Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Georgia Travelog #6
Savannah, GA - Tuesday, 8 Apr 2025, 4pm

As of a few days ago we weren't sure what we'd do today, Tuesday, in Savannah. The weather forecast looked not-so-great, with cool weather and a chance of rain. Well, the weather forecast improved as of late last night. The storms passed through quickly yesterday— though they did make visiting the beach less fun— leaving today with clear and gently warm weather. We decided to do another day of self-guided touring on foot in Savannah today. And what a great day it turned out to be for that!

We started with a simple plan. It was as simple as 1-2-3-: One, search "things to do in Savannah" on the web. Two, filter out from that reasonably short list things we a) already did Sunday or b) generally don't like to do. An example of the latter is anything that feels too touristy... like ride a garishly painted tour bus around town. Three, pick a place to have lunch nearby whatever's left to start with lunch.

So we drove downtown at started with lunch at Clary's. It's a 1950s-ish diner serving a wide menu. And unlike many of the restaurants we turned down in our searching, it's not a gentrified place opened a few years ago designed  to look like an idealized 1950s diner, it's a legit 1950s diner with staff who look like they've been working there for 20+ years. Plus some fuzz balls hanging from the A/C vents that look like they've been there at least that long, too. 🤣

After lunch we walked to nearby Forsyth Park.



Like I noted on Sunday, downtown Savannah is studded with small city parks. We actually passed through a small park, about 1 square block in size, just walking to Forsyth Park. Forsyth is much larger. It has long promenades and a few fountains and memorials.



On the promenades to either side of the Forsyth Park Fountain (yes, that's its name) were artists and panhandlers plying their crafts. We chatted with a few of the artists. I met one who's from France and said she likes Savannah because of all these parks in it. "It's like a European city," she said. "Nowhere else in the US feel like home like this."

The other thing we'd picked out to visit today in our 1-2-3 planning exercise was the Basilica of St. John the Baptist. On the way to Forsyth Park, though, we found another house of worship we were curious to visit— the Synagogue of Mikve Israel.



Jewish synagogues aren't as common as Christian churches, or even specifically Catholic churches. But we seem to have a way to find them unintentionally when walking around. It's like Hawk has Jewdar (Jewish radar). Or maybe it's those Jewish mind-control space lasers MAGA-world was ranting about a few years ago. We waited a bit until the temple was open to visitors and then paid to take a guided tour.

This building dates to 1876 but the congregation Mikve Israel was founded in 1733. It's one of the oldest continuous Jewish congregations in the US. The founding families were immigrants from London, most of whom were descendants of Jews who fled Spain and Portugal during the Inquisition.

This house of worship is unusual, architecturally, for a Jewish synagogue. It looks like a Christian church! And not just outside but also inside, where the sanctum is a narrow, high ceiling nave with a transept (so it's in the shape of a cross!), and there's a pipe organ and a choir loft. The guide explained it's because the architects available in 1876 when the congregation was rebuilding after a fire were only familiar with building Christian churches, and neo-Gothic design was also all the rage. So they made it their own and also became the first Jewish congregation to have musical accompaniment with their singing.



When we visited the Basilica of St. John the Baptist later in the day it was hard not to see the similarities. I mean, the religious content of what's in side is different; one's a Jewish temple, the other a Catholic cathedral. But they have such similar shape (though the cathedral is larger) with the same iron pillars inside painted to look like marble (a common neo-Gothic technique) and stained glass windows all around.

One thing I found refreshing about this Catholic church is that it was open to visitors. So many other historical Catholic churches we've wanted to visit charge a fee just to walk in— and many even explicitly say that visitors are not welcome. So the fact that this one was not only free of charge but also free of "Thou shalt not..." rules for visitors posted on signs around the doors, was refreshing. Even better, a few volunteers inside gladly answered questions from visitors like us instead of sternly shushing us as if merely attempting to speak were a profanity. It's like it's a church that welcomes people outside the faith who come with curiosity and a desire to learn. Imagine that!

