Friday, August 29, 2008

Gustav sucks!

How things change in a few days. Long story short, we were going to get all the rain from Gustav if we continued the direction we were going, or at least we would have to drive home through it if Faye is any representation. So, we decided to head home, in a hurry. We are in Little Rock tonight, and will drive 460 miles tomorrow to get home. No reason to stop short of that, all the RV spots are taken, either from Labor Day, or from people fleeing Gustav. We have to leave this RV camp (KOA) tomorrow, because they are then booked solid with people from Lousianna.

We may get home just in time to leave again, but at least I could board up the house and pick up my generators (probably need them). We will finish this Blog later when things settle down a bit.

Dutch and Sandy

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

HORSES!

We stayed in Ohio two nights. The trees were actually starting to turn fall colors… in August! There were several places where this was evident.

Then we went to Kentucky. We found and stayed in the Kentucky Horse Park RV Park in Lexington, KY, which is the center of the universe in the US for horse breeding and racing. It was right beside the facility that Kentucky built in the late 70’s to show off and promote everything “horse”. It has the statue and grave of Man-O-War. We had actually visited this statue in the early 70’s when it was just in a small park. It is now surrounded by about 1,000 acres of a working horse farm/ranch/museums/tourist stuff. There are lots of things to see, and I think we saw it all. There are facilities for events and competitions that are quite extensive. There was a hunter/jumper competition going on, but we were too pooped to go see it.

The pictures below show a lot of horses. All the horses seemed to love the attention of the spectators. One picture shows a 2,000 pound draft horse interacting with an 80 pound small boy. Most of the pictures are of either different breeds of horses, or of thoroughbreds that are past champions. The pictures of horses being posed in an indoor ring are the past champions. I won’t even try to identify them all. The pictures shown in an outdoor ring are mostly breed varieties, with riders in costume of the countries that they came from originally. In one group, the black horse with the rider dressed in Spanish clothes is an Andalusian. There is a man riding a black that is a Friesian.

We are currently located in a small park about 50 miles south of Lexington, Kentucky, waiting for the rain of Faye to go away. We plan to drive south and spend some time in the Pigeon Forge, Tennessee area. When we called for reservations for this weekend, one lady kindly laughed. We had forgotten that this was Labor Day weekend! We will go there after the holiday and see some shows, etc. Yes, I know…. We are going directly back into even LARGER hills! ….mountains even! I expect we will be on the Natchez Trace in about 10 days, and then to home. We have gone about 5,000 miles so far, and expect it will be close to 7,000 by the time we get home. We are starting to look forward to coming home, but not to the heat. We are currently in temps in the mid 80’s, but part of that is lower than normal here we are told.

Dutch and Sandy

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Thursday, August 21, 2008

Pennsylvania and West Virginia

OK, we are tired of hills. We are REALLY tired of hills! The pictures below show some of the topography that we passed through in the last few days. The really steep and twisty roads have no pictures because we were busy hanging on to the truck, although Sandy did get some video that is good. The other pictures are of a small pond where we are camped currently. It is deep, clear, and full of large bass, catfish, and crappie (so the owner tells us). I saw a few, caught none.

The last few days have been….. memorable! Two camps ago, we parked in an RV park by backing in at an angle into a grass site. We backed in slightly downhill. When we wanted to leave the next day, we had to pull out….. yes, UP-hill, on wet grass (dew). When the tires started spinning, we used the orange plastic leveling blocks to put under the tires and in front of them to get traction. It worked! …for about 4 feet. We then moved them in front of the rear tires again, and got another 4 feet. Then we hit a slightly more uphill section, and got zero feet. We had to go about 30 feet more to get out. I was about to call for a tractor to pull us out when Sandy noticed that the guy parked below us had left. She suggested BACKING out. Of course, it worked perfectly!

