Buster Travels

Hi, it's your pal Buster again. Behind me is the famous Mackinac Bridge, also called the "Mighty Mac."

The Mackinac Bridge connects the lower and upper peninsulas of Michigan, right where Lake Huron and Lake Michigan meet. On the north side of the bridge is St. Ignace on the Upper Peninsula, and on the south end is Mackinaw City.

At 8,614 feet, the Mackinac Bridge is the longest suspension bridge in the western hemisphere (North and South America). That's one and two-thirds of a mile! When it was completed in 1957, the Mackinac Bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the world, but longer ones have been built in other parts of the world since then.

Its towers are 552 feet tall above the water, and 3,800 feet apart. At its maximum rise, the bottom of the bridge is around 200 feet above the water, high enough to allow large container ships to pass underneath.

A suspension bridge is a bridge with overhead cables supported by towers, with a roadway suspended (or hanging) underneath. The curved cable and the suspension cables are in tension (tension is pulling force) and the towers are in compression (pushing force). This combination of forces holds the roadway up. (See the drawing I have attached.)

Suspension bridges can cross longer distances than any other bridge type.

Some early suspension bridges had trouble with stability. (Watch a video of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, if you don't believe me!) But the design of the Mackinac Bridge avoids these problems because of the truss supporting the roadbed, which you can see in my fourth photo.

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Hi, it's Buster Rabbit again, reporting to you from St. Ignace, Michigan, overlooking Lake Huron and Mackinac Island.

Lake Huron is one of the five Great Lakes in North America. It's connected to Lake Michigan just south of here. Lake Huron is the second largest of the Great Lakes by area, and the third largest freshwater lake in the world.

The Great Lakes were formed by melting ice around 14,000 years ago when the glaciers started shrinking at the end of the last Ice Age.

In the second picture you can see Wawatam Lighthouse in St. Ignace. The lighthouse was moved here from elsewhere in Michigan, and has been a working lighthouse since 2006.

Fun fact: Did you know that the five Great Lakes contain more than 20% of the world's freshwater?

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Happy Easter from Hampstead Handknits and Buster Travels !

Today I'm in Peterborough, New Hampshire, standing in front of the Peterborough Diner. Peterborough is known for being the town on which playwright Thornton Wilder based his beloved play, "Our Town."

We had an excellent lunch at the Peterborough Diner. While we were there, we found out that it is one of the few dining cars still in use that was made by the Worcester Lunch Car Company in Worchester, Massachusetts.

A dining car was a self-contained restaurant that included a kitchen, and could easily be located wherever there was demand for good, inexpensive food. Dining cars, or "diners" as they were called, were a uniquely American invention.

Dining cars originally evolved from lunch wagons, which were horse-drawn wagons that could provide inexpensive food for factory workers in the 1800s. Eventually these vehicles were closed in and became eat-in wagons that contained lunch counters and full kitchens. From the outside, they looked like a train car or trolley car. (Trolley cars were pulled by horses in those days.)

You can think of the dining car as the world's first food truck!

In the 1900s, manufacturers like the Worcester Lunch Car Company started producing pre-fabricated dining cars. These were complete restaurants that could easily be installed in a permanent location. Although they were no longer being driven around, dining cars kept their train-like appearance for many years because they were delivered to their destination via the railroad.

The Peterborough Diner was installed in its current location in 1950, which makes the building more than 75 years old. It is known as Worcester Lunch Car No. 827, and is believed to be the first diner made by the company in a green-and-cream color scheme.

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Hi, this is your pal Buster Rabbit, at the Aviation Museum of New Hampshire in Londonderry, NH. The Aviation Museum of NH is a small museum housed in a cool Art Deco-style building that used to be the Manchester Airport's main terminal until 1961. The terminal was built in 1937 by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which provided jobs building infrastructure during the Great Depression.

They have a large number of model planes at the museum, along with a full-size experimental biplane, the cockpit of an Embraer 110, and a cool flight simulator.

I'm posing in front of a turbofan engine, the GE TF34, which was used in the A-10 Thunderbolt II and other aircraft. A turbofan is a type of gas turbine engine that provides thrust for aircraft. (The thrust of the engine pushes the aircraft forward.)

In a turbofan engine, a large fan at the front sucks in a lot of air. Some of the air bypasses the engine and is funneled out the back. The rest of the air is compressed, or squeezed under pressure, by passing it through a series of rotating turbine blades in the compressor. The air speeds up and gets hotter when it is compressed. Then the hot, compressed air is pushed into a combustion chamber, and fuel is injected into the chamber. The fuel is ignited and burns. The exhaust coming out of the combustion chamber creates thrust for the aircraft, and also turns the fan at the front of the engine, which helps the engine suck in more air.

Thrust is actually produced by two different types of gases rushing out the back - the exhaust, plus all the bypass air. In the attached diagram, these are the red and pink gases coming out of the back of the engine.

The TF34 is a high-bypass turbo fan, which means that most of the air sucked in by the fan is bypassed. A high-bypass engine uses less fuel, but it also produces less power than an engine with a lower bypass. High-bypass turbofans are widely used in aircraft today because they are very fuel-efficient and less noisy than some other types of engines.

