Wow... what a beautiful day today in North Georgia! Tony and I had to punt last Saturday due to thunderstorms and I can't tell you how excited both of us were to get started on our final leg of the ATL50 - Canoeing thru the Chattahoochee River NRA journey. We knew this was going to be the day, but we also knew that with the three biggest shoals sections on the river ahead of us, it was going to be the toughest day yet, but wait... I'm getting ahead of myself...
We met up where we left off at the end of ATL50 - Leg 7; Lower Morgan Falls to Powers Island. Gretchen was gracious enough to agree to drop us off and pick us up.
I love this launch point, but I felt an omen falling over us when this nice family was asking a bunch of questions about our journey. I responded with such confidence and bravado telling them that we were doing our final leg of a 50 mile trip. For me at least, that kind of non-disclaimer based presentation is usually followed with some kind of karmic kick-back. Right away we knew it was going to be tough, but fun. Under the 285 bridge the current was wild and the canoe quickly turned 90 degrees on us. Tony reported a quick, "what did you do!?" that I replied with "the river takes us where she wants us to go".
We did pretty well through our first few sections of rocks/shoals and we had very high spirits. We knew we were surely going to get wet today and it didn't take terribly long to flip the canoe and get our first good dip into the river for the day. No worries, it wasn't deep and we were able to dump all the water on a nearby rock and get started again. That's when things quickly went from fun to failure...
I can still see it now, we slipped through a break in the rocks just wide enough for the canoe and then had to make a tight left turn to go for another break around the protruding rock in front of us. That's when it all happened. We caught the rock on the starboard mid-section on the canoe. It rode up on the rocks just enough for water to come in on the port side. Then as we were tipping (hey, I still thought we were easily going to recover from this) I started to stand with my left leg and the current caught me a bit. I was pushed back on the stadium chair setup we had (see last picture in ATL50 - Leg 3; Settles Bridge to Abbotts Bridge) which held me in place until I finally wiggled myself out. I looked over my shoulder to see the chair going downstream.
Yep, we fell prey to the classic canoeing blunder of getting the middle caught around some rocks. I call it the "canoe taco". With our gear all securely tied down to the middle seat in waterproof bags and boxes we didn't have to worry about loosing anything else except for the paddles. Tony and I started working on unjamming the canoe with intentions of clearing the water afterwards and resuming our trip. So... things didn't go that well...
I won't bore you with all the things we tried, but we spend about an hour exploring all kinds of different strategies. Unfortunately the water current had the boat pinned down hard – REAL HARD! After about 10 minutes I pretty much figured we had lost her, but I surely wasn't about to walk away from this investment without giving it the old college try (and then try it again). Many thanks to Tony who I'm sure knew it was toast even sooner than I, but stayed with me the whole time in the freezing water. He tirelessly tried all of my feeble plans to free the ride that has taken us so far; the iScanoe (see ATL50 - Leg 4; Abbotts Bridge to Medlock Bridge for the source of that goofy name). He even came up with a ton of good ideas to try and didn't even give me grief when I started to get snappy towards the end. Thanks, Tony!! I appreciate you trying so hard to free her.
So, there she lies...
There are far uglier places to end your usefulness.
Check out my Kayaking & Canoeing Google Map of the journey to see exactly where this is on the river. At least the area has a manly name; Devils Race Course Shoals. I guess I should have taken that as another omen.
So, Tony and I hiked out through the trails we were lucky enough to end our outing near and Gretchen, being gracious as ever, was so kind to wind down to a remote parking lot on the CR NRA that I would have been OK never visiting in order to extract us from today's "fun in the sun".
Before we hiked out, we waited around to see if it would break in half, but it never happened for us. Being the eternal optimist, my sincere hope is that the iScanoe frees itself in the next 24 hours due to the daily swing in river height and that someone downstream is able to recover her. Who knows, maybe my loss will introduce someone else to the joy of canoeing. Truth is, I'm doubtful she can even bend back into shape, but one can hope!
RIP my iScanoe! You've taken us far on the ATL50 - Canoeing thru the Chattahoochee River NRA journey and we'll soldier on and find a way to finish without you, but we'll never forget the great memories we were able to burn into our mind because of you.
As the day was extremely beautiful and we really had nothing special planned, we pulled out the 60 Hikes within 60 Miles of Atlanta book to see if there was a trail that sounded fun. We stumbled upon the pages describing the trails at Poole's Mill Covered Bridge Park. What caught our eye was the obvious "covered bridge" which itself sounded interesting to check out, so we headed out.
The actual Poole's Mill Covered Bridge is a very short walk from the parking lot.
As one might expect, the bridge has its obligatory historical market with good information to soak in.
Unfortunately, it suffers from a good amount of graffiti which I decide to not highlight in the pictures I've posted, but worth noting should you decide to visit the park & bridge. Here's a picture looking back at it from the other side.
As a big fan of waterfalls, I was pleased to see the start of a simple cascading waterfall.
Plenty of folks where glad to cool themselves off in the rushing waters.
While it very small, there were some sections you didn't want to walk (or slide!) down.
All in all, Gretchen and I were glad to find this little escape not far from our home. Back at the house, Gretchen researched covered bridges in Georgia and found out that there are only 15 of them. Maybe we found another multi-outing adventure we can share together? I sure hope so as I so love relaxing in the out of doors with my beautiful wife!!
