Meandering on the Way

July 6, 2025

Crossing Central Washington — Washtucna to Napavine

Palouse Falls — Drumheller Scablands — Othello — Hanford Reach — White Pass

(This posting is part of the Road Trip series. Meandering on the Way will return soon.)

There’s a nice freeway that runs east/west through the state of Washington. If you were traveling west, you could start in Spokane, a town of 230,000 near the Idaho border, and pretty quickly end up in the Seattle area, where 3,581,000 people live near the shores of Puget Sound. That would be fine. But there are lots of other ways to cross the state. You could, for example, start in a Washington town called Pasco. That’s where M started in June of 2025.

In Pasco, M stayed at a Hampton Inn that was in the midst of transitioning into something else. He dined at a Mexican restaurant called Trejo’s, which was really good. In the morning he found Washington Hwy 124 and left Pasco heading east. Soon he found himself on a bridge crossing over the Snake River, just a mile north of where it flows into the Columbia. Oregonians tend to think of the Columbia as that big old thing that runs west across the top of the state until it finally reaches the Pacific Ocean. But at the place where the Snake flows into the Columbia, the Columbia is actually flowing southeast, which was something that M had not expected. However, as he himself was beginning his westward journey across Washington by heading east, he could hardly object if the Columbia was doing something similar. (More on that later.)

Since his first destination was Palouse Falls, he eventually turned off of 124 and took a small road northeast toward Clyde and Lyons Ferry. The route led him out the farming country he’d been seeing and into something…different.

When M got to Lyons Ferry he found that it doesn’t have a ferry anymore. But it is still the spot where the Palouse River flows into the Snake River. And it is quite a place, in its way. For one thing, there is a rather striking railroad bridge over the Snake just downstream from where the Palouse comes in.

The Snake is curving around on the left and the Palouse is entering from the right. The birds are just sitting there.

There’s also a highway bridge. At its north end there’s a nice state park down among the trees.

M crossed the highway bridge and found that the main road made a hard left. It then took him under the railroad bridge, which at that point looked like this:

From Lyons Ferry–the place of the two bridges–it’s just a few more miles to Palouse Falls State Park. To use the park, you have to display a Discover Washington recreation pass. Fortunately, M had bought such a pass. Less fortunately, he had forgotten to bring it. So he parked in the main lot anyway and hoped for the best. The place was mostly empty. Here’s his first glimpse of the falls.

And here’s the big picture:

Remember that railroad bridge at Lyons Ferry? That same rail line passes very near to Palouse Falls. M took the following photo from a little bridge where the Palouse State Park road crosses over the track. The falls are just a few hundred yards away.

Click the link to see drone footage of a Canadian Pacific train coming down from the north through this exact spot.

Now that he’d seen the waterfall, it was time for M to get serious about his goal of traveling west. Naturally, his first step was to drive northeast. Sigh. But not for long. At a town called Washtucna (population 211, said to have been named for a prominent Palouse Native American) he turned left onto Hwy 126 and headed west. It was at about this time that the day started getting warmer, which was unfortunate because the air conditioning on M’s truck wasn’t working. The fan roared, but the air coming out of the vents was awfully warm. Great.

At this point M was aiming to get to the town of Othello, where he figured he could turn north and make a visit to a place called Drumheller Channels. It was only about 45 miles to Othello, but the temperature was up to 88. M drove with both windows slightly open to get some air circulation and to ameliorate the greenhouse effect. It was hot and noisy. He thought of the old days, a trip he’d taken with his family from Utah to Colorado in the early sixties. That had been a hot ride also–back in the days when cars didn’t have air conditioning. As far as M is concerned, we–as a society–should probably not go back to those days, at least not till things go truly bad.

From Othello it was just fifteen minutes to the Drumheller Channels National Natural Landmark. M had never before experienced anything called a National Natural Landmark. What was that supposed to be exactly? Well, here’s what it looked like from the viewpoint:

Hmm. M was not impressed. This landmark, whatever it was, just looked hot, dry and seriously lacking in shade. But, as it happens, there are some landmarks that you can only really see if you use your imagination. (And yes, that does mean that M had driven fifty miles through the heat just so he could visit an imaginary landmark, but bear with us.) The interesting thing about this landscape is the matter of how it came to exist–the past events that caused it to be what we see today.

There are in fact lots of places in Washington that are similar to this. The first person to study them and provide an explanation of how they were formed was an Univ. of Washington geologist named J Harlen Bretz. In the summer of 1922, Bretz became fascinated by the geology of the eastern part of the state. He saw that the landscape included what appeared to be very large potholes, ripples and water channels. These are the same features that are found today in rivers everywhere. The only difference was that the ones he was seeing in the landscape were up to a hundred times larger. He concluded that these channeled scablands–as they are now called–must have been created by one or more massive floods in the distant past. During the next few years Bretz published a series of papers on the topic, all of which were unanimously rejected by the Geology establishment, which was then dominated by Ivy League Geology departments.

Bretz stuck to his guns and forty years of academic debate ensued. During those years another geologist, Joseph Pardee, began publishing his findings concerning Glacial Lake Missoula. Pardee’s work provided more evidence in support of Bretz’s theories, as did analysis of satellite photos and other research in the 1970’s. In 1979, when Bretz was 96, he was awarded the Penrose Medal, the Geological Society of America’s highest honor. “All my enemies are dead,” he told his son, “so I have no one to gloat over.”

So…to properly appreciate the view at the Drumheller Channels National Natural Landmark, all you have to do is imagine that that there is a river flowing over this scene from left to right–a really big river, a river 500 feet deep and who knows how many miles wide. Let’s try looking at the photo again and this time adding in the river.

Of course if the river was 600 feet deep, we’d be standing here under 350 feet under water. So, to avoid our imaginary drowning, maybe we should move along.

When M left the Drumheller Scablands viewpoint, it was getting to be lunchtime. He had prepared himself a lunch before leaving Pasco. Now what he needed was some shady place where he could sit down and eat it. His best bet was to find a park in Othello (pop. 8,549). He ended up in Pioneer Park, which may not be the most pleasant park ever made. It is on the main highway through town and just half a block from another busy route. But…it had a picnic table in the shade and a lovely view of this USAF T-33 training aircraft. The T-33 was developed in the 1951 for the express purpose of teaching experienced propeller plane pilots how to fly jets.

Othello’s connection to the U.S. Air Force dates back to the cold war era. From 1951 to 1973, the 637th Radar Squadron was stationed just outside of town.

If you ever find yourself in downtown Othello, take a drive up North Broadway Avenue to the north end of town. That will take about a minute and a half. There you will see a half dozen or so large industrial buildings, some of which look like factories. M saw them as he drove through and wondered what they were making. Turns out it that pretty much everything in Othello is about potatoes. The industrial buildings are all either cold storage facilities or factories that make frozen potatoes. The complex in the north end of Othello is owned by a company called McCain. Another similar complex a few miles east of town is owned by Simplot. The production of these two facilities combined means that Othello processors account for 1.5 billion pounds of frozen potatoes annually, roughly 15% of all North American production. By coincidence, the small bag of Kettle chips that M had with his Pioneer Park lunch weighed exactly 1.5 ounces. They were delicious.

The day was advancing and M wasn’t even halfway across the state. It was time to get a move on. M got back in the truck and drove down South Broadway Ave till he could turn west onto Washington Hwy 24. This would take him across the top of a large arid plain called the Hanford Reach and then along to the city of Yakima. The Hanford Reach, as M saw it while driving across its northernmost section, looked like this.

At this point M was following Hwy 24 straight west through a portion of what is now the Hanford Reach National Monument. The Monument was created in 2000 and includes 325 square miles of land. Those 325 square miles had previously been part of a security buffer zone within the Hanford Nuclear Site. On the map below the jagged blue and gray line shows the extent of the original Hanford Nuclear Site. The gray areas are the land that was removed from the nuclear site in 2000 and turned into a National Monument. The white area in the center is the core of the original nuclear site and is now called the Dept. of Energy Hanford Reservation. It covers 586 square miles. The thick black line that runs from the upper left to lower right is the Columbia River. M’s route is shown in green.

You can see on the map that M crossed the Columbia River just a few miles west of a small gray square labelled B/C. M remembers crossing the river and noticing two things. First, how odd it was to again see the river flowing eastward and second, that it was a much smaller Columbia River than he was used to seeing. What he didn’t quite realize at that moment was how near he was to the site of the Hanford B and C nuclear reactors. Completed in 1944, Hanford B was the world’s first large scale plutonium production reactor. Hanford B produced plutonium for the world’s first atomic bomb–the test device that was detonated in New Mexico on July 16, 1945–and also for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

In the following years, seven more reactors were built on the south bank of the Columbia. All of them used river water for cooling. As the water passed through the reactors it became contaminated with radioactive isotopes of many elements and also with a number of toxic cleaning chemicals. When it left the reactor the water was directed into one of the more than one hundred “retention basins” where it was allowed to cool down from its 200 degree temperature. Retention time was “up to” six hours. Then, still quite warm, it was pumped back into the river. (See this article for details about the effects of this practice.) The Hanford reactor bank continued to produce weapons grade plutonium for the next 27 years..

