Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category
Big Island Memorializes Liberated Queen
By Igor Lobanov
Mature Life Features
The Hale o Keawe temple at Pu’uhonua o Honaunau National Park on the BigIsland once was the home of the Hawaiian aristocracy.
— Big Island Visitors Bureau photo
HAWAI’I —- It wasn’t your average royal-family spat. It required a renowned English mariner to navigate the emotional shoals to resolve it.
Queen Kaahumanu, a liberated woman for day, was adored by her people and was the first King Kamehameha’s favorite among his 21 wives. But her independent ways were a source of conflict with the warrior monarch.
One day, she ran away. She eluded her pursuers and, accompanied by her dog, swam four miles across Kealakekua Bay to what is now Pu’uhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park. Hawaiian custom prescribed that those who violated kapu (the ancient code of law) and made it to this lava-tipped intrusion into the sea some 20 miles south of Kailua-Kona were safe from harm. Priests provided ritualistic purification, allowing the law-breaker to return home.
Still fearful, Kaahumanu hid behind a large stone that still stands along the short nature trial and was discovered when her dog barked, but she refused to leave her hiding place.
The king opted for diplomacy in the person of Capt. George Vancouver, the British explorer who happened to be visiting. Persuasion carried the day. The queen emerged and was reunited with her husband.
The year was 1792, and King Kamehameha (The Great) was warring with powerful chieftains throughout the Hawaiian chain. In the next decade, he would unite the islands into a kingdom that would launch Polynesian Hawaii’s golden age and endure till the dawn of the 20th century.
His reign initiated a family dynasty spanning 80 years with five successive Kamehameha sovereigns. Those who followed included the popular Merrie Monarch, King David Kalakau, whose devotion to preserving nature, music, and dance ranged from sponsoring free nightly theatrical performances in front of his palace in Honolulu to reviving the revered hula, the story-telling dance condemned by straight-laced missionaries.
King Kamehameha I restored the Ahu’ena Heiau, an ancient temple to the god of prosperity, Lono. It remains on the grounds of the King Kamehameha Kona Beach Hotel in Kailua-Kona. Visitors can view the carved idols along its outer walls but the interior, still considered sacred, is open only to Hawaiians. The colorful early-June parade through town commemorating Kamehameha’s birthday ends here.
Other remnants of ancient Hawaii include the ancient fish ponds and petroglyphs on the grounds of the Mauna Lani Resort to the north in the Kohala district.
To fully grasp the Big Island’s startling range of natural beauty, consider a self-drive tour of at least two or three days for the 200-plus-mile circuit. From the Kona International Airport, it’s a 10-minute drive to the tourist center of Kailua-Kona, with its historic buildings and white-sand beaches. Continuing south, you pass through small settlements and the stark lava landscape at the bottom of the island.
The route rises to north almost imperceptibly to 4,000 feet above sea level and the entrance to the island’s premier attraction: Volcanoes National Park. Give yourself several hours to view the home of Pele, goddess of fire, and the ongoing interaction between molten lava the island’s vegetation, wildlife, and human habitation.
Then it’s downhill to the rainy windward side and Hilo, the island’s administrative center. Better known as a “natural greenhouse,” Hilo’s verdancy marks the gateway to the Hamakua Coast, a north-shore region with towering waterfalls, lush rainforests, and gentle communities whose lifestyle differs sharply from the resort-oriented sunny west coast. Waipio Valley, a bit of Eden extending inland, is home to a few farms. It’s accessible only by locally available four-wheel vehicles or on horseback.
As you roll around the northern end of the Kohala Coast, you run into a string of fine accommodations. First in line is Laurence Rockefeller’s legendary Mauna Kea Beach Hotel. Perhaps you’ll arrive in time for dinner on the terrace at dusk, and be as lucky as we were to see a crescent moon hanging over the evening star. Later, we strolled to a nearby rocky point to watch manta rays surface seeking dinner among fish drawn to the illuminated waters.
Mature Life Features, Copyright 2003
Go Ahead, Live Abroad
By Igor Lobanov
Mature Life Features
The 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City’s the World Trade Towers and on the Pentagon a decade ago heightened Americans’ concerns about their safety, both at home and abroad. More than 3 million Americans live in foreign countries, according to some estimates.
