone probably doesn't really show the length very well.
The rooms are long and narrow. This is the view of the bathroom door from the bed end of the room. The door into the room is on the wall to the left of the bathroom door. There's a vanity to the right of the bathroom door.
The walls are very thin. You can hear everything the neighbors do. They got a 7:00 wake-up call each morning. We were already awake at that time. It would have been a bit annoying if we wanted to sleep in. The neighbors were already bustling about by the time they got their call.
Here's the original (but not operational) fan.
(I couldn't tell that the picture was this blurry when I took it.)
At the right of the picture is a door that connects our room to the next room in case we wanted to have a suite. Of course it is locked. The second night we had neighbors in that room. They were unsure what the door was to. They tried and tried to open it. The knob would rattle every few minutes. I wondered in a clear and somewhat loud voice why the neighbors were trying to get into our room. With the thin walls they must have heard me. But that didn't stop them from trying to see what's behind that mysterious door. The next morning there were some more attempts to get through the door.
The portholes weren't locked shut. They're big enough to crawl through but I guess nobody bothers to get a room in order to end it. They must just take the cheaper tour and jump from the Promenade deck.
We had a view of Long Beach.
There was a problem with the air conditioning. The thermostat wasn't controlling it. So the room was very cold. We tried leaving the windows open but that didn't help much. And it let the mosquitos in. I got a bunch of bites that were red and a bit swollen but didn't itch at all. Strange.
They fixed the problem the second night after Jerry asked if there was something that could be done about the temperature.
The bathtub had some knobs that don't do anything these days. Apparently you could bathe in salt water in the good old days. Do cruise ships still use salt water?
The towel was nicely hung on the bar. The fandolded washcloth was tucked in a pocket folded in the hand towel.
It was nice to stay on the Queen Mary. I still think I'd feel too confined to spend time on a real cruise.
We went to Santa Catalina Island on Thursday. Jerry wanted to take the 15 minute helicopter ride to the island but I, being cheap, suggested the less expensive, one-hour boat ride. We had planned on taking the boat from the Queen Mary landing but that is closed after Labor Day. So we had to drive into Long Beach to catch our boat.
But it turned out that we got to see our home away from home on the way out of the port. We were inside the Commodore Lounge and saw the Queen Mary through slightly hazy windows that had the sun shining on them. So the pictures from the boat are rather washed out.
If you follow the line of the mast near the boat's stern (on the left) down to the round portholes just below the rectangular windows on the ship's Promenade deck, you'll be looking at the portholes in our room. Sorry that the picture is so fuzzy.
Here's the boat that took about 65 minutes to take us the 26 miles to the island.
We wandered through Avalon and quickly got bored with their touristy junk shops. After lunch we got tickets for the two-hour Skyline Drive tour. The tour wasn't in the towed bus-thing shown in the tour's video. We were in an old bus. Jerry and I sat right behind the driver and had a great view.
Here's the view of Avalon as we're climbing up the hill.
The road was very windy and narrow. And it had steep drops but was lined with eucalyptus trees to keep us from careening to our deaths. At one point Richard, our tour guide and driver, said that we had to do a stretch of the road with no slowing. I started making a movie just after he started this mad dash up the mountain. I hope this gives you a feel for what we went through.
The tour took us to the Airport in the Sky where we had 20 minutes to recover from the thrill ride up the mountain.
This is the bus that brought us safely up to the airport.
There's a nature center that has a tile map of the island. Here's Jerry looking at the far end of the island. Avalon is at the narrow part of the island near the left end of the island and the airport is about half way to the far end.
A feature of the tour is visiting with the bison that were imported for a silent movie that was filmed on the island.
On the way back to Avalon, we got to stop at a scenic spot overlooking the ocean. I took five pictures and Photoshop Elements did a bang-up job of pasting them together for me. Aren't computers and some computer programs amazing?
(I guess Blogger has a limit to the width of pictures. This was much larger. The picture is all there, they just shrunk it. If anybody needs to see a more detailed version, just ask and I'll email it to you.)
Here's another view of Avalon's bay as we're coming back into town.
Here are the condos where Richard, the tour guide, says Babs is an owner.
I found this juxtaposition of the psychic and the Coke machine amusing.
Not only can you enjoy a Coke with your Full Life Reading, you can visit the psychic in her Santa Barbara location. I suppose she uses astral projection to commute between the two spots.
There was a beautiful sunset on the return trip but my camera couldn't deal with it. Here's a blurry picture to give you a bit of an idea what we got to see.
