The Long-Awaited Vacation, Part Five

Wow ... I can't believe that our cruise was almost a month ago already and I've barely done any posts at all on it! Time management is simply not my strong suit these days I'm afraid but I guess the nice thing there is that maybe by the time I finish doing posts on warm and sunny places that Connecticut will finally be a warm and sunny place, too! One can only hope, huh?  Anyhow ... onward to the Bahamas!



I spent our first night on the ship sleeping quite well if I remember correctly and when we awoke on Monday morning, Barb peaked out of the cabin window and announced "we're here!"  I grabbed my camera and took the above shot of the sunrise. Not bad for a through-the-window shot!


I don't remember exactly what time we finally made it out to the open area of the Lido Deck but the view towards the Atlantis Resort wasn't exactly sunny and blue but it was working on it!


Matter of fact, it was a little shadowy in areas but that didn't stop the few people that were using the jogging track.


These guys looked like they were lined up for inspection along the rail on the starboard side of the ship!


Heck, if they were going to pose so nicely I just HAD to take another picture, right? 


From the port side of the ship I took some pictures of Nassau - that's Senor Frog's with the bright green awning.  It might have been a little early for anyone to be there drinking but then again - maybe not. After all, we were in the islands!


A view of Festival Place with just the bow of the yacht the Prince Abdul Aziz on the right. When the 482-foot  yacht was built in 1984 in the shipyard of Helsingor Vaerft in Denmark, it was the largest and most expensive yacht in the world. Named for his son by the original owner, the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, I believe it's presently owned by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. According to the locals, it had been docked there for a couple of weeks prior to our arrival. Personally I thought a new coat of paint might be in order but hey, what do I know? 



After Barb and I debarked the ship to check out the port, I had to take a shot of the view to the port side of the Carnival Glory as she sat docked in Nassau being that she looked so pretty sitting there - no new paint required at all!



But she wasn't exactly docked there all by her lonesome - we had company in the form of the Disney Magic who had pulled in while Barb and I were having breakfast.


Speaking of Barb, here she is welcoming you to the Bahamas! 


Not really having anything in particular planned in Nassau, from the Festival Place we managed to catch a taxi (van) over to the Atlantis Resort on nearby Paradise Island where we thought we might get some good photo ops. 


Barb stretched out in the giant chair for her picture -


- while I merely perched on the edge as I was afraid if I sat back too far I'd never be able to get out of the thing!  And yes, I'm wearing a sleeveless shirt - please don't tell anyone! 


After leaving about $20 each in one of the slot machines in the casino, we thought maybe we'd go check out Atlantis' famous marine area but we didn't get too far before we were told by a security person that unless we were guests of the resort or wanted to pay a rather high admission fee to walk around we could go no further.  We were, however, free to walk around outside on the walkway around the casino. 


I have to admit, it does have that whole "Paradise" look about it, huh? 


There were pretty waterfalls ...


... and private beach areas that we could only look at from afar! 



After walking around and thinking how huge everything was, we went back through the casino area where we passed a glass sculpture that looked like an angry redhead had posed as the model! 


We caught our taxi back over to the Festival Place and while walking around the small group of shops in search of postcards, we met up with Sandee & Zane along with Miss Bee & Sarge Charlie.  Zane took the below picture of us. I'm not quite sure what Barb was looking at - maybe the fan she had just bought? 

Finally finding some postcards at a small shop across the street, Barb and I got them written out and mailed at a conveniently located post office.  I believe it cost me $2.18 to mail four postcards and the one I sent to Jamie finally arrived here a week after I got home so almost two weeks after I had mailed it; Amanda got hers a day or two later what with it being further north to Massachusetts! Ah well, at least they arrived at some point even if it seemed as if they must have strapped them to the backs of dolphins to send them to the States!


We decided at that point that it was time to go back to the ship for lunch but before we re-boarded I asked Barb to take a quick picture.  I know it looks like I have a lump on my head but that would actually be my sunglasses perched up there! 


Following lunch, I took some more pictures of the area from the upper decks.  This is Hog Island Lighthouse which is located at the western end of Paradise Island (formerly Hog Island) and marks the northwest entrance to Nassau Harbor. Built in 1817 and still an active aid to navigation, Hog Island Light is the oldest and best known lighthouse in the Bahamas and the oldest surviving lighthouse in the West Indies. And because it was any sort of a lighthouse at all, I was thrilled! You'll find more pictures below of course!



Pretty soon it was time for everyone else to come back on board. 


While sitting out on my favorite deck - Deck 3 Starboard - and waiting for the ship to push off on our way to our next destination, Barb and I talked about how hard it must be to live in that house above! 


Pretty soon we had put out to sea and I was able to get more pictures of Hog Island Light.


I loved all the different colors of the water! 


