SEVEN WEEKS – 5 DAYS – 9,720 MILES

08 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by backyardnotes in Camping, Summer!, Travel

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Acadia National Park, Badlands National Park, black hills south dakota, camping, lobsters, Mt Rushmore, Niagra Falls, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, vacation

Quoddy Point, Maine–the first place in the U.S. to see the sun rise

WE DID IT. WE LEFT SEATTLE ON JUNE 1st BOUND FOR MAINE. We finished our trip in Winthrop, Washington at the 25th Annual Winthrop Blues Festival and returned home on July 23rd. We traveled east through Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and into Maine. On the return trip we tracked south through Maine to Massachusetts, turning back west into New York and along the southern shores of Lakes Erie and Huron then into Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota. We camped along four of the five Great Lakes; two National Parks, one National Lakeshore, state parks, and National Forests. We saw well known attractions and some not so well known–at least not to us! We hiked in the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Adirondacks (and kayaked), and the White Mountains of New Hampshire; we biked some carriage roads in Acadia National Park and kayaked on Lake Superior. An amazing, great trip.

A few highlights below. (photos for first leg of the trip at Flickr. I’ll update in a few days with more photos.)

Zoomed in on the Bear’s Tooth, seen from 10,000 ft along the Beartooth Highway, Wyoming

Mt. Rushomore National Monument, Black Hills, South Dakota

Badlands National Park, South Dakota

Niagra Falls, New York

A swallowtail at Seventh Lake in the Adirondak Mtns. in New York

I tried out my new Sony A57 with my old Minolta lenses and caught this butterfly. I shot over 1200 photos with the new Sony, a Nikon Coolpix S9100 point and shoot and an iPhone – I’m a shooting fool! I’ve whittled that number down to less than half. It was fun to shoot with the phone camera and share in real time with family and friends.

A quirky roadside invitation to dine

The church where the signal was given for ‘One if by land, two if by sea’ in Boston. We followed the history of the American Revolution along the freedom trail through Boston, beginning at Boston Common.

Foggy morning on Cobscook Sound, Downeast Maine

Dinner on Mt. Desert Island, Maine. Now that’s some kind of great camping! We bought fresh lobsters direct from the fisherman on two occasions. Turns out lobsters are in plentiful supply this year.

A small segment of the 48 miles of carriage roads built by John Rockefeller, Jr. on Mount Desert Island, Maine, now part of Acadia NP.

Two residents of the park

Grand Marais dune, Lake Superior, Michigan

We paddled through this arch on Lake Superior, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, Michigan. The water is crystal clear and surprisingly warm.

The supposed geographic center of North America (not really).

The spectacular raging water of the Kootenai River at Kootenai Falls, east of Libby, Montana. Awesome!

Big thunderstorm about to move through on the first day of the Winthrop Blues Festival. Weather cleared before the first act went on that evening. But tents and awnings were flying! Home three days later. Then back to the business of canning and gardening. (More on that in a few days.)

TWO JEWELS OF THE NATIONAL PARKS

25 Sunday Sep 2011

Posted by backyardnotes in National Parks, Travel

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bison, camping, geysers, national parks, tetons, Travel, yellowstone

IT’S HARD TO DECIDE WHICH PART OF YELLOWSTONE IS THE MOST SPECTACULAR. Yellowstone Falls, the gem of the Yellowstone Grand Canyon has plenty of competition within the park.

To get the best view of the falls you need to walk down 300 steps (and back up!). But worth every step.

Where else can you see the vivid colors of thermal activity up close and be truly awed. This is the Prismatic pool.

Unworldly colors of bacterial mats that form in waters of 130° + in the Biscuit Geyser Basin. Most of the geysers are found in the central/west area of the park.

To the east in the Lamar Valley, we saw several large herds of bison, including this calf and his mother. A few days later on our way to Lewis Lake in the south end of the park, we had to stop while some bison crossed the road and a young calf stopped to nurse, holding up traffic. Sweet.

Yesterday morning we had our first glimpses of the Tetons. Majestic. Soaring. Awesome.

I could not resist this window display in a park store. Automatic giggles.

AUGUST MASH-UP–PART TWO

12 Monday Sep 2011

Posted by backyardnotes in Canning & Preserving, Harvest, Ornamentals, Uncategorized, Vegetable garden

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camping, canning, garden chores, harvest

BY THE THE BEGINNING OF AUGUST there is plenty of deadheading to do. As I started this tedious chore I felt inspired to create a bouquet using the more interesting deadheads (August 18th above) and have continued to add to it (as of September 8th below).

The same day that we dug the iris I enlisted the extra hands to help clean the garlic. With three pairs of hands we cleaned four varieties in no time. Yesterday I cleaned the remaining 25 heads. Total garlic harvested: 142 heads.

CANNING began in earnest with cherries, apricots and zucchini in late July.

Since spring-like weather persisted well into June the cherry and strawberry harvests were late. I put up five half pints each of strawberry and cherry preserves in the last week of July. These were modeled on a low sugar preserves recipe from Eugenia Bone’s blog post of July 18th.

PEACHES started showing up in the markets mid-August so I made peach preserves (seven half pints) and froze sliced peaches in half pound bags (5). At the end of the month on our way home from Palmer Lake, I bought more peaches (fifteeen pounds) and about four pounds of the last (!) bing cherries at Lone Pine fruit stand in Wenatchee. The cherries were wonderful and I put up 8 more half-pints of preserves. The lovely looking Glowstar peaches however had a difficult time fully ripening. They became 6 pints of what I am calling Ice Cream Peaches; kind of like a loose, syrupy preserve flavored with vanilla beans and Calvados brandy. They taste yummy!

The bulk of tomatoes remained firmly green even with the red plastic mulch until the last week of the month. And at that, only a handful or two had ripened.

We spent the week of the 22nd happily lazing about at Palmer Lake in northeast Washington. The DNR campground is small and was surprisingly short of visitors for a change. The water was warm, the weather was warm, we paddled around the lake, and I caught up on my travel journal. There is good birdwatching habitat around the lake; cherry and apple orchards to the east and some walnut orchards and open pastures to the north. Tom saw an Indigo Bunting! We have been ‘bunting hunting’ all summer on our trips to eastern Washington–too bad I missed seeing it. We saw a muskrat one morning in Palmer Creek and a beaver in the water at our campground on our last morning.

I LOVE FINDING something new and unknown to me. On one of our walks we spotted a hatching of Box Elder bugs, boisea trivittata. I snapped this photo so I could identify them when we got back home. Apparently they are a nuisance in most areas, but we had never seen them before. According to Wikipedia “They may form large aggregations while sunning themselves in areas near their host plant (e.g. on rocks, shrubs, trees, and man-made structures).” That is just how we saw them.

Time to move on to Septet