In the Vatican
pics prohibited
in Vatican Museum
memories must serve
Vatican City and Rome – June 2019
Boat Ride on the Seine – June 2019
Paris
Seine River Boat Ride
Eiffel Tower lights the night
Paris trip highlight!
Denver 2026
In Denver
Colorful street bulls
Denver’s Union Station trains
Mile High city sights
Route 66: June 2023
Normally I’m reluctant to stay in old motels, preferring a good, clean Hampton Inn with doors that open into hallways instead of out directly into the world. But as we did our research about the things to do ( don’t miss Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, for example) and iconic places to stay along Route 66 when we drove from Chicago to Albuquerque in June of 2023, we learned that we’d be missing a big part of the Route 66 experience if we ruled out motels. So we stayed at the Wagon Wheel in Cuba, Missouri and the Blue Swallow in Tucumcari, New Mexico as two of our “iconic motel” choices.
These motels have largely been “redone” over time to make improvements in plumbing and HVAC systems, but they have preserved the retro feel of the rooms, right down to issuing metal keys on triangular keyrings that have the room number on them. If you’re planning a trip down 66 anytime for the 100th Anniversary of The Mother Road, I highly recommend The Blue Swallow Motel. And if you’re into souvenirs, you can buy a keyring to take with you!
Stays and Sprays on 66
Blue Swallow Motel
Cadillac Ranch spray painting
Route 66 fun!
Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia
Our host for the third and final day of the July Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com is Glenda Funk of Idaho, who inspires us to write clerihews. A clerihew has four lines with an aabb rhyme scheme and focuses on a person. You can read more about this form and read the poems of others here. Like Glenda, I took liberty with the poem. I created mine about a group of people rather than just one person.
My People
community of writers
inspiration igniters
fine-tune words through a lens
as we breathe through our pens
In keeping with my travel theme for July, I’ve also unearthed a photo of our trip to Colonial Williamsburg from July 1976. Hard to believe that this was taken a half century ago, but here we are. We’ve come a long way, Baby……but I’m not sure whether we’ve moved forward or backward.
While Mom was taking this photo, my brother, Dad and I were posing on a cannon in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia in 1976, during the nation’s 200th birthday month. Like so many families nationwide, we visited our nation’s capital and Colonial Virginia during this iconic year in our nation’s history.
Cannonball
family cannon
snapshots, time-stamping our place
in this history
Disney Dads
Back in 1974, we took a vacation to Walt Disney World with another family who were close friends of my parents. At that time, Dad was the pastor of First Baptist Church on St. Simons Island, Georgia, and his friend Joe Fennell was the husband of the organist in our church. Our mothers were close friends. In fact, when I hadn’t had chicken pox by the time they wanted me to have it before I got older, their children got it and our mother arranged for us to go and play with them so that we would contract it. Tiffany, standing third from left in this photo (next to me, the tallest kid in the green shirt) freely shared her germs. I kept a scar right between the eyes well into my teens from a popped pox.
The popcorn cart reminded me of the popped pox as I sort through pictures of travel this month. While I’m not particularly a fan of amusement parks, we made such wonderful memories there even when the Disney parade was nothing but a few characters walking down Main Street without lights and music and all the thrills of a big parade.
Popcorn, Pox, Pops
Disney popcorn cart
between-eyes popped chicken pox
posing with two Pops
Juneau, Alaska
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be on a glacier with all this heat in the Southeastern United States today? We were there several years ago, and we took a helicopter ride to Mendenhall Glacier, where we got to ride with the sled dogs. Fun fact: they pee and poop on the run. Meeting the next generation of Iditarod and other sled racing dogs was a highlight of that trip!
Sled Team
Mendenhall Glacier
riding with the sled team dogs
Alaskan sporting!
Saguaro Cactus
In February, we traveled out west to visit one of our daughters in Nevada. We saw beautiful deserts with sunset skies in violet purples, tangerine oranges, buttery and vibrant yellows, and deep rose reds. Many of the cactus plants looked as if they were singing praise to their maker. I painted a watercolor picture, but it did not turn out at all, so here is a photo I did not take that shows better what I had tried to capture in color.
Holy Hands
Saguaro Cactus
praising purple sunset skies
raising holy hands
On the Day I Was Born – July 8
During the last week of June, I had the amazing privilege of traveling to Portland, Oregon to visit the archives of the poet William Stafford at Lewis and Clark College as part of The Stafford Challenge Poetry Conference. I learned that people often ask to see the actual hand-written notes and poems that he wrote on the day they were born, and so I did the same.
Archive Haiku
William Stafford:
I visited his archives …
my birthdate writing:
Here is my best transcription of this page from his handwritten notes on the yellow pages in the photos that follow, below.
8 July
We thought leaves waited, without
winds. But their work flourished, then.
Lost as leaves are, in the fall, each
has all its guarantee: sun, air wind.
I take the fall.
Maybe someone found all this language
the world brings. Not a snake but a stream
through the air, or maybe little waves
nothing holds — anyone in this town fear
news the ants work on? News peeled off
the yellow car that left here this morning; news
trotted among sounds, under the bridge. I felt
the snake across my feet in the bus. And watched
the conductor act calm, as required by the state.
The fox I stole gnawed : inside my coat. Men
act so free: “No fox I stole has ever bitten
me.”
Forsaken liberal, I stamped the curb:
every cause I ever found
has had my vote. Now the animals
prefer their keepers to the kept or freed.
8 July 1966
Seasons mark the brain: a shaft
of spring has always hurt what winter
held. I see beyond the plate and
feel the foxes well. No angel, no
prophet rides with me, but animals.
Keepers are enough too and they live well;
To feed that fox I commit to walk through hell.
every day
Lizards and liberals both low and
adaptable, come back to their holes and love it there.
Such great song scared the birds;
they tiptoe – winged away
Pascal fell through a million windows,
a little kid too smart to be saved by
stupidity.
Though the handwriting is challenging to decipher and does leave some questions, I hang on the first two lines:
We thought leaves waited, without
winds. But their work flourished, then.
Yes, these periods of waiting often seem frustrating, challenging, and even pointless at times. Some days we feel we are merely holding on. But we wait, knowing our work is flourishing. Knowing that the best is yet to come.
At Niagara Falls – 1998
Rainbow Mist
she stood at the top of the falls
a treacherous plummet possible
oh, but look above!
a rainbow, God’s promise, kept her safe
