Canadian Rockies - July 2022

 at Waterton Lake

Link to more photos. (View the photos individually to see the captions.)

When I did this trip in 2016, I wrote that I should have brought Victor. Now I did. He loved it. As before, we were lucky to have mild temperatures and no rain.

The itinerary had changed a little. With COVID complications for US border crossings, they had opted to omit Glacier National Park and instead added a few new sights near Waterton. (The border COVID rules eased just days before the trip, but the itinerary didn't change.) New stops were Red Rock Canyon and Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. I had never heard of bison jumps; the film there was very instructive. Peyto Lake was even more impossibly blue than I remembered (see the photos).

In addition to deer, we saw mountain goats, big-horned sheep and black bears (see the photos). The scenery was spectacular, although there were many trees that had burned and many that were damaged by mountain pine beetles.

Walking on Athabasca Glacier was fine, but Victor noted that we walked farther and did more on Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina in 2009. 

On my 2016 trip, no one told me about the triple continental divide at Snow Dome above Athabasca Glacier, where some water flows to the Atlantic, some to the Pacific, and some to the Arctic Ocean.

Big Bend, Carlsbad Caverns, White Sands — May 2022

 

Sunset at "The Window"
Big Bend National Park

Link to more photos. View the photos individually to see the captions.

This tour took us to all four national parks in Texas and New Mexico and a few additional stops. The temperature was frequently above 100, and we used four different buses, which required adjusting the itinerary for lost time. But despite the heat and the bus issues, the trip was a success.

Our first stop was McDonald Observatory. When I drove between Los Angeles and San Antonio, I always saw the turn-off for the observatory, but because it is more than 30 miles off of the interstate highway, I had never visited. We had an excellent tour guide.

We continued to Big Bend National Park, another Texas attraction I had never visited, mainly because it is so remote. On the first night there, I lucked upon a spectacular sunset photo (above).

The next day's highlight was Santa Elena Canyon and the Rio Grande, sadly nearly completely dry (see photos). The lowlight: A road construction crew had one piece of equipment sticking out too far, and it damaged several panels of our bus! Investigating and reporting the accident involved federal officers and much time. Since the nearest replacement bus was many hours away from Big Bend, we were happy that our bus remained drivable.

The next day, we changed to a new bus as we left the park. We had lunch in Marfa and stopped at the famous Prada art installation there.

We made a brief stop at Guadalupe Mountains National Park, but saw nothing that really interested me.

The next morning, our bus driver noticed a leak under the bus, and we waited several hours for a replacement bus. It was older and from a different company, so we were told we would get yet another bus the next day!

We stopped at the Living Desert Zoo and then proceeded to Carlsbad Caverns National Park. I had visited Carlsbad Caverns when I was maybe twelve; Victor, of course, had never been there.

The next day, with our fourth and final bus, we went to White Sands National Park. I was at a different portion of the park on a 2013 tour of New Mexico's "Space Trail".

The next morning, after a short stop at Old Mesilla, we returned to El Paso for our flight home.

Autographs — Solnit

 
After a two-year pandemic absence, The LATimes Festival of Books returned yesterday. I managed to hear at least parts of five panels, and I bought two books. I have enjoyed much of Solnit's work. I would have preferred getting her to sign some of her other books, but this was the only one available at the event.

P.S. In January 2023, a Facebook friend asked what I thought of the book, and I wrote this note.

(Index to autographs)

Autographs — Klune

 
After a two-year pandemic absence, The LATimes Festival of Books returned yesterday. I managed to hear at least parts of five panels, and I bought two books. I chose this one because Klune spoke about how pleased he was to include a "happy gay" character. I have not read any of his work yet.

(Index to autographs)

Autographs — Sandra Tsing Loh

 

Sandra Tsing Loh spoke at Occidental today, and was happy to sign this book. Now I have to read it! When I saw that she was coming to Oxy, I bought this, hoping to get her autograph.

I have read some of her essays, and before I retired, I often heard her short "The Loh Down on Science" pieces on the radio while commuting. Today, her talk was "The Loh Down on Writing". As expected, she was informative and entertaining.

(Index to autographs)

Atlanta — March 2022

Link to more photos. (View the photos individually to see the captions.)

This tour took us to Atlanta and vicinity. I chose this because although I have been through the Atlanta airport many times, I had never stayed to visit. 

I originally booked this for Spring 2020; COVID moved it first to 2021, then to 2022. During this delay, CNN stopped giving tours, and that was dropped from the itinerary.

We were to face further disappointments: Because of a winter storm in mid-March, the cherry blossoms were delayed.  This tour had been carefully timed to include Macon's International Cherry Blossom Festival:

but the entire festival was postponed a week. Instead of seeing multitudes of cherry blossoms, we saw very few. 

Also, when we visited the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Park, the grounds were open, but the buildings, including the Visitor Center, were closed due to COVID. Of course, they re-opened the very next week.

Finally, when we visited Stone Mountain Park, the Summit Skyride was closed due to wind.

Despite all that, the trip was pretty good. The weather was mostly mild, with only a bit of rain one day and some strong winds on our last day. 

