Travels in the 2nd half

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you should know that my engineering background makes “big things” must see for me. So on a recent trip to San Francisco I took advantage of the time to visit the Golden Gate Bridge on more than one occasion. One of the most iconic structures in the United States, the Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, connecting San Francisco with Marin County, to the north. The Golden Gate is the name of the straight that connects the San Francisco Bay with the Pacific Ocean. The bridge is 1.7 miles long and its roadway is 220 feet above the mean high water mark. By US National Park [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons One problem with sight-seeing in San Francisco is unpredictable weather. The cold water of the Pacific Ocean is a fog generator, and every morning that we were in town started as a cloudy, foggy day. So one morning I headed to the bridge with the hope that the skies would clear. Unfortunately they didn’t. The clo...

  The moon takes its first bite of the sun One thing to know about watching an eclipse in a large public place, there is a lot of sitting and waiting. I arrived at the Athens’s Tennessee Regional Park early – at 10 AM. So I that meant I had a three hour wait until the start of the eclipse and a 4.5 hour wait until the start of the total eclipse. So I found a seat in the shade. This gave me the opportunity to meet and talk to a lot of people around me. The crowd coming into the park at 10 AM This is not the first solar eclipse that I have seen. I distinctly remember the 1979 eclipse. In New York City. It was a partial eclipse. The strongest memory I have is that the leaves of the trees diffracted the light and there were dozens of images of the sun on the sidewalk. This was the first time that I have been close enough to a total eclipse that I could travel to see it. So I drove over seven hundred miles from New York City to Knoxville TN. I picked Knox...