We really enjoyed visiting the Muhammad Ali Center in downtown Louisville. I was impressed how the center handled all aspects of Ali’s career–boxer, activist, humanitarian–in a straightforward, warts-and-all manner. You hear him calling white people `devils’; you also hear him say that a 60 year old man who thinks the same things that he did …
Well, it was a cave, and it was mammoth. We took the short tour, and we were sated. Lots like this. The Park Ranger who guided the tour was very good. Later we visited Lincoln’s birthplace at Sinking Springs, most memorable for a majestic temple which contains a replica of the humble log cabin where …
West Virginia, astonishingly vertical, rises like a wall nearly everywhere but right in front of you. The highways cut like ribbons through the hills, while below grade, little communities huddle in the hollers. We got off the highway and followed a thin road to Matewan (that’s MATE-wan), a coal and railroad town. Now kind of …
View from our hotel balcony.
That’s pronounced Curry.
At Plymouth, I reached the site of William Cushing‘s great triumph, the place where he sank the CSS Albemarle with a manual torpedo, a perfectly ridiculous offensive weapon. At a lovely little museum devoted to the event and to the Albemarle‘s earlier triumphs and to otherCivil War events in Plymouth, I met some wonderful people, …
From most of what I saw, North Carolina is a long series of two-lane blacktops bracketed by fields of weeds. I don’t know why people object to immigrants coming to America; there seems to be ample room for them in North Carolina. But there were some things to see: a place called Tarheel Barbecue, where, …
Intermittent deluges blinded on the endless two-lane blacktops of northern North Carolina.
Went for a pleasant three hour cruise around Hampton Roads. The tour info was a little lighter than I had hoped, but on the bright side, it was nice to spend a cool and breezy three hours on the water (when it was hot and stiflingly humid on lsnd.) We saw many US warships tied …
The Maritime Museum at Newport News is just splendid. The museum has a lot of terrific artifacts, including the pricelss eafle figurehead from the USS Lancaster, and a whole exhibit on Nelson and his battles at Copenhagen, the Nile and Trafalgar. The highlight is the the terrific exhibit on the Monitor and the Virginia, including …