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I left Bethesda on June 30 at around 10am, and headed to Dayton, OH. It was hot, high 80s, not too bad for having the top down. I decided to go through West Virginia for a change, and so that I wouldn't have to go to Breezewood again. I've been to Breezewood and the PA turnpike way too many times!
I reserved a room at a hotel in Dayton near the old neighborhood where we lived way back in the late 1950s. I think we lived there from around 1957 to 1961, when we moved to Long Island. We lived in an old style suburban shack on 201 Orinoco St, and I wanted to see it. It's in the Page Manor neighborhood. So I drove by and took some photos. This first one is of our house.
Orinoco St was a very nice street for little kids, it was a dead end with a baseball field past the trees at the end of the block.
The next day, July 1, I drove to Urbana, IL, through Indiana. I tried with all my might to find something about Indiana that I liked, but alas I failed, there wasn't much take pictures of, and I didn't stop. I particularly didn't like Indianapolis, the freeways were a mess, and the place looked pretty run down. Urbana is one of the truly great midwestern college towns, I had lunch with a friend but didn't stay very long. Headed to IL to pick up Jerry Blazey, and had a delicious dinner at their house (brats and burgers!!!).
We left Illinois at around 9:30am and headed west, deciding to just stay on the interstate to get as far as we could. We ended up in Grand Island, Nebraska:
Grand Island is pretty interesting. We stayed at a Motel 6 in a truck stop right by the interstate, and it was jam packed with rigs. And a giant store where truckers could by almost anything, a restaurant, showers, etc. We went to dinner downtown Grant Island, which has some hints of prosperity (there's ag industry all around there) but also some decay. Like the railroad tracks east-west through town divided the place with hispanics to the north. Anyway we ate at a brew pub, and went for a walk and found this bar (photo of Jerry in front):
If you've never read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot, I invite you to do so, it's a wonderful poem. Lyrics can be found here. Note that the poem title is "...Prufrock" but the bar is "...Prufrocks". We asked the bartender about the origin of the name but he had no idea. Probably never heard of the poem.
We left Grand Island sunday morning at around 8am and headed to Alliance, NE. It was really foggy, and the temp was 70F which was amazing. Here's the route we took:
By the time we got to Alliance, passing a time zone, it was around 94F!
On the drive we went through a host of tiny towns, population around 100 to 400, and a couple of small towns with population around 1 or 2 thousand. And we passed a lot of things that were closed, decaying, and will never see the light of day. For instance:
And these small towns had "downtowns" that had also seen better days:
Of course being sunday, maybe you'd expect to not see so much activity, but it really seemed dead - store fronts closed, dusty, etc. Life there seems to be slowly drying up.
The drive took us through the "Nebraska Sand Hills", which were gorgeous, but not particularly amenable for things to grow as there are very few trees.
But Alliance is a sizeable town, maybe 14,000 people, and it has a movie theatre that is on the national register.
This photo probably needs no words:
So what we are dealing with here is a population of people living far from any urban area, they've been there for decades and decades, their way of life is dropping out from under them and there doesn't seem to be anything anyone does anything about. They are getting left behind. Maybe many of them aren't very well education, maybe they are making things worse for themselves, but I don't think it's simply because they are stupid and nasty. I think it's much more complicated.
Anyway...we then headed north of Alliance for around 3 miles to one of the most amazing things: Carhenge! What we are talking about here is quintessential "only in America":
Here's a plaque there that describes "why carhenge":
It's so campy and weird that it's entirely wonderful. It's right off the road, in a field, surrounded by farming.
Here's a movie of it:
Leaving Carhenge, we headed to Boulder via Cheyenne, and on the way went through some pretty hot and dry country. And ran into some tremendous rain storms along the way. Spectacularly dynamic!
