Month: August 2011

This is a picture we had taken on our vacation.  Some places that do these photos don’t put much heart into it.  This place was a great deal of fun.  The owner really made it an event.

Our second-to-last day of vacation was spent in Six Flags New England.  The kids really wanted to ride some “intense” roller coasters.  Six Flags New England had ten roller coasters, including one called “Bizarro,” which has been rated the number one steel roller coaster in the world for the last five or six years.  It was really excellent.

Some musings on amusement parks in general:

In Star Wars (before George Lucas produced crapisodes I-III) Obi Wan Kenobi says of Moss Isley, “A greater den of thieves and villainy you’ll not find in the galaxy.”  I have to say of amusement parks, “A greater collection of rude, uncouth, smelly, large, slutty, and inconsiderate people you’ll not find in the galaxy.”  I was amazed at the number of folks who just didn’t care how they looked or acted.  Wow!  I say again, wow.  At one point we were behind a woman who smelled so bad we thought we had passed a dumpster.

I enjoy roller coasters as much as I ever did; however, I find that I can’t ride them back to back to back any more without getting unpleasantly motion sick for the rest of the day.  I have to space them out.  At a “regular” amusement park, like a Six Flags, it’s all about roller coasters, things that drop you, or things that spin you.  There seem to be few other activities to pass time while waiting for my stomach to settle.  When I think of Walt Disney’s idea of a place where the whole family to play together, Six Flags  isn’t it unless you’ve got a stronger middle-age stomach than I apparently have any more.

Some impressions of Six Flags New England:

The Six Flags franchise does not live up to the standards of Busch, Disney, or Universal parks in almost every dimension.  When we first arrived at the park, a few minutes BEFORE opening, the bathrooms already reeked.  The workers were largely uncommunicative, unhelpful, and unhappy.  They did NOT portray an impression that they were happy to be there or that they cared if you were happy to be there.

Before lunch time, all the credit card machines and all but one of the ATMs in the park died.  They didn’t bother to put signs at the BEGINNING of the food lines to tell people they could only use cash.  I typically don’t travel with much cash and planned to put lunch on a card.  Surprise!  So most of my cash — including cash to pay all those east coast highway tolls to get home — went to lunch.  The good news was that you couldn’t get cash, because the ATMs were also down.  When I did find the ONE ATM in the park that worked, there was a $4 fee.  It seems to me that if you’re bone-headed enough to let all your credit card machines to fail on a Saturday at meal time during peak season, the least you could do for customer good will is waive or comp the ATM fees.  Nope.  Not these guys.  Not so much as an apology for the inconvenience.  So we’ve got a back up at check out from lunch that stretched all the way to Tarre Haute because the products of our degenerate educational system couldn’t total bills in their heads — or on paper — or make change without the machine performing simple arithmetic for them.  I even had one woman refuse to give me two quarters for five dimes so I could squash a penny for one of the kids unless I bought something first.  Apparently, they don’t teach their checkout people how to do a “no-sale” operation on their cash registers.

Everything was gouge, gouge, gouge.  There was a price to get in the park, an additional price to go to the head of the ride lines, and yet another price to sit in the front car of a roller coaster.  There were even rides that REQUIRED you to put all your gear into a locker — for a fee.

The food lacked selection, but at least it was crazy expensive.  I really don’t want to hear people complain about Disney prices.  Six Flags was at last as high, but the quality was poor, so we had that going for us.

Their processes for food service and getting people on and off rides was TERRIBLE.  They could certainly use some Lean Six Sigma analysis.  Actually the processes were so poor that two 12-year-old Justin Bieber fans could improve their systems with little analysis between commercial breaks of Hannah Montana.  For the wooden coasters in particular, getting people off and on took about three times longer than it needed to.

Six Flags Atlanta used to have some really tremendous live entertainment.  What little live entertainment existed at Six Flags New England was poor.  There were virtually no options for entertainment between roller coasters or for me to do while the kids were riding 9-G Twising, Spinning, Flipping, Nightmare Coaster of Doom for the fourth time.

They have a really nice attraction themed around Houdini.  It uses some illusions to give the impression that you are sitting in seats that are revolving around a room.  In fact, the seats don’t move; although, they do tilt forward and backward.  The illusion is aided by the fact that the walls move.  It was an interesting attraction.

Having said all that, Six Flags New England had some tremendous roller coasters.  In that regard, the day met the kids’ objective, and they had a great time.

