Category: Personal

We left Sandusky and headed West to Indiana.  We’ve traveled through Gary many times between home and Mark, IL, as a kid, and I never knew this even existed.  On the Southern-most end of Lake Michigan is a national park and a state park preserving some natural wetlands and sand dunes.

We hiked through the Cowles Bog area.  The bugs weren’t too bad.  We hiked through deep sand, up and down steep dunes, so the four-mile hike was a bit strenuous.  We saw a couple of blue heron in the marsh, but I wasn’t quick enough with my camera.

Eventually, after a number of steep climbs, we reached the shore of Lake Michigan.  The water was surprisingly warm.  We spent a relaxing hour in the water, wading out some distance to a  sand bar, and playing frisbee.

This view gives you some idea of how steep the dunes were near the water’s edge.  The largest of these sand dunes is Mt. Baldy.  These dunes normally move about four feet a year, but because of tourists trampling the delicate grasses that hold the dunes, Mt. Baldy is moving 26 feet a year.

They have most of Mt. Baldy roped off.  Tourists are supposed to stay on marked trails.  You can see the footprints here where people have ignored the signs.  The park ranger said each footprint will result in the movement of a ton of sand.  In a year or two they expect the parking lot and bath house to be covered over with sand.  You can see how the sands have just about covered some trees in this photo.

It was a relatively strenuous day, but we had fun.

We spent the second day of our vacation at Cedar Point amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio.  I hadn’t been to Cedar Point if almost 30 years.  When we were kids Cedar Point seemed to be the place you went if you couldn’t go somewhere better.  Over the years, I’ve seen Cedar Point mentioned a number of times on the Discovery Channel for having the best, fastest, highest, or some other -est roller coaster in the world.

Both of you who read my blog may remember me ranting a bit about Six Flags New England and how disappointed I was.  That’s why we scheduled Cedar Point early in the vacation — so if it was bad, it wouldn’t be the culminating event of this year’s vacation.  I told Candy before we started that this was the part of the trip I was least looking forward to.  We really had a good time.  The roller coasters were fun.  The park was immaculately clean.  The food was terrific and reasonably priced.  The workers were pleasant and all spoke English.  Even the patrons were largely well behaved.

For the week of Fourth of July, Cedar Point was giving free admission to active duty military and their families.  That was a very pleasant surprise.  Since we had the admission money budgeted, we decided to use it pay for Fastlane  passes for all of us.  That meant we got to move to the head of the line for most rides.  As a result we rode everything we wanted before the bad weather rolled in — more on that later.

I remember the Corkscrew, Gemini, and Blue Streak being the roller coasters of choice.  At one point they said that the Corkscrew was built in 1976.  Wow, did I feel old.  These rides are now sort of passé, replaced by Millennium Force (the number one steel coaster in the world several years running), Mean Streak (which might be the  best wooden roller coaster I’ve ever ridden), and others.

Halfway through riding the Mean Streak wooden roller coaster, Candy discovered that her glasses were missing (from where she had been shoving them inside her shirt all day during rides).  She found them under her shirt, but when we got off the roller coaster, she realized that one of the lenses was missing.  We got right back on the ride.  Because it wasn’t crowded, we waited for the correct color train and got in the exact same seats.  She found her lens!  That’s what comes of clean living.

As we were getting off our last coaster for the day, a huge storm rolled through the area.  We took cover in a cookie shop — requiring us to spend some cash on giant cookies.  We just HAD to do it.  I have never been in an amusement park during hail (the size of grapes), so that was a unique experience.  After they made the decision to cancel the evening entertainment, we left the park about an hour before closing.  The bad weather only served to cut out the kids’ time to re-ride their favorite rides from earlier in the day; we had gone on everything once.

Cedar Point was a far superior experience to our visit to Six Flags New England last Summer.  It was a really nice second day of vacation.

 

We began this year’s vacation, by retrieving Sam.  She had spent the previous week camping in Sandusky at the KOA with her friend Emma and Emma’s family.  We got on the road Saturday heading West.  They got on the road Saturday heading East.  We met just off the Pennsylvania Turnpike near the Ohio border.

