MOTORCYCLES AND...
Summer's final romp (maybe)

Son Brian and I meandered gently over 145 miles of Ohio's country roads in today's beautiful but waning days of summer.

Here we are paused at the Chambers Road covered bridge in northeastern Delaware County.  This truss-style bridge was built in 1883 and continues to serve traffic on this bucolic country road.

From here we temporarily endured the mayhem of I-71 traffic for a lunch hook-up with Brian's bride Kate and son Dane in Fredericktown where after lunch we treated ourselves to a visit to the village gun shop.

Felt bad about that with Brian's wife and son having to head back to work while we continued our scholarly journey.  

From there we roamed the back roads to Danville for a peek at that town's gun shop which a friendly clerk described as Danville's answer to Cabelas.  Yup, that fits.

Just south of Danville we enjoyed a refreshing pause at the Honey Run Creek Park which hosts the

only natural waterfall in Knox County.  From there we ricocheted back through Danville to Brinkhaven which hosts Ohio's longest covered bridge coined the Bridge of Dreams.

Click here for some earlier blog stories on this marvelous structure.

This bridge (below) is so long a telescope would be handy to see folks at the other end.

Alas, while the day was mimicking mid-summer, failing light was chasing the sun into the western sky and we headed for the barn, so to speak.  Besides, looking down from the side of this towering structure was making me dizzy (below).  Some would say "dizzier".

Those are our two motorcycles parked between the vehicles viewed from far above and with a slight dose of Photoshop applied.

Two covered bridges, two boy's toy stores, lunch with family, one waterfall and nearly 150 miles of mostly gentle meandering on colorful country roads, it just doesn't get much better than that!




  

NASA'S SUPER GUPPY--

I asked the uniformed guy just inside the fence at Mansfield Lahm Airport today if he knew any of the specifications on the huge airplane that arrived in town Monday morning.

"T'is a big one, sure 'nuf," he opined.

I guess that about sums it up.

Turns out the airplane was acquired from the European Space Agency in a barter agreement where NASA took ownership of the plane in return for carrying ESA equipment to the International Space Station in two (then) future space shuttle flights.

This aptly named behemoth of an airplane has a cargo compartment that is 25 feet high, 25 feet wide and 111 feet long.  It has a weight carrying capacity of more than 26 tons.
 
You can see the seam in the above photo where the nose area is hinged and can roll open 200 degrees toward the camera's view on the nose wheel to allow unobstructed access for loading and unloading.

The small photo (right) from NASA shows the nose opened on an earlier model and a loading/unloading platform handling two small NASA jets.

The plane was here to offload future space mission equipment that will be trucked to NASA-Sandusky for further fabrication.  

SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE--

The conservatives in the US House of Representatives finally got rid of the soon to be x-Speaker. Now it appears the GOP majority is about to elect a new speaker endorsed by Sen. Harry Reid.

God help us!

75 LAPS AROUND THE SUN--

Good grief.  How many miles would that be?  The sun is about 93 million miles from Earth so that would be the radius of a very large circle.  The formula for determining the circumference of a circle is Pi times the diameter.

So, the circumference of our very large circle would be 93 million miles X 2 or 186 million miles X Pi.  Let's use the short form of 3.14.  That's close enough for our purposes.  So, that leaves us with 186 x 3.14 or 584--million miles.

That's how many miles I've traveled while hitching a ride on Earth as it has circled the sun for those 75 years since my birth.

No wonder I feel a bit tired once in awhile.

Now that I think of it,wouldn't it be great to convert that into a frequent-flyer reward!

At a more pedestrian level my bicycling-birdwatching-geocaching-kayaking friend Greg hopped enthusiastically on the thought of riding our bicycles 75 miles one day to celebrate my then approaching 75th birthday.

After all I did 65 miles then 70 miles to celebrate those birthdays.  Completely forgetting I am not getting any younger as these years roll along, I did not discourage his enthusiasm.

Woe is me.

Yup, we gave it a shot--and, to my surprise, did manage to pedal ourselves 55 miles that day on the local bike trail.  We both had some energy left but I was about out of gas and the end that usually follows him around was complaining too.

So, that ended that.

But, as my birthday continued to creep up on me my son Brian proposed we do a fairly hefty ride on our motorcycles.  A sunny day presented itself and we meandered around the Ohio backroads, mostly in Amish country for about 130 miles.

Ignoring the fact this latest 2-wheeler had a throttle, I felt perfectly exonerated from that measly 20 mile failure in our bicycling challenge.

That evening at our student's square dancing lessons my birthday continued its celebration with a boatload of hugs and handshakes when my birthday was recognized publicly.  The very next morning Sue and I joined Mark and Nancy Meinzer (above) in that amazing, geocaching outing in Wapakoneta discussed in the previous story.  Saturday night Sue treated me to dinner at a local, Italian restaurant then the musical "Singing in the Rain", on stage at the Mansfield OSU campus.  The celebration continued Sunday with a visit with Sue's sister in Newark where Patsy treated me to a yummy steak dinner.

Leave it to me to screw up this delightful chain of celebratory events--by scheduling some car repair work on Monday's actual anniversary of my birth.  When the young lady at the car doctor's office offered me an appointment that day, I took it, being completely unmindful the day had some other significance attached.

Now, let me see; where did I put that list of frequent-flyer reward offers. 



  

THE TEMPLE OF TOLERANCE--


The mystique of Stonehenge is alive and well in a quiet residential neighborhood of Wapakoneta, OH where an unbelievable collection of boulders from geologic time anchors this reverent assembly of folklore whose ultimate meaning is left to the scholarly instincts of the beholder.

