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

  2. 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


  3. Sumiki

    Belly-Dancing Ninjas

    By Sumiki,

    Another long day took us out from Amarillo, along one of Texas’s unique but no less navigationally infuriating one-way frontage roads to gas and then onto the Interstate. We made good time to Oklahoma City, where we stopped for a Subway to meet Portalfig.
     
    I briefly met Protalgif last BrickFair when he showed up for one of the public days, and I encouraged him to attend this year as well if at all possible. My dad regaled us with non sequiturs that nearly had Tagolrip choking on some lettuce, although I didn’t help matters when I did my vocal imitations and described the childhood incident where my uncle caused me to snort a piece of spaghetti up the back of my nose. Torgalpif and I discussed the finer points of getting hotel staff to think you’re an inspector as well as various Sumiki’s Dad-isms such as “at Sub-Zero, bears fall from the ceiling” and the enduring favorite topic of “belly-dancing ninjas.”
     
    Ifgtalrop met Yoder the Duck, and we taught him our “Yoder Salute” which he imitated instinctively. On the way out, a crow began to scream at us. Protalgift, aware but having not lived through the Cteve saga, was a little less terrified than were we.
     
    But once again we found ourselves in Oklahoma City on the weekend and Memphis, while still a ways away, was now within our sights. We got through the other side of the city, and thus out of the plains as the land morphed into the rolling hills of Arkansas and points east.
     
    We soon found ourselves in Arkansas, where we stopped at the welcome center and got gas. My parents broke their streak of not eating at national fast food chains on these big trips, as they, despite my objections, had me roll through a Wendy’s and order them hamburgers. I did not partake and have remained pure in my personal road trip mantra of abstaining from such locations in favor of what I like to call “actual food.” (Plus, I was still full from my six-inch sub earlier in the day.)
     
    I kept on from Oklahoma City to somewhere outside of Little Rock, where my dad took over and took us the rest of the way. But while on the road between Little Rock and Memphis, we passed many truckers. One of them stuck her hand out the window while we passed, and then another one pulled behind us and flashed his lights at us and honked his horn. Disturbed that there might be something amiss with the vehicle, we pulled off and then found absolutely nothing amiss with the car inside or out—save for that crack in the windshield, but it hasn’t changed an inch since Albuquerque. We chalked the truckers’ actions up to coincidence on the one’s part and mindless vitriol on the other’s, then kept on going.
     
    When we crossed the Mississippi River and got to our hotel, we found that there were too many vehicles with guests trying to check in, leaving us stuck on the road in the middle of Memphis. This being an absurd safety hazard, Mom and I rushed inside to figure out what was going on. The valets were conspicuous in their absence as cars piled up behind us into the intersection.
     
    My dad managed to get the car to safety and tried to figure out why the remaining valet staff appeared to be quitting en masse. The security guards and front desk were laissez-faire about the slow-motion traffic jam until I pointed out that the potential guests behind us had left for the competition—at which point everyone in sight hopped on the ball and figured their mess out.
     
    With the car unloaded and valeted away to safety, we dumped our bags in the room and went across the street to the stadium of the Memphis Redbirds, the Triple-A affiliate of the Cardinals whose pennant we were unable to obtain three years ago. The fast-paced game was already into the eighth inning, and folks were still buying tickets for the postgame fireworks show. Nonetheless, we didn’t need to get a ticket to get a pennant, as a few were left for sale from an unenthusiastic vendor just outside the ticket office.
     
    They generally allow the public in without tickets in the last innings, but for the weekend fireworks the security was doubled down, so we settled for a few pictures inside the courtyard area within the gates. We went back to the room to assess our dinner options, only for me to look at the tiles on the ceiling in the room’s foyer area and realize that they were sagging.
     
    A call to the front desk later, the repairman showed up. After poking on the slanted bunch of tiles, he assured us that while it certainly shouldn’t look like it did, it was the result of a rowdy bunch who had inhabited the room some time before us combined with a slack job by the housekeeping staff. From the looks of the room, the sheets and surfaces are clean but all other general tidiness items such as the warped ceiling tiles have been thrown under the proverbial rug.
     
    Delayed a bit, we finally looked at our food options. There was about a five-item room service menu, an adjoining T.G.I. Friday’s, or a walk out into the streets of downtown Memphis after dark directly into the Beale Street party scene, where the fireworks were going off after the game and the lights of police cars, positioned to guide the exiting Redbirds fans, blinded those unfortunate enough to so much as look out the window. T.G.I. Friday’s it was. The place had been all but empty when walking back from the Redbirds stadium but had since been packed and now featured a waitlist of at least thirty minutes. However, we were able to grab some seats earlier than that … at the bar.
     
