Author Archives: Denny

A Hundred Looks at a Hundred Books

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Last Wednesday’s post was the 100th book review published on this blog. Eight were of my own books and one (Book Review (not really), A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving) was, as the title proclaims, not really a review of the actual book. Still, that leaves 91 legitimate reviews of books I didn’t write and that’s many more than I anticipated when I posted the first review in November of 2011. The blog was just about three months old then. The About page says that the most likely subjects of books reviewed are “…those related to something I personally like such as old roads or cars.” That first review (Ghost Town of Route 66) clearly fits and I think the 100th (Walking to Listen) does too. It’s not about a particular road but it is about being “on the road” which seems close enough. Besides, the phrase is “such as old roads or cars” not “exclusively old roads and cars”. The truth is anything “I personally like” is fair game.

When I wrote that “old roads or cars” line, I expected the bulk of my reviews to involve one or the other but that has not been the case. An imprecise classification effort found only 5 reviews of books about or featuring cars. There were 32 about roads which means that 63 were about neither.

I was not surprised to see that only 9 of the books I reviewed were fiction. Books are either fiction or not but they can appear in more than one of my arbitrary subject categories. Those counts are:

  • 37 – history
  • 32 – road
  • 25 – memoir
  • 16 – photo
  • 15 – guide
  • 12 – travelog
  • 5 – cars
  • 1 – physics

I won’t even attempt a “Best of” lists but I do have some “Most Memorable” picks. That I picked several photo books did not surprise me but seeing that three of my picks involved motorcycles was unexpected. No Room for Watermelons tells of Ron Fellowes’ ride through fifteen countries on a 1910 motorcycle. Hues of my Vision, by Ara Gureghian, and The World from My Bike, by Anna Grechishkina, visually document their authors’ life on the road over several years. Living on 3 wheels (a sidecar carried his dog) ended for Ara when back problems made it impossible to ride. Anna’s travels were interrupted when her homeland was invaded and she returned to Ukraine to help in its defense. I hope with all my heart that there is a sequel.

Route 66 Sightings coverTen Million Steps - coverI clearly have a weakness for photo books but these two are also road books. In 2004, Joe Hurley took the steps and Travis Lindhorst took the pictures for Ten Million Steps on Route 6. Three of Route 66’s finest (Shellee Graham, Jim Ross, and Jerry McClanahan) collaborated on Route 66 Sightings which might be the best advertisement for a decommissioned highway you’ll ever see.

Outside the Wire coverEvery member of the trio responsible for Route 66 Sightings turns out plenty of exceptional solo work. Most of it is connected to Route 66 but this book from Jim Ross is an exception. It’s the story of his time in Vietnam. In my review, I said of Jim that, “What he does do is bring veteran skills to the telling of a rookie’s story.” I think that’s why this book is so memorable to me.

This is one of the five “car books” I counted. The car is a 1926 Model T that carries Darlene Dorgan and her friends on some wonderful adventures in the 1930s. Darlene’s Silver Streak tells of those adventures as well as the car’s modern-day restoration and display. I bought the book when I first saw the car on display which is probably part of the reason I find it memorable.

The count will not stop at one hundred, of course. In fact, a couple more are already in the works. One is sort of about a road. The other is not. I really see no reason to expect the mix of topics to change much in the future except for a probable decrease in the number of physics books reviewed. 

 

The First Day of Pompeii:
The Exhibition

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Pompeii: The Exhibition opened at the Cincinnati Museum Center on Friday. I would have been in the first group admitted and possibly even the first person admitted if a guard had not blocked the stairs and escalators until precisely 10:00 AM. That was the official exhibit opening time but an unguarded elevator a few feet from the stairs meant that a group of patrons were receiving their pre-entry briefing when I and the rest of the walkers arrived. It’s always good to begin the day with something funny.

Following our own briefing, we entered, received another short briefing beneath the screen in the opening picture, and were then treated to an introductory video on that screen. At the video’s end, doors opened on a life-size marble statue of the goddess Aphrodite. Much like the moon, this is the view of the goddess that we most often see although there is another.

Pompeii was a prosperous port city and art was plentiful. Public spaces and private homes contained decorative mosaics, frescoes, fountains, and more statues.

There were plenty of practical items too. Examples are scales used in the market, fishing hooks, and cooking utensils. I know I’m not the only one with a cast iron skillet that looks almost exactly like this bronze one from Pompeii.