We had done all the roller coasters and a few other rides/attractions by 2000.  We decided to leave the park early and go to Red Robin (which was right next to our hotel) for dinner.  The cost was a bit more than dinner in the park, but was better food.  After showering up and watching a couple of episodes of Johnny Quest, we hit the sack to prepare for our drive home.

We got up early on Sunday to beat some of the back-from-the-Jersey-Shroe crowd at all the toll booths along 95 and to get home by mid-day to unpack and relax a bit before going back to work on Monday.

It was a great vacation.  Since 99% of my Email is on classified networks I cannot access while on leave, it was relatively easy for me to forget about work for a change.  We’re beginning to think about next year’s vacation, which will likely include Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, perhaps Nebraska, and Montana to see Glacier National Park.

Back to work.  🙁

Today was a bit of a slow day, picture-wise.  My digital camera has been acting squirrelly lately.  Today it ate about half my pictures from the walk around Leffert’s Pond.  I’ve liked this Kodak; it’s been a good camera.  It looks like it’s days are numbered, however.  I don’t suppose digital cameras can even be repaired.

I began the day with a six-mile run, which seemed to be all uphill.  There WAS one stretch of a mile and half uphill that was pretty difficult.  We had a nice breakfast, featuring freshly made blueberry pancakes, at the hotel.  (Blueberries seem to be the only thing I like that’s actually good for me!)

Then we were off for a hike.

Near Mt. Killington is Leffert’s Pond.  It was a nice walk past lakes and streams.  At one point the trail split and we headed off in what we thought was the right direction.  (It turned out we WERE correct.)  The trail brought us through some marshy areas, which involved gingerly skirting the edges of morasses.  We had thought the hike was supposed to be “easy,” so we didn’t wear proper shoes.  Despite that, it was a very enjoyable hike.

It’s hard to beat these kinds of views!

After our walk around Leffert’s Pond, we headed to Pico Mountain ski resort.  They have an Alpine Slide, which is like a dry, warm bobsled ride.  You sit in little plastic sleds and then careen down the side of a mountain through fiberglass troughs at high speed with little control.  It’s great fun.  You take the ski lift to the top, where you grab a sled and slide down the mountain.  In addition Candy and the kids did a bungee cord trampoline thing, and we all played miniature golf.  After five or six runs down the mountain, we called it a day and headed down the highway to Connecticut to our hotel.  Tomorrow we’re going to spend the day at Six Flags New England.

We left Lincoln, NH, after a huge breakfast involving blueberry pancakes and blueberry syrup.  The weather was sunny and warm, so the views were terrific.

Our first stop was the factory tour for Cabot cheese.  The tour was minimalist, but we did get to see cheddar in the making and learn the difference between curds and whey.  Cabot is a farmers’ cooperative, so all the farmers who participate in the co-op get a share of the profits at the end of the year.  We also learned that more aging makes cheddar sharper.  Average, run-of-the-mill cheddar ages two to four months.  Extra sharp ages about twelve months.  Some of their more “select” cheese is actually aged in caves not far from the factory.  They had lots of cheeses to sample while awaiting the tour, and we walked away with quite a few blocks of the cheese.

We found this license plate very funny.  Look at the number: four!  Where have you ever seen a single-digit license plate?

There are two competing stories of how Vermont got its name.  The first claims that a Dr. Peters, saw Mount Killington and christened the area “verd mont” in 1763.  The second lore traces the name to a letter from a Dr. Young to friends in which he calls the area Vermont in 1777.  It seems to me that both could be true.

Our next stop was the Ben and Jerry’s factory tour.  We enjoyed the stop, but frankly we’ve been on much better factory tours.  The introductory movie was more about Ben and Jerry’s commitment to left-leaning ideas than it was about how ice cream is made.  The Blue Bell tour in Texas was a better tutorial on the production process.  After a small sample of ice cream at the end of the tour, we got back on the road.

Along route 100 and complete unmarked are the Moss Glen Falls.  We were looking for it but missed it the first time.  There was a pull off, but no marking whatsoever.  These are purported to be the “most photographed falls” in Vermont.  Given the single-digit license plate number and the fact that the falls are unmarked, I’m not sure what would constitute the “most photographed.”  In any event, the falls were quite spectacular and were in fact two sets of falls 50 feet apart from each other.

We took a detour off the scenic highway into the Green Mountain National Forest to see the Texas Falls.  When we first approached the falls, they were mostly hidden, so they didn’t look like much.  As we got closer, however, the crevasse cut through the rock seemed to open up, revealing their full extent.

