A Visit to the Terra Port

One of the stops we’d planned on the homeward-bound leg of our adventure was to stop in Jackson Center, Ohio to tour the Airstream factory where our ePod was made and to have some much needed service done.

Airstream has set up a very convenient campground right next to the factory which they call the Terra Port. It’s a unique layout for a campground – 3 circles each with parking for six or so Airstreams with full hook-ups. Some owners park there because they’re stopping by for the factory tour, just visiting, or having their trailer serviced.

If you’re there for service, it’s quite an interesting experience. The day before your service appointment, you arrive at the Terra Port, unhook your trailer, hook-up water and electric, and spend the night as in any campground. Then at seven in the morning you hear a tractor approaching your site, they hook up your house to the tractor, take it away to the repair facility and you’re on your own for the day. If they need more than a day (which they did in our case), they tow your trailer back to your site at quitting time, you spend the night in it, and they come by at seven in the morning and tow it away again.

The one downside is the location of Jackson Center in the middle of cornfields miles from any place worthy of a visit. To compensate, they do provide a very nice waiting area to help you while away the hours. They even allow dogs! Sprocket had a good time with some kids and had a soft couch to curl up on. It’s a fairly good place to get some computer work done except for the TV’s and computer games in the background. They also offer a terrific factory tour (unfortunately they don’t allow cameras).

We had our wheel bearings repacked, brakes adjusted, 2 leaky skylights replaced, vents caulked, some interior trim issues resolved and the compartment over our bed reattached after it broke loose. Found out from our neighbors in the Terra Port that this is a problem with many of the International CCD’s including theirs.

It’s the best repair experience I’ve ever had. The Airstream people are easy to work with, we met some really nice fellow Airstreamers in the Terra Port, and had good breakfasts at the Hobo restaurant next to the factory and a good dinner at The Verandah restaurant with a fellow Terra Porter.

We left Jackson Center this morning and are spending the night in Conneaut, Ohio tonight. We’ll actually be in New York State tomorrow!

The Temple Square

In honor of Josh and Sloan’s semi-annual trip to the Outdoor Retailer’s Show, at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake, we submit this SLC catch-up blog entry from 7/6/08 and Park City from 7/8/08. (By the way, have a great show!)

The map of Salt Lake City is easy to learn. The Temple Square is the epicenter of the city’s grid, and all streets surrounding it begin as 100, North Temple, South Temple, East Temple, West Temple: each block going up to the next hundred, outward. Our campground was at 1400 West North Temple.

So, reversing the process, it’s always easy to find the Temple Square, on which sits the Mormon Chapel, which was the first sanctuary built by the early Mormon settlers, the Tabernacle,

the large lozenge-shaped building with the high, domed roof, home of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and the Mormon Temple, (off limits for visitors) the one with all the spires, which in pictures, lit up at night, always looks gigantic, but in reality, is an average sized cathedral.

We are always interested in the history of places we visit, so with an open mind, we acquiesced to taking a tour suggested by an man of a certain age, dressed in a light summer suit. There seemed to be a lot of these, eager to greet and inquire ‘Where are you from?’ They all reminded me of senior auctioneers I’ve enjoyed over the years.

We were directed to two sweet young girls with serene smiles wearing calf-length black skirts and summer blouses. There were a great number of these pairs. Indeed, two sprang up from a bench outside the ladies room and greeted me with, ‘Welcome to the Ladies room!’

Our first stop was at a monument to seagulls, who, to quote our guides, ‘Our heavenly Father brought to save our early settlers from a plague of crickets. The birds just came, killing them, not even eating them, but ridding the land of their destruction of that first year’s crops.’ Sounds a bit like the providential run of herring in Otsego Lake that sustained the early white settlers there in their first hungry year. Nature is a wonder!

This tour would not be the in-depth history tour we’d come to expect throughout our travels, but rather, very simple spiels these young girls had learned, in sing-song upspeak (each sentence ending with an upward cadence, though to be fair, they didn’t intersperse ‘like’ into every other phrase) National park docents enjoy our questions and usually delight in being able to tell more obscure facts that are rarely called forth. These lovelies knew nothing except the exploits of their prophet and heavenly father. When further questioned, their serene little foreheads puckered prettily for lack of any other information.

