Caruthersville, Missouri

Last Tuesday John and I started the trek which would move our home from Mississippi to Missouri.  Before I write about our stop for that evening I have some final musings regarding Mississippi.  First, I would like to mention that the state flower is the magnolia, pictured above.  We saw several of those trees at one rest stop, and I was pleased to see them as I realized that the further north we traveled we would most likely not see many more blooming plants or trees. Secondly, at all of the rest stops, in Mississippi, where we stopped, there were security guard huts.  One can be seen below under the flag.

 If I remember correctly, in all of the rest areas we have been in, across the nation, there probably was only a couple of them where we noticed guard shacks.  What intrigued me about the ones we saw in Mississippi, was that there were guards in them, which made no sense to me because the guards, to protect the visitors to the rest stops, should be patrolling the grounds and not sitting inside where they could only view the parking lot in front of them!  Thirdly, my attention was drawn to the Mississippi flag, which looks a bit like the Confederate flag.  Upon researching the subject later I learned that the state's flag is the sole remaining flag with the Confederate battle flag's saltire ( St.Andrew's cross).  Mississippi had a flag referendum to change it in 2010, but it was voted down - the state wanted to keep the 1894 flag.

Tuesday evening  we parked near the Mississippi River, on the grounds of the Lucky Strike Casino.  The casino is in Caruthersville.  The town is named after Sam Caruthers (1820-1860) who represented the area in congress in the 1700s.  Caruthersville was once called "LaPetite Prairie".  The New Madrid earthquake of 1812  devastated the town,  but it was rebuilt by 1857 and designated as the county seat of Missouri's bootheel.  John and I walked the streets of the town Tuesday evening, and I thought it looked like a sad metropolis.  Many of its downtown buildings were empty.  There was a bit of activity at a pizza parlor, the only restaurant in town.  Of course the casino has plenty to offer in that regard, as well as entertainment.  Out at the edge of the town is a Walmart.  Have lived in Missouri most of my life I had ofter heard about Caruthersville, but never been there or had any idea of what the town was like- and now I know.  We arrived in Illinois on Wednesday, and plan to reside there near our daughter and her husband for awhile.  Their little boy Nathan continues to hold a spell over me, I have enjoyed helping out with his care.  We also plan to spend some time in St.Louis before hitting the road once more.

Jackson, Mississippi

John and I have failed miserably at acting like snowbirds.  Yesterday Jackson broke all previous records with a high of 42 degrees.  Coldest on record previously was 48 degrees in 1960 for March 17.  Well, I guess this has not been a normal year weather-wise for most of the country.  As Vicksburg, Jackson has plenty of places for the tourist to visit.  However, with the cool weather John and I were unwilling to spend much time outside.  The capitol seemed the best place to start.

The Mississippi is known as the "New Capitol" since it succeeded the old statehouse in 1903.  Our tour guide informed us that its' cost was $1,093,641, easily covered with funds from a lawsuit against the Illinois Central Railroad for back taxes.  It was built in the Beaux Arts style, which is defined as "scholarly, self-confident, grand and lush" (quotation from the Oxford dictionary of Architecture).

Pictured above is part of the rotunda which features white Italian marble with trimmings of Belgian black marble.  The colossal columns are of scagliola ( plaster made to imitate marble).  All of the inside of the capitol gave me an impression of being dramatic and yet simple in appearance.  Our next stop was lunch, and it being St.Patrick's day we wanted corn beef and cabbage.  In Mississippi it is all about soul food, but we did find a capitol staff worker who directed us to an Irish pub.  They happened to have a special on corn beef and cabbage.  The meal still had over-tones of soul food, but was still quite good.

After lunch we shifted through all the travel brochures of Jackson and discovered that many museums are closed on Monday.  Given the weather we could not do gardens or even the Jackson zoo, which left us with the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science.   We had a wonderful afternoon there learning all about the diverse natural heritage of Mississippi.  A 100,000- gallon aquarium system houses over 200 species of native fish, reptiles, amphibians and aquatic invertebrates.  Also a 1,700-square foot greenhouse called "The Swamp" has another aquarium which provides a home for alligators, turtles, and fish.

