We were up early to pack and clean up the cabin. We had plenty of time – checkout was 10.30am – but I didn’t want to rush. Roy and I were pretty much packed and ready to go by 9am but there was still the fridge to clear and sort out.
Unfortunately we had to throw out a bit of food – I HATE that, but there was really no alternative – we can’t carry much with us on the plane (although we will take food to eat on the flight because we’re flying with United this time and they are crap). And Sue and Dean have a day of driving ahead (they are dropping us off in Nashville) and don’t have a proper cooler – it wouldn’t fit in the car with us and our bags. They have a couple of plastic bins with lids and some ice from the freezer – and there’s only just enough room in there for all the stuff they actually want to take home and need to keep cool on the drive.
We have put out a LOT of rubbish while we’ve been here – at least three big bags, in less that three days. Cans, glass, plastic, the lot – there is simply no recycling here, so everything goes in the garbage. It gives us the shudders – there are recycling bins everywhere on the West Coast (although we didn’t have one in our Lake Tahoe hotel room – we took the recycling with us). It seems unbelievable in 2017 to be putting all this perfectly good recyclable stuff into land fill. Scary. Some parts of the US have a looooong way to go. Sue and Dean’s rubbish collection at home (which is a bit of a way out of town, in a semi-rural area) is by private contractor – there is no separation of rubbish. I don’t think there is a recycling plant anywhere near them.
Anyway, eventually we were all done – and there were lots of goodbye hugs and a few tears as we said good by to Hal and Teri. It was great to meet them after having heard so much about them from Sue over the years. I was dreading the parting with Sue and Dean in Nashville this afternoon so I tried not to think about it – we all piled back into the car and we were soon back on the road, heading for the magnificent Twin Falls.
Untill next time… thanks Cozy Cabins!
We’d been to Twin Falls on our last trip, but it’s always worth another look. It’s a fantastic set of falls, just downstream what was the confluence of two rivers.
When one of the rivers was dammed to create hydro power, the water trapped in the reservior above forged a new path through the caverns and cracks in the rock of the riverbanks (I think it’s mostly limestone – there are caves nearby).
In contrast the falls we visited the day before yesterday, there was plenty of water here. It thundered down in hundreds of falls, trickles and sprays, over the layers of rock to the fast-flowing river below, which is also fed by the spill from the hydro plant upstream.
We walked along the track beside the river a little way, to find a good vantage point for photos of the falls.
It was a pretty hot and humid day out there, but much cooler under the trees that grow on each side of the track.
I took pics of tiny fungi and flowers along the way.
We found a spot where we could step down some rock shelves to get a bit closer to the falls and out of the overhang of the trees along the track.
Yep, pretty certain that this is limestone – hey palaeos, any idea if these are fossils? And if so, of what?
We made our way back over the track and the 60 steps up to the car for the next leg of our journey. As we turned back for a final look, Roy noticed the soaring birds above – turkey vultures (or buzzards), and some crows.
There were stacks of them circling overhead! Just like in the movies after a gunfight or a battle 😉 We all checked our vital signs to make sure we weren’t the ones they were after (they are carrion feeders) and made good our escape.
***
Our next target stop was The Hermitage, near Nashville. This was the home of President Andrew Jackson, one of the three US Presidents who came from Tennessee. The Hermitage is the second-oldest private not-for-profit museum in the US. It’s run by a trust set up in 1887 by Andrew Jackson’s descendants, to preserve the house and grounds and educate the public about Jackson’s legacy. I didn’t know much about Jackson, other than that he was a key political figure in US history, so I was quite interested in finding out more about him. And I like looking at old stuff, too, and getting a glimpse of how people lived their lives in the past.
We arrived at The Hermitage sometime between 1 and 2pm – I thought closer to 1, but Roy recalls closer to 2. Anyway, we quickly gobbled up sandwiches I’d made that morning and braved the blast of the sun (why wasn’t the eclipse today?). At the ticket office, they told us it was a 45-minute wait to get into the tour of the mansion, but that there was plenty to do in the grounds, starting with the indoor section of the museum. We decided to go ahead and buy tickets, if only to get into the air-conditioning of the museum!
