Central America Trip #43

Mary is no longer available for RV traveling, but we remain good friends.
I’ve invited her to continue posting entries on this blog.

---

The motorhome is parked at Thousand Trails Palm Springs RV Resort in Palm Desert, California. I’m scheduled to depart here December 16th.

I’ve stayed here a number of times in the last 20 years and have blogged most everything of interest in this area. Rather than re-blogging those items again…

I’m taking you back to my…

2004 Central America trip…

This trip ended up being 343 days and 16,000+ miles through the back-country of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. 11 rigs started the trip, within a week we broke into three smaller groups for ease of traveling. Only myself and one other rig went the full, pre-planned route. All the others dropped out for various reasons. All returned safely to the United States. I’m planning to show these photos, more or less, 10 a day, whenever I’m not doing something else deserving a blog entry. FINALLY, it must be remembered these photos are prior to my switching to digital in 2006. The films were developed during our trip and the lack of quality control sometimes is plainly evident.

Today…Panama (south-bound) #2…

As always you may left click upon an image to see an enlarged view and then click once again to see an even larger view…

 

 

In Nata, Panama, I bought a souvenir (bicycle) license plate which now hangs in my current motorhome. My tan is now almost as dark as the local natives…

 

 

We continued on to San Carlos, Panama, where we are once again parked for the night on a beach with the Pacific Ocean about 200 feet away. About 6 PM, the local fishing fleet headed out to fish during the night. It’s now 6 AM and the fishing fleet is returning…

 

 

These fellows were either unemployed or not working that day. They gather to watch their friends returning from a night of fishing…

 

 

The fisherman bring their catch to be weighed before they can be paid…

 

 

This slender fellow is carrying about 100 pounds of fish. There were about a dozen different kinds of fish and the process continued until about 10 AM. It was most interesting to watch…

 

 

Panama is an Indian word meaning “an abundance of fish”…

 

At the end of the Amador Causeway, there are three small islands. In 1913, they were known as Fort Grant and protected the western entry to the Panama Canal. From material dug out of the canal, in 1913, they built this causeway and breakwater from the mainland to the outer island, to protect the ships entering the canal. Today, there was major construction going on building marinas, hotels, casinos, etc…

 

 

We saw these huge turtles among the many exhibits at the Smithsonian Museum Marine Exhibition…

 

 

At the Balboa Yacht Club, we watched boats preparing to transit the Panama Canal…

 

 

The view from the yacht club of the Bridge of the Americas looking east into the canal. According to our guidebook, the Panama Canal is now considered to be the boundary between North and South America, so we are now officially in South America…

 

 

You can read all about Panama by clicking this link…https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama

Here’s my trip website link…http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/panamaorbust

I hope you enjoyed the photos.

 Yesterday was partly sunny and 74 degrees. Forecast for today is partly sunny and 76 degrees.

Enjoying nice weather is another joy in the life of a full-time RVer!

The red dot on the below map shows my approximate location in the State of California. You may double left-click the map to make it larger…

Enjoying 65-75 degree temperatures with low humidity most of the year is a primary joy in the RVing lifestyle!

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving”…Albert Einstein

My current travel rig is a 2006 Fleetwood 26′ Class A Motorhome and a towed 1986 Ford Bronco II, Eddie Bauer Model. This photo was taken in the desert at Slab City near Niland, California…

On October 27, 2012, I created a two-minute video titled America The Beautiful. The music America The Beautiful is by Christopher W. French. The photos, which I randomly selected, are from the states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Tennessee, Washington and West Virginia (not shown in that order)…are mine. Yup, That’s me standing in front of the Post Office in Luckenbach, Texas…Y’all!

Click this link to start the video. Make sure you have your speakers turned on and go to full screen asap.
http://youtu.be/FfZUzEB4rM8

If you would like to see my YouTube videos, click this link… http://www.youtube.com/user/JimJ1579/videos

There are more than 600 photo albums in my Picasa Web Albums File. To gain access, you simply have to click this link… https://picasaweb.google.com/jimjrver

If you have not checked out my Ramblin Man’s Photos Blog, you can do so by clicking this link…http://ramblinmanphotos.wordpress.com/

For more information about my books, click this link:
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/panamaorbust

All original works copyrighted – Jim Jaillet -2015

ARRIVED HOME SAFELY.

