On Towns with a Theme

On Saturday we drove inland to a town called Solvang, which has made the decision to appear to be a Danish town!!! So all the shops and houses are sort of painted with beams, with lots of Bavarian woodwork, spires and towers as well as windmills, the overall effect is slightly right of Disney’s version of Pinocchio. It was absolutely awfgul, still, I suppose someone has to do a quaint version of Denmark, complete with Brother Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson.

I sometimes wonder if there was at one time a giant convention of town officials in U.S.A. and they drew up a huge list of food items, animals, countries, artefacts, materials and stuff and then bid for what their town could exploit So Plant City (FL) got Strawberries, London (KY) got chicken, it is the Chicken Capital of the World, Petaluma (CA) got chicken too! (ah, but it’s West coast Chicken), Helen (GA) got Switzerland. Now Santa Rosa managed to Charlie Brown Capital Status, which is pretty good. Some are not so obvious, I am racking my brains for the town in West Virginia which is so memorable as the Grits Capital of the World, hardly surprising I can’t remember it.

But there are a lot of unfortunates who had to end up with the wrong end of the manure rake, here though we have two towns next to each other, both of whom are in competition for the most unimaginative Capital of the World – Solvang has Denmark (which I suppose at least in not Belgium) and right next to is Buellton which has as it’s claim to fame: Buellton - The Home Of Split Pea Soup!! I don’t think you could actually invent that one.

I am now determined to create a list of towns which are famous for ……., are the World Capital for ……, or are The Home Of …….. Watch this space.

The most inspiring place in Solvang is the Mission, Santa Inez, which is number 18 of the 21 missions that were founded in California. We have visited several already, this one is not particularly remarkable, but is a very lovely place which is very peaceful. Sally and I enjoyed our wander around it.

The Cruise Highlights

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Tuesday So today we take to the little launches that will take us to Catalina Island. The Sun is out and it is nice and warm. We are landed on the pier of Avalon and left to stroll round the little town at our leisure. There are some nice shops, but the best entertainment was the pelicans, the fish we could see going in and out of the kelp forests and the dolphins that were swimming in the stretch of water between the ship and the harbour. We did have a nice cup of tea/coffee and spent a few minutes watching the bluegrass Jam in Anthony’s Pizzeria. By lunchtime we had exhausted the tourist bits and returned to the ship for our buffet lunch, before finding a bluegrass jam, which was a bit slow.

Dinner however was excellent, poor Sally could only find Lobster Tail and Shrimp to eat on the menu, so she ordered two of them. I on the other hand could order the lobster and shrimp as well as a slice of Prime Rib, which complemented each other quite nicely.

Wednesday

Today we arrived in Mexico at a town called Ensenada. It is barely in Mexico and is not much of a town. Still we took the shuttle bus into the mains street and walked from there back to the boat. The overridding impression is that of dirt, poverty, poorly maintained roads, buildings and pavements. Almost everyone we saw wanted to sell us something or to beg for money. It was not a very pleasant experience and we were glad to be back on the ship for lunch. Now I am sure that this is not typical of Mexico, but it’s the only bit I have seen (apart for a view from El Paso last April), so that is my experience.

Thursday

A day at sea, when we would try and do some bluegrass jamming. The morning was a total write off as Jerry had tried to organise a slow jam, which just did not work for us. The afternoon was much better and we had a real swinging time on the Promenade Deck.

Friday

We were disembarked pretty early on Friday, but it was well organised and gave us plenty of time for a last breakfast on board. We returned to our rig in the Queen Mary Car park and set off for our next campground – Malibu Creek State Park. It was our intention to use this park as a base to visit Los Angeles, but when we got there it was such a pretty park with so much to do that we never did go back to see Los Angeles.

Internet Problems

Well. At the  moment we are unable to get ourselves on line. We seem to have a problem with Windows 7. But I am working on it.
Be back soon.

Queen Mary

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So we have made it aboard the Queen Mary and it is indeed like stepping back into the 1930's, not that I remember those days, the ship is definitely a star. Once we got ourselves sorted we had a wander round, up to the sun deck and the bridge, then down to the promenade deck and a walk round the deck, it was a beautiful day, warm and sunshining. Looking up the three huge orange and black smoke stacks. Lots of Art Deco ornamentation, although you could see the move  to functionality in the fittings, a 1936 response to the Depression. We found our room, it is one of the rooms that still has the Art Deco decor of the 30's, with wood paneling and lots of geometric angles and curves built into the dressing table, wardrobes and ceiling. It was a very luxurious and interesting eexperience, preparing us for our cruise tomorrow.