Next camp, we parked in a very level spot with packed gravel (can’t fool me twice!). When we got up, no power! … but there were rabbits everywhere! Black ones! We noticed them when we drove into this park. They were everywhere, calmly nibbling grass. One guy had about 50 of them around him because he was feeding them something. When we got up early the next morning (after Sandy noticed that the power had gone out sometime in the night), we opened the door and about 10 bunnies ran towards us… I guess they thought we would feed them! FAT CHANCE OF THAT!!! After they finished the carrots we gave them, we went ahead and hooked up and left… about 6:30 am.

The next camp we headed for was in the middle of some very tall hills in northern West Virginia…. At least I think so, because we couldn’t find it! We turned up the correct road that was indicated by the GPS… and it wasn’t the park. It was, however, a very steep, very narrow, very gravely road up a hill up to a housing area. I was committed, and couldn’t back out because the road behind us was too narrow and totally blind to traffic, with ditches on both sides. When I finally got to the top, after some extremely discouraging tire slippage on the gravel, I got out to consider what to do next. The bottom had a culvert drop off on the left side, and the right side had large potholes. I walked down the drive and ascertained that I could not make a left turn. The road we had turned off of was a single lane blacktop. Now understand, when I say single lane, I don’t mean single lane each direction. I thought I could make a right hand turn if I did it “just right”. I turned around by backing into a house driveway/front yard. We went back down the gravel hill, and as I prepared to turn right a pick up truck was preparing to turn onto the gravel road I was on. He gave us an odd look but simply drove just past the entrance and stopped, allowing us to leave. Needless to say, my attention was drawn to the ditch on the right and I hoped I could make the turn without getting stuck in that ditch. It worked. Now we were on the narrow blacktop, headed back to the “highway” that was itself, extremely narrow, curvy, had no shoulder, and was heavily traveled by semis going in both directions. Our nerves were a little shot. Sandy called me her “hero”. I felt I need to clean my shorts.

Then we got here. We are in West Virginia. We went 320 miles in the hills, chasing elusive RV parks on Tuesday. I took Wednesday off. Tomorrow we go into Ohio. OK, we didn’t do an exhaustive look-see in West VA, but like I said earlier… we are tired of hills. I am afraid that tomorrow isn’t going to be much better though. We will keep in touch the best we can as WiFi becomes available to us.

By the way, I wrote this whole, long documentary for today directly into the blog. When I went to post it, I was informed that the WiFi had dropped us, and I lost it all. This post was done in Word first and posted by cut and paste the next morning. Like I said earlier… fool me once…

Dutch and Sandy

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Corning NY & Corning Glass Works Museum

We are still in beautiful hills around Corning, New York. We toured the Corning Glass Works in Corning, NY yesterday. The museum is absolutely huge with thousands of items of historical glass, some as old as 3500 years. The collection is astonishing, and in the end was overwhelming. I didn’t even try to capture a photo record of the historical pieces, and only took photos of things that had the WOW factor for me. The photos below are of objects all done with just glass, no paint or stains. The plates that look like cameos are in fact raised glass, not artificially colored. I don’t know how they did it. There was a large section of the museum dedicated to the different colors that were predominant in history, especially reds and greens.

There is a series of pictures below that are of an all glass chess set. The chess pieces are made in the form of Roman Catholic vs Jewish figures. They are all different and the set is amusing to look at, as it is made in the form of caricatures, not meant to be realistic. However, the plaque under it said that each figure is wearing accurate and appropriate dress for the rank of each figure. The factory also had a very large sales shop where you could spend as much for artistic pieces as you wanted to. Sandy got some very nice Christmas tree ornaments that were hand made in glass.

After we wore ourselves out there, we took a trolley downtown to the artist district and saw a lot more glass for sale in the windows. Then we got some ice cream in a historical ice cream shop, went home, and made dinner (stew and fresh bread) in Dutch ovens. At 4:00 in the afternoon, it was 72 degrees outside and breezy. The weather forecast for the next few days here shows a heat wave is coming, with highs in the low 80’s and lows in the mid 50’s. I guess we’ll just have to suck it up and bear it! ;^) Today, I am going to play golf in a State Park nearby. I am waiting for it to warm up a little and for some dew to dry off a little.

Dutch



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Corning Pictures