Most oft photographed bird in all of North Carolina

Venus i.s the most oft photographed bird in all North Carolina. We walked on the beach every morning and I let her fly over the ocean. I t

Dozens of people came up to me and asked me what she was.  I told some people she is a Carolina Parakeet, "really? " Some people missed the day in biology class when they talked about extinct species..

when I was asked if they could take a picture, I sometime said sure , just 25 cents, take all the pictures you want. I loved the hesitation before they realized I was kidding.

In all the week was wonderful, not much rain, great food, and good company. The twins were on the go every day and had a great time.  They finished the week at the NC aquarium and left this morning at 645. Donald and Hilary leave later this morning and the rest of the crowd in the evening. I'm saddling up Sunday morning heading home, 3 box finds short of 5000. I really hoped to reach the magic goal while everyone was here but it didn't happen. I'm sure I'll find #5000 on the road Sunday, just about 7 years since we started letterboxing. Atlasquest posts a hall of fame which shows every members finds. the site used to have brackets that separated finders who found 1000, 5000 etc. Too many people got hung up on the numbers so the thresholds were made arbitrary, e.g. 4316, 1243. I'm still happy to reach 5000 finds.

sleeping people cant see turtles

I drove through South Carolina and Charlotte without any wild adventures but I did see a few interesting sites. The Peach shaped water tower in Gaffney very interesting. I think it elicits visions of something other than what it was designed to look like.

 

Charlotte is all Bank of America, including a huge stadium for the Panthers that looks really out of place. I remember when California's business climate became too much for Gianinni's bank.

 

I arrived in Fayetteville Friday afternoon and had a nice German dinner with my inlaws,Barbara and Frank. At this point I've found 4991 letterboxes, 9 more to the 5000 mark. . We drove to Emerald Isle near Swansboro yesterday and the rest of the clan showed up by midnight.  There are at least 14 more letter boxes around the area so Im encouraged we will make the goal. This morning we had squealing and running around as Aaron and Dahlia discovered the turtles in the pond in the backyard.

Back on track

I took a bit of a detour to Nashville but am now back on track and nearly in North Carolina.
My first stop was Birmingham, the only industrial city in the south for over 100 years. They made steel there and the mill was right in the center of town. The homes on the hill are still monuments to the wealth that it brought this area.
When I was 16 years old, my father and I drove from Stockton to Washington dc and went through Birmingham and took a night tour of the city in a taxicab. We had trouble flagging down a cab and finally when we were picked up the driver explained only white cabbies drove white folks.  I remember stopping on this overpass and watching the red hot steel ingots sliding across the ways and watching two Birmingham cops beating a prisoner on the bridge. It was a lot to take in. My father, always acutely aware of his heritage, asked the driver if there were any Italia"ns in Birmingham and how they were treated. The driver replied ," they're about the same as the niggers". He and I looked at one another and didn't ask too many more questions. We also went up to the statue of Vulcan which towers over the city as a symbol of the wealth that Iron brought to the region. So today, 52 years later, I visited both the iron works, which are totally shutdown but un-demolished and the statue of Vulcan, of course there were letterboxes there. Gone were the segregated bathrooms and water faucets but so too was the economic engine that drove this area for a century. It's a pretty seedy place.

Atlanta was fun too, many memories here, of being a student at Ga Tech, being recently married, Underground and Stone Mt. Letterboxing was better than Birmingham but the weather is warming up and I have to leave the window rolled down when I leave the car if I don't take Venus with me.  I learned there is no good to come of doing a good deed too. I parked and didn't put any money in the meter and ran to get a letterbox. I encounter a scoundrel in front of the Fox theater who was repeatedly asking folks for their cell phone so he could call his father..Unhuh. I walked away and called 911 and reported him... they thanked me and as I rounded the corner, having been delayed by doing my civic duty another cop was putting a parking ticket on my windshield.

Two more cities,, Greenville SC and Charlotte and Ill be done with the first half of this trip.

Today is Sunday, the seventh day of my trip. Its a good day. I spent the night at Ellen's, got all my clothes and Venus's dirty towels washed, took a real shower for the first time in a week and caught  up with an old friend.