    I have never sat at a bar before and fortunately it was not too loud of an experience. The bartender, a gregarious live-in-the-moment party animal with a slicked-back mohawk, lobe-stretching earrings, and a penchant for delivering profanity-laced bits of wisdom, put on an absolute show with the way he’d flip glasses around behind his back and refill three drinks at once. It was a twisted incarnation of a hibachi-grill show and somehow, while racing around in a state of looking perpetually fast-forwarded, he found the time to give us and the other patrons a hard time about pretty much anything. The food (we all got three burgers) paled in its inherent interest to the guy behind the bar.
     
    I ate all of mine, then what remained of my parents’ fries, and I’m still not completely full … but it’s sure better than nothing.
     
    The party scene is heating up inside and out as I write, but we have earplugs to insert and pillows to stack atop our heads. Our exhaustion and eagerness to get back will fuel our sleep tonight.
     
    Tomorrow: we get home.
  5. Sumiki

    Full Circle

    By Sumiki,

    We awoke in Memphis at 10:00 and began the process of leaving the hotel, which took until an hour later because of the chronically understaffed valet service. Having determined a much better hotel route should we ever go across I-40 that far again, we left Memphis and navigated its traffic through the suburbs and across Tennessee.
     
    Our route today is pretty much the exact reverse of our first two days of the first Great American Road Trip, so in many ways our day today—and our overall I-40 route back—have wrapped up these four trips in a way that indeed comes full circle.
     
    The traffic patterns moved like an accordion across many sections, where traffic going 0 one minute would be flying at 80 the next and then back again. We stopped for lunch at an Arby's outside of Cookeville, where we got things we knew—save for me, who had curly fries (I'd only ever gone for their potato cakes in the past) and an orange cream milkshake, which was so thick and so cold that it stayed chilly until I finished it off past the North Carolina border.
     
    The traffic thinned out and aside from some bits of road construction and a little rubbernecking, we made excellent time as we went along with the wall-to-wall traffic at a clip steadily five over the speed limit. Sunset darkened the sky after we passed Asheville.
     
    We stopped at a Food Lion for midnight snack and breakfast supplies, but we had gotten there a few minutes too late and they had just closed. We made our way to a Harris Teeter and were the only other customers in there save for a tattooed, yet very mild-mannered young couple and a convoy of three highly efficient couponing black women.
     
    We got home after 24 days, 20 states, 7,215.7 miles and 23.8 average MPG.
     
    Tomorrow: we sleep in after a long (and physically exhausting) trip. The past three long days back from Utah have been especially hard.
  7. Sumiki

    Setting Sail

    By Sumiki,

    -----Our Alaska Marine Highway ferry was scheduled to leave the dock at 5:00, and we wanted to be there early enough for its departure. But the vessels of the Highway are juggled early and often, and upon our confirmation, we learned that departure was actually 7:00. But it was better to be early than late, so we left Whitehorse—this time, for the final time—around 8:40 in the morning.
     
    -----The hour and a half of driving between Whitehorse and the next sign of human activity in Haines Junction was one which we’d already covered on the day we first entered Alaska, and it was a good chunk of the reason behind wanting to leave so early. A 14-kilometer section of badly damaged road and some of the worst loose gravel sections of the Alaska Highway were once again expertly navigated, though somewhat mitigated by the fact that they were doing some road work on the front half of things. When we stopped, the lady holding the stop/slow sign—replete in pink hard hat and yoga pants, with her lazy dog napping in the shade of a nearby car—approached each and every vehicle in line and cheerfully told all of us how long it’d be and how great it was that they had two pilot cars running. Truth be told, someone so friendly is in the wrong line of work.
     
    -----The cloudiness and the raininess that dominated our journey up the Alaska Highway had passed, leaving clear skies and views of the snowcapped peaks as we motored on to Haines Junction. We got gas in Haines Junction, at the same place as we did before, with the words of our secondary Arctic Circle tour guide ringing in our heads: “on the road to Haines, always get gas when you see it.”
     
    -----True to form, the first sign that greets you on the Haines Highway is one that warns of no services for the next 200 kilometers, and as far as lonely drives are concern, it’s practically a paved Top of the World. The route took us south through what remained of the Yukon, swerving into verdant valleys with mountaintops all around. It was well-paved, with only a few chipsealed sections to eradicate our complacency and serve as reminders of exactly how good it was to have legitimate pavement under our wheels once more.
     
    -----Few vehicles were coming from Haines, and even fewer were going in our direction, and as we passed into British Columbia, the scenery began to morph. As rain began to drizzle and snow encompassed the mountains, the landscape—now a rolling plateau—had frozen lakes and rivers just now feeling the thaw, and in every direction the snow lay in a patchwork of embankments “like spilled milk,” as my mom put it. As we reached the summit, we encountered a man who had gotten out of his truck who waved us down to ask if we had a spare gasoline tank. We told him that we didn’t, but that the RVs we passed earlier might be of help. What we soon learned is that, if he gave his vehicle a good push, he’d probably be able to coast the rest of the way.
     
