So Michael likes beer. I don't think this will shock anyone. Certainly, anyone who listened to his Death to Classical show this week knows that he loves the beer. Our friend Connor joined him to pair beers and music. They had to taste every beer, of course, and so cabbed it home that night. (Drink responsibly!) There should be a recording of it archived at some point, so you can share in the joy.
Darcy notices everything. Nothing escapes that girl's eye. So it shouldn't have surprised me when, several months ago as I was trying to choose a beer from the co-op to bring home, Darcy's piped up, "Dad loves IPAs. You should choose an IPA." Ok, sure. Yes, he does love IPAs, but why do YOU know that?? One day last year, I opened Darcy's school folder to find this:
Really? My child is 16 years away from her first legal drink and yet she already knows what kind of beer Michael likes to drink? And she makes beer-themed art IN SCHOOL? A smart child is a double-edged sword.
Yikes! Here I was, about to turn off the light and go to sleep when I realized I hadn't blogged yet today. Can I blame not enough sleep last night? Or Michael being off hiking in the Trinity Alps? Or the fact that we have a dog visiting for a few days?
All of those things are happening. Darcy and I went to the Arcata Saturday market this morning and hit a few highlights of Humboldt for one of the last times. She got a hair cut in preparation for class picture day this coming week. Michael headed out this morning for three days of hiking, while Lola moved into our house for four nights. It's all good.
Here's a picture of Darcy from late spring/early summer in Ashland, OR. She had just figured out how to hang by her knees a little before this trip, so she wanted to show it off a lot. Her hair seemed so long then, but now she has enough for pig-tails and other "fancy" hair styles. Once again, today, I had to struggle to answer questions about how I wanted her hair cut. One of the benefits of being back in the Northeast will be not having to answer them any more. Duane will just decide. Right, Duane? I'm counting on you, not just for Darcy, but for me. I don't want to decide any more.
I might be cheating slightly today. It's not much of a cheat because I have written a long, complicated, well-illustrated blog post. Just not here.
Some very few of you know that I used to have an active food blog. It's been about two years since I wrote anything at all on my food blog, but yesterday, I was inspired to do so. A friend of mine here in Crescent City is participating (and helped plan) Ferment Del Norte's Local Food Challenge. For most of October, he is trying to eat only foods that are grown in our region. This is a challenge that requires a lot of forbidden foods, since there are so many foods that simply do not grow here.
The one ingredient that is not produced and sold here that I could not give up is salt.
We were discussing this yesterday morning and I asked why you couldn't just make your own. We do live right next to a rather large bath tub filled with salt water, after all. So I promised him I would make him some salt. If you want to read the story of how three random gallons of the Pacific Ocean became beautiful bowls of salt, you can check out part one and part two on my food blog, Isolated Foodie. I have never cross-posted from one blog to the other before, and even my own mother claims that she didn't know I had a food blog, because I did it for me, not for an audience. Although I did start using my first name on the blog, I use pseudonyms for the places we've lived and the two blogs are on different accounts. In other words, if you'd like to comment over there, please don't say, "Hey, Angela GLORE, I didn't know you could make salt in CRESCENT CITY. Glad I read about it on GLORES AROUND THE PARKS." Otherwise, enjoy!
Crescent City and surrounds have lots to offer, but we do go further afield at times. One of my favorite places to look for wildflowers in the spring and early summer is a trail along the Rough and Ready River near Cave Junction, Oregon. We stop there occasionally on our way to Grants Pass, Medford, and other parts of Oregon on I-5.
Here are a few pictures of this year's blooms:
The other plant-of-interest at the Rough and Ready are a handful of Ponderosa pines. We learned last year during our first trip to Bend that Ponderosa pines smell nothing like what you'd (or I'd) expect a pine to smell like. They smell something like the intersection of vanilla, dried orange peel, cinnamon, and something else. If you ever find yourself near a sun-warmed Ponderosa, act like Darcy and stick your nose in a crack in the bark to sniff deeply:
Well, this is sad. It might be because Michael and our friend got home from doing Michael's radio show and I'm very distracted by conversation and the tv show they're watching, but I am striking out on a good blog topic for today.
So, let me share some of the highlights of our planned drive across the country. There will be links, but no pictures. We'll start out in Lake Tahoe to see the kokanee salmon spawning. Michael and I got to see them seven years ago on our honeymoon and Darcy's excited to see them.
From there, we'll drive across Nevada, stopping to see Great Basin National Park for a few hours. We know some folks who have worked there in the past and we want to hit a bunch of parks on the way. It is kinda middle of nowhere, but that's ok. We'll stay the next night in Moab, which we think might be like Bend ("the place to be"), and spend the next morning in Arches National Park.
As you might be able to tell, I'm trying to find one major activity for each day and then minor stops for stretch breaks as well. From Moab, we'll drive to Denver to visit with our friend Gretel for an evening. We've both driven across Kansas on Interstate 70 before and, no offense meant to Kansas, but we're not keen to do it again. So from Denver, we'll head back up to I-80 and go across Nebraska instead. Kearney, NE, was a cross-roads for most of the major trails west and promises a couple interesting museums. The following morning, we'll skip south to hit Homestead National Monument, with the plowshare-shaped visitors center.
Then comes ST LOUIS!! We'll spend two nights in St Louis! We'll go to Friday Archaeology. We'll take Darcy to the zoo, to MoBot, and possibly to the City Museum.
After St Louis, there are still a couple of great stops of interest. Recalling Darcy's very first obsession, we will be stopping at the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historic Park. For those of you who don't know the Wright Brothers history as well as we do, while the first flight was in Kitty Hawk, their airplane was perfected outside of Dayton, OH. We have the Martin-Sheen-narrated film to prove it.
