Here on the Hill

It has been difficult to blog the last week since we have been without internet access at our motels or while staying with my family in New York. As a result, we have not really presented a very good synopsis of our activities over the past few days. We are at another friend's house currently so don't have long to write, but here are the abbreviated highlights of our jaunt through New England:

• Shopping at the LL Bean outlet in Freeport, ME.
• Renting a tripped-out 1970's era four-bedroom house on an Econo Lodge property in Lincoln, New Hampshire for $150 a night after a slew of Scots took every other available room in town and within a 20-mile radius for the Highland Games. We obviously did not know about the event when planning our stay in the region.
  
• Seeing said Scots in full Scottish regalia (kilts and funky fringed knee socks) over breakfast at the motel the next morning.
• Walking through the Flume in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
• Walking around the grounds of my old summer camp in Sunapee, New Hampshire and reading old grafitti in the bunks from when I was there (in the late 1980's!!!).
• Driving through numerous covered bridges in New Hampshire and Vermont.
  
• Doing nothing all day but eat, do laundry, and watch movies with my nephew at my parents house in Upstate New York.
• Having dinner in Boston with an old camp friend, Meredith, after cold-calling her that morning (after being out of touch for over 3 years).
• Taking a nap on the beach in Cape Cod.
• Eating even more lobster.
• Visiting my friend Kaveri's art studio in Providence, RI.

As you can tell, we are still having a blast on the road. Next stop is New York City where we will visit more with my parents and my old high school pals.

I leave you with the following picture which will be achingly familiar to a couple of our friends and readers and baffling and not particularily interesting to everyone else. Same goes for the title of the blog.


Post-script from Dave:

I think Kathy has slightly sold short the whole Econolodge 1970's house thing. Basically, I honestly went to bed that evening half-expecting to get hacked to death in my sleep by a crazy hotel manager. The reasons for this are as follows:

1. The hotel manager, for indecipherable reasons, insisted that we had to pay him in cash for the room. Up front.
2. The hotel manager had two teeth. I guess its probably un-PC to judge somebody based on their possession or non-possession of teeth. But, hey, something about a guy missing almost all his teeth with a slightly wild look in his eye makes me think "serial killer".
3. The four-bedroom house looked like something out of a 1970's horror film:

I'm happy to report that we survived our night in the 1970s horror movie house. I guess I misjudged Mr. Toothless Hotel Manager guy. All I know is, if I ever lose all my teeth and end up managing a hotel, I'm getting me some dentures so I don't creep everyone out.

We Pahked Our Cah at Hahvard Yahd*

(* For 28 Bahks. )

Greetings from Boston. We really did pay 28 bucks to park our car at Harvard Yard today. The only upside to paying 28 dollars to park your car at Harvard is that you get to truthfully say that you pahked your cah at...well you get the idea.

Sorry for the recent blogging silence. We've actually been in a wireless internet void for the past few days as we've travelled through New Hampshire and then stayed in upstate New York with Kathy's parents. It's also pretty late now, so I'll have to give a more complete update tomorrow. In the meantime, here's a picture of Kathy's parents dog, Cujie (the pug-huahua) planting a sloppy kiss on our nephew Anthony.

Just When I Had Given Up Hope...

So, I had pretty much completely given up my dreams of seeing any significant fall foliage on this trip a couple days ago, but behold!


Okay, so it's not exactly "When Harry Met Sally"-worthy, and it's just one rest stop in Maine near the Canada border, but hey, it's pretty exciting for a guy who grew up in the San Fernando Valley. According to the "Fall Foliage Network", northern Maine has reached "moderate" level of fall color. Yee-ha! Moderate fall color rocks! Mod-er-ate! Mod-er-ate!

In other news, after three weeks on the road, we have now completed the "cross-country" portion of our trip. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the East Coast:

That there's the Atlantic Ocean. Looks kind of like the Pacific Ocean, I guess. Except the sun rises over it instead of sets into it. And it seems to be a little warmer. Still, it was exciting.

We're here in Bar Harbor, Maine, just outside of Acadia National Park. Maine is pretty darn pretty. Thumbs up. Although we've kind of overdone it on the whole eating lobster thing. In our past four meals, Kathy and I have between us eaten four lobster rolls, two whole lobsters, and three bowls of clam chowder. We're leaving Maine for New Hampshire tomorrow, which the lobster population will be plenty happy about.

Stupid Americans

So, we thought that Montreal was pretty European, but it turns out that Quebec City is like Montreal to the tenth power or something. It is pretty much indistinguishable from any city in France except for the fact that Kathy can still turn on the TV and find a rerun of the season finale of Grey's Anatomy.

We even had a restaurant hostess be rude to us, just like in France! Seriously, we walked into a restaurant with at least six or seven open tables and were told "We are not seating people anymore." Not "There will be a thirty minute wait, can I have your name?" Not even "We're sorry, but we're completely booked for the rest of the day -- maybe come back tomorrow?"

