Veering South. A veering diatribe.

We are going to be veering towards the South. Probably tomorrow.
Doug is insisting that we stop at "South of the Border" which sounds like an ultimate version of "Another Roadside Attraction". Large, glitzy, rundown in spots, new in other areas, and a little hard to define what the actual business is.
Speaking of "Another Roadside Attraction" we went to a real humdinger today. We went to a "Pottery Village" of some sort today, which touts itself as "200 acres of pure hell" (that probably isn't the actual wording that the marketing people used, but that is what my male mind translated it to). This one was a little better than most. They not only had the usual factory outlets with overpriced "factory direct" items, but they also had a wonderful collection of misspelled signs that pointed to buildings that used to house the retail shops that were either going out of business of already gone, that all seemed to have managers or marketing people who didn't see the need for a proofreader.

Small Business Rule #464: If you don't have the foresight to have someone else double check your signs before you hang them up, you probably don't solicit second opinions on any other knuckle headed business decisions that you confidently make.

The non-proofread signs usually pointed to dead or dying businesses in their odd little buildings.

The buildings were cool. All different, all awful.
In an attempt to make the project an "enclosed shopping experience" a decade or two ago, skyways were added between the second floor of various buildings. Badly designed, badly executed, badly modified, what's not to love?
The grounds and buildings were so bizarre that I couldn't even figure out how I could convert the place to garages and workshops.
It had a really cool pedestrian culvert (they called it a tunnel) under the railroad tracks that bisected this 200 acre shopping mecca.
The other side had a huge group of outdoor statuary, fountains, outside things of unknown purpose.
Hmmmm.

Very
Odd
Outdoor
Stuff
Incomprehensible
At
Driving
Speeds

VOOSAIDS!!!

There were odd stone pedestals, benches, giant stone "lanterns", quarter sized buddhas, half sized aligators, full sized elephants (really!), and a large selection of reflective and see-through bowling balls on stands.
And then we went into...... the BIG building.
Doug and I ventured in to do a quick loop so we could scurry back to the safety of the car and wait for the girls.
I was plodding slowly along in awe of the quantity of items for sale that had 'no commercial value' when Doug said "hey, look to the side. Look how big this building is". I stopped in my tracks. Imagine a Home Depot flanked on each side by two Super Wal-Marts and the whole thing is stocked with very large quantities of items that would make Wal-Mart seem like a high-end boutique store.
** Wal-Mart unofficial byline: The leading supplier to America's yard sales and landfills since 1964.

I marveled at glassware, baskets, brass, fake flowers-tree-sticks-wreaths. Seeing all of these products was a catalyst for my little manufacturing engineer brain to kick into overdrive.
I was attempting to get Doug, Leslie, and Beth to be as impressed as I was about the fact that we were looking at the results of many sweatshops in China producing berries, honeysuckle, seeds and colorful items that are exact copies of plants that they had never seen. These parts are sent to an assembly shop where shipments of fake sticks and vines from plant #7501 will be combined and assembled with the large containers of leaves and flower petals from plant #1604 and then packed in boxes from plant #4500 to be shipped in a container ship and then trucked to this odd warehouse/Christmas store to be bought by people to serve a mysterious purpose that my brain can't really get a handle on. This stuff has to be molded, painted, assembled, and shipped at an incredibly low cost so that the distributors, shipping companies, and stores could make any profit at all on a 79 cents item that has to have at least 12 minutes of skilled labor just to assemble it, never mind the packing and unpacking.
Doug, Leslie, and Beth didn't seem to be overly impressed.
When looking at the granite and concrete items on the outside of the store my mind lurched and sputtered ahead to the concept that these items were loaded into a VERY heavy shipping container and stacked on one of those HUGE container ships that we see on the horizon when we are at the coast. I don't know how they actually decide the loading order of those containers that they stack so high but they MAY try to stack the ones that are almost as heavy as a train car filled with granite and concrete towards the BOTTOM of the ship. When one of these ships that are loaded high with colorful railcar sized containers hits a storm way out in the ocean, some of the containers fall overboard. Over 50,000 thousand containers per year. My mind was going a little squirrely thinking about the fact that in the event of a storm, many containers of these carved granite things that look like enormous tin lanterns might safely arrive across the ocean while a lightweight Ferrari sinks to the bottom.
Speaking of sinking containers, did you know that on the west coast some people use the internet to find the mate to sneakers that have washed up on the shore? In fact, oceanographers were able to learn a lot about currents when they found out that all of the Nikes shaped for the right foot ended up in Seattle while left footed sneakers ended up in San Diego. The shape of the object determines the destination.

