SOLAR LUNACY

August 21, 2017, is the date for the first total solar eclipse to be seen across the entire U.S. in nearly 100 years.  Since we can’t wait for the next one, we’re off to Oregon for, weather permitting, the big event.  Us and about a gazillion other bozos.  I began thinking about this when I first heard about it nearly a year ago.  But, as usual, I dithered until around the first of this year, plenty of time, I thought, to make camping reservations.  Not! No matter where I tried along the path of total darkness, there was not a campsite to be had.  I toyed with the idea of just going up and boondocking, but after pouring over maps of public lands, I didn’t find much that would be accessible by road.  And, no doubt, we’d be competing with thousands of others trying to do the same.  I rejected the few offers of a space in a farmer’s field for $150+ a night, with 3 night minimums.  And so, I punted.  We went off to our Lazy Daze group get-together at Morro Bay in March and lamented our dilemma to various others.  And then . . . bingo!  Two of our friends, Robyn and Lydia, had managed to score a spot at a KOA in Albany, OR, right in the path of the totality.  They had been talking with management that day and had learned of a cancellation.  Robyn called the park, a KOA of all things, and handed me the phone.  Just like that, we snatched the cancellation and were in.  Thank you, Robyn and Lydia!

We made our reservation for three nights, to start on Saturday before the Monday event, so as to avoid some of the last minute traffic jams we were sure would develop.  As I type this at Big Lake, that was a good idea.  We were going to leave on the 11th, and do a liesurely drive up through NoCal and Oregon, but we had forgotten long-ago plans to attend a Diana Krall concert at the Hollywood Bowl with Chuck and Alice.  That was a must-do, as they had reserved a Philharmonic League box down close to the stage!  Major $$$.  The concert was on Saturday night, the 12th, so we spent the prior several days washing the rig, loading it, and doing minor maintenance.  After a great time at the Bowl, but getting home near midnight, it was a challenge to roll out the next morning and get underway.  Memo to self:  Sunday is NOT a light travel day in August on the I-5.

First stop was to be Camping World in Valencia to pick up a few items.  Not having the forethought to program it into Gerty, we missed the right exit.  CW in Valencia is poorly situated for getting into.  It’s easy only from one direction, and we weren’t on it.  I’ll omit the many shouts and curses as we encountered no left turns, median barriers, and other obstacles to just being able to access the damn lot.  Once there we blew excessive dough on a new propane detector (ours is way overdue for replacement), a valve fitting for our new dump hose, and an air filter for the Onan generator.  The latter required me to go back out and disassemble the current one and bring in the part as the counter man couldn’t figure out which was the right one.  Fortunately, that’s the one repair on the rig that is relatively easy to do, and without tools! 

Having spent the wad, we made our way at a steady 61 for the next five hours or so to our first stop, the Kit Fox RV Park in Patterson.  Management had locked up early, so we just took the spot that I had been told over the phone a couple of months earlier, ignoring the strident signs warning YOU WILL BE TOWED if you park without paying!  So keep your posted office hours, folks.  The park is mostly long-termers, but there were a number of overnighters as well, including our novice RV neighbors who entertained us with multiple attempts to back into their space with a very long rental unit.  Turns out he’s Australian, she’s English, they live in the British Caymans, and they’re on a ten-day blitztour of upper California.

Not having been towed, we paid the next morning and took off to try to hit the seam between the commuting and lunch traffic in Sacramento, which we did.  We had an uneventful drive further up I-5 to just north of Redding.  The week before we left, I had read about a great app for downloading audio books, called Libby.  I highly recommend it.  Great interface, and it works near seamlessly.  With it, we can borrow books from our library, and the LAPL is loaded with audio books.  So, free app, free books, and Bob’s your uncle.  Of course, not everything is always readily available, but we got a couple of works by C.J. Box that are entertaining and not too complex to follow.  We put them on Loni’s iPhone as she has 64gigs of memory, so can handle multiple downloads.  It really makes the endless I-5 miles go much quicker.

