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Archive for the ‘Travels With Maggie’ Category

Time to Move On

Posted in Journeys, Travels With Maggie, tagged , , , , on March 10, 2012| 21 Comments »

“If you’re going through hell, keep going” — Winston Churchill

Maggie was the first dog I owned that always took time on our walks to stop and smell the flowers. -- Photo by Pat Bean

I guess I’m going to survive the loss of my Maggie. I was looking for a quote on grief and came across the above one by good old Sir Winnie – and I laughed.

Of course I also cried when I came across these words from an unknown author: “Without tears, the soul would have no rainbows.”

This one's for you Maggie. -- Photo by Pat Bean

I’m so very thankful that I had loved ones around trying to distract me from my sorrow. I got two free lunches and learned how to use a game controller the past three days while hiding out from my blog and from working on my travel book.

 I’m also extremely thankful for my Cloud World of writing and blogging friends. While each of your heartfelt words started the tears anew, the virtual hugs that came with them helped me tremendously.

It’s the first time I’ve turned to others during a bad time in my life. My usual tactic is to run away and hide and bare my sorrow in solitude. It seemed easier that way, but I was wrong.

Even so, last night was the first time I’ve ever felt alone since I moved into my RV. So, in honor of, and meaning no disrespect to Maggie, I’ve already started looking for a new pet.

Like Maggie, it will be a dog needing rescued. My druthers are a 20-25 pound, one to two-year-old female canine that likes to be walked, wants to travel, isn’t averse to being spoiled rotten, and likes to cuddle. Chocolate brown eyes that melt your heart, as Maggie’s did mine, would be a plus.

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Maggie’s Gone

Posted in Travels With Maggie, tagged , , , on March 8, 2012| 51 Comments »

Half asleep but with one eye open because Ijust opened the refrigerator door. Maggie had more attitude than any dog I ever owned. And I will miss her greatly. -- Photo by Pat Bean

I can’t stop crying long enough to write. Maggie’s gone to doggie heaven and whomever’s in charge damn well better make sure they treat her well. We lost the ear-infection battle.

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Favorite Places: Manatee Hammocks RV Park

Posted in Favorite Places, Nature, Travels With Maggie, tagged , , , , , , , on March 2, 2012| 2 Comments »

 “Hear! Hear! Screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where I had heard a tittering for some time, “winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel if you know where to look for it.” — Henry David Thoreau.

The pier through the trees at Manatee Hammocks RV Park in Titusville, Florida. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Travels With Maggie

Florida scrub jay -- Photo by Pat Bean

I’m sitting by a bank of third-floor windows looking out past naked tree branches at a dull Chicago day in which snow has been forecast.

It’s quite different from the Texas Gulf Coast I left behind. According to today’s weather report, it’s 77 degrees and raining in Lake Jackson. I hope someone remembered to shut the windows in my RV and turn on the air conditioner for Maggie.

Actually I’m sure they – my son, Lewis, and his wife, Karen – did. Karen just texted me that Maggie had a nice walk this morning and shared their steak dinner yesterday evening.

I left Maggie behind to fly into Chicago for a week to visit my youngest son, Michael.

Thinking about my two-and-a-half-hour flight from one climate to another got me thinking about the winters of my past.

Oranges just outside my RV door. -- Photo by Pat Bean

I grew up in Dallas, where we might get a bit of snow that stayed on the ground less than a day. Then there was Texas’ Gulf Coast where the world stayed green through the winter, and a rare half-inch of snow maybe once every 10 years shut down schools.

In January, 1971, I moved to Northern Utah, where I didn’t see ground beneath the snow that year until early April. I took up skiing and came to love the snow.

Since retiring in 2004, winters have mostly been spent on the Texas Gulf Coast, although I did spend one December in Guam, and one entire winter in Florida.

That winter in Florida, while my friends back in Utah were buried in snow, I was seeking out shady spots – and getting a good look at my first Florida scrub jay, a bird that can be found only in Florida – and only in one small portion of the state.

I saw the bird on a tour that was part of the Titusville Bird Festival. For the week I spent in this area adjacent to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, I stayed at the Manatee Hammocks RV Park. It was a delightful place where I could pick fresh oranges just outside my RV door.

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Posted in Birds, Nature, Travels With Maggie, Writing, tagged , , , , , on February 24, 2012| 8 Comments »

More About Maine

“I felt like I’d been misplaced in the cosmos and belonged in Maine … I had to live this long, have the experiences I’ve had, to create what I do. I knew I wanted to write for years, but I had to be ready so I wouldn’t blow it. The move to Maine was the final step. ” — Terry Goodkind

Travels With Maggie

Acadia National Park -- Photo by Pat Bean

Yesterday’s blog of a simply photograph, quote and my Bean’s Pat was a throw away, the kind of blog I write when I need a break from writing.

