Jump to content

Sumiki

Premier Forum Assistants
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    12,174

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    51

 Content Type 

Blog Entries posted by Sumiki

  1. Sumiki
    We left Lubbock at 10:00 and found a gas station in the midst of the confusing roads. We then exited the city - surprisingly easier than we had originally thought - and headed southeast, bound for San Antonio. Flat farmland was on either side as oil fields began to dominate the landscape. Eventually we ran into gigantic wind farms which stretched for miles and miles into the flat distance, and also saw a Google Maps truck taking pictures when we were in the town of Snyder. (If a snapshot of our car makes it to Google Maps, I'll inform the good folks of BZPower.)
     
    We got on the Interstate and entered the town of Sweetwater, which styles itself as the Wind Energy Capital of the World - and I certainly believe it. We got gas at around 12:30 and got drinks before hitting the road again, traveling on the Interstate for about ten miles before exiting on Texas Route 70, which we went on for a good ways.
     
    That is, until our car decided to overheat.
     
    There were no odd sounds, smells, or sights emerging from the hood, but we diligently pulled over at the first chance we got. My dad and I checked under the hood, where everything seemed nominal, while my mom accessed the owner's manual to check on what our dashboard had told us. We waited for a while with the engine off to let it cool down, which we did for about a half-hour. During this time we assessed the levels of coolant and oil, which were both surprisingly low given their Santa Fe top-off but not enough to account for the engine overheat.
     
    We gingerly turned the car back on and everything sounded alright, so we cautiously rolled down the road for about two miles before the engine heat shot up and the dashboard urgently beeped, telling us to stop the car immediately, so we pulled off on a farm-to-market road and stopped the car. Again we checked under the hood, but everything once again appeared to be normal. We did not want to try going any farther down the road, however, so we contacted OnStar for roadside assistance and proceeded to get in touch with possibly the most incompetent and klutzy person we could get, who clearly read off the screen in front of her without comprehending our situation. Eventually - after a ton of re-explaining and exasperation (especially when she asked if we needed a ride literally right after we'd explained the entire situation using small to medium-sized words) - we got ahold of a towing company who sent out a truck to get us. After this, we cancelled our San Antonio and Austin reservations and booked a room in Abeline.
     
    Then began a long wait wherein we all tried our best to pass the time before a fellow who worked down the street rolled up and pulled off to help us. He knew quite a bit about cars - though he wasn't a mechanic - and tried to rectify the situation by adding some coolant. When that didn't fix it, he called his buddy in to bring in some oil - but even after that fellow showed up the same issue was occurring. After some careful exploring of the under-hood area we discovered a dry-rotted, half-ripped, and rapidly disintegrating belt near the engine area. None of us knew what it was but we theorized that it was likely a fan belt, which would make sense given the overheating. (I don't know about the second fellow, but the first one said that he worked for the county government to maintain the county road system, and that they were in the process of paving the mostly unpaved county roads.)
     
    After those two gentlemen left, we waited around for a little while longer before the tow truck arrived. The car was put up on a bed and secured five different ways before we stuffed ourselves into the tow truck cab that lacked air conditioning. We rolled down the windows, which was fairly unpleasant for me in the back - I didn't have enough room to sit down normally and, to avoid breaking my legs, I had to lean them over halfway onto mom, and with the windows down got a face full of air for a half-hour until it went sightly numb.
     
    The tow truck driver used to be a tank driver in Iraq and was very friendly, but scared us when we were careening down the Interstate at 80 MPH. Near the dealership some crazy guy in a pickup truck pulled out in front of the wrecker and braked trying to instigate a crash. After a reaction by the driver I didn't fully see but I assume to be an obscene gesture and his call to the police to report the fellow as a likely drunk, we pulled into the dealership, where we threw away our incredibly warm sodas and acquired cold water bottles.
     
    We waited in the dealership for a few minutes before they set up a shuttle to the hotel. We got all our necessities (read: meltable stuff) and piled into the shuttle, which was driven by a Korean War veteran originally from Alabama but who had lived in Abeline for nearly his entire life. (He was in Korea not when it started, but when it ended.) He had recommendations for barbecue places in Abeline, as we were unsure how many days we would have to stay here. (As it turns out we'll only be here for a day as they replace the belt and do an oil change.)
     
    After getting to the hotel, we ate there as we had no car. It's probably the best hotel food of the trip - certainly better than the bland brick of a chicken breast in Grand Forks or the burned toast of Idaho Falls fame. We replenished our own coolant by ingesting nearly an entire pitcher of lemonade.
     
    Tomorrow: Shreveport, Louisiana, as we've decided to reroute the trip on Interstates, which are safer if the car has another issue. Once we're back in the south we're back to more densely populated regions. (At least there's sweet tea.)
  2. Sumiki
    After delicious breakfast which included corned beef hash, blueberry muffins, and coffee so strong it took us one pot of cream each to tame it, we left the hotel when we got the call from the dealership that the car was ready. We went over to pick it up and realized that, in addition to fixing the cylinder (which turned out to be due to carbon buildup on the spark plugs), they rinsed off the outside, cleaned a bit of the interior, and fixed a rear taillight that hasn't been coming on consistently. We talked a bit more with the crew there - who still wanted us to trade it in - before thanking them profusely and heading out in a much smoother ride.
     
    Since we had a day on the town, we headed downtown to a very historic section of Santa Fe - the Plaza, which was made out to be more than it really was. It was still nice, with brick streets blocked off to car traffic and a nice big green area in the middle with a number of trees, but it wasn't all that mind-blowing.
     
    (Side note: Santa Fe passed an ordinance in the early 1900s that was unusual for the time - it said that all new constructions must be adobe-style. There are no buildings which are not adobe-style, leading to the interesting sights of seeing adobe-style Wal-Marts and McDonalds. Also, I did not anticipate the kind of hippy culture that thrives in the Plaza area - it was kind of like some parts of San Francisco.)
     
    After navigating around some sort of wedding in the popular Plaza area, we found parking and within short order found something to do: a New Mexico history museum located next to the Palace of the Governors, a 1610 construction that has been modified over the years but still retains original portions. We toured the museum and learned quite a bit about New Mexico's history, from the arrival of the Spanish to the Puebloan revolt to the Mexican-American War and finally to the present day. It was extraordinarily well done and maintained a great number of unique and original artifacts.
     
    After roughly two hours touring the museum and the adjoining Palace of the Governors (which was really squeaky but didn't tell us too much more than the museum itself), we headed out of Santa Fe on I-25 northbound towards Glorieta, a nearby town and the namesake of Glorieta Pass, the site of a far western Civil War battle often referred to as the "Gettysburg of the West."
     
    The far western theatre only lasted for a few months and did not greatly affect the war's outcome, but if the Confederate forces had won at Glorieta Pass, then the reach of the Confederacy could have extended to southern California, reenforcing their case as a legitimate country to potential European allies. The three-day battle ended in a technical stalemate, but the Union won by sending a detachment behind Confederate lines to Johnson's Ranch, the site of relatively unguarded Confederate supplies. The Union burned them, forcing the Confederacy to retreat to Texas and ending the far western campaign.
     
    (The Battle of Glorieta Pass also featured a character by the name of Major Shropshire, who was trying to take out a Union artillery battery at Pigeon's Ranch. Motivating his men to take the hill, he said "come on and help me take that position, or stay back and watch men who will." He was killed approximately five seconds later leading the charge up the hill.)
     
    Our route not only took us through Pigeon's Ranch - a place where some of the original house structure still stands, with rocks behind it that Confederate snipers once crawled upon - but it was also once a part of Route 66. We got to the visitor center in the town of Pecos and asked questions of the ranger there. Most of the battlefield is in private hands, and those private hands don't care for snooping around - unless you're on a ranger-led tour. Unfortunately the next such tour was scheduled for next Monday, by which time we will be deep in the heart of Texas. The one non-ranger trail didn't have much on it that we hadn't seen in Mesa Verde - plus, the nearly 7,000-foot elevation was made doubly unpleasant by our unfortunate lack of sunscreen.
     
    The lack of trails or other roads to parts of the battlefield was disappointing, but since there was nothing else to see in the area we headed back to the highway, where we passed by Pigeon's Ranch again - but after heading on the Interstate for a while, we exited near an old church, which the ranger had told us about. We went on a road that dead-ended at Johnson's Ranch in Apache Canyon, the site of the Confederate supply burn. While looking at the old church we encountered a man who asked where from North Carolina we were from. He was born and raised in Winston-Salem, but lives in Boston now and also has ties to the Oakland area. He's on a big road trip of his own, following as much of Route 66 has he can before coming up to Oakland and then back to Boston.
     
    We then got back on the highway bound for Santa Fe, where we got a late lunch at "Bumble Bee's," which specializes in burgers, gourmet tacos, and general Baja cuisine. We all got a fish taco - yet another item crossed off my food bucket list on this trip - and they were surprisingly delicious. While the soft shells were not big, the amount of fish, sauce, pico de gallo, cabbage, and avocado they put on the thing makes it tricky to eat without getting half of it all over your body. Originally anticipating their size to make them appetizers for a larger meal, we were full by the time we had finished them.
     
    At around 6:00 we left for the stadium of the Santa Fe Fuego, an independent minor-league team in the relatively new Pecos League. The Pecos League functions on a unique business model comparative to short-season A ball - but with league tryouts to make the teams competitive and a limit of just a few years for players within the league. The league is in its third year, and within its first two years, it saw 119 players sign with affiliated minor league teams or higher-level independent league play.
     
    The play was surprisingly intense with a lot of excellent defense and pitching. Most of the offense was provided by extra-base hits on the part of the visiting Roswell Invaders, who use baseballs with green seams on them for home games as part of their alien shtick. They did not sell pennants, but they had a cool hat, which we got. We left at the end of the seventh inning with the Fuego down 7-2. (I've seen better outfield defense at the high school level.)
     
    When we left around 8:00, the sun was setting behind mountains, providing a fiery backdrop for the black smoke of two forest fires, which are sizzling behind the mountains. Fortunately for us, that's due west - a direction we won't go in for the rest of this trip if we can help it.
     
    By around 8:30 we pulled back into Bumble Bee's, where we got some more tacos. I tried the shrimp taco, which was even better than the fish.
     
    Tomorrow: either Las Cruces or Clovis, with the outlying possibility of Carlsbad. These routes will all serve to take us down south so we can take I-10 to San Antonio.
  3. Sumiki

    Ode to Oven Racks

    By Sumiki,

    poems by sumiki and sumiki's dad: back by popular demand
     
    It's hard to snack on an oven rack
    (it's not easy to do)
    It's hard to pack an oven rack
    (I don't know what to do)
     
    It's hard to stick a tack in an oven rack
    (without sticking your finger)
    It's hard to comb an oven rack
    (without, you let it linger)
     
    It's hard to take a nap on an oven rack
    (you fall right through between)
    It's hard to hug an oven rack
    (unless you don't want your spleen)
     
    It's hard to date an oven rack
    (because they're just so flat)
    It's hard to sled on an oven rack
    (because you'll just go splat)
     
    But it's easy to cook on an oven rack
    (it's what they're made to do)
    And it's easy to bake on an oven rack
    (because they exist for you)
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    next time, we write about smuffin slappers
  4. Sumiki
    We had a hard time getting to sleep last night, due in equal parts to excitement, over-tiredness, and altitude. After route planning for a bit, we eventually dozed off.
     
