Tag Archives: road

Look Both Ways When Crossing the Road

While parked up at East 90 and watching the birds hunt, I glanced behind me – always a wise plan – and saw a northern harrier coming in my general direction. It flew low across the field and over the road before finding a perch. As I looked through the images afterwards, I found it funny to see the bird crossing what seemed to be not far behind a vehicle. I hope it had been taught how to cross the road.

A little while later, the same process was followed by a bald eagle. The shot makes it look like it was actually coming along the road but I think that is just compression of perspective. It was probably this side of the road. It also safely made its way across without having any conflict with passing vehicles. Maybe the local birds have copies of the Green Cross Code (for those of you of a certain age that grew up in the UK).

A Street and Houses Perched on a Manmade Cliff

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The terrain around Bristol is pretty undulating. Houses are built up the sides of hills on streets that are rather steep. However, the buildings up in the Clifton area of town seem to have made better use of the land than might have seemed likely. From low down beneath them, they seem awfully precarious but, since they have been there for well over 100 years, I guess they are reasonable solid. The road in front of some of the buildings clearly seems to have been built up from very little with the arches supporting the roadway built on to the cliffs. It all looks rather dramatic. I suspect if you are up there, you are not as aware of what is beneath you but you will have little doubt of the vantage point you have looking across the surrounding countryside!

Interchange Construction

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Continuing my theme of aerial photos from my flight to DC, as we got in to the metro area, I could see a major interchange under construction on one of the highways. I’m sure, if I could be bothered, it would be possible to work out which highway this is and where the interchange is being built but I’m not that interested. If you happen to recognize it, I would be fine knowing since that would require no effort on my part! The evening light angle meant the shape of the construction was picked out with more clarity. I wonder when it is due to be completed?

Bridge at Hecata Head

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Highway 101 passes Hecata Head and crosses a river before entering a tunnel through the cliffs. The bridge is a pretty elegant structure. Unfortunately, winter is not a good time to try and photograph it. It is tucked in amongst the hills and the sun will only be on it when in the west and probably only in the middle of summer when it gets a lot further north. I had to work with what we had in the shade. Playing around with exposures and working with some HDR processing did allow me to bring a bit more punch to the shots which I felt represented more of what I actually saw while I was there.

Index Road Bridge

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I mentioned the bridge in Index in a previous post and I thought it deserved its own post. The bridge is relatively new having been built in the late 1990s. The road to the town in on one side of the river and the town is on the other so the bridge is pretty important! There is a rail bridge too, but the road is the way for most people since the trains don’t stop anymore.

It is an arch structure. The roadbed is suspended from the arch by a selection of cables. These come down in pairs from the arch and into the bed of the bridge. The structure is steel and, whether it was assembled on site or elsewhere, you can clearly see how the sections were assembled with the bolts through plates at each of the joints.

The arch shape is attractive and the symmetry of the bridge when viewed from the end is also very nice. Because the area is not too busy, they have not cluttered things up with too much fencing to segregate the pedestrians from the traffic so the whole thing has a simple look to it. A nice job by some engineers!

Road to Hana

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One of the more famous things to do on Maui is drive the road to Hana. We were advised that an early start was a good idea before the road got filled with tourists and you stopped seeing the sights and instead watched the rear of the car in front of you. I don’t know how busy it got later since we followed the advice but we certainly had a quiet road to drive.

The terrain is undulating so the road twists and turns as it makes its way around the coast. You never go very fast and the odd straight sections feel very unusual when you come upon one. There are plenty of spots along the route to take note of and lots of waterfalls to see. Some are more impressive than others and our guidebook was very effective at making sure we saw the best of the bunch but didn’t lose too much time at those that were less worthwhile.

It was certainly a nice drive and quite pretty. Whether I would agree that it is one of the most beautiful drives in the world is a very different story. Worth doing if you have the time but not unmissable. I am glad to have done it but won’t feel compelled to do it again if we should return. There certainly isn’t too much in Hana to do once you get there! However, it does provide access to some of the nice features of the south side of the island which I actually found more appealing.

Restoring Lower Wacker

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One of the parts of the city that most tourists never get to see is Lower Wacker Drive. Wacker Drive is the road that runs around the Loop along the line of the river. It is on two levels with Upper Wacker being normal street level and Lower Wacker sits directly beneath it. Half of Lower Wacker was rebuilt before we moved to the city but the other half was in an unrestored state for many years. If you watched the first of the Christian Bale Batman movies, you will have seen Lower Wacker in all of its darkness. (Go further back and the Blues Brothers movie also provided a tour of this area in the final car chase.)

I like Lower Wacker as it provides a bypass to get to the Eisenhower Expressway while avoiding the worst of the traffic – at least it did. Then they closed it for a progressive rebuilding program. This has been going on for a couple of years and is now about to be concluded. I have not been paying a lot of attention to the rebuild but I have taken a look whenever I have been passing by. The work has been a rolling program gradually moving down the length of the road. A section has been closed off while everything was diverted around it. Then the whole process would shift a few blocks further south. When I was up on the top of the Sears, I had a great view of the bottom of the drive from above. It was clear that everything was nearly done. Now I get to wait until I first can drive the new road. I have heard they have calmed the traffic flow down there which is probably a good idea but a little disappointing!