San Diego Zoo

Jean and I visited the San Diego Zoo today. Jean is a member so she got me a guest pass. We started out our visit by taking the guided bus tour of the whole park so I could pick out the places I wanted to focus on.

The star of the bus tour was the 2 month old giraffe, who was extraordinarily cute. The first place was the panda exhibit. We walked thru the fern display, across a bridge, and into the panda garden. There was a zoo keeper there talking about the pandas. She spends a lot of time with the pandas and had some really interesting information. The female belongs to the zoo, and she had a male child at the time I visited.

Apparently panda's have a limited amount of maternal instincts and when they are done, they are done. Period. And this panda was done. So, they had to move the 19-month old panda to its own enclosure. Jean told me that the agreement the Zoo has with China requires them to return the baby panda to China when he is 24 months old. They are such cute animals, but the zoo keeper warned us not to let them fool us. Pandas can be quite dangerous. But the two we saw today were really cute! BTW, this picture is photo shopped; they would not let us handle the pandas.

We had lunch near the Asian cats - Mandarin chicken salad and pot stickers. Both excellently prepared, and huge.

We walked to the Asian waterfowl exhibit. The Asian birds were gorgeous, but the most interesting thing about the exhibit was that local ducks and egrets had discovered the enclosure and decided that zoo keepers feeding them several times a day is a good thing and had moved in. The exhibit did have some beautiful black and white Asian ducks and some grey Asian egrets. So, their American cousins probably felt right at home.

We took the Kangaroo express bus up to the elephant odyssey exhibit. It looks like that space had recently been remodeled and expanded. They have about 6 elephants there, half of them Asian which you can tell because they have smaller ears and bigger heads, and half of them African because they have larger ears and smaller heads. Jean and I were captivated by Minda, who the sign on the display said had lived 35 years of her life alone, and seems to prefer to be by herself in the enclosure. The day we were there, she was indeed by herself. Since elephants are primarily herd animals, it was sad to think about what her story might have been. The zoo keepers had come up with a new game for the elephants. They had created large cubes with holes in them. The cubes were stuffed with food, and then hung on chains from a large structure that looked like a giant umbrella stand. The elephants had to try to get the food out of the cube while it swung back and forth on the stand. They did seem to enjoy the game. We also saw a maneless wolf - which is not actually a wolf, and a California condor, which is really huge close up.

We got back on the Kangaroo express to ride back to the entrance, but then changed our minds as we approached our destination and decided to go on the Skyfari ride, an aerial tram that transverses the park. We could see a long distance from that height - the San Diego bay, and Balboa Park which is right next to the Zoo. We decided to take a twirl thru Balboa Park. But first I had to visit the Kid Store and buy stuff for my grandchildren.

Balboa Park was built for two expositions: the Panama Exposition in 1915 and the California Pacific Exposition in 1935. All the buildings remain and San Diego has discovered cultural and history uses for the

structures. We walked in along El Prado street with buildings that out-Rococo'ed Rococo style. The exteriors are so dense with sculptural features, they can only be described as Byzantine. We walked thru the Plaza de Panama where we could see the San Diego Museum of Man which looked like a cross between a Spanish church and a Moroccan mosque, but was actually built for the Exposition. We continued on to Spreckels Organ Pavilion which looks like a Roman amphitheatre with St. Peter's Cathedral portico wings that serve as a kind of breezeway. There really are organ concerts in the park. And this guy doing a human statue in the park - with an occasional mime guitar concert.

We walked to the Houses of Pacific Relations. It is a circle of small cottages representing 36 nations exhibiting their history and culture. There were Norwegian, Swedish, Irish, Iranian, Chinese, etc cottages. They take turns putting on programs on Tuesdays and Saturdays. I bought some post cards. We twirled around the Museums and puppet theater int he Pan American Plaza. The sheer number of museums is overwhelming - sort of like the Smithsonian in D.C.

Then we backtracked to the Prado House of Hospitality with its gorgeous interior courtyard to the Botanical Building (photo above). We went inside to see the orchids and palms on display. There were orchids of every color, size, and description on display; more orchids than I have ever seen in one place. On the way out we walked thru the portico of the extremely rococo Casa de Prado.

Jean and I walked a lot today.

Bucket List Item: Complete Family History

Since I promised to work on or knock off some bucket list items on the trip, it was about time to start doing that. Since one of my bucket list items is to finish my mother's family's genealogy.

