Blue Ridge Music Center, a spot on the Blue Ridge Parkway, Galax VA. June 24, 2014

After settling in at the Wal Mart, and making several stops in downtown Galax, I went on over to the Blue Ridge Music Center on the Parkway itself.  

The GPS took me a goofy way to the Center, down a dirt road for nearly 2 miles, the "back way", but I managed to find it, in a misting rain.   The Center is a fairly newer building dedicated to telling the history of Bluegrass and Mountain music, and does an excellent job.    While I was there, there were two fellows playing for a very small crowd out in the building, would have liked to have sit in, but was on a schedule.   

One of the interior displays:

Didn't know the Gibson company made banjos and mandolins.....

And, got the stamp 

June 12th Revisit to Yellowstone, this time on the East side....

We had a massive trip plan change this morning, but I realized I still would be able to get to the East Side of Yellowstone Park, so I was able to do that today, and get 3 stamps and a pin and a couple of nice postcards.  

Rather than continue on up to Reno, I went to the Mono Lake NFS Visitor Center as planned, then on into Yellowstone, on the Tioga Road.  What a sight that was!

Mono Lake VC 

I entered the park at the Tioga Pass Entrance station, and then drove on down to the Tuolumne Meadows VC.  

June 11th Park 281- Manzanar NHS

This was a Japanese Relocation Camp during the War.  One of the larger ones.  It has one of the better museums and displays that I have visited.  It is also a National Historic Site.

June 11th Park 282 Devil's Postpile NM Mammoth Lakes, California

Date of visit:  June 11, 2014.

The park was actually pretty much just opening for the season, and the Ranger Station location was not opening until this Saturday.  

June 7th Additional Visit to Old Spanish Trail Avila Adobe in Downtown Los Angeles

We dropped into central downtown LA to stop at the Adobe Avila for a Spanish Trail stamp.

The Avila Adobe was built in 1818 by Francisco Avila and has the distinction of being the oldest standing residence in Los Angeles, California. It is located in the paseo of historical Olvera Street, a part of Los Angeles Plaza Historic District, a California State Historic Park. The building itself is registered as California Historical Landmark #145 while the entire historic district is both listed on the National Register of Historic Places and as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.
The Plaza is the third location of the original Spanish settlement El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Ángeles sobre el Río Porciúncula, the first two having been washed out by flooding from the swollen Río Porciúncula (Los Angeles River). The Avila Adobe was one of the settlement's first houses to share street frontage in the Pueblo de Los Angeles of Spanish colonial Alta California.
The walls of the Avila Adobe are 2.5–3 feet (0.76–0.91 m) thick and are built from sun-baked adobe bricks. The original ceilings were 15 feet (4.6 m) high and supported by beams of cottonwood, which was available along the banks of the Los Angeles River. Though the roof appears slanted today, the original roof was flat. Tar (Spanish: brea) was brought up from the La Brea Tar Pits, located near the north boundary line of Avila's Rancho Las Cienegas. The tar was mixed with rocks and horsehair, a common binder in exterior building material, and applied to beams of the roof as a sealant from inclement weather.
The original floor of the Avila adobe was hard-as-concrete compacted earth. which was swept several times a day to keep the surface smooth and free from loose soil. (Dirt floors were common among most early adobes.) In later years, varnished wood planks were used as flooring.
The original structure was nearly twice as long as it now appears and was "L"-shaped with a wing that extended nearly to the center of Olvera Street. The rear of the house had a long porch facing the patio. Francisco tended a garden and a vineyard in the rear courtyard. The nearby Zanja Madre (literally "Mother Ditch") was a main water aqueduct and irrigation ditch that brought water down to the Pueblo from the Los Angeles River and was close enough to the adobe for Francisco Avila to avail himself. Avila eventually added a wooden veranda and steps to the front of the adobe.