I suppose these items are also practical in their own way. Gladiatorial contests were primarily held for entertainment but staying alive was definitely a practical concern for the participants. Next to the displays of weapons and armor, a holographic video about the various types of combat got its share of attention.

Also getting attention was a small room offset from the primary flow. Both entry briefings had described the special markings for this adult-oriented display in case parents wanted to make sure their charges avoided it. If any did, it wasn’t obvious. A sign begins with the astute observation that “Ancient Roman sexual customs were different from those of our contemporary society.” Back then arriving with bells on really meant something.

Theatrical entertainment was quite popular in all of Rome including Pompeii. Actors wore masks to establish their characters. Here is a fresco depicting a pair of masks and a full-size marble mask. Both of these were purely decorative as masks actually worn on stage were made of lighter materials such as linen.

Another set of warnings in those entry briefings concerned loud noises and bright lights in the “4D eruption theater”. I do not doubt that these could be disturbing for some but most will find them underwhelming. Same with the slightly moving floor which I assume is the fourth dimension. If you enter expecting a high-definition video of the eruption shown on a large flat screen you will see an extremely good one. Expect more and you might be disappointed.

Images of the casts of the victims of the eruption are the most familiar and also the most disturbing. These are not human bodies but shapes formed within the volcanic ask where bodies once were. The quote on the wall in the first picture is from Pliny the Younger who watched the eruption from a little more than a dozen miles away and then documented it. In this exhibit, many of the casts are displayed in front of large photographs which I assume depict the situation in which they were found.

Exit is, of course, through the gift shop where we are reminded that striking a good final pose will greatly increase your chances of appearing on a shot glass or refrigerator magnet in a couple of millennia.

Aphrodite’s butt and iffy shot glasses aside, this is an impressive exhibit that provides a detailed and accurate look at a real Roman city of two thousand years ago. Pompeii: The Exhibition runs through July 28.

Book Review
Walking to Listen
Andrew Forsthoefel

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Twice I have posted previews of books. This was the subject of the first one back in 2013. The second came along in 2015, and I believe it was posted with the hope of boosting a Kickstarter campaign to publish the previewed book. I’m not quite sure why the first preview was posted. Maybe I just felt an overwhelming urge to write something. It does happen. Whatever the reason, I was obviously quite impressed with the This American Life episode where I first learned of Andrew Forsthoefel and his recently completed walk, and I really expected the book to appear shortly. It did not.

In a paragraph at the end of the second book preview, I reported that I was still following Forsthoefel’s blog and there was still hope for the book but that my confidence was weakening. I eventually stopped following the blog and missed the book’s publication a couple of years later. A recent Amazon Associates change (They dropped support for links to images.) had me revisiting all of my reviews and making changes to many. That Walking to Listen preview required no changes but looking it over jogged some memories and I learned that the book had been published — about seven years ago — and was now available.

The recently completed walk that caught my interest back in 2013 was 4,000 miles long and had taken nearly a year. The book documents the journey in the tradition of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways which means it is much more about people and experiences than places. Of course traveling by vehicle, as Steinbeck and Heat-Moon did, is a lot different than walking, which Forsthoefel did. There is a third book I often thought about while reading Walking to Listen. Ten Million Steps on Route 6 is the story of Joe Hurley’s walk across America. That’s closer to Forsthoefel’s experience but Hurley had a chase car that picked him up at the end of each day while Forsthoefel often slept right where he stopped walking in a tent he carried.

“WALKING TO LISTEN” was written on a small sign that Forsthoefel carried. It was a visual aid when explaining what he was doing. I suspect it gave more of a sense of mission to his walk than simply speaking the words would have. Maybe it made people less reluctant to speak into the small recorder that Forsthoefel used in interviews. Being twenty-three and fresh out of college probably helped too. The bulk of Walking to Listen consists of Forsthoefel telling his story in his own words although he does use some quotes from interviews in the telling. But every chapter is preceded by a verbatim transcript of a portion of one of those interviews. The person or persons speaking is identified along with the location and approximate date and the transcript follows. Some are very short excerpts. None are longer than a couple of pages but they do add a little “live-action” to the well-crafted retellings that fill most of the pages.

