BEARS ON THE ROAD

We arrived just in time for dinner but first we had to check into our hotel. We resisted the temptation to collapse into bed and left the hotel for late afternoon sustenance. We stopped to take pictures of awesome buildings, and I found a flag. We shopped in some other booths and a linen shop.  Riga is famous for “Art Nouveau” and has tons of buildings in that style, but my mom wanted us to look at the older stuff first. My favorite house was the “cat house”. It has 2 cat statues on the roof. The story is that the merchant who owned the house wanted to join a guild but was rejected. To get revenge he placed the 2 cat statues on his roof with their rear ends facing the guild’s house. The guild took him to court and agreed to let the merchant in if he turned the cats around.  Blackhead's House  We also saw the Blackheads’ House. It was sort of a clubhouse for unmarried merchants. One Christmas they decorated a tree and burned it. That’s how we started decorating Christmas ...

Fierce downspout We got up too early and went to breakfast. I had Polish cocoa-puffs. Next, we went and looked around the old town and went into the castle. The water spouts were shaped like dragons! There were statues on the roof and by the doors. It was really beautiful. Outside the Wawel Next, we went shopping. I got an amber pendant at a place called “World of Amber” and a Polish flag. My parents took about 80 million pictures, so we had to stop about every millisecond. We ate lunch at a Polish restaurant and my mom informed me that she had had to eat pizza in every country I had ever been to and was sick of it. We had potato pancakes (YUM) and spinach pierogis. Then we ran all the way to the train station to get back to Warsaw to catch the bus to Lithuania. tolerating my parents, briefly After the overnight bus, we arrived in Lithuania. We stopped at a café in the bus station so my parents could have some coffee and I could have some juice, but really what we needed wa...

POLSKA! Part 2 Salt, Chopin and chocolate! We got up before breakfast and got on a train for Krakow. Apparently the woman at the ticket station gave us 1st class seats on the way there, but 2nd class on the way back. Huh, oh well. After the very long train ride, we arrived in Krakow, dropped the bags at our hostel and went to the bus station to go to the salt mine.  Copernicus!   Salty!  First, we had to go down 380 steps. After that we started our tour. We learned about methane explosions, how they got horses down into the mine, culture and wood. We heard the legend of St. Kinga, patron saint of salt miners. She was a Hungarian princess and when she was to be married to a Polish prince, she asked her father to give her a salt mine as her dowry (salt was amazingly precious then, one big block could buy you an entire village!). He obliged and as a sign of ownership she chucked her engagment ring down a shaft of the mine. When she arrived in Poland, she order...

POLSKA! Part 1 rainbow pegasi! We landed in Warsaw and took a bus to out rainbow hotel, Jan III Sobieski. After putting our bags up, we first went to the War Memorial of Warsaw’s uprising against the Nazis. Personally, I think it would have been better without little children swinging off the rifles. We couldn’t get a good picture, so we went to the National Library to look at the rainbow pegasi (yes, Madeleine, there was a hot pink Pegasus). We got several pictures and then were finally able to get a good shot of the War Monument because the little kids left. inside the Old Town walls Then we went to the Old Town. The houses had magnificent designs on them. The doors had beautiful statures and there were amazing painted designs. One even had a dragon on it! The flowers were beautiful. I also liked the mermaid fountain.  What was amazing was that it was all rebuilt after WWII. After Warsaw’s Uprising the Nazis destroyed the town, so the people used pictures to bui...

It's grand and it's central! Well, we’re in NYC. Mmm… waking up at 3:30AM…BOO! We actually had to take 2 flights – Houston to Memphis and Memphis to Newark. The Memphis flight was really rough; we met some turbulence and the pilot couldn’t turn off the seatbelt sign until we were practically there. The second flight was uneventful. After we got to the hostel, we grabbed the camera and headed off to the subway. We got off at Grand Central station. After admiring the amazing zodiac ceiling and the architecture, and looked at the clock, and took tons of pictures we walked to the Empire State Building. We climbed to the top (or rather the elevator took us to the top) and had a spectacular view of the city. After we had made a complete circuit, we went to the gift shop to buy some necessities, like stuffed King Kongs. We saw a gigantic model of the Empire State Building that was made out of Legos , complete with a Lego monkey on top. In the end, I settled on a “Z” with NYC them...

Well, this is it. The big finish of our trip to San Francisco is the total destruction of the world! I am talking about Gotterdamerung! It means the twilight of the gods… it also means 5 ½ hours of broken hearts, betrayal, poison drinks, polluted rheinmaidens, evil plots and machinations, stabbings, smotherings, neck breaking, self immolations and the world catching fire and Valhalla crashing down in flames. It started off with the norns weaving fate with cables. They recap the first 3 operas and then as they try to see the future, the cable breaks. Thus ends their eternal wisdom. The scene gives way to Brunnhilde and Siegfried. She urges him to go back out and resume his heroic deeds. He gives her the ring to pledge his undying love, and she gives him Grane, her horse. He leaves her surrounded by flames and heads out. Next we meet Gunther, Hagan, and Gutrune lounging on leopard skin pillows and drinking weird glowing lemonade. Hagan tells Gunther that he has great goals to accomp...

