Murals, Ireland, and the Post I Can't Write

After having it on my life list for many years, I finally got to visit Northern Ireland. I waited for a lull between bombings. Nothing's exploded for a while, hey? Time to go!

It was as amazing as I'd hoped it would be...and far more tense than I ever expected. I mean really, really tense. If I happened to say "Derry" instead of "Londonderry," the British Loyalists would say, "So...they've gotten to you, have they? They've taught you to call it that?" If said "Londonderry," the Irish Nationalists would take me aside and tell me to rip the "London" right out of it. And that was the least of the hostilities. I dare not write what else I heard. Wherever I went, it always felt like half of the population was looking away from the other half. A powder keg about to blow.

Indeed, a bomb did go off just a week or two after I left, but since I was still travelling I didn't hear about it until much later.

I originally planned to write a post about all the various murals I saw throughout the country, ones honoring fallen heroes on both sides, ones that inspired, ones that terrified. But then I realized I couldn't write a single letter without bias, because what information I learned on my short fling through the country is hardly worthwhile repeating. I left with nothing but impressions. Impressions of men who frightened me, no matter their politics, with stories about their roles in violence and murder. Impressions of the dead castles, the green hillsides, the waves crashing steadily against the mathematical rocks of the Giant's Causeway, that pay no heed to whose feet stand or whose blood flows. I came and went as a tourist in the purest sense of the word, unable to contribute anything useful to the argument. Unable to articulate anything, really, except a great sense of loss and frustration, even though I have nothing personally at stake.

I can't write this post, you see, because I can't possibly tell an accurate version of what is happening, what has happened, in Northern Ireland. It's too complex, and I'm bound to get something terribly wrong, or oversimplify, or just plain insult. It's over my head.

What I can give you, however, before I slip down any further into my own deep morass of rumination, is

THE RED HAND OF ULSTER

Zing! Here it is. You can, I don't know, stare at it for a while.


This was a mural in the Shankill area of Belfast. In comparison to some of the others in the area, you might consider this particular mural "lighthearted." A sign on the side reads, "There are many legends telling the origins of the Red Hand of Ulster. This mural depicts only one of these."

I think this mural depicts the "race" version of the legend. According to Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1898:

"In an ancient expedition to Ireland, it was given out that whoever first touched the shore should possess the territory which he touched; O’Neill, seeing another boat likely to outstrip his own, cut off his left hand and threw it on the coast. From this O’Neill the princes of Ulster were descended, and the motto of the O’Neills is to this day 'Lamh dearg Eirin' (red hand of Erin)."

I love how in the mural O'Neill is saying, "Yay I won!" while waving around his one remaining hand.


Also he doesn't seem to be wearing any pants. Couldn't he have, I don't know, just cut off a finger? You've got to hand it to him - he was determined. I guess he handled it the best he could. It's a good thing there wasn't a seagull nearby, or he might have been caught by it red-handed. Hand to mouth, you might say. It's okay that the other guy lost, though. He wouldn't have wanted the land anyway. It was a hand-me-down.

Okay, I'm done.

The Red Hand has been used as a symbol by both Loyalists and Nationalists. So there. I'm safely apolitical. This post has been entirely evenhanded.

Er...

University Rooms

When I travel, I stay in hostels. I love hostels. Mostly. Sometimes when I'm just trying to cook up a meal in a kitchen filled with staggering, drunken teens, or read the morning paper over the thumping sound of bass, or sleep in a crowded bunk room where one person is snoring, one has a constant cough, and one has a boy sleeping next to her, I think, "I might be getting too old for this."

That thought hung over me like a gloom as I searched for hostel options in Oxford. I already had some familiar mainstays for London, but I knew nothing about Oxford, and the hostel reviews were grim. A bed and breakfast might give me some of the same group atmosphere that hostels are good for - less drunkenness too - but I wasn't quite ready to bump up to that level.

That's when I discovered a great site called University Rooms. The site works with various universities around the world to rent out their vacant rooms, especially during school holidays. Rooms cost more than a hostel but less than a bed and breakfast.

In most cases you might ask, "Why on earth would I want to pay to sleep in some kid's empty dorm room?" But for Oxford it was perfect. For Oxford, it meant that I got to march boldly into colleges that are normally closed to the public. It meant I could loiter in the quad in the morning and watch the light shine through the stained glass at night, and there was no tour guide looming over me to rush me along.

I stayed in Oxford for several nights, and each night in a different college. Like a bed and breakfast, my stay always included breakfast in the main dining hall. If you want to imagine what that's like, picture the dining hall at Hogwart's, but smaller and with no floating candles. Picture servers who won't let you raise a finger, dishes engraved with the school's crest, and rows upon rows of austere scholarly dead guys gazing down upon you. (Non-moving portraits, sadly.) And then picture contentedly strolling back through the gardens, up the narrow stone staircase to your room, recently cleaned by the scouts, where you make a cup of tea while looking out the window at the rooftop spires while the bells of half a dozen towers ring out the hour in discordant unison.

To think, right now I could be tiptoeing over the mystery stain on the carpet in a hostel while Tuberculosis Girl hacks over the communal sink.

Of course, not all Oxford rooms are created equal. At one college I was in a room several hundred years old, while at another stayed in an addition build in the 1960's. The newer rooms lack charm, but the older ones lack...heat. Plumbing. I think there has been a general philosophy over the centuries that the more uncomfortable you are, the better you learn.

Here are the rooms I stayed in. Can you guess which colleges they're from?


A modern (and teensie!) room that overlooked a street. A little too much traffic noise for my taste, but I imagine you get used to it if you're into your reading deeply enough. (If you're not into your reading that intensely, what are you doing studying here?)


And old room that's been modernized. The little fireplace was sadly non-functional. (It had carpeting underneath it.) But pretty classy, otherwise.


I drew the curtains because it was nighttime. I'm pretty sure these curtains (also the furniture) were original to the circa 1960's room.


Wow, a room that doesn't have gray carpets! I really liked the permanent Dutch angle feel to this room, which, as you can see, was shoved right up against the sloping roof. Kind of a hobbit room. Did Tolkien ever stay here? Hmm...


This room might not blow you away, but man oh man, you should have seen the view out that window. Plus those shutters opened up completely and the ledge was two feet wide, so I could sit halfway out writing in my journal while eavesdropping on conversations below. I might be biased for this particular room just because it was the first one I stayed in.

Did you guess the colleges? Did you see the wicked trick I just played on you?? One of those rooms is a Cambridge room, of course! Bwa-ha! How delightfully droll of me.

In that last picture, notice the one brilliant, rebellious, eye-popping decoration on wall. Weee! This is one of the big differences between Oxford/Cambridge college rooms and American ones. When I was a university student, I moved in to my room big time for the entire year. And by that I mean I grew tropical plants there, strung up Christmas lights, got an awesome ghetto $20 recliner, flipped the beds, had a gecko, stuck posters and postcard to every surface...That room was mine, baby.

(Well...and also my roommate's, to be fair.)

