Eccentric Flower:200906/Revenge of Linkage
From Eccentric Flower
Revenge of Linkage
In case you're wondering, all our databases at work are down until Friday. Server move. Which essentially means I can do nothing. Which means you get five thousand entries.
Links about Centralia are amply covered in the "Snottiness" entry. It also has a Wikipedia page (natch).
I personally can't read about Centralia without it reminding me of another abandoned place in Pennsylvania I have some fondness for: The abandoned tunnels of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I wouldn't mind going to visit these, although I gather that Sideling Hill is not for the puny; it was the longest tunnel in the system - over a mile - and it has a rise in the middle, so when you're in it, you can't see light at the other end - and it is damned dark. This is what you see in the middle of the Sideling Hill tunnel with five bicycle headlamps around you.
[Troutman's page also demystifies for me why the highway takes a backwards loop/bypass through Never-Never-Land when you're trying to get from I-70 to the Turnpike or vice versa. "The word 'rigamarole' was invented in Breezewood."]
At least Sideling Hill and Ray's Hill are legally visitable. The Turnpike Authority still owns the bypassed Laurel Hill tunnel and does not like visitors. They have also refused to acknowledge what the tunnel is currently being used for - best guess is because it is being used by a racing crew for a some sort of testing, and they don't want other racing teams to know what they're doing.
Memo to self: Remember to explore category at bottom of Wikipedia page - "Demolished highways in the United States." Promises to be almost as lucrative as "Air travel disasters."
Iain links this strip, which is funny enough (although I can't quite swallow the juxtaposition of gaming cartoon and unrelated real-world rant, apparently the readers love it). But I favor this one.
This is the method I use for choosing most of my online game characters - ranged damage rules; melee is for mooks. My perfect online character would be one who sneaks up, fells the enemy with a rapid volley of ranged weapons, and then sneaks away, all without ever being seen, much less engaged. Snipers 4 the win. But it's interesting - there do seem to be a lot of players who consider that sort of thing "coward classes," as if there is some nobility in always confronting the enemy at point-blank range with primitive weapons and possibly getting the **** beat out of you. You say coward, I say more highly evolved; go figure.
(This is not intended in any way as a slight to Mel, who, while seeming to innately prefer the "charge in and hit them with a heavy object" approach, has never given me the slightest grief for preferring a different method. Actually, we balance out well - as long as she picks a class that can actually withstand melee for more than three seconds.)
Iain:
Iain links this strip, which is funny enough (although I can't quite swallow the juxtaposition of gaming cartoon and unrelated real-world rant, apparently the readers love it). But I favor this one.
Given my current assortment of weblogs, linking cartoons and unrelated real-world rants is pretty much my raison d'etre, so to speak. (Also, pretty much the only reason I linked that is because, despite being a cartoon character, Zobbie is kind of ... well, hot.) (Hey, I own my perversions!) Actually, given his current state and how he got there, I'd have thought Enkidu -- the woman in the other HOLE strip I linked today, and no, I have not mixed up my pronouns -- would appeal to you a bit.
I never entirely understood wanting to be a fighter when I was playing D&D. I always wanted to be a wizard or archer. The one time I wound up being a paladin was rather ... painful, all things considered.
-- 23:21, 16 June 2009 (BST)
I suspected that Zobbie's physique might be one of the appeals, but I didn't want to allege that directly. heh.
I had to read quite a bit back before I realized that anything had happened to Enkidu. I have never looked at this strip before so I had utterly no continuity.
-- 23:34, 16 June 2009 (BST)
Back in the day, when I had moved to VA from OH, I drove back to OH on a regular basis via Breezewood. One of my more exciting trips involved a snowstorm so heavy I actually saw lightning and thunder during the storm. The normally 12-14-hour drive home took me 23 hours, not counting stopping to sleep in Breezewood, where, amazingly, it wasn't even snowing at all.
But I hated the tunnels. All I could think of was all that earth above my head. Couldn't WAIT to get past them. To each his own. At least the Hampton Roads tunnel allowed me the option to swim to safety, should it be damaged by a passing cargo ship, say. But if that mountain collapsed, that'd be all she wrote.
There's a non-profit outfit called Rails-to-Trails that reclaims abandoned railroad spurs and converts them to hiking trails. Your mention of abandoned highways reminded me of them. They used to be affiliated with the Combined Federal Campaign, JFK's answer to the United Way for Federal employees. I always thought, what a waste of charity monies. But, then, why not, I suppose. Cancer research already gets gobs of funding, right?
Speaking of cancer, did you hear that Kenny Rankin died?
-- 23:41, 16 June 2009 (BST)
The tunnels are my favorite part. They add variety to an otherwise mostly tedious road.
The spur with the two tunnels I mentioned is, in fact, run by one of those rails-to-trails type organizations (I'm tempted to say it's Pike 2 Bike, or something else like that, and I can't go run back and look this minute). Unfortunately they've never quite gotten the money to adequately fix the place up. Still, they're why it's legal to go explore it. Just don't bring a motorized vehicle.
-- 23:47, 16 June 2009 (BST)
Platypus:
There's a bit of abandoned Highway 101 in Torrey Pines State Park here, and another chunk in Camp Pendleton. It used to go through the UCSD campus, and when I found some old concrete with lane markers at the bottom of the eucalyptus woods I was all excited, but that turned out to be the remnants of a different, much smaller road. All that's left of 101 on campus is a marker that used to face traffic, and I have my suspicions that it's been moved slightly from its original position. I'm pretty fond of the other road, though, and have spent a fair bit of time researching where it used to go and copying old maps that show it.
-- 21:57, 16 June 2009 (BST)