Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Ohio Waterfalls Travelog #21
Wheeling, WV · Mon, 20 Apr 2026. 3pm

Update: Wow, this blog got delayed way longer than I expected. Do you remember where we were a few hours before this?

As we got back to the car after our previous hike, Rockstall Falls outside of Logan, Ohio, Hawk and I were discussing what to do with the rest of the day. Our hotel reservation tonight is in Columbus, and we had nothing else planned. It was only 12:30pm.

"Here's a wild idea," I said. "Let's go to Wheeling, West Virginia!"

Why? Why not? ...Or maybe "Just so we can take a shit on West Virginia and leave." (Yes, I proposed that. Hawk countered that we could eat lunch there... then shit on WV and leave. 🤣)

As I drove us out of the deeply rural parts of Ohio and onto a state road where we could get signal, Hawk looked up things to do in Wheeling on her phone. "There's a bridge there, over the Ohio River. It's a park. You can walk over the bridge."

That sounded like more fun than than eating, shitting, and leaving. Especially because, timing-wise, we'd want to eat long before getting to Wheeling. 😅 Little did I know, though, what "You can walk over the bridge" would mean.

You see, I'm a bridge buff. I have been since I was 6 and wanted to be a civil engineer when I grew up, designing bridges, tunnels, and skyscrapers.



There are bridges, then there are bridges. This bridge turns out to be a cable-stayed suspension bridge. And it was built in 1846-1849.

An Early Version of a Modern Bridge

Okay, those last two sentences probably mean very little to you. Like they would've meant very little to me at age 6 when I first wanted to be a civil engineer. By my teens I became more interested in computer science than civil engineering. But I never gave up on bridges. I took a civil engineering course in college. I entered a bridge design in a contest. I won.

Back when I was 6 (and 8, and 12, and maybe even after that) I was always fascinated by all the bridges and tunnels we'd cross when my parents would drive us to New York City to visit my grandmother, I always wanted to be awake for all the bridges and tunnels. Even if it was 3am.

My favorite bridge back then was the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in NYC. It was the longest main span suspension bridge from the time it was finished, in 1964, until 1981. Its center span was longer than that of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, a fact my childhood friends always fought me on. And it remains the longest main span bridge in the western hemisphere.

The Verrazano was superlative for its scale but not its design. The architecture of the bridge, a cable-stayed suspension bridge, was proved historically in 1883 by the Brooklyn Bridge. You know what the Brooklyn Bridge looks like, right? Picture it....



Boom. There it is, right? Wrong. This is a photo I took today, in Wheeling. This is the bridge over the Ohio River in Wheeling, West Virginia. And it was built 34 years before the Brooklyn Bridge. In fact, in 1849 it wasn't even in Wheeling, West Virginia. It was in Wheeling, Virginia. This bridge predates not just the way more famous Brooklyn Bridge, it predates the US Civil War!

The main span of this bridge is 1010' feet, very short compared to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge's 4,260 feet, but not too far off the Brooklyn Bridge's 1595.5 feet.



This bridge was also part of the early interstate highway system.

Everyone in the US knows the modern interstate highway system. You know, the roads we all prefix with "I-". I-5, I-10, I-90, I-95. The roads that were built after WWII. But before them was an older interstate highway system, the US routes. US-1, US-40, US-101, etc. In fact US-40 was routed over this bridge for many years. (Now it's routed over a newer bridge about 100 meters away, along with I-70.) But before even US-40 and its kin there was... The National Road.

Yes, The National Road.

It's like The Area Code when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Back then everyone's phone number was just "1". 😂

The National Road was authorized by Congress in 1806 and signed into law by President Thomas Jefferson. Initially the road traversed from Cumberland, Maryland, to the Ohio River in Wheeling, Virginia. In 1825 they started building the National Road on the other side of the river. The road eventually extended to Illinois. But travelers on the road— horse riders— had to cross the river here by ferry. This early suspension bridge created a continuous link from the outskirts of Baltimore to the midwest. It was like the Route 66 of the pre-Civil War era.

