City Of Rocks

 It was never my desire nor yet my intention to end up in a rather dark dubious place called "Fairyland" but life has a habit of taking peculiar turns and so it was I shrugged off the negative vibe and stepped into the cave so labeled. There was no other way out so I bravely followed my dog underground into the land of faeries. 

 How my wife managed to get me to a place called City of Rocks where I came face to face with the Old Woman who Lived in a  Shoe tableau seen above, is a story that starts with our recent trip to Chattanooga Tennessee. It took us two days of driving, twelve hours on Saturday and just three hours the following Sunday to arrive in the city which sits at the base of Lookout Mountain. The original plan was to ride the train up the side of the mountain but we missed the turn for the lower station and by the time we reached the top we had the rather surreal experience of watching the riders step out of the train into an upscale suburban neighborhood. There was a State Park up the street and there was a rather hazy view but that was all.  

 We sat in the car for a moment while my wife studied Trip Adviser and announced finally that we had to go to Rock City. I was glad to be doing something so we ignored the traditional state park, a first in my traveling experience and followed the blue GPS line across the top of Lookout Mountain.

It was a lovely sylvan drive, a winding road dipping through suburbia, going apparently nowhere at a leisurely pace. What we did, without much noticing it, was switch from Tennessee to Georgia though it seems eastern Tennessee remains on eastern time unlike the rest of the state which is in the central time zone.

The sign posts were unconventional though clear and like Hansel and Gretel we blindly followed the breadcrumb trail. Rock City? Not  a clue what it was though we were getting an idea how to drive there.

After a fifteen minute meander we arrived at a place that was clearly placed in the 21st century but looked like a roadside attraction from sixty or more years ago. I couldn't wait to see what my wife had scrounged up for our amusement. They assured us our dog was welcome so we parked the car in a vast spacious lot and in we went at a cost I seem to recall of twenty bucks apiece. Cheyenne  was free.

It was an attraction of a similar kind to what one see sat Disney, explicit instructions, a simple map and a fool proof (I think) visitor experience. Rock City presents itself as a unique place and I have to say it is high up on the list of oddities. I looked at the steps and I looked at my portly middle aged Labrador and I wondered...but off she went, like a rocket, frightening a couple of dog phobic visitors into stepping aside. I mumbled my apologies but Cheyenne was intent on getting through it. I came to suspect she might be a bit claustrophobic, a sensibility I would never have attributed to her.

At first I thought the notion of staying IN the trail to be rather ungrammatical but it was borne in on  me that the sign was supposed to be taken literally.

Sometimes we had no choice, on the thirty minute scramble to the end of the magnificent overlook at trail's end.

Other times Cheyenne seemed to be rather too curious about what was going on outside the perfectly manicured trail.

And as usual she found a cooling bath that also served as a refreshment stop for her. A walker who passed us in a wide spot on the trail expressed surprise at seeing our dog. "Do they allow them?" he asked wistfully, mentioning his dog left at home for this trip."Well," I said, "Its pretty much impossible to sneak a  104 pound Labrador anywhere.".

According to the literature a couple of missionaries on a journey to convert the heathen found this place in 1823 and described the jumble of rocks as resembling a city. Hence the name that stuck. 

Since then they've provided a fair bit of work to stone masons to create the very elaborate trail.

 A trail yes, but there are also many natural clefts in the rock:

My wife is no great fan of suspension foot bridges though she's done a few over the years of mad exploration with me.  Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina comes to mind, as do several rather rickety zip lines in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, but I could see no way to get Cheyenne easily across the void in one piece. Fortunately there was a more solid if no less extravagant rock bridge built in a series of impressive arches for the less fleet of foot.

 For some youngsters vertical pathways presented a more interesting challenge.

And here was our reward, a view across they claim seven states, though that claim has been rather tartly refuted on line by the corollary that the claim is "unfounded." Impossible seems more like it, but one doesn't want to be rude. Beyond that disputed claim there wasn't much to see, a collection of rolling woods and a town rather indistinct far below.

It was nevertheless an impressive collection of paths, buttresses, viewing points and overlooks.

 From the platform seen above one could view this human-made waterfall shown here below:

Aside from the need to create human attractions, a preposterous gnome garden and weird structures welded into place in an effort to amuse the masses, the place had its own natural grandeur and it was, I have to say, a shame to see it bent to the needs of crass commerce.

 We wound our way back to the start, a mile long walk they say and there we were almost out yet obliged to go through Fairyland where small children admired, with loud squeals, the assorted tableaux of traditional, to my surprise, children's stories. Here: little red riding hood, set in a  cave off the main trail..

 These oddities are the sort of attractions you have to seek out when on vacation. Its a bit like the worlds largest ball of twine, or Cadillacs planted in the desert. What Nature provides sometimes has to be improved upon. I could imagine coming up here some bright midweek winter's day and exploring the trails and enjoying the views alone and it could be quite the mystical experience. On a 90 degree day shepherding a surprisingly enthusiastic Labrador down the trail was an experience of a different magnitude.

We sat at the Starbucks for a while and refreshed ourselves. Cheyenne had a bowl with us and we watched the world go by. It was a pleasant moment as southern strangers made cheerful conversation and we slipped into the moment, almost without trying. As we gathered ourselves up to leave this monument to Georgia's natural beauty we spotted an electric car plug in station. It reminded me that sophisticated urbane Key West recently rejected the notion of buying electric cars for parking control saying the city lacked the infrastructure to recharge them. Here it is:

Not that complicated surely?  And here it is at Rock City of all places showing us how it's done.

Posted with Blogsy

Museum Of...Wreckers?