This morning I realized I was on the northern end of the Natchez trace parkway. Its a splendid two lane road that runs for 300 plus miles from Nashville to Nachez Mississippi on the river. Its all a national park so its unfettered with any advertising. there were 5 letterboxes between Nashville and tupelo,Ms, my goal for the day. I found most of them but the most interesting was a box at the Key Underwood Coon dog Cemetery. it was started in 1937, only coon dogs can be buried there and it has a population of several hundred curs. Many tombstones are granite and there are two monuments depicting the dogs treeing a raccoon.
The drive to this cemetery went WAY into the woods of Northern Alabama... I thought I could hear banjo's or smell the sweet odor if corn mash. The weather was nice but I did my business and got the hell out of there quickly.

Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis was born, suffered a pretty bad tornado early in May this year. Id never been in a tornado zone before the mess was cleaned up, it was pretty stark, roofs blown off hotels, complete buildings destroyed and when I asked the waiter at a restaurant about it, he said the staff had to hide in the cooler and bathrooms til it was over. give me a little ground shaking anytime.

How Venus saved the day and odd sounding offramps

You ask, how could a parrot save a day. well let me tell you. It all started several years ago when I started letting Venus fly with a harness in Orinda. It proved to be a really good thing, she learned to fly, tired herself out and behaved better in the house and I met lots of new people on the Donald drive ridge behind our house.

Now we are in a far off land with a freeway that has off ramps called Toad Suck Pond and Bucksnort. I was looking for one called spider bark but never saw it.

So today we were driving down I 40 eastbound headed for Nashville to drop off some art for Ellen and pulled off at a reststop to find a letterbox. we were unsuccessful. While Venus was flying a group of people came up to me and gawked at her and shared their amazement at a green bird flying around a rest stop. We talked a while and they warned me that a that a truck had exploded along the road and offered that I could use an alternate route to avoid the back up. Indeed I did and saved about 2hrs sitting on the freeway waiting for the authorities to clean up this mess....... so Venus saved the day!!!

Silence is golden

More boxing along Hwy 40 for the last two days. Ive taken to leaving Box radar up and running all the time as I apparently didn't capture all the boxes along the route using Atlasquest's trip search. I've found about 5 boxes just looking at box radar and pulling off at the closest exit. One benefit of driving alone is I don't lectured everytime I look at the GPS or my phone. The silence is golden.

Last night I pulled into Oklahoma city around 6pm and thought I would have time for just one more box. It was located in Stockyard city. things must have been slow because there wasn't much cache au vache in the air. What there was , was great restaurant, Cattlemen's café. A total throwback to the 1950's including awesome food. Of course I had a filet wrapped in bacon, what else would I be eating there? fish?

I didn't fly Venus for a couple of days because we were at high altitude and the she doesn't like the new harness, its too tight. So I have been letting her roam the truck unharnessed.The problem with her not flying is she gets restless in the truck and starts munching on things like my ear, the window controls etc. this entails making a quick stop and putting her back in the cage. Other wise our trip is pretty calm. Venus trying to talk more but mostly she just sings along if I have music playing. I never thought Id tire of XM satellite radio, but it seems Bloomberg is obsessed with fines for GM, Fox wants to go to war in Nigeria and medical shows make me want to pull in at every ER to check the symptoms they are talking about and I keep getting. Silence is golden sometime

I think I've found 54 letterboxes so far, less than I expected but still it keeps me busy for 12 hrs. every day. And as for sleeping arrangements. I've been able to sneak Venus into the room every night and keep her in the backpack, she goes right to sleep when its dark.

Not much to say about Little Rock, I've been here before in 2007 with Maggie and saw all the Clinton junk. The food was pretty awful tonight.  I've never eaten a pizza with absolutely no spices whatsoever. On the way into Little rock I drove up to the top of Petit Jean Mountain. It had gorgeous view of the Arkansas river and lots of camping sites.

Tomorrow I think Ill stretch and make it Nashville and stay with Ellen. She has a washing machine and I'm running low on clothes. Then its off down the Natchez Trace to Tupelo to see where the King was born.

