It takes a different kind of railroad to push a train up a thirty-seven percent grade. Specifically, it takes cog railroad. Aside from the normal rails on the track, a cog railroad has a third rail between the tracks with steel bars about four inches long and a few inches apart. The cogwheel attached to the locomotive’s engine fit nicely between the bars. At full steam, you make at best a couple miles an hour ascending the side of a mountain.
The railway in question is undoubtedly one of the more eclectic rail lines in the country. Some twenty years ago, we took the Cass Scenic Railroad from Cass, West Virginia to the top of Bald Knob. We thought its eleven percent grade was impressive. However, it has nothing on the Mount Washington Cog Railway. You board your railcar at a depot about six miles from Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.
So in a way it is amazing that in a bit more than an hour its locomotive has pushed us and sixty or so fellow passengers from the base station some four thousand feet above sea level to the summit of Mount Washington, which is at 6,288 feet. Mount Washington happens to be the highest mountain in New England. The tree line rapidly disappears as cog by cog you ascend the mountain. With each cog, you can feel a ka-chink, which makes for a noisy journey. Our coal powered train put an impressive amount of environmentally incorrect dark smoke into the atmosphere. Progress though is coming to this railway, which started in 1869 and has locomotives going back to its beginning still in service. One of the locomotives runs on biodiesel fuel.
We were lucky with the weather. It was a partly cloudy day, however there were clouds just below the summit, which somewhat obscured our views. The Appalachian Trail cuts across Mount Washington’s summit. We saw some backpackers, but most of them appeared to be tourists only willing to hike a few miles across this rocky and largely vegetative-free part of the trail. If you do not want to pay more than sixty dollars a ticket to ascend Mount Washington on the railway, you can also drive your car up to the summit. The mountain is the home of an observatory as well as a weather station, which once registered a surreal wind gust of 231 miles an hour. In addition to the observatory and weather station, there are places to buy a meal and the compulsory gift shop. I was glad we paid for the train ride, which took close to three hours round trip. You cannot get an experience like this from a car.
Mount Washington thus was literally the high point of our trip, sandwiched about midway in our vacation. I almost feel compelled to say that our vacation was all downhill from here but that was not the case. The mountain was less than forty miles to the Connecticut River, which separates New Hampshire from Vermont.
Vermont was lush, verdant and as intensely green in August as Ireland is in the spring. Vermont feels surreal, being too bucolic to feel real, yet there we were, surrounded by gently rolling hills, pastoral meadows, cows, some horses and not many people. The Queens Anne Lace is plentiful along the sides of its roads in August. Vermont is not big enough to have any place that feels like a metropolis, with Burlington (where we spent on night) coming the closest. We drove through Montpelier, its state capitol, which feels more like a village than a city. The shining golden dome of its state capitol sits within blocks of some of the most decrepit housing in the state. In many ways, Vermont reminds me of Utah. It is mostly rural and overwhelmingly white. No doubt, there are people of color here somewhere, but you have to look hard. As with Utah, its citizens proved to be welcoming and hospitable.
Vermont is more recently known as the state that made Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream famous. Since it was on our way, we stopped in Waterbury and spent $3 a ticket for a tour of its factory. The factory is a surprisingly big draw in Vermont, pulling in hundreds of tourists, many of them children. We could not have picked a better summer day to visit. Cheerful summer help directed us to parking spots on the lawn. Ben & Jerry sold the business years ago, but it still feels very much like they own it. Believing that a business should give back to the community, seven percent of its pretax profits still go to charity. There were long lines to get to their ice cream cone counter where you could order any of their exotic flavors including oddities like Chunky Monkey. The tour itself included a few short videos and an observation booth that looks down onto their production floor. Other than the free samples given out at the end of the tour, the tour itself was not very memorable but nonetheless fun in a quirky sort of way. The casual and fun attitude of its employees was quite evident and welcome.
Our stay in Vermont included a fabulous suite at a Mainstay Inn overlooking Lake Champlain. We could see sailboats anchored in a nearby bay and the blue green Adirondack Mountains ascending in the west. It would be hard to pick any location with a more impressive view. We also turned out to be only a couple blocks from Pauline’s Café where you can dine on exceptional food at the cost of $15 to $25 an entrée.
Friday morning we left Burlington and drove south along U.S. 7, stopping for a while in Bennington, Vermont. We stopped to see the impressive Bennington Battle Monument, a 306-foot high stone monument to the militias that fought the British in 1777. It looks something like a slightly scaled down Washington Monument, only much more accessible. Tickets to the observation tower are only two dollars each and are available at the gift shop. Inside the base of the monument, there is a mini museum that you can tour at no charge.
Our Friday evening plans included a concert at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts deep in the Berkshires. Tanglewood is the official summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Unfortunately, to save some money during the overpriced summer season, I picked a hotel about thirty miles away in East Greenbush, New York. This made commuting to Tanglewood, not to mention finding the place, challenging. It was worth the hassle. Wolf Trap Farm Park near Washington D.C. is clearly modeled on Tanglewood. Our concert was in “The Shed”, actually a very large open-air pavilion where lawn seats were available for less than $10. There we heard two pieces of 19th century French classical music.
The first was Saint-Saens Violin Concerto No. 3 in B minor featuring the soloist Janine Jansen. She turned out to be worth the price of admission and then some, giving a spirited and full body interpretation of this work. It was followed by a symphony I have listened to many times but never heard performed live, Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Our conductor Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos had his work cut out for him because this is exceptionally challenging music to conduct with its wide breadth and frequent discordant portions of the score. The Boston Symphony Orchestra proved they were worthy of their reputation as a first class orchestra. The weather was cool but comfortable. This was our daughter’s first live classical music concert.
Our final vacation event today required us to head back to the Berkshires to a town called Stockbridge, just a few miles from Tanglewood. The town hosts an annual theater festival, similar in some ways to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival held annually in Stratford, Ontario. We attended two plays there in 2005. Like Lenox, which hosts Tanglewood, Stockbridge is a too perfect example of a New England town. To live there it helps to be independently wealthy. We saw Samuel Beckett’s classic 1953 play Waiting for Godot, still as befuddling and existential as it was in 1953, at the Unicorn Theater, a small venue that probably seats no more than one hundred fifty. The director tried to liven it up with a bit of humor for American audiences, which helped to make endurable what is really a very bleak play. This play was a stretch for all of us and worth seeing once for the experience. Once is probably enough for a lifetime.
Tonight we are holed up at a Microtel Inn in Middleburg, New York. The hotel is hosting a large group of Hassidic Jews, which is making for an interesting cultural experience. Hassidic Jews have children who behave very much like everyone else, judging from their screaming as they run up and down the hallway. We return to our home and our cat tomorrow afternoon.
