Eye in the Sky

It was one of my Fridays off, and my husband and I decided to have a nice lunch out, followed by a hike in the outdoors. So we went to Couch's in McAlevy's Fort, and we each had a hot roast beef sandwich, curly fries and gravy, a roll, and a double cole slaw.

My husband doesn't actually eat cole slaw; the ones he got were for me. Yes, I took quite a bit of it home (in perfectly sized containers I'd brought along myself, of course - you know how I am about containers). :-)

And then we went over to Greenwood Furnace State Park and parked by the Blacksmith Shop. From there, we walked all around and saw our favorite parts of the park: the swimming area (not open yet, but in a few weeks, it will be), the spillway, the little cemetery, the furnace stacks.

I've posted a few blips about Greenwood Furnace, and I'll share some of those links. It is a park we used to swim at many years ago, and then somehow we just quit going there. I don't even think there was a reason why. But in August of 2014, we returned to the park for our first swim there in probably 20 years. We've been going back regularly ever since. Go figure!

Our favorite activity at the park is actually probably swimming, especially in the high heat of summer. The park boasts some of the coldest water I've ever swum in. Fortunately, I adore a good cold swim. It calms and soothes me. So most of my prior pictures are of the swimming area (prior blips: PA beach scene; summer fun; and Greenwood Furnace).

On this day, we enjoyed the sights and smells of many spring wildflowers. We walked over to the two furnace stacks, and they were looking great. I've shown you Stack No. 2 before; in fact, it was the location of one of my blippiversary dates, and that shot got a lot of views. In it, I talked about the furnaces themselves. According to the park website:

"A walk through historic Greenwood Furnace evokes images of the community that flourished here from 1834 to 1904. Greenwood Furnace was a busy industrial complex, with all the noise and dirt of a 19th-century ironmaking community. The village throbbed with life:

*The roaring of furnace stacks
*The shouts of the workmen
*The hissing of the steam engine
*The creaking of wagons loaded with charcoal
*The cast house whistle signaling another pour of molten iron

The furnaces were hot (3,000 degrees Fahrenheit) and cast clouds of smoke and cinders into the air, which rained down on grass, people, livestock, and buildings; rendering everything sooty and gray. At night, the fire’s red glow lit the sky, probably allowing residents to walk about without lanterns. Greenwood Furnace was a village built around an inferno."

On this day, though, things were mighty peaceful. There was no roar, no smoke, no red glow, when I walked over to Furnace Stack No. 2 and looked straight up through it into the sky. I was intrigued by the shots I got, which turned out very abstract and strange. A look up into Van Gogh's starry, starry night? Or perhaps just another eye in the sky. . . .

The soundtrack song: the Alan Parsons Project, with Eye in the Sky.