On the Road: Munich Art Museums (continued)

After visiting the Alte Pinakothek, I walked the short distance to the Neue Pinakothek, which turned out to be not as Neue as I had imagined. The building is new, but the art is mostly 19th century art. I have always associated the place with Impressionist and Post Impressionist art, but the museum was founded by King Ludwig I of Bavaria in 1853 (the original building was destroyed during World War II; the building that houses the collection today opened in 1981) and much of the collection is art that was contemporary around that time and not long after—in other words, 19th century art. It's not until the last three or four of more than twenty galleries that any modern painting appears (modern in the art historical sense).

The Anatomist (1869) by Gabriel von Max

Among the older works, there were some oddities that caught my eye, including a painting entitled The Anatomist (1869) by Gabriel von Max. The anatomist of the title is in shadow, alone in a dark room with a pretty female corpse, lifting the white cloth that drapes her, about to expose a lifeless white breast. He seems perplexed more than anything, as if doesn't quite know what to do with the body. Another odd painting shows a group of monkeys sitting on top of what appear to be crates for shipping paintings. The edge of a gilded frame appears to the left side. The amusing title is Apes as Art Critics (1889). It was also painted by Gabriel von Max.

Apes as Art Critics (1889) by Gabriel von Max

Arnold Böcklin, Playing in the Waves (1883)

Another oddity was Arnold Böcklin's Playing in the Waves (1883), which shows a group of people (if "people" is the right word) playing in the ocean. The men appear to be centaurs and at least the large foreground figure is a mermaid. The upturned bottom of the swimmer diving under the waves at upper right is a particularly amusing touch that suggests at least some of the swimmers are human. I liked this painting the more I looked at it, strange as it is. It's not clear to me what's going on here, but it made me laugh. Aside from that, the use of color is appealing and the way the half-submerged figures disappear into the depths as the light fades under the surface of the water is convincing. I wonder about the title. "Playing" might be the wrong term. The mermaid doesn't look especially happy....

Nymphéas (1915), Claude Monet

 There were many good pieces by Caspar David Friedrich as well. I particularly liked Riegengebirgs Landscape with Fog Rising (1819-20), but the atmospheric effects didn't photograph well.

Vincent Van Gogh, View of Arles (1889)

The Impressionist and Post-Impressionist galleries at the end of the museum, if you follow the suggested route, are impressive. The walls are painted strong colors that suddenly bring the museum alive as you turn a corner—a bit startling at first, as the colors the Impressionists used were when these paintings were new. All three of the Van Goghs here I've seen before but only in reproduction. There is an early Cézanne still life, a large Monet waterlily, one of the Van Gogh sunflower paintings, a very large, very interesting Bonnard view of a colliery using a lot of his characteristic yellows and oranges despite the subject matter, and a beautiful Gauguin, among others. I had thought there were more modern works in the museum than were on display, but it was wonderful to see these. Perhaps a lot is kept in storage and rotated often, or maybe lent frequently. I don't know....

Lignite Colliery (1918), Pierre Bonnard

The Birth–Te Manari No Atua, Paul Gauguin, 1896

Vincent Van Gogh, Vase with Sunflowers (1888)

Poster designs by Ikko Tanaka
at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Next, I visited Pinakothek der Moderne to see its collection of modern art. There was a lot to see and I was tired by the time I got there, so I went around in something of a daze, but I got to see a special exhibit of graphic design by Ikko Tanaka in addition to the permanent collection, which, not surprisingly, is strong in German artists and artists working in Germany, including Max Beckmann and the Expressionists. I rarely get enthusiastic about sculpture, but a pice by Oskar Schlemmer caught my eye (below) along with a few pieces by painters unfamiliar to me.

Black and white at
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

In a large gallery of starkly black and white paintings, a woman dressed from head to toe in black was an irresistible subject. I'm not sure she was unaware as I photographed her from a distance.

Abstrakte Figur (Freiplastik G)
Oskar Schlemmer (1921)

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On the Road: Munich to Leipzig (July 1, 2018)

On the ICE express from Munich to Leipzig by way of Nuremberg and Erfurt, the countryside is mostly wheat and corn fields but also I have seen large fields of vines trained up high on wires—surely hops for making beer. This is Bavaria after all. I didn't make it to a beer hall while in Munich, but I have a bottle of the local brew in my bag for later. The people of Munich certainly consume a lot of it. There are beer halls everywhere and beer bottles everywhere, too, although, in general the city is quite clean.

Great Spotted Woodpecker, English Garden, Munich
July 1, 2018

I spent the morning walking around the English Garden, which includes some surprisingly thick stands of large trees, as well as streams and lakes and large open meadows. A team of Indian or Pakistani amateur cricket players was using one of the meadows for some practice, sharing the space with a flock of geese.

Fieldfare
English Garden, Munich, July 1, 2018

I went to the garden to do some bird watching. I heard a lot of loudly singing birds, but, the singers tend to stay high in the trees and hidden, which is rather frustrating. That said, I saw the ubiquitous local blackbirds and many tits (Great Tits, I think in this case), and I did add two new birds to my life list: the Fieldfare (a Robin-like thrush) and the Great Spotted Woodpecker. I managed to get photos of both. It was interesting also to see female Mandarin Ducks, which look only subtly different from the females of our closely related Wood Ducks.

Female Mandarin Duck
English Garden, Munich
July 1, 2018

On the Road: Munich (June 30, 2018)

Bols: The Governers of the Amsterdam Wine Merchants' Guild (1659)

Aching feet, but I'm happy. I spent the whole day at the Pinakotheken—Alte, Neue, and der Moderne, in Munich. Half the Alte Pinakothek (yes, half of the entire museum) was closed for renovation, which was very disappointing, but perhaps a blessing in disguise. I would probably not have made it to the other two museums otherwise.

I can't complain. I got to see a few paintings that I've always wanted to see—in particular The Governers of the Amsterdam Wine Merchants' Guild (1659), by Bols. I had a postcard of this painting pinned over my desk at work for many years, although I can't remember where I got the card. The figure at far left, is a servant, according to the wall label, not one of the governors. He holds a pipette for sampling wine and a tastevin, the only indicators of the profession of the main subjects. Seeing the painting in person, I noticed that, aside from the marvelous faces, the cushion on the stool (lower right) is particularly well done; it seemed so real, I wanted to touch it.

Rubens: The Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt (c. 1616)

The early German section of the museum was open, as were the Reubens rooms. Among the paintings by Rubens, I especially wanted to see The Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt (c. 1616) as my mother once saw it and, impressed by it, had on a number of occasions described it to me. It's quite impressive—large and full of action. I love the expression on the face of the man top center (half obscured by the raised arm of the man in the white turban to right of him). The hippo, too, is wonderful. The wall label suggests Rubens may have based his depiction of the hippo on a stuffed hippo that was on display in Rome in 1601, although the painting is dated to about 15 years later than that.

Cranach the Elder
Lucretia

Early German portraits and religious figures have a certain distinctive quirkiness that appeals to me deeply. The bodies are sometimes a bit exaggerated or not quite right in some way (yet oddly convincing). The clothing is often interesting. The figures in portraits usually hold something of interest in their hands that indicates a profession or social rank. There are often inscriptions in otherwise blank areas of the image. Interesting hats abound. Memling, Balding, and the Cranachs are quite familiar. It was thrilling to see Cranach the Elder's Lucretia, with her cloak so diaphanous as to be virtually non-existent (although it is more apparent in person than in my photograph here).

Bernhard Strigel: Conrad Rehlinger the Elder (left)
and The Eight Children of Conrad Rehlinger (right)

In addition to these, I saw a number of very strong works by one Bernhard Strigel that impressed me, and, fittingly, a portrait by a painter named Maler (meaning "painter" in German) that I liked very much, also a portrait by a painter named Meulich. Strigel, Maler, and Meulich I'd never noted before, although chances are I've seen their work elsewhere. In the French section, it was also fun to see one of the several versions of Resting Girl on a Sofa by François Boucher (1753).

Boucher: Resting Girl on a Sofa (1753)

There were too many very beautiful paintings to mention or to show here. Again, maybe it was a blessing that half the museum was closed....

Hans Muelich: Portrait of Andreas Ligsalz

Hans Maler: Portrait of Wolfgang Ronner

Hans Baldung: Portrait of Christoph I, Margrave of Baden

On the Road: Munich (June 29, 2018)

Chandelier in the main building of Nymphenburg Palace

Today is my first day traveling alone after ten days as a chaperone with a youth orchestra touring Central Europe. I had hoped to continue reflecting my travels with the orchestra here in my personal blog, but blogging for the tour group left me no time. Now I find myself in Munich, staying walking distance from the Nymphenburg Palace, which turned out to be well worth the time it took to visit.

I spent about three hours seeing the main palace building and the extensive gardens around it, crisscrossed by paths and canals, with ponds large and small, the famous garden pavilions, and a museum of carriages and sleighs housed in what once were the palace stables. It's worth it to buy the ticket that gives access to all the sights on the grounds.

A Chinese-inspired wall decoration

The palace was built in the early 18th century as a summer retreat from court life for Bavaria's royal family, but was later expanded and modified. The rooms of the main building are interesting for their interior decorations, often using textiles or tiles in what was known as the "Chinese style," reflecting fanciful notions of life in China and a mishmash of Asian influences. Some of the decorations appear to have been authentically made in China, but they were made for the European export market rather than for domestic consumption and they have been tailored to European tastes, in some places incorporating Western-style linear perspective, for example.

Portrait of Katerina Botsari by Joseph Karl Steiler,
one of the 36 beauties in the Gallery of Beauties

I very much enjoyed seeing the famous Gallery of Beauties—36 portraits, painted between 1827 and 1850 (mostly by court painter Joseph Karl Stieler) for Ludwig I of Bavaria, reflecting the king's taste in women. I'd say he had a good eye; many are indeed beauties. I was rather taken by a number of them but perhaps liked Katerina "Rosa" Botsari best. According to Wikipedia, she was a member of the Souliot Botsaris family in the service of Queen Amalia of Greece and "admired throughout the European courts." King Ludwig also had a quite democratic outlook. Most of the portraits are of royalty or other nobility, but some of the women depicted are commoners.

Royal horse carriage

Carriages and sleighs may sound dull, but the Marstallmuseum houses a fabulous collection of royal conveyances that has to be seen to be believed. The one pictured here is among the simplest in the collection. Others are so heavily decorated with cherubs and sphinxes and all manner of other gilded ornament that it's a wonder they were able to move. The largest of them required a team of eight horses to pull. In addition to sleighs and carriages, the museum displays a wide variety of horse trappings, including a horse blanket with hundreds of bells attached used on horses that pulled sleighs through the snow. The horse must have been audible long before it arrived. A sign points out that one of the carriages cost the equivalent of about 140 times a baker's annual salary at the time, which, if my calculations are correct, would be the equivalent of going on $6,000,000 in today's money. These were the custom-built super-luxury yachts of their day.

Detail of ceiling decoration
in the Amelienburg

Each of the garden pavilions is interesting in its own way. The earliest, the Pagodenburg (1717-1719), is decorated inside with blue and white Dutch tiles. The design is supposed to evoke blue and white Chinese porcelain. The Amalienburg (1734-1739), decorated with mirrors and in silver and blue, the colors of the Bavarian royal family was a gift from Elector Karl Albrecht to his wife Amalia, who was a daughter of Emperor Joseph I. My online research suggests that many consider it to be the finest extant example of a European pleasure pavilion in the rococo tradition.

The Badenburg is remarkable for its tiled pool. According to the Munich Tourist Office, Josef Effner built the pavilion between 1719 and 1721, although it was later remodeled. The pool was heated. The walls on the upper level are made of faux-marble (stucco painted to look like marble). We saw a fair amount of this stucco marble on the orchestra tour, but none was as well done as this. Finally, the Magdalenenklause (Magdalene Hermitage) is a rather bizarre church built on the palace grounds between 1725 and 1728 as a place for religious reflection. It is decorated inside as a grotto with stone and shells. The effect is rather gloomy, but worth seeing once just because the place is so strange.

Interior of the Magdolenenkrause

The gardens themselves are very pretty. It was a pleasure just to stroll in the woods and meadows of the extensive grounds. Birds were singing everywhere, but I was unable to see many or identify any in the woods beyond the common Blue Tit and what I believe are Chaffinches. In the ponds and canals were European Coots, several types of geese (including Barnacle Goose, Canada Goose, and Greylag Goose), Tufted Ducks, and a couple of varieties of Grebe, one of which was a Great Crested Grebe (pictured)—among others.

A grebe in a canal at The Nymphenburg Palace

Salzburg and Salt (June 21, 2018)

The Friesacher Hotel, Salzburg
Outstanding breakfast buffet!

Salzburg today is known for music, but it was salt that made Salzburg prosperous. At the start of my day, I enjoyed a bountiful breakfast buffet—overflowing with choices: whole grain breads, hams, salamis, smoked salmon, eight or nine cheeses, liverwurst, cereals, eggs, omelettes, cakes, pastries, and more—before leaving my quintessentially Austrian hotel (the Friesacher) for the center of Old Salzburg, where a guide led me on a walking tour that included views of the famous Mozart Statue in the Mozartplatz and of the Nonnberg Convent (where the real Maria Von Trappe studied), the Hohensalzburg Fortress, and a visit to Mozart's birth house.

Mozart composed The Magic Flute on this instrument

It was interesting to see the room where Mozart was born and to get a sense of how the Mozart family lived, but some of the displays were badly lit and hard to see. The guide moved quickly and the small rooms were overflowing with other tour groups. Despite that, some of the artifacts made a deep impression. Of special interest was a small, improbably modest-looking keyboard instrument that the guide revealed was the instrument Mozart used to compose some of his last and greatest compositions, including The Magic Flute, which remains by far my favorite opera by any composer. It was moving to see an instrument used to create a piece of music that has become a human cultural treasure.

Ceramic room heater in the Mozart House

Of interest to me were the large, often elaborately decorated ceramic oven-like structures against the wall in the corners of many of the rooms. These appear to have been room heaters, apparently fed with firewood from outside to avoid smoke. The guide didn't remark on them until I asked. They aren't part of the official tour. It seemed strange not to mention them while a great deal of time was devoted to mostly mediocre portraits of the Mozart family and associates—although there was a rather nice pencil portrait of Mozart's sister in one of the cases.

Coat of arms of Leonhard von Keutschach
I love the turnip

Hohensalzburg Fortress, which dominates the town, is accessed by a steep, fast funicular railway. The ride is dramatic. You rush up the mountain and in a few seconds have a panoramic view of the city below. The fort was of some interest and the surrounding scenery impressive. Among the coats of arms displayed on various buildings around the fortifications was that of Prince Archbishop Leonhard von Keutschach (1495-1515). It sports a turnip. I used my free time after lunch to see a show of Japanese photography that happened to be at Salzburg's modern art museum. Lunch was pasta with chorizo made at the restaurant proprietor's "piggery" and Mediterranean vegetables with a local weissbier (Stiegl); the pasta dish was delicious but excessively salty—which seems to be the way the Austrians like their food. Fruits and vegetables for sale at an outdoor stand looked very tempting, particularly the berries, including fresh red currants and gooseberries, fruits we very seldom see in California.

Market produce, Salzburg

Later in the afternoon I toured the salt mine at Hallein (about 30 minutes south of Salzburg). For many hundreds of years salt has been mined near Salzburg. Celtic settlers in the area began mining salt in the area with wood and iron hand tools as early as 200BC. After a long lapse, mining began again in the medieval period and continued into the 20th century. Tourism has long been part of activity at the mine (the Hallein mine bills itself as the oldest exhibition mine in the world; visitors have been allowed to tour the shafts since the 16th century).

The local beer, Salzburg

Modern mining used modern methods. The salt deposits at Hallein are not crystalline. The salt is in seams about 40% salt mixed with clay, limestone, and other substances. The salt has always been extracted with water (to create brine that is then heated to cause evaporation and crystallization), but industrial-scale slurry mining eventually became the norm with water pumped directly into mine excavations and brine pumped out after insoluble components settle out of the mix.

Visitors enter the mine as modern miners did, wearing white, hooded uniforms (provided by the mine for the tour, ill-fitting and probably unnecessary, but part of the fun) and on a small-gauge railway with no cars, straddling a metal beam (there are no seats), everyone pushed close together in seated single file, and then move further underground on a series of wooden slides, polished with use. Both the fast-moving train and the slides were a hit, with shouts of "Wheee..." echoing through the mine shafts as we raced through the dimly lit tunnels on the train, each holding on to the closest passenger in front of us, or on the slides. Once underground at mining levels, a slow boat takes visitors across one of several underground lakes, remnants of the slurry-based mining process (the 100-yard trip a bit comically dramatized with colored lights and incongruous music). Walking about a mile through the tunnels to the exit point takes visitors across the Austrian–German border underground and back again, no passport required.

Wooden slides in the salt mine

The weather has been hot and humid. It's been nice to have the delicious alpenwasser (water from the Alps) available everywhere, even from street fountains in old Salzburg.

Arrived in Europe (June 20, 2018)

Chaperoning the 2018 Europe Tour of the Santa Rosa Symphony Youth Orchestra, I arrived yesterday, June 20, in Munich and went with the group from there by bus to Salzburg. Today, June 21 will be the first full day of the tour. Departing San Francisco and the outbound flight went smoothly. Entering Germany was likewise without major incident. Although three of the young musicians managed to get off the aircraft without their passports, all were found.

Most of the musicians slept after the first in-flight meal service, but the 10.5-hour journey from San Francisco took us north and east over Nevada, just north of Boise, Idaho, and then into Canadian airspace. For those who stayed awake, a cluster of tall buildings glowing in the dark below the aircraft about three hours after departure was Saskatoon. We passed over Hudson’s Bay and Greenland, crossing the North Atlantic between Scotland and Norway after skirting the northeastern corner of Iceland.

From there it was only an hour or so before land again appeared—the German coast. What we could see of Germany below was industrial in the north but increasingly a patchwork of green-black forest and chartreuse farmland as we approached Munich airport. On the ground, the crops proved to be potatoes, corn, and wheat.

There was no border control entering Austria. The border wasn't even marked, although a few miles across the frontier, police were randomly pulling over trucks and buses for inspection. Ours was spared scrutiny. So far, Bavaria and Austria look like their pictures.

Serendipitous Art: Blue Shadows

Shadows in a museum showcase looked like art to me. Serendipitous, ephemeral art.

Click on the image for a larger view. For more unintended art, see my blog Serendipitous Art.

Books I'm Reading: Nature's Palette and The Anatomical Venus

Nature's Palette: The Science of Plant Color, by David Lee (Universtiy of Chicago Press, 2007) was an interesting read, but it was rather more narrowly focused than I expected it to be when I acquired it. The book deals mainly with the biochemistry of pigmentation in plants while touching only glancingly on the history of pigments made from plants, a subject that interests me more. It reads a bit like a doctoral thesis.

Despite the narrow focus on plant biochemistry, there was enough about the importance of plant colors as adaptations to available light in different environments and about the physics of structural color (as opposed to color resulting simply from the reflectance of particular wavelengths of visible light) to keep me from abandoning the book before finishing it. Notable also for its many full-color photographs. Printed on high-quality coated paper that make the book very heavy.

Even more lavishly illustrated with photographs is Joanna Ebenstein's Anatomical Venus: Wax, God, Death, and the Ecstatic (Distributed Art Publishers, 2014), which looks at the history of dissectible, mostly female, wax anatomical models made chiefly between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century. These were painstakingly crafted in mostly European workshops, the most famous of which was at La Specola, in Florence, where the famous Medici Venus (also known as the Demountable Venus) was made between 1780 and 1782 by the workshop of Clemente Susini.

These models were conceived as a way to teach human anatomy without the need for dissection of cadavers—which was (and is) smelly, messy, ethically questionable, and dependent upon a supply of dead bodies—but they were made at a time when the human body, and specifically the female body, capable of birth, was understood to be a reflection of the perfection of god, emblematic of the relationship between man and god. The Anatomical Venus attempts to contextualize these figures by examining how they were used and received in their own time, at how they came to be understood later, mainly in the nineteenth century (when they were just as likely to be seen in a sideshow as in a medical setting), and at how they have been viewed more recently.

What makes them bizarre and disturbing to us today is that they are beautiful and beautifully presented. They are tricked out in ways that seem unnecessary to their utility as anatomical teaching tools, often with real eyelashes and real human hair, bedded in fine linens, and enclosed in handmade glass and wood display cases. Their entrails spill out of them, yet they are posed as if blissfully asleep or in a moment of ecstatic possession. Are they art? Are they medical teaching aids only? Are they memento mori? Are they in some ways pornographic? The Anatomical Venus attempts to answer all these questions.

Santa Rosa Symphony Youth Orchestra Tour Less than a Week Away

The Santa Rosa Symphony Youth Orchestra (SRSYO) will be departing San Francisco for Münich on June 19 to start a 10-day tour of Europe. Main stops are Salzburg, Vienna, and Budapest. My son is Principal Clarinet. I'll be going along as a chaperone/photographer/blogger.

