Category: Travel

Ha Ha Tonka — It’s No Joke

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Missouri Day Trip: Ridgedale to Kansas City

Ha Ha Tonka State Park                                                                  Roadtrippers Map
Lake of the Ozarks
Closest Town: Camdenton, Missouri
About 158 miles from Kansas City and 178 miles from St. Louis
As with all Missouri State Parks, it is dog-friendly

From their brochure:
With its intriguing history and outstanding geologic features, Ha Ha Tonka State Park is one state park that should not be missed.  The park is a geologic wonderland with sinkholes, caves, a huge natural bridge, sheer bluffs, and Missouri’s 12th-largest spring.  The ruins of a turn-of-the-century stone castle overlook those wonders and offer impressive views of the Lake of the Ozarks and Ha Ha Tonka Spring.

 
 

I’ve wanted to visit this Missouri State Park for several years — it’s an Instagram favorite. It’s best known for its castle ruins, and its beautiful location at the top of a hill overlooking the Lake of the Ozarks. It’s easily explored via trails, boardwalks, and staircases.  And many stairs. Lots of stairs. Still … that’s better than blazing your own trail.

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Ecuador: I Can’t Quit You, Quito

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Wyndham Airport, $130/night
This unexpectedly-beautiful hotel sits about 300 yards from a runway at the Quito Airport, yet we never heard a single plane both nights we stayed there. It’s a great place to stay if you’re between flights in South America. It’s new, the rooms are big, there’s a restaurant on-site, it has excellent air conditioning (don’t under-estimate that!), and the staff is fantastic. The only con is that it’s 45 minutes away from Quito, so you have to make arrangements if you want to go into town (the hotel can help).

As I look back at this past year, and forward to more interesting travels in 2020, I’m amazed at the things I saw in Ecuador…the Galapagos Islands, on my bucket list for years; the Amazon rainforest, a place I never expected to find myself; and lovely Quito, the capitol of Ecuador.  And it was all one trip, organized by Adventures for Solo Travelers.  Continue reading →

Bread and Puppets

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The Bread and Puppet Museum, Theater, and Paper-Mache Cathedral
753 Heights Rd
Glover, Vt 05839
802-525-3031

From https://breadandpuppet.org/museum :
The Bread and Puppet Museum is a massive accumulation of the puppets, masks, paintings and graphics of the Bread and Puppet Theater, housed in a 150-year-old barn in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, 25 miles south of the Canadian border. It is one of the largest collections of some of the biggest puppets and masks in the world. It was created in 1974 when Bread and Puppet Theater moved to this former dairy farm after a residency at Goddard College, and before that close to a decade in New York City. The museum is full to the brim; its population density is an expression not only of the accumulations of time but of the urgencies which inspired the making of so much stuff: the poverty of the poor, the arrogance of the war-mongers, the despair of the victims, and maybe even stronger than that, the glory of this whole god-given world. And naturally, all this will decay in due course.

 

The Bread and Puppet Museum is an immersive experience, even when it’s closed. During the winter and spring months the museum is closed, but their website proclaims “…you’re welcome to come in, turn on the lights, and have a look around.”  You just have to turn off the lights when you leave.

obsessivehobbyist.com

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Roadtrippin’ the Palouse – A Wanderer’s Guide to the Rolling Hills of Eastern Washington

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This was Days 16-20 of a fabulous Fall road trip a couple of years ago. This leg was Seattle to Ellensburg to Pullman, Washington — 289 miles. If you fly, Spokane is the closest airport.

Holiday Inn Express, Pullman, $121/night with a AAA discount + $20/night pet fee. Nice, recently-renovated hotel. Big room; lots of green space to walk the dog, and they don’t mind if you leave the dog in the room (they even give you a tag for the door that says Do Not Disturb/Dog Napping) (love that!). Located close to Washington State University, so be sure to book in advance on football game weekends. This is football country!

I’d wanted to visit The Palouse, famous for its photogenic landscapes, for years and finally made it part of my long roadtrip home (the move from California back to my home state, Missouri).  Most photographers visit in the spring when the rolling hills of eastern Washington are like green velvet, but I think Fall in The Palouse is absolutely gorgeous, in a whole other beautiful way. I was there towards the end of October, long after the wheat harvest, and I used Pullman as my headquarters and spent 4 days wandering aimlessly around The Palouse, which I highly recommend. If your time is more restricted there are lots of local photographers there who offer photo tours, but I really enjoy wandering.

Fair warning: I include a LOT of highway shots from behind the wheel. I do it to remember the journey, and hopefully share the thrill of discovery. You can discover the beautiful red barn when I do, resting peacefully just off the highway in a beautiful field, or perched precariously near the highway curve because it was there long before the highway interrupted.

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Cuban Cowboys

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A Uniquely Ordinary Day in the Cuban Countryside

In March 2017 I went to Cuba for the first time, and I’m just now sharing my first Cuban photos. And, interestingly, they’re not photos of old buildings, old cars, or old people. But of the thousands of photos I took, these are the first I processed. And this was the most ordinary, and most unique, day of the trip. I went to Cuba on a photography workshop with Colby Brown Photography, and was thrilled that we didn’t just photograph all the usual suspects — old cars on the Malecon in Havana (we did that), colorful Trinidad (we did that, too) — but we went beyond the usual tourist attractions.

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