Once past Hanford, Hwy 24 took M westward toward Yakima. He got there in mid afternoon and stopped only to get gas before taking Hwy 12 northwest into the foothills of the Cascades. Slowly but surely, as he climbed into the mountains, the temperature declined. Good. Before too long he reached the summit at White Pass and began descending down the west side of the mountains. The road was good but had only two lanes and was very curvy. The scenery made a nice change from that of the central and eastern parts of the state.

Shortly after he stopped to see the waterfall, as M was continuing down the mountain, going reasonably fast, he suddenly noticed a white car right behind him, very close behind him. It was some kind of exotic sports car, possibly a Lamborghini; he couldn’t really tell. Clearly the driver would like to pass. Just as clearly, what with all the constant curves, passing would not be safe. While M was stewing about this, another car came up close behind the white one. It was also an exotic, a Ferrari. Behind that appeared a red Porsche, and behind that several more vehicles of the same sort. M couldn’t see how many because of the curves in the road. He thought it must be some high end car club out on a run. They were probably based in Seattle and planned to loop back up that way when they were done with Hwy 12. M did not like being in the front of this particular group. It had been a long day and this was not something he had planned on dealing with.

After a few minutes and a few more curves, M realized that the experience was a little like driving the pace car at the beginning of the Indianapolis 500. The idea there is for the pace car to drive one lap of the raceway at a very moderate speed with all the real racing cars tucked in obediently behind. At the end of that one lap, the pace car darts quickly out of the way, the race drivers all hit the gas and the event begins. On this road, though, there was no place for M to pull over and get out of the way. But wait, maybe there was. What about that place? It was on the wrong side of the road but never mind. M turned on his left turn signal, hit the gas and quickly crossed over to the wide spot, braking hard as he arrived. He was rewarded with an almost immediate roar of sound as the line of sportsters all got back on the throttle. The white Lambo shot ahead and disappeared in the blink of an eye around the next curve, followed by all the other cars in the line. It turns out there were ten or more cars in the group. One driver, seventh or eighth in line, gave M a casual wave as they passed. Then it was all quiet again.

Eventually M got down out of the mountains and found the town of Morton, where he checked into a motel. The next morning he continued on through the towns of Mossyrock, Saltum and Ethel. A little after 10:00 AM, he reached Interstate 5 near the town of Napavine (pop. 1,988). He didn’t quite reach the shores of the Pacific, bur he’d gone far enough. He turned south toward Oregon and home.

Wait a minute, is that the same Napavine that hosts the annual Napavine Funtime Festival? Why yes it is. Thanks for asking. And did they used to have a parade starring a teenage beauty who had been chosen as that year’s “Princess Napawinah” in honor of the 18th-century Newaukum tribal leader for whom the town was named? Well…yeah, more or less. Was the princess usually a white girl? Uh..we dunno. But was she dressed in elaborate “pan-Indian” regalia of a kind never worn by any real Native American woman anywhere? By all reports, that is correct. Is there any good evidence that there ever was a real woman named Napawyna for whom the town could be named? Actually, no. Might the town’s name come instead from the Newaukum word “napavoon” meaning “small prairie?” Possibly. And does the town still honor Princess Napawinah during their Funtime Festival? Since 2023, no. And finally, are some longtime Napavine residents still really upset about that transition? Almost certainly.

June 3, 2025June 3, 2025

Meandering on the Way — May 22 to 31, 2025

Thursday, May 22nd

We just had to drive up to Portland today. We had found this travel company, you see, that promised to deliver us all the way to Albany, New York in just half a day(!) All we had to do was give them some money and show up at a certain place and they would do the rest. Specifically, they said they were going to hoist us up 30,000 feet into the air and then drop us down into Colorado, where we would just bounce back up again and eventually come down in Albany, only a little the worse for wear. It sounded ridiculous, but what if it was actually true? We couldn’t resist giving it a try.

Well, somehow or other, it worked. The only slightly disconcerting thing was that we arrived in Albany at the unlikely hour of 12:30 AM. So there we were, pulling our luggage through another airport, pleased to see that the car rental place was still open. We got a car and went to a nearby motel. We asked the desk clerk where we could get something to eat at that hour. Well, said he, just right down the road there’s a Golden Grain. So we drove for a block for so and sure enough, Golden Grain was open and active. It was a sort of fast food Italian place, so we ordered a couple of slices of pizza and sat down. We had asked if they had beer or wine and the young man behind the counter said that they didn’t. He was pretty young, probably too young to be allowed to serve alcohol even if they had it. The rest of the staff were around the same age.

The customers were young too. Nobody in the place looked more than twenty and only a few looked more than seventeen. (Except of course us.) Apparently it was a kind of teen hangout, a place you could go if you were too young to get into a bar. What were they all doing there at 1:00 AM on a school day? We don’t know. Guess it’s just how things are these days. We enjoyed the “young people” atmosphere as we ate our slices. E was interested in observing the hairstyles of our young companions. The girls had long straight hair, much the same as young women of yesteryear, but the boys were all sporting some sort of mushroom on top of their heads.

Friday, May 23nd

From Albany we started north, wandering leisurely through the area around Ballston Spa, where E grew up. From there we went to Glens Falls where we spent some quality time at Mrs H’s place with her and with S, who had come down from the north country for the occasion. Of course we had Hart’s pizza, followed on this occasion by Esther Foskett’s Birthday Cake.

Saturday, May 24th

We drove up to Huletts Landing, where J₂‘s family has a small compound on the eastern side of Lake George. It’s beautiful this time of year, but coolish, so only some of the camps showed signs of occupancy on this Memorial Day weekend.

The view from the dock, looking out across Kitchal Bay toward the main body of the lake. The piece of land to the right is a small island in the mouth of the bay–a nice destination for swimmers when the water is a little warmer..

The lake wasn’t real busy, but there was some traffic.

Sunday, May 25th

We rode with J₁ and J₂ over to Vermont to attend the graduation ceremony at Middlebury College. E has a degree from Middlebury, as does one of her nephews and also our Corvallis friend A. The class of 2025 included her grand nephew T, who earned his degree with a double major in History and Economics. By now, he has already headed off to Boston, where he will be working for Wayfair. Another grand nephew is set to graduate in 2027.

The weather outside was cool and damp, but the rain held off.

Monday, May 26th

A day at the lake. It was great to be able to spend some time with J₂ and his family, plus his new friend D. We had a boat ride in the afternoon and in the evening earned our keep by producing a meal. E provided spinach lasagna and salad and M made fresh dinner rolls via Rhodes frozen dough.

Tuesday, May 27th

We took the rented BMW through Adinrondack Park, which M had never really seen. It was lovely but our plans to have a nice lunch in one of the small towns along the way were thwarted, as most of the good places were closed, including the intriguingly named Paradox Lake Brewing Company. What a disappointment. We ended up getting some deli sandwiches and then stopping at a seemingly nice place just off the road where we planned to have a picnic. However, the local flying things were so excited to see us that we hastily returned to the car and ate in there. Wow!

Thursday, May 29th

This was our day to return to Oregon, but since our plane didn’t leave until late afternoon, we went down to Malta, NY and took J₁ out to lunch. We didn’t have a lot of time, so we thought we’d just go to Macdonald’s to get something quick. Boy, did that not work out! It was a nice new building in a pretty, almost parklike setting, but the new staff hadn’t quite figured things out…

Eventually we got back to the airport and caught our plane. We were flying on Southwest, which we have always liked. We appreciated their free checked bags and didn’t mind their unique boarding system or the way their planes had only one main cabin with no first or business class. It made them different, at least. As it turns out, all these things are changing. Over the last year, an investor group called Elliott Investment Management have acquired a significant portion of Southwest’s stock and have won six seats on the airline’s board of directors. For whatever reason, they mean to change the direction of the company. The free bag policy ended just days after we booked. The boarding system and cabin spaces will soon change to be in line with other airlines. Sigh. Perhaps it’s our imagination, but their usually comical staff seemed very subdued.

Is that why our flight to Portland was 45 minutes late? Who knows. It was a long day for us and 45 minutes didn’t make too much difference. We got to Corvallis at 1:00 AM Oregon time, 4:00 AM back in Albany.

Saturday, May 31st

Today was the annual Get Outdoors Day/Un Dia en el Bosque at the OSU Research Forest. E again served as a volunteer bilingual assistant.

The weather was great and there were lots of attendees to keep E busy.

May 21, 2025

Meandering on the Way — May 16 to 21, 2025

Friday, May 16th

We have a big trip coming up on the 22nd, but first we snuck in a little one. We were interested in seeing two places in Central Oregon: The Oregon Badlands Wilderness and the quasi ghost town of Hardman.

To do that we had to leave early (ish) on the first day. It was around 8:30 when we set off. We were in the Frontier, E at the wheel. Four hours, one driver change, and one mountain range later, we arrived at the trailhead. It was about 60 degrees and a little breezy, with a mixture of clouds and sunshine.

The wilderness area is a 30,000 acre patch of high desert twenty-five miles east of Bend. The dominant vegetation is western juniper and sagebrush. It’s generally flat, but there are hundreds of igneous outcroppings poking up out of the sandy soil. The landscape was formed about 80,000 years ago by lava flows from the Newberry Volcano, which lies many miles to the southwest. Geologists say that the lava made its way from the volcano by flowing more than twenty miles through a system of lava tubes. When the lava flowed out of the tubes, it spread out over a large area. Today there is still only a thin layer of soil over the underlying lava, and much of that soil can be traced back to ash fall from the tremendous eruption of Mt Mazama about 8,000 years ago.

