S/V Tavarua

There’s new belief that China “discovered” America in 1421. There certainly was a lot going on in India about then, and the Khmer civilization was spreading from the Indus Valley across Southeast Asia and into Indonesia. So this isn’t exactly implausible.

But here in New England, they’re celebrating Columbus Day tomorrow. Columbus was Italian, by the way. Now I don’t know, maybe we celebrate Columbus Day in California too, but all I know is that Columbus Avenue runs through North Beach and that’s where Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store Cafe delivers delightful tasty treats. Unlike here.

Pictures.

I don’t think we’re ultimately going to get this coast.

We drove out to our boat yesterday with our daily list of things to work on, one of which was to spray that anti-corosion stuff on our mast step, which is down a hole in the cabin floor where the mast usually sits. Imagine our surprise when we arrived at our boat and found that our mast had been put back on yesterday with NO FUCKING NOTICE! Sure, we’d sent some email to New England Boatworks last Friday telling them that Rig Pro might be able to get to it this Thursday (tomorrow), but given that we’d received no reply to that email nor any voicemail or phone calls, we just assumed it had gone into the same black hole that apparently engulfs most of the subcontractors we’ve been dealing with. Things do get done, but no one seems capable of coughing up something as ludicrous as a schedule or actually keeping you apprised on their progress. They just show up on some random day and at some later point announce, ‘it’s already done’, usually in response to you calling them to see where they’re at. In fact, they often tend to combine this last point with mock ridicule, as if you were too stupid to notice that the project has already been completed.

I guess if you like being surprised all the time this system works very well. Or maybe it’s just that most of the people who own boats that are serviced where we’re at don’t really live on them and don’t really care about how they’re put together beyond a cursory check-box level: watermaker, check. Got one. Maybe it’s like that.

It does help to see your mast back on your sailboat. Perhaps we will actually be back on the water one of these days. Hopefully we’ll even get to see the launch, but I’m not betting on it. More likely we’ll just find that it’s been launched one day when we show up to work on it. Hopefully someone will tie it off.

There’s apparently a popular t-shirt out here that reads, simply, “Hollister, CA”. Now Hollister is in the central valley of northern California, an easy flight from Watsonville (Santa Cruz). It’s one of those places you can fly to for a $100 hamburger if you’re flying out of Watsonville. And being the central valley, there’s not much there, except for a sky diving school, and lots of garlic, lettuce, tomatoes, artichokes, and those migrant farm workers doing all those jobs Americans won’t do (sic). There’s also Frazier Lake Airpark (1C9) which has a sea plane runway that’s parallel to the asphalt! But that’s CA airplane porn. Here, it’s some sort of bizarre fashion statement. Go figure.

What started out as a slow week ended in a flurry of activity and there’s now a chance we’ll be ready to splash our boat next Thursday! We’d probably be ready to go even sooner, but the folks who get to re-attach our mast can’t get to it before Thursday. However, this is real progress!

The main thing that got done on Friday was our mast work. We stepped (took out) our mast because our surveyor told us that we had mast step corrosion and because we decided that we wanted to replace our standing rigging on general principal. (’Standing rigging’ is the high-test wire that holds the mast in place, as opposed to ‘running rigging’, which means all of the ropes that are used to position the sails.) Once we decided to step the mast, we quickly decided also to upgrade all of the lights that are used when under sail to be LEDs, which consume about 1/10th the power of incandescent lights. And then when New England Boatworks actually took out our mast with their giant manly crane, they managed to set it down on the wiring bundle and pretty much crushed everything but the radar and VHF coax cables. Bummer.

So at that point we decided to replace every wire in the mast. And until Friday, that was holding us up. But the folks we were having do that work unexpectedly came through on Friday. They replaced the wires to the spreader lights, the B&G network Quad sensor cable, the VHF coax (just because), installed our new 2kW radome, added a second AIS antenna, and replaced the steaming and tri-color/anchor/strobe lights with 2 nautical mile (NM) US Coast Guard (USCG) approved LED lights manufactured out of anodized aluminum by Lopolight out of Denmark.

And what about that mast corrosion? Well, there wasn’t any. It was just dirt. We vacuumed it out and scrubbed it down with a wire brush and it’s good to go. There’s some zinc-chromate anti-corrosion goop you’re supposed to slather on it that we still need to acquire, but that’s essentially done.

Other progress: our prop’s done (but still needs to be re-pitched once we’re back on the water), our new high-output alternator’s on, our Link 2000-R’s on, our name’s on, our new life line’s are on, and our watermaker is about half installed. It’s almost possible to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but that could still be a train, we’re not sure.

I ordered a solid-state MacBook Air to use for our planning and navigation software. I’m running VMware Fusion with Windows XP Pro for any Windows software we need to run. At the moment, that’s just the RayMarine RayTech RNS software which interfaces with our new chartplotter/radra/AIS. The existing Pathfinder chartplotter was pretty dated and then when we opened the radome, water poured out of it. So that upgrade was a no-brainer. We tried to fit a 12″ multi-function display on the helm but had to go with the 8″ because that’s all that would fit in a pod on the custom Lewmar Whitlock helm that shipped with the PS40. We’re also moving our B&G Quad, Wind, GPS, and Auto-pilot instruments to a pod that’s going to be mounted above the companionway hatch.

