Hello, Cleveland!

It’s been awhile since that last Starfighter adventure to Port Clinton and Put-In-Bay (read the post HERE).  But the planets recently aligned for another perfect day.  “Name three places you’d like to fly today,” John said when we woke up.  Hmm... a picnic at Highland County?  Kelley’s Island camping?  Cleveland...?  Cleveland.  I'd never spent any real time in Cleveland.  The forecast showed some weather coming in from the south later in the day, but it all looked good in the north.  

I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of Cleveland before — I don’t think I realized that Burke Field — the executive airport — was so close to the city, never mind pretty much IN the city, and right on the lake.  While John took care of flight planning, I figured out what we could do when we got there.  There were the usual suspects: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Great Lakes Science Center, the aquarium.  But I don’t know, I guess I didn’t want to spend the entire day indoors.  I remembered a blog post written by Kaylah Doolan of The Dainty Squid.  A Clevelander, she wrote a “faves” post about the city which I bookmarked.  Maybe there were a few spots we could get to easily enough without a car.

We folded up the scooters, fueled up the plane, and off we went.

The lake was sooo blue, and I loved seeing the city from the air.  What a view!

The base-to-final approach was so stinkin' cool.

We fueled up, checked in at the FBO, and unfolded our transportation (the Razor A5... HIGHLY recommended for portable travel as they fold up small and speed along much faster than the scooters with smaller wheels.) Ready...set...go!

Well, sort of.  We didn’t get very far because the International Women’s Air and Space Museum was right on the field.  Had to check that out.  The exhibits were great. Could I please have this jacket?

I didn’t know this, but in 1911, Harriet Quimby became the first woman to earn a pilot’s license.  Also the first woman to fly the English Channel and also, sadly, the first woman to perish in a flying accident.

The museum had a couple early flight simulators! Can someone pleeease make a real plane that looks just like this little blue guy??!!  How cute is that!?  (It even comes with outdoor seating!)  

The history of these things is so interesting.  Their inventor, Edwin Link, was learning to fly but found training to be somewhat cost-prohibitive.  So he did what anyone else would do, obviously: he made his own simulator which operated off an organ bellows (as in, church organ) from his family's factory. In 1934 the Army Air Corps ordered a bunch of them to aid in instrument training and pretty soon, Link trainers were everywhere.  The one in my photo is the later GAT-1 model.

The IWASM is making efforts to grow and establish itself, so I highly recommend a visit!  As a fly-in destination, it's perfect, and they’ve got a lineup of great events in the works.  I was so bummed that I was going to miss the “Dress up Like Amelia” wine night, but I hope to get involved up there.

It was definitely time for lunch, so we scooted over to Townhall, near the Cleveland Clinic.  What a fabulous spot!  Everything from smoothies to sandwiches to creative entrees.  We shared a rice bowl, wanting to leave room for ice cream at Mitchell’s down the street, but when we saw the dessert menu -- holy cow! -- I rarely want EVERYthing on a dessert menu, but Townhall’s was sooo tempting!

Mitchell’s did not disappoint.  We’ve got Graeter’s and Jeni’s in Columbus, but Mitchell’s seemed like something in between.  Creamy gourmet flavors but also down-home standards.  I’m usually a straight vanilla with sprinkles kind of girl, but I tried a sample of the lavender honey and was blown away.  What a great building too: skylights and huge curved beams.  And a birds-eye view of the magical-ice-cream-making down below!

We thought we’d try a different route back to the lake, and while trying to figure out how to get to the bridge we needed, we came across this mural.  Cleveland seems to have a lot of great stuff painted on walls in places you don’t expect.

Finally found the bridge, but it was tucked down underneath all these other bridges. And where did all these hills come from?! Cleveland looks so flat from the air.  It’s a ruse.  

While scooting back along the lake, we passed the Steamship William G. Mather (everyone seems to call it the Cleveland Cliffs boat) that’s always in the harbor.  Turns out it’s part of the science museum.  It looked so tiny from the sky but giant up close!  We decided to take the tour.  I don’t know why these huge freighters fascinate me so much.  I think it’s because they’re SO big.  The ship was built in 1925 and was the "flagship of the Cleveland-Cliffs Steamship Company fleet until 1952."  The Mather mostly carried iron ore from Lake Superior down to the steel mills of the lower lakes.

Walking through the crew and guest quarters was like stepping back in time.  I felt like a ghost from the future.  We were the only ones aboard by the end of the day too.

It was still hot at 5pm.  By the time we left the ship (basically a giant solar oven) I was wilting.  It was time to get back to the airport anyway.  (... via a short stop on the lawn of the R&R Hall of Fame.)

I SO enjoyed my first real visit to Cleveland, although I felt like we hadn’t explored much of the city.  True, it hadn’t been the plan to wind up in two museums, but I'm so glad we did, and there will be plenty of next times.  Cheers, Cleveland!  See you again soon!

* Read more Flying Adventure posts HERE  * Find out more about the International Women's Air and Space Museum HERE

A Homemade Artist Residency

This spring I applied to a residency program at an art center in Florida. As I should have suspected, the universe had other plans for me.  Yes, I was disappointed to get that “We’re sorry, but thank you for applying...” letter, but after grumbling about it for a couple of days, I realized it was ridiculous to wait for an artist residency to get to work.  As it is, my Flying Adventures book has been on a long and rough road to get back onto my studio table, and putting it off until November — even for a residency — was still just putting it off.  Sometimes it’s easy to know when you’re stalling.  When I start vacuuming and doing the dishes instead of working in the studio, I know something’s up.  This was harder to figure out though.  I liked the idea of spending a chunk of time with other artists who are also working on projects. I liked the idea of getting some feedback and guidance on the structure of the story.  I also liked the idea of being accepted into my first residency.  BUT I realized, finally, that all of that wasn’t as important as just getting to work.

