Deep in the Heart of Texas

We are so happy to be on the road again, heading west, to rivers and canyons grand. We like the arroyos and cottonwoods, the dry air and big sky, cowboy cafes and gems.  A few nights ago, we hiked to the top of Enchanted Rock, a massive dome of pink granite that offers a 360-degree view of Texas hill country.  We saw the full moon rise in synchrony with a glowing sunset, a memorable Texas two-step.

To be sure, we loved the southeast.  It’s just that we’re comfortable in the West.  Maybe it’s the favorable nature:people ratio or knowing that we’ll be skiing powder in a week.  Or maybe it’s just human to like what feels familiar.  And things are starting to feel familiar.  This is probably why we loved Austin so much.  It felt familiar with its upscale grunge, litter-free trail running, faded jeans and delicious eats everywhere.   What also feels familiar is the drought, the epic drought.  The drought in central Texas is considered the region’s worst drought ever.  San Antonio is evaluating desalination projects using Gulf of Mexico water.   Travis and Buchanan Lakes, the drinking water sources for Austin, are at roughly 30% of average.  The parks and campgrounds all have fire bans.  It’s bad.  Our lips are chapped and fingers cracked…..it feels familiar.

While in Austin, we camped just outside the city at a state park.  We explored the amazing springs and pools, the state capitol, historic sites and of course the Austin restaurants. THANK YOU TINA F. FOR THE OUTSTANDING RECOMMENDATIONS!  I am not sure you intended for us to eat at every restaurant on the list, but, that’s right, we ate at every restaurant on the list – Chuy’s, Salt Lick, Hut’s Hamburgers and Stubbs for a Sunday Gospel brunch.  Amen! 

A few momentous things happened in Texas:

1)   While touring historic command central at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Johnny decided he might want to be one of the Orion astronauts going to Mars in 2035.

2)   We visited Charlie’s birth town of Midland/Odessa and played in the now, vintage, Dennis the Menace Park.

3)   Julie returned to vegetarianism after a 10-year meaty hiatus.

4)   We saw a three legged dog walk into a bar…probably looking for the man who shot his pa.  not kidding.

We heart the heart of Texas.  Here some pics for a taste….

Texas Live Oak

Enchanted Rock

 

 

Enchanted Rock

photo credits:  Char and Johnny

 

 

NOLA

Sometimes it feels like we are on the face-to-facebook-tour.  We roll into a new town and friend our old friends and their friends in person.   Then the whole social network enjoys some Cajun food and watches the Saints win their first playoff game together.   Antiquated, I know, but this is our kind of kind of facetime.

New Orleans was such a treat thanks to Linda and Rob’s over-the-top hospitality.  And, that, they allow their 7 and 9 year old boys to play tackle football in the living room, made Johnny feel instantly at home!  Rob (aka The Crawfish Guy) was our personal tour guide, cook and driver, naturalist, historian and entertainer.  These guys seasoned our NOLA time with a perfect mix of lore, wit and southern charm.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.  And, by the way, check out www.crawfishguy.com to order you a cajun microwave!  

Our second day we enjoyed Rob’s home cooking and an afternoon snack of beignets and cafe au lait at Café Dumond.  We explored the French Quarter and landed at Preservation Hall for a smokin’ set with the Tommy Sancton’s New Orleans Legacy Band.

We learned about the post Katrina green building boom and had a chance to connect with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade (yes, the nonprofit group that appeared in Erin Brokovich, that works toward clean air, justice and sustainability) and see some of the new homes in the the Lower 9^th Ward.  We owe a huge thank you to Erik Paskewich, an inspired and inspiring young businessman working to build a market for non-toxic, recycled Mardi Gras beads and throws with ZomBeads (www.zombeads.biz).  The infusion of social entrepreneurs, artists and advocates is fascinating.  We are so lucky to have spent time with locals to see this side of New Orleans.

I think our time in New Orleans was especially sweet for Charlie, having lived here as a young boy with his family.  Everywhere we went, Char sparked with memories of his mom and dad’s time in New Orleans.  Of hearing Ella Fitzgerald at the Roosevelt Hotel.  Mardi Gras.  Holding his Dad’s hand on Bourbon Street.   How wonderful to have sprinkled new memories on top!