    I awoke at 6:30 and got my dad up - my mom had already awoken and was getting some things out of the car. We ended up leaving the hotel a little before 8:00 bound for the Great Sand Dunes.
     
    The roads there - especially Colorado 150, which leads to the park entrance - are ridiculously straight, continuing in the ancient lake bed valley where Alamosa lies. It was so flat that we could see the city in the distance, a good 20 miles away.
     
    I was expecting something like the White Sands of last year, but the Great Sand Dunes are unlike anything else. They seemed small from a distance, but we were a good four miles away from them. The curving peaks and solidified-wave formations of the dunes look like they jut up against the mountains behind, but they were not, as they instead jut out for miles ahead of them. While we could, at one point, see the entirety of the dunes, that was not due to their smallness but rather due to our extreme distance from them.
     
    We then officially entered the park and stopped at the visitor center, where they have a small interactive diorama with sand in it, and turning a handle changes the direction of the wind inside and you can sort of shape the mini-dune by wind direction. (It was probably intended for kids but we had great fun watching it do its thing.)
     
    We continued the route to the dunes and passed two very dark mule deer. At 8:55 we parked in the parking lot, which did not have very many people in it - definitely less than we had anticipated, as it's a cooler environment in the morning.
     
    Since I came in with White Sands experience, I expected something almost completely different from what we got - mainly the distance from our car to the first dune, which is a mile-long hike that feels like so much longer. It also crosses Medano Creek, which we had to ford sans footwear. The sand is not of consistent texture either, ranging from soft, mushy beach-like sand that sucks at your feet until you sink six inches down to bits of rocky clumps that dig into your feet. Most of the walk to and from the dunes were on the latter, and most of the dunes were of the former.
     
    After fording Medano Creek we kept trudging for what felt like the better half of forever. The 7,515-foot elevation got to us before we even got to the dunes. We went up and sledded down the first dune, which due to its small grade was unimpressive. We then spotted the next dune over, which we appropriately trudged up.
     
    I don't know how far down the hill was, but it was long and steep - perhaps 120 feet at the very least. We waxed up our sleds and proceeded to careen down the hill at breakneck speed.
     
    Of course, the way the boards are designed, it's incredibly hard to get any sort of balance, stability, or control. Any attempts at controlling the direction of the board led to immediate wipeout - first by my dad, who did a faceplant into some (thankfully cold) sand, and then by me, as my board got wobbly and stopped suddenly when one side dug into the sand. I didn't do nearly as good of a wipeout as dad; he got an enormous amount of sand out of his nose and ears, whereas I only had an enormous amount of sand in one ear.
     
    We sucked on our large water bottles and rested a good bit, as the sand dunes are incredibly hard to walk up. The kind of sand that the dunes are made of is very soft and you only stop when you get to a wetter kind of sand a few inches down, which - combined with the over-7,500-foot elevation - makes going fast hard. It's a good workout, though, and the slides down the dunes were totally worth the effort.
     
    (As far as dune slides go, my dad had the worst wipeout and the longest run while my mom nabbed the straightest run - and on her first go, at that. I had a hard time getting balance as my sled kept wobbling around, but my wipeouts were about as fun as my slides.)
     
    By 10:00 we'd done all we felt up to on the Dunes and trudged back to the car, interrupted by a number of breaks for water sipping. We got back to the car at 10:38 and rolled back out of the park. (Good thing, too - the sand was not only getting hot on our bare feet, but the crowds were starting to come in. The measly-looking Medano Creek apparently is the local answer to the beach, and folks came in with beach clothes and equipment - very few sleds, however.)
     
    After dropping off our boards at the sports equipment place, we got back to the hotel where I surveyed the insane amount of sand on my body. Sand stuck to my sunscreen-sticky arms and plastered my face, ears, nose, and hair - even though I wore a hat the whole time. Sand was all over my chest and lodged itself around my mouth and in my facial hair, which made it look incredibly dark. Getting a shower was an interesting proposition, as the sand and old sunscreen turned the water into a kind of slush and I was afraid of being responsible for a backup should I wash it all away at once.
     
    After we all got cleaned up as thoroughly as we could, we moved our Santa Fe reservations up a day and began the drive down to New Mexico. We passed by silos which featured murals on their sides and the oldest church in Colorado before it began raining in hard drops - hard enough that the smell of petrichor was thick, even inside the car. Concerned about the possibility of hail, we got out of the storm and continued south, where we entered New Mexico. (That makes it the second time this trip, if you count Four Corners.)
     
    The rain made the temperature plummet from 73 to 51, but it increased to 65 as soon as we got out of it. New Mexico is distinct due to some "half-and-half" landscapes we saw - green rolling hills interrupted by scrubby, arid pastureland. It seemed too organic to have been irrigated to look that way, and we pondered the origin of such a strange landscape before we saw the half-dried creek in the valley. We saw yellow blooming sagebrush as well as random rock formations akin to tan versions of some of the Arches scenery, but these were rather few and far between.
     
    (It was here that my dad had the following dialogue with himself, all spoken slowly in an accent of indeterminate origin: "I'm from New Mexico." / "What do you do in New Mexico?" / "I chase a little beaver around a tree." This had us laughing inordinately hard.)
     
    We began entering the more populated area around Santa Fe and found ourselves in the city, where we entered road construction. This usually would not be so bad, but the knocking we'd felt in the engine for the past few states finally came to a head - my dad reported that he "felt something pop" and the engine light came on. We got diagnostics run while on the go and were told via the OnStar guy that there was a misfire in the engine - which would account for the knocking. The guy advised against speed, hauling things, hard accelerations, and steep hills - all things that our car has done pretty consistently on the trip.
     
    Add the fact that we had experienced this in road construction - and the New Mexico drivers were letting in morons who sped past the lane-closure warning signs, thus slowing the pack down - made it kind of scary. We got connected by phone to the dealership, but the call got dropped before we could say much of anything.
     
    The engine didn't sound any worse than it had in the previous thousand miles, but we arrived at the Santa Fe dealership. My dad stayed in the repair area to check the car in while my mom and I went into the dealership to see about the possibility of a rental car or shuttle. We ended up talking to a receptionist whose mother is from Greensboro, NC - yet another NC connection. (It was also her first day on the job and didn't know her coworkers' names very well, which led to some hilarity when "Kevin" turned out to be called "Keith." This "Keith" character ended up saying "you ladies" when referring to my mom and me, which led to even more hilarity. He was ridiculously apologetic for his slip-up after he realized what had happened.)
     
    We ended up getting to know the dealership characters, who were quite the bunch. With nothing else to do and a co-manager bent on trading our car in, we looked at a few new cars, which were surprisingly nice - better than our current ride in some aspects, while inferior in others. We ended up meeting two fellows named "David" who worked there - one of which had a practically trademarked catchphrase I can't repeat on this site, while the other was even newer than the receptionist, but played up on the humor in his newness by saying things such as "a walk-around is car-salesman talk for when ... you walk around."
     
    As it turned out, the third cylinder had misfired, but everyone there was incredibly friendly and promised that, if possible, they'll have it done by noon tomorrow. If the engine turns out to have more extensive damage, we might just have a new ride for the journey home.
     
    Instead of a rental car or a shuttle, they actually let us use one of the sexy-looking cars we tested out, which was incredibly nice of them. I actually drove it a bit around the hotel parking lot, and it handles quite well.
     
    We ate at a mexican restaurant just a short walk from the hotel called the Blue Corn, which was half-brewery, half-restaurant. I had a huge chimichanga with some interesting limeade, while my parents got fajitas. (When the server asked me what kind of sauce I wanted, I remembered something the receptionist had said about "christmas" - half red chili, half green chili. I ordered this and I'm glad I did, as the green chili was delicious but the red chili less so.)
     
    When we got back to the hotel, we decided to stay an extra day in Santa Fe. We were able to extend our reservations and got some drinks from the small pantry area near the front desk. We also were interested in sampling the pecan pie that we'd gotten at Serious Texas Barbecue in Durango, Colorado and had been lugging around in the cooler for three days, so we inquired about acquiring some forks. We were told that they would be delivered to our room, which thereby put ourselves in the unique position of having the first-ever hotel fork delivery. We prepared for this moment by having my dad open up the door before the front desk lady was prepared for that to happen and by my act of taking a picture just as her eyes got big as my dad presented the pecan pie to her to prove that it actually existed. It was quite hilarious.
     
    Tomorrow: we spend a day in Santa Fe. Featuring an independent minor-league team and a number of delicious restaurants (the dealership receptionist said that you "really couldn't go wrong" with Santa Fe food), our extra day in the US's oldest capital will not go to waste.
  5. Sumiki
    My dad had gotten up around 6:00 in the morning and went to get our brakes checked out at the Durango dealership. It's fortunate that he did so, as he reported the engine light blaring at him every mile or so - a repeat of the oil-light false alarm we got outside of Kamloops, British Columbia. After a series of scares he got to the dealership, where they checked the engine (which has been knocking a little bit), the brakes, and the oil. They did an oil change and reported that everything was fine with the engine and brakes - the brakes sound strange and the engine is knocking simply due to the altitude. (Brakes apparently accumulate more dust at higher altitudes.)
     
    And boy, did we have altitude today. He got some intel on the over-10,000 foot Wolf Creek Pass en route to Alamosa from almost everyone he could, and learned that it was easier than the 10% grade of Teton Pass and didn't have nearly as many curves. It was, however, quite long and very high up - but their advice was to stick the car in third gear so we wouldn't have to ride the brakes.
     
    We left the hotel a little after 11:00, and stopped at Serious Texas Barbecue so for lunch. We rolled through Durango's historic downtown and saw a number of old buildings before getting out of the town and on towards the epic Wolf Creek Pass.
     
    Between Bayfield and Chimney Rock we hit the 6,000-mile mark and our trip odometer reset.
     
    We entered more forested areas and passed Colorado's Chimney Rock (the namesake of the town and also apparently a National Monument in its own right) and within short order had arrived in Pagosa Springs, the last town before Wolf Creek Pass.
     
    We entered the San Juan National Forest, but before we went over the mountain,. we stopped at a pullout called Treasure Falls. Run by the National Forest, the trail goes up a number of switchbacks before taking you over a bridge for a fantastic view of a large waterfall. We walked down to the rushing stream below it under a rock overhang and touched the frigid water before getting back on the trail and descending down the switchbacks to the car.
     
    Then we went over the mountain.
     
    The car was doing all it could to get up over the mountain. The grade wasn't really all that steep, but the altitude did a number on the engine's ability to combust fuel. We got to the top safely before pulling off the road to let the engine cool down. Conveniently, this was at the Continental Divide at 10,850 feet above sea level - over two miles high. The air was pretty thin and I got a bit winded just walking around. Trucks that passed the pullout were clearly having troubles going up and down alike.
     
    The engine did not overheat and cooled to a more normal temperature as we got back on the road, which we did earlier than we'd wanted to due to the beginnings of rain. It did nothing more than sprinkle, however.
     