At Redding we stayed at a place we’ve been before, Mountain Gate RV park.  Very nice, very clean restrooms and showers, and friendly folk.  We also topped off on propane there as we were headed for four days off grid here in Oregon.  The best scenery up thisaways is easily Mt. Shasta, and it was still snowy beautiful in August.  This from Loni’s cellphone:

Looks like a Japanese painting.  From Redding it was I-5 up to Weed, then US 97 north through Klamath Falls (not particularly memorable), skirting Upper Klamath Lake (huge and pretty), then up the valley to the junction with SR 58.  Somewhere along the way we stopped at this diner and had a very nice lunch, including home made pie(!).  Just about every construction worker in the area was in there. I love the Greyhound bus stop sign by the road.

  Going NW on 58, we turned north on county road 46 which took us through a gazillion trees to our campsite on the Crane Prairie Reservoir, just north of the Wickiup Reservoir.  The place was virtually deserted, with no one else in our loop, and just a couple of unseen/heard souls in other loops, which were widely separated by forest.

We spent two nights here in some of the most profound silence we’ve ever experienced.  No bird sounds at all.  Almost no human sounds save for the occasional fisherman’s motor on the lake.  Quite a change from the freeway-adjacent stops the last two nights.  A path led down to the lake from our site, where a fishing skiff was tied up.  We never saw anyone come near it, so don’t know what it was doing there.

We debated a lot about the mountains we could see across the lake, but finally decided we were looking at South Sister (with all the snow), Broken Top, center, and don’t know.  All subject to revision until we can get back and check our detailed Oregon mapbook, which, of course, I left at home.

Anyway, it was a beautiful vista.

We did a lot of walking around and reading, and just decompressing from the drive up.  My allergies at night were pretty bad (pine trees??) and I had a lot of trouble sleeping.  Too quiet?  In one of our strolls we found these memorials affixed to the trees.  Guess someone’s grandparents really liked the place.

The second afternoon we were joined by a couple who were touring on bicycles.  Oof.  They looked mighty tired when they pulled in, quickly set up their tent, ate something cold, and crashed.  I almost felt guilty sitting in the relative luxury of the rig.  But we long ago paid our tent dues, albeit without chuffing around the country on bikes.  We left the campground and continued north on County 46, which goes up and around Mt. Bachelor, a big ski area.  A pretty drive, especially the little jewel that is Devil’s Lake and the view across to Bachelor.

It was good to be reminded of why we bought the rig.  It’s been too long since our last real trip.

A GOOD CUPPA JOE

Good gravy!  As I write this, it is one week shy of a year since we ended this cruise.  The King of Procrastination will be my epitaph for sure. 

We departed Costa Rica and spent a day at sea enroute to Guatamala, our next stop.  The usual routine.  I gallantly assisted Loni by finishing off the second half of her breakfast cinnamon bun.  After, of course, demolishing my own along with a bowl of oatmeal.  What happens at sea, stays at sea, except for the poundage.  Spent the morning reading in front of the panoramic windows at the bow in the Constellation Lounge.  For me, this is the best place on the ship.  Relatively quiet and with 180 degree views.  After lunch, we heard another Bill Hall lecture on the Canal and learned that the U.S. got outbid on supplying the concrete for the construction of the new locks by only $1.5 million (to a consortium of Italy, Korea, Spain, and Panama).  Fast forward to today.  While the century-old U.S. concrete of the old locks is still in excellent shape, the newly-opened locks suffer abismally from holes that are causing huge leaks.  The “fix” is to insert steel rods and inject epoxy into the holes!  Many lawsuits are pending.  Amazing.