When I was 16, I’d worked with a young Mormon who happened to be a missionary, so I got the whole Mormon story. I found it mildly interesting, believing, as I do, that there are many spokes to the wheel of Spirit. Years later, I read the book of Mormon and found that Joseph Smith’s adventures in Upstate NY seemed plausible, because a simple farm boy couldn’t possibly have made up a whopper like the Book of Mormon from his own imagination, Angels and disappearing gold plates notwithstanding.

Then, in my forties, I read two books of local history in Cooperstown and came across an interesting item. Joseph Smith had worked for a time in an Ohio print shop. Later, an unpublished fantasy manuscript dated before Joseph Smith’s revelations, was passed down from someone in the print shop to a relative living in Hartwick Seminary: Yes, the story of the angel Moroni, the gold plates, the whole thing. Hmmm. Then word got out, and two charming missionaries visited this lady, one keeping her chatting while the other roamed the house. She later found that the manuscript had disappeared. Curiouser and curiouser. With this in mind, I bit my tongue a good deal on our tour. When I get back to Cooperstown, I want to look those two histories up. Just can’t help it; I love history!

I can honestly admire the power of imagination’s ability to spawn mighty things. For example, in the Tabernacle every 15 minutes, a sweet young convert from Mongolia mounted the podium in the Tabernacle, where she ripped a piece of paper three times, then dropped a straight pin, a safety pin, and a nail to demonstrate the space’s perfect acoustics. Impressive.

A docent told us that the dome had been made without nails. For moment I pondered the miraculous, until a sensible man among the tourists asked ‘Mortice and tennon? Wooden pegs?’ The woman grudgingly answered, ‘Yes’.

The Latter Day Saints Conference Center certainly is a mighty thing. It’s auditorium can house 21,000 people at a time, and we were told that the open space between the loggias and the organ could accommodate two 747 jets.

Now, I wonder where the spiritual runway is?

Park City and the Olympics

We were drawn to Park City because of it is home to the Sundance Film Festival.

High above Salt Lake City, it was once a mining town, with narrow, steep streets and lovely mountain views. Now, its prosperity comes from skiing and tourism, and judging by the boutiques along the main street, many tourists are affluent film buffs or producers.

We had lunch in the No Name Saloon, which turned out to be the place for town regulars, and reminded us of the Doubleday Café, if it were liberated from baseball and bedecked with eccentric memorabilia, complete with an ancient motorcycle and a battered chair lift, hanging from the brick (yes, brickwork, arched between rusted steel beams) ceiling.

We browsed the shops and found a visitors’ hole-in-the-wall where we got maps to the lifts and nearby winter sports complex, built for the 2002 Olympics. On the drive through mountains and prairie, and new developments of condos with the usual accompanying retail complexes, we saw two distant ski jumps curling up from steep slopes, and then the large sculptural signs for the Olympics.

We went into the visitors’ center, filled with costumes, medals, and some of the giant puppets from the opening ceremonies. A tour was due to start shortly, so we joined it and went up to the bobsled runs, got to learn lots about bobsledding, skeleton, and luge, from two knowledgeable and enthusiastic young women who’d been local high school go-fers during the Olympics. We got to stand in the starting gate of the largest ski jumps, look out at the spectacular mountain view, and then down, down the narrow ramp that would offer the lift of a lifetime and one chance for a medal.

When we returned to the center, we watched people making practice jumps from three lower, year-round jumps, which have white plastic bristles that simulate snow surface, and a large swimming pool at the bottom.

As each skier began the descent, dense air bubbles would froth up from the bottom of the pool to break the surface tension for a safer landing. Coaches in adjacent towers would call out comments and observations to the emerging, ski-attached swimmers. We were told that the water was very cold, but the sun was warm, and none of the jumpers seemed to mind.  Each one wore a helmet and standard ski-boots, which, by the end of the day got completely water-logged. At the far end of the pool, thick padding surrounded several trampolines, where athletes could practice somersaults, twists, and other moves needed for free-style ski jumping. There are only two such facilities in the States. The other is in Lake Placid, NY.

Camps and days are offered to anyone who wants to try jumping, and there’s an Olympic training school here as well, where athletes attend regular school in the summer and then train full-time when the snows begin.

Catch-up Posts

We have made four catch-up posts tonight, so be sure to scroll down! More coming as soon as I can put them together.

Tonight we’re in Deadwood, South Dakota on our way to Mt. Rushmore.

Antelope Island

Catch-up post from July 12.

We decided to go to see the Great Salt Lake on our last day in Salt Lake City, knowing we’d regret it if we didn’t, but not knowing what to expect. Our day’s adventure began at the gate of the causeway that crosses the lake to Antelope Island State Park, where we paid $9.00 for our vehicle entry.