I found an interesting thing when I went to light a candle the other day. The box of matches I kept nearby had just run out, so I rummaged around other places in the house where we keep matches and found this:



What's so interesting about a matchbook with a restaurant's name on it? I mean, aside from the fact that restaurants basically don't "do" customized matchbooks anymore. It used to be a thing years ago, back when more people smoked. Back when smokers could smoke in virtually every restaurant, everywhere. Restaurants would hand smokers a matchbook with the restaurant's name on so they could light up at their tables, then remember the restaurant by taking the matchbook home, sort of like a calling card. A calling card that makes fire.

What's interesting to me about this particular matchbook is that I've probably had it in my possession, through multiple house moves across multiple states, since about 1992. I know that because the Greek House restaurant in Ithaca, NY was one of my regular haunts in 1992-1993 when I lived a few blocks away. Yes, these matches are from another century!

And why would I have old matches when I've never smoked? Ah, it's because in that century past the apartment I rented had a stove that needed to be lit with a match. That's right, a gas stove without an automatic striker or even a pilot light!

How old is that? Well, since you asked.... I estimate the house I lived in was built in the 1910s. That comes from style of foundation the house was built on and the foundations of other houses in the neighborhood. (Haha, you asked an engineer "How old is that?" and now you get an engineer answer. 😏)  Some houses had stone foundations/footings, others had concrete. Building standards changed from one to the other in the US after 1910. Thus I estimate the neighborhood was built around that time, with my house being slightly newer than some because it had a concrete footing.

Now, the stove might not have dated to the 1910s, but I figure it wasn't newer than the 1940s. Pilot lights become common in gas stoves in the 1940s. For example, my grandmother owned a stove manufactured in 1941, and it had a built-in pilot light.

So, since my flatmates and I needed matches to use our stove, and we were poor college students, we grabbed free matchbooks at restaurants when we dined out so we could eat hot food at home. It was lucky for us, I guess, that smoking was still common.

BTW, the Greek House closed in 2006.

BTW², these 33 year old matches don't work well anymore. Unsurprising since they're cheap giveaways. Two fell apart as I tried striking them before the third lit.

Panama Travelog #29
Panama City, Panama - Sat, 28 Dec 2024. 12pm.

Today we toured the Panama Canal. We booked a half-day ferry excursion that took us from the Pacific Ocean to approximately the midpoint of the canal, at Gamboa. There are 6 locks from end to end, 3 up and 3 down in each direction. Our ferry ascended through 3 locks then docked. Following that we rode a bus back to Panama City.

It was an early day. We set alarms for 4:45am to be out the door at 5:30am to report to the marina at 6am for check-in and boarding. The day started even earlier for me as my body decided at around 2:15am that it really didn't want more sleep. I sat up for 2.5 hours until our alarms rang.

Once at the marina things moved smoothly. Smoothly doesn't mean swiftly, though. One of the things our tour guides on the ship explained is that ships first wait an average of 8-10 hours at either end for the signal from authorities to begin transit, then a full transit through the canal takes 10-12 hours. So, going from ocean to ocean is a 24 hour process. Though that is quite swift compared to having to sail around Cape Horn at the tip of South America.



Continuing with my resolution to avoid backlogging I will share just one photo from this amazing and information-packed trip. This pic shows the ship ahead of us, a car carrier that can hold 3,000 cars, entering one of the locks at Miraflores. We followed it through each of the locks. There was room for both ships.

Note the tugboat in the foreground. It helped guide the freighter into the narrow lock. By narrow I mean that the there is less than 1 foot of clearance on each side of the freighter.

There are also electric locomotives, two on each side of the lock. You can see their rails in the picture. These "mules", as they're called, attach steel cables to large ships fore and aft to pull, push, and guide them through the locks. We didn't have mules attached to our ship because we're narrow enough to fit easily. That car carrier fits in the locks with less than 1' of clearance on each side.

These are the original locks that were designed in 1904 and completed in 1914. The reason ships like this barely fit in the locks is because they're designed that way. For decades freighter ships have been designed specifically to fit through the Panama Canal locks that have been operating for just over 110 years now.