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August 16th, 2008 at 09:34pm
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Tags: Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont
What a surprise. Salem, Massachusetts is a happening place! This was particularly surprising given that the cities we passed through on our way to Salem, which included Revere and Lynn, and which sit on the north side of Boston, are definitely not happening places. They look tired, distressed, and sad. Enter the City of Salem and you discover a city that knows how to market itself. Its downtown area models an old fashioned downtown from fifty years ago, except it is far more congested, thanks to all the tourists flocking in. It can be challenging getting either in or out of Salem.
There are plenty of things for tourists to do in Salem, if you can find a parking space. It is nearly as challenging as finding a parking space in Georgetown. Fortunately, unlike Georgetown, there are several city-provided parking garages. We felt fortunate to snag street parking a few blocks away from The Salem Witch Museum, our destination. The museum turned out to be cheesy and unmemorable, but for $7 a ticket (with our AAA card), it did not matter too much. You get to sit with a hundred or so people in one dark room surrounded by scenes from the Salem Witch Trial of 1692. You hear somber recorded narration while bright lights beam on the scene of interest. Hey, this ain’t Disney World. I rather expected some lame animatronics but you do not get even that. Afterwards there are some unmemorable exhibits in the back and of course the compulsory exit through the gift shop. One of the exhibits connected past incidents with associated catalysts that caused witch-hunts throughout history. One example provided was the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s unleashed by Senator Joseph McCarthy. The exhibit needed updating: September 11, 2001 + George W. Bush = Guantanamo.
If you do not want to take in this witch museum, there are other witch theme related establishments in Salem including a witch dungeon. (None of the alleged witches in Salem had dungeons of course, nor am I aware of any witches that had dungeons outside of fiction, but never mind.) There are also period actors provided by the City of Salem on the Salem Commons to tell you when Bridgette Bishop, the first of nineteen people to die due to superstition and paranoia, is going to be brought into the public square for her trial. I suggest going with this rather than the witch museum as it is likely more entertaining and costs less. If witches are not your thing, you can learn more about Nathaniel Hawthorne, see the House of the Seven Gables or take a tour of Salem Bay. I enjoyed all the dense nineteenth century row houses, mostly well preserved and home to a new generation of eco-friendly urban dwellers.
We thought it might be fun to drive to Portland on U.S. 1 along the Maine coast. What a mistake! This puts you right into snooty resort cities like Ogunquit and Kennebunkport with their associated traffic. Due to the dearth of traffic lights, we were stuck in traffic for close to an hour. We eventually decided that paying for the Maine Turnpike was a much better use of our time. We had only a few glimpses of Portland as we drove through it. Soon we were back on U.S. 1, as it was the only pragmatic way to get to our destination: Boothbay Harbor.
Almost precisely two years ago, I was in Maine on business. A number of us elected to drive down to Boothbay Harbor for dinner, which was no minor matter as our meeting was in Augusta. I was charmed by Boothbay Harbor so it seemed a convenient place to revisit with the family. Rain earlier in the day made the harbor area unnaturally cool, but we enjoyed our fine dinners at the Tugboat Inn anyhow. Afterwards we walked through the many tourist businesses hugging the harbors. There are in fact many picture postcard marinas along Maine’s glorious Atlantic Coast. Boothbay Harbor though is one of the most picturesque. Our hotel was not in the harbor itself. Rather we stayed overnight at The Flagship Inn, which is a few miles inland. Generally, I am not that fond of roadside motels, but this one was surprisingly nice and clean. Unlike the Doubletree hotel in Boston where you have to pay $10 a day for wireless access, the modest Flagship Inn provided reliable and free high quality wireless access for all its patrons.
This morning we drove some more along the Maine coast. U.S. 1 north of Boothbay Harbor offers some spectacular scenery. In particular, the harbor cities of Bath, Rockland and Rockport offer magnificent views of the Gulf of Maine and the Maine coast hugged by myriad sailboats.
When you are from out of town, it is no trivial matter finding a restaurant in Augusta, Maine even if you have a GPS. Thanks to my last trip to Maine, I was somewhat familiar with the layout of Augusta, so we arrived at our destination only fifteen minutes late. We dined with one of my wife’s online friends, her husband and her two young children at a barbeque place in downtown Augusta. The young couple reminded me of my wife and me two decades earlier. Their three-year-old son though was a handful and had to be distracted throughout our time together. I am glad that those years are behind us.
Our home for this night is a Best Western in Franconia, New Hampshire. Getting from Augusta to Franconia was no trivial matter, as there are no direct routes. There was plenty of road construction (including several miles where the pavement was removed and we had to navigate through a rocky construction area) on our route but the scenery along U.S. 2 was often spectacular. Every mile closer to New Hampshire revealed taller mountains. The citizens of Maine must have had a hard time coming up with names for their towns for we passed a cluster of towns named after countries like Mexico and Peru. Mexico, Maine though has little to recommend it and comes with an unwelcome stench from what appears to be a local paper mill. The picturesque Androsco River though flows through Mexico and the adjacent towns that border U.S. 2. This road is definitely one of the less traveled roads in the continental United States, but one of its more bucolic.
Here in Franconia we find an area of New Hampshire overrun with gnats and mosquitoes. We will definitely need the bug spray tomorrow, and we will need to brush them off our clothes and out of our hair before we resume of tour of New England. They lie by the dozens on our windshield. Tomorrow’s final destination: Burlington, Vermont, the last state in New England that I have yet to visit.
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August 13th, 2008 at 09:56pm
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Tags: Boothbay Harbor ME, Maine, Massachusetts, Salem MA
To have a good vacation you do not necessarily have to fly thousands of miles. That is our premise this year. There are not many areas left on the East Coast that we have wanted to visit. Since my brief trip to Maine a few years ago, New England became an area I wanted to see further. It is also reasonably close as it is only a long day’s drive away. It is mostly an undiscovered region for me. In addition, it has the virtue of being in my time zone. Jet lag gets old after a while.
Before heading to New England, we first elected to spend Saturday night in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. We spent much of the afternoon and evening in Mount Gretna, a near by and decidedly liberal (and well moneyed) township in the woods where respect for the natural environment is a high priority. Tourism accounts for a fair amount of its business. The Mount Gretna Playhouse hosts a number of shows during the summer. There were two last Saturday alone. We attended a performance of The Capitol Steps, which my wife and I saw for the first time in January. The Mount Gretna Playhouse is a covered amphitheater that is far larger than I expected for being in such an out of the way community. This time our 18-year-old daughter Rosie came along. A few of their numbers were familiar, but most were new or reworked. They seemed edgier than they were back in January and even funnier.