From Boulder we went through Nederland, CO, on to Frisco where we met up with a friend who has a townhouse there. The downtown part was closed off for the 4th, so we grabbed some lunch and headed to Leadville. This town has a very interesting history. By around 1890 it was the 2nd most populous city in Colorado, with lead and silver being the "cash crop". But in 1893 Congress passed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which caused the price of silver to crash. The town was famous for its lawlessness, but it had an opera house! In fact, in 1882 Oscar Wilde visited Leadville on his tour of the US, if you can imagine that. This is where he had the famous quote about art and culture after visiting a local saloon:
...where I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice – 'Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.'It has a downtown, which is not too dolled up compared to all the rest of the Colorado mountain towns.
The town is around 10,000 ft up, has a population of around 2700, and has a superfund site just east of town.
All in all, it's a beautiful place, and is one of the last Colorado towns that has any authentic feel to it left, the rest being the playground to the wealthy. Here's a shot of the view heading south.
From Leadville we headed to Crested Butte, through very beautiful country.
The highlight was going up over the Cottonwood Pass, 12,100 ft. It might be the highest road in the lower 48!
It was cold up there, but so beautiful!
We hiked up to the top of the hill above, and I made it but hiking at 12,000 ft isn't easy! But it was beautiful up there.
The rest of the drive to Crested Butte was through country like this:
Very lush country with lots of ranches, some quite prosperous, with the occasional large mansion:
and the occasional odd abandoned place, maybe an old ranch or an old trailer that once upon a time someone thought would be a good idea to park it in the middle of nowhere:
Crested Butte on the 4th of July was pretty hectic. Lots of people, no fireworks but lots of parties. We had lunch with a friend (former student) and headed out the next morning early.
The road from Crested Butte to Moab goes through a town called Gunnison, which is maybe 20 miles south. Then you head west on route 50, through Montrose, CO. But there's construction on that road, and it's only passable between 12:30 and 1:30pm, so we decided to take Colorado 12 out of Crested Butte. It was a long day's drive, but it was stunning.
CO 12 is not paved all the way. Maybe about half of it is, but the rest is hard pack dirt. Not too many stones. But it's also the kind of dirt that is close to clay maybe, and gets pretty slippery when wet. And given that there were rain storms almost every afternoon, we left Crested Butte early. It was a wonderful bit of luck, because that road is awesome! There's almost no one on it, and it goes through some beautiful country.
And, best of all, past some amazing Aspen groves with huge trees, taller than I've ever seen.
From route 12 the scenery changed quite a bit, still through beautiful country.
You can see in the photo top right just above that there was a lot of weather around there, and we were in quite a few rainstorms, but nothing serious.
We stopped in Delta, CO for lunch, and it was pretty good. This is a pleasant but pretty sleepy town.
But they did have this lot with some pretty dusty old cars!
From Delta we took route 50 almost up to I70, but then turned south on 141 towards Moab, going through some beautiful country.
Then it started to rain, pouring for quite a long time.
Eventually the rain stopped and the countryside started looking more and more primitive, dry, desolate, like what you would expect in eastern Utah. Like this:
We got to our Airbnb and headed to Arches national park. They require a reservation if you go between 8am and 5pm, so we waited till 5 and headed in.
Arches National Park is one of the most amazing places. It is ridiculously beautiful.
On entering, you pass by things like this:
This one is called "Balanced Rock" for obvious reasons. It's 128 ft tall, and has been around for millions of years, maybe as many as 65 million.
We went to the last trailhead in the park, and walked about 1.5 miles round trip to see Landscape Arch, which is the largest arch in the park, over 300 feet long. Some pieces fell off in the 1990s, so you can no longer walk under it, but you can walk to it and take lots of photos!
We drove around a bit more to see views without hiking, stopping to walk a short distance to "Double Arch". It was full of people, under it, and it was stunning. That there were 2 arches is pretty unusual, and probably due to some kind of erosion and not random.
Here are 2 photos at sunset, one doctored so you can see what the light does.
We were pretty tired and found a decent Mexican restaurant in downtown Moab, which is not such a bad town. It's a bit touristy but not all dolled up like the Colorado towns we saw, and the people were just a bit more "authentic".