Walnut pie for dessert at lunch and chocolate/mocha cake for tea in the afternoon.  Decadence.  Afternoon trivia did not go well, us scoring 12/20 with 17 as the winner.  Who could possibly know that Wrigley gum was the first barcoded product? Bah!  Dinner was vegetables en croute for Loni, shrimp pasta in lobster sauce for me.  Oh, the hardship.  At our table was a couple from Yorkshire, so we made the obligatory “All Creatures” comments to tolerant smiles.  He was upset because the ship had run out of his favorite cider and this was simply an outrage.  The other couple was from Germany so we discussed my old beer clients, Bitburger and Erdinger. Early day tomorrow for portfall, so to bed early.

The port for Guatamala is Quetzal (the national bird), which is strictly a working port, surrounded by jungle, with nary a tourist spot of interest.  I don’t include the bazaar that one has to navigate between the gangway and the waiting buses.  If kitchy shopping is your thing, it lies within that grove of trees behind us.  We again signed up for an all-day tour ($119 each)to include a coffee plantation and the colonial-era city of Antigua.  As the tour left at 7:30, we were up at 5:30 to ablute, grab breakfast, and wait for our disembarkation call (we were group 16, as you can see by my sticker). 

All went smoothly and we were on our way with our enthusiastic guide, Dario.  It was about a 1 1/2 hour drive to the coffee plantation, with not much to marvel at until we got near the volcanoes.  One was distantly venting a bit of steam, below.  When we got to the plantation, the entry drive was so narrow the bus had to do a 47-point turn to back into it, completely blocking the highway for some time, resulting in a huge backup in both directions.  Incredibly, not one car honked.  Everyone, even the motorcyclists, waited patiently (and it took a while) for the maneuver to complete.  Try that in the states and the drivers would be threatening to sue.  I liked the Jeepney-style bus that got hung up in the traffic.

The tour was quite interesting.  Coffee bushes are grown under canopy trees to provide shade.  A tree starts producing beans after only two years, but is not mature until about the age of ten.  The trees self-fertilize, having both the female and male parts.  The pods are ripe when they are red or yellow and are all picked by hand, in December, by local women.  The beans you see in the photo are all colors, and this in mid-November.  After harvesting, the beans are dumped in a large vat.  The best quality ones are the heaviest and they sink; the #2’s float.  After washings and fermentation for 2 days, they are spreand outside on drying tables for about 10 days.  Our guide said this farm grows 40,000 lbs annually, which doesn’t seem like enough to pay for the 60 temporary pickers, but I guess they are only on the payroll for a short time. 

After the tour we all relaxed under the trees for a very nice coffee break.  I thought the coffee was quite smooth, but my impaired taste buds couldn’t pick up any particular flavors.  Loni thought it was good.

As we were waiting around to get on the bus, the local volcano decided to put on a show.  In the inset picture, it’s the one on the left, and you can barely see the smoke puff starting.

Back on the bus for the drive to Antigua, which was designated the capitol in 1541, and sits at an altitude of 5,000 ft.  This is supposedly a big flower growing area, both roses and tulips, the latter for export to Holland!  We didn’t see any flower farms, but lots of farmland and jungle growth.  The city is laid out grid-fashion, with fairly narrow streets and no buildings over two stories (save government, churches, etc.).  It all looked pretty much like this shot from the bus.

Once we arrived we assembled the group for a walking tour over the cobblestone streets.  Alas, we never went inside anything!  Except the jade store, of course.  Gotta keep those merchants happy.  Except for a couple of views, I didn’t find the place particularly interesting save for the fact that it has looked like this for hundreds of years.

Almost nothing is open to the street; private homes are all behind walls, but we did get the occasional peek into a courtyard, and some of the homes sport flowers.  The fountain was in the main square, and featured a number of bosomy babes clutching their, uh, bosoms.

This was the prettiest street we saw.  Don’t know what any of it is, our guide was less than stellar.

There was a main town square that was packed with locals, tourists, and hucksters.  It was quite colorful, centered on the fountain and backed by the handsome white government building.