The comments it brought, however, got me thinking more about Maine and the nine days I spent there. The trip was part of a six-month, 23-states-and-Canada, 7,000-mile journey I made in 2006. It was my first time in New England.

I dawdled along the way, so that far too many of Maine’s birds that I wanted to see had already migrated by the time I reached Bar Harbor, Maine. I saw only eight new life birds of the twenty or so I had expected to find. And a storm blew up the day I was supposed to go whale watching.

Other than those annoyances, everything else about my Maine stay was perfect.

Bar Harbor streetscape. While I missed the birds, I caught the town's off season serenity. -- Photo by Pat Bean

One of the nicest things about my stay just outside of Bar Harbor was the free shuttle bus that stopped at my campground every half hour or so, and which took me all over Mount Desert Island, including Acadia National Park while my canine traveling compainion, Maggie, stayed behind in the RV.

The park is full of natural wonders to explore. One of these was Cadillac Mountain, the highest summit on the East Coast north of Rio de Janeiro, and the first spot in the mainland states to be hit by the morning sun in the fall and winter.

I was on its summit one dawn to catch that first ray of rosy light. I laughed, but to myself, when one guy standing nearby spotted a herring gull and got all excited because he thought he had seen a bald eagle. No reason I thought to extinguish his excitement. Later in the day I did see a bald eagle soaring over the park. I hope that guy also saw it.

As replacement for the canceled whale tour, I took a trolley tour of the island. Our guide was full of facts and trivia, such as President William Howard Taft’s 27 strokes on the Kebo Valley Golf Club’s 17th hole back in 1910, and the fact that scenes for the Dark Shadows TV soap opera had occasionally been filmed on Mount Desert.

Hopefully the next time I’m in Maine – a revisit is definitely on my to-do list – I’ll arrive before the birds have migrated south.

Bean’s Pat: All Write: Spring and the Cigarettus Smokerus http://tinyurl.com/7ox9d76 As an avid bird watcher, I laughed my head off at this. But, warning, if you don’t have a sense of humor some among you may find this offensive and sexist.

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Favorite Places: Grand Teton National Park – For One

Posted in Favorite Hikes, Favorite Places, Lakes, Nature, Travels With Maggie, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 19, 2012| 13 Comments »

“Give me the comma of imperfect striving, thus to find zest in the immediate living. Ever the reaching but never the gaining, ever the climbing but never the attaining of the mountain top.” — Winston Graham

While this tiny creek is too small to make most maps, it makes it on the list of my favorite places. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Travels With Maggie

Wyoming's Grand Teton, photographed at the end of a hike to Taggart Lake, makes my long, long list of favorite places. -- Photo by Pat Bean

I get tongue-tied when people ask me what’s my favorite place among those Maggie and I have visited in our RV travels.

How do you name one among so many?

I’ve discovered beauty and awesomeness everywhere I’ve gone, from coast to coast and border to border.

I’ve ridden to the top, in a tiny cramped ball, of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, crossed the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, stood beneath Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln at Mount Rushmore, and gazed down on New York City from the top of the Empire State Building.

All these places were awesome.

But just as grand and beautiful in the eyes of this nature-loving old broad have been all the nature refuges, lakes, mountains, rivers big and small and even the trees, especially the redwoods, that Maggie and I have visited.

Yes. Perhaps that’s the answer. My favorite place is where Mother Nature resides. 

Bean’s Pat: 20 Minutes a Day: Saturday Morning http://tinyurl.com/6w8ce3h A writing prompt that had me laughing all the way through.

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Advice From My Brain and a Famous Dancer

Posted in The Write Words, Travels With Maggie, Writing, tagged , , , , , on February 17, 2012| 7 Comments »

 “It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: He catches the changes of his mind on the hop.” – Vita Sackville-West

The Write Word

Watching a sunrise is my idea of a good ritual to start any day. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Completing the rewrite of my book, “Travels With Maggie.” was high on my list of New Year’s Resolutions, yet I procrastinated doing it for the entire month of January.

February has been better because I finally turned on the light bulb in my brain and then took some advice from a famous dancer.

It dawned on me that the way I got through NANO (writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days) was by making it the No. 1 activity of my days, which have always been filled with many eggs to crack and enjoy. So, I decided “Travels With Maggie” would be my No. 1 priority.

Any sunset is the perfect time for the ritual of counting the day's blessings. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Then I started reading Twyla Tharp’s book “The Creative Habit,” in which she talks about the importance of ritual as a way to make sure she went to the gym daily so as to keep her body in shape for dancing. It’s the same, I thought, for writers. We must exercise our writing fingers and minds daily for the most benefits.

