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I spent two weeks in October driving around the eastern seaboard with my mother. 5187.7 kilometers in total. We visited Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia (very barely), Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia (barely), Maryland. Delaware and Virginia.
We spent a night in Bar Harbor, Maine so we could go up Mount Cadillac in the morning to catch the first light of the new day to hit the US.
Up into New Brunswick, we got lunch at Saint John which seemed like a pretty cool place. Having just finished riveting the boiler for the Prairie Line Trail project, I loved this decoration.
We spent that night on Prince Edward Island. The original plan was to take the ferry to Nova Scotia, but there was a literal gale gusting to 120 kph that morning. Even the bridge -- which is freaking amazing already -- was shut down for a bit. That's okay, though, cause it gave me a chance to get this picture and walk around in crazy hurricane-style winds a bit. I could jump up in the air and feel myself being pushed backwards a bit.
The Bay of Fundy, has the largest tides in the world. This part, Hopewell Cape, would be 8 meters underwater a few hours later, and that was only a moderately large tide for them. It also has some really cool rock formations to explore at low tide. That one on the left make me want to do a sculpture of a human head on roughly that scale.
We tried to go up the cog railway to the top of Mount Washington in New Hampshire, but another storm dropped enough snow to make them shut it all down. So we were working our way through the White Mountains, trying to circle around the worst of the weather, when we stumbled on this, the Mount Washington Hotel. Which I knew better as the site of the 1944 Breton Woods conference, where the modern international monetary system was invented. Not only was that cool, it gave me an excuse to introduce my mom to podcasts.
We stopped by the Rock of Ages granite quarry for a tour. Turns out they weren't really doing them this time of year, but a college geology class happened to be stopping by so we were able to tag along with them. The quarry barely scratches the surface of a member of the Devonian New Hampshire Plutonic Suite, a series of giant globs of magma that pushed up into the sedimentary rocks of the area about 350 million years ago. This one goes 10 miles deep and still has enough granite for another 4,000 years of extraction at current rates.
In the second pictures, on the right, a dark grey dike can be seen cutting through the granite. This is one of the proto-rifts formed when Laurasia started to split into North America and Eurasia 55 million years ago. Had things gone a bit differently, this would have become the mid-Atlantic rift that pushed the continents apart.
We did Ben and Jerry's, of course. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the tombstones in their flavor graveyard were actually made of granite. I'd always assumed cheap plastic.
I finally got the chance to visit the American Precision Museum, which has sat on my tourism map for years. (That's not a metaphor. I keep a map of all the places I'd like to visit in the world, culled from all the weird shit I find online. I'll probably never get to most, but it's a great resource when I end up going to new places.) It's pretty great! Best collection of ancient machine tools I've seen outside of the London Science Museum. It even has Bridgeport serial number 1 from 1938! This is amazing because that is, hands down, one of the most influential pieces of industrial design in history. The cheap import vertical knee mill I bought 78 years later looks almost identical. They got it more or less perfect from the very beginning.
The Erie Canal! (And the Erie Canal Museum.) Turns out canals are something that me and my mom both find helplessly romantic. Talk has started of maybe renting a longboat for a weeklong family excursion in 2020...
We found out about this coal mine that shut down in the 60s but is now a museum, so obviously we had to do that. I found it very cozy, honestly. I can totally see the allure of mine engineering, that would be a very attractive form of mastery to feel.
Philly! We did the obligatory Americana, including lucking into a tour of Independence Hall despite not getting the tickets ahead of time.
There was a great exhibit in Philosophical Hall of the American Philosophical Society, the colony's Royal Society ripoff started by Franklin himself. It included this letter from Darwin to Lyell, which was so illegible that Lyell had to cut out a section and mail it back to Darwin to get a translation. As someone of abominable handwriting myself, I found this comforting.
I also did the Mutter Museum of medical specimens, but they don't allow photography. They say that is to be respectful of the human remains, which sounds nice, but then I noticed they sell photos and even coloring books in the gift shop, so...
Falling Water! I'm so ambivalent about Frank Lloyd Wright -- like, maybe figure out how to make roofs not leak before getting so full of yourself? Yet, I have to admit, I often totally fall in love with his buildings once I'm in them. This was no exception.
I toured another FLW house in the area, Kentuck Knob, the next morning. Which was nice enough, but mostly I wanted to see these two Andy Goldsworthy pieces in the sculpture garden. He's a favorite of mine, and I'd never managed to see any of his work in person before. As you might imagine, they don't lend themselves to traveling exhibits.
This is a terrible picture, but that sign says TRUCK WARNING -- DANGEROUS MOUNTAIN 1/2 MILE. I love the idea that an entire mountain can sneak up on you. It was a decent hill, I guess? Only 10% grade, though.
We had some time to kill so we visited the Hagley Museum, which is on the grounds of the original Du Pont gunpowder works. It has a bunch of old water power still working, including this old rolling mill. Big thick walls on three sides, thin wood ones on the fourth so when (not if!) there is an explosion, you don't have to completely rebuild everything.
There is also this amazing line-shaft machine shop there, which is pretty much everything I've ever dreamed of. It even had line-shaft driven ceiling fans! Even if you don't lust for a water-powered machine shop, I highly recommend a visit. Really cool place all around.
We ended up at Hagley because they are now the owners of a collection of patent models that I had tried to go see up in Syracuse. Up until 1880, if you submitted a US patent, you had to include a working model. They were everything I had dreamed they would be, though sadly they only have a temporary exhibit at the moment.