    -----What comes up must come down, and coming down meant going through customs. They give travelers a good warning, but it’s not always wise to slow down to a stop while on a steep grade. The Canadian customs office was just around the turn, and we stopped at it only so my dad could get out and tell one of the officers about the guy out of gas at the top. A quarter of a mile down the road, we reached U.S. customs, where the guy there took one look at our passports, asked the mere basic questions in a monotone, and sent us on our way.
     
    -----Haines is regarded for the immense number of bald eagles that either live there year-round or make it home seasonally, and the “Welcome to Alaska” sign called the area “The Valley of the Eagles.” The road descended—gradually, now—alongside the Chilkat River. On either side, mountains shot straight up. We’re not at the right time of year for the tens of thousands of eagles, but we did see a handful of them soaring above our heads as we came into town.
     
    -----Haines, as it turns out, is a rather sleepy little place. Like many places in the Alaskan southeast, it receives quite a bit of rain, and I don’t think it’s quite stopped drizzling since we exited Canada for the final time. The Marine Highway used to be nearer to the town centers for each of its ports of call, but recent decades of increasing cruise ship activity necessitated shuffling the workaday Marine Highway to the side in favor of the massive vessels that pump money into the economy. In Haines, the port is about three miles from the center of town, so we ended up going into town for some lunch.
     
    -----The place we ended up going to, nestled near the harbor at the end of the road, was one that I had reservations about upon first sighting it. There was something fishy, and I don’t mean what was in the fryer. Though lunchtime, there was only one other car parked outside, and they had a phenomenal view. The interior was clean—though old and slanted somewhat—but smelled like some kind of diluted cleaning fluid.
     
    -----We went in because we’d already parked and my dad badly needed something to eat beyond what we had in the car, and we ended up all splitting an appetizer sampler platter where the shrimp was the only halfway decent thing. It was one of those places that gets by solely on the backs of deep-frying everything they serve into utter submission, and upon unwary travelers like us—and on the one day we didn’t do our research, at that! The calamari came in flat sticks, the chicken wings were more sad than anything else, and the mozzarella sticks tasted like they were straight out of an Italian nightmare, as most of the cheese had disintegrated in the frying process and the result were mostly empty husks of solidified frying material.
     
    -----As it turned out, we would find out later that it is considered to be, by far, the worst restaurant in Haines. But we didn’t contract any illnesses and it was enough of a caloric intake to get us around. Our next stop was the visitor center, where the lady who was supposed to be knowledgable knew absolutely nothing. But Haines is a small place, so after about a minute of driving we arrived in historic Fort Seward, where old Army headquarters have been updated and refurbished to serve as a hotel and some lodgings. The fort was one of the military posts in Alaska and policed the gold rushes into the area.
     
    -----With several hours to spend, we meandered our way through Haines again and towards the Marine Highway terminal, where we went in to confirm our reservations. When we’d booked last winter, they’d not only had us boarding at an earlier time, but on an entirely different ship. Later, this was changed with the same route, only changing ships in Ketchikan. Now, we’re entirely on the different ship, as the one in our original reservation is still being prepared for the season. All of this led to some disorganization, so we thought it best to make sure we were still good to go and to generally scout the place out.
     
    -----The terminal is well-organized and the employees inside the deserted lobby confirmed that we were still good to go at 7:00, as the latest info says. We saw our ship already docked, with the waters it was in—constituting a truly massive fjord—absolutely pristine and absolutely stunning. What wasn’t a mountain was a rainforest, and what wasn’t either were the waters of the fjord.
     
    -----With several hours still to go and absolutely nothing else to do, we washed the car and then found the Haines Borough Public Library, which was—in one of these recent years—voted one of the best small libraries in the United States. It’s got a quaint interior and free—but slow—Wi-Fi.
     
    -----After leaving the Haines Library, we wandered around Haines and got to a place called Mountain Market for a bite of proper dinner before boarding the MV Malaspina. Though ranked highly amongst the Haines restaurants, we soon discovered that a) it’s more of a coffee bar and dessert place whose sandwiches are an afterthought at best, b) it’s half grocery store anyway, and c) those who ran the place were infinitely more interested in speaking to old locals than to give half a glance to any newcomers. Our sandwiches were as bland as they were hard to bite through. The peanut butter chocolate brownie was the only remotely exciting thing there, and though it began life on our taste buds as if it were chocolate fudge with peanut butter cookie dough atop, by the time we finished with it, it was positively repulsive.
     
    -----We went all the way to one end of Haines and then all the way to the other, and the more we saw, the less we thought. Other towns nestled in the Inside Passage are more keen to advertise their wares, but Haines is just sort of … there. There’s just not much to it, and those who lived there don’t seem to have any sense of civic pride. After we got gas for the final time before driving onto the Malaspina, my dad said that “the food isn’t something I’d feed to a praying mantis.”
     
