Travel: Witches in the Woodwork - 1

"Standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, I've got seven women on my mind...", so goes the song from the 1972 by the Eagles.

About the same time this song was gaining airplay, I took a few road-trips. Along the way I met some interesting people.

I'm a talker. I like people. I find them interesting, so it's not unusual for me to engage in conversations with strangers during my travels. I've been doing it for years.



A week or so ago I watched a BBC production called Dr. Who. My wife spent some time in her youth in Scotland, and the Dr. Who series is part of her personal culture. I was just tagging along. In one particular episode, The Shakespeare Code, three unique extraterrestrials play key roles in the unfolding drama. Two of the three look very much like our Halloween witches. The third is a pretty, but conniving, blond. The third was more typical of the witches I've met.

The story line suggests that maybe these women were the prototypes for the witches that appear in some of Shakespeare's works. The story suggested to me that there are witches in the woodwork: real life practitioners of wicca who lurk at the edges of our awareness.

I've met a few.



Wika-pedia defines wicca as a neopagan, nature-based religion. If political correctness applied to witches, then we'd call them Wiccans.

Wiki-pedia informed me that Wiccans "typically worship a Goddess (traditionally a Triple Goddess) and a God... Other characteristics of Wicca includes the ritual use of magic, a basic code of morality, and the celebration of eight seasonally based festivals."

The Wiccans I met seemed nice: misunderstood nature lovers perhaps?




The first two appeared on my radar while I was on a month long motor trek up the West Coast. Starting out from my hometown of Anaheim, the home of Disneyland, Nick and I headed north. Mostly we camped out along the way. Mostly we stayed in state parks. It was beautiful.

We weren't great planners, so we had no reservations. That was only a problem the first night when our targeted state park was full. For a slightly higher fee we were able to camp out in an adjacent privately owned campground.

An LA Times writer provides a description of the area, "Waves splash over the tide pools at Carpinteria State Beach, a popular coastal camping spot southeast of Santa Barbara. When day trippers leave, campers can enjoy empty stretches of sand and the sounds of crashing surf. There are hiking and biking trails with beautiful views of the Santa Ynez Mountains on one side and the Channel Islands on the other."

We camped next to that. One of the features of our campground was an open recreational pasture-like area. Nick and I enjoyed a game of Frisbee until a youth group from a local Baptist church set up a volleyball net. They invited us to play. I joined them, and Nick retreated to our campsite to relax.



When I returned an hour or so later to the campsite, Nick was not alone. He had attracted the attention of two slightly "older" ladies. Nick was probably 19; I was 18. The girls appeared to be in the mid-20's. Go Nick.

In the course of the ensuing conversation, I discovered that our guests were Wiccans. They too were enjoying the beauty of the beach. They had moved to Santa Barbara, drawn in part by the Wiccan community that lived in the area. They were saving up their money to buy some land. They wanted to plant a grove. (Add eerie music here.)

I left Nick to the converse with the witches while I meandered over to the youth group's campfire. They had invited us for dessert and some singing. I opted for the fire, Nick opted for the shadows. (Truth be told, the girls were more interested in Nick anyway. Had the positions been reversed, I might have stayed in the shadows as well.)

For me the night was a bit of a fork in the road. At the campfire, I heard for the first time the stirring lyrics of "For Those Tears I Died." I was left pondering the question, "What if God really is real? What if Jesus is really alive and cares about my tears?"





Nick and I were pilgrims of sort. Like the title of the Cat Stevens' song of that era, we were "On The Road to Find Out."

Little did I know the reality of the lyrics of another Christian hymn that says, "I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew he moved my soul to seek him, seeking me;it was not I that found, O Savior true; no, I was found of thee."

Regardless of that watershed night of Wiccans and Christians, Nick and I continued our journey up the Coast.

It was several years later, on another road-trip that I met my next pair of Wiccans.

More on that... next time!

