Hi all. Hope this posting finds everyone well and healthy…
Let me start with a couple of observations about the south. First of all, the kudzu is taking over the world – first the South; next America. For those who don’t know, kudzu is a plant that was imported to stabilize the banks of the Mississippi River. It quickly escaped that area and is now growing wild throughout the south – I even saw it in the everglades. It’s a viney sort of plant that grows up the trunks of trees (or shrubs or guy wires or whatever) and quickly suffocates the trees by not allowing their leaves to get any light, effectively killing them. I’ve tried to get a few photos, but it’s almost comical to see these areas where it’s completely taken over – it looks like topiary – like someone had sculpted a scenery of trees and rocks and shrubs with hedge trimmers.
Secondly, and in the same vein, they imported some flying bugs (informally called love bugs) that were supposed to eat mosquitoes – but they don’t, and the birds won’t eat them because they’re too acidic, and they proliferate like crazy (they’re called love bugs because they are usually flying while coupled – at first I thought it was one bug, until I saw a few ‘solo’) and they’re only known enemy is…the windshield. And supposedly their guts will destroy the finish on a car quickly, which is why I need to get to a car wash soon.
The moral is, don’t mess with Mother Nature unless you know what you’re doing.
And: I know where your Christmas tree comes from. Driving through North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, and throughout the south, I saw huge Christmas tree farms, where they’ve cleared the land of native trees, planted Christmas trees and then harvest them after 4 years and, in most cases, leave the land fallow. (Lots of native stuff regrows, but not the forest.) So to summarize: cut down trees to plant trees to cut them down. Is it any wonder I went to an artificial tree several years ago? Pathetic…
I was in Tallahassee when I last wrote, waiting on new tires for my chariot. After that was done, I headed west on the interstate (yes, I admit it) for about 80 miles before turning north up a highway to Montgomery, Alabama. The rain had let up and the weather was getting hot, so I was hopeful for a dry night in camp. The drive was uneventful; a lot of the same scenery I’d seen throughout the rural south – lots of thick forest, farmland and rangeland, interrupted by a small town about every 5-10 miles along some river or other. I arrived in Montgomery in the late afternoon and went to the Rosa Parks Museum downtown near the state capitol. It was fantastic – every bit as inspiring (and yet horrifying) as I’d expected. The museum basically set the stage by demonstrating segregation in the south in 1954, re-enacted the events leading up to the 13-month bus boycott (her refusal to give up her seat) and showed what happened both during and after the boycott. This event was the birth of the passive resistance civil rights movement and Dr. King’s involvement, and it was interesting to hear some of his early oratory and thoughts about how to pattern the struggle after Gandhi’s efforts in India decades earlier.
I found a good camp spot that evening on some backwaters along the Alabama River between Montgomery and Selma. Although there was no swimming allowed due to alligators, none bothered me as I set up near the waterline (but on top of a steep bank!) There weren’t too many other people and thankfully, none of the RV’s was running a generator, so it was quite peaceful. I roasted hot dogs for dinner, a change from fast food and insta-food, and enjoyed the quietude. I must have been tired because I slept in until almost 9am! And it did stay dry.
Fortunately my next destination, Selma, was not far away. I wanted to visit the site of the so-called ‘Bloody Sunday’ events, where civil rights demonstrators had attempted a march between Selma and Montgomery (a distance of about 50 miles) but were brutally beaten back on the bridge outside of town after going just 6 blocks. They were protesting the death of another activist weeks earlier who was killed during a voting rights demonstration in another town. A couple of weeks after the beatings, Dr. King came down and led a 5-day march to the state capitol, hoping to get an audience with Governor Wallace. About 3000 started the march but there were 25,000 at the end. There’s an excellent museum along highway 80 dedicated to these events. I came away with a newfound appreciation for President Lyndon Johnson and his role in pushing through voting rights legislation. I’ve always thought of Johnson in terms of the Vietnam War and its acceleration under him, although he’d campaigned promising withdrawal. I see now that he was a real champion for civil rights – one quote from him, just a few days after the beatings and before Dr. King’s march, showed that he already completely understood the events in Selma as a turning point in American history, comparing it to Lexington and Appomattox. Great stuff!
After leaving the museum, I headed into Selma proper and walked over the bridge to the memorial below. The main part of the memorial park is well kept-up, but the lower portion had a lot of trash. I picked up some of it but wished I had about 10 trash bags. That would’ve been my small contribution, so that when school kids visited the site they’d see it nice and clean. Missed opportunity…
I headed west again, out towards Philadelphia, Mississippi which is another civil rights site. In 1964 three voter registration activists were murdered here, and the case went unsolved until just a couple of years ago. I don’t know what I expected to see, but the only acknowledgement of the event is that they named the highway into town after the three men. There’s no memorial or even plaque that I could find. I tried to imagine what it was like for two young Jewish college kids from New York City, who’d never been in the deep South, to come down and volunteer for a just cause - and lose their lives almost immediately. Tough to swallow, what we Americans have done to each other.
I headed north out of Philadelphia towards a national forest campground, on my way to Memphis where Dr. King was slain. This campground was also very quiet, along a lake with some good hiking trails (populated with many spiders, of course). I took my spider-whacker stick and wandered through the forest for about 4 miles and then hit the road. In Memphis, they’ve converted the Loraine Hotel (where the assassination occurred) into the National Civil Rights Museum. It had a lot of what I’d already seen, but of course concentrated a lot on Dr. King’s works. It was a good synopsis of all the work that had gone on in America and what’s left to do.