At Oxbridge they do a pretty good job of communicating the fact that you are just passing through - nay, that you are a wispy seed of a person who hardly deserves to settle more than a moment upon the venerated stones of those schools. If you should go out into the world and do well for yourself, that's another matter. Then you can donate a lot of money and have a renovated section of rooms named after you. But you want to hang a picture on the wall? Forget it. To make sure of this, they uproot you from your room every eight weeks and rent it out to ogling tourists like me.

So, if you ever find yourself in Oxford (or Cambridge!) without a place to stay, I highly recommend you take a look at University Rooms.

That way when you get sick with a cold and have to sleep and sip tea for half the day - like what happened to me - you can stare at the walls and at least feel like you're still having a unique travelling adventure.

UK, What?

Today, a sampling of British bobcat eggs that I found while travelling.

If you are an American abroad, Great Britain's not the place to go for culture shock. It's pretty easy to shrug off the most blatant differences, like having to look right instead of left as you step off the pavement, or signs that say "Way Out" instead of "Exit," or inexplicable urges to visit Florida, or Morris dancing. The subtler ones, like the vestigial influences of the class system or the (in comparison to Americans) general social reserve come across more as "annoyance" than "shock."

The most I have ever been shocked in Britain was when I went to buy a sandwich. "Prawns and mustard? Eggs and cress? Pickles and cheese? What is wrong with these people??!?" I said. Also, Marmite.

Britain's not more prone to strangeness than anywhere else. Quirky knows no bounds. Quirkiness is everywhere. (Alaska, I'm looking at you and your gold-painted moose poop.) With that disclaimer, I just have to ask, really...what is going on here, UK?


Found these babies in a...oh, I nearly said Marks & Spencer's. (Wait, does M&S even sell food? Ah yeah. That's where I found $20 per lbs cherries once upon a time.) Waitrose. Waitrose. I can read it in the picture. I'm not sure what tickles me more about these - the fact that they are what they are, or the fact that they are so CLEARLY and HONESTLY labelled. I wish all grocery items were labelled this way.

"A Creamy White FAUX EGG Sandwich Spread"

"Crunchy Puffed CORN Delightfully Coated in BRIGHT ORANGE CHEESE POWDER"

"Carbonate BEVERAGE Lightly Drizzled With SWEET BROWN COCAINE"

It would really take the mystery out of shopping.

One slow day in London I was trying to take a close look at every statue, plaque, and monument I passed, figuring that if someone had taken the time to make the darn things, I should make the time to appreciate them. Because of this I got to learn that so-and-so defeated someone at the battle of something, that what's-his-name and his company built this section of the embankment, that Lord Sir Edwards Ballingham Tippory Roo Fairchild His Excellence donated this plot of grass to the common people, and so forth.

I was especially touched by the words on this statue:

In honour of over 2100 men and women volunteers who left these shores to fight side by side with the Spanish people in their heroic struggle against fascism 1936-1939.

"They went because their open eyes could see no other way."


But...what? What...what is...? Is that a horse? ...With a melon?

I looked at this thing from every possible angle, but it never turned into brave men and women volunteers. I'm sure it's fraught with deep and meaningful symbolism, but five hundred years from now when the words have rubbed off, bemused foreigners like myself might mistake if for a celebration to ménage à trois.


No. What? No, Britain, no. There is nothing remotely Californian about this coffee I just had. This coffee was distinctly non-Golden State. I could understand if you wanted to market a bag of CHIPS this way, but...I mean, look at the size of the cup that lady's holding. Is it a European espresso? Haven't you heard of the bottomless pot? We Americans drink such large cups of coffee that I can't even get a short here anymore. They give me a tall, and I buzz around on the sides of the walls for the rest of the day. People who try to drink teensie cups of sophisticated coffee here are beaten up by roving gangs of biker-patriots who snap off your pinkie finger if they catch you holding it out.

Also, when I hear "California" and "coffee" in the same sentence, I tend to think of free rest area coffee. No. That was not the sensation I was going for when I came in here for a drink.


Yes it is! Because ten is a sin and thirty is dirty. (But forty is sporty, and fifty is nifty, and sixty is sexy...Seventy just makes you hit pedestrians and veer off the road in a spectacular fireball.)


Oh, sorry. This one's all mine. It seemed like a waste to throw out all those perfectly good toilet paper tubes. So instead I created an installation piece that forces the viewer to confront one of life's more difficult questions.


My American friend and I had a strange craving for Jello. We wanted to make it. We needed to have it NOW. But in the UK "jelly" doesn't come in powder form. It comes in these alarming jiggly blocks that, and I can't stress this enough, do not taste good eaten as-is no matter how much they look like the finished product. Before we started making the jelly, we entertained ourselves with the blocks by poking them, wiggling them, stacking them, and seeing if they would bounce. I'm actually kind of sad these aren't a US thing.


I had to include a picture of the Tardis, of course. It was well camouflaged.

Direct Flights Are For Pansies

I have flown.

The longest flight I've ever been on was 14 hours, Sydney to LA. Fourteen hours was four hours too much. After three movies, a book, four jogs up and down the aisles, twenty jumping jacks in the bathroom (twice), and lots of sleeping, we were still somewhere randomly over the Pacific. A different take on the term "cabin fever."

The longest single journey I've been on, first airport to final airport, was 36 hours. I started in Seattle and had a 10 hour layover in Amsterdam before continuing on to Cape Town, jumper flights not included. By the end I had forgotten what normal life was supposed to look like, because the world only consisted of stewards and beverage service and departure boards.

But the prize for the most endlessly complex itinerary that I've ever pieced together was my attempt to fly from the US to Prague to the UK and back again. I could have been soft. I could have bought three tickets. Instead I had eleven.

Flight #1: Denver to Atlanta. Uneventful. Yeah!

Flight #2: Atlanta to Paris on AirFrance, possibly the best flight I've ever taken. Amazing food. A cute steward with a French accent. Video feed from cameras mounted all over the outside of the plane. Spiral staircase. Ability to play games with other passengers via the video system. Cute steward...did I mention the cute steward? Yes, AirFrance. Yes.

Except...AirFrance was late getting into Paris, which was apparently quite usual for that route, and I had another connecting flight. The staff nonchalantly put me in a van and drove me out to my plane somewhere in the hinterlands of the tarmac. That's when I discovered that all of the other passengers for that flight, ALL of them, had been waiting in a bus next to the plane until I arrived. Once I pulled up, they finally opened the doors on the bus. I lingered in the van, grateful for the shaded windows, until most of the other passengers had boarded. Sometimes it's good to avoid the limelight.

Flight #3: Paris to Birmingham, UK. Here I had to change airlines, which meant going through customs, reclaiming my bag, rechecking my bag, and going back through customs again - fab. On my entry form I wrote, "Duration of time in the UK: two hours."

"Two hours?" the customs official asked. More customs officials came over to have a look. It must have raised some red flags. "Not much of a vacation, is it?" said one of them.

Considering how narrowly I made the last flight, I was unsurprised, but crestfallen, to learn that my bag had not made it past Paris. Ate a Magnum bar to ease my pain, then went all out crazy, bought some makeup, and marched into the restroom with purpose. I might not have luggage, but I was going to not have luggage and look good, darn it.

