2012 Road Trip Photos #36: Little Museum on the Prairie

December 11, 2012 By Randall A. Golden in Travel Tags: Charles Ingalls, histor, history, Independence, Independence Kansas, Kansas, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie, photography, photos, road trip, tourism, travel, vacation 1 Comment

After two major attractions and lunch at Freddy’s Frozen Custard and Steakburgers, we finally exited Hutchinson and pursued other Kansas fancies on Day Eight. We headed southeast, skirted the perimeter of Wichita, wound our way down I-35, and negotiated the offroad highways leading near the town of Independence to one of several Midwest locations that once housed the original Ingalls family, stars of the biographical Little House on the Prairie series that was mandatory reading for all women of my wife’s generation.

As you can imagine, this short stop in the middle of drought-stricken agrarian territory was for her benefit. We were a long, long way from the manly gadgetry of the Kansas Cosmosphere.

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2012 Road Trip Photos #35: the Kansas Cosmosphere, Part 2 of 2: Starship Parts Catalog

December 9, 2012 By Randall A. Golden in Travel Tags: aviation, Cosmosphere, Hutchinson, Kansas, kansas cosmosphere, photography, photos, road trip, science, space, space program, space race, spaceflight, tourism, transportation, travel, vacation Leave a comment

As we saw in our previous installment, the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Museum in Hutchinson, Kansas, provides a good, safe home to many retired spacecraft and spacecraft understudies. Their collections are a comprehensive tribute to those pioneers and daredevils who yearn to see mankind reach beyond our spatial boundaries and discover what else lies in store for us in God’s universe.

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2012 Road Trip Photos #34: the Kansas Cosmosphere, Part 1 of 2: Starship Graveyard

December 6, 2012 By Randall A. Golden in Travel Tags: aviation, Cosmosphere, Hutchinson, Kansas, photography, photos, road trip, space, space program, space race, spaceflight, tourism, transportation, travel, vacation, vehicles 2 Comments

Once we returned from the Underground Salt Museum to the surface world, Day Eight of our nine-day journey continued on the other end of Hutchinson at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center. Our family has seen space-race paraphernalia in other museums such as the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (2003), Kennedy Space Center (2007), and Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry (2009), but the Cosmosphere competes in its own way, particularly with souvenirs from foreign contributors to the space race. Kansas seems like the last place on Earth you’d find a dedicated repository for cosmonaut relics, but there it was.

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Reflections in a Giant Magic Bean

December 3, 2012 By Randall A. Golden in Travel Tags: art, Chicago, Cloud Gate, Millennium Park, photography, photos, postaday, reflection, sculpture, self-portrait, tourism, travel, vacation, Weekly Photo Challenge 7 Comments

This week’s edition of the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge is my second foray into the field. It’s not a fierce competition with a major award at stake, just a fun excuse for participants to compare experiences and imaginations. I’m strictly an amateur pic-snapper, but it’s fun throwing my hat in the ring anyway.

My entrants were drawn from two separate visits to Chicago’s Millennium Park, home to a sculpture called the Cloud Gate, nicknamed “The Bean” by the locals because of obvious reasons. If a giant uprooted an entire hall-of-mirrors fun house, wadded it up in his massive mitts, left a dent in the middle by smashing it against his forehead, and then tossed it a giant rock polisher, it might look like this.

“Cloud Gate” by Anish Kapoor. Just imagine the beanstalk.

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Wallflower Agrees to Disagree with Company Holiday Party

December 2, 2012 By Randall A. Golden in Mundane Tags: company parties, holiday parties, holidays, humor, musings, opinion, parties, photography, photos, still life, thoughts 8 Comments

Every year my wife and I pin my company’s holiday party on our calendar for exactly three reasons:

1. It’s a rare excuse to spend quality time together in an adult setting in nice clothes.

2. It’s a free dinner.

3. They’re generous about giving out door prizes to the majority of the attendees.

It’s been a few years since my last door prize, but I try not to give up hope for the first few hours of the party, during which she and I do our best to pass the time with not much to keep us occupied except each other and pure imagination. This is not as easy for us as it is for normal people. We don’t dance or drink. Those I call “friend” usually find reasons to bow out. Those I call “happy acquaintance” are great at pre-planning their seating arrangements with their longtime closer friends. The two of us usually find an empty table, establish our own Island of Misfit Diners, and grant asylum to other loners or latecomers seeking refuge. It’s a necessary service we’re used to providing.

