Day: May 25, 2019

No photo.

I have put this off way too long.  I have once again neglected to live up to my promise to post pictures from prior trips over the winter.  I have run out of excuses and will start posting pictures tomorrow.

I have my 2019 trip booked and will be leaving Durham in late June to drive north and visit Acadia National Park in Maine, then cross into Canada to spend 7 weeks driving primarily on scenic roads in the Maritime provinces (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland – I will not be going to Labrador) as well as portions of Quebec and Ontario provinces.

This trip was inspired by a book given to me by my friends Eric and Shawn.  I am really looking forward to my trip and will hopefully be posting pictures just about every day.

This has absolutely nothing to do with me or my travels but I heard about it on NPR and found it very amusing.

Back in January of 2019 a gentleman in Iowa won $1 with an Iowa “Stinking Rich” lottery ticket.  He promptly drove down to lottery headquarters and asked for (or perhaps demanded) an oversized check like big-money winners get:

(Photo credit: dailymail.co.uk)

 

… or as my first GPS unit was fond of saying – “When possible make a legal U-turn”.

I saw this story online earlier today.  This was the result of a rockslide in southwest Colorado between Cortez and Telluride (literally on Route 145, which I traveled more than once in 2017).  This is one of the boulders which destroyed a section of the highway.  It will have to be blasted into smaller pieces for removal and the highway will be closed for the foreseeable future:

(Photos credit:  Colorado Department of Transportation)

So beware when signs advise you to “Watch for Fallen Rocks”

 

 

My friend and I took a break from our 4-day visit to Universal Studios theme park in Orlando in January 2018 to make a day-trip to Kennedy Space Center out on the coast.

These are the engines which launched the Gemini spacecraft:

This is the actual Apollo 14 Command module:

This is a model of America’s newest heavy-lifting rocket, the Space Launch System (or SLS):

This is a Dragon capsule which is used primarily to carry cargo to the International Space Station:

After visiting the various indoor and outdoor displays at the Visitor Center we boarded a bus to visit other areas of the facility (noteably Mission Control and drive-bys of the “crawler” which carries rockets to the launch pad and the launch pads themselves).

If you are at all interested in the space program I highly recommend a visit to KSC!

My friend and I took a break from our 4-day visit to Universal Studios theme park in Orlando in January 2018 to make a day-trip to Kennedy Space Center out on the coast.

Everyone probably recognizes this astronaut wanna-be:

Here are some shots of the Space Shuttle Atlantis:

This is a model of the Hubble telescope:

This is part of the left-side body panel  from the ill-fated Shuttle Challenger which exploded shortly after liftoff in January 1986:

These are the cockpit window frames from Shuttle Columbia which was destroyed on re-entry in February 2003.

This was part of a very tasteful tribute to astronauts which were lost during the Shuttle program.  Others areas at KSC had tributes to men and women from other programs in America’s quest to study outer space.