7 Quick Takes from Guatemala

— 1 —

So, yes, some of us are in Guatemala this week. As a backup for this blog, I scheduled reprints of Mary Magdalene posts from last year. For the life of me, I can’t remember if I actually proofread and updated them, so this all might be quite awkward. My internet has been mostly terrible, and when I’ve had it, I’ve used it mostly to make sure my ATM card hasn’t been skimmed and my bank account drained, so I hope you have enjoyed the Mary Magdalene posts, whatever they say. Read the book! 

— 2 —

The rest of this post will be mostly photos, and not the best ones, even. I have been using a real camera for this trip, but failed to bring the little card reader I need to put them on my computer, since this tiny thing doesn’t have an SD slot. So you’ll have to make do with my phone photos, which are okay, but not as comprehensive as what’s on the…camera. Remember those?

But …I will say this, and I will say it here mostly to hold myself to it. I am not going to post a comprehensive trip report. I’m going to write it in book form and publish it on Amazon – for a very nominal fee, yes, but I really think I have enough to write about here for at least 20-25,000 words, but I don’t want to bother with a traditional publisher – and I don’t think a traditional publisher will be interested.  I mean, who the hell wants to go through a year of writing/editing/thinking about marketing/rewriting/selling some little book about my Guatemala trip? Nobody, not even me. But I’m willing to spend a few weeks on it, and toss it out there for whomever is interested.

There was a day when writers did this sort of thing all the time, and there were magazine publishers who were willing to put out a long-form article or newspaper publishers who would serialize, but no more. I’ve decided that for this kind of experience, a series of blog posts is selling myself and interest readers short. So hopefully, when I get back, I can buckle down and do this thing.

Send thoughts and prayers my way, please!

Hate  ” thoughts and prayers your way,” by the way. We pray to God, not send prayers to each other. So, just kidding. 

— 3 —

So, yes. This has been a week of ruins:

 

Tikal, Yaxha, Uaxactun, Aguateca and Ceibal have been visited. Not all pictured. 

— 4 —

Nature has been spotted:

Just the tiniest fraction. Most photos were taken with the camera. The oddest thing is – you think before you go to somewhere like this that “Seeing a monkey in the wild in a tree will be the most amazing thing ever!” And the first two times, it is. And then you realize that they’re like Guatemalan squirrels, and you get over it.

— 5 —

Food:

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And all of it has been fantastic, and none of it been served in anything but fairly basic restaurants. Comedors – sort of like a diner.

The very humbling thing is that every bit of it has been actual food, not  Cysco can contents warmed up or stuff from Sam’s or Cotsco’s thawed and heated. It’s real food, really cooked right there in the kitchen using ingredients that someone nearby either grew or caught or raised. This is real farm-to-table, and for far less than 30 bucks a plate and without the attitude or pretense.

Left: dining room in Flores. Right: Kitchen in village near Uaxactun ruins. 

— 6 —

And just encounters and experiences:

 

— 7 —

Oh, and Star Wars background scenes. That, too.

For further reference…go here. 

 