We were standing on a walking bridge to take these pictures.  Interestingly, just on the down-stream side of the bridge, we could see the rock in the picture below.  Look how the falling water has cut this nearly circular path through the rock.

Vermont seems a lot more “blue,” leftist, Commie, and Hippie than I expected.  This is general impression based on the bumper stickers and signs I have seen hanging around.  I would have expected a place involved in so much hunting, fishing, and agriculture to be more conservative.  (On the other hand, New Hampshire seems more conservative than I expected.)  My buddy Mark, who grew up in Vermont, said it wasn’t like this in the past, but he seemed to validate my impression of the current state of affairs, commenting that Vermont is becoming a “welfare state.”

We stayed for the night near Mount Killington.  This is a ski resort area, so in August, it seems pretty dead.  We ate dinner at an Irish pub and came back to the room to finish a game of Phase 10 that we started yesterday.  I won, which made Sam pout, since Phase 10 is her game.

Tomorrow we’ll be doing a couple of hikes and then heading to Massachusetts, where we’ll be going to a Six Flags.  Our vacation is drawing to a close, which is sad.

The weather didn’t cooperate with us much today.  I ran a few miles toward the entrance to Franconia Notch State Park in the morning.  After breakfast in our room, we headed to the Flume Gorge.  The Flume Gorge is a gorge created by falling water over many years that has cut its way through the rock.  Many of the views were spectacular.

It drizzled and rained on us throughout our visit, but the views were nonetheless exciting.  Because of the rain, the water was falling a little faster than normal through the gorge.

Side note:  I found that in general the employees at the New Hampshire state parks are neither helpful, friendly, nor personable.  It seems like the rangers at the national parks are much more friendly.  We had no major incident, but this is just my general impression.

The falls at the top of the gorge fall in a series of small drops over rock worn smooth over years.

There were a number of naturally-formed caves along the various trails we walked through the gorge.  One is this “Bear Cave.”  Another is the “Wolf Cave,” which gave the kids an opportunity to crawl through a dark tunnel formed by several large boulders resting next to and atop each other.

It’s difficult to capture the magnitude of these various falls in photographs.  You can’t really get close enough to them to put a person in the picture for perspective and scale.  Throughout the gorge the sound of rushing water is quite loud.

After visiting the Flume Gorge we went for lunch, hoping that the rain would clear up (as predicted) so that we could go on some SUNNY afternoon hikes.  Somehow those weather folks who can forecast global calamities associated with climate change over hundreds of years (with little real science behind those predictions) can’t seem to forecast the weather three hours from now.  The predicted all-afternoon sunshine only poked through for a couple of hours between three thirty and six in the afternoon, to be followed by rain of biblical proportions in the evening.  In any event, it was clear enough to go for a drive along the scenic highway through the White Mountains National Forest.

Despite the dreariness of the afternoon (partially compensated for with computer image manipulation magic) and the low clouds, we were able to get some nice views of the mountains and valleys between Lincoln and Conway, NH.  The low-lying clouds made some of the pictures better, while completely blocking all views from other overlooks along the highway.

We took a very short hike out to the Sabaday falls about halfway between Lincoln and Conway.  These falls seemed as tall as the ones in the Flume Gorge, but they didn’t have the same drama of having cut a deep crevasse through rock.

We really like our hotel in Lincoln.  Many of the hotels in Lincoln have retained a nostalgic feel, including many separate, small cabins.  The Mt. Coolidge Hotel is no exception.  It has the feel of a hotel in the early 60’s.  It is immaculately maintained, so it doesn’t feel like an old, run-down hotel; it feels like stepping back in time a bit.

After a couple of hours at the hotel pool, we went to dinner at a family restaurant that had a clown making balloon sculptures every Wednesday night.  Sammy received this cute balloon dog.  We had planned to follow up dinner with some miniature golf, but the torrential rain put the cabash on that idea.  Instead we went back to the hotel and played a card game, called Phase 10.  Despite the poor weather most of the day, we enjoyed seeing many interesting sites and beautiful vistas.

Tomorrow we’re off to Vermont.  Those accurate weather forecasters are predicting better weather tomorrow around Killington.  We’ll see…

Our second day at Moosehead Lake began with a 0500 wakeup to meet our guide.  We took a 45-minute drive to a hidden pond in the back country, followed by a two-hour canoe ride to try to spot moose.  We had a false start at the boat launch, because two women proved to be completely unable to paddle or steer their canoe.  So Tommy, sporting his canoeing merit badge, took over their canoe and saved the day.