But like France, Quebec can get away with that because it's so damn charming.


See, tell me that picture isn't France all over.

Anyway, the main part of Quebec City is this very well-preserved old city with a wall around it. As Kathy and I were walking along the wall today, we realized that we didn't really know what or who exactly Quebec's wall was supposed to be protecting the city from. In fact, we realized we don't know diddly-squat about the history of Canada or who its enemies were. We actually found it a little surprising that Canada ever had any enemies at all -- such a nice, pleasant country. Who could hate good ol' Canada?

Thus we proved true the image of the stupid American who doesn't know anything about the history of the rest of the world. Alas.

It turns out Quebec has been attacked several times. It was originally founded by the French, then captured by the British in the 1760's. Then, the U.S. attacked Quebec on several occasions, including during the War of 1812.

Huh? The U.S. attacked Canada during the War of 1812? Damn, I need to retake my 10th grade history class. I guess Americans are stupid.

I will end this post by posting this picture that Kathy wanted me to share:

Talk to you back in the U.S. (Oh, and for the record, FALL has not reached Quebec City.)

Scenes from the Road, Part Deux (Canadian Edition)

• 10:00 AM: Kathy and Dave leave Toronto, where they've spent the last two days with their friends (and excellent hosts) Oliver, Joanne. and Jeffrey. They start driving toward Kingston.
• 1:30 PM: They arrive in Kingston. They intend to walk around the downtown, grab some lunch, and then catch a cruise to the Thousand Islands area at 3 pm. The sun is shining, birds are chirping, and all is happy and well with the world.
• 2:00 PM: After walking around the lovely Kingston downtown area, they sit down for lunch at a restaurant with a lovely outdoor patio out front.
• 2:02 PM: A truck parks immediately in front of said restaurant and Dave and Kathy's table. The driver leaves the engine running (very loudly) and then disappears into an adjacent building. Dave and Kathy shrug and hope the truck driver doesn't leave his truck idling in front of their table for too long. They are able to converse by using raised voices, like at a frat party.
• 2:10 PM: Driver has disappeared off the face of the earth. Kathy and Dave's table is also suddenly attacked by one extremely persistent wasp, who finds Dave's Diet Coke especially intriguing. Dave attempts to shake the wasp off the Diet Coke glass, but the wasp drops into the glass, landing delicately on the surface of his Diet Coke. It takes a sip and then jumps back on the glass rim.
• 2:15 PM: Driver of truck appears, loads two small boxes from the truck on to his dollie, and then disappears into the adjacent building. Truck is still loudly idling. Dave and Kathy eat their meal, staring at the truck. Waitress brings a jar of something and says that it's "supposed to drive the wasps away".
• 2:20 PM: A second wasp, apparently attracted by the jar, attacks Kathy's Diet Coke. Driver of truck reappears, then loads two small boxes from the truck on to his dollie, and disappears.
• 2:30 PM: Truck driver returns to truck, gets in the truck, but doesn't drive away. He appears to be reading a magazine of some sort.
• 2:35 PM: Dave and Kathy finish meal. Truck driver, naturally, drives away.
• 2:40 PM: Dave and Kathy pay their bill, then walk over to buy tickets for the 3 pm boat cruise.
• 2:45 PM: Dave and Kathy are informed that the 3 pm boat cruise is sold out. A large gaggle of senior citizens has just bought out the last remaining tickets. Not to worry, though, there is a similar cruise leaving from an nearby town, Ganonoque. They typically run dinner cruises around Thousand Islands area. Dave and Kathy shrug, and leisurely walk around Kingston some more.
• 3:45 PM: Dave and Kathy arrive in Ganonoque and see two ticket booths for Thousand Islands cruises. One is closed. Dave and Kathy go to the other one and ask about cruises and are told the last cruise has left for the day. Dave and Kathy shrug and walk leisurely along the river shore.
• 4:20 PM: Dave and Kathy walk into a visitor information booth and are told that another neighboring town has a 5 pm cruise. This neighboring town, Rockport, is apparently about 20 minutes away. Dave and Kathy sprint back to their car and arrive back at their car at about 4:30.
  
• 4:30 PM: Dave speeds toward Rockport. Kathy is quite panicked. An excerpt of the dialogue in the car:

Kathy: Go, go, go!
Dave: There's an old lady crossing the street.
K: Run over the old lady!
D: Run over the old lady? Why?
K: Cause she's old!
D: I think the impact might slow the car down.
K: [bleep], [bleep], [bleep]-ity [bleep]-ity [bleep].
D: (laughs) What's a [bleep]-ity [bleep]?
K: (laughs, getting a bit punchy) That driver in front of us is [bleep]-ity [bleep]. He's a [bleeping] [bleep]-ster.
D: A [bleep]-ster? That sounds like some kind of adult version of Friendster.
K: Shut up.