    -----We arrived at the port at 6:30, and we rearranged the car in the misty rain as those around us filled into the loading lanes. The Malaspina was supposed to leave at 7:00, but was nowhere in sight by 7:15, so after my dad entertained us with his patent-pending moose impression before my mom and I went inside the terminal and inquired about the status. As we did so, the Malaspina came into view, cruising in from Skagway before coming to a stop in the dock.
     
    -----We waited for a long while as the vast innards of the vehicle bay spurted out RV after RV after camper van after RV, and finally, several attendants came around who looked at the signs in our windshields telling them of our destinations and told us to wait for directions. The loading process was very quick, as the crew made up for their lost time by packing vehicles in to several inches of each other in spots.
     
    -----It took two trips to get our stuff from the back of the ship to the front of the ship, for as it happened, we were bequeathed one of the very front cabins on board. It was snug, to be sure, but roomier than I expected. It was clean, with a bolted-down table on one end and four chairs aside, with two sets of bunk beds. I took one of the top ones to satisfy a long desire to sleep in a top bunk. Our windows, though equipped with a sign reminding us to close them at night so as not to interfere with the night vision, afforded a wonderful view of whatever happened to be to our front right.
     
    -----The Malaspina has a lot of stuff on board, and even though it’s one of the original ships in the fleet and thus showing its age when it comes to the amenities, the accommodations are pleasant. After exploring, we went out onto the deck and watched, with the wind in our faces, as the Malaspina set off from Haines, and went to bed content with our activity for the day.
  8. Sumiki

    Russian to Action

    By Sumiki,

    -----We awoke hungry, and breakfast ended at 10:30. Our cabin and the entrance to the galley were pretty much on totally opposite ends of the ship, and it was thus to our advantage that the Malaspina is not a particularly long vessel.
     
    -----I remain nonplussed with the state of affairs when it comes to the operations of passenger services. Our breakfast was plentiful and tasted good … when we got it. There are too many options and the line takes forever to get through. But they piled the breakfast foods high and we came out as satisfied as we came in hungry. (Subsequent meals were timed so as to avoid this.)
     
    -----Our route, which had stopped in Juneau in the middle of the night—something I expected to at least jostle me awake, but one which I slept through—took us through narrows towards Sitka, one of the oldest settlements in Alaska, which served as the capital for the Russian operations before the Alaskan purchase. The Marine Highway was kicked out by the cruise ships to a dock a good seven miles out of down, and we were amongst the handful of Malaspina passengers to disembark in anticipation of somehow seeing the town.
     
    -----Sitka’s approach towards tourism, unfortunately, skirted something akin to what we’d witnessed in Haines in that they’ve always had it and take a lackadaisical approach to it with the idea that it’s always going to be there. The people at the ferry terminal had absolutely no clue what they were talking about, but knew a vague something about a bus that would be cheaper than a cab, and so we and another family got on the bus—once the bus found us, because while the bus stop exists, the sign certainly doesn’t. The bus driver mumbled his way through confusing answers to eminently straightforward questions, but we learned one extremely important thing: if we got off the bus, we’d have to take our chances on one of the cabs we’d been promised were everywhere but which turned out to be essentially nonexistent.
     
    -----The bus seemed to only care for the ferry terminal as an afterthought, as it served more to shuttle locals around town. The locals are friendlier to tourists than in Haines, perhaps because—as inefficient as their transportation options are—they do understand something about tourism as an industry. This is not to say that the six dollars we paid for the bus was wasted, as the time we had in Sitka was not extremely long for any sort of cab ride or tour. We got a view of the spread-out town with stops at grocery stores and downtown strips alike, and we caught glimpses of the famous Russian church architecture in the place they used to all “New Archangel.”
     
    -----The bus arrives back to the ferry terminal every thirteen minutes past the hour, and as we needed to get back on board at 2:00, our only choice was to stay on the bus as it completed its loop and traveled back to the terminal. We did so, and after some more ambling around, got back on the ship around 1:30. The car deck is the only way to get on and off, and while many cars were on board when we got on in Haines, only a fraction remained.
     
    -----Going out of Sitka took us back through the same narrows, and we admired the scenery from our window for a while. We ate lunch, where I satiated my inexplicable craving for chocolate milk, and thereafter napped. We saw some sea otters and a few pods of porpoises in the respite from the rain, but the rain came down again, as it always does. Dinner—if you can call it that—was simply some drinks from the galley and a few bites of a mediocre cheesecake amidst the bounding waves.
  10. Sumiki

    Ketch as Ketchikan

    By Sumiki,

    -----We’d reached Petersburg at 1:00 in the morning, and Wrangell at 5:00 in the morning, but I slept throughout. There is something calming about sleeping on a ship—the dull, interminable roar of the engines far away, murmuring through steel, the gentle rocking to and fro, enough to feel but not interfere, etc. My dad is a much lighter sleeper than I ever recall him being, having been awoken that morning by kids running around in the lounge area directly above our heads—as it turns out, spurred on by a distant whale. He explored the ship in the morning as my mom and I, one after the other, figured out how to get showers in an extremely narrow area, and how to dry off with towels only a hair larger than a standard hand towel. (Ill-advisedly, as it turned out.)
     
