“Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.”
Winston Churchill
Winston on Free Speech
Nov 18
Travel Advice
Nov 18
I’ve found the only way to relax on vacation is either bad weather or a boring location, both of which I try to avoid.
Giant City
Nov 3
On our way to Giant City State Park we passed a billboard in rural Illinois advertising “affordable” colonoscopies. Yeah, that’s what holds people back from having one. And nothing holds me back from writing travel posts.
Why go spend a couple of days in Southern Illinois? Some would say a wild hair, others it seemed like a good idea at the time. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which is whom. I’ll just note that the forecast dropped 10 degrees in the week in between booking and taking the trip. At least the leaves are pretty.
We’ve spent our trip like so many others – hiking, eating, and visiting the occasional winery. And taking way too many pictures. Until cold and tired, hiking the fourth trail of the day on jelly legs, we become a lot more selective and the picture taking grinds to a halt. But the hiking had to go on until the end of the trail and most importantly our car was reached.
The draw of Giant City is a cluster of sandstone blocks that you can walk between and in theory resemble a city for giants. Plus the park has a lot of bluffs. A lot. My spidey sense hasn’t been tingling, but my acrophobia has caused more than a few unpleasant moments. And the lodge that wins best chicken dinner in Illinois year after year – they have all the certificates on display – no doubt is another draw.
My only complaint about the park is they end every trail name with “nature trail” which implies to me an easy boring trail for small kids and old people. So it took us awhile to figure out that Giant City Nature Trail is the trail through the ”Giant City” formation. And oh yeah, the lack of water flow in the shower that I can only compare unfavorably to bathing in Mexico with a half gallon of water and a red solo cup.
Q & A
Oct 31
Lawyers ask questions to which they already know the answers,
Scientists ask questions to which they don’t know the answers,
Philosophers ask question to which there aren’t any answers,
Engineers provide answers.
Return from Arkansas
Oct 14
Another day, another taut travel thriller. Our bedroom at this Airbnb is always quiet and dark in the morning so no meteorology report in every post, except I was surprised to read in the weather app that today we were experiencing the remains of Tropical Storm Pamela, not that it was a big deal. Last trip was TS Fred, and he (it?) was a big deal. Just hoping one day it’s TS Chen [Galaxy Quest reference] that rains on our parade.
Today we journeyed to the bustling metropolis of Little Rock where MBH asked if I was going to call every driver who annoyed me “Arkansas”. No, not the ones with Texas plates I replied. We visited the Big Dam Bridge, Lost Forty Brewing for lunch, the MacArthur Military Museum (yes, that MacArthur – he was born there), and then an outlet mall. Ah, we ended on a sad note as malls are dying. But we hit a Bass Pro Shop and all was right with the world again. Mostly.
Yesterday we hit the easy button and stayed around the village. The day before we took a long scenic drive to Mount Nebo State Park where we hiked the rim trail which had non-stop fantastic views that kept my acrophobia tingling. Out west they would call the flat topped, ship shaped, steeply sided prominence a mesa, here it’s just another Mt.
Now it’s time to say so long until next trip!
An Arkansas Getaway
Oct 11
We are back on the road again, and by that I mean we have at long last ended our string of restless trips and are spending an entire week at the same location: Hot Springs Arkansas. Now you may well be wondering why, of all the places we’ve been and could go, Hot Springs gets this distinct honor, and I have to tell you it’s because MBH planned it that way. My incessant whining about constantly moving, learning how to use a different Keurig model every couple of days (and just for the record, the one at our current Airbnb is identical to all the others in that some things are the same and some are different) probably had an effect. I may have forgotten how to be a good engineer but I’ll be a champion whiner to the day I die. That and MBH likes me, she really really likes me.
We are not actually staying in Hot Springs, but Hot Springs Village, America’s largest gated community (says so on their website) and while the gates keep the riff raft out, as guests there are only two gates we can enter by and they are inconveniently located like twenty miles apart at either end of the village and our Airbnb is pretty much in the middle. So if we head of East or West it’s not really a big deal, but Hot Springs is to the south.
Saturday we enjoyed Bath House Row and environs with several thousand of our closest friends. Sunday after streaming church (ain’t technology something) we headed off to Lake Ouachita (pronounced just how it sounds) state park and a grueling three hour hike. Before we stopped for lunch the trail was fairly crowded, afterwards the only people we saw were the two guys who found my sunglasses which I had unknowingly dropped on the trail. And there are those who say the age of miracles and wonders is over.
