Category Archives: Travels with Maria

Blogging from the road.

Sheridan, MT

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At a friend’s ranch.

My August 2005 road trip (which still hasn’t made it to this blog), took me all over the northwest. On the way back, I decided to stop in and visit our friend Lynn. Her husband, Ray, had been partners with Mike (my husband) on a Grumman Tiger airplane. At the time, Ray and Lynn lived in town. They decided to move — or maybe Lynn did — and they bought a house on some acreage in Sheridan, MT.

I arrived at Lynn’s doorstep after a very long day in the car. I’d started at McCall, ID and had driven along one scenic road after another. In Idaho, most roads don’t run east to west. They run north to south between mountain ranges. (Or at least that’s how it seemed to me.) So I did a lot of zig-zagging up and down the state of Idaho before crossing the Continental Divide at Chief Joseph Pass.

I’d been told that Ray and Lynn’s house was in Dillon, MT, so that’s where I headed. When I got there and called for directions, I learned that I was still about 30 miles away. I finally found the place in the foothills of the Tobacco Root Mountains, near the Beaverhead National Forest.

Sheridan, MTLynn got me settled in and we had some wine by one of the two creeks that flowed past her house. Then we went for a walk in her alfalfa field. This is the view from the end of the field, looking back toward her house.

I can’t remember how many acres they have there, but I can remember the color: green. There was a lot of water in the area and with the right irrigation equipment, they were able to grow two crops of alfalfa a year. That was more than enough than they needed for their horses (which graze in a separate field). So they hired a guy to cut the alfalfa twice a year. He gets half the crop for payment and they sell the other half to pay their annual property tax bill. Nice.

I spent a wonderful night there, listening to the water flow by outside my window.

Fort Lee, NJ

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We spend some time along the retreat route.

Fort Lee, NJ is a town on the Palisades of the Hudson River. It’s known primarily for two things: the George Washington Bridge crosses the river at Fort Lee to the upper end of Manhattan island and George Washington’s retreat route runs right through it.

Of course, there was a fort. It sits high on the Palisades, just south of the bridge. There isn’t much left of it, but there is a nice park with paved paths and lookout points with benches. The Americans used the fort to lob mortars onto British ships sailing up and down the river.

Until the Americans ran away.

I’m making fun, of course. Back in those days of the Revolution, the American army did a lot of retreating. What’s weird is that there are signs along the retreat route proudly proclaiming that they ran away right past where the sign now stands. But we did win.

We had some time to kill before meeting my sister and brother and some others for dim sum, so we went for a walk in the park. And we got a few treats.

Fife and DrumThe first treat was the re-enactment stuff going on. I don’t know if they do this every Sunday or if we just happened to stop by on the right day, but there were men in revolutionary war uniforms doing the kinds of things the soldiers did back then. Like marching around with a drum and fife. Or with guns. Or setting up a camp near the mortar lobbing area. Or building a shelter without any modern tools.

camp I don’t know why these guys were there, but they were definitely into it. Their outfits looked great — but a lot cleaner than they would have been 230 years ago. Sadly, there weren’t many spectators. The park was pretty empty. It was as if they were performing for themselves. Maybe something was going to start later on. We didn’t hang around. We had dim sum to eat.

George Washington BridgeWe also spent some time at one of the lookouts, watching the bridge and the river flowing beneath it. I took some pictures (of course). And I can recall some of the facts that I’d read about the bridge while in my hotel room.

The George Washington Bridge — or GWB, to the locals — was once the longest single span suspension bridge in the world. It’s still one of the 15 longest. (It’s about 2 miles across the river.) It was built in the 1930s and was originally designed with two levels of roadway, but budget cuts kept the bridge to just the upper level until the early 1960s when the lower level was added. It’s the primary crossing from New Jersey to New York — I can’t remember how many millions of vehicles cross each day. The bridge’s original design called for the towers to be faced with local stone so it matched the Palisades on the New Jersey side. That plan was nixed along the way and the bridge is painted regularly. They just finished doing some rennovation on the towers — you can still see some of the scaffolding on the New York side in this photo.

When I was a kid, my family had a small motor boat. We kept it at home, on a trailer. We’d go boating in the Hudson River. The boat ramp we used is just south of the tower on the New Jersey side. We’d go on day trips around Manhattan island or past Ellis Island (before they fixed it up) and the Statue of Liberty. The water in New York Harbor was always rough; the water in the Harlem River was always smooth. Hells Gate, where the rivers came together with the Long Island Sound, was a crapshoot.

Leaves and SkyAnyway, I also took some time to lay back on the bench and look up at the sky through the leaves of an oak tree. It was nice to be among trees that were a good deal taller than I am. The area is lush with vegetation, like a jungle waiting to reclaim the land.

And just beyond it is I-95 with traffic and exhaust and the sound of cars and trucks.

