Kaybee’s visit ammended version - for Saff

As some of my regular blog readers may already know, Kaybee and I are cousins and we have just had a great time with cousin Kaybee staying with myself and The Better Half (TBH) here in the UK.

For much our lives, although we had known each other as children, we had little contact with each other having gone our separate ways.

Kaybee and Snafu on the beach at Flamborough Head Yorkshire UK

It was only really with the advent of the Internet, that we have been able to locate each other and we have been catching up with our respective lives for some time now. We had visited Kaybee twice in Canada and now it was our turn to have her stay with us here.
Kaybee was flying into Heathrow, which is about an hour and a half from our home on a good day, so I had arranged to drive down and collect her.
I have a some trouble holding on to dates and deadlines and have had this problem all my life, so after an inadvertent practice run the day before she should arrive at Heathrow, I went there again on the actual day she had told me she was arriving.   I had actually printed out the email with the flights and times, so I really did not have any excuse, but this inability to retain dates has led me into trouble from time to time and I have gone places on the wrong week. I even went to a job interview a fortnight late once. Funnily enough I did not get that job.

Before Kaybee set out for England, and after some discussion with her and reassurances from me that her laptop would work on UK voltage and she could link into my Wi-Fi easily, she brought along Sheba (her Toshiba notebook) confident in the knowledge that she would be able to stay on line throughout her visit.
As soon as she had arrived, the Internet service to my house dropped out. After doing all the right things, it came on for an hour or two and then dropped out again for the entire next day.
This went on for most of the week, whilst I raised my blood pressure choosing number options and being recorded for training purposes. This delightful task of convincing my Internet Service provider that, ‘really truly, cross my heart and hope to die if I was lying’ I had a real problem, had to be fitted in between our planned schedule of outings that TBH and I had organised, for taking Kaybee around the parts of the Cotswolds that she had not seen before.

Country towns
Our first outing was a tour of two of the local country towns, Malmesbury and Tetbury.  Both of these towns are built on a hill and have some really quaint houses and scenery surrounding them.
In Malmesbury there is an ancient Abbey, consecrated in 1180 it is now only about one third of its original size, but still in use as the parish curch.  Over the centuries it was allowed to decay until part of the major structure collapsed about two hundred years ago.  The remaining building is just one part of a structure with a floor plan that formed a cross shape with a central tower. The remaining nave being the only habitable part of the original abbey.

Part of the missing tower and the blocked off archway which allows the single remaining nave to be  occupied

The cross in Malmesbury

The Five Valleys
Following this we travelled around the part of Gloucestershire where TBH hails from. We drove around Stroud and the Five Valleys, which took us past views of steep wooded and farmed valleys and wonderful views across the River Severn valley to the distant hills of Wales beyond.

A cotswold gatehouse 

Painswick, one of the towns of the five valleys

A view from Minchinhampton common

The view across Gloucestershire, the Severn valley with the River Severn
snaking through it to Wales on the far side.

All this scenery viewing makes for a good appetite, so this particular tour included a visit to the Weighbridge Inn, famous for its 2 in 1 pies. These are a large pie dish filled with a vegetable in a rich sauce in one half and a pastry capped meat or fish filling in the other. The pastry is not that ghastly fluffy stuff that most shop pies have, nor yet a soggy shortcrust but a perfect in between melt-in-the-mouth shortcrust. Should you find yourself in the vicinity, be warned, these pies are not something one should indulge in too often if you wish to keep wearing the same size clothes, particularly if you go for the full size ones, but much too good to miss should you have just, co-incidentally, been passing around that way at about lunch time.

A 'Mini' 2 in 1 pie. (Half size)

Bath
On another day we went to Bath and had a look at this fascinating Regency town, which of course has to include the famous Royal Crescent.

The much filmed Royal Crescent, scene of many a period drama 

A mature tree graces the centre of Abbey Green

Poultney Bridge, Bath

The weir on the River Avon

 Bath is known for the buskers that perform in the central areas around the Roman Baths and in front of the Abbey.

This busker seems to be playing a musical flying saucer. 

