Tag Archives: Travel sights

Catching Up – Installment 1

Long, long ago (well, last October at least) we drove from California to Waco, TX. And we took 10 days to get there! The reason it took so long was that we made stops at any number of National Parks along the way. I just checked where I had left off with our travel stories, and it seems we had just left Page, AZ and Lake Powell. Then I went to Gary’s journal to refresh my memory about what came next –

Tuesday, Oct 11 –
Left Walmart & drove east along rt. 98 & 160. Stopped at 4 Corners (Navajo land) & also Hovenweek NP – Pueblo Village-buildings. Continued on to campground. Set up RV. Relaxed. Went to Dinner. Pizza – Stopped at Walmart – ordered drugs. Went through many back roads to get to Hovenweep.
Wednesday, Oct 12-
Went to Mesa Verde NP. Toured Balcony House and drove around to all other lookouts. Stopped @ museum & watched movie. Also went to Anasazi Village for more movies and museum. Dinner @ small restaurant. Picked up scrips @Walmart and did laundry @ campground.

Yes – we do lead an exciting life, filled with Walmart trips and laundromats. But there were a couple of POI’s in those paragraphs too!

Four Corners –
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Truth here – it was a little disappointing. Although, it was what it said it was – a marker of where the four states come together. Several folks were waiting in line to get a picture of someone in their group standing in all four states at once, but that didn’t seem all that important to us. In looking back over my pictures, the one above is really, truly the only one I took. Oh well.
Hovenweep National Monument
I’d never even heard of the  Hovenweep National Monument. How about you? Here’s a little bit about it from the website –

Once home to over 2,500 people, Hovenweep includes six prehistoric villages built between A.D. 1200 and 1300. Explore a variety of structures, including multistory towers perched on canyon rims and balanced on boulders. The construction and attention to detail will leave you marveling at the skill and motivation of the builders.

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We enjoyed a bit of a hike
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and were impressed with these remains perched on the canyon rim.
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Here’s a little panorama of the canyon –
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See the mountains in the distance? It was quite the landmark in this neck of the woods!
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🙂
After we did a bit of exploring in the Hovenweep ruins, we continued on our way to our next campground. Remember the mention of lots of back roads?
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Oh, yeah, baby!
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We settled nicely into our campground (and worked in that exciting stop at Walmart). The next day we set out for Mesa Verde – a true highlight of our ‘long road to Waco”.
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Mesa Verde National Park

Mesa Verde, as you probably know, is all about cliff dwellings. It was absolutely amazing to see these masterpieces of engineering from centuries ago.
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While most of these cliff communities were viewed from overlooks, there was one that you could actually tour. The Balcony House
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And it was a real hands-on tour!
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We had an excellent Native American guide, who, as we stood silent in one of the rooms, serenaded us with a melody from his handmade flute.
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It was goose-bump beautiful!
These cliff dwellings were truly amazing.
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And the view on the way back to the campground was pretty striking too!
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It was a great day – from the guided tour to the many cliff dwellings to the beautiful views to those handy movies!
I’d highly recommend it as an addition to your bucket list!

Well, that gets us a little farther down the road, but there are still more adventures to share. But enough for tonight! HERE‘s a link to more pictures of the Hovenweep National Monument, and HERE‘s a link to more photos from Mesa Verde National Park.
I’ll save the rest of the trip for another day!

Mondays are for Memories – More LBJ

Since we had such an interesting visit at the LBJ Ranch on Friday, I thought I’d go back and find the post about another piece of the LBJ puzzle. So here is post from almost five years ago, when we once again (or would that be once before) checked out a bit of Presidential history –

