Alfred at Last!

The waiter came over to get our drink orders at this cozy restaurant in downtown Flagstaff, Arizona.  Munchkinhead ordered a pomegranate margarita and showed him her Wisconsin ID.  Alfred ordered a margarita and showed him her Iowa ID.  I kind of wanted to order something just to show my California ID, but the restaurant had milk.

Munchkinhead and I had met up with Alfred in the morning when she arrived in Flagstaff.  We were so happy to see her!  She had arrived much earlier than originally anticipated (she had spent the past few days driving down from Iowa), so that meant we had time for some fun before she had to meet with her new supervisors.

First stop, the Prairie Museum.  It’s in an old indigent hospital and covers the history of Flagstaff.  We saw an old iron lung, lots of saddle stuff, and some other old stuff.  And we found the kid’s room.  Hee hee.  We built Lincoln Log structures, played school, dressed up like pioneer girls, served dinner and had a gun fight.

 

After the Prairie Museum, we all headed to Alfred’s new home at the Museum of Northern Arizona.  While she met with her people and was shown around her new home, Munchkinhead and I explored the museum.  It’s a fairly small museum, most of the exhibits are about Indians, though there is some geology and dinosaur stuff.  Alfred is going to be helping the museum catalogue its new plant and bug finds.

When we finished with the museum proper, Alfred showed us to her new home.  It used to be a chicken coop, but you can hardly tell. It’s a nice dorm-like room in a long building.  Her room is closest to the kitchen and bathroom buildings.   We helped her unload her car into her new room and then shared the cake we had brought for her to celebrate her new job and new home.

Then we set out for our next adventure of the day.  There’s a 10-mile gravel road in the area called Schultz Pass Road.  It goes between the San Francisco peaks.  We really wanted to go on this road, but alas, it was closed because it was still covered in snow.  So, we took a few pictures with some of the signs and decided to go see a National Monument north of town instead.

The drive to the monument was very beautiful, with lots of neat mountain scenery.  The monument was probably beautiful too, but we didn’t see it because we didn’t feel like paying for entry to the park.  We headed back down the long road linking the park to the highway.  Then, there it was, directly in front of us, the other end of Schultz Pass Road, and it was open!

We spent the next hour or so exploring gravel roads, taking pictures with signs and kicking up a huge cloud of dust.  Despite the snow on the ground outside, it was too hot in the car to not have the windows down.  Consequently, dust filled the inside of the car, coating the insides of our mouths with the flavor of a  bowling alley.  The outside of the car, once white, became a chalky grey color.  It’ll need a good washing and vacuuming by the time we return to the Yay.

The remainder of the evening was spent helping Alfred settle in, grocery shopping, unpacking and dinner at that delicious restaurant mentioned above.  We bid Alfred an early goodnight at about 9 and headed back to our hotel to prepare for our sunrise departure and long one-day drive back to the Yay.

Sorry Folks

I hate word verification on websites.  Most of the time, I can’t read the letters or numbers and it takes me several tries to type one verification sequence in correctly. 

However, I have had to turn word verification on for comments on this blog.  I’m just getting far too many spam comments and don’t know any better way to attempt to prevent.

Please don’t let the word verification dissuade you.  Continue to leave comments.  I love reading them. - me

We Got Our Kicks, and Plenty of Great Pics

The second day of our journey took Munchkinhead and me Bakersfield, California, where we stopped the night before, to our destination of Flagstaff, Arizona.  On I-40 and Hwy 58, the drive between Bakersfield and Flagstaff is about 6 hours.  We took 12 hours; we didn’t take I-40 or Hwy 58 much at all.  We took the old Route 66, at least where we could, and National Trails Hwy.

Arizona has maintained Route 66, highlighting it as an historic scenic route.  Although the Route overlaps with I-40 in some places, it is still separate through all the downtowns which Route 66 passed through back when it was the main thoroughfare.    The towns, even if very small, are still there and functioning.  In one area, there’s even a town who’s main street is designed to look like an old western town.  And there are still Burma Shave ads along the side of the road.  I was so excited to get to see real Burma Shave ads!!!

Route 66 in California is a whole ‘nother story.  The road is in bad shape, very rough, lots of cracks and pot holes.  The former towns along the route are now empty shells, disheveled buildings with half-collapsed frames, graffiti covered bricks, piles of old tires and rusting vehicles of yesteryear.  Even though there are frequent ramps leading to and from nearby I-40, there is nothing for miles and miles.

The scenery however, was magnificent in both states.  Arizona’s high mountains through which Route 66 winds round and round, up and down, narrow road, sharp turns and the most amazing views looking down into the valleys.  Munchkinhead and I had a lot of fun looking across to roads we could just make out across the great abyss and predicting if we would later be on that road.  We often were.  We stopped at many of the turn-offs to take pictures.

California’s Route was flatter than Arizona’s, with soft hills Munchkinhead called “roly poly hills,” flanked on either side by large mountains in the distance.  In some places, huge, jet black rocks, protruded from the cactus covered ground.  We took  pictures of these so Alfred could tell us what they were and how they got there. 

