Misc Photos

United States Custom House at Dusk

us-custom-house

Wandering around Charleston, South Carolina looking for just the right restaurant to buy a $100 dinner for two in to celebrate our 40th Anniversary.

4 Hours & 41 Minutes

Sunrise Over Hartsfield

We watched the sun come up while waiting to board our 8:20 AM flight and when we arrived at our destination 4 hours and 41 minutes later it was not even 10:00AM. That’s how long you have to sit in an airline seat to get from Atlanta to San Diego. We checked in, unpacked our suitcase and walked across the street to get our second lunch of the day. From there we walked a couple blocks south to visit the U.S.S. Midway.

It has been 40 years since I was last aboard and when I walked into the entrance area that led to the hanger deck I noticed it still smelled the same. We didn’t bother with the self guided tour and just wandered around on the tour route.

The only place that was really familiar was the mess deck, but that was mostly because the places that were open to the public were the surface Navy areas where I didn’t spend a lot of time in. Our berthing area was never always in the same spot each time aboard because our little detachment was only part of the Air Wing some of the time. I would have liked to think I could have found our little Maintenance Shack because it was in the same spot all the time, but I’m not so sure. But it didn’t matter as most of the aviation areas were not open to the public anyway.

We did take the guided tour of the island to to get to see the Bridge, the Chart House and PriFly (the airport tower.) Very interesting. The only time I was ever in the island while on board was to pass through on the way up to Vulture’s Row or the Crow’s Nest to take pictures of flight ops. Last stop was the Gift Shop on the fantail where I bought a hat and some postcards.

59,000 Books in the Palm of My Hand

Lens Flare Sonata

And a cheap camera too.

Way back on Black Friday, Amazon was offering their their new bottom of the line tablet, the Kindle Fire, for a mere $35 instead of the usual $50. I thought, thirty-five is near impulse buy territory, but I was perfectly happy with the Kindle Paperwhite, so I passed.

The following week I was chatting with a co-worker about the near purchase, when she mentioned that she bought two of them. Curious, I asked why, knowing she has and has had several. “To give as Christmas gifts of course” she said. There were a couple of young relations in mind, one she knew was fine, but for the other she was unsure whether the mother would let her give it to her daughter.

I said if it doesn’t work out I’d give her thirty for it. She countered with forty. We agreed on the $35 she spent on it. I forgot all about it until last Friday when she asked me if I still wanted it. Taking this as some sort sign, I said yes. So now I’m the proud owner of a small Android based tablet locked in the orbit of the planet Amazon.

The above picture is a small portion the interior of the Purple Whale through some lens flare cropped from a larger image. I took it with built in camera on the Fire while waiting for Donna to come out from getting her allergy shot. Yesterday the Sonata passed the 59,000 mile mark while on a bagel run.

Saturday Sunset

Sunset

We’ve got a bunch of sunrise pictures from the balcony of condo B-327 in the Hilton Head Beach & Tennis Resort because it faces east, but today when the sun went down the horizon turned pinkish like the start of a sunrise, even though it was setting about 150° away.

Vacation Wrap Up

Tomorrow it is back to reality, so let’s hang on to the vacation just a little bit longer shall we. The Emperor used nearly all of the 15 fill ups he received in the last two weeks averaging 29.1 MPG for the trip. Because he is royalty he only drinks Premium Fuel at an average cost of $2.656 per gallon. The highest gas price paid was $2.959 in Pennsylvania and the the cheapest was $2.449 in Arkansas.

We took over 320 photos with the vast majority of them for the Motoring Challenge, but a few of them were just for the heck of it. Here are most of those:

Cub In

Cub In

The last post’s photo came as we were leaving the Aiken Radio Control Society‘s 3rd Annual Cub-In on Saturday. It’s called a Cub-In because if you are flying a Piper Cub replica you get extra point credits, but you can fly anything you want. There were Piper Cubs there with wing spans ranging from 2′ to 6’ and there were also a lot of other types of aircraft on the “tarmac.” It seems like most of the folks in attendance had one Cub and then some other flying thing.

The wind did seem to die down a bit as the morning progressed, but it would still gust at times causing some of the planes to end up in the weeds or upside down even while doing the Ground Pylon Event. It may have not been the fun event the participants had hoped for, but Donna and I did enjoy watching the planes fly when they could. By lunchtime though, we had had enough sunshine, and headed back home.