So far...

After my health woes of the last 12 months, once I was fully healed by May, I started on the long and arduous road back to running.  I don't run with anyone anymore as all my former running buddies have moved away or in one instance, she doesn't return my calls. Life moves on, friends fall away.

I created a plan--run 3 times a week, paying close attention to distance (low mileage) and pace (plodding). Most running plans fail because of unrealistic goals, and I am closer to 70 than 60.

I started with a 1/2 mile per jog for two weeks, then kicked it up to 3/4 miles per run for two weeks with a "long" run of a mile. By June I had pushed past the I'm-going-to-die feeling each run and although my pace remained a mere plod, I found a "2d wind" late in runs, and I was up to a mile each run.  Most importantly I was still at it. 

I added a little weight lifting before and after and I stretched prior and subsequent to each run, a significant factor that I believe has kept me injury free so far. 

July brought further progress, 3 miles per run with a long run of 4 miles. I recently hit a weekly total of 10 miles. 

Unfortunately I developed a mystery calf injury last week and although I I felt like a sloth, I took the full week off and it healed. Monday I plodded two miles and I intend to do 3 miles my next run. So far so good.

I'm coming back

What a year. A year ago I developed a hole in the vision in my right eye and I had emergency surgery the next day for a torn retina, the first of four surgeries in the past year that saved my sight in that eye. 

The worst was when the first surgery failed and the surgeon filled my eye with silicon the next week (surgery # 2) and for 5 months I went about with a foreign substance in a major organ (my eye) and don't think my body didn't know every minute of every day that there was something foreign in it that it couldn't expel. But surgery # 3 took the oil out, except for floating residual particles (that I call my asteroid belt) that lazily cross my vision in a flurry and I wonder if a lifetime of this will eventually drive me nuts. In other words, it seems as if often there are flies buzzing about on the periphery of my vision, except that they aren't there, unless it's that one in a thousand that actually is there. 

This caused me not to run till my eye was fully healed, which I determined to be a month after my fourth and last eye operation in April. Meanwhile I put on dozens of pounds in my lethargy. (Any workout can strain the eye, in my feeling. And my vision had (has) flaws in it from the damage, especially in depth perception.)  

In May I started coming back, running three times a week beginning with runs of 1/2 mile at a time that first week. I couldn't make the entire two laps around the track that first time out without having to walk. Last week I suffered a slight setback in my routine, but I have come back from that. More to come later.

Grand Theft Auto

Sometimes when I have trouble sleeping in my house during the heat season (I have no central air), I take a walk in the cool of the night.  Last night I woke up in a drenched bed and I took my accumulated aluminum cans to the recycle barrel on Main Street around the corner.

As I was pouring the cans into the recycle bin I heard a car being cranked over repeatedly.  At 3:30 in the morning in a darkened business district with no one else around.

I took a few steps and stood on the sidewalk watching someone inside a darkened car in the used car lot turning the engine over, and then when it caught the car made a loud screeching sound, shuddered and the engine killed.   Again and again this process was repeated

I thought my standing 60 feet away in the dim glow of the street lights would induce the driver in the dark car to emerge to sheepishly explain himself, or else run away, especially since the business was completely dark and shuttered for the night.  Not so, he just kept repeating the suspicious process.

The former cop in me, 30 years dormant but already jarred awake by the dissonant car engine noise in the night, I thought briefly about striding up to the car in the lot and asking the driver what the hell he thought he was doing.  After all, maybe it was a repo, or an owner who had returned to get his car at that hour, perhaps by arrangement.

But in the olden days (cops always take action, it's their job to do so) I would have had two crucial advantages: a pistol on my hip and a radio nearby in my car, connected to a wide network of swift support.  This was a dangerous course for a mere civilian out alone in the dark encountering a possibly criminal situation with no nearby apparent support.

Ruing that I am so old as to not view my cell phone as an essential appendage of my body to be taken with me at absolutely all times (it was sitting on my dining room table), I turned and started walking briskly home, a two-minute walk.  As I rounded the corner to gain my residential street, I heard the noisy engine finally catch and with a loud vroom, it pulled out of the lot onto the street and I looked back to see it peeling off EB on Main Street at a high speed, completely without lights.

I ran the rest of the way back home and dialed the Falls Church police.  Thus began a charade, a caricature of civilian interaction with police that informs us why the public doesn't readily interact with the police.