We got up early and left for Canyonlands National Park at around 7am just to make sure that we wouldn't get caught without a reservation after 8am. The park is only around 35 minutes from Moab:
The park is up on a plateau, around 6000 ft, and has 3 levels: plateau or mesa; a sandstone "bench" which is about 1000 ft down; and the rivers, which are another 1000 ft below the bench. The rock deposits date back almost 300 million years, and is part of the Colorado Plateau. Around 20 million years ago that plateau started uplifting, around the time the Rocky Mountains were formed, all from plate tectonics. The canyons were formed by the Green and the Colorado rivers.
There are 4 basic areas of the park, the one we chose to explore is called "Island in the Sky", and is the section north of the junction of the Green and Colorado rivers:
This place is amazing. Here are some shots taken early in the day, like at around 8am, the light and shadows are beautiful.
Here's a nice blub about the canyons and what the various layers are made of:
The first place we stopped for a hike is called "Mesa Arch". It's about a 1-2 mile hike to the arch, and it was getting pretty hot but not too bad. The trick is to bring about 1 bottle of water per mile of hiking when it's really hot. We were lucky, it wasn't too hot and we had plenty of water. Here are some shots through the arch. It was still pretty early, like around 9, which is why the colors are a bit red from the sun rising.
We visited a very unusual part of the park called "Upheaval Dome". The dome is actually a circular indentation with rock pushed up in the inside, and there's some controversy as to what caused this as it's very different from any other part of the park. The indentation is around 3 miles across
Nowadays, the most likely cause is from a meteor about 1/3rd of a mile across that hit around 60 million years ago. That would be near the time when the giant Chicxulub crater was formed by an asteroid that was over 6 miles in diameter. This is the asteroid that is credited with wiping out the dinosaurs 65 millions years ago. Here's a picture taken from the space station:
We drove to the southern part of Island in the Sky to see "Grand View", where you can see clearly what the rivers and weather have carved out.
In this photo, you can see the road that snakes around the shelf. We were told that that road goes around the entire plateau for 100 miles, and takes 4 days to travel as it is not paved and you have to go slow. Sounds like fun to me!
It's magnificent. In the last photo just above, you can see structures that look like towers, and some of them are as high as 300 ft!
To see it better, check out this movie. You can see the vastness of the canyons carved out by the rivers, and that they must have been quite bigger in the distant past to do such carving. It's really a tribute to how stable things are on earth over millions of years.
We were in Canyonlands from around 8am to around 1pm, then it started getting hot, and there were storms heading our way from the south.
So we headed back to Moab, having hiked around 6 miles in all.
After a short rest in Moab, we headed back up to Arches at around 6pm after the reservation period ended at 5pm and sailed through on the way to hike up to "Delicate Arch". The trail is around 3 miles round trip, climbing almost 500 ft from the parking lot. So the hike there is strenuous, but the hike back is pretty easy.
The sunset was pretty spectacular!
We left Moab in the morning and saw these two swallowtails having a conversation on the driveway,
and headed for Ely, Nevada. Not much of a choice of a path there so we just went up to I70 and wound our way through.
We passed the Green River, which merges into the Colorado south of Canyonlands
Just a few miles west of Green River, UT, we came upon this amazing thing called the San Rafael Reef
which is a 75 mile long sandstone barrier at the edge of nowhere. To quote the sign there:
For centuries only the most intrepid travelers found their way through its narrow slot canyons and into the forbidding landscape of the San Rafael Swell. The early Spanish explorers detoured 20 miles north to avoid this wall.A 1 lane 2 way road was built in the late 50s, and the 2-lane interstate in 1970, snaking through canyons that originally were no more than a few feet wide and 100s of feet deep.
From there we snaked along I70, passing scenes like this:
It was pretty desolate, and we saw this abandoned trailer. Pretty strange, the middle of nowhere. Someone sometime probably thought it was a good idea to put the trailer in the middle of nowhere:
We took US 50 at Salinas, and then I15 at Scipio going south to pick up US 50 again and into Delta, UT where we had lunch at "Mom's Cafe". This place was a throwback to the 1960s, it probably hasn't changed since then. The waitresses were older than we were, probably had been there for their whole life, and quite nice. They tried unsuccessfully to get us to eat some of their home made desserts.