If you’re still mulling such a move as part of your retirement dream, there are plenty of information available in books and online. For example, you can type “The Grown-Up’s Guide to Retiring Abroad” into your search engine. Author Rosanne Knorr who, with her American husband, has spent several summers in France’s Loire Valley and winters in Florida, outlines factors to be considered if you’ve longed to live in a foreign land.
Americans who choose to live outside the United States have a variety of reasons for choosing a particular country. First there’s the environment or ambience.
Knorr points out that, unlike vacationers who stay at a resort or condominium complex where daily needs are easily met, you need to consider how close markets and shops are and what your social life will be like when you live long-term among the local populace. Will you want to spend time only with fellow foreigners who may be there for only a short time? Or will you make an effort to blend into the rhythm and routine of the community. If you choose a resort area, you’ll have to put up with crowds of visitors during the season and possibly empty streets and shuttered shops the rest of the year.
Then there’s the climate. The warm and cozy days of summer may turn cold and miserable when winter arrives. Don’t take others’ assessments. Get information on the weather in all seasons and, if possible, visit at various times of the year. For example, you may decide the south of France, which is known for its warm weather, is unbearably hot in the summer.
Local culture and way of living also are important. In Spain, for example, restaurants customarily don’t begin serving dinners until 10 p.m. or so. The Spanish love dining late. You may not. Many restaurants in Spain do start to serve earlier, but chances are your fellow diners will be mostly tourists.
Language also plats a role. Can you order from a menu that’s all in Greek? Or Japanese? Other considerations include a country’s cost of living, its transportation network, and its legal code. The latter could be vital in its application to how your estate will be distributed if you die over there. Finally, there’s health care. A key reason that many American expatriates decide to return home is the availability of superior medical care here.
It’s important to do your own research into areas or countries that interest you. Sources include guide books, travel magazines and videos, websites, tourist offices for the nations involved and books, such as Knorr’s, that discuss moving to or living in a foreign locale. For up-to-date information on safety and security in areas you’re considering, go to the State Department’s Citizen’s Emergency Center at www.travel.state.gov/travel-warnings.html. Local newspapers, which you or a friend can pick up during a visit, often contain classified ads for homes or apartments to rent. Call the country’s embassy or consulate for rules governing an extended stay.
Mature Life Features, Copyright 2003
Time-Travel Czech List
Vltava River hugs Bohemian village of Cesky Krumlov
By James Gaffney
Mature Life Features
CESKY KRUMLOV, Czech Republic – The Australian flag waving from the window of the Moldau Hilton youth hostel seemed a little out of place in this medieval Bohemian village. The owner, a chain-smoking 50-something woman with a raucous, Phyllis Diller-like laugh, put everyone on the inside track.
“It’s the 52 pubs here,” said Jana Perina. “That’s why this place is so popular with Aussies.”
One of her Australian guests was a young artist who gave the accommodation its unofficial moniker when he painted the mural above the entrance. The mural depicts a trio of cherubs holding aloft a banner emblazoned with the words, “Moldau Hilton.” The name pays tribute to the hostel’s location on the banks of the meandering Vltava, known as Moldau in German, the river immortalized by the 19th-century Czech composer Bedrick Smetana.
Nowadays, when people in this country advise foreign travelers to get away from overcrowded Prague to experience the real Czech Republic, they’re probably referring to Cesky Krumlov. New life was breathed into this town of 15,000 nestled 100 miles south of Prague and 30 miles from the Austrian border when it was designated a World Heritage Site. Before the fall of communism in 1989, the community had deteriorated into a drab slum, according to locals.
The town now insinuates a hundred fairy tales with its renovated Renaissance and baroque gables, tapered roofs, old stone stairways, balconies and oriel windows. This is especially true during late afternoons when shadows half-darken mysterious lanes filled with centuries-old facades adorned with sgrafitto, artistic designs etched into the outer layer of plaster revealing the different-colored underlying layer.
Dating to 1253, Cesky Krumlov is a medieval time-capsule of winding streets squeezed into a tight S-bend of the Vltava. The historical center, a jumble of colorful stone houses, is an island- like pedestrian area linked to land and the main castle — the second largest in the Republic – by three bridges, creating a sequence of mini-waterfronts dotted with wooden walking paths, outdoor cares, touristy boutiques, and small, affordable pensions. It’s easy to explore the entire town on foot in a day.
By dusk, the day trippers and tour buses have disappeared and chatter from inside the town’s dimly lighted riverside taverns echoes in the cobblestone alleys. Couples fill cozy sidewalk café tables bathed in the soft glow of candlelight.
