Wait for this to load, then click on expand.  You will see a new screen with the whole blog set out as a magazine.

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Now I’m back home I’m working on an update of the blog – correcting some formatting errors and adding a few new posts into the mix.

Plus I’m developing it as a downloadable PDF file, and an online magazine.  It’s done, but not finished.  Watch this space…..

Coming in to Hobart International Airport (no trains needed here).  Our property is on the end of the line of hills under the wingtip.  Seeing this after all our travels was very good indeed.

After many hotels, and much driving, and a very interesting trip, there’s no doubt that Tasmania is by far the best place to live – for us at any rate.  You have to leave to really appreciate what you’ve got.

USA was OK, but I’m not going to rush back.  It was different from what we thought – our only exposure to that culture, for all practical purposes, has been the movies over the years.  Which, now we’ve seen the place, put a gloss on it.  Either that or the increasing population and the crowding has changed things too much.  Certainly what was supposed to be attractive (I’m thinking California here), is rather tired now.

But overall it’s a great thing to have done as a family, made us appreciate each other more and become closer.

Back on Australian soil, Katie got out her phone.  New Android OS update.  Woohoo!  So now she has discovered it has voice recognition.  This means that not only can she SMS, and talk to her friends, all the time – she can talk to the phone too.

We now realise the best way to communicate with teenagers is clearly by phone.  Speaking and listening is so last week, isn’t it?

We’re all packed up now, and we leave on the plane at 7 tonight.  24 hours being squashed up in a tiny seat again.  Yuk.

Still, it’ll be good to be back home.  We’re all traveled out now, having been here for two months and seen so much.  It’s been constant moving, with few rests which eventually becomes just tiring.  We should perhaps have had a day or so every 7-10 days just to sit and do nothing if we wanted, it would have made things easier.

But we saw so much, and did so much.  Visiting our relatives was wonderful, and Sue and Jack in Denver were welcoming and kindly drove to Yellowstone with us.  A warming experience among friends and family.

And what of the US – well, the food was pretty awful overall.  Much more processed than we like.  Had we been doing the same in Australia we would have had less ‘plastic’ food, and more tasty, varied food.

American consumerism is all pervasive.  There just seems to be so much stuff on sale – not just a variety of everything, but a huge variety of everything.  The Walmart and Walgreen stores exemplify this.

Long queues for every tourist venue.  I’ve heard nowadays it’s hard to get into the museums in Europe for the same reason.  Not something we are used to because it’s been a long time since we traveled like this.  We missed Alcatraz because we didn’t book weeks in advance, and we gave up on other things when we saw the queues.  Perhaps the days of easy tourism have gone – we had the golden age in the 70’s and 80’s.

The homeless in the cities is a bit hard to take – at least in a Western country we aren’t used to it.  The lack of welfare is pretty hard on the lower socioeconomic groups.

But it was a wonderful country to see – vast natural beauty, fascinating geology, awesome sights.  We’re glad we came.

Fog has covered the harbour and the bridge during our stay, making each day cold and windy.  Finally we got to see the Golden Gate Bridge.  Here you go.

Crummy weather they’ve got here.

This majestic building on top of the Presidio was copied from the European buldings of the time.  It was designed to show off American heroes, and to display American art, a lot of which was similar to European art (the modern art museums were set up later).

Its grand design recalls the French grand architecture, and it’s a lovely building inside. We saw an exhibition of Dutch Masters there, which was wonderful – all romantic and exquisitely detailed paintings of the 17th century.

The de Young museum was built in the Golden Gate Park for modern art.  It was a beautiful old building, but was eventually too badly damaged by the earthquake of 1989 and finally knocked down a few years ago.

What they built instead wasn’t all that popular, since it’s flat and an odd shape – but the inside is pretty good.  The skin of the building is made of copper, which weathers to a dull green and lasts a long time.  These odd pimples on the skin come from the design being based on digital photographs of the old museum blown up to become pixelated, then the pixel pattern copied onto the copper.

Well, an odd idea that sort of works.

We’ve been looking all over the US for one of these for Katie.  It’s a bun called a bear claw.  Doesn’t look much like one, and it’s got 7 fingers.  Finally snagged this in the museum cafe.  The verdict – not very good.

Goes in the bin with bagels and the rest.  Including the bread by the way, which is usually sweet, like a scone.  In the end I gave up eating it.

They all have to do this by law – turn the wheels out when facing uphill, in when downhill.  Stops the car rolling away.

I went on a tour of Golden Gate Park by Segway.  It is hard to look cool on these gadgets, but one does one’s best – and fails.  I think it’s the hat.

The Segway was a spin-off from the iBot, invented by Dean Kamen who wanted to produce a stair-climbing wheelchair.  This was successful – it could also raise itself up by rotating two wheels around each other.  A very clever balancing device, it sold some hundreds a year to disabled people. Johnson and Johnson bought the technology, but unfortunately could not make it pay – they marketed it as a medical device, but medicare would not pay the $26,000 price tag and it has been discontinued.

