Sunday, October 25, 2020

HOME for the winter

 A great summer trip is behind us now and back home to spend the winter. Here's a map of our five-month travels...


Five months. 37 Stops ! ....and many experiences, locations, and sites along the way.


Just a few of the Highlights:
  • Glacial Lake Missoula
  • Kayaking in Lake McDonald at Glacier National Park
  • Theodore Roosevelt National Park car trip in North Dakota
  • Staying at a yacht harbor in Duluth, Minnesota
  • Cheese, cheese, cheese in Wisconsin!
  • Iowa state capitol in Des Moines
  • Custer State Park in South Dakota
  • Elk in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
  • Kayaking under the Grand Teton Mountains, Wyoming



Grand Tetons, Wyoming





Lake McDonald, Glacier NP, Montana

Tetons from the kayak...spectacular!

Lower Falls on the Yellowstone River




CHEESE in Wisconsin!!!


Male Elk in the Madison River, Yellowstone NP



Elk. Male, Female and young ones hunkered down in the grass upper right

Sunset in Iowa


We hope you enjoyed our journeys as much as we did. I apologize for not posting more entries along the way....we sure saw some wonderful things....maybe next trip. 

We celebrated our 30th Anniversary on this trip!


Katie keeping watch.











Tuesday, September 22, 2020

You give me fever! Peggy Lee Museum

 Here's one for all of you that remember Peggy Lee. 

How many of you do remember her?



The Peggy Lee Museum in Wimbledon, North Dakota !

Wimbledon is a city in Pierce Township, Barnes County, North Dakota, United States. 
The population was 216 at the 2010 census !!


In case you are not sure where Wimbledon, North Dakota is....


All photos are taken by my wife, Kim

Singer/actor Peggy Lee grew up as Norma Deloris Egstrom, living in the railroad depot where her father worked. 


The upstairs quarters have been restored with Peggy Lee memorabilia.

Norma's bedroom

An entire room upstairs is packed with Peggy Lee history and memorabilia.


One of Peggy's famous outfits she wore while performing


Here are a few of the photos in the museum.









 During six decades of professional singing, Lee recorded well over one thousand masters and performed frequently in concert, on radio and on television. She also wrote nearly 300 songs, of which dozens were recorded by other artists and a fair number became hits for her. Among her many other honors are 12 Grammy nominations (plus a Lifetime Achievement Award) and an induction in the Songwriters' Hall of Fame.

...and just a few of her album covers...










If you are interested in her biography, here's some excerpts.... I know it's a lot of text but she is an icon in the music business!


Norma began her professional career as an adolescent living in Wimbledon, ND, and traveling on weekends to nearby Valley City, where she made her debut on the radio. In 1937 she was invited to audition for WDAY in Fargo, the biggest radio station in North Dakota at the time. She was hired on the spot, but right before she went on the air, the programming director told her that ‘Norma Egstrom’ had to go and christened her with what would become her new professional name: Peggy Lee.

Nationwide popularity and chart-hitting success first came to her in 1941 after being hired as the singer with the Benny Goodman Orchestra. While working with Goodman, she met Dave Barbour, the band’s guitarist and the man who would become her first husband and father to her daughter, Nicki. When Dave was fired from the band for “fraternizing with the girl singer,” Lee gave notice and – looking forward to becoming a full-time wife and mother – announced that she was retiring. Peggy and Dave were married in 1943, and though the marriage only lasted eight years, she considered him to be the love of her life and greatest musical collaborator.

Lee’s “retirement” didn’t last long either, and she found herself once again behind the microphone. She established her solo career by joining the then-emerging Capitol Records and ranks as the female act with the longest stay at that renowned label, her musical alma mater: 24 years. She also spent five very productive years at Decca Records in the 1950s, and recorded albums with several other major and independent labels starting in the mid-1970s. Throughout, Lee continued to work extensively on television, radio and in concert up until the mid 1990s.

Her vast and varied catalog of songs flourished from such longevity in the music business: she recorded more than 1,100 masters and over 50 original albums. Her total number of radio broadcast performances is over 800, and her television appearances surpass the 200-mark.

Best known for such songs as “Fever,” “Why Don’t You Do Right,” “I’m A Woman” and “Is That All There Is?,” she amassed over 100 chart entries beginning with “I Got It Bad” (1941) and culminating, to date, with the posthumous hit “Similau” (2017). Among the myriad music honors bestowed upon Lee are 13 Grammy® Award nominations, a Grammy® win in 1969, and a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995.