Bath Abbey, similar in style to Malmesbury Abbey in design, but complete

Snowshill Manor
Our last outing was to Snowshill Manor, the home of a cluttered and rather random collection once belonging to an old British eccentric Charles Wade. He had filled his house with so many treasures that he lived in an outhouse and eventually donated them, house and all, to the National Trust for posterity, a short time before his death.

Charles Wade in the 1950s, from a photo displayed in the Manor

The steep steps are the entrance to the small living area Charles Wade and his wife occupied at the Manor

This Manor house is in the Village of Snowshill deep in the Cotswolds with enviable views out of his bedroom and bathroom windows that must have greeted him each morning.

The view from his bathroom window

There are quite large orchards in the grounds and I have not seen quite so many apples in fruit on a tree for a long time. A portent of a hard winter, according to the old wives tale.

Apples galore

Snowshill Manor with one of the orchards in the foreground and Charles Wade's living quarters on the left

A typical part of the collection on display showing one of the magnificent cabinets behind the smaller treasures.

A room full of antique musical instruments

On the fourth day of Kaybee’s visit, I had to give a prearranged talk to my local U3A group, which I could not avoid and so on Monday I went to get some files off my main computer, when the hard disk I use for current work in progress, died quietly. This was only an inconvenience because I had backed up my work and was able to find it and finish it before the talk.
I always have a minimum of two hard drives in my computer, one for the Operating system and system files and one for storing my work files. I am a bit paranoid about backups, so on this PC, I have also fitted two further disks just used for regular backups. I had a suitable spare disk in a drawer which could take on the role as my work disk, so was able to take out the dud disk and return the PC to its normal state which got me to bed at just gone midnight.

After many phone calls, over a number of days, number choosing and much seriously distorted monophonic waiting-for-the-operator canned music I had managed to get my Internet Service Provider to restore the Internet service.
After this triumph, I wanted to get some family photos to show Kaybee, which were stored on my second computer, only to have flames coming out of the back, followed by dead silence as it passed on to the great data bus in the sky.
This was a nuisance, but not yet a disaster, I still had my restored main computer, although none of the photos  I wanted were on it, but as soon as I started to use this PC, it had also decided to commit hara-kiri in sympathy. So now there were no working PCs at all.

One dead PC, another undergoing open heart surgery

This turned out to be easy to solve since I had disturbed a cable inside it when I had fitted the replacement disk drive and so after a little head scratching, it was working again although Windows needed to ‘restore-the-last-known-good-session’. Once working again it complained about the unexpected shut down and went off looking for a cure for me. I laughed at this, thinking that Artificial Intelligence is not so smart, the loose wire had caused the shutdown – I thought.
I soon stopped laughing when halfway through some work, the PC blue screened and needed another Windows Recovery to restore a working version. Something else was wrong.
It ran all the next day and then blue screened again, once more needing to go through the recovery process in order to reboot. I realised that something else was seriously wrong this time, so I thought a bit and remembered having this symptom once long ago with faulty RAM. So using the memory from my still dead second PC, changed over the memory sticks and it started working again and has been ever since, so a kind of happy ending after all.
My dead media PC is much more troubled and will need to be rebuilt entirely, so I have bought a new power supply module and I need a motherboard, some more memory and possibly a new CPU. Windows does not like major changes to the hardware, since the Microsoft licence is tied in to the hardware. This means that I will need to buy more MS Windows to run the repaired hardware. Wonderful people Microsoft, when you consider that they achieved the preeminent position in the world markets with very little licence protection. Now they bludgeon us honest users with annoying and expensive restrictions, whilst they are still being ripped off in the less scrupulous nations of the world and appear to do nothing about it. TANJ! (There Ain’t No Justice)

The rest of Kaybee’s trip was largely unaffected by this ongoing saga of micro misery and went well. We had time to look through oodles of family photos and played the game of I-think-that-one-is-whatsit’s-grandma together and chatted about family history.

On the last weekend of Kaybee’s visit, our second cousin (CG) and her daughter (SW) had been invited to stay so that they could spend some time with Kaybee.  They duly arrived on the Saturday very promptly.  It usually takes a little over two hours to drive from their home and they had promised to arrive at 9.30am, they were only a couple of minutes later than their stated time, which meant that they must have left home very early, which showed true dedication. Once settled in, we were able to chat about the family and get up to date with everyone’s news.  They were staying the night and returning home Sunday.