The Segway was an offshoot of this – a person balancer instead of a wheelchair.  The development is chronicled in a fascinating book called “Code Name Ginger” by Steve Kemper which I read some years ago.  About $100 million was put into the design and production, but it has never become widespread for a few reasons.  It is expensive – around $5,000 each – and it is difficult or impossible to get permission to use publicly in many countries.  Most governments cannot make up their minds if it is a motorcycle or a bicycle, and won’t license it for medical use. It is certainly heavy, relatively fast, and requires smooth ground such as roads to operate on.  It is also silent, making it somewhat dangerous in public places.

The result is that sales have been limited, and it has never fulfilled it’s promise as a widely used personal transportation device. It is in use in private sites such as warehouses, and in some places is used by the police and the postal services.

I followed it’s development with great interest after I read the book, so I was very interested to have a go.

After a half hour training exercise we spent two hours rolling around central park with an earphone in and a guided tour (I have to confess I turned the volume down on the tour, to enjoy the Segway).  It’s a little odd at first, and my legs became quite tired from standing in one place for so long.  However after a short time it becomes pretty natural to move exactly where you want, and I had fun trying to zoom around corners and get up to maximum (limited) speed of 10mph.

The downside of these devices is that they do cause injuries, some serious and often involving facial and skull damage – because if you fall, you go flat out and often hit your head, being unable to protect yourself by putting your hands out.  It is apparently a bit like being hit by a car.

Hmm, maybe I won’t be getting one anytime soon – you can’t buy them privately in Australia anyway.

Near Haight-Ashbury are houses beautifully decorated called the “painted ladies”.  They were the homes of rich merchants in the area, and have been restored to something of their former glory.

The area at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets was the centre of the counter-culture movement which was given immense impetus in the “Summer of Love” in 1967 – 45 years ago.  Doesn’t seem that long.

The street names commemorate pillars of society – a banker and bureaucrat oddly enough – the exact opposite of what the area became famous for.

In the 1960’s the offshoots of the Beat Generation – Jack Kerouac et al – started to live in San Franciscos northern beaches area.  It became too expensive, and so people started living in Haight-Ashbury which was cheaper.

By coincidence a freeway was planned through the Panhandle nearby, and was successfully opposed by residents, who finally won in 1966, giving the area a strong sense of community.

In the summer of 1967 school students started to converge on Haight-Ashbury, and in the end around 100,000 people lived in the area.  The authorities made the problem much worse, and provided free publicity, by saying they would keep the hippies out – something the police were unable to do.  Community organisation was carried out by local residents, who also provided free food and medical care.

This was the time of Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, Jimmi Hendrix etc – all living near or performing in Haight-Ashbury.  Their message of anti-authoritarian behaviour, including peace and love,  mixed with drugs and altered social behaviour, took hold. The idea of communal living and and alternative lifestyles was born, and still remains a powerful influence in society today.

Coupled with this, 1967 saw the worst racial violence ever seen in cities such as Detroit and Newark, badly handled by state and federal forces.  Subservience to authoritarian America probably came to an end that year.

By the end of 1967 Haight-Ashbury was overcrowded, with drug problems, crime and homelessness creating an impossible situation.  The weather was turning cold, and something had to stop.  The residents held a mock funeral to signify the end of the long summer, but also to tell people to stay away.

They did, but they took hold of the central idea of love, peace, anti-war protests, harmony, social experimentation, ecological sustainability and communal living – the hippy lifestyle in other words.  This did a lot to mold the politics of the next 20 years, and changed the direction of society forever.

In retrospect, what happened at Haight-Ashbury was something positive which is reflected in some of the good things in current society – the green movement, caring for the planet, alternative building and lifestyles.  It captured our young minds at the time and those young minds grew up to be the mature minds of later years.

Nobody can see the past clearly, because we all live such a short time, but mine stretches back to the first world war, thanks to my parents.  This saw the end of the British Empire and changed the idea that war was glorious forever.  The second world war saw a fight against real evil, born in the desire to raise new empires.  After that war the very idea of an empire was dead, and with it the underlying assumption that authority was always right and war always justified.  We younger ones simply saw that there had to be another way, and Haight-Ashbury was the example we needed.  In 1969 I organised a “Sympathetic Convention” on the Isle de Groix off Brittany – not many people went (I didn’t either), but the fact that I, a 19 year-old, could do that speaks for the time.

What remains now, at Haight-Ashbury is a bit seedy – dirty streets, cheap clothes shops, lots of cafes, dope-smoking shops, old hippies and some spaced out looking people.

We never made it here – what we didn’t realise is that you need to book way in advace to get on the trips.  Even turning up at 7am to get a place had only a slim chance of success, so we gave up.

Thirty years ago we had a nice drink in a little cafe here.  Things have changed a bit since then.

After our trip down the coast we drove back to SF for 4 days in the city. We stayed at the Mayflower Hotel, 4 blocks from Union Square and convenient to all the central shops and bus routes.

It was a good hotel, cheap by central standards, and old, but with character and helpful staff.  The room was big enough and comfortable.

We didn’t plan well enough for the city – preferring to get there and see what was interesting.  This was a mistake, since the interesting things could have been found out online prior to our visit – we missed two or three things we wanted to see because they were at the wrong time or we couldn’t get tickets.

In any case the city wasn’t all that attractive – the weather was cold, foggy and rainy; the streets crowded and dirty with a lot of beggars.  It certainly didn’t live up to its reputation for us anyway.

A lot of this in Felton, north of Santa Cruz.  Scores fairly heavily in the fruitloopery department.

Fish processing plant.

Tourist processing plant

Is every bit as full of rubbish as this.

The sardines disappeared in 1948, from overfishing, changing currents, and pollution. Fishermen left, canneries closed, and the Row fell into disrepair. Curious tourists continued to visit the area. Steinbeck himself wrote, after visiting in the 1960s, “The beaches are clean where they once festered with fish guts and flies. The canneries that once put up a sickening stench are gone, their places filled with restaurants, antique shops, and the like. They fish for tourists now, not pilchards, and that species they are not likely to wipe out.”

This was remarkably accurate.  It said that within about 35 minutes we will get extremely pissed off with everything to do with Cannery Row and clear off out of there.

The famous Pebble Beach Golf Course.  This, for those ignoramuses among you, is one of the famous golf courses of the world. And for those of you with poor eyesight there are little golfers golfing in the fog. How good is that?

People think golf was started in St Andrews, in Scotland.  It wasn’t – it was gentrified in St Andrews but started on a scrubby bit of dunes called The Links just outside the gates of the school I went to in Musselburgh, Edinburgh.  Pebble Beach has come a long way from there, but its the same idea.

My theory of golf (in which I’m not the slightest bit interested by the way) is that it is there to replicate human society in miniature.  I mean, if you want to put a little ball in a hole the simplest way is to walk over and drop it in.  But no, people buy a lot of very very expensive gear to do it according to an immense list of rules.  Anything more pointless is hard to fathom.  So it’s there only for the milieu, like a lot of other sports

And they have expensive prizes, arcane hierarchy, and exclusive clubs to do it with. Which, of course, is the point.

Actually my other theory of golf is tied in with extraterrestrial intelligence.  Those who are looking for proof of alien life should look no further than the golf courses, where aliens  – who landed a long time ago – congregate to discuss control of the human race.

Alien landing site

It’s a very clean place.  On one corner we saw dog grooming, nail grooming, and window grooming.

Driven, presumably, by this atmosphere of cleanliness, Katie was moved to clean her teeth.

Driven also by the same atmosphere, Sally wouldn’t let Katie spit in the gutter.

Time to move on I think.

Every now and then you come across a town where the whole atmosphere indicates a particular mindset.  In the case of Carmel it is definitely driven by wealth – the main street is sort of twee and upmarket at the same time.

Chaps with loafers and ladies with bling.

Driving out of Big Sur toward Monterey we cross several bridges.  The design of this one, similar to the other big ones on the road, is elegant and simple.

So is the natural one nearby.

Moss Landing, which proved to be somewhat deceptive on the way South, with rich clientelle and crappy food, redeemed itself as a seal and sea otter haven.

Seals are spread along the California coast, but normally need a bit of effort to see.  However, at Moss Landing they have taken over one of the jetties in the harbour, and the beacH, and are laying all over each other, close to the camera.  In fact you can walk up to them and touch them if you (and they) feel like it.

These are harbour seals, and like most seals except the elephant variety, are cute, loveable, and smelly.

North of Monterey is a flat area with rich soil growng fruit and vegetables.  Including artichokes.  Artichokes are very nice to eat – except when cooked by the all too common American method of deep frying them in oily sickly fat.

Two bites and they went in the bin.  Why do they do this to food?

Sitting right on  the harbour at Moss Landing is this power plant.  It puts out roughly 1.2 billion litres a day into the harbour.  Some of the water is allowed to be released 20C higher than surrounding seawater, which doesn’t do the local marine critters all that much good.

Coupled with this is the pollution in the harbour, and the constant traffic from boats, making life generally hard for the fauna.

Moss Landing harbour is a haven for sea otters, which lie around in rafts of 50 or so in an eddy out the current and near the beach.

These cute little creatures lie on their backs with their feet in the air, paws together looking like they are at a prayer meeting. When feeding they dive down and pick up shells, which they eat on their backs, cracking them in their sharp teeth.

This group is well known to sea otter affionados and well studied.

The most excellent bakery at Big Sur where, for once the prices are worth it, brings a big smile to Sallys face.

At the excellent bakery at Big Sur.  They make nice sheds too.

Here’s why living on the coast isn’t so nice hereabouts.  These houses were in the sunshine when we set off (but we weren’t – it was cold, damp and foggy at the bottom of the walk).

After midday the seabreeze started to come in when the landmass heated up.  The cold air was then sucked up the hills, and the fog started to rise.  We could feel the cold wind blowing up the track as we descended.

Back at the road the fog blocked all views, as it had done all day.

At the top of the Tan Bark train was an old structure called the Tin House, with an interesting history.  It was build by a rich politician who owned a lot of land here in the 30s and 40s.  He had a magnificent house on a river at the bottom of the hills here (with a marble staircase 16ft wide). But his wife got sick of the constant fogs in summer and wanted a house up the hills, out of the fog.  Being wartime there was little in the way of building materials, so they cannibalised two petrol stations and made a house of metal sheeting.

On moving in they discovered the tin was extremely hot during the day, and creaked and groaned as it contracted at night (as anyone with an ounce of sense could have told them).  They stayed one night and left for good.

It burned down sometime after that, and remains as a reminder to do your home work before building your home.

We’ve given up on the coast, and decided to do some walks.  We did couple yesterday, about 5 miles (8km) in all, which were nice enough but crowded.  Today we did a longer 6.5 mi (10.5km) trail which wound up steeply into the hills, arriving nearly at the top of the range, then down a fire track.

It’s called the Tan Bark trail, because the creek is full of oak trees which were cut to harvest the bark used for leather tanning, and exported in boatloads all over the world.

The track was nice enough, but dusty and pretty hot after climbing out of the fog. There were some huge fires here in 2008 which destroyed a lot of the vegetation, and the trail has only been reopened a few months now.

Vegan jerky – there’s an oxymoron.  Emphasis on the moron.

I tried one today, in the name of blog research.  Absolutely bloody awful.  Vegans are all bonkers of course, but you’d have to be barking mad to eat this stuff.  Bugger all else you can do with it.  Binned it toute de suite.

Pretty well anywhere that doesn’t charge you money has one of these signs on it.

This place was started way back in the hippy era when we were all going to be enlightened by an exploration of the new consciousness.  Assisted in no small way by a headfull of dope.  (Actually New Age stuff nowadays is a repeat of the same gobbledeygook).

Over the years they have had a load of big names running courses there.  Joan Baez, George Harrison, BF Skinner etc etc.

As far as I’m concerned this outfit is the home of fruitloopery.

Skip over to http://www.esalen.org/ if you can be bothered.

This is what it’s supposed to look like.  I got this off the web.

So we came all this way to see the beautiful Big Sur coastline.  Slight problem there – we couldn’t see it because of the fog.  Which sat there for two days, and, for all we know, will stay for a week or a month.

In any case the view was restricted to trees, fog and hillsides.

For all the hype, if you take away the view of the sea, what you’re left with is a narrow, windey two-lane road with a lot of traffic – mostly tourists or road gangs, slow driving, and scenery which is tedious and repetitive.

And the few shops charge prices starting at roughly twice what is reasonable.  The restaurant we ate brunch in was overpriced and the food crappy.  The restaurant we ate supper in was overpriced and the food good (apart from the goats cheese pizza, but that doesn’t surprise me). The people serving us were grumpy.

The tourists are somewhat overpriced too.

This coast obviously was wonderful once upon a time, but it’s been overrun and overused.  It’s well past its use-by date now.

Better value elsewhere.

Driving through Santa Cruz, down the coast to Monterey and on to Big Sur was just a drive along a crowded highway, so we stopped at the second place we found in Big Sur.  In the redwoods, by a river.  Very peaceful, nice cabin.  We’re here for 3 days.

So we stopped at a quaint little place called Moss Harbour.  Marina with yachts, and working boats.  Picturesque, all nice. No cutesy designer boardwalks and trinket shops which I hate.  Seemed like the sort of sleepy little outfit we love to poke around in.

But then some weeny little things didn’t quite fit – the cafe where we wanted to eat had a waiter and tablecloths, and menu prices off the scale.  And then a limo pulled into the carpark.

Hmmm.  We wound up at a fish market – looked like a good spot to eat.  But then noticed considerable bling on the customers, and designer clothes, and some very fancy cars along the road.

The food cost a bomb and was bloody awful.  We ate it on the rocks, with seals playing in the harbour.  That was the nice bit.

Here it is – the West Coast.  After 7 weeks traveling we’ve crossed America from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.

In Santa Cruz I came across a couple of oldies in a gas station looking forlornly at a map.  They had parked their big RV in Morgan Hill, took off in the little jalopy they were towing behind and ended up in SC.  Unfortunately they had then forgotten how to get back.  We got the maps out and showed them, but they looked a bit confused, and kept getting the directions wrong.  Mrs said they should go and have lunch and a sit down.  Probably still there.  Poor old things.  Never happen to us.

