Category Archives: Travel

2023, Family, Food, Travel, Uncategorized, work

Coffee Time

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We are incredibly spoiled, and order six pounds of coffee beans every six weeks or so from this coffee place in Brookings, SD. The beans are dark roasted. I place the order on-line, and they arrive, freshly roasted, sometimes the next day via Speedee Delivery. They are Carmen Pampas/San Ignacio blend beans from Bolivia/Peru, and for every pound we order the coffee place makes a donation to destitute schools in Bolivia. The coffee tastes heavenly. We like it strong. We only drink it in the morning. The box of beans is redolent of coffee aroma, even before we open it.

I really don’t know how the coffee place and Speedee Delivery manage to get the beans to us so quickly. It is 500 miles from there to here. We only drink coffee we brew at home, and never go to coffee places in town. I like my coffee with half and half and sugar. Husband needs heavy cream and sugar in his coffee. We use a Bodum French press pot to brew our coffee.

The other day I was able to greet the Speedee Delivery guy when he delivered our coffee order. He told me he couldn’t stand the smell of coffee, and it was really hard when he had to go into coffee shops and got all these boxes of coffee beans to deliver. I sure hope he didn’t have to drive 500 miles to deliver ours! Poor guy!

How do you take your coffee? What cooking smells can’t you abide? What comestibles are you fussy about?

2023, Automotive, Family, Travel, Uncategorized

Wheels

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We are back from our trip to South Dakota, happy but weary. I noticed as we drove our Honda van East out of Bismarck on Thursday that the odometer passed 153,000 miles. It wasn’t too long ago we were thrilled to get a vehicle past 100,000 miles. What happened?

We have two vehicles- a 2011 Honda van and a 2014 Toyota Tacoma pickup. I am unsure how many miles I should expect to get on the Honda, I really don’t want to think about getting a new vehicle just yet. I need to rethink the need for a van if we have a pickup. They are all so expensive, and I come from a father who never in his life bought a used vehicle. It was unthinkable in his opinion.

What vehicle did you get the most miles on? If you got a different vehicle, would it be new or used? What is your most memorable means of transportation?

2023, Travel, Uncategorized, Words

Message Board

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We drove to Brookings, SD yesterday, a 500 mile trip. There was lots of road construction. I also noticed a few electronic message boards that the various Departments of Transportation entities had installed. The SD message boards won the prize for cuteness with “Be a thinker. Use your blinker”. I was greatly amused last winter to hear a rather conservative member of the ND Legislature wonder if the ND DOT was sending subliminal messages to citizens on the boards. He was quickly shut down.

Son found some messages on-line that I liked:

Get your head out of your apps.

OMG are you texting? I can’t even.

100 is the temperature, not the speed limit.

Visiting in-laws? Slow down, get there late.

Texting and driving? Say it: I am the problem. It’s me!

What would you like to see on electronic highway message boards?

2023, Art, History, Travel, Uncategorized

Higham Ferrers

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When I was a junior in college, I went on a month long seminar to England, France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland sponsored by the Religion and Philosophy Departments at Concordia College in Moorhead. We studied the transition from medieval to modern in thought, literature, art, and architecture. One of our stops was Higham Ferrers, a small town in Northamptonshire noted for its memorial brasses in the church.

The most famous brass is that of Laurence St. Maur, (pronounced Seymour), a parish priest who died in 1337. The brass dates from that time, and was originally on the floor. In 1633 it was placed on a tomb about four feet off the ground. . We were able to do rubbings of the brass on black paper and gold crayons. It is six feet long and two feet wide. I managed to get mine home rolled up in my backpack, had it framed, and managed to haul it to Winnipeg, Indiana, and North Dakota in one piece. He hangs on our hallway with framed Jim Brandenburg photos. You can see the top part of the rubbing below. It was hard to get a good photo without glare.

