2009 Poulsbo

For the third summer in a row Linda and I spent three months in Washington working on our home construction project there. It's an addition to the home of her siblings, Ann, David, and Barbara, who live on five beautiful wooded acres on the Kitsap Peninsula in Puget Sound. We expect to spend the next few summers there and eventually move there full time. A contractor erected the shell and by last summer it was "in the dry." We began the interior work then and this summer we continued with flooring, tile, bathrooms, kitchen cabinets, etc.

For the past two summers we had traveled separately, Linda driving her Prius and me riding a bike. She takes the direct route and I take the long way on the back roads. This year it worked out best for us to travel together on four wheels. Yes, that's two more than needed, but I had left the Buell up there last summer and I would be back in the saddle on the great roads of the Pacific northwest when I arrived there.

We filled the Volvo (there was too much stuff for the Prius) and our travel mode was a compromise between those of the two previous summers. We took a fairly direct but leisurely route, visiting several friends both going and coming, and saw some great sights along the way. I love this country.

Time out. It's the wee hours of Feb 12, 2010 and just after I began to pull these trip photos together it began to snow. Soon after that I naturally found myself in the hot tub. I couldn't resist a photo to capture the unusual (for Dallas) conditions. It reminded me of how great doing that felt years ago after a long day of skiing.

Even old farts can have fun in the dark!

Okay, enough of this digression. Let's get on with the 2009 Poulsbo travel photos.

Our first leg was to Des Moines, NM to visit our friends Tim Keller and Christina Boyce.

To get to New Mexico, one must first cross the Texas Panhandle

We arrived in Des Moines early enough to scoot over to nearby Folsom to see the museum

I thought it would be mainly have relics of the Clovis Culture of about 11,000 years ago

But most of it dealt with the settlement of this area by the Americans a bit more recently

We met this nice lady and learned she would be at Christina's concert later this evening

We also had time to drive through Capulin Volcano National Monument

Before arriving at Christina's Studio on Main Street in Des Moines

Inside the Studio

Our room was upstairs above it

Christina is preparing for a music concert in the studio this evening. Our timing was good.

Our room for the evening

What makes you think Christina is an artist?

Downtown Des Moines, NM

Tim & Christina's house

Next morning I went with Christina to pick up some furniture

Then we drove to Raton with Tim to see his photo exhibit at the gallery

The next day we headed for Taos to attend a benefit for our friend Don Conoscenti

Don's guitar collection was on the auction block

To pay medical bills for repairing the femur he shattered in a bicycle accident

All his songwriter friends turned out. Everyone loves Don!

and the pale ale was good, too

We head toward the Grand Canyon and stop at the Colorado River Bridge outside Taos

My favorite chauffeur (and favorite person)

This was new country to both of us. We were headed to the north rim, which isn't on the way to anywhere.

We took our first quick look at canyon from the north rim

then we met our friend, songwriter Bernice Lewis at the Lodge

She knows both rims and led us on a more extensive tour

Bernice often performs in the Park, and this summer she was their "Artist in Residence"

Back at Bernice's cabin

She made us a nice pasta dinner

Then we headed on toward Washington

Before I was born my father was stationed here in Hermiston, Oregon in the Civil Conservation Core

Having fully tapped the Columbia for hydro-electricity, we're now harnessing its wind as well

Along the Columbia River

We found a local tribute to Stonehenge

and then stopped in Roslyn, Washington

"Northern Exposure" fans (like me) know Roslyn as Cicely, Alaska

They will quickly recognize "The Brick"

The Brick's interior

and it's bar

ÝThen we went on to Poulsbo to begin work on our house. It's the new part to the right of the Volvo

Linda first tackled the fireplace pad in the living room

Does this lady know how to do tile or what?

My first job was to pressure wash and stain both decks. They had suffered badly over the winter

Linda's mom's room, temporarily ours

My second job was to install miles and miles of bamboo floor

Well, it seemed like miles and miles

I was proud of this joint, so to speak.

Some evenings I played chef (and I do mean played)

Quixote was always on guard

Stop! This is my turf!

This is part of the nice five-mile ride into the town of Poulsbo

The old town, the cool town, is right on the water

My favorite place for breakfast

And a good place for lunch or dinner

Roads like this are everywhere around there and begin right at our driveway

Barbara and I took a ride on the Buell

We found this civil war re-enactment in nearby Port Townsend

Less than a hundred miles out, this approaching storm made us head for home

We haul off the garbage and recyclables every couple of weeks

Our friend Bruce Balmer, a great songwriter who is also a great carpenter, came up to help us for a month

Linda continues with the tile

and the tile, and the tile

I trimmed the attic access door

Our future bedroom

My bathroom to be

The future theatre

My cardio clinic goofed up on my schedule and I had to return to Plano for some tests

I'm on the ferry to Seattle to catch a plane back to Dallas for a week

Seattle has a cool skyline from the ferry

Home is always special

Linda's new herb garden. She planted it after I filled in the hopeless swimming pool

The hot dry August was tough on it, but it survived

Now I head back for Poulsbo

and joined Linda to install the Ikea kitchen cabinets

While Bruce put his special touch on the stair railing

We inserted screw A into hole B, and it actually worked!Ý (at least sometimes)

Progress on the upstairs shower

Installing the cork floor in the theatre

I took a break to attend the Table Mountain Star Party, a couple of hundred miles east near Ellensburg

Ivar's is a great place to eat, though out of my budget except for special occasions

On the road to Ellensburg

A star party has some things in common with Kerrville, but with telescopes instead of guitars

Artist Hulen Fleming did a painting of my optician Carl Zambuto. He also showed me this photo of himself with our mutual friend the astronaut Story Musgrave. It's a small world and Story's been around it more than most.

