Last Day

Sue and I have had a painting in our kitchen for 20 years, of a little diner called "Susie-Q" with the motto "Let's Eat Here!"

I knew it was a real place, I'd seen it years ago working in Mason City, Iowa.  I've been meaning to go check it out for a long time, but like Bartlesville, it's not really on the way to anywhere, I'd have to make a side trip.
Mason City is also where Frank Lloyd Wright's Park Inn Hotel was built.  This is a bank and hotel complex, built in 1910.  While FLW was there, he was commissioned to build several houses, and evidently there was a Prairie Architecture boom, because there are also some excellent Walter Burleigh Griffin houses and others built around the same time.

I found the Susie-Q diner, unfortunately it was closed Sundays.  It looks kind of beat up, but still picturesque.

The Park Inn complex was being restored.  According to their website it'll be redone like the original.  Right now it's pretty much disassembled, I hope they can do a suitable restoration.
I took the walking tour, saw a lot of nice homes.  I'm a big fan of Prairie School and the Arts and Crafts movement.  There are some nice examples there.
Even an old fire station - I couldn't find any info on it, but it looked cool.

I followed US-18 most of the way home. The only trouble with the middle of nowhere is there aren't a lot of restaurants.  Other than chain places, I couldn't find anything interesting along the drive.  Eventually hunger drove me to grab a Subway sandwich... oh well.

Eating good regional food and camping out more were the only things I wasn't able to do as much as I'd hoped on the trip, though. The lack of good local food seems to be a tradeoff for exploring the most unpopulated areas, and the weather is hard to predict - it would have been perfect for sleeping out by the time I was leaving.
Overall, it was an excellent time.  I saw a lot of things I'd wanted to, and most of them lived up to expectations.  I had good subjects to photograph, and I had the time to think about my photography - my tastes, influences and motivations, and what images I want to make.
I arrived home recharged, ready to get back to work, looking forward to the next getaway.
Thanks for reading this.  I plan on posting the next trip... when I find out where I'm going.

Zigzagging home

Post for Saturday, Oct. 30
Whenever I'm on a road trip, and it's time to head back, I tend to drive straight through, and get home as fast as possible.  It's partly a habit from when I worked on the road - the Six Days on the Road effect. I remember my father doing the same thing.
I'm trying to reconsider assumptions and habits, and I'm tired of arriving home burnt out from a marathon drive.
So, I tried making the drive home a continuation of the trip, taking my time and stopping along the way.
I was planning on continuing to follow old Route 66, I-44 from Oklahoma City through Missouri.  But I've done that route many times, and I'd already spent quite a bit of time looking at Route 66 attractions.
Google Maps' suggested route was different from my usual one, up I-35 and across Iowa on US-20, going near several places I've been wanting to explore.
First off, though, I made another Route 66 stop - Shamrock, Texas.

There's a beautifully restored service station / diner there I've been wanting to photograph, and the weather and light were perfect.

I stayed on the freeway up to Tulsa, and then headed north to Bartlesville, OK.  The Price Tower, Frank Lloyd Wright's only skyscraper, is there - no one ever paid for his mile high skyscraper design for some reason...

I used to work around Bartlesville every year, and vaguely remember noticing it, but I wasn't paying much attention to that sort of thing back in the 80s I guess.
I was wandering around, photographing it from different angles, and then found out that there were tours available, and I was just in time for the last one of the day.  Photos weren't allowed inside, unfortunately, but it was quite interesting to see - partly in a 'what the hell were they thinking?' way.
Like a lot of FLW work, it's more a sculpture than a useful, livable building.

Even though it's 19 stories tall, it's vary narrow, and the rooms are oddly shaped.  Doors and stairways are very small, and the furniture had to be custom built to fit in the angled walls and corners. If it wasn't for all the glass, it would be very claustrophobic.
It's visually pleasing and far ahead of it's time, though, and I was pleased to see they've done a lot of restoration work.
From there it was two lanes for quite a ways, beautiful day to travel through the prairie.

Back in familiar territory

Post for Friday, Oct 29
I've been going through Santa Fe on each trip through New Mexico.  It has a lot of spots I like.
The Plaza Cafe is high on the list - it's an art deco diner with stainless steel interior, built when Route 66 ran that way.  The food and service has always been excellent - highly recommended.
But this time it's closed for remodeling!  Found an OK place, but not the food I was planning on, and certainly not the decor.  Nice sign though.

