Monthly Archives: April 2018

Trip Peek #70
Trip #139
Road Crew Redo

Posted on by
Reply

This picture is from my 2017 Road Crew Redo trip. I’d seen the Road Crew perform their Route 66 themed songs at Route 66 events but never in their home state of Tennessee. I tried in January of 2016 but a snow storm played havoc with my plans. This time I was successful. The trip’s first day was spent getting to Nashville, doing some honky tonking, and attending the Grand Ol’ Opry in Ryman Theater. The picture is of a modern neon sign inside Robert’s Western World.  On the second day I moved on to Franklin and did some sight seeing before catching the Road Crew at Jack and Jameson’s Smokehouse. A leisurely drive home filled the third day.

Trip Peeks are short articles published when my world is too busy or too boring for a current events piece to be completed in time for the Sunday posting. In addition to a photo thumbnail from a completed road trip, each Peek includes a brief description of that photo plus links to the full sized photo and the associated trip journal.

Trip Peek #69
Trip #91
Motorcycle Cannonball Plus

Posted on by
Reply

This picture is from my 2010 Motorcycle Cannonball Plus trip. The full name of the event it was centered on was the “Pre-1916 Motorcycle Cannonball Endurance Run”. It was the first of what has become an  established biennial event. Subsequent runs have involved motorcycles of various vintages but all have been rather aged. The 2018 event is for pre-1929 motorcycles and will run from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. The bikes will start rolling September 8.

In 2010 the run’s closest approach to Cincinnati was Cherohala Skyway near Chattanooga, Tennessee. I got there in time to see many of the ancient two-wheelers pass by, then headed onto their end of day stop at Coker Tire. The picture was taken the next morning as the riders set out on the next leg. Once the first groups were on their way, I drove south to Little River Canyon then back the check out Ruby Falls. I spent the night in Chattanooga and had a wonderful time at the city’s aquarium the next day.after breakfast at Aretha Frankenstein’s. This was my first visit to the quirky restaurant which became an instant favorite. I made it to Nashville in time for a show at the Bluebird Cafe then stopped at a couple of car museums the next day as I headed home sort of on the Dixie Highway.

Trip Peeks are short articles published when my world is too busy or too boring for a current events piece to be completed in time for the Sunday posting. In addition to a photo thumbnail from a completed road trip, each Peek includes a brief description of that photo plus links to the full sized photo and the associated trip journal.

JHA 2018 Conference

Posted on by
11

On Monday, the temperature in Cincinnati plummeted into the 30s and there were snowflakes in the air. I took that as a sign to leave town so I did. And headed north. I don’t mean just a few-miles-to-Dayton north but a few-miles-into-Canada north. On the surface, that must appear even more logic defying than my most recent trip to chilly Pittsburgh but it’s really not as dumb as it sounds. My target in Canada is Winnipeg, Manitoba. Almost as soon as I reach there, I’ll start south on my first full length drive of the Jefferson Highway and that will take me to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. “Pine to Palm” as the highway’s nickname promises. Near the midpoint, I’ll pause for a few days to attend the 7th Annual Jefferson Highway Association Conference in Saint Joseph, Missouri. At the end, I’ll pause a few days to visit my NOLA resident oldest son.

This entry is to let blog only subscribers now about the trip and to provide a place for comments. The journal is here.

500 Posts

Posted on by
9

Last Sunday’s post was this blog’s 500th. Some blogs I follow have thousands of posts. Some, with multiple contributors, publish more than 500 posts each and every year. Many celebrated their 500th post a long time ago if they bothered to note it at all. Of course there are others that caught my attention and subscription only to fade out after a few articles. They will never reach 500. Then there are the sporadic blogs that may or may not. They start a short series of posts with “Sorry it’s been so long” then, after a return to silence, do it all over again. And I know there are many more that never caught either my attention or subscription. So, even though 500 isn’t a major milestone for everyone, I’m pretty sure that a lot more blogs don’t reach it than do. Therefore, by golly, I’m going to celebrate. And, by celebrate, I mean brag.