    So we went down, and we just kept on going down. Alamosa is at roughly 7,000 feet above sea level - so we had to come down 3,000 feet from over two miles high.
     
    There were some curves - including curved tunnels through the sides of mountains. It seems like it'd be more trouble to build the tunnel than to just keep on blasting out the roadway. We eventually leveled out but kept winding around the sides of mountains before finally settling down into a valley, where we mostly paralleled a small, but rushing, river.
     
    We went through small towns on the way to Alamosa, but the big driving fun was over for the day. We arrived at our hotel at 3:20 and got checked in.
     
    (Our room features a locked circuit breaker, and I'm not entirely sure why.)
     
    The land around Alamosa is not part of the plains that define the eastern half of Colorado, as we're not out of the Rocky Mountains yet. Its flatness - and fertility - is due to the area being an ancient lake bed. After so many mountains, it's good to have some flat roads for a while.
     
    Equal parts hungry and tired, we ate at a decent local Italian restaurant in town. Their personal pizzas are good but filling, and we had our leftover pieces boxed to take back to our room for lunch tomorrow. (En route to the restaurant, we'd stopped by a local sports-equipment shop and rented two sand sleds.)
     
    After a few nights of not getting much rest, I'm looking forward to good sleep tonight.
     
    Tomorrow: we get up early to sled on the Great Sand Dunes, the largest sand dunes in North America.
  6. Sumiki
    We left the hotel a little before 11:00 and got on the road to Cortez, Colorado. We passed through more rock formations similar to Arches or Canyonlands, saw swirly grass patterns and passed by a tourist trap called "Hole in the Rock" (though there are a great many holes in rocks in that area of the country), and encountered a bit of road construction but not enough to slow us down considerably.
     
    A bit after noon we entered Colorado, a state I've never been to before until today; we hit all of Colorado's surrounding states last trip. The scenery featured a bit more trees than the consistent scrub-brush of Utah, but was not all that different altogether. Within the hour we were in Cortez and turned to backtrack slightly along a 38-mile route to our first destination of the day: the Four Corners monument, the only place in the United States where four state corners meet. It's officially on an Indian reservation, so we paid the nominal fee to get in.
     
    There were more people there than I had anticipated, but getting parked and walking to the monument (which is essentially a large circular plaque on the ground) was still easy. This means that this trip also features Arizona on the list of states/provinces - we got to 25 last year and we're aiming to get to at least that number this time. (So far, we're at an even 20, so I don't think getting to 25 will be a problem.)
     
    (Side note: roads through Indian reservations are generally not very good. They're bumpy - as if the asphalt was poured directly on top of the terrain sans grading - and feature an insane amount of potholes. It always seems to be like this and I don't know why. We did run into road repainting - something the road very much did not need!)
     
    While our route did not take us to the official borders of Monument Valley, we got near there enough to see rock formations similar to what is found there. After Arches, though, I'm not sure what much Monument Valley has that could be better.
     
    We went back to Cortez, as that was the only way in and out that did not involve even more desolate roads than the ones we traversed. We finally found the Colorado welcome center, which, I have to say, is the worst welcome center I've ever seen. It was clean and all, but they simply do not make it easy to find. The sign is practically camouflage and there are no road signs to point it out. However, they did not, for some reason, have an official Colorado road map. I don't understand why - they're a freaking welcome center. What welcome center doesn't have maps?
     
    We got gas on the outskirts of Cortez and went a few more miles up the road to Mesa Verde National Park, the famous site of ancestral Pueblo homes constructed inside large holes in the mesa cliffs. The park was a bit different, as most of the tours up into the famous archaeological areas were led by park rangers. We discussed getting tickets for these, but with our feet still very sore after the many hikes in Arches yesterday and with all of us (for some bizarre reason) not having gotten enough sleep after said hikes, we skipped the longer tours. I didn't feel too bad about doing so, as we were later informed by a park ranger that the free tour of a dwelling called Spruce Tree House was better than the ranger-led tours as it was in better condition than the other, larger dwellings. (The same ranger told us that some bear had been spotted in the park recently - just our luck. We didn't see any, though.)
     
    Soon we were on the road through the park, and climbed up a huge number of switchbacks up to the top of the mesa, where the views out over the flat fields below were insanely cool. We didn't do any trails aside from the paved walk down to Spruce Tree House, which was basically a very small town consisting of three or four extended families living in stone-and-mortar dwellings halfway up a sheer cliff underneath a massive overhang. Average ancestral Puebloan size was roughly five feet, life expectancy was around 30 years old, and the infant mortality rate is estimated to have been about fifty percent. The windows and doors on the now-crumbling structures were quite small, and even if folks were allowed inside them I don't think very many people could fit.
     
    Circular underground ceremonial rooms, known as kivas, were sacred places for the Puebloans, and a reconstructed kiva was provided. I squeezed through the small hole down the slightly slippery ladder into the cool circular chamber - quite a nice place to beat the heat when you're dealing with southwestern temperatures.
     
    The Puebloans used the area behind their dwellings, where the overhang joins with the cliff, as a refuse area, where trash and animal carcasses were incinerated. (Soot can still be seen to stain the overhang as it goes back.) These unsanitary practices likely led to the poor conditions described earlier.
     
    With the heat becoming stifling and the lower halves of our bodies complaining after the effort they collectively expended yesterday, we headed back up the trail, where we saw an incredibly cute chipmunk nibbling on tree leaves.
     
    Barely able - and totally unwilling - to get out of the car further, we went along a small loop trail until we could get to a good view of the Cliff Palace, the largest of the Puebloan dwellings. The fact that these things are constructed literally inside the cliffs - and that the Puebloans had to climb up and down tiny handholds and footholds in the rock face daily - made them very impressive.
     
    (We also saw a wild turkey in there, and he was a big one.)
     
    As we went out of the park and descended the steep curves and hills, we spotted a group of wild horses. The descent out of Mesa Verde never just stops, as the roughly thirty-mile drive was almost all downhill. I was tired enough to sleep through a good portion of it, but was awoken to taking some scary turns at some equally scary speeds. The brakes did their job, but they've taken such an incredible beating on this trip that we're going to have to give them a check-up before we go up to 10,000 feet and down again en route to Alamosa, Colorado.
     
    We arrived in Durango and checked into our hotel. We'd seen a place just about a block from the hotel called Serious Texas Barbecue, and it came with high recommendations from the hotel staff.
     
    This place is little more than a shack with a couple of additions to it. Its dive-like qualities are emphasized by its old wooden construction and highly rickety nature, as well as the many Texas-themed signs stuck to pretty much every available open spot - including many that referenced "Kinky for Governor." When we asked about who this "Kinky" fellow was, and why he felt the need to run for the Governorship, we got the response of "ah ... Texas."
     
    Their apparently famous pulled pork sandwiches - featured on Live with Regis and Kelly - were absolutely huge and rank right up there with some of the best barbecue I've ever eaten. It came with some sort of cherry chipotle sauce which tasted less like cherries and more like delicious. Their sweet tea had about a gallon less sugar than our variety, but it was still tea and we got refills. As it turns out, one of the three girls who ran the place (and cooked up the delicious barbecue) was from just outside of Asheville. The more we travel, the more North Carolinians we encounter.
     
    We got a number of pictures of the quirky interior and headed back to the hotel room, where we're anticipating a good, long night of sleep.
     
    Tomorrow: another resting day as we take a short drive over to Alamosa, Colorado, which will serve as our base camp for sledding in Great Sand Dunes National Park. We'll also probably get the car looked at to make sure everything is still in order before we go up to 10,000 feet above sea level - all electronic diagnostics have come back clean, but there's no substitute for having someone who knows what they're looking at check things out.
  7. Sumiki
    A little after leaving the hotel, we hit the 5000 mile mark. Whether this is the halfway point or something a little after that remains to be seen.
     
    We followed secondary roads as we meandered our way back to the Idaho border. The roads were scenic and followed the zigzagging Snake River as we passed by tall mountains. Many birds were present in the region, including a number of osprey, who made their distinctive nests on the top of telephone poles (when the tops were flat) and on specially-made poles when the telephone poles were not conducive.
     
    (For some reason, there were hilarious - and official! - signs along the side of the road that designated some part of the Targhee National Forest as "Lunch Counter Kahunas." You can't make this stuff up, folks.)
     
    As we neared crossing the border back into Idaho, the land flattened into a stereotypical land of dairy. Black and white cows munched grass and lounged around, and signs advertised cheeses. We crossed back into Idaho via the small community of Freedom.
     
    We looped back into Idaho via a scenic but bizarre road that went due west before a series of crazy hairpin turns (for what reason I can't fathom; there was no obstacle to prevent the building of a more gradual turn) which took us south over rolling hills of roller-coaster proportions. The Idahoans took the road at a snail's pace, but the nature of the road - with blind curves and hills - meant passing opportunities were rare. This was not a problem for an enterprising Utahan in a black SUV, who passed the slowpokes on the aforementioned blind hills and turns. He was lucky that no one was coming in the other direction.
     
    The scenery was quite gorgeous, and at one point featured a conglomeration of almost every kind of scenery we'd seen on the trip: rolling hills with scrub brush, prairies off to the distance, mountains beyond that and snowcapped peaks poking out from behind them. To the side was a lake of considerable proportions, complete with islands.
     
    Lava-like rocks were common along the side of the road, and a number of mounds of black rock similar to the a'a lava of Craters of the Moon. We didn't pass by close enough to any of these nearly circular piles to get a good look, but if I had to bet, I would say that they were formed from some sort of volcanic activity.
     
    As we rolled on towards Soda Springs - the only Idaho town of any real size east of Pocatello - we saw a number of unlabeled mines with large barbed-wire fences and a little too much security to not be suspicious. I suspect that these are mines for some kind of precious element - possibly uranium, due to its high quantity in this region. One was a phosphate mine and was one of the closest to town - but it, too, had quite a bit of security.
     
    We got to Soda Springs and filled up the tank, then followed the signs for Geyser Park. The geyser is from a naturally carbonated spring, one of a number in the Soda Springs area and the namesake of the town itself. However, back in the late '30s or so, the original geyser hole was filled in with concrete and a somewhat random tree stump, then rerouted through pipes to a new location. They then rigged the system to open it up every hour on the hour to let off steam. The National Park Service actually sent a letter to the town soon after they did this, requesting them to shut the geyser off as it was "interrupting Old Faithful" - but they were more concerned about the potential tourist competitor to Yellowstone. Fortunately for them, that did not happen.
     
    Well, we'd arrived there at the bottom of the hour and had some waiting to do until it exploded again. We walked around the entire geyser area, which mostly consists of yellowish-orange travertine that is left behind by the geyser's stinky mineral water. Seagulls seemed to enjoy the water, however, and fought over various puddles on the travertine.
     
    While waiting for the 2:00 eruption, we met a couple from the Netherlands who were on vacation in the US, along with the woman's Austrian sister and a biker dude that turned out to be her son. Small and uncontrolled kids ran around on the slippery, puddle-filled travertine around the geyser with only token parental supervision. They were obviously local but knew something we didn't about the temperature of the geyser; we stayed where the wind wouldn't blow the spray into our faces under the impression that the volcanic activity that fuels the geyser would make the water hot. It apparently was not, as the kids ran around in it with abandon and were not scalded for their efforts. The geyser spewed for about ten minutes and reached a hundred feet into the air.
     
