Wilmington NC Trip

Another short summer trip, another quick post. A few pictures are on Flickr.

We went down to Wilmington NC, on the coast, for a weekend break. The town is definitely a tourist destination but it also seems pretty classy - at least the older part of town by the river, we didn't go down to the beach. The main attractions were seafood and the museum battleship USS North Carolina. We drove in on Friday night and went to an oyster bar and got some oysters and a steamed sampler of everything else, which was delicious.

Saturday morning we headed to the ship. Those who may have previously complained about us visiting other major works of engineering will note that this one is fully set up as a museum and the exhibits are even in English. We showed up early but missed the tour lead by a human being because the group in front of us took the last spot. However, that turned out to be OK - they have an app for phones that gives the tour when walking around - it was a little shaky but it allowed a tour at completely our own speed and we spent about 3.5 hours touring the ship, a non-zero portion of which was assessing how various things had been manufactured because we are professional engineers and also nerds. A much higher percentage of the ship was accessible for touring (and some things even were functional and allowed messing with) than we'd expected and that was great.

Lousy picture of us on the deck. 

The main gun turret periscopes seemed to be fully functional - drawing light in a binocular fashion from lenses about 40 feet apart (one on each side of the turret) and still very clear more than 70 years later with all controls working. 

Despite having several hundred tourists on board, the ship was built for more than 2,000 people to live there. With most of it open for touring, waiting a minute or two would generally get you a space to yourself. We had the bridge of the ship to ourselves for several minutes to spin the wheel and sit in the captain's chair without being judged by five-year-old children waiting to do the same thing. Ana also enjoyed the buttons that made authentically obnoxious noises play over the bridge speakers.

Later on Ana found a kitchen mixer of a size that met her approval. I think it said they made 700 loaves of bread a day on board so they needed some scale.

We both geeked out on the machine shop - the available tooling was very impressive, and of course all of this stuff was made by hand and controlled by hand. Probably represented pretty close to the state of the art at the time and the quality (and scale, power, etc.) is still strong by today's standards.

After touring all morning and into the afternoon, we had a pretty nice seafood lunch followed by a nap followed by a pretty fancy seafood dinner that wasn't even outrageously priced.

We ended up both wanting two of the specials so we got them both, ate half each, and switched. Scallops and lobster both delicious. Sunday it was raining and we didn't feel like messing around, so we just headed home and got some stuff done so we didn't start the week completely behind.

West Virginia Hiking Trip

Quick entry for a quick trip - we've been quite busy with finally completing the move to North Carolina (house in IN is sold and Ana lives here in NC now, finally) and the whole starting a new school of engineering thing, but we found time for a quick overnight hike in West Virginia on the way to a workshop and conference in Ohio. Pictures on Flickr.

We specifically wanted West Virginia because it is home to the darkest skies east of the Mississippi, which is supposed to result in excellent stargazing. We were interested in seeing what the skies looked like with as little light pollution as possible and also getting some hiking in. We found a trail with an easy two-day length (16.5 mi) near Spruce Knob, the center of the dark sky zone. We did some driving and stayed in a hotel the night before the hike so we were sure not to have any difficulty doing the miles we needed to get to the desired campsite.

Arriving at Spruce Knob, it sure looked like the weather reports had been fibbing and we were walking into a storm of some sort, with dark and fast-moving clouds all around. We hung around a little to see if it was just about to start but nothing changed so we set off anyway.

Fears of a storm blew over quickly as the sun came out and we made good time into the backcountry. The trails and campsites showed remarkably little use with lots of grass and plants growing on both - one of the highest beauty / use ratios for all the places we've hiked. Some mud was present from rain in previous days but overall it was fine. Most of the trails had tree coverage but there were also some open sunny meadows which were very scenic.

