JAPAN

 

Midwest Loop Part Two

 

 The Coles County Courthouse is in Charleston IL at the east end of the county from Mattoon.  Above is a monument honoring Civil War soldiers.  Oddly, Southern sympathizers were involved in the Copperhead Riot in1864 which left bullet holes on this courthouse.

A peaceful lunch

Of course no visit back home is complete without looking up a few family grave sites.  These were my paternal grandparents Amelia Emily (Mamie) Johnston and Andrew Johnston.  I thought I had never met either of them but a recent discovery shows me at Grandma Amelia's knee when I was two or three, circa December 1946.  She died in 1947.

Nearby is buried everyone's favorite uncle, Uncle Archie, Herbert Archibald Johnston, USMC, veteran of the Bataan Death March and two years as a POW in Osaka, Japan.  His indomitable rascally sense of humor must have contributed greatly to his chances of survival.  

 

True life size.

 

Upon leaving Mattoon we swung over to Springfield IL and visited the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.  If you're ever in the neighborhood don't miss this place.  Open since 2005.  Amazing.

 

Warning: do not linger too long gazing on this life size tableau of a slave auction in progress.  The palpable anguish of the woman, the child and the man can evoke tears.  Most folk don't know that Abe traveled down the Mississippi at nineteen years of age to New Orleans, where he reportedly witnessed such scenes as this.  His life, and American history, were changed forever.

This was Abe's Springfield home

And a recreation of the facilities out back.

Sorry about that.  I think Uncle Archie might have exerted some rascally influence on me.  Or maybe irreverence is simply genetic.

On to St Louis--------

Here is Marcella Petzchen in front of the Georgian Condominiums where she lives.  These are the remnants of the once mighty St Louis City Hospital, where I started my bootstrap education as a freshman student nurse sixty years ago.  Marcella was a 1968 graduate who went on to become a Nurse Practitioner.  This interesting story includes one photo with my ex-wife Marla Lipscomb, among other classmates of Marcella's.

https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/dirty-dozen-last-nursing-grads-of-old-st-louis-public-hospital-reunite-after-50-years/article_86067037-8965-5a17-aa84-cf95d99a2e74.html

Great vignettes of City life in there.  I was four years ahead of Marcella's class and off in anesthesia training in the US Army when they graduated.  We had a good visit and admired her condo and also her god-daughter's, Sarah Lohmeyer.  In addition Shannon and I had a delightful afternoon visit with Pat Freeman Brush, a 1964 City Hospital classmate of mine, at her home on stylish Longfellow Boulevard in  the Compton Heights neighborhood.  Shannon and I stayed in a nearby B&B.

City in its heyday

 

Then it was off to see some sights, the Missouri Botanical Gardens, formerly Shaw's Gardens, Forest Park, the Art Museum, and this guy:

St Louis in person atop Art Hill

Botanical

Outside the Climatron

Inside

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The extensive Japanese gardens

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The free admission St Louis Art Museum (along with the free zoo) were valuable entertainment for penniless students 60 years ago.

Jolly Flatboatmen (1857) by George Caleb Bingham

All in all, a glorious three week visit with family and old and new friends Back East.

Midwest Loop

 

Shannon and I drove back east last month after a quick stop with 'the kids' in Ft Collins/Windsor, to visit friends and family in Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and we stopped in St Louis on the way back.  The original idea was to attend my high school reunion but we managed to fit in numerous historical and artsy attractions along the way, as well as some hiking.

Our Durango neighbors Bruce and Carol Stoddard hosted us at their Madison WI home and took us hiking around Devil's Lake State Park.

We ferried across Lake Michigan from Manitowoc WI to Ludington MI on the SS Badger, the only remaining coal-fired passenger ship in America. 

Yes, a lot of smoke.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shannon has family in and around Grand Rapids MI.  While we were there the extensive  Art Prize competition was going on.

Here she is with her sister Nicole Kipp

On the way from Grand Rapids down to Mattoon IL, where I was born, we stopped to see the sculpture gardens of Allerton Park IL.

 

 

 

 

During our three days in Mattoon we enjoyed dinners with family and friends, spent time catching up with classmates from 60 years ago (there were an awful lot of old folks there) ...

I'm the old guy in a blue shirt at the upper right, a thorn between two roses

and we toured some sites around Coles County, including Fox Ridge State Park, a scenic spot that figured prominently in my childhood.