A female answered on the fourth ring and the conversation, while not verbatim, went something like this as well as I remember it 24 hours later.

"Hello?"

"Is this the Falls Church police?"

"Yes, how can I help you?"

"I just saw a very suspicious occurrence at the Falls Church Auto used car lot on Broad [Main] Street one minute ago, a person started up a darkened car in the lot and went speeding off eastbound on Broad Street at a high rate of speed with no lights on."

"Sir, what are you saying?"

"I think a car might have been stolen from the used car lot at Falls Church Auto just a minute ago and it was headed EB on Broad Street without lights a minute ago."

"Where is Falls Church Auto?"

"It's on Broad Street across from the car wash."

"Which car wash is that?"

"It's right where the bicycle bridge on the W&OD Trail crosses over Broad Street."

"What part of town is that?"

"You're not familiar with Falls Church, are you?"

"What side of town is this lot in?"

"It's right next to the Car Title Loan storefront, and Smokey's garage service station.  It's directly across the street from the old Chevy Chase Bank branch, which turned into a Capital One branch, which is closed now."

"Do you know its address?"

"No."

"And the car left on Broad Street?"

"Yes, EB."

"What kind of car was it?"

"I don't know, it was dark.  It was a dark sedan.  It had a pennant flag on the roof and a promotional front plate."

"A what?"

"A cloth banner flying on the roof and a promotional front plate."

"What's a promotional front plate?"

"It wasn't an ordinary front tag, it contained an advertisement for the used car lot on the front plate."

"Did you see the license plate or get a license number?"

"No, it was too dark, but I could see that it was a novelty front tag."

"What is your name"

"Peter Lamberton."

"How do you spell that?"

"Like it sounds.  L-A-M-B-E-R-T-O-N."

"What's your phone number?"

[Feeling crucial minutes slipping away!]

"Isn't my number on your caller ID?"

"We just want to confirm it.  Does it end in 4**4?"

"Yes."

"Can you hold for a minute?"

"Yes."

After three minutes of being on hold, I hung up.  There was no further communication with the local police.

Today I stopped in at Falls Church Auto.  After all, I have bought two cars from that business, and sold two cars to it.

There I heard a sad tale of woe, that a classic car with only 15,000 miles on it, already pre-sold to a buyer in France and being prepared for him, had been stolen off the lot at 3;30 that morning.  The police received a call from a citizen at that time and had responded by 3:48 am and had found an open window at the business and left a note.  They came back at 9:30 am, learned of the theft and took the report.  They didn't have any information on who the informant was.

At the business, I learned that a key for the car was missing, and that it was a manual transmission and that the emergency brake had been locked down tightly, both of which would explain why the car had been catching, shuddering with a screech of metal on metal and quitting if the thief was not fully conversant with a stick shift or knew that the emergency brake was tightly engaged.  I wish I could have done more to have averted this theft because it is a small business and I like the people there.

Climate change, anyone?

June was the hottest month on record.  July is on pace to be the hottest month yet again.

This week it has, with the heat index, seemed like 110 degrees outside.  My bedroom has become my living cocoon in the house because it has a window air-conditioning unit..  Using the rest of the house, I sit at the dining room table as much as possible, next to a cooling fan.

To go outside is to instantly break out in a sweat.  I took a 3-mile walk the other day on the Mt. Vernon Trail instead of running that afternoon.

I go out with friends for lunch in restaurants which, obviously, have air-conditioning.  Pastrami sandwiches, chili, mussels, it's all good.

50 years ago today...

I remember exactly fifty years ago today, the wonder of observing live (on TV) the first setting of a human foot on a foreign body in space over 270,000 miles from Earth.  Apollo 11 had settled down safely on the moon's surface a short while earlier (I think Neil Armstrong had only a few seconds of extra rocket fuel left aboard the Eagle when he picked a boulder free landing site to land upon, before he started using the reserve committed to lifting off again).  That was a wonder in itself but when, listening that evening (on Nantucket) to the pinging of the transmission sounds from the moon on the live TV shot and watching from a remote camera shot the awkward, jerky-jerky descent of the fully space-suited Armstrong down the pod's short ladder to step onto the moon's surface, that was an incredible few seconds.

Awe inspiring.  What an American achievement, an incredible undertaking equal to Operation Overlord or the Manhattan Project, a difficult enterprise brilliantly executed that shouted out the greatness of America which has never dimmed from that day.  (MAGA. What cockamamie horse shit.)

