This had to be one of my favorite spots we went in San Diego. San Diego has a lot to offer visitors. In Omaha, the Zoo Safari is something you drive through. It is not close to the zoo and you drive through several acres of land where buffalo and deer and elk roam free. It is quite a nice experience. The Zoo Safari in San Diego is quite different. It is also not located near the zoo…but about an hour north. It, too, is a sprawling area where animals have large places to roam. However, you walk through a majority of it. I got a LOT of steps in that day, but I loved every moment of it! They house their big cats there and they had twin 4 month old tiger cubs out for awhile to romp and play. They were little pistols! They practiced their pouncing and attacked each other and their mom. Their dad was in a jungle enclosure across the path and he was anxiously waiting for his kiddos to come out for their morning exercise with their mom. There were three lioness sisters. Their personalities were hysterical. You will be able to see quite clearly who the more difficult sister with a ‘trying’ personality was. We were able to see lots of rhinoceros and elephants and giraffes. It was a wonderful day and I hope to go back again sometime!
Thanksgiving is a hard holiday for our family. We tried to celebrate it last year and it was just really hard. We decided at that time we would all head to see Tim for Thanksgiving and wherever his team was playing a basketball tournament. We would forego the traditional Thanksgiving from now on but still be together as a family. This past Thanksgiving we went to San Diego and spent the day at their world famous zoo. We had a lot of fun. Here are some of the photos of the animals that cooperated with me and my camera.
Sunsets and beaches….San Diego knows how to do both of those things really well. I have seen a lot of beautiful places but the sunsets in San Diego are AMAZING. So here are some beach scenes from our time in San Diego at the end of November.
We spent a day at Sea World. Rich and Lily went on a couple of roller coasters and I went to some shows and to see the beluga whales….I find them beautiful. Thankfully, Sea World has evolved from when I went as a kid in Florida. Would I rather see these creatures in the wild? You betcha. Many of them aren’t able to be released back into the wild for one reason or another. Anyhow, here are a few photos from the day.
Still playing catch up with the photos. I will be for awhile, I think. In September, we went to the East side of Glacier National Park. There are more wildlife to see there and it is just different than the west side. We got to see a couple of moose at Fishercap Lake and what a thrill that was! We saw a lot of bear scat…but no bears. I got to play photographer and fiddle around with speed and light with some waterfalls. Here are some of the photos I took from that day.
Glacier National Park is spectacular…no matter what time of year it is. I went to Glacier one afternoon after a snow in mid-November to take a few photos. You can’t get but about 10 miles into the west side of the park after mid-October due to heavy snow in the higher elevations. When I say higher snow, I mean like 80 FEET of snow. It is crazy amounts of snow. Anyhow, here are some of the photos. It was a really beautiful clear day, which is rare here in the winter. We have a lot of inversion clouds during the winter, which makes us socked in a majority of the time. It is pretty in its own right, but this was a crystal-clear day and no winds…McDonald Lake was so very still, making for beautiful reflective photos.
Whelp….I have a local yocal event to share with you! Today, Rich and I, along with another couple who lives in our neighborhood, when to Martin City for the Cabin Fever Days. We specifically went to see the Barstool Ski Races. We did forego the snowshoe softball game (CAN YOU IMAGINE???) because the Barstool Ski Races had us tapped out for Montanan events for the day…..maybe even the whole weekend, perhaps the week! Martin City is one of the little cities (honestly it has city in the name but it is barely qualifies as a town or village anywhere else in the U.S.) that is in the Bad Rock Canyon on the way to Glacier National Park from our spot just east of Columbia Falls. As I mentioned with Hungry Horse, these town are where we do mutual aid fire calls….Hungry Horse, Martin City, Coram, West Glacier, etc. We all have different equipment so we can help each other out…we have vehicle extrication tools like spreaders (the jaws of life) that Hungry Horse may not have….so if they get an MVA (motor vehicle accident), we go on their calls to assist. Anyhow, this event was a fundraiser for those volunteer fire departments. A local tattoo artist came up with the art for this year and I love it!
