Susan Vineyard, Artist, Photographer and Blogger: road trip

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Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas: A trip worth taking

We had a great trip driving over to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville Arkansas.

This museum was founded in 2011 by Alice Walton and the Walton Family Foundation as a nonprofit charitable organization and is free to the public. It does have paid options and I took one of those each time I have visited and enjoyed both of them.

They sponsor some impressive artists. We just missed a Chihuly exhibit this time. Last time I saw Salvador Dali and Picasso paintings. I mean, I was standing two feet from them! In the foothills of the Ozark mountains in Arkansas.

It’s a little more than a two hour drive over there. Not bad on a pretty day. We had lunch in Bentonville, toured the museum and were home for supper. They also have a restaurant on premises, but it's only open at certain times, so check their website.

We drove over on a weekday, and found plenty of parking. When we exited the elevators that took us down to ground level, a giant spider welcomed us!

We toured the galleries of the early American art, then visited the Frank Lloyd Wright house on the premises. We weren't allowed to take photographs or video tape there, but we are glad we went. The rooms are very small. I could barely walk through the hallway without my shoulders touching on each side. The living room is fantastic, though. The glass wall to the woods and the flooring that continues outside makes the room look like it's as much outside as inside.

After the tour, we continued to the more modern art galleries. We especially wanted to see the the Georgia O'Keeffe painting, because, when we visited her museum in Santa Fe, we were told that the purchase of that one painting by Crystal Bridges funded the entire O'Keeffe museum.

This oversized 3D sculpture of the artist, complete with his own hair, fascinated Dan. It was pretty spooky.

One of the cool things about Crystal Bridges is that it is built with glass walkways between the galleries, a way to kind of cleanse the palate before your senses are overwhelmed again.

We enjoyed a lot of the modern art but questioned some of it, like the giant silver pile of poo, titled, "Eat Meat." You can see it in the video.

This museum is definitely worth a visit if you are nearby. And Bentonville is a fun American small town to visit, with some great restaurants.

Our video below features a lot of the artwork displayed there, and our reactions to it. Be sure to subscribe to this blog and/or our YouTube channel for stories of more of our roadtrips.

https://crystalbridges.org/

From Cubicle Rat to Digital Nomad

What a whirlwind.

I lost my job. It was inevitable. The company was bought and sold three times in three years. The final company who bought it to keep it rather than to just repackage it to sell to someone else "restructured," and they already had a forty-person communication team in Palo Alto or somewhere, so I was, they determined without even consulting my supervisor, "redundant."

Do I sound bitter? Eh, not really. I want to become a digital nomad anyway. So I can work from Mexico or wherever. I never want to be a cubicle rat again.

Well, maybe just a little bitter. I did post this when I was near Palo Alto the other day

A certain company, located in Palo Alto, CA., really pissed me off recently, although they may have actually done me a favor in the long run. Anyway, here I am, one hour away from their corporate headquarters, and my buddy, Dino, insisted on making a very significant gesture in their general direction. I really appreciate that gesture, but the hotel room really stinks now !

So why was I near Palo Alto when I live in Oklahoma and plan to move to Mexico? How did I get so far off my planned route? Two days after the "big news," my husband woke up with a brilliant idea. We've wanted to take a trip out to California to visit my stepson for ages. I didn't want him making the drive without me, so here was our opportunity.

And what a trip it was! We planned it in four days. We worked out a timetable and made all our hotel reservations. We even made dinner reservations at the Grand Canyon. The trip took two weeks. We drove approximately 5,000 miles!! We saw many places that one or both of us had never seen before.

We packed up our trusty BMW X3 with all the goodies we thought we'd need, and it worked out well.

And we packed our dinosaurs, which was a really great idea. I ordered them on Amazon, and they were well worth the price for fun travel photos. They will travel with us from now on.

Our other great purchase for this trip was a plug in cooler. OK. I'll admit it. We bought it because we wanted cool wine when we got to our hotel rooms at night. It worked great! We kept it plugged into the car while we were driving and unplugged it if we turned off the car for any period of time, and plugged it in in the hotel rooms at night.

And it came in handy for other stuff. In California, where we stayed three days, we bought some supplies and took leftover meat and cheese and tortillas along with us when we left, which came in really handy for a road lunch and even a light dinner when we pulled into Taos really late and didn't want to bother with a restaurant. We just wanted to sleep. And drink chilled wine, of course. We think this cooler has a bright future, including accompanying us on our drive-down trip to Mexico when we move.

But now we are home and it's time for me to start figuring out how to be a digital nomad. I have so much to do.

I need to re-brand the novel I already have published. I let my husband convince me it wasn't a romance. It is. And it needs to be labeled as one and look like one.
I need to post some of the YouTube videos I made on our trip.
I need to find a new home for my online art.
I need to finish my new webpage.
I need to write this blog more often!!! (I will write some blog posts about the places we visited on this trip. It was a fascinating ride!)
I need to really pay attention to our diet and create some "Fine dining with KETO" videos and post some recipes.

So here goes! Cubicle Rat to Digital Nomad. THAT'S ME!!!!

This post may be sponsored or contain affiliate links. My opinions are always my own. If you purchase a product through an affiliate link, I make a small commission – at no cost to you – which helps keep this blog running, my recipes free, and supports our efforts to bring information about the low carb lifestyle and the experience of moving to Mexico to you.

Road trips, dinosaurs and lenses

So we are going on a two week road trip through the western USA, starting next week. We are visiting Santa Fe, the southern rim of the Grand Canyon, driving over the Golden Gate Bridge, stopping in Mendocino, staying in a Victorian Inn in Ferndale, CA., visiting friends in Willow Creek, CA, then driving up into Idaho to visit Ketchum where Hemingway spent the last two years of his life, where he killed himself and is buried. From there, well drive through Salt Lake City, and stop to see the lake, then drive over the Royal Gorge Bridge and then down to Taos for a couple days on the way home. That's almost 80 hours of driving with a few days here and there to catch up with ourselves and rest in very cool places.

I had never heard of the Taos hum until an Australia friend asked about it (Thanks Stace Irving), but I guess we'll have to check that out.

I didn't know all my lenses for my new EOS 80D when I went to Mexico, so I played around with them a little tonight to get ready for this road trip. First, I bought some dinosaurs to take some fun pictures with. Can you imagine them at the Grand Canyon? And they are poseable!!!

So I am experimenting with all my lenses and my dinosaurs to know how to use my camera better on this trip. Here are my results:

Regular lens all the way in