Category Archives: Traveling Along, We’re Adventurers

Scribefire Next Borked, Scribefire Classic Still Works Sort Of

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While on a 26+ train journey I needed to be able to blog offline – the newest version of Scribefire will not complete, says it can’t get information on either of my most active blogs. Yet the old version, when reinstalled, remembers how to connect to all my blogs, even the inactive ones.

Oh, well! Backward into the future-past!

Expect some posts about the journey, and the rest of our vacation since arriving in Whitefish and exploring Glacier National Park.

ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. You can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, upload images, and post to multiple blogs

Via ScribeFire Classic :: Add-ons for Firefox

Going-to-the-Sun Road Information and Transit System – Glacier National Park

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It’s an amazing drive – but congested and slow during reconstruction of a section damaged by a mudslide last month. The transit system is excellent and efficient; we should also have considered taking a Red Bus tour but they were booked up. Book a few days in advance (or more) during peak season.

One of the most amazing highlights of Glacier National Park is a drive on the Going-to-the-Sun Road. This engineering marvel spans 50 miles through the park’s wild interior, winding around mountainsides and treating visitors to some of the best sights in northwest Montana.

via Going-to-the-Sun Road Information and Transit System – Glacier National Park

Grouse Mountain Lodge

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They open the doors for you when you arrive, and the warm welcome sets a nice tone.

We had a double queen wheelchair accessible room; probably could change it now that the weekend is almost over, but won’t bother. The amenities, besides the golf course on-site, include a small conference center, a small but nicely arranged indoor pool, two jacuzzi tubs on the deck, and dining in a big lodge room with a 3-story river cobble fireplace. There’s screened deck seating and a deck bar when the weather is fine (and it has been). The food is very good although the service is a bit slow (which was partly due to a large tour group in-house the first morning).

My sister Timmy and her hubby Frank would like this place, it’s a nice drive from their home in Kellogg, especially after turning off of I-90. Attention, Frank: fly fishing galore on the way, and also on the way up to West Glacier. And there’s a spa and gift shop here, too. The van picks up in town until 2am (at least on the weekends) so dinner and entertainment are no problem.

We will definitely stay here on a future trip, maybe break it up with a stay on the east side of the park as its a haul to get over there for some of the activities.

The scenery is amazing – not visible from down in town, but a dramatic reveal as you drive up from the entrance (once past the ugly sprawl in the area of Columbia Falls, between Whitefish and West Glacier).

We’ll return the car to Whitefish airport Wednesday, which was cheaper than dropping it in West Glacier, and the hotel van will follow us and bring us back. Then they’ll take us to the train station in Whitefish the last morning. It’s worked out pretty well, staying here, and I give it at least 4 stars.

The only drawback; the wheelchair accessible room looks a bit unfinished compared to the other rooms I’ve glimpsed. The shelves need a bit of trim and the shower needs a curtain of some kind (it’s a nice roomy roll-in). The bedding is really nice, the towels are wonderfully fluffy, and there’s wifi.

Nice property, nice people; Grouse Mountain Lodge is a great value and a good home base for touring the Glacier Park area… And I might need a massage later, so that’s covered, too.

Grouse Mountain Lodge is ideally located in beautiful Whitefish, Montana, minutes from Whitefish Mountain Resort, as well as Glacier National Park.With 143 beautifully appointed guest rooms, extensive meeting & event space, an on-site activity planning company, sumptuous dining, and a substantial list of services & amenities, Grouse Mountain Lodge truly is the premier choice in Montana resorts.

via Grouse Mountain Lodge

So Far

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So far, we’ve

  • Flown from Chicago to Seattle
  • had breakfast, lunch, and dinner with boats
  • explored the Seattle Underground with tourons and alleged rats
  • hiked on a beautiful forested trail by a remote beach
  • had delicious beers with friends
  • had circus with bread, which is a little different than having bread and circuses.
  • avoided Seafair, but not the Seafair Pirates
  • driven to Idaho
  • hung out with family
  • walked on a rails to trails route
  • been licked by dogs
  • eaten huckleberry ice cream (me only)
  • eaten Vienna Sausages (again me only)
  • seen 2 deer
  • seen innumerable ground squirrels and chipmunks
  • driven over Moon Pass
  • eaten coconut shrimp
  • booed a villain at the mellerdrammer
  • ridden bikes through old railroad tunnels and over trestles
  • watched satellites and shooting stars
  • laughed a lot
  • seen BATS!
  • Had a slow leak BOO!
  • Gotten it fixed at least temporarily YAY!

