Monthly Archives: December 2020

Posts of Christmas Past

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I last spent Christmas in Cincinnati in 2005. I slipped out of town for Thanksgiving that year, and it went so well I did it again in 2006. Then, with a full week available at Christmas, I again hit the road to start a string of December twenty-fifths spent away from home that was unbroken until this year. My 2020 Christmas plans shared the fate of many others: COVID clobbered ’em. Whether or not a new streak is launched next year remains to be seen, but it’s a fact that there is no new Christmas trip journal entry for 2020. In its stead, I’m using the blog to recount the fourteen entries already there. All photos were taken on Christmas Day.

2006 — Natchez Christmas was organized around a drive of the Natchez Trace Parkway that began the day after Christmas. Christmas Eve and Christmas Night were spent in a room above the Under the Hill Saloon in Natchez, MS. It’s between the two white-fronted buildings in the picture.

2007 — I decided to go a bit farther south the next year for Crescent City Christmas. New Orleans had recovered sufficiently from Katrina’s 2005 devastation to welcome tourists to bolster the recovery effort, and it’s a pretty good place to celebrate anything. The tree and Joan of Arc statue are in front of the French Market.

2008 — My great-grandparents spent Christmas on the Alafia in 1920, and I tried to do something similar. I could not camp on the river bank as they did but I could stay in a nearby motel. On Christmas Day, I had breakfast at Showtown USA in nearby Gibsonton. At the time, Showtown still had plenty of carnival people as both employees and patrons.

2009 — My retirement in mid-November meant I now had time to drive to US-62’s West End from my most western contact with the route in western Kentucky. After spending a day snowed in in Altus, OK, I reached Lubbock, TX, on Christmas Day and stopped by Buddy Holley’s grave. Lubbock possesses no snowplows so most of the record five inches that fell the day before was still there although much had been blown from the area in the photograph.

2010 — My Chattanooga Christmas was also a white one. The depth may not have been a record but the fact that this was the first Christmas Day snowfall in Chattanooga in forty-one years meant it was something special. The Delta Queen had been forced to quit cruising in 2009 and was serving as a stationary hotel. I had spent Independence Day 2009 aboard her, and couldn’t resist the chance to spend another holiday on board.

2011 — Although my path reached as far south as Alabama, Nashville, TN, was the target for George for the Holidays. The title refers to George Harrison whose 1970 album All Things Must Pass was performed by The Long Players on December 23. Oven Master Mary had supplied me with a whole gingerbread family for the trip, and I photographed one family member on stage at Legends Corner.

2012 — The plans for Christmas Escape Repeat included New Year’s Eve in Raleigh, NC, and some time in Atlanta, GA, but were timed to allow me a second Christmas stay — this time without snow — on the Delta Queen in Chattanooga. It was the first of only two times I used the word “escape” in the title.

2013 — A Wild and Wonderful Christmas was spent at North Bend State Park in West Virginia where “Wild and Wonderful” is a slogan. After a fine holiday meal at the lodge, I went for a drive that took me to “America’s Oldest Five and Dime” in Harrisville. Berdine’s was not open on Christmas Day but was open the day after so I got to check out this delightful store on my way home.

2014 — Christmas Escape 2014 turned out to be quite the escape indeed. There was Christmas Eve with friends in Savannah, GA, Christmas Day with a friend in St Augustine, FL, (where the picture was taken), and some time with an uncle near Lake Alfred, FL, to start the new year. Plus a lot of Dixie Highway and a little time in the keys.

2015 — That WV state park had worked out well in 2013 so I tried out a neighbor on the other side for It’s a Wanderful Life. The holiday meal at Indiana’s Turkey Run State Park was fairly late in the day so I helped my appetite by doing a little hiking before dinner.

2016 — I stayed fairly close to home and used Ohio’s new tourism slogan for Finding It Here. Home base was the lodge at Burr Oak State Park. A Christmas Day drive took me to the town of Cambridge and a long stroll through the Dickens Victorian Village erected there each year.

2017 — With this trip, I proved that I Can Drive Twenty-Five. I followed the current US-25 from its beginning at the Ohio River to its other end in Brunswick, GA. Holiday dining options were somewhat limited and I ended up with a not so traditional Christmas dinner of crabcake, grits, broccoli, and cookies. In honor of the holiday, I named these four gingerbread men — a gift from Oven Master Mary, of course — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Ringo.

