This is my Fourth installment of my combination of Thursday Doors & Monday Window featuring Antique Automobiles.
1934 Packard
Convertible Sedan
The antique automobiles I have been sharing were photographed by dad when he (possibly we) went to a car show in California way back in July of 1980. My dad loved attending Car Shows and we went to many of them over the years.
This week’s Monochrome Madness theme was selected & hosted by Sarah from Travel with Me; she has selected Trees as the theme for this week.
Trees are almost everywhere we go regardless of whether we are in the city, the country, near the beach, or in the mountains. I love spending time in the forests and especially when the forest is in the mountains.
Looking back over my dad’s old slides as I have been doing these past few weeks, I have been enjoying the memories, or seeing what my parents enjoyed doing back in years past. The trees here are from their time in the Sequoia National Forest.
Viewing the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains and Hume Lake from Hume Lake Christian Campgrounds.
Hume Lake is a reservoir in the Sierra Nevada, located within the Sequoia National Forest 65 miles east of Fresno, California. It is in the unincorporated community of Hume, California adjacent to Hume Lake.
The 87-acre lake lies behind the world’s first concrete reinforced multiple arch dam, designed by John S. Eastwood and constructed in 1908 by the Hume-Bennett Lumber Company.
Hume Lake is a popular destination for a variety of recreational activities including camping, boating, fishing, hiking, and swimming.
Hume Lake Christian Camps is a non-denominational, nonprofit parachurch organization and is one of the largest operators of Christian camps and conference centers in the world. Hume has camps and conferences for every age group ( for children and adults alike).
My parents,along with other couples from our church, spent a weekend at Hume during the summer of 1979. I’m not sure if they were attending one of the marriage retreats offered at the campground or they were all volunteers for the weekend. It seems they had plenty of leisure time to explore and photograph the Sequoia National Forest and the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
I attended weekend at Hume in my late teens with others from my church one winter. Somewhere, not sure where, I have pictures from when I was there. I remember seeing and walking by the lake.
This week we are continuing our adventures from August 1979 allowing y’all to imagine the experience and excitement of Pulling Up a Seat with us … Let’s Ride!
… California’s Great America’s Willard Whizzer Roller Coaster in Santa Clara, California. A transition roller coaster was introduced later on in 1986 called Grizzly Roller Coaster, which helped kids adapt from the kiddie roller coaster versions of Lucy’s Crabbie Cabbies and Woodstock Express to more grown-up thrills.
Willard’s Whizzer’s hills and ground-hugging curves gave riders a heightened impression of speed. Lacking inversions, the coaster has been a favorite of families. In the beginning, the ride didn’t have lap bars or seat belts. Small children rode side by side with a parent helping them to feel comfortable and protected. The forces of the ride were designed to keep well-behaved riders in their seats according to the laws of physics. For many children, at the time, this was their very first “big” roller coaster ride.
A walk back in time to visit a place my mom and dad visited with friends, remembering the love they shared. I believe this was a day trip they took with friends from their Sunday school class.
On this day trip from San Diego, California, in 1979, they ventured to The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens located in San Marino, California. The Botanical Gardens section of Huntington has approximately 120 acres of specialized botanical landscaped gardens, including the “Japanese Garden”, the “Desert Garden”, and the “Chinese Garden”.
Walking through a floral passageway with friends.
The Huntington’s Botanical Gardens showcase plants from around the world. Huntington worked diligently to make them thrive in the generous climate conditions of California. The gardens are divided into more than a dozen themes including the ones mentioned earlier.
Japanese Garden
The Japanese Garden creation began in 1911 with a donation from art dealer George Turner Marsh and was completed in 1912. However, it did not open to the public until 1928. In the Japanese Garden you can find three distinct gardens: the original stroll garden with koi-filled ponds and a drum or moon bridge, the raked-gravel dry garden which was added in 1968, and the traditionally landscaped tea garden.
Japanese Garden Bridge
An interesting side note: the gardens are frequently used as a filming location. Shits can be seen in the Carpenter’s music video, “Only Yesterday” (1975), in Star Trek the Next Generation’s episode Justice (1987), in CSI Miami’s episode of You May Now Kill the Bride (2008) and in many other productions.
The Huntington Botanical Gardens were honored on May 13, 2020 with a postal stamp as part of the American Gardens stamps. The Desert Garden was featured on the postal stamp.