    -----11:45 was our expected arrival time in Ketchikan, the most promising port of call for those who wished to venture on terra firma. The downtown area is two miles from the port, and lo and behold, when we disembarked, various taxis were lined up! We grabbed one in order to maximize our precious time in the downtown, and our driver gave us restaurant recommendations while reminiscing about the days when Ketchikan wasn’t amongst the largest population centers in the state. The highway now runs a good ways around its island and features suburbs of mansions with wonderful views. He dropped us off at noon outside Annabelle’s, a seafood restaurant he highly recommended. My parents, who ate breakfast aboard the ship, each got the crab cake appetizer, while I got massive king crab tacos. I wouldn’t say that they were better than the halibut tacos of the Denali Park Salmon Bake, but they were certainly different and much easier to eat in a somewhat dignified way.
     
    -----The service was quite slow, so it took an while between entering and leaving, but we still had an hour to explore downtown Ketchikan. Tourists were everywhere, meandering around sidewalks and streets slowly, chatting loudly, and with no concern for the fact that yes, there were others there too. The cruise ships had docked, several end to end, right outside downtown, and they were hulks—like skyscrapers tipped over—who spewed endless numbers of people onto the already congested streets. Eagles could be seen soaring high overhead, not even having to flap their wings, as they hunted for their next fishy meal.
     
    -----Throngs of humanity aside, Ketchikan is a cute little town. Everything’s basically lined up on one road, and the further you go away from the harbor, the less crowded things get. There are a lot of shops, especially high-end ones; I was shocked by the sheer number of jewelry stores around the area. They definitely know the specific subset of tourists they attract.
     
    -----It was overcast, as it seemingly always is in the Alaskan Panhandle, but it wasn’t raining as we walked past the rows of shops, lush greenery, and totem poles, for which Ketchikan is highly regarded. My dad got a mighty chuckle out of several signs too bawdy for BZPower.
     
    -----With time to spare returning to the main street, where our taxi driver was scheduled to pick us up at 2:00, we ducked into several stores in an eventually successful pursuit of a Christmas ornament as well as a very fancy establishment that dealt in fine artistic imports from Russia, including large hand-painted wooden dolls that went for $6,000. Each item was intricately carved and colorfully painted, and it was a treat to be able to see them. (They even had Matryoshka dolls of professional sports teams that went five players deep.) One younger fellow who worked there followed us around the store and I’m inclined to think that he was keeping an eye on us given our wild beards.
     
    -----Ketchikan’s revitalization as a hub of tourist activity is a relatively recent phenomenon, as we got an impromptu history of the region from our cab driver, who hails from nearby Prince of Wales Island and who has been in Ketchikan since January 1989. The pulp mill that had dominated the economy for years finally shuttered its doors, and in 1997, it was thought that Ketchikan had no future. But they invested in one, and they got it, as the endless cruise ship tourists attest.
     
    -----Upon our return to the Malaspina, we went to the observation deck as we shoved off for international waters. To comply with the law, announcements came over the public address system calling for medically trained professionals to volunteer in the case of an emergency, as well as a general “what-to-do-if-something-should-befall-the-ship” talk. Somewhat disconcerting in the moment, but overall par for the course. The only wildlife we saw were birds, of which there were plenty of eagles. Others thought they caught sight of porpoises, but these unfailingly turned up to be either mirages of the surf or simply driftwood.
     
    -----It was once again nap time aboard the Malaspina, and my dad and I slept soundly as my mom—generally speaking, the preeminent taker of naps—stayed awake, taking pictures of lighthouses and potential critters, but while asleep, we missed very little. As the route between Ketchikan and Bellingham passes by Prince Rupert, British Columbia, my dad sleepily asked if we’d “seen the Tim Hortons sign yet” so we could “say goodbye to maple donuts.” We told him that we’d not yet caught sight of that community, and we passed it while snoozing.
     
    -----At close to 8:30, we decided that it was a good idea to go get something to eat. There is a yin and a yang to going to the galley late—on the one hand, they’re usually out of at least something by that point, but what’s left is usually given in enormous proportions. We’ve gotten to know the cooks, one of whom bears a striking resemblance to Dom DeLuise, and he’s one of these big fellows who likes to exaggerate and poke fun at a lot of stuff and generally doesn’t take things too seriously … so when he said that he’d go two-for-one on the Hawaiian chicken burger special, I assumed that he was joking.
     
