Pictures 28: Adventuring on the Delaware River

About a week before Patrick and I decided we really needed to get outta dodge, we took what was going to be a day trip to High Point State Park in New Jersey and the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It turned into an overnight camping trip that also included the Upper Delaware National Scenic River in New York.

We got a late start because I was lazy and wouldn't get out of bed, so for a while Patrick was quite cantankerous. He had wanted to do some serious hiking that day, but since I decided not to get out of bed til about 10 am, his plans were foiled. We tried to make the best of the day anyway, but when signage at the Delaware Water Gap was pretty much the worst we've encountered at any NPS site, then Pat pulled a tendon in his calf that he'd pulled a few weeks ago and which was just starting to heal, it was shaping up to be a pretty lame day.

Since we'd gotten such a late start, however, by about 5:30 or 6 pm, we were still tooling around northeastern Pennsylvania and I said... "Do you want to just - not go home?"

We were in Pat's Jeep, which still had all his camping equipment in it. So he said, um, okay. So we drove up to New York and along the upper Delaware on the Upper Delaware Scenic Byway until we found the Ascalona Campground. What the campground is, basically, is the property of an older couple who had a bunch of prime land along the Delaware and decided to do something awesome with it.

By the time we got there, it was probably near 7 pm, and there was a sign on the main office (aka the proprietors' house) that if you wanted to camp, ring the doorbell if it was before 8 pm - or, if it was after 8 pm, just pitch your tent and register in the morning. We rang the bell, and a woman with a heavy European accent came out and greeted us. When we told her we were just driving around and unexpectedly decided to spend the night, she smiled and said that instead of $15 per person, she'd charge us $12. She told us to camp anywhere - the campground was completely empty, but there was a large party coming in the next day, so we had our pick that night.

We drove down to the campsite furthest away from the main building and pitched the tent. We didn't have service at the campground, so we drove a little ways back south on the byway til we got a bar. I called home and told my parents I wouldn't be home that evening and that I'd see them tomorrow. Done and done.

I'll talk a little bit more about camping when the pictures come up...


This is the monument at NJ's highest point, which also happens to be right near the northernmost point of the state too.


We really couldn't have asked for a better day, weather-wise.

34 more images below the jump - click any one to make it bigger in Photobucket.

Pictures 27: New Jerseyan Miscellanea

Pat and I spent about two weeks in New Jersey, so I have a few overhanging pictures that didn't really fit into any other category. So here they are.

I very rarely get to ride over the Pulaski Skyway - I am usually driving - so it was quite a treat when my dad drove and I got to take pictures out the window of the urban landscape. Of course, the zoetrope-like railing didn't make for very good shots.

See? My dad drives. And Pat rides.


8 more pictures below. Click any one to see it bigger.

Pictures 26: Thomas Edison National Historical Park

A very awesome site in New Jersey that I had somehow never gone to before is the Thomas Edison National Historical Park. It includes the labs, prototype factory and home of Thomas Alva Edison, the relatively uneducated inventor who had a hand in inventing pretty much everything you use today, from the electric car to the modern movie studio. There are 1,093 American patents in his name.

Edison was a pretty cool guy, but he was also a bit of an obsessive genius. There is a little bed in his library that he would often use on overnight thinking sessions. He was constantly coming up with new things that could make life easier or, more often, would come totally out of left field and invent something we didn't know we wanted. When he was just a kid in Michigan, he started selling candy and vegetables, and soon became a relative expert at the telegraph. He'd amassed quite a fortune for himself by the time he moved to New Jersey, and he used his wealth to fuel inventing, and used the revenues from his inventions to fund more inventions.

Despite his total genius, he was a weird dude. Since childhood he had a severe hearing impairment, so he often felt awkward in social situations, unable to engage in much conversation. While he was working on prototypes of the gramophone, his horrid taste in music became clear; he often enjoyed shrill vocals and dissonant music because he could actually hear it. He was also stubborn - he worked in his labs until a few months before his death at age 84, and his employees had a personal elevator installed for him so he wouldn't have to climb the stairs. He refused to use it, however (despite a sign on it reading, "For Mr. Edison Only"), and climbed the stairs instead.

I'll babble a few more facts as we go through pictures. Patrick and I went to Edison's Labs on June 20, 2010.


The thumbs-up!


The area around the big brick buildings (which include the machine shop, library, chemistry lab, blacksmith, etc - everything needed to create any invention known to man, basically) is very cool, and feels like you're stepping back in time to when it was a bustling factory.

36 more images below! Click any one to see it bigger in Photobucket.

Pictures 25: The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island

Backing up a little, getting caught up again on photo posts, we venture way back to June 15 to our jaunt into the Hudson to visit the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island (which, if you want to get picky, are the Statue of Liberty National Monument and Ellis Island National Monument [part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument], both National Parks System sites in New York). Yep, they are part of the NPS, so we got to check a few more off our list of NPS sites to visit!

We decided to go on a weekday because we figured the crowds would be easier to handle - and while we were probably right in some regard, we made the sore mistake of choosing a weekday in June. Anyone with any experience with public schools in North Jersey will know that there are a few places notorious for being the destination of many schools' end-of-the-year field trip, and the Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island is one of them.  (Various resorts in the Poconos are other top choices, as are art museums in the city and historic Philadelphia - and once I even went on a June field trip to Amish Country [Lancaster County, Pennsylvania], which was definitely the best end-of-the-year field trip ever.)

So while we missed the weekend crowds, we were inundated with hordes (no, seriously - hordes) of middle-school-age kids bouncing off the walls, screaming, running back and forth, and generally being obnoxious and terrible. I can understand the impulse of taking kids that age to Ellis Island, but you really would be better off taking kids of a high school age to the site - they would probably understand it better and actually read the trillions of text-based exhibits. The kids who were there seemed to have been given a scavenger hunt to find facts and information around the site, but they seemed to better enjoy running from clue to clue than actually learning about what they were finding.

That being said, the first two hours of our jaunt into the river was pretty rough, but once the school kids cleared out just after lunch time, things quieted down and we were left with mostly fellow adult tourists, which I can deal with much easier.

A few words to the wise about visiting the Statue of Liberty (which I always want to call "Shashoo Liberty" for some reason) - book your ferry tickets early, your pedestal tickets earlier, and your crown tickets months in advance.

You must take a ferry to get to Liberty and Ellis Islands, of course, but many people (including me!) don't realize that you need to advance-purchase tickets to the observation pedestal under the statue (they are typically sold out one to two weeks in advance), and if you want to climb all the way up to the statue's crown, those tickets need to be bought three to six months in advance. Crazy! I don't know why I didn't realize these things, but at least we were able to get ferry tickets online ahead of time.

So, without further a-blah-blah, here come some pictures. I am starting out with pictures from the visit my dad, Patrick and I took to Liberty State Park the day Patrick arrived in New Jersey.


I like this one.

26 more images below; click any one to make it bigger in Photobucket.

Pictures 24: General Grant National Memorial and Riverside Church

On our last stop of our pictoral tour of Manhattan, we have made it all the way up to Morningside Heights (122nd Street, to be exact) in Riverside Park, home of General Grant National Memorial, also called Grant's Tomb. Just down the block from Grant's Tomb is the ever-impressive Riverside Church, which we visited in the same trip, so I've included those pictures here as well.

A Civil War hero and America's 18th President, Ulysses S Grant was pretty well-liked among the public - over a million people attended his funeral in 1885. His tomb is the largest tomb in North America - I guess it's like an American pyramid. The national memorial currently houses exhibits in the main room, but an extra pavilion is being built across Riverside Drive to house the exhibits, so that the memorial itself can exist without too much extra distraction. I think this will be a great move, and I'm excited to visit the tomb as it was intended to be: A "simple" monument to Grant and his wife.


What would a new site be without the thumbs-up from Patrick?



19 more images below the jump.

Pictures 23: Federal Hall National Memorial

Call me daft, but a lot of Revolutionary history is just too distant for me to truly grasp. I have known people who get just as jazzed about Revolutionary history as I would about something that happened yesterday, but I just can't do it. I think part of that may be because much Revolutionary history happened in the Northeast, and so much of the Northeast has changed irrevocably since that time, so it's hard to get a sense of what the landscape was really like back then.

That being said, Federal Hall National Memorial was still cool. It's down in the Financial District, just a stone's throw from the New York Stock Exchange, and is the site of George Washington's oath of office. It also originally housed the first Congress, Supreme Court and Executive Branch offices. Must have been a little crowded.


I was here. See? There I am!

7 more images below the jump. Click any one of 'em to make it bigger in Photobucket. Go ahead, click it!

Pictures 22: Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site

There are a few recurring themes that come up as you travel around the Northeast's National Historic Sites and National Monuments, and it's fun to piece them together as you travel along. Franklin Delano Roosevelt has come up a lot (more on him when we get to the Hudson Valley), of course George Washington, and Theodore Roosevelt are three of the big ones.