Our menial goal before Thursday: get 2-3 more coats of wax on the mast. It’s quite obvious where the sawhorses were when we put the first two coats on, so we’re inclined to do another three coats if for no other reason that we don’t want to store this expensive 3M wax we bought and there’s still a half-can of it left.

We’re thinking about driving up to Lexington tomorrow for Dim Sum at Yangtze. Thoughts of sailing into Shanghai and Hong Kong are all that keep us going right now. Steamed pork bun, yum!

We’ve made some progress, despite last week’s Newport International Boat Show, which was mostly rained out except for Thursday. Not really sure why anyone pays to attend this; we scarfed “free” tickets from some of the folks working on our boat. The highlights: a 70′ Hinckley sailboat with over-the-top varnish work and several 50-60′ catamarans, which win some sort of prize for having windows in the staterooms, bathrooms, and under the stairs which look down/out below the waterline!

Back in our little world, our bottom is freshly painted, mostly. There’s still a few spots where the jack stands used to be before they were moved, that need to be finished off. Interlux Micron Extra was the flavor of choice here. It’s an ablative paint formulated for warm water, a veritable steal at something like $200/gallon. Huh?

Our rudder’s repaired and back on, our dual racor diesel fuel filters are installed, our prop’s back from servicing, and a new through-hull for our new watermaker has an appropriate backing plate. Which means that we’re almost ready to go back in the water!

It looks like the gating factor now is our new LED running (sailing) lights and new radome (radar dome). We knew this wasn’t going to happen until after the boat show, but we were planning on going back in the water without a mast and finishing this up later. But New England Boatworks (NEB) informed us today that while they don’t have a problem with us being out of the water (gratis) for as long as we need, they do need the space where our mast is sitting, so could we please finish that up ASAP? So we’re going to call the light folks in the morning and see if we can get that back on the top of their list. Pinball. This reminds us a lot of pinball.

On the menial labor side of things, we bleached out the lockers (again) and polished the brass rubbing strake that runs along the side. Why anyone would put things that oxidize on the outside of a boat is currently beyond me but then again, if I think too hard about any of this, I want to just hang my head and cry.

Must remind self: sunsets. Exotic food. No Department of Fatherland Security.

Tomorrow, we finally get to clean out our mast step (the anodized aluminum base plate that the mast sets down into). Ours was really dirty from ten years of goop coming down the mast through holes where the lines (halyards) that raise the sails go in and out. You’re supposed to pull your mast and clean these things out occasionally. The tool for this job was determined to be an 18V Dewalt .5 gallon wet/dry hand-vac. Amazon Prime is our friend.

We’re also horrified to report that fall is in the air. The trees change here and everything! What’s up with that?

What’s left of Tropical Storm Hanna passed through Portsmouth, Rhode Island last night. That makes one tornado and one tropical storm since we arrived here in late July. Where was this weather in Tahoe the last two winters?

So yes, we made it out of Tucson and we stayed there long enough this time to really start liking it. But then again, we fled just as it was getting to be summer. What a lovely spring they have there though.

Our plan to follow the border fell apart in El Paso. I guess we only had about three border towns in us. Mexico reminded us too much of those aspects of travel that we were trying to get away from. So we bee-lined it for Florida thinking that maybe we’d finally get around to taking those sailing lessons we swore to ourselves that we’d take back in, oh, Greece. Or Croatia. Or Italy. Or Thailand. The list correlates strongly with those places that are warm and wet and have good food. Places you’d love to stay longer in, if only you had a nice comfy pillow.

Unfortunately, we’re idiots. You don’t take sailing lessons in Florida in the summer. In fact, the school we were most interested in attending packs up and heads to Newport for the summer. Oh the irony.

After Florida, we headed for Savannah and Charleston and discovered that late spring is not the time to visit here either. That’s peak tourist season, since it gets pretty miserable for the duration of the summer. The Little White Haired Old Lady (LWHOL) meter was pegged. Pegged, I tell you.

Charleston left us pretty close to some of the best BBQ in the south, so we headed for my alma mater, Chapel Hill (Go Heels!).

I’m happy to report that Allen & Son and Bullocks still serve some of the tastiest pork on the planet. And Chapel Hill and Carborro are still mostly the same sleepy college town I left in 1986. There are changes, of course. Because of some bad tax decisions, businesses have largely abandoned Franklin Street for Carborro, which is good for Carborro and not so good for Chapel Hill. One positive result however was the closing of the Gap which blighted the corner of Franklin and Columbia. That Gap was to Chapel Hill what Borders is to Pacific Ave in Santa Cruz. Good riddance!

It’s a blur after Chapel Hill. We did check off a few states neither of us had been to: Oklahoma (okay, that was before Florida), Wisconsin, and Nebraska come to mind. But save for the most horrific Christmas store on the planet, Bronner’s in Frakenmuth, Michigan (where’s the umlaut?), there’s not much to recall. We did enjoy our time in South Dakota and Wyoming. We’d bought a National Park pass way back in El Morro, and we were determined to get our money out of it. We think we broke even in Yellowstone, which is always a delightfully surreal experience. We also highly recommend the Antler Inn in Jackson, if you’re ever in need of a relatively cheap moose-themed motel with fast WiFi. What’s not to like there?

