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Mt Pisgah Inn

We’re staying at the Mt Pisgah Inn for two nights – views are great, food is great, rooms are not bad for 5700 feet above sea level out in the middle of nowhere. (I’ve actually had worse rooms.)  We arrived late yesterday afternoon and had supper in the restaurant (you don’t need to be a guest to eat at the restaurant – its a really nice place).

Great Smokie Mountains
After breakfast we headed out to look for butterflies. No luck at wagon wheel gap or tunnel gap so we decided to go on down the parkway, almost to the end. On the trip back we found a lot of blue butterflies (swallow tails?) and some monarchs. It was starting to rain but we stopped at Graveyards fields to hike down to the waterfalls. We were last there 15 or 16 years ago. They now have wooden bridges and walkways (both wooden and paved) for easy access. It’s an easy walk down and a steep walk up – but I made it.  Butterflies don’t do rain, so we came back to the room to rest and enjoy the views while i got some work done.

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I think I got ripped off…

We’re taking a winding route from Cleveland to Johnson city TN, going by way of Mortgantown and Elkins WV. The best route there was Ohio to PA turnpike, get off at Cranberry PA and take I 79 South.  We hadn’t went this way in years and were pleasantly surprised to see open tolling lanes (in PA) at the OH border. There are no tollgates in Cranberry… so, worried that we missed something (and didn’t want our ez pass charged full length tolls, I looked it up online… and discovered East bound pays $3.80 or so and west bound is no tolls at the OH border. So… since we’re going one way (East) we paid a high price for the few miles we traveled the PA turnpike… must remember this if we ever go this way again. I might look for a different, no toll route. 

But hey, it was the first time we used the PA EZ pass in PA since getting it in 2007. And the open tolling lanes are nice. The last time we went east (about 6 or 7 years ago) we sat at the tollgate for an hour.

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Veteran’s Day

Dad served about 22 months in WWII (he’s not sure of the exact time  but he joined near the end of the war). He went to New Orleans and FL for training then to the South Pacific, serving on a small boat. He said there were 16 crew plus 4 gunners from another boat (no one in his crew could shoot) on a 110 ft boat. It needed towed a lot because it couldn’t hold enough fuel. They went out to sea to support the bombers – circling in the water, waiting for the pilots to bail out. None did. When the runs were finished, they were towed back to port.

He spent his time in the service circling in the ocean, waiting to rescue pilots in a boat that couldn’t hold enough gas to go anywhere….

I wish I knew more of his war stories. The only one he really talked about was being within 50 miles of australia and never going to shore there. He always wanted to go back, but after he retired, he always had excuses about why they couldn’t go.

Oh, and he talked about the endless meals of spam.

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GPS & Weather Radar

We went to see Mom over the weekend and had to drop Cece off at school on the way home. The forecast called for possible freezing rain in the higher elevations so we left early to avoid the bad weather. I had the GPS up, Desktop Weather Max set on radar maps, and updated the GPS fix on the blackberry weather bug app every 10 min so we could get current temps (radar maps load slow) . Based on the radar maps, it looked like we were running about 15 min ahead of the storm as it moved into northern tier of PA and southern tier of NY.

I’ve used a GPS for years with my Tablet PC and Street Atlas (from Delorme) and often wished I could overlay weather radar so we could see where the storms were.  Both when we lived in TN and also now when we head east on I-90 along Lake Erie or west on I-80 through IN, it would really be nice to see the local temps and radar so we know what we’re running into when the weather is bad.  My Blackberry and the weather bug app can do this and its really helpful, but I wish my GPS map could do it – I like the bigger screen and it seems like it loads faster than the blackberry maps.