    Near the geyser is a small hut which housed part of the Ground Observation Corps, which was a volunteer force dedicated to watching the sky for enemy planes near holes in the radar system. It was discontinued in the 50s when radar was significantly improved, but Soda Springs has preserved their little hut for geyser-goers to see. Also, on a mountain overlooking the geyser is a slag pile from the phosphorus mine: molten rock that's added to the pile by being thrown onto the pile from a specialized truck. The resulting bright red-orange flow is basically man-made lava; if it was actual lava, then we'd have been in a world of hurt.
     
    We left Soda Springs and its slanted light poles bound for I-15. As we went west our temperature steadily increased through the 70s and, before we got on the Interstate, to 80 degrees for the first time on the trip. (We'll have to break out the shorts tomorrow, I think.) In addition to our newfound sunniness and warmth, we saw what we think was a marmot scurrying across the road.
     
    The portion of I-15 in southern Idaho is indistinguishable from northern Utah. Nothing is there to break up the drive until we got to the exit that gets to the Golden Spike memorial where the Transcontinental Railroad was linked together. As soon as we consulted our maps and realized that the historical site would be well over an hour round-trip - and on some unpaved roads to boot - we turned around and topped off the tank before hitting the road again to the Great Salt Lake.
     
    The temperature rose and rose some more until it hit 90 degrees around 4:30. We took I-15 through the city, possible because the traffic was not backed up due to it being a Sunday. The traffic, however, was filled with the most insane of drivers who seemed to display an active disdain for turn signals, the brake pedal, and consistently staying in the same lane. We passed the time by making jokes about the ridiculous billboards in the area, most of which had to do with various aspects of body image.
     
    We checked in at our Orem hotel which has no automatic doors and features a dimly lit and jittery elevator. (The rooms are clean, though, so I can't really complain all that much.) Tired, with very little on our stomachs, and with no local establishments open, we went over to the tart-smelling IHOP next door. (I'm pretty sure most places in Salt Lake smell funky - everything both last year and this year, new and old alike, features a similar smell.) The food was mediocre, but we needed the sustenance.
     
    Utah is not my favorite state, but it's hardly my least favorite. I have a distaste for most metropolitan areas, and Salt Lake is no different, but the gorgeous scenery of southern Utah more than makes up for Salt Lake's relative blandness.
     
    Tomorrow: we traverse the state to Moab, the jumping-off point for Arches and Canyonlands National Parks.
  8. Sumiki
    After breakfast, our destination for the day was Craters of the Moon National Monument, halfway between Carey and Arco in the middle of Idaho, which might as well also be the middle of nowhere. This was the first day in a good long while where there was neither rain nor the threat of it, and we spent the sunniness and breeziness of the day to our full advantage.
     
    Soon after leaving Mountain Home on US Route 20, which took us all the way through the Craters into Idaho Falls, we saw a full-blown Abrams tank with a plaque that read "in honor of those who served." The landscape was an open range, like Nevada or Utah, but hilly and scrubby. Signs often warned of an open range, and though we saw no farm animals on the road, we saw them near the road without being fenced in. We saw the Sawtooth Mountains, snowcapped as they were, to our north, and climbed a set of very large hills until we finally settled into the rhythm of the long, straight plateau.
     
    While we drove on the a long, straight plateau, the mountains to our north and south could still be seen - but the north more so. Along with massive irrigated fields for crops, ranches were abundant, and wildlife was more prevalent than I had anticipated. In addition to a number of pronghorn, we saw two eagles - I'm not entirely sure, but I think that they were bald eagles.
     
    (It was around this point that my dad called Craters of the Moon "Creteor Mater," a mangling of "Meteor Crater," which we saw last year.)
     
    A little before 12:45 we officially entered Craters of the Moon, and as soon as we did, the landscape was markedly different. The Craters are not really craters, but are actually the remains of a gash in the Earth's crust, which left behind a trail of solidified lava. (The same volcanic activity that caused the lava flow in the Craters has, due to the shifting of tectonic plates, moved underneath Yellowstone and is the cause of that park's famous geysers. Within the next few thousand years, geologists believe that Yellowstone will itself erupt.)
     
    The Craters are bizarre. Sections of the lava were highly rocky, with jagged black rocks piled high on top of each other. This lava, which we learned later is called "a'a," is famous for its impassability and sharp jaggedness. It looked quite like magnified dirt. Other sections, called "pahoehoe," were smoothed over, and looked like frozen black waves. We did not learn of these technical terms until we stopped at the visitor's center, where we saw a golden squirrel scurry across the parking lot. Originally we'd mistaken this squirrel for a kind of chipmunk which is only found in the Craters area, but as it turned out the squirrel was also distinct to the region.
     
    After asking a few questions about the nature of the park from some rangers - the first Idahoans who finally seemed to know what they were talking about when it comes to the Craters - we rolled on into the main section of the park, which mainly consists of a one-way loop around the most interesting area of the lava flow. There were small patches of grass and the occasional tree, as well as many wildflower species, but all of it was growing - somehow - on the lava flow itself. We walked out on a few paved trails and saw a few places where the lava had boiled up and burst through the surface, leaving cracks in the lava flow similar to large cracks in old asphalt. Also left over from these ancient eruptions are monolithic hunks of rock, which were epic to behold.
     
    The next stop was a loop trail called Devil's Orchard - aptly named, considering the large dead trees in the area. The trees did not die due to natural causes, but were in fact poisoned by the park rangers, who wanted to get rid of a plant they had deemed ugly and had thought was a parasite. They later realized their mistake, but it was too late to save the trees. In addition to more of the lava flow, the dead trees made the area creepy, but were interspersed with small, colorful wildflowers. (It seemed to me that the colorful flowers were rarer, as well as prettier.)
     
    The bushes of the area also have a distinctly odd smell - not bad, but due to their abundance it's quite strong and takes a few minutes to get used to.
     
    The next stop of our Craters excursion was an quarter-mile, steep hike up a black, gravelly slope called Inferno Cone. The park's brochures claimed the hike up was .2 miles and its elevation as 6181, but we were mere feet below 6000 feet at the visitor's center and the Cone was clearly much higher, leading me to believe that these numbers are either gross underestimations or the product of a vast typo conspiracy. More on this story as it unfolds.
     
    The views from the top of the Cone were splendid and well worth the effort to climb the somewhat slippery slope in the altitude. One could see the entire lava flow all around, and then flat nothingness beyond, interrupted on the horizon by buttes, extinct volcanoes, or - occasionally - hills. It was quite scary seeing as we were standing on top of what was essentially a glorified pile of solidified lava gravel, but everything was fine.
     
    While on top of the Cone, we met a group of brothers who were motorcycling around the country from locations as diverse as Oregon and Arkansas. One of the brothers got a group picture of us if we agreed to take a group picture of them, which I did - and the Arkansas guy said that "he wasn't from Arkansas," but had moved there - "you can tell because I still have all my teeth." I added the fact that I knew he wasn't from there because he actually wore shoes. As it turns out, they're heading towards Grand Teton, which is where we're headed. We may run into them again.
     
    The way down was slippery and I had a hard time stopping myself; I found it very hard to get traction on the gravelly surface. We eventually stopped ourselves about halfway down and saw a few pieces of pumice with sparkly blue flakes inside. Yet another had silver and gold flecks embedded in it. All of the gravelly surface feels like pumice, so it'd probably float if given the chance.
     
    We made it down the epic hill and journeyed to our next stop, which was a short, steep, paved trail that literally led into a volcano. Thankfully extinct (as are all the volcanoes in the park's vicinity), it was still cool to be able to look down into the same dark, jagged shaft where lava once flowed in order to erupt from the top.
     
    We skipped one of the longer trails (which also happens to be one of the most uninteresting, from what we gathered) in order to spend maximum time on one of the park's many highlights - its lava tubes. The tubes vary in size and are hidden from view or access until the tunnels naturally decay and collapse in on themselves. It is then, and only then, that explorers can go into the unique lava tube caves.
     
    The first cave is known as Indian Tunnel, which is the largest and is easily accessible via a set of metal stairs. We descended down into a large hole and eased our way down an impressive pile of rocks until we reached the tunnel floor. The tunnel is a good thirty feet high and about that wide, and bends around a tiny bit along the way. This would have been a quick journey, but we had to clamber over massive piles of loose rock - the result of cave-ins many, many years ago. There are no trails over these piles and you are left to your own devices to navigate through them successfully, and would have been impassible had it not been for the fact that, when the rocks came down, it left a massive hole in the ceiling. These were scattered pretty evenly throughout the tunnel and let in enough light for us to mostly navigate sans flashlights. The end of the tunnel is a bit of a squeeze, but we managed through it and worked our way back to the trail by following the conveniently placed sticks.
     
    We then walked a little ways to Boy Scout Cave, but its entrance was blocked by a large bickering family, embroiled in an ongoing and seemingly never-ending debate about whether or not to go into the cave. When it became clear that they would not let us pass (and we didn't want to hear their drivel anyway), we continued on to Beauty Cave.
     
    Beauty Cave is very dark and we could only get about twenty feet into the cave itself before we had to turn back. The darkness there is no match for our flashlights, which are not known for their feebleness. The only thing of note in Beauty Cave is the tendency for its cold, still air to make your breath turn into an unmoving fog as you exhale. Also prevalent in the section we could see were flat sections of ice, ranging from foggy and opaque to crystal clear - so clear, in fact, that we really had to watch our step getting out. You couldn't even see it in some places.
     
    We backtracked to Boy Scout Cave and, sans yapping family, we decided to do what we did in Beauty and see how far we could get. My dad and I had to crouch and duck to fit over the loose rock and under the tight overhang, but we made it to the cramped bottom intact. Due to both its relative smallness and the prevalence of reflective ice in the cave, dad and I navigated a good halfway into the cave, trying to simultaneously not slip on one of the many icy patches on the floor and not hit our heads against the cramped ceiling. I'm convinced that we could have made it to the other end of the tunnel and emerged somewhere in the lava fields, but, almost simultaneously, two things happened.
     
    One: there was a family ahead of us that was turning back - for what reason I can't fathom; the entrance is the scariest part of the whole thing.
     
    Two: my dad's head lamp light went out. Previously in the day, my mom's head lamp had gone out.
     
    With only his small handheld flashlight and my head lamp - with whatever charge it had left in it - to guide us, we got out of there while we could still see what we were doing. Excited, we decided to go a little ways inside Dewdrop Cave, but, as the trail guide pamphlet had said, you can see most of that cave from the trail. With miles of walking behind us, we'd seen all we wanted to see in Craters of the Moon and hopped in the car.
     
    We looped around out of the park and continued on US-20 to Arco, where they have a peculiar tradition of painting the last two numbers of the year on the side of a mountain near the town. We supposed that these were graduation years, as none of the previous years were erased. Also in Arco are various murals, the painting of which seems to be a theme of western towns.
     
