by mgrandusky | Aug 28, 2014 | 20th Century
We got about 2/3 of the way towards Anchorage and realized it was a bit too much to continue. So we stopped at an RV park which was really bare ones. No TV or sewer. But, like I have said, being self contained, we don’t really care for just one night.
On Tuesday morning we woke in Trader Creek, Alaska. It was our one month anniversary. We are doing well. I think it will work just fine. The trip odometer read 5806. A lot of time in the truck together. We set out again on the Parks Highway, going south, for the first time.
The Parks Highway runs through Denali National Park and Denali State Park. In the park is the highest mountain in North America, Mt. McKinley. Going south out of the parks, the indications of civilization increase. Towns are closer together, buildings are more substantial. The Iditarod is big business in this area. It is a four season business, too. There are places to meet the dogs, play with the dogs, even sign up to go as a guest on the Iditarod in late February!
Although the official start of the Iditarod is in Anchorage, the unofficial start is the next day in the tiny village of Willow. And, as if to accent this fact, we were driving just outside Willow and spotted a musher on the bike trail along the side of the road, training his dogs by having the team pull an ATV with two people on board. What a sight!
Going through the up and coming city of Wasilla was a thrill, mostly because it is the home of Sarah Palin. Wasilla may be known for some odd things, besides her: it’s Walmart is the largest in the state. And, according to Anchorage News, this particular Walmart has sold more duct tape than any other Walmart in the world. Wonder what that means for construction.
One of the most fascinating parts of the trip, so far, is a visit we made to Klutna National Park. Half a mile off Parks Highway is another world. There is a small Russian Orthodox church, St Nicholas, in an Athabascan (native Indian) village. Why? How? My sense of history was too hazy to remember. Russia owned Alaska for a few hundred years. By the late 1700s, Russian Orthodox missionaries had come to this area and began to teach the Athabascans, and other natives, that Christianity was the culmination of the pagan beliefs. The teaching of the Russian Orthodox faith is that all is part of God’s plan and must be incorporated into the life of the believers. So, these brave missionaries used the Athabascans’ lifestyle to help them incorporate Christianity into their own lives.
Ah, I digress once more. Anyhow, we spent almost an hour talking to the young lady who was manning the information desk. She showed us the beautiful little chapel, the old chapel which is over 150 years old.
I decided to make myself a Rosary with souvenirs from the trip. I had bought blue agate and lapis beads from Fairbanks. Then I found a small crucifix at the gift shop here. I will put it together this week. It will be a beautiful work, however, I better never lose it!
by mgrandusky | Aug 26, 2014 | 20th Century
The part of the Alcan Highway in Alaska was somewhat better maintained than the part in the Yukon. This is not to demean the Yukon Highway Department, but more a realization of how different areas’ roadways can deteriorate at different rates. So, the roads in Alaska were somewhat more passable than the roads we had previously driven.
I was surprised at the tundra. My Alaskan education led me to picture the tundra as a cold desert. I was not prepared to see a forest of very slender conifers and various colors of flowers in the fields. Although inviting, I must remember that two months from now, the colors will be gone and the snow will be covering all. I read that the spruce trees are deceptively small. A 100 year old spruce can be as narrow as two inches in diameter. The permafrost prohibits deep roots, therefore the trees grow very slowly.
Always on the lookout for odd places to see, we missed a chance to go to the Delta Meat Market, where you have your choice of meats: elk, bison, reindeer. So we went to the IGA in the town to see if there was some of their meat. I was so very surprised at the selection of meats and jars in Russian. Well, after all, they were here first. I guess they didn’t all leave!
At the store, we met a man who had recently wrecked his truck on a moose. The man said four Russian men came up to the moose, asked if he wanted it (he didn’t) and proceeded to gut and cut the moose before the tow truck had arrived to take the truck away. He regaled us with his adventures and warned us that something was up because he knew there were too many planes at the air force bases practicing.
Driving into Fairbanks from the west, we passed by Eielson AFB where there is a fighter squadron.
And then we passed by a series of roads with names like “Snow White”, “Bullwinkle” and “Flying Squirrel”. The developer had a sense of humor.
There is a town just outside of Fairbanks named North Pole. It has delightful street names like St. Nicholas Way. And the church? St. Nicholas, of course. By that point the trip odometer read 5480 miles.
In Fairbanks, we found a lovely RV park on the Chena River. It had treed lots, a pristine Laundromat and shower area. The office was a store, also, and a mini post office. This place had acreage along the river for a while, and on the opposite side of a high fence were probably close to 100 little cottages, each the size of a standard hotel room and bath, only each had a tiny patio in front of the door. In addition to that the RV park owners also have a lovely restaurant on the premises. We went there for dinner because Dear Hubby had read the menu online. And he was not disappointed. The seating was both indoors and out on the veranda overlooking the river. Just excellent!
