I'm just enjoying so much seeing USAF gear on static display. Not only those planes just look plain cool, it helps drive home the point of just how huge those gadgets are IRL, even if the military gear books I used to eat up when I was in elementary school made them look about as big as pickup trucks. Up top: a F111; down below: a B47. I've always found the F111 particularly good looking, especially with the wings pivoted all the way back into an elegant delta shape perfectly complementing the pointy nose and subdued air intakes. It's also an interesting historical artifact: variable-swept wings were mostly left behind in the history of airplane design. To this day the only variable-swept remainign in US service is the B1. The B47, other other hand, is a goofier proposition, from the transition era from the transition between the old doctrine of conventional strategic bombing, and the emerging one of nuclear deterrence. It would take several phases of aerodynamic and engine research before bombers could escape the old straightforward shape of a metal cigar with wings attached, which is why the B47 looks like a swept-wing, jet-powered adaptation of a WWII B29, with a jet fighter cockpit attached on top. That's essentially what it is.
But besides those planes looking just plain cool and/or goofy, there's the extremely loud political message hammered in here: the US of A is threatening to bombard you with thermonuclear weapons.
The B47 was designed to carry live nuclear bombs on 20-hour long patrols that would take them right up to the border of the USSR, flying faster and higher than Russian interceptors, and stand ready to vitrify the surface of Moscow. The F111 was designed to be a general-purpose precision conventional bomber, but could be called on for low-altitude penetration nuclear missions. It's a miracle that the B47 were never ordered to attack, but permanent alert, flying bombers carrying live nuclear bombs ready to strike was always a risky proposition, and tons of nuclear devices were lost in B47 crashes. Those planes also carried their share of nuclear tests.
So essentially the USAF is publicly exposing the ghastly tools they were using for decates to threaten world extinction, and the infinite budget hole that historically prevented Americans from benefiting from the type of government benefit programs that the rest of the western world now takes for granted. The average American seems to be perfectly okay with this and justify with a simple quip: "freedom ain't free".
AuSable Chasm! Took the smaller 9 road out of Plattsburgh by happenstance instead of the I87, which proved to be a happy little accident when I drove on top of an adorable steel arch bridge spanning a waterfall canyon. All my pictures of this adorable tourist attraction turned out horribly except for this one, which is merely look-at-able, so enjoy it while it lasts! Harnessing this power is a 2.4MW hydro plant built in 1904. Next time I'l make sure to bring my family do some mild rapids rafting.
This was one of the main reasons I wanted to travel upstate NY: the 1980 Olympics gear. If you've ever channel surfed your way onto the winter olypics at the time of the ski jump competition, and thought that it's absurd, well rest assured, it entirely is. The scale of those gadgets bears no relationship with real life sports. Also apparently the preferred way of partying in Lake Placid NY is to ski jump into a pool with forced air injection to absorb the impact and eliminate any risk of injury in order to maximize airborne creativity and radness I could find worst ways to have fun.
Very nice of the facilities to leave a technology demonstrator model up near the parking. For starters, I was asking myself if this is shotcrete, gunite or just regular formwork. The only relevant info I found out was that the 2018 olympics bobsled track "was recognized with Honourable Mention 2016 as an Outstanding Shotcrete Project of the Year by the American Shotcrete Association.". Structurally, those things also just look like skateparks, which to my knowledge are always done with shotcrete. Case closed? The other thing I'm having a hard time getting a handle on is the shape of the rebar. It's hollow, which would make sense for weight reduction, but it's also not grooved like any other rebar, so you'd imagine they would have problem with the concrete slipping off the bars? Maybe they thought the grid on top would mitigate this problem. Maybe all their loading is sideways so they're not worried about that?
The "Shady" curve, definitely built as a bespoke bobsled olympic media money shot.
East Germany and Switzerland dominated the bobsled competitions.
Simply amazed that an ancestral european Alps sport essentially equivalent to toboganning became one of the most absurd and infrastructure-intensive part of the olympics. Truly a commendable effort to break down the metaphor.
Had some difficulty finding information on this building but as far as I can tell it's merely a spectacularly majestic McDonald's franchise that went down with the WestWorld-themed park
My traveling process usually starts with query on Atlas Obscura. This is quite simply where one finds the good shit. And by that I mean, crumbling remnants of a decaying Western Civilization.
Turned out my mom went to Frontier Town in 1963, a mere 11 years after the park's opening.
The hilarious flyer we found in a shutdown concession stand seems to indicate they had issues with the law and decided to strike back by calling the cops to be acting unconstitutionally, which I find absolutely hilarious
Two rare and unique flightless birds trapped in a cage for the amusement of children. Heart breaking. Send thoughts and prayers
Trying my hand at the Chris Maggio cursed over-flashed under-processed style on the beach of a state park camping
Now, the life arc of this David Henderson guy is on its face hilarious, but I have to respect his insane business plan.
I have to respect this type of steel-eyed determination, entire life force and motivation dedicated to the bitter end to a single, simple goal: provide iron to quench the forever thirst of the Destiny Manifesting west expansionist United States of America, whatever the cost.