By this point we were aiming for a sailing school in Seattle which would get us out on the Puget Sound and save us from living life east of the Mississippi. About a month later, we were not-so-proud holders of American Sailing Association (ASA) 101 & 103 certification, which means, well, almost nothing really. I think we spent about 8 hours in a sailboat, total. Think of it as a vague introduction to sailing, with a tedious written.

We were digging the sailing, so we started trying to figure out how to get more sailing time on bigger boats. What we finally settled on was chartering this boat out of Bellingham and paying an instructor to liveaboard with us for two days and teach us ASA 104, which along with the 101/103 is the minimum you need, in theory, to charter boats around the planet. Take that with a grain of salt, really. Because what anyone who actually charters boats looks for is logged experience, not ASA certification. But it was useful in the sense that 101/103 let us charter something out of Bellingham and after we dropped our 104 instructor off in Friday Harbor, we had five days of sailing around Puget Sound on our own.

(To Audrey and Bas: we sailed around Lopez but the entrance at Fisherman’s Cove is considered to be one of the trickiest in the sound. There’s a submerged rock there that likes to bite boats and a really narrow channel into the harbor and our charter company pretty much warned us not to go there. We tried the cell as we were passing, but there was no at&t coverage. Wow, if you’re going to live out in the middle of nowhere, you sure picked a nice middle of nowhere to live in!)

Kudos to San Juan Sailing, an absolutely first class charter company. And I say that even though we were forced to participate in a group prayer during the mandatory Skipper’s orientation meeting. Om namai Shiva, we were both thinking. Or was that praise Buddha? The mind boggles. Regardless, if you’re ever wanting to charter a boat on the Puget Sound, go straight to these guys.

Realizing that there’s just no economical way to sail a boat big enough to live on, we started looking for a sailboat to buy. By this time we’d consumed quite a few sailing and cruising books (”cruising” is a sailing term that means living on a boat for the purpose of actually going places as opposed to trying to impress people with the size of a boat you never sail) and had narrowed the field down to a Pacific Seacraft 40. That’s about the biggest boat either of us felt we could be comfortable on in the short term, but still capable of sailing around the world. There were only four for sale in the states and the newest one (1999) was also the least molested one and located in tax-free (for boat sales) Rhode Island. So that brings us to today and what’s left of Hurricane Hanna.

Well, there was one more tedious drive across the country, but we just let the Nüvi take us straight to Middletown, Rhode Island and so there’s not much to cover except for the pizza in upstate New York. It happened to be a Sunday when we were passing through the Hudson River Valley and my first and second choice Yelp spots were closed. So it was with utmost delight that the only place we could find that was open happened to dish up the goods. Tiff suffered through a no-cheese half and from that lone experiment we can now affirm that it’s the cheese. Same sauce, same crust, no cheese — horrible. Unbelievably bad. With cheese, foodgasm.

Our boat’s out of the water (”on the hard”) in Melville Marina, in Portsmouth, Rhode Island just north of Newport. All boats need work and ten year old boats, more so. That we expected, but what we didn’t expect was how long this was going to take to get done. We’ve been here since late July and I think we’ll be lucky if we have her back in the water in two weeks. It’s a combination of many factors and Hanna pointed out quite dramatically that we don’t really need to be heading down the east coast any earlier than next month anyway. But it sure would be nice to move aboard, not the least of reasons being that we’ll finally have our own kitchen again.

I’m not sure I can convey how awful the food is here. It’s got to be tied with Ohio in terms of worst food in the states. Unless you like clams or fried fish, I guess. It’s just unbelievably bland and unhealthy. Clams, lobster, and hamburger, and some of the worst “Italian” food you can imagine. We’re living out of the frozen natural foods section in between bouts with the local cuisine. You can tell a lot about a culture by its food, Bourdain said. And another thing he said about the states was, “if you view us the way you’d view any other indigenous culture, you’ll be better off”, or words to that effect. Wise words indeed.

We’re headed for the Florida Keys, ‘if we ever get outta here’. We will have some networking on board (more on that in another post), but I found a 12V WiFi router that combined with a 3G USB modem gives us anywhere from 400Kb to 1.4Mb anywhere there’s 3G service. The Keys are supposed to be 100% covered, according to the at&t 3G coverage map. We’ll see.

I’ll be posting some photos to my Flickr feed once we get our mast back on and actually start floating again. A good friend from DEC, who still lives in New Hampshire and has been helping us out the whole time, assures me there’s nice tropical sunsets at the end of the tunnel, but right now it seems like just a mess of strange parts and questionable outfitting decisions.

On a more positive note, we now have shiny portholes and a blank space where, “Mulligan’s Wake” used to reside. It’s supposed to be bad luck to rename a boat. So if we sink to the bottom of some far-away ocean, we’ll try to remember to blame ourselves for our misfortune.

We named the boat for our cat, one of the biggest downsides of this plan.