We’ve had a wonderful trip so far.

We flew into Seattle last Friday and stayed downtown at the Silver Cloud Lake Union – of course the nav system misguided us but we eventually got there (it sits on a narrow lot between two streets, but the entrance is on Fairview, NOT Eastlake). The room was very nice, with a fridge and wet bar, and they had a good hot breakfast each morning in a really beautiful third-floor breakfast room with comfy couches and tables, overlooking the boatyards at the south end of Lake Union. The SLU Trolley (which used to be known as the S.L.U.T. until somebody pointed it out to Sound Transit) ends just a block down, in front of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (and the Residence Inn Hotel).

We hardly took the car out of the garage that weekend – the hotel van does Pickoop Andropoffs at the Seattle Center, Pike Place Market, and Pioneer Square, so we took advantage of it 2 days running. David had never been on the Seattle Underground Tour, but I had done it many years ago and wanted to see it again (somewhere at home I still have the book).

On Sunday, we went for an urban hike in Discovery Park and put in about 5 miles or so (maybe a little farther according to David’s GPS). It took a while to find parking, it was such a nice day; everybody in Seattle not at Seafair was at the park.

After that and a little break, we went downtown to meet up with Kevin and Lynn at the Central Saloon (one of my old hangouts) for some tasty beverages, before they had to take off for the Sounders game. We walked back up to Pike Place, which was closing down for the day… but I found my way back to the Pink Door! It was awesome, the look on David’s face, when I pushed the “anonymous” looking door open on Post Alley and went inside. He was like “where the HELL are you going??”

They had a circus performer doing tricks from a big ring suspended from the ceiling. The food was incredible; I had a pasta dish with prosciutto, garlic, excellent olive oil, more garlic, and mint. David had Cioppino Pink Door and pronounced it excellent.

After that we wandered back to the pickup point. JUST MISSED a van, but waited in front of the Chocolate Box shop and the cupcake-and-ice-cream place; David bought me a tin of Chocolate Tea, and we wondered about the QR code and the Post-It Note art up in the windows of the building across the street (I was really into the architecture, we really need to plan ahead next time and take a tour). The QR resolved to some kind of SEO firm.

We left Seattle in our rented Ford Escape and headed to Idaho to see my sisters (Timmy lives there, my sister Tudy was up for the week from Salt Lake) and my niece Raeanne and her kids Collin and Paige. Timmy and her hubby Frank have this great house they built up the gulch from the Interstate, but it’s remote feeling enough that you get wildlife (like the bear that visited them a few weeks back). Frank built a Bear Alarm in case it comes back; he’s got concertina wire strung along the lower level deck that leads to a Diet Coke can full of gravel outside their bedroom window on the level above. Because of the slope of their lot, both levels have decks – the living room/kitchen/bedroom level is where the “front” door is behind the house.

We hung out there in the evening the first night watching for satellites and the ISS and talking about everything… including the amazing pictures sent back from the Curiousity rover right after it landed on Mars the night before:

Mars Curiousity from StephLaberis Twitterfeed

YipYips! BRRRRRRR-INNNNNNGGGG! Mars Calling!

Yeah, the Internets were fun the other night, hard to explain to my sister and brother-in-law, as they’re not that into that geeky stuff.