Today I started the day with a flat, fast run and then it was off to the beauty of Garvan Woodland Gardens. After soaking up the sights there we saw sights from a higher vantage point – the top of Hot Springs Mountain and then we headed off to our Hot Springs bath appointment at Quapaw Baths and Spa where all of our aches and pains were first melted away in the hot mineral water and then we were reinvigorated with a very cold mint scented towel that stayed ice cold even when applied to a hot body for an amazingly long time.
COVID in Missouri
Aug 30
I plotted COVID cases and deaths here in Missouri with year on top of year which I think is important with a seasonal virus. While there were divergences between cases and deaths in 2020, 2021 they look pretty lock step taking into account the slight delay from cases to deaths.
My biggest takeaway looking at the death chart is that while happy days may not be here again, happier days are – as long as the drop isn’t due to delays in death reporting. The fact that cases and deaths have been dropping essentially for the month of August while last year they kept rising is a good sign, a sign that between vaccinations and infections the virus is running out of susceptible people to infect. I would be concerned that if the cases chart is a more accurate indication of seasonality, we might still have a fourth wave coming in November (again).
Another take away is since we’ve been through three waves in Missouri, we have achieved “herd immunity” three times already, IOW R (reproduction number) has been above 1 three times and below 1 three times (don’t even get me started on R naught for a seasonal virus). I think we are headed to COVID becoming an endemic minor childhood disease but we still have some rough times ahead to get there in the year to come. If you have not gotten infected or vaccinated yet, your choice is either to go through an infection vaccinated or unvaccinated, and I’m going to suggest vaccinated is the better way to go. COVID zero is a pipe dream, COVID as just another viral infection amongst others is the reality.
Clearly Delta is more infectious since the late summer surge was greater in 2021 than 2020 despite the fewer susceptible people more people were infected and died. The media keep saying the hospitals and ICUs are as full right now as during the peak last Nov and Dec last year, yet the death rate of the most recent peak is roughly a third what is was then so I have to wonder what is really going on. Are we hospitalizing more for treatment, or are we doing that much better keeping hospitalizations advancing to deaths? Or is the media just being negative and sensationalist? The answer is left as an excercise for the reader.
There’s No Place Like Home
Aug 26
Today we had a simple plan: a leisurely morning at the motel, a short drive to Owensboro, a tour of the Green River Distillery (the Westernmost distillery on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail), lunch in downtown Owensboro, and then a three hour drive home. We executed flawlessly.
Now we are snug at home after a quick stop to pick up milk and mushrooms for breakfast tomorrow. I’ve had my celebratory glass of St Louis water (tastes great and less filling) and I’m ticking off the final to do item of both the day and the trip.
Until the next adventure!
Mammoth Cave
Aug 25
Today started with the alarm going off at 6 AM. Ugh. Retirement means you only set an alarm on vacation (there went any sympathy). We needed to make it to our tour at Mammoth cave at 8:45 AM.
The River Styx tour took us from the top to the bottom of Mammoth cave, which is 400 miles of caves that basically are now dry underground streams that drained water from one side of a plateau to the Green River on the other side. A cap of sandstone and flint kept the upper levels from eroding away leading to its enormous size but kept water from leaking in, leading to a near total absence of all the formations you associate with caves. In other words, we walked two and a half miles of dry creek beds, just under ground. At the bottom we came to an actual wet creek, AKA the River Styx. Then we turned around and walked back out. We only got to hear the Charon waterfall, but we did get to see a sunken boat in the creek, 350 below ground.
I made it through Fat Man’s Misery which was more like Svelte Man’s Discomfort until I came to the spot where the floor abruptly rose and then it was Old Man’s Stumble. In some ways the highlight of the tour was our guide, Greg.
Every Kind of Driving
Aug 24
Today is going to be a short post since basically all we did was drive. And eat. And check out of the Airbnb. Ha ha, bazinga! You don’t check out, basically you clean up after yourself (one place we didn’t even have to do that, but we’re middle class midwesterners so we still did anyway), leave, and message the owner. Then we review them and they review us. Oddly enough, “clean” is always included in the reviews of us. I admit the place in the mountains this trip was different since we had to take our trash to the local recycling center.
So today we went back thru Tennessee and the unavoidable Knoxville, and in the middle of nowhere we set out on mostly two lane roads to Cave City KY and our rendezvous with the Sleep Inn there. I hate driving through Tennessee because so many drivers think they are in a NASCAR race but I have come to find out that’s only on the interstates and in the big cities. In the countryside they drive like your maiden aunt wearing white gloves and a frown. You don’t want to get too close to the speed limit because you might inadvertently exceed it.