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Hi, it's your pal, Buster. You may remember that last year my humans and I visited the Alton Bay Seaplane Base and Ice Runway in Alton Bay, New Hampshire.

This year we returned on a sunny Thursday in February. It was cold but really quite pleasant, if you could stay out of the wind. It was a busy day on the runway - we saw several take offs and landings. I'm attaching a couple of videos so you can see what we saw!

Alton Bay Ice Runway and Seaplane Base (B18) [https://www.facebook.com/AltonBaySeaplaneBaseandIceRunway] is an ice runway in the winter, when weather permits, and a base for seaplanes during the summer. It is the only officially recognized ice runway in the US outside of Alaska.

The ice runway is a plowed rectangle that is 100 feet wide by 2,600 feet long. It has a taxi lane and a runway.

Ice needs to be rather thick before you can land on it, which is why they can't always open the ice runway every winter.

The weird thing is that we could see ice fishing cabins on the lake, just beyond the runway. I wonder what the fish think of all this!

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Yikes! These are Japanese Spider Crabs, at the Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, CT.

Japanese spider crabs are the largest arthropods living on earth today. Arthropods are a large group of animals that have external skeletons or shells, segmented bodies, and legs. (Lobsters, crabs, insects, spiders, centipedes and millipedes are all arthropods.)

The biggest arthropod of all time was a 9-foot long millipede called Arthropleura, who lived 300 million years ago. The second biggest was a Eurypterid. (If you've been reading my posts, you may remember that last year I encountered a giant eurypterid at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto!)

Japanese spider crabs are not spiders, but crabs. They have ten legs: 8 legs for walking, plus 2 front claws. Their front claws can extend up to 12 feet across, and they can weigh as much as 44 pounds. (See the attached photo of the specimen from the American Museum of Natural History.) Yowza!

They spend most of their time in deep water, and eat both plants and animals, including algae and shellfish, as well as dead fish and other dead bits that fall to the ocean bottom.

Here's a silly riddle for you: How do crabs call their friends? On their shell phone!

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Hi, Buster Rabbit here. I'm visiting the northern fur seals at the Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, CT.

Northern fur seals are eared seals that are closer to sea lions than to true seals. Like sea lions, they have a flexible hip joint that allows them to rotate their rear flippers forward. This means that when they are are land, they can walk on all four flippers, which allows them to move more quickly.

When they are in the water, they can swivel their flippers backward and swim gracefully using their front flippers. They love to eat fish and squid.

(In contrast, true seals do not have ears you can easily see. They also do not have flexible hips, so their rear flippers always face backward.)

Like their name implies, northern fur seals live in northern waters like the north Pacific Ocean, the Bering Sea between Alaska and Russia, and the Sea of Okhotsk in Russia. The northern fur seals we saw at Mystic Aquarium were rescue animals or were bred in captivity.

Did you know that northern fur seals have toe nails in their back flippers, around half-way down? They can use them to scratch their faces, as you can see in one of the attached photos. The other half of their back flipper is long and very floppy. (It is floppy because it has flexible cartilage inside instead of bones.)

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Hi again from Buster! This is Charlotte, a green sea turtle living at the Mystic Aquarium. Charlotte is actually male, in spite of his name - he was named before they figured out his gender.

Charlotte was injured by a boat, which caused him to have what is called "bubble butt". Air is trapped in the back of his shell, which causes his rear end to float and makes it difficult for him to dive.

In spite of his injuries, Charlotte lives a good life at the aquarium. He is a favorite for visitors. There is even a book that was inspired by his life! ("Bubble Butt! The Challenged Sea Turtle of the Mystic Aquarium")

Green sea turtles normally live in warm tropical waters. They eat sea grasses and algae. In spite of their name, green sea turtles are not typically green but usually have a brown shell. They are called "green" because the fat inside their bodies is colored green, probably because of what they eat.

The Mystic Aquarium’s sea turtle rehabilitation program takes in around 20 to 30 rescued sea turtles a year. Most are released once they are well, but sometimes a turtle like Charlotte cannot return to the sea.

Good news! Although green sea turtles were considered endangered, they were recently taken off of the endangered list because their population has been increasing in recent years.

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Hi, Buster Rabbit here, this time at Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, Connecticut. I'm having fun watching the beluga whales as they swim by in their outdoor habitat.

Beluga whales are white whales with conical (means "like a cone") teeth that live in cold Arctic waters. They can be found near Alaska, Canada, Norway, Greenland and Russia. They eat fish, squid, octopus, shrimp and crabs, which they swallow whole. (Their teeth are good at grabbing things but are no good for chewing.) They are around 12 to 15 feet long.

Beluga whales have a "melon" shaped dome on their heads that they can use to help make different sounds. They are sometimes called the canaries of the sea because of all the different whistles and chirping sounds they can make. We heard them whistling and talking when the trainers were feeding them.

Did you know? Baby beluga whales are usually grey, not white. Scientists think this may help them keep warm - because darker colors absorb more sunlight - and make them harder for predators to see. As the babies get older, they shed the grey skin cells and become white like their parents.

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