Author: Susie

We had a beautiful day today.  I always look for "small town America." If you were reading the blog 2 years ago when we went to the submarine convention in Springfield Missouri, when we got to Hannibal Missouri after working our way "up" the Mississippi I went all crazy over small town America.  Today we left San Antonio and drove to Sonora, Texas and found "small town America – main street." I had researched and was looking for "Friends of Sonora" and the Veteran’s Museum on Main Street.  Found a wonderful guy named Bill who manages the friends of Sonora and he not only showed us the veteran’s museum (tributes to townspeople who have served in the military and some who gave their lives, along with a September 11 tribute) he had tributes to the women of the west also.  Then he took us on a town tour. showed us where one of Butch and Sundance’s men Will Carver met his maker… listened to an old restored house give us the town history and stayed with us for over an hour and then we sat and drank wine and talked for another hour.  He is a rancher so we talked about raising goats and cattle and the Texas drought… he is excited about the restoration of main street.  We then went to the Caverns of Sonora. My goodness how beautiful!!!!  The caverns are alive with lots of stalagmites, stalagtites and electites (these are curly horizontal growths), and water ponds and milky rocks with crystals – very beautiful. It was an amazing 1 1/2 mile cave tour.  I kept seeing angels’ wings in the "growths". I took plenty of pictures. We came back to town where by the way many houses are stone covered in a lovely light stone… went to rest in a Prayer Garden, an amazing little public effort. Imagine a family donated a building lot and then someone wonderful designed a little garden with a stone (concrete) cross all inlayed with stones and neat wood and shells… Little stones had Bible quotes and the many names for Jesus are carved into the stone ground around the cross. Just a wonderful small town secret.  I took plenty of photos there too!  Finally we went to the town ampitheater where Bill thought we might hear music, but no one came to play.  Did hear the local school at band practice. That’s pretty much it for today. We might explore a nature garden called Sonora’s Eaton Hill Wildlife Sanctuary tomorrow, but honestly, Chuck might have had enough garden walking in the heat…  So we might head for the higher elevations. We are booked into the Fort Davis Historic Hotel Limpia a restored 1912 Inn in Fort Davis. We will see the McDonald Observatory and the Chihuahuan Desert Nature Preserve, but I’m getting ahead of myself!!!  God bless you and have a wonderful summer evening.

I dove into the pool… ahhh like bath water. But now, I need to dive back in. We’re just a little north of downtown San Antonio near some wonderful gardens.  Chuck and I drove the Mission Trail; we started at the Cathedral of San Fernando where I got all misty at the beautiful tomb containing the remains of Davy Crockett, Bowie and some others who died at the Alamo. At the Cathedral is a beautiful tribute to Saint Anthony of Padua who is the patron Saint and after whom the city is named.  We then drove south along the mission trail and I stood for the Gospel and homily in Queen of the Missions "San Jose". 4 of the 5 original 300 year old Spanish missions are active parishes.  Chuck had a book to read. (Mom will ask… so yes Mom I went to 8am Mass at St Joseph church downtown – built by German immigrants bunches of years ago).   After a proper tribute to the Missions, we traveled north to an amazing Japanese Garden created out of an abandoned quarry by city of San Antonio and had "Tea",  then on to another Botanical Garden that we got into for free due to Fairchild Tropical Gardens membership. Have used that card to enter gardens in LaGrange and SanAntonio for free!   On then to the hotel and am now sitting with Chuck outside at the pool.  We are the only sojourners today.  Drinking a bottle of wine given to us by friends Rick and Marilyn. Thanks folks very nice.  At this point bro in law Lee will say, "Is Susie drinking again?" Well what can I say.  We ditched Del Rio as the next stop as I went online to check out one of the places I wanted to go and it is closed… The only other thing left is a winery. Got wine.  Decided to go on to Sonora. They can’t close Caverns can they?  Chuck said it’s time to take out my paints and get busy painting so tomorrow we’re on to Sonora and the caverns and painting … I’ll look for a horse for Chuck to ride. We are moving across Texas in 100 degree oven temperature but loving the journey!!! God bless you!

