Category Archives: travel

Betsy Ross House Performance, Philadelphia

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Betsy Ross House Performance

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck.

Here in Philadelphia’s historic district many of the buildings offer historical tours and insights.   Here at Betsy Ross’s actors from “Once Upon a Nation” talk about women and the Revolution.     I’ve really been impressed with the quality of some of the interpreters here who make you feel like you really are stepping back in time.

I’m glad to see this approach is becoming a popular way to teach people history. National Park Service ranger guides are usually professional but lack the clothing and often that spark of historical enthusiasm that makes the enactment interpretations so effective.

Blogging Philadelphia ?

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Wow, I’m here in Philadelphia enjoying the Hilton Hospitality with good free WIFI, but didn’t realize until tonight that the Blog Philadelphia UNconference is going on today and tomorrow.   Looks like a great and sold out event, and it’s great to see blogging conferences sprouting up outside of Silicon Valley.  I’ll miss meeting other bloggers which would have been fun, but I will plan to enjoy history and cheessteaks with the family as we explore this spectacularly historical American Masterpiece – Philly!

U-S History is one of our Online Highways websites with great history info.

Pennsylvania Travel at Online Highways

Gophila.com is a great information resource but has some serious navigation challenges.  For example the drop down menus are annoying and complex, and most crazy is the flash photo montage at the index page which almost immediately wipes out the intro screen that has the navigation a user needs.   The pix are OK, but don’t do the history justice.   I think local folks don’t realize that people don’t come to Philadelphia to see a pretty garden or Christmas light display.     They come here to see Independence Hall, Liberty Bell, Ben Franklin’s house, and the cradle of American Liberty.     I guess those things just aren’t stylish enough for the Philly web design crowd?   Sillies!

Philadelphia Freedom

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Happy birthday to our great American Experiment!

Our local morning talk show had many callers who were concerned about American’s poor reputation over much of the world and concerns about the health of the USA as a democracy. I’m not so pessimistic, believing that we should view the violence and instability around the world as caused by those who want violence, instability, and major change rather than those who have as their objective personal freedom, religious freedom, free speech, and prosperity for almost everybody. (ummm – that would be my country that wants all that, right?!)

America’s mistakes – and there are many – almost always come from a *distortion* of the ideas and ideals of the founders rather than as part of the great American experiment. Slavery, poverty, civil unrest, political power abuses, corruption, and most or our other American problems here and abroad are in defiance of the basic US Constitutional and ideological framework, not part of it. Critics of America both here and abroad should spend more time asking themselves “what is the right course of action” and far less time ranting about whatever course the other party/person/nation is currently taking.

Even the founders themselves recognized the challenges of a populist democratic experiment, and even the remarkable and otherwise politically prescient Ben Franklin notably suggested that he’d be surprised if the American experiment in democracy and personal freedom he helped inspire would last very long.

Ironically, Franklin also noted that people should not complain about taxes – unless the rate got to a terribly outrageous amount approaching 10% – in which case another revolution would be justified. “Yo, Ben, put DOWN that muzzle loader, we tax the heck out of everybody now”…

One great irony of the current American situation is how far we’ve come from the original vision of the founders. Even the founders would struggle to understand the sheer volume of our American empire – the largest economic and military power in history. They’d also certainly view with great skepticism our huge federal and state Governments bureaucracies, and also be very concerned about how aggressively we have sought to maintain our power or the power of our allies through force in so many regions of the world. The founders were globalists – remarkable for that time – but they viewed large, centralized governments as dangerous, unneccessary, and an inhibition to innovation and progress.

We are heading to Philadelphia next week and I’ll hope to get some insights about our great American experiment as I sit in the cradle of American liberty. Are we now adrift or does America remain the shining beacon of liberty, justice, and prosperity to all our fellow global citizens? Maybe …. we are both.

Uzbekistan Travel and the Province of Djizak

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Update – both this page and our Uzbekistan Travel “Province of Djizak” page are now ranked very high for “Province of Djizak” searches.    Thank you Google for ranking us properly.     Also note that my old experiments on this term were messed up by blog changes, so I think the great page I created was left hanging, and it’s to Google’s credit they wound up ranking the OHWY page (correctly) as fairly authoritative.      Fairly clear to me now that our  earlier troubles were a from a site-wide Google downrank penalty.

The old story:

Normally I would not be writing so much about Uzbekistan Travel.    We already have a great guide to Uzbekistan over at Online Highways’ Uzbekistan Travel section that was put together for us by Marat, a magazine publisher over in Tashkent, Uzbekistan who visited Online Highways in Oregon a few years ago.

