Does this scene look at all familiar? If you're a fan of Alfred Hitchcock movies, it might--since the building on the left was the schoolhouse where the children were attacked in/by The Birds. At the north end of our drive up the California coast, Gloria, Jeffrey and I stopped in the town of Bodega Bay--whether just to look for movie locations or to enjoy an extra stretch of scenic coastal drive before heading back to Sheboygan I couldn't say. The day before, we had seen Hearst Castle/San Simeon, as I reported in my previous post, then driven north through Big Sur and up to San Francisco. We camped again that night: on Mt Tamalpais, near Muir Woods, north of the city. The following photo of Gloria was taken that day, though I don't recall where; the photo to the right of it shows an ocean view from Mt Tamalpais near sunset:
From Bodega Bay we turned inland as we began heading back toward Wisconsin. By 1979 Napa Valley was beginning to be known beyond the world of wine aficionados as a producer of great vintages, and we thought our drive eastward along two-lane highways and local roads would take us through the valley for a few wine tastings. Unfortunately, our maps led us astray, or we misread them, and there was little or no signage. Years later I visited Napa more than once, but that morning we saw nothing like its green hills and colorful small towns and historic wineries--just dry Western farmland, mostly flat. We did come across one winery--I'm guessing in the Carneros district--but none of us liked the tannic reds that we tasted; probably they were recent vintages meant to be stored for years, not the nearly-ready-to-drink styles offered today. So we headed onward, past Sacramento, and stayed at a motel in Truckee that night. We spent most of the next morning on the shores of Lake Tahoe :
Our route took us through Nevada, past the Great Salt Lake (no photos) to Salt Lake City, where we stopped to see the Capitol and other features of downtown. I see that I also took a photo of the mountains beyond the city:
Our drive across Utah toward Dinosaur National Monument, on the border between Utah and Colorado, took us through beautiful landscapes with dramatic clouds above them:
Dinosaur National Monument stretches over a huge wilderness area, but we stuck mostly to the area near the Visitor Center where dinosaur bones have been quarried since 1909:
We spent a good deal of time with the educational exhibits at the Visitor Center, if I recall correctly. That evening we must have camped in the Flaming Gorge Recreation Area not far north of Dinosaur, near the Wyoming border. I say "must have" because I don't remember doing so, but I have several photographs of the Gorge area taken during what must have been sunset and the next morning:
What I remember more clearly about this phase of the trip is driving across southern Wyoming and then through Nebraska and Iowa, all on I-80; we stayed at a motel somewhere in western Iowa that night, and got back to Sheboygan the day after.
The next time I got out the Nikon was again on a trip with Gloria and Jeffrey, but this time only as far as Chicago for a weekend. Readers of my previous posts won't be surprised to see that the following photos are all of Frank Lloyd Wright structures, mostly in Oak Park. I'm now surprised that I took so few pictures--could I have been remembering that I had taken some with my Instamatic back in spring of 1973? (For three not-very-good shots see BOXES 73-76.) In any case, here are two views of the Cheney House, though my first shot has the place almost ridiculously hidden behind foliage:
Of course we took the tour of Wright's home and studio. In the photos below you see the place from the back; my photo of a photo (probably hanging from a wall) of an earlier stage of development; a ceiling grid for a light fixture, I think over the dining-room table; and the house from the street.
We also saw the Williams house in nearby River Forest, the Hills-de Caro House and the hybrid Moore House. (We must have seen a dozen others, but these are the only ones I photographed.)
Finally we stopped at the Unity Temple, where my shots are a bit less 'standard' than the preceding: one looking up at detail near the roof, the other of Jeffrey:
The Oak Park weekend was sometime in September. In the next photo it's late fall, and the view is from the UW-Sheboygan campus looking southeast through the trees at the top of the bluff:
And then it's winter, with sunset seen from another part of campus:
It was during this fall semester that I bought my house. Here are the first pictures I took of it, in December or January of 1979-80:
It was painted a darker shade of brown when I bought it (it's more reddish-brown now, with some green trimming around the windows). Here's a closer view of the front porch:
And here are two shots of the front alcove that you see on the right in the outside views. My furnishing was still sparse; that red rocking chair with a stool was something that a friend in Evanston had bought at a flea market, reupholstered, and given or sold to me. In later years a Sheboygan friend removed one arm (it could still be reinserted) so he could sit and play the guitar. Finally it got junked.
I took one other photo at this time which I'll publish here only for historical documentation. I still use the speaker stand, which Wayne Donnelly in Evanston had built for me, but the student-apartment-style TV and stereo stands have long gone.
In 1980 I took only a couple of boxes of slides--just enough material for the next post.
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