June 7 Another De Anza Trail visit Mission San Gabriel

We worked our way over to the Mission, where there was a large Hispanic Wedding underway, lots of pretty dresses and sharp looking young men in tuxes.  This is a revisit to a stop on the Trail.  

San Gabriel is one of the string of 21 Missions founded by the Catholics back in the day and is an active Church today.  

Mission San Gabriel was founded on September 8, 1771 by Father Junipero Serra. The planned site for the Mission was along the banks of the Río de los Temblores (the River of the Earthquakes—the Santa Ana River). The priests chose an alternate site on a fertile plain located directly alongside the Rio Hondo in the Whittier Narrows.^[11] The site of the Misión Vieja (or "Old Mission") is located near the intersection of San Gabriel Boulevard and Lincoln Avenue in Montebello, California (known to the natives as Shevaanga). In 1776, a flash flood destroyed much of the crops and ruined the Mission complex, which was subsequently relocated five miles closer to the mountains in present-day San Gabriel (the native settlement of 'Iisanchanga). The Mission is the base from which the pueblo that became the city of Los Angeles was sent. On December 9, 1812 (the "Feast Day of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin"), a series of massive earthquakes shook Southern California. The 1812 Wrightwood earthquake caused the three-bell campanario, located adjacent to the chapel's east façade, to collapse. A larger, six-bell structure was subsequently constructed at the far end of the capilla. While no pictorial record exists to document what the original structure looked like, architectural historian Rexford Newcomb deduced the design and published a depiction in his 1916 work The Franciscan Mission Architecture of Alta California.

Legend has it that the founding expedition was confronted by a large group of native Tongva peoples whose intention was to drive the strangers away. One of the padres laid a painting of "Our Lady of Sorrows" on the ground for all to see, whereupon the natives, designated by the settlers as the Gabrieliños, immediately made peace with the missionaries, because they were so moved by the painting's beauty.^[1] Today the 300-year-old work hangs in front of and slightly to the left of the old high altar and reredos in the Mission's sanctuary.

A large stone cross stands in the center of the campo santo (cemetery), first consecrated in 1778 and then again on January 29, 1939 by the Los Angeles Archbishop John Cantwell. It serves as the final resting place for some 6,000 "neophytes;" a small stone marker denotes the gravesite of José de Los Santos, the last American Indian to be buried on the grounds, at the age of 101 in February 1921. Also interred at the Mission are the bodies of numerous Franciscan fathers who died during their time of service, as well as the remains of Reverend Raymond Catalan, C.M.F., who undertook the restoration of the Mission's gardens. Entombed at the foot of the altar are the remains of eight Franciscan priests (listed in order of interment): Father Miguel Sánchez, Father Antonio Cruzado, Father Francisco Dumetz, Father Roman Ulibarri, Father Joaquin P. Nuez, Father Gerónimo Boscana, Father José Bernardo Sánchez, and Father Blas Ordaz. Buried among the padres is centenarian Eulalia Perez de Guillén Mariné, the "keeper of the keys" under Spanish rule; her grave is marked by a bench dedicated in her memory.

Mission San Gabriel Arcángel circa 1900. The trail in the foreground is part of the original El Camino Real.

Well over 25,000 baptisms were conducted at San Gabriel between 1771 and 1834, making it the most prolific in the mission chain. In its heyday it furnished food and supplies to settlements and other missions throughout California. A majority of the Mission structures fell into ruins after it was secularized in November 1834. The once-extensive vineyards were falling to decay, with fences broken down and animals roaming freely through it.^[12]

The Mission's chapel functioned as a parish church for the City of San Gabriel from 1862 until 1908, when the Claretian Missionary Fathers came to San Gabriel and began the job of rebuilding and restoring the Mission. On October 1, 1987 the Whittier Narrows Earthquake damaged the property. A significant portion of the original complex has since been restored.