Even Armstrong's corny, scripted words, sexist though they were even then, were thrilling to hear in the moment.  "A small step for man.  A giant leap for mankind."

I went out on the side porch and looked at the moon, brilliant in the dark, clear, sky.  I could have stood in the back yard and observed it rhapsodically for as long as I cared to but I wanted to be closer to it in the thrill of the moment so I jumped up, grabbed the gutter and pulled myself up to the roofline and hung on it for a minute, a few feet nearer to the celestial orb as I observed it in wonderment, a new destiny which humankind had claimed that night in America.

Call the Zombie Patrol for a Pickup

Like a zombie lurching through a heat-stifled town, as if apocalyptic fires were burning everywhere adding to the heat, I plodded four miles this morning as the heat of the day built up rapidly.  The hottest June on record last month, and July is headed for another heat record.  With high temperature and excessive humidity, it's slated to feel like 110 degrees later today here in DC.

I went 3.2 miles early on Wednesday, another scorching day where it felt like 100 degrees when the heat built up.  I finished my run then totally drenched and feeling lightheaded and slightly sick, just like today, and I spent the rest of that day in my house recovering from the enervating effort.  I feel better today, so maybe I'm becoming acclimated to the sapping heat.

I feel good about my running right now.  I was out of running for the last two years while I recovered from an achilles strain and then was felled by a retina tear which required four surgeries to heal and nearly took my sight in that eye.  My last surgery was in early April and on May 1st I started running as I was fully healed.  Coming back was (is) slow and hard; my first day I targeted running a mere half a mile, slowly, and I had to walk the second half of that "run."

But I have been keeping at it, running three times a week, stretching my calfs and achilles before and after each run assiduously, which I never used to do, and slowly building up the mileage, first a half mile, then three quarters of a mile, then a mile, now I'm up to three-mile runs each time, albeit very slow and plodding, with today's long run for the week of four miles.  Whoot, I cracked double digits after two and a half months with ten miles for the week.  It's paltry progress but I'm keeping at it, taking it slow and steady, and I no longer feel like I'm going to die each run.

Sorry I missed your birthday earlier this month . . . .

Hey birthday boy!  Sorry I missed your birthday earlier this month, but I was busy driving around towns in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia on a big car trip for my vacation.

I forgive you for almost backing over me years ago, if that was you dating my ex-wife last decade, in your big jeep with its ever present Life Is Good spare tire cover.  After all, you are now married to her and I wish you all the luck in the world; if the scales ever fall from your eyes you will need it.

There is one psychological condition you should research, that of the covert narcissist.  Just sayin'.

But I am sorry to say that you revealed to me a hard, inhuman side to your character, in my opinion, that puts you in proper company in your latest marriage.  You see, I haven't had a word of communication from any of my three children in over a decade and have repeatedly tried to ascertain if they are well or indeed, even alive.

The last time I saw the mother of my children on a public street in Arlington, very near where I live, I happened to drive by while coming home from work and you, an adult man and woman, some teenagers and a German Shepherd were on a walk with her on the public sidewalk and I parked and walked past the large group and asked her, regarding each of my three children, five questions for each that represent the bare minimum that any parent would tell another parent, no matter how estranged or outlandishly inimical that person was to the other.  After all, I love my children and worry about their wellbeing and you, since you were there, could have at any time during that single minute, allayed my fears by interjecting, as any human being would to another, that my three children are well, or not well because of [this happenstance].

After all, you obviously know them all; my youngest son speciously referred to you as "Dad" in his marriage book, my middle child has used your address as his address, I believe, and my oldest son has parked his vehicle for extended periods outside your abode and does or has, I think, lived there or caretaken your dwelling.  The five basic questions of anxious parents?

Is he alive. Is he well. Is he married.  Does he have children.  Where does he live.

Your current wife has had this pressed-lip, fallacious and self-serving (to feed her implacable, absurdly oversized rage against the father of her children) narrative to answer my former written inquiries about my children, limited though they were, of:  The children will give you any information they see fit to.  This is an outlandish wild-eyed attitude of parenthood that represents the fringe far end of the PAS (Parental Alienation Syndrome) spectrum, a Western phenomenon fueled by the Mother Knows Best bias of domestic law courts that Sharon played masterfully with her coterie of divorce lawyers and "professionals" until the Arlington court and Appellate courts woke up to her harassing litigiousness, using our minor children as her lawsuit cut-outs, and penalized her almost $50,000 for it.

