Roadside Attractions

Part of the fun of bike riding or scenic drives are the things you see along the way. On our trip to Lake George we took a side trip to Whitehall NY to see one of the locks on the Erie canal. As a child my parents had actually taken up the Erie canal by boat. It was one of the most memorial trips we had on the boat so I wanted to go back and see one of the locks to see how different it was from what I remembered. 

The lock is close to what I remembered but the town is a lot more run down now. The restaurant/antique shop I remember having the best honey buns in the world is gone. The restaurant/antique shop was memorable also for the fact that the woman running it had some hand painted color slides made for president Lincoln that showed battle scenes from the civil war. I remember she brought us up to the second floor and actually used a projector to show us some of the slides. They were as detailed as and realistic as any Thomas Eakins painting but a lot more vibrant.

On are way back from Whitehall we came across an interesting memorial to a marine sergeant who died in 2017. It was an eagle atop a motorcycle as you can see at the picture at the top of the post. It's a cool memorial. Much better than the usual stone statue or marker and makes an interesting roadside attraction. 

This past Saturday I led a ride from Allentown with the purpose of seeing the new windmill at

Holland farms. It had been under construction for about a year and now that it was finished I wanted to see it.  It was a cold and windy day so we did a 30+ mile no stop ride that came back to Allentown via Rue Road. The windmill can be seen at the bottom of the road. We couldn't get a really good view from the road so we snuck up a dirt driveway into the farm to get a picture. Laura probably got a better picture with her super zoom camera but we did see it. Holland farms actually has a winter festival with an interactive light display including a lit up windmill. I may go check it out some night. 

As the winter approaches I will keep looking out from some sights along the roads to try and make the rides a little more interesting. 

P.S. Martin for reasons only he can justify decided not to make any shifts for the entire ride even though we did go over some hills. He is now known as One Gear Griff

Space, the Final Frontier...

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Ever since seeing the original series in the late 1960s I have always been a fan of Star Trek. I don't consider myself trekee since I don't go to conventions or have a huge collection of Star Trek memorabilia (okay I do have a small collection of Star Trek Christmas ornaments). I like the show because it provides an optimistic inclusive view of the future. They have a history of reflecting the current conflict of our society and providing thoughtful commentary. It also had some ground breaking moments. The first interracial kiss on TV was on Star Trek. The show with it many different series has been on TV for over 50 years so there is amazing depth of characters and stories to explore. 

Then there is the cool technology like the warp drive, talking computers, communicators (which became reality with the flip phone) and of course the transporter (Beam me up Scotty).

Who won't want to be transported to their destination instead of have to deal with traffic.

Even though the original series only lasted three seasons it ignited the imagination of generations of fans and spawned 14 movies and 11 additional series. At this point Star Trek is a part of our culture that shows no sign of slowing down. 

Even after 50+ years there are still enough fans to keep Star Trek going. There is even one super fan who decided to rebuild the sets of the original series up in Ticonderoga NY (because that is where he lives) and open it up to the public. It's called Star Trek Tours and my wife and I decided to take a trip to see it as part of a long weekend get away.  

We stayed at a cabin on the northern part of Lake George about 10 miles south of Ticonderoga. It was a nice place to relax for a couple of days. It had great views of the lake and surrounding mountains which was damped a little by all the rain but it was a good place to hang out. 

We spent Saturday morning touring the Star Trek sets. James Cawley who is the super fan who created the sets did an amazing job of reproducing the Enterprise sets. When he was 17 he befriended Bill Theiss the costume designer for Star Trek The Next Generation and he actually worked as a costume designer for the first season. James and Bill be came good friends and Bill eventually gave James the full blueprints for the Star Trek Enterprise and Star Trek The Next Generation sets. 

We had an hour tour of the sets with a guide who explained a lot of interesting stories about the sets and the making of the series. It was unbelievable how accurate the sets were. After watching it on TV is was just so cool to be walking through the actual ship. 

The different sets were connected by the hallway of the ship so once you entered the set you felt like you were on the actual ship. 

The sick bay was the biggest set and had a few different rooms with a lot of the props used on the show. 

The salt shaker looking things on the table above were used as laser scalpels.

 

I was able to get a close look at the monitor above the beds and what they are actually measuring makes no sense (e.g. one of the bar graphic on the monitor is just labeled brain). But hey it's TV it doesn't have to be that accurate. 

The conference room

and the crew quarters were as accurate as the other sets 

 

but my favorite was engineering and the bridge. I think the picture of the warp core is going to be my new Zoom background

Here is a panoramic picture of the bridge.