    Twenty miles outside of Arco we rolled past the building which housed the first nuclear reactor in the United States. We would have stopped there had we gotten out of Craters earlier, but the free tours had stopped at 5:00 and it was after 6:00 when we rolled past.
     
    Most of the drive from Arco to Idaho Falls consists of sheer nothingness, dotted occasionally with what appeared to be research laboratories. The nearly completely straight road took us all the way to Idaho Falls, where we were buzzed by a yellow crop duster as visions of the Hitchcock classic "North by Northwest" played in our heads. Within short order we'd checked into our hotel.
     
    We were hungry, tired, and considering that the hotel chain we're staying in usually has pretty good - if not excellent - dinners, we decided to eat there. After our nightmarish experience in Grand Forks we were anxious to see if that was an outlier in terms of quality. My mom and I ordered the club sandwich, while my dad got some chicken - two foods that are hard to screw up. Right?
     
    You'd be wrong. About halfway through our salads (which had bleu cheese bits on them and were quite delicious), I smelled something burning. Specifically, food burning. Specifically specifically, bread burning.
     
    Our bread.
     
    It was somewhat edible, but certainly not tasty. I ended up taking most of the meat, cheese, and lettuce out and making small wraps out of them.
     
    The meal was not totally wasted, as they had the most delicious strawberry lemonade in the recent history of forever. By our third refill, we jokingly requested that they bring an entire pitcher over - which they did. They didn't think we were going to finish it.
     
    We - by which I mean me and my dad - drank it all. As the waiter came to clear the table, I told him that we'd need another pitcher. Unfazed, he moved to get another one before we had to stop him and explain we were joking around.
     
    (During the meal, the only other folks eating - an older couple at the next table over - noticed the presentation of the pitcher to our table. Soon after my dad refilled his glass, the man turned and said "I don't usually count these things, but isn't that your seventh glass?" As it turns out, they were originally from Portland, Oregon, and are heading to Grand Teton as well.)
     
    Tomorrow: we cross into Wyoming to see Grand Teton National Park, possibly on a road that has, amongst other hazards, a 10% grade for three miles in both directions. No word yet on whether or not we'll traverse it.
  9. Sumiki
    We left La Grande at 10:38, in 53 degrees with lots of clouds, though it thankfully was not raining. The rolling hills around us were mostly filled with cattle peacefully grazing on ranches. We saw mountains - some snowcapped - all around, but we drove for a good ways in the vast, flat valley before getting to them. The snowcapped peaks were mainly to our left and were part of the Blue Mountain range.
     
    A little bit after 11:00 we crossed the 45th parallel for the fourth and last time on the trip. Now closer to the equator than the north pole, we passed by Baker City as we began to climb the mountains in earnest. The hilly, arid landscape is highly reminiscent of Nevada, but also a bit Badlands-like. Also present in the area are cement plants, of which we saw a few.
     
    As we entered the last Oregonian county before the Idaho border, the time zone changed back to Mountain Time and we lost an hour, completely skipping noon. (My dad said that this was okay because he "wasn't hungry anyway.")
     
    Curvy parts of the road could be seen from the crests of hills, with three miles of highway condensed into perhaps a little over a mile as the crow flies. We skirted around these hills of epic proportion, given scale by tiny-looking three-trailer-long trucks traveling the other way.
     
    It was not raining constantly, which had been one of the defining themes of our trip so far. Instead we saw rows upon rows of clouds that looked to us like they were stacked on top of each other. Within short order we entered Ontario, Oregon, the last city before the border, where we saw an Ore-Ida plant. It was there that it occurred to me that the name of the company came from the first three letters of Oregon and Idaho.
     
    My blind was mown.
     
    After re-assembling the bits of my cerebral cortex we found splattered over the interior of the car, we entered Idaho. We stopped at their welcome center which offered a grand vista of the Idahoan plains. With the 75 MPH speed limit, we made good time through the fairly metropolitan stretch of highway bound for Boise. We stopped for a much-needed gas-up a few miles before hitting the stadium of the Boise Hawks, a short-season minor-league team in the same league as Vancouver and Everett.
     
    We encountered someone that I assume was a sales guy, who gave us two free magnets as he ran off somewhere into the front office to see about the pennant situation. We got a pennant as well as a really cool hat, which we were led into a hidden shed to get. (As well as getting the aforementioned magnets, we snagged a discount on the pennant and hat as well.)
     
    As we were heading out of the stadium, my grandmother called on the car's built-in phone, which scared the living daylights out of us. Despite this, we successfully navigated out of Boise towards Mountain Home, which is about as far from Boise as Boise is from the border. This trip was relatively uneventful, save for old tractors used decoratively along the side of the road as well as a wide-load modern tractor being towed by a truck cab going 80 MPH. We made it to Mountain Home, where we visited the visitor's center before heading to our hotel.
     
    (Side note: Idahoans are very friendly folks, but none of them ever seem to have visited any of the parks in their state - which is strange considering that Craters of the Moon is rather famous for its geological weirdness, the fact that it's not very far to drive, and the fact that everyone we asked should have known more about it considering they worked in various visitor's centers.)
     
    We checked in at our hotel where we received a great number of recommendations for various restaurants in the area by the incredibly bubbly girl behind the front desk. We ate at a local pizza place, where mom and dad got personal pizzas and I got a gigantic burger with bleu cheese on top. (I like bleu cheese now; bleu cheese is cool.)
     
    Tomorrow: Craters of the Moon National Monument, as well as probably some ice caves, en route to Idaho Falls.
  10. Sumiki
    Before we left our Kamloops hotel room, we saw what we believe was a marmot which had climbed halfway up a tree. He looked like he was standing guard.
     
    Just a little after 11:00 we left Kamloops for British Columbia via the Yellowhead Highway and Trans-Canada Highway 1. It was surprisingly sunny and the temperature was 14 (57).
     
    After no more than twenty minutes on the road we went up a massive hill at a high altitude. The engine gave it all it could but it sounded as if it was on its last legs. The oil light flashed to the tune of an alarmingly fast dinging sound as the car told us that the oil pressure had dropped. We turned the engine off, thinking that running it further could ruin it. If that was true, then we had no way to get the car back to Kamloops under its own power, so we called OnStar and they ran a diagnostic test on the car. This came back clean, and when we somewhat apprehensively turned the engine on again, all systems were nominal with 74% oil life remaining.
     
    While this scare was possibly a glitch in the system, it likely had to do with the incline at that particular altitude with a comparatively cool engine trying to pull a heavy car. We had no problems - or scares - for the rest of the trip, though we did continue to have trouble getting up the 6-8% grades.
     
    But getting up? Oh, that was the easy part.
     
    You see, Vancouver is at sea level. We had to go down. From about a mile high.
     
    Fun!
     
    In addition to nearly 20-kilometer-long 6-8% downhill grades, there are scores of unmarked, hard turns, long sections that do not have guardrails (but need them), and of course, the sections which had three lanes of traffic but no lines anywhere.
     
    Eventually we flattened out, guardrails became more common, and the road began to have lines again - but this was after many intense minutes of trying to figure out what was going on and trying our best not to get ourselves killed.
     
    We entered the Nicola Valley which looked kind of like the Napa Valley on steroids - but without the vineyards. We saw snowcapped peaks in the background, which we figured out was part of the Lillooet Range, but we could not figure out if what we were seeing was Skihist Mountain or Breakenridge Mountain.
     
    It was around this point that dad spotted various power lines that had been stretched across the valley, down from one mountain and up another. The trees had been cut out to accommodate the power lines. My dad described this sight as "like spaghetti on top of pasta."
     
    We were not sure what he meant by this, but, as we have learned to do, we just accepted it and moved on with life. After all, our lives were in this man's hands.
     
    Unfortunately, this jocularity did not last very long, as we had many more challenging downhill runs ahead of us, through smaller snowcapped Rockies I like to think of as the "Alp-alachian" range.
     
    (Side note: When there are Canadian road signs, you had better pay attention to them. A great many curves that would be given ample warning in the US would just be there without fanfare for you to deal with while careening down a mountain doing about 130 KPH, braking the entire time in an attempt to keep from making pâté on a conveniently placed concrete barrier. In addition to the hazards listed earlier, this section featured slow-moving trucks in the right lane as well as ample amounts of both potholes and road construction.)
     
    Near 1:00 we saw many signs for a number of roads bearing the names of Shakespearean characters, including Lear, Othello, Iago, Romeo, and Shylock. We also saw a great many round structures that looked a bit like concrete hideouts - I honestly don't have the faintest idea of what those things might be.
     
    We crisscrossed the Coquihalla River and ran into very lush vegetation reminiscent of a rainforest. We had heard that it rained almost constantly in that region, and, appropriately, we encountered some rain as we passed through - rain that stayed with us, in some fashion, all the way to Vancouver.
     
    It was at this point that we entered into the city limits of Hope, at which point the lines on the road ran out again. The Yellowhead Highway had ended and we were once again on Trans-Canada Highway 1 bound for Vancouver. From here on out the road flattened out, but the traffic increased rapidly.
     
    We entered into a valley area with mountains on all sides, reminiscent of the scenery around Salt Lake City. The rain increased as we came nearer towards Vancouver. We saw nurseries and vineyards as we went through the suburb areas of Greendale and Abbottsford. Within a few minutes we had officially entered Vancouver where, at 3:00, the traffic was backed up through many stoplights. Maybe rush hour here is earlier; maybe it's always like this.
     
    After a few harrowing and unexpected lane changes and nearly running over an insane bicyclist who apparently thought it was a good idea to bike between lanes and cut in front of unsuspecting cars, we got to our hotel. We oriented ourselves with a few maps and found out the location of a local place called the American Cheesesteak Company, which we'd seen rather serendipitously on the Canadian TV show "You Gotta Eat Here" while we were in Jasper. Our original local place to eat at, as we learned yesterday, was in a very bad part of town, and the cheesesteaks looked supremely delicious so we decided to go there.
     
    I had a cheesesteak called "The Cowboy," which featured barbecue sauce and custom ranch sauce as well as cheese, incredibly tender meat, and something that looked like french-fried onion rings. (I was able to call dibs on the last bottled tea that they had - apparently tea is catching on here in the land of the Canucks.) The cheesesteaks were as delicious as they had looked on TV.
     
    This place was a little over a mile from our hotel in constant rain, so we got some good exercise going to and from there. I stayed relatively dry underneath a complimentary umbrella from our hotel room, but my lower legs and feet were cold and dripping wet when we got back. While en route back, my dad ducked into a place called "Beard Papa's," which claimed to have the world's best cream puffs. He appreciated the cream puffs, but I was nonplussed with the bite I got and was even more disappointed when I realized that it was a chain with locations in California and Hawaii, for some reason.
     
    We were originally going to go back out and explore Vancouver's famous Stanley Park area, but due to the conditions we opted out of doing so tonight. Instead, we will explore that area tomorrow morning. With our evening freed up to relax after some tough drives, we went upstairs to the 16th floor to a viewing area, where we felt the building sway and got a number of shots of the city.
     
    Vancouver is very environmentally conscious, with many bikers and pedestrians. A good number of roofs feature some sort of greenery, from patches of moss to a full-blown forest. From our room, we can see a street that has everything on it from apartments with doctor's offices inside to schools to grocery stores to businesses. One could live one's entire life and never leave that particular street.
     