I don't agree with her parenthood-wrecking attitude and actions but I understand them because she is, in my opinion, a covert narcissist and they only think of themselves.  Your attitude I don't understand, unless you are a terribly cowed husband or you didn't want to, in fact, impart terrible, distressing information to me in a brief interlude.

Indeed, are they all alive?  Well?

There was no answer from her to any of my five simple questions about each one's current well-being (see above).  Nor from you.

A belated happy birthday, Jim.  Life is good, eh?

My summer vacation

Nothing could compare to being in Normandy in April and treading upon the very beaches where giant men from America, Britain and Canada stormed ashore on June 6, 1944 and thrust a dagger into the heart of Nazi Germany.  But my seven-day 2500-mile car trip through five states had its salient moments, most notably in visiting with my sister and her family in Corolla, NC, visiting with my college roommate in Vandemere, NC, and visiting with my best friend in ninth grade at Staten Island Academy before I went off to boarding school. (My nephew, my sister, and my friend from CU.)

When I visit the south, I like locating the town square and seeing its usual statue of a Rebel sentry, and reading that town's notion of why the war was fought on its base, because of my interest in the Civil War.  I do the same thing in northern towns.  (Ellaville's Rebel sentinel, still on duty.)

The major-league baseball game I saw in Atlanta's new baseball stadium in a Cobb County suburb far from downtown was fun, and I was glad to see a Bryce Harper home run, but that park isn't in the hallowed spirit of hoary baseball because it has no connection to Atlanta anymore, it's just a suburbanite's destination site for an evening of expensive entertainment.  What kept me going alone in my car during the hours of driving wasn't Siri giving me often wrong directions as I tooled along the highways but my Sirius radio subscription, listening to rock and roll songs on the Classic Vinyl station, till I discovered the same songs would be played each day at about the same time, so I switched over to the Comedy Channel which didn't suffer from day after repetition.  (Hammerin' Hank's statue is inside SunTrust Park, you'll have to get there by car, pay for parking and purchase a ticket that can be displayed on your hand-held device to see it.)

The best part of my vacation, beside seeing people dear to me, was my trip to the site of the Andersonville Civil War POW camp, because it was so haunting to be in a place with so many displaced souls (thousands of Union soldiers perished there) and at a place where heroes, giant men, trod.  I also liked visiting the D-Day Memorial and Appomattox in Virginia, again because I was following the path of giant men who altered history not too long ago.  (A beautiful sunrise in NC.)

Virginia

And so my seven day car trip came to an end after my last stop at...Appomattox, the tiny hamlet where the Civil War came to an end and America was assured to be a world superpower and free.  Lee signed the surrender terms on the afternoon of April 9, 1865, men died on both sides on the morning of the ninth.  (The Confederate Cemetery at Appomattox; it has an unknown Union soldier buried there also with an American flag at his gravesite.)

The great war was over and the southern men made their way south to return home in the best way they could, the trek of the vanquished.  But they soon set about terrorizing the freedmen of their communities and instituted another century of slave-like Jim Crow dominance before federal power finally broke to pieces the ways of the past.  (The Civil War ended here, at the McLean Hose behind me.)

In wandering about the McLean house yard, in which the armistice was signed in its parlor, where the slave quarters were behind the main house, the obscene difference between the single room with loft shack out back and the mass'a's 3-storey house was stark.  A South American couple was examining the placards describing the conditions of lifetime enforced servitude and I could sense their disapprobation and I felt embarrassed to be an American.  (The big house and the shack in back.)

But slavery was abolished there at Appomattox, in effect, and the great country was bound up to heal from its divisions.  A century and a half later, after yet another great war and many, many little ones, are we better now?  (The slave quarters at the McLean House.)

Bedford

On the last day of my week-long car trip I was in Virginia and went to two reverential sites in south central Virginia (plus the UVA campus where two of my children were born and I earned a law degree in my late-thirties) that defined our country.  The first was Bedford, a small farming community of 2500 souls where unknown to its inhabitants, in a terrible half-hour on Omaha Beach in Normandy on June 6, 1944, D-Day, twenty of their sons were cut down in the first wave of the Allied assault on Hitler's Fortress Europa.  It would be a full month before the residents of this sleepy town would know, in three terrible days in July when the War Department released casualty lists from the battle and sent telegrams to the affected families that their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers had been among the 80% carnage rate of the first wave on that beach during the assault, the true cost of our freedom.

