Header photo of Adliswil by Parpan05 (Own work), CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0  via Wikimedia Commons

Today’s post comes from Cynthia in Mahtowa.

Christmas is not one of my favorite times of the year, Memories are loaded with emotional and physical loss – each of my parents died, I received divorce papers, old reminders of the difficult maneuvering after my parents separated and divorced and remarried. Then there was exhaustion after the long hours working in my father’s retail business wrapping presents, followed by a six hour drive to southern Minnesota to be with grandparents, my parents smoking and arguing what seems like the entire way.

But one Christmas I love to remember: the year I was in Switzerland.

After my first year teaching I quit to travel in Europe. I ended up staying with a family in the small village of Adliswil just outside Zurich. They lived above their tearoom and bakery but also had a home up in the mountains near Einsedeln. The month leading up to Christmas they made candies — delicious Swiss chocolates, many with nummy hazel nut cream. (I thought they were called Moor’s Caps/Moorenkoppen, but I can’t find what I remember them being on the web…so memory being what it is…who knows what they were called.)

Not only did they put up with me, but they graciously allowed me to invite a college friend who was studying in England to join me for the holiday.

On Christmas Eve we drove up to their mountain home. The tree was decorated (did I help decorate it? I don’t remember) with real and lit candles. Interestingly my friend remembers many more details of the holiday than I do, but this we both remember: There was snow. In the evening, we walked somewhere I don’t recall and on our way up along the mountain road a man was riding a bicycle down the road yodeling. A perfect Swiss moment.

Do you have a favorite Christmas memory?

Today’s post comes from Bill in MPLS

In the early 1970s, Robin and I and our friend Steve Carley drove to Calgary, Alberta for the Calgary Stampede. In truth, I was only vaguely interested in the rodeo. As it turned out, the rodeo wasn’t especially exciting; the problem was that the competitors were all excessively competent—every participant performed perfectly and the difference between them amounted to seconds or fractions of seconds.

The real reason I was in Calgary was because Wilf Carter was going to be in the pre-stampede parade. Wilf Carter, also known as Montana Slim, was one of the original singing cowboys. Carter was the first Canadian country music star. An unbelievable yodeler, Carter belonged to the ilk of Hank Snow, Jimmie Rodgers, and Gene Autry. Here’s a sample:

The Stampede was my chance to see him in person. He rode in the parade, in a convertible designed, I think, by the legendary Nudie Cohn. The header photo shows that car.

Nudie was a Ukrainian-born tailor who established himself making sequin-bedecked outfits for the likes of Elvis and Roy Rogers and later branched out to designing boots and even cars. Here’s what the interior of the car looked like:

I was going through my cowboy phase then. I was collecting and listening to a lot of early cowboy/country music. You couldn’t get a shirt in those days in the style of the classic movie cowboys, so I was making my own cowboy shirts, with fancy piped yokes and cuffs, curved slash pockets with arrowheads on the corners and pearl snaps. Sometimes the fabric was atypical— hawaiian prints, for instance.

I was never really interested in the actual business of ranching or horses.. What attracted me was the lore and milieu of the singing cowboys. The imagery of the likes of Tom Mix, Ken Maynard and William S. Hart. At the time I was working on a series of drawings I called my Patsy Montana drawings. They had nothing to do with the real Patsy Montana or her songs. She was my muse and the drawings were more along the line of “Even Cowgirls get the Blues”.

In downtown Minneapolis in the 70s and early 80s, on First Avenue, just north of Hennepin, on the second floor, there was a record shop called Pyramid Records. It was a big open space with waist-high benches around the perimeter, on top of which were boxes of records, many of them cutouts, all inexpensive, and chiefly old country recordings and vintage jazz. The proprietor sat in an overstuffed armchair in the center. He seldom made eye contact and never conversation. When you had made your selection, he would reluctantly accept your money. I’ve heard that he just disappeared one night, leaving his entire record stock behind. But he had some incredible, obscure records on offer, if you were in that market. There was a label out of West Germany, CMH, that had reissued classic early country music, including Wilf Carter, Hank Snow, the Carter Family and Goebel Reeves.

I bought them all.

Eventually I moved on from my cowboy phase, though I’ve never lost my interest in either the music or the imagery. I’ve overlaid them with newer fascinations but not many carry the pervasive richness that that long-ago cowboy fixation carried for me.

I can’t judge the extent to which I am deaf to the popular culture and the extent to which I am willfully contrarian. Some of both no doubt. But those are traits I also savor in others. What interests me, what I look for, are the obsessions people nurture that aren’t delivered to them as a readily consumable commodity— obsessions that call for research, diligence, craft and expertise. It could be an art, in the broadest sense, or it could be a collection. It scarcely matters how arcane, how peculiar the obsession might be. After all, the more elusive the interest, the more dedication it requires. And the more dedication it requires, the more it can be uniquely yours.

So, how do you entertain yourself?

Today’s post comes from  Barbara in Rivertown.

For several years after my dad died, I traveled almost monthly from Minneapolis to Marshalltown, IA, to visit my mom, before she moved up to Minnesota. It didn’t take me long to get tired of the straightforward I-35 à I-30 route; and besides, 35 veered east and took me slightly out of my way. I got out the maps and found a number of “back roads” which, although they didn’t necessarily save me time (since the speed limit is 55 instead or 70), took me more directly south and gave me some different scenery. I got in the habit of giving myself extra road time, because I liked to stop at whatever caught my eye – i.e., the photo at top is in tiny Austinville, IA, north of Marshalltown. There were parks in towns like Hampton that made nice rest stops, and I learned which towns had a decent coffee shop.

Minnesota has great back roads, too – for the numerous trips between Mpls and Winona that we’ve taken this year, we often use the alternate Hwy. 50 north of Red Wing to catch 52, instead of taking Hwy. 61 through Hastings, and this takes us right by a lovely old “garage” in New Trier. Heading south from Winona to catch 90, a short detour into Pickwick yields a view of the old Pickwick Mill.

On our recent trip to Marshalltown from Winona, we could have followed I-90 to I-35 to I-30, but we jumped off 90 at Austin, MN, and head south on 218. This was a little dicey because of the unusual amount of rain that the driftless area (NE Iowa, SE Minn, et al)  has seen this month. Indeed, we drove into Charles City and made it over the roiling Cedar River, but were lucky to be leaving 218 and turning west – the road east was under water and barricaded. Here’s a video of this same spot back in 2008, when there was even worse flooding.

On the way back to Winona we decided to try another route, through Nashua IA where resides the Little Brown Church in the Vale – my folks got married there 70 years ago.

We crossed the Cedar River again, still roiling but not flooding our path. The little church was open for visitors, and as I signed the guest book I was astonished to see that the name above mine was a college friend – I looked up and there she was waiting for me to realize we’d crossed paths!

When have you had a memorable experience while traveling the back roads?