According the Oxford Dictionary, a Pathway is a path which you can walk along or a route you can take and a Passage is a way of exit or entrance; the act or process of moving through, under, over, or past something on the way from one place to another.
For Judy’s “The Numbers Game #30”Today’s number is 151. To play along, go to your photos file and type that number into the search bar. Then post a selection of the photos you find under that number and include a link to your blog in myNumbers Game blog of the day. If instead of numbers, you have changed the identifiers of all your photos into words, pick a word or words to use instead, and show us a variety of photos that contain that word in the title.
California Adventures
Since I have been working on digitizing my dad’s old slides more than photographing outdoors in our extreme heat, I decided to share some of my dad’s slides and my memories from our California adventures with all y’all.
Lombard Street San Francisco, CaliforniaSan Francisco Bay Bridge San Francisco, California Turn Off to PCH 1 Doyce Eileen Waters ( My mom) and Myself Redwood Sequoia Sempervirens Washed Ashore at Crescent City During The Christmas Flood Of 1964. Placed Here At The Gateway To The Redwood Empire.Nornal Hule Waters (My dad) Sequoia National Park Three Rivers, Tulare County, California Centennial Stump Sequoia National ForestSequoia National Forest Campground Princess Sequoia Sempervirens Coastal California Redwood Sequoia National Forest
Locations: 1-5) San Francisco, California; 6-9) Sequoia National Forest Campground; Three Rivers, Tulare County, California, USA
God Bless. Thank you for visiting and sharing your time and thoughts with us. Sharing memories are precious and a delight to behold. I appreciate y’all very much.
Bugs Bunny & Wile E. Coyote at California’s Great America
Since the Opening of California’s Marriott’s Great America in 1976, the park featured appearances from Warner Bros. Looney Tunes characters. Some of the Looney Tunes characters included Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, Tweety, and Yosemite Sam. The Looney Tunes characters would roam around the park greeting visitors as well as putting on a fun entertaining show.
Here is my entry for this week. These are from a trip to Solvang, California back in September of 1978. Solvang is known as “Danish Capital of America” because of its Danish heritage and European-inspired culture, architecture, and museums.
Solvang is a sun-soaked slice of Danish culture in the Santa Ynez Valley, where California wine cellars mix with European bakeries and shops. It’s where you can drink, dine and shop like a Dane without ever leaving the California sunshine.
The name Solvang means “sunny fields” in Danish. The city of Solvang was founded in 1911 by a group of Danish immigrants who purchased 9’000 acres of land near the Old Mission Santa Inés and built a community to preserve and promote Danish culture.
An interesting note (especially for Hallmark fans), A still from “A Very Charming Christmas Town,” the Lifetime Christmas movie set in Solvang.
God Bless. Thank you for visiting and sharing your time and thoughts with us. Take Care Cee! Chris thank you for taking good care of our friend. I appreciate y’all very much.
My selections for this week’s challenge were captured on film in 1978 in Solvang, California many years ago.
11270 KM To Copenhagen
This Statue is a milestone marker indicating the distance from Solvang to Copenhagen, Denmark, a mere 11270 kilometers apart.
Hans Christian Andersen Statue
The Bronze Statue of Hans Christian Andersen is located in Hans Christian Andersen Park in Solvang, California. This Park is a tribute to the renowned Danish author, Hans Christian Andersen and was founded in 1970.
Presented To The Community Of Solvang By Friends Of Denmark Sponsored By The Solvang Chapter Of Rebuild National Park Society 1976
Solvang is known as the “Danish Capital of America” with its strong Danish heritage and European-inspired culture. It was founded in 1911. It wasn’t incorporated as a city until May 1, 1985.
Besides the Statue of Hans Christian Andersen there is a museum dedicated to him you might be interested in visiting. The monument of Hans Christian Andersen Denmark’s renowned Fairy Tale Writer was created by Henry Luckow Nielsen of Copenhagen, Denmark.
God Bless. Thank you for visiting and sharing your time and thoughts with us. Take Care Cee! Chris, thank you for taking good care of our friend. I appreciate y’all very much.
The Whizzer is a steel roller coaster located in the Hometown Square section of Marriott’s Great America. This one pictured here was taken at The California Marriott’s Great America amusement park in April of 1979.
