Trip Statistics & Florida wildlife

I recently returned from my extensive friends and family visiting trip around the US.  I’ve been remiss in keeping people up to date via my leoralore list and this blog, so thought I’d start with a short piece that relays some of the statistics I’ve accumulated about the trip, and do some shorter write-ups about various aspects of the trip that were “story-worthy," later.

Over the entire trip, I:

• drove 14,764 miles (23,760 kilometers)
• visited 35 states (other than Oregon)
• visited the 8 continental states I’d never visited before: West Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, Nebraska
• was gone nearly 6 months, 3 of which were spent in Michigan
• slept in 36 different beds, only one of which was paid accommodation (when ice climbing in Ouray) [a HEARTY thank you to everyone who put me up on this trip!!!!]
• arranged to meet some 76 different families/individuals/groups
• did NOT get around to seeing some 18 individuals/families/groups I’d intended to visit when I started out on my trip!
• spent (only!) 8 nights camping out
• spent 1 night sleeping (fitfully) in the car (across the 2 front seats)
• took over 2000 pictures (mostly with the people whom I visited, and photos for Cure JM)

So, I’ve now been to 49 out of our 50 states, with my last state being Hawaii, although, I have, in point of fact “been” there, as I had a stopover in the Honolulu airport, although I don’t like to count that, and I do wish to visit the state.

One nice thing on this trip was that I got to visit the Big Cypress Natural Preserve, in Florida along the Tamiami (pronounced Tammy-ammy) highway.  This was made possible by a relative of a friend opening up her house to me in the Miami area, so that I could shoot across the southern part of the state the next day to visit a cousin on the western side of the state.  I was very much impressed, first with the highway, which was very straight, and typically had water on both sides, but also with trees and the tons of birds hanging out in the trees and along the edges of the water.  When I got to the Big Cypress Visitor Center, I understood why.  The water along the side of the highway was chock full of fish!   As well, the water was chock full of alligators!!  I never saw the alligators appear to eat anything, and only once saw a bird get a fish.  But the fish, alligators, and birds were all plentiful!

Here is a sampling of the birds I saw, there:

Clockwise, from upper left: black vulture, anhinga, an-I-don't-know-what, egret (with a fish in its mouth), great blue heron.

And here’s a bunch of fish – I think that that may be an alligator head on the right:

And one of the many alligators that I saw:

I like the above picture, because you can see the whole alligator, but I like the below picture, because the eyes are so classic:

Here is a typical bird and alligator picture:

At one of the rest stops in Florida, I saw yet another heron, this time, with a ton of turtles:

There are no fewer than 7 turtles in the above picture!!!

Finally, here is one of me, hanging out with a bunch of brown pelicans near Boynton Beach, Florida:

While I’m not big on Florida, I was happy to see even that small section of the Big Cypress Preserve and all of the birds that were present in Florida, in general.

May you always have a nice place to sleep!

Leora

Oregon to Michigan highlights (lots of pictures!)

On August 25, 2012, I started my approximately 2,500mile (4,000km) trip out to Michigan, where I expect to stay for the next couple of months.  Here are a few of the highlights of that trip, which lasted a week.

 

In earlier trips out through this part of Washington (US 97 crossing from Oregon into Washington), I think that I was blithely unaware that this replica of size and form of the English Stonehenge existed.  It makes me want to get a clue as to how it could be used to measure time and mark seasons.  It was the first monument in the US for those who gave their lives in World War I.  It looks pretty crappy in the picture – there was lovely scenery all around it  (except on this side), except that I couldn’t get a picture of the whole thing from any of the other more flattering sides.  I see that others managed to get a better picture at website for Stonehenge. (Click on the pictures to see a higher quality version of them.)

