Travels with Gunther and Kara

It’s been cold here in SW FL…we actually had to wear jeans and close the windows and doors the last few days as lows were down to the high 40s one night. We’re warmer today and back to our normal winter weather with lows in the high 50s and highs in the 70s to low 80s. We’ve got a quick overnight trip to Orlando coming up for an Elks thing but other than that we’re pretty much doing our normal life things. The good thing about the cooler weather was that Connie got to wear one of her warmer long sleeved dresses to date night on Tuesday that it’s usually too hot for her to wear.

She had her first concert of the year…the Faure Requiem. It was down at the same place they rehearse and went well. Next up is their Christmas concert at the same place and then the Deck the Halls extravaganza with the Gulf Coast Symphony the following week at the local concert hall. The conductor of the symphony didn’t invite the Irish Dancers to perform again…instead he’s having (I kid you not)…an aerial violinist. This woman is…according to her website…is the only aerial violinist in the world. She basically gets hoisted up from the stage and while in midair both sings and plays the violin while simultaneously doing acrobatic tricks. Sounds like the dumbest idea in the history of ideas to us…but hey, if people will pay you to do it then why not.

On the tech front…the folks that provide our main email accounts upgraded their mail server last weekend and we immediately lost the ability to send outgoing mail using our own domain email addresses as the server only knows about the dot com addresses and not the dot net ones. Seems to me that any halfway competent email software would have a place to enter additional authorized domains…but it apparently doesn’t. We still have our dot net addresses but they exist on a different server with no actual mailboxes but just redirect any incoming mail to the dot com mailbox on the upgraded server. The solution on our end turned out to be pretty simple…since the provider is either unable or unwilling to make the dot net domain an authorized outgoing recipient on that server we just changed the outgoing email address to the dot com one. We were always connecting to that mailbox anyway but just using our dot net email addresses. The other alternative was to stop the redirect and for Neil to manage mailboxes on the dot net server via the web…but he’s not interested in being a mail server admin at this point in life and they would still have to check the dot com mailbox anyway for mail that comes directly into it…so he took the easy fix.

Connie and Neil signed up for a Viking cruise next year once the weather in the EU gets warm. They’re flying business class because it’s just way more comfortable than being back in the cattle car section for 9 or 10 hours with no ability to really sleep overnight. The cruise is 14 days from Budapest (which is actually two different cities…Buda and Pest…that are across the Danube river from each other in Hungary and ends in Amsterdam with various stops in Austria and Germany in between. While Neil has exactly zero interest in an ocean cruise after being in Uncle Sam’s Canoe Club…this one is essentially a driving tour of those countries only somebody else is driving and it’s a boat instead of a car. At about 900 miles or so over the 2 weeks it’s a pretty slow pace. There are included excursions at the various ports and additional ones you can pay for…they’ll set up those later. The Viking Longship they will be on is 443 feet long with a draft less than 6 feet so they can navigate the rivers which get shallow in some places…190 total passengers so far less crowded than the big ocean cruise ships.

OK, on to the last couple of days of the leaf peeping trip. The last two places we stayed on the parkway were really the only decent ones…mostly we stayed close to the parkway as we navigated around the closed due to hurricane damage sections. The Moonlight Manor we stayed at is a purpose built B&B with a house for the owners and then a separate wing with 4 or 5 bedrooms, the dining room, and the living room…probably 3,000 square feet just in the separate wing…and we stayed in the honeymoon suite. Neil was disappointed it didn’t have a heart shaped hot tub…but it didn’t. The owner served us enough breakfast for at least 5 or 6 people…fruit/yogurt followed by French toast with bacon…and we actually got dessert for breakfast (some apple crumble that we took to go as we were completely stuffed from the French toast which was bread about an inch thick with two pieces turned into a French toast sandwich with cream cheese and fruit in the middle. The following night we stayed at the Peaks of Otter Lodge just 50 or so miles from the end of the parkway. We sat at the bar per our normal practice and had some very nice wine along with dinner and conversation with our fellow bums. Turns out they were about our age and like us eat most of their meals at the bar rather than at a table…Neil told them that was because you meet a much better class of bum sitting at the bar and they agreed.

This is actually an old Baptist church from well before the parkway was established.

And with the ongoing shutdown of the government and the resulting closure of the rest areas run by the park service…we were frequently reduced to visiting this sort of thing…but for porta-pottys they were actually pretty clean and odor free.

This is the Puckett Cabin where Aunt Orelena Hawks Puckett lived for the latter part of her 102 year lifetime. She was 53 when she began a career of midwifery delivering over 1,000 babies including the last ones in 1939 (the year she died)

This is the view over the lake at Peaks of Otter Lodge. Your room was on the lake side (well, all the rooms are actually so it was nothing special).