That was a different generation, a breed hardened as children who often went hungry during the Great Depression where 25% of Americans were out of work, and payment for services and goods were done in a barter economy.  My grandfather in Colorado, a dentist, took chickens in payment for dental work in his small farming community there, Doc Fox, and for all I know and highly suspect, no payment at all, only a promise, very often fulfilled later, or not.

This is the America I love.  When I was a young boy, practically everyone's household had a veteran of WW2, tightlipped, many having seen the elephant, like my father did in the Pacific War, learning there in the crucible that having to depend unthinkingly and instantaneously upon boys from Brooklyn, Birmingham, Boise and Bath for their very survival, that American greatness depended upon cooperation with all other Americans who were there and learned the same lesson, leaving out the lunatic fringe who never went which unfortunately, we see influential in a commanding way as "victims" today.

Heroes, those twenty two or more men from Bedford, (more Bedford Boys died during the Bocage Campaign in Normandy).  The National D-Day Memorial is there in Bedford, symbolizing American greatness, belying the notion of American Carnage as espoused recently by people who never knew or forgot our greatness.

Chattanooga

On the penultimate day of my 2500 mile car trip through five states, I toured the Civil War battlefield of Chickamauga in Georgia, where in September 1863, Union General George Thomas, a Virginian, earned the permanent sobriquet of The Rock Of Chickamauga when he saved the Union army from destruction with a heroic stand upon Snodgrass Hill a few miles outside of Chattanooga after the army was sent reeling in disarray during the battle when a gap inadvertently, due to a confusing set of order, opened in its battle line.  Thomas organized a defensive line among disorganized fleeing troops upon the high ground in the background of the picture below and held the position until nightfall, when the army retired to Chattanooga where it was besieged by the Rebel army.

The dominant position in the siege of Chattanooga was on lookout Mountain in Georgia, just south of the city, where Rebel artillery made the Yankee position below practically untenable.  However, U.S. Grant was appointed commander of the Union army in Chattanooga, and with forces he brought with him from his own army which had just captured Vicksburg, he drove the Rebels away in the Battle Above The Clouds on Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain in November 1863, thus opening up the Deep South to the Union invasion which occurred the next spring with General William Sherman's army's march through Georgia to Atlanta.

The picture below taken from downtown Chattanooga shows how Lookout Mountain dominates the landscape.  In the city I also visited the National Cemetery and stopped at a few jazz sites before I headed northwest through central Tennessee to return to Virginia.

Along the way I saw a nice rainbow, although it signified encountering rain on the drive.  The next day I wished to see a couple of landmark sites in Virginia before I returned home.

Dalton

Leaving Andersonville National Historical Park in central Georgia mid-afternoon on the Fourth, I drove west across Georgia on Highway 26 before turning north on Interstate 85/75 to drive to the Tennessee border so I could tour the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Civil War battle sites the next day.  At Ellaville on the highway to the west I came across a Rebel sentry guarding a raft of Amrrican flags planted in the city square for the Fourth.

A few miles further west I stopped at the town hall square in Buena Vista to read the myriad monuments on its grounds. One ballyhooed the "Poet and Confederate Hero, author of the Great Poem 'All Quiet on The Potomac Tonight'"Thaddeus Oliver, who died in 1864 during the war at age 38, and another was proudly dedicated by the Marion County High School class of 1971, the first "intergrated" class as mandated by federal legislation.

Far north in Dalton I encountered a statue of Confederate General Joseph Johnston downtown, who harassed Sherman's army on its drive from Chattanooga to Atlanta, and then again after Sherman's March to the Sea that made Georgia howl and, basically, made the morally bankrupt Confederacy lose the war as the Union eastern armies manned the trenches outside of Richmond and Petersburg.

On the top of a hill just west of downtown Dalton was a cemetery with a small, lonely part enclosed as the Confederate Cemetery, with a Rebel sentinel watching over 425 graves of Confederate soldiers and four unknown Union soldiers, victims of nearby battles.  Meanwhile at the Whitaker County Courthouse, acres of American flags were planted on its lawn and along the main avenue, with no tanks in evidence as the proud banners waved gently in the cooling breeze.