About those places and things…. 02/02/2012

We’re parked tonight at the Walmart in Port Lavaca, TX.  Tomorrow we’ll head into our February project at Texas Baptist Encampment in Palacios, TX (right along the coast between Houston and Corpus Christi). Before we get started on February Goodness, I figured I’d better finish up the “Places and Things” part of my post a couple of days ago.
So, the places…..
JoRoyButler We didn’t do a great deal of sightseeing while we were in Giddings, but we did make one trip into Austin to meet up with our good buddies, Jo and Roy.
And of course, not wanting to waste a 60 mile drive on just sightseeing, we met up at Costco. 🙂 We both did a little shopping and we got our tires rotated and THEN we decided to check out the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum.
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Now, I confess that I’ve never particularly enamored with LBJ. But I did find this museum full of memories of my teenage years, so all in all it was pretty interesting. And, it was Free. I love Free.
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There were many interesting displays and places to explore
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but we couldn’t actually check out the Library –
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since it isn’t open on Saturday. It sure did look impressive (though I think I’d have had trouble finding any “light reading”)!
Here’s a view of Austin –
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and a view of the guys waiting for Jo and I…..
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🙂 We finished up the day with a late (great) lunch at Eastside Cafe (as much as I get frustrated with my “smart phone” I LOVE that I can find these fun places to eat when we’re out and about!).
So that was Austin. To say we scratched the surface is an understatement – but at least we can say we were there.
Now let’s see….what else did we do…?
Well, we met up with 3 SOWER couples in San Marcos for lunch one day.
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Can’t say we saw a lot of San Marcos, but it was fun to get together with friends at another fun spot (thank-you Yelp!)
And that, with the exception of a wonderful final (for this year anyway) trip to Waco to see Lara and friends and collect hugs(where Gary did not do ANY major projects and we enjoyed a lovely evening sitting around that firepit!) was about the extent of our “places” this month. All good. All very good.
Which brings me to the “things” –
And it’s really only one thing.
Every time we drove into Giddings we saw this sign-
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Really?

OK – enough rambling for tonight. Tomorrow we’ll be getting settled by the bay :), but even tonight, here in the Walmart parking lot, we were blessed with a beautiful reminder of our creative God.
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Sweet Dreams!

Mondays are for Memories – January 2010

Since so many of our family and friends are posting snow pictures, I checked back in the archive to January 2010 when we were working at Cherry Valley School in Beaumont, California. We might not have had a ton of snow at our location, but it wasn’t far away!

January 31, 2010 – The Round About Way

Since this was our last weekend in the “Pass” (as this area is known), we figured we’d better take the advantage of a beautiful day on Saturday to take a drive to some of the nearby spots we’d been wanting to check out. Big Bear Lake and ski areas were only about 45 miles away according to our GPS, but of course we wanted to stay away from major interstates and congested areas. “Let’s go up the back way, through Oak Glen (a quaint town of orchards and all things apple only 15 miles or so up the road), maybe check out a couple of geocaches, and then make our way over to Big Bear Lake.” Sounded like a plan, so I grabbed the camera, a couple of bottles of water and some snacks, and off we went!
First Stop – Oak Glen.
OK, so we didn’t actually stop (it’s not exactly prime apple harvest time), but the views were impressive as we were heading out of town –
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And we really enjoyed the signage!
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Trust me, they really know how to do “curvy” here in California!
Oh – and I wish I knew exactly what mountain that is in the distance. It was in my viewfinder for most of the day, but the best I can do is “San Bernardino Mountain”. And it’s a guess, folks. Just a guess.
But I digress with my lack of geography knowledge…..
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See, there it is again!
Since we were headed to Big Bear we knew we would be coming into some snow. Remember last week when we had 2-4 inches of the stuff? Well, the mountains near here got 2-4 feet. Or so it seemed by the look of this car coming toward us on the highway –
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Uh, sweetie – the snow was LAST WEEK, and maybe you could have cleaned a little more off the driver’s side??????
But for us, the roads were clear.
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And even though the plowed piles got higher and higher, the drive was lovely!
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We did take a little detour to do a geocache, and while Gary was walking around with his trusty GPS
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I was busy clicking away at the beautiful snow covered landscape.
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(I think this cactus was a little concerned about the blanket of snow….)
Finding the cache with all the snow presented a little bit of a challenge (and we hadn’t done much geocaching lately, so we were a little out of practice), but I finally noticed a straight edged thing under a root.
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I made Gary do the groping (I’m not really fond of sticking my hand into dark “what just might be there” spaces, and we were rewarded with our first “find” in several months.
There were several other mountain roads that Gary had hoped to explore, but they were all closed. Such a disappointment for a guy who was really hoping for some dirt road adventures.
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Anyway….on to Big Bear Lake.
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All along the way we saw cars pulled over and folks getting ready to find a sledding hill or strapping on their cross-country skis or just plain having a snowball fight. Those are some renegade snowballs on the lake ice!
And there certainly was snow enough for everyone.
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Maybe they are waiting for spring?
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We literally crawled through the town Big Bear Lake – not only was last week’s snow the first BIG snow in a couple of years, but this was the first weekend day that the roads were open. It took us 2 ½ hours to drive the 10 miles along the south side of the lake. (We stopped for lunch thinking that maybe we could “wait out” the traffic. Not only was the lunch the slowest meal we’ve had in a loooonnnng time (2 hrs. for a burger and a bowl of chili), but the traffic was still waiting for us when we were (finally) done.) I have to tell you, 4 ½ hours of Big Bear Lake is just a little bit too much!
Not wanting to go back the same way we came, Gary chose to head north, pick up a cut-off road that went over to Yucca Valley, and return from the East. It was a great plan, except we never found the short cut road. Apparently the plows had never found it either. The road we thought was “it” turned out to be a little connector road that took us back to Baldwin Lake and was only about a ½ mile long.
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But it did (almost) give him his dirt (mud) road fix.
Almost.
Enough chatter – here, in the order of their appearance, is the rest of drive home.
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Baldwin Lake
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Down the other side of the mountain until we ended up in the “high desert”.
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We were losing daylight fast –
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Caught the sunset going through Yucca Valley
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(sorry for the blurry sunset. It’s very tricky taking sunset shots from a moving truck!)
That trip home was definitely the “long way home”!
Here’s our day’s journey on the map –
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(You can see our missing”shortcut” home – it goes east above Big Bear and heads over to Pioneertown and Yucca Valley. It would have been sweet if it had been open!)
Zoomed out a bit –
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And here’s a zoom in –
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Yeah, there were a lot of those curves!
You know, not everyone can take what should be a 100 round trip drive and turn it into a good 200 miles. And even with the crawl through Bear Lake and the incredibly slow lunch service, it was indeed a Very Good 200 miles!

