Arch, Point, Tunnel, Bridge

 September 18, 2019. I'm skipping the 17th for now. We took a day and went to the Kentucky State Botanical Garden. That was awesome, but I'll save that for another time.

Our first destination for the day was Gray's Arch. This is one of the biggest ones at about 80 feet high. Very impressive. But it was hard to get pictures because it's surrounded with trees.

Our biggest goal of the day was to find a trail that goes to Hanson's Point. It's not on the official maps, but everyone said we shouldn't miss it, and that it wasn't hard to find. So we went hunting, and it was well worth it.

This trail goes out on a peninsula of land that sticks out into the central valley. The peninsula gets narrower and narrower as you approach the end. Near the end of the point it's bare rock.

The views from there were the most far-reaching we'd seen. The valley is the Red River Gorge.

This is a fun item. I zoomed the picture in, but there is a tower of rock out there that isn't eroded away. It's called "Revenuer's Rock" because supposedly moonshiners operated out there during prohibition. No one could get to them undetected.

Then we drove through the Nada (say NAY-duh) Tunnel. This was hand cut in 1910 as a railroad tunnel for logging. Now it's a single-lane road tunnel. Yes, it's the small dark rectangle at the bottom of that pile of red rocks. It's 900 feet long.

We had just one more stop to make for the day. We wanted to walk the suspension bridge for the Sheltowee Trace across the Red River. I'm glad we got to walk it then, because it was destroyed in floods last year. There's a walkaround if the water is too deep to cross. Guess I'll find out in a couple of weeks.

We walked about 8 miles that day.

In other news: I hunkered down and worked on my projects. Time is running out, and I had to add another one that I had forgotten about to the list. Yikes!

See Seven More Arches

Seven More Arches

 September 16, 2019

I haven't looked very hard for the notes from this trip since I have so much to do, but our goal was to visit all the arches in Red River Gorge. I think there are 17 of them. We did manage it, and there was an interesting variety. We went to seven of them on this day.

I'll start with the most spectacular. In fact, this may be my favorite of the whole trip. It's a solid pillar of rock on one end and just a little balance point on the other. This is Sky Bridge, and you walk both on top of it and underneath it.

The view from the top.

Hensen's Arch is totally different- just a little double chimney with some water flowing in. You could go down inside it.

Look down at the end of those half moons that aren't quite arches. The last one IS an arch. This is Hidden Arch. Yes, it's small.

This one was medium sized and called Silvermine Arch.

Angel Windows was fun- it's two arches at an angle to each other. Just person size.

It's easy to figure how this one got it's name- Whistling Arch. Although we didn't hear it whistling.

As if that wasn't enough, we also went to Rock Bridge, so named because there is water flowing under it. I guess that's not terribly common. Most of these are made by wind erosion.

In just under 8 miles, we took in 7 arches. I also got what I think is one of my best wildlife pictures- a fence lizard eating a grub or caterpillar of some kind.

In news from today: I worked really hard and spent a block of time on each of my projects that have to be completed in one week!

See Whittleton Arch and D. Boon Hut

Modern Dentistry Is Amazing!

 Today I had the tooth that could be saved fixed. What they did today used to take a couple of months. This took 2 hours!

The blue line points to the screw-on nut that is keeping the dental implant covered until I can afford to get that tooth made.

The black line points to the crown they did today. I know... best tooth in my mouth, right?

It used to be that you had to get the rot drilled out of the tooth and filled. Then they would take an impression. That would be sent to the lab. In about a month a temporary crown came back and that would be fitted, trying to fashion it so that your bite wouldn't be altered. Then it would go back to the lab again. The final crown would come in another month, and it might be really good or not. And it was usuallly gold. I have a couple of those.

Of course, I had a lot of crowns on my front teeth before the partial plate was made. If you missed the whole long, sad dental saga of my life, and care, you can click the link. The point is, I've been subjected to a lot of bad dentisry, and some good but still brutal dentistry over the last 69 years. This was quite different.

They do almost none of that anymore, except drill and fill the bad tooth if needed. It was needed. But the filling material is some newer product that they squeeze in with something like a pastry bag. No more scooping and tamping until they think the crevices are filled.

Then...and this is the best... no more impressions that make you gag. The tech uses a small, hand-held 3-D scanner and just keeps waving it around inside your mouth until the computer builds an accurate picture of your teeth and gums.

This is that part of my lower jaw with the cover on the implant post (the round thing). The white part is the dentist's first go at computer-generating the crown. There was a previous view without the crown that tells the computer how to make it fit on the old tooth. The purple is just like you remember... it's where the tooth is going to hit the upper teeth, so he took a little bit off that.

They also do a scan with your mouth closed, so they can get the accurate bite. And the details of my partial plate are rendered quite accurately.

A machine grinds the shape of the cap out of a block of lithium disilicate. Then they check that for proper fit and decent bite. At this point, the crown is very fragile.

But, it's actually a type of porcelain. So then in goes into a kiln for about 20 minutes and comes out hard and perfect. One last fitting, glue it on, and out the door. I think this is the only crown I've ever had made that didn't mess with the bite. And no restrictions- I can eat and chew as desired right away.

Basically, not painful at all. They use a numbing jelly before they inject the... whatever it is. I'm sure it's not novacaine any more. It had all worn off by about 1 pm, and the only consequence was a tiny bit of a headache.

I am in awe of the speed, efficiency, technology, and painlessness of the entire process.

As a reminder, this is part 3 of a 4-part, expensive project.
1. Remove broken molar- last fall
2. Replace that hole with an implant- over the winter
3. Crown on the rotten tooth next to that one- today
4. Crown on the implant- as soon as I can save enough money.

I am blogging early today because I have a meeting later, and I'm going to take a short walk on the way to it. Most of what I did today was dentist and prep for the meeting.

Later:
Miles walked in 2026: 303.2
NCT miles walked in 2026: 114.7

North Country Trail, Lake Co, MI. North from 40th St for 1.25 miles and back. 2.5 hot, humid miles.

See Scouting Out the Dental Landscape

Whittleton Arch and D. Boon Hut

 September 15, 2019. I was feeling better, so we did a full day of exploration. An awful lot of it was on the Sheltowee Trace, so I'll see some of this again!

(It looks like we walked to VanHook Falls on the 14th, but were disappointed because there was almost no water in the creek, so I'll just skip that day too.)

First walk was to Whittleton Arch. Actually, this is down a short branch trail, so perhaps I'll go to it or not on this next hike. It was OK, but not spectacular. The best thing about it was that you could scramble all over the rocks. There were families with kids there and the young'uns were having a blast.

I climbed up into the rocks, but Marie did not!

This hike was shorter than we thought it was going to be, so we tacked on another trail that took us to a cave that had D. Boon scratched into it. No one knows if THE Daniel Boone was here and just didn't finish his name, or if it's someone else. The cave is blocked off because there are endangered bats that roost there.

It was a hanging shelf cave, like all the others in the area, so I'll just show you this close view through the fence because this is more interesting. In this cave was mined potassium nitrate, Niter, which is used for making gunpowder. It was actively mined here through the Civil War. The troughs have something to do with that.

I just liked these roots.

Hiked a little over 5 miles that day. We were kind of in camper heaven. Even though it wasn't totally fixed up yet, the trailer was useable. We also had a screen house on our site. This is the only time we've used that when the wind didn't blow it over, but it worked great for that trip.

And I was in botany heaven with a lot of new plants. We'll see if I have time for some of those before I leave on this trip.

In other news: I worked hard on computer things today including editing. Made a small dent in my list, but the big projects are getting an alloted time slot each day, so they won't be DONE until probably early next week. I can't bear to work on any one of them for hours at at time.

See Rockcastle Narrows a nd Mill Springs

South Channel Light

 I was hunkered down at the computer, and had been for hours, when Cathy called and suggested a walk. Yes!

We went out to the Ludington south channel. This is the opposite side of the channel from the lighthouse. You can see both in this picture, but it would be 10 miles to walk from where we were to the Ludington light. We were headed for the red striped light on the left.

The water near shore was an amazing turquoise, although farther out it was deep blue. You can just kind of see that in the pictures above and below this one.

Although we probably could have made it to the south light safely by hugging the channel side of the walk, Cathy didn't want to get as wet as seemed likely!

On the way back to the car we walked through the Pere Marquette memorial. This is where Jacques Marquette may have died.

We added a little more to our hike by climbing the 73 steps up the dune to walk through Buttersville Campground. That had more shade and made a nice ending to our walk.

The little adventure made a good break in my computer-bound day- editing and other stuff.

Miles walked in 2026: 300.7
A loop from Buttersville Park, Mason County, to partway out the south breakwall and back. 3.8 miles

See Liquid Air