At this point we are on the eastern side of the Great Basin, which takes you all the way through western Utah and Nevada to the west side, which abuts the Sierra Nevada. The following comes from the University of Nevada geology web site.
Mountain ranges in Nevada, commonly about 10 miles wide and rarely longer than 80 miles, are separated by valleys. The geologic structure that controls this basin-and-range topography is dominated by faults. Nearly every mountain range is bounded on at least one side by a fault that has been active, with large earthquakes, during the last 1.6 million years. For the last several million years, these faults have raised and occasionally tilted the mountains and lowered the basins. Over the years, these basins have filled with sediments that are derived from erosion of the mountains and that are locally tens of thousands of feet thick.
This describes the Great Basin well, which you can see in the following 2 photos, one is just a close up of the other.
This next picture is of Sevier Lake, just west of Delta. This lake is almost always dry due to diverting the source of the lake for irrigation. It generates a lot of dust storms, is 2-3x saltier than the ocean. It was pretty hot out, upper 90s, and that generated some really beautiful mirages.
We passed a lot of dust devils, a very localized whirlwind caused by a localized hot spot that causes hot air to rise and that causes rotation, but the rotation is not due to the Coriolis effect!
Here we passed a moderate wind farm with about 60 turbines. The blades were probably 100 ft long, generating 1-2 MWatts of power, which means the entire farm generates close to 100 MWatts, enough to power 100,000 homes.
down incredibly long and straight roads that span from mountain top to mountain top, anywhere between 5 and 25 miles
Just outside Ely, Nevada, we stopped at the "Ward Charcoal Ovens State Park" to check out the ovens:
These ovens were built in the 1870s and operated for only 3 years, 1876 to 1879 when silver and gold mining was big in this part of the world. It was used to produce charcoal from burning wood, and the charcoal was used to smelt the ore (smelting applies heat to separate the various materials in the ore, and the charcoal provides carbon to react with the oxygen binding to the metal to remove it). It takes 30-50 bushels (1 bushel is 8 gallons, so this is 240-400 gallons) of charcoal to reduce one ton of ore. The following was displayed in the park, which was totally empty, no one for miles and miles around.
Just for fun....
We stayed in Ely, Nevada, for the night, at the Hotel Nevada.
This hotel was built in 1929, and was the largest building in Nevada when it was built. There is a "walk of stars" out front, people like Ingrid Bergman and Wayne Newton, and even Pat Nixon, wife of the president, who was born there.
The town is having a hard time, but showing signs of life. Although probably it's still going downhill, just not as fast as it was last year which when it was just beginning to recover from covid. Lots of small stores and shops have closed.
I couldn't figure out what this place was about...
It turns out that Ely is in one of the counties in Nevada where prostitution is legal, and there are 3 brothels that you can find advertised on the web. I was curious about what the brothels looked like so I took a few pictures. Pretty depressing places.
All in all, Ely is a dying town. Another generation from now and I suspect there won't be a lot of life left in that town.
Leaving Ely, we drove up NV 93 to look around, and went through the town of McGill, NV. Population 1200 after the 2010 census. The town is really on the way out, but as is is in a really beautiful and peaceful area. If you want to live somewhere and be left alone, this is it.
We took a road up into the hills and passed some really beautiful ranches, with yes, the occasional:
We doubled back to Ely and headed west on US 50:
through fantastic countryside.
We stopped in Austin, NV, literally the middle of nowhere. A dying town, but on this dirt road about a half mile from the highway we stopped to see the Stokes Castle. This is a medieval-like structure built in 1897 by the wealthy mine owner Anson Stokes. He built it for his sons, who lived in it for 2 months one summer. Stokes liked the old fashioned medieval look. It's made of huge ganite stones. It had 3 floors, each with a fireplace, plate glass windows, and balconies on the upper 2 floors, with plumbing. And lavishly furnished.
Continuing on through beautiful Nevada, we took a turn up through Virginia City, which I've always wanted to see ever since I watched Bonanza on TV 60 years ago:
and stayed at a hotel in Reno. Nothing special, but there was a large lake behind the hotel, about 1 mile around, so I went for a walk before sunset. The colors were amazing, there was a lot of wildlife (ducks, some swans, etc), and this photo shows both the beauty and tragedy of the lake. Sigh...
