The Family Reunion Trip - Part One
Being gone for three weeks and returning to
Seattle with about a thousand things to do has caused me to break with the usual
style of this journal. Instead of thousands of words and dozens and dozens of
photos detailing the 22 days' adventure, I'll break the trip into four parts and
post images from the various parts even later. This post is both a
recapitulation of getting from Seattle to North Carolina and a series of short
essays on what I found on this trip across America. Parts Two, Three and Four
will follow fairly soon (define fairly? define soon?).
I've got a lot to talk about and know no one
wants to listen to me for four hours nonstop, so..., I'm gonna say what I want
in separate parts, sort of
thematic-like.
Part one will be this one - the recounting of the family beach reunion "getting there" part.
Part two will be the "so this is what my family is like these days" part.
Part three will be the "yet another chance to cross North America through Canada" part.
And, part four will be the "I've been in Seattle now for one year - four seasons" part.
Part One:
Just to recount (email people got this already, web people didn't):
Well, I said I wouldn't be posting any notes - not true, the second night out, some random Best Western in Chillicothe, Missouri, (if this isn't the heartland then the heartland doesn't exist - right up the street is a rock-and-roll Christian FM station "the Wave") and I find I have free wireless. Last night I stayed in Broomfield with a dear old friend from my Code X days at NASA - enjoyed the company, his wife and their two boys - 7 and 2 (almost) - great fun to be around such bright lithe tykes again - had to go chasing a frisbie - need to practice my level throws but not necessarily my catches.
So, here's a tip for anyone wishing to see the beautiful side of Wyoming (no, it ain't ALL open pit chemical mines, it just seems that way). Take 287 from Helena down through Yellowstone and parts of Grand Teton National Parks and then follow the Wind River and the Wind River Range all the way practically to the southeast corner and border with Colorado - and then divert and take Wyoming 130 through the Medicine Bow Mountains to get to Laramie and points further east.
I've been following US 36 today, which Katherine says we took a long, long time ago on one of our trips back East from the West - before Houston and kids. Parts of it seem to be familiar - certainly the level-flat high plains of Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas. On the mountain trip from Bozeman to Broomfield, I spent nearly 2/3 of a gig of flash card data taking an unbelievable series of time-motion studies (herky-jerky™ movies). Can't wait to see how I'll compose soundtracks for this boatload of images/movies. It seemed since I was trying to save time, rather than stop and take VRs, which would eat up at least 10 minutes per VR, I decided to try and capture the "motion" and "changing" nature of the journey. There's one stretch where I'm following a series of switch-backs knowing it will open to some mountain and it opens to this huge, eight-thousand-foot granite rock with half one face covered with boulders and rock debris. That should translate into a minute flick of the approximate-ten miles it took to get to that image. I'll need an appropriate soundtrack - but what?
Anyway, I'm tired. This has been three days (today, too) of 12 or more hours of driving. Thank goodness for the iPod and my car stereo. 1941 songs is what's on the new one - I think I've really turned into a huge alternative music freak after listening to a whole bunch of the ripped CDs I picked up in San Francisco at Amoeba.
So far I'm safe, have had outstanding weather (clear, beautiful, pleasant temperatures, appropriate clouds when needed for photos, etc.) and have once again renewed my spirit with all this great land we've got. One could spend a lifetime just looking at this planet!
Tomorrow the Mississippi - and given my timeline and bent - I'll probably squander half-a-day exploring more river roads. I brought lots of blues and blues guitar music to listen to. Discovered Tinsley Ellis recently (Alligator Records) - nothing like live, 'lectric, Chicago blues licks - but, I can still remember before Clear Channel driving through St. Louis and hearing one really hot blues station - and that far south of Chicago - it was great. Now, of course, it's gone - but those radio waves keep traveling on out there in space...(as do I)
Posted August 10, 5:05 pm
Today (Wednesday) I made my way east to Hannibal, Missouri, and followed Missouri 79 south until it crossed at US 54 and then followed Illinois 96 first and later Illinois 100 and finally Illinois 3 into the now-completely-shut-down-and-downtrodden East St. Louis former wharf area and then made a clean, straight, hop right onto I-64. All of the state roads, on both sides of the Mississippi River, are part of the Great River Road system. I've travelled a goodly portion of the Mississippi on both sides along its path and have crossed it on many a bridge from Minnesota to Louisiana. But, there's still highways along the river which I haven't taken and bridges I haven't crossed. The entire Mississippi has about two thousand miles of roadway on both shorelines with over a hundred bridges. It's really it's own socio-economic system in addition to being one hell of a watershed river.
From St. Louis I headed east through the lower plains of Illinois, surrounded on all sides by either the Mississippi or Illinois or Wabash and from there into the lower plains of Indiana, surrounded on all sides by the various forks of the Wabash and the Ohio Rivers. A day of river swamp and flood plain hopping which put me right downtown Louisville - where once again there's wireless.
So far this trip I've ticked off Yellowstone and Grand Teton and the rivers and green mountains of Wyoming; the scenic high plains of Colorado and Kansas (US 36 is great, fast, straight, rolling hills finally, but devoid of anyone who doesn't live there); the Great Mississippi River and its humongous flood plain - I mean hundreds of miles - there's dams, causeways and locks, and embankments and dikes like you wouldn't believe. This is our Holland and it's much larger area- and shoreline-wise; and coming up one more shot at crossing the Allegheny Mountains.
Louisville is much more vibrant than one would think. I've been around and through here before but never stayed and played. This is a young town (people wise) and has amazing architecture - another one of America's cities which couldn't afford to tear down the old 18th and 19th century structures. Except in the case of Louisville, they completely wiped the old Ohio River wharves and replaced it with a double-deck superfreeway which connects two new bridges and lots of other concrete but which definitely blocks the river from the city. Shades of Alaskan Way Viaduct or Georgetown's Whitehurst Freeway. Louisville has put parking under the entire structure for an effective city-owned parking lot and added about seven miles of hike-and-bike trail along the right-of-way. It works fine and gives great views of the river and the city and all the transportation infrastructure, including the freeway itself. This means that for long periods along the trail there is a constant hydrodynamic pressure situation caused by the moving cars, the moving planks of concrete on the overpasses and suspended roadway, and the reverberations of all this on all the flat surfaces which are all around. DC didn't have a really good spot to listen to freeway noise. Seattle has the streets at the north end of Capitol Hill directly underneath I-5 and Louisville has its River Walk. Similar noise levels can be heard at the end of airport runways - just a constant rush of wind with variable pitch and timbre - depending on the number of wheels and the mass of the vehicle.
