Mom's Guide to the Galaxy

Visiting Victoria: dinosaurs, bugs, and miniatures

Reconstructed from assorted fossils and fillers, Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops skeletons sit at an oversized table sipping tea at Victoria's Dino Lab.

Our second full day in Victoria was also spent walking, as everything we wanted to see that day was in easy walking distance of the hotel. We started the morning at Dino Lab Inc., which offers 90-minute tours of their private gallery and fossil prep lab, including some hands-on restoration work. As the first tour of the day, we milled about in the gift shop for a few minutes before walking into the gallery, where we saw the eye-popping scene in the photo above: a triceratops and a tyrannosaurus rex having tea. Our particular tour was oriented towards adults, since we were the only people there; they also have birthday parties and organized fossil digs available (though the later is quite pricey). After exploring the gallery, we had some time in the fossil prep lab, where we were taught to use the the tools to remove the lock layer from real fossils and given a bit of time to work on an existing sample.

After a quick stop at our hotel to drop our purchases from Dino Lab’s gift shop off, we grabbed lunch on the way to the Victoria Bug Zoo. I know, you’re probably looking at that beautiful tarantula in the photo, thinking “that’s not a bug.” They have a variety of insects and arachnids – “50 fascinating species” according to their home page – most of which aren’t classified as bugs. They run continuous tours, looping through showcasing the various animals, including some hands-on opportunities, and switching off tour guides at set intervals. I recognize that not everyone appreciates spiders the way I do, so the photo of me holding a tarantula named Jane Goodall will probably not make it onto our holiday card. They also have a gift shop with a nice variety of themed toys, clothes, and the occasional snack. (No, I didn’t buy the seasoned crickets, I’ve had them before.)

Miniature World is aptly named, as they have over 85 miniature dioramas including the “World’s Smallest Operational Sawmill” (which, for safety reasons, is not running – you want a video of it instead). Their website includes highlights of some of their exhibits, with just a partial photo of each featured exhibit. You need to see it in person to really notice all of the intricate details, including some of the objects in motion, like a train moving around a town or the hood of a classic card slowly opening at a button press. Some of the intricate battle scenes will certainly awe historical wargamers. No gift shop here though, the path through lands you directly at the exit to the street.

One of many topiaries in downtown Victoria shaped like local wildlife - this one like an orca.

That exit gave us the opportunity to walk past this amazing orca topiary again – one of several topiary the downtown Victoria shaped like local wildlife. This orca on a wave is actually cooler from the other side, as there’s a smaller orca next to it. This entire trip was filled with days where I easily exceeded my step goal, usually doubled, as we either walked to nearby places or drove to places that then involved walking.

A brief interruption about glass pumpkins

Some posts must be more timely than others, so I am interrupting my posts about touring Victoria with important information about glass pumpkins. Last year was the first time we attended Morton Arboretum’s Glass Pumpkin Patch, and if I wait to post about it, you’ll have missed this year’s event, which is happening this weekend, from Friday, October 9th through Sunday, October 11th.

Several shelves of small glass pumpkins in a wide variety of colors.

You may have seen a glass pumpkin or two in your life at different shops… but have you seen 8,000 of them in one place? Yes, with three zeroes.

This mind-blowing collection features multiple artists who create a wide variety of largely the same thing – glass pumpkins. There are some variances in sizes and styles, and some miniature items like glass beads available as jewelry, but for the most part, it’s a huge number of beautiful pumpkins. The photo here is just a partial display from one of last year’s artists. There were also glassblowing and flameworking demonstrations on the schedule, so you can actually watch a pumpkin being created.

If you go later in the weekend, there won’t be 8,000 pumpkins anymore… they’re available for purchase, and people were eagerly taking some home when we attended last year.

Visiting Victoria: the Malahat Skywalk

A sunset view of Fisherman's Wharf in Victoria, British Columbia. Across a brief section of water are an assortment of houseboats in various colors with a larger building in the background against a mix of clouds, buildings across the water, and the orange-red of sunset.

There are many things to see in Victoria, British Columbia, starting with stepping out onto our hotel room balcony, which had a view of the Fisherman’s Wharf, and more importantly, at least for us, a gap of water and land just between our hotel and the wharf. Our first morning there, shortly after sunrise, we realized the importance when we noticed otters swimming in the area, followed by an exciting couple minutes when several ran out of the water and onto the land made visible at the low tide. Over the next several mornings, we watched an assortment of wildlife, including otters, cranes, a raccoon, and a deer, actively engaging with the area. There was some activity at dusk as well, but dawn was clearly the time to be watching, which I appreciate as a morning person.

A scenic view of water and mountains, mostly tree-covered, from the top of the Malahat Skywalk.

