East Tennessee Looks Good

We ended up on Rush Minute near Johnson City.  It reminds me of Boise traffic jams in 2001.  Admittedly, it was Labor Day weekend but there was no traffic, no crowds.  

We stopped for lunch in Knoxville which is roughly equivalent to Boise in traffic density and fancy restaurants.  Homeless people everywhere.   At the offramp one guy having ferocious fistfights with invisible enemies. 

My Impressions of France and Switzerland

 Paris and Marseilles are crowded and noisy.  Bern and Basel in Switzerland was also crowded and noisy.  Our hotel in the suburbs of Bern was quiet.

Food

The food was often surprising.  Not bad or good, just different.  We were desperate for something fast in Marseilles, so we ordered at a kiosk in a McDonald's on the corner from our hotel.  The fries were awful.  Ther Big Mac was different in some way that I cannot articulate.  It was okay, just not home.  By comparison, the Burger King fries in Basel, Switzerland were indistinguishable from home.

There were a number of meals that were only okay.  My daughter and wife were ga-ga over how good everything was.  I did not feel their amazement.  I wonder if our ten mile days might have contributed to how much they enjoyed their meals.  The French onion soup around the corner from Nortre Dame was completely typical of what I get here.  The croissants were wonderful, but not immediately superior to what I get in any supermarket here.

Safety

I felt safe in all of these cities.  French police in the Paris train station, the Louvre, and Eiffel Tower, were all carrying M4s.  Even in the subways, I felt reasonably safe.  The streets were clean.  Public rerestrooms were generally clean.  Beggars were less common in Paris than San Francisco (admitedly, a low bar to beat, but simlar to Boise).  I saw one beggar in Switzerland.  There were few obviously homeless people in any city we visited.

Diverse

One of the consequences of imperial France's insistence that all their colonial possession citizens were little Frenchmen, regardless of skin color, is that France is very diverse.  While some Muslim women were wearing hijabs, most were not.  My interactions with Muslims in customer-facing roles seemed friendly and appropriate.  Admittedly, I did not go into any of the bad sections of Paris.

Curiously, an East Indian woman told my daughter that the crime problem only became an issue with Africans arriving.  Whether this perception reflects reality, I do not know.

Friendliness

Everyone but one person in a tourist-facing role was friendly and kind, contrary to the stereotpe of difficult Frenchmen.

Language

The conquest of the Middle East by Alexander the Great created a single dominant culture with a common secondary language, Greek.  The Internet and American dominance in culture has done the same for English.  While the customer-facing people all spoke and understood English, they were grateful when my wife and daughter attempted French.  At least no one served us a chocolate-covered tractor.

Cameras

 I hate to drag along my Pentax DSLR on trips.  It is pretty large and bringing along my case of specialized lens really better suits car trips.  I have a 12 MP point-and-shoot, but I could not find it in the mad dash to get packed.  

Why not just use my phone's camera like I did for this last trip?  These cameras are high resolution even compared to DSLRs but the lens diameter means they do not work in low-light conditions.  While the resolution of the image is high, that small diameter also limits the fundamental resolution of the image more than the sensor.  Even pretty good pictures do not crop to good images.

Driving Through a Buffalo Herd

When I alluded to driving through a buffalo herd, I was not exaggerating.

 

Badlands National Park

Once you see these highly eroded clay hills, you can see why farmers had no interest in them.  They are quite scenic.

There are bighorn sheep herds as well:

Interesting Places to Visit In and Near Rapid City, S.D.

We went to Bear World, which is sort of a private zoo.  But more Lion Country Safari in that many of the animals are roaming free around your car as you drive through.  Many are not terribly rare to those of us in Idaho, such as deer.  I suspect international visitors to Mt. Rushmore think differently.

Deer:

Others are a bit rarer such as this wolf:

Of course, bison, we saw a lot more a couple days later when we discovered that eve if you cannot rollerskate through a buffalo herd, you can certainly drive through one.

Black bear munching sweet potatoes (they are omnivores):

They have some more dangerous critters in cages, such as mountain lion:

Wolf feeding time. Remember: Fifi has wolves in her family tree:

Tourists go to New England for fall colors, but South Dakota does pretty well too.

No pictures but the Journey Museum in Rapid City is better than I expected.  It has dinosaurs, and a bit of history.

The Mammoth Site in Hot Springs is a collection of in situ mammoth fossils among others who fell into a sinkhole.  There is a layer of shale that when wet reverts to slippery mud.  If you get to close for a drink of water, you slide in.  It is also not so easy to climb back out.

This is an active paleontological dig.  

There is an interesting story to it.  A developer was building a subdivision and his bulldozer unearthed a mammoth bone.  After receiving uninterested responses from several university paleontology departments, he stopped development and set up a foundation to do the work needed.  It is gratifying to see people in the business of making money decide to work for the public interest.

It was not expensive ($14 for an adult), especially when you consider it has no governmental funding.

Devil's Tower

To give you some idea of the scale, this picture shows those columns.  Those little round things on the right?  Those are helmets of those crazy intrepid enough to climb it.

Lovely vacation. 

The debris field around the base?  Basalt boulders that have fallen.  The Visitor's Center says none have fallen recently, but in winter who would know?  The modern, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?"

There is a 1.3 mile loop around the base of the tower and gives you opportunities to see it in various levels of sunlight.

Manhattan From the Air

You have no comprehension when you are on the streets how spectacular Manhattan Island really is.

And what a magnificent creation Central Park is:

I started using GIMP on some of these pictures from 2007, and find myself wishing that I had known about GIMP back then.  As an example, this spectacular picture of the top of the Chrysler Building, a brilliant example of Art Deco architecture.

and then after adjusting Contrast/Brightness and Unsharp Mask:

Petroglyphs National Monument

Just a few miles from Albuquerque, we had an abbreviated visit because we were about to fly out and the direct sunlight was intolerable.  (There was a nice cool wind, but direct sunlight at that altitude makes hiking unpleasant for Rhonda and me.)

Albuquerque's National Museum of Nuclear Science & History

This is a Smithsonian museum devoted to nuclear history (both weapons and peaceful uses) and it is awesome.  I linked to the Wikipedia page because the museum's page has a certificate error.  It has a detailed history of the development of nuclear science and many of the delivery systems.

They have a B-29 and a mockup of the Trinity Site tower and plutonium bomb:

Inside they have not a mockup, but one of the other four Fat Boy bomb casings (minus the pit, of course) which shows the detonators and wiring harness.  Have 15 kg of plutonium?  I think I know where to go to complete your nuclear science project.  Your junior high school science teacher will be so surprised!

Delivery systems:

and the cases for air drop:

and the ultimate stupid idea delivery system, the nuclear shell cannon:

They also had a series of exhibits explaining the decision to drop the bomb, and a section on Cold War brinksmanship and civil defense.  They also had a section on popular culture manifestations of peaceful nuclear science, including Dr. Brown's Delorean.  Admission was $10 per person, the day we visited.