Cousin Jean inherited a treasure trove of photos of this family from her mother Clara. After a great breakfast that included tangerines she picked off her backyard tree this morning, we started looking thru boxes of genealogy stuff, old photo albums, and old scrapbooks. The women in this family loved to collect newspaper articles about family and paste them in scrapbooks - and as a family historian, I could just kiss them for doing that.

This family is just one reason that I wanted to stop and see Jean - aside from the fact that she and her husband Bud are really great conversationalists and have wide ranging interests. The first photo below is of my great-grandmother Hvill (also spelled Viel) on the far left with her mother (and my great-great-grandmother Barbro the only adult in the photo).



But the real find of the day was this photo of my great-grandmother Hvill (or Viel) Lesteberg as a young woman. I had no

photos of her until her children were grown before this. She was always a handsome woman, but she is really beautiful in this photo. I can see now why the newspaper commented "Success!" when she accepted by great-grandfather's marriage proposal.

Jean and I cleaned up the mess we left on her dining room table, and Bud took all three of us out to eat at Black Angus. It was a really comfortable and cozy space and the food was excellent. I had prime rib with mashed potatoes and broccoli.

Day 10 - Arriving in San Diego

Today was Day 10 of my Great National Retirement Tour. I woke up at 5:30 am and wrote in my journal and downloaded photos from my camera til Dan and Colleen woke up. Had trouble getting on the internet, so decided to update security and do a full scan. Someone from New Jersey hacked my Facebook page.

We had breakfast, packed up the car, and hit the road – I-10. Except I had to come back to get the folder with my itinerary, journal, and memory book.


We drove all day again. 415 miles from Tucson to San Diego, most of it on I-8 – flat as a pancake thru the desert and then the last leg thru some 4,000+ foot mountains as we approached San Diego. I have logged over 2,600 miles total so far on the Tour. There was virtually no wind on

what can be a dangerously windy road. On the bright side, we saw some impressive sand dunes at the Arizona/California border and some equally impressive huge rock formations in the Jacumba Mountains.

Carol went to stay with her friend K.C. and I am staying with my mother’s cousin Jean. They live on a hill (as does almost everyone in San Diego), so the camper is parked on a wing and a prayer. Bud made really good dinner while Jean and I looked thru her Skare genealogy box. Tomorrow Jean and I will have more adventures with her genealogy boxes, scrapbooks, and photo albums.

I think I should explain this map. I made up the maps before we left Saint Paul. Then we made a mid-course correction and decided to take the southern route along I-10 and I-8 rather than the northern route along I-40. So the map looks like we drove around in a loop, which we did not. But don't fear, we will get that loop driven before the trip is over.

Day 9 - Leaving Santa Fe

We left Santa Fe about 11 am. I wanted to post up a photo of us sitting around a table with Gail because we spent so much time doing that during our stay in Santa Fe. Thanks so much for your wonderful hospitality, Gail.

This is Day 9 of our trip. We traveled 510 miles to Tucson, stopping only for breakfast in Lemitar, New Mexico and periodically for gas, water, or potty breaks. So far on the trip, we have logged 2,200+ miles. We arrived safe and sound at Colleen and Dan's house in Tucson about 8:30 pm.

Shopping and Dining

Friday was shopping day. We went shopping at K-Mart and World Market for small empty glass jars. Found some really nice 1/2 cup ones at K-Mart and some really small ones at World Market. Then went shopping at an open air market close to The Plaza. I bought a beautiful Southwest style shawl with turquoise highlights that perfectly matched the shirt I was planning to wear to dinner that evening. Also found a gift for Brent and a couple of the grandkids.

Along the way Carol and I stopped at the Loretto Chapel to see the unsupported spiral staircase to the choir loft. The story goes that the church was the first Gothic style church built in New Mexico. In those days, most members of Catholic church choirs were men and they would climb ladders into the choir loft. But this chapel was staffed by nuns who had a mission to start a school for girls. So, they needed a staircase. Because the chapel was small, a conventional staircase was out of the question. So the nuns started a novena. Before they were finished with the novena, a mysterious stranger appeared and said he could build a staircase. He built a staircase that is still a marvel of engineering. It is only supported at the top and bottom; the sides are kept in place only by superior engineering and construction. After completion of the stairs, the mysterious stranger disappeared and never submitted a bill for the 6 months of his work.

