August '21: Stained Glass Trip, Part IV

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 Phoenix 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 anitlock 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.)

August '21 Stained Glass Trip: Day 2

This is part two of the Stained Glass Trip. You can read Part 1 here.

I love planning trips. I sometimes love planning a trip more than actually taking the trip. Planning is a way of learning, costing only time, while travelling usually costs both time and money. But for all the planning I do, usually meticulous, sometimes obsessive, I always say that every intersection is an opportunity to change plans. Today was a day that put that maxim to the test, and the result shows why I prefer planning to execution. 

The day started early. Way too early. I woke up between 2 and 3 o'clock in the morning. By five I had given up on going back to sleep, so I was on the road very early. My first stop was a 24-hour convenience store about 200 yards down the road in Cloudcroft, where truly mediocre coffee was available at a not-outrageous price. Okay, it was a pretty good price, or would have been had the coffee been better, but I'm in kind of a mood now and so my instinct is to say the price was just not outrageous. I stood in the parking lot drinking my coffee and smoking a cigarette and watching the garbage truck try with limited success to empty three large dumpsters. It took several tries and the driver had to get out and pick up all the trash that missed the truck, so there was some entertainment value there. I threw away about a third of the coffee and headed down the road to my first stop, which was only about half a mile away.

Mexican Canyon Trestle

Back in the day, someone built a railroad up to Cloudcroft, which sits above 8600 feet altitude, to bring
tourists up so they could escape the lowland heat. On the west side of town is a remnant of that railroad, a curved trestle across Mexican Canyon. I had asked the doyenne of last night's hotel about it, and she said that it was about an hour's hike each way, and the return trip was very steep. So I decided just to go to the overlook and see it.  I did that. Not really sure why it's a sight to see, but there it is: a trestle, sans rails. And I'm pretty sure the woman at the hotel has never in her entire life been there, because it's only about a 300-yard hike each way from the trailhead, and couldn't possibly take an hour each way unless you're on crutches.

Next stop was about ten miles farther down the road to Alamogordo, which drops about five thousand feet over about fifteen miles. A place called Tunnel Overlook, I suppose because it's just past the one tunnel along the road. The tunnel is nothing special; the attraction is the south-facing cliff opposite the road, which is, according to signboards at the parking area, an archaeological site used by native Americans of the Ancient Culture, or maybe the Fresnal Culture; the sign wasn't clear about that. In any case, I couldn't make heads or tails of the signage in relation to the actual cliff face, so I just read all the signs and took some pictures and moved on. 

Down in the valley, I stopped for breakfast at Denny's and had their version of eggs benedict. While it was not at all authentic, it wasn't bad; and the coffee was much, much better than what I'd gotten at the convenience store. I didn't throw any of it away.

Feeling restored, I started down the highway toward Las Cruces, where I'd pick up I-10 for about 60 miles to Deming, then go back up into the higher elevations with a couple of stops in New Mexico before going into Arizona. I figured to get to around Payson today, with the high point being a view of the Mogollon Rim, which I've never seen. Fifteen miles out of Alamogordo, plans changed. The United States Air Force had the road closed. "For at least an hour," the 80-year-old MP told me. I pulled over to wait with everybody else, and checked my GPS guide. It told me that if I went back to Alamogordo and then south to a point just north of El Paso, I could be half an hour ahead of the game. So, what the hell. Drove back to Alamogordo and then south towards El Paso. About halfway down the road, Google Maps told me that Interstate 10 near the Texas-New Mexico line was now closed and the Alamogordo route was now the fastest. 

 Not having a paper map to consult, I pulled into a C-store to see if maybe they had one. Maybe there was another road that crossed the short distance between the highway I was heading south on, and the Interstate that headed north just a few miles away to the west. The clerk there told me the Air Force closes that highway every time they plan to test a missile. They launch a drone that tows a target, then launch a Patriot missile to bring down the target. It all takes maybe three seconds, but they close the road for at least an hour, from an abundance of caution. 

Anyway: there's no other road, but now Google Maps shows the interstate is open again, so on I go. Very unpleasant drive, because the speed limit on the southward highway changes frequently, for no apparent reason, and because the connector from that highway to the interstate is a pothole testing ground. Only about five miles long, but five miles of really bad road. I'd have preferred a gravel road to that. Then up the interstate to Deming. Had lunch there, at a local burger chain known apparently for its glacial service. Oh, and let me tell you one other thing: that part of New Mexico swarms with flies. I took more than a dozen on a ride up to my next stop. (I tried to get them out, but more came in than went out.)

