"The best looking couple in Lewes (this weekend)"

The best looking couple...
Originally uploaded by mmahaffie

I have no idea who these two people are. I ran across them while I was wading in the shallows of Delaware Bay along Lewes Beach today.

The gentleman said, "wanna take a picture of the best looking couple in Lewes this weekend?" Putting aside for a moment the fact that the best-looking couple would have to, by definition, include the Lovely Karen, I said, "sure," and snapped this picture.

They thought I must be a newspaper photographer, because they asked about where the picture would appear. I promised them that I would post it with this title so they could google it and find themselves.

And so, I did.

...So Far

Just for fun, I ran the RSS from the blog through Wordle to see what the word cloud of recent posts looks like. Recent travel and Census stuff seem to predominate.

We're Missing a Tourism Opportunity: Water Baseball

Water baseball [Men playing baseball in
surf.] 27 July 1914 (LOC)
Originally uploaded by
The Library of Congress

The Library of Commerce photo stream in the Flickr commons includes a few intriguing, if faded, images of men playing baseball in the surf sometime in 1914. We should investigate this as a tourist activity/draw for Delaware beaches. The Division of State Parks could organize leagues. But I imagine the outfielders would have to be fairly tall.

Stuck in the Middle With (897,933 of) You

Census Bureau Director Robert Groves was out in the tiny village of Plato, Missouri, yesterday to unveil a National Geodetic Survey disc commemorating Plato as the new national center of population.

The Census Bureau calculates the center of population after each census as "the place where an imaginary, flat, weightless and rigid map of the United States would balance perfectly if all residents were of identical weight." The center of population has moved slowly west and south from Kent County, Maryland, in 1790 to Missouri.

The Census Bureau also calculates the center of population for each state. In 2010, the center of population for the 897,934 of us counted in Delaware was northeast of Smyrna, along Route 9.

Walking Up A Pair of Waterfall-Filled Gorges

I had a day to kill in Ithaca, New York, this weekend. Daughter #1 had a day of training scheduled the day after pick-up from Villanova. We drove straight from Radnor in PA to Ithaca on Friday and I spent Saturday wandering around two of New York's Waterfall-themed state parks.

First up was Taughannock Falls State Park, north of Ithaca and above Cayuga Lake.


Just south of Ithaca, and distressingly close to a Home Depot and other big-box retail, is Buttermilk Falls State Park.