Dotting this whole area of Washington near the US97 crossing of the Columbia River, are windmills.  I have to admit, I thought that they made for a pretty picture:

I didn’t tarry too long in Washington, except for Stonehenge, taking a few pictures of windmills, and waiting for our chance on the single lane in a construction zone.  By the time I got to Coeur D’Alene, I knew I needed to bed down for the night, so I started looking at possibilities as soon as I got within National Forest boundaries.  I found a place that was unfortunately above Interstate 90, so I heard the gentle roar all night, there, but as it was after dark by the time I started looking for a place, I decided to settle for it.  So here is a picture of where I slept that night:

In the dark, it seemed to be out of the way.  So, it was amusing to be awakened by a guy and his dog hiking by me in the morning.  Since someone was using this as a hiking path, I decided that that likely meant that I could get a good run in, here, so I went for a run.  It was quite nice, indeed – with lots of views of treed low mountains.  I never saw the guy and his dog while running, and by the time that I returned to my car, his car was gone.  The whole time I was there, no one else came.  I was struck by how nice it must be for the residents of Coeur d’Alene to have such a big recreational area.

 

On the highway in Montana, I was going up a hill and around a curve, when I saw a guy flagging down traffic.  I slowed down, and saw someone walking in the middle of the road, as well – I asked him what the issue was, and he said that there was a semi down, but that small cars might be able to get around it.  I had my iphone on the dash of my car, so I used it to snap this photo as I lined up to get by the truck, passing other semis and RVs who would not be able to get around it:

As I went around the end, I worried about the woman who was standing next to the tail end of it, should it have fallen.  The west bound traffic was completely stopped.  I hope and expect that all occupants of the semi were ok, but it must have been one scary ride for them.

 

After visiting my friends in Helena, Montana, I saw farm after farm after farm with bales of hay.  Here’s an artsie shot of one such farm field:

 

The western part of North Dakota was different in one very significant way – here, the hay fields were interspersed with oil wells.  (See the oil pump in the background of this photo?)

 

The configuration in the picture, below, was duplicated many times over, all over this northwestern section of North Dakota:

 

There were bigger operations, like this one, that also had a lot of rectangular containers, and the flame, burning off the gas: 

 

When I drove into North Dakota, I thought that I was going to drive into the western entrance of the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park.  However, the roads didn’t seem to match either my Microsoft Streets’ mapping program, nor the Map program on my iphone.  It was starting to get dark, and I was seeing just one oil operation after another, all lit up, and dead end streets.  I decided that I wasn’t going to get to the park that night, so needed to find a place to bed down for the night.  I saw something that looked like a tractor road, and turned into that, which went up a tiny little hill and then down, again, which was enough to hide my car from immediate visibility from the road.  I parked the car, got out, and noticed some deer standing there, wondering what to do.  They decided to take off.  I spent the night, sleeping behind my car.  During the night, some coyotes were checking out an area not far enough away from me (for my liking).  I was happy when a flash from my flashlight sent them running, since I wasn’t eager for a pack of coyotes to think that I might be a tasty morsel.  In the morning, I took a picture of my surroundings: 

The coyotes had been just to the right of the silos in the above picture. 

 

After bedding down for the night, I was able to get a cell phone signal, and so I sent my little “I’m safe” email to my Mom, since I knew she was worrying about me, and told her that I couldn’t find the western entrance to the park.  She thought that was weird, and checked out the park’s website, and discovered that the road didn’t go through (the website said that it was closed at some point – I don’t think that it actually said that there was no western entrance), and emailed me that info, so in the morning, I just looked for a way to go east to get to that entrance, so that I didn’t have to drive 20 miles north to get to the main highway before heading east, and then south, again to get to the park.  The roads had changed from all of the mapping software, and looked as though they were dictated by where there was oil.  I finally decided, when yet another road I was on dead-ended into an oil operation, to just follow a truck carrying oil out of the operation.  That truck, did, indeed, lead me out to a road that led to a main highway. 

 

The roads reminded me of the maze of roads that sprang up behind my house in Tillamook State forest when they started logging operations, there, recently.  In North Dakota, it was obvious that the high quality dirt roads were put in fairly recently, to allow access to the oil operations springing up, everywhere.  I was also amused when I saw a truck repair “shop” out in the middle of nowhere. 