My D&D group playing my adventure story The Collector's Menagerie spent much of the last session doing battle in the basement. After fighting the owlbear in the Hall to rescue the butler and get some sense of the challenge at hand the group decided that they would clean house bottom to top. Especially because they heard faint cries for help wafting up the servants' staircase from the underground level. Though first they checked out the chirping coming from the Conservatory. Finding there were stirges there, they closed the door on them and left. Then it was time to head downstairs and rescue the servants calling for help.

A Little 9-Ball Torture, Anyone?

On their way around to the stairs the PCs peered through a wrecked door (the owlbear had damaged a lot of things in this part of the mansion) into one of the rooms along the front façade of the mansion.

"The room is sumptuously wood paneled but otherwise Spartan except for a large table sitting slightly askew in the middle of the room," I told them. "The table is quite stout, and about 8 feet by 4 feet across the top. A raised lip surrounds the table top. Below that lip the table is covered with green fabric. Several white, stone balls are scattered across the surface, and two light maces site among them."

"It's probably a torture chamber," one of the players scoffed with a laugh.

Dipshits. Did we not already establish that this mansion is like the one in the game of Clue? It's the Billiard Room! 🤣

(BTW, my description of "light maces" on the table comes from a quick bit of research I did about the history of billiards. I didn't want it to be an anachronism that a wealthy person in this game world owned a billiard table. I'm giving my world a technology level roughly corresponding to 1600. I found that billiards had been around for upwards of 200 years by then. It had been adapted from croquet, though, an outdoors lawn sport that used mallets. Thus the indoor version used small mallets, called maces. The modern version with cue sticks would evolve later.)

As the group descended the narrow stairs a sense of foreboding grew. Occasional cries for help, in a weak but deep man's voice, continued. "Help, help me." The air cooled to a chill as they descended and an awful spell of rot and decay filled everyone's noses.

A wide, plain stone corridor stretch into darkness at the bottom of the stairs. Its end was beyond the reach of the group's lights. The magic lights provided by Ryuu-Han, who had a seemingly endless number of small but useful gadgets in his magical man-bag.

The Crypt 

The group moved in close formation, wary that there might be a trap or a monster crouched in hiding, and not wanting to be split up.

First they peered through an open portal on the left side of the corridor. With their enchanted torchlight they saw a crypt: a chamber with stone pillars and stone coffins, and at the center a bier atop an alabaster dais. There appeared to be a body under a light drape on the bier.

Satisfied that nothing in the crypt seemed to be shaking, the group moved on without checking out its deep shadows.

The Kitchen 

Through a wide door on the other side of the corridor the group found the Kitchen. Prep tables, hearths, and storage barrels were lit at weird angles by enchanted torches knocked to the ground. Here the air reeked of spoiled meat, a different olfactory offense than the stench of trash and waste out in the corridor.

Herran the ranger entered the kitchen first. Herran had taken the brunt of damage from the last two monster encounters, the owlbear and the stirges, so it made sense to send him in first again. 😣

"Guys, it looks clear in here!" Herran announced just before he turned around and saw... a 8-foot long centipede-like creature with a mount full of sharp teeth crawling down the wall behind him.

The monster, a carrion crawler, swatted at Herran with one of its tentacles. It hit, stinging him with a contact poison that caused paralysis. 😨 Herran was unable to move, unable even to speak, as the monster moved around behind him to start eating him.

Fortunately for Herran he wasn't alone. Leoghnie wasn't about to let some overgrown arthropod make a meal out of her friend, even if it was thematically appropriate for being in the Kitchen. 🤣

Leoghnie stepped up, braving the crawler's waving tentacles herself. Sword already in hand, she lost no time joining the fight. With an mighty overhand blow, still aided by the strength enhancement from Kiarana's divine blessing, she chopped a big chunk out of the crawler's side.

Ryuu-Han acted next. Speaking words of magical conjuration he thrust his hand forward and launched a glob of acid at the monster. The acid sizzled and burned the creature's slimy hide.

