Kings Canyon National Park

The John Muir Lodge is in Kings Canyon National Park, Sequoia’s less popular sibling. When it was first set aside by President Harrison, a week after Sequoia was christened, it was called General Grant National Park. The lodge itself has modern hotel-style rooms with televisions and refrigerators. By contrast, the 20 or so cabins next door are both more rustic and more expensive. Even though we don’t watch the TV, at our age we really appreciate the en-suite facilities. 

It was another early morning for us today, but not as early as yesterday; Kathy woke up at 4:00 AM, and I slept in until 5:00 AM. Grant Grove Village, the compound where the lodge is located, has a restaurant that opens for breakfast at 7:00 AM, and we were there right on time. Kathy had a whole-wheat breakfast burrito with eggs and vegetarian sausage. I had an omelette with hash browns and fruit. It was fine, but not as good as Cracker Barrel.

About two miles from the lodge, Grant’s Grove is the third largest grove of Sequoias, and is much more accessible than the Giant Forest Grove which contains the General Sherman tree. It is also much less crowded. The main attraction is the General Grant Tree, the second largest tree in the world. (I’m not sure why General Sherman got the largest tree, while General Grant, who went on to become President, got the smaller one.) 

The General Grant Trail is an easy, half-kilometer loop. At eight in the morning there were only a handful of other visitors and it was so peaceful. In 1872 the brothers Israel and Thomas Gamlin built a log cabin in the grove while they herded sheep nearby and tried to file a timber claim. From 1891 to 1913, the U.S. Cavalry used the cabin to store hay and feed for patrol horses. Later, it was the residence of the first park ranger. It is the oldest remaining structure in the park.

There were several other interesting sights that I didn’t get pictures of. The Centennial Stump is the remains of a tree cut down in 1875, divided into pieces and sent to the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition where it was reassembled. However the people back East didn’t believe it was a real tree. They called it the “California Hoax”.

The “Fallen Monarch” is a giant, hollow Sequoia log that has been used as a hotel, stable and saloon over the years. We walked through it and it was impressive. We thought that the best part of Grants Grove were the large number of  “anonymous” trees scattered throughout the site. It is a really peaceful place. 

After Grants Grove, We got back on the Kings Canyon Scenic Byway and headed for Cedar Grove and the end of the road. When we saw a turn off for Hume Lake (where I had gone to church summer camp as a boy) we took it, and, after a few miles we could see the lake. I took a picture of Kathy, our Subaru and the lake, and then we turned around.

We got to Cedar Grove around 1:00 PM. Most of the campgrounds in the area had closed a few days earlier, so it was eerily deserted. The Cedar Grove Lodge along with its restaurant and store were still open, so we picked up some snacks and ate them sitting in the shade, watching the dragon flies flitting over the burbling Kings river. So very peaceful. 

After our rest, we drove to the end of the road where we found a parking lot that was surprisingly filled with the cars of people who were packing into the wilderness. There we turned around and headed back to our lodging. The Scenic Byway is well named. Imagine driving on a narrow road, beside a rushing river, with giant granite cliffs close on either side. I tried taking a few pictures through the sunroof, but they just couldn’t convey the scale and the awesomeness of the drive.

 Back at Muir Lodge we sat in the rocking chairs on the deck for a while. At five we walked over to the restaurant for dinner. Then, back to our room; asleep by eight. Tomorrow we head to Yosemite.

Sequoia National Park

Five minutes before the alarm went off at 3:00 AM, I sat up in bed and turned on the light. Like well-oiled machines, Kathy and I threw on our clothes and toted clothes, bags, coolers and walking sticks out to our Subaru. After one last look around, upstairs and downstairs, we were on the road at 4:30 AM.

Two and a half hours later, we pulled into Cracker Barrel, just off Highway 99 in Bakersfield, for our traditional road-trip inaugural breakfast.

In keeping with tradition, I had the hash brown skillet, topped with scrambled eggs, red peppers, green chiles and fried onions, augmented with biscuits and sausage gravy. As you can see from the picture, Kathy chose to flaunt tradition, and went with scrambled egg whites, tomatoes, turkey sausage and fruit. I probably need to move into the future with Kathy. Tomorrow.

An hour and a half east of Bakersfield lies the southern entrance to Sequoia National Park, the second National Park in the country, added in 1890. There were only three or four cars lined up at the entrance to the park, and no-one at all in the right lane, so we showed our Senior Citizen Lifetime National Parks pass to the ranger, picked up a map, and started down Generals Highway. 