Hit up the old I-8 interstate out of Yuma. If only they could hold the weather at the 10AM temperature, all would be well. Breezed through Dateland, (still in Arizona) and ate one (and only one) date, then caved at the gift store counter and bought two Red Bulls. (You never know when lack of caffeine will overcome the need for determining which wickedly sweet date is the best of them all.) Then off to Gila Bend at a stifling 90+ degrees after a lunch Sophia’s for some ‘adequate, but nice, better than that-renamed-Outer-Limits-diner-down-the-street’ tacos. Then, finally, to the piste de resistance… the Organ Pipes National Monument. Oh, la, la. There are spring flowers on the cacti, a rabbit in the field, and doves abounding. The border patrol (which we crossed three checkpoints of.. were overly tan, and had a few German Shepherds in hyper-checkout car mode), and well, the dudes were rather mellow in the 95+ degree heat. Who could blame them? And, well, thank God. That is one crappy, dangerous job. For the most part, I’d be cranky doing it and would probably be shot by an equally irritable migrant who understood the absurdity of checking borders when it is all about labor (and the ever-popular “Drug War”) and nothing more or less. But I digress… Once we found the visitor center, a mere five miles from the Mexican border, we walked the ten minute nature trail and spent 20 minutes in the visitor center of the park. Ah, air conditioning. Other than their complaint about the recent 150 miles of illegal road trails in the park from people not using the border entryway that were destroying a portion of the park (complete with memorial to park rangers who have been killed), um.. well, the visitor center was ‘Uplifting’ in a true ‘nature is the best’ sort of way. The consensus from the both of us, the park is absolutely beautiful. Possibly our favorite of the parks, so far. (Oh, but I am still a sucker for Yellowstone.. damn, I can’t get away from Yogi the Bear, yet for the moment, this park is the Summer of Love.) The temperature for this jaunt is not April average, but May/June levels. Damn, if that scenery isn’t a gorgeous, but completely human hostile environment. We actually bought two gallons of purified water from Gila Bend before heading out (home of the Gila monster lizard)… (oh, the humility of buying non-tap water) and, thankfully, for the record, we finished most of the first jug before our traversal to Tucson, with nary a rest stop on the way. Desiccation, the reason people usually don’t live in the desert. Doh!

Back to getting it together to update again… ah, procrastination can snowball…

Santa Cruz->San Simeon: Highway 1 along the coast delivered perfect blue skies and seas the entire way. With a stop at Phil’s Fish House in Moss Landing, we made a serious mis-order of the Tuna Special. Who knew you could turn Ahi Tuna into pineapple-sweet American Chinese food?! Sigh. At San Simeon, we found a nice-enough Best Western room with a fireplace and a view of the ocean. The surf sounded great, but the wind was blasting. In the morning, we took a tour of Hearst Castle. A big place, with a mish-mash of furniture and rooms. The most impressive part were the Spanish tiled patios with views in every direction. Nice.

Wildlife spotting: On the way up to Hearst Castle, a Golden Eagle hanging out and a Coyote eyeing our bus going up the hill, but alas, no zebras.

San Simeon->Santa Barbara: More Highway 1, but this time through some silly towns. We cruised through Buellton for some (famous) Andersen’s Split Pea Soup from a Dutch restaurant that was popular when the highway still ran by it. Then to continue our Dutch perusal of the area, we checked out Solvang, a town with few Dutch people left but all the glamour of silly Dutch decorations complete with pretend windmills along the main street. (Think Leavenworth, WA.)

Upon reaching the overpriced burg of Santa Barbara, we didn’t do so well on our pick of hotels. Another Best Western, but this one was 4 miles from the other end of State Street, and the decoration in our room was crazy un-matched 50’s/70’s decorations. Brown thick 70’s tiles, full-mirrored wall, and pink Laura Ashley wallpaper. Holy Cow, is that an ugly combination. The room just called for plastic plants. Not much for hanging out in rooms that could be inhabited by ghosts of past irate interior designers for the motel, we immediately headed downtown. With an eating ahead mentality (always with us), we picked the Palace Grill for dinner. It was almost Louisiana Cajun food, but well… not really. It was like too many LWHOL’s dined there (the main customers, really) and asked for all the spice to be removed from the food. Speaking of LWHOL’s, Santa Barbara was completely overrun with Baby Boomers of all shapes and sizes. Great weather though, and the birds sounded fantastic.

Santa Barbara->El Cajon: A brutal Friday afternoon drive, enough said on that. Too many people, too many cars, too much smog. Ah, Los Angeles.

El Cajon, CA->Yuma, AZ: We drove up through Lakeside into the hills and found all of San Diego in Ramona shopping for antiques, going ATVing and dragging horses around in the back of their trailers. It was a beautiful drive, but step out of the car for 1 second and you’d lose Toto and Dorothy. The winds were intense. Stopped in Ramona and checked out Charlotte’s Antique Store, who informed us that housing in California is crazy (duh) and that eBay is really cutting into the trinkets side of the Antique business. Stopped in at Dudley’s Bakery, did a quick survey of the breads, pastries, and LWHOLs, but left empty-handed. Stopped for lunch in Julian’s (a tourist stop that would like to remind you that Apples are grown in the region). We dined at Buffalo Bill’s for a bison burger and can thoroughly state that Sysco food delivery has really hurt the ‘home-cooking’ industry. Since when did freezer-ready onion rings constitute ‘home-cooking’? Such a very, very sad state of affairs. We stopped by the Desert Tower near Jacumba, CA (”the last of the great roadside attractions” its handout proclaims) and checked out the carved rock formations that they etched and painted. It was the equivalent of a McDonald’s playground size area that kids would love running through. Not much of an attraction, but we found ourselves laughing climbing around it, so I guess it works. Finally, off to the Yuma Cabana, a pink motel with palm trees… old, retro and with a small patio off the room with great temperatures at sunset. 80 degrees, wow.