Otonio stepped up to fight, as well. The group had been skeptical of him. With his foppish attire and noble lineage they suspected he was just cosplaying as a guard officer for his two-days-a-month duty. But he plunged his rapier deep into the monster's body, killing it.

Kiarana stepped forward to cure Herran's temporary paralysis with one of her spells. But the danger wasn't over.



The group's focus on the battle in the kitchen created a perfect opportunity a pair of ghouls hiding in the darkness in the crypt to attack. Yes, there were monsters hiding in the darkness the group didn't detect! And with the group's big warriors fighting the carrion crawler toe-to-... hundred toes in the kitchen, the ghouls attacked from behind against the unarmored Ryuu-Han.

The ghouls were human-like forms dressed in clothing hanging in rags over their mottled, decaying flesh. Bones poked out, mouths were full of sharp teeth, and eyes burned like hot coals in their sunken sockets.

"Zombies!" shouted Ryuu-Han.

Otonio once again rushed forward, defying his typecasting as the idle rich kid. One of the ghouls lunged and bit at him. Its sharp teeth tore through his handsome doublet but— CHUNK! couldn't penetrate the thin layer of mail hidden underneath.

As Ryuu-Han and Otonio started to fight back, the cleric Kiarana— still in the kitchen— spun around in anger at the report of undead. She raised the holy sunburst medallion from her neck and called upon the power of Reema, Goddess of the Sun and its Life-Giving Warmth. Rays of light burst from her medallion, passing between the arms and over the shoulders of Ryuu-Han and Otonio, and striking the ghouls. The power of the sun lit their undead bodies. Their skin glowed and started to crackle. Their eyes flared from smoldering orbs to burning flames. In a split-second flash that seemed to play out in slow motion, their bodies burned to ash.

Kkarana hadn't just invoked her power to Turn Undead, she made it a Greater Turn Undead.

To be continued....

North Coast Roadtrip travelog #8
Shelter Cove · Sun, 27 Jul 2025, 11:30am

Sunday morning after visiting the Black Sand Beach(es) just north of where we stayed for the night on the Lost Coast we drove back past the inn to the small marina on the south end of town at Shelter Cove.



The first thing you notice at Shelter Cove, after driving past an airstrip— I guess flying is an easier way to get here than driving the steep mountain roads— and a shockingly packed "campground" that is just a parking lot full of RVs and trailers parked next to each other, is a lighthouse. And it's a short light house. Like, the lamp in it (which has been removed) wouldn't have been much higher than about 22' (6.5 meters) above the ground. Why not a tall lighthouse like the classic ones seen all over the Atlantic coast and even around the Great Lakes?

The answer is explained in a historical marker outside the lighthouse. This lighthouse wasn't originally located here, on this flat field atop a low cliff. It was originally built for Cape Mendocino 30 miles north, where it sat atop a cliff 400' above the ocean. It didn't need to be tall since it was already high. Its light could be seen 28 miles out at sea.

The lighthouse went into operation at Cape Mendocino in 1868. It served for over 100 years before the Coast Guard decommissioned it due to its clifftop perch become unstable and becoming too expensive to maintain. The lighthouse was moved here and restored in the 1990s by a nonprofit group.



While we were at the cove we also climbed down the stairs to beach to see the cove. There are rocky shallows here where the innkeeper this morning boasted that, if our timing was right, we'd see all five kinds of starfish in the tide pools. Five kinds of starfish? WTF, they come in 4-, 6-, 8- and 10-armed varieties in addition to the standard 5 shape? 😂

Well, it was a bad day for starfish as we saw exactly zero of them in the tide pools. These were frankly very lame tide pools, just stinky water and weeds. It's nothing like the tide pools at Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego. And the grim weather here is nothing like that beautiful sunny day in February we enjoyed in San Diego.