As for Lebanon, it is a sad declining city on the outskirts of Pennsylvania’s Dutch country. Like many cities in the Northeast and in Appalachia in general, it has seen much better days and it appears those days will never come back. Our stay at the Quality Inn in Lebanon was anything but. The hotel was musty. The free wireless was spotty. The free breakfast was non-existent. Our windowpane was cracked and there was dirt and mold around its seam. There was only one elevator serving its five floors and it was slow and antiquated. My daughter complained endlessly about her uncomfortable rollaway bed while my wife refused to take a shower in the hotel because she did not feel it was clean enough. It is at best a two star hotel. I hope that other Quality Inns have higher standards. Unbelievably, this was one of the less expensive hotels in the area, yet we still paid more than $120 a night for a room with a king size bed. We were glad to check out of the room.
Sunday we drove from Lebanon, Pennsylvania to Boston, touching five states in one day including two I had never been in before: Connecticut and Rhode Island. We elected to avoid New York City and navigated around it instead, taking I-81 to Scranton, then I-84 across the southern part of New York State into Connecticut. I saw some lovely and mountainous country I had not seen in more than forty years along the Hudson River. Connecticut charmed both my wife and I. We were especially intrigued with the cities of Waterbury and Meriden. We both ached to explore more of Connecticut, but we had to get to our hotel in Boston.
We stopped for dinner at an Applebees in Cranston, Rhode Island. For being the nation’s smallest state, Rhode Island seems to be doing quite well and Cranston was doing better than most, with expensive multistoried housing going up. Rhode Island surprised me because it was prettier, hillier and more prosperous than I expected. Cranston is also located next to Warwick. My wife and daughter are fond of the show Ghost Hunters on the SciFi channel. Two plumbers who are the hosts of the show now apparently make most of their money selling their alleged expertise in the area of the paranormal detection. Anyhow, we found their storefront for TAPS, The Atlantic Paranormal Society, which was an otherwise indistinguishable storefront along Warwick’s main drag. I snapped a few picture of my wife and daughter in front of the storefront. Apparently, the ghost hunters were busy elsewhere that Sunday afternoon, but we could see through the door that they left a heap of fast food wrappers in their wastebasket.
The sun was setting and thunderstorms ahead provided an illuminating show as we headed north on I-95 toward Boston. Our GPS had been acting cranky and would lose its satellite connections after about an hour or so. Consequently, we used it only sporadically when it seemed fresh. It took us to our hotel well enough, but with the crazy roundabouts that populate Boston it took several attempts before we successfully got on the right road to the Doubletree Inn Bayside where we are spending two nights.
Today we spent the day trying to get a brief taste of Beantown. I had been through Boston at age five or so but had no recollection of it, so I was seeing it for what felt like the first time. Our hotel near the convention center was far nicer and cleaner than the Lebanon Quality Inn, but a bit pricier. I picked this hotel because it was just a couple blocks walk to the T, Boston’s name for its subway system. The T is an aging transit system and it shows, but at least it is reliable. There are just six stations between our hotel and downtown Boston.
Unfortunately, we did not have much time for sightseeing. Today was inordinately cool for August as well as overcast and periodically rainy, with high at best making it into the low 70s. We spent most of the day inside the Museum of Science, which is on an island on the Charles River. This was just as well considering the weather outside. An IMAX show, a planetarium show, lunch in the cafeteria and a couple hours of wandering the exhibit halls later, we had seen enough.
From there it was a brief subway journey to the Boston Commons, where we dodged more rain. We did not have time to do much more than look around, but our time there did cement our decision to come back to Boston sometime and see the city properly. We then took the T to Harvard Square across the Charles River in Cambridge, where we met a friend. What little I saw of Cambridge impressed me. Of course, it helps to have two of the nation’s most prestigious schools there, including Harvard University, which is right across from the station. It seemed that Click and Clack were right because we found a number of bums hanging out at Harvard Square. We found no sign of Car-Talk Plaza, nor of the law firm of Dewey, Cheetem and Howe.
Thanks to our friend, we did dine at Bartley’s Gourmet Burgers, which the Wall Street Journal proclaims as one of the best burger joints in the country. I certainly enjoyed my “This Old House” burger, which was both juicy and very hot. Their hamburgers have unique names, most with political affiliations. (The John Kerry burger, for instance, says he voted this the best burger before he voted against it.)
We should end up at Boothbay Harbor in Maine tomorrow night, followed by a day in New Hampshire, a day in Vermont, and two days in the Hamptons.
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August 11th, 2008 at 09:10pm
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Mark |
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Tags: Boston, Connecticut, Lebanon PA, Mount Gretna PA, Rhode Island
I spent last week, as I typically do two or three times a year, in Denver, doing the nation’s business. I arrived home this afternoon. As has been necessary for ninety percent of my flights in and out of Washington Dulles International Airport since my first flight in 1985, I exited the plane and headed for a mobile lounge to get back to the terminal.
You hardly see mobile lounges anymore. Dulles International Airport is probably the last major airport where most of its passengers need to use a mobile lounge to get to and from their gates. I suspect most passengers consider the mobile lounges archaic and a damned nuisance. It’s enough just getting through the often intimidating security lines at Dulles. After that you go through the additional hassle of getting to your gate via a mobile lounge. Typically, you must wait in the mobile lounge for a few minutes before it takes you to your concourse and gate.
For about a year now, travelers needing to get to the B concourse have had the option of taking a walkway to the terminal. An Aerotrain system is planned for 2009. When it is complete, these mobile lounges will be unnecessary. I imagine they will keep a few around in case they need to embark or disembark passengers directly to a jet, but most of them will become as obsolete as, well, trolleys. They might as well sell them for scrap metal. (I am hoping the airport authority will donate one to the National Air and Space Museum Annex, also at Dulles Airport, so I can show my grandchildren what they were like.)
I have always considered these mobile lounges to be interesting. They were never pretty but in truth, they rarely added more than a few minutes to your commute to and from the terminal. The planned AeroTrain system at Dulles will be entirely underground. This pattern is true of most of these airport trains. While fast and efficient, they lack something. Specifically what these underground trains lack is a view.
Except for when an airplane is taxiing, you do not really have a chance to experience an airport except from inside its terminal and concourses. What is neat about a mobile lounge is that it takes you out onto the tarmac and rapidly moves you between concourses. You zip by a dozen jets a minute, from lowly commuter planes to massive and majestic Boeing 747s, which are still a major presence at Dulles International Airport. Fuel trucks and baggage cars can also be seen cruising on the tarmac. In short, you get a mobile view of the airport impossible to get any other way unless you are employed at the airport. Each mobile lounge, which can carry up to 102 passengers and is 54 feet long and 16 feet wide, comes with large windows on both sides of the lounge, offering a fast moving perspective of the airport.
