Stokes Castle

We are making our way North to visit our daughter Karen and her squeeze Albert. In making our way North through the desolate lands of Nevada, we passed for the first time the little burg of Austin, where I caught this picture from the junction of Hwy 50 and Nevada 305. In 1896, Anson Phelps Stokes, a mine developer, a railroad magnate and a banker began building a summer home outside Austin. The castle is patterned after that Stokes had seen and admired in the Roman Campagna in Italy. Built of hand-hewn native granite, the first floor held the dining room and kitchen, the second floor the living room, and the third floor were two bedrooms. The Stokes occupied the residence for part of a few years, but as they sold their mining operations, their interest in Austin Nevada waned, and the castle fell into disrepair. Thankfully the Austin Historical Society now maintains it.

Talk to you soon.

Gotta love it

Seniors are funny – they will go to amazing lengths to save a little bit of work. In our neighborhood, the Association’s Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions (CC&R’s) prohibit residents from storing their trash cans outside if visible to the street. Most folk place them just inside their garage doors, but that means dragging them out a whopping 5 or 6 more feet on trash day. Our neighbors believe they have solved this dilemma – trash can camouflage – make your trash can look a little bit like a bush. Genius or sad – I can’t decide.

Talk to you soon.

Slowly emerging from the abyss

I have hit a number of milestones this week. On Wednesday I attended a meeting of the Nevada State Board of Accountancy. In that meeting I did two things I haven’t done in likely over 2 years – I shook the hands of 3 folk (hit the hand sanitizer bottles immediately, no offense meant) and I hugged 3 non-family members. This weekend we got a nice surprise – a visit from our son Nick since one of his friends that lives on the East coast was in town. At his suggestion, we went to the first movie in a theater in 2 years as well. M. Night Shyamalan’s “Old” was at least better than most post pandemic movies we’ve seen, but still would only give it a 5. At least the theater was maybe under 10% occupied!

Talk to you soon. 

Special outing

We decided to have lunch at a place we both knew about and had been to before, but we had never eaten there. The Pioneer Saloon in Goodsprings was built in 1913. While it was actually used in many movies over the years, it is most known as the bar frequented by Clark Gable when he was in Vegas. The entire bar is filled with all kinds of photos and memorabilia regarding Clark Gable and his lovely bride, Carole Lombard.

When Carole Lombard left Las Vegas on Western Airlines (later became Transworld Airlines or TWA) flight 3 on January 16, 1942, Clark Gable was sitting here at the bar as he often was. Little did he know that inclement weather would confuse the pilots who thought they had gained enough altitude to clear the mountains in the Sheep Range. Sadly, flight 3 instead flew directly into Mount Potosi, killing all 22 aboard. Several years ago I climbed to the crash site. Today I sat where Clark Gable sat.

Talk to you soon.

I learned something the hard way

We had two low shrubs in our back yard that I had never seen before, other than in many of the yards in our neighborhood. The way it seems to be growing is that the bulk of the healthy-looking green shoots are grouped in the middle. The shoots lying close to the ground turn brown, and look to be either dying or dead. So, I decided to trim the ugly shoots around the base to make them look far prettier. What a mistake that turned out to be!

Soon after pruning, my face became very swollen, and my left eye began to water seriously. I had originally though that some of what was going on with my face had been from a lot more mask wearing as we were increasing our restaurant, bar and store visits. In researching on Google, I learned that these plants are a member of the Euphorbia species – and I started seeing labels like “poisonous” and “toxic”. Wikipedia says Euphorbia produces a milky latex sap, and goes on to say “In contact with mucous membranes (eyes, nose, mouth), the latex can produce extremely painful inflammation.” I also noticed my vision was more blurred than usual.  Per Wikipedia “The sap has also been known to cause mild to extreme Keratouveitis, which affects vision.”

Never again!

Talk to you soon.