My first acquaintance with Teddy Roosevelt was at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site in Manhattan. Roosevelt (called "Teedie" as a kid) grew up wealthy and weak - he was a small and very unhealthy child, so he often sojourned to the country to help his lungs (he also drank gallons of coffee and smoked cigars when he was about 6 years old onward, but that's another story). As a result, he grew to love the outdoors and became the burly, strong and wilderness-obsessed 26th President that we know him as today.

I really enjoyed this historic site. It is tucked back on 18th Street and blends in seamlessly with the buildings around it - so much so that the rangers there said they have had visitors who tell them, "I've lived on 20th Street my whole life and never knew this was here."

The house had to be entirely reconstructed. Roosevelt lived there until age 14 (that's 1872, for anyone who's keeping track), but after the Roosevelts moved out, the building changed hands many times. It was completely unrecognizable when the Women's Roosevelt Memorial Association acquired it after Roosevelt's death in 1919. Over the years, the organization pieced the house back together by calling relatives and friends, painstakingly tracking down pieces of furniture, decorations and art, and somehow figuring out what wallpaper hung in each room and precisely how each room was laid out.

Now, about 90% of the furnishings are original to the family. The entry level is more like a museum exhibit about Teddy Roosevelt, including memorabilia and a collection of political cartoons, and when you take a tour upstairs you get to see the house itself.

Touring this site was awesome. Since the tour groups are small (there were only 5 people in our group), the site is set up so that you can walk right into the reconstructed rooms - they simply ask, "Don't lean on anything," because most of it is original and, if it's not original, it's probably a just-as-old period piece. There is no Plexiglas, no railings, no velvet ropes. I can understand this layout not working so well for larger tour groups and larger homes, but for this situation it was really great.

Without further ado, here are some images. We visited this site on June 17, 2010.


The outside of the building.


Downstairs - in what would have been the basement/kitchen/servants' area back in the day - is the museum-like exhibit of countless documents and artifacts.

21 more images below the jump...

Pictures 21: African Burial Ground National Monument

This was one of the coolest National Monuments we have been to so far. The African Burial Ground National Monument is a memorial to all slaves - more specifically, those kept in Manhattan - more specifically still, those who were buried under the monument's location on Duane Street. The bodies were discovered in 1991, when construction of a federal office building uncovered hundreds of skeletons.

New York City (nee New Amsterdam) was mostly a farming community in the century-ish before the American Revolution. The slaves on those farms were allotted a space in the no-man's land just north of the city proper to bury their dead; the area is believed to span about seven acres in what is now Lower Manhattan, near City Hall. Between construction, the building of the subways and the building of roads, most of the grave sites were obliterated over the centuries.

When the skeletons were discovered in 1991, there was an uproar from the community about how to respectfully deal with the remains - not to mention an uproar from developers who wanted to build on the site. Eventually, a compromise was reached, which included designation of the site as a National Monument and the ceremonial re-burial of the recovered skeletons after archaeological review.

The monument is especially cool because it's so new, I think. The visitors' center is very cool, with tons of information about the history of slavery in New York City. An informational video is re-created with spookily realistic life-sized sculptures of the actors in the film. After studying African-American and post-colonial literature out the wazoo in college, it was really cool to visit this site and increase my knowledge.


i wuz heer.

Find 9 more images below the jump, including the visitors' center as well as the outdoor memorial.

Pictures 19: World Trade Center

Virtually everyone in America had their own intense experience on September 11, 2001 - some more potent than others. I will never claim to have been deeply personally affected by it, since my concept of "deeply" is based on seeing people whose spouses, children, parents and friends were killed in the attacks. Meanwhile, compared to someone in Idaho, perhaps I could be considered "deeply" personally affected.

Living in New Jersey - and northern New Jersey, at that - at the time of the attacks automatically made my experience more immediate than the experience of 99% of Americans, and visiting the World Trade Center site and thinking too long about the whole thing is always an unsettling experience.

Having studied creative writing (namely poetry) in what I deem a pretty rigorous undergrad program for five years, I think I have a pretty strong aversion to abstract quasi-patriotic words/concepts like "courage," "bravery," "freedom," "tragedy" and the like - but talking about 9.11 is a strange exception in my literary brain. It's as if I can't use concrete words. I can only refer to that day in terms of abstractions, in terms of words you can't necessarily define - as if to be able to define it would be too painful, too raw.

I don't quite feel like getting into it here, so I'll let some pictures suffice.