Sadly, most passengers on the mobile lounge are busy talking into their cell phones or fidgeting because they are wondering if they will make it to their gate in time. Many of these passengers are inured to the mobile lounge experience. They should not be. Soon the mobile lounge experience, common to passengers at Dulles International since its opening in 1962, will be just a fading memory.
It used to be that you could visit airports for leisure. You could climb up into the terminal tower or walk out on an observation deck and take in the grandeur of the airport. All the while, you could marvel in the delicate ballet of planes taking off, landing and taxiing. If such a place exists at Dulles, I am not aware of it. Moreover, visiting the airport is expensive. Hourly parking is so cost prohibitive that only the most fanatical bother to meet their parties at the airport. Even if they wanted to meet their parties at the gate, they are not allowed beyond the security checkpoint. You typically end up meeting your party at curbside.
Mobile lounges are the next best thing for the airport tourist. To my mind, there are few better showcases of industry and organization than airports. A generation or two ago, if you wanted to see American industry, you took factory tours. Today, you visit airports. Granted, with overbooking and increased numbers of flights, sometimes an airport seems more inefficient than efficient. Yet the modern airport experience overall is remarkably efficient and well engineered. Each is its own little city. Without the mobile lounge, my perspective of the grandeur of the airport markedly diminishes.
I may be a small minority, but I will shed a tear or two when the mobile lounges are retired. They are probably inefficient and obsolete, which is why the $1.4 billion dollar AeroTrain system is under construction. Perhaps, in an effort to pay some bills, Dulles International could turn a few of its mobile lounges into tourist attractions. Then once an hour or so, tourists could take a nostalgic mobile lounge tour of our remarkable and growing international airport.
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April 6th, 2008 at 08:40pm
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Mark |
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Tags: Airports
I lived in Florida for five and a half years. Part of it was spent finishing high school in Daytona Beach; the other half was spent rushing through a four-year degree at what was then called Florida Technological University (now the University of Central Florida) in Orlando. Being a northeastern boy, spending the latter half of my teen and early adult years in Florida was a big change. Overall, Florida did not agree with me. After graduation, I migrated back north to the Washington D.C. area where I have been happily but expensively abiding ever since.
Florida was too weird for my tastes: too hot, too humid, too old, too flat and too much weird nature including giant armor-plated rats (armadillos), pervasive monster-sized cockroaches and conjugating bugs. During mating season, “love bugs” would smear your windshields and gunk up your radiator grills. It was also too conservative: Baptist churches overwhelmed the religious landscape. Anita Bryant got tired of selling orange juice while I was there and found it convenient to attack gays and liberals instead. While Orlando seemed a much more happening place than Daytona Beach, not enough of the right stuff (like jobs) was happening there to make me hang around.
The Florida panhandle remained unexplored territory until business took me to Tallahassee last week. I wondered, would it be more of the Florida I remembered or much different culturally and climatologically?
Four nights in Tallahassee in October are not long enough to say for sure. One thing surprised me: Tallahassee has hills. Granted, they would hardly qualify as hills in most other states but they are enough to be noticeable. Perhaps that is why Florida put its capitol building on a Tallahassee hill. From there you can look down on the state, such as it is.
Yet what of the rest of Tallahassee? The trip from the very laid back Tallahassee airport to my hotel was not encouraging. It tells you something when you routinely pass by business establishments with iron bars in front of their windows and doors. Happily, the neighborhoods improved as we moved toward the center of the city. Our hotel just east of the capitol on Apalachee Parkway seemed situated in a more prosperous and growing area of the city. It came complete with an Applebees and a mall.
The Washington area is hardly known for its low humidity. Nonetheless, the humidity in Tallahassee, which hit us from the moment we disembarked our plane, was pervasive. During our five days and four nights, it never abated. The Courtyard Inn where we stayed was reasonably upscale. Even so, the effects of living in a humid climate were impossible to mask. The cold air coming from my air conditioner unit was cold enough, but it also smelled of mildew.
I have returned to Central Florida a number of times since I left in 1978. In many ways, particularly around the Orlando area, it has grown cosmopolitan. The same does not feel true of Tallahassee. It may host two large universities. It may have nicer areas on its northeastern side. Many roads may even come with bike trails, a nice touch I also saw in my last business trip to Madison, Wisconsin. At its heart, Tallahassee feels good ol’ boy redneck, with a dash of Cajun thrown in. There are Starbucks in Tallahassee, but proportionately far fewer than in most cities. A search on Google Maps shows only eight Starbucks in the entire city. This was a source of consternation to our group, for whom quality coffee was critical. The Carmel flavored water represented as coffee at the Courtyard Inn didn’t quite do the trick.
There was a dearth of other expected institutions in certain parts of the city. I take these for granted elsewhere. Where I live you cannot walk two blocks without tripping over an ATM or a bank branch. In certain parts of this city, ATMs and banks were simply unavailable. You could drive for miles on the major roads and find neither. Maybe in these neighborhoods people like from paycheck to paycheck. Maybe they use neighborhood cash checking businesses instead. However, I found the lack of banks in many areas of the city disturbing.
Also disturbing were the number of obese citizens in Tallahassee. Maybe obesity is part of the good ol’ boy culture. Thank goodness for the students, who generally have fewer weight problems. They provide some balance to a city that is disproportionately not just overweight, but obese. Perhaps the obesity is one consequence of farm subsidies, which have made grains and processed foods so plentiful and cheap, while pushing up the cost of quality vegetables and fruits. A doctor specializing in diabetes should consider moving to Tallahassee. He would have no lack of clients, particularly among the African American community. I imagine Glucophage manufacturers would want to set up special distribution outlets in Tallahassee to handle the demand.
Wherever I go on my employer’s dime, I try to take in some of regional cuisine. As you would expect being near the Gulf coast, there is plenty of seafood, as well as Cajun cooking in Tally. I have not yet been to New Orleans, but I suspect the Cajun cooking we sampled is not quite as good as what you can find there. Naturally, being in the South, finding grits and black-eyed peas on the menu was a given. Barbeque joints are also popular. The hardest kind of food to find in Tallahassee is the quality healthy kind. There are no Whole Foods in Tallahassee. I am not sure a Whole Foods store would be commercially viable there. The obesity epidemic in the city is no doubt fed by the many, many greasy fast food joints available in the city.
One upside to living in Tallahassee is that it is a cheap place to live. 1960’s era housing, particularly the run down three-bedroom ranch type house with a carport can be had for a song. While you may not get the variety of foods found elsewhere, at least food is cheap. A retiree looking to pinch some pennies could pinch many pennies living in Tallahassee.