But we didn’t visit Victoria for a week just to stay in our hotel room. Our first full day there, we walked to the nearby shuttle stop for our free ride to the Malahat Skywalk, an elevated walkway through treetops that ends at a spiral tower with amazing views of the surrounding area, and a glass overhang area if you want to step off the walkway and see everything. We could easily have spent more time up there just watching birds and enjoying the landscape, but the attached restaurant was at the bottom of the tower. Those who ware so inclined can take the slide down. Everyone else – including strollers and wheelchairs, as the walkway and tower were built for accessibility – went back down the way they came up.

A chapter ends, a new one begins.

I am currently “between jobs.” Not unexpectedly, like last time – this time I gave a month’s notice, which despite a week’s vacation in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, was ample time to document and transition my work to other team members. (A post or two about Victoria will be coming soon, I hope.) Having just taken a vacation, I decided a pair of days would be sufficient before starting the new job, though to be fair, a week would not have been a bad idea given the gardening and chores around the house that I would like to accomplish in just a couple days. I spent about two hours moving mulch this morning, and have probably about the same left to do for the section I’m currently working on. Plus I still need to empty my old work desk, so we can move it to the garage as our workbench. (The sit/stand desk is working out fabulously!)

I’m not sure what impact, if any, the new job will have on my posting schedule. I will be starting work an hour earlier, so I know I’ll shift some chores to the afternoon, which will be fine for gardening this time of year. By the time summer rolls around again, with earlier sunrises, I expect I’ll be back to avoiding the heat with early morning gardening. Either way, I’m super excited about my new job, which I will talk about here about as much as I did my old one, which is to say… not at all.

Work stays at work, this is my fun space.

Random memories of my parents – cruises

My first cruise with my parents was a family affair, celebrating my oldest nibling’s birthday at the age when they were tall enough for most rides at Disney World. This was not my parents’ first cruise, though I’m not sure when that first one would have been. As I recall, my parents had landed from a trans-Atlantic cruise and flown from New York to Miami on September 10th, 2001. They got stuck in Miami for a few days. This was, however, my only cruise with Dad.

My sister, nibling, and both my parents went, so we had two separate rooms in each place. This was the beginning of Mom’s tradition of taking each grandchild to Orlando for their birthday. For this particular celebration, we planned a full week that included staying onsite at a Disney resort, followed by a 3-night Disney cruise. At our last stop, the canoeing excursion we wanted only had 2 spots left, so my sister and I went canoeing, giving my nibling the option of the ship’s kids’ area or spending the day shopping with my mother. They chose the kids’ area, with self-checkout privileges in case we didn’t make it back to the ship on time for the showing of the new movie I recommended: Lilo & Stitch.

Over the years, it became hard to keep track of when my parents were travelling, with the cruises gradually increasing in length. When they visited before my black belt test, they were headed to a multi-leg cruises in Europe, and Dad’s final stroke happened on a ship that had already visited several places in South America and was headed to Easter Island. (Yes, a medvac helicopter from Easter Island back to South America will suck up most of your travel insurance.)

When Cassandra reached the Orlando vacation age, I organized the trip with just Cassandra, my mother, and myself. The first night was hellish, arriving late in the evening, then settling into a single room with tiny Cassandra kicking me repeatedly and my mother snoring in the next bed. In the middle of the night, I seriously considering marching down to reception to get a second room in the rather expansive, and not particularly crowded, hotel. On the second day, a friend of Mom’s messaged me and asked if her snoring was still bad… I asked why she hadn’t warned me! As it turns out, it could be abated with allergy medicine, which made the rest of the trip less painful. This was Mom’s first time visiting parks in Orlando outside the Disney brand – she had flagged Discovery Cove as somewhere to visit from talking to people on one of her cruises, and we visited one of the Universal parks. This was followed by another Disney cruise, which included an excursion to a chocolate factory where we prepared our own chocolate bars, and a parasailing event where we were the only guests.

Our last cruise with Mom, which is already well-documented here, was to the Galápagos in 2017. While she was a terrible roommate, sprawling stuff everywhere and complaining when housekeeping straightened the mess she left on the desk, we were all delighted by the trip. She was particularly proud of her first paddleboarding experience, as she managed to stay upright the entire time.

Image of Sarah overlaid with text: 1946-2026 Sarah Rodgers has left on her cruise. Join us to remember her on Sunday, December 13th at 2:00pm, with the house address and contact information.

If you’ve spoken to me in the last few years, particularly early in the year, you will have heard me say that Mom was off on another cruise. Those have been 3 or 4 month cruises, sailing around the world or, earlier this year, pole-to-pole. The revised invitation my sister created for December, now for her celebration of life instead of her birthday, reflects her love of cruises.