The highway is so named because it connects the General Sherman tree in the southern part of Sequoia National Park with the General Grant tree in neighboring Kings Canyon National Park, where we’ll spend two nights at the John Muir Lodge. Sherman and Grant are the two largest trees in the world by volume. 

In both parks you’ll also find a Robert E. Lee tree, but you’ll need an older guidebook, since the Park Service no longer maintains the signage, or puts them on maps. In a similar vein, the Sequoia National Park entrance sign features the Plains Indian portrait which originally appeared on the back of the buffalo-head nickel, and that has proved controversial.

It’s been a beautiful day, and the driving has been exhilarating. Just smelling the air, we could tell that we weren’t in the city any more. The park speed limit is 25 miles per hour, and, it often felt like we were the only ones on the road. When we entered the park, the temperature was about 82 degrees (at 10 in the morning). As we gained elevation, it dropped to mid 60s, so we drove with all of windows open, and the air-conditioning off. Quite a relief from the heat and humidity of the last month in Southern California.

At the Giant Forest Museum, we saw the 2,200-year-old Sentinel Sequoia. It is 257 feet tall with a 25-foot diameter at its base. The 37th largest Sequoia in the world, it is just average size as Sequoias go.

From the museum we started walked along the Big Trees Trail loop, a paved trail through a portion of the Giant Forest. There were more people here than on our drive up, but it certainly wasn’t very crowded.

I’ve been going to the gym and walking a couple of miles on the treadmill several times each week to prepare for this trip, so I was pleased to find that I wasn’t too tired. When we got back to the car, we drove a few miles north to see the General Sherman tree. On the way, traffic stopped for a small black bear who was tearing the bark off a fallen tree, probably to get at the grubs underneath. We were lucky to get a parking space in the first row near the trailhead. Taking our walking sticks, we started climbing down the trail, which featured this sign.

The trail was fairly crowded, and we heard a lot of different languages. Mothers were carrying their children, and there were a few older folks with walkers. When we reached the tree, there was a line of people waiting for just the right photo. Instead of getting in line, we started to take a selfie from a different angle, when one of the people in line offered to take our picture.

After our last hike, I thought that this one would be a piece of cake. It wasn’t. We took it slow climbing back up, stopping for a rest at every bench. We got back to the car around 2:00 PM and were hungry, so we stopped at Wuksachi Lodge at Lodgepole and ordered a pesto and chicken pizza, along with a meatball sub for lunch. The food was surprisingly good and more than we could eat.

This is the first time we’ve stayed inside one of the National Parks. We got to the John Muir Lodge in Grants Grove Village at a 3:45 PM, and waited 15 minutes for our room to be ready. I had heard that some people were disappointed at the in-park lodging, but our room was really nice.

In my imagination, I had pictured sitting out on the porch, watching the sun go down. In reality, both of us were really beat. I worked on the blog for a bit, both of us read for a while, and by 8:00 PM we were asleep.

Retirement Road Trip

Tomorrow morning, at 4:00 AM, Kathy and I are leaving on our first post-retirement road-trip, traveling across the United States, and back. We'll be gone for almost two months, and we'll visit 23 states. You can view our itinerary by clicking the map above.

I'll be posting pictures here, along with a little color commentary. I'll also post some food pics for my brother, Gary Gilbert. We're looking forward to trying fried green tomatoes in Alabama, and barbecue in Mississippi and Memphis. In Wyoming, we'll steam in the Thermopolis hot springs, and walk around the Devil's Tower from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

We'll stop off at Walnut Grove (from Little House on the Prairie), as well as Natchez on the Mississippi, where Greg Iles' Penn Cage books are set. In October, we should be able to catch the leaves changing on the Blue Ridge Parkway. In Florida, we'll drive the Overseas Highway to Key West, spend two days at Flamingo in the Everglades National Park and listen to John MacDonald's Travis McGee on Audible. In Louisiana, we'll stay in Dave Robicheaux's home town of New Iberia, have breakfast at Victor's Cafe, and maybe tour the Tabasco factory on Avery Island.

To follow along with us, just bookmark this page, and then you'll see the updates as they appear. See you on the road. 

 

Rennes and the Saints

On Wednesday we all had to be packed and out of our apartments by 10:00 AM; Hosanna and Matt heading to the airport and then back to LA; Kathy and I grabbing a fast train to Rennes in Brittany. (Hosanna texted us their plane photo while we were onboard the train.)

