2021 Huntsman Trip, part three

This is part three of a multiple-part post. You really should read them in order. You can find Part One here, and then click "newer post" at the end of each section. Pictures taken on this trip can be seen here.

 So, a couple of developments. First, I'd planned to go over to Los Angeles for a couple of days, to tour a car museum or two and visit with a friend. I'd made arrangements to see my friend, but I got no response from any of the museums I'd contacted about interviews; so I decided to cancel that little side-trip. I'm sure that was more a disappointment to me than to my friend, but I had seen him not that long ago when I was out there for the stained glass exhibit. 

 Second, my friend Curtis can't go hiking this year. Those few days of hiking each year are the real reason I come on these Huntsman trips; the tournament my wife plays soccer in is only the excuse to justify wandering around in Nevada and Utah with Curtis and Carly. But this year, Curtis has to stay close to home to look after his wife, who is having some serious medical issues. 

 The upshot of these developments is that, this year, I'll be spending the entire trip here in Lake Havasu City, which I often say is two and a half hours from anything to do. That's not technically true, but compared to any major city, it's pretty well devoid of things I like to do, especially alone. And I don't know anybody here. So after Nancy and Bryan return to Colorado, and Sherry goes up to Utah, I'll be sitting here twiddling my thumbs, unless I can get more ideas on my List of Activities than "Watch old DVDs," "Walk dog," and "Play on computer." 

 So far, though, all I have is a plan to visit a car museum in Laughlin and meet up with Curtis there, to hand over the small box of stuff I've been holding onto for him for the last year or so. That will occupy one day; one other day, there's a soccer match I plan to watch at some local bar; leaving me with three and a half days to fill on my own. I suspect that DVD player is going to get a workout, and Carly will sniff a lot of gravel landscaping. (Grass lawns are most definitely not done in Havasu.) I expect I'll also shop for T-shirts and fridge magnets (like I need more of either) and I suppose I might as well spend an hour at the LHC history museum. If I weren't such a cheapskate I'd go drop a C-note at one of the local casinos (Laughlin, where I'm meeting Curtis; Parker, half an hour south of Havasu; and across the lake at Havasu Landing; I hear there's a ferry that will take you across). But that just seems like a waste of both time and money. We'll have to see how desperate I get. Can I convince myself that I might actually win something?

 Saturday, the finest weather returned; the sky was a cloudless blue, the morning temperature around seventy degrees, the forecast high in the low-to-mid 80s. A perfect day for a short, easy hike through the Crack in the Mountain.

 Every time I've made that hike -- this may be my fourth time -- I've gone through the Crack both ways. The hike is about three and a half miles each way; it starts with a more or less flat walk along a wash until you get to a slot canyon that is so brief and so wide (maybe twenty yards) that you hardly even notice it. Then another stroll through a gravel-bottomed wash to the Crack, where the main attractions of the hike reside. Here the walls of the slot canyon are so close together that you have to brace yourself against one side and slide your butt along the other side to get down over an eroded channel that drops just a little too far to jump; getting back up it on the return trip depends on being able to get some traction on the smooth rock. In one place, there's a belayed rope, and you have to rappel down a short drop, maybe nine or ten feet, over a large boulder. This spot is my entire experience with that technique. Somewhere beyond that, another boulder has recently (within the last 3 years or so) gotten lodged in the Crack, and there are stumps of a metal ladder placed to help hikers over the obstruction. 

 Other than that, it's just a very narrow passage with a floor of gravel mixed with rocks: not easy, but not hard to pass through. 

bighorn sheep

The Crack opens onto a longish stretch of wash that curves between two low ridges. Here, for the first time, we saw a couple of Desert Bighorn Sheep, a threatened species that has a wildlife refuge a little farther to the south. They look like deer from a distance. This is probably the longest discrete section of the overall hike, about two-thirds of a mile through loose sand, gravel, and rocks. At a certain point, the trail rises onto the right-hand ridge, then you can either go left to the trail bottom at three tall mushroom-shaped rocks on the lakeshore, or right to a point higher up that gives a view of the lake, the rocks, and a picnic area on a point of BLM land.

 This time, we decided to take a different route back, the Blue Trail, which winds along the top of the right-hand ridge parallel to the Crack trail. It involves a few short climbs; one scary point (for people with acrophobia, like me) where the trail crosses a saddle that is just wide enough for the trail; and a few very badly marked junctions. At one, the trail marker had an arrow pointing diagonally down on one side, and diagonally up on the other. It seemed to indicate that the trail goes up a very steep slope for about a hundred and twenty feet. While Sherry and Carly went up that way, Bryan tried the lower trail, which turned out to be the correct one. Thank God. I really wanted that to be the right trail.

 And there is no shade at all along the Blue Trail. Even Carly was completely exhausted and had to be carried for a stretch. The last mile or so was like a Death March, except without the Death part, just an air-conditioned vehicle at the end. I ran out of water, then got resupplied by Nancy or Bryan, then ran out again. It's now two days later and I'm still feeling the aches in my feet and legs that came from this "short easy hike." A sure sign of aging. As if I need one.

Carly at the Lake

 The plan for Sunday called for trail riding in the rail and the Jeep in the morning, and boating on the lake in the afternoon. Now, Nancy and Bryan have a lot of experience with all manner of outdoor activity, and they are our Source Authorities for all such things. Sherry has more experience with it than me, but her knowledge of such things isn't nearly as exhaustive as Nancy and Bryan's. Their knowledge of The Outside World seems to me literally comprehensive, and I defer to them in almost every detail.* They grew up doing these things, while my childhood experiences of the Great Outdoors consisted largely of rare occasions wandering around undeveloped lots bordering edge-of-town subdivisions. 

But they (and Sherry) seem to have no concept of how long things take at the house. Specifically, the getting-things-together part of each expedition. 

