Short Version:
We leave.
Long Version:
We drove 31,455 kilometers, through two provinces of Canada, two states of Mexico, and nine states of Amerika. We met incredible numbers of incredible people and rode our bikes so far that we lost count of the miles; through rain and snow and hail and wind and sun, in forests and deserts, across mountains and plains, on rock and wood and dirt and mud and sand and snow. We saw canyons and weird rock formations, old mines, new cities, spiky plants. We drank beers tasty and not-so-much (but mainly tasty), and ate some seriously delicious foods.
In short, we've had a blast.
But it's cold now, in the wintery north, and the sun is shining on the beaches of Waiheke Island and Mount Maunganui, so - as Rancho Notorious once sang - we're heading south.
The Reaper is gone, driven away to its new home by the first people to come look at it. They looked, they listened to it and to us, they admired the graceful lines and subtle paintjob, the (freshly scrubbed and de-stained) tan velour upholstery, and they handed Nene a big wad of hundred-dollar bills before setting off into the gloom of yet another rainy winter's day in Vancouver. We didn't go so far as to shed little tears, but it was kind of weird and sad to watch someone else drive away in what had been our home for seven months and through uncounted adventures.
The bikes have been stripped and cleaned (with my sister's toothbrush - Hi Steph!) and bubble-wrapped for their long trans-Pacific journey. We couldn't bubble-wrap ourselves for it, though, and now find ourselves sitting in a flying tube, high above the ocean. Well, hopefully we're high above it; one of the cabin crew asked if we had cycle helmets because we didn't trust their driving (most of them were too bemused at the sight of the raccoon and moose headgear coming down the skybridge towards them to say anything much at all).
They've been feeding us Business Class wine despite our cattle-classness, which is very nice. Not sure if that's because of the raccoon/moose parade, or because we've told every Air NZ staffer who'll listen that it's our wedding anniversary. Either way, yum, and we wouldn't want to hit Auckland at 6am on a Tuesday without a hangover, would we?
Thursday, December 16, 2010
The High Cost of Living
Short Version:
Houses aren't cheap, especially if you have Chinese neighbours
Long Version:
We plan to return to Vancouver pretty soon; it's a really neat city. There's shitty stuff that goes on, for sure - in a metropolitan area where over 4 million people live there are bound to be some ratbags - but it seems to keep itself confined largely to areas we wouldn't want to go anyway (ie Surrey) and/or to those involved in the (apparently very lucrative) drug trade. That's not to say that all of the laws are obeyed all of the time by all of the people, even in the nicer parts of the city - we heard a tale the other day of a street race and a confiscated car and an unimpressed father; apparently Dad was none-too-impressed that his CAD$200,000 Lamborghini had been taken away from his miscreant son. That's permanent confiscation too, none of the pussy thirty-days crap that NZ feebly imposes.
One of the biggest drawbacks Vancouver has, apart from the massive amount of precipitation it gets, is how unaffordable its housing market is; on average, for homeowners in the Greater Vancouver area, 68% of total household income goes towards servicing the mortgage. That's a lot. The cost of housing is so high that first-home buyers are virtually unheard-of anywhere near the city proper, despite the preponderance of one-bedroom and studio apartments; those start around the CAD$300,000 mark. And you probably wouldn't want to live in one from the lower end of that scale. There are, of course, a bunch of factors influencing price, including the recently-researched impact on sale price of the property's street number; this, we're told, can raise or lower the sale price of a property by as much as 2.5%, which is not very much if you're shopping at one of the thrift stores we frequented (and which tended to throw 40-50% reduction sales on a weekly, if not daily basis), but can amount to a significant amount when you're speaking of a CAD$500,000* apartment**. And that's the average amount, so you have to figure that some people out there are paying vast amounts for some particularly auspiciously-numerated house.
The price inflation is higher in neighbourhoods which are heavily populated by ethnic Chinese, and according to wikipedia, Chinese lucky numbers are 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 (ie most of them), with 8 the special favorite. On the downside of the ledger, unlucky numbers are 4, 5, 6, and 7 (ie half of the lucky ones, plus four***). Four is the big nasty of the bunch - it's the anti-eight, akin to 13 in Western societies. so, if you're looking to purchase a property for its resale value, and you believe for some reason that the Sinofication of the area is shaping to increase, nab an 8 property (or an 88, or an 888) but steer clear of 4, or 44.
Also beware of 167, 169, and 1679, which are dirty jokes; 250, which means imbecile; 5354, which often refers to something that is half dead or on the verge of death; 7456, which is "pissing me off"; and 9413, which can be interpreted as inferring "nine die to one live meaning 90% chance of being dead and only 10% chance of being alive, or survived from such situations (a narrow escape)."
Apparently these numbers are used by some Sinophile interwebsters as shorthand statements, so the next time someone responds to your brilliance with "Nice call, Mr 250," or simply says "1679" at you, be offended.
* = For the mathematically-challenged, 2.5% of 500,000 is 12,500. That's a lot of beer tokens.
** = It's a condominium (a "condo" if you're young and hip, or trying to be) if the occupant is the owner.
*** = No known numerologically-evil association with the golfing pants known as plus-fours, which are breeches or trousers that extend 4 inches (10 cm) below the knee (and thus are four inches longer than traditional knickerbockers, hence the name); they're awful of their own accord.
Houses aren't cheap, especially if you have Chinese neighbours
Long Version:
We plan to return to Vancouver pretty soon; it's a really neat city. There's shitty stuff that goes on, for sure - in a metropolitan area where over 4 million people live there are bound to be some ratbags - but it seems to keep itself confined largely to areas we wouldn't want to go anyway (ie Surrey) and/or to those involved in the (apparently very lucrative) drug trade. That's not to say that all of the laws are obeyed all of the time by all of the people, even in the nicer parts of the city - we heard a tale the other day of a street race and a confiscated car and an unimpressed father; apparently Dad was none-too-impressed that his CAD$200,000 Lamborghini had been taken away from his miscreant son. That's permanent confiscation too, none of the pussy thirty-days crap that NZ feebly imposes.
One of the biggest drawbacks Vancouver has, apart from the massive amount of precipitation it gets, is how unaffordable its housing market is; on average, for homeowners in the Greater Vancouver area, 68% of total household income goes towards servicing the mortgage. That's a lot. The cost of housing is so high that first-home buyers are virtually unheard-of anywhere near the city proper, despite the preponderance of one-bedroom and studio apartments; those start around the CAD$300,000 mark. And you probably wouldn't want to live in one from the lower end of that scale. There are, of course, a bunch of factors influencing price, including the recently-researched impact on sale price of the property's street number; this, we're told, can raise or lower the sale price of a property by as much as 2.5%, which is not very much if you're shopping at one of the thrift stores we frequented (and which tended to throw 40-50% reduction sales on a weekly, if not daily basis), but can amount to a significant amount when you're speaking of a CAD$500,000* apartment**. And that's the average amount, so you have to figure that some people out there are paying vast amounts for some particularly auspiciously-numerated house.
The price inflation is higher in neighbourhoods which are heavily populated by ethnic Chinese, and according to wikipedia, Chinese lucky numbers are 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 (ie most of them), with 8 the special favorite. On the downside of the ledger, unlucky numbers are 4, 5, 6, and 7 (ie half of the lucky ones, plus four***). Four is the big nasty of the bunch - it's the anti-eight, akin to 13 in Western societies. so, if you're looking to purchase a property for its resale value, and you believe for some reason that the Sinofication of the area is shaping to increase, nab an 8 property (or an 88, or an 888) but steer clear of 4, or 44.
Also beware of 167, 169, and 1679, which are dirty jokes; 250, which means imbecile; 5354, which often refers to something that is half dead or on the verge of death; 7456, which is "pissing me off"; and 9413, which can be interpreted as inferring "nine die to one live meaning 90% chance of being dead and only 10% chance of being alive, or survived from such situations (a narrow escape)."
Apparently these numbers are used by some Sinophile interwebsters as shorthand statements, so the next time someone responds to your brilliance with "Nice call, Mr 250," or simply says "1679" at you, be offended.
* = For the mathematically-challenged, 2.5% of 500,000 is 12,500. That's a lot of beer tokens.
** = It's a condominium (a "condo" if you're young and hip, or trying to be) if the occupant is the owner.
*** = No known numerologically-evil association with the golfing pants known as plus-fours, which are breeches or trousers that extend 4 inches (10 cm) below the knee (and thus are four inches longer than traditional knickerbockers, hence the name); they're awful of their own accord.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Prairie Girls Are Wild!
Short Version:
Home comforts and the Chinese have a physical effect, orange, wearing watermelons
Long Version:
We're getting fat. Or, more accurately, I'm getting fat. Fatter. Whatever. Nene's still lovely, of course.
We arrived back in Vancouver fighting fit but slightly gaunt; seven and a half months living in a van and riding nearly every day will do that to you. Since we've been back, though, the proximity of a refigerator full of food has proved dangerous, and the various charms of a warm house with comfy chairs, giant televisions, and access to the interwebs without having to purchase a shitty coffee have added up to not going out into the cold rain all that often. We have been running - Nene according to her marathon training programme; me randomly and with lots of falling over on snow and ice - but not nearly enough to counter the vast calorific intake. Especially not when eggnog - which is essentially liquid lipid - can be purchased from the supermarket, handily-packaged in a recyclable cardboard carton.
We do have the option to claim victim status though: apparently my rapid expansion is probably a result of climate change: scientists* have discovered the existence of a hitherto-undiagnosed global-warming-derived obesity epidemic**. Apparently the ever-increasing amount of pollution in the atmosphere - largely due, we're told, to coal-fired power stations in China - is to blame for the fattening of rats, mice, and lab primates. And, by logical extension, me.
To the tune of five new kilograms in two weeks.
Nothing to do with the non-stop eating and drinking, of course, and nothing at all to do with peanut butter confectionery, which is really really good. Over here it's BIG business, too; Hershey Corp (which makes top peanut-butter/chocolate line Reese's Pieces) is battling Mars Inc in the courts for trademark infringement because the latter chose to package their competing peanut-butter/chocolate product in Reese's-style orange packaging.
Also bedecked in orange are the Oregon State University Beavers, which makes them the Oregon College team I'm cheering for***. There's an orange-clad team in the Canadian Football League too - the BC Lions - but if you ignore the humour value of Head Coach Wally Buono's name they're kind of crap; much more fun are the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Quite apart from the fact that they're named after a ribbed condom, their fans are famed for carving gameday headgear from watermelons, often adding moose antlers viking-style to the sides or Mohican hair-strips to the top. Fruiterers import vast quantities of the bulbous, tapered seedy-fleshed goodness capsules ahead of each home game, and up the numbers significantly when the game is a big one (like the recent Grey Cup final, which the Roughtriders lost, for the second year in a row, to the dirty pseudo-Frenchies from Montreal).
The only other things we know about Saskatchewan are that "Prairie girls are wild," and that they refer to gin as "Panty-remover." Both these things we learned from my cousin. At our wedding.
* = We heart scientists!
** = Coexisting happily with the fast-food-and-TV-engendered one we already knew about
*** = Crush the filthy OU Ducks!
Home comforts and the Chinese have a physical effect, orange, wearing watermelons
Long Version:
We're getting fat. Or, more accurately, I'm getting fat. Fatter. Whatever. Nene's still lovely, of course.
We arrived back in Vancouver fighting fit but slightly gaunt; seven and a half months living in a van and riding nearly every day will do that to you. Since we've been back, though, the proximity of a refigerator full of food has proved dangerous, and the various charms of a warm house with comfy chairs, giant televisions, and access to the interwebs without having to purchase a shitty coffee have added up to not going out into the cold rain all that often. We have been running - Nene according to her marathon training programme; me randomly and with lots of falling over on snow and ice - but not nearly enough to counter the vast calorific intake. Especially not when eggnog - which is essentially liquid lipid - can be purchased from the supermarket, handily-packaged in a recyclable cardboard carton.
We do have the option to claim victim status though: apparently my rapid expansion is probably a result of climate change: scientists* have discovered the existence of a hitherto-undiagnosed global-warming-derived obesity epidemic**. Apparently the ever-increasing amount of pollution in the atmosphere - largely due, we're told, to coal-fired power stations in China - is to blame for the fattening of rats, mice, and lab primates. And, by logical extension, me.
To the tune of five new kilograms in two weeks.
Nothing to do with the non-stop eating and drinking, of course, and nothing at all to do with peanut butter confectionery, which is really really good. Over here it's BIG business, too; Hershey Corp (which makes top peanut-butter/chocolate line Reese's Pieces) is battling Mars Inc in the courts for trademark infringement because the latter chose to package their competing peanut-butter/chocolate product in Reese's-style orange packaging.
Also bedecked in orange are the Oregon State University Beavers, which makes them the Oregon College team I'm cheering for***. There's an orange-clad team in the Canadian Football League too - the BC Lions - but if you ignore the humour value of Head Coach Wally Buono's name they're kind of crap; much more fun are the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Quite apart from the fact that they're named after a ribbed condom, their fans are famed for carving gameday headgear from watermelons, often adding moose antlers viking-style to the sides or Mohican hair-strips to the top. Fruiterers import vast quantities of the bulbous, tapered seedy-fleshed goodness capsules ahead of each home game, and up the numbers significantly when the game is a big one (like the recent Grey Cup final, which the Roughtriders lost, for the second year in a row, to the dirty pseudo-Frenchies from Montreal).
The only other things we know about Saskatchewan are that "Prairie girls are wild," and that they refer to gin as "Panty-remover." Both these things we learned from my cousin. At our wedding.
* = We heart scientists!
** = Coexisting happily with the fast-food-and-TV-engendered one we already knew about
*** = Crush the filthy OU Ducks!
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Dog Mountain
Short Version:
Music, snow, movies, popcorn.
Long Version:
The charity single "2 Minutes of Silence" has cracked Britain's Top20 chart. Given the tripe that constitutes the UK's so-called "music" scene post-1984, it's not really surprising - it's almost certainly far more listenable than anything else out there.
We found some silence of our own, pausing en route from one mountain to another across a snowy hillside. A sunny Saturday was drawing to a close, and we'd driven up Mount Seymour to the Sno-Park, where we'd lucked into a parking space right at the top end of the top parking lot. From there we wandered in past the user-pays lift-enabled trail system to the back-country snowshoe trails, strapped on our borrowed snowshoes (Janine had to help me do mine up) and set off, following the channel which had been pressed into the deep powder by other ambulators.
Walking in snowshoes is an art, and we were kind of at the crayon scribble stage to start with: I fell all the way over a couple of times and even Nene had snow caking the back of her legs where the tails of her snowshoes had flicked it up. The longer we walked the better we got, though, and by the time we'd powered past First Lake and out onto the high spur that is Dog Mountain we were getting pretty good; sliding down chutes in a more-or-less controlled manner and hiking up steep grades without slipping backwards. Much. We even had a crack at running. The snow-covered trees were spectacular in the last, golden sunlight, and we had fantastic views from Dog Mountain: West out over Horseshoe Bay, the Strait, and the Island; East towards seemingly endless chains of snow-covered mountains and towering peaks; and South past Vancouver into Amerika, where glimpses of Cascades volcanoes reminded us of Mounts Hood, and St Helens, and of all of the Black Buttes.
Then we went home and ate delicious foods before hitting the town, to the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour, which was playing at North Vancouver's Centennial Theatre. We'd caught the festival on its Auckland stop a few years back and thoroughly enjoyed it; this time around the films were less impressive, and the highlight was - somewhat surprisingly - a half-hour semi-doco about fly-fishing in Russia's remote Kamchatka region. All eight of the films that played had some great bits, but most - and particularly the foreshortened festival edits - lacked flow. Suspicion is that they'd been butchered in the edit suite. Still, watching people climb up then snowboard down sheer snow walls hundreds of metres high was pretty impressive, as were some of the rapids and waterfalls negotiated by the kayakers. Unfortunately, the mountain-biking film suffered more than most at the hands of the brevity-mandated editors, and we were left feeling more like we'd just seen some wonderful cinematography rather than an awesome mountain-biking flick. Parks Canada had an informational stand, though, and they gave us some microwave popcorn which we cooked and ate when we got home, which was kind of neat, and very definitely not something we could have done in the Reaper!
Music, snow, movies, popcorn.
Long Version:
The charity single "2 Minutes of Silence" has cracked Britain's Top20 chart. Given the tripe that constitutes the UK's so-called "music" scene post-1984, it's not really surprising - it's almost certainly far more listenable than anything else out there.
We found some silence of our own, pausing en route from one mountain to another across a snowy hillside. A sunny Saturday was drawing to a close, and we'd driven up Mount Seymour to the Sno-Park, where we'd lucked into a parking space right at the top end of the top parking lot. From there we wandered in past the user-pays lift-enabled trail system to the back-country snowshoe trails, strapped on our borrowed snowshoes (Janine had to help me do mine up) and set off, following the channel which had been pressed into the deep powder by other ambulators.
Walking in snowshoes is an art, and we were kind of at the crayon scribble stage to start with: I fell all the way over a couple of times and even Nene had snow caking the back of her legs where the tails of her snowshoes had flicked it up. The longer we walked the better we got, though, and by the time we'd powered past First Lake and out onto the high spur that is Dog Mountain we were getting pretty good; sliding down chutes in a more-or-less controlled manner and hiking up steep grades without slipping backwards. Much. We even had a crack at running. The snow-covered trees were spectacular in the last, golden sunlight, and we had fantastic views from Dog Mountain: West out over Horseshoe Bay, the Strait, and the Island; East towards seemingly endless chains of snow-covered mountains and towering peaks; and South past Vancouver into Amerika, where glimpses of Cascades volcanoes reminded us of Mounts Hood, and St Helens, and of all of the Black Buttes.
Then we went home and ate delicious foods before hitting the town, to the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour, which was playing at North Vancouver's Centennial Theatre. We'd caught the festival on its Auckland stop a few years back and thoroughly enjoyed it; this time around the films were less impressive, and the highlight was - somewhat surprisingly - a half-hour semi-doco about fly-fishing in Russia's remote Kamchatka region. All eight of the films that played had some great bits, but most - and particularly the foreshortened festival edits - lacked flow. Suspicion is that they'd been butchered in the edit suite. Still, watching people climb up then snowboard down sheer snow walls hundreds of metres high was pretty impressive, as were some of the rapids and waterfalls negotiated by the kayakers. Unfortunately, the mountain-biking film suffered more than most at the hands of the brevity-mandated editors, and we were left feeling more like we'd just seen some wonderful cinematography rather than an awesome mountain-biking flick. Parks Canada had an informational stand, though, and they gave us some microwave popcorn which we cooked and ate when we got home, which was kind of neat, and very definitely not something we could have done in the Reaper!
Wives!
Short Version:
Toes. Wives.
Long Version:
While we've been wandering through ramshackle ex-factories perusing artists' studios, buttering up little old ladies at craft fairs, and spending hour after hour exploring the forested foothills of the North Vancouver mountains with the increasingly disobedient pooches, Canada's been popping up in the NZ news, and for some slightly odd reasons:
- Sour Toe Cocktails.
A glass of whisky, into which a severed human toe is plopped. You pays your money, you drinks your whisky - ensuring that the wrinkled, brownish toe touches your lips - and you is a member of the club. Nice one!
- Polygamy.
Canada, and particularly British Columbia, are investigating whether the ban on polygamous relationships contravenes the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is the equivalent of the Amerikan Constitution, only without the hype. In short, they're questioning whether polygamy should be allowed, and the scaremongers are already ranting about the inevitable influx of fringe religious groups should the 120-year-old prohibition be overturned. Having spent a bunch of time in Utah, and drunk a lot of Wasatch Breweries' Polygamy Porter (You can't have just one!"), this one piqued our interest.