Since I’d picked up another hour in the day (because of moving into the Central time zone) I had time to drive all the way to Arkansas Hot Springs without missing too much because of darkness. The campground was pretty crowded, as this is a popular destination year-round, but I found a lot of great hiking nearby. It was the best hiking I’d had since hitting the AT in Tennessee over a week ago – I got some serious climbing and heavy breathing! The trails were well-used and not too many spiders had chosen to weave their webs across the paths. I hiked down into the village where the hot baths are but was too cheap to pay for the ‘spa treatment’. Guess I’ll have to come back with Naomi, who enjoys that sort of thing. I did add to my t-shirt collection, as I’ve been buying cheap t-shirts for the students in my upcoming class in Shanghai.
I headed south and east towards Louisiana. I know that’s the wrong direction but I hadn’t really stuck my toe into the Mississippi River, so I had to do that. I kind of made a Z down to the southeast corner of Arkansas and back west a bit towards Alexandria, where I spent the night in Chateau Prius when I couldn’t find the campground in the national forest. The sections of Arkansas and Louisiana I was driving through are very flat and agricultural, and I could have been driving through the central valley in California. There were some forested areas in Louisiana, and I actually encountered an armadillo (a LIVE one for a change!) along a forest service road. He walked sort of slowly and ponderously across the road – until I approached him with the camera, at which point he zipped into the bushes. Didn’t know they could move that fast…
Being a Tabasco fan, I decided I had to take the factory tour, which was down on Avery Island in southern Louisiana. It was pretty interesting, especially the jalapeno ice cream. Picked up a couple of souvenir bottles and headed down through the swamps towards Texas. I’d been waiting to see some actual swamps with cypress and alligators and such, and I wasn’t disappointed. There were a couple of wildlife preserves with lots of birds and enough reptiles to satisfy me too.
I managed to make it all the way down to Galveston, Texas, which is a beach town (and port) on the Gulf. I got one of the last campspots (fortunate I had a tent rather than an RV) and got a chance to walk along the beach in the dark as well. This morning I got up and broke camp and headed over to the beach so I could “bathe”. I suppose the EPA might have gotten after me for water pollution but they didn’t catch me. I’m sitting in a Starbucks writing this up and waiting for my car to be washed (volunteer car wash at the business next door – hopefully they will remove my bug collection.) I’m going to San Antonio to visit a cousin this evening and then on down to Big Bend National Park along the Rio Grande. Time’s running short, as I need to be back in Sacramento by October 10th, and I still have a ways to go…Hope all’s well with everyone reading this. Take care!
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Monday, September 24, 2007
ahhhh...florida
Ahhhh…Florida. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve wanted to come here. Sun, surf, sand…well, two out of three isn’t bad.
Not too much sun this week. After getting my car serviced in Savannah on Tuesday (and posting the last blog) I drove down the Georgia coastline, such as it is, and into Florida. My first stop was in Fernandina Beach (sp?) and it was clouding up and blowing about 30mph. The surf was pounding and there were a few surfers out trying their luck on the huge (by Florida standards) waves. Some couldn’t even make it past the breakers because the incoming current was so strong. Looking at the USA Today I’d picked up at the hotel, I could see that the Florida forecast was for thunderstorms across the entire state all week – which proved to be accurate.
I headed further south hoping to outrun the storm and camped that evening right on the beach, at a state park just north of Daytona Beach. I was expecting some wind and rain but nothing like I got. I thought I’d been soaked up in Delaware, but that was cake. My tent held up pretty well (with me weighing it down!) but the campground was one giant puddle – and as I drove south along the coast, many of the town streets were, too. It rains a little differently than I’m used to with our wussy California weather – in Florida it’ll go from dry to pelting rain in 10 seconds and then back to dry in just a couple of minutes. I hoped if I headed far enough southwest I could get out of the rain, and I was right. I pulled into the Everglades campground a bit after dark and enjoyed a dry evening – but awoke in the morning to a thunderclap directly overhead (or so it seemed). That was enough to get me out of the tent and into the car to plan out the day.
It’s off-season in the Everglades (I didn’t know there was such a thing) and the campground was free – and nearly deserted. There were only 5 spots occupied out of about 160. Since I wanted to cover the Everglades and also travel the Florida Keys, I decided to make the free campground my base of operations for a couple of days. So on that first day I did some hiking on the nature trail near the campground (it was full of standing water and I only saw one snake) and then headed over to the main visitor center. The ranger on duty was very helpful and told me about a naturalist-led boat trip down at the other end of the park, so I drove down to the Flamingo (flaming “O”?) bay region to catch the boat. The mosquitoes, which were bad at the campground, were 10x worse down on the bay – they were eating me alive, and mosquitoes don’t usually bite me. I had to buy some DEET. The 2-hour boat tour was really fantastic. We saw lots of birds and wildlife – crocodiles, alligators, dolphins – but unfortunately no manatee and no rare Florida panthers. I did see some pink flamingoes later – wading, not standing on one leg in the classic pose. I did several other hikes, nearly ran over a rattlesnake in the car, but the mosquitoes drove me out of one hike called Snake Bight. (You know I just HAD to try that one!)
