Today I went to the Petrified Forest National Park, primarily since I needed to go past it anyhow. I’ve seen petrified wood before, but just small fragments. I had not been expecting such vast amounts. It resembled a torrent of water had just recently brought down a forest, but these trees were washed down in the very early Triassic, just as dinosaurs were starting to appear. The tree trunks’s constituent molecules have since been replaced particle by particle with different kinds of minerals producing some rather interesting colours. After that I went to Meteor Crater, Arizona, a place I’ve long intended to see. I was suprised to see it so close to a highway and even had its own site visitors’ centre, for some reason I always thought it was out in the wild somewhere. Anyhow, it’s a large hole – 4,000 feet across as well as 550 feet deep – you don’t really need me to relate to you the details of a big hole in the ground, suffice it to say it was a quite recognizable hole as it’s always shown on TV. The crater was made approximately 50,000 years earlier, by a meterorite the dimensions of which you could fit a good-sized building in. Evidently the detonation was just over 20 megatons which is 1000 times larger than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in WWII. A little piece of the meteorite, tipping the scales at half a ton, is all that remains and it now sits in the museum. OK so tonight I’m in Flagstaff, Arizona, where I’ve booked into a hotel for a couple of days. After all that barren land I’ve been exposed to, I need to put in time with real folks!
TRAVEL NEWS
First Ever Flights to St Helena
(September 2015) For the first time in its history, the island of St Helena in the Atlantic was visited by an aircraft, a Beechcraft King Air 200, which travelled from Angola and touched down at the brand-new airport on the island. Once the plane was at the airport, the crew began performing several calibration tests to get the airport ready for regular flights in the future. The aircraft was piloted by Grant Brighton and co-pilot Dillan Van Niekerk. They were said to be honored to be amongst the first people to travel to the island by air. They were also accompanied by the Beechcraft King Air 200 aircraft designer Jeffrey McKenzie as well as the FCSL principal pilot, Stuart Rawlinson, and Nick Whitehouse who is the chief air travel assessor for FCSL. Once the calibration tests have been completed, the island is expected to receive a small number of flights daily.Handgun discharged in expensive N.Y. hotel
(14th June 2015) A handgun inadvertently discharged at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel and resort in New york city in the middle of a wedding celebration, wounding a minimum of 4 people, according to reports. The accident is believed to have occurred at 7:25 p.m. in the Park Avenue hotel's lobby. Police stated that the wedding visitor's gun discharged and the shot hit the ground. The Waldorf Astoria is one of the most popular hotels in the world. The landmark building was recently sold by Hilton Worldwide to Anbang Insurance Group for close to 2bn dollars.New York’s La Guardia Airport to be renovated
(12 June 2015) New York governor Cuomo has recently been joined by US vice president Joe Biden to unveil the concept design for the comprehensive renovation of LaGuardia Airport.
Under the scheme, the airport will be completely transformed into a structurally unified primary terminal with increased transportation accessibility, considerably raised taxiway capacity and best-in-class traveler services.
Construction on the first half of the newly unified terminal, anticipated to be a $4 billion venture that generates 8,000 direct jobs and 10,000 indirect jobs, are going to be managed by LaGuardia Gateway Partners, a new public-private joint venture chosen by the New York and New Jersey Port Authority to develop the project.
Building of the first part will likely commence after approval from the Board of Directors of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. That authorization is anticipated for the initial part of 2016.
Most of this initial part of the project is anticipated to be ready for people in 2019, with full completion scheduled for around 18 months afterward.
The second part of the new terminal is anticipated to be redeveloped by Delta Air Lines, which has provided strong backing for the new vision, and anticipates starting the redevelopment of its terminals on an identical track with the LaGuardia Gateway Partners project.
New York had a disruptive, can-do strategy to big infrastructure in former times-- and today, its moving forward with that mindset once more according to governor Cuomo.