Along this five-mile thread of road over water, we saw the surrounding mountains reflected in shimmering pastels on an Easter-egg blue ‘sea’: not the dark mirror of normal lakes, but something almost iridescent: a surface that made reflected shores appear to float without a solid horizon. Once on the island, we passed a tiny marina of sailboats, and climbed the island’s worn, sculpted hills, covered with buff-colored grass and tufted with gray-green sagebrush and low evergreen
scrub.

We watched a video at the visitors’ center first. It seems silly to sit in a darkened room and watch a screen when a fresh, outdoor experience awaits, but we got a lot of good background information of the island’s geological and natural history. The Great Salt Lake is the last remnant of the prehistoric Lake Bonneville, which covered more than 20,000 square miles during the Ice Age. Beneath this vast lake, the land sank over time, leaving only Antelope Island and smaller Egg Island visible today. Now the lake has shrunk to 75 mi. long and 28 mi. wide. Water flows into it via four rivers and with no outlet, the evaporation leaves high concentrations of minerals (generally 5 times saltier than the ocean).

The island and surrounding lake is home to over 250 species of birds and is a critical link in the Pacific Flyway between North and South America. We saw some of the world’s largest nesting population of California gulls, black-neck stilts, avocets, white pelicans white-faced ibis, and beneath the eaves of the visitors’ center, dozens of barn swallow nests bulging with babies almost ready to fly. These are the same swallows, which fly to Capistrano! We were grateful for their busy parents’ hunting, as the deer flies were persistent and seemed to know that focusing photographers are easy marks.

The island is 28,000 acres, and was rediscovered in 1845 by John C. Fremont and Kit Carson, who observed several pronghorn antelopes and called it Antelope Island. The surrounding lake appears as a dead sea, but it’s home to algae, eye-lash-sized brine shrimp, and the brine flies that feed on them, in turn offering an inexhaustible supply of food for the bird population.

Over at Buffalo Point, we ate delicious bison burgers at the food concession, and then, feeling restored, drove to Bridger Bay, the one accessible ‘beach’ on the island. A white crescent of almost lunar landscape spread before us: sand crusted with salt and odd flat flakes of pale stone. The sun baked down on the shimmering wasteland and as I peered across to the distant waters’ edge to where people were clustered in small groups, I half expected to see Salvadore Dali’s melting watches draped on driftwood, so surreal was the expanse. Only, there was no driftwood: only flakes of stone and salt.

This was certainly not another day at the beach! As we finally reached the water, billions of almost invisible brine flies exploded out in vast brown pressure waves from our footsteps, leaving their feast of dead brine shrimp whose carcasses formed a shredded carpet of amber-brown sludge in the gray-white shallows. Actually, there were only shallows. Far out into the water people were still only ankle deep and this obviously wasn’t the place where you could sit, buoyed lounge-chair fashion by the dense minerals of the water, as seen in brochures.

We soon left in search of other things promised in the video, and were encouraged when we saw a pronghorn cross the road. We hoped maybe we’d see a bison, too. When bison were threatened with extinction, a small herd of them were brought to the island for refuge. We came on a large herd, spending the afternoon at their favorite feeding and dusting ground in a salt marsh, between the road, and another vast salt beach. With no natural predators, they have thrived and multiplied and every October, there’s a round-up, where many are taken to populate other protected areas, ranches and zoos. Big horn sheep have also been brought here, and there are coyotes and mule deer as well.

At the end of the road on the eastern side of the island, eleven miles south of the visitors’ center, we explored the Fielding Garr Ranch. Built in 1848, it represents 135 years of western ranching history, but as we wandered through the house and outbuildings, I had an odd sense of homecoming, to my New England childhood, when my father had taken me on visits to many of his farmer friends. The sparse furnishings, the tree-shaded grounds, the simplicity and peace were so familiar and suddenly so richly remembered.

The best part of this exhibit, was that it was just there, as if its inhabitants had left for the weekend. There were pens of chickens, and a paddock of horses, and we’d seen a man driving a chuck wagon of tourists when we first arrived, but soon we were alone with the past. A man sat working at a computer in a small workshop attached to a barn, but he ignored us. Nothing was under or behind glass. Tools and household items simply lay where they’d been left. It didn’t appear as if anyone had taken advantage of this trust, and it was fun to feel like we were discovering an abandoned settlement. They even had a very early Airstream!