We were lucky in that there was just us and another couple on the tour so I was able to get some clear shots of the sets without a lot of people in the way. If you click the link at the top of this post you will get to the photo album that has all the photos that I took. These sets have been open to the public for 8 years. Before that they were actually used on some of the other Star Trek series and for some fan movies. I know that this was a totally geeky thing to do but it was a lot of fun and I'm not ashamed to show my geekyness. 

Star Trek has been inspirational for a lot of engineers, scientist, writers, activists, and astronauts like Mae Jemison, the first black women in space, who credited Uhura's character into believing she could become and astronaut. It has a very passionate fan base so I hope they continue to produce new chapters to the story and keep inspiring people to believe in a more humanistic and optimistic version of the future. 

Drought Warning

Although we have had a few droughts in New Jersey over the years I can't remember one like this where there has been almost no rain for a month an a half. We had no mensurable rain in October and only slightly more than that so far this month. Since I live close to the Manasquan reservoir I pass by it on a regular basis, on my bike rides, and have seen its level drop over the last few months. Here is a picture I took by the marina back in July 2017 and is normally how the dock looks.

Notice the relationship between the pilings and the dock. Here is a picture of the same location from a different angle in Sept 2022. This is when they took the level of the reservoir down to do some work on the dam and marina.

This is was the lowest I have seen it until today. 

This is what it looked like today

Again look at the relationship between the pilings and the dock. It's only got a few more feet before the entire dock is just sitting in the sand. There is some rain in the forecast but it is going to take a lot of rain (over a foot last time I checked) to get us back to normal.

Wildfire Update

 

I did a ride this week past Rova Farms to check out the remnants of one of the wildfires that have been popping up because of the dry weather. As I mentioned last week there was a wildfire in my area called the Shogun fire. It was on S. Stump Tavern Rd and was started by a person firing a shogun at a firing range using ammo called "Dragon's Breath" which has some extra magnesium in it so that the blast is brighter and has more sparks. First that ammo is illegal, second using something that creates "more sparks" when the fire danger is this high is plain stupid. They did find out who started the fire and he has turned himself in. However the damage is done with over 300 acres burnt. 

The burnt forest isn't as badly damage as I suspected. Yes most of the underbrush is gone or burnt but most of the trees looked undamaged. There are scorch marks on the trunks of the trees but that is about it. The Jackson fire department did a good job of containing the fire. 

The main reason I wanted to check out the damage is that the back of my house faces a forest so I wanted to know how dangerous that could be given the current conditions. During the Shogun fire the Jackson fire department did have to protect a few houses that were in the path of the fire. The created fire breaks around the houses and had fire trunks in the neighborhood to put out any fires that threaten any homes. There was no damage to any structures during the fire so I suspect that the fire department could prevent a fire from damaging my house if there was a fire was in the area. Of course I am hoping for a lot of rain so soon so that I won't have to worry about that possibility. 

On a completely different subject. I led an off the books ride this Saturday up to Jamesburg. We found a good coffee shop that would makes good muffins and fritters so I may head up that way more often. While we were in the area we stopped to check out on of the posse members that we haven't seen in a while.

We snuck into his community and did a surprise visit. He didn't join us on today's ride because he was providing some narration for a production in his community which I know he will be good at. It was good to see him and hopefully he will join us on our rides again soon. 

The Fall Riding Season

You know it is fall when you have to put on a jacket to do a ride. For the past few weeks I have been enjoying some fall rides. We haven't had any rain in over a month so there has been no excuse to not get out and ride. Even with the dry weather the foliage has been pretty good. The leave are mostly off the trees now but we had a couple of good weeks of color. 

Besides rides through the Assimpink and the Pinelands to see the foliage I also did a couple of rides to see the Halloween display. 

The decorations in Lambertville were the usual strange displays. I was a little disappointed by the ones in Bordentown. I did a few extra passes through the town on my normal Bordentown ride but did not see anything spectacular as I have seen there in years past. A lot of people are just buying some blow up monsters or skeletons so there wasn't anything real original.

The weather has been warmer than normal for fall. We actually have a few 70 and 80 degree days that I took advantage of. The dry conditions have led to a few wildfires in my area. There was one fire called the Shotgun fire (caused by some jerk who used illegal magnesium in his shotgun shells which caused the ensuing sparks to ignite the firing range) that is only 7 miles west of where I live. Although there is no danger of the fire coming my way it has made the air unhealthy at times when the wind it blowing in the wrong direction. 

Now that the leaves are off the trees I know the weather will be getting cooler and my rides will be getting shorter. Hopefully the mild winter predicted will be true and I can get through the winter without having any major interruptions in my riding.