SF & OR

Our travels took us to San Francisco for a day. We hooked up with an old family friend, Brother Robert. We were given a first class tour of the city viewing it from high points on both sides of the bay. I was great to spend some time with him, and to introduce him to our kids. The day started off foggy, but cleared enough for some great views. Here we are at the golden gate bridge....As Brother Robert was directing my driving, he said "Now, just wait for this car ahead of us to go and then it will be our turn." I did as he said, and all of a sudden I was on Lombard Street, the famous very, very, steep zig-zag street!

We explored 'Fisherman's Wharf' and had clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl along with a sandwich on sourdough bread. We all love sourdough bread!
Heading for the Oregon border, we went through a 100 mile section of thick smoke. This was from the forest fires that were burning a few ridges west of us. Some of these fires have been burning for months.
In preparation for this trip, we purchased the book Watch It made in the USA. It lists and describes some popular factory tours by region in the U.S. One of these is the Jelly Belly tour in Fairfield, CA. We had a blast watching from the catwalk above the plant floor as millions (billions?!) of jelly beans were being produced . Here we are at the 'tasting bar' where you can get a sample of every flavor they make!After we left California, we headed to the Oregon coast. We had a rare, sunny seaside day and were practically alone on the beach to explore and play in the cold surf. Below Q explores a 'tidal pool' that has tons of little brine shrimp-type creatures.


Ivo says: Here I am walking along Oregon’s Pacific coast. The water was numbingly cold, but it also was addicting. The more you went in, the more you wanted to get out yet the more you stood out of the water, the more you wanted to go back in! The waves rolled in one after another splashing our legs, creating cool patterns and leaving interesting things for us to discover. The whole beach combing was amazing.

Here I am again holding the jelly of a dead jellyfish that was clear and had a cool pattern on it. Mom is feeling it here.

Q and Xi inspect the lens of a lighthouse on Cape Meares. In the 1800's it cost $ 60,000! The glass pieces for the lens was created in Paris and shipped to Oregon in barrels of molasses for protection. It had to cross the Atlantic and then round South America before it could be hauled up this cliff and installed.
Every morning of a travel-day includes packing the car. The 'anchors' of the trunk are the cooler, the camping 'chuck box,' and the 6-man L.L. Bean tent stored behind them. Everything else gets packed around those three items. When everything is packed in its container (duffles, stuff sacks, etc.) and sitting next to the car, it takes about 10 minutes to load the vehicle as everything now has its place. This is a great improvement from the 45 + minute ordeal it took back in June. Regular shipments back home of acquired trinkets and gear we no longer need helps to keep the car load down to 'absolute necessity size'.
Tillamook, OR is home to the regional favorite, the Tillamook Cheese Company. We toured this amazing factory and saw the processing of cheddar. The aging warehouse can hold 5 million pounds of cheddar at once! The blocks below are large blocks of cheddar that have been aged and are ready to be cut and packaged.

Hi all, It has been great to hear from so many of our friends and family who are periodically checking up on our travels via this blog. The emails, calls and posts here are a great connection to you, thanks. Below is the end paper from my sketchbook/journal; it graphically shows our trail, each dot being someplace we have spent the night. When we were visiting Xi's cousin in San Diego, we were the farthest we will be on this trip from our home. We have begun to head north and toward the end of this week, we'll turn east. As I write this, it is a balmy 62 degrees just outside San Fransisco which we will be tomorrow.

We spent 6 days house sitting (house mooching?!) at the beautiful L.A. home of our friends Fred and Jo. It was a great home base while we explored the area. Here we are sitting in our favorite room, the patio. The weather here was beautiful and sunny with daytime temps in the 70s.

"you can't miss it, it's the only house with a ginat cactus next to the garage!"

We spent a day at Malibu Beach, one of the most famous surfing beaches in America. We watched the surfers, spent hours body surfing, listened to the many different languages being spoken by the tourists, and watched these para-surfers. They had a controllable parachute-kite attached to their belts and would zoom across the surf at high speed doing tricks.
After paying a fortune at a parking ramp, we decided to park our car on the side street. We set the alarms on our watches and loaded up with quarters for the meter. S was the first one to go add quarters to the meter. When he got there he found a ticket for $50 under the wiper blade. It stated that it was illegal to park on this side of the street between 12 and 3 on Tuesdays! Here is the sign that was suppose to let us know this important information, think it's worth fighting?!

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art or LACMA was awesome. Here Xi bathes in one of her favorite artists' works, David Hockney!

Somewhere in Utah, we took a rock in the windshield. Fortunately our time in LA allowed for a relatively painless (except the deductable!) replacement.

We are seeing some wonderful things being transported on the roads and rails of the country. Here, a double trailer of lemons heads to market or a processing plant in central CA. We have seen similar loads of plum tomatoes, almonds and garlic.

Q is most happy when he has a jar of pickles in front of him!

Somewhere it is written 'thou shall not covet the Viking convection/range of thy neighbor,' but I do anyway! I have loved cooking on this baby, especially after cooking so many of the summer's meals on a 2 burner LLBean propane camp stove!
Ivo suffers the natural consequences of her actions after putting a handful of sour skittles in her mouth on a day hike.
Words cannot describe what it was like to spend a day hiking in Sequoia National Park among hundreds of these beautiful giants.
We did a 6 mile loop through the largest grove of giant sequoias in the world. We have found that in nearly all parks, once you leave the paved trails behind and hit the back country, you nearly have the park to yourself. We saw a black bear on this trail too.
Many of these healthy trees have hollowed out bases that you can walk into. Here we stand inside a tree looking out!
OK a bit corny but we did it anyway
I know this shot is a bit washed out but it shows the scale of some of these trees, the family is in the center.