Wildlife spotting: A wild turkey crossing the road outside of Julian.

A back entry of travels…

South Lake Tahoe -> Ely
We drove out on US 50 and were literally the only ones on the road for 45 minute stretches at a time. That highway doesn’t see much use, eh? We pulled over when we did find a few cars stopped by the side of the road just past Fallon (home of the Fallon Naval Air Station) and noticed they were watching the sky with binoculars. Looking at the map, we noticed the highway runs through the US Naval Reservation Target Area and sure enough a gigantic black plume of smoke was erupting from the hillside and six jets and a mid-sized fixed wing plane were zipping around us. We waited for a second bombing, but they were intent on flying in formations, instead. As the traffic dissipated down to nothing again, we were confronted by a pioneer wagon and horses coming at us with a sign on the side about some sort of pioneer route they were following. Our country is full of very strange people.

Wildlife Spotting: A few antelope, quite at home on the range.

Ely->Green River
We stayed at the Hotel Nevada and Gambling Hall in Ely, which came complete with a set of Harley Davidson Baby Boomer Bikers checking in with queries about the bordellos down the street. The receptionist assured them that they were within easy walking distance, and since they probably won’t be sleeping for days, may as well head right on over there. Folks in these parts were looking, um, a tad rough around the edges, but they were enjoying smoking and beer drinking at 9AM as we were checking out. Everyone looked happy in a Nevadan sort of way, which is to say, they would have rather lived back in the days of the dusty streets and cowboys of yore. We’d stayed out the night before over at Mr. G’s Maggie’s bar and listened to a local group play some music while inhaling way too much second hand smoke and wondering if the old gentleman that tipped over smack dab in the middle of the bar’s empty dance floor was going to be able to crawl back up or not. I tell you, Ely is a class act of a town. Heading back out of town, we forgot how much we dislike greasy egg breakfasts and ended up ordering a gigantic Chorizo Egg Scramble. What on earth were we thinking? We considered the roadkill set of folks next to us ordering pie for breakfast may have committed a lesser health crime.

Ely -> Green River
More of US 50 and more empty roads. We considered that Utah is still a strange place, after stopping off for pizza at a local restaurant that was decorated with mismatched tiny floral prints, and finally reaching Green River and being overwhelmed by the same style wallpapers and tons of pale pink stuffed furniture. It is a distinct decorating style and quite far away from the rough and tumble Nevadan cowboy aura. Gads, yuck. We found the UNC-Duke game on (without sound, bah) over at Ray’s Tavern (pretty much the only place to eat in town other than the fast food row, and packed with motorcross riders). We were fine with our overcooked pork chop and veggie burger until the guy next to us found the remote and started channel surfing. We bailed and ended up watching the game in the Utah-esc hotel of plastic plants and pink furniture. UNC won, so it was a fine end to a very long day of driving.

Green River->Vail
Another long drive past Arches National Park and onto Vail. Not much excitement, but we found that the snow storm that we thought we were chasing had evaporated into warm sunny days. We skied a few days on some (whew) free tickets. (Vail is now going for an ungodly $92/ticket these days. Go figure.) The snow was the standard spring crunchy/sunny stuff, but the ‘big snow storm’ turned one day into a foggy/overcast, no precipitation, sort of day. With the normal Vail restaurant scene reaction: “Whoa, that was an expensive sandwich.”, we shuddered, apologized to our wallets and dined at Zazza Za! in Avon for some semi-adequate Naple’s stye pizza, Garfinkel’s for some fish tacos and to watch the skiers come in from the foggy afternoon and, well, the Swiss Chalet for some fine overpriced Swiss raclette. Staying at the Evergeen Lodge was a good deal, though, a slightly dumpy, but not too dumpy, place on the ski bus line.

Wildlife Spotting: A Big Horn Sheep under a bridge near Glenwood Springs

Vail-> Boulder
We swung by Idaho Springs for some Beau-Jo’s pizza. They serve a ‘mountain pie’ pizza with a large rolled edge crust with honey on the table, so you end up with both pizza and dessert with a single order. They’ve removed most of the paper napkin drawings that used to cover the restaurant walls, but it is still a charming place. From there, we headed over to Celestial Seasonings for a tea packing tour. They have a mint storage room that they open up on the tour, and within seconds you’ll be lightheaded and after a few minutes your eyes will be tearing. Nice. Their peppermints and spearmints were the one item solely grown in the U.S., from the Pacific Northwest, in fact. While in Boulder we managed to fit in our 90,000 mile Toyota service and find some decent Thai and Vietnamese food. With that rejuvenation for the car and us, we were ready to go.

Wildlife Spotting: The prairie dogs whistling in the Celestial Seasoning’s prairie dog field.