 I've noticed the same circumstance applies at home: whenever Sherry announces to me that she's going to take Carly for a walk, on average around 45 minutes will elapse before I hear her phone say "Begin workout"; and it's only at that point that the walk begins. I don't know what goes into the preparations for a railing expedition or a boating trip, but on those occasions when I am a part of the planned activity (that is, the land-based activities), the group seems to be ready, and then not ready, and then ready to go, and then not ready, and then ready. And then we're not ready quite yet. And then we're ready to go. (And if you're thinking, "Why doesn't he help?" rest assured that that's been tried, and it doesn't move things along. I stay out of the way while those who know what they're doing do what they know needs doing. My job is to drive in the direction I'm instructed to go.) To the uninitiated eye (mine) it all appears as random slow-motion chaos; yet everything gets done, eventually, and we never end up out in the middle of nowhere with somebody saying "Oh, we should have brought such-and-such." Well, almost never.

Jeep & Cactus

 So when they told me the plan was a trail ride Sunday morning and boating Sunday afternoon, I snorted derisively to myself, in the manner of Sheldon Cooper. (I didn't do it out loud, because there was just the slightest possibility it might actually happen.) And sure enough, about an hour elapsed between the first "Let's go" and the actual "Let's go." I put my hat on and took it off four times, perhaps five, each time thinking despite my own experience with this phenomenon that we were really ready to go trail riding.

 Our ride lasted until late-late-late in the afternoon. But it was great. Bryan had plotted a course out farther than we normally go into the desert, out beyond nearly everyone else; and we encountered some trails that proved to be a real challenge for the rail (though not, of course, for his Jeep, which seems almost to glide serenely up or down any available slope). We even found one hill the rail couldn't climb at all, but there was another, easier route up a short distance away that Sherry found after going up in Bryan's Jeep. 

 By the time we got home, it was way too late for boating, which got pushed back to today -- Monday. Preparations for that expedition got started around nine this morning, and owing to an unexpected problem with the truck (which got a trip to the auto-parts store for a new battery) they continued long enough to make lunch at the house appropriate. That done, further preparation ensued until a shade before 2PM, i.e., just now, when Sherry came in from the garage to tell me that the wind had picked up too much and they weren't going boating.

 All this seems meaningful right now, while it's happening; later on, not so much.

* The one occasion on this trip when I didn't was when they formed an ad hoc committee to discuss which of four paths to take at the start of the Blue Trail. I got frustrated standing around in the hot sun while they debated the pros and cons of three paths that were, to me, obviously wrong, so I just said "This is the trail" and left. They caught up with me about three quarters of a mile along. At the time I felt pretty smug about the whole thing, but further reflection has softened that as slight possibilities for great disaster begin to appear among the fog of what might have been.

Postscript: If you're interested (and why wouldn't you be?) you can read the article I wrote for AutomotiveMuseumGuide.com about the Laughlin museum at this link.

2021 Huntsman Trip, part two

This is part two of a multiple-part post. You really should read them in order. You can find Part One here, and then click "newer post" at the end of each section. Pictures taken on this trip can be seen here.

 Unfortunately, the blog post I'd written about this trip for the days between Monday, October 4 and Friday, October 8, got deleted. I don't know how; I'd highlighted a single sentence near the end that I was going to rewrite, and hit "delete," and the whole post's text was replaced by a symbol that looked like two wavy lines. I then hit "undo" (Command-X on this Mac computer) and an Omega symbol appeared. At that point the blogging program saved the post. And there is no way I can see to get it back. 

 So I can't really say what-all happened on those days. I apologise for the rambling nature of this replacement post, and who knows; I may actually be able to reconstruct something like a cohesive narrative. But it will never match the lost original, which was perhaps the single most significant piece of non-fiction literature written in the past two and a half centuries, a classic to rival, nay, to surpass Common Sense, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Walden and The Glory and the Dream. Such a loss to the world of letters. I blame technology.

 I remember that the other folks took the boat out one day, and they took the jetski out another day; I know I went to watch Italy lose to Spain in the Nations Cup, and I recall that the fly perched on the screen for most of the second half was the most interesting thing on that screen. At some point, while everyone else was out on the water, I watched a movie on DVD called The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, with Judi Dench and Dev Patel, which was pretty good; and another called Seven Pounds, starring Will Smith, which was not. I also remember that I rode out into the wild lands in Bryan's Jeep, with Nancy following us in the rail, one evening, and that it was kind of eerie being out there in the dark. But we saw not a single bit of wildlife, not even the reflection of headlights in eyeballs. Not so much as a rabbit. 

 I know that on one afternoon, I went next door and talked to the neighbour who trades in antique cars. He has just acquired a bug-eyed Sprite, a '49 Chevy, and a Rausch Mustang. The cars he currently has that are most of interest to me, though, are a '71 or '72 E-Type and a '52 Rolls. If memory serves, he spends his working life, about half the year, in Wyoming where he owns a craft brewery, and the other half of the year he's here, tinkering with his collection of old cars. The garage on his property holds about a dozen cars, and the garage attached to the house holds two more. He's serious about it. So you'd think he'd be a great person to get to know, a man with interesting stories to tell. So far, though, there has been no spark to suggest an incipient friendship there.

Carly in the English Village

 And I remember that Sherry and I went downtown to watch the US beat Jamaica 2:0 in a world cup qualifying match. That must have been on Thursday, because it was Old Car Night in Havasu, and the main drag downtown was full of maybe 100 interesting cars, mostly authentic American classics like Chevies from the 1950s and '60s, many of them modified, with a smattering of European cars (I recall a '60s-vintage Volvo and a Triumph TR-6), and there were a couple of replica cars, including a beautiful 1933 Mercedes replica in candy-apple red. And it was Taco Night at the bar where we watched the game, but we didn't have any because later that night, we had plans to get together with some friends of Sherry's family who live here now. This we did, at a restaurant in the English Village by London Bridge that had a nice outdoor seating area and live music. And finally, I remember that on Friday, we went back to the English Village to do the walking tour of London Bridge, which none of us had ever done before, despite having come to Havasu over and over for the last 30 years (longer than that for Sherry and Nancy).

Maybe I could dredge up a few more memories of that missing four days, but who really cares?

 

2021 Huntsman Trip, part one

All the pictures taken on this trip can be seen here.

