I still publish five blogs.  I have not touched this travel blog for more than a year.  I used this blog as a historic reference in Dave’s Weather Blog, to weather events that have persisted more than a year.  Tornadoes and flooding rainstorms that began on our road trip to Branson, MO, and nearby Arkansas, got really wild on the road between Little Rock and Blytheville in April 2010.  We  missed the same pattern by a matter of days on our Spring 2011 trip.  Damage already was happening near Roanoke, VA., while we visited Charlottesville and Monticello to the north.  Not long after this year’s trip, Joplin, MO was destroyed, too close to friends and relatives in Missouri and Arkansas.  The pattern persists  as I write in July 2011.

This year’s spring road trip deserves several blog posts.  This first entry already is a memory exercise that fits another theme, “Pictures of My Mind”, a memoir story that will take me a year to draft.  Photographic memories are in fact an important exercise I practiced  in a writing course I took this spring, “Memories, Myths, and Dreams”.  Follow the sidebar link to my Taurus Id blog (partlydave.blogspot.com) to read  posts that will appear in my memoir stories.  Read those posts back to January 2011.

Do you use flash memory devices?  We call ours memory sticks.  Many of the photo albums from our spring 2011 trip went to Facebook while we were travelling. Just today I found the complete set of albums on a memory stick that has no label on it.  Those photos do not carry the captions and comments that appear in my Facebook albums.

Have you been invited to use Google+ ?  One reason you might use Google+ is to link to  a “cloud” called Picasa Web Albums.  To use Picasa, you also must have Picasa3 software on your pc.  That is a good thing for tracking what you have and do not have stored on your pc, as well as the means to upload new photos.  I think Google+ may be a struggle for those already using Flickr with Yahoo.  I am much more familiar with Facebook, and can see why they are miles ahead of Google and Yahoo in both social networking and photo sharing.  Familiarity with the tools requires constant use, else memory loss due to normal aging makes the multiple platforms (Google, Yahoo, Facebook) difficult to manage.  I use them all. I ignore Twitter, except to keep up with friends who prefer it.

Our D.C., Williamsburg, Monticello stories encompass a full range of historical memories, including our own history over the past forty years.  Many more threads come out of that trip, including a brief trial of Ancestry.com.  My wife and my daughter may be able to prove they are DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution).  Put more than two and two together from what we heard from excellent tour guides and other historians.  We have become experts in our own minds, after ten years experience as historians and tour guides working for the Minnesota Historical Society.  We prove the case in conversation with some of the best guides we’ve ever met on our Spring 2011 road trip.

Day one of our road trip was as pleasant as a spring day could be.  We took our time leaving Little Marais and the North Shore.  “Why would we ever leave our place?”, I asked.  I had spent the night with the bedroom window cranked open to hear the surf sound full volume.

We arrived in Downtown St. Paul about a half hour earlier than I expected.  We wanted to get pictures of the flooded Mississippi, but all access points and parking lots along Shepard Road were blocked off.  By bicycle, you might have gotten down to the river near the I-35E bridge.  There was no place to park in that stretch.

Onward to DesMoines, we stopped for the night at a Country Inn by Carlson’s near the I-35/I-80 interchange on the west side.  You can’t beat the price, $89 for a two room suite, king-size bed, full size swimming pool, and free breakfast.  For dinner it was an easy walk across the parking lot to a Cracker Barrel Restaurant.  I had a catfish dinner, and expect to have more of that on this trip.

Here is a photo gallery of a walking tour I took November 21, 2009.  Walking through the woodlot east of our boathouse on the shore of Lake Superior is a tangle of red dogwood shrubs, mountain ash, birch, and poplars.  The vegetation line at the shore is a difficult walk on boulders banked with a four foot high berm.  The beach is strewn with a never ending supply of driftwood, most of it washed down from the Little Marais River.  Our boathouse is set back in a cove protected from most extreme surf action, so the driftwood debris collects, and we pile it up.

Onward to the east, photos show how a former groomed cross country ski trail has overgrown with tall grass and more tangled shrubs in just the past eight years.  Two resorts west and east of our place supported the winter trail.  The former Stone Hearth Inn is now a private estate.  Fenstad’s Resort only operates from May through October, while they had groomed connecting trails that extended 10 kilometers into the Superior Ridge 400 feet elevation above the lake.

