After our time in St. Clair, we made our way toward the Upper Peninsula, stopping for a night in St. Ignace. We learned the correct pronunciation – IGness, not igNACE – and managed to get it right and not embarrass ourselves. 😉
We were only there for a few hours, but managed to get a few photos of the marina and the lighthouse.
We learned on a previous visit that when visiting the U.P. having a Pasty is kind of a requirement. I managed to have a Breakfast Pasty at Bentley’s Cafe.
I realized a few weeks ago that I had not completed editing and processing my photos from our trip to Michigan in July. I finished them up a few days ago and have posted a gallery on my Adobe Portfolio page.
We spent a few days in the Port Huron area, staying a bit south in the town of St. Clair. It was our first time in that area, and gave a chance to catch up with Mark Graf that I posted about earlier. While in St. Clair we managed to spend some time in Port Huron, exploring the town, taking a boat cruise on the St. Clair River and visiting the Thomas Edison Depot Museum.
Readers of an Edison biography might remember that Thomas Edison lived in Port Huron during his early years, and as a 12 year old got his entrepreneurial start selling newspapers and confections on the train from Grand Trunk to Detroit. The railroad depot in Port Huron houses the Thomas Edison Depot Museum.
An interesting thing about the St. Clair River is that it marks the boundary between the United States and Canada. We realized that when we were looking across the river we were looking at Canada! And our phones would occasionally welcome us to Canada also! 😉
As it happened, we were in Port Huron during the lead up to the annual Blue Water Festival, so things were starting to get a bit busy. We managed to get in and out of town during the day and before the start of festivities without a lot of traffic issues, although a boat parade on one of the evenings would have been fun to see.
Overall Port Huron is a nice town on the water with plenty of things to see and do.
I’ll be posting things in random order just because I am randomly processing photos!
On our way back from Bardstown, KY we stopped by Wild Turkey Distillery in Lawrenceburg. They recently opened a new visitor center that I wanted to see, and of course their bourbon is pretty tasty. Wild Turkey is the name of the distillery and their flagship product, but the good stuff is called Russell’s Reserve, named for the three generations of the Russell family who have been making fine bourbon since 1954. In fact, the Wild Turkey distillery traces its roots all the way back to 1855.
We booked late, too late to get a tour of the facility, but not too late to have a tasting. Perhaps the next time we’ll have a little more notice and get to complete the tour. In the mean time we got to enjoy some refreshments and lunch in the Generations Lounge.
I’ve finally finished sorting and processing my photos from our Yellowstone & Grand Teton trip in May. They can be found at my Adobe Portfolio site, along with photos from many of our past adventures.
One of the most popular spots in Yellowstone National Park is the Midway Geyser Basin. It is so popular that if you arrive after about 10:00 (earlier in the summer!) you could wait for hours just to get a place to park.
With that in mind, Kathy and I decided to make a non-peak visit to the basin, early (-ish) one morning (my first photo was taken just before 8:00. Unfortunately that meant that instead of dealing with bunches of crowds, we ended up dealing with bunches of steam. As it works, the bigger the difference between the air temperature and the springs, the more chance for steam and fog.
We knew this going in and decided that seeing it, even in less than ideal conditions, was better than dealing with huge crowds. It was still quite dramatic, and even though I didn’t get the “classic” Grand Prismatic Spring” shot (in reality very few people do get the classic shot, and to get it you kinda have to be there in perfect conditions, preferably in an airplane!), we were happy to have gotten there on a nice day with plenty of sunshine to show off the rainbow of colors.
After our morning visit to Midway Geyser Basin we headed on down the road to Fountain Paint Pots, another popular spot. That lot was starting to fill up when we got there, and by the time we got back to Midway the traffic was already starting to line up for the parking lot. But that’s a story for another day. The lesson though is that timing is everything!
Charlotte Douglas International Airport has for years had an Airport Overlook, and like the aviation museum it was closed and then relocated to accommodate expansion of the airport. The old overlook was a gravel parking lot, with a few benches and a port-a-potty or two (sometimes). The view of the airport was good and it was located close to the center runway.
