Worldtravel

Terri Ann Yates and Vern Campbell pose for a photo after exchanging vows in a Cherokee-style wedding Saturday in Mingo Creek Park, Pa. Photography was prohibited during the ceremony.

By Scott Beveridge

EIGHTY FOUR, Pa. – A fire is set in a sacred pit at the center of a large roped-off circle as a Cherokee-style wedding party awaits the blessings of an Indian priestess.

The woman who has taken the name Spotted Feather uses smoke and a large feather to bless nearly 30 people Saturday before they proceed to the fire, where Mon Valley, Pa., residents Terri Ann Yates and Vern Campbell will join hands in marriage.

A boy about 4 years old sulks appearing unwilling to participate while wearing store-bought Indian costumes. Campbell, though, is dressed in expensive white buckskins. The location of the bride remains secret as the women lead the party to the fire.

Spotted Feather then escorts the groom to join them with a blue blanket draped over one arm and marching, Indian-style, to the sound of recorded drums blaring from a loudspeaker.

The couple will be married in Washington County’s Mingo Creek Park in a blanket ceremony, one of the the oldest and most-beloved traditions of the Cherokee Nation. The ceremony offers them two blue blankets to represent the their past lives before they are wrapped together in one white blanket to represent newly-found happiness.

Vern Campbell apparently has some Cherokee blood in his ancestry while his new bride does not. Yet they selected this style of ceremony because they seek to embrace Indian traditions that include respecting the earth and its living creatures.

As the ceremony proceeds, a small group of males briefly leave the circle and walk to the woods where they will find the bride hiding behind a tree. They return to the circle with Yates dressed in an ornate white buckskin dress and hiding her face behind a bouquet of flowers.

At face value, the ceremony is quite unusual and nothing that waspish Americans are accustomed to witnessing. But at its core, the wedding is every bit as traditional as those in a Presbyterian Church where newlyweds promise a holy union before one creator and shed their past lives for a new beginning.

“All water is under the bridge as you say,” Spotted Feather announces.

But here Saturday, the couple will take seven steps clockwise around the fire and leave the circle under an arch created by the waving arms and hands of the wedding party.

These days, travelers seem overwhelmingly disappointed with air travel, but hotels seemingly are still viewed favorably. Richard P. Carpenter Travel & Trivia recently posted the results of a survey commissioned by hotels.com on what people like about staying in hotels. I went to the hotels.com site to try to find out the breadth, depth and randomness (or not) of those surveyed, but I couldn’t find it on their site. Therefore, here are the results from Carpenter’s blog:

What people said they looked forward to when spending a night in a hotel:
* 66 percent (tie) — simply peace and quiet.
* 66 percent (tie) — having no responsibilities.
* 58 percent — not having to make the bed or clean up.
* 43 percent — room service.
* 41 percent — a full night’s sleep.
* 18 percent — control of the TV and remote.

What people said they would gladly leave behind when heading for a hotel:
* 75 percent — chores and housework.
* 47 percent — their jobs.
* 11 percent — their children.
* 8 percent — their spouses or significant others.

Jemez Road is a quiet byway for shunpiking Interstate 25

When we drive to and from Albuquerque, we almost always take Interstate 25, and since many of central New Mexico’s most interesting events, museums and restaurants are in Santa Fe, we find ourselves on the Albuquerque-Santa Fe stretch of the highway over and over. Someday, I’m going to take the Rail Runner Express train (below, heading south out of Santa Fe), but it didn’t happen this trip.

On our most recent trip, we wanted to make a day trip to Los Alamos on a gray, sometimes- rainy Tuesday, so instead to reprising I-25, we followed New Mexico Highway 4, the Jemez Road. Much of it travels through tribal land, where photography is generally discouraged — if not downright prohibited. Exterior shots of the Jemez Pueblo’s Walatowa Visitor Center (below) are permitted, but the small tribal museum is also off-limits for photography.

The small, artsy Anglo community of Jemez Springs with a handful of galleries, shops, restaurants, accommodations, the Jemez State Monument and several hot springs, makes for a fine quiet getaway from Albuquerque, Santa Fe or Los Alamos, but the monument (ruins of an ancient pueblo) was closed the day we passed through, so we just stopped at the Highway 4 Cafe for coffee and pastry — both of which were very, very good.