Also on the Fenstad Resort property is the Little Marais River Gorge.  The gorge is deeper in the hills along the old ski trail, but the final descent below the Highway 61 bridge is a beautiful series of cascades and rapids.  We’ve had less than two inches of rain in November, and for the year, rainfall is more than three inches below normal, but the river is flowing full.  The steep banks of the gorge are covered with a variety of mosses, lichens, and cedars.

Driftwood near our boathouse

Cross country ski trail

Entrance to Our Place

Little Marais River bridge on Highway 61

Top of the Little Marais River Gorge

Flood debris from 2008

Cedars line the steep ascent

Cascades

Cascade

Cascade

Little Marais River Gorge descent

Little Marais River Gorge Lichens and Mosses

Little Marais River Gorge West Wall

Little Marais River north of Hwy 61

Shoreline Rock Berm

Mountain Ash Berries

Cross Country Ski Trail blocked by 2009 Ice Storm

Cross Country Ski Trail overgrown

Cross Country Woodland Ski Trail

The photo in the header of this blog was taken in July 2005.  Storm clouds extended along the North Shore for more than 60 miles.  Near Grand Marais, hundreds of song birds were found dead in the water.  A strong downdraft? There was no rain or wind with the clouds here.

Standing on the deck off our living room, or on the deck in front of our boathouse, the scene is always picturesque.  More often than not, it’s the weather or a sunrise that captures the mind.  Day and night there is the surf sound, and when the sound stops, we hear coyotes and wolves howling at night.  Bald Eagles, Merlins, ravens, crows, herring gulls, merganzers, and always song birds in the daytime.

Blue Ice

Ghosts/fog on the Lake May 2006

Ice Mounds 12 feet high March 2007

20 foot waves pound cliffs at Tettegouche State Park

 

This is the my first blog entry in the travel series on WordPress.  The older posts that follow were previously published on Blogger as Dave’s Travel Blog.  I transferred them here today.  I encountered problems uploading photos to Blogger, no longer able to position captions with photos, or arrange photos within text.  There are tools to use instead in Blogger or WordPress, but the basic Blogger editing function was corrupted.   My problem or Google’s, I don’t know.  I prefer the WordPress Photo Gallery features, and there are many other features I have not tried.

Saturday, September 19, 2009 was the booya at the Finnish Heritage Site on Little Marais Road near Finland, MN. The booya was a fund raiser for Zion Lutheran Church in Finland. Community leaders from all over northeast Minnesota were there, not only Lutherans and Finns. It was a true feast day, with several area food vendors, and local crafts vendors.

The Finland Area Historical Society, FAHS, is one of the best local historical societies, and has the benefit of close association with the Minnesota Historical Society. The centerpiece of historical interest is the John Pine Cabin, home of one of the settlers in Finland. A new Suomi Museum has professional designed displays showing the heritage over the past thousand years, people who lived here before European immigrants settled beginning in the 1880′s. I’m partial to the links between Little Marais, where I live on the North Shore of Lake Superior, and the various communities a short distance inland, including Finland and Isabella, and other communities that exist only as historical place names, such as Cramer.

Categorize this post under my general theme of 100 Places that top my list. There are plenty of such places in my immediate neighborhood.

Baraboo, WI. is an interesting place to visit, not only for the Circus World Museum. but interesting terrain. A geologist can tell you more than I can about this area that once was an island amidst a sea of glacial ice.

The Ringling Brothers Circus made its home at Baraboo, WI. The Ringling Family were Austrian immigrants, a heritage shared with my wife’s great grand parents. The Ringling Brothers made a fortune with their circus. I wondered what they paid their talent and workers. Smaller circuses did not pay much.

I was most interested in the Cinderella exhibits in the museum. The artistic quality of the costumes, and the large scale size of the props were magnificent. The circus was more than animal acts and acrobats.

Several of our companions in the audience for the one-ring circus performance informed us that Circus World had provided better entertainment until the mid-1990′s. There had been a clown college. Now you go to a summer program at UW LaCrosse to get clown training.

There had been a complete circus parade on the grounds. There had been a three-ring circus under a bigtop tent. Now the one-ring hippodrome is a metal structure.

Baraboo itself is an old town, but the current extent of the city limits goes eight miles north to Wisconsin Dells. The active business district is west of the old downtown. The old town along the river looks as old as the hills.

