40,000 Ghostly Images of Old Florida

We are on our way to visit Donna’s sister and her family and my snowbird cousin for a couple of days. Because we will drive back on Sunday on mostly Interstate we are taking two days to drive down on mostly back roads. On today’s drive we came into Florida and took aim half way between Lake City and Jacksonville where we found some small town’s and uncrowded back roads.

We originally planned on driving the Miata and doing some more Motoring Challenge photos, but the weather was supposed to be crappy today and then again Sunday for the drive home, so we opted to take the Sonata for the trip. Turns out there were some towns, counties and photo ops that would have been good for the challenge, but they were mostly mid-Georgia, so we filed them away for a weekend in the future.

Somewhere near the small town of Orange Springs the Purple Whale eased by the 40,000 mile mark. Tonight we are in a new HIE in Silver Springs. While this section of town is too full of modern amenities to be considered Old Florida, once inside our dinner spot we were thrown back in time. The Denny’s was located inside a Days Inn and it was filled with characters from Central Casting, including; a really old man alone at a table wearing shorts, sandals with black socks, a Veterans of Foreign Wars ball cap with large-lensed sunglasses who was chewing with his mouth open and eyeballing us because we didn’t belong, a skinny androgynous African-American who spoke on his cell phone loudly in a high-pitched stereotypical gay queen manner, plus the cook teasing a couple of regulars were they going to eat or were they here for the paranormal meeting.

I thought she was just joking, but when we used the restroom before walking back to our hotel, right next to them was a “banquet room” that was shared by Denny’s and the Days Inn and it was all set up for Investigating the Paranormal with Carolynn and Carla.

Yikes!

Up A Tree

We had the dead and broken branches trimmed from around our house today by a crew that ordinarily would be ice fishing in Minnesota at this time a year. We called a couple local places but either they never returned our calls or told us that it would be at least a couple weeks before they could even think about giving us an estimate. These folks were going door to door with flyers. They were here for over 4 hours and they worked on seven trees total with 4 of them working at death defying heights without a net.

While watching the crew of four guys working we chatted up the owner of the company. He told us he has collected a couple hundred cards from the different tree companies working in the area. While helping clear out Hitchcock Woods he got to talking with someone familiar with the workings of the city and he found out that in the ice storm of 2004 the city collected 80,000 cubic yards of debris and so far from this storm, and they are nowhere near done, as evidenced by the piles of trees lining along our road, they have collected over 800,000 cubic yards…

More Moss Motoring Moments

This spot was today’s goal, the only National Park in South Carolina, Congaree Swamp. We didn’t actually enter the park, we’ve been in a couple times previously, back before it was made a NP, so we just took this picture of the sign. On our way there we drove through South Carolina’s recreation of the Scandinavian peninsula:

I’ve created a gallery so you can follow along with our adventures, it is over there on the left – 2014 Moss Motoring Challenge. We also captured a couple of counties, a dead end, an airport and a candidate for one of the next Sneak Peek photos, but I haven’t finished editing and uploading them yet.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1298

The Week That Was

As a run up for Season 2 of Orphan Black the folks at BBC America released 8 sneak peeks and because I’m such a nice guy I collected all of them and made a handy YouTube playlist so you can watch them back to back to back…and when I say peeks they are just that at 15 seconds a piece. To add a little meat to the list I tacked on a trailer for Season 2 at the end.

What does Walt Whitman‘s “Song of Myself” have to do with the Clone Club? I have no idea, but it must mean something as a sharp-eyed Clone Ranger, Valerie Anne of the website AfterEllen, noticed that at the end of each of the sneak peek is a bit of binary code that converts into a line from that poem.

On Sunday John Travolta mangled the name of the singer for Frozen’s Oscar nominated song “Let It Go,” Idina Menzel calling her Adele Dazeem . Now if you’d like, thanks to Slate.com, you can find out how John would has mispronounced your name had you been her. Brian Bogardus would have been Benn Bozowens…

Now if I had known about this around Christmas time last year I would not have wasted my money on that quadcopter that lasted a week. Instead I would have commissioned my very own likeness as a rubber stamp.

I think I have said here before that my ideal Miata would be my first one reincarnated with about 20 to 30 thousand miles on it. Well here is one that is almost exactly fits the bill – Hemmings Find of the Day. It is not Smurf Blue, but I almost bought one in white when the wait for a blue one got past 100 days.

Renunciation Of Citizenship

Official-Red-Sox-Nation-Citizen

For the past 10 years I’ve been listening to the Red Sox baseball games on the internet, because it was a throwback to a simpler time when I was a kid and my mom would always have the game on the radio. It also gave me something to listen to in the background while I wasted time surfing the web. Eight years ago I joined the Red Sox Nation because there was a couple dollar discount on the MLB Gameday Audio I was using to listen to FRS games and I got some cool benefits (that would have been more helpful if I actually lived within driving distance of Boston.) Oh, and there was a membership card I could carry around in my wallet to prove my citizenship.