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #6
Lexington, VA - Sun, 1 Sep 2024. 10:30pm

My trips often take me to fairly anonymous looking hotels in office parks and small towns. For tonight and tomorrow night we're in a Hampton Inn... in a mansion built in 1827.



This is the Col Alto house in Lexington, VA. It was built for a US Congressman.

Of course, we're not in the historic mansion part of the building. Yes, rooms were available there, but they're a) old-timey and b) $$$. We're around back in what feels like the servants' quarters, on the ground floor. Except it's not really the servants' quarters because... think about it... 1827 in Virginia, a slave state. The servants were enslaved people. They probably slept 6 to a room in a wooden shack. Yes, there's literally a wooden shack outside our room! A historic marker proclaims "nobody knows what it was used for." 🙄 Our ground floor room may only have a single window that opens barely 4 inches for fresh air, but we have all the modern conveniences.

Australia Travelog #9
The Sydney Tower Eye - Mon, 25 Dec 2023, 1pm

The Sydney Tower Eye has been present in almost every view of the downtown skyline. In fact it was the first piece of the skyline we noticed when we arrived downtown and thought, "Okay, that looks... weird." So why not visit it? As the skies remained clear early this afternoon it seemed like a good time to see Down Under from above.

The Sydney Tower Eye reminds me, structurally and in gaudiness factor, of the Seattle Space Needle and Toronto's CN Tower.

Apparently I'm not the only one to note the gaudiness factor as locals variously call the Tower Eye the AMP Tower, the Flower Tower, the Glower Tower, and the Big Poke.

The tower stands 309 meters (1,014 feet) tall. Part of that height is the antenna and lightning rod on top. The highest publicly accessible floor is the observation deck, on the 4th level of the clump at the top of the stem. It's at 250 meters (820 feet) above ground level. That's still higher than the top of any other building in Sydney, as you'll see in my photos below.

For people interested in records, BTW, the Tower Eye isn't the tallest tower around. It's not even the tallest in the Southern Hemisphere. The Sky Tower in Aukland, NZ surpasses it with a total height of 328 meters. Roughly a year ago the Autograph Tower in Jakarta, Indonesia, topped both with a height of 382.9 meters. And that's not counting the many taller structures in Northern Hemisphere cities. Plus there are all the structures that are buildings, not towers, that are really tall. (The architectural distinction is that a tower is designed for regular public access but not living space or offices.) Like the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which tops out at 829.8 meters.

Anyway, on to more pictures!



The view north across Sydney shows most of the city's other tall buildings. In the middle distance you can see the Harbor Bridge spanning the harbor. Slightly to its right are the white canopies of the Sydney Opera House.



Looking south there are a few tall buildings though not as many as to the north. One interesting thing about this view is that you can see the Hilton hotel where we're staying. It's in the foreground, just below the center of the picture. It's the gray building with the blue logo at its upper right area. And on the building's eastern face you can see the window of the room we're in. No, I'm not going to count how many windows up/down/over it is. This version of the photo is not high-res enough for that!

Thanksgiving Travelog #5
Washington, DC - Sun, 19 Nov 2023. 9:45am.

Today Hawk and I are visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. Our tickets aren't until 10am, though, when the museum first opens, and we arrived in town at 9:30am. That means there's time for an impromptu tour of Washington, DC!

After passing by the Pentagon and seeing the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument as we drove into town via I-395 and the 14th Street Bridge, we parked on Independence Ave just off 14th Street. It's half a block from the museum and not much further from various other things....



This view of the Washington Monument isn't from our parking space, but it is close. We crossed to the west side of 14th Street and took a few steps up onto the grass. Yes, one of the cool things about Washington, DC is that lots of iconic places are practically right next to each other.



As you walk north on 14th Street from Independence Ave you cross the National Mall. This is a huge lawn bookended by the Capitol to the east and... frankly, the Lincoln Memorial to the west. The Washington Monument is somewhere in the middle. Across the Mall from 14th Street you can pretty easily see the Capitol. It may look close but it's actually not. It's over a mile across the lawn to the building.