After picking up Sam, we continued Westward to Cleveland.  We stopped there to see the house where much of the shooting of A Christmas Story was filmed.  A fan of the movie bought the house on Ebay and restored it.  He also bought the house across the street and turned it into a museum.

He’s collected a couple of neat artifacts.  He’s also produce a pretty nice video.

Some of the items are not from the movie.  For instance, the leg lamp from the movie was thrown away after they broke it for that scene in the movie.  He has done a nice job of collecting like items, however.

He’s also done a really nice job restoring the kitchen and bathroom.

We all enjoyed the visit.  I’m not sure that I’d make it a destination, but if you’re passing through the area, it’s well worth a stop for 90 minutes or so.

After visiting the Christmas Story house, we continued to Sandusky.  As is our SOP, we stayed in a mom and pop hotel on the outskirts of town.  It was quaint and clean.  We also had time for a little putt-putt golf before hitting the sack.

Socks are only for bowling.

You never use an umbrella because the rain will be over in five minutes.

A good parking place has nothing to do with distance from the store, but everything to do with shade.

You can tell the difference between fire ant bites and mosquito bites.

Anything under 70 degrees is chilly.

You’ve driven through Yeehaw Junction.

You know that… no other grocery store can compare to Winn Dixie.

You know that anything under a Category 3 just isn’t worth waking up for.

You dread love bug season.

You are on a first name basis with the Hurricane list. They aren’t Hurricane Charley or Hurricane Frances. You know them as Andrew, Charley, Frances, Ivan, Jeanne, Wilma, Irene, Cheryl, Rita, Mary, Alison.

You know what a snowbird is and when they’ll leave!

You think a six-foot alligator is actually pretty average.

‘Down South’ means Key West .

Flip-flops are everyday wear.

Shoes are for business meetings and church, but you HAVE worn flip flops to church before.

You have a drawer full of bathing suits, and one sweatshirt.

You get annoyed at the tourists who feed seagulls.

A mountain is any hill 100 feet above sea level.

You know the four seasons really are: Hurricane season, love bug season, tourist season and summer.

You’ve hosted a hurricane party.

You can pronounce Okeechobee, Kissimmee, Withlacoochee, Thonotosassa and Micanopy.

You understand why it’s better to have a friend with a boat, than have a boat yourself.

You were 25 when you first met someone who couldn’t swim.

You’ve worn shorts and used the A/C on Christmas and New Years.

You recognize Miami-Dade as Northern Cuba.

It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press.

It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.

It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us freedom to demonstrate.

It is the soldier, not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial.

It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag.

~~ Father Denis Edward O’Brien, USMC

This is a picture we had taken on our vacation.  Some places that do these photos don’t put much heart into it.  This place was a great deal of fun.  The owner really made it an event.

Our second-to-last day of vacation was spent in Six Flags New England.  The kids really wanted to ride some “intense” roller coasters.  Six Flags New England had ten roller coasters, including one called “Bizarro,” which has been rated the number one steel roller coaster in the world for the last five or six years.  It was really excellent.

Some musings on amusement parks in general:

In Star Wars (before George Lucas produced crapisodes I-III) Obi Wan Kenobi says of Moss Isley, “A greater den of thieves and villainy you’ll not find in the galaxy.”  I have to say of amusement parks, “A greater collection of rude, uncouth, smelly, large, slutty, and inconsiderate people you’ll not find in the galaxy.”  I was amazed at the number of folks who just didn’t care how they looked or acted.  Wow!  I say again, wow.  At one point we were behind a woman who smelled so bad we thought we had passed a dumpster.

I enjoy roller coasters as much as I ever did; however, I find that I can’t ride them back to back to back any more without getting unpleasantly motion sick for the rest of the day.  I have to space them out.  At a “regular” amusement park, like a Six Flags, it’s all about roller coasters, things that drop you, or things that spin you.  There seem to be few other activities to pass time while waiting for my stomach to settle.  When I think of Walt Disney’s idea of a place where the whole family to play together, Six Flags  isn’t it unless you’ve got a stronger middle-age stomach than I apparently have any more.

