A Day in Seattle

We drove south from Port Townsend about 50 miles to Bainbridge Island and walked onto the ferry to Seattle. From Seattle, Mount Rainier is very ghostly and prominent and only about 60 miles away.

The first hotel in Seattle was opened in 1856 by Madame Damnable. She ran a high-class hotel of ill repute but earned her nickname, not from that, but from her ability to swear proficiently in Chinese, English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. Her name was Mary Ann Conklin. Prior to moving to Seattle, she was abandoned in Port Townsend by her hubby, "Bull" Conklin, who was a whaling ship Captain.

The last time we saw Seattle was 1968. We had a favorite Italian restaurant called Ferlinghetti's. It always took about two hours to get though the many dinner courses. Sometimes we even missed our theater ticket showtimes. We discussed the restaurant on the bus yesterday with some long time Seattle residents. They told us Ferlinghetti's. had gone out of business decades back.

The Space Needle and monorail were built for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair. Both of these and the old Food Court were still there, but several other attractions have been built since we were last here to supplement an area now called the "Seattle Center". There is a Science Fiction Museum and a Music Appreciation center currently featuring "Nirvana" to name two new enhancements to the sleazy old World's Fair location. At a top speed of 45 MPH the Seattle monorail is thought to be the  fastest monorail in the world. Each of the trains has logged over a million miles on the one mile track. Back in the 60s we all thought monorails were the tits.

We went to a really run down area of the city in 1967 to see three short plays by Leroy Jones. All of the actors and the audience were black except for me and Mrs. Phred. One scene required anger and frustration from a black man wearing a hard hat. He took it off and threw it really hard and hit me in the chest with it. I was really impressed with his aim and it left me with a cool indelible memory. Did I tell you Mrs. Phred was thrown in jail in 1964 for protesting the Florida pavilion at the New York World's Fair and Florida's racial policies?

Sometimes the things you see in city store windows are as interesting as what you can see in a big city art museum.

We had lunch at a micro brewery on the waterfront and then spent a couple of hours in SAM (Seattle Art Museum).

I took a few pictures. Works in glass are always appealing.

It's interesting to go around to art museums in different big cities and see how much the directors are willing to put on the line in the way of unconventional modern art vs. the tried and true. Seattle's SAM  was packed with stolid stuff.

You Ain't Nothin but a Hound Dog

White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico

We went into the White Sands Missile Range  to check out the museum this morning. My personal favorite is the Hound Dog. It was in service back in 1965 when I was in the Air Force. It's a beautiful design. Two of them were carried under the wings of a B-52. They each had a 1.45 megaton warhead. That's about 75 times more than Hiroshima. The  Hound Dog  had a 500 mile range. They were designed to take our air defense systems so that the B-52s could go in and deliver four big 24 megaton city busters.

722 Hound Dogs were produced by North American Aviation. The first delivery was 1959. The Hound Dog employed the KS-140 star tracker to help it home in on a target. The Hound Dog had a probable circular error of 2.2 miles, but with a 1.45 megaton payload, this was largely irrelevant. The Hound Dog engines helped to power the B-52 on takeoff. The Hound Dog was strictly a nuclear war missile which was never used for the purpose intended.

Here in Las Cruces we have numerous tennis courts available. The one we usually use has ten courts and a view of the rugged Organ Mountains.

One of the museum exhibits is the Patriot. It was designed to take down air breathers, but a software upgrade gave it a fair shot at unsophisticated ballistic missiles like the Iraqi SCUD in 1991.

The Pershing missile was a nasty little intermediate range ballistic missile. It was good for 1,000 miles with a nuclear warhead and a very small expected circular error. It was retired after the SALT treaty. I think the Russians were really nervous about having these in Germany. They probably imagined German troops taking them away from US forces. Crazy Germans...a Russian nightmare.

This 155 millimeter cannon fires a radar directed rocket with an extreme range.

They say that this flying saucer type rocket was launched from Roswell and landed here at White Sands. My guess is that it's just disinformation to cover up the actual Roswell saucer crash.

