Oh, and I also went here today

 

The darker side of fame

One of the things I wondered about at Apsley House was how Wellington had coped with his fame, which was relatively sudden and must often have felt overwhelming. At least he didn't know that his false teeth would be displayed to the world after his death.

The original wellingtons

Yes, the boots were named after the duke.

I couldn't get a good picture of them, but I thought it was interesting so I'm including it anyway. The boots generally worn by cavalry were thigh-high and protected the legs during battles, but were difficult to walk in. And the boots worn by infantry were ankle-high, good for walking but not great for keeping the feet dry. So Wellington had waterproof knee-high boots made for himself and they became very popular. They've been made of rubber rather than leather since the mid-nineteenth century, but they're still called wellingtons.

Napoleon and Josephine

The art collection in the museum is really impressive—there are paintings by Velazquez, Titan, Goya, Rubens—and more interesting than all the gilt frames and Adam ceilings in the house itself. But there are also dozens of paintings and statues of Napoleon (including a colossal statue in the front entryway.) Apparently anyone who owned a painting of the former emperor foisted it off on the duke as a show of admiration.

I do really like these portraits of Napoleon and Josephine, though.

Saturday reflections

A portrait of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, reflected in a display case of his uniforms at Apsley House, his home in London.

We toured the house on our field trip on Thursday. My course this year is on the Brontës, who were all great admirers of Wellington's. (Charlotte Brontë named the hero of the imaginary kingdom she created with her brother “Arthur Wellesley” after the duke.)

The Brontës weren't alone—the house is packed with trophies, silver, fine china and most of the Spanish royal collection of paintings looted by Joseph Bonaparte, all of it presented to the victor of Waterloo by the grateful royal houses of Europe.

Little house on the prairie

 

More canola fields

Canola

Then we started to pass canola fields. The bright yellow fields alternating with greens were unexpectedly beautiful. The weather had also improved!

Windbreak

I didn't find this drive boring at all; although there definitely weren't a lot of landmarks or flashy geological formations to admire, I enjoyed how different it was from anything I'm used to. Like these trees, which act as a windbreak for the house behind them. Or the fences set back from the highway, which are there to catch the snow and prevent it from drifting into the road.

This is the real Big Sky Country. When nothing obstructs the horizon, the sky takes up a disproporionate amount of what you're seeing.

Jumping back to, say, North Dakota

 

There's a drought here in the UK, and most of the lawns at Merton have gone brown—they water a couple of the smaller ones. And many of the flowers in the gardens are dying or dead. There's been a little rain this week, but clearly not the amounts they need.

So here's a flashback to rainy and quite green North Dakota, the morning we set off from Jamestown, heading west. Flat, flat, and then more flat.

One more dinosaur

I don't remember what kind of dinosaur this is, but I still like the image.

T. Rex

There's a parade of mammal skeletons, including bison, elephants, and giraffes, in the main hall, and also some dinosaur skeleton replicas. I like the way the black and white photo makes the bones feel like part of the building design.

Ceiling details

I really love the design here—the plant ornamentation and the decorations on the wrought iron. It's not remotely minimalist, and not my usual taste, but with the patterns of shadow on the iron, it's really lovely.

Museum of Natural History

I know I've been jumping from state to state and country to country without any apparent plan recently, but it's a pleasant evening in Oxford and I'm sitting on the deck behind my hotel and I'd rather finish up one Oxford topic before jumping back to, say, North Dakota.

The museum building, completed in 1860, consists of a large exhibition hall, with decorated wrought iron pillars supporting a glass ceiling. (I may have mentioned how hot it was in there yesterday!) I took this picture from the gallery.

Sunday bird blogging

OK, this wandering albatross is most definitely, as Monty Python might point out, pining for the fjords, but as I have actually seen many albatrosses in the past year, at least one of them a wandering, I think it counts as bird blogging.

It was certainly the one thing that really surprised me in the natural history museum yesterday. It's one thing to know that these birds can have an eleven foot wingspan; it's quite another to actually see how fricking huge they are. (The woman standing behind the display is very useful for scale!)

Saturday reflections

At the Natural History museum in Oxford today.

The museum isn't air-conditioned, and the ceiling is glass, so it was very hot inside. But the adjoining Pitt Rivers museum is air-conditioned, and the kind woman in the cafe gave me a huge cup of ice with my lemonade just because she thought I looked like I could use it.

More closeups

I love that hand, with the Lilliputian cranes and trucks. Crazy Horse's face is almost 50% taller than the heads on Mount Rushmore.

Crazy Horse Memorial

This monument, 15 miles from Mount Rushmore, but on private land, has been under construction for more than 70 years.

Henry Standing Bear (Mato Naji), an Oglala Lakota chief, had petitioned Gutzon Borglum to add Crazy Horse to Mount Rushmore, but Borglum never responded. Standing Bear then made a deal with the government, trading some of his own land for a permit to build on the mountain, and commissioned Korczak Ziolkowski, who had worked on Mount Rushmore, to create the memorial. The Ziolkowski family (now children and grandchildren) is still overseeing the project. Although all of the funding is private, and no state or federal funds are used, there have been questions about how the money is being used, especially among some of the Lakota people.