We left the park right around noon and headed into town. Fort Lee (or Fort Ree, as we sometimes call it) is known for another thing: good Asian food. With a huge Chinese, Japanese, and mostly Korean population, it shouldn’t be a surprise.

Want some of the best dim sum in the New York metro area? Go to Silver Pond on Main Street in Fort Lee. You won’t be disappointed.

And if you have time, check out the Fort Lee Historic Park. Maybe those guys will be camped out again.

Ground Zero, In Passing

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I finally pass by an area I’d been avoiding.

We passed by Ground Zero in New York City the other day while going to the movies. I’d been avoiding lower Manhattan — something that’s pretty easy to do when you live 2,400 miles away and visit New York infrequently — since the World Trade Center’s twin towers disappeared from the skyline.

Ground ZeroBut Sunday I was there.

It’s amazing how much you can see of the area with the buildings gone. I could see Trinity Church and the old Woolworth Building (the tallest building in the world for 13 years, topped by the Chrysler Building and later the Empire State Building in 1934). We were on the west side of Ground Zero; evidently, the tourist stuff is on the east side. From our view, it just looked like a big construction site. Very big — four city blocks. Of course, I didn’t get a picture of it from the theater’s windows; the shot here is from the car.

I feel kind of weird about the way Ground Zero is being treated as a tourist attraction. I hope most people are very respectful to the site in remembrance of the thousands who died there. I don’t think that people who don’t know New York can understand the significance of the attack and buildings’ collapse. Lower Manhattan is occupied by literally hundreds of thousands of people on a typical workday morning. Those buildings were each 1/4 mile tall. If they had fallen any way but straight down, the body count and damage to New York would have been far, far worse. Any New Yorker can tell you how lucky the city is that the buildings came almost straight down. And any New Yorker who was in lower Manhattan that day can tell you, without exaggeration, how lucky they are to be alive.

The Grand Tetons

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A road trip photo.

Back in August, I took a 16-day road trip in my “midlife crisis” car (a 2004 Honda S2000). In a way, it was a midlife crisis trip. The goal was to find a place we could live in the summer and still make some kind of living or, better yet, a new year-round place to live. I traveled as far west as the Oregon coast and as far north as Mount St. Helens. I covered a few hundred miles a day, making up my route as I drove, finding a cheap place to sleep most nights and splurging for a nicer place on a few nights. (I wanted to spend $100 or less per day on average.) I saw more of this country in those 16 days than most people see in a lifetime.

I took my laptop with me and documented the trip in my old blog. Those entries haven’t made it to this new site for two reasons: (1) importing them with their images is time consuming, tedious work and I can’t stand much of that for long and (2) I’ve decided to expand on them and turn them into a travel book.

The Grand TetonsI’d woken that morning in Montana, at a friend’s house, and had taken the scenic route south, through Yellowstone National Park. South of that park, I reached Jackson Lake with this late afternoon view of the Grand Tetons.

I like this picture, primarily because of the color: blue. It’s funny how you can look at something and percieve it a certain way, then point a camera at it and get a picture that shows something you didn’t really see. In this case, it’s the color blue. Of course, I noticed the sky was blue and the water was blue, but in this shot, the mountains look blue, too.

“Of purple mountains majesty”? Perhaps this is what they were talking about.

Yellowstone, Tetons, Montana, Jackson

Breakwater at Rockland

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Another scenic view in Maine.

Breakwater at RocklandI couldn’t remember where this photo was taken, either. I knew it was in Maine and I knew I’d taken it on one of our outings with John and Lorna. So I e-mailed Lorna a copy of the image and asked her. The response came back almost immediately: Samoset Resort in Rockland, ME.

I remembered the drive to the parking area clearly — past the resort grounds to a shady lot with several dozen cars already parked. We walked from the lot to the water’s edge where this long, stone breakwater awaited us. There were people on the rock wall, walking in either direction. I managed to get a shot where you couldn’t see any of them.

The rocks were huge and placed precisely. It was an amazing feat of engineering — at least I think so. The surface was smooth enough for a vehicle to drive on it — maybe even a mountain bike with fat tires. But you did have to pay attention while walking on it. One wrong step could mean a badly twisted ankle.

Rockland Lighthouse, MaineYou also can’t see the building at the end of breakwater about a mile from where this photo was taken. Here it is. It was a lighthouse and apparently still functions as one. But it’s closed to the public, so you can just walk around it or onto its stone steps. We spent some time sitting out in the sun, watching the boats go by. It was a peaceful, relaxing place. There was some fog in the trees on the other side of the channel — the same fog we’d walked through earlier in the day when visiting the Owl’s Head Lighthouse. (Did I get that one right, Lorna?)

John and LornaI took this photo of John and Lorna on the way back to the car. John’s not an easy guy to get a picture of. It seem like every time you tell him to stand still and pose for a picture, he acts like he doesn’t believe someone’s really going to take his picture. So you have to take a few of them in a row for one of them to come out natural enough to use. This one gets them both.