The Everglades is really an interesting place. It’s essentially a river of grass, not a swamp – 80 miles long and 50 miles wide, with an elevation change of just 14 feet. So although the water is moving, it’s moving very slowly. There’s a spot in the park called Rock Reef Pass, elevation 3 feet, which is sort of a continental divide – water on one side of the ‘pass’ flows to the Gulf and the other side flows to the Atlantic. Slight elevation changes of just 6 inches or a foot cause ‘islands’ of certain types of trees (like mangroves) instead of grass, a little higher and even different trees (mahogany, for example) can grow. It rains all summer and dries up in the winter, so some of the grassy water becomes prairie, and the animals congregate to the wet areas. (The alligators dig water holes all around the park that keep the wildlife wet.) So at this time of year the wildlife is a little more scattered, but I still encountered my share of beasties. I was hoping to see some alligators on dry land (from a safe distance, of course – they can’t outrun you and they don’t chase prey across land anyway, but still…) but every one that I saw was in the water. There’s a short trail called Aningha which is world-famous for seeing wildlife and I went out there several times.
In fact, I have to tell you this: when it comes to wildlife, I don’t scare easily. But one of the nights I decided to go out to this Aningha trail and take my headlamp to see if the alligator eyes really glow red. Of course, I was the only one out there and as I got partway up the trail, I started thinking – what if one of them IS on land and gets in behind me and doesn’t want to move? And, having forgotten my cell phone in the car, the mind started racing and I decided it was not the best place to be. So I never did get to prove the red-eye thing. I did see some lightning bugs out there, which I haven’t seen anywhere else. Cool - reminded me of the year I spent in Illinois as a child…
On Friday I drove down the length of the Florida Keys, all the way to Key West. I just left my tent set up at the everglades since it’s only about 30 miles from the beginning of the Keys highway. I got off to an early start because I planned to meet a former co-worker, Catherine Mollyneaux, at the north end of the keys in the evening where her musician husband was performing. There are so many fine beaches and things to see that I could probably spend a week just hanging out. The weather was pretty good – even when it rains in Florida it’s 85 degrees. My main goal was to get a ‘bath’ in the ocean so I could be more presentable in public - no showers in the Everglades campground and with the sticky weather, I was a rather humid being. I have to admit it was pretty nice just floating in the ocean off of Bahia Honda State Park…
It’s been good to visit my friends on this trip – I’ve worked with them remotely but not too much face time. I have one more person I want to see in Houston and then my celebratory retirement tour will be complete – just in time for me to get back to work (at least temporarily)!
I definitely have to come back and spend more time lazing around the Keys, but it was time for me to head north and really, start heading towards home. I’ve had a blast but I am feeling a bit homesick. Travelling alone is a tradeoff between the freedom of doing whatever I want whenever I want, vs. the loneliness of missing my wife and family.
So Saturday morning I broke camp in the Everglades and headed towards the gulf coast. I stopped at one other Everglades entrance to explore an area that I later found has been closed since Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Didn’t see much in the way of wildlife and the ranger told me that this is mainly why they haven’t put budget into re-opening the area. I drove partway up the gulf coast, past Fort Myers (home of the ubiquitous blue-haired lady) before veering inland towards the Ocala National Forest, which someone told me was beautiful. I was worried about finding a campsite on the weekend (which has been a problem on this trip) but was able to sneak into a rather noisy Forest Service campground.
Now I have to take an opportunity to laugh at myself. Despite my “don’t scare easily” comment above, I do have one kind of animal I’m not too thrilled with: spiders. And in the morning I found I had a friend stretched above my tent – the biggest spider I’d ever seen in real life (excepting slow and ponderous tarantulas). Some sort of common garden-type spider, I’m sure, that wouldn’t bite me except in self-defense, but still, an intimidating sight. I snapped a photo, took down my tent and went on my way. A few miles up the road I saw a trailhead and headed off for a hike. Not 100 yards up the trail I walked right into a head-high spiderweb exactly like the one in my camp – but fortunately not populated. I’m sure it would have been a comical sight as I was jumping and herking and jerking trying to see if I had a giant spider on me. Naomi says I have no rhythm – I think she’d change her mind if she’d seen my arachnoleptic fit.
So later in the morning I did my most challenging hike of the trip, the 2-mile Salt Springs loop. How can a 2-mile hike be so challenging, you say? Well, the trail was full of these webs – most WITH big spiders in them. I believe in live-and-let-live but hey, this is MY trail and they can spin somewhere else. So armed with a branch and some very cautious steps, I trail-blazed my way to the salt springs overlook and lake. Spent some time watching the fish jump all over the lake – I don’t know what they were doing – it didn’t look like they were catching bugs but more like having fun, which I’m sure is not the case. Fish fun?
I continued my drive north and ended up in Tallahassee. Given my showerless state (and with some laundry piling up) and raining as usual, I decided on a motel, where I sit as I write this. I’m going to try to get some new tires for the car in the morning and then head up through the South – I plan to travel through Montgomery, Selma, Philadelphia (Mississippi), Memphis, and Little Rock over the next few days before hitting Texas. Hope everyone is doing well!
Not too much sun this week. After getting my car serviced in Savannah on Tuesday (and posting the last blog) I drove down the Georgia coastline, such as it is, and into Florida. My first stop was in Fernandina Beach (sp?) and it was clouding up and blowing about 30mph. The surf was pounding and there were a few surfers out trying their luck on the huge (by Florida standards) waves. Some couldn’t even make it past the breakers because the incoming current was so strong. Looking at the USA Today I’d picked up at the hotel, I could see that the Florida forecast was for thunderstorms across the entire state all week – which proved to be accurate.
I headed further south hoping to outrun the storm and camped that evening right on the beach, at a state park just north of Daytona Beach. I was expecting some wind and rain but nothing like I got. I thought I’d been soaked up in Delaware, but that was cake. My tent held up pretty well (with me weighing it down!) but the campground was one giant puddle – and as I drove south along the coast, many of the town streets were, too. It rains a little differently than I’m used to with our wussy California weather – in Florida it’ll go from dry to pelting rain in 10 seconds and then back to dry in just a couple of minutes. I hoped if I headed far enough southwest I could get out of the rain, and I was right. I pulled into the Everglades campground a bit after dark and enjoyed a dry evening – but awoke in the morning to a thunderclap directly overhead (or so it seemed). That was enough to get me out of the tent and into the car to plan out the day.