Boulder->Denver
We headed over to Golden to take the Coor’s Brewery tour, finally. It is amazing how you can live in a city for a few years but never actually go to any of the nearby tourist’s sites, eh? Well, now, I have seen how they make that horrible beer, not even their Killian’s Red is good. The fine part of the tour was the smell of malt in the air, though. The place was permeated by that rich, sugary wort smell. It made us want to either brew beer or cook molasses spice cookies. Pilsner, though, what a waste. It was St. Paddy’s Day (oh, not really… just that Denver couldn’t face the fact that St. Paddy’s was on a Monday, so they moved their downtown festival to the weekend). We rolled into Denver in the early afternoon as the beginning of the mass exodus of the ‘Green People’ were exiting the ever so Irish street fair. It was an amusing sight. Folks were sporting such witty t-shirts, such as: “The leprechauns make me do it.” and “Wish on me lucky charms.” with many sporting green face paint. We decided to get more green watching in at the Wyncoop. And though, despite the abundance of green people, the food and beer were really disappointing. It’s been 10 years since I’ve been there, but the great food that I remembered didn’t get anywhere near our table. And, heck, they took out the pinball machines upstairs. Nothing like a round of playing a round of pinball on a very green Attack From Mars machine… oh, the disappoint.

Denver -> Pagosa Springs
On the way out town, I couldn’t convince Derrell (or myself for that matter) to actually get the nerve up to check out the Colorado Springs mega-evangelical church of Ted Haggard fame. You know, Ted Haggard, that political pastor that had a bit of a gay prostitute problem while really liking meth? Nice guy, we read that he was reformed and no longer gay. All thoughts of getting speedball crazy high and dreaming of men, gone, completely back to his family ways. Anyhow, it was Sunday, and Colorado Springs was close, but we’d feel too creepy if we entered that 10,000 person congregation. Instead, we drove U.S. 285 through the mountains and ran into some oddly difficult driving conditions for a short stretch. The sun was shining (no snow for us, of course) and the snow by the roadside was melting fast. This was causing water to wash over the highway and steam off the warm asphalt thus turning into a heavy dense fog that was only along the ribbon of highway and nowhere else. It was a peculiar sight and at times slowed us down to a speedy 15 miles per hour. We found the town of Pagosa Springs had grown since we last saw it and contemplated that Wolf Creek ski area was looking good. Unfortunately by the time we checked into Pagosa Springs, we lost skiing ambition with the super warm temperatures. We did find the tiny Pagosa Brewing Company, which since it was Monday, and actually was St. Patrick’s Day, was celebrating on the correct day with just about every local in town crammed in the one room bar for a post parade get together. Now, unlike the current brewers at the Wynkoop, Tony Simmons can brew fantastic beer and he has a kick ass chef doing some serious pub grub from the small red cart out in the garden. We enjoyed our evening chatting with him and his European story of how he got around to making beer and setting up his less than two year old business. Sweet!

Pagosa Springs->Santa Fe
Well, being close to Durango, we had to see what the housing boom had done to the town. It wasn’t too bad, but they did have an overabundance of new strip malls along the highways. One of these newly built areas did deliver, though. We were ready for lunch and spotted a parking lot full of huge pickup trucks and a line of people out the door at a fine establishment called ‘Serious Texas Bar-b-que’. OMG, was that pulled pork good. That place was well worth the wait and those Texans were smokin’. It made up for all the past week’s mediocre food and then some. We had a great drive to Santa Fe, thanks to the Garmin Nüvi and managed to get a number of back roads in through the New Mexico pine forest. It was a thoroughly gorgeous drive and came complete with every cowboy’ed hatted pickup truck driver giving us a wave as we drove past. Now, that’s some small town living. Upon arriving in Santa Fe, we found comfortable spot at Garett’s Desert Inn within walking distance of the plaza and immediately met a pair of Baby Boomers from Northern Minnesota walking around in shorts and complaining that is was really cold (probably near 62 degrees out at that time). We were completely confused by them having just come from the snowy mountains that morning, but later saw that the forecast for Santa Fe was going to hit the mid-70’s by the end of the week. Ah, spring.

Santa Fe->Albuquerque
We walked the Old Town’s trinket shops and observed the tourist buses with loads of white haired old people and yet again found the area not to our liking. The Seasons cafe overlooking the Old Town is about as close as one needs to get to the touristas. We got a good morning of history in at the Art and History museum. The General Beale and his Southwest Camel Corps must have quite a sight in 1857. Camels, it seems, were perfect for desert and mountain travel, but they have a few bad traits. One is that with bad tempers, they can spit the entire contents of their stomach at you (with accuracy), and, well, if you could get past that, the strong stench would cause horses downwind to bolt. I just read in a Montana magazine that Nevada had enough camels that the state passed a law forbidding you to let your camels run at large on public roads. A strange world to contemplate before the steam trains and autos took over the continent.