On our way back to the causeway, we photographed the bison herd again. The late afternoon sun now warmed their rich brown color as they strode through the cool gray-green of the sage brush. What a satisfying day!

San Francisco Tour and SFMoMA

Catch-up post from June 12.

Arriving in San Francisco via the ferry is ideal. The hills, encrusted with tall buildings as well as lower-storied neighborhoods excite us, and the welcoming portal is the Ferry Building. The harbor side houses restaurants, coffee shops, wine bar, ethnic eateries, bookstore, and a cookware store.

Passing through to the street side, you’ll discover a long, high-ceilinged promenade in three sections.

The middle section is brightened by skylights, which spill light over the colorful, trendy stores/stalls, featuring such things as fine chocolates, fungi, high-end gardener’s toys, and a caviar bar along the walls by the Embarcadero. Opposite these, organic markets, a culinary antiques shop, cheese boutiques, and deli-markets, tempt tourists and commuters, and attractive, skylit young San Franciscans sip wine at an interior ‘side-walk’ café. There’s so much material here for New Yorker cartoons, but I don’t think there is an equivalent magazine in San Francisco. This was a lovely shining day for riding atop an open-air double-decker tour bus: something we’d never done before.

We got off in front of SFMoMA with no particular expectations of a specific exhibit and thoroughly enjoyed the current exhibition of artists such as Matisse, Arp, Giacometti, Pollack, Picasso, Lichtenstein, Rauchenberg, Miro, Magritte, O’Keeffe, DuChamp, etc. Many works were old friends we’d seen elsewhere; some, like the drawings of Henry Moore, we’d never seen, ever. Large white rooms: silent, reverent spaces attended by small watchful guards, contributed to the sense of being in a holy of holies. A museum is the point of arrival for the artists. Their works provide a point of departure for the rest of us: into their particular vision of the world, visions long ahead of their time and perhaps even ours.

Later, we strolled through the park by the Mosconi, center where red-clad tables loaded with giant woks were being set up for a private party that evening for Apple, after its kick-off event of introducing the new iPhone. Dozens of planters, holding boxwood hedges were brought in to create boundaries to keep the riff-raff out, so we wandered over to the new Contemporary Jewish Museum, designed by Daniel Liebeskind, which artfully uses the last remaining wall of the old San Francisco Power Station (from the 1906 earthquake) and then incorporates a blue-steel ‘chai’ form that breaks out of traditional rectilinear architectural form and creates wonderful exhibit space within.

We would have ‘done the whole museum, rather than just the gift shop, but our 48 hr. bus ticket hadn’t mentioned that bus pick-ups stopped at 5:30, so we hustled on to the next destination.

Just down from the open court that surrounds the CJM, we found the little yellow Beard Papa shop, which specializes in cream puffs: light and crisp and filled just seconds before purchase with chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry custard. Noah had brought some home, and told us where to find them. Art and culture is fine, but San Francisco food-ops should not be overlooked.

City Hall and the Asian Museum

Catch-up post from June 19.

We’d seen the Civic Center from our open-air tour bus, and now we headed over from the Muni bus to see the relocated Asian Museum. On our way, we speculated out loud about whether the Gyro King would be a good stop for lunch. A delightful lady in front of us turned around and told us how very wonderful it was, so we popped in and in FindingOurWay fashion, we weren’t disappointed. Great chicken gyros!

We were disappointed in the Asian Museum, however. We’d seen it long ago in Golden Gate Park, and it had been a somber, old-fashioned museum. In its new location, in one of the many classical, pillared granite and marble buildings on the Civic Center Square, it is much the same. The graphics, the two-storey entry with banners and glass courtyard were promising, and the audio tours were free: a nice touch. The actual exhibits were still rather underlit, the walls still somber, and the displays still much the same. The move was either limited by funding or by a very staid board of trustees who didn’t like change. Among the numerous Asian deities, there were some exceptional artifacts, but we grew very weary, not from over-, but rather, under-stimulation. Excitement never overcame our tired feet, and we stepped out into the square with relief.

The square, itself, has also undergone change. City Hall has been shored up somehow, and elevated onto a system of rollers and bearings, which should protect it from seismic events, and the long reflecting pools that once dominated the center of the park are now beautiful colonnades of polled sycamores, providing pools of shade and flickering rows and patterns of trunks to the passer-by.

