Monster Mash

The 2nd Annual Banff Mansion Murder Mystery Dinner took place on October 17th this year.  Nathan (a.k.a. Buster Ghost) and I (Di Wrecked, the producer of a haunted house TV series), appeared at the event dressed as our characters.

Buster Ghost including Ectoplasmic Detector (flash light, shoe box, stick, and duct tape) & Ghost Bag

I had to sit between a narcissistic ghost hunter who had seen over two ghosts (Nathan) and a somewhat violent turkey-choking ex-con played by our friend Danny.  For anyone that's never been to a murder mystery dinner before, it starts out with a murder, then, more and more clues pointing to the murderer are disclosed throughout the night and dinner courses are sprinkled in between.

The food was great, most people had WAY too much Witch's Brew, and, fittingly, Danny (a.k.a. Si Coe) was the murderer.  Above he is posing with his prize for best actor of the night with a gun, which coincidentally was not the murder weapon.  He had, of course, used his turkey-choking skills to strangle one of our TV hosts with a belt...in the dungeon.

Witch's Brew + a pinata held up by Danny - this should be good!

Also pictured: Katie (pregnant nun), Migs (host), Lisa (host & maid), & Jossie

Fancy a Bite to Eat?

Since Nathan and I will quickly find ourselves 25 minutes from ANY restaurants this winter and next spring in a city where Subway, Wendy's, McDonald's, and Sonic are 2/3 of the entire restaurant selection, we're throwing dietary caution to the wind and trying to get our fill of our favorite restaurants in Rochester while we still can.

Last night, we checked off Famous Dave's, which is Nathan's favorite. Dave's is still a slim possibility in the future, since there are franchises located within the state borders of North Dakota and Kansas, but apparently BBQ is big in Kansas, so we're hoping for great things in Great Bend, which is 30 minutes from where we'll live.

Larned, KS from space (this makes it look like a decently-sized city! yeehaw!)

Last weekend, we found a coupon to Jenpachi, one of those "Japanese" steakhouses where they cook the food right in front of you. It's not something we'll be able to get any time soon and the food is good, plus you get dinner and a show for the price of dinner.

On the list remaining are The Redwood Room (my favorite restaurant in the entire world), City Cafe, Beetle's and Noodles.

In case you were wondering, it's official, we are pulling up stakes here in Rochester. We met with our real estate agent Friday and plan to put the house up for sale next year. Oh, I'll be back to work occasionally and more importantly to visit people here, but keeping up three residences with a house in the one place we almost never are sounds pretty annoying to me.

Mammoth Cave

We ended our fabulous Tour d'East Coast on a high note at our lowest point: Mammoth Cave National Park.  Mammoth Cave is the earth's longest cave at 367 miles (that we know of).  The park offers a wide variety of cave tours that you need to book early.  I couldn't decide between seeing why it's called Mammoth Cave and seeing splendid stalactites and stalagmites, so we did two tours: the Historic Tour and the Frozen Niagara Tour.

The Historic Tour was probably the most interesting.  Through a dry cave and over two miles, you don't see anything that caves are really famous for (i.e. stalactites), but you are enveloped in the grand scale of the cave.  It starts you in a large room called the Rotunda, since the ceiling is a giant circle and walks you down through parts of the cave that have been used by humans for over 4,000 years.  Along the way you learn about how slaves mined for saltpeter deposits that may have helped us win the War of 1812 by providing us with gunpowder materials after the British cut us off from the gunpowder trade and other interesting tidbits like about the eyeless fish in the river still carving out sections of the cave hundreds of feet below where we walked.  Note: It was proven long ago that the cave does not cure tuberculosis.  Sorry, now you've got to think of another way to beat your consumption.

The Rotunda

The Historic Tour also takes you through a place called "Fat Man's Misery", a very skinny, winding section you have to duck and squeeze through for several minutes.  This was my favorite part and, as our guide pointed out, some of us polish the rock as we go by more than others.

The second tour was short and sweet: Frozen Niagara.  This section of the cave is still being formed by water, so you get the fantastic formations.  You also get cave crickets and spiders, where the other part of the cave could not support life (no water or food)!  A very cool place, if you're ever in the area!