In this area the junipers very often sprout next to or even in the midst of rocky outcrops. This tree may look sickly and confused, but it is very much alive.

The trees grow slowly but can live for hundreds of years. The oldest in the area is estimated to be about 1,600 years of age. Could this one be a thousand?

Trees are not the only attraction. This is Leucocrinum montanum, sometimes called sand lilly.

It was a nice hike, but somehow– just as the afternoon got hotter–we ended up walking a mile or so farther than we meant to. E remembers we did the same thing in Aranjuez. So we can now refer to this mistake as ‘pulling an Aranjuez.’ Still, it was only about 3:30 when we finished. We then drove over the mountains to Prineville by taking OR 27–the Crooked River Highway. We stayed in the Country Inn and Suites by Radisson, which was quite nice despite being nothing like the Radissons we remember from other places and other times. Good dinner at a Japanese Fusion restaurant called Bonito Fresh.

Saturday, May 17th

We got our breakfast at the Country Inn, and couldn’t help marveling at the specialized and super processed nature of American motel breakfast food. This is the true American exceptionalism; we don’t care how awful something is as long as someone tells us it’s free. After breakfast we gassed up and made the hundred mile drive to the ghost town of Hardman, fifty quick miles on US 126 followed by a much slower 50 miles on OR 207. Despite the frequent light showers, we found that this last half was a fantastic stretch of scenery, probably at its best at this time of year.

White settlers first came to Hardman in the 1870s, drawn by the abundance of excellent agricultural land. In the early part of that decade, three separate towns sprang up, all within a few miles of one another. One was founded by an ex-rustler named Royce. His town was called Dairyville. Just one mile away, another group–one with a less colorful origin story–founded a town called Adamsville. For reasons that remain obscure, both of these towns had alternate names. Dairyville was known to some as Dogtown; Adamsville’s alternative name was Yaller Dog. Into this melange of two towns with four names came a newcomer named David Hardman, who started yet another town just a mile southeast. This settlement became known simply as Hardman. In the mid eighteen eighties Hardman successfully lobbied to have the first area post office located in his town, which gave it a certain amount of prestige. Just to confuse things, however, Hardman soon moved his post office to Dairytown, which he then renamed Hardman. As for Adamsville, it also managed to get a post office, but its post office closed after just one year. Adamsville then withered and from 1890 onward only one town remained: Hardman née Dairyville/Dogtown.

By 1900, it has been claimed, Hardman was a bustling place with three general stores, two hotels, two feed stables, two blacksmiths, a saloon, a barber shop, a church, schools, a post office, a newspaper, a telephone office, two meeting halls, a skating rink, and a racetrack. In 1920, however, the town suffered a fatal setback when the railroad decided to bypass Hardman and run their line through Hepner, twenty miles to the north. At that point Hepner became the regional commercial center and Hardman quickly declined, soon becoming something of a ghost town.

These days Hardman is a bit peculiar. There are a lot of old wooden buildings dating from before 1920 and many of these are abandoned and falling to ruin. And there are abandoned junk vehicles everywhere: cars, trucks and machinery from many different eras. There are no paved streets, no city services, no schools and no businesses. And yet…some of houses are in good condition and are clearly inhabited. One source claims that there are 35 year-round residents and a couple dozen more out-of-town owners who visit their properties from time to time. You only need to count the number of recently reroofed structures to see that the town is not totally abandoned. Also, there is a functioning community center in a well-preserved building that was originally built by the local IOOF and is now in the National Register of Historic Places. A 2025 source asserts that it is currently the site of monthly potluck dinners.

The lilac trees aren’t quite as tall as the house. Not yet.

Panoramic view of North Second Street

This is the parking lot in the Hardman central plaza. One of the choicest parking spaces is taken by this nice old Dodge with a yellow exterior…

…and a red interior. Note that these older models came equipped with nest boxes.

diet — This semi tractor has found a quiet place to retire following a work related injury.

This is one of at least four(!) mini dozers that have also been retired to Hardman. Busted out campers and trailer homes far outnumber the dozers, but they aren’t nearly as cute.

We walked around the town a little, then got back in the truck and drove up to a hill overlooking the town where we could stop and eat our lunch. After that, we set out to return to Prineville. E was at the wheel as we headed south. Hardman is located near the southern edge of the rolling grasslands of north central Oregon, so it wasn’t long before we left the agricultural landscape behind and entered into a portion of what are called the Blue Mountains. OR Highway 207 is a well-maintained road, but it is a fairly narrow. Here it follows a shallow canyon that leads through the foothills toward an eventual 4,600 ft summit. E doesn’t normally do curvy roads, but this wasn’t too bad and there was almost no traffic at all. Unluckily for her, we soon came upon a cattle drive. That is to say, we caught up with a sizable herd that was being moved from lower winter pastures to higher summer ones. They too were taking route 207. The herd was big enough to completely block the road as the mass of cows flowed slowly up the canyon. Four or more cowboys on four wheelers patrolled the front, sides and back of the herd. Another four wheeler, larger and more deluxe, followed closely behind. Also following the herd were three young women on horseback and two small black dogs. E stopped. We regarded the scene.

The large four wheeler also stopped and an older fellow with a very fine mustache got out and came up to E’s window. He explained that he was going to have to slowly lead us up through the herd and that E should follow closely behind. He was polite, though not real happy. He got into his four wheeler and drove slowly into the ragged back end of the herd, where the cows more or less made way for him. E followed. Now, we had dealt with this kind of thing before, but never with E driving. The cowboys were doing most of the work, creating just enough space for our truck to slide through. The only hard part was that we were supposed to follow the lead vehicle very, very closely, so that no cows would be tempted to slip in between us and the pilot. When E lagged a little, one of the cowboys made frantic motions signaling for her to close the gap. M just got to watch and had a chance to see lots of different cows very close up. They were beautiful. Most were black, but some were dark brown and there were a few big yellow ones. Were there a dozen or two calves among the group? Well, sure.

All went well and soon we were through the front of the herd and on our way. Eve couldn’t help thinking that certain aspects of this tour had been badly organized. M thought it was fun.

Sunday, May 18th

We made the long drive back from Prineville to Corvallis. Nothing worth mentioning or photographing. Well, almost nothing. We did pass through Sisters.

Wednesday, May 21st

We’re making final preparations for our trip to the far east, the far east, that is, of the United States. Leaving tomorrow.

May 14, 2025

Meandering on the Way — May 5 to 10, 2025

Monday, May 5th

In the morning we took a walk in the forest.

Here’s a sure sign of spring: a wild iris poking its head up through the poison oak.

In the afternoon, M took off on another drive, heading east over the Cascades and checking in to a cheap hotel in Bend. Why Bend? Was it because he had registered for a Barrel House Tour at the Deschutes Brewery? Or because he had heard about a nice 2021 Porsche 911 Turbo that someone over there was practically giving away? Or was he needing to stop in at Kara’s to replenish his supply of Maplewood smoked bacon infused olive oil and bourbon barrel aged balsamic vinegar, handcrafted by Olivelle, a mother and daughter team based in Bozeman, Montana? No, nothing as exciting as that. He just wanted a place to sleep for the night so he would be fresh in the morning to go driving around in the southern unit of the Ochoco National Forest.

Tuesday, May 6th

The plan was to go some miles east of Bend on US Hwy 20 and then turn north and go over the Maury Mountains down to Oregon Hwy 380. Can one cross these low mountains without having to deal with bumper to bumper traffic? Oh yeah. Ideally, one might do it without being troubled by any traffic at all. M gave it a try. The first critical step of this project was to stop at Whole Foods and get a premade sandwich. That done he set out.

Twenty-five miles later, leaving pavement behind, he turned north onto the Crooked River highway. Less than a mile later, he turned east onto Merril Road. After ten minutes or so, he realized that Merril Road was a big mistake. So much for his carefully made plan. He returned to Crooked River Road and then–after yet another false start–finally turned east onto Bear Creek Road, which turned out to be the sensible thing to do. After a number of miles he then turned north onto Tackman Road, which led him up out of ranch country and into the National Forest. There, he turned west onto Forest Road 16, and then south onto Forest Road 17. This took him down to Antelope Flat Reservoir, a very pretty spot where he could stop and eat his sandwich. Then he drove back up 17, following it all the way over the crest of the mountains and down the other side, reaching Oregon 380 at Pine Creek. There were plenty of other roads that he would have liked to explore–notably the very interesting looking Forest Road 1750–but it was already 1:30. He was three and a half hours from home and it was his night to cook. So it was back onto pavement, Pine Creek to Prineville to Redmond to Sisters to Corvallis.

Here’s a bit of Tackman Road as it climbs the south side of the Maurys. Tackman eventually enters national forest land up closer to the top.

Up in the higher reaches, there had been a fire, probably last fall.

…but this strangely dense stand of young ones seem to be dead.