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2012 Road Trip Photos #33: Underground Salt Museum, Part 3 of 3: Hollywood Under Glass

December 1, 2012 By Randall A. Golden in Travel Tags: entertainment, Hutchinson, Kansas, movie props, movies, NaBloPoMo, photography, photos, preservation, road trip, salt, Superman, tourism, travel, Underground Salt Museum, Underground Vaults and Storage, vacation Leave a comment

The curators of the Underground Salt Museum realize that visitors want their money’s worth for the experience. Staring at shelves filled with real film canisters and acid-free storage boxes isn’t the most stimulating visual aid to the average tourist. Either to drive home their mission statement or to dazzle and delight us, the tour ends with a collection of sample movie props that have been forwarded to Underground Vaults & Storage for permanent preservation. If American civilization ends and the next wave of settlers happens to be searching for clues as to the leisure-time predilections of their predecessors, the contents of this fortified entertainment bunker will tell them all they need to know about the movies and characters that meant the most to all of us, that transcended commerce and became High Art worth saving from oblivion.

They’ll also see the Mr. Freeze suit from Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin.

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2012 Road Trip Photos #32: Underground Salt Museum, Part 2 of 3: To Preserve Man

November 28, 2012 By Randall A. Golden in Travel Tags: film preservation, Hutchinson, Kansas, NaBloPoMo, photography, photos, preservation, preservatives, road trip, salt, tourism, travel, Underground Salt Museum, Underground Vaults and Storage, vacation Leave a comment

In addition to their service as a simple salt mine, the subterranean chambers of the Underground Salt Museum provide a stable temperature, humidity, and overall salt-heavy atmosphere ideal for slowing the biodegradation process and preventing everyday objects from crumbling into dust. To prove the point, one of their museum exhibits is a stand filled with vintage garbage, looking just as freshly disgusting as it did when Don Draper’s contemporaries first threw it all away decades ago.

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Starbase Indy Photos, Part 3 of 3: Costumes! (and other objects in space)

November 26, 2012 By Randall A. Golden in Conventions & Events, Indiana Tags: celebrities, conventions, cosplay, costumes, entertainment, Indianapolis, Klingons, NaBloPoMo, NASA, photography, photos, Star Trek, star trek convention, Starbase Indy, travel 1 Comment

Let’s face it: costumes are the real reason to attend a sci-fi convention. Celebrities are okay. Talented writers and artists are nice to meet if they’re not terrible people. Panels, Q&As, and fan club meetings are great opportunities for great minds to hang out together. There’s also something to be said for wandering the dealers’ room for new hobbyist purchases, whether new items you’ve never seen or vintage collectibles you could never afford. My wife and I even attended an interesting lecture on nineteenth-century forensics, which drew comparisons between the original Sherlock Holmes stories and later historical developments in the field.

When it comes to Internet recaps, though, costumes are the main attraction. They celebrate our favorite characters, they showcase the creativity and inspiration of dedicated fans, they enliven the dullest moments of any convention, and they help distract us from garish hotel carpeting.

Among the best of this year’s bunch: a pink samurai, hanging out for a moment here with one of Indianapolis’ own Naptown Roller Girls.

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Starbase Indy 2012 Photos, Part 2 of 3: Ezri Dax, the Real Astronaut, and the Hippie Space Chick

November 25, 2012 By Randall A. Golden in Conventions & Events, Indiana Tags: Alexis Cruz, Captain's Chair, celebrities, conventions, costumes, David Reddick, Deborah Downey, Dr. David A. Wolf, entertainment, Indianapolis, NaBloPoMo, Nicole DeBoer, photography, photos, space, space program, spaceflight, Star Trek, star trek convention, Starbase Indy, travel 5 Comments

Despite the focus of Part One on Klingons extraordinaire Robert O’Reilly and J. G. Hertzler, they weren’t the only unforgettable personalities appearing at this year’s Starbase Indy convention. For Trek fans who’d attended previous cons (and therefore already had the chance to meet each Klingon warrior), the headliner would be Nicole DeBoer, making her first Indianapolis appearance. She’s known to us as Ezri Dax, a season-seven regular from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, who had big shoes to fill when Terry Farrell’s Jadzia Dax exited the series.

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Starbase Indy 2012 Photos, Part 1 of 3: The Day the Klingons Sang

November 24, 2012 By Randall A. Golden in Conventions & Events, Indiana Tags: celebrities, conventions, costumes, entertainment, Indianapolis, J. G. Hertzler, Klingons, NaBloPoMo, photography, photos, Robert O'Reilly, Star Trek, star trek convention, Starbase Indy, travel 3 Comments

As if Black Friday weren’t busy enough, my wife and I attended the seventeenth iteration of Starbase Indy on Friday and Saturday. This fan-run Star Trek convention is a longtime Thanksgiving weekend event that she and I have done several times (see previous entry). The convention cordially welcomes actors and fans from other shows and universes as well, but Trek still commands center stage.

Two of this year’s guests approached their Saturday Q&A with an unusual flourish. Fans of Star Trek: the Next Generation and Deep Space Nine will remember Robert O’Reilly as Chancellor Gowron, ruler of the Klingon Empire and frenemy of Worf. Don’t let his now-genial features fool you. Once upon a time, Gowron’s gaze was penetrating and frightening. Today his voice is no less stentorian.

J. G. Hertzler was DS9’s General Martok, a longtime ally of Worf, key player in the Dominion War, and successor to Gowron upon his death at Worf’s hands. As with O’Reilly, Hertzler could still be heard at the back of an auditorium even when his microphone malfunctioned.

O’Reilly and Hertzler shared a Q&A on Saturday in style. With the remarkable assistance of makeup artist John Paladin, the dastardly duo spent a few hours donning familiar faces and uniforms that the fans haven’t seen in a very long time.

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2012 Road Trip Photos #31: Underground Salt Museum, Part 1 of 3: Into the Mines of Morton

November 17, 2012 By Randall A. Golden in Travel Tags: cars, Kansas, Kansas Underground Salt Museum, mining, NaBloPoMo, photography, photos, road trip, salt, tourism, transportation, travel, Underground Salt Museum, vacation, vehicles 2 Comments

We ended Day Seven with a hotel stay northwest of Wichita in Hutchinson, a city large enough to have its own dying shopping mall and not one, but two notable attractions. Thus did Day Eight commence in the heart of the Kansas heartland…at the Underground Salt Museum.

I realize the name carries an excitement level on par with a box factory or the state of Delaware, but the Salt Museum is no ordinary salt mine. Granted, yes, part of it is an ordinary salt mine, but we’d never seen one of those before, either. Could it possibly be fascinating to gander inside the workplace that provides us with one of the greatest-tasting minerals on Earth?

This rusty but imposing chainsaw-mobile says yes.

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A Photo Salute to Green, Before it Retreats into Hibernation for the Winter

November 17, 2012 By Randall A. Golden in Misc. Media Tags: blogging, green, NaBloPoMo, nature, outdoors, photography, photos, postaday, tourism, travel, vacation, Weekly Photo Challenge 14 Comments

This week’s edition of the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge is the first such challenge I’ve ever attempted. It’s not a fierce competition with a major award at stake, but I feel sheepish daring to share a theme with so many top-notch professionals who do this for a living and/or have had extensive formal training. In the spirit of fun, though, I’m giving the Challenge a whirl anyway.

Behold my octet of entrants from my own collection, submitted in the categorical competition of general greenery:

1. Sugar Creek runs through Turkey Run State Park near Rockville, Indiana.

2. The Jolly Green Giant, standing tall and proud in Blue Earth, Minnesota.

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2012 Road Trip Photos #30: Boot Hill Museum, Part 2 of 2: Dedicated Hobbyists of the Old West

November 15, 2012 By Randall A. Golden in Travel Tags: Boot Hill, boot hill cemetery, Boot Hill Museum, collections, cowboys, Dodge City, Kansas, NaBloPoMo, photography, photos, road trip, tourism, travel, vacation Leave a comment

Previously on MCC: The most notable event of Day Seven of our road trip was a quick tour through the Boot Hill Museum in Dodge City. The main attraction is a preserved portion of the original Boot Hill Cemetery, still populated by the original customers, still marked by low-budget tombstones of the Old West.

However, the Boot Hill Museum is more than those preserved historical plots. Beyond that and the spacious gift shop, visitors can also walk along a simulated Dodge City strip mall of the Old West. Some of these shops are inaccessible, but several invite visitors and contain display cases filled with souvenirs and paraphernalia of the Old West. The saloon even has occasional rounds of singing, and waitresses who invite you in for a glass of sarsaparilla, which I was afraid to sample. There’s also a working ice cream shoppe, but the tourism-level prices inspired us to bide our time and fetch snacks later at a Dairy Queen down the street instead.

Not all the contents are vintage 19th-century items. One room is dedicated to TV shows of the Old West in general and Gunsmoke in particular. Their short-sighted gift shop missed a profit opportunity by not offering copies of these objets d’art for sale. What child wouldn’t want to pop Gunsmoke’s Festus…Sings and Talks About Dodge City and Stuff! into their parent’s CD player and listen to it twelve times a day?

