Rob had brought one of his Cutco knives with him to have it repaired. I tagged along when Mark brought him to their headquarters, located in...ta da; Olean. Mark and I checked out the years of history displayed on the walls while Rob settled up his business with the sales lady. The most interesting part of the company's history (in my opinion) was the legend of old knives, prototypes, discards, mock-ups, etc. having been dumped and buried behind the original building (not located where they currently are). Eventually (decades later), the current owners agreed to dig around and see if they could find any of these alleged knives. Sure enough; there were tons of them - they'd been used as filler underneath some concrete sidewalks that had been poured on the grounds.
On our way out, I spotted an Olean squirrel which I hadn't previously known was there, so I felt obliged to snap a pic (to go with the other Olean squirrel pics I've posted over the years).
From there, Mark took us down a side street to a specialty wood company that he likes to deal with. Rob, being a wood craftsman as a profession, was in his glory. The guys that worked here were awesome - as soon as we walked in, one of them asked us if we needed any help. When Mark explained he was just bringing us by to check out the amazing types of wood they had, he droped what he was doing and gave us the grand tour.
For some reason, my camera didn't take very good pictures of these. Trust me when I say that the colors in these boards was 100 times brighter and more vibrant than these pics appear.
Some very cool grain in these boards!
I don't even know how this kind of grain gets created...
Even these were brighter than they look in the pic. I'd never seen such bright colored wood, and it's all natural. No man made dyes or coloring going on here.
Here's an example of some of the exotic names of the woods that were here. Apparently they search the entire globe for high quality and interesting trees which they can then have milled into boards.
And speaking of milling - these boards were 4+ feet wide, by 15+ feet long. Amazing stuff, and the grain on these was just as incredible as on anything else we'd seen so far.
This was the last stop for the day, as it was their closing time. This stump had been flown in from some far-away swamp (I forget where, exactly). All it needed was to be leveled out and then have a nice piece of glass installed on the top (technically; the bottom, as this is upside down) and you'd have a stellar table. The guy at the shop said they'd probably wind up selling the stump as-is for 2 grand. Rob gave that some serious contemplation, and I think if he had 2 grand to play with, he would have taken it off their hands, worked some magic on it, and sold it for a great profit.
Ok, moving on from the wood...
I forget which meal it was (Mark and Mary do such a great job of feeding us that sometimes it's hard to keep the breakfasts separate from the lunches...and separate from the dinners.
But at any rate, one of their windows has a whole slew of prisms hanging in front of it, and the sunlight was passing through them and casting rainbows all about the room. Natalie thought it was great fun to point out any rainbows that were bieng projected on us and saying "You have a rainbow on you!!!", and then we'd wriggle and squirm to position ourselves so as to not have any rainbows on us. She thought it was great fun - even when I took a pic of her to prove that she had some on herself.
Well, we certainly can't have folks thinking that we're abusing our entertainment, so here's a follow-up pic showing that she indeed has no shiner.
There you go; just a few of the fun things we did while out in Olean.
Next up; Saturday's daytime run to the Kinzua Railroad Bridge, the annual waterfight with Alyssa, and the pig roast at the VFW on Saturday night...
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