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.

dawn, charlotte airport

When I flew to Norfolk, Virginia for the LADEE launch last month, I took a redeye flight with an early morning layover at Charlotte, NC's Douglas Airport, because it was US Airways and basically all of their flights connect through Charlotte. Taking the jump of 3 time zones into account, this meant that I was navigating an unfamiliar airport at about 3am my time, after a few fitful hours of trying to sleep on the plane.

The sun was just starting to come up as I waited for my connecting flight from CLT to ORF, and since the airport's due west of downtown Charlotte, there was a nice view of the downtown skyline with a multicolored pre-dawn sky behind it. I will freely admit that these are almost certainly not the best sunrise-in-Charlotte photos ever taken. I'm just pleased (and kind of surprised) that groggy 3am me thought to take photos at all. So here they are.

Updated: I just realized I accidentally took a short video clip, too, so I've added it to the post. It's not any worse than the photos, I'll say that for it.

The other thing I should point out is that most of the tall buildings in downtown Charlotte are headquarters of horrible megabanks, companies that bear a big chunk of the responsibility for detonating the global economy in 2008. Nobody's been held accountable; in fact they've gotten even bigger after getting bailed out at taxpayer expense. Grr.

Tri-Cities BNSF Bridge

When I stopped briefly in the Tri-Cities to snap some photos of the famous Cable Bridge, there was a BNSF railroad bridge in the background and I ended up taking a few photos of it too. It looks like your average utilitarian railroad bridge, with a bunch of truss segments and a lift span, but it turns out this one is quite old (by Northwest standards) and historically significant. Its HistoryLink page explains that it was built way back in 1888, completing a key missing link in the Northern Pacific transcontinental railroad between Minnesota and Puget Sound, and the towns of Kennewick and Pasco were founded here on opposite banks of the Columbia River, thanks in large part to the railroad.

Before the bridge was completed, a steamboat railcar ferry served here for several years. Trains would be demated and the railcars slowly barged across the river. Once reassembled on the opposite bank, the train would continue on its way. This sounds kind of crazy but it does actually work, so long as you don't care too much about speed or the cost of manpower. A similar arrangement once operated near Portland until the Vancouver Railroad Bridge went in.

Eastern Washington was still part of the wild west in the bridge's early years, and the Kennewick side of the bridge was the scene of a big outlaw shootout in 1906. It's a proper Western tale, with posses, horse thieves, an improbable jailbreak, and an unsolved mystery. I don't keep up on Tri-Cities news that closely but I assume the area isn't quite so rough-n-tumble anymore. Still, in 2011 the city of Kennewick managed to get the bridge designated as a "potential terror target", netting a cool $250k in Homeland Security pork cash.

I did come across a couple of good photos of the bridge to pass along: one of the bridge at sunrise, and another taken on the railroad tracks looking across the bridge.

Cable Bridge

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A few photos of the Cable Bridge, which crosses the Columbia River between Kennewick & Pasco, Washington. It's a cable-stayed bridge, as the name suggests; it picked up the name because it was one of the first cable-stayed bridges in the United States, and it was kind of a novelty at the time. Many sources insist it was the first, but I was poking through a book on inspection & maintenance of cable-stayed bridges, and it points out that the Sitka Harbor Bridge in Alaska dates to 1971, making it a good 7 years older than the Cable Bridge.

I remember visiting my grandmother in Kennewick, not long after the bridge opened, and being amazed by it. I mean, I think I was amazed most of the time at that age, but still. I probably picked up on the local civic pride about the thing. The older Pasco-Kennewick Bridge sat right next to the Cable Bridge at the time, although it had been abandoned in place when the new bridge opened. My grandmother went on and on about how the new bridge was modern and forward-looking and something to be proud of, while the old bridge was an eyesore that needed to be torn out. That finally happened in 1990, after twelve years of legal battles.

This type of bridge still isn't common in the Northwest. Right now the only cable-stayed bridge I know of in Portland is the big skybridge at OHSU, and it'll remain the only one until the new TriMet MAX bridge opens in 2015.

Ft. George Garden, Astoria

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I was rummaging through an old iPhoto library a while back and noticed I had a few photos of of the Ft. George Garden in Astoria, an overgrown rose garden surrounded by an ornate iron fence, on Exchange St. behind the Fort George Brewery. These photos were taken several years ago, shortly before the brewery opened. Apparently they've employed a gardener to look after the place, so it may not be as overgrown as it was the last time I was there.

The garden sits next to a small city park marking the site of Fort Astoria, a fur trading post founded in 1811, which happened to be the first American settlement on the Pacific coast. After only two years in business, the fort was sorta-captured by the British during the War of 1812, and spent the next 33 years as Fort George (as in King George the 3rd), an outpost of the Hudson's Bay Company. The post was later abandoned as the Hudson's Bay Company moved its main operations inland to Fort Vancouver. I don't know whether the garden itself has any particular historical significance. Based on the fencing I'm going to guess the garden (or at least the fence) dates to the late 19th or early 20th century, or later if someone was aiming for a retro look.

River Shift

Here are a few photos of River Shift, the public art installation at the south end of Waterfront Park, near the Marquam Bridge. The RACC page about it includes an extended artist's statement:

The idea for this piece had its source in the rough concrete piers and reinforcements that were being excavated from the old waterfront site when I first saw it. I made a progression using local basalt stone and the existing wrecked concrete.

At the top of the berm there is a grouping of saw-cut vertical basalt, and some irregular, displaced foundations. As the basalt pieces progress from berm to river, they tip over, so that the concrete below becomes exposed and the basalt becomes submerged and eventually disappears.

At the river path there are various configurations of concrete and stone, including inlays and pieces that can function as seating. Concrete is cut in various places to expose the river rock aggregate inside as well as the old embedded wood piers, and some heavy steel reinforcement emerges in various plant-like and root-like ways.

The work is meant to be a quiet narrative that is derived and retained from the site, rather than a thing that was brought in.

The artist's website has a photoset about River Shift, including a few shots looking down on the area from an adjacent building, which gives a better idea of how the various parts of the piece are laid out.

The idea of turning construction debris into art isn't a new one. You could probably travel the world and put together a big coffee table book of other examples from all over, and maybe write a thesis about the genre and what it all means. This does make me feel kind of bad for construction workers: They tear down a building, filling dump truck after dump truck with broken concrete and twisted rebar, having no clue about all the expensive capital-A art they've just created. They could probably all retire after the first couple of buildings and live off the proceeds, if only they knew. It's a real shame. In any case, River Shift is a well-executed example of the genre, and paths down to the river are obviously a popular feature since river-level access near downtown is pretty rare. People actually fish there, and when the weather's nice a few people will even try to lie on the sorta-beach and work on their sorta-tans. Californians, probably.