Some impressions of Six Flags New England:

The Six Flags franchise does not live up to the standards of Busch, Disney, or Universal parks in almost every dimension.  When we first arrived at the park, a few minutes BEFORE opening, the bathrooms already reeked.  The workers were largely uncommunicative, unhelpful, and unhappy.  They did NOT portray an impression that they were happy to be there or that they cared if you were happy to be there.

Before lunch time, all the credit card machines and all but one of the ATMs in the park died.  They didn’t bother to put signs at the BEGINNING of the food lines to tell people they could only use cash.  I typically don’t travel with much cash and planned to put lunch on a card.  Surprise!  So most of my cash — including cash to pay all those east coast highway tolls to get home — went to lunch.  The good news was that you couldn’t get cash, because the ATMs were also down.  When I did find the ONE ATM in the park that worked, there was a $4 fee.  It seems to me that if you’re bone-headed enough to let all your credit card machines to fail on a Saturday at meal time during peak season, the least you could do for customer good will is waive or comp the ATM fees.  Nope.  Not these guys.  Not so much as an apology for the inconvenience.  So we’ve got a back up at check out from lunch that stretched all the way to Tarre Haute because the products of our degenerate educational system couldn’t total bills in their heads — or on paper — or make change without the machine performing simple arithmetic for them.  I even had one woman refuse to give me two quarters for five dimes so I could squash a penny for one of the kids unless I bought something first.  Apparently, they don’t teach their checkout people how to do a “no-sale” operation on their cash registers.

Everything was gouge, gouge, gouge.  There was a price to get in the park, an additional price to go to the head of the ride lines, and yet another price to sit in the front car of a roller coaster.  There were even rides that REQUIRED you to put all your gear into a locker — for a fee.

The food lacked selection, but at least it was crazy expensive.  I really don’t want to hear people complain about Disney prices.  Six Flags was at last as high, but the quality was poor, so we had that going for us.

Their processes for food service and getting people on and off rides was TERRIBLE.  They could certainly use some Lean Six Sigma analysis.  Actually the processes were so poor that two 12-year-old Justin Bieber fans could improve their systems with little analysis between commercial breaks of Hannah Montana.  For the wooden coasters in particular, getting people off and on took about three times longer than it needed to.

Six Flags Atlanta used to have some really tremendous live entertainment.  What little live entertainment existed at Six Flags New England was poor.  There were virtually no options for entertainment between roller coasters or for me to do while the kids were riding 9-G Twising, Spinning, Flipping, Nightmare Coaster of Doom for the fourth time.

They have a really nice attraction themed around Houdini.  It uses some illusions to give the impression that you are sitting in seats that are revolving around a room.  In fact, the seats don’t move; although, they do tilt forward and backward.  The illusion is aided by the fact that the walls move.  It was an interesting attraction.

Having said all that, Six Flags New England had some tremendous roller coasters.  In that regard, the day met the kids’ objective, and they had a great time.

We had done all the roller coasters and a few other rides/attractions by 2000.  We decided to leave the park early and go to Red Robin (which was right next to our hotel) for dinner.  The cost was a bit more than dinner in the park, but was better food.  After showering up and watching a couple of episodes of Johnny Quest, we hit the sack to prepare for our drive home.

We got up early on Sunday to beat some of the back-from-the-Jersey-Shroe crowd at all the toll booths along 95 and to get home by mid-day to unpack and relax a bit before going back to work on Monday.

It was a great vacation.  Since 99% of my Email is on classified networks I cannot access while on leave, it was relatively easy for me to forget about work for a change.  We’re beginning to think about next year’s vacation, which will likely include Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, perhaps Nebraska, and Montana to see Glacier National Park.

Back to work.  🙁

Today was a bit of a slow day, picture-wise.  My digital camera has been acting squirrelly lately.  Today it ate about half my pictures from the walk around Leffert’s Pond.  I’ve liked this Kodak; it’s been a good camera.  It looks like it’s days are numbered, however.  I don’t suppose digital cameras can even be repaired.

I began the day with a six-mile run, which seemed to be all uphill.  There WAS one stretch of a mile and half uphill that was pretty difficult.  We had a nice breakfast, featuring freshly made blueberry pancakes, at the hotel.  (Blueberries seem to be the only thing I like that’s actually good for me!)

Then we were off for a hike.

