Omaha Zoo

 Most of the placed we visit we suggest that “if you are ever nearby, you should check out this place.”  The Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium is a different matter.  This zoo complex in Omaha, Nebraska, deserves to be a destination! Trish and I spent more than seven hours here yesterday, but we already know we want to deliberately come again.

After a golf cart tour for orientation (and some behind the scenes animal visits) we started with the apes and monkeys.  They were very active and in a huge natural environment. Every place we saw on this day looked very clean, very well maintained, and there was plenty of space.  We couldn’t even guess how many acres larger animals had in their habitat.

We watched the elephants and then got to go into their 27,000 square foot barn! All the animals here are so cared for and the zoo’s world-wide conservation work impressed us greatly.  We later visited the very tall giraffe barn.

The giraffes lived in a rolling hills huge environment but seemed to enjoy human attention. The lions environment included towering rocks the males seemed to enjoy.  They got to look down in everything!

Besides all the animals, the zoo has a long steam train that runs all the way around the perimeter, and a “Skyfari” ski life ride that gives you views from above more intimate that from down below.

Trish and I are already watching our calendar for times we can come here again.

The House on the Rock

 The place where Trish and I spent the day yesterday is most difficult to describe.  The House on the Rock was said to have been born in a meeting between Frank Lloyd Wright and Alex Jordan when Wright laughed at an architectural plan Jordan had drawn.  Jordan vowed that he would build a Japanese house that Wright could see.  

On top of a sixty-five foot rock five miles from Wright’s home, in the 1940’s Jordan built The House in the Rock and opened it to tourists. 

But…that building was only the beginning.  By today there are three gigantic buildings so hidden in the woods that you do not see them when entering the overall complex.  It took us five hours to walk through it all, and that was with very little lingering!

The house itself goes on and on and features Japanese themed rooms and is more than 4,000 square feet right in too of the Rock.  It features the Infinity Room that takes you out over the treetops.

Leaving the House, you begin to enter two gigantic museum buildings you did not know were there. What to they contain? Unimaginable multitudes of collections of everything from dollhouses to carousels!

There is the Street of Yesteryear that features a fill street of shops and establishment which themselves serve as little museums from the dentists’s office to the apothecary of yesteryear.

The Music of Yesteryear holds giant music boxes, player pianos and other self-playing instruments of every sort, gigantic self playing organs and even a full band and orchestra with animatronic musicians on real robotic instruments!

There is a large collection of miniature circuses, twenty or more, finally leading to the word’s largest carousel.  Eighty feet in diameter and with 269 animals to ride, the carousel contains not a single horse, but figures from full-sized elephants to imaginary dragons.  The organ that accompanies it totally surrounds the giant room housing the carousel!

Imagine five hours of more stuff!  All we can say is they you should go there ONCE!  That will be enough to last a very long time!

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin

 In the nineteenth century a number of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Welsh ancestors settled in the Wyoming Valley of Wisconsin.  Born in 1867, Wright grew up spending summers on this land often working on an uncle’s farm there. As a young adult he began to buy land from his relatives from whom he also inherited land.  Eventually he owned 2,700 acres.

He began building a home there and in 1911 moved there with his lover, Mamah Borthwick.  Named “Taliesin,”  a Welsh word meaning something like “the brow of the hill,” Wright lived and worked there for the remainder of his life.

Yesterday, Trish and I spend a lot of the day visiting the estate and the home.

The home is so large, and its arms and wings encircle the top of the hill, that it is impossible to photo the whole thing.  Wright measured the total of Taliesin at 37,000 square feet, but, he included the enclosed garden spaces in that measurement believing that, done right, the outdoor space was part of the building.

You enter the house through small doors and low hallways designed to prevent lingering.  After the small entryway, the large rooms seem bigger than ever once all the way inside.

As we moved through the house, it was clear that this was space in which to live, not just look at.  There are 22 fireplaces and little nooks within rooms that make you want to hide out with a book.

Windows are everywhere truly blending outdoors with indoors everywhere.  The grounds feel very intimate rather than sprawling.  The overall effect of the total site is restfulness.  We last visited the huge studio where Wright taught dozens of students at a time. 

Overlooking the whole is the windmill Wright built.  Nicknamed “Romeo and Juliet” it has withstood storms that flattened conventional metal windmills. The design makes the wind circle the structure rather than blow against it.

This was a wonderful day of eye-filling education!

Lake Superior

 From Mackinac, Trish and I drove to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and stopped for a couple of days at Munising on the shore of Lake Superior.  This massive lake is more than 1,300 feet deep at its deepest point and contains more water than all the other Great Lakes put together.

