Hiking

Lost in Hitchcock Woods

Polar Bear PitAs a recent graduate of the John Locke School of Survival I feel right at home in the woods. But when Donna and I somehow got off our mapped trail this afternoon and stumbled on this trail, I have to admit that I became a little uneasy.

For the first time in about three weeks we finally escaped the high gravity couch and took a walk in the woods. The last time we took a hike, on that same day, we watched a couple of episodes of Season 1, Disc 5 of TDTVS. Today, along with the walk, we also watched a couple episodes of Season 3, Disc 2 of TDTVS.

Papa got a new pair of shoes!

We finished the evening off with dinner out with friends. We went to our least favorite Italian restaurant, Roma Pizza. We got the polar opposite of last visit’s service, if anything our waiter was too attentive. We decided to get something besides pizza this visit, I had spaghetti with sausage and Donna had the veal parmigiana. the food was good, but not great, we’ll be sticking to the pizza from now on.

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4 8 15 16 23 42 Part II

We are now half way through Disc 5 of Season 1. Finished up with one of my favorite episodes, Numbers, in which we get some of Hurley’s back story. We find out he won a lot of money playing the lotto with numbers he learned from a fellow “inmate” at a insane asylum (a back story I hope we go back and visit.)

Hurley: They’re cursed. You know that, right? The numbers, they’re cursed.
Rousseau: Numbers are what brought me here. As it appears they brought you. Since that time I’ve lost everything, everyone I cared about. So yes, I suppose you’re right. They are cursed.

Hitchcock Woods in DaguerreotypeWe got off our duffs this afternoon and took a walk in the woods, had to be today, because tomorrow they are calling for a wintery mix. The temperature made it into the middle 50’s and made for a pleasant walk. I took two whole pictures on the walk of a section of the trail that was full Spanish Moss. When I got home and downloaded the images they had a distinct blue tinge. Drat. I had set the white balance to indoors the other day and forgot to set it back. No amount of post processing of the color balance would fix it, so I tossed it through a daguerreotype filter.

We are supposed to go for a drive to Saluda for a breakfast run with the Miata Club early tomorrow morning. There are winter weather advisories for tomorrow from 7AM to 10PM, so the event may not go off. Donna and I are going to get up in the morning check the weather channel, and depending on the radar picture, will either stay home or go for a drive.

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Captain Gaylord’s Fences

Captain Gaylord's FencesWent for a nice couple hour hike in the woods this morning. We’ve been threatening to go for a hike for a couple weeks, but just haven’t made it. It was sunny and mild, but you can tell it is winter because you can see further with all the leaves off the trees.

After lunch we ‘wasted” the rest of the day away watching The Good Shepherd and then Season 1 Disc 1 of Bones

To say that Matt Damon’s performance as Edward Wilson in the Good Shepherd was understated is an understatement. In the Bones pilot, everything was moving too fast and seemed over the top just to catch your interest. It had the exact opposite effect on us, after the first episode we almost stopped watching. After the second episode we figured we’d finish the disc and not get anymore. At the end of 4 episodes and the disc we thought, what the heck, let’s add some more Discs.

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Gray Friday

Woods PortraitMy wife and I did not get up early to shop the sales. We slept in until 8:00 AM and after breakfast we walked in Hitchcock Woods for a couple hours.

Afterwards we did go to downtown Aiken and finished up the Christmas shopping. That done, it was time to drag the 8 storage boxes of Christmas decorations out of the attic. The rest of the weekend will be spent placing festive bits into every nook and cranny of the house.

In the evening we went out to eat with friends. Then we went to one of the couple’s house where we were fed desert of frozen strawberry yogurt and a nice slide show of the wife’s pictures from their end of summer trip to Glacier National Park. To be fair we then watched some of the husband’s exploits at Barber Motorsport Park in POS.

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Gafinkleforp

Mystery FieldIt took a while this morning, but we finally got off our duffs and made it into Hitchcock Woods around 9:30. For grins we headed all the way over to an entrance on the other side from where we usually enter, so we could walk on some different trails. One new place we passed by was called Mystery Field and there were two mysteries about it that we could see, 1) it really wasn’t a field, but more of an area covered in youngish pine trees and 2) a lot of the trees were painted with blue markings.

We stayed at our company shindig long enough to eat and the door prize drawings before sneaking out the back door. We both “won” prizes, Donna got to take home one of the two large flower arrangements and I was selected to take home one of the small table flower arrangements. Not only did we really not want the big flowers, we weren’t sure they would fit in the Miata, so we gave them away to someone who was sitting at our table.

