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Posts Tagged ‘Travel’

Fascination Overrides Fear in Longhorn Caverns

Posted in Birds, Nature, Travel, tagged , , , , , , , on January 6, 2011| Leave a Comment »

  “I don’t know anyone who actually likes the dark .. I don’t care how much they say it doesn’t bother them. That’s why we used to huddle in caves and light fires when the sun went down.” — Paul Kane

The entrance to Longhorn Caverns and a journey down dimly lit tunnels. -- Photo by Larry Moore

Travels With Maggie

Just 70 miles away from Harker Heights, where my RV has been parked at my son’s house for almost a month, is Longhorn Caverns State Park. It’s perfect for a getaway day trip. I visited it during an earlier visit with my son, and was glad to have the company.

While I’m quite comfortable doing most things alone, I’m never comfortable in a cave. I have claustrophobia. I can’t even stand to be in a bird blind for more than a few moments before I make a dash for a sky ceiling. I need windows to the outdoor world, preferably with sunlight shinning through them.

And yet caves intrigue me. I seldom pass up an opportunity to go deep into the bowels of the earth where the air smells musky and feels primal. I attribute my ability to overcome my claustrophobia to my stubborn unwillingness to give into fear, a trait that serves me well in my solo travels.

But I’ve also discovered that as long as I keep moving through the dimly lit tunnels with my eyes seeking out the alien underworld formations created by water and time, I can put my claustrophobia temporarily on hold.

Comanches, Confederates and Texas legendary outlaw Sam Bass are said to have used Longhorn Caverns as their hideouts. I guess they weren’t afraid of the dark. As for me, I realized early on that I had to be law-abiding because I would go crazy if someone locked me up.

When my son and I exited the cavern, I drank in the hot Texas air with a feeling of relief.

“Come on,” I told my son. “Let’s go hike the nature trail.” And we did.

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Birds and Travel Go Together

Posted in Birds, Nature, Travel, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on January 4, 2011| Leave a Comment »

 

A northern mockingbird was my first bird of the new year. -- Photo by Pat Bean

 “Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.” — Henry Van Dyke

Travels With Maggie

I’m a passionate birdwatcher, who keeps a list of birds I’ve seen. My life list now totals 696 bird species. It’s a respectable number for this late-blooming birder, but far from spectacular.

If you want to know more about the birding numbers game you should read “The Big Year” by Mark Obmascik. It’s a great read even if you aren’t a birder. It’s about three guys who spend a year chasing birds all across North America. At the whisper of a rare bird alert, they would fly thousands of miles on a minute’s notice.

Although I did once drive 400 miles to see one particular bird, these days I usually just bird where my travels take me. I check out bird festivals going on while I’m in the vicinity, and hook up with local Audubon chapters for birding field trips. This past year these efforts, including one day when I hired a guide to help me find the golden-cheeked warbler that I had been trying to find for three years, earned me 12 new life birds. And yes, the warbler was one of them.

I spotted this yellow-crowned night heron at the Sea Center in Lake Jackson, Texas. -- Photo by Pat Bean

This year’s birding efforts, meanwhile, have begun slower than normal. I’ve been parked in my son’s driveway here in Harker Heights all this week and a cold front moving through the area seems to have kept the birds tucked away.

At least they’re not falling out of the sky dead, as red-winged blackbirds and starlings have been doing in Arkansas the past couple of days. That’s a scary thing because birds, like the canaries coal miners carried into the tunnels with them as their bad air detectors, are indicators of an environment’s health.

My first bird of this new year was a northern mockingbird, appropriate since it’s Texas’ state bird. It was a brilliant gray and white fellow with yellow eyes that landed on a fence about eight feet from my RV window. As I watched, it flashed its long tail in the air – then pooped.

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The Badlands: Steeples and Ripples of Striated Color

Posted in Nature, Travel, tagged , , , , on January 1, 2011| 6 Comments »

A landscape with more appeal to nature lovers than farmers. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Note: Since I have taken the pledge to blog daily, this is the first of 365 blogs for 2011. Maggie, my 13-year-old cocker spaniel co-pilot, and I are now in our seventh year of traveling across America. We live and roll down the road in Gypsy Lee, a 22-foot RV that now has 115,000 miles on her. I hope you join us for the ride.

Travels With Maggie

The Badlands “are so fantastically broken in form and so bizarre in color as to seem hardly properly to belong to this earth.” Theodore Roosevelt

 My RV rocked and rolled for three days in up to 45 mph wind gusts that blew sand down through my air conditioner and into my tiny RV home as I sat out a South Dakota September wind storm just outside of Badlands National Park.

Once an ocean, then a jungle, now bad lands. -- Photo by Pat Bean

 Finally the wind broke – thankfully before my sanity – and I took the opportunity to go exploring. Why, I soon wanted to know was this land called bad. I found its steeples and ripples of striated red and white rocks that reeked with fossil evidence of an ocean, and even a jungle, in its past fascinating. Seeing it for the first time as a I drove through the park was awesome.

 Probably because it was a week day and also because the wind was still haughtily showing off its power in occasional bursts, it seemed as if Maggie and I, and the prairie dogs and rattlesnakes, had the park all to ourselves. Later that night, with the wind still jiggling my RV, I researched the origin of the land’s naming. It was, I discovered, a Sioux thing.

