Flag Run : Ft McHenry (w/ Optional Flag House)

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Type: Short Trip (Morning/Afternoon ride)

Distance: 65.1 miles

Drive Time:  1 hours 56 min according to Google Map

I was a bit too busy this weekend. By the time I found a time to go anywhere, the weekend was almost over. So, I decided to take a quick trip to Ft.McHenry in Baltimore. It is an old fort where Battle of Baltimore was fought against British Navy during the War of 1812. This battle inspired a guy by the name of Scott Francis Key to write what is now a lyrics of Star Spangled Banner, the American national anthem. It is designated as a "National Monument and Historic Shrine".  The route map above also contains a Flag House Museum, where Star Spangled Banner (this time mean American Flag) flew over the fort was sawn.

Point A (Point D):
I left around 4:00 PM, with me on FZ-1 and my wife and kids in a car.

Point A to Point B:

I avoided interstates on the way out. The route itself was rather boring. This may be one of those routes that actually should be rode on interstates to save time. The route gets tricky as it gets closer to Ft.McHenry. Once you past the bridge, wait to the second light and turn to the right just before the on-lamp to I-95. Then, carefully follow the sign to the fort. The fort is tacked behind freight terminal and pretty hard to find. I recommend studying the map well for this part. 

 

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Point B:

When we got there, the monument was technically closed (the park closes at 5:00 pm). They don't really close the facility just yet though. There is an important ceremony of changing the flag at 5:00 pm.  You see, by the presidential proclamation, this fort is supposed to fly the Star Spangled Banner 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, rain or shine or cannon balls, so that it shows "the flag was still there" as a symbol of the country. During the day, it flys an old, 15 stars 15 stripes banner, which was the national flag when the battle was fought and the anthem was written. At night, they change this flag to present day, 51 stars 13 stripes banner. The ranger changes the flag with a help of visitors. The monument is supposed to cost 7 dollars to enter. They did not charge us today though, perhaps because it was technically already closed.

Point C:

Maybe this was the main event of the day instead of the fort. We stopped by at Canton Dockside restaurant for dinner. They have a great steamed crabs! When we ordered it, they simply dumped a dozen freshly killed crabs onto the table. With mallets and knives in our hands, we savaged through the crabs. It is not cheap though. Medium size crabs were $75 a dozen that day. It changes via market price. Down side of taking this route from Point B to Point C is that it has a short underground tunnel, which has $3 toll. The alternative is to make a long detour over the land to avoid the tunnel. Well, I think I take the toll way.

Point D:

I did not actually go there this day, but if you want to make it the day of history, you can visit the Flag House Museum., where Mary Pickersgill saw the flag flew over Ft.MacHenry that day. They are open from Tuesday through Saturday. The actual flag is apparently in Smithsonian now.

Point E:

Return was a quick ride back on the highway. The map of this page has slightly different route from actual route of the day because we actually did not go to Point D. The actual ride was that tunnel back to I-95.

To: Hershey,PA. The Town That Chocolate Made. (by car)

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Type: Long Trip (Multiple Days)/Day Trip

Distance: 263 miles

Drive Time:  5 hours 7 min according to Google Map

So, this was a family trip, not a motorcycle trip. I  got a couple of days off in exchange of working over a weekend. We wanted to go somewhere. Camping was out of the question since a storm was approaching. Well,  we decided to visit Hershey, PA. Yes, that Hershey, where Hershey chocolate are made. Actually, I learned while I visited there, the Hersey chocolate made the town of Hershey. (It is close enough to make it a day trip if you like, but there is a lot to do.)

From Point A (Point E) to Point B to Point C:

We left around 9:00 after breakfast and drove almost non-stop to Hershey. However, I need to point out that town of York is on the route (Point B). York is where Harley Davidson is made. They do offer factory tour, but children under 12 years old are not permitted, so I skipped it this time. Maybe I will bike over next time. Although it is interstate, the route does not look too bad for bike ride.

Point C:

It was around 10:45 when we got to the town of Hershey. When you enter downtown, the pavement turns to chocolate brown, and the street lights on  main street (Chocolate Avenue) are Hershey's Kisses. Some are peeled and some are wrapped in wrapper. (We stayed in a motel on Cocoa Ave)

Let me go ahead and talk about the town before the day's business. Hershey is a well groomed city with many amenity, including a large amusement park with water park, a zoo, a theatre, a major hospital, educational facility, etc. Most of which was built by Milton S. Hershey, as a benefit to his employees at candy factory. In 1905, he built his candy factory in the middle of nowhere, just a farmland. People started to come in to the place to work for the factory. He set up a financial vehicle so that these employee could purchase home, and started to build a town. He believed that employee should have healthy, happy life. So, he built these amenity as for the new town folk and invited sports clubs and broadway theatre companies. The result is a thriving town that is Hershey PA today. He apparently did not have a children, and wife passed away before old, and gave away all of his fortune to the school for underprivileged children that he built. Quite a guy. One can dream of utopia, and believe in good of humanity. Making them true is quite another.

