It looks like a near-perfect beach day at Haleʻiwa Beach Park on the North Shore of Oʻahu in Hawaiʻi, as seen during our 2023 Hawaiʻi trip.
When you hear of North Shore beaches on Oʻahu, people are probably talking about beaches just a bit east of Haleʻiwa Beach Park. But this park was a nice place for us to visit, and we saw lots of sea turtles out in the water while we were there, too. You can read all about it in Part 7 of the Hawaiʻi trip report.
Happy birthday to my lovely wife Laura, seen here at the North Shore on the island of Oʻahu during our 2023 Hawaiʻi Trip.
Birthdays are always worth celebrating, especially for someone as special as Laura is to me. Here’s hoping this is the start of another wonderful trip around the sun!
Who knew that the 2024 Eclipse would not be the only extreme weather event of the day?
After the eclipse ended, the clouds of the morning returned, and those clouds eventually brought with them a strong thunderstorm that included lots of hail at our house. Take a look:
All that white stuff in the grass is hail. Lots and lots of hail. In the past when we have had any hail, it has just been small bits for only 30 seconds maximum. This time around, we got large hail for around five minutes.
I don’t know if you heard, but we had a solar eclipse here in the United States in April 2024. If you are in the United States, I do not know how you could NOT have heard about it, because it was everywhere, especially if you were within a hundred miles or so of the path of totality as we were.
I had resolved not to try to take any photos of the eclipse, knowing that they would look very similar to the photos from the 2017 eclipse (spoiler alert - it looked just about exactly the same, except the sun was slightly more covered)
The Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC was built as a memorial to Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of the United States. We visited the Jefferson Memorial during our July 2023 Virginia and Washington, DC trip.
Inside the dome of the Jefferson Memorial, a statue of Thomas Jefferson is surrounded by quotes from some of his writings. Like him or not, it is difficult to deny his place in American History. He did, after all, write the Declaration of Independence, among other things. And he was the third United States president, after George Washington and John Adams. He is the guy on the nickel1. Plus, you might recognize him as one of the giant faces on Mount Rushmore, too.
Beginning in the late 1800s, bathhouses were constructed in Hot Springs, Arkansas, to take advantage of the natural hot springs and their healing properties. Some of those bathhouses survive today along what is known as Bathhouse Row. We got to see them during our February 2024 visit to Hot Springs.
The bathhouses are pictured here from north to south, as we walked from The Arlington Hotel.
Superior Bathhouse was built in 1916 and is the smallest of the bathhouses. Its red brick facade and green window trim make it eye-catching, even on a rainy day1.
During our October 2023 trip to Florida, we took a day to visit Blue Spring State Park. We packed a picnic lunch and set out to see what we could find. We were not disappointed!
When we arrived, we were greeted by this large live oak tree, with a palm tree growing in the middle of it. And lots of Spanish moss all around, of course. What a cool find! And this was just in the parking lot. We were hoping that meant that there were more good things to come.
You may remember that we visted the Lincoln-Douglas debate site in Jonesboro, Illinois, and we have also visited the debate site at Quincy. Continuing our quest to visit all of the Lincoln-Douglas debate sites 1, we also stopped at the Lincoln-Douglas debate site in Charleston, Illinois, which included a small museum.
The Charleston debate between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas was held on September 18, 1858, just three days after the Jonesboro debate. There were around 12,000 people in attendance. The area that was at one time filled with 12,000 people is now a quiet corner of the area fairgrounds, and we were the only ones there when we stopped in.
The sun sets behind palm trees at Ko Olina Lagoons on the island of Oʻahu in Hawaiʻi, as seen during our 2023 Hawaiʻi trip.
It is another month, which means another Hawaiʻi sunset photo. Maybe I have not been posting one a month, but it feels like it.1 Maybe it will become a regular thing, or maybe not.
The Tower Life Building dominates the skyline above the San Antonio River Walk in San Antonio, Texas.
During my brief trip to San Antonio, I was intrigued by the tall building just across the River Walk from where I was staying. It’s size made the building difficult to ignore, after all. So I looked it up and discovered that the building was built in 1929 as the Smith-Young Tower. At the time, its height of 404 feet tall made it the tallest building in San Antonio, a distinction that it held until 1968. It is still the tallest eight-sided building in the United States. The Smith-Young Tower was later renamed the Transit Tower, and it is now known as the Tower Life Building for its current owner, Tower Life Insurance Company.
