It Will Only Get Better

It is almost 2021 and it has me thinking that things have to get better soon. I just wrapped up the toughest semester of my teaching career due to COVID-19, a feeding tube, and an ileostomy. My guts are a mess and I cannot continue my journey of having them fixed until the burden on the Cleveland Clinic from COVID019 is reduced enough that they will schedule “elective” surgeries requiring overnight hospital stays. It is frustrating to me that “elective” includes passing my waste into a bag attached to my abdomen with a lot of crazy adhesive (this is how you go #2 with an ileostomy pouch) but, on the other hand, many people live with ileostomy pouches every day. They must be better at pouch management than I am.

Aligning with the surgery, there were also complications. First, my heart rate was too low for surgery and I required a three-day cardiac workup. Next, I developed an ileus, which means part of my intestines did not want to wake up with the rest of them. Finally, my recurring pancreatitis, after a record six years of silence, made a vicious reappearance—corresponding directly to finals week and turning in final grades for my students. The folks in the hospital thought I was nuts for grading while in the hospital, but I also respect and acknowledge the agreement I not only made with the university but, especially, the agreement I made to my students that I would have their material graded by a certain date.

To maintain my health and preparedness for the upcoming surgeries I am hunkering down at home a lot, reading a lot of trashy novels, getting more caught up on emails than I think I have ever been, and reconsidering a jaunt into the blogging world. Reach out if you have any questions about working while navigating multiple abdominal surgeries or if your life experience puts you in a position to offer advice on the matter. Well-wishes are also never declined.

It will only get better!

View fullsize

November 21, 2020 at Massanutten Mountain, Virginia

NoVA’s Most Wanted Geocaches

After our trip to the DC area got off to a rough start due to problems on the Red Line (and everyone who has ever lived in DC has just shook their heads in agreement), we returned to Reston and gathered our bearings. Instead of the virtual geocache crawl we had planned for the District of Columbia, over a comforting bowl of pho, we crafted a new plan: to “free cache” the best caches in Northern Virginia, in the area we were in. Spoiler: I think it turned out better this way, anyway.

To alleviate the frustrations our first stop was to chow down. We found a non-described pho place near the Metro station. Chris had never tried pho and I had never met a bowl of pho that I didn’t like so we took this perfect opportunity to try it out. Besides, you can’t get pho in Morgantown. Things like this are exactly why we love to visit “the big city.” The restaurant was quiet and the staff was attentive, it was the respite needed after the frazzling experience of Metro. After our bellies were full we started hopping between the nearest highly rated caches.

Despite our new outlook on the day, we didn’t get off to a great start. Mart of Many Nations managed to stump us. We’re normally old pros at parking lot geocaches but from the previous logs we thought we might be in for a little more of a challenge. So if you’ve found this one before, hints are appreciated. Normally failing to find the first cache of the day is a bad omen, but we decided to try a second.

There seem to be some standard “unique” caches, these are caches that you’ll maybe find one of in a region, but if you’ve cached in multiple regions you’ll see them again. This was the case 2 foot cache, we had seen one just like it in Airway Heights, Washington. But given that I was going to very crankily give up caching for the day otherwise, it was a happy and comforting find in front of the Home Depot. I love it when cache owners go to such great lengths to repurpose basic items as geocaches.

Next, we headed out the Manassas National Battlefield to “Rally behind the Virginians.” Firstly, we’re used to the Civil War sites in West Virginia, which are very often very close to as they were during the conflict. In fact, one site, Camp Allegheny is truly so close to how it was that it is difficult to reach by passenger car (you need the ground clearance!) and there was staunch opposition when a wind power generation facility was to be put up within the view-shed. Other sites, like Laurel Mountain (site of the Battle of Laurel Hill) and Cheat Summit Fort retain most of their Civil War-era characteristics with only a few suggestions of modern times here and there. But in Manassas, there are piles of non-descript homes and businesses that really encroach into the area of the battlefield. It’s a very different feeling than you get when you visit the sites in West Virginia. Though there is no question, if you visit Manassas, that Stonewall Jackson was ripped. That is not something you get a sense of when you visit his boyhood home, in what is new Lewis County, West Virginia.

Stonewall Jackson riding on at the Manassas National Battlefield Park

Very close to Manassas we also found The Iron Goose. Compared to the rippling muscles of Stonewall Jackson and the fact we had found a very similar, though now archived, cache in Huntington, West Virginia this sneaky find didn’t really seem terribly remarkable. But when you’re seeking out the very best, it’s all shades of awesome.