 

I made it to the park fairly early that morning.  As usual, I didn’t want to pay for camping, and it turned out that camping was free if one backpacked and got a permit to do that.  I just had to be ¼ mile off of a trail, and out of sight of both trails and roads, so that my accommodations wouldn’t mar the beauty of the scenery for other park visitors.   The seasonal employee who issued me the permit seemed to think that this was all a big deal.  She made me think that it was, too, even convincing me that a topographical map was required for this grand expedition that I was about to go on.  When I started talking about how I was also going to visit the Little Missouri River, it seemed to me that she thought that it was just too much to do in one day.  And I MUST take at least a gallon of water with me, because there is no water available on any of the trails, and someone died, earlier in the summer due to dehydration.  She made me think that I really was doing something that was a big deal.  Because of that, I decided to go super light, and eat dinner before backpacking to find a place to camp for the night.  I found a picnic area (with running water!), took the little interpretive walk, there, where I took this shot of the park, to give a general feeling of what was there:

The following photo was also taken on that little hike, as well, and has some longhorn cattle (brought back to the area for nostalgic reasons, even though, unlike bison, they aren’t native) lounging in a bend of the Little Missouri River:

It was a wickedly hot day (in the 90s F/mid 30s C), so I decided that I wanted to spend some time in that river.  While I cooked my dinner, a ranger came by, and we discussed my plans.  I told him what the seasonal person had said about the death, and he looked surprised and then said, oh yeah, someone had died in the South Unit, and acted as though that were a whole different world.  He made it seem as though what I was doing was perfectly normal, more as I had originally expected.  But it was still really, really hot, so I took off on the trail that was supposed to cross the river.  The woman who’d given me the permit also mentioned that there was a lot of mud near the river.  She was quite right about that!  At first, I thought that I wasn’t going to have any issues – that I could just walk on top of the crusty surface, and then, all of a sudden, the crusty surface broke, and mud soon encapsulated my feet.  You can see, here, that the mud is over my ankles – it felt as though it would suck my feet down, further – reminded me of stories of the tar pits of prehistoric times:

I eventually made it to the water.  The river was rather shallow, but deep enough in some places where I could lie down in it, getting all of my clothes soaking wet, which I assumed would get all dry fairly soon in the baking heat.  I took a short a hike on the other side of the river, my wet clothes cooling me off, went back to the river, and walked upriver quite a ways before coming back, seeking some shade, and taking this picture from my little place in the shade:

The broken crust was from bison, the longhorn cattle, beavers, and me.

 

I spent a little more time in the river before heading back to the car to finally get ready to go for my hike to find my bed that night.  Just before taking off to go for my hike, I met a ukulele-playing pilot who was using his spare time on his latest assignment for visiting the park.  It turned out that he was doing the same thing I was – just hiking a couple miles in, and camping, so that he wouldn’t have to pay for camping.  As I had originally suspected, it was no big deal, except that he was surprised by an encounter with a rattlesnake his first night out. 

 

With about an hour’s worth of sun left, I finally took off on my evening hike.  My hike took me through “Prairie Dog Town” which was absolutely full of prairie dogs – like these two guys in two of the most classic poses – stretched over the hole, ready to go down it on a moment’s notice, and standing up, looking: 

I also loved the moon coming up while the alpenglow lit up the eastern hills:

There are also a ton of prairie dogs in the above picture, but this version is just too small to see them.

 

At last, I found a nice flat place to bed down.  Here’s my bivvy sack, filled with my sleeping bag and an air mattress in tonight’s bedroom:

I turned around, and noticed that we have our own little “dildo valley” (as I like to call it) here in the US – no need to go to Turkey, except, that no one could build a home in this one:

Soon after going to bed, I first heard the coyotes howling and yapping, and, I assumed, having yummy little prairie dog dinners.  A little later, I heard a swoosh right over my head – I looked up through the netting, and realized that several bats were flying about.  They didn’t hang out very long, there, as the swooshing seemed to stop after just a couple of minutes, so I was able to go to sleep fairly easily. 

 

 

The next morning, I was packing up my gear, and was nearly done when I thought that I could hear the presence of someone else. Sure enough, not 30 feet (~10 meters) away, was a bison:

I remembered all of the stories about how dangerous these animals are, but, there wasn’t much that I could do, so I snapped the above picture of him (I assume that it was a him, since he was alone), and finished packing, so that I could head out of there.  I thought that I would try a short cut, but the bison had moved on, and the short cut took me toward him, so I backed up and gave him extremely wide berth.

 

On my way back through Prairie Dog Town, this little guy let me take a picture of him/her:

So cute!!!!