We’d chosen a week of great legal change for many people, and City Hall was the epicenter, where marriage licenses would now be issued to loving couples: whatever their gender preference. The very first of these new marriages had just happened on the weekend, for two female gay rights activists, both in their eighties, who had lived in a committed relationship for many decades.

Having been personally blessed with friends in such relationships, whose love and sense of family has supported our own, we just had to go there and soak up some of the good energy. After having our bags carefully examined, (sigh) the great feeling hit me as we entered the echoing halls. Tears welled up, for I knew that some gentle and historic shift had happened here. A guide at the marriage information desk at the foot of a massive column agreed with me. She said she’d happily cried through the whole first hour of her shift after the licensing had begun. She said that things had calmed down a bit, but that Friday and the weekend would be packed. We arrived at the rotunda just in time to see a happy couple stride down those beautiful steps and embrace for their friend’s cameras.

We wandered into the South Light Gallery to see some large wooden architectural models, including a cutaway of the rotunda, complete with exquisite, laser-cut ornamentation. Different woods had been used to create better contrast and detail and it was a true masterpiece. I kept dashing from the model to actual rotunda to compare and understand better what I was seeing. The North Light Gallery, was hung with large photos of ordinary people and their quotes about the rights and potential of all humanity. Beneath these, rows of tables had been set up and decorated, to smoothly process all the documentation for those seeking marriage licenses.

Along with the usual day-to-day feelings that brush against the walls of a city hall, joy was abundant here, from polished marble floors to the fine, coffered dome above.

As we descended the steps outside, a smiling blond lady, waving fistfuls of daisies, asked two men ahead of us if they’d just been married. They said, shyly, ‘No’ but they’d just got their license. She pressed flowers on them and then to us and we laughed and hugged and celebrated the happiness and the feeling of heart on this great San Francisco day.

Chihuly II and the Women Impressionists

A catch-up post from June 21.

We’d had a delightful conversation with a guard at the Chilhuly show, who generously got us some tickets on his break for seeing the show again and also seeing the opening day of the Women Impressionists, over at the Legion of Honor. We’d planned to leave the day before, but in FindingOurWay style, we happily changed our plans.

There were fewer ferries on Saturday and a free concert at Pier 33 had drawn hundreds of extra passengers, but we managed to get the 9:40, which would get us to our 11:00 ticket slot at the De Young.

We’d already seen the movie, so now we had an enhanced appreciation of the show, and noticed so many things we’d missed the first time. We also got to re-do some photos that hadn’t been so successful.

I got a chance to see the Ruth Asawa wire sculptures, which had fascinated me two years ago, as we waited for the elevator to the tower. Bruce was eager to use his new lens to shoot the 360º view of San Francisco provided by the large glass observation deck at the top.

Afterward, we took the MUNI bus over to the Legion of Honor, just in time for our 2:00 tickets to the Women Impressionists.

The four women featured were: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès, and Marie Bracquemond. What an impressive gathering of paintings, and works on paper! There are so many details missed in art books: details that can only really be seen in the actual painting on the wall: the small dabs of paint that the viewer’s eye magically sees as a button, a flower, or a scrap of lace. We learned so much about seeing from these four amazing women. Two did not live anywhere near as long as they should have, and one didn’t paint for the last thirty years of her life because her husband disapproved of impressionism. So much more could have come to this world, otherwise. (Unfortunately, no photography of the show was allowed, but outside there was an other large Chihuly in the Courtyard being contemplated by “The Thinker”.

It made me think of all the great art, discovery, thought, and invention that goes unrealized because of oppression and injustice. Humanity limits and deprives itself of such treasure and goodness when it limits any peoples, anywhere. The show delighted us, and also made us sad and thoughtful. These women were at least recognized by their peers in their time, but are not as widely known or appreciated as masters of painting, breaking new ground in the history of art.

Chilhuly at the De Young

A catch-up post from June 18.

We’d seen the Dale Chihuly glass ceiling garden at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, and just missed his book-signing appearance at his gallery there, so we were delighted to hear that his show at the De Young in San Francisco had just opened.

Our tickets were timed, so we went straight in. I wish now that we’d seen the movie offered before getting our tickets. It documented a week’s symposium at the hotshop of the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington. Each day, Chihuly, or rather, Team Chihuly along with invited glass-masters of the world, created masterpieces beneath an upper gallery of fascinated spectators.