One really nice thing about Route 66 in California, we were pretty much the only car on the road.  (This was certainly not the case in Arizona.)  Being the only car on the road, we were able to stop whenever we wanted to take pictures, including pictures in the middle of the road.  (see above)

We were also pretty much the only car on National Trails Hwy, a windy, two-lane highway running roughly the same direction as Hwy 58 in California through some large hills/small mountain areas.  It was a very good thing that we were pretty much the only car on the road because Munchkinhead was driving!

 

Adventures with Munchkinhead Part 1

Yesterday, my little Munchkinhead and I set off on a three-day tour.  Me behind the wheel and her as navigating skipper, we set off from El Cerrito down the coast of California.

Highway 1 from San Francisco all the way down to San Louis Obispo.  It was absolutely gorgeous!  The sea was a deep aquamarine with black rocks jutting abruptly from the frothy white waves.  The sky, a perfect light blue with light wispy clouds.  The day was sunny and warm.

We stopped several times along the roadside to watch the waves crash against the rocks, hike down to beaches covered in glossy pebbles or soft sand, and take pictures.  We laughed as a large wave crashed into the shore, sweeping away our newly made footprints, glad we had moved in time.  “Hey look at this big tubby one!” “or this cute little baby one!” we yelled to each other from above the elephant seals sunbathing on the beach, throwing sand onto their backs with their flippers.

Lunch was served on a deck along the shores of the Big Sur river.  We both had salads, yummy white people salads that were designed more to be decorative than to be eaten.

After finishing our stretch of Hwy 1, we jogged up a bit of 101 to Hwy 58.  We had no idea of the crazy adventures that awaited us there!  Curvy, narrow roads climbing huge hills, round and round, up, down, left, right, weeeeee. 

Munchkinhead and I are both a bit prone to motion sickness.  Some of those hills, as we went up, up and then crested the hill, our stomachs felt like they were gonig to drop right out of our bodies and be left sitting there at the top of the hill.  Luckily, a good supply of water, fresh air from the windows and the absolutely breathtakingly beautiful scenery kept us together.

Then we saw the sign.  A sign no girl ever wants to see, “Next services 82 miles.”  At least we had a full tank of gas.  (My car gets great gas mileage, amazing really if you consider that it’s a 17 year old boat.)  The countryside was beautiful.  We wound our way up and around high hills, going up over 2000 feet, and then winding our way back down the other side.

Needing that 82 miles to end soon, Munchkinhead found a great little shortcut that cut straight east while our hwy dipped down sound and turned north again in a V-shape.  So we took the shortcut.  Right through Chevron’s oil fields. Neither of us had ever seen so many oil rigs before!  The smell wasn’t great for our already slightly dizzy and nauseous bodies, but it was a neat shortcut.

We finally stopped for the night outside of Bakersfield, ready to continue our journey east in the morning.

Cute as a Bucket

There was one thing still missing from my beautiful new bathroom.  A storage place.  You see, my roommate has the left side of the sink, but I had already monopolized the drawer on that side.  And things in that drawer, I wanted to keep on that side.  Clearly, I either needed to keep being an unfair vampire, or I needed to create a new solution.

New Solution: bucket!

  Isn’t it cute?  Would you believe that in it’s former life this beautiful bathroom bucket was red, plastic Lego bucket?  You wouldn’t!

I have a number of empty Lego buckets lying around.  They’re perfect for lots of things.  So I thought, ‘why not use a Lego bucket instead?’  However, after all that hard work making my bathroom look superb there was no way I was going to just stick a red, plastic bucket in there.  So, I made a cover for it.

It was a bit more work than I expected.  My original plan was just to wrap a big rectangle around the outside.  Problem: Lego buckets aren’t rectangular; they’re sort of trapezoidal with rounded sides and corners.

So I tried a new prototype with stripes.  The center blue stripes and the brown flowered stripes are all regular rectangles.  But the blue corner pieces, they’re trapezoids. 

When I sewed all the strips together, I had a sort of little skirt.  A little skirt that fit snuggly around the bucket.  Then I cut some slits to go around the handles and added a rounded-corner square to the bottom.  From little skirt, to little bag.

The bucket just nestles right into the little bag, perfect fit.  The top edges fold-over into the bucket and are glued to the insides.  The handle cover is also glued on.

The lid was one of the hardest parts.  You see that blue fabric is actually an old blouse of my mother’s that I really loved.  The blouse had too many stains to be worn as a blouse any longer, so I used it for my bucket cover.  After piecing together what was left of the blouse’s large flat parts (as opposed to collars and sleeves), there wasn’t enough to fully do the lid the way I wanted.  So, I added a 2” band of the brown flowered material all the way around.  Like blanket binding.

The lid is wrapped in the very large square (about 3x the lid’s size) and wrapped with string to create a cute little bow/flower looking thing.  It looks much cuter in real life than that picture.  There’s fiber-fill in it to poof it up a bit, make it look cozy and hide the red color that would otherwise be seen through the blue.  (The bucket cover itself is lined).

I’m really pleased with how the bucket turned out.  It’s a great addition to my new bathroom.  :)