In our weekend, we found a tiny church in downtown Fairbanks, Immaculate Conception. Built in 1904, it was deemed by 1911 to have been built in an inconvenient place. So, the priest, a Jesuit, of course, figured out the logistics of moving the whole structure, intact, across the frozen river, 400 yards. The church sits overlooking the river, surrounded by flower gardens.
Talking about flowers, the summer in the great north is full of flowers. They may as well get as much color out of their brief growing season as they can. Most houses and businesses have lovely hanging baskets and flowers along the walks. The flowers are, for the most part, annuals, like marigolds, petunias and impatience. All colors.
by mgrandusky | Aug 24, 2014 | 20th Century
This has been a week of amazing scenery, culminating in an evening of impressive northern lights, albeit in movie form.
We zigzagged our way across the Continental Divide several times early in the week, following the major roads north and west. After Jasper, we got into a rustic environment. Most buildings are log cabin or modular. All along the way from Dawson Creek on, for over 1000 miles are small communities with populations from 29 to 1500.
We stayed two days in Dawson Creek, catching up on grocery shopping and laundry. There are some real deals in groceries if you look! One place had full salmon, cleaned, with gills and head still intact, several pounds worth, for $6.75! Another place had a box of meat, 8 sausages, 16 hotdogs, 4 boneless pork chops, 4 chicken quarters and four boneless steaks. All for $25! Then we found a twelve-pack of Arizona half and half (lemonade and iced tea) for $4. I thought it was going to be mini bottles. Nope. The $.99 can!
So far I have learned that I didn’t pack well for this trip. My three year old Crock slip-ons were more worn than I realized. Had to throw them out early on. Guess I didn’t notice the wear since I walk on flat ground most of the time. Then, in Dawson Creek, it was the Feast of the Assumption and we went to 12:10 Mass at Notre Dame, the ultra modern church in town. I wore my new sandals and a dress. But barely had I gotten to the church when I slipped getting out of the truck and broke the whole side of the shoe to the point where I couldn’t keep it on. Not to e perturbed, I walked into church with one shoe on and one shoe off. Of course, one can’t walk long that way. Too uncomfortable. So I took both off. I think I was the only one going to Communion barefoot. It takes all kinds!
We found that our requirements for an RV park got more distinct with time. We need 30/50 amp service, water, sanidump service, laundry, showers, WiFi. Some places we have stopped by did not have one or another of the services. Provincial campsites do not have these services, or maybe just one or two. Some private sites shut off the electric at 9pm, or charge $8.00 for a shower. Grief! This is especially hard for dear hubby who finds a 2’x4’x6’ high shower a little too claustrophobic for his comfort. I can not see spending $20-35 for a night’s parking without the accommodations we want.
One night, in an especially deserted section of the Alaskan Highway, we got tired of looking for a place to park for the night. Fort Nelson was not to hubby’s liking, so we kept driving. Looking at the map, there was not another settlement for a while. The roads were under construction in a number of places and it was taking just forever to get from one place to another. At 7:30 at night, I suggested, and he agreed, that we simply pull over to the next turnout, a maintained area, cut into the side of the road, typically two lanes wide, flat, with garbage cans or outhouses , sometimes both. Being more wilderness than we are used to, while I prepared dinner (it’s amazing how well one can cook on a three burner propane stove), hubby got out the shotgun and loaded it. We slept all night, very well, with a shotgun sitting upright on his bedside table.
The only problem there is that it was Saturday night and we were in the middle of nowhere for Sunday Mass. I am sure God understa
by mgrandusky | Jun 12, 2014 | 20th Century
The research for the upcoming book, "The Ragman Murders" took forever. It has been about twenty years since I first heard the story of the 1912 murder. Over time, I have been to the places in Hartford involved in the story. Eventually, I learned that part of the story happened in Providence. On a vacation trip to Cape Cod, in April of 2013, we stopped in Providence to do some research:
Friday, we went to Providence, RI. I am looking for information as to why Giovanni Tassone was killed by Giuseppe Amato in 1912. The newspaper accounts mentioned that Giovanni was wanted for attempted murder in Providence. He had lived there since emigrating from Italy in 1895, moving to Hartford in 1908-09. Looking for references to Tassone, we went to the city library. There, we went through newspapers of 1908 to no avail. Then, we went through directories of Providence for the time period. Giovanni was there, along with his brothers Giovanni and Dominick. In the 1905 directory, the entry says that he went back to Italy. This is strange, since we know that his sons were born in Providence in 1907 and 1908.
On Saturday morning, we toured Federal Hill area of Providence, still a predominantly Italian neighborhood. I took pictures of houses and empty lots which had held homes with the right addresses a long time ago. We also found the old train station that figured into the story. I was pleased to find standing, and in good condition, the house Giovanni's fiance lived in before they got married.