Went to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum next.  I'd been there a year ago, but wanted to see the paintings of landscapes I was looking at yesterday.  Her work has been resonating with me.  I'd like to make my landscapes and still lifes simpler, verging on abstraction.  I also tend to emulate her choice of subject matter.
Andrew Smith Gallery is now right next door - by far the best photographic gallery I've seen.  I spent a rewarding hour or two there looking at original prints by Ansel Adams, Herman Leonard, Elliot Erwitt, Cartier-Bresson and many others.
On my way out, I stopped at Pecos Pueblo National Historic Park. This was a huge trading point, the only year round pass in the area between the plains and the mountain valleys further west.  It eventually had 700 rooms and housed up to 2000 people.
There's not much left, basically foundations, but it's interesting to see the scale of it and imagine what it was like.
The only building standing is the ruins of the mission - I guess it's fitting that after a thriving 1000 year settlement, only the church of the exterminators remains.

I like traveling via old Route 66.  There's a lot of history, from a time when traveling across the country by car was a new possibility.  I like the architecture, the art deco and roadside modern, all the neon...

I've driven the stretch from Santa Fe east before, but the weather had been gray and blustery, not conducive to photography.  Today it was beautiful, bright and warm.
I stopped at some places I'd photographed before, and redid them, and explored some new sites.

A grocery store in Tucumcari has a good selection, I got a big bag of green chiles for 99 cents a pound - my kind of souvenir. 
With all the stops, I only made it as far as Amarillo, but that's an easy two day drive home.

Brought to you by Acme and Little Giant products.

Entry for Thursday, 10/28
Nice night sleeping in the wilderness - the moon was so bright it woke me when it came up.
When I got up, it was 19 degrees and well before dawn.  I'd planned to make coffee and hang out a bit, but I just jumped in the truck and started driving. It worked out well, by the time the sun was coming up I was in another picturesque area.
I did some more map research - the Four Corners make it kind of tough, there are four maps to coordinate to plan a route.  Monument Valley sounded like what I was looking for, on the Utah - Arizona border.
I'd guessed right - it had the spectacular rock formations and views I was hoping to find - like the background of a Roadrunner cartoon.

 There was a sort of road running back behind the balanced rock formation, overlooking a creek and a lot of hills.  Nice place to have breakfast.

From there I headed east - Kayenta, AZ was my furthest point west.  I considered going further, the Grand Canyon isn't all that far, but better not to overdo it - I have to be home by Sunday.

It's a great area to drive.  very sparsely populated, magnificent scenery, easy to pull off the road and wander wherever you like.
I went through Shiprock, which sadly is hazy and eye-watering from the giant coal fired power plants in the area.

Continuing east, I drove through the northern edge of New Mexico.  The land was what I would call 'typically' New Mexico, although NM has so many different terrains there isn't really a representative.one.  Brown, exposed, rounded rock hillsides, pinon pine and juniper in the valleys, douglas fir in the alpine areas.
My next destination was Georgia O'Keefe country.  While I'm not really a huge fan - I like some of her paintings quite a bit, but a lot of others seem contrived and repetitive - I like her eye for landscape and her abstractions.  She had an affinity for the same country I do. In that way, she is an influence on my work, and I want to explore that.
I saw a 'Ghost Ranch' marked on the map and knew she'd stayed there.  As I headed that way, down the Chama valley, the landscape became more orange sandstone, with some green accents, eroded into striking formations.
I saw a mountain that looked very familiar from her paintings,

I inquired and it is indeed one of her favorite subjects - it's called Pedernal Mountain.
Ghost Ranch was a tourist ranch O'Keefe had visited, and eventually bought a piece of for her home.
There is now a small museum there, and you can see the same views that were her 'back yard'.

Leaving there, the sun was getting low, and the scenery was beautiful.  I spent a couple hours wandering around shooting pictures and enjoying the view.

 Spent the night in Espanola, kind of a funky little town on the way to Santa Fe, but with much cheaper lodging.  Had an OK New Mexican dinner - great posole, average enchiladas.

Spent the night in Utah in a cave up in the hills

… cave, back of a pickup truck, same diff.
This is actually October 27.  I'm sitting in a campground at Canyonlands in Utah typing this, not sure when I'll be able to post it.
Today I got to see the things I'd been looking forward to.
The drive west from Pagosa Springs is beautiful - I'm sure the drive there was nice too, but I have to do some of the route in the dark, oh well.

I headed west to Durango, and stopped and looked around there.  It's pretty touristed out, most of Historic Old Town seems to be T-Shirt stores, coffee shops and art galleries. The architecture is pretty though.

Got an oil change, and headed out.
Next stop was Mesa Verde - a cliff dweller site in the midst of some spectacular scenery.  I had been noticing that I was approaching the boundary where alpine mountains give way to more eroded mesas, and this was actually in the first major mesa formation. 