Here’s a link to the original post – The Round About Way

Now where were we?

Right – just leaving the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and heading to Page, AZ for our next National Park visit.
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And what a beautiful drive it was!! Most of it was a very scenic drive along the Vermillion Cliffs,
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across the Colorado River
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up a couple of ‘hills’
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and then down into Page, AZ.
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Page is a fairly new city, having been founded and then developed only during the building of the Glen Canyon Dam.
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And of course, the dam created Lake Powell, which is a huge recreation (boating, camping, hiking, etc.) area.
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Now we didn’t take in ALL there was to do the area, but we gave it our best (scratching the surface style) shot!
There was the Dam Tour –
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which was made all the more interesting by our tour guide, who was a Page ‘native’ and had lots of stories from ‘back in the day’. Like when he and his buddies would cut school and explore the inner tunnels of the dam, before security shut that down. (He was also a retired policeman, so that added a bit of interest too!)
We took in one fairly long hike to find some “slot canyons”.
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It was not only a beautiful drive to GET to the hike –
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(more of those beautiful Vermillion Cliffs)
but since the hike was through a “wash’, there wasn’t much of an elevation change to deal with (our nemesis!).
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Although the slot canyons at the end of our Wire Pass hike were probably not as impressive as perhaps the more well known Antelope Canyon (Wire Pass – Free. Antelope – almost $100 for the two of us), we certainly were impressed!
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We absolutely love the sculpture of these rock walls

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A wonderful reminder of the creative beauty of our God! (And the power of moving water!!!)
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We checked out a bit of lake shore camping,
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(maybe next time!)
enjoyed another short hike
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and just generally enjoyed the beauty of the day.
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As the sun was beginning to sink and hoping to catch the sunset, we checked out another highly recommended (and short) hike – Horseshoe Bend.
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We were not alone in our thought process!
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(I confess – this picture really cracks me up!! And – they are ALL too close to the edge!!!)
I guess I’ve seen more beautiful sunsets –
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but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen more people hoping it would be (more beautiful)!
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So that about wraps up our time at the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. There was so much to see and do here (not to mention that it might have been nice just to sit on the beach and stare at that lake) that it might warrant a trip back! But for now – it was pack ‘er up and move on down the road.  Still to come – Four Corners, Mesa Verde, Hovenweep, and the Petrified Forest.

Next time, okay?

As always, thanks for stopping by. And thanks for your patience as I work on getting this ol’ blog up-to-date between lovin’ on these cutie pies!
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I’m sure you can understand my distractions!

Steph

Oh – and if you’d like to see some additional photos from our time in and around Page, Arizona, you can check them out HERE!

Getting there

If you’ve visited here before, you know I take an inordinate amount of “Road Ahead” pictures. I take them when we’re driving in the truck, and I especially take them when we’re in Lizzie (our RV). And heaven forbid we are on NEW (to us) road – man, is that shutter clicking!
Our drive from central California to northern Arizona was no exception. Oh, my – how those “Windshield Shots” added up!
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Sometimes just pointing the camera out the window worked pretty well, too!
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But my favorites are usually just the Road Ahead.
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You know I could go on and on (and on and on), but for now, I think it’s time to move on to just what we were aiming for as we drove from California to Arizona. (But if you’d LIKE to see more “Road ahead” pictures, you can check them out HERE! 🙂
So next up will be the Grand Canyon – North Rim!
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See ya tomorrow! (I hope!)