It’s off-season in the Everglades (I didn’t know there was such a thing) and the campground was free – and nearly deserted. There were only 5 spots occupied out of about 160. Since I wanted to cover the Everglades and also travel the Florida Keys, I decided to make the free campground my base of operations for a couple of days. So on that first day I did some hiking on the nature trail near the campground (it was full of standing water and I only saw one snake) and then headed over to the main visitor center. The ranger on duty was very helpful and told me about a naturalist-led boat trip down at the other end of the park, so I drove down to the Flamingo (flaming “O”?) bay region to catch the boat. The mosquitoes, which were bad at the campground, were 10x worse down on the bay – they were eating me alive, and mosquitoes don’t usually bite me. I had to buy some DEET. The 2-hour boat tour was really fantastic. We saw lots of birds and wildlife – crocodiles, alligators, dolphins – but unfortunately no manatee and no rare Florida panthers. I did see some pink flamingoes later – wading, not standing on one leg in the classic pose. I did several other hikes, nearly ran over a rattlesnake in the car, but the mosquitoes drove me out of one hike called Snake Bight. (You know I just HAD to try that one!)
The Everglades is really an interesting place. It’s essentially a river of grass, not a swamp – 80 miles long and 50 miles wide, with an elevation change of just 14 feet. So although the water is moving, it’s moving very slowly. There’s a spot in the park called Rock Reef Pass, elevation 3 feet, which is sort of a continental divide – water on one side of the ‘pass’ flows to the Gulf and the other side flows to the Atlantic. Slight elevation changes of just 6 inches or a foot cause ‘islands’ of certain types of trees (like mangroves) instead of grass, a little higher and even different trees (mahogany, for example) can grow. It rains all summer and dries up in the winter, so some of the grassy water becomes prairie, and the animals congregate to the wet areas. (The alligators dig water holes all around the park that keep the wildlife wet.) So at this time of year the wildlife is a little more scattered, but I still encountered my share of beasties. I was hoping to see some alligators on dry land (from a safe distance, of course – they can’t outrun you and they don’t chase prey across land anyway, but still…) but every one that I saw was in the water. There’s a short trail called Aningha which is world-famous for seeing wildlife and I went out there several times.
In fact, I have to tell you this: when it comes to wildlife, I don’t scare easily. But one of the nights I decided to go out to this Aningha trail and take my headlamp to see if the alligator eyes really glow red. Of course, I was the only one out there and as I got partway up the trail, I started thinking – what if one of them IS on land and gets in behind me and doesn’t want to move? And, having forgotten my cell phone in the car, the mind started racing and I decided it was not the best place to be. So I never did get to prove the red-eye thing. I did see some lightning bugs out there, which I haven’t seen anywhere else. Cool - reminded me of the year I spent in Illinois as a child…
On Friday I drove down the length of the Florida Keys, all the way to Key West. I just left my tent set up at the everglades since it’s only about 30 miles from the beginning of the Keys highway. I got off to an early start because I planned to meet a former co-worker, Catherine Mollyneaux, at the north end of the keys in the evening where her musician husband was performing. There are so many fine beaches and things to see that I could probably spend a week just hanging out. The weather was pretty good – even when it rains in Florida it’s 85 degrees. My main goal was to get a ‘bath’ in the ocean so I could be more presentable in public - no showers in the Everglades campground and with the sticky weather, I was a rather humid being. I have to admit it was pretty nice just floating in the ocean off of Bahia Honda State Park…
It’s been good to visit my friends on this trip – I’ve worked with them remotely but not too much face time. I have one more person I want to see in Houston and then my celebratory retirement tour will be complete – just in time for me to get back to work (at least temporarily)!
I definitely have to come back and spend more time lazing around the Keys, but it was time for me to head north and really, start heading towards home. I’ve had a blast but I am feeling a bit homesick. Travelling alone is a tradeoff between the freedom of doing whatever I want whenever I want, vs. the loneliness of missing my wife and family.
So Saturday morning I broke camp in the Everglades and headed towards the gulf coast. I stopped at one other Everglades entrance to explore an area that I later found has been closed since Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Didn’t see much in the way of wildlife and the ranger told me that this is mainly why they haven’t put budget into re-opening the area. I drove partway up the gulf coast, past Fort Myers (home of the ubiquitous blue-haired lady) before veering inland towards the Ocala National Forest, which someone told me was beautiful. I was worried about finding a campsite on the weekend (which has been a problem on this trip) but was able to sneak into a rather noisy Forest Service campground.
Now I have to take an opportunity to laugh at myself. Despite my “don’t scare easily” comment above, I do have one kind of animal I’m not too thrilled with: spiders. And in the morning I found I had a friend stretched above my tent – the biggest spider I’d ever seen in real life (excepting slow and ponderous tarantulas). Some sort of common garden-type spider, I’m sure, that wouldn’t bite me except in self-defense, but still, an intimidating sight. I snapped a photo, took down my tent and went on my way. A few miles up the road I saw a trailhead and headed off for a hike. Not 100 yards up the trail I walked right into a head-high spiderweb exactly like the one in my camp – but fortunately not populated. I’m sure it would have been a comical sight as I was jumping and herking and jerking trying to see if I had a giant spider on me. Naomi says I have no rhythm – I think she’d change her mind if she’d seen my arachnoleptic fit.
