It took a while, but I made it to the northern Outer Banks. The local wildlife say hi:
Hi, ladies.
This is wild-horse country. Feral, if you want to be technical about it. But we spotted several small groups on a drive-around this morning, most of them indistinguishable from any old horse standing in a field, except that they’re in someone’s yard. It’s an interesting place, even though it was offensively chilly (high 30s) today.
I felt like I was outrunning weather most of the way down here, and then I was outrunning traffic. I left early enough to miss the Thursday snow, but it rained, torrentially, all the way to Pennsylvania. Had dinner with Jason T. and his wife, then retired early to watch the ladies’ figure skating finals in the Olympics, which was, as we all know by now, ridiculous. On to Norfolk the following day, which meant I was skirting D.C. at lunchtime on the Friday of a holiday weekend. Which mean the traffic was insane, but not necessarily any more insane than it usually is. The plan was to spend the night in Norfolk, but when I got there, the tunnel/bridge had a 45-minute delay, so I noped all the way out of that and stayed in Newport News. But that meant I could breakfast with another NN.c-er, Kim, before pushing on to the Outer Banks, or OBX as it’s known in the local shorthand.
My friends here are great. Haven’t seen them in 25 years. But it was like yesterday, which is the real mark of great friends.
But Monday I leave for Atlanta, so we’ll see what happens along the way. Low tide is fairly early, so I should make it in one day, unless I become entranced by some place along the way and feel the need to stop.
That might happen. You never know.
In the meantime, more horses, this one a boy:
The weather is getting warmer. So am I.
alex said on February 20, 2022 at 5:55 pm
So are these horses descendants of colonial shipwreck survivors like the ones at Chincoteague? Haven’t been to the Outer Banks since I was a little kid in the 1970s and don’t particularly remember wild horses. I do remember the beaches having plenty of conch shells and desiccated starfish and suchlike, and hoarding them, and having to ditch them on the trip home after they started ripening in the hot car.
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jcburns said on February 20, 2022 at 6:07 pm
We’re flexible, Nance. We’re flexible!
Pasted from the end of yesterdays comments:
Alex (and Tajalli):
Go to the finder, hold down the command key and spacebar. Type “Music” in there. One of the folders will have all your music in there. Other things you can type: PDF file, MP3 file, email from Nancy, email from 2016, URL from Norway (and so on and so on.)
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Deborah said on February 20, 2022 at 8:12 pm
Love the travelogue. I extended my stay in Santa Fe until the 12th because I started having extreme anxiety about the window replacement installation happening a couple of days before I was originally expected to leave for Chicago. My husband has to leave on the first day of the install because his mother’s funeral in Sarasota is happening on the 2nd. There is so much furniture moving around that has to be done to get everything away from the windows and put back again and LB can’t do any of the moving because of her recent hip ablation procedure. I would have had to leave the day after the completion, meaning having to pack etc in a complete construction zone. I feel so much better now, I can finally remain asleep after 2am. Lately I’d been waking up about then and not going back to sleep which was maddening.
Today we met in person here with the owner couple of 2 units in our Santa Fe condo building, who live in Dallas. We went over all of the problems with the building and grounds with them and we came to the conclusion that we’re going to have to raise the monthly assessments to even begin to start to address some of the serious issues. The assessments were ridiculously low for so long and things had started to deteriorate years ago. Thankfully we seem to be on the same side. The asshole owner is going to scream bloody murder but it has to be done. She has gotten away with so much in the past because she’s such a bully.
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tajalli said on February 20, 2022 at 8:18 pm
Thanks, jc, you are our own private apple forum!
That music fold contains both my Garageband and iTunes and is in the first level of files within my home username since my iTunes is still working, so no problems for me since my OS is deprecated.
“Music” search will show every blessed track of every album – huge mish-mash – plus every file that has a mention of music either in its name or contents – trés overkill. Ha ha.
