Source

Found it.  This is where all pigeons come from.  I assume they are then shipped to all the major cities in North America via train.

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Smokey

Befitting it’s name, most of the epic vistas of the Great Smokey Mountains were shrouded in fog & cloud.  But look at these elk on the eastward approach, lounging around in their cervine splendor.

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Tears

Visited the Museum of the Cherokee Indian.  Pleasantly high production value.
I had never heard of this technique of poisoning fish before.I wonder if Sterling Archer knows the origin of Lacrosse?I don’t remember ever hearing the term “trade guns” in school.  It reminded me in a tiny, tiny, tiny way of how Pixar licenses a watered-down version of its Renderman renderer to competing animation studios.If you can’t trust the king of the most powerful nation on the globe, who can you trust?Some of the clan names seem cooler than others.

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Wood

Found this lovely nod to Tolkien.

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Hardware

Because of the David Wilcox song, I was unsurprised to find this hardware store just down the road from a Lowe’s.

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Nest

I stopped at a scenic overlook of the New River.  Two local women where already there, looking out at the island in the middle of the river with their gigantic binoculars.They offered me a chance to look through their binoculars.  I got to see both the bald eagle and it’s (gigantic) nest a few trees over.  Majestic as fuck.

Thoroughly enjoying the rolling hills and river valleys of West Virginia.

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Country

Yes, driving through West Virginia, I played John Denver’s “Country Roads” on a loop the whole time.

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Joy

The curtains in my boutique hotel in Lewisburg, West Virginia look like a Joy Division album cover.

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Church

I stopped for lunch while driving through the Shenandoah Valley.  I was surprised to see how busy the Applebee’s was on a Sunday, but then remembered that this must be the after-Church lunch crowd.

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Ridge

I drove Sky Line Drive along the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Shenandoah National Park.The altitude was high enough that the cold air had preserved the recent snow.But the relentless sunlight had been melting the snow, which would refreeze into ace around the twigs and branches.

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Picnic

The Manassas National Battlefield Park preserves the location of two important battles in the Civil War which are named after the small stream that runs through the land:  First Battle of Bull Run and Second Battle of Bull Run.Bull Run was the first major battle of the entire war and the North was so confident that people from Washington, D.C. came out to picnic and watch the Union victory.  They were shaken when, instead, the Confederacy won the fight.Stonewall Jackson received his nickname for being a “stone wall” during the First Battle of Bull Run.

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Targets

I attended the three hour March for Our Lives event in D.C.The Mall was already booked, so they closed Pennsylvania Ave.  It was simultaneously the most inspiring and most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever seen.  I’ve never seen so many young people this politically engaged.  But kids walking around with targets drawn on their shirts carrying signs that read “Am I Next?” was painfully sad.At one point, two short women asked me how far back down Pennsylvania Ave. the crowd stretched.  “Farther than I can see.”This was the sign I had carefully conceived and clumsily written the night before.  Getting out of my car, I overheard an old woman with a thick Southern accent say, “Oh, that’s a good one” and then read my sign to her friends.Dude!  I know, right?I found this inscription on the pedestal of a statue in front of the National Archive both fitting & poetic.

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Potbelly

I stumbled into D.C.’s Chinatown and was able to translate the characters written in gold on the entrance arch, even though they were written in traditional characters and right-to-left.  It says…Chinatown.

As a bonus, I learned the Chinese characters for the name of my favorite sandwich place!Not sure why it’s 客常㚒, but there you go.

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Coward

The current occupant of this house was too cowardly to stay in town during the March for Our Lives.

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Objectivists

In case you were wondering what kind of people live in the D.C. area.

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