Raleigh's Crape Myrtle Festival

My pals Sean and Michael walking to the elegant Raleigh Convention Center. Is that a shimmery Crape Myrtle tree superimposed on the upper windows?

What is Crape Myrtle?

If you’re talking about the tree, it’s a dramatic one that grows throughout the south with ruffled flowers of pink and purple.

If you’re talking about the festival, it’s Raleigh’s annual fundraiser that takes place every summer concurrent with the Triangle Pride and Shades of Pride celebrations.

 The Raleigh hotties in attendance worked a mix of cocktail and casual looks. 

Over the past 30 years, the festival has raised tens of millions for North Carolina’s consenting sexual minorities and the HIV positive.

I attended the party last summer, when I visited my friend, politico Sean Kosofsky and his partner, Michael.

Anniversary cake realness

For just a couple bills, we were treated to hors d'oeuvres, slices of fanciful fondant cake, a drag show, fine art, and a silent auction.

 The ladies of "Legends," Raleigh's premiere drag show

Panels from the AIDS Quilt were on display especially for the 2010 event.

The 2011 gala’s theme is “Heroes: There’s One in Each of Us.” Hopefully, this will inspire some cosplay: Raleigh has some hunky mens!

You can purchase tickets here or at the July 30th event, which takes place at the Raleigh's Contemporary Art Museum.

Fort Collins Hot Air Balloon Adventure

A view of the Rockies from the Flights of Fancy basket

The ideal way to see the Rocky Mountains is from the air…preferably the hot air!

My day with Flights of Fancy begins at 5 am. I help owner Pam Fancy hook the balloon trailer up to her truck and drive to the launch site. The field, just East of Ft. Collins, Colorado faces a school and is dotted with prairie dog holes and brush.

Fancy boosting her flying machine with a shot of propane flame.

My job is to unpack the balloon, a silky funnel of motley panels, and then affix the vented dome, one Velcro tab at a time. Fancy and her assistant Curt lace it to the basket and load in the propane tanks.

Three in the basket, ready to ride!

A father/daughter couple from Oklahoma will join Pam and me in the basket. Curt will drive the truck and follow us from the ground.

Fancy has logged hundreds of hot air hours and flown in many of the top races and rendezvous in the West. Her knowledge of the Colorado Front Range is superb. She names many of the structures, mountains, and remote towns.

Our reflection upon the water. 

We glide over a fog hazed lake and catch the reflection of the balloon in the water. Fancy asks us if how high we’d like to go up. We want to go up all the way!

The high altitude makes me dizzy. Even though I grew up in Northern Colorado, I’m very susceptible to a head rush now. My lungs burn when I run here and I can’t ever seem to drink enough water.  Giddy breathlessness, however, seems ideal at 5000 feet.

A soft landing

We touch down after a half hour, in a nearby field. I asked Fancy if she ever has difficulty accessing landing sites. She said once an elderly man promised her she could land in his field and then forgot, but mostly people are glad to see her.

After all, a hot air balloon is like a giant invitation to party. 

We all got certificates to celebrate our achievement!

Once we’ve landed, Fancy breaks out champagne, mineral water, and pomegranate juice and we toast.

 Cheers!

I can’t wait to go up up and away again! 

Dollywood Adventure

signs beside the River Rampage ride indicate a recent anniversary for Dollywood

My friend Bryson picks me up at my Knoxville hostel to go to Dollywood. He has a congenital heart condition, so he gets in at a discount all summer long. And he goes three or four times each summer.

I am initially skeptical that reality-heavy Dollywood will sustain my interest beyond a curiousity go.

Consider how most people read a biography once but return to a good novel over and over. With other theme parks, a reliance on fictional characters, iconography, and familiar mythology creates this type of respite. The burdens of paying the rent and baking bread for breakfast can wait.

Dolly Parton’s life story, however, is different. It encourages visitors to consider their daily lives as opportunities to be heroic.

(clockwise from upper left): Dolly is not hiding her involvement; each ticket has her name and likeness on it. An iconic map makes navigating the many park villages easy. Dolly's home-on-wheels gives visitors a chance to see what life on the road is like for a country musician. The book train for Dolly's Imagination Library.

That understanding begins with Parton’s philanthropy. Beyond Bryson’s gate discount, Parton is the organizing force behind The Imagination Library – an international foundation that provides free books to pre-kindergarten youngsters.

I think about the books I purchased for my niece and nephew, “doesn’t everyone buy books for the children in their life.”

