One Lap

Date: 10/29/2013

Day: 33

Location: Kitty Hawk, NC

Miles Today: 250

Total Miles: 7307

South to North Carolina, Seen on the Road

South to North Carolina

America is beautiful. Well, it is aside from the commercial strips which could be cluster bombed with no great aesthetic loss. In fact, none at all; the British do this better for some reason.

Watching the rural landscape roll by sometime grabs your heart; an emotional, even visceral thing. It changes (wonderfully) as one circumnavigates the continent, but there is a poetry, an appropriateness to the way open land flows into tilled land, then into stands of trees. And sometimes there is a beach and ocean to look at.

The Atlantic was a bit more ocean-like today

Not many mountains hereabouts.

There are no words for this.

A Cable Stay Bridge

The Colonel thinks that the engineers have given us nothing so beautiful as a cable stayed bridge since they thought up the suspension bridge. There is a dandy one in Boston.

A Very Long Bridge

The path today went south (of course) over the Chesapeake Bay bridge - tunnel. It is 23 miles long with two separate mile long tunnels each way to allow the boats to get through. The roadbed goes in tunnels and under water at islands constructed for the purpose.

If you look very closely, you will see the bridge extending from left disappearing to right against the skyline. A 23 mile long bridge is not easy to photograph.

Chesapeake Bay; no bridge in this one.

Seen on the Road

Buildings on Stilts

Many buildings on this part of the eastern sea coast are raised 10 to 20 feet above ground level on pilings, the exact opposite of how we build in California. Put your building on stilts driven into sand? Not in earthquake country. Here, however ... the point, of course is to let a storm surge pass beneath. The pictures show modest size structures. They do this with large 20 story apartment buildings as well.

Today is the one year anniversary of Super Storm Sandy, much commented on a round here.

Tyson vs. Perdue

Ali vs. Forman, the First Armored Division looking across the Fulda Gap at their Soviet counterpart; in North Carolina, it's Tyson vs. Perdue in the heavy weight chicken wars. The buildings below are automated chicken houses belonging to team Tyson. The silo thingies are full of feed. There is no one around and only a faint odor of chicken. An unattended factory producing chicken; that's why it's so cheap. Chicken processing plants are common as well.