Flight, part 2

I'm back home after my SECOND cross-country airplane trip of the year (this could get to be a habit!). Jeannine and I were planning to attend a memorial service for one of her relatives in California, and decided that it might make sense, given that we were traveling all that way, to extend our stay a few days and see some sights.

So we flew off to San Diego, a place I'd not been to for nineteen years, I think. It certainly has changed -- I barely recognized the downtown area, though Seaport VIllage still looks about the same. And the San Diego Zoo is still a cool place to visit -- literally, the day we were there, it was in the low 60's, I think, and the animals were pretty active. Like most of the tourists there, I took a bunch of photos -- here's one of a peccary…

... a koala...

… and a monkey (sorry, don't know the type) on a rope…

… and two beautiful ladies posing with a chrome polar bear.

Emily was going to attend the memorial service as well, so she met us in San Diego, and we had some extra time with her, which is rare these days. (We actually didn't stay in San Diego -- we had a nice room at the Hotel Del Coronado, a place I'd wanted to get a closer look at since my last trip out there.) Here's a shot I took of Jeannine (wearing her "Organically Grown" cap) posing with some dramatic cloud lighting on one of our walks on the beach.

A few days later, following the memorial service, we continued on to Los Angeles, where we spent some more time with Em (including going out to dinner with her employers, whom we'd not met until then -- very nice folks). Em also took us to Griffith Park, a place I'd wanted to see on our visit in July. I was amazed at the number of people there -- I'd thought we would drive to the top and see maybe a handful of sightseers, but we were lucky to find a parking space about a half mile down from the observatory. But what a view! We got there just as the sun was setting, so we had some dramatic views of LA all lit up as the sky darkened.

I spent a good part of the time on the flights out and back peering out the window (Jeannine let me take the window seat)…

…and snapping shots of landscapes with my pocket camera.

They're not as cool as the photos from Stan Sakai's trip to Croatia, but I like them. A lot of the images from our flight over the desert and the mountains out west reminded me of the landscape-building stuff I used to do with the 3D program "Bryce"… maybe I should dig that program out and play around with it some more.

I did try to do some drawing during the trip… and this last photo, taken as the sun was setting on our last leg of the return trip back to Connecticut, shows my sketchbook reflected in the window of the airplane. -- PL

Morning at Kittery Point, Maine

This is another image from my trip to the Dover area this past weekend, taken fairly early in the morning, shortly before I surprised Steve Lavigne by showing up on his doorstep with no advance warning. With the help of my TrekPod and my camera's self-timer function, I managed to get myself into one of the three photos I used to create this small panoramic shot of Kittery Point beach in Maine, a place Jeannine and I used to go to sometimes to swim and walk. It was typically not very crowded because it was not, frankly, a great place to swim, but perhaps more to the point, there were not many parking spaces.

But it is a beautiful spot, and even though my panorama-making software once again had a few problems with the moving waves, I like this one -- the colors, lighting and composition appeal to me. -- PL

Weekend in New Hampshire (and Maine)

This past weekend, my wife went out to Minneapolis to visit a family friend and attend a convention of like-minded bloggers. I would have loved to have gone with her, but in spite of my best efforts, it just didn't work out. So while she was in the midwest having fun, I decided that rather than be miserable and lonely at home, I could be miserable and lonely* somewhere more interesting and potentially distracting in a good way. So I chose to spend those days by myself in the Dover, NH area.

I stayed in Portsmouth, but I made trips to some of our our old haunts, favorite areas on the seacoast as well as Dover itself and the neighboring town of Durham. It was interesting to walk around Dover and see what has changed -- not much, I think. The ice cream parlor that we used to enjoy going to is no longer there, replaced by a nifty little cafe where I ate two of my lunches that weekend, and they were both excellent. I walked over to the good ol' Dover Public Library, which we used quite a bit when we lived there…

… and when I went inside to poke around, I was happy to see that they still had the "magazine swap" shelf that I so enjoyed back in the early 1980's -- it was a great way to recycle your old magazines. (Although i think it may have been called a magazine EXCHANGE back then… but I could be confusing it with a similar thing at the Sharon, CT library some time later.)

Looking around the library, I found Jeannine's latest book, "Borrowed Names", shelved in the poetry for young adults section. That's it, fourth from the left.

Here's a shot of the cover of "Borrowed Names".

(By the way -- and I say this in a completely unbiased way -- it's a great book. Check it out!)


Continuing my stroll around Dover, I took one street that led to this view…

… a bit of interesting scenery I don't recall from our days in Dover. Maybe we never walked up that street.