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Wheelchair Adventure Requires Maniac Driver to Decelerate from 60 to 0

November 12, 2012 By Randall A. Golden in Mundane Tags: Christmas, Christmas Gift and Hobby Show, faith, family, fruits of the Spirit, indiana state fairgrounds, Indianapolis, NaBloPoMo, patience, photography, photos, thoughts, wheelchairs 2 Comments

Saturday the 10th was my first day spent with a wheelchair. I tried to imagine the day beforehand, to anticipate the drawbacks and plan for every single troubleshooting scenario. I’m surprised I nailed most of them, but it was still a learning experience full of ups and downs. The day could have been much more painful and full of recriminations, had I not been blessed with a very patient, very grateful passenger.

One of the highlights each year for my wife’s grandmother is when the three of us spend a November Saturday together at the Indianapolis Christmas Gift and Hobby Show, a cavalcade of Christmas arts, Christmas crafts, Christmas edibles, and non-Christmas small businesses and hucksters held at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in one of their cavernous pavilions. It usually takes us a few hours to traverse the length of the pavilion several times to see all the booths, marvel at the decorations, overspend on a few choice items, and — always number one on Mamaw’s to-do list — have her watch batteries replaced at a specific jeweler’s booth. No one in all Creation is allowed to change her watch batteries except that one jeweler. Everyone else ever born will do it wrong.

Last summer, this once-hyperkinetic eightysomething dynamo took a nasty spill that left her wounded for a good while and reset her normal energy levels at a much lower bar. She’s having much more trouble getting around than she used to, and takes a little longer to perform her chores the way she wants them. Though she weighs under one hundred pounds, she still doesn’t have quite the endurance for supporting that frame around extensive distances. Excessive walking now leaves her winded and ready to call it a day. As her beloved Christmas Gift and Hobby Show drew near, she seriously doubted she could manage the day-long stroll that would entail, and had resigned herself to skipping the show, despite how many she’s attended, despite how much she looks forward to it every year. She feared attempting such a feat now would be the death of her.

Enter: the wheelchair.

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2012 Road Trip Photos #29: Boot Hill Museum, Part 1 of 2: Paupers’ Graves of the Old West

November 10, 2012 By Randall A. Golden in Travel Tags: Boot Hill, Boot Hill Museum, cemeteries, cowboys, Dodge City, Kansas, NaBloPoMo, photography, photos, road trip, tombstones, tourism, travel, vacation 3 Comments

After hundreds of miles of tourist unattraction, our first real Kansas sightseeing oasis on Day Seven was in Dodge City, fabled frontier town of the Old West. The “frontier” aspect is diminished now that the place is swamped with all the usual famous chain restaurants, but at least one section remains somewhat preserved and partly simulated: the Boot Hill Museum, which contains a preserved portion of the most well-known cemetery of the Old West.

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2012 Road Trip Photos #28: Kansas Flatland Interlude

November 8, 2012 By Randall A. Golden in Travel Tags: flatlands, Kansas, monotony, NaBloPoMo, photography, photos, road trip, santa fe trail, tourism, travel, vacation 6 Comments

We reluctantly exited Colorado on Day Seven late in the morning. Highway 50 led us from Lamar, CO, to the regions of Kansas that everyone always warns you about. It’s not completely deserted. The long stretches between signs of life could be discouraging, but civilization exists in pockets if you know where to look, or if you’re patient enough to wait for it to cross your path, such as this armored farming vehicle that resembles the futuristic, titanic Batmobile from Frank Miller’s Batman: the Dark Knight Returns.

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2012 Road Trip Photos #27: Lamar, Colorado — Last Stop, This State

November 1, 2012 By Randall A. Golden in Travel Tags: Colorado, Lamar, Madonna of the Trail, NaBloPoMo, petrified gas station, photography, photos, road trip, tourism, travel, vacation, windmill blade 4 Comments

Day Seven of our family’s nine-day road trip kicked off with our last remaining hours in the amazing state of Colorado. After extended visits with the Rocky Mountains, Pikes Peak, the Royal Gorge Bridge, and Smashburger, our time to depart was nigh.

In a rare move for us, we chose to exit Colorado not by interstate, but by ordinary state highway. This is a rare move for us. I’m usually a fiend for the interstates with their higher speed limits and lack of intersection interference. This time, we decided to try something different, as both Colorado and Kansas offered tourist attractions along their southern halves, through which almost no interstates traverse. On the bright side, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that their highway speed limits were generous compared to ours back in Indiana. In terms of travel time, I hardly noticed a difference. Better still, Highway 50 through Kansas was all but deserted. The open road was mine.

Before Kansas, though, we had one final haven of roadside attractions to visit in Colorado. The town of Lamar is designed more as a warm Colorado welcome wagon than as a “Good Luck surviving Kansas” outpost, but we enjoyed a few minutes of walkabout anyway.