Something went right to start out this trip. Actually, two things went unexpectedly right, but I can't remember the second one, so let's not dwell on it.

The thing I remember that went right is that Sherry noticed there was a yellow jacket inside the car before we had gone very far, and before it got warmed up enough to start flying around in the cabin. That would have been more excitement than either of us would care for. 

Against that one good thing, and the second good thing that I can't remember -- Oh, plus the fact that Carly didn't throw up all the way to Havasu, a first for her -- there's the fact that none of the electric window switches in the Subaru are working, for some reason. This means that we can't leave Carly unattended in the car when it's the least bit warm out. Which in turn means lunch is a take-away sandwich eaten at a city park -- once in Fort Stockton, Texas and once in Tucson, Arizona. Not really too bad, except that the Subway sandwich we bought in Fort Stockton cost like ten bucks, which is way more than it costs back home.

Also, the electric door locks on the driver's-side door don't work now. A minor inconvenience that probably has something to do with the window switch malfunctions.

And the rearview mirror came off in El Paso. That was more of a surprise than a problem, since it was easy enough to slip back onto the holder. Just a weird thing to have happen, and of course it happened where there was no place to pull over for a couple of miles

Other than these oddities, the trip over to the Lake was uneventful. We listened first to Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, one of those books you're supposed to read in High School, so of course neither of us had ever read it. A short book, a novella really, and in audio form only about four hours long. So now we're familiar with it, and neither of us is entirely sure why it's considered such a classic and important piece of fiction. (I had chosen it because I've seen so very many references to it in the last few years.)

After that finished, we started the new murder mystery featuring the Thursday Murder Club: The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman. I actually thought to myself, in one of those moments where you reflect on Life In General and Your Place In It, that I was happy to have lived long enough to hear (or read) the first two of these amusing mystery stories. We're only about 2/3 of the way through the current story, so I won't talk more about it.

We got to the Lake in time for dinner yesterday, Saturday. Nancy and her son Bryan were already here, and Nancy had prepared dinner for us. My only function was to figure out where we'd be able to watch the Liverpool-Manchester City match at 8:30 this morning. Juicy's, a burger bar near downtown, opens at 7am on Sundays, so we thought we were set.

Headed out this morning to watch the match, only to find that Juicy's has only one full-sized TV, which  was tuned to an NFL Preview show, and they "couldn't" change the channel. So we started back to the house. (All the other places listed under "sports bars in Lake Havasu City" open at 10am or later on Sundays, by which time the match would be almost over.) Sherry noticed a little grey building with several cars outside that looked like an open bar or restaurant, so we circled back to check it out. They didn't open until 9, but they were perfectly happy to have us sit in there and watch their television; they put the game on, coffee was available, and we were as happy as Granny Clampett with a fresh batch of potion. They had a buffet that included all the Mimosas you can drink, so the price was a little steep but no more than we would have spent on food and drink at the bar back home for a match that isn't available on our TV at home. (There are a few.)

After a disappointing but not upsetting result (a 2:2 draw, leaving Liverpool in second place, a point behind Chelsea and a point ahead of both Manchester clubs), we went back to the house and planned an excursion out in the wild lands east of town. Bryan had driven his Jeep down from Colorado and wanted to take it out on the trails; and we took the rail, which is like a dune buggy without a body: it's basically a VW engine mounted on an open chassis. 

Made it! Bryan tops a rise

Something goes wrong with the rail every time we take it out. Last time it was the steering. This time it's the suspension. But it was functional, in a minimalist sort of way, and we had a great time. Nancy drove this time, and started out nervous and overly cautious (just like I do when I start driving it), but by the end of the afternoon she was slammin' over rocks and up and down steep hills like a pro. Which is a fortunate thing, because Bryan led the last segment in his Jeep (because he had some kind of satellite software on his phone that would enable him to figure out a way back to the part of town our house is in), and he was like a stately ship on Disneyland's Jungle Cruise, while we followed along like we were on the Runaway Mine Train at Six Flags. 

Bryan's planning to go out on the trails at night some time soon, and I said I'd like to go with him. He's used to much more challenging excursions in his Jeep Club back in Colorado, so none of the trails out here will be beyond his capacity, I don't think; probably nothing to require the use of a winch and a second vehicle, which seems to be par for the course from the stories he tells of his club trips.

A First! Well, a Second. A Second!

 People often tell me I should be a writer. This ought to shut them up:

 I used to write a lot, for my own entertainment, and occasionally for other, more serious purposes. College pretty much ruined writing for me. 

 Law school put the tombstone on the grave, though afterwards I would on rare occasions put together enough of a coherent thought for a law review article and, on one occasion, an editorial. But there was no real joy in it. It was nice to see my name in print, and even nicer to see my work referenced in a court opinion (that happened once or twice, no more), but by the time I retired from the practice of law -- or, more accurately, quit -- I was ready to go the rest of my life without putting words on a page. Comments on soccer websites we're about the extent of my public expression.

 And then I found blogging. By the time I started doing it, in 2009, it was already passé, but it has limped along as an alternative medium, one where anyone can have their say, confident that few people will ever see it. 

 And now, after 14 years, I have finally returned to the exciting world of journalism; meaning, writing that somebody else publishes. There's no money in it, but there's an undeniable ego boost. 

It's a thrill.

August '21: Stained Glass Trip, Epilogue

This is the last post of a series; you really should read them in order. You can get to Part I here, and then click on "newer post" at the bottom as you finish each part.

The pictures from this trip are all in this album. 

OK SO ONE LAST LITTLE BIT. The rest of the trip went pretty much as I anticipated. I spent Friday morning at the Petersen Automotive Museum, They have a parking garage, but there's also metered parking on all the nearby side streets, and it's much cheaper, a dollar an hour.

