We were thankful to have another year with all four of us having a full week off for Thanksgiving. This year we decided to use the time by taking a trip up to Tahoe, on our way to Eric's aunt's house for Thanksgiving.
Our route north was on the eastern side of the Sierras, which is an area the kids have never been and Eric and I have seen just a little.
The older I get, the more I notice the beauty of the desert. Also, the more I enjoy its beauty, the more I feel the need to help my kids see its beauty. Lucky kids. I think they're starting to appreciate it.
When we got going up the 395, there was clearly a wildfire in the mountains because it got dark and the sun looked reddish.
Our big stop of the first day was Manzanar, the Japanese Relocation Center from World War II. With all of the troubling talk about how some people in the US feel we should deal with immigrants and people of the Muslim religion, I felt it was especially important to see what happened when our country tried to keep us "safe" from a group of people.
What a bleak place. I can only imagine how those American citizens felt being torn from their normal lives and sent to a place like Manzanar.
There is a pretty interesting museum with a good video, but after the video we didn't have much time for the museum because visitor hours were short for November and we wanted to see the buildings on the site.
Our first stop was to see an example of the barracks where the people spent about three years. The first place we visited was a barrack that was set up to show how life looked for them in the first part of their stay.
A second barrack was set up to look like it did later during the interment, when the people we able to get drywall for the walls and some basic flooring to cover the floorboards, to make the shared barracks look a little more like a home.
We also visited the mess hall where they ate their meals. It was noted many times in the visit that the mess halls contributed to the eroding of families, because at Manzanar families didn't eat meals together at a table in their home but in a communal way.
After visiting two barracks and the mess hall, we got in our car and drove the road around the camp.
One stop was at Merritt Park, which was a park created within the camp by the people living at Manzanar. Years ago I had read that the owners of the San Gabriel Nursery were sent to internment camps (although that family was sent to the Gila River camp in Arizona), so I could easily imagine Japanese families coming together to create beauty in such a rough (and windy) place. The image in my mind for Merritt Park looks something like the grounds of the San Gabriel nursery or parts of Descanso Garden (San Gabriel Nursery supplied many of the plants at Descanso Garden). Today, you can see the hardscape of the garden, including the ponds and bridges.
As the sun set behind the Sierras, we visited the cemetery and monument that remembers the people who lived and died at Manzanar.
Our final stop was at the sign and front gate for the camp. In the movie at the museum, it talked about how the Japanese people had been told that they were being sent to the camp to be kept safe but realized once they got to the camp that the towers were looking into the camp and they were the ones being watched and kept inside.
Wow. Sorry. That place is heavy. We were really grateful to have visited it and have some really good discussions related to our visit.
We spent the night at a motel in Bishop, which meant that we were able to have breakfast at Schat's Bakery. We picked up breakfast treats, in addition to a loaf of Sheepherder bread.
The view from the gas station on the north end of Bishop:
Our next stop was Mono Lake. We checked out the visitors center before stopping at two places to get a closer view of the lake and its tufa (rock formations). The way the color of the lake seemed to change was fascinating to me.
From Mono Lake we used our GPS to drive to Bodie State Historic Park. We had heard that the road to Bodie was tough but realized at some point in our 10 mile drive on a bad rocky, dirt road that we had taken an even worse road than we expected. Our poor Venza survived, but it was tough.
Bodie is an old gold-mining "ghost town." It is amazing to see inside homes and businesses that people just "up and left." People left nearly everything behind. Furniture. Dishes. Tools.
As a visitor to Bodie, you pay a fee in an envelope ($18 for us four, I believe), and you are free to explore the place. Sometimes you can walk into the buildings but more often you just look in the windows.
The sky was clear and blue, but gosh it was windy and cold there! Carter was the only one of us without glasses. Despite looking a bit silly, he was happy to wear mine at times to get a break from dust being blown into his eyes. I really hate when weather keeps you from truly enjoying a place (it happened to Eric and me in Vesuvius but that time it was hot, humid, and miserable).
The school
When we weren't freezing, it was a pretty neat place to explore.
After Bodie, we continued up the 395 until we took a cut-off to Tahoe. Along the way we drove through some gentle snow, which thoroughly delighted the kids, and were glad to make the drive to our hotel in South Lake Tahoe without having to put chains on the car.
Next up... Lake Tahoe!
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