as long as Mother Nature doesn’t interfere, it looks like Bonneville National Speed Week will be happening.
as of July 20 the long course has 8 miles of nicely groomed salt and the 9 mile will be groomed by Speed Week (August 11). the short course has also been groomed 5 + miles and the rookie course has 3 good miles.
that’s what we like to hear!
photo courtesy of the Southern California Timing Association
while on my way to Calistoga today i noticed Mark West Springs Road, Mark West Quarry and Mark West Lodge….who was Mark West?
as it turns out there was indeed a Mark West and this is his story.
in 1834 Governor Figueroa of Mexico visited Sonoma County on a mission to establish a presidio which was to be named Santa Anna y Farias. he selected a site on Mark West Creek that later became the property of Henry Mizer near a well known redwood tree that was still standing in 1877.
this site was to be colonized by a group of Mexicans called the Cosmopolitan Company. the leaders of the Cosmopolitan Company arrived in Sonoma County, disagreed with the head of the government there, and left Sonoma County never to establish the presidio of Santa Anna y Farias.
the Mark West Area is only a small part of what made up Rancho San Miguel acquired by land grants from the Mexican Governor Alvardo in 1840 by William Marcus West. there were 23 land grants confirmed to original owners in Sonoma County. the men to whom land grants were given were Jacob P. Lesse, John Fitch, John Bautista Rogers Cooper, John Wilson, and Mark West. Cooper, Wilson and West were brothers-in-law to General Vallejo.
in 1840 Mark West acquired the Rancho San Miguel land grant which included 6,663 acres between the Mark West and Santa Rosa Creeks. it supposedly was the “richest body of land of the same number of acres in the state. there was not an acre of it that would not produce from seventy-five to one hundred bushels of wheat.”
on the Rancho San Miguel, Mark West built a great adobe hacienda and established a trading post and post office near the beautiful stream which now bears his name. in exchange for the land, Mark West agreed to furnish cattle skins to General Vallejo and cut trees to supply lumber for the Mexican government. unfortunately Mark West was a terrible businessman and so it is sad to note that in 1877 “none of his descendants owned a foot of his splendid estate which (at that time) was worth over half a million dollars.” Mark West did leave something of value behind though – his name. (Mark West lies buried on a stony point, up Mark West Springs Road.)
information courtesy of The Mark West Area Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Center
photo courtesy of The Sonoma Heritage Collection
i’m now fully booked for my trip to Colombia next year. i’m super excited.
since i wanted to use miles for the airfare i had to lock in my dates relatively early. reward travel is really nice, but it can be limiting at times. i ended up reserving in the beginning of May 2017, and the trip will be three weeks.
i start in Cartagena and end in Bogota, with stops in Santa Marta, Medellin and Armenia. as part of the Santa Marta portion i will be participating in a 5-day trek to Ciudad Perdida, “the Lost City”.
i booked everything through a tour company called South America.travel and they were fantastic. i worked with Martin, and he was knowledgeable, friendly and responsive. plus he wasn’t pushy at all.
i have a long time to wait until this adventure begins, but i love having this trip to look forward to, whohoo.
Santa Marta photo courtesy of expedia.com
Blogger out, WordPress in. and that is what i have been doing in my spare time, creating, importing, editing and cursing the new version of international geotastic.
right? you know you looked at this blog and thought, “wait, didn’t it look completely different last time i looked at it, like 3 years ago?” it’s true, it now looks and acts differently, but the voice is the same my friends, all me, all the time!
it has been quite the experience i must say, because remember……i have said it many times, i am not tech savvy. AND, when i originally started this whole blog thing i tried WordPress and found it completely daunting. but hey i got this up and functioning and i think once i get the swing of things it will be great.
please note that i did import my old blog into this new blog and i did my best to make it all look pretty, but some things just won’t format correctly and i’d lose my mind if i worked on it any more.
i hope you enjoy this new format and if you have any suggestions on how to make it better please let me know.
logo courtesy of wordpress.org
ok, we all know how little i actually post to this site, but that doesn’t mean i don’t look at it from time to time, or talk about it. so today, i’m proudly sharing info about my site and it is brought to my attention that all of my pictures from September 2011 posts are gone. i mean ALL of my pictures are gone.
what happened? i have no idea. do i need to remind you i’m not a tech savvy person? could it be that i did all of these posts on my iPad and at some point last year i had to have my iPad wiped clean? maybe that was it? but i could have sworn i created other posts on the iPad and those pictures seem to be there. or so i think.
an entire month of post pictures gone. vanished. and you know it was that month spent in Argentina and there was a post a day with numerous pictures per post. sigh. i can only hope that i was prolific enough in my writing that i can figure out what pictures were there originally.
this reminds me a little bit of when i erased my memory card by mistake on my Peru trip and thought i had lost all of those pictures forever. only to realize that you don’t ever completely erase everything and you CAN recover erased images from a memory card. all it took was a camera shop and $60.
realistically no one really reads this blog, so wouldn’t i just be reloading images for my own sake? i have a hard copy photo album of Argentina and an electronic photo album (which you can link to from this site), do i really need to put in the effort to reload? i think i do, i can’t leave things partially complete, i just don’t work that way.
but hey, maybe this has all happen so i can get back in touch with my inner-blogging self……..probably not, but it was a thought.