Tuesday Afternoon

Recently I've been getting Tuesday evenings off from my night job, so once the day job finishes up, I've got an entire day to play, to explore, and to cause breif and reasonable mischief.

This past Tuesday afternoon found Corrie and I taking care of some tasks and seeing some things that I'd been meaning to check out for some time; one of the things I'm sure I'm going to try to return to and explore some more.

Driving home one afternoon from my day job along a different route than I normally travel--I was in a controlled experiement to see which route would be faster--I noticed a huge gaping quarry less than a mile from our apartment. Item one for Tuesday Afternoon checkout...

We had to drive down a dirt access road that turned out to be someone's driveway, get out and walk a little further, hop a fence, cross some train tracks, and then hop a barb-wire fence (only I did that part) to gain access to one entrance of the quarry and get this picture:



Afterwards, using google maps, I found a better approach, and will make a second trip to check out the surface of the moon terrain and take more pictures. I'm writing a piece about the theft of a quarry, and I'd like the physical inspiration. The quarry, if it matters, seems all but abandoned now, with nary a trace of human presence.

The way to get to the access road that took us to the start of the quarry trek was where one street Ts into another. The road that is the top of the T, the continuous one, after a name change, is the street our apartment complex is on. The road that dead-ends into it, forming the T, is where you can find our second trek.

Travelling back along that road, away from the dirt path, you can eventually get to my day job, and pass another thing I'd been wanting to examine closer since noticing it on my controlled-time-trial. This, though, is no quarry...

From the road it looks like some kind of industrial factory, or industrial something...shockingly, it is. If you turn off the road and onto what amounts as an entrance, there are visible signs for a Post Office along the way.

Keep on the entrance road, and you come across three large stacks of what looked like, from a distance, railroad ties. Upon closer inspection, well, I'm still not quite sure what they are. You decide. Here's a picture Corrie took of one:



Driving past these, and crossing train tracks, you get to the Post Office building, which claims to be open from 8 to 10:30 a few days a week. Weird, right? What good would it do these construction contractors (that's who would be using this industrial facility) to have morning access to a PO? In any case, the building was clearly older and predates the automobile, as its entrance is thirty feet from the oldest set of train tracks in the area, so maybe as nostalgia is it still open.

Finally driving past that we got to the actual entrance into the deal, a lime manufacturing plant, which could just as easily be called a lime extracting plant, which is probably what they quarried from my earlier adventure. I used lime when I mixed concrete (cement, aggregate, water, lime)...for those unfamiliar with the product: lime is a white powder that will burn you if it gets on your skin. The burns aren't too terrible; once I got a wave on my arm, and it looked like I had a peeling sunburn for a week or so. All in all, it's pretty bad juju.

But on this Tuesday Afternon of adventure we pulled into the long drive way armed with our camera. There were no signs telling us not to enter, which makes sense, since construction guys come and go all day, and we weren't so much surrounded by their trucks as among them. Our tiny Saturn, though, was woefully out of place, and we didn't rally want to have a conversation about our pictures, so we snapped a few, spun around in a U-turn, and left. I would like to maybe try to get better shots, but here's the best: