Category: Travel

Categories
Blogging Driving Home Travel

Highlands County Florida

Welcome back to #TravelThursday. Last Thursday morning I actually returned home from a quick 2-day road-trip to and from Highlands County Florida – located about 3 hours from home.

A little over 101,000 residents call Highlands County home. Less than 23,000 live within the established limits of the 3 incorporated cities / towns of Avon Park, Sebring, and Lake Placid. (More than 78,000 residents live in adjacent unincorporated communities and rural areas of the county.)

U.S. 27 runs in a mostly NNW / SSE direction for about 48 miles through the county. U.S. 98 runs concurrent with U.S. 27 through the northern-half of the county.

So a little over 101,000 residents live within an 1,106-square mile county. By comparison – more people live within about 5 miles of me right now.

Highlands County is my future home, and on the first day I was there last week I met my Real Estate Agent for the first time at her office in Lake Placid. I followed her to 1 of her 2 Sebring offices, and then from there I got in her vehicle. We drove up the road (U.S. 27) to my future neighborhood (between Sebring and Avon Park). It was awesome to finally pass-through the front gate of that secure entrance. I got to check-out 3 separate condos currently for sale – a 2/2, a 3/2, and a 2/1 – in that order. The 2/2 was nice, but the 3/2 was wonderful. All 3 condos were fully or partially-furnished. I wasn’t sure I would like that. I loved it. They all had better furniture than I do right now !

I got to experience my future neighborhood for about an hour on that Tuesday. Before the experience I was about 98% sure that it was where I want to live (based on online research). Now I’m at 100%. We drove 1.2 miles clockwise around the neighborhood that surrounds a 10½-acre manmade oval-shaped lake. I loved everything about it. I’m looking forward to working with my Real Estate Agent early next year in the purchase of my future forever home.

My plan is to initially live (and work remotely) up there on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and live (and work on-site) my final year here in Homestead on Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays.

So I would do a 3½-hour commute early on Sunday mornings and late on Wednesday afternoons. That’s my plan for now (subject to change).

I had a fun (less than) 48 hours up in my future retirement area of Highlands County. I enjoyed Breakfast with my only known friend in the area – a former resident of Homestead who moved to the area nearly 15 years ago. I also met lots of new friends at different places that I plan to serve with during my retirement era.

Next #TravelThursday we’ll visit one of those places up in Avon Park. Let’s keep traveling together.

All rights reserved (c) 2022 Christopher M. Day, CountUp

Categories
Animals Blogging Nature Photography Travel

Zoo Miami

Welcome back to #TravelThursday. A couple of weeks ago on the Friday leading-in to Memorial Day Weekend here in the U.S.A. I visited the Miami-Dade Zoological Park And Gardens – also known as Zoo Miami. It’s about 18 miles from my home.

This was my 6TH visit over the past 11 years – but first in over 5 years. I usually like to visit once every 2 or 3 years on a cool day during the wintertime (dry season). On this occasion I visited on a sunny and hot day at the end of May (rainy season). I actually took advantage of free admission for all military and veterans during the holiday weekend.

Zoo Miami is huge. It sits on about 750 acres of land – of which less than half is actually developed for animals, employees, and visitors. Over 3,000 animals and 500 species call Zoo Miami home.

This place holds a very special place in my heart, as it’s the first zoo that I ever visited in my life – as a 20 or 21-year-old in 1988. (I never got the zoo experience as a kid.) So I consider it my “childhood” zoo that I’ve now been visiting every few years for the past 34 years. I usually spend a little over 3 hours with each visit. I also don’t see everything during those 3 hours, so I try to visit the exhibits that are new, or that I didn’t get to experience on my previous visit.

On this Friday before the Memorial Day holiday the zoo was absolutely packed with hundreds (maybe over a thousand) elementary, middle, and high school students – roaming in packs large and small – counterclockwise around the park (4 miles around). So I followed the few adults and families that traversed the park clockwise – to mostly avoid the packs of school kids.

That would’ve been nice to visit the National Zoo in Washington D.C. as a school kid in the area back in the late-1970s and early-1980s.

I took 40 photos during my 3-hour trip around the zoo. Here are a few:

Next #TravelThursday we’ll visit my future retirement area of Highlands County Florida. Let’s keep traveling together.

