A Lot to Be Thankful for in Chaotic Times

 Covid-19, political angst, family health concerns… “These are the times that try men’s souls.”  Thomas Payne wrote those words over 240 years ago in “An American Crisis”.  Yet, I feel incredibly fortunate.  My husband, Mike, had not one but two heart attacks during “Covid season”, but he is back almost full-strength, going to the gym, and arguing politics.  Three years ago, my now-ninety-year-old father was diagnosed with cancer and told he had three months to live.  He is still with us, playing cards each day with my feisty, patient mother.

We’ve had trips cancelled this year – everything from a river cruise in Eastern Europe to RV adventures in Wisconsin Dells and Nashville with our ten-year-old granddaughter, to camping trips with friends around the country.  But as we look forward to the future, we are making plans to take those trips, and more.  So as I stand in line at the grocery store for thirty minutes, six feet apart from fellow shoppers on the designated spots on the floor; dutifully wearing my mask, I have time to consider how fortunate we are, even in these unsettled – and unsettling - times.

The future is an unknown, but really, it always has been. Yet as we learn from the past and look forward to our future, we do so with hope, appreciating the ordinary as well as the extraordinary.

Full moon over the Rift Valley in Kenya - 2008.  Some anthropologists believe
the Rift Valley could have been the site of the Garden of Eden.

“I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world”       ~ Mary Anne Radmacher

Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, Africa - 2014.

“I have inside me the winds, the deserts, the oceans, the stars, and everything created in the Universe. We are all made by the same Hand, and we have the same Soul.       
                                       ~ Paulo Ceoelho from The Alchemist

We have always liked the name of this place. The town of Useful, near
Jefferson City, MO, no longer exists, but the town cemetery does.

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope."    ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

My Mom and Dad will celebrate their 72nd wedding anniversary next month

“Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent.”     
                                                               ~ Virginia Woolf                                                                                      

The campus of my alma mater, Central Methodist University, Fayette, MO

“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”       ~ Abraham Lincoln  

We saw this man in Moscow, Russia, in 2018. We weren't sure
what his story was, but we found him terribly interesting.

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” 
                                                                   ~ Socrates

Florida Gulf Coast - 2016

“The cure for anything is salt water – sweat, tears, or the sea.”
                                ~ Isak Dinesen

Morning Glories adorn the front of our home, even
as the leaves change with the coming of fall.

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the Heavens.”                                  ~ Ecclesiastes 3:1

 

“It is not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”   
                                                ~ Henry David Thoreau

 

Kenya, Africa - 2008

“Courage is grace under pressure.”          ~ Ernest Hemmingway

Vietnam - 2011

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” 
                                           ~ Confucius

Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania - 2008

“Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.”
                      ~ Emily Dickinson

Tonle Sap Lake, Siem Reap Province, Cambodia - 2011

“Be kind when you can – and you always can.”        ~ Buddha

Ganges River, Varanasi, India - 2015

“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”                                                ~ Gustave Flaubert

“People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone.”    

                                                                 ~ Audrey Hepburn

“Never lose sight of the fact that just ‘being’ is fun.”

                   ~ Katherine Hepburn

“I don’t think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.”
                                                                              ~ Anne Frank

Indian family on holiday, Abhaneri, India - 2015

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”       ~ Maya Angelou

Hanoi, Vietnam - 2011

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”  ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry from The Little Prince

Grand Teton Mountains, Wyoming

“The longest journey you will make in your life is from your head to your heart.”                ~ Sioux traditional wisdom

                                                                   

A few days after we started this blog, we felt we should err on the side of caution and postpone our annual Thanksgiving gathering at my parents’ farm. It was a difficult decision and we hated to disappoint people, but with the virus infection numbers spiking we felt we should avoid potential concerns for the safety of family members from three to ninety years of age, and everyone in between. 

I have learned that a person has little to no control in some situations. That lesson was reinforced for me over Memorial Day weekend when Mike had his heart attacks and the resulting insertion of three more stents, giving him a total of nine.  I had insisted for the previous two months that he avoid grocery stores, Walmart, and other heavily populated places, even if he wore a mask, because he is very much in the “high risk” category for Covid.  A heart attack was not even remotely on my radar, but nature has a way of reminding us that man is not always in control, despite all of the science we know and the bravado we show.  But we do what we can, when we can, as well as we can.  Thanksgiving may not happen on November 26^th this year, but it will happen…we will, indeed, have a “thanks”-giving.  In the meantime, we remain thankful for the extraordinary people, places and things in our lives - -and perhaps even more so for the “ordinary.”

A traditional Sioux proverb says “The longest journey you will make in your life is from your head to your heart.”  Whether the future brings you actual travels or internal journeys of the heart, we wish you happy, meaningful, warm, and wonderful Road Stories.

Have a Blessed and SAFE Thanksgiving.

“She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.”                                                  ~ Mark Twain

 

In "Loo" of a Story...

Loo, toilet, bathroom, water closet, lavatory, restroom, latrine, privy, outhouse, john, powder room, comfort station, porta-pottie, outhouse, head…the names are as varied as the styles and the décor, from the very simple and utilitarian to the elegant and grandiose. 

Art-Deco restrooms at an old Gulf filling station in Bedford, PA
on our first RV trip to Washington, DC in March of 2012

In England, the toilet is called the “loo”. The name derives from the French “guardez l'eau”, which means “watch out for the water”.  The British adopted the phrase, but shortened it to the more pronounceable “gardy-loo”.  Eventually the toilet itself became simply the “loo”.

For some reason, bathrooms have long fascinated me, and I began taking photos of everything from the simple outhouse that once served the needs of the family that originally homesteaded my parents’ farm to the elegance of a stately hotel built by the British, overlooking Victoria Falls on the Zambizi River in Africa.

The first flush toilets in the U.S. were in hotels. In 1829, the Tremont Hotel in Boston was the first hotel to have indoor plumbing, with eight water closets built by architect Isaiah Rogers. Toilet paper, invented during the 15^th century, didn’t become commercially available in the Western world until 1857, when Joseph Gayetty of New York marketed a "Medicated Paper, for the Water-Closet,” sold in packages of 500 sheets for 50 cents.

Even as the current pandemic was unfolding, people began to hoard, of all things, toilet paper, buying it as fast as the stores re-stocked their shelves. Now, with the lockdowns largely over and a return to some sense of normalcy, some stores still limit the purchase of toilet paper.  Gone are the days when “TP-ing” someone’s house was a simple practical joke.  Now, those rolls are a coveted commodity.

Decades ago, as a college student visiting England, I recall collecting toilet paper samples from the Tower of London and other tourist venues. I was intrigued by the fact that each individual square of paper was embossed with the Royal Seal and the words “Property of Her Majesty, the Queen.”

And that leads us to the corollary topic of this blog.  Anthropology is the study of human societies and cultures and their development.  Just as scientists have long studied the ancient baths of Greece and Rome, perhaps some future anthropologists will examine our bathrooms in their studies of how we lived.

At any rate, it’s been fun to snap pictures of a variety of “necessary rooms,” from the utilitarian to the elegant. Here, in no particular order, is a sample of my efforts…

With my cousin Karen in front of a porta-potty at
the Round Top Antique Festival in Round Top, TX

Started in 1874 and completed in 1877, the Fulton
Mansion in Rockport, TX had the most up-to-date
features at the time, including indoor plumbing

Feature wall of the women's restroom at House on the Rock
in Spring Green, WI

This is an original, but no longer in use, outdoor bathroom at the
Madison County Historical Society Museum in Winterset, IA - 
the birthplace of John Wayne (Marion Morrison) and the setting
of the novel and movie The Bridges of Madison County

Guys, this is NOT the men's room at McGuire's
Irish Pub, Pensacola, FL. This is the women's
restroom. (The men's room has a similar sign
proclaiming that it is NOT the women's restroom.)

This sign, too, is at McGuire's Pub, but it is in the women's
bathroom. I wonder where the rest of the toilets from the
San Carlos Hotel went.

At the Bay of Fundy in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia in June 2016

But what's really interesting about this bathroom is that
just outside the door is a display of petrified dinosaur poop.

Porta-potties near the Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C.
during the Cherry Blossom Festival in March 2012, on our 
inaugural out-of-state RV adventure and the first FROG trip

In May, 2011 we visited Cape May, NJ, which bills itself as
"America's Original Seaside Resort".  The entire city of
Cape May is designated a National Historic Landmark.

This bathroom, including the stunning claw-foot tub,
was in the Queen Victoria Bed & Breakfast in Cape May

Cell with two bunks, sink and toilet in the former
West Virginia State Penitentiary in Moundsville 

Curt Teich & Co. postcard.  Teich was an American
publisher of German descent who produced popular
postcards, primarily of scenes from American life.
The postcards pictured in this blog are all from 1940s.

Public restroom at Kingsbrae Gardens, St. Andrews,
New Brunswick, Canada (August 2018)

The bathroom of our room at the Camellia
Hotel in Hanoi, Vietnam (January, 2011)

Public bathrooms near the volcanic stone labyrinth of Dimmuborgir in Iceland. Many
public bathrooms require payment to get in. This one is very modern, and takes both
coins and tickets, dispensed from a machine on the wall (September, 2019)

Here is the ticket to get into the bathroom, complete with QR 
code, dated September 10.  The cost is 200 Icelandic krona
(ISK), about $1.46 U.S.

This elephant wandered into our camp in Botswana, Africa in
March, 2014, and headed straight toward the bathrooms. Everybody
was out taking pictures. The staff said he was a regular visitor

And apparently he really did have to go. Elephants can eat as much
as 300 pounds of food per day, and much of it passes un-digested.
But the little yellow butterflies like it.

Mrs. Bellingrath's bathroom in the Walter and
Bessie Bellingrath home, located in Bellingrath
Gardens, Theodore, AL (March 2019)

Bathroom in the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, WV.
The Asylum operated from 1864 until 1994, and was so much a part
of the community that the town's movie theater was in the facility
and the local high school held its proms in the asylum's ballroom

Porta-potty on the beach at Port Aransas, TX for Mardi Gras in
February 2020. The sign on the side of the porta-potty gives the
name of the company that owns it - Texas Throne

Not technically a "bathroom", but the rocks that form the breakwater
at the Port Aransas (TX) Municipal Marina are covered with guano
from the brown pelicans that frequent the area   (January 2020)

When you go to visit Old Blue in the Coon Dog Cemetery in Cherokee,
Alabama, you might have to use the facilities, so they have thoughtfully
provided a latrine back behind the grave sites.  (May, 2014)

The Fairmont Le Chateau Frontenac, Quebec City, Canada
(June, 2016)

Peeking out of the outhouse at the Hatfield and McCoy Dinner
Theater, Pigeon Forge, TN  (October 2014)

Another Curt Teich & Co. postcard. The company operated from 1898
until 1978. The verse on the card is somewhat reminiscent of the
Burma Shave signs, another fixture of early- to mid-20th century travel.

One of our first trips after Mike and I got married 
in 1984 was to England, and I took this picture...
long before dog waste containers became standard
in many cities and towns (and every RV park)

Aboard the USS Lexington, a WWII aircraft carrier anchored
at Corpus Christi, TX. For our son, the head is one deck
below; for most civilians, the restrooms are downstairs.

Pay toilet near the "Big White Church" in Reykjavik, Iceland.
They must have had the coin mechanism turned off, because
if you pushed the button, the door opened.  (Sept. 2019)

The interior of the toilet was unbelievably clean, 
and the whole thing had a "science fiction" look to it.
"Beam me up, Scotty"

This picture hangs in our bathroom at home. I bought this
painting at a little restaurant called the Eager Beaver in
Eldon, MO back during our boating days at Lake of the Ozarks

Another Curt Teich & Co. card. After a visit to Germany
in 1904 where he first saw the first "Greetings From..."
cards, Teich came home and started producing highly
colorful "vacation" themed postcards.

Two students hang out at the door to the bathrooms at a
school that we visited in China in 2004. The two signs
both say "Restroom for Child Only".

This is at my Dad and Mom's farm. The corrugated tin door
at the rear of the shed was once the door to the outhouse.
It was long ago filled in and turned into a small closet-like
structure to store tools.

This bathroom is under one of the mansions along the cliffs
in Newport, RI. It is open to those who take the Cliffwalk
Mansion Tour  (photo from July 2011)

Our "tent" included an en suite bathroom at Kashawe Camp
in Hwange district, Zimbabwe in March, 2014

More African elephant dung, this time with small mushrooms
sprouting up. Once the dung is dry, it is burned in small buckets and
the smoke keeps flies and mosquitoes from biting you while on safari

More porta-potties, along with lots of campers on the
beach in Port Aransas, TX, during the annual kite
festival in February, 2020

We found Iceland to be very modern, but somewhat spartan.
This was the bathroom at the Hotel Laugarbakki on the night
before we started our journey to the Westfjords

China, 2004. This was the women's restroom. You stand over it
and squat to use it. (No, I'm not using it at the moment.)

Formerly the KOA in Terre Haute, IN, now renamed Terre
Haute Campground. This isn't really an outhouse, but it 
provides an interesting visual, located next to the dump station

Bathroom in the Rockcliffe Mansion in Hannibal, MO. It was built
in 1898 by John J. Cruikshank, Jr., who made his fortune in the
lumber business. Today it is operated as a bed-and-breakfast.

The Westfjords area of Iceland is 8,600 square miles, with a
population of only 7,115 people, so not many roadside amenities.
Roadside rest areas are generally porta-potties.

This is Petra's Stone and Mineral Collection Museum in Iceland.
We stopped there because I had to use the restroom (note the W C
for water closet on the building), but I found the collection interesting

Another interesting graphic on a public restroom,
this one near the harbor in Rockport, TX  (Feb. 2020)

Women's bathroom in the Victoria Falls Hotel in Zimbabwe.  It
was built in 1904, originally to accommodate workers on the Cape-
to-Cairo Railway. It is Zimbabwe's oldest and grandest luxury hotel

One of our stops in Iceland had a very modern washroom built very
close to the 2010 volcanic lava flow. In this picture you can see the top
of the volcano that erupted and shut down air traffic all across Europe

Inside the washroom, looking out toward the sea

Waterless "vault" toilets at Taum Sauk Mountain. At 1,772 feet, Taum
Sauk is the highest natural elevation in Missouri.  (August 2020)

Curt Teich & Co. employed hundreds of traveling salesmen,
who sold picture postcards to domestic residences, and
encouraged business to create advertising postcards

This bronze relief of a pioneer woman is on
the door to a women's restroom in Bisbee, AZ

The seven-tiered, 330 foot (100 m) Dynjandi waterfalls (aka Fjallfoss)
has been compared to a bridal veil. These brand-new restrooms, near
the car park, had just been completed when we were there in Sept. 2019

On a tour through Denali National Park in Alaska in 1999, we
came upon this ADA-accessible toilet out in the middle of the
park. If you look closely, you will also see a red fox in the road.

My parents like to celebrate anniversaries and holidays
at Sybill's Restaurant in St. James, MO. This interesting
oil painting is hanging in the women's restroom.

Eufaula, AL has some beautiful old antebellum homes,
and we stopped on a trip south to tour the Raney-Connor-
Blackmon-Taylor house, built between 1857 and 1863.
The home recently underwent 19 months of restoration. 

On an outing with my cousin Karen and her five kids, we found
this outhouse somewhere in rural Wisconsin. I took the picture
while they posed, with Karle actually sitting in the still-in-use privy

Bathroom of a restored home on the grounds of the Madison
Co. Historical Society Museum in Winterset, IA. The toilet actually
works, but is taped closed to prevent use.  I like the antique
toilet with the tank mounted high up on the wall.  (Oct. 2012)

On the beach at Port Aransas, we found this porta-potty called a
Skid-O-Can that is ADA accessible. There are wheelchairs with
balloon tires that make it possible for wheelchair users to
enjoy the beach.

We found this in Reykjavik. It was once an underground bathroom,
but is no longer used for that - note that the "W C" sign has been
X-ed out. It is now the underground punk-rock museum.

Women's bathroom at "The World's Largest Toy
Museum Complex" in Branson, MO  (July 2019)

When ya' gotta' go, ya' gotta' go in Iceland's Westfjords

Composting toilets at the base of the Observation Tower and Boardwalk
at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge at Austwell, Texas  (March 2020)

In the Florida home of writer Majorie Kinnon Rawlings,
author of The Yearling. She was so proud to have the first
flush toilet in the county that she showed it off with flowers
that her uncle gave her, during a party at her home. 

In one of the tented camps where we stayed in Zambia in 2014.
Each tent had its own en suite bathroom. This "public" restroom
was located near the dining room and bar.   (March 2014)

Bathroom in Iceland. The sign literally translates
to"Key in Delivery" which we kind of thought meant
the checkout / front counter area of the snack shop

On a safari through Kenya and Tanzania in 2008, we came across
this "wash room" in Tanzania where you could not only relieve
yourself, but you could also buy artwork   (March 2008)

In a restroom in Cambodia in 2011, we found this sign. Obvious: No
smoking. Less obvious: No squatting over the toilets; no cleaning or 
washing your shoes or boots; no showering. (Was the sign put up 
beforehand, or only after these practices had taken place?)

More porta-potties in Iceland - on a rainy, foggy morning, we 
found this pair at Dettifoss, reputedly the second-most powerful
waterfall in all of Europe, after the Rhine Falls in Switzerland

Restrooms at St. Mary's Primary School in Hwange district, 

Zimbabwe, Africa   (March 2014)

We'll leave you for now, but at some time in the future, we'll be back with more bathroom pictures.  In the meantime, we'll share with you the wisdom of the above sign, also from Iceland. Wherever you go in the world, you can always find a restroom, a loo, a W.C., a toilet, a privy.  Just, please, don't poop in the stream...and "watch out for the water".

We hope that you have stayed well during the pandemic and imagine that, like us, you're ready to get back out and find your own Road Stories.