Our train was a fast TGV train that made the trip to Rennes in just under two hours. At the front of the train car was a flat screen that occasionally showed the speed. Sometimes is exceeded 200 mph.

Rennes is the capital of the area of France known as Brittany. In addition to French, they speak their own language, Breton, one of the six still living Celtic languages (including Welsh, Cornish, Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx.) As in Quebec, signs are in both languages (but not in English, unfortunately for me and Kathy). We’re staying for four nights in Rennes, using it as a home base for day trips.

Our hotel is named after Anne of Brittany who was the Queen of France, married to Charles the VIII, and, upon his death, married his successor, Louis XII. (She was also the wife of Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor in 1490, but that was annulled.) Our hotel room was clean and spacious, and was less than half the price we paid in Paris.

It was about 15 minutes (walking) from Rennes old town. Rennes has more old half-timber houses than any other town in Brittany. We followed Google Maps to the Cathedral Saint-Pierre de Rennes. There’s been a church on this site since the 6th century. In the 1100s, a Gothic cathedral was built to replace the original. The Gothic church collapsed in 1490, and the current church was built in a neoclassical style.

For the next thousand years, the interior of the church was modified and elaborated, and today, it looks almost more Byzantine to my eyes, than Roman or Renaissance. 

Beside the Cathedral the old town also has the best dining scene. Since ii was after 5:00 PM, we went looking of someplace to eat. Again and again, the places we found didn’t open until 7:00 PM. In Paris, because of the number of tourists, the 12-2 and 7-10 eating schedule was not so strictly enforced. Finally around 6:00 we happened upon the Creperie L’Epi de Ble (Ear of Wheat). When we asked if they were serving food, we were thrilled when they showed us to a table.

The traditional food in Brittany is the Galette, or savory buckwheat crepe. I had mushrooms, cheese and egg while Kathy had mushrooms, cheese and cream sauce, and salad. In addition I had the traditional apple cider which is drunk out of what look like coffee cups. All of it was delicious.

Visiting Saint Michel

Yesterday we saw Saint Pierre’s church. Today we set aside for visiting Saint Michel’s Abbey. A month before we left on our trip I purchased bus tickets from Keolis Armor which runs several daily bus lines between Rennes, Mont St. Michel and Saint Malo.

The first bus left at 8:30 and dropped us in the parking lot of the Abbey. We went into the information center and bought two tickets to tour the abbey itself (around $20 each). You can walk from the parking lot, or you can take the free shuttle bus. We decided we would take the shuttle on the way back.

My first surprise was that there were no elevators. Haven’t they heard of the ADA? The steep main road to the abbey is lined with eateries and the normal mercantile trade that, truthfully, probably hasn’t changed much since pilgrims made the trek in the Middle Ages. 

It really is steep. I’d guess that three fourth’s of the people we passed turned around and didn’t enter the Abbey itself.

When we got to the Abbey, there was a service going on in the main church. The sound of the singing nuns was haunting. The church is at the very pinnacle of the rock, and its spire reaches a total of 557 feet above sea level. 

The view from the top is awe inspiring. From the terraces on either side we could look down on nesting gulls and small moths that look almost exactly like hummingbirds, flitting from blossom to blossom. (At first we thought that they were hummingbirds until we looked them up.)

After that, we had fifteen other rooms to see, climbing up, and climbing down. This is the cloisters, the covered walkways that surround the central garden. This separated the monks from the outside world, and is from this that we get the term “the cloistered life”. 

This is the refectory or dining hall, built between 1211 and 1218, where the monks ate. It reminds me a little of the refectory where The Last Supper is frescoed on the wall in Milan. 

Notice the graceful ceiling and pillars here. I believe that this is The Knight’s Hall, a reference to the Order of Saint Michael, founded by Louis XI in 1469, with its headquarters in the Abbey.

The oldest parts of the Abbey are the three crypts that were not discover until the end of the 19th century. The most impressive of these is the Crypte des Gros Piliers, whose ten pillars are indeed gross, since they hold up the Abbey above them.

In the 15th-19th centuries, Mont-Saint-Michel did double duty as a prison. This giant “hamster wheel” was used by the inmates to haul their provisions to the prison.