During our geocaching visit we had the marvelous experience of a rambling discussion of his creation with the creator; James R. Bowsher, Writer - Archaeologist - Folklore Collector - Lecturer and Master of his assemblage of antiquities, geologic and otherwise; where a nudge of pious reflection oozes from--everywhere!

As he described the assembly of rocks, many of unfathomable weight, my thoughts wandered to construction techniques from antiquity where "machinery" consisted of ropes, rollers and ingenuity uncommon in today's understanding of such things.

His temple includes an aging residential structure and some equally geriatric outbuildings, all adorned with relics of the past.  It's a stone garden confined within an antique, wrought-iron fence, with cubbyholes begging for discovery around every corner.  

We were there hunting for clues that would lead us to a geocache container and our hobby's reward of discovery; vastly exceeded by our sense of discovery in absorbing the meaning of Jim's creation.

Jim admitted having no formal, scholarly acclaim but I chose to think of his life's PhD being in the form of pious, geologic philosophy...

...with a great sense of humor as evidenced by this jarring artifact hanging from the eaves:

Photos:  Sue (top) ponders the grand-daddy of backyard stonework.  Jim (top left) creator.  Mark Meinzer (right) who with wife Nancy were our caching companions for this expedition, and (lower) this grand-daddy of conflicted meaning.

     

U.S. NAVY BAND CONCERT
and a wee bit of geocaching, of course

The high-voltage US Navy band Cruisers performed their first traveling concert of the season in downtown Akron recently.  They are described as the "...Navy's premier contemporary entertainment ensemble" and most certainly lived up to that billing in their performance.

Band members are setting up their equipment in Akron's Lock 3 Park outdoor Amphitheater (above).  Patrons set up their lawn chairs on the grassy area which was packed by showtime that evening.

Navy veteran and friend Mark Meinzer explained band members attend naval boot camp as recruits

but upon graduation are immediately advanced to the rank of first class petty officer from which they advance in their navy band careers.

Leading the band is drummer and senior chief musician Leon Alexander shown to the left of the female band member in the official navy portrait (right) where band members are presented in their navy blue uniforms.  They did Akron's show in their summer white uniforms.

Click here for their official web site and schedule of all navy band performances.

While enjoying the show's recorded music prelude we discovered there was a geocache in this very park.  (You may remember it was the Meinzers--Mark and Nancy--who introduced Sue and me to this delightful activity).

The photo below reveals the cache location which was about 200 feet or so to the left of the area visible in our lead photo:

There is a blue kiosk visible in the left-center area above.  Sue is barely visible standing where we found the cache in a magnetic container on the metal railing.  The robust splash of water is in the course of the original Ohio & Erie Canal now flowing among and under downtown buildings.

Also joining us in this magical, summer evening were our good friends and chauffeurs, Don and Roberta Karger.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN--

Left home Monday, 8/31 for a geocaching romp through a slice of western Ohio  We are working on caching in each of Ohio's 88 counties and trying to cache in at least 55 of her state parks along the way.

Managed to add 6 counties and two state parks this outing and rolled into my home driveway early that evening with exactly 350 new miles on the odometer.

Over in Paulding County we encountered this tree, representative of a species that chooses to discourage geocaching.  A search of my Audubon field guide suggests this might be a Honey Locust but I certainly will yield to a more informed opinion.

Our favorite stop was in Bellefontaine where the very first, concrete street in America is located.

Yup, a very enterprising fellow named George Bartholomew in the late 1800's was experimenting with a mineral he had found in abundance near Bellefontaine.  He thought it could cure the muddy quagmire that plagued local streets after every rain.

He presented his "mudstone" idea to city council but they were very skeptical of Mr. B's creation.  After all, no other successful samples of artificial stone pavements could be found--anywhere!  Finally, council authorized the test "paving" of the square around the courthouse.  They also required Mr. B to donate the "cement" and post a $5,000 bond that guaranteed the pavement would last 5 years.

That was in 1891.  The pavement remains in use to this day.

 

That's Sue admiring Mr. B's memorial with my silver car parked in the immediate background of Court Ave., which continues to serve as the street and and parking area south of the county courthouse.

We certainly wish the town's fathers would consider converting this historic site into a pedesterial boulevard, this preserving it from future automotive damage.

Several weeks back we were caching in Elyria's Cascade Park, the south end of which offers a

miniature version of the geologic features common to the Hocking Hills in Central Ohio. Sue (right) is looking for a cache in the remnants of an ice-age waterfall site high above the current river level. The huge stones are slump-blocks.  They once formed an elongated overhang over which the water fell and dissolved softer stone below over geologic time until the upper rocks collapsed of their own, unsupported weight.

Shortly after the Elyria experience we were caching in the rural hills of Tuscarawas County and discovered a delightfully natural rock formation totally hidden from the view of a nearby county road intersection and totally undeveloped commercially.

It was an acre or two in size and was a labyrinth of overhang-tunnels, cracked rock paths and randomly explorable geology that man would be hard pressed to duplicate.  We didn't find the cache that was hidden here, largely, I suspect, because I became a kid again and was lost in purely, imaginative exploration.

That's Sue peeking around a corner where our random wandering just happened to provide this encounter.  Finally we reoriented our bearings and made our way out of this forest-enveloped stone theater of natural creation. 

May the curiosity regarding what is around the next corner never cease.