As we were passing by the lighthouse, I noticed a pile of odd-shaped cement breakers and immediately thought about my trip out California in 2009 to meet Katherine in Santa Cruz where very similar odd-shaped cement "jacks" serve as the breakwater for the Santa Cruz lighthouse.  Thanks to Wayne, a blog reader who had emailed me, I remembered that they were called tetrapods and just looking at them brought a smile to my face as that jumbled pile in the water definitely brought back some very fond memories of a wonderful trip to Santa Cruz! 


Before long the Bahamas were behind us as we started towards our next port of Saint Thomas and an upcoming "Fun Day at Sea" as the ship calls it but for the moment I was quite content to be sitting in a deckchair in what turned out to be my favorite spot on the ship and just watch the water slide by ...

Five on Friday - The Inception Version

Been having another one of "those" weeks and didn't get to the blog too much but I didn't want to miss Five on Friday where our host Travis asks us to pick out five favorite pieces of music and then share them with you.  Music is just one of those really important things in my life that I never ever take for granted so it's easy to want to sit down and do a post to do share some of it with you even when the days preceding this post have been busy and hectic and chaotic and ... well, you get the idea!

This week I decided to return to one of my favorite composers that I've featured once before - Hans Zimmer.  Hans is a fantastic musical score writer for many very popular Hollywood movies and one of his projects that I totally loved was the music for Inception.  If you haven't seen Inception it's quite the ride from beginning to end and the music really completes it.  As a matter of fact, Hans was up for an Academy Award for Best Soundtrack but once again got cheesed when the people who decide these things in LA gave the award to somebody else.  Seriously?  What are you people out there thinking?  Hans Zimmer is brilliant and without his music movies like Sherlock Holmes, The Pirates of the Caribbean, Driving Miss Daisy, Backdraft, and The Lion King - just to name a few - would be nowhere near as good as they are. I just don't get those award shows sometimes!

Ah well, be that as it may, I'd like to share five pieces of music from Inception that I was actually able to find on Playlist.com and hope that maybe you'll like them as much as I do.  If not, click on over to Trav's Thoughts and see if you can find five other bits of music that you might like better from the other folks that participate in Five on Friday but I tell ya, you don't know what you're missing with Hans Zimmer!

Amanda Translates Rex Duodecim Angelus Into Stained Glass

If you'd like to click on the video below while reading this post please do so as the music goes along with the post; I promise it's not any sort of loud head-banging kind of music but is instrumental in nature and is part of the music that is used for a web-comic called Homestuck.


Before proceeding on with the main part of this post, I need to try to sum up what Homestuck is other than one of Amanda's obsessions similar to Doctor Who, Ludo, and anything H.P. Lovecraft! It's the latest installment in MS Paint Adventures which is:

"... a catch-all term for several webcomics by Andrew Hussie which are all, as the name suggests, made entirely in Adobe Photoshop and later, Flash. Each of the stories is written in the style of an Interactive Fiction Game, where each panel is accompanied by a text description, and the link to the next panel represents a player's command. 

Homestuck is the newest story, beginning with a 13-year old protagonist named John Egbert, who's alternately trying to play a reality-altering video game called "Sburb" and struggling mightily against a poorly-designed inventory system. It has since snowballed into an epic of children trying to survive After The End. While still happily displaying the energetic imagination and lightheartedness of Problem Sleuth (Hussie's third series), it has increased focus on deep characterization and dialogue, dramatic moods and a wildly twisting plot. It was initially done entirely in Flash, before Hussie decided to switch back to Photoshop because Flash is a pain to write comics in, though it is still used for some sections, both in interactive mini-games and animations."

Everyone who is let's say over the age of 21 who may be lost please raise your hand! You could include me in that group but it's hard to type with one hand in the air so I'll keep my own hand down for now but trust me, I was totally lost when Amanda first started talking about Homestuck and creating troll horns in her spare time! Anyhow, struggling on in a way that I hope readers can understand ... Homestuck's music is associated with and released by a small record label - What Pumpkin - which is made up of a small group of musicians who have created "a large variety of original music and a similarly large variety of remixes based on the various music".  The music (which can be found here) is quite good and I even home-shared Amanda's iTunes library and now have almost all of it on my own iPod, including the music above which is part of their newest release, AlterniaBound.

So, with all that said you're now probably really wondering what on earth this post is about, right? Some of you may recall that Amanda was home on Spring Break last week and one of her projects that she had in mind to do while she was home was a drawing based on the above music which translated from the Latin means "King of the Twelve". She had it in her head that she wanted to do a drawing in the design of the Bristol Rose Window, a stained glass window which is located in the Cathedral Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, a Church of England cathedral in the city of Bristol, England, and commonly known as Bristol Cathedral. The church, originally known as St Augustine's Abbey, was founded in 1140 and became the seat of the bishop and cathedral of the new Diocese of Bristol in 1542.