So later in the morning I did my most challenging hike of the trip, the 2-mile Salt Springs loop. How can a 2-mile hike be so challenging, you say? Well, the trail was full of these webs – most WITH big spiders in them. I believe in live-and-let-live but hey, this is MY trail and they can spin somewhere else. So armed with a branch and some very cautious steps, I trail-blazed my way to the salt springs overlook and lake. Spent some time watching the fish jump all over the lake – I don’t know what they were doing – it didn’t look like they were catching bugs but more like having fun, which I’m sure is not the case. Fish fun?
I continued my drive north and ended up in Tallahassee. Given my showerless state (and with some laundry piling up) and raining as usual, I decided on a motel, where I sit as I write this. I’m going to try to get some new tires for the car in the morning and then head up through the South – I plan to travel through Montgomery, Selma, Philadelphia (Mississippi), Memphis, and Little Rock over the next few days before hitting Texas. Hope everyone is doing well!
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
finally - another one!
Hi all, sorry it’s been so long between postings. It was hard to find WiFi after I’d gotten this thing written, and then I was having problem getting my computer to connect.
When I last wrote I was finishing up the 49ers game, which they won, fortunately, in the last 2 minutes (and again this week!). So that put me in a better mood as I left Vermont for the Adirondacks. While hiking in Vermont, a woman I met told me that if I got to Keene Valley, NY (where I intended to hike) to stop at a particular store called The Mountaineer. Good advice, because when I stopped at the store the owner told me everything I needed to know – where to access the Giant Mountain trails (recommended by a couple I met in Glacier), which of the four trails to take (it was raining and some were more slippery than others), how long they were, where to camp for the night (free!), and a trail to hike the next morning before I left the Adirondacks. Everything went wonderfully – the initial hike was a bit less than fun because of the tactical nature of dealing with the slippery rocks, but it definitely got my heart rate going – 3375 foot climb in just 3.6 miles. I got up and back in just under 4 hours and found the camping spot in the wilderness area he’d recommended. There was only one other set of people there, and they were quite far away, so it was nice and quiet. It even stopped raining, although it started again around 3am. Fortunately the wind came up after that and dried out the tent before I had to break camp. The second hike was a lot more fun – a 6.7 mile loop so almost the same distance, a little less elevation gain (although I bagged two peaks!) but most importantly, dry! I managed to get done by noon and spent a few minutes sitting outside the closed library using their WiFi to check my email and validate my next route.
I wanted to get down to the Woodstock Festival site, which was too far to cover in one day since I was getting a late start driving. So I picked a scenic route through the Adirondacks and down to the Catskills. I went through Lake Placid (cool looking ski jumps!) and passed through some familiar-looking place names. Someone was having some fun: I went from Amsterdam to Florida in just 5 minutes. Spotted a sign for the Little Pond campground off of the main road I was taking – it was quite far off the main route. And verrrry cold – the campground attendant told me the next morning that it had gotten down to 35 degrees. (Can’t wait for the REAL Florida!) I checked the map before I left the next morning (and having a 5-mile hike and a shower) and was able to pick a different route through the Catskills to get to Woodstock. (I have to be able to tell my grandchildren that I went to Woodstock! They don’t have to know it was 38 years late…) It turned out to be actually due south of me and not too far. I wasn’t able to get on the grounds per se, since they’ve build a new concert venue on the site and there is security. But I got some pictures and soaked up some vibe. Now I’m feelin’ groovy.
At this point I discovered that I’d neglected to get a map of Pennsylvania, which was my next destination south. I could see that Scranton was not that far from Woodstock, so I swallowed my pride and jumped on the interstate so I could locate and get to AAA before it closed at 5pm. Just barely made it, and picked up some other maps and camp books I was missing. I don’t know what I was thinking…
About 30 miles south of Scranton there’s a pretty large state park called Hickory Run, so I headed down there. Had a very nice camp site (albeit with ice-cold shower) for just $14. As I’ve noted in previous postings, I’m a sucker for marketing hype, so naturally I just HAD to do the hike there called “Shades of Death”. The only thing deadly about it, though, was the poorly marked trail – I took three wrong turns at the beginning before I settled into the main trail. I guess it’s fair to say I could have died out there, wandering the wilds of Pennsylvania.
South of the state park is a town called Jim Thorpe, which I guess is where he grew up, so I had to stop there, being a sports fan and all. I used the library to find my way down to the area in Amish country I wanted to visit, and while there I took the opportunity to talk to a couple of foster kids from a local group home. They were new to the area so I told them to read up on Jim Thorpe, since he came from a pretty lousy family background and made something of himself…
On a more sobering note, some of you may remember last year’s story of the madman who took some Amish girls hostage in a schoolhouse and killed a few of them and himself. The important part of the story was the forgiveness of the Amish. Within hours of the shootings, a group of them were at the gunman’s house comforting his surviving wife and children – who weren’t even Amish; they were complete strangers. That amazing action has had a big impact on me - I’ve thought about it a lot since it happened and wanted to visit the area to make sure I remember it forever. Kind of a personal thing, so I won’t say a lot about what I did down there, but I feel better now…
South of Amish country I rolled on down to Delaware and made it all the way down to Rehoboth Beach on the south seashore before dark. (OK, it’s a pretty small state…) The wind off of the ocean was quite warm, about 75 degrees, so I figured something was up weather-wise. Sure enough, it started raining about 10:30pm and dumped what seemed like about 3 inches by morning. That’s a lot for this California boy! Naturally it stopped just AFTER I’d broken camp with my wet tent and all. I did get some good walking time out on the seashore, one of my favorite activities, before heading south and west. Through Maryland’s eastern shore (including the ‘other end’ of hwy 50, which starts in Sacramento), across the Chesapeake Bridge / Tunnel to Norfolk, and all the way west across Virginia, finally stopping at a state park called Douthat near the West Virginia border. Western Virginia is astoundingly beautiful – mountainous and a tree canopy so thick that I’m sure you can’t see the ground from the air, and trees themselves are big, not the spindly forest I was seeing in the northeast. They’re mostly deciduous, so I’m told that October is a spectacular sight from afar. I wonder what it looks like in February with everything bare.