Of course, it is a sunny day here. It's sunny above the fog layer. As one of my high school guidance counselors years ago loved to say on rainy/cloudy days, The sun is shining, you just can't see it! 😎

Italy Travelog #9
Rome - Sunday, 25 May 2025, 3pm

Our tour guide left us atop the Palatine Hill overlooking the Roman Forum. We were a little miffed about that. For one, we felt like our tour guide was "timing us out" 2.5 hours into what was supposed to be a 3 hour tour. The guide arrived 15 minutes late, and the organizer assured us multiple times that timing would be a problem. "He'll stay with you as long as you need," the guy assured us. Bzzt! That carriage turned into a pumpking right on schedule, nevermind that it rolled up 15 minutes late to the ball. And two, the guide left us as we were overlooking a history-rich area we would have loved to have an knowledgeable person guide us through, the Roman Forum.



Oh, and three, we weren't sure how to get down off the hill into the area below.

Well, the power of the Internet in our pockets helped with that. We doubled back toward the Colosseum, which you can see in the distance in the next photo.



Fortunately we didn't have to go as far back as the Colosseum, just maybe 1/4 that distance. Then down the steps. Lots of steps.

It's kind of funny but for years when I've heard "Roman Forum" I've thought of a political forum; as in, this is the place where Rome's senators met to discuss lawmaking. Bzzt! It's was more like Main Street, USA... except for being Main Street, SPQR. In the photo above you can see the remnants of some of the temples and public memorials erected in ancient times.



This building (above) looked pretty cool. It's one of several temples in the forum. This one's not to a god, though, but to Antoninus and Faustina, an emperor and his wife. It was dedicated by the Roman Senate in 161 CE. Later it was turned into a Catholic church, after the facade was stolen— by the Catholic church, to pretty up another Catholic church. The brick steps would've been put in a few hundred years ago to replace stone steps they stole.



As we walked down the Via Sacra of the Roman Forum one other thing that was interesting was the Palatine Hill itself. A lot is built into the side of it. And you can see people standing on a viewing platform at the top. That's where we were when our guide pumpkined out on us and where I made the first two photos in this journal entry.

Italy Travelog #7
Rome - Sunday, 25 May 2025, 12:30pm

In planning our visit to the Colosseum today we debated whether to hire a tour guide. Generally we like to get around by our own wits— see also, walking and taking the subway to the Colosseum this morning. Though it's not so much that we dislike tour guides as we hate tour groups. We hate seeing/hearing just the least-common-denominator stuff and having to move as slow as the slowest group member— which, in our experience, is often a person who can barely walk and wants to stop for smoke breaks and/or gift shopping frequently. But when we were investigating how to visit the Colosseum on our own we found that it would take a lot of planning effort and still likely entail waiting in long lines when we got here— two other things that we also hate. So we booked a guided tour, a private guided tour, for a few hundred dollars.

Our guide started us out with a history of the Colosseum. It was basically an R-rated soap opera of ancient times. It was a string of one emperor who murdered another, whose mother murdered all his rivals, who then murdered his mother to consolidate power, who then was murdered by rivals without his murderous mother to protect him, et cetera.

"I'm really not interested in who murdered whom," I said with a bit of a snarky tone in my voice. I mean, it's hard not to be snarky when saying those particular words! "I'd like to spend time seeing the architecture of the Colosseum."

That's one of the nice things about private tours: you can customize them to your liking. Our guide shifted from dwelling on ancient incest and murder to taking us around the whole mezzanine level of the Colosseum and the ground level, too.



One bit of history I do remember from amid the saga of who-killed-whom was that the Colosseum was built starting in 69 CE. It took 8 years, the guide told us. "That's a long time."

"That's nothing," I shot back. "In San Francisco, where we're from, it took the city 4 years just to build a few toilets."

And to raise money— and labor— to build the Colosseum in those 4 years, the Roman Empire went out and sacked Jerusalem. They scraped out a lot of the treasure and took Jews slaves. "Wow," I quipped, "It's  like some Roman architect saw the pyramids in Egypt and said, 'We've got to hire— I mean, enslave— their construction crew!'"

Georgia Travelog #4
Savannah, GA - Sunday, 6 Apr 2025, 2pm

Today we headed into downtown Savannah for a bit of self-guided sightseeing. Our plan wasn't rigorous; it was as simple as "Here are two places related to rock collections Hawk wants to see; we'll walk around and see other things nearby." It turned out to be a fortuitous plan as Savannah is studded with small urban parks showcasing its history.

