Just down the street from where MLK Jr. grew up is the church where his father was minister and he was assistant pastor. The interior is undergoing renovations but the neon sign was there to behold.
After four hours of meetings I still had energy and enthusiasm to get out and see some of Atlanta. This city is rich with interesting things to do: tour CNN, visit Coca Cola HQ, see the Olympic Park, and much much more. I chose to continue two quests started long ago: to visit as many presidential museums and civil rights memorials as I can manage.
Down a long narrow parkway called Freedom Park are important sites of two native Georgians: President Jimmy Carter and Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.
This is just the gatehouse to the Biltmore Estate. From here you drive 3.1 miles just to get to the main house. The scale of this residence just blows my mind. Think of the maintenance costs. Gasp!
Asheville? I’d never heard of it. Sad how ignorant I can be.
After abandoning my second attempt to drive the complete Blue Ridge Parkway due to road closures I headed for Asheville, NC. It’s located in the western portion of the State. This was not my chosen destination because I had done research and knew what was there. Instead it was simply where I had planned to stay after completing the parkway drive.
I found Asheville to be substantial. The music and art scenes are really vibrant as evidenced by what can only be described as an excessively lopsided ratio of galleries to residents. The Biltmore Estate is located here and it is America’s largest private residence which, at $59 to access, is a house I will probably never tour. Chimney Rock would have been a great hike had I the time. Asheville is hilly, has a river winding through it, has tunnels all around, has an historic downtown … it’s got a lot going for it. Perhaps I’ll return one day.
On my way to Atlanta I made one stop: The BMW Museum. Their U.S. facility where BMW makes all of their X3, X5, and X6 cars is located in Spartanburg, SC. Also at this plant is a Performance Driving School. Not being a particularly rabid fan of BMWs I expected to spend only a few minutes walking around. Then I saw several of the tiny BMW Isetta cars, the same cars I fell in love with when I lived in Chile. So, ladies and gentleman, below I inflict you with pictures from the museum. Check ‘em out.
Winston Link captured in sight and sound the end of the steam railroad era. In the restored Roanoke passenger train station is a wonderful collection of his work. Check out this link to see a selection of pictures.
Riding the Blue Ridge Parkway is fun. It’s not a stunning experience or life changing in any way. It’s simply joyful. The path is not ruthlessly twist-turny but instead follows the contours of the hills. You can drive a satisfying 35 to 45 mph, about right for this roads. The periodic overlooks provide pleasant vistas and the roadside historic sites are interesting. For around these parts, this drive is a pretty nice distraction.
The impression you get is that you’re driving a road through the wilderness. However, in the winter this illusion can be shattered. Whether you’re driving the Natches Trace Parkway, Shenandoah’s Skyline Drive, or the Blue Ridge Parkway the trees having lost their leaves makes it possible to see out of the park. You realize how narrow, how tunnel-like these parkways are. You can occasionally look off to either side and see back yards. The rest of the year you can delude yourself in to believing you’re riding through a never-ending wooded landscape along nature’s contours. Winter strips away the veil.
In any season I enjoy riding these roads. If it wasn’t for my tendency to go in the winter when storms leave ice and snow which result in road closures and detours, well, I’d enjoy them even more. Some day I would like to the end of the Blue Ridge. Again this time the bottom third is closed. At mile marker 290 I exited and went by Interstate to Asheville. Sadly this means I fell 175 miles short of my goal of finishing.
Some day I need to drive this road during another season.
Valencia had great art. When combined with early morning light and a bit of post-production trickery you can create some fun results. Kelsey and I took this on our dawn stroll to pick-up our rental car.
Courtney is spending the Fall semester in Spain. She’d been there three months when Thanksgiving break came along which gave us the opportunity to go as a family to visit her. Off we flew.
The big picture was to drive from Valencia to Sevilla along the Mediterranean coast. Courtney would fly to spend the weekend with us in Valencia and the following weekend we would join her in Sevilla for a tour of her “home town”. Along the way we’d see a bit of Spain and tour some highlights of the south. Wonderful trip but second only to seeing Courtney was the Alhambra.
My strongest impressions were of the extend and the precision of the ornate architecture. That it was perched atop a hill with amazing vistas in most directions was another of it’s strong characters. Having been built over such a long period of time, having survived through to the present, having avoided near disaster on several occasions, it really is something special.
There are other reasons to visit Granada but none comes close to visiting this amazing mash of structures from the Moors and Spaniards. The Alhambra is amazing to have survived and I’m lucky to have seen its wonders.
