Bethlehem had its St Patrick’s Day Parade on Saturday the 16th, which was breezy and chilly but otherwise a fine day. We went up the street and watched it go by, here are some pics:
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Fun With Maps
A friend sent me a video how-to to build a 3d map the other day, and while I thought it was really cool I didn’t want to use the software in the video. I have some pretty good stuff already, I thought, and tried to find a way to do it with either GRASS or QGIS. GRASS was a bit of a bust: I really hate the interface they use for 3d, and couldn’t find much on how to drape one layer over another — it used to be easy!
QGIS wasn’t much better, but then I am a few versions behind. There is a plugin, however, which enabled me to make a 3D map website. So here’s mine:
Old School Bethlehem in 3D I used the USGS topographic map from 1894, and “draped” it over the DEM I made for the Lehigh Valley cycle routing project (which DEM unfortunately has height in feet rather than meters, so the hill heights scale a bit big). The view in the picture is of Bethlehem and environs, with South Mountain and Lehigh Mountain on the left, and the Camel Hump, back when it was still Quaker Hill, in the upper right. Click the image and it’ll take you to the map website.
I noticed, when playing with that topo map, that for things like roads it doesn’t align everywhere with current maps. The map was provided with a CRS by USGS, but I suspect it was guesswork: there is no projection or datum information on the map itself. (The corners do line up exactly.) This may be because of surveying inaccuracies, back then or even for modern maps — I’m mostly using OpenStreetMap, after all — or it could be that the roads themselves were moved or straightened over the years, or they guessed wrong with the CSR. I thought it interesting then, that on the 3D map the hills and contour lines line up as well as they do: the surveyors knew where the hills were, at the very least.
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Spring Sprang Sprung
It was a perfect springlike day Monday, so I hopped on the Iguana to do a little OpenStreetMapping — there was a note on the website saying that a Moravian spiritual retreat just outside of town had been closed, and I thought if I could go there and confirm it on the ground, I’d go ahead and make the change when I got home. The former retreat was right next to a new park too, so I could also do a little exploring when I got there.
My ride was pretty low-key: I was just out in street clothes and boots (and my helmet), something I’d been doing lately for casual riding; I was also inspired to keep it simple by Bike Snob’s recent article… I tooled up Main Street to Macada, then Altonah, then made a right onto Santee Mill Road, which is basically as bucolic as the City of Bethlehem gets. I was looking for a road/path off Santee Mill to take me into the park, but never found it (I saw later it was smaller than a sidewalk and very easy to miss). No matter, I continued forward, back into civilization, and entered the park from the front. Just outside the park entrance was a house where the retreat would have been; the house had posts out front, from which there might once have hung shingles, and the shingles might once have said “Spiritual Retreat” or whatever, but the shingles were gone now and there was a big “Private” sign by the driveway. So Phase 1 of my exploration was complete…
That left the park — officially, “The Janet Johnston Housenick & William D. Housenick Memorial Park” but apparently just called “Housenick Park” by normal people. This is a parcel of land donated by Janet Johnston Housenick, granddaughter of Archibald Johnston, the first mayor of the consolidated City of Bethlehem (he was also chief architect of that consolidation, and a high ranking executive at Bethlehem Steel — he was as Bethlehem as it gets). The land was once part of the Johnston farm/estate, and it includes the old Archibald Johnston Mansion. The park is fairly new and still under construction/renovation, but there are a bunch of new footpaths and old carriage roads, and I cruised around for about an hour, taking pictures.
Archibald Johnston Mansion 
Driveway to the Big House 
Monocacy Creek 
Monocacy Creek 
House on Hill 
Lime Kiln 
Inside the Lime Kiln 
Behind The Big House 
Monocacy Creek 
Archibald Johnston Mansion 
The Archibald Johnston Mansion
It’s hard to believe looking at it, but the estate only dates from the 1910’s or 1920’s — it looks typical of a farmstead from about 100 years earlier — and the house was built using Bethlehem Steel beams. There was a boat house and tennis courts (or the ruins of them), but there were also lime kilns and the remains of orchards, ornaments in a hobbyist’s historical reenactment of country-squire life.
The ride home was uneventful, and pleasant though the day was getting breezy. I returned via Township Line Road, which eventually becomes Altonah, and basically retraced my steps from there. I went about 16 miles all told, and total ride time was just over 2 hours
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Winter’s Last Hurrah
I went out XC skiing this morning — I noticed, on a little towpath hike yesterday, that the snow still seemed pretty decent, so I went to bed early and rose early with the plan, if the temperature was below freezing, to get in one more session.
I was not as early as I would have liked, but I managed to get out for about two hours on Ilick’s Mill recreation fields (behind the swimming pool) and the golf course, covering just over three miles.
