June 2019 – Adventures of Roy and Laurie

June 24, 2019June 24, 2019

Wrigley Field And A Mets/Cubs Game

A bucket list item for us is to see a Cubs game at Wrigley Field in Chicago. This bucket came full to the brim as the Mets happened to be in town while we were there and our hotel, the Hotel Zachary had a “room with a view” to die for. We got to watch the Cubs/White Sox cross town rivalry game on Wednesday night from our hotel room and the Mets/Cubs game at the stadium on Thursday night.

The view from our hotel window…..Absolutely amazing!

Some blackberry merlot from a Kentucky vineyard (provided by Laurie’s niece Mandy) to celebrate our experience here.

Chicago’s finest know how to keep dry in a rainstorm!

We got to see the left half of the diamond action from our window but we also had a live feed on the jumbotron. They did finish the Whitesox/Cubs game without delay believe it or not.

The hotel’s namesake Zachary Taylor (not the president that died in office in 1850) was the designer of Wrigley Field back in the 1900s. There were framed art pieces throughout the hotel. Some represented his imagination and some…..

One of the actual blue prints for Wrigley was hanging in our room.

Mets/Cubs game day dinner of Thai food served in a wonderfully eclectic Thai restaurant, Cozy Noodles n’ Rice located right around the corner from Wrigley.

Bobblehead dolls adorned much of the wall space. The doll covered by a paper bag is one of many the owner covered as it was a Milwaukee Brewer, one of the Cubs biggest rivals.

There was also a wall covered with “license plate art”. We found this one to be particularly appealing.

On our way to the game from dinner we had to stop and watch the police on horses do “the shuffle” to the live music playing outside the ballpark. The horses were better dancers than we ever thought of being. Cool!

Once in the park we snapped this photo of our previous night’s hotel room.

We made it to our seats and took in the atmosphere. Notice the seats toward the top are not even in the park. They are situated on an apartment building across the street. Neat set-up.

Mets’ batting practice. Lots of home runs hit here.

Wrigley under the lights. They were begrudgingly installed back in 1988 to keep up with the modern way of life. The Cubs still have an inordinate amount of day games to satisfy the “purist” from Chicago who grew up watching all their baseball during daylight hours.

A very talkative and knowledgeable usher agreed to snap our picture for posterity. We believe we will return to Wrigley some day for another game.

June 23, 2019June 23, 2019

Nature Did Not Disappoint Us With All Its Glory In The Smokies.

**PLEASE MAKE SURE TO SEE THE PREVIOUS POST AS WE INADVERTENTLY DELETED ALL PICTURES AFTER WE POSTED IT**

As with many of the National Parks the Smokies was set aside because of its beauty. This beauty is accentuated by an abundance of wildlife and variety of plant life.

What flora and fauna will this path called the AT leads us to next?

Starting with the mammals: There are of course many black bear in the park. We did run into one a few times but they are very shy and keep their distance unless startled. The really odd mammal in the park are the wild boar (hog/pig). They are not quite as shy and make horrific snorting noises when you come across them. Not my picture (googleimages) as I had no interest in putting down the pack and getting out the camera!

The wild boar look kind of warm and cuddly until you get a closer look:

Not sure what the long fangs are for and I definitely did not want to find out.

We did see the damage these boar can cause as they root up the ground looking for something good to eat.

These cute little goats were not wild animals in the park of course, but, oh my were they cute!

This is not technically a mammal but…..It was the first salamander we had seen all spring and we were careful to shoo it off the trail so it would not ger stepped on.

Let us take a look at the flora side of the Smokies. Never mind it was early Spring time when we started our hike and we got to watch the trees bud out and eventually leaf out over the course of April and early May. It has always been a goal to start down south and “walk north with Springtime”. We kept up with spring and all its beauty for a while before the summer temps crept up and all the plant life was fully leafed out.

The hillsides in the Appalachian mountains are teeming with rhododendron plants. It is a thing of beauty to see

A good use for a rhododendron leaf is to help funnel the water from the streams into the bottles for drinking. We use chlorine pills to purify all the water we drink in the backcountry.

It was indeed May when we saw, as far as the eyes could see, fields of mayapple plants. Here they were starting to flower and by late May they were turning into actual fruit. This fruit is, however, poisonous so don’t eat them!

Wild ramps, on the other hand are delicious and nutritious. They taste very similar to an onion or leek.

Fiddleheads are the beginnings of a fern plant and are very tasty when fried in butter. Isn’t anything tasty when fried in butter? When I mention fiddleheads I hope you are looking at the plant in the foreground and not me walking down the trail!

This is a closeup of the kudzo plant. It is an invasive species that can grow up to 1 foot each day under the correct growing conditions here in the Smokies. It was introduced into the United States in 1876 and was initially used to help stop soil erosion.

Yes there is actually a house under this patch of kudzo plant!

A carpet of Spring wildflowers that stretches on and on over the miles of trail.

We are sure that some plant based material was used to craft this absolutely wonderful habanero/mango whiskey.

June 15, 2019June 22, 2019

The Great Smoky National Park…..Awesome Beauty!

Check out the views we got when starting our hike near the highest point on the entire Appalachian Trail. We were near Clingman’s Dome at 6,644 feet.

The unique viewing tower at Clingman’s Dome. It is accessible by road too.

Never knew cement could be that hard on the feet!

With a high elevation we ran into some snow during our 70 mile hike in early May. Nothing to worry about though.

