City Streets

Pixel art cityscape by Waneella

Bangor, Maine

Split-level Dom Luis I Bridge on the Douro River, Portugal

Training Day

New York City police officers, including members of the Emergency Services Unit, training by walking up the main suspension cables of the Brooklyn Bridge - Ramin Talaie/Corbis via Getty Images

Sum dood was climbing on the cables and the cops were sent to get him down. Just another day in the big city, but we get this cool pic from a no crazy-people-involved event. I mean, other than walking up those cables in the first place. It might have been exciting when I was younger, but not now.

Report from Bingen

Silent RR Crossing

Iowa Man came to town today so we had lunch at Longbottoms. We were talking about the advantages of living in Bingen (which is across the Columbia River from Hood River) versus living in the big city. Rent, as you might expect, is cheaper. Grocery stores are few, scattered and cost a bit more. 

The thing that caught my attention is the trains - 50 trains a day. There are three crossings where the train has to blow its horn, and if you are nearby those horns are loud. I've been out to Bingen a couple of times, but I don't remember the trains being a big deal. But then I was only there for a few hours. Iowa Man survives by stuffing silicon earplugs in his ears.

Anyway, Bingen is supposed to be getting a Quiet Zone. Iowa Man was telling me a silent crossing involves concrete barriers to keep cars from evading the crossing gates and probably some other requirements. Looking around for a picture, this is the only one I could find. It is the splash panel that shows up when YoiTube displays a list of videos. Play the associated video and this image is nowhere to be found. This is a screenshot that I uploaded to Google Photos to crop because my Windows image viewer won't crop images anymore. All I get is a black image. Probably need more memory. I wonder if older memory would be cheaper that the latest stuff that is costing 10x more than it was a year ago.

Hood River Bridge

The 100 year old bridge over the Columiba River is going to be replaced, or at least they are talking about replacing it. That's kind of the way it goes with people. Before anyone does anything, everyone has to discuss it and discuss it at length.

Hood River Bridge

Looking at that first picture of the bridge reminds me of just how wide the Columbia River is at that point. The bridge is almost a mile long, and remember, this isn't one of your long, lazy flatland rivers, at this point the Columbia is rolling along at two miles per hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It don't stop for nobody or nuttin'.

Insitu FLARES and INTEGRATOR drones

Insitu is building drones in Bingen. It was bought out by Boeing and now it is being absorbed by ACHR, one of the air-taxi guys. Since our skies will soon be filled with flying air-taxis, does this mean that Bingen will become the Detroit of the 21st Century?

Cunningham-Hall PT-6 biplane with Mount Hood

There is a big antique car and airplane museum in Hood River - WAAAM - the Western Antique Aeroplane and Automobile Museum. The museum was founded in 2007 which might explain why I have never heard of it. I don't know how many vehicles they have on display but the list on Wikipedia takes 17 screens. The museum itself covers five acres. Iowa Man recommends riding in the cart.

Custom map of the Hood River area made for this post.

I-5 Tunnel?

Tunnel Roadway Profile and Upstream Alignment chart

The I-5 bridge between Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington is an antique. They've been talking about replacing since forever, but all the talk has gotten nowhere. Maybe we should consider a tunnel. At the least.

Willamette Week has a few words to say on the subject:

Shouldn’t We Be Talking About Constructing a Tunnel Under the Columbia River?

Clark County Today posted a story three years ago:

Is a tunnel actually viable for crossing the Columbia River?

Previous post about the bridge.

Early photos of the river and bridge.

My hare-brained idea for a bridge.

Two Wheel Transport

How e-Bikes are Killing Motorcycles - Aniioki A9 Pro Max Review
FortNine

I fully expect the government to weigh in on high-power electric bikes any day now.

The Janus Halcyon 250 is Dangerous and Wonderful
FortNine

Weird combination of custom throw-back and economy import. It's like a 1930's bike made with modern manufacturing techniques.

The government is legally required to drive you over this bridge*
Chris Spargo and Evan Edinger

We've got bike lanes all over Washington County, but you'll see a zillion cars before you see a bicycle, and that's good, because I hate seeing bicycles in the bike lane next to traffic flying by at 50 MPH.

Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials - Netflix Series

Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

It's got the look and feel of nice, classic murder mystery, but the story is a bit clumsy.  We do have a cute girl playing the lead, and she drives a cool old car, a Lagonda:

1932 Lagonda 2 Litre

1932 Lagonda 2 Litre

This car looks a whole lot like the one in the show, though it's a little tough to tell, it only shows up on screen for a few seconds at a time. Ask Google to identify the car from a screenshot and it says it's a Blower Bently, i.e. James Bond's original car. I had a bit of a time sorting it out. In some scenes you see that the driver's door is cut down, but when you see the other side of the car the door full height. Nobody actually built cars, with different size doors, did they? As you can see from the photos, they did.  Anyway, it's not the correct car for the story, the show is set in 1920-25 and this one is from 1932.

There are a bunch of guns in this show. We have one scene where the swells, both men and women, are out shooting pheasants with shotguns, and they all seem to be competent enough. But then somebody gets killed (not by shotgun) and now one of the kids sends his butler out to procure a pistol. What kind of pistol does he want? 'One that shoots bullets with alacrity and has a stylish handle', just so we know the caliber of the people we are working with.

The story is that a man from Cameroon has invented a process that makes steel very much stronger, and all the European powers are competing for the rights to his patent.  Seems unlikely, but history is full of such unlikely stories, so I went looking for one that might be the basis for this. Found a variety of African-American inventors, and a couple from Cameroon, but nothing that sounded like it might have been earth-shaking, which is what we need for this story.

Cast

Actor	Surname	Title	Character	Surname
Mia	McKenna-Bruce	Lady	Eileen "Bundle"	Brent	Our girl
Edward	Bluemel		Jimmy	Thesiger	one of the boys
Iain	Glen	Lord		Caterham	deceased father of our girl
Martin	Freeman	Superintendent		Battle	Scotland Yard
Helena	Bonham Carter	Lady		Caterham	Our girl's mother
Hughie	O'Donnell		Bill	Eversleigh	one of the boys
Nyasha	Hatendi	Dr	Cyril	Matip	Inventor from Cameroon
Alex	Macqueen		George	Lomax	Engineer
Nabhaan	Rizwan		Ronny	Devereux	one of the boys
Corey	Mylchreest		Gerry	Wade	one of the boys, our girl is stricken with him
Dorothy	Atkinson	Lady	Maria	Coote	old biddie, deft hand with a shotgun
Mark Lewis	Jones	Sir	Oswald	Coote	old bat, deft hand with a shotgun
Tim	Preston		Rupert 'Pongo'	Bateman	Coote's butler
Ella-Rae	Smith		Loraine	Wade	Gerry's sister
Guy	Siner		Tredwell		Caterham's butler
Ella	Bruccoleri		Socks
Tristan	Gemmill	Doctor		Jackman
Liz	White		Emily
Josef	Davies		Alfred

3 episodes, one hour each.

There are some cool scenes, like this one of Barmouth Bridge.

Barmouth Bridge - Episode 3, just after the 20 minute mark.

Barmouth Bridge is a half-mile long, single-track wooden railway viaduct across the estuary of the River Mawddach built in 1867.

Barmouth Bridge

Barmouth Bridge location on the Irish Sea

The estuary is within Eryri National Park, also known as Snowdonia, which sounds like something out of a fairy tale.

Being as this is an Agatha Christie murder mystery, we have a giant, old English manor house.

Badminton House

Badminton House is the stand-in for the fictional Chimneys. This is also where we got badminton:

Whether or not the sport of badminton was re-introduced from British India or was invented during the hard winter of 1863 by the children of the eighth duke in the Great Hall (where the featherweight shuttlecock would not mar the life-size portraits of horses by John Wootton, as the tradition of the house has it), it was popularised at the house, hence the sport's name.

Nanpu Bridge

Nanpu Bridge Shanghai China

There is a big river that goes through Shanghai, the Yangtze, but this bridge doesn't cross it. It crosses the much smaller Huangpu River that runs through downtown.

Shanghai China

I went to Google Earth to get this map. Google Earth can give you grid lines, which are kind of important when you are looking at large areas. Since this part of the world seems to be a hot bed of hostility, I want to remind myself of the relative positions of these players. Of course all that hostility might just be something the media hype because it gets them more eyeballs, and we all know that more eyeballs means more advertising dollars, which is the real reason they are in business. Makes me wonder if any of this purported hostility is real, I mean there's still a zillion dollars worth of trade going on with all these countries, well, except for North Korea. Russia seems to be the only ones doing business with them. 