Chuck and I really blew through Galveston. Well we only spent one overnight there.  We arrived via car ferry which is always fun! (a free car ferry by the way).  Checked into a hotel that Chuck had stayed in 5 years ago… The name changed, but he remembered the place right across from Galveston seawall and beach. Then we visited the Seawolf Park where there is a complete and very well restored submarine called the Cavalla SS 242.  We were escorted by a guy who had been a sub sailor Master Chief who now manages the park and who had served during the Vietnam conflict like Chuck did.  They pointed out things like, "there’s where I slept, and they had more bunks in here." etc. The Master Chief explained that finding the old beds and authentic hardware is getting hard but he did a brilliant job of restoring.  He has also acquired the sail of a nuclear sub and along side the Cavalla is a destroyer.  It is worth a visit! We had lunch at a cute cafe, but then I needed to cool off. I have been sitting in my Mom’s air conditioned room for a month, and this Texas heat got to me. After a nap and cooling off, I was ready for a walk and sweated up again walking the beach for an hour.  After breakfast this morning we headed for San Antonio and secured a hotel near the Riverwalk and then proceeded to spend all day on the Riverwalk and at the Alamo.  I recommend highly, but what are we going to do about this heat?  My cheeks are bright red.  We drank a lot of water and not a lot of alcohol. Heavens, are we getting old?  We now ask for the senior discount. Dinner at Pat O’Briens ( a nod to an old friend of a restaurant in New Orleans that we bypassed this trip).  Tomorrow after Mass we’ll go to 2 gardens and possibly Fort Sam Houston and then…. some sleep and off the next day (Monday) to the Mission Trail to see some Spanish Missions and then west to Del Rio in search of artifacts and a winery on the Rio Grande. Hope to find some horse back riding for Chuck.  Will be meandering west from Del Rio through Sonora, Ozona, Fort Davis, Alpine, Van Horn and ElPaso and then turning north through Carlsbad Caverns.  Have a wonderful weekend and stay cool!!!

Chuck and I drove from Auburn, Alabama to Beaumont, Tx and he thought he had been in Beaumont before, so I was all ready for this cute sea food restaurant on the water… and as we drove through Lake Charles, Louisiana, he said "There is where the little restaurant is, and there is the hotel!"  OOPs. We have reservations 50 miles down the road in a different state!  We watched the cute little restautrant go by and we drove on. Actually Beaumont isn’t anything special unless the "old town" is hidden someplace.  Our hotel is on a little river… but where is old town?   Now Auburn was special – it has a real small town feeling. I am thinking of the University of Miami being a "campus" but I never got the "small town feel."  I think first of all U of M being smack in the middle of very exclusive Coral Gables was an issue, and second we don’t have that all important stadium in the middle of the campus. Auburn is ALL AU… tiger paws everywhere and everyone talks sports.  Two really big guys poured out of a car at an Auburn gas station wearing Tuskeegee football shirts and all I could think of is "Yes" you do play football don’t you?  My gosh, what it must take to feed those tanks!  Football and sports abound, but Auburn also has a beautiful Art Gallery/Museum.  So….. onward into Texas.  Tomorrow we head south to Port Bolivar and take a car ferry over to Galveston Island.  I haven’t been there and they were wiped out two years ago by one of those hurricanes that we wished west from the Keys…. (sorry Galveston)… so we’re planning to camp there for a few days and catch some beach breezes.  It’s hot today and I hope the Gulf will be cool (wish on). We planned the rest of our Texas trip when we got a bunch of materials at the welcome center … oh boy oh boy Sedona, El Paso, Fort Davis, Alpine, Big Bend, etc.  I just have to get us to those places and out again and headed north to get to Denver on time to deliver art in Aspen (we have a tough life).  So my dears. Have a wonderful end of the week! Hope you are dry and cool!!!