We stopped at Munising because it is the access point to Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, a National Park we have never visited.  You have to see the shore from the Lake itself, which means a boat ride.

Both days we were there the winds were high and the entire tour could not run.  We only got to see the beginning of the beautiful Pictured Rocks on this trip…maybe again sometime.

 

Our big trip there was a glass bottom boat trip over to Grand Island where we were to see shipwrecks underwater there.  We say the restoration of the first lighthouse there where the keeper got $400 a year plus a cow for his service.  

Our boat had large glass panels in the bottom where we could all look down at everything underwater.  It was remarkably clear as we floated around over the Schooner Bermuda, a nearly perfectly preserved wreck of an iron ore carrier that was overloaded and didn’t survive its journey in 1870.

This stop was a bit off the beaten path, but we enjoyed coming here immensely.

Mackinac Island, Michigan

 After visiting Trish’s ninety-six year old mother in Lake Orion, Michigan for several days, we came on up to Mackinac Island for a few days.

We took the passenger ferry from Mackinaw City on a twenty-minute crossing to the island where we have been in a century-old inn right on Main Street for a few days.

There are no cars allowed on the island and the ways to get around are walking, biking, or horse-drawn vehicles.  

We spent most of our first day relaxing and reading on our front porch.  It was also a good place to watch pedestrians, bikers, and horse-drawn vehicles including the UPS delivery wagon! 

The second day we took an extended carriage tour of the island.  The first held of the ride was in a two-horse carriage and mostly around the town on the island.  The second hall was on a wonderful troika, a three horse carriage that took us all through the State Park woodlands.

On our tour we made a stop at Arch Rock for a unique view through the arch itself.

Perhaps the loveliest thing about being here are the magnificent flowers!  The Mackinac Garden and Landscape Company brings over to the island thousands of flats of flowers each year.  They plant all of the public spaces and also do private property plantings.  Right now the flowers are at a late summer peak.  We could wander forever looking at endless plantings everywhere!

What a beautiful few days before we travel on west from here.

Cataloochee Homecoming Reunion

 In 1837 the first settlers of European descent began to settle in Cataloochee Valley.  They were mostly of Scots/Welsh/English descent.  They were homesteading farmers with a population that at its peak was well over a thousand.

Almost 100 years later, 1934 to be exact, Cataloochee Valley became part of the new Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  By that year, all those residents had been bought out and only a few with lifetime tenancy remained there.

In 1937, one hundred years after first settlement, Jonathan Woody, himself born in the Valley of a long-time family there, led the organization of the first Cataloochee Reunion gathering both people born in the Valley and their descendants.  Except for WWII and COVID, the Reunion has been held every year on the second Sunday in August.  As usual, Trish and I were in attendance as I have ancestors who came out of this Valley.

To get to Cataloochee, you have to drive across the Cataloochee Divide from Waynesville on an unpaved road.  Trish and I arrived fairly early and there were already nearly a hundred cars and a swarm of people gathered.  At 11:00 the Palmer Chapel bell rang and the sanctuary filled.  Only a little more than a hundred can fit into the church, so others gather outside, some by the open windows, as the service begins.

From the 1937 start, Jonathan Woody presided at the gatherings for  nearly thirty years.  Since that time, his son, Steven (in the white shirt and tie) has been in charge for another sixty years. At the pulpit we see Charlie Sellars, Acting National Park Superintendent, giving the annual report from the National Park.

The sermon was delivered by my old friend, David Reeves, minister of the Crabtree United Methodist Church, where many of those gathered are members. (I have been very privileged to preach at this event on three occasions.)

One important part of the service is the roll call of families with someone present.  It usually begins with a call for anyone born in the Valley to stand.  Last year Harley Caldwell was present.  Since then, Harley has died, and there are no people left who were actually born in Cataloochee.

Then there is a roll call of all family members and descendants who have died since last year.  After each name, the church bell rings for them.  This year there were eleven.

It’s not far from the church to the food and a season of eating is underway!

After the meal, many families visit old home places, old family cemeteries, and some even

fill up jugs with water from the springs that supplied their ancestors.

It is amazing that, with all the original settlers gone, hundreds of their descendants still gather in sacred memory.  Now that Cataloochee is part of a National Park, it forever belongs to everyone.

(By the way, the name “Cataloochee,” is a Cherokee word that means “land with fringed edges.”

Look up at the top of the ridges surrounding the Valley and you will see that the ridge top trees, many of which are conifers, indeed look like the edge against the sky is fringed.)