Overall, my northeastern biases are probably showing. If you prefer relatively slow traditional Southern living with some of the advantages of living in a city, Tallahassee should meet your needs rather well. While in Madison, Wisconsin at the end of September, I was impressed enough by the city to mention it to my wife as a possible retirement community. I think we can rule out Tallahassee as a place to spend our golden years. Nonetheless, I was glad to becoming acquainted with Tallahassee, although my acquaintance is likely to remain fleeting.
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October 21st, 2007 at 11:42am
Posted by
Mark |
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Tags: Florida, Travel
A couple weeks back I read somewhere, probably on Craiglist, about a web site called youporn.com. Hmm, YouTube, YouPorn. I think I had a good idea what sort of content would be found on this site. Being of prurient mind, well over 18 as well as a blogger who is always looking for something novel to write about, I checked out the site.
As I expected, it was a site modeled somewhat after YouTube.com. Here you can upload your personal pornographic videos to share with others not offended by sexually explicit content. Moreover, just like on YouTube, you can rate the various videos. This may give you an idea of what’s hot and what’s not. Naturally, before you can get into this digital red light zone you first have to assert that you are at least 18 years old. This takes only a single mouse click.
The folks at YouTube go out of their way to ensure there is no sexually explicit content on its web site. However, on YouPorn, you expect the graphic and the lurid. Instead of YouTube’s white backgrounds, you get a dark black background. You feel like donning a raincoat when you enter the site. On its main screen, you can see what was recently uploaded, with the highest rated videos of the day appearing first. By placing your mouse over one of the preview images, you can see a number of snapshots from the video. You have to click on the image to bring up a page with the video on it. Once there you then click on the larger embedded image to start the movie. As best I can tell, there are no gay movies to be found on youporn.com. However, lesbian flicks, at least those where buffed up women pretend to be turned on by other women, are plentiful.
The video quality is often not that great. Like YouTube, it appears that uploaded videos are in a Flash video format. If you go to YouTube regularly, you know what that means: the videos load relatively quickly, but lack a little something in resolution. Some of the videos are so fuzzy and grainy that you will need to substitute imagination for explicitness. However, at least they load quickly and stream. (Stream means you do not have to wait for the whole thing to download before you can start watching it.)
Nor as best I can tell, are most of these videos actually amateur videos. Most of them appear to be blatant rip-offs of vignettes from “professional” or semiprofessional pornographic web sites. The videos appear primarily oriented toward horny men, although I imagine there are many women who also like their video sex raw. In short, expect more of what you would see elsewhere on the web or on Usenet in the alt.binaries.erotica newsgroups, just with less resolution.
There is another and perhaps crucial difference between YouPorn and most other adult oriented web sites. On YouPorn, you do not have to buy a pass in order to view its content. You do not even get annoying pop up ads. You do get advertising, of course, but the ads appear to the right of the embedded videos. The ads are what you would expect: generally adult sex personals and girls with web cams, all of whom presumably will want to start their meter running when you pay them a visit.
In short, YouPorn is free porn for the masses. The video quality may lack something. Given the hordes of horny Internet users out there, its servers may sometimes slow down. But it appears that YouPorn will always be there for you. It is your new trusty if somewhat dirty digital friend, always ready to transport you into a much hotter and more perverse world than you likely encounter in real life. But then, when has pornography ever modeled real life?
I am currently in a hotel in Tallahassee, Florida. It, like most hotels these days, comes complete with high-speed Internet service. I take this for granted now but until I learned about YouPorn, I had no idea exactly what this meant for the frequent traveler. It is now possible to have safe sex on the road, as long as you lug your laptop and do not mind having sex with yourself or your trusty battery powered device. I hope that though you will try to muffle your orgasmic screams rather than rouse the curiosity of your hotel neighbors.
It used to be that Leisure Suit Larrys would congregate in front of the hotel bar hoping to score there, but usually without much success. Those with deeper pockets could call an on-call massage service and hope they provided more than a massage. Given how hard it is for travelers to find sex on the road, and how dangerous it would be if it were found, YouPorn is providing a valuable service to the traveling public. You get much better, or at least much more explicit porn on YouPorn than you can get from the soft-core stuff on your hotel’s private TV channel. Nor will you acquire a social disease. Except for any friction generated by your fingers, hand or vibrator, your sex will be virtual rather than real. Perhaps you will have a new sin to whisper to your priest at your next confession, but otherwise there seems to be no downside.
Therefore, I predict a decline in hotel bars. Massage parlors and escort services may also be taking a financial hit. For better or worse, YouPorn will be changing the dynamics of both online pornography and local sex businesses. It is far from pornographic perfection. Yet it is the 80% pornographic solution that travelers can turn to in need. It is also a possible solution for the many millions of sexually frustrated people out there who would like to have sex but for whatever reason cannot acquire it.
I once wrote a very popular entry wherein I compared ex porn star Sharon Mitchell with sainthood, because of her tireless work within the adult industry to ensure that porn stars do not transmit STDs. YouPorn is also providing a public health service, by giving those who need it a safe outlet for their sexual urges. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
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October 17th, 2007 at 08:17pm
Posted by
Mark |
Sociology, Travel |
5 comments
Tags: Internet Commerce, Internet Commerce, Pornography, Sexuality, Travel
The chocolate raisins at Grove’s Natural Snacks are excellent. That much I have concluded from repeatedly spending time between flights here at Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport. The hard part is not buying too much of it. When I pass through the airport, I limit myself to two scoops. I never have a problem finding this particular concessionaire, since I have been here often. It is in Concourse C, at the top of the escalator, just to the left. Perhaps one of these days I will try the chocolate pretzels, but right now, I stick with what I know.
I know little airport secrets. If you want a decent meal at this airport, your best bet is to take the underground subway to Concourse E, the International Terminal. In Concourse E at certain times of day, you can watch a pianist in a tuxedo playing at a Grand Piano. The piano is parked at a bar in front of the food court. Here, among the tangle of international travelers and soldiers looking bound for Iraq, you can chow down with fast food from Panda Express and hear a pianist play, probably for the thousandth time, As Time Goes By. If a pianist is not present, the piano also works as a player piano.
Time does indeed go by here at Hartsfield International but after many passages through the airport, it starts to feel like something of a second home. This is my third pass through Atlanta Hartsfield so far this year. I will connect through here again later this week on my way home. This trip has me bound for Tallahassee, another city where my agency has an office and which I would likely not otherwise visit. A few weeks ago, I was sent to Madison, Wisconsin. Since there are no direct flights to Madison from Washington Dulles International Airport, my trip required a connection through Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Here was one of those major airports I had not really become acquainted with before. I expected it to look shopworn, but the airport authority has done a nice job maintaining the property. The dancing neon lights above the movable walkways between concourses that are synchronized to New Age music were a nice touch.