• 4:50 PM: Dave and Kathy arrive in Rockport, with ten minutes to spare. Relieved, they walk up to the ticket booth. A women is in the ticket booth busily counting money.
  
• 4:51 PM: Dave and Kathy are told that there is no 5 pm cruise today. An excerpt of the dialogue:

K: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

• 5:00 PM: Dave and Kathy regroup and decide to go to Thousand Islands park, which is just across the bridge from Rockport.
• 5:15 PM: Dave and Kathy cross the bridge and come across a long line of trucks and cars. Dave and Kathy discover that the Thousand Islands park is actually located in the U.S., and not Canada, so they have to go through customs, including an inspection of the contents of the car's trunk.
• 5:45 PM: Dave and Kathy arrive in Thousand Islands park and discover that it is actually a housing development, not a public park. Dave and Kathy dissolve into hysterics, laughing like madmen for the next half hour. They drive to the opposite side of the island in search of some sort of lookout point. They find a semi-okay lookout point, which is infested with mosquitos. They feast on Dave's legs. Hysterical laughter continues.
  

I know it doesn't sound like it, but all this was all quite fun, actually. I swear. For the record, we did finally find a lookout tower that had very nice views of the Thousand Islands area. We took the following picture:



Now, that was worth it, don't you agree? No?

...and on the 10th Day They Rested

So, yesterday we basically took the afternoon and evening off from touring. The secondary reason for this is that we were kind of tired from all the rushing around and needed some downtime. The primary reason is that I somehow developed a stiff neck the day before and was suddenly finding it painful to move my head from side to side or up and down. And when you're touring and looking at sights, you'd be surprised at how much you kinda want to be able to move your head. Like if someone says, "Hey - look at that building", and you try to turn your head to look at that building but instead get a shooting pain in your neck, it definitely puts a damper on the whole experience of looking at the building.

So, we spent the late afternoon and evening watching bad cable movies and TV shows in our hotel room. It was exquisite - just what we needed after nine days of touring around like crazy. And I discovered that the Brady Bunch movies aren't nearly as bad as you might think they'd be. And then we had some excellent Thai food at a restaurant with the motto "Thai it, you'll like it!" All in all, a great day considering the whole excruciating pain thing and all.

Today my neck was good enough to continue our trek. We drove to Madison and on the way visited House on the Rock and Taliesin, the architecture school created by and designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. At both places, we got there right before closing and got the weird experience of visiting tourist attractions where we were the only tourists and the employees were waiting for us to leave so they could go home. At the Frank Lloyd Wright school it was kind of nice because we got a private guided tour of the place. It actually kind of put a damper on the House on the Rock, but it did allow us to take this picture of me in the Infinity Room without any other tourists getting in the way:

America is Weird

Hello from Worthington, Minnesota -- home of, uh, a KFC, and some hotels.


So, since we last blogged, we've done the following:

1. Saw Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial.
2. Almost killed ourselves trying to swerve around a turkey that lept into the middle of the highway in Custer, South Dakota.
3. Ate perhaps the best burger I've ever had at the Firehouse Brewery in Rapid City, South Dakota (that would be me, not my non-meat eating wife).
4. Stopped at Wall Drug (excellent) and the Corn Palace (not so excellent).
5. Did some hiking around the weird rock formations in the Badlands in South Dakota (also excellent).

Since we last blogged, we did NOT do the following:

1. Go to Carhenge.

I won't go into the Carhenge thing right now other than to say that with missing out on Carhenge and almost killing ourselves to avoid hitting a turkey, it wasn't such a good morning.

It's kind of funny how the U.S. has this peculiar obsession with taking a pretty mountain and then blowing it up with dynamite until it resembles a series of historical people. I don't know if you've heard of this Crazy Horse Memorial that they're currently building, but back in 1949, the Native Americans asked this Polish sculptor to create a monument similar to Mount Rushmore as a tribute to the Native American people. The Polish sculptor said "Hey, I'll do this sculpture of the great Native American, Crazy Horse, riding his horse and pointing to his lands. I'll make it ten times the size of Mount Rushmore and, boy, that will be a great tribute to the Native American people."

Ok, I'm paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it.

So, anyway, here's the scale model he made to show his sculpture concept:


Very nice. Everybody loved it. So they started building the thing in 1949 on this mountain in Custer, South Dakota, and have been building pretty much non-stop since then. Today, after 57 years of tireless construction, the sculpture looks like this:


I guess you'd say they still have a ways to go.

The Polish sculptor died about 20 years ago, and his children have continued on with his life work, showing the remarkable determination and purpose that exemplifies the American spirit. That's what the visitor's center movie said anyway. (Actually, I guess it would really exemplify the Polish-American spirit, although the visitor's center movie didn't really make that distinction.)

You'd have to conclude at this point that the sculptor bit off a little more than he could chew, don't you think? I mean, