Backtrack: Pilot Mountain State Park 050715
I found these pictures posted on my Facebook page in May 2015. As mentioned in the brief post below, I was driving to my 35th college class reunion when I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to visit the Pilot Mountain State Park in East Bend, North Carolina. I had to save the compressed photos from Facebook until I find the originals, so the quality is not so good. Still, I find them worth sharing. BTW, RB is my dearly departed Red Barron car. The post and pictures follow: RB and I heading to North Carolina for my 35th class reunion. Sunrise over the mountains is so beautiful, even looking past the dead bugs on RB’s windshield. Then, I realized that, with all my journeying through the great American west, I hadn’t visited the Pilot Mountain State Park in my own home state. So,… why not now? Before 8…
Bidding a Fond Farewell (Pt. 1)
My 2006 Food 500, which I’ve dubbed the Red Barron (or RB for short) because of the way she handled herself on the road and anywhere I deigned to take her, and I have been through a lot since I bought her in 2009. I’ve noted many of our road adventures on this site and its predecessor at https://singin1.wordpress.com. I’d hoped we would have many more road trips still to experience, but then it turned that RB was in the wrong place at the wrong time during a drecho that hit Iowa on Monday morning, August 10. This New York Times article described the extensive damage throughout the area. I was blessed to be at home inside a structure that provided plenty of protection from the storm’s destructive forces. Other than the experience of being without power for four days, I was just fine. RB was not so fortunate.…
… And MORE Star Trek!
Well, as might be expected, my summer 2016 travel plans have undergone some adjustments. And the odds are quite high that there will be other changes (hopefully only minor–and better option–ones) even as RB and I are on the road. In this case, I’ve added Riverside, Iowa, as my first stop so I can attend their annual Trekfest. If you are a fellow Trekker, I don’t need to tell you that Riverside is known as “the future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk.” Even though Riverside is just 75 miles away, I’ve only attended one previous Trekfest, the one in 2009 when they featured Nichelle Nichols (Uhura-TOS), George Takei (Sulu-TOS), and Walter Koenig (Chekov-TOS) as guests. I had a great time that year and am looking forward to whatever they are planning for this 50th anniversary year (perhaps they’ve finally been able to get William Shatner to come). Hey, I’d…
Afterthoughts about Goin’ West 2014
This is the map of my 16-day, Goin’ West 2014 trip: This surpassed my previously longest car trip from Grinnell to Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, by a whole 17 miles!! I stuck pretty closely to my original route, with some new additions–especially Little Bighorn National Park and North Cascades National Highway–and only two major deletions. After the magnificence of Yellowstone, I didn’t feel the need to deviate 250 miles from my westward trip to see Glacier National Park in Montana, although I’d heard many wonderful things about it. I also didn’t cross into Canada to visit Vancouver. The trip included visits to seven national parks: Little Bighorn (Montana), Yellowstone (Wyoming), North Cascade, Olympic, and Mount Rainier (Washington State), Redwood, and Yosemite (California). The parks were fantastic and more than worth the cost of the annual season pass. My favorites were Redwood and Yosemite, but none disappointed. There were other parks…
Ease on Down the Road (Day 4)
Nearly bit off more than I could chew today. I’d spent several hours in the gracious company of Eugene Simpson, with whom I discussed several research approaches to Hall Johnson’s compositional philosophy and ways I should prepare for a much more extended visit and study of the Johnson collection. I then visited and got a tour of the home of my host daughter, Tianhan. We went out for an enjoyable dinner of shrimp (me) and grilled octopus (Tianhan) at an uptown restaurant in Philadelphia. (BTW, if you know of a dignified way to eat corn-on-the-cob and take the head off of shrimp, please let me know.) I am so proud of how well she is adapting to her new surroundings, which are so very different than Iowa. Since she’s now graduated from the college, I guess I’m not technically her host mother any more, but I hate giving up the…
Ease on Down the Road (Day 2 & 3)
No post on Friday because I didn’t really stop long enough to do one. RB and I went from Port aux Basques, Newfoundland, to the outskirts of Philly (1284 miles) in about 36 hours. See the route at http://mapq.st/q2Puzi. Along the way, I had to stop at an Esso gas station, a holdover from years before it became Exxon? Was pretty much out-of-touch from 1 a.m. Friday morning when we left the ferry’s WiFi access until my cellphone finally ended its week-long “looking for signal” mantra somewhere around Bangor, Maine. As much as I appreciated the hospitality of the Canadians I met, I must admit I was happy to see the gates of home at the border. It was certainly much faster to cross there than it was crossing in either direction at Niagara Falls. Hmmm… wonder why? The lady who gave me a history of St. John’s on Monday…
Ease on Down the Road (Day 1)
Since I got in so late last night, it was after one a.m. before everything other than what would be needed to dress in the morning was packed. I concluded that I didn’t have a snowball’s chance of dragging myself out of bed at 3:30 a,m., which I’d need to do to allow enough time to complete the 10-hour drive around Newfoundland and arrive in time to get the 4:30 p.m. ferry back to the mainland. Plus, I probably wouldn’t be a safe driver if I did pull it off. Actually beat the cellphone’s 7 a.m. alarm–one of the few things that’s currently working on the phone while I’m in Canada–by four minutes. Showered, dressed, checked out and was on the road by 8:30 a.m. While the weather was foggy and chilly (nearly noon before the temps rose above 50), thankfully it only rained sporadically throughout the day. In the afternoon,…
At the Symposium (Day 1 Pt. 2)
To say I woke up tired would be an understatement. I’d set the alarm for 6 a.m. in a useless exercise. Between that and managing to rehearse with the pianist, I missed the morning sessions. The afternoon ones were primarily geared to choral music, so I’m afraid I didn’t get much out of them. Hopefully, I’ll have lots interesting to report about tomorrow’s (beyond the obvious). I’ve now been on the east coast three days and hadn’t had a single bit of fresh seafood. From what I was told, today’s 72-degree temperature was especially warm and sunny for this area. So–impulsively and without even going back to my room to change, jumped into RB and took someone’s directions to a restaurant called Ches’s. It has been in business since 1951 and very popular around here. Boy, was their famed fish and chips wonderful!! Could see the Atlantic Ocean near Ches’s,…