Stalactites

The Frozen Niagara

Cavern Wonders

On Top of Old Smoky

'Old Smoky' from that song (whose lyrics have been replaced in my head by a song about a meatball) is actually Clingmans Dome, the highest point in Great Smoky Mountain National Park (6643 feet).  This is the most-visited park in the country and also the cheapest: free thanks to a stipulation on a $5 million grant from the Rockefellers back when the park was being established.

 

As you can see, the views are amazing.  The trees had already started changing colors so it looked like a beautiful patchwork mosaic from the road through the park.  That is, until the "smoky" part of the Great Smoky Mountains set in.

View of Tennessee from the TN/NC Border

I'm convinced that if there were a supernatural power controlling the weather, that they've got an evil sense of humor.  There is someone that just doesn't want Nathan and I to see any cool mountain ranges.  We've been in the Grand Tetons and yet haven't seen them and Kilimanjaro was always covered in clouds, except for a few mornings during the climb where we got fleeting glimpses of the summit.  So it was with the Smokys.  We saw nothing above a couple thousand feet due to the rain and clouds.  Oh, the drive was still gorgeous because of the trees along the road, but we blew through the park pretty fast.

Creek in Greenbrier

Luckily, one of our friends from Theodore Roosevelt National Park recommended the Ramsey Cascades hike, an 8-mile up-and-back on the Tennessee side of the park.  Despite the rain, we pulled on our hiking boots and set off for what proved to be one of my top five hikes of all time.

This time of year, the trail was lined withe colorful leaves.  You hike up a total of over 2000 feet, but you're constantly walking through streams, over roots and rocks, and through unbelievably gorgeous forest.  Honestly, amazing - here are some pictures:

 

First of Two Precarious Bridges

A creek followed us almost the entire way up the trail

The falls are well-worth the trek and the sore legs you'll have the next day.

Ramsey Cascades

On the way back, I found 5 salamanders.  It turns out the Great Smoky region is the most diverse area in North America in terms of biodiversity, especially when it comes to amphibians.  There are so many salamanders in the park that, combined, they eat more meat in the parks than the 1600 black bears!  They are also incredibly cute.

Can you find two salamanders in this photo?

We stayed the night in our first Bed & Breakfast, the Buckhorn Inn.  I'd gone crazy and splurged a little since this was one of our last nights, so we ended up in a secluded cottage with a living room, jacuzzi, screened porch, and fireplace.  This may in fact be the best place we've ever stayed.  So serene, they had a nature trail, pond with swans (whose names were Penn & Teller), hot chocolate and cookies at all hours, movies, games and a lot more we could have done if we'd only known it would be so great.  Check it out - I highly recommend it over the dirty, loud, cramped, god-awful tourist deserts that are Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge.

Cottage 2 Living Room

Cabins at the Buckhorn Inn

Sami's Married!

My little sister got married this weekend in Wilmington, NC.  She had a gorgeous ceremony & reception!

First things first - I and her friend, Meredith, were in the wedding party, so we threw her a bachelorette bash Thursday night.  I can't give you the details to protect the innocent, but we started with dinner and ended at 2am at a Cowboy Bar called City Limits.  Sam had a great time as you can see form this photo (all others have been destroyed. :)

Samantha holds her own on the mechanical bull!

I also got stopped near the UNCW campus by a mandatory drunk driving checkpoint.  This was pretty fun, since I was probably the only sober person on campus that night.  The cops, however, apparently didn't believe that I hadn't been drinking (I don't think anyone in that town believes that the MN driver's license is real), so I got to take a breathalizer test on the spot!!  Double zeroes, baby.

Sam recently moved to Massachusetts, so this may be the last time we visit Wilmington and we needed to live it up while we had the chance.  Nathan and I stayed at the Blockade Runner hotel on Wrightsville Beach.  Although it was too cloudy each day to see the green flash, we did enjoy the very beachworthy weather (80's in October!) and took full advantage of the beach (we saw dolphins almost every day)!  I also met up with a woman who was on the Corporate Service Corp Tanzania 3 team, Gloria.  We'd worked together via the phone, but had never met in person.  She showed me around the South side of Wilmington and took me to Carolina Beach State Park.  I bet you thought Venus Flytraps lived in abundance in the deep forests of the Amazon, right?  Me too.  Apparently, they only live within 75 miles of Wilmington, NC and that's it!  They are also incredibly tiny!  I got to see two patches in the wild, which was, well, wild.