It was a nice way to spend a day. Next time we'll have to take one of the longer tours.
Jerry and I took a little vacation this week. We started the week by doing San Diego activities then headed north for a few days.
Here's what I ate on the road.
Our first stop was Laguna Beach where they have art galleries. We didn't buy anything except lunch. We ate at the Heidelberg Pastry Bistro.
I had the Spicy Heidelberg Wrap and iced tea. It wasn't terribly spicy. It was good. This was across the street from the Pottery Shack that isn't there anymore. It's now The Old Pottery Place where they have a cafe, an art gallery, tchotchke shops, etc. I'll miss the Pottery Shack.
We then shopped for a while in the downtown part of Laguna Beach for a few hours then headed to our hotel in Long Beach.
Jerry comes up with fun vacations. We stayed on the Queen Mary for a couple of nights. For dinner the first night we ate in the Promenade Café.
I had fettuccine with vegetables. (I forgot to take the picture until I had eaten quite a bit of it. Sorry.)
The next morning we had breakfast in their coffee shop. We had bagels with cream cheese and caffè americano. (Again, I forgot to take the picture until after I had started eating. There's a bite missing from the bottom half.)
We then took the Catalina Express to Avalon on Santa Catalina Island. I don't know if the hotel upgraded us to the Commodore Lounge on the way to the island or if it was part of the package Jerry booked. (We were planning on taking the boat from the Queen Mary but that service gets turned off after Labor Day so we had to go to the downtown port. Maybe they upgraded us for our inconvenience.) Because we were in the Commodore Lounge, we got a cookie and a beverage.
Here's my chocolate chip cookie with the usual missing bite because I forgot to take my picture in time.
And my mimosa.
There's not much to do in Avalon. There are tourist junk shops. And restaurants. (There are tours around the island but that's another story.) We had lunch at a café on the water.
I had a mushroom veggie burger and fries. I forgot about taking a picture until I was finished. It's just as well, it wasn't terribly good. The mushrooms had no flavor and the burger was pretty flavorless, too, in spite of all the flavorful ingredients the menu said it contained. Don't bother with the Busy Bee Café when you visit Avalon. Jerry wasn't thrilled with his lunch, either.
Veggie burger and fries aftermath:
(As you can see I finished it anyway.)
Our return trip wasn't until 7:30 so we had dinner in Avalon. It was much better than lunch. Jerry enjoyed the aroma of the smoker cooking food at El Galleon and they had pasta primavera for the picky eater so that's where we ate.
My pasta primavera before even one bite was taken! (We didn't keep what they called "souvenir glasses.")
We sat on the outside deck of the boat on our return to Long Beach. There was a beautiful sunset.
We had some shopping to do in Santa Monica so that's where we headed Friday morning. We got on the freeway and decided to stay in the carpool lane and held out till we got to the Santa Monica area for breakfast. We had bagels with cream cheese and americanos at Tanner's Coffee. My Linux netbook wouldn't connect to their free WiFi service so I didn't get to check my email for the whole trip.
We were very successful in our shopping on Montana Avenue but you'll have to wait to hear about that adventure.
We then headed downtown to shop at Penzeys Spices. Jerry stocked up on spices. Later, you'll hear about some other fun stores we happened to run into.
On Tuesday, we went to the Wild Animal Park. They've replaced the monorail ride around the big, open spaces with The Journey Into Africa, an open-sided, soft-wheeled tour vehicle. That's where we headed to first.
Mei wanted to sit in the front row of the first car but there was a sign saying it was reserved for wheelchairs. So we went back towards the second car. As we were looking for a place to sit we heard somebody call "Charles!" It was our friend, Lou. You remember Lou, don't you? She goes to a lot of the cultural events Jerry and I see at the California Center for the Arts, Escondido, and now the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts to movie theaters. She's the one Mom had sent the artwork from all the return address labels that charities send her. So Mom and Lou got to meet each other. Wasn't that nice?
We then went to see the baby elephant that was born 18 days earlier.
We first went to the main pen outside the elephant barn. Here we watched an elephant retrieve some tidbit just outside of its pen.
The new baby wasn't there so we kept going. We found it in the small pen to the side of their barn. We then went to Lorikeet Landing where we fed the beautiful birds. Of course, there was the Petting Kraal. There was a baby rhino in a pen in the Petting Kraal (over Xin's left shoulder) but we couldn't pet it. My camera can't take pictures through mesh fences so you'll have to take my word for it...baby rhinos are cute.