If you notice, it is the 45th annual Cabin Fever Days. The barstool ski races are the high light of the event, even though I mentioned the snowshoe softball games and there is also lots of food trucks and arts vendors on the trek up to Sugar Hill for the races, and there is also a mountain man competition and an arm wrestling contest. Later in the evening there is a doubles pool tournament, a dart tournament, and karaoke at several local area bars. We stopped on the way out at the food trucks and Rich and I had wild boar sausage on a bun with maple mustard (Rich skipped the mustard) and pineapple salsa. Interesting, right? It was messy but man, it was good!
So on to the main event of the day…barstool ski races. It is just like it sounds….you affix a barstool of your choice to some skis, sit on it and get shoved down a hill on main street. There are two racers per heat and usually the more dressed up you are, the better the crowd participation. You can always tell if someone falls as the entire crowd reacts audibly. When the two guys dressed up as ducks fell near us, the crowd cheered them on, yelling, “quack , quack, quack, quack!” The majority of the crowd is being kept warm by flannel shirts, Carhart pants and jackets, mucking boots, and the kind of liquid that warms you from the inside out….and I don’t mean hot chocolate or coffee. LOTS OF ALCOHOL. We arrived at noon and there were at least 1000 people there, all of them pretty toasty off their liquid courage. There was a lumberjack-looking woman standing near me who had her silicone collapsable cups in her backpack, along with her bottle of crown royal. Smart. She was not cold. Anyhow, back to the races…there are three categories: straight barstools on skis, a barstool-like contraption on skis that can be steered, and then the open event where people do whatever on skis to make it fun for the crowd. I took a few photos with my phone. Here they are….because I can’t make this up, folks!
I have been so busy doing so much learning for our new travel advisory business (you would think being an avid traveler would be enough…but alas, there is so much to learn!) and then taking this emergency medical responder course….it takes up a lot of time….I have yet to pick up my nice camera in 2024 and I miss it. I realized that I had over 1000 photos to go through in lightroom. After taking a block test and taking notes on a new chapter, I opened up my surface to start going through some photos. I am in my happy place! I am pretty far behind…many photos were from the fall.
Here are some photos from the Hungry Horse Dam. Hungry Horse is the small town between where we live and Glacier National Park. We answer mutual calls with Hungry Horse volunteer fire department. They are a great group of folks. They came to our fire hall when I helped teach Stop the Bleed class. They drove over in their bright shiny new fire truck. Truck envy…it’s a thing between rural volunteer fire departments. These were taken in October.
These next photos were taken in Whitefish, Montana, about 20 minutes from our house. This was in September, the last summer runs up Big Mountain on the ski lifts before they closed until ski season. The views were spectacular.
At the end of September, I drove 5 hours to Anaconda, Montana, near Butte. I went to a program for women of western Montana with cancer, called Mending in the Mountains. It was a free weekend getaway….we just had to get there. There were 60 of us women and it was wonderful to meet people going through some of the same things I am. Think of Shrek and Donkey talking about the onion….I didn’t have to worry about peeling away so many layers, because we all had a lot of the same layers. It is nice to not have to explain things…side effects from meds, fears of treatments or death. For me it was like being with my military friends, they know the lifestyle and the sacrifices made…they just get it. Here were some of the photos on the way there and back.
The next group of photos were taken in Glacier National Park on November 1st. My mom was visiting at the time and there was some snow, but still some pretty colors as well. This is why GNP is called the Crown Jewel of the Continent (and why we named our Cruise Planners business Crown Jewel Cruise Planners….as a nod to our beautiful national park right here in our back yard.
I have so many photos to still work on….lots from our time in San Diego….they have a pretty awesome zoo and safari park there. I also have more Glacier National Park photos from both the East and West side…including some moose photos that I can’t believe I haven’t processed yet. Those are forthcoming.