One of the foremothers of the singer-songwriter school, Lee ranks among the most successful female singer-songwriters in the annals of American popular music. She wrote over 200 songs – most often lyrics, but sometimes music as well, with a variety of collaborators, including Harold Arlen, Cy Coleman, Duke Ellington, Quincy Jones, Marian McPartland and Victor Young. Some of the artists who have covered Peggy Lee compositions are Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole, Natalie Cole, Bing Crosby, Doris Day, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Diana Krall, Queen Latifah, Barry Manilow, Bette Midler, Janelle MonĂ¡e, Nina Simone, Regina Spektor and Sarah Vaughan.

Walt Disney took notice of Peggy’s songwriting ability, and in 1953 he hired her to write all of the original lyrics for his classic animated film, Lady and the Tramp. Walt liked Lee’s song demos so much, he asked her to voice four of the characters, and even named one after her.

Lady and the Tramp was not her only work in film. She appeared in several motion pictures, most notably at Warner Bros. in The Jazz Singer (1952), costarring Danny Thomas, and Pete Kelly’s Blues (1955), which brought her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress and the Audience Award for Most Promising Female Personality of 1955. 

A perennial advocate of artists’ rights, Peggy Lee was quietly standing for this cause as early as the 1940s. In solidarity with the American Federation Musicians’ 1948 record ban, she was among the vocalists under contract who refused to do any recording activity for the entire year. 

and



Hope you enjoyed this trip through memory lane!




Oh...cannot forget our Katie photo...



steve/kim/katie

Thursday, September 17, 2020

Mount Rushmore 2020

For our third time visiting Mt. Rushmore, I'll just paste in the one from our last visit. It's still spectacular, inspiring and breathtaking. I would encourage you to click on the photos to see them larger. It's well worth it.

https://stricksretirement.blogspot.com/2019/09/mount-rushmore-2019-visit.html




steve/kim/katie
2020







Saturday, August 8, 2020

NORTH DAKOTA !

 Here's our journey so far. As you can see, we're way behind in the blog entries as we're up in the NE part of Wisconsin - Door Country. 

Going into North Dakota, we saw Theodore Roosevelt National Park, had a terrific hours-long lightning storm, Dakota Zoo in Bismark, went to the Peggy Lee Museum, took some walks, went kayaking and saw great vistas.

Years ago, we went to Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce and Arches in Utah/Arizona. The colors and majesty were spectacular. So, when we came here for the first time, we were underwhelmed. But, this time, we decided to forget all that past and just enjoy it. Sure glad we did because it is gorgeous!


If you're into geology, this place is fabulous!!

Close up of the layers of soil deposited over millions of years...some thin, some thick.


We call ourselves Dr. Kim and Dr. Steve....eminent doctors of geology



Some scary looking clouds arriving but how bad can it be?
We are right in the center here

A closer look. Each of those yellow things are lightning strikes. Notice the 0.1 miles was the closest strike. This went on for 3 hours! Fortunately, it was mostly cloud-to-cloud lightning and it moved north of us so we could watch it from a distance.




Fleet-footed pronghorns are among the speediest animals in North America. They can run at more than 53 miles an hour, leaving pursuing coyotes and bobcats in the dust. Pronghorns are also great distance runners that can travel for miles at half that speed. We see these all over the west.





Here's four Pronghorns in the wild with one young one.


A couple of Marsupials...very cute




Some male bonding going on here in the TR NP.

Free range is all over North Dakota

What? I'm not going fast enough for you?

Kayaking outside of Bismarck, ND. Clouds are just so neat to look at. I belong to the Cloud Appreciation Society. Check it out sometime. 
https://cloudappreciationsociety.org/

Love the colors of the pollen on the water

It seems that we never think the kayak day will be memorable...just another getting-out-on-the-water trip. But....then...a couple of Canada Geese families and a bunch of singles too come into view.

We'll do Peggy Lee Museum and more on the next entry.

Hope you like all of North Dakota. Great state.

The obligatory Katie photo. Every morning ...and I mean every morning, Katie comes over to get scritched on my lap. Then she lays down on my legs to take a nap while I check email and read. Think she likes it?


steve/kim/katie

Kayaking again...finally!

Finally, we got back on the water. This time at Meacham Lake in upper state New York, just on the north edge of the Adirondack Mountains (yo...