The semester schedule, especially for college, often just seems like a mad dash from beginning to end. It’s slightly less so for school before college since the semesters are longer, but there’s still that same feeling.
The days are longer, the birds are louder, the air is warmer, it was Spring for a few days, and may be almost there again now.
Life: life is hectic and busy. Louie is completely overworked right now, but his sprint only goes through the end of April. Mine goes longer, but I’m not as overworked. Still time to read, to plan upcoming trips, to relax.
I haven’t felt like getting into the garden yet this year. I’m not sure if I’ll do it or not. I think I’ll probably plant at least a few things, maybe beans and zucchini, but since we’ll be gone I want to time it so that hopefully it’s okay if I wasn’t there the whole time.
It’s been a tough semester, with some work reasons I won’t go into here. I will say: I’ve been working hard on envisioning my own life, what I want the rest of my career to look like, and coming to terms with the fact (probably 20 years late!) that what I see as success and happiness in my career is what matters, not what other people see as success, especially colleagues who may have very different world views. I am not teaching in order to make my students into competition winners or performers, I am teaching because I want them to love playing the violin like I do, but I also know that for most of them, this is one part of their lives, and that’s okay. I want it to be a good part.
The same with performing: I can’t do everything. I have said repeatedly that I’m glad to be doing less, and I’m still playing for sure. I’m saying yes, I’m saying no, making decisions for myself. Do I get feelings of jealousy when I see what other people are getting the opportunity to do? Yes, sometimes. And sometimes those pangs are very fleeting, because then I remind myself, you chose a different path, you had a lovely evening, you played that other job, you already turned that gig down because it conflicted with something, or whatever. You can control your second thought.
Maybe they are just bragging on social media to make themselves feel better anyway, because they are missing something in their life, or because the freelance game is like the Game of Thrones.
Or, maybe they are genuinely happy and sharing because of that, it’s possible! There is room for all of us, their happiness doesn’t take away from mine.
I got new hiking shoes! I am trying a zero drop shoe. I thought that I didn’t need new hiking shoes for the summer and then I realized that my shoes were actually falling apart and worn down. We went on the Lime Kiln trail last weekend, and my calves were working hard on the uphills, but otherwise I loved them. I’ll need to build up those muscles.
New hiking shoes!
My old shoes treated me well: I hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, all over Utah (we did 5 parks in one trip!), Colorado, Missouri, and more. These shoes are more trail runners, so they are lighter, and probably won’t last as long, but the lightness is a nice feature as well. They are the Altra Timp 3 Trail Runners.
You can see my old shoes in these photos: With Louie at Delicate Arch in Arches National Park, me hiking up to Mills Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park, and relaxing by Mills Lake in RMNP on my 40th birthday.
I’ve been reading the Inspector Gamache series of books lately by Louise Penny. I happened into the first one somehow and then have been reading as many as I can. TV wise, we’ve been watching Occupied, which is a Netflix show in which Norway is occupied by Russia for their gas…it really takes on a whole new level watching this show during the current atrocities Russia is committing in Ukraine, but the show is good and making us excited for visiting Norway.
Food wise: we attended a Wine Dinner at the Whittemore House last weekend. It was a pairing of Moroccan food and wines (not Moroccan, but just to pair.) We had a great time. I haven’t been cooking anything super fun lately, just quick dinners to get by, like frozen pizza, fish and roasted vegetables, pasta, that sort of thing. Oh, one favorite recipe lately is Black Pepper Tofu and Eggplant from the Smitten Kitchen.
We only had a weekend to getaway over our respective Spring Breaks, and didn’t want to drive too far, so I decided to figure out a trip that would take us to do some interesting hiking. I also wanted to stay somewhere reasonably interesting, which ended up being a bit of a challenge. We settled on visiting the Garden of the Gods (in Illinois, not Colorado) since we had heard wonderful things about it and knew a few people who had gone. I couldn’t find much information about what to do online, so I hope this post will be helpful to you if you plan a trip!
So the Garden of the Gods is a Wilderness area in the Shawnee National Forest, and honestly, we barely tapped the surface, but I’ll tell you what we did. But first, let me tell you where we stayed!
I had looked at some cabins closer to the Garden of the Gods, but they were either too expensive or already booked up. I realized that there were a few options in areas overlooking the nearby Ohio River though, and settled on a place with a jacuzzi and porch overlooking the river. That location has several varying options, and they are all part of the same place. (It is a former Catholic Retreat called San Damiano.)
It was about a 3 hour drive for us, which is about right for a weekend. We left around lunch on Friday and arrived mid-afternoon. Check in was easy (key in our room), and we immediately found that yes, the view was as advertised.
The place itself was…quiet and isolated. There were a few other cars there and we saw a couple out walking their dog, but otherwise it looked run down and abandoned (there was a large building that used to be perhaps a conference center, which looked simply closed during our visit, but maybe closed for good.) We unpacked the car and then took a walk, following a sign that said “to the Ohio River 1/3 mile”. Indeed! It was a trail that went around the bluffs, really a road, and then we were closer to the river level. We walked for about a mile, and kept thinking maybe somehow it would circle back around, but it didn’t, so finally we reached what seemed to be “the end” and turned back. We also explored a bit around the building we were staying as well, as there were some benches, statues, etc. to walk around and look at.
Part of the road might have been a boat ramp at one time, but looked a bit flooded.
We got back up to our room and went out on the porch for “Happy Hour” of cheese/crackers. The porch wasn’t entirely private, but we had our own space. The room we had was part of a building with four rooms, but only the one on the opposite end was occupied. There was a nearby building that had a couple on the end as well, and at this time everybody seemed to be out enjoying the view.
It did get a little chilly however, so we went inside and turned on the gas fireplace and started cooking dinner. We had what we needed to cook, but nothing extra! There were no wine glasses either, which I figured just meant that the place was tired of people breaking them, since they did have a wine bottle opener.
At one point, we saw our first barge!
You can see our excitement!
It was exciting, because we could see the barge from afar, coming around the bend, but then it slowly got closer and closer.
We went to bed early, after watching a few shows on Netflix: there was a tv but no internet, so I assume just a few local channels. Do bring your own downloaded entertainment!
Oh, and barges make more noise than you might think. After dark, we would hear them coming up and down the river.
The next morning we enjoyed coffee and watched the river more. It was a bit chilly and rainy so we mostly watched from inside.
Our next plan was to visit the Garden of the Gods. We did two hikes there, which I highly recommend. We started with the Observation Loop, which is a must do hike in the area. It’s short and quite easy: there’s a mostly stone path to follow, and you can go off path and climb more rocks, or you can just stay on the path.
These rock formations were huge!This one looked like a turtle.I think this was called the Devil’s Smokestack, but there’s a 40 percent chance that is just in my head.
After we hiked the Observation Trail, we drove to the Indian Point Trailhead. It was a smaller parking lot, but was pretty crowded. This hike was around 2 miles, and was very enjoyable. We went counterclockwise. It was a little muddy starting out, but wasn’t bad overall.
The views at what I assume were Indian Point were very nice.
Not a bad view!
And then the trail goes by a bunch of rock formations, some with crevices and cave-like features that likely more adventurous people than me crawl all over. We really enjoyed this hike, and also the solitude of it. It was easy to follow and was well marked, though I’d downloaded it on Alltrails as well.
After that, we knew there was more to do at the Garden of the Gods, but nothing that we really felt like we knew enough about. So, if you have been and have recommendations for next time, please tell me! It looked like there were some longer hikes, but all the All trails reviews mentioned horses and being poorly marked…and we just didn’t want to deal with it. So do the Observation Trail and the Indian Point Trail, and then drive to Rim Rock Trail, which is about 15 minutes away, and will be awesome…when they fix the stairs.
The stairs look amazing. And they were closed for repairs.
We enjoyed about a 1 mile hike around the Rim Rocks Trail, but couldn’t do what looked to be the highlight of the Trail, going down those stairs into the rock formations down below! I would highly recommend all three of these trails, and none of them were particularly difficult–the Indian Point Trail was rocky and you’ll want good shoes for all of them.
