It's My Birthday

"It's my birthday, and I'll smile if I want to, smile if I want to, and you would smile too if it happened to you."  So.......did you sing along?  You did if you're over 50!!!!!   I had a lot to smile about today.  Of course, I always smile a bunch   anyway, but on my birthday I over smile.  Is that a concept?  Over smiling.  Is that even possible; well, I guess if you're a drooling idiot, maybe.  Not for me, though; it was an over smiling day.  

I woke up OLD today.  You can't pretend to be anything else when you wake up eligible for Social Security - now you know how old I am.  Those of you closest to me know that I've been 62 since January 1st.  I believe in changing my age on the first day of the year - it saves me the trouble of trying to remember how old I am - even I can do that arithmetic [current year - 1950 = my age].  See, I even know the formula.

It's also gratifying on your birthday to go online to discover over 40 emails, and not one of them was for penile enlargement.  I didn't make it to the post office today, so there are probably snail mail cards there.  Speaking of which, I discovered this week that the Seal Rock Post Office is a faux post office.  Somehow, it's not real even though there's a building, a sign, a flag and everything.  If you HAND address a piece of mail:  Jan/Drake Smith, General Delivery, Seal Rock, OR 97376, then it comes to Seal Rock.  HOWEVER, if a computer addresses the envelope, then the address is:  Jan/Drake Smith, General Delivery, Waldport, OR 97394.  I don't understand.  Something about Seal Rock being a contract office, but you can get mail there, mail packages and buy stamps.  I don't know why it's not real.  I did notice that it has funky hours.

Oh, and here's a good mail analogy:  Sarah Lynn has slid into Yale like a birthday card into an envelope.  Catch this:  She's having breakfast with the CEO of Patagonia this week, and she's going to hear Aung San Suu Kyi speak in person.  She's going to New York City for dinner as her birthday gift from Jay.  And how old is she tomorrow?  27.  Pretty good for 27 if you ask me. 

And shall we speak of birthday gifts?  Why not?  Here's my gift from Drake: 

It's spiny oyster, opal, lepidolite (it looks black in the picture, but it's really dark purple) inlaid with silver.  It's an artist out of Albuquerque, but he bought it from a gallery here in Newport, Oregon.  Good job, don't you think?  Looks just like me.  He says that he was reminded of a sea gull.  Plus he went shopping today to help me find a long sleeve fleece jacket - even I think it's cold here.  Then we played blackjack for a couple of hours - and the best news -  it only cost me $1.  That's my idea of a win.  We topped the day off with ice cream.  Yummy, yummy.

I love birthdays.  I actually love everybody's birthday.  There's never been a birthday I haven't enjoyed.  I like feeling special.  I like eating sugar in any form:  cake, pie, ice cream.  I'm an equal opportunity sugar eater.  It's a bonus when all your friends send messages, and you get gifts, and have a swell day.  Birthdays.....only 364 days until my next one, but even better, only 1 more day until Sarah's birthday, and 3 more days until Drake's birthday.  The only thing better than MY birthday is our family's birthday week.

Oh, final P.S.:  Thanks, Larry, you're a lifesaver - that micro cell gives us 5 bars in this dead zone of a house.  Anybody can call me anytime now.

If you haven't already figured it out, this is my thank you note to everyone who wished me a Happy Birthday today.       

  

Indulging Myself and Meeting Monica.

What's your favorite ice cream?  Did the taste of it just pop into your mouth, or are you intellectualizing and internally debating the merits of mint chocolate chip or rocky road?  To say I love ice cream would be an understatement.  Did you know that ice cream is different depending on where you are.  Oh, of course, there are the 'standards', but each location has an ice cream of which they are particularly proud.  Each region also has concocted favorites whose names usually involve the wild animal of the region:  "Moose Tracks", "Deer Tracks", or the local fruit or nut or condiment - "Maine Blueberry" or "Oregon Blackberry".  In Montana and Idaho, I hit huckleberry season, and there was huckleberry ice cream.  I never tasted better maple ice cream than in New England.  And to give the Aggies their due; the best ice cream EVER is Aggie Ice Cream at Utah State in Logan.  Yes, friends, as much as it pains me, the homemade USU Aggie Ice Cream is better than Texas' Blue Bell.  

Here, in Seal Rock, we have a sweet shop called "Indulge" that advertises evil brownies, fudge and ice cream.   The ice cream is luscious.  Tonight I had Brown Cow.  (It probably should have been called Brown Sea Lion.)   Think of the taste of white chocolate and milk chocolate ice cream with dark chocolate chunks.  If the ice cream isn't enough, the shop also has homemade fudge as well as chocolate candies.  I haven't eaten any of that stuff....yet.  The divinity is calling me, though.  And she has penuche, a cooked brown sugar candy similar in consistency to fudge.  OK, enough, enough.  I could talk desserts, ice cream, and candy until people run screaming from the room.

I started talking to the owner, Monica, tonight.  This wasn't our first trip into the shop and I ease dropped last time as she told a friend she had an upcoming vacation.  This is her first vacation in 10 years.  Understand, she runs a business that is open 7 days a week from 10 - 6.  And where is she going?  Paris, France to show and sell her doll clothes.  

Meeting interesting people is the best thing about traveling.  Monica confided if you live on this rural, Oregon coastline, you'd better have a hobby to occupy yourself when the rain blows sideways for ten days in a row.  I can already see this has to be true.  About ten years ago, she was noodling around browsing eBay.  Thinking she might want to buy some fancy jam, she came across a doll dress designer with name that popped her up on the eBay search.  Monica saw her first Blythe doll.  It was the start of a unique hobby.  

Blythe is a doll introduced to the American toy market by the defunct toy company Kenner in 1972.  It's an 11 inch doll, that has a Japanese anime look with big eyes and an oversized head.  It also has a string to pull which will change the eye color of the doll. It was a total flop, and was only manufactured and distributed for one year.  

According to Wikipedia:  In 1997 a New York TV and video producer, Gina Garan, was given a 1972 Kenner Blythe doll by a friend and she began using it to practice her photographic skills.  She began taking the doll everywhere and took hundreds of photos.  The result was in 2000 Ms. Garan published a book called This is Blythe and started a phenomena which resulted in Hasbro (who bought the defunct Kenner Toys) to issue a license to Takara Toys of Japan to produce a new edition of Blythe (Neo Blythe),  The re-issued doll was used in advertising campaigns in Japan and became an instant hit.  The Japanese success caused Hasbro to issue a license to Ashton-Drake Galleries in 2004 to sell Blythe replica dolls in the United States.  Alexander McQueen, the famous fashion designer, launched a fashion line for Target with an ad campaign featuring Blythe dolls.  These dolls are now collected and 'dressed' by a growing group of hobbyists.  Monica visualizes "Blythe" as a sweet, innocent 10 year old girl, but if you search the internet, you will see many incarnations of this doll.

As Monica and I started visiting, I learned that she has a background in tailoring. She brushed off those skills and translated them into designing and making Blythe doll clothes.  These are individually designed and sewn.  They are 1/6th the size of adult clothes.  Now, I've made Barbie clothes for my daughter and for sale in the St. Paul UMC Fall Festival.   I can tell you that my best friend was Velcro.  Monica is in a whole different class; she's a haute couture doll clothing seamstress.  She is making cuffs, and button holes and doing hand embroidery using a single thread to create a Trompe L'Oeil  effect.  She's hand knitting sweaters and vests, making wool felt coats and trimming all of her creations.  While she downplayed her skills, I suspect you don't go as an exhibitor to a show in Paris, France unless you have major talent.

Monica prefers the original 1972 Kenner dolls, and she owns three of them.  She'll be taking and exhibiting two of them (wearing her creations) to Paris.  I was disappointed not to see some of these dresses, but as she put it,  "I don't have any fabric in the candy store".  Smart.  That would be disaster waiting to happen.  I wouldn't want to risk a smear of inadvertent chocolate on something I had spent hours making under a magnifier.  

This evening's visit was fascinating.  Here's a woman running her own business, and in her limited spare time also has an unusual hobby that is largely self taught.  I can hardly wait to get to know her better.  Oh, and if you are driving down Coastal Highway 101 in Oregon between Newport and Waldport, stop in Seal Rock and INDULGE yourself.           

Thinking of Beaches

What is it about beaches that attract people?  They're messy.  Bits of sand cling to you even if all you do is look at it from the scenic overlook.  The water is sticky with salt.  There's weirdo seaweed, and if you are unlucky, there are those plastic bags that sting you when you aren't looking.  Then there's the hidden pieces of glass protruding from the sand waiting to cut your foot.Ugly reminders of last night's illegal beer bust on the beach.  Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello fueled my early teen beach fantasies with their beach blanket movies.   Reality is in the hot sun, the dead fish, half eaten crabs, and dead plastic bags AKA jellyfish all stink.

Even so, I could hardly wait to rent this house overlooking the beach at the Seal Rocks in Oregon.  I relish the slog down the path, the sliding struggle through the loose, powdery, shifting sand to the hard packed water's edge to begin combing.  Beaches are the world's biggest garage sale.  You never know what you are going to find.  True, some of it is icky and stinky, but every prize needs to be won to have value.

Joey Lucas, Margie McIntyre, and Rick Graves at Galveston

 Beach combing and collecting started the very first time I saw the ocean:  Puerto Penasco, Mexico, December of 1971.  I have those shells today; and I can still visualize my 21 year old self so excited and thrilled at the goodies free for the finding.  I have shells from Galveston as a result of our first out of college jobs in Houston.   Galveston was a quick weekend get-away.  One of my favorite shells comes from those beaches; found with a dear friend as we walked along the beach during one of those weekends.  While I love the beach, my dearest friend thought beaches were as close as one could get to heaven.  She was known to take her china and crystal to the beach and serve a semi-formal dinner to friends on blankets on the sand.  While we teased her without mercy for doing this, secretly we were so pleased to be included in her beach dinner parties.

Drake and Jan, age 24

In 1974, we went to Acapulco, and Drake parasailed at that beach.  At age 26, our first cruise vacation included a visit to the Cayman Islands, and I saw my first turquoise waters.  I still have the conch shell I haggled for on a rickety dock.  My clothes from that trip smelled from my shells when I opened my suitcase back home.  1983 we went to Puerto Vallarta and stayed in a villa on the beach with our closest friends.  That was the first time I saw four foot waves and glimpsed the real power of the Pacific Ocean.   

The shells of Sanibel

Even our miracle child happened at the beach.  Drake and I waited a long time to make up our minds about having children.  I don't know any other couple married 15 years before their first child.  Our mothers had given up on us.  In 1984 I was down two strikes - two miscarriages, and the ob/gyn was not encouraging.  While trying to come to terms with a probable childless life, we decided to emotionally risk one more try for a baby.  We took a Christmas vacation and drove from New Orleans to Sanibel Island.   Sanibel is a beach lovers paradise.  There were seashells the size of my hand laying everywhere on the beach.  What a delight!  I spent days strolling the beach doing the Sanibel Stoop, and nights conceiving our precious Sarah Lynn.  I've always thought the sounds of the ocean provided the charm needed for a full-term pregnancy.  The large shells from that visit are brown and white speckled.

If the first trip to Sanibel was a welcoming of a new life beginning, then my second trip to that island was farewell to a life ending.  The island was the last roommate trip for me, Patti and Margie.  Patti and I spent that trip both laughing with Margie, while privately crying over Margie's all so obvious upcoming death.  My shells from that trip are delicate flowers, pieces of art that are a permanent memorial in my house to Margery Lynn and her love of the beach.     

Sarah's first beach were the white sugar sands of Alabama.  She was only about 14 months old, and starting to walk when she discovered the softness of the sand and the tickling ocean.  Twenty five years later, SL and her Dad are still enjoying the ocean; this time on a boat in Hawaii getting ready to jump in for a snorkeling adventure.  We've done family beach vacations down through the years from the day at the Antigua beach in the Caribbean, to the driftwood beach on the Northwest Coast, to the beaches on the islands of Nova Scotia and PEI.

I'm eager to see what memories and memorabilia this Seal Rock beach will attach to us.  These beaches are different.  Full of tidal pools and rocks rather than smooth sand covered with shells.  There are rumors of agates for the picking on some of these beaches.  There are birds and animals to watch.  On view from our living room, Drake checks the seals everyday that lay on the rocks exposed by low tide, and I am constantly watching the gulls, cormorants, terns, and pelicans that live here.   There are already little bits and pieces of shells and rocks being carried back in my pockets from our strolls on this beach.  

Here's the pictures....https://picasaweb.google.com/jalyss1/2012OregonCoastAndSealRock?authkey=Gv1sRgCKGYjJek9smMcg

The City of Gardens

Rather than write about Portland, Oregon, I have decided to tell the story of our quick visit in pictures.  They start with our visit to Lan Su Gardens, a garden designed and constructed by Chinese artisans who came to Portland from their sister city in China, Suzhou.  This city in China is famous for its gardens.  The Lan Su Garden is their gift to Portland.