I had parked at a meter the other day, farther up towards town. The meters LA uses have LCD screens that, after a certain number of years in the Southern California sun, are pretty much unreadable. But on that occasion, I stuck in my credit card and kind of guessed at what the screen was saying, and ended up buying two hours' worth of parking when I only wanted about half an hour. This time, when I saw I couldn't read the screen, I checked the other five or six vacant meters in that block and couldn't read any of them. Then I noticed a phone number to call when there's a problem with the meter; so I called it, thinking maybe they could walk me through the steps. There were 26 calls ahead of mine. Their recording kept telling me I could report problems with a meter on their website, and after hearing it 2 or 3 times I could remember the URL well enough to plug it into my phone and see, while on hold, what it might tell me. After wandering around their poorly organized website for about ten minutes, I finally located a link that allowed me to report the meter. I put in the information, got a confirmation email from them, and went into the museum. When I came out two hours later, I had a $63 parking ticket which I expect to get dismissed when Monday comes. 

1924 Mercedes Targa Florio

Jaguar XKSS

Ferrari Barchetta

The Petersen is nearly completely rearranged since my last visit. The concept cars that were on the third floor, the ones I found so interesting last time, are all tucked away in the Vault (a separate storage area of the museum). The movie and TV cars are now down on the first floor. The top floor now hosts an exhibition that deals with the relationship between auto racing and production. It starts off with a 1924 Mercedes Targa Florio that was built to be both a racer and a road car; it ends with a line of "supercars" that ... well, you can figure out that relationship yourselves. I was particularly struck by the juxtaposition of a 1952 Ferrari Barchetta Superleggere (super-light), in gorgeous black, with a 1955 Mercedes-Benz SL (for SuperLeight, a designation they still use) gullwing coupe, also in gorgeous black. Each car influenced the designs of a number of later vehicles, but in two distinct lines. The Ferrari became the Ford Thunderbird and cars in that line, while the Mercedes, after a long interval, is the stylistic ancestor of a great many currently manufactured sporty vehicles, particularly from Audi, Volkswagen, Hyundai and, yes, Mercedes. 

After the museum I spent some time with a friend of mine, a lawyer formerly in banking but now doing non-profit work. I met him on an earlier visit to LA and have sort of kept in touch. Then I went back to my hotel and started writing my article for automotivemuseumguide.com. 

Saturday morning I checked out of my hotel and went down to Culver City, a suburb about half an hour south of LA, to watch the Norwich:Liverpool match with a couple hundred of my new best friends, the Los Angeles chapter of the Liverpool FC Fan Club. Wow! what an atmosphere! It's like being in the Anfield Road end of the stadium. They sing pretty much the whole time, and loudly, and every now and then I could even understand the words. (About half of them had British accents, but I don't know if that had anything to do with the trouble I had understanding their songs.) A really fun way to watch a match. I compare it to those occasions when we go watch a match at the Winchester in Alamo Heights, where the San Antonio chapter of the fan club meets. There, nobody sings; there are seldom more than fifteen or twenty people there and nobody talks to anybody not at their table. 

After the match I headed east, getting as far as a suburb of Phoenix before calling it a day. (I nearly killed myself shortly before that, falling asleep at the wheel. Thank God for those noisy ruts they carve on the edges of the freeway these days. Naturally I was wide awake after that.) Today I felt a little tired early in the day, but after taking a walk in Deming, New Mexico I felt fine the rest of the trip, and have now arrived in Fort Stockton, Texas for the night, about six hours from home.

The last picture of the trip.

Postscript: while reading one of my old blog posts, trying to fix dead links from years ago, I came across this in a post from September 2009:

Had I had the luxury of time, I could have made the trip from San Antonio to Phoenix, and presumably on to San Diego, much more interesting than it is when we just get on I-10 at Hildebrand and get off at the 202. I could drive west out of San Antonio to Camp Wood, and up the South Llano River, or over to Langtry and up through the Big Bend Country or the Davis Mountains; I could cut across the corner of New Mexico, through Cloudcroft and Alamogordo, and up through Silver City and into Globe. It'd take a long, long time, and it's all country I've covered before.

 Considering how this trip started, I find that almost eerie.

August '21: Stained Glass Trip, Part 5: What I Came For

 This is part five of a series; you really should read them all, and in order, starting with Part I. All the pictures for this trip are in a Google Photos album that you can see by clicking on this link.

I had planned to be at the museum at Forest Lawn, in Glendale, when it opened at ten o'clock this morning. I woke up right at 6AM, so I guess I must be used to Pacific time. Had breakfast at Noah's Bagels, a couple of miles east of my hotel. I had breakfast there a year and a half ago when I'd just bought the Sacramento Jag & was taking it to its new home, & I remembered that I really liked everything about the place. It's a little different now -- all the restaurants here are, because of all the restrictions about masks and indoor dining. But the food & coffee were still good, the employees were still helpful, and the prices were still reasonable (for Los Angeles).

Being up so early meant I had some time to kill. First I went for a walk down Beverly Boulevard for a few blocks. I seem to be in the Jewish District. I passed two synagogues, and there are several Kosher restaurants (including a Kosher French Bakery & Cafe), and some other businesses with signs in Hebrew or names that reflected their Jewishness; all this mixed in, of course, with Salvadoran and Thai and Italian and Greek and a few things I don't really recognise. 

There was a guy standing on the sidewalk, leaning against a doorway, and he had some kind of black box on a strap on his head. It looked at first glance kind of like a jeweler's loupe, pushed up onto his forehead. Overall, he looked like I imagine a diamond merchant would look during a break from work. We said hello as I passed by headed east. A few minutes later I'd turned back, and he was still there. He said hello again and commented on my having just passed not five minutes before. I said something about it being as far as I'd wanted to walk, and started to go by when I decided I was going to ask him about his loupe. So I said, "Are you a jeweler?" and he said yes. I asked him about the thing on his forehead, which he called by a word I couldn't catch (it was probably in Hebrew) and said it contains a scripture verse on a little roll of parchment. It's used when you pray in the morning. Kind of like a mezuzah, I guess; that little metal box you put on the front door frame. We talked about that for a while, and about judaism (like I know anything about it) and then I moved on, back to my hotel. It was only when I got back to the room that it occurred to me that he must have thought I had asked him, "Are you a Jew?", which even I would think a rude question, coming out of nowhere like that. Especially since, as I started to tell him I was curious about his loupe, I couldn't remember the word "loupe", so I just kind of waved at the thing on his head. 