All rights reserved (c) 2022 Christopher M. Day, CountUp

Categories
Blogging Career Driving Military Travel

Chicopee Massachusetts

Welcome back to #TravelThursday. 12 years ago this month the USAF sent me to Westover Air Reserve Base in Chicopee Massachusetts for an observation of how my counterparts there do the same job as me at their base. Me and my supervisor at the time flew in to Bradley International Airport (#BDL) on a Monday. Bradley is located in north-central Connecticut about halfway between Hartford Connecticut (15 miles to the south) and Springfield Massachusetts (15 miles to the north). We got our rental car, and we drove northward into Massachusetts towards Westover. It was my very first time ever into the states of Connecticut and Massachusetts, and I haven’t been back there since.

Westover Air Reserve Base (ARB) is the former Westover Air Force Base (AFB) – built in 1939 at the start of World War 2. It’s been an ARB for the past 30+ years, and it’s the largest ARB in the U.S. in both size and military and civilian employee population.

Chicopee is the city that includes nearly all of Westover. About 55,500 residents call Chicopee home. The city reached its peak population during the early-1970s, and it’s been dropping steadily since. It’s a northern suburb of Springfield which it borders. About 156,000 call Springfield home, and about 700,000 live within the Greater Springfield metro area.

“When at Westover – eat at Bernie’s“, and so we did. It’s a nice restaurant located inside a train car. It’s very unique-looking from the outside, and the food is pretty good inside. I remember it to this day.

The area sits near the foothills of the scenic Berkshires – a low-elevation mountain range that’s part of the Appalachians. It’s about a 45-minute drive to the west. On a future visit to the region (and I hope that there is one) I definitely wish to explore this area. Chicopee is known as the “Crossroads Of New England”. My first (and only to date) visit to New England was way too short (barely 5 days). It was a sneak-peek of a future non-work-related trip that will hopefully include more of New England into Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

Finally – I was wondering if Chicopee / Westover was the furthest north I’ve ever been here stateside. No. It’s near 42.2° north latitude. I’ve been further north – Detroit (42.3°), Milwaukee (43.0°), Syracuse (43.1°), and Niagara Falls (43.1°).

Next #TravelThursday we’ll visit ZooMiami. Let’s keep traveling together.

All rights reserved (c) 2022 Christopher M. Day, CountUp

Categories
1970s 1980s Blogging Driving Movies Radio Travel

Kings Dominion

Welcome back to #TravelThursday. Kings Dominion is a fun seasonal amusement park located between Washington D.C. and Richmond Virginia (much closer to Richmond) right along I-95. The 280-acre park opened on May 03RD 1975 – the same exact date that my little brother was born. Starting in the late-1970s and continuing into the mid-1980s me and my family would visit the park every few summers. We would actually alternate between Kings Dominion, Busch Gardens near Williamsburg Virginia (opened 13 days after Kings Dominion), and Hershey Park in Pennsylvania (opened 116 years ago this weekend).

Kings Dominion is generally open starting in mid-March – weekends only at first, and then daily from Memorial Day Weekend to Labor Day Weekend. The park returns to weekends only during the Autumn months. It’s also open during Christmas and New Year’s Week for festive displays and events known as #WinterFest.

Me and my brother always had a lot of fun roaming around the park and riding all of the rides. My parents were there for the shows, shops, and restaurants.

There are still some original rides from the 1975 opening including what used to be the “Rebel Yell” rollercoaster – now known as the “Racer 75”. It rises to a height of 85 feet, and it drops 81 of those 85 feet at a top speed of 56 MPH. That was perhaps the first rollercoaster I ever rode on. It was scary back then, and I wouldn’t ride it today because – well – it’s still scary. (And nowadays I get motion sickness very easily on those types of rides.)

That’s me as a teenager in the early-1980s atop the Eiffel Tower – a one-third replica of the real thing – standing tall at 314 feet. (The observation decks are 40 feet below the top.)

So 26 years ago this week (leading-up to Memorial Day Weekend) was my final visit with my brother to Kings Dominion. My brother won a radio contest on Washington rock station #DC101 – two free tickets to Kings Dominion – where you got to go there as VIPs before the park opened to participate in a “Mission: Impossible” scavenger hunt all throughout the park. (The Tom Cruise movie premiered at the box office that week.) Me and my brother drove down to the park on an unseasonably chilly and drizzly day, and we had lots of fun with the scavenger hunt and the rides on that day.

A lot of fun family memories at Kings Dominion. It’s good to see it still thriving with new generations of families 47 years later.

Next #TravelThursday we’ll visit Chicopee Massachusetts. Let’s keep traveling together.

All rights reserved (c) 2022 Christopher M. Day, CountUp