Onto the Portland Art Museum which was rather forgettable, but they had a few nice pieces.  We had lunch at a restaurant, Jake's Crawfish Restaurant, which has been in business since 1882.  We took public transit all over Portland; we never moved our car from the motel parking lot the first day we went downtown.  We rode both the train and the streetcar.  After lunch I went to the Button and Ribbon Emporium.  At least there was a chair for Drake. 

Next morning, on our way out of town, we visited my favorite place - The Portland Test Rose Garden.  This rose garden has been there since 1907, and there are some very wonderful stories associated with this garden.  The Royal Rosarians - a group of rich rose fanatics who are nominated to this society which is based on the English parliamentary system.  They call their leader a 'Prime Minister'.  This elected official of the society gets to chose a rose to be planted in his/her name in the garden. 

Skip the pictures of the places you find boring, but don't miss the rose pictures.

 https://picasaweb.google.com/jalyss1/2012OregonPortland?authkey=Gv1sRgCO-54b-n5Z-XTg 

A Man with an Obsession; a Museum in the Middle of Nowhere

This is the Maryhill Museum.  It sits on the Washington bank of the Columbia River in middle of nowhere.  There are literally no buildings within sight of this 'house'.  That's what it was built to be by Samuel Hill, a man with an obsession over two women.  Sadly for his marriage, neither one was his wife.  Yes, this place is as huge as it looks.  In the reviews I read about this place, it's described as 'eclectic' and 'eccentric'.  I would also add unexpected and creepy.  

 Meet Loie Fuller.  A nice mid-western girl, only able to speak pigeon French, who overnight became a dance sensation at the Follies Bergere in Paris at the turn of the century.   She was lionized by the press and became an instant European and American celebrity.  Her talent?  She devised a series of dance steps involving voluminous gowns she swirled about herself using rods and dowels to twirl the material.  She must have had 'something' because she managed to keep herself in the limelight for the next 30 years becoming the darling of the rich and powerful.  One of her conquests was the American entrepreneur, Sam Hill.  Sam, the builder of the above house was her lifelong friend.  The house, now the Maryhill Museum, contains photographs of her, posters advertising her run at the Follies, paintings, bronze medals struck with her likeness, the above statue, and a 1906 Pathe Company movie of Loie doing her dance routine.  She must have been compelling because she was friends with royalty, multi-millionaires, great artists (Rodin), and scientists (Marie Curie).  With Sam, she raised millions of dollars for post WWI European relief.  All fame is fleeting...nobody today remembers her at all.  

Entering the mansion you are confronted with bizarre furniture, clothing and accessories.  Behold Sam Hill's second lady:  Queen Marie of Romania.  

  Here she is surrounded by her children.  She is a relation of Queen Victoria (like who wasn't in European Royalty in 1900).  Somehow she and Sam Hill developed a relationship.  In the house she urged him to turn into a museum, I saw the coronation gown she wore to the crowning of Czar Nicolas II, two thrones, her crown, as well as various pieces of jewelry and trinkets designed and executed by Faberge.  The gown and mantle were the most fascinating.  I think it's less the material (woven with gold threads and embroidered with silver accented by rhinestones) as much as the 18" waistline.

  (No, she didn't wear tennis shoes under her coronation gown; those are my feet.  A trick of the reflection.)


The entire time I was in these exhibits, I kept wondering about the relationships between this wealthy man and these two women.  The all knew each other.  That much is obvious from the pictures scattered around the museum.  I couldn't decide is he was with them consecutively or concurrently.  I suspect he and Loie were the love match.  She never married.  I think the Queen and him became friends rather than intimates during his herculean effort to raise money for European relief after World War I.  Without the efforts of wealthy and influential men and women, a significant portion of the European population would have starved to death in 1919.   

  After reading about his personal history (very hidden; you had to find the small print), I don't begrudge him the happiness he found.  It turns out that his wife didn't like the West, and she didn't like either Oregon or Washington at all.  She whisked herself back to the Midwest taking their two small children with her.  The small print allows that they were 'estranged'.  I had to wonder - before or after Loie and the Queen?  Even sadder, Sam's two children:  his daughter developed paranoid schizophrenia, and his son totally rejected him and refused to communicate with his father.  There were certainly volumes not disclosed in the few short paragraphs I was able to find.

If this wasn't enough, the excellent portion of this museum took me totally by surprise.  Down in the basement was gathered an amazing collection of Native American artifacts from every portion of North America once inhabited solely by Indians.