Still a load of time to kill, so I got on the internet, where wasted time goes to live forever. Some of you may have gotten my morning blast of funny signs put up by the Indian Hills, Colorado, Community Center ("Welcome to the Assumption Club! I think we all know why we're here!"). Putting that together and sending it out took up even more time than I had to kill, mostly because I was laughing and not paying close attention to the time. But I got to Forest Lawn pretty soon after ten.

I thought Forest Lawn was where all the famous movie stars are buried. Maybe they are, but if so, it's an oddly understated cemetery. There are, actually, half a dozen or so Forest Lawn Cemeteries scattered around California, so maybe there's another one somewhere that features the kind of self-important carved marble tombs one expects the very vain -- and ordinary New Orleanians -- to be buried in. This one has a number of mausoleums scattered around, each with a name like you'd expect an unctuous sales committee to have given out in the 1950s. All the graves have flat headstones in the modern style, with just names and dates and maybe one short descriptive line ("beloved husband"; "together always now"; that sort of thing). And the place is huge; L-shaped, probably two miles front to back and side to side.

The attendant at the entrance helpfully gave me a map with the route to the museum highlighted, so I had no trouble finding it. Besides, there were signs at every intersection. (Temple of This to the right, Temple of That straight ahead, museum to the left.)

museum on the right, cathedral on the left

The museum looks like a small building. That's partly because it stands next to a large Gothic Revival building that looks like a medieval cathedral from some unspecified place in Western Europe. Inside it's a cross (get it? Cross?) between an underused convention hall and a government building. The main attraction in the place is a painting called The Crucifixion. The painting is enormous, nearly 200 feet from end to end and fifty from top to bottom. It was painted for a worlds' fair by an artist from Poland who couldn't afford to get it home with him. Now it hangs on a curtained wall behind a shallow stage and in front of seating for probably three hundred people. It is an impressive painting, and not just for its size.

But the museum. It's showing an exhibition called "Judson Studios: Stained Glass from Medieval to Street". This is why I'm in Los Angeles, to see this before it goes away.

St-Gaudens, Lincoln

When I stepped into the museum, I was taken by surprise. It never occurred to me that the Forest Lawn Museum might have its own permanent collection of art, real art to exhibit, but there it is. Not a lot of it, just one good-sized room; they may have more, of course, but there's just the one room on show: half a dozen exquisite bronzes by famous American sculptors like Remington and Borglum and St-Gaudens. Beautifully carved marbles. Copies of a few famous sculptures. (They used to have a full-sized copy of Michaelangelo's David, until an earthquake knocked it over. Now they exhibit the head, and so for the first time I could see, up close, just how monumentally big that statue is.)

It was truly an impressive little collection. 

In the room behind that is the museum's gift shop. And in the two rooms behind that is the glass exhibition I've come all this way to see. 

Can you feel tension building? If you're not really interested in the techniques of glass, I suggest you skip pretty much the rest of this post. I'm really only writing it for me anyway.

There are now three kinds of stained glass in the world. (Four, if you count dalle glass, which is big chunks of brightly-coloured glass stuck into cement; it was popular mainly in church architecture in the 1970s and '80s, but we got over it.) All three kinds are usually called "stained glass", but actual Stained Glass is the kind of thing you see in medieval churches: pieces of coloured glass, painted (or stained) with a dark layer of something like soot, most of which is then removed, leaving behind part of a picture. 

actual stained glass

Look at the face of Mary Magdalene in this photograph. The thick, heavy lines that go across her mouth, along her jaw, over her eye? Those are lead-lines, where pieces of "stained" glass are joined together. Her face consists of five or six pieces of flesh-coloured glass. Each of those pieces was painted with a soot layer, then an artist scraped away soot to leave behind her features -- eyes, nose, mouth, teeth -- like a drawing. The shadow on her neck is made by leaving behind some of the staining layer, sort of like an artist working with pencil will do crosshatching to make the appearance of a shadow. The glass, after the extra stain is scraped away, is then fired and the bits of the soot layer that were left merge into the glass, and these stained pieces are assembled into a whole with lead.

Then there's the kind of craft that I practice. It's called "stained glass," but it's more properly called "leaded glass," or "leaded-and-foiled glass." The technique I use takes pieces of coloured glass and assembles them into an image or design without using the staining process, which takes an artistic talent that I've never exhibited, like the ability to draw.

Torrey Pine

This is the kind of work I do. This panel is done by foiling, where the edge of each little coloured piece of glass is individually wrapped in a thin piece of copper, and the wrapped pieces are then soldered together to make the image. You can also join the pieces using long strips of lead, which is soft enough to bend around the edges of pieces of glass. Copper foil (now, thankfully, manufactured with adhesive backing) is much more flexible than lead, while lead produces a more even line. You can zoom in on this picture and see that the black lines where pieces are joined together vary in thickness; up close, they're irregular. (The lead lines on Mary Magdalen are a little bit irregular, but that's because lead calme -- the strips of lead that join the glass pieces together -- were made by hand back then; nowadays, they're just extruded from a machine like pasta.)

Then there's fused glass. This technique started to become popular back in the 1970s, but unlike dalle glass, which was just an architectural fad of the era that required no artisanal sensibility, fused glass has become more and more popular with wider availability of the needed equipment and supplies. I've never tried it myself; I don't have the equipment, and it's only recently that I've given some thought to getting it.

This is fused glass. Tiny pieces of coloured glass called frit are laid out in a design and slowly melted together to form an image. The ovens needed for this process are now cheap enough, a couple hundred dollars, that normal people can afford small ones; that's why, when you go down to the Sasquatch Hunt or the Boudin Festival, you see pop-up booths where people are selling jewelry made from glass beads they've made themselves. Commercial concerns, and serious artists, use ovens that have gotten bigger and bigger; they're similar to the room-sized ovens that ceramics companies use. 

