Duniway Park expedition

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It occurred to me recently that I'd never done a post about SW Portland's Duniway Park even though it's more or less in my neighborhood, on Barbur just outside I-405. I figured I could rectify that, since had a few photos of the park lying around, and more importantly the library's Oregonian database to rifle through. The park's best known today for its running track, but there's more to it than that, and the area has an interesting history.

Suppose you were standing at the Duniway Park track and were transported a century back in time to the year 1913, possibly thanks to a new Nike shoe with a flux capacitor in the heel. You would recognize absolutely nothing about the area. You'd also fall a substantial distance, and you wouldn't like what you landed in.

The present-day park is laid out as couple of flat terraces with a steep slope between them: The lower one containing the main running track, and the upper one another running course, some picnic facilities, and the park's lilac garden. The ground drops steeply again on the other side of Barbur. (The adjacent ivy-choked forest is also part of the park, but it's not the interesting part for our purposes here.) West of the park along Sam Jackson Park Road is a canyon formed by Marquam Creek, which flows down out of the West Hills and into a pipe, flowing deep under Duniway Park and on to the Willamette River. Looking around today's park, there's nothing to suggest there was ever a creek here.

It's hard to imagine this now, but Duniway Park was once Marquam Gulch, a steep gully at the south edge of downtown Portland. A high railroad trestle crossed the gulch at 4th Avenue, where today's Barbur Boulevard now runs. Like much of South Portland in those days, Marquam Gulch was a poor Italian and Jewish immigrant neighborhood, with little houses clinging to the sides of the gulch. It also served as a municipal garbage dump, of an unclear degree of officialness. It's unclear whether it was a neighborhood first and then a city dump, or vice versa, or both at the same time, which I can't rule out considering the time period. Presumably there's still a layer of century-old garbage down there somewhere, preserved for future archeologists.

A few links about the bad old days of Marquam Gulch:

• An Oregon Historical Society page about immigrant groups in the early 20th century. I'm always leery of accounts that generalize "The Russian Jews did X, while the Italians did Y", but it's an interesting article nonetheless.
• A Portland Police Museum account of a 1907 homicide case gives a sense of what the Marquam Gulch area was like at the time. The page includes an 1885 photograph showing the old 4th Street Bridge, which carried pedestrians and a long-vanished railroad over the long-vanished gulch. The route of the old railroad became today's Barbur Boulevard, so the location of the old bridge is now the eastern edge of Duniway Park. The whole situation is kind of hard to visualize.
• An old 1909 USGS publication, Structural Materials in Parts of Oregon and Washington, notes there were also rock quarries operating in Marquam Gulch at the time.
• The neighborhood in Marquam Gulch may not have been strictly legal. A brief Oregonian item from April 1893 mentions the O.R.& N. railroad trying to keep squatters off its Marquam Gulch land. The court case at hand concerned accusations of trespassing against a gentleman referred to simply as "An Italian, with an unpronounceable name."
• The 1904 tale of a stabbing in Marquam Gulch, which began with children arguing over a bag of peanuts, and which escalated into an adult knife fight, though it's possible ill feelings betwen the two familes extended further back to the old country. The victim and perpetrator were both Italian, and the Oregonian luridly claimed that "VENDETTA COMES TO OREGON".
• Officially sanctioned dumping began around 1914. It was argued that Seattle was dumping garbage in gullies already, and it was working out ok for them, even in nice neoghborhoods. And more importantly, it was cheaper than building a new garbage incinerator, though that eventually happened at what's today's Chimney Park. Property owners were already outraged by October of that year, claiming the stench from the Marquam Gulch dump was intolerable, and the city had unwisely promised no odors.
• Illegal dumping was prevalent as well. An item from March 1915 explains that one offender was caught when she dumped a pile of rubbish in the "forbidden grounds" of Marquam Gulch that included letters addressed to her. In related news, let's all agree that City Sanitary Inspector Salisbury had quite a thankless and disgusting job.
• A 1910 proposal would have run a railroad spur up Marquam Gulch, enabling the creation of a new warehouse district there, thus improving an area the paper called "practically worthless". Nothing seems to have come of the proposal.

The conditions at Marquam Gulch led to calls for reform of some sort or other. In 1916, local schoolchildren were recruited to write letters to the city council, begging for a proper playground so they didn't have to play in the gulch or in the street:

Mike Sholkoff writes in part: "In South Portland there are many children killed every year. The children pick things out of the dumps and sell them to the junk man for 5 and 10 cents, and then have to pay hundreds of dollars for doctor bills. A playground would cost about $60,000, but that isn't much when it saves many chidren's lives. Portland is the second cleanest city, but if the gulch were gone it could come first."

"Honorable Mayor and Commissioners," writes Harold Johnson, "I think that South Portland should have a playground for the following reasons: There is no place for us children to play except in the streets and you know that isn't 'safety first.' Just about the time that we have a good game going the cop comes along and chases us away. If you can't give us a playground take away the cops. It wasn't so bad while the cops walked, but you can't tell one Ford from another until a cop jumps out. Just think if you were a boy how much better it would be to have a playground than to play in the streets. I am willing to work for it."

This and similar efforts eventually led to today's park, which was dedicated (in a partially built state) in August 1918. A November 1919 article "Dream of 20 Years is Realized in Duniway Park", explains the long history of the project, with a map of the planned facilities, and a photo of the Southern Pacific trestle where Barbur is now. The project was funded by a voter-approved 1917 parks levy, which specified fixing Marquam Gulch as a top priority. It was originally proposed to name the park for Mrs. J.F. Kelly, who campaigned to create it. She declined the honor, however, and asked that they let her name the park instead, and "Duniway Park" was her choice.

Duniway Park is still one of a very short list of Portland city parks named for women. Named for Abigail Scott Duniway, a notable women's suffrage activist of the early 20th century. Others include the new Elizabeth Caruthers Park in the South Waterfront, and Vera Katz Park in the Pearl District. The latter isn't really a city park, per se, but I'm having to stretch the definition just to bring the list up to three. Although obviously there may be some I'm not aware of.

Duniway's brother, Oregonian editor Harvey Scott, was deeply opposed to her suffrage campaign, and the two feuded bitterly. Despite being wrong about a broad range of social issues of the day, Scott was memorialized with a smug-looking statue near the top of Mt. Tabor.

I haven't come across any mention of what became of the gulch's previous residents. As far as I can tell, the Oregonian didn't see fit to report on that little detail, much less inquire into why there were so many desperately poor people in the city.

The newly created park still didn't resemble today's park. Much of the park was below the grade of SW Barbur, and most of it consisted of baseball fields. A 1938 aerial photo at Vintage Portland shows the old gulch partially filled in, and the old trestle replaced with an earthwork structure to carry Barbur. A 1934 photo gives another view of the site of the present-day running track.

All of this reworking and reimagining hasn't done wonders for the local street grid. A page about the Marquam Gulch area at ExplorePDX digs into this and discusses why current maps of the area often sport inaccuracies, including roads that don't actually exist in the real world.

When World War II broke out a few years later, the Oregon National Guard camped in Duniway Park & the South Park Blocks in 1943. Not because of World War II necessity, but as part of a PR exercise coinciding with the movie premiere of Irving Berlin's This is the Army (which is on YouTube here). The park was used again for the same purpose (but without a movie premiere) in 1944; the Oregonian ran two photos from the encampment, one of GIs peeling potatoes, and the other of soldiers marching through mud lugging enormous duffel bags.

The current layout of the park dates to 1965 in an agreement between the city & Portland State College (now Portland State University). The agreement allowed PSC to use part of the park as team practice facilities, but without the city giving up title to the land. The land was raised to its current level at this point; the article mentions "Most of the fill material will be donated and will be from excavations for the Foothills Freeway", better known as Interstate 405. The running track went in at this point, and the baseball fields were removed.

In 1970 this was the staging area for a big protest march, part of the People's Army Jamboree, an event opposing the national American Legion convention in town. The Jamboree was smaller than first envisioned because the state government-sponsored Vortex One music festival drew many of the city's hippies and freaks and longhairs away to frolic at Milo McIver State Park on the Clackamas River near Estacada. This march became known for a nationally broadcast flag burning, which an Oregonian letter writer suggests was staged for the TV cameras.

Later in the 1970s, the park and its running track became a focus of the fitness craze. In 1977, a groovy new YMCA building opened next to the park. It was a YMCA for decades, but was sold a couple of years ago, and has bounced around between a few owners and operators since then. It's a cool building, unfortunately with a few decades of expensive deferred maintenance to sort out. Until recently it was the Duniway Park Athletic Club (which I was a member of) until the club was evicted in a dispute with the building's owner. So it's anyone's guess what happens next with the building.

Around 2005 or so (based on the date in the PDF), a Portland State engineering class studied daylighting Marquam Creek, that is, restoring it to flow above ground once again. The study is light on specifics and doesn't indicate how that would happen in an area as extensively modified as this. Digging out the fill dirt and restoring the old gulch would be a lot of work, and probably very expensive. Letting the creek flow on the surface through today's park would be interesting; it might mean a little waterfall at the edge of each terrace section, and salmon trying to leap up the falls. And then grizzly bears show up, just like in all the nature shows about Alaska. That could be cool.

cirrus

Battle Green, Lexington

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It's time for another set of Boston photos, this time from the town common in Lexington, MA, commonly known as the Battle Green due to the Revolutionary War battle that happened here on April 19th, 1775. I lost track of how many monuments, statues and plaques there were in the common itself and the surrounding neighborhood. This photoset includes many prominent examples, but I'm sure I missed a few. Beyond this historic district, though, Lexington comes across as an average suburb. That really shouldn't have surprised me, but it did somehow. As with the Old North Bridge a few miles west in Concord, the modest scale of everything is striking. For all its eventual historical importance, the number of people actively involved at any point in the entire war was quite small. I don't mean to go off on a history lesson here; if you're curious, and somehow missed the entire term of 8th grade history that covered the American Revolution, or you grew up outside the US, there are much better sources of information than some random internet blog. I just wander around taking photos and trying to describe what's in them. For more obscure topics, the describing part involves linking to "authoritative" sources, which can sometimes be hard to find. As for Lexington, though, perhaps half of all the historians in America have already written a book or two about the Revolutionary War, or so it seems. There's a vast range of facts and opinions out there, and you can google for it just as well as I can. But feel free to enjoy the photos while you're here though.

Vantage Petroglyphs

Here's a slideshow of the Vantage Petroglyphs, a collection of ancient Native American rock carvings currently located at the Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park visitors center, near Vantage, WA. These carvings were once located dramatic location on a columnar basalt outcrop next to the Columbia River, but that site was flooded when the ___ dam went in. The petroglyphs were rescued, Abu Simbel style, and moved to their current location. Rock art near rivers was a fairly widespread practice; an Oregon Lakes & Rivers article "Paddling for Petroglyphs" details a number of examples that can only be visited by boat. Those less accessible examples likely haven't received the same level of casual vandalism that you can see here, but affords little protection against determined thieves, like the ones in recent cases in California and Nevada, and those are merely a couple of high profile cases where the thefts were publicized and the thieves were caught.

In putting this post together, I was surprised by how few authoritative sources of information I've been able to find online. There are, of course, a lot of academic works about the art and crafts of Northwestern tribes, but much of it seems to be either not online, or behind an expensive paywall. And then on the other hand there's no shortage of free but useless web pages out there, some of a New Agey crystals-n-dolphins bent, and others catering to the sort of crusty old Tea Party dudes who feel a need to hoard arrowheads for some reason, and resent the dang gol-durned gummint for telling them not to.

Anyway, here are a couple of items that were a.) available online at the time I posted this, and b.) seemed authoritative and reliable, at least going on my incomplete knowledge of the subject. At least neither proposes that those who carved the Vantage Petroglyphs must have had help from ancient aliens or wandering Vikings or any such thing.

• James D. Keyser's Indian Rock Art of the Columbia Plateau (University of Washington Press, 1992).
• American Indian Rock Art in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, a recent (2013) publication from the Oregon Archeological Society.

Boston Public Garden

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While I was in Boston a while back, I wandered into the city's Public Garden to look around for a bit. Formal landscaped gardens like this were very popular in the 19th Century, and into the early 20th. Looking around, I was immediately struck by the idea that Portland's Laurelhurst Park -- which is rather fancy by Portland park standards -- is a cheap imitation of Boston's Public Garden, or at least a cheap imitation of the general style. Boston has a lake, we have a smaller lake with water quality issues. Boston has meticulously tended lawns and flowers, we have grass and many rhododendron bushes. They have swans, we have lots of Canada geese and a couple of herons. They have famous Swan Boats, we... don't. They have a famous bridge over their pond, we... don't. They have statues and fountains scattered around the garden, we have this 1980 stainless steel whatzit. And so on.

Boston as a whole kept reminding me of Portland, in the sense that it felt like I was now seeing the original and realizing I lived in a low-budget, semi-skilled imitation. It wasn't like that all the time, mind you; there's nothing in Portland anything like the North End, for instance, and Portland seems to have quit with the imitating after 1950 or so. But I saw resemblances every so often, and it was disconcerting. I imagine this is what a trip to Paris is like when the only Eiffel Tower you've ever seen is the silly Las Vegas one. At least the beer's better here, and it snows a lot less. So there's that.

There's more to the park than what you see in this slideshow. I more or less made a beeline across the park, heading from Boston Common toward the Back Bay neighborhood, since I was actually trying to find some coffee at the time. Thus I didn't walk around the entire pond, or track down every last exotic plant or obscure Victorian statue hidden down a side path. I suppose I could have done that, but I think I captured the gist of the place. And to reiterate, I needed coffee. You know how it is.

Assateague Island

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Since I've been on a vacation photo kick lately, here's another slideshow from coastal Virginia, this time from the south end of Assateague Island National Seashore and the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge next door. After I checked in to my Chincoteague Island hotel, I decided I wanted to at least dip my feet in the Atlantic a little, so off to the beach I went. Assateague Island is the ocean-facing barrier island due east of Chincoteague Island, and the two are separated by a channel of shallow water and salt marshes. So it's a bit of a drive, with a few sights here and there to stop and take photos of, which I of course did. At the beach itself, well, I'm not really keen to be That Guy who lugs a big camera around at the beach, taking photos of who knows what. That's right up there with White Van Metal Detector Guy in the rogues' gallery of suspicious-looking beach denizens. So I switched to phone photos, and didn't take a lot of those either, since I actually don't like having people in my photos and it was hard to avoid there.