We did not choose the group air travel, but we did connect with the group when they arrived at the Atlanta airport, so we joined them for the bus to dinner and the hotel.

Monday, the first full tour day, included the Georgia State Capitol, a bit of the Atlanta Beltline, the World of Coca-Cola, and MLK Park. At the Coke headquarters, I finally was able to buy a couple of products I have been vaguely searching for: Coke Zero Starlight and Vanilla Coke Zero with Coffee. They were pricey — $2.50 and $3.50, respectively. I drank them later in the week; they were nothing special.

Tuesday, we went to Marietta for the Gone With the Wind Museum, and Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, then returned to the city for the Atlanta History Center, including Swan House and the Cyclorama. While on the bus, our tour guide showed us Gone With The Wind. I had not seen it in more than fifty years; now it seemed way too melodramatic, and Scarlett O'Hara was simply stupid.

Wednesday we were in Macon. A step-on guide showed us many historic Macon homes (we toured one, Hay House), and regaled us with stories of famous Macon musicians.

On Thursday, we went to FDR's Little White House in Warm Springs. On the bus traveling there, our guide showed us the movie Warm Springs, with Kenneth Branagh as FDR, which was quite good. I liked the displays at the park, but after the movie, I was disappointed that we didn't see pools full of spring water, just empty pools with one small bubbling water trough where we could touch the spring water. Later, we stopped at Callaway Gardens (more of a large forested park than a garden) and the included birds of prey program and Butterfly Center.

Friday was the last day with the tour group. We hit the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum and Stone Mountain Park, including its Historic Square of relocated period houses.

Victor and I stayed for one more day on our own. After considering many possibilities, we walked to Piedmont Park, where we stumbled upon the Atlanta Science Festival.

I was worried that Victor would not get much out of this trip, but he says he did enjoy it, even if he didn't know most of the history involved, including the U.S. Civil War!

And, repeating: Link to more photos. (View the photos individually to see the captions.)

Maps

(See five photo links below.)

I'm another map freak. I have hundreds of maps. Printed maps. Even in this digital age when all maps are available online, I still like printed maps. 

Many are from AAA and National Geographic. But some are from more obscure map-makers. And, from my father, some are older than I am. And, from my father's workplace as they were being discarded, a handful pre-date him!

The photo albums linked below show just a few of my maps. Each album begins with a description of the maps shown. Click on any image to see it larger.

1918 map (date circled in red)

Map Album 1: Some of my oldest maps (1900-1921)

Map Album 2: Topographic maps

Map Album 3: Thematic maps

Map Album 4: Trend maps

Map Album 5: Miscellaneous maps

Autographs — Peter Alsop

 

My only composer autograph. I only recently remembered that I had an LP with an autograph. The album is from 1977. I don't recall the circumstances, but I think it might have been at USC. Here is his website.

(Index to autographs)

Rubik's Cube

Link to more photos. 

I have a collection of Rubik's Cubes and similar objects, about 20 of them (See the photo album.)

When I first read about it, in a fourth-generation copy of an article in a German magazine, I couldn't see how it was possible —  how a cube of smaller cubes could possibly rotate slices in all three dimensions. 

At the time, they were only available in Europe, not in the U.S. My Occidental math faculty colleague Don Goldberg managed to get one from abroad, and I borrowed it for a day. In that time, I did learn how to fix one side, but that's all I could reliably do.

Sometime later, the May Co. department store was the first place in town to have Rubik's Cube to sell. As a promotion, they advertised that, for one day, they would be giving $50 gift certificates to anyone who could solve one side in three minutes.

I went there on that day as soon as they opened, and I was one of the first set of three people who were given a chance. Of course, I won a $50 gift certificate. As the day went on, more and more Oxy students were showing up and winning. They quickly cut back to one group of three contestants every hour instead of every thirty minutes, and long before the day was done, they stopped the promotion altogether. Oxy students who never got a chance protested, and there was even some TV coverage of it all.

In his 1981 book, Notes on Rubik's Magic Cube, David Singmaster writes, "A Los Angeles department store offered $50 to anyone who could put one face right in three minutes.  They lost $600 to a group of Don Goldberg's students at Occidental College."

For years afterwards, I bought and received as gifts many variations of the cube. I also participated in the Cube-Lovers email group (now long gone).

Anti-vaxxers

Weeks ago, my cousin Mark Weiss posted this on Facebook:

Vaccine mandates are leading teachers who don't believe in science to quit, nurses who don't believe in medicine to quit, and cops who don't believe in public safety to quit. I don't really see a downside to this.

I like that a lot, and I quoted it to others. Later, I decided I should send it as a letter to the editor of the LATimes. I first asked Mark whether it was his own or whether he was quoting someone else. He said, "I’d seen a couple of things out there that resonated with me, and that was my amalgamation of what I’d seen, though it may have been closer to one or another. That may not be a big help, but frankly, I don’t recall it in detail."

So I sent it to the Times, prefaced with "Recently seen on Facebook:" They didn't print it.