    Tomorrow: Stanley Park and a pennant from the Vancouver Canadians before we re-enter the US bound for Seattle.
  11. Sumiki
    We left the hotel around 10:30 and, after gassing up, headed out on the Yellowhead Highway to Kamloops, BC.
     
    Within thirty minutes we'd had a bear sighting - a momma grizzly and her cub. We pulled off the road and watched them for ten minutes, but the mother did nothing but eat and the cub did nothing but sleep and occasionally poke his head up above the grass to look at us. This sighting made the count eight bear in three days.
     
    Soon after we exited Jasper National Park. Within two minutes we were at the British Columbia border, set our clocks back another hour to Pacific time, and read about the origin of the name "Yellowhead" - originally a name for a mountain pass that was adopted by the highway. Instead of it being an Indian name, it was in fact named after a blonde fur trader. (The more you know.)
     
    Soon after the border crossing we saw some sort of animal - either a wolf or coyote. In any event, it was quite big and trotted alongside the road the opposite way. Just a few minutes after this sighting, we saw - you guessed it - bear #9! He was a grizzly meandering up a hill into the woods beyond.
     
    Nine bear in three days - not bad.
     
    The park's exit features the same kind of scenery as the park's entrance, with majestic Alp-like snowcapped jagged peaks poking out behind the hilly, quasi-Appalachian large hills we were skirting. We passed by a number of large lakes including Yellowhead Lake, where we could see the reflection of an exceptionally large mountain. The clouds that have dogged us recently did not do so to the same extent today as they have in days past, and thus did not obscure the view too much. It did, however, intermittently rain.
     
    After bear, wolf/coyote, deer, and elk sightings, we thought we were bound to see at least one moose before we got out of their habitat due to their apparent abundance. Unfortunately the moose population has been dropping rapidly in recent years due to an increase in predators and a deadly liver disease that has ravaged their numbers. We passed by long, thin, beautiful Moose Lake, but it did not live up to its name as we did not see a single moose.
     
    We stopped at the Mount Robson visitor's center to stretch our legs and get some information on Kamloops and Vancouver. Mount Robson is the highest point in both the Canadian Rockies and in all of Canada, and is within the borders of a provincial park bearing its name. Unfortunately, Robson's height made its peak impossible to see because it jutted into the cloud cover. While there I learned that I am the height of a small one-year-old moose.
     
    The sun came out as we left the provincial park and the temperature rose to 10 (50F). We then continued on the Yellowhead Highway southbound to Kamloops.
     
    (Side note: People here drive like absolute lunatics. Tiny cars would fly past a convoy of two or three double-long trucks on a blind hill or curve - and this was on a two-lane highway. Passing lanes were few and far between, but these sections were the only times that the truckers and campers would actually go fast. One time we saw one guy pass on a hill when we were about to get to a passing lane within five seconds. We pulled off the road every now and then just so we wouldn't have to witness a head-on collision.)
     
    We crisscrossed the Thompson River amid sporadic sprinkles, nutty drivers, and a continually rising temperature. I dozed off somewhere in here and missed a half-hour or so of the action.
     
    We pulled off the road a little after 2:00 to let a few nuts pass us and to stretch our legs. My dad spotted what appeared to be a set of hairballs on the ground and within short order voiced his hypothesis that they were from a bear. We walked around for a bit more before hopping back in the car.
     
    The scenery changed rapidly as we approached Kamloops. The alpine mountains were no longer there and the forested hills had become more lumpy. We saw the remains of a forest fire which had "jumped over" the river and ignited trees on the other side.
     
    A little after 3:00 we entered the Kamloops city limits. The city limits in all of British Columbia seem large, encompassing what would otherwise be separately incorporated suburbs. I suppose that their lack of organized county system makes the need for government at the city level more important. It took us almost a full half-hour to get from the Kamloops outskirts to our hotel.
     
    After getting settled into the hotel and scoping out the laundry situation, our stomaches began to collectively rumble. (Considering that my breakfast consisted of two bites from a scone that my mom had smuggled into the room and my lunch had consisted of a few potato chips that we'd all sporadically munched on throughout the day to stave off the impending hunger, I had a right to be very hungry.) We heard about a place just across the street whose chef had recently competed on a Canadian competitive cooking show.
     
    We went over to eat and I had Pad Thai for the first time in my life. (It was quite good.) We were the first ones to show up for supper and had fun with our waitress. She recommended places to go in Vancouver and enjoyed the Yoder tradition. After dessert of tempura banana, we wiped out the slanted-shaped bowl it came in, placed a clean napkin inside, and placed Yoder on that. It was, for all intents and purposes, Yoder's throne. We turned this decoration into a full-blown spectacle with salt and pepper shakers, slightly used chopsticks, and cream containers.
     
    It's a little after 7:30 here in the middle of British Columbia, and I have a theory that my body has always been on Pacific Time. I actually feel sleepy around a sane bedtime, which is totally abnormal for me even if I'm sick as a dog.
     
    Tomorrow: south to Vancouver. The Canadian portion of the trip is nearly complete.
  12. Sumiki
    We escaped from our hotel at 9:48 and gassed up soon afterwards. We went along the Bow Valley Parkway north to Lake Louise and Lake Moraine. We saw more than we could yesterday as far as scenery went, but there were still too many clouds for a completely clear view. We saw a lot of deer as we traveled the Parkway.
     
    The clouds looked a little more clear so we pulled into the Lake Louise parking lot again to see what we could see. We saw a bit more of the mountain-lake scenery than yesterday, with snow-covered, jagged rocks jutting up out of the sides of the lake through into the clouds above, but we could only catch occasional glimpses of the white peaks. After getting more pictures of the clearer lake area, we went towards Lake Moraine.
     
    This time, the road to the lake was open, and we went along the eight-and-a-half-mile-long winding mountain road up to the lake. There were no guardrails and we could see just how much snow accumulated yesterday which was plowed onto the side of the road. The rain turned to slush and then hard snow as we ascended the mountain and the temperature plummeted to freezing.
     
    It took us fourteen minutes to go these fourteen kilometers, but we arrived safe and sound at Lake Moraine. It was larger and prettier than Lake Louise, and due to its altitude and temperature had completely frozen over. The lake juts up against incredibly tall and jagged mountains and was initially carved by a glacier - hence the geological term "moraine" for the lake. (A "moraine" is consolidated loose matter accumulated in one area by the movement of a glacier.) There was snow everywhere and it was gorgeous, if very cold.
     
    Just after noon we headed back downhill. Rain took over from snow as the temperature climbed to a comparatively tropical 1. Rain and snow switched out as the temperature dipped and rose to and from the freezing point. Fortunately we didn't run into any hail, unlike last year's Black Hills experience.
     
    The drive had taken a toll on our gas tank so we stopped for gas in the village of Lake Louise. We were given a coupon by a very polite Korean man at the gas station for sandwiches at a place across the street called the Javalanche. Their club sandwiches featured red bell peppers and cucumbers, which was rather odd.
     
    We took Alberta Route 93, also called the Icefields Parkway after the Columbia Icefields, northbound to Jasper. The Columbia Icefields are about halfway between Lake Louise and Jasper. The temperature reached a balmy 2 as we saw various scenic waterfalls and passed small glaciers. The precipitation would never stop - it would slow to a meager drizzle but would never quite come to a halt. As the temperature fluctuated, so did the kind of precipitation we got.
     
    Bow Lake, which feeds the Bow River, was frozen over. The sun kept up its efforts to poke through the cloud cover but the clouds always won the battle. As we descended into a valley, the mountains around us had ribbons of snow on top of them - kind of like layers of cake. There'd be snow, rocks, and trees, all in strata all the way up the sheer cliff.
     
    It's really quite hard to describe the scenery along the route. We'd enter down into utterly flat valleys carved out by glaciers past, but we hugged one side of the valley. On the other side of the valley, sheer and jagged mountains erupted from the ground all the way into the ever-lessening cloud clover. Just off the right of the road, however, the mountains were like incredibly large hills, clothed from top to bottom in large evergreens. The juxtaposition of these incredibly disparate pieces of scenery make that part of the drive highly eclectic.
     
    At 2:30 we entered the Columbia Icefields area. We saw the Athabasca Glacier as the sun finally burst through the clouds and we saw the first slice of blue sky since the middle of Saskatchewan.
     
    There is a private company that takes large tour buses up onto the Athabasca Glacier and lets people walk around for a few minutes. This by its very nature was something that we absolutely had to do.
     
    For being something out smack-dab in the middle of nowhere, it was like the Olympics; every nationality was represented. However, almost none of them understood English and, as such, disregarded the bus driver's many warnings not to go out onto unchecked glacial ice as they could fall into a crevasse as deep as the Eiffel Tower is tall and would instantly die.
     
    In addition to walking around on a freakin' glacier - which was in and of itself completely awesome, as it is surrounded on three sides by the trademark snowcapped, jagged peaks of the Canadian Rockies - we dipped our hands in frigid, pure glacial water, just now melting after being frozen for thousands of years. The glacier is flowing off from the vast Columbia Icefields, which were just beyond our line of sight up and over the glacier. (The Icefields are so incredibly large that they could pick up the entire city of Vancouver, put in on the Icefields, and still have more than enough room to spare. We did not see them but we got enough of a taste of them after the glacier walk.)
     
    We talked with a Welsh couple who were visiting family in Vancouver as I entertained their precocious 20-month old with Yoder the Duck. He took a liking to the little orange duck and seemed sad when he had to give him back. We also learned more about glaciers than we probably needed to know courtesy of our enthusiastic bus driver, who talked so extensively about glaciers and glacier-related topics that, if his loses his job as an glacier bus driver, he could easily land a gig somewhere as an auctioneer.
     
    At 4:30 we hit the road again and saw more of the strange Rockies/plains/large hills landscape.
     
    A little after 5:00 we saw a massive grizzly bear walking the other direction along the road. While we aren't sure, given its sheer size we think it was a male grizzly. (My parents lived a few years in Alaska before I was born and they both said that it was the largest bear they'd ever seen.)
     
    As we rolled on towards Jasper, the scenery got progressively more gorgeous. The large hills became interspersed with the jagged peaks. Solid white mountains poked out of the occasional spaces between the mountains. The road would go straight for miles and miles, giving scale to the peaks that lay before us. It's hard not to feel small when driving through.
     
    We got plenty of pictures and heard about another bear from some folks at another pullout. Thinking that we were lucky for seeing three bears in two days, we kept on towards Jasper.
     
    At 6:00 sharp we saw a number of cars parked along the side of the road. Pulling off, we saw what they saw: a momma black bear with two cubs that play-fought with each other and climbed up on trees. Tourists would come too close for comfort to the bears, but did not get between the mother and her cubs and thus they did not get eaten. We got tons of pictures as the bears walked into the woods and, having seen six bears (three grizzly, three black) in two days, we felt pretty good about ourselves. Within a few minutes we were in Jasper.
     
    Wanting to continue the scenic drive, we skirted around Jasper and headed up the road towards Patricia and Pyramid Lakes in search of the still-elusive moose. We'd seen six bears when seeing one is uncommon, but we still hadn't seen a moose.
     