Invariably when visiting a hub airport, instead of rushing to my next flight, I have two and a half hours to kill. I think this is because relatively small and prosaic destinations like Madison or Tallahassee have fewer flights. So here, I wait. Having little else to do to kill time, I ride the trams between concourses. I look around. I take in the atmosphere, for a large airport is really a city in itself. I like the little viewing area of the taxiway at Concourse A. I like looking at the fancy international gates in Concourse E. Delta Airlines is the 800-pound gorilla at this airport, of course, and they keep expanding their international destinations. You can fly directly to Africa from Atlanta. If you need a nonstop flight to Moscow or Prague, you can find them at this airport too.
I keep hoping that someday one of these airports I frequent will offer free wireless internet. I might as well wait for a pony. Airports are expensive endeavors. Even with the landing fees, ticket taxes and hundreds of eateries and concessionaries pumping in revenue into the airport authority’s coffers, more revenue is always needed. The good news for us data consumers is that this market is consolidating. Soon you will be able to purchase one wireless airport service and use it everywhere. Some airports though have yet to catch up with the times. Washington Dulles, for example, has no wireless service at all, but is touting its availability next year. I realize there is a lot of renovation going on at my airport, but wireless networks are commodities. It should not be that big a deal to add a wireless internet service. Moreover, since the Washington area is one of the most wired places in the world (and in fact, the Internet’s hub rests a few miles away in Herndon) it seems odd that this airport remains relatively in the digital dark ages.
The hottest seats at Atlanta Hartsfield are often on the floor. You will see travelers with their laptops plugged into any outlet they can find, and they are not always next to chairs. So they end up on the carpet or on the tile floor, transfixed in their computer screens and oblivious to the noise and chaos around them. Hartsfield is becoming more computer friendly however. More eateries are providing countertops with electrical plugs in them.
The repeated airport announcements warn us that the security level is Code Orange, but no one cares. We are inured to recorded announcements. For many of us airports are way stations. Yet there are most of the comforts of home here, all available for a price, of course. In most airports now, you can get a neck massage if you need one to ease your flying anxiety. Near Concourse E here in Atlanta, if so inclined, you can pray in an interfaith worship room. The Starbucks are ubiquitous, of course. Most of us are docile, but you will see the occasionally intent businessperson or flight attendant scurrying with unusual haste down a concourse. Other passengers looked ticked when people block the escalators with their luggage. Get a clue people: walking passengers may be in a hurry to make a connection. They need space to pass on the left. As for the restrooms, Larry Craig would have plenty of opportunities to try out his widened stance. While I have no idea whether some are hotspots for kinky homosexuals, there is plenty of room to do a toe dance with your bathroom neighbor if so inclined.
Some part of our obesity epidemic must be related to so many of us traveling through airports. There are simply too many temptations to resist. Here in Atlanta, chocolate raisins are my weakness. At Washington Dulles, I often succumb and buy a Frosty at the Wendy’s in the Concourse D. At Denver International, I invariably find myself in Concourse C, so it is up a level to Wolfgang Puck’s to find something tastier than fast food.
At some point, like now, I find myself parked at my gate more than an hour before my flight, too cheap to pay for Internet access, but lugging my ultra heavy IBM Thinkpad, which my employer says I need to drag around. I often feel like Sisyphus toting that thing. So here I sit on my ass and pass time blogging. Usually I am determined to blog on some weightier topic. Tonight, I just feel like chronicling one of my many passages through these air portals. Increasingly airports, like them or not, are becoming a part of my life. I might as well write about them.
For the record, this is my seventh airport voyage of 2007. It should also be my last. I will be glad to be done with the travel for the year. At least this trip offers the benefit that I get to stay in my time zone. Tonight I will arrive at the Courtyard Inn in Tallahassee and post these ramblings for your amusement. I will be kept busy all week, so this may suffice for my blogging until the weekend.
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October 15th, 2007 at 09:59pm
Posted by
Mark |
Travel |
one comment
Tags: Airports
Mostly I fly United Airlines. Since I generally cannot escape United Airlines when I fly on business, I joined their Mileage Plus Club. After three years of flying United on six to eight trips a year, I finally earned a free business class upgrade on a recent trip to Denver. The seats were wider in business class and there was much more leg room, but otherwise I was wondering what all the fuss was about. Their breakfast was nice, but it was no better than I used to get back in the 1980s flying on Delta in coach. Times have changed in the airline business and clearly, standards have slipped too.
My family’s recent trip out west was on our own dime. It was an odd trip. We flew to Phoenix, stayed there for a few days, then flew to Las Vegas, spent a few more days, then flew back home. Trying to figure out how to do it at an affordable price was challenging. We ended up getting there and back on Airtran. We made the hop between Phoenix and Las Vegas on Southwest. I had never flown Airtran before, and was curious whether they were just another discount airline or not.
Airtran’s major hub is in Atlanta, so we had to fly through Atlanta going both east and west. Airtran is an airline that takes penny pinching perhaps a bit too far. Their airline fare consisted of the world’s tiniest bag of “gourmet” pretzels and a beverage service. On the reverse side of the bag of pretzels were suggestions that told you that you could enjoy your pretzels more by ruminating on all the money you saved flying Airtran. In saving money though, they skipped on a few more things than the pretzels. For example, they could not be bothered to clean the airplane between flights. The floors and seat pockets were littered with the residue of other flights. I guess to turn a profit they have to turn over their flights quickly, so that left little time for niceties like cleaning the plane. Saving money also meant no in-flight movies. It was more a three and a half hour haul between Atlanta and Phoenix, which was a lot of time to read books and magazines. Perhaps to make up for the lack of movies, Airtran offered XM satellite radio instead, and provided complementary headphones. This made my long flight endurable. It also gave me an appreciation for the world of satellite radio. This was my first flight where I could actually listen to news live during the flight. As a news junkie, I appreciated the satellite radio, particularly the public radio channel.
It had been years since we had flown Southwest, and my last experience had not been a good one. This short flight between Phoenix and Las Vegas though changed my opinion about Southwest. Unlike all our Airtran flights, this plane was clean for this flight. I was impressed by how efficiently Southwest got us in and out of the plane. The lack of reserved seating is actually something of a bonus, because it reduces the time it takes to get on the plane. The flight attendants were not particularly friendly, but neither were they surly. I rather liked their offbeat orange and blue uniforms. Female flight attendants should dress business casual more often; the hose and heels look standard on the major carriers is so 1950s. Your bag of peanuts was small, but at least they were honey roasted. At least on this flight the flight attendants were glad to hand out additional bags of peanuts. Moreover, unlike the other airlines I have flown recently, Southwest seems to have the airline business down to a predictable science. There were no last minute stragglers trying to claim that last empty seat on the plane. We pushed away from the gate a minute early. I was also surprised to find I had sufficient of legroom. This is hard for me to find, since I am a tall man. Moreover, their seats were upholstered with real leather. This was almost classy for an airline with a no-frills reputation.