Well, yes, that’s kind of the point. Dolly has a ginormous life.

In nearby Sevierville, Parton established a center for women’s health services. She might as well be helping her neighbor pay for a mamogram.

Everyone I meet on my trip to Tennessee seems to have a story of how they have been personally touched by her benevolence. Her interests employ literally thousands of people in Nashville and Pigeon Forge alone.

Bryson has an interesting way of putting it: “Out here, there are three kinds of money: old money, new money, and Dolly money.”

Yours Truly and my pal Bryson in front of the Dollywood Express that chugs guests to the park's various corners

Among her greater extravagances are the park's Vegas-scale musicals. They run three times a day, simultaneous to one another.

Bryson and I snag air conditioned seats for “Dreamland Drive-In,” a jukebox revue and “Sha-Kon-O-Hey!” for which Parton wrote original music.

Parton’s journey takes on depth for me at the Smoky Mountain Home and Dolly Museum attractions.

The first is a replica of Parton’s two-room childhood home, decorated with treasures from the original.

The second is a museum filled with Parton clippings and displays.

I consider my father’s beginnings on a chicken farm in Oklahoma. How he moved to a house with modern conveniences with my great uncle in Colorado after returning to the US from war. Those were dramatic changes for him and he only lived with one sibling and one parent.

Dolly has eleven siblings!

My chance to feel tiny at one of the many photo op sites in Dollywood

Inside the museum, I read a piece on the opening of the park. People magazine inferred on their cover that Parton was a “hillbilly.”

While this term is now generally recognized as a slur, it's breezy deployment in 1986 must have had an awkward, private impact on the mountain dwellers among her fanbase.

Dollywood has the expected thrills and rides, too. Thunderhead, one of the world’s last wooden roller coasters is here. While the banks aren’t as sharp on wooden coasters, the vibration of the wood enhances the thrill of the steep, slow climbs and delicate freefalls.

My ride on Thunderhead is as smooth a ride as I’ve ever had on this type of frame, perhaps eclipsed only by the defunct Mister Twister which I rode as a child in my youth.

I enjoy the gravity defying loops of the more modern Tennessee Tornado, feeling my feet slip over my head and back again.

Bryson checks the ride site photographs after each ride. I always seem to be smiling broadly with my eyes closed.

(L to R): The grist mill from which delicious baking eminates! The Mystery Mine, a fire danger theme ride with a splash ending, and patrons strolling the Dollywood grounds.

There are eleven unique villages in the park. That doesn’t even include the separate admission water park next door.

I enjoy engaging the spaces between the villages, too.

It is cheering to hear gospel coming from a group performing in a gazebo and know it is musical celebration and not in the service of a fear-mongering liturgy.

At every walkway, Dolly’s hits whisper steadily over the park P.A. system. "Coat of Many Colors," "Nine to Five," and "Here You Come Again." She's been making them for so long, you forget there are so many.

A bald eagle winks his eye at the on-site preserve for non-releasable birds. The smell of cinnamon rolls wafts up beside the waterwheeled “grist mill."

Oh, yes, the park has a professional whittler and a participatory taffy pull.

Can this be happening? I am moved by a theme park!

Pollok Country Garden and Burrell Collection Adventure

Yours Truly relaxing after my walk to Pollok Country Gardens in Glasgow, Scotland

A six mile walk from the West End of Glasgow might seem distant for some, but I grew up against the Rocky Mountains. An absence of thin air, crag, or grade along the route means my trek to Pollok Country Park is relaxing and invigorating.

The Clyde Arc Bridge is a "winking" bridge; one that tilts on an ellipsis

I cross the handsome Clyde Arc Bridge to the opposite side of the river. Over the last two decades, Glaswegians built huge convention centers, office parks, and museums along the banks of the Clyde.

Further south of this divide, Indian and Pakistani immigrants enliven the red-brick Victorian townships. Foreign proprietors have claimed the spaces once belonging to Scotch dressmakers and tobacconists and dressed the windows with glittering saris and hookahs.

Above: the afternoon light filtered through the treetops at Pollok Country Park
Below: Scotland is home to 5 percent of the world's total mosses, making it the richest nation in terms of bryophytes. On this tree alone are 3 of its 1000 varieties.

At the edge of Lochinch, where the park is located, I observe how the highway gives into a thick conifer forest. I can barely extend an arm between the trunks of the thrity and forty foot trees. It’s the kind of forest that would have inspired me to draw stories in crayon on butcher paper when I was a child.

