Dave & Meredith's Travel Blog

Ahoy from the balmy shores of the Hudson Bay. Seriously, we arrived in Churchill today and instead of the arctic blast I expected when we got off the plane, it was probably 25-30 degrees. Supposedly that’s very unusual. They’ve warned us that the rest of the time will be much windier and colder. That’s ok with me but I’d like to at least get some sun. It’s supposed to be overcast and snowy the whole time.

Above: our plane at Churchill airport

Above: Yours truly enjoying the warmer weather

Churchill is a small town but not terribly small. It is after all a working grain port and also there is the 6-week window of the year when people come up to see the bears so there’s all the usual things here you might expect. A grocery store, post office, bank, gift shops, etc. That said, we walked up and down the main street this afternoon and I think we’ve done the town. We also were driven around on a tour and we saw a field where a guy breeds Eskimo dogs. There were dozens there including puppies. It’s hard to deny they’re cute. People took a lot of pictures.

We also were taken to an example traditional dwelling like the local Inuit used to use. It’s basically like a teepee. While we sat in a circle, a local couple sang for us, did a traditional dance with a drum, and answered questions.

After dinner, we had our orientation. Right after the slideshow ended, we heard gunshots outside and a truck with blue and red flashing lights flew by. This was the polar bear patrol and when a bear wanders into town, they race towards it and fire blanks to scare it away. A few minutes later, we saw the bear come up the road! He came up one side of the hotel and turned the corner down the other side of the hotel. We watched from inside – we have been warned dozens of times already about going outside after dark. I thought the bear was huge but supposedly he was only a teen. Wow.

We head out tomorrow at 7:30 and stay out on the tundra buggy until 4:30. They say the polar bears are very active right now so it should a great time.

– Dave

It’s a beauty way to go. Or so I’m told by Bob & Doug McKenzie (and to be complete, Geddy Lee too).

When this post goes live, it means I’m flying up to Churchill, Canada for a photo workshop with Andy Biggs to shoot polar bears. There’s a summary itinerary page here and I’ve updated our Itineraries page too. I expect it to be very cold. The 10-day forecast calls for a 20 degree high during the day and 10 degrees at night. No, not Celsius. 🙂 I should have enough gear to stay warm. I did buy some new cold weather boots that claim they’re “rated” to 40 degrees below zero. They certainly look impressive if nothing else.

This is a “short” trip (yeah, I know, it’s all relative). It’s a nice change to pack for a trip that’s only a week long. There’s so little luggage compared to all of the other trips this year that it’s easy packing. Although at this point, I better be pretty good at packing. This is the only trip so far where for the most part I’m already packed two days ahead of leaving.

Meredith is not coming on this one since the trip will be filled with photo nerds who would drive her batty talking all day about all things photography. She did say once though that she finds it amusing when men talk about their photo gear. She said something about machismo, adequacy, and measuring up but I just didn’t understand what she was talking about at all. Anyway, the hotel claims there’s wireless Internet in every room so, time permitting, I’ll try to post enough to give people a sense of what it’s like.

– Dave

We arrived in Boston early Thursday morning after a red-eye flight from Oakland, CA. Here are a few stats about our last 4 weeks on the road:

• We drove 4,500 miles. That’s equivalent to driving from Bangor, Maine to Miami, Florida and then to Los Angeles, California.
• We bought 170 gallons of gas. Yes, this was a big part of the budget.
• We visited a total of 12 National or State Parks in 5 states.
• We consumed a total of 20 gallons of water, 20 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, 8 ham and cheese sandwiches, 6 freeze-dried dinners, 6 quarts of yogurt, 1 gallon of apple juice, 3 boxes of cereal, 10 packs of oatmeal, 10 apples, and 8 bananas plus we ate one restaurant meal per day.
• We spent 14 and a half nights in our tent, 12 nights sleeping in real beds (4 unplanned), 1 and a half nights in our car, and 1 night on the plane.
• We visited 8 friends/family.
• We took 11 showers at hotels or friends’/family’s houses and 5 at campgrounds.
• We saved $120 buying an annual National Parks pass at the start of the trip.
• We posted 37 blog posts.
• We (mostly Dave) took 2317 photographs. It should have been higher but 75% of our days were cloudless (that may seem backwards to many people but cloudless days are dull photographically speaking).
• We bought 8 more tent pegs.
• We had one car wash including a vacuum.
• We visited two wine tastings.