I spent the next morning hiking (and dodging mountain bikers, popular at Douthat) up to the top of the ridge and back down, a healthy 10-mile loop, and then followed that up with a few more miles at the New River bridge in West Virginia. (This particular bridge is the tallest in North America at about 850 feet above the river.) Even though it was 4pm by the time I left the New River, I had the idea that I could make it all the way to Asheville, North Carolina in time to check into a motel and watch Sunday night football. It took a lot longer than I expected and I was still 100 miles away when the game started at 8pm local time – and it was getting dark. So I gave up on expecting to watch it and started looking for a camp spot instead. None were found nearby, and I was on such a lonely stretch of road that I decided to check in at “Chateau Prius”. Wise choice – I pulled off the side of the road, found the game on the radio, and didn’t see a single car between the end of the game (around 11:30pm) and 6am. In hindsight I could have pitched the tent right there by the roadside and slept more comfortably!
After awakening, I verified my position on the map and decided to head in the ‘wrong’ direction just so I could drive into Tennessee. (I was in North Carolina and found I was only about 15 miles from the Tennessee border.) Turned out there was a section of the Appalachian Trail in that area of Tennessee, so I stopped and did 5 miles out and 5 miles back. So now I’ve been on the trail 3 times and still have about 2000 miles to go! I met a couple of guys from Oklahoma who had started at the terminus in Maine at the end of May and were hoping to reach the other end in Georgia in another 3 weeks – they were ‘only’ 420 miles away. The thought is growing that someday I’d like to do that…
I drove almost 400 miles from Tennessee through North Carolina and all the way through South Carolina before settling tonight into a well-deserved motel room in Savannah, Georgia. I’m going to have the long-delayed 30K mile maintenance done on my car here in town and will look for a way to post this blog as I wait. The car deserves some professional pampering as I’ve just passed the 10,000 mile mark on this trip yesterday.
When I last wrote I was finishing up the 49ers game, which they won, fortunately, in the last 2 minutes (and again this week!). So that put me in a better mood as I left Vermont for the Adirondacks. While hiking in Vermont, a woman I met told me that if I got to Keene Valley, NY (where I intended to hike) to stop at a particular store called The Mountaineer. Good advice, because when I stopped at the store the owner told me everything I needed to know – where to access the Giant Mountain trails (recommended by a couple I met in Glacier), which of the four trails to take (it was raining and some were more slippery than others), how long they were, where to camp for the night (free!), and a trail to hike the next morning before I left the Adirondacks. Everything went wonderfully – the initial hike was a bit less than fun because of the tactical nature of dealing with the slippery rocks, but it definitely got my heart rate going – 3375 foot climb in just 3.6 miles. I got up and back in just under 4 hours and found the camping spot in the wilderness area he’d recommended. There was only one other set of people there, and they were quite far away, so it was nice and quiet. It even stopped raining, although it started again around 3am. Fortunately the wind came up after that and dried out the tent before I had to break camp. The second hike was a lot more fun – a 6.7 mile loop so almost the same distance, a little less elevation gain (although I bagged two peaks!) but most importantly, dry! I managed to get done by noon and spent a few minutes sitting outside the closed library using their WiFi to check my email and validate my next route.
I wanted to get down to the Woodstock Festival site, which was too far to cover in one day since I was getting a late start driving. So I picked a scenic route through the Adirondacks and down to the Catskills. I went through Lake Placid (cool looking ski jumps!) and passed through some familiar-looking place names. Someone was having some fun: I went from Amsterdam to Florida in just 5 minutes. Spotted a sign for the Little Pond campground off of the main road I was taking – it was quite far off the main route. And verrrry cold – the campground attendant told me the next morning that it had gotten down to 35 degrees. (Can’t wait for the REAL Florida!) I checked the map before I left the next morning (and having a 5-mile hike and a shower) and was able to pick a different route through the Catskills to get to Woodstock. (I have to be able to tell my grandchildren that I went to Woodstock! They don’t have to know it was 38 years late…) It turned out to be actually due south of me and not too far. I wasn’t able to get on the grounds per se, since they’ve build a new concert venue on the site and there is security. But I got some pictures and soaked up some vibe. Now I’m feelin’ groovy.
At this point I discovered that I’d neglected to get a map of Pennsylvania, which was my next destination south. I could see that Scranton was not that far from Woodstock, so I swallowed my pride and jumped on the interstate so I could locate and get to AAA before it closed at 5pm. Just barely made it, and picked up some other maps and camp books I was missing. I don’t know what I was thinking…
About 30 miles south of Scranton there’s a pretty large state park called Hickory Run, so I headed down there. Had a very nice camp site (albeit with ice-cold shower) for just $14. As I’ve noted in previous postings, I’m a sucker for marketing hype, so naturally I just HAD to do the hike there called “Shades of Death”. The only thing deadly about it, though, was the poorly marked trail – I took three wrong turns at the beginning before I settled into the main trail. I guess it’s fair to say I could have died out there, wandering the wilds of Pennsylvania.