Most of the roadside pullouts on public land north and east of the pueblo provide fishing access, but one is a bona fide scenic and geologic attractions. The Soda Dam, one of the area hot springs, is right off the road, so of course, we stopped.

So did other travelers, and many of them were wandering around the travertine formation.

The highlight is a waterfall that emerges out of the tangled rock layers.

Valles Caldera National Preserve was created in 2000 to preserve and protect the 89,000-acre Baca Ranch in a volcanic crater in the Jemez Mountains. The preserve also represents a unique experiment in public land management, combining historic ranch operations with programs and facilities for visitors.

Leaving Valles Caldera, the route passes through the section of Bandelier National Monument burned during the Cerro Grande Fire of May 2000. It started as a prescribed burn that went out of control and ultimately burned about 48,000 acres, destroyed 235 homes and other structures, threatened the towns of Los Alamos and White Rock from which more than 18,000 residents were evacuated and threatened the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Natural revegetation has occurred in the nearly nine-and-a-half years since then, but the Cerro Grande fire remains searned into the consciousness of all who were impacted.

On a previous visit to Los Alamos, we visited the Bradbury Science Museum and the Los Alamos Ranch School, where the Manattan Project was hatched. My husband loves surplus stores, and this trip had the goal of visiting the Black Hole Sales Company, a legendary surplus store established by the late “Atomic Ed” Grothus. I took a few snapshots (below), but if this interests you, I urge you to click here for photos and text by Dave Bullock, a California programmer, photographer and blogger who is for more competent at conveying the spirit of the place than I am.

I couldn’t begin to identify most of the objects in this 19,000-square-foot boneyard for surplus from the nuclear labs.

If you needed some cords to connect this to that, you might just be able to find it here. My husband, a connoisseur of surplus stores, praised the Black Hole for its organization.

I got a kick out of such whimsies as a barrel labeled “Empty” but clearly full of pipe couplings.

My husband remarked that I was “lucky” that the Black Hole was not in Denver, and I suppose I am. His eyes lit up at many of the objects that I couldn’t identify, but if it were closer, I suppose I might be living with some of them. The Black Hole is at 4015 Arkansas, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87544; 505-662-5053. It is open from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Tuesday through Saturdays (except major holidays).

Photo © Teru Kuwayama-All Rights Reserved
A veteran documentary photographer, Teru Kuwayama has made more than 15 trips to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir, traveling both independently, and as an embedded reporter with US and NATO military forces, as well as Afghan, Pakistani, and Indian armed forces. In 2009 he received the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor award for his work in Pakistan, and a fellowship from the South Asian Journalists Association.

He is a 2009-2010 Knight Fellow at Stanford University, a contributor to Time, Newsweek and Outside magazines, and a contract photographer for Central Asia Institute, a non-profit organization that builds schools for children in remote areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

GIZMODO has featured Teru’s Ask a Pro: How to Shoot (and Not Get Shot) In a War Zone, which is certainly a must-read for every inexperienced photographer with romantic notions on war photography.

Whilst all of his suggestions are extremely valid, I liked these:

Avoid the faux-commando stuff. Learn How To Say “Hello” and “Thank You” and To Count To Ten. Don’t Follow the Pack.

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Jean Claude Louis was born in France, and moved to Southern California in 1990. He’s a physician and scientist, and had a life-long career in biomedical research. He now is pursuing his passions: travel and photography.

I’ve featured Jean-Claude Louis’ work through the many photographic contests he won in 2007 and 2008. He participated and won (in specific categories) awards in National Geographic International competition, the Travel Photographer of the Year competition (two categories), and the B&W Magazine Portfolio Competition.

He returns to TTP with his Polaroid images of Asia…countries such as Myanmar, India, Viet Nam and China.

In Jean Claude’s own words:In the Shadow of Time “is homage to the natural environment of these places and the people who live in it. The physical beauty and harmony of the places is accentuated by my use of the unique texture and light rendition of Polaroid Time Zero film to create a timeless, painterly effect.”