Werner Van Braun...America's greatest German rocketeer.

The museum had a Stinger missile.

This is a picture of the escape capsule rocket for one of the manned space flights.It was a great museum. They had ground to air atomic missiles that could take out a whole fleet of Russian bombers at once and tiny missile for tanks and everything in between.

We drove up to Cloudcraft at 9,000 feet and met Jim and Darryl. They were bicycling from California to Georgia over a six week period with a group of 30 that has an average age of 66. They only ride on the interstates when no alternative is available. The Interstates have "alligators" which are wires from failed truck tires that cause them to have many flat tires with their 120 PSI bike tires. They had just biked up 5,000 feet over 16 miles from Alamagordo to Cloudcraft. Mostly they sleep in churches except on Sundays.

There's a ski lodge on top of the mountain in Cloudcroft.

Mrs. Phred went into the tower in the lodge.

This is a view of White Sands from Cloudcroft. The dunes take up 275 square miles

The trestle at Cloud croft.

I graduated at the top of my class in Navigator school. Normally my assignment to the Strategic Air Command would have been automatic. However, I talked to the base commander just before graduation and told him over drinks that I was anxious to get my fingers on a nuclear trigger. In his wisdom, the Colonel had me assigned as a navigator on old cargo planes that carried no weapons or parachutes.

The Precipice

Coos Bay to Winnemucca, Nevada

Ever notice that, while you don't mind standing on the edge of a cliff, it can make you extremely uncomfortable when your companion does it?

Precipice

When everything falls apart

time
age
health
wealth
glory
faith
belief

We hang barely
by a thread of love.

- Pradip Chattopadhyay

The campgrounds in Oregon have been full and hard to get into this summer. Tourism is up over 50% since the beginning of the "Great Recession".  It might be cheaper gas. It might be a stronger economy than the pundits would lead us to believe. Anyway you cut it, you better reserve far ahead for State Parks or RV park accommodations.

We spend three nights in Crescent, Oregon after leaving Coos Bay.

The eight hour drive east and south to Wunnemucca was very empty.

I've Been Everywhere

I was toting my pack along the long dusty Winnemucca road
When along came a semi with a high canvas covered load
If your goin' to Winnemucca, Mack with me you can ride
And so I climbed into the cab and then I settled down inside
He asked me if I'd seen a road with so much dust and sand
And I said, "Listen! I've traveled every road in this here land!"

 I've been everywhere, man
I've been everywhere, man
Crossed the deserts bare, man
I've breatherd the mountain air, man
Travel, I've had my share, man
I've been everywhere

Song by Johnny Cash

We should be able to buy some propane when we head east again this morning. We have a bolt on the main slide that keeps breaking. So far I've been able to fix it by replacing the bolt. I bought some triple strength bolts in Home Depot, but they shear off too after several extensions and retractions.

I take a long walk in the early morning through Winnemucca, past the bordellos,  casinos and sunflowers..

The drive to Winnemucca

The drive to Winnemucca

The drive to Winnemucca

The drive to Winnemucca

The Cradle of Western Civilization

Athens, Greece – May 17, 2006

We thought about visiting the Acropolis in Athens and decided instead to spend the day in an opium den on the waterfront in Pireaus. We are seated by the proprietor, a morbidly obese albino Dutchman. In the afternoon, we stagger though the ship’s security checkpoint and back onto the boat and are greeted by the cafeteria steward Deowa, a diminutive ray of sunshine from Bali, Indonesia. Deowa engaged us in conversation early in the trip and never fails to greet us with a cheery, “Good Morning, Bob and Carol!”.


Three weeks with limited internet access has me thinking about the upcoming summer trip to Alaska. Most of it will be though parts of Canada we haven’t seen before. My ISP doesn’t cover that area as part of my monthly contract. Even in Alaska, our ISP does not have good coverage. On the other hand, the reds start running July 15th.