Most of the works in this exhibition are a combination of fused and stained glass.  All of them show a level of artistry and technical expertise that blow me away. I'm tempted to put all the pictures I took of them into this post and describe each at length, but nobody I know is really that interested in any of it. If you wanna see some pretty glass art, look at the photos in the album that goes with this series of blog posts. I will, though, show you my favourite piece, a modern piece of actual stained glass:

 

 

 

Sangre Nueva, by Mike MacGregor

Now, then: plans for the rest of this trip consist of a visit to the Petersen Automobile Museum tomorrow morning; lunch with a lawyer I know out here, and watching the Liverpool match on Saturday morning at a bar in Culver City, half an hour south of my hotel, where the local LFC fan club hangs out. I had planned to drive the Palos Verde Peninsula scenic route, but now I think I'll wait until I can put the top down again. 

My point being, there probably won't be much to write about after this. Besides, I'll probably be starting on my article for automotivemuseumguide.com, and that'll likely take up all my computer time. So don't expect more of this weird prolix drivel. It may come, but no promises.

August '21: Stained Glass Trip, Part 4

This is Part IV of the posts for this trip. You really should read them in order, starting with Part I, here.  

And you can get to the picture gallery for this trip here.

When I arrived in Twentynine Palms last night I booked a room online at one of the motels along the main drag, but something went wrong. Maybe I selected the wrong dates -- it was late, I was tired and, to be honest, a little stressed out about all the sand and rain -- or maybe, as has happened before, the reservations website altered the dates I selected. Anyway, after I made the reservation, I got a message from the website saying my reservation for the next night was confirmed, and any changes or cancellations had to be taken up with the hotel. (No contact information given, though; "Figure it out your own damned self," seemed to be their attitude.)

Not a problem, I thought, I'm going there anyway, I'll just have them change it from tomorrow night to tonight. Simple.

Problem: the office was closed. No one was in there. There was a night window around the side, with a bell and a phone. Rang the bell; no answer. Tried the phone; I could hear the phone ringing inside the office, but nobody came to answer it. Tried the bell again; still no answer. Tried the phone again; still no answer. Repeated Steps 1 and 2 several more times, with no success. At that point I just said the hell with it, and went back up the highway to another motel. (I should add that I was already a little pissed at the reservations website because it had failed me on the reservation in Globe the night before. That worked out alright, since the motel gave me an even better rate when I showed up with, apparently, no reservation.)

That "other motel" was a Motel 6. It's a mark of how pissed off I was that I went there. I had a very bad night in a Motel 6 about 35 or 40 years ago and have studiously avoided them ever since. But now, as seems to happen too often these days (damn it), I have to revise that opinion. Except for the arrangement of the parking lot and the noise of the fan in the bathroom, the place was pretty good: clean, comfortable and cheap. 

I'm not proud about it, but my first instinct last night was to blow off the whole reservation thing and just claim that I'd shown up the next night -- tonight, that is -- and that there was nobody to check me in. Not my fault. (May actually be Not My Fault, but at this point it's academic.) This morning when I woke up I was still of that inclination. Checked out of my hotel, went for breakfast (Denny's again; nothing to report except the waitress looked remarkably like an aunt on my father's side, and she was upset that Denny's recently added prime rib omelettes to their menu but now they can't get prime rib) and then went questing for Arch Rock, which according to RoadTrippers was located about three blocks from the restaurant.

Actually, the location it led me to was the Visitors' Center for Joshua Tree National Park. The rock in question is located in the park, about eight miles down the road, and then 1.3 miles east, on foot. Having already seen a picture of what awaited me there, I decided that it could go on a-waiting, and I started for LA. Before I got out of Twentynine Palms, though, I had wrestled enough with my conscience about the hotel reservation, and so I pulled over at a parking lot, called the hotel, told them what had happened, and they cancelled my incorrect reservation. (The woman I spoke to wanted to know all about the night window non-response, so somebody might be in trouble there. Not my problem.)

The next place on my itinerary is an architecturally interesting house called the Desert Castle, and it appears that, when I was plugging in the next spot to Google Maps, my eye skipped over that one. A shame; the Desert Castle looks like something I'd actually want to see, as opposed to all these things that are just an excuse to pass a certain way. But it'll still be there next time I go through Twentynine Palms (which, since it lies on the route between Havasu and LA, will happen before too long). I've saved it to My Places on R/T, so maybe I'll remember to check next time I pass that way.

The point I actually put into the navigator was a scenic viewpoint. I'm going to take a shortcut here and just say this: I had a number of these scenic viewpoints set out on this section of the trip, mainly just to get the mapping app to take me along the route I wanted to drive, because I didn't want to just take the freeway to LA and the only way to make it guide me along the mountains was to plug in all these locations along the way. And they are all -- ALL -- closed. No reason given. Just a locked gate at the turn-off to each and a sign saying "Closed". Now, I didn't particularly care, but it would have been nice to know going in, since I passed up a number of good photo spots for Big Bear Lake in the expectation that the Lakeview Scenic Viewpoint would be the best spot available; and by the time I found out otherwise, I was past the lake.

I spent an hour and twenty minutes sitting in one spot, around noon today. Construction. One lane road. Pilot Car. I was getting a little miffed about it because, every now and then, a clump of traffic would come from up ahead; then, after a long pause, another; then another, and I'm thinking When do WE get a turn. Realised as I finally went through the construction zone that each clump represented people from a different subdivision that emptied into the road being resurfaced, and each of them had to get a turn. 

Google Maps chose this as the day for a work stoppage. It's not speaking to me today. I noticed this first thing, when it did not tell me to take a Slight Right in a quarter mile on the way to Joshua Tree, but I didn't think anything of it until I was driving along from point A to point B in the mountains and suddenly and unexpectedly found myself on a freeway that I had worked very hard to avoid when putting in the waypoints. It seems that, at some point, it decided I didn't know what the f*** I wanted, and re-routed me along that freeway, and of course said nothing about it. 