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Monday homeschool

• Monday. Late start. Which is too bad because I wanted him to wake up before the frost melted away, so we could talk about that. Maybe tomorrow.
• Prayer: Reading of the day.  I introduced them by reminding him that now that it is Ordinary Time – for the next few weeks at least – the Mass readings will be focused on Jesus’ public ministry. The first readings for daily Mass are beginning with 1 Samuel. So first we read the Gospel and prayed the petitions for Morning Prayer, Lord’s Prayer, etc.
• Then after prayer proper we talked about the Old Testament.  Reviewed the basic historical content up to Samuel, drilled a bit on listing the books up to 2 Kings. Talked about Pentateuch/Torah, about the scrolls in a synagogue. Then read the passage for the day (1 Sam 1:1-8) with a map open, talking about Shiloh, about how Jerusalem would not be a part of the story until David, etc. Also pivoted back and drilled on the names of the first four apostles.
• 1 Samuel is my favorite book of the Bible, so even better.
• When I say “drill” I don’t mean with a pointer in hand, barking out names. I mean just learning by going over it a few times. There.
• Copywork was Mark 1:16-17 in cursive.
• Math: workbook pages on multiplication of negative and positive integers in Beast Academy. Four pages of puzzles basically – it’s one of the things I love about BA – puzzles are an integral part of the learning and reinforcement. Like this one. 
• 
• It can be frustrating. The puzzles get more difficult pretty quickly, but they are so cannily written that working through them results in clearly superior understanding.
• History next, but a bit of a break from the politics. We dabbled a bit in art, music and literature of the Revolutionary period. Basically culled from what I pulled together while he was doing his math.  So yes, intense prep.
• First, music – watched a bit of this video, focusing on “Yankee Doodle.”  It started interrupting and hesitating, so after Yankee Doodle was done, I declared it finished.
• Then art – this video on Copley, part of a YouTube channel that I think is just great.  Probably do a bit more on this tomorrow.
• Then Phillis Wheatly – quickly read/summarized some biographical material, snippets from a couple of poems, an account of her meeting with George Washington, and briefly discussed why she falls out of favor with some contemporary critics.
• At some point, this was interrupted by the request to learn how to do a coin roll over the knuckles.  A video was watched, that was attempted, as well as videos on flicking cards and the “waterfall.”
• Latin – workbook pages in chapter 19. 
• We have been doing the Writing and Rhetoric series from Classical Academic Press, and I’ve liked it very much. Because it takes a particular angle, I thought it best to start below grade level to get used to the routine – so we did books 1 & 2 (grades 3-4. He’s 5th) last year . It started to get a little tiresome, so I peaked ahead at the grade 5 material – it’s fine, and not an unreasonable jump at all. So that arrived last week and we started today: Refutation and Confirmation.  He read the introductory material (defining the terms, using the legend of John Henry and Peter Pan as examples) and then we discussed it.  It fit in nicely with a discussion we had sometime last week about suspension of disbelief and how that works in the dramatic arts – and on what basis we can get immersed in a story about a talking pig, rat and a spider who knows how to write and read and then, at some point, come to a point in a story we can’t buy. (Not that I have one in Charlotte’s Web. It’s just something that fascinates me – how can I be watching an animated feature in which literally anything could be made to happen, and then mentally check out when something “unrealistic” happens.
• So just reading and talking about that today. Writing tomorrow. Back to Johnny Tremain, as well.
• Then some art – this came through my emailbox today, so we went for it. Chalk pastels are not his favorite, and I absolutely sympathize.  I don’t like the feel of chalk against paper – as is the case with say, dry paper towels rubbing against each other – it’s something I weirdly can’t even think about without a shiver. WHY????  
• But he put that all aside and had fun, first experimenting and testing, then getting to the actual project. Simple, but good.

• Oh, I was going to be all “let’s be cultural” during lunch, so I started playing audio of The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and after 73 seconds he just looked at me in total confusion. Yeah, he had never read it, and the beginning is hard to follow, especially if you’re only listening.
• So we watched the Lego version. 
• Timeframe, including prayer and lunch: 10-2.

Dissection stuff arrived over the weekend. Haven’t opened the box or told anyone it’s here yet. Give me a minute.

Reminder why I’m doing this – first as a record for myself.  Secondly, just to have it out there for anyone pondering homeschooling. This is one way to do it. 

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Death Valley is Hot

I’m going to try to finish this up today, with a post on Death Valley, and then one on Vegas, baby.

(Which I hated. /spoileralert)

(Keep up with all the posts on this trip here.)

Death Valley is about two hours northish and west of Las Vegas. When Thursday began, we were in Saint George, which is about two hours east of Las Vegas. So this was going to be a big driving day, but also remember that because of the time change, it would, in the space-time continuum, be only three, not four hours between here and there.

There were times in the run-up to the trip I had regretted casually mentioned Death Valley, even though I wanted to see it.  Once I brought it up, the other two had decided that the trip wouldn’t be complete without it, but it was on the opposite side of all of the rest of the trip.  I wondered if we would have been better off with another day in Zion instead.  And that would have been great, but that said, in the end, despite the slight hassle, I’m glad we went.

Even though…it was…hot. 

Duh.  Of course it was.  It was late May in one of the hottest places on the planet! And I do like hot, and would not be too sad if I never spent time in frigid climes again.  But still…this was something else.

So that’ my first recommendation – if you do go to Death Valley, don’t go during the summer. Take everyone’s advice. They know what they’re talking about. If you go during the winter, you can probably stay outside and actually do some hiking, which is really almost impossible and not advisable in the summer.

Once we got to Las Vegas, I believe we hit an In n’ Out for lunch, and then drove on.  I took the northern route in on 95 instead of the more southerly route through Pahrump, mostly because I wanted to hit the ghost town called Rhyolite.\

Really interesting, and a valuable lesson in the reality of ghost towns. Rhyolite existed for less than ten years, but during its existence, it was quite a busy place after gold was discovered nearby….

The town immediately boomed with buildings springing up everywhere. One building was 3 stories tall and cost $90,000 to build. A stock exchange and Board of Trade were formed. The red light district drew women from as far away as San Francisco. There were hotels, stores, a school for 250 children, an ice plant, two electric plants, foundries and machine shops and even a miner’s union hospital.

The town citizens had an active social life including baseball games, dances, basket socials, whist parties, tennis, a symphony, Sunday school picnics, basketball games, Saturday night variety shows at the opera house and pool tournaments. In 1906 Countess Morajeski opened the Alaska Glacier Ice Cream Parlor to the delight of the local citizenry. That same year an enterprising miner, Tom T. Kelly, built a Bottle House out of 50,000 beer and liquor bottles.