At the western end of the nave at Bristol Cathedral is located their rose window - a generic term applied to a circular window especially used in churches of the Gothic architectural style. The origin of the rose window may be found in the Roman oculus - large circular openings that let in both light and air with the best known being at the top of the dome of the Pantheon. There are nine different styles of rose windows with the Bristol Rose Window being in the Rayonnant Gothic style. This style of rose window is divided by mullions radiating from a central roundel overlapping in a complex design with each light terminating in a pointed arch and often interspersed with quatrefoils and other such shapes. In addition to the Bristol Cathedral, the north transept at Westminster Abbey has another well-known example. Most, if not all, stained glass rose windows are based on some form of symbolism whether it be the Last Judgement, the Virgin Mary, God's dominion over Heaven and Earth, etc.

So, now that you're totally lost in talk of windows and historic cathedrals and all that good stuff - not to mention all the confusing information about Homestuck above! - allow me to show you the completed drawing of Amanda's Homestuck Rose Window which took her just about three days to draw. It was the style of the window and the symbolism that she wanted to portray that inspired Amanda to create her own rose window based on the song above, Rex Duodecim Angelus, using Homestuck characters.

Please don't ask me who all of the characters are as I honestly don't know but I do know that Amanda did a phenomenal job and I think her final rendering most definitely has a stained glass look about it.  Personally I think that Andrew Hussie ought to have his own autographed copy sent to him but Amanda demurred and said that it certainly "wasn't that good".  To that I say harrumph and of course it is!  I'm going to sound like a bragging parental unit here but honestly? That kid has talent! Not that she got it from me, mind you, but she most definitely has talent! Oh, and if you click on the picture, I think you can get a better look at in a bigger image which makes it even that much more impressive. So ... how do I get Andrew Hussie to read this post?!?

Full Moon With a 100% Chance of Clouds

In the hopes of maybe finally getting some decent photos of the moon being that we were supposed to be witnessing the biggest one in almost 20 years, Amanda and I drove down to the coastal campus of the University of Connecticut at Avery Point in Groton yesterday evening.  It was my hope that I'd be able to catch a few shots of the moon coming up on the horizon over the Long Island Sound. Unfortunately, we may have been expecting a "super moon" but it appeared that the "super clouds" were going to thwart its much-touted appearance as that's exactly what I found on the eastern horizon - some pretty dark clouds.

Darn the luck but oh hey ... look! There were other things that I could take pictures of whilst I was darned near freezing down where the mouth of the Thames River meets the Long Island Sound. Not to sound like a total wimp who recently came back from a Caribbean vacation but it was kinda chilly and there was a stiff breeze blowing to make it feel even colder. I had an extra jacket but have yet to master taking pictures with gloves on and they were definitely called for! Oh well ... on to the pictures ...

The above is obviously some sort of an obelisk. I've yet to find out exactly what it is and why it's there as I've only been able to do scant research due to time constraints but trust me, I'll find out and let you know at a future date unless someone would like to enlighten me via a comment which I'd be more than happy to let you do!

This is Avery Point Light which was the last lighthouse to be built in Connecticut. Completed in 1943 during World War II, it was not lighted right away due to concerns about possible enemy invasions by sea. It finally went into service on May 2, 1944 with an unusual lighting characteristic which consisted of eight 200-watt bulbs showing a fixed white light at 55 feet above sea level. The light was later changed to a flashing green characteristic.

Located on the grounds at Avery Point on the east side of the Thames River entrance in Groton, the lighthouse still is an active aid for navigation after undergoing extensive restoration in 2005-2006. Avery Point was originally named for an early settler to the area named Captain James Avery and for a long time the 73-acre site served as the huge estate of a wealthy industrialist named Morton F. Plant. Plant died in 1918 and in 1942 the land was sold to the state of Connecticut which in turn handed it over to the Coast Guard. From 1942 to 1967 it was the site of the United States Coast Guard Training Center before it was returned to the State of Connecticut in 1969 and became part of the University of Connecticut at Avery Point campus.

This was the view across the Long Island Sound from Avery Point yesterday evening.  I do love clouds! 

And this was the view across the Thames River to New London as the sun began to set. I do love a nice sunset, too!

From Avery Point I could get a pretty good view of Ledge Light - another lighthouse with a very interesting history that I'll have to tell you about some day.

Another view of the setting sun across the Thames.

No amount of wishful thinking was going to get those clouds to clear out before the moon came up but the dark clouds with a pink tinge made for a lovely landscape background.

I have to admit that it was pretty in spite of not being able to see anything on the horizon other than Pine Island and clouds! Pretty enough to definitely warrant a return trip at some point!

Walking back to the car I snapped this quick picture of one of the pieces of sculpture that is displayed on the campus.  I'm not really sure I get it but then again, I never seem to quite "get" modern art! Way in the distance you can just barely make out New London Light and that I do get! 

Giving up on getting any sort of lunar pictures on the coast, Amanda and I drove back to Norwich where the "super moon" was just about to rise over the top of Laurel Hill so I met family friend Amy up near the parking lot where we work and managed to take a few pictures that just go to prove without a doubt that I really, really need to work on proper lunar photography as these pictures basically suck! 

Oh well, there's always next month provided the clouds cooperate and even though it won't be a "super moon", there will always be another full moon. Maybe by then I can figure out what settings I really want my camera on! Or not ...