Key West

We're sitting here at an RV campground in Key West, with the weather a balmy 61 degrees and the wind blowing gusts of 28 mph. Yesterday was the nicest day we've had, sunny and about 68. Mostly we've been freezing our tails off, with lows in the 30s and 40s. I know that that sounds warm compared with what you've been getting, but not so good for camping. We just put our longies away a couple of days ago.

We were lucky dodging a couple of huge snow storms on our way down here. We visited Angie's brother in Charlottesville, VA, getting there just after the 20 inches of snow from one storm had been cleared away, and escaping just before the next big nor'easter hit. Heading over to Atlanta, we stayed with our new friend, Mark Hendrickson, who's throwing over his present office job to devote his life to his real love, writing. He shared some of his short stories with us, and he has real talent, plus some life experiences which give him plenty of fodder for invention. (Mark is the brother of Marla, who is married to jazz pianist Tad Weed. What a lot of talent in that family!) The three of us managed to crash the engagement party of our niece Kim, who's had quite a few adventures in her own life, and her fiance Chip. They've known each other for eight years, and as Chip says, it was a a crooked road to the engagement, and all their friends got there before he did.

We were disappointed to find that we couldn't camp in any of the public campgrounds in the Keys. They are booked up to eleven months in advance--no more walk-ins. It's getting so you can't be nomads anymore, at least in the popular locations. We found the same thing in southern Utah. Last year they kept a small percentage of spaces open for transients, but this year they are going 100 % reservation in the national parks. At least in the west you can camp on BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land if you are self sufficient, but it ain't that way in the Keys. We miss our gypsy adventures in Mexico, where you can go just about anywhere and find someplace to camp.

Our best camping experience so far was on Anastasia Island off St. Augustine. It was cold, but sunny, and the white sand beaches are beautiful. Angie got a couple of really nice images there. Otherwise, we haven't been able to do much of the kind of photography we hoped to do. Savannah was nice, too, but the weather wasn't conducive to photography--gray skies and lots of wind.

Coming through West Palm Beach we reconnected with our old friends Jack and Donna Jacobs, who lived on their sailboat Horizon in the Bahamas for 17 years. They got some of their first sailing experience with Jim on the Escapade, and we spent a lot of time with them at Man-of-War Cay when we were on our year long sailing trip 25 years ago. They gave up their boat, a beautiful wood Alden yawl, about 10 years ago, and now ride out the hurricanes in relative safety in their small house near the intra-coastal waterway.

Today we'll spend the day in Key West, which has become an absolute zoo, and not much like we remembered it from our separate experiences many years ago. And then we're off to the Everglades, where we hope to resume our picture making. From there we'll work our way around the Gulf Coast to New Orleans and southern Louisiana, visiting more friends along the way.

Update! See the photos that go with this blog here: http://www.fotogypsies.com/GulfCoast1/

Love to you all,

The Fotogypsies

New Found Land!

Newfoundland native Alfred with the gigantic iceberg we
saw in Trinity Harbour, Newfoundland.
(click on any image to see a larger version)

Thursday, July 7, 2008 L'Anse aux Meadows, NFLD

Today dawned beautiful and sunny, the third in a row after many days of rain, and the first without high winds. We took advantage of the break in the weather to book ourselves on an iceberg, whale and birdwatching cruise out of St. Anthony, high on the west side of Newfoundland. The icebergs were easy--there were two just outside the harbor. We were impressed, although our guides told us that a couple of weeks ago they were 8 times as large. The ones were were looking at now had been on their way for up to three years, and would be history in another month. In the meantime the water (we tasted a chip) and oxygen they contain had been frozen for 1000 years and was the purest on earth.

We had just about given up on sighting a whale and were returning to port when one blew about 1/4 mile away. We gave chase, and the whale obliged us with several flipper waves and a full broach before we had to turn away. Unfortunately the boat was gyrating so much to keep in touch with the whale and to give everyone of the 50 of us aboard a view that we were unable to get any really good photos.

Cape Bonavista Harbour with a replica of the ship Mathew that
John Cabot (an Italian, real name Giovanni Caboto, Angie points out) landed from in 1497 (the first European to set foot on the American continent since the Vikings).