We spent the last four days visiting, going to Melodramas, soaking in the rooftop hot tub at the Silver Mountain Resort, walking on bike paths with family, riding on bike paths with just the two of us, and generally having a ball. I highly recommend the Trail of the Hiawatha mountain bike path! But also recommend that you either bring your own bikes, or rent from a bike shop in town rather than from the bike shop up at Lookout Pass Ski Resort, which is the concessionaire for the trail access. The bikes we rented were in need of a little TLC – my front wheel was out of true and had to be swapped out by a friendly trail marshall about 2 miles down the trail from the East Portal tunnel.

As you ride, you go through several spooky (and cold!) tunnels and over several high trestles. David and I almost got run down by a deer in one long tunnel, which kept getting spooked by bikes and reversing direction. I heard it coming with this “galumphy galumphy” noise in the dark ahead of me; suddenly my dim headlight illuminated something that was all hooves, knee joints, and terrified eyes and ears before it executed a mid-air pirouette and went back up the trail to daylight. The tunnels were inky dark (did I mention cold) and headlamps would be handy, as the lights they rent to you are okay but not really that bright.

Gosh, it was FUN, though. Even with my creaky, rattling bike it was fun. It’s a steady 2% downgrade for 15 miles, so you have to pedal to have any kind of speed, but it’s easy pedaling. A series of old buses run shuttle schedules from the bottom of the trail back up to the WEST portal of the first long tunnel – you have to ride back up through the tunnel to the parking lot at the EAST portal, but the grade was level at that point and no problem. I had a nice skunk tail when I was done, but I also won the trivia contest that Sheri the bus driver did, so I got FREE ice cream (but also bought 2 nice T-shirts to commemorate our ride).

We would definitely do that again – it was busy even on a Thursday, so get there early in the day and to avoid delays, check your equipment with a test ride if you rent.

We’re leaving for the “third half” of our vacation in Glacier National Park. We’re about to pack up and go – after a short delay caused by 2 (TWO) nails in our rear left tire. Slow leak, we called Avis, they sent a guy from local operator Nicholson’s to get us on the spare, and David got it fixed for free at Les Schwab. So we’re good to go – time to button up and see what happens next.

We’ll be in Glacier at Grouse Mountain Lodge for a bit less than a week, then on Amtrak to go home to Glenview, IL. Should be interesting, as delays are expected due to summer heat and the usual “slow freight” backups. Better pictures to follow, too. Here’s what I took on the iPhone in the meantime.

Boatyard across from the Silver Cloud Lake Union Hotel – from the third-floor patio off the breakfast room

More boats, also seaplanes, from the deck of Chandler’s Crabhouse

Walked in Discovery Park along the North Beach and Hidden Valley trails

QR code in downtown Seattle across from the Chocolate Box

My sister Tudy hangs out in the hammock on our sister Timmy’s deck – great view down the gulch toward the Silver Valley in Idaho

Sunset watching – this cloud looked like a phoenix chasing other birds. “I’ll save you!” said the little bird chasing it.

Used to be the railway station, it got moved when the freeway came in; the rail line was converted as rails to trails years ago.

We had a blast at the Mellerdrammer. Especially as the plot of the play revolved around some other “Baker Girls.”


Piano in the Rose Mary Pit – in memory of long-time accompanist Rose Mary, who was also a friend of my sister Timmy’s

A lady named Kathleen got pulled onstage for a little number. She was handed a parasol and twirled like a pro.

We rented bikes from Lookout Pass Ski Area and rode 15 miles on the Trail of the Hiawatha

The Trail of the Hiawatha follows the former route of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St Paul railroad, also known as the Milwaukee Road. The passenger line was called the Hiawatha and was famous for views like this – in the nighttime!