Southwest was not quite the cattle car that I remembered. To fly Southwest I have to go to an airport an hour away from my house. If they start flying out of Washington Dulles Airport, near where I live, I will look forward to flying them more frequently. As for Airtran, their prices were definitely lower than other fares, but not dramatically lower. We had to endure two-hour waits between flights in Atlanta. While this made it difficult to miss a connecting flight, it also made us see much more of Hartsfield International Airport than I wanted to see. I killed time by getting exercise walking between terminals.
So thumbs up for Southwest, but thumbs sideways for Airtran. Moreover, thumbs down in general to all airlines (including United) that cannot build time in to their schedules to clean their planes between flights. No matter what airline you fly, you should at least have the expectation that you will not find trash by your seat or stuffed into the seat pockets. If it takes raising the fares a bit, I will gladly pay for it, and I bet you would too.
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July 26th, 2007 at 08:56pm
Posted by
Mark |
Travel |
no comments
Tags: Airlines
Most of the rest this country is non-smoking, but Las Vegas has not gotten the message. The cigarette remains king here. Smokers smoke puff away with impunity and do so openly, proudly and defiantly. It is a rare public space that does not reek of tobacco. Since you are gambling away your hard-earned dollars, you might as well gamble away your life too. So go ahead and take heaping lungfuls of second hand smoke. It is not as if you are likely to have a choice.
I am certain there is a correlation between smoking and a predisposition toward gambling. This would explain the virtual absence of any smoke free casinos in Las Vegas and the disproportionate number of smokers in the casinos. Smoke free areas of casinos apparently do exist here in some Las Vegas casinos, but your odds of finding one at random are much less than winning in roulette. Even if you are visiting Vegas and do not gamble (like me) you cannot escape the cigarette. It is everywhere along the strip, indoors and outdoors. Even so, I think there is profit to be made in smoke free gambling. If I were sufficiently wealthy like Donald Trump, I would build my own smoke free casino and hotel. I doubt I would have to round up customers.
This is my second trip to Las Vegas (the first was six years ago). Nothing has changed and everything has changed. Old casinos are being torn down. New casinos are going up. Every conceivable variation of marketing techniques is being tried, retried and refined in Vegas. Its use of energy remains obscenely reckless. It may be 110 degrees outside but to lure you inside they will have the casino doors flung open. It is a shameless city, which is okay. That is its appeal. If you want up tight morality, you go elsewhere. Vegas is all about escape. It is all about reveling in your sinful nature. While prostitution is technically illegal in the city, de-facto prostitution abounds. You are unlikely to see prostitutes on the street, but you can find their calling cards. In place of news racks, you have tart racks. Walk any block and open one of these machines to get little advertising brochures that essentially pimp women. Whoops, sorry. Not just women, but also men, transvestites, transsexuals, and pretty much any variation you can imagine. This includes, if you are age 50 like me, women in their 40s, 50s and 60s. (Hmm, I would think their rates would be deeply discounted.) I saw one today pimping young, buxom, blonde Asian women, with specials starting at $49. Granted I am not much of a world traveler but buxom certainly does not describe Asian women so I suspect they have been to a plastic surgeon. Moreover, if you want them blonde too then doubtless their color comes courtesy of a box of hair dye. And yes, they want you. They are passionate about you, even though they have never met you. They cannot wait to get into your pants, no matter how old, obese and disease ridden you may be. They may all be drop dead gorgeous, but basically they are total sluts.
Of course, they do not work for free. There is nothing free in Vegas, although there is the illusion that you can get a lot free. You can get prime rib dinners for $6.99 available 24 hours a day here in Vegas. Of course, since slot machines overrun Vegas, there is likely one sitting right next to your table. Perhaps the $6.99 prime rib applies only if it is delivered to your slot machine or roulette table. I do not have the inclination to find out.
If you are one of these rare people like me for whom gambling holds no allure, Vegas can be a cheap vacation. Room rates at many hotels are steeply discounted in the hopes that you will make up the rest in the casinos. There is shopping in Vegas too. Of course, off the strip, there are all the usual Best Buys and Targets, but you do not come to Vegas to go off the strip. You come to live on the strip. If you choose to leave the casino then you have to deal with inconveniences like the deadly sun (it was 111 degrees today). In Vegas, time ceases to exist. There is only the now: the ever-present stench of cigarette smoke, the inane tunes from the gazillion slot machines, neon-neon everywhere and the frequent trips to the cashier or the ATM where you are likely to zero out your accounts. Some part of you realizes that everything is rigged. If it were not profitable, there would be no reason to keep building new casinos. These casino resorts though keep going up, like desert cacti.
While my wife and daughter attend a convention, I am left to fend for myself. Yesterday I escaped Vegas by renting a car and checking out some of the places my wife’s indigent father haunted in his last days. I found the hospital in nearby Henderson where he died (as hospitals go, St. Rose Dominican Hospital was quite small) then drove south to check out Searchlight, where he may have spent his last years. I found a town that was half truck stop and one quarter mobile homes in perhaps the most desolate but most beautiful spots imaginable. Three thousand feet up in the mountains, it was noticeably cooler and windier than in Vegas. Searchlight came replete with a community center/library/museum (all in one building) and, naturally, a saloon with slot machines. I can imagine my wife’s father felt right at home in the saloon when he had the money.
Today, with my rental car returned there was little else to do than to check out the strip to see if anything had changed. Our hotel is about a mile off the strip. Slathered in sunscreen I hoofed west on Flamingo Road. Some things had changed in six years. There was now this monorail. It was not actually on the strip itself but a bit to its east; it sort of paralleled the strip. A new casino is emerging just south of the Bellagio, and it looks like the pirate show is still playing in the artificial lagoon in front of the Bellagio. Caesar’s Palace was as opulent as ever. Once an hour on the hour you can still watch the animatronic fall of Atlantis for no money whatsoever. I wandered the mall feeling no inclination to buy anything. This is a mall for fashion chicks with fat charge card limits. Nonetheless my second trip to Caesar’s Place cemented my opinion that it must be the most over the top, opulent and gaudy place in America. The only place I have ever been that was more opulent was Versailles. Caesar himself could not have afforded to live in such opulence. But I doubt Caesar had casinos either. Maybe he should have.