Atlantic barrier island beaches like this are all variations on a simple theme: Long flat straight expanses of sand, a low rise behind the beach with some low shrubs (assuming developers haven't had their way with the place), and behind that a wide expanse of salt marsh between the barrier island and the mainland. So the beach here reminded me a lot of the Canaveral National Seashore down in Florida, which I already had photos of. I did the toes-in-the-nice-warm-Atlantic thing though, which was the main goal here. Ahead of photos, even, if you can believe that.

If the names "Assateague" and "Chincoteague" sound familiar, it's either from avidly reading my other blog posts here of late, or more likely from the famous series of young adult books about the islands' wild ponies. I never read any of the Misty books as a kid, but I seem to recall grade school classmates being obsessed with them. And then begging their parents for ponies of their own, probably. The books, while fictional, were based roughly on real people, horses, places, and events. If only I'd done a little more research ahead of time, I would've learned that two of the famous horses, "Misty" and "Stormy", were taxidermied and are now on display at the ranch where they once lived. This seems like a hilarious bit of macabre bad taste. If only I'd known, I would have carved out a bit of time to go visit the former children's book stars in their, um, retirement. I mean, where else can you see something like this? It's not like they've taxidermied the former stars of the Harry Potter movies, at least not so far. Not giggling would be the hard part. Or at least not giggling to a disruptive degree.

Every year, ponies from the island are herded and made to swim across the channel to Chincoteague Island (even though there's a perfectly decent bridge they could walk across) to be auctioned as a fundraiser for the local fire department. This has become the area's largest annual tourist event. I understand the need for some sort of herd management. As in the Western US, wild horses are an introduced species with no natural predators. Furthermore they're an introduced species that the public has become attached to, so removing them isn't a viable option. Thanks to the lack of predators, the unchecked population grows until it outstrips the local food supply, and the public won't stand for starving horses any more than it would accept the absence of horses. So they've taken to auctioning "excess" horses every year, to keep the herd size manageable. (Which is what the BLM does in Oregon and other western states, somewhat controversially.) The pony herd on the Maryland part of the island (kept separate from the Virginia ponies by a fence) is on birth control, believe it or not, which keeps the size of the herd down in a somewhat less picturesque way.

This business about ponies is not really a digression, because one of the books ("Stormy, Misty's Foal") centers around the real-life Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962, which also played a key role in the protection of the National Seashore. Much of the island had been platted for development, roads had been built, and some construction had begun when the storm swept through and flattened everything. Instead of rebuilding everything at taxpayer expense, which is what usually happens, the federal government acquired the island and handed it over to the National Park Service to run as a public beach park. Possibly this was due in part to sentimental attachment to the ponies. It's not clear what would have become of them if Assateague Island had been converted into vacation homes and trinket shops.

The adjacent wildlife refuge protects an extensive area of salt marshes, along with the historic 142' Assateague lighthouse (both of which I have photos of), and inland parts of the island where the local pony herd tends to hang out, which apparently are closed to the public. The lighthouse was closed for renovation when I was there; I didn't really mind since I've never really had a thing for lighthouses. I'm not going to make fun of people who do, though; I have wayyy too many posts here tagged 'bridge' for me to go around casting that particular stone.

Longfellow Bridge

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Here's a slideshow of Boston's ornate 1907 Longfellow Bridge, which connects downtown Boston (and the Beacon Hill neighborhood) with central Cambridge across the Charles River. I walked across on a sunny Friday afternoon back in July 2012; the bridge is now closed for an extended and much-needed $260 million renovation project. The rust and disrepair shown in many of the photos should be a big clue why this is happening. Media accounts claim this closure is the Traffic Apocalypse. Which is odd, because it's widely believed that every day in Boston is the Traffic Apocalypse. Everyone says so, even local residents, who presumably are the ones causing all the Apocalypse-ness.

The thing is, I can't actually corroborate this stereotype about the city. I had a rental car for most of the week I was there, but I was out in the 'burbs during that part, and driving in suburban Boston seemed just like driving in suburban anywhere else. It wasn't a problem. I suppose it's probably worse if you try driving in downtown Boston, which I didn't do. But I did walk all around the central city and nobody ran me down in a crosswalk, deliberately or otherwise, or tried to bean me with a beer can as they drove by. I walked across the bridge and survived to tell the tale, and nobody swerved to try to hit me on the sidewalk, or even pretended like they were going to. Not a single Bostonian, drunk or otherwise, tried to shove me in front of a bus just for the lulz, something a coworker tried to warn me about when he heard where I was going. There was about the level of honking you'd expect in any major East Coast city, and I never saw honking escalate into a road rage incident, not even mild fisticuffs. I never saw anyone deliberately ram anyone else, or aggressively tailgate anyone, NASCAR-style, which immediately puts Boston ahead of both Washington DC and Atlanta in my book, just going on things I've personally witnessed in those cities. Honestly, driving in Boston was fine.

The great thing about central Boston, though, was that I could get anywhere I needed to go on mass transit, generally on the 'T', the local subway, the Red Line of which crosses the river on the Longfellow Bridge. So driving in the allegedly worst city in America to drive in is completely unnecessary, as far as I can tell. And as with driving, I can't corroborate any horror stories about Boston's mass transit, such as the one in the Kingston Trio song "The M.T.A". Here's a free travel tip: If you stay at a hotel at Logan Airport, you can take the Silver Line to downtown Boston for free, or at least you could when I was there. The Silver Line, the city's only bus rapid transit line, is an odd hybrid: When you get on, it looks like you're just getting on a regular bus. It takes a freeway tunnel under the Charles River, makes a couple of bus-like stops, and then converts from diesel to electric power and drives the rest of the way to South Station in a dedicated subway-like tunnel.

A curious thing about the bridge is that it looks for all the world like it's a drawbridge, but it actually isn't. Its main piers, mid-river, give the impression that the span between them ought to open, and the turrets look like somewhere a bridge operator would sit, munching endless Dunkin Donuts and waiting for the occasional mega-yacht heading upriver toward Harvard. It's all a sham, though. Purely ornamental, for display purposes only. This is the sort of fakery that drove modernist architects batty back in the early 20th Century, and rightly so I think.

An even curiouser thing is that the main piers are designed to evoke the bows of Viking longships, in memory of Leif Erikson's visit to the Boston area circa 1000 AD. Wait, what? Don't remember that one from history class? There's a reason for that. This alleged visit was an eccentric pet theory of a Eben Horsford, a 19th Century Harvard chemistry professor, who today is best known for inventing the modern formula for baking powder. Horsford had little success in selling his idea to other scholars; annoying little details like the total absence of archeological evidence probably didn't help his cause. That didn't deter him from promoting the Vikings-in-Boston theory to the general public, aided by his considerable baking powder fortune, and he found a willing audience. It's been widely argued that the vogue for all things Leif Erikson in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had an ugly ethnic undercurrent to it. Columbus, you see, was one of those icky Italian Catholics, just like the poor immigrants then arriving in Boston by the boatload. Whereas Erikson was entirely noble and selfless and enterprising, as far as anyone knows, I mean, it just stands to reason, and of course his hair and eyes were the right color, and he probably never touched a clove of garlic in his entire life. So the Viking theory had its fans among the local Brahmin aristocracy, and funding and official approval were easy to obtain. Thus, today Boston has Horsford to thank for a Leif Erikson statue on Commonwealth Avenue, the bridge piers here, and a nature park in Newton, MA, formerly the site of a local amusement park, which in turn was named for a nearby legendary lost Viking city of untold riches that Horsford rediscovered, and which totally existed in real life. Supposedly.

Rainbow Bridge, Hale'iwa

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On my recent trip to Oahu, I spent most of a day riding bus #55, which loops around the eastern half of the island. After a few earlier stops including Turtle Bay and Waimea Bay, I decided to stop in the little North Shore town of Haleiwa for lunch. When I got there, I couldn't help but notice this little arched bridge at the edge of the town's little downtown area. So naturally I had to take a few photos of it.

Hawaii's generally not a land of interesting bridges, as the local geography doesn't favor them. For the most part the islands' rivers and streams are too small to require anything beyond simple utilitarian bridges, and the channels between the islands are too wide to bridge at all. Hale'iwa's "Rainbow Bridge" on the little Anahulu River is a rare photogenic exception to the rule. In the early 20th Century, Hale'iwa was a popular seaside resort at the northern terminus of Oahu's cross-island railroad, and the town was a popular weekend escape from the (relative) hustle and bustle of big-city Honolulu. The bridge dates to the town's resort heyday, which I imagine is why it's more decorative (and presumably expensive) than it strictly needed to be.

After taking the bridge photos, I stopped at a nearby food truck for a plate of garlic shrimp. It was delicious. I usually don't like shrimp, so that's saying a lot. And yes, I'm blogging my Instagram food photos. Somehow it feels a little less vain and self-absorbed when they're also vacation photos. I think. Anyway, after that I stopped at a famous shave ice shop, and I have an Instagram photo from there too:

So I can recommend their tropical combo with condensed milk on top, in case you're ever in Hale'iwa and feel like getting a shave ice.

Anyway, about Hawaii and bridges, I said earlier that the islands are too far apart to bridge, but Wikipedia's "Channels of the Hawaiian Islands" article indicates that all but one of the inter-island channels are no more than 30 miles wide, which is shorter than the Channel Tunnel or Japan's Seikan Tunnel. The ocean between the islands is also up to 6100 feet deep in places, much deeper than any existing undersea tunnel, which is kind of a problem. Still, if you could figure out a way to deal with that, tunnels might be technically possible. It's just that it would cost many tens of billions of dollars, and Hawaii only has a bit over a million people, and most of them live on Oahu, and inter-island flights are quick and cheap. So this is more of an SF novel plot point than an actual idea. Imagine, in an alternate timeline, an inter-island bullet train network serving the fabulously rich Kingdom of Hawaii, the Switzerland of the Pacific. Possibly created with advanced alien technology, or built by domesticated krakens, or something.

Chincoteague Causeway

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A few photos of the long, winding Chincoteague Causeway , which connects Chincoteague Island with the mainland. My hotel was on the island, and the NASA center is on the mainland, and I lost track of how many times I drove back and forth along this route. It's kind of a fun drive, actually; there are a few elevated bridge portions, but much of the route is a very low causeway that feels more or less like you're driving along right at water level, as if you're zipping across the marsh in a hovercraft or something. It probably didn't hurt that my rental car was a fast little Fiat 500, and going anywhere with it made for a fun drive.

As the story goes, when the road to Chincoteague Island opened in 1922, the grand opening drew a large number of motorists to the island, who were then stranded there when bad weather damaged the road. The road was eventually repaired and reopened, but it still wasn't up to the job and was replaced with an improved bridge in 1940. Time and traffic and salt water eventually took their toll on their replacement, and it in turn was replaced in 2009.

The original bridge first crossed the much smaller (and aptly named) Marsh Island, which has just a handful of houses. From there a truss swing bridge connected to the main island. That bridge was an iconic image of the island for many years (although, let's be honest, it wasn't exactly the St. Johns Bridge or the Golden Gate or anything). The replacement project went ahead and ripped it out anyway, and lots of junky beach tourist knicknacks suddenly became valuable collector's items.

The new causeway now detours around Marsh Island (with a short spur bridge connecting it to the causeway) and it avoids the island's downtown, instead connecting to the road that continues out to the beaches of Assateague Island, further east. I never saw firsthand what traffic was like with the old bridge, but just looking at a map and comparing the two routes it stands to reason (I think) that the new bridge is a big improvement. Even if it never shows up on t-shirts and collector spoons and shot glasses like its predecessor.

fire twirling, waikiki

Here's another Vine clip from Hawaii, this time of a little fire twirling outside the local Hello Kitty Seafood Buffet, which exists. Not only does it exist, I went there for birthday number four-zero a few years ago, just to do something silly and not entirely age-appropriate. They seem to be downplaying the Hello Kitty angle now, and the fire dancers are new. Apparently they put on a mini-show on the lawn out front, promising more of a show inside if you choose to patronize their fine establishment. Which is in addition to various licensed Sanrio characters wandering the restaurant and posing for photos with kids and Japanese tourists. I'm fairly certain there is no exact equivalent to this place here in Portland, or probably anywhere else for that matter.

friday night fireworks, ala wai harbor

Because it's Friday night, here's another recent Vine clip from Hawaii, this time of the Hilton Hawaiian Village's Friday night fireworks show, taken from next to the Ala Wai boat harbor. Only bad thing about this clip is the little note saying it was taken 41 days ago. Sigh.

Manoa Falls

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When I was in Honolulu back in September, one thing I wanted to do was tear myself away from the beach and the urban jungle for a bit and go find a hiking trail. Manoa Falls was the obvious choice. It's one of the tallest accessible waterfalls on Oahu, and the hike to the falls is short and fairly easy, though slippery and muddy in parts. The thing that really sold me on Manoa Falls is that you can get there on the regular Honolulu city bus system, which was important since I elected not to rent a car. All I had to do was walk from my hotel over to the Ala Moana Mall and hop on the bus #5, which heads up mostly-suburban Manoa Valley. The bus turns around at the point where suburbia peters out. At that point you can get off the bus and walk uphill into the rainforest, where you'll soon encounter both Lyon Arboretum (about which a separate post is coming) and the Manoa Falls trailhead. If the place looks vaguely familiar, apparently both Jurassic Park and Lost shot a few scenes here. The falls may also look familiar from an earlier post of mine with an Instagram photo and a Vine clip from the falls. I think I said at the time that photos from the "real" camera were coming soon. "Soon" turns out to mean "a couple of months later", but that's still pretty punctual by my usual standards.

I'd only visited one other Hawaiian waterfall before, 'Akaka Falls on the Big Island, and that was wayyy back in late 2000, and all I had was a crappy point-n-shoot film camera at the time. I figured this time I was going to come prepared. I don't usually lug a mini-tripod or remote shutter widget along with me, but I had the notion that I wanted to do some long exposure waterfall photos (See for example: Majestic Falls, Wahclella Falls, Yacolt Falls, and Cedar Mill Falls). All that preparation (which is a lot by my usual standards) turns out to have been overkill. Even though I barely missed a huge downpour just before I arrived, there wasn't enough water going over the falls just then to pull off the classic long-exposure waterfall look. Which is fine, I mean, them's the breaks, and it's still a waterfall in the middle of a tropical rainforest. I thought it was pretty great, and nowhere near as overrun with tourists as I was led to believe it would be.

There's a great article about the Manoa Falls trail at Exploration Hawaii (although you'll end up reading more of their articles, and wonder where the last three hours went.) Here are two more hike reports worth reading; the first one has a photo of the falls with much more water. Although looking at that photo, I'm not sure the long exposure trick would have paid dividends then either. I'm starting to think the only way to be sure would be to move to Hawaii and come here every so often for new photos, and come back later if I don't quite get the shots I have in mind. As if I needed another excuse to want to move there.

Eastern Shore of Virginia NWR

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Here's a slideshow from the Eastern Shore of Virginia National Wildlife Refuge, near the southern tip of the Eastern Shore. I stopped here on my way from Norfolk, VA up to Wallops Island back in September. I'd taken a redeye flight from Portland, with an early morning layover in Charlotte, and I was a bit out of sorts. (Protip: Don't assume US Airways will give you a pillow and blanket just because JetBlue had them on your last redeye flight.) I'd stopped for breakfast at the little restaurant on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel (yes, on), but I decided I needed to stop and walk around a bit, so I turned at the wildlife refuge sign and had a look around.

It's primarily a migratory bird refuge, but early September isn't prime bird watching season (as far as I know), so most of my photos are of butterflies and a nearby abandoned artillery battery. The visitor center had a small butterfly garden behind the main building, and most of the photos come from there, but it seemed like there were butterflies everywhere, to a rather surreal degree. I noticed the butterflies all along the Eastern Shore, so I can't blame this entirely on jet lag. Maybe what I picked up on is actually the Northwest's relative lack of butterflies. I'm not sure, and the Questions & Answers page from the North American Butterfly Association is vague about what regions have larger or smaller butterfly populations. The Coastal Virginia Wildlife Observatory has been doing butterfly research here for several years, and several TripAdvisor reviews of the refuge mention the butterflies, so it's probably not just my imagination.

There are also a couple of photos of an enormous "cicada killer" wasp that was bumbling around on the visitor center lawn. I'd never seen one before, or any sort of bee this large for that matter. As a West Coast resident, I didn't realize the USA had bees this size. I figured (correctly, as it turns out) that I would've heard of these creatures before if they were as dangerous as they looked, so I stopped for some close up photos. A refuge volunteer wandered by to see what I was doing & was amused that I was so fascinated by a mere cicada killer. Every time an East Coast person says something like this, I always want to respond with "Oh yeah? We have wolves." Which is true, though I've never actually seen one in the wild.

The coastal battery in a few of the photos is Battery Winslow, part of the former Fort Custis. During World War II, it (along with Fort Story in Virginia Beach), defended the entrance to Chesapeake Bay from shipborne evildoers. This involved several concrete batteries sporting huge cannons, pointed seaward and able to put very large holes in anything that strayed too close to Hampton Roads. This is more or less the same role Fort Stevens played at the mouth of the Columbia River here in Oregon. Fort Custis morphed into an air force installation shortly after WWII, and was finally deactivated in 1980. The US Fish and Wildlife Service took it over a few years after that.

I'm not a military history fan by any means, but abandoned military bases can be a good source of mysterious concrete structures, slowly being reclaimed by nature. That tends to be photogenic, so I'm willing make a detour to see something like this. I"m not sure a warm sunny day was the right time to visit, though. The battery seems to call for a cold, gloomy, blustery day, and black and white photos, and maybe some angsty musicians or runway models posing unhappily in front of it. Maybe as an album cover, with an equally gloomy vinyl LP inside.

Ginkgo Petrified Forest

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Here's a slideshow from Washington State's Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park, on the Columbia River north of Vantage, WA. The park is famous for the aforementioned petrified ginkgo trees, but I mostly stopped for the view of the river. And, well, the nearby Vantage Bridge, which I've already posted about. This bridge thing is a sickness, I tell you. I was on my way east to Moses Lake at the time and didn't have time to explore beyond the visitor's center, unfortunately. The park is over 7400 acres in size, and features a number of hiking trails. HistoryLink.org, the Washington Trails Association, and a 2008 Seattle Times article all have more info about the various hiking options, if you have more time than I did. The state's Wanapum Recreation Area, just south of the park, includes a campground and boat launch. If I was more into camping I might consider staying there at some point; this area along the Columbia strikes me as a great place to take sunrise or sunset photos, and it's not like there are any swanky hotels nearby to stay at.

For some reason, my mother has always been fascinated by ginkgo trees. Particularly the fact that they used to live in the Northwest but went extinct, but their relatives survived in Asia, and now they've been reintroduced here. That tale seems to be meaningful to her and I've never been sure why. She even tracked down a fossil ginkgo leaf and had it in a display stand on the living room coffee table for a long time. I'm afraid this fascination didn't pass along to me; the trees are attractive and they do have interesting leaves, but they can also create a disgusting mess in the fall when they start dropping their waxy vomit-scented fruit.

Technically you're supposed to pay to park at Ginkgo Petrified Forest. The visitor center was closed, though, and I couldn't figure who or how to pay. So I did this outlaw style, sort of. I did end up buying a parking permit at Sun Lakes / Dry Falls a few days later that I'm not sure I actually needed, so I guess it all balances out somehow.

People's Bike Library of Portland

At the corner of SW 13th & Burnside is this odd thing: A tall pole topped by a gold child's bicycle, with a bunch of junky kids' bikes chained to the base. This is the People's Bike Library of Portland, a combination art project and bike rack. The official RACC description of it:

The Peoples Bike Library of Portland is a functional bike rack, bike ‘lending’ library, and monument to the vital bike culture of Portland. Erected by artists Brian Borrello and Vanessa Renwick in collaboration with Zoobomb (www.zoobomb.net), an iterative design process led to the current sculpture. An accumulation of small kids’ bicycles are locked to the sculpture, lent to the public for weekly ‘zoobomb’ rides.

A BikePortland article about the grand opening raved about the thing, or at least the symbolic value of the thing. As did a blog post about the event by a visitor from Austin, our compatriot/competitor city in hip urban hipsterdom.

The "bike library" replaced the previous, unofficial pile-o-Zoobomb-bikes at 10th & Oak. There was some sort of muttering about that pile being unsafe or something, but in truth this is just the Portland Way. The city gets to replace an unofficial thing with an official thing, because unofficial things can't be trusted. The people who get the new official thing are flattered, because, I mean, who wouldn't be flattered by the city suddenly spending a bunch of money and endorsing your odd little hobby? Artists get paid, designers get paid, construction people get paid. Obscure bloggers like your humble correspondent have something new to blog about. The end result, ideally, raises property values or helps with the city's "branding", which in turn convinces the Right Sort of People to move here, and maybe lures in some free-spending cosmopolitan European tourists as well. And they all pay taxes, and then we can afford even more urban goodies. And the whole thing becomes a delicious glowing ball of locally-sourced win for everyone.

I'm not disputing the underlying theory, mind you. It seems entirely possible to me that investing in a bit of official bike squee will attract the Right Sort of Person to our fair city, assuming that hipsters and "young creatives" are the Right Sort of People. A shallow theory, but quite possibly an accurate one. The important thing here is that the rain dance works, not that it working makes a lot of sense. And I get the bike thing too: Building even the fanciest bike rack is orders of magnitude cheaper than building a parking garage, and bike lanes are cheaper than freeways. And, ideally, people who've gotten used to a bike lifestyle won't flee to the 'burbs the moment they have kids.

