CANADA’s JOGGINS FOSSIL CLIFFS – Guest Post by Caroline Hatton

Joggins Fossil Cliffs, Nova Scotia: Visitors listen to a guide from the Joggins Fossil Centre

My friend and fellow children’s book writer Caroline Hatton explored the Joggins Fossil Cliffs, on the shore of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, Canada, in October 2014. She wrote this article especially for her friend Charlie, a very young, budding fossil scientist.

Fossil Belinurus (extinct animal)

Credit: Courtesy of the Joggins Fossil Centre

When I visited the Joggins Fossil Cliffs on the shore of the Bay of Fundy in Canada last year, I felt like I had traveled back in time and arrived 315 million years ago, when giant insects and some of the earliest reptiles lived in a warm swamp forest. I wondered, how did a forest full of life become cliffs full of fossil remains? 

Matching cast fossil (left) and mold fossil (right) of tree trunk

First, floods buried the base of the trees in sand and killed the trees. The tree tops broke off, leaving standing stumps. The insides slowly rotted and the stumps became hollow. Flowing water carried matter and left it in layers of sediment, which piled up around each stump. When the sediment spilled over the rim, it filled the stump, like plaster filling a mold before becoming a cast. Over time, the sediment hardened and became a fossil, preserving the shape of the inside of the stump. 

Can you spot the two chunks of fossil tree trunks?

Dead animals, their footprints (tracks), and poop (called coprolites) also turned into fossils. More sediment piled up and buried the fossils deep below the surface of the ground for millions of years.

Then as Atlantic Ocean waves gradually dug the Bay of Fundy, they carved the Joggins Cliffs and exposed the fossils, much like cutting the first slice of a giant cake and taking it away to reveal the layers inside.

Path from top of cliffs to stairs to beach

Inside the Joggins Fossil Centre at the top of the cliff, I saw fossils (like the one in the photo at the top of this page) and learned about them. Then I followed a guide down the path for a walk along the beach where he taught me and the other visitors what to look for.

Soon everyone spotted fossils in the rocks on the beach or on the cliff. Collecting fossils is not allowed, but keeping human-made objects, such as sea glass (broken glass polished by sand and waves) is okay. Taking photos is the best!

Fossil: standing tree trunk with attached root and rootlets

At other places around the world where fossils are found, the fossils of tree trunks, their roots, and rootlets might be broken into many pieces and scattered far apart. At the Joggins Fossil Cliffs the guide showed us a fossil tree trunk with a fossil root and fossil rootlets still attached.

The fossils of the Joggins Cliffs are special because the forest and the animals are preserved as they lived. And there are fossils of many kinds of plants and animals, telling the story of life in the ancient forest. The Joggins Fossil Cliffs are like an ancient book written in stone. They are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a treasure for everyone on Earth.

Fossil track of giant millipede

Of all the fossils that the guide showed us, the one I liked best was the track of a giant millipede. Experts think that when it was alive, it might have been 6 feet (2 meters) long! I’m glad I live now and it doesn’t.

The Bay of Fundy is home of the world's highest tides, rising and falling up to 42 feet (13 meters) a day at Joggins. In strong storms, waves pound away the base of the Joggins Cliffs and expose new fossils. Who knows, the next new fossil, perhaps of an insect or reptile never known before, might be discovered by a kid!

 

Location of the Joggins Fossil Cliffs

Joggins is a small community in western Nova Scotia in Canada. The area was known to the Native American Mi'kmaq people as "Chegoggins" meaning place of the large fish weir, a name modified by French and English settlers to Joggins. Now the town is famous for its fossils.
 
For more info

See an artist’s vision of the prehistoric forest and more at http://jogginsfossilcliffs.net/.

Read a scientific description of the Joggins Fossil Cliffs at http://www.whaton.uwaterloo.ca/waton/s931.html

Acknowledgment

Many thanks to Melissa Grey, Curator, Joggins Fossil Institute, for fact-checking this post.