Near the end of our ride – all told about 2 1/2 hours of PURE FUN. David looks back up the trail from the last high trestle and considers riding back UP. We had shuttle bus tickets…

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Aloha, Leah

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Leah gets lei’d at Maui Kahului Airport in September, 2007

Leah Sharron Gibbs, nee Green, age 70, beloved wife for 50 years and best friend of Sheldon. Loving mother of David (Virginia), Daniel, Mitchell (Gloria) Gibbs. Cherished grandmother of Melissa, Joshua, Jennifer and Naomi. Dear sister of the late Seymour Green. Devoted daughter of the late Abrasha and Udasha. Fond sister-in-law of Norma and Bill Brown. Loving aunt of many nieces and nephews. Long time teacher at Serena Hills School in Chicago Heights, IL. Member of B’nai Yehuda Beth Sholom. Services Thursday, 11 A M. at B’nai Yehuda Beth Sholom, 1424 183rd Street, Homewood. Interment Shalom. In lieu of flowers contributions in her name to the Cancer Support Center, 2028 Elm Road, Homewood, IL 60430 would be appreciated.

A rare flower bloomed for a time, but lives forever in the garden of memory.

She lived in amazing times, from Saturday, November 8th, 1941 to Memorial Day, Monday, May 28th, 2012. She was a month old when “a day that will live in infamy” dawned. Ironically enough, that day took place in Hawaii too, but this picture shows Leah being greeted at Maui airport with 2 flower lei and a hug by my husband David. She and my father-in-law Sheldon joined us there to help me celebrate my 50th birthday in 2007.

She loved, loved, loved so many things. Purple, books, flowers, good food, good friends, and travel; most of all, she loved her family deeply and wanted the best for each of us. She welcomed me, even though we come from different backgrounds, without hesitation and with open arms. I was proud to call her a friend as well as my my mother-in-law; after my own mom died in 2006, Leah became my second mom. She also had a deep connection with my sister-in-law Gloria, who was able to spend a lot of time with Leah in the last few months, attending meetings in Leah’s home with her “Goddesses” support group.

The Cancer Support Center meant a great deal to Leah, and we will be donating in her name for as long as it takes. Please consider making a donation on their website, or check out their amazing yearly fundraiser/silent auction/talent show.

I haven’t been able to say much here on the blog or on Facebook or Twitter about what was going on with Leah, but she passed away today surrounded by friends and family. She was in home hospice care until last Monday, and then it was decided that she needed to go into the hospice unit in a hospital farther to the south from her home. For the last week we’d been making the long drive back and forth between here and a place I thought of as the “Borderlands Hotel.”

We’re grateful for the care she received, and thankful that she no longer needs it. She’s at peace now.

While all of us in the family were at her home tonight, decompressing from the enormity of losing a wife, mother, sister, and grandmother, I browsed in the pile of books on a side table by her favorite sofa. One passage, just 2 short pages, was marked by not just one, but FOUR bookmarks AND a dog-ear. I should have borrowed that book, but there will be time to retrieve it with all the to-and-fro we have to do this week. It had interesting insights on life, living with cancer, and doing it with humor and grace.

Potential images for my banner from Hawaii trip, and Father Manny’s Purple Poncho

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Ho, well, I never post anymore, blah de blah. We had a wonderful time in Hawaii, pictures are all still on my laptop and need to be culled and copied to my desktop machine. However, I found a few on the card that was in my camera this morning when I took a picture of Father Manny in his purple Lenten poncho (okay, church purists, it’s a chausuble).

Here’s one of his photo-op pictures, which will shortly be uploaded to the St Nicholas Facebook page and used on the website for the rest of Lent.

I enjoy “Faddah” Manny’s sermons so much; he’s open, friendly and approachable, pretty much as he is in this picture. Today’s sermon started out as a commentary on that famous reading from John that includes “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoso believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

OOH! Here’s the St Paul’s Cathedral Choir singing John Stainer’s “God So Loved The World,” a piece we sang at St Nick’s last year during Holy Week. I love singing this piece – and we’re only about 8-10 voices WITH the extra people who ring in for the big services. St Paul’s is a traditional Anglican choir with boy altos and sopranos. I particularly love the twitchy boy in the final closeup – he’s next to the kid that the camera zooms in on.

