Carl Henning

Who was the 25th US President?
Who was the last president to have served in the American Civil War?
Whose vice president was Teddy Roosevelt?
What president was born in Niles, Ohio?
If you read the title of the post, you might guess “President William McKinley.”

I love small town museums. Now Fayetteville, North Carolina is not really a small town and the museum is in a big building but it has that small town feel. (Because of nearby Fort Bragg there are some Army museums here too. I already blogged about them.) Adjacent to the museum are the remains of an Arsenal. It was destroyed by the Union Army during the Civil War.

Bill and Mary suggested Sierra Nevada Brewery for lunch. Good choice. I even had a beer with my hamburger. A Kolsch. Not my first brewery. Not my first Kolsch. I think I’ve met control engineers from Sierra Nevada before… So maybe they use PROFIBUS. Anyway, once an engineer, always an engineer. I enjoy watching stuff made and, in this case, packaged.

The 75th anniversary of D-Day is fast approaching. So on our drive from Houston through Lake Charles, Louisiana, it seemed natural to stop to see the USS Orleck Naval Museum. This Destroyer was commissioned in 1945 in the shipyard in nearby Orange, Texas. It saw duty in Korea and Vietnam before being given to the Turkish navy. They donated it back to a non-profit organization to display.

Wonder what drones were like in 1963? Yeah, really; one is featured here.

So it’s no secret that I’m a baseball fan. We got to spring training games in Phoenix to start the preseason. After a wedding in Boston, got to a game at Fenway Park for Mariners versus Red Sox. Cold, cold, cold day for baseball… with rain the whole game. An Astros game in Houston (no rain, but Minute Maid Park has a roof anyway). And football and baseball with one of the Houston grandsons.

Because they were built by indigenous peoples before written history, America’s earliest cities are often ignored. In Arizona there are thousands of these cities and villages. Many are protected in our National Parks. But we visited one today that is a city park, Besh Ba Gowah Archaeological Park and Museum in Globe, Arizona.

I categorized this post as “Travel” because we had to travel for 23 minutes from home to reach the Deer Valley Petroglyph Preserve. It’s run by Arizona State University and preserves over 1500 petroglyphs. A petroglyph is an image formed by chipping away “desert varnish” that covers rocks. It’s not a hieroglyph which is a language. It’s not a petrograph which is painted on a rock surface.

We returned to our old stomping grounds in Cave Creek where the public library provides a great panorama of the area. Today that panorama includes snow. Arizona actually gets a lot of snow, just not here in “The Valley of the Sun” (Phoenix and surroundings). Northern Arizona and eastern Arizona have ski areas with fairly long seasons. And the cliche is that you can water ski and snow ski on the same day.

We visit the Musical Instrument Museum (The MIM) occasionally. We tried to visit yesterday, but the parking lot was filled to overflowing when we arrived. Our company blamed the rain. We blamed the darn snowbirds. Anyway, we arrived shortly after they opened today to no lines.

One of my recommended travel apps let us down this trip: iExit. It found a Stuckey’s for gas and snacks, but missed Buc-ees. Buc-ees is like a truck stop that does not allow trucks. Inexpensive gas and a convenient store that’s more of a supermarket for stuff. Stuff like lunch, sugared nuts, all kinds of candy, crawfish cleaners, trail cameras, and more.