Carol and Vern's excellent adventure, part 4, the return home

Friday, the 24th  - Sherman traveled across the southern United States leaving burning cities in his wake, Savannah decided to surrender and save the town from burning. Carol was excited about seeing the old south minus the destruction of the Civil War. BUT we learned that the city had burned, many times in fact over the years since the end of the Civil War. While it was old and charming, it was a let down in many ways, it was horribly congested and we really didn't see much that excited us. We went on a trolley tour and got to see the old downtown... like I said it was disappointing and expensive.

Saturday, the 25^th we drove in rain from Savannah to Panama City Florida. Carol found us a nice hotel with a room facing the beach so we could listen to the surf from our balcony, unfortunately our room had an air conditioning system with an extra loud fan that completely blocked the sounds of the surf... and when our AC unit was off there were others surrounding us. It was late so we retired early and did some reading. The next morning we took off our shoes and hiked down the beach, the waves were breaking hard, the sounds and smells were fantastic. Too soon we had to be back on the road again.

It was a warm day, the sun was shining bright, we decided to go topless, so put the top down on the Mustang and hit the road. The GPS lady wanted us to go via the Interstate but we wanted to stay close to the coast so we could see as much of the Gulf as possible, so we put up with her “recalculating” speech for a couple of hours.

As we got close to Mobile we saw signs for a Maritime Museum featuring the battleship USS

Alabama and the submarine USS Drum. This wasn't on our schedule but when we travel we try to build in a bit of flexibility to take advantage of what should appear – as some of these diversions can be the best part of the trip and this was a really outstanding detour! After you pay a small entrance fee the ship is open for exploration. There were three self guided tours: top side, forward and aft under decks. Carol and I took a tour of the upper decks and the aft part of the ship which included engine rooms, fire stations for directing the big guns (rooms of equipment that I am guessing could be replaced by a laptop today!), the loading stations for the 16” and 5” guns. Lots of crew spaces, hospitals, etc. Fascinating!!!

barbette

16" artillery shells

The gun turrets are mounted on a steel cylinder with an inside diameter of about 40', called a barbette.  This cylinder extends from the deck to the hull of the ship and is 16" thick solid steel!

fire control

aft torpedo room, note rack (bed) in upper left corner

After the Alabama we looked at some aircraft of the same era and then toured the USS Drum. While the spaces in the Alabama were tight, the spaces in the Drum were quite small with crew racks over every piece of equipment including torpedoes. Hard to imagine life on either ship. I worked in an office on dry land for most of my military time.

We rolled into New Orleans in a light rain just as the sun was setting. Our hotel was in a mid 1800s residential complex that had been remodeled, our hotel didn't have a sign, so when our GPS guided us there we were not sure if we had entered the address incorrectly or what. The hotel attendant greeted Carol with, “Yep, you are in the right place.” Bet she says that a hundred times a day!

Monday, the 27th - Severe weather over night, almost 4 inches of rain, water standing everywhere, we watched news coverage of strong winds blowing a train off a bridge, lots of power outages. But despite the weather we decided to have lunch at Commanders Palace. Carol was so excited, Commander's Palace is a 5 star restaurant and is high on her bucket list. The service is the best I have ever experienced!!! The food was excellent. Btw, if you want to eat there you have to dress up, no un-collared shirts, shorts or jeans allowed, in fact they recommend suit and tie for men and dresses for women. We went back to the room after lunch, waited for the rain to subside, then rode the trolley to the french quarter where we walked around for a couple of hours. We got a drink and walked about some, did some window shopping, I bought a couple of hand rolled cigars (I smoke one cigar a year so it was a splurge), had supper at the Hard Rock Cafe. At this point it was probably about 7 pm and we were bored so we caught the trolley and went back to the hotel. It was, for both of us, a kind of been-there-done-that experience, we don't need to go back.

The plan has changed, we met some people from Minnesota at a rest stop before we got to New Orleans.  They own half a dozen mustangs and were admiring ours and it was just enough to start a conversation.  They had toured the Vicksburg and Natchez battlegrounds so we decided to take another diversion and visit the Vicksburg battleground. On the road to Vicksburg we must have met 200 electrical utility boom trucks, in caravans, heading for the New Orleans area, we knew the storm was big but that is a lot of trucks and people!

