Good Morning!
On this day in 1621 the first duel in America took place in the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts.
In 1778 Britain evacuated Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War.
In 1812 the War of 1812 began as the U.S. declared war against Great Britain.
In 1873 Susan B. Anthony was fined $100 for attempting to vote for a U.S. President.
In 1928 Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.
In 1942 the U.S. Navy commissioned its first black officer, Harvard University medical student Bernard Whitfield Robinson.
In 1953 seventeen major league baseball records were tied or broken in a game between the Boston Red Sox and the Detroit Tigers.
And in 1961 “Gunsmoke” was broadcast for the last time on CBS radio.
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Quote of the Day
“The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.”
Amelia Earhart
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A couple of musicians have birthdays today. We’ll start with the most well-known.
And it’s Blake Shelton’s as well.
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Anyone have a QoD?
Wandering Views 
I heard about Susan B. Anthony on the radio. She never paid the fine. So they named a dollar coin after her.
They have tried bring the dollar coin back. A genuing 14 carrot gold colored coin the size of the SBA coin. I don’t like them either.
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and Amelia Earhart was last seen in Papua New Guinea
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Just an update on Baby Girl. She was supposed to finish the first session of summer school next Thursday. Then she was going to have to go for three weeks during July for the second session. She finished up BOTH sessions yesterday. Her daddy said she was somewhere she didn’t want to be, with people she didn’t wnat to be with, doing something she didn’t want to do, so she figured out the system and the shortest way out. I am proud of her. THAT she gets from me. 😉
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The problem with the newer dollar coins is that no cash register drawer is set up to handle them so merchants take them back to the bank rather than keeping them in circulation AND they are too close to the size of a quarter so your drawer could come up several dollars short from making change.
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A cashier at Hot Dog World tried to give me one in change. I said, “Please don’t give me that.” I’m sure it went to the bank, as Kim says.
During the Susan B. Anthony time, one of our bosses was asked, for the agency paper, how he liked the new dollar.
His wise, politically correct answer: “I wish I had a million.” 😆
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My sister and her husband are down from Maryland. They are with us today, then they go on down to SC tomorrow. Last night she asked me to take her out to “the place where the road runs under the waterfall.” I said that she was talking about Bridal Vail falls. She remembers it from when she was a little girl, seventy someodd years ago. Uncle Fred used to drive us around and she remembers that. Going for a ride was a big thing in those days. You don’t understand.
Anyhow, they have improved and widened the road (US 64). You don’t drive under the waterfall any more. But I will take them to the site. It’s still an attraction. It isn’t far, but it takes about two hours to get there because of all the up&down and round&round.
It’s a pretty drive for everyone but the driver.
They’re still asleep now. It was a rough day for them.
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Chas- I remember going for a Sunday afternoon drive. We had several routes outside of Tucson we would take. Most of them are housing developments or shopping centers now.
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I have an idea for a QoD based on Chas’ comment- Where is one place you take visitors who have never been to your part of the world?
Growing up, we would take them to Saguaro National Monument east of Tucson. There is a 9 mile loop road that goes a little ways up into the mountains and offers great views of the majestic cactus and the valley.
Now we walk them down to the river, since most of our friends have only seen the Mississippi River form a bridge. Or we go down to Hannibal and drive up Lover’s Leap. It’s a viewpoint 250 feet above the river and offers a wonderful view of Hannibal and Illinois farm land.
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Good morning, I haven’t been on here for a bit. Magazine deadlines, and putting on a one week sport camp–this replaced our VBS 10 years ago–for 1300 kids is my excuse.
QoD: The beach is the first place. I have taken visitors there who have never see the ocean before. That is always fun. La Jolla Cove is a must see. It has sea caves, tide pooling, is a sea lion rookery, great surfing when the swell is hitting north facing beaches and an underwater preserve that is great for snorkeling and diving.
Since San Diego and Carlsbad are tourist destinations there is a lot to do here. We have Legoland in Carlsbad, Sea World, the world famous Zoo and Mexico to the south, Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm and Universal studios to the north. I am not a big amusement park fan. The Zoo or Tijuana are more interesting to me.
