TV lies

Over the weekend, I took a couple bike rides.  I don't really know how far I went, because the battery in my odometer is dead, and I haven't been able to find anyone willing to sell me only one replacement battery.  The first battery lasted six years.  Why would I want a two-pack?  I checked my routes on Google (they have a nice Beta feature to map routes along bike trails, but DC is a bad place to get really detailed directions that way because the trails are marked even more sporadically than the roads), and it looks like I managed about 40 Saturday and a bit less than that Sunday.  Blame for these abbreviated rides may be assigned to either my own lethargy, or my bikes urgent need for new bearings and gears.  Take your pick.

Yesterday I ventured along trails to Silver Spring, Maryland, where I was surprised to find the Discovery Channel.  They had a "sensory garden," which sounded interesting, so I stopped to have a snack and look around.

I'd like to think that a garden outside the headquarters for a cable which, although a corporate, for-profit entity, purports to be at least semi-educational, would get its own facts straight.  I let them slide on calling the garden a fractal design (it was arrayed in progressively smaller circles, though I don't know that they followed any mathematical structure)--we'll call that artistic license.  I'll even look past what I thought was a misspelling of "Crepe Myrtle," because after a quick bit of research I learned that their version may be an acceptable alternate spelling, but it still makes me itchy.

However, this is a flaw too far.

NOT Oregon Grape Holly

I'm from Oregon.  Oregon Grape Holly is the state wildflower.  I know Oregon Grape Holly.  This is NOT Oregon Grape Holly.  It's not even close.  I looked around, hoping the sign had simply been placed in front of the wrong plant, but Oregon grape holly was nowhere in that entire garden.

Myth: Busted.

Found Items

Last weekend, we packed the Tardis to the grilles (HA!) and drove to North Carolina for a wedding.  Someone the Girl and a mutual friend of ours knew in high school, and the three of us car-pooled there because... well, they wanted to use my car, so they had to invite me.  Saturday morning, the Girl went off to visit a college friend while the remaining two travelers went in search of expensive, high-end dance shoes.  No, really.

Thus began a serendipitous journey, and I was thrilled, because I've always wanted to have one of those.

On our way to Princess Lucky's Magical Dance Shoe Emporium and Wonder-Mart, we passed under a long pedestrian bridge which spanned four lanes of traffic and at least two entry/exit ramps.  Our goal for the afternoon was to find the trail that would allow us to cross that bridge, but of course we had no idea what it was besides "the bridge between exits 4 and 5."  We had large burritos after the shoe place, because we heard they are brain fuel.  After negotiating our way back to the highway with the aid of/ despite the efforts of my GPS, we decided to just get off at Exit 5 and try to find a park.  We reasoned there had to be something parkish at either end of the trail; we just had to find it.

Luckily, we picked the right end.  We had to wind a round a little, but we eventually saw a large grassy area, and a nearby (but seemingly unrelated) parking lot.  We tucked ourselves into the corner, hoping nobody would notice we had parked at a museum without actually going inside, and stepped through a fence to get to a trail we could see once we got out of the car.

Then we turned a corner on the trail and saw this.

We were perplexed, befuddled, and giddy with sudden excitement, but then we saw the map, and things started to make sense.

We're both engineers (sort of), so our first course of action was to plot a loop that would show us as many of the labeled dots as possible (for some reason, we were both interested in "Untitled"), knowing that our time was limited, because we had to go pick up the Girl at the hotel and get to the wedding later in the afternoon.

Gyre

Some of the trail cuts through a large manicured lawn, with gentle rolling hills dotted with picnickers and couples on blankets.  The atmosphere, along with the enormous sculptures, made me think of some of the sci-fi shows I've seen, like when Wesley Crusher gets arrested for stepping on plants, or SG-1 finds the civilization in suspended animation in the garden.  I can't explain it, but I didn't fight it, either.

Untitled

Near Untitled, we found my very favorite ...piece?  Exhibit?  Installation?  It was called Cloud Chamber, and it looked like a Hobbit house.

Hobbiton outside, camera inside.

When we stepped inside, I noticed a sliding plate in the ceiling with a series of four holes in it, ranging from about 1.5" to 0.5" in diameter.  There was a puddle directly under the plate, and I wasn't tall enough to reach it anyway, so I went back outside looking for a stick, and feeling very Indiana Jones.  When we started moving the plate, we found that it changed the size of the blurry light spot on the floor.  Then I figured it out and closed the door.

Inside the Cloud Chamber.  You can just see the bench built into the wall.

The entire building was a camera obscura.  Light coming through the pinhole in the roof projects an image of the leaves and branches on the floor and walls of the room, with startling detail and clarity.  We spent a while in there, playing with aperture settings and showing the next group of people who entered (who knew about the effect, but didn't know it was adjustable).  We also spent a lot of time toying with settings on our own cameras in an attempt to show people what it looked like in there.  The best result, shown above, was from my friend's camera.

As luck would have it, I'm pretty sure we'll visit North Carolina again, so the Girl can visit her college buddy, and I plan to require another tour of the museum trail as part of our trip.  Maybe I'll have a better grasp on my camera settings by then.  If nothing else, I think that little adventure shows the importance of wandering around and looking for cool new stuff, even if your only lead is "I want to cross that bridge."