Milton S. Hershey School

Milton Hershey's House.

Yes! The worlds largest chocolate factory! Actually, the factory is no longer  in operation. They have newer facility elsewhere in town.

Now that we are in town, first order of business is Hershey's Chocolate World. It is a factory store and fun house. The first thing we did was to take a ride in a simulated factory tour, where singing cows (yes, milk is important for milk chocolate.) teaches you how to make a confectionary from cocoa beans.  Our kids enjoyed it so much, we rode it twice. Of course, they gave us samples before releasing us to a factory store.

Besides the tour, they have attractions such as Create Your Own Candy Bar (you program the computer and a machine make it for you.), Design Studio (it's a candy store that let you design and decorate sweets), etc. It also offer's a tour of town in a trolly bus (it's more entertaining than informative. They also kept feeding us candy) We spent about 5 hours in this facility.

Next day, we went to Hershey Story Museum. The name says it all. It is a museum about the story of Milton Hershey, the Hershey Chocolate, and the town of Hershey. It was a kind of cool to know that he got the idea of adding milk to candy while he was working in Denver. Anyway, one of the points museum made was an analogy for Hershey's chocolate making to Henry Ford's car production. They brought the luxury item down to ordinary people by introducing assembly line mass production. 

I kind of liked this. It is a bath tub. They put a wheel to move around large quantity of stuff. A sign of innovation.  When I was working for small company, we did many kludge similar to this.

Old Kiss Wrapping Machine

In the cafe in the museum, we tried chocolate tasting.  You get to taste chocolate made from the cocoa beans harvested in the different parts of the world. I highly recommend this. It was an eye opener. The chocolate was surprisingly different from one place to the other. My, and my older daughter's favorite was Ghana. It was kind of fruity, honey taste. Second daughter liked Java, a kind of similar to Ghana but less fruitiness. My wife liked Tanzania, robust, dark taste. Mexico was least popular, a bit sour.

After spending a couple of hours in the museum, we headed home.

Point D:
We drove through Pennsylvania Dutch (Amish) country on the way home, stopping by Intercourse PA (yes, it is an actual name of the town, since 1814). This is a town where the movie Witness was shot. Amish people and English (they call non-amish this way) work side by side in this town. People were driving horse drown buggies and pedal powered scooters. I did not take any pictures though. I hear they don't like that. I wouldn't like it if I was them. Some place had "please do not take photos" posted. However, I could not help taking this picture.

Point E:
We got home before sunset. It was a nice trip. 

Return from Wright Brother's Memorial, and Air show at Virginia Beach.

This is a continuation of the previous post. I am writing the Point E to Point I on the map in this post.

        <<<Previous post (outbound trip)

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Type: Long Trip (Multiple Days)

Distance: 626 miles (This leg 305 miles)

Riding Time: 11 hours 3 min according to Google Map

                        (5 hours 41 min this leg)

Now, the return trip. It was 7.5 hours (including some breaks) coming back to Maryland.

Point F:

The highlight of the return trip was this modern marvel, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. (Don't get confused with Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which I wrote in detail last week. I later crossed it in this trip too,) According to the Wikipedia article, this 23 miles long combination of bridges and tunnel was named one of the "Seven Engineering Wonder in the World" by  American Society of Civil Engineers in the '60s. It is a system of 12 miles (19 km) of trestle, two 1-mile (1.6 km) long tunnels, four artificial islands, two high-level bridges, approximately 2 miles (3.2 km) of causeway, and 5.5 miles (8.9 km) of approach roads. It is too large to be captured in a single photo, so here is a representative stock picture.

Courtesy of vbbound.com

The picture above kind of shows a system and a scale of this structure. It shows probably about 40 percent of the system. (Note: this picture is looking from the Eastern shore heading to West. I went the opposite way, but you'll get the idea.) As you can see,  the road approaches from the shore (at this point you have already gone through another large bridge and a small island), goes over a large bridge, long stretch of trestles, then the road disappears into the ocean. Actually, the trestle ends at a small artificial island, and dips into an underground tunnel, then come back out on to another artificial island. Then you have more trestle, ... repeat this pattern one more time.