We went driving around to seek out the next cache, a virtual cache at a modest memorial to those who lost their lives in 911, 911 Memorial. It’d been threatening to rain most of the day. We thought we would be able to avoid it, but as we pulled up the memorial to log the cache and pay our respect the rain came pouring down. It added some interesting perspective to the location and, once dried off, was almost appreciated. This cache truly provided us with a five-sense experience.

A five-sense experience at this somber 911 Memorial

The final find of the day, also in the rain, was one of the cornerstones of the District of Columbia. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting to find the DC Cornerstone this in a sleepy neighborhood a few blocks away from the old downtown of Falls Church, Virginia. Originally, the District of Columbia was a ten-mile by ten-mile allocation that looks like a cube tipped on one point, incorporating lands belonging both to Maryland and Virginia. However, during the Civil War, Virginia took its part of the DC allocation back and it is now Arlington.

We logged five finds, which is pretty good given the quality of the geocaches and the delay in getting to the geocaching part of the day. Northern Virginia is a wonderful place that has a unique combination of fascinating history, delicious restaurants, and just enough southern hospitality that you know you’re not in Maryland anymore. We look forward, as always, to our next trip!

Silver Streak or Silver Sneakers?

To celebrate the second weekend of its service, Chris and I made the trip out to Northern Virginia and DC to give the new Silver Line a whirl. Given the sheer terror of my time as a commuter on the Red Line (especially in the months after the horrible crash where we all learned what “telescoping” meant and nine individuals perished), my hopes were not high. Yet, what I found reminded me of home, for it seemed almost as smooth as the SkyTrain that offers a similar level of not-quite-light but not-quite-heavy rail transit.

The Silver Line opened on July 26^th after several years of hot debates, delayed construction, and hot debates over delayed construction. For all the headaches involved, it’s a wonder that we can build anything on this type of scale with these types of goals when so many agencies are involved. There was hardly enough pie for everyone to get their slice. But once we got through the throngs of tourists unable to figure out how to use a Smartrip Card and the bathrooms that were locked but didn’t seem locked at the Wiehle-Reston East station, the trip on the train for the four-remaining Silver-only stations was a pleasure.

My greatest concern with the Silver Line is that it only increases the severity of the bottleneck at Rosslyn (and others agree and explain the situation very well!). Unlike other stations in the system that have three lines meeting, at Rosslyn they must do it all on the same track. Because of the spacing between trains and the demand on the peripheries of each respective line, the only word that comes to mind to describe those commuting through Rosslyn is “hell.” For the Blue Line in particular, I imagine the delays have only grown. Likely reminiscent of Red Line commuters who really, really want to get to Forest Glen, Wheaton, or Glenmont  but can’t get any further than Silver Spring if their lives depended on it, but worse.

But as these thoughts get frantic and negative, we were suddenly at one of the Farraguts trying desperately to get to the other Farragut to get onto the Red Line. The Red Line, not wishing to disappoint me, had a train break down at Gallery Place and no trains were running toward Shady Grove. After 30 minutes at the other Farragut with no trains coming, we turned around to go back to the original Farragut and get on the Silver Line back towards the safe arms of suburbia. Thankfully, due to the invisible, magic “transit tunnel” between the Farraguts, there was no financial toll for the 30 minutes in Metro Limbo, but we made the return trip much faster than expected. Returning to the original Farragut, within moments we were headed back out to Wiehle-Reston East and the day began getting substantially better from there.

On this journey, in one of the newest cars in the fleet, I saw my first glimpse of Metro’s tongue-in-cheek advertisements urging commuters to look alive because the love of their life may also be riding the Silver Line. I don’t know if it was my frustration or delirium from being outside of the mountains, but I found it absolutely hilarious.

I took this trip on a Saturday and was really impressed with the balance of traffic I saw heading both into and out of DC. Some things I was expecting. For example, I expected Tyson’s Corner to be the same kind of hit that Metrotown Station is on the Expo Line in Vancouver. You can’t go wrong with frequent rail transit to a major entertainment destination (especially if it’s the wintertime and there’s precipitation).  But I did not expect Wiehle-Reston East to be such a bustling hub of activity. Most of the construction here is not even complete (they’ve got all kinds of transit-oriented-design goodies planned here), yet it was probably the busiest station, rivaling even Tyson’s Corner. This is evidence to me that the line is desired and will see use. I hope that in five or ten years the only question remaining in the minds of those that pushed for this is, “why couldn’t we have this super nice thing sooner?”