Saturday morning we left Reno and headed for SFO to drop off Jerry to make his flight. It was a warm and sunny day, nice drive, and all went well until 2 minutes north of SFO on 101 I was driving in the left lane when two cars collided in front of me, maybe 100 m. One of them crossed the road and slammed head on into the divider, the other crashed ahead of that. There was a big white SUV in front of me, it slammed on its brakes, I glanced in the rear view mirror and saw another white SUV behind me, looked like I was going to be caught between a rock and a hard place but luckily the needle was thread and we emerged without a scratch. And an adrenaline rush. Up to that time I had put 3800 miles on the car since leaving Maryland, with no close calls at all.
And so ended the westward journey!
I spent 5 wonderful nights in the magical Bay Area: 4 nights in Berkeley at an Airbnb, and 2 nights in Mill Valley at my friend Aniko's place. Some of the highlights:
Hanging out at my favorite cafe in Berkeley (Cafe Strada, Bancroft and College Ave). That's the law school across the street:
Walking around Dogpatch, a neighborhood in SF, with Jack and Peter. Here I am waiting for them to show up:
Going for a very long walk with Barbara up into the Berkeley hills above LBL. We were above the fog line and could see the fog as it was coming in:
Going to the Giants game with Rick on Tuesday. The Giants killed the Diamonbacks!
Spending time with Dave and Joan Getz at their place in Fairfax with Rick. Here is the view from their deck which is almost 100 ft above the street level!
We had lunch:
and here is a nice photo of them. They are doing really well:
David entertained us with his ukulele!
On Friday, I visited an old friend, a retired physicist who used to be the Fermilab director. He has his own vineyard, grows grapes for Cabernet and Zinfandel, about 50 acres, in Healdsburg, CA which is just north of Santa Rosa:
It's quite an impressive operation, and takes a good bit of his time. His main worry: fires! So far he's been lucky, fires have gotten near and the smoke ruined one crop a few years ago but so far so good. My fingers are crossed for him:
After lunch I drove north to Medford, OR, through some pretty hot areas hitting I5 south of Redding.
I passed the site of past fires:
...passed Mt. Shasta:
and got into Medford late, but with a pretty nice sunset:
Medford is a nice little town in southern Oregon along I5. It's famous for "Table Mountain":
I then drove up to Eugene to have lunch with an old friend, and from there to Seattle:
I stayed at an Airbnb near the university where I went to a conference for 2 days. It's a wonderful neighborhood, slightly shabby but full of colorful houses like this:
On Tuesday I visited my former postdoc advisor from the late 1980s, he's retired and lives on Orcas Island, which is one of the San Juans.
Access is only via ferry, which you get in the town Anacortes, about 1.5 hours north of Seattle. One has to be aware that there's 2 types of time in the world: real time, and Washington Ferry Service (WFS) time. WFS time intervals are almost always greater than real time intervals!
The ferry boat ride was wonderful. The weather was perfect, which it sometimes is not! Here's a photo of Mt. Baker in the background:
Here's a closeup of Mt. Baker, which is in the US, and at 10700 ft is 2nd highest to Rainier, which is around 14400 ft.
And here are the James Islands just east of Decatur Island:
The ride took about 2 hours, but was only scheduled for 1.25. Not too bad. Here's a video taken from the ferry. It has a nice rhythm!
But the perfect weather and beautiful scenery was amazing. Here are where all the seagulls seem to hang out without being bothered by humans:
No idea what this is but it's beautiful, just sitting there!
These islands are quite prosperous. Lots of small resorts, well paved roads, people come to hike and bike ride and just relax. And of course, a lot of private homes:
Since the ferry was so late, I only had around 3 hours on Orcas to visit, and it turns out they lived on the opposite side of the island from the ferry doc, about a 30 min drive. But the island is just beautiful:
Here's another shot of Mt. Baker on the return trip:
Then on to Vancouver!