This pic. came from longestbridges.com. A kind of a neat site.

The toll was $12. It's a kind of steep but if you really want to go somewhere in the Eastern shore of Virginia, this saves a ton of time. Just think about the alternative. You would be going all the way up to DC, then MD, cross over the other Bay Bridge from Annapolis, then come back down all the way to the Virginia side of the peninsula. It easily shaves off 10 hours in good traffic. Well, I found out that many people enters this bridge-tunnel don't cross to the other side. I will get to that in a minute. 

Photo from marinerchesapeake.com

The ride is fun. Four lanes on a water. It makes you feel like you are flying just above the water. Then you reach this artificial island. There are total of four such islands, but they let you get out on only the most Western shore side one. You make a right, right before the road goes down into the tunnel to pull into the parking lot.

Just as I was pulling into the parking lot, I saw a huge, white cruise ship passing through the channel, then a large cargo ship goes into the channel in the opposite direction. It was a bit surreal. I wish I was there a 5 minutes earlier, so that I could take a picture of it.

This was a cargo ship just pass the channel.

There was a fishing piar on this island, and there were many people fishing there. In fact, that seemed to be the majority of the traffic this day. You can actually turn around on this island and head back to the western shore of Virginia. So, people come here to fish, or tourist come to see the bridge, and head right back to where they came from. After passing this island, the traffic was less. Judging from the number of people, and the fact that you have to pay 12 dollars to get there, it must be a pretty good fishing point.

The bridge-tunnel continues for another 10 miles though. This is just the first island/tunnel entrance. It's definitely a unique experience. The other side of tunnel-bridge is a nature preserve. It has a beautiful beach there. I am not sure if you are allowed to set foot on it though.

From Point F to Point G

There is really not much special for another 110 miles. It is not a bad scenery though. I like riding through firm lands.

Point G

Actually, there is not much for even longer if you don't get off the highway in a small city of Salisbury. If you google map the route, it comes out like this.

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Right at the junction of US-13 and US-50, the route makes a big loop and avoids this town all together. In fact, these two main highways avoids the town. It got me curious. What is hidden from the travelers? Why did this town chose to let the highway constructed this way? So, I decided to take a this way instead, and see what's out there.

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I was kind of expecting run down, forgotten city. Like so many ghost towns and semi ghost towns you see in Colorado. The town in a middle of nowhere once thrived and now forgotten. Not so. This is a city very much alive today, complete with a university. I later learned that it is actually a largest city in Eastern shore. It left me perplexed though. How does some city survive, and some goes down?

Point H:
The ride was pretty smooth up to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge (yes, the other bay bridge : ). Essentially re-tracing part of the previous week's route. As I approach the Bay Bridge, the cloud has descended and it started to rain. The good thing was that the view was beautiful in totally different way from the previous week. The foggy rain made a view surreal. The bad thing was, the rain started just as I approach this 4.3 miles bridge. Well, once you get on the bridge, there is no shoulder nor place to pull over to put on a rain suit. I did have a new rain suit. The replacement for the one got burnt with the saddle bags, but did not have a chance to put it on.  In a mean while, the traffic slowed down due to the rain, and made me more wet.

Point I:
By the time I got off the bridge, I was wet anyway. I decided to press on without the rain suit. I as soaking wet by the time I got home. I got home around 7:30. The kids were still awake. They made me promise to take  them to my next outing.

Wright Brother's Memorial, and Air show at Virginia Beach.

This is the outbound and the meat of this trip (Point A to E). I have the air show and the memorial visit here. For return trip which includes crossing of Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel and Easter shore ride, click below.

                            Next Post (Return Trip) >>>

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Type: Long Trip (Multiple Days)

Distance: 626 miles (325 miles this leg)

Riding Time: 11 hours 3 min according to Google Map

                        (5 hours 22 min this leg)

It's beach time! Well, actually, an air show at the beach. I found out that Patty Wagstaff was performing at an Airshow in Virginia Beach VA. She is a legend in aerobatics. She is one of the winningest competitive aerobatist of all time. So much so that her aircraft now hangs in Smithsonian next to Amelia Earhart's. I've wanted to see her for a long time, and of course, I wanted to do so before she retires from the air show business. So, I planned a trip around it, and while I was planning, realized that I could just ride out to the Wright Brother's First Flight Memorial in 1.5 hr. I decided to make a trip. This trip also let me stayed at and enjoyed the beach. Great plan, isn't it?