The “fresh out of college” situation I mentioned is one of the reasons for the walk. Graduation is sometimes seen as a time to access things before making the next commitment and so it was for Forsthoefel. He frequently referred to life after college as “coming of age”. He really was walking to listen and hoped to hear some advice. But there was another source of uncertainty in his life. His parents’ divorce had surprised him and left him unsure of his relationship with his father. He started the walk hoping to get some help with that too.

Although Forsthoefel wanted mostly to learn something about himself, he couldn’t help but learn something about the world just as the other three writers I’ve mentioned did. Sadly, one of the biggest things he learned in 2012 was the same thing Steinbeck learned in 1962: racism in the U.S. is quite healthy. It is usually more subtle and there might even be a little less but it did not go away during the intervening half century. Forsthoefel happened to be in Selma, Alabama, on Martin Luther King Day. One of the people he spent time with was the city’s African American police chief. Clearly, progress had been made since March of 1965. Yet, on his last morning in town, he runs into a man he had met earlier. There are others with him and at one point he whispers to Forsthoefel, “But some of them are still living in the past, if you know what I mean. So don’t bring up integration. Just play it cool.”

Forsthoefel also learned that generosity, too, is quite healthy. People of all sorts offered help that ranged from a single donut to housing and feeding him for several days. He was grateful for every helping hand, of course, while realizing that some of that help would not have been there had he been anything other than a young white non-threatening male.

The walk can be considered a success I think. Forsthoefel probably didn’t get as much advice on “coming of age” as he hoped but he did get quite a bit and the confidence that comes from walking solo across the country no doubt helped a lot. The relationship with his father also seemed to be in pretty decent shape when the walk ended. At least one person reviewing the book thought too much space was given to these personal issues. I thought they were discussed just enough to provide some understanding of why the walk was happening.

I did not read this book to help with my own coming of age or with parental issues. It’s a little late for both. I read it to get another person’s view of the country and I got that — at three miles an hour.

Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time, Andrew Forsthoefel, Bloomsbury Publishing (2017), 5.5 x 8.15 inches, 400 pages, ISBN 978-1632867018
Available through Amazon.

100th Book Review
Responding to that Amazon change I mentioned involved filtering the list of blog entries and learning I had written 98 book reviews. One more has been published since which makes this the 100th book review published on Denny G’s Road Trips Blog.

Trip Peek #131
Trip #9
Road to Revolution

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This picture is from my 2002 Road to Revolution day trip. The journal is organized as a day trip and posted in the DayTrips directory but had to have a Next Page link added because the trip actually occupied two days. It’s the only such journal in my collection. The sequence of Trip Peeks is random but of late the selections have been from the fairly recent past. This is the earliest trip to appear in a Trip Peek for quite some time. The photo is from Zoar Village which I visited on that second day.

The trip’s title comes from its destination being Fort Laurens, Ohio’s only Revolutionary War fort. Stops on the way included Great Circle Earthworks, National Road and Zane Grey Museum, and Gnadenhutten. I knew very little about Zoar Village at the time but stopped there for dinner at a place that was also an inn. I quickly realized that this was a place I needed to see so I spent the night and toured the village the next 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.

Movie Review
Deep Sky
IMAX Original

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I have not followed every detail of the astounding James Webb Space Telescope’s beginnings but I have been aware of some of the bigger events. I knew when it left Earth atop an Ariane 5 rocket on December 25, 2021, and I listened to reports of its eighteen gold-coated mirrors being unfolded and aligned. I marveled at those first images shared with the world on July 12, 2022. They were impressive on the tiny 6-inch screen on my phone, more so on my compact laptop’s 13-inch screen, and better yet on my small-by-modern-standards 42-inch TV. I need a bigger word than impressive now that I’ve seen some of them on a 72-foot OMNIMAX screen.

Deep Sky was released on October 20, 2023, and has been playing in several theaters spread around the world for a while. It began its run at Cincinnati’s Robert D. Lindner Family OMNIMAX® Theater with an 11:30 showing on Friday, February 2. I was there.