June 7 Juan Bautistia de Anza National Historic Trail - Griffith Park Los Angeles

We then cut over to the famous Griffith Park section of Los Angeles, to stop by the 
Ranger Station to get a stamp for the De Anza Trail.   There are probably 25 or more stops in California for this trail and we'll be getting to lots of them on the trip... A revisit for this trail.  

Some information on Griffith Park:

Griffith Park is a large municipal park at the eastern end of the Santa Monica Mountains in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. The park covers 4,310 acres of land, making it one of the largest urban parks in North America.

Griffith Park was the busiest destination in Los Angeles for on-location filming in 2011, with 346 production days, according to a FilmL.A. survey. Projects included the TV shows Criminal Minds and The Closer.^[9]

With its wide variety of scenes and close proximity to Hollywood and Burbank, many different production crews have found new ways and angles to film the same spots and make them look different. One would be hard pressed to find a spot in Griffith Park which has not been filmed or taped.

The Griffith Observatory, which sits atop the southern slope of Mount Hollywood, was featured prominently in the 1955 classic Rebel Without a Cause. A bronze bust of the film's star James Dean is on the grounds just outside the dome. Other movies filmed here include The Terminator (1984), Disney's The Rocketeer (1991), Stephen Sommer's 2004 film Van Helsing, The Majestic (2001), and Yes Man (2008). The area of the park around the Observatory also appears as a location in the role-playing video game Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, which is set in Los Angeles.

Griffith Park has many other locations familiar to moviegoers. It was used as a location in the first two Back to the Future movies. In the first movie (released in 1985) it was used for Marty McFly's starting point when accelerating to 88 mph (142 km/h) in the film's climax, and in the second movie (released in 1989) it was used for the "River Road Tunnel" scene when Marty was trying to get the almanac back from Biff Tannen. The same tunnel was used as the entrance to Toontown in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). The park was also featured in the Robert Altman movie Short Cuts (1993).

A sampling of television shows filmed here includes the Nickelodeon show Salute Your Shorts and an episode of Remington Steele in which Laura Holt is trying to evade the police. The park was also the location for Adam Lambert's music video for his single, "If I Had You". Griffith Park and Griffith Observatory are significant in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Future's End" (originally aired November 6, 1996). The crew are thrown into the past and Griffith Observatory discovers Voyager. The tunnel was also used in the 1960s spy television series Mission: Impossible.

In John Rechy's novel City of Night and non-fiction book The Sexual Outlaw, Griffith Park is the scene of gay pick-ups and public sex as well as numerous gay bashings and violence from the LAPD in the 1960s and 1970s. It is the scene of similar activities in several novels by James Ellroy.

Bronson Canyon, aka Bronson Caves, is a popular location for motion picture and television filming, especially of western and science fiction low-budget films, including Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). The site was also used as the location for the climactic scene in John Ford's classic 1956 western, The Searchers. The scene includes John Wayne cornering his niece, Debbie (Natalie Wood), in one of the caves with the apparent intent of killing her. He relents at the last moment, however and, in the film's most famous shot, picks her up in his arms and turns to carry her back home. Many fans of the film are startled by the revelation that this scene was actually filmed in urban Los Angeles, probably due to how well the shot is integrated into the rest of the picture's location scenery. The craggy site of an old quarry, a tunnel in this canyon was also used as the entrance to the Batcave in the opening sequence of the 1960s Batman television series, and in numerous other shows. The natural "cave" walls are preserved by the many layers of paint used to make them look like rock

June 7 Santa Monica Mountains NRA California

After we left LAX we got our rental car, and headed out and up into the mountains around Los Angeles to the Sooky Goldman/William O. Douglas Visitor Center for the Santa Monica Mountains NRA.    It was in the Franklin Canyon area of the park. Pretty drive up into the Beverly Hills area, sadly, we hadn't unpacked our camera, so you'll have to take my word for it that it was an interesting and pretty drive. The Visitor Center had some nice exhibits about the local wildlife- got the stamp and a couple of postcards and a sticker....

This is a revisit, as I had been to two other stamping locations for this park.