A De-Bunking and a Dark Hollow
Some solid light work, and a hollow dark excursion.
This weekend flew by—largely because we burned most of Saturday working at the Athpartment—but we still tried to pack in as much action as we could.
De-Bunking
As we've mentioned previously, Athennia and Riley are in the process of switching bedrooms, since Athennia can take the larger room now that Riley has a room to herself (with Taylor and her girlfriend having moved out).
Athennia and I had already moved most of her bedroom furniture out into the living room earlier in the month—and she finally got time to shampoo the carpet in that room a few nights ago—so the first order of business was to get Riley's furniture fully moved out of her old room and into her new room.
Athennia and Riley actually took care of 99% of that process over the past few nights; but, the one major hurdle still standing was moving Riley's bed—a bunk bed with a full-sized futon frame on the bottom... just a few inches too wide (like, probably 40) to get through the door frame.
Meh, I move stuff all the time: You just log in to the box in question and tell the machine to do your bidding. It's no big deal...
ssh wintermute@127.0.0.1
mv ~/athennias_room/bunk.bed ~/rileys_room/bunk.bed...But, it turns out Riley's bed isn't running Linux—which meant that the only drivers we had for interfacing with this hardware were literal screwdrivers: A pair of tiny Allen wrenches, to be exact.
The manufacturer made sure to put each and every Allen bolt in a tight corner to ensure that we could only loosen them a quarter-turn at a time; so, there wasn't a dull moment... or, depending how you look at, there was nothing but dull moments.
Six-and-a-half months later (35 minutes maybe), we had the thing in pieces small enough to fit through the Athpartment's doorways...
Riveting as it was to take the thing apart, we knew it would be even more fun getting it back together; so, we took a break from it to cross some other things off the to-do list.
With the bed out of the way, we moved Athennia's furniture into the larger bedroom so she could shampoo the living room carpet. In the meantime, Riley and I made a couple trips to the dumpster to toss a rickety desk from the kids' room and some other no-longer-needed items that were just taking up space.
Then we tackled the re-bunking—which took significantly longer than the de-bunking had: Maybe an hour and a half all in all, by the time we reconstructed the entire thing with half-tightened bolts and then went back and re-torqued everything after all the parts were in place...
Tyler Too (sans a Tippy Canoe)
We already had plans to go to Applebee's for dinner; but, since we had a bit of daylight left, we stopped by Tyler State Park (which is right across the street from the Newtown Applebee's).
Since it's a state park, we knew the rules would be numerous: Imagine all the regulations of a county park, plus a whole bunch of bonus rules at the state level to suck even more fun out of the experience!
First impression? A fancy taxpayer-funded electronic sign right there on the entrance road, dictating the exact minute of government-calculated sunset at which point the park promptly closes—either because it turns into a bottomless pit until the following morning, or because some bureaucrat unilaterally decided once upon a time that our park will hereby close when he decides.
So, we stayed pretty close to the parking lot and just hung out for half an hour or so...
Riley and I found a ridiculously-high bench that's either for exceptionally tall individuals in the 7'7" to 8'4" range, or maybe for people worried about snakes biting their ankles while they're sitting...
...And then, it was getting dangerously close to bottomless-pit hour; so, we took our leave and headed to dinner.
Appal-bees and Heading South
The Newtown Applebee's had a line out the door; so, we bailed and decided to drive half an hour to the one by me in Southampton—where they were certainly doing business, but had plenty of open tables... and took our order and got our appetizers to us inside of 15 minutes.
We wolfed down a much-needed meal after a hard day's work (and a virtually nonexistent lunch of cereal and Eggo waffles). Then we stopped by my parents' house just a few minutes away to say hi before we took Riley home.
Dark Hollow 2.0: Darker... Hollower... Awesomer
Athennia and I were keen to return to Dark Hollow Park on Sunday and had been praying all weekend that the forecasted rain would hold off.
We made it there shortly after noon—initially parking at the same lot we did last time, in the hopes of finding a trail leading north along the creek this time instead of south.
No luck.
...But, even if you're like me and have never wondered even once what the soft underbelly of York Road looks like, you still might find these pictures somewhat cool...
I stopped to take this reverse-shot of last week's picture of a bridge through a bridge; and, while I was doing that, Athennia found this interesting rock that's either slick with oil or full of mineral deposits. (We can't tell which... but she brought it home and cleaned it up, and the iridescence is still there.)
Our attempt at path-finding being a bust, we returned to the car and drove to the old Mill Road bridge, right where we had ended our hike last week. From there we were able to pick up a path to continue onward (south again, but toward locations we hadn't visited before).
Though we pride ourselves on using only our own photography on this blog, I thought a bit of context might be interesting for these next pictures.
So, here's Google Maps' coverage of the park...
...and, wow; it's actually difficult to overstate just how utterly useless this map is!
Why don't we switch over to something better... that actually respects our privacy... and isn't operated by the largest surveillance and advertising company in human history?
I humbly present the free, open, crowdsourced, and far-superior OpenStreetMap...
The numbers above correspond to the locations where we snapped these eight photos...
No sign of rain; so, we tried to cover as much ground as we could!
Someone left a note scolding the jackasses who think P-A-R-K spells landfill and leave their trash wherever they want. You'd think he would've also mentioned this tree...
"Hey! Not sure whether you saw FernGully back in 1992; but, whatever you do, you don't want to cut this one down!"
The scenery was breathtaking—especially the rocky mountainside once we got deep into the park!
It would've been great to have a safe way up the mountain, or a bridge to get across to the other side of the creek; so, I decided we should crowdsource a construction project...
I found the perfect keystone for a bridge and left it out in the open for future park-goers to infer my intent and continue the mission...
Athennia for Scale!
I took a lot of pics with Athennia for scale. (For reference, she's 5'0".)
Kevin for Scale
She took some of me as well...
And, of course, there's always time for a bit of artistry too...
Thunderstruck
But then, the clouds were starting to roll in; so, it was time to head out. We didn't have a super long walk back to the car... but we were far enough out in the middle of nowhere that it would be a cold and soggy walk back if we got caught in a storm.
We gambled on taking what would hopefully prove to be a shortcut: the dry creekbed of the "offshoot" part of the creek—which we knew had water in it at some point up ahead, but hoped we'd be lucky enough to find a break in the underbrush and the poison ivy and hop back up to dry land when we got to it...
Eventually, we came to the end of the road...
We laid down some stepping stones just after these trees, walked a few hundred more feet up the creekbed, and used a bowed tree trunk to jump back up onto the path.
The power lines and the woods felt like a completely different place on the walk back... Nothing like on the way in!
Athennia got some lightning alerts on her phone as we made it back to the woods, and we arrived at the car just in time...
Warming Up on a Chili Evening
Later in the evening, we kicked off autumn by whipping up a batch of my slow-cooker chili with some corn bread on the side...
Happy autumn, everyone!