We sound a bit more like this choir:

Anyway, after that musical interlude, more photography and churchy stuff, and finally, a soaring bit of Hawaii.

The background was chosen because there was too much backlight when he was at the altar, coming from the windows behind him. He had someplace to be so I quickly directed him over by the font, which is “dressed” for Lent. Note the empty font pool behind him, and the arrangement of leafless branches; the symbolism is stark, but the potential for life and renewal is there in the coming of Spring and the water of Life. The folks responsible for decorating the church for the liturgical seasons have really been creative this year; they’ve been given free rein and the result has been interesting, engaging, and tasteful while also being innovative and working with a minuscule budget. I can’t wait to see what they do on Holy Saturday for the Great Vigil; the sanctuary will be full of light and spring flowers, I know that.

Today was nice as we had another new person attending with her young son, and last week’s new person was there with her daughter too. The kid’s program is really unfolding in a neat way -today was another of the “Children’s Gospel” Sundays, where the kids go to the Noah’s Ark area (a comfortable lounge with couches off the main gathering space) and conduct their own service and read the Gospel, then talk about it. They get invited forward before the first reading, and are then sent off to do their thing (supervised and guided, of course, but it’s their activity). They return to their families just before the Eucharist (communion) and we seem to have it working well. Other Sundays, they either are with their families, or they actually help conduct the main service; the committee that designed the program figures it’s easier for families to schedule things for specific Sundays due to the sports and extracurricular activities they’re signed up for other weeks.

In other churchy news that’s also funny, we’ve somehow put our hands (paws?) on an Easter Bunny costume, which belongs to St Bede’s Bensenville. They’re merging with us at St Nicholas in May, so there’s been some sharing back and forth (I need to try to take some photos next week to send over there of us as a “get to know you” thing). They are bringing some treasures with them – among them some stunningly beautiful Stations of the Cross, which have already been installed along our back wall and will be used (I think at the Good Friday service). But they also offered the bunneh suit, and Faddah Manny was game for running out the back at the end of the Easter Sunday service, de-ponchoing (he’ll be wearing the cream/gold festive chausuble that day) and hopping (heh) into the bunny suit. Well, that’s clearly not workable, so we’ll find someone else to be the bunneh. In fact, we need a Bunneh Stig.

We somehow need to meld this:

with THIS.

In related news, it appears that The Stig may simply have been hatched from an egg, so Bunny Stig is actually entirely possible.

And on that bombshell I’ll move on to the soaring pictures from Hawaii.

We went for a drive down along the North Shore one day on Oahu, and more or less blundered into yet another area that was historically significant in World War II, but had seen its glory days pass by, Dillingham Airfield. I have picture on the laptop of the signs for it, but quickly switched to a new card when I noticed some interesting activity on the tarmac.

Got it together quickly enough to get this and other similar pictures:

They flew around a bit, and then the glider was released and the little yellow plane came back down to line up for the next go-around. The glider landed:

Glider N387BA landing, its single wheel just inches from the asphalt

Managed to get it just before the single wheel kissed asphalt (OOH!).

Glider N387BA getting tow cable set for another go around Dillingham Field

It came to a stop and the pilot hopped out to hook up the cable for another go-around. Lovely day for soaring. I know very little about gliders other than the obvious, but this looked like a lot of fun. There were a couple of outfits there that seemed to be selling glider rides but it looks like this was flown by Honolulu Soaring. I can’t get the tail number to match up with them – glider N387BA is registered in Alabama, but there are mentions of it being at Dillingham. The tow plane is a pretty distinctive little yellow guy with a great big GRRRR!! toothy grin.

I’ve made banner images for a couple of the other pictures and will be adding more, you’ll see them appear if you refresh a time or two.

It’s Raining, But Who Cares? We’re In Maui

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20120212-081057.jpg

Not our earliest start, the overnight in San Francisco took a bit of the edge off.

It rained all night, it’s raining now; it’s a relaxing day in Paradise.