The mass of photographs that Kaybee and I had been viewing had come from CG’s grandfather, our uncle H, who had lived for most of his life, with his wife, CG's grandmother,  in his mother’s home until her death.  When the family home was sold, he had been able to retain some very old family treasures and photo albums.  Uncle H had also been a very keen photographer and had amassed a huge collection of 35mm slides and printed photos he had taken, dating way back to his childhood, some of which he had entered into photographic society competitions and were prize winning entries.

CG and her daughter live in a fairly small house and so have little room for her grandfather’s stuff.  To save space, she had given the photos to me on the understanding that I would scan them and give her electronic copies.  I collected them in January and am still scanning pictures in October!   Uncle H had amassed thousands of slides.

There are not so many pictures left now but there are still three large 35mm slide boxes still to be sorted and scanned and CG tells me she may have some more in storage.  

These pictures have proved to be very interesting for genealogical purposes and some are very nostalgic for Kaybee and me, since there are many pictures of our grandparent’s house, a place we both loved dearly and which has many happy childhood memories for both of us.  

After an enjoyable visit, where we talked, played whatsit’s grandmother, played games on the Wii and generally had a great time, CG and SW packed up and started off in their car. 

This had been parked quietly on the one short stretch of straight road in our street since Saturday and as they started off, there was a loud bang as something burst under their rear wheel.  On investigation, it seems there had been an empty vodka bottle there.  It was made from very light glass, so did no obvious harm, but one cannot help but wonder if someone had left it there deliberately.   It is not something you normally see in our street, and was in just the right position to be broken as they drove away.   It has left me wondering what pond life would do such a stupid trick around here.

No one was hurt but we had to make sure no glass had stuck in the tyre before they could finally set off again.

The next day, and much sooner than it seemed that it should, the sad day dawned when Kaybee had to be taken back to Heathrow and arriving in good time, we had a final coffee and then we waved farewell as she went through the departures gate. It had been a great visit and we hope she can do it again another year.

Trip Part eight – Mesa Verde and the Great Divide

Mesa Verde

Our next visit a few miles along highway 160 was to have a look at a place called Mesa Verde.
For most of my formative years, the Cowboy and Indian Westerns presented a very simplistic view of the peoples of America. Most of these stories featured the clean shaven, white hatted, two gun packing hero who just wanted to live peaceably in the prairies raising cattle, singing songs about four footed friends and life on the range and who always got the girl. Pitted against him and his girl, were the evil badly shaven, black hatted gangsters, often with a long moustache, property developers with a neat moustache, claim jumpers and of course on top of all these enemies, were the hordes of hostile Indians, wearing feathered headdresses and firing deadly, but strangely inaccurate arrows at him. These savages were only driven off by the cavalry arriving in the nick of time and allowing the victims to count the dead and carry on with their peaceful lives.

The typical hero, white hat, two guns and a terrific right hook 

The Indians lived in wigwams, hunted buffalo and were unreasonably aggressive, constantly attacking the peaceful law abiding settlers at the slightest whim, with the occasional good Indian, thrown in who was fanatically loyal to the hero for various, often unspecified reasons.

It was rarely suggested in those days was that these Native American peoples also only wanted to live in peace too, without being driven off their traditional hunting grounds by the encroaching white settlers. The Indians featured in these Westerns were plains Indians and none of these stories ever suggested that there were any other kinds of Native Americans.
For many years, raised on this diet, I had no idea that there were also many other Native Americans living in a totally different manner to the plains Indians, living in settlements, built permanent dwellings and grew their own food. Also no one ever mentioned that American cultures go back thousands of years into prehistory and many different peoples have lived in different parts of the ‘New World’, long before it was discovered by Europeans.
There are many archaeological sites and ruins scattered across the USA ranging in age from 10,000 BC to just a few hundred years ago. A mummified corpse found in a cave in Nevada has been dated as 7,420 B.C, placed there by an established society of the time. All across the Colorado plateau around the Four Corners there are remains of Anasazi settlements that pre date the current Navajo, Hopi and Pueblo Indians living there now. Their exact relationship to the Anasazi is unclear since some translations of the name mean Ancient Foes, some translate as The Ancient Ancestors or The people who came before.