So today we went to the Presidio, Golden Gate Bridge, Crissy Field, Fort Point, and Fort Mason. We walked over 6 miles to get to all of them. At Fort Point, we learned about the cannons, cannonballs, and the granite. The ranger told a story about the inefficient cannons. There were 3 forts in this thing called the triangle defense. To celebrate the 4th of July, in 1876, they put a ship filled with fireworks on it in the middle of them all and had a contest to see who could hit the ship first. At this time, they still used completely smoothbore cannons. They started shooting at the non-moving ship, and 3 hours later, they were still shooting. After the tour, we went up to the top of the fort and were almost blown off of the fort. We went back down, walked through Crissy Field, and went to Fort Mason. I found several gigantic pinecones. Soon we had to leave. We went back to the car and drove to the opera. Tonight’s opera was Siegfried. It opened with Mime, Alberich’s brother, making ...

If you are finished pondering this, then I will tell you about out second opera, called Die Walkure. Remember Fafner or Yardstick? Well, now he’s a dragon. It opened with a stranger outside a woman’s home. The woman’s name is Sieglinde, and her husband is Hunding. She invites the stranger in, and when Hunding comes, the stranger, called Wehwalt, tells his tale. It involves a girl, a forced marriage, and ends with him being chased by soldiers. Hunding tells him that he was one of the soldiers, and lets Wehwault stay the night, but tells him to prepare for battle in the morning. Wehwalt has no weapons, and Hunding ties his foot to a pole so he can’t escape. Sieglinde comes out and unties his leg, and says that she has drugged Hunding’s drink. Wehwalt says that his father told him he would find a sword in his hour of greatest need, aka, now. Sienglide pieces together pieces of Wehwalt’s story, and realizes that not only are they passionately in love with each other, but they are brother a...

After the long flight to San Francisco, we drove around until we found the ultimate life preserver for my parents-Starbucks. After they drank their coffee and I ate my cake ball, we drove the marshmallow car to Lucky, a grocery store. We used our Triple AAA cards at a map vending machine and got ourselves stocked with provisions. Then we found the hotel. We next prepared for Das Rheingold. It opened with three beautiful maidens guarding magical gold. But then, ugly Alberich comes and tries to seduce them. They swim out of his grasp and tease him. Foolishly, they tell him about the gold and that whoever renounces love and makes the gold into a ring can control the world. They show him the gold, and he grabs it, renounces love, and runs off. In the second act, Fricka the goddess is berating Wotan about giving her sister Freia to the giants in return for building their fortress. A distressed Freia runs in, pleading for help. Wotan and her brothers, Froh and Donner, tell her not to worry....

Again, we were up at literally 1:30, but this time, to go see the baby turtle release. I slept all the way to Padre Island, our destination. We went to the dock and listened to the ranger speech. The rangers on the beach gave us the “ready” signal and the crowd slowly inched forward to the beach. There were 4 people holding the corners of a net to protect the turtles from hungry birds. Others were holding long white poles with orange streamers to scare away seagulls and pelicans. The ranger in charge, Dr. Donna Shaver, Chief of Sea Turtle Science and Recovery, placed a cooler on the sand under the net, opened it, and began placing turtles in a pile on the sand in front of her. The point of this is to make it as realistic as possible, and they want the turtles to imprint on the beach so they know which beach to go back to if they survive. There were 80 turtles being released, and they were all groggy. Not one of them was moving. Then, one turtle hesitantly began moving tentative flip...

Well, this was the first REAL week of summer, since I wasn’t dragged to school with my parents. On Tuesday, we went to Sea world. First we went on Steel Eel, which was a large yellow roller coaster made of a course of ups and downs, moving like an eel, as you can probably guess from the name. Then, we proceeded to the penguin exhibit, which was refreshingly cool… but smelly. It was a slow walkway with a vast odiferous view of penguins swimming, diving, sleeping, and just chilling out on the ice. Next up was THE GREAT WHITE! I was practically hysterical at the thought of being upside down and was NOT comforted by my parents suppressing giggles, with unmistakable smirks on their faces. HMPH! They probably wouldn’t have been laughing when they were handing over gigantic checks for my therapy. I was still hyperventilating as the attendant came to check my seatbelt. She asked, ‘’ Are you sure you want to do this?’’ I was crying as I nodded my head. I was determined to do it. I had seen a...