However, writing about the Province of Djizak has been an excellent way to get some information about why Google has been punishing OHWY.com for the past few years.  I’ve created the world’s best Province of Djizak page at the OHWY blog and linked it up.  Due to spelling irregularities for Province of Djizak clearly the new blog page is *a great page* that most users would probably want if they were searching for Province of Djizak.

However, it’s the blog posts here that seem to “stick” as the number one page for that term, with the better page going from rank of about 200 to rank of 3 to rank of about 200 again.

The conclusion?   A sitewide penalty by Google that downranks even great, user friendly, advertising free, must see pages about Province of Djizak.

Hey Google, that’s arguably not a good approach if the goal is to give users the best information, especially when there is still no Google mechanism to tell a legitimate site why the Algorithm thinks that portions of the site suck so much that the computer is punishing the whole site.

Oregon Travel: Weekend Getaways I

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My pal asked for some weekend getaway advice for Southern Oregon.
He had a tall order:

Old, quaint hotel or a cabin
Not too expensive
In or near a town with at least one or two decent restaurants, maybe a coffee house.
Hiking and swimming near
Town Festival a bonus
Not too far from free WiFi

You can’t find all that anywhere I know, but here are some possible nice family spots:

Odell Lake Lodge, No. Klamath. About 3 hours from here this is my families favorite “local” overnight though we usually go in winter. Boating and (cold) swimming in Lake, really nice, small cozy lodge, hiking all around, very good food at the restaurant lodge. I think no internet. Kind of secluded in the woods. No WIFI at our last stay – March of 06.
http://www.odelllakeresort.com

Prospect Inn up 62 on way to Crater Lake, which itself has some new cabins I think, though they probably won’t be cheap. Crater Lake Lodge is expensive and probably full but it’s worth a stay sometime. Prob no WIFI

Oregon Caves Lodge – rooms are pretty rustic but this is really a *cool* lodge in my opinion and your son will love the cave tour. Lots of great hiking nearby and good food at the lodge though I’m not sure if they have all 3 meals there. OregonCaves.com (one of my sites!). No WIFI

Coast: I’m not up on many of the lodges over there. Best Western on the beach in Brookings is nice.. (there is also one on 101 that is nice but not on water), Windermere in Bandon, Inn at Face Rock. For coast consider a house rental. Search “Oregon Coast home rentals” to bring up a bunch.

SunRiver – fancy lodge and nice houses, can be expensive depending on time of year and availability. Great hiking very near. Bend is 15 miles away and it’s a beautiful small city.

I’ve left out some of the best places to stay if you are coming to the Rogue Valley because I live here and don’t stay overnight in Jacksonville, Medford, Ashland, Grants Pass. Weasku Inn, for example, is one of the nicest lodges in the West and a former haunt of Clark Gable.

Here is more Oregon Travel detail at Online Highways

Kim Search blog gathering

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Yesterday we had a very enjoyable breakfast at the Galice Resort with some of the folks who made the blog so interesting during the search for the Kim family up in the Rogue River Wilderness. I’ll put up some pictures soon though I only took a few along the route because this set of pictures, taken about 3 months back, was so good.

At breakfast we had Bob Hollenbeck and his wife Sue, John Rachor, Sara (JoCoSAR), and Emily (RogueRiverRat78)

John, who was spotted Kati and the girls, flew in and out in his Chopper.

After breakfast Emily and Sara took me all the way up to where the Kims had stopped the car and became snowed in, and many miles before that where James had made the fateful decision to head down into Big Windy Canyon. Phew – that is a quite a road up there when you take the BLM 34-8-36 (which may be named differently depending on the local person you talk to). This is the right turn they took after backing up from snow on the route NF23 which does go over to Gold Beach. The gate to BLM 34-8-36 is NOW LOCKED on the BLM road that heads off to the right, and I understand that the BLM plans to keep it locked all season. There was a rock cairn and picture of James on one of the posts as a memorial that had been placed recently there.

The pictures can’t really convey how steep Big Windy Canyon is where you head down off the road, and my windy tour with Emily and Sara made it clearer to me how hard it was to get people in there to search, how huge the search area was, and how difficult the searching would have been in those conditions. Bob Hollenbeck wants to take an onstar up there this summer to see if it’ll work.

Another thing that became very clear to me was how difficult the search was made by the false reports of sightings of the family, including ones way over in Gold Beach. This made it very hard to narrow the search area.