Andersonville

Rather than hang around the District on the Fourth to listen to an oversized kindergartener give his version of the Revolutionary War, with real tanks as props, I left Atlanta the morning after I saw a ballgame at the Braves' new ballpark the evening before and drove to Andersonville, Georgia, to pay my respects to the thousands of Union POWs buried at the National Cemetery there, on the grounds of the notorious Andersonville Prisoner of War camp during the Civil War.  33,000 POWS were kept there within the wooden stockade during the last year of the war, without shelter from the elements and with little food and foul water, and 13,000 died, and many of the rest including, I think, a relative of mine, suffered from ailments because of their captivity there for the remainder of their reduced lifespan.  (33,000 men occupied this field, within a wooden palisade, without shelter and scant food, drinking the polluted water trickling trough the ravine cutting across the field, downriver from the Rebel guards' camp, with only the clothes they arrived with.)

The open-air prison contained no officers, only non-coms, and military order quickly broke down and a hideous lawlessness reigned inside the camp, perpetrated by the Raiders, a gang essentially that preyed upon individual soldiers or prison newcomers who had not yet formed bonds with anyone, robbing, beating and killing them.  These predators were opposed by the formation of a reprisal gang called the Regulators who identified the lot and especially the ringleaders and reported on them to the camp commandant, Major Henry Wirz (who was the only Confederate tried and executed after the war as a war criminal).  (The six predatory gang leaders within the prison camp were hanged by their peers after a trial and buried apart from the thousands upon thousands of Union soldiers who perished from the inhumane conditions within the POW camp.)

Wirz arrested the identified Raiders, kept them apart from the main population while a military tribunal made up of inmates inside the prison put them on trial and delivered the six ringleaders back to the prisoners after a sentence of death by hanging was imposed upon them by their peers, who hanged them inside the prison on July 11, 1864.  A raider leader named Patrick Delaney uttered his last words, "I would rather be hanged than to live the way most prisoners have to live."  (The Raiders are hanged for their crimes.)

The six executed men were buried apart from the rest of the Union men in the burial grounds.  Today a Union sentry stands vigilant guard over the thousands of men within the cemetery who gave their last full measure of devotion to the freedom we enjoy, for now.  (Ever faithful to democracy, despite the individual cost.)

Georgia

On the fourth day of my car trip, I left behind the kind generosity of my two long-time friends who played host to me the three previous nights and headed out towards Atlanta so I could see a ball game at the Braves' new suburban baseball park they plunked down in the far northwestern suburbs of the Atlanta metro area, far, far from downtown with no public transportation there to get there except by car driving up the beltway so they could better serve who they perceive as their clients, white suburbanites.  Good luck going forward on tat one, it was a nightmare in honking, slow traffic on Atlanta's Interstate system to get there, trying to make split level decisions as to which fork in the multilane roadways to take as Siri gave out vague directions on these similar-to-wet-spaghetti-strewn-out-on-a-table exits that came up multiple times as I tried to work my way to this new stadium that couldn't be seen from any roadway.  (The Battery outside SunTrust Park.)

I made it, however, and then faced my next new-age challenge, gaining admittance using the phantom ticket I'd bought online without its physical presence like a ticket I could have picked up at the Will Call window.  Nope, that option was "unavailable" even while it cost $5 more (the stadium does have a Will Call window) and once I purchased the ticket I was directed to Ticketmaster so I could create an account and bring up the ticket's QR image, whatever that is, on  my "handheld device" to show the ticket taker. Well, that didn't work because I got locked out of Ticketmaster when I couldn't enter my Apple ID and password (?!) and I was just SOL.  Grr.  (A statue outside the Braves' new park of the legendary Warren Spahn, a figure whose pitching heyday was in Milwaukee, bespeaking of the Braves' longstanding ties till now to three cities, Boston, Milwaukee and Atlanta.)

I got in after 30 minutes in the "Ticket Resolution" office while a 30-something bored park employee hardly listened to my I'm-an-old-guy-with-no-kids spiel while she poked my I-phone with her index finger and voila, suddenly brought up my ticket's bar code.  Inside SunTrust Park, the sight lines were good everywhere and passage around all aspects of the park was easily gained, but it's a stadium totally removed from anything Atlanta and it might as well be plunked down in Any Suburb, USA.  It's strictly a money-maker as the team obtained generous terms from Cobb County, brought their partners in to develop "The Battery" in the stadium's immediate environs with restaurants, hotels and business parks, and control the parking revenues at this drive-only park.  (My $11 dinner at the ballpark, it was quite good.)