The definitions of what constitutes an illicit multiple-partner relationship which have emanated from various lawyers and law-makers since the hearings began have been confused, confusing, and contradictory, and the issue which we initially thought was so laughable has proved to have some depth to it: leaving aside personal prejudice against extremist Mormons and other religious personages, why is polygamy so frowned-upon? In this day and age, where Civil Unions between homo couples is deemed perfectly acceptable, why is it considered reasonable to limit the number of participants in that union to two? Or does the prohibition apply only to hetero couples, and then only when the gender mix is one-to-many man-to-women? Are provisos around underage brides sufficient, or is a brainwashed wife an inappropriate wife regardless of her age?
Far as I'm concerned, if you need more than one wife, you married the wrong woman.
Toes. Wives.
Long Version:
While we've been wandering through ramshackle ex-factories perusing artists' studios, buttering up little old ladies at craft fairs, and spending hour after hour exploring the forested foothills of the North Vancouver mountains with the increasingly disobedient pooches, Canada's been popping up in the NZ news, and for some slightly odd reasons:
- Sour Toe Cocktails.
A glass of whisky, into which a severed human toe is plopped. You pays your money, you drinks your whisky - ensuring that the wrinkled, brownish toe touches your lips - and you is a member of the club. Nice one!
- Polygamy.
Canada, and particularly British Columbia, are investigating whether the ban on polygamous relationships contravenes the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is the equivalent of the Amerikan Constitution, only without the hype. In short, they're questioning whether polygamy should be allowed, and the scaremongers are already ranting about the inevitable influx of fringe religious groups should the 120-year-old prohibition be overturned. Having spent a bunch of time in Utah, and drunk a lot of Wasatch Breweries' Polygamy Porter (You can't have just one!"), this one piqued our interest.
The definitions of what constitutes an illicit multiple-partner relationship which have emanated from various lawyers and law-makers since the hearings began have been confused, confusing, and contradictory, and the issue which we initially thought was so laughable has proved to have some depth to it: leaving aside personal prejudice against extremist Mormons and other religious personages, why is polygamy so frowned-upon? In this day and age, where Civil Unions between homo couples is deemed perfectly acceptable, why is it considered reasonable to limit the number of participants in that union to two? Or does the prohibition apply only to hetero couples, and then only when the gender mix is one-to-many man-to-women? Are provisos around underage brides sufficient, or is a brainwashed wife an inappropriate wife regardless of her age?
Far as I'm concerned, if you need more than one wife, you married the wrong woman.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Enviropig, SuperSalmon, Bionic Woman
Short Version:
Genetically-modified pork products are headed your way! Backhanders for healthcare professionals. A bad pun.
Long Version:
Neither the AquaBounty AquAdvantage salmon, which grows twice as fast as its unmodified counterparts, nor the Guelph Enviropig, which thanks to the E. Coli bacteria (famous for living in swimming pools) has a vastly more efficient digestive system (ie poops and farts less) than its ancestors have been approved for commercial release in Canadian markets - no genetically modified animal has, yet. But there are indications that it's probably not far off, and the race is on to see which of these transgenic critters will be the first to gain approval from Amerika's Food and Drug Administration, which is not only the key to the blockbusting US market, but also to the lesser but more red-taped Canadian environment; the markets are so tightly-integrated that an approval from the (multitudinous) Canadian authorities would essentially mean the Amerikans following suit, turning a blind eye, or banning Canadian piggy/salmonish products entirely. The first two aren't going to happen, and the third would be disastrous for Canada's economy, so that's out too, which leaves Amerika going first.
Apparently the Amerikan FDA approvals processes for both species are halfway complete, which is stark contrast - maybe - to how things stand north of the border, where the Canadian government decided to go around the difficulties involved with regulating the burgeoning new industry by shoe-horning transgenic animals into the existing regulatory systems as a new type of veterinary medicine. Both critters have received conditional approval from one of the three Canadian regulatory bodies involved in the certification process, but neither of their backers have heard anything from the other two.
Still, it sounds very much like both these critters are likely to be signed off as fit for Amerikan (and subsequently, no doubt, for Canadian, and therefore probably NZ - did I mention that Canada's where NZ gets most of its imported pork products?) consumption in the relatively near future, which should enrage some people so much that they join a facebook group in protest.
Speaking of protests, when we were in Amerika much was being made of the near-universal antipathy towards ObamaCare, the much maligned universal medical insurance scheme introduced by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning 44th President of Amerika. (Theoretically, his Peace Prize was awarded on the strength of "...his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." Arse; bunch thereof.) Giving credit where it's due, though; in tackling Amerika's healthcare industry he certainly wasn't shying away from the big jobs - it's a bloody mess.
In contrast, Canadians have long held dear the belief that their public health system is a wonderful thing; that it provides an umbrella of care for all Canadians, no matter how full their pocketbooks. Recently, evidence has come to light to suggest that this may not necessarily be true, at least not all of the time in all parts of this sprawling country. Admittedly, most of the stories of medico-fiscal malfeasance which have been trumpeted about the place of late involve Quebec, which is that crappy bit in the middle of Canada where they wish they were French, and which has long been renowned as a hotbed of corruption at all levels of the public sector, so it may well be that the one (very) bad apple province is tainting the reputations of all the others. Still, any time you have people stating outright and on the record that the going rate to have your doctor bother to turn up for the birth of your child is somewhere between two- and ten-thousand dollars, you know your medical system has a problem. Similarly, the tales of envelopes stuffed with large-denomination bills being stuffed under pillows for the anaesthetist to find are mildly horrific. Especially when your step-mother's just had a knee replaced, and has spent several days post-op throwing up near-constantly after receiving some bizarre anaesthetic concoction that contra-indicates her prominently-displayed allergy status.
Fat envelope under the pillow? No.
Several days of narcotized misery? Yes.
Coincidence? Probably.
Still, the new knee seems to be at least as good as the old one, and that's even before the surgical slice and dice has had a chance to heal up. Friends are already planning a knees-up to celebrate.
Genetically-modified pork products are headed your way! Backhanders for healthcare professionals. A bad pun.
Long Version:
Neither the AquaBounty AquAdvantage salmon, which grows twice as fast as its unmodified counterparts, nor the Guelph Enviropig, which thanks to the E. Coli bacteria (famous for living in swimming pools) has a vastly more efficient digestive system (ie poops and farts less) than its ancestors have been approved for commercial release in Canadian markets - no genetically modified animal has, yet. But there are indications that it's probably not far off, and the race is on to see which of these transgenic critters will be the first to gain approval from Amerika's Food and Drug Administration, which is not only the key to the blockbusting US market, but also to the lesser but more red-taped Canadian environment; the markets are so tightly-integrated that an approval from the (multitudinous) Canadian authorities would essentially mean the Amerikans following suit, turning a blind eye, or banning Canadian piggy/salmonish products entirely. The first two aren't going to happen, and the third would be disastrous for Canada's economy, so that's out too, which leaves Amerika going first.
Apparently the Amerikan FDA approvals processes for both species are halfway complete, which is stark contrast - maybe - to how things stand north of the border, where the Canadian government decided to go around the difficulties involved with regulating the burgeoning new industry by shoe-horning transgenic animals into the existing regulatory systems as a new type of veterinary medicine. Both critters have received conditional approval from one of the three Canadian regulatory bodies involved in the certification process, but neither of their backers have heard anything from the other two.
Still, it sounds very much like both these critters are likely to be signed off as fit for Amerikan (and subsequently, no doubt, for Canadian, and therefore probably NZ - did I mention that Canada's where NZ gets most of its imported pork products?) consumption in the relatively near future, which should enrage some people so much that they join a facebook group in protest.
Speaking of protests, when we were in Amerika much was being made of the near-universal antipathy towards ObamaCare, the much maligned universal medical insurance scheme introduced by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning 44th President of Amerika. (Theoretically, his Peace Prize was awarded on the strength of "...his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." Arse; bunch thereof.) Giving credit where it's due, though; in tackling Amerika's healthcare industry he certainly wasn't shying away from the big jobs - it's a bloody mess.
In contrast, Canadians have long held dear the belief that their public health system is a wonderful thing; that it provides an umbrella of care for all Canadians, no matter how full their pocketbooks. Recently, evidence has come to light to suggest that this may not necessarily be true, at least not all of the time in all parts of this sprawling country. Admittedly, most of the stories of medico-fiscal malfeasance which have been trumpeted about the place of late involve Quebec, which is that crappy bit in the middle of Canada where they wish they were French, and which has long been renowned as a hotbed of corruption at all levels of the public sector, so it may well be that the one (very) bad apple province is tainting the reputations of all the others. Still, any time you have people stating outright and on the record that the going rate to have your doctor bother to turn up for the birth of your child is somewhere between two- and ten-thousand dollars, you know your medical system has a problem. Similarly, the tales of envelopes stuffed with large-denomination bills being stuffed under pillows for the anaesthetist to find are mildly horrific. Especially when your step-mother's just had a knee replaced, and has spent several days post-op throwing up near-constantly after receiving some bizarre anaesthetic concoction that contra-indicates her prominently-displayed allergy status.
Fat envelope under the pillow? No.
Several days of narcotized misery? Yes.
Coincidence? Probably.
Still, the new knee seems to be at least as good as the old one, and that's even before the surgical slice and dice has had a chance to heal up. Friends are already planning a knees-up to celebrate.
Monday, December 6, 2010
The War of the (Bloody Big, Bloody Scary) Bears
Short Version:
Chores are very tiring.
Long Version:
As the world warms, the sea-ice upon which polar bears live will disappear. The bears will be forced to adapt in two main ways: First, they'll need to migrate to areas where there's more actual land instead of spending the majority of their time wandering about on the frozen seas, because less of the sea will be frozen; Second, they're going to have to adapt their diet, as there are far fewer seals swimming about on land than there are under the sea-ice. This means a probable shift to a plant-heavy omnivorousness, as there are few remaining land mammals available as prey which are large enough to satisfy the nutritional requirements of a predator of that size operating as a carnivore. This, scientists say, means war, against their bigger, browner cousins...
Grizzly v Polar.
At stake: undisputed enormous omnivore supremacy, and, perhaps, survival of the species.
Scientists say they've figured out the result already, based on skull and jaw strength: put your money on the grizzly ones.
Having said that, there is another way: Making Love, Not War. Apparently crossover bears were a favorite selective breeding programme of the Germans a hundred-or-so years ago, and recently there have been numerous sightings of what are thought to be bears born of polar/grizzly lovestorms wandering in the wild. Jury's still out on whether that should be exciting and cause for renewed faith in nature's ability to overcome the human obstacle, or whether we should all just go back to bed and pull the covers over our heads and wait for the world's scariest hybrid to come get us.
I wanted to write: "The bears are all asleep at the moment, of course; slumbering their way towards spring," but that would be untrue: bears don't hibernate. Their winter state, wherein body temperature drops around six degrees and metabolic rate is significantly lower than usual but they remain relatively easily roused, is called winter lethargy. Even so, we haven't seen hide nor hair of any kind of bear since we left Corvallis, where we saw the hairy hide of a small black bear draped over the arm of a couch. This means we've both restarted listening to music while running in the woods - we'd stopped doing so while there were critters bigger and grumpier than us meandering about seeking delicious foods. We've been doing a lot of trail-running, as we a) can't face the prospect of sitting on our bikes at the moment and b) have pulled all the ruined and/or worn-out components - which is pretty much all of them - off the bikes in order to reduce baggage weight on our impending trans-Pacific journey, back to NZ, where sunshine and warm seas await. And, of course, we've both been eating and drinking too much, so inactivity is not an option.
In between running in the woods (an activity which now includes not only cantering in an ungainly manner across icy boardwalks, but also falling face-first onto said icy boardwalks and sliding off their edges into half-frozen swampy mud puddles) we've been busy since we returned to Vancouver:
- Yoga. Thirty dollars gets you two weeks of unlimited classes. Nene's been at least once a day, sometimes more. I was banned for bad behaviour.
- Cooking. We have stove! No-one else has been allowed in the kitchen as Nene rediscovers the joys of cooking on something other than a single-burner propane-powered camping stove
- Movies. Nene's watched many, many films. Documentaries, boy-wizard adventures, historical romances... you name it, she's wallowed in it.
- Cleaning. Thanks to Nene, the Reaper is clean (and for sale). Our clothes are clean. Pots and pans and plates and cups are clean, tent and sleeping stuff is clean, everything that can be cleaned has been.
For those of you who've failed to pick up on the common theme, Nene's the one who's been busy. She's done pretty much all of the chores, apart from driving the Reaper to a carwash and sitting in it, reading, while the nozzles sprayed various liquids against the outside of the van, and the brushes whirled and the jets blasted air. Man, that was tiring! I needed a cup of tea and a lie-down when I got home, but settled for a beer on the couch in front of a sports channel playing on the wall-sized television.
Chores are very tiring.
Long Version:
As the world warms, the sea-ice upon which polar bears live will disappear. The bears will be forced to adapt in two main ways: First, they'll need to migrate to areas where there's more actual land instead of spending the majority of their time wandering about on the frozen seas, because less of the sea will be frozen; Second, they're going to have to adapt their diet, as there are far fewer seals swimming about on land than there are under the sea-ice. This means a probable shift to a plant-heavy omnivorousness, as there are few remaining land mammals available as prey which are large enough to satisfy the nutritional requirements of a predator of that size operating as a carnivore. This, scientists say, means war, against their bigger, browner cousins...
Grizzly v Polar.
At stake: undisputed enormous omnivore supremacy, and, perhaps, survival of the species.
Scientists say they've figured out the result already, based on skull and jaw strength: put your money on the grizzly ones.
Having said that, there is another way: Making Love, Not War. Apparently crossover bears were a favorite selective breeding programme of the Germans a hundred-or-so years ago, and recently there have been numerous sightings of what are thought to be bears born of polar/grizzly lovestorms wandering in the wild. Jury's still out on whether that should be exciting and cause for renewed faith in nature's ability to overcome the human obstacle, or whether we should all just go back to bed and pull the covers over our heads and wait for the world's scariest hybrid to come get us.
I wanted to write: "The bears are all asleep at the moment, of course; slumbering their way towards spring," but that would be untrue: bears don't hibernate. Their winter state, wherein body temperature drops around six degrees and metabolic rate is significantly lower than usual but they remain relatively easily roused, is called winter lethargy. Even so, we haven't seen hide nor hair of any kind of bear since we left Corvallis, where we saw the hairy hide of a small black bear draped over the arm of a couch. This means we've both restarted listening to music while running in the woods - we'd stopped doing so while there were critters bigger and grumpier than us meandering about seeking delicious foods. We've been doing a lot of trail-running, as we a) can't face the prospect of sitting on our bikes at the moment and b) have pulled all the ruined and/or worn-out components - which is pretty much all of them - off the bikes in order to reduce baggage weight on our impending trans-Pacific journey, back to NZ, where sunshine and warm seas await. And, of course, we've both been eating and drinking too much, so inactivity is not an option.
In between running in the woods (an activity which now includes not only cantering in an ungainly manner across icy boardwalks, but also falling face-first onto said icy boardwalks and sliding off their edges into half-frozen swampy mud puddles) we've been busy since we returned to Vancouver:
- Yoga. Thirty dollars gets you two weeks of unlimited classes. Nene's been at least once a day, sometimes more. I was banned for bad behaviour.
- Cooking. We have stove! No-one else has been allowed in the kitchen as Nene rediscovers the joys of cooking on something other than a single-burner propane-powered camping stove
- Movies. Nene's watched many, many films. Documentaries, boy-wizard adventures, historical romances... you name it, she's wallowed in it.
- Cleaning. Thanks to Nene, the Reaper is clean (and for sale). Our clothes are clean. Pots and pans and plates and cups are clean, tent and sleeping stuff is clean, everything that can be cleaned has been.
For those of you who've failed to pick up on the common theme, Nene's the one who's been busy. She's done pretty much all of the chores, apart from driving the Reaper to a carwash and sitting in it, reading, while the nozzles sprayed various liquids against the outside of the van, and the brushes whirled and the jets blasted air. Man, that was tiring! I needed a cup of tea and a lie-down when I got home, but settled for a beer on the couch in front of a sports channel playing on the wall-sized television.
Goodbye Amerika!
Short Version:
We head for the border via the booze/cheese/gasoline store, acquire a little person, and make someone cry.
Long Version:
Our final morning in Amerika dawned... actually, we have no idea how it dawned.
We arose reluctantly and eventually, bleary-eyed and thick-tongued and full-bladdered. Between the beautiful shining espresso machine and Wendy's fresh-baked scones it wasn't long before we were feeling good again, though, and we hit the road north excited to be travelling, and looking forward to seeing the Candians again, but also somewhat sad that we had to go, and determined to return to hang out with Scott and Wendy again, and to take in some of Seattle's trails, on a day with less standing snow and leftover rain.
Wendy had pointed us at a super-cool store in Mount Vernon, halfway to the border, and we stocked up on booze and cheese and gasoline before plowing onwards and upwards. We joined a queue of vehicles at the border, and hadn't been sitting long when a young Border Police officer approached the driver's side window and started asking me questions about where we were from, where we'd been, what our plans were, what did we have in the van... His ginger moustache made it difficult to take him seriously, but we were doing pretty well, right up until the point where his patrol partner, who had sneaked (or possibly walked normally, peering into each of the Reaper's rear windows) around to the van's far side, knocked on the window next to Janine's head. The surprised leap she performed was one of which Yelena Isinbayeva would have been proud, and the next round of questioning saw us somewhat less composed than we had been beforehand. They eventually had us drive on up to the booth, where the bloke asked many of the same questions, using the same sneaky-trick, "Let's see if we can get these potential scoundrels to contradict themselves" style employed by his mobile colleagues.
And then we were free to go, onwards into Canada, where I immediately exceuted a chewing-gum fail, biting my tongue hard enough to draw a significant and unstemmable flow of blood, only a little of which ended up in my beard. It had stopped by the time we reached the ferry terminal at Tsawassen, and cleaned up reasonably well, although I still garnered more than a few strange looks as I stood, shabby and unkempt, in the Arrivals waiting area. Maybe it was the fact that I was staring intently at all the really short people; I was trying to spot which of the heavily-bundled midgets was my smallest sister, but given how disreputable I now look I probably looked like I was sizing children up for bed and/or oven.
Smallest sister acquired, we carried on driving, under a river and up into the hills, to North Vancouver, where we hid the Reaper and arrived at the family doorstep clutching booze galore and gifts aplenty for smallest sister's big sister on her birthday. She cried when she saw us, because of happy surprisedness, and then we all ate delicious foods and drank some drinks and left the dirty washing in the Reaper overnight, because a task that monumental is not one to be attempted late in the day, and especially not when there are illicit imported alcholic beverages to be consumed, and for such a good cause!
We head for the border via the booze/cheese/gasoline store, acquire a little person, and make someone cry.
Long Version:
Our final morning in Amerika dawned... actually, we have no idea how it dawned.
We arose reluctantly and eventually, bleary-eyed and thick-tongued and full-bladdered. Between the beautiful shining espresso machine and Wendy's fresh-baked scones it wasn't long before we were feeling good again, though, and we hit the road north excited to be travelling, and looking forward to seeing the Candians again, but also somewhat sad that we had to go, and determined to return to hang out with Scott and Wendy again, and to take in some of Seattle's trails, on a day with less standing snow and leftover rain.
Wendy had pointed us at a super-cool store in Mount Vernon, halfway to the border, and we stocked up on booze and cheese and gasoline before plowing onwards and upwards. We joined a queue of vehicles at the border, and hadn't been sitting long when a young Border Police officer approached the driver's side window and started asking me questions about where we were from, where we'd been, what our plans were, what did we have in the van... His ginger moustache made it difficult to take him seriously, but we were doing pretty well, right up until the point where his patrol partner, who had sneaked (or possibly walked normally, peering into each of the Reaper's rear windows) around to the van's far side, knocked on the window next to Janine's head. The surprised leap she performed was one of which Yelena Isinbayeva would have been proud, and the next round of questioning saw us somewhat less composed than we had been beforehand. They eventually had us drive on up to the booth, where the bloke asked many of the same questions, using the same sneaky-trick, "Let's see if we can get these potential scoundrels to contradict themselves" style employed by his mobile colleagues.