I think Jean Claude succeeded in his quest…the images are ethereal. I chose the above image of a fisherman at dawn on Li River, China, because of its beautiful colors.

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Mobile handset-shaped gadget will offer “computer-grade performance”. Nokia announced the launch of N900 the company’s latest mobile internet device running its Maemo software and it will be showcased next week At Nokia World Conference.

Shaped like a mobile handset, the N900 has a touchscreen plus slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a Mozilla-based web browser, an ARM Cortex-A8 processor and up to 1GB of application memory.

Nokia claims this processing power will offer “PC-like multitasking” so users can run many applications simultaneously, switching between them using Maemo’s dashboard.

Connectivity-wise, the N900 will support Wi-Fi and HSPA, while its browser will support Flash 9.4. There’s 32GB of storage plus a microSD card slot, and a five-megapixel camera. It will be priced around 500 Euros.

There’s already speculation about what Nokia’s activities with the Linux-based Maemo OS means for Symbian, which it uses for its other smartphones. It will be interesting to see how this whole story of Maemo vs Symbian will pan out.

I have so many nice neighbors!

Adisa’s initial interest in writing can probably be traced back to the stories she was told by her Aunt Zilla, who Adisa would visit during the summer. Since she was frequently around storytelling, Adisa reflects on “always writing, or at least making up stories and poems in [her] head" (Agard 43).When she left for Hunter College, she was not aspiring to major in English or Creative Writing, but

The 2008 Monongahela “calendar girls” made a command appearance this month as bridesmaids in a hippie-themed marriage renewal ceremony to mark the 240th birthday of their city in southwestern Pennsylvania. The event also marked the 40th anniversary of the opening of an unusual riverfront park in the town otherwise known as Mon City.

The following is a story about the event published in the Observer-Reporter newspaper in Washington, Pa.

By Scott Beveridge

MONONGAHELA – The bride wore an orange tie-dyed long dress Sunday to renew her marriage vows and her toenails were painted with flowers to match her hippie style.

Elissa Stein of Monongahela walked down the aisle as her daughter sprinkled white rose pedals to the white gazebo in Monongahela’s Chess Park where she meet her husband, Bill, for the ceremony.

“We loved it,” said Bill Stein, 62, after the event sponsored by the Monongahela Area Chamber of Commerce.

The organization wanted to have a hippie-themed, wedding-type event to mark the 40th birthday of the city’s landmark arena that rises from the banks of the Monongahela River in the nearby downtown.

Elissa Stein, 61, said she volunteered to participate after reading about the plan in the newspaper.

“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t that be fun?’” said Elissa Stein, a welfare supervisor.

Bill Stein, chief executive officer of CLI Corp., wore blue jeans and leather sandals to the affair.

Meanwhile, a group of older women who became local celebrities after posing semi-nude last year for a benefit calendar served as bridesmaids.

They arrived at the park to applause riding in either a 1972 pink Cadillac convertible, classic Volkswagen or 1932 white Model A Ford. One of the women who is in her 70s relied on a walker for the short stroll to the John Moreschi Gazebo.

Monongahela Mayor Bob Kepics carried out the service wearing a black wool tuxedo with tails under a humid sky and the temperature approaching 90 degrees.

A disc jockey then played Sonny & Cher’s signature song from 1965, “I Got You Babe,” as the couple left the gazebo.

“The city was just great,” said Lorys Crisafulli, who organized a number of events over the weekend in honor of the Noble J. Dick Aquatorium.

Built in 1969, it has wooden benches painted to appear like the U.S. Flag and seats more than 3,000 people. It’s about to close to undergo more than $1 million in rehabilitation work.

“This whole town came together for this,” said Crisafulli, one of the “calendar girls” who came to Sunday’s ceremony wearing a cowgirl skirt and colorful hippy beads around her neck.

Nearly 100 people witnessed the ceremony, she said.

Bill and Elissa cut a cake in the park before going to their Monongahela home with their four children and friends for a Champagne toast.

“These people put together a wonderful celebration,” he said.