SF was the usual hassles plus extra crowding – I was surprised that the car hire setup was now separated completely from the airport, and, not only consisted of a row of hire firms, but also the queue at each counter was about 20 minutes.

The freeway out of the city was a bit of a nightmare – everything happened at about 70 mph, and without much regard to what lane it happened in.  Hard work, all the way to Santa Cruz on the coast.

And we passed all these roadsigns – Menlo Park, Cupertino, Palo Alto,Silicon Valley – to a geek this is like a catholic driving around Rome.  I offered the ladies a driving tour of these suburbs, but they told me to shut up and get on with it.

Maybe I’ve been out of touch with how crowded the world is getting.  And maybe I want to keep it that way.

We went into SF on the BART (subway).  On the way in I sat next to a particular woman, who got off at a different stop to us.

We spent the afternoon and evening in the city, then decided to catch the train back to Oakland at about 9pm.  Remarkably, when we got onto the carriage, the very same woman got on at the other end, came along and sat on the seat behind me.

The odds against this happening must be astronomical.  According to my theory of the universe (there’s an old guy with a beard pulling levers) when this sort of thing happens the old guy with a beard’s looking at you – and you maximise the moment.

So the very next day I bought a couple of lottery tickets and a scratchie.  Well the scratchie didn’t do much.  But the lottery tickets.

According to my theory of lottery tickets you buy hope, and hope allows you to dream.  Now – as long as you don’t look at the numbers – you’ve still got hope, therefore you can go on dreaming up all sorts of scenarios where you’re very rich.  So you can keep the ticket for as long as you like, and every time you look at that little bit of paper, there it is: a ticket to dreams. Very cost-effective – yes?

Now the key is not looking at the numbers – the result then stays in a state of probability, which doesn’t collapse to a certainty.  Quantum physicists do exactly the same with photons, and if they can get away with it (and they do) then I can with lottery tickets (and I do).

Did I win? Yes I did.

Hah! Wouldn’t you like to know.

Pips

We flew from Denver to San Francisco to start the next part of our trip – California.  The plan was to stay in SF for the afternoon and night, then hire a car and head off down the coast.

This we did, staying near the airport in a Best Western hotel, with a quick trip into the city to have a look at it.

We stayed overnight with John at Boulder, a nice town near Denver.  He has a house up in the mountains with spectacular views.

Walking in the surrounding bush was interesting – compared with Tasmania it is very open and easy to walk through.  Meadows are delightful spaces, inhabited by deer.  Bear and mountain lions are found in the hills.

Build by a family whose son was killed in Vietnam.  They bought some land to make a resort, but after he was killed sold off the blocks and made this memorial to him and his companions.  Quite moving – for us the Vietnam War was very real, but distant.  A sad time for our world.

Oddly enough this place is isolated in flat, dull country.  Presumably so they can blaze away at anything silly enough to move.  These guys are into guns in a very big way. But the worrying thing is they are into power in a big way – administrative power they think is a right if you have a gun.

Last year, NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre explained it in chilling terms to the wild cheers of the Conservative Political Action Conference. According to LaPierre, when it comes down to it, the only freedom that really counts is the right to be armed – without it, “liberty is but an illusion.” In the NRA’s world, we are free only to the extent that our guns allow us to impose our will on others. Here are LaPierre’s words:

“Our divine rights, they might have been endowed by a Creator, but they are preserved by mortals, if we mortals have the means and the will to make it stick….Freedom is nothing but dust in the wind till it’s guarded by the blue steel and dry powder of a free and armed people….Our founding fathers understood that the guys with the guns make the rules.”

Bloody hell, these guys are saying that not only do they have the right to bear arms (the Second Amendment), they have the right to use them – including against the government if they think it reduces their freedom.

The NRA has long been the most powerful purveyor of an ideology that legitimizes violence, and the threat of violence, as a tool of political power.

And what’s more, apparently God agrees with this.

Now we leave Taos and New Mexico and our trip around the Canyons. Taos was a much-needed rest after all that travelling.

Heading back to Boulder to stay with John overnight and go for a walk, then back to Denver briefly before heading off to the California part of the trip.

Spotted tacking up the main street.  A few of this species around.  I daresay he has a past.

I was intrigued by the middle one, who looked so different from the others.  I finally discovered her looking mysterious.

[There is a gallery of photos of the Pueblo on the Galleries page]

After the pueblo indians came down from the hills in about 1100.  When the climate became dry, they moved into the Taos area, and joined other tribes.  Using local materials they built the Taos Pueblo, which has been inhabited ever since – about 1000 years.

It was fully occupied until 1960, then people started to move out because of health and convenience, and by 1975 only a few families lived there.  Now about 20 people live in the buildings, which has been declared a World Heritage site.

The Pueblo is run by the local indians, who manage the site as a tourist attraction.