We left Lake Minden north of Sacramento yesterday and arrived in Murphys at about 1:30. I walked the lake the night before without my camera and missed some great shots of two big catfish surfacing, mouths open, holding above water long enough for a photo. Dang. I should always carry my camera, I know that. So, I told Jim, we had to walk the lake again before we left in the early morning-with camera. Reflections on a “glass” surface.

Clear and beautiful.

The fish were feeding, and jumping and biting, but just try to get a photo.

A fish would surface, grab an insect and be under before you could snap the photo. I have multiple pictures of gray shadows in the water.

It is a pretty place, and peaceful here. Jim gets exhausted driving with one eye impaired. He has to concentrate so hard that we move very slowly. So, it was a lovely last night on the road.

I got home to my usual pounds of mail and then made the mistake of looking at the news.  What mediocrity we call news. Everyone is incriminating Obama because he saluted the flag with a cup of coffee in his hand. There are life and death issues to deal with and the news focuses on a cup of coffee?

Did the “newspapers” ever make a fuss about Bush saluting with his dog?  What crap passes for news. I used to give Jim a bad time about getting rid of his news feeds. I don’t any more. It is mostly garbage and good luck trying to tell the truth from the lies. Lies have become standard and accepted. Money to both parties is like a river, while very little work gets done by the people we elect TO SERVE US. What shame that we have entrusted our fate to legislators that  govern from where their largest donations come from. Corporate interests.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WESTPORT HARBOR, PART ONE.

Westport Harbor has a marine Museum located in the former Coast Guard Station, an appropriate transition.

It is on a board, how can you get a notion of the size of a 126.5 lb salmon. Having just carved up a 5.25 lb salmon that has thus far provided Jim and I with three meals and three left to go in the freezer, I had to think seriously about this big fellow. It was 53 inches long and had a waist line of 42 inches. Now that puts it as tall as a 10 year old boy with the stomach of a pregnant woman. Yup! On a board. There is pictures of other giants on the wall at 57 pounds and down. I now look at them as food. No wonder the Indians of the Northwest were so healthy and prolific.

I try to find something that I’ve never seen before in a museum. Certainly the salmon qualifies and so does this dairy. Instead of a milk delivery from door to door, the milk was delivered to a tree. Now that is novel.

One building on the Coast Guard complex was devoted to the fresnel lens from Destruction Island Light House. Ive seen many lenses but never so beautifully displayed. The docent imparted a bit of trivia, telling me that the state with the most lighthouses is Michigan. Since I lived there for 13 years, why did I not know this?

This building held skeletons of whales, the Minke, and other whales are endangered because Japanese hunters refuse to obey the hunting ban.  The length of the building, the long part of the L shape, is 100 feet. A blue whale, the largest living mammal on earth,  would take up the entire building. What interested me about this exhibit is signs on the building, Clam Chowder, $5 a bowl. A hotdog and a soda, $4. It went on to compare fish foods to junk foods and gave me another perspective on the relatively cheap food we have in America, healthy as opposed to unhealthy.

It was about lunch time and we zapped over to Bennett’s Fish Shack, which came highly recommended and we weren’t disappointed.

Clam chowder and crab cakes. The docent at the museum told us Dungeness crab tastes better than king crab. I have to agree.

On the street we met little dog, Mikey. Who could resist a pose like that. I know he was just begging me to take him home. If I ever get another dog, I’ll chose a little one.

After lunch, we walked in one of Washington State’s “heavy mists” along the harbor. It turns out that Westport is the most western point in the U.S. mainland coast. It also has the highest lighthouse on the West Coast, now open to tourists. We didn’t get there. But we had a great time photographing the largest Marina on the outer coast of the Pacific Northwest.  I stopped and gabbed with this fisherman and a couple of others. No luck. They all complained they’d seen few salmon in the water but this guy said, in a couple of weeks, there will be thousands of them in the harbor. People here love to fish.

Suddenly, on float #8 (I think it was 8) we saw some excited activity, a plastic bag full of red meat salmon on the float. (Click to enlarge this photo, then back arrow to the blog.)

A fishing boat had come in and this dude on the right was filleting them for the guys to take home.

I asked him how many fish he’s cleaned and whether the people on the boat had any fun, like a little wine, some music, maybe a dance or…? He looked at me and said, …”fishing is fun, that’s what we do.” He said he’d probably cleaned a million fish.

These two silvers were on the boat walk and the fisherman was waiting in line to have them fileted.

He was only too glad to hoist them up for us to take a picture. He got the pin for the  day’s catch, “I caught the big ‘un on the Tequila. ” He hadn’t had them weighed yet. All hands estimated the big one to be 14 pounds. The captains know where the fish are and everyone got their limit which is two salmon, plus whatever else they are allowed.

