All posts tagged: Heritage Travel

In Praise of Sligo Creek

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On a beautiful fall day at the height of the fall color season, Candice and I walked through Maryland’s Sligo Creek Park today and soaked up the wonders of nature. The Washington area is blessed with parks and Rock Creek is the best known.  But where Rock Creek Park can be busy on a gorgeous day, nearby Sligo Creek Parkway – located five minutes from our front door – is a great alternative with less crowding.  So we walked for an hour, breathed the fresh air, took a few pictures of the creek and the fall foliage, and tried to just “be.”  We hope you’ll enjoy. More to come… DJB  

Touring Old Salem

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Last weekend I had the chance to tour Old Salem while on a work trip to Winston-Salem.  It had been more than 10 years since I visited this historic home of the Moravians in North Carolina, and it was a great way to reconnect to this very historic – and special – place. I knew the day would be a treat when a long-time and dear friend, Martha Hartley, stepped on our bus with her husband Mo to give us the traditional Moravian escort from the boundaries of Wachovia.   Martha and I worked together in preservation many years earlier in Virginia, and I didn’t know she had been tapped as the organizer of the day’s tours.  Mo and Martha traded special insights back and forth about the founding of Salem, the impact of the landscape and waterways, and the practices of the Moravians. After the short organ recital on the David Tannenberg Organ by Janette Fishell (see my earlier post In Praise of Tracker Organs), we spent the rest of the morning touring the town, …

Random Ridge

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I just heard from my good friend Susan in California.  Her note reminded me of a wonderful time that my daughter Claire and I had a couple of years ago at Susan and her husband Bill’s vineyard and winery on the Sonoma/Napa border.  Susan was writing to say she enjoyed the blog and that she loved baseball, acoustic music, historic places, and teenagers.  Hey, she’s my target audience!  This is a post to connections and friends. Susan is a preservation lawyer.  Bill is a surfer, poet, and winemaker.  Their wonderful wine is Random Ridge and Claire and I enjoyed a delightful lunch and afternoon at their winery a year or two ago with the staff and families of the Western Office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The day was rainy (hence the appropriateness of Susan’s photo of the double rainbow at Glen Ellen) but the friendship was warm.  Claire and the other children enjoyed playing with Susan’s dog and marveling at Bill’s ceilings made of surfboards.  The adults enjoyed the wine, food from …

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 …