There have been quite a few surprises in Newfoundland. For one thing, where we expected to see weathered shingle sided buildings such as are common in Maine and New Brunswick, here on the western side of the island all of the houses were neat, mostly white, vinyl sided bungalows.
Wood and paint do not stand up well to the weather here, and for the last 30 years (shortly after the first highway connected all of the fishing villages), all the the new houses have been built with vinyl siding and most of the old ones have been resided.

The highway has brought another interesting feature. In most places, the soil is too thin over the rock to allow cultivation. So people plant gardens along side the road, where the ground was broken up to create the roadbed. They stake out their rectangle (it's Queen's land, we were told, but she doesn't seem to mind), build a fence to keep out the moose and caribou, and plant their potatoes, carrots, rutabaga and cabbages. Also along the highways we saw huge stacks of firewood. Men go into the bush in the winter time, cut their wood and haul it to the side of the road on sleds pulled by snowmobiles. Each stack is marked with the owner's permit number--and nobody bothers it.

Tickle Cove (A tickle is a narrow entrance to a cove or harbor where
the rocks are said to tickle the keel of the boats as they come in).
Be sure to click on this image to see the full panorama!

July 10, 2008 Twillingate, Newfoundland "Death of an Iceberg"

Highway 1 stretches from Port aux Basques, on the southwest corner of the island, 550 miles to St John's, on the far east end. It is the aorta from which secondary arteries stretch out to the southern coast and north up the peninsulas that reach out toward Labrador and the Atlantic Ocean. In Twillingate, an archipelago of islands jutting into the Atlantic from one of these peninsulas, we get directions to the town dump. We follow the pavement almost to the end, then turn down a gravel road that winds through rocky crags with glimpses of the ocean in the background. What a place for a dump! "It looks like Corsica," Francoise had told us at the campground. (Francoise, petite, 60 years old with jet black hair, had hitched here from Quebec City carrying her 35 pound pack.) Acrid smoke from an incinerator and a congregation of gulls told us we had arrived at the dump, and we pulled La Gitana off to the side of the road and followed a path over the rocky hillocks toward the ocean. Suddenly we saw it, looking something like the turret and superstructure of a dazzling white submarine that had somehow drifted into the bay and foundered.
Rockscape at the dump, Twillingate, NFLD


The iceberg began its journey in Greenland maybe three years ago, splitting off a sea level glacier that had already spent a thousand years working its way down to the sea. The water frozen into the ice and the air bubbles trapped in it are the purest on earth, uncontaminated by polymers and preservatives. You can buy the water in local shops for a couple of bucks a bottle. After breaking off from the glacier, the iceberg drifted across the sea and down the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland, until it was pushed by wind and tide into this bay. While we are watching and photographing it, we hear a tremendous crack, then another. The iceberg is beginning to break apart. One end seems to be rising and falling with the waves, independently of the other. It is obviously aground. The next morning we think the iceberg has disappeared; we don't see it until we are at the edge of the cliffs. What is left of it has been pushed up into the point of the bay. Pieces of it dot the harbor. In a few days it will be gone completely.


A panorama showing Norris Point on a fjord near Gross Morne National Park, in the west of Newfoundland. (You may have to use your slider to see all of this one!)



July 19, 2008

On our last day in St. John's we went to the top of Signal Hill, the only point from which you can see both the ocean and the city, one of the oldest European settlements on the continent. From here, in the days of sailing ships, merchants' agents were stationed to fly signal flags when a ship bound for that particular merchant was approaching port. A character in a novel (The Navigator from New York) takes her nephew/foster son up signal hill and points out to him the directions of England, Canada, The United States. "They don't know we exist," she tells him. We felt a little the same way. Before coming here, Newfoundland seemed a wild, remote place. Once we arrived we found it full of surprises. For example, where we expected "quaint fishing villages" we found settlements of neatly kept houses.
In this region on the west side of Newfoundland, nearly all of the fishing dories are painted this same orange color. "It's tradition," a fisherman here in Little Cove told us. "It's an easy color to see if the fisherman has trouble at sea and needs to call for help. But the orange paint has become scarce, and now some of the new boats are white or blue."