We saw some very nice scenery, but we didn’t spot any moose.  The guide claimed she saw signs that a moose had passed that way “recently,” but that may have been a canard.  In any event, the two hours in a canoe were great fun.

Moosehead Lake was designed to be some “down time” in a hectic schedule.  We spent the rest of the day lounging around the hotel, reading by the lake, and playing dominoes.  It was very windy, so we couldn’t throw the frisbee around.  We were wishing we had brought the bocce set.

We were a bit cold and wet from the canoe trip (we were in a light rain for most of the canoeing), so we made grilled cheese and soup for lunch in the room.  For dinner we had chili dogs and salad.  The we finished the dominoes game we began the day before.  We finished the day by watching some Mickey Mouse cartoons on the computer before calling it a night.

The next morning we drove through western Maine to Mount Washington, NH.  Though it was obscenely expensive, we took the Cog Railway to the top of Mount Washington.  Built in the 1870’s, the train uses a gear (cog) to pull the train up 30-degree slopes.  It was a marvel when built, and it is still awesome in its conception.  If you look at the picture above, you get a sense for the slopes the train climbs; the trees in the picture point straight up and down.  This picture is taken level with the window frames of our train car.

The weather atop Mount Washington is known as the harshest climate in the world.  Because of its annual average temperatures and snowfalls, Mount Washington is officially classified as arctic tundra.  It is engulfed in fog 60% of the year.  Average temperature in July, it’s warmest month, is in the 40’s.  We were lucky.  Despite wind, fog, and rain, during our visit to Mount Washington, the temperature only reached the 50’s.

We found this building interesting.  Originally built as a weather station, today it houses a gift shop.  Notice the chains that go from cement blocks anchored deep into the ground over the top of the roof and into cement blocks on the opposite side.  These chains hold the building from blowing off the mountain during heavy winds.

The wind did not reach 231 MPH on our trip.  The wind probably exceeded 231 MPH on this record-setting day.  At 231 MPH the dynamometer broke off and blew down the mountain.

This section of track is called Jacob’s Ladder.  It climbs a 37-degree slope and cants 30 degrees to the left.  The benches at the front of the car are twelve feet higher than those at the back of the car.

After returning to the bottom Mount Washington, we decided to take a hike to see some falls in Crawford Notch.  It was getting late, so we had to force march the 1.4 miles to the falls.  There were steep grades, steps cut in the side of the trail held in place by 14-inch logs, and very rocky trails.  It was a relatively strenuous hike.

In the end, the falls were worth the journey.  After some of the spectacular falls we saw in Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, and Rocky Mountain National Park, I wasn’t expecting much.  These are the tallest falls in New Hampshire and were very impressive to see in person.

From Crawford Notch we headed to Lincoln, NH, and our hotel for the night.  We stayed at the Mt. Coolidge Motel, which is very “mom and pop.”  When we called to let him know we would be late (since we didn’t complete our hike back from the falls until almost 2000) the owner said he’d leave the light on in our room and the key in the lock; we could check in the next day.  I love mom and pop places run by personable people!  Lincoln New Hampshire reminds me of Granville, IL, near where I spent many summers as a kid.  Despite the tourist trade, it seems to have managed to maintain a small-town ambiance.

We began our last day in Acadia National Park with a quick trip to the Bass Harbor Light House.  It was only about two miles from our hotel.  A short walk down a trail and a long set of stairs took us to the rocks below the light house where we took these photos.  The area  below the light house was strewn with pink granite.

It was our intention to visit the Jordan Pond House and Cadillac Mountain, the highest point on Mount Desert Island, before heading to the Moosehead Lake region.  Clouds rolled in, and it rained steadily for hours.

This is the view on either side of the road leading from the light house toward Cadillac Mountain.

We did stop at the Jordan Pond house.  When we went in to visit the gift shop — the nicest on the island, I think — it was overcast.  When we came out it was pouring.  Nevertheless, we went up to the top of Cadillac Mountain hoping the rain would subside and we’d be able to see some of the views from there.  The rain never subsided.  We went down into Bar Harbor for lunch with the idea of returning to the mountain afterward, but it was still raining hard, so we declared defeat and headed toward Moosehead Lake.

We stayed in a small motel on the lake’s edge in Greeneville, ME.  While the proprietors were not very personable, we like the hotel.  It had a small kitchenette and a beautiful view out the back window.  We went to the local grocery store and stocked up for two nights.

We made quesadillas for dinner in our room and then settled down to some serious dominoes action.  We had a 0500 wakeup for the next morning, so we called it an early night.