Louisville also has an interesting downtown street life. There's definitely different districts to the downtown area, which like most American cities, covers an approximately square mile plat (as do most state universities) give or take a square mile depending on the tier rank of the city. DC had about three square miles of real downtown. Seattle has about two square miles. Louisville appears to have about one. That's still a lot of streets with a lot of action and people milling about. The Ohio wraps itself around Louisville in such a way that some streets start and end at the river. It's also got two free downtown bus loops which sort of follow the two old main streets, one parallel to and the other perpendicular to the river. Lots of French influence around here - which makes sense since the city is named after the King of France who helped the American Revolutionaries. It also has a huge medical presence. In addition to the home office of Humana - the health-care wunderkind of our time - it has about a square mile of hospitals headed by the many campuses of Jewish Hospital. I'll have to research that one in this place - sounds like a storied history waiting to be read.
It's also a pretty city in that the streets are very broad - clearly the French Haussman's influence at work. Plus, most of the avenues (the streets are laid out with some as avenues and others almost as alleys by their varying width) seem to start or end with a river or a bluff view which gives each street a different "scape" even though one normally thinks of river towns as flat. They are but don't have to be uninteresting.
Camera, car and computer - the 3 "C" 's - are all performing well - in fact I even went through the roughly 40 meg OS upgrade and security and java and synch software patches - I think only a Mac owner would even consider updating system software on the road, let alone believe it would work flawlessly - which it did. Today I shot a bunch more movies and here in Louisville took a huge number of VRs and other images. One VR is in the middle of the Ohio River. It's US 31 and it's the original bridge with sidewalks on both sides so I just walked halfway across right as the sun was setting in the West and took a series of panoramas and VR images. There were even a few kids biking across from Louisville to the Ohio side.
Thursday was an exciting day. It was Wet and Wild in West Virginia. I headed out east from Louisville into the bluegrass turf of Central Kentucky and headed right past that beautiful stretch northeast towards Ashland, on the Ohio River (which meandered West-by-South-West from there to Louisville). At Ashland I would encounter the Appalachians, specifically the beginning of the Allegheny Mountains. It started to rain almost immediately and went from fog, lost in the clouds, pouring rain, and back and forth for the next six hours. I had left Louisville about 8:00 am because I was dog tired from meandering around the Mississippi the day before and from walking all around Louisville that night and had slept late. It was about 3:00 pm when I entered the mountainous mainline of West Virginia. I'd decided to take the way-back-woods roads and from Charleston took US 60. US 60 is another road like US 33 and US 50. That is, an old-fashioned, two-lane, winding and curving and switchbacking highway through the mountains. There are no passing lanes (except for the very odd few on each of the three) and once you start on that path there are no alternate routes - the alternate routes are the modern interstates which you have left far behind by taking these old US highways.
So, I'm well along in my mountain ride, have changed from US 60, which goes east-west through West Virginia's highest hills, to US 219, which runs up the spine of the Allegheny Highlands, skirting four-thousand-foot mountains and snaking its way up the valleys following endless rivers. I was one valley east from the New River Gorge and one valley west from Green Bank Observatory at one point in the journey. Right about there is where highway sixty crosses highway two-nineteen. I turn north and am about an hour into the trip. By this time I've gone up and down at least a dozen mountains with the classic 270-degree curve on the downside leading directly into S-turns to get off the hill. I've been religiously following the West Virginia Highway Department's yellow speed signs with arrows showing which way the curve bends. A typical mountain would have signs which read "Speed Limit 55," and then there would be dozens of yellow signs with 45, 35, 40, 25, 15 or some other speed marked. These are the speeds which it's safe to take the curves and the Volvo fits into this paradigm perfectly. West Virginia and Pennsylvania are the two states whose road signs I follow "for real" since they have hundreds of years experience in navigating these mountains and have settled on speeds which keep the traveller alive. There are very few speeders in the West Virginia hills. The curve I'm coming out of has a 30 sign and I'm at 35 and ease up on the accelerator to achieve 30 and head into the spiral. As I'm coming out of the spiral, the roadway is glistening with sheets of water - it's been pouring all day here - and my two front drive wheels decide to translate laterally rather than following my command.
The only problem with this scenario is that I'm moving at 30 miles an hour in a 2800-pound vehicle heading down at an eight percent grade with about one-and-a-half car lengths worth of road width. One side is a deep culvert with a guard rail on the down side and a straight down fall of several hundred feet. The other side is a deep culvert with native plants overgrown on top of a very muddy berm which is the mountain side from which the road is cut. The car is heading towards the guard rail and I try and figure out how to prevent it from either going off the road down or crashing into something hard. I tap the brakes in the hope that some wheels will grab and change my direction. They do and I'm swung around clockwise so I'm now heading up the hill in the same lane I was going down and the car IS slowing. It now is my hope that the wheels will not go off the roadway or shoulder because the culvert is at least three feet deep and if a wheel gets in there then I'm going to be stuck. Whatever actions I performed seemed to work. The car's driver-side rear bumber and left-rear quarter panel resoundly hit the dirt berm and the car is stopped.
The engine was still running and instinctively I shut it off and then realize that the iPod is still playing so I shut it off too. Then I get out to see if there's cars coming and how far into the roadway I am. A guy who had seen all this coming up the hill stops and offers assistance. I ask him to just stay there and make sure any traffic knows to slow down while I see if I can start it and drive it back to the roadway. Both front wheels are still on the road and the right rear wheel is on the shoulder with the left rear wheel being suspended in air over the culvert. I somewhat clumsily reattach the plastic bumper over-bumper (I guess so you can replace them without it costing too much once they get a few nicks). The underbelly air scoop, which is a long molded piece of plastic, has had one of the two tabs connecting it to the underside snapped, probably when the car's front swung around and this scoop caught the pavement while the wheels were still on the shoulder. Anyway, it's the piece which gets scrapped everytime I park at a lot with these eight-inch or so concrete lane spacers. I tear the thing off, leaving the tab attached to the engine well. Now, there's nothing flapping about and the car looks pretty good except the whole rear bumper and trunk area are now covered with West Virginia mountain mud.
I thank everyone, because by now - about ten minutes after I had spun out - there's a small convention of West Virginians in their pickups who have basically stopped traffic on US 219 to watch and offer advice, and drive on my way. Within about ten miles there's a West Virginia state trooper who attaches himself to my rear bumper for the next twenty miles while we traverse endless hills and curves and switchbacks - all I presume for the purpose of determining if I can drive in West Virginia or not. Anyway, after about twenty miles he tears away from me and goes on about his other business. Meanwhile it continues to rain, dip clouds down onto the roadway, there's fog around every curve it seems, and the weather just continues to have a great time.
My Thursday excursion was going to be one where I explored the way-back woods of West Virginia, hitting some valleys I'd only seen from afar and driving through towns I'd only heard about. It was great and I can only appreciate the hand fate has dealt me today because, although it was certainly exciting, frightening for moments, and a major adrenaline producer, it was just that - a weird quarky moment. It was just one of those things - I was bound to take these windy back roads, the weather was probably as bad as it could be for the entire duration and length of the journey, and one freak hydroplane incident, a few dings and mudbath later, and I'm back to enjoying the scenery.
