Rustic Rail Line, Galena, IL

Hubs' like anything with a train in it: museums, tracks, rail-to-trail bike paths, whatever. He sees to it that I always get enough railroad site seeing! He likes Galena because there is a place where the tracks make such a severe curve that the trains wheels make a lot of screechy noise. Little boy fun! This isn't the place, it's the other way. But it's quite noisy.

Galena isn't settling for this recession....

Woo-hoo! My first non-family member comment on my blog!! Seemed like an alert guerilla-marketer encouraging tourism to the fair little city. So I'll bite: I like to go to Galena with Hubsy to take a long, long walk all around town.

We mostly window shop, look at houses and scenes, take pictures, etc. The town is crawling with restaurants, so we definitely have a good lunch someplace among them. It is like a little getaway to the 19th century, without the horse poop in the streets and the contagious diseases.

Hubsy is "good" for a trip about every two years: that's just Hubsy. This photo shows Mrs. Grant's view of the town, assuming she had time to sit around and enjoy it.

Ok--Just a second....

just finishing up with a nice bath...then I'll wish you a

Happy Chanuka. I'm only a cat, so I may not spell it right.

Something with snow in it....

...taken last winter on a getaway to Galena, IL.

This is US Grant's historic former pre-Civil War home. A nice old brick home. Unfortunate placement of photographer (me) regarding that one tree, near center. We live and learn; that was then: now I'd probably watch for something like this.

So, I was telling you about this book...

"My Faraway Home" by Mary Mckay Maynard. It made me think of the novel, "A Town Like Alice" by Nevil Shute, except this is a memoir written years after the events; amazingly, the author maintains her sense of wide-eyed wonder at all that was happening around her; circumstances she has no control over. Like a child holocaust survivor's account, only in the tropical jungle.

And, Family, the author actually knew our Uncle Fred Feigel! He was the assistant to her father in the operation of the Mother Lode Gold Mine on Mindanao! I found the book by googling Fred's name one evening a month or so ago. She knew Aunt Jean, Fred's wife, too. Amazingly small world, sometimes. I'd heard about the submarine rescue of Jean, and this book tells the exciting story of how all that went down. They had all been stranded due to the Japanese attacks all over the Pacific that included Pearl Harbor--by coincidence, the anniversary today--and had to hide out at the company's remote mining camp. Had they been found, they all would likely have been killed. Several of the men, including Fred, were eventually killed by the Japanese.

Big Dictionary is back with a word:

Palimpsest - a parchment or the like, from which the writing has been partially or completely erased to make room for another text.

I'm reading "My Faraway Home" by Mary McKay Maynard; a WW II-era memoir inwhich the author as a little girl is stranded with her parents and a few others at a remote mining camp in the Philippine jungle for two years. She's running out of paper to practice writing, so she erases pages to provide herself more space.

Two bundles of energy...

l'il pearl and hubs' powering the great westward migration a few months ago. good ol'days.