There were loads of Indian women in bright colors that were hawking wares throughout the square and in other areas as well.  Talk about multitasking—the woman leaning back on the car is not only carrying her cloth goods, but a huge bundle on her back and a baby in her arms.  Check out the look on the lady at the left as she glances over.

Off for lunch at a very nice patio restaurant.  Everything was steam tray served, but it was quite good.  This is pretty much the standard fare for the country, and quite similar to what we got in Costa Rica.  Chicken, plantains, beans, rice, beef and potatoes, and a blue corn tortilla.  I appear to be in white face from my suntan lotion.

After lunch we trundled down the street to the Jade Museum, which is a working jewelry shop that gives lectures and demonstrations.  It was interesting, especially learning that Guatamala has some significant deposits of quality gems, but we found it easy to avoid buying anything.  After the shop, it was time to load up for the 2 hour trip back to the ship.  This shot illustrates one of the downsides of cruising.  Multiple ships with multiple tours all congregate on the same few tourist spots.  That’s our guide in front, but that’s another tour altogether across the street.  Out of view are three more buses and related groups.  All trying to escape at the same time.  Oye.

Trying to get out of the city we encountered repeated traffic jams, as the buses all had to perform multi-point turns to negotiate various corners.  At one point we passed a bunch of firemen soliciting funds.  Apparently they are not paid by the government, but have to rely on donations.  Yikes!  Back on board around 4:45.  Loni’s foot made it through the day, but it is swelling up again with a bruise on the inner ankle.  We applied first aid in the form of tea and cake on the stern as the ship pulled out of its berth.  Dinner in the “to order” cafeteria, but they overcooked our fish.  Nice show with a gal pianist doing jazz and show tunes and remarkably well supported by the house band seeing as how she had just come on board before departure and had no rehearsal.  Still not sleepy, so we finished off the day with (groan) coffee and dessert.  It never ends.

COZZZZZZTA RICA

After exiting the Canal, we had a sea day on our way to CR.  We got to put our clocks back an hour after entering the next time zone.  Sticky bun and fresh OJ for breakfast, nice lunch with a couple from Austin, TX, played trivia with only us as a team, dinner (pea soup, escargot, and salmon) with a Trump-supporting (but nice) couple who were power cruisers with 6 future trips already lined up, and the evening entertainment of a trumpet playing singer and and lady standup comedienne.  Both were quite good, and we thought this the best show so far.

Unfortunately, CR was the most boring part of the trip, other than Puerto Vallarta (more about that later).  It’s too bad, because every travel report I’ve read about CR extols the natural beauty of the flora and fauna.  I’m sure they’re not lying, and were probably talking about the Caribbean side of the country, but our Pacific-side tour didn’t come close to being satisfying on either front.  We docked at Puntarenas, which is nothing more than a working seaport, no tourist sights at all. We had signed up for the most expensive (gasp) of the tours, at $199 each (!), a nine hour excursion to include the Pacific Rain Forest Aerial Tram and a boat trip of the “famed” Tarcoles River.  This was, of course, the “Manager’s Recommendation” of the various tour options offered by Celebrity.  The Manager is a master of hyperbole.

We hit the breakfast buffet early at 6:30, and after the usual waiting-around disembarkation routine, we boarded buses and settled in for a 1 1/2 hour ride to the rain forest tram.  I will say that everything was lushly green, but that’s all it was:  a lot of green.  The trams were modern and seemed well-maintained.  The group ahead of us taking off:

The rise up is pretty steep.  Note the two cars at the top, and the watercourse below.

Aaaaand, that’s pretty much all we saw.  Virtually no wildlife.  The most interesting things were the other trams.

OK, we did see one bit of fauna, a bird, waaayyy off in the jungle.  Can you spot it?  I had to use the electronic zoom on my little Lumix, and the results are definitely not sharp. Not even Audibon Chuck will be able to identify this sucker.

