St. Louis, MO, 10-28 to 30
We visited Jim's brother and his wife, John and Cassandra, in St. Louis.
Cassandra took us to the St. Louis Art Museum.
Ancient Roman mosaics and painting.
An 1854 painting by Charles Wimar who, like Edward Curtis with his photographs, recorded Native American life.
A fragment from an 1890 hide painting of the Battle of Little Big Horn by the Cheyenne warrior/artist White Bird, a participant in the battle.
John F. Peto's 1887 three-dimensional painting of a letter rack.
A vessel from Oaxaca, Mexico, c. 600-900 AD.
For our pierced readers, an Aztec gold teocuitcuauhtentetl or "god-excrement eagle lip plug," and...
...a pair of Peruvian filigreed silver ear plugs. The posts are about 1.5 inches in diameter.
It was raining so we could not photograph the St. Louis Public Library, but in the art museum we found this panoramic and digitally altered photo of a public library in Stockholm, Sweden.
Two rooms in the new East Building; although highly utilitarian, they make an artistic "splash."
Sweet home Illinois.
For our final entry in the blog, a poem embedded in a San Francisco sidewalk.
Palo Duro Canyon State Park, Canyon, TX
Sunrise at Palo Duro Canyon.
A "foam donut" on the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River. The rapidly spinning donut is about 4 feet wide and 2 feet high, and is caused by an eddy current in the water.
Final views of the canyon as we drove up to the rim.
The plains of the Texas panhandle.
We drove a short distance on old Route 66 through Shamrock, Texas
We arrived in Oklahoma City with its 30-plus working oil wells within the city limits.
Amarillo, TX, 10-25
We drove through Amarillo on our way to Palo Duro Canyon State Park.
Amarillo Public Library
The American Quarter Horse Hall of Fame and Museum is located in Amarillo. Painted horses, reminiscent of Chicago's cows, are located throughout the city.
Our cabin on the floor of the canyon is on the left; our nearest neighbor, on the right. Like the roads leading into and through the canyon, the cabins were built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).
Inside our cabin we found two flies...
Approximately 120 miles long, 20 miles wide and 1,000 feet deep, Palo Duro is the second largest canyon in the US. It was formed less than 1 million years ago when a fork of the Red River began carving through this high plain. We hiked land trod by dinosaurs.
We hiked a path...
...that led to the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River.
Flora and fauna of Palo Duro.
Rock formations dating back 250 million years.
