Tulsa, part 2 – a difficult history

Our plan was to head northwest from Tulsa to meet our friends and fellow travelers Mark and Linda who were going to be in southern Colorado. Unfortunately, their motorhome had a mechanical problem which forced them to skip their rendezvous with us in favor of a visit to the Sprinter dealer, way up in Denver. Though we were sorry to miss our friends, a consolation prize for us was that, if we weren’t heading to Colorado, we could slow down on our push to Albuquerque. We started by extending our stay in Tulsa to take care of a couple of necessities (like laundry) and see a little more of the city. The Arts District we talked about in the previous post is adjacent to, and partly within, the Greenwood section, which was once known as Black Wall Street. Over the past few years, along with many others, we learned for the first time of the history of that area – in particular, of the horrific events that took place there a little more than a century ago, hidden and suppressed for most of the ensuing years. To learn more, we visited the Greenwood Rising History Center.

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Portland proper

Asa, Rob, Meg, Wyatt, Sue, Doug

Our home town of Warren VT spans a section of the Mad River Valley from the Monroe Skyline on the west to the Northfield Mountains ridgeline on the east with the valley (and the Mad River, itself, of course) in between. From our house, a little less than halfway up the ridge on the west, we can see out across the valley to where our friends Meg, Rob, Wyatt, and Asa built their ski house in East Warren. When we all first met about 10 years ago, they were Bostonians skiing at Sugarbush and taking lessons there – which is how we came together. About 5 years ago, the family moved to Portland, ME. As we were planning for our Tour de Maine, we reached out to Meg and she arranged with us a visit for a mid-day walking tour of their adopted home city.

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Maine Maritime Museum

The weather forecast was calling for 90% chance of rain, so it seemed like a good day for an indoor tourist thing. We headed over to the Maine Maritime Museum, on the original site of the Percy & Smalls Shipyard in Bath. Uh oh. A big part of this museum is outdoors or inside the preserved original buildings connected by footpaths across the 20-acre site. But as luck would have it, the forecast was mostly wrong. The sky cleared up nicely after a 10-minute downpour, and stayed that way for the rest of our day at the museum.

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The thing about old motorhomes

Fried wires

The parts wear out and sometimes break or fail. The reason I bring this up is that we’d noticed odors emanating from the space below our refrigerator on a few occasions. These odors smelled like something getting hot and they seemed to correlate with operation of the microwave or the electric heating element in the water heater. Hmm…

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BGU/Grand Rapids, MI

BGU Jam – Grand Rapids, MI (photo by Jon Miller)

Long before we started planning our Eastern Canada tour for this summer and fall, there was exactly one fixed point in the schedule, and that was a four-day blues jamming extravaganza in Grand Rapids, Michigan organized by our friend Tom (aka tommytubetone), that we could catch on the way home. Tom is no stranger to this blog, having hosted us twice when we were around Kalamazoo. Tom also jammed with me that time in Memphis as well as at various other times and places going back almost ten years by now.

This event was already being laid out when we swung by to see Tom in 2018, and it was well along in the planning stage when we stopped by again in 2019. And while it was disappointing to see all of those plans go into storage with COVID, much like a fine whiskey improves with age, when this bottle was finally opened we found there was pure magic inside.

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St John’s NL

St John’s Harbour

At the southeastern corner of the island of Newfoundland, St John’s is the largest city in Newfoundland and Labrador. At this moment, about 530,000 people live in NL, and 212,000 of them (40%) live in the St John’s metro area. [By contrast, just 26,650 (5%) live in all of Labrador, though Labrador accounts for 72% of the land area of the province.] Anyway, statistics aside, we were eagerly anticipating our visit to the urban St John’s for several things we would find there: music, history, hiking, sightseeing… and a Sprinter service center.

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Recording: The Studio On The Road

Strait of Belle Isle

It’s getting to be about time for a musical post. We’ve been learning and practicing a particular song with an eye towards recording it to use as a joint “summer recital” piece for an online music school we’re both involved with, also as a recording we can share, as well as just to add the song to our repertoire.

This would be the most elaborate on-the-road recording we’ve done, and a first test of our latest traveling studio gear.

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Festival de la chanson de Tadoussac/Tadoussac Song Festival

Tadoussac was the site of the first Canadian trading post along the St Lawrence in 1599. Its location where the Saguenay River and fjord meets the St Lawrence River made it an ideal trading site between the European and indigenous people of the region. The location is also beautiful! Current-day Tadoussac, home to fewer than 1000 people along with scores of whales, has become a popular destination for tourists (many in search of a glimpse of said whales) and second homeowners from the more southern parts of Quebec. It was also the site of the 37th annual, 4-day Festival de la chanson de Tadoussac (Tadoussac Song Festival).

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Beaufort, NC

Walker

There is in this blog another post with a very similar opening photo to this one. In that post, we introduced our readers to Walker, who lives with our friends Hope and Carlos in Beaufort, NC. But the photo above is recent, and Walker is almost five years older here than in the previous photo, and don’t we all wish we could have aged as well as he!

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Monroe, NC

Doug, Sue, Maurette, Lloyd

My friend Lloyd has only ever sold one guitar, and I bought it. We met online through the Blues Guitar Unleashed forum, which we were both using in our quests to become the amazingly excellent blues guitar players we are today. Since that seminal transaction, we’ve gotten to know each other pretty well through our online interactions. We have met in person once or twice, and we have tried and failed to meet in person at least one other time. This time, it was relatively simple for Sue and me to adjust our northbound route between Florida and Vermont to include Monroe, NC, which (not coincidentally) is where Lloyd and his wife Maurette have chosen to make their home.

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