Here's Cat Steven's singing the anthem of my heart at that time: On The Road To Find Out.



Here's the compare/contrast to the song I heard at the youth group's campfire:



Was it the 70's or was it just the time of early adulthood? Or maybe both?

Twins! (and other blessings)

A special bulletin: Today, in central Illinois, a set of twins were born. Mom and identical twin boys are doing fine.

I have no pictures yet... but here is a "before" of their mom, my daughter: Joanna.

Joanna is and has been an athlete. That paid dividends at delivery. (The boys are welcome additions to her family: Abby, Rachel, and husband John.)








My son, Joel, who lives, works, and plays in British Columbia is also active. Here are two pics I unearthed of him online. (In the PS to a post I almost missed, was a link to a race called Phantom Run. He won the 12k mountain trail race on November 14th. An hour and seven minutes to cover seven plus miles of trail.) The other picture of him, in better weather, is from the Mountain Madness website that sponsors these "fun" runs.







The last two pics are of my youngest daughter. (She's in Illinois to help out the new mom!) She worked this summer in the Sierra Nevada mountains repairing and building back country trails, including parts of the John Muir Trail in Kings Canyon National Park. Here are a couple of pics from her summer job. (She's the one in the blue bandana.)





Kids and grand-kids: the dividends of a life invested in family.

The highlight of my birthday on Saturday, was hearing my two granddaughters sing Happy Birthday over the phone. Good times. Great blessings.

Happy Birth-day Twins!

PS: Just as I was getting ready to post this... I got an e-mail... with an attachment. (Beauty is in the eye of the beholder... Ain't they cute?!!!!)

Travel Stories Anyone?

One of my fellow bloggers, Chase, has been after me for some time to recount a few stories from my various travels. (He just spent a year in Taiwan.)



I'm writing today on my 56th birthday.

At my age, I have lots of stories. (Many of them I repeat. Just ask my family.)

I have purposefully refrained from reminiscing on this blog. I've worked hard to stay in the moment, to spend time looking forward, and to explore rather than rest.

But after 200 plus blog entries, I feel okay about exploring another set of topics: my past.



I am a traveler. One of my favorite books is called, The Universal Traveler, but it's not a book about travels. It's a book about problem solving. Travelers solve problems. They encounter strange places and strange people. They do it on purpose. Strange only means different, unusual, not customary.

I have encountered many non-customary people in my travels. I converse with people. I "interview" them, and I learn.

One non-customary group of people I've met in my travels are witches.

I was reminded of them while watching an episode of a British sci-fi drama series called Dr. Who. My wife has visited Scotland several times in her life. As a result she has some interest in things British, like their TV.

Here's a taste of Dr. Who and some witches he encountered. (Next post... I'll talk about some that I've met on my travels.)



PS: The eucalyptus trees are in bloom.

Risk Management?

Driving to work a week or so ago, I saw a road worker standing in the middle of a very busy intersection. He was holding the stick for a survey team.

The intersection had nine lanes on one road (Imperial Highway) and six lanes on the other (Idaho).



The hard-hatted worker had four orange cones surrounding him and his tripod.

He was attentive.

I marveled at him from my safe, red-light vantage point.



As he looked around at the 18 wheelers and assorted vehicles driving by at 50 miles an hour, he lifted his hand to his shirt pocket... pulled out a pack of cigarettes... and lit up... eyes still scanning the traffic...

"Of course he's a smoker," I thought to myself and laughed.

The cars may never get him... but the cigarettes probably will!



PS: Took a walk today at Cal State Fullerton. The next few posts will feature pictures from my November 14th walk in SoCal.

Misdiagnosis!

My bathroom faucet had a stroke, but it took me several weeks to correctly diagnose the problem. Let me explain...



A month or so ago my bathroom sink (and shower) drains began to show signs of slowing. Usually I attach a Drain King to my garden hose and blast out the clog.

I used to use hand powered snakes, but I discovered the Drain King a decade or so ago. They have saved me hundreds of dollars.