Albuquerque->Gallup
Following a large piece of Route 66 and setting the Nüvi to map out a route off-highway, we had a Nüvi failure. Our road turned to dirt, then to a bumpy trail and finally stranded us at a culvert crossing full of water trying to take us under the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad line. In 4-wheel drive we backtracked our way out of that routing. We settled back onto paved roads and visited Bandara’s volcano crater and Ice Cave. This was a privately owned Ice Cave and not much of a stop, but it was great to get out of the car and do some walking. After that, down the road past many a speed trap and through one DUI checkpoint (Easter was in full swing in New Mexico), then over to El Morro National Monument to check out the graffiti of over 2,000 signatures left near the watering hole. And of course, our new found Camel hero, General Beale had his signature carved there, as well as some dudes taking over the continent for Mexico City back in the 1600’s.
Wildlife Spotting: Coyotes out and about for the day. We ended our day in Gallup at the Historic El Rancho Hotel where the walls were covered with signed pictures from movies stars from the era when Route 66 carried them through this seriously overbuilt lodge.

Gallup->Flagstaff
We drove through the Petrified Forest National park and inspected the extremely heavy chunks of wood/fossils that were over 225 million years old. The park had a late start, since just outside the southern gates, there looks to be more petrified wood chunks for sale outside the stores than all of the pieces combined within the huge park. Ah, capitalism. Another UNC basketball game was calling us when we reached Flagstaff and we lounged about watching it, while people were working on getting their first of the season sunburns outside on the patio. We stayed at the old Weatherford Inn which is a wonderful hotel with the one weak spot of being near the center train station and the 60 trains that go through town blowing their whistles all night long. Traveling with earplugs is a good thing. Haven’t needed them since India. Go Heels!

Flagstaff->Beatty’s
We scored some great Biff’s Bagels and garlic bagel chips on the way out of town. The girl at the counter said she had just started making them. Good stuff and we shortly realized we should have bought the other bag. Traveling through fields upon fields of desert flowers we reached Hoover Dam and an hour long trail of cars crossing it at 11AM on a Tuesday morning. We had no idea how close to Las Vegas the dam was, but we certainly are well aware of it now. That was a crazy amount of people. A bridge is being built beyond the dam to alleviate the traffic and probably to avoid having that much weight on the bridge everyday since the Lake Mead water level is half of what was when the dam was built. We cruised the Las Vegas strip and decided not to stay in town, but headed out to Beatty’s. We met some young Brits at the Sourdough Pizza and Pub and listened to their opinions of what they had seen between San Francisco and Beatty. It was something along the lines of: wow, what a big country.. it is way poorer than we expected.. and it is very surprising to see town after town look the same with all the same stores.. and your news is like The Sun.. And on the other side of us, we later met Baby Boomers (how can there be so many?!) from Eastern Oregon and they proceeded to advise us to retire early and buy an RV. We liked the sound of the first part, but given that this early in the season, the RV parks were showing No Vacancy signs already, we were really suspicious about the latter advice.

Beatty’s->China Lake/Riverville
Yet another National Park, this time Death Valley. Having traversed snow just a week ago, hanging out in the desert at 94 degrees was a bit disorienting, but we warmed up to it. We were just at the edge of surviving the short walks in the park in the heat. Add another five degrees and forget it. It was a great time to see the area, the wildflowers were blooming in every direction. The Toyota survived all the climbing. Standing at 232 feet below sea level in the valley and looking at the highest point in the US, Mt. Whitley (14,505′) gives an astounding amount of depth perspective to the valley. The evening spent in China Lake left us with one of the few meals we’ve walked out on after only one bite. We ordered some fajitas from a dumpy Mexican restaurant and they offered up a plate of chicken fat and gristle. Even by southeast asian standards, that’s beyond bad. What a dump of a town. We ended up at the Best Western in town and were assigned a room with a kitchen, so we recovered our evening and cooked up some fine aglio e olio.

Wildlife spotting: A roadrunner hanging out near the campground picnic tables.

Riverville->Three Rivers
We were headed towards Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, and given the 90 degrees of the past couple of days, let the Nüvi pick our routing. Well, lo and behold, there’s still a few yards of snow left up in those there mountains and the roads usually stay closed until mid to late May. We backtracked and drove around the West side of the park through the orange groves and past the strawberry stands. We stopped at an orange stand and tried to buy just two naval oranges, we were laughed at and given two oranges for free. I guess their primary business is selling large boxes to the local grocery stores, eh? After that, while looking for a Swedish Bakery which ended up in a Nüvi routing failure, we instead stopped at bought a basket of strawberries from a Vietnamese family tending a small plot of them at the edge of a small town. Finally, small strawberries with flavor. So, we forgave the Nüvi and used it to select a random lunch spot. Porter Street BBQ in Porterville sounded nice, so off we went. We discovered the BBQ joint was just two southerners in the middle of a parking lot with a few permanent tables under a tree. Now, that has all the signs of being good BBQ! We ended up with a tri-tip sandwich with some fantastic sauce on a perfect bread roll. Is that really what the Arby’s chain was trying for? Arby’s should hang their corporate heads in complete shame. Our evening stop, landed us in Three Rivers, in a beautiful little town near the river (doh!) and at a Best Western that was since the last printing of the 2008 BW guide, now a ‘Best West’ and no longer part of the chain. We were soon to discover the reason for the parting of ways the next morning. As we turned on the water for a shower, there wasn’t a drop of warm, or even luke warm water coming out of the shower. We asked at the front desk and the Indian family informed us that maybe this evening the repair man will be out and have the gas heater fixed. Sigh, no shower.