Bird of Paradise bush, maybe

Rock Wren, probably

That next stop was City of Rocks State Park. The rocks are tufa ("Kneeling Nun Tufa," according to the park's brochure, but it doesn't explain where the name comes from), a fairly soft and relatively lightweight volcanic rock. There are a number of outcrops clustered in the park, with a botanical garden near the entrance and a number of short hikes around the edges, plus one hike that goes right through the middle. I ended up spending a lot longer at this park than I'd expected to. I head for the botanical garden, because somebody I know is really into that stuff. The plants are almost all cacti that are common enough from Texas to California to Mexico, but there is one very pretty flowering plant with no label that I take a picture of (see left). Then I hike up through the middle of the park about halfway, until I encounter a Little Brown Bird that makes clear I'm not welcome in its territory. I take a picture of it, too (see right); it comes so close to me I could have reached out and touched it.  I showed the pictures to the park ranger, who told me with absolutely no confidence that the plant might be a Bird of Paradise, and the bird might be a Rock Wren. I've decided to believe him.

The next planned stop is The Kneeling Nun, which Roadtrippers says is Silver City's favourite sculpture. (I suspect that it has something to do with why the local rock is called Kneeling Nun tufa.) I only put it on the trip because I wanted the route to go through Silver City, and it was either that or some bar that managed to get a listing. So I drive up to Silver City, which twenty years ago was a charming old town but now is a booming sea of suburban sprawl. My GPS took me to the center of town and told me my destination was on the right. I parked and got out at what looked like an old high school but is now a public utility office. There was no sculpture that I could see, so I opened up the Roadtrippers listing and read that it's located eighteen miles east of Silver City at a place called Santa Rita. Well.

So. On to my next stop. I realise I'm not going to get as far as Payson, thanks to the Air Force, so I'm thinking I'll be staying in Show Low tonight. The weather now is fine, so the top comes down, and I'm cruising along a nice little two-lane highway, heading northwest towards Arizona, when it starts to rain a little. I pull over and hit the button to put the top up ... and nothing happens. There's a whirring noise but no action. I get out the owner's manual and read about how to put the top up manually. I manage that chore in about 20 minutes, just in time for a gullywasher of a thunderstorm, complete with impressive displays of lightning. 

I decide that I'm not going to be able to spend a week in LA without being able to put the top down or the back windows up (they're operated by the same mechanism), so I look up the nearest repair shop. It's in Scottsdale, outside of Phoenix, five hours away according to Google Maps. Okay, that'll have to do, so I start down the road, heading now for Scottsdale. After about 20 miles, I decide I should make an appointment for service for tomorrow morning (because I know I'm not going to get there before they close today). I pull over to look up the number, but there's no service. And I manage to erase the directions. I plug in the address again and set off looking for a signal. A few miles along, Google Maps kicks in, and now it tells me to turn around and go the other way. Grrrr.

The forested road it takes me down is a road that would be the perfect drive if only I could put the top down, and not have to drive in the heaviest rain I've seen since the last flood back home. The wipers can't keep up, and in my mind I know that water is pouring in through the open rear windows, and I'm driving through the forest, making hairpin turns and going up steep climbs and down steep descents all at around fifteen miles an hour because I can't see shit. Eventually the rain ends, and I finally got a phone signal and call for a service appointment for 9am tomorrow, and book a hotel in Globe, which is a little less than two hours from Scottsdale, so I'm pretty sure I can make that. And that's where I am now, in Globe, worried that it might rain again and my car is sitting outside with the windows down.... 

But I'm still optimistic that I can get the roof mechanism fixed and still get to LA on Wednesday. Actually, I might get there sooner, because there's not much to see along I-10 out of Phoenix. Though I still plan to head up to the San Gabriel Crest on the way across southern California. We'll see what can be salvaged, when the car is fixed. But I'm pretty sure I won't get to see the Mogollon Rim.

Oh, and by the way, the pictures from this trip are all in this gallery.

August '21: Stained Glass Trip, Part 1

THANKS TO MY SISTER-IN-LAW, who sent me an article from the New York Times about an exhibit of stained glass on show in Los Angeles this summer, I started out this morning from San Antonio to the west coast. It being August, and I having nothing pressing at the time of planning, and being assured that there would be someone to take care of the dog while I'm gone, I had laid out a trip of the sort I most enjoy: a roundabout low-key wander, away from freeways as much as possible, with every potentially interesting spot included as a stop. I was really looking forward to this excursion, four days to get there, three days there, a scant three days back.