West Virginia is an incredibly understated place. There is hidden wealth there. The back country valleys are filled with dozen-acre chemical plants located right on the shores of the endless rivers which run down these mountains. I could see today how deeply rooted a lot of West Virginia really is and for how long they've been there. I was also not that much surprised at how fast assistance appeared - seconds actually. I wasn't that surprised when the trooper began following me either, probably the brother of one of the folks who stopped to offer assistance - probably said to his trooper brother: "Check out that red Volvo with Washington plates. The driver had a real interesting near-miss back on 219 before Slatersville."
Tomorrow is DC and then the beach the next day.
Well, it's Tuesday, we've been at the beach for three days now. I picked up Leif and Adam at 7:30 am Saturday morning, as planned, and we drove down Interstate 95 heading toward North Carolina. The traffic was pretty much what I expected - very busy. As we approached Richmond we began to get some serious wind and rain and super-coincidentally my friend with whom I had spent the night called from Frederick to give us an on-the-fly report on Tropical Storm Charley - whose eye we were heading directly into. After Richmond there were very, very few cars heading south along I-95 and an endless stream of cars heading north. The Frederick-based "remote doppler radar" feed continued. I got updates, gave my friend our points of travel along I-95 and Steve (my friend) and I figured out where along the freeway the worst of the bands of rain and wind would be - they were expected to be in the fifty-mile-per-hour category. At about the perfect time, we pulled over at a Cracker Barrel restaurant near Wilson, North Carolina, and had a leisurely late breakfast while all hell broke loose outside. Afterward we continued on the journey with almost no one on the freeway but lots of downed trees, some extending nearly the entire width with lots of hazard-avoidance driving. We got to Wrightsville Beach about 4:00 pm and were the third group to arrive. The other two groups were my cousins from Chapel Hill area, who had also been on the freeway with the storm and had pulled over about the time we had but in a slightly further south town.
After unpacking and getting a few things straight, most of us put on swim trunks and headed for the beach. The ocean following a good storm or hurricane always has outrageous waves and we were being moved along by waves with incredible power. So much power that it was easy to get caught in an underwater tumble instead of catching the top and surfing. We stayed in the water for about 40 or so minutes and concluded that this was enough for one day since most of us got really tired of competing against the waves. It was awesome fun, though, another example of the amazing and truly uncontrollable forces of nature. The car performed quite well, we did hydroplane here and there but the road was about as straight as an arrow and level so there was less concern about additional spin-outs. What an interesting, exciting set of weather days getting here.
Sunday was rain all day, the left-over debris clouds from the hurricane, which by now was providing continuous rain up the East Coast. Monday was a super beach day and the forecast for the rest of the week is perfect Carolina beach weather.
Next post will either be later here at the beach or much later on the road heading back to Seattle. Pictures will have to await the return trip. If I set out on this three-week trip with the expectations that this would be a long adventure, I was only about half-close. It's been an incredible adventure with its share of hair-raising events and "bite-your-nails" situations. I fully expect the remaining time at the beach to be less eventful but am holding my opinion for the return trip to Seattle. Adam and I have decided that we want to cross the Canadian Rockies, so we'll be heading for Banff and then taking the "top of the world" highway which connects Banff and Jasper passes. They're about two-hundred miles apart and this is probably Canada's equivalent of Highway 219 in West Virginia so I'll be a little more cautious and vigilant - especially since that location and this time of year sometimes produce ffreak snowstorms. Anyway, I'll be safe and expect to have some really outstanding photos from this whole adventure.
Posted August 17 8:26 am
So, how was the trip East?
Overall it was outstanding. I'd long known about the Wind River and Wind River Range and had long believed it to be fabled and beautiful, which in Wyoming can be difficult to conceive for a lot of the places where most outsiders get to glimpse Wyoming, me included. I'm pleased to learn of such a tranquil and scenic route, especially one which covers the great distances this one does - caddy-corner across the whole state from northwest to southeast. Plus it starts (or finishes) at Yellowstone. How equally cool could anything else be?
I was also pleased to have discovered a tranquil, if unchanging, route across the middle Great Plains. Previously I'd tried any number of ideas to find a straight-away which wasn't jammed with either cars or cities or both. Not that either isn't interesting or useful in its own right! US Highway 36 was a trip across mechanized farm America. It was populated by locals who got on and off usually within ten miles. Average speed was probably 50, slow for many but easy on the gas mileage (31 or better everywhere) and did provide a Mark Twain-like view into modern farm life on the west bank of the Mississippi's great flood plain. It's different in Colorado and Kansas (and Oklahoma and north Texas) than it is in the Dakotas or Nebraska. And, the plains west of the Mississippi are starkly different from those east of the Great River. That's one of the things I finally set in place - the various and many "plains" which encompass the Mississippi River Basin (and its scads of major sub rivers and thousands of streams and creeks).
The development which occurred on the eastern banks for the two hundred years it took to open up the western banks give the Eastern Plains - Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Western Kentucky, Western Tennessee, Northern Mississippi, Southeastern Minnesota - a look, feel and smell which almost puts "farm" in the same category as "factory." This is the Plains now, not the boutique and Amish farms of the Northeast. On the western bank, the plains have more of an individual farmer or collective sense about them - the buildings, the placement of houses and farms (well, it WAS developed on the square-mile section plan!!). On the eastern banks, the older states have managed to subdivide large farm tracts so there are soybean fields and corn fields interspersed with Caterpillar and White Freightliner and Archer-Daniels-Midland plants (selling lysine to the world at cartel prices all from their home office in Decatur, Illinois). On the western banks, there are scant few signs of anything but agriculture itself, not the farm-machine making plants on the eastern banks.
One thing about criss-crossing America and Canada as many times as I have is that I am learning - first hand - about all the evolutionary phases of the growth of both industry and populace across the land and can almost place the various waves in my mind as I'm in one area or another. I stop pretty much at all the "Viewpoint", "Historical Marker", or "Item of Interest" signs along all the roads - mostly old US highway and state routes. It's almost like a form of cemetery - except for the traveller. I've followed a great many "trails," for instance. Across the Oklahoma plains I've followed the "Trail of Tears" and the Comanche Trail. Stopping along these highways and reading the signs gives me almost a tangible sense of what has transpired here.
I also discovered that West Virginia can be wild - and I mean wild. I've crossed US highway 33 through West Virginia, US Highway 50 and the few interstates which go through during rain, fog, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the night. Each time I cross West Virginia I think how many other times I've crossed and how the road conditions vary all over the place. I've taken all the interstates and West Virginians like to drive fast - they're mostly 70 miles an hour except that even the interstates will cause a side-motion detector to go off - or an inclinometer to show double-digit degrees. I usually drive West Virginia below the posted limit because A) it's so unbelievably beautiful - even in the fog; and B) I feel safer at a lower limit through that state. I have only spun out twice in my life - once back when I was 17 and driving around a 90-degree turn coming from the bridge at Harrisburg onto the local main street of the towns which sit across the river. That was in winter and the roadway was covered with ice and I was driving my mom's F-85 Oldsmobile with an aluminum V-6. Lucky for me then there was no one else on the road - I was out driving in the snow and ice because I wanted to. I spun 360-degrees and wound up in the wrong lane but heading where I had been headed. It was so slick that even the curb was covered with ice and there were no marks left on the tires or car when I caromed off both side curbs. Whew! Lucky me and lucky mom (she could ill afford any repairs I might have caused to be needed). Well, the second time was in the middle of a rain-fog-sunken cloud day after the eleventh or twelfth switchback at super-slow speeds and only 3200 feet above sea level but only about 500 or so feet above the valley floor. I was equally lucky this time as before and except for a few replaceable plastic bumper parts and a slight dent in real metal, this was just as scathe-free.