Looking back over the last 4 weeks, the trip seemed to go much faster than our other month-long trips. It’s always a mixed bag coming home. On the one hand the trip is over which is a downer. The upside is having all of our conveniences again. There’s a bunch of “admin” to do such as unpack, pick up mail from the post office, restock the fridge, etc. but that’s not too bad. Getting to see friends again is always great of course. I have yet to post any photo galleries from the trip but I hope to in the next few days.

What’s next? I’m off on my last trip early Tuesday morning. I’m going on a photo workshop to Churchill, Canada to photograph polar bears and I’ll be back on the 17th (supposedly they have the InterWebs up there so stay tuned for more blogging). Meredith says it’s now time to work on her resume. That means it’s time for me as well when I get back. Apparently one has to eventually pay for all of the fun.

– Dave

This would be the place we would have included our view from our window while we stayed with our friends Sharon and Charla in the Bay Area.  Unfortunately, we forgot, again.  Sorry.  I feel like we let down our readers.  😉

Sharon and Charla moved from Boston to Alameda (an island in the east Bay) about a year and a half ago, and bought a beautiful old house which needed some TLC.  So far, they’ve completed renovation of the kitchen, where Charla whupped us up a mess of vittles every day (she is a great cook!).  Anyway, had we taken the picture, you would have seen their back yard, which features a lemon tree, an orange tree and an apple tree, as well as tomatoes.

We really chilled out while we were there (4 nights!), but we did manage to do a few things:

• Visited Sharon’s horse Red Hot at her stable in Walnut Creek to put metal flashing on the wooden fence so she would stop eating it.
• Went to a wine tasting at Rosenblum Cellars, a winemaker on Alameda that sources grapes from growers throughout California.
• Spent an afternoon in Monterey walking around Cannery Row and eating seafood.
• Visited the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose.  The woman who lived here believed that she needed to perpetually build her home to appease angry spirits (it’s hard to describe this place.  It is a Victorian mansion with 160 rooms, and it’s completely wacky).  The woman who built it was the widow of the Winchester gun guy, and was crazy.  Also, the guy who gave us our tour was like a cross between Barney Frank and Paul Lynde, which made the experience all the more interesting.
• Cleaned and dried out our tent!
• Watched the Pats-Colts game (wah wah wah waah).
• Had a yummy dinner with my high school friend Jenn and watched election night coverage at a party with her friends (Yay Obama, boo California Prop. 8.)

Here are a couple of pictures:

Charla (left) and Sharon sated on Monterey seafood

The four of us doing one of the things we do best

– Meredith

I know "Yosemite" is a funny-sounding word, but with all due respect to Warner Bros., I don’t get the connection.  I’m pretty sure Sam would not have prospered in Yosemite.  There weren’t many people for him to rob or claims to jump.  Although, there were plenty of varmints to shoot, so maybe that’s it.

Sam is a bit different from Yosemite’s other famous men.  Let’s compare:

Exhibit A: Yosemite Sam

Exhibit B: Conservationist John Muir 

Exhibit C: Photographer Ansel Adams

Exhibit D: Grizzly Adams (no relation to aforementioned Ansel)

The first thing we should look at is facial hair.  At first glance, it seems that Yosemite Sam fits in with this crew of famous Yosemite men.  However, upon closer examination, we see that Yosemite Sam simply has a giant mustache, while the others have beards.

But the differences run even deeper than that.  They all wear different types of hats, for starters. 

Now let’s look closer.  We’ll start with John Muir, one of the most influential environmentalists and conservationists in American history.  The only thing Yosemite Sam was interested in protecting was his pride, and he repeatedly failed at that.  How about Ansel Adams, an avid nature lover and an American photography icon?  Yosemite Sam is an American icon too, although mostly on the mud flaps of semi-trucks.