And then we were free to go, onwards into Canada, where I immediately exceuted a chewing-gum fail, biting my tongue hard enough to draw a significant and unstemmable flow of blood, only a little of which ended up in my beard. It had stopped by the time we reached the ferry terminal at Tsawassen, and cleaned up reasonably well, although I still garnered more than a few strange looks as I stood, shabby and unkempt, in the Arrivals waiting area. Maybe it was the fact that I was staring intently at all the really short people; I was trying to spot which of the heavily-bundled midgets was my smallest sister, but given how disreputable I now look I probably looked like I was sizing children up for bed and/or oven.
Smallest sister acquired, we carried on driving, under a river and up into the hills, to North Vancouver, where we hid the Reaper and arrived at the family doorstep clutching booze galore and gifts aplenty for smallest sister's big sister on her birthday. She cried when she saw us, because of happy surprisedness, and then we all ate delicious foods and drank some drinks and left the dirty washing in the Reaper overnight, because a task that monumental is not one to be attempted late in the day, and especially not when there are illicit imported alcholic beverages to be consumed, and for such a good cause!
Figgy Pudding
Short Version:
Waffle fail, Black Friday. Angry cripple, fridge excellence. It's a small world.
Long Version:
We started the day with a telling-off from the hotel manager. Apparently the sign affixed to the waffle-maker that read: "Pour mixture in, close lid, turn handles" meant that after pouring the mixture in and closing the lid one should grasp the two handles and rotate the entire device. I'd been busily unscrewing the plastic handles while the "This muppet hasn't flipped me!" alarm blared out, grating and harsh in the early morning stillness.
Black Friday's a strange one: Thanksgiving Day is a public holiday. It falls each year on the last Thursday in November. Many businesses don't open on the Friday either*, turning Thanksgiving weekend into a 4-day break. Kind of makes sense when half your populace is travelling long distance to be with family. Most of the thrift stores in Corvallis were open, though, as was brewpub Block15, which is the home of delicious Figgy Pudding seasonal beery deliciousness. Both things suited us just fine but did mean that it was evening by the time we reached northern Seattle.
We stopped at the local shopping centre for delicious foods and wine, and witnessed a wizened little old crippled lady taking to task a robust chap who'd sinned cardinally by parking his enormous pickup truck in the disabled parking spaces (both of them). We joined in the righteous indignant condemnation of the able-bodied park-snatcher ("How dare he? Shame on him!"), and then high-tailed it out of there, to the not-quite-as-badly-parked Reaper and then on to Scott and Wendy's house, where we found the two of them and daughter Fiona decorating a bloody big Xmas tree, with "assistance" from Lulu the dog and the two cats.
Scott has edited their downstairs fridge, and it is now such a beautiful marriage of form and function that it beggars description. The key change is the hole in the door, sealed by rubber flanges, to which a hose has been run, on the inside. On the outside of the door, a tap. Inside the fridge, at the far end of the hose and connected to a gas cylinder for propulsion: a keg of delicious, nutritious Deschutes Brewery's Jubel Ale (a seasonal release from the people who bring you Black Butte Porter).
To recap: the fridge has a keg of beer in it, hardwired to a tap on the door.
It's like those refigerators with an inbuilt iced-water/ice dispenser built into the door, only much, much betterer.
Between that miracle of modern engineering and the bottle that came out once we admitted a liking for usquebaugh, we were a little the worse for wear by the time we hit the sack after an evening of conversing about everything under the sun, and some things which aren't. Mighty interesting to hear an alternate perspective on Amerikan politics, although one can't help wondering whether referring to Sarah Palin's political prominence as a proof-positive of the Mayan calendar's determination that the world will end in 2012 might be taking things a step too far. Speaking of that so-called lady, it turns out that our Seattle and Sedona connections were already connected, through mountain-biking, trail-building, and the magic of tequila. Small, small world!
* = Although it sounds like more and more stores are buying into the concept of Black Friday Sales and opening their doors. The name Black Friday actually comes from the belief - probably apocryphal - that it's the day of the year when retailers move to profitability for the year. Whether that's a result of having most of a year's trading under their belts, or whether it originated as a throwaway remark from a retailer enjoying a frenzied sale attendance, it's certainly now the equivalent of the Boxing Day Sales in NZ**
** = ie Avoid at all costs
Waffle fail, Black Friday. Angry cripple, fridge excellence. It's a small world.
Long Version:
We started the day with a telling-off from the hotel manager. Apparently the sign affixed to the waffle-maker that read: "Pour mixture in, close lid, turn handles" meant that after pouring the mixture in and closing the lid one should grasp the two handles and rotate the entire device. I'd been busily unscrewing the plastic handles while the "This muppet hasn't flipped me!" alarm blared out, grating and harsh in the early morning stillness.
Black Friday's a strange one: Thanksgiving Day is a public holiday. It falls each year on the last Thursday in November. Many businesses don't open on the Friday either*, turning Thanksgiving weekend into a 4-day break. Kind of makes sense when half your populace is travelling long distance to be with family. Most of the thrift stores in Corvallis were open, though, as was brewpub Block15, which is the home of delicious Figgy Pudding seasonal beery deliciousness. Both things suited us just fine but did mean that it was evening by the time we reached northern Seattle.
We stopped at the local shopping centre for delicious foods and wine, and witnessed a wizened little old crippled lady taking to task a robust chap who'd sinned cardinally by parking his enormous pickup truck in the disabled parking spaces (both of them). We joined in the righteous indignant condemnation of the able-bodied park-snatcher ("How dare he? Shame on him!"), and then high-tailed it out of there, to the not-quite-as-badly-parked Reaper and then on to Scott and Wendy's house, where we found the two of them and daughter Fiona decorating a bloody big Xmas tree, with "assistance" from Lulu the dog and the two cats.
Scott has edited their downstairs fridge, and it is now such a beautiful marriage of form and function that it beggars description. The key change is the hole in the door, sealed by rubber flanges, to which a hose has been run, on the inside. On the outside of the door, a tap. Inside the fridge, at the far end of the hose and connected to a gas cylinder for propulsion: a keg of delicious, nutritious Deschutes Brewery's Jubel Ale (a seasonal release from the people who bring you Black Butte Porter).
To recap: the fridge has a keg of beer in it, hardwired to a tap on the door.
It's like those refigerators with an inbuilt iced-water/ice dispenser built into the door, only much, much betterer.
Between that miracle of modern engineering and the bottle that came out once we admitted a liking for usquebaugh, we were a little the worse for wear by the time we hit the sack after an evening of conversing about everything under the sun, and some things which aren't. Mighty interesting to hear an alternate perspective on Amerikan politics, although one can't help wondering whether referring to Sarah Palin's political prominence as a proof-positive of the Mayan calendar's determination that the world will end in 2012 might be taking things a step too far. Speaking of that so-called lady, it turns out that our Seattle and Sedona connections were already connected, through mountain-biking, trail-building, and the magic of tequila. Small, small world!
* = Although it sounds like more and more stores are buying into the concept of Black Friday Sales and opening their doors. The name Black Friday actually comes from the belief - probably apocryphal - that it's the day of the year when retailers move to profitability for the year. Whether that's a result of having most of a year's trading under their belts, or whether it originated as a throwaway remark from a retailer enjoying a frenzied sale attendance, it's certainly now the equivalent of the Boxing Day Sales in NZ**
** = ie Avoid at all costs
New Nubbins
Short Version:
Thanksgiving in Amerika is about gathering together with family and friends and eating far too much. Kind of like Xmas in NZ, only without the crass commercialism and the religious nonsense.
Long Version:
We arrived back at the house on Canterbury Circle to find it filling rapidly - eventually to the brim - with people who, for one reason or another, were not with their families; a few literal orphans, and a lot of East Coast folks, for whom the tyranny of Amerikan distance had proved visit-prohibitive. Several of them, at various points in the evening, described moving West as the best thing they've ever done, with one saying she felt like she hadn't realised what it was like to breathe properly until she moved to Oregon.
The Nest of pillows and blankets on the living-room floor worked a treat in the absence of and in preference to a more formal table setting, and the feeling of familial friendliness that permeated the gathering was wonderful. We met a bunch of new faces, and by the end of the evening felt like we'd known them all for a lot longer than just a few hours. Unsurprisingly, week-old Corbin stole the show when he put in his appearance, although the description of beer-cheese soup (and the promise of a recipe) was up there as well. The deliciousness of the delicious foods was pretty extreme, from cranberry/wasabi cream cheese dip, to roast tofurkey with cranberries, to pumpkin pies, and and and and and and we all ate far too much, especially Nubbins*, who ended up lying on the floor rubbing her belly and groaning. There were conversations about bioluminescence in Puerto Rico and on Waiheke, medical and other writings, and the joys and perils of being a counsellor for drug-addled teens at a remote backwoods treatment facility.
Then, all-too-soon, it was time for us to leave. Farewells were said, threats (to and from me) and promises (to and from Nene) of visits in the future were made, hugs were given and received. The Reaper seemed extra-cold on the way to the motel.
* = A complaint about an inappropriate nickname led to a raft of suggestions for new ones. Nubbins** was the clear standout.
** = All together now; (E) A nubbin, a nubbin, a nubbin, a nubbin, (A7) A nubbin, a nubbin, a nubbin, a nubbin! (REPEAT)
Thanksgiving in Amerika is about gathering together with family and friends and eating far too much. Kind of like Xmas in NZ, only without the crass commercialism and the religious nonsense.
Long Version:
We arrived back at the house on Canterbury Circle to find it filling rapidly - eventually to the brim - with people who, for one reason or another, were not with their families; a few literal orphans, and a lot of East Coast folks, for whom the tyranny of Amerikan distance had proved visit-prohibitive. Several of them, at various points in the evening, described moving West as the best thing they've ever done, with one saying she felt like she hadn't realised what it was like to breathe properly until she moved to Oregon.
The Nest of pillows and blankets on the living-room floor worked a treat in the absence of and in preference to a more formal table setting, and the feeling of familial friendliness that permeated the gathering was wonderful. We met a bunch of new faces, and by the end of the evening felt like we'd known them all for a lot longer than just a few hours. Unsurprisingly, week-old Corbin stole the show when he put in his appearance, although the description of beer-cheese soup (and the promise of a recipe) was up there as well. The deliciousness of the delicious foods was pretty extreme, from cranberry/wasabi cream cheese dip, to roast tofurkey with cranberries, to pumpkin pies, and and and and and and we all ate far too much, especially Nubbins*, who ended up lying on the floor rubbing her belly and groaning. There were conversations about bioluminescence in Puerto Rico and on Waiheke, medical and other writings, and the joys and perils of being a counsellor for drug-addled teens at a remote backwoods treatment facility.
Then, all-too-soon, it was time for us to leave. Farewells were said, threats (to and from me) and promises (to and from Nene) of visits in the future were made, hugs were given and received. The Reaper seemed extra-cold on the way to the motel.
* = A complaint about an inappropriate nickname led to a raft of suggestions for new ones. Nubbins** was the clear standout.
** = All together now; (E) A nubbin, a nubbin, a nubbin, a nubbin, (A7) A nubbin, a nubbin, a nubbin, a nubbin! (REPEAT)
"I'm SO Into Neuter Clinics!"
Short Version:
We give thanks for things, including snow, bikes, and beer.
Long Version:
Thanksgiving Day in Amerika is huge. We'd not realised quite what a big deal it was, and had some confused and confusing notion of what it was about which involved people dressing up as Pilgrims and giving each other turkeys to say "Thanks" for royally screwing the Indians.
Apparently we weren't entirely correct, and Thanksgiving in Amerika is more about gathering together with friends and family to stuff yourself far too full of delicious foods for comfort. Hence the huge numbers of vehicles caught on Amerika's highways and byways without chains or snow tyres when the weather got cold fast earlier in the week. They'd be facing official sanctions, ticketing, and potential vehicle impoundment if they were that irresponsible in Canada, where iciness is taken much more seriously. Need proof? Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently visited Quebec City, home to 750,000-or-so people. Admittedly it's in Quebec, which makes those 750,000 people pseudo-French, but even so the PM's decision to snub meeting the mayor of this, the capital of Quebec and the province's second-largest metropolitan area, so that he could spend more time with a giant snowman is pretty awesome.
Not as awesome as riding* a titanium single-speed bicycle up the side of a snow-covered mountain, drinking beer at the top, and then riding** back down again, in company of Corvallis Carl and a bunch of folks from nearby Salem***. That was a pretty excellent way to spend Thanksgiving morning. Next time I'll take a flask of something stronger to the top, and sip small sips whilst looking out over the awesome views of the Corvallis area, floating dreamily beneath banks of fog lit by bright orange morning sunlight. I'll also bear in mind that those soft-looking piles of snow on either side of the trail are a) made of cold stuff that's wet when it gets warm, and b) not always composed entirely of snow (the ones made mainly from rock, especially, defy their pillowy appearance when employed as landing zones). Several times I watched others disappearing up hills on their one-gear machines while I walked the walk of shame. I shudder to think how little of the uphill I'd've been riding had this taken place towards the front end of our trip! And once again I found myself entrapped by attempts at caution: riding slower than usual, due to an unholy combination of unfamiliar bike and end-of-trip Murphy's Law paranoia, caused me to crash a bunch more times than I would have under more normal circumstances.
Of course, the snow didn't help much on that front either, and I found myself at one point looking down the hill towards where the trailblazers were gathering (variously picking themselves up, licking - or bandaging - their wounds, or standing around chatting and sharing further pulls on flasks) and thinking "Yes! Their sliding has cleared the snow from this hillside! I can ride down it!" The assumption that the ground they'd uncovered would be less slippery than the cold white stuff turned out to be fallacious; it was, in order of appearance:
- Frozen mud
- Wet leaves
- Frozen puddles
- Unfrozen, wet puddles
- Unfrozen, wet mud
All of these things were at least as slippery as the snow that had been moved aside by the wheels of the frontispieces, and, adding insult to injury****, we were riding beneath and between conifers.
Beautiful trees, smell really nice. Those ones.
That bugged me for some reason. Took me a while to figure out why: Conifers = evergreen. So where the hell did the Andre-the Giant's-palm-sized wet, slippery leaves that carpetted the uncovered ground come from?*****
When we arrived back at the cars it was both all- and none-too-soon for my liking: I'd loved the ride. It was great to ride a singlespeed, and especially a handmade one. Riding in the snow was awesome, the scenery was great, and the trails were pretty amazing. Having said all that, I was knackered! My legs were so weakened by their exertions that just standing up to drink my delicious post-ride beer was a challenge. Having interesting folks around to chat to helped, though.
Eventually (soon) the beer was gone, and we made our way back to Carl and Shaun and Mary's house on Canterbury Circle, where Janine and Mary had returned from their run, and Shaun from his deer-hunting expedition*****. The house was full of the odours of delicious foods being cooked (until we dragged our smelly selves on in, that is) and the construction of The Nest was in progress.
* = May have involved walking, through what was, in places, shin-deep fresh powder snow.
** = I'm told that following me was kind of dangerous, on the grounds that the entertainment value of watching me was distracting people from concentrating on what they were supposed to be doing. I'm not sure what the big deal was: surely the forests of Oregon are chock full of shabby beardy guys sailing through the air to faceplant into snowbanks, cartwheeling (with bike attached) down near-vertical slopes, sliding sideways towards sheer drops, and bouncing off tree after tree? Maybe the grinnin' and hollerin' was unusual, although I saw and heard others doing likewise.
*** = Not the one with the witches. I asked.
**** = I managed to escape relatively unscathed. The biggest scare I had was when I landed on what turned out to be a snow-covered branch, which snapped. Loudly. I thought I'd snapped my femur, and that the sound of the break had reached my ears before the pain had hit my brain. I'm learning to like being proved wrong*******
***** = Vine Maple, apparently
****** = No deer this time, which was a shame, but also no being menaced by a cougar, which is an improvement on his last time out
******* = Probably a good thing, being married to Janine.
We give thanks for things, including snow, bikes, and beer.
Long Version:
Thanksgiving Day in Amerika is huge. We'd not realised quite what a big deal it was, and had some confused and confusing notion of what it was about which involved people dressing up as Pilgrims and giving each other turkeys to say "Thanks" for royally screwing the Indians.
Apparently we weren't entirely correct, and Thanksgiving in Amerika is more about gathering together with friends and family to stuff yourself far too full of delicious foods for comfort. Hence the huge numbers of vehicles caught on Amerika's highways and byways without chains or snow tyres when the weather got cold fast earlier in the week. They'd be facing official sanctions, ticketing, and potential vehicle impoundment if they were that irresponsible in Canada, where iciness is taken much more seriously. Need proof? Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently visited Quebec City, home to 750,000-or-so people. Admittedly it's in Quebec, which makes those 750,000 people pseudo-French, but even so the PM's decision to snub meeting the mayor of this, the capital of Quebec and the province's second-largest metropolitan area, so that he could spend more time with a giant snowman is pretty awesome.
Not as awesome as riding* a titanium single-speed bicycle up the side of a snow-covered mountain, drinking beer at the top, and then riding** back down again, in company of Corvallis Carl and a bunch of folks from nearby Salem***. That was a pretty excellent way to spend Thanksgiving morning. Next time I'll take a flask of something stronger to the top, and sip small sips whilst looking out over the awesome views of the Corvallis area, floating dreamily beneath banks of fog lit by bright orange morning sunlight. I'll also bear in mind that those soft-looking piles of snow on either side of the trail are a) made of cold stuff that's wet when it gets warm, and b) not always composed entirely of snow (the ones made mainly from rock, especially, defy their pillowy appearance when employed as landing zones). Several times I watched others disappearing up hills on their one-gear machines while I walked the walk of shame. I shudder to think how little of the uphill I'd've been riding had this taken place towards the front end of our trip! And once again I found myself entrapped by attempts at caution: riding slower than usual, due to an unholy combination of unfamiliar bike and end-of-trip Murphy's Law paranoia, caused me to crash a bunch more times than I would have under more normal circumstances.
Of course, the snow didn't help much on that front either, and I found myself at one point looking down the hill towards where the trailblazers were gathering (variously picking themselves up, licking - or bandaging - their wounds, or standing around chatting and sharing further pulls on flasks) and thinking "Yes! Their sliding has cleared the snow from this hillside! I can ride down it!" The assumption that the ground they'd uncovered would be less slippery than the cold white stuff turned out to be fallacious; it was, in order of appearance:
- Frozen mud
- Wet leaves
- Frozen puddles
- Unfrozen, wet puddles
- Unfrozen, wet mud
All of these things were at least as slippery as the snow that had been moved aside by the wheels of the frontispieces, and, adding insult to injury****, we were riding beneath and between conifers.
Beautiful trees, smell really nice. Those ones.
That bugged me for some reason. Took me a while to figure out why: Conifers = evergreen. So where the hell did the Andre-the Giant's-palm-sized wet, slippery leaves that carpetted the uncovered ground come from?*****
When we arrived back at the cars it was both all- and none-too-soon for my liking: I'd loved the ride. It was great to ride a singlespeed, and especially a handmade one. Riding in the snow was awesome, the scenery was great, and the trails were pretty amazing. Having said all that, I was knackered! My legs were so weakened by their exertions that just standing up to drink my delicious post-ride beer was a challenge. Having interesting folks around to chat to helped, though.
Eventually (soon) the beer was gone, and we made our way back to Carl and Shaun and Mary's house on Canterbury Circle, where Janine and Mary had returned from their run, and Shaun from his deer-hunting expedition*****. The house was full of the odours of delicious foods being cooked (until we dragged our smelly selves on in, that is) and the construction of The Nest was in progress.
* = May have involved walking, through what was, in places, shin-deep fresh powder snow.
** = I'm told that following me was kind of dangerous, on the grounds that the entertainment value of watching me was distracting people from concentrating on what they were supposed to be doing. I'm not sure what the big deal was: surely the forests of Oregon are chock full of shabby beardy guys sailing through the air to faceplant into snowbanks, cartwheeling (with bike attached) down near-vertical slopes, sliding sideways towards sheer drops, and bouncing off tree after tree? Maybe the grinnin' and hollerin' was unusual, although I saw and heard others doing likewise.