Random memories of my parents – road trips

My love of travel came from both parents. When we were young – before our first visit to Guatemala – we would take cross country road trips in our full size van, sometimes with a mattress replacing the backmost bench. We varied between camping (Dad had been a Boy Scouts troop leader and had appropriate gear), staying with friends (Mom’s ex-boyfriend in Nebraska got us tickets to the University of Miami’s first national championship win at the 1984 Orange Bowl game), and sometimes driving through the night. If we woke up to find the van parked at a Waffle House, and no sign of our parents, we knew we were allowed to find them inside and get some hot chocolate.

With our summers allocated to Guatemala, and then shifting to school there, our road trip habit declined. We did one big road trip there during middle school, hiring a large van and its driver to take us from Antigua to Tikal. In addition to the four of us, our housekeeper and several family members came along, including his elderly mother. The morning of our departure, the driver arrived on time, only to leave again immediately, having secured permission to bring his wife and children along as well. (For clarity, we did not have a phone at the time.) As we arrived in Petén, most of us had to disembark from the van because of the muddy road (in dry season); on the return trip, everyone except the driver disembarked. This was the only time I have camped at Tikal, and we were really roughing it, relying on the dry season to allow us to sleep on the ground rather than in a tent. While there were bathrooms for campers, they were locked overnight. Yikes! By the next time I visited Tikal, right after college, the stairs on Temple 1 (Templo El Gran Jaguar) had degraded enough that it was off limits for climbing.

My next big road trip with my parents was in college, on my way to study at the University of Glasgow for a year. We started, as with most trips in the UK, by staying near London, arriving in time to celebrate my aunt and uncle’s 40th anniversary, where I heard the story of Dad accidentally locking himself out of their house, which he was watching for them, when he dropped them at the airport for their honeymoon. Dad was a climber – mountain and rock – and realized there was an open window on the second floor, so he climbed up and let himself back in.

We spent about three weeks visiting family and friends, with the occasional unscheduled stay along the way, arriving into a town and immediately visiting tourist information (typically at the train or bus station) to find a suitable bed & breakfast. In one such place, the bed & breakfast was a large manor house attached to a farm, and the owner showed Dad some coins he had recently dug up, which Dad identified as likely being from the Charles II era. They then referred us to a pub for dinner which was even farther outside of town than the B&B and turned out to be amazing.

I suspect that Dad would have appreciate the digital navigation options we have now. They certainly would have been better than Mom’s style of navigation: “You were supposed to turn back there!” That resulted in the harrowing experience of Dad backing up on a roundabout. On two different occasions. Please, don’t ever do that. Go around.

Frances, Sarah, Cassandra, and Frank at the Paramount Theater with the Million Dollar Quartet backdrop.

The last time they visited us here was supposed to involve a short road trip to the Wisconsin Dells. Their visit was scheduled to coincide with my planned black belt test… which got pushed out a week right after my parents booked their flights, both to here and onto Europe for one of their many cruises. (My black belt test then got delayed by six months due to a car accident.) Given the weekend in town instead of in Wisconsin, I booked tickets to see Million Dollar Quartet again at the Paramount, figuring the music from that era would resonate nicely for my parents. (It did!)

Random memories of my parents – movies

Since we’ve asked people to share memories of my parents, I’ve been thinking about what I would share if asked for the same thing. Here’s a spattering of items about each of them.

I can’t recall going to a movie theater with Mom after elementary school; I think the last movie we saw together in a theater was E.T.. (If I had to guess, it was either because she didn’t like sitting still, possibly because of her arthritis, or not being allowed to talk. “No, Mom, I don’t know what’s going to happen in this new episode of Star Trek. I haven’t seen it before.”) We didn’t see a lot of movies in theaters in elementary school, so it was fairly memorable.

In middle school, my sister and I established a fairly solid movie habit; one of the two single-screen theaters in Antigua had double-showings at the weekend, so we could spend all of either Saturday or Sunday afternoon watching somewhat recent movies. (I will note that the pairings were not always appropriate, such as a He-Man movie followed by Revenge of the Nerds. Kids movies were dubbed; everything else had subtitles.) At some point before that, while staying with a local family in a neighborhood with many kids our age, we decided to convince Mom to pay for 5 or 6 of us to see Jaws. We weren’t dragging her along, we were just hitting her up for the money, which at the time was probably $3 or $4 for the entire group. As the second-youngest member of that group, I spent a decent amount of the movie peeking out from behind the chair in front of me, along with the youngest member. (I have since rewatched it with less hiding, as well as reading the book in English and Spanish.)