Cruising

Today we are traveling up the coast to Long Beach and tonight we will stay aboard the Queen Mary. Tomorrow we transfer to the Carnival Inspiration for a five day cruise to Catalina Island and Mexico. I have no idea what Internet coverage there will be, I suspect little as we are in steel rooms on the ship. WiFi is available, at a cost of about $1 per minute -sack that. So our next blog may not be until next weekend.

Mount Palomar

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There are some places and things which define a generation, time, or a culture.
Mount Palomar is one of those places, and one of the icons of the the 50's and 60's which impacted on a whole generation. As the Iron Horse the technology which enabled the development of the West in the 19th C, so Astronomy was the technology which fed the romantic fires of the frontiers of Space and our drive towards digital technologies. In the early part of the century new telescopes enabled scientists to look further and further into the universe, boldly laying down theories on top of new observations, which promoted more new theories which need to be verified by observation. The race was to build the biggest and best telescopes to attract the brightest intellects. At the top of this tree was Edwin Hubble, it was he that unified the observations of galaxies to bring order to the stars.
This early space race fed the imagination and gave the need to go into space some credibility, which crystallised in the development of NASA and the race for the Moon.
At the heart of this technology was the 200 inch Hale Telescope at Mount Palomar. If an astronomy story was published, if space pictures were needed they the iconic building which housed the Hale Telescope was rolled out. It was the 1950's quintessential image of all things spacewards. Though it was planned and paid for from 1928 it was not completed and operational until 1949. It was such a leap in technology that nothing better could be made until the Hubble Telescope was put into orbit in 1990, even now with advances in technology the Hale telescope is still at the forefront of Astronomy.
So Mount Palomar to me has been synonymous with pure science, which I first came into contact with probably as a 7 or 8 year old, and new I would never get to see.
Well today we did see it. We drove the 45 miles up into the mountains and took a good look at it and around it. We were not there very long, but what we did see fulfilled my expectations. Although there is no tour on weekdays we were allowed access to the building and because sally is disabled we had to enter using the service elevator, which enabled us to not only see the huge telescope but to get up close to it and marvel at its size and engineering. We had to wait outside for the man to escort us, he was supposed to arrive at 1.00, but was a few minutes late. When he arrived he apologized and asked if we had been waiting long. I said "About 55 years, since I was about seven".
The rest is boring statistics.
The telescope is like a giant shaving mirror. It is a piece of pyrex 200 inches across, that's nearly 17 feet and 20 tons, perfectly ground (it took eleven years to complete). Mounted on a huge structure which is so perfectly balanced and well lubricated that it can be moved by a single person. Unlike a shaving mirror the top surface is silvered, rather than the back surface, so it must be resurfaced every few years, so the whole mirror can be removed and placed in a giant vacuum tank which is used to diffuse Aluminium on to its surface.
Although the telescope was put in place 60 years ago new technology means that results are constantly improving. The biggest advance has been Adaptive Optics. A wobbly mirror, whose shape is controlled by computer, is placed in the light path. A laser reference system determines the distortion due to the atmosphere and the computer then flexes the wobbly mirror to neutralise the atmospheric distortion, amazing. It is no longer the largest telescope, as new technology will dwarf this mirror, ESO, European Southern Observatory is now building the E-ELT, a 39 metre diameter mirror with 948 sq m of collecting surface, compared to the Hale's 20 Sq m. Nice web page here, do miss the nice video
So having now achieved a boyhood dream Sally and I returned to our campground, a momentous day for me at least.

San Luis Del Ray Mission

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Just down the road from the campground is the San Luis Del Ray Mission, the Eighteenth Mission of the 21 founded in California.
We visited there on Thursday, it was a glorious afternoon and we had a very pleasant time looking at the old mission. I had noticed that above the entrance to the Mission's cemetery was a skull and crossbones. On enquiring I was told that this was a relatively recent addition. In the  50's Walt Disney made a series called Zorro, with Guy Williams as Zorro. They used the Mission to do some of the location filming and the skull and crossbones was part of their set, which they left for posterity, fascinating.
After the Mission visit we re-visited and old haunt, we had noticed a local branch of The Home Town Buffet and thought we should give it a try, for old times sake. We were quite impressed both at the variety and quality of the food available, I am sure that the kids would enjoy it now just as much as they did when we ate there in 1997.

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