There is no question this is a place that takes visitors back in time. A hilltop path that leads around the tree-shaded perimeter of its medieval castle presents a bird’s-eye perspective of the town’s red-riled roofs rolling down to the calm Vltava. Nothing in this panorama reveals its Internet cafes, ethnic restaurants, or souvenir shops with traditional Czech marionettes hanging in the doorway.
Mature Life Features, Copyright 2003
Add Color to your Trip
| CECIL SCAGLIONE |
We smelled it as soon as we swooshed through the cool glass doors from the oppressive Pennsylvania humidity into the revitalizing air-conditioned low brick building.
“Crayons,” my wife said. She always says things like that before I do.
This nasal nostalgia triggered a rainbow of reminiscences: my first Christmas crayons and coloring book, the shopping sprees for the opening day of classes all through grade school, and the comfortable, colorful clutter of books and chopped-up crayons around the house as my children were growing up.
We had entered the Crayola Hall of Fame in the Binney & Smith corporate complex nestled in a high rolling Easton meadow close by the New Jersey border.
It was a timely visit because, for the first time in history, eight traditional tones were to be retired and a similar number added to the colorful contingent. To make room for the new hot hues – dandelion, wild strawberry, vivid tangerine, fuchsia, teal blue, royal purple, jungle green and cerulean – the traditional tints of maize, raw umber, blue gray, lemon yellow, green blue, orange red, orange yellow and violet blue were ensconced in the hall of fame.
I lobbied for the enshrinement of a violet orange I developed when an old crayon melted in my water color set long ago. But I couldn’t get enough weighted votes.
The move to modernity was made after interviews with Crayola’s major consumers – kids – revealed a need for brightness among the 72 official corporate colors.
We asked our guide, a retired Crayola craftsman, if there was any move to add a scent to the product. “Are you kidding?” was the response. Studies show that crayons are among the 20 most-recognized scents in America. Coffee and peanut butter top the list. And the most popular 32-color Crayola carton is to coloring what Coke is to soda pop.
While the scent is readily recognizable, it isn’t easily discovered. Plan to add at least 30 minutes for getting lost when you book an appointment for a tour of the coloring complex. The directions and map accompanying confirmation of your tour aren’t much help. Be prepared to ask local residents how to get to the Binney & Smith plant.
Inside, it’s almost disappointing to see how such colorful pieces of my life could be the product of such a small, spotless and constantly-clattering plant. It was like discovering that Santa’s workshop is in a carport.
Workers do display an elfin quality in the care and concern they show in making sure all those Crayolas have straight labels and perfectly pointed tips. My palms itched and ached to rake over those pristine-pointed columns of color. While there are more than half a million Crayolas on the floor at any one time, there are only a dozen or so workers attending clackety-clacking molding and packing machines. They produce 1 billion Crayolas a year. Another billion are produced at plants in Kansas, Canada and England.
Color is splattered all over as paraffin is recycled in large globs, colorful paper sleeves await the cylindrical sticks of color, and the familiar orange-and-green boxes of various sizes house the hundreds of thousands of Crayolas ready for shipment to more than 60 nations.
Crayolas have rolled out of this site since the first eight-color pack was produced in 1903 and sold for a nickel. The trade name Crayola derives from the French word craie for chalk and the Latin oleum for oil. Crayolas are made of paraffin and pigment. And crayon is the generic term for a colored writing stick. Anything else you ever wanted to know about Crayola and crayons can be obtained by writing to the company or by visiting.
The one person I hunted for but never found: the inspector who checks for crayons that stay inside the lines.
Scaglione is a San Diego free-lance writer.
April 07, 1991
Spoons Dish Out Welsh Soul
By Sandy Katz
Mature Life Features
- Cardiff Castle (British Travel Authority)
To be born Welsh is to be born privileged.
Not with a silver spoon in your mouth,
But music in your blood,
And poetry in your soul.
–Wilfred Wilson
CARDIFF, Wales — In the heart of this Welsh capital, I dropped into the Castle Welsh Crafts shop to learn more about Wales’ soul by poring over spoons made out of wood rather than silver. These utensils with variously designed handles are known as love spoons and date back to the 17th century, when a young man would carve one to present to the young lady he wished to woo.
The symbols carved on the spoon have particular meaning. For example, a heart signifies love; a wheel, work, and a shield, protection. They’re still given out as a lasting token of affection.