20,000 men died in the battle of Vicksburg from May 18 – July 4, 1863 in one of the final battles of

USS Cairo sunk in the Mississippi on 12 December 1862

the Civil War.  The Confederate forces under Lt. Gen. John C Pemberton was able to control commercial and military traffic on the Mississippi river from the bluffs bordering the river.  Union Maj. Gen. Ulysses S Grant was able to move his troops to the south of Vicksburg and surprise the Confederate forces and starved them out.  Pemberton surrendered on July 4th.  After the war members of both the Union and Confederate Armies came back to the battleground and marked off their respective positions and provided historians with an accurate timetable of the battle.

We drove through the battle field in a steady drizzle, I suppose due to the weather there were few cars in the park and so it was serene and a bit eerie. The Confederates were dug in at the top of the hill and held the advantage of the higher position.  The Union army dug trenches and surrounded the Confederate Army... looking at the battlefield it must have been a gruesome 45 days!!!  There are read signs marking Confederate positions and movement and blue signs for the Union Army.  Literally hundreds of memorials, some simple slabs of stone and others are huge buildings and full size bronze statues.

Carol booked us a room at the Cedar Grove Mansion Inn and Restaurant in Vicksburg.  This Antebellum estate is considered to be one of the largest and most elegant bed and breakfasts in the south. 
                 
The price of a room for the night was about $150 which included breakfast for two.  The house had been taken over during the Civil war as the Union Headquarters and Hospital.  We stayed in General Sherman's room. 

Yep, there was a cannon ball in the wall of the living room!  All total the house had been hit I think 67 times.  They preserved cannonball holes in the doors and floors.


At this point we were getting a little tired of being a tourist and decided to head for home.  We made it in two days of hard driving... sure nice to sleep in our own bed!

We put 5,100 miles on the mustang.  We got about 25 mpg.

I never expected so many trees in the south.  The trees line the right of way on most every highway, dense to the point that you have no idea if there is anything beyond or not, except that there have been traffic lights every mile or so for the last 10 miles and there is a ton of traffic.... but not a house or business in sight!

We had great weather.  Nice temperatures, between 70 and 80 degrees on most of the trip, a bit of humidity but not oppressive and only infrequently.  Except for New Orleans the rain didn't slow us down much.

All in all a great trip.  Special thanks to my co-pilot on the trip, we make a pretty good traveling team.

Carol and Vern's most excellent adventure - part 3 - the Atlantic Ocean

We arrived at Jeff and Pauline's house late afternoon on Monday. They have a beautiful house that Jeff built – Jeff is a retired Air Force officer/pilot and a building contractor specializing mostly in house construction.

beyond the peninsula the Atlantic

Jeff, Lee and Vern

Tuesday morning, the 21^st, we got going early, grabbing some breakfast from McDonalds and sandwiches from Subway for lunch, meeting Jeff's friend Lee at his home. Lee had the boat hooked up to the pickup, gas in the tank and the bait ready to go. We drove for about 20 minutes to the boat launch on Winyah Bay close to the old downtown of George Town SC, launched the boat and headed out into the bay. The bay is shallow with lots of exposed mud flats, shallow water ways with shallow oyster beds, narrow channels, twisting and turning, it took us about an hour to get to the ocean.  You have to have experience to navigate the water ways, I would not have been able to get us out of there.  Lee let Jeff and I out on the barrier peninsula and we walked around the point to the Atlantic.

It was time to get serious, we anchored a short distance from the mouth of the river where it meets the Atlantic. I was the first to catch a fish, a Blue something or another, about 2 pounds, too small to keep. After an hour or so of no bites Lee decided we should try our luck in a channel surrounded by mud flats, the tide was going out so fish should be moving from the shallow mud flats to the channels. After a few more hours of no bites we moved again back to the mouth of the river where Jeff caught a fish, a bass. As he was reeling it in, Lee ready with the net, within feet of the boat a 5 foot shark swam up and bit the fish in half!

Lee was worried about the tide making the waterways too shallow to navigate, his boat must have drawn all of 2 feet of water... the water was so murky that we couldn't see more than a half a foot down.

When we got back close to Georgetown we picked up a 12 of beer at the marina and toured the waterfront at Georgetown. It was a great day. We later met the ladies and had dinner at Drunken Jacks, a local supper club, I had a plate of blackened Grouper that was absolutely out of this world.

Jeff had a golf outing planned for Wednesday with John and Shannon and asked if I would be interested in going along... I told him I was a good sport and would be happy to go along with anything, within reason of course. The last time I had golfed had been in Japan, 40 years ago. So I told Jeff not to laugh me off the golf course if I was really bad at it.