Mesa Verde is the site of an ancient Pueblo settlement where these particular people had lived until about 1200AD. They were cliff dwellers and built substantial brick dwellings in crevices and under overhangs in cliff faces. They were also an agricultural people who grew maize, squash and made a characteristic pottery which is still produced. They must have been extremely agile because access to some of their dwellings was only by scaling ladders and using toe holds carved into the rock.
It is from these people that we obtained Maize because they cultivated it for many centuries and developed the seed into a number of varieties which are still around today.

Much of the USA suffered an extensive drought around 1200AD and so it is believed this was the cause of them abandoning their homes at this site.

Point Lookout comes into view as you climb up to the mesa proper
Click to enlarge any  picture

It is a long drive, about 15 miles, up to the top of the Mesa, which is a little under 7,000 feet high. It is not so long ago that the road was put in so anyone living there had a very long trek to get to and from the summit and the surrounding countryside.

Approaching the top

One of the canyons running into the top of the mesa

These do not look deep, but that is a forest at the bottom

Once there, you can walk along the canyon to view the cliff dwellings. Some of these are little more than a walled in cleft in the rock, but some like the House of many Windows, is a complex many roomed dwelling.

At first you just see a cliff face but look carefully
there are buildings all along the front of the cliff

Looking a bit closer and you can see the structures

Again look carefully and you will see the buildings

A closer view again reveals the buildings hidden in the cave

 Going through the visitors centre you can view the most complex series of structures on the site and climb down into the Cliff Palace which is found hidden in the narrow canyon.

Abandoned around 1200AD, these ruins are in amazing condition

Inside the square three story building the wall decorations are still  in remarkable condition

These circular Pit Houses were roofed over and had a central fire place with a smoke hole in the roof. 

The top of the mesa has very little rain and can become extremely dry, which often leads to fires. There is not a lot that can be done to control these, so they will burn until either it does rain or they run out of fuel. Signs of past fires abound in the area, some recent some quite old.

Signs of a fairly recent fire

Plant life returns

After looking around for about an hour, we returned through the inevitable Gift shop where I was able to buy myself a replacement hat for the one I left in the Grand Canyon.

You could take a guided tour

This was the last of the most special sights we were able to visit on this trip, and now we were heading home. We had booked a hotel in Colorado Springs and had to cross over the Rocky Mountains once again before arriving there.

The road down from Mesa Verde

 We descended from the mesa into a flat valley which was farmland and re-joined highway 160.

You can see how high you are as you start to head down

Down in the Animas River Valley

 Travelling east along the 160, we passed through a town called Durango and then on to Pagosa Springs where we started to approach the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. As we approached them, the houses started to take on a distinctly Alpine look, similar to buildings in Austria and Switzerland.

An Alpine house

The foot hills of the Rocky Mountains

We started to climb and soon we started to see snow around us.

Snow in June at ten thousand feet

 Our route took us through Wolf Creek Pass which is about 10,500 feet but we did not have any trouble with crisp packets this time.
The hills were highly forested and by the time we reached the Continental Divide, there was snow on the ground underneath the trees we were passing.

Snow under the trees

We stopped at the Great Divide sign, for an obligatory photo shoot of the family posed straddling the Continental Divide.

The metal strip under the sign shows the exact line of the Divide

From here on it was downhill until we reached South Fork, which is on the headwaters of the Rio Grande. Considering this river is part of the border between Mexico and the USA, it starts out a long way north of the border. Having run parallel with highway 160 for about fifty miles we crossed the Rio Grande at Alamosa, the river heading south as we continued east.

Crossing the Rio Grande

The area is still fairly mountainous and we went up and down a few times passing some spectacular scenery.

Arriving at Walsenburg, we joined the Interstate I-25, headed north towards Pueblo and finally Colorado Springs.

Heading North

 At Colorado Springs we stayed in the Academy Hotel, close to the US Air Force Academy and air base.

The next morning we set out on highway 24 to join the I-70 for our return to Kansas.