Twyla’s ritual was the taxi cab ride she took to the gym. She knew that once she got to the gym, she would both exercise and enjoy it.

“Some people might say,” Twyla wrote, “that simply stumbling out of bed and getting into a taxicab hardly rates the honorific ritual that anyone can perform. I disagree. First steps are hard; it’s no one’s idea of fun to wake up in the dark every day and haul one’s tired body to the gym … but the quasi–religious power I attach to this ritual keeps me from rolling over and going back to sleep.”

After reading that, I decided I needed my own ritual. I made it the simple one of  setting my alarm clock to signal the end of the writing time I had promised myself.

Believe it or not it worked yesterday when I woke up in the mood to do anything but write.  Just set the alarm clock, I told myself. And I did. And I wrote.

Bean’s Pat: Writing Though Life http://tinyurl.com/7r4wmez This is a great blog for anyone writing a memoir, keeping a journal or even just blogging regularly.

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Happy Valentine’s Day to All

Posted in Favorite Places, Travels With Maggie, tagged , , , , on February 14, 2012| 12 Comments »

 “The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.” Blaise Pascal

I married twice, but never had a honeymoon. So I took myself to Niagara Falls. What a beautiful sight. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Travels With Maggie

Seeing as how my choices of men as soul mates were always poor ones, today is not a lovey-dovey sentimental one for me, although I truly rejoice for those who enjoy it as such..

While it wasn’t always so, I am quite happy that my only domestic partner is my canine traveling companion, Maggie. I think the choices I made in my life led me to this point, perhaps because I subconsciously always knew it was the end I truly wanted.

 

My first great-grandchild. He's 2 now and one of the loves of my life. Happy Valentine's Day Junior. -- Photo by Baron Marsh

And just because I don’t have a significant other, doesn’t mean I don’t have love or passion in my life.

My friends (both male and female), children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren provide the love. While I married the wrong man, the union did provide me with five wonderful children. And because of that, I can have no regrets.

Books, writing, nature, birds, travel and a zest for life, meanwhile, provide all the passion my old-broad libido needs these days.

I don’t think I have settled. I think it is truly who I am. I feel like I finally fit in my own skin.

So Happy Valentine’s Day to all those out there who are enjoying it with a person of their choice, and happy hunting to all those still seeking that special someone. Just don’t forget to live your life while you’re looking.

And may the rest of us just enjoy a happy day. And the same tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow …

Bean’s Pat: Horsetail Fire Falls http://photobotos.com/2012/02/13/horsetail-fire-falls A rare photograph captures why this waterfall was so named. Absolutely awesome! But then I’m a nature lover.

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Dookie Day with a Braggart Ending

Posted in Travels With Maggie, Writing, tagged , , , , , on February 12, 2012| 6 Comments »

A bouquet of black-eyed susans to brighten my followers' day. -- Photo by Pat Bean

“You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Travels With Maggie

Dookie … Dookie … Dookie. That’s the g-rated version of my favorite S word. You know, the stuff that smells as bad as a skunk.

But it was the S-word I said several times yesterday, loud enough for Maggie to give me a quizzical look, when I couldn’t get my blog to post.

 

And a special rose to all those who nominated me for a blog award. Thank you. -- Photo by Pat Bean

My computer screen kept telling me there was an error on the page. That in itself was only worth a few dookies. It was while I was randomly pushing buttons to solve the problem and accidentally deleted two posts – the swan and the Henry Ford ones – that caused me to revert to screaming out the S-word. Maggie sat up on that exclamation.

It took me about three hours of fiddling before I finally got yesterday’s blog to post. The error, which was finally corrected, was nothing more than a wrong link for my Bean’s Pat. Why in the dookie didn’t the computer simply tell me that? I mean if it knew there was an error, surely it knew what it was.

Or am I giving my geeky, top-of-the-line computer to which I’m addicted, and which has more power than was used to take man to the moon and back, too much credit.?

Meanwhile, since I try to fill my blog with positives – because there’s already too much negatives in this crazy world we live in – I’m now going to mention that my readers have given me some awards that I failed to mention in a timely manner.

My grandmother told me never to brag about myself, but I think she was wrong. I think it’s OK to now and then give ourselves a personal pat on the back for a well-done achievement, just so long as we don’t get in the habit of playing one-upmanship.

The awards include: Three nominations for Versatile Blogger, a Kreativ Blogger award, and a Lamplighter Award. I must have done something right because they all came in the space of two days, overwhelming me. In defense, I flagged the notifications and then promptly forgot about them.