2018 — The focus of Kitty Hawk Holidays was the 115th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Big Kill Devil Hill. That was on the 17th so I did a bit of running around before ending up in Knoxville, TN, on Christmas Day. A selfie in Worlds Fair Park let me show off the new mustache my grandson had given me for Christmas.

2019 — Finding (More Of) It Here had me back in Ohio at a park lodge. This time it was at Geneva-on-the-Lake State Park. The photo was taken just before dinner as the sun set to my left and illuminated the clouds over Lake Erie.

A Cosmic Reason for the Season — Redux

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I was understandably alarmed when I first saw the news at right. However, reading beyond the headline reassured me that it was only the program planned for Fort Ancient that has been canceled and that the Sun and Earth and other heavenly bodies are to continue as is. The program was held last year and I attended. It was on a Saturday and the following article was published the next day as the regular weekly post. I am reusing it as a regular weekly post 364 days later, a day ahead of the 2020 Winter Solstice which will occur at 5:02 AM December 21.

Calendars come and calendars go and Earth just keeps on turning. And it keeps on orbiting, too. The turning bit creates what we call days. The alternating periods of light and dark impact almost all life on the planet and humans adopted the day as a basic unit of measure pretty early on. What we call years comes from Earth orbiting the Sun. There was plenty of time for early humans to stare at the sky and not a whole lot to keep them from doing it. They couldn’t help but notice that things in the sky moved around. In time, some of the more observant among them realized that not all that movement was random and eventually some patterns were noted. I can’t imagine how exciting it was when some smart guy figured out that the sun popped up at the same point about every 365 days. Of course, that “about” would be very important.

The opening photo shows the sun rising yesterday over a “gateway” in the earthen enclosure at Fort Ancient. The photo at left was taken a bit later and includes a small mound inside the enclosure in the foreground. When the mound, gateway, and sunrise align, sunset will follow sooner than on any other day of the year. This is the northern hemisphere’s Winter Solstice. It is the day when the sun is above the horizon for less time than any other day of the year, and yesterday that amounted to 9 hours, 25 minutes, and 9 seconds. Although we talk about Solstice being a day, it is technically just an instant. It is the moment when the Sun is farthest north or south of Earth’s equator. It happens twice each year and happened yesterday at 23:19 EST.

Serpent Mound, another ancient earthen structure containing solar alignments, is a little more than forty miles southeast of Fort Ancient. The serpent’s head is aligned with the Summer Solstice sunset. Body coils align with Summer and Winter Solstice sunrises. For several years, a modern event known as Lighting of the Serpent took place there at Winter Solstice. It was discontinued in 2017. The picture at right is from 2014 which is the only time I attended.

Long before they knew anything about orbits and equators, humans knew the day of Winter Solstice was special. It is the point where each successive day receives more rather than less daylight. It’s the big turnaround that will eventually lead to the warmth of spring and summer. It is clearly a day worth celebrating and it has indeed been celebrated in many different cultures in many different ways.

During their existence, humans have developed a slew of calendar systems. Several actually remain in use today, but the Gregorian calendar is the one most widely accepted. In the late sixteenth century, this started replacing the Julian calendar which had been around for all of those sixteen centuries and then some. The Julian calendar had been created by folks who calculated that a year was 365 and 1/4 days long which was a lot more accurate than an even 365. They came up with the rather clever idea of adding an extra day every four years to balance things out.

We now know that a year is 365.2422 days long. A year is the length of time it takes Earth to orbit the Sun, a day is the length of time it takes Earth to rotate, and neither is adjustable. When the Julian calendar was first adopted, the northern hemisphere’s Winter Solstice fell on December 25 but it slowly drifted away. Someone in authority thought to put an end to this nonsense by declaring December 25 the official solstice. But those non-adjustable orbits and rotations kept doing what they were doing and the official solstice and actual solstice just kept getting farther and farther apart.

