Leftover snow with underlying ice made the going a tad slow in places. Seven miles and 3,000 vertical feet to Linda Vista, a good hike for my feet. Nice to be breathing in the fresh scents of the desert plants and stimulating conversation with friends. A new trail for me. Maybe next time,after the ice melts, The Finger, a thousand or so feet higher. Read the rest of this article…
Litang is far from a tourist town. The roads are so bad that the Han Chinese find it quite an adventure to travel there via modern SUV to view the, strange to them, Tibetans. They found it quite strange to find two Westerners, a couple, riding a tandem bicycle, on the roads and elevations they found so daunting. They are daunting, and took a physical toll on us, leading to a well deserved rest in a town we came to love, and found difficult to leave, despite the high elevation and wonky weather. Read the rest of this article…
So sad to hear of the crowd disaster and all the deaths in Cambodia. In our three weeks or so in the country we found the people to be hard working, cheerful and generally happy despite sometimes difficult living conditions. Like most Southeast Asians, they love their festivals, and the Water Festival is most beloved. This is an unusual occurrence and should not deter anyone from visiting this wonderful country. We’d go back in a minute. เทศกาลน้ำ Read the rest of this article…
Recently Claire and I were lucky enough to catch a hike guided by the park paleontologist and an interpretive ranger. The short, two mile or so, hike took us away from the road and interpretive signs and into the washes and flats where dinosaurs died 225 million years ago in the late Triassic Period. We found pieces of bone and Claire even found an intact tooth. The stark landscape adds to the mystery and amazement of the realization that you are holding a thing, that was once part of a living Stagonolepis so long ago. Nothing like science to put one’s lifespan into perspective. Read the rest of this article…
We got on the, still unfinished, Kettle Valley Railway (rail trail) bypassing Kelona and on to Penticton. The Myra-Bellevue Provincial Park is the most spectacular section of the trail, with 18 trestles and two tunnels in an 8.5 kilometer section. Read the rest of this article…
A fun example of the cultural mixing here was the jig contest. Now, I’ve always thought of the jig, danced to a fast fiddle, as an Anglo-Saxon tradition: Irish, Scottish, French, but here it’s a local tradition, with most of the dancers of First Nations descent, with plenty of mixed and white faces giving it a go. Oh, by the way, the really really excellent fiddler seemed to be from the orient. Go figure. Read the rest of this article…
The Longsword Winery in the Applegate Valley of Southern Oregon, was the first winery that hosted us for a night under the Harvest Hosts program. For a $20 membership you receive access to a growing number of wineries and farms who will allow you to park your RV overnight without a fee. Read the rest of this article…
It appears the volcano in Iceland is not going to go back to sleep without causing mankind to take notice of the disruption possible. Thousands of flights have been canceled by the the ash cloud ejected from the eruption under a glacier. The ash is even more destructive to air traffic because some of it may be turned to glass by the ice before being ejected high into the air.We’ll just have to wait and see if this will last for weeks and cause major economic disruption in North Atlantic and European transportation, or fade away quietly. I wouldn’t bet on either.
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