Wild Venus Flytraps

Ok, back to the wedding.  Sam had been planning to have the wedding outside in Greenfield Park, but all week it was threatening to rain.  It was touch-and-go there for a while, but we all arrived at the park at 3:30pm to sunshine.  The place is gorgeous - a lake, beautiful trees, and Sam walked over to the ceremony on a bridge.  Colors were ivory and wine.  Look at Sam all grown up!

 

The ceremony was short and this turned out to be key.  Five minutes after it ended, we heard thunder.  We scrambled to simultaneously take pictures and get chairs and music equipment into the cars.  Just as we'd finished taking the basic set of shots (the last few were quite dark), it started to rain.  We'll have a good picture of the wedding party running to their cars.  About a minute after we got into the cars, it started to pour.

The reception site was the Best Western Coastline Convention Center in downtown Wilmington, a cute little brick building on the river.  Dinner was awesome, then we danced the night away (wait - did I say we?  I meant Adam's family - they are much more outgoing and comfortable with their moves than we are!).  Actually, I felt a little overpowered by Adam's family; our side being so far away, we barely rounded out one 8-person table.  The rest of the 63 guests were Adam's.

Anyway, Sam had fun.  She and Adam left in style at 9pm, riding in a limo all the way to Raleigh to catch an early flight to St. Lucia for their honeymoon.

It was a VERY successful day.  The only thing that "went wrong" is that the black chairs Sam ordered turned out to be white.  This is by far an improvement over Nathan and my wedding, in which the officiant forgot to have our witnesses sign the marriage certificate (the one thing that needed to happen to make it official)!

Congrats Sami & Adam!!  Here are some pictures for you to enjoy!

  

Getting Ready

Meredith, Sami, & Me

Sam & Adam (Picture Courtesy of Nathan King Photography, Inc)

Table Decorations

Cake Cutting

 

First Dance 

 

Amber & Nathan

Mom & Dad

Ring

Dancing - Sam & Adam's Dad

Get-Away Outfits

Appomattox

I'm learning a lot about the Civil War and no longer find it excruciatingly boring.  We've been to Gettysburg and Fredericksburg, and now the place were it all ended, Appomattox Court House.  I felt a greater connection to this event and site, which brought the country back to peace.  To me it was all the more impressive after being at the other battlefields and knowing that hundreds of thousands of people died to get us to the surrender at Appomattox.

McLean's Parlor

Reconstructed to look like it did when General Lee surrendered

Appomattox Court House is where General Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865.  He didn't actually do it at the town courthouse, he surrendered instead at the adjacent McLean residence.  (Appomattox Court House was the name of the town - I won a bet with Nathan about this so I must gloat.)  The park has the reconstructed courthouse, McLean house, jail, and several other key pieces of the town, kept as closely as they could be to how they were the day of the surrender.  You can see all of the places Generals Lee & Grant met over the course of several days and the road where Confederates stacked up their weapons. You can also learn all about how the Union basically forced an end to the war by cutting the South off from their supplies.  The surrounding countryside is kept undeveloped and the cute little town is frozen in 1865.  Well worth a stop - you may find yourself involuntarily imagining yourself watching the printer print Confederate parole notices and wondering if a hardtack (which looks a lot like the ever-delicious Dr. Kracker) really tastes as bad as they say.

Are those bite marks?

Shenandoah

We visited too many cities on our Tour d'East Coast and the mountains were calling us.  Shenandoah National Park is perched on the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Western Virginia.  These mountains are beautifully different from the ones I've fallen in love with in Montana.  Instead of rocky outcroppings and grueling trails in excess of 10,000 feet, the Blue Ridge Mountains are a gently folding blanket of green trees with gorgeous sun-streaked trails.

The trees were just starting to change colors, but still monotonous enough to make every pull-out look the same.  The road is nice, but the hiking trails are spectacular.  We only had time to do two short trails.  The first one was the Old Stony Man trail, which leads you up to the second-tallest point in the park, a mere 4,010 feet.  We stayed in the Skyland Lodge, which is right next to the Old Stony Man trailhead.  By the time we got checked in and put our gear on, it was 45 minutes until sunset.  Even though the sign at the trailhead told us it would take 2 hours to complete the circuit, we left with 30 minutes to spare and got to the summit to see the sun dip behind a neighboring mountain and were down in less than 45 minutes.

