The rest of the trip

The remnants of tropical storm Lee interfered with my plans this week.

I'm sure Shenandoah National Park is beautiful and I will go back and see it sometime soon.  However, when it's misty and rainy there is not much to see there.  Overlooks are wonderful, but not so much when you're staring into the fog/clouds.  The few pictures I took there pretty much tell the story.

So I spent a slow day in Charlottesville reading and then  hung out with friends in the evening. It was good to see Alison, Eric and Amy again.  I've known them for a long time now.  

Then on Wednesday I went to Monticello.  Thomas Jefferson was amazing and definitely a gadget hound:  He had a dumbwaiter installed in the dining room just for wine!  A brilliant idea I think when the wine cellar is directly underneath the dining room.  He also used a mechanical copying device, where you write with an ink pen and the device automatically copies what you're writing with another ink pen.  Since he wrote 19000 letters in his life and wanted to keep a copy of every one of them, I guess that's the way to go.   These are only a couple of things he experimented with.  There are many more examples.  From innovative beer and wine making to being the self-educated architect of Monticello.

Monticello is interesting, but what was really interesting was to learn more about Jefferson.  It's fascinating to see the results of a lifetime of work by a very smart and intellectually curious man, who recorded most of what he was thinking and curious about.  And I'm not even talking about his political achievements:  Declaration of Independence, Virginia Constitution, two terms as President, one term as Vice President, Secretary of State and Ambassador to France for 5 years.  Amazing.

I took a few pictures.  The Monticello website has much better ones.  Again, low hanging clouds obstructed the views, which I'm sure are beautiful up there.

So when the weather on Thursday morning was still not conducive to going to see the Shenandoah Valley, I decided to head home.  It was a good trip.  I saw some beautiful country that I hadn't seen before, saw some friends I hadn't spent time with in a while and even really left the US for a few days by going to Quebec. 

After 13 days on the road and 3000 miles, it's very nice to be back home.

Reflections on a zero day

I'm glad I visited Quebec.  It was more touristy than I liked, but the old city is a very pretty place.

I left to travel back via the "Chemin du Roi".  This is a very old road  (it claims to be the oldest highway in North America).  It now largely follows a modern road (2 lane ---a number of expressways run parallel to it) from Quebec to Montreal.  The road is much more interesting than the expressway I drove in on.  Beautiful vista's look out over the St Lawrence River, and you can detour off the modern road and visit some really old villages.  Many of the houses are in the 17th and 18th century style and there are some that are  indeed from that era.  All in all, a pleasant trip back from Quebec. 

During all this driving in the province of Quebec, I listened to a lot of radio(French spoken on the radio is a little easier to understand than the street French in Quebec City).  It's interesting that, although the topic doesn't seem to come up much in the rest of the world, the Quebecois  on a daily basis still discuss separation from Canada. At least on the radio.  It didn't help that the current Prime Minister of Canada just appointed a new communications director who doesn't speak French.  It left the Quebecois pretty mad.

In the spirit of not driving 500 miles days anymore, I stopped in Plattsburgh, NY and ate at a Tibetan Restaurant.  What a Tibetan Restaurant is doing in Plattsburgh  is a little unclear, but since I ate arguably the best Thai meal I ever had in Galway, Ireland, I know longer ask those questions much.  The meal was quite delicious.

So now I'm back in the Catskills.  I got some laundry done, bought a proper cable so I can play music in my car using the radio and I'm just lying around reading.  This is pleasant down day.  It's hazy, hot and muggy out, so no pictures.

Tomorrow I head toward the Shenandoah Valley, which I'll take some time to really explore on Tuesday.  Then I'll visit Monticello and explore Thomas Jefferson's legacy  on Wednesday.  Then I'll visit with some friends in Charlottesville and head home.

Through the Adirondacks to Quebec

Another hard day of driving.  I made it to Quebec City but I'm going to stop doing 400-500 mile days and break things up a bit.    First the drive:  It was all right in the beginning as I drove out of the beautiful Catskills.  Then it got kind of boring past Albany and then I hit the Adirondacks.  Isolation on a grand scale up there.  It seems to go on forever. Beautiful country though.  I took a couple of pictures but they didn't come out very well.  I'm abandoing my camera and use my phone instead.  I seem to be getting better shots from it and I have it on me anyway.  Anyway, after the Adirondacks your drive another 70 miles or so and then you hit Canada.  That 75 miles is flat and boring and so was the next 3 1/2 hours from the border to Quebec.