I didn't know my friend and partner, Paul Porter, would be there

Or Terrance Dickinson, author of my favorite observing book

This is truly a hardware store telescope

A fellow telescope maker and friend of Carl Zambuto

We gathered in the tent on a cloudy night for some music.

I shared some of my favorite songs about the universe

Next morning it was time to head out

That's Mount Ranier. I would be passing near it as I took the long way home

The closer you get, the more impressive it looks

This aint North Texas, my friends

This is my friend Carl Zambuto, the master optician who fabricates my telescope mirrors

He had arranged to have my 20" Teleport mirror in process

So I could do the really tricky partÝÝÝ (sure)

Carl makes the very best mirrors for the very best telescopes

As you can see, this was serious business

Back home in time to make a run of the garbage and recyclables

Barbara's beautiful garden in front of their house

Barbara the wall builder, with her assistant Quixote

Linda had made good progress with our Ikea bedroom closets

Anne checks out the new ladder I built so she could access the overhead storage in her new building

She may decide to just stay up there

I took a day off to ride the Buell up north for some sightseeing

And soon found a powow of the Squamish tribe, a few miles to the east

I shifted the end of the wall to gain parking spaceÝ (since some folks don't ride a bike)

and helped Anne put some paint on her building

The Buell plates are a little out of date, but they got me by

Linda is starting to make our bedÝÝ (literally)

Linda's bathroom

our shower

my bathroom

Can you believe she's still making the bed?

From 11 boxes of parts and 400 pages of instructions.

The kitchen countertop people are here

Pretty spiffy, huh?

Linda's beautiful new bathroom countertop

Bruce finished the stair treads just before he left

then I built the column to (sort of) match them

Hey, this is starting to look a lot like a kitchen

This was our coffee bar for the summer

and this was my official break room

It's well stocked with cheap Cabernet and great literature

I never saw a woman take so long to make a bed : 2 days!

I will admit it's a little different

Barbara is checking the fit of Ursula's new life vest

They were preparing for Ursula's first canoe trip

Hey, the new mattress is here

and the dishwasher

and the refrigerator

The bed is finally made, but it still isn't "made"

This will be a small but very efficient kitchen. Linda and Ikea both did a great job

Heading back home, down the Oregon coast

Our first stop was in Tillamook to tour the huge creamery

You wanna know who cut the cheese? It was these guys!

There's enough of it for most of the people in the Pacific Northwest

and they make the ice cream, too

This is a little boutique creamery just down the road

We took Hwy 101 down the Oregon Coast

Then Hwy 1 (the "PCH") down the coast of northern California

It sure was more scenic than last years mad dash down I-5

The Golden Gate area is always special

Particularly when it's filled with bikers

and parasailers

Breakfast at the restaurant in Carmel we remembered being good a few years ago

Carmel seems like it wouldn't be a bad place to live, but I suspect it's a bit pricey

Being close to Point Lobos doesn't hurt

It's always tough to leave Point Lobos

We had a great stop at Morro Bay

Then drifted on into Santa Barbara

To join our friends Kate Wallace and Douglas Clegg for a walk on the beach

These two great songwriters are coming to play a concert at our place next March

Troops and gulls were on beach maneuvers

We're roaming in an area near Vista, CA, just east of Oceanside

For our first visit at the new home of our friends Sue and Terry Lewis

Can you believe they left the LA area for this?

Okay, perhaps it was a good move

Sue was my son's music teacher when he was four. She started him on the road to being a great conductor

Sue and I have been friends for 37 years. Terry just retired as a vice president of Yamaha International

We think they just moved here to be near Peterson's Donut Corner in Escondido

See what I mean?

They are also close to Palomar Mountain

I never miss a chance to see the Hale Observatory and wanted to share it for the first time with Linda

The 200" Hale telescope was used by Edwin Hubble to change our view of the universe

Then it was used by Allan Sandage to determine the Hubble constant

Alan's son David was more serious. He bought one of my early 10" Teleport telescopes

Apparently we were having too much fun to think about filling the Volvo tank

But a very nice trucker was loafing a bit and came to our rescue

We zipped on east on I-10 to Quiet Valley Ranch for the Wine & Music Festival

Paul had somehow managed to beat me here from Table Mountain

Festival founder Rod Kennedy strolls the vendor booths

and visits with his ex-wife Nancy Lee. These two changed the world of singer/songwriter music

Our friend Don Conoscenti has recovered a lot since Taos and was bouncing all over the stage

We stopped at my son Kevin's for the night

To visit and help work out his plans to remodel his house north of Dripping Springs

After five years, he resigned as conductor of the U.T. orchestra, but still lives in Austin because he loves it