 

For the rest of my trip, I got to visit a friend in St. Paul, Minnesota, and then I high-tailed it to St. Joseph, Michigan, where I swam in Lake Michigan (ah!  Relief from the heat!), and picked up a high school buddy for our class reunion.  We did stop to check out the historic Kalamazoo Psychiatric Hospital in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where my friend’s Mom had worked, briefly, years before.  It had a nice little tower that we took pictures of – trying to get the Cure JM poster in a Michigan photo, but a security guard came up to us and told us that we had to have permission to take photos of the facility, and told us to delete the pictures we’d taken.  It seems that they don’t want people casing the place, due to some of the folks who are housed there.

 

I hope that you’re all doing well!



Iguazu Falls, Argentina

Hi, all - I'm back from 3-1/2 weeks (Oct. 17 through November 10th) of traveling in Argentina, with the final two days spent in Uruguay. Iguazu Falls, in Argentina, was the first place that we headed.

Rebecca (wife of a high school buddy), Ed (high school era and travel buddy), and I met at the airport in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas:
and then flew down to Buenos Aires, got a taxi from the international airport to the domestic airport and got on the first plane out to Iguazu Falls. These falls are absolutely spectacular. I've had people send me power point slides of these falls, and I've seen websites of friends who'd gone before me, so I already knew that I'd be in for a treat, but being there just makes it all so much more real, and, well, so much more spectacular. We'd reserved two days to actually visit the falls, and I'm glad that we did, as one day would just not have been enough for us.

The falls:

The first day we wanted to get a little exercise, so we chose to start out with a hike to one of the smaller falls. The hike turned out to be longer than expected (3km just isn't that far, but it sure felt as it if were!), but we amused ourselves with the plants, birds, and butterflies (many, many) that we saw along the way. Here is a montage of some of the many different types of butterflies that we saw:

We then took a little park train and went to what was supposed to be the most spectacular part of the falls, and therefore suggested to be saved for the last. The book warned us that we should expect to get soaked. This being spring, down there, it was actually quite warm, so getting wet wouldn't be a problem, and we decided to go see that fall, next. The train let off at a path that was at least 1/2 mile from the platforms looking over the falls. The path was mostly an elevated walkway with a metal grating that allowed one to look down at the wide, wide river running below the walkway. We saw, first an anteater, and then hawks and cormorants on the way.

This picture is to give you just some idea of the walkway to the falls - we're already almost there, having gone at least 2/3rds of the way, already, all the way walking over smooth, shallow, river. You can just make out the tops of some of the falls in the distance, and the mist from others:

When we got to the overlook platform, there were tons of people. We joined the crowd. We got soaked as the spray from the falls was whipped back up and around us by the wind. We looked into "the Devil's Throat" and were absolutely entranced by the amount of water, the speed of the water, the roar of the water, the long drop of water, and, the spray. This was a very Niagra-looking/feeling waterfall. And like Niagra, where another country is on the other side of the river, here, Brazil was on the other side. We kept watching the waterfalls, and eventually, would be the only people around! The next trainload would come, and for a while, we'd be surrounded by many others, until they moved on, and then would once again, be some of the few standing around. We stayed for hours, partly because we tried to get in a "your magazine was at Iguazu Falls" picture with a local newspaper near Ed's place. We never succeeded in getting that picture - the winds were just too unpredictable, causing drenching actions very often. We took a ton of photos, none of which can possibly capture the feeling, the sound, the experience. We saw swallows diving under some of the waterfalls into their nests behind the waterfalls! This was a very, very, very captivating sight, indeed.

Here is one that attempts to show what I think of as the mouth of the falls (The Mouth of the Devil's Throat, if you will. . .):

The above was just off to my right on the big platform. Moving the camera farther to the left, I could see all of these falls raining down from Brazil:

And then looking off to my left, at the other falls falling down from the Argentinian side of the river, there were these - see if you can see the birds just about to dive into the waterfalls to get to their nests:

The falls produced so much spray that it was rarely possible to see down to the river, below, since the water was coming from all sides and just pouring into this narrow little canyon. The roar was intense!

When we'd finally decided to depart the falls, leaving the rainbows, roar, and wet, behind, we were absolutely drenched. The sun came out to warm us, and by the time we got back to the train, we were dry!