This guy was tagging heads. He knows how many boats go out each day. They are all licensed. They told him they had to throw back a silver which he records on his chart. He tells what boat these fish came from, the total catch, and a number of other statistics. He knows where they were raised, from what hatchery and the statistics give him an idea how many are still out there and when to close the season to allow for spawning. Fishing is tightly controlled to make sure enough survive and keep the fish numbers sustainable.

We walked the floats and took pictures around the harbor. This is Jim’s favorite nickname for me.

The marina is a fascinating place with small, individual boats like this one.

To huge net trawlers like this one.

We see very little color in this gray atmosphere.

As we drew nearer the commercial floats, pens of fingerlings have been planted here. This gull somehow got under the net and then could not get out. We watched her try and try to get out. I know some birds mate for life, maybe gulls do to because the brownish gull kept returning to her and watching helplessly by while she struggled. It was sad to watch.

A heron stayed hopefully by the fingerling beds for a long time.

In two weeks, maybe the whole fishing fleet will be after the salmon. A poor fish doesn’t have a chance. I think there were 15 floats with boats tied to each side.

We found fresh air, wonderful people, fish and beauty. But, I’m not finished. More tomorrow. We move 100 miles south today to Seaside.

Clallum Bay, Washington

Yesterday I drove the motorhome the 37 miles from Joyce to Clallum Bay, Washington. We are planning to depart tomorrow.

Because of the winding up and down roads, the drive took 1.5 hours. We are traveling on Washington State Highway 112 also known as the Juan de Fuca Scenic Byway which you can read about by clicking this link…http://www.highway112.org/

The below Google Earth image shows our camping location marked by the “X”. Today we will drive the Bronco to the most northwesterly point in the contiguous United States. CF indicates Cape Flattery…

As always you may left click upon an image to see an enlarged view and then click once again to see an even larger view…

Here are some photos from yesterday starting with a beautiful sunrise at Salt Creek Campground…

Traveling along the Juan de Fuca Scenic Byway…

Our campsite at Sam’s RV Park…

The usual dinette window photo…

Clallum Bay and Sekiu separated by a two-mile beach is where folks come to fish. There are a lot of RV’s and a number of motels here housing these people. Here are some of thee local photos…

We were the only people on the two-mile sand beach…

Mary poking around in the sand…

Found these agate…

I HOPE YOU ENJOYED THE PHOTOS.

With regards to my upcoming cataract surgery..my pre-op exam and consultation is set for September 29 at the VA Hospital in Palo Alto, California…surgery is scheduled for October 9th.

Yesterday was a sunny day at 67 degrees. Forecast for today is sunny and 67 degrees.

Enjoying nice weather is another joy in the life of a full-time RVer!

The red dot on the below map shows our approximate location in the State of Was. You may double left-click the map to make it larger…We are off the map in NW Washington!

Enjoying 65-75 degree temperatures with low humidity most of the year is a primary joy in the RVing lifestyle!

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving”…Albert Einstein

On October 27, 2012, I created a two-minute video titled America The Beautiful. The music America The Beautiful is by Christopher W. French. The photos, which I randomly selected, are from the states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Tennessee, Washington and West Virginia (not shown in that order)…are mine. Yup, That’s me standing in front of the Post Office in Luckenbach, Texas…Y’all!

Click this link to start the video. Make sure you have your speakers turned on and go to full screen asap.
http://youtu.be/FfZUzEB4rM8

If you would like to see my YouTube videos, click this link… http://www.youtube.com/user/JimJ1579/videos

There are more than 500 photo albums in my Picasa Web Albums File. To gain access, you simply have to click this link… https://picasaweb.google.com/jimjrver

If you have not checked out my Ramblin Man’s Photos Blog, you can do so by clicking this link…http://ramblinmanphotos.wordpress.com/

For more information about my books, click this link:
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/panamaorbust

All original material Copyright – Jim Jaillet 2014

KOOTENAI FALLS AND BONNERS FERRY

Nine miles west of Libby is the Kootenai Falls and Swinging Bridge.  I appreciated this sign because we have a place in our county referred to as Candy Rock that is popular with young people and there have been tragic drownings. The Corp of engineers dynamited one of the dangerous whirlpools but it still isn’t a safe place to play. A sign like this might be helpful. In fact, this is where the movie River Wild was filmed and where Meryl Streep got washed off the raft and nearly drowned.