Last August, MLBTV ran a special of $19.95 for their Premium service for the rest of the season and I took advantage of it. Turns out with that I can have the best of both worlds by watching the game on TV in HighDef and listening to the radio announcing team make the call. It was good. So this year I decided to spend the $130 for the full year of MLBTV Premium. Unlike the deal they had for audio, there is no corresponding package with TV, so this year I won’t be card carrying member of the Red Sox Nation. I’ll still be a citizen in my heart, but I won’t be able to watch batting practice from the Green Monster or get 10% off at the fan shop at Fenway.

136,000 Calories

136,000 Calories

A little bit of Spring weather today sent Donna and I out into the world with the Miata to have a top down adventure. It was time to go take a few more Moss Motoring Challenge photos and some make up geocaching. We needed a Duck Crossing sign and knew right where to find one because we had stumbled on it while on an unsuccessful geocaching trip about a month ago. When we had gone to sign the log of our first find back then, we realized that neither of us had a pen, doh!

We started in Aiken with a photo of a horse track and then we drove to Augusta to get the Duck Crossing sign photo. I took our laminated Motoring Challenge poster and stuck it right below the crossing sign between the sign and the post while we snapped a couple shots. We then took a walk near Lake Olmstead and the Augusta Greenjacket’s stadium to take care of our cache signings. It wasn’t until we were getting back in the car that I realized that I had left the challenge poster hanging on the Duck Crossing sign. Almost forgot it.

Next we headed for a cupcake bakery. I remembered where one was on Washington Road and Donna remembered where another one was further out on the same road. The first one didn’t actually say cupcake in its name, so we continued out further on Washington Road into Evans where the above photo comes from, a place called “Small Cakes, a Cupcakery.” I made myself right at home at the table right outside to un-opened bakery with my poster propped up at the window.

Seeing as we were this far out on Washington Road we decided to keep on going north and then cross over the Strom Thurmond Dam back into South Carolina. Donna thought it might be cool to take a picture in front of the dam to use as one of our next Sneak Peek photos. Turns out there was a small playground right there, something we needed for the Challenge, so we took a photo of that with the dam in the background. When I opened the trunk to get the camera and the laminated Challenge poster I realized that I had the camera, but no poster. This time, unlike at Lake OLmstead, I did leave it behind.

I was all for just forgetting about it as we did have the back-up smaller version still and I could always make another one, but Donna thought that we should go back to Evans and get it. She reasoned that it was nearing lunch and there were plenty of places to chose from for eating back that way and then we could get a cupcake for desert.

The Emperor passed through the 136,000 mile mark as we crossed the dam back into Georgia. The sign was still there at the bakery, right on the table, where the girl who sold us the cupcake had put it when she opened the store. Originally we were going to share a cupcake, but they looked so good and had such a variety that we opted to get one each. They were moist and dense and the frosting was so superb that I’m betting they packed in about 136,000 calories each.

When we got home it was still too nice a day to stay inside, so I went out and washed both cars. The Emperor will be fine as he will be staying in the garage for the week, but the Purple Whale’s cleanliness will not last, tomorrow it is supposed to rain and with the warm weather, the pines surrounding the Valve Store’s(r) parking lot will be emitting yellow pollen dust soon.

Started down, went up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1297

Postcards from Big Bend

It has been a whole year since we were in the middle of the BKR and took a week off to visit west Texas. And it has been nearly as long that this post has been in my blog’s drafts folder awaiting completion. I don’t know why I didn’t ever finish it in the beginning, but I do know why I didn’t for the last 6 months or so, out of sight is out of mind. On the site’s backend admin page there was a spot that listed your drafts front and center when you logged in, but on one of the updates to the WordPress software that item for some reason disappeared. I recently discovered this during another update and now the drafts are listed again. Anyway…

Whenever I go on a big vacation I try and send back a postcard to each of my co-workers along the way to let them know I’m having a good time not at work while they are having a not so good time at work. This time when I mailed out the 6 cards, instead of writing something different on each card as I went, I took a blurb from the Big Bend National Park website and an explanation as to why the cards all came from the same spot this time, divided them into 6 somewhat equal chunks, one for each postcard and sent them off. I was hoping they would get the card, read the partial phrase, scratch their heads, compare notes and then put the cards together like a big jigsaw puzzle and marvel in my creativity. I put a #1 at the bottom of the card that had the beginning of the phrase to get them started.


[spoiler]No one comes to Big Bend by accident and most would say it is a big effort just • to get here. Once here, many decide that it is just big enough for them to want • to stay for a lifetime. Big Bend National Park encompasses over 800,000 • acres. You could stay forever and not see every nook and cranny. It’s a little • piece of paradise that most are unaware of. This is one of the least visited • parks in our National Park system. So even the solitude and the quiet are big here.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]We usually don’t have any • trouble finding postcards from all • the neat sights we see • on vacation, but Texas proved • the exception, so everyone gets • one from the same place.[/spoiler]

So much for curiosity and/or teamwork, each person got their card, looked at the pretty front, read the back, wondered if I might have been tired, drunk or just plain crazy from the heat, and pinned the postcard to their cubical wall. It wasn’t until I got back, gathered everyone’s cards together and showed them what I had done that they went, “Ahhhh.”

This year I may buy a post card, write out an individual sentiment on it, then cut it into 16 pieces, throw that into an envelope and mail it to them. Oooh, I just had an even better idea, but I don’t want to spoil it here…