I do think we place too much emphasis on everything needing an official seal of approval from City Hall, though. I keep thinking of times when a holiday's come along (New Years, Mardi Gras, etc.) and the city's neglected to organize an official celebration event. Every time this happens, people show up at Pioneer Courthouse Square and wander around, looking lost & wondering where the city put the party they were supposed to organize. This is probably the same mindset that gives us such a low crime rate for a major US city, but expecting the city to be your party planner is just kind of embarrassing, don't you think?

Couple of minor quibbles though. First, the gold bike on a high pedestal reminds me of the of the golden calf corporate logo in Dogma. But that's just me, probably. More importantly, what happens to the People's Bike Library 20-30 years down the road? It looks fairly permanent, and it's designed to facilitate zoobombing. Is that still going to be popular a few decades from now? If not, is there anything else it can be used for? Or will it just sit there, empty and mysterious, for future bloggers (or whatever the replacement for blogs ends up being) to wonder about? At some point down the road the gold leaf is going to need regilding too. I imagine the city's on the hook for that, but if zoobombing goes the way of roller disco, are they going to bother? As far as we know, in 2043 all the cool kids will get around with giant robot exoskeletons powered by organic hash oil, and they'll sneer at the crappy little-kid bikes their parents were stuck with. I can't prove that won't happen, and neither can you.

Oneonta Tunnel

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Here are a few photos of the restored tunnel next to Oneonta Gorge. The tunnel was part of the original 1914 Columbia River Highway, but was closed and sealed up in 1948 when the railroad was rerouted away from the cliff, and the highway was rerouted to use the railroad's old right of way, bypassing the tunnel. Over time the old highway was replaced by a river-level route that eventually became Interstate 84; a December 7th, 1954 article headlined "Gorge Lovers Deplore Eclipse of Scenic Road; Age Demands Utilitarian Route" sort of rolls its eyes at preservationists and their futile efforts to stand in the way of Progress.

The tunnel remained sealed until 2009, when it was finally restored and reopened, after a couple of decades of lobbying efforts. I remember reading about the tunnel as a kid, on a list of the Columbia Gorge's "lost wonders". Among the other lost wonders, the Mitchell Point Tunnels really are gone for good, having been dynamited and all, but I haven't quite given up on getting Celilo Falls back someday. Anyway, I remember thinking it would be cool if they could reopen the Oneonta Tunnel, and being fairly certain it was never going to happen in real life. But amazingly someone with actual power had the same idea I did, and it happened. Granted it finally happened because they needed more parking at Oneonta Gorge, and the only free space was on the far side of the old tunnel, so it's not like they did it for the history and romance of the thing. But still.

Japanese Peace Garden, Moses Lake

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Here are a few photos from the Japanese Peace Garden in Moses Lake, Washington, which I visited back in July. It's not a terribly large place, but has the essentials one expects at a public Japanese garden, with a torii gate, a koi pond, a small waterfall, a rock garden area, etc. The garden's right in the middle of town, but it's situated on a sort of island inside a larger wetland area so it feels quite secluded and peaceful.

The reason there's a Japanese garden in a small Eastern Washington town is somewhat convoluted. The city's airport, Grant County International, is the former Larson Air Force Base (which closed in 1965), and thus is much larger than your average small town airport. The city inherited the airport after the base closed in 1965, and they were looking for tenants for the now underused facilities. At the same time, Japan Airlines needed a center to train flight crews for the upcoming Boeing 747, and no suitable facilities could be found anywhere in Japan. The two parties found each other, and a long relationship began.

A few years later a sister city relationship was established with Yonezawa, Yamagata Prefecture, Japan. As the sister city association explains, the owner of the local newspaper in Yonezawa was a college buddy of the president of Japan Airlines, and the newspaper had been sending contest winners to Moses Lake for several years.

The JAL center closed in 2009 after the airline decided to switch to the newer Boeing 787. Other news accounts blamed the cost of fuel for the closure.

An exchange student program is still in place, and the local community college (also on the grounds of the former air force base) offers a Japanese Agricultural Training Program, in which students from Japan are able to live and work on farms in the Moses Lake area. Which is a popular and desirable thing, apparently.

Gov. Atiyeh Statue, Portland Airport

At the far end of Portland International Airport's international concourse is a statue of former Governor Vic Atiyeh, who was governor of Oregon from 1978-1987. He was famous at the time for international trade missions, forever flying to Japan and points across Asia trying to interest them in Oregon products and tourism and so forth. Hence the statue of him standing in the middle of the terminal, looking like his flight's been delayed. Portland Public Art devoted a short post to the sculpture, which is by the same guy who created the Vera Katz statue on the Eastbank Esplanade. The post is sort of lukewarm about the statue, saying "its mundanity, its general ordinariness is disconcerting". I actually like that about it; it seems to capture its subject more accurately that way. I mean, I only met him once, briefly, and I was one of a hundred or so Cub Scouts in the room, and I don't claim to have been a keen judge of character then (or now for that matter), but I recall he seemed like a nice man and he didn't act as though talking to us was a waste of his precious time or anything. If the sculptor had gone the traditional 19th century route and made a larger-than-life equestrian statue, with the governor in fantasy Roman emperor garb, now that would be a disconcerting thing to find in the middle of the Portland airport.

As of right now (2013), Oregon hasn't seen a Republican governor since Atiyeh left office. A recent Steve Duin column waxed nostalgic about the Atiyeh era, when politicians of both parties supposedly all worked together for the common good and so forth. I'm not sure how true that really was, but the end of his second term was also the beginning of the end of the state's traditional (and once-dominant) Republican party, business-friendly and socially (and temperamentally) moderate. In this polarized age, it's hard to imagine Oregon Republicans nominating an Arab-American of Syrian descent, much less reelecting him after he raised the state income tax to patch a hole in the budget. The party nominated moderate Republicans again in 1986 and 1990, losing narrowly both times. In the 1990 election, a far-right candidate drew 13% of the vote, more than enough to tip the election to Barbara Roberts, the Democratic nominee. The party got the message and spent the next few elections nominating a series of right-wing whackaloons for the top job. The last couple of elections have seen a return to sorta-moderate candidates, albeit ones with limited political experience and little charisma. Oregon Republican primaries tend to be rather brutal affairs, and the typical winning strategy is to tack as far to the right as possible in the primary, and immediately scurry back toward the center once you win the primary, and hope the public forgets all about your primary-season persona. The last couple of elections have been closer than the nutjob era of Bill Sizemore and Kevin Mannix, but they still can't seem to get over the top. It's possible that there just aren't as many moderate Republicans and true independent swing voters as there once were. I'm not really a swing voter, to be honest. I'm a registered Democrat of a liberal to left-leaning persuasion. When it comes to future elections, I'm not inclined to absolutely rule out voting for anyone or any party; I've even quietly voted for the 'R' in a couple of cases, albeit in cases where they had absolutely no chance of winning, just to keep the winner's margin of victory somewhat less absurd. My ideal world is one in which the Republican candidate keeps losing by a slim and hard-fought 51% to 49% margin, forcing the Democrats to nominate quality candidates and build reasonably professional campaign organizations. The D's have gotten careless over the years, seeming to think they just own the Governor's office, leading to lazy candidates (*cough* Kulongoski *cough*) and flabby poorly-run campaigns. At this rate, one of these cycles they're bound to screw it up and we'll be stuck with a shrieking flat-earther for four years. Which is a terrifying idea.