Google Earth crashed twice while I was trying to get the view I wanted.

Tu Tu' Tun Lodge

South Oregon Coast Bridges

We spent a lovely weekend at the Tu Tu' Tun Lodge in southern Oregon. The lodge is on the Rogue River just east of Gold Beach.

Elk bedded down at the Dean Creek Elk Viewing Area

On our way down we noticed a couple of elk standing in a field. Then we noticed a bunch of lumps sticking up out of the grass. They were the heads of elk that were bedded down in the grass. There must have been a couple of dozen of them. Very cool.

Part of our journey took us on US Highway 101 along the Oregon coast. Much of the road was nice, straight two lane blacktop in good condition. There were patches though that had suffered from subsidence. They had been repaired, but pavement now had slumps and small hills. Since there are like 8,000 miles of two lane blacktop in Oregon so I suspect the road crews are kept busy. Our tax dollars at work.

Somewhere along the way we went through a tunnel. I spent a couple of hours examining the map without finding one. Through happenstance I stumbled over the the Elkton creek tunnel, which is not on the coast, but we did go through there on the way down. Since it seems to be only tunnel on our route, it must be the one, which is weird since I could have sworn it was on the coast.

While I was looking for the tunnel, I recorded every bridge I noticed. Most of them are small, simple bridges over creeks, but there are four big, impressive ones, all designed by Conde McCullough.

Siuslaw River Bridge
Florence, Oregon

Umpqua River Bridge
Reedsport, Oregon

Conde McCullough Memorial Bridge
Coos Bay, Oregon

Isaac Lee Patterson Bridge
Gold Beach, Oregon

All four of these bridges were built in the 1930s.

Arizona Nightclub Budapest 1938

Arizona Night Club

Continuing to read Kingdom of Shadows by Alan Furst. Nicholas Morath, our hero, take the night train to Budapest where he visits the Arizona night club. It's kind of a wild place.

Dancers of the Arizona Nightclub in Budapest in 1938. They Are Climbing Onto A Boat Under The Dumbfounded Gaze Of The Sailors.

From a story in the Independent:

Around the corner in the magnificent green-tiled building at Nagymezo utca 20 you come to the Hungarian House of Photography. The first-floor shop displays the depth of Hungary's photographic tradition (think of Kertesz, Brassai and Moholy-Nagy) and the temporary exhibitions are usually worth a look. Before the Second World War, the building housed the Arizona Club, which wowed Patrick Leigh Fermor when he visited. But in 1944 The Arizona's owners were killed in the Holocaust – a reminder that the wartime ghetto was not far away on the other side of Andrassy ut.

Mai Manó Ház, Nagymező utca 20, circa 1900

Near as I can make out, this poster is advertising the accomplishments of the photographers Mai & Tarsa

Mai Manó Ház, Nagymező utca 20, Today

Chain Bridge and the Hungarian Parliament Building

The Chain Bridge connects Buda & Pest and is not far from the Hungarian House of Photography / Arizona Night Club.

Chenab Rail Bridge

Chenab Rail Bridge

India just opened the highest bridge in the world. It's in Kashmir, basically the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains where India & Pakistan have been fighting since forever.

Chenab Rail Bridge
Area shown is approximately 650 miles across

Via RT

Brink of Disaster

Collapsed Bridge
Chuck Pergiel

Via Liberalguy

P. S. Another video. Yahoo has the story about the Houzi River Bridge collapse.

The Portland-Vancouver Bottleneck

This ANCIENT ELEVATOR makes you STOP on the FREEWAY
Road Guy Rob

Interstate 5 between Washington and Interstate 84 slows to a crawl during morning and evening rush hour. There are periods outside of those times when it can be clear sailing. 

Part of the problem is that Oregon has income tax and Washington doesn't, so a fair number of people live in Washington and commute to Oregon over this bridge. Blame the Oregon reactionaries who are adamantly opposed to sales tax. The commies in Washington run on their 6.5% sales tax.

Another part of the problem is that a replacement bridge would need to be something similar to the Fremont Bridge, which is a massive structure.

The argument about building a new bridge has been going on for a long while.