From SAN DIEGO'S GLOBE to LONDON'S GLOBE: UK Theater Tour with Blue Badge Guides, Guest post by Hal Fuson

Stage, Globe Theater, London

I thank my friends Hal and Pam Fuson for the following post about their recent trip to the UK for a close-up look at the British theater scene, led in part by the excellent Blue Badge Guides.

Recently, long-time friends pushed us to join them on a theatre-themed tour of London, Bath and Stratford-on-Avon sponsored by The Old Globe Theatre, a San Diego company with an 80-year history of producing Shakespeare and a wide range of other plays, both new and old.  As a director of The Old Globe I knew many of the other forty members of the tour group and, of course, we shared an enthusiasm for seeing plays and looking behind the scenes at some of the world’s other great theater companies, including London’s 1990s reproduction of Shakespeare’s original theater, also known as The Globe.  

Mild October weather makes the gardens of Blenheim Palace, where Winston Churchill spent his early childhood, a welcoming stop in Oxfordshire.

If anything, the prospect of being in the hands of a tour company was more of a negative than a positive. On earlier trips we had successfully bought discount theater tickets at the Leicester Square TKTS ticket booth. And since we did more or less speak the language, we questioned the necessity of paying someone else to steer us about on a schedule not our own. Happily, as it turned out, we rather enjoyed being steered about, partly because we could always blame the tour company, instead of ourselves or our friends, for the inevitable mishaps and aggravations of travel.  If the bed was a little too soft, or the food service a tad slow, or the last sight a bit passé, well, so it goes. There was always a next restaurant or another fascinating backstage for us to look forward to without any of us having to worry about the timing or the tickets.  

Wearing signature orange National Theatre jackets, tourists go behind the scenes

A stark reminder of what can go wrong came at our first theater booking, “The Play that Goes Wrong,” a farce that is doing well in London’s Covent Garden.  What went wrong for us was that our forty seats were double-booked, apparently because of an error by the ticket agency on which our tour operator had successfully relied for more than twenty years. The tour operator compensated by finding us seats for a matinee a few days later, this time featuring David Suchet as Lady Bracknell in “The Importance of Being Earnest.” It helped that the Oscar Wilde masterpiece was directed by Adrian Noble, the former director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, many of whose Shakespeare productions we had seen during his turn as the artistic director of the summer festival at San Diego’s Globe.  

Blue Badge guide describes the effect of later additions on Hampton Court's architectural integrity.

Another task the tour operator undertook for us was hiring a remarkably good crew of guides, all of whom were certified holders of Blue Badge status under the UK’s demanding system of training and testing.  Each guide had charge of groups of 15 or less when we were moving on foot, which was most of the time when we weren’t seated in theaters or restaurants.  

Visitors peer down at the Roman baths with the Bath Abbey looming in the background.

 Not only did they know where to lead us and what to say about the sights along the way, they were theatrical acts onto themselves.  They herded groups of us mostly older cats, with our different capacities for mobility, hearing and attention span, keeping us on defined time schedules across busy urban landscapes crisscrossed with traffic diversions and occasional traverses of royal or parliamentary carpools.  Not the least of their skills was in always knowing the way to the best nearby pub and, shortly thereafter, to the nearest restrooms, or, in the Queen’s English, the “loo”, a matter of considerable intensity for us older folk.

At tea in this home in Bath, Jane Austen, or a very good likeness, still reads from her work.

But managing the logistics is only the beginning.  Just as important is the guides’ stock of stories about the sights we were seeing.  For example, the origin of the terms “loo” and “Big Ben”.  It happens, as a guide in London told us, the origins of both terms are a bit hazy.  One story is that “loo” has something to do with the Waterloo train station, or even with the battle after which the station is named.  Another has it that a one-time maker of iron cisterns branded its products with the mark “Waterloo”.  Our Stratford guide steered us to a prize-winning loo next to the River Avon, but he affirmed that the origin of the name was uncertain.  

Guide Sean Kelleher in Westminster discussing how Big Ben, the bell, got its name.