As you travel from the west, the sparsest settled and most "unspoiled" (if such a term can be applied to Newfoundland) side of the province, the terrain and the nature of the towns change, as do the accents of the people, but one thing that doesn't seem to change is the friendliness and openness of the Newfoundlanders.
When we went down to Dunfield, near Trinity, to see the huge iceberg we had heard was there, we ran into Alfred, who was sitting of a log talking to a couple of other tourists. "Is this your land we're trespassing on to take our photographs?" we asked him. "In Dunfield, you can walk anywhere you like," he replied.

Street in St. John's, Newfoundland


Fish houses and lobster pots. The yellow wildflowers covered the island!

Land of Wonders

On Abraham Lincoln's birthday we crossed the border at Reynosa and McAllen, and after a week in Texas, we passed over into New Mexico and reentered the United States. During all of this time we have been traveling through border country known as "the frontera," a land more Hispanic and Indian than Anglo. It is wonderful country, for its natural beauty as well for its cultural mix and man-made wonders. We can't deny the pleasure of smooth highways and super clean, well stocked (with soap and toilet paper) bathrooms. Not that these things don't exist in Mexico. We are finding them more and more often, especially in the newer Pemex gasoline stations: but you can't count on them. When we pull into a park or campground in Mexico, Angie designates herself as "the bathroom patrol," taking it upon herself to make sure that the facilities are adequately clean and functional.

Today we are poised on the brink of a defunct open pit copper mine in Bisbee, Arizona. You can't believe the impact that seeing this for the first time has on you. It's a mix of the kind of awe one has upon first viewing the Grand Canyon (or the Barrancas de Cobre or Chiricahua Nat'l Monument--see below), and the horror of witnessing the destruction we have wreaked on the environment, all the while knowing that it is our need for and dependence on the earth's resources that has caused this destruction. Bisbee itself is a fascinating town full of artists, colorful people and colorful buildings. We met Allberto Lucero, who calls himself a llanero, part hispanic and part indio, in a parking lot where he was working as an attendant. In his lifetime he has been a soldier (a Viet Nam vet) cowboy, actor, story teller and now author of a book of stories his greargrandmother, who lived to be 102, told him.

We missed a bit of border country drama this morning. On the highway below where we are camped, a white car forced a van off the road. Soon the van was hemmed in by white and green SUV's, the vehicle used by the border patrol, and there were a dozen or so Mexicans sitting along the edge of the road, waiting to be hauled away--victims of a failed attempt to reach the promised land (or as Willie Nelson sings, "the broken promise land.")

One of our favorite spots here was the town of Truth or Consequences, just because it is so quirky. T or C is little more than a village with two main streets, actually one making a loop, about six blocks long. It was originally called Geronimo Springs but changed its name to satisfy the producder of a radio quiz show about 58 years ago. Well, you'd think a in a town named after a quiz show people would have some answers, but when we asked directions (trying to find an artists' party we had heard about), nobody seemed to know the names of the streets or the location of one of the biggest and most colorful (purple) buildings in town. We found the party, the annual meeting of the local artists' association, and met a lot of interesting people. We concluded that there are two kinds of people--poles apart--in T or C: artists, intellectuals, and bohemian types on one hand, and on the other, people who had just filtered down out of the mountains where they's been holed up for about a hundred years. We camped in a low end trailer park (Angie vetoes the term tr***** tr***) for $16, which included a soak in the naturral hot springs baths and enjoyed it so much that we stayed a second night. But this time, because the winds were so strong that we were afraid to put the top up on La Gitana, we stayed in the Charles Motel and Spa, which also included hot tubs, all for $37.





We could easily spend months exploring the natural wonders of this little section of New Mexico and Arizona, weeks on any one of them. Maybe the most astounding to us were the rock formations and grottoes of Chiricahua National Monument, partly because in this little chain of mountains between two deserts they were so unexpected. We hiked until we were exhausted, shooting endlessly, knowing that in no photo would we be able to capture the impression this rugged and beautiful land was having on us.

After seeing Patagonia and Arivaca, we plan to check out two of the other wonders of this part of the world, Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon, before heading for Ann Arbor. Hope you are all well and those of you in the northland have been able to dig out from under the latest snowfall.

Love from the Fotogypsies

Oh, the picture at the top? A castoff mannequin from the Queen Copper Mine tour.



The Fotogypsies in Oaxaca