It was snowing when we left Chicago, and currently it’s 27 degrees there. More snow expected this week. I’ll take the rain, thanks.

The flight was delayed more than an hour, not bad once we got in the air. We arrived at the hotel via shuttle, and will stay in SFO again on our way back to avoid that deadly overnight flight. The flight to Maui pushed back on time, and I was closer than David on the Halfway to Hawaii game (although he helped with my calculations, he cheated and used his GPS).

One quibble; for such a long, full flight, United should offer a meal. We passed on the paid snacks and after getting the car, stopped for lunch at Beach Bums in Maalaea. Yummy calamari sandwich, never had such tender thick chunks of it before.

Good thing, too, because the traffic crawled slowly, for no visible reason, through Kahului and around the two-lane part of the Pali. Next time, we’ll turn on the Hana Highway, avoid Dairy Road, and cut through town.

Headed To Paradise, But Not Soon Enough

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Barring any weird developments, this is the other place we’ll stay on our upcoming vacation.

Visit Paradise, the ultimate true Hawaii vacation experience. Paradise Bay Resort offers the most beautiful natural setting and the best kept secret hide away on Oahu. We are the only B&B, resort hotel on the tropical Windward of Oahu. Enjoy panoramic views of the Ko’olau and Kualoa Mountains, magnificent Kaneohe Bay, Chinaman’s Hat Island, the Pacific Ocean and the neighboring Kahouna Fish Sanctuary.

Link: Paradise Bay Resort Hawaii – Kailua Bed and Breakfast, Kailua Beach Hotel

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The World Is Not Ending In 2012, Despite What The Marketers Of The Apocalypse Have Been Selling You

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I know a little about the Mayan “calendar round,” and have an amateur-archeologist interest in Pre-Colombian cultures. I’ve had conversations with people who actually believe the movie and book hype, promulgated by people who’ve taken a distorted view of Mayan texts in order to sell more books or movie tickets.

The Mayans believed that time was organized like a set of nested, revolving rings; they were trying to keep both lunar and solar time, and they were such keen astronomers that they worked out the cyclic nature of how the two sets of rings synced up in 52-year “short count” rounds. Various “long count” rounds can take thousands of years to re-sync. The end and beginning of a new cycle, short or long count, is significant.

December 21, 2012, according to some (but not all) translations of Maya date glyphs, marks the end and beginning of a particularly significant “long count” cycle. Mayan scholars are trying to educate people away from the simplistic, Apocalyptic “end of the world!!1!” view of this date, made popular in various recent movies and book.

It’s an uphill battle. People WANT to believe old Mayan predictions of the return of a creator god, because they want to think it reinforces the concept of the Apocalypse and the Second Coming of Jesus.

This image shows my mom’s birthdate in Mayan glyphs, probably in short count notation. I bought it many years ago on a trip to Mexico, as a souvenir of a day spent at Chichen Itza.

PALENQUE, Mexico (Reuters) – If you are worried the world will end next year based on the Mayan calendar, relax: the end of time is still far off.

So say Mayan experts who want to dispel any belief that the ancient Mayans predicted a world apocalypse next year.

The Mayan calendar marks the end of a 5,126 year old cycle around December 12, 2012 which should bring the return of Bolon Yokte, a Mayan god associated with war and creation.

Author Jose Arguelles called the date “the ending of time as we know it” in a 1987 book that spawned an army of Mayan theorists, whose speculations on a cataclysmic end abound online. But specialists meeting at this ancient Mayan city in southern Mexico say it merely marks the termination of one period of creation and the beginning of another.

“We have to be clear about this. There is no prophecy for 2012,” said Erik Velasquez, an etchings specialist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). “It’s a marketing fallacy.”

The National Institute of Anthropological History in Mexico has been trying to quell the barrage of forecasters predicting the apocalypse. “The West’s messianic thinking has distorted the world view of ancient civilizations like the Mayans,” the institute said in a statement.

Link: Mayans never predicted world to end in 2012: experts – chicagotribune.com

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