*** = Not the one with the witches. I asked.
**** = I managed to escape relatively unscathed. The biggest scare I had was when I landed on what turned out to be a snow-covered branch, which snapped. Loudly. I thought I'd snapped my femur, and that the sound of the break had reached my ears before the pain had hit my brain. I'm learning to like being proved wrong*******
***** = Vine Maple, apparently
****** = No deer this time, which was a shame, but also no being menaced by a cougar, which is an improvement on his last time out
******* = Probably a good thing, being married to Janine.
Baaaaaaaa! Baaaaaaaa!
Short Version:
Truck crash chaos, we taunt Amerikans unjustly. Arsenic.
Long Version:
It took us a long time to get to Oregon. Not because it was particularly far from where we were in northern Kalifornia, but because the road was blocked by trucks which had jack-knifed atop the Siskiyou Summit, which is the passage over the Siskiyou Mountains through which the Interstate passes. At 4310ft it's not all that high - it's barely half the elevation of either the Deadman or Conway Summits, both of which we crossed en route to our unplanned overnight in Susanville. Actually, since we passed that way, much attention's been focussed on Mono Lake (pronounced MOE-noe, not MON-oh, apparently) - not because we passed that way, or because we harvested a bird there, but because the lake, which has always been known to have thrice the salinity of seawater, has now been found to be hosting sizeable communities of hitherto unpossible extremophile bacterium (poetically named GFAJ-1) which usually eat phosphorous but which, when starved of their normal sustenance, become eaters of arsenic, which has the coolest name of any of the elements (tungsten's the runner-up) but which kills pretty much everything with which it comes into contact.
The traffic jam on I-5 stretched for miles and miles, and was heralded well in advance by nifty electronic informational signage, which told us the road was blocked, and that all traffic was to exit at Yreka. Which we did, along with literally thousands of other vehicles. Yreka was ill-prepared for the onslaught, at least from a traffic management perspective, and it was with some relief that we found our way onto the narrow, winding byway that our map showed parallelling the Interstate. I'd not want to be driving anything bigger than the Reaper up (or down) that road. Twisting, turning, off-camber corners, potholes and other surface damage, overhung by rock outcrops... it was like being back in NZ, apart from the other drivers, who over here are, for the most part, actually capable of driving. Still, it popped us out fifteen or so scenic miles north, back onto the deserted Interstate, free and clear and laughing and making derisional sheep noises at all the stoopid Amerikans who'd blindly obeyed orders and were now sitting in food-vending establishments in Yreka, drinking highly-caffeinated sugary beverages they'd stood in lengthy queues to obtain while awful plastik musik played through tinny speakers. Baaaaaaaa! Baaaaaaaa! Stoopid Amerikans! Stoopid... Wait, what's that up ahead? It looks like... the tail end of a traffic jam. Rats.
We sat for an hour, then crawled for another one. We learned about how dirty snow becomes when it's been lying on the Interstate for a while; our windscreen was so befilthed by the time we started down the northern slopes of the hills that we couldn't see much at all, and had to stop at a gas station in some random highway town to wash it. And then another anonymous hotel room, and on the TV was more unfathomably popular "football" being played by men in tights and helmets who get paid insane amounts of money, and then we hit the thrift stores and then the highway, and rolled back into Corvallis just before the end of the working day, to the Cyclery where Carl was actually literally in process of sending us an email when we arrived. Synchronised!
Truck crash chaos, we taunt Amerikans unjustly. Arsenic.
Long Version:
It took us a long time to get to Oregon. Not because it was particularly far from where we were in northern Kalifornia, but because the road was blocked by trucks which had jack-knifed atop the Siskiyou Summit, which is the passage over the Siskiyou Mountains through which the Interstate passes. At 4310ft it's not all that high - it's barely half the elevation of either the Deadman or Conway Summits, both of which we crossed en route to our unplanned overnight in Susanville. Actually, since we passed that way, much attention's been focussed on Mono Lake (pronounced MOE-noe, not MON-oh, apparently) - not because we passed that way, or because we harvested a bird there, but because the lake, which has always been known to have thrice the salinity of seawater, has now been found to be hosting sizeable communities of hitherto unpossible extremophile bacterium (poetically named GFAJ-1) which usually eat phosphorous but which, when starved of their normal sustenance, become eaters of arsenic, which has the coolest name of any of the elements (tungsten's the runner-up) but which kills pretty much everything with which it comes into contact.
The traffic jam on I-5 stretched for miles and miles, and was heralded well in advance by nifty electronic informational signage, which told us the road was blocked, and that all traffic was to exit at Yreka. Which we did, along with literally thousands of other vehicles. Yreka was ill-prepared for the onslaught, at least from a traffic management perspective, and it was with some relief that we found our way onto the narrow, winding byway that our map showed parallelling the Interstate. I'd not want to be driving anything bigger than the Reaper up (or down) that road. Twisting, turning, off-camber corners, potholes and other surface damage, overhung by rock outcrops... it was like being back in NZ, apart from the other drivers, who over here are, for the most part, actually capable of driving. Still, it popped us out fifteen or so scenic miles north, back onto the deserted Interstate, free and clear and laughing and making derisional sheep noises at all the stoopid Amerikans who'd blindly obeyed orders and were now sitting in food-vending establishments in Yreka, drinking highly-caffeinated sugary beverages they'd stood in lengthy queues to obtain while awful plastik musik played through tinny speakers. Baaaaaaaa! Baaaaaaaa! Stoopid Amerikans! Stoopid... Wait, what's that up ahead? It looks like... the tail end of a traffic jam. Rats.
We sat for an hour, then crawled for another one. We learned about how dirty snow becomes when it's been lying on the Interstate for a while; our windscreen was so befilthed by the time we started down the northern slopes of the hills that we couldn't see much at all, and had to stop at a gas station in some random highway town to wash it. And then another anonymous hotel room, and on the TV was more unfathomably popular "football" being played by men in tights and helmets who get paid insane amounts of money, and then we hit the thrift stores and then the highway, and rolled back into Corvallis just before the end of the working day, to the Cyclery where Carl was actually literally in process of sending us an email when we arrived. Synchronised!
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Don't Eat the Yellow Snow
Short Version:
We rip off Amerika, see some natural and unnatural history, ignore our responsibilities as responsible road users, and get trapped in a small town with a little old lady for company. Then we leave, but not fast enough for some people.
Long Version:
Most of the ex-Vegas traffic stayed on the Interstate, bound for LA. We had less than no interest in going back to that horribly enormous shitty pit of a city, so turned north, up Scenic Highway 395. Once again, the scale of Amerika caught us napping, and as the sun set behind the freshly snow-dusted Sierra Nevada mountains we had no idea where on earth we were going to find a place to park up for the night. The full moon rose bulbous and yellow over the China Lake Naval Weapons-Testing Area, and illuminated an unlooked-for bonus: signage for a dirtbag campground! Really it was a fee campground, but three days in Vegas had eroded our morals to the point where we didn't pay the $6 despite filling our solitary remaining water canister from the manual pump and hiking the trail to the now-dry Fossil Falls, where ten to twenty thousand years ago Indian bands lived on the banks of the then-rushing river. The effects of both river and people on the landscape can still be seen: the jagged edges of the area's volcanic rocks are smooth where the water once flowed, and human-made flakes of obsidian still lie where tools were made in ages past.
The wind that had kept us pinned in the Reaper near Boulder City was the warm desert fringe of the first big winter storm for the year, which had dumped a bunch of snow on both the Sierra Nevada and Coso mountains, so we were driving in a green valley between two snow-covered ranges as we worked our way north. Unfortunately, the storm had also heralded the closure of the eastern entrances to Yosemite National Park, but we had enough on our plate just trying to get over the comparatively low passes along our route without trying to get up even higher. Warnings and admonitions about chains and snow tyres abounded, and the wisdom of a backroad run in the face of imminent winter started to seem more and more suspect as the amount of snow and ice on the road increased. Near Reno the highway was closed to trucks and other large vehicles due to wind gusts, and the looming ominosity of the weather became even more pronounced at the Kalifornia border inspection station ("Do you have any fruit in the vehicle?"), where the inspector lady told us there was another snowstorm coming in overnight. Joy.
We had just left Susanville when the snow began to fall. Half an hour later the road was barely visible beneath a chilly white blanket and the world was disappearing into dark grey. We figured enough was enough and turned back, to the Susanville River Inn, which had the world's most stereotypical Sweet Little Old Lady manning the reception desk. When we arose late the morning the Reaper was covered in snow, and it was still falling when we left town after a quick stop to ogle the stuffed bobcat swiping the stuffed bird out of the air in the shop run by the woman in the motorised wheelchair. By the time we reached the previous night's turning point the road was no longer visible beneath several inches of snow. Not having the foggiest idea what might constitute good snow-driving practise, we were driving pretty slowly, but then so was everyone else... except the logging trucks, which had the hammer well and truly down; we were averaging around 40mph, they were doing at least twice that, fully loaded with enormous frozen logs. Still, we made it to Weed without mishap, although anyone planning to eat snow near Hat Creek should avoid gobbling the yellow patches.
We rip off Amerika, see some natural and unnatural history, ignore our responsibilities as responsible road users, and get trapped in a small town with a little old lady for company. Then we leave, but not fast enough for some people.
Long Version:
Most of the ex-Vegas traffic stayed on the Interstate, bound for LA. We had less than no interest in going back to that horribly enormous shitty pit of a city, so turned north, up Scenic Highway 395. Once again, the scale of Amerika caught us napping, and as the sun set behind the freshly snow-dusted Sierra Nevada mountains we had no idea where on earth we were going to find a place to park up for the night. The full moon rose bulbous and yellow over the China Lake Naval Weapons-Testing Area, and illuminated an unlooked-for bonus: signage for a dirtbag campground! Really it was a fee campground, but three days in Vegas had eroded our morals to the point where we didn't pay the $6 despite filling our solitary remaining water canister from the manual pump and hiking the trail to the now-dry Fossil Falls, where ten to twenty thousand years ago Indian bands lived on the banks of the then-rushing river. The effects of both river and people on the landscape can still be seen: the jagged edges of the area's volcanic rocks are smooth where the water once flowed, and human-made flakes of obsidian still lie where tools were made in ages past.
The wind that had kept us pinned in the Reaper near Boulder City was the warm desert fringe of the first big winter storm for the year, which had dumped a bunch of snow on both the Sierra Nevada and Coso mountains, so we were driving in a green valley between two snow-covered ranges as we worked our way north. Unfortunately, the storm had also heralded the closure of the eastern entrances to Yosemite National Park, but we had enough on our plate just trying to get over the comparatively low passes along our route without trying to get up even higher. Warnings and admonitions about chains and snow tyres abounded, and the wisdom of a backroad run in the face of imminent winter started to seem more and more suspect as the amount of snow and ice on the road increased. Near Reno the highway was closed to trucks and other large vehicles due to wind gusts, and the looming ominosity of the weather became even more pronounced at the Kalifornia border inspection station ("Do you have any fruit in the vehicle?"), where the inspector lady told us there was another snowstorm coming in overnight. Joy.
We had just left Susanville when the snow began to fall. Half an hour later the road was barely visible beneath a chilly white blanket and the world was disappearing into dark grey. We figured enough was enough and turned back, to the Susanville River Inn, which had the world's most stereotypical Sweet Little Old Lady manning the reception desk. When we arose late the morning the Reaper was covered in snow, and it was still falling when we left town after a quick stop to ogle the stuffed bobcat swiping the stuffed bird out of the air in the shop run by the woman in the motorised wheelchair. By the time we reached the previous night's turning point the road was no longer visible beneath several inches of snow. Not having the foggiest idea what might constitute good snow-driving practise, we were driving pretty slowly, but then so was everyone else... except the logging trucks, which had the hammer well and truly down; we were averaging around 40mph, they were doing at least twice that, fully loaded with enormous frozen logs. Still, we made it to Weed without mishap, although anyone planning to eat snow near Hat Creek should avoid gobbling the yellow patches.
Shagging Ginger Rogers' Mother
Short Version:
We visit the Hoover Dam.
Long Version:
The Hoover Dam is named for a bloke named Herbert Hoover, who was President between 1929 and 1933. He was a Quaker, a charter student at Harvard, and an engineer who once translated the Latin text De re Metallica (On the Nature of Metals) into English. His personal physician, recognising the sedentary, stressful lifestyle associated with the Presidency, devised a sport designed to keep Herbert physically fit. Known as Hooverball, it's very much akin to a game of catch-and-release volleyball played with a medicine ball, was played pretty much daily on the south lawn of the White House* during Hoover's term in office. It's still played today; primarily in Iowa, Hoover's home state.
Having read James Ellroy's excellent novels, we'd always assumed the dam was named for J. Edgar Hoover, long-time Director of the FBI, and the only human Hoover of whom we'd heard. It did seem somewhat paradoxical that an edifice that sizeable and overt should be named for someone who dealt in shadows and insinuation, and it turns out that the dam was completed and named at around the time that John Edgar commenced his lengthy FBI Directorship, which lasted from 1935 to 1972 (and followed on the heels of the eleven years he spent running the FBI predecessor; the non-Federal Bureau of Investigation). Subsequent FBI Directors' terms have been limited to ten years maximum in order to forestall their gaining as much power as was achieved by John Edgar, who was a committed Freemason and whose unorthodox personal life lead to persistent rumours of homosexuality, including orgy participation, as well as allegations of cross-dressing. It is now believed that these rumours sprang largely from discreditation campaigns carried out by both Amerikan and foreign interests, especially in light of the substantial evidence linking Hoover romantically with the divorced mother of dancer Ginger Rogers.
The Hoover Dam was constructed between 1931 and 1936, at great cost to the USA, both monetarily and in terms of human life: 112 people died to bring the dam to completion, assuming you exclude the 42 workers who died of either pneumonia or carbon monoxide poisoning. The 112 does include J. G. Tierney, who is generally counted as the first man to die in the construction of Hoover Dam. He was a surveyor who was looking for an ideal spot for the dam when he drowned on December 20, 1922. His son, Patrick W. Tierney, was the last man to die working on the dam's construction, 13 years to the day later.
The heavily-used US Highway 93, which links the tri-state nexus where Arizona, Nevada and Utah meet with Sin City ran across the top of the Hoover Dam until October this year, when a new bypass bridge was opened. The dam parapet is still open to non-through traffic, though, so we took the Reaper across. No harvest on the top, as far as we know, although we got close to some of the many jay-walking waddlers; the annual visitor numbers have been pushing a million for a few years now, and are expected to have exceeded that number this year.
We ogled the dam for a while, impressed by its immensity, then joined the westbound traffic, which was a trickle on the way in to Las Vegas, and a flood out the other side; Sunday afternoon, and people who'd been living large for the weekend were heading home to Kalifornia.
* = The Amerikan Presidential home office, not the strip club / knock shop on Auckland's Queen Street
We visit the Hoover Dam.
Long Version:
The Hoover Dam is named for a bloke named Herbert Hoover, who was President between 1929 and 1933. He was a Quaker, a charter student at Harvard, and an engineer who once translated the Latin text De re Metallica (On the Nature of Metals) into English. His personal physician, recognising the sedentary, stressful lifestyle associated with the Presidency, devised a sport designed to keep Herbert physically fit. Known as Hooverball, it's very much akin to a game of catch-and-release volleyball played with a medicine ball, was played pretty much daily on the south lawn of the White House* during Hoover's term in office. It's still played today; primarily in Iowa, Hoover's home state.
Having read James Ellroy's excellent novels, we'd always assumed the dam was named for J. Edgar Hoover, long-time Director of the FBI, and the only human Hoover of whom we'd heard. It did seem somewhat paradoxical that an edifice that sizeable and overt should be named for someone who dealt in shadows and insinuation, and it turns out that the dam was completed and named at around the time that John Edgar commenced his lengthy FBI Directorship, which lasted from 1935 to 1972 (and followed on the heels of the eleven years he spent running the FBI predecessor; the non-Federal Bureau of Investigation). Subsequent FBI Directors' terms have been limited to ten years maximum in order to forestall their gaining as much power as was achieved by John Edgar, who was a committed Freemason and whose unorthodox personal life lead to persistent rumours of homosexuality, including orgy participation, as well as allegations of cross-dressing. It is now believed that these rumours sprang largely from discreditation campaigns carried out by both Amerikan and foreign interests, especially in light of the substantial evidence linking Hoover romantically with the divorced mother of dancer Ginger Rogers.
The Hoover Dam was constructed between 1931 and 1936, at great cost to the USA, both monetarily and in terms of human life: 112 people died to bring the dam to completion, assuming you exclude the 42 workers who died of either pneumonia or carbon monoxide poisoning. The 112 does include J. G. Tierney, who is generally counted as the first man to die in the construction of Hoover Dam. He was a surveyor who was looking for an ideal spot for the dam when he drowned on December 20, 1922. His son, Patrick W. Tierney, was the last man to die working on the dam's construction, 13 years to the day later.
The heavily-used US Highway 93, which links the tri-state nexus where Arizona, Nevada and Utah meet with Sin City ran across the top of the Hoover Dam until October this year, when a new bypass bridge was opened. The dam parapet is still open to non-through traffic, though, so we took the Reaper across. No harvest on the top, as far as we know, although we got close to some of the many jay-walking waddlers; the annual visitor numbers have been pushing a million for a few years now, and are expected to have exceeded that number this year.
We ogled the dam for a while, impressed by its immensity, then joined the westbound traffic, which was a trickle on the way in to Las Vegas, and a flood out the other side; Sunday afternoon, and people who'd been living large for the weekend were heading home to Kalifornia.
* = The Amerikan Presidential home office, not the strip club / knock shop on Auckland's Queen Street
Inconvenient Wind
Short Version:
Back in the Reaper, we head to an internationally-renowned mountain-biking destination, where we experience inconvenient wind.
Long Version:
Boulder City was built back in the 1930s to provide accommodation and services for workers involved in the construction of the nearby Hoover Dam. Nowdays it's a bit of a mixed-bag: dormitory town for the ever-expanding menace that is Las Vegas*; Hoover Dam tourism centre; birthplace of Playboy's May 1998 Playmate Deanna Brooks; sixth-best place in the USA to retire to; and - most importantly for our purposes - home of the Bootleg Canyon mountain-bike park, which kind of made it a near-mandatory stop for us despite their traditional focus on downhill trails rather than cross-country / all-mountain, which is where we fit when pigeonholed.
The main trailhead area is well-equipped with flush toilets(!) and showers(!!!), so we parked up and settled in for a couple of days of riding hard in our new, temporary back yard.
The wind had other ideas.
Not much point digging out official definitions of "gale force"**, as we had no way to measure what we were experiencing. The van was rocking, and not cos of us: we read books.
We did manage a 90-minute ride, and we could tell that there was some great riding to be had, but the wind was nasty, and kind of ruined the fun. What we did ride was loose-over-hardpack interspersed with sections of rock that looked scarier and less rideable than they really were. In the end, though, Boulder City goes down in our annals as the place we went straight after the luxury hotel experience, and where we spent two days shut in the Reaper while the wind howled outside. Quite a contrast.
* = With around two million inhabitants, Vegas is now Amerika's 28th-largest city, and grew the most of all US cities during the 20th century (it inherited that mantle from Chicago, which was the fastest-growing city during the 19th century)
** = 62-74kph; 8 on the Beaufort scale***.
*** = v = 0.836 B3/2 m/s, where v is the equivalent wind speed at 10 meters above the sea surface and B is Beaufort scale number.
Back in the Reaper, we head to an internationally-renowned mountain-biking destination, where we experience inconvenient wind.