Flight #4: A cheap hopper flight to Prague. The plane was stripped down to the metal bolts. I'm amazed they gave us pressurized cabin air for free. I had already paid to check my non-existent bag. Bitterness ensued.

Once in Prague, AirFrance gave me a consolation prize...gift bag...survival kit consisting of a toothbrush (which I already had - ALWAYS CARRY A TOOTHBRUSH IN CARRY ON, PEOPLE!), some other random toiletries, and a sized XXXL white T-shirt emblazoned with AIRFRANCE!

I guess I could have used a sharpie to write on the shirt "LOST MY BAG!" and then worn it around as an explanation to the world about why I was gradually transforming into a hobo. But in two days, AirFrance came through, delivering my bag right to the door of my apartment in Prague. Aw. You're forgiven now, cute-steward-hiring airline.

Flight #5: Prague to London on British Airways. Cancelled due to a British Airways strike. BA made a quick recovery, hired another plane, and got me to London on the right day, if a little late. They even used British Airways-stamped napkins aboard just to complete the illusion.

Flight #6: London to Glasgow. Nearly missed it. This was entirely my fault. I should have taken an earlier bus. If it hadn't been for the massive backpack pinning me to one spot, I would have worn out the floor on the tube train pacing back and forth. It's a long, long ride from London city center to Heathrow, especially when your plane's engine is revving.

Flight #7: And then a volcano erupted.

This was in 2010, when some fireball in Iceland threw up a plume of ash that shut down all of Europe's airspace. The entire continent came to a standstill. People were trapped wherever they happened to be. Hotels started charging double, then triple; rental cars were sold out; train and bus stations had queues that stretched for blocks. No one could travel.

I was extremely blessed to be visiting a friend in Scotland at the time, and she very very kindly put me up for the duration. I preemptively rescheduled my flight. (The airline would not officially cancel it until just a few hours before, optimistic that airspace would open anytime.) While faint news of the ensuing chaos drifted in from time to time, we enjoyed an extended visit under sunny skies, Scotland being one of the few places that was not choked by a dark cloud of ash.

God looked out for me big time. I'm constantly amazed how reliably he is when these kinds of things happen. I always run around in a panic until I finally get it through my thick head that he's still got everything under control. "Oh, right," I'll say. "You can do that. Cool."

Flight #7: (finally) Glasgow to Amsterdam. Stared in a daze at some tulips for sale. That's all I can remember.

Flight #8: Amsterdam to...geez, I don't even know. New York or Chicago, some big hazy airport with planes that looked like Tylenols. It's getting worse now. I'm losing touch with reality. I think I've taken enough connecting flights to bend the universal fabric. Am I travelling east instead of west, also back in time? Is that a dinosaur in the clouds? I don't even...

Flight #9: Somewhere to Denver. If I fled from the airport now, I have friends here who can take me in. Am sorely tempted.

Flight #10: Denver to Salt Lake City. Cancelled due to weather. I'm shuffled onto a different flight. I think Salt Lake City happened at some point, but can't be certain.

Flight #11: Salt Lake City to Portland. And for the grand finale, NOTHING EVENTFUL HAPPENED. No lost bags, no strikes, no volcanoes, no storms. Can such a thing be? Also, did I just get through eleven flights without sitting for five hours on the tarmac somewhere? (This happened to me on a different trip.) Holy cow. I don't even remember what real ground feels like anymore.

After this I vowed I would not fly again for a long, looong time. I kept good on my vow. It lasted for a whole eighteen months. But I'm excited about flying again now, because now I have this:

Goodbye, Prague

That was my week in Prague. It brought me incredible highs and then threw me crashing down into the earth again, a passionate city, a city without mercy. There is none like it.

All cities have a song, of course. London is grey and stately, Paris sparkles with life and romance, New York is unapologetic and raw, Portland proud and disheveled. But Prague hides itself. It seeps in like a fog. It takes over.

Some streets still made you feel like the best thing to do was drug yourself til you dropped. And in some corners, dark and damp with black sewer water, you could come down with schizophrenia as easily as you catch a cold. Then again, other places seemed to emerge from the magic spell of inertia to reconnect with happier days. By some miracle, or maybe it figures, these were the oldest places...

- Jachym Topol, A Visit to the Train Station

This is a Prague not found at the base of the Astronomical Clock, nor in the crowded places or the postcards or the audio tours. It lingers in the empty streets at the first light of dawn, at night in the winding walkways that lead to nowhere. It's in the cold concrete walls and the old people, in the ringing of water pipes and church bells. It is a hungry, patient debutante, siren-boned, crashing men and minds against its beauty. And I? I have steered my ship too close.

On the Charles Bridge stands the statue of St. John of Nepomuk. It's easy to miss, as the bridge is lined with statues on both sides. The story, more myth than history, says that John was a priest in the early 1300's who took the confession of the Queen of Bohemia. Her husband the King suspected her of adultery and, assuming that she had named the other man in her confession, demanded that John tell him what she had said. He refused, so the King had him thrown off the bridge to his death in the Vltava below. He is considered a martyr for the Seal of Confession.

On the base of his statue is a plaque that depicts the moment he is thrown into the river. How this is connected to his story, I have no idea, but local legend says that anyone who rubs the plaque will someday return to Prague.

Oh well...sure...why not?



So goodbye, Prague, for now. I'll be back.

The man who did not beg

A page from my Prague journal. Not a happy story. I debate whether to share it. But travelling is sometimes less sightseeing and more just plain seeing:

Friday. A day originally planned for hedonism. Wandered down to Husava near Bethlehem Square. A walk filled with traffic and city, working people, playing children, tourists. Found the small memorial to victims of Communism, including Jan Palach (a student who set himself on fire) beneath the shrubs near the statue of St. Wenceslas. Sat beside the memorial for the longest time, thinking. Nazis, Communists, riots, water cannons, freedom, replaced now with the callousness and complacency, shallowness, consumption, rush, that comes with capitalism. A generation who does not struggle, a gift won by their parents. Do they realize? Tourists who drift and gape. No one weeping in the square. No one laying flowers on the graves. Yes, don't waste flowers in this way. There are better ways to honor the dead.

I escaped into Old Town Square intending to eat myself silly, searching the market for bramboraky (potato pancakes) and trdelník (round pastry)...Paid 10KC for a public bathroom. Highway robbery. Trying to decide between 100g of Old Prague Ham or a duck sandwich, I stopped to take pictures of a weaver at a loom. Nearby an old man was reaching into a trashcan. Did not notice him at first, but then after finishing my pictures realized the man had pulled out first one and then another coffee cup - one was a Starbucks - and was trying to sip what little was left from them.

Is it possible for a man who has lived through the Nazis, through the Communists, to stand in the very heart of this city and drink drops of coffee from the trash while all around people pay for painted eggs, tours, candy, great hunks of meat, sugared pastries, overpriced restaurants, admission to a clock? Why does no one stop? Why aren't we lifting this man on our shoulders and celebrating him?

