All posts tagged: Heritage Travel

In Praise of Independent Coffee Houses

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Dolores emailed me this morning to say that our neighborhood coffee house here in Silver Spring – Kefa Cafe – was having a customer appreciation day with free food.  Candice and I had been looking for a time to have a coffee together, so we braved the remnants of Hanna that are making their presence felt in Washington today and enjoyed our coffee, pastries, and good company. There’s a nice post on Kefa on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s This Place Matters site where Dolores tells why this is her Third Place in Silver Spring.  Run by two sisters since 1996, it is a great place to hang out, enjoy good food, and meet interesting people.  Candice and I shared our table today with two middle age guys who just returned from their weekly basketball game at a local gym…a tradition they’ve continued for 20 years. Support that special independent coffee house in your town.  Like all unique and special places, they are going too fast. More to come… DJB

Practicing

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Four restful days on the Patuxent River in Southern Maryland brought our summer holiday to a close.  We used this time for unwinding from our western travels, reading, talking as a family – but mostly for being.  The sunset on the river was illustrative of the four wonderful days of weather we experienced…nary a day when the AC was required…but it also struck us as appropriate for an end-of-summer-holiday post. We’ve been fortunate enough to have access to this retreat for nine years, and there are some traditional activities we’ve taken on during that time.  While our visit was shortened this year, we were still able to visit Cone Island at Solomon’s to buy the traditional “Monster” ice cream cones that Andrew and Claire showcase below.  It just wouldn’t be a summer without a Monster! Candice and I were also able to finish some reading over the weekend.  Candice completed an out-of-print book she bought on Amazon entitled Nourishing the Soul:  Discovering the Sacred in Everyday Life and said it was transformative in its insights.  …

Stadium Memories

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Some people read 1000 Places to Visit Before You Die and think about how many they can check off in a year.  My quest is more modest:  to visit all the major league baseball stadiums in the next ten years.  I’m about 1/3 of the way through my list, but I have to admit that given stadium demolitions, I’ve had to make up my own rules about what counts.  Essentially, I’m just trying to get to at least one stadium  per team. So along that line, I wanted to let you know there’s a great online story – accompanying a magazine feature in Preservation – of Yankee Stadium memories on PreservationNation.org.  If you like baseball stadiums and/or baseball stories, check it out. FYI, this has been a good year in my quest.  So far I’ve visited three new (for me) parks this year:  Oakland (with Anthea and all the folks from the Trust’s Western Office), Coors Field in Denver (with Mountains/Plains Office Director Barb and Dolores), and – of course – the new Nationals Park …

A few “classic” photos

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I mentioned in an earlier post that my daughter Claire took black & white photos during our western trip on my old film camera that she calls “the classic.”  We just had that film processed (since Claire doesn’t have access to the dark room at school during the summer) and I thought I’d post a couple of her shots for all to see.  The shot above was taken in the church yard of the 1760 mission church in Las Trampas, on the High Road to Taos.  Claire said this was her favorite of about 140 shots she took during the trip.  The second photo I’ve posted is from Acoma, where Claire took two full rolls of film.  She loved the mission church at Acoma, so I’ve posted a shot she took of the bell tower early in our tour of the site.  There are so many great opportunities for photos at Acoma — the buildings and landscape are so evocative both individually and together.  In the photo at right, I liked the interplay of the …

Rafting the Rio Grande

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We awoke early this morning as we were heading out to raft the Rio Grande River south of Taos (see photo at left).  As everyone in town had promised, the rainy, cool evening gave way to a beautiful, sunny, yet cool morning.  Bundled up with fleeces, but in our quick-drying shorts (i.e., bathing suits and gym pants) we shivered our way to the little town of Pilar to meet with our guide from Far Flung Adventures. Claire has a classmate named Pilar, so we began by taking 12 different photographs around the “Pilar Yacht Club” (actually, a little hole in the wall – see photo below) so they could post a Where in the World is Pilar? album for her Facebook page.  Then we met up with Hank, Bill, and Erica – the three Far Flung Adventures guides. After a quick safety lecture, we joined up with Hank – a late 50s river guide, metal artist and all-round outdoors guy who was perfect for the four of us.  With Andrew and Claire in the front, Candice and …

Great Little Towns; Wonderful Drives

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After our visit at Mesa Verde, we took off on the short drive to Durango on Saturday morning.  But along the way, we passed the historic little town of Mancos and saw a sign for the Absolute Bakery & Cafe.  Since we love small Main Street communities AND we were ready for breakfast, we pulled over.  Mancos has a small historic downtown, and the Bakery & Cafe was in one of those older buildings.  We found a wonderful menu, a soundtrack of late sixties and early seventies songs on the stereo, and an eclectic mix of patrons.  More than once, one of us said, “This place would fit right in at Takoma Park” (the DC/Maryland neighborhood which has a great counter-culture 4th of July parade and is the area’s only nuclear-free zone – as approved by their City Council).  It has been a while since I’ve heard so much Steppenwolf, Neil Young, and Jefferson Airplane that early in the morning! After breakfast, we visited a nice local arts cooperative and then took off for Durango, …

Home of the Cliff Dwellers

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We had been told by friends and colleagues that Mesa Verde was a special place.  But until we saw the stone communities, hiked the canyons, climbed among the cliff dwellings, heard the rangers tell the stories of the Ancestral Puebloans, and took in the majesty of the landscape, it was hard to comprehend its wonder. We spent two days at Mesa Verde National Park and the lack of internet connectivity…not to mention the lack of televisions in the hotel rooms…helped us focus on the people and their stories.   It made for a very special visit for our family. On the first day, we arrived in time to visit the Spruce Tree House site (see photo above), which is easily accessible and a good introduction to what we’d see the next day.   With our appetites for the site visit whetted, we satisfied our appetites for food with a great meal at the Far View Lodge’s restaurant. The second day was full of hiking and climbing.  All four of us began the day by visiting the Long …

Bluff(ing) our way to Canyon de Chelly

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When last we were in the land of Internet connectivity, we left you in Bluff, Utah – population 320.  After driving through Monument Valley with a stop at Goulding’s Trading Company for some great Navajo tacos, we arrived in Bluff to spend the night at the historic Decker House Inn.  We were met by Sandy the innkeeper in one of the town’s more substantial homes, and shown to a wonderful double room where we could all spread out.  Needless to say, Andrew and Claire were pleased! Bluff is located in the middle of a very harsh landscape of red sandstone and deep gorges.  The town was settled by Mormon pioneers in the middle of the 19th century, and some of the buildings from that era (such as the Decker House Inn) have survived.  Even with such a small population, Bluff had some good restaurants, probably the best quality trading post we’ve seen so far, and a historic preservation organization which had prepared walking tours and great brochures of the town’s history.  After a scrumptious breakfast served …