Long Version:
Boulder City was built back in the 1930s to provide accommodation and services for workers involved in the construction of the nearby Hoover Dam. Nowdays it's a bit of a mixed-bag: dormitory town for the ever-expanding menace that is Las Vegas*; Hoover Dam tourism centre; birthplace of Playboy's May 1998 Playmate Deanna Brooks; sixth-best place in the USA to retire to; and - most importantly for our purposes - home of the Bootleg Canyon mountain-bike park, which kind of made it a near-mandatory stop for us despite their traditional focus on downhill trails rather than cross-country / all-mountain, which is where we fit when pigeonholed.
The main trailhead area is well-equipped with flush toilets(!) and showers(!!!), so we parked up and settled in for a couple of days of riding hard in our new, temporary back yard.
The wind had other ideas.
Not much point digging out official definitions of "gale force"**, as we had no way to measure what we were experiencing. The van was rocking, and not cos of us: we read books.
We did manage a 90-minute ride, and we could tell that there was some great riding to be had, but the wind was nasty, and kind of ruined the fun. What we did ride was loose-over-hardpack interspersed with sections of rock that looked scarier and less rideable than they really were. In the end, though, Boulder City goes down in our annals as the place we went straight after the luxury hotel experience, and where we spent two days shut in the Reaper while the wind howled outside. Quite a contrast.
* = With around two million inhabitants, Vegas is now Amerika's 28th-largest city, and grew the most of all US cities during the 20th century (it inherited that mantle from Chicago, which was the fastest-growing city during the 19th century)
** = 62-74kph; 8 on the Beaufort scale***.
*** = v = 0.836 B3/2 m/s, where v is the equivalent wind speed at 10 meters above the sea surface and B is Beaufort scale number.
$1 Margaritas and Photos of Lion Butts
Short Version:
More sights, sounds, and smells of Vegas. We win, then we leave.
Long Version:
There really were quite a lot of fat people in Las Vegas. Many of them were appallingly dressed (as were many of their skinny counterparts). I know I occasionally tuck my T-shirt in, but that's purely to irritate Janine. Really, it's an unacceptable choice, and especially when you're in your forties, you're a bit fat, it's a Harley Davidson T-shirt, and the jeans it's tucked into are from Wal-Mart and you're not wearing a belt. The men were even worse.
We breakfasted in a rainforest with an assortment of animatronic critters that don't coexist out in the outside world, then went and ogled the lion cubs at the MGM Grand. We tried to take photos of their butts up through the glass floor they were sitting on, but they seemed to know there were southern hemisphere perverts about, and several times moved away just before we pulled the trigger.
We wandered for hours among the chaos and carnage of the Strip, stopping every so often to drink $1 margaritas and free beer, or to admire some pretty cool public art, and eventually we admitted to each other that we weren't ready to leave town and go live in the van again just yet. The Luxor is a big black pyramid with a beam of light emanating from its tip. Not as fancypants as NY:NY, and cheaper. We walked there, and noted the change in the style of the winnable vehicles in the casinos we passed through: the Audi and Mercedes cars of The Bellagio and The Venetian became Camaros and Corvettes, and then we were inside the gaudy Excalibur, where the cars gave way to custom choppers, and the crowds got even less stylish, which we frankly hadn't expected to be feasible. Our waitress at dinner had big tits that were barely contained by her exposed black lace bra, which; a) spoke volumes about the place we were in, and b) earned her an extra-good tip. The class downshift was even more evident in the show we went to: too worn-out to leave the Luxor we plumped for half-price tickets to the Criss Angel magic show, where we found a lowbrow crowd and a show that was big on crass humor and loud rap-rock, interspersed with some pretty cool magic tricks. The highlight was without question the lenticular poster for the show which featured a lovely white rabbit that bared some serious fangs as one walked past. Not for sale*, unfortunately.
We saw some people throwing down some big sums on gaming tables, but there were far more people pumping cash into bleeping, brightly-lit machines. We did too: Nene turned $1 into $40 on a Sabretooth at The Luxor, and a $10 payout from a Shark Attack at The Venetian saw us call "Time" on our gaming while we were ahead on the ledger**. A quick jaunt out into the streets saw us exploring a whole bunch more fantastic architecture, being astounded by opulence and by the apparent expense of the design options, and mildly nauseated by the insanity of adding layers of over-the-top Xmas decorations to the already overblown casino areas. We caught the fountain show at The Bellagio, which was ever-so-romantic, and wandered off hand-in-hand, past the homeless people and the fat tourists, back to the NY:NY parking garage and the Reaper, which harvested my sunglasses as I desecured the doors. Bastardo!
* = Of course, this being Vegas, it probably was for sale, for the right amount; it's just that the right amount was probably a first-born, or a soul, or something else above and beyond our ability or willingness to pay
** = Ahead assuming you're not counting accommodation and food costs, that is
More sights, sounds, and smells of Vegas. We win, then we leave.
Long Version:
There really were quite a lot of fat people in Las Vegas. Many of them were appallingly dressed (as were many of their skinny counterparts). I know I occasionally tuck my T-shirt in, but that's purely to irritate Janine. Really, it's an unacceptable choice, and especially when you're in your forties, you're a bit fat, it's a Harley Davidson T-shirt, and the jeans it's tucked into are from Wal-Mart and you're not wearing a belt. The men were even worse.
We breakfasted in a rainforest with an assortment of animatronic critters that don't coexist out in the outside world, then went and ogled the lion cubs at the MGM Grand. We tried to take photos of their butts up through the glass floor they were sitting on, but they seemed to know there were southern hemisphere perverts about, and several times moved away just before we pulled the trigger.
We wandered for hours among the chaos and carnage of the Strip, stopping every so often to drink $1 margaritas and free beer, or to admire some pretty cool public art, and eventually we admitted to each other that we weren't ready to leave town and go live in the van again just yet. The Luxor is a big black pyramid with a beam of light emanating from its tip. Not as fancypants as NY:NY, and cheaper. We walked there, and noted the change in the style of the winnable vehicles in the casinos we passed through: the Audi and Mercedes cars of The Bellagio and The Venetian became Camaros and Corvettes, and then we were inside the gaudy Excalibur, where the cars gave way to custom choppers, and the crowds got even less stylish, which we frankly hadn't expected to be feasible. Our waitress at dinner had big tits that were barely contained by her exposed black lace bra, which; a) spoke volumes about the place we were in, and b) earned her an extra-good tip. The class downshift was even more evident in the show we went to: too worn-out to leave the Luxor we plumped for half-price tickets to the Criss Angel magic show, where we found a lowbrow crowd and a show that was big on crass humor and loud rap-rock, interspersed with some pretty cool magic tricks. The highlight was without question the lenticular poster for the show which featured a lovely white rabbit that bared some serious fangs as one walked past. Not for sale*, unfortunately.
We saw some people throwing down some big sums on gaming tables, but there were far more people pumping cash into bleeping, brightly-lit machines. We did too: Nene turned $1 into $40 on a Sabretooth at The Luxor, and a $10 payout from a Shark Attack at The Venetian saw us call "Time" on our gaming while we were ahead on the ledger**. A quick jaunt out into the streets saw us exploring a whole bunch more fantastic architecture, being astounded by opulence and by the apparent expense of the design options, and mildly nauseated by the insanity of adding layers of over-the-top Xmas decorations to the already overblown casino areas. We caught the fountain show at The Bellagio, which was ever-so-romantic, and wandered off hand-in-hand, past the homeless people and the fat tourists, back to the NY:NY parking garage and the Reaper, which harvested my sunglasses as I desecured the doors. Bastardo!
* = Of course, this being Vegas, it probably was for sale, for the right amount; it's just that the right amount was probably a first-born, or a soul, or something else above and beyond our ability or willingness to pay
** = Ahead assuming you're not counting accommodation and food costs, that is
The Strip
Short Version:
Living high on the hog, we see a bunch of low-lifes and some high-class art and architecture
Long Version:
The transition from living in a van to a luxurious hotel with king bed and unlimited hot water was tough, but we managed. The purple corn chips with chipotle salsa helped, as did the fancypants Gnarly Head Zinfandel we were drinking. Leaving the room was kind of tough, but the madness of Las Vegas Boulevard was calling to us, with voices made of neon and excitement, so we put on our party frocks* and hit the Strip.
Things we saw on the Strip:
- Fat people
- Rappers
- Darth Vader and a TIE pilot
- Drunk people
- Enormous sculptures, of horses and mythological figures
- Elmo from Sesame Street
- Huge blown-glass things
- Spiderman
- Homeless people
- Sunglasses vendors
- People carrying plastic yard-glasses of artificially-coloured frozen margarita
- Batman
- Can-can girls
- Rednecks (aka meshbacks)
- Mexicans handing out business cards for hookers**
The hotel/casino complexes were pretty amazing:
- Paris, Paris and its Arc d'Triumph/Eiffel Tower/balloon adornments
- The Venetian/Palazzo, where the architecture of Venice has been brought to full-sized life, including canals and singing gondoliers, all indoors
- Caesar's Palace, where an entire city block has been transformed into an amalgam of ancient and modern Rome
- The Bellagio, Italian opulence di eccellenza
- The ultra-flash ultra-modern Vdara and Aria hotel/apartment complexes
No wonder Amerikans feel like they don't have to leave Amerika; Las Vegas provides replikas of the good bits of the rest of the world, conveniently packaged and without the inconveniences of international travel: no funny money; the people who can't speak Amerikan properly can be safely ignored; and no intrusive, privates-manipulating airport security searches.
The Treasure Island Hotel and Casino was a bit shit, but we went inside to the Cirque d'Soleil show Mystere, which was pretty excellent. The outdoor Siren's Cove musical performance was very much not so excellent. Indeed, it well and truly sucked. And the crowd was full of weird-looking drunken Russians or Belarussians or Bulgarians or whatever they were, all smoking revolting-smelling cigarettes and talking too loud. We went home to the 34th floor*** of New York New York, to the king bed and the endless shower, where we drank some more delicious wine before sleeping the sleep of the virtuous**** caught in the City of Sin.
* = Not literally
** = We collected hundreds***** and alphabetised them
*** = The floors were numbered 1, 2, 3, 30, 31... and on up from there. Not sure what happened to floors 4 through 29
**** = That's us, in case you were wondering
***** = Of business cards, not Mexicans.
Living high on the hog, we see a bunch of low-lifes and some high-class art and architecture
Long Version:
The transition from living in a van to a luxurious hotel with king bed and unlimited hot water was tough, but we managed. The purple corn chips with chipotle salsa helped, as did the fancypants Gnarly Head Zinfandel we were drinking. Leaving the room was kind of tough, but the madness of Las Vegas Boulevard was calling to us, with voices made of neon and excitement, so we put on our party frocks* and hit the Strip.
Things we saw on the Strip:
- Fat people
- Rappers
- Darth Vader and a TIE pilot
- Drunk people
- Enormous sculptures, of horses and mythological figures
- Elmo from Sesame Street
- Huge blown-glass things
- Spiderman
- Homeless people
- Sunglasses vendors
- People carrying plastic yard-glasses of artificially-coloured frozen margarita
- Batman
- Can-can girls
- Rednecks (aka meshbacks)
- Mexicans handing out business cards for hookers**
The hotel/casino complexes were pretty amazing:
- Paris, Paris and its Arc d'Triumph/Eiffel Tower/balloon adornments
- The Venetian/Palazzo, where the architecture of Venice has been brought to full-sized life, including canals and singing gondoliers, all indoors
- Caesar's Palace, where an entire city block has been transformed into an amalgam of ancient and modern Rome
- The Bellagio, Italian opulence di eccellenza
- The ultra-flash ultra-modern Vdara and Aria hotel/apartment complexes
No wonder Amerikans feel like they don't have to leave Amerika; Las Vegas provides replikas of the good bits of the rest of the world, conveniently packaged and without the inconveniences of international travel: no funny money; the people who can't speak Amerikan properly can be safely ignored; and no intrusive, privates-manipulating airport security searches.
The Treasure Island Hotel and Casino was a bit shit, but we went inside to the Cirque d'Soleil show Mystere, which was pretty excellent. The outdoor Siren's Cove musical performance was very much not so excellent. Indeed, it well and truly sucked. And the crowd was full of weird-looking drunken Russians or Belarussians or Bulgarians or whatever they were, all smoking revolting-smelling cigarettes and talking too loud. We went home to the 34th floor*** of New York New York, to the king bed and the endless shower, where we drank some more delicious wine before sleeping the sleep of the virtuous**** caught in the City of Sin.
* = Not literally
** = We collected hundreds***** and alphabetised them
*** = The floors were numbered 1, 2, 3, 30, 31... and on up from there. Not sure what happened to floors 4 through 29
**** = That's us, in case you were wondering
***** = Of business cards, not Mexicans.
The Wickedest Town in the West
Short Version:
We see some sights on the (long!) way to Las Vegas
Long Version:
Having found a better Sedona, with loads of awesome riding still to do and a bunch of interesting people, we didn't want to leave. Unfortunately we'd booked ourselves some Vegas action back when we weren't quite so enamoured of the place, so after a delicious farewell breakfast in Darch's uber-luxury RV we hit the road, north and east towards Nevada.
We didn't get very far; the first town we reached - it was called Cottonwood - soaked up a bunch of our time with its thrift stores and chore-enabling facilities. Some loud subnorms had an argument over a television at the local Goodwill store, and we met a man shopping on behalf of his broken-backed wife (she'd been pulled downwards and sideways by a rather strong patient in the hospital where she works as a nurse).
In the mountains to the west of Cottonwood we found ourselves wending our way up, and up, and then into and around the narrow streets of a little town called Jerome, once heralded as "the wickedest town in the West." Jerome was a mining town, contributing heavily during the back half of the 19th and front of the 20th centuries to Arizona's status as Amerika's leading copper producer. The town burnt down repeatedly during the late 1890's, and blasting (the intentional kind) in the mines at one point shook the town so hard that the local jail slid down the hillside. They had a bunch of mining disasters, including innumerable fires throughout the mines; one of them stayed alight for over twenty years. Nowadays it's a tourist-focussed town, with souvenir shops and art galleries galore, and a bunch of ghost-related stuff. And a wine-tasting cellar for the vineyard owned by Maynard James Keenan, lead singer of prog-rock band Tool.
We carried on, over the hills and far away. Far, far away. You'd think by now that we'd be used to the huge distances between things here in Amerika, but we're still being surprised at how long it takes to get from one place to another. In this instance, it was dusk when we started down into the Las Vegas basin, giving us seriously excellent views of the city lighting up for the night as the sun set behind the Spring Mountains to the west. The skyward beam from the tip of the black pyramid that is the Luxor was a great navigational beacon, and we made it to the nearby, mildly fancypants New York, New York hotel relatively unscathed by the chaos of the city's rush hour.
We ensconced the Reaper in the parking lot amid a wild assortment of luxury sports cars, then set off into the labyrinthine hotel/casino complex in search of the hotel registration desk. Which we found, but not before we saw an incredible assortment of people, and started to figure a few things out about Vegas:
- You can smoke wherever you like. Please do.
- There is no dress code.
- Fat is good.
We see some sights on the (long!) way to Las Vegas
Long Version:
Having found a better Sedona, with loads of awesome riding still to do and a bunch of interesting people, we didn't want to leave. Unfortunately we'd booked ourselves some Vegas action back when we weren't quite so enamoured of the place, so after a delicious farewell breakfast in Darch's uber-luxury RV we hit the road, north and east towards Nevada.
We didn't get very far; the first town we reached - it was called Cottonwood - soaked up a bunch of our time with its thrift stores and chore-enabling facilities. Some loud subnorms had an argument over a television at the local Goodwill store, and we met a man shopping on behalf of his broken-backed wife (she'd been pulled downwards and sideways by a rather strong patient in the hospital where she works as a nurse).
In the mountains to the west of Cottonwood we found ourselves wending our way up, and up, and then into and around the narrow streets of a little town called Jerome, once heralded as "the wickedest town in the West." Jerome was a mining town, contributing heavily during the back half of the 19th and front of the 20th centuries to Arizona's status as Amerika's leading copper producer. The town burnt down repeatedly during the late 1890's, and blasting (the intentional kind) in the mines at one point shook the town so hard that the local jail slid down the hillside. They had a bunch of mining disasters, including innumerable fires throughout the mines; one of them stayed alight for over twenty years. Nowadays it's a tourist-focussed town, with souvenir shops and art galleries galore, and a bunch of ghost-related stuff. And a wine-tasting cellar for the vineyard owned by Maynard James Keenan, lead singer of prog-rock band Tool.
We carried on, over the hills and far away. Far, far away. You'd think by now that we'd be used to the huge distances between things here in Amerika, but we're still being surprised at how long it takes to get from one place to another. In this instance, it was dusk when we started down into the Las Vegas basin, giving us seriously excellent views of the city lighting up for the night as the sun set behind the Spring Mountains to the west. The skyward beam from the tip of the black pyramid that is the Luxor was a great navigational beacon, and we made it to the nearby, mildly fancypants New York, New York hotel relatively unscathed by the chaos of the city's rush hour.
We ensconced the Reaper in the parking lot amid a wild assortment of luxury sports cars, then set off into the labyrinthine hotel/casino complex in search of the hotel registration desk. Which we found, but not before we saw an incredible assortment of people, and started to figure a few things out about Vegas:
- You can smoke wherever you like. Please do.
- There is no dress code.
- Fat is good.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Medicine Wheel
Short Version:
A great ride. We learn things.
Long Version:
Dragging ourselves out of bed wasn't easy, but was made much more palatable by the prospect of more illicit trail exploration. And we were rewarded once again by some fairly spectacular balloonrise action in the glorious morning sunshine.
We'd met Ogden* the Alaskan-Jewish Palinist Islamophile over delicous foods the night before, and set off on the bikes from his house late in the morning, in fine spirits and bound for parts unknown. Six hours later, we were back, eating delicious snacks and drinking beer in the hot tub. We figured we'd earned it, having hit slickrock and unslick rocks; soft sand and hard; water-sculpted stonescapes in the midst of the desert; derelict cabins; mesas and buttes; sidehills and steep rollovers and stacked ramps and spiky plants. For the second day in a row Nene nailed a steeply-sloping slickrock sidehill that took some of my skin when I failed to negotiate it appropriately, and for the second day in a row she rolled stuff that looked impassable, impressing the natives and scaring the few remaining bejeebers right out of me.
Picking highlights is a tough ask when the whole ride is that phenomenal, but it would be remiss of us to fail to mention at least a few things:
- The Medicine Wheel: The Doctor*, Renfrew* and Ogden were riding around and around this rock circle when I arrived. Each new arrival on the scene joined the carousel action, and once we were all present and accounted for we peeled off one by one. A seriously cool active way to regroup. And apparently we got luckier and younger each revolution we made, which is a pretty excellent bonus.
- The Steep Thing: It was steep.
- The Snooze: Most of us napped in the sun at the bottom of the steep thing while the Doctor and Ogden and Renfrew repaired trail damage back along the Mescal Mesa traverse. Someone had been performing trail sabotage since the folks last passed that way, and Renfrew's trail-blockage rock removals had become more and more vehement. We felt bad for not helping, but when it comes down to it we (I) would probably have been more hindrance than help. And snoozing in the sun was really, really nice.
- Darch Flies: Darch rides everything, almost always with aplomb, so hearing the tale of the tree-strike from the previous day was pretty special. Seeing him pitch over his handlebars on a minimal drop, with a tiny difficulty level was - once he'd picked himself up and proved he'd survived (relatively, and excepting dignity) unscathed - kind of cool.
- Felix*: Mrs Renfrew appeared about halfway around the Aerie Trail. She was riding solo as she wasn't feeling 100%, and that's borderline scary given how fast and how smooth she rode; not only named after a cat, but catlike in grace and power as well. Kind of like her husband, only with less beardness. And she had a shirt that said "Shit" on it.
- Ogden and the Prickly Pear: The stylish, graceful entirely intentional dismount that landed him on the spiky plant was impressive enough, but the several large chunks of bespined plant matter that then intertwined themselves with the frame of his bike made the whole episode just that little bit specialler.