Before you get to the river bank, you have to cross this very safe railroad bridge which was one and a half flights of stairs up on this side.

A train was coming while we were on the bridge, so like kids we had to watch it. Hey, a new experience for me. I hope you are chuckling.

We didn’t watch it until it disappeared. (Jim moans that I’ll use up all of our picture bytes before I fly home.)

The down hill path was clean and easy looking, but that soon changed.

At the back of my mind, I’m thinking I’ve got to climb back up. This is my first  big challenge, a mile hike over rough terrain and…steps. Plus, this is a non-pain pill day. I’m on pain pills every other day right now and I know I’m getting stronger.

And there she is. I was expecting one of those bridges with net sides where every step makes you question your judgment. This one is well braced from below and much more stable but still gives a significant bounce.  A sign tells you no more than five people at a time on the bridge. This is a new bridge that replaced the old one lost in a flood. Built by the U.S. Forest service for fire access.

It still bounces a good bit with two people on it. Maybe I’m glad it isn’t the net variety. The chain link sides are pretty comforting.

Over the edges of the bridge I looked for stromatolite formations. Signs about the geology talk about the formations formed in shallow water, but we are so high up you can’t really see them well. This is also a river of “folds” formations that cause great ripples. And, they talk about the various colors of sandstone in the area.

We got off the bridge and walked back to the right fork to the falls. I found one rock with the described formation-a stomatolite.

I did find some pretty colored rocks, like this baby blue and some lavender.

Yellow and pink. I couldn’t help but think how much prettier these rocks would look under water or after a rain instead of on this dusty path. It was a cold morning and I didn’t brink a water bottle.

I spit on a kleenex and swiped the rocks here and there. And it does show how pretty they are but I only had one kleenex in my pocket and Jim thinks I’m nuts anyway.

I don’t have a clue what type of tree this is. I think it may be a peeled one of the tree next to it. I wish it was labeled. What a beauty.

And finally the falls. It looks like we are level with it, but it is down a very steep, rocky cliff from where we are standing.

It falls about 300 feet in a very short distance.

We hiked back to the railroad bridge and on the river side, there are 3 and a half sets of these long flights of stairs to get up. I was committed when I came, so I had to climb them without taking baby steps. A small epiphany for me, I slept well. This morning I feel no pain and I feel stronger. Good portent for the future.

We met some fisher people on the path. They go for kokanee salmon. “Heard they were running.”   I expect that means spawning.

The Kootenai Falls is in Montana and we crossed into Idaho and stopped at Bonners Ferry.

This is a days catch of sturgeon from the Kootenai River. I don’t know if they still exist. One picture showed a record size sturgeon of 315 pounds.

Bonners Ferry was started by E.L. Bonner in 1863. Gold was discovered and a frantic rush of people headed for British Columbia had to cross the river. Bonner was one of them. He noticed the hold-up getting across the river, got the crossing rights, and built a ferry here. After the gold rush, the economy was based on timber. Here a mammoth log drive of 80,000,000 board feet.

The size of the logs, the power of the horses and strength of the men is impressive especially compared with today where there is nothing left of these giant forests but “twigs”. I see trucks all the time with trees of 9-11 inches in diameter coming out of the woods, here and in California where I live,  also a logging area.

Not only the size of the logs, but the danger of riding with such massive logs aimed at your head as on this truck.  Even modern log truck drivers check their chains before going down hill with logs behind their heads. I’ve ridden out of the woods with one of them.

Now, that’s a load. The area thrived not only on its timber, but the Pacific Railroad came through here as well.

This was a wonderful museum.  William Wright’s saw buck pack-saddle, made of wood, from 1896. Wright ran a string of pack horses through “buffalo hump” country and up the Wild Horse Trail. He renamed Mosquito Flats by tearing down the sign and replacing it with one that said Paradise Flats.

This couple is showing off their new car. But, look at the pride in that woman’s face. Isn’t that a hoot?  SHE’s doing the driving.

I recently discovered a gas burning iron. And now a charcoal burning iron.

My mother owned a Ouija board, but, we and she thought it was pretty boring. She tossed it.

Most old clocks have a similar kind of look. This one was different and still chimed.

This museum had a lot of nice things, and good personal people stories. They had a beautiful portrait gallery of the movers and shakers of Bonners Ferry. The huge portraits, at least 100 of them, were accompanied by a biography below it like this:

This way you knew who they were and what they did. C.W. King was the youngest senator to serve in the Idaho Senate.

