Finally home and a real computer. It’s nice to be home in my own
bed and with my own files.
I haven’t moved my digital presence totally onto the network
so my own files and desktop and organization are not portable.
It feels comfortable to be home.

I’ve sorted through the pictures and the main groups are up.
This is a long, catch-up entry with descriptions and pointers.

First is the
Great Smoky Mountains National Park
(pictures)
which were, well, smoky.
The haze is a natural phenomena and the park is full of hills, trees,
camping, water falls and streams.
A
previous blog post
was from Mingo Falls
and later in the day we hiked in to see Laurel Falls
(pictures).
We hiked the mile to find a small falls filled with people.
Some had obviously packed everything for a day of picnicking
and splashing with the kids. A nice hike in the woods, though.

Just outside the park is Tuckaleechee Caverns
(pictures).
This is an old fashioned, family owned cavern roadside attraction.
An easy walk through the well paved cavern with interesting rock
formations.

For a little historical South, we stopped at
The Hermitage
(pictures).
This is the farm Andrew Jackson retired to after
service as the president of the United States.
It’s back in the time before secret service and security
details. It’s just a farm although, these days, they make a big
deal about the slaves who lived there and made the farm work.

Keeping with the presidential theme, the next stop was the
Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site
(pictures).
Wikipedia has a
concise description
of the history of this monument.
In our cynical age, it is hard to comprehend the adoration a
log cabin received. Eventually, it was enshrined in a granet monument.

The next stop was to downtown St. Louis with a visit to the Arch.
If you were following the news at that time, you would know that the
central U.S. was surviving record floods and tornadoes.
We weren’t sure the arch park would be open but it was completely
operational although some of the
pictures
do show the Mississippi overflowing it’s banks onto the sidewalks.
The trip up the Arch was bizarre.
You get into these claustrophobia attack inducing little pods which
then click and clunk as they take you to the top.
Once at the top, you are in a small arched room with
TINY windows to peer out over the city.
It is clear that Disney was not consulted when they built it.

A lot of driving brought us to
Jewel Cave National Monument
(Wikipedia explains
that a “national monument” is declared by the
president without requiring the approval of Congress.)
This gigantic system of caves now has an elevator for us softies
to casually tour the underground.
There are still people squeezing through the caves but we get to
walk through the cool 56 degrees on concrete and aluminum walkways
and enjoy the formations.
It was hard taking pictures because the lights they used
had widely different temperatures.
That, and my little digital camera doesn’t have a flash that
goes more than a few feet.
Some pictures
did turn out.

Out of the ground and over to Yellowstone National Park
(pictures).
It was an amazingly beautiful day — cool temperatures, bright sun,
blue sky filled with white clouds.
The park was showing itself off.
Bison grazed (and clogged the roads) and the rush of melting snow filled
the streams.
Beautiful.

Well, how do you top Yellowstone?
With a nuclear reactor, of course.
Pictures.
In the 1950’s, a small reactor
(”Experimental Breeder Reactor 1″ or “EBR-1″)
in the middle of Idaho
proved that nuclear reactors could create their own fuel
(”breeding” plutonium) and generate electricity efficiently
(output more than goes in).
The DOE keeps the building open in the summer with tours by informed but otherwise very bored
employees.

Up the road is an area of lava formations in the
Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve.
Pictures.

After 9476 miles, we are finally home. Whooo hooo!!! The bad news is the of bills and weeds to contend with. I will be uploading the rest of the pictures and videos and adding some more commentary the next few days.

It looks like We have made it through the bad weather in the middle of the country. The stop at the arch in St Louis meant some extra driving around since the road along the river was closed. Flooding because of the high Mississippi River. there have been many flooded fields along the highway with rain still coming down.

We spent the night in Kansas City. The night was windy and the tornadoes occurred to the west of the city while we sleep peacefully in our beds. Thursday morning was cool (65: the coolest weather we’ve had since touching California) and the front had moved to the east leaving us to travel north behind all the bad weather.

The plan is to move quickly with long driving days so we can get home next week. We are getting tired of traveling around living out of suit cases. The boys also remembered things they would really like to do on the 16th (Monday) so we are looking at driving 11 hour days to make it home by then. It will be nice to sleep in our real beds after this trip.

I have a lot of picture processing to do when I get home. There are many panoramas to build from pictures and I have videos of some things that I thought would be better as video than still snaps.

