My friends's trip to South Africia

Hey guys, while my travels are done for awhile, my friend John is traveling to South Africia. Check his blog out!

http://bernhajm.wordpress.com/

Aquatica Orlando, FL

Once we got back to Orlando, we went to Aquatica. It was a cool little park. They have a wave pool...

...a bunch of water slide rides...

 ...fish...

...two lazy rivers...

...and Commerson’s dolphins! They did trick for us. Bear with the long video, the most impressive tricks are at the end.

You can even take a slide ride down into the dolphin pool and see all of them underwater.

You can also see the dolphins (and people going through the slide) from one of the lazy rivers.

We even went to the kid park, probably the most fun place! =p

Well it looks like this will be my last blog post for awhile. I'm not sure really what I will do with this site now, perhaps I'll also post more about later travels.

 

Remember to always act like a kid, they have more fun! Stay adventurous.

Hot Springs National Park, AR Sept

Our last stop (besides going back to Orlando of course) was a relaxing visit to our nation's oldest national park, Hot Springs Arkansas. It is so old in fact, it pre-dates the national park system. In 1832 it was set aside by President Jackson as a federal reservation, some 40 years before Yellowstone National Park.

Outside the administration office, they have a fountain which continuously sprays the natural, mineral rich hot water upward.

They also have some free fountains that allow anyone to come and fill up a jug of water to take home. I'm pretty sure I saw a restaurant come and fill up some cartons for later sale at their establishment. Also saw a homeless-looking man come fill up.

While most of the spring water is now protected from contamination by covering it up, this spring was left open to show what it was like back when the Indians used it (minus the concrete basin of course).

The center of the park is not really what you would think of when one thinks of a national park. It is a block of buildings which are mostly old baths that were open in the early 1900s, now turned to museums or art galleries. Here is a model of the buildings on Central Ave.

We took pictures of some of outside of some of the old bathhouses.

However, not all of them are closed. Some, under supervision of the National Park Service, still remain operational. We decided to try out the only one with a pool, the Quapaw bath house.

 Its kind a weird experience if your not used to a spa I suppose. You go up to the desk and tell them if you want a pool bath, a private bath, a massage or whatever. In the background you can see the spa's 4 pools each kept at a different temperature by removing more or less heat from the hot springs water.

After our long trip, this was very relaxing. We ended up staying there almost the entire day! The upper pool is the coldest at about 98 F.

The lower 3 pools are hotter. The best one was the one closet to your body temperature.

We stayed not far away from the city at a campsite. There was a nice little cat there that I had a meowing contest with. I won.

Science Museum Oklahoma Sept 24th

I had never been to Oklahoma so we decided to stop at the science museum in Oklahoma City to say we had stopped there. It was actually very cool with a lot of interactive exhibits. One let you ride a Segway. While I still think they are a little pricey for what they do, they are actually very fun to ride. It is almost like you are controlling them with just your thoughts because all you have to do is lean ever so slightly and you move in that direction.

Here is a video of a mirror maze. They were positioned in just a way so that a light beam can travel from the entrance to the exit making it such that you can see the way out at any point in the maze.

A view of the exit with me walking through it.

Another neat "smoke ring" machine.

Cool tornado generating machine. It had four columns that blew out air in such an angle that it forced the air in the center to spin while a fan on the ceiling pulled the air upwards.

A Van de Graaff generator you power with your hand. For every inch the spark jumps, about 70,000 V of potential is required!

On the road we did see a pretty sunset mixed with windmills.

We also stopped at a Fazoli's Italian Restaurant in Texas which is like a fast food Italian restaurant. Good food.

Blue Hole, Santa Rosa, NM and Gardenia Inn Motel Sept 23rd

An unexpected stop was in blue hole. Strange, who New Mexico has a dive spot? As you can tell by the permanent sign, the temperature is a consistent 61 degrees Fahrenheit. It is artesian well that was once used as a fish hatchery. We also met a cool couple there who was walking across the country. They were really friendly and talked to everyone. They carried all their stuff in a shopping cart and had a dog.

They have buoys you can go down and some PVC to hold onto. Apparently it is a very popular training spot for divers. We didn't go scuba diving (we did go swimming), you had to get a pass from the city which took a day or two.

The NM police search and recovery team was training there when we came by.

They had surface air as well as helmets for communications. It was just basic air though, no mixes here.

A guy holding the pipe for a diver.

Not far away they had a pool which was (I would assume) supplied by the artesian well. No one was using it despite the fact it had a cool slide and boardwalk.

The Gardenia Inn Motel in Gallup, NM was so ridiculous I think it deserves mention. Basically the only thing that worked as it should of was the TV, which wasn't very nice in the first place. Bathroom had barely any hot water and no lights. I suppose you get what you pay for at $26/night, it was slightly nicer than some of the campsites, but not all of them.

To what person would this be an acceptable hotel room? What were they thinking? haha

Petrified Forest and Painted Dessert, AZ

Arizona really had a lot to show us on this trip. Our last stop in this state was the Petrified Forest and Painted Dessert. Both can be seen in the same park although the painted dessert really stretches all the way back west to the grand canyon. The painted dessert was the name given to the land with these little foothills. Very pretty.

Of course, they come in monochrome too.

In the park is the remnants of a ancestral Puebloan people. Here is a summer solstice marker which marks the point when the days start to get shorter (usually June 20th in the Northern Hemisphere). They could tell when it was the solstice by looking at the shadow cast by another rock at about 9 am. If it pointed to the center of the spiral, they knew the days would start getting shorter.

Another group of petroglyphs; the meaning of which has been lost.

The petrified forest has a lot of wood laying around that has turned to stone. Now days they have strict laws that prohibit removing wood from the park but a lot of the best samples have been removed before the park was founded in 1906.

Petrified wood forms when wood is covered and hence isolated from oxygen. The lack of oxygen delays the decomposition process. The organic cells are then replaced with different types of minerals delivered by water trickling through them. Different minerals produce different colors. According to the pamphlet we got:

red/pink-Hematite, Fe2O3

yellow, brown, orange-goethite HFeO2 and Fe2O3

green-reduced iron, Fe

white-silica SiO2

black-carbon or pyrite (FeS2)

purple/blue-manganese dioxide MnO2

The bark looks especially real.

This is a picture of a petrified tree without any support underneath it. Concrete was placed underneath it in the early 1900s to prevent it from collapsing. Current park practices would have not allowed this.

Meteor Crater and Winslow, Arizona Sept 22

Next was a quick stop at a place called meteor crater, a well preserved meteor impact site. It was used as a training ground for Astronauts and had a few space exhibits. Overall though, I'd say it isn't worth your money.

The crater is 550 ft deep and was made in an instant about 50,000 yrs ago by a meteor traveling at 26000 mph releasing as much energy as a 20 mega ton bomb.

It was very windy (as in the observation deck was shaking an unconformable amount) and we didn't stay outside long.

Not far away is Winslow, Arizona which contains Standin' on the Corner Park. The park is named after some lines in the famous Eagles song Take it Easy saying:

"Well, I'm a standing on a corner 

in Winslow, Arizona 

and such a fine sight to see 

It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed 

Ford slowin' down to take a look at me."

It was erected in hopes of breathing new life into the city after the historic route 66 (which goes straight through the town) was closed. Have to admit, although cheesy it is creative.