One thing interesting about Savannah is how its public presentation of its history compares to that of Charleston, South Carolina. Both are port cities established ~300 years ago that were important trade hubs from colonial times through the start of the US as an independent nation. But whereas Charleston's self-accounting of its history focuses on the Civil War— and the city's role in declaring war against the United States and the rule of law under the Constitution to preserve the brutal institution of slavery— Savannah's historical exhibits in its parks show its role in the Revolutionary War.



In addition to the typical "George Washington slept here" kind of markers relating to the Revolutionary era, we found displays like the one above, a monument to Haitian soldiers of African descent who fought on the side of independence. The inscription on the monument shown above indicates that the young drummer in the Battle of Savannah in 1779 represents Henri Christophe, who later led Haiti's war of independence against the French, ending in 1803.

It was fun taking a self-guided tour through Savannah. In addition to the many small parks and historical displays I enjoyed seeing the range of architecture. There are renovated old brick buildings dating back to the 1800s as well as early modern era skyscrapers from about 100 years ago. The latter are interesting because while they only rise 10-15 floors high versus the 50, 60, or 100 or more storeys common today, they include stonework and other architectural details that make them visually appealing. As I quipped to my niece, A., who's a student at Savannah College of Art and Design, "Architecture is art you can live in."

Panama Travelog #13
El Valle, Panama - Tue, 24 Dec 2024. 12:30pm.

After the one hike we were able to do this morning, at Chorro Macho falls, we came back through town to get lunch. I was still fuming about the two hikes we were not able to do but tried not to let my frustration drag me down too much. After all, there are still other worthy things to do here in Anton's Valley. We used lunchtime as downtime to review our plans and see what we could pull forward.

It helped that the sun starting poking out from behind the clouds. It was the first time in almost 24 hours we'd seen it! I'd been fretting, among other things, that we were doomed to have nothing but gloom and rain for our 9 days here in Panama.

"Let's hike La Dormida," I suggested.

"We could do that tomorrow, and get an early start. It might be too late today—" Hawk responded.

"Let's hike while sun is shining!" I interrupted.

Okay, so what is La Dormida? It's kind of a Romeo and Juliet story... if Romeo and Juliet also involved a mountain.

The Legend of La India Dormida

A legend from the time of the Spanish conquest in Panama tells of La Dormida, or The Sleeping (Native) Girl. Luba, a young woman, the younger daughter of the local chief, fell madly in love with one of the Spanish soldiers subjugating her people. But a young man, Yaravi, a brave warrior of her own people, was madly in love with her. Yaravi was so distraught over what he saw as Luba's betrayal (to himself and to their people) that he took his own life. When Luba learned of this she reconsidered her actions and was filled with regret. She renounced her love for the Spanish soldier and ran off into the woods. Exhausted, she lay on the ground, then died. The mountains took the form of her body.



The legend is explained on a sign at the trailhead on the edge of town. Along with it are these two pictures. Above is a view of the mountain from (I think) down here in the valley. You can kind of see the supine human form in it: head to the right, neck in the middle, chest and abdomen to the left.

In case that's not obvious enough the sign also includes a pencil sketch illustrating the resemblance:



So, what's the point of hiking La Dormida? It's not to have the joy of proclaiming, "I stood on her nose!" 🤣 It's to have a view of the valley from the top of the ridge, to see several waterfalls along the way, and to see some native rock art, too.

It's Friday night... and again it's Friday Night Halfway! Last Friday found us in Auburn, halfway to a hike in the Grouse Lakes Basin of Tahoe National Forest. Tonight we're in Jackson, halfway to a hike tomorrow along the Pacific Crest Trail above the Kit Carson Pass.