If you don't get the voice instructions you have to keep an eye on the screen, and, I'm sorry, that's really hard to do when you're driving in unfamiliar winding mountain roads with a lot of traffic. At one point I found myself in some really congested village, with my otherwise silent phone making a bonging tone over and over, and this little blue squiggle of a highway shifting around like every few feet it was rerouting me. (I finally realised that the bonging sound was a signal that the phone was charging; it kept going off because the mounting stalk doesn't seat tightly into the car's power socket, and every curve of the road was making it stop charging, then start again, and every time it'd start charging again, it'd make that noise to let me know. And as I'm writing this, I'm realising that it was rerouting me after every block because it wanted me to go back to the way point that I'd skipped and thought I'd deleted, because of yet another construction-related traffic jam.) At one point, I rebooted my phone, whereupon my Maps Lady said to me, "In a quarter mile, continue straight," and then fell silent again. (I have now uninstalled and reinstalled Google Maps; we'll see tomorrow if that fixed the problem.)

By coincidence, the audiobook I'm listening to now is about water in the West, and today's chapter was all about Los Angeles. I felt like I was taking a tour of places associated with the ruination of the Owens Valley. That cement plant I passed? That was built to provide materiel for the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

After a loooong drive along the San Gabriel Mountains, I got into LA around rush hour. Lucky for me, I was going in the opposite direction of 99% of the traffic, and other than a few slow blocks on Beverly Boulevard, had no trouble with the traffic. Saw some interesting parts of town coming in, too, particularly an area along Silver Lake Boulevard. Don't know what that part of town is called.

first sight of the city

Now, here's a couple of not-quite-random thoughts:

 (A) The middle-class-hotel business is increasingly operated by South Asian immigrants, so I'm coming into contact with them more and more often. How come so few of them ever smile? Is it a cultural thing for them, or is the business that stressful for them? And do they not understand the meaning their customers ascribe to their facial expressions? I'm thinking about this because of the stark contrast between the clerks, last night and this morning, at the Motel 6 in Twentynine Palms, and the Indian or Pakistani woman at my hotel in LA. Motel 6 made me feel welcome; the Beverly Inn would have preferred I stay somewhere else.

 (B) Los Angeles is a remarkably diverse city. I wonder how long it will be before somebody starts a campaign to make us all think that naming parts of town things like "Korea Town" and "Little Armenia" are racist, and we suddenly have to call these neighbourhoods something else in order to be politically correct? Will that happen before or after Trump is convicted?

Okay, that last part actually was random.

tonight's near-brush with celebrity

August '21 Stained Glass Trip, Part 3

This is Part Three of this trip's blog posts. You can read Part 1 here. You can read Part 2 here. The photo album for this trip is here.

Arizona, where I started the day today, is on Pacific Time during the summer, since it doesn't concern itself with such social engineering schemes as Daylight Savings Time. So when I fall awake at 4AM -- that's 6AM back home, and my usual wake-up time -- I feel well-rested. I'm not, but I feel like I am, which is good enough for the present.

When I come out of my motel room I see that it's rained during the night, but the car is OK. No pool of water on the back seat, and nothing taken through the open windows. (I was worried about losing my liter-bottles of Diet Mountain Dew and my sun block; though I have lots of DMD, and with the top up, I don't really need the sun block.) My first objective for the day is, obviously, the Jaguar dealership in Scottsdale. Well, no, first is coffee, then breakfast, then Scottsdale. Google Maps claims it's 94 minutes away, and they're right, or right enough, about three fourths of the time. Plenty of time, so I load up and go on the hunt for coffee, easily found, and breakfast, also easily found. When I get back on the road, I have a cushion of maybe 20 minutes. I'm trying to wean myself off my obsessive dislike of being late, but it's a tough row. Twenty minutes' cushion is the best I can make myself do.

The Powers of the Universe decide to help me in that process, by sending me a backhoe with a top speed of fifteen mph, accompanied by a dump truck to keep the long tail accumulated by this little motorcade from even attempting to get around them on the narrow highway that winds west toward the big City. But at last, after about 20 minutes, they turn off. 

Coincidence? Or Providence? 

Traffic in the Phoenix suburbs is as usual, meaning long stretches of very slow movement, but I do get where I'm going, and only a few minutes behind schedule. It's a building process, this move toward not giving a rat's ass about timeliness, like everybody else.

While I'm waiting for my car, I get a chance to reflect on one of my favourite topics: cars. Specifically, automotive design. More specifically, Jaguars. This place deals in both Jaguars and Land Rovers (both made by the same company). There are about a dozen Land Rovers in various models (all of which look the same to me) for sale on the lot. There are three Jaguars: one SUV and two convertibles, one of which is a used 2019 model. There are no XFs (the small sedan model), no XJs (the medium sedan), no XJLs (the large sedan). Maybe it's because of the pandemic; maybe it's a supply problem. Maybe the dealership can't keep them in stock. I think it's something else. I think it's because they don't sell.

Jaguars used to be sort of a slightly-more-affordable top-end brand. They succeeded when their cars were remarkably beautiful, and they had more success than most in coming up with beautiful designs: the XK-120, and its update, the XK-140; the E-Type (still the most beautiful mass-production car ever made), and the XJ sedans. They also threw out some visual clunkers, notably the XK-150 and the XJS, both last-minute model-line add-ons without the usual thought processes that resulted in the company's successes. When Ford bought the company, they came out with an almost-gorgeous model combining the old XK-series engine (updated, of course) with the E-Type's sexy lines (also updated): the XK-8. My car.

Almost as pretty: my Jaguar XK-8

It is not, I would claim, in the same design class as the E-Type or the XK-120. If I were a mechanic, I'd much rather have either of those models. But I'm just a guy who loves to drive and appreciates beauty in many forms; there's no way I could keep an E-Type's three carburetors in tune, and when it breaks down in western New Mexico, what the hell would I do about it? No point in taking it into a shop, there's nobody to work on those cars in most parts of the world. So I bought myself an XK-8. Almost as pretty as the E-Type, with modern features like antilock brakes and 3-point seat belts and air bags; and new enough that it should be pretty reliable, still. And if it does break down, I can find somebody to fix it. I may have to drive 5 hours out of my way, but there are places out there. For me, it's the best combination of practicality, style and comfort. (And it has legroom and a trunk big enough to serve.) 