Unfortunately, I decided to try something a bit different this time. I shoved a brake cable from a bicycle down the bathroom sink drain. The cable didn't break the blockage, so I tried the casing of the cable. That didn't work either, but I did pop a pea-sized hole in the bottom of the P-trap under my pedestal style sink.

Ouch.



Pedestal sinks are pretty, but they don't leave much room for working on the plumbing. They generally require a de-installation. We're talking $500 plus in plumbing bills, plus some tile work.

To make matters worse, we are a one bathroom family. Ouch.

We limped along for a week or two, thanks to my wife's patience, before I figured out a way to fix the P-trap myself, without the aid of a plumber or uninstalling the sink.



Unfortunately, in the process of repairing the P-trap, the water pressure in the sink plummeted. I diagnosed the problem as two failed turn-off valves that I had used during the P-trap fix.

Another week or two passed until I got up the nerve to attempt a double valve replacement. At least the valves were more accessible than the P-trap. However, they refused to get fixed. I took apart the cold water turn off valve four or five times, simply trying to install the valve wide open. Still nothing but a trickle.

A visit to the hardware store yielded nothing more than a clearer picture of what the inside of a valve looked like. I wasn't messing up the valve fix-it job. It's just that the valves weren't the problem.

Then what was?



I did a little more investigation. Tried a few things. Mopped up a few quarts of water. And then... I had an idea: maybe the valves are bad; maybe the faucet is.

I've never had a faucet go bad. I've had them start leaking, but generally they don't stop spouting out water.

I investigated. I was going to operate on the faucet's valves, but they were inacessible. As a last resort, I used some pliers to remove the screen that covered the spout. These screens are generally in place to aerate the water and catch any big hunks of sediment.

My home has soft water and copper. We don't get sediment.

I twisted off the screen only to find a flow-inhibitor behind the screen. The flow inhibitor is a solid piece of plastic with a hole in it about the size of a BB. This hole was plugged with a piece of sediment that had come loose from the valves when I turned off the water to fix the P-trap. (Oh. I guess we do have sediment.)



I had misdiagnosed the problem. The valves were fine. It was a clogged flow-inhibitor. Dang! That mistake cost me two or three hours.

Once I had properly diagnosed the problem, I was able to fix it in about two minutes. I removed the sediment, but then I decided to just remove the flow-inhibitor.

Water pressure was restored! (Now I understood why both the cold and hot water flows had been affected. Now I understood why the bathroom sink seemed to take so long to heat up. I didn't know I had a flow inhibitor!)



A simple piece of sediment broke loose (like plaque off an artery) and caused my faucet to have a stroke.

Go figure.

This misadventure caused me to ponder, "How often do we waste time and effort on solutions that aren't addressing the real problem?"

Too often I fear.



Sometimes it takes an unrelated problem to make me rethink some of my other persistent problems. Maybe you can learn from my mistakes and re-diagnose some persistent problems of your own.

Here's hoping!

(After I fixed the water flow problem, I reverted back to my Drain King and hand powered snake to clear the drains without further mishap. Keep the cables on the bike and out of the drains!)

California: Home Sweet Home

I grew up in Anaheim, California, just about one mile from Disneyland. Summer nights, we'd go out and stand at the end of the driveway and watch the fireworks. Back then, they went off at 9 pm. Nowadays, I'm closer to five miles from Disneyland, and I can hear the fireworks... 9:30 pm, almost every night.


I'm glad I live in California, but I'm a bit surprised that I do.

Somewhere in my mid-teens I concluded that all the world wasn't like Orange County. Disneyland is called "The happiest place on earth." The track of homes I grew up in each had a tile on the front porch that said, "Enchanted Homes." Somehow, it didn't seem quite real -- not quite true. I was all about truth... so I decided to do some traveling when the chance came.