Friday, May 9th

We went up to Vancouver, WA today and stayed the night in preparation for some Mother’s Day festivities scheduled for Saturday.

Saturday, May 10th

When asked what she wanted for Mother’s Day, E had requested a hike somewhere she had never been and the Andees had made plans accordingly. We met them at their place in the morning and the five us–four people and Haley the dog–set out for the Wahclella Falls Trailhead, forty-three miles up the Columbia River Gorge. The trail turned out to be just what we needed–challenging in places but never too much for our level of ability. The trail goes up a lovely narrow canyon. There was a major fire in the area about nine years ago, after which the trail was impassible. Back when he worked for the Forest Service, one of our A’s had a hand in rebuilding it. This experience also taught him how to find a connection to an extra parking lot when things were tight.

Lots of dead stubs remaining after nine years; also lots of new growth.

About halfway up to the big waterfall, we passed a smaller one plunging down a rock face just a few feet from the trail.

Here is Wahclella Falls, where the trail ends.

After the hike we went back to the Andees’ and had a lunch of quiche, salad and cupcakes. To top it all off, E got even more nice things to take away.

April 28, 2025

Meandering on the Way — April 19 to 27, 2025

Saturday, April 19th

We are now obsessing over a horrible jigsaw puzzle. We are so “grateful” to the east coast “friends” who passed it along to us. You know who you are.

Sunday, April 20th

We celebrated Easter Sunday by taking the red car over to Newport for brunch. Very nice weather, partly sunny with temps in the 50s. Newport seemed very uncrowded. Lunch included an interesting dessert:

After lunch we went over to the site of the original Yaquina Bay lighthouse, a wooden structure built in 1871 on the north side of the entrance to Yaquina Bay. It was used for only three years before being replaced by the Yaquina Head Lighthouse, which was built on higher ground farther north. The old lighthouse is closed for restoration these days, but there’s a nice little park there and a path down to the beach across some old dunes.

Here’s a view from the parking lot looking southwest. Beyond the dunes, you can see the north and south jetties that extend out from the mouth of the bay. In the past nine years, seven lives have been lost crossing the bar.

This view to the southeast shows a portion of the iconic Yaquina Bay Bridge. Just beyond that lies another important local landmark–the Rogue brewery.

From the parking lot we took a trail downward toward the dunes. It’s an old route, originally constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression.

We descended these charming old stairs and continued onward…

,,,until we found the path uncharmingly flooded by seasonal rains.

After detouring around the water, we got down to the level of the dunes, and then climbed up to the top of one. There we found some purple flowers that E’s phone identified as the blossoms of a leguminous plant called Sea Pea, Lathyrous japonicas.

Tuesday, April 22nd

Today E got back to work helping with reading at the bilingual elementary school. She missed last Tuesday due to cataract surgery. Today, while she was working with a fourth grader, a program staffer came around and gave the boy a little sticker. When the staffer had gone, E asked the boy what the sticker was for. He said it was a reward for doing his reading. E said that she was also doing her reading and asked why she didn’t also get a sticker. The boy thought for a minute and then said, “I think it’s because you’re old. You’re still beautiful though.” Eve says that the boy is in fact not greatly interested in reading, but she predicts a bright future for him anyway.

While E was being responsible, M took off on a joyride, making his way up to Portland and then heading east up I-84 through the Columbia Gorge, where he spent the night at the Cousins Hotel in The Dalles.

Wednesday, April 23rd

In the morning M had to go another forty miles up the freeway before finally turning south at Blalock. Whew. Finally the real driving could really begin.

Blalock Canyon Road is a narrow, worn looking squiggle of pavement with no shoulders, lots of curves, good visibility, and no traffic whatever–a nice warmup for a day of driving. The road ends at a T-junction and M turned left onto Cedar Springs Lane, where he had a chance to slow down and do a little 21st Century sightseeing.

Did he see any cedar trees or springs? Uh…no. Those must be located on some other part of Cedar Springs Lane. What he did see, on his left, was the southern edge of a very large facility called Chemical Waste Management of the Northwest. Now, back In the good old days, if you had some chemical waste that you wanted to get rid of, you could just truck it to the nearest river and dump it in, preferably on a moonless night. But there’s less of that now. Instead, “customers in the states of Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Hawaii, Alaska and provinces of Western Canada” can call CWMNW to make their toxic waste go away. Here are a few pages from the brochure. It makes for interesting reading.

We might all wish that when CWMNW collects or accepts chemical waste, the material would then go to some state-of-the-art processing plant where it would be detoxified and rendered harmless. Ho-ho-ho. Unfortunately, it appears that no one really knows how to do that. But if toxic materials are not going away, then they will have to be permanently stored, stored in such a way, hopefully, as to minimize the hazard. And that, of course, is the purpose of the CWMNW site near Arlington, Oregon. The facility is just a large, specially constructed landfill complex. Most of it is around behind a hill, so you can’t see much, but there is a diagram on their web site. Even better, you can use the navigation app on your phone to bring up satellite photos of the place. From the road he was on, M only saw the main entrance, a railroad siding, and a quarter-mile long field filled with a hundred or so containers. Most of these were the standard metal shipping containers, but there were also some other things that looked like giant dark green bins with high mounded covers held down by green cables. Weird.

After that excitement, as he neared the junction of Cedar Springs Lane and Oregon Hwy 19, M came to another kind of place that didn’t exist in the good old days: a large wind power construction and maintenance facility. You know, the kind of place where you see very large, blindingly white support columns lying on their sides waiting for some giant to pick them up and plant them somewhere.

There’s a lot of wind in the Columbia Gorge and large numbers of turbines have been built to take advantage.

Moving along down OR 19, M rapidly left the both the clean energy and the dirty chemicals behind. Once you get farther away from the gorge, there are miles and miles of mostly treeless country, with lots of ranch land and wheat fields, not so many houses, and not so many towns. The roads are mostly paved now, but might not have been when they were originally laid down 75 or 125 years ago. They tend to follow the contours of the land more than our modern roads do. And the land has a lot of contour to it: up hill and down dale, with sudden little folds into which to drop and plenty of little ridges over which to climb. Very little traffic. Jaguar country.

After a bit M turned off OR 19 and drove east on OR 206, then went south again on OR 207. He passed through the towns of Hardman and Spray, and soon entered a somewhat more mountainous area. The road took him around the southern edge of Hoogie Doogie Mountain*, and eventually to a bare bones state park called Mule Shoe Recreation Area, which lies upon the banks of the John Day River. There he found some shade and ate his lunch.

After lunch came another 75 scenic and moderately entertaining miles along US 26 to the town of Prineville. Prineville used to be a nice little place, famous only for being the birthplace of the Les Schwab tire empire. Nowadays, it’s a cloud server town. Facebook (Meta) has nine data centers there, each about twice the size of a Walmart. Apple has six big data centers. We do not have exact information about how much data can be stored in these centers, but total capacity is likely to be many petabytes. (A petabyte is roughly one billion megabytes, or 1,024 gigabytes.) The data centers provide around 1,000 jobs, some of which must pay pretty well, given the number of big new houses littering the mountainsides.

Thursday, April 24th

Tertulia with R and J this morning at Coffee Culture. R talked a little about the impact on OSU caused by the recent reduction in federal funding for scientific research. He noted that in past years federal research proposals would be rejected if they did not include a section about how the project would contribute to the societal goals of diversity, equity and inclusion. These days, of course, proposals will be rejected if they do include any mention of DEI.

Back in our living room on Oak Avenue, we have finally finished that jigsaw puzzle. It seemed awfully hard, but finally yielded to a “loaf by loaf” strategy.

Friday, April 25th

Lunch today with our old friend J.

Saturday, April 26th

Errands and garden work today.

The camus are blooming. Seems to be a great year for them.

And someone has been leaving peanuts out for the jays.

Sunday, April 27th

Pretty busy day. For breakfast we suffered through plain croissants–no chocolate. While we were out for a walk we noticed that our neighbors were having a plant sale. We went over to check it out and ended up buying a half dozen Ajuga starts. We also got the chance to tour their backyard, a wonderful place of beauty and repose.

After that M got to work in our own backyard while E took off on a joyride to yoga class at her friend L’s studio out in the country.

Later on we went to a dinner put on by the Corvallis Sister Cities program. Corvallis has two sister cities, one of which is Gondar, the one-time capital of the Ethiopian Empire. Since 2005 the CSC-Gondar group has worked with a number of NGO partners to support the city in the areas of education, at-risk children, nutrition, safe drinking water, reforestation, and watershed management. The dinner consisted of Ethiopian food, which as some of you may know, does not involve the use of knives, forks or spoons. So there we were, 175 Corvallians, all trying to figure out the best way to pick up our food by squeezing it between the layers of a folded piece of injera bread. Fortunately, generous supplies of napkins were provided. Injera is a soft, spongy flatbread. It is made from Teff flour and is thus gluten free. We also saw a display about how Ethiopian coffee is made and served. It seems that Ethiopians drink a lot of coffee.

At a traditional Ethiopian coffee drinking ceremony, guests can expect to drink three small cups of coffee. The first cup is called abol, the second is called tona and the third baraka. Baraka means blessing, and signifies the host’s wish to bless the guests. To refuse the third cup would be considered extremely rude. Let’s all of us remember that, just in case.