Outside of the museum is a system of nature trails which meander through wooded bluffs, river bottoms and swamplands.  It is part of the LeFleur Bluff State Park. 

Yes, the above picture does have a wintery look to it.  However, I was impressed by certain vivid colors in the scene above.  The slough is a beautiful turquoise blue, the red bud is in bloom and the trees are beginning to don their bright green leaves.  Spring has to be coming soon!  The park also has several varieties of wildflowers starting to bloom, one of which is the"Little-Sweet-Betsy" trillium.

Vicksburg's Old Court House Museum

Saturday turned out to be quite a goofy day for us.  We drove to Vicksburg with a rather long list of places which we wanted to see.  However, our car had other plans for the day.  We parked in the historic area of the town and that is when the trouble with our car started.  It would not go into park and John could not pull the key out of the ignition.  Only thing to do was to call for a tow truck, the only available one was 90 minutes away.  While John waited for help to arrive I wandered down to the waterfront.

At the entrance to the downtown riverfront are 32 life-like pictorial murals that depict periods of history in Vicksburg.  Also on the waterfront is Catfish Row Children's Art Park, a creative adventure into the history of the Mississippi River and the paddle wheel steamboats which once traveled on its waters.  Eventually the tow truck did arrive, but it turned out that the car did not need to be towed because the man who was going to tow us figured out how to fix the problem.  By then our day was partly gone and we decided, given the lateness of the day, that the best place to spend our time in Vicksburg would be at the old courthouse.  That was a good choice as a lot of history pertaining to the area is in this one building.

The old Warren County Courthouse was built in 1858. The city block surrounding it had been designated by Rev. Newet Vick (who founded Vicksburg in 1819) as a public square.  Here Jefferson Davis made a campaign speech in 1843 when he made a run for the state legislature.  Teddy Roosevelt, William McKinley, Zachary Taylor, and Booker T.Washington also spoke in this square.  General Grant reviewed his troops here after the siege of Vicksburg.  The courthouse has nine rooms of interesting pieces of history including artifacts ranging from pre-Columbian Indian and pioneer implements to many artifacts (clothing, furniture, toys  tools and art) pertaining to the Civil War era.  In case you are wondering, that is a cat in the picture below. He is known as the "Courthouse Cat" and the infant cradle in one of his favorite napping spots.

In one of the rooms is a typical courtroom of the Victorian era.  It features an ornate cast iron judge's dias.

There is also an entire room dedicated to Jefferson Davis.  Even though he was imprisoned for two years, he never came to trial because legally he had done nothing wrong.  He refused a pardon.  In his mind he had done nothing of which he had to repent, at West Point he had learned that secession was not wrong.  Another interesting fact which I learned was that the defeat of Vicksburg happened on July 4th. and the town refused to celebrate that holiday for 82 years until July 4,1945.  Vicksburg's citizens were so thankful for our victory in World War II that they had to celebrate the holiday!   Also in this museum I picked up some interesting information about Mary Todd Lincoln, of whom history has not always treated too kindly.  She had four brothers in the Confederate Army, and three of her sisters married Confederate officers.  Eleven of her cousins also served on the Confederate side.  Besides the personal tragedies in her life she was also probably alienated from most of her family.  That was our day in Vicksburg, we certainly will need to come back, but the courthouse museum was all we needed for this time around!

Natchez Trace Parkway- Part Two

The second day of our journey back to Mississippi was primarily on the parkway.  John  had seen some of the northern sections of it, as you may know from reading this blog, and he wanted for me to also have the experience of riding on it.  Our first stop was at a Chickasaw village site.  Here there are markers noting where the tribe had its' summer and winter houses, as well as a fort.

Not much there now except daffodils, which we continued to see all day along the parkway.  Interpretive signs at this site provided interesting information about the Chickasaws.  Followers of DeSoto first saw them in 1541 when they had a bloody battle with them.  Two hundred years later the tribe became allies with the British, and were used by them to oppose French expansion. They remained a thorn in the side with the latter until France in 1763 gave up all its North American possessions.  Along the parkway are also sites of ancient burial mounds.  We saw the Bynum Mounds which were built between 2,050 and 1,800 years ago.