South of the state park is a town called Jim Thorpe, which I guess is where he grew up, so I had to stop there, being a sports fan and all. I used the library to find my way down to the area in Amish country I wanted to visit, and while there I took the opportunity to talk to a couple of foster kids from a local group home. They were new to the area so I told them to read up on Jim Thorpe, since he came from a pretty lousy family background and made something of himself…
On a more sobering note, some of you may remember last year’s story of the madman who took some Amish girls hostage in a schoolhouse and killed a few of them and himself. The important part of the story was the forgiveness of the Amish. Within hours of the shootings, a group of them were at the gunman’s house comforting his surviving wife and children – who weren’t even Amish; they were complete strangers. That amazing action has had a big impact on me - I’ve thought about it a lot since it happened and wanted to visit the area to make sure I remember it forever. Kind of a personal thing, so I won’t say a lot about what I did down there, but I feel better now…
South of Amish country I rolled on down to Delaware and made it all the way down to Rehoboth Beach on the south seashore before dark. (OK, it’s a pretty small state…) The wind off of the ocean was quite warm, about 75 degrees, so I figured something was up weather-wise. Sure enough, it started raining about 10:30pm and dumped what seemed like about 3 inches by morning. That’s a lot for this California boy! Naturally it stopped just AFTER I’d broken camp with my wet tent and all. I did get some good walking time out on the seashore, one of my favorite activities, before heading south and west. Through Maryland’s eastern shore (including the ‘other end’ of hwy 50, which starts in Sacramento), across the Chesapeake Bridge / Tunnel to Norfolk, and all the way west across Virginia, finally stopping at a state park called Douthat near the West Virginia border. Western Virginia is astoundingly beautiful – mountainous and a tree canopy so thick that I’m sure you can’t see the ground from the air, and trees themselves are big, not the spindly forest I was seeing in the northeast. They’re mostly deciduous, so I’m told that October is a spectacular sight from afar. I wonder what it looks like in February with everything bare.
I spent the next morning hiking (and dodging mountain bikers, popular at Douthat) up to the top of the ridge and back down, a healthy 10-mile loop, and then followed that up with a few more miles at the New River bridge in West Virginia. (This particular bridge is the tallest in North America at about 850 feet above the river.) Even though it was 4pm by the time I left the New River, I had the idea that I could make it all the way to Asheville, North Carolina in time to check into a motel and watch Sunday night football. It took a lot longer than I expected and I was still 100 miles away when the game started at 8pm local time – and it was getting dark. So I gave up on expecting to watch it and started looking for a camp spot instead. None were found nearby, and I was on such a lonely stretch of road that I decided to check in at “Chateau Prius”. Wise choice – I pulled off the side of the road, found the game on the radio, and didn’t see a single car between the end of the game (around 11:30pm) and 6am. In hindsight I could have pitched the tent right there by the roadside and slept more comfortably!
After awakening, I verified my position on the map and decided to head in the ‘wrong’ direction just so I could drive into Tennessee. (I was in North Carolina and found I was only about 15 miles from the Tennessee border.) Turned out there was a section of the Appalachian Trail in that area of Tennessee, so I stopped and did 5 miles out and 5 miles back. So now I’ve been on the trail 3 times and still have about 2000 miles to go! I met a couple of guys from Oklahoma who had started at the terminus in Maine at the end of May and were hoping to reach the other end in Georgia in another 3 weeks – they were ‘only’ 420 miles away. The thought is growing that someday I’d like to do that…
I drove almost 400 miles from Tennessee through North Carolina and all the way through South Carolina before settling tonight into a well-deserved motel room in Savannah, Georgia. I’m going to have the long-delayed 30K mile maintenance done on my car here in town and will look for a way to post this blog as I wait. The car deserves some professional pampering as I’ve just passed the 10,000 mile mark on this trip yesterday.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
back in the saddle again...
Just a slave to my 49ers…finishing this in a hotel room in Burlingame, VT as I await their first game. May be happy, may be crying, but at least I’ll see it…but first, let me start with what I wrote during my trip home.
I’ve had a great time at home these last 10 days. Besides the reasons for my visit (getting my daughter started at the local community college, celebrating her 18th birthday, and some doctor appointments) and all the honey-do’s (go to the dump, the recycler, the hazmat, change the oil in the car) and other things (spending time with Naomi and with my parents, following up on a few employment possibilities), I also had time to do some fun things:
· We went down to San Francisco for a free concert in Golden Gate Park, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the so-called “Summer of Love”. Getting there was a bit of a hassle, because coincidentally, the Bay Bridge was shut down, making driving impractical. Instead we took the ferry and a series of city buses (the local subway system, BART, didn’t get us close enough). Still, we got there early enough to enjoy the music and the general scene before it got too crowded. (The crowd was expected to be up to 100,000…but it looked to me like they only got about 40-50,000.) The music, by many of the re-formed 60s bands, was sometimes good and sometimes awful, but anyway, the ‘scene’ was just as entertaining. Some people were definitely trying to relive their youth while others had never moved on. I bought a couple of souvenirs of the day to give to friends.
· We also enjoyed the California State Fair and its Labor Day headliner, ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic. For these who don’t know, he parodies popular music – this set included send-ups of James Blunt (“You’re Pitiful”), Michael Jackson (“Eat It”), The Kinks (“Yoda” to the tune of “Lola”), Queen (“Another One Rides the Bus”), Nirvana, etc.
