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.