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alex said on February 20, 2022 at 8:20 pm
Thanks JC! I’ll try that when I get home. The Apple support forum pretty much said fuck you for being too stupid to copy your music, guess you’ll just have to rip your CDs all over again.
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Mark P said on February 20, 2022 at 9:29 pm
I envy you your trip. There’s really nothing I like better than being on the road. I had intended to make a trip to Dallas to dump a bunch of old photos on my nephew, then drive up to Colorado and Utah for a couple of days. Then over to Denver for my other nephew and a visit with some old friends. But various medical stuff for my wife got in the way, and now I don’t know when I can do it.
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Sherri said on February 20, 2022 at 10:41 pm
Joan Ryan told us twenty-five years ago about the abusive cultures of figure skating and gymnastics, that abuse is still being tolerated.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/20/russia-figure-skating-abuse-child-athletes-reforms-needed/
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tajalli said on February 20, 2022 at 11:54 pm
Alex, so sorry I suggested the forum. Mean people suck. Slough it off and enjoy your music, life’s short enough as it is.
And thanks, Nancy, for the horse pictures. Looks like they’re rather furry, their winter coats? And their short legs are part of being wild?
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Dexter Friend said on February 21, 2022 at 3:27 am
One hot day at a Cleveland Indians game I happened to be sitting between a Wall Street floor trader in town on business and a travel agent. The New Yorker was a talker and answered all my questions such as how stressful it is to be on that pressure-packed floor at the stock exchange.
OK, that’s the red herring…the travel agent was telling me about how OBX is such a popular request for his business. He told of wild horses, the Wright Brothers attraction there at Kill Devil Hills, the surf, the great crab restaurants…and we began going there 8 out of the next 10 summers for our summer vacation. In 2001 we rented a huge house with 12 rooms near Duck, and most of our extended family flew in or drove down for a great vacation. In 1991 I rented a Toyota Tercel at the Toledo airport for $97 for 10 days, to drive to OBX. Imagine that today. You can’t, ha. The Wright Brothers show featured a park ranger telling all about the first flight (in the USA anyway), and was geared for school kids, properly, but I got a kick out of it. One thing upset me a bit, as I was cycling on the bike path near Duck, there were nuclear waste warning signs all over, telling anyone to not enter the water in that area and not go near the sand. I guess that is a former dump for the nuclear industry. Yuck and fuck that.
Nag’s Head is a fun place to be, but North Carolina is a wide state. It takes forever to get to Nag’s Head once you enter North Carolina. The last time we spent any time in NC was staying a few months at New Bern 19 years ago. Our daughter’s husband was fucking around and left the marriage so Carla Lee and I went there to help with her 3 kids. Carolina, yeah, I spent more time there than any other state in which I did not have a mailing address.
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LAMary said on February 21, 2022 at 9:37 am
When I watched the first performance by the 15 year old Russian skater I thought she looked anorexic and brow beaten. It was one more depressing aspect of the olympics this year.
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Dorothy said on February 21, 2022 at 10:14 am
Aren’t the wild horses only on Assateague Island? Have been to the OBX several times since our daughter lived and worked in Norfolk from 2005 to 2017. And my youngest sister has lived in Chesapeake for a long time. But we never made it to Assateague. Daughter and her partner’s favorite place to eat is the Kill Devil Grill. They don’t get there much since they moved to the D.C. area in 2017.
When I worked at Kenyon we were host parents to two lovely women. One of them is Ukrainian. I’m worrying about her parents. Dasha is not there (met up with her in 2019 when we were in Scotland) but I still am fretting about them and I’m sure Dasha is too. I am really hopeful that diplomacy will win out but Putin is such a nasty shit I am not holding my breath.
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Heather said on February 21, 2022 at 10:40 am
Looks beautiful and sounds like a fun trip. I miss that feeling of freedom and adventure on a road trip. I drove from Seattle to Chicago with a friend when I moved back in 1994 or so, taking lots of time for stops, and it was great. Haven’t done all that many since then. Have fun and be safe.
