Another gentle family day today starting with the colourful Farmers’ Market and ending with the delightful Lantern Parade.
Friday 20th September 2018
A peaceful family day with lots of relaxing and chatting together, sharing recipes and family stuff. On our walk for lunch we spotted a tiny door in the wall….
Cakes to make; I’ll be trying the Hummingbird Cake!
Door…
Lunch was a delicious and very American burger.
Best Burger
Wednesday 19th September 2018
This morning we drove to Phoenix, dropped off the car – we have driven 1,506 miles, through mountains and deserts, through small towns and farmland and have flown to Atlanta, Georgia to spend the next four days with my lovely Brother and Sister-in-law. It will be good to stop moving for a few days!
Thursday 20th September
My Dear SIL planned a treat for us for today – a trip to Atlanta’s beautiful Botanical Gardens and an evening performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Gardens and what a treat that turned out to be! The garden was a story book delight! All the characters are made out of plants and are exquisite.
The Story Book
The front cover
The Dragon (with a Sleeping Princess)
The Phoenix
Rip Van Winkle
Earth Goddess
Camels
We didn’t manage to see everything on this visit as we had to have dinner and make our way to the Theatre space which was on the 63ft wide pond! It was still very hot – it had been a very humid 29C earlier and so, along with the ticket, each member of the audience was given a fan, a lovely gesture.
The stage before the play began
I’m a Theatre Fan!
The play was an absolute delight, sparkling from start to finish with just six actors taking all the parts and clearly loving every minute as we did.
Atlanta skyline at night after the show
Dawn over the Mittens at Monument Valley – what a treat for the last full day of our road trip.
Dawn
Sunrise
We drove to Flagstaff after breakfast to spend the night with our friends with whom we have spent the last few days having amazing adventures. Their garden in the desert is full of colour – a tribute to the gardeners – and the Hummingbirds love their sugar feeder.
Road to Flagstaff
Mural seen on the way
Sunflowers
Hummingbird waiting by the tomatoes
Hummingbird silhouette
Hummingbird coming to the feeder
While we were at The Hubble Trading Post, we treated ourselves to a beautiful piece of Navajo weaving and then, when we were in Monument Valley, also on Navajo Nation lands, we found a pretty dye chart which shows some of the natural dyes used in the making of the rugs and wall hangings.
Small wall hanging woven by El Dora Bia, Style Burntwater
Dye Chart made by Rosalyn H Washburn (Dine)
Our eldest daughter is visiting for a while to help winterise the boat and she brought a couple of presents with her, elegant 3D printed vases, one red and one black, shapes that would be impossible to make in any other way.
3D printed vase
Monday 17th September 2018
Today, a drive through more incredible landscapes from Colorado to Utah and Monument Valley, that landscape known to many from the ‘movies.’
The road to Monument Valley
Sunday 16th September 2018
Great excitement today as we arrived at the station in Durango ready for a two and a half hour trip on the historic steam train through to Silverton and back again. Join us on this delightful trip, enjoy the steam engine and the spectacular leaf colours.
We had lunch in Silverton, took the train back to Durango where we had an excellent dinner at Ken and Sue’s and ended the evening with live music in the Diamond Belle Saloon.
Saturday 15th September 2018
Having looped all around, we drove back to Durango today and met our dear friends from Flagstaff with whom we are to share a few days of our trip. They have a 4×4 in which they have offered to drive us into the back country on the road known as the Alpine Loop to visit a Ghost Town, left abandoned by the gold and silver miners in the early 1900s and which by 1920 was a Ghost Town. First a gallery to show some of the sights on today’s drive of 186 miles.
From Durango off we went to find Animas Forks, a little town which I found very moving indeed.
Some of my readers may remember the research I did in 2016 into a Cornish tin miner who emigrated to Colorado, taking his sought after hard rock mining skills. This was the kind of place he may have come to. For those new to my work – his fiancée, Mary, followed him, travelling alone across the seas from Cornwall then across the USA to be with her John. They married and had a child, Foster, whose war grave is in St Euny Graveyard, just down the road from us. John died when Foster was very young and Mary returned to Redruth, with her little boy, to be with her family – another challenging and amazing journey for a young woman in the late 1800s. Foster died in 1916, while in training to join WW1 and his mother died just 6 months later. They are buried in the same grave in St Euny.
I walked around this remote town in the mountains imagining Mary, fresh from Cornwall, in this bleak environment.
The drive was another challenging one but this time we weren’t driving! The Quaking Aspens were becoming more beautiful by the day, the road rougher and the destination more remote. What must Mary, coming to meet her much loved man, have been thinking as she made this journey at only 21 years old?
If you’d like to know more about Animas Forks, here is a link to Wikipedia
Friday 14th September 2018
Today’s drive took us to Alamosa through more mountain roads and through a delightful small town called Saguache (pronounced Suh-watch) where we stopped for lunch. Come with me along the drive and for a walk around the little town in the following gallery.
After arriving in Alamosa, we drove on to see The Great Sand Dunes which were fascinating. They are the highest sand dunes in North America and don’t move like ours do, they shift just a few feet one way and then a few feet back depending on the winds. One of the rangers explained to me that the prevailing South Westerly winds blow the sand mass North Easterly and then powerful North Easterlies, sometimes 40+miles per hour, blow the sand back toward the South West. This back and forth action piles the sand vertically. We saw a photo from a hundred years ago that showed the Dunes then to be where they are now!
You can see them from miles away as you approach and they look vast. As you get closer, they just get bigger and vaster! Not until you’re nearly at their border does their true scale become apparent: dunes up to 750 feet tall, extending for mile after mile—an ocean of sand hills of breathtaking magnitude. That’s just how the explorer Zebulon Pike described them in 1807: “Their appearance was exactly that of a sea in a storm (except as to color), not the least sign of vegetation existing thereon.”
The size of the people demonstrates the vastness of the Dunes
From Montrose, we drove to The Black Canyon of the Gunnison, another National Park.
From the NPS website :-
“Big enough to be overwhelming, still intimate enough to feel the pulse of time, Black Canyon of the Gunnison exposes you to some of the steepest cliffs, oldest rock, and craggiest spires in North America. With two million years to work, the Gunnison River, along with the forces of weathering, has sculpted this vertical wilderness of rock, water, and sky.”
It’s a remarkable place, deep, steep and narrow gorges carved out by the river over millennia.
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