Long day today (and no links for this entry—I'm too tired to even consider links right now; do your own XXXX searching).
After leaving the hotel, we drove around the state a bit, including Lincolnton, where Smirk is thinking of moving to soon. After that (and a very cool antique store with the Obligatory Velveteen picture of Our True Lord and Savior Elvis Aaron Presley and old tin advertising signs) we headed out to Brevard.
Yup, the town I grew up in.
It hasn't changed a bit, yet everything is different. The old drug store on the corner of Main and Broad St. where I used to buy my Uncle Scrooge comics is now an upscale toy store (not the Porche type toy store, but a train set and teddy bear toy store—back in 1988 when I last visited it, it had split into a two stores, one being a Hallmark store). Yet the townhome we lived in was still called “Shepards Square” and was still the same redwood color (although the actual townhome that I called “home” now had an access walkway across the lawn).
We then drove out to Connestee Falls. At first we couldn't find it since the area had built up in the past few decades. We stopped at a realty office specializing in Connestee Falls realestate (not only is it named for a spectacular waterfall, but a housing development in the same area) but found it closed. I then walked to a nearby house and asked the very friendly resident were the falls were. He pointed out that they were still about two miles further down the road.
Two miles later we found the falls. What had once been a series of octagonal shaped buildings holding the sales offices and restaurant is now long gone (only one lone octagonal building is still there and it was the home to some other local business) with the paths leading to Connestee Falls long gone into disrepair.
The only portion still “open” was the upper observational deck, with the semi-natural stairs that lead to the base of the main falls closed off with a no trespressing warning sign. We found the rements of a path that lead around the gate and being the scufflaws that we were, made a very careful descent down to the base of the main falls.
Connestee Falls is rare among falls in that two falls, nearly opposite each other, meet and run off into a perpendicular stream. The path we followed down looked like it hadn't been maintained since my last visit to the falls in the summer of 1988, and we only made it to the base of the main falls (and were about twenty feet away from the lower observational deck that was otherwise behind unreachable forest.
The weather in Brevard was drizzly, but that made it all the more vibrant around Connestee Falls, the rain bringing out deep greens and browns of the forest. Very beautiful and very tranquil setting, making me wish I had a house overlooking the falls.
After an indeterminate amount of time, we relunctantly made our way back up the trail to our vehicle and made our way back to the data center to finish setting up our equipment.
By the time we got back from Brevard (and dinner) it was after 10:00 pm when we headed directly into the data center. We mounted the servers, reran the power cables and were about to make the actual network cables when we found one of our servers DOA. By then it was after 2:30 am (okay, I'm backdating this entry a bit) when we figured we'd call it a day.
We cleaned up, and left one server backing up another one since we need to reinstall the operating system. We have a full day ahead of us tomorrow and it's expected we might not make it back on Monday.
It's now almost 4:30am and I'm getting ready to crash.