What I learned and what I should have already known was that I was in a hydroplane condition the entire day. Perhaps I wouldn't have gotten even that far had I thought those thoughts earlier. I had heard the "swish - whoosh" which the tires were making on the roadway but hadn't put the two-and-two together which would have equalled "driver alert." And, with a dozen such mean and evil hills already climbed and descended successfully, I might have been suffering from classic NASA syndrome - "I think I understand the physics and besides which nothing has failed yet." Anyway, I was totally alert from that incident on - even more than previously and I can honestly say that such a high level of driver alertness is really taxing and tiring. But worth it.
Coming back into DC after being gone for a year was its own trip. I'd lived in and walked, cycled, driven, taken bus and subway nearly everywhere and don't think there's another place on Earth I know better or more naturally. But, I was inside the place - an "inside the Beltway" resident and thinker. I was an "Eastern, effete liberal snob," and reasonably proud of it. I expected excellence and knew where to find it for anything I might need or want - so long as I was willing to put up with the overt and sometimes covert costs. I don't think I realized how many costs there really were. I'm living about identically in Seattle as I was in DC and yet I have many hundreds of dollars more left over each month here than I ever did there. Not that folks in the DC area aren't paid well enough to indulge - they surely are. Two of the top ten richest counties in the country are one each Maryland and Virginia suburbs. And some of the things I took for granted I now understand were paid for by some of the "costs" which I was paying. The DC area has some of the most outstanding and well-executed freeways of any city in the country. Sure, they don't move much but when they're empty (I also know the times to use freeway and times to use back street) they are a work of beauty. I'd forgotten that or perhaps had just become ennured to it. Plus, it pays to have been a city for three hundred or so years. There's just some amazing infrastructure in DC - the city. I'd almost forgotten that too. Anyway, my re-arrival presented a very rich and very well manicured city for me to behold. It really IS a grand city and it really does look, smell and feel like one. Plus it was a kick-in-the-butt to know where I was going and to be able to navigate my way around the place without even thinking. It's about as easy to get around as Boston and it's twice as large in area so that made me feel good too.
I looked at my old house, now completely renovated and modernized by Juan - the former attorney-turned-old house renovator. I believe Juan has kept what was quintessential about the place - it's late 18th Century farmhouse look - and did the grounds to compliment the house and the relatively wild lot which is the park on the other side of the street. It looks like it did even though Leif has toured inside and complains that the spacious feel of the former "true" farmhouse has been replaced with endless warrens and nooks and that it now feels "cramped" and small.
All together, the trip from Seattle to DC was a good trip - I filled in a lot of holes in my knowledge about the continent and its people - both now and then. Getting to the beach from DC was fated to be an adventure for Leif, Adam and me. I picked them up from Leif's Capitol Hill group townhouse on Saturday morning and we headed south - first on 395 through the District and Alexandria and over the $350 million interchange being built at the intersection of 95 and then down 95 towards Richmond. This was really early Saturday and I expected heavy but not stop-and-go traffic on the interstate. I-95 is arguably the worst road in America. It's the one and only main connector road between Maine and Florida and every city on the East Coast has a section with something-or-other-95 as part of its highway system. Pick a spot up or down the roadway and there's probably an average of over 100,000 cars a day which traverse that section. The section from the 395 interchange for the next twenty miles sees an average of over a quarter-million cars and trucks per day. Of course it was built for about a quarter that volume. Traffic to Richmond was not that bad. Just before Richmond it started to rain and seemed like it was getting worse. We breezed through Richmond and headed for the next marker, the North Carolina border. My friend who I stayed with Friday called me in the car to tell me I was probably headed directly toward the eye of now-downgraded-to-Tropical Storm Charley. I hadn't even considered the idea of a hurricane interfering with my drive - with my beach vacation, yes, but with the drive down, no. It turns out that we were - indeed - on a direct intersect with the eye. My path was down I-95 through Virginia and North Carolina until just east of Raleigh where I would pick up I-40 for the beach leg. By leaving when I did and by taking these two roads and traveling at the rate I was going - which was now about 45 mph due to the rain - I would run into the eye about halfway from the I-95 intersection on I-40 and the beach.
I thanked my friend for the update and commented how useful satellite weather and Doppler radar would be if they were installed on car dashboards. We continued south with the rain and winds picking up considerably. By the time we crossed the North Carolina border there were only about three or four cars that we could see in front of or behind us heading south and a nearly continuous stream of cars heading north in the other lanes. We concluded that the storm must be really bad ahead of us since it was now about an hour and a half away from the eye on our present trajectory. A few more miles down the road and we decided to lay over at a Cracker Barrel restaurant for the next hour and see what happened. We parked and discovered that a lot of other people had figured out the same thing. We got our number, walked in the rain for a while, went back to Cracker Barrel and walked around, sat in the rocking chairs on the porch and finally got called for our table. It was about eleven in the morning so we were going to have breakfast and ordered accordingly. Food was good mostly because it was simple and we were hungry. After we finished and cleaned up we went back outside and gave my friend another call. It looked like the eye had passed overhead while we were inside despite the fact that the rain was still coming down.
We got back in the car and continued toward I-40 and by the time we exited on that freeway the skies were beginning to clear and the rains had gone away (or more technically correct, had continued up the coast). The highway was pretty deserted and there were big lodge-pole pine trees scattered along the highway and toppled in the forests which lined much of the early stretch of the road to Wilmington. Nearer Wilmington we began to see a few signs and other debris of strong winds but generally things looked pretty spiffy - rain and wind do have a nice habit of cleaning things up.
We were - for a change - among the first to arrive at the beach cottages. While others delayed, went back or laid over, we cleverly dodged the worst of the storm and trekked onward. My brother, his wife and son, and mom had driven from Charlotte and were next to arrive and after that my cousin and her family from Chapel Hill. Soon enough we were all headed for the Target to get sheets and towels - all required by the renter but in our case left to buy onsite.
By the evening everyone who was expected to arrive on this first day was there and we had our customary first meal of pork barbecue and beans and other Southern comfort foods. I believe I ate my first course of brownies just to make sure I'd get my fair share since there were tons of beans and barbecue but only two gallon plastic zipper bags of brownies.
The family reunion, the beach, beach movies and beach towns as well as the Atlantic and the surf will be recounted in Part Two.