Sunset over Shenandoah Valley

Old Stony Man actually starts on a portion of the Appalachian Trail, which spans from Georgia to Maine, so now I can officially claim I've hiked the Appalachian Trail. :P  It was impressively lovely, especially this time of year with the trail lightly covered in leaves and the sun shining through the yellowing trees.

Appalachian Trail

The next morning, we tackled Hawksbill summit.  We did a three-mile loop that also encompassed part of the Appalachian Trail and ended up on the rooftop of Shenandoah, 4,050 feet.  The view was nice, but there's something to be said for busting your butt all day to get to the top of a really tall mountain vs. doing a jolly 2-hour hike to the highest peak in a park.  I miss Glacier.  Still, there was a fantastic view at the top that is worth the easy walk.

 Hawksbill Summit

South of the park, the Blue Ridge Parkway, which connects Shenandoah to Great Smoky Mountains National Park begins.  I actually liked the scenery on this road better than the parks' - it was a bit more dramatic and in some places more of the trees had begun to change colors so it was very spectacular.

 Trees Outside Skyland Lodge

Gettysburg & DC

If Europe seems light years ahead of the U.S. in terms of interesting history and architecture, then the East Coast is to the Midwest what Europe is to the U.S. We spent the last few days visiting Gettysburg, PA and Washington DC. Amazing. Amazing.

Gettysburg

I was only half-excited to see the famous Gettysburg Battlefield, now I can't wait to go back and see what I missed. Now a National Military Park run by the National Park Service, we skipped the pricey museum, movie, and cyclorama, and headed for the field with the bookstore's audio tour in hand. This was a good way to do it since Nathan had already started demonstrating his encyclopedic knowledge of the event - it would have been a shame to pay to hear someone else tell me the same thing. It also allowed us to get out there and imagine what it must have been like to watch the Confederates peter out at the High Water Mark and try to hold both your left and right flanks on Little Round Top as the 20th Maine. (Yes, I learned something!) The battleground is FULL of great stone monuments to mark almost every round fired. There's so much to see and do, you could easily spend a weekend or more there, even if you deplore learning about people killing each other like I do, I truly found Gettysburg fascinating.

Monuments galore at Gettysburg

Gouverneur (his real first name!) Warren who scrambled up Little Round Top to discern where exactly the Confederates were in the treeline below.

Washington DC

DC just proved to me that you shouldn't knock a city 'til you've tried it. I used to have the impression that DC was a dirty, dangerous, terrorist-ridden, political dumping ground destined to spontaneously ignite in the flames of its own disgrace. The truth? I think I could live there.

I liked everything I saw of DC - the metro: why doesn't every city have one? the museums: second to none! the restaurants: lots of amazing things I can't get at home! famous sites: check! access to influential people: check check! It's just a neat place to be.

Luckily Nathan's brother, Justin, just moved there and was able to show us around on the inside track. I met a colleague from IBM at a restaurant called Central that had excellent (albeit expensive) burgers and desserts. Thanks, Bobbi! Saturday night, we also did a circuit tour of all of the monuments lit up beautifully.


Sunday we did a marathon of all things tourist. Starting out at the Museum of the American Indian, we sat next to the pipes our friend Travis from Pipestone National Monument crafted. They are some of the first things each visitor sees in the museum and Travis has a key role in the museum video also!

Museum of the American Indian

Travis' Pipes

We got side-tracked on our way to the Capital by the excellent Botanical Gardens:


The capital...


We doubled back to the Museum of the American Indian for lunch. They serve all manner of out-of-the-ordinary native dishes. I myself enjoyed the Crawfish Fritters, Three Sisters (corn, squash, and black beans), and Yucca Fries in green chili sauce (slightly more dense than potatoes and sweeter). Justin stole the last of the Rabbit Pot Pie which I have just now forgiven him for.


Most of the afternoon was spent at the Air & Space Museum, then we trucked it up and down the mall to visit the Washington, Lincoln, Vietnam, WWII, Korean, Jefferson, and FDR memorials/monuments.


We ended the night with a trip to Georgetown and an Ethiopian Restaurant called Zed's. It might just be the fact that I'm about to move to a small Kansas town whose Sonic is 1/6 of the restaurant options, but I just loved the variety of everything you can get in DC. You want it? They've got it! I will be back.