I chose to rush out of Providence that morning. I had another place I wanted to be before noon. We sped up the interstate to do some shopping at the farmer’s market in Boston. There is little more exciting than walking around the open air market with men and women hawking their produce and negotiating prices while keeping track of their money. There were old men and women with their baskets on wheels doing their weekly grocery shopping, young families with children there to spot deals. The signs in the brick and mortar stores surrounding the open air market are printed in Spanish, English and Arabic. One meat market had a sign “Goats freshly cut, whole or half”. I remember seeing similar signs in the North End years ago, often in the front window next to a dead naked rabbit hanging upside down.
After buying enough produce and cheese for a week, we got back in the car. Whatever we saved in groceries was spent on parking. $6 for half an hour in a new parking garage at Haymarket. And then we set off for the Cape.
It is definitely spring on the Cape. This is quite the opposite of our experience on Friday morning, when it was snowing so hard in the mountains Bob could barely see and the road was covered with half an inch of big wet flakes. But on the Cape, the dogwood trees have bloomed, the daffodils and tulips are all at their peak, lending color to the later-blooming trees that still look grey and dead. There are few oaks and other deciduous trees noted. It all seems to be evergreens. Of course it could just be the season.
I am into architecture, as a fan, much the same way that I am into the Red Sox. I can tell you the decade a house was built just y looking at it. And I found a curious thing about the buildings. The vast majority on the west and mid Cape are made of cedar shakes. They are not painted, for the most part, and are allowed to fade to a silvery grey color. Unless they were shellacked once or twice, then they turn a warm brown. So house after house is this silver grey color. And I now know why Cape Cod houses are called that. They are by far the predominant architectural style of the area. There is an occasional Victorian house with white clapboards to break up the monotony. I did notice a very odd thing, though. The owners of these grey cedar shake houses seem to want to go modern in some cases. So they put clapboards or vinyl siding on the house. But only on the front. It happens too often to be someone who ran out of money. I think this is a demonstration of Yankee austerity.
Another instance of Yankee austerity is the plethora of consignment shops. Every little village has two or three. Furniture, clothing, tools! And things that are not of good enough condition to go into the consignment shops go into the antiques shops, of which there is one every few miles.
Closer together than that is the omnipresent Dunkin Donuts shops, sometimes as close to each other as 200 yards. As far as restaurants go, there are plenty of those, mostly with names like, The Lobster Shack or Brazilian Seafood. You don’t see a steak house. They also have plenty of seafood shops, where you can buy your own seafood and take it home to cook. When was the last time you saw a beef and pork shop?
Something I did not expect was the Portuguese influence here. I should have realized it since there was a sizeable settling of Portuguese in Fall River 100 years ago and this is still in the Fall River diocese. We went to a breakfast place after Mass on Sunday and on the menu was eggs, home fries and your choice of bacon, sausage or linguica, a Portuguese sausage that tastes like kielbasa with a spicier back taste. When we went to a grocery store to buy meats for the week, I bought Portuguese stuffed clams, which taste like they contain linguica. Yummy.
On Monday we went to Plymouth. We went to the Pilgrim Museum where they have artifacts from the mid 1600s, including a sampler sewn by Miles Standish’s daughter, Laure. Kind of faded but there! We did not go to Plimoth Plantation. I didn’t feel like spending $25 each to be lectured by people on planting and weaving. The Mayflower II was in dry dock so we didn’t get to see it. We enjoyed a picnic by the beach, prepared ahead of time. Parts of Plymouth along the beach are reminiscent of Virginia Beach before all the condos went up along the beachfront. The rest is a series of hilly streets with quaint shops and houses. Mostly grey. I had to buy a little fudge from one of the shops, just to say I did.
The water is 100 yards across the grass and dunes from the condo we are staying in. It is about 48 degrees. Not swimming weather, for sure. And not much for wading, either. The dunes are kept in place by tall grasses. There are signs asking people not to pull up the grass. It’s the only thing holding the sand in place.
Tuesday, we drove out to Provincetown, a whaling town on a series of hills made mostly of sand. The dunes just out of town are as high as two story houses and are protected from humans crossing them. A lot of shops here, too, but the prices are higher, except at the grocery store, where we stopped to get sodas to go with our lunch. Loads and loads of little cottages along the water’s edge, mostly newer with vinyl siding, although you see a few cedar shake out there.
One of the more interesting things as we drove along was the multitude of cranberry bogs. This time of the year they are gold and red in color. Always near water (not too hard in an area of lakes and streams connecting with the bays) the bogs have deep irrigation ditches demarking the borders. Within the bog there are narrower ditches dividing up the land. The bogs tend to be rather small, only 5-10 acres in size, most of them. But there are so many, I can understand why we get all the cranberry juice, jellies, etc we want.
Bob has a thing for ice cream. We have found a number of ice cream stands. Mostly soft serve in various flavors. So far we have had peach, black raspberry, twist and crème de menthe. Guess who gets the more outlandish ones?
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