It is Grizzly Adams that Yosemite Sam most closely resembles.  Grizzly Adams spent most of his life in the mountains of California, capturing animals for zoos and circuses.  His claim to fame was making "pets" out of grizzly bears and wrestling them.  Idiot.  I never saw Yosemite Sam wrestle a bear, but he did go after Bugs Bunny quite often, and there was that one episode with the shark ("Down! Ya shark-livered varmint!").

Maybe he fits his name after all.

– Meredith

Here is the view from our tent in Yosemite NP:

We camped at the Upper Pines campground in Yosemite Valley near Curry Village.  It was a beautiful site, despite all the rain.  We didn’t see any bears in our campground, though the rangers say that they are spotted there almost every night.  We put all our food and other items with a scent in our sturdy bear locker, so no issues.  We never once used the $2 bear whistles I bought before the trip.  😉

– Meredith

She failed us. Our tent valiantly tried to withstand the ravages of a wind and dust storm in Monument Valley and redeemed herself later in the trip from the status of “Stupid Tent.” But she was no match for the heavy rains of Yosemite. She achieved the status of some old thing that wasn’t actually that great and the people involved with it struggled and suffered but much later they look back on it with affection as if they were old friends that shared hard times together. And they refer to it with a folksy nickname. Let me explain.

We pitched our tent in Yosemite like we did at any other park and the rain hitting the fly blurred into a soothing white noise as we drifted off to sleep on our first night. Around 2am, I woke up feeling a few places on the floor and my sleeping bag were wet. I thought it was no big deal until I heard drips falling. I turned on the light and saw that the entire top ridge of the inside of the tent was a tsunami of drips waiting to drop onto us. It wasn’t going to get any better and might get worse. It was chilly that night and I have a down sleeping bag which would be useless if it got wet. We had to make the call so we came to grips, got up, grabbed our sleeping bags, and camped out in the car once again. At least this time there were no fierce winds rocking the car and keeping us awake.

In the morning, we climbed out of the car to inspect the damage. Our first peek into the tent looked like this:

The picture is a bit small but what you should see are a) several pools of water on the tent floor and b) completely saturated tent fabric. I admit my weakness to the public: at this point, if Meredith had hinted that we could spend the remaining two nights in a lodge, I would have encouraged it. But Meredith was hell-bent on embracing the wilderness experience. Sigh – foiled. So we drove over to Curry Village and the mountaineering shop there. We told the helpful guy there what had happened and we agreed that the sensible next step was to try rigging up a tarp over the tent. So we bought a super-duper tarp and 100 feet of cord and drove back to the site. We spent the next hour or so rigging up something that Rube Goldberg would be proud to put his name on. In the middle of the tarp-raising, a ranger came by and said it was “one of the more … interesting … approaches” [pauses are accurate] to putting up a tarp that he had seen. We attached some sides of the tarp to several trees, one side was staked into the ground, there was a picnic table leg involved somewhere, and a large mess of tangled cord (the latter was dense enough to double as my Early Warning Bear System). Here’s the final result:

We left the site at noon and drove around the park, hoping the tent would dry out in time for that night and, when we got back that evening, it had. I was surprised although I reminded myself that I’m an engineer by training and that means I’m a Professional Problem Solver so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised after all. We spent the night in there and no water fell on us. Operative word: Fell. When I woke up in the morning and shifted around, the tent floor under my mat was soaked. Hmmm. We were still dry but I got out of the tent and looked around. It had rained so much and so steadily that the ground was saturated. Our tent was a floating island in a small pond and the water was eager to find any way up through our floor.

We conferred and decided that we’d go eat breakfast in the Village and look at the weather report online. If the rain wasn’t going to stop, we’d leave a day early since we didn’t want to hike in this and we’d seen what could be seen of Yosemite from a car. It turned out that the weather wasn’t going to break so we drove back to our tent and broke it down. It’s no fun packing up a soaked tent.