In fact the mud used is of poor quality for building, being mainly sandy and so very prone to erosion.  It needs constant maintenance to keep the walls from disintegrating, and there were crews working when we were there.  They have to re-render and re-build yearly.

Cooking is done in mud ovens – which are very effective.

Nevertheless it is an interesting place, with a long history, and the architecture is pleasing.  It is nice to see adobe being used naturally and effectively.

The basic structure of the earthships is a sun-facing greenhouse, collecting heat and light.

The back of the house is buried by an earth berm.

The result being a house with large thermal mass and maximal thermal input.

The structural unit used by Mike Reynolds was the used car tyre filled with rammed earth.  This provides a simply made wall of great stability (reo bars run vertically and the tyres are laid in a stretcher bond) and thermal mass.  The advantage is that it requires little skill to make, so the cost is minimal.

The tyre walls form both the back wall of the house, and a foundation for side walls and decorative structures.  Concrete bulked with used aluminum cans which forms the back and front wall above the tyre foundation,  and can provide decorative and variable additions to the main house.

the treatment of waste water, water collection, and energy management is discussed at various places.  A good place to start is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship

Taos is home to the Earthship concept.  In the late 70s Michael Reynolds, an architect, started to investigate ways to build cheaply constructed houses which were independent of the electricity grid, collected and recycled their own water, and was of sufficient thermal mass and insulation to maintain an even temperature.

He had many battles with the local Taos council, and was eventually deregistered as an architect.  However, this all changed with the tsunami in Ache 10 years ago.  He took a crew over to the island and rebuilt houses for the inhabitants quickly and cheaply.  The US architects association recognised his achievement, reinstated him, and the building code was changed so these houses could be built.

There are now many houses on the 1000 acre spread just outside Taos, and many houses in USA and Europe.  There are plans for villages of the houses to be built in England.

Download the movie – Garbage Warrior – which describes his remarkable achievement. http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/garbage-warrior/

It’s well worth a look – I was fascinated by both the movie and the place – Sally and I have build mud houses, and been interested in energy efficient structures since the late 70s when these developments were taking place.

The great thing about the Earthship project is that all the mistakes have been made by now – as Reynolds intended – and the technology is mature.

Katie bought an indian rug from a shop where the rugmaker was working on a loom in the window.  Nice guy, and Katie was really pleased to be able to talk to the maker.

The loom was the original type which had been used for many years, with carved gear wheels.

He said a rug took him about a day to make, but the big ones he makes at home with his family on a 4m loom.  They take about a month.  He keeps all the designs in his head, and each family of rugmakers has its own designs.  He’s teaching his two young sons to take over from him at present.

I wasn’t hungry.  At least I didn’t think so, but a “small” pizza slice slid down very nicely thank you.

The ‘restaurant’ (more of a shed really) had a torpedo in the garden.  Not many of those around.

Sally and Katie loved all the little tourist shops selling jewellery and bits and pieces – often of high standard. We wandered all day among the shops, sipping coffee and munching tidbits here and there.  Very nice.

Taos is built of adobe (mudbrick) of a certain characteristic style with flat roofs supported by vegas (wooden poles), and having rounded corners and wall tops.  It is pleasing and soft to the eye, most noticeable when meeting again the hard edges and sharp corners of our usual building style.

Houses use second hand materials, and often decorate the walls and gardens with objets trouves, which makes for a pleasing and sometimes whimsical effect.

The people are similarly artistic, mostly good-natured, and the shops nearly all have some kind of art on display, mostly for sale.

After all the driving and the canyons, we decided to stop in Taos for a while.  Good choice.

We stayed in a little house (casa) rented by some friends of Sue and Jacks.  It was small and peaceful, just what we needed.

Taos is a centre of New Mexican art and culture, and has been in the centre of hippy/artistic culture for many years.  A number of communes started up around the town in the 70s and 80s, not all welcomed by the local Indians, who were not altogether happy with a lot of drug-taking layabouts enjoying the area where they had to work to survive.  Over the years the layabouts moved on,and those wishing to work and live stayed.  It became the centre of a lot of art of diverse types, and has been well established as such for many years. My sister and her husband lived there for 17 years as jewellers and artists before moving to Maryland, then Kentucky about 8 years ago.

We meandered around the town all day, looking at the shops, buying trinkets (well, not me).  The next day we visited the Earthship colony and the Pueblo, a 1000 year old still inhabited adobe community. It was so good we stayed an extra day before moving on to Boulder, then Denver.

Well, don’t bother with Mexican Hat.  Go to Bluff instead – wish we had.

Then Mesa Verde, the site of many 1000 year old cliff dwellings, fantastic and I wish we’d stayed longer.

Via a fancy ski resort in a fancy apartment outside Durango.  Nice.  Apart from the toilet.

Then to Taos New Mexico to see artistic types and adobe architecture and have a rest.

