We’re flying home from Jackson, Wyoming later today.
We had an amazing trip—especially Yellowstone National Park. Many people told me how awesome and magical it is—and they were right. America’s first national park is absolutely spectacular.
Our first stop, after a quick visit to Bozeman, Montana, was Mammoth Hot Springs, which is known for its stunning thermal features.
“Minerva Terrace” in Mammoth
The sound was beautiful too.
We took a half-day wildlife tour out of Mammoth with a National Park Service ranger named Rachael. She was terrific. She took us through the Lamar Valley.
Rachael looking for wolves that were in the area feasting on a carcass
A sweeping view of a bison herd crossing the Lamar Valley
A closer view of the bison herd
A herd of pronghorn we spotted in Yellowstone’s northern range, which is sometimes called “America’s Serengeti”
We stopped here to check out an osprey nest through Rachael’s spotting scope.I was able to get a photo of this young osprey, still in the nest, by holding my iPhone to the lens of Rachael’s scope.
Back at the hotel, a few elk were hanging out near our parking spot.
After two nights at the historic Mammoth Hot Springs hotel, we headed south towards the major geyser region of Yellowstone.
Stay tuned for Part 2 (and possibly Parts 3 & 4). I took so many pictures!
I look forward to catching up on all your blogs when I get back. 😊
Speaking of buckets…way to go Boston Celtics! 🏀☘️ NBA championship #18.
This morning’s Boston Globe
I started a Bucket List (I’ve heard some say “Life List”) in the notepad app on my phone a couple years ago. I update it whenever the mood strikes. Sometimes a TV show, movie or book will shake up the order. For example, I read a book called “Independent People” by Haldór Laxness (a Nobel prize winner in literature) which resulted in Iceland getting booted from my list.
Here’s the latest version: Grand Canyon ✅ Paris ✅ Finger Lakes & Hot Air Balloon ✅ Tanglewood Yellowstone National Park Ireland NYC comedy club or SNL Southern Italy (Naples; Amalfi Coast; Cinque Terra) and maybe Sicily Sweden Return to Paris in warmer weather and see the sites we missed Argentina? Return to SoCal – LA/San Diego; Santa Monica; Venice Beach; Yosemite; Joshua Tree? Key West Austin TX Greece Acadia National Park
An image from my last trip to LA (you know, the city that’s won 17 NBA championships)
The year was 1988 and George H.W. Bush was on the ballot.
My friend Julie (the eventual artist) made sure we visited the Watts Towers in South Los Angeles.
The famous Watts Towers in LA—a renegade 33-year folk art project by Italian immigrant construction worker and tile mason Simon “Sam” Rodia
Apparently some part of it was closed that day, but we got the idea. It’s very cool—a labor of love.
A year ago this week, we were in Grand Canyon National Park.
Selfies are hard. This is one of our better ones.
We stayed right in Grand Canyon Village. This was taken just outside our hotel—Thunderbird Lodge.
Shoshone Point—a wild and gorgeous spot in Grand Canyon National Park
Shoshone Point
We even took a helicopter tour—scary at first, but spectacular and worth the price.
This trip was motivated by the death of my close friend Carla who loved the Grand Canyon and whose ashes are spread there. (Carla is the person who set me up with my husband more than 33 years ago.) I would consider it my first “bucket list” trip of retirement, even though I didn’t retire until six months later.
I’m lucky to have a kind and hardworking husband who is willing to travel with me (within reason). He doesn’t love it like I do, but he usually ends up liking the trip a lot more than he thought he would.
Thirty-one years of marriage—that’s a whole lot of time together!
The Grand Canyon lives up to the hype. Go, if you can.
I don’t like cold weather. I especially dislike snow. We have so many places in the Northeast that are spectacularly beautiful—in the summer. The Finger Lakes region (aka the Southern Tier) of upstate New York is one of them.
This area is a very long drive from Boston (about 6 hours), so I made this weekend’s graduation trip to Ithaca a “bucket list” sort of trip. I have enjoyed my many visits up here, but I doubt I’ll be back again.
Stunning glass sculpture at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, NY
Corning Museum of Glass
The city of Ithaca, NY is on Lake Cayuga and I’ve seen it many times. This trip, I wanted to see the next Finger Lake over—Lake Seneca. It is equally beautiful and has the cute town of Watkins Glen at the bottom.
The harbor area in Watkins Glen on Lake Seneca
Watkins Glen is also home to one of New York’s most beautiful state parks.
Watkins Glen State Park
There are many wineries in the area, but I had never been to a cidery, so we stopped at South Hill Cider after graduation for a glass of hard cider and a charcuterie board. Lovely spot and their dry, sparkling Baldwin cider was great. I bought a bottle to take home.