Once I realized, I scrambled for money to give him, and came up the quickest with two 20KC coins just as he was leaving. "Prosim!" I said, holding it out to him. He said thank you in Czech, nodded and smiled - he had not been begging; he had not asked for it. "Prosim," I said again, stupidly, not knowing what else to say, because prosim means please, here you go, and you're welcome. I felt greater and lesser all at once, a saint for charity, and the lowest sinner for my gluttony, that I could think of eating pastries while men still suffer.

Here was a black hole in the marketplace, a void that sucked into it all joy, all color, all bustle. Not from the man, for he was blameless - a saint himself, an angel speaking Czech. The darkness came from what minutes before had been the cheerful crowd, the crowd who had ignored this man with sinister blindness. Where is human kindness? And now I, wracked with guilt, walked towards the Karlův Most, not caring about the traffic. Why hadn't I given him more? Why not have emptied my pockets? What is it to me? No grand lunch for me; I found a 30KC sausage and ate it gratefully, thinking that the man could buy that with my 40KC, at least...But why hadn't I given him more? He might buy himself a whole cup of coffee now, but why hadn't I given him more? He disappeared into the market, humble and bowed with age, and I, stunned, walked towards the bridge.

I want to drink; I want to sip grey coffee in a small and thoughtful place. I need to write to understand this, and now put it to paper on the benches between the Manes and Charles while the happy music from a nearby tent mocks me with its sureness.

Beheading the Lion: Part the First

A funny little story from 2008 that I never got around to telling. It ended up being so long (because I, hem, got distracted and went off topic) that I broke it into two parts.

Beheading the Lion: Part the First
In Which I Reminisce About Lions I Have Loved and Lost

At the very start of winter here in the Pacific Northwest, there is a delicate window of opportunity between the departing storms of tourists and the oncoming storms of the ocean. In that window, the sky and the land and all the sea look exactly like a snapshot of the worst the winter has to offer - grey and cold, with heavy wet sand and trees sheared by the cutting wind. But it is nothing more than that - a still, silent picture of what is soon to come. The waves have yet to turn angry, the surf pulls in and out with sullen patience. The sea is waiting to strike. The clouds wait to rain, the wind waits to bite.

But not yet. Although winter will unleash itself soon, in that brief early window of warning the beach is a wonderful, wild place to explore. And so, one day in early November, I took the dog out for a walk. We had the sand to ourselves, miles untouched in either direction. The hills in the distance watched us like wise old men, beards of fog trailing across the sand into the ocean.

While I was hunting for shells along the tide line, the dog looked for smells. How often I had to drop everything to stop him from rolling in an old carton of bait or a washed-up fish head! Near the end of the walk he spent longer than usual smelling around the edges of a curious mound of sand. I went to investigate. My dog was digging now, and I leaned in to help him uncover his prize. It was a black flipper. I brushed away more sand, and attached to the black flipper was a hide of deep brown fur, and attached to the fur was a dead sea lion, seven feet from nose to tail.

I would like to think that I have a better understanding of sea lions than most people, not because I'm particularly insightful, but because of a job that put me right in the middle of a sea lion colony. Before that, I knew them only through brief encounters - a head bobbing in the harbor, a playful visit while scuba diving, watching through telescopes, waving hopeful to catch the attention of a sleek body gliding past the viewing window of an aquarium. I remember a colony at the waterfront in Cape Town that would haul out onto the docks and amuse tourists with their bickering. Sea lions have always been part of the coastal landscape to me, something just there, sleeping brown blobs that will occasionally move or bark in tandem, but tedious to watch and too distant to understand.

That all changed on the Island. (Location: Undisclosed.) There the sea lions were not distant and mysterious, but my neighbors every moment of every day. Anything that involved the water involved the sea lions. When I went to the surf to wash the dishes or take a bath or launder my clothes, they were right there, trying to see what I was doing. When I went for a swim to cool off, they came to join me, and after a while I learned how to imitate them. I swam upside down, as they preferred. I learned how to flip and quickly change directions, how to have the most fun with bubbles, and how to keep my eyes open, always open, until the salt no longer burned and the border between air and water became a very insubstantial thing indeed.

They were masters of the water, yet could take nothing seriously. They showed me that any new object was a potential plaything, especially man-made flotsam like ropes and PVC pipes and plastic forks. I joined them in their rowdy games of tug-of-war and keep-away. When I ignored them and went back to watching fish, they snuck up behind me, gathering there in anticipation. As soon as I turned around they scattered in all directions, a game of "no see me." They never let me catch them. I could almost hear them snickering.

Each day when the sea turned, the sea lions rushed to the breakwater to bodysurf the waves of the incoming tide. I tried this rough sport a few times, never quite as good as they were. Whenever a neighboring surfer passed me with a backwards glance, I couldn't tell if the look in his eyes was of pity or smug mockery. But they all seemed to delight in the fact that I made the attempt, and pointedly stayed close beside me, as though encouraging me on. (Or perhaps just for laughs.)

When at last I couldn't keep up anymore I would watch from afar as they grandstanded - riding on top of the very crests of the waves, throwing themselves high above the water with aerial acrobatics, leaping, spinning, somersaulting, touching nose to tail - until the tide slacked off and the water went calm once more. Time to haul out for a nap.

On the land, it was a different story. Whereas they circled me playfully in the water, it was I who had the advantage on dry ground. My sleek and graceful friends transformed into awkward creatures with harsh voices and horrible smells, gracelessly humping along the sand inch by inch as I nimbly, nonchalantly passed them by. Often they piled along the beach so thickly that it became a challenge to walk anywhere without stepping on a fin or whisker. Any small disruption to one would cause him to wake up and complain, which made the ones around him wake up and complain, which bothered everyone else, a chain reaction, until soon the entire beach was one long line of groaning, whining, squirming sea lions. They did this to themselves, too, especially in the middle of the night. Their culture dictated that if one accidentally woke up, everyone should wake up...including any poor humans who happened to be trying to sleep in tents nearby.

They never quiet got used to the fact that the part of the beach where we lived was no longer theirs to command. And so it was that I and my coworkers would be sitting around the table eating popcorn or listening to the shortwave, and suddenly a youngster would flop into our midst, carelessly knock over a camp stool with his flippers, bump jars and bottles off the top of the cooler, then throw his head back, whine "Maaaaaaaw!" and proceed to pass gas strong enough to make birds drop out of the sky. We would stand up and shoo him out, and all the way he would complain, "Maaw! Maa-aaah!" while his nearby comrades grumbled at us for being inconsiderate.

They felt - and were - entitled to everything on the beach. Objects on land were meant to be climbed on, no matter if they were chairs, tents, other sea lions, or a radio someone (me) was trying to listen to. Once an offending obstacle had been successfully climbed, a sea lion celebrated the accomplishment by snorting out a blast of salty water from his nose, falling asleep on it, and emanating noxious smells.