The Whizzer, originally named “Willard’s Whizzer,” was one of two identical roller coasters built for each of the Marriott’s Great America parks. The Whizzer roller coasters made their debut when the parks opened in May of 1976.
The California Great America Whizzer operated from 1976-1988. My family visited the California location of Marriott’s Great America in Santa Clara, California in April of 1979. I am not sure if I actually Pulled Up a Seatand ride the roller coaster or not (I’m not too keen on large high-speed roller coasters.) The second location for Marriott’s Great America (currently known as Six Flags Great America) is in Gurnee, Illinois.
From the very beginning, both versions of Whizzer suffered with problems surrounding the braking system. The braking system would sometimes allow the trains to collide in the station. From 1976-1979, there were at least 11 recorded instances of station collisions on the California’s Great America version, resulting in an unknown number of injuries. The Illinois’ Great America Whizzer also had two station collisions which occurred less than a month apart in 1976. A total of 31 riders were injured in the Gurnee collisions.
The Steel Roller Coasters were manufactured by Anton Schwarzkopf of Germany. These two versions of Whizzer were the last “Speedracer” models ever built.
If you want to have a chance to Pull Up a Seat on the Whizzer, you’ll need to visit the Gurnee, Illinois location of Six Flags Great America.
This month is going to be a little different for me since I haven’t been anywhere to use my camera this month. I have been busy digitizing my dad’s old slides. I hope it’s alright to post the last picture from the last roll of his I converted to digital format.
From my Dad’s Minolta XG-7 35mm:
My dad’s reflection of him taking the photo is in the mirror.
For this CosPhoChal, Dale has challenged us to post photos depicting Art for Art’s Sake. I chose to continue on our tour of Hearst Castle by allowing you to see some of the art and sculptures we saw when we were there that day. I formatted the pictures into a slideshow, while I was blogging on this post, for enhanced view and entertainment. Relax and enjoy the show.
Location: Hearst Castle; HearstSan Simeon State Historical Monument; San Simeon, California, USA
God Bless. Thank you for visiting and watching our slideshow. Thank you for sharing your time and thoughts about my blogging posts. I appreciate y’all very much.
While on our San Francisco Bay Discovery Cruise we were able to see beautiful views surrounding the Bay. We were able to view unique perspectives of the amazing architectural features of the Bay Area Bridges.
Looking at The Golden Gate Bridge from the waters below …
The Golden Gate Bridge is a suspensionbridge spanning the Golden Gate, the one-mile-wide (1.6 km) strait connectingSan Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean.
Golden Gate Bridge
The structure links the U.S. city of San Francisco, California—the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula—to Marin County, carrying both U.S. Route 101 and California State Route 1 across the strait.
The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is made up of two (2) bridge segments: a skyway structure/single anchored suspension bridge between Oakland and Yerba Buena Island, and a suspension span from the island to San Francisco. The two (2) are connected by the world’s largest diameter bore tunnel.
The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is the region’s workhorse bridge, carrying more than a third of the traffic of all of the state-owned bridges combined. It is also a jewel along the San Francisco waterfront.
San Francisco Bay Bridge
The Eastern Span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge underwent an extensive replacement renovation to replace a seismically unsound portion of the Bay Bridge with a new self-anchoredsuspension bridge (SAS) and a pair of viaducts. The span replacement took place between 2002 and 2013, and is the most expensive public works project in California history. The Eastern Span replacement upgrade was part of a plan to make the bridge more seismically sound. The replacement was necessary due to an earthquake of unanticipated magnitude of the horizontal motion caused by the Loma Prieta Earthquakecausing significant damage to the Bay Bridge. It also caused section of a major highway along the bay (a portion of it double-decked) to collapse; repairs on these were completed by the late 1990s.
Oakland Bay Bridge
The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2001. The Bay Bridge is significant for its influence in the California Bay Area.
Bay Bridge Architectural Design
The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge’s multi-modal design is a direct example of the mindset of commuters during the 1930s. Constructed in 1936, the bridge was used to support the increase of automobiles and public transit lines in the early half of the 20th century.
San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge
Today the Bridge continues to pay a vital role in transportation as it serves as a major freeway connector for many who travel to and from the Bay Area.
Looking through the my dad’s old slides the photos of these Bridges reminds me of a 70’s song by Simon and Garfunkel called “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
Gfpacificbee’s Insights & photography 