Big Ben, we learned, is actually the bell within the tower now named for Queen Elizabeth II on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of her reign, just as the other tower on the Houses of Parliament was named for Queen Victoria when she passed the same milestone.  The bell, we were told, is inscribed with the name of Benjamin Hall, the first London Commissioner of Works, under whose leadership the towers and many important items of modern infrastructure, including perhaps a number of loos, were built.

Looking up a Hampton Court staircase toward the Chambers of Henry VIII.

I have learned in my involvement with theater that when you have a particularly knotty problem with lots of moving parts prone to failure, you should hire a first-rate member of the stage managers union. Now I know that adding a Blue Badge guide to the team sharply increases your chances of success.

A guide explains a feature of the almost 800 year-old Salisbury Cathedral

You don’t need to be a member of a tour group to hire your own guides.  The Blue Badge and London Walks web sites provide details, and web searches and guidebooks for other destinations should reveal similarly qualified guides at locations around the world.  Just be sure to check references.  Also, remember that most of the usual stops on many routes offer good and inexpensive tours of their highlights — our Blue Badge folks handed us off to local guides at locations like Blenheim Palace and the four theatres whose backstages we toured —The Royal Opera House, The National Theatre, and Shakespeare’s Globe in London, and The Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford — and their guides were uniformly excellent.  Pricing and other details are available on the web sites.  Our tour operator was the unflappable Barry Tobias of San Diego-based Break-Away Tours.

Shakespeare speaks often of swans, as in this line from Othello: ˜I will play the swan,/ and die in music".  Hundreds of the majestic birds frequent the River Avon near Stratford

ON THE ROAD IN INDIA: Village Life, from the Memoir of Carolyn T. Arnold

Roadside scene, India

The following is an excerpt from the memoir of Carolyn T. Arnold, my husband’s aunt, who traveled to India in the 1960s.

On my first tour of India the itinerary called for a drive in cars as we toured northern India. The idea was a good one except in July the usual range of heat is from 100 to 117 degrees, and the humidity goes up to 75%. We saw much of village life, more than was intended, as the old cars broke down repeatedly. Daniel, our driver, was the only mechanic, so we all had to stop while he went back to fix the car.

On the road in India

Before we left, I had asked if the roads were paved and was assured they were. True enough, one strip down the middle of the road was covered with asphalt. When meeting another vehicle, both had to swing out to the wide shoulders, stirring up clouds of choking yellow dust

Man with laden donkeys

On the roads of India, one can see almost any kind of transportation from man-drawn rickshaws, to camels, to trucks, and worn out buses, and always cows. They are allowed to go anywhere without harm, wandering in and out of traffic, which is hectic even without the cows. At one point on our journey, several carts, with two large wheels, creaked along as the oxen lumbered by. 

Gypsy woman

Then a band of gypsies and their camels came along. The women carried jugs of water on their heads while their long, red skirts were swinging and their bracelets and necklaces were jingling. Small babies rode in pouches on either side of the camels. 

Women at the village well

We saw elephants, water buffaloes, and women at the village water well. The women seemed to be engaged in local gossip. Leaning against the outer wall of a building was a charpoy, which is a bed made of a wooden frame with web straps woven alternately in and out and fastened to the frame. It didn’t have a pad or mattress. We could easily understand why it was cooler to eat, sleep, and work outside then inside a building. We saw a barber at work, his customer sitting on a piece of cloth spread on the grass in the shade. I learned later that families of a higher class also sleep on the flat roofs of their homes during the extremely hot weather.

Perhaps the original intrepid tourist was Carolyn T. Arnold, my husband’s aunt.  A single school teacher in Des Moines, Iowa, she began traveling abroad when she was in her forties, beginning with a bicycling trip through Ireland in 1950.  She went on from there to spend a year as a Fulbright Exchange Teacher in Wales, to more trips to Europe and beyond, and eventually became a tour leader, taking all her nieces and nephews (including Art) on her travels.  When she retired from teaching, she wrote of her experiences in a memoir called Up and Down and Around the World with Carrie.  Today, as I read of her travels, I marvel at her spirit of adventure at a time when women did not have the independence they do today.  You can read of some of her other adventures in these posts on this blog:  October 21, 2013; October 7, 2013; July 29, 2013.March 10, 2014, January 12, 2015.