We were to stay a couple of days, but the place was so nice and peaceful we stayed 4 days instead.  Round about now we need a rest – do nothing for a while.

Only 2 weeks left, pity.

Katie had been having increasing abdominal pains for a few days and we thought it could be appendicitis.  No way for us to figure it out except go to a hospital.  So we did – the Mercy Hospital in Durango.  Nice doctors, nice nurses.  Three hours in ED, a few tests = $950.  Yikes.

Well, it wasn’t appendicitis.  But the bill was pretty painful too.  Insured happily, but it reinforces how lucky we are with out medical system in Australia.

Those of you who are non-toilet oriented should read this with your eyes firmly closed, since it may contain material which may offend.  It offended me, I can tell you.

We’re staying in a very fancy apartment in a ski resort, and this morning is the second time a toilet has blocked up – in different appartments – and it’s because of poor design.  This is the only toilet design we’ve seen and it doesn’t work.  American toilet engineers are just not thinking.  The solution smacks of a bureaucratic approach, and I don’t like it.  America should be able to do better than this – they need to rethink their toilets.  Grrrrr.

American toilets are designed with a small outlet and a large bowl – which contains a veritable lake of water.  Quite unnecessary I might add, unless you are in one of the drier states and want to go waterskiing, or perhaps do a spot of recreational fishing.

The small outlet means the toilet is a one-flush-wonder.  Despite the large lake (where, by the way, things do float around a lot), the small outlet means it can only cope with one – shall we say – load at once.  Now if you go to the toilet at night, you don’t want to flush it because it wakes the others.  If you happen to be female, you use toilet paper.  Multiply this by, say, four and you have a certain amount of debris to be cleared come morning.

However, if one (ie me) trots (in both senses of the word) along in the morning, then there is a certain amount of extra – shall we say debris – to flush away.  Which it doesn’t.  Which is quite unpleasant actually.

BUT – here’s the kicker – the solution to this is to provide a big plunger, located under the sink in the bathroom.  The plunger is beautifully designed to fit the small outlet and the large bowl, and with a long enough (nearly) handle to avoid significant backwash but requires a dancing approach to the operation of squishing all the stuff down the little hole – to keep away from those little splashes.

The question which occurred to me (to be precise it occurred to me about 45 minutes ago) is WHY DON’T THEY BUILD BETTER TOILETS INSTEAD OF SUPPLYING FANCY PLUNGERS.  Eh?

Bureacrats, who produce and deal with vast amounts of crap solve problems this way.  Surely toilet engineers can do better.

LATE BREAKING NEWS: Sally went to the toilet in some place yesterday and there it was – right next to the toilet pan, a plunger, waiting for the inevitable blockage.  Hah.  Not only the rich have crappy toilets.

Final update.  These things were everywhere when you start looking.  The funny thing is the Americans, are as nutty as the proverbial about hygiene, even giving you little paper things to put on the toilet seat (you get pregnant from sitting on toilet seats, as you know).  However they put plungers in the toilets which will spray a dilute aerosol of faeces into the room when used which settles on things and gets breathed in, and dribble the aforesaid mixture on the floor afterwards.

Barmy.

So just to recap, we went to Yellowstone and saw amazing things which bubbled and spat, and interesting animals.  Then we went to Buffalo Bills town, Cody, and ate cowpoke food and went to a rodeo – fantastic, yeehah.

Back to Denver the on the road again to the rudest of motels at Green River (it’s brown actually).  Down to Zion national park which was beautiful and big.  Couple of days, couple of walks, then off to the Grand Canyon for a couple of days.

The Grand Canyon really has to be seen to be believed, even then its hard to.  Extraordinary.

After Mexican Hat, Monument Valley where cowboy movies were made and tourists are ripped off, then Mesa Verde where the Anasazi Indians used to live, followed by Durango for a night, then Taos for a rest.

Seeya later……

This is where the Anasazi lived – in the cliff overhangs over the top of a mesa.  The canyon is accessible in its upper reaches, often by climbing down rock faces or up from the bottom.  They build where there was water, often coming from springs in the rock.  The canyon floor was wet and flat patches could be used to grow crops – mainly corn.  Animals were common.

The country was much wetter than at present, with better growing conditions and more animals.  A prolonged drought forced them to leave and migrate to the river country in about 1100 AD.

The Anasazi were a stone age people using stone tools.  Evidence of sharpening is everywhere in the ruins.

The Mesa Verde people (Anasazi) lived in holes in the ground called Kivas.  Thought to be something to do with a sacred idea that they came out of the earth so that’s where they lived, or perhaps did ceremonial stuff.  It is thought the structures became more ritualised as time went on, till eventually there was one for every 10 families or so, and some for seated about 70.  The ones we saw were one per family group.