John Rachor’s excellent warning sign was up near the left turn off of Galice Road and up into the high country but in my opinion it’s unfortunate he had to move it back from where it was. I’m a lot more familiar with that area than any tourist would be and it’s still pretty darn confusing with respect to signage. That said, we now know Kati and James made a decision to back up from the Forest Service 23 after they hit snow and take the lower road. Better signs would have helped keep them off this road, but it was not signage that got them to take this “wrong road”.

At the car site little was left from the Kim’s extraordinary challenge of facing 9 days there with little food. The fire area had been scraped mostly clear – it was about 50 yards from where the car was which was near the middle of the intersection of 3 roads.

Sara spotted a red package way up in the bushes which turned out to be an emergency blanket that had been dropped after Kati was found but before they could pick her up.

All in all an amazing day yesterday where I got a much better idea of the scale of this search and the difficulties faced by Kati, James, and their family. I can’t thank Emily and Sara enough for a remarkable tour of the area that seemed so oddly familiar even though I’d never been there. On the *long* way back to Galice up and down that windy road it was even clearer to me how James Kim would be OK with the outcome of his personal tragedy – his family is safe and is going to be fine.

Airport Security is too darn expensive ?

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My posting over at the Airports Blog says we are spending too much on Airport Security.   This may seem odd to  many in light of the recent foiled terror plot at JFK, but I don’t hear any advocates for huge budget military and security spending balancing the cost of all the security and military spending with alternatives to that approach.

The reason they can’t rationally make the case for current budgets is that the cost is completely out of line with the return on the investments.    Ironically those claiming to be “fiscal conservatives” have become the most flagrant spenders in history, suggesting that the war on terror justifies all budgets because the cost of catastrophe is very great.   The problem with this line of thinking is similar to the big spending social program line – government work is expensive work.    We need to find more effective and cheaper ways to challenge terror, and probably need to factor in many scenarios so we can compare them with alternative investments in infrastructure.

For example I think many would say it is worth it to spend 5 billion government dollars for a 50% chance of thwarting  an attack that would kill 1000 people.   Yet those same folks would vote against spending an extra 5 billion on health care measures that would save 10,000 people.   The second spend is *twenty times* more cost effective than the first.   Sure there are many factors, but this type of analysis should at the very least be fleshed in a bit to avoid what we do now – spend based on political and emotional agendas that bear little relation to cost effectiveness.

My argument is simple -we are currently foresaking a lot of good in favor of fighting bad, and this approach is probably not sustainable for the long term.

Mission San Luis Rey, California

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Mission San Luis Rey, California

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck.
I really enjoyed our visit to the San Diego area. The Mission San Luis Rey was beautiful and historically very interesting.

From their information panels with minor editing by me:

San Luis Rey was the 18th in the line old California Missions. Founded by Father Lasuen in 1798, San Luis Rey soon became the largest of all the California Missions. Father Peyri, builder of San Luis Rey, remained at the Mission for 34 years and saw it prosper. Afer the mission was taken from the Padres it became a ruin. Restoration has taken place in recent times and continues today. Much of the former Glory of San Luis Rey as “King of the Missions” can still be seen today.

… and so it can! This is only about 10 minutes off Highway 101 at Newport Beach, CA. Drop by In and Out Burger for a great lunch on the way back on to California Highway 101.

Kit Carson, famous pioneer scout, led Gen. Kearny’s “dragoons” and camped at San Luis Rey in December of 1846.

Airports Blog and Online Highways Blog

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Well, I’m going blog crazy these days and hope I can keep up the writing pace needed to maintain a bunch of blogs related to website projects. For me, the blog format makes it a lot easier to write a lot. Perhaps this is because I’m a very fast writer but somewhat design challenged. Blog content management allows me to focus only on the words and ideas and not much on the navigation, design, or overall site structure.

The new Travel blog is Online Highways, a companion to our mega travel site. I’m also starting an Airports Blog
as a companion to my languishing QuickAid.com Airports website project which *will* get a major overhaul as part of this process.

The President Picker blog is one I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep up. Here I will try to keep current with the latest presidential stuff though president news is so overwhelming so early in the process I’m hardly providing much of a service here.

More likely to get maintained will be the Prescription Report blog. This will be a companion to the Prescription Report website. The idea here is simple – whenever I see an advertisement for a new prescription drug I’ll review the drug, trying to provide information about the basics of the drugs include the safety and about the pros and cons of the prescription drug as well as links to company sites and sites with alternative views about the drug.

Another one I have yet to start will feature detailed travel tips from Oregon. This is an area where, theoretically, I’m a big expert so you’d think it would be going by now … but … it’s not. Soon though, soon!