Jeff loaned me a set of clubs and three balls. The course was beautiful, bright green grass, not a brown spot in sight, trimmed bushes, some flowers. We had a perfect day, it was in the low 70s, partly cloudy, with just a light breeze. The water hazards featured some gators, a few were quite large. I started out with 3 balls, lost one in a water hazard early on but retrieved two balls from the hazard, later in the day I dropped two in a water hazard and then lost another in the rough. I had to borrow a ball to finish the game. I shot a 56 on the back nine and a 58 on the front nine. I got some good drives with a 3-wood but could not get the 1-wood to work.

abandoned rice field

Thursday we took a river/creek tour of the rice fields. In the early 1800s this area was a primary source for rice in the United States. The slaves that were brought over from Africa had lived/worked in similar conditions in Africa and so developed the swampland into  productive rice fields. Our guide told us about plantation life in that era. We saw about a dozen gators, some about 12 feet in length.

Many thanks to Jeff and Pauline for their wonderful hospitality.  Carol and I enjoyed our stay immensely.  We look forward to seeing them in the Hills.

We departed on Friday morning for Savannah, Georgia

Vern and Carol's excellent adventure part two - heading east

We left St. Cloud, next stop was Des Moines, Iowa.

Monday the 13^th.  We visited West End Salvage, the site of the TV reality show of the same name. They have 5 floors of architectural salvage, we had a lot of fun snooping around... in the end we walked out with nothing but smiles. On the way out of town we stopped at the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden.

Then on to St. Louis. We spent the night with Leigh English and his wife Sheila Mapes in their lovely home. Leigh was my first judo instructor at NDSU. We were just in time so I could join the judo class in Leigh's basement. Monday is the kids class, “little puppies” is I think how Sheila referred to the kids. There were half a dozen adults and a half a dozen spirited kids. It was great being on the mat again with Leigh! And great meeting his students and training with everyone.

After training we got a chance to hang out for a while and visit. After a nice breakfast the following morning we said our goodbyes. It was great seeing both Leigh and Sheila again, it has been many years!!! Too many years!!! They were my sanity at NDSU after I got out of the Army.

On the way out of St. Louis we stopped at the Missouri Botanical Gardens and spent much of the day there. The trees were just budding/blooming, azaleas were at their peak, black and yellow tulips in profusion! This garden is very photogenic, I took about 30 pictures and they all turned out great.  It is a big place, it takes a couple of hours to tour the grounds, more if you really want to check things out. The Japanese Garden is very handsome.

 











Next stop Bowling Green, Kentucky

Wednesday the 15th We arrived at the Corvette museum a bit after 10 am, it had been raining off and on all morning. If you like Corvettes this is a great place to spend a morning. There are 70 to 75 Vettes on display, including the 8 cars that ended up in the bottom of the sinkhole. The sinkhole has been filled in, they were finishing up the concrete the day we were there. The cars from the pit are on display in various states of damage, from relatively minor to almost nothing left – from a car enthusiasts point of view the collapse was a horrible loss as all of the damaged Corvettes were one of a kind vehicles and irreplaceable.

After lunch at the Museum Diner we toured the Chevrolet Corvette manufacturing facility across the street from the Museum. The walking tour started with a short video. We watched as the various sub assemblies were put together, then attached to the frame, watched as engines were mated with the chassis, brakes, wheels, seats... to start up and testing. Even Carol was fascinated with the entire process.

We departed Bowling Green for Mammoth Cave, only about 50 miles away. We stayed on the park grounds in an old hotel, which is run down and we were told in its last year of operation. Once we were settled in our room the rain which had been off and on became steady. I opened the exterior door to the room and settled into a chair with my Kindle for some “reading in the rain.”

After a bit we visited the park restaurant for supper... while it was clean and the service was good the food was not good. We had breakfast there the next morning and they even screwed up bacon and eggs! Don't eat there!

Carol and I took the historical tour of Mammoth Cave. Mammoth Cave is the longest cave system in the world at 400 mapped miles, with they think, maybe an additional 600 miles yet unmapped. Bat guano was mined from the cave by slaves during the Civil War to supply manufactures with saltpeter for gun powder. After the war the saltpeter mining was abandoned and the former slaves who worked the mine were converted into tour guides.

Mammoth Cave is pretty much devoid of flow formations, we saw no stalagmites or stalactites on our tour, although we understand that there are a few. Wind Cave and Jewel Cave are much prettier and our favorite is Carlsbad Caverns, if you only tour one cave in your lifetime it should be Carlsbad Caverns!

Friday the 17^th In the morning visited the American Museum of Science and Energy, a museum dedicated to the Manhattan Project, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This is a very data dense facility, it would take the better part of the day to read all the displays.  A fascinating part of our history.