The trip started auspiciously enough. It was fairly cool in San Antonio, especially considering it's the middle of August or near enough, and there was some cloud cover to keep the sun at bay for a time. My stops were all laid into the Roadtrippers App that I finally paid to use after so many years as a free-rider. And I had used it enough on the recent trip up to Pennsylvania to be comfortable with it as a guidance tool. And for back-up, there are always paper maps.

I got to my first navigation point at Tarpley, Texas, chosen only to ensure my transit along one of the most beautiful drives in Texas. FM 470 (or whatever it is) takes you through an achingly beautiful part of the Texas Hill Country, not with any spectacular vistas or important Must-See places, just mile after winding mile of well-maintained, lightly-travelled highway. A nearly perfect Sunday drive. 

At a certain point the clouds gave way to bright blue skies and the temperature soared to eighty degrees. Mercy. Well, at that point I thought it best to stop and lay on a slather of sunblock. Naturally, though I had passed perhaps six hundred and seventy-five picnic areas, historical-marker pullouts and church parking lots in the 80 or so miles since leaving the house, there was not so much as a wide spot on the side of the road for the next thirty minutes or so. Ever notice how that happens? It's like trying to pass someone on a winding road: as long as you're stuck with the solid yellow line in your lane, not a single  car comes from up ahead, but as soon as the road straightens and the solid line gives way, the oncoming traffic is relentless. 

Eventually, of course, I found a place to stop and apply my protective coating, and judging from how I feel just now, at the end of the day, I'd say it was soon enough; except that I forgot about the back of my neck.

During that stop I tried to load in the directions to my next waypoint. I had no signal whatsoever. I couldn't even get the Roadtrippers App to find out what the next planned spot was, so I had to wing it.  Time for the backup plan. I reached behind the passenger seat for the Texas highway map ... and it wasn't there. At that point I recalled throwing it away because it was so worn and torn from a year and a half of mild use, with the intention of taking another, more pristine copy from the other car. Unfortunately, I had not carried through with step two of that plan. But fortunately, I thought, I've wandered these roads often enough that, surely, I would recognise the turns or the destination signs when I come upon them. 

Not so, it turns out. I recognised every single town name, and could not guess which ones were to be on my planned route. So I flipped a mental coin at a T intersection, and went right. That turns out to have been a bad decision. While it eventually took me up along the beautiful South Llano River (which had, at one point, been a part of the plan, but had not survived to the final version), it led me, despite every avoidance maneuver available, to the town of Junction, a place I didn't want to be. I gave up on getting even a 3G signal and bit the bullet, heading to Junction. Junction is two hours from home on the freeway. Thus I arrived at a spot two hours from home after only four hours of wandering the Hill Country.

At a pit stop there, I bought a bag of Boston Baked Beans. I don't like to use the restrooms at convenience stores and not buy anything, and I remember that, as a child, I thought Boston Baked Beans -- peanuts covered in some reddish kind of hard candy shell -- were a real treat. Let's just say that my tastes have changed, or the Beans have. (It didn't help that they were stale enough to make me think they may have been hanging on that peg since I was last a fan.)

At that point it was still cool enough for top-down driving, even with the sun directly overhead, but top-down driving at freeway speeds is the opposite of fun. So the top went up and the audiobook went on. (Up until then, I'd been listening to the music I have loaded on a USB drive, about three thousand of the best songs from my youth, plus about fifteen hundred other songs. Anything I like makes the cut, so I have  Je t'aime, je t'aimais et je t'aimerais (my all-time favourite love song, even from before I translated the lyrics) to Carmen played by the Canadian Brass, and a smattering of Russian bluegrass and a heavy dollop of fado, particularly by Cristina Branco, who has the most perfect crystalline voice.) The audiobook of choice was Far From the Madding Crowd, by Henry James.

Henry James is one of those writers you have to read in school. After all these years, I've finally gotten over that, to the point where all I could remember of his work was that there was dialogue in impenetrable dialect, and that he tends to be wordy. (Yes, I appreciate that here I am the pot to his kettle. So be it.) But I have discovered over the slew of decades since I studied literature in college that many, even most of those dusty ol' novels they make unwilling students read in school are actually quite good stories. Not always, but often. And so I had determined to give ol' Hank another try.