Nine Arches Bridge

Nine Arches Bridge

The Nine Arch Bridge . . . is a viaduct bridge in Sri Lanka and is one of the best examples of colonial-era railway construction in the nation. - Wikipedia

This puzzle was pretty tough. The bridge and the train were easy enough, but the trees were almost impossible, probably because there are 300 pieces. Setting the number of pieces to a smaller number would likely have made it easier, but where's the fun in that?

Swan Island Water Slide

Carnival Panorama arriving at the Portland drydock
KetAwesomeness / Ketner Mizée

Older son noticed there was a cruise ship docked at Swan Island. He noticed it because he could see a water slide poking up above the warehouses. Swan Island is an industrial district, full of warehouses, train tracks and shipyards, so a water slide was definitely out of place. 

Carnival Panorama Water Slide

The water slide is perched on top of a cruise ship that has come to Portland for repairs. We were driving around down there Saturday morning and every so often you could catch a glimpse of it, but nowhere could you get a good view of it.

Near as I can make out, this ship operates out of Long Beach, California. They had some engine trouble and decided to send it to the Vigor Shipyard in Portland for repair. Vigor has only drydock on the west coast that is big enough to accommodate this ship. 

Carnival Panorama funnel
Notice scaffolding around the funnel

Before they could come here they first had to stop at Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, to have the top part of the funnel removed so the ship could sail under the bridges on the way up the Columbia River to Portland.

Bridges between Swan Island and the Pacific Ocean

Bridges between Swan Island and the Pacific Ocean

P. S. Most every web site about cruise ships is so loaded with ad-ware that it drug my computer back into the dark ages. Very annoying.

Lagos, Not Lagos

Lagos

Lagos, Nigeria*

In the last episode of Sky High: The Series, our gang flies to Lagos, Nigeria for a meeting with a bunch of other gangsters. It opens with the above shot of the Third Mainland Bridge across Lagos Lagoon. It's kind of a weird bridge, it follows the shore line due north from Lagos Island, the essential center of the city and the government.

Third Mainland Bridge, Lagos, Nigeria

We also get some street scenes that look like you might expect Lagos to look. Here our gang has bailed out of a tuk-tuk and are hustling to the airport terminal. That building in the background looks very distinctive, and it is:

Nawair-ru-deen Central Mosque, Lagos, Nigeria*

It was a little hard to track down because there are at least three mosques with that name in Lagos, and Google Maps doesn't know where all of them are. Even given the address, it isn't sure. The Streetview hasn't recorded the street it's on, but I was able to get a couple of shots from nearby streets:

Nawair-ru-deen Central Mosque, Lagos, Nigeria

Nawair-ru-deen Central Mosque, Lagos, Nigeria

Not Lagos

Then there's the hotel. It seems plausible that it's in Lagos. The performance by the 'native dancers' was a little over the top. I dunno, maybe that's what fancy hotels in Africa do.

Hotel*

I was able to pick out the name of the hotel from a couple of scenes: NAU Hotels & Resorts. They are in  Algarve, the southernmost province of Portugal. Problem is there are several of them, however with a little pointing and clicking I was able to find it:

NAU Hotels & Resorts Algarve Portugal

The meeting with all the other gangsters takes place in this fancy building:

Fancy Meeting Place on Breakwater*

Looking at Google Maps I couldn't find any sign of a building on a breakwater. Breakwaters do tend to stand out. An inquiry on reddit turned up the answer.

Building of control CCS of the outer harbour of Ferrol, Spain

Ferrol is on the northwestern corner of Spain.

When our gang finally makes their getaway, they board a Pilatus PC-12 Turboprop.

Pilatus PC-12 Turboprop*

You can't see the registration number here, but is does show up for a second, so now we have it.

Pilatus PC-12 NGX

From FlightAware, this plane operates mostly in eastern Europe. Then I got to wondering - could it even fly all the way from Madrid to Lagos? Not quite. It's 2,400 miles and the PC-12 only has a range of about 2,100 miles. Stopping in Morocco for fuel would knock 400 miles off the trip, so Morocco to Lagos would only be 2,000 miles, which would be doable.  The PC-12 cruises at 325 MPH so it would take about eight hours. There is no restroom, so you might want to make a couple of pit stops. Me, I wouldn't survive.

* images are screen shots from Netflix. Looking over this post I noticed all the screenshots have a yellow tint. I wondered if maybe that was Google's doing, but no, that's just the way the show looks, though I didn't notice it while we were watching it.