Thursday, July 28, 2011

Road Trips

Here's the abridged version of a couple recent road trips...


I parked the car at a meter and walked around downtown Wilkes-Barre the other day.  I had no problems finding a really good space at a meter, and that's a tip off that business could be better.  It shouldn't be impossible to find a space.  The streets shouldn't be empty, either.


There was a decent amount of foot traffic and people having lunch outside, in spite of the heat.  As I've said before, most cities would kill for a space like Public Square in the middle of downtown.  It's nice to see so much activity there.

A few things were striking-- like the overwhelming stench of sewer gas on South Washington Street, how much the big department store needs an overhaul and some air conditioning, and the number of vacant buildings.

Every city has storefront vacancies, but the Wilkes-Barre ones looked horrible.  At least, try to clean them up a little.  Trash abounds.

My other recent trip was through Wyoming, Sullivan, and Bradford counties.  The scenery was splendid, especially Sullivan County.

While dump trucks and water trucks were everywhere, thanks to the Marcellus Shale drilling, I only saw a couple wells.  It's entirely possible I wasn't looking in the right places-- and I didn't venture that far up into Bradford County.

I was spinning around the radio dial.  WKSB, Kiss FM, from Williamsport booms in.  After all these years, Gary Chrisman still does an outstanding morning show.  He doesn't mail it in.  There was something entertaining in every break, with a really good energy level, and that's not easy to do.

Elsewhere, I found some music I liked, but the guy behind the microphone talked for the sake of talk.  It was pointless chatter.


I took a few pictures on the northern tier trip, and I'll bore you with those in the days to come.