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BCoF 's Virtual 50-State Bucket List Tour, 2025 |
My virtual blog for
We’re going To Boston, Charleston, Dayton, Louisiana Washington, Houston, Kingston, Texarkana Monterey, Faraday, Santa Fe, Tallapoosa Glen Rock, Black Rock, Little Rock, Oskaloosa Tennessee to Tennesse Chicopee, Spirit Lake Grand Lake, Devils Lake, Crater Lake, for Pete's sake And by we I mean myself and Lyn's a Witchy Woman   AmyJo-Downhill slide begins!  Noisy Wren   WakeUpAndLive  and her dog SproutSandraLynn  StephBee  Krista Princess Megan Rose  Richard ~ Looking for Luck!  And other companions to be named later! |
| Not too long ago, I took a number of online courses on volcanology. Not something I got to use too much back home, but it was knowledge I could use first hand while visiting Alaska. Except on Lyn's a Witchy Woman ’s Magical, Not-So-Mysterious Tour, we were heading in the wrong direction. Well, perhaps somewhere further down the line in our fifty state tour, I’ll get to put my amateur volcanology skills into action! We started our journey by flying into Anchorage, Alaska. Nearby Mount Spurr (eighty miles to the west) was softly rumbling, but nothing to worry about. More than a decade ago, Mount Spurr erupted with a huge ash cloud, shutting the airport down. Nothing like that was going to happen to us today! We were barely off the plane when our group and our belongings was whisked off to the Denali Star, the twelve hour train ride between Anchorage and Fairbanks. The skies were clear and, as we approached the small town of Talkeetna, we saw Denali rising like Olympus above the Susitna River. I’ve always wanted to summit Denali. It’s one of the Seven Summits. I’ve done Kilimanjaro and Mount Kosciuszko, but Denali captures one’s dreams. Well, maybe some day. It seemed like the Denali Starr was all window, with an open air platform at the rear of the train for when it slowed down or stopped between stations. And speaking of stations, when we pulled into the Denali Park Depot, I remembered to go to the gift shop to pick up something for my "Snegurochka"  . Thanks for the reminder WakeUpAndLive !Not long after we left the Denali Depot, we saw wolves, which we were told was an uncommon sight from the train. I couldn’t imagine what Princess Megan Rose ’s wolf thought about the sighting. Or WakeUpAndLive ’s dog Sprout!We passed through the amazing scenery of Denali park before crossing the Mears Memorial Bridge (one of the world’s largest simple truss bridges) over the Tanana River and into Fairbanks. It was still light outside, but at this time of year in Fairbanks, it’s always light. Even for those few hours that the sun dips below the horizon, it never gets truly dark. Fortunately the hotel we stayed at had blackout curtains for our rooms, so we all slept solidly for the night. I got up early and headed down to the hotel’s restaurant for a cup of coffee and whatever breakfast sandwiches they had on hand. The vehicles that were going to take us to Chena Hot Springs weren’t due for a few hours, so I was going to take a little side trip on my own before then. As I left the hotel, I saw AmyJo-Downhill slide begins! , Noisy Wren , SandraLynn , StephBee , Krista and Richard ~ Looking for Luck! wander Into the restaurant, in a sort of a singular collective. I gave them a wave, but I don’t know if any of them saw me leave or not.The Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO] has two offices: one in Anchorage, and the other was right here in Fairbanks, at the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It was early, but apparently everyone kept strange hours during Alaska summers. The folks at the AVO didn’t get many tourists, but they were happy to talk to me. We discussed Mount Spurr and Great Sitkin and they showed me all the real time sensors and live camera feeds they have access to. It was pretty cool! I did make sure I got back in time for our trip to Chena Hot Sorings. I don’t think our ride to Chena Sorings was as scenic as our train ride up here, but I felt like we saw more wildlife. And you don’t realize how big a moose is until he’s standing right next to your vehicle! They put us up in cabins as soon as we got to Chena Hot Soring# and then we went exploring! Some of us wanted to go straight to the resort’s outdoor spring fed lake and get soaking. It had felt like we had been going nonstop from the moment we stepped off the plane just yesterday morning. The rest of us wanted to check out the sights. So we all agreed to meet up for dinner. The first place we went was the Aurora Ice Museum, which is 25 F year round. They handed out parkas to all of us before