downhill

I spent last night in Albuquerque and tonight its Amarillo, Texas, a ride downhill. Beside the difference in altitude, the food isn't so good either. If you ever visit Albuquerque, make sure you have dinner at the Church St Café, its in Old Town and worth the drive. Today was a full boxing day, 15 finds and I found out a little about my preplanning too.  I started printing boxes to be found on this trip in March and thought I had done  a pretty thorough job. Ive had a few surprises. Some of the boxes have gone missing and some more got planted. I had about a 70% coverage, meaning about 70% were actually printed and I found them, the rest went missing or I printed the clue in the hotel last night.  Im pleased with the $35 printer I bought for the trip too. Today I saw the first plowed field since I left California. It was just across the Texas border. And I let Venus into the truck today sans harness. If you've been reading along, you know she escaped in Los Banos the first day. The replacement harness seems tight over her neck and she squawks when I take it off, so today we drove without a harness. She never bolted for the door and seemed pretty content; lots of singing when I played the radio. Speaking of radios, I sure appreciate Sirius XM satellite radio; no jump to jesus, no farm reports and no espanol, just good old Bloomberg.
Hwy 40 is loaded with relics of the route 66, decaying hotels, gas stations in shambles, café signs leaning against walls. It made me realize how much commerce was generated along this highway with folks wanting to reach California. I spent some time on the old rte 66 and I could hear the pavement talking about the millions of people who passed there. I even planted a letterbox at a dismantled indian gift store at the continental divide. I found a few boxes at a Mountain Lion zoo near Flagstaff as well. I think in many places along this road, nothing at all has changed in the last hundred thousand years too.

Living with Avian Pesto

As the name of this post implies, I severely underestimated the amount of avian pesto that would be produced on this trip. I'm keeping up however by changing towels everyday. Pity the poor Laundromat or motel six days from now when I stop for a washing.

Enough scatology, I had a real neat moment just west of Kingman, Az. today. Hwy 40 goes through a set of steep hills and I was listening to "An Army at Dawn", the story of the WW2 north African campaign. The author was describing the struggle to take the steep hills, and there I was, able to completely imagine soldiers trying to take and retake the hills right next to me. It was a serendipity moment.
..
One of the boxes I found was dedicated to BLEVE that occurred in Kingman in 1973. As I walked off the hill back to the car, I swear I could smell odorized propane....that's what caused the fire and explosion 41 years ago.

I also went to Pluto's home and found several letterboxes. The Lowell observatory is a really neat place, they have both day and night programs and star gazing. Its actually pretty cool here tonight, 45 or so I'm not going back up there.

Dinner was at a place called Grannies closet. Food was ok but the name was enough to make me almost drive by the place.

Yesterday Barstow, tomorrow Albuquerque

hellava way to begin a trip

I hope the rest of the trip is a bit less eventful than this morning. I found the first letterbox in Los Banos, the wind was blowing fiercely and I thought I'd let Venus have some exercise, bad idea. She took flight and harness lanyard broke. As she soared above me at about 50ft I could see the tail end of the harness hanging down.
Have you ever watched those medical shows where the guy's heart quits beating and the doctor stabs him with a dose of adrenalin? then you could picture me in an empty parking lot watching Venus circling about in a 25kt wind. Down she came, up she went, close to me, tried to grab her and she slipped away, not once , not twice , maybe four or five times. we raced across the parking lot together and finally she got tired and came in for one of her normal landings on my hand and chirped a few times, like ,wow that was fun ,can we do it again?
I intentionally bought two new harnesses in case her existing one started falling apart. Glad I had a backup or we would be looking for a bird store tonite.

Oh and you know how you feel after an adrenalin rush? wiped out, kinda had to rest for a few minutes to get my strength back. 
Boxing was fun and I ended up in a Barstow motel full of 1920's and 30s automobiles. Didn't even us Hotwire and got it for $39. Venus is searching the bedding for chimichi now.

It was the night before departure all through the house
the bags were packed and the truck is loaded
all food is in the truck, the feeding station installed, the poop shield in place
the new printer has been tested and the laptop is charged
I bought two spare harnesses , just in case
Maggie was dispatched to Las Vegas this morning
no eggs yet in the parrot cage, the pen is spotless for the other fowl
Venus is ready, she just had a bath and  her cachet is not foul
Los Banos will be our first stop , then Bakersfield, Boron and Barstow
I 40 ,not 15 will take us to Needles,
On to Kingman, Flagstaff, Winslow, and Albuquerque
Guess what color caused them to name Amarillo?
OK City and Memphis  and ft Smith,Little rock then Tupelo
see where the King was born and then to Underwood Coon Dog Cemetery
I lie not, its there really!
Birmingham, Atlanta,
Greenville and Fayetteville and them Emerald Isle
Letterboxes everywhere, too many to list but never too many to find
follow us daily and chuckes I promise, and remember my daily prayer

Oh Lord , protect us against speed traps, stinging nettles, nails on the freeway, bedbugs, ptomaine,
hail storms, floods and critters that bite.  Turn every hawks gaze away from us as we fly. May all the Innkeepers be so profoundly overtaken by Venus's beauty that  they welcome her into their establishment without conditions.