*If anyone recognizes the language of the Hoogie Doogie Mountain web site, please let us know in the comments.

April 13, 2025

Meandering on the Way — April 1 to 13, 2025

Tuesday, April 1st

So…here we are back in our house again. There’s definitely more space here than in that mini-apartment in Madrid. Wow. And speaking of space, the refrigerator here is empty. Can we survive on olives, pickles and ketchup? Probably not. We’re really missing that unopened bag of potato chips that we left behind in Madrid. Someone must have thought it was impractical to pack potato chips into an already bulging suitcase. We did bring some nuts from the plane, didn’t we? They must be here somewhere…

Outside, the yard is…uh…somewhat overgrown. Some of that grass is ten inches high. Makes the house look like it’s been abandoned. The neighbors can’t be too thrilled.

Wednesday, April 2nd

A little damp, but not really raining much. In the back yard, there is very little trace of the flowers that bloomed while we were gone. The crocuses have totally disappeared. The hyacinths are still standing, but their blossoms are all kaput. T sent is a couple of photos a few weeks back; otherwise we would have missed them both completely.

Some other flowers, however, were nice enough to wait until we got back: flowering currant, dwarf iris and tulips.

Thursday/Friday, April 3rd/4th

Better weather. It turns out that there were two big wind storms while we were gone. Lots of limbs came down into our front yard. A neighbor kindly removed some of the larger ones so as to make the house look a little less deserted. The grass really does need serious attention. M is working on it.

Saturday, April 5th

Good weather. M has finished the first round of lawn mowing. E is getting over a cold and is still taking antibiotics for an ear infection. The antibiotic cannot be taken with dairy, so E is having almond milk in her morning coffee. She is not thrilled.

Sunday, April 6th

E tried a new yoga class out at L’s house. She liked it very much.

Monday, April 7th

J and L from Utah arrived today for a visit. They’ve been visiting J’s daughters in Idaho and Washington. L is still working as a wrangler at a horse ranch and riding school. J is between construction projects. In theory he is debating about whether to take on a new project or to retire. No one is betting he will retire.

Tuesday, April 8th

We took J and L on a hike today over at The Crestmont Land Trust acreage near Cardwell Hill. We walked through intermittent rain, but the area was very lovely. We saw lots of that bright yellow green that only comes in early spring. Here and there we’d see a mountain cherry in bloom. For contrast, there was the dark green of the fir covered hills to the south. There are also a lot of oaks in the area. They are still leafless, so what you see now are thriving colonies of furry moss and papery lichens.

We also found a large eruption of fawn lilies, more of them in one place that we had ever seen before.

There were dozens spread out on the south side of the road…

…and a couple dozen more climbing the bank on the north side.

In the evening J and L helped us start a puzzle.

Wednesday, April 9th

J and L left this morning, just as we started on the hardest parts of the puzzle. They’re no dummies.

Thursday, April 10th

M did more lawn mowing today. Yes, we know, he just did that five days ago. Five days can be a long time in the spring.

We had dinner at B and B’s place. One of the B’s cooked thick chunks of halibut that the other B had caught on a fishing trip to Alaska. This was followed by lemon meringue pie! What a feast.

When we got home, we were drawn back into the puzzle. By 11:00 or so, it was done.

Friday, April 11th

We had our friend H over for dinner. She brought dessert: strawberries, wafer cookies and dulce de leche flavored spreadable caramel made with water buffalo milk. She also told us about the treatment she’s been getting to cure her occasional vertigo. Apparently it involves having your head twisted around at a certain angle, so as to revitalize the crystals of the inner ear. H is a great dinner guest.

Today’s quiz question: Which of the following was the country of origin of our dulce de leche water buffalo milk spreadable caramel? A. Cambodia B. Canada C. Colombia (Answer down a ways.)

Saturday, April 12th

Sunny weather today, with at least two more sunny days forecast. Okay! M went over the storage place and unwrapped the Jaguar. We drove up to Burgerville in Monmouth for lunch. Since the temperature was only 55 degrees, we left the top up. After lunch the temperature was up to 58, so we took the top down and went home the long way via Elkins Road and Airlie.

The tulips are still doing well out back. Our backyard camera has detected several incidences of a woman sneaking in and stealing some of the nicer blooms. Some of these have made it into the house.

Sunday, April 13th

A quiet day. We had our traditional Sunday breakfast of pain au chocolate and coffee. Later in the day, that woman snuck into our back yard again, this time making off with most of our rhubarb. It appears that a pie is in the offing. I can smell it now.

Answer to the Quiz: How the heck should we know? Do you know how tiny the print is on a tub of water buffalo spreadable caramel? Well…finally we dug out a strong magnifier; it’s from Colombia.

April 1, 2025

Meandering on the Way — March 25 to March 31, 2025

Tuesday, March 25th

We went to the Palace Hotel for lunch today, at the invitation of E’s godson Pedro, an architect who works at the hotel. A large part of his job is involved with the ongoing renovation/restoration of the hotel, which was built in 1912. Two hotels were constructed in Madrid that year—the Palace and the Ritz. They were built near each other in a neighborhood close to the Prado art museum, each vying to be more luxurious than the other. This competition continues today; the current restoration of the Palace will cost about one hundred million dollars. When it is complete, the Palace will be upbranded from Marriott/Westin to Marriott Luxury Collection.

On the main floor there are some 17th century tapestries that were part of the original 1912 decor. You can see part of one of them in the photo below. They have all been recently restored and look amazing.

The restaurant in the picture is called The Cupola and if you look up at the ceiling, you can see why. The dome is the original construction from 1912, but it too has just been restored, having been entirely disassembled with each individual piece of glass being either cleaned or replaced.

The main entrance has also been restored to be just as it was in 1912, as has the reception lobby just inside. Lots of marble in there.

The library was empty, which was nice because it meant that Pedro could give us a quiet look around.

On the wall is a framed bar napkin dating from the 1930’s. The figures were drawn by Salvador Dali; the poem is by Federico Garcia Lorca. It reads: Alfonso doce de plata/vuela en la moneda blanca/De corcho y de hoja lata/Mi cuerno de la abundancia/Me gasté en el bar del Palace/Mis monedillas de agua.

Wednesday, March 26th

We visited Aranjuez today, a town that was first established some five hundred years ago as the site of a summer palace. Today it is a town of 60,000, but until 1752, only members of the royal family were allowed to live there. There’s a palace, of course, and several huge courtyards. The main attractions are the extensive gardens, the biggest of which is the Island Garden—which is partially enclosed by a bend in the Tajo river and features dozens of big old trees as well as smaller plantings.

We had hoped to arrive early, but as it happened we didn’t arrive until…lunchtime! So we had the menu del día at a restaurant outside the palace grounds. It was the traditional kind of place with heavy white tablecloths and complementary rolls which the waiter tosses, not onto your starter plate, but just onto the tablecloth next to you. Good.

Another attraction of the site is the Museo de Falúas Reales. The Spanish word ‘falúa’ translates to ‘barge’ but these are recreational barges, not cargo carriers, and they have their own propulsion system—a bunch of guys pulling heavy oars. The Tajo river runs past the Aranjuez palace and long ago a weir was built to create a one-kilometer-long stretch of calm water. It seems that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was fashionable for kings to have nice boats that they could go float around in whenever they felt like it. They weren’t for travel, just for fun. In England, Henry the Eighth had one for toddling around on the Thames. For the Spanish kings, Aranjuez was the favorite place to go barging and the museum holds five well-restored barges from the era.

It was a long walk to the see the barges, a walk which took us through many acres of royal fields and fruit trees.

This is the smallest of the barges on display. To our eyes, it was also the prettiest. It’s built of mahogany.

This was the oldest barge…and pretty much the ugliest.

Once we’d finished with the barge museum, it was time to get back to the train station and return to Madrid. The train line between Madrid and Aranjuez is a little bit special. It was completed in 1851 and was just the second rail line ever built in Spain. So why wasn’t it the first one? Something else was more important than taking the king to his boats?

Thursday, March 27th

Finally made it to the Thyssen Bornemisza museum today. Wonderful place. Here are some things we noticed.

Autumn by Frederic Church. 1875. The Thyssen has a whole room full of paintings from the Hudson River School .

Here’s another American scene: New York Street with Moon by Georgia O’Keefe

The Viaduct by Paul Delvaux, 1963. Delvaux was a Belgian painter who is said to have been obsessed with nudes, trains, nightfall, hanging lights, and mirrors. This one hits four of the five.

Friday, March 28th

Today our friend M-HP met us in the city at Moncloa and we rode the bus out to Galapagar-La Navata, the northern suburb where he lives. We had lunch at a restaurant called Tablao and then went with him to pick up his two granddaughters from school. The girls are ten and twelve, so they both attend the same colegio. It was interesting to see how the parents came to pick up their kids. In Corvallis, we just have long lines of cars in which drivers wait patiently for the kids to come out and hop in. But at this school, the parents park their cars, get out, and walk over to the main gate, which is closed at that point and watched over by a guard. Then, about five minutes before school lets out, the guard opens the gate and the parents go into the school grounds and take up position near whatever door they know their kids will exit from. In our case, we waited in the back of the school by the playground…

When M-HP’s granddaughters came out, the five of us—in a throng of other parents and kids—walked back to the front of the school and exited through the same gate that we had entered.