Inside the kiva, which is entered through a ladder in the roof, the fireplace is in the centre.  There is an air passage from the outside which blows on the fire, but a vertical deflector stops it blowing the fire out.  Around the edge are some shelves which might be seating.  Under the shelves are little holes which are for sacred objects.  The roof is made by laying beams on the buttresses then beams on top of them till the roof is filled in.

There is quite a bit on the web about them, one interesting page is:

http://pages.swcp.com/~spsvs/outdoors/anasazi/ruins.html

Mesa Verde is a remarkable place.  For around 2000 years the Pueblo indians lived here in the cliff overhangs at the top of a mesa – at around 7000 ft.  There are no written records, so we don’t know all that much about their lifestyle or why they built like they did.  The rock buildings are made of stone with mud mortar, and are mostly only a few rooms tucked away under an overhang.  A couple of exceptions, one of which is Cliff Palace, held around 150 people in about 100 rooms.

One of the oddities is that they lived in circular underground rooms about 10ft deep by 15ft across.  It is thought these were ceremonial rooms.  The above ground rooms are small (the people were about 5ft 4inches tall) and jammed together filling the available space.  Small passageways link the rooms.  They were a stoneage culture, with no metal till the Spaniards came.

Around 1000 AD the rainfall dropped significantly and they all moved out, to join the other Indians along the San Juan river in New Mexico.

A fascinating and rewarding day.

Fences are so interesting aren’t they.. (Yes, thank you for your support, I’m glad you like them too).

Here’s two more.  The second is different – you need a lot of spare logs for this one.

This bear isn’t black but that is what they call it.

It was toddling down the road on the way up to the Mesa Verde park, sniffing at all the cars which had slowed down to sniff at it.

This is the first non-stuffed or carved bear we have seen. Very exciting.

Beam engine

We saw a few of these in the oilfields.  The design has been around for a long time, and was called a beam engine used to suck water from the early mines.  It was originally operated by a horse or donkey (called a donkey pump), then, when steam was discovered as a power source the original expansion steam engines were used.  They lasted for a many years until Watts piston steam engines took over.

Today they are operated by a diesel engine (like this one) just ticking over, or gas, or electricity.  We poked around here and took a sample of the oil direct from the ground.  Yellow and smelly.

ROCK OF THE WEEK

Features one of the display rocks for one week.

After the rough-and-tumble of Medicine Hat we stopped at the first cafe in Bluff for a restorative cup of coffee, and some blue corn pancakes.  The cafe is part of an artists studio, with some gently whimsical objects dotted around.

The SEAL OF BLUFF CITY

vs The Great Seal of California

RUSSIA

That’s a set of teeth hanging off a row of nails

Here is the hat for which Mexican Hat is named.  It is by far the best feature of the place – avoid at all costs.

Many bikers, mostly in groups, overwhelmingly Harley Davidsons. Saw a Swiss mob  today, identical bikes, identical gear.  Swiss precision.

Here’s one with a lot of hitech gear, and a couple of photographers in a support vehicle 2x Canon EOS Mk II, tripod, ipads, iphones and the rest.  Turns out that its an outfit called Touratech, who are on the Utah Backcountry Discovery Route on their BMWs. You can follow them on the web if you care.

Presumably, like us, discovering that Mexican Hat is a place to avoid.

In Mexican Hat the gourmet diner can experience on of two restaurants.  The one we chose, this delightful little bistro, offered a choice of steak, steak, hamburger, or veggie burger (don’t ask).  As a side dish one had a choice of beans or salad.  The wine list consisted of beer.

The beans were directly from a tin, and tasted awful.  At least the two mouthfuls I ate did.  I saw inside the fridge where the salad was kept and decided not to risk actually eating any, so it remained as a green(ish) decorative counterpoint to the grey(ish) beans, as you can see on the right hand plate.  The plates, incidentally, were made of aluminium, and seemed unloved.  Whether they were clean or not was hard to tell – but they certainly showed the patina of a long, hard life.  Rather like the cook.

The steak was shared between us.  It was yummy, as was the toast – cooked alongside the steaks on a grill swinging back and forth over a wood fire.

The performance of the grizzled old cook, possibly a grizzled old cowpoke, demonstrated an intriguing approach to the culinary art which eschewed both hygiene and finesse in favour of speed.

As a meal it hardly gave value for money, but if seen as an entertainment too, then it was almost worth it.

These buttes and mesas are the leftover remnants of the plateau we have just come from.  The grand canyon, zion national park, bryce canyon and the rest are all situated in a high plateau which was uplifted and then worn away.  The result is spectacular canyons.

Hundreds of years in the making, tens of millions in the shaping, the plateu is around 8000 ft, while the land here is around 5000 ft.  The landforms in Monument Valley lie at the edge of the plateau, where the floor has mostly worn away leaving a few outcrops.  The outcrops get smaller and finally disappear.

While the overall shape of the buttes is similar, the protean details continually intrigue. Set against the vast plain and spectacular sky, and in the changing light the shapes are dramatic and awe inspiring.