Three Rivers->Los Banos
Showerless, we entered Sequoia National Park and the ranger asked us how our day was going. Well, showerless, we informed him. He queried us about where we were coming from and then laughed and said that he and his wife when they first took this ranger job were staying at that hotel for a few weeks. Nothing was ever working, since the family that ran it insisted on fixing everything themselves. He since then has a beautiful spot in the park housing.. with working warm water. The park was beautiful, the trees were big, the snow was still high (so most trails would take more effort than we were willing to give them since they required snow shoes) and the tourism was at a dull roar. After way too windy of a road leaving the park and a consensus by all within the vehicle that we’d been in the vehicle far too long without getting any walking, we finally, finally, finally, drove into Los Banos for the evening next to Gilroy. Another UNC game to watch, this time against WSU. Go Heels!

Los Banos->Santa Cruz
And this is where we stop the road trip for awhile, since you can never road trip through a town where you have lived for long periods of time. We did manage to get our Rio swapped out in Santa Cruz, though, so finally we will be able to listen to the radio again. Nothing like country music or Mexican music on the road.

After exiting Italy (past Fortezza / Franzensfeste), we drove through the Alps, no stops for dressed up cows this time, though. We overdosed on more autumn scenery and ate lunch at a tourist trap of a restaurant with great views overlooking the town of Innsbruck.

We headed to Füssen in Germany, and after checking into the Hotel Sonne (with a great sauna and bathrobes!), we headed out for some touristing. We drove by the Disneyland castle Neuschwanstein, but didn’t go in, and checked out the interior of the Wies church. The latter being a Rococo style church full of scary looking cherubs, which just made me want to check out the ultimate Rococo residence, the Catherine Palace near St. Petersburg. (The summer palace of the tzars… Now that’s some interior design!)

We had decided to head up the village of Hees in the Netherlands, as in Voorhees, or at least the town before Hees. This sounded like a grand plan until we went to leave Füssen and found that the Ford Focus locks the trunk when you put the lid down. (Well, only if the doors to the car are locked. The mighty Ford Focus doesn’t lock the trunk, if one of the car doors is unlocked.)

Now just how did we discover this nuance in fine automobile design? Ah, by locking our keys in the trunk… So, we rechecked into the hotel without our luggage and spent the day getting ADAC (the German equivalent to AAA) out to unlock the car. Since every good German is a member of ADAC, only non-members pay for this rescue service… and pay we did. We found out it costs 110 Euros to have a guy in a spiffy yellow jumpsuit come out and, in less than two minutes, use two blood pressure cuffs to push the top of the door away from the frame and insert a state-of-the-art coat hanger to pull the door handle open. It was such an easy job, it made us wonder why Ford even bothered putting locks on the car. Derrell was also quite amused that the anti-theft red light in the dash was blinking contentedly throughout the entire procedure.

Well, anyhow, that pretty much blew our chance of getting from South Germany to North Netherlands and still get the rental car back in time. So, Hees was a short-lived destination.

Füssen, even for an additional day, was another cute place. It had the standard Alps in the background, autumn leaves falling, river through the middle of the town… Y’know, the old ‘bowl you over with the scenery’ that is starting to look standard in Germany. The tourists were missing, that was a fine thing. And the owner of a winestube adopted us, along with two chaps from Scotland and fed us a mighty fine fried wiener schnitzel (with only a touch of actually tasty brown sauce).

As we drove up to this Tyrolean town, the smog & weather cleared to gorgeous autumn weather. This town was still in Italy, but it was most assuredly Austrian. The menus reverted back to mostly brown-gravied items. We were served one of the stranger food items that we’ve ever encountered. It was listed as Gnocchi e Spinachi in the Italian translation of the menu, and so I ordered it with the true sadness that comes with ordering the last Italian dinner that you will see for quite some time. What arrived though, was truly an inspired dish. Two oval German bread dumplings the size of large goose eggs arrived over a puddle of green pureed spinach, with a load of chopped sauteed ham over the dumplings, dusted with white melted cheese, and for the glamorous touch… the plate edge was decorated with paprika sprinkles. (This was a fine restaurant, after all.) Well, our reaction was complete shock, then we headed straight headlong into complete dining despondence. Ah, Austria. Oh, and I won’t mention the deep fried, heart-attack-on-a-plate, gigantic elephant ear pesto flat breads that they were selling to a line of Austrians at an outdoor food stall being washed down with equally gigantic beers… whimper.

Realizing that there were soon to be no end to the number of dumplings in our future, we looked for other things to amuse us in the town. The town was gorgeous in its Autumn foliage. There was a river running through the town with the Alps as a backdrop, and in the evening, some of the smallest bats that we’ve ever seen were zipping around in a feeding frenzy along the river’s edge. We had stepped into a fairy tale set, again.

The cathedral in town had been recently refurbished with an extreme use of gold gilding over its Baroque interior, and even to our jaded, seen one cathedral too many, eyes, we considered it impressive. It even had Tyrolean painting on the outside. We kept forgetting that we were still in Italy. (Well, other than the no-smoking ban… )

And finally, for other amusements, our Hotel was a Best Western and that came with an indoor swimming pool, including a smattering of white haired old ladies and men (yes, in Speedos, with not a care in the world about fashion), a hot tub (woo!) and a swimsuit spinner (now that’s luxury, baby).