I spent 7 glorious days in Vancouver with Danny and Barbara. This picture was taken at the beach in English Bay:
after eating at a wonderful restaurant right on the water. We had to walk to the water taxi from their condo, then take a 10 min taxi right across the channel, then walk along the water to get to the restaurant. Along the way we saw where people have decided it would be cool to pile up rocks and make little towers:
The place was really lively - lots of young people on the beach, having fun. We felt like we were the oldest people there by maybe a factor of 2 or more!
We had a great meal:
and caught the sunset. Beautiful place:
Here are some examples of the architecture on the buildings, apartment/condos, etc. They have some very creative building designs, but they all conform to a style that maximizes the amount of window space.
The neighborhoods, at least the ones I saw (which were probably on the ritzy side), were full of very charming houses, with cafes around the corner and lots of bike trails that had gardens alongside. Here are some pictures of houses:
Unfortunately, they are somewhat expensive, probably more than even the Bay Area in $/sq ft. But they are certainly beautiful houses, each one different.
And the gardens along the bike path or just outside of houses are wonderful:
And lots of condos in buildings with view. Speaking of views, here's the view from Danny and Barbara's condo:
Notice how many condos have quite substantial gardens on their balcony.
There's an amazingly interesting phenomena in Vancouver where each day, crows from all over the city take off and fly to a town east of Vancouver called Still Creek and roost. (Click here for more.) You can see them flying by in the evening!
I left Vancouver around 11am heading to the Canadian Rockies, to the town of Golden. It's in the middle of the Rockies, west of Banff.
It was in the upper 80s when I left, but got into the upper 90s just outside Surrey and stayed hot all the way through Kamloops, even though I was well into the mountains within an hour or so of leaving:
The area around the town of Revelstoke, which is on the western side of the Rockies, was especially gorgeous.
There is plenty of water here, and the farms look very prosperous.
This resort looked pretty full, right on a lake beside a mountain.
As the sun started to set, I passed through country with awesome beautify, like this:
Golden is just a few miles past the Columbia River, which is not too wide up there but is the same river that is almost a mile wide when it gets into Washington state.
It has a population of around 3700, is around 3700 ft up, and is on the edge of a ski resort as you can see in the picture just above to the right. I was told that the chair lift takes you up to the top of the ridge, and you can walk along the ridge. It passes a grizzly bear that the town has adopted, and they built a log house for it. It was pretty hot during the day, the bear finds a lake and just sits in it all day. Or so I'm told!
I left Golden after getting a cappuccino and gassing up, heading for Banf and Jasper.
The goal is to experience the drive between Banff and Jasper, on what is known as the Icefields Parkway. It cost me $9 Canadian to get into the national park! I did not actually go to Banff or Lake Louise, it was too crowded, and the common thing to do there is to hike or boating, and I wasn't prepared for some long hikes. I wanted to take the drive, which is around 145 miles, take side trips, photos, etc. It was supposed to be a superb drive, and believe me it was!
Right away, between Golden and Banff, I passed scenery like this, over 6000 ft above sea level:
On entering the park, I started north on the Icefields Parkway.
I stopped at Peyto Lake, about 25 miles into the parkway. It's about 6000 ft up, but is down from the road into a valley. You park at a parking lot and hike up to a viewing area, it's a short hike, maybe a half mile, but it's all uphill! Here's a view of the lake and where the glacier used to be, and a comparison from 1885:
It's not easy to see in the old picture, but the glacier came all the way to the edge of the lake back then. It has receded quite a bit in 140 years.
The lake is gorgeous!
and runs north-south with the glacier on the south side. The view north is spectacular, along the valley.
I went for a hike away from the tourists, it was very quiet, quite warm (mid 80s probably), around 6700 ft up, and so beautiful. I love these old dead trees, how gnarly and exotic they look!
Just north of Peyto I stopped to look at this glacier. Note that the parkway goes north-south, and this was on the left side of the road so it's a mountain that faces east. The bottom photo was taken using the 60x telephoto.