The Bellagio, just to its south, is a close second. The Bellagio has the virtue of being a more tasteful hotel and casino. In fact, parts of the Bellagio are just plain beautiful. Its hotel lobby is a work of art, with Picasso inspired ceramics hanging from the ceiling. Yet everywhere are the omnipresent slot machines and the smell of cigarettes.
Of course, there are shows to see in Vegas. I had not planned to see any shows at all, but since Spamalot is playing here and tickets were not hard to acquire, we bought some for the 8 PM show tomorrow night. There is a “gentlemen’s club” conveniently next door should I feel the need to ogle some female flesh. Fortunately, few things bore me more. Therefore, I have ample time to blog, surf the web and walk the streets of Vegas.
I will be glad to fly home on Monday. Las Vegas must be experienced once in life. Each subsequent return though leaves me less inclined to come back. Booze, loose women (at least the kind I have to pay for) and gambling hold no appeal to me, but that in a nutshell is what Vegas is all about. I will be glad to return to Washington Dulles International Airport, where baggage claim contains exactly zero slot machines, and where I can leave my gate without being accosted by someone trying to sell me a time-share. For all its glitz Las Vegas is really an empty city, bereft of spirit. Perhaps some of these things can be found off the strip and maybe some day I will discover that side of Las Vegas. For now, I just want to go home.
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July 14th, 2007 at 07:50pm
Posted by
Mark |
Travel |
no comments
Tags: Las Vegas, Nevada, Searchlight, Nevada
Savannah, Georgia is where I am currently hanging out.
I have this room at the local Hyatt, an allegedly four star hotel, that looks down on the Savannah River. The view from my room is satisfying. Tugboats periodically push freighters up and down the river. This gives me close encounters with ships that I rarely get. A yacht that looks fancy enough for Donald Trump is parked beneath my window. Also tethered nearby is a riverboat with a big paddlewheel that takes tourists out onto the river. Just up the river is the Talmadge Memorial Bridge, an impressive a cable-style bridge. Completed in 1991, it has given this otherwise sleepy Southern city an impressive and stylish new landmark. It will soon be hard to imagine Savannah without the bridge, in the same way it is hard to imagine New York without the Statue of Liberty.
This is not New York though; this is the South. I know I am back in the Deep South when I hear that distinguished muddy Georgian southern accent and have a hard time finding a restaurant without grits on the menu. Nevertheless, that is okay. The problem with most of the South these days is that it has lost its character. Atlanta is a case in point; it has gone crazy and completely morphed from its roots because it got addicted to growth. Savannah seems content to remain an old-fashioned Southern City. It has become gentrified, but in a good way. It is like New Orleans, but without most of its crime as well as its inebriated and often licentious patrons. Rather than having a French Quarter, it should have an Irish Quarter. Reputedly, it has the second largest St. Patrick’s Day parade outside of New York City. It is not hard to hear Irish brogues walking around this city. Yet there are other accents too. Whereas not too long ago the city was almost exclusively white and black, now it is increasingly multicultural. Russian was just one of the languages I heard this evening strolling along River Street, an aptly named road mostly for pedestrians that is right next to the Savannah River’s south side.
Also largely absent, at least from downtown Savannah, are many of the common markers of globalization. There is a Starbucks but it is several blocks away from my hotel. There are no Wendy’s or McDonalds within walking distance of downtown, at least that I have discovered. There are lots of independently owned restaurants, as well as restored vaguely Victorian-like buildings. It is a sleepy southern city that understands its current success is due to careful marketing and restoration. Minus much of New Orleans’ crime and poverty, it is much more approachable. You can find championship golf, horse drawn wagon rides and tours of Savannah’s many haunted areas. Savannah has a rich history of murder and scandal that presumably is now mostly in its past. The modern Savannah now sees these dark days as a marketing opportunity. You can take tours of its haunted areas conveyed in hearses.
For a haunted city, Savannah nonetheless has its charms and unique features. I like the little parks scattered every few blocks here in the downtown area. They are lined with tall and shady trees, and often come with a fountain. I imagine that in its pre-air conditioned days these parks were lovely oases for tired and hot souls. They still are. Although I am sure children are discouraged from playing in the fountains, I suspect in the height of summer that the temptation become too much to resist.
There is traffic in Savannah, but it is manageable. The streets are clean and well maintained. At least this is true until you move toward the outskirts of the city. Then it becomes a city rife with strip malls, fast food outlets and billboards.
I was charmed by Savannah’s airport, simply because it is small compared to the airport I regularly fly in and out of: Washington Dulles International Airport. There were no underground trams or movable walkways because the terminal is not big enough to need one. There is no need to worry about airport congestion because the airport does not have enough traffic to become congested. Despite the short walk to baggage claim and being in Seat 1A in the little regional jet I flew in on, my baggage had arrived at baggage claim about the time I had walked there.
I am here to press the flesh and to give a presentation tomorrow. An organization called the National Hydrologic Warning Council is convening here. While NOAA and the USGS are the two heavyweight federal agencies affiliated with the NHWC, there are other smaller and regional organizations affiliated with it too. Despite its name, this group does important work. One only needs to witness the mess that was Hurricane Katrina to understand why the NHWC is needed. It is in the business of sharing information on how to predict and warn affected people and organizations of major storm events like floods and hurricanes. My agency, the USGS is in the business of constantly monitoring the nation’s streams, lakes and ground water. The data we collect on the near real time stream flow conditions is in high demand by these people. Its ready availability and accessibility is crucial to their forecasting needs.
What I have learned so far is that it is easier to predict the effects of these events than to figure out ways to get the information to the right people so that lives and property are saved. The predictions for Hurricane Katrina were right on the money. So why did government on all levels do such a bad job of managing its effects on people? This is some of the dialog occurring at this conference. In part, I am here to point a way toward the future, by showing how my agency is working to make its stream flow data more accessible to other monitoring systems using a technology called web services. Savannah has seen its share of devastating hurricanes, so it is an appropriate place to hold a conference like this. It also makes an interesting place to visit, if only for a few days.
My family moved to Daytona Beach when I was fifteen. The Deep South was quite a shock for someone raised in upstate New York. It never agreed with me. Five and a half years were enough. After college graduation, I moved to the Washington D.C. area. I have been reasonably happy there ever since. Still, I found this reacquaintance with the Deep South a pleasant experience. Time moves a bit slower here in Savannah. It is not suffering from the effects of crazy growth as we have in Virginia. Savannah has figured out a way to live in the 21st century while being true to its Southern roots. Perhaps there is some wisdom here in the old South that my youthful prejudices could not see.
I hope life takes me to Savannah again. Next time I hope I will be here strictly for pleasure.
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June 12th, 2007 at 10:09pm
Posted by
Mark |
Travel |
one comment
Tags: Georgia, Savannah