Auld Lang Syne

Mobile living is definitely shifting how we chart time.   Dusk and dawn set our cadence more than calendars or watches.  At dusk, the bugs come out, campground gates are locked and the sky turns pink, luring Char and his camera out for a stroll.

Neither are seasonal cues reliable like they used to be.   It’s winter, yes?  Rosy-cheeked Coloradans are drinking Bhakti chai and chanting for powpow.  But central Florida looks like fall, is dressed up like Christmas and feels like summer.  CONFUSING!  Kale is in season.   Farmers’ markets are bustling and black bears are awake.  They become lethargic, but do not hibernate.

Last night on New Year’s Eve, we made a campfire and ate kale soup.  We lit sparklers and stayed up until midnight but really, what we were thinking about and celebrating, was, knowing that today, January 1, 2014, would be our 200^th day on the road!!  woohoo!  200 extraordinary days that are our funny little life this year.

And while 200 days have gone by, we have not forgotten you our dear, dear friends and family. We love and miss you and wish you a wonderful, healthy and happy 2014!

Johnny here – Happy New Year to my friends and family!!

Hi Everyone,

I miss you guys and hope you are having a great time skiing.  I want to be there with you right now.   I have not been skiing on snow, but I did jet ski in the Florida keys.   It wasn’t powered by my body. It was powered by an engine.  Can’t wait to see you again.  I hope you have a very happy new year!!!  Your friend, Johnny

Wild Things

Where the wild things are, that’s where we’ve been.  Beltway bandits, assateague ponies, pirates eye and butterfly fish.  Feral chickens, six toed cats, cormorants and anhingas; alligators, sawgrass, spanish moss; salty sailors, loopy santas, nosee’ems to the southern most point of the continental US.

From sandy, sunny, flatly, funny Florida, we wish you happy holidays and a wild new year.

Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve, Florida

Supreme Court, Washington DC

Friends in high places, Jared Polis and Johnny 

 Welding in Uncle Tony’s shop, Brooklyn, NY

The Highline, NYC

 Autumn day at the Vietnam Memorial, Washington DC

Misty? wild ponies on Assateague Island, MD

 Wild Thing, Johnny boy

 Ocean dog

 Juno Beach, FL

  Long Key State Park, FL

 Bahia Honda State Park, FL

 Atlantic ocean paddling

tropical lighting, Florida Keys

  Pirate’s Eye, Florida Keys

 Seagrass on Florida barrier islands

 The Danger Sailboat, Key West, FL

 Florida National Marine Sanctuary

Banyon Tree, Key West, FL

 Wild chickens, Key West, FL

Southern most dog, Key West, FL 

 Southern most Char

Colorful Key West

 Hemingway’s House and Museum, Key West, FL

Everglades, FL

Swampthing

Big Cypress National Preserve, FL   

 Happy Max!

 Missing you!   

 Hanging 10

Not quite a powder day, but we’ll take it!

xoxoxoxox, J, C, JD and Max

ps – how do you know that J, C and JD were staying with Julie’s parents in Florida? They’re still there!!!!

Thanks Mom and Sol.  So awesome to be with you.  We love you.

Hardly but Heartily in the Heartland

Sunday November 3, we headed out from Grammy’s house in Denver for the third time – first was west to Telluride; second was to Europe.   And last week was eastward ho through the heartland toward the Nation’s Capital.

Johnny is such a Colorado kid, he had never been east of DIA let alone the other side of the Mississippi River, though he can spell Mississippi backward – I-P-P-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-M.   We rolled through windy Kansas and hiked in the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve trying to imagine the time when millions of bison roamed these amber waves of grasses.  Eastward we rolled through St. Louis’s gateway to the west and across the great Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.  We made it to Columbia, Missouri for a delightful visit with grad school friends, Esther and Michael. We enjoyed an early morning run and experienced our first ever centrifuge-brewed coffee – Columbia may have out-Bouldered Boulder with the sophisticated-looks-like-a-chemistry-lab-tastes-like-a-perfect-cup-of-coffee experience.

