Happy Thanksgiving

It's snowing here. Ice and steep hills are not a good mix -- a problem Midland doesn't have.

Midland Trail

It doesn't take long after I think I've made the very last posting on this blog that something else comes up. In this instance I headed out last week for a trip with stops in West Virginia and Virginia followed by a week in Atlanta. While driving from West Virginia to speak at a conference in Virginia, I started seeing freeway signs touting "Midland Trail."

I had seen "Midland Trail" on maps before I left but had pressing issues to put to bed before departure so I didn't investigate. But seeing the name on freeway signs made me take note -- and hassle with pulling out the "big" camera to snap a picture in passing, just for my records if nothing else.

Today, just returned from that trip (home at 1:30 AM PST), I got time to look up "Midland Trail" online. Of course, Midland is a popular name for towns, cities and regions -- there's even a Midland less than an hour's drive south of here. though it might just be a "district" of Tacoma.

But adding "Trail" promised something else, something historical. And so it is! Not an old pioneer trail as I had thought, such as the Oregon Trail (which ends three hours south of here), but a national auto trail, possibly the first transcontinental auto trail, ca 1913, from D.C. to L.A.

Back East Route 60 follows much of the old Midland Trail, it turns out. In a way reminiscent of Route 66, part of which I walked in Albuquerque during a conference this summer, and another part in Kingman AZ which I encountered in a break from a conference in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, and which I will see again this January.

None of which has anything to do with Midland MI other than the name Midland. Though if I'd not been a Midlander I would probably never have encountered this little bit of history.

Apples and Autumn

On some flight from Seattle earlier this year, my seatmate was in the apple distribution business. I had to ask him which were better in his opinion: Michigan or Washington apples? He put it slightly to Washington. I remain unconvinced, though it's been decades since I've had a Michigan apple. (Both are better than the New Zealand apples we get here -- a bit mealy-tasting.)

In any event, for me autumn will always be associated with apples, in so many ways. Trips out to someplace forgotten (the name "Apple Mountain" sticks in my mind, can anyone confirm?) where one could get fresh apple cider and other apple products, I think, while watching the press. The tradition sort of continues here with a "farm" in Woodinville that also sells fresh cider this time of year. Kathy says they use a special variety of apple developed right here -- whatever the case, it's good.

And as it gets colder and nearer winter another memory comes forward: the heady smell of bushel baskets of apples on the Hensons' enclosed back porch. Sadly their house on Ashman Street (at Nelson) is gone now, along with all the apple trees we kids played in, from the huge old tree out front to the small young trees, some barely large enough to climb in. I really wonder about that property -- it doesn't seem to be a park though it's kept. Perhaps the current owners of the Caldwell and Putnam houses (to the north) own it now?

And one more memory I can barely place: a church youth group party in 1967 where, among other things, we bobbed for apples. I don't remember where it was, other than in somebody's basement, but I'm guessing the Fayerweathers'. I seem to remember a hayride along with it, but that's stretching things.