Sunday, July 17 2022

Crazy route map and road video

Following the death of my camera yesterday I searched online to find a replacement I could pick up today. However, supply chains being as they are at the moment, seemed to make this impossible. Even Amazon didn’t have anything similar to my Sony for less than $1,100 that they could deliver by Monday. Just as I was getting desperate I saw an “Open Box” offering on the Best Buy site which was basically the same camera as the one that died and was half price. The only catch was that I had to pick it up from a store that was 37 miles east of me when I wanted to go 35 miles west today and Best Buy does not open until 11 AM on Sundays. However, it was too good an offer to pass up so I placed the order last night.

This morning I headed to a local diner for breakfast before the Sunday morning rush and then on to Wildwood Nature Reserve for a pleasant walk before returning to my hotel to wait for the email to tell me the camera was ready to pick up.

Wildwood is a wetlands area that encourages birds to nest and has a number of well maintained trails.

I had expected to wait until after 11 o’clock to hear from Best Buy but someone must have come in early and I got the confirmation email around 10:15 so I headed off on the 74 mile round trip to pick up the camera and test it out. I then headed further west to Corning, NY for my planned stop at the Corning Museum of Glass.

There are many live demonstrations of glass working in the museum. This one was showing how to make a glass animal designed and sketched by a young visitor.

Another demo involved showing how different glass types would break and treatments that are used to make such items as bulletproof and windshield glass. As a teacher I had often had my students do simple glassblowing and cutting so I didn’t learn a lot from these demos but they were cool and attracted big crowds.

I did learn a lot from the “innovations” section of the museum where they focused on more modern developments, such a fiber optics. The clarity of glass needed for this is amazing. This display compares the brightness of light from the same laser after traveling through 250 km (155 miles) of optic fiber, at the top, compared with just one meter (3 feet) at the bottom.

The uses of glass are simply endless and the museum could easily have occupied me for several hours but, after three hours, I retraced my path once again, traveling east to Horseheads, NY for the night.

A day when I have a good breakfast, an enjoyable walk, visit my destination and acquire an ideal camera replacement for half price has to count as a success.