    -----He was not joking. Fortunately, the burgers—though served on truly immense buns—weren’t actually all that big, and my mom helped me dispatch them. My dad had cereal without milk, and—strange as it is to say—he seemed quite pleased with his dry crunching.
  12. 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.
  13. Sumiki

    Nap Time

    By Sumiki,

    -----We awoke at around 5:00 to a very bouncy ship. No storm was around us, but we’d entered choppier waters, unprotected by any islands to our west. We’d go up and down, squeaking on our mattresses as we went along, before things settled down a bit and we were able to continue to sleep.
     
    -----After breakfast, we came back to the cabin and continued to sleep, catching up on much-needed rest, until the afternoon, when we assembled some of our luggage for the afternoon car deck call. The car deck, which exists on the deck below the cabins, is generally closed unless the Malaspina is in port, but on days where there is no port of call, they open it on occasion. Dogs, cooped up in kennels down there, get fifteen minutes of activity about three times a day, and otherwise seem as miserable as their owners given their condition. The Alaska Marine Highway is not designed for pets and I question why any pet owner would subject their creatures to such conditions.
     
    -----An announcement came over the public address system informing all passengers of several humpback whales in the area, but by the time the interested passengers got to the observation deck towards the front of the ship, there was only driftwood and the occasional bird. The topsy-turvy ride earlier had slowed to smooth sailing as we got within the protection of Vancouver Island, of which British Columbia’s capital—Victoria—is at the southern end. We knew that the end of our oceanic journey was within reach.
     
    -----Dinner was a surprisingly good corned beef, although a bit streaked with fat in places. With an early morning, we got to bed for the final time ready for terra firma.
  16. Sumiki
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow1dznt-RrU
     
    Charles Ives stands at the forefront of American music. Ives was not a full-time composer and his works were largely ignored during his lifetime; publishment of his pieces was done out of his own pocket. A millionaire from his insurance business, Ives' tireless promotion of his own work was the only thing that ended up saving them from languishing in obscurity. Of his oeuvre, only perhaps a dozen are to my liking, but those dozen are special pieces in their own right.
     
    A devoted experimenter who utilized free dissonance, polytonality, and quarter tones, Ives' music is chaotic and dissonant with only occasional forays into traditional harmony. "A Son of a Gambolier" is not one of those pieces; its traditional structure is indeed at odds to most of what he wrote. It calls for one of the larger ensembles utilized in his eclectic collection "114 Songs" - in addition to the voice and piano, the score calls for a kazoo chorus, two trombones, and assorted violins and fifes. It's an incredibly clever piece which - surprisingly - lacks a whole lot of singing.
  20. Sumiki

    A Leigh Gallagher Quote

    By Sumiki,

    "Sumiki - that's a really awesome name". - Leigh Gallagher on The Three Virtues
     
    (it's paraphrased, shut up)
     
    (it's also not actually in the episode)
     
    (but you should totally listen anyway)
  21. Sumiki
    My grandmother's surgery meant that we had to spend a week or two in the southern portion of North Carolina, roughly an hour and fifteen minutes from where I usually live. My great aunt, who is from the mountains in the west of the state, also came to visit and help, but given her age (and her own health problems) she left earlier today. My grandmother is doing as well as can be expected and expects to be discharged tomorrow (or later today, if you want to be pedantic).
     
    My mom packed for a long stay, but my dad and I had to play things by ear and—in a move classified by leading scientists as "pretty stupid"—packed incredibly lightly. I didn't pack my retainer, which I wear every other night to keep my teeth straight after my year+ with early teen braces. I didn't even bring along another pair of pants.
     
    And so it came to pass that the surgery meant that one (or two) of us would have to stay with her more or less constantly until her discharge. With her house ten minutes from the hospital, it became obvious that we would have to move into her house for the time being.
     
    At 10:00, after watching the latest episode of Doctor Who on the TV in her hospital room (albeit on mute, so I'll still be avoiding spoilers until I can watch the repeat next week), my dad and I left and went back to her house, where he expressed the concern I'd been feeling all day but hadn't yet mentioned: we needed our things, and the round-trip drive would take over two hours.
     
    Well, my parents and I are on three different shifts: my dad is first-shift, myself, second, and my mom, third—just as she was in her days as a nurse. Usually this only leads to my dad complaining about how we all need to get on better cycles, but today, it worked to our advantage.
     
    With my dad too tired to drive and us really needing supplies from our house, we set out, driving a little over an hour up to our house, loading the car up with foodstuffs and clothes and toiletries and my electric piano (composing deadlines wait for no one), and then driving back, arriving back at my grandmother's house a little after 1:30 AM.
     
    It was, in the words of my dad, "the dumbest thing we've ever done."
     
    I respectfully disagree with him, but all the same, it was not the most well-thought-out plan we've ever put into action.
  23. Sumiki

    Long Road to Hoh

    By Sumiki,

    -----Our early mornings have finally become routine, I suppose, as we were able to get up bright and early in Forks. They call themselves the rainiest town in America, but regardless of that statement's truthfulness, it was sunny and nearly cloudless as we headed southbound.
     
