Off the Beaten Path: Aviero

Aviero Portugal (click/tap to enlarge),

is off the beaten tourist track.

Portuguese people often vacation here.

It is the Venice of Portugal, replete with canals and gondolas,

but quieter and more peaceful.

There are old Azulejos tiles all over Aviero,

many depicting the town itself.

Except for cars,

and wonderful street art, Aviero hasn’t changed much from the scenes depicted in the old tiles.

Cheers to you from peaceful Aviero~

Note: My new theme! WordPress tech support was really helpful in sorting out many of the aforementioned blog problems. So thank you WordPress support. You are appreciated!

Off The Beaten Path: Kotor

Church of St. Nicholas,

Kotor, Montenegro.

My favorite places,

are less traveled and uncrowded.

Kotor is exactly such a place. It is charming, unspoiled and an explorers paradise.

Kotor is one of the best preserved medieval old towns in the Adriatic.

It is a desiginated as two separate Unesco World Heritage Sites. First, for it’s buildings of medieval significance, and secondly for it’s Venetian defensive structures built at the height of Venetian power in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Cheers to you from the first in a series of ‘Off the Beaten Path Places’ in our small world~

A Riot of Spring~

In rain soaked (tap to enlarge),

Southern California.

The Carlsbad Ranuculus Fields,

are a blooming,

glory.

Spring is dancing,

blooms are bursting,

plants are happy,

and birds are singing!

Sending California’s blooming beauties to you,

with Cheers and Hopes for Happy Spring ~

Peace & Merry Christmas To You~

Venice Italy

Strasbourg France

Barcelona Spain

Melk Austria

Cinque Terre Italy

Lisbon Portugal

Strasbourg France

St. Petersburg Russia

Vienna Austria

Dubrovnik Croatia

Santorini Greece

Budapest Hungary

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to you from our fragile, precious world~

North Rim~

Aspens with their new summer leaves in the Kaibab Forest.

Sunlit view from the North Rim. (Click to enlarge and see The Colorado River.)

Landscape near Lee’s Ferry.

The Colorado.

Horseshoe Bend.

We entered here for a seven day raft trip when the kids were younger. I will never forget the sound of the rockslides in Marble Canyon at night,

or the lizards doing pushups by my sleeping bag when I woke in the morning.

Cheers to you from the resident chuckwalla~

Rock Talk~

This is Picture Canyon in Arizona.

The canyon is covered in petroglyphs,

that are 800-1300 years old.

The oldest petroglyphs are geometric in nature.

Later rock art depicts animals, rivers, planets and human figures.

This is The Mojave Desert in the southwestern US,

and it is where Jim and I went hunting for hidden petroglyphs.

There is historical rock art all over the southwestern United States. Most thought to be 800 to 1000 years old. Much of it hidden and unpublicized. I even found some at The Holler.

Here is the blogger that led us here. I have no idea who he is, but, as we all know, bloggers are precious resources:

https://harryhelmsblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/petroglyphs-of-kelbaker-road-california.html?m=0

Below are some links to my prior posts about more amazing southwestern pictographs and petroglyphs, much of it quite older:

Cheers to you from The Talking Rocks of the Southwest~

Falls Creek Sacred Site~

Falls Creek, in southwest Colorado, is one of the most important ancient sites in the southwest. It was once a village and had burial sites.

It contained mummified remains of individuals, and has antiquities from the ancestral pueblo basket maker period from 1500-2000 years ago.

Look carefully to the right, below the waterfall and under the overhang (tap to enlarge).

You can see more here.

This sacred site was heavily plundered in the 1930’s and it is now protected, with no public access. It is under the protection of the tribal nations who are descendants of the original occupants.

I am not an archeologist. I am a psychotherapist by training. It is hard to get information on the place and it is difficult to find. Still my husband and I were curious to see what we could, without trespassing or violating the site. This is as close as we could ethically get, and these are full zoom shots. Our interest was piqued by the objects in the lower right quadrant under the overhang (enlarge to see better).

For more on this fascinating place check out the following two links:

https://www.mail-archive.com/nativenews@mlists.net/msg03828.html

If anyone reading this has more knowledge about Falls Creek, and would like to share it, I would be eager to pass on the information.

Cheers to you from the mysterious and sacred Falls Creek~

Walnut Canyon National Monument~

Southeast of Flagstaff Arizona (click to enlarge and spot the cliff dwellings hidden in the rock face),

on a plateau,

is a six hundred foot deep canyon,

carved by Walnut Creek, a stream that flows east into The Grand Canyon.

Walnut canyon has been occupied by people for thousands of years.

The first permanent residents,

who occupied the region from CE 600- 1400,

left approximately 800 remaining structures.

We visited here as part of an exploration of lesser visited, and even unpublicized cultural sites in the American Southwest. In the next few posts I will show you some of what we have found. But our explorations are still ongoing. It becomes quite addictive finding sites that aren’t widely known. We even found some at The Holler.

For more about Walnut Canyon see:

https://www.nps.gov/waca/learn/historyculture/people.htm