There was lots of interesting info there, as well as artefacts from Jackson’s time. Obviously I’ll need to read the book Sue gave us about him, because in this short tour there was way too much to get my head around! He was certainly an expansionist, energetically advocating for the theft of land from native Americans (although he didn’t call it that, of course). He clearly loved his wife and family dearly. He was a strong supporter of the Union, and of the primacy of Federal law over State law. His grandsons, however, fought on the Confederate side in Civil War. He was an extraordinary military leader and strategist.
And he had about 150 slaves running the grounds and house at The Hermitage. There was an audio-guide for the grounds and the house, only some of which I listened to. I wonder how many people took the option to press “play” to hear the recital of the names of all the slaves who worked on the estate? I felt that it was the least I could do.
The grounds, of course, are magnificent, and many historical plantings have been maintained.
The garden attached to the house is beautiful – it has several “rooms” with decorative, commemorative and practical (i.e. kitchen garden) themes. There were nectar-feeding butterflies, moths and bees everywhere.
The garden also contains the small family graveyard. Jackson’s adopted son and his wife are buried there, and their children. The youngest grand-daughter, also called Rachel, had nine children, six of whom also lie there (as far as I can make out, anyway).
Next to the graveyard is the tomb Jackson had built for himself and his beloved wife, Rachel, who predeceased him by many years, dying only a couple of weeks after he won his first presidential election.
On the other side of the tomb is the grave of one of his long-serving slaves, “Uncle Alfred”, who died at the age of 98. The inscription says: “Faithful servant of Andrew Jackson”. Erk.
The house is meticulously preserved. Jackson had extended and renovated it significantly after Rachel’s death, and the guides take great pains to emphasise that the mansion we see today was not the house that Rachel knew. They have much of the original French wallpaper though, and the furniture, and portraits. And of course those poignant reminders of the humanity of the home’s occupants – the slippers and dressing-gown by the fire in Jackson’s bedroom; the portrait of Rachel that was the first thing he saw on waking and the last thing he saw before going to bed; the grandchildren’s rooms with their dolls and cradle. I don’t have pics of all this because no photography is allowed inside the house itself – copyright, items on loan etc, etc. The outside is fair game though:
Of course, what has not been preserved, but to the Museum’s credit is brought to the attention of visitors by the guides, are the rough mats on which the slaves slept in the corridors outside the family bedrooms, at the beck and call of their “masters”. Hideous. In the slaves’ hut where Uncle Alfred lived it is permitted to take photos – nothing special, valuable or worth owning copyright over in there.
By the time we’d finished with the house, the garden and the slave quarters, it was almost 5pm and time to go. Sue and Dean still had a couple of hours to drive after dropping us at the hotel. We decided that we’d have a last dinner together, so we went and checked in and then all headed out to O’Charley’s for ribs and steak. These ribs were much better than those we’d had when we first arrived – the meat literally fell off the bone – delicious! We shared a bottle of wine and toasted our wonderful time together over the last week.
When we left the restaurant, it was raining and there was a lot of lightning and thunder around. In the 10 minutes drive back to the hotel it worsened – heavy, driving rain and almost continuous lightning – when Nashville puts on a storm, it doesn’t do it by halves! I suggested that Sue and Dean come in to our room for a little while to give the storm a chance to pass – they were reluctant at first because they didn’t want to get home too late, but as we pulled up in the hotel carpark it was clear that driving wouldn’t be too wise right then.
We went up to the room, switched on the lights and started to check out the satellate and radar weather maps online. We’d only been there a few minutes when – BANG – a massive lightning flash and thunderclap and the room went dark! So glad that didn’t happen while we were in the lift! We had a bit of a laugh, sitting in the gloom and reminiscing about our great week and promising a repeat performance in 2024, when the next total solar eclipse crosses the US. Finally the rain eased, the weather maps showed that the storm was moving on, and it was time to say farewell. We braved what was left of the rain to wave goodbye as Sue and Dean pulled out of the carpark and headed home. We are so grateful for their wonderful hospitality and enduring friendship. I will miss them so much.