After that, we decided to visit the nearby towns. We started with Golconda, which was technically the mailing address of our retreat. It was a little tiny town on the Ohio River, with a history of being a place where the Trail of Tears went by. The Wikipedia page tells the story, of a ferry man who refused to help the Indians cross the river, and made them wait in a cave and many of them died there. The town itself was quite run down (though to be fair, so are parts of my city) but the river was nice: we drove up on the levee and went down as far as we could. Oh, I considered renting an airbnb on the levee here with a lovely porch to watch the river, but I’m glad I chose the one I did, with the jacuzzi, and being further from town. There wasn’t much to do there, though there was maybe one little restaurant.
We also visited two other nearby towns, named Rosiclaire and Elizabethtown. We had thought if we saw a fun looking restaurant we might have dinner in town, but didn’t see anything that appealed. (We also get a little uncomfortable with all the political signs in these areas, to be honest, and that makes me not want to spend any more money, as well as concerns over health safety.)
So, we headed back to be on barge watch! And by that I mean, more cheese and crackers, and the sun even came out for a bit.
There was no outside table so we had to improvise.
And then we cooked dinner and relaxed.
One interesting thing that happened in the early morning was that we heard a barge blowing its horn, over and over. I was tired and chilly and didn’t get out of bed, but I chatted with the neighbor later and she said it was a foghorn–that the fog covered the entire river and there were two barges passing one another blowing their foghorns at one another. I should have gotten up!
Anyway, we took our time getting going in the morning, but left around 11 am. On our way out we stopped by the outskirts of the Retreat center to do a short walk in the woods and visit a giant statue.
The walk took us to an old cemetery, a pet cemetery (it was sweet but if you read Stephen King you will get shivers reading that phrase) and what looked like it used to be a place with statues but was now just old wooden posts and cement block with broken bits. I think it was a place to visit the Stations of the Cross and I don’t know if it was taken away or vandalized, or what, but it wasn’t anything anymore. We did see a few deer as well.
The main building, which looked to be closed, perhaps abandoned?
I hope you get a chance to visit the Garden of the Gods sometime, or visit the Ohio River. We definitely enjoyed our stay and would go back again, especially to hike the Rim Rock Trail with the stairs fixed and maybe another longer trail in the Garden of the Gods area.
It was an easy drive home, less than 3 hours and the cats were happy to see us.
We had a nice ice/snowstorm last week. It started Tuesday night late with ice, then a bit of snow, then a break, and then it starting snowing early Thursday and snowed practically all day. I had off school for my early morning job, and then taught online Wednesday and Thursday. Friday I did go into the college to teach, though I borrowed Louie’s Subaru rather than drive a Corolla.
It was beautiful to watch, and I’m glad we got the snow, but I’ll be glad to see it gone. Today the high is in the 40’s so I’m hoping it makes things easier to get around in and that I can start driving my own car again without concerns.
This weekend has been mostly at home relaxing, but we’ve done some interesting things over the past few weeks. One day we hiked the Lewis and Clark trail–it was after a snow, and there were some icy bits but mostly it was a wonderful day of hiking, and the weather was perfect: sunny and in the 40’s. It’s nice hiking in St Louis in the winter when it’s warm enough, because there are no bugs, and if it’s a scenic hike you get more views.
Quite a lot of the hike was along the Missouri River. It had a lot of ice floes traveling along it. The hike was about 8.5 miles. This was the map from Louie’s watch. You can make it a 5 miles hike, or shorter if you just do the out and back to the first river overlook (which is very nice) but I have to say, the whole hike is really nice! It isn’t terribly steep overall, and so much of it is along the river that it might be the most scenic hike in the St Louis area.
We also walked around Forest Park a few times and enjoyed the scenery there.
We often park near the World’s Fair Pavilion to start any walks in Forest Park. This was on a cold day after a bit of snow.
We haven’t been out much otherwise, lately. It’s cold and you know, omicron. We’ve eaten out a few times though, at Lily’s Mexican and a place near our house. And last night we got takeout from Himalayan Yeti, which we had almost forgotten about! There are some leftovers for lunch as well.
