Cornelius Pass Portland Blues: Thursday, November 6th!

The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time. -William Butler Yeats, writer, Nobel laureate (1865-1939)

Left Susanville after a super-duper lumberjack's breakfast and made our way out of town. After a bit I pulled into a gas station to make sure we were on the right route for Bend.

Turned out that we were not and the attendant Whirlygig spoke with handed him a small printout with directions! Seems as if the question comes up so often that the owner decided to put together the handout! At any rate, we weren't far off but glad we asked as I really didn't want to head back to I-5. The countryside, inland and paralleling the Interstate is far more interesting. In places one seems like one is travelling through the US Southwest with huge butte-like cliff faces. One actually expects to see cowboys and Indians, along with cavalry coming to save wagon trains! Stereotypical, to be sure, but nevertheless, these are the images that the stunning landscape produces.

Very smooth sailing until we started to head northwest, shortly after leaving Madras and making for Mt Hood National Forest. Once we started to descend towards Rhododendron the rain started, lightly at first, but soon became quite steady. Dusk had come and gone and with fairly steep downhill grade and added difficulty of driving through the rain, it was not a very comfortable time as we'd been on the road for more than nine hours by then. Still, I soldiered on and by the time we reached and passed Sandy, Boring Gresham and finally Troutdale, rain had stopped. Although traffic was pretty heavy, (We were almost in the midst of rush-hour.), it was almost a blessing to be going relatively slowly. 

So slowly, in fact, that we didn't actually make it to Oliver's place until about 7:30 pm. We had planned to take them out to dinner at a local pub to thanks them for their continued hospitality. However, arriving when we did, Marilyn decided it was too late to go out again. She had a wonderful array of appetizers waiting for the famished travelers and we proceeded to open many bottles of wine to go with the cheese and olives and crackers. Always the more than perfect hostess, Digitale took out three frozen pizzas and proceeded to jazz them up with all sorts of fried sausages, mushrooms and other tasty toppings. 

They were certainly tastier than any of the pub fare we could have expected and everyone was delighted not to have to venture out again after having been on the road for such an extended period of time. In spite of this we all manged to stay up until close to midnight. By then the wine and the malt and the drive had taken their toll and we all trundled off to bed, thanking our marvellous hosts for their unstinting and seemingly endless, ever-flowing hospitality!                      Patrick and co. We have finally started putting a few miles into our legs 45 k yesterday and 25 today tho not as committed as some we get by. Your sculpture is in the mail I hope you enjoy. Cheers from Greg and Claire

Our fabulous holiday in France Dear all: We've created a private online version of our project to view and share online. We call it albumshare. http://bit.ly/10vhw3g

Wilson, A. Scott Berg, The Berkley Publishing Group

2013: "In 1917, England and France were locked in a stalemated, bloody trench war with Germany -- the bloodiest war in world history to that point. Then the American troops joined the Allies and turned stalemate into victory. In December, 1918, with the war now over, President Woodrow Wilson traveled by ocean liner to France, landing in Brest, to help negotiate the peace treaty. He was met in Paris by "the most massive display of acclamation and affection ever heaped upon a single human being -- sheer numbers alone making it the greatest march of triumph the world had ever known":

"A procession of motorcars transported [President Woodrow Wilson] through the medieval streets [of Brest] -- festooned with laurel wreaths and banners -- past the largest crowd ever amassed in the picturesque city. .... But nothing, not even those advance welcomes, could have prepared the President for what awaited him in Paris.

"Under brilliant skies, the train arrived precisely at ten o'clock at the private station in the Bois de Boulogne, a terminal reserved for visiting dignitaries of royal blood. The building's walls and pillars were draped in red, white, and blue, and, high above, from a pair of staffs, waved a huge Star-Spangled Banner and a Tricolore. 

President Raymond Poincare, Premier Georges Clemenceau, and all the leadership of the French government, along with members of the American Embassy, greeted the Wilsons as they stepped off the train onto a crimson carpet. Bands played as the dignitaries entered a magnificent reception room fragrant from profusions of roses and carnations. After a few speeches of welcome, the two presidents led the procession outside, where eight horse-drawn carriages, each attended by coachmen and footmen in national livery, awaited. On the roadway above the station and on nearby rooftops and windows, thousands of admirers cheered wildly as they entered the first open victoria. 

The Presidents' wives and Margaret Wilson entered the second carriage, followed by Clemenceau and the rest of the party, in hierarchical order. The Garde Republicaine, on horseback and wearing shimmering brass helmets with long black horsetails down the back, led the cavalcade along a four-mile route to the Wilsons' Paris lodgings. 

" 'The cheering had a note of welcome in it,' observed Admiral Grayson, 'and it required the best efforts of the troops to prevent some of the over-enthusiastic breaking through and overwhelming the Presidential party.' Irwin Hood 'Ike' Hoover, the chief usher of the White House, said that behind the soldiers from many countries who lined the streets, 'as far as the eye could see was one writhing, milling mass of humanity. They did not applaud; they screamed, yelled, laughed, and even cried.' 

Sixty-eight-year-old diplomat Henry White, the lone Republican member of the American negotiating committee, said he had witnessed every important coronation or official greeting in Europe for fifty years and had never seen anything like it. Reporters claimed the crowds were ten times those that had recently assembled for the visiting monarchs of England and Belgium.

"Reaching the Etoile, Wilson received a historic honor: the chains encircling the Arc de Triomphe had been removed, thus granting him the passage that had not been allowed to anybody since the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, and only to Napoleon before that. Down the broad Champs-Elysees they rode, the crowds thickening. 

As Edith Wilson observed, 'Every inch was covered with cheering, shouting humanity. The sidewalks, the buildings, even the stately horse-chestnut trees were peopled with men and boys perched like sparrows in their very tops. Roofs were filled, windows overflowed until one grew giddy trying to greet the bursts of welcome that came like the surging of untamed waters. Flowers rained upon us until we were nearly buried.' More than an expression of gratitude from one nation to another, the demonstration grew personal. "They crossed the Seine at the Alexandre III Bridge to the Quai d'Orsay and then recrossed to the Place de la Concorde, into which 100,000 people had jammed, hoping for a glimpse of 'Meester Veelson.' The noise grew deafening, as the carriages proceeded through the Rue Royale, and the crowd kept roaring the phrase posted overhead in electric lights on a sign that spanned the street -- 'VIVE WILSON.' President Poincare declared that the reception 'stood alone among the welcome given any previous visitor to Paris.'
 

"The wartime population of central Paris was a little over one million citizens, and newspapers estimated that two million people filled just the handful of arrondissements along President Wilson's route. Forgetting neither Alexander nor Caesar, not even Napoleon, France offered that day the most massive display of acclamation and affection ever heaped upon a single human being -- sheer numbers alone making it the greatest march of triumph the world had ever known. To those who had just endured an apocalypse, observed future President Herbert Hoover -- then in Europe to supervise the feeding of the hungry -- 'no such man of moral and political power and no such an evangel of peace had appeared since Christ preached the Sermon on the Mount. Everywhere men believed that a new era had come to all mankind. It was the star of Bethlehem rising again.' Wilson gloried in the reception."