Because things have been no less hectic since I've been back and because I took over a gig-and-a-half of photos, the imagery for the tales will have to come later - many movies and many VRs as well as many ordinary one-shots. And like any photographer or writer, I'm always looking for bright ideas or methods of making all this easier to digest and appreciate - ideas are welcomed.
More, of course, later.
Part one will be this one - the recounting of the family beach reunion "getting there" part.
Part two will be the "so this is what my family is like these days" part.
Part three will be the "yet another chance to cross North America through Canada" part.
And, part four will be the "I've been in Seattle now for one year - four seasons" part.
Part One:
Just to recount (email people got this already, web people didn't):
Well, I said I wouldn't be posting any notes - not true, the second night out, some random Best Western in Chillicothe, Missouri, (if this isn't the heartland then the heartland doesn't exist - right up the street is a rock-and-roll Christian FM station "the Wave") and I find I have free wireless. Last night I stayed in Broomfield with a dear old friend from my Code X days at NASA - enjoyed the company, his wife and their two boys - 7 and 2 (almost) - great fun to be around such bright lithe tykes again - had to go chasing a frisbie - need to practice my level throws but not necessarily my catches.
So, here's a tip for anyone wishing to see the beautiful side of Wyoming (no, it ain't ALL open pit chemical mines, it just seems that way). Take 287 from Helena down through Yellowstone and parts of Grand Teton National Parks and then follow the Wind River and the Wind River Range all the way practically to the southeast corner and border with Colorado - and then divert and take Wyoming 130 through the Medicine Bow Mountains to get to Laramie and points further east.
I've been following US 36 today, which Katherine says we took a long, long time ago on one of our trips back East from the West - before Houston and kids. Parts of it seem to be familiar - certainly the level-flat high plains of Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas. On the mountain trip from Bozeman to Broomfield, I spent nearly 2/3 of a gig of flash card data taking an unbelievable series of time-motion studies (herky-jerky™ movies). Can't wait to see how I'll compose soundtracks for this boatload of images/movies. It seemed since I was trying to save time, rather than stop and take VRs, which would eat up at least 10 minutes per VR, I decided to try and capture the "motion" and "changing" nature of the journey. There's one stretch where I'm following a series of switch-backs knowing it will open to some mountain and it opens to this huge, eight-thousand-foot granite rock with half one face covered with boulders and rock debris. That should translate into a minute flick of the approximate-ten miles it took to get to that image. I'll need an appropriate soundtrack - but what?
Anyway, I'm tired. This has been three days (today, too) of 12 or more hours of driving. Thank goodness for the iPod and my car stereo. 1941 songs is what's on the new one - I think I've really turned into a huge alternative music freak after listening to a whole bunch of the ripped CDs I picked up in San Francisco at Amoeba.
So far I'm safe, have had outstanding weather (clear, beautiful, pleasant temperatures, appropriate clouds when needed for photos, etc.) and have once again renewed my spirit with all this great land we've got. One could spend a lifetime just looking at this planet!
Tomorrow the Mississippi - and given my timeline and bent - I'll probably squander half-a-day exploring more river roads. I brought lots of blues and blues guitar music to listen to. Discovered Tinsley Ellis recently (Alligator Records) - nothing like live, 'lectric, Chicago blues licks - but, I can still remember before Clear Channel driving through St. Louis and hearing one really hot blues station - and that far south of Chicago - it was great. Now, of course, it's gone - but those radio waves keep traveling on out there in space...(as do I)
Posted August 10, 5:05 pm
Today (Wednesday) I made my way east to Hannibal, Missouri, and followed Missouri 79 south until it crossed at US 54 and then followed Illinois 96 first and later Illinois 100 and finally Illinois 3 into the now-completely-shut-down-and-downtrodden East St. Louis former wharf area and then made a clean, straight, hop right onto I-64. All of the state roads, on both sides of the Mississippi River, are part of the Great River Road system. I've travelled a goodly portion of the Mississippi on both sides along its path and have crossed it on many a bridge from Minnesota to Louisiana. But, there's still highways along the river which I haven't taken and bridges I haven't crossed. The entire Mississippi has about two thousand miles of roadway on both shorelines with over a hundred bridges. It's really it's own socio-economic system in addition to being one hell of a watershed river.
From St. Louis I headed east through the lower plains of Illinois, surrounded on all sides by either the Mississippi or Illinois or Wabash and from there into the lower plains of Indiana, surrounded on all sides by the various forks of the Wabash and the Ohio Rivers. A day of river swamp and flood plain hopping which put me right downtown Louisville - where once again there's wireless.
So far this trip I've ticked off Yellowstone and Grand Teton and the rivers and green mountains of Wyoming; the scenic high plains of Colorado and Kansas (US 36 is great, fast, straight, rolling hills finally, but devoid of anyone who doesn't live there); the Great Mississippi River and its humongous flood plain - I mean hundreds of miles - there's dams, causeways and locks, and embankments and dikes like you wouldn't believe. This is our Holland and it's much larger area- and shoreline-wise; and coming up one more shot at crossing the Allegheny Mountains.
Louisville is much more vibrant than one would think. I've been around and through here before but never stayed and played. This is a young town (people wise) and has amazing architecture - another one of America's cities which couldn't afford to tear down the old 18th and 19th century structures. Except in the case of Louisville, they completely wiped the old Ohio River wharves and replaced it with a double-deck superfreeway which connects two new bridges and lots of other concrete but which definitely blocks the river from the city. Shades of Alaskan Way Viaduct or Georgetown's Whitehurst Freeway. Louisville has put parking under the entire structure for an effective city-owned parking lot and added about seven miles of hike-and-bike trail along the right-of-way. It works fine and gives great views of the river and the city and all the transportation infrastructure, including the freeway itself. This means that for long periods along the trail there is a constant hydrodynamic pressure situation caused by the moving cars, the moving planks of concrete on the overpasses and suspended roadway, and the reverberations of all this on all the flat surfaces which are all around. DC didn't have a really good spot to listen to freeway noise. Seattle has the streets at the north end of Capitol Hill directly underneath I-5 and Louisville has its River Walk. Similar noise levels can be heard at the end of airport runways - just a constant rush of wind with variable pitch and timbre - depending on the number of wheels and the mass of the vehicle.
Louisville also has an interesting downtown street life. There's definitely different districts to the downtown area, which like most American cities, covers an approximately square mile plat (as do most state universities) give or take a square mile depending on the tier rank of the city. DC had about three square miles of real downtown. Seattle has about two square miles. Louisville appears to have about one. That's still a lot of streets with a lot of action and people milling about. The Ohio wraps itself around Louisville in such a way that some streets start and end at the river. It's also got two free downtown bus loops which sort of follow the two old main streets, one parallel to and the other perpendicular to the river. Lots of French influence around here - which makes sense since the city is named after the King of France who helped the American Revolutionaries. It also has a huge medical presence. In addition to the home office of Humana - the health-care wunderkind of our time - it has about a square mile of hospitals headed by the many campuses of Jewish Hospital. I'll have to research that one in this place - sounds like a storied history waiting to be read.