The PATH (Port Authority Trans Hudson) station at WTC obviously closed shortly after the attacks and re-opened only a few years ago. Thousands of people use it every day - and I might even say it's my favorite PATH station. Hopefully this image can give you an idea of its size.

The best place to view the "reconstruction" of Ground Zero is in the World Financial Center just west of Ground Zero. You can see they have made a lot of progress. (End sarcasm.) Personally, I think the whole site should just be turned into a simple park, but who am I to decide.

In addition to simply thinking about the attacks, the way the site has turned into a tourist attraction is unsettling as well. I appreciate that people from all over the world want to see where this event took place, but what I cannot forgive is the commodification of what is essentially a graveyard. While Patrick and I looked at the site through the World Financial Center's large glass windows, a woman with a European accent came up to me, asked brassly, "Is this where the attack happened?" and pointed out the window. I said yes, and she then turned to her group of friends and spoke loudly in her native language, gesturing to the scene. It was like she was asking, "Is this where King Kong was?" while pointing at the Empire State Building. I wanted to tell her to shut the hell up. But it wasn't worth it.

7 more images below the jump.

Pictures 18: Midtown

June 18 found us wandering Midtown (we spent one day in Lower Manhattan, one day in Midtown and a half a day way up near Grant's Tomb - that photo post is coming later). We skipped most of the touristy stuff for lack of funds (no adventure to the top of the Empire State Building - it's $18 a head to stand in line for three hours! What?!) but did manage to see everything that we could see that was free. And now you can see some of it too.

Click any image to make it bigger in Photobucket.


Nerd! Sometimes being a tourist is fun. We lamented that we couldn't go to the top, but then again, if we were inside it, we wouldn't be able to see it, now would we?

17 more images below the jump.

Pictures 17: Summer in the city

Having grown up in New Jersey, I think I'm a little blase to the city - well, I'm kind of blase to any city.

You know how there is always some "big city" of your childhood? Like, if you grow up in Nebraska, maybe it's Omaha, and if you grow up in eastern Washington perhaps it's Spokane, or if you're from Florida it's Tampa. You can be used to going to Omaha or Spokane or Tampa and still be totally blown away when visiting New York. But it's hard to be used to going to New York and be blown away by Omaha or Spokane or Tampa or... anywhere, really. So when New York City is "the city" of your childhood, you're kinda hard to impress sometimes.

That's not to say that I'm city-savvy. I think I was pretty good when I was in high school and during the first half of college, but now that I've lived away for seven years and haven't spent an extended amount of time at home for five of those years, I find myself getting "misplaced" (I prefer to use that word rather than "lost," because I think "lost" connotes hopelessness, whereas "misplaced" implies that I've only gone slightly off-course and will be righted soon) more often than I ever used to.

One thing I can definitely recommend to anyone visiting New York is that you should have a plan. Have places you want to go and know where they are. There is always a time and a place for spontaneity, and I'm hardly saying you should put a chokehold on your schedule, but I've done New York both ways - wandering around aimlessly and going in with an agenda - and personally, I prefer the latter.

It's especially useful in New York because, since the buildings are so tall and there are just so damn many streets, it's very easy to miss what you wanted to see. For example, we had to basically spiral around inward on streets around in order to find the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site - there's no way we would have found it if we didn't know it was there. Had we just wandered around the city, we certainly would have missed it - and I'm glad we made it there, because it was pretty awesome.

But anyhow, I promised you pictures, so here are some pictures - these were all taken on June 16 (wow, that was a long time ago!). I present you with a random sampling of lower Manhattan before I move on to more specific locales.

Click any image to make it larger in Photobucket.


Buildings. I like buildings. This is somewhere down in the Financial District.

17 more images below the jump...

Pictures 16: Greene County Miners' Memorial - Pennsylvania

This actually happened before Pittsburgh, but, as is my fashion, I have forgotten to post it earlier. Alas. It's okay, though, because this will probably only be interesting to other weirdos like me who find coal mining fascinating. This is the Greene County Coal Miners Memorial in Kirby, Pennsylvania.

Click any image to see it larger in Photobucket.



See 4 more images below the jump.

Pictures 15: Pittsburgh familiarity and fraternization

Seeing my brother Dan in Pittsburgh was a real treat. We are very, very different people, but when it comes down to it we find the same things funny and regularly text each other seeming non-sequiturs simply because we know the other would appreciate it.

So, hanging out with him, his roommate Matt and his girlfriend Mandy at his place in Lawrenceville was nice. We spent a lot of time just vegging out at his apartment, so that made for a lot of images of the four of us, as well as some cool shots from the roof outside his kitchen window.

