Friday, November 26, 2010

You don't miss your water til the well runs dry...

Pennsylvania has kicked our ass.
The good news is: more exciting tales from the road, this time in mid-Winter. Hell yeah!!!
If Clyde skids off the road and flies off of a mountainside, you'll be the first to know about it, and really, isn't that why you hang around here at Lelko Blog after all? Yes.
Stay tuned....
LELKO

Monday, November 15, 2010

Random Driving...(includes some walking)

Continuing our tradition of driving around aimlessly (because we hate the earth and want to pollute it as much as possible), here are a few shots from the past couple weeks. They include another visit to the Moravian cemetery in Bethlehem as well as a couple other cemeteries around the area (hey, we just think they're cool, it's not like we're ghouls or something).
my girlfriend is way prettier than yours, and here's proof
For some reason I really like taking photos of our kitchen, so here's another one
While walking the extension of the Ironton RailTrail past where old Fort Deshler once stood and into Egypt, we found this great old cement factory near the Troxell Steckel house (plenty of other folks have documented that house built in 1756, like this fella ) which looks like its been sleeping for quite a while. There is an old quarry just to the west of it that a hunting club uses and a little company town, some of which is abandoned.
The locals have a cool rope swing that'll plop you into the Coplay Creek on those hot summer days that seem so far away now... the ladder on this tree leads you to it.
These abandoned homes have been pretty well trashed, and what the local kids haven't done nature is working on but as far as cool places to creepy-crawl, they seem pretty perfect.

I seriously doubt this is up to code...The out-houses are failing a bit, but they sure look neat-o.

I haven't found anything out about this old place, but maybe I'll look into it some more for next time.



I decided to make a point of getting a few shots of the Whitehall Mall interior. As a kid we (my fam) would go here pretty often, and it used to be a pretty cool indoor mall that, for whatever bad reason, was turned into a mostly outside, glorified strip-mall sometime in the last decade or so. However, parts of the old mall still exists and you can actually see where they just chopped off the front of the mall when you walk in the doors . Therough edge on the bottom of this wall is another sign of the Hack job they did on this place. The biggest anchor store (which was a Leh's in my time) was literally chopped in half and now houses a fitness place. It's too confusing for me to even understand what happened to the movie theater. Whatever. Just another sign of how things change and how utterly pointless that change often is.
Yum! Honey Bunny makes me one of these raw wraps everyday!


Some old cemetery west of town off of old route 22.
Our second visit to the old Moravian cemetery that you learned about a few posts ago. We then walked along the bluff in Bethlehem to the next cemetery down the line...










...and we found these creepy, ego maniacal folks' grave! You can also see the most in -you-face evidence of the decline of our society, the remains of the once mighty Bethlehem Steel (1857-2003), now just a rusting hulk. But hey, it's not all bad (actually it is), the good folks who brought you the fall of western civilization have used part of the buildings to bring the world another casino for our new Gulag-Casino economy! Ya-Hoo!!!!



And then we went to the shoe house. Soon we felt like we needed a little intercourse......Pennsylvania, that is.
Strangely we soon found some Amish which we thought could be Menonites until we saw and that kinda straightened us out. we found another covered bridge (this time with a chemtrail!) and ate at a Diner. As you may know, it is a state law that every third structure must be a diner. I don't think we even ate at this Diner, but I'm sure it has the same menu.
And before you ask, yes, this dragon actually runs the farmer's market. Until we go burning up some more of those fossil fuels (yeah right) and wasting valuable mega-pixels, bye y'all.
LELKO

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Hawk Mountain

The Mighty Hawk King


As promised, we took a ride up to Hawk Mountain the other week. I was disappointed to learn it was not, in fact, a mountain ruled by the angry Hawk King, ruler of the un-free hawk world, nor was it a mountain made entirely from the carcasses of millions of Hawks. Turns out it's simply a hawk sanctuary, which really means you can go to this cool forest and walk around and see a bunch of birds for a few bucks while trying desperately to ignore the many humans. Not bad for a few chuckles.

You know us, so you are aware that we might drive around given all of our free time. So drive we did, down Route 611, then a left at 31, or thirty-something (that's for all you early gen x-ers!) and found. There were a couple cool barns and an old house that some dead guy built while still alive. I was gonna look into the history, but I have better things to do so, hey, by all means, feel free to look into it yourself.

I believe they call this sort of barn a Swede, cos, you know, the Swede's favored them, even though most of the ones in these parts were built by the Germans, who are called the Dutch, for Deutsche. Don't ask if you don't wanna know.
Emily is always peeking into old dead guys' houses. In case you forgot, we look pretty damn cool most of the time as you can see from this shiny photo.
Our next stop was the cute little (tourist trap) town of New Hope, where every parking space has a meter everyday!

I think they were getting ready to make some soup outta this stuff, but I can't be positive.
Along the Delaware River in New Hope, at sunset, you can just barely make out Luke Skywalker gazing into the setting suns (cos, ya know, the first Star Wars was called A New Hope. get it?)


This weird old place is in Easton, another Delaware river town.



Surprisingly, at least for me, there are a pile of old covered bridges in these parts. Maybe I'll tell you about them next time, but right now I think I'm gonna go for a walk. See ya later, brah.
LELKO