Tag Archives: night

The Grand Canyon

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From the inside.

In February 2005 Mike and I made our second overnight mule trip into the Grand Canyon. We went with our friends John and Lorna from Maine (Hi, Lorna!) and spent two nights at Phantom Ranch.

Inside the Grand CanyonAlthough it’s not a difficult trip, it is a long one. Although Mike and I have horses and ride once in a while (not as often as we used to, I’m afraid), this is 4 to 5 hours in the saddle — enough to make anyone sore. But it’s worth it. Only a tiny percentage of the millions of people who visit the Grand Canyon each year actually descend into the canyon. This is one of the “easy” ways to do it. And you get a whole different view of the canyon once you get below the rim.

Phantom Ranch is nice, too. Stone cottages, Bright Angel Creek, lots of healthy hikers and campers from all over the world going through.

This photo was taken during our full day down in the Canyon. We went for a hike on a trail that climbed up from the river and made its way upriver. After the initial climb, the trail was pretty level — which is good for me because I don’t climb hills well. We saw lots of wildflowers and rock formations along the way. And a helicopter pulling equipment out from Roaring Springs on a long line.

It’s another trip I highly recommend. But book it far in advance — there’s about a 6-month waiting list. Unless you do it the way we did: go in the winter when no one wants to go.

Grand Canyon, Arizona, photo

Surprise Valley Drugs

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One of my favorite shots from my August 2005 road trip.

Surprise Valley DrugsYes, it’s the side of a building. But it’s also an old billboard for a drugstore that probably doesn’t even exist anymore. And there’s something about it that I really like.

I took this photo at the end of the second day of my trip. I was spending the night at Cedarville, CA, in a little motel on the edge of town. Cedarville was a quaint, undiscovered farming community. I’d passed at least a dozen huge California barns, hay fields, and horse pastures on the last half hour of my drive. I was exhausted and this quiet little town was like an oasis in the desert.

This billboard had been painted on the side of a row of shops. I don’t know how long ago it had been painted or whether the Surprise Valley Drug store was in Cedarville. But I snapped the photo to remember.

The next morning, after stopping back in town for a some car noshing supplies, I’d seen a similarly interesting shot across the street. But there were people out and about and I felt silly about taking the photo. Someday I’ll go back and snap it.

And to readers of my Maria’s Guides eBooks, if this looks familiar, it should. I used it for the cover of one of my eBooks.

Buy on RedBubbleThe full-frame version of this photo is available for sale as cards and prints at RedBubble.com

Keeping Up to Date with this Site

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A few tips for keeping up to date with what’s new without having to surf over here every day or two.

The other day, Cliff, one of my editors, asked me (in an iChat chat) what the best way was to keep track of the new material on this site. He wanted to read my “pearls of wisdom” (his words, not mine, and I think he was teasing me) regularly.

Cliff uses a newsreader to monitor blogs. I think he was more interested in the how-to stuff I write to support my books than the somewhat boring pieces about my every day life. After all, do people really want to know that as I type this, my bird is barking like a dog in the next room? Or that I hung up on a Republican canvasser who called me in my office today? Or that today’s humidity in Phoenix is only 3%?

I told Cliff there were a few ways to keep up with this site’s new content:

  • Subscribe to an RSS feed for the entire blog. The good thing about doing this is that you won’t miss anything new. The 25 most recent posts are always available in the feed, so if you check in at least once a week, you’ll be all set. The bad thing about that is that you have to use a newsreader (which many people don’t use). And you will get summaries of all 25 most recently posted articles, including the ones about barking birds, being rude to republicans, and Arizona weather. If you want to do this, use my Feedburner feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/marialanger.
  • Visit my RSS feeds page and subscribe to just the feed(s) that interest you. Just interested in a book or two? Subscribe to just the feeds for those titles. Want to learn more about flying a helicopter for hire? Subscribe to just that topic’s feed. You’ll still need a newsreader, but at least you won’t have to read summaries about posts that you don’t think will interest you. (Of course, you may be surprised by what you miss.)
  • Use the E-mail Notification form in the navigation bar on most (if not all) pages of this site to subscribe to this blog by e-mail. This is a great way to keep up with the site without having to set up or use a newsreader. I subscribed to see how it worked and I’m very pleased with the results. Each day that I post to this blog, an e-mail message is created that provides a brief summary, with links, for all the posts written that day. So if I wrote 10 posts that day, you get one e-mail. If I wrote one post that day, you get one e-mail. If I didn’t write any posts that day, you don’t get an e-mail at all. The e-mail goes out in the middle of the night, so the message is in your in-box in the morning (like the New York Times, delivered, but without the airs). There are no ads and you don’t get spammed. Best of all, when you get sick of reading this drivel, you can cancel your subscription to stop the e-mails.

Of course, you can always make a point of stopping by this site to see what’s new — the old fashioned way. Visitors are always welcome.

And have you read yet about my chicken with the crooked beak?

rss, newsreader, blog, notification

Oregon Coast…in Fog

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Just after dawn at Fort Stevens State Park.

A lot of the photos in the header for this blog come from the 16-day road trip I took in August 2006. This is one of them.

I spent the night in a yurt at Ft. Stevens State Park on the northwestern tip of Oregon. In the morning, I went to the beach for sunrise. Unfortunately — or so I thought at the time — it was foggy. But when I did a little exploring around the deserted post-dawn park, I found some beautiful images that my little digital camera had no trouble capturing.

Oregon Coast in the FogThis dock stretches into a body of water not far from the coast. It was a haunting image, made magical by the reflections of the dock and grasses off the perfectly smooth water surface.

There was a fisherman there that morning, too, but we didn’t ruin the moment — or wonderful silence — with conversation. I moved around as quietly as I could, snapping photos here and there. He cast out his line, reeled it in, and casted it out again. After a while, I slipped back into my car and disappeared into the fog.

The next time I had Internet access, I sent the photos I took that morning to Mike via e-mail. He told me they were the best photos I’d taken so far on the trip.

The credit goes to the fog.

Oregon, coast, fog, Ft. Stevens State Park

Vichyssoise

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Another cold soup.

Mike and I got on the cold soup kick the other day when I made gazpacho. We decided to try a few different cold soups for dinner, leaving the big meal of the day to lunch time (when it really should be eaten).

So I got online and did a Google search for cold soup recipes. I wound up on a page at allrecipes.com with a list of cold soups. I printed off a few recipes that sounded good. But the one I decided to try first was for vichyssoise, a leek and potato soup. The recipe was submitted to the site by Derek Parker and had a rating of 5 out of 5 stars.

The soup was quick and easy to make. I followed the recipe quite closely and was rewarded with an extremely tasty soup. We had it for dinner last night and I just had a little post-lunch snack of some more.

If you try this recipe, serve it with a crusty bread, like a loaf of French bread. That’s the only thing it needed to make a perfect summer meal.