I am not sure why we turned off the parkway into French Village, but it turned out to be a good move.  We had not had lunch and thought that there were no restaurants along the Natchez Trace.  However, there is a cafe at French Village, the only eating establishment on the parkway.  French Camp was founded circa 1810 by a Frenchman who opened a stand, or tavern and inn here.  The village has log cabins, an antebellum home and other structures dating back as early as the 1820s.  We had a wonderful lunch in the cafe of sandwiches made by the bakery on the grounds of the village, and homemade soup.

At Cole Creek and Cypress Swamp we were able to take short trails through bald-cypress/tupelo swamps.  In the above picture notice the cypress knees which support the trees.  The tupelo has a swollen base which anchors the tree.  We looked hard for a sighting of alligators, but no luck on that.  Only wildlife which we saw on the parkway was one coyote and many deer.  At the French Academy Village we did see an abundance of  bluebirds.  Our journey along the parkway also took us near the Pearl River, so named because a French explorer found pearls in its' waters.  The river has served as a boundary between Mississippi and Louisiana since 1812.  That was pretty much our day on only a small portion of the parkway, certainly had we not traveled on it we would have had arrived home much sooner!   But then we would not have had such a fun and interesting day!

Corinth, Mississippi

The past several weeks have passed rather quickly.  Most of that time we have stayed in Carbondale, Illinois, except for a couple brief visits to St.Louis and Farmington, Missouri.  It is amazing how our lives have so completely revolved around our grandson Nathaniel.  Our nights and days totally melted into one another as we tried to give our daughter some sleep time between the constant feeding demands of a newborn.  As Melissa is breast feeding, there is not much we can help her with in that department!  The picture below was taken during one of her nap times- notice the cat Zelda in the upper right-hand corner who is standing guard over her and the baby.  For the moment all is peaceful.

 

 We left Carbondale on Thursday and our stop for the night that day was in Corinth, Mississippi.  We came into the town completely ignorant of its history.  We only knew two things:  we needed to find a place for supper, and we wanted to see the downtown area.  As we drove through the town we found its historic section and stopped to look at a few interpretive signs in front of some older-looking buildings.

The house pictured above was once the headquarters of Confederate General Polk during the Civil War.  And the house pictured below was where the Confederate General Beauregard had his headquarters.

 In April of 1862 the General made the prescient statement that "If defeated here, we lose the Mississippi Valley, and probably our cause".  After supper at the "Blazing Noodles" ( a wonderful restaurant in Corinth) we walked around the Civil War Trailhead Park and learned further about the war which took place in Corinth in October of 1862.  The park was once a critical railroad junction for the town and it was one of the battle sites where the Confederates briefly rallied against the Union Army.  Hard to imagine, but in this little town 20,000 Confederate troops fought house to house against 20,000 Union Army troops in a street battle after which the Southern troops were driven from the town in disorder. There is a Civil War Interpretive Center in Corinth which explains in more detail the battle of 1862, as well as the Battle at Shiloh, unfortunately we did not have the time to visit it.

Carbondale, Illinois

Wow. guess I have some explaining to do!  Some of you, our readers, may have figured out that I did not write the last two posts.  My two sisters Gloria and Julia guessed that I was not the author of those posts, and they were right.  Last week I took a train to Illinois so that I could be present at the birth of our first grandson.  Our home and John stayed in Jackson, Mississippi so John could continue sightseeing.  He also was wishing to stay as far south and warm as long as possible.  He wrote the posts on the Natchez Trace and Vicksburg, did such an awesome job that maybe I can persuade to write more on our blog site.

Pictured above is Nathaniel John Taylor, born February 21st.  His weight was 7 pounds and 11 ounces, and his height was 20 inches.  I arrived in Illinois two days before his birth, which allowed Grandmother Cohen, Melissa and I to finish decorating his room.  His birth went into a rapid mode once his mom started feeling labor pains early Friday morning.  We all went to the hospital at about 3:30 that afternoon and Nathaniel entered the world at 5:20 PM.  It was a beautiful and natural birth,  Memorial Hospital of Carbondale is to be commended for following Melissa and Spencer's birth plan.  Melissa and the baby came home Sunday afternoon.  Melissa is breast feeding and consequently this past week has gotten little sleep.  Grandma Cohen, Spencer and I have tried to relieve her during the baby's fussy times, with the night hours being my time to rock little Nathan.
John drove to Illinois on Wednesday and, as the baby seemed to be getting on some semblance of a sleeping and feeding schedule, we drove to St. Louis on Friday to visit my sister Julia and her husband Cal.  Their house is very quiet and I sometimes awaken in the wee hours of the morning to listen for the baby's wail.  A winter storm has hit this area, but hopefully John and I can return to Carbondale tomorrow or Tuesday.  After a couple of more weeks there we plan to drive back to Mississippi and move our rig north.

Natchez Trace

It's 1800. You have just sold your boat and load of produce that you floated down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to Natchez. You have a pocket full of money and need to return to your home in Ohio. You find a three foot wide path leading out of Natchez to the northeast and begin walking (see picture). After 60 miles you come to the Choctaw Boundary. Behind you is Natchez territory and civilization. Ahead of you is Indian territory and wilderness. There are no inns or way stations, no food supplies. There are, however, bandits, Indians, wild animals and loneliness. You are on the Natchez Trace, an ancient pathway that was in use before Europeans set foot in this country. It runs for 444 miles between Natchez and Nashville and in its day was fairly dangerous but the main road between those cities. Meriwether Lewis, of Lewis and Clark fame, was shot on the trace in1809 and is buried next to it about 60 miles south of Nashville. There is a monument there. You can still walk the trace if you want, although sections are now missing, but the best way is to drive the Natchez Trace Parkway. This is a well kept two lane road that runs parallel to the trace and is under the jurisdiction of the National Park System. It runs for the same 444 miles at 50 mph and has no billboards, no houses or other buildings and, as in olden times, no services but is a very scenic road.

Eventually way stations, called stands, were established along the trace to serve travelers. Some of these grew into small towns, most of which are now defunct, and a few grew into larger cities. As you drive the Parkway there are turnoffs to sections of the trace or some of the old town sites. One of these was Rocky Springs, a small town established near a spring that served as a watering hole on the trace. The town is now gone except for an old church, a cemetery, a couple of cisterns, and oddly enough, two old safes without doors (see picture). The cistern in the foreground still contains water which you can see through the grate.

If you are driving the Parkway and have the time you might want to see this. A few miles north of the trace, but not really related to its history, is the Mississippi Petrified Forest, the only known petrified forest east of the Mississippi river. It is just outside the town of Flora, MS. Studies indicate the trees were from an area farther north and floated to this area by an ancient river into a log jam configuration that was then covered with mud and eventually petrified. This happened 36 million years ago and they were just uncovered in recent times by erosion. There are probably many more trees not seen yet as a well was being dug in 1962 and hit a petrified log at 75 feet down! Most of the logs are quite large (see pictures) and include species of Sequoia, Maple, Fir, and Spurge plus some extinct varieties. At the end of the trail is a very comprehensive fossil museum.

Vicksburg, MS

Vicksburg, the historic river city that sits on the Yazoo river. Wait! You thought it sat on the Mississippi river? It did until 1876 when the river changed course and the Yazoo was diverted into the old channel to provide a waterway for the city. Otherwise the city would have been left high and dry and this was the era when most transportation was by steamboat. The picture shows the Vicksburg waterfront and the water is only several hundred yards wide. The Mississippi this far south is well over a mile wide. The confluence is now several miles south of the downtown riverfront.

The Yazoo river also provided another surprise in 1964 when researchers discovered the remains of the USS Cairo, a Union ironclad gun boat that had been sunk by mines of the Confederates. It sank in 12 minutes and, as a result, all of the armament, personal items, military items, equipment, etc. ended up in the mud on the river bottom where it was protected. When retrieved 102 years later most items were still in very good shape and provided a window on what life was like during the war. Many of the items are shown in a museum next to the restored boat on display as shown in the picture. Incidentally, the barge that raised the USS Cairo was also called the Cairo.

