Red, orange, and yellow

This is urban art in Front Royal for Silly Saturday. 

I went to Shenandoah today. I don’t think I’ve been this year. This is the weekend that is supposedly corresponding with peak color of the leaves and I knew that meant there might be a lot of people.

When you know there are going to be a lot of tourists you should GET UP and GET OUT. You should GET OUT OF BED. You should make breakfast quickly. You should wash the dishes quickly. You should GET GOING.

By the time I got there the police had closed the road. 
Wait, that seems really familiar…
You could not get into Shenandoah from the Front Royal entrance. You had to go to the Luray entrance, 19 miles away. 

I also did not get going early enough to do the hike I wanted to do but a ranger suggested a different, shorter one. It was all downhill to the waterfall, which means of course that it was all uphill back. It was fun zooming past people on the way back, even with a photography backpack and a big bunch of trash I’d picked up while down there. 

I’m including the extra mainly to justify the little piece of my tripod that I lost while getting the photograph. 

Everyone was happy. There were so many different languages spoken. Parking was insane, including throughout the park. It was wonderful to look at the leaves while someone else drove. Wait. Kate is in Oregon. Who drove?

I saw an electric truck, a Rivian. 

I saw a house that still has giant signs for Trump and Pence and making the country great again.

I saw signs for Hung Cao, running for political office, everywhere on the way to Shenandoah and back. I saw a farm with cows. Then I saw a sign that said farmers support Hung Cao. 

Ok. 

Back several alternate realities ago, I led a team to Uganda. We met with local governments. The second to the Mayor was called a Chief Administration Officer or CAO - pronounced “cow.” We kept arriving at meetings on time ,to everyone’s shock, and several times the mayor would loudly yell, “COW!!!” Not once, not a single time, did we lose it and burst out laughing. 

Putin’s mobilization led to 370,000 citizens leaving. 

A guy who moved to Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, shortly after the war started, began getting frantic calls from his friends trying to get out. He chartered a plane and concocted a story about a conference people had to attend. The owners of the aircraft wanted $100,000 upfront. He pulled money from every source he could, including his own. When the owners were getting too nervous, he sent someone to the company with stacks of cash stuffed into a black backpack. He called the plane “Ark,” a reference to the biblical rescue. Fifty men and women made it through border control. Then Ilya Flaks did it again the next day. Now he is providing a place to stay in what was a co-working space he’d created but has converted to empty apartments. Most of them work in IT, so they can leave with a backpack. Russia has lost software engineers, bankers, and scientists. They are starting brand new businesses. 

In Georgia, there used to be 3,800 new companies registered each month. In March, it was 9,000, and it has averaged over 7,000 each month since. Foreign direct investment has dramatically increased. 

On the other side, Ukrainians are returning home by the millions, motivated by family, poverty, and guilt. They are primarily women reuniting with husbands or parents.