Bye-Bye, Las Vegas!

With our move (in theory) approaching in two weeks and our schedule between now and then pretty packed, we realized that our trip to Las Vegas on Friday might well be our last as a family. Darcy and I will make it in at least once for grocery shopping and to return our library books, but Michael probably won't be back unless we find a time to reschedule the tapas night out originally scheduled for Friday.

So it seemed fitting that we should drive the extra mile north on Las Vegas Boulevard from our library to pay homage to the oh-so-famous Las Vegas sign. For all those people (and there are lots -- I've seen long lines of people waiting their turn for pictures, whole wedding parties, wedding parties with an Elvis impersonator along for the ride) who want this classic snapshot, Las Vegas provides handy-dandy drive in/drive out parking. Very convenient!

Most people want the view featured in the first photo. We (ok, maybe I, because Michael seemed surprised when we got there) wanted the other side. The side that you see as you are leaving Las Vegas. Because that's pretty much what we'll be doing soon. We might not live in Las Vegas, but a lot of our public lives center on that city. Virtually all of our shopping and errands happen there. We use the Las Vegas parks and libraries. Darcy has play dates there. And all that is coming to an end. I don't mind that it's coming to an end; it's a long and not particularly exciting drive from Cima to Las Vegas. But it did seem fitting to mark the end of our odd relationship with Sin City. So here we are, with the sun in absolutely the wrong place, being wished Happy Trails by Las Vegas.


On the book front, I've now finished the heartbreaking, but beautifully written Grapes of Wrath. I knew most of the story from the movie, but it didn't stop me from having heart ache, both for the fictional Joads and for the hundreds of thousands of people who lived through many of the same things the Joads experienced. Ah, greed! What could our world be without your presence?

I'm taking a break from the more reading-list-like books for my next book. I've just started The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. It's a fairly light-hearted (at least so far) mystery narrated by a young man with autism.

Why My Pocket-Sized Camera Should Always Be In My Pocket

I didn't have the camera with us today. It seemed so unlikely that we'd need it because our plan when we left the house was to drive to Needles (99 miles) on Michael's day off so he could have a work meeting for about 45 minutes, we could go to the library (our Bookmobile operates out of Needles and we missed it last week), and Darcy could play at a playground for a while before we tumbled out of Needles back to Cima.

But then ... Michael's colleague said, "You've really never been to see the London Bridge?" Because, as it turns out, the original* London Bridge (of the "falling down" fame) happens to reside about 45 miles from Needles in Lake Havasu City, Arizona.

"Why?" you ask. Well, you can read all about it here, but the long and the short of it is that the London Bridge started sinking a little more than a century after it was built. Those crazy Brits decided they should probably replace it before it became a causeway instead of a bridge, and the bridge was put up for auction: "And if you believe that one, I've got a bridge to sell..."

Anyway, someone decided that having a big ol' stone bridge connecting mainland Arizona to an island in the Colorado River that had previously been a peninsula before a channel was dredged out so the bridge would have a body of water to cross was the Best Idea Ever.

And so a large quantity of money was given to London to take apart the bridge. It traveled across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal, and across the desert to Lake Havasu City. Because that's what you do with bridges when you're done with them. You send them to the middle of the desert.

So the camera was desired when we admired the bridge from the walkway along the river (ok, the dredged-out-channel). It was wanted while we walked across the bridge to have lunch at a brew pub. And it was desperately needed when, to appease our "I want to ride in a boat PLEASE" daughter, we took a boat ride across the river and back with a few passes under the famous bridge.

While our gondolier serenaded us with Italian love songs and told us all about his invention, the EZPlunge.

Oh, I see you doubt this part. But it's true! Dave-the-singing-gondolier plies his craft (see the double meaning there?) in his homemade gondola (because, he says, there's a three to ten year wait for gondolas actually made in Venice) in Lake Havasu City.

And that's why I should have had my camera. How often in my lifetime do you think that I'll take a gondola ride on the Colorado River underneath the vintage-1831 London Bridge? I'm guessing just the once and there I was without a camera to prove it.


On an only semi-related note, I'm in the middle of The Grapes of Wrath now. When I got home (from my simple trip to Needles) and read for a while as Darcy and the very extended Wright family buried me on the couch, I got to the part of the book where Tom and Pa and assorted others wash and rest in the Colorado River in Needles.


*Ok. So everything near the bridge wants to make it the "original", but in truth, this was a replacement for the one that had heads on pikes, etc. But it's still pretty old and completely freaky.

Migration From St. Louis

Some of you might know that when we moved to Alaska (Michael in June '05 and me in January '06), we moved via USPS. That's right ... everything we moved from St. Louis to King Salmon moved by parcel post. That left a lot of stuff behind. We sold a lot on Craig's List. We had a fairly successful yard sale. We gave away a very motley assortment of things (a two-hole three-hole punch, anyone?) at a party we had that was most definitely not a going-away party for Michael.