- Xmas Wash: No, not the annual bathing escapade; rather, an occasional watercourse - dry now - that the hardcore (Ogden, Renfrew, The Doctor) and the stupid (me) rode instead of the fast flowing descent option taken by everyone with an ounce of sense. Right from the (steep, sketchy) get-go, this part of the ride shaped as trouble with a capital everything, and it didn't disappoint. I was inordinately pleased when the Doctor put a foot down, joining me in the Didn't Clear Xmas Wash (Today) Club. Of course, he still rode way more of the head-sized boulder-fields interspersed with evil soft sand than I managed, and we'll not go into how long Renfrew sat awaiting our arrival at the end of the Wash... It was seriously challenging, and bloody hard work, and ultimately really rewarding.
Special mention has to be made of the extreme man-love session partway through the Wash. And of the Lingerie Football League game that Ogden used as a teaching aid whilst instructing us in the joys of Amerikan Football. And politics. And Comparative Religion, the History of the Middle East, the Sociology and Geography of Alaska... This was our first opportunity to hear from the red side of Amerikan**, and we grabbed it with all of our ears.
By the time we left (late!), we were hammered, and learned, and pretty well worn out.
* = Names have been changed to protect the incredibly guilty
** = Those El Bizarro Amerikans have reversed the color scheme in use pretty much everywhere else, so areas controlled by or traditionally associated with their theoretically-left-leaning Democrat party are shaded blue on maps, while the more conservative Republikan party's domains are shaded red. This despite McCarthyism, Reds Under the Bed, all the antipathy towards the former Soviet Union and all their Communist allies, and the fact that they've had not just one Red Scare but two (The First, in 1919/1920 was about worker (socialist) revolution and political radicalism. The Second ran from 1947 to 1957, and was focused on (national and foreign) communists influencing society or infiltrating the federal government, or both)***
*** = Thanks, Wikipedia!
A great ride. We learn things.
Long Version:
Dragging ourselves out of bed wasn't easy, but was made much more palatable by the prospect of more illicit trail exploration. And we were rewarded once again by some fairly spectacular balloonrise action in the glorious morning sunshine.
We'd met Ogden* the Alaskan-Jewish Palinist Islamophile over delicous foods the night before, and set off on the bikes from his house late in the morning, in fine spirits and bound for parts unknown. Six hours later, we were back, eating delicious snacks and drinking beer in the hot tub. We figured we'd earned it, having hit slickrock and unslick rocks; soft sand and hard; water-sculpted stonescapes in the midst of the desert; derelict cabins; mesas and buttes; sidehills and steep rollovers and stacked ramps and spiky plants. For the second day in a row Nene nailed a steeply-sloping slickrock sidehill that took some of my skin when I failed to negotiate it appropriately, and for the second day in a row she rolled stuff that looked impassable, impressing the natives and scaring the few remaining bejeebers right out of me.
Picking highlights is a tough ask when the whole ride is that phenomenal, but it would be remiss of us to fail to mention at least a few things:
- The Medicine Wheel: The Doctor*, Renfrew* and Ogden were riding around and around this rock circle when I arrived. Each new arrival on the scene joined the carousel action, and once we were all present and accounted for we peeled off one by one. A seriously cool active way to regroup. And apparently we got luckier and younger each revolution we made, which is a pretty excellent bonus.
- The Steep Thing: It was steep.
- The Snooze: Most of us napped in the sun at the bottom of the steep thing while the Doctor and Ogden and Renfrew repaired trail damage back along the Mescal Mesa traverse. Someone had been performing trail sabotage since the folks last passed that way, and Renfrew's trail-blockage rock removals had become more and more vehement. We felt bad for not helping, but when it comes down to it we (I) would probably have been more hindrance than help. And snoozing in the sun was really, really nice.
- Darch Flies: Darch rides everything, almost always with aplomb, so hearing the tale of the tree-strike from the previous day was pretty special. Seeing him pitch over his handlebars on a minimal drop, with a tiny difficulty level was - once he'd picked himself up and proved he'd survived (relatively, and excepting dignity) unscathed - kind of cool.
- Felix*: Mrs Renfrew appeared about halfway around the Aerie Trail. She was riding solo as she wasn't feeling 100%, and that's borderline scary given how fast and how smooth she rode; not only named after a cat, but catlike in grace and power as well. Kind of like her husband, only with less beardness. And she had a shirt that said "Shit" on it.
- Ogden and the Prickly Pear: The stylish, graceful entirely intentional dismount that landed him on the spiky plant was impressive enough, but the several large chunks of bespined plant matter that then intertwined themselves with the frame of his bike made the whole episode just that little bit specialler.
- Xmas Wash: No, not the annual bathing escapade; rather, an occasional watercourse - dry now - that the hardcore (Ogden, Renfrew, The Doctor) and the stupid (me) rode instead of the fast flowing descent option taken by everyone with an ounce of sense. Right from the (steep, sketchy) get-go, this part of the ride shaped as trouble with a capital everything, and it didn't disappoint. I was inordinately pleased when the Doctor put a foot down, joining me in the Didn't Clear Xmas Wash (Today) Club. Of course, he still rode way more of the head-sized boulder-fields interspersed with evil soft sand than I managed, and we'll not go into how long Renfrew sat awaiting our arrival at the end of the Wash... It was seriously challenging, and bloody hard work, and ultimately really rewarding.
Special mention has to be made of the extreme man-love session partway through the Wash. And of the Lingerie Football League game that Ogden used as a teaching aid whilst instructing us in the joys of Amerikan Football. And politics. And Comparative Religion, the History of the Middle East, the Sociology and Geography of Alaska... This was our first opportunity to hear from the red side of Amerikan**, and we grabbed it with all of our ears.
By the time we left (late!), we were hammered, and learned, and pretty well worn out.
* = Names have been changed to protect the incredibly guilty
** = Those El Bizarro Amerikans have reversed the color scheme in use pretty much everywhere else, so areas controlled by or traditionally associated with their theoretically-left-leaning Democrat party are shaded blue on maps, while the more conservative Republikan party's domains are shaded red. This despite McCarthyism, Reds Under the Bed, all the antipathy towards the former Soviet Union and all their Communist allies, and the fact that they've had not just one Red Scare but two (The First, in 1919/1920 was about worker (socialist) revolution and political radicalism. The Second ran from 1947 to 1957, and was focused on (national and foreign) communists influencing society or infiltrating the federal government, or both)***
*** = Thanks, Wikipedia!
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
The Doctor Will See You Now
Short Version:
Right-wing agitators take us on a crime spree in and around Sedona
Long Version:
We were tetchy about the prospect of riding Sedona again after the over-populated underfunned first attempt, but we'd handed over actual moneys for a trail map, and there's snow in Northern California, so we figured we'd just grin and bear it for another day or two before hightailing it to Vegas and Boulder City for some luxury and some hardcore riding respectively. We certainly didn't expect to spend two days and nights riding the unmapped illegal Sedona trail network - hell, we didn't even know it existed!
We'd met Darch (Hi Darch!) at Gooseberry Mesa, and hooked up again when we arrived back in Sedona from Black Canyon. He'd been riding with the Doctor* and his crew for a couple of days, and they took us with them when they set off for Monday's ride, along with one of the other sets of Canadians we'd met at Gooseberry, Bruce and Ardelle, who we spied riding up the road we were being driven up in a truck. We'd finally managed to source brake pads for Nene, which was just as well given the ride: the aptly-named, mildly scary Hangover. When we'd mentioned the name to the guys at the bike shop** they'd said it was a) illegal and b) not very good. Turns out they were half-right: the Forest Service went so far as to send a crew of volunteers armed with wire-brushes to eradicate the painted bear-paw tracks that had been used to mark the trail. Now riders follow the wire-brush marks. We followed the Doctor up to a saddle, from where the trail drops down and across a rock face and into a narrow gap between wall and trees. Nene rode it with aplomb. I fell off and skinned my elbow. That was to be the pattern for us for the next two days.
Hangover is named for the series of rock overhangs beneath which the trail passes. The fear factor of the trail proper comes from the sheer drop on the downslope side of the trail, and the very real possibility of being shunted off by one's spare tyre or backpack whilst attempting to sneak by. We both survived, with some walkage, and then set off with a reduced group to ride some more of the awesomeness that is the semi- and illegal trail network which threads in and out of the legitimised, mapped system. We know where we went, in a general sort of way, but we'll probably not be leading any guided rides any time soon; there are more non-legit trails than there are mapped ones, they're not signposted, and some of them don't even have bike tyre marks: we carried our bikes on our shoulders in past visible range before remounting and setting off again. Once again, Nene rode incredibly; the only dismount she did was forced by me jumping off in front of her and blocking the trail. I wasn't quite so flash, to the extent that not only did I manage a pinch-flat from riding too fast and with not enough skill, but I didn't even fix it myself; I'd been chasing the incredibly fast, incredibly smooth-riding Canadian Renfrew* down the short downhill section of Baldwin that we hit when I flatted. By the time I had the bike upside-down and the wheel off, he had ridden back up, and before I quite knew what was going on he'd pulled the dead tube without using tyre-levers to get the tyre off, partially-inflated the new tube using his lungs, placed the new tube and re-seated the tyre, and inflated it using a compressed air canister he'd produced from somewhere. He handed the wheel back to me within a couple of minutes of the flat occurring, and I was so discombobulated that I said I was discombobulated, and then I had trouble putting my wheel back on. Impressive bastardo.
Back at the homestead, we took Baxter* up on her offer of showers, and it felt so incredibly good to be clean that we were near dancing on the table. In the interest of not getting kicked out of the house before we got a chance to eat delicious foods and talk with interesting peoples, we refrained.
* = Names have been changed to protect the incredibly guilty
** = Yes, that's the same guys at the bike shop that sent us off on Bell Rock and Templeton on a holiday(ish) weekend.
Right-wing agitators take us on a crime spree in and around Sedona
Long Version:
We were tetchy about the prospect of riding Sedona again after the over-populated underfunned first attempt, but we'd handed over actual moneys for a trail map, and there's snow in Northern California, so we figured we'd just grin and bear it for another day or two before hightailing it to Vegas and Boulder City for some luxury and some hardcore riding respectively. We certainly didn't expect to spend two days and nights riding the unmapped illegal Sedona trail network - hell, we didn't even know it existed!
We'd met Darch (Hi Darch!) at Gooseberry Mesa, and hooked up again when we arrived back in Sedona from Black Canyon. He'd been riding with the Doctor* and his crew for a couple of days, and they took us with them when they set off for Monday's ride, along with one of the other sets of Canadians we'd met at Gooseberry, Bruce and Ardelle, who we spied riding up the road we were being driven up in a truck. We'd finally managed to source brake pads for Nene, which was just as well given the ride: the aptly-named, mildly scary Hangover. When we'd mentioned the name to the guys at the bike shop** they'd said it was a) illegal and b) not very good. Turns out they were half-right: the Forest Service went so far as to send a crew of volunteers armed with wire-brushes to eradicate the painted bear-paw tracks that had been used to mark the trail. Now riders follow the wire-brush marks. We followed the Doctor up to a saddle, from where the trail drops down and across a rock face and into a narrow gap between wall and trees. Nene rode it with aplomb. I fell off and skinned my elbow. That was to be the pattern for us for the next two days.
Hangover is named for the series of rock overhangs beneath which the trail passes. The fear factor of the trail proper comes from the sheer drop on the downslope side of the trail, and the very real possibility of being shunted off by one's spare tyre or backpack whilst attempting to sneak by. We both survived, with some walkage, and then set off with a reduced group to ride some more of the awesomeness that is the semi- and illegal trail network which threads in and out of the legitimised, mapped system. We know where we went, in a general sort of way, but we'll probably not be leading any guided rides any time soon; there are more non-legit trails than there are mapped ones, they're not signposted, and some of them don't even have bike tyre marks: we carried our bikes on our shoulders in past visible range before remounting and setting off again. Once again, Nene rode incredibly; the only dismount she did was forced by me jumping off in front of her and blocking the trail. I wasn't quite so flash, to the extent that not only did I manage a pinch-flat from riding too fast and with not enough skill, but I didn't even fix it myself; I'd been chasing the incredibly fast, incredibly smooth-riding Canadian Renfrew* down the short downhill section of Baldwin that we hit when I flatted. By the time I had the bike upside-down and the wheel off, he had ridden back up, and before I quite knew what was going on he'd pulled the dead tube without using tyre-levers to get the tyre off, partially-inflated the new tube using his lungs, placed the new tube and re-seated the tyre, and inflated it using a compressed air canister he'd produced from somewhere. He handed the wheel back to me within a couple of minutes of the flat occurring, and I was so discombobulated that I said I was discombobulated, and then I had trouble putting my wheel back on. Impressive bastardo.
Back at the homestead, we took Baxter* up on her offer of showers, and it felt so incredibly good to be clean that we were near dancing on the table. In the interest of not getting kicked out of the house before we got a chance to eat delicious foods and talk with interesting peoples, we refrained.
* = Names have been changed to protect the incredibly guilty
** = Yes, that's the same guys at the bike shop that sent us off on Bell Rock and Templeton on a holiday(ish) weekend.
"I Suppose I Can't Blame It Entirely On the Lizard"
Short Version:
Guns in the sun, angry plants, a hard day's ride with real lizards, fried-egg sandwiches
Long Version:
Unfortunately for us, the same semi-official long weekend which had cluttered Sedona's inner trails with day-hikers and -bikers meant that the desert around the Black Canyon Trail's southern trailhead at Table Mesa was far from deserted. In fact, we managed to stumble into the midst not only of an ATV convention, with all the attendant glories of fat sweaty people who talk loud and laugh obnoxious laughter too often and too forcefully; but also a competitive target-shooting weekend outing. Knowing, as we do, that Arizona is gun central, we probably shouldn't have been surprised that an area of desert within an hour's drive of a major city in this firearms-mad state would be populated with shooters of all shapes and sizes, discharging weapons of all shapes and sizes, on a sunny Saturday afternoon on a long(ish) weekend... but we were.
Not as surprised as I was, though, not long after we found a spot not in anyone's firing line and not next to the fattest or greasiest-looking ATV crowds, when a cactus I walked past leaped out and attacked me. I was shocked, and mildly horrified, and in pain, and a wee bit scared, because I absolutely had not touched the vicious plant-like evildoer, and yet there was a big chunk of it attached to my leg with enormous, barbed spikes. It was the exact same type of cactus that had attacked me in the exact same manner down in the Baja, near the disembowelled dog on the outskirts of the horrible shitty city, only this bespiked menace seemed healthier. Maybe fat Amerikans are more nutritious than skinny Mexicanos. It took a while to get the thing off me, and the horror stayed with me afterwards, banished only when Nene managed to turn her butt into a pincushion for a prickly pear, which meant that I got so busy using tweezers and the last of the sunlight that I forgot to keep freaking out about the jumping nasties.
The assortment of weaponry which was being employed in our vicinity was staggering. Not only were we hearing the flat crack of rifles and the deep booming of shotguns, but also semi- and fully-automatic weapons, and an occasional huge bass thud that had us thinking of dynamite and mortars (and not the kind that have pestles as partners). The artillery cacophony carried on well after darkness fell but we figure that people must have gotten too drunk to reload because eventually the echoes of the last percussive reports faded, and we ended up getting one of the best nights' sleeps of the trip so far - maybe subconsciously figuring that no-one was going to be stupid enough to be messing with anyone else in a place where absolutely everybody was armed to the teeth and had spent most of the weekend brushing up on their targetting skills.
They started again early the next morning, but we were already up and about, and were riding not long afterwards; past the fat, greasy ATV crowd (who were just beginning to rouse after what had no doubt been a hard night of carousing with quality beverages and snack foods) and onto the trail. It turned out to be crowded on both sides by plants with spikes: the jumping ones, prickly pears, even cartoon-stereotype giant saguaros. Nene got scratched-up during an encounter with one of the evil kowhai relations, but had a scapelizard handy. Between the undulating terrain, the dry heat, and the mixed-bag of trail surfaces that included sketchy loose-over-hardpack and soft, wheel-eating fine sand, it was a hell of a hard work ride.
We'd both been fantasizing about the fried-egg sandwiches we were going to have when we made it back to the Reaper for a while by the time we saw the lizard. I thought I was hallucinating at first; it was too big, and far too pink-and-brown for unreserved believability. But Nene saw it too, and so did the camera, and then it hid in the bushes so we carried on, back to the trailhead, where we saw a man so fat that I almost rode into a cactus while staring at him, and then we cooked and ate fried-egg sandwiches, and they were really, really good.
Guns in the sun, angry plants, a hard day's ride with real lizards, fried-egg sandwiches
Long Version:
Unfortunately for us, the same semi-official long weekend which had cluttered Sedona's inner trails with day-hikers and -bikers meant that the desert around the Black Canyon Trail's southern trailhead at Table Mesa was far from deserted. In fact, we managed to stumble into the midst not only of an ATV convention, with all the attendant glories of fat sweaty people who talk loud and laugh obnoxious laughter too often and too forcefully; but also a competitive target-shooting weekend outing. Knowing, as we do, that Arizona is gun central, we probably shouldn't have been surprised that an area of desert within an hour's drive of a major city in this firearms-mad state would be populated with shooters of all shapes and sizes, discharging weapons of all shapes and sizes, on a sunny Saturday afternoon on a long(ish) weekend... but we were.
Not as surprised as I was, though, not long after we found a spot not in anyone's firing line and not next to the fattest or greasiest-looking ATV crowds, when a cactus I walked past leaped out and attacked me. I was shocked, and mildly horrified, and in pain, and a wee bit scared, because I absolutely had not touched the vicious plant-like evildoer, and yet there was a big chunk of it attached to my leg with enormous, barbed spikes. It was the exact same type of cactus that had attacked me in the exact same manner down in the Baja, near the disembowelled dog on the outskirts of the horrible shitty city, only this bespiked menace seemed healthier. Maybe fat Amerikans are more nutritious than skinny Mexicanos. It took a while to get the thing off me, and the horror stayed with me afterwards, banished only when Nene managed to turn her butt into a pincushion for a prickly pear, which meant that I got so busy using tweezers and the last of the sunlight that I forgot to keep freaking out about the jumping nasties.
The assortment of weaponry which was being employed in our vicinity was staggering. Not only were we hearing the flat crack of rifles and the deep booming of shotguns, but also semi- and fully-automatic weapons, and an occasional huge bass thud that had us thinking of dynamite and mortars (and not the kind that have pestles as partners). The artillery cacophony carried on well after darkness fell but we figure that people must have gotten too drunk to reload because eventually the echoes of the last percussive reports faded, and we ended up getting one of the best nights' sleeps of the trip so far - maybe subconsciously figuring that no-one was going to be stupid enough to be messing with anyone else in a place where absolutely everybody was armed to the teeth and had spent most of the weekend brushing up on their targetting skills.
They started again early the next morning, but we were already up and about, and were riding not long afterwards; past the fat, greasy ATV crowd (who were just beginning to rouse after what had no doubt been a hard night of carousing with quality beverages and snack foods) and onto the trail. It turned out to be crowded on both sides by plants with spikes: the jumping ones, prickly pears, even cartoon-stereotype giant saguaros. Nene got scratched-up during an encounter with one of the evil kowhai relations, but had a scapelizard handy. Between the undulating terrain, the dry heat, and the mixed-bag of trail surfaces that included sketchy loose-over-hardpack and soft, wheel-eating fine sand, it was a hell of a hard work ride.
We'd both been fantasizing about the fried-egg sandwiches we were going to have when we made it back to the Reaper for a while by the time we saw the lizard. I thought I was hallucinating at first; it was too big, and far too pink-and-brown for unreserved believability. But Nene saw it too, and so did the camera, and then it hid in the bushes so we carried on, back to the trailhead, where we saw a man so fat that I almost rode into a cactus while staring at him, and then we cooked and ate fried-egg sandwiches, and they were really, really good.
My, What a Big Fat Ass You Have...
Short Version:
Sedona: land of affluent tourism. And fat people.
