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Pwm to lga

Originally uploaded by EricHolsinger

Ready for takeoff

I just got back from a weekend in New York city. I stayed at the East Houston hotel in the Lower East Side. It’s a great, lively location. Lots of opportunities for street photography.
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I used my wife’s compact camera to make some short video clips of our trip to Ripley’s Aquarium of the Smokies and later turned them into a little mini movie.

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While traveling through Kentucky I couldn’t resist visiting Big Bone Lick State Park. My wife and I joked together about how fun it would be to wear a t-shirt that simply said “Big Bone Lick” in large letters with “State Park” in small letters below it. As it turns out, the idea was not lost to the folks who design the gift shop merchandise and I got my t-shirt. I also learned a few things about the area, too.

The first thing I noticed was a sign about Lewis and Clark. Lewis and Clark had visited the area to collect specimens for President Jefferson on their expedition West. Apparently, Big Bone Lick was a famous site of thousands of fossilized bones of prehistoric mammals. The bones reportedly were scattered across the valley and visible or lying on the surface. So that is where the Big Bone part comes from; Big Bones of prehistoric mammals.

There is a paved path to walk with informational plaques. The informational plaques are interesting and tell you about the history of the area, but the locations of the plaques is unclear as to the purpose. The plaque is positioned as if you were supposed to read it and then look past it as something relevant to the words on the plaque. In a couple places we had no idea what we were supposed to see that was related to what we just read.

Apparently the water in the area was/is salty and full of minerals. The animals came here to drink up the yummy water. Apparently this is the lick.

The Native Americans used to extract salt from the water. Later the water was boiled away in wood fired salt furnaces to extract the salt commercially. The area also enjoyed a period of time as a famous health resort where people would bathe in and drink the sulfurous water for it’s purported healing qualities. Very little of the marshy quagmire and treacherous wet earth exists today.

The little stagnant looking stream is milky white; presumably from the mineral content. But the stream is difficult to imagine supporting a industry of salt furnaces turning out 60 bushels of salt per day.

The park has some unexpected inhabitants: a herd of bison are kept in the park. When we were there, the bison had been moved from a smaller fenced area to a larger one because they had trampled the pasture so much. It was easy to see them anyway.

The Bison were lying in the shade of the trees. As we approached, the herd started moving out of the shade into the open field. Just on the other side of the trees was a paddock for rounding them up. The background settings was terrible, but the visibility was great. The bull was the proud papa of 4 little brown baby bison.

The big bull bison just lumbered around the females sniffing and showing flehmen behavior. In retrospect I should have taken of photo of him in the flehmen pose. Drat!

The National Park Service has an interesting page with more information about Big Bone Lick State Park.

We survived the “raging” fires last night. Today my head is pounding and I can see fires burning on the hills across the Papagayo Gulf. Seriously, it’s like every day there is a fire here and it’s no big deal. This is like how they maintain the land. It’s so common the staff act like it’s no big deal.

My wife decided to go on the Congo Trail Canopy Tour with the rest of the group. She isn’t very happy about it. She was pretty quiet and introspective at breakfast. Doing the SCUBA in the pool was a big achievement for here because she doesn’t like stuff on her face and gags when she puts a snorkel in her mouth. Some snorkels make me gag, too. But, for my wife, it was a big deal to put on goggles, use a regulator and actually swim around underwater. So, today she is going to face her fear of heights.

Thankfully, the bus ride is only a half-hour. (Note to Self: next vacation, stay near all the attractions.)

The guides, Roberto and Jose, are pretty quiet and serious, at first. They drone on repetitively about the safety rules and how we need to listen to them. Once we actually start going the canopy tour, it turns out these guys have a great sense of humor and are very friendly.

My wife was a little panicked after the first zip line and was shaking uncontrollably. She balked at doing it herself, and came across last with Roberto. Everything is fine, of course, it’s just that she has such a strong fear of heights.
Another woman, Judy, was very scared and nervous about it and insisted on going first before seeing anyone else. But, she braked too much and got stuck. She was too scared to do the hand over hand to get the platform and needed to be “rescued”. One of the instructors came back down the zipline to get her and take her to the platform. I figure that, given how nervous she was, getting stuck was probably the worst thing that could happen to her. I don’t know exactly, but the feeling of just hanging there was probably overwhelming if you are afraid of heights. She did great, though and did the next one by herself.

She was refusing to open her eyes for most of the lines, but recovered her sense of humor and was a lot of fun. The guides were having a lot of fun about her fear and were playing around to get a rise out of everyone.

We ended up doing 11 zip lines, two after a short hike up a hill, and had a great time.

Tomorrow, we get up bright and early and head off to the airport to fly home. It has been an action-packed vacation. Costa Rica is a friendly place that I would like to come back to.