And that left the things we really cared about. My grandparents' dresser. The chair given to Michael by Patty Jo. Books. CDs. CD jewel cases. My wedding dress. And virtually all our wedding gifts because I couldn't bring myself to send our new dishes to Alaska and risk having them all break. We rented a storage unit and filled it up.

And then we paid for it. And paid for it. And paid for it. Last summer, we considered going to get our stuff. But gas prices sky-rocketed and truck rentals were expensive, too, so we put it off. And paid for it. And paid for it some more. But no more!

We are all done with paying for storage because our stuff is all here in Cima! It's very, very exciting, let me tell you. Even with the pictures of the full storage unit, we had still managed to forget some of the things that were in there. Olivia poster? Totally forgot that we had a framed Olivia poster, but Darcy has now claimed that as her very own.

In theory, I'd love to go through some of those boxes and totes and get rid of some more stuff before we move next month. After all, we've lived without it for almost four years. There must be some of it that we could continue to live without. But it's not in an easy-access format right now, so we'll see how much of that gets done. If not here, we'll do it in Crescent City where it can live in half of our two-car garage while we work our way through it.

We owe a huge thank you to Michael's brother Stephen for flying out to St. Louis and helping with the packing and driving. They did an amazing job of packing and unpacking quickly -- the whole trip was only about 72 hours.






We enjoyed an extended visit with Juliana and Henry, too! They came out on Friday and spent the night so they could take Stephen home after the unpacking was done. Henry seemed keen on walking around outside in the desert. He and Darcy had a good time together!

Out here, company is always nice, and we had even more over the weekend. Our friend Matthew, an undergraduate student while we were at WashU, was on a whirlwind trip to the (wild) west, and stopped last night for dinner before heading on to Vegas (last night) and Zion and Bryce National Parks today.

It's been an eventful week, but with a lot of fun and satisfaction in the mix. It's going to be very nice to set up our new house in Crescent City with ALL our things instead of just the parcel-posted stuff plus what we've acquired over the past four years.

Almost Forgot The Book Update

I know you're all at the edge of your seat waiting for an update on my book list quest. I finished Great Expectations last night, the first of almost a half-dozen books by Dickens that I need to read. I enjoyed it. The story was good (with a lot of coincidence thrown into the plot, but that's ok), the pace was quick, there was humor. All good.

I'm half way through the introduction to The Grapes of Wrath now. I usually save the introduction for after I read the book because they too often give away the whole plot, so what's the point of reading the book? But I know the basic story of this one, having seen the movie a few times. I decided I'd get educated before starting the story this time.

Wright Brothers vs. Disney?

Darcy is becoming a great rock climber, as she demonstrated a few days.

You know how people (by which I mean middle school and high school boys, really) like to pose the question, "Who would win a fight, Batman or Spiderman?" The question I pose in this post is, "Who would win a fight, the Wright Brothers or Disney characters?"

Darcy hasn't had a lot of exposure to Disney movies or characters before our trip to Disneyland. She's had a Mickey Mouse doll for a long time (courtesy, I think, of Dan and Betty) that she ignored until two days ago. Yesterday, she slept with Mickey (she refers to him as "the Disneyland mouse", or she did before yesterday anyway) at nap and at night. Both times, she fell right asleep with no fussing, no songs, no second visits by Michael or me to her room. That NEVER happens and I do mean never. I don't believe I have ever gotten her to sleep for her nap without songs before.

Given all that, I had some hope that the Disneyland trip might finally be the new thing that loosens the hold the Wright Brothers have on our girl's imagination. The answer to the inspirational question for this post seemed to be that Disney characters would win.

But those pesky Wright Brothers! Persistence is always mentioned as one of the character traits that made them successful, so I shouldn't have been so quick to count them out. Yesterday afternoon, I started noticing that Mickey was being called Will an awful lot and by bedtime, he WAS Will. Today, we went to town to drop Michael at the airport and Darcy insisted that both Wilbur and Orville had to go -- and she wasn't talking about Michael and me (although we are both still Orv and Will). Mickey/Will and Orv (represented by a blue-clothed doll) play acted the most important scenes of the Wright Brothers story over and over in the car. They crashed. They played out the whole typhoid scenario. And on the ride home, I kept hearing Mickey/Will say, "I love scrapping with you, Orv. You're such a good scrapper!" This quotation (usually, "I love scrapping with Orv. He's such a good scrapper!") shows up in a lot of biographies when talking about how the Wright Brothers argued about things all the time.

Darcy has taken the most-recognized mascot of Disneyland and turned him into a Wright Brother. My conclusion: The Wright Brothers win. My other conclusion? We're going to be living with Will and Orv for quite a while longer.

I'm going to give them their very own tag. Sigh.

A Silhouette to Remember

I generally manage to resist souvenirs and so-called memorabilia from theme parks and other tourist traps (i.e., except for those darling figurines I got from Precious Moments Park in Carthage, Missouri--who could resist children shedding single teardrops, all captured in delicate porcelain?!). I admit, however, that when it comes to Darcy Jo, I tend to splurge. Frequently, I splurge on crap. Walking down Main Street in Disneyland, however, I spent $9 for a cut-out piece of black paper glued to card stock. And it was all for me! Oh yeah--it was for Angela, too. And Granny Mimi.