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Jeff Borden said on February 21, 2022 at 10:43 am
We’re looking to get out of Dodge, but my teaching will keep me anchored to Chicago until early May. Dog knows what the world will look like by then. The economic impact of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, I’ve read, will be large and long-lasting with particularly pressure on fossil fuels. Premium gas in the Chicago area is already close to $5 per gallon and our natural gas bills equal the GDP of Romania. A car trip when gas is stratospheric and, perhaps, not in great supply might not be a swell idea.
Numerous reports I’ve read suggest Putin is acting out of weakness to keep his own restive population in thrall to his narrative that Russia is preventing “genocide” of Russian ethnics in Ukraine, but so what? He must chuckle to himself while looking at the West, where we can’t even get our shit together enough to defeat a pandemic. Fox must be music to his misshapen ears for repeating his lies and bullshit for its drooling audience. And Republicans, who once stood for being anti-Communist to their core, appear quite accepting of rogue thugs like Putin if he makes Joe Biden look bad.
So. . .we’ll see about a driving vacation. Until then, I will travel vicariously with Nancita.
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Jason T. said on February 21, 2022 at 11:00 am
It was great to see you, but if anything, you’re downplaying how miserable that rainstorm was on Thursday. I don’t know how you managed. Just from our house to the restaurant in Greensburg was a stressful drive.
On the positive side, we’re still finishing the leftovers.
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Julie Robinson said on February 21, 2022 at 12:04 pm
My knowledge of Assateague and the ponies pretty much begins and ends with Misty of Chincoteague, although now I think of it, there was also a sequel or two?
Jeff B, D had a Prius rental on his Cali trip, and grilling him this morning he said they drove over 1500 miles on three tanks of gas, including the top off before turning it in. Of course, there was the rental cost, but it was a great deal for them. Secretly I’m hoping he’ll see the wisdom of getting a hybrid over electric for our next vehicle.
So the tainted and joyless Olympics are finally over. We didn’t even watch much by the end though we had bought Peacock. If one positive thing can come out of it, it will be changes in figure skating to disallow Eteri Tutberidze and her band of chemists any participation.
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alex said on February 21, 2022 at 1:54 pm
Meanwhile in Michigan…
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/21/trump-mellissa-carone-second-act-00010405
She’d been upstaged by Rudy’s audible farts so I’d forgotten about her.
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Jim said on February 21, 2022 at 3:20 pm
I weep for Ohio: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/21/jd-vance-attack-on-barry-mcaffrey-shows-decline-of-gop-ohio/
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Jeff Borden said on February 21, 2022 at 3:32 pm
I am pretty certain the Buckeye State is beyond salvation. It is almost unrecognizable to me these days. They might as well legalize fireworks and complete the transition to becoming Indiana East.
A great friend of mine from the Cleveland area (I came of age 30 miles south of there) has pondered a return to Northeast Ohio and his old stomping grounds, but that’s not a sentiment I share. I wish no ill upon the state –I still have family and scores of friends there– but I see nothing appealing about going back. One party rule has destroyed it all.
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Jim said on February 21, 2022 at 4:22 pm
It has been a long time from the Indiana Democratic Party days of my youth. We had senators (Vance Hartke, Birch Bayh) who were liberal, and for a brief while I even had a liberal representative (Phil Sharp).
Heck even Evan Bayh and Frank O’Bannon were pretty liberal, especially by today’s Indiana standards.
Thank heavens I have moved. I’ll be in Neguse’s district after this election, and that pleases me immensely.
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diane said on February 21, 2022 at 5:30 pm
Yet Ohio has given the Senate Sherrod Brown. I am probably unduly optimistic but I find that to be a very positive sign about Ohio.
I too will be in Neguse’s district after the newly drawn lines are in effect. I am quite happy that I will no longer be in Boebert’s.
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