In the Atlantic there is the Sargasso Sea which is a non-windy area where eels and seaturtles grow up in the huge fields of floating plant life. In the Pacific there is a large sea of plastic from all of these containers. It floats, it doesn't rot, and is hundreds of miles across. It circles counterclockwise, I think.
Some people have talked about developing boats to go out there to harvest cup-o-noodles, barbies, cameras, and deck chairs for a source of fuel, plastic pellets, or something else with the stuff. I saw a picture of it once and it looked like a sorting area for all the bad yard sales in the world.
Of course, venture capitalists would probably get a better return by investing in a website that allows people to look at the junk for a fee than they would from investing in a technology that would actually do anything with the stuff.
But I digress...
...again.
Anyhoo: We didn't buy anything and now we are lounging next to a pool, and yesterday we saw an awesome wildlife park for damaged animals, we walked through historic Williamsburg when it was closed and the day before we went to Jamestown where we Europeans started our plundering.

An unrelated rule:
Business Rule #465: Always remember -- Pillage, THEN burn.

So anyhow, this brief description of our morning expedition is a testament that we are close enough to the NorthEast that we could buy some ICED COFFEE. My pen can flap as fast as my mouth if given the opportunity. In fact it's better than my mouth because nobody can tell me to be quiet because they think I am busily writing "very important stuff" instead of a rambling analysis of sinking containers.
Bye.

Trashed
Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Sneakers
Other Sneaker type stuff
Here's a direct source: The Beachcombers Alert!
Disclaimer: All "facts" that I spout off in this post about containers and flotsam are dirivatives of what I remember from stuff I read years ago. Things may have been modified slightly while in storage in my memory. The links may not match the "Facts" as I presented them.

4 am from Williamsburg

(hello)

No, this is NOT an abandoned website. No, I haven't forgotten about it. No, I really DO care. I was going to call you, but I lost my phone, or my computer, or, or, I really really meant to call.

Well, anyhow, aren't you glad to hear from me?
I was real busy for the last week. Car stuff you know. Carlisle, Hershey, cars, walking, work, work, work. I have been working overtime. I would have written, but you know how this car stuff ties you up.
It's 4 am and Doug is going pouring another cup of coffee, talks, goes out to smoke a cigarette, comes in, pours coffee, talks, goes out to smoke...
It's great to see him again. Six months. It's always a trip to see his morning routine. Beth is still sleeping on the pullout couch in the living room / dining area / kitchen corner / computer cubicle of this maximum security tourist condo in Williamsburg. D&L are here because they traded one of their extra weeks that they couldn't use in Sanibel. Odd sort of banking system, but it seems to work, and we get to visit D&L right here in ol'vaginny so it's oooohkay wi' me.

We have been staying at George B's place for the last week. It was great. We slept in our tent in the yard until they turned the heat off and then we moved inside. Beth is stubborn like that. George offering a mattress, Beth not wanting to put him out. They spar back and forth until four nights later when it is really cold and pouring rain. Beth comes in to see why I am not coming to bed yet (Ed and I are telling stories) and she falls asleep on the couch. I seize the opportunity to sleep on the carpet, and the tent was abandoned for the last few nights.
We had nice weather up until Wednesday, the day Hershey started. It was hot walking around.
Hot enough so at 2pm there were at least three simultaneous wind funnels that lifted up large vendor tents and dumped them in the next aisle. Each one was just about in the middle of their respective fields. We saw one happen. It's very odd to see a 20 by 40 tent getting lifted up twenty feet and toppled over when there isn't any wind where you are and you are only thirty feet away. I guess it happens every year at Hershey and I suspect it is from such a large mass of asphalt being covered by so many tents that strange thermal events occur. Or it's the aliens.