The lights came on about an hour later, giving us time to pack our bags for the flight tomorrow and set our alarms before we hit the hay. Tomorrow: Eugene, Oregon via San Francisco. 🙂
We went to Cane Creek Falls first and took some photos. If you look carefully in some of the pics, you can see people right down the bottom, in the deep pool at the foot of the falls.
Roy and I didn’t stay long at the pool – we didn’t want to hold everyone else up – but when we got back to the top and found Sue and Dean again, they said that Hal and Teri had decided to go back to the cabin and would meet us there for dinner. So the four of us took a walk across the bridge and back. It is a little unsettling, but it wobbles less if you walk on the middle board. It was fun! And you get a lovely view of the swimming holes in the cascades below.
Something I’d forgotten from last time was the big basket-like webs hanging on some of the trees.
At first I thought they were spiders, but they’re not – they’re small parasitic “bag worms” that attack a tree by spinning these webs and, I assume, feeding off the tree sap (must look that up!)
They do eventually kill the tree. Dean said that they’ve been particularly bad this year – and we have certainly seen plenty of them about as we’ve been driving and walking around.
We stopped to look at the main Fall Creek Falls nearby. The outlook here is grand, and a bit reminiscent of the Blue Mountains, the way the layered sandstone cliffs jut out above deep valleys.
There was plenty of parking near the Truckee River Bridge when we arrived. As I think I said in yesterday’s post, the Truckee River is the only waterway to flow OUT of Lake Tahoe.
Lake levels are strictly monitored and the release of water to the river via the sluice gates at the dam is calculated daily to balance the downstream and upstream (lake) needs. There is also a spillway in case the lake level rises above the dam, but for the most part they use the gates.
Lake levels vary according to the volume of snow and evaporation – there is a graph showing the levels over the last few decades and you can clearly see where the droughts are. The drought years (with little snow or other precipitation) resulted in lower levels, and must have placed massive stress on the downstream communities. Since the last drought broke a couple of years ago, the snow intake has increased hugely and the lake is at a healthy level. Only one sluice gate was open when we were there, but there seemed to be a fairly good flow into the river.
Alas we saw no fish in the river or the lake – Roy suspects that they’ve been pretty much fished out, at least in this area. What a pity, it would have been great to see at least some sign of the fish featured in the signage near the car park. We did see a Stellar’s jay though, down by the river – the flash of brilliant blue in the sun gave it away. I’m never quick enough to get a photo of them, they move around constantly and seem to never sit still!
It was a peaceful and scenic place to eat lunch and talk about our trip so far, with the sound of the lake’s tiny wavelets lapping over the rocky shore at our feet (again, see Facebook for the video!)
We watched a group of Canadian geese make their way across the water towards us, with a number of Californian gulls keeping a respectful distance behind them.
The latter are smaller than the Pacific gulls we’ve seen along the coast, but still larger than our silver gulls at home. This is, indeed, The Life. I took some photos around the shore, and then we headed back to the car, as we were almost out of parking time.
As it turned out, following the creek bed might have been the only strategy for getting a decent look at the lake – we went back to the road and, despite the signs warning us that it was “private”, walked down to the end, where the view was blocked by lantana and there was a closed gate where the road turned along the shore.
Although there was a path around it there was also a very firm sign informing us that this was a “private beach” and pointing us to an invisible “trail” back to the paved road. I wonder how the Washoe feel about that!!! I tell ya, when I rule the world, there won’t BE ANY “private beaches”.
We walked around some of the houses, where we could glimpse the lake between houses and hedges. And, as it happens, a couple of snow ploughs. So they do manage to get in and out in winter! (Although it must be pretty hairy with the cliffside soft shoulders.)
Roy wanted to venture down between a couple of houses so we could at least get a decent view of the lake and so I could take some pics, but itt was clearly private property. I wasn’t confident that “I’m Australian and a socialist and I don’t respect your private property or your monopolisation of the foreshore” would cut it as a defence against a trespass charge, so we turned around and headed back up to the top.
unionchoristersatlarge 