After a couple of hours of reminiscing, I drove out to Ogunquit, ME, where I walked on part of the fabled "Marginal Way", and I was reminded of why I prefer the coast of Maine to the coast of Cape Cod (well, to be fair, the parts of the coast of Cape Cod that I saw a couple of weeks ago)...

... great rocks! You can't really see it in the photo below, but the stiff breeze was blowing spray off the white-capped waves -- very dramatic!

I did sit down and do a little sketching of some of the rocks, but it was pretty cold and breezy, so I only did one drawing. I have to spend more time up there in the warm parts of the year, I think.

The next day I decided to take a drive up to one of our favorite beaches, Long Sands in York… so named because it's, well, a long, sandy beach. I remembered that the last time we walked on it,  the sand was not very squishy underfoot, but firm… and I started thinking that MAYBE it would be firm enough to support me and my bicycle. So I parked near one end of the beach, carried my bike down the steps to the sand, and started riding. And it was GREAT! I think -- no, I KNOW -- that this was the most fun I had all weekend. I spent probably an hour riding up and down the beach, dodging seagulls and sandpipers, going in and out of the surf, and watching my shadow, cast by the setting sun.

It was almost too picturesque, and shortly made even MORE so by the rising of the moon just off Nubble Point near the lighthouse. I took a few photos of this scene using the zoom lens on my camera (which is why the moon looks so huge, I think), and put them together into this little panorama.

On my last day of this impromptu vacation, I headed up a little further into Maine, to drop in unannounced on Steve Lavigne and his family. I think I surprised the heck out of him, but we had a nice visit. Then I decided to drive back to Dover one last time, because i had a mission there.

You see, on my way up on Friday, I had stopped at a general store called Calef's just outside Dover, and picked up a few postcards which I intended to mail to Jeannine. One of them featured a cool aerial photo of Dover, and I was hoping to see if our old house was, by some chance, included in the image. So I was studying it, and for some reason, I just couldn't figure out exactly from which direction the photo was taken… which was a little odd, because I am pretty familiar with the layout of downtown Dover. So I once again walked around the streets of Dover, trying to pick out significant landmarks and compare them to the tiny images in the postcard, attempting to get my bearings.

And after about ten minutes of this, it hit me -- the photo was REVERSED! I found it kind of surprising that just reversing the image would throw me off so much, but it did. (When I got home, I scanned the postcard, flipped in in Photoshop, and instantly everything fell into place and made sense.) Sadly, our old neighborhood was just out of shot in the postcard's aerial image.

On the drive back home, I decided to take a spin through nearby Durham, NH, and had to stop to take a photo of this fabulous tree, which just at the moment I was driving by happened to be lit up perfectly by the sun. It was simply blazing. -- PL

(*Full disclosure: I was not actually miserable. -- PL)

Clouds and waves

Steve Lavigne and his wife Denise, who live not very far from where we are staying for our Maine vacation, invited us out to dinner last night in York. They treated us to a very nice meal at a restaurant where, as Jeannine remembers it (I only have a very vague memory of this) she and I were turned away years ago (because we did not meet their dress code), probably on one of our return trips to the area after moving away from Dover, NH to Sharon, CT. This time, it was not a problem -- either because we were less scruffy than we were back then, or the new owners are less insistent upon such protocols. I'm not sure, but it was great to see Steve and Denise. Thanks again for the meal!

After this delightful get-together, Jeannine and I headed back to our rental home, but we decided to take the shore road, thinking it might be nice to do that beach walk we'd been talking about for roughly a week and a half. We'd had the idea that we wanted to take a walk on a long beach, preferably without too many people around, and maybe near sunset so the sun was not blazing down on us. And at low tide, too, so there would be more of a beach to wander upon.

I can't believe I had forgotten that this beach existed, because just a couple of years ago, Steve Lavigne and I had ridden our bicycles to it from another vacation rental home (not more than half a mile away from the one we are currently enjoying). It's called "Long Sands", it's in York, ME, and it turned out to be perfect. As it was about 6:30PM, there were lots of parking spaces available along the sea wall, and very few people there, and the tide was pretty far out.

Jeannine and I took off our shoes (she first, me following a minute or so later when I realized what a dopey thing it was to be walking in my shoes on this beautiful, soft sand beach) and walked down pretty much the length of the beach, enjoying an occasional wave across our bare feet and the feel of the sand beneath, watching a few hardy surfers catch some late waves, several dogs enjoying a romp through the waves, and some parents chasing little kids across the sand.

And a big plus was the fact that as the sun was setting, it was turning the clouds various shades of purple and gold, colors which in places (if you looked westward, toward the sunset) were beautifully reflected off ripples of water on the beach.