At least it wasn’t raining during our ride up and down the tram, but it sure started once we returned to the bottom.  The next phase of the tour was to view various snakes and critters in enclosures while trying to follow the earnest but unintelligible guide, Armando, all while trying to stay dry.  Yes, his mouth seemed perpetually to be skewed like that.  Nice guy, tho.

On our walkabout we did see a few bits of life.  Don’t have any notes on what the hairy pods were, but that’s a tree iguana and I think the plant is some variety of heliotrope, with a false flower which actually is an asymetric leaf.  I think.  Loni’s notes are, um, obscure.

We had lunch at the park, simple local fare that was quite tasty.  Beans, rice, chicken, salad, fruit, and a plantain cooked in maple syrup.  We also bought some CR coffee, 3 bags (12 oz each) for $15 total.  After lunch we piled back on the buses to go back to the coast for the Tarcoles River tour.  This turned out to be an even bigger dud than the tram.  I guess I had some African Queen steaming in mind, winding up a twisting river lined with dense jungle and lots of monkeys and birds.  Not!  We loaded on to the boat, scrambling and elbowing to get an outside seat so you could take a picture without shooting over someone.  Needn’t have bothered, there was precious little to shoot.  The “river” turned out to be the estuary of the river, very broad and with uninteresting vegetation on the banks.  So much for the African Queen. 

No monkeys or exotic birds, just caymans and mostly shorebirds we can see in California.  Even with my binocs there wasn’t much to view.

And that was pretty much it.  We spent a loooong time idling in the estuary at one point while the guide was imploring everyone to use their binocs or long lenses to see some interesting bird that was about a football field away in deep brush.  I never could focus on the dang thing, whatever it was.  This is pretty much all I saw.  I was sympatico with the guy in the rear leaning on his arm.  Oh, the excitement!

By the time we got back to the buses, the rain had started again and we got pretty soaked.  It was not a comfortable ride back to the ship in wet clothes inside a humid bus with 40 other drenched souls.  Once back, we changed clothes and opted to skip the sit-down dinner and headed for the buffet instead, and it wasn’t bad at all for dinner.  Roast beef, lots of Mexican entrees and sides, and of course desserts.  We looked in on the evening’s entertainment and saw some acrobats (meh) and some not-bad classic rock (Stones, Beatles, etc.).  Didn’t keep us from leaving early and crashing.  Fitting end for a fizzled day.

HERMAN THE GERMAN

Gatun Lake is situated in the valley of the Chagres River. It was formed by the construction of the Gatun Dam in 1907–1913. The damming of the river flooded the originally wooded valley; almost a century later, the stumps of old mahogany trees can still be seen rising from the water, and submerged snags form a hazard for any small vessels that wander off the marked channels.  The lake has an area of 164 sq mi at its normal level of 85 ft above sea level; it stores 183 billion cubic feet of water, which is about as much as the Chagres River brings down in an average year.  Here’s another view of the dam, with the river running off behind:

Ships waiting for their turn to enter the Gatun locks; the middle one is really riding low.

There’s not a whole lot to see while crossing the lake to get to the Cut.  Mostly it’s meandering shoreline with estuaries branching way off to the sides.  Too bad it was such a hazy day, not great for photography.

The Canal has an elegantly simple means of navigation across the twisting path the ships must follow in order to stay in the dredged channel.  On the islands or the main shore are a series of verticle markers, visible from a great distance.  Once a set of markers is lined up so that it looks like a solid stripe, the ship knows it is on the proper course in the lake.  It follows those markers until the next set appears, then it alters course to make those line up.  See the offset markers in the top half below, meaning the ship is not precisely on course and needs to come starboard a bit.  In the bottom half, the markers are (almost) lined up and appear as an unbroken vertical stripe.  Actually, we need to come port a bit.  The approaching ship is keying on a set of markers behind us.