Long Version:
Sedona, Arizona is a tourist town. A comfortably-affluent tourist town, with too many art galleries to count, a bunch of nice-looking restaurants and hotels, and a liquor store which houses a fine collection of bespoke handmade bottles of sage wine, pear brandy and old, theoretically wonderful tequilas. We bought dark, coffee-infused Hawaiian beer from the liquor store, and nothing from any of the galleries (although the huge stone bear looming massively outside one of them was pretty special). We did buy some brake pads and a map from one of the several local bike shops, and picked their brains extensively in pursuit of optimum local ride options.
We settled on a trail combo described by one of the bike shop guys as his favorite local ride, chatted a while with Kumeu locals Logan and Joy (Hi Logan and Joy!), and then set off up the road to the Bell Rock Path trailhead. Many, if not most of the trails we've found on this continent have been mixed-use, which is a definite contrast to NZ's trail systems. Most of the time it's not proved problematic, and we've been edging towards a belief that there really isn't that much need to keep varying recreational interests quite so comprehensively segregated. People have been almost unfailingly polite, and the biggest access issue we've struck thus far has been that comical situation where everyone is attempting to defer to everyone else, and no-one actually moves. This was true of the Bell Rock Path, and of the Templeton, Baldwin, Little Horse and Llama Trails as well, but the sheer volume of other trail users was nightmarish; it got to the point where it seemed like every time we got up some speed, or started to relax into the flow of the ride we ran into one or more groups of people, be they hikers in twos or fours or mores, or bikers on rental machines picking their way gingerly along the trail on foot or on wheels. A couple of times we nearly introduced ourselves vehemently to piles of bikes abandoned mid-trail while their temporary custodians took pictures of large red rocks and/or each other.
Pretty soon we were a-hating, although the downhill section on the Baldwin Loop was pretty cool, and the enormously (seriously, ENORMOUS) fat woman who fell on her enormously fat arse in the river just as we rode past was a definite highlight. The Llama Trails were less occluded and therefore more rideable, but by then we were tired and grouchy, so as soon as we made it back to the Reaper we left town and drove further south towards Phoenix, seeking the more remote ride of awesomeness the bike shop guys had spoken of: the Black Canyon Trail.
Sedona: land of affluent tourism. And fat people.
Long Version:
Sedona, Arizona is a tourist town. A comfortably-affluent tourist town, with too many art galleries to count, a bunch of nice-looking restaurants and hotels, and a liquor store which houses a fine collection of bespoke handmade bottles of sage wine, pear brandy and old, theoretically wonderful tequilas. We bought dark, coffee-infused Hawaiian beer from the liquor store, and nothing from any of the galleries (although the huge stone bear looming massively outside one of them was pretty special). We did buy some brake pads and a map from one of the several local bike shops, and picked their brains extensively in pursuit of optimum local ride options.
We settled on a trail combo described by one of the bike shop guys as his favorite local ride, chatted a while with Kumeu locals Logan and Joy (Hi Logan and Joy!), and then set off up the road to the Bell Rock Path trailhead. Many, if not most of the trails we've found on this continent have been mixed-use, which is a definite contrast to NZ's trail systems. Most of the time it's not proved problematic, and we've been edging towards a belief that there really isn't that much need to keep varying recreational interests quite so comprehensively segregated. People have been almost unfailingly polite, and the biggest access issue we've struck thus far has been that comical situation where everyone is attempting to defer to everyone else, and no-one actually moves. This was true of the Bell Rock Path, and of the Templeton, Baldwin, Little Horse and Llama Trails as well, but the sheer volume of other trail users was nightmarish; it got to the point where it seemed like every time we got up some speed, or started to relax into the flow of the ride we ran into one or more groups of people, be they hikers in twos or fours or mores, or bikers on rental machines picking their way gingerly along the trail on foot or on wheels. A couple of times we nearly introduced ourselves vehemently to piles of bikes abandoned mid-trail while their temporary custodians took pictures of large red rocks and/or each other.
Pretty soon we were a-hating, although the downhill section on the Baldwin Loop was pretty cool, and the enormously (seriously, ENORMOUS) fat woman who fell on her enormously fat arse in the river just as we rode past was a definite highlight. The Llama Trails were less occluded and therefore more rideable, but by then we were tired and grouchy, so as soon as we made it back to the Reaper we left town and drove further south towards Phoenix, seeking the more remote ride of awesomeness the bike shop guys had spoken of: the Black Canyon Trail.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
The Big Freeze
Short Version:
Cold. An aborted ride, re-ridden after caffeine. We leave town in search of warm.
Long Version:
Before we could ride, we needed caffeine and foods. Before we could make caffeiny goodness, we had to turn ice into water, and before we could do that we needed to get the stuff out of the bottle it was frozen inside. It took a while, but we got there eventually, and before long we were on the bikes, blasting down the road to the trailhead. Both of us were complaining about the cold, albeit with reference to differing body parts: Nene's fingers were frozen, and I had serious toe discomfort afoot. On the bright side, we had one fully-functional set of digits between us.
We stopped at the trailhead to try to warm the extremities, but it wasn't working so we gave up pretty quickly and set off up the Schultz Pass Trail. It was pretty nice riding, but it was cold. Really cold. We made slow, heavy going of what should have been an easy ride, and gave up after half an hour when it became apparent that hands and feet weren't getting any warmer, and that their iciness was making what should have been an extremely pleasant jaunt in the forest into a really unpleasant ordeal.
One warming cup of Macy's caffeiney goodness and some eggy deliciousness later we returned for a second attempt, and found the valley up which the Schultz Pass Trail runs much less chilled than it had been in the early morning. It still wasn't tropical though, and we were soon riding past patches of snow and ice-rimmed puddles. One downhill corner was so completely icy that I looked at it and thought: I wonder, if one went too fast and one's wheels slid out from under one, whether it would hurt more than usual when one hit the frozen ground.
The answer, apparently, was yes.
At Schultz Pass we hooked onto the Secret Trail, and from there across to Upper Moto. We tried to ride Anthony's Slutty Sister, but gave up and went back to Upper Moto, where we found a boulder field with lots of tricky technical stuff. Lower Moto was more open and flowing, and we got fast before we got finished. Only two and a half hours out, but the cold made it feel like more. Discussing the ride later we agreed that the trails, like the town, had reminded us a lot of Bend; a nice mix of technical and not; fast and flowing sections contrasting with tight, tricky bits.
We left, with peanut butter sandwiches, and drove through the scenic Oak Creek Canyon to Sedona and Oak Creek Village and a scrubby patch of desert south of town where we parked ourselves for the night.
Cold. An aborted ride, re-ridden after caffeine. We leave town in search of warm.
Long Version:
Before we could ride, we needed caffeine and foods. Before we could make caffeiny goodness, we had to turn ice into water, and before we could do that we needed to get the stuff out of the bottle it was frozen inside. It took a while, but we got there eventually, and before long we were on the bikes, blasting down the road to the trailhead. Both of us were complaining about the cold, albeit with reference to differing body parts: Nene's fingers were frozen, and I had serious toe discomfort afoot. On the bright side, we had one fully-functional set of digits between us.
We stopped at the trailhead to try to warm the extremities, but it wasn't working so we gave up pretty quickly and set off up the Schultz Pass Trail. It was pretty nice riding, but it was cold. Really cold. We made slow, heavy going of what should have been an easy ride, and gave up after half an hour when it became apparent that hands and feet weren't getting any warmer, and that their iciness was making what should have been an extremely pleasant jaunt in the forest into a really unpleasant ordeal.
One warming cup of Macy's caffeiney goodness and some eggy deliciousness later we returned for a second attempt, and found the valley up which the Schultz Pass Trail runs much less chilled than it had been in the early morning. It still wasn't tropical though, and we were soon riding past patches of snow and ice-rimmed puddles. One downhill corner was so completely icy that I looked at it and thought: I wonder, if one went too fast and one's wheels slid out from under one, whether it would hurt more than usual when one hit the frozen ground.
The answer, apparently, was yes.
At Schultz Pass we hooked onto the Secret Trail, and from there across to Upper Moto. We tried to ride Anthony's Slutty Sister, but gave up and went back to Upper Moto, where we found a boulder field with lots of tricky technical stuff. Lower Moto was more open and flowing, and we got fast before we got finished. Only two and a half hours out, but the cold made it feel like more. Discussing the ride later we agreed that the trails, like the town, had reminded us a lot of Bend; a nice mix of technical and not; fast and flowing sections contrasting with tight, tricky bits.
We left, with peanut butter sandwiches, and drove through the scenic Oak Creek Canyon to Sedona and Oak Creek Village and a scrubby patch of desert south of town where we parked ourselves for the night.
Coffee!
Short Version:
The Reaper harvests snow, a cold night and a colder morning. We find seriously good coffee and shitty decorative craft.
Long Version:
The snow that had been falling on us as we hiked up out of the Grand Canyon was unevil, mellow snowfall. It was kind of like being in one of those knick-knack snowstorm globe things after someone feeble has given it a gentle shake, and things are settling down agan after the mild turbulence. Up at the top it was a different story, and once we were a-Reapering at speed it was downright scary. Kind of neat though, especially the way the snow flew up past the windscreen without actually hitting it. It seemed very much like how hyperspace travel might manifest itself, should we ever crack that long-held dream tech, although the prospect of entering hyperspace in the Reaper is at least mildly bemusing.
It wasn't particularly warm, either.
We skipped the Visitor Centre and set off downhill, towards the I-40 and Flagstaff. The snow stopped as we dropped, and we had clear skies by the time we reached the fringes of the Kaibab National Forest, where we set up camp not next to the dead thing and slept the intermittent sleep of the not-warm-enough, waking to icy everything. Water bottles were frozen solid and shut, the tarp covering the bikes was a rigid sheet of white, and in the end it came down to a bladder-control contest to see who got fed breakfast in bed.
Once her ladyship had finished her repast and deigned to exit her down-filled coccoon into the chilly, sunny Thursday morning, we set off for Flagstaff, which appeared to be in the process of waking up. Counter-culture kids were everywhere, meandering about the place with hair of all colors and cuts and stages of mattedness. They seemed to be centred largely at a place called Macy's. It had wi-fi and a laundromat next door, so we decided to use our current bedraggledness to full advantage and infiltrate the joint.
Best coffee in North Amerika.
Better than the Back Porch Cafe in Bend. Better than... nope, there hasn't been anywhere else good. Seriously, coffee in Amerika is total pants. The stuff we make in our nifty stovetop espresso thing is umpteen times better than the filth that gets doled out at cafes and diners across the continent. It's so bad that Starbucks is actually not shit, comparatively speaking.
But not at Macy's, on Beaver St, in Flagstaff, Arizona, Amerika. The food was really good too: cheesy eggy goodness. The people-watching was excellent, interwebs were robust, and the only downside was the owner's or owner's spouse's or spawnlet's blithering shite arty photography plastered all over the walls. I will never regain the minutes I spent looking at the one in front of me while Nene booked us a Vegas hotel; they are lost forever, burned wastefully on a piece of pretentious craft masquerading as art. That last bit is a flaw with photography in general, not with Mr. Macy's stuff in particular. Mr. Macy just added a personal crime against discerning humanity by posing subjects abysmally, tritely, and phonily. Horrible.
60% of the Australo-British Grand Canyon band put in an appearance; they'd managed to espy a cougar in the snow as they left the Park the previous day. We were jealous. We weren't jealous of their next mission, though: a Greyhound bus trip. We went thrift-store shopping. All over town. Didn't buy much, though; everything was, again, just not-quite. Nene bought a hat. The beer and the food at the Flagstaff Brewing Co were excellent, and it was a happy pair who hooked off into the woods and camped up the road from the trailhead from which we were to ride the next morning, although the evening was ominously chilly...
The Reaper harvests snow, a cold night and a colder morning. We find seriously good coffee and shitty decorative craft.
Long Version:
The snow that had been falling on us as we hiked up out of the Grand Canyon was unevil, mellow snowfall. It was kind of like being in one of those knick-knack snowstorm globe things after someone feeble has given it a gentle shake, and things are settling down agan after the mild turbulence. Up at the top it was a different story, and once we were a-Reapering at speed it was downright scary. Kind of neat though, especially the way the snow flew up past the windscreen without actually hitting it. It seemed very much like how hyperspace travel might manifest itself, should we ever crack that long-held dream tech, although the prospect of entering hyperspace in the Reaper is at least mildly bemusing.
It wasn't particularly warm, either.
We skipped the Visitor Centre and set off downhill, towards the I-40 and Flagstaff. The snow stopped as we dropped, and we had clear skies by the time we reached the fringes of the Kaibab National Forest, where we set up camp not next to the dead thing and slept the intermittent sleep of the not-warm-enough, waking to icy everything. Water bottles were frozen solid and shut, the tarp covering the bikes was a rigid sheet of white, and in the end it came down to a bladder-control contest to see who got fed breakfast in bed.
Once her ladyship had finished her repast and deigned to exit her down-filled coccoon into the chilly, sunny Thursday morning, we set off for Flagstaff, which appeared to be in the process of waking up. Counter-culture kids were everywhere, meandering about the place with hair of all colors and cuts and stages of mattedness. They seemed to be centred largely at a place called Macy's. It had wi-fi and a laundromat next door, so we decided to use our current bedraggledness to full advantage and infiltrate the joint.
Best coffee in North Amerika.
Better than the Back Porch Cafe in Bend. Better than... nope, there hasn't been anywhere else good. Seriously, coffee in Amerika is total pants. The stuff we make in our nifty stovetop espresso thing is umpteen times better than the filth that gets doled out at cafes and diners across the continent. It's so bad that Starbucks is actually not shit, comparatively speaking.
But not at Macy's, on Beaver St, in Flagstaff, Arizona, Amerika. The food was really good too: cheesy eggy goodness. The people-watching was excellent, interwebs were robust, and the only downside was the owner's or owner's spouse's or spawnlet's blithering shite arty photography plastered all over the walls. I will never regain the minutes I spent looking at the one in front of me while Nene booked us a Vegas hotel; they are lost forever, burned wastefully on a piece of pretentious craft masquerading as art. That last bit is a flaw with photography in general, not with Mr. Macy's stuff in particular. Mr. Macy just added a personal crime against discerning humanity by posing subjects abysmally, tritely, and phonily. Horrible.
60% of the Australo-British Grand Canyon band put in an appearance; they'd managed to espy a cougar in the snow as they left the Park the previous day. We were jealous. We weren't jealous of their next mission, though: a Greyhound bus trip. We went thrift-store shopping. All over town. Didn't buy much, though; everything was, again, just not-quite. Nene bought a hat. The beer and the food at the Flagstaff Brewing Co were excellent, and it was a happy pair who hooked off into the woods and camped up the road from the trailhead from which we were to ride the next morning, although the evening was ominously chilly...
The Grand Canyon. It's Quite Grand.
Short Version:
Mormon knowledge, a walk in a bloody big ditch. A band that wasn't, a crippled meatophile, color-coded geological history, snow. And it's all OCD-friendly!
Long Version:
Neither of us had heard of Pipe Springs National Monument, but we were passing, and had a pass, so we stopped. We were glad we had, because we learned more about the Mormons (in whose State we'd been frolicking for the past month) in an hour than we had in all the time we spent in Utah*. My favorite thing was the revolving shelving unit; Nene liked the horse. I didn't get to feed a peppermint to the shelving unit though. There were Texas Longhorn cattle in a pen (they have long horns) and some seriously crazy ducks in the tree-lined pond, and then there was cheap gas at the Indian-owned station and we were off again, through Fredonia and Kanab and on into Page, where we ate uninspiring fast-food burritos sold to us by an incredibly enthusiastic young chap with quite bad skin.
Weird stuff had been happening on the road, with several mouse-like critters attempting crossings with varying degrees of success. The chaos ratcheted up a notch just after Antelope Pass when a pickup pulled out in front of us as we blasted along at just under the 65mph speed limit. We managed to not die, then disappeared off into the Kaibab National Forest to camp in a grove of somewhat bedraggled trees, with a planned early start for Grand Canyon day.
And an early start it was, although "early" is not the thing it'll be remembered for: it was COLD! Frozen windows and water-bottles.
The watch-tower at the Desert View Lookout hadn't opened for the day before we moved on to the next spot, and it was still chilly as we wandered aroud the ruined Indian village. Eventually we found a lookout with sun, and with minimal wind, and we breakfasted while looking out over what really is an amazing spectacle. Pictures don't do the place justice. The canyon is absolutely immense: it averages ten miles across and is over a mile deep in places, and the rocks in the lower reaches have been dated as being over 1800-million years old. They're dark grey. The geological history of the place is exposed in the cliff walls, and color-coded for your convenience: a band of cream amongst the orange here; a series of dark stripes a few hundred feet lower; a giant green shelf halfway down where harder rock has arrested the effects of erosion and has been colonised by hardy scrub.
We weren't the only early risers already on the move; others included:
- The Amerikan couple who emigrated to Williams Lake (for goodness' sake, why?). They were turned away at the US border last time they came back for a visit because they had their pet cockatoo with them.
- The Anglo-Amerikan couple from North Carolina. He spent twelve years and fifty-thousand dollars jumping through immigration hoops in pursuit of US citizenship. They told us about the Horseshoe Mesa hike, a few stops further along the way, and said that they'd been told it was worth exploring.
Having now done the Horseshoe Mesa hike, we concur.
There was an incredible amount of signage at the top of the trail, much of it safety-oriented, and geared towards making people not die as a result of heat- or water-related issues. We had plenty of water, and the chill wind was still blowing so we had our packs full not only with delicious foods but also with numerous hard-weather garments.
We set off at 11:11, down a steep and sketchy path. It got steeper and sketchier. We met a group of men on their way out from a multi-day trip. From all across the southern States of the US, they've been doing an annual hiking trip for thirty years. We told them they should come hike in NZ. We also met some interesting folks from non-Chicago Illinois (I never knew there was anything else there), and then we met the not-band.
Two Australians and three Brits, dressed in an assortment of styles appropriate for pretty much any urban setting you could name. They didn't look very much like hikers, but did look very much like a British band out filming a video, albeit one that's several hours long and doesn't change much. As one of the Australians said when it was mentioned, they must be a prog rock band.
We hiked about halfway down into the canyon, past the orange and the cream and the brown sections, and the light grey and the crimson-and-yellow. Not long after the translucent green, we were on the flat, and making our way out along the western arm of Horseshoe Mesa to the end, where we found wonderful, awe-inspiring views in all directions, including not only along and along, but also up and down. And then we got to walk back up.
As we'd hiked down, we'd turned occasionally and looked back up at what we'd clambered down. It looked cool. Once we'd turned at our end point and started walking back up, though, it no longer looked quite so excellent; it looked, more than anything, like a bloody hard slog waiting to be done. The path was visible only very occasionally, but what was plain at all times was that it went up. And up. And up. The signs at the top had told us to budget 2-3 times as long to do the return climb as we spent hiking down, which meant we were looking at 4-6 hours of climbing. Yikes.
Then it started to snow.
Then we met the carnivore. He was haranguing the Australians about being anemic because of their vegetarianism. He was bemused when told that we were vego also: "But you have color in your cheeks!" he cried. He was then left far behind on the climb up out of the canyon; a fact which was originally upheld as exemplarising the power of eggplant, but which we suspect may actually have had something to do with the fact that he was mildly twisted, physically speaking, and incapable of striding or even scuttling with any great speed. Didn't stop him yelling "MEAT!" at us every time he caught sight of us as we made our way up through the switchbacks on the steepest part of the climb. We yelled "BEANS!" back at him.
The more obsessive-compulsive among you will be pleased to note that, having set off at 11:11, it took us 2 hours and 22 minutes to get to the end of the western arm of Horseshoe Mesa, and we arrived back at the van at 16:11, exactly five hours after we left. In addition, our last gasoline purchase, back on the Paiute Indian Reservation at Pipe Springs, was $55.55. Feel better now?