Two different versions of the same shot…the first one has the people removed but the guitarist and the guy videoing him Neil left in…he can’t decide whether he like the pure landscape better or the one with the local folks in it out on the point. The guitarist was playing country music of course.

We had several hikes planned for the trip but due to a combination of cool almost cold weather, altitude, the up and down nature of the hikes, and time constraints we punted most of them. That meant Neil was disappointed as they were all to waterfalls but we did get this one which was just a few feet from the parking lot. It is only about 2 feet tall and there was no place to setup the tripod for this 1/15 or 1/20 of a second shot. To counter that…he braced himself and fired off about 30 or so frames hand held and with the stabilization in his Nikon Z8 body actually got 2 or 3 that were in focus to process. You have to have the slow shutter speed to get the water motion blur with the exact speed depending on the waterfall and how much blur one wants in the water. He doesn’t think much of fast ‘freeze the water droplets’ for the most part and doesn’t want the motion to completely destroy all detail in the falling water…so he repeated the process (as he would if he was using a tripod) at speeds from 1/10 second up to about 1/30 or 1/50 for tall falls…in this case he had about 100 or so total shots of which maybe 10 were in focus and not blurred to his moving the camera a smidge then he picked this one for the best blurred but still with detail before processing it.

There was a taller section uphill about 50 or 60 yards and he climbed up the rocks to get there but it was also a lot wider and due to the low water flow this time of year wasn’t really a waterfall but rather just dribbling down the pretty flat rock face rather than going over the top and falling midair. He took some shots up there as well but none of them were worthy of processing so he didn’t.

Overall…it was a really great trip even with the lack of waterfalls and the less than normal amount of fall color on the trees. Wildlife wise it was pretty much a bust…1 hawk, 2 squirrels, a couple of rabbits was all we saw outside of the ever present turkey vultures.

As we left the Peaks of Otter Lodge the last morning on the parkway we evaluated our timeline as we had a dinner date that evening. After some thought and rejiggering various plans we ended up leaving the parkway about 40 miles before it ends at I-64 west of Charlottesville VA. That saved us about 120 miles and 2+ hours getting to Belmont NC for the night where we had dinner plans with our friends Bill and Linda from the RVing days. We had originally planned on doing the parkway to the end then heading 50 or so miles east to Midlothian to have dinner with the human kids and had scheduled this with them. Unfortunately they got a better offer for dinner for a 90th birthday party for our DILs step grandmother so they headed off to Ohio for the weekend. 

So…at that point we decided that after the parkway ended we would take I-81 south instead of I-95 and that would get us home a day earlier than originally planned. Then Neil noticed that we would be passing through Belmont anyway and it would be about where we would be spending the night anyway so he checked with Bill on dinner. His original plan was to just meet at a restaurant and eat but instead Linda cooked some great ribeye steaks along with potatoes and salad. Dessert was something the recipe called Creamy Cheesy Caramel Flan. It was really excellent but different from what one usually thinks flan is…a bit less custardy and with a lighter cheesecake flavor. Doesn’t matter though…it tasted really good and he got the recipe from her to make here at home so you know it was good if he does that. Neil immediately knew it would be steaks for dinner when Bill told him she would cook…because Bill would eat steak every other day at least if she would cook it that often. So…if you see this…thanks again to them for an excellent dinner and conversation, we hope to return the favor when ya’ll next come down this way.

We’ll be back to photos from Botswana next time…he’s gotta process them for me first though.

Cyas.

OK, as I said last time Ima gonna take a short break and the next two posts will be about our leaf peeping trip a couple weeks back. 

As I noted before…we left on Sunday about noon after Mass and choir singing by Connie and stopped overnight in Valdosta GA. The next morning we continued on to the southern end of the Blue Ridge Parkway, stopped at the visitor center, then did the first 50 miles or so of the parkway stopping overnight in Asheville NC. We were all pretty tired after 2 pretty long travel days but fortunately the remainder of the week (except for Friday and Saturday) was at a more relaxed pace averaging less than 100 miles of the parkway per day. Due to the remnants of the hurricane damage to the parkway there are still parts of the parkway that are not open…so Connie had done a bang up job before we left of figuring out where to get off and how to get to the next open section…then she checked nightly to verify that nothing had changed in the interim. The only drawback was that her detailed directions were something you might get in rural West Virginia or Kentucky…they had a lack of the number of miles to the next direction and a lot of things like “turn right at the Shell station” and “if you see the country store you’ve gone to far”. 