Quebec is a little like Monmartre and a little like Amsterdam.  Like Montmartre it has many hills and stairs and little windy alley ways.  Also there are artist selling their work from stalls in these little streets.  But it is older than Montmartre (Quebec was founded in 1608) and in that respect it reminds me of Amterdam.  It's also a port city. 

People speak French here and sometimes I even manage to understand them.  Sometimes they understand me too.  The accent is really different from the French I'm used to hearing in Paris and the Provence.  My French is limited under the best of circumstances, but this accent makes it more difficult.

I'm staying in a Hotel just outside of "Vieux Quebec", since the hotels within the walls are very expensive.  The hotel is OK, still kind of expensive, but not quite as bad.  In general I find this an expensive city.  The smallest meal ends up costing $15-$20 (the US and Canadian dollars are basically at par at the moment),  Reasonably nice hotels are minimally in the $120-$200 range.  A good meal with wine (I had one last night) is well over $100.

But the hotel is a 5 minute walk from the "Ecolobus".  It is sort of like the Monmartrebus, which is a little bus that takes you all around Montmartre for a Euro or two.  This one takes you all the way around the old city for one dollar.  People tell me that when they started this service, these were smaller electric buses.  Hence "eco" in the name.  Apparently these electric buses broke down a lot (perhaps because of the extra strain caused by all those hills?) and so the city got rid of them and they now run the route with regular buses.  Driving in the old city makes no sense.  Just like in Amsterdam or in Monmartre.

The city was a French colony from its founding in 1608 to 1760 or so and then the British defeated the French in a bloody battle and it became a British colony.  So the oldest parts of the city (in the lower part by the river) have more of a French feel to them whereas the upper parts are more British.  The Brtis stationed armies here. Some of these were outsourced armies:  Irish, Scottish, Welsh,  German and Flemish.  Each army had to have their church of course and so this city has a LOT of churches and by far not all of them are Catholic (which you would expect in this French speaking part of the world).  Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran what have you is all represented.

I'll tell more later.  Here are some pictures. You might need to enlarge them to get the proper effects.

This is looking at the Adirondacks

Looking out from the upper

part of the city over the St Lawrence River

They claim the Hotel Frontenac is the

most photographed Hotel in the World

An odd sculpture

in the middle of the city

Catskills..

After a hard day of driving, I'm finally in the Catskills...the first of my tentative destinations.
What beautiful  country this is.  Lush green after a summer of plenty of rain and Irene just a day or two past.  And especially spectacular views.  My limited ability to capture this on a camera doesn't do justice to this country.  I'll include some pictures here just because I took them.  But they're not great.

The big joy of being here is that I get to hang out with my friend Annika.  We've been meeting up in many places: We met in Ann Arbor and traveled to and from Chicago where we've looked each other up a number of times.  We even met up in Amsterdam for a few days and  now in Delhi, NY.  It's great to see that she's doing well after a really tough time. 

I got there on Sunday night, and on Monday we went driving around.  No particular destination, other than looking at the beatiful country on a gorgeous sunny and cool day.  Villages and towns around here like to claim their name to fame on their signs:   We went through Bainbridge, NY that said it is "the home of Elmers Glue".  The next town over claimed to have "the best tasting water in New York State" while Unadilla, NY has signs all over the village saying it is home to "Boy Scout Troop # 1" in the US.  Well, we didn't sniff the glue or taste the water and we didn't see any of the Boy Souts.  We did notice (because we were hungry) that we couldn't find any eatery that appealed to us. 

I've been coming to upstate NY for a long time, but the latest recession seems to have done away with they two estavblishments any village there was able to sustain:  A Diner and a Bar.   Many of those towns, pretty as they are, don't seem to be able to support those anymore.  A said state of affairs if you ask me.  We then decided not to go visit the Baseball Hall of Fame, although Cooperstown, which houses that fine Hall, is not too far away.

All in all, a wonderful day, not because of what we did, but because we got to hang out without any particular agenda.

The pictures are around the house of a friend of Annika's and where she stays a lot.  It's walls are made of straw and it's structure is one of a pole barn.  It's a very nice place. It looks out at a mountain and in the back is a meadow with horses.  The horses were too far away to see on the picture.

Staunton, VA

So after some delay, I finally set off on my trip on Sunday August 28th. Beautiful day and a beautiful drive, through Northern NC and South West VA.  I stopped for the night in Staunton, VA.