Highland cow and calf

I crash on a park bench of contemporary design carved from calcium hardened wood. On the path to my right, I spy a naturally felled wych elm sprouting ferns, moss, and mushrooms. I walk to my left, and highland cattle come into view.

The cows have just calved. There are four youngsters among the horn-and-shag faces, resting in the shade. I can feel how the air is still wet low to the ground even on this unusually warm day.

The White Cart River

Elsewhere in the park, the White Cart River sounds to me just like its namesake as the footsteps of joggers run past it like a team at a gallop.

The home of the Burrell Collection

The angular cottage I enter next is the Burrell Collection. Burrell was fascinated with the fine art of his time and befriended Rodin among others. Degas “The Rehearsal” is among the famous works Burrell collected. Many spaces in the mezzanine gallery are vacant as the curators lease works out for retrospectives.

Burrell rescued stained glass from deteriorating European cathedrals

Like other industrialists of the time, Burrell also used his wealth to preserve artifacts of the world’s great cultures that were threatened by exposure or neglect. Here, I can almost touch a hand-painted pane of stained glass from a demolished 12 th century cathedral. I see my reflection in Elizabethan armor polished and stacked upright.

A sculptural manuscript from the Burrell Collection

The curators permanently host Burrell’s pottery, sculpture and other fragments from Egypt, China, Japan, Greece, Rome, and Mesopotamia. Burrell’s interest is the only thread that connects them.

I imagine how his friends must have come to understand his perspective on his own life, hearing the story of his choice to acquire a statue of Egyptian revenge goddess Sehkmet, or how, in a market of illuminated manuscripts valued for their gold, he was drawn to the earthy alabaster carvings of a rare sculptural gospel.

One of the old study rooms at the Burrell

Near to the displays are the study rooms where visitors to the collection were once welcomed. Now, the elegant study rooms themselves are a display within the collection. I step in close to the velvet ropes and smell the carved, unfinished mahogany. The early wrought-iron electric lamps are still working!

Yours Truly beside of the carved mantlepieces at the Burrell Collection

Frequency Hopper Update and New Posts Coming Soon!

Yours Truly hugging a tree in the Queen Ann Garden of Stirling Castle in Stirling, Scotland

My tour of Northern England and Scotland winds up this week!

I've had a tremendous time. Most everyone has been super friendly and helpful.

A few points of order:

deltamagnet@yahoo.com or deltamagnet@facebook.com

- At this time I'm soliciting new adventures. If you are the representative of a travel bureau or own a business you would like me to visit, please email me.

- Presently, I have solid couch surfing offers from pals in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Tehama, Japan. These are my best leads for a 2012 international trip. Nearby B&Bs, upscale hostels, and unique housing situations: please ring me up! The doors are wide open and I'm in planning mode.

- I'm launching two new "ongoing series": Cafes I Have Known and Bookstores I Have Known. If your cafe or bookstore business would like to be featured in a future post, please let me know and I will arrange a visit when next I'm in your town.

- Below are some of the posts I'm organizing for the summer and fall.

I'll be folding in my promised Colorado, Wyoming, and Arizona posts also.

If you'd like a notification when a specific topic is posted, please email me and I will let you know when it is up...

Manchester, England

Salford Lads Club Smiths Room Quest (with video)

Newcastle, England

Segedunum and Hadrian’s Wall Adventure

Glasgow, Scotland

Tramway Hidden Gardens Adventure

Glasgow Necropolis Adventure

Pollok County Garden and Burrell Collection Adventure

Strathyre, Scotland

Right-of-Way to Rob Roy’s Grave Adventure (with video)

Ben Vane Hiking Adventure (with video)

Falls of Dochart and Killin Trail Adventure

Stirling, Scotland

Stirling Castle Adventure

Edinburgh, Scotland

Craigmilllar Castle Adventure

Arthur’s Seat Adventure (with video)

Egilsay, Scotland

Edible Egilsay Adventure

Nashville, Tennessee

Nashville Cycle Tour Adventure

The Columbia Viper and Superhero Tourism

Knoxville, Tennessee

Knoxville Noon Music

Pigeon Forge, Tennessee

Dollywood Adventure

Asheville, North Carolina

Linville Caverns Adventure

Black Mountain College Quest and Montreat Hiking Adventure

Carl Sandburg Connemara Farm Adventure

Raleigh, North Carolina

Crepe Myrtle Pride Celebration

University of North Carolina Greenbelt and Botanical Garden Adventure

St. Louis, Missouri

Going Up In The Gateway Arch

Thanks to all my readers for making these journeys so fun to pursue!

xxoo
Dale

Oban, Scotland McCaig's Tower Adventure

The proprietress of Strathyre's Rosebank House , Mal Dingle is driving. Her sister, my friend, Iona is in the passenger's seat.