The general plan was to proceed up the parkway south to north with no really fixed itinerary beyond where we would spend the night. We had a list of hikes and waterfalls and other things to see that we planned on following as the whim struck us. 

Overall there were several things we noticed.

• Overall it was a less than great leaf season due to a lot of dry weather during the summer. It was still way, way better than leaf season in Florida though. While we didn’t get many sweeping panorama shots of mountainsides full of color we did get many closer in settings that made the trip worth it.
• Our friend Bill’s description of highway overlooks that had never had the brush and weeds cut back as “North Carolina overlooks” from years ago is still true…most of them were overgrown…and the disease has spread to both Virginia and the federal land on the parkway…most overlooks were overgrown.
• There are a lot of churches…and I mean a lot. We would drive through a town that probably had 1,500 people living in it max and there would be 7 or 8 churches…most of them Baptist. I’m guessing their congregations are too small to support a full time paid minister and there are a lot of volunteer hours put in at the church and the minister had to have a real job in addition to being the minister to support the family.
• The road along the parkway is really curvy although it didn’t have nearly as many blind curves with sheer drops on the outside as one would find out west. 
• Most of the really great color spots had no place to pull over for a photo…this didn’t stop Neil from edging over on the shoulder as much as possible and jumping out for one though.
• The seat of the pants idea worked pretty well. We ended up passing on the hikes (except for one short one) since we were at altitudes from 1,500 to over 5,000 feet and with age and being flatlanders there was just no air. The one hike we did was a short one to a waterfall but flow was pretty low so not a real great shot…but hey, better than no waterfall at all.

We had essentially 3 full days of leaf looking with a half day on both ends. I’ll split the week essentially in half over the next couple of posts. Lodging and eating will get a little bit of attention for the better places but both of those were later in the week.

As I said…it was a lot of over the river and through the woods…and although we did not make it to grandmother’s house we did make it to Grandfather Mountain and we saw it’s slightly shorter causing Grandmother Mountain from afar as they say in NC. 

You can see what I’m talking about with the lack of wide vista shots from these first few.

Our stop at Grandfather Mountain turned out to be a bit different than we thought. It’s supposedly a state park but inside the park there’s a large commercial development tourist trap sort of thing…we don’t normally do those but it was on the agenda for the day so we did and it was better than expected. This is Sphinx Rock partway up the mountain.

And right next to it is Split Rock…you’ll never guess where that name came from.

Up at the top you’re over one mile high and there’s a little swinging suspension bridge that goes over a piece of the gorge to the other side for a view. Here are Neil’s feet and legs as Connie took a shot of the bridge sign.

And here’s a shot of her facing her terror of heights and making it over to the other side…Neil made her go since he made her go to the tourist trap place.

As you can see above…the it’s not very far down as you go over the bridge but there is a wonderful view out to the right side from the far end.

The other claim to fame for the establishment…outside of the Mile High Bridge…is Forest Gump Curve. If you remember the movie…he ran down (or maybe up, I can’t remember exactly) this curve…and after putting Milepost 12 from Monument Valley where he turned around and headed home in the blog years ago when we were out west Neil decided to put this one as well so we’ve been to two famous locations from the movie.

And one from the bottom as well…

This was taken an overlook named the Dooley Overlook It’s named after Tom Dulla (pronounced Dooley in the local dialect back then) who was a Civil War veteran who stabbed and killed a woman and was convicted and hanged for it in 1868. Other than being from NC…he has little relation to the parkway but after the song was written about him later on he became a local legend and I guess the feds needed an overlook name.

The next morning we headed to Blowing Rock…which is a place where if you throw something off the cliff the prevailing winds blow it up and back into your face. We can concur that this happens.

While we were there…we noticed a helicopter flying nearby. Turns out it was carrying a tree trimming machine that was operated by a guy in a truck on the ground while the pilot just got it into the right position. He needed to lower it in the 10 or 15 feet of clearance between the power line along the inside of the road and the rock face behind the trees…and with the wind he was having lots of trouble. It was an interesting way to trim them though, and the power lines were of the high tension variety which ment the poles were too tall to easily reach with a bucket truck so I guess that’s the only way to get the job done.

And here’s the view from next to the Blowing Rock…that’s Grandfather mountain where we were before to the left with Grandmother Mountain to the right of it and farther away…probably 10 or 12 miles to the former from here…and as you can see not many sweeping vistas of fall color.

And that’s it for today. I already went a bit past halfway in the images Neil processed for me to finish up the Blowing Rock stop in this post so I’ll get back to ya in a day or three with the rest of the week.

Interesting things found on the net.

Cyas.