1. From Our Collection of Vintage Memorabilia
A booklet published in 1911 ...
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Our Greatest Mountain
and Alpine Regions of Wonder
by A. H. Barnes
Rainier National Park Series
1911 |
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| Typical interior page. |
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| "Painting made especially for this book." |
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Trail just below Camp of the Clouds
(All photos from the book copyright ca. 1910 by A H Barnes) |
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Indian Painted Cup
(Indian Paintbrush) |
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Gentian
A flower of autumn. |
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| Mimulus (Monkey Flower) |
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| Original Stage Road |
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| Valerian |
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Mt Rainier as viewed from prairie out from Tacoma
Copyright 1908 by A H Barnes |
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Camp Reese and Eagle Cliff ---
the west end of the Tatoosh Mountains |
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| Reese's Hotel at Camp of the Clouds, 5,600 feet altitude. |
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| Arch Paradise Glacier |
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Leaving Camp Muir at sun rise.
"The climb gets steeper from here on." |
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| Caverns along the way above Camp Muir |
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A September Afternoon in Upper Paradise Valley.
(Possible painting just for this book?) |
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Our own photo of Mt Rainer
taken January 3, 2017
From a spot about 12 miles south of Seattle. |
2. Postcards for the Weekend #29
The theme for this week’s Postcards for the Weekend is a card "from a country you wish to visit." It is surprising how much fun we’ve had with these themes, going through our collection of old postcards to find cards that fit to share here on the blog. Since we hope to visit Germany one of these days we settled on this week’s card, from Bremen, which resulted in research into another of our interest areas: ocean shipping. Today’s card was probably published around the late 1800s or early 1900s. The card was issued by a German shipping company, Norddeutscher Lloyd. (Roughly translated that’s North German Shipping. In the mid 1800s the word “Lloyd” became common for referring to shipping companies.) The image on the front of the card shows the cross-Atlantic shipping lanes for Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL) from Europe to North and South America. As you can see from the image those were the days when steam ruled!
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German Shipping Company postcard
showing ocean shipping lanes.
Published late 1800s/early 1900s
Norddeutscher Lloyd
Bremen, Germany |
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| Back of the unused card. |
Further researching the image we found the artwork to be by German artist, Karl von Eckenbrecher (1842—1921). You can purchase posters of the art on this card. For example, Kmart offers it on canvas, 18 x 24 inches, ready to hang, and it is colorful! See below. We'll stick with our postcard! :-)
NDL was founded by German merchants Hermann Meier and Eduard Crüsemann on 20 February 1857. By 1890, with 66 ships, NDL was the second largest shipping company in the world. So, although our card might have been commonplace at the time it was published, today it is fairly rare! We don’t see another like it on the WWW. How do you like it?
Enjoy more
Postcards for the Weekend and thanks to Maria for hosting!
3. Curiosity of the Week
While surfing the web this past week we stumbled upon the photo below.
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| The Pencil, New York City |
Have you seen the new building in New York City called "The Pencil"? It's the super tall building in the photo, 432 Park Avenue.
At a height of 1,396 ft (425.5 m) it is more than twice the height of Seattle's Space Needle at 605 ft (184 m). It features 104 condominium apartments. Construction began in 2012 and was completed on December 23, 2015. Per Wikipedia, it is the third tallest building in the United States, and the tallest residential building in the world. It is the second tallest building in New York City, behind One World Trade Center, and ahead of the Empire State Building.
Our curiosity lead us to the Official Website
432 Park Avenue. The pictures of the views are fascinating and it's interesting to see what asking prices are for available units ... yes, there are a few! The top-floor resident of 432 Park who makes one daily round-trip will log about 178 elevator miles in a year. The elevators are super fast and make the trip in just under one minute. If you find skyscrapers interesting there is more info on this building at
Skyscraper Center.
4. SkyWatch
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Colorful twilight
March 16th 6:41 PM |
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Sunset into clouds
March 16th 6:07 PM |
5. Ships Spotted
(For first time visitors, we like to include something "maritime" in our posts as we are located near the waters of Puget Sound, Washington.) Three recent spottings below. We know bulk carriers are not necessarily pretty, but we're seeing lots of them and that's a good sign for the economy.
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Bulk Carrier Oak Harbour
Pacific Basin Shipping
Arriving March 16th 6:51 AM |
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Container Vessel Cap Jervis
Hamburg Süd Shipping
Arriving March 15th 12:55 PM |
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BSL Limassol
(Hamburg, Germany)
Smaller Container Vessel
Arriving March 18th 6:25 AM |
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Closing thought ...
Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you'll understand what little chance you have of trying to change others.
Jacob M. Braude