Today we are “at sea”, in and out or showers and sunshine. We arrive in Messina, Sicily tomorrow morning for a tour up the slopes of Etna. I’ve got some good shots of its snow covered slopes from earlier in the trip, but the cost per minute of the boat’s internet makes me reluctant to pay the price of posting any pictures on the internet. After that, we spend a few days wandering the streets of Rome and the back to Florida on the 23rd.

Our 40th anniversary was last Christmas Eve. We don’t buy presents for each other anymore. We agreed at Christmas back in Las Cruces that this trip would be to celebrate the occasion, but any excuse would have done just as well.


This is not a good time for Americans to travel in Europe. The cost of a thimbleful of espresso, for example, now averages $6. The Euro is at $1.40 and going up. This trip will cost roughly double what we have been spending on similar trips a few years ago. Our Greek tour guide yesterday feels sorry for us. She says once we were once a rich people and now we are poor like them. She hopes we can join the European Union one day. They tend to force policies of economic sanity on member nations.


Our Athens guide had an astounding passion for Athens, although she admits that it is an astonishingly ugly and depressing city of small condominiums full of cars with no parking spaces. She calls it the cradle of western civilization. Mrs. Phred and I glance at each other when she says this and shake our heads…everyone knows that Florida State University is the cradle.

We signed up for a long tour. First we go to the Temple of Poseidon south of Athens, and then have lunch and a tour of the Acropolis. Our guide tells us a long story on the bus ride involving King Minos and his wife who was stricken by a bad case of zoophilia and who fell in love with a white bull. She hid herself inside a specially built wooden cow (don’t ask for details) and the resulting offspring of this union was a minotaur who was very fond of virgins and who lived in a labyrinth. Somehow Icarus and a golden thread come into play later in the story.

The Sea of Cortez

Puerto Penasco, Mexico 
We spent a couple of days in the desert in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Organ Pipe cactus, unlike Saguaro, is rare in the U.S. They’re cold sensitive and grow here only on the Mexican border on the south slope of the mountains. These cacti, like Saguaro, have hard woody skeletons, like whale penis bones, which remain behind after they die of old age. Their waxy surfaces hold in water during the day. At night they open their pores to breathe and bloom. Long-nose bats dart from flower to flower spreading pollen.


Most of the scenic roads close to the border have been closed in the monument. Drug smugglers and “coyotes”, who smuggle people, use Organ Pipe extensively on runs North, creating new roads and litter. A few park rangers and border patrol agents have been killed here in skirmishes so they try to keep the tourists and the smugglers separated in a balancing act. The park rangers are more offended by litter than by smuggling.


We cross the border and drive 60 miles though the sandy desert to the northern tip of the Sea of Cortez at Puerto Penasco. There are $2 margaritas at the resort next door during Happy Hour. We drink some and dance a little.

The sea is tranquil and very blue in the hot Mexican sun. I expect a big tide since the sea is shaped like the Bay of Fundy in Maine and like Cook’s Inlet in Alaska. At low tide a big expanse of white sand appears.

John from Montreal catches me trying to photograph a “green flash” at sunset and stays to help and offer advice. He’s an old diver too with a French accent. He likes to spearfish. He thinks the water is too cold at 60 F. We spent two hours talking about diving. He's sailed his 33 foot sailboat to South America, the Azores and along the coast of Europe...he's 69 now...drifting south though Mexico until Montreal warms up...he shot himself, like Hemingway, with a "bang-stick" hunting a big Bull shark near Cat Island in the Bahamas...broke his leg in 4 places with the 44 magnum...he shows me the scars...

We have some Coronas with lime slices placed in the bottleneck at a restaurant built on pilings in the Old Port. Corona is pronounced properly with a rolled “R”. The beaches here are lined with new million dollar condos built for American boomers from California.


Black dogs run in packs on the beach in the morning. They have adapted to life here. They forage on the beach for food washed in by the tide. I see a few going though garbage cans that they can knock over. As the sunlight comes the dogs change color from black to brown and white.

The whales from Alaska winter here. At dawn the reflections on the wet sand beach are golden.