Most of the Welsh are descended from people who began settling in these western reaches of Great Britain thousands of years ago. The earliest were the Iberians followed by invasions of Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, and English. Struggles against these marauders and efforts to earn a living from the harsh, rugged land helped shape the strong, independent Welsh character. Their eloquence, warmth, and imagination have been attributed to their Celtic forebears.
Wherever you roam in Wales, you’ll encounter the Red Dragon. This symbol of bravery and victory over countless invaders has been emblazoned on shields and standards since the Middle Ages as the emblem of the Welsh people.
Pubs play an important role in social life here, but Welshmen proudly maintain close family ties and are deeply religious. They love to sing and are famous for their excellent choirs and glee clubs. It’s not surprising that they turned out to be quite a theatrical and poetic bunch. Consider such well-known actors as Sir Anthony Hopkins and Richard Burton, singer Tom Jones, and, of course, poet Dylan Thomas.
Cardiff sprang from the wealth fueled by the region’s thriving 19th-century coal empire. In the city’s center stands the 1,900-year-old Cardiff Castle. Restored in the 1800s by Victorian architect William Burges, the citadel is an extravaganza of color and exquisitely detailed craftsmanship. East of the castle stands the aristocratic structure called the National Museum of Wales. Amidst its art, natural history, and science displays is a spectacular exhibition on the evolution of Wales, complete with animated Ice Age creatures and a simulated Big Bang. The fourth-floor gallery houses paintings by such Impressionist masters as Degas, Manet, and Pissaro.
To learn more about the Celts, we headed for Celtica, a recently restored mansion in the village of Machynlleth just south of the mountainous Snowdonia National Park. Exhibits illustrate Celtic beliefs and culture, as well as their poetic, inventive, and heroic nature.
Anyone who dotes on browsing in musty bookshops will find nirvana in Hay-On-Wye on the Welsh-English. The tiny settlement proclaims itself as the second-hand-book capital of the world. Virtually all the shops, including the town’s former theater, offer books on every conceivable subject. The village’s reputation for beguiling bibliophiles owes a fair amount to the somewhat eccentric bookseller Richard Booth who, among other things, once declared himself the King of Hay and that his minute realm was to be independent from England.
To the west, beyond Camarthen in the village of Laugharne, Dylan Thomas devotees will find his Boathouse where he wrote his most famous work, “Under Milk Wood.” Built into the hillside a 15-minute walk from the town, “The Shack,” as he called it, is a shrine to the poet that houses photos, manuscripts, and recordings.
Local legend says Merlin the Magician was born in Carmarthen and raised by his mother and nuns in the Church of St. Peter. His mother was said to be the daughter of the King of South Wales and his father was described as a spirit who lived between the moon and earth. Merlin was thought to have spent most of his adult life in the area of Caerleon advising King Arthur.
Copyright 2003
Jettison Jet Lag
By Igor Lobanov
Mature Life Features
A not-so-funny thing happens sometime when you fly across several time zones. You can arrive feeling disoriented, irritable, a bit addled, and with a headache and swollen feet. It’s commonly called jet lag. But what, exactly, is jet lag?
To begin with, it occurs throughout your body. Science has made it public that various body organs and processes function according to individual biological clocks that operate on different schedules. Thomas Wehr, chief of the biological rhythms section at the National Institute of Mental Health, offers the following explanation. From New York to London, you fly through five time zones.
When you step off the aircraft in the British capital, “your brain is pretty much there, but your liver is out over Iceland.” From the point of view of your other body clocks, “All your organs are kind of spread out across the Atlantic Ocean.”
Getting all those mechanisms back into the pattern they’re used to back home can take time. Some observers say you should allow one day for each hour of time change. There are a number of things you can do to prevent or minimize the out-of-synch symptoms. Tactics range from the somewhat exotic use of scented oils (aroma therapy) that said to use our sense of smell to enhance mood to changes in diet and a bit of exercise.
On the day before departure, cut back on fatty and high-protein foods in favor of carbohydrates and vegetarian dishes, which help you relax. Try to get in some exercise, such as a brisk walk or a swim. Do that again when you arrive. Even more important is the exercise you do en route.