Dad, on the other hand, enjoyed movies in theaters, but was fairly selective about what movies he saw. As an example of something worth seeing on the big screen, we saw Dances with Wolves together once I was back in Miami for school. He saw The Crying Game before I did, I think while we were hosting my sister’s bachelorette party at the house. Near the beginning of middle school, I recall there was a movie he and I both wanted to see – Amadeus – but my sister wasn’t interested, so we compromised and saw something else at that opportunity. A month later, we were all in Guatemala and looked for somewhere we could see it. (Back when you checked movie times in the newspaper!) With only two single-screen theaters in town, it wasn’t playing where we could walk to it, so we caught a bus to Guatemala City, then another bus to the appropriate zone of the city for a theater with multiple screens that was still showing it. And then had to reverse that process to get home in time for dinner.

A truncated project

At the beginning of the month, I mentioned playing yarn chicken with multiple crochet projects, including a historical temperature blanket project.

Umm… that blanket was for my mother.

And wasn’t done yet… I was partway into month nine when she passed.

A crocheted chain link blanket in a variety of colors.

The decision not to finish it was an easy one. After all, who else would need a historical temperature blanket tracking the high for the day in her city of birth, starting at her birthdate?

The real question was whether to frog (that means undo) the seven or eight days in month nine that were already done – leaving me with awkwardly small sections of yarn for each – or finish off that row. As it happens, the row I was working on already included the date she died, so it seemed logical to finish just that row. I also decided to mark that chain with something extra, in this case a gradient white to gray yarn, to make it stand out.

And now we have another crocheted blanket in the living room, of different styles and weights for all our blankety needs.

RIP Sarah Rodgers

Sarah (Edelson) Rodgers, age 79, passed away in Guatemala after a brief illness including anemia, fluid in the lungs, and, unshockingly (to anybody who believes in science), extensive scarring in her lungs after decades of smoking.

She was born in Portland, Oregon on December 14, 1946 to Elizabeth Ruth Thompson (Stevely) & (absent) Harold (Hal) Miller, immediately adopted by Zan & Mary (Lonergan) Edelson, and further raised by Bunny Edelson.

She met her husband, Frank, while attending Portland State University, quitting her role as Student Body President and the related protests at faculty events that she was now invited to after marrying the Director of Libraries. They moved with their young daughters to Miami, Florida in 1979, just in time for Hurricane David to turn around off the coast, leaving them with boxes of avocados rapidly harvested before the storm and a desperate quest to use them all, thus introducing avocado lime pie as a family favorite.

She fell in love with Antigua Guatemala on her first visit in the 1980s, following with subsequent visits, enrolling her daughters in middle school, and ultimately buying and renovating a house that became known as Sunshinetenango, merging her personal sun logo with the “tenango” suffix from many Guatemalan towns. (Oddly, “tenango” arrived from the Nahuatl people in Mexico with the European conquistadors, rather than from the Maya people of Guatemala.)

Her fascination with Guatemalan textiles involved buying many used clothing items and repurposing some of the fabric into pillows, bag holders, and other common use items. On one occasion in the late ‘80s, she and housekeeper Salvador took an overnight trip home to a remote village with someone they met on the street to buy the clothes off his back. In addition to the clothes for her collection, she brought home a twisted ankle, acquired descending a slope to the outhouse in the middle of the night.

She is, as best we know, the oldest of her siblings: Syl, Charles, Rich, and Andrea (all surviving) from Zan; Betsy, Janet, and Doug (only Janet surviving) from Elizabeth; and Stephanie, Karen, and Christine (unknown status) from Hal.

She was preceded in death by her adoptive parents, birth parents, and husband, Frank.

She is survived by her amazingly resilient stepmother, Bunny; daughters Hilda and Frances; grandchildren Jesi, Alex, and Cassandra; and a fabulous array of nieces and nephews.

Altered invitation, changing Sarah's 80th birthday party to a celebration of life.

Due to the unfortunate circumstances, her planned 80th birthday party will be repurposed as a celebration of life. Whether you can attend or not, we would appreciate if you share some memories – and photos, if you have them – of both her and our father, Frank, so we can assemble a combined memory book.

So many yellow flowers!

By a combination of chance and design, we have a wide assortment of yellow flowers spread across our yard this season, and that’s in addition to the bison bur flowers I mentioned recently.

Pumpkin flowers around and on the Eastern Redbud in the front lawn, as well as some yellow on the many dill plants, mostly in the mulch.
An evening primrose volunteered in the front yard with small yellow flowers.
Yellow flowers in our cantaloupe bed and the first indication of a formed cantaloupe.
So many yellow flowers on the tomato plant, many of which have already become delicious cherry tomatoes.

While the pumpkin flowers are deliberate, the pumpkin vines climbing up the redbud are not; we have been removing young fruit as it forms there. The redbud is barely taller than I am, and the pumpkins are the large white carving pumpkins we grew last year. (And then saved the seeds from, of course.)