I am sitting in a dark pool in our hotel in Crescent City after a huge Chinese dinner. We left Portland in good time this morning, and there were no traffic jams or border waits, but even so, it is a long drive and rather hairy from time to time as you make your way out to the sea from the inland. William was gripping his seat and clenching his teeth as we drove the last windy road before we got here and whispered to Mike to slow down.
We stopped in the whitewater capital of the US -- Grant's Pass -- for lunch. Riverside Park is very pretty and there are ducks and geese and big rafty boats that go down the Rogue River for a wild ride, I guess. It reminded William of Penticton and drifting down the river there on an inner tube. It was super hot and we had a nice picnic and William took a dip in the river.
We decided we wanted to visit the mysterious Oregon Vortex and Mystery House (in preparation for saskquatch sightings in the Redwood Forest) and so we asked our GPS girl to lead the way, but she had a lot of trouble dealing with the mysteries of the vortex and Highway 5, so in the end, we had to figure it out ourselves. We drove up to the place and joined a tour and demonstration of all the mysterious properties of the Vortex. Brian, the host, was very entertaining and showed us how people shrink and grow depending on their relationship to the vortex and we went into the mystery house which looked like one of Batman's enemies' lairs, except a lot more rustic. A broom stood on its end and a bottle rolled uphill and people's heights changed and Mike said he felt a bit dizzy which seemed to be just what Brian wanted to hear. At the end of the tour, Brian showed us lots of strange photos of poltergeist-y forces working in the vortex and we left amazed and mystified and kitsch-ed right out!
Mike's romance with GPS Jill underwent a very unpleasant bumpy patch, when Jill insisted we take one route, when we all knew that it was wrong. Once we got close to Crescent City, she insisted Mike pull a U-turn in the middle of the four lane highway and finally we gave up on her and phoned the hotel for directions. The Northwood Lodge is a nice place with a pool for William, a nice little patio perfect for the sipping of a glass of wine for me, a hearty breakfast for Mike and a soft bed for Anthony, but Crescent City (except for the Wing Wah Restaurant which serves delicious Chinese food until nine o'clock at night!) seems a little dead. Mike's family stopped here on their way to Disneyland a thousand years ago when Mike was Anthony's age (well, maybe not a thousand) but he doesn't remember it very well. He thought it was up on a crest, but we are right across from the harbour which is full of fishing boats and dredgers and things like that.
Tomorrow we'll experience the majesty of the redwood forest (which we drove through this evening in a weary dash to our hotel and to dinner). There is a lot of logging going on in Oregon -- I've seen more logging trucks on the highway than we ever see in BC and the Redwood Forest is only a tiny vestige of what once was, but the trees are huge and noble and the forest is deep and dark and ferny and far more mysterious than even the mysterious vortex. Nature-wise, we've been surprised at how many turkey vultures we've seen circling the hills and dales along the roadside. We've also seen lots of lovely deer as well.
I wish I knew how to add photographs to the blog. I have tried to figure it out but you know how "help" is on the computer. No help at all!
I wish you knew how to add pictures too (sigh)
ReplyDeleteHi Jean! Wow - tag-team blogging. This is going to be great, I know. I feel a little inadequate already, you being a published playwright and all...LOL. Just kidding, I'm loving it already.
ReplyDeleteI myself have told GPS Jill exactly where to go on a number of occasions over the course of the trip. Luckily both boys had their headphones on. Norbert can't understand my overwhelming desire to throw it out of the window as soon as he pulls it out of the glove compartment. My fail-safe to Jill was to go to the hotel computer and do a Google Map search on the destination for the day and print it out to take along in the car as well. Sometimes it was just the most sensible thing to do. We hadn't uploaded any updates to our Majellan for some time, so it could POSSIBLY have been out of date, but I doubt it. I think it was just a dumb technological idea that everyone is convinced will save them and it WON'T damnit!
To add photos: I will try and summarize what I learned by trial and error:
if you haven't already installed Google Chrome as your browser instead of Internet Explorer, try and do that first. I had much more success using that after IE crashed on me repeatedly when I tried to add photos.
Sign onto Blogger.com and your own blog as usual once you get to your search page on Google Chrome. The 'front end' page will look different; don't be alarmed; just type your address into the line where you would normally see the web address.
Cut and paste your text portion of the blog from Word.
I found it easier to compose off-line first, then paste it in.
Take the memory card out of your camera and insert it into whatever slot will take it on your laptop (if you're using a hotel computer, I'm not sure what their policy on 'foreign' devices is)they may frown on inserting anything that isn't sanctioned by them first.
Once you have the memory card inserted and you're on your newly-composed blog page, click on the little photo icon at the top of the blank blog you're working on.
There are a number of choices, i.e. insert video, insert weblink, etc. You are only trying to paste in some photos, and the blog site now wants to know where you're trying to 'grab' them from.
Click on 'Browse', and try and find the drive that your SD card from the camera is located.
If you double-click on that drive, all your photos will be in there, probably arranged numerically but with individual jpeg numbers.
You can click on 'date modified' to just pull up the ones taken most recently. This will short-circuit the need to go through all sorts of images that you won't want to insert.
You may need to 'preview' them to see which ones you'd like to insert; just make a note of the .jpeg numbers or re-name them immediately to make identification easier before you try and insert them.
Once you've decided on the images, press Control+Click to select individual photos, and then 'insert selected images' Your images will appear as little empty boxes while they're uploading, then you should gradually see them magically appear one by one.
If they're all uploaded correctly, click 'Publish' to get the new post out there, photos and all.
I hope I've remembered all the steps correctly. Sorry this has been such an interminable comment. Probably should have just tried to do this via email instead!
Miss you already!! Esther, Norbert & Evan
Thanks for the instructions. I will try them tomorrow, although I'm even having trouble taking pictures with Mike's phone! Aargh!
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