It's also a pretty city in that the streets are very broad - clearly the French Haussman's influence at work. Plus, most of the avenues (the streets are laid out with some as avenues and others almost as alleys by their varying width) seem to start or end with a river or a bluff view which gives each street a different "scape" even though one normally thinks of river towns as flat. They are but don't have to be uninteresting.
Camera, car and computer - the 3 "C" 's - are all performing well - in fact I even went through the roughly 40 meg OS upgrade and security and java and synch software patches - I think only a Mac owner would even consider updating system software on the road, let alone believe it would work flawlessly - which it did. Today I shot a bunch more movies and here in Louisville took a huge number of VRs and other images. One VR is in the middle of the Ohio River. It's US 31 and it's the original bridge with sidewalks on both sides so I just walked halfway across right as the sun was setting in the West and took a series of panoramas and VR images. There were even a few kids biking across from Louisville to the Ohio side.
Thursday was an exciting day. It was Wet and Wild in West Virginia. I headed out east from Louisville into the bluegrass turf of Central Kentucky and headed right past that beautiful stretch northeast towards Ashland, on the Ohio River (which meandered West-by-South-West from there to Louisville). At Ashland I would encounter the Appalachians, specifically the beginning of the Allegheny Mountains. It started to rain almost immediately and went from fog, lost in the clouds, pouring rain, and back and forth for the next six hours. I had left Louisville about 8:00 am because I was dog tired from meandering around the Mississippi the day before and from walking all around Louisville that night and had slept late. It was about 3:00 pm when I entered the mountainous mainline of West Virginia. I'd decided to take the way-back-woods roads and from Charleston took US 60. US 60 is another road like US 33 and US 50. That is, an old-fashioned, two-lane, winding and curving and switchbacking highway through the mountains. There are no passing lanes (except for the very odd few on each of the three) and once you start on that path there are no alternate routes - the alternate routes are the modern interstates which you have left far behind by taking these old US highways.
So, I'm well along in my mountain ride, have changed from US 60, which goes east-west through West Virginia's highest hills, to US 219, which runs up the spine of the Allegheny Highlands, skirting four-thousand-foot mountains and snaking its way up the valleys following endless rivers. I was one valley east from the New River Gorge and one valley west from Green Bank Observatory at one point in the journey. Right about there is where highway sixty crosses highway two-nineteen. I turn north and am about an hour into the trip. By this time I've gone up and down at least a dozen mountains with the classic 270-degree curve on the downside leading directly into S-turns to get off the hill. I've been religiously following the West Virginia Highway Department's yellow speed signs with arrows showing which way the curve bends. A typical mountain would have signs which read "Speed Limit 55," and then there would be dozens of yellow signs with 45, 35, 40, 25, 15 or some other speed marked. These are the speeds which it's safe to take the curves and the Volvo fits into this paradigm perfectly. West Virginia and Pennsylvania are the two states whose road signs I follow "for real" since they have hundreds of years experience in navigating these mountains and have settled on speeds which keep the traveller alive. There are very few speeders in the West Virginia hills. The curve I'm coming out of has a 30 sign and I'm at 35 and ease up on the accelerator to achieve 30 and head into the spiral. As I'm coming out of the spiral, the roadway is glistening with sheets of water - it's been pouring all day here - and my two front drive wheels decide to translate laterally rather than following my command.
The only problem with this scenario is that I'm moving at 30 miles an hour in a 2800-pound vehicle heading down at an eight percent grade with about one-and-a-half car lengths worth of road width. One side is a deep culvert with a guard rail on the down side and a straight down fall of several hundred feet. The other side is a deep culvert with native plants overgrown on top of a very muddy berm which is the mountain side from which the road is cut. The car is heading towards the guard rail and I try and figure out how to prevent it from either going off the road down or crashing into something hard. I tap the brakes in the hope that some wheels will grab and change my direction. They do and I'm swung around clockwise so I'm now heading up the hill in the same lane I was going down and the car IS slowing. It now is my hope that the wheels will not go off the roadway or shoulder because the culvert is at least three feet deep and if a wheel gets in there then I'm going to be stuck. Whatever actions I performed seemed to work. The car's driver-side rear bumber and left-rear quarter panel resoundly hit the dirt berm and the car is stopped.
The engine was still running and instinctively I shut it off and then realize that the iPod is still playing so I shut it off too. Then I get out to see if there's cars coming and how far into the roadway I am. A guy who had seen all this coming up the hill stops and offers assistance. I ask him to just stay there and make sure any traffic knows to slow down while I see if I can start it and drive it back to the roadway. Both front wheels are still on the road and the right rear wheel is on the shoulder with the left rear wheel being suspended in air over the culvert. I somewhat clumsily reattach the plastic bumper over-bumper (I guess so you can replace them without it costing too much once they get a few nicks). The underbelly air scoop, which is a long molded piece of plastic, has had one of the two tabs connecting it to the underside snapped, probably when the car's front swung around and this scoop caught the pavement while the wheels were still on the shoulder. Anyway, it's the piece which gets scrapped everytime I park at a lot with these eight-inch or so concrete lane spacers. I tear the thing off, leaving the tab attached to the engine well. Now, there's nothing flapping about and the car looks pretty good except the whole rear bumper and trunk area are now covered with West Virginia mountain mud.
I thank everyone, because by now - about ten minutes after I had spun out - there's a small convention of West Virginians in their pickups who have basically stopped traffic on US 219 to watch and offer advice, and drive on my way. Within about ten miles there's a West Virginia state trooper who attaches himself to my rear bumper for the next twenty miles while we traverse endless hills and curves and switchbacks - all I presume for the purpose of determining if I can drive in West Virginia or not. Anyway, after about twenty miles he tears away from me and goes on about his other business. Meanwhile it continues to rain, dip clouds down onto the roadway, there's fog around every curve it seems, and the weather just continues to have a great time.
My Thursday excursion was going to be one where I explored the way-back woods of West Virginia, hitting some valleys I'd only seen from afar and driving through towns I'd only heard about. It was great and I can only appreciate the hand fate has dealt me today because, although it was certainly exciting, frightening for moments, and a major adrenaline producer, it was just that - a weird quarky moment. It was just one of those things - I was bound to take these windy back roads, the weather was probably as bad as it could be for the entire duration and length of the journey, and one freak hydroplane incident, a few dings and mudbath later, and I'm back to enjoying the scenery.
West Virginia is an incredibly understated place. There is hidden wealth there. The back country valleys are filled with dozen-acre chemical plants located right on the shores of the endless rivers which run down these mountains. I could see today how deeply rooted a lot of West Virginia really is and for how long they've been there. I was also not that much surprised at how fast assistance appeared - seconds actually. I wasn't that surprised when the trooper began following me either, probably the brother of one of the folks who stopped to offer assistance - probably said to his trooper brother: "Check out that red Volvo with Washington plates. The driver had a real interesting near-miss back on 219 before Slatersville."