Off I go for a few days of “west and weewaxation at wast”…..

Hikers are required to stay in one of the shelters unless it is full. This one was so…..
Note the bags of food strung up in the trees on the left. Bear are a big problem here.

Someone had a bit of fun with the “L” on this sign. The actual “sheeters” are called privies out on the trail.

In order to backpack through the Smokies you must pay $20 for a one week permit. The park is free to visit and drive through but if you want to hike it cost money! Good government, bad government.

The week-long (5 days) hike covered some fairly strenuous ups and downs. Check out the elevation profile map above. The black squares are the shelters for sleeping. Coming down the northside to Davenport Gap (right) was a bit hard on the knees! A 4000 foot drop over about 15 miles.

Check out a few of the views we had in the Smokies:

Would you dare to walk into this foggy abyss?

June 11, 2019June 11, 2019

Ripley’s Gaitlinburg Aquarium…A Must See!

After a good month of hiking on the Appalachian Trail through Georgia and North Carolina we entered Tennessee and the Smoky Mountain region. The Great Smoky Mountain National Park has lived up to all the hype we have heard over the years. It happens to be the most visited National Park in the country-wide system of parks but we did not see it at its busiest as it was only early May. We are enjoying the Smokies so much that it is time for a touristy day.

A tunnel through the aquarium that is a football field long, and teeming with sharks and other marine life was a highlight of our visit to the aquarium.

A neat computer app figured these heads would be ours if we were marine creatures!

While looking at this sawfish we had interesting thoughts regarding evolution and de-evolution! We were reminded of the song “In The Year 2525” by Zager and Evans. Check out the YouTube Link if you want to know what we are referring to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQB2-Kmiic

Staying with the evolution theme we found it very interesting that some sharks appeared to have the beginnings (or ends?) of legs.

Laurie touched a jellyfish first then…
She guilted Roy into touching one too.

We occasionally got “the look” from some of the residents.

Every hour there was a live feeding session with divers in the tank. Looks like a good job!

Check out the faces on these Rays as feeding time begins!

The aquarium also had a number of larger fossils hanging from the ceiling.

Check out the choppers on that great white shark.

Very cool…
Even cooler!

We enjoyed watching the penguins live up to the names they were given.

Somehow Laurie managed to become part of this exhibit?

I had a very good time but….
I think Laurie was more enthralled!

June 1, 2019June 1, 2019

The Stalking Scooter….Where Will It Appear Next?

Our method of hiking the AT is generally to leave our scooter at the end of the hike on the southern end then drive the truck to the beginning of the hike on the northern end. We then hike to the scooter and drive it back to the truck. We then leave the scooter overnight so we can repeat the same strategy the next day. This means we are always walking south on the trail but moving northbound toward Maine in general. This can give you a headache thinking about the logistics, but the idea is that the hikers continually see our scooter in in the oddest places. Because of this many folks have come to know us as the “Scooter People” but we do have proper trail names.

A quick note on trail names: Most AT hikers assume, or are given, trail names. Within the trail community, these names are how other hikers remember you. Our names are Sherpa and Ultralite. Can you guess who is who in the picture.

Sherpa and Ultralite in the mountains of Northern Georgia.

Our trusty scooter getting a lock placed through the wheels at our first hike’s end.

Here is the scene as we arrived at our scooter. With this eerie backdrop you can see why so many thru hikers were uneasy coming across the scooter over and over again at different trail heads.

Here is the shelter on top of Blood Mountain in Georgia. Named so because it is quite the uphill climb to get to it causing some potential thru hikers to re-think their hiking aspirations. We met Homer (trail name) from Homer, NY here for the first time. Many encounters later he figured out we were the “scooter people”. He created a Twilight Zone type video on his Go Pro, of all his scooter encounters in the woods.

Emma Cragg was watching us as the scooter was “laid to rest” in the woods next to her tombstone. The scooter awaited our arrival after our next day’s hike. The epitaph reads “Absent, Not Dead.

We came across a number of “suspect” places that our scooter should probably not venture into. There were a few hikers in the woods who cheered me on as I attempted, and succeeded in crossing this overflowing stream.

I was about to turn around and find another route…
but the flooded stream was no match for our scooter.

It turns out that we would have to cross many a swollen creek during the rainy season here in Appalachia. Below are pics taken the next day as we ran across a young cyclist stuck on a large rock in the creek. As we had our truck this time we helped pull him out.

The water here in early April was really cold to wade around in!
We supposed that someone else was not as lucky as the guy we helped?

Our favorite scooter story was reported by at least 4 separate hikers. When we went to leave the scooter at a trail head, we felt the area was not safe to leave the scooter for two straight days. We found a spot a half mile or so from the trail proper and secured it deep in the woods (or so we thought).

We did not realize this was on the blue blaze path that leads hikers to a water source. This very strange scooter hiding spot seriously freaked a few folks out.

Imagine hiking across this foggy bald in North Carolina and coming to the same scooter you have seen at many different spots recently….as if it were following you!

There was one group of anxious thru hikers that had taken pictures of the scooter at every encounter. They started holding up fingers in the picture to show how many different scooter encounters they’d had. One of the hikers named “Little Beast” had counted 7 separate encounters by the time they met us and expressed their glee that the scooter mystery was solved; when they met us the “scooter people”. Little Beast was her trail name as she weighed in at around 90 pounds but had carried a 50 pound pack 300 miles at this point.