February 4th is World Cancer Day. I just got done watching the Stanford women’s basketball team win over UCLA decisively whilst wearing their pink uniforms to honor cancer patients. Pink tends to be identified as bringing awareness to breast cancer. Today, however, is for ALL cancers….whether your ribbon is pink, green, turquoise, orange, navy, white, black, or purple, like mine. Today honors all the fighters out there, slogging through each day as best we can. It honors those who have gone before us and fallen in the fight, to remember their valiant efforts to help others coming behind them by talking to researchers, agreeing to clinical trials, and recording their struggles and triumphs. No one with cancer dies in vain. I have lost a lot of friends since the last year. I am an active part in a cancer zoom group out of Nebraska of chronic cancer patients. These folks saved me when I was diagnosed almost 4.5 years ago. They became my cancer tribe….the people I could talk about anything to and they would laugh and not be horrified. Four of those wonderful ladies have died in that core group of about 7 or 8 of us. I miss them. I miss seeing their smiles and their laughs…even in the midst of some really serious stuff going on in their lives. I have a very close friend who is struggling with cancer reoccurrence right now. It isn’t good, but man, she is a fighter and I know she will be giving it her all. I almost feel guilty. I was given a death sentence in Oct 2019. Here I am living life to its fullest everyday and doing pretty good. I don’t want you to think it is a cake walk. It isn’t. I am on so many pills everyday….and shots once a month…and IV infusions every 3 months. But I have embraced my “normal” and have run with it. What were my options, really? Cancer can be a very isolating disease. I think about that every time I am in a CT scanner….in that huge whirring donut tube where a recording tells me to hold my breath as I am mechanically rolled in and out of the tube and then IV contrast is pushed into my system that makes me feel like I am being boiled from the inside out for about 60-90 seconds, where they repeat the scans again. My life is so much easier than so many I know with my disease of leiomyosarcoma. I am thankful for that and after losing Joe, I know not to waste a single minute of it.
Little catch up on us….we had our fire department awards night last night. It was fun to see all the guys gussied up. I am used to seeing them in dirty Carhart pants and mucking boots and hoodies. On calls, we are all in our bunker gear. So to see folks in dress shirts and pants and even several ties…it made me smile. They announced our new lieutenants and the firefighter of the year (which is my new lieutenant). There were blooper awards which launched into embellished stories of people’s screw ups. It was a fun evening.
Today we went to Mass and the celebrant was our bishop! Our parish is called a part of a deanery, and we are a part of the diocese of Helena, Montana. (3.5 hours drive from us) It was nice to meet him and to hear his homily. I have befriended a little guy named Vinnie who sits in front of us during Mass. He is maybe 8 years old. I am not good at guessing anymore. He has 3 sisters. He is the 2nd oldest. He noticed my Maltese cross I wear everyday with Joe’s OFD badge number on it. He noticed there was writing on the back as well. I told him it was in both English and in Italian. He told me he was a quarter Italian. (He was very proud of that!) We had a really great talk after Mass before he got distracted by something. (He is an 8 year old boy, after all). We stopped by the firehall on the way home and did some chores there. We got home and it was snowing pretty steadily. I put on my Carhart pants and mucking boots and Rich and I took Tallinn for a walk. He loves the snow. He chases snowballs and gets so disappointed when they disappear. I took this photo of him intent on watching Rich making a snow ball to toss for him. Total concentration. He wore himself out bounding in the dense 8 inch snow we have right now in our neighborhood. He has been tuckered out in his dog bed all afternoon. He is loving life in Montana. I think the only thing he misses about Nebraska is the mailman. We have to walk about 1/3 of a mile to the neighborhood post office box. He doesn’t see mail trucks anymore, which he recognizes and knows they contain the mail man…who brings treats for him….at least in Nebraska. We have so few cars in our area that he rarely has anything to look at. He does give the UPS man a bark every now and then. He is not as happy with them – never even liked their trucks going by in Nebraska either. Tallinn enjoys watching the deer….and playing in a big yard. I think he likes his bed being in my office where he can just hang with me all day. I was studying at the kitchen table the other day and he plopped himself down by my side in the dining room on the floor with a sigh. He is still my little side kick. I fell off a step ladder on Friday….I am fine….it was just a clumsy move on my part…but I fell pretty hard. He was right there trying to hug my neck with his and licking my face (which is not something he normally does). He was pretty concerned, poor guy. I am so lucky to have this little guy in my life!
Messina Musings 