Of course, for all of the promise of the Silver Line, it is still part of the overall Metro Rail system. I think my concerns about the bottleneck at Rosslyn are real. But Metro has an opportunity to set their best foot forward with something new and fresh that hasn’t had time to be ruined by neglect, vandalism, and bureaucracy. I hope they take it for all it’s worth and turn over a new leaf!

The Dimming of the Day

Once we completed the Pocahontas County geochallenge for this year, we learned about another geochallenge happening in the area, the Route 39 Byway Challenge. Unfortunately, this series proved to be somewhat more disorganized than the Pocahontas County challenge. We had managed to find a few of the geocaches in this series (the first one, Jailhouse Blues, was entirely accidental), but one was entirely elusive and it turned us off of completing series. Several other experienced cachers had failed to ever log a find on the cache and the cache owner appeared to be oblivious on how to remedy the situation. 

What this drove home to us is the power of geocaching as a tourism tool. The promise of a cool, fun, well-curated geocaching tour lures cachers like us to an area. However, a poorly executed series rapidly leads to grumpiness. Other issues with this series included lacking a central place to get information on the trail, incomplete and inconsistent passport sheets to record the finds, multiple owners of the caches (which makes it difficult to find a list or contact owners online). Though probably the most egregious error was in creating a series commemorating Route 39 specifically, one of the caches required a 90 minute round trip deadhead south of the route to log one of the caches. But no one says you must complete all of the challenges, so we didn’t. We enjoyed the quick detour into Bath County, VA and once we became annoyed we changed strategies.

The original Jefferson Baths at Warm Springs, Virginia along Route 39

We headed north on U.S. Route 220. This is an utterly stunning drive in Virginia and West Virginia. It isn’t even too bad if you keep following it through Maryland and Pennsylvania. But we headed toward Seneca Rocks and right at dusk found ourselves at the New Germany Valley overlook. We got out of the car stretched our legs and took photographs (and logged an earthcache!).

Sitting on a guadrail with Germany Valley behind me, utterly breathtaking

Given the dimming of the day, we cruised down through Monkeytown and toward Elkins where we had dinner. The long days of late spring sometimes seem to have a disorienting effect on when it’s time to eat or even when it’s time to head toward home.

Top 10 of 2013: A Very WVTim January

Numbers 6 through 8 are all hidden in the same area by the same amazing geocacher, WVTim (though note, these are not his last entries on the top ten list for 2013!). WVTim is indeed so awesome that he was the March 2013 Geocacher of the Month. Each of these three caches were found on the same weekend in January on a trip deliberately scheduled to find awesome caches away from home. 

Number 8: Hi-Tech
Clearblook, Virginia
193 Favorite Points

This is the most favorite cache in the entire state of Virginia (not too shabby!) despite its humble placement on a truck stop off I-81. So far, the caches on this list have been about amazing locations, this is about an amazing container. Frankly, so are 6 and 7. WVTim puts hours and hours of work into his geocache containers and is a deliberate and kind member of the geocaching community. The care he puts into his caches is obvious to all who find them and in this case realize that a birdhouse isn’t quite a birdhouse. 

Number 7: The Quick and the Dead !
Inwood, West Virginia
216 Favorite Points

While this list proves that many great caches were found in 2013, this may have been the most entertaining. Many of WVTim’s geocaches are “gadget” caches. These are geocaches that often require an extra tool or device (ranging from balloons to batteries to jumper cables) to extract the log. Illustrated in the photograph below, I’m sure you can imagine that I’m pretty glad this one was not a gadget cache!

Trying to get the cheese!

This is the fifth most favorited cache in the state of West Virginia. 

Number 6: TB Hotel Extraordinaire
Martinsburg, WV
225 Favorite Points

And sometimes, truly great caches are right under your nose. Chris and I always stay at the Martinsburg Holiday Inn when we’re in the area. There are so many great reasons to stay there: nice pool, clean rooms, friendly staff, and, as it turns out, this geocache. We were planning our geocaching day and to our surprise, there was this cache staring right at us as we looked out our window.

A travel bug (or TB) hotel is a geocache safe for individuals to place travel bugs. For those who do not know what a travel bug (or trackable) is, it is a trinket or coin with a code on it that is supposed to travel from geocache to geocache and as new people find it, it can be logged via it’s unique code on the Geocaching website. For example, I released a travel bug in Seattle with the goal for it to travel to State College, PA. Though its route was circuitous, traveling via Wyoming, Florida, Ontario, South Carolina, Georgia, and a few other states, it eventually made it to Williamsport, PA. Williamsport is about an hour from State College so on my next day off I picked it up from the geocache it had been placed in there.

