After reading my recent post about Echo Valley, my brother Houston decided that further photographic proof was necessary.  As archivist for our family, he had the necessary photographs and sent them to me via email. So, here we go..

Here’s a photo of my standing in front of the Swamp Rabbit Railroad…

…and here’s the infamous shot of Stephen standing on the gallows…

My thanks to Houston for keeping these reminders.

I’ve been interested in these little gizmos for some time now.   The Eye-Fi Explore is an SD card that will automagically upload your photos to your online photo service of choice whenever it comes within range of an open wireless network.  Not only that, it uses some strange alchemy to geotag your photos each time you click the shutter.  It sounded like the perfect photographic tool, but also the promises seemed too good to be true. I was hesitant to make the investment until I saw that Woot.com had one for a dirt-cheap price.  I decided to give it a shot.  I found it both to be about as amazing as I expected, and about as frustrating as I imagined.

The Eye-Fi comes with the SD card (2 GB in my case, but available up to 8 GB) and a USB card reader, as shown above.  The management software comes on the card itself, and automatically launches when the device is first plugged into the computer.  The first thing I discovered is that you must have wireless access to configure the device.  Just being connected to a computer with Internet access isn’t enough.

There are lots of parameters that can be set with the device.  You can choose your photo hosting service (Flickr, in my case) and even set up separate routing for videos, so your photos may go to Flickr, but your videos to YouTube.  You can set the device to connect and upload automatically to any wifi hotspot, or only when it comes within range of specified hotspots.  I always like to edit my photos before they go public, so I set the privacy settings so that I would be the only one to see them on Flickr.  You can also enable/disable geotagging.

The most amazing thing is that this device actually works. I tried it in both my Fuji WP33 and my Nikon S70. It took photos, and when I turned the camera on in the presence of a wireless network, it uploaded the photos to my Flickr account without any interaction from me.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the northern part of Greenville County the Middle Saluda River flows across a long flat valley. Where Highways 276 and 11 come together, and where the Saluda crosses this road, one finds the community of Cleveland, South Carolina. The valley now hosts a post office, convenience store, and a couple of other businesses, but at one time an exciting amusement park occupied this same spot.

It was the late 1960’s and I was seven or eight years old. Dad and Mom loaded five of us (my two oldest siblings were in college) into the Chrysler and we headed toward the Great Smokey Mountains. It was a fantastic trip up through the mountains of North Carolina, with stops at Pisgah National Forest, Maggie Valley, and eventually Gatlinburg, Tennessee. That was the trip that we visited Echo Valley, a Western-styled theme park along the banks of the Saluda River in Cleveland, South Carolina.

During this time Western theme parks were all the rage in North Carolina. There was Ghost Town in the Sky in Maggie Valley, Frontierland in Cherokee, and Tweetsie Railroad in Boone. Most of these featured a Wild West town with regular shoot-outs and the endless conflicts between cowboys and Indians. There were also carnival rides and can-can dancers to round out the bill. Echo Valley followed this same pattern, and was developed to capture some of that Wild West market for Greenville audiences.

The late Melvin Jarrard was postmaster of the Cleveland post office and a local businessman. In his autobiography The Mountaineer of Cleveland, South Carolina, Jarrad describes how Harry Stuart brought the idea of Echo Valley to the area, and how that idea had originated with Ghost Town in the Sky. Read the rest of this entry »

Laura had a Furman function, so I was on my own for dinner. I was in the mood something savory, but also something that would accommodate sore braces. I was on my way home, planning to do something simple, when I spotted Pho 99. Soup, noodles, and soft meat sounded pretty good, so I turned in.

Truth be told, I’d spotted a reference to Pho 99 in the blog A Greenville Life. The review in that blog was really about Pho Noodleville, but the comment was that Pho 99 was better. Having tried Noodleville and two other Vietnamese places in town,  I decided to give 99 a shot.

Atmosphere

Pho 99  is located on Wade Hampton near Bob Jones University, in a strip mall populated with other Vietnamese businesses.  The place isn’t large, but there are a fair number of tables.  The decor was clean and fairly modern.

There were two young American couples, possible college kids, but there rest of the patrons were Vietnamese. I always take it as a good sign that a particular ethnicity patronizes a restaurant with that food from that country.

Menu

While it doesn’t have a 35 page menu like on of the other Vietnamese places in town, the menu is quite extensive. It can be broken down in to several groups – pho, two types of rice dishes, and a couple of types of of noodles. I don’t pretend to be even slightly familiar with Vietnamese food, so I can’t really comment on the dishes. Prices ranged from $6.50 and up.

Food

Not knowing anything about Vietnamese, I ordered the first pho dish on the menu – “Beef broth with thin sliced raw premium tenderloin.” Yep, you read that right – raw. Don’t worry, though. This isn’t some weird sushi or steak tartar. The broth comes out very hot and the meat cooks as it sits in the broth, very much like Chinese hot pot.

The broth was quite savory. I added a touch of red sauce to spice it up a bit, along with a few bean sprouts. The noodles were light and cooked to perfection. They separated easily, and were no problem to manage. The meat itself was tender, and did, in fact cook through thoroughly in the hot broth.

Service

Service was passable. I was waited on quickly, and the food did come out in a reasonable amount of time. Beyond that, though, the waiter offered no help with the menu, nor did he come back to check on me or offer to refill my water.

Conclusion

All in all it was quite good and quite filling. I must say that the flavors were the best of all of the Vietnamese Pho places I’ve tried in Greenville. The food is relatively inexpensive. Service was a bit lacking, but I’m hoping that the waiter was just having an off night. He seemed to be very attentive to the other patrons. Pho 99 may be one of those places that you just drive past, but it’s worth a try.

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Today I discovered an excellent new online resource.  The South Carolina Digital Library is a collaborative project between several agencies, organizations, and colleges which brings together several digital libraries.  The collections include historical images, documents, audio, and other ephemera.  These items are still housed in their previous locations, but the SC Digital Library brings all of these together in a simple, searchable user interface.  The project is based on the same concept as the American Memory Project from the Library of Congress.

One of my favorite collections is the Historic Images of Greenville.  There’s also a collection of postcards, and the Sanborn Insurance Collection, which includes images of lots of historic schools.

I really like browsing the state map.  Users can select a county, then view all of the items available for that county.  I could easily lose hours looking through the collections.  Very cool, indeed.