    (Side note: Patricia Lake was used during World War II for Operation Habakkuk, which tested the theory of unsinkable ships carved from icebergs. While these ships never actually launched they were tested extensively - as the MythBusters once proved, while the theory has merit on paper, real-life conditions are not conducive to its use in warfare.)
     
    Both lakes were gorgeous and the sky was almost completely clear. We saw a number of mule deer in addition to the lakes, but even though we passed many marshy areas conducive to moose sightings and slowed down in the hopes of catching a glimpse, we still have yet to see a moose.
     
    But don't worry. We'll see moose when we drive the Alaska Highway next year. (To pass the time on the hypothetical drive to Alaska next year, I would tell my parents everything I know about the history of and sights along the highway, then spend the rest listening to the complete works of ABBA and Dire Straits on the iPod. What time remained would be dedicated to making horrible puns.)
     
    After checking into our hotel we went out for some dinner. While driving into the restaurant, we saw about twelve or so large female elk that were either walking near the road or right next to the restaurant, busy stripping off plant leaves. We got up pretty darn close to some - as close as we could to still be safe, but it wasn't all that far away. As we walked to the restaurant, a man came running out and waving his arms at the other tourists, screaming "two bus lengths! If they get scared they'll kill you!"
     
    Strangely enough, this very man ended up being our waiter.
     
    The steaks were excellent but the dessert of maple-walnut ice cream was better than the maple ice cream we first tried (and went back for) last year in Portland.
     
    Pyramid Lake is the furthest north I've ever been and the furthest north we'll go on this journey. (That is, unless we decide to wing it and go up to Alaska.)
     
    Tomorrow: Southbound again to Kamloops in British Columbia.
  13. Sumiki
    We slept in a bit more today and headed out at 11:00 in rain. We were going up the Bow Valley Parkway, which parallels the Trans-Canada Highway to Lake Louise northwest of Banff. Instead of trying to go on the fast-paced highway, given the amount of precipitation, we decided to take the Parkway for a smoother, more wildlife-filled ride.
     
     
    By 11:15 we'd seen an elk eating and walking over large downed branches on the side of a steep hill. We still could not see the tops of the mountains due to the cloud cover and rain, but we were nonetheless still awed by what scenery we could see.
     
    At 11:40 we could see more elk lying down in an open field. All of the trailheads were closed due to the number of bears seen in the area, but even if they were open we still would have opted out of walking on them due to the rain. We kept being fooled by various stumps and rocks in fields, as we kept thinking that they were elk, deer, or moose.
     
    A little after noon we pulled off the road to look at a few signs which told the story of World War I-era Canadian citizens who didn't sign up for duty and were rounded up and put in internment camps during the war. (However, most of those that were rounded up were homeless.) They targeted those of the same nationalities as they were fighting, assuming that those that didn't want to fight were actually enemies.
     
    It was 2 degrees Celsius and snow began to mix in with the rain. The snow increased and the temperature dropped to 0 - freezing - as we shifted to third gear going down hills. By 12:30 rain had taken over again as the temperature had risen to 2 again. We saw a large black wolf trotting in the woods with some lunch flopping around in his mouth.
     
    Then, a little after 12:30, we saw a large female grizzly bear along the side of the road, looking up at the stopped vehicles and finally walking away into the woods. She was a big one.
     
    We reached the end of the Bow Valley Parkway by 12:45 and headed up to the famous Lake Louise area. It was one degree and snowing very hard, coming down thick with large flakes. It dropped to 0 again as we crossed the Continental Divide and soon we found ourselves parked and getting out to see Lake Louise.
     
    It seemed like a good idea at the time.
     
    The temperature stayed at freezing for the entire time, and the snow that had fallen had melted just enough to make the walk down to Lake Louise slippery and dangerous. The snow was still coming down on top of us, piling on our hoods and backs and soaking through our shoes.
     
    Then we looked out onto majestic Lake Louise and saw a bunch of fog. It was beautiful in its own right but I was too cold to appreciate it very well. We took out the camera underneath my mom's opened coat and got a few good shots. (She really took one for the team.)
     
    We trudged back up the slippery slope and got back into the slightly warmer car. It was still freezing and the snow had compacted itself into ice along the bottom of the windshield. Bits of this ice would be flung off as the windshield wipers went on.
     
    Our next stop was going to be Moraine Lake, but we were stopped by a Mountie with possibly the thickest Canadian accent one can have. (It still wasn't all that thick.) He told us that the snow was too thick up there and it'd take an hour to clear it with the snowplow. Considering that we're in a land used to getting through lots of snow the fact that they decided to close it off said it all. With no other places to stop we decided to go back to Banff via the Parkway in an attempt to see more critters.
     
    We saw more critters - specifically a grizzly cub. He decided to walk along the road for a while until looking right at us as he cut across. After exploring the other side of the road, he presumably didn't know what all the fuss was about and, glad he was not a chicken, he ambled back to the other side of the road and scampered off into the woods.
     
    We saw more mule deer as the temperature rose to 1, but it soon began to snow fully again when the temperature dropped to freezing again. The snow was the predominant precipitation, interspersed with rain when the temperature rose.
     
    More mule deer ate along the side of the road, then soon we saw more elk munching away. As we pulled into Banff we saw more deer along the railroad tracks.
     
    It was almost 3:00 and our breakfast wasn't holding us any longer. We found some free parking and ate a late lunch at Coyote's - which serves southwest-style food, the last thing one would expect in the Canadian Rockies. The meals were good but hardly filling, as I left the establishment with the same hunger headache I had entered with. We headed back to the hotel and lounged around for a bit before heading out for dinner at a famous Banff restaurant called Bumpers.
     
    It was delicious. My dad and I both got some of the most tender prime rib on the face of the planet, complete with loaded baked potatoes and some puny token veggies. Our waitress was from Brisbane, Australia, and we entertained her by playing up on our southernness and drawled on about mint juleps when we saw that they had stuck a sprig of mint in the tea glasses.
     
    (My dad and I ended up getting very, very punchy and decided to badly re-enact Romeo and Juliet with napkins folded around utensils. Also, I was offered a cocktail by the Aussie waitress, who was under the impression that I was twenty.)
     
    Tomorrow: Jasper, Alberta, via the Bow Valley Parkway once again. We'll then walk onto a glacier.
     
    (While I expect our hotel will have Internet, we're out in the middle of nowhere, so there may not be an entry for a few days.)
  14. Sumiki
    We had a filling breakfast of eggs Benedict far surpassed last night's dinner in terms of flavor. The storm system that had pasted us last night was still in the area, but had moved past far enough for us to make good time west across North Dakota. Our first stop of the day was the geographical center of North America at a town called Rugby. We took US 2 all the way there.
     
    We saw a bunch of red-winged blackbirds. It was raining intermittently and gusted indefinitely. The record rains North Dakota has been getting create impromptu lakes along the sides of the road to the degree that you sometimes feel as if you're still on the Mackinac Bridge. We saw cloud cover low enough to obscure whatever windmill blade happened to be on top.
     
    At 12:30 we stopped at a rest area. A fellow in a red shirt walked by as we used the term "lunch" to describe small bird roadkill in the parking log. My dad then proceeded to tell him about our usage of the word, as well as more recent additions to our dialect such as "snack pack," "dinner party," and "buffet," which all mean different things for different kinds of roadkill. The man said "oh, good to know" and hurried away. As he walked back to his car, we were still looking at literature inside, so I decided to prank him by locking the car until it honked as he walked past.
     
    I think we disturbed him.
     
    At 1:35 we arrived in Rugby and pulled over to see the geographic center. All that was there was a small stone obelisk with a few plaques on it, along with the flags of the US, Canada, and Mexico. We got as many pictures as is was possible to take, as the wind was whipping all around us. My dad and I barely held onto our hats as we staggered back to the car.
     
    We went through downtown Rugby and saw, amongst other things, a water treatment plant. Now, water treatment plants are not usually considered interesting sights, but Rugby is a sleepy town and their only claim to fame is found in its location. The water treatment plant used a bunch of fire hydrants as decoration.
     
    From Rugby we went to the Canadian border via state route 3 and were surprised by the hilliness of the area. It was not mountainous but it was not the sheer flatness that had characterized the state up until Rugby.
     
    A little less than an hour later we got to the Canadian border, but we did not go through customs first. Instead, we went inside the Canadian border at a place called the International Peace Garden. It's the only place where you can drive into and walk around in Canada without the need for going through customs. The border was symbolized with various cool-looking monuments all around the Garden, but we barely saw anyone else there save for a few construction workers renovating the small chapel there. The border ran through the exact center of the building, through the pulpit and organ. We didn't stick around in there for long because of the constant sound of jackhammers. but they had a plethora of cool quotes carved into marble around the sides.
     
    We got a number of dumb pictures goofing off on the border, jumping over it and making faces. My mom was the resident nonplussed designated picture-taker.
     
    There was also a bell tower there and a memorial to the 9/11 victims with a mangled mass of steel and concrete from Ground Zero. Continuing with the theme of international cooperation between the US and Canada, the signs around the memorial emphasized Canada's role in the aftermath of the tragedy.
     
    Before we exited the Peace Garden area we pulled into the nearly deserted parking lot of their interpretive center, next to - of all things - a car with another North Carolina license plate. We found them inside the center's greenhouse. They were a young couple on their own road trip, though not as massive as ours is going to end up being.
     
    The greenhouse houses a large collection of cacti, of all things. Almost every species was present inside the large, humid building, and we found strange specimens ranging from furry towers to spiked melons to vines. It was apparently the private collection of a rich fellow who lived in the southwest and moved to Minot. After the Minot floods a few years back they moved the collection to the Peace Garden. There was only enough room in the center's greenhouse for about a third of the entire collection and the rest is in other greenhouses on the property waiting to be moved into the center's greenhouse when it is expanded.
     
    After talking to the musician at the gift shop for a little while we got back on the road and headed towards Canada. It took a while to get through the border but the customs guy was friendly. (In our discussion with him we learned that Americans commonly attempt to smuggle firearms across the Canadian border.) He checked out our passports and heard him say "eh," which was rather fun.
     
    We crossed into Manitoba and played "O, Canada" as we changed the car's settings to Metric. We had fun trying to figure out the temperature gauge in Celsius and fiddled with it for a while. The road up to Brandon was littered with potholes of all sizes.
     
    En route to Brandon we passed through the small town of Boissevain. The customs guard had told us to "look out for the turtle" as we drove through. The turtle was hard to miss to the the fact that it was 30 feet tall. The rural roads that intersected the highway were rarely, if ever, paved.
     
    At around 5:00 we passed a fun billboard advertising Wendy's Baconator that said "Holy Cow and Pig!" A few minutes later we rolled into Brandon and within short order found the hotel.
     
    We went out to find supper and my dad had a hankering for Mexican food so we pulled into a Qdoba. The girl who checked us out was giving him a hard time for not drinking a beer and intimated that she had connections that would prevent us from getting arrested if he drove drunk.
     