Of course, the thing that Vicksburg is most known for is the Civil War battle. Vicksburg was a supply point for the Confederates on both sides of the Mississippi. If the Union could win it would split the South and cut off supplies to their army. It was considered the key to winning the war or losing. As a result, the town became a fortress. Numerous forts and bulwarks were built along an eight mile line in a U shape around the city with the ends at the river. These were maned with around 30,000 troops. When General Grant and the Union army first tried to assault the line they were defeated so Grant decided to lay siege to the city with his 70,000 men. The Union line was set up parallel to the Confederate line but outward about shooting distance. This became as little as 50 to 100 feet in some cases or up to more than 1000 feet. Both sides had cannon firing at each other in addition to rifle fire all along the eight mile front. Untold numbers of shells were fired during the 47 day siege and there were over 19,000 casualties. Eventually the Confederates ran out of supplies and had to surrender the town. This broke the back or the Confederacy, so to speak, and some historians think this action was more significant than Gettysburg for the Union. Ironically, the occupation  forces of the city for the rest of the war were mostly freed slaves that were recruited by the U.S. Army. The picture shows a Union cannon looking across the battlefield at a monument that marks a Confederate stronghold.

The tour road today follows the Union line for about eight miles and then loops around and follows the Confederate line for another eight miles. Along this road are over 1300 monuments to various units, persons, military actions, locations, etc. The largest is the Illinois monument shown in the picture.

One other unique thing that Vicksburg is known for is that it is the first place that Coca Cola was bottled for sale in 1894. Before that it had always been a fountain drink. This happened at the Biedenharn Candy Co. which is still in existence and is a museum as shown in the picture. All in all a very interesting town.

R.W. Norton Art Gallery

We planned on staying one more day in Shreveport, before leaving on Monday for Mississippi.  According to our tour books, the city has four museums as well as a science discovery center.  I think that the city of 200,000 plus people does very well with tourist attractions.  It can certainly be very proud of the Norton Art Gallery which we chose to visit yesterday.  In our travels we have seen a wide variety of art galleries, usually most of them are not that large.  The Norton art gallery has 400 American and European paintings by more than 100 artists.  Sculptures, decorative arts, and rare books are also displayed.

Speaking of the latter, the art museum has a beautiful library, in the foreground of the picture above you may notice the onyx pillars supporting the book shelves.  In this room we viewed one of the volumes of James Audubon's The Birds of America.  The art museum has a total of five volumes of the book in the double elephant format, 391/2 inches by 291/2 inches, the same size on which he created his original paintings.  The Gallery's copy was purchased in 1939 from Queen's College, Oxford. 

Pictured above is a bell from the foundry of Paul Revere.  Between 1792 to 1828 the foundry produced 959 bells of which 300 are still extant.  The bell pictured above once hung in a Baptist Church in Plymouth, Massachusetts.  The art gallery has in its main building a section called "Vision of America".  Many portraits of soldiers and statesman can be seen here.  What we found wonderful about this art museum is the information which is posted by each painting; not only regarding the artist and his work, but also fascinating details regarding the person portrayed in the painting.  In this area there is also a section on the old west, here I saw many paintings by my favorite cowboy painters, F.Remington and C. Russell. 

The art museum has one of the largest collections Steuben glass animals in North America.  Also in this room are whimsical sculptures, some of which are inspired by children's stories.  In the foreground of the picture above is "Crocodile Dandy", behind it is Red Riding Hood and the wolf, and on the right, the pig with a web above him from the book Charlotte's Web. 

In the museum I found most interesting this rare 1916 war propaganda poster which predates WWI by H.R. Hopps. The poster (said to have been the inspiration for King Kong) portrays Kaiser Wilhelm as the ape and he is clutching "Columbia" the feminine form of America.  After a three hours in this museum I felt like I was getting information over-load and convinced John that we needed to take advantage of the warm sunny  weather. The rest of our afternoon was spent at the Red River Wildlife National Wildlife Refuge, there our exciting find was an armadillo who scurried rapidly away from us and into a thicket.

Shreveport, Louisiana

Yesterday, Saturday, we left the piney woods of Texas and moved over the state border into Louisiana.  After parking our rig north of Shreveport, we drove into the downtown area of the city.

Shreveport lies on the Red River.  In the background of the picture above is the Horseshoe Casino.  There are two casinos in Shreveport and five located in Bossier, the city across the river from Shreveport.  Those casinos pretty much dominate the cities skyline.  From the waterfront John and I stopped at the visitor's center, where we were reminded that Mardi Gras celebrations will be starting soon.

