November 22, 2020

Sights Before No Travel

By roads-rus

The year before travel was interrupted by stay-at-home-orders was indeed rich. From March 2019 to March 2020 Ruth & I saw many marvelous sights and made it to 2 foreign destinations mentioned in the previous essay called “Sights Before Quarantine”. The subjects above and below were photographed during this period and have not been shown before.

We were at CALM, the California Living Museum near Bakersfield, the final week of 2019. CALM’s specialty is animals native to California including many large cats. That’s a California bobcat heading this blog and a Desert Tortoise from the Mojave Desert just above this paragraph. The bobcat is widespread in California. They are seen almost everywhere in the state except for the Central Valley and the Mojave Desert.

We took a tour of Casa Neverlandia in Austin, TX kind of by accident early in 2020. Artist James Talbot named his home Casa Neverlandia after moving to Austin in 1971. Talbot had lived in Morocco and Turkey but felt an affinity for Austin and stayed. He has seen big changes and turned his home and studio into a kind of personal playground that he gives tours of on weekends. That’s a photo taken in his studio just above and one of his front door below.

I took a photo of a lunchbox with Bugs Bunny’s face on it in Allen Woodall’s eclectic Lunchbox Museum in Columbus, GA last year. Woodall’s livelihood is a hoot and a half in this surprisingly vivid town with lots of tourist activities. The red-green plant was photographed last fall on Salt Spring Island in Canada’s Gulf Islands. This was my favorite trip during this period, and I’m rather glad I didn’t know what was going to happen to the world in 2020 when I took it.

Hank

Austin

desert tortoise

About roads-rus

Since the beginning, I've had to avoid writing about the downside of travel in order to sell more than 100 articles. Just because something negative happened doesn't mean your trip was ruined. But tell that to publishers who are into 5-star cruise and tropical beach fantasies. I want to tell what happened on my way to the beach, and it may not have been all that pleasant. My number one rule of the road is...today's disaster is tomorrow's great story. My travel experiences have appeared in about twenty magazines and newspapers. I've been in all 50 states more than once and more than 50 countries. Ruth and I love to travel internationally--Japan, Canada, China, Argentina, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, etc. Within the next 2 years we will have visited all of the European countries. But our favorite destination is Australia. Ruth and I have been there 9 times. I've written a book about Australia's Outback, ALONE NEAR ALICE, which is available through both Amazon & Barnes & Noble. My first fictional work, MOVING FORWARD, GETTING NOWHERE, has recently been posted on Amazon. It's a contemporary, hopefully funny re-telling of The Odyssey. View all posts by roads-rus
This entry was posted on Sunday, November 22nd, 2020 at 9:46 pm and posted in Remembered Destinations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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