The front end of the movie covers the telescope’s construction, launch, and deployment. Some big numbers were tossed out concerning distance, number of people involved, etc. One that caught my attention was the count of Single Points of Failure (SPOFs). A SPOF is something that causes an entire system to fail if it does. It’s a concept I’m familiar with from my working days in software. A definition found online ends with “mission-critical systems should not have a SPOF”. According to Deep Sky, the deployment sequence for JWST had 344 of them. Not one caused a problem.`

There is a fair amount of computer-generated graphics in the film to illustrate the operation of the telescope in space and other impossible-to-capture views. They are wonderfully done and visually quite stunning on the big dome. Giant images from computers are great and may even equal those produced by the telescope in terms of visual impact but knowing that something you are seeing is an actual capture of something in the real world generates a whole different type of awe. 

There is a lot of awe present in the movie itself. It is apparent in every one of the program participants who put in an appearance. These are people who are truly excited to be part of a project that is advancing mankind’s knowledge of this world and their enthusiasm is more than obvious.

Much of the buzz generated by JWST comes from never-before-seen objects it has captured such as galaxies older than any previously recorded. These are well represented in Deep Sky. JWST has also provided better images of things that have been studied for some time. One example is the supernova of 1604 which was observed by Galileo. Another is the “Pillars of Creation” first imaged by the Hubble telescope in 1995. A JWST-generated image of the Pillars is in the movie poster that begins this article. A Hubble version can be seen here. NASA has made bunches of information about JWST and a huge number of images collected by the telescope available here. As I said, those images are truly impressive even on a display screen that fits in your pocket. You don’t have to attend a showing of Deep Sky to be gobsmacked by those awesome pictures but a 72-foot diameter dome jam-packed edge-to-edge with glowing galaxies will gobsmack you a bit differently and maybe a little harder.

While I was at the Cincinnati Museum Center, I took in Jane Goodall: Reasons for Hope which was showing ahead of Deep Sky and I snapped a picture of a promotion for the upcoming Pompeii: The Exhibition. All images in this article other than the first two are of a dynamic promotional display in the museum. I very much enjoyed the Goodall movie and there are some sections that take advantage of the IMAX format. I already have my ticket for the Pompeii exhibit which opens February 16. Coordinated with that opening is a return of
Volcanoes: The Fires of Creation which was the first movie shown in the Lindner Theater following its conversion to digital in 2018. I reported on seeing it here.

For both movies that I saw, the familiar psychedelic light tunnel video that traditionally kicks things off was replaced by a video that points out some of the theater’s features while entertaining eyes and ears much like the light tunnel. An attendant told me they have been using the new video for about a month and that the light tunnel is still around and used for some movies.  

Happy Imbolc (Again/Exact/Maybe)

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One of the few details I remember from Tracy Kidder’s 1981 The Soul of a New Machine is the note that one of the engineers left behind when, frustrated by nanosecond timing issues in the computer they were designing, he simply took off. The note read, “I’m going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.”

What a wonderful idea. Problems seem to just naturally appear in dealing with time shorter than a season even when the time in question is much longer than a nanosecond. There is a problem of sorts in simply measuring a season. Something that I must have known but which did not really register with me until recently is that not all seasons are equal. And by seasons, I mean the periods between solstices and equinoxes. A simplified explanation is that Earth moves around the sun in an ellipse rather than a circle and that it travels faster relative to the sun when it is closer to it. I was reminded of this when I tried to calculate the time and date of Imbolc and realized that dividing an exact fourth of a year in half just didn’t work. The actual lengths are approximately 90 days for spring and autumn, 94 days for summer, and 89 days for winter. Yeah, that doesn’t add up to 365 days but throwing in the word “approximately” makes it OK.

When I spoke of calculating the time and date of Imbolc, I meant the point halfway between winter solstice and spring equinox. I suppose I should quit calling it that. Even though Imbolc may have originally been linked to that point, many who celebrate it have more or less attached it to the calendar date February 1. Same thing with Saint Brigid’s Day. Similarly, Candlemas and Groundhog Day have been nailed to February 2 even though they too were once associated more tightly with winter’s midpoint. Of course, even before they were detached from astronomy and attached to calendar dates, these were seen as holidays rather than instants. Back when humans first started recognizing solstices and equinoxes and points halfway between them, they were no doubt happily dealing with no unit of time shorter than a day.

I first wished the world Happy Imbolc in 2016 then repeated it in 2023. Those posts used a photo of a sign at Gobbler’s Knob taken on my only Punxsutawny Phil visit. This time it’s a picture of Howdy Doody and Princess Summerfall Winterspring which I think fits better with all that talk of seasons.