To get blood and oxygen circulating through your muscles and organs, walk up and down the aircraft’s aisle. On a wide-body plane, make one or two circuits of the cabin. While seated, do some simple stretches that won’t have you bumping the passengers around you. These can range from putting your hands behind your neck and pushing your elbows up in front of you to wiggling your toes and rotating your feet. Wear loose-fitting clothing and, to avoid swollen feet, doff your shoes for the flight.
Pressurized cabins in jetliners are extremely dry, so you’ll need to keep your body hydrated by drinking lots of water, fruit juices or sodas. Go easy on the alcohol, which dries out your system, and coffee, which acts as a stimulant. Keep a bit of Vaseline or lip balm handy to ease lip and nostril dryness.
Try to get in some naps, but avoid going to sleep sitting bolt upright in your seat — a position that, if unchanged for some time, can let blood pool in your lower legs and bring on dangerous blood clots. A better way to get some rest is to turn sideways and, if possible, try to scrunch down so your head is almost low enough to reach the arm rest, with one of the airline pillows or a piece of clothing rolled up as a pillow. If you have stowed carry-ons under the seat, drag them out to use as a foot rest. Again, don’t invade the space of the people around you. Your objective should be to put your body into a position that approaches horizontal.
Wrap an airline blanket around you for warmth, slip on an eye mask and, if needed, use ear plugs. With luck, the drone of the aircraft engines will carry you to off dreamland. Some long-distance travelers swear by over-the-counter sleeping potions, especially for red-eye flights, but some doctors warn that when you’re crossing multiple time zones such medications can delay the adjustment process.
Scientists now recognize that daylight can help reset your body’s clocks, including letting your brain know that it’s time be “with it.” If you’re traveling eastward, try to get exposure to the sun in the early morning after landing to help your body advance its clocks to the new time. Westbound, look for that dose of brightness late in the day.
Copyright 2002
Edison Linked to Canadian Baseball
By Cecil Scaglione
Mature Life Features
ST. MARY’S, Ontario —- You could say the chronicles of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame are crafted in concrete. The St. Mary’s Cement Co., founded in 1912, is to Canadian cement what Louisville is to baseball bats.
The Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame was opened in 1983. It was housed in the American League Toronto Blue Jays’ original home in the Canadian National Exhibition stadium on the Lake Ontario waterfront.
It was dispossessed in 1989 because it was not included in the baseball team’s new home – the massive Skydome built in the lee of the CN Tower, the world’s tallest free-standing structure that looms over the lake.
That’s when the cement company came to the rescue by donating 32 acres of land for a museum-and-sports-field complex. We stopped by this hidden gem a couple of hours east of Toronto while on a mission to dip our toes in the three Great Lakes – Huron, Erie and Ontario — that lap the shores of Southern Ontario.
This bustling industrial town also produced Arthur Meighen, who was prime minister of Canada during the early 1920s, and Timothy Eaton, who launched a coast-to-coast department-store empire. It also was a brief stopover for Thomas Alva Edison, who worked as an itinerant junior telegrapher for Western Union in his teens.
A near-disaster vignettes his brief career in St. Mary’s first railway station, although other towns claim this bit of notoriety. As the story goes, he displayed his creative bent while serving as the local night telegraph operator. To prevent night operators from sleeping on the job, the company required them to tap out “six” every half hour. He invented a device that automatically sent out the code when a crank was turned and he slept while the night watchman turned the crank every 30 minutes.
One night a message came through to hold a train in a passing track. Edison failed to relay this message to the train crew. Fortunately, the engineers saw each other’s train in time to stop. And the young man slipped out of town before the subsequent inquiry was completed.
A new structure on the Hall of Fame site is a bleacher section erected at the recently built ball fields. The museum is a house that was built on a comfortable knoll in 1868 and rented to cement-company employees.
Among the more renowned of the mostly Canadian players memorialized here is Chicago Cub’s pitcher Ferguson Arthur Jenkins, who was born and raised in Chatham, Ontario. It’s about 50 miles east of Detroit and was a major terminal on the underground railway used by slaves fleeing the United States. He’s also inducted into the Cooperstown, N.Y., baseball Hall of Fame. His 1971 Cy Young award for National League pitcher of the year is on display here.
Also in this baseball circle is Jackie Robinson, who played for the Montreal Royals, a Brooklyn Dodgers farm club, before he broke the color barrier in the major leagues.
While hanging around to listen to the echoes dancing around the uniforms, mitts, bats, spikes, caps, and photographs was enthralling, it soon was time to return to our original mission – to dabble in the three Great Lakes.