If you don't know me, nor do you stalk me online (here or via Facebook), you may not find all of these images too fascinating, but here they are nonetheless.

I am, after all, still enamored of my new-to-me camera, so I really like the way a lot of these images came out.

Click any image to see a larger version in Photobucket.


This is Dan on the first morning I was in town. We were tired and I was showing him how my camera worked. He took a picture of me, too, but it is extremely unflattering and there is no way it is going online.


Looking out his living room window - all those trees got clobbered by the snow this winter.

23 more below the jump...

Pittsburgh, and Pictures 14

It's been nearly a week since I came home from Pittsburgh, and I've yet to write anything about it. I suppose I'll keep it short, then - besides, I didn't do much besides hang out with my brother and sleep on his couch and do nothing - so there aren't a ton of stories to tell.

And, come to think of it, I don't feel like telling stories at all, so I will just show Pittsburgh to you.


A view of the city from Grandview Park in the Mount Washington neighborhood

I think a lot of people have a very mistaken and outdated idea of Pittsburgh. It was established as a steel city in the Allegheny Mountains, a particularly beautiful stretch of the Appalachian Mountains that runs through Pennsylvania and West Virginia. For a long time it existed in a decidedly stereotypical Appalachian realm of being relatively poor, dirty, and decidedly Slavic.

Over the years, what with the decline of the American steel industry, Pittsburgh has seen a waning population and waxing culture. While the town does have two notable colleges - Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh (the latter of which being my brother's alma mater) - students tend to come to Pittsburgh, learn valuable things, then leave Pittsburgh.

For those who stay in town, however, there is an entire city full of blossoming music, theater, art and social circles, all coupled with an incredibly low cost of living and what I think is one of the most picturesque cityscapes in the country.

More images and musings below the jump. Remember to click any image to see it larger on Photobucket.

Pictures 13: Tennessee abandoned house

Okay, let's throw this in reverse a little bit; this actually happened before West Virginia did. When I was still in Knoxville, Patrick showed me this abandoned building by a train track, almost totally hidden by ivy.

Click any image to see the larger version on Photobucket.


From the outside


Aaaand from the inside

5 more images after the jump

Pictures 12: Fayetteville, West Virginia

On my drive from Knoxville to Pittsburgh, I took US-19 through Fayetteville, West Virginia. And here are some pics to prove it. Also included here are some images of the New River Gorge Bridge.

Click on any picture to see the larger version on Photobucket.


Downtown Fayetteville


I liked this theater. Clearly.

11 images below the jump.

Pictures 11: Youth rodeo in Harmony, North Carolina

After a wrong turn off of I-40, I stumbled upon a youth rodeo in a small town in North Carolina. I got a ton of amazing pictures, which is a damn good thing, because I ended up paying $102 to see this rodeo; a $6 admission fee and $96 to replace the flat tire I got in the parking lot.

Click any image to see it bigger in Photobucket.


This kid was cool.


Listening to the preacher beforehand... Don't they look enthralled by the word of the Lord?


Warming up the horses... it was DUSTY.


18 more pictures below the jump...

Pictures 10: Abandoned house on the Blue Ridge Parkway

I have always had a thing for abandoned houses. A few years ago my friend Jessica and I drove cross-country from NM to NJ and went to some amazing houses in Colorado and Kansas; ever since then I have had the bug. I go into every house I can find. As I said in the North Carolina entry, I may someday pay for my adventures, but it will be worth it.

This house was just north of Groundhog Mountain. Judging by a calendar on the wall I judge it's been empty for about 29 years.

Click any image to see it bigger on Photobucket.


I first went to poke around this old barn, when I heard a clunking noise from inside. I called out to see if anyone was there, and...


...Someone was!


9 more images after the jump...

Pictures 9: Blue Ridge Parkway landscapes

Over bits and pieces of two days (Friday, May 14 and Saturday, May 15), I drove about 150 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway. The whole parkway is 469 miles long, so I have a ways to go til I can claim to have done it all.

There are countless overlooks off the highway, and I only stopped at the particularly impressive ones (cause they're all at least a little impressive).

I also came upon an abandoned house along the BRT, but that will have an entry to itself.

Click this map to enlarge.

Click any image to see a larger version on Photobucket.


Now entering...


The first day was a bit hazy, which in the beginning made for a nice contrast, but eventually became too overpowering.

16 more pictures below the jump...

Woe is Toe

We have reached that point in the pictoral story where I break my toe by giving a curb in Knoxville a healthy kick.

To see the damage, click below. To skip the damage, don't click below.