By my calculation, the instant halfway between the most recent winter solstice and the next spring equinox is 10:47 on February 4, 2024. I am not 100% certain that is accurate and I’m not even sure what I should call it if it is. But it’s all I’ve got and, since it is a mere 4 hours and 47 minutes after this blog’s normal weekly posting time of 6:00 AM, I have decided to synchronize this week’s post with that cosmic event.

Happy Winter’s Midpoint! We’ve made it halfway.

Meltdown Winter Ice Festival

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The last weekend in January seems like a pretty safe time to have an ice festival in Richmond, Indiana. The average temperature there for both the 26th and 27th is 32°F which sounds just about perfect. But averages are not guaranteed. If the town’s Meltdown Winter Ice Festival had taken place a week or two ago, organizers might have wondered if people would brave the near-zero temperatures to attend. On Friday, their top concern was probably whether or not the ice sculptures would survive the day’s temperatures which were pushing fifty.

This is the Meltdown’s eleventh year but it somehow hid from me for the first decade. A significant part of it escaped me this year, too. I timed the hour-and-a-half drive to give me time for dinner before the first item on the schedule. I parked near Jack Elstro Plaza where big blocks of ice were being unloaded and food trucks were setting up. I ate at a local restaurant as I worked my way to the historic district. An online map indicated where sculptures would be but those I walked by were empty. It eventually sunk in that all carving was to be done on-site and was just starting Friday evening. All ice festivals I’ve attended had on-site carving but others also had some sculptures finished elsewhere and trucked in ready to display.

I continued along the path indicated by the map. It included several blocks of Main Street and it was on Main, in the vicinity of Jack Elstro Plaza, that I saw my first ice sculpture of the day. A fellow adjusting the sponsor tag as I approached told me it had just been finished a very short time before. There was already evidence of melting and I had to wonder if it would make it through the night.

Back at the plaza, things had picked up considerably while I was walking and eating. Several sculptures were nearing completion and perhaps would soon be positioned around town like the one I had seen on Main Street.

A couple completed sculptures appear to have already been moved from the carving area to display positions around the plaza. Or maybe they had been carved in place. I’m still not really sure how all this works.

The food trucks were all operating and the igloos scattered around the plaza area had a few occupants although I believe they had entered out of curiosity rather than a need to keep warm. I went through all of the food trucks looking for a cup of coffee but came up empty. Maybe if it had been fifteen or twenty degrees cooler, some enterprising vendor would have coffee or hot chocolate on their menu. And maybe those igloos would have been completely filled.

So I learned that showing up when the event first opens is not a wise move in terms of looking at completed sculptures. I had intentionally picked Friday over Saturday because I thought Saturday might be too crowded. I had only myself to blame for feeling a little disappointed when I started for home.

I was not disappointed enough to drive back to Richmond on Saturday but I did check in on things remotely. Rain might have reduced crowd size somewhat but there was still a good turnout and there was never any thought of canceling the festival’s main event, the Meltdown Throwdown, because of the rain. I was surprised to learn that this timed competition between two teams of carvers was being streamed live for the first time. The teams carve in three ten-minute segments. The screen captures are from the beginning of the second and third segments and after it is all over. The winner, selected by audience volume, was the iguana from Team Ice with a tongue carved separately and attached in the final moments. The guitar on Team Fire’s rocker was also a separately carved attachment. A second guitar was smashed in dramatic Pete Townsend fashion as time expired

Book Review
The Pioneers
David McCullough

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For the second time ever, I’m reviewing a book that was a recent “#1 New York Times Best Seller”. That’s two more than I anticipated when I started doing reviews on this blog. This one, like the other one (The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles), will be pretty shallow. There are plenty of reviews out there from high-profile professionals and an author with two Pulitzers to his credit does not really need a lot of praise from me. McCullough’s forte was (he died Aug 7, 2022) biographies (his Pulitzer winners were Truman and John Adams), and The Pioneers tells the story of the white man’s take over of Ohio through streamlined biographies of the men who led it. They are not household names like Truman or Adams. A few, such as Putnam and Cutler, might be household names in select Ohio households, but most would be recognized only by fairly serious students of regional history. The book is not organized around individual biographies. The tale of early Northwest Territory settlement is told chronologically with the lives of key figures smoothly embedded and expanded forward or backward or both without much interference with the flow of time.

