Canyon of Danger - review

Book 3 of Susan K. Marlow's Goldtown Adventures series has just come out!

Canyon of Danger continues the adventures of 12-year-old Jem Coulter and his sister Ellie during the waning days of the California gold rush. Pa has to be gone for a few days and leaves Jem in charge of the ranch. Jem is excited about this new responsibility... until everything starts to go wrong. It's a great story for tweens about making wise choices and being dependable. You can read an excerpt here.

 Susan's books are well-written and engaging, even for us "kids" who are a "little" older than her target demographic. She offers lapbooks and free study guides to go along with each title which makes them great for homeschoolers.

The fourth book in this series, River of Peril, will be out in the Spring of 2014. You can also read my previous reviews of Book 1: Badge of Honor and Book 2: Tunnel of Gold.

Thank you to Kregel for sending me a review copy.

Redwood Forests

 It's rainy and damp today here on the coast. It's supposed to clear off tomorrow, I think. Rather than spending the day cooped up in the trailer, we decided to drive south about 50 miles to see the redwoods of northern California. As always, the trees are majestic and beautiful. I loved driving through the misty forests in the off-season. The crowds are gone, and the visitors' center is closed, but the trees were glad to see us!

Getting My Kicks on Route 66

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I will also be writing for the Homeschool Bliss channel sometime soon.

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Highway 1

On Day 5 of our roadtrip we drove up the central coast of California on Highway 1. It was pretty foggy – not ground fog to make road visibility bad – but enough to make it hard to see the ocean. I guess that’s typical for mornings this time of year. The fog finally burned off about noon and we enjoyed a sunny, clear day with moderate temperatures.

One place we stopped along the coast was beach where Elephant Seals lived. They are great big critters with funny bent noses (like very short trunks!). There was a whole bunch of ‘em snoozing – and snoring! – in a pile on the beach. Every now and then another one would come out of the water and scootch up to the pile to join in the community nap, or one would up and squirm back out to the water. They used their flippers like hands! They’d lay there and flip sand up on their backs… or lay on their backs and scratch their tummies with their flippers. It was neat to watch them.

Later in the day we saw a batch of Harbor Seals on Monterey Bay. They were smaller than the Elephant Seals, and some had babies.

The highlight of the day was a visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We had a personal tour by one of the volunteers, who is the teenage son of a friend! They went with us through the aquarium, and knew a lot about it to tell us that we wouldn't have learned otherwise. DH and I had been to the aquarium once about 18 years ago. That was before we had kids. The aquarium has expanded quite a bit since then, so it was fun to see the new exhibits. My favorite exhibit was still the sea otters. They are so much fun to watch!

We spent 2 or 3 hours at the aquarium and then went to the beach for a few minutes to let the kids wade and look for shells.

Route 66

Day 4 of our roadtrip (see previous days below) called for an uneventful 10-hour trip from Williams, Arizona to San Luis Obispo, California. We continued to see signs about Historic Route 66 as we drove along and we talked about how much fun it would be to try to follow the old route sometime. We stopped in Kingman, Arizona for drinks (at Sonic!) and saw a museum about Route 66. I was just dying to go in, and we would have taken the time except it didn’t open until 9:00 and it was only 8:30. We decided we shouldn’t just wait around for the museum to open. So DH decided to get off the interstate right there and follow the old highway to Needles, California (about 50 miles) before resuming our originally planned route.

As we angled away from the interstate the highway began to look just as I had always pictured it in my mind. Narrow two-lane highway, no shoulders, sand right up to the pavement with the ribbon of road stretching across the desert as far as the eye could see. It was a surreal experience, especially as there was very little traffic and no buildings or other signs of human life for miles at a time.

We could see mountains ahead of us and I wondered how the highway crossed the mountains. We soon found out! This narrow two-lane highway twisted around and around and up and down, with hair-pin curves and sheer drop-offs (still no shoulders!), winding it’s way over the mountains. Now I could understand why the Joad Family in The Grapes of Wrath waited until night to cross the mountains so their car wouldn’t overheat! Did I mention it was already 100 degrees by 9:00 a.m.? Well, it was!

We passed through an authentic ghost town, somebody’s old car (from back in the day) that apparently hadn’t made it around one of the curves and was just stuck in the brush half-way down the mountain, and another “live” town that looked like something from the Old West with wild burros wandering through the streets. This stuff was REAL, too! Not staged for tourists.

By the time we finally made it back to civilization I was in desperate need of a bathroom! (Remember the Sonic drinks?) So we were happy to find a gas station, even if gas was $3.89 a gallon for regular! By then the temperature was 110.

We somehow lost the old highway about 10 miles before we got to Needles. The signs we tried to follow just led to a dead-end road, so we just got back on the interstate. I hadn’t noticed before how wide California is down in the southern part of the state. We drove across that wide expanse of desert, past Edwards Air Force Base, and gasped to breathe the next time we stopped at a blistering 114 degrees!

The rest of the drive was uneventful, and the coast was blessedly cool (mid 70s) by the time we got to our motel about 5:15 p.m.

I was just thrilled to get to experience this small portion of the historic "Mother Road"!