BOX 126: Out West: California to Ohio.

That's Double Arch at--where else?--Arches National Park, a stop on my way back from California to Wisconsin and then Cleveland. Note the person standing in the background framed by the farther arch.

More about Arches later in this post, but the story of the last portion of my trip out West starts with my dropping Max off at the San Francisco airport (see previous post) and driving directly back to Santa Monica to spend several days more with Gloria and her family. (I'm sure I took the fastest route, through the Central Valley, rather than along the coastal highway that we had taken on our way north; but I don't remember any of the drive south, and took no photos.) It was sheer pleasure hanging out at the Garvin home (again, see photos in the previous post) and the nearby beach, and Gloria showed me more parts of L.A. These next photos were taken in the Desert Garden at the Huntington Library and Gardens, near Pasadena:

The Library/Art Gallery building contained rare books on display as well as a famous collection of paintings. I took one photo of part of the veranda:

. . . and a couple more of the beautiful grounds, open to the public since the 1920s:

Since we were near Pasadena, we also stopped at the Norton Simon Museum. Here's a work by Barbara Hepworth outside the museum, with the San Gabriel Mountains in the background:

We also took a look at a Frank Lloyd Wright's Millard House (1923) in Pasadena. My photos show first the front, then the back.

And we spent time at Gamble House (1908), the Arts and Crafts masterpiece of Greene & Greene, just around the corner from Millard House:

Gloria's mother had an AIA guide to Los Angeles architecture, and on another day I borrowed it to check out some other FLW accomplishments as I drove around the city. I see that I took a couple of pictures of the Sturges House (1939) in Brentwood:

. . . and one of his Anderton Court Shops (1952), another ramped structure like the San Francisco gift shop, on Rodeo Drive:

. . . and finally, the Storer House (built 1923, like the Millard House and also in his 'Mayan' style). It was undergoing some repair at the time:

The only other L.A. photo I took is this one, looking from the hills near the Storer House toward Santa Monica and the ocean:

And then it was on the road back to Wisconsin. My next slide is of a sunset, which could have been taken in Los Angeles but more likely was taken from near Las Vegas, where I stopped my first night:

I camped that night at a site on Lake Mead--maybe not the best idea, since it was very hot in my tent when I woke up soon after dawn, but I did see my first roadrunner as it crossed the campground. (No photo.) That day I drove through Nevada and into Utah, staying that night in a campground near the town of Green River. I can't identify any of the locations of pictures I took that day--maybe some viewer can help me? There were cliffs:

. . . and mountains in the distance . . .

. . . and desert expanses under moody skies . . .

. . . and a spectacular vista of the highway winding through a pass:

I took two photos of the sunset:

The next morning I made the one major stop of my return trip--at Arches National Park (recently upgraded from a National Monument). The road leading into the park branches off in various directions toward different arches and other formations, some of which require a short scenic hike to get to.

The formations in the next photo look like a row of strange monumental chess pieces against the mountains. The one on the left is called Balanced Rock.

The 'hole-in-the-wall' of the next photo is called North Window. I think the shot that follows is looking up at it from underneath:

I took a couple more photos of Double Arch:

Of course, even the vistas sans arches were pretty awesome:

I also saw what is named Landscape Arch, with the longest and thinnest span:

But, as I've realized after looking at the Arches NP website, I somehow missed the most celebrated arch of the whole park, Delicate Arch (so-named, though Landscape Arch looks quite a bit more delicate). I must have missed the side road that led to it. Well, a reason to return!

Driving back to I-70--or rather, to the two-lane highways that connected stretches of I-70 in 1978--I took a shortcut on a tertiary highway that went northeast from Moab, along the Colorado River. I think the next photo was taken along this route:

Another riverside photo looks like it was taken farther upstream, maybe over the Colorado State border:

I spent that night in Vail--at a motel, since it was pretty chilly for camping (to me anyhow). Here's a view from the highway of some Rockies before sunset:

. . . and the next morning:

That night I stayed at a motel somewhere in Iowa and got home the next afternoon. My last photo of the trip is of a sunset (or much less likely, sunrise), which therefore was in Iowa:

It was mid-June when I got back to Sheboygan, but I didn't spend much time there. I used up the rest of this roll of film taking photos of the family in my mother's back yard in Warrensville, and all the slides of the trip are labeled 'June 1978,' so I must have had them developed in Ohio, to edit and show to the family--and to Max in South Bend when I eventually drove back to Wisconsin. It looks like my brother and his family were over for dinner one afternoon, since I have a shot of my mother and Dottie over a spread on the screened-in back porch. (Is that coffee pot being used as a wine carafe or for iced tea?)

The rest of the pics were taken in the back yard, including these in the shrubbery far in the back:

A couple more have us posing in front of--or in Jamie's case in the branches of--a tree:

And here is my mother posing with Jamie and a grandson of her next-door neighbors, the Woodfords:

And finally, how could we have a photo session from this era without Donya:

Turning to the box of slides following this one I was a bit shocked to see that the slides were stamped 'May 1979,' nearly a whole year later. This was quite the longest gap so far in my history of picture-taking. Maybe, after taking so many photos during the trip out West, I was exhausted--or maybe I realized I had used up the good will of folks willing to sit through my slide shows. In any case, I spent those next 11 months in the usual places: mainly Sheboygan, of course, with visits to friends and family in Chicago, Cleveland and New York. But the summer of '79 would involve even more driving, through the South and again out West, as I'll start to describe in the next post.