Oh dear, just listen to me.... I've been going on and on... and how have you been?
.... oh, uh-huh, yes, that's very interesting... well I've got to eat some breakfast now, you'll have to tell me your wonderful stories a little later when we have more time. I'm sure it was a wonderful week at your little car place, yes I would love to hear all about it. Oh, you have pictures too? Yes, I'm sure they are lovely. Stories and pictures, I just can't wait.

Standard Time.

At the Clock and Watch museum, you not only get to see a whole lot of clocks and watches, but you get to find out some odd things about time measurement and the history of calendars.

Did you know that in Japan they used to use variable length hours? They changed as the season changed. Clocks were VERY difficult to build there.

The original water clocks were built to limit the length of politician's speeches. Some long-winded speakers would not pour in clean water at the start of their speech, but would use water from a well that had a lot of silt in it so that the water would flow slower.
That is where the term "don't muddy the water" came from.

The oddest thing to me was some American history that wasn't too far in the past.
We have Eastern Standard Time (EST), Pacific Standard Time (PST), CST, MST.
Well, there are twenty four of them around the world. Obvious after it's stated, isn't it?

Well they still argue about daylight savings time, but they used to argue about Standard time too. Every town had it's OWN noontime. When the sun was directly overhead.
Every town. Not just the big ones. That worked fine. Most watches weren't that accurate and you didn't travel fast enough that anything seemed askew. You would just adjust your pocket watch to match the local time.

Then the trains started running. Time wasn't an issue when a train line only had one train that went one way to the end of the track, and then went the other way, but trains became popular and more were built. They started using the same tracks to go both ways ... at once.
Spectacular collisions with large explosions from large boilers became common.

They needed to use a consistent time value.
Railroads developed "Railroad Time".
Each railroad company would synchronize ALL of their stations to the local time of the city that the main office was in. Each railway station had clocks that showed the "Local Time" and the "Railroad Time". The "Railroad Time" was transmitted by telegraph so that they were consistent.

Trains could now coordinate when they should pull into a siding to let a train going the other way on the same tracks, actually go the other way without the nasty interruption of an explosion and dead people. The quantity of train wrecks went WAY down after "Railroad Time" was adopted.

Then the various railroad companies started connecting their tracks to other railroad companies. For a while there were conversion tables so you could subtract 2 hours, 19 minutes and thirty seconds from the Denver railroad to know when the Chicago railroad was going to be at ten o'clock. They had used the same type of conversion charts back in the old days to convert from "town time" to "other town time" with very limited success. These charts were worse.
East-West wasn't the problem, it was which BRAND of train was coming through.

Train crashes were becoming much too common. The price of equipment meant that a single crash could ruin a month's profits, and if there were several crashes..... well, something had to be done.

The railroad tycoons developed standard time at about the same time that Europe was running into the same issues. Some people wanted 24 time zones, some wanted none. If we had time zones, where do they start? Greenwich had become a stepping off point for many of the conversion charts over there, so it was decided that worldwide standard time would be Greenwich minus your timezone. Except France. France wanted the standard time to be in Paris. So for a great number of years there was worldwide standard time, and then "Paris Time" which was some hours, nine minutes, and 12 seconds different from Greenwich Mean Time.
Years later, when one central office was needed to coordinate the correction input from all the different areas of the world, Paris was chosen as the spot. At that point France finally adapted Greenwich Mean Time and synchronized their clocks with the rest of the world.

And America? The trains were already running on time with a lot less booms.

Museums

The advantage/disadvantage of not having any plans is that things don't quite go like you haven't imagined them.
We were finishing up the Blue Ridge Parkway which sort of automatically loads you into Skyline Drive when you cross into Virginia from North Carolina. We were enjoying the great camping, abundant deer, and astounding vistas, but we were being affected by Bart's Boring Beauty Syndrome so we took a left down off the ridge and drove along the base of the mountains in the Shenandoah Valley. We love back roads. Up down left right cows houses barns cars trucks fields. It is very comforting to us to have a change of pace.
When we got to the Tri-State area and settled into the hostel, we realized that we were only two hours from Carlisle and we had an entire week to get there.

We were all museum-ed out. No more. We needed a break. Beth also didn't want to be around a lot of people before the week of the Hershey car show.