Henderson, surveying Upstate New York in a desperate bid to not die poor, found a promising area that included easily accessible iron ore reserves, a rich forest, and a river. His Sid Meyer's Civilization-inspired plan was to cut down the trees, cook them into charcoal using more local wood using DIY low-oxygen kilns, and use the river to power air pumps to force air into the charcoal fire that would melt the local iron ore into pig iron. This semi-final product would then be shipped down the Hudson River, which at that lattitude is nothing more than the stream pictured here.
In other words, a completely self-supported, independent foundry. Presumably its only input would be some food during the winter when the hunting is bad, and its output would be pig iron ready to be purified and used in the countless railways, bridges, and guns that the fledgling US of A was desperately thirsting for as it was barreling into the Civil War.
Only remainder of the village where his workforce would live: half-collapsed chimneys, after the wood structure completely rot away
To the left: a rock full of reddish iron-oxide blotches. To the right: a common use of the refined forms of iron
The rail bike!
Supremely relaxing experience biking through a forest and besides, then above, a river. One of the rare occasion to legally walk along a railway, an activity that I otherwise do all the time.
The buggies had two cranks on the same notional bottom bracket axle, driving the front wheels. A cable-operated disk brake is mounted on the back axle. The ratio was empirically calculated to not create any difficulty to the beaten-out-of-shape geriatrics that might come along to this tourist trap family outing while dealing with the minuscule uphill part, and keeping the group moving relatively swiftly along the track, and more importantly not let teenage fixed-gear commuter punks like us the occasion of speeding and going off track because of speed wobbles. Which, I've been told by the mechanic, is a thing that happened to him while doing speed tests.
Also told us that he heard about it from Korea, went out to do it, found it both supremely relaxing and a neat business idea, took some quick references of how their buggies are made, and quite simply built a batch of them using aluminium beams and off-the-shelf parts
This is, btw, the same river as the foundry above
Now this is how I like to travel: the insane way.
I had bought tickets to Hersheypark months in advance, but the weather forecast kept looking very iffy for that area. Since all serious rollercoasters shut down during rainfall, we were prepared to cut our losses and find something else to do closer to home. But then suddenly, after stepping off the rail-trail buggies, we saw the forecast solidifying: warm and grey during the morning, thunderstorms later in the afternoon. We decided to make a 600km run for it.
Driving and being fed grocery store snacks by the copilot, stopping only for pisses and gas (emptied the tank couple times), planting a tent for free in a gas station lawn, drinking couple beers sitting on a rock, then passing out shortly after sundown. Waking up at the crack of dawn, asking nicely for a dunkin' attendant to fill a nalgene with terrible coffee, driving, driving, driving.
Made it 30m before the park's opening, just in time to eat a nice breakfast wrap in the parking lot. The iffy weather must have convinced everybody to stay home that day, because it stayed hot, sticky, but not rainy for the 4 hyper-intense hours we spent at the park. And what intense hours those were. We were able to hit 4 of the biggest, most insane roller coasters I've ever been on for about 15 minutes of wait each. Efforts thoroughly rewarded.
Perfect distillation of Intamin vs. Bolliger&Mabillard. Yellow vertical lift with a 93 degree angle drop, red twisty with unexplainable trajectory, vs. deep blue smooth, fluid, elegant curves. Great Bear, in all aspects a conventional B&M inverted coaster, with a regular chain lift, dropping into a swooping downward spiral culminating into the company signature giant full-speed vertical loop, into a tight curcuit perfectly calculated to minimize any kind of shock, to fold the track on itself multiple times, turn using the tightest possible angles within the self-mandated 4G maximal load. From its inception in the dawn of the 90's, B&G's only visible technical innovation has been its train design, starting with the inverted, floorless Batman design they then photocopied a dozen times. Their true breakthrough was to create smooth flows that would completely remove any side-to-side hit of that type that always plagued Arrow Dyamics coasters. The company's absolute mastery of track physics resulted in designs that are simply pleasant to look at from the outside, coasters that are easy to apprehend at a glance.
Intamin, born a decade later, decided their purpose in life was to push every limit they could conceive. Their first big design, the Millenium Force, was a world record tallest coaster that would also focus on removing the brutal shocks that the previous tallest-in-the-world type gadgets started to suffer from at those velocities. They then always took the wackiest orders they could get their CAD workstations on, including those two up here. First, they repurposed their powered drag racing launch tech on the Storm Runner, the red snake with Chthonic curves that warp the mind and summon Nyarlathothopic monstrosities. Their next(-level) project, with the yellow lollipop-shaped lift hill, is called the Farenheit. This one focuses more on cramming as many loops as possible in a small footprint than on number of weird launcher technology.
Ended up riding both sides of the Lightning Racer, possibly winning the race against ourselves, possibly not, I can't remember. I was too braindead at that point to care that the Skyrush, a magnificient B&M hypercoaster, was down for maintenance. And now I learn that they have another one of those, called the Candymonium, on the verge of opening.
That was fun, but now I have to go back