W

Watch where you step. -- Photo by Pat Bean

 The Indians had called it bad land because its formidable terrain was difficult to travel through and because the land was no good for growing things, As one who had traveled the awesome ground on pavement and who didn’t have to grow her own food, I realized my way of loving a land merely for the pleasure it gave me might be considered selfish.

 The thought brought me back to my days as an environmental reporter and my efforts to fairly cover the polarized issues of conservation and economic survival. I had realized back then that neither side was wrong and that compromise was usually the only answer.

 Thankfully, the act turning the Badlands into a national park was a win-win situation for both sides. The land is protected for nature lovers like me while our tourist dollars help keep food on the table for South Dakotans.

The wind was still blowing the next morning when Maggie and I continued our journey down the road. I wondered why someone hadn’t called this place Windyland

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Travel Disaster Only Temporary

Posted in Travel, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 12, 2010| 4 Comments »

         “I believe that if you think about disaster, you will get it. Brood about death and you hasten your demise. Think positively and masterfully with confidence and faith, and life becomes more secure, more fraught with action, richer in achievement and experience.” — Eddie Rickenbacker

Gypsy Lee -- my RV's named after my mother's maiden and my middle name and my itchy feet -- is once again ready for the road. She's pictured here resting for the journey at lake Walcott State Park. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Travels With Maggie

 I was just outside of Baker City, Oregon, when disaster struck. The left rear tire on my RV exploded, strewing rubber all along the highway. Thankfully, I managed to get the vehicle safely to the side of the road. In six years, and 110,000 miles of travel, this was my first roadside emergency – well if I don’t include getting stuck in the mud in my daughter’s Dallas backyard.

I immediately called my Good Sam emergency road provider, telling them first that I was safe, then where I was and that the only spare I had was for my front tires, which are a different size from the rear ones. I knew I could be in trouble because my RV sits atop a Volkswagen Eurovan chassis and its tires are not common. The voice on the phone, however, assured me that he would get me help and to hang tight while he made some calls.

 Twenty minutes later, he called back, saying he had located a tire for my vehicle, but that it would be a couple of hours before it could be picked up and delivered to me. At this point, I thanked my guardian angel for both the tire, and that I was stuck on the side of the road in Oregon, where the temperature was only 72, instead of my native Texas, where it was in the high 90s with humidity just about as high.

 Knowing help was on the way, I opened my RV windows to take advantage of a gentle breeze and settled in with a good book for the duration. Thirty minutes later, however, an emergency roadside service guy turned up with my tire

Maggie hopped onto our bed and snoozed the disaster away. -- Photo by Pat Bean

 – or so we both thought. Turns out he discovered he had the wrong tire after he had jacked up my RV. He left to go get the right tire, but 20 minutes later he returned red-faced to retrieve his jack. Seems he not only had the wrong tire, he had the wrong customer. His guy, now angry at the delay, was still waiting up the road.

It was another hour and a half before my service provider showed up with the tire for my RV. It was only a 4-ply passenger tire, however, that I would need to quickly replace. That took two weeks and a lot of searching. Rusty, the manager at an auto repair shop in Ogden, Utah, where I get my RV serviced when I’m in town, finally located a pair of 10-ply tires in San Jose, California, that would work. He had them shipped to Ogden, where a friend of mine picked them up and brought them to me at Walcott State Park in Idaho, where I’m currently a volunteer campground host.

 I had the tires mounted at a tire store in nearby Rupert – and am looking forward to getting back on the road again next week. Hopefully my journey will be trouble free – but if it’s not, the journey will still be worth any problem the road throws at me. Life’s too short to worry about what might happen.

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A Beautiful Day at Epcott

Posted in Birds, Nature, Travel, tagged , on March 27, 2010| 3 Comments »

              “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson 

        I had the recent opportunity to spend a day at Epcott with my oldest son

One of the many landscaped scenes at Epcott in Orlando, Florida ... Photo by Pat Bean

and his two grown children. Simply being with them was the most pleasurable part of the day. It would be the last time I would see my son until he returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan with his Army unit; and my grandchildren are the rewards I get after overspending on my credit card – always a treat.

        It was a crowded spring break day at the theme park. Lines were long and the pavement was hard on the feet. But I don’t think a smile ever left our four faces. We took the Mission to Mars and traveled to the future in Spaceship Earth. After that, we mostly walked through the beauty around us.

       Epcott has done a fantastic job of landscaping, and its varied architect lets you briefly believe you could be in the better parts of Morocco, Africa, France, Mexico, Norway or Japan. The bratwurst, sauerkraut, schnitzel and beer at the Biergarten Restaurant, along with an Octoberfest in full swing, truly transported us to Germany for a late, feet-resting lunch.

        As we continued on, all the carefully coiffed flowers, fresh paint and enchanting structural details strangely got me thinking about the time I pulled into a crowded, non-landscaped El Paso, Texas, campground where RVs were parked on cement a mere six feet apart row on row. The setting shrank my nature-loving soul. But when I looked out the window early the next morning, I saw a line of Gambel’s quail trotting in a line across the pavement mere inches away from my motor home. It was an awesome sight to this avid birdwatcher.

        Thank you Disney for my beautiful, expensive, landscaped day at Epcott – and thank you Mother Nature for your fantastic wonders that I can enjoy daily for only the cost of awareness.

Japan at Epcott ... Photo by Pat Bean

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