On the Road with Jan and George

We arrived in Iowa City and joined Vicky Brown and Eleanor Newton (who flew in yesterday) who were waiting for us at Maile Sagen’s house.

57.1% of the M7 - Jan, Maile, Eleanor and Vicky

When Jan became active in the ombudsman world some years ago she developed a group of friends who decided that seeing each other only once a year at a meeting was not enough.  The M7, as they call themselves, have since gotten together at one of their homes every year for a good part of the past decade.  They’re now mostly retired, Jan’s retirement leaves only one of the gang still an active ombuds, and they’re still getting together each year.  This year’s M7 meeting won’t take place until September in Santa Barbara, but by a happy coincidence two of the seven happened to schedule a visit to Iowa City which overlapped with our visit.  Vicky was the Ombudsman at Central Florida in Orlando until her retirement just a few months ago, Eleanor was Ombuds at Cal State Monterey Bay until she moved to Princeton a few years ago.

The next morning Maile took us all on a driving tour of the city and the University of Iowa and the nearby environs.  The University is the largest employer in the state, and Iowa City has the feel of a real university town.  We stopped at the Cedar Ridge winery, which is also a distillery who make their own bourbon and gin.  We weren’t so fond of their wines, but their bourbon was very nice and I bought a bottle to help us through the lonely evenings on Lake Vermilion.

Farmers' Market - Jan & Mail checking out the baked goods.

Saturday morning we all visited Maile’s favorite Farmers Market, after which Eleanor and Vicky packed up and Maile drove them back to the airport to head home.  But not before lunch.

One more lunch...

Meanwhile, Jan and I spent the afternoon wandering through downtown with its variety of crafts and antique stores.  We toured the museum in the Old Capitol building, which became the original building of the U of Iowa when it was first created less than two months after Iowa’s gaining statehood in 1847.

Iowa Avenue -The Old Capitol, and one of the"City of Literature plaques - "If you build it he will come".

And, or course, we always gravitate to local bookstores, and ended up in the city’s famous Prairie Lights Bookstore.  Iowa City is the world’s third named “City of Literature” (after Edinburgh and Melbourne), and an array of sidewalk plaques along Iowa Avenue attest to this status.

And we remembered to replenish our stock of bourbon and vermouth for our travelling bar.

During our drive from Nashville to St. Louis last week we had crossed the Tennessee and Ohio rivers, they were both high but not threatening to flood.  On the way from St. Louis to Iowa City we crossed the Missouri and Iowa rivers, neither of which looked unusually high.  But the highway we were traveling approached the Mississippi at Hannibal, and we decided to stop and check out Mark Twain’s home town and the setting for his Tom Sawyer tales.

The Mighty Mississippi at Hannibal.

Hannibal is a substantial town, quite apart from the scenic and touristy downtown riverfront area devoted to Mark Twain and his life and literary world.  And the Mississippi is indeed an impressively gargantuan river, not surprising that it lent considerable importance to the city when the river was the major mode of transport of goods and people up and down the midwest.

Jan whitewashing Tom Sawyer's fence.

George communing with Mark

Jan got to help whitewash Tom Sawyer’s famous fence, and old Mark was quite accommodating in posing for a photo with George.  But it turns out we didn’t know a soul in Hannibal (no, Helen, it seems we do not know everyone in the world).  So we bid farewell to the mighty river and pushed on to Iowa City, although we would cross the Mississippi a couple more times on our travels.

Wednesday morning Jan and I headed off to the St. Louis Zoo.  Many of our friends over the years have told us we were nuts,  but we’ve always visited zoos wherever we’ve traveled, even before we had kids.  We also have a special connection to this zoo, since George Johnson was director of their education center a number of years ago.  We had a short time to walk through their famous 1904 flight cage and some of the other bird exhibits before we took off for De Soto about one hour’s drive to the south.

Great Egret .......................................... and some kind of Cormorant

Some tropical ground bird...............................................and a Kookaburra.

Why De Soto?  Paul Pallazolla, the oldest of our next-door neighbors’ three kids was sixteen when we first moved to Costa Mesa in 1977.  Imagine our surprise when we learned that Wednesday was his 50th birthday!  His sisters are now in Connecticut (Maria, whom we saw with her family a few weeks before leaving New York) and Philadelphia (that’s Gina, whom we didn’t get to see).  So we went to De Soto to see Paul and his wife Mandy, and their two kids, David and Lauren, whom we’d never met.

Lauren, Paul & Mandy and their De Soto Home.