Me at Ilick’s Mill Conditions were not the absolute best, but there was a lot of area still covered with snow, and a lot of the snow was still in pretty good shape; the skiing was actually pretty good, especially on the Ilick’s Mill side. There were multiple tracks already laid and crisscrossing each other, and I followed one track or another depending on what looked interesting. (I could see what looked like the same at the golf course, but the only tracks I found when I got there were goose tracks.) Since I expect this snow to be gone by tomorrow I didn’t want to stop, I wanted to see everything before I left even though my legs were getting tired, but conditions deteriorated as the sun, and temperature, climbed; I turned around when my skis started sticking.
The public golf course in winter. This snow was the stuff that fell last weekend, which I’d thought was no good and only likely to get worse, but there was a cold snap this past week, and conditions were awesome when I got out Wednesday night. Go figure, O me of little faith…
This was at Lehigh University’s Goodman Campus, my first time there, night-skiing (also a first) with Renee. I’m sure I looked ridiculous, skiing along with a bicycle helmet (which is what my light mounts to), but I had fun. Besides, it was dark.
Now the sun is out, the temperature is in the mid 40’s, and tonight looks like rain — there may still be more snow this season, but the air has felt like spring for more than a week now, and I think that today was winter’s last hurrah.
By the way, this was me in Vermont, when we were out in “real winter,” with daytime temperatures in the single digits:
Booger Man! It’s really just condensation. Mostly.
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At The Library
I’m blogging from the library right now, where some doofus keeps making noise by moving his chair and bumping into the heat vents, another keeps coughing, and there’s a constant chatter from somewhere near the front. Whatever happened to quiet??
Meantime, my book quest continues. I got a recommendation for local author Carmen Machado, but the library doesn’t have her, so I picked up War of the Gods by Poul Anderson and Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett; neither book is on my “recommended” list, but both authors have books on the list, so I guess that’s close enough… By the way I returned Surface Detail today, mostly unread.
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No Bad News
It turned that my headache problem wasn’t allergies, sinus or whatever after all. My nose was stuffy, sure, but what was really going on was that I had a stiff neck: I’d been lifting weights lately and pulled something in my neck or upper back; between that and the long car ride, the whole area between my shoulders was one huge knot. One day out XC skiing and it all loosened up again, and I felt great. Perfect!
Of course, we’re back home now, so there’s that, but we did have a great few days away. We got to see Burlington, by day and by night, and we — finally! — got in a bit of winter fun too. (It snowed here overnight, ironically enough.) Now we’re getting back into the swing of things, and I also started (today) playing easy duets with Donna H. I guess we did OK, but we’re both beginners and it shows…
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Good News and Bad News
Anne and I are up in Burlington VT, chasing winter conditions, trying to get our XC ski on and I think we found what we’re looking for. We drove up yesterday, today is for hanging out in town, and tomorrow and Wednesday look good for Bolton and von Trapp. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that I seem to have some cold, or an allergy, possibly to something in our hotel room, making me all headachy when I sleep. I had them change the pillows (I hope it helps, but the room stinks of carpet cleaner), and I took some benadryl; I want nothing more than to go take a nap, but we’re trying to stay outside for as long as possible. Ugh…
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Blast From The Past
Mural of Calypso Island Seen on my neighborhood ride-about, a mural of Calypso Island at West End Park.
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The Sap is Rising
The days are getting longer, and the air is feeling more spring-like even when there’s snow on the ground. That spring air is starting to get into my blood too, and I’ve started doing morning exercises again (pushups, sit-ups and dumbbell exercises), as well as grabbing some easy saddle time. It’s coming…
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Readings
I’ve been on another sci-fi binge lately, going through the “suggested reading” list I keep on my phone, and getting what books I can from the library (or, failing that, checking out books by the same authors). So far it’s worked out pretty well:
First on my list was Daniel O’Brian’s Stiletto, which read like a more comic version of China Mieville, or a supernatural detective/spy thriller, or even a “buddy movie” kind of story: a quick, fun, “chewing gum for the brain” kind of read. (“Fast-paced romp” is also a phrase that comes to mind, and I might have even seen it on the book jacket.) It’s a sequel, which I didn’t know, and it seemed a disappointment to reviewers who read the first book; maybe that means I have another, even better book on my radar.
My next recommendations were books by the author Iain M. Banks. The library did not have any of the specific books recommended to me, but I found a few others (Transition, Look to Windward, and Matter) and really liked them.
I am now reading his Surface Detail, and unfortunately I don’t like it nearly as much as the others. Some of this may be that I read so many of his books at once that they became too much of a good thing, or maybe it’s just that some of the premises of this book are annoying — the story involves people whose personalities have been posthumously uploaded into a digital afterlife, including punishment in a digital “Hell,” and I have never been able to suspend my disbelief that a copy of someone, no matter who it thinks it is, is the original person: the transporter on Star Trek is a killing machine, and Roko’s Basilisk is a meaningless thought exercise. Surface Detail does seem to have a theme, or motif, of people being punished for the crimes of others, so I still have to see where this all goes.
I’ve also been doing a bit of nonfiction, including a bit of local history as well as some STEM things (data science, etc), though these have been dryer and less interesting than I expected. All in all though, it’s all been better than the hate-read of H.P. Lovecraft’s collected works I put myself through last month.