Berlin, Germany, GARDENS OF THE WORLD

Chinese garden, Gardens of the World, Berlin, Germany

On our recent trip to Europe we spent a few days in Berlin where we visited friends and Art attended a conference. We stayed in the Melia Hotel on Friedrichstrasse in the former East Berlin, not far from the Brandenburg Gate and Museum Island.

Brandenburg Gate

Visits to Berlin always bring back memories for Art, who was an exchange student there in 1961, the year the Wall went up and this part of the city was off limits. What was a divided city then, isolated from what was then West Germany, is now a bustling metropolis, filled with arts and culture, and a spectacular mix of old and new.

Enjoying a currywurst, a typical Berlin fast food

On our trips to Berlin we always look forward to our favorite German foods–apple strudel, currywurst, fresh bread in the morning–and returning to favorite places. But we also like to have new experiences. One afternoon while Art was at his meetings a friend took me to the Gardens of the World (Die Garten der Welt), a large park (21 acres) on the outskirts of the city with gardens built in various international styles.

Oriental garden

We went first to the Oriental garden with its fruit trees, fountains, and colorful ceramic tiles reminiscent of the Alhambra in southern Spain. From there we walked to the Chinese Garden, constructed around a large pond filled with lily pads and reached by a zigzag bridge. We watched swans dipping their heads to feed underwater while we drank tea and ate Chinese snacks in the lovely outdoor tea garden.

Afternoon tea in Chinese garden (lids keep the tea hot)

As we followed the path through the park we stopped at the English maze--where we were unsuccessful at finding the center–and then visited the Korean garden, Japanese Zen garden, and the Christian garden, a peaceful enclave surrounded by a metal arbor created from passages of scripture.

Enclosed Christian garden has a flowing water feature in the center

The afternoon of our visit to the Gardens of the World was cool, but not rainy despite the forecast, and, as it was midweek, few other people were there. Many of them appeared to be gardening enthusiasts, inspecting the plants and reading their meticulously written labels. The park also has a nice gift shop.

Address: Eisenacher Strasse 99, 12685 Berlin, Germany

Phone Number: +49 (0) 30 700 906 699

We paid an entrance fee of 5 euros and a parking fee of 2 euros.
Parts of the garden are under construction as it continues to expand.

For current information and more about the garden click HERE.

Fall flowers near the entrance to the garden

September in UMBRIA, ITALY, Part 3: Assisi

Assisi, approach to the lower church of the Basilica of St. Francis

It was our fourth day in Umbria, and we headed for Assisi, about a forty minute drive from Perugia across a flat, agricultural plain. This famous medieval hill town is perched at the edge of Mont Sebasio National Park, which can be seen just beyond the walls of the city. We followed signs to a car park near the Basilica di San Francesco (Basilica of Saint Francis), and walked through the gate and up narrow streets to the broad ramp that led to the entrance of the lower church.

No talking or photographs are allowed inside the Basilica so we rented audio guides–an excellent way to make sense of the abundance of art inside. Every square inch in both the upper and lower church is covered with decoration, either in carved stone or as wall paintings, the most famous being the fresco cycle in the upper church that depict scenes from the life of Saint Francis.

Poster of Giotto fresco in the Basilica

Traditionally, the frescoes are attributed to Giotto and his workshop, but today there is some question by art historians as to whether Giotto was the artist. In any case, the paintings are superb examples of Renaissance art and the use of realism and perspective. The Basilica was built on orders from the Pope just after the death of St. Francis in 1226. St. Francis is the patron saint of Italy so the church and town of Assisi draw thousands of tourists every day. But the requirement for silence inside the Basilica makes a visit there feel calm and peaceful despite all the visitors.

