Robert Pence

Perfect vantage point, and I love the colors.

Damn! Extraordinarily fine shots, and the weather cooperated with a haze-free day.

Excellent! Very nice-looking town.

Colorful! Good stuff that many visitors never know about.

Awesome stuff! I spent a week there, once, and it took me a while to re-learn how to walk on level ground without leaning, after I got home.

Outstanding photos!

Interesting place. I was gonna' 'splain about the streetcar deck on the Hope Memorial Bridge, but KJP beat me to it.

I trust all the forumers I know; even the crazy ones are mostly harmless, and I can hold my own when it comes to craziness. It's the unknown lurkers I fear. :-o

Fun shots!

Done:

Nice work, David. Columbus is enjoyable, and I love all the bricks in German Village and the Brewery District.

Celina is pretty nice. The lake is quite large and beautiful, and the Mercer County Courthouse is well-maintained and pretty elegant inside.

Good article, but; Journalists don't refer to car travelers as auto enthusiasts, or air travelers as plane enthusiasts. There's an implication in this that only people who are slightly odd or obsessive would choose to travel by train instead of flying or driving.

If you pace yourself approaching stoplights to avoid having to come to a full stop, it's possible to coast on your bike, neither stopping nor pedaling, all the way from the top of Twin Peaks to the Ferry Terminal.

I thought that might be the case. The statistic may not testify so much to improvements in U.S. energy efficiency, as to the impact of outsourcing/offshoring so much of the country's industrial base.

Beautiful!

Fabulous photos!

Interesting town. The courthouse dome is wonderfully ornate.

That library is pretty impressive!

Beautiful. I love old, dense, moist woods. On the family farm south of Bluffton, Indiana there's a modest-sized partly-marshy woodlot, maybe 15 acres, that has some old-growth trees in it including some huge beeches. There's a broken-off snag of one of the old ones, about six feet high and hollowed out in the center, where buzzards sometimes nest.

Sweet town! What a fun project this could be:

and then at closing ... Uhhh, before we sign, there's just one little thing we'd like. We decided it would be nice to have a full basement, with a bathroom and wet bar.

I'm not sure I buy this outright, but I don't know where this info comes from or how it was computed. Does it include the petroleum content, both as material input and energy consumed in manufacturing, for imported goods? Automobile manufacturing, for instance, consumes huge amounts of energy and a lot of it comes from petroleum and natural gas. Petrochemicals are feedstocks for plastics manufacturing, too. Even if the info is complete and accurate for the U.S., it's not realistic to look at per-capita consumption according to political/geographic entities. Manufacturing, trade, and finance all operate on a global scale, and frightenly, so does military capability. People compete for resources and quality of life on a world-wide scope, and where great disparities exist, great pressures to equalize them will come into play.

The mention of the name, "Shantz" ("Schantz") brought to mind a memorial I saw in Johnstown, PA, last fall. I wonder if there was a family connection.

Beautiful shots! Looks like a pleasant way to spend an evening. In the shot of the Lorain-Carnegie Viaduct (Bob Hope Memorial Bridge), you can see the lower deck that was provided for future streetcar use, but never used. It has room for four tracks.