A roar of applause would erupt each time a piece was finally severed from the gaffer’s pipe and placed into the fire-suited arms of a bearer who’d whisk it off into a kiln for slow-cooling like a trusted midwife.
Scorched wooden smoothing paddles, hot-tables spread with gold leaf or delicate glass threads, waiting to adhere to the soft globe of glass, emerging from roaring glory holes of intense heat, optic molds for shaping ridges in taffy-like, red-hot glass, which would later spin out into scallops, veins, and stems of enormous flowers: all these elements were kept in play by skilled, sweating muscles of glass masters. They followed the directions and sketched concepts that Chihuly would dash out on large paper, with fistfuls of pencils, or thick charcoal sticks, but their artistry would always take center stage in this amazing co-creation.

Dale Chihuly would have been one of the great masters in glass, but his destiny was to be an artist who could evoke the magnificence of a team of masters, and bring forth objects and installations beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. First, he lost an eye, which made the missing depth perception in a hotshop very dangerous. Then he injured his shoulder and was finished as a glass-blower, but certainly not as a leader in the art of glass.

His show is a riot of color and light, and impossibly large forms that don’t mimic nature but express its energy. The De Young has mounted this show with all the work exposed. Nothing is behind glass; only discreet markers on the floor and vigilant guards keep these enormous pieces from harm. One guard told me that the Monet exhibit was worse, because of the extreme value of the pieces, but this show, especially on our second visit on the weekend had to be a challenge. Photography was allowed, but not flash, and many of us had cameras that would default to flash every time we turned them off to save the battery. Many of us had large, swaying, camera bags, and some people had hyper little kids who stamped around energetically. The gaurds would tactfully tail them and were surprisingly understanding about the unintended flashes.

Like exotic creatures from other worlds, pink and white neon-filled glass drool-forms reflected deeply in their black glass display.

Giant glass vases with outlandish flowers reached toward the spotlights near the black ceiling.

A brown trellis was of parasol-sized ‘flowers’, all in exuberant sun colors lifted our hearts, like California poppies.

A long, low platform covered with ‘tabac’ colored ‘baskets’ and bowls was flanked by shelves of Ancient Indian baskets, which had inspired the glass ‘baskets’ mixed among them. The opposite wall displayed dozens of Pendelton blankets, which inspired some to the tiny details in the baskets and in cylindrical vases further into the show.

Another room billowed with large (>3’) bowl/flowers on tall iron stands. Each had a bead of contrasting color along its edge, and many were arranged to play against the next piece. The undersides of these glowed with the layers of color within.

One room had huge birch logs, from which ‘grew’ shoots of deep lavender glass, over a layer of white case glass deep within, inspired by the glassworks of Finland. The sheer size and number of these created a tranquil ‘forest’ and their uniformity of color calmed the eye for the next room’s riotous spectrum.

On a sea of black glass lay two old wooden boats: one filled with gargantuan glass floats, inspired by Chihuly’s child-hood love of old glass marbles, and his discovery of Japanese fishing floats along the Northwest coast, and the other overflowing with flowers, vines, pods, tendrils, dragon’s tongues and other serpentine forms which reflected in the still, black ‘water’ below.

The next room held four of his famous hanging ‘chandeliers’, consisting of hundreds of pod-vine-like forms that snaked out from their dense, grape-like clusters to catch the light and cast fantastic shadows.

The next room, painted white, was lined with benches along the wall, which were filled with stunned visitors waiting for friends, or looking up at the glass ceiling above, which supported hundreds of flowers, Persian pod-shapes, shells, stars, putti (wingless cherub-forms) and other smaller delights. It reminded me of the bottom of a toy box belonging to celestial beings. On first visit, I didn’t even try to shoot the ceiling, but shot the ripples of colored light that spilled down the white walls.

The last room was truly a grand finale: a garden of unearthly delights, using all the forms previously seen, rising again from the mirror of black glass, form playing against form, color vying with color, textures inviting touch, and watchful guards forbidding it. I think they were right to allow photography, as it kept hands busy and the photos, long afterward, will help recall the exquisite experience. No, it wasn’t all just a dream.

Out of Yellowstone

Yellowstone National Park is a fantastic place, but it’s a cell phone/internet black hole. No service anywhere, so you have not been hearing from us. Tonight we’re in Cody, Wyoming, which does have internet, and we’ll be uploading a couple of catch-up posts we’ve had ready for awhile. We’ll be posting Jackson Hole and Yellowstone shortly.

We’ll be shooting for Devil’s Tower National Monument tomorrow.