I saw the Smithsonian Museum of Native America when I was in New York, and the Maryhill Museum collection was equally impressive.  Not only were there artifacts of significance, but they were beautifully presented together with amazing early photographs of vanishing people.  Here's my favorite one:

Tlinglit Basketmakers in Sitka, 1895 - baskets were already being made for tourists.  I couldn't resist taking pictures of the various artifacts that appealed to me as either unique or outstanding examples.     

Finally, Sam Hill was certain this area was destined to become a major economic player in the United States.  He gambled buying thousands of acres and trying to lure 'settlers' to immigrate and make his vision a reality.  He had enough pull to get a major bridge built across the Columbia within spitting distance of his new house.  Who knows why this didn't happen?  Perhaps the 10" of annual rainfall stunted agriculture which he envisioned as the economic lynch pin of his dream.  Perhaps he was diverted by the two women with whom he was obviously obsessed.  Or perhaps he lost heart after World War I as did so many others of that generation.  He left a mysteriously haunting museum which I'm glad I saw.

If you want to see more pictures of the Columbia Gorge as well as Sam's museum, click the link:

https://picasaweb.google.com/jalyss1/2012OregonColumbiaRiverGorge?authkey=Gv1sRgCMrKo63Lv9SSqgE    

A River, Rails and a Road

We headed for Portland, Oregon.  As we move from place to place, we have discovered generally you can travel one of two routes.  We have learned to choose the non-Interstate route when possible since we are the slowest vehicle on the road.  Additionally, the 18 wheelers own the Interstates, and when they travel in packs, it's pretty darn intimidating. The second route is usually the old two lane plodding farm road through every tiny town that survived the 19th and 20th centuries.  We plod right along with the old pick up trucks, tractors, and often some piece of baffling farm machinery lumbering down these roads.  

One of the things I have learned on this trip is the importance of a river.  People learned thousands of years ago if you want to go anywhere of significant distance west of the Mississippi, you'd better use a river, and you'd better find a pass over mountains that are thousands of feet high.  The power and importance of the Snake River and its tributaries, and the Columbia River and its tributaries still dominate the land.  Almost every significant road we have driven in the past month followed every curve of one river or another.  It doesn't take much imagination to visualize the canoes traveling the West.  This impression has been facilitated because we have followed a significant portion of the 200+ year old route of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Their mission as stated directly by Thomas Jefferson was to find a navigable water route across the continent to open trade with Asia.       

Land transportation routes in the West were laid down first by deer, elk and bears, widened by Native Americans, used by covered wagons, covered with railroad tracks by the Manifest Destiny crowd, and paved with concrete and asphalt in the first half of the 20th century to accommodate the gasoline powered engine.

As we drove along the north shore of the Columbia River on Highway 14, a dandy scenic two lane Washington state highway,  I realized that I was watching more than a thousand years of human history roll by.  Look at this picture:  There's the Columbia River on the left, and right beside it is a railroad track (just happened to catch a passing train), and you can see the road on the right side of the picture.  This history illustrating triumvirate rolled on mile after mile.

While the river is efficient for long stretches, you don't have to read too far in the Lewis/Clark journals to hear about the 'portages'.  For the unknowing, a portage is where you climb out of the canoe, shoulder everything you're carrying in the canoe, then pick up the canoe and carry it and everything else to the next section of navigable river.  This happened FREQUENTLY and portages could be a hop, skip and a jump, or long grueling miles.  The long and short of it is that for the purposes of major commerce traveling by river is limited and not very efficient. 

The land trails that usually ran beside the rivers were narrow strips of dirt.  Great for animals, OK for slow individual human progress, but again, you don't have to read many pioneer covered wagon journals before the horrors of crossing rivers and going over mountains is detailed often by counting the dead. 

The Hiawatha Bike Trail, with its tunnels and trestles made us realize the effort it took to carve a railroad over and through the mountains.  We got to see the "Golden Spike" area of Utah where the first rail line joining the East and West met.  WOW!  I finally understood not only the economic significance, but also the psychological impact two strips of steel laid over squared trees had on the commerce and psyche of America.  

This trip was a graphically visual lesson of transportation in America and its evolution.  The rivers introduced Europeans to the grandeur and almost unimaginable resources which must have seemed free for the taking.  The railroads decided which towns lived or died, rang the final death knell of the nomadic Plains Indian culture by facilitating killing off the buffalo, and standardized many elements of everyday life.  The time zones that we live by are a consequence of the railroads.  