The view at South Hill Cider in Ithaca, NY
There’s an expression you may have heard—Ithaca is Gorges. Its deep gorges and their accompanying waterfalls are truly gorgeous, and there are dozens of them all over the region. I had seen the showstopper—Taughannock Falls—on a previous trip, but wanted to check out a couple of others before we left.
I broke a toe once, really badly. I don’t even like to think about it. It hurt SO much. (I stubbed it on a futon leg while barefoot.) It was wildly out of alignment. My husband had to pop it back into place. OUCH! Doctors can’t really do anything about toes. They just taped it to the one next to it and I limped around until it healed.
Fortunately no bones were broken during our Friday night “bucket list” excursion in Ithaca. The take-off was much wilder than I thought it would be. I was holding on to the basket for dear life. But once we were floating, it was quite magical. I’ve been in a helicopter before, but this was different. It’s as close as you can imagine to being a bird. So very many shades of green. The bottom of the basket occasionally scraped on some tree tops. “No problem,” said our pilot Dar. “Basket cleaners,” he called them. And then handed us some leaves. 🍃
My husband and son got put to work on both takeoff and landing. I took pictures and videos.
Three people were already pre-loaded in the basket at this point. The rest of us scrambled in over the sides, once “Captain America” was upright. Up we go, with Dar’s hand on the “flame throwers” (which were a bit loud, when in use)We floated over some waterfalls in Ithaca’s Robert H. Treman State Park
The magic of floating in the air and Dar thanking his ground crew.I really did not want to drop my phone, but eventually I relaxed enough to hand it to a fellow passenger from Pennsylvania. He took this nice pic. Group selfie with DarFarms and fields and Lake Cayuga in the distance
I think we were all a bit nervous about the landing. Once he found a good spot, Dar had the heavier people, including my very strong husband, move to one side of the basket. We all crouched down with all body parts inside the basket. We dragged on the ground for a bit. My husband got out and helped hold us down, which he said was hard. (He got a rather large bruise as we attempted to “jump” the basket up and over a small ditch. Inside the basket, we actually jumped up and down.)
When instructed, I did not waste any time grabbing the bars and vaulting myself out of the basket in a move that my son described as “wildly athletic.”
My son was instructed to run out into the field and help the ground crew pull down Captain America.
The landingMy son and the ground crew pulling Captain America back to earth Everyone helped put Captain America back in his bag.
We celebrated with a roadside champagne toast and then the ground crew drove us back to our car!
I’ve been lucky to visit and travel in Europe several times since the 1980s (especially Italy), but I’d still like to visit some cities that I’ve never been to including Stockholm, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Lisbon, Dublin, Edinburgh, Vienna, Berlin and Athens.
And I’d like to go back to Europe’s greatest city – Paris. I loved it in the holiday season, but I want to go back in warmer weather. Also, I want to see Notre-Dame when it reopens. Here’s how it looked last week, still under scaffolding. What a massive and complex restoration!
Hello blogging friends. I’m back from Paris and it was definitely a highlight of the year! My husband was a real trouper and enthusiastically went “full tourist” with me. (I wasn’t sure if that would happen, but he really rose to the occasion, despite having bad knees. Thanks Mario!) I had been to Paris once during my semester abroad in Italy in the 80s, but I always wanted to return to Europe’sgreatestcity. I’m sorry Rome, London, Madrid…but Paris is just…PARIS. I’m extremely fortunate that this was my second bucket list trip of 2023. I also visited the Grand Canyon, for the first time ever, in June. (That trip was motivated by the passing of my dear friend from college in 2022. Carla loved the Grand Canyon and her ashes are spread there.)
But back to Paris. We bought six-day museum passes (at the recommendation of my new BFF Rick Steves) and saw a ton of stuff. Notre-Dame is still closed due to the horrific fire in 2019, but everything else was open and the entire city is gearing up for the 2024 Olympics. We had dinner in the Eiffel Tower, visited the Louvre, the Orsay, l’Orangerie, Sainte-Chappelle, Arc de Triomphe, Carnavalet Museum, Versailles, the Army Museum and Napoleon’s Tomb, the Sacre-Coeur, and the St. Germain-des-Pres. We took ubers, taxis and the metro and visited many neighborhoods including the Marais (my favorite), Rue Cler, Montmartre, Rue Monorgueil, the Left Bank, and the Champs-Elysees, which was all lit up for Christmas!
We ate in cafes, fine restaurants, Bon Marché (Paris’ oldest department store) and one Burger King. I’m very jet-lagged at the moment, but cannot resist sharing a couple photos.
The Eiffel Tower is painted a mustard yellow and they light it beautifully at night.
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