I drove north along the parkway amidst amazing scenery:
I stopped at one more point to take a closer look at some glaciers, at Colubmia Icefields. This is a very popular point, lots of cars, people walking around on the glacier. I didn't stay too long. It was pretty cold and windy, very beautiful.
That was it for the Canadian Rockies. Spectacular. I turned east at Jaspar and headed to Epson for the night, and immediately got into the great plains.
There's not much to see in Epson, which is about halfway between Jaspar and Edmonton. Population around 8,000, still 3,000 ft up, which makes it pretty damn cold in the winter. Coldest temperature ever was -55F on Jan 22, 1943. It's pretty far north, so I set my alarm for 2am and drove out of town to get away from any light in case the sun was cooperating and there was a North Lights to see. Nope, the sun was quiet. The Northern lights are the result of charged particles from the sun circling around the earth's magnetic field lines and being herded to the poles, and when those particles spiral through the atmosphere it gives off light. But you can only see them during a solar storm, which doesn't happen all the time. This was destined to be a long drive!
I then drove towards my next destination, Yorkton, Saskatchewan.
It took me through Edmonton, which is a rather large city, population over 1 million, and is the capital of Alberta. Right outside Edmonton on the east, driving along, I started to see these amazing fields of yellow which turns out the be mostly canola, but also maybe mustard. And some beautiful farms, and lots of water.
I passed through Saskatoon, right in the middle of Saskatchewan, population 250,000. It's a fair sized place, and the highway stopped in the city on the south side and snaked through. I caught this photo.
And this photo in a tiny little town called Lanigan. That's something you rarely see these days!
And to give you an idea of where I was, check out this sign:
I got to Yorkton after sundown but the sunset was incredible.
From Yorkton I headed into the US, landing at International Falls, MN, another 10 hour day on the road.
Lots more fields of canola. In the following I also have a closeup of the plant that is in the fields, and it's clearly canola.
This is really the great plains, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, flat with big skies. Just beautiful.
I entered into the US near Longworth, MN, right on Lake of the Woods, and drove into International Falls, MN along the Rainy River. The sunset was spectacular. Note some of the pictures of the river, how still and clear it is. The light hit the farm on the Canadian side just right.
From International Falls, I headed to Duluth and then south of Lake Superior to
Not much to says about International Falls, other than it has some of the coldest temperatures in the lower 48. Population is only around 6,000, no large buildings, a border crossing and a hydro plant and that's about it. The main street has some gas stations and fast food places and not much else.
Duluth on the other end was a very nice town. It's right on the lake, between the lake and some hills.
I drove up in the hills, and there were some beautiful houses and old buildings.
No idea now they get up to the top of those hills in the middle of a bitter cold icy winter, but I suppose they figure it out.
And it has a rather active down, right on the water with shops, restaurants, and lots of people walking around. And quite a few young people.
After leaving Duluth and going through Wisconsin, I crossed into Michigan and stopped in Iron River, MI for dinner. A 1 horse town if there ever was one, a downtown consisting of 1 street with about 3 blocks, with a lot of boarded up stores and not much in the way of places to eat.
From Iron River I headed to Mackinaw and down to visit friends who live near South Haven, MI.
I stopped at a little town called Escabana, right on Lake Michigan, to go for a walk. Cute little town, but not very prosperous. Hard to tell if it's just a sign of the times, or still weakened by covid. Nice car though!
I walked down by the water, where they have a very interesting old lighthouse that you can walk around. But not much else.
It was a long day, got to South Haven in time to see the sunset!
I stayed with two close friends, a married couple who I've known for 40 years, since we were grad students. The house is right on the beach, which is on the west side of the lake so it gets the lake breeze. Here are some beach pictures - notice all the erosion. The lake is as high as its ever been, which is probably from all the rainfall due to climate change.
The town of South Haven is like something out a Normal Rockwell painting, we went in for ice cream but the beautiful part was walking along the small creek that feeds the lake.
The sunset that night was also wonderful.
I left South Haven at around 8:15am for home, and arrived 12 hours later. It was a long drive. But good to be home. And so ends a trip that took me 32 days and 8,600 miles. And no problem at all with the mini!
