Southeastern Ramblings

I've fallen way behind just by not issuing a blog post for four days.  There are so many interesting things to investigate in the southeastern US!  I stayed two nights at Cedar Key, FL.  It's at the end of the road on an island on the Gulf.  No one passed through here.  You have to have it as your destination, or you'll never visit.  It's a village out of the past, Florida as it was 60 years ago.  There are no big fancy developments, probably because there are no marquee beaches.  But it's a nice place to hang out.  I stayed at a very nice condo; mine is on the top floor, second building on the left.  I rode out a storm here on Friday.  Always a good thing when you're by the sea.

The tide surged a good foot above normal during the storm.  You can see here that the Gulf came up onto the street.  Probably not a rare occurrence.

The Island Hotel is an institution in Cedar Key.  The building, with its arcade and wraparound deck, reminded me of a typical Australian town, all of which have such a structure serving as the focal point of town; a place where people sleep, eat, drink, and socialize.

After a long day of rain, the skies cleared at sunset and I soaked up the beauty from my deck.

Sunset at Cedar Key.  If you visit Florida and you want to see how it used to be, come to Cedar Key.

Here the Lizards are way down upon the Suwanee River!

Flooded cypress swamp near the Suwanee, which like many northern Florida rivers is in flood after a couple downpours in the past week.

Now I'm on St George Island, near the fine town of Apalachicola.  This is a shell shot on the beach.

Yesterday was a cool, gray day on St George...with temperatures in the 60s and lots of clouds, it was just like a summer day in Monterey!  But the sun popped out briefly and the light was fine.

The Gulf is to the right in this pic.  The gulfside of the island is low sand dunes and grass.  Nothing too large grows there since storm surges from hurricanes overrun the area several times a century.  But farther inland, the dunes are much higher, and protect the inland side of the island from surges.  Here, on the left of the pic, large pine forests thrive.

Apalachicola is a fine old town.  I first became aware of it in college, when Ray Ramsey, the meteorologist on KOMO TV, would mention its weather often, simply, I suspect, because he enjoyed saying the name...ap-al-ach-ee-co-la.  It rolls off the tongue.  At any rate, it's a very nice place, with lots of Victorian homes, big old mossy live oaks, and even a Piggly Wiggly!  The Pig was in Portland 50 years ago...there was a Piggly Wiggly across the street from the bowling alley where I hung out.  As a teenager, I used to go to the Pig and sneak a look at the latest Playboy magazines,.  But by 1970 Piggly Wigglys were gone from Portland.  They endure in Apalachicola, and surrounding towns.

A fine Victorian home in Apalachicola, complete with wraparound porch and widows' walk.  Pleasant place to pass a sultry afternoon, with a cool adult beverage.

This is the USS Alabama, BB-60.  The Alabama had a short but distinguished career in World War II, doing convoy duty in the stormy North Atlantic and then fighting the Japanese in the south Pacific.  The ship is now a museum.  The shell to the left of the pic is a 16 inch projectile that was fired out of the three big guns to the right.

This is the Combat Information Center (CIC).  This was my duty station when I was in the Navy in the mid 1970s and except for having more sophisticated radar, my CIC wasn't very different from this one.  CIC is where a ships battles are fought from, basically.  It's the nerve center of a naval vessel.

An engine room on the Alabama.  There were four, one for each engine.  The pic doesn't tell the whole story; There was little or no air conditioning on this ship...even thirty years later that hadn't changed.  And when you were in tropical waters, the temperature in this room could easily reach 130 degrees or higher.  The snipes, as all engine room workers were called, did some serious sweating here.  The rest of us on the ship admired...and pitied...them.  Tough folks, the snipes.

This is a look into one of the 16 inch gun turrets.  The cylinders on the lower floor are powder charges...each shell had to be loaded with a large powder charge.  The shells were actually fired from Gun Plot, nearby.  The guy doing the firing would first press an alarm button, which would alert people to an imminent VERY LOUD firing.  Then he'd simply pull a trigger and the guns would thunder.  I saw this procedure on my ROTC midshipman cruise aboard the USS Newport News off Vietnam in 1972.  That cruiser had 8 inch guns.  Imagine how loud the Alabama's 16 inchers were.

I actually got to use the officers' head...deja vu! 

Here's a typical junior officers' stateroom on the Alabama.  I had a similar room on the USS Chicago thirty years later.  The railings on the bunks (racks in Navy terminology) kept us from rolling onto the deck during heavy weather.  These staterooms were cramped compared to my dorm rooms in college, but luxurious compared to the enlisted mens' quarters, where each man had a tiny locker for his gear and slept three deep on narrow racks.

This is a P 51 Mustang!  It was the state of the art fighter airplane at the end of WW II.  A friend of mine flew these...he never got into combat but if Truman had not dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, Lee would have probably flown this airplane over Japan during an allied invasion.

I also toured the USS Drum, a WWII submarine. I clambered up and down the ladders on the Alabama...muscle memory.  But I struggled with the hatches and cramped spaces on the Drum.  The hatches extended one to five feet above the deck...you had to get through them fast, and I had to take my time.  This was the wardroom; no more than 350 square feet.  All people on board, even the officers, essentially slept in closets.  The enlisted men had to share bunks in shifts, and many of the racks were slung on top of the torpedoes!  If you were larger than 5 feet 6, 135 pounds, you'd have trouble getting space on a submarine.  And I've heard the U-Boats were worse!