The new Jaguar line is not pretty. The sedans look ordinary, despite their overhyped "recessed" grille garbage. They're staid. They're meh. They're too expensive for most people who like them, and not expensive (or exclusive) enough for people who can afford them. They have no cachet. The new sport model, the F-Type, is commonplace. It looks like a cross between an undersized Camaro retread and a Mazda Miata, but with a deeper voice. There's basically nothing to recommend it to a purchaser with $100,000 to put towards a car-toy. If you want a car that small, you buy a Porsche or a Mercedes (or a Miata). 

So I think Jaguar is a failing marque, likely to go the way of the Hupmobile and the De Soto.

End of rant.

So they couldn't fix my car -- the parts would take days to come in, and I wasn't willing to wait. But they did get the back windows up (and then disconnected them so that I don't accidentally lower them again). It was around noon when I left the shop. Went across the highway to a restaurant to see what I could salvage of my planned excursion.

The beauty spots across Northern Arizona all had to go by the way: Point of Mountain, Military Sinkhole, Woods Canyon Vista and, most painfully, Mogollon Rim. And Tonto Natural Bridge, near Payson, was out. But the rest was still doable.

So I headed up past Wickenburg to see the Shrine of St. Joseph-of-the-Mountains, in a little town called Yarnell. I'm not big on things religious beyond the fact that some of them tend to be among the more beautiful architectural expressions of Western civilization. This wasn't likely to be that, but one never knows, does one. My reason for including it in the plan was that I have a good friend who is heavily into the rites of the Church of Rome, and so when I have the opportunity to visit such a place, I do so with him in mind, and maybe I pick up a little souvenir that he might appreciate. 

Well, the Shrine is "temporarily closed." No sign of when (or even if) it might re-open. But there appears to be some kind of construction-related activity contemplated. So maybe in the future.... And it wasn't a total loss, this cruise up the mountain: the road up there was a great drive, made even better by the fact that the travel lanes are separated by about 40 to 80 feet of altitude. The road winds up along the edge of a steep mountain, with views to the southeast across a wide valley. On the downhill run, there's a belvedere where I got some pictures of the view across the valley; but I need to stitch them together on my other computer. Someday, maybe in a couple of weeks, they'll be available for viewing.

I have a sort of gig lined up, contributing articles to a website called automotivemuseumguide.com. I intend to make my first submission about the Petersen Museum, one of the largest in the country. I already have a ticket purchased to see it (again; I was there in 2019) on Friday, but I thought it'd be a good idea to see if I could get somebody from the museum to meet with me then, to give me information to illuminate and edify my eventual article. Turns out, though, that it's Pebble Beach this week. That's one of the world's biggest antique-car shows, at a famous golf resort up the coast from LA; I reckon, for those Petersen people, it's either a buying trip, or a selling trip, or just a great perk of the job, and everyone's gone to that. But I got a couple of email contacts, which I will write to tomorrow, after I get to LA and check into my hotel.

Poston Monument

Meanwhile, I'm drivin', I'm drivin'. When I get to Parker, on the Colorado River, I almost decide to skip the next point on my itinerary, the Poston Monument, fifteen miles south of town. But it only added about 15 minutes to my trip, so I went on down the road to see it. It's a column marking the site of the largest of the Japanese-American Internment Camps during World War II. I'm glad I went to see it; it's a moving reminder of what this country did to loyal citizens in a time of panic, and I think the shame we all feel, or should feel, as Americans has gone a long way toward making us a better people.Or at least, to keep us from doing that again.

The border of the small plaza where the monument stands is lined with bricks giving the names and assigned dwellings of various internees of the camp; and on the back of the monument are the names of internees who gave their lives in the service of their nation during that same war, despite what that nation had done to them and their families. The bottom of the monument hosts a number of origami, mostly swans, which I assume are meant as reminders to the world and the former inmates of the camp that their suffering has not been forgotten. 

My First Sandstorm!

On leaving Poston, I caught my first-ever sandstorm. I could see it, off to the east, and by the time I'd gotten to my turn-off for California I'd had to pull over twice to wait for adequate visibility. It wasn't nearly as exciting as I thought it might be. The sandstorm continued as I headed west, but on that road I was mostly among irrigated fields, so the dust was only dangerously heavy in the interstices between fields, where the wind picked up dust and blew it across the road. I could always see six or seven telephone poles ahead, so I felt comfortable going on, though at reduced speed. (Plus that road had no shoulder to pull on to.) Once I crossed the river into California, though, there were no more telephone poles, so I had to slow way down. By then, though, the storm seemed to be waning, so I kept going. I thought about going back to Parker, but it was already 25 miles away, so I stopped for a time at the C-store at the turnoff for Twenty-Nine Palms and waited it out.

Between the C-store and Twenty-Nine Palms, I drove through my second and third sandstorms, with hard rain in the intervals. The sand was just drifting ahead of me on the road like wraiths. These sandstorms were lighter than the first, but it's a little disturbing when your automatic windshield wipers come on and throw off a load of powdery sand you didn't expect to have there. It was dark long before I got to my destination for the night, and I was tired, so I pulled over on a turnout (nice of them to put those in, and to let you know they're coming up) to just close my eyes for a couple of minutes. I often find that two or three minutes just sitting with eyes closed will perk me up enough for a sustained bout of driving. After, it turns out, about 20 minutes, a car passed me and woke me up, and I drove into Twenty-Nine Palms, where I am writing this. It's after Midnight, and I'm pretty wide awake. There's one thing in this area I want to see in the morning, then I'm heading over to Los Angeles on what I hope is a stunningly beautiful drive, but with the top up, as I can't put it down until I get the thing fixed after I get home. (I need two new high-pressure hydraulic hoses; both of them gave out, and I have hydraulic fluid sloshing around in the back of the car, between the trunk and the outer skin, according to the mechanic who worked on it. But at least my windows are up now.)