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We cringe around here, btw, when asked how to get to the Carlsbad Caverns.
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Adios- You remind me of the time I took a friend along to visit my brother when he lived in SD. This friend grew up in Indiana and Arizona and had never seen the ocean. When we got there, I ran out to the hard packed sand where the waves were rolling in and out. He stopped at the edge of the dry sand because he thought the wet sand would be like quicksand. Once I convinced him it was okay, he was fine. The next day we all went to the beach and it was next to impossible to get him out of the water!
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Well, of course I will take you to the world’s largest dive bar (which isn’t so divey anymore). I know how to show a guest a good time…wink, wink.
Or I will get you lost in New Orleans…there is more than just the French Quarter and you may as well see it. 😉
The town I live in is kind of touristy. Then there is the beach. I can take you to the Hermit House–a tiny little silo of a building where our most eccentric writer lived.
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Well, Kim, some of those divey-type places have the best food and are known only by the locals. 😉
If we are talking about very close to where I live, we would take them to the world’s largest open pit mine in Hibbing, MN. There are several other mine look-out areas. We could also travel a bit further north and go to an old underground mine, which is now used to do science experiments. They recently found some ancient water down there, apparently.
If we are going a bit south, we would take them to the port in Duluth to watch boats come in from all over the world, take in the marine museum and enjoy the lake walk. We could watch the bridge go up for boat traffic and down for the cars that cross it in between. Then we could head up the north shore of Lake Superior and enjoy the lighthouses and wonderful lake views.
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QOD, nothing really in Birmingham. I would take them north of here to the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville.
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We did Sunday afternoon drives when I was growing up, too. We also did family bike rides and hikes. We didn’t have a TV, and we did more “natural” and better entertainment. (We also went camping, mostly not my favorite memories since I tended toward carsickness and hated Dad’s tendency to get in the car and drive till we were all so exhausted we couldn’t stand up when we finally stopped for the night.)
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Lots to see where I live, much of it already mentioned.
Located on a peninsula (surrounded by water on 3 sides — the harbor/port of la to the east and the ocean to the south and west), we have spectacular cliff viewpoints & parks overlooking the ocean. We have lighthouses, no longer “working” (except the one built in 1913 on the tip of the breakwater which is mechanized with fog horns; lighthouse keepers used to live inside). Another very picturesque lighthouse from the 1800s is now a city museum, it sits in a park overlooking the ocean.
Our working port offers an unusual live “theater” of its own as huge container ships glide into the harbor to deliver their goods and cruise ships are often in port collecting or leavng passengers.
We also now have the USS Iowa and the maritime museum next door along with several other interesting museums in the area; and the tide pools.
One of the places that’s fun (and free) for visitors to see is an out-of-the way marine mammal care center where they bring sick or injured sea lions and other mammals for rehabilitation & later release. A couple of the folks from the dog park are volunteers there — it’s basically an outdoor “hospital” with pools you can walk around to get a rare look at these animals closeup. Fun to watch the ones that are feeling better playing and splashing together in the water. Love the whiskers, black eyes and big button noses. 🙂 They’re like the puppy dogs of the sea.
One of the more popular patients there for close to a year was “Big Guy,” a humongous sea lion who was blind and had to be hand fed. Unable to release him back to the wild (they didn’t know what had caused the blindness but it was a condition that made him too vulnerable in the ocean on his own), they shipped him to a zoo/aquarium in another state. I hear he’s doing quite well in his new home.
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I’ll bet Cheryl’s family asked “Are we there yet?” a lot. 😉
When my mom was busy with PTA or just sleeping in a bit, my dad would take me for weekend drives through the quaint little beach towns to the west of us — surfing was really taking off in those years (1960s; hermosa, manhattan, redondo) and it was fun to watch all the big kids with their boards and see glimpses of the waves in the very near distance as we traveled through the main streets.