I've been away from the river for far too long and Tony Mayes and I made this trip far too short. We had a great time and should have planned for more. Everything was cooperating – especially the beautiful blue-skied day. We started at the other side of the dam that Gretchen and I stopped at during the ATL50 - Leg 6; Azalea Park to Upper Morgan Falls Dam trip.
The dam was only letting a trickle out (on the far side, not visible in that picture), but it presented one of the best looking currents we've seen so far on the ATL50 - Canoeing thru the Chattahoochee River NRA multi-trip journey.
Just as on the North side of the dam, some cliffs presented themselves.
We also ran into a decent amount of wildlife to include the egret above, many ducks, and lots of turtles including the one below.
With the current rolling along rather quickly (well... by Chattahoochee River standards!) it wasn't long before we were approaching Powers Island. As we were getting closer to the formal city parts of Atlanta, we were able to see our first ever office buildings from the canoe as seen below.
Before the trip was done, we came across a bunch of geese, too.
And their friend... a blue heron!
Our take-out point, Powers Island, is just North of Loop 285.
As you can see from the Kayaking & Canoeing Google Map, this short six mile trip takes us to 41.5 miles. We're also now really in Atlanta proper. Tony and I scouted out our ending point for our planned final leg of the full ATL50 - Canoeing thru the Chattahoochee River NRA expedition. One more leg – I can't wait!!
Last Friday night during dinner my son let me know he was very interested in building himself a desktop PC. We chatted about how fun that would be and knowing how I'm always on the lookout for activities to do with him (yep, he's a teenager now) I jumped at the chance for him and I to do this together. Right after dinner we headed over to our local Fry's and he found a case that he really liked which we bought it on the spot.
Yep, it is big and white, but it was the one he picked out. I actually like it, too. Of course, I've got a white iPhone 5 and it sort of reminds me of it. We eventually decided to call his new rig Arctic Thunder after the popular arcade game where you ride a snowmobile through all kinds of mayhem. You remember it... it was a follow-on from Hydro Thunder (which I actually like a bit better).
We hemmed and hawed Saturday night researching various build options and ultimately settled on the stuff you see at Arctic Thunder Component List that I ordered on that Sunday. Yes, some of this stuff was a bit high-end (I'm thinking of the i7 processor), but my thinking was to get stuff that would get him through high school. You surely can build a PC cheaper than what we did, but as they say, "if you're gonna be a bear – be a grizzly!" I did offset a high percentage of the costs by using up all of my Amazon gift card balance (that's my credit card reward "scheme" – not "miles").
Everything was slated to come in on Tuesday and I was fortunate enough to have a light day of meetings as was able to telecommute so that I could be home when the boxes of goodies arrived. The motherboard arrived pretty early that day.
These ASUS motherboards are pretty slick and I think worthy of consideration if you decide to build a PC of your own. As for the rest of the components, they didn't arrive until around 8pm and my son was getting very worried they simply wouldn't make it.
We got an even later start on putting it all together and we were having some troubles with mounting the motherboard in the case. Also, that crunching sound when we closed the hatch on the CPU sounded like money down the drain.
We finally got everything all wired-up and installed just before midnight.
Imagining that "Murphy" was going to pay us a visit, we decided to go to sleep as we were both exhausted. Truthfully, I was just as worried that all would work fine and we'd be up several more hours getting the OS installed and playing with a completed PC.
The next day we tried to power it up and, of course, no dice! Knowing it was probably all the the various leads (namely the power and reset ones) we played around with them some more and finally it powered up. I never imagined I'd be so thrilled to see the BIOS setup screens. BTW, this ain't your father's BIOS – it actually looks cool.
We then went on to install the operating system. As you'll see from the Arctic Thunder Component List, we went with Windows 7. Now... we did a lot of back/n/forth on the OS. I was very adamant that we should install a Linux distro and then run VMware or VirtualBox to run Windows in a virtual machine. I finally gave into making the host OS Windows when I accepted that to get all the gaming optimizations my son will want, we'd have to have Windows as the base operating system. Bummer... I then made it crystal clear that we'll install VirtualBox and a distro like Ubuntu as I'm hoping for him to learn some Linux skills, too, from my investment. 
As for Windows 7 instead of Windows 8. Yes, I should have just gone with 8, but I absolutely can't stand that silly tablet-looking interface they are pushing. Besides, my son backed me up when he said some games are still having Windows 8 growing pains.
It sounds like we should be at the end of the tale, but wait... there's always another problem. The motherboard has a gigabit ethernet port, but my son's room doesn't have a wired connection. Yep, great planning on my part! We do have some electric "wireline" network adapters in use at the house, but I simply couldn't get this new PC to recognize it (interestingly enough, his Lenovo laptop that also runs Windows 7 had no troubles). So, I did some quick research and found a decent $20 USB WiFi adapter we could get.
I picked it up the next day (Thursday) during lunch and we had no troubles getting it connected at 144Mbps. Now we just had to get through the 1,000,000 Windows updates since Win7SP1 which went pretty fast on this screaming machine as the callouts below indicate.
Then, all we had to do was move it from the workbench up to his room and now he is the proud owner of a very rocking new PC.
We had a great time building this PC together, but I'm positive he'll have much more fun playing games on it. Long live Arctic Thunder!!