We were aiming for one of the campsites along the creek at the bottom of the valley, which were supposed to be pretty nice.  The whole area was pretty nice actually. Saw our first other person on a hike right at the end, where he was fly fishing for trout in the creek.  He reported they were going after the lure but he wasn't any good at hooking or netting them. We saw many fish, so I think he was getting plenty of practice. 

The trail crossed the stream several times, which was nice on feet at the end of a day of hiking. Ana found a designated campsite that had seen so little use that the tent site was covered in fluffy grass, which was pretty amazing. It also had great trees for convenient bag-hanging, easy access to water, stone chairs to sit in and more flat stones for food prep. 10/10

Picture from the next morning 

We went to sleep fairly early but set an alarm for later at night to look at the sky. When the alarm went off the skies were clear and we could get a good look - but I have to report that it was not notably more spectacular than looking skyward from home on a mountain in New Hampshire. We'll have to step it up to the darkest place in the continental US in Texas at some point, or do something really spectacular like Gates of the Arctic I guess.

We took it easy getting up and going in the morning since our mileage target was very achievable and we were not under any time pressure. I picked up a really disgusting heavy bag of trash in another meadow that had obviously been left by one of the university groups that had also camped in the area - I usually wouldn't want to cart something that heavy out, at least not if 'out' was far off but with only 6 miles or so to go I sucked it up. At the last stream crossing (the only one with a bridge) we ran into an older couple who asked us how we could possibly fit everything we needed into such small and light packs so we stopped and had a substantial conversation about the costs and benefits of our equipment choices and recommended a few websites for them to peruse later.

We posed with the sign after hiking back up the mountain. The view from the tower was also very nice and the weather while breezy was pleasant.

On our way out, we stopped at a family diner at the base of the mountain (Gateway Diner, if you're in the area) where Ana ordered the fried local trout (apparently didn't get enough in Japan). Trout can be hit or miss, especially at a diner, but apparently the mountains of West Virginia is the place. Very fresh and crispy and overall worth mentioning. Darn cheap, too. We drove up north for a while through some very pretty country before finding a hotel in Morgantown for the night.

We had the whole next day to get to our hotel in Columbus and the drive wasn't that long, so we had a huge leisurely breakfast then stopped at a local winery / distillery named Forks of Cheat (which is apparently the local river or something) near Morgantown on the way. I had kind of expected it to be new and cheesy but they've been there for quite a while and had some impressive products, which, since we weren't flying, we could purchase in some quantity and drive home ourselves. 

From there we continued on to Columbus where we were staying at a pretty fancy hotel downtown that was attached to the convention center hosting the workshop and conference. We had the evening free before the 8 am workshop start so we found a combination bar/movie theater (Studio 35) showing Wonder Woman. It was outstanding. We'd tried to see the movie the previous week and found only sold-out shows locally, even on the third weekend of release and hours before showtime. Seeing it with a not-notably-overpriced pizza and beer with only adults in the movie theater was great - hope more theaters like this open near us. 

After that we had two days of workshop and two days of professional conference. We've been in the field long enough that we know a lot of people and constantly run into them at events like these, which made it probably the most fun conference of this type we've been to yet. The workshop was the Advanced tier of the National Effective Teaching Institute, which focused on best practices and implementation strategies for a lot of the techniques we use already, but there were some interesting twists and sound advice to take things further. The conference was the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition and that was a nice mix of catching up with colleagues, a bit of networking, seeing research presentations, and making research presentations. It also turned out that the food in downtown Columbus is pretty amazing in some cases - we recommend Wolf's Ridge Brewing, which we thought was a standard gastro-pub but was considerably higher quality than that, pushing potentially into our top ten dinners out of all time though we only split some appetizers and a dessert.

Left to right: chive gnocchi (the best $10 I've spent in years), steak tartare, and scallops crudo. I think the scallops were the most impressive - multiple flavors and textures melted together in the mouth. Bonus: work paid for the food (but definitely not the booze)!

Back in NC now teaching a summer class. Living the dream!