At the Visitor's Center we learned about the town's beginning and how it got its name.  In 1833 Capt. Henry Miller Shreve, American inventor and steamboat captain, was commissioned by the U.S. Government to open the Red River to steamboat navigation.  At that time it was no easy task as the river had an 165 mile long log jam which had been forming since the 1400s.  It took Shreve and his partners five years to accomplish the task.  That piece of Shreveport history can be seen in the giant mural which John and I discovered on one of the downtown's buildings.  It is call "Once in a Millennium Moon" created by Meg Saligman in 2000.

Fortunately there was an interpretive sign near the building which explains the mural.  The artist perfected the picture on a paint by number grid.  Paint parties were held all over town, over 2,000 townspeople worked on painting the mural which was applied to sheets of plastic cloth "floated in acrylic" much like wallpaper.  More than 40% of the mural was done by the community.  Nineteen local people from the ages of 3 months to 80 years can be found in the mural.  They represent diversity in race, age, gender and religion and neighborhood.  Cycles of life can also be found in the painting:  birth is represented by a christening cap, puberty by the torah, a veil and garter for marriage, and a veteran's dog tag for death.  Forty heirloom objects, which have meaning to a person, or family can also be found in the mural.  Examples of them are a clown doll, ceramic cup, fork and a cast iron skillet. Near the bottom of the painting is a cornucopia of northwestern Louisiana produce including strawberries, peaches, tomatoes and dewberries.  It is certainly a mega mural with a magnificent message of joy and hope!  In another area of downtown John and I found another impressive mural, pictured below.  We will certainly remember Shreveport for its murals.

President L. B. Johnson's Presidential Library

There are plenty of things to do in Austin for the tourist, and some of them we have done in the past during our visits to the capital city.  Monday was a cool, cloudy day, John and I both thought that it was a type of day to be inside, probably touring museums.  According to the tour books the presidential library of Lyndon B. Johnson has been given an excellent rating, so that is where we headed for the day.

As of 2013 there are 13 presidential libraries, from H. Hoover to George W. Bush.  President Johnson’s library has been the only one to be located on a university campus, the University of Texas, Austin. 

                                      

 The library was dedicated in 1971, two years before the president’s death.  As President Johnson noted during his address at the dedication:  “ So it is all here, the story of our times with the bark off.  This library will show the facts, the joys and triumphs as well as the sorrows and failures.”   Within the library are 40 million pages of documents as well as photographs, videos and audio recordings.  Below is a picture which I took looking up at the 5^th floor, one of five floors of the archives.

 

President Johnson had a Dictaphone belt recorder installed in his office and recorded 643 hours of telephone conversations, some of which have been made available for the public.  That feature of the library is what I enjoyed most during my visit there.  I saw the brusque and bullish side of Johnson in his conversation with the Chairman of the House and Education and Labor, to whom he gave a dressing down for delaying legislative action on the Elementary and Secondary School Bill.  I heard a compassionate and personal side of Johnson in his conversations with Jacqueline Kennedy as well as with his wife Lady Bird..  Another phone conversation which I found fascinating was the one President Johnson had with Katherine Graham, The Washington Post journalist.  He expressed to her his frustration with congressmen who always seem to be out of town on one holiday or another.  He was anxious to get bills passed and no one was ever around!  He strongly suggested to Graham that she do interviews with them (in a kind manner) and find out what they were doing with their time when they were out of town.  Other interesting conversations were those Johnson had with Martin Luther King,  and John Steinbeck before the latter left on a fact-finding trip to Vietnam.  There was certainly a lot of United State history in the years from 1963 to 1969, and it was a time I remember well.  Pictured below is a replica of  the oval office as it looked during the years Johnson was in office. 

 Furniture belonging to our 36th President was his rocking chair and desk which he used as a senator, vice-president and president.  The oval office during the late 1960s certainly saw lots of action , during his time as president Johnson signed many important bills- in regards to civil rights, poverty, education, clean water, public broadcasting, our national parks, head start, Medicare- to name but a few.