When my wife looked up from her iPhone and said there was a wreckers museum in Chattanooga I thought for one confused moment he meant Key West style wreckers - people in boats rescuing people in stranded ships and claiming their cargo. In this case it's the more modern version involving tow trucks. Yup. There a museum!

This place takes the art and silence of towing vehicles very seriously. Indeed the list of those who died doing this job was astonishingly long. Who knew? And why Chattanooga?

The answer to that latter conundrum was explained in the introductory film. At the beginning of the 19th century there lived a dude by the name of Ernest Holmes who was domiciled in this fair city. Around the time of World War One (in Europe) Holmes dreamed up the genesis of the modern wrecker, in Chattanooga.

And here it was, named the 485 after the price he charged for it. Odd but true.

We were free to wander here and there as we pleased. So we did.

Owing to my total lack of knowledge of the field I thought I would add this link so you can read all about it: Home - International Towing & Recovery Museum.

This little Japanese wrecker, powered by a two cylinder engine, called a Cony ended up in the States. It got short shrift from another museum goer for whom apparently there is no substitute for size. "Good for golf carts?" he grumbled."Ford Escorts actually," my wife piped up, reading from the information sheet. He gave her a filthy look and strutted off to look at the big boys of towing. I found the identical conversation online. How weird. 1970 Cony 1/4 Ton 2 cyl.engine-Rogner's Wrecker Palatine IL. | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

They also display wrecker tools.

Things have only changed incrementally; they seem to have always been pick up trucks with a crane:

This is where they get careers started:

And this is an international museum. Members belong to countries in Canada, Mexico, Europe and Australasia. The toys are British and German:

I loved this piece of craziness:

Even I could appreciate getting this truck, fully equipped up to 109 mph, such that the tires started to catch fire! Balls of steel these wrecker drivers have!

I like history, and if it's the history of towing so much the better. All I could think of was Bonnie and Clyde. Actually Chattanooga has some history in that department. This town was the scene of Machine Gun Kelly's last bank robbery. Machine Gun Kelly - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This truck puts me in mind of the era:

And the Hall of Fame, all white, mostly men, from all over the place. Key West gets no mention anywhere in the museum, unfortunately.

My wife got me a t-shirt because we really liked this place, as fascinating as it was unexpected.

Great fun. I shall never look at a tow truck the same way again.

Posted with Blogsy

Paradise Blows Back

En route to bed last night I was quite surprised to find my bath tub was full of water. The water was a thick dark brown, a situation I will leave to your imagination as the picture was quite repulsive. I had to go to work at one in the morning and we found to our astonishment that no twenty four hour plumber in the Keys isn't actually available twenty four hours.... Weird that.

I've lived most of my adult life on boats so the vagaries of house plumbing and the like are a bit of a mystery to me. In conversation at work (after I washed myself at home in the kitchen sink) Shannon told me about this little square plug used as an emergency drain in the pipes. Open that and release the jam she said. This morning my wife located a septic tank dude to come and empty the tank and a plumber to snake the system, we thought. I touched nothing preferring to give the experts a chance. Silly me.

We had a meeting in town we could not avoid but the septic tank guys came by, couldn't locate the underground tank and left promising to bring a back hoe as soon as possible to dig up the yard and try to locate the errant sewage pit. "Maybe tomorrow," he said. Maybe I thought to myself. This was the best effort of a sewage tank man called Hauk famous in the Lower Keys as the best man for any septic tank job, by far. Great, this is looking good, I thought to myself. Third Generation Plumbers of Marathon came by while we were gone and they opened the fatal valve apparently. The area under the house was sprayed, forcefully by the backed up contents of the down pipe. Great. They didn't even snake the deadly mulligatawny in the bath tub, which was marinating nicely where we like to wash. So much for experts. I cleaned the tub with old towels, bleach and scrubbing. What a great day off work! Bits of toilet paper stuck to everything under the house where the experts opened the firehose valve. Used toilet paper hosed everywhere. Bleach is a wonderful thing, it turns out. Too bad the experts couldn't have used a garden hose to rinse it before it dried and stuck to everything.

We stopped by West Marine on the way home and bought a forty dollar plastic toilet seat that supposedly fits on a five gallon bucket. Line the bucket with a plastic bag and there's your emergency shitter. Designed for a boater to use on a small vessel, useful in an emergency in a house following a hurricane, or when "the experts" can't clear your septic tank. We readied it for service, though naturally the seat doesn't fit the bucket without some minor modifications... We are now ready if the toilet backs up again before the "experts" locate the missing septic tank. So much for the middle class lifestyle, bitches.

In point of fact we live with one eye on a natural disaster or a human made error cutting us off from the rest of the world. You pretty much have to if you choose to live on a ribbon of dirt in the middle of the ocean. I store gasoline in jugs against power outages. We have a fully functioning water cistern that supplies our whole house with filtered rainwater that tastes better than aqueduct water piped to the house. We keep a small generator supposedly ready at a moment's notice .... to power fans and lights in the event of a prolonged outage. We also store cans of food and some long life dehydrated crap they make in Utah for Mormons waiting for their personal rapture (true story -look it up). The test pouches don't taste too terrible if your chef uses her sauces and potions to add some zest; my wife will cook anything if she has to! Self reliance is a pain in the ass but it limits the stress of hurricane season. If we do get cut off we won't starve. Plus we now have somewhere to take an emergency crap.

Next time you call a tradesman and they show up and do the job remember it doesn't work that way everywhere in the continental US. Paradise sometimes comes down to "will the buggers show up?" Remind me of that when your driveway is covered in snow and the skies are gray and I'm gloating about my winter sunshine...

Posted with Blogsy