The Pioneers was recommended to me by multiple sources both in print and in person. The personal recommendations were made by people familiar with my interest in “local” history. The book is centered on Marietta, the first settlement in the territory. Despite it being on the far side of Ohio from where I live, it is a place I have visited many times. I recognized the names Putnam and Cutler and a few others but I knew just the basics about any of them. Instead of writing what I’ve already noted is unneeded praise, I’m just going to identify a few of the things this book taught me about my own extended neighborhood. 

I knew that Marietta had been named after Queen Marie Antoinette but I did not know why. From McCullough, I learned that the Revolutionary War veterans who named the town felt that she was more influential than anyone in getting France to support the revolutionaries.

In 1800, a square-rigged brig sailed from Marietta down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans. Less than a dozen years later, in 1811, the first steamboat on the river traveled from Pittsburgh to New  Orleans, with a stop in Marietta, in an astonishing fourteen days.

Even though the ordinance establishing the Northwest Territory seemed to rule it out, there was a proposal during the writing of the Ohio Constitution to permit slavery up to 35 years of age for males and 25 years of age for females. It failed by one vote.

There are many more, of course, and I believe that almost everything in The Pioneers is true. I had to slip that “almost” in there because I did discover one goof in the book. McCullough correctly writes that the Shawnee chief Tecumseh was killed in October 1813 by forces commanded by William Henry Harrison. He incorrectly states that this occurred “in Ohio’s northwestern corner”. The correct location is Ontario, Canada, at the Battle of the Thames.

I certainly don’t want to end this on a negative tone so I guess I’ll offer some praise after all. Anyone claiming to know anything at all about Cincinnati history should be able to tell how Mount Ida was changed to Mount Adams to honor John Quincy Adams following his trip to the city to dedicate the observatory there. McCullough tells of that trip and of Adams’ stop in Marietta during his return to Washington. A few residents of Marietta, including Ephraim Cutler, accompanied the former president from there to Pittsburgh. McCullough’s reporting provides a warm and personal view of Adams that I quite appreciated.

The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, David McCullough, Simon & Schuster (May 5, 2020), 6 x 9.25 inches, 452 pages, ISBN 978-1501168703
Available through Amazon.

A Bigger Rear View

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My parents would be absolutely appalled to see something like this. It’s my Google Maps Timeline which I was reminded of in an email about a week ago. Seeing a record of their travels that they did not create would have truly alarmed my parents. They, and most of their generation, guarded their privacy to the nth degree. Subsequent generations, including mine, have each been a little less guarded than the one before. In at least one regard, I am less protective of my privacy than many of my own generation. That, of course, would be travel. A guy with a website that exists primarily to tell people about his road trips is obviously not going to be upset that somebody knows about them. I’m much more likely to be upset that more people don’t.

For any that are appalled or upset or even a little uncomfortable, please note that maintaining the timeline is enabled by a Google account setting called Location History. The email that reminded me of its existence also reminded me that I “can view, edit, and delete this data anytime in Timeline.” I cannot speak to how well disabling the feature or deleting the data works because I’m not interested in either.

The map above includes all data from when Google Maps started watching me sometime in 2014. A drop-down list goes back to 2010 but 2014 seems to be the first year with any data recorded. There are also drop-downs for month and day for drilling down to some details.

Here are the maps for all of 2014, the month of December, and Christmas Eve when I drove from Augusta, GA, to Savannah, GA. At the day level, the route and most stops are shown.

This post was triggered by that Google Maps reminder email, of course, but also by the fact that this blog’s 2023 in the Rear View post was fresh in my mind. There is another view of 2023 at the right.

Clearly, all of my travel that Google Maps knows about (i.e., mid-2014 and later) was in North America. To be honest, that’s also true of nearly all of my travel before that but there were a few exceptions. Tripadvisor is a service I joined in 2005. It provides a map of contributions and also allows direct entry of locations for the map. I’m including the Tripadvisor map for an even bigger look in the rear view. Some of the stuff on that map is from the last century.