The Gregorian calendar, which we have used for roughly 400 years now, put an end to that. Like the Julian calendar, it considers most years to be 365 days long but has a more involved system of “leap years” that add an extra day. The result is that over a long enough period our years will average 365.2422 days in length. Not only did the new calendar eliminate future drift, it tried to correct for some of the previous drift by throwing away ten days. The calendar’s namesake’s full-time job was as Pope of the Catholic Church. Ditching those ten days moved the solstice to December 22 which is where it had been in 325 when the church was founded. Of course, some holidays that had been tied to the official solstice (which hadn’t been anywhere near the actual solstice for some time) would continue to be celebrated on December 25.

Anyone wanting a more complete discussion of calendars, solstices, and holidays will find one here. Additional information on Fort Ancient is available here.

Purple Trusses Majesty

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This isn’t the first year for a Christmas display on the Purple People Bridge but it is the first year I’ve taken notice. Maybe that’s because more people have been posting pictures of it on social media, or maybe it’s because I’m sitting at home paying more attention, or maybe it’s because the display has received a little more publicity because it almost didn’t happen. The privately owned bridge is normally home to a variety of fundraising events throughout the year but that was not the case in COVID-riddled 2020. There was simply no money in the budget of the nonprofit Newport Southbank Bridge Company for lighting the bridge this year, but local companies, led by realtor North American Properties, stepped in to assure that there would be lights. The 25-foot tree placed at the bridge’s south end by the Wish Tree Program is covered with gift suggestions for people in need.

I arrived at the Kentucky end of the bridge a little before sunset and walked across it to Ohio. Note that the state line is a lot closer to Ohio than it is to Kentucky. It is the low-water mark on the northern bank — as it existed in 1792. When “love locks”, closed by couples before tossing the keys in the river, became a problem around 2017, they were removed from the actual bridge and a special area designated. I presume that even the special area has to be cleaned up occasionally. The middle picture is of the Big Mac Bridge which carries I-471 and is officially named the Daniel Carter Beard Bridge. The supports in the foreground of that picture once carried railroad tracks. They can be better seen here. The third picture was taken from the Cincinnati access ramp looking back at the bridge.

As the light faded, I headed back toward Kentucky. With the change in lighting, the people on the bridge also begin to change. It had been mostly people jogging or biking for exercise and workers on a foot-powered interstate commute. Now small groups, including some obvious families, began to appear to take in the lights.

When darkness came, the bridge began to take on that “infinity room” look I’d seen in pictures others had shared online. Somewhere near the middle, I leaned over the railing to grab a shot of the big tree in Newport.

Back on the Kentucky shore, I stepped off to the side for a view of the city across the river before taking a parting shot of the Wish Tree and heading home. The display is free and it only cost me $3 to park in the garage next to the bridge. The lights will be lit each night through January 15.

What was originally called the Newport Cincinnati Bridge opened in 1872 as a railroad only bridge. Over the years, it was widened, had decks added, and for a long time served automobiles, trains, and pedestrians. It lost the trains in 1987, became a people bridge in 2001, and became purple in 2006. In addition to being painted purple, the bridge had stairs and railings added to allow people to walk along the top of its trusses for a fee. They’re still there.

Sadly for the promoter, there usually wasn’t all that much to look at, and, even when there was, the improved view from a maximum of maybe 140 feet above the free-to-walk deck did not seem worth the fee which hovered in the $30-$40 range. These pictures were taken during Cincinnati’s last Tall Stacks Festival when the riverfront was full of boats. That gave climbers something to look at and the idea was new enough to seem attractive. I’m fairly certain those few days in October 2006 were the busiest ever for the climbing operation which closed less than a year later. 

My Gear – Chapter 21
Garmin zūmo 396LMTS

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Everybody’s out of step except my boy Denny. That’s sure how it seems when the subject is GPS routing. I have once again purchased a Garmin product that disappoints me. It’s not that it doesn’t have some wonderful features or that it’s shoddily made. It’s because it doesn’t handle predefined routes the way I think it should. The out-of-step feeling comes from the fact that almost no one else sees any problem at all with the manner in which the unit plays back what it calls “Saved Trips” while I see some very big problems.

I wrote that opening paragraph over a year ago, shortly after I purchased the unit. I’ve been putting off finishing this article with intentions of gaining more experience with it and verifying or disproving some of my theories. Even after all this time, I’m still not sure if some of my theories are right or wrong, but I have gained experience and I do have a more informed opinion. Things aren’t quite as bad as I thought when I wrote that first paragraph, but they are a long way from good.