Washington D.C. was within a quick drive and we KNEW that we could easily grab a train into the city, but if you aren't there to collect or distribute money then D.C. means museums.

No museums. We left the hostel and turned left. We were driving right next to the old C&O tow-line canal which was recently re-opened to the public along the entire length. A couple of miles along we saw "Mr. History" from the hostel, and we stopped to talk to ask him how the locks worked way back then. He talked for quite a time about the details of the C&O and how it was George Wahington's brainchild and broke ground July 4th 18?? on the same day that the B&O railroad broke ground. He said we should go on a tour of Harper's Ferry while we were there, but we said we were museum-ed out. He showed me on the map where Antitiem was, the site where more Americans died in a single day of battle that at any other time or place.

We avoided Harper's Ferry park, and drove along next to the C&O. Ate in Shepardston. Went through Antitiem and took pictures of the battlefields. We traveled along more backroads. These are roads that we will NEVER be on again. If there is something to see, you've got to see it now.
An orchard, buy apples. Some driving. Ooooh! The town that is preparing for the huge apple festival in two more days. Sixty to one-hundred thousand people in a small town. Let's keep moving. Oooooh! The national apple museum. They are closed, but since we drove so far... our private tourguide showed us their museum which includes a nice collection of apple peelers from Goodell Company in Antrim, NH.

More backroads. We come across Gettysburg. We have no choice. We would be in trouble with some folks if we didn't stop. We drove around the fields and took pictures and read the signs.
We started talking about the importance of things that we just read about.

We drove through the town of Gettysburg, more back roads, some non-descript city. Gotta see the Clock & Watch museum, but it's Friday and housing is always tough to find on Friday.

The Clock & Watch Museum was great! After a couple of hours, Beth went out to the car to take a nap. I got kicked out at five PM. I attempted to claim that I didn't know what time it was, but when I said it, I realized that I was in a section where all of the clocks were working correctly. Damn.

I went out to the car and Beth had been on the phone with a campground to see if they had any vacancies and was yelled at for having the nerve to ask "on our busiest weekend".

I was able to find a place Pennsylvania State Campround an hour away, and off we went. We stayed the night at a wonderful camground and headed off in the morning, swearing that we were NOT going to go to any museums.

We drove straight to Carlisle.

Car Week, again.

We have been circling around Carlisle for as long as we could. We were scheduled to get here next Tuesday, but the East Coast is a little smaller than we remembered and we got here a week early. We are camping in a Marmoneer's backyard and are going to the Carlisle show in a few more minutes. It turns out that the "Carlisle Fall" show is for parts. There is NO car show. All of the leftover parts travel twenty miles up the road on Monday and Tuesday to Hershey for the hoards to peruse. They did have a two day auction here. We checked in when they were auctioning off number 220 of 242 cars. Beth and I really liked this wonderful 1954 Nash Metropolitan Convertible, and we were actually going to bid on it, but the price came within our grasp and then quickly shot up above our self-imposed limit.
There were a number of other cars which various people we know would have loved. I called my brother David about a beautiful 1962 Galaxy 500 hardtop that was very nice with a 4 barrel and 4 on the floor. I was going to bid up to a few thousand for him since I didn't have his permission. It went for $29,000.
Then right behind it was a 1958 Galaxy 500 hardtop with 14,000 original miles, one owner, all original, never restored, looked like new. That sold for 20-something too.

Today is parts. I only need a hubcap that isn't likely to be there. I am safe.
You folks are also spared the overload of photos that were likely to ensue. I have been having an ongoing argument with my cheapo-stubborn-crapola-computer for a week now, and it seems to be winning the argument about whether it wants to read photo memory cards or not.

Now I wasn't going to be uploading all of the photos right now, that would be when we are settled in for a while in one spot (starting in late October), but I use the computer to clean off my camera for the next day's adventure. I have had to throttle my picture habit back a little until I fix this $^&$@! computer.

So it is beautiful weather on this fine Sunday morning in Carlisle Pennsylvania.
George the homeowner will be back in a day or two, and we have been trying to organize with some other folks the details of who is going to be where for the Hershey show later this week.