Monday, December 18, 2023.  HAPPY HOLIDAYS from the Cloister at Three Creeks! American Holly.  Not one tree in my area seems to have produced berries this year. 'Tis the season.  Holiday fever and last-minute shopping are well underway.  As always, I prefer to 'Opt Outside' so my holiday mission on this day was to document Nature's free holiday ornaments.  What single plant is most associated with this season?  It's gotta be Holly.  I started the day on a mission to find an American Holly female tree sporting her bright red berries.  Fail ..read more

  This is Captain John Smith, one of the founders of Jamestown Colony, and my cousin by marriage (to be specific, he is my children's 5th cousin 13 times removed.  My kids and Captain John Smith actually have 29 common ancestors based on data retrieved from WikiTree on 17 Dec 2023). This is a family history biography of my ancestor John Smith, colonist who left his home country and made a new life in the New World.  But it is NOT about the guy in the engraved illustration above.  And it is not about Jamestown Colony, Virginia.  It's not even about a man named ..read more

  Here is where I hiked yesterday—the Blue Ridge of Virginia.  It's not just about the miles! The distance around our planet Earth - its circumference - is HUGE - 25,000 miles, more or less. The exact distance depends on where you measure it, and for us number geeks, the exact number matters.  It is defined by the current accepted standard, called WGS84 (The World Geodetic System, 1984 version), and it is what your GPS uses to tell you exactly where you are.  These guys measure this stuff down to an accuracy of 2cm—that's less than an inch.  The bottom line i ..read more

  Here I have assembled the basic list of the people whose genes contributed directly to mine.  No siblings or cousins or aunts and uncles are listed here, just my direct ancestors.  Eventually I hope to write family history stories (biographies and historical sketches) of most of these people, perhaps even making an attempt at my own.  Wherever a name appears as a hot link, that is the link to their story.  Please check them out! Without further ado, here we go.  I list them by generation starting with parents and grandparents, who are shown in the imag ..read more

  Screen shot of the Outside Magazine article.   Jenny Hoffman is an over-achiever.  She's both a record setting ultra-marathon runner and an award-winning PhD professor of Physics at Harvard.  She just completed a certified Fastest Known Time transit of the US via the same route that Pete Kostelnick ran in 2016.  Here's a link to the Outside Magazine article covering Pete's record, written by the same author as above (Martin Fritz Huber). Jenny has unwittingly managed to combine two of my core interests—quantum physics and traveling continuous long distances ..read more

  The most bizarre sunrise of my life, complete with sunspot (look in the upper part of the haze band, right of center). My 75th birthday has come and gone.  2023 has been an eventful year.  As I've posted, I published my long-delayed AT memoir in April, and then my long-standing mega-novel in August.  Between those two projects I traveled to New England, where I spent a month and a half hiking, including touching base with the New England National Scenic Trail and extending my personal continuous footpath to the state of Rhode Island (connecting my 27th of t ..read more

Amazon.com: Eden's Womb eBook : Wetzel, P.J.: Kindle Store There are many ways to tell a story. Oral traditions are the oldest and still the best--with the listener an integral part of the experience, and acting as the 'recording device'. Modern story telling has taken full advantage of advances in technology, to the point of Virtual Reality and the interactive experiences of Video games, particularly the role-playing ones where the player participates in creating the story. The leap to the real world, and the stories we tell ourselves and others is not a big one. Think of politicians and ..read more

  Here's another installment in the report of my tour around the North from Svalbard to Alaska's Bering Strait. These two days found me continuing my guided Ring Road tour around Iceland.  The morning of Day 20 found us visiting the town of Höfn first.  It was a clear, calm, misty morning along the east coast.  We stopped at a trail simply called the "Nature Trail" (Iceland has a habit of severely over-simplifying its place names in general - for example the name of the largest glacier on the continent of Europe is simply 'Water Glacier'). The "Nature Trail" followed ..read more

Iceland's major National Park, containing and named for Vatnajökull, the largest Glacier in Europe, is the subject of this video. It's more than just a lot of ice. There is a special south-facing mountainside where I had an almost magical experience walking a lush forest of stunted birch trees. Then there was Glacier Lagoon and Diamond Beach, where remnants of icebergs from the glaciers glisten like jewels on the deep black sand. Everything shown here happened on the same day - the second of six on my Ring Road tour of the country ..read more

Waterfalls are my favorite thing.  Iceland has bunches of them, big, little, intimate and gimongous.  Then there are the places where water goes up.  The video presents highlights of my six-day Ring-Road tour ..read more