Our Flight to Detroit and then on to Amsterdam is good to go. Happy we didn't waste money on trip insurance. They aren't paying anyway, claiming natural disaster....read the fine print, SUCKA! Breakfast at the airport was oysters Rockefeller and a goat cheese, onion and strawberry salad. It feels funny to be on vacation again and watch the suits with their laptops and blackberries....
I got new books in the airport by Tim Dorsey, Lee Child and Michael Connelly for the long flight. Maybe we'll get a hotel room in the red-light district over a hashish den before the river cruise starts on Friday.
We have a flight scheduled to Amsterdam on Wednesday. Normally, I wouldn't mind a reschedule or a refund, but we've booked a river cruise that starts Friday and those Dutchmen are not going to be handing us back a check if we fail to appear. It was pricey...I should have bought the trip insurance. We're on the same flight as the underpants bomber...it could be worse...What's that cooking?...smells good...idiot child.
The volcano acted up in 1821 and then it laid doggo until we were ready for our river cruise.
We've found a great tennis court here in Asheville. The scores have been 6-0, 6-1, 6-0 and 6-2. I might not have done quit that well, but Mrs. Phred is hitting them all to me instead of flipping them into a corner as she is quite capable of doing.
In town, the people and stores and restaurants show a very serious hippie quality and flavor. We had mojitos and a cuban sandwich on one visit and plan to hit the Biltmore Estate on Sunday.
The Blue Ridge Parkway is just opening. They had a lot of damage to the trees from winter ice storms, which they are just now clearing. We drove up to Mt. Mitchell at 7,000 feet today. There were a lot of bicyclists pumping slowly up and whizzing quickly down.
Was it Billy Pilgrim that came unstuck in time and space? Sometimes I feel that way too. There I am….Five years old and unable to untie my ice skates. I have to walk miles back home with my ankles twisted painfully.
The memories of years of places and people shout and compete for attention.
We’re in the Pisgah National Forest. …again. Today we saw a waterfall with Eastern swallowtail butterflies flitting in the mist. The butterflies like the mist.
It’s not first time for us or for the butterflies. You couldn't make up butterflies. Who could imagine laying little eggs that turn into fuzzy caterpillars that eat leaves and weave themselves into cocoons and then turn to mush and metamorphose into lovely butterflies that lay little eggs that turn into fuzzy caterpillars?
We left Baker Creek State Park in South Carolina two days ago. We went to dump the “black water” and “gray water” and nothing came out, which could be a very serious impediment to our future travels.
However, it turns that the only problem is that you can’t empty our tanks completely when the RV front is lower than the rear. The last time we saw these butterflies our motorcycle gas tank split a seam and I had to epoxy it with a miracle product called “JB Weld”.
This time, our GPS power supply fell apart and I had to steal a spring from a ball point pen to get it going again. We also lost a brake light bulb and the new floor pulled apart when we retracted the slides. We’re gluing it back, but it seems to be kind of a gremlin zone for mechanical things, studded with lots of mountains and waterfalls.
These worn down Appalachian mountains are thought to be a billion years old. The dinosaurs evolved and died out in the last 250 million. They don’t change much in a lifetime.
FDR made this area a wildlife refuge by a stroke of the pen in 1937. I'm still waiting for Obama to take up his righteous mantle and create some things like that. I wonder if he has a Harry Hopkins, Frances Perkins, Cordell Hull or Bernard Baruch to whisper in his ear? What's that? Geithner? Gates? Hillary? Oh Dear!
"3am At The Border Of The Marsh From Okefenokee" is a track on Tangerine Dream's 1976 album Stratosfear.
I loved the album and liked the swamp even more. You might have missed the Krautrock movement which came out of West Berlin in the early 70s. That's OK...I did too.
A big gator approaches us as we stop for lunch ten miles into the swamp. I throw a crust of bread which lands between his eyes.
I've never suspected that gators are very good at problem solving. This one crosses his eyes and keeps turning and snapping, but can't get at the bread crust on his nose.
Here, Mrs. Phred says goodbye to Gordie, Mark and Darwin. They asked her to play doubles with them early Easter morning.
There is one theory that the squadron of lost Navy fighter pilots associated with the Bermuda Triangle may have actually ended up here in the swamp. It's a huge place, about 700 square miles, mostly impassible on foot or by boat.
The green orbs of glowing swamp gas float around everywhere here. They are very annoying and seem to follow us wherever we go.
We spot a red cockaded woodpecker just off the trail pounding on a log. It's an endangered species. You have to wonder about the niche it has selected for itself....looking for bugs by beating apart logs with its nose. The pictures are all blurry. This is the best of the lot. We also spot two skunk apes (both a little over nine feet tall). They smell like a cross between ground pepper and an open sewer. The pictures don't turn out.
Okefenokee Swamp is possibly the most unloved and least visited National Recreation Area.
This is the alien abduction capital of America. The theory is that the lack of roads and people make it a good place to grab the occasional human or cow for closer observation and/or mutilation.
We'll rent a boat today and penetrate the mysterious Okefenokee a little more deeply.