As a kid born in the 1940s our school days were filled with observations and lessons about the nuclear world we lived in. We had “Duck and Cover” drills in school, Bert the Turtle encouraged us to “duck and cover” when we “saw the flash.” The fact that no one would survive a nuclear attack if you saw the flash was denied by the Government and protests pointing out the fact were vigorously quashed. Government sponsored programs encouraged people to get ready for nuclear attack by setting up fallout shelters, our neighbors had a shelter buried in their backyard. We all worried about Khrushchev pushing the button.

Oak Ridge prior to 1942 had a population of just a few thousand people but by 1945 the population was 75,000 and other than the residents few people even knew it existed. Oak Ridge was chosen as the site of the Manhattan Project because of it proximity to roads, railroads, a newly constructed hydro electric dam and the topography; the ridges and valleys would allow for a nuclear disaster without damaging the entire facility and... hide what was going on there. Amazingly only a dozen or so people even knew the purpose of the facility: to extract Uranium 235 from yellow cake. After the bomb was dropped in Hiroshima, only then did the employees learn what they had worked on for 3 years.

original graphite reactor

We took a tour from the American Museum of Science and Energy of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a 3 hour bus tour of the facilities. The tour guide was retired military, had worked at the Lab in his earlier years and at the Pentagon in his later years – he gave an excellent history and explanation of the facility. There was an old guy on the trip, he had worked as a physicist at the Lab during the war, he was showing two of his granddaughters where he worked. We got to see a lot of buildings and hear about the current research effort taking place... it was interesting to me. We also got to see the original graphite reactor that was brought to life during the war.

Although there are great dangers with nuclear energy there can be great rewards and so I support the use of nuclear energy reactors - except that the ones that I support are small, air cooled reactors that are built to be meltdown proof – of course they are less efficient and make less money for investors so there is little investment, except in Europe.

Saturday the 18^th We started our day at the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum. The day was partly cloudy and free of rain, warm and not so humid so we could leisurely stroll the grounds and look at the trains on display. There were a couple of steam locomotives, a couple of diesel locomotives and an assortment of cars in the yard. I walked around taking pictures while we waited for our 12:05 train to depart. Our consist was 3 passenger cars and a diesel locomotive. We

choose the oldest car with opening windows. The route is only 4 miles with a turn around wye at one end and a round table at the other. When we got to the yard we departed the train, watched the train decouple and spin the locomotive on the turntable. We got to look around the yard. There was a small crew of older guys, guessing retirees, who were maintaining and restoring equipment in the yard. If it were closer I might consider volunteering some time to help out, it looked like fun!

All aboard, next stop is Asheville, NC

 Sunday morning, wipers pushing rain off the windshield, we are on our way to the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC. From the entrance of the estate to the house proper takes 45 minutes at 20 miles per hour... the place is huge... the azaleas are in bloom and color is everywhere. We elected to have valet parking, it is sure nice to drop off the car next to the front door so we didn't get drenched. The main house was built between 1889 and 1895 by George Vanderbuilt and still remains within the family making it the largest family owned residence in the United States. The house is 178,000 square feet. It is really hard to describe the feeling in the house, it is huge with high ceilings, extensive stone and wood work, fabulous attention to detail, amazing. It really takes one's breath away.  Think about Downton Abbey the TV show and that will get you in the right time frame.  If you are interested I would suggest googling the Biltmore Estates and look at the images.  The picture below is from the Internet. 

We spent the better part of two hours on a self guided tour with one of those audio devices.  Then we toured the gardens, luckily we purchased rain coats at Mammoth Cave so all but our feet stayed dry. The gardens were European style and very beautiful.

The stables, to the right of the house in the picture, have been converted into shops and restaurants... without losing much of the charm of the old stables.  We were seated in a horse stall where there were 3 tables... there had to be seating for a thousand people! The menu has many items that would have been served during the time of the Vanderbuilts, we choose a meal for two consisting of roasted chicken, pulled pork, ribs, cold slaw, pickles, and cheesy grits – we took a doggy bag and got a second meal out of it.

We stopped at the former dairy on the estate, participated in a wine tasting and finally hung our hat at Cedric's Tavern, named for the St. Bernard dog that was the Vanderbuilt's pet.  I had a locally brewed stout that was very good. After the Cedric tap we dropped by the dairy and picked up malteds made with hard ice cream on our way to the car.

The tour is expensive, we paid about $50 each but we both enjoyed ourselves and felt it was money well spent. The food, beer and wine was no more expensive than eating in Fargo.

We arrived in Murrell Inlet, South Carolina on Monday evening, the 20th