{"id":155,"date":"2006-01-21T17:28:17","date_gmt":"2006-01-21T22:28:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/?p=155"},"modified":"2006-01-21T17:28:17","modified_gmt":"2006-01-21T22:28:17","slug":"Mt. Cheaha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/?p=155","title":{"rendered":"Mt. Cheaha"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

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\nHere amidst a flurry of blogging, I’d like to talk about the wonderful
\ntrip I had to Mt. Cheaha on Wednesday and Thursday of this week. Samford
\nhosted an orientation conference for new faculty at Bald Rock Lodge
\nlocated on top of Mt. Cheaha, Alabama’s highest point at 2407 feet.
\nI took these two pictures above on Thursday morning right before the
\nsun came up over the Georgia horizon (Mt. Cheaha is near the border
\nof Georgia). The first picture is looking northeast. The second one is
\nlooking southwest along the ridge. You can watch a short video of
\nthe sunrise by clicking one of the two links below:\n<\/p>\n

\nDownload<\/a> mpg (4.15 MB) |
\nStream<\/a> real (6.70 MB)\n<\/p>\n

\nThe conference was to help orient \/ redirect new faculty after
\ncompleting their first semester at Samford. It was a debriefing time
\nwhere we could talk about what is and isn’t going well. We also took
\ntime to create a vision of how to improve Samford through our roles
\nas professors. It was an awesome conference, and I learned a lot.\n<\/p>\n

\nOne of the major highlights for me, though, was my longest bike
\ncommute ever — from Birmingham 78 miles due east all the way to
\nMt. Cheaha (pronounced “Chee-haw”). Here is a funny story relating
\nto the unique weather we get here in Alabama. On Tuesday, the high
\nwas 61 degrees and we got 1.69 inches of rain. By Wednesday morning
\nthe rain was long gone, but the temperature dropped significantly
\nall the way below freezing. This led to a winter weather advisory
\nfor icy roads and bridges. I thought that that might be a problem
\nfor me on my bike, but at 5:30 in the morning I wasn’t about to
\ngive up before I even got started!\n<\/p>\n

\nThe temperature at our house was still 33 degrees, so that tempered
\nsome of my concern as I left our house and rode down the very wet
\nhill outside of our house. Then I made it through the rest of
\nour neighborhood which also had very wet streets, but no ice! I
\nwas running late so I decided to take the main highway, Us 280<\/a>,
\nout of town all the way to Vincent — much farther than I had
\noriginally intended.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe temperature reading on my new bike computer made it down to
\n30 and my feet were very cold by the time I made it to Vincent.
\nI noticed frost on the ground and ice in the puddles alongside
\nthe highway. I also notice a couple bridges with a little bit
\nof ice on the shoulders — but no ice in the road! In Vincent, I
\nwas able to pick up my intended route<\/a>
\n on the next leg of my journey. I made it past Lake Logan Martin,
\nwhich was filled with sea gulls near the dam. Then when I was trying
\nto navigate through St. Clair county, I realized that I was having
\nto stop too often to pull out my map. I decided to go ahead and
\ntake the short route directly to Talladega. I’m glad I did because
\nthis route took me through the Sleeping Giants – a pair of mountains
\nseparated by a road that goes right between them.\n<\/p>\n

\nI flew through Talladega with a tremendous tailwind on the
\nlast leg<\/a>
\nof my bike ride. This was good because I knew by this point that I
\nwasn’t going to make it to the state park before 10AM when the conference was
\nsupposed to start, and I knew that once I started climbing up to
\nthe mountain, my pace would slow way down. I finally made it
\nup to the top and up to the lodge where I saw a large group of Samford
\nfaculty members getting ready to enter the lodge. My first though
\nwas that I had missed the entire first session! It turns out, however,
\nthat they were just getting there, too. They had run into numerous
\naccidents because of ice on the interstate. So I wasn’t late
\nafter all!<\/p>\n

\nThat was the funny story. Now for the pictures!\n<\/p>\n

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\nRight before getting to the top of the climb, I saw the remnants of a light
\ndusting of snow. The next morning before the sunrise I came across
\na deer that leaped across the road in front of me. He\/she stopped a little
\nways into the woods. Can you find it in the center of this picture?\n<\/p>\n

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\nOn Thursday morning, I got up early to go for a bike ride. When I realized it was
\ngoing to be a beautiful sunrise, I headed for the tower at the highest point of
\nthe mountain so I could get some pictures. Here are the two best pictures I got
\n(one from the tower and one from the base of the tower). Also you can watch video by clicking one of the links below.\n<\/p>\n

\nDownload<\/a> mpg (4.15 MB) |
\nStream<\/a> real (6.70 MB)\n<\/p>\n


\n<\/p>\n


\n<\/center><\/p>\n

\nFinally, these are the two best pictures I have of the mountain. I took
\nthe one on top first looking down the mountain towards a lake
\nthat is also part of the park. You can see the road that goes
\nright up to the lake. The next picture (the one on the bottom)
\nis taken standing beside the lake looking back up at the restaurant
\nfrom where I took the first picture. The thing that I LOVE about
\nthe second picture is that you can’t see the clouds and sky
\nabove the mountain because of the sunrise coming up on the other
\nside, BUT you can see the clouds and the sky in the reflection
\nin the water. I think that’s cool. What do you think?<\/p>\n

\nWell, I think this blog has gone on long enough. I’ll have to
\nblog about my ironman training later!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here amidst a flurry of blogging, I’d like to talk about the wonderful trip I had to Mt. Cheaha on Wednesday and Thursday of this week. Samford hosted an orientation conference for new faculty at Bald Rock Lodge located on top of Mt. Cheaha, Alabama’s highest point at 2407 feet. I took these two pictures […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkzLf-2v","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toonesalive.com\/blog\/family\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}