SOUTHERN TEXAS, BEAUMONT: THE ART MUSEUM OF SOUTHERN TEXAS

 November 22, 2021

In my last post, I mentioned what a surprise it was to discover a church as beautiful as St. Anthony's Cathedral Basilica in an industrial town like Beaumont, Texas. Some of the primary businesses associated with the town are Bethlehem Steel, Gulf Oil, and Exxon Oil. Driving around, we definitely got the feel that it was a blue-collar town, stereotypically not a place known for things like art museums.

So as we pulled up to the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, I must confess that my expectations were not very high, in spite of the fact that we'd just been blown away by St. Anthony's. The exterior is nice but not exceptional. A statue of a rakish George O'Brien Millard, a prominent Beaumont citizen in the early 1900s who helped develop the city's public school system, stands on the corner.

We stopped at the front desk to pay our $8 admission fees and I was almost immediately hooked. This was going to be Beaumont Shocker #2. Right next to the desk was an elaborate Tree of Life sculpture that rivals just about any similarly-themed sculpture I've seen.

Tree of Life, Creation (1960-1980) by Alfonso Soteno

A close-up view of the top shows God the Creator overseeing his creations, including Adam and Eve in the Garden with the serpent between them.

At the bottom of the tree are Adam and Eve again as they are being expelled from the Garden.

SOUTHERN TEXAS, BEAUMONT: ST. ANTHONY'S CATHEDRAL BASILICA

November 22, 2021

For the first time, the college where I work gave us the entire week of Thanksgiving off. Bob and I just couldn't pass up that opportunity. We started planning a trip to Nashville, but then Covid numbers in that area started looking bad, and most of the places we wanted to go were inside. Where could we go that was less crowded and had more outdoor attractions? 

Why, Texas, of course! After all, we had never been to the Texas Gulf Coast!!

To say I wasn't very excited about our new plan was an understatement. Bob booking a flight that left at 6:05 AM from Palm Springs didn't do much to increase my excitement. I got up at 2:30 AM and we left for the airport at 3:30.

Our flight was uneventful and we arrived in Houston around 11:00 Central Time, picked up a Mitsubishi rental car at Budget, and got on our way.

We headed for the lovely town of Beaumont, Texas, which turned out to be full of surprises. But then, just about every place we have ever traveled to has been full of surprises of some kind.

The first surprise was so wonderful that I'm going to give it its own post. St. Anthony's Cathedral Basilica has to be one of the most beautiful churches we've seen in Texas, and maybe even in the United States.

The exterior was being spray-washed when we visited.

NEW YORK: ITHACA, CORNELL UNIVERSITY SITES, AND RETURNING TO NYC

 July 28, 2021

We spent our last day of sightseeing in Upstate New York in Ithaca, home to Cornell University.

We started out with a delicious vegan lunch at Maru Ramen.

I love how colorful each dish is. Everything was very good.

After lunch we drove to the Sapsucker Woods Sanctuary, which is part of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. It is a free, 220-acre natural habitat for the study of birds.

Two sculptures are near the entrance. The first is this bronze of a passenger pigeon, almost spirt-like in concept.

I learned a lot from the onsite information:

NEW YORK: WATKINS GLEN STATE PARK

 July 28, 2021

As I mentioned in the last post, the number of beautiful places in the United States that I have not heard of before visiting them never ceases to amaze me. Watkins Glen State Park in Upstate New York was another one of those places.

The park is located at the tip of Seneca Lake, one of the Finger Lakes.

The park has three trails, two that run along the gorge's upper rim, and the main two-mile trail, the Gorge Trail, which is the closest to the stream. Hikers can start at either the top or the bottom of the gorge. It descends 400 feet, so it was a no-brainer for us. We drove to the upper end of the trail and started from there. 

Here we go! The second photo is looking back at the stairs we had just come down. Altogether, there are 832 steps on the Gorge Trail.

NEW YORK: LETCHWORTH STATE PARK

July 27, 2021

When we travel in the United States, I am always surprised by how many truly incredible places there are that I have never heard of. I know our country is vast in comparison to many countries of the world (we are the fourth largest geographically, or the third if you count our overseas territories), so why should I be surprised? And yet it happens all the time.

We hit two such spots in a row on this trip, Letchworth State Park and Watkins Glen. I'll start with Letchworth State Park, located between the Alleghany foothills and the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York and known as the Grand Canyon of the East. (Note: We also traveled to the "Grand Canyon of Texas" earlier in the year, Palo Duro State Park.) I was surprised to learn that Letchworth State Park is "America's #1 State Park," at least according to a public poll. Why hadn't I ever heard of it?

Of course, it took about two seconds for these two to find a ginormous puffball, the first of many great fungi discoveries.

Letchworth State Park is famous for its series of three falls, creatively named Upper Falls, Middle Falls, and Lower Falls.

The park is named after American businessman and humanitarian William Pryor Letchworth (1823-1910), who in 1859 purchased a large tract of land around the gorge created by the Genesee River. In 1906 he bequeathed what had become a 1000-acre estate to New York State. It was eventually joined to other lands to form the current 14,427-acre state park.