My first big trip (not counting childhood trips to Iowa, Arizona and Washington) was a month long road trip up the West coast. I was in my first or second year of college. It was summer and a guy I kind of knew from high school was looking for someone to join him on a road trip. He had the car. We bought a large, four man tent, and started up the coast. We worked the state parks all the way up into British Columbia, Canada.

We met lots of interesting people, saw some beautiful places, and spent two days in Legget, California waiting for a new radiator. Good times. I also remembering driving back into the LA area during a smoggy rush hour. And you know what? We were glad to be "home."



My next road trip was a year or two later. I took a year off of college. My friend Craig and I drove my Fiat as far as Council Bluff, Iowa. That's where the engine died. We had hiked the Grand Canyon, camped in the Rockies, and sang at the top of our lungs to Chuck Berry on the open road.

I had enough money to fix the car and head home, or... sell the car and hitch-hike the rest of the way. I opted for "sell the car." We wish we'd done it sooner. Our first 8 or 9 rides were like a traveling party. Not only did people give us rides, they took us into their homes. (Yes, we did spend one night under some bushes along the river, but... hey.) In Pennsylvania, the people who had picked us up, lent us their tent and they slept in their van because it was raining. I still remember seeing several deer standing on a slope leading to a fog covered river the next morning. Good times.



Our trip ended in Long Island where Craig had lived until he was ten. Later, we hitched down to Cape Cod (Chatham) where we spent a couple of weeks with some high school buddies. Our only "appointment" on the trip was a Halloween party in Norwood, Mass. In Norwood, we almost rented a house with some girls I knew from California. I had worked at 31 Flavors with one of them. At the last minute, our plans fell through. I decided to take the bus home (a three day, mind-numbing trip) while Craig traveled to Vermont where he nearly starved due to a lack of jobs. (No snow.)

Once I got home, in late November, I remember putting on a light jacket, my flip-flops, and taking a walk in the park. Ahhh... California.

The last big road trip of my youth was a month long trek from Anaheim to Orlando to Nova Scotia to Spokane (and the World's Fair.) The trip went full circle back to Anaheim. That too was a trip to remember. Many places, many people, many states.



After all this exploration, one would think I might have ended up somewhere else. I really thought I would, and I did, sort of. I moved five miles north to Fullerton.

What happened? After all my wanderings I got reacquainted with God. One day I prayed, "O Lord, I'll live anywhere you want me to live." Within six months I found a new home... five miles north. I've been here ever since.

For years I simply thought God had a good sense of humor. Now, I think He just had good sense.

Over the last decade, my wife and I have traveled in many of the US states as well. We did a month long road trip from Fullerton to Mason City, Iowa. We took the southern route on the way there, and the northern route on the way back. We saw the sights of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, (Nebraska), and Iowa. We followed the Lewis and Clark trail west after visiting Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, eventually hitting the Pacific Coast at the Columbia River. Then we took Highway One south, all the way to San Francisco visiting the Oregon Coast, the coastal Redwoods, and Mendicino. We traveled the 101 from San Francisco to Los Angeles, then 30 miles south to Fullerton.

Each place had its own charms, but our own home and locale seems to have a magic which captures us more and more each time we return.

I think Joni Mitchell, a Canadian, captured some of the magic in her song: California. (Enjoy!)

Capistrano Beach and Laguna Beach: The End

Here's some final pictures of last weekend's mini-vacation.

The train is Amtrak's Coaster. Between LA and San Diego in straddles the coast and affords many picturesque views.



The van and picnic table are at Capistrano State Beach. Just a couple of couples enjoying the sun and fun.



The volleyball courts, basketball courts, and such are pictures taken out the car window as we traveled north on PCH through Laguana Beach on the drive home. Late Fall at the beach in So Cal means less people, but still plenty to see and do.





This week-end we're back at home. The lawns are still growing, but at a slower pace. I'm going to get to wear one of my long-sleeved work shirts! (It's cool enough.)





Life in So Cal. It has it's perks.