One day I was reclining in my hammock with a good book - and believe me, any book is good if you're stuck on an island - when a friendly lion fellow decided that the very exact place he wanted to be was underneath me. I didn't necessarily mind this, even if it would draw in more flies than were already swarming around me, but what I did mind was that one of my few precious pairs of sunglasses was resting on the sand right where he was about to flop. I made a snatch to save them. An arm coming down from nowhere must have been a startling sight for the sea lion, because he suddenly lunged up and hit my hammock from the underside, flailing around and giving me a decent eight seconds of rodeo action. I was still clutching the sides of the hammock for dear life when he finally retreated back down the beach, complaining about the unfairness of the world in general.



I miss those fellows - those smelly, graceful, graceless fellows who filled my days with stories. I lived with them as equals, both of us trying, wide-eyed, to understand each other's strange habits. The sight of the dead sea lion brought back all of those memories in one great rush, and I suddenly realized I'd been staring down at it for an unnecessarily long time...

Thus ends part the first.

Pictures of Prague: Part II

More things of interest, as seen through a viewfinder:

It's a door! Covered with heads! I sat and pondered this for some time. The best I could come up with is that these heads are placed similarly to where doornails would be. Ergo, each man represents a nail, a commentary on how Communism belittled the people's very bodies as menial components easily sacrificed to support the structure of the greater machine...little acknowledging that without such support, the machine could not stand. Gives new nuance to "hitting the nail."

Speaking of heads, I overcame one of my greatest food phobias and sampled, for the first time, HEADCHEESE. Not just headcheese, but headcheese suspended in MYSTERIOUS CLEAR JELLY. It was incredibly tasty. I might have to start looking for a new "scary food" to make jokes about.

This picture is not a picture of that meal. (The headcheese picture, in all honesty, looks nasty.) This is a picture of pork knuckle and Czech dumplings. Don't ever let anyone tell you the Czechs don't know how to cook. The food in Prague was all fantastic, and included the best bacon and sausage I've ever tasted. You can eat your way from one end of town to the other...and then drink your way back on Turkish coffee, mead, and mulled wine.

This building makes actual unicorns weep. It was located in the more modern outskirts of the city, where hulking grey concrete cubes built during the Communist era dominate.


The best thing about this poster is not that it advertises hallucinogenic alcohol in a kiddie-friendly form, but that the green fairy flaming kiddie nightmare cone is "kosher."

Here's a menu that really, really tried. I think this was supposed to be dessert. Other sections of the menu included "From piggy" and "From the moo-cow."


Looming over the city nightscape and the dancing lights of the Vltava, Pražský hrad (Prague Castle.) Despite the fact that it sat atop a steep hill, I often found myself arriving at the castle whether I intended to or not. For that reason it came to represent the heart of the city to me.

Eating Out: The Prague Edition

A page from my journal:

Last night's pizza dinner reinforced what seems to be the trend in restaurants here. Here's how it goes...

1. You sit down.

2. "Mluvite anglicky? (Do you speak English?)" you say. "No," says the waiter. This might be short for "ano," which means "yes" in Czech...or it might be the only English word he knows.

3. Waiter immediately wants your order; what do you want? What? What? What? Hurry up!

4. The menu is poorly translated. Your phrase book keeps opening to "At the Post Office." Panicking, you make a Hail Mary and point at something, sincerely hoping that syrem means "cheese" and not "headcheese."

5. Food takes forever to come. (Actually, it's not bad in most places, but this pizza joint was abysmal. Also, don't ask why we were eating pizza, of all things, in Prague. Just don't.)

6. Optional intermission: adventures in bathroomland.

7. Food comes. It is thankfully more cheese than head. "Dobrou chut!" says the waiter. (Enjoy your meal.) "Dobrou chut!" you say back, because (curiously) that's the thing to do.

8. Nazdravi, you eat!

9. You must flag down the waiter, who is trying very hard to ignore you, otherwise the bill will never come.

10. Before your party can correctly divide the bill, your waiter is hovering over you. Pay now! Pay now! Pay! Pay! Hurry up! Get out!

That, pretty much, has been my experience.

Pictures of Prague: Part I

Some of the things I came across during my Praha week:

I drool over interesting gargoyles. I guess the feeling is mutual. Because of its age and turbulent history, Prague has some amazing architecture going on. So many different styles, from Gothic to Art Deco to Neoclassical...It's as if the city designer was handed a slip that said, "Please build incredible things; no genre!"

Painted eggs for sale at the outdoor Easter market. A pysanky paradise.

I might have bought one of these boar skins, but I'm pretty sure customs wouldn't have approved.

A traditional children's folk dance at the outdoor market. I'm not sure what the story was, but it went somewhere along the lines of: the girls celebrate the advent of spring by picking flowers, milking cows, and parading with the milk tins, then the boys come along and beat the girls with sticks until they run away screaming. (Don't worry; the sticks have ribbons.) This photo shows the part where the boys are threatening to hit the girls. All the while, younger children on the edge of the stage merrily dance and sing.

???

Watching this was one of the times I really wished I spoke Czech.

A McDonald's right outside the Museum of Communism. Two red symbols of terror. (Three, if you count the trash can that is clearly labelled as a bathroom.)

Top, a motivational poster greeting Czech workers during the height of the Communist era. Below, a translation for us schmucks wandering the museum.

If you're going to San Francisco, do the hair/flowers thing, but if you're going to Prague, take a can of spray paint. This is the John Lennon Peace Wall, which was once used to write covert Beatles-related messages opposing Communism. It's still being overwritten daily with fresh messages of love and peace. Now instead of carrying the secret hopes of a few Czech students, it's an international canvas for anyone who comes to visit a new free Prague.

The Beginning.

"Let's go to Prague," my good friend said.

"Sure. Why not?" I said.

...

Maybe that's not exactly how that conversation went down. It was probably more along the lines of, "I'm going to Prague...wanna come along?" We're starting a tradition, I guess, where she picks some random far-flung place to visit random far-flung friends and family for her spring break vacation, and I tag along for the adventure. I hope it's a tradition; I rather like it.

For example, several years ago we went together to Ecuador, and although it was my third time there, I felt like I had never seen the place before. Certainly not like that. Ecuador in a week! Two days in the jungle! Two days in the city!! Two days in the mountains!!! Nearly get killed by a snake, eat bull testicles, play soccer straddle the equatorwaaaaa-haaa! If living in a country for several months gives one a true local's taste of it, speed-touring through a representative cross-section of a country is like falling Alice-in-Wonderland-style into a promotional TV travelogue.

That's what I was expecting for Prague. Shutter snaps of Central Europe!! Vienna, Bulgaria, Warsaw! (Obviously I was not really looking at a map, just randomly naming places in the nearby...continent.)

Instead, I discovered that once I got to Prague, I didn't want to leave it. A week spent in the heart of one city doesn't have to be a snapshot. It can be intensive...and intense.

Thus began one of the strangest trips of my life. I'd call it life-changing...but really, aren't they all?

Me Pointing at Things

I pointed at a lot of things on our Alaska trip, apparently. I feel that a pointing finger placed strategically within a picture adds so much interest to the composition, don't you?

Here are some of the things I pointed at:


Me pointing at British Columbia. They're a bit full of themselves, aren't they?