I don't know enough about it to comment, but it's not just a giant sculpture. There is a college campus onsite that offers summer programs for students of Native American descent, and a really interesting art gallery in the visitor's center.

Avenue of Flags

Yes, that's the official name—accurate if unimaginative. As you approach the monument, you walk through this array of the flags of all of the US states and territories.

But what interests me more in this picture is what you don't see. I expected Mount Rushmore—and really, all of the national parks we visited—to be a lot more crowded than they were on a holiday week in July. Which isn't to say that there weren't a lot of people; there just weren't as many as we expected. And I am wondering if the falloff in international travel to the US is the reason.

I know just how they feel

The faces on Mount Rushmore seen through a zoom lens. Geology moves slowly, but the cracks are starting to show. Or maybe the South Dakota weather is drying out the Presidential complexions the way it did mine.

It was slightly cooler in Oxford today—quite pleasant when walking or sitting in the shade, less so almost anywhere indoors where the lack of air conditioning was obvious. My hotel room isn't as awful as it was yesterday after a few hours of running the fans with the door propped open, but I spent most of the evening sitting on the very pleasant deck instead.

I'd rather pretend I'm here

 

Badlands redux

I'm a long way from South Dakota, but Oxford is having a heat wave and I'm sitting in a stifling hotel room with a huge fan blasting hot air at me, and remembering the insane winds in hundred-degree temperatures in eastern South Dakota that I described as being in a “full-body blow dryer.”

I took the all-day flight instead of the all-night flight, which means I don't lose a night's sleep and walk around like a zombie for two days. Instead I'm sitting in a hot hotel room when it's after midnight local time and my body insists it's hours until bedtime.

Some unexpected color

I loved these sandstone cliffs along the Belle Fourche river near Devil's Tower; the color was such a surprise in the middle of the greens and yellows and browns of the prairies.

It reminded me of the banks of the Zambezi river in Zambia.

It really is strange...

...in a way that you can't appreciate close up. It's when you're still miles away, and all of a sudden you see this crazy, lopped-off mountain standing by itself in the middle of nowhere that you think, “What the everlasting f**k is that?”

You can see why Spielberg had the aliens in Close Encounters land there. Sadly, just as I failed to find Cary Grant at Mount Rushmore, this was the only alien I saw at Devil's Tower—in the gift shop.

Devil's Tower

We cut across a corner of Wyoming going from Montana to South Dakota so we could visit Devil's Tower. If you're not going to climb it—and many crazy people do—there's not much to do except walk around and admire the behemoth from a few angles, take some pictures, and go.

More mountain Xanax

Deep breaths

I basically emptied out the suitcase, washed everything, and packed it up again, getting ready to fly to London very early on Friday morning.

I was feeling pretty proud of myself until I spent half the afternoon looking for my keys. I knew they were in the apartment because I was in the apartment and couldn't have achieved that without them, but they weren’t on the counter, or in my purse, or in my pocket or on the floor. I ended up taking everything back out of the suitcase in case I had somehow managed to pack them (I hadn't) so now I have to pack again.

I'm taking deep breaths and looking at pretty pictures of mountains in Glacier National Park to calm myself down again. It's a good thing they don't administer IQ tests at border crossings or I might be out of luck right now. (I did find the keys, by the way—in the silverware drawer.)

More bighorns, plus a baby

Unfortunately, the picture of the lamb is blurry, but the cuteness comes through.

More Glacier fauna

We thought that these nosy creatures checking us out through our windshield were mountain goats, but they are actually bighorn sheep.

We never did see a moose, but we probably were able to get a lot closer to these sheep than we ever would to a moose.

A Møøse once bit my sister...

And I segue seamlessly from Monty Python to early morning in Glacier, where we had been hoping to see moose. (Or møøse.)

And now for something completely different

This chipmunk in Glacier National Park does not get any of the Monty Python references, and clearly isn't impressed by anything I have to say.

Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam!

Of course there was an entire exhibit devoted to Monty Python, and explaining, with some pride I think, how junk email came to be called Spam.

Meaty Juicy Satisfaction

That is what Spam is called in China, a fact I learned at the Spam museum in Austin, Minnesota. Although the museum rightly focuses on all things Spammish, they also include exhibits for other Hormel products, like chili. Hence this giant chili dog. (It's allegedly a sofa, though I'm not sure where exactly you're supposed to sit.)

So after breakfasting on ice cream, lunch consisted of a Spam slider. I haven't eaten Spam since I was a kid, nor have I wanted to, but I have to admit that taste brought back memories of sitting at the kitchen table in San Francisco eating my mom's grilled cheese and Spam sandwiches for Saturday dinner. Proust's Spam sandwich.

Sunday bird blogging

A pair of magpies at a rest stop in Montana.

What Would Jesus Eat?

A coffeehouse across the street from the ice cream parlor.

The Ice Cream Capitol of the World

The main street in Le Mars. You can see a couple of the giant ice cream cones celebrating the town's status as ice cream capital.

Breakfast of Champions

We had detoured into Iowa on our last day's drive from Sioux Falls back to Minneapolis to visit this landmark: the Blue Bunny ice cream parlor in Le Mars.

Because it was out of the way and we had a long day's drive, we left Sioux Falls early and were there shortly after it opened. Ice cream for breakfast was a sacrifice I was willing to make.

It was delicious.