Streets of Assisi

Assisi's history goes back to before Roman times and historic buildings line the steep, narrow streets. Visiting Assisi is like spending the day doing stairmaster–except for a few piazzas, almost every street is slanted or stepped. My legs ached by the end of the day, especially after climbing to the top of the hill to visit the castle (Rocco Maggiore) with its 360 degree view of the town and verdant Umbrian countryside. Inside the castle we climbed the towers and visited a museum of medieval tools, weapons, and costumes. After we made a small donation we were given a small poster of the fresco in the Basilica showing St. Francis giving his cloak to a poor man. (see above)

Inside the castle walls of the Rocco Maggiore. The fortress was first built in the 12th century, then rebuilt in 1367.

On our way back down the hill we stopped at a shop selling Umbrian food specialties and bought two roast pork sandwiches, which we ate later as a picnic supper back at the hotel. Shops in Assisi are filled with saintly souvenirs and local specialties such as salami, truffles, pasta, beans and olive oil. There are also a surprising number of art galleries.

Local Umbrian specialties include pork and wild boar (chingiale)

During the day, as we toured the town, we also went into the small Baroque church of Santa Maria delle Rose, as well as the Duomo (San Rufino), an imposing Romanesque cathedral built on top of Roman ruins. Some of the ruins are visible under thick glass beneath the church aisle and in the plaza in front. It is a little disconcerting to walk across these glass "windows"--as if one is floating on air--but fascinating to see the ancient ruins below.

Carved stone figures appear to hold up the wall on the Romanesque facade of San Rufino, completed in 1253

We thoroughly enjoyed our day in Assisi. It was a warm, sunny day and although there were plenty of tourists, it didn’t seem crowded, perhaps because we visited on a weekday.

View of Assisi and Mont Subasio from the path to the Rocco Maggiore

September in UMBRIA, ITALY, Part 2: Lake Trasimeno and Isola Polvese

View from Isola Polvese across Lake Trasimeno

Lake Trasimeno, located in the northwest corner of Umbria, is the fourth largest lake in Italy and about an hour’s drive from Perugia. It was the site of Hannibal’s defeat of the Romans on 21 June 217 B.C. and has long been an important place in Italy’s history. The lake is surrounded by low hills dotted with medieval fortified towns and castles. In the middle are three islands: Isola Maggiore and Isola Polvese (both accessible by ferry), and Isola Minore (privately owned). We decided to spend a day exploring Isola Polvese, the largest of the islands.

Ferry to Isola Polvese

We drove from Perugia to the town of Magione and from there followed signs to the small lakeside village of San Feliciano where we caught the ferry to Isola Polvese. It was midweek and we were among just a few passengers for the ten minute ride to the island. Most of the island is a nature preserve. There are no cars on the island, although one can rent bikes. Near the ferry landing is a cluster of buildings with a restaurant and small souvenir shop and a few meeting rooms, but except for a youth hostel in the middle of the island, the island has few other buildings except for some ancient ruins in various states of disrepair.

Flowers were abundant along the coastal path

A path at lake level circles the island, while another path goes up and across the center. To begin with, we decided to turn left toward the castle ruins and go clockwise around the island. It was a beautiful, sunny day, perfect for a walk. Lake Trasimeno is extemely shallow and most of the island is surrounded by reed beds, an ideal habitat for waterbirds such as ducks and herons, which we saw stalking prey and flying up from the water. Much of the path was shaded by large oak trees and in many places the ground was carpeted with patches of bright pink flowers. In the sunny spots, lizards scampered among the stones.

Lizard

It took us an hour or so to circle the island as we stopped to take pictures or admire the view. Then, after a cup of coffee at the snack bar, we followed the sunnier path across the top of the island through olive orchards to the ruins of San Secondo church and monastery, currently in the process of being restored.

Path to the church and monastery of San Secondo

 We returned to the dock in time to catch the 3:45 ferry. (Ferries ran about once an hour.) It had been a peaceful and relaxing day in the out-of-doors.

Ferry landing, Isola Polvese

The following day our plan was to drive to Assisi, home of St. Francis, Italy's patron saint. (To be continued next week.)