We all went to the kids’ house and the girls had a little snack that Grandpa had bought them at the restaurant. E particularly enjoyed seeing the girls, as they are the granddaughters of her friend Margie who passed away two years ago. E was touched that the older girl told her that when she grows up she wants to be an English teacher “like Grandma.”

Saturday, March 29th

Our stay here is almost over. Today we met our friends L&M and M&P in Rivas to say our final goodbyes. Of course this involved another nice meal, this time at an Italian restaurant named Cabiria. Anyone recognize the name? We didn’t, but now we know that the restaurant was named for the main character in the 1957 Fellini film Nights of Cabiria. The decor was quite amusing and artistic.

We were very lucky that it was a sunny day and we spent time before and after the dinner sitting on L&M’s back terrace next to the swimming pool. That’s where we got dessert:

As we said goodbye, we all wondered if this might be the last time we would see each other. Travel gets harder as we age and Corvallis is a long, long way from Madrid.

Sunday, March 30th

This morning E went out to a bakery and got us a couple of fresh chocolate croissants. Clearly, she is well adapted to this environment. After breakfast, the day’s main question was whether all our stuff is going to fit into our suitcases.

Later, with cases mostly packed, we returned to our local restaurant for one last Spanish meal.

Monday, March 31st

We got up at 3:00am this morning and took an Uber to the airport. After checking bags, scanning our VAT refund code, getting through security, and finding our gate, we finally had breakfast around 5:00. By 6:30 we were in the air headed for Amsterdam; by 10:35 we were in another airplane, this one headed over the pole to Portland.

The plane was a KLM 787 configured to have a “Comfort Premium” section that sits just behind first class and in front of economy. The key comfort feature is space–lots of leg room, oodles of foot room and lots of space on both sides. It’s really nice. Our Delta flight to Europe from JFK had also been on a 787 with the same Comfort Premium configuration.

Although our section was toward the front, we were not permitted to use the First Class bathrooms. Of course not! So, from our section, if you wanted to go to the bathroom, you had to push aside a curtain and walk back through the economy section for a ways. That was a weird experience. As soon as you push that curtain aside, the sight before you is appalling. Oh my god, you think, look at these people, the way they’re jammed together. And you know just what it feels like because you’ve been there. And then right after that, you can’t stop yourself from feeling a twinge of superiority because you’re so much better off than those poor souls. And that makes you feel guilty. Why does it have to work this way? What have I done, you ask, to deserve this superior experience? Not that much, really, nothing you can think of offhand.

The weather was clear, but the view out the window was pretty dull, just many hours of featureless Arctic whiteness. Until, suddenly, it wasn’t quite so featureless any more.

As the plane descended into Portland, we both had the same feeling: our long stay in fantasyland was over. We were back in the real world. We got back to Corvallis at around two in the afternoon, twenty hours after that first Uber came to pick us up at Calle Piamonte at 3:00 in the morning. We have more or less survived—we think.

March 24, 2025March 24, 2025

Meandering on the Way — March 18 to 24, 2025

Tuesday, March 18th

We did some grocery shopping today. The store is just 600 feet away, which isn’t very far, but we do have to walk home carrying all that stuff. And suppose that your items happened to include, as was the case today, a liter of newly squeezed orange juice, 1.2 liters of San Pellegrino, 1.25 litres of limonada, and a bottle of wine. At one point, M wondered if maybe we should stop buying so many liquids. E showed little enthusiasm for that idea, but she did pull one of the bottles out of M’s bag and place it in her own.

Once our larder was resupplied, we had a light lunch and then set off for a visit to the Prado Museum. We took the metro and got off at a stop called Estación del Arte (Art Station—kind of a no-brainer.) When we came up out of the metro, rain was pouring down like crazy; and it turned out the Estación del Arte is actually three fourths of a mile away from the building that has the art in it. There were rivers running everywhere in the streets and you needed to stay far away from where the cars were splashing by. When we finally got to the museum, we were pretty damp despite our raincoats. Luckily, the museum was warm and over the next hour or two we slowly dried off.

It’s a big museum, so we planned to focus on just three artists: Velasquez, Goya, and Federico de Madrazo, Madrazo being the painter who did the portrait of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda that we liked so much at the Galdiano Museum last week.

First we found the big Velasquez section, which of course included Las Meninas. Then in the Goya section we saw many portraits of Spanish aristocrats (yawn) but also some other things, like Two Old Men Eating Soup and the double masterpiece Second of May/Third of May, 1908 about violence during the French invasion of Spain. And somewhere along the line we also found another striking painting by Madrazo: the Portrait of Amalia Llano.

We also found the coffee shop on Floor 0. It is huge and efficient. So nice to have a place to sit for a spell. That gave us enough energy to buy a couple of t-shirts. And when we got outside again, had the rain stopped? Yes.

Wednesday, March 19th

We went to the city of Toledo today. Instead of driving or going by train, we had decided to book a bus tour. That meant that we had to get ourselves down to Callao in time for a 9:00 AM departure. The bus was huge and very full. The weather was fine, no rain in Madrid and a lot of sun forecast for Toledo. It was a one hour ride to Toledo and the first part was pretty drab as we passed through an endless succession of business parks and light industrial sites that lined both sides of the freeway. E remembered that the area had long been known as the place you went to buy furniture. And still today, there are lots of furniture outlets. Oddly enough, we also law lots of Asian restaurants—hot pot shops and so on. Does this mean that Spaniards who make furniture tend to like Asian food? Maybe. But more likely it indicates that Chinese furniture maker reps make frequent visits here.

During the second half of the trip the views improved a little, showing us some open country and green fields. And when we got to the city of Toledo the views got radically better, which is one reason people like to go to Toledo. In the first phase of our tour the bus drove us around the edges of the old town so we could experience some of its more photogenic aspects.

The city was originally founded on easily defensible high ground above the river. The earliest remains are from the Bronze Age.

The old city is set in a bend of the Tagus River, the longest river in the Iberian peninsula. As you can see, rain in the region has been plentiful this year. The previous two years were dry.

Big tour buses cannot navigate the streets of the old city, so our bus dropped us off at a place at the bottom of the hill. Our bus load of 60 tourists was separated into two groups of 30. Headphones and radio receivers were distributed, and our two guides led us onto a long series of escalators that took us up to where the action was. We spent two hours walking around with the guide. Among the high points was an old synagogue that looked more like a mosque to us, but which in any case had been turned into a church when Spain ejected the Jews in 1492. Just a year earlier, the Christian armies of Castille and Aragon had ended the Muslim presence by winning the battle for Granada. Those two developments marked a major change; Muslims had been living in Spain for eight hundred years while Jews had been around for more than a thousand.

This meant that in Toledo’s formative years, it was inhabited by members of all three religions, who managed to live together largely in harmony. Today all of the tourist brochures call it “a city of three cultures.” So why not go there and take a look at a synagogue that looks like a mosque, which has been turned into a church?

The gold decoration at the back was added when the building became a church. Previously the back wall might have been plain white.

Another stop on the tour was at the church of Santo Tomé to see a famous El Greco painting called The Burial of the Count of Orgaz. It was painted in 1586 to depict events said to have occurred in Toledo 250 years before. In 1323 a miracle occurred when two saints (St. Stephen and St. Augustine) came down from heaven to personally lay to rest the body of a nobleman and philanthropist named Don Gonzalo Ruiz de Toledo, a.k.a. The Count of Orgaz.

Our guide pointed out some interesting aspects of this painting. First we have to understand that the bottom half shows the scene down on earth where the burial is going on; the top part is meant to show heaven where Don Gonzalo’s soul is being welcomed in. Something else we might notice in the earthly half is that everybody is either watching the body be interred or else gazing up at heaven—except for two figures on the left just next to the robed figure.

The two figures are El Greco himself and his son. El Greco is the one who is looking somewhere off to the left and El Greco junior is looking straight out at us and pointing to the part of the picture where the main action is. Our guide said that El Greco deliberately depicted himself as not looking at the burial because he wanted to make it clear that he had not personally witnessed the miracle, (which occurred 200 years before he was born.) That almost makes sense…but not quite.

Another tour stop was the massive Toledo cathedral with its many incredible decorations. But sometimes we tire of cathedrals, so here is a clip that includes just one of the cathedral towers along with a little of the street below.

Thursday, March 20th

We spent this day doing chores around the house and exploring the neighborhood. For lunch we got take-out from a deli just a couple of blocks away. We’d passed by it several times but had never been inside. It turned out to be interesting. E got a sort of twice-baked eggplant dish: half a long eggplant stuffed with chopped eggplant, tomatoes and sweet peppers. M got a pastrami sandwich. We had heard from M-HP that pastrami was having a moment in Madrid and sure enough, there it was, right in our neighborhood.

Later on we went out for a drink at a restaurant called 11 Knots. We sat out on their terrace. It was just what E had been looking for and we were there right at sunset. Not that we saw any sunset. For one thing, the sky was totally cloudy and for another, the main view from the 11 Knots terrace is of the upper floors of the apartment building across the street. But still, it was a treat to be up high above some of the streets where we walk every day. As we were sipping, a light rain began to fall. Happily, the terrace had a big awning and several heat sources, so that was nice too.