They have a lovely home on the shore of a community lake where they can boat, fish and swim, we had lunch and stayed and chatted into the evening, it was a wonderful visit.  Although we hadn’t been together in about thirty years and had many years of catching up to do, it felt as if we’d just seen them a few  months ago.

We headed back to St. Louis in time to share a fashionably late Manhattan with George & Barb, this was our last evening with them before leaving for Iowa City in the morning.

George does his magic...

The Arch from Citygarden - the dome is the Dred Scott court building.

The next morning (but not too early!) George drove us all downtown to the new Citygarden, a landscaped and sculpture-filled mall aligned with the Arch at the edge of the Mississippi.

Barb & George - life is good!

I had visited St.Louis shortly after George first came here, when the Arch was still pretty young, but nothing like Citygarden existed.  It’s a wonderful space, and apart from one eyesore of an office building which was allowed to be built there, provides an unobstructed extension of the park that the Arch sits on.

Lots of sculpture, much of it very cool!.

George's favorite view of the Arch.

George loves this new public space and the Arch itself, and is an enthusiastic tour guide.  He led us straight to one corner of the North base, a spot from which the Arch seems to sit completely crosswise.  He also pointed out to us the plaque on the stairs leading down to the river, which indicates the high water mark of the Great Flood of 1993.  You can see the riverfront sidewalk down on the right, considerably higher than the current level of the river, which is nevertheless still causing serious flooding downstream of St. Louis.

George is pointing to the plaque....which marks the flood level of 1993

Back home for dinner, where we were joined by Suzanne, the youngest of George and Barb’s three girls, and her boyfriend Ben.  Suzie graduated last year from Scripps College in Claremont – unfortunately we were in New York all the time she was in California and we never got to see her.  Suzie and Ben will be in Atlanta next year where she’s starting a Master’s program, we were really glad that we were able to see them on this trip.

Ben & Suzie                                                                    George G, Barb & Ben

We found our way to St. Louis, and our trusty Android phone’s GPS guided us to George & Barb Johnson’s home on Amherst Ave.  George and I were friends and roommates as graduate students at Stanford, and yes, our common name created interesting situations (some of them best discussed elsewhere).   For a while we had a third roommate named – you guessed it – George.

Jan & George J, Climatron in back.

Japanese Garden - the zig-zags make it hard for evil spirits to follow.

GBJ (George Brooks Johnson) was hired by Washington University’s Biology department straight from his Ph.D. work at Stanford, very unusual even at that time.  But after making a significant mark in molecular evolutionary genetics, he found himself drawn more to education than research, and has made quite a career for himself as an author of college and high school textbooks (see http://txtwriter.com/)

First stop after our arrival was a brief visit to the world-famous St. Louis Botanical Gardens, a gorgeous and fascinating place.  The Director of the gardens for the past forty years had been Peter Raven, our common friend from Stanford, who just retired last year.  We’d hoped to see him on our visit, but the day we arrived he was on his way to the Galapagos – very poor sense of priorities.  😉  But we thought of him as we explored the beautiful and serene Japanese Garden.

At the end of our visit to the Biltmore Estate we’re back on the road to Nashville.

A welcome committee of one.

Lots of music, on street corners, in the parks and coming out of every bar and restaurant.  Biscuits & gravy with grits for breakfast, barbecued everything, lively and tourist-packed town.  Nightlife on the Honkey-Tonk section of Broadway doesn’t begin until nine or ten – as we wended our way back to our car after midnight there was a traffic jam of cars coming into town on Third St.  Didn’t have the energy to stay up and attend any performances, we’ll have to come back.

Honkey Tonk Alley - reminds us of Bourbon Street.

Back on the road to St. Louis - this is May??

Won't see this guy in California.

Thursday morning, May 12

We leave Pinnacle and are back on the road to Asheville, NC, to get reacquainted with another old friend, Betsy Clark, whom I knew from the summer I spent in Woods Hole after graduating from Columbia (she was on the Columbia faculty at the time and joined my mentor, Teru Hayashi, when he moved his lab to the Marine Biological Laboratory every summer ).  We were planning to just stop to have lunch with Betsy, but all our friends told us how much they loved Asheville and we decided to spend a night and see at least some of the town.  We arrived in the afternoon and visited the River Arts District, where old warehouses and industrial buildings are being converted into studios, allowing a growing community of artists to produce, show and sell their work.  We had to remind ourselves that we’ll be living in our Subaru for the next few months, and acquiring anything which is not consumable is not a great idea.

George and Betsy by her front door.