Now, just look at that! Is there no profile better suited to silhouette...art...-istry?! That noggin! Those curls!

When I was a boy, I remember looking through my mother's big box of family photos and coming across a vintage paper bag from Disneyland. In it were very similar-looking silhouettes of both my mother and father. I remember being pretty much amazed at the detail. I assumed that something like this must have taken forever to create: First, someone took a series of photographs of my parents in profile. They were then told to return at closing time, after the images had been developed and the scissors artist had carefully and faithfully followed the contours of each hair, each characteristic facial curve.

As it turns-out, however, it's nothing like that at all...

We walked into the Main Street shop and, immediately to our left, facing the storefront window, sat a lady dressed in Victorian clothes. I said, "Hello." I think she returned the greeting, but before I could even begin some sort of request for services, I noticed her hands moving. She was looking at Darcy Jo while cutting black paper with what looked like a toenail-grooming scissors. I kid you not, in less than a minute she was done. No photos. No wait. Nine dollars.

Turns-out this woman's been doing this for 35 years. In the same little store on Disneyland's Main Street. With the same scissors, you think? Maybe she even cut-out my young parents' silhouettes (I haven't done the math...). Amazing. As soon as Darcy Jo was finished, another couple with their children came-in. Before I could even finish paying the cashier for my souvenir silhouette, what witch (how else do you explain it?) had finished cutting a faithful profile of a toddler asleep in his stroller. Nine dollars. NEXT!!

Oh, Disneyland...

Introducing Darcy To The Wonderful World Of Disney

So we had agreed that we would take Darcy to Disneyland for her third birthday. Michael grew up going to Disney and may have had a small Disney obsession for a few years. Then he went and got himself a new job and we will no longer be in southern California in November, so we decided to take her before we left. That translated into yesterday. And what a day it was!

Yesterday, Disneyland was open from 10 am until 8 pm. Our plan was to get there at opening bell, so to speak, and to stay until Darcy was approaching a walking coma, which we assumed would be around 4 or 5. We walked through the gates at 9:50 (they do a ceremonial opening on Main Street, USA at 10) and walked back out around 7:20 after indulging her request for one more ride on the submarines! Who knew that the wonderful world of Disney would manage to keep Darcy entertained for almost ten hours with no nap and only one very minor meltdown at lunch? Considering that she knows almost none of the Disney characters or the stories behind most of the rides, it was a small miracle.

There were the rides. We were taking our Jungle Cruise by about 10:05, followed by the carousel, the Alice in Wonderland ride (Darcy did NOT like it -- too loud and too many sudden changes), the spinning teacups, and It's A Small World. That one, Darcy liked. A lot. She was singing along with the song by the end of the ride and we ended up riding it twice more later in the day. We took the steam train around most of the park after that, both for a rest and because Darcy loves trains. She loved the Grand Canyon and dinosaurs the train passes, too.

We climbed the tree house and rode with the Pirates of the Caribbean, which she loved even with the steep drops and darkness. Then we went to explore a Winnie-the-Pooh themed ride that was new to Michael. It was mostly Pooh dreaming of rivers of honey and was well-received. And when we got out? There was Tigger! And within a few minutes, Pooh and Eyeore joined him. Darcy got pictures with all three, but was not completely convinced that being near these giant characters was a good thing.

She was very sure -- even while we were trying to take a picture with Pooh -- that Pooh's overflowing collection of honey pots was a very, very good thing. After posing with Tigger, we went around to the back of the honey pile and she got to see it up close and personal. You can see Pooh just behind her, but unfortunately, can't see the personification of the Heffalump which looks like a bee crossed with an elephant. Quite cute!


There were, of course, more rides. The Nemo-themed submarine ride (twice), the rockets, more train rides. We had a nice, quiet interlude petting goats at the ranch. As she did the only other time she's had the opportunity (maybe at the Portland Zoo?), Darcy made sure to pet each and every goat. Very briefly.


We were able to get away without buying anything except food and Michael's indulgence of a silhouette of Darcy. It was pretty impressive watching it made. The woman who cut it just sat and looked at Darcy sitting on Michael's lap and took her folded piece of paper and very small, sharp scissors, and a minute later -- it was done! She told us she'd been cutting the silhouettes at Disney for 35 years! She did a great job with the crazy-curls. Michael is planning on scanning it and (maybe?) actually writing his first post for this blog. Darcy was very restrained in the gift stores. We went in planning to get her something small, but just didn't see anything we wanted for her and nothing she begged to have.

When we got back to the car, we got Darcy into PJs for the ride home, and ten minutes later? She was sound asleep. She slept the whole ride home and even transferred from the car to her bed without waking up, something she has done only a handful of times. All in all, I think we got our money's worth from our day at Disney. We have a happy girl and fond memories.