Tomorrow is DC and then the beach the next day.
Well, it's Tuesday, we've been at the beach for three days now. I picked up Leif and Adam at 7:30 am Saturday morning, as planned, and we drove down Interstate 95 heading toward North Carolina. The traffic was pretty much what I expected - very busy. As we approached Richmond we began to get some serious wind and rain and super-coincidentally my friend with whom I had spent the night called from Frederick to give us an on-the-fly report on Tropical Storm Charley - whose eye we were heading directly into. After Richmond there were very, very few cars heading south along I-95 and an endless stream of cars heading north. The Frederick-based "remote doppler radar" feed continued. I got updates, gave my friend our points of travel along I-95 and Steve (my friend) and I figured out where along the freeway the worst of the bands of rain and wind would be - they were expected to be in the fifty-mile-per-hour category. At about the perfect time, we pulled over at a Cracker Barrel restaurant near Wilson, North Carolina, and had a leisurely late breakfast while all hell broke loose outside. Afterward we continued on the journey with almost no one on the freeway but lots of downed trees, some extending nearly the entire width with lots of hazard-avoidance driving. We got to Wrightsville Beach about 4:00 pm and were the third group to arrive. The other two groups were my cousins from Chapel Hill area, who had also been on the freeway with the storm and had pulled over about the time we had but in a slightly further south town.
After unpacking and getting a few things straight, most of us put on swim trunks and headed for the beach. The ocean following a good storm or hurricane always has outrageous waves and we were being moved along by waves with incredible power. So much power that it was easy to get caught in an underwater tumble instead of catching the top and surfing. We stayed in the water for about 40 or so minutes and concluded that this was enough for one day since most of us got really tired of competing against the waves. It was awesome fun, though, another example of the amazing and truly uncontrollable forces of nature. The car performed quite well, we did hydroplane here and there but the road was about as straight as an arrow and level so there was less concern about additional spin-outs. What an interesting, exciting set of weather days getting here.
Sunday was rain all day, the left-over debris clouds from the hurricane, which by now was providing continuous rain up the East Coast. Monday was a super beach day and the forecast for the rest of the week is perfect Carolina beach weather.
Next post will either be later here at the beach or much later on the road heading back to Seattle. Pictures will have to await the return trip. If I set out on this three-week trip with the expectations that this would be a long adventure, I was only about half-close. It's been an incredible adventure with its share of hair-raising events and "bite-your-nails" situations. I fully expect the remaining time at the beach to be less eventful but am holding my opinion for the return trip to Seattle. Adam and I have decided that we want to cross the Canadian Rockies, so we'll be heading for Banff and then taking the "top of the world" highway which connects Banff and Jasper passes. They're about two-hundred miles apart and this is probably Canada's equivalent of Highway 219 in West Virginia so I'll be a little more cautious and vigilant - especially since that location and this time of year sometimes produce ffreak snowstorms. Anyway, I'll be safe and expect to have some really outstanding photos from this whole adventure.
Posted August 17 8:26 am
So, how was the trip East?
Overall it was outstanding. I'd long known about the Wind River and Wind River Range and had long believed it to be fabled and beautiful, which in Wyoming can be difficult to conceive for a lot of the places where most outsiders get to glimpse Wyoming, me included. I'm pleased to learn of such a tranquil and scenic route, especially one which covers the great distances this one does - caddy-corner across the whole state from northwest to southeast. Plus it starts (or finishes) at Yellowstone. How equally cool could anything else be?
I was also pleased to have discovered a tranquil, if unchanging, route across the middle Great Plains. Previously I'd tried any number of ideas to find a straight-away which wasn't jammed with either cars or cities or both. Not that either isn't interesting or useful in its own right! US Highway 36 was a trip across mechanized farm America. It was populated by locals who got on and off usually within ten miles. Average speed was probably 50, slow for many but easy on the gas mileage (31 or better everywhere) and did provide a Mark Twain-like view into modern farm life on the west bank of the Mississippi's great flood plain. It's different in Colorado and Kansas (and Oklahoma and north Texas) than it is in the Dakotas or Nebraska. And, the plains west of the Mississippi are starkly different from those east of the Great River. That's one of the things I finally set in place - the various and many "plains" which encompass the Mississippi River Basin (and its scads of major sub rivers and thousands of streams and creeks).
The development which occurred on the eastern banks for the two hundred years it took to open up the western banks give the Eastern Plains - Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Western Kentucky, Western Tennessee, Northern Mississippi, Southeastern Minnesota - a look, feel and smell which almost puts "farm" in the same category as "factory." This is the Plains now, not the boutique and Amish farms of the Northeast. On the western bank, the plains have more of an individual farmer or collective sense about them - the buildings, the placement of houses and farms (well, it WAS developed on the square-mile section plan!!). On the eastern banks, the older states have managed to subdivide large farm tracts so there are soybean fields and corn fields interspersed with Caterpillar and White Freightliner and Archer-Daniels-Midland plants (selling lysine to the world at cartel prices all from their home office in Decatur, Illinois). On the western banks, there are scant few signs of anything but agriculture itself, not the farm-machine making plants on the eastern banks.
One thing about criss-crossing America and Canada as many times as I have is that I am learning - first hand - about all the evolutionary phases of the growth of both industry and populace across the land and can almost place the various waves in my mind as I'm in one area or another. I stop pretty much at all the "Viewpoint", "Historical Marker", or "Item of Interest" signs along all the roads - mostly old US highway and state routes. It's almost like a form of cemetery - except for the traveller. I've followed a great many "trails," for instance. Across the Oklahoma plains I've followed the "Trail of Tears" and the Comanche Trail. Stopping along these highways and reading the signs gives me almost a tangible sense of what has transpired here.
I also discovered that West Virginia can be wild - and I mean wild. I've crossed US highway 33 through West Virginia, US Highway 50 and the few interstates which go through during rain, fog, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the night. Each time I cross West Virginia I think how many other times I've crossed and how the road conditions vary all over the place. I've taken all the interstates and West Virginians like to drive fast - they're mostly 70 miles an hour except that even the interstates will cause a side-motion detector to go off - or an inclinometer to show double-digit degrees. I usually drive West Virginia below the posted limit because A) it's so unbelievably beautiful - even in the fog; and B) I feel safer at a lower limit through that state. I have only spun out twice in my life - once back when I was 17 and driving around a 90-degree turn coming from the bridge at Harrisburg onto the local main street of the towns which sit across the river. That was in winter and the roadway was covered with ice and I was driving my mom's F-85 Oldsmobile with an aluminum V-6. Lucky for me then there was no one else on the road - I was out driving in the snow and ice because I wanted to. I spun 360-degrees and wound up in the wrong lane but heading where I had been headed. It was so slick that even the curb was covered with ice and there were no marks left on the tires or car when I caromed off both side curbs. Whew! Lucky me and lucky mom (she could ill afford any repairs I might have caused to be needed). Well, the second time was in the middle of a rain-fog-sunken cloud day after the eleventh or twelfth switchback at super-slow speeds and only 3200 feet above sea level but only about 500 or so feet above the valley floor. I was equally lucky this time as before and except for a few replaceable plastic bumper parts and a slight dent in real metal, this was just as scathe-free.