Hi dear friends.  Chuck left Peter and Karen Skipp’s in Tampa and he is headed to collect me at my sister, brother in law, and Mom’s at about 4pm today.  I cooked Mom a bowl of oatmeal with raisins, will do a last laundry, and give mom a great big wet shower!!! and then will try to pack my suitcase. Somehow it’s much harder to pack after a long holiday… nothing fits in that one bag!   Our first stop will be in Auburn, Alabama because my southern family tells me it is a lovely college town, so we’ll see and report.   I’ve written about 17 Psalms with 133 to go for book.  Say a little prayer for inspiration, for a good, safe journey and you too have a wonderful summer day!

Dear friends who live "all over".  I’m sitting upstairs at my sister’s house in LaGrange, Georgia watching the new Pope Francis land in Rio de Janiero, Brazil for World Youth Day, and I’m running downstairs to watch news on the birth of a Royal heir to the throne of England on the downstairs TV.  I’ve been on baby watch with my English friends for a few weeks, and I’m so reminded of times we have shared with English friends in their home where they took care of my need to "see it all" when I watched a Papal funeral, when Diana died, and when Prince William married. I remember so well being at my friend Sally’s father’s funeral and lighting candles for him and praying in a small English church. We are united in so many ways. We share our heritage and I am grateful for many friendships.  I thought as Mother and I watched, and the new baby was heralded on the TV downstairs, I’ll write to my "many" friends and they can read if they want to.   You might be thinking, Sue writes a lot, do we really have to read it all? So you might be thinking; then edit it!  I’ve been with my mother for a month, and I’ve submitted a book proposal to my publisher, so I am emotional and yearning, sad to be away from Chuck, and glad to be so close to my mother who is 97 years old.  So my dears, Chuck will be picking me up on about July 24 and we’ll be travelling for about 2 months, and for the next few months I’ll be journaling of the sights and events.  We’ll visit Galveston which was almost wiped out 2 years ago by hurricane, the Alamo, Carlsbad Caverns, Denver, Clear Lake Iowa, Rochester Minnesota for a submarine convention with my favorite WWII veterans, Niagara Falls on the Canadian side… maybe Maine, and then on south to definitely Connecticut cousins… and, eventually home again and to visit Mom again.  So, stick with me and I won’t intrude on you with emails. Dial in to see "where are they now???" And let me say to my friends far and wide, in the US, in England, in Italy, God bless you and let us see each other soon. and while we are away from one another, let God bless you!

"I think I need to find a pair of jeans," Chuck mumbled. "It’s not THAT cold!" I countered. "Mosquitoes! They haven’t gone away yet! They’ll eat me alive!" he advised as he dug through shorts and tee shirts looking for long pants. Today is the first day in the year that we go gleefully diving for sweatshirts and long pants because … it’s cool! For a little while in the morning, before the sun bakes the fog off, we have a hint of autumn. Keats described autumn as "Season of Mists and mellow fruitfulness." I wrote a poem about autumn once and actually won a prize. We’re supposed to write about what we know, but I don’t have colorful leaves, or mists, or mellow fruitfulness… you see, we south Florida flowers have no autumn, no leaves falling (orange falling inspire poets to talk about the end of life as in "Margaret are you grieving over golden grove unleaving?" (Hopkins) or "It was my thirtieth Year to heaven / stood there then in the summer noon / Though the town below lay leaved with October blood. / O may my heart’s truth / Still be sung / On this high hill in a year’s turning." In "Poem in October" Dylan Thomas mused over the view of his "unleaving" town that reminded him of the "autumn" of life. This is one day in the year when a northern cold front pushes in and actually gets here… this is one day when a morning begins crisp and cool. My neighbor mows the too long grass in shorts, and I champ at the bit to get out to pull weeds and mow too, and Chuck is sent to his shed that needs clean up after two years of neglect. Here we come mosquitoes! We’ll be wearing deet. Look elsewhere for someone to chomp on! Happy autumn dear friends and family!

Today dear friends and family is the day before September 11, ten years later. The news is going over what was happening that day before… the news that no longer matters. Economic, innocent, secure…  We’re in an alert status because I guess the enemy doesn’t think he has changed our lives that much. New York mayor Bloomberg is trying to explain why clergy is excluded from the September 11 celebration due to separation of church and state…. Oops on his forgetting that this country was established "under God…" The colonists felt God was on their side, and we talk about our "God-given rights." No prayer, no religion will be at Ground Zero. Michael Brown, former Bush adminstration FEMA director, stated "we are not free from religion, we are free for religion." I remember on that day 10 years ago, I went to our church at that time, Little Flower in Coral Gables and I prayed endlessly to Saint Michael the Archangel who in the book of Jude at the end of the New Testament… was fighting Satan (Jude 1: 6&9). Even Michael could not kill or put the stake in the enemy’s heart, but it is for us to expect God to chain Satan in the depths of the earth. On a better note… yesterday the sub vets spent an hour in memory… They prayed a benediction and sang the "Navy Hymn" as they tolled a bell for men lost and boats lost. "Lest we forget." Submarines are still out there today guarding and protecting us.  The ceremony was beautiful and solumn.  We expect to close up the convention tonight and start on our last journey tomorrow (September 11) as I’m going to visit my Mom and Chuck will go to buddy Dave’s hunting camp for a week. God bless America. Have a blessed weekend. Love Susie

Hi dear friends and family. The title is a phrase used for torpedos…  I see the phrase on the vests of many of the guys here in Springfield.  There are many guys with about 10 submarine names on their vests and I tease them that they couldn’t make up their minds…  Apparently there were many submarines and when one went "in the yards" you just moved to another.  There are many "old guys" as the World War II submarine vets are here too. We took a wonderful guy named Jack Higgins who is 85 and fought in the Pacific to the Fantastic caverns yesterday. He was full of wonderful stories. Together Jack and I read the map and guided Chuck to the Caverns!  These guys were "at Pearl" and in Hong Kong as well as the Atlantic and the "Med."  Chuck and I have been busy walking all around the University of Missouri area of Springfield, and I am going to St Agnes church with a wonderful priest named Mike. They sing a lot at Mass and I like that. The weather is chilly in the morning (low 50s and up to 70s during the day.) Everyone prays for rain. We watched the U of M v. Maryland football game last night that was played in the pouring rain in Maryland… I guess we all wonder why we can’t siphon some of that rain west…  today we’re going to Springfield’s botanical gardens and then to the VFW for a ceremony in thier gardens where they have the sail (the top) of a submarine  the USS Lapon one of whose missions was highlighted in the book Blind Man’s Bluff. These sails are memorials, "lest we forget" the men who fought and died for our freedom. On a sunny, albeit chilly day, I pray for our freedom, that we remember and work hard to protect the rights of the weak and those who can’t protect themselves. God bless America! Love Susie    

Hi dear friends and family! We left Breckenridge at about 8:30 mountain time, crossed the Continental Drive at Hoosier Pass, elevation over 11,000 feet, passed many miles of grazing land, and imagined Bonanza and the wagon trains headed west… miles and miles of just grazing land with mountains and rivers. Then we began a steady drop "down" to 7000 feet. We then passed through Fairplay, Colorado (I imagine poker players must not cheat in this town…) and crossed over the South Platte which has its headwaters near Fairplay. This is our third crossing of the South Platte (we crossed over it twice when it merged with the North Platte in – you guessed it, North Platte, Nebraska). … Passed Pike’s Peak and entered "the city" of Colorado Springs. Before we could shake a lamb’s tail, we were on the flat, great plains of Kansas. As broad as a Kansas corn field; corn as far as the eye can see… yep – that’s Kansas. We changed our clocks forward an hour and stopped in Colby, Kansas "The Oasis of Kansas" and the trading and service center for the wheat and corn producers in Kansas.  Time for a nap and a steak and some sweet corn. Yum. Love Susie