Leaving one's heart in San Francisco

OK, so I should have planned an extra week beyond the conference in this fabulous "city by the bay". In addition to workshops on improvisation and theatre games, we managed to explore a little portion of Golden Gate Park (the Japanese Gardens and the Dahlia garden), bypassing the fairly expensive deYoung Museum, even though I would love to have seen the Impressionist exhibit; the Embarcadero (featuring a fabulous performance of "Peter Pan" combining live performance, puppetry, and CGI); Fisherman's Wharf and a sunset cruise that could not quite find the sun setting, but enjoyable nevertheless as we sailed past Alcatraz and under the fog-bound Golden Gate Bridge; and some shopping in Macy's, Bloomingdale's, and Nordstrom's. We finished up with a hike through The Presidio (a National Park at the base of the Golden Gate), stopping to visit the Disney Family Museum, an intensive exploration of the life, films, TV shows, and entertainment parks of Walt Disney which suggests it'll take 1 and 1/2 hours to explore, but you really need 2 days.
And tomorrow we head north, thinking that we do indeed need to come back, because a heart is a terrible thing to lose.

land formations

When one is driving across the USA, one pays attention to the divergent landscape. After the Great Plains of Iowa and parts of Nebraska and Wyoming, mountains are quite interesting. Of course, there's the patches of snow on the peaks above 10,000 feet, but along I-80, some of the most interesting formations are raised platforms of rock and sand. I have learned that the largest of these is a plateau - an area that is above the adjacent terrain on at least one side; similar is the mesa - from the Spanish for "table", it too is a flat raised area, but it is toyally surounded by lower terrain. Finally, the smallest of these is a butte - which one dictinary says is an "eroded mesa". but can be seen as a smaller version. Completely eroded buttes often result in hoodoos - tall spire like formations. Descending from the mountains into the basin of Utah, one encounters the salt flats - a flat section of land that is covered with salt from evaporated water (aren't you glad you asked?) We drove passed the most famous of these - the Bonneville Salt Flats, a section of which is used to speed test cars. The speed limit on the highway near there is 75 mph, although most folks go a bit faster. A favorite practice of the locals is to take dark rocks and stones arrranged on the white salt to make formations like hearts (better than carving on a beech tree I think) or initials or messages like "peace" or "Go Vikings" (I don't think they mean the ancient Danes, probably a local sports team).

Rocky Mountain High

We're in Utah, about 40miles from Park City (home of the Olympics), surrounded by the grassy sagebrush hills of the Rocky Mountains. We're staying in a lovely little cabin (emphasis on the little) near a stream in the quaint town of Coalsville. After dinner, we took a stroll up a country road and saw some wildlife: an osprey on his nest (didn't know they liked streams), a goldfinch (had to come to Utah to see the NJ state bird), a rainbow from a distant storm, and now, as I finish this outdoors on the picnic table, thunder and lightning from that not-so-distant storm!

Shy Anne

We covered the entire state of Nebraska today. We made good time, traveling through its capital (Lincoln) and following the various Platte Rivers as we drove. Lunch was a Sunday Buffet at "Grandpa's" in Kearney, NE (pronounced just like the one in NJ). Very popular spot for locals, but I think we were among the youngest in the room. Nevertheless, they gave us the "senior discount" without being asked. Damn - I didn't think we looked old enough. But "all you can eat" for $10 each? I'll take the deal.
We also took a get-out-and-stretch break in Ogallala, where we found the "Mansion on the Hill" open for tours. We'd been by this home years ago on a previous trip while visiting nearby Boot Hill cemetary, but it was closed. So we took an hour to explore this brick home built in the 1870s, filled with interesting items from those years and on into the early 20th century, when the nearby river was dammed, creating a reservoir. With the time change (we're now in Rocky Mountain time, even though those peaks are not yet in evidence), we made up the visit, went way past our intended destination in Nebraska, and made it about 60 miles into Wyoming to stop for the night in Cheyenne. No camping though - it's raining and we need showers after the 90 degree temps down on the plains.

Our Stake in Omaha

We are finally "camping" - in a KOA, sleeping in the van, and heating up some leftovers on our new Bass Pro stove. We're just outside Omaha, Nebraska in the town of Gretna. It's a little buggy - gnats and flies don't totally understand how the new "Off fan" works. But I'm sitting at our picnic table, listening to the locusts buzzing in the trees and watching the sun go down, a little after 8 p.m. CST, across the cornfields. We had a great drive from Illinois, 415 miles on I-80. We crossed the mighty Mississippi (running high; they had floods in Iowa last week) and saw fields of wind turbines - about 30 in a row, stretching across the cornfields and rolling hills of Iowa. (Interesting place, Iowa. Is it "State Fair" that says "You really ought to give Iowa a try"? We have in the past - the bridges of Madison County, the Danish themed town of Elkhorn, - but we could come back for a cluster of German villages from the 1850s called Amana Colonies and, of course, there's Des Moines and Council Bluffs. It really is amazing what is out here - or anywhere for that matter - for us to see and explore.)

But no time. San Francisco beckons in 3 days. And Nebraska is more than 450 miles long!

Continuing a theme...

Well, we missed Utica (see last night's post) because of a diversion of traffic on I-80 just west of Chicago. But, in a continuing theme of last night's entry, we traveled "alternate I-80" through Newark, Lisbon, Norway, Peru, and Marseilles, all within the space of 30 minutes and geographically in Illinois. Talk about "alternate". We ended up staying the night in Ottawa - no, still in Illinois. But we got talking with a couple in the parking lot (small dog in their arms, a ball of yarn in Patty's: natural elements for a conversation to start up) who were actually from Ottawa, Canada! They're heading for Vancouver Island and decided it might be fun to visit a namesake town. Forecasts of heavy T-storms made us pass up on our planned encampment at Starved Rock State Park and settle on Holiday Inn instead. We'll watch for a camp tomorrow, somewhere in Nebraska.

On the road again...

It's 2010 and I'm going to try to keep this blog up to date with an occasional entry as we travel west to San Francisco and then North to Alaska once again. Our first day took us through several major back-ups thanks to closed lanes on I-80 in PA, but we arrived safely if late. As we drove along, I was thinking about the places that replicate other place names across the USA. I mean, here I am in Boston Heights, Ohio! Not a hill overlooking the Massachusetts city. Not too far from here is Miami (OH) and on the way out, we passed by the Jersey Shore in Pennsylvania. (I've heard that a group from NJ settled on the banks of a nearby river and the natives of the area began to call that bank of the river "the Jersey shore".) And we also passed nearby Indiana, Pennsylvania - those folks just can't decide where they are!
Of course, there's only one Rahway.
Tomorrow, it's off to Utica...Illinois.