Me pointing at the Exit Glacier. Whoops, these aren't in any kind of order at all. The Exit Glacier is nowhere near British Columbia.

Me pointing at spinach. For supper. Yummy.

Me pointing at the infamous "Yukon Sour-toe." You can drink it fast, you can drink it slow, but your lips have gotta touch the toe. And yes, it is a real severed human toe, thank you very much.

Me pointing at a gorge we took a hand tram across. It was a very long ways down, and the door on the basket wouldn't shut, so whoever wasn't pulling the rope had to lean against the otherwise open door. Fun.

Me pointing at a black bear, one of our first official wildlife sightings. This was in fact in British Columbia.

Me pointing at delicious moose dinner, the steaks we got from the gal at the visitor's center. Served up with a little spruce tip jelly. Mmmm. The best meal of the whole trip, I thought.

Me pointing at the Burwash Landing (Yukon Territory) giant gold pan, biggest gold pan in the world. Is that man bleeding? I couldn't tell.

Me pointing at a fairy slipper. They're rare to see because they are over-collected by flower fanciers. A fairy slipper plant has to be 13 years old before it will flower.

Me pointing at a lake at Snag Junction, the Yukon. We camped the night there and swam in the lake the next morning. It was cold...we survived.

Me pointing at salmonberries. Ketchikan had more ripe salmonberries than I've ever seen in my life. They're one of the first summer berries to ripen, so we were lucky to time it just right. I had to use my hat when my hands got too full.

Me pointing at a can of refried beans, de-canned and festooned with spoon. Using cans of refried beans turned out to be a lot harder than we thought, so we were left with quite a few at the end of the trip.

I am slowly working through my thousands of Alaska pictures, attempting to organize them. That takes care of the "Me pointing at things" category!
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Is It Wyoming Yet?

Ah, the glorious experience of waking up in the backseat of my car at 5 in the morning, when the first blue haunt of sunlight is beginning to lighten the broad flatlands of Idaho's southwest. I crawl up into the driver's seat and pop open a bottle of Starbucks frappuccino, roll out of the dark and sleeping streets of the town which I came to, also in the darkness, and drive back to the freeway on-ramp. Now the horizon has turned pale, and... was that a sign for I-84 East I just passed? Is this... is this road going up and over the interstate? Is this road siphoning me onto I-84 West???

Getting onto the freeway in the wrong direction at 5 in the morning, when the next exit is 15 miles and 15 minutes away? That's a very special feeling.

But I finally got turned back towards the east and got to watch the sun rise over the most boring stretch between Oregon and Colorado (apologies to the competing boring stretches of Utah and Wyoming): the road between Boise and Twin Falls, Idaho. Bleh.

Day one of my two day drive is Oregon, all Oregon, with just a little piece of Idaho thrown in at the end for fun. If you look at the map, you can easily see that Oregon is not geographically as large as Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming put together, but the road is 55 mph all the way. It starts in the wet coastal forest, goes up and over the coastal range into the fertile Willamette Valley, and then climbs up again into the Cascades, where the forests are dry and peopled (treed?) by lodgepole pines. After dropping down the other side of the mountains, trees disappear and are replaced by sagebrush, and it is the sagebrush that continues to dominate the scenery until Colorado.

I used to think of Utah as being the most desolate place in the country, but I have changed my opinion substantially. It has mountains, at least, and although they are mostly the tough and jagged kind, all rock and no majesty, they fit in well to the rest of the stark landscape. The word for northern Utah is "salt." White salt flats stretching off in the distance, shimmering in the sun, the Great Salt Lake putting out fingers of bitter water towards the freeway, salt marshes prickling with sharp grass. The rocks are reds and browns and coppers - the plant life, too - and crop up in fantastic formations such as the Devil's Slide, a steep narrow chute that dives from a mountain to the road. (The exit for it always sneaks up on me around a sharp bend in the freeway, but it was closed this time for construction, so I did not have to veer to catch it.)

But by the Devil's Slide I feel like I've been driving...well...far longer than I should have been driving. Where the heck is Wyoming? Wyoming is the home stretch, welcomed this time of year but grueling in the winter, when black ice covers the road and powder snow is blown across it in a sideways blizzard so dense that you cannot tell the difference between the pavement and the sagebrush. Wyoming is beautiful in its own way. Fawn colors, khaki, beige, every shade of tan man ever thought up a name for, rolls away from the road, and the road itself turns into a sky-colored mirage. The freeway is marked by giant red gates every 100 miles or so that say "Road Closed - Return to..." fill in the blank to be the nearest town of any great size. This is so that when snow drifts close off the freeway in the wintertime, they can divert traffic before we go plowing into oblivion.

Wyoming is also the land of Little America. If you do not know what Little America is, you will by the time you get there. There are signs - "Little America, 200 miles. 50 cent Cones!" and "Little America, 175 miles. Kids stay for free!" and "Little America, 150 miles, Are We There Yet?" etcetera to the point where you, the driver, with nothing else to occupy your attention except the occasional fireworks stand, start to wonder, "What is this mysteriously wonderful Little America?!" (Answer: a tricked-up gas station.)

Wyoming at last breaks its hold just a little south of Laramie, where a big old timey wooden sign proclaims, "Welcome to Colorful Colorado!" and immediately stands of green bushy ponderosa pines spring up, and the deer frolic, and grand snow-capped peaks burst out of the ground. And there you are. The Rockies.

(Finally! And now maybe I can part ways with Bosco for longer than a day? Sorry Bosco!)
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Like Balls on a Roulette Wheel We Are Flung

Surfacing for air: a decompression.

Twenty one hours alone on the road is a long time to decompress. The first three hours are pure excitement. The next three become something akin to work, as in "I should be getting paid to do this." After that, the miles begin to creep backwards. Every minute I glance down at the odometer, but the number stays the same. There are still 1100 miles to go. It is a fierce and solid number, and there is nothing I can do about it. I pull off to the side of the road to take a break, but the miles are still there. The CD in my player has run out and everything my radio finds seems jarring on the ears - I spend two minutes listening to static on the AM thinking that it is the sound of applause about to die out - and then I turn off the radio and howl at the road like a wild woman (something you can only do when you're alone), but the miles are still there to drive.

After that there is nothing but time to think about things, and I have a very noisy mind. Big questions become small and manageable; little ones well up to take their place. Sometimes I sing my thoughts out loud, and sometimes I talk them, and sometimes I talk to God... but I don't talk to God too often, because when I talk to him, when I really talk to him, I get tears in my eyes. I think it is that the conversation is too honest, that it cuts down through the masks to the heart of me and who I am, what I am trying to be, real and raw. Often painful.

But you can't cry while you're driving. So no... I don't talk to God too often.