My return flight to Newark was a bit less eventful than my flight out – but only a bit. My first flight was an hour late but I made my connection and got to Newark only 20 minutes late – at 12:30am. I’d intended to take the train and a taxi to my friend Pat’s house, but he insisted on picking me up – since the drive to drop me off went smoothly, he expected a smooth drive to pick me up. Unfortunately he was delayed by construction, got lost in a bad section of Brooklyn trying to avoid it, and then encountered a bridge completely shut down by an accident. We got to his house at 4am. We played a beautiful golf course that day (and the way I was hitting the ball, I saw ALL of it!) and got to bed early because…we needed to leave at 4am the NEXT day to drive to Connecticut and catch a ferry to Block Island, RI.
And now I have a new place to add to my list of favorites. Block Island is a great combination of beaches, green space, and homemade ice cream. (OK, a few nice houses out there too…) A couple of Pat’s friends were already on the island with their bikes, so we rented a couple of mountain bikes and joined them on a tour of the place. We even rode some of the rock-and-root-filled dirt trails that lead to the ocean. Even past Labor Day, there was still a lot of people out there. The afternoon ferry back was a little choppy due to the wind, and by the time I drove up to Massachusetts it was raining hard. Not what I was hoping for on my first night camping, but c’est la vie…carpe diem? I tried to seize the day, but it fought back…
The next day, I visited one of my former co-workers in northern Massachusetts. Although it was still raining, she and her two boys took me on a 6-mile hike up a mountain in New Hampshire, followed by a fine home-cooked meal. I drove down towards Boston to visit another former co-worker and talk about some training we’d previously done together. It was good to get together with a couple of the people who helped me have a successful career. May any future co-workers be as helpful (assuming I don’t stay retired!)
Today I drove towards my next hike, in the Adirondaks, while grabbing a quick hike in Woodstock, Vermont. Burlington is pretty close to the area in which I plan to hike, so even though I’d already been here, I decided it was a good enough place to watch my 49ers (who are getting stomped as I write this). I’ll get up early and post this and get over to Giant Mountain, which was recommended to me by some New Yorkers I met in Glacier. After that I hope to head down to the ‘real’ Woodstock and then into Amish country. Hope everyone’s well!
I’ve had a great time at home these last 10 days. Besides the reasons for my visit (getting my daughter started at the local community college, celebrating her 18th birthday, and some doctor appointments) and all the honey-do’s (go to the dump, the recycler, the hazmat, change the oil in the car) and other things (spending time with Naomi and with my parents, following up on a few employment possibilities), I also had time to do some fun things:
· We went down to San Francisco for a free concert in Golden Gate Park, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the so-called “Summer of Love”. Getting there was a bit of a hassle, because coincidentally, the Bay Bridge was shut down, making driving impractical. Instead we took the ferry and a series of city buses (the local subway system, BART, didn’t get us close enough). Still, we got there early enough to enjoy the music and the general scene before it got too crowded. (The crowd was expected to be up to 100,000…but it looked to me like they only got about 40-50,000.) The music, by many of the re-formed 60s bands, was sometimes good and sometimes awful, but anyway, the ‘scene’ was just as entertaining. Some people were definitely trying to relive their youth while others had never moved on. I bought a couple of souvenirs of the day to give to friends.
· We also enjoyed the California State Fair and its Labor Day headliner, ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic. For these who don’t know, he parodies popular music – this set included send-ups of James Blunt (“You’re Pitiful”), Michael Jackson (“Eat It”), The Kinks (“Yoda” to the tune of “Lola”), Queen (“Another One Rides the Bus”), Nirvana, etc.
My return flight to Newark was a bit less eventful than my flight out – but only a bit. My first flight was an hour late but I made my connection and got to Newark only 20 minutes late – at 12:30am. I’d intended to take the train and a taxi to my friend Pat’s house, but he insisted on picking me up – since the drive to drop me off went smoothly, he expected a smooth drive to pick me up. Unfortunately he was delayed by construction, got lost in a bad section of Brooklyn trying to avoid it, and then encountered a bridge completely shut down by an accident. We got to his house at 4am. We played a beautiful golf course that day (and the way I was hitting the ball, I saw ALL of it!) and got to bed early because…we needed to leave at 4am the NEXT day to drive to Connecticut and catch a ferry to Block Island, RI.
And now I have a new place to add to my list of favorites. Block Island is a great combination of beaches, green space, and homemade ice cream. (OK, a few nice houses out there too…) A couple of Pat’s friends were already on the island with their bikes, so we rented a couple of mountain bikes and joined them on a tour of the place. We even rode some of the rock-and-root-filled dirt trails that lead to the ocean. Even past Labor Day, there was still a lot of people out there. The afternoon ferry back was a little choppy due to the wind, and by the time I drove up to Massachusetts it was raining hard. Not what I was hoping for on my first night camping, but c’est la vie…carpe diem? I tried to seize the day, but it fought back…
The next day, I visited one of my former co-workers in northern Massachusetts. Although it was still raining, she and her two boys took me on a 6-mile hike up a mountain in New Hampshire, followed by a fine home-cooked meal. I drove down towards Boston to visit another former co-worker and talk about some training we’d previously done together. It was good to get together with a couple of the people who helped me have a successful career. May any future co-workers be as helpful (assuming I don’t stay retired!)
Today I drove towards my next hike, in the Adirondaks, while grabbing a quick hike in Woodstock, Vermont. Burlington is pretty close to the area in which I plan to hike, so even though I’d already been here, I decided it was a good enough place to watch my 49ers (who are getting stomped as I write this). I’ll get up early and post this and get over to Giant Mountain, which was recommended to me by some New Yorkers I met in Glacier. After that I hope to head down to the ‘real’ Woodstock and then into Amish country. Hope everyone’s well!
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