    -----Olympic National Park is massive, as it covers nearly the entirety of the peninsula. It gets multiple entrances and thus multiple visitor centers for its myriad natural wonders. We'd seen mountains and gotten top-of-the-world views on highways so named; what we were after in Olympic was something new. Something new came in the form of the Hoh Rain Forest, a remnant of one of the oldest and largest of the temperate rain forests that once spanned the western coast of the continent from southeast Alaska to California.
     
    -----The road in was in good shape, and as we rolled through towards the park boundary, the trees got bigger. The average height for a tree in the Hoh is 220 feet, and many reach over 300 by the time all is said and done. By the time we parked, we were surrounded by a fairytale jungle.
     
    -----The longest trail at the Hoh Visitor Center is one that takes overnight hikers 18 miles to the base of Mount Olympus, and it is a testament to how verdant and green everything is that it couldn't be glimpsed even in the clearings. Huge trees were everywhere, and where they'd fallen had provided fertile ground for new growth in a straight line. The forest floor was drenched in ferns, and I do mean drenched—one touch, and your whole hand would be soaking wet. The humidity kept the relatively low temperature in check; when it heated up, the bugs started to come out to play.
     
    -----It was strange, walking around on these loop trails that go into natural "clearings" where the trees aren't quite as close together. Moss, wet as could be, hung down like loose locks of hair from every available hanging surface. On one occasion, the trail even curved underneath a tree that had naturally grown in an arch.
     
    -----The Hoh Rain Forest is so named for the Hoh River, which—in the native tongue—means "swiftly flowing." That remains a very apt description, as its vibrant blue waters—icy cold, I'd imagine—rushed past, carving a path through the forest on both sides. There were a lot of cool spots on these trails, and we were able to take our time taking them in. It's the exact opposite of the sheer cragginess we'd come to expect while in Alaska.
     
    -----Wildlife was scarce, as we didn't venture into the backwoods, but there had been bear and elk sightings in the area and we were keenly aware of our surroundings. None emerged, though we saw evidence of the bear and the unmistakable footprint of the elk. We did spot a black squirrel, a redheaded woodpecker (who really slammed his beak into the tree to dislodge significant chunks of bark), and a slug who looked, at first glance, to be a homeless banana.
     
    -----Many more birds tweeted their way around the canopy, but they were too far up and too well-hidden to be seen. Coho salmon fry and tadpoles churned their way upstream in the extraordinarily clear waters of the Taft Creek that feeds the mighty Hoh. The creek had a bluish silt at its bottom, which we found fascinating. The canopy was so thick that, when it began raining as we made the return journey from these trails, we only felt a scant few drops.
     
    -----We began making our way south to the famous Ruby Beach, where craggy rocks jut up out of the waters in a makeshift cove, but by the time we arrived, I was feeling quite sick. It wasn't what I'd had in Homer—my personal feeling is that it was just too much stomach acid and not enough food—but again, concerns over dehydration led us back north to Forks. Their hospital is older but there's not much going on there, which was to our advantage. I felt better after I got some IV fluids, but I had several anomalies on my blood work and they ran some extra scans. These all turned up negative, as expected, but did slow the discharge process. (The doctor there has driven the northern roads quite a bit and was very pleased to hear that we'd driven the Top of the World Highway. To quote him: "it's a great road, but not a lot of people even know about it.")
     
    -----(By comparison, I did not really regain any sort of appetite from the Homer norovirus until we reached Dawson City four days later. This time, I was starving by the time we left Forks for the final time.)
     
    -----By the time we were fully on the road to Olympia, I felt absolutely back to normal in every way. I was thankful for this, but at the same time, it struck me as extremely weird. My dad took us on the mountain roads down to Olympia, past utter walls of trees on either side and fields of wild forsythia. It was in the state capital that it got dark on us. This was extremely unpleasant, as we'd gotten so accustomed to the midnight twilight that we forgot how enormously confusing the roads can be when darkness falls.
     
    -----We got turned around as we saw nothing but closed restaurants, and finally—when we got to our hotel—we were thankful that their in-house restaurant did not close for another thirty minutes. We looked like a mess, collectively, and we had to endure the loudness of a little-too-drunk collection of travel-baseball parents, but we got there in the nick of time.
     
    -----I felt entirely normal but still wanted the lightest thing on their menu. When our waitress told us that they'd run out of chicken, as it was apparently slammed since they opened, the option for a light sandwich went out the window and the lightest thing on the menu became a steak. I ate about half of it as well as some potatoes which probably weren't all that great but that tasted great to me. (The meat did not go to waste, as I'd lopped it in two when I started and my dad wolfed down the other half.)
     
    -----Tomorrow: east to Spokane.
  24. Sumiki

    Big Storm Country

    By Sumiki,

    -----From Spokane, it was all I-90 today. We crossed the state line, through the treacherously mountainous fifty-odd miles of the Idaho panhandle and then downhill on precipitous curves into Montana. We were hit with our first heat wave of the trip, as the high was 80º as we went through the mountain passes. After the Rocky Mountains conclude, it'll be some smooth sailing ... but getting through them proved more difficult than initially imagined.
     