I took the museum tour - originally a CCC project, so it has that classic architecture and design.  I enjoyed the exhibit mentioning that the Native Americans who lived there had domesticated dogs and turkeys, and that the dogs were probably pets for the children...
The cliff houses are in amazingly good shape - the ranger / guide said they'd only rebuilt a small portion - it's well over 90% intact.

I climbed down in one of the kivas - not a lot of room, or light down there.

I wasn't sure where to go from there - how far into the surrounding states to go, where the interesting scenery, sites, and food would be.  Since Dove Creek, the pinto bean capital of the world, wasn't too far,  I decided to head that way, and continuer northwest, into Utah.
With 10 pounds of pintos and some Anasazi beans, which the lady assures me will be delicious, I headed into Canyonlands National Park.
Since the Green river canyons are so deep, the park is actually split in three sections, none directly accessible from the others.  I went into the Needles section, since it was closest, and I haven't been to this part.
I stopped at Newspaper Rock - a section of petroglyphs.  There's no way to date the writing on the rock, so they have no idea how long it's been there, or who did it.  They also don't know what significance it has - whether it was religious, historical, or graffiti.

I continued on to the Needles area.  It's an area of sandstone formations.

I took pictures right up until sunset - nice to be staying in the midst of the scenery.

I was hoping to camp on previous nights, but the lows were around 10 degrees, which seemed excessive.  Tonight it's only supposed to dip to the upper 20s, which should be comfortable, although my fingers are getting cold now, I won't be typing much more.
I'm in a campground surrounded by beautiful rock formations.  It's absolutely quiet, now that my neighbor has stopped running his generator.  Let's hope he's done with that for the night.  The stars are starting to come out.  There is a slight haze, but that shouldn't obscure the sky too much - this morning it was amazing.
So, it's time for my dinner of salami, BlueMont cheddar, and an apple for dessert…  Don't worry, I had a great big green chili enchilada for lunch.

And now things start to get interesting.

One of my favorite things on a trip is to wake up in a new landscape.
The last views before dark yesterday were still farmland, prairie, looking much the same as Iowa and some of Wisconsin.
I drove 150 or so miles further SE in the dark before stopping, and today I woke up to the Plains - open treeless vistas, achingly blue cloudless sky, everything in shades of tan.  Beautiful, in its austere way, but hard to catch in a photograph.
Better to look closer then:

A truck graveyard in SE Colorado:

I'll probably add more later, I'm itching to get back on the road.  I'm in Pagosa Springs, CO now, heading west to Durango and the Four Corners.

(Later)

Kansas grain:

It took most of the day, but I could see mountains before dark.

Freeway Day

Slow start, long boring drive, the usual start to a road trip.
Freeways are great for covering long distances quickly, but as soon as you're anywhere, it's better to get off onto back roads.
On the two-lanes, you're not insulated from your surroundings.  You can stop pretty much anywhere you see something interesting.  There are restaurants, motels and stores that aren't the same ones you see at every other freeway exit.
Anyway, an easy drive except for strong winds, down to I-80 and west through half on Nebraska.
Around dusk, I got off the interstate and angled south.  I'll be cutting through a bit of Kansas and then the grasslands of SE Colorado tomorrow.

And away we go...

Welcome to my blog / travel log / another place to stick photos / whatever.
I go on road trips regularly, to see the country, take pictures, explore the local cuisine, clear my head - basically I get itchy feet now and then.
I usually keep a handwritten trip journal.  This time I'm experimenting with doing it online.
I'll post pictures and share my thoughts where they're available and accessible.
On the other hand, most of my destinations are internet free, so I'm not sure how timely the posts will be.

So this trip I'm aiming for the Four Corners area - I've never been there, and I gather the scenery there resembles the background in Roadrunner cartoons.
Plus it's the setting of The Monkey Wrench Gang - this will be a perfect opportunity to reread it after 20 plus years.

I plan to jump off the interstate in central Nebraska and angle through Kansas to southern Colorado. My exact route will be determined by weather, scenery, recommendations, how I feel that day... it's not a planned sort of adventure.
If anyone has suggestions of sights to see, places to eat, things to do - I'd love to hear them.


The return trip will go through New Mexico - one of my favorite places.  Not sure of the route there either, but it will probably involve green chile, Georgia O'Keefe, Route 66, native weavers... maybe I could start today!


It's Sunday morning now, I'm packing and trying to get work stuff covered.
I'm hoping to hit the road first thing tomorrow AM, and be in Kansas tomorrow night.

Books, music, maps, coffee makings, long johns, oil change, corkscrew, chargers, telephoto... back to work!