This is a pretty town.  it's very hilly, and there are lots of old, well maintained buildings and houses. There is also a College in the middle of town, with gorgeous old trees.  On a Sunday night there wasn't much to do.
After some dinner at a local Sushi restaurant, I had a beer before turning in and heard an interesting story:

This area used to be called Asylum and apparently you can still find that name on old maps.  There was an old-fashioned insane asylum here at least through the beginning of the 20th century.  Below is a picture of the main builidng.  It's now all boarded up. (By the way, the pictures don't do justice to the beauty of the landscape here).

Later in the 20th Century one of the State Universities took over the Asylum and it was then named a hospital for the mentally impaired.  Eventually many of the patients were released into the community. With limited skill sets and income, many of them ended up in the local flop house downtown. 

Then, a number of years ago, that flophouse was bought to be renovated and turned into a swank downtown hotel.  The new owners gave the occupants $6000 and a scooter to get them to leave the hotel.   Why a scooter is not revealed in this story.

"So now", as the local bartender who told me this story said, "we have a bunch of people who are quite crazy and run around on scooters".  Like the lady who will always tell you, as a first sentence, that she has lost her umbrella. Or the guy who will always tell you that he's too busy to talk to you now, but please, could he get back to you later.  We've all met people like that, but on scooters?  That's pretty odd.

Overall a good day driving through gorgeous country.  I'm vaguely thinking of abandoning the Quebec idea and coming back down here to spend some time exploring the Shenandoa Valley and Southwestern VA. We'll see.

 

New and worrisone things to consider.

I'm planning to visit a friend who lives in the Catskills in New York on this road trip.  It's a little tricky since she has to do some business elsewhere and doesn't know yet when she's going to be at home exactly.  But that's what a road trip is about: keeping your options open and being able to change plans quickly and easily.  If she isn't there, I'll keep going to Quebec (city), hang out there for a few days and then catch my friend on the way back.

All this was fine until I looked at the predicted path of Hurricane Irene.  I don't usually worry much about hurricanes.  After all, Charlotte, NC is several hundred miles from the ocean.  The fall-out of hurricanes is usually torrential rain for a couple of days, but that's all.  However, with my current travel plans, I'd be following that torrential rain all the way to the Catskills and on to Quebec.  Road trip or not, driving 1300 miles in the pouring rain is not my idea of a vacation.  Of course the predictions aren't always accurate, especially at this stage of the hurricane, but methinks it's time to have an alternative destination ready. Especially for next week.

The other problem with this hurricane is that, if it slams into the NC coast,  it may cause 60-75 mile/hr winds here in Charlotte.  I live on the 4th floor and I have big windows. I'm afraid at least one of those windows may not survive that sort of winds.  It would be a big mess if that happened, but it would be worse when I'm hundreds of miles away.

Yesterday I experienced my first earthquake here.  The whole building rattled and shook and, had it lasted longer, my TV would have crashed to the floor.  Now I have to worry about a hurricane.

It seems like we live in interesting times.


Follow up on Monday August 29th:  Fortunately, the hurricane was not an issue in Charlotte.  And its path was not such that much rain is on my way.  I may see some flooding in the Catskills, but we'll see.

Planning a road trip

It's been quite a few years since the workload allowed me to take 2 weeks off.  American business culture, for some reason, frowns on people taking off more than a week or 10 days.  It's a strange custom.  Capitalism seems alive and well in Europe where taking a month off is considered normal. 
But when some expected work was pushed back 6 weeks, my manager agreed (bless him..he's a great guy) that this would be a good time to take two weeks to re-charge the batteries.  When I return it will be very busy for the foreseeable future.
So what to do with my precious time off?  I considered Europe, but that's more than I want to spend:  Airfare is in the stratosphere at the moment and the Euro is up there too.  Besides, in order to see the people I'd like to see, I have to do a lot of running around on trains, planes and automobiles (actually, not much in automobiles, but a lot in trains and planes). I want to do something different.
So I decided to remain on this side of the Atlantic and take a road trip. My trusted car and I will visit some places I haven't been to, see some friends I haven't seen in a while and leave a lot of unstructured time to make last-minute decisions about the next destination.  It's been a really, really, long time since I've taken that kind of trip so I look forward to it.  And I'll write this blog about it. Maybe others will find it interesting to read, maybe not.  That doesn't matter. I will find it interesting to write it.  I've never really done that. It's time for doing something new.