The Themes runs through London where traffic runs along and across the great river. From this vantage point you really can get a feel for the character of the city and a sense that it plays a prominent role.
Tomorrow I fly home. So how do I typically spend the day before leaving London? Walking my feet off, of course! Today I covered the core of London from the Tower of London and London Bridge on the east to Buckingham Palace and Covent Gardens in the west. In addition I spent two hours in to the excellent London Transportation Museum. After 10 hours on my feet, walking and listening to audio tours, I was quite happy to collapse into a chair at a coffee shop. Ahhhhhhh …
Ever looking for interesting pictures to take I decided to take advantage of a special perspective: elevation. The Monument is a memorial of the 1666 fire that destroyed London and a celebration of London’s reconstruction. It stands 202 feet tall, the distance from it’s base to where the fire began on Pudding Street. I climbed the 311 stairs to a viewing gallery hoping that I could get some good shots and I think I did. While the subject matter isn’t novel I’m hoping you agree that the lighting, context and angles are special.
If it were a head of hair I’d say it hadn’t a strand out of place. Windsor is a manicured spectacular! Half available for touring and half reserved for the Royals as their residence. Its scale is immense. Huge!
I’ve probably visited between 40 and 50 castles in the past five years. Often they’re an exercise in using your imagination. You know there will be a defensive outer wall, a mote, a keep, a place to live and usually you have only a vague outline of stones and a structure or two to guide you. If you’re lucky you’ll have a fairly-well restored castle where a reconstructed version of all the pieces are there to be seen. Certainly Sterling, Edinburgh, and Cardiff were excellent structures to visit but every castle I visited prior to Windsor Castle lacked heart.
Windsor Castle is the U.K.’s largest castle. It’s not only the weekend residence of the royal family but also a place where official U.K. state business is conducted. However, most important to my sentiment of it having heart is that it’s a home, it feels lived in and has been for 900 years. Windsor Castle’s scale, importance, use and lived-in status help set it apart from all other castles I’ve visited. Today I was impressed anew with castles.
Severe? Dogmatic? Impatient? Sure, and worse! But eloquent and charismatic and brilliant. He seems to have been just the right man to lead the U.K. during World War II ... and I’m proud to note he was half American by his mother!
Getting reoriented was the basic plan for today so, as millions of others do, I started a walking tour at Big Ben. Rick Steves narrated my stroll which included Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey, and so forth. I then consulted his list of most recommended sites and found the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms highly rated. “Why not?” I thought.
What a fabulous museum! Actually it’s two-in-one museums.
Seems everywhere I went there were lions, unicorns, dragons, and various other mythical creatures. In a land as ancient as the U.K. more lore has survived into modern culture and resulted in exotic symbols.
Amazingly after climbing Ben Nevis I wasn’t sore but my legs certainly were tired. So walk around Glasgow for the day? I thought not! Instead I chose an option for site seeing that I’ve come to trust and enjoy: the hop-on, hop-off bus tour of the city.
Not only did it choose the City Tour bus, I chose to ride it twice.
Everywhere you look around Edinburgh you see beautiful architecture and if you look up you see a skyline of spires. After London I believe Edinburgh has more to crow about than any other U.K. city.
A few cities just bowl you over and Edinburgh is one of them. With the cliff-top Edinburgh Castle connected to the Holyrood Palace by the gently descending Royal Mile you form the backbone of the Old Town. Near by is the Georgian flavored New Town and the heart of transportation, Waverly Station. This description sounds too detached from reality and I was intent on remedying that.
Seems I had done a pretty good job when last I was in Edinburgh. Every place I revisited rang with familiarity. Many places I saw from afar today I knew I had visited before. It sounds like conceit but I impressed myself! My energy level is always high when visiting this city of art, culture, and commerce. Though poking my fingers into old familiar places is how I started my day, I did visit three new sites.
Enter below and exit above or vis versa, this amazing combination of art and engineering reunited Scotland’s canals systems east and west. Great care was paid to how it appeared and the result is a world-class mechanical sculpture.
My primary goals today were to visit two extraordinary structures: The Forth Bridge, a rail bridge inextricably linked with Scotland’s identity, and The Falkirk Wheel, a boat lift which united east and west Scottish canals for the first time in centuries. However, if I was going to be out-and-about on a BritRail pass then I could do more.
Choosing the loosely defined theme of “bridges” I looked in to where else I could go. Perth offered three(!) bridges with pedestrian paths I could cross. Adding this to my first two choices could result in a loop … and what more could be found on the loop?
by 
