Travels around my neighbourhood

A lovely fall day...my favourite type of day. Blue/black clouds, bright sun, red and gold. The dogs are too busy sniffing and don't look up to enjoy the view.

Pennsylvania

 

Hand made stained glass and tiles by Doug Hopkins, owner of The Pump House
Bed and Breakfast in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Pennsylvania countryside - contour farming

 

 

 

 

The beautiful Shenandoah Hills

Our last night of travels brought Alice and I to the Bent Mountain Lodge just outside Roanoake, Virginia.
We drove a paved road with lots of switchbacks to get up here but it was worth it. This is the view from the deck of the lodge.

And this is my friend Alice and one of her crazy Dachshunds. She refuses to allow herself to be photographed so it's the best I could do.

Since we didn't have dinner the night before we weren't going to miss it a second time. We asked our host where to enjoy a marguerita and he said Roanoke was 16 miles in one direction and Floyd was 16 miles in the other. The route to Floyd was flatter and marginally straighter so it seemed like a better route to drive coming home in the dark. We had dinner at a mexican restaurant in which the food was not good but the atmosphere was jumpin'. They did not serve hard liquor, only beer...so much for the marguerita; but the fact that it was Friday night Jamboree made up for everything. This was a true old time jamboree. People formed small groups, played together for a while, broke apart and joined other groups. It was like standing in the recording session for the soundtrack of  Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?. The folks graciously allowed us to take their pictures and Alice even recorded a bit on her iPhone.

Nathan and Nick of the Floyd Country Ice Cream Parlour

Jammers

More jammers

El Charro, Mexican Restaurant

One of the locals

Still more jammers

Downtown Mt. Airy, North Carolina.

 

 

 

 

Mt. Airy, North Carolina is the home of Andy Griffiths. For those of you too young to know who he is
google Mayberry R.F.D.

The 100 yard dash

Last night I was honored to be invited to join a group of volunteers monitoring sea turtles nests around the Isle of Palms beaches.(That's in South Carolina).  Loggerhead turtles nest on the beaches from May through August. The volunteers relocate the nest if it is too close to the tide lines, remove one egg for dna analysis which allows them to monitor where and how many nests a female has made, and monitor the nest during the hatching.  They had cordoned off this one with string and hung a sign letting beachwalkers know what was going on and inserted a sound probe down into the nest. The turtles had actually hatched out of their eggs two days before and were climbing their way out of the pit. The sound probe was picking up the noise of the sand shifting and moving as they clawed their way up. We had a full moon last night. The reflection on the water helps guide the turtles to the sea. It was also an outgoing tide which helps carry them out. A volunteer was seated over the nest to take pictures with a camera mounted on a tripod. They use these photos to produce a variety of fundraising materials.I couldn't take pictures even though the flash was turned off.The tiny focusing light was still too bright and disruptive.  We would watch cracks and small holes appear in the sand, using red light flashlights. Every once in a while the sand would move and heave. We started our vigil at 8:30 p.m. and at 12:30 a.m. the first turtle breached the open air. After that, it was as if they boiled up out of the nest and crawled like mad to the water. There were about 90 eggs in the nest and we tried to count the babies as they came out but they were exiting in a mass and too quickly. We spread out the team to make sure none of the late night beach walkers impeded the turtles'  way to water and followed the last critter to the sea's edge. You could see the tracks of all the babies in the wet sand,  reflecting moonlight. It looked like miniature tractor tracks leading out to sea. There was a party of two families with children and they could not believe their good fortune at witnessing this. One young boy of about ten said he got more than he bargained for on this vacation and he would never forget it. In half an hour the whole thing was over. It was a truly magical event for me. Having watched it on tv many times I got to see it live. Unforgettable.

Coming down the Home Stretch

Our accommodating hosts, Norm and Pennie, sent us on our way with a lovely paleo breakfast - egg and ham souffle and coffee. Our next stop is Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I love Wisconsin and I don't know why. I loved it on my drive out west in February and I loved it again in August.
Wisconsin seems friendlier, lovely, green rolling hills, cows and cheese and the mighty Mississippi River.
Our destination is Milwaukee, a city I've never visited but AGAIN, I just fell for this place.
We stayed in the historic Lakefront District at the County Clare Pub and Inn. We arrived in the early afternoon (for the first time on our trip) which gave us time to wander downtown and take lots of photos.

Miller Field

The County Clare Pub and Inn

The Milwaukee Art Museum

In front of the Miller Pavilion

PBR bus!

All that photography in the wind and hot sun made us thirsty so we trotted back to our inn and enjoyed a couple of margueritas on the front patio. Kevin struck up a conversation with the couple beside us who had come for dinner. She's from Ottawa. He is an American who, after serving in Vietnam, moved to Ottawa to care for someone's Charolais cattle. He met her, married and they now live in Milwaukee. He has farming acreage/interests over a few states and understood Kevin's business. They talked corn, prices and hedging for a few minutes. Kevin's face lights up when he meets someone who understands what he does for a living (I admit it still confuses me)
Then a quick change and into the dining room for dinner - a tasty chicken pot pie for me and I believe Kevin had a porkchop. This was accompanied by a bottle of champagne that was included in the package price of our room. A very nice room..large, clean and quiet, two entrees, bottle of champagne and breakfast for two for $149.50. You can't beat that.
We chose to ride the Lake Express Ferry from Milwaukee to Muskegon, Michigan instead of driving through Chicago and south around Lake Michigan. Unlike the B.C. ferries, this one was smaller and a catamaran style. The wind was up and so were the waves and a few people lost their cookies on deck. Kevin was outside for the duration of the 2 1/2 hour trip while I enjoyed working on my needlepoint in the 'business class cabin' and chatting with the other passengers.
Having landed in Muskegon, we drove another 5 hours, arriving home in Kitchener around 11 p.m.
So many lovely sights, so many nice people, a few exquisite meals and a few crappy ones, too. An R.V. and another month would have been the best way to do this trip....but there's always tomorrow.

Rapid City to Sherburn, Minnesota

Rapid City is in the southwest corner of South Dakota. I think it was one of my favourite places, geographically speaking, on our entire drive.The forests were more parklike - the trees were spaced farther apart and you could see deeper into the bush. There were lovely forest meadows and creeks and rivers and few cars. Turns out a lot of kids had already started back to school and so there were fewer vacationing families on the road than we had expected.
 We headed southwest about 45 minutes to Mt. Rushmore. We only had time for a quick drive-by then north and east to our next stop of Sherburn, Minnesota.

The forests of South Dakota became the deserts of South Dakota which, in turn, became the cornfields of Minnesota. Minnesota is all about corn...well the southern part, at least.  They are just on the the edge of the drought, according to our host for the evening, Mr. Norman Kittleson. The Kittlesons (Norm and Pennie) are retired dairy farmers. I believe Norm said he himself was born in 1923. The b&b was built in 1848 and was originally a stagecoach inn called The Four Columns Inn.  Norm's dad bought the property in the early 1900's. Norm and Pennie renovated the place and raised a family in it and now run a b&b with the same name.  We walked along the farm road as twilight was coming on just to stretch our legs a bit. We saw a couple of interesting little birds and I heard, but didn't see, a pheasant. The corn stretched on for miles and miles and miles.