Cooking wise I’ve made a few delicious soups lately. I might have already told you about the Broccoli Cheddar soup, but I’m not sure. That one we ate with leftover rolls from Union Loafers: I had bought some things from them for Christmas, but froze the dinner rolls as we couldn’t eat it all at the time. I wish they sold them year round.
I also made the potato mushroom soup linked here. I made a few substitutions based on what I had, but I chose it because I had mushrooms and potatoes to use up and we wanted a soup. Highly recommend.
TV wise we’ve been watching 1883 and Euphoria as they come out, we just finished the latest season (or half season?) of Ozark. Last night we watched figure skating and other things on the Olympics.
Books: Non fiction I’m reading a book on the Marquis de Lafayette, Hero of Two Worlds by Mike Duncan and They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie Jones-Rogers. I am slowly working through my nonfiction book stacks.
I also read Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang which was a memoir showing a family of Chinese immigrants and their great difficulties living in NYC. Very thought provoking and well written.
Fiction wise: I recently read Mrs. Dalloway for my book club.
Eight Perfect Hours by Lia Louis, a cute romance
The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang. I would have liked this book better if the main character hadn’t been a violinist as I found most of the violin parts to be pretty bad (poorly researched), but the rest of the book to be wonderful.
It’s another week ahead of me, and it looks to be a “normal” week, weather reports look fine, it should be back to work, teaching, getting the spring festival application done, and a few other things. I slept poorly last night worrying about stupid things, and had some weird dreams of trying to get to various gigs in Ohio, but otherwise, no complaints! We are preparing for a performance in late February at the school, which gives us a good direction for the next few weeks of classes.
What have you been up to? Read any good books lately? Goodness knows I don’t actually need any more on my lists, but I’m always up for me.
It’s been a busy week, but we’ve made time for some fun as well.
Over the weekend I decided to do some baking to test out the new oven. Verdict: terrific!
I made pumpkin cranberry bread: I made it vegan to share, and at first I was doubtful, but by the second day it was fantastic. (It turned out my first bite may have been tainted by some expired crisco I’d used to grease the pan. The loaf we are giving away doesn’t have that issue.)
Then I made fruitcake to age for Christmas. I don’t know how it turned out, exactly, but I think it’ll be really good. You may say, fruitcake, that’s gross?! but you would be wrong. Some fruitcake may be gross, but some fruitcake is fantastic, as long as you like dried fruit, nuts, and really moist (yes, moist) cake.
We’ve been managing to get some weekday hikes in, and this past Tuesday was no exception. Louie and I went to Lone Elk Park to hike the White Bison Trail, advertised to be 3.2 miles. We’ve hiked it several times before, but never during this time of the year, which we highly recommend.
We saw several groups of elk along the way (give them space, they ARE wild animals–one group was fairly near the trail–10 to 30 yards away–and the male was standing in front defensively watching us hike by!) and then after our hike we went driving around. We saw another group of elk right near the roadway (in fact, we may have missed a “one way” sign and gone the wrong way down a road due to our excitement over the elk) and then we headed for the bison area.
A bunch of elk just hanging out. This was the women and children: the male elk was on the other side of the road keeping an eye out.
Bison, yes. If you aren’t aware, there is a bison herd at Lone Elk Park here in the St Louis area. They are in a fenced (electric) area and can’t get out, but they have room to wander.
We thought it was a bust at first, as we didn’t see any bison where we have in the past, and were able to leave disappointed, when lo and behold, we came up on a line of stopped cars, and there we were, in a good old-fashioned bison jam!
A bison jam!
We watched the bison from the car, taking pictures, admiring their strange large heads, slowing driving forward when possible.
We were probably “stuck” in the jam for about 15 minutes and it was glorious. If you haven’t been out to Lone Elk Park, I highly recommend it.
Anyway, other than that, teaching, etc, I’ve read a few books recently. I particularly enjoyed Emily Henry’s Beach Read, Tia Williams’ Seven Days in June, and Marie Benedict’s The Personal Librarian. Before that (not sure if I already recommended these books): Katherine Henry’s Early Morning Riser, and the Royal We series by Heather Cocks, Kristin Harmel’s The Forest of Vanishing Stars, V.E. Rue’s The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue, Kristin Hannah’s Magic Hour, Jennifer Weiner’s Mrs. Everything, and Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age. TV wise, I just finished watching “Only Murders in the Building” on Hulu and found it quite entertaining.
How is your fall going? Have you decorated for Halloween?
It’s been a minute since I blogged (I hate that expression but I’ve started using it to fit in, haha), so let me pop in and say hello. I’ve been busy, more than you’d think for summer.
I’ve taken two different online teacher courses (I’ve been learning tons, and really just trying to take advantage of this opportunity to learn online: if it goes away, taking one week of training in person, when you factor in travel, taking off work, and the tuition, would cost about as much as the nearly 5 different courses I’ve taken over the past year!) so that kept me busy, plus teaching. I’ve been working hard these past few weeks on getting my studio and my studio schedule organized for the fall. One thing I am telling myself is that if somebody can’t fit into the schedule, that’s okay. It happens, and I don’t need to lie awake stressing over how to make it work for everyone. (Yes, I do that sometimes. Yes, it is a little insane.)
It’s also been a bit of a stressful time. I got exposed to COVID from a student (vaccinated) and then had to do the whole teaching online/testing/waiting for test results thing. I know I wouldn’t technically have had to quarantine, CDC guidelines don’t say you should, but I imagined how I would feel having to tell my students if I tested positive, and that was enough for me to ask them to be online for a few days of lessons. I’m glad I’m mostly seeing folks in person though, because I didn’t love being online all day again. I still teach some students online, but I see more than half in person. I assume something like this will happen again this fall, with the delta variant running rampant through our area, but I hope that more vaccinations (come on, vaccinations for under 12’s) and going back to intense mask wearing will help. Oh, and I found out I had tested negative just in time, as my parents were visiting for the day.
Louie and I camped for two nights at Hawn State Park. We’d camped there before, but this time we took a walk-in site. It was a nice location, though the walking in was a little annoying. The first night we had the area to ourselves and it was beautiful…then a group of young people had two or three of the sites, so we lost our solitude. They were perfectly nice and respectful though, and we had a weird incident involving a man walking through the sites poking around at about 5 to 6 am in the morning, but nobody was hurt. I noticed him first, and quietly awoke Louie, and we weren’t really sure what to do, but my impulse ended up being to start yelling and wake up the other 12 people sleeping nearby, while Louie had evidently been planning to go out and approach the guy calmly, and either way, we got the guy to leave (he had a lot of excuses for why he was there) and blah blah blah. I don’t really feel like talking about it more.
The day we spent at Hawn was nice, except I was dealing with a migraine and the heat was pretty bad. We did a hike of about 4 miles, and then ended up eating dinner at a nearby restaurant. This was when we still trusted our vaccines, which we may not anymore: we ate at a patio last night, and I think it’ll be awhile before we eat indoors again unless it’s a place we really trust to be either vaccinated or mostly vaccinated and well spaced.
Our tent siteThis little area was right behind the camp ground, very beautiful!We really liked the shower icon.
Anyway, after we left Hawn we headed to St. Genevieve just to visit the National Historic Site–it had recently been turned into a National Historic Site, and I wanted to see it. We visited the Visitor’s Center and watched a short movie and saw a few displays, including a wonderful model of the town.
Not the model of the town, but some house models. This vertical post construction is what the town is known for.
Then we took a house tour (the Felix Valle House) and learned quite a bit, and then we just walked around a bit and had lunch at the Anvil Restaurant. There are other houses we could have toured, but we were ready to go home at that point.
Anyway, then another week and more went by and then my parents visiting, just for the day and overnight on their way somewhere else. We did a little sightseeing, and went to see the Ulysses S Grant National Historic Site, which none of us had been to even though it is less than 20 minutes from my house. It had a really nice museum and we took a ranger guided tour of the grounds. It is a small site, but very educational and well done. We were probably there about 1 1/2 hours total.
From the museum, these were Ulysses’s parents, Hannah and Jesse Grant. They were abolitionists.The backside of the house with the laundry and kitchen building. The Grants did own enslaved people.
We had more time after that, so we headed down to visit the Arch Grounds, which my Mom hadn’t been to since they were redone. We didn’t go inside there due to worries of too many people, but just walked around a bit. The weather was really quite nice, not too hot and sunny, so it was a lovely day for it.
We had pizza from Pizzeria da Gloria that night, which is quickly becoming Louie and I’s favorite pizza place. Try the mushroom pizza!
My sister and her family are visiting for a few days, starting today, so I’ve been cleaning as well, getting the house ready for more visitors (okay, full disclosure, I haven’t been doing much cleaning, but we did move some things around and then we had to set up a futon) and planning some fun activities. We are planning to visit Grant’s Farm, the Aquarium, and the new Playspace at Forest Park. We have reservations for one outdoor patio meal at Katie’s Pizza and Pasta, and otherwise are cooking or doing takeout: if we need to wear masks again, we shouldn’t be unmasking inside in front of strangers whose vaccination status is unknown. It’s too bad, because I was enjoying going to some restaurants and sitting inside, but…
Have you been to the NPS sites I mentioned above? What is your take on eating inside? Any other thoughts?
I’d been feeling a bit overwhelmed by what would be my last trip post, if I kept the same pattern of two nights, and then I said to myself, this is MY blog, nobody except me and my mom reads it, so why not break the last post up?
So far I’ve told you about Little Rock, Hot Springs, and our wonderful cabin in the Ozarks near the town of Pettigrew. Our next airbnb was south of Fayetteville where we would be spending our final two nights of vacation, but I wanted to make a stop en route.
I like seeking out National Park Sites, not for a bucket list or anything, but because they are often well done and worth visiting, and I enjoy learning about history as we travel. I noticed that Fort Smith National Historic Site wasn’t too far out of the way, and I’d also found a blogger who really loved the town of Fort Smith, so we decided it was worth a short visit.
I wasn’t sure if our google directions already took the gravel roads into account when telling us how long it would take to get there, but it turned out they did. It took about 1 1/2 hours to get to Fort Smith, so we rolled in somewhere between 10 and 11. Fort Smith is located right on the western border of Arkansas by the Arkansas River, and our directions had us briefly in Oklahoma, which was very exciting.
That is Oklahoma.
The Visitor’s Center was closed due to COVID but there was a ranger sitting outside with a table of brochures and happy to answer any questions. I’m sorry we missed whatever museum would have been inside, but he said otherwise, just walk around and it is all well marked.
Various pictures from the route. There was a bit about Fort Smith itself, fighting against Native Americans and stealing their land and the Trail of Tears, things about the Civil War, a supplies area, and a garden.
It seemed that the Fort was important in its history in regards to the Civil War and the Trail of Tears. Some of the information we read was a little confusing out of context, for instance we read something about the soldiers at the Fort abandoning the town when South Carolina seceding from the Union, but then later referring to the soldier being there fighting…so maybe that visitor’s center museum would have been helpful? Or a book I suppose.
In any case, it was a nice place to walk around. There was an extra long walk one could take down by the river, which added about 3/4 mile (I am just trying to remember this without research, so I could be wrong). We enjoyed a nice walk along the Arkansas River. We’d had dinner along the Arkansas River and crossed it a few times by foot in Little Rock and now we were seeing it again on the other side of the state.
It was a lovely, shaded walk on a hot day.The sign was at the edge of the property on the walk, not near the parking lot. Does that mean that the US is becoming a more pedestrian country?
After about an hour, we had seen all we could see. There weren’t proper restrooms at the site, so we figured we’d go and find lunch and bathrooms at the same place.
We drove down a very quaint, historic looking downtown strip to find a place called A.J.’s Oyster House. It was perfect: friendly, cool, had bathrooms, and we enjoyed some oysters too. I got the Oyster Po’boy and we split some Oysters Rockefeller.
After lunch we decided to pop back over to the downtown area to walk around, but I got distracted by a sign about Victorian Homes, and we ended up walking by some of them instead. They all seemed to be law firms now.
We couldn’t check into our airbnb until 3 pm and it was an hour away, so after our stroll we got coffees and relaxed at the Fort Smith Coffee Company (super cool place!) until it was a reasonable time to take off.
Keep your eyes out for the final, or who knows, installment of the trip to Arkansas!