Friday, March 21st

E invited a guest for a late lunch today. We got some lasagna from our newly discovered deli and E made a salad. Our guest brought dessert: an amazing pistachio cheesecake. (It seems that cheesecake is also much in fashion here.)

Since we were entertaining, we decided to use the formal dining room…

Saturday, March 22nd

Dinner at M and P’s with the old gang. Wonderful meal and lively conversation.

The occasion featured two desserts: Milhojas de Crema and Pastel Ruso.

Milhojas originated in France, where it is called Mille-Feuille. (Either way, that comes out as Thousand Sheets.) This is an internet photo of Milhojas de Crema; The one we had looked better than this, but unfortunately we did not take pictures.

Pastel Ruso was also invented in France, to honor the occasion of Czar Alexander the Second’s visit to the Paris Exhibition of 1855. But Spanish sources say that it is neither Russian nor French. It was created by a team of Spanish chefs who had been brought to France by Napoleon the Third’s wife, Eugenia de Montijo. She was from Granada and when she married and moved to Paris, she took her cooks with her.

Sunday, March 23rd

Just a relaxing Sunday. We decided to go for a walk in Retiro Park, which is not so far away; but when we got there, we found that the whole park was closed! They had some weak excuse, but never mind. The weather was mostly sunny and it was nice just to walk around town a little, stopping for coffee and a shared dessert along the way.

Monday, March 24th

Error Alert! Contrary to what you may have read in one of our previous posts, the modern incarnation of MG Motors does in fact make smallish convertibles. This is the Cyberster, made by SAIC in China. It is 20 inches longer than a 1962 MGB roadster and, being an EV, weighs more than twice as much. Not really a sports car.

March 17, 2025March 17, 2025

Meandering on the Way — March 11 to 17, 2025

Tuesday, March 11th

We set off to Barcelona today, primarily to see the current state of the Sagrada Familia, which is, of course, a Catholic church. But because it has been designated by the Pope as being of special importance, it might be best referred to as a basílica. Whatever you call it, it is certainly unique. When the building was begun in 1872, the initial plan was to construct a conventional gothic style church. But that definitely did not happen. For whatever reason, in 1873 the original architect resigned and was replaced by Antonio Gaudí, who created a new design that mixed gothic elements with Modernismo, an artistic and cultural movement related to Art Nouveau. Gaudí continued to apply his extremely fertile brain to the project until his death in 1926, at which point the project was about one quarter complete. In the following years, progress was slow and sporadic. In 1985, when M last saw it, the building had a couple of impressive looking towers but not much in the way of walls. Since then, however, things have speeded up, partly due to advances in construction techniques, especially computer aided design and milling. The goal now is to have the building essentially finished by 2026, the 100 year anniversary of Gaudí’s passing.

Our Sagrada Familia tickets were for Wednesday, so today we just did a little warm-up by going to see what is probably the most famous Gaudí-designed residence, the Casa Battló, which is located on a broad Barcelona avenue called Passeig de Gracia.

And while we’re in the neighborhood, here’s another house just two doors up the street.

Wednesday, March 12th

The Sagrada Familia is a massive tourist attraction, so when you buy your tickets online, you also get an assigned entry time. In costs $38 to enter, unless you want to go up in one of the towers, in which case it costs $80. But never mind that, because you have to reserve weeks or months in advance for the towers. We arrived at the site about half an hour before our scheduled entry time. So we sat down at an outdoor cafe to have some coffee and take a picture. It wasn’t quite warm enough to sit outside, but the view was great, so we enjoyed it anyway.

The main structure is more or less complete, but, several of the towers remain unfinished.

Soon it was time to make our entrance through the east side of the building, which is named the Nativity Facade.

This facade was the only one that was completed during Gaudi’s lifetime.

Here you can see some details. Gaudí was fond of details.

Next it was time to go inside. There, things looked a little different. The branching pillars are just one striking feature of the interior.

One thing that is finished is the stained glass. It is awesome.

Some of the interior columns have embellishments that are sure to be symbolic of…something or other.

Eventually we were ready to go outside again. We exited on the opposite side of the building. As we came out, we saw lots of people looking up toward something just above the our heads. When we also turned to look, we saw what is called the Passion Facade. Gaudi designed the church to have three great facades, all very different looking. Two of the facades of are finished and the third, the Glory Facade, is still under construction.

After the church, it was time to meet Andrea’s cousin P and his father J for lunch. After a fifteen minute walk, we met them at a restaurant called Molina de Pez, (The Fish Mill.) It was a long, leisurely meal with lots of interesting conversation. P has studied at McGill and later at Harvard and also has an interest in veterinary medicine. His father and Roberto were cousins, so J also knew Roberto’s father. J remembered meeting E once before, when she and Roberto made a visit to Barcelona while they were living in Madrid in the 70’s.

Besides some talking, there was also some eating. For starters there were croquetas de jamón serrano, ostras, and boquerones fritos—ham croquettes, oysters, and fried anchovies. For their main course, E and M split a sea bass, which was presented whole and then separated by our server at the table. A fish should swim thrice, they used to say, once in the ocean, once in butter and once in good wine. Yup. And by the way, if anyone is wondering what fried anchovies taste like, M notes that they do not taste anything like the anchovies that are found on some particularly unpalatable pizzas. Fried anchovies are good.

Thursday, March 13th

We got up and had breakfast at our hotel: the Catalonia Park Putxet. You have to pay extra to get breakfast there, but it’s an awfully good breakfast. Eve still raves about the eggs. And the orange juice came from one of those machines that squeeze some oranges for you while you wait. Oh yeah. Today we were able to have a leisurely breakfast before packing up and heading back to Madrid.

On this trip we traveled by train. There are several different companies that operate intercity trains in Spain, all of them running at around 150 MPH. Our Iryo train included one intermediate stop in Zaragoza and covered the 380 miles from Barcelona to Madrid in a total of two hours and forty-five minutes. That speed is about normal for high speed rail in Spain. For comparison, trains in China run at around 180 MPH while Japanese bullet trains and some German trains run at around 200 MPH. Japan, China and Germany also have a limited number of maglev trains, which travel at about 350 MPH.

Friday, March 14th

Today we had to go downtown to pick up E’s new pants from the seamstress. The shop was called The Little Seamstresses, but we only saw one. She was normal sized and also delightful. M’s Spanish lesson of the day consisted of the words written in white on the sign—dressmaking, tailoring and alterations.

While we were downtown, we made an obligatory stop at another of E’s favorite places, a rooftop eating area called the Terraza Corte Inglés Callao that is also, apparently, known as the Corte Inglés Gourmet Experience Gran Via. This is a little confusing whether you speak Spanish or not. Anyway, we got there around 12:30 PM, early enough so that it wasn’t too crowded; so we were able to get a tiny table by the window. We had a vermut and a snack and looked down at the city, just as E had done so many times in a former era.

Saturday, March 15th

Today we went out to meet E’s old friend M. (This M used to work at Hewlett-Packard, so we will be referring to him as M-HP to avoid confusion with M-OSU.) He took us walking along the banks of the Manzanares River. The area used to be a freeway but is now a long, park-like river walk, a change that happened partly because two sections of the above ground freeway were converted to tunnels in the mid 2000’s. M-HP grew up in a nearby neighborhood that is located just across the river from the Royal Palace Gardens. When he lived there, it formed the extreme edge of the city. The city has expanded greatly since, but the area where he lived has changed little.

It is a very quiet area, completely different from the hubbub and tourist crush of the main downtown plazas, which are not all that far away. At least we thought it was quiet, until M-HP motioned us in through the doorway of the old Tirso de Molina Market. We say “old” because the place had clearly been built to house an open market back in the days before we had grocery stores. So you have to imagine a largish rectanglar space with an iron frame holding up a simple roof to keep the food vendors from getting rained and snowed upon. This view shows the basic idea:

This is a nice enough picture, but it has one big problem, at least from our point of view. When we were there, instead of three people on this aisle, there were twenty or so. And of course it does not show all of the food sellers. There are in fact 15 retail stands or mini-shops, including five butcher shops, two charcuteries, one bakery, one fruit and vegetable stand, one gourmet foods shop, one Asian market, one pickle and olive stand, one fresh fish seller, one organic food shop, and one cake and pastry stand. There are also a few restaurants and bars in the market, eighteen of them in fact. We said that the space was largish, but it isn’t that large, so all those bars and restaurants have to be small. The eateries spill out into the aisles and the whole place was jammed with customers. The customers were all drinking one thing or another—mostly beer. All them were talking and they were all talking loud enough to be heard above the noise of all the other talkers. And so, once we passed through the door, the neighborhood totally stopped being quiet. We found that it all worked quite smoothly and it was pretty clear that a good time was being had by all.

We put our name in for a table in the paella restaurant and drank a vermut at a bar nearby. The bar was just a tiny stand but was hugely busy. We spent 20 minutes there and then sat down at the paella place to eat. E had a portion of vegan paella with artichokes and M had some paella Valenciana, a carnivore’s dish that is made with the (unwilling) assistance of chickens and rabbits. It was pretty good, but he still prefers the seafood varieties.