And then…bust.  The San Francisco Earthquake and  the 1907 financial panic brought everything down, and by 1917, the town was basically abandoned. A really good lesson in the transitory nature of life and achievement and….stuff….

Below are photos of the Bottle House

Around 1905, during the Gold Rush, Tom Kelly built this famous house in Rhyolite, NV. It was built with 51,000 beer bottles and adobe mud. Bottles were also used in the walkway to the house. Kelly chose bottles because “it’s very difficult to build a house with lumber from a Joshua tree.” It took him about a year and a half to build the three room, L-shaped building with gingerbread trim. He spent about $2,500 on the building with most the money for wood and fixtures. Some of the bottles were medicine bottles but most were Busch beer bottles donated from the 50 bars in town.

(Where did the town building go? People were frugal..they wouldn’t just leave the structures..they dismantled them and used the materials elsewhere.)

There’s an outdoor sculpture installation nearby and a tiny little museum staffed, the day we were there, by a retired history teacher.

I don’t remember in which town his school was located, but…BUT..he told us something quite exciting…while he was teaching in the 1970’s, several of the children from his school were used as extras in STAR WARS, which was filming in Death Valley.

Okay, now, we were all definitely on board for Death Valley. The search for filming locations was on.

First, the entrance.

And then you drive….down, down…down.  I saw a lot of fascinating sites on this trip, but this drive down into Death Valley was, oddly enough, near the top of the list, partly because went into this with no expectations other than “hot.”  I had never seen the television show “Death Valley,” and had never thought much about the place.  I had never considered that it is an actual, well, valley, and what that means.  From that north entrance, you head down into this vast, shallow basin surrounded by mountains, and it really is like you are driving into another world.

First stop was Mesquite Flats Sand Dunes, which are the only dunes in Death Valley, and where some Star Wars stuff was filmed.  It was..hot.

Then on to Stovepipe Wells, which is a tiny settlement and the location of one of the few accommodations in Death Valley. Stopped at the little store, looked around, saw a tiny bird outside on the sidewalk, wings spread, panting, got back in the car to drive to our accommodations in the Furnace Creek area. 

This is the most historically developed area of the park – it’s where the Borax mining operations were centered. (And yes, this is where your “20 Mule Team Borax” got its start.

We stayed at the Furnace Creek Ranch – the less expensive and more available of the two lodgings in that area.  I had absolutely no problems getting a room, and I don’t think I even booked it until a couple of days before we got there.  To Death Valley.  The Furnace Creek Inn is the fancier, more expensive, and more historic lodging – an interesting history is here. The borax had been mined out, but the railroad company didn’t want to waste the investment in had made in the transportation into the valley, so they decided to try to make it a tourist attraction.

As I said, the Inn is pricier and was always booked up when I checked, so we settled for the Ranch, which was fine – us an the Europeans – mostly Italians this time, which was unusual. For most of the trip, we’d been following Germans and Asians. I don’t know why Italians suddenly popped up at Death Valley.

The Furnace Creek Ranch is on NPS property, but of course it is privately managed, and I do want to talk about this for a bit. As I had mentioned before, we had stayed at the Grand Canyon North Rim Lodge, also on NPS property, and managed by Forever Resorts.  It was fine, and you can’t beat the Grand Canyon, but there were certain aspects of the experience – mostly the value-to-quality ratio of the food that you are forced to pay for because you are a captive audience. It was overpriced and not that good (in the restaurant, at least).

The Furnace Creek Ranch is run by a different company – Xanterra – and it was a different experience.  Just as the case at GCNP, there are no other options for dining other than what’s at the hotel, but here, the food was pretty good and reasonably priced.  In other words, I didn’t feel taken advantage of or ripped off, and yes, I made a point of mentioning this on checkout.  So thumbs up for the Furnace Creek Ranch. (Very nice pool, too…in Death Valley, anything cool and wet is a nice pool, though)

After we checked in and once it had cooled off a bit, but before it got dark, we set off to see a few things.  We also so a few things the next morning – as early as I could possibly rouse them, so we could try to beat the heat.  I won’t go moment by moment, but just offer some photos:

History of Borax and Death Valley

Badwater Basin, lowest point in North America. In the photo above, he’s pointing to a sign marking sea level.

In the steps of R2D2

The Devil’s Golf Course.  It’s all salt.  Hardened, dried salt. Would be very painful to fall on this!

Zabriskie Point.

Death Valley was fascinating, quite beautiful and haunting, and I would love to go back and hike in canyons and so on…in December.

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In the footsteps of R2D2

Source. 

(Scene? Something in the first Star Wars. Or the fourth. Whatever. I guess if I can drag them to Breaking Bad locations in Albuquerque, they can drag me to Star Wars locations in Death Valley.)

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