Most TB hotels are indistinguishable from regular geocaches, except that they tend to run larger and be in areas where they are monitored or unlikely to be removed. This one, however, is no comparison to those. This is the Greenbrier of TB hotels.

This is the third most favorited geocache in the state of West Virginia.

Summertime 2013!

After completing an exam this morning, the Spring 2013 is officially wrapped up and the time of year I affectionately refer to as “summer” is here. Summer for a graduate student is not the same as summer is for an undergraduate student. This is a concept lost on many people, including my mother. For a graduate student, summer is the time they have to delve into their research without the distractions of classes and (usually) teaching responsibilities. This is when dissertation topics are developed (but rarely proposed—after all, your advisor often needs a vacation, too!), field work is completed with reckless abandon, and we often carry our laptops and books outside and enjoy a campus virtually devoid of the otherwise ubiquitous undergraduate student.

My plans for the summer are to do much of the data collection for my dissertation. I may even kindly solicit the help of you, my blog readers, for parts of this data collection. I’m also working on proposals and still that big project that pays the bills. That other thing that many do not understand, if you are a funded graduate student, school more resembles work. Despite the fact a schedule similar to a 5-day work week is adhered to, over the summer there are a few opportunities for a long weekend adventure or two (or five?).

I’ve had a few ideas (fantasies?) for summer adventures, for those more experienced, I’d love to hear what you have to think or suggest:

The Delmarva Peninsula and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge/Tunnel: Any bridge where locals make piles of money driving folks from out of town across (because it’s long, high up, and freaks people out) sounds like something I must check out. As for the Eastern Shore of Maryland (and the neighboring bit of Virginia), like with Western Maryland, you don’t hear much about it. It seems like a quiet, pleasant place (except possibly for Ocean City on a hot July day).

Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina: I’ve had the opportunity to explore other areas of this state, but I’d like to see where it was that North Carolina became first in flight. I hear the beach is nice, too, but beaches are far more ubiquitous than the first controlled, powered airplane flight. I feel like it would have the same kind of strange ambiance as discovering where Marconi transmitted the first telegraph from the US to England. Though, I can’t imagine getting the solitude of the Cape in October on a North Carolina beach in a warm month.

Paddling Stonewall Jackson Lake: Earlier this year, when it was particularly frigid out, Chris and I spent a wonderful night at the Stonewall Jackson Resort (near Weston, WV), which sits right on the lake. At that point we also learned that, included in the room rate, are several recreational opportunities, including kayaks. I would love little more than to spend a day on the lake (with A LOT of sunscreen!) pulling up on the little islands and peninsulas beyond the reach of walking men… and it’s just incredibly beautiful out here.

Camping at Rocky Gap State Park: As a kid, the idea of camping sounded like some kind of hell. Yet, over the past few years, as I’ve assimilated into Appalachian living, the idea sounds more and more appealing. So I’ve reserved a cabin for what I’m calling “baby camping.” I use the term because it is a cabin with electric and it’s across the lake from a resort. Though, given we’re going with coolers full of meat with plans to grill, I think I’ll survive.

Tubing on the Shenandoah River: I tried tubing on the Juniata River in Mifflin County, PA last year. It got off to a rocky start when I did a really lousy job of getting myself into the tube (and consequently slamming my knee on the bottom of the river—slick granite—leading to a few months of physical therapy). Though once I got going, I had a great time. The biggest surprise was the amount of pain my whole body was in the next morning. I’ve really made tubing sound freaking miserable, but I would like to do it again, and I’d like to do it in a nice, clean river like the Shenandoah around Front Royal/Luray and all that good stuff.

I believe it was the month of July last year where on four consecutive Saturdays I signed some kind of liability waiver that used the word “death” multiple times. It was a pretty good month. I’d do that again.

Awesome Public Art

This will likely become a series as I stumble across neat expressions of art. I enjoy public art because it disrupts a landscape or a place, it catches your eye and changes how you think of or look at a place or a moment in time. In many cases, I think it also positively augments how we travel through the world, be it something we can see from the freeway at 70mph, an intriguing discovery on a side street, or a surprise in the wilds on an easy hike.

