Man, Blogging is hard!

Hey all, just a quick note to let you know I'm alive. I don't know how I let the month of May come and go without writing anything, certainly not because there hasn't been much to write about, but I'll catch up soon since I've got stuff on my mind I wanted to share.

Otherwise, I wanted to say we here in West Chester have successfully made the transition from Winter to Spring, and are about to turn the corner into Summer. Allergies have come and gone, with only a hint of pink eye. I even missed the World War II weekend in Reading, PA, my first in 5 years. Of course living with a female again might have had something to do with that, especially since we went last year. That said, I'm going to try and drag her to the air show at New Garden Flying Field in Toughkenomen this weekend, June 12th and 13th, Saturday there is supposed to be a flyby of a B-2 bomber, so that'll be cool! Anybody else want to come with? Anybody? No? Ok fine, whatever.

Oh, and another quick note, Tuesday is West Chester Story Slam, with the theme of "Broke", and I still don't know what I'm going to talk about, (I wouldn't know anything about not having money, *ahem*) and Thursday I'm one of about 10 people hosting walking tours of the neighborhood of Northwest West Chester starting from the Chester County Historical Society and compared to some of the human encyclopedias that live here in West Chester, I'll be lucky to finish my tour with the same people I started with and not get lost.

So on all counts, wish me luck, and once I get over the hump here, I'll write more about what's grinding my gears....

Insert "Intercourse" Joke Here.

Hey, if the Amish can cash in on the name of their town, why can't I, right? I mean, who knows what kind of readers are going to find their way to my blog based on the word intercourse, but hey, traffic is traffic, right?

This weeks story...

I got it in my head, when I managed to get to Toughkenamon, you know, just beyond Kennett Square and back on the scooter, that further distances were possible, especially if you used the "walking" feature on Google maps, where you indicate you want directions to where you want to go by foot than by car, thus keeping you off the interstates and such, places where my scooter and I have no business, what with the highway speeds and all that we cannot possibly reach.

So, I found out that there was going to be this small fly in of airplanes at the Smoketown Airport, not far from Lancaster, Pa. Sure enough, there was a route of back roads I could take to get there and back, all 35 miles, so I figured why not?

So the trip starts off good enough, breakfast with my friends at Penn's Table, and then riding out of town on West Strausburg Road. The problem, if one can call it a problem, is the fact that there was a bridge out in Mortonville. This led to a very nice detour through Embreeville and Unionville before getting back on track. Thank God I had the iPhone with the Google Map and GPS feature, at one point I found myself at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, cornfields at every side, I almost expected the devil himself to come out and make me a deal so that I could play the guitar really well or something.




There's definitely a change in the topography that takes place from where we are in the cool shade of the trees that hang over the roads and over the Brandywine river to where it begins to open up to our north and west into rolling farmland and open spaces. The other sign that things are a little bit different? Horse drawn Buggies. Men in suspenders and straw hats, women with scarves on their heads and long skirts, riding the scooter through piles of horse manure on the road, yup, the Amish.



The Scooter made it perfectly to the infamously named town of Intercourse, Pennsylvania, the gateway to where the Amish cash in. Who can blame them really, between their fresh farm grown products, the quilts, the handmade quality furniture, who can't resist the desire at some point living in the Mid Atlantic states or beyond of just packing up the car and making a little road trip out to this bucolic countryside and do some shopping or ride on a buggy?



Just to cover their bases though, because surprise surprise, not every guy likes going over quilting patterns for hours and hours, right in the middle of Intercourse is the American Military Edged Weaponry Museum. I saw this place and had to stop, I mean, a military museum? How can I not? I mean, knives and pointed sticks? I mean, I can defend myself against fresh fruit, (you know, loganberries, bananas) but a bayonet in the gut? I had to check it out. 3 bucks gets you buzzed into an old bank branch complete with vault where they have display cases of every kind of knife we have ever used in wartime. They even had several versions of the knife I used in the Army, the Aircrew Survival knife, through my skilled hands many a coconut has met it's demise when we were in Key West.

So, back on the road, and after a fill up first as the scooter refused to go an inch further without some gas, we made it through Intercourse (no sex jokes, have you noticed?) and went through Bird in Hand, (that's a town, Bird in Hand, Pennsylvania) before finally making it to Smoketown.


There regular pilot folks, with regular old general aviation airplanes, not a whole lot of warbirds, or fancy schmancy airplanes, just a few classics, getting together for spot landing contests and flour bombing contests. That's right, a contest where a pilot flies 500 feet above the runway and throws out a sack of flour to hit a target below. Something I don't see every day, that's for sure!

Beriev 103 Seaplane from Russia

It seemed like controlled chaos, but somehow it worked. Airplanes took off and landed, entered the pattern, all without the aid of an Air Traffic Control tower. This is what happens when people who have a passion for something, they can make anything possible, from the flying right down to the hot dog grill.

Planes and Trains or Amtrak and Airplanes

Before long, it was time to make the reverse trip home, and it was relatively uneventful, now that I seemed to know what I was doing. The bridge being out still forced me to take another scenic detour, but honestly, every turn it seems is a new path of discovery around here, I really hope I have a chance to try them all.