We concluded our mini-tour by looping back to our parked car to stow our heavy jackets, figuring we won't want to drag them around inside the museum. The pic above is of Independence Ave, where we parked. (Ours is one of the vehicles on the right.) I included this photo to show just how close to downtown we were able to park.

Street parking is free in Washington on Sundays. It's a policy designed specifically to encourage tourism. Of course, a wide-open street like this will be filled up by later in the day.

Choosing an early time for our tickets was part of a plan to keep things simple. By leaving relatively early in the morning we completed the 24 mile drive into the city with no traffic slowdowns. And we were able to park right away, no circling the blocks, just steps from the museum. This is so much better than the weekday travel default of parking at a satellite location on the Metro Rail system and riding a train into town. Plus, having the car with us makes it easy to visit some friends who live about 10 miles north of here for dinner this evening.

North Cascades Travelog #16
Coulee Dam, WA - Tue, 5 Sep 2023, 10am.

Today we're headed back to GEG airport in Spokane to fly home. Our 4 day trip to eastern Washington and the North Cascades is almost over. Almost over is not the same as over-over, though. There's still stuff left to do and time to do it! We stopped in Coulee Dam, Washington, to see the Grand Coulee Dam.



The Grand Coulee Dam is the largest dam and largest hydroelectric generation plant in North America. The photo above shows a view from outside the visitors center. The scale of this behemoth can be hard to discern from pictures. The dam is 5,223 feet wide— nearly one mile across. It's 550 feet tall. People often marvel at the Hoover Dam east of Las Vegas... the Hoover Dam is about 32% taller (726 feet vs. 550) but, at 1,244' across, less than one-quarter as wide. The Grand Coulee contains 11,975,521 cubic yards of concrete, more than 3.5x the volume of the Hoover Dam, and the collective 6,809 megawatts its hydroelectric generators can produce is more than 3x the Hoover Dam's output.

Just to put that 550' height figure in perspective.... If the Washington Monument had its base at the river level at the foot of the dam, only the tip would peek over the bridge at the top of the dam, by five feet. The Statue of Liberty's torch (the highest part of the monument) would come just over halfway up the dam, even including the 151' tall pedestal the statue stands on. This dam is big.

Big Nuts, Big Tools

When you've got a size queen like this dam you're going to need big nuts and big tools.



"Everything's bigger at Grand Coulee," this sign at the visitors center explains.

5 Days in the Desert travelog #13
Kelso, CA - Sun, 25 Dec 2022, 2pm

In the middle of the Mojave National Preserve, in the middle of the desert, is a beautiful train station. It was built in 1924 in a Spanish Revival style. ...So it looks like a certain building memorialized in a classic, classic rock song. Trains still pass by on the active rails, but the station hasn't seen a passenger in probably more than 50 years.



A big depot was built out here back in the 1920s as part of the infrastructure for steam locomotives. The Cima Grade to the east has a rise of 2.2% over 19 miles. That's too steep for steam locomotives pulling a full train to ascend. The depot was built as a base of operations for "helper engines", locomotives that would join the train to help pull it up the grade.

Servicing these helper engines required significant staff: not just pilots but also boiler-makers, mechanics, hostlers, and water tenders. Oh, and there was a water pipeline several miles long to bring lots of water down from springs up in the Providence Mountains. And once you have hundreds of workers in all these various trades housed in the middle of nowhere you also need cooks, housekeepers, plumbers, carpenters, accountants, constables, etc. Plus there was a mine nearby.

The depot saw its heyday during WWII. Not only was the mine running at peak operation to support the war effort and trains busy moving cargo east and west, but passenger trains carrying draftees to ports on the West Coast for deployment to the Pacific theater passed through.

Not long after WWII the depot shut down. ...Not because trains stopped running on the tracks, but because diesel engines replaced steam engines. A diesel locomotive individually isn't as powerful as a steam locomotive (that's what I learned when I visited the California State Railroad Museum, anyway) but diesel engines are much easier to synchronize to run in tandem. Watch any train passing through this area nowadays and you'll see they usually have 3 or even 4 engines.