I did, however, want to leave my own space and daily life to work elsewhere.  Sometimes that makes a huge difference in how you approach and focus on a project.  Enter Lynn, my college roommate-turned-dear-friend many years ago.  A writer and educator with plenty of creative projects on her own plate, she told me to come visit, and off I went to upstate-ish New York via this lovely view of the city.

Lynn’s house has always made me happy.

Even here though, I stalled. I had emails to answer and phone calls to make and shouldn’t I be working on my next blog post and balancing my checkbook, etc, etc.  Finally I asked Lynn if I could borrow the dining room table and then wound up staring at my pages of words and thumbnails for an hour:  Is the story too long?  What should I cut out?  I have too many images.  How long does it take to read it out loud?   Do I stay true to the facts of the story or to the spirit of the story?  Will scans of pages look right on a slideshow screen for the reading or should I show single images?  Will I go broke buying frames for all the pages when I make the exhibit for wall spaces? Do I edit the story with the book in mind or the reading?   Is Lynn’s table big enough?

One step at a time.  I knew the first thing I had to do was cut up those papers, so I started there.  No thinking involved.  Soon enough, at least one of my questions was answered: yes, it did fit on Lynn’s table.

Images were next, and this is where I got stumped.  Do I lay it out as it looked in the original book, then rearrange?  Or do I just start from scratch?

I decided to group images with relevant text, regardless of where they’d gone in the first edition.  I figured I’d put down what I knew for sure and hoped that the rest would fit itself together later.
 
From there I methodically worked on scenes. I lost track of time.  When I moved my first photo from the wrong place to the right place I got goosebumps!  Putting the layout together was like working on a puzzle. I scribbled notes in the margins if there was something I needed to think about: Fix wording… Get a photo of… Cut this part…? Switch this with…

In between time at the table, Lynn and I took a field trip to hear her friend sing with a jazz trio (which put the singing bee back in my bonnet — although that’s another post), and spent an afternoon at the Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, where I wandered over fairy bridges and had tea on the giant porch.  The whole place felt like Hogwarts but in upstate New York.

While exploring the hotel, I passed the “Naturalist’s Office."  People are invited to leave notes on the bulletin board on the door if he’s not in. My favorite: “We had a small snake visit our room…”

We also took a field trip to the city.  Except for the night sky itself, is there anything as magical as Grand Central's ceiling of stars? 

It was an amazing week. (I even met up with a relative I didn’t know I had!) When all was said and done, I had my layout finished, a shortlist of things that still need attention, and I even started working on the slideshow format for my reading. 

To put icing on the cake — how weird is this?! —  after I finally cleared the table and packed up all my little strips of paper and tiny photos, I checked my email to find a note from a photo-friend/art professor at Snow College in Utah, wanting to add me to their schedule of visiting artists in the fall.  It will be the debut of the book’s “illustrated reading” AND my first paid gig — Yes!!  *October 27... come if you can*

As I left New York for crazy gorgeous skies, I felt so thankful.  I thought about how different I felt from the week before when I arrived.  I am excited again, hopeful, purpose-full, and clear about what the next steps are to get this project out to the world.  Stay tuned… 

Many, many thanks to the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council for funding that is helping to facilitate further work on this project.  Find out more about the book, view the original edition, and purchase one of the last remaining copies of the mini paperback version HERE.

Iceland Album - Part 3

(Continued from Iceland Album - Part 2) From the Solheimajökull glacier we drove back towards Reykjavik, but turned north just after Selfoss.  I’d found a perfect little cabin via Airbnb across from Lake Apavatn that would give us a cozy, quiet place to call home for two nights, with easy drives to the landscapes along the Golden Circle, and close proximity to an end-of-the-day treat:  the Fontana baths at Laugarvatn.

The little cabin was even cuter than in the online photos.  Agnes, our host, had cut fresh lupines for the table and left fruit and other goodies for us.  I think she also arranged for the sunniest days in Iceland ever.

We’d stopped for some provisions on the way… I’ve never been so happy to cook spaghetti and sauce from a jar! Easy, inexpensive comfort food - yay!  And yeah, the kids fought over who was going to sleep in the loft (because of course they wouldn’t share it), but nothing was going to ruin my happy place.  John went for his morning runs along the horse trails and I spent time on the porch with tea and my journal.  Next time we will rent the cabin for our entire stay - it was HEAVEN!

We started our Golden Circle drive with a visit to the Gullfoss waterfall (along with every other tourist).  I am not a fan of crowds, but how could we be this close to an Icelandic icon and not go?  I suppose it’s like some of our own more popular national parks: there is no such thing as solitude at Half Dome in the summer!

From Gulfoss we backtracked to the geysers.  Geysir, the one that gave us the word “geyser” — I did not know this! —  no longer erupts regularly, but Strokkur, the one next to it, does.  I kept trying to make a photograph without every other person on the planet in it, but was always foiled.  Then, however, as I was muttering and cursing, Strokkur erupted out of the blue and I got totally soaked.  Serves me right :-\ 

I did, however, manage to get a couple photos I liked of John and the kids disappearing in the steam...

I love sundials.  This one, partway up the hill overlooking the geysers, was so beautiful...

While I did not bring my camera to the Fontana baths, trust me, they were a perfect end to a day full of walking and people:  quiet, and right on the shore of Laugarvatn Lake.  While I wish we'd had the time to find some secret hot springs in the middle of the wilderness somewhere, this would do nicely!

And then, ahhh, a home to come back to.  We love you, Cabin Agnes!

If you missed it, click to read PART 1 and PART 2