Betsy moved to Asheville just a few years ago after retiring from her provost’s job at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.  We joined her for a glass of wine at her new home, then all went out for dinner to a nearby Italian restaurant.  We had a wonderful visit and got caught up on each other’s history…also that of some mutual friends, not all of which were happy stories.  This, of course, is an increasingly frequent experience as one grows older.

The next morning, bright and early, we packed up the car  and headed out to visit the 135,000 acre Biltmore Estate,  the main house of which is billed as “America’s Largest Home”.  It was built by George Vanderbilt at the end of the nineteenth century, he hired Richard Morris Hunt to design the house and Frederick Law Olmstead to design the grounds.  It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you have an unlimited supply of money and hire brilliant artists to tell you what to do.  We enjoyed the visit immensely (actually more than we had expected), both that of the house, which is a real museum of art, architecture and history, and of the extraordinary gardens and grounds.  Jan particularly enjoyed the outdoors part of the visit, she’s seriously missed her California garden during our time in Manhattan and any proximity to dirt and blooms immediately raises her spirits.

Biltmore Estate (in between cloudbursts)

A happy camper surrounded by flowers.

...and more.

A bit of color...

Tuesday, May 10

Two days later we’re back on the road (in the WRONG direction…sorry George!) to spend a couple of days with Sally and Phil in Pinnacle, friends from our earliest days in Irvine.  George had visited them here four years ago, I hadn’t seen them for a long time before that.  Their peaceful home looks out over their vineyard to Pilot Mountain.

Sally & Phil (George forgot to take their picture, this is a snapshot from their wall)

View of Pilot Mountain from the living room

Of course our next morning involved a walk around the pinnacle at Pilot Mountain .  This was followed by a drive through beautiful rolling green hills to Hanging Rock State Park to the east, where we started with a relatively short hike to Hidden Falls and Window Falls.

On the way to the Falls - George is trying to look worried.

Hidden Falls, nice spot for a picnic.

The "Window"

We were a little weary by then and George was still a little under the weather with a cold, but after a snack I was ready to hike to Hanging Rock overlook, described as a “moderate” hike by the park brochure.  Moderate my eyeball!!! Check out the photo of the mile long staircase!!!

On the way to Hanging Rock - seemed like climbing a mile-long ladder!

Mountain Laurel - rewards along the way.

We were rewarded with beautiful wildflowers and spectacular views, however, as well as the satisfaction of meeting the challenge. It was really fun reconnecting with Sally and Phil after such a long time.

Jan at the top of Hanging Rock...

...and George (that's him at the lower right).

Sunday, May 8 (still a few days behind on our blog…)

Boone , NC was our next stop.  An idyllic setting on a green hill was where we found George’s “cousins” Ingrid and Jeff, and their canine companions Mel and Lola.

Jeff Tiller & Ingrid Kraus at home in Boone

The beautiful House on the Hill

The "girls", Mel & Lola

Near the top of the hill in the back

Ingrid took the next day off to give us a grand tour of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Watauga County.  We hiked Rough Ridge and enjoyed spectacular views of the Linnville Viaduct, Table Mountain and Grandmother Mountain.

Jan & Ingrid on Rough Ridge

Trillium

After a lunch at the Tartan, we drove up Grandfather Mountain and were amazed by the diversity of plant and animal life there.  I even found courage to walk the “swinging “ bridge one mile up!!!  (G note: The bridge no longer swings, the original wooden one was replaced by the present steel one in 1999.)  We picked up Jeff and had a lovely dinner at Rico’s Bistro.

Jan's already crossed the bridge and is looking forward to the return trip

Friday, May 6

Our next destination is Winston-Salem, NC, the trip gave us our first (only?) FIVE STATE day.  We left PA and crossed MD, WV and VA before entering North Carolina.  Arrived in time to join George’s UCI colleague and friend Richard McKenzie at the Village Tavern in Reynolda Village for an evening cocktail and light dinner.  (“Reynolda” comes from the Reynolds tobacco family, *very* big here.)  We joined Richard the next morning on his daily walk through the lovely woods on the Wake Forest campus.

Jan & Richard in the Wake Forest woods

Then the two of us visited Old Salem letting Richard get some work done on his video lecture modules.  This town was settled by Moravians and became a center of commerce and crafts.  It was a great day and we enjoyed visiting the old buildings and beautiful gardens in the town.

Old pump in Old Salem

Lick-Boner House, 1787

Had breakfast with Richard and his childhood friend Spooky before we left for Boone.

Jan, Richard & Spooky (he was born on Haloween)