Page 6 of 6
Charlotte, North Carolina
The south was such a blast with firewater mind, firewater soul
We’re now at the Bechtler Museum in downtown (really Uptown) Charlotte, a small well designed museum by Mario Botta with a small respectable collection of generally modern art and a crazy ass mirrored Thunderbird out front. What’s not to love?
While I could truly care less about NASCAR, I still enjoyed the well done NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, North Carolina, a museum with a lot of interactive exhibits and (as predicted) a very, very small diversity exhibit.
Forty minutes north of Charlotte is the free to visit Penske garage, where you can watch Penske workers slowly attend to various cars on a late Friday afternoon. The Penske garage was very nice and part of a whole group of garage tours and NASCAR sights throughout the greater Charlotte region, although most seemed to be on the North Carolina side.
Raleigh is North Carolina’s State Capitol, and if there’s a state capitol to see, you know I’m going to stop by to see it. Here they have three statues of native North Carolinian US Presidents: James K Polk, Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johnson. It’s honestly refreshing to see a US Federal tribute out front in a southern state and not an uncomfortable Civil War apologist monument. Maybe that one is on the other side.
I was in the American South to attend my cousin’s wedding in Greenville, South Carolina, an interesting city that seems a bit out of place sometimes. This is an iPhone ProHDR photo, or, to be more accurate, photos. Each ProHDR takes and merges several photos at once, which is how you get those ghost people on the right. Then I use an app called Autostitch to combine those ProHDR photos into a panorama, which explains why some things (like the handrail) doesn’t quite line up right. And why the pride of Greenville, the Liberty Bridge at Falls Park on the Reedy, looks all weird and crooked.
We’re continuing our way down south at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta, officially the world's largest (the Guinness Book of World Record people were there just last week) and the only aquarium in the Western Hemisphere that has whale sharks (not pictured), a definite draw for anyone who likes to see massive wacky looking fish.
I actually was at the Atlanta Summer Olympics in 1996- I attended a bunch of mostly weirder second tier sports- and arrived in Atlanta the morning after the bombing in Centennial Park. By the time it reopened, the security entering was (for the time) crazy And visiting the park during the games was nothing like it is now. It was busy, there were temporary structures everywhere, and you couldn’t even get to these fountains. Today, 14 years and three and a half summer olympics later, you can walk right up anytime you want.
Work brought me next to Manassas, Virginia where afterwards I still had some daylight, and I used some of that time to see the place that put Manassas on the map. The battlefield where the first Civil War battle occurred took place at Bull Run in Manassas, a still evocative battlefield where the South may have won the battle but eventually still lost the war.
This is SOM's Burj Khalifa (the world's tallest building) made entirely of Legos, on display at the always awesome National Building Museum near Judiciary Square in Washington DC. The tower was part if an exhibit (at scale) that included other large skyscrapers and (for a few minutes) a little action.
A small boy (maybe about 4) got a little too close to the Gateway Arch Lego model, touched it, broke it (collapsing the center of the arch) and then ran like hell out of the exhibit. After the woman at the exhibit called security, she told me that this was the third time that tragedy had befallen the Lego Gateway Arch and she feared it wouldn't be the last.
This is the Battleship Wisconsin in downtown Norfolk, Virginia, anchored right next to Nauticus, a bizarre museum that doesn't know what it wants to be. Some of the museum was about historic Norfolk, some of it was interactive for no reason, some of it was about the NOAA (!) and there was a shark exhibit. Finally a museum I guess for the history loving, weather enthusiast shark fan.
And so, after an immense, 23 page slideshow and after we’ve been to Multnomah Falls, Vancouver, Chattanooga, Asheville, Oklahoma City, White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns, Savannah, Charleston, Seaside, Edmonton, Washington DC, Madison, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Trois-Riveres, Baton Rouge, the Sault, Columbus, San Antonio, Birmingham, Nashville, Houston, Chicago, Montreal, Milwaukee, North Dakota, Bar Harbor, Portland Oregon, Portland Maine, Plano, Oak Park, Winnipeg, Seattle, the Great Smoky Mountains, Ottawa, Bingham Canyon, Salt Lake City, Sequoia Kings Canyon, Assateague, Kansas City, Boise, Craters of the Moon, Minneapolis, Garrison, Buffalo, Charlotte, Raleigh, Greenville, Atlanta and Manassas, we’re finally ending things right here on a gray December day in Norfolk, already looking forward to 2011 and wherever we end up next.