We'd had a pretty full day so decided to just head back. While others were in the rest room, I was looking out at the green grass, and noticed some animals scurrying about. We asked and were told that they were guinea pigs. Some were almost a foot long, so they seemed a little different than the ones that we have in the US:

We had our tickets stamped on the way out so that the following day, we could get in at 1/2 price.

The following day, as we packed to get ready for our second and final day at the park, we reviewed the material for the falls and determined that it would be a "dry" day. That is, the part of the falls that we were going to visit wouldn't be sending mist all over us, and the wind wouldn't be whipping it against us - we were going to be just too far away from this other set of falls. We returned to the park (the bus ride in from the town was about 1/2 hour) and bought our 1/2 price tickets. Right after getting in, Ed noticed a park ranger standing around, and decided to go and talk to her, telling her that he, too, worked for the park service, but in the US. She told him that he didn't have to pay, then - Argentina extends a "professional courtesy" to park employees from other countries to enter their parks, free. However, he had paid. She brought us back out of the park to go into an office where there were some other park officials, and introduced Ed and Rebecca and me to the others there. I thought that we were just having a chat, but what was really going on was that she was trying to make up for Ed having paid for two days. They asked us if we'd taken the boat, yet. We hadn't. They told us that we should first go to the interpretive center, and then meet someone at 10am at a specific location. We went to the interpretive center, and there the people gave Ed a whole bunch of brochures and a couple posters (which he then left with them for safe keeping while we toured the park), and then went to the appointed spot. The ranger, Nancy, had arranged that the 3 of us should get a courtesy tour of the jungle by truck and the falls by boat by the vendor! Ed was in shock. In the US, not only do his friends who visit him have to pay to visit the National Historic Site where he works, but he has to pay to visit any other national park. And here, a park employee was able to get a park employee of another country, and his two friends, a free tour by a vendor working in the park!!!

On the jungle tour, the tour guide kept asking if anyone had questions. We realized that this was our opportunity to get all the questions we'd been accumulating from the previous day, answered. Even though there are plenty of animals in the jungle, we saw none of them on this particular tour. The next step was the boat ride. We were given life vests and drybags to place our shoes and anything that we were carrying, including cameras. They told us that we'd be able to take pictures until a certain time, and then they'd tell us to put it into the drybag and close it up. Oh, so we might get some spray. Maybe it wouldn't be such a dry day, after all. . . We sped up the river from down river of all of the falls. The river itself was fast-flowing, and we had a rapid or two to negotiate - the standing waves were high, so it gave some of the crew quite a thrill (and we rafters got a thrill, too, since they were impressive waves!). They drove us to some picturesque sight, gave us some time to take pictures, and then told us to put cameras into the dry bags. They then took us to the base of some of the falls so that we could experience the force of the falls. We experienced it, alright! We got mostly drenched. They then took us to the base of another fall. It appeared as though we were going to go right under the actual fall, but really, they only took us near to it, yet the spray was so intense that it thoroughly soaked us. Everyone on the boat was excited about the experience and called for them to do it one more time, so the guy turned around and dove back for the falls. We know that they do this multiple times a day, but it sure feels as though one time, they might just get it a little wrong, and the boat would be capsized in a moment. However, nothing untoward happened to us, but I definitely hung on for dear life, and was THOROUGHLY soaked by the time we'd done it, again, if not before. . . Looking at other boats doing the same thing, I saw them disappear in the mist at the base of the falls.

This was the view:

The mist at the base of the left-most falls is where the boat would disappear into, and then come racing back out.

Here is a more distant view of the above waterfalls, plus more of the surrounding falls:

The big white fall upper center of the picture are the falls that we went under in the boat. The falls to the far left of the picture are the falls coming down off the Brazilian side of the river in the place that we were, the previous day (fifth picture from the top of this article).

Some birds (2nd is a Turkey Vulture):

And more wildlife:

and:

I hope that this gives you some sense of the enormity of the whole thing. It was truly, truly impressive. And in addition to the falls, we didn't see such a variety of butterflies anywhere else, and this was the only place that we saw the anteater and the fairly large reptile pictured above, whose name I've forgotten.