One of their most famous spots is this building constructed from ancient petrified wood. Originally a gas station, it now serves as a small used-car lot.

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2012 Road Trip Photos #26: Pueblo’s Arkansas Riverwalk, Part 2 of 2: Art of the Riverside

October 27, 2012 By Randall A. Golden in Travel Tags: Arkansas River, Arkansas Riverwalk, art, arts, Colorado, fountains, photography, photos, Pueblo, Riverwalk, road trip, statues, tourism, travel, vacation, Walks Among the Stars 3 Comments

Previously on Day Six: While my son held down the fort back at our Pueblo hotel room, my wife and I spent a romantic evening strolling along the city’s Arkansas Riverwalk, which domesticated and decorated a stretch of the same bumpy river that we’d watched bubble and babble beneath the Royal Gorge Bridge mere hours and miles prior.

As with any well-executed riverwalk, art is a key contributor to quality of leisure. Clean sidewalks, neatly trimmed grass, and vivacious flower arrangements are to be expected, but artistic expressions are a much-appreciated means to enliven any pedestrian attraction. One of the key pieces along the Arkansas Riverwalk is Walks Among the Stars, a Lakota Sioux woman cast in bronze and clad in an actual quilt.

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Starbase Indy Clip Show: Memories of 2010 and 2011, Plans for 2012

October 27, 2012 By Randall A. Golden in Conventions & Events, Indiana Tags: celebrities, conventions, costumes, entertainment, Indianapolis, photography, photos, Star Trek, star trek convention, Starbase Indy, travel 1 Comment

On and off over the past two decades, Starbase Indy has served proudly and admirably as one of the longest-lived geek-culture gatherings in Indianapolis. Originally a purebred Star Trek convention by design and preference, its scope has broadened over time as organizers and attendees proved amenable to the presence of more than one fictional universe in their midst. Granted, it’s no coincidence that the festivities have grown more inclusive as Paramount Pictures withdrew Trek from prime-time television and lamented the decreasing aesthetic returns from the latter-day movies. The JJ Abrams reformatting certainly didn’t hurt the cause, but SBI today is a smaller, tighter gathering than its earliest incarnations — now run locally and purely For-Fans-By-Fans, not by out-of-town sideshow promoters who fancy themselves the next Gareb Shamus.

My wife and I have attended more than a few SBIs. We took a break for several years during a long, unpretty transitional period, but made our tentative return in 2010 when a few encouraging signs enticed us back. We enjoyed ourselves so much that year, we were happy to attend in 2011 as well. This selection of highlights from our last two SBI experiences is by no means the complete collection of every photo we took, nor does it represent all the SBIs we’ve ever attended. Our souvenirs date back far enough that many were created using the ancient medium that primitive man once called “35mm film”.

2010 Highlights:

Special guests included Ethan Phillips, best known to Trek fans as Neelix from Star Trek: Voyager, also known to even older TV viewers who can remember as far back as Benson.

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2012 Road Trip Photos #25: Pueblo’s Arkansas Riverwalk, Part 1 of 2: Return of the Arkansas

October 25, 2012 By Randall A. Golden in Travel Tags: Arkansas River, Arkansas Riverwalk, Colorado, ducks, nature, photography, photos, Pueblo, Riverwalk, road trip, The Sicilian Pueblo, The Sicilian restaurant, tourism, travel, vacation 1 Comment

Day Six of our vacation ended in Pueblo, Colorado — an address well-known to anyone who ever saw one of the famous commercials from the ’70s/’80s about the Consumer Information Center and its free catalogs by mail. For that alone, my wife and I assumed the city held world-famous status. Some of our friends disagreed, but that’s their problem, not ours. Believe it or not, TV had more than just toy commercials back then.

The two of us spent the evening visiting the Historic Arkansas Riverwalk of Pueblo, a pleasant downtown diversion that interested my son not one bit. This, we decided, was the perfect opportunity for a husband/wife outing. Our hometown of Indianapolis has its Canal Walk, and we enjoyed the visual diversity of the San Antonio Riverwalk in 2005. Pueblo is much smaller than either city, but its foray into the beautifying riverwalk business is fairly new, still expanding, and worth several moments of time and dallying.

I was a little surprised to reunite with the Arkansas River, the very same waterway that runs beneath the Royal Gorge Bridge back in Cañon City, a few dozen miles west of Pueblo. How nice of the Arkansas to serve as a thematic through-line to our day. Note that Pueblo has succeeded in containing the Arkansas and removing those turbulent rapids and imposing mountainside walls.

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