Ridge Lake

In the early 1950s my dear departed sister Marie and her husband Marvin Moore often took their children and me to Fox Ridge to picnic and hike.  Because I fell more or less between generations (Ria was fifteen when I was born) I grew up with my nieces and nephews as if they were my cousins instead.  I found the wooded hills and trails at Fox Ridge much different from most of Central Illinois, vastly more interesting.  It was there, playing in the water running off from Ridge Lake alongside my little nephew Tom that I had a life-changing epiphany.  

Suddenly Nature, the Woods, with the sights and sounds of birds in the trees, of running water sparkled by sun, the smells of maple greenery, moss and wildflowers -- all this Great Outdoors combined to slap me upside my young head with this sudden revelation: LIFE CAN BE FUN.  

Midwest Loop 2021 PART TWO

500 miles later....

 

Fifteen years after starting SOBO from the Gudy Gaskill Bridge over the South Platte River south of Conifer CO, Shannon and I arrived back at that same point, ending Segment One, our last piece of the Colorado Trail.

 

On The Road Again

 On The Road Again

 

Yes, it has been a long interregnum in this eight year span of travel blog posting.  We're back, with photos of our June trip to Grand Canyon, Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Parks, and a brief visit to Morro Bay, California.  Here was a sunset at Desert View Point with a fingernail moon and evening star.

We weren't alone at The Big Ditch; six million people a year visit.

Then it was on to Kali-forneeah, as the Governator called it.  One night in Bakersfield, then on to Sequoia where we camped three nights in the popup, first and last night down low at Potwisha Campground, middle night at Lodgepole higher up in the Sierras.  Here's Shannon at a bridge over the Kaweah River near Potwisha.

The size and age of the Sequoias is really hard to grasp.  They are the oldest and most massive of living things on the planet.  The General Sherman Tree is estimated to be 2,300 to 2,700 years old.  Yeah, older than Christianity, perhaps older than the Golden Age of Greece.  

Even older than I sometimes feel

The Sherman Tree and the General Grant are very impressive but they are fenced and impossible to approach up close.  However, there is a group called the Muir Grove which we hiked to and enjoyed all by ourselves, no other tourists whatsoever.

En Route

In Its Spell

A twin, more in the following video

Such Giants

Then we finished off our adventure with a few days on the coast.  We had  last visited Morro Bay twenty years ago.

The otters are staging a comeback

We had a nice birthday dinner for Shannon on the water.

Also visited with Lars Morris, an old Durango friend.

 The drive home was uneventful, although it was 122 degrees in Needles CA, so we decided not to camp there.  (!)  

Fascinating Copenhagen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenborg_Castle

At the end of our ten day Holland America cruise of the Baltic, Shannon and I spent another five days in June visiting the sights of Denmark's capital, København.  Not nearly enough time.

 The basics: City Hall, right across from Tivoli Gardens (second oldest amusement park in the world) and this memorial to Hans Christian Andersen.

That's the tower of City Hall sticking up back there.

Then we moved on to the museums.  What a lot of them there are.

Runic Stones

Wow.  Realism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid_(statue)

Baltic Cruise II

From St Petersburg we sailed back west, visiting Helsinki, Finland; Stockholm, Sweden; Rostock (Wismar tour) and Kiel, Germany.

Helsinki has much fancy modern architecture, contrasted by the offbeat tourist draw called the Church in the Rock.

Fascinating Ceiling

Stockholm features the Vasa Museum, containing a ship resurrected from the harbor 333 years after it foundered and sank on its maiden voyage in 1628.  Swedish engineering has vastly improved since.

Stockholm Harbor

From Rostock, Germany we took a short excursion to the medieval town of Wismar, where we learned a lot about the early history of brewing beer.  Beer was health food actually -- for all ages -- as the water was not safe to drink unless made into beer.

They love these pig sculptures

According to our guide the mayor in the olden days would issue a proclamation like, 'Dear Townspeople, on Wednesday please do not shit or piss in the canal, as we'll be brewing beer from that water on Thursday.  Thank you.'  Or some such.

So we went to a brewery, in business since 1452 and had a pint.

The tour included a walk around a church still not entirely reconstructed from WWII.

The tour guide lamented the fact that, in her opinion, Allied bombing of the church in the last days of the war was an "entirely unnecessary" act.  I did not offer my opinion that there had already been by that time six million unnecessary acts committed by Germans.

Next day we docked in Kiel, Germany.  Not much to report from there.

What?

 Then we were back to Copenhagen for more adventures.