After that we were in DC with my brother and sister-in-law who live there, which was fun but not as photogenic.
We spent a night in Bar Harbor, Maine so we could go up Mount Cadillac in the morning to catch the first light of the new day to hit the US.
Up into New Brunswick, we got lunch at Saint John which seemed like a pretty cool place. Having just finished riveting the boiler for the Prairie Line Trail project, I loved this decoration.
We spent that night on Prince Edward Island. The original plan was to take the ferry to Nova Scotia, but there was a literal gale gusting to 120 kph that morning. Even the bridge -- which is freaking amazing already -- was shut down for a bit. That's okay, though, cause it gave me a chance to get this picture and walk around in crazy hurricane-style winds a bit. I could jump up in the air and feel myself being pushed backwards a bit.
The Bay of Fundy, has the largest tides in the world. This part, Hopewell Cape, would be 8 meters underwater a few hours later, and that was only a moderately large tide for them. It also has some really cool rock formations to explore at low tide. That one on the left make me want to do a sculpture of a human head on roughly that scale.
We tried to go up the cog railway to the top of Mount Washington in New Hampshire, but another storm dropped enough snow to make them shut it all down. So we were working our way through the White Mountains, trying to circle around the worst of the weather, when we stumbled on this, the Mount Washington Hotel. Which I knew better as the site of the 1944 Breton Woods conference, where the modern international monetary system was invented. Not only was that cool, it gave me an excuse to introduce my mom to podcasts.
We stopped by the Rock of Ages granite quarry for a tour. Turns out they weren't really doing them this time of year, but a college geology class happened to be stopping by so we were able to tag along with them. The quarry barely scratches the surface of a member of the Devonian New Hampshire Plutonic Suite, a series of giant globs of magma that pushed up into the sedimentary rocks of the area about 350 million years ago. This one goes 10 miles deep and still has enough granite for another 4,000 years of extraction at current rates.
In the second pictures, on the right, a dark grey dike can be seen cutting through the granite. This is one of the proto-rifts formed when Laurasia started to split into North America and Eurasia 55 million years ago. Had things gone a bit differently, this would have become the mid-Atlantic rift that pushed the continents apart.
We did Ben and Jerry's, of course. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the tombstones in their flavor graveyard were actually made of granite. I'd always assumed cheap plastic.
I finally got the chance to visit the American Precision Museum, which has sat on my tourism map for years. (That's not a metaphor. I keep a map of all the places I'd like to visit in the world, culled from all the weird shit I find online. I'll probably never get to most, but it's a great resource when I end up going to new places.) It's pretty great! Best collection of ancient machine tools I've seen outside of the London Science Museum. It even has Bridgeport serial number 1 from 1938! This is amazing because that is, hands down, one of the most influential pieces of industrial design in history. The cheap import vertical knee mill I bought 78 years later looks almost identical. They got it more or less perfect from the very beginning.
The Erie Canal! (And the Erie Canal Museum.) Turns out canals are something that me and my mom both find helplessly romantic. Talk has started of maybe renting a longboat for a weeklong family excursion in 2020...
We found out about this coal mine that shut down in the 60s but is now a museum, so obviously we had to do that. I found it very cozy, honestly. I can totally see the allure of mine engineering, that would be a very attractive form of mastery to feel.
Philly! We did the obligatory Americana, including lucking into a tour of Independence Hall despite not getting the tickets ahead of time.
There was a great exhibit in Philosophical Hall of the American Philosophical Society, the colony's Royal Society ripoff started by Franklin himself. It included this letter from Darwin to Lyell, which was so illegible that Lyell had to cut out a section and mail it back to Darwin to get a translation. As someone of abominable handwriting myself, I found this comforting.
I also did the Mutter Museum of medical specimens, but they don't allow photography. They say that is to be respectful of the human remains, which sounds nice, but then I noticed they sell photos and even coloring books in the gift shop, so...
Falling Water! I'm so ambivalent about Frank Lloyd Wright -- like, maybe figure out how to make roofs not leak before getting so full of yourself? Yet, I have to admit, I often totally fall in love with his buildings once I'm in them. This was no exception.
I toured another FLW house in the area, Kentuck Knob, the next morning. Which was nice enough, but mostly I wanted to see these two Andy Goldsworthy pieces in the sculpture garden. He's a favorite of mine, and I'd never managed to see any of his work in person before. As you might imagine, they don't lend themselves to traveling exhibits.
This is a terrible picture, but that sign says TRUCK WARNING -- DANGEROUS MOUNTAIN 1/2 MILE. I love the idea that an entire mountain can sneak up on you. It was a decent hill, I guess? Only 10% grade, though.
We had some time to kill so we visited the Hagley Museum, which is on the grounds of the original Du Pont gunpowder works. It has a bunch of old water power still working, including this old rolling mill. Big thick walls on three sides, thin wood ones on the fourth so when (not if!) there is an explosion, you don't have to completely rebuild everything.
There is also this amazing line-shaft machine shop there, which is pretty much everything I've ever dreamed of. It even had line-shaft driven ceiling fans! Even if you don't lust for a water-powered machine shop, I highly recommend a visit. Really cool place all around.
We ended up at Hagley because they are now the owners of a collection of patent models that I had tried to go see up in Syracuse. Up until 1880, if you submitted a US patent, you had to include a working model. They were everything I had dreamed they would be, though sadly they only have a temporary exhibit at the moment.
After that we were in DC with my brother and sister-in-law who live there, which was fun but not as photogenic.