We are talking about how there is very little professional tango dancing in London. Iona dances tango professionally and has difficulty finding European men who can keep up with her!

I'm in the back seat eating seasoned peanuts and copious amounts of fruit. If there is such a thing as a vegan garbage disposal, I'm probably it.

In the U.K., people drive on the opposite side of the road than Americans do. It means fewer accidents, although one waits much longer at traffic lights.

They also drive crazy fast on narrow roads here. That's what they get for translating everything into metrics!


At low tide in Oban, Scotland, the gulls frenzy picking at dulce and washed up sealife along the schist banks.

You can see McCaig's Tower at the top of the hill.

The hike up was steep but brief. Only about 15 minutes from the seaside.

McCaig built the tower to honor his family and employ Oban's stone masons during the winter months. The estates of both John McCaig and his widow were famously contested, leaving the tower we see today without its planned museum and sculpture garden.

From Oban, people ferry off to the islands of Mull and Lismore in the distance.

Iona is enjoying some oysters and crab here. Yes, they were excruciatingly fresh. I made contact with those-who-were-about-to-die in their baskets at the fish stand. Poor little guys!

In the U.S., salt water taffy is the ubiquitous seaside sweet. In Scotland, sugar mice fill that role.

Invented in Crieff by Gordon and Durward in 1954, sugar mice are especially popular at Christmas.

Tradition is that their tails should be made of string and not licorice, though the ones I saw didn't have tails at all.

Newcastle Castle Keep Adventure

Yours Truly inside the Newcastle Castle Keep

When I get a crack at a castle, I think of Marcello Mostriani, in La Dolce Vita, holding a candleabra, bounding through an Italian ruin. I think of loud laughter in acoustically perfect rooms.

The castles I know have steep, worn steps too small for any feet to fit on entirely. My movements within them are quiet and deliberate. On the turret stairs, I am always thinking about my feet, descending a fan of spiral stone wedges.

The stairs leading to the chapel and garrison rooms at Newcastle Keep

I typically engage in the type of adventure that moves fast. At Newcastle’s Keep, I know the adventure will be more like crossing a rope bridge or descending a crevasse.

When I see the blond face of the Keep, I interpret playful industry from the 12th century brickmasons.

These men suggested an elephant at rest where the old castle motte must have appeared like the hump of it’s back curled resting against the River Tyne.

Though few English had actually seen them, the "face" of the castle keep is consistent with artistic interpretations of elephants from Medieval times

Inside, I explore the garrison room, where men were jailed in irons. I trace the cool arches in the chapel and feel a warm shaft of light tickle my skin through cross-hatched window panes. The most favored and least cherished representatives of human nature came together on this floor.

The Keep chapel

I imagine the town under seize by the Scots, how the townspeople would gather in the Great Hall for protection, how they might receive an address from a representative of the Royal Family staying in the King or Queen’s chambers. I imagine the balcony lined with bow-drawn archers ready to the defense.

One of the four towers atop the Keep. Most can be entered via a crawlspace.

Some believe a stone in sentient, that it holds memories, and the intensity of the actors who touched it or passed can be felt within.

Modern Newcastle as seen from the Keep rooftop

But perhaps it is that, like stones, the people of Medieval times were durable beyond the softness of our age. Perhaps this legend is the crutch that enables our compassion for them, their fears and superstitions.

Edinburgh Elephant House Adventure

The entrance to Elephant House, a cafe just off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, Scotland. It is the birthplace of the Harry Potter books.

J.K. Rowling inspires me.

I knew she was all right when evangelicals began trying to ban her books in American libraries.

When her wealth began to rival that of the Queen of England, she became the hero of all writers.

The crowd inside the Elephant House. Table 10, Rowling's favorite, is frequently reserved.

We no longer have to apologize for spending long hours in solitude, or for fits of relative poverty. The cost-benefit analysis of our souls has been permanently silenced.

Edinburgh, Scotland is vividly Rowling’s inspiration. The Medieval roots of witchcraft, British class stratification, and the value of experiential education play themselves out daily in this landscape of castles, old trade streets, and universities.

