So, I am an aficionado of a certain kind of YouTube series – of ambitious DIYers who most usually have either mad professional building skills, or a generous income (most often both), plus absolutely insane levels of optimism, who take on a decrepit bit of housing, or at least something with all or most of a roof on it. Over a number of years or months, these skilled, and hopeful masochists take on an abandoned or derelict rural property – a tumbledown pig farm in Belgium, a decayed village house or farmstead in Portugal, a ruinous French chateau, a French village hoarder house with half the roof fallen in, or a burned-out country cottage in Sweden. Usually at least half the time-lapsed video is of tearing out the decayed bits, and sometimes the finished result is a painfully ultra-modern interior and looks like one of the display rooms in an Ikea outlet … but if the owners are happy in it, who am I to quibble over their tastes in interior decoration.
Diversions
Visible Signs
My daughter and I have done a handful of long road trips over the last few years, especially after Texas sensibly lifted the most onerous COVID restrictions. For many of these trips we preferred to take country roads; various two or four-lane routes which meandered through miles of Texas back country, hopscotching past small ranches and passing through small towns of varying degrees of prosperity. One thing we often noticed in passing was a scattering of Trump banners, many of them weathered and obviously left over from the 2020 campaign. It was a hard-fought campaign; obviously many Trump supporters out here in flyover country remained sore about the steal. Also rather obviously, residents in rural Texas aren’t worried about random retaliatory vandalism to their property or vehicles by displaying such political partisanship.
Grand Canyon
On our way home from California at the beginning of the month, we stopped over at Flagstaff and made a side trip to see the Grand Canyon. A view from the South Rim – and that isn’t even a look at the bottom of the Canyon. One of my life ambitions now is to be able to spend about a week at El Tovar, and to see the Canyon at sunset, and at night.
(There are more pictures here at my author blog, and a fuller account of our excursion to the Canyon.)
California Dreaming
My daughter and I and Wee Jamie the Wonder Grandson had to make a flying visit out to California all last week. Family reasons my mother asked to see the three of us. She is in her nineties, bedridden and failing; this was the first time that she had asked to see us. We knew it would be the last, so we dropped everything, packed Thing the Versa and hit the road on Memorial Day for the twenty-hour-long drive, rather dreading everything that we might encounter when we got there. Not just the personal but dreading encounters with the progressively-inclined and everything else which has come about in the nearly half-century since I upped sticks and left California behind for the military and then retirement in Texas.
De Plane! De Plane!
Explanation here.
This very ornate and very small cottage is actually the guest house on the grounds of what was the estate of Elias “Lucky” Baldwin and is now the LA County Arboretum, in Arcadia, California.