And thus this post’s title. We struggled a bit with the folksy nickname. Ol’ Soggysides reminds me too much of Old Ironsides (“Huzza! Her sides are made of…soaked nylon!”). Ol’ Soggytop reminds me too much of a famous bluegrass song (“Soggytop, you’ll always be, cold and damp to me. Good ol’ Soggytop. Soggytop Yosemite”). I admit that Soggy Bottom is reminiscent of Foggy Bottom in Washington DC but most people won’t make the connection. So there it is: Good Ol’ Soggy Bottom. She’s like an old friend to us now.

– Dave

We moved south again after our visit with Eddie and Amy to spend three nights in Yosemite National Park. 

We left Lake Tahoe later than we planned, but it turns out our timing was perfect!  As soon as we had reached the floor of Yosemite Valley, just around dusk, we spotted…a bear!  Actually two.  We saw the first bear right by the side of the road.  We stopped the car a short distance away and signaled to the oncoming driver to stop.  We all proceeded to watch the bear cross the road.  We thought it was over after that, but then the bear came back across the road with a cub following her!  The mama and cub hung out at the side of the road together for a minute, and then they ran off into the woods.  What a welcome to Yosemite!

Sorry, no pictures of the bears.  Dave was driving, and it happened so quickly, we couldn’t get the camera out in time.  They were black bears (no more grizzlies left in California, sadly).  We didn’t see other wildlife while at the park (other than birds and squirrels).  Perhaps they were trying to hide under rocks to stay dry. 

I suppose now is a good time to mention that it rained while we were in Yosemite.  A lot.  There were a few moments of light showers when we were able to do a little touring of the park, but most of the time, we experienced steady, heavy rain.  In fact, it was fairly difficult to see the features of Yosemite because the main valley was often filled with clouds.  This did have one positive side-effect: waterfalls.  By fall each year, most of Yosemite’s waterfalls are dry.  However, because of the rain, those falls that had been dry before we arrived were running nicely by the time we left, and those that were at a trickle when we arrived were rushing torrents by the time we left.

So, the photographic opportunities were a bit scant for us in Yosemite.  That’s okay.  It’s not a very photogenic park anyway.  No one ever got famous by taking pictures of this place.*  Here are some shots Dave got when the clouds were somewhat cooperative:

Yosemite Valley including El Capitan (left), Briadalveil Falls (right) and a very faint Half Dome in the distance

Half Dome towers above Mirror Lake and Yosemite Valley

 Half Dome shot from Glacier Point; while it rained on us, it snowed on the peaks in the distance

– Meredith

* With the possible exception of Ansel Adams. 😉

After visiting Mono Lake, we headed north to the Lake Tahoe area.  Here is the view from our window while staying with friends Amy and Eddie in Incline Village, NV:

Amy and Eddie were our guides on our trip to Mongolia this summer.  Our visit was too short, but we had a great time catching up and meeting their dog, Chafu (Swahili for dirty).  We didn’t stay long enough to spend time at the lake, but Dave snapped off a quickie from the road:

– Meredith

Man, there are a lot of ghost towns out here.  Yesterday, we went to one of the best preserved towns I’ve ever seen.  It’s a town called Bodie, north of Mono Lake near the Nevada border.  The town is a National Historic Landmark and a State Park, so there are serious conservation efforts and even park staff that lives in town (there are 12 residents today!).  It must be a lonely place to live – it’s really in the middle of nowhere.

Back in the day (1880s – 1920s), it was a large town (10,000 residents) and had quite the reputation, complete with frequent murders, gambling, prostitution, opium dens, stagecoach hold-ups, and the “misappropriation” of gold by legitimate mining concerns.  We spent a morning looking at old houses, hotels, shops, mills, a hydro-electric power plant, and mines, all in surprisingly good condition.  Here are some pictures Dave took:

A view of the Standard Mine operations from a distance. Visitors aren’t allowed to go here because it’s unsafe.

This is an old sawmill used to cut firewood. Apparently the winters are what I would call unbearable with 20 feet of snow. It’s a miracle this building is still standing. There are no right angles!

A residence in Bodie

A gas station/general store

One of two churches (not including the Taoist Temple in Chinatown). Based on the town’s reputation, I’m not sure anyone ever paid attention to the sermons.

For more information on Bodie, visit www.bodie.com (but I disavow myself of the egregious misuse of punctuation and spelling errors on this site).

– Meredith