After leaving the Abbey, we stopped in the gardens and ate the sandwiches we had packed for lunch. Instead of walking back to the parking area, we took the shuttle. On the way back to Rennes, both of us dozed off. When we got back to town, we once again went to the “Ear of Wheat” creperie and shared a savory galette, and had a sweet chocolate cream with ice cream and whipped cream crepe for desert.

Visiting Saint Malo

When I was reading one of the travel forums on Rick Steve’s Website, one of the posters commented on a week long rail pass she had used the previous year in Brittany. After researching it (with much help from Google translate) I found the pass which cost 100 Euros and was good for unlimited travel, for one week, for five people, on the local (TER) trains. Such a deal.

On Friday, the 13th, we hopped on a train for the hour-and-a-half ride to the French Privateer town of Saint Malo. This town was also the scene of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning World-War II novel, All the Light We Cannot See. (Kathy checked the book out from Libby and is listening to it now.) When we got to the Saint Malo train station we walked a mile to the city gates. Along the way, we found this billboard  encouraging me to pick up after my dog.

Once inside the city, we stopped for lunch at one of the creperie/brasseries inside the ramparts. Despite its pretty good rating, be both were a little disappointed with the food.

What we really came for, though was to walk the ramparts around the city. The ramparts started to be erected in 1144 and have been updated continuously. Unlike the city walls in Dubrovnik, the city fathers of Saint-Malo haven’t attempted to monetize the attraction, so there is no admission charge. As you can see from my pictures, there aren’t a lot of people either.

At low tide the boats in the harbor rest on the mud. Notice the cruise ship in the background.

Once around to the sea-ward side, there are several interesting beaches, including Plage du Mole which was featured in the Netflix adaptation of All the Light We Cannot See.

The main beach, Plage de Bon-secours features a huge, sea-water filled swimming pool that is refreshed each high tide, as well as the Ile du Grand Be, which contains the remains of an ancient fort and the grave of Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, a French writer from Saint Malo.

Leaving Saint-Malo I took one last picture of a fearless seagull, and we caught the bus to the train. (You didn’t need a ticket; you just tap your credit card. Unfortunately, I tapped thrice instead of twice. Oh well.)

When we got back to Rennes, we stopped by a Kebap shop next to the hotel, called Berliner, where we got a sandwich to take back to our room. I liked this poster of Monty Burns in the window.

The Marche de Lices

On Saturday we had two tasks: to visit the second largest market in all of France, and, to spend the afternoon in the medieval town called Vitre, about a half-hour east of Rennes.

The Marche de Lices (Walk of the Lists in English) is one of the oldest and largest markets in France. There are acres of produce…

…exotic processed beans and vegetables and spices from Africa…

 …olives…

…fresh herbs…

…all kinds of mushrooms and truffles…

…fresh bread…

…more cheeses than you could ever eat…

…rotisserie chickens and any kind of meats…

…and, of course, any kind of fresh seafood. I think that our friend, Hourik Kazarian (a noted cook) would think she had died and gone to heaven.

After the market we went to the train station to catch the train to Vitre. I had checked the schedule earlier in the week and saw that the trains ran every half hour. Unfortunately, I didn’t check the Saturday schedule, which were only a few times a day. So, instead, we decided to go to a Boullion (soup kitchen) restaurant, whose menu we had seen earlier in the day. When we got there, the waiter handed us a much higher-priced menu. Kathy insisted on the menu that was displayed on the street. In the end, the food was OK, but we felt pretty awkward. The people next to us ordered a large boat filled with shrimp and crabs.

Heading Home

Earlier in the week, I caught a cold that moved into my chest. We’ve gone several times to the pharmacy to get cold medicine, but it doesn’t really seem to be going away. We had planned to spend five more days in Brittany, but both of us decided that we’ve seen enough of France for this year.

So, we called Delta and found we could exchange our tickets for next Tuesday’s flight. I was also able to exchange our TVG tickets back to Paris for two seats on the Sunday 7:48 AM train. All the other trains on Sunday and Monday were filled. Finally, I was able to cancel our hotels in Quimper and Vannes, and rent a room at the Ibis Styles at the airport. (Kathy says that the room reminds her a little of a pod-hotel). So, early Sunday morning we got to the train station, and Kathy took one last picture of this statue of a pair of horses drinking with their reflection.

We got to the airport hotel around 11:00 am and were able to check in. We went to another hotel for dinner. Today, we had a great breakfast, one of the best that I’ve had at a hotel. Tomorrow, we’ll be on the plane home. It’s been a great trip, but we’re learning that we’re not 70 any more.