Phoenix - sort of

We visited my brother Jerry in Buckeye Arizona (a suburb of Phoenix) for a few days. We hadn’t seen them in well over a year, so it was really nice to spend some time with him and Brenda, and get a chance to see their spanking new house. We didn’t do much, other than morning walks around the neighborhood. We did manage to get out in his new golf cart, complete with stereo speakers, and we managed to find a couple of geocaches in his neighborhood.

We carved out a morning and headed to the Museum of Musical Instruments in nearby Gilbert – still almost an hour away. It had musical instruments and displays from all over the world, and was really quite impressive. The oldest thing we saw there, at least that could be authenticated, was a harpsicord made in Italy in 1639. The museum was huge, and even with a whole day, you could only really get a quick glimpse of all it had to offer.

Jerry and Brenda had to take us to all their normal haunts to show us off to their friends – the regulars. It was really strange to go to bars where nobody, not even the servers were wearing masks, but I guess we have to rely on the vaccines at some point. We managed to hit Oreganos (beers and dinner) as well as the Irish Wolf Hound (just beers, but I got a nice black and tan specialty of the owner and the women had some shepherd’s pie). At Brookside it was just beers, but we did manage to get in some darts.

Where Jerry and Brenda live, there is a gas station – that’s it. There is no grocery store, no restaurants and no bars – nothing! To get to any retail businesses, you have to drive east 20 minutes – pretty much always driving through the city of Surprise where they used to live. The good news is that on the drive to the bar each day, we got to pass by Surprise’s favorite local landmark – the infamous hugging Saguaro cactuses.

It wasn’t just bars and food. We did head over to the community center and look around. At one of the community centers Jerry asked me to teach him the rules for Pickleball. We had a great time! Although we only played one game (after which we were done in), it took us as long as the locals take for 3 games.

We actually just missed Jerry’s birthday by a couple of weeks. We managed to score him a beer mug made out of an Arizona Diamondback’s bat. It was pretty awesome. But not nearly as awesome as this new hat we got him.

Talk to you soon.

Belated Happy 4th!

We celebrated Independence Day by having our BFF’s Ron and Teresa over to the house for grilled meats. It was nice to finally feel like we could have an indoor dinner with guests. We played some Wizard, always a favorite for this group. I rocked – thanks to my successful 7 bid – I never looked back after that point. At dusk, we began to watch as the entire Vegas valley began to light up with massive fireworks displays. We assumed we would enjoy our awesome view from up here, but it turned out to be even more impressive than expected.

Talk to you soon.

Big Bear

We did a lot of just sitting by the lake taking full advantage of the lost 30 degrees of heat. Getting in our 6 miles of walking a day, we took on our pre-pandemic hobby of geocaching since there were oodles of them nearby. With a little diligence we managed to scare up a total of 31 caches in our 6 days here. We haven’t scored that many caches in something close to two years!

We ended up spending Father’s Day at the lake. Since we didn’t have either internet or TV reception (or cable), we stopped at Von’s to see if they might have a cheap multi-pack of DVD’s. Lo and behold we came away with a Mark Wahlberg 5 DVD marathon. Not great cinema but something to do after dinner. My Father’s Day cards from the kids will be waiting at home when we get back, but the Woman got me a new sunhat!

Even though the weather was pleasant, the effects of the drought on the area is pronounced. In the main part of Big Bear Lake there is plenty of water for recreational pleasures. But the smaller lakes, where many folks used to have lake views from their decks, don’t even exist. I think anyone would be hard pressed to either boat or to swim in this field.

Finding a sports bar in Big Bear is not all that easy, at least one with any level of service. We watched our first Las Vegas Golden Knights game at the Big Bear Bar and Grill. There were two small TVs behind the bar, but at least we got good seats. We watched the next two games at Whiskey Dave's – they claim to have 22 TVs, and they are much larger. However, there is no servers – you have to go to the bar to order food or a drink, and pay cash. At least the OT VGK win was worth the hassle.

As we were just roaming around looking at the always interesting California lake side and mountain top real estate, we came across a carving from a tree trunk that looked very much like it could have been done by Peter Toth. However, his monuments are nearly always signed, and I search all around this guy, but no signage was to be found.

Talk to you soon.