And then, just like that, we'll be arriving in Pennsylvania for house-hunting, start of work, and the transition to a new school. (Whew! With half an hour left in this day, I have a post! I'm going to try my best to get a picture a day while we're travelling, so you WILL get images of all these places.)
Regular readers of this blog know that Darcy can get a little obsessive about one particular thing for months at a time. Right now, we are in the midst of ocean obsession. This has been going on for a very long time now. I think it's been close to a year and it shows no sign of stopping, even as she lets smaller obsessions come and go. Birds are one of the minor interests these days, and she spends time reading bird books, using iBird to look birds up and listen to their calls, and musing about the birds we see out and about. Like everything else she turns her mind to, she is building an amazing wealth of knowledge about birds. But, in keeping with the major obsession of the moment, ocean and shore birds have an edge over all others.
So earlier this summer, I spent a week driving her to and from Trinidad so she could go to Marine Lab Day Camp at Humboldt State University's marine lab. I started to write a very long post about that week and never published it. It was supposed to lead up to the last day of camp, when Michael and I got to the lab to pick her up and discovered that she had lost a tooth during lunch! There had been no wiggling, no looseness...she bit into her sandwich and out it came. I had tried to take a picture of it without success and that's when I put this post on hold, thinking I would fix that. And there it sat, unpublished. But now I'm dusting it off and adding some more pictures of the marine camp.
This was definitely a highlight of our summer. Amazing that our small child got to play in a college lab, feed fish heads to sea anemones, and walk to the ocean for science every day. Crescent City readers take note: Other than figuring out rides (carpool!), this was ridiculously affordable. I think it was $40 for the whole week, five hours a day. Watch for it next summer. So here's the original partial post:
It's been quite a week in our corner of the world. Quite a looooong week.
Monday was my birthday (and a very good one, too, thanks to the many wonderful people in my life who sent greetings, birthday wishes, and gifts). I got up at six so I could finish moving us our of our friends' house. We had been living there while they were away for ten days so that Michael could put new flooring in our bathroom, entry, and kitchen, and install a new-to-us wall oven. Darcy and I left at 7:30 to drive an hour and twenty minutes to Trinidad for the summer day camp at HSU's Marine Research Lab. This is the view from thirty steps away from the lab:
Not so bad, huh? While Darcy was at camp, I spent five hours drinking coffee at a nice cafe, window shopping in Arcata, chatting with friends and family on the phone, and generally just being relaxed. It was lovely.
I got back to the lab a bit early to pick Darcy up and they weren't yet back from their daily field trip, so I walked around Trinidad's hilly streets for a while admiring the views and gardens. I was across the harbor when I saw kids starting to descend from Trinidad Head and spied Darcy (in the orange top with a hat near the utility pole):
She had a great first day at camp and we hopped in the car for the drive home. And once home, we changed into soccer-appropriate clothes and went to her first soccer practice:
Home again for a very quick, simple, but completely delicious dinner of bread, apples, avocados, and a variety of lovely cheeses, followed by molten chocolate cakes made by Michael! End of Day 1.
(Here, the original post ends.)
Yes, that's right! Instead of taking part in National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) this year, I'm going to attempt to blog every day in October. It's my way of saying good-bye to this wonderful place we've lived for the past three years and documenting our transition to Pennsylvania. While we're still in Crescent City, I'll focus on the parts of our life here that we'll miss. A lot. And so, for the first October post, some pictures of the short visit of John and Stef (Auntie Best). We tried to show them EVERYTHING we loved in 36 hours. Not really possible, but we did a lot.
Darcy led them through the sun-dappled beauty of the redwoods in Stout Grove. It was a beautiful day. The redwoods did their best to be spectacular and they're good at that on even a bad day.
We didn't get to properly swim in the Smith River, but we did take the side path from the Stout Grove trail to the river and put our feet in. There was some rock-skipping and tadpole catching, and we picked and ate blackberries on the way there.
Then we hit Big Dune. It requires a walk through some of the worst mosquitoes ever to get there, but once you make it, it's wonderful. This is an inland dune, surrounded on all sides by forest. Most of the grass you see in the picture is an invasive foreigner. All this adds up to behavior that we would not condone on many other, more fragile dunes. John and Michael had long jump contests. We all sledded/rolled/fell down the sand.
Michael was the winner of the long jump contest (he has had more practice, in fairness to John) and was feeling very triumphant. Note that the redwoods, the river, and the dunes were all visited in one single day. Del Norte has a lot to offer.
The next morning, in response to Darcy's desperate pleas, her very kind aunt and uncle consented to try to see the tide pools despite the poor timing of the low tide. We didn't see much, but at least we got to show off yet another of our region's beauties:
Right before we left for the dunes, Darcy took off most of the skin on her big toe. She reluctantly allowed us to bandage it, all the while insisting that it was nothing -- no injury, no pain, no blood. But walking over the rocky beach this next morning was clearly bothering her and so, taking an uncle's right to spoil as his own, John carried her up the hill from the beach. We headed home, they packed their bags, and Michael arrived home to drive them to the airport in Medford.
As I type, John and Best are en route to Bhutan, a nation hidden high in the Himalayas. Bhutan is one of very few countries that measures national happiness instead of national gross domestic product. Knowing John and Stef, the gross national happiness of Bhutan will be increased slightly for the next 10 days.
It has been a privilege to share this corner of the world with friends and family. Even though we wander the national parks, it is hard to imagine that we will live in another place that can surpass the natural beauty of this place, whether you call it the far North Coast of California, the Wild Rivers Coast, or the State of Jefferson.