Stopped on the way home to buy gas. There was a white Miata in the adjacent lot of a restaurant, so while the tank was filling I walked over and put an MMC calling card under their windshield wiper. After filling up we went into Krogers to do our weekly shopping. Pushing the cart out the door I paused as the woman of the couple in front of us snagged some home buyers or apartment guides out of the rack. The couple who grabbed the brochures were in front of us along with two other women shoppers heading towards our section of the parking lot. There was a white Miata parked out there near us and I speculated as to if it was the same one. We both wondered which of the pairs would get in the Miata. The male/female couple made a beeline for the Miata and Donna said to me quietly, “Don’t go say hi, I don’t want to spend 20 minutes in the parking lot chatting.” We were loading the bags in our trunk and as the woman got in the white Miata she noticed us and waved. I noticed the same 1/4 raised stuck power antenna as the one from the restaurant parking lot. I wonder if they thought the card and then seeing us was a coincidence?

Tonight’s title is a word I made up. It returned zero hits on Google. How long will it take for this post to show up in a search engine? How long before someone besides myself searches for the “word” gafinkleforp?

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Full Day Too

We started our day with a trip to Chimney Rock Park. After threading our way through the Eye of the Needle, we climbed the rest of many stairs to the top of the rock. The view up there is great and while the leaves are at peak higher up, in the surrounding mountains at 2 to 3k there is still a ways to go. Donna and I then walked the 1-1/2 miles of the Skyline-Cliff Trail Loop. A lot of the out is on boardwalk, but the way back is mostly dirt and rocky. On all of the loop there is thankfully fences and rails, because the average elevation of the trail is around 2300 feet and you can look straight down at all of it for quite a bit of the walk.

After cruising slowly back and forth through the touristy towns of Chimney Rock and Lake Lure we ended up deciding on Mexican for lunch. In spite of the upper 60’s temps and cloudless skies we were the only two people dining on the porch.

The afternoon was spent at the Foothills Highland Games and Festival in Hendersonville. Pipe bands & Celtic rock, musket fire, bonnie lasses & brawny laddies, sheafs & cabers being tossed and probably hagis for sale, but we didn’t look for any.

I took a couple of Post Office pictures, but they were of towns in North Carolina just in case this is the next state we pick on.

And TDPM is on again tonight, but I’m not watching it, so there.

Pictures from today can be found HERE.

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Pretty Full Day

  1. Breakfast in Aiken
    • We went to the New Moon and came to the conclusion that we are still eating there because of past performance. My muffin, while good, was not heated nearly enough. Donna’s hot chocolate had to be requested a second time before being served. If our last 3 visits here, were our first three visits here, they would be our only 3 visits here.
  2. Walk in Hitchcock Woods
    • Instead of our usual ingress point we started at the South Boundary entrance because we were already downtown for breakfast. A beautiful fall day and we shared the 2,000 acres with a horsewoman and her dog plus another woman walking a couple of small dogs. As is usually the case with our walks in the woods, we were certain of our path for approximately 75% of the time, never actually lost, just sometimes not sure where we were in relationship to the map.
  3. Pack the car and head north
    • I am constantly amazed with how much stuff we can stuff in the small trunk of the Miata. I am also constantly amazed with how much stuff we have to take with us for being away from home for a mere 48 hours.
  4. Lunch in Newberry, SC
    • The Grill On Main serves a mean Patty Melt. Donna had a cup of vegetable soup and a half of a chicken salad sandwich. The chicken salad had some mustard and maybe thyme in there to give it a different twist.
  5. Photographed 5 Post Offices
    • Whitmire, Union, Buffalo, Jonesville, Pacolet & Pacolet Mills. We stopped at White Stone, but it was busy and it had enough character that we decided to come back on the way home Sunday when it might not have cars in front of it.
  6. Dinner in Asheville Fletcher, NC
    • We had pizza from the second place we tried. We drove the 4 miles to a place just inside the Asheville limits that had some good reviews I found on the web. We left after we never got any attention from a server after being seated. That and the dozen small ants that crawled out of the menus and had to be squished under our fingers. The next place we tried was take out only so we ended up dining in our room at the Fairfield Inn in Fletcher, NC. The pie was not bad and probably would have been better if we could have eaten it moments out of the oven instead of the 15 minutes or so later that it took us to get back to the hotel and get settled.
  7. TDPM on USA
    • Commodore Norrington: No additional shot nor powder, a compass that doesn’t point north, [looks at Jack’s sword] and I half expected it to be made of wood. You are without doubt the worst pirate I’ve ever heard of.
      Captain Jack Sparrow: But you have heard of me.
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