We drove through Iowa today to get up to South Dakota. One the of main differences between here and the Southern states is the lack of billboards. Most of the south has zillions of billboards along the road. Even better, since the road service planted trees on both sides of the road, the billboards are on large green poles (large to withstand hurricanes) 50 to 100 feet in the air. What a visual mess.

Abe birth place


Originally uploaded by MisterBlue



There is a national park with a monument to the log cabin that Abe Lincoln was born in. Inside the building you see here is a log cabin. The laptop I was borrowing died so it will be a while before U get more pictures up.

Mingo Falls


Originally uploaded by MisterBlue



Today driving through the Smokey Mountain National Park. It looks a lot like home except for the humidity and that it is kudzu climbing the trees and not ivy.

We are finally moving westward. A lot of time was spent getting to the east coast so the trip back will be a lot quicker.

After New Orleans, we spent a few days in Walt Disney World. The place is special, amazing and expensive. I think I’m getting tired of the parks like Walt did. Not that he came to dislike them, but he was ready to move onto something new. I am starting to get that feeling about being there — time to find something new.
In that vein, the pictures I took are of some of the many flowers in bloom and the crowds — things people don’t usually take pictures of.

From WDW, it was to the far coast and the Kennedy Space Center.
This has been duded up with rides, multi-media presentations and gift shops — oh, and high entry fees — to make it a Disney-like experience. There are some rockets also. The bus tour takes you between fenced off places to peer at the launch pads, old Saturn rockets and modules being assembled for the international space station. The simulated shuttle launch ride was disappointing. The best presentation was the one about landing on the moon. Some pictures.

Up the Florida coast to Palm Coast. Tonight we’re in Byron, Georgia. On the way there, the Fountain of Youth beckoned.
On the northern shores of Florida is where Ponce de Leon came ashore looking for the Fountain of Youth. The natives told him that an island existed up north (he was the governor of what is now Puerto Rico at the time) with such a mystical fountain. On that spot today is a tourist attraction and a well said to be the remains of the once bubbling fountain. I sampled but, sadly, I don’t feel any younger. But we visited the planetarium (with the oldest, manually operated planetarium system in the nation) and wandered the grounds until exiting through the gift shop, of course. Pictures.

After a night in a funky little bed-and-breakfast in
the town of Taos, New Mexico
we visited the
Taos Pueblo.
Just outside the town of Taos are Indians
living more or less (less actually) as they have for hundreds of years
The century old pueblos are lived in an maintained with as few
modern additions as possible.
They, of course open their houses to sell jewelery
and trinkets to the tourists.

From New Mexico, we drove across the south end of the rockies
traveled through Colorado before making it to Texas.
What better indication of Texas-ness than
Cadallic Ranch
outside Amarillo.
From Amarillo, we drove through the traffic jams of Dallas
and southward into the heat and humidity of Houston.

We just happened to be at the
Johnson Space Center
when the
space shuttle Discovery launched.
On the plus side we watched the launch on the IMAX screen with
commentary from one of the astronaut team.
On the minus side, the mission control tour was
unavailable because they were busy.
This place wasn’t what I expected at all.
There was the science side of the space program (the tram tour)
but, when you walk into the building you are confronted with this
gigantic jungle gym type of thing.
We’re talking kids climbing and bouncing all over a brightly
colored structure that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with
space flight. The only connection I can see is it relates to
astronaut training. Back in the back are some displays of space
suits and a full sized mock up of the nose of the space shuttle.

We spent the night in Sulfur, Louisiana (it smelled of sulfer
that night too — I blame the oil refinery close by)
and the next day drove across the state to the city of New Orleans.
We took a walk through the French Quarter of that city and
ate some Cajun food.
The boys were unimpressed with the shops and bars.
They thought that, since it was set up as a party town,
you need your buddies and a buzz to enjoy the place.
Can’t argue with that.
What did get their attention were the
beignets
from
Cafe du Monde
– warm donut-like pastries smothered in powered sugar was worth a thumbs up.

Tonight we are in Pensacola, Florida before diving into
the central area of that state and finally to
Walt Disney World.

There are some more pictures up:
Taos Pueblo,
Cadillac Ranch,
Houston Space Center
and
New Orleans
.

We’ve gone over 4000 miles so far and we’re about to start our
third week. We’ll need to get a move on if we’re going to make
it back in our alloted time.