We had left Goderich on the blue-water shores of Lake Huron a couple of hours earlier after a couple of days roaming around the rustic region along its eastern shore. We went antique gawking in such fanciful towns as Tobermory, Kincardine, and Southampton. Villages in this area boast stone-and-brick churches that look large enough to house all the remaining buildings in the community.
From St. Mary’s, we dropped down to the north shore of Lake Erie. The water there appears to reflect the tone of the earth around it. We took time in Port Stanley to sample the sweet and succulent Lake Erie perch, a lunch you’ll always remember once you’ve tried it.
Our next leg was east around the metropolitan Toronto complex to Prince Edward County, an island on the north shore of Lake Ontario. This lake serves as a weather monitor – angry black-and-white when it’s stormy, crisp and translucent blue when sailing is at its best, and steel-grey cold when the temperature plummets.
We devoted some time here to view the area picked by loyalists to the British cause during the War of 1812 as they scooted across Lake Ontario to this land of milk and honey that has become Canadian wine-and-cheese country.
Picton, about 90 minutes east of Toronto, is the major town that anchors the eastern end of the Ontario wine country, which winds westward through the Niagara peninsula and on to the junction of the Detroit River and Lake Erie about 300 miles away.
The pub in the Waring House Inn, a cozy 17-room hostel and cooking school, proclaims its heritage in the Barley Room. Barley from this little island was in demand throughout North America during the latter half of the 1800s.
All this is within a two-hour drive of Gananoque, on the U.S. border at the head of the Thousand Islands leading into the St. Lawrence River; Ottawa, the country’s capital, and Toronto, often cited as the most cosmopolitan city on the continent.
Mature Life Features Copyright 2003
Havin’ Fun on California’s 101
By Tom Morrow
Mature Life Features
It’s more widely known as Pacific Coast Highway but the old U.S. 101 is as storied as it’s more renowned neighbor, Route 66.
It’s where we took Marvin the Magnificent, our 1981 Chevy motor home — some of the remaining sections are obliterated by the Los Angeles metroplex — to re-collect fond memories and gather new ones along this 1,500-mile scenic coastal route that links Canada with Mexico.
It begins in San Diego, where the first California mission was established in 1769. Over the next half century, Franciscan friars opened a string of 21 missions that formed El Camine Real (The Kind’s Highway), which outlined the original route of 101.
As we rambled north alongside the Pacific Ocean, we trundled through such towns as Dana Point and Malibu until we reached Oxnard, about 60 miles north of Hollywood, and voila, there it was: U.S. 101. Our first stop was in nearby Simi Valley, which houses the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. My mom served him breakfast every morning when he was the play-by-play voice of the Chicago Cubs on WHO radio in Des Moines and passed on her reactions, all favorable, to me through the years.
Our next stop was at Solvang, home of Mission Santa Ynez, the 19th of the Spanish missions that form California’s backbone. The Santa Ynez Valley is California’s wine country, locals will tell you. Other areas that claim otherwise are just pretenders, they say. The Hans Christian Anderson-looking Scandinavian village neighboring the mission has many attractions but we just took time for the Museum of Gasoline Pumps, since we were on automotive odyssey.
Pismo Beach was our next stop. The first motel in the world was opened to highway travelers in 1925 at nearby San Luis Obispo. It began as the milestone Mo-Tel and is currently called the Motel Inn.
A dozen miles north of San Luis Obispo is Morro Bay, called the Gibraltar of the Pacific because of Morro Rock punching out of the ocean just off the coast. It’s one of nine extinct volcanic peaks that punctuate the coastline down to ‘Obispo.
Another couple of dozen miles north, we detoured into San Simeon with its fabled twin-towered castle (see photo) built over three decades by newspaper baron, William Randolph Hearst. He couldn’t stop amassing “stuff” and his collection of artworks that he donated to the state of California now draws more than a million visitors a year. The late Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, after being a guest at what Hearst called “the ranch,” said, “This is the way God probably would have done it if he had had the money.”
Up the road a piece is Monterey. There aren’t many cities that have played such an important role of California history. It was the capital of both Spanish and Mexican California and, for a time, the headquarters of territorial Gov. John C. Fremont during its transition to the United States. Besides being the site of the word-renowned Monterey Bay Aquarium and Maritime Museum, it’s also the home of John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row,” which once was touted as the sardine capital of the world.
About 30 minutes inland is Salinas, the Pulitzer-Prize winner’s home town in “The Salad Bowl of the World.” Housed in the National Steinbeck Center there are scenes re-created from such books as “East of Eden” and “Grapes of Wrath,” clips of movie versions of his works, and his notes and references.
Next door to Monterey is Carmel, home of Mission San Carlos Borromeo del Rio Carmel, the second mission to be established in California. Buried under its altar is the body of Junipera Serra, the founder of the first missions to open up the California coast to European settlers. Carmel garnered national attention some years ago when Clint Eastwood, the Oscar-winning movie-maker and star, was elected the town’s mayor.
From here, it was time to turn back south, saving the remaining sections of this road up through Redwood forests to the forthy Oregon coast for another time.
Copyright 2002 Mature Life Features
Ship Shape for Photos
By Igor Lobanov
Mature Life Features
So you like to take pictures of all those places you visit on a cruise. What about the ship? “Not interesting enough,” you say?
You may want to re-think that.
Life aboard a cruise vessel, which is really a floating city, presents a panoply of picture possibilities: deck areas, lounges, and hidden nooks you’ll find on any ship worth its salt. To capture these scenes effectively, you’ll want a wide-angle lens. One with a 20- to 25-millimeter focal length will do to shoot interiors, spacious open decks, and dramatic white superstructure against the blue sky. You may want to include a railing, deck chairs, portholes or other elements of the vessel to add interest to your composition.
The upper decks are built-in vantage points for photographs of the shorelines, harbor activity, and other watercraft. You might look for a zoom lense to zero on these scenes. The general range of zoom lenses you should consider are 24 to 85 mm, 70 to 200 mm, and 200 to 400 mm. Many current cameras have built-in wide-angle and zoom lenses.
For shots of the ship taken from shore, put a person in the scene — your companion, a new-found friend, a crew member, or even a dockside vendor or local resident — to provide a sense of scale.
If you’re in the tropics, where the sun is unusually bright, you may want to use a polarizing or neutral-density filter to darken a blue sky and reduce the sun’s reflection off the water. The polarizing filter is fitted with a ring that lets you rotate it to see if you’re getting the sky too dark or eliminating all the reflections on the water.
At mid-day, when the sun in directly overhead, scenes will seem to be flat, with colors mostly washed out. Colors are more vibrant and shadows more dramatic before 10 a.m. and after 4 p.m.
To photograph friends and family on board, try to catch them in some activity, such as around the pool, or sunning themselves on the upper deck.
Keep in mind that salt water can harm cameras and video equipment by eating away at the electronic circuits and metallic gears. You’re pretty safe using the camera high up on the ship’s decks during calm seas. But remember that winds carry bits of salt that leave an oily film on equipment. When you go ashore in one of the ship’s tenders, where salt spray is almost inevitable, protect your camera in a water-repellent plastic bag. Clean all the exposed metal surfaces with denatured alcohol at regular intervals during the cruise. Use lens cleaner and lens tissues to clean glass surfaces.
If you want to take long-exposure photos, use a tripod because a ship is always in some sort of motion, even when docked. You can cut down on movement by setting your camera on a pillow. Of course, the longer the cruise, the more photo opportunities there are bound to be.
Mature Life Features, Copyright 2002
Sci-Fi Suburb in Austria
By James Gaffney
Mature Life Features
VIENNA – Facing the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, I raised the baton and with breezy optimism began conducting one of the world’s premiere music ensembles in Johann Strauss’ “Blue Danube Waltz.”
The moment was magic — until I butchered the tempo. The orchestra played too fast, then too slow. Finally the musicians ceased playing all together. A tuxedo-clad violinist stood up and shouted something in German to this wannabe maestro. The orchestra chuckled. An Austrian boy standing nearby with his giggling classmates translated: “The man said, ‘Have you even heard this piece before?'”
It all started with a retired Australian couple I met on the four-hour train trip from Prague to Vienna. They unfolded a map and “palace, palace, palace … cathedral, cathedral … palace, cathedral ” the man rattled off amicably before rolling his eyes.
In all fairness, Vienna is still regarded as the embodiment of a grand European capital. Just stand in the shadows of the 1,441-room Schonbrunn Palace or any of the baroque or neoclassical refuges left by the Hapsburg dynasty that ruled half of Europe from 1278 to 1918. And don’t forget the Vienna Boys Choir and Spanish Riding School’s prancing Lippizaners, cultural icons reflecting this city’s unabashed devotion to artistic precision.
But even locals admit the city has rested for too long on its cultural laurels. “A lot of people think of Vienna as only this,” said resident Christiane Haustein as she played an invisible violin to make her point. An exclamation point to her statement can be seen in the hip MuseumsQuartier, a tour de force of 10 art museums housed ironically enough in the Hapsburgs’ royal riding stables.
The several hundred exhibits gallop the gamut from modern art and experimental architecture to avant-garde multimedia demonstrations amidst an interactive children’s museum, theater, cafes, restaurants, and library. The icing on this cultural cake is the Leopold Museum, home of the world’s largest heretofore private collection of Expressionist masterworks by Austria’s Egon Schiele. Adjacent rooms feature the highly stylized works of Schiele’s mentor Gustav Klimt. He was the turn-of-the-century Viennese artist behind those arte nouveau paintings of femme fatales casting their Victorian cares to the Freudian wind.
The cobblestone boulevards of this city of 1.6 million people are still swept clean, making it still a delight to sip espresso at the Black Kameel. This 385-year-old sidewalk café is where a peckish Beethoven often sent his manservant for take-out schnitzel and beer.
Nearby, the sweeping central bay of the Hofburg Winter Palace is where Hitler made his conciliatory speech to the Austrians in 1938. That was shortly before the German army rolled into town, destroying nearly a third of the city, during World War II.
Gentler times are reflected in the eye-catching art-nouveau facades that flatter the pleasant, upscale shopping corridors of Kohlmart, Graben, and Rotentum. The same curvaceous style also left its signature inside the city’s legendary, turn-of-the-century coffeehouses. One evening we tumbled into the oldest — the smoke-filled, bohemian Hewelka. There we drank in the cross-section of Viennese society over a late-night Turkischer, or Turkish coffee.
It was clear no one was going to mistake this buzzing, theatrical java den for an American Starbucks. First of all, the waiters all wore tuxedos — a tradition requiring three years’ formal training as prescribed by Austrian law. Second, nobody at Hewelka sat quietly alone with noses buried in a laptop computer.
“A coffeehouse is Vienna – it’s life,” said Diane Naar, an English-born writer who has called this city home for some three decades. “It’s where Viennese come for dinner, meet friends, have intellectual conversations. Look around. People are actually talking to one another, people who have only just met while sharing a table.”
Next morning it became clear why the Gasometer, or G-town, has been turning the heads of urban planners and architects since it opened early this century. It’s worth the 15-minute U-Bahn, or subway, ride from Stephansplatz downtown for anyone who wants a glimpse into the weird and wonderful future of suburbs as science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury might have designed them.
Envision a quartet of round natural-gas storage structures, or gasometers, from the turn of the 20th century sitting side by side. Each is about half the size of a domed stadium. They’re connected by glass walkways. The lower levels comprise the uber-mall of four brick mega-structures complete with florists, cinemas, nightclubs, banks, grocery stores, rental car agencies, you name it. Rising above the glass-domed ceilings of the uber-mall are residential communities of apartments and condos. A second glass dome tops each gasometer’s residential section allowing for year-round, weather-proof outdoor living.
But even the futuristic G-town seems almost plain compared to the hallucinogenic vision called Hundertwasser Haus. Designed in the 1980s by Vienna’s late artist-turned-architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, this Gaudi-meets-Crayolas apartment building dominates nearly a city block with sinuous multicolored walls, leaning columns of colorful broken tiles, and multi-tiered roof forests.
The man standing at the curb snapping photographs shook his head. “Have you ever seen anything so ridiculous?” he asked. Actually, yes. Me conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
But that’s not the fault of the software-driven “Virtual Conductor,” the popular interactive exhibit at the House of Music. Opened in 2000, the high-tech $55 million complex is a six-story showcase of enjoyable cutting-edge multimedia exhibits celebrating Vienna’s A-team of composers — Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, the Strausses, and Mahler. With “Virtual Conductor,” an infrared beam from a baton aimed at a super-sized screen “conducts” an interactive Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra that responds to the maestro’s tempo and rhythm.
Raising the baton for a second try, I led the orchestra through Strauss’ most famous waltz, successfully this time. And this time the orchestra applauded.
Mature Life Features Copyright 2002
Mature Life Features 