'A little a dis a little O dat'

While doing a driving tour of L.A.'s Hollywood/Bel Air area, we came across a fellah selling maps identifying the 'homes of the movie stars.' We spent the $10 and off we went. The event basically consisted of driving slowly along winding, twisting streets seeing bushes, gates, and security alarm signs. Here is a picture of our favorite set of bushes and wall, because it belongs to one of our favorite stars, Steve Martin. We felt especially connected to his place because we also saw a patio umbrella poking up from above the bushes. After about a half-hour of this tour of seeing more of the same (J-Lo's, Barry Mantilow's, & Danny Devito's), we canned it and went to a museum.

We visited the Four Corners marker for MB. This brass plaque identifies the convergence of four states: Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. The funny thing is, it is just a point on a map that has no meaning beyond that, but it is the only place in the US where this happens. It is a total tourist trap, but Ivy can now say that she sat on four states at the same time, in 110 degree sun, while eating a blue snow cone! MB, you really didn't miss much.

Back in Colorado, we rode the Durango-Silverton narrow gauge steam railroad. This railroad was built 130 years ago to serve the mines (tons of mines!) in and around the Silverton mountains. Because it costs $75 for a round trip ticket and takes 7 hours, we decided to divide the journey between us. The boys rode the train up from Durango and the girls rode it back from Silverton. We highly recommend doing this. From the train, we saw some spectacular scenery and the spot where they filmed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid jumping off the cliff.


One of the highlights of the trip for all of us was getting a chance to meet a whole branch of Xi's family, one that none of us had ever met before. We had looked forward to meeting C & T at their place in Silverton, but as a major bonus, we got to meet C's siblings/family from Pagosa Springs, CO and Hawaii! We had the best time eating, touring rock collections, and sitting around the fire in the backyard learning about each other.

While staying in Las Vegas, S and the kids visited the Hoover Dam. Here we are walking in the ventilation tunnels in the middle of the dam itself. At the end of the tunnel, we reached a vent in the center of the face of the dam where we looked out over the turbine buildings and the lower Colorado River. Xi opted to wait in line for theater tickets for the evening, and then she went and visited the Bally's spa where she got to soak in a hot tub, get a 50 minute Swedish massage, and was treated like she was 'Queen for a Day.' It was GREAT!

We spent a day in San Diego with Xi's cousin and her family. We hadn't seen J in 12 years, and had never met her family. What a great crew, what great parents they are, and what a great time we had together. We visited the San Diego Zoo and had a Mexican feast for dinner.

Here we are enjoying the feast!

Mesa Verde National Park

This site is called the 'Spruce Tree House'.


We hiked to a remote location in the park to see some pertoglyphs carved by ancient locals. I put my hand next the hands of the long gone artist (not touching) for scale. Interpretations of the images have been made by experts, but I mostly think the artist was expressing him/herself in this work. I love spirals and this artist did too!

We went on a tour of the Balcony House. This photo shows the 32' ladder we had to climb to get there.

Here is the tunnel we had to crawl through to get to another series of dwellings.

Stone footholds have been cut into the rock by the park service to allow us to get out of the dwelling. We had chains to help us too. The orignal residents had a 100+ foot climb using much smaller foot holds (no ladders, chains or ropes), everyone got into the house this way, the very young and very old included!

Ivo writes, "Here I am standing in an Anasazi cliff dwelling that they built using their handmade stone tools and bare hands. This tour to the Balcony House required us to climb a 32 foot wooden ladder (see photo above) to get up into their dwelling. Then from there, after a full tour of their space, we had to crawl through a narrow 15 foot tunnel leading to two more 10 foot ladders, and finally ended with us climbing up foot and handholds carved into the cliff's face. "

Zion N. P. Angel's Landing Hiking Trail

The hike that we have been most nervious about and most excited about is the Angel's Landing trail in Zion National Park. We first heard about it on a hiking website who labled it 'Americas scaryiest day hike'! Set smack dab in the center of Zion canyon, this 5 hour hike was the most exciting one we've ever done.
Here we are at the beginning of the hike. The innocent looking peak is in the background.

We pause for a breath and look down at the valley. At this point, we've only just begun.

What you see here is a section of the Angel's Landing hike called Walter's Wiggles. If you look closely beyond Q, you can see the trail contains a series of tight switchbacks.

Until this point the trail was a steady steep assent, like most mountains we hike. Here is where it begins to get scary. Actually, many people end their hike here before starting the final 1/2 mile. Here is an apt description of the hike we found online. "Hikers will navigate the next half-mile along a narrow sandstone isthmus with sheer cliffs on both sides. The narrow and arduous trail drops 1200' on one side and 800' on the other."
Q heads onto the final mile of trail.
Q & S are ahead looking back at Ivo & Xi's progress. The images don't begin to capture the sheer drop-offs on both sides. We all had psychological moments of fear/panic during this part of the hike, but worked through them on our own.
The park service has mounted chains to aid climbers in the most dangerous and tricky places. After we completed it, we looked online, only 6 people have died on this trail since 1986, amazing really.


As you can see from this picture, we made it to the summit! Here we are looking out at the spectacular view of the canyon from the summit after a hair-raising climb to the top.

A view from the top.

The decent was much easier, no fear of the unknown. Here, in one of the narrowest parts of the trail, Ivo and Xi put their arms out over the 800' and 1200' cliffs at the same time!

Following our Angel's Landing hike, Ivo & Xi soak in the Virgin River which carved this amazing canyon.