What I learned and what I should have already known was that I was in a hydroplane condition the entire day. Perhaps I wouldn't have gotten even that far had I thought those thoughts earlier. I had heard the "swish - whoosh" which the tires were making on the roadway but hadn't put the two-and-two together which would have equalled "driver alert." And, with a dozen such mean and evil hills already climbed and descended successfully, I might have been suffering from classic NASA syndrome - "I think I understand the physics and besides which nothing has failed yet." Anyway, I was totally alert from that incident on - even more than previously and I can honestly say that such a high level of driver alertness is really taxing and tiring. But worth it.
Coming back into DC after being gone for a year was its own trip. I'd lived in and walked, cycled, driven, taken bus and subway nearly everywhere and don't think there's another place on Earth I know better or more naturally. But, I was inside the place - an "inside the Beltway" resident and thinker. I was an "Eastern, effete liberal snob," and reasonably proud of it. I expected excellence and knew where to find it for anything I might need or want - so long as I was willing to put up with the overt and sometimes covert costs. I don't think I realized how many costs there really were. I'm living about identically in Seattle as I was in DC and yet I have many hundreds of dollars more left over each month here than I ever did there. Not that folks in the DC area aren't paid well enough to indulge - they surely are. Two of the top ten richest counties in the country are one each Maryland and Virginia suburbs. And some of the things I took for granted I now understand were paid for by some of the "costs" which I was paying. The DC area has some of the most outstanding and well-executed freeways of any city in the country. Sure, they don't move much but when they're empty (I also know the times to use freeway and times to use back street) they are a work of beauty. I'd forgotten that or perhaps had just become ennured to it. Plus, it pays to have been a city for three hundred or so years. There's just some amazing infrastructure in DC - the city. I'd almost forgotten that too. Anyway, my re-arrival presented a very rich and very well manicured city for me to behold. It really IS a grand city and it really does look, smell and feel like one. Plus it was a kick-in-the-butt to know where I was going and to be able to navigate my way around the place without even thinking. It's about as easy to get around as Boston and it's twice as large in area so that made me feel good too.
I looked at my old house, now completely renovated and modernized by Juan - the former attorney-turned-old house renovator. I believe Juan has kept what was quintessential about the place - it's late 18th Century farmhouse look - and did the grounds to compliment the house and the relatively wild lot which is the park on the other side of the street. It looks like it did even though Leif has toured inside and complains that the spacious feel of the former "true" farmhouse has been replaced with endless warrens and nooks and that it now feels "cramped" and small.
All together, the trip from Seattle to DC was a good trip - I filled in a lot of holes in my knowledge about the continent and its people - both now and then. Getting to the beach from DC was fated to be an adventure for Leif, Adam and me. I picked them up from Leif's Capitol Hill group townhouse on Saturday morning and we headed south - first on 395 through the District and Alexandria and over the $350 million interchange being built at the intersection of 95 and then down 95 towards Richmond. This was really early Saturday and I expected heavy but not stop-and-go traffic on the interstate. I-95 is arguably the worst road in America. It's the one and only main connector road between Maine and Florida and every city on the East Coast has a section with something-or-other-95 as part of its highway system. Pick a spot up or down the roadway and there's probably an average of over 100,000 cars a day which traverse that section. The section from the 395 interchange for the next twenty miles sees an average of over a quarter-million cars and trucks per day. Of course it was built for about a quarter that volume. Traffic to Richmond was not that bad. Just before Richmond it started to rain and seemed like it was getting worse. We breezed through Richmond and headed for the next marker, the North Carolina border. My friend who I stayed with Friday called me in the car to tell me I was probably headed directly toward the eye of now-downgraded-to-Tropical Storm Charley. I hadn't even considered the idea of a hurricane interfering with my drive - with my beach vacation, yes, but with the drive down, no. It turns out that we were - indeed - on a direct intersect with the eye. My path was down I-95 through Virginia and North Carolina until just east of Raleigh where I would pick up I-40 for the beach leg. By leaving when I did and by taking these two roads and traveling at the rate I was going - which was now about 45 mph due to the rain - I would run into the eye about halfway from the I-95 intersection on I-40 and the beach.
I thanked my friend for the update and commented how useful satellite weather and Doppler radar would be if they were installed on car dashboards. We continued south with the rain and winds picking up considerably. By the time we crossed the North Carolina border there were only about three or four cars that we could see in front of or behind us heading south and a nearly continuous stream of cars heading north in the other lanes. We concluded that the storm must be really bad ahead of us since it was now about an hour and a half away from the eye on our present trajectory. A few more miles down the road and we decided to lay over at a Cracker Barrel restaurant for the next hour and see what happened. We parked and discovered that a lot of other people had figured out the same thing. We got our number, walked in the rain for a while, went back to Cracker Barrel and walked around, sat in the rocking chairs on the porch and finally got called for our table. It was about eleven in the morning so we were going to have breakfast and ordered accordingly. Food was good mostly because it was simple and we were hungry. After we finished and cleaned up we went back outside and gave my friend another call. It looked like the eye had passed overhead while we were inside despite the fact that the rain was still coming down.
We got back in the car and continued toward I-40 and by the time we exited on that freeway the skies were beginning to clear and the rains had gone away (or more technically correct, had continued up the coast). The highway was pretty deserted and there were big lodge-pole pine trees scattered along the highway and toppled in the forests which lined much of the early stretch of the road to Wilmington. Nearer Wilmington we began to see a few signs and other debris of strong winds but generally things looked pretty spiffy - rain and wind do have a nice habit of cleaning things up.
We were - for a change - among the first to arrive at the beach cottages. While others delayed, went back or laid over, we cleverly dodged the worst of the storm and trekked onward. My brother, his wife and son, and mom had driven from Charlotte and were next to arrive and after that my cousin and her family from Chapel Hill. Soon enough we were all headed for the Target to get sheets and towels - all required by the renter but in our case left to buy onsite.
By the evening everyone who was expected to arrive on this first day was there and we had our customary first meal of pork barbecue and beans and other Southern comfort foods. I believe I ate my first course of brownies just to make sure I'd get my fair share since there were tons of beans and barbecue but only two gallon plastic zipper bags of brownies.
The family reunion, the beach, beach movies and beach towns as well as the Atlantic and the surf will be recounted in Part Two.
Because things have been no less hectic since I've been back and because I took over a gig-and-a-half of photos, the imagery for the tales will have to come later - many movies and many VRs as well as many ordinary one-shots. And like any photographer or writer, I'm always looking for bright ideas or methods of making all this easier to digest and appreciate - ideas are welcomed.
More, of course, later.
Posted: Tue - September 7, 2004 at 12:32 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM