An Excellent Road Trip (Part 2)

 The last day of our road trip we stopped at the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden, where I discovered the best road trip trick I never realized before: botanical gardens are the BEST road trip stops!!! Especially when you're driving some of the straighter, less-varied segments of highway in the Midwest, stopping at a botanical garden is about the most refreshing and revitalizing thing one could possible do. Enjoy these photos while I get on my soap box about it.

View from the mezzanine in the conservatory

1. A botanical garden that has a conservatory offers you varied climates. You've been in your low-ceilinged car for hours, breathing recirculating air, heated or cooled. Suddenly you enter an expansive-ceilinged building (and a glass ceiling at that) with humidity or aridity, and all the fresh oxygen being pumped out by a profusion of plants! Invigorating!

My favorite of their hibiscus collection

A succulent that looks like a cabbage!

Cascade of pretty pink flowers

White-speckled leaves

Purple and multi-textured

Peachy irises

Sunset irises

Irises with peach on top and purple on bottom!

2. You get to see all sorts of different shapes and colors! Some are bright, some are subtle, some are familiar and some are surprising and new. The feast for the senses (because of course, there's all different smells as well!) is such great stimulation after you've been driving for hours, looking at the same basic colors of passing landscape, pavement, and automobiles.

Water feature!

Dangling flowers from an overhead trellis

A furled flower, stunningly like a chrysalis!

Tiny flower inside big leaves!

3. Your brain is stimulated to look at things in all different depths, spaces, and places! You can walk around an outdoor, landscaped garden that has unique lines and features. You can walk underneath a canopy of vines and look up to see a set of flowers reaching down to you. You can notice a flower that is furled so tightly that it looks like a chrysalis and be in awe. You can even peer inside the water-filled cups of a massive, spiky plant and see that it holds a little tiny flower!

When we left the botanical gardens, I felt incredibly exhilarated for the last leg of our journey. We arrived at Aunt Pam's in Illinois later that day, where the air was thick with the smell of lilacs and I packed and repacked for the next leg of my journey: a train to Michigan, where I surprised my family. 

I don't know that I will do a post for that part of the trip, it all having passed a few weeks ago at this point and me wanting to stay in the moment rather than feel beholden to report out on something to a digital platform. If you want to ask me about it yourself, you certainly can! Suffice it to say that it was an enjoyable trip, I got to see all my immediate family and a couple cousins, I got to swim in the Lake, I got to see lots of neat wildlife (including a Scarlet Tanager!), and I got to host an online ranger program from my parents' living room.  I took the train home, Jack picked me up, and after our drive home was finished I went to sleep, got up, ran a couple errands, and then went back to sleep for the rest of the next day until evening!

Now it's been busy at work, hot outside, and flowers have really taken off around here! Summer is definitely hitting the ground running! 

Happy solstice everybody!

Until next time!

An Excellent Road Trip (Part 1)

 I've had the pleasure of driving across the country on numerous occasions, especially in the early years of working public lands when I was going back and forth between jobs and school or my parents' home in Michigan. Very often I would find myself worn down by the beauty, disinterested in the stops, as my tank of experiences to share filled up and there was no one to share it with. But this month I got to take a road trip with someone so that I could share it along the way. It was a road trip that was truly excellent, and it was with my mother-in-law. 

Kathy, my mother-in-law, at the John Denver Sanctuary in Aspen, CO

My mother-in-law is the best road trip buddy. She doesn't want to drive too many hours in a day, she laughs it off if we take a wrong turn, she's not a backseat driver, she let's me put on whatever I want on the radio (as long as it doesn't interrupt her reading), and she's always willing to stop and look at something interesting (but doesn't feel the need to stop and look at everything - a difficult balance to strike!). We made it across the country in 5 days and 4 nights, making at least one lovely tourist stop each day (and sometimes more).

Somewhere in the Utah desert...

Day 1 was Cali to Zion - it was a bit of a flat and drab desert drive until we got across Nevada into the tiny piece of Arizona before Utah, when things suddenly started getting colorful and textured out there. Our visit to Zion was a bit of a tourist faux pas - we basically arrived, went to the gift shop (we'd both been to the park before, but she had missed the gift shop on her last visit), went to get on a shuttle - and then discovered that due to c19 regulations that was not going to be available to us! No worries - we had gotten a later start than anticipated so this just meant that we would get to turn in at a reasonable time. Another hour on the road to our hotel and a good night's sleep.

Kathy and I in front of the "Painted Wall" at Black Canyon of the Gunnison NP - we have beautiful smiles!