    -----The first city of much size in Montana along the eastbound I-90 corridor is Missoula. As we retraced our route from the first trip, it was surprising what we remembered of Missoula, although what's new is a road construction section along a roundabout in town that featured—of all things—loose gravel. We never saw loose gravel before this trip and, post-Alaska Highway, it's just following us for the express purpose of taunting us. If our driveway has mysteriously turned to gravel when we get back, I'll really know something's up.
     
    -----We've had more than our fair share of heavy meals on this trip, and on the way back we have a great interest in eating light, so we had a Jimmy John's downtown. On the way back out, we got gas, and from our vantage point we caught a glimpse of a bearded man plucking away on a small bright red ukulele, and around him was a dog and a creature who appeared for all the world to be a bear. It had to have been a dog, but it looked exactly like a bear cub. Missoula's one of those weird and unusual places where you'd find stuff like that.
     
    -----As we drove along, we recalled our adventures on the same road five years prior, when we'd been hit with a thunderstorm of epic proportions and had to duck into the very Bozeman hotel from which I am writing this to check the weather, being entirely free of smartphone tyranny at the time. This time, we were armed with the foreknowledge of the route ... and the fact that there was, once again, a storm on the horizon. My mom kept us updated from her backseat post as we inched further to the storm, and spotted a sole bald eagle out the window as we did.
     
    -----Montana's roads are neither better nor worse than the roads of the states that surround it, but they effectively have no speed limit, because for most of the day, it was set at 80. Mountain roads, curves, and the occasional chipsealed section made for some hairy driving in spots. They do care about the speed limit in their unnecessarily long road construction sections, where—moments after a sign reaffirming 80—it drops to 35. What's worse is that they expect you to actually pull it off, which leads me to wonder how quickly dealership maintenance departments go through brakes. (You can't go 80 up the hills because it'd bust your engine, you can't go 80 down because you'd go straight off the cliff, and you can't go 80 around a curve because the guardrails would shred you up before you could say the words "antilock brake system.")
     
    -----The rain dropped slowly, but the temperature plummeted quickly, going down to a low of 47º. The rain came down in torrential sheets, and lightning struck the mountaintops around. On several occasions, we were certain that a enormous thunderclap was imminent due to the apparent proximity of the strike, but there was barely a sound. It was in this rain that we went through Butte and went over the last section of treacherous mountainousness: the Continental Divide. We passed over as quickly as was safe because we didn't want to get toasted by an errant bolt from the gray, but all the same, there were small rivers that appeared to be flowing over the road. Hydroplaning never happened, but appeared imminent throughout.
     
    -----Once past Butte and towards Bozeman, the temperature warmed again, reaching into the 50s, as the northbound storm broke up. Things still looked dark and dreary, so once we were safely at our hotel, we set out for dinner ... at a nearby Jimmy John's. I wouldn't be surprised if the steaks from the Rusty Moose in Spokane constitute our last heavier meal.
     
    -----My dad then next wanted to modify tomorrow night's reservation in Gillette so as to get an entirely free room instead of a heavily discounted one. In order to do so, he had to create a second reservation and then cancel the first. When he went to cancel the first one, it was ever so slightly past the cancelation deadline. Usually this isn't a problem, as we've done it before with no issues at all, but to do so, he had to call the hotel ... which is where things got real fun.
     
    -----The girl at the front desk immediately put us on hold, and then for five minutes flirted with another customer—as we could hear the whooooooole thing—and only picked up the phone when she remembered that she'd put it down. She said that, despite what the web site said, she had no authority to do cancelations, which had to be done through the main hotline. My dad got on the phone to the main hotline and was given the severest of run-arounds before getting to some guy who told him that there was no way the policy would allow a late cancelation unless we had the name of the girl in Gillette. My mom called the Gillette people on her phone, and—as my dad was conducting the other conversation from my phone, we stuck the two phones face-to-face so she could say "I give the approval for the cancelation," which was all that was necessary in the first place.
     
    -----The Jimmy John's was not satisfying, so we went to the hotel restaurant for an appetizer, which were bacon gorgonzola fries. The sole waitress had no other patrons and we had a good time asking her random questions about Montana. Dessert was huckleberry ice cream, and it was extremely good, almost like a blueberry crossed with a strawberry.
     
    -----On the way back to the room, we explained the Gillette run-around to the guy at the front desk, and he was flabbergasted that any hotel would have such unusual policies regarding cancelation, especially considering that we were still staying at the same property and effectively just altering the payment. Whoever was at the front desk in Gillette was clearly not following procedures, and heaven help her if there's the slightest of problems when we get there.
     
    -----Tomorrow: Gillette.
×
×
  • Create New...