There were six different paellas on offer.

Lastly, here’s proof that we are not just making all this up. We are actually in Madrid.

Sunday, March 16th

Today’s expedition was to the Lázaro Galdiano Museum. Galdiano lived from 1862 to 1947 and spent most of his life in Madrid. A number of sources describe him as “a journalist, magazine editor, and collector.” Okay, fine. But check out his house, which is now the home of the museum. Is this the house of a magazine editor?

Construction of the house began in 1904, soon after Galdiano’s 1903 marriage to Paula Florido y Toledo. The museum website describes Florido as a “dama rica Argentina, tres veces viuda (a rich Argentine woman, three times a widow.) Okay…that might partly explain the house, which nowadays contains a huge collection of things: paintings, furniture, sculptures, ceramics, jewelry, coins, and weapons, most dating from the 15th to the 18th centuries. The most interesting painting for E was this portrait of Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda, a 19th century Cuban-born Spanish writer.

E remembers reading one of her books for a college Spanish class and being impressed to have a woman writer included in the curriculum. There was also a nice El Greco painting called Saint Francis in Ecstasy. In addition to the paintings, the entire interior of the house is a work of art in itself and the old furniture pieces are amazing.

This 400 year old table is beautiful, but it has a broken piece of inlay, so it’s probably not worth much.

This desk is in better shape, but it doesn’t have any holes to put your cords through, so what good is it?

Monday, March 17th

Nothing much going on today, just resting up and doing a little planning. Also laundry and maybe a little purse shopping. Only two weeks left here.

March 10, 2025March 10, 2025

Meandering on the Way — March 3 to 10, 2025

Monday, March 3rd

The day started with an hour long metro journey to the airport. We had to negotiate a couple of flights of stairs along the way, but that was okay. This time we were travelling light—no big suitcases. There were masses of people at Barajas airport and at first the security check area looked like chaos. But it turned out that the lines were moving amazingly fast. The only hard part was that Barajas Terminal 4 is one of those places that is primarily a shopping mall and only incidentally an airport.

It was a two-hour flight to Naples, time enough for a very good meal. As our plane descended, we got a pretty view of the Bay of Naples. Everything went smoothly at the airport and pretty soon we were out in the sunshine trying to figure out where to catch the shuttle to the rental cars. We’d been following signs, but the signs had pretered out. We found the shuttle anyway, and twenty minutes later we were behind the wheel of an MG, the first Chinese car we had ever been in. For those of a certain age, the MG part might sound strange, but we assure you it’s true. In Europe and Asia MG is a major car brand. MG’s are produced in China by a company called SAIC. They make sedans and SUV’s instad of little convertibles, but they do legally own the MG trademark.

The moment we pulled out of the rental car lot was the point at which our Italian adventure really began. With M driving and E helping Siri navigate, we had to get ourselves out of Naples and onto the autopista, then drive thirty or so miles to the city of Pompei and find our hotel. We didn’t do it the easy way because of course we missed an important early turn. And of course driving in Italy is…a little different. We recognized it though; it was like driving in Cyprus, except just a little easier because at least in Italy they drive on the right. So the actual driving part wasn’t bad. Navigating was harder. Siri was generally okay, but not always precise. E quickly learned how to make up for those shortcomings and whaddya know, after a while there we were in front of our hotel, right across the street from the Pompei Archaeological Park. But now what? We knew that the hotel offered free parking, but there was no indication of where that might be. This being Italy, we stopped in a No Parking zone and E went into the hotel to ask. Turns out, you had to go around to a little side street, stop at a locked gate and push a button. We did that and after a moment the gate started to slide open. As M maneuvered the MG through the opening, we saw that we were entering a very lovely combination car park and people park. The first thing we noticed was a huge lemon tree bearing equally huge lemons. We thought they were grapefruit—but they weren’t. Anyway…whew. Long day. And prettiest parking lot we’ve ever seen.

Turesday, March 4th

This was the big day! We’d booked a tour with an archeologist guide that started at 10:00. We met our group at a place called Porta Marina, which, back in 79 AD, was one of the main gates into the city of old Pompei. Old Pompei was a port city, and the Porta Marina was very close to the docks. Before we walked up through the gate we were in fact standing directly above where the old docks had been. The eruption threw out so much debris that the old docks were now thirty feet below us and the sea was more than a mile away.

The Pompei Archeological Park is a big place and our guided tour covered only a part of it, but there was plenty to see.

Of course we got to see some of the plaster casts that give such detailed representations of some of the victims. Many people died quickly, being buried under tons of hot ash. Over time, their bodies and clothing decomposed, leaving hollow spaces in the layer of volcanic debris. A man named Giuseppe Fiorelli was the first archeologist to develop a technique for using these spaces as molds to make plaster casts.

We also saw a number of surviving mosaic floors and frescoed walls.

This mosaic is at the entrance of a place called the Wounded Bear Tavern.

Inside the Wounded Bear, there is a well-preserved shrine and a partially complete fresco.

One of the best frescos we saw was this one.

These photos may not show it, but in fact there were tourists everywhere in the park. The photo below was taken at what seemed to be the most popular attraction of all. It was, of course, an ancient brothel. The photo shows one of the rooms. In the tavern part of the establishment, which was just across a very narrow street, archeologists have been able to read the posted price list. Glass of wine: 1 coin. Glass of really good Falernian wine: 4 coins. Prostitute: 2 coins.

And speaking of sex, penises were everywhere in old Pompei. They symbolized fertility, growth and prosperity, so having a phallus displayed was thought to ensure the success of a business. Below is an example. It appears on the outside wall of some kind of shop, just above the name of the business.

Of course, no good luck charm is infalible, and 79 AD was a really bad year…

And finally, in this picture taken from the window of our hotel breakfast room, we see a tranquil view of Vesuvius, the mountain that caused it all.

That’s Vesuvius on the left. Mt Somma, to the right, is a much older volcano that has collapsed.

Wednesday, March 5th

Early morning sights and sounds from our hotel room balcony..

You might think that Vesuvius would be satisfied with burying one city under thousands of tons of debris. But no. During the two-day eruption, the wind direction varied. At some point the wind blew north toward the city of Herculaneum. So that town too was buried, and hundreds of people died there as well. Only a small area of Herculaneum has been uncovered, but we heard that the ruins there were in somewhat better condition than the ones in Pompei. So, after breakfast we packed a lunch, fired up the MG, and set out to see if we could find them. Eventually, after a certain amount of trial and error, we did.

Like the Pompei ruins, the Herculaneum ruins are bordered by a modern cityscape. Also like old Pompei, old Herculaneum was a port city, right at the edge of the sea. More than a hundred people died beneath the arches at the bottom of this photo. They had gathered there in hopes of escaping the city by boat.

This was a food stand/restaurant. There are tons of these in both Pompei and Herculaneum. Archeologists think that most people in Pompei were poor and did not cook food in the small spaces that they lived in. Everybody got cheap take-out.

These frescos are inside a building used by a group who worshipped the god/emperor Augustus

There is a nice little park in the middle of the Herculaneum ruins. It has Mediterranean pines, olive trees, pomegranate trees, and a flower or two. There is also a little glass booth full of books and magazines and, best of all, a big rack of lounge chairs for anyone who feels like resting for a while.

And if you don’t want to read—maybe because most of the reading material is in Italian—you can just lie back and enjoy the view upward.

Thursday, March 6th

Since 79 AD, there have been more than two dozen further eruptions on Vesuvius. These have been relatively small, but still have caused many fatalities. A major eruption today would be catastrophic. Three million people live near Vesuvius, making it the most potentially life threatening volcano in the world.

Today we went to see the top of the mountain. A small tour bus took us most of the way; we hiked the last mile.

The red building is where the bus dropped us off. You can see a fairly recent lava flow at the base of the mountains.

The mountain still has a little steam action going on.

Our flight back to Spain was going to leave very early the next morning. So at the end of the day we drove to back to Naples and checked into a hotel near the airport, saying goodbye to the MG in the process.

Friday, March 7th

The Naples airport is old and a little cramped, not much fun at 5:00 in the morning. But it did its job and we were in the air by 6:30. We were on the ground in Madrid by 9:00 and back into our little apartamento by 10:00. We did some grocery shopping and some laundry and in the evening made ourselves a non-Italian dinner of tuna sandwiches and gazpacho. The food in Pompei was fine, but it was also tourist town Italian, with masses of cheese and carbs. We needed a break.

Saturday, March 8th

We did some miscellaneous errands today: pharmacy, grocery shopping for what we forgot yesterday, and some general searching for this and that.

We ate dinner at home again, still trying to keep it simple: garbanzos and rice with a few spoons of homemade chutney. This was followed by a chocolate or two from a Madrid shop call La Mallorquina. Couldn’t stay away from that.

Sunday, March 9th

We met L and daughter S for lunch today. They were in the neighborhood visiting the archeological museum, so meeting up was easy. We ate at a nearby restaurant and then invited them back to our place for tea. E had been dying to do this and it was fun. It was also nice to get to know S a little better, especially since she showed us how to get more channels on our TV.

Monday, March 10th

¡Chocolate con churros in la Chocolateria San Ginés! Nos sentamos en la sala principal al lado de una foto de Tina Turner.