Yours Truly and my friend budding Hungarian writer and translator Bence Molnar.

As the staff will share with you, Rowling never intended on renewing the writer’s relationship to the cafe. Elephant House was the only public place in Edinburgh she could keep her infant daughter from crying.

Children's drawings of elephants near the cafe counter.

Trophy cases in the cafe are arrayed with elephants: cut of onyx, carved of wood, stuffed with cotton. The music in the cafe is typically smooth jazz or bright, classical piano work.

Fan art, scribbled on napkins or bits of paper by children, is posted on a wall with Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling notices just to the left.

The picture windows at the back catch the south east side of Edinburgh Castle. You can also catch a sliver of Greyfriar’s Kirk graveyard.

Settling In at Strathyre's Rosebank House

The entrance to Rosebank House in Strathyre, Scotland

Strathyre’s Rosebank House proprietress Mal Dingle is picking me up in nearby Callander.

She’s 5’8” and hearty, gray hair elegantly fringing her face, delivering the anticipated accent without theatricality or irony.

Will she give into it? After decades of familiarity with Scotland? After leaving for art school in London, finding love and fortune and returning to funnel her life into B and B work mode?

Yours Truly and Mal Dingle

The abbreviated definite articles and the word “wee” emerge from her with sincerity. Her love of Scotland and for looking after people is genuine. She txts me twice as my bus approaches it’s destination. When I disembark, she wants to know how I am “getting on.”

“It is so beautiful up here,” I say, “I can’t stop smiling.”

A view of the River Balvag from Rosebank House

I do not intend to come to Scotland. My international invitations for 2011 include an artist’s colony and English-only dude ranch in Japan, some gay-owned B and Bs in Germany, and a sober, vegan commune off the coast of Vancouver.

Somehow, a guy from the Scottish travel board and a college classmate prevail upon me. Mal invites me to stay in the Forest Suite while her sister, my Facebook friend, is also visiting. The last pieces of the journey come together as I am boarding my flight from SFO.

The banks of the River Balvag

It’s an unusually sunny two weeks. No one can remember the weather being this clear for so long. “Did you bring it with you?” Mal asks.

It is probably a good thing the Scots can only count on a few hours of cloudbreak a day: the sun is brighter up here.

The clarity of the sun, the intense light, generates, to my eye, greater color and detail. I tromp through gorse and under budding rowan in the sun. In the shade, my open hands brush against ferns, mosses, lichens, and mushrooms. My eyes are fully dialated: I’m tripping on nature.

The garden behind Rosebank House in Strathyre

Across from Rosebank, cyclists tour and walkers stroll either side of the River Balvag. Mal’s Mountain Room overlooks both paths.

The Rose Room, Garden Room, and Forest Room (where I am booked) look onto a garden of red azaela and other bedding plants. There is a cast iron picnic area for socializing and a quaint log cabin for solitude.

(above top to bottom)

The spacious Forest Suite, huge key fobs won't get lost while you recreate, a view of the village from the bathroom skylight.

In inclement hours, guests can get close to the elements from the comfort of a glassed in gazebo on the second floor. Alternatively, Rosebankers can tipple a few in the comfy lounge fully distracted by DVDs, television, wi-fi, books, or games.

This weekend, I have the pleasure of meeting two of Mal’s first customers. Roger comes back frequently. It is typical for him to bring three of his pals from Yorkshire. William liked his inital stay at Rosebank so much, he basically moved in, so Mal always has at least one paying guest, like a lucky charm.

There can be a “wee” bit of confusion in the marketplace. Mal reports of at least five B&Bs named Rosebank House here in Scotland. This is the only Rosebank in Strathyre, however, and certainly the only one where Mal’s touch is evident.

The global hugback can be felt in pages of the guest book. I note visitors from South Africa, Florida, The Netherlands, and Japan on a single page. And daily guests from the U.K. are about mingling in the garden, the lounge, or at the breakfast table.

Vegan haggis: not an oxymoron!

My days at Rosebank begin with a breakfast of vegan haggis, toast, juice, fried mushrooms and tomatoes. If the weather holds, I plan a hike up a Munro, Corbett, or a Graham. When it rains, Mal approaches me with suggestions for indoor activity day trips. Perth for shopping, Stirling for history.

My nights are filled with games of Skat, quiet reading, and coffee-fueled chats. Mal says many of their guests become familiar friends. I look forward to my return as one of that number.

Yours Truly in the garden at Rosebank House