Another weekend, Another adventure

I have yet to ride my scooter to work, mainly because I've used the excuse of rain and springtime pollen and it's associated allergies to keep driving the car, but that may come to an end soon. I took the C-3 out as far as I've ever taken it before, about 15 miles, from downtown West Chester to the New Garden Airport, just west of Kennett Square. Speaking of Kennett Square, it was nice, a wanna be West Chester, but with more Mexicans. Must be all the Mushroom harvesting houses, I guess they are they absolute opposite of a green houses huh?, and the area smells like, well, how else do you think they raise mushrooms?











What was my inspiration to make it out to New Garden Airport? Yes, another airshow, of course. This one is a small airport, so it's a small airshow, but I've noticed more people at this airshow than at the helicopter airshow we have at Brandywine Airport here in West Chester. I wonder if that might change, as I heard that there might be a wings and wheels airshow in September, which might bring out the people, so vamos a ver.


You know this being an airshow like the last airshow I attended, what stands out in my mind was the non airshow related stuff, like how nice the ride out was. More farmland, more shady lanes, more twisty roads, I took Google's "walking" advice as opposed to driving advice to come up with a map there, so I would end up on these back roads on purpose so I didn't feel like I was backing up any traffic. I passed this really cool set of ruins on the way there, and then when I arrived there, I got to park among the motorcycles and antique cars that were on display there. I felt like a VIP and I got some looks.

The other cool thing was stumbling upon someone's "hanger". I guess he opened it up for the airshow, and with the exception of a beat up glider hanging from the ceiling, this was really one man's collection of antique motorcycles. Nortons, BSA's, Vincents, Triumphs, and old Indians and Harley Davidsons. There's no law that says you have to keep airplanes in an airplane hanger, heck late in Steve McQueen's life he practically lived in his hanger with his airplane and motorcycles.

Now that sounds like the good life to me...

Location, Location, Location

One of the best things about living in West Chester, and I may have mentioned this before, is the ability to get out of town easily, and that in a relatively short amount of time you can be somewhere else that's pretty cool too. Whether it's someplace obvious like Philadelphia, (although I don't know why people venture into Philadelphia, since we have everything you could want right here in the Dub-C.) or more interestingly Washington DC or New York City.

I've made a couple of trips down to D.C. in the last couple of weekends, and I've had a lot of fun.

First off, since the new Administration took over, DC doesn't feel any different, it's still the center of power of the free world, and that's reassuring. Second, there's always something going on an any random weekend there, so you really can't go wrong when you show up, unless it's in the absolutely oppressive heat and humidity of August.

So on the one weekend I went down to DC with Lana, we stumbled upon the preparations for Earth Day celebrations on the National Mall. There were tents set up everywhere showing off all this Green technology stuff, at least highlighting what the feds are proud of as progress along those lines. There were some electric vehicles, including an Electric Scooter. And not the Hover-round scooter either, but an actual like motorcycle like Scooter. But can something be called "Zero Emission" though any more? Yes there is no pollution coming out of the tailpipe, but electricity comes from somewhere, and somewhere there is a smoke stack converting something that was something else into electricity, right?

The most recent trip to DC involved meeting my brother Joe who came up from Langley AFB for the long anticipated visit with the newest member of the family, little Judah. Now of course it turns out there was an open house airshow at Andrews AFB, so Joe and I couldn't miss that. How many times have we seen the same types of airplanes over and over again over our lifetimes? Too many times to tell, but that's hardly the point is it? There is no unique fact about any of these machines that we can impart on the other brother without them already knowing that fact, yet we go anyway just for the shear joy of being in our comfort zone. This particular trip was unique though, in so much as Joe actually was in Air Force ROTC with one of the 6 pilots from the USAF Thunderbirds Aerial Demonstration Team. Major Sean Gustafson, a super good looking, er, I mean "good" guy. (whoa where did that come from?) Seriously, those Thunderbird pilots look sharp, both in their Flight Suits and in formation.

Now back to the reason of our trip to DC, first some familial background.

In the Rodriguez-Carbonell family bloodline that arrived here from Cuba, there were 4 individuals that ended up comprising "The First Generation" of kids being born in the USA. I was the first in 1967, followed by Ralph and Joe, and our cousin Lauren was the last, arriving in 1977. Now despite our obvious manliness, my brothers and I have yet to procreate, (that we know of) so it ended up that Lauren taking on the burden of bringing in the first of the "second wave" of our family to be born here.

So looking and holding little Judah, you realize you're not looking at another baby for the umpteenth time, the babies of your friends, neighbors and coworkers, but you're holding a relative. Now I'm no judge of baby character, but knowing his parents as well as I do, I think the "second wave" is off to a great start. In fact, he's going to be a hard act to follow. God I hope there will be more to follow, the world deserves more little Andys, (and Ralphies and Jo-Jo's too), they may be the planet's only hope! :)

I hope this kid will like going to Airshows......like he'll have a choice.... :)