We rolled through Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky into Julie’s hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio for three days with Johnny’s cousins and Aunt Andrea.  THANK YOU, sister!

We managed four visits to Graeter’s ice cream and a stunning outing to the Underground Railroad Freedom Center on the free side of the mighty Ohio River.   We learned about the slave trade, the underground railroad and that “wade in the water” was a lyrical warning to stay in the rivers to keep slave hunters’ dogs off the trail of escaping slaves.   The Freedom Center helped us march through history, through the civil rights movement, celebrating the progress, but still feeling the weight of past and modern day injustices.

Through the mountains of West Virginia, we rolled into Canaan Valley.  It had been 12 years since my last trip to the best ski area in the world and it was so heartening to see that nothing had changed at White Grass.  It’s exactly the same!!!!  Exactly the way it should be – tucked into the base of a hill, with a wood stove, vegetarian chili, bearded men wearing gaitors and wool sweaters and good people who love to ski with other good people who love to ski.  The grass was still green and the center was not yet open, but volunteers were working and weather was approaching, so we helped put up some snow fence and reminisced about 7 amazing seasons in the valley of good karma.  Thank you EPA ultimate Frisbee team who bought my first skis – three pin Kodiak Karhus. I still have them, the leather boots and adjustable poles.  Thank you, too, Laurie and Chip and may the snow goddess bedazzle your gem of a ski area with lots and lots of the fluffy white pow.

We camped by the Shenandoah River, catching the last little bit of a glorious fall, and yes, we listened to John Denver’s country roads.  “Almost heaven, West Virginia, Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River. Life is old there, older than the trees, younger than the mountains, growin’ like the breeze……

…country roads, feel like home.

And, it’s not really a blog post unless there’s a picture of the dog, most photographed.

Bridges

Just a hop, skip and Wizzair flight over the Adriatic Sea from Italy is the bustling and very beautiful town of Budapest, the birthplace of Johnny’s great, great grandfather, Samuel Frieder, and the current home of our dear friend, Izabella, and her family.

We flew in for a weekend and were so happy to sit and hold baby Zalan.  We reminisced about Johnny’s firsts with Izabella.   We walked and walked on the very wide boulevards exploring the many bridges built and rebuilt over the Danube.   We felt brilliant light and dreadful darkness in the monumental town of Buda and Pest.

  Shoes on the Danube Bank. sculptor Gyula Pauer.

We ate authentic Hungarian Goulash, thanks to Csaba’s mother, celebrated Char’s birthday watching soccer in a Hungarian pub.  We discovered Kurtoskalacs, a sweet pastry known as “chimney bread” and went to Shabbat services at the historic Dohany Synagogue.   All in all, Budapest was Budaful.  Thank you Iza and Csaba!

The Italy Interlude

There’s pretty much nothing not to love about Italy.  You say, “Buon Giorno” (good morning,) until 2:00 in the afternoon.  It’s permissible to kick around a soccer ball in 14^th century piazzas.  An order of small gelato gets you two flavors.   Streets are cobblestone and vespas rule.  Masterful sculpture and potted flowers adorn public spaces and 9-year-old Americans wearing Italian soccer jerseys prompt conversations everywhere.   We drove itty bitty stick shift cars, ate extra gluten, practiced Italian phrases and understood perfectly the English responses.   We feasted on autumnal Italy– sun, grapes, and olive oil, bread, wine and ringing bell towers.

Today, in Denver, we went to Il Vicino, a wood oven pizza restaurant, and Johnny ordered in Italian!  It was hilarious.  And just so you know, pepperoni in Italy gets you peppers.  If you want pepperoni on your pizza, you have to order the salumi picante!

We cannot wait to go back…..back in time and back in scale, back before suburbs and sprawl and plastic.    We have so much more to see and do and learn in Italy but we surely experienced a monumental month of Mediterranean life lessons.  Johnny got perspective when Catarina explained the neighboring town of “Vita” is new, that it was established in the 1700s.  We picked olives for five days and went to the press to see the oil making process.  We visited with a sheep farmer and watched him make fresh ricotta and pecorino.  We experienced old and new and the layering of stone, civilization, destruction, power and beauty.

I understand now why Italy is such a popular tourism destination and has been for centuries. Yet, it seems that some favorite places are at risk of being loved too much – that authentic Italy may become a production of itself as a tourism economy plants wifi and bacon and eggs breakfast where there used to be a fishing village.  I hope not.  Allora, tutto bene!

Photo credits, tour guides and translators- Char (Carluccio) and Johnny (Giovanni)

Magical places

After much ado about sea spray, salmon, deserted beaches and pacific driftwood, we finally pulled ourselves away from the west coast and its many magical places.

We said goodbye to glowing redwoods, ferns and the ocean and headed out the historic Columbia Gorge highway from Portland, stopping for a side excursion up to Oneonta Falls, a wildly fun adventure.  The narrow gorge glows with a chartreuse light from 80 foot moss-brushed walls.  There is no actual trail so intrepid waders go through cold, fresh water, in some places, chest deep, up and over a 15 foot log jam, into a waterfall sanctuary.

I hesitate to talk too much about our love of water, waterfalls, forests and rainforests, as our dear friends and beloved community of Boulder, Colorado are in the midst of a historic flood event that some are calling a 500 year flood.

We are following what we can from the road and here’s what we know – our home town Boulder has had 11.66 inches of rain in the last 36 hours and meteorologists are calling for another 2-3” today.   Annual rainfall in this area is typically 15” so, yes, about as much rain in one storm that we usually get in a year.  The University of Colorado has been closed for two days.  Elementary schools, commercial establishments and offices too are closed.  The Boulder Creek, which usually flows at less than 100 cfs this time of year reached 7000 cfs yesterday according to the USGS gauge at 75th St.  Bridges, houses, trees are washed away and mudslides are likely to continue.

We are feeling the tug, the love and the concern and we are sort of in the area, so we have decided to drive back to Boulder to help however we can.

We expect to arrive by Monday with rubber boots, working hands and time.   We’re happy to haul, clean, lift, cook, babysit or even provide temporary housing in our rig (it sleeps six!).  We’re pretty sure that Mt. Rushmore and the Black Hills will be around for awhile, so we are heading back to the most magical place we know – home – to be available to help our friends, family and community.  We hope everyone stays safe.  Thank you Eric, Karen, Roe, Helene and Amanda for taking care of our home while we’re away.  We appreciate your help and look forward to thanking you in person next week.  Sign us up to help!

Road School note from Johnny

School started.  I have been in the Redwoods doing math and reading.   It is so fun.  I am reading a book called, Captain’s Dog. It’s about the Lewis and Clark expedition told from Meriwether Lewis’s dog, Seaman. 

For PE, yesterday I biked 6.8 miles through humungous Coast Redwood trees.  They are the tallest living things on earth.  They are only found on the northern California and southern Oregon coasts.  They grow here because of the climate – foggy summers and rainy winters.  Only four percent of this old growth forest remains.   Old growth forest means the trees have never been cut down so these trees can be 1000 or 2000 years old.  The tallest Coast Redwood was measured to be 379 feet tall!  I slept in a tent in a grove of Redwoods.  I feel responsible for keeping these trees alive.  I hope you get a chance to see them.

Last week we paddled 40 miles on the Rogue River over four days.  It was super fun.   We went down big rapids like Argo, Grave Creek and Blossom Bar.   The first three days I was in a raft.  The last day I was in a kayak, a red Jackson hard shell.  Phil and Mary DeRiemer, great kayak instructors, were teaching me.  They showed me the line and taught me how to do better ferries and get started on my roll.

They also taught me a new sport called “bottom walking.”  Here’s how you do it.

First, find the biggest river rock you can carry.

Second, lift it up and walk it to the river.

Third, start to walk into the river.

Forth, when you get in deep enough, and the rock holds you under, you try to walk on the river bottom as far as you can.

Fifth, when you run out of breath, drop the rock and swim back to the top.

I recommend doing it with a pfd (personal floatation device, otherwise known as a life jacket).

I hope you are having fun in school.

From,

Johnny