Looking east, out toward the ocean, I found myself compelled to take some photos I could later stitch together into a cloud panorama. I knew the waves would very likely not stitch together correctly (and I was right), but the clouds did, as you can see here.



That figure walking toward the ocean just to the right of the center of the image is Jeannine, who enjoyed the small waves cresting over her feet. She thought the water was even warmer there than it had been earlier in the day, when we'd taken a couple of "boogie boards" and romped around in the surf at York Harbor beach. I think she was right, and we may go back to Long Sands today to swim, if it warms up. It's our last full day here in Maine on this vacation trip, and it would be nice to get in the ocean one more time before we have to leave. -- PL

Back home

It wasn't a long trip, either time-wise (three days, two nights) or in terms of distance (somewhere north of three hundred miles round trip), but it sure was fun… and relaxing. I definitely want to start doing more of this kind of thing.

Jeannine and I decided that it would be nice, for our twenty-seventh wedding anniversary, to return to the New Hampshire seacoast area. That's where we got married, in the little back yard of our rented house in Dover, NH in the summer of 1983. We didn't invite a lot of people, but our friends and family members did quite a good job of making that small space seem filled to the brim with life and joy. A few days ago, while sharing memories of our wedding day, Jeannine reminded me of the lopsided carrot cake she'd made as our wedding cake -- I honestly can't remember it being lopsided, but knowing her baking skills I have no doubt it was extremely tasty. I mostly remember being fairly giddy with excitement and happiness, and filled with an unshakable certainty that of all the good decisions I'd ever managed to make in my life up to that point, this was at the top of the list.

And it still is.

Our wedding was a civil ceremony, with a Justice of the Peace from the Dover City Hall officiating. Afterwards, we had Jeannine's carrot cake for dessert following a variety of other foods, some prepared by us, others -- like the roast turkey brought up by Jeannine's dear friend Marguerite -- supplied by helpful friends and family.

A few of our friends stayed for a while after the wedding, and joined Jeannine and me in a drive out to one of our favorite beaches on the New Hampshire coast, Wallis Sands. We walked on the sand and hugged and breathed in the fresh smells of the salt air as the afternoon light waned. It was a great way to cap a wonderful day.

Twenty-seven years later, it seemed appropriate to revisit that beach and remember that day back in 1983. It was cloudy this time, and a bit cool, but still beautiful. We walked about a mile down the beach, and I persuaded Jeannine to pose on some photogenic rocks poking up from the sand.



(I hoped to put together about five shots taken at this spot into a panorama, and it kind of worked, but I forgot about the "moving wave" problem, so it did not stitch together perfectly. But that's okay -- I really like the image of my lovely wife on those rocks, with the backdrop of sand and water and sky... and the memories.)

It was a relaxed couple of days (almost, I was to remark to Jeannine when we got back home, like the honeymoon we never officially had), spent mostly walking around Portsmouth, finding interesting places to eat, cozying up in our hotel when it rained, or doing a little browsing in Portsmouth's many cool shops.

(Speaking of our hotel, here's a view from our little balcony looking out over part of the working harbor of Portsmouth. That green bridge just to the right of the center of the image is one of two vertical drawbridges, this one the innermost, which connect Portsmouth to Kittery, ME. I remember that on our first trip together to the Portsmouth area, back in 1982 when I had come with Jeannine to help her look for a place to live while she was going to graduate school, we had to stop at the outermost of these two bridges, and wait while the large middle section of the bridge was raised to let a ship pass underneath, then wait while it was lowered to allow wheeled traffic to resume across the span... and Jeannine was a little spooked by that. I think I was too, a bit, having never before encountered or driven over a bridge which was not just one reassuringly solid, unmoving surface, but -- as in this case -- something that could split in two, leading the overactive imagination to dire visions of cars accidentally plunging into the salty depths. The large green arching bridge seen off slightly to the left in the distance is another New Hampshire/Maine connector, this one the major highway between the two states, Route 95.)



While waiting for Jeannine outside one of those Portsmouth shops, I spotted this odd twig sculpture being erected on the sidewalk… I have no idea what it is or is supposed to represent, but it's kind of nifty.



One place that Jeannine wanted to go for supper our first night -- and breakfast on our third day -- was a small restaurant near the central square in Portsmouth called Popovers (named, I believe, for the delicious popover pastries in which they specialize, which I can attest are quite yummy). Here's a shot of me enjoying my breakfast fruit salad at Popovers.



Although we discussed it, we never did get over to Dover to walk around and reminisce, but maybe we'll save that for our next trip to the seacoast. -- PL