We stopped at the gallery where Carol's nephew Jordan works on Canyon Road. We talked to both of his co-workers and an interesting woman named Eva who is planning to move to Santa Fe. The Meyer gallery had just acquired a new piece by a local Santa Fe artist who likes to paint rural scenes from around New Mexico. We left a bottle of ginger beer with the boys and headed home.

Jordan took us all (me, Carol, Gail, and Lisa) out to dinner at The Osteria, an Italian restaurant downtown where the owner still talks to the staff in Italian. It was superb northern Italian food. I had veal picatta, which was done perfectly. It is one of those few ingredient dishes that is surprisingly hard to cook well - but they did a fantastic job. The owner suggested a Valpolicella to go with the meal - and it was a perfect choice.

Bandolier National Monument - Pueblo Cave Dwellings

Carol and I drove north out of Santa Fe to Bandolier National Monument near Los Alamos, New Mexico. A National Monument is a piece of land that has great historic and/or environmental significance, but our do-nothing Congress can't get its act together to vote to make it a National Park. Bandolier is a ruin of an ancient Pueblo cave dwelling village in the Frijoles Canyon. Jemez Mountain - the largest land form in the park - is actually a long inactive volcano that spewed out some volcanic ash called "tuff" that settled sometimes miles deep all around it when it last blew and created very soft rock that naturally and due to man's influence develops caves easily. The photos below show the natural landscape: Jemez Mountain, Frijoles Canyon and some of the Swiss cheese rock formations.


The Pueblo discovered this land 10,000 years ago, and then in the 1200s they hollowed out the caves with stone tools and created cave dwellings for themselves. In about the 1400s and 1500s, they also built structures on the ground to create a canyon-floor based village.

We took the self-guided main trail tour of both dwelling types. The photo mashup below shows the ruins of the ground dwellings as they exist now. At their height these buildings would have been two and sometimes three stories high with wood and mud roofs.

The photo to the left is an artist's interpretation of how the ground dwellings would have looked in the 15th and 16th Century.

Pat wandered off and climbed up one of the ladders into a cave dwelling. It was not particularly easy to climb up that ladder, but it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. The inside was very cozy and warm, with two pits hollowed out on the floor - no doubt one was for a fire. Coming down the ladder was considerably harder than going up. We passed on going up the other two ladders on the trail. The photo mashup below shows the ladder, me in the cave, me sitting at the mouth of the cave when Carol relocated me, and Carol sitting in the same cave.

We drove back an sunset, picked up a bottle of champagne, and returned to Gail's house for a dinner of left-overs with champagne. A good time was had by all.

Day 6 - Chimayo and Truchas on the High Road to Taos

It is Day 6 of Pat and Carol's Excellent Adventure. We have driven 1,500 miles so far on our trip.

Today we decided to head north out of Santa Fe and take the high road to Taos up to two tiny villages in the mountains: Chimayo and Truchas. First stop was Chimayo where the Sanctuario de Chimayo is the star attraction. It is a very small, humble, mostly hand hewn church for the small population of Catholic residents of Chimayo. But is famous for its holy dirt that is alleged to have magical healing properties. People make pilgrimages to Chimayo from as far away as Mexico to access the healing powers of the Sanctuario's holy dirt. One can purchase tiny metal cylinders (like the kind that hold one or two pills) to take the dirt home with them, or can kneel on the stone floor and put some dirt on their hands while they pray for relief from whatever brought them here.

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I bought a candle and lit it for Brendyn, who will face his biggest troubles so far tomorrow. I can only hope now that God will hold Brendyn in his hands.

The walls of the church are lined with wooden statues and icons that also appear to be hand-made. The overall impression is of a church that serves a very small and poor community, but displays an enormous amount of talent and love.

The town of Chimayo is also known world-wide for the quality of its green chile. They also have excellent red chile. In a town with a one block downtown and probably about 6 businesses that are not the church, there are two shops that sell chiles. Carol and I purchased bags of green and sundried red chiles from Potrero's Store.

We drove back to Santa Fe to have pizza and salad dinner with Gail at Il Vicino on San Francisco Street. It was fabulous - even if it was vegetarian. Gail told us that the Christmas lights were still up in The Plaza, so we drove over there to see the lights. Which reminds me that Carol and I went shopping at the Native American street vendors who sell turquoise and other hand crafts at the Palace of Governors. I bought a couple of things.