The newly opened Airport Overlook is a wonderful spot. The views aren’t quite so good currently, but a new runway (to be called 1/19C since you can’t have two 18/36Cs!) is being built that will be about as close to the new overlook as the old one was to the center runway.
Besides a large paved parking lot, there is a huge children’s playground, picnic tables and park benches, an F-4 Phantom on display and (not yet open) real restrooms!
Kathy & I visited this past Saturday with our son and grandson. It was a humid morning, with a bit of fog hanging around, and I had fun photographing the planes taking off and creating condensation clouds around their wings as they passed through the moist air.
The former Carolinas Historical Aviation Museum, located on the grounds of Charlotte Douglas International Airport, closed several years ago to make way for a runway expansion. It recently reopened as the rebranded ‘Sullenberger Aviation Museum.’
Chesley Burnett “Sully” Sullenberger III is the pilot credited with saving the lives of all passengers and crew aboard US Airways Flight 1549 on January 15, 2009, when he ditched the plane, landing on the Hudson River after both engines were disabled by a bird strike. This event has been known as “The Miracle on the Hudson.“
Flight 1549 had just departed LaGuardia airport in New York City bound for Charlotte when the accident occurred. Since the plane was bound for Charlotte, a number of passengers were from Charlotte, including a number of high level officers of several area companies. Their influence allowed for the creation of the new organization and a campaign to have the salvaged aircraft brought to Charlotte as the centerpiece of the new museum.
Kathy & I visited the Sullenberger Aviation Museum shortly after it opened in early June along with our son and grandson. It is a very nicely done tribute to Flight 1549 as well as a showcase for the aircraft housed in the previous museum. In addition to the aircraft from Flight 1549, there are a number of military, corporate and civilian aircraft on display, as well as a number of hands-on spaces for kids both small and large. We enjoyed our time there and look forward to returning.
Imagine our surprise when we read that a “hydrothermal explosion” had occurred at Biscuit Basin in Yellowstone on July 23. We had visited just two months prior, and the news photos of the devastation were incredible. All of our tour guides had joked about how Yellowstone sits on a huge underground volcano, and “you never know….” It’s well known that violent eruptions can happen at any time, and sometimes they actually do. Yikes! Fortunately no one was injured, and damage appears to be mostly limited to the boardwalk. And of course the size and shapes of several of the pools were dramatically altered.
Our visit was in an evening and the sky was overcast. As a result a lot of the colors are quite muted. But the various colors of the pools and the surrounding bacterial mats are quite evident.
And gnarly trees! 🙂
Because that’s what bison do! 🙂 Hopefully not on a blind curve at dusk….
This was just one of numerous occasions where we had to wait on a “Bison Jam.” And yes, it was snowing.
Kathy & I visited Grand Canyon twice during our visit to Yellowstone. The first time was on our own, and we got there before 8:00am to avoid the crowds. We use the term “Nooners” to describe the people who start showing up to tourist locations around the time we are leaving. Yes, I know there is another connotation for that word! 😉 In a place like Yellowstone the Nooners start showing up and filling the parking lots by around 10:00am, in some places even earlier.
The canyon and the waterfalls are spectacular in any light, and we managed to get quite a few photographs, especially on the north rim where you could really see the topography. One of the things I particularly liked about the north rim is the gnarly trees growing out of the rock cliffs. They made for interesting subject matter and I’ve included just a sample here.
As we were leaving the Artist Point area, someone asked me if I knew what time the rainbow happened. It must have been obvious from the look on my face that I didn’t know anything about a rainbow. Silly me – a failure of research!
Fortunately, we returned the following day on a morning photography tour aboard one of the yellow buses. Our guide knew exactly when the rainbow would occur (about 9:40am, just in time for the Nooners! 🙂 ) and positioned us in the right spot. Not knowing when the peak color would be I made over 100 frames in order to end up with about 6. The one posted here is the only one I’ve processed so far but is typical of the others. Interestingly, the first day we visited was overcast, so we might not have seen the rainbow that day anyway!
Because it was a photography tour and not a Tom & Kathy journey, the tour only stayed long enough to capture the rainbow and didn’t travel the north rim at all. It was off to another photographic destination! I’m glad we saw the rainbow, but also glad to have visited the canyon on our own!