An interesting historical footnote appeared as we approached the Gaillard Cut.  During WWII, Germany built a number of gigantic cranes to be used to haul U-boats out of the water and other tasks.  One of these,  Schwimmkräne No. 1, was turned over to the U.S. as a spoil of war, redubbed “Herman the German,” dismantled, shipped through the canal in 1946, and resurrected in Long Beach, Ca. After extensive testing, YD-171 was officially placed into service on 31 December 1948, and was a fixture at the Naval Shipyard for decades. She lifted everything from the gun barrels of USS New Jersey (BB-62), steam locomotives for South Korea, the underwater habitat SEALAB II, the first atomic reactor on the West Coast, and even Howard Hughes’ H-4 Hercules (the “Spruce Goose”) when she was placed on display in Long Beach in the early 1980s.  Deemed obsolete, it was sold to the Canal Company and moved here (intact!) in 1996, and played an important role in the expansion of the canal.

The Gaillard Cut, also called Culebra Cut, is an excavated gorge 8 miles long across the Continental Divide. It’s named for David du Bose Gaillard, the American engineer who supervised much of its construction. The unstable nature of the soil and rock in the area of Gaillard Cut made it the most difficult and challenging section of the entire canal project. Workers who labored in temperatures of 100 or more degrees used rock drills, dynamite, and steam shovels to remove 96 million cubic yards of earth and rock as they lowered the floor of the excavation to within 40 feet of sea-level. Hillsides were subject to unpredictable earth and mud slides and at times the floor of the excavation was known to rise precipitously simply due to the weight of the hillsides. The well-known Cucaracha slide continued for years and poured millions of cubic yards into the canal excavation. Although the hillsides have been cut back and their angles decreased over the years to lessen the threat of serious slides, dredging remains a necessary part of canal maintenance in order to insure an open channel. This shot shows some of the cut-backs, unfortunately taken through the blue-tinted windows of the lounge.

Work continues on cutting back the banks to reduce slides and erosion.

Approaching the end of the cut, the difficult nature of the dig is displayed by these huge hillsides.  In the background appears the Centennial Bridge, opened in 2004 to supplement the only other crossing, the Bridge of the Americas (the small service bridges built in the lock structures at Miraflores and Gatún Locks are only usable when the lock gates are closed and have limited capacity). 

For perspective, there’s a bus or truck crossing right in the center of the bridge.

After passing under the bridge, we entered the Pedro Miguel locks, the middle set of the three locks series.  We again are using the narrower old locks, on the left.  To the right of the picture you can see the much broader new channel for the new super lock in this set.  The PM lock is a single one.  There is an oncoming ship in the left lock, but you can only see its superstructure as it is at the lower level.

Having not eaten in, oh, hours, we retreated to the cafe to watch the proceedings while downing a nourishing lunch.  Hmmm.

The procedures and equipment at the PM locks are much the same as at the Gatun ones, so I won’t lard up the blog with similar photos.

 

 

I did want to include, however, the famed “rubber bend” in the lock.

Below is the view straight down the side of the ship.  One foot of clearance!  I gripped the camera fairly tightly.  That’s the top of one of the little donkey engines down below.

Looking back while in the PM locks, towards the Centennial Bridge, with the new lock channel on the left.

Turning back the other way, we are immediately approaching the Mira Flores locks, the last of the series.  In the right background is the Bridge of the Americas, the first one to cross the canal.  The channel for the new locks is out of the picture way off to the right.

Peeping over the hills is the only view we had of the skyscrapers of Panama City, which lies on the Pacific.  From what we heard from other travelers, we aren’t missing anything.

Entering the Mira Flores locks.

The water goes down, the workers go home to dinner, and the final gate opens to let us out.

Exiting the lock, into the bay just before the Pacific Ocean.  The roiling water is from the discharge of the lock water back into the sea as our lock emptied.

We’re through!  Under the Bridge of the Americas and we’ll be in the Pacific.  Farewell Panama Canal, you were a very neat ride!

Happy Cruisers.