The Braves beat the Phillies 9-2, Bryce Harper, recently of the Washington Nationals, hit a home run and after a night at a nearby Motel 6 ($66.13) and drove away the next morning to spend July 4th at the Andersonville Civil War POW camp to reflect upon true heroes of our country at the National Cemetery there rather than listen to some BS history lesson from a colossal and dangerous fool flanked by tanks on the National Mall.  I won't ever be back to see a game at the Atlanta' Braves SunTrust Park, it''s a nice park but so totally outside the fabric of venerable baseball that it's not appealing to me in the least.  (The view from SunTrust Park, of corporate America,)

South Carolina

On the 3d day of my vacation, I arose early in Vandemere, North Carolina, to capture the sunrise, then headed out to drive to Charleston, South Carolina, to visit a friend from high school who had recently moved there.  Enroute, I stopped in at a seaport town for lunch at the Trolley Stop in search of the perfect hot dog in North Carolina; a quest that was stymied in January because the restaurant was closed that day when I was in that town with my host of the prior two nights, Jimmy, who was looking around for a house to buy.

Entering South Carolina I drove by Myrtle Beach and could see its carnival atmosphere from the roadway, a ferris wheel loomed on one side and King Kong swung from a building on the other side.  Reaching Charleston, I met my high school friend Lew, and we toured some nearby beaches that were prominent in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.

Then we had dinner at the Poe Tavern on the main street of the beachfront community.  Poe was a soldier stationed in Charleston when he was in the service so the community has an affinity for this Baltimore native.

Getting up early the next morning, I ran 3 miles in the coolness of the predawn hour and then headed out for Atlanta by driving over the very unique-looking Cooper Rive Bridge.  I had to make a baseball game that evening at the Braves' new stadium in the far northwestern suburbs of Atlanta, SunTrust Park, one of two existing major league venues at which I have never seen a baseball game (new Yankee Stadium in the other park).

Corolla

On the first full day of my summer vacation, I arose early to watch the sunrise from the Vandemere town dock.  Then my host Jimmy and I took the free ferry across the Pamlico River and drove up to Corolla on the very northern tip of the Outer Banks to visit my sister who was vacationing there with her family.

I took a dip in the ocean.  There are wicked currents at play on the beach there and the surf was up so being in the water was a bit of an adventure.

Then we visited the brick Currituck Lighthouse.  For $10, you can climb its 220 steps.

We missed the last Pamlico River ferry so we had to drive the long way around throughWashington, North Carolina (little Washington, they call it) to get back to Vandemere.  After a dinner of a fried flounder sandwich ($2.99 at a local Stop 'n Go) I retired because I had to get up early the next day to drive to Atlanta to see a Braves game at the new SunTrust baseball stadium in Atlanta's northwestern suburbs, far, far from downtown and not even remotely served by MARTA.

North Carolina

I went away for my summer vacation, a 2500-mile car trip in seven days, driving through North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia to see people and things. I went on average 357 miles a day, an exhausting daily regieme but I saw and did things that I have been meaning to see or do for a long time.

Primarily, I wanted to get away from the District over the July Fourth week before our president took over that celebration of our nation's birth and turned it into a military hardware show (look at my tanks!) and further displayed his colossal ignorance (the Continental Army captured all the airports in our region, a strategy that led to us winning the Revolutionary War, during which it soundly defeated the British on the ramparts of Fort McHenry).  I certainly didn't want to stick around to see the despicable Proud Boys strut around the National Mall in support of their reprehensible idol or hear the see-no-evil nonsense spewing forth from the moronic brains of the cult-leader's base.

I started off by driving to Vandemere, North Carolina, to stay for a couple of days with my college roommate, Jimmy Sherwood.  He had recently visited me in Falls Church and I wanted to return the gesture.

Life in Vandemere, a dirt-poor small town on North Carolina's Inner Banks, is simpler than up here in DC--taxes are low, government pensions aren't taxed by the state, you can go around half naked and barefoot and there are no policemen around anywhere to watch out for or to tell you what you can't do.  When I got there after a seven hour drive, I hung out with Jimmy on his porch in his house on stilts overlooking his wrecked dock, a casualty of hurricanes Irene and Florence, and we ate a po' boys' dinner of chicken parts, mustard greens and taters, purchased from the Piggly Wiggly for under $2 total.