Our Travels from Arizona to Texas

As you may notice from the title of this posting we have certainly put on the miles this past week!  This is the first time that I have tried to chronicle our travels with pictures, and they are not the greatest because I took them from the windows of our rig.  Pictured below is the area of Cochise's Stronghold, in the Dragoon Mountains of Arizona.  The granite mountains, according to legend,  was where the Chiricahua Apaches hid out when they were being pursued by the US Calvary.

We certainly saw a good deal of beautiful mountain scenery from Arizona to Texas, and it was my major focus when taking pictures.  John commented that the biggest thing he would miss now that we were heading east was the mountains.  I would have to agree with him on that, and maybe that was why I only took pictures of mountains, and other large rock formations on this trip.  Anything elevated looked good to me considering we will be back in the flatland of the Midwest in a few weeks!  It was on a very cool overcast and hazy morning that I photographed the mountains of Las Cruces as we were driving into that city.  The city sits at the foot of the Organ Mountains.

Our plan when we started the rv lifestyle was to follow the sun and stay warm.  That did not happen this past week when a cold front dipped into the southwest.  For several nights the temperature was below freezing and it was necessary to run our furnace.   At one campground in New Mexico I saw, in a cactus garden, a birdbath holding frozen water.  Friday evening, at a campground outside of Junction City, Texas the owner of an rv park where we stayed told us that he was forced to buy Levis that day because all he had ever worn was shorts!  So what we have experienced this past week has certainly not been normal- and I am sure many parts of the nation would say the same thing.  We are now in the hill country of Texas, outside Austin.   Today, Sunday, the sun is out and our temperature is in the mid seventies.  Hopefully we can stay warm for awhile.  As you may notice in the picture below we are now seeing land dotted with green trees instead of prickly pear and saguaro cactus.

Salton Sea

     In my last posting I wrote that it would be my last posting from California, and I was wrong.  John and I changed our travel plans and decided to stay in the state one more night.  We did move our rig, as planned, from Vista on Saturday.  However, our first night’s stop was in El Centro, California,  not Yuma, Arizona.  We had decided that we wanted to see the Salton Sea, which is about 30 miles from the Mexican border.

     On Sunday we worshiped at the First United Methodist Church of El Centro.  It was the only church which did not have services at 9AM, that is too early for John.  It turned out to be a good choice, Rev.Dr. Ron P. Griffin gave a wonderful sermon on Micah 6:1-8.  An interesting side note here is that we learned that John Glenn was a member at this church and his wife an organist during the time he was stationed at the local naval base.  That must have been years ago!

     On Monday we drove to the Salton Sea.  We initially went a bit east of the lake so we could check out the dunes wilderness area at the base of the Chocolate Mountains.

 

     The above picture was taken at a lookout area above the dunes.  Highway 78, in the center of the picture, is the major road running through the area.

 

      There are several interesting facts about the Salton Sea.  First of all, it is below sea level.  On are way to Salton Sea we passed a sugar factory which had a mark on one of its towers where sea level is located, and I was impressed by how far below it we were.  Centuries ago the Salton Sea was a fresh water lake, called Lake Cahuilla by the Native Americans of the same name who once lived by its shores.  In wet times the Colorado River would fill in the sink basin, other times it would bypass the sink causing the lake to shrink or disappear.  The sea was also originally the northern part of the Gulf of California, so through the years it had a mixture of salt and fresh water.  Currently the salinity of the sea is rising as rivers bring in dissolved salts and water evaporates.  The sea also lacks any outlet. 

       Pictured above, along with the sea gulls, are black necked stilts.  The Salton Sea supports significant segments of many migratory birds populations which eat fish.  Unfortunately the sea's rising salinity threatens the 400 bird species which arrive here yearly along the Pacific Migratory Pathway.  On our walk through this state park, along the shore, we also noticed many herons and egrets perched high in the trees.  One solitary green heron sat on the wharf.  He allowed me to get fairly close to him for a picture.  Our path along the shore was lined with many tamarisk trees, also called salt cedar trees.  They are in bloom now with beautiful pinkish-purple flowers.  Our day trip took us completely around the sea, it was interesting to note how different the scenery was on each side of the sea.  The western side is agricultural with palm (think dates) and citrus orchards.  I also saw trucks filled with carrots on the road.  The south eastern shore of the sea is all desert, with no appreciable development of any kind.