Some of the towns still have quaint areas, but as you might guess they’ve also fallen prey to developers through the past few decades. Too many tall/big buildings, too many cute bungalow cottages taken out (though many remain, thankfully).
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Donna, my friend was recently on a photo shoot at a local state park where you could rent the cutest beach cottages decorated in 30’s 40’s or 50’s themes.
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We did not do Sunday drives. We were poor but did not know it and I suspect that would have been considered a waste of fuel. My husband’s family was poor and they knew it but they went for Sunday drives all the time. So, I am not a fan of driving just to drive and he is. When people come here, a rare thing indeed, I figure they are here to visit us or put in some work. He takes them for a bit of a tour. Maybe to Selway Falls to watch the salmon coming back from the ocean to spawn in the creeks. Or to the grade to look down.
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Sunday drives — especially ours which were just to the beach, not very far at all and we were probably back in 1-2 hours tops — were really pretty cheap getaways, a chance to get out of the house every so often just see what the rest of the “world” was doing (just down the street, almost literally). 🙂
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Kim, you me and the Florabama, great memory 😉
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very near distance
I can’t believe a journalist wrote that! How far is that, give or take a very near or two? 😉
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Peter, one crew who had never seen the ocean before were from the Midwest, cousins of friends. I was 10 when we all trudged to the beach. The cousins couldn’t swim which astonished me. To me that was like saying they didn’t know how to run. It was a learning experience for sure.
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I like “very near distance.” 🙂
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Very near distance.
Is that like “just down the road a piece”? We came to find out that in La., a piece is 60 miles. 😯
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We’re in wine country, so we will take folks to a winery if they want to go there, and we’re near redwood country, so we take them to see the giant redwoods–the Chinese kids last year couldn’t believe their eyes.
We’ve got the coast, of course, beautiful parks and if they come through San Francisco, we’ll take them to see things down there–usually the wharf though occasionally the De Young Art museum.
Mostly, though, we like to sit in the backyard and talk.
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I’ve always wanted to see the giant redwoods. The only time I was there I was traveling with the family of my sister’s roommate to visit them (my sis and her r.m.) in Seattle. The family did not want to stop anywhere other than a campground, so all I could do was try and see them out the window of a fast moving station wagon. Some day…
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I like “very near distance.”
What wrong with close by, or not far off, or some other clearer saying. Oh, I forgot, women don’t know how to make sense to us men. (Ducks and runs for cover.)
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I live near some cool places. I live in a location away from major cities, but you can reach NYC and Philly within an hour. Plus Gettysburg is an hour west. That gives you lot’s of options. Broadway, Radio City, Museum of Natural History, the Constitution Center, Ben Franklin’s and other well known historical figures homes, and the battlefields of Gettysburg along with all it’s historical options.
And then there’s THE NY GIANTS, the little tiny jets, the Knicks, the Rangers, Islanders, THE YANKEES! 🙂 and the mets, the Phillies, flyers, sixers, and assorted minor league teams.
The Delaware Water Gap, the Pocono Mountains, for scenery in the fall and fishin’ (next week 🙂 in the summer, skiing in the winter. And did I mention fishing? Because I meant too. 🙂
There’s a lot of options.
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Well, AJ. We were just in your neck of the woods, and I agree about the beauty. I would like to go back and explore Gettysburg some more. We only had five hours and it was not enough! And you forgot mention Hershey. We didn’t take the time to go there.
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Reading today’s thread is like browsing a travel brochure. 😉
You might recall I’m the secretive one about where I live (although I have dropped a few hints here and there), but I’ll say I’m blessed to live in an area of great natural beauty, without a lot of what my husband calls “tourist traps”. A nice, quiet, rural area, which suits us well. 🙂
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I forgot Hersey, 6 Flags, Dorney Park, and Valley Forge too.
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“Hey! I am looking for a 4 bedroom 3 bath condo on the beach for under a $100K. I know that’s possible so will you call me when you run across something and oh can you send me all the foreclosed condos too!”
yep. I will write your name down and spend my days searching for just that bargain for you.