I had this post completed and scheduled when an online discussion reminded me of yet another view of my travels. The image at right is my current map of U.S. counties visited from the MobRule website. I included the May 1, 2017 version in the book published after I visited my 50th state (“50 @ 70“). The current count is 1887 of 3144 or 60%. I failed to record those details about the 2017 map so cannot quantify travels since then but I think the only readily noticeable change between the two maps is a few more shaded areas in the northwest. As I said in 2017, maps like these are extremely misleading in terms of territory covered. Visiting New York County in New York State (the smallest on the mainland) let me shade in less than 23 square miles of area. I got to shade in just under 145,900 square miles when I visited Yukon-Koyukuk County in Alaska.

MobRule also supports tracking county equivalents in Canada, Mexico, Great Britain, and U.S. Territories. The only one of these I use is Canada where I have accumulated just 62 of 669 or 8.5%. Overlaying these counts on Google Maps is supported but zooming seems to lose the data. Open Street Map is also supported and does not have this problem. The map at left is from Open Street View.

Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption

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Some things stay on my to-do list for a long time because they are far away or expensive or have very restricted access. Others have none of these issues but still hang around because, I’m guessing, they don’t really fire up my curiosity. Apparently, the Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption is in that latter category. It is about twenty miles from my current residence and some places I’ve lived have been even closer, it is free, and is usually open to visitors from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM, Monday through Friday. I have heard about the place and how stunning it is for decades but Thursday was the first time I’ve been inside. It was, in fact, the first time I’ve stopped to look at the outside. Not sufficiently curious I suppose. It is not a duplicate or even an attempted replica of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. There are many similarities but there are also differences. The most common phrase used when describing the Kentucky church’s connection to the church in France is “inspired by”. Make that “heavily inspired by”.  

Construction started in 1895 and was suspended, they say, in 1915. I doubt anyone is too surprised to hear that the place has not really been frozen since then. Installation of the numerous, immense, and famous stained-glass windows occurred before, during, and after World War I. Most of the fantastic wood carving was done after World War II. Twenty-four statues of saints were added to the front of the building in 2021. At least one news article said that the cathedral was now complete as the statues were the final piece of what Bishop Camillus Paul Maes, who got this whole project rolling, envisioned. I had no idea whom I was photographing but have since found a spotter’s guide that identifies the fellows in the photo as Pope Pius X, Patrick, Benedict, and Joseph.

Perhaps the single most eye-catching thing in a building filled with eye-catchers is the stained-glass window in the north transept. At 67 feet tall and 24 feet wide, calling it the Great Window is certainly justified. It is the largest in the western hemisphere and second largest in the world. It depicts the Council of Ephesus held in 431 AD. It is even pretty impressive from the other side.

The south transept holds the 1932 Wicks pipe organ and a 26-foot rose window. I’ve included a better view of the organ and a different view of the window. It looks pretty good on the outside too.

The Chapel of St. Joseph contains some of the carved wood I mentioned and there is more behind the Sanctuary.

A bit farther beyond the Sanctuary is the St. Paul Relic Shrine. Most of the relics are centuries old, of course, but the shrine itself was dedicated in August of 2021 so is quite new. Some of the reliquaries are even newer. The reliquary holding the carpal bones of St Paul the Apostle is one of two described as “recently commissioned ” in an article dated March 4, 2023.

In theory, I could have stayed until 3:00 but an award ceremony for students from Covington Latin School was scheduled for 2:00, and as the hour approached a small but increasing number of pews became occupied. I find taking pictures inside an active church to always be a bit uncomfortable and doing it with an audience even more so. With more haste than was truly necessary, I snapped photos of the 1859 Schwab organ, the Duveneck murals, and one of the Stations of the Cross mosaics, signed the guest book, and exited the building just as the bulk of the students were starting up the ramp to the door.

As I headed to my car, I realized that I had not photographed one thing that I had intended to. Not long after I entered the cathedral I had a wonderful conversation with a volunteer named Roger. As we talked about modern additions like the wood carvings and the new statues on the front of the building, he pointed out a painting hanging near the Duveneck murals and told me that it was 500 (or maybe 400) years old but had been hanging there for just a couple of months. I eyed it from afar but forgot it when I was in the area. I also missed photographing the oft-mentioned gargoyles atop the building. That was not an oversight. The terra cotta figures were removed early last year and will be replaced by new ones cast the old-fashioned way. There was a ceremony when the saint statues were added so maybe there will be one when the gargoyles return. If there is, I might attend. I probably would not have attended the one for the statues even if I’d known about it. As Billy Joel sort of said, “I’d rather laugh with the gargoyles than cry with the saints”.