The roads which followed the rails allowed everyman to move himself, his goods, his services and his family anywhere in this country.  Truckers criss cross this country on multi-lane high speed highways.  All this coordinated, accessible transportation would seem like magic to Lewis and Clark.  Those same roads are allowing us to have this marvelous adventure.  It's just plain ironic and humbling that these roads we whiz over are following so many footsteps before us.    
          

The Hiawatha Bike Trail - Riding at the Tree Tops

When I was fooling around looking for stuff to do this month in Montana and Idaho, I ran across the Hiawatha Bike Trail.  Normally, these 'bike trails' are designed for hard bodies that are at least 40 years younger than I am.  It was a real surprise to discover this trail was COMPLETELY DOWNHILL.  I couldn't believe it!  Even I can do downhill.  This is a rail to trail deal.  Basically, that means that an abandoned railway is converted to a bike trail by taking up the steel rails and 'tracks'.  That leaves a graded road bed which usually has a slope of less than 2% - especially in the mountains.  No one wants to see a runaway train.  You ride downhill, and at a certain point, a shuttle bus (actually yellow school bus) takes you back to your car.  

Drake, of course, was all excited; he's been looking forward to this day for months.  I was finally reassured that I could do this when the geezer (he had to be at least 10 years older than ME) who drove the Red Bus in Glacier told me he had done the ride and it was fun.  He was totally right. 

The trail we did is 12 miles long.  We opted NOT to do the one and two-thirds mile tunnel just before the Roland Trail Head which is after the big tunnel.  Doing the St. Paul Tunnel would have lengthened the ride to about 15 miles.  Turned out to be a very smart decision on our part because we discovered in a 648 foot tunnel later in the ride that our bike lights were totally inadequate.  I saw what I'm doing for bike lights in the future.  A couple of women had strapped 9 volt flashlights on their handlebars - now those will conquer a tunnel.  Tunnels, it turns out, are quite scary when you get into utter darkness and can't see light from either end.  That happened to us for about 30 feet in one tunnel.  It was creepy.

Trestles, on the other hand, are absolutely exhilarating.  They are like riding across a two lane bridge; but when you look out, you see the tops of conifers.  Some of the trestles were a couple of hundred feet high, and the views over the trees was breathtaking.  That is what I was looking forward to, and I wasn't disappointed.  

The real bike riders ride the Hiawatha Trail UPHILL for 15 miles then turn around and ride it downhill.  Those would be the 'hard bodies' I referred to above.  All kinds of people are on the trail.  There was one family with a five year old in her helmet pedaling her 16" bicycle.  Even downhill was going to be a big ride for her.  There were groups of college students, and some oldsters like us.  There was one group of women who had included one of their moms.  She was riding her three wheeler and carrying picnic lunches for everyone.   This trail was bumpy in that it's gravel and embedded stones.  Our hybrid tires were OK, but there was one couple with ultra thin racing tires.  They must have been excellent riders because I would have been spilled off in the first 100 feet.  

The trail was like a dirt road, and in some sections like a dirt road with washboards.  My hands and arms are tired from the constant shaking.  One smart thing we did was to both get new hybrid bikes which have suspension on the seat post and on the handlebar post.  Man did we need that extra suspension.  A woman getting on the shuttle bus back to our cars was really complaining about how bad her hands were hurting after riding her 'old' bike with no suspension on it.  Her husband was just ignoring her; I guess she was a complainer in real life.

We ended this day with lunch in historic Wallace, Idaho.  I've been in many, many towns who preface their name with 'historic', but in the case of Wallace, it's the only town in America which is entirely in the National Register of Historic Places.  It's a turn of the century mining town with all of their downtown business buildings preserved as well as their homes.  The lady at the tourist information center told us they registered building after building to defeat Interstate 90 from demolishing the town.  When they finished, they had registered every major building and home in town, and I-90 had to be moved.  

I also talked to a guy who sold me a piece of silver, lead, copper and quartz ore.  I didn't 'pick it up', but it is from one of the mines around Wallace.  Silver is still being mined here today.  Interestingly, lead is lovely in it's raw form and silver is ugly.  When they are refined, it's just the opposite.  We had lunch in the 1313 Saloon, and a milkshake from the Red Garage.  Everywhere you look in town there are unique architectural details.  I tried to capture some of them in the photos  

The pictures are bang up this time, with more info about the trail and the town.

https://picasaweb.google.com/jalyss1/2012DriveToIdahoHiawathaBikeTrail?authkey=Gv1sRgCKO5_PHPsozUFg