Sometimes, sometimes... when my thoughts are on repeat play and the fault lines on the pavement are hammering away a steady beat, then I finally find the rhythm of the road. The car stops moving. Instead, the land moves around me. If I am on a winding two lane highway, the ribbon of pavement seems to whip beneath me like a high pressure water hose. But if I am on the freeway, it becomes more like a video game. There are cars to pass and cars passing me. I weave and dodge with the cruise control on, focusing on the two possibilities - Are they gaining on me or am I gaining on them? Never tap the foot on the brake, that is the goal of this game. Every vehicle I encounter takes on its own personality by its shape, its color, and the way it moves. Is it timid? Does it reek with machismo? Polite, clever, lawbreaking? And yet I never see the faces on the other side of the glass.

The radio catches a moment of European electronic techno, and suddenly I picture myself in a different place entirely, under the water, laying back on the sand watching the fish swim above me. Scuba divers hardly ever stay put in one place. Generally you don't want to touch anything around you, lest you kill it or it kills you, or sometimes the only thing beneath you is a deep swallowing darkness, a silent enemy. But when there is sand - try this if you get the chance - you can lay back and look up at the fish, their silhouettes black against the bending light of the surface. Watch them pause and circle, flick their tails and be gone, one after another. Watch as the bubbles rise up from your regulator, flat on the bottom and round on the top, big and small, wavering up in a delicate dance to the surface, when the only sound around you is the hiss and blurb of your breath and the constant snapping of the shrimp hidden beneath the rocks. I don't know why techno made me think of this.

But I am back on the road, drinking milk out of a quart carton. The scenery is blearily monotonous, and in my boredom I notice even the slightest things. There is a dead creature on the side of the road lying on its back, all reddish fur with four paws sticking straight in the air like a cartoon. It looks wombat-ish, but I'm pretty sure eastern Oregon doesn't have wombats. Miles later I pass a dead cow lying on the other side of a barb wire fence like a fallen fiberglass statue, its legs sticking out from its side. The heat makes the dead things bloat. And then up on the hill, a large metal horse in mid-lunge, and beyond it a corral for the wild horses caught by the BLM, and I think about the times I have seen horses running in the wild. Not this time, though. Not this drive. Only hawks and pronghorn antelope to keep me company, and the rolling sagebrush looking the same for every mile, and Cheerios in odd places in the car, and now an empty quart of milk.

Twenty one hours alone on the road is a long time to decompress.
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*

The Car That Ate An Antelope

The sunlight is coming in shafts through the trees, the peacocks down in the valley are wailing plaintively, and as I stand beside Bosco considering my life's next chapter of plunging into the great unknown I am faced with an old familiar question: Should I take The Antelope?

Well of course I should. Why the heck do I drive a small SUV if not to throw my bike into the back of it whenever I please? But the process of putting The Antelope in single-handed is daunting, especially since the first time when Bosco was still shiny and new and I managed to get a nice big grease smudge all over the upholstery. But I like to bike. And....I like my Antelope.

(Mind, "The Antelope" isn't its model but its name, like Fred, or Joe Jackson, or Fluffy. It is a good name.)

So it's fiddle off the front wheel, grope around for a nonexistent "good grip" as the handlebars swivel around to smack my knees as the whole bike slips back on the remaining tire. A regrip, and now I've forgotten to avoid pressing the greasy chain against my clothing (but I'm wearing dark colors - whew!), and now the sharp bits of metal where my front tire used to be are threatening to gouge plastic and break windows, and now I finally have it hoisted up halfway into the car (I see for the first time "Made in China" written on the side. My bike was made in China??? Did China even make anything back then? Aaah, my bike is Chinese!!), and now the petals are punching down into whatever it is underneath the sheet I've spread across the rest of the packed stuff, but has it done damage? I like to keep it a mystery. And now I am spending two coils of rope lashing The Antelope to every tie-point my car has to offer, because I picture it flailing around in there and doing mighty, terrible things if I don't.

That's how Bosco and The Antelope get along. One of these days I should probably invest in a bike rack.

The entire time I was wrestling to get the bike inside, between mild expletives, I found myself asking questions. So many questions. Why do people travel? What's in it? Why don't more people do it? Is it a way of life or a break from life? Can it be a constant? And why do I travel? What do I hope to find, and what have I found already? If I forget everything from my past travels, have I really ever travelled at all?

The answers could come in cliched bits like, "Americans have always been on the move!" (Like some 1950's "Ride the Train" poster), or maybe something about the struggle of man vs. nature, I don't know. I didn't want to go down that route. There's something far more satisfying in the asking of the question, and I seem to be doing a lot of that lately. The questions come easier than the answers. Maybe I should be a philosopher, heh? Or a police interrogator.

But I have at least one question answered for today. The Antelope is strapped down and ain't going anywhere but Colorado. So that's a "yes."
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And Then the Road Ran Out

Is it over? It happened so fast. The mileage on the dash says 7502, so I must have gone somewhere. And yet here I am back with familiar sights and familiar sounds, and all that’s left of the trip is a car full of stuff and a head full of music, a camera full of pictures. A bracing, grinding halt.

Today I’ve been facing a curious teetering between two states, exhaustion and complete boredom. I’m lugging my body around the house like one of the undead while my mind is still racing for things to do and places to go. But it’s a fatigue deeper than coffee can go, despite the millions of things I have to do between now and Friday, when I hope to start the two day drive to Colorado. Today I feel like one of those skits in a comedy show where one person hides behind another and puts their arms out in front to do simple things like brushing teeth (and shoving the toothbrush in their eye) or eating a sandwich (and spilling it all down their shirt.) That is an accurate depiction of my efficiency rating at present.

Despite that, I’m starting to tick off a few minor chores. I've been washing my sleeping bag in the bath tub, not an easy task. It takes some muscle, sort of like washing a dead Saint Bernard. It turned the water into a lovely deep brown “sleeping bag tea.” Which is funny, because I wasn’t expecting it to be that dirty, but I guess the last time I can definitively remember cleaning it was back in 1999. I’m also slowly extracting items from the inner rubble of Bosco, an explosion which resulted from quickly sundering all of TSO’s belongings from the rest of the stuff in a rush to make his ferry, a bit akin to yanking a tablecloth out from under a full setting of china, but with fewer pointy shards. Before this we had to leave Bosco parked unattended in Tacoma for 24 hours, so I left it a little chaotic as a theft deterrant. But I have to admit, my side of the car has more or less been in a state of explosion since the Yukon, so right now it is really just more exploded. When the option is to spend time organizing or make a “that’ll-do” and hit the road, I hit the road.

The 7502 miles is from my driveway to my driveway, but it isn’t a perfectly accurate measure of our trip because it includes a lot of backtracking (like zigzagging around Washington State this last week) and noodling around in the cities. We logged 35 miles in Ketchikan, for example, and I don’t think Ketchikan even has 35 miles of road. So the actual distance may have been closer to 6000 miles, seven weeks travelling, six weeks solid tent camping, access to one oven, two instances of watching television (not counting the ones inside interpretive centers), seven cans of propane, six crossings through international customs, five ferries, zero flat tires, and four boxes of Jujubees. Plus we got eaten by a bear.

So I’ve missed blogging about pretty much everything between Juneau and the civilized world, but I will get around to catching up, I promise. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and after my family’s reunion, which is going to be two weeks worth of my clawing up the hiking trails behind everybody else gasping some excuse about how I’ve been locked in a car the past seven weeks and have no muscle mass left.