The SRSYO 2018 Europe Tour blog is now up and running. See the blog for information about the tour, the upcoming Bon Voyage Concert on Saturday, June 16, in Weill Hall at the Green Music Center, and for daily updates on the concerts the group will perform in Europe and their other activities while away. https://srsyo.blogspot.com.

Miscellaneous: Colin

The name Colin is fairly popular in the United States today. It wasn't so when I was a child, in the 1960s. I was teased at school, called Colleen, called a girl. On those rotating drugstore racks selling bicycle license plates for kids, there was never a Colin.

None of this bothered me much, but I did grow up thinking my name was rare, so that, even now, I notice the name when it pops up. Recently in San Francisco I was a little pleased to find there's a street there with my name on it--Colin Place. It's only an alley, and one with no public access at that. But it's got my name on it.

[Update: Strangely, two days later I walked into a wine shop in San Francisco and the first thing I saw, literally, was a bottle of Champagne with my name on it--a producer I had never heard of before.]

Plants I'm Growing: Cactus "Scarlet Cup"

Once a year, fleetingly, the several varieties of cacti we have in pots on the deck give a good show. Perhaps my favorite among these is Echinocereus triglochidiatus, a type of hedgehog cactus known as scarlet cup, or claret cup, among other names. The flowers just began to open today. They will last perhaps over the weekend.--or maybe not that long.

Wines I'm Drinking: Opening Old Bottles

Clearly, wines meant to age get much better when allowed to. I learned that lesson years ago the first time I bought a decent Bordeaux by the case and opened the bottles over a period of seven or eight years.

When I left Tokyo for the United States, in the year 2000, I shipped back with me more than 30 cases of wine accumulated during my 19 years in Japan, wine meant to age. The oldest bottles I still have are now about 35 years old. I've been reluctant to open these wines, because they deserve a special occasion, special guests, special food. Despite repeated invitations, opportunities to share with friends who appreciate fine wine have not often materialized. So, my stash of old wine has dwindled only slowly.

But there's no point in waiting so long that the wine has died by the time it's consumed. A few of these bottles will still improve. Some are already too old. Many are at the end of their optimal drinking window. So, in the past year I've taken to opening a few--if only to go with an everyday family meal. I've been happily surprised. They have been stored reasonably well, and most have remained vibrant. Recently I've had a 1998 Guigal Chateauneuf-du-Pape, a 1990 Chateau Pez, a 1986 Chateau L'Angelus, a 1983 Chateau Lynch Bages, a 1986 Chateau Pontet-Canet, a 1995 Chateau Lafleur St. Georges, and a 1990 Penfolds Bin 407, among others. The Guigal  Chateauneuf-du-Pape, the '83 Lynch Bages, and the '86 L'Angelus were standouts. There's plenty more....

Wines I'm Making: Not Exactly Wine (Cider Fermentation, Spring 2018)

Not wine, but hard cider. I was surprised recently when I opened a bottle of hard cider I made a few years ago to find its flavor greatly enhanced by the aging. (I first made cider in February of 2013 then again in November of 2013, so the bottle I opened was four to five years old). Greater depth, more complexity--all around more interesting. I was inspired to do another fermentation, as I suspect the cider I have on hand will now start to disappear. I inoculated three gallons of local apple juice with Mangrove Jack's cider yeast today, May 22, 21018. Fermentation will probably take about 10 days.

Art I'm Making: Untitled Collage No. 201 (Santa Rosa)

A recent collage. This is Untitled Collage No. 201 (Santa Rosa), April 16, 2018. Acrylic on paper, acrylic monotype, graphite, collage. Image size: 37.4 x 27.7cm (14.7 x 10.9 inches). Matted to 24 x 20 inches. Signed on the mat. Signed and dated on the reverse.

Click on the image for a larger view. For more, see my collage (and photography) website at http://ctalcroft.wixsite.com/collage-site

Miscellaneous: West Virginia! My Quest is Over

Silly as it is, I've been amusing myself by trying to see a license plate from every state of the Union (in the course of my regular daily meanderings, without making trips for the purpose). North Dakota and West Virginia long eluded me, but I saw a North Dakota plate a few months ago and yesterday I finally saw a West Virginia plate. Only took about three years.

But now I feel like I want to start all over again....

[Update: Inevitably, I have started all over. Since writing this post, as of May 20, I've seen: Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, California, Hawaii, Iowa, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Washington.]