I’m thinking that for you to fully appreciate my viewpoint would require more background than I’m willing to write, and definitely more than you’re wanting to read. The most basic piece of background is that I want a GPS unit to feedback to me a route I’ve predefined. Garmin zūmos do that. Most GPS units do not. They provide a route of their choosing from where you are to where you want to be. Smartphone routing apps do this too. The 396 does this exceptionally well and even integrates with smartphones to provide traffic and weather information plus Foursquare and Tripadvisor ratings for restaurants and motels. 

A rather basic requirement for following a predefined route is the ability to turn off automatic recalculation when you happen off of the route. Without this, the GPS will recalculate the route every time you miss a turn or pull over for gas. The 396 supports this but with at least one flaw. If a point on the route is blocked by construction or something else, the unit seems to take that as justification for ignoring the fact that automatic recalculation is turned off and just recalculates things anyway. Yes, I understand that that allows you to continue your travels without backtracking but it sure interferes with following an old road up to the edge of a temporary closure.

Of course, the ability to download those predefined routes is also a requirement, and here the 396 really missteps. I realize that infinitely long trips cannot be supported so I readily accept limiting or splitting trips at some point. 29 via points does seem a little low but this is the “economy” model. Maybe the more expensive zūmo XT supports more but that isn’t the real issue anyway. The real issue is that the Garmin unit does exactly what it says and splits the route into two (or more?) completely separate trips. When the endpoint of the first segment is reached, that fact is announced and it is left for some human to select and activate the next segment. To show how this didn’t have to be, I’ll make my first comparison to the previous generation of zūmos.

I own a zūmo 220 which, like the 396, is the cheapest of its generation. As far as I know, the only differences between it and its larger siblings, such as the 660, are screen size and (possibly) memory capacity. The 220 has a point limit, of course, but it appears to be somewhere around 200, and it is handled quite differently. When the limit is encountered during route import, the user is told that directions to points beyond the limit could not be calculated. Then, as those points are approached (and earlier points fall away) directions become available. There is no need to fumble around with route selection in the middle of traffic or drive on without directions while the GPS accesses the new route. Forgetting or maybe just tossing something that I think they did right in the past is the sort of thing Garmin does repeatedly.

To illustrate my more basic complaint about the 396, I’m going to again reference the 220. When a route is selected on the 220, it asks whether you want to go to the route beginning or not. If the answer is yes, it provided directions to the start point then switches to the selected route without manual intervention. If the answer is no, the route is plotted and displayed. Intersecting it at any point causes the GPS to begin guiding you along the path. It’s the same operation all along the route. You can drive off of the route and even loop backward or skip ahead and the little colored line is waiting for you to intersect it at any point. You can even deactivate the route by having the GPS take you to a motel or some such then reactivate and rejoin it whenever you’re ready.

With the 396, you MUST select one of the route’s waypoints before starting and you MUST physically reach it or manually skip it which simply selects the next one. Of course, I really don’t want to manually pick a starting point, but even if I did my routes contain mostly automatically generated point names which provide little help in selecting one.

I guess that isn’t an issue when starting a route at the very beginning but it certainly is an issue when joining (or rejoining) a route in the middle. I did try to simulate the desired operation by selecting a point prior to the one I knew to be next, driving to intersect the plotted line, then skipping (red arrow) the selected point. I’m not 100% sure this actually works without altering the path to the next point, but even if it does, it’s a complication that did not exist in the prior model.

In September, I finally got serious about using the 396 on a trip with a route that I really wanted to follow. It was an all Ohio trip I split into separate north and southbound segments but I still encountered the 29 point limit on the southbound segment and it was on this trip that I discovered the calculation setting override related to blocked roads. I went through the motions of trying it on a recently ended twelve-state trip but I already knew it wasn’t going to work. The trip was already split into sixteen segments. The 396 split most of those in half and simply refused to load the longest of them. I sort of used it for the familiar first leg but quickly switched to my beaten but still breathing 220 for the rest of trip. I did keep the 396 powered on to record a track for geotagging and to find motels but it was the 220 whose directions I followed. Garmin, you blew it again.

My Gear – Chapter 20 — Lenovo ThinkPad 13