 Day 2 was Zion to Black Canyon of the Gunnison - one of my favorite National Parks. We realized that Arches was just off the 70 and, since neither of us had been there before really we thought we'd boogie down there and do the tourist drive - but 45 minutes south of the 70 we discovered that the park was "full" and a sign told us to come back in 3-4 hours... we decided this was a sign that we need to plan a Utah-only trip to hit up all the National Parks sites we haven't seen yet in that amazing state. Crossing into Colorado we hit some rainy weather, but by the time we got to Gunnison things had cleared up pretty well. Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park holds a special place in my life. Back in the summer of 2009, my family took our last all-family trip to several Colorado National Parks. It was while walking around the campground loop with my dad in the morning at Black Canyon that I decided that what I wanted to do with my life was work for public lands. That was a decision that led me on the path for the next decade of my life (and then some, so far). This trip's brief visit was my first since that one back in 2009, and I enjoyed soaking in the magic a little more - it was still there. :)

Outside the east end of the Eisenhower Tunnel - look at the snow!

 The day that gave us the most trepidation was Day 3 - Black Canyon to the northeast Denver suburbs. This was the day that we would be traversing the Rockies and - unlucky coincidence - the day that we were expecting the worst weather. Fortunately, the storm predictions had lessened a little bit each day as we approached, and it was much better than what we had expected - instead of snow it was moderately heavy rain and a patch of hail, nothing the sedan couldn't handle. We drove over the 70, detoured briefly to visit the John Denver Sanctuary in Aspen, drove through one of the highest-elevation vehicular tunnels in the world, and used my 11th night free on Hotels.com to treat us to a two queen suite, with plenty of time to relax and enjoy it! (In case you haven't already heard, I've recently become a HUGE fan of the hotel suite, when reasonable for the situation, as the most comfortable way to stay.)

Kathy hitches her horse outside the Perkins General Store at Hastings Museum

 Day 4 was Nebraska - we tried to get across the whole thing, we made it as far as Lincoln. Along the way we stopped at the Hastings Museum (home of Kool-Aid), by recommendation of a friend, and were wowed by the vast number of taxidermied animals from around the world for a small city museum. Unfortunately, we arrived close to closing and neglected to visit the gift store, which meant that I failed in my wifely duties of bringing my partner a Kool-Aid sticker... sorry, Babe!

Posing with the Kool-Aid Man... or... Men... I guess :)

 You may have noticed that in all the photos from the trip, we're wearing the same shirt. Jack designed us road trip shirts to wear - "Dil-Mil" (daughter-in-law, mother-in-law) Cali to Chi-town - but we were told that it was our job to wear them EVERY day. Luckily there were two apiece. But the photos are proof that we kept up our end of the bargain!

 Day 5 was Iowa and Illinois - I'll post on that later. As it is, this is a rather delayed post and I'm only just now home and going through photographs. I was scared to start this en route, lest I accidentally publish and give it all away! Now that the trip is over, I am eager to catch this blog up on the big events of May so I can start musing on the natural world waking up around me in June!

May Reading Check-in

 The reading has been slim, the blog-writing has been slim, the British Bake-Off and Victorian Farm watching have been high, the workload has been picking up, and the travel has been improving as well. Fully vaccinated meant I could have lunch with my friend Betty in San Francisco, and a weekend with my Aunt and Uncle and cousin in the Santa Rosa area, whom I've been waiting about a year to see since we were first supposed to visit them in April of 2020. 

So in the last couple months I did a typical summer load of reading, that is: two books. I tried for four. But didn't quite make it: one was a non-winner, and the other I wasn't able to get through before it was due.

The two books I did manage to get finished were doozies, and both took me more than a month (one of them took about 4) to finish.

The first was Hidden Figures, the book that inspired the movie. I went into it thinking that the book would simply be the same story as the movie. What I discovered within the first chapter of the book was that this was a proper historical treatise on about a dozen different women's stories of the hundreds of Black men and women that worked for NASA and its predecessor in the 40s through 80s+. The movie covered a very small period and just a few key women, but the book detailed an entire culture of mathematically-minded women of color who encouraged and scouted each other for this golden opportunity in a day when segregation and sexism kept many women from excelling in maths-based careers. Kudos to the author who recognized that these stories she grew up with were missing from our general popular history in the U.S., especially with regards to the space race, and managed to get this epic book published (and then get a movie deal after that!).

The second book I finished (the one that took the better part of 4 months) was The Overstory. I had a recommendation from a coworker on a fire assignment to read it, and then I saw it in the list of recommended/impactful books from 2020 for a theater group that I've been participating in virtually since last summer. So I went ahead and got it on ebook - only to find out that when I'd read all the way to the last three chapters I had only read the first quarter of the book... it took 6 more weeks to get through the 3rd-to-last chapter, at the end of which something terrible happened and I decided I didn't want to read it anymore. However, I was still curious what happened next, so I got it on audio for what was still almost another 10 hours of listening. All said and done - I don't think I recommend the book. But it was very interesting in the things it made you think about trees. But I don't know that it was worth the slog. 

 And that's it for now. Jack and I went to the coast this weekend and I'm taking a week off of work before the season gets really busy - whatever that's going to look like in this weird halfways normal year.