A woman who rescued her husband from an Indian Tribe bent on execution. You will enjoy this museum, and this community. Bonners Ferry is progressive. They have a farmers market and a brewpub. What more do you need?

GREAT PLAINS DINOSAUR MUSEUM, PHILLIPS CO., MONTANA

Our goal as we put miles on Highway 2 toward Seattle was Phillips County, Montana, two stops, both small towns. First Saco where Chet Huntly was born and raised.

The one room school house  he attended held ten students. I liked the way the teacher could just  stand by the door and raise and lower the flag each day.

They preserved a one room jail and a small church. The stop takes about ten minutes. The site is unattended and the classroom is behind a floor to ceiling chain link fence.

Pictures of various students and teachers are safely tucked behind glass, as they honor their favorite son. Saco is tiny, population about 200.

Our major goal was Malta, a small  town of 2,000 with side by side museums of major importance. The Great Plains Dinosaur Museum,  and across the parking lot from it, Phillips County Museum, honoring pioneers from this neck of the woods.  I chose the Dinosaur Museum and Jim opted for the pioneer museum.

In the old days, archeologists went out with horses and a buckboard to gather fossils. In fact, fossils from Montana were all over the United States in Museums, but none were housed in Montana.

Fossil hunters using tried and true methods, dug up bones, used a varnish on them to help preserve them, then encased them in plaster to protect their fragility. The bones were then delivered to museums or labs for study.

Montana is one of the richest dinosaur repositories from the cretaceous period in the U.S. Looking at the map, the green areas are where to find fossils. Farmers and Ranchers would routinely find bits of bones in the soil but no one was doing anything about it until a group of archeologists founded a volunteer organization that secured a grant to begin the Great Plains Museum. They finally moved into this state funded building in 2002.  Small, but expected to expand, it holds fossils from Phillips County and a working field station for their work.

The way things are done today, when the site is identified, the major dirt is removed from on top by machine.

The same type of work takes place, with dental picks, brushes, and small hand tools until the bones begin to appear.

This dinosaur was on a steep hillside and couldn’t be platformed.

Platforming gives the workers a “table” to work around and makes removal easier.

And this is the result. Julie, a beautiful and complete raptor. Names are often chosen from the landowners family, or from the archeologists name. An Austrailian team discovered this fossil and wanted to name it Julie after a member of their family. The land owner had a daughter named Julie, so it was a perfect name.

Not all finds are as complete as Julie, but now major finds are kept in the county. They allow them to travel to other exhibits and they are open to scientists for study.

This is a picture of Sue Frary the curator and lead archeologist at the Museum. She does field work and study here. Very friendly, enthusiastic and informative, the museum encourages people to take vacations here, join a field exploration and maybe even bring home some fossils. 

The Koss family did just that and 4 year old Kennedy Koss made a major discovery.

Kennedy’s find above, discovered in 2008 and named the Kennedy Koss Horn. It is a triceratops horn with a bite mark on it. Sue told me another 4 year old found a dinosaur tooth.

And another child found the Giffen Stegosaurus “spike” or plate, as shown in the figure above. Giffen is the only Jurassic dinosaur discovered so far in the area.

This is Leo a young male dinosaur. He is one of the few dinosaurs with mummified skin. He shows tendons and features usually not present on old bones. He travels all over the world and brings in money to help support the museum.

An example of dinosaur skin.

And this is Roberta. She still sits in her plaster bed. She died from a bite that got infected.

In this close up of her head, the second pendula from the left is a fracture that tried to heal. Above the fracture are two darkish holes where infection set in and most likely caused her death.

This is a close up of the two bone parts of the face. On the right the open fracture and above it the infected holes. Somehow, other dinosaur museums didn’t interest me as much as this one. Some how, gawking and oohing and awing over the immensity of the creatures wasn’t as personal as this small museum.

Dinosaur eggs.

What Julie looks like when fleshed out.

Prehistoric fish bones.

A plant dinosaur specimen. A type of redwood tree that apparently grew all over Montana.

There is a lot to see here and I really enjoyed this place. Do go. You’ll learn a lot in a very interesting fashion with an interesting curator. Better yet, send your grandkids on a field trip. And, last, I chose to wear orange on Sunday.

Orange is a bold color, and the No Kid Hungry campaign has an equally bold solution for ending childhood hunger in America. This September, join Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign to raise awareness that 1 in 5 children in America face hunger. It’s a problem we can solve, and it’s time to get involved. Add your support to the No Kid Hungry campaign, and together let’s end childhood hunger in America.