This past Sunday we visited Girona and Figueres, Spain.
Girona is a city in Spain’s northeastern Catalonia region, beside the River Onyar. It’s known for its medieval architecture, walled Old Quarter (Barri Vell) and the Roman remains of the Força Vella fortress. Landscaped gardens line the Passeig Arqueològic, a walkway following the Old Quarter’s medieval walls, which include watchtowers with sweeping views.
I realized a few weeks ago that I had not completed editing and processing my photos from our trip to Michigan in July. I finished them up a few days ago and have posted a gallery on my Adobe Portfolio page.
We spent a few days in the Port Huron area, staying a bit south in the town of St. Clair. It was our first time in that area, and gave a chance to catch up with Mark Graf that I posted about earlier. While in St. Clair we managed to spend some time in Port Huron, exploring the town, taking a boat cruise on the St. Clair River and visiting the Thomas Edison Depot Museum.
Readers of an Edison biography might remember that Thomas Edison lived in Port Huron during his early years, and as a 12 year old got his entrepreneurial start selling newspapers and confections on the train from Grand Trunk to Detroit. The railroad depot in Port Huron houses the Thomas Edison Depot Museum.
An interesting thing about the St. Clair River is that it marks the boundary between the United States and Canada. We realized that when we were looking across the river we were looking at Canada! And our phones would occasionally welcome us to Canada also! 😉
As it happened, we were in Port Huron during the lead up to the annual Blue Water Festival, so things were starting to get a bit busy. We managed to get in and out of town during the day and before the start of festivities without a lot of traffic issues, although a boat parade on one of the evenings would have been fun to see.
Overall Port Huron is a nice town on the water with plenty of things to see and do.
After one day in Fredericksburg, Kathy & I decided we had seen enough cowboy art and turquoise jewelry, the wineries were busy and charged more for tastings than for a bottle of wine, so we stopped by the visitor center to see what else we might do. The woman there mentioned a driving tour of one room school houses in Gillespie County, the area surrounding Fredericksburg.
Better than I can tell it, here is a bit of history about the schools from The Friends of Gillespie County Country Schools:
As many as 44 rural schools were in operation around Fredericksburg, the county seat of Gillespie County, in the early 20th century. German immigrants had poured into the area that became known as the Texas Hill Country in the mid to late 1800’s, starting with the settlement of New Braunfels in 1845 and Fredericksburg in 1846. As families moved onto land more distant from town, the earliest rural educational efforts normally involved hiring a teacher to educate the children in private
homes.
Eventually land was donated by a family in the area and a community school was built taking names descriptive of nearby natural landmarks such as Cave Creek, Crabapple, Pecan Creek or Lower South Grape Creek. The German heritage of Gillespie County is evident in other names like Luckenbach, Meusebach, Rheingold and Nebgen.
The Gilmer-Aikin Law of 1949 resulted in the consolidation of most rural schools in Texas, bringing a close to this era of public education. Remarkably, the main buildings at only two of the 44 rural schools in Gillespie County were demolished over the decades. In the 1950’s, community clubs were organized and maintained some of the rural school properties in Gillespie County using their own funds, even though they were owned by the Fredericksburg Independent School District (FISD).
Short histories of the schools can be obtained at the Visitor Information Center in Fredericksburg, located at 302 East Austin Street, at each school and on our website: www.historicschools.org
The tour resulted in a very nice day, and quite a collection of interesting, albeit very documentary, photographs. It’s ultimately the way we prefer to spend our time, rather than trudging up and down the main street in a town, wandering through shops with no intention or interest in buying. When there is a bakery or ice cream shop, however…. 😉
We’re off to Ohio in a few days in hopes of catching the eclipse. I do plan to take some pictures, but not of the eclipse. I just want to watch it myself and let those with the patience and proper equipment make photos I can see later. I do hope to get lots of pictures of people wearing those awesome glasses, though! 🙂
After our stop in Shiner we arrived in Fredericksburg, where we stayed for a few days before heading east toward Florida. The draw for Fredericksburg is that it is in the heart of Texas wine country. We drove through Fredericksburg on a previous trip but only spent one night. Ironically, despite being in the middle of wine country we didn’t visit any wineries! We did manage to drink a bit of Texas wine, did a little shopping and some sightseeing.
I was really taken with the public library. Housed in the former Gillespie County Courthouse that was built in 1881-1882 and used until 1939, the building was subsequently converted to the current use as the library. The limestone exterior, high ceilings and wooden trim are a reminder of the days of fine craftsmanship. The library even has a card catalog, although the drawers are empty now.
The town of Fredericksburg is like a lot of small towns these days, just with a Texas twist. Instead of antiques and country crafts there is cowboy art and turquoise jewelry. Lots of interesting restaurants, though. We had several really nice meals during our stay.
We stayed in a really cool hotel located at the Gillespie County Airport. Named the Hangar Hotel, it is styled after a WWI aircraft hanger, complete with an Officer’s Club, the name of the lounge. It was fun watching all the planes coming and going, and made for some interesting photography.
On our journey across Texas we made a quick stop in Shiner, Texas to visit the K. Spoetzl Brewery, home of Shiner Beer. We had some gen-u-ine Texas brisket, toured the brewery and had some Shiner Beer before heading off into wine country.
The Spoetzl Brewery started in 1909. It was originally named The Shiner Brewing Association (SBA) and was founded by German and Czech immigrants who had settled around the central Texas town of Shiner. Unable to find the type of beer they had known in their home countries, they decided to brew their own. It is the oldest independent brewery in Texas and one of the oldest independent breweries in the U.S.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the brewery’s Shiner Premium Beer and Shiner Bock accounted for less than 1% of the Texas beer market. In 1983, Spoetzl produced 60,000 US beer barrels of beer; in 1990, only 36,000 US beer barrels. Sales improved after Carlos Alvarez of San Antonio acquired the brewery in 1989. Production grew to 100,000 US beer barrels in 1994, and over the next 10 years production nearly tripled. The company now has 120 employees and as of 2012 it was the fourth-largest craft brewery in the United States.
It was a good visit, and some of the Amber Bock even made it home for us to share with our friends, neighbors and family! 😉
We made an overnight stop in Columbus, GA, a former mill town on the Chattahoochee River along the border with Alabama. The Eagle & Phenix Mills Buildings have been converted into apartments and condominiums, and much of the downtown area has become a dining and entertainment area.
We spent only a brief amount of time in Columbus, but on the morning of our departure I managed to do a little photography on the way to and from breakfast.
One of the notable features of Passau is the many narrow alleyways, with cobblestones painted to direct visitors to artists’ studios. Many of the shops were closed at the time of our visit due to the artists being on holiday, but the alleys themselves were interesting to explore.
I’m several days behind in postcards, but have posted some (way too many!) unedited photos to an Adobe gallery. We start for home at 0 Dark 30 tomorrow, so I’ll be processing photos once we’re home and sitting at a large screen.
We made a lunch stop in Regensburg, Germany enroute to our ship. This was a nice view of the Danube through a portal. Weather is chilly but sunny so far.
I had the perfect opportunity to photograph the sunset behind the Portage Canal Lift Bridge in Houghton (pronounced HOE-tun) Michigan. Once again the clouds cooperated, and even though there were a few raindrops around, it was a pretty nice scene.