Unconventionally conventional

October 3, 2013 Tigerotor77WBig Creek, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Mt. Cammerer1 Comment

It’s been a long time since I went on a hike — and the last time I tried to summit a mountain, I ended up circling its base for five hours. I therefore wavered on going on a hike up Mt. Cammerer, just under 5,000′ in elevation but requiring a six mile plod to summit. About 40 miles west of Asheville and just barely inside the borders of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the hike was intended to showcase some of the fall foliage in the area. The weather was supposed to be great (no rain this weekend!), and the only real unknowns were my tolerance for a 12 mile hike and how many leaves were going to have turned this early in the season.

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They’re moody everywhere

September 29, 2013 Tigerotor77WBlue Ridge Mountains, Cradle of Forestry, Mt Pisgah, Pounding Mill Overlook2 Comments

It wasn’t intentional, but I haven’t done a good job of concealing how much I love mountains. As geographic desires go, my fascination with mountains wasn’t cultivated from a young age — I only vaguely remember my first trip to Seattle, and that memory features heavily the Boeing plant tour, not my hike up Rainier two days after. But maybe it sparked something: some fried nerve that turned into an obsession seeing me visit Rainier five times in seven weeks in 2007, or the craze that brought me to Switzerland five times in 2011. (I did the math on this one: a typical weekend, say Friday-Sunday, is 48 hours. On a trip to Switzerland from Stuttgart, I’d spend 25% of that driving and another 25% sleeping — leaving me no more than 1/2 of the weekend to do what I wanted to do. Who in his right mind would take 50% odds like this for five times!)

But perhaps there is an underlying assumption that my definition of “mountainous” covers an area containing peaks higher than 12,000 feet, for it wasn’t until I had been in Charleston for 90 weeks that I visited the Blue Ridge Mountains waiting just 5 hours away from the Lowcountry. I thought only Rainier changed moods without a moment’s notice; this trip showed me just how wrong I was.

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Wimping out on sunrises

September 6, 2013September 6, 2013 Tigerotor77WBlue moon, Charleston Marina, Charleston skyline, clouds, Cooper River, lightning, marina, Mt. Pleasant, Sunset3 Comments

Impeccable timing! I had just written a post boasting about the serenity of dawn, and a week later (photography time, not real time) I end up actually leaving work “early” to catch the sunset and the blue moon. There are two definitions of a blue moon, but in this case, the full moon was the third in a season (rather than the second in a month). It’s been a long time since I’ve explicitly gone somewhere to watch the moonrise (the last time was in 2007 on Tolmie Peak — after work on a Monday!), but whether from a mountain or a dock, it’s always impressive how quickly the moon rises over the horizon and shrinks into a tiny dot.

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Because sunsets are too easy

August 19, 2013 Tigerotor77WAwendaw, beach, boneyard, Botany Bay, Botany Bay boneyard, Canon 6D, Edisto Boneyard, Edisto Island, Perseids, Shell Ring, Sunrise2 Comments

Don’t get me wrong — a sunset isn’t “easy” in the sense that it doesn’t take preparation or that conditions are always perfect. But I am (and most people are) almost always awake at sunset. Sunrises, on the other hand, demand effort — to stay awake, to get up, to suffer through the rest of the day and week. And even then, it’s a crapshoot as to whether the sky will alight with the right clouds to reveal a colorful sunrise.

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Well that took a while

August 18, 2013August 18, 2013 Tigerotor77WAngel Oak, Canon 6D, Edisto Island, Firefly Distillery, Sunset, Wadmalaw IslandLeave a comment

I typically don’t have a sweet tooth but I admit that sweet tea is a bit addicting. A bright mind took this refreshing Southern staple and “added” alcohol, culminating in sweet tea vodka. Firefly Sweet Tea vodka was thus officially born, and about half an hour away from Charleston (on Wadmalaw Island) is the distillery where the drink has its origins. And they have tastings! Not being comfortable taking pictures of the bar or bartender, my only proof of having been there (apart from two bottles of their stuff) is a picture of the trees around the distillery. The forests are so green around here.

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Duck duck duck

August 4, 2013 Tigerotor77WCharleston Duck Race, Daniel Island Rotary Club, fiddler crab, Wando RiverLeave a comment

I think I have more posts about my three weeks away than I do about Charleston. Here’s a few photos from the Charleston Duck Race to rectify that (more to come soon).

For the past few years, 25,000 [rubber] ducks get dumped off a bridge and into the Wando River for the race, which is hosted by the Rotary Club of Daniel Island. There’s not always a lot of current, so sometimes the ducks need a little bit of coaxing to get to the finish line.

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A Lion among Tigers

July 29, 2013July 29, 2013 Tigerotor77WArtScience, Asian Tigers, escalator, Essential Eames, Herman Miller, Lion City, Marina Bay Sands ShoppesLeave a comment

Some readers might have noticed that there was one color missing from my post on Singaporean colors: blue. Many flowers aren’t blue, and the same holds for most animals, but usually it’s fairly easy to find that color by looking toward the planets. Due to the haze, for the first few days the color proved slightly evasive, but by the end of my time in Singapore it was fairly easy to spot, even through the gargantuan, slatted awning of the Marina Bay Golden Sands Shining Shopping Centre of Extraordinarily Rich People, Tourists, and Gluttony.

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Color me impressed

July 27, 2013July 27, 2013 Tigerotor77Wleopard, leopard drinking, orangutan, Singapore, Singapore Botanic Gardens, Singapore Zoo, white tiger2 Comments

There’s a lot of green in Charleston. Sometimes blue, and probably other colors, too, but given that I’ve been a hermit so far, I really can’t speak to the presence of a single other color.

In Charleston, we have sharks and jellyfish and alligators (and an aquarium), but I haven’t been to the zoo so I must also conclude that the only other animals apart from these that exist in this climate are dogs, which are positively everywhere.

On both counts, Singapore is different.

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