Jackson is a town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. It's a crossroads town, at the junction of highways 88 and 49. Route 88 is one of the passes over the Sierra Nevada. Route 49 is "the 49er trail" connecting a bunch of towns in the foothills that sprang up in the California Gold Rush that hit its peak in 1849 following the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill the year before. Sutter's Mill is/was about 35 miles north of here, in Coloma, though in the gold rush years gold was discovered nearby here, too. In fact there are at least a dozen historical gold mines within a few miles of Jackson. But those are not why we're here. For us it's just Friday Night Halfway.

Not Stuck in Lodi Again

The drive out to Jackson starts like a drive to Yosemite. We leave the Bay Area via Livermore on I-580 the hook the short I-205 east toward Manteca. Yes, Manteca, the Spanish word for lard; lard as in rendered pig fat. But instead of going all the way to Manteca as we would en route to Yosemite, we turn north on I-5 to Stockton and cross over to Route 99 north. On Route 99 we drive north a few miles to Lodi to exit onto Route 88, which angles northeast up into the Sierra foothills.

Lodi is always an amusing town to drive through. We can't so much as think about the town without also thinking about the classic hard-luck song named for it.


Thankfully we're not stuck in Lodi tonight, or even hanging our hats there. I mean, we could have chosen a hotel there. We actually did, once, ten years ago. Going back would have to be just for the LOLz, though, as Lodi is about as dreary in real life as it's made out to be in song. ...Not that Jackson is worlds apart. It's a hardscrabble town whose best days were upwards of 150 years ago. Stately Victorian buildings built as banks with Gold Rush money are today biker bars popular with 50+ year old rebels in MAGA hats. But at least Jackson's 30 minutes closer to where we're going hiking tomorrow.

New Zealand Travelog #31
Rotorua, NZ - Wed, 17 Apr 2024, 6pm

Today was another busy day, combining getting from point A to point B with several hiking treks. A and B were respectively, leaving the small motor lodge with natural hot spring pools and checking in to a nice hotel in Rotorua with views over Lake Rotorua.

In between those and with a route of 180km— which, at this point, is one of our easier days of driving— we did several things:

• We hiked at Huka Falls, a park in the town of Taupo where the Waikato River draining Lake Taupo plunges over a small drop. What's impressive here isn't the height of the waterfall but the enormous amount of water pouring through it. The flow averages 200,000 liters per second.


• We also drove through Taupo, a resort town on the lake. It was very... resort-y. I looked at staying there when I was planning bookings for this trip, but the cheapest hotels were 2x what we spent on the old time-y, middle-of-nowhere one with hot springs.


• We visited Okere Falls, near the town of the same name. This park is home to not one but several waterfalls. We hiked a walking track that visited two of them then drove a short distance to a short hike for a third.


• Te Puia, on the edge of Rotorua, is both a geothermal park and a Maori cultural center. We walked around for a few hours, first with a guided tour group, then on our own, seeing the geothermal features and learning about Maori culture and history. We managed to time a viewing of the park's biggest geysers erupting as a pair late in the afternoon— and with literally nobody else around at the time!


• In terms of learning about Maori culture, we confirmed a wild notion we'd had since last week, "Hey, these Maori place-names read kind of like Hawaiian place names... they're both Polynesian; are they from the same people?" Yes! The Maori who settled in New Zealand, which they named Aotearoa in the 12th and 13th centuries CE, were seafaring people who explored from Taiwan to the Easter Islands to Hawaii to as far as South America before arriving here.

As with yesterday's busy day, I will followup with additional blog entries later to expand on these activities and share photos.

There's an interesting way to put time into perspective, and especially what events you consider recent or not-so-recent. It's to compare when two things happened versus today. One basic pattern is, "Event (X) occurred closer to Event (Y) than today."

Take WWII as an example of a huge historical milestone. WWII ended in 1945, so a thing that happened in 1984 is closer to then than it is to today (2024). Thus you could say— accurately!— "The Apple Macintosh launched closer to WWII than to today!"

Also, the movie Ghostbusters (1984) came out closer to WWII than to today.

As someone who remembers seeing Ghostbusters in its first theatrical release I'm like... *gulp*.

You can also flip around the order. WWII ended (almost) 69 years ago, and 69 years from now is... 2103. So, the 22nd century is closer to today than WWII is.