we entered, and gave us a fifteen minute tour of the ice sculptures and other displays at the museum, before letting us loose on our own. We of course stopped off at the ice bar for an apple-tini (the only drink they serve) in specially carved ice glasses. We then went on a guided ATV tour of the surrounding area, though to be honest, we were enjoying traveling over the rugged terrain more than the view of the terrain itself. We all reassembled that evening at the restaurant at the Chena Hot Springs resort, where they do the farm to table thing. I had the blackened halibut, which was done to perfection. Over supper, we talked about how this would probably be the perfect place to view the Northern Lights, when the twenty-four hour days wouldn’t interfere with the viewing. I mentioned I had seen the Aurora Borealis three times in the Ozarks, but those were just colored skies. It wouldn’t be anything like the light shows one got to see up north. Later that evening, as i was soaking in solitude in my cabin’s hot tub (filled with the local, pungent mineral spring water), I was thinking about the last two days, and wondered what lied ahead for our group! |
| Fifty states in fifty days. Well, fifty states and the District of Columbia in fifty one. Fortunately, the organizer of our journey, Lyn's a Witchy Woman , wasn’t expecting us to be modern day Phileas Foggs. NASA’s Space Camp for adults, for example, was going. My journey started a day before we were all supposed to meet in Huntsville, in my farmhouse in Arkansas. I was up in the wee hours of the morning, kissing my sleeping "Snegurochka" before heading out to my aged Expedition. I carried out a few thermoses of coffee that I had picked up at a coffee house called the Midnight Oil, in a town half an hour northeast of my little farm.My dog Rosey, who’s part black German shepherd and part something that makes her ornery, intercepted me before I got to the back door. I promised her I’d be back in a few days, possibly with a new friend or two for her to meet. Mollified, she let me pass. I didn’t get on the interstate until the small town of Hazen, about an hour and a half west of Memphis, Tennessee. By that time I had a chance to stop at a little diner called TJ’s for a bag of sausage sand homemade biscuits. I also grabbed some donuts at a Shipley’s along the way. Both of these places opened early for the local farmers. And I do mean early. Our eclectic group was coming in from all over the world. Some were taking flights direct to Huntsville, others flew into Memphis. I was picking up the latter group, at eight in the a.m. It was a tired but excited group that loaded up in my Expedition, and they quickly divvied up coffee, doughnuts and sausage and biscuits. Fortunately, they left me a maple bar! About halfway between Memphis and Huntsville we stopped in a small town (less than three thousand people!} of Iuka, Mississippi (pronounced eye-you-kuh). While we were there, we stretched our legs by walking the summit trail of nearby Mount Woodall which, at eight hundred and six feet, is the highest point in Mississippi. Then we went to the Cream and Sugar in Iuka for meatloaf sandwiches. We got to Huntsville about seven that night, tired but content, and ready to begin our real adventure. The next morning all our group headed over to the NASA facilities for our three days of Space camp. After orientation, they first got us settled into our bunks. Yep, you read that right. Bunks, not Rooms. There wasn’t that much of an argument about who got the top bunk as when I was a kid! The next thing they did was take our group, along with other space campers, en masse to the multiple gee simulator. Remember those carnival rides where you were on the inside of the outer wall of a circular cage? Then the cage would start spinning around, pressing you up against the wall? That’s what this was, except fancier! After we got to experience what several gees feel like, we split into different groups for different projects. We were all going to do everything from jet simulators to underwater activities. I went with the group that was going to build and test heat shields first. Okay, I admit, I have a secret engineering geek inside of me. But the class where we learned about the history and science of heat shields, then designed our own heat shield and tested it against simulated atmospheric recently…I was in geek heaven! The next three days went by too fast. I learned they have an advanced Adult Soace camp, that lasts almost a week. I’m definitely coming back. And it would be cool if the group I came with was the group I came back with! |
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