Carolina experience

This weekend was jam packed activities with my better half traipsing through a 100 mile radius from home and visiting a multitude of food and recreation spots outside Charlotte.

Saturday started with visiting now revitalized digs of former tobacco and rail barons like RJ Reynolds and Duke and JP Morgan in the form of Winston Salem. Having visited before we knew where some taste bud enticing menu was located and we immediately stopped there.

Food came in the form of pork buns and steamed shrimp dumplings along with some amazing beef noodle soup in a spicy broth. The place, May Way, is a little shack in the Reynolda garden complex (part of the Wake Forest University close by). The spring season was in full bloom and so a walk later on in the rose and flowering gardens was enjoyable along with stopping to chat with visitors from far and near also seeking joy in nature.

After this heart beat racing stroll in the gardens we stopped for a little bit to admire art and poetry (erasure poetry was a new art form to me) at the SECA complex not far from Reynolda.

From there it was a short drive south to just outside Salisbury to see the Norfolk Southern goods train marshalling yard - the access being at the end of a dead end street. There is no signage whatsoever and for a minute you are not even sure your car is going in the right direction until you end up at the tens of tracks housing the rail cars waiting to their turn to be shunted to their destination.

As a rail geek it is always a fascination to see such action up close.

From there we visited another historic and amazing facility - this the NC state transport museum in Spencer, NC. Town was named for a guy that JP Morgan hired as owner of Southern Railway, over a 100 years ago to run his railway business which resulted in America's glory days in rail including that for the Carolinas. Samuel Spencer was the first president of the railway and the town is popular today because of this museum.

100 year old roundhouse (largest of its size and kind in North America)

To get to this town off I-85 you can take a service road coming from parts north like we did in Winston and it took us over a 100 plus year old Wil-Cox bridge. An amazing architecture and engineering marvel it is best viewed from a pull out on the northern end as it spans the Yadkin river.

I loved walking around the 37 track and 100 feet long roundhouse table that is still used to service some of the exhibit locomotive and train set that operates on the site.

After relaxing Saturday night with some amazing Indian food we planned a hike for Sunday morning in a 2,000 acre greenspace, this time in town of Fort Mill SC. This wonderful area is named after the woman who bequeathed this land to the locals to be used as a recreational space and opportunity to get outdoors. Her name was Anne Springs Close. Her maiden name of Springs tells the history of a cotton mill baron, her father who owned several mills in the area in South Carolina and later donated his estate to her.

It is part educational space for young children - with exhibits for both natural artifacts as well as historic ones being the site of the trail carrying armies to fight the British during the war of 1867.

A hanging bridge over Steele Creek inside this park along with some quality time strolling along Haigler lake was our favorite part.

New England is gleaming in the fall

This autumn the weather gods cooperated as we took a family trip in the northeast to see six states that qualify or makeup what is known colloquially in America as New England. Mass, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island (tiniest state in the union). The outing helped tally up the states we either lived in, visited or have worked in to 47. Guess which three have eluded this intrepid traveling family. Any rate the drive was all in about 1,800 miles and included some memorable geographic wonders or points of interest. Easternmost part of state of Massachusetts being one. Furthest drivable road east in Mass being another. Visit to all Ivy League schools (term harkens to a collegiate athletics conference and generally regarded as elite academic institutes of some repute worldwide) is another random bucket list item of which this trip afforded the chance to knock two more of the list. Dartmouth in Hanover, NH and Brown (and its sister institute the RISD - school f

Searching for a lavish 'fill in the blank with other adjectives and gender' in bed

Many of the readers of this blog have experienced this. Strange sounding messages popping up in your text or WA or emails all day long from some exotic sounding locale with an out of this world individual looking for love, sex, money or other paraphernalia to get a high. I mean granted that electronic spamming is a low cost enterprise and all but the sheer volumes and the variety in these exhortations is beyond imagination. Having a desire to engage you in some sort of sexual payola or invest in some arcane crypto scheme must be a profound algorithm that someone from Oklahoma to Odessa is cranking on through the night and watching one in a few million fall for. Otherwise this nonsense would not exist I suspect. It would be funny to watch the lifecycle of some such persona that creates said content and that of a prospect for this invite becoming an unwilling or willing participant. Then that whole thing could go on some social channel and earn likes and subscriptions for someone else a

Lakeside frivolities

We moved to the Charlotte area not knowing where exactly our new home would be. Turns out it was by a popular lake formed by the damming of the Catawba river which flows north to south in the Carolinas. Local electricity generation utility built a series of dams along the waterway for hydro and couple nuclear plants as well to supply the state grid. The lake our house butts into is Lake Wylie. While tract home build has picked up in the Carolinas the developer often carves out parcels that they can get their hands on leaving behind privately owned lots that the individual owner may not want to sell. Our house is part of a subdivision but backs into actual lake front yardage that has always been part of legacy family owned properties who chose to build a cabin or getaway and did not sell to a corporation wanting to build in the hundreds. As such we can see the water through the year but it does not afford actual water access. That privilege is to our neighbors who still maintain thei

Brown Motion

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