He doesn’t look too happy. There is an inscription farther down around his chest, ornately decorated robes, and two active dogs at his feet. He doesn’t have a head dress, but I gather that many brasses did, and the brasses were often used to show the decedent’s sense of style. Animals at the feet were often symbolic of how the person died. Flowers were also popular and symbolic. I read about a brass on someone named St. Margaret of Antioch who had a dragon at her feet. I gather that she was swallowed by the Devil in the form of a dragon, and emerged from his side unscathed.

What inscriptions or symbols would you want on your memorial brass?

2023, animals, Nature, Travel, Uncategorized

Wild Horses

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I live about 40 miles from Theodore Roosevelt National Park. It is situated in the North Dakota Badlands. Teddy had a ranch there, and there still are lots of ranches that surround the park. It is home to bison, coyotes, deer, mountain lions, pronghorn, prairie dogs, and big horn sheep. And horses.

For decades before the park was formally established in 1947, ranchers would turn out horses on the open range to live and breed, and just round up horses when they needed them. That ended after the park was fenced in 1954. After the fences went up, horses remained in the park, overbreeding. Every few years the Park Service would round up what horses they could and sell them at auction. They even tried horse contraception to reduce the herds.

The Park Service decided recently to change policy and remove all non-native animal species from the park, specifically the horses. This led to a very emotional reaction from locals who have a very romantic notion of the horses and believe they should stay. The Legislature passed a bill to maintain livestock in the park. It is ultimately up to the Secretary of the Interior to decide what happens next.

What is your favorite National Park? Would wild horses be a draw for you? What animals do you get emotional about?

2023, Family, Travel, Uncategorized, work

Alternate Routes

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Our town has about 25,000 people. Compared with a larger metropolitan area, there isn’t that much traffic. When he isn’t working at the Human Service Center in Bismarck, Husband “hotels” in an office at the Human Service Center in our town where I work and works there. We both take different routes to work for the silliest reasons.

Our drive to work takes 10 minutes. In the summer and fall, husband likes the eastern route that takes him over the butte near our home and through a residential area, and approaches our work building from the back. He likes that route because there is less traffic and he can see the gardens by the houses he drives past. He doesn’t like the route in the spring and winter because it can get icy driving up and down the butte.

I like a southern route that takes me past a house where two standard schnauzers live. I love to catch glimpses of those magnificent dogs. I often see them jumping in fruitless attempts to catch the squirrels teasing them in the tree branches just above their heads. The route takes me to the main commercial street in town that eventually runs right past our work building. The only problem with my route is that I have an unprotected left turn to get onto the commercial street.

I am an impatient person. Our town is too small to have very many traffic lights and four way stops. I suppose I have to wait, at a maximum, two minutes before the way is clear for me to turn left. I just hate having to wait for that. Sometimes when I am in a very impatient mood I turn left on a residential street a block before the commercial street. That takes me to another major street where I can make a right turn, and then a left turn with a light, onto the commercial street. Again, it takes me 10 minutes to get to work, no matter what route I take. This is so silly. I am lucky I don’t drive in a big city all the time.

Do you ever take alternate routes for silly reasons? How do you feel about unprotected left turns?

2023, Automotive, Family, Travel, Uncategorized

Sweet Talk

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I got a text from Daughter Sunday letting me know she talked her way out of a speeding ticket. She said she was only going 10 mph over the speed limit. I told her she needed to slow down.

I don’t know how she does it, but this is about the fifth or sixth ticket she has talked her way out of. I have only had one speeding ticket in my life, only going about 5 mph over the limit in town, and the police officer had no trouble citing me.

Husband got several speeding tickets from the Dunn County Sherriff and Tribal police driving back from the Reservation. The Tribal tickets were never reported to the State, so he didn’t get points on his license for them.

The Highway Patrol in western Minnesota often cite people who don’t notice that the speed limit changes when you cross the Dakota borders into Minnesota, and assume they can still drive Dakota speeds. Our governor just vetoed a bill that would have increased the speed limit to 80 in ND. People drive that speed here anyway, so it wouldn’t have made much of a difference for him to sign the bill.

Every talked your way out a ticket? What is the fastest you ever drove? Why were you going that fast?

2023, Automotive, Family, Kids, Travel

Grand Travel Plans

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We are planning a trip the end of May to visit Husband’s sister and brother-in-law in eastern Wisconsin. We will drive, and will spend about three days there. It is 700 miles one-way from us, so that means one night on the road there and back. I don’t like driving more than 500 miles in a day. We also plan to visit Son and Daughter-in- Law in Brookings on the return trip. We will leave the Tuesday after Memorial Day and return the following Monday.

Husband is a hopeful traveler who likes to make elaborate but unrealistic plans of what we can do while on the road. When we were moving to North Dakota from Indiana after Husband finished his psychology internship, he insisted that we meet up with some Canadian friends of ours who were driving east from Manitoba to Ontario the same days we were driving west. We met up in a campground somewhere in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It really wasn’t a very direct route, and our visit was extremely short, perhaps an hour or so, but it was really important to Husband that we see our friends.

I don’t know why I was surprised last Monday as we were finalizing our travel plans to Wisconsin that Husband was trying to figure out how we could find a way to visit Baboons in the Twin Cities as well as my third cousin TJ in St. Peter without lengthening our trip. While I would love to visit everyone, the logistics as well as the limited time we have made such plans pretty impossible. I appreciate Husband’s sweet consideration for me and my friends, but sometimes he wants to do too much.

When do you try to do too much? Do you prefer to mosey or get to your destination?

Business, Food, Travel, Uncategorized

Pasteles

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I’ve discovered a new bakery.  Well, technically PJ discovered it for me.  And you all know how I love a good bakery.

On Saturday I dropped off some Ben eggs for PJ (Ben to tim to me to PJ… roundabout) as well as an immersion blender from Bill.  I love how we built a little community on the trail – that’s a blog for another day.

Anyway, PJ and I talked about the great Mexican food that I had in Tucson and she mentioned that there is a great Mexican panaderia close to her.  As I was leaving, she gave me directions and I headed toward it; I found it easily – Don Panchos Bakery on Cesar Chavez.  The customer area wasn’t too big but had huge displays on each side filled with an amazing array of goodies.  Donuts, cookies, cakes, breads and lots and lots of pastries.  Even flan. 

I picked out a couple of conchas, which I adore and then when I turned around to the other case, I saw “besos”.  It’s two cakes held together by sweet custard and I’ve only encountered them a couple of times during my travels.  I quickly added a couple of those to my tub.  Pricing was much lower than I expected.  In fact, when she gave me the total, I asked her if she had gotten everything.  It was all I could do to get out of there without enough pastries to open up my own shop! 

It was also all I could do to not eat all the pastries on Saturday afternoon!

Which direction do you head if you want to find a bakery?

2023, Art, books, Food, Travel

Decisions Decisions

34 Comments

As you all know I love cookbooks.  And you all also know that I have too many – neither my wallet nor my shelves can handle my just willy-nilly buying of any and all cookbook that look interesting.  But a quick perusal doesn’t cut the mustard either – you need to go though a cookbook thoroughly to know if it earns the right to displace another cookbook on my shelves.

The way I deal with this is to check out prospective cookbooks from the library.  Then I can leisurely go through them, look at the recipes, ingredients, level of difficulty, etc.  If a lot of recipes look interesting and I can envision cooking from the book, then I have to decide if it’s enough to replace an existing cookbook on my shelves.  If there are only a couple of recipes, I copy them and add them to my big binder.

When I was in Tucson, we visited a few places that had cookbooks on display.  One was an amazing cooking shop in the arts colony of Tubac.  We spent quite a bit of time there as Susan was texting photos of various tea towels to a friend who was in the market.  This shop had A LOT of tea towels; it would have been very easy to over-indulge.  Wandering through a cooking shop is not a punishment for me and I came across a handful of cookbooks that looked interesting.  I took photos and then when I got home I requested them from the library.  Three are in transit, so hopefully in the next few days I can relax with some hot tea or cocoa and go through them to my hearts’ content.

How do you decide which books to buy and which to not buy (or borrow)?