Colonel Summers Park expedition

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A photoset from Portland's Colonel Summers Park & Community Garden, at SE 17th & Taylor. I've gotten into the habit of saying I don't bother with neighborhood parks like this, where most of the park is devoted to ball fields and play equipment. But the community garden is fairly photogenic, and there's a little history to pass along, so I'm going to make yet another exception, like I did for Irving and Sewallcrest Parks earlier. Before we get to the history bit, some info about the park's standard-issue features, since those are what almost all visitors who aren't me come here for. The park includes basketball and tennis courts, a baseball diamond, and a covered picnic area. It formerly offered a wading pool for kids, but like the ones in other parks around town it was permanently closed in 2010 due to state health regulations. There's a neighborhood campaign to build a splash pad to replace the old pool.

Because this is the middle of a very hip part of town, it also attracts things like adult dodgeball, bike polo, and assorted as-seen-in-Portlandia activities. Years ago, coworkers and I used to come here on Friday afternoons and hit a volleyball around, which is one sorta-sport that hipsters still haven't discovered somehow. It was fun, but you had to watch out because dog owners weren't always that meticulous about cleaning up after their pets, and there was always a chance of finding a little grenade lurking in the grass if you weren't careful. Ah, memories.

As this is inner SE Portland, the park has also hosted Food Not Bombs and Occupy Portland events in recent years.

The southwest corner of the park contains a small memorial to the park's namesake, Col. Owen Summers. He was widely regarded as the "Father of the Oregon National Guard" (even our National Guard says so), and he was best known for his service with the 2nd Oregon Volunteers in the Spanish-American War. The same obscure conflict memorialized by two memorials in Lownsdale Square, another in Waterfront Park, yet another in Lone Fir Cemetery (though it's primarily a Civil War memorial), and probably others elsewhere. That war was an ugly episode in our national history, and it's kind of embarrassing that Portland built monuments to it all over town.

Summers himself was said to be a decent guy, and the Oregon volunteers came home before the guerrilla war in the Philippines got going in earnest. Still, I'd be perfectly happy with renaming the place back to "Belmont Park", which is what it was called until renamed in 1938 in a fit of patriotic fervor, for the war's 40th anniversary. The park was rededicated on September 13th, 1938, as part of the city's war anniversary festivities. The Battleship Oregon opened at its "permanent" waterfront home the same day. Although that turned out to be far from permanent, thanks in large part to the day's top news story, the infamous Munich Agreement that enabled Nazi Germany to annex the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. The juxtaposition of the two stories is kind of mind-boggling. In any case, page 7 of the paper was a full page of Spanish War festivities photos, including one showing the dedication of the Summers memorial plaque. A page 5 story covered the dedication in more detail. As far as I can determine, Summers had no connection to this particular spot, and it's not clear why the city selected this park to name after him rather than one of the others around town.

I can't tell you a lot about the memorial plaque itself. The inscription says it was created by someone named Daniel Powell, but I can't find much in the way of info about him. The Smithsonian art inventory mentions one work by someone named Daniel Powell, located at Bok Gardens in Lake Wales, FL, co-credited with 15 other artists. I don't know if it's him, but the dates are potentially correct. A history page for the Oregon Society of Artists lists him as the organization's president from 1942-44, and describes him as "High school teacher. Sculptor, sketch artist." An April 14th, 1945 Oregonian article on the Society's Spring Art Show mentions him:

This year the society, in addition to showing paintings, drawings, and small sculptures, will exhibit two sculptures of heroic size, one of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and one of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, completed in the Sabin high school art classes under the direction of Daniel Powell, society member who is art instructor at that school.

I haven't found any record of what happened to these student-built heroic sculptures after the art show. "Sabin High School" was a short-lived boys' alternative high school program based at Sabin Elementary School, 1939-1947, which was formerly part of Thomas A. Edison High School.

Turtle Bay

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A cool thing about the island of Oahu is that the Honolulu city bus system serves essentially the entire island, so you can get out of town and go sightseeing for the price of a bus pass. So one day I caught the #55 bus, which loops around much of the windward side of the island. The bus runs about every 45 minutes during the day, so I picked out a few spots I might want to get off and look around and take some photos. At the far northern tip of the island is the Turtle Bay Resort, which I had a vague idea I'd heard of before. There was a bus stop right in the main parking lot, so I put it down on my list as a maybe. When we got there, it was raining steadily, and I was kind of settled in on the bus and thinking mostly about lunch, and I couldn't see much from the bus except for golf courses. As a non-golfer, that didn't look too promising, so I stayed on the bus and snapped a few quick camera phone photos out the windows. Still, I try to appeal to a broad audience here, and I imagine there may be a few golfers among this humble blog's Gentle Reader(s). So on their (theoretical) behalf I figured I'd go ahead and post my subpar photos of these very famous golf courses. I'm even going to grit my teeth and not make the usual stale wisecracks where I pretend to confuse golf with mini-golf. So, here ya go.

This is pretty much the only resort on the north shore of Oahu, and one of only a handful outside of Waikiki. It turns out the place had a rather unusual origin. It was the brainchild of Del Webb, a real estate developer who, among other things, built Las Vegas's Flamingo Hotel for Bugsy Siegel. In fact the resort was originally supposed to include Hawaii's first casino, which may explain the location way out here in the middle of nowhere. The resort's main building (which somehow didn't make it into any of these photos) even has the classic three-armed hotel floor plan seen all over Vegas. A ballot measure that would have legalized the casino failed, though, and as far as I know it hasn't been back on the ballot since then. To this day, Hawaii is one of only two states (the other being Utah) with no legal gambling of any kind: No casinos (Indian or otherwise), no horse racing, and no state lottery. Even church bingo is illegal. Possibly as a result, Las Vegas has been nicknamed the "Ninth Island", and the California Hotel in downtown Vegas markets itself almost exclusively to visitors from Hawaii. I can't help but wonder what the north end of Oahu would look like today if that ballot measure had passed.

Waimea Bay

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Here's a slideshow from Waimea Bay, on the North Shore of Oahu. It's one of the world's legendary surfing spots when the surf's up (as seen on YouTube, for example). The day I visited, though, the surf was most definitely not up, so it was pretty much just local families hanging out at the beach, and a few guys jumping into the ocean off the one big rock. Somehow I imagined the place would be larger than it was. Mythology has that effect, I guess. I occasionally have this idea that in some alternate timeline, alternate-me lives in a groovy beach hut, and sort of hangs out waiting for the perfect wave, and says "gnarly, dude" unironically. Which is not to say I want to do that myself; I hate salt water in my eyes, for one thing. And as a career choice, the economics just don't seem to pencil out unless you're a super-elite pro, or you have a trust fund to live on.

I only had about 45 minutes here before the next bus #55 came by, so I didn't have time to visit Waimea Valley, just on the other side of Kamehameha Highway. Apparently it's quite scenic and interesting, so it's on my list for next time around.

The word "Waimea" just means "red water" in the Hawaiian language, where red tends to mean sediment-filled. So this is a common place name all over Hawaii. There's a town on the Big Island, and the famous Waimea Canyon on Kaua'i, which is on my short list of to-do items at whatever point I make it to Kaua'i.

Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel

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On my recent trip to Wallops Island, VA, I flew in to the Norfolk airport and then crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel to get to the Eastern Shore side of the bay. After I planned this out, it took roughly a millisecond for me to go, hey, here's an idea, I'll take some photos of the bridge while I'm there and do a blog post about it.

This is by far the largest bridge I've covered here. It spans the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, and it just goes on and on for 23 miles. Most individual parts of the bridge really aren't that remarkable; much of the distance is over shallow water, this being an estuary and all, so the bridge is just a low trestle structure over those parts. There are two tunnel segments though, along with one higher bridge segment, to accommodate the bay's shipping channels. The reasoning behind the tunnels (as opposed to building more bridge segments) is that the Hampton Roads region is home to the world's largest naval base, and the navy could be blocked in port if the Rooskies or other evildoers managed to collapse bridges into the shipping channels.

At either end of each tunnel is a small artificial island. The island closest to the Norfolk side of the bay actually has a restaurant, gift shop, and fishing pier. (The others have no facilities and I'm not sure you're even allowed to stop on them.) I naturally had to stop and have a look around. Partly for the whole photo / blog post thing, and partly because I didn't get to stop there on my only other trip across the bridge, on a family trip to the East Coast back in 1987. My mom decided it was a tacky tourist trap and she turned up her nose at the idea. So I pretty much had to stop and check the place out. It actually wasn't that tacky, although it very well might have been in 1987.

One other difference versus 1987 is that the bridge now has separate trestles for northbound and southbound traffic, so it's a four lane bridge now except for the tunnel parts. The tunnels still narrow down to one lane each direction, I imagine because building more tunnels would be expensive.

A point about naming: I'd always thought of this as the "Chesapeake Bay Bridge", but it turns out there's an unfortunate naming collision at work here. Further up the bay there's a large bridge that also goes by "Chesapeake Bay Bridge", so you can't drop the word "tunnel" without confusing people. This bridge is technically named the "Lucius J. Kellam Jr. Bridge–Tunnel" after a local civic leader, but as far as I know nobody calls it that. The acronym "CBBT" seems to get a bit of use though.

Did I mention it costs twelve dollars to cross the bridge-tunnel? Seriously. Granted that comes to about 50 cents per mile, but still. Twelve dollars.

halloween sky

Neptune's Park, Virginia Beach

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At the tail end of my recent trip to Virginia, I made a brief detour over to Virginia Beach to take some photos of the huge and sorta-famous King Neptune statue and the surrounding Neptune's Park. The statue is a mascot of the city's Neptune Festival and has actually only been there since 2005. Based on the photos of it that I'd seen, it looked cheesy enough that it merited a side trip, plus I had a rental car I actually liked for a change and I wanted to drive it a bit more.

So I got there and realized there was some sort of municipal weekend festival going on, and the whole area was clogged with tourists, and it was $10 to park in the nearby public parking garage. I only had about 10-15 minutes to spare before I needed to head toward the Norfolk airport, so this was a problem. I don't like to think I'm a stingy person, but paying $1/minute to park struck me as a poor allocation of funds. So I figured I could still pull off a blog post if I drove by the park on Atlantic Avenue and snapped a few quick phone photos of the statue while I was stuck in traffic. The resulting photos turned out to be comically, hilariously bad. I think one of the photos may include part of either the head or the trident, out of focus and behind some festival stands and tents and so forth, but I'm not really sure about that. It could also be a bigfoot sighting, based on the photo quality. For what it's worth, I also had big sticky half-eaten chunk of baklava in the car to maybe chuck at Pat Robertson (who's based in Virginia Beach) if I saw him, and then blog about it from jail, but that didn't pan out either, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have actually done it anyway, and I ended up throwing the baklava away at the airport instead.

So I went back and forth trying to decide whether I had enough material for a blog post or not. The photos I ended up with were so terrible that I figured I could go with a "so-bad-it's-good" angle, sort of the Plan 9 from Outer Space of blog posts. And then I thought, if I only go with photos from successful photo-taking forays here, I'm creating a skewed idea of what this blogging lifestyle is really like, and kids will grow up wanting to be just like me, not realizing how frustrating and annoying it can be sometimes, until it's too late. Or something like that. Anyway, trumping all other concerns was the idea that I either use these crappy photos, or I don't get a little "Virginia Beach" pushpin on the map for this humble blog. That's kind of an absurd reason and I imagine I'll get over it sooner or later, but for now I'm still kind of big on adding exciting new places to the map. Even if they're just a blur.

Wallops Island National Wildlife Refuge

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A few photos from Wallops Island National Wildlife Refuge across the road from part of NASA's Wallops Flight Facility. Since the USFWS website is shuttered right now due to a silly government shutdown, here's their description of the place pulled from Google's cached version, since I have no idea when the official site might come back online:

The Wallops Island National Wildlife Refuge was created on July 10, 1975 when 373 acres of land were transferred to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The refuge, comprised mainly of salt marsh and woodlands, is located east of Wattsville in Accomack County, Virginia and contains habitat for a variety of trust species, including upland- and wetland-dependent migratory birds. Additionally, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has an agreement with NASA to use the NASA-owned portion of Wallops Island proper on a non-interference basis for research and management of declining wildlife in special need of protection. The agreement with NASA covers approximately 3,000 acres of Wallops Island proper and is primarily salt marsh. Wallops Island NWR and the agreement with NASA are administered by the staff at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge.

A sea-level fen, known as the Simoneston Bay sea-level fen, exist on and is protected by the refuge. Sea-level fens are nutrient-poor, maritime seepage wetlands, confined to a few sites with an unusual combination of environmental conditions for the mid-Atlantic. The fen is located just above the highest tide levels, at the base of a slope where abundant groundwater discharges. Only four occurrences are known in Virginia.

The Wallops Island NWR was opened for the first time ever to public hunting in 2002 to reduce the affects of overbrowsing by deer on refuge habitats and reduce the potential of deer collision with vehicles on the adjacent state highway 175 and neighboring flight facility.

The origin as excess, unused NASA land is similar to how the Merritt Island NWR at Cape Canaveral came about. I'm not sure coastal development pressures are quite as acute here as they are in Florida, but from the NASA standpoint it's great to have a buffer area between your launch pads and encroaching hotels and condos and so forth. The launch pads aren't protected from encroaching nature, though, as an unlucky local frog discovered during the LADEE launch.

As the USFWS description explains, this refuge is administered by the nearby Chincoteague wildlife refuge, and it doesn't have its own visitor's center or really anything in the way of developed facilities. There's just a grassy parking area and a small sign with the name of the place and some hunting and fishing regulations, and an unmarked trailhead leading off into the forest.

I stopped here on the day of the LADEE launch, as there weren't a lot of public activities that day and I had some time to kill. It basically looks like a typical coastal forest and wetland area. It probably wouldn't merit a blog post of its own if I lived in the area and saw scenery like this all the time. Still, if this isn't the sort of environment you see every day, and you're in the area anyway, it's a representative example if you want to have a quick look. Just remember to bring bug spray. I'd just purchased a new can of DEET spray but somehow forgot to put any on before wandering into the wildlife refuge, and I ended up with a few annoying bug bites. As an erstwhile South Carolina resident who really ought to know better, I found this kind of embarrassing.