Finding them at the bottom of my e-mail messages (I was cleaning out my mailbox while trying to figure out how to solve my blog-posting problem) was the bright point of my dookie-S-word yesterday. Each of the nominators, if they haven’t already, will eventually receive a Bean’s Pat, because I think their blogs are great, too.

Now does anybody know how to recover deleted WordPress posts and put them back in the order they belong?

Bean’s Pat: http://lavenderdragonfly.wordpress.com/ Great blog of quotes to live by.

 

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40-Acre Lake and Coots Galore

Posted in Birds, Favorite Hikes, Favorite Places, Nature, Travels With Maggie, tagged , , , , on February 11, 2012| 7 Comments »

“I never was one for rushing through a country. I like to take my time breathe the air, get the feel of it. I like to smell it, taste it get it located in my brain. The thing to remember when traveling is that the trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast and you miss all you travel for. “ Louis L’Amore

A coot and a turtle inspect each other. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Travels With Maggie

The mile and a half walk around 40-Acre Lake at Brazos Bend State Park is one of my favorites. While I’ve walked it many times, each time around is different.

Some days the stroll to the observation tower is filled with black-bellied whistling ducks. On other days its egrets and herons that dominate the shallow shore line and swampy wetlands.

Brilliant common yellowthroats like to hide in the reeds, and a northern harrier or two can usually be seen circling in the sky above. One day I had to turn around because the path ahead was lined by huge alligators. I had Maggie that day and I decided I didn’t want her to become just a tasty morsel for those toothy jaws, not to mention that I didn’t want to become dinner either.

Observation tower midway along the hike around 40-Acre Lake. -- Photo by Pat Bean

This past week, it was the coots that dominated the lake. While not the most glamorous of birds, I love watching them. On this day, perhaps because I felt I was one with nature as I had the trail all to myself on this off-season, week-day, the coots let me get close enough to see the glow in their red eyes.

Bean’s Pat: The Fairy Tale Asylum: My Miss Havisham

 http://thefairytaleasylum.wordpress.com/ It’s Margaret Michell’s Scarlet O’Hara for me. I had read the book, “Gone With the Wind.” four times by the time I was 12.

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A Morning Walk Around a Lake With the Vultures

Posted in Birds, Favorite Hikes, Favorite Places, Lakes, Nature, Travels With Maggie, tagged , , , , on February 7, 2012| 9 Comments »

 “As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.” Stephen Graham, “The Gentle Art of tramping.”

Black vultures claimed the deck that jutted into Creekfield Lake -- Photo by Pat Bean

Travels With Maggie

Come. Take a walk with me around Creekfield Lake at Brazos Bend State Park. Bring your binoculars and camera.

It’s a cool, gray morning here at the park, where Maggie and I are spending a couple of days to hike and bird-watch.

The walk begins, continues and ends with cawing crows and dee-dee-deeing chickadees providing background music. Their not unpleasant cacophony is occasionally punctuated by the rat-a-tat-tat of a downy woodpecker.

I was surprised at how close this great blue heron let me get before it flew off. -- Photo by Pat Bean

I was surprised at how close this great blue heron let me get before it flew off. -- Photo by Pat Bean

The robins, titmouses, warblers and mockingbirds also occasionally add a note or two to the melody.

There’s a sign at the beginning of the loop around the lake that says “Don’t feed or molest the alligators.” You can be assured I won’t. I hope someone told the alligators not to molest the hikers. At least Maggie wouldn’t be their dinner. I left her back in the RV after taking her for an earlier morning walk.

Near the swampy, dark-water shore, three white-ibis are feeding. In deeper water, common moorhens are holding a large meeting, their shrill, screeching making it sound as if a dispute is going on.

But by far the most numerous bird I see this day is the black vulture. They have claimed a small island in the lake, many trees, a deck that juts into the water, the top of the park observatory and even the paved trail. They wait until I am almost upon them before they move, then only reluctantly and only to the closest tree, where they sit and watch me pass beneath them.

It’s a bit eerie, but not discomforting. I know they prefer dead things for dinner and I am very much alive.

That the vultures didn’t budge until I was almost upon them didn’t surprise me. The lone great blue heron that let me get closer than normal before flying off did surprise me. They usually fly at the first appearance of a human.

I had the trail to myself, and I was constantly lingering to look about at everything about me, the lingering red leaf, the mushrooms growing on a fallen tree, the feather floating in the water.

A small bench nicely situated beneath a large live-oak tree beckons to me. I sit and soon am being entertained by a small flock of bluebirds that just happen to be passing by. When they move on, I get up to follow. The bluebirds stick together in male and female pairs and I decide they are courting. As I watch a crow flies to a nearby tree with a stick in its beak. I assume it’s for starting a nest.

All too soon, I’ve completed the walk around the lake. What a great morning.

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