The Mill Mountain Star

Roanoke, Virginia is an old railroad town. On the surface the place looks as one expects for a city nestled into the foothills of Appalachia. The city and suburbs wind between ancient rounded hills and mountains, most of the buildings are low-rise and there is a clear network of limited access roads. One of the things that sets Roanoke apart is that it is apparently the only city to have a mountain entirely within city limits and atop that mountain is this, the Mill Mountain Star (often referred to as the Roanoke Star). The Mill Mountain Star is the largest illuminated man-made free-standing star.

There are multiple sets of tubes on the star and it can be lit in different combinations of red, white, and blue. Of particular interest to this blog, there was a period when the star would be illuminated in red rather than white to indicate a traffic fatality. In front of the star is an overlook open to the public that grants an impressive view of downtown Roanoke. From this angle, the city does look like some place special and unique. The legacy of the star is pretty impressive for something that was intended originally as a marketing ploy during the 1949 holiday shopping season.

Old Man in the Garden

The West Virginia Botanic Garden is a hidden gem in the greater Morgantown area. It took several years to find out that it exists. The location of the gardens around the former Tibbs Run Reservoir is secluded among some smaller housing developments. During the winter months parking is at the top of a hill that does not look like much, but as you ascend the grounds begin to unfold before your eyes. At the entrance to the walking and hiking trails that tour guests through the grounds is this gentleman, carved into a tree. The kind face of the wise old man is a pleasant welcome to a place of peace and natural wonder.

Toil

Many universities feature public art installations. I found this one, aptly titled Toil, at East Tennessee State University to be particular interesting. I can certainly relate to the person in this piece, chained to books of knowledge. Despite spending some time with the sculpture and looking at the photo several times, I’m not sure if I like it or if I simply understand the feeling. Indeed, this is part of what makes this piece so wonderful.

If you have discovered thought provoking or paradigm shifting public art, I’d love to hear about it and potentially discuss it in a future entry!

Bath County: Finding the Homestead

Outside of the immediate area, Virginia is often thought of synonymously with Washington, DC or, during the summertime, as having some excellent beaches on the Atlantic. But in the west-central part of the state is a unique place that takes guests into a time past. Bath County is one of relatively few on the east coast that has never been widely settled. Bath is a county without a single incorporated city or town nor a single traffic light. There are no scars of heavy industry nor has the population of this county ever topped 10,000. What Bath County does have is stunning natural beauty and phenomena, which has fueled it’s economy.

The Homestead Resort, a National Historical Landmark

The most notable landmark of Bath County is the Homestead Resort. The Homestead pre-dates the founding of the United States and in the hey-day of America’s “Grand Resorts,” few could compete with the service and the grandeur of this summer hideaway. The presence of natural springs, perceived to be of great medicinal benefits, and the altitude made Bath County the ideal location for the resort, despite the challenges of transportation once posed by the Allegheny Mountains. And unlike some of the other mineral springs resorts still in existence, visitors are still able to take a seat next to and slip their feet into the hot springs.

Seats to slip your feet into springs at the Homestead

Many of the “Grand Resorts” have been victims of the times, whether through improved transportation, changing tastes in how to spend vacation time, or failure to invest in the resort to strike the right balance between modern tastes and classical elegance, yet the Homestead nobly rests in the village of Hot Springs, solidering these changes. Approaching Hot Springs from the north on U.S. Route 220, you round a curve less than a half mile from town, and are greeted by the immense structure of the main resort building.

Touring the inside of the resort, it is unclear what the future holds for the resort. It is a unique combination of classic elegance from the turn of the 20^th century as well as mid-century ideas of what turn of the 20^th century décor looked like (think Dorothy Draper/Modern Baroque). While the overwhelming feeling from the resort was one of absolute grandeur, the times have been taking a toll on the resort for the reasons stated. If I may make a personal appeal, if you have the opportunity to visit Hot Springs, do stop at the Homestead. Explore the resort and if you see fit, spend some money there. Living, breathing National Historical Landmarks are harder and harder to find and are worth supporting, even if it’s just a cup of hot cocoa or a keychain.

Ballroom in the Garden Wing of the Homestead

It is clear the effect this area has on it’s natives. Only a few miles south of Hot Springs is Ashwood, home of legendary golfer Sam Snead. Despite traveling extensively as a professional golfer, all roads always led back to the Allegheny Mountains. If he was not in the Hot Springs area, he was a mere 50 miles away working as the golf pro at the Greenbrier Resort. His love of the region is not unique to him though, many people find themselves returning to the region year after year to refuel their spirits in the unrivaled natural beauty and solitude.