Ah… Alaska, the Yukon, the north. When will I go back?
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Impressions

Impressions of Homer:

-artsy fartsy
-tourists confined to segregated area (known as "the Spit")
-pay money, catch halibut, take pictures with halibut
-$20 sandwich: white bread, PB & J
-locals say "yeah, lots of eagles, beautiful mountains, blah blah blah"

-alarming lack of fresh seafood
-bald eagle wants to eat your dog

Impressions of Seward:

-cool without trying to be cool
-every marine creature and bird comes here at least once in their life, for it is lush
-city camping on the beach, heck yeah (minus irritatingly loud Asian family next door at midnight and again at 5am)
-amazing tours, no advertising, which you discover after you've already left

-alarming lack of fresh seafood
-Exit Glacier biding its time to retake the world

Impressions of Girdwood:

-11pm? time for everyone to wander the streets!
-dead cars going "dust to dust" in random spots in the forest
-sketchiest city campground ever

-best combination camping/defunct gold mine ever

-reasonable lack of fresh seafood
-ski lodge wants to eat your baby and your dog

-now featuring bread-free bakeries

Impressions of Haines:

-we're friendly, but we don't like you

-10 art galleries, 1 artist

-uncluttered by plumbers, mechanics, or anyone who knows how to replace toilet paper/soap/towels in bathrooms

-our faces will break if we smile

-thousands of eagles can be seen at all other times of the year, just not today

-8oz wrongfully delicious Muffin Cake

-fresh seafood, but guarded by a cranky old man who will snap at any moment

-we are only tolerating you, give us your money

Impressions of Juneau:

-amazingly buff Juneaun thighs

-grey, cold, warm, sunny, rainy, grey

-quality souvenirs for the low low price of $999.99!

-finding skyline from water comparable to Where's Waldo? with massive cruise ships

-fresh seafood location: pricey restaurant plate

-Seattle's younger, rowdy little cousin

-it's 6pm and we're going home and we don't care that you're on vacation because we're here all year and if you have to get on the boat before we open and can't buy your little Made in Tawain "Alaskan" eskimo child doll then you're screwed, aren't you?

-gelato

Swoop! Southeast!

TSO and I have been travelling WiFi dry for a little too long, and in the time we've had a connection, I have not had time/motivation to write. It's hard to look at a computer screen when the alternative is hundreds of mountains and glaciers and swooping eagles and the like.

Yes, I shook the Anchorage blues. We went down into the Kenai Peninsula, which was originally supposed to be a short little side jaunt. I thought it was so close to Anchorage that I didn't even factor in the mileage to our trip total. So... it turns out that the Peninsula is actually like an upside-down "Y" with Homer at one tip and Seward at the other. and each over 100 miles from Anchorage. We ended up visiting both.

Okay...okay...triage...

It's very late and I have to get up in 4 hours to go catch the ferry to Sitka. What should I write about?

Well, the mosquitoes here are every bit as big and bad as the warnings say. We have mostly avoided running into them, but our last few campsites have been some of the worst. We stayed at Huck Hobbit's Hostel in Slana, where they came by the thousands, and fell asleep staring up at the hundred or so that had gotten themselves trapped between the outside of the tent and the rain fly. When I took off the fly in the morning, a visible cloud of mosquitoes lifted straight up into the air. Then there was the campground in Haines, Chilkat Lake?, where I had to get up in the morning before our ferry left and boil water to wash the dishes. The water came from a hand pump, like most of the water in state/provincial parks, with an advisory to boil it first. It takes about half an hour to do enough for dishes and drinking, and in that time every mosquito from a five mile radius came and hovered around me, attracted by the heat and steam. A good fifty or so kamikazeed directly into the uncovered clean water bucket, which made washing dishes interesting. I finally busted out the mosquito hat that I brought, the first time I've had to use it on this trip. The actually mosquito net, however, remains packed and untouched. Oh yes. We are rough woodsmen now, aren't we?

Bears have not been a problem, knock on wood. The only ones we've seen have been A) on the side of the road while driving, B) in Denali while on the bus, and C) with enough people watching them already that they were no surprise. The first ones like that were the ones I mentioned in the Kenai. Today we encountered another similar case, but much worse. We went to visit the Mendenhall Glacier just outside of Juneau, discovering that apparently every person aboard every one of the four massive cruise ships parked outside of town was doing exactly the same thing. It was the most crowded "tourist" site we've seen yet, so bad that we had to practically march in a line as we walked up the trail. (We finally did break away and make it to a more remote spot much closer to the glacier.) But when we first arrived, I parked Bosco next to a large group of people surrounding a tree, taking pictures and pointing up at a little black bear high in the branches. The poor bear was agitated, but there was no way down, so it crawled around and gnawed on branches. Several hours later when we came back to the car, the tour buses and people were gone, and so was the bear.

We finally hit a nasty part of the Alaskan Highway several days ago, as we were driving from Tok to Haines Junction. This bit is all torn up, apparently a permanent thing, alternating between pavement unexpectedly turning to gravel, massive divots and waves marked only by a little orange flag (or sometimes not at all), frost heaves, and construction delays. It wasn't quite as bad as the drive from the Canadian/US border to Chicken, Alaska (a steep dirt road made muddy by a recent rain), but it was enough to shake and shimmy poor Bosco, who is beginning to take on a few extra rattle-y noises. The populous Kenai clubbed my Lower 48 driving sense back into me, so the first time I met a massive dip in my lane, I took it, causing things in the back to catch air and rearrange themselves, and then immediately realized that there was no one in the other lane for probably 50 miles and that I could - hey! - actually cross the yellow line to avoid things. It's funny I've forgotten this so quickly, considering how free and easy driving was for most of the Yukon. The Yukon - Where Road Markings Are Suggestions.

The drive from Haines Junction down to Haines is probably a leg that most people skip, since the RVers continue down the way they came and the cruise shippers never stray so far from the water, but this stretch was, I think, my favorite drive yet. The road goes up and over a mountain pass, one that was fiercely guarded by the coastal Tlingit so that they alone could control trade with the Interior Peoples. It starts in the taiga (Russian for "little sticks"), a forest in miniature. The permafrost stunts the growth of the trees, so that they can grow several hundred years and still look like a sapling. Occasionally there are "drunken forests" where the permafrost has melted under the roots of larger trees, causing them to tip this way and that like a bad hair day. Lakes and kettle ponds go past, and then the road climbs above the low treeline into the tundra, with massive snowy mountains in every direction. When it finally descends below treeline on the other side, massive trees quickly appear, the wet coastal forests of southeast Alaska.

And that's where we are now, one big jump from the Kenai to Southeast, and all I can say is "Finally!" For some reason I thought that it wouldn't take long to get from one to the other - the mileage in numbers certainly doesn't look intimidating - but when we finally turned around in Seward and set our sights on Haines, it took four days to get there!

I've got far too many stories to tell. We have a 25-hour ferry ride in our future. Maybe they'll have WiFi?