    Now we're back in the hotel trying everything we can to get the internet to speed up to a snail's pace. My mom is walking all over the room to try and get various pages to load on the iPad and I think she's found a spot in a corner that's a bit faster.
     
    Tomorrow: we head westward once again on the Trans-Canadian Highway bound for Swift Current, Saskatchewan.
  15. Sumiki
    At 10:00 we left Wausau bound for Minnesota. By 10:40 we made it to Abbotsford, the first city in Wisconsin. The sky was overcast and very cloudy. We passed farms and saw various farm animals as well as various farms and silos. While different, the sameness of the road was tiresome after a while.
     
    We were surprised to see signs warning of Amish buggies, and saw a farm animal pulling a plow, but did not see any horse-and-buggy combinations then. Each small town we passed through on the route featured beautiful and customized signs with the town name and motto. Wisconsin towns are clean and have a lot of pride in themselves.
     
    Trees became a more common sight as the hills began to roll as we headed towards Chippewa Falls. The sky began to darken just a little bit more the farther we went towards Minnesota.
     
    We neared Eau Claire as my mom read to us from her back-seat nest of a massive rivalry. Apparently, Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls had a massive rivalry as they competed for dominance in the state's once-large logging industry. However, when the forests were depleted, the towns both turned to other fields. No word on whether they're still bitter with each other.
     
    Trees in Wisconsin are just starting to bloom, as the long winter has finally passed. A little before noon it began to drizzle as we merged onto Interstate 94 bound for the Twin Cities.
     
    The road became very wet very quickly as trucks churned up mist. We had to pull off the highway and stopped for gas about 30 miles east of the Minnesota border. It was pouring rain at this point. Pulling out of the gas station, we saw an Amish buggy before getting back on I-94.
     
    By 12:30 we were heading out of the storm and the rain had decreased to a steady drizzle and saw a coyote near the road. The rain stopped as we crossed the Mississippi into Minnesota (state #7). We stopped at the welcome center and saw a number of interesting characters, including a man with his shirt half-off crouched over on a picnic table, around 15 Amish men and women, and an anorexic hippy who, my mom testified, busied herself in the bathroom by washing her hair in the sink.
     
    At 1:00 we were in the Twin Cities, crossed the Mississippi again, and tried to find a place we'd seen on TV called Pizzeria Lola. The route there did not seem hard - just go on the expressway until you exit off and go on Xerxes Avenue.
     
    What we did not realize is that not only did the exit we were supposed to take nonexistent, but that there seems to be more than one Xerxes Avenue. In our attempts to get to our hotel we ran into this road a number of times, but we did not take it at any point for fear of getting even more desperately lost. At that point, all we wanted to do was get to our hotel.
     
    We had seen what we thought was our hotel from the Interstate into Minneapolis, but that one turned out to be different. Thinking that was the only one, we were confused when our GPS told us to pass it. We pulled off into a Culver's parking lot and called the hotel. After a series of unfortunate misunderstandings, everything went better than expected; our hotel was right where it was supposed to be. Our confusion was due to the fact that it can't be seen from the highway. We then ate at Culver's and sipped on some milkshakes as we went to our hotel.
     
    Heading off at around 6:45 for the stadium of the independent league St. Paul Saints, we took a detour and drove around Macalester College. The outfield fence at their field was incredibly short but also incredibly high, at they built the field into very limited space. It would have been fun to see a game there - my dad called it "arena baseball."
     
    At 7:15 we parked near the stadium in the Lions Club parking lot, where the attendants could not believe that we had driven over 1500 miles from North Carolina. One guy even ran behind the car to check our license plate out. Clearly we need to play up on our accents and throw in more "y'all"s.
     
    The game was insane, and by insane I of course mean our brand of insane. One of the highest-drawing independent teams in the country, the Saints are co-owned by the grandson of famous baseball owner Bill Veeck, the mind behind such infamous fiascos as pinch-hitting midget Eddie Gaedel, 10-cent beer night, and the infamous Disco Demolition. His grandson carries on a muted version of this bizarre tradition, with such between-inning games as the tire roll race and various contestants trying to put on a frozen t-shirt first.
     
    The Saints also have various characters who are paid to just walk around in-character to entertain (and occasionally harass) fans. One fellow alternated between French chef and train conductor, another was dressed in drag and hobbled around on a walker, and yet another was basically Elvis meets Mr. Sulu. (Oh my.)
     
    One of the most inventive traditions the Saints have is the annual pig mascot, named before Opening Day and announced with smoke signals like they're selecting a new Pope. Previous pig names included Kim Lardashian, Kris Hamphries, and Kevin Bacon.
     
    Their PA announcer wandered around the stadium and I'm still not sure if he was drunk or not. He asked fans dumb questions and made fun of the other team. During the "charge" cheer, he did the "charge" yell in a very small, sleepy voice the first time, then burped the next time and didn't say anything the third. He also told all the fans that he "hoped they all had their jumper cables." (If my dad were a PA announcer, he'd be that guy.)
     
    The food at the stadium was also excellent, as it is one of the only independent teams in the country to have a VP to run the stadium food. We sampled gyros and cheese curds - both of which were fresh and excellent. We left a bit early to get ahead of the large, drunken crowd, but when we left the Saints were beating the New Jersey Jackals 7-2. (The Jackals starter got hammered in the first two innings - he had no control and kept leaving pitches over the plate.)
     
    Tomorrow, I'll be at the Mall of America meeting Paleo at the LEGO store. We'll also go and meet Takuma Nuva later on in the day.
  18. Sumiki
    Blogarithm Contest #1: Strange PMs!
    Objective: Come up with the a bizarre PM.
    Contest Period: October 8-10, 2009
    Entries: 11
    Winners: -Toa Lhikevikk-, HercuLesss, ChocolateFrogs, and Mesonak
    Prizes: PBZP MOCs.
     
    Blogarithm Contest #2: Subtitles!
    Objective: Come up with a subtitle for Blogarithm.
    Contest Period: October 22-25, 2009
    Entries: 18
    Winner: Jonah Falcon
    Prize: Subtitle used on Blogarithm for one month.
     
    Blogarithm Contest #3: Home Improvement!
    Objective: Come up with a concept for an improvement to BZP.
    Contest Period: August 27-September 4, 2010
    Entries: none (contest canceled)
     
    Blogarithm Contest #4: Fresh Salad!
    Objective: Build a MOC that integrates a fruit or vegetable.
    Contest Period: January 1-February 29, 2012
    Entries: 4
    Winner: Sparkytron's Dr. Bananabot
    Prize: none
     
    Blogarithm Contest #5: Biographical!
    Objective: Write Sumiki's staff biography.
    Contest Period: June 15-23, 2012
    Entries: 5
    Prize: Usage in Sumiki's official staff biography.
     
    Blogarithm Contest #6: Topic Closed!
    Objective: Create a hilarious topic-closing post.
    Contest Period: September 19-26, 2012
    Entries: 32
    Winner: Lego Obsessionist
    Prize: Have your topic-closing post used on the forums.
     
    Blogarithm Contest #7: The Wisdom of Sumiki!
    Objective: Guess the nature of Sumiki's surreal status updates.
    Contest Period: January 4-15, 2014
    Entries: 11
    Winner: Paleo
    Prizes: An autographed selfie and an engraved "Dreams About Farm Animals" brick
     
    Blogarithm Contest #8: The Great Vine Challenge!
    Objective: Provide the concept to a six-second Vine made by Sumiki, Zatth, Xaeraz, Takuma Nuva, and others at BrickFair VA 2014.
    Contest Period: July 28-30, 2014
    Entries: 9
    Winners: Octodad, Makuta Luroka, and Kitania
    Prizes: The completed Vines from BrickFair VA.
     
    Blogarithm Contest #9: Vakama Eats Spam‽
    Objective: Come up with a Sumiki's Dad-esque reason for why Vakama would eat Spam.
    Contest Period: December 7-14, 2014
    Entries: 13
    Winner: Portalfig
    Prizes: Appearance in The Adventures of Sumiki's Dad 2: Vakama Eats Spam and a signed copy of the complete Adventures of Sumiki's Dad saga.
     
    Blogarithm Contest #10: Express Building!
    Objective: Build a MOC using twenty pieces or fewer.
    Contest Period: August 7-15, 2015
    Entries: 15
    Winner: Paleo's Separator Monster
    Prize: An engraved brick
  19. Sumiki

    Approvals

    By Sumiki,

    Here lies the list of approvals that this blog has accrued.
     





    My Approval


    CF's Fusion Approval


    Chunky's Canned Approval


    Chunky's Awesomenees Approval


    Chunky's Zen-Master Approval


    Chunky's WOW-ful Approval


    Nidman's Amusing Approval



    Morgoth's Dynamic-Page Approval


    Lhikevikk's Error-Message Approval


    Blue Dragon's self-proclaimed small approval



    VB's creepy approval



    Toa Dave's Freaky Approval


    Brickeens' Text-Bubbly Approval



    Dr. Evil's Bald Approval


    Mysterious Minifig's Mysterious Approval


    Kylus's Photok Approval


    Kylus's Awesome Drawn Approval


    Gorgnak's Desert-Formation Approval


    It's-a-Ziko's A-Mario Approval


    The Official Brickeens Awesome Award


    Keanu Reeves' Drawn Approval


    Ballom's PURPLE Approval





     

    Bitter Cold's Wishful-Thinking Approval






     

    Porky Pig's Doubled-Up Approval



    Taka Nuvia's Clever Approval



    I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT DR. EVIL'S HOGAN APPROVAL


    Mesonak's Onua Mistika Approval


    Cash Chicago's "By the way" Approval


    Lewa Krom's Shaky Approval


    Cherixon's Tree-and-Scanline Approval



    Cherixon's Mata Nui Approval


    Rawr's RAAAAWR Approval


    Shut up, it's Peter Griffin's Approval


    LewaLew's Major League Approval


    Toa Spirit's Awesome Drawn Approval


    Toa Spirit's Calvin-and-Hobbes Approval



    VB's Messy Approval


    The Rabid MOCists's Quizzical Blawg Approval (x2)


    Christo1096's Dark Kopaka Approval


    Shadix's Drawn Approval


    Ran Yakumo's Guitar Approval



    Ran Yakumo's Second Approval



    Shadix's Flashy Approval


    Ran Yakumo's Third & Updated Approval



    Daiker's Nuparu Approval


    Daiker's Second Nuparu Approval





     

    Unit#phntk#1's Text Approval



    Ran Yakumo's Fourth Approval



    Zakitano's Ripoff Approval


    WE'RE DOING THIS's Somewhat Philosophical Approval


    Legolover's Approval


    Blademan's Indecipherable Approval


    Ardros's Surprisingly Non-Octagon Approval


    tent163phantoka's Olmak Approval


    Toa of Smooth Jazz's Ood Approval


    Dual Matrix's Somewhat Hyperactive Approval


    The Lonesome Wanderer's Homestuck (?) Approval


    Total Approvals



    -58-



    this is getting to the point of utter ridiculousness


  25. Sumiki

    Rest In Peace

    By Sumiki,

    My grandfather died today, four days shy of his 92nd birthday. It wasn't by any means unexpected - he had cancer that had progressed into his bones - but it's still sad.
×
×
  • Create New...