Near Mt. Killington is Leffert’s Pond.  It was a nice walk past lakes and streams.  At one point the trail split and we headed off in what we thought was the right direction.  (It turned out we WERE correct.)  The trail brought us through some marshy areas, which involved gingerly skirting the edges of morasses.  We had thought the hike was supposed to be “easy,” so we didn’t wear proper shoes.  Despite that, it was a very enjoyable hike.

It’s hard to beat these kinds of views!

After our walk around Leffert’s Pond, we headed to Pico Mountain ski resort.  They have an Alpine Slide, which is like a dry, warm bobsled ride.  You sit in little plastic sleds and then careen down the side of a mountain through fiberglass troughs at high speed with little control.  It’s great fun.  You take the ski lift to the top, where you grab a sled and slide down the mountain.  In addition Candy and the kids did a bungee cord trampoline thing, and we all played miniature golf.  After five or six runs down the mountain, we called it a day and headed down the highway to Connecticut to our hotel.  Tomorrow we’re going to spend the day at Six Flags New England.

We left Lincoln, NH, after a huge breakfast involving blueberry pancakes and blueberry syrup.  The weather was sunny and warm, so the views were terrific.

Our first stop was the factory tour for Cabot cheese.  The tour was minimalist, but we did get to see cheddar in the making and learn the difference between curds and whey.  Cabot is a farmers’ cooperative, so all the farmers who participate in the co-op get a share of the profits at the end of the year.  We also learned that more aging makes cheddar sharper.  Average, run-of-the-mill cheddar ages two to four months.  Extra sharp ages about twelve months.  Some of their more “select” cheese is actually aged in caves not far from the factory.  They had lots of cheeses to sample while awaiting the tour, and we walked away with quite a few blocks of the cheese.

We found this license plate very funny.  Look at the number: four!  Where have you ever seen a single-digit license plate?

There are two competing stories of how Vermont got its name.  The first claims that a Dr. Peters, saw Mount Killington and christened the area “verd mont” in 1763.  The second lore traces the name to a letter from a Dr. Young to friends in which he calls the area Vermont in 1777.  It seems to me that both could be true.

Our next stop was the Ben and Jerry’s factory tour.  We enjoyed the stop, but frankly we’ve been on much better factory tours.  The introductory movie was more about Ben and Jerry’s commitment to left-leaning ideas than it was about how ice cream is made.  The Blue Bell tour in Texas was a better tutorial on the production process.  After a small sample of ice cream at the end of the tour, we got back on the road.

Along route 100 and complete unmarked are the Moss Glen Falls.  We were looking for it but missed it the first time.  There was a pull off, but no marking whatsoever.  These are purported to be the “most photographed falls” in Vermont.  Given the single-digit license plate number and the fact that the falls are unmarked, I’m not sure what would constitute the “most photographed.”  In any event, the falls were quite spectacular and were in fact two sets of falls 50 feet apart from each other.

We took a detour off the scenic highway into the Green Mountain National Forest to see the Texas Falls.  When we first approached the falls, they were mostly hidden, so they didn’t look like much.  As we got closer, however, the crevasse cut through the rock seemed to open up, revealing their full extent.

We were standing on a walking bridge to take these pictures.  Interestingly, just on the down-stream side of the bridge, we could see the rock in the picture below.  Look how the falling water has cut this nearly circular path through the rock.

Vermont seems a lot more “blue,” leftist, Commie, and Hippie than I expected.  This is general impression based on the bumper stickers and signs I have seen hanging around.  I would have expected a place involved in so much hunting, fishing, and agriculture to be more conservative.  (On the other hand, New Hampshire seems more conservative than I expected.)  My buddy Mark, who grew up in Vermont, said it wasn’t like this in the past, but he seemed to validate my impression of the current state of affairs, commenting that Vermont is becoming a “welfare state.”

We stayed for the night near Mount Killington.  This is a ski resort area, so in August, it seems pretty dead.  We ate dinner at an Irish pub and came back to the room to finish a game of Phase 10 that we started yesterday.  I won, which made Sam pout, since Phase 10 is her game.

Tomorrow we’ll be doing a couple of hikes and then heading to Massachusetts, where we’ll be going to a Six Flags.  Our vacation is drawing to a close, which is sad.