More Blue Ridge Parkway

What a Trip!

Near Laurel Knob Overlook (elev. 4600 … about 200 feet above Mt. Mansfield)

Too lazy to get out of car. (In our defense, we must have pulled into two dozen overlooks, at least.)

Asheville NC mall

NOT your typical mall. Old building. Great architecture. All local stores with mostly local goods. 

Did you know that there's a whole separate market for artisans from Western North Carolina?

Somewhat unusual building next to the mall. 30 seconds. It's what's at the top that I liked.

More random trip items

History of Boathouses
(Finger Lakes)

They seem like they'd be the coolest place to live in the summer and fall.

Charleston SC 

Charleston beauty (not the name of the flower)

Kennedy Space Center: Apollo 8

Here's some stills from my cam recording (done legally) of KSC's Apollo 8 (mankind's first orbit of the moon) multimedia experience. You sit near and above the very consoles that were used that day. The theater darkens and various stations light up that are most key to the countdown at any given stage. I have a ten minute video of the whole thing, but it's not very good on the whole and time consuming to upload and watch so I've extracted some stills from it that some of you might find interesting. When you exit you find yourself in a huge hall with the 36 story high Saturn rocket used in the Apollo program suspended on its side from the ceiling. The four engine exhausts in the main stage are perhaps 8 ft. in diameter. KSC is a terrific place to visit.

Apollo 8 was launched on December 21, 1968. (11 years to the day before my daughter was born.) For those of you too young to have experienced this as it was happening, I can only say that I personally can't think of anything as positive and exciting in the last quarter century as the Space Program and the key launches that were part of it. (Being in D.C. for President Obama's inauguration is the one exception I've come up with.) For those of you outside that loop, think of it as the Super Bowl, World Series, Olympics, American Idol final, July 4th fireworks, and finding a parking space downtown … all rolled into one.

Horseshoe Curve Train

One train start to finish around the curve. Often these trains are completely full and double stacked with containers, not trailers as this one was. Believe it or not this was not nearly the longest we've seen there. You can tell it was not one of the biggest because there were no pusher engines behind it … but that's also partly due to the "light" load.

I included the whole train to give some of you an idea what the experience at Horseshoe Curve is like.

Finger Lakes boathouses

I read something that says no one is allowed to live in these remarkably appealing boathouses. I want to … badly. And it sure seems like there's living quarters set up in some of them. There's rows and rows of these that look like narrow little streets.

Rainbow at Letchworth

Letchworth state park in western NY near Geneseo. What a gem! This is from the middle falls.