* = Apparently the Mormon Church wanted to call the state Deseret, which may or may not have a meaning to do with honeybees of some sort, but the Federal Government, which didn't like the Mormons much at all, overruled them and named it Utah after the Ute Indians who'd lived there before the polygamists moved in
Mormon knowledge, a walk in a bloody big ditch. A band that wasn't, a crippled meatophile, color-coded geological history, snow. And it's all OCD-friendly!
Long Version:
Neither of us had heard of Pipe Springs National Monument, but we were passing, and had a pass, so we stopped. We were glad we had, because we learned more about the Mormons (in whose State we'd been frolicking for the past month) in an hour than we had in all the time we spent in Utah*. My favorite thing was the revolving shelving unit; Nene liked the horse. I didn't get to feed a peppermint to the shelving unit though. There were Texas Longhorn cattle in a pen (they have long horns) and some seriously crazy ducks in the tree-lined pond, and then there was cheap gas at the Indian-owned station and we were off again, through Fredonia and Kanab and on into Page, where we ate uninspiring fast-food burritos sold to us by an incredibly enthusiastic young chap with quite bad skin.
Weird stuff had been happening on the road, with several mouse-like critters attempting crossings with varying degrees of success. The chaos ratcheted up a notch just after Antelope Pass when a pickup pulled out in front of us as we blasted along at just under the 65mph speed limit. We managed to not die, then disappeared off into the Kaibab National Forest to camp in a grove of somewhat bedraggled trees, with a planned early start for Grand Canyon day.
And an early start it was, although "early" is not the thing it'll be remembered for: it was COLD! Frozen windows and water-bottles.
The watch-tower at the Desert View Lookout hadn't opened for the day before we moved on to the next spot, and it was still chilly as we wandered aroud the ruined Indian village. Eventually we found a lookout with sun, and with minimal wind, and we breakfasted while looking out over what really is an amazing spectacle. Pictures don't do the place justice. The canyon is absolutely immense: it averages ten miles across and is over a mile deep in places, and the rocks in the lower reaches have been dated as being over 1800-million years old. They're dark grey. The geological history of the place is exposed in the cliff walls, and color-coded for your convenience: a band of cream amongst the orange here; a series of dark stripes a few hundred feet lower; a giant green shelf halfway down where harder rock has arrested the effects of erosion and has been colonised by hardy scrub.
We weren't the only early risers already on the move; others included:
- The Amerikan couple who emigrated to Williams Lake (for goodness' sake, why?). They were turned away at the US border last time they came back for a visit because they had their pet cockatoo with them.
- The Anglo-Amerikan couple from North Carolina. He spent twelve years and fifty-thousand dollars jumping through immigration hoops in pursuit of US citizenship. They told us about the Horseshoe Mesa hike, a few stops further along the way, and said that they'd been told it was worth exploring.
Having now done the Horseshoe Mesa hike, we concur.
There was an incredible amount of signage at the top of the trail, much of it safety-oriented, and geared towards making people not die as a result of heat- or water-related issues. We had plenty of water, and the chill wind was still blowing so we had our packs full not only with delicious foods but also with numerous hard-weather garments.
We set off at 11:11, down a steep and sketchy path. It got steeper and sketchier. We met a group of men on their way out from a multi-day trip. From all across the southern States of the US, they've been doing an annual hiking trip for thirty years. We told them they should come hike in NZ. We also met some interesting folks from non-Chicago Illinois (I never knew there was anything else there), and then we met the not-band.
Two Australians and three Brits, dressed in an assortment of styles appropriate for pretty much any urban setting you could name. They didn't look very much like hikers, but did look very much like a British band out filming a video, albeit one that's several hours long and doesn't change much. As one of the Australians said when it was mentioned, they must be a prog rock band.
We hiked about halfway down into the canyon, past the orange and the cream and the brown sections, and the light grey and the crimson-and-yellow. Not long after the translucent green, we were on the flat, and making our way out along the western arm of Horseshoe Mesa to the end, where we found wonderful, awe-inspiring views in all directions, including not only along and along, but also up and down. And then we got to walk back up.
As we'd hiked down, we'd turned occasionally and looked back up at what we'd clambered down. It looked cool. Once we'd turned at our end point and started walking back up, though, it no longer looked quite so excellent; it looked, more than anything, like a bloody hard slog waiting to be done. The path was visible only very occasionally, but what was plain at all times was that it went up. And up. And up. The signs at the top had told us to budget 2-3 times as long to do the return climb as we spent hiking down, which meant we were looking at 4-6 hours of climbing. Yikes.
Then it started to snow.
Then we met the carnivore. He was haranguing the Australians about being anemic because of their vegetarianism. He was bemused when told that we were vego also: "But you have color in your cheeks!" he cried. He was then left far behind on the climb up out of the canyon; a fact which was originally upheld as exemplarising the power of eggplant, but which we suspect may actually have had something to do with the fact that he was mildly twisted, physically speaking, and incapable of striding or even scuttling with any great speed. Didn't stop him yelling "MEAT!" at us every time he caught sight of us as we made our way up through the switchbacks on the steepest part of the climb. We yelled "BEANS!" back at him.
The more obsessive-compulsive among you will be pleased to note that, having set off at 11:11, it took us 2 hours and 22 minutes to get to the end of the western arm of Horseshoe Mesa, and we arrived back at the van at 16:11, exactly five hours after we left. In addition, our last gasoline purchase, back on the Paiute Indian Reservation at Pipe Springs, was $55.55. Feel better now?
* = Apparently the Mormon Church wanted to call the state Deseret, which may or may not have a meaning to do with honeybees of some sort, but the Federal Government, which didn't like the Mormons much at all, overruled them and named it Utah after the Ute Indians who'd lived there before the polygamists moved in
Gooseberry
Short Version:
Hard rain, hard ride. Hard, awesome ride. With hard rocks to land on, and cacti without spikes. Lovely stuff.
Long Version:
Cold. Rain overnight, and we could see more coming. When it arrived, we discovered that some of it was hail.
We rode anyway: South Rim Trail, Cattle Guard and God's Skateboard Bowl sections; Hidden Canyon; North Rim Trail; White and Yellow Trails to the Point; South Rim Rattlesnake section; Hidden Canyon; North Rim and White back to camp. No idea how much ground we covered, and all the backtracking and re-riding we did means that working it out would be onerous. We were out for just over five hours, and pretty much all of it was demanding, rewarding, difficult technical riding. A lot of it followed the edge of a more-or-less long-way-down cliff, which was occasionally scary. We were pleased that the strong, gusty wind was coming up over the rim, pushing us away from the edge instead of towards or over it. One of us (not Nene) face-planted on some rocks at one point - ironically, on the easier-than-most North Rim Trail. We both rode stuff we didn't know we could ride, had a bunch of fun, and ended up blimmin tired, and really really happy after some of the best riding we'd found on the trip to date. We'd seen heaps of prickly-pears, including many carrying startling crimson fruit and some with no prickles (unprickly pears? smooth pears? nubby pears?). We also met lots of Canadians, including a bloke from Merritt, a woman from Canmore and one from Golden, and two chaps from Victoria, including the business partner of one of the guys with whom we rode the Mckenzie River Trail back in June. Small, small world.
The trails were great, so we stayed the night and rode again in the morning. Tentative arrangements to meet some of the Canadians in the morning were thwarted, at least temporarily, by the end of Daylight Savings - no wonder I was grouchy; I got up at six! - but we did eventually hook up with Merritt Darch for an hour or so towards the end of the three and a half hours we were out. We re-rode some of the stuff we'd ridden the day before, and some new stuff, including an easy roll out to a derelict windmill and back. The wind was substantially weaker than the day before, and the sun was shining. Hidden Canyon the opposite direction was awesome, as was God's Skateboard Bowl. We met another set of Canadians, then ate reconstituted mashed potato mixed with tinned sweetcorn back at the van before setting off south and east into Arizona, home of the Grand Canyon.
Hard rain, hard ride. Hard, awesome ride. With hard rocks to land on, and cacti without spikes. Lovely stuff.
Long Version:
Cold. Rain overnight, and we could see more coming. When it arrived, we discovered that some of it was hail.
We rode anyway: South Rim Trail, Cattle Guard and God's Skateboard Bowl sections; Hidden Canyon; North Rim Trail; White and Yellow Trails to the Point; South Rim Rattlesnake section; Hidden Canyon; North Rim and White back to camp. No idea how much ground we covered, and all the backtracking and re-riding we did means that working it out would be onerous. We were out for just over five hours, and pretty much all of it was demanding, rewarding, difficult technical riding. A lot of it followed the edge of a more-or-less long-way-down cliff, which was occasionally scary. We were pleased that the strong, gusty wind was coming up over the rim, pushing us away from the edge instead of towards or over it. One of us (not Nene) face-planted on some rocks at one point - ironically, on the easier-than-most North Rim Trail. We both rode stuff we didn't know we could ride, had a bunch of fun, and ended up blimmin tired, and really really happy after some of the best riding we'd found on the trip to date. We'd seen heaps of prickly-pears, including many carrying startling crimson fruit and some with no prickles (unprickly pears? smooth pears? nubby pears?). We also met lots of Canadians, including a bloke from Merritt, a woman from Canmore and one from Golden, and two chaps from Victoria, including the business partner of one of the guys with whom we rode the Mckenzie River Trail back in June. Small, small world.
The trails were great, so we stayed the night and rode again in the morning. Tentative arrangements to meet some of the Canadians in the morning were thwarted, at least temporarily, by the end of Daylight Savings - no wonder I was grouchy; I got up at six! - but we did eventually hook up with Merritt Darch for an hour or so towards the end of the three and a half hours we were out. We re-rode some of the stuff we'd ridden the day before, and some new stuff, including an easy roll out to a derelict windmill and back. The wind was substantially weaker than the day before, and the sun was shining. Hidden Canyon the opposite direction was awesome, as was God's Skateboard Bowl. We met another set of Canadians, then ate reconstituted mashed potato mixed with tinned sweetcorn back at the van before setting off south and east into Arizona, home of the Grand Canyon.
Huge, Variously-Colored Monoliths
Short Version:
We are a blockage! Huge, variously-colored monoliths.
Long Version:
We're getting our money's worth from our US National Parks Annual InterAgency Pass: Yellowstone; Grand Teton; Fossil; Arches; Bryce Canyon; and now, just down the road from the Thunder Mountain Trail, Zion. We spent enough time chatting to the chatty Ranger lady at the entrance that:
- We found out what we should see and do in the Park
- We found out how to get from there to our next actual destination, Gooseberry Mesa ("I'll tell you so long as you don't tell anyone else about it.")
- We caused a entrance gate queue to form from nothing and grow to at least six vehicles. Ha ha! [shakes fist] Did you feel that, vehicles?!?!?
Once into the Park proper, we found awesome things to look at on all sides; huge, variously-colored monoliths, looming to our left and our right. We spent so much time driving on the wrong side of the road that it was like being back in NZ, only with huge, variously-colored monoliths all over the place. Eventually we got a bit tired of all the adrenaline that we were getting from all the near-miss head-on incidents, and decided that maybe Nene should look at the cool stuff and I should make us not die. Then we reached the tunnel.
We've driven through tunnels before, in several countries and in a variety of vehicles, but we've not seen anything like this one before. It had corners, for a start. And viewing portals, through which one could see out through the cliff wall and across the ravine to whatever huge, variously-colored monoliths happened to be in line with the window. There were signs all over the place demanding that we refrain from stopping in the tunnel, and we obeyed them mercilessly. A bit. Not at all.
Pretty soon we were at the main canyon, where we joined the other vehicles - including several tandem bicycles, which all seemed to have a bloke at the front, pedalling hard, and a woman perched on the back, sitting up and smiling and looking around and taking photographs - driving from viewing spot to viewing spot up into the gorge. The huge, variously-colored monoliths were spectacular, and often bore little or no resemblance to even their closest neighbours in either size, shape, or color. Pointed red peaks stood shoulder-to-shoulder with rounded, bulbous cream entities; mottled red-and-black behemoths towered over narrow burnt-orange fingers. Threaded through it all were trees exhibiting a similar variety of hue in their leaves; colors from the vivid green of baby crocodiles to the red-brown of dried blood, and hit every shade of yello and orange along the way.
A stop at the Visitor Centre yielded encounters with stupid people, 3-dimensional topographic represeantations of the Park and its huge, variously-colored monoliths, and some rather nifty architectural features. But no internets, so it was off to the Publc Library we toddled! Apart from the fact that we didn't know where it was, and had so far overshot it by the time we stopped for a small amount of overpriced gasoline that we decided to just go play up on the Mesa instead.
Ranger lady had told us that rain was forecast for the morning, and that if it did come we should stay up there rather than trying to make it back down the access road, which she said was dangerous when wet. Turns out it was pretty gnarly when dry too, but the Reaper handled it with aplomb, even passing another vehicle on the way up. Admittedly it was a 1974 Mercedes UniMog which had been painted yellow and stuffed full of tourists, but it was still an uphill passing success. Once at the top we still had several miles of shitty dirt/rock road to negotiate to get to the trailhead, and to an excellent campsite, fifty metres away from the start of the infamous Gooseberry Mesa Trails. With views of the now-distant huge, variously-colored monoliths.
We are a blockage! Huge, variously-colored monoliths.
Long Version:
We're getting our money's worth from our US National Parks Annual InterAgency Pass: Yellowstone; Grand Teton; Fossil; Arches; Bryce Canyon; and now, just down the road from the Thunder Mountain Trail, Zion. We spent enough time chatting to the chatty Ranger lady at the entrance that:
- We found out what we should see and do in the Park
- We found out how to get from there to our next actual destination, Gooseberry Mesa ("I'll tell you so long as you don't tell anyone else about it.")
- We caused a entrance gate queue to form from nothing and grow to at least six vehicles. Ha ha! [shakes fist] Did you feel that, vehicles?!?!?
Once into the Park proper, we found awesome things to look at on all sides; huge, variously-colored monoliths, looming to our left and our right. We spent so much time driving on the wrong side of the road that it was like being back in NZ, only with huge, variously-colored monoliths all over the place. Eventually we got a bit tired of all the adrenaline that we were getting from all the near-miss head-on incidents, and decided that maybe Nene should look at the cool stuff and I should make us not die. Then we reached the tunnel.
We've driven through tunnels before, in several countries and in a variety of vehicles, but we've not seen anything like this one before. It had corners, for a start. And viewing portals, through which one could see out through the cliff wall and across the ravine to whatever huge, variously-colored monoliths happened to be in line with the window. There were signs all over the place demanding that we refrain from stopping in the tunnel, and we obeyed them mercilessly. A bit. Not at all.
Pretty soon we were at the main canyon, where we joined the other vehicles - including several tandem bicycles, which all seemed to have a bloke at the front, pedalling hard, and a woman perched on the back, sitting up and smiling and looking around and taking photographs - driving from viewing spot to viewing spot up into the gorge. The huge, variously-colored monoliths were spectacular, and often bore little or no resemblance to even their closest neighbours in either size, shape, or color. Pointed red peaks stood shoulder-to-shoulder with rounded, bulbous cream entities; mottled red-and-black behemoths towered over narrow burnt-orange fingers. Threaded through it all were trees exhibiting a similar variety of hue in their leaves; colors from the vivid green of baby crocodiles to the red-brown of dried blood, and hit every shade of yello and orange along the way.
A stop at the Visitor Centre yielded encounters with stupid people, 3-dimensional topographic represeantations of the Park and its huge, variously-colored monoliths, and some rather nifty architectural features. But no internets, so it was off to the Publc Library we toddled! Apart from the fact that we didn't know where it was, and had so far overshot it by the time we stopped for a small amount of overpriced gasoline that we decided to just go play up on the Mesa instead.
Ranger lady had told us that rain was forecast for the morning, and that if it did come we should stay up there rather than trying to make it back down the access road, which she said was dangerous when wet. Turns out it was pretty gnarly when dry too, but the Reaper handled it with aplomb, even passing another vehicle on the way up. Admittedly it was a 1974 Mercedes UniMog which had been painted yellow and stuffed full of tourists, but it was still an uphill passing success. Once at the top we still had several miles of shitty dirt/rock road to negotiate to get to the trailhead, and to an excellent campsite, fifty metres away from the start of the infamous Gooseberry Mesa Trails. With views of the now-distant huge, variously-colored monoliths.
Thunder Mountain (is Good)
Short Version:
Outlaws, #113, snow, hoodoos.
Long Version:
We'd heard some great things about the Thunder Mountain Trail, both from people we've met and from faceless anonymities on the interwebs. We did a minor navigation fail before we even arrived, and camped at the wrong trailhead, but given that camping was disallowed at either location and the "right" trailhead was right next to the Ranger Station, our fail was probably actually an accidental win. And the place we camped was once the hideout of famous outlaw Butch Cassidy, which is pretty cool.
We set off up the paved Red Canyon cycleway to the top end of the canyon, then bailed into the woods on the #113 Road, although not without some debate over whether the #112 Road on the other side of the highway was actually the one we were seeking. Victory for the #113, and then not far past the Horse Camp we hit the Coyote Hollow Trailhead, which heralded the advent of singletrack. Not all downhill though; the first half hour or so was a series of descents into lateral ravines, each followed by a climb back out the other side. Nene managed to flat on the way in to the deepest one, which had snow still covering the ground in the shadowed sections; we figured the tiny rain we'd had overnight down low had translated to some snowfall up higher.
Satisfactorily unflatted we set off again, and found ourselves climbing onto a ridgeline that afforded some pretty stunning views down into Red Canyon and several subsidiaries; there were Hoodoos galore, and if we hadn't seen a bunch of them already at Bryce Canyon we'd've been totally gobsmacked. As it was, they were still well cool, but there was a chill wind blowing across the exposed ridge, so we carried on, dropping down a series of loose-surfaced switchbacks into Red Rock Canyon, where we found scenic variants on what we'd appreciated from above, along with a few technical ride challenges, although most of that came from the surprise factor of high-speed post-corner feature discovery. The last mile and a half out to the road was flatter and smoother - except for the washes where there'd been some obvious recent flash-flood action - and we hit some extreme speeds before popping out of the side-canyon mouth and back onto the paved trail for the last mile and a half back up to the Reaper. Two hours well spent, and we could see why folks from all over had been complimentary.
Outlaws, #113, snow, hoodoos.
Long Version:
We'd heard some great things about the Thunder Mountain Trail, both from people we've met and from faceless anonymities on the interwebs. We did a minor navigation fail before we even arrived, and camped at the wrong trailhead, but given that camping was disallowed at either location and the "right" trailhead was right next to the Ranger Station, our fail was probably actually an accidental win. And the place we camped was once the hideout of famous outlaw Butch Cassidy, which is pretty cool.
We set off up the paved Red Canyon cycleway to the top end of the canyon, then bailed into the woods on the #113 Road, although not without some debate over whether the #112 Road on the other side of the highway was actually the one we were seeking. Victory for the #113, and then not far past the Horse Camp we hit the Coyote Hollow Trailhead, which heralded the advent of singletrack. Not all downhill though; the first half hour or so was a series of descents into lateral ravines, each followed by a climb back out the other side. Nene managed to flat on the way in to the deepest one, which had snow still covering the ground in the shadowed sections; we figured the tiny rain we'd had overnight down low had translated to some snowfall up higher.
Satisfactorily unflatted we set off again, and found ourselves climbing onto a ridgeline that afforded some pretty stunning views down into Red Canyon and several subsidiaries; there were Hoodoos galore, and if we hadn't seen a bunch of them already at Bryce Canyon we'd've been totally gobsmacked. As it was, they were still well cool, but there was a chill wind blowing across the exposed ridge, so we carried on, dropping down a series of loose-surfaced switchbacks into Red Rock Canyon, where we found scenic variants on what we'd appreciated from above, along with a few technical ride challenges, although most of that came from the surprise factor of high-speed post-corner feature discovery. The last mile and a half out to the road was flatter and smoother - except for the washes where there'd been some obvious recent flash-flood action - and we hit some extreme speeds before popping out of the side-canyon mouth and back onto the paved trail for the last mile and a half back up to the Reaper. Two hours well spent, and we could see why folks from all over had been complimentary.
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