Point A (Point G) to Point D:

Kick stand up at 7:30. I should have left earlier, but still acceptable. The whole point of going down to Virginia Beach is to see the air show, so I just hurried down there. I took US-50, I-95, I-295, I-64 then I-264. Notice that it's interstates almost all the way. Of course, this is not at all the way to enjoy a bike trip. It just get you to the destination quicker. That's all. I needed to get there by noon. I normally try to avoid interstates as much as I can. As expected, this outbound trip was pretty boring. Fairly heavy traffic, fairy straight road and not much of a view. I stopped at a visitor center in Fredericksburg (Point B), and one more stop to fill up a gas. Besides that, I just rode non-stop.  Fredericksburg apparently has a close association with George Washington. It may be a good place to visit some other time. Oh, one more place worth mentioning on the way is Williamsburg (Point C). It is a living history museum, where 18th century city (it was a capital of Virginia colony) is preserved. I have taken my family once. Maybe I will write about it some day.

"Virginia is For Lovers" the state slogan says... 

Point D:
I got there just about noon and quickly checked into a hotel. Why? I wanted to drop off my riding gears  and get into the beach ware. As I was pulling into the parking lot, I saw sky divers coming down. That meant I was just missing the first 10 minutes or so  of the show while I was checking in. That's OK. I came here for Patty. As long as I catch her and see the rest of the show, it's all good. And what a good show it was! Patty Wagstaff's solo was amazing. I got to see her 8 Sided Loops and Water Dance (aka snap rolling 360 circle) with my own eyes.  BTW, I almost hate to mention, and do so in disbelief but she is 62 years old this year. How do you get to be pulling -6G to +10G at that age (or at any age for that matter...)?  (Actually, there were a couple of more performers that probably worth noting their age. It's either flying upside down creates monsters or only the monsters gets to fly upside down.) Anyway, other performers were great as well, Kirby Chambliss (5 times national champs and former Red Bull Air Race champion),  Skip Stewart, MIke Wiskuss to name a few. The greatest was though, when Patty and Skip came out together and flew what they dubbed Air Duel. Basically showing off each other and having fun. I was on my feet with tears in my eyes. Boy that was exciting and fun fun fun.

It's so hard to take a pic of high speed aircraft, but here is Patty Wagstaff flying her Extra 300.

GEICO Sky Typers

Point D to Point E:

The beach was fun and relaxing. I stayed at the Virginia Beach overnight and nursed my sore butt while I get a plenty of sun. The ocean in the morning was beautiful too. I left the beach around 8:00AM and headed down south. There is a toll section on VA-168. The toll was $2 for motorcycles. It was actually a very short segment of the168 right before where it turns into NC-168. It makes you wonder why such little section had to have a toll. It also makes you wonder if there is a way to avoid that section. Probably the locals know such way. Let me know if you knew it. The drive was beautiful though, especially in North Carolina. It is a rush green and relaxing farmland all the way. You see fresh produce market here and there. Strawberry must be in the season now.  You also see brothers of this truck  on the way. You can't miss it. The "dungeon" is right on the highway.

Point E:

I got to the Wright Brother's Memorial around 9:45. This is it. The holly place of flight. The entrance fee is $4. You can almost divide the place in three sections. The actual place where the first flight took place, the memorial, and the airstrip (yes, you can fly in here). 

Let's start with the first flight. You have to use some imagination though. You see, a hundred and ten years ago, when Wright's were here, the place had nothing but sand. Today, it is covered in grass, rush and green.  In fact they chose to come here because they wanted a good sandy place for landing of the aircraft. So, as yo see the picture, every green you see was actually gray sand. This stone memorial stands right at the point where the first airplane took to the air.

Click on the pic. The stones mark the landing spot of the first, the second, the third and the fourth flight (all the flights happened that day.)

The first landing was only 120 feet, lasted only 12 seconds. You will be struck by how short that was when you actually see it. It was a short hop. but mankind was never be the same from that moment.

The fourth flight, on the other hand was more than half a mile (you can barely see the take off point in the distance in this photo. The shack on the left is a reproduction of their hanger and the living quarter. You also see the memorial on top of the hill.) It was definitely a sustained flight. You can imagine how ecstatic the brother was on that day.

 The memorial is on top of the hill. This hill is where the Wright's experimented with kites and gliders. Life guards from the nearby coast guard station helped them bring up the machine to the hill. Remember, the hill was just a big mound of sand.

A little snap shot of the memorial and FZ-1. I walked, but I could actually ride up to the hill. There is a road looping around the bottom of the hill, and small numbers of parking space on that road.