A Professional Dilettante

I have just returned from my annual trip to Tyler, Texas, to visit my almost 92-year-old mother, and, this time, to make a short (three-day) jaunt with my sister, who lives down there, too.  We planned this several months ago, before all of the problems with my condo made me decide to sell it and take another Long Trip, and the plane tickets were already bought, so I didn’t try to cancel it.

Anyway, Mother is getting more and more fragile.  I won’t get into her health issues here except to say how grateful I am that she’s still alive for me to go visit.  I stayed with my sister Ann, and that’s only one reason I’m grateful she’s down there nearby for Mother.

Anyway, I’d been wanting to go to Austin and San Antonio and the Hill Country for a long time, and since this time I had to rent a car, anyway, I decided to go, and to invite Ann to go along with me.  After a couple of days visiting with my mother, we headed south to San Antonio.

One of the nice things about Tyler is that to go any direction but due east or west, you pretty much have to get off the Interstate.  The drive to San Antonio, aside from missing one turn, not realizing we had until we’d gone too far to turn back, and having to reroute ourselves, was fun.  Wide open spaces, small towns, and wildflowers scattered all over the roadsides.

We arrived in San Antonio in the late afternoon, and found a hotel within walking distance of the River Walk and the Alamo, and went to eat supper along the River Walk.  The River Walk reminded us both a bit of certain parts of Disneyland, but it was still fun (and about 10 degrees cooler than up on the street), and we ate fancy pizza right next to the water.

The next morning, it was raining just a bit.  We strolled over to the Alamo under Ann’s umbrellas (she had two).

I liked the Alamo.  It was very interesting historically (they did a terrific job with the museum exhibit part of the thing), and the gardens were lovely.  The rain was a minor nuisance, but not a big deal.  Yes, the Alamo is basically a shrine to Texas, but I knew that going in, and, well, I eat history up with a spoon, so I had no problem with it.

On our way back to the hotel to pack up and check out, we saw a whole bunch of carriages decorated as if for a wedding.  Turns out we’d arrived the night before San Antonio’s annual Fiesta began.  According to one of the carriage drivers, Fiesta attracts more people every year than New Orleans’ Mardi Gras, and was started when a bunch of ladies got drunk and flung flowers at each other 🙂

In the afternoon, we drove up to the Hill Country, which is sort of legendary for its spring wildflowers.  It did not disappoint.  After lunch in Fredericksburg, we took some back roads out through the rolling countryside (calling it hilly would have been stretching things, IMHO), and saw whole fields of flowers.  Bluebonnets, of course, but also winecups and evening primroses and all sorts of things.  Just gorgeous.

We wound up spending the night in the town of San Marcos, just south of Austin, and came in for a rude surprise when we turned on the Weather Channel.  A huge storm was headed our way.  You might have seen the recent news reports about flooding in Texas?  Well, we weren’t in Houston, where it got really bad, but the rest of it?  We were right where it was about to hit.

So we decided to cut our trip short by one day and go back to Tyler the next morning.

People think it rains a lot here in western Washington, and we do get a fair amount.  But it’s a soft rain.  Texas rain is like driving through a bleeding waterfall.  I’m not overly fond of thunder and lightning, either.  At least we didn’t have any tornado warnings.  But we made it back, and my only disappointment was that I didn’t get to go to the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin.  Maybe next time, if there is a next time.

Once back in Tyler, the weather cleared up (bad weather seems to go around Tyler a lot of the time, which is really weird), and until I left several days later (having planned the trip with the jaunt in the middle so Mother could rest up while we were gone), I not only spent as much time as I could with my mother, but I got to stroll around a nature trail just down the street from my sister’s house, where there were also lots of wildflowers.

The last day before I left, Mother and I drove out to a place called Love’s Lookout, about fifteen miles south of Tyler, where there’s a nice little bench with a beautiful view, and we sat and talked for a while.  It’s kind of our place, and I’m glad she was still able to go out there with me.

And that was my visit to Tyler this year.  Every year now I wonder if this will be my last visit with my mother.  I hope not.

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

Slowly.

This is today’s photos of my favorite local trail, the Nathan Chapman trail.  It’s a three-mile lollipop (a trail with a loop at the end) round trip, about fifteen minutes from my house.

And that was my walk today on the Nathan Chapman trail.

Don’t forget:  Repeating History is on sale through tomorrow:

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

It’s 60 degrees outside!  And the sun is shining!

Naturally, I went for a walk.

Waughop Lake is part of Fort Steilacoom Park in Lakewood, Washington.  It used to be a farm for the mental hospital across the road, where the patients doing farm work was considered therapy back in the old days.  Nowadays it’s a city park, with soccer fields and a bark park (as my sister calls off-leash areas) and trails.  And an old cemetery managed by a wonderful group called Grave Concerns.

Waughop Lake is not a Native American name, even though it sounds like it ought to be, at least to me.  It’s named after a former superintendent of the mental hospital.

Anyway, it was a lovely spring day, and my new camera lets me take much better photos than my old one.  So here’s some of what I saw.

And that was my walk at Waughop Lake.

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

This one’s called Many Trips Around the World, because that’s the name of the pattern.  The fabric I started with is the one that looks light gray in the photo, but the bird fabric is the one that jumps out.  Oh, well.

36″x48″, hand quilted, just cross-hatching.

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

144 years young.  On March 1, 1872, Ulysses S. Grant signed the legislation that created the world’s first national park.

Charley would have been pleased.

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

In honor of Leo DiCaprio’s acceptance speech on the Oscars last night, here’s a couple of nature photos I’ve posted here before, showing visible climate change over a period of 45 years.

Two photos of Athabaska Glacier, an offshoot of the Columbia Icefield, in Jasper National Park.

So far as I can tell, the two places I stood when I took these photos weren’t all that far apart (granted, the 1970 photo was taken from closer up than the 2015 photo was).  The parking lot and road haven’t moved, either.

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

I’ve been doing this on Facebook, but it did occur to me that it might be fun to post these photos on my blog, too.  I’ve been participating in a challenge, to post one nature photo each day, which gave me the idea to go back in my archives, so to speak, and pull some of my older photos.  The quality’s not so great because anything before 2005, when I bought my first digital camera, is a scanned film photo.   But the memories are fun.

The photo above is Mendenhall Glacier, just outside of Juneau, Alaska, from my trip on the ferry up the Inside Passage and back in June of 1995.

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

Here’s a clickable link:  http://amzn.com/BI00PIAD446

And a link to the first chapter.

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.