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Speaking of travel, today Hubby and 1st Arrow traveled to work together. 😉 The company Hubby works for recently moved to a different location (much closer to home–his commute is less than half what it was–yay!) and is now on the same road as 1st Arrow’s workplace, only about a half-mile away. “A very near distance”, in other words. 🙂
1st Arrow’s shifts vary widely as far as start times, number of hours per shift, which days of the week he works, etc. Hubby’s work days and times are much more regular now than they were before, and today both Hubby and 1st Arrow started and will end their shifts at exactly the same time, so they left today in one vehicle. It was pretty cool seeing the men in this household go to work together. 🙂
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Speaking of “Are ww there yet?” We are just getting back from vacation. On the first day we had to drop the dog off at the kennel and for the first time as parents of an only child we experienced ,”Mom! Make her move over.”Dad! She’s iin my window.” And a lot of whining which I took as dog for “Are there yet?”
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Kim, when I was in college my major encouraged (but did not require) an internship. I wanted a career in my field, and an internship seemed like a very good use of my time, and it also counted as class credit, so I tracked one down a year ahead of time to be sure I got it.
One of my classmates complained, “I keep hearing of all these people doing internships! I told the professor I wanted an internship, and let me know if he heard about any, and he never got back to me.” Um, he never “got back to me,” either. I got my own. Just as I sent out my own resumes a year and a half later, and went on my own interviews, and got my own jobs. Sometimes it helps “to know people,” but generally if you want bargains, job leads, and so forth, it’s good to make at least some effort to track them down!
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Here is my musical contribution for the day. It is the birthday of Ignaz Joseph Pleyel, a composer and a contemporary of Mozart and Beethoven, to name two names you may be a little more familiar with. 😉 Delightful music and pictures in this video, I do declare. 🙂
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Cheryl, I was being ugly. I made 408 calls today speaking with 74 people, some of them were looking for “a good deal” they want to “pick up” a distressed property for next to nothing. They all know someone who got a $600K condo for $100K. I just pulled the numbers. There are 4 foreclosures and19 short sales.
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Here, no one visits, too expensive and very hard to travel. At home in California I would take folks for a drive up Hwy. 20, there is a wonderful view area. If they have longer, we go to Tahoe. Emerald Bay is beautiful and if you take the trail north to DL Bliss state park, you leave the busy places and can feel like you were the first ones to see the lake.
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We take visitors to one of the nearby lakes and to the nearby resort town. If there are kids along we always go to the candy store that carries many unique varieties of candy and other novelties. Wherever we’ve lived for the last 25 years has been in or close to a National Park, where natural beauty abounds.
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QoD: It depends on the person’s interest. I took my sister 2.5 hours one way just to see a place where a waterfall goes over the highway. It has changed now, but they have modified it since my last visit there. You may, if you wish, drive under the waterfall. We did.
Or, I might take them to the Biltmore House, where George Vanderbilt could look out the window and not see any land he didn’t own.
Some go to The Cove, a Billy Graham center.
Or one of the many church camps in the area.
I might take them to Cherokee, NC where they might buy some genuine Indian articles, mostly made in China. Then, to the Smokey Mountains Nat’l park. That was Cheryl’s choice. Smokey Mountains is the most visited National Park in the US.
Some would rather drive five hours over to Myrtle Beach.
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Has anyone seen an old comic strip that shows a child in one frame asking “How long until we get there?” And in the next frame it shows the child has grown a beard and is asking, “Are we there yet?”
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Are we there yet? There. 😉
http://depositphotos.com/7951896/stock-photo-Are-We-There-Yet-Freeway-Sign.html
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I don’t remember seeing the comic strip you mention, Janice, but it sounds funny. 🙂
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Interesting story:
http://pjmedia.com/blog/hagia-sophia-to-become-mosque/
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Chas, I like your list. My Dad told me that my great grandfather engineered the roads into the Biltmore estate, so that is on my list of places to see.
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