Didn’t find the time to do updates for the last couple of days . . . how did you survive without me? On the final leg of the journey today, north through West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York. Unless the border crossing is really bad, we should be home for dinner.
April 9, 2010
April 6, 2010
Boatin’
A few photos taken on our boat tour out into Charleston harbour, including a stop at Fort Sumter:
The (remains of) the fort, from the inner harbour, approaching the dock
Some of the recovered cannon from the Civil War sieges
The USS Yorktown, taken from the Aquarium on the other side of the river.
April 5, 2010
Still tourin’
With yesterday being Easter Sunday, we had no idea how busy things might be, or even what might be open. On the way into Charleston, we stopped at Middleton Place, which I expected to be an hour or so side-trip, but turned into the main activity of the day. It’s a huge property (6500 acres) that had been a rice plantation until the Civil War, when the property was destroyed by Union troops in 1865. The family could only afford to re-build one of the three main buildings, the south “flanker”. The unreconstructed remains of the other two buildings were thrown down in the 1886 earthquake.
The rebuilt south flanker, from the river side
The remains of the main house, after war and earthquake damage.
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April 4, 2010
Tourin’
Arrived at our base of operations for the week — Summerville, SC. The initial plan for yesterday was just to get on the I-77 for the bulk of the run, but within a mile of joining the main route, we hit a miles-long traffic jam. It took us about 15 minutes to get the 1/4 mile to the next exit (W.V. state road 16). That took us away from the traffic, but it also took us deep into coal country:
I had no idea how deep those valleys were: the valleys we drove through the previous day were nothing in comparison. I lost track of the tiny little villages we passed through which were literally just wide spots in the road, with a couple of dozen houses crammed between the valley walls, with the road, the railway, and the river taking up the only flattish spots.
It was very much like a trip back in time, as aside from the few newer buildings in the larger villages (a few new suburban-style houses, a couple of government buildings, one or two small primary schools), everything else looked like it’d been there for a century or more. The roads switched back and forth to match the valley side, and I honestly have to say that in many cases the posted speed limit was higher than I think was really safe: and I can’t think of many other places I’ve visited where I can say that. 55 MPH on some of those mountain roads is very literally taking your life in your hands.
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April 3, 2010
Still travellin’
Got as far as Beckley, West Virginia yesterday. The scenery along the way was . . . um. Once you get into West Virginia, your line of sight drops off to a few hundred metres in any direction except straight up: there’s always a wooded hill or ridge or whatever blocking your line of sight (to be fair, it’s blocking your view of yet another wooded hill, etc.).
I’d have stopped to take some photos (especially of the New River gorge), but we were trying to get as far towards today’s destination as we could, so we limited the stops to the absolute minimum.
April 2, 2010
Travellin’
On the road for a bit, don’t know what my internet access will be like for the first part of the trip, so updates may be somewhat irregular. I’m sure you’ll all cope just fine.
March 19, 2010
Light posting in forecast
Taking Victor up to Trent University today, so no posting until later. Maybe.
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March 15, 2010
Minor irritations
I realize it’s a positive sign that all I’ve got to complain about is a trivial thing, but damn it’s annoying.
“It”, specifically, is the latest update to Firefox (now at version 3.6). There’s now a problem with my mouse scrolling wheel in Firefox, but only in my Rogers/Yahoo webmail client. You don’t realize how often you use a feature until it stops working unexpectedly. I noticed it on my desktop last week, but didn’t directly attribute it to Firefox until this morning when I updated the browser on my laptop and it started displaying the same symptoms (also, YouTube videos lose their sound, but that’s only on the laptop).
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March 10, 2010
Slight stylesheet change
A comment by “sm” let me know that not everyone was seeing the same formatting on the blog that I was seeing (the term he used was “spidery” to describe the text). As I’m not an expert at stylesheets, I consulted Jon, my former virtual landlord. He quickly diagnosed the problem as a stray lettering specification which affected most paragraphs, but which didn’t show up for visitors using ClearType. Each of the machines I’d been using to post on the blog had ClearType turned on, so I wasn’t seeing any issues.
So I’ve changed the stylesheet to remove the negative letter spacing, which should provide a better viewing experience for anyone not using Windows XP/Vista.
February 7, 2010
Hosting service suffered an outage
HostGator, my ISP, had some router issues this morning, so apologies if you tried to access the site and couldn’t. Things appear to be stabilizing now.
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January 5, 2010
Updated to new version of WordPress
In case there are any style or functionality glitches, that’d be the reason why. If you do see something clearly not right, please drop me a comment on this post and I’ll flail around to try to fix it . . .
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January 1, 2010
Here’s to a better year (decade) this time around
Happy New Year, everyone. 2009 wasn’t my favourite year, but it was a mild improvement over 2008, which in turn was nearly as shitty as 2007. 2006, that was a pretty good year . . .
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December 25, 2009
Merry Christmas, everyone
Normal-ish blogging will resume in a day or two . . . in the meantime, what are you doing reading blogs? Go enjoy yourself!
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December 14, 2009
Sorry for the lack of posts over the weekend
I hadn’t planned to avoid blogging all weekend, it just sort of happened. Of course, at this time of year, many of you aren’t reading the blogosphere as frequently, so it probably balances out.
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November 18, 2009
Busy with work this morning
Hoping to get a chance to do a bit of blogging later today. Check some of the fine blogs listed in the blogroll over to your right if you’re looking for interesting reading material.
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