A different sort of adventure this week.

First off, I worked locally this week, so I got to catch up on to-do list items that require being home. Like setting up my 18th century camp in the yard, doing maintenance, and getting it ready for the Labor Day weekend Rendezvous. That pretty well filled up the week. My friend Sue came down and we did archery things, too.

On my way home from North Carolina last week, though, I had bought an ostrich egg. So this weekend while my friend Jacki was here, we decided to have scrambled ostrich egg for supper.

They're big eggs.



And hard.






To get into them, you drill a large hole in one end. Then while the whites are slowly leaking out into a measuring cup, you change bits and drill a small hole in the other end.


















The yolk sac's too big to come out the big hole.



















So you poke the yolk and break it up.











Then you blow the rest of the contents out into the bowl.
There's more than a quart of egg here, folks.















We used a cup and a half to make scrambled eggs.
Then I froze the rest in ice cube trays. Each cube equals a normal chicken egg for recipe purposes. I froze 2 trays - 2 dozen cubes.
The ostrich farmer had given me the how-to instructions, and told me that these eggs have no fat, no cholesterol. They do have taste however: they taste amazingly like - eggs.

What's Cool About This Place? part 3

Pictures are up! Yay!

This week took me back to North Carolina.

One Cool Thing about this week's towns was they all had Curves, so I was able to get my workouts back on schedule. This did not interfere with exploration, however. The day I went to Hillsborough, my afternoon was taken up with Curves and going to the bank and walking along Churton Street. Churton's the main street through Hillsborough and boasts interesting little shops and more restaurants per block than anywhere I've ever seen. They all looked like they'd be good, too.

Then I saw a sign "Occaneechi Indian Village". It was late in the day, but now that I have a Palm Treo, I can look things up on the internet from anywhere. I googled Occaneechi Indian Village and didn't find much - certainly not what hours they were open - but I did find mention that a local restaurant, the Flying Fish, had salmon spinach enchiladas. OK, after work Tuesday, Indian Village and enchiladas.





The Indian Village was hard to find. It's not exactly marked with much signage and I sure didn't expect it to be right in town between the courthouse and the doctor's office. But there it was.


There was a sign board explaining about it. There were no people around and it looked as though there'd been no activity or maintenance this year. I hope the folks in charge of it do maintain it - it's a neat site and deserves to be well maintained and visited.


(http://www.northcarolinatravels.com/hillsborough/occaneechi-village.htm )

The enchiladas, by the way, were delicious.

The other town I spent time in on this trip was Gibsonville. What's cool about Gibsonville took no detective work whatsoever. My supermarket was just next door to the Gibsonville Garden Railroad.


This is a model railroad set-up with hills and towns and trestles and all the cool model railroad stuff - oh, heck, look at the pictures.




The trains run twice a week and I sure hope my travels bring me to Gibsonville again at the time they run.





Real fullsize trains run by there also. Alongside the tracks sits an elderly caboose, with wooden steps at each end so one can go inside and look.




Of course, I did. It was interesting, spare and sparse, with everything labeled in stencil lettering.



















Another cool thing about Gibsonville (and they had air conditioning too) is the Deep Set Blue Jewelry Company. This is not your normal jewelry store.


It's a gallery showcasing - was it 15? 20? more? - different artists' work - mostly jewelry makers, also a painter - on consignment. Lots of neat stuff.


And then on the way home I found an ostrich farm - so now I get to try ostrich egg and ostrich burger.

What's Cool About This Place?, part 2

Pictures are uploaded! I did a lot of things so I don't know what worked, but they are up!

2 weeks ago work took me - and my new Palm Treo cellphone - to Hampton & Newport News VA. This was rather wierd: My daughters used to live there and moved away just last year so it felt really really strange to be there and not visit them. Of course I've been there a lot - but always DID visit the kids so I wasn't exploring.


This time, I found - mere miles from their old house - the Sandy Bottom Nature Park. http://www.hampton.gov/sandybottom/ I spent 2 afternoons enjoying the green shade and waterside trails.

Sandy Bottom is reclaimed land. It used to be a place where sand was mined for building roads and garbage was just dumped. Now it's 456 acres of nature in the middle of the Newport News/Hampton traffic.

There's a nature center and gift shop. There are twin lakes with a trail running between. Lots of other walking trails too. You can picnic, fish, rent boats, go camping...

There's a tent campground and 4 cabin tents on platforms which are so much at the lake shore that they almost hang over the water.












It wasn't a work trip that took me to Buena Vista, VA last weekend, but a bike rally at Glen Maury Park. I'd driven past the sign to the park many times previously. Somehow I had pictured a small flat RV park in the middle of town which occasionally hosted a bluegrass festival. Well, it does host a bluegrass festival, but there the accuracy of my vision fades. Glen Maury actually is a quite large park, with lots of green space between its 3 camping areas. Nice pool. Lots of good riding in the area too.Sue and I rode to the Goshen Pass and enjoyed the cool river for a while before returning to camp for dinner.



She rides a Harley Fat Boy; I ride a Honda Elite scooter. Quite a pair. We had a great time.

What's Cool About This Place?

That's the question I try to answer during the non-working hours wherever my job takes me. The past 3 weeks were busy - including the weekends - so I didn't get to do any blogging 'til now. What's cool about Lynchburg is I'm working at home this week and having time to post to blog.
In really hot weather, What's Cool About This Place? has a double meaning. 3 weeks ago I was in North Carolina and it was ungodly hot. What was cool about Goldsboro was the town pool. It closed at 5, and I didn't get there 'til 4:25, but it was a lovely swim nevertheless.

Tuesday afternoon I went to the second part of the assignment, in Roanoke Rapids. What's cool about Roanoke Rapids is the canal path. http://www.roanokecanal.com/ This is a 7-mile hiking trail from the dam on Roanoke Rapids Lake down the Roanoke River to Weldon. The day I went there, the temperature must have been an easy 100 degrees. The Roanoke Canal Museum will have to wait for another time as they were closed. The trail itself, however, was tree-shaded and very inviting as compared with the inside of motorhome. The Escaper had been sitting in a sunny supermarket parking lot all day and it was HOT in there even with the fans running.So I figured I'd walk the trail for a little ways and come back. Right. I'm a big fan of bodies of water and there's a lake at the trail head. There were a few open areas, but most of the trail was shady so I just kept going, past interesting stuff especially the Rochelle Pond, 'til I reached the lake, 1.5 miles and another 1.5 miles back to the motorhome. The folks at work the next day said I was nuts. But it was fun and felt great.









What else was cool about that whole trip was that I could stop and visit friends in Raleigh on the way out and in Lawrenceville VA on the way home. In Lawrenceville, Barb and I took the opportunity to go hear Too Human, http://www.toohumanonline.com/. I was pleased to discover they were playing Lynchburg the next night, so I went to hear them again with my friend Sue.