I put a slide show about Split Rock Lighthouse on my Taurus ID blog back in April. Since then, Lee Radzak has created an official weblog for Split Rock within the Minnesota Historical Society website.
Check it out on this link.
http://discussions.mnhs.org/splitrock/

Here’s a link to my slide show.
http://partlydave.blogspot.com/2009/04/more-things-nbr-37-photo-tales-complete.html

Here is a slide show of our Father’s Day 2009 trip to Voyageur’s National Park and Crane Lake, MN.

We stayed at the Voyagaire Lodge in Crane Lake. Took a kayak for a two hour trip across the south end of the lake, past Nelson’s Resort, which we had driven into earlier in the day. It was more than eight miles from town to Nelson’s by road, not that far by water.

Nelson’s Resort offers rustic cabins of various sizes, more trails to hike, and more activities. Nelson’s is much more expensive than our $100 per night; as much as $1600 for three days, including a guided fishing trip and all meals included.

Also in the slide show are scenes from Vermillion Falls, a ten mile drive south and west from County Rd 23. The Vermillion River flows into Crane Lake just west of town.

The slideshow ends with scenes from two National Park visitors centers on Kabetogama Lake.

“1000 Places To See Before You Die” includes this area in the book. I will add it to my 100 Places list, but with the qualification that it is a subheading within many places to visit in Northeast Minnesota.

The reason for coming here has to be boating and fishing. Otherwise, the town of Crane Lake is quiet. Hundreds of vehicles are parked in lots around town. Same thing at Nelson’s. The people must be out on the vast expanse of wilderness lakes. A few sea planes come and go. If you are going to be a resident, I can see the benefits of owning a plane, a fishing boat, and maybe a houseboat. You could stay out on the network of lakes for days.

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Here’s a simple post of my photos from an October 2008 hike on the Meyer’s Beach Sea Cave Trails. It’s part of the Lake Superior National Lakeshore. On the north side of the Bayfield Peninsula. West of the main Sand Island access campground.

An unfortunate, but humorous story. My wife and I got separated on the trails, which are densely wooded. We missed each other by only a few yards, and only by walking 1 1/2 hours back to the parking lot did we find each other. It is in fact a dangerous place to get lost or separated, because of the many opportunities to fall into a cave, down a ravine, or over a cliff into cold Lake Superior.

I used Picasa 3 on my PC to create the collage, and post it to this blog. Neat interface!
A tool I learned to use as part of the Web 2.0 Learning Program “More Things on a Stick”.

Top 10

1,000 Places To See Before You Die, A Travel Channel series, was being filmed in St. Paul Vance in the hills above Nice, while my wife and I were there in October 2007. We were on a daytrip, part of a packaged tour of Provence, centered on a French Riviera beach town, Juan Les Pins. We bought the package through the University of Minnesota Alumni Association. Others in our group were alumni of colleges and universities throughout the Midwest, Texas, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Alabama, Iowa, Illinois. Most were retired, but some were currently employed, checking their Blackberries daily on a working vacation. I could list several Provence daytrips among my 100 favorite places. We watched our episode months later, and some of our co-travelers. My wife gave me the book, 1,000 Places To See Before You Die, ,as a gift after the trip.

My home in Little Marais, MN ranks number 1. Second on the list is the island of Terceira, Azores, Portugal where we lived from 1971-73. St. Paul, MN., Amery, WI., Stillwater, MN – all belong in my memoirs as important home places or root places, and may make the top 100 places. Wichita Falls, TX., and Norman, OK, were my homes briefly, and will not be in this list, but are in my memoirs.

Four trips to Israel were literally mountaintop life experiences. Each trip we stayed in hotels atop Mount Carmel in Haifa, or in other accommodations on the slope facing Haifa Bay. Haifa, Akka, Nazareth, Jerusalem, and the Tel Aviv beach will be among the top 10 places. Baha’i Pilgrimage and family visits were the reasons for our four trips. My daughter Rebecca’s wedding with Sean Molloy at the top of the Nof Hotel, was the top mountaintop experience.

Sean Molloy’s hometown, Ballingary, Tipperary, Ireland, makes the top 10. That trip was all about family, his entire family hosting us in their homes, and giving us a grand tour of historic places unlike any packaged tour could offer.

The 100 Places Category will have many blog posts. The trips I have taken to beautiful, historic, and otherwise meaningful places, will make it into my memoirs via this blog.

1. Little Marais

2. Terceira, Azores, Portugal

3. Akka/Haifa, Israel

4. Jerusalem

5. Tel Aviv

6. The Galilee

7. Ballingary, Tipperary, Ireland

8. Grand Canyon, Arizona

9. Chicago

10. London