Henry James writes like a greedy man who is paid by the word, and paid extra for polysyllabic utterances. (Again, yes, pot:kettle.) And yes, there are characters in his books who speak in a dialect that I can hardly penetrate at times, when reading the printed page. They're like those closed-captions one encounters during a live interview with a non-native English speaker: they seem vaguely like words you know, but they run together at a pace that the typist can't keep up with. Worse than reading a B'rer Rabbit story. But I also find that (A) when they are read out loud by someone who understands what they mean, as in an audiobook, they make perfect sense, and (B) the dense dialect is only used by secondary working-class characters. The main characters all speak in what used to be called, back before we all became egalitarians, U (for University), or Received Pronunciation. (The working-class dialects were, of course, Non-U. Received pronunciation had no counterpart, as anything other than it literally did not matter.)

I also discovered, much to my astonishment, that Henry James, who is more English than the English, has a sense of humor, and will show it to you from time to time. If you can get past the dated attitudes, mostly about class or the proper roles of the sexes; and if you can overcome words like "vermiculations" and "colloquist" -- which words I, being once upon a time a fluent speaker of even the snottiest variations of English, can deal with -- the man's writings turn out to be soggy with wit of an ironic sort. He manages to damn all the things he praises, to point a focussed beam on the idiocies of society (and he wrote in the late Victorian and Edwardian times, so there was a lot of idiocy lying thickly about, unused on the grass), even while grabbing those extra pennies from his publisher by naming in a list many of the cows owned by Bathsheba Everdeen, as if Daisy and Lilly and the others were important to the story; or while describing the hind-end of horses with reference to Moorish architecture. 

There are, I admit, occasions when James' allusions escape me; as when he referred to an ancient poet who, apparently, made up an overly-long love-poem for a pair of famous Ancient Greek lovers whose names I knew I should have recognised; but Ancient Greeks ... well, once we get past the main gods, and the above-the-title stars of the Iliad and the Odyssey, I fold. I can't keep 'em straight. I might recognise a name, but I don't recall if it's a god or some person who gave birth to a farm animal, or turned into a bush by the side of the road to avoid saying hello to someone coming the other way. I understood what James meant when he spoke of Zeus and the others leaving the "cramped quarters of Olympus" for the more ample spaces of the skies above, but that's pretty much the end of my cognisance of all them Greeks. Even so, the thrust of his reference to this long-winded poet and these unknown lovers was clear enough in meaning, if not in casting, that I didn't miss the gist of what he said.

(One thing I remember not understanding is the statement that a certain character, Sgt. Troy, was indifferent honest with men, but lied constantly to women; in fact he "lied like a Cretan." Maybe it was "lied like a cretin" -- it's an audiobook, and the two words are sometimes pronounced the same -- but even if it was, I don't think that advances my understanding at all. Why on earth should either Cretans or cretins have such a reputation in early-20th-Century England? Unless they were, in fact, actually phenomenally prolific liars as a group. I somehow doubt that.)

My planned route took me down the Fort Lancaster Scenic Loop. I'd been to Fort Lancaster, a 19th-Century military outpost on the Old Chihuahua Road, many years ago. It was there that I saw my first vinegaroon, and for being so remote a memory, it's a surprisingly clear one. Not just the vinegaroon, but the whole Fort Lancaster experience. I thought that in the intervening thirty or forty years, something of note might have happened there, what with the Texas Parks Department being so keen on staying relevant and all. 

Just before getting to Fort Lancaster, I stopped at a picnic area to take what turned out to be the only photograph of the day. Here it is:

Overlooking Fort Lancaster

Fort Lancaster is closed on Sundays and Mondays, it so happens. So that will be a stop on another trip, somewhere down the road.

After that it was back on the interstate for a stretch, then up along the Pecos River into New Mexico. I pat myself on the back for having the foresight to buy a turkey sandwich at a convenience store at some dusty village at the farthest edge of Texas, and for getting gas (again) at Artesia, New Mexico. It was a hundred and seven degrees there. Half an hour later it was cool enough (90) to put the top down again, and half an hour after that I had to dig a long-sleeve T-shirt out of my duffel bag. 

I had planned to stop at something called the Mayhill Lookout, just on the odd chance that it afforded a scenic view from the mountains it's in to the plains to the east; but as I feared, it was several miles down (or up) a gravel road, and my little convertible roller skate doesn't do gravel. I continued on, with not too much in the way of regret. But I didn't make it to Alamogordo, where I'd planned to stop for the night, because of those extra hours wandering in a circle in the Hill Country this morning. So now I'm in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, up in the Sacramento Mountains, with a wood-burning fireplace in my motel room and I'm wondering where I might get some firewood. This is shaping up to be a really great trip. Really.