In the initial, “Hello again, world”, post on August 7, 2011, I stated my goal of posting at least every Sunday and, with a single exception, I’ve done that. The blog has never been focused on anything in particular but from the beginning I intended to announce road trips that were being documented elsewhere on the site and, fairly early on, I started doing some reviews. With the exception of a couple of early trip announcements that filled Sunday slots, these announcements and reviews, along with some truly “miscellaneous” posts, were in addition to the Sunday morning articles which means it didn’t take 500 weeks to reach 500 posts. It took 6 years and 8 months or about 344 weeks.

There have been 185 “formula” posts with predetermined topics and formats. 48 trip announcements and 7 year end reviews are included in that count. The other 130 are “filler” posts used when “my world is too busy or too boring for a current events piece to be completed in time for the Sunday posting”. These are typically created in advance and can be posted without regard to date. They come from four groups. There were 11 My Apps chapters, 20 My Gear chapters, 30 My Wheels chapters, and 69 Trip Peeks. Trip Peeks and trip announcements are close to brainless. The others usually require at least a little thought and some photo editing. Trip Peeks and trip announcements require little or no photo editing and the only writing involved is a one or two paragraph summary of the associated trip. The blog was a little more than a year old when I resorted to posting the first Trip Peek. I’d completed 107 trips at the time and that seemed like an endless supply. I’ve added 41 trips since then but I’ve used the peek trick more often than expected and my “endless supply” is down to 79.

Will this blog get to 1000? Don’t know. I didn’t expect this website to live for ten years or even five and it’s closing in on twenty. The blog is hardly consistent in terms of subject matter. Topics have ranged from museums, to music, to food, to cars, to the blog itself and the tools involved. The quality might not be all that consistent either. I’m certainly not the best person to judge that but I don’t think it’s ever been horrible. Nor has it ever been earth shatteringly great. What has been consistent is the timing. Or maybe dependable is a better word. Yeah, dependable probably is the better way to describe having some sort of post every Sunday and then some. And that’s what I’m bragging about.

Allegheny, Monongahela, Ohio, and Nile

Posted on by
Reply

No river actually runs through Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Allegheny and Monongahela flow into the city where they combine to form the Ohio which flows out. On Monday, I drove US-22 from near my home to where that wet magic takes place.

And Willie Nile isn’t a river at all. He’s a rock and roller who is performing in Pittsburgh on Tuesday. I’m here to see that and some of the city too.

This entry is to let blog only subscribers now about the trip and to provide a place for comments. The journal is here.

Cincy’s Belated Opening

Posted on by
1

Sometimes the Findlay Market Opening Day Parade marks an opportunity to forget a less than stellar previous season. People braving Monday’s cold temperatures were trying to not only forget last season’ 68-94 finish but this season’s 0-3 start. You see, to avoid interference with crucial pre-Easter sales at the Market, the parade happened, not on Friday before the Reds’ first game of the season, but on Monday before their fourth.

Actually, that first game wasn’t exactly when it was supposed to be, either. Scheduled for Thursday, it was moved to Friday to avoid predicted severe weather.

I reached downtown in time to poke around the staging area a little bit before the parade start. The giant Mr. Red at the top of this article belongs to the National Flag Company. The snowman at left, who I believe made it all the way through the parade, is made of real snow. He’s riding on the 911Steel float with a real piece of the World Trade Center and replicas of the twin towers.

Cincinnati was, and is again becoming, a major brewing center. There are plenty of stories about the city’s pre-prohibition Beer Barons. Beard Barons are a more recent development. Distilling, rather than brewing, is involved in the product shown in the second picture and made a little more than a hundred miles to Cincinnati’s south. Cincinnati brewing does get some notice in the picture of a Crosley Field bound bus in front of Rhinegeist Brewing. Crosley Field was the Reds’ home until 1970.

Rozzi Fireworks is certainly capable of starting things off with a bang but they decided on a pillar of fire instead. Maybe they’re saving a big boom for the centennial next year. I guess there’s something pretty cool on the other side of the street because Grand Marshalls Danny Graves and Sam LeCure didn’t look my way even once as they passed.

Here are some long time Cincinnati legends. That’s King Records drummer Philip Paul and wife Roberta in the red convertible. The fellow in the top hat is entrepreneur and politician Jim Tarbell dressed as departed legend Peanut Jim Shelton.

Breaking up all the locals in the parade were some easily recognized out of towners. Budweiser isn’t my favorite beer but these guys are my favorite horses.

There’ll be nothing but locals from here on out. Like some folks from Findlay Market, the Red Hot Dancing Queens, and Kahnie from the American Sign Museum. I even got a shot of Tod piloting the big black truck.

The Kroger Company still has one of Barney Kroger’s delivery wagons from the 1880s and Arnold’s has a passenger bathtub although it’s not one I’m familiar with and it’s not quite self-propelled. On the 25th the bar made a plea for a “go-cart mechanic” and on the 29th there was video evidence that repairs had been successful. However, the tub in the picture is neither of those I’ve seen before, has a rear mounted bubble machine, and is being propelled by a couple of laughing footmen. And it was still way cool. The third picture is of a new-to-me float from Rhinegeist.

This is the bus I had a pre-parade partial shot of in front of the Rhinegeist Brewery. It wasn’t really the last thing in the parade but I thought it would be an OK thing to use for the closing panel. A few hours after the parade wrapped up, the Reds got  their first win of the year by beating the Chicago Cubs 1-0. The three loses were to the Washington Nationals. A second Cubs game scheduled for Tuesday was postponed by rain then, after a pre-planned day off, the team headed to Pittsburgh for a four game stand. They lost the first two, won the third, and one remains to be played. The Reds begin 2018 with a 2-5 record.

Easter Fools Day

Posted on by
Reply

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me annually, it’s a holiday. This year, Easter and April Fools Day coincide making things like Easter Snipe Hunts something to be on the lookout for. I always post on Sunday and, although the reasons are somewhat different, Easter always happens on Sunday. That means there have been several Easter anchored posts in the past. Despite them all being pretty shallow, I’ll post links at the end of this article.

April Fools Day is a different matter. This is only the second time in the life of this blog that April Fools Day has fallen on Sunday. The first time, in 2012, I attempted a joke, Product Review – Dial2Text, but it received virtually no attention. So, no joke this year. Instead, I looked into the history of the prankish holiday.

Like so many of our holidays, including the currently coinciding Easter, April Fools Day has several possible origins. My personal favorite involves the change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar that started back in 1582. The change didn’t happen instantly. After Italy, France, and several other countries made the switch, 344 years passed before Turkey fell in line in 1926. Others switched at various points in between with England and her colonies, including those in North America, adopting the no-longer-very-new calendar in 1752. Depending on when the switch was made, 10 to 13 days had to be eliminated to get into sync. A more detailed description of the process is available here.

The Gregorian calendar places the start of the year at January 1. Prior to the switch, most Europeans considered a new year to begin at the Catholic Feast of the Annunciation on March 25. For some, this was a week long celebration which meant the party didn’t wrap up until April 1. The theory goes that, like folks who get to work an hour late when Daylight Savings Time kicks in, some people failed to adjust to the new calendar and continued to think of the first of April as the start of a year. They were laughed at and called April Fools by those more in tune with the times. I also suspect there were those who celebrated both dates and thought everyone else fools for missing out on half of the partying.

Of course, not everyone buys into this theory and some point to what may or may not be references to April 1 foolishness made well before 1582. Read some other theories and other details about the day here and here.

If the calendar story is true (and I really hope it is), then modern day April Fools differ greatly from the originals. People who celebrated a new year at the wrong time did it on their own and those who laughed at them were just enjoying the goof. Today it’s all about intentionally making others look foolish. The transition happened a long time ago. The image at the top of this article shows a “ticket” to see the non-existent “Annual Ceremony of Washing the Lions” at the Tower of London. It’s dated 1856 and there are records of the prank being played — probably without tickets — as early as 1698. Once everybody got on board with the January New Year thing, waiting for something like another calendar change to watch large groups of people do something dumb just wasn’t acceptable. Pranks, both big and small, quickly became the order of the day.

I’ll be on my guard, of course. There’s no way I’ll go looking for a left handed monkey wrench or polka dot paint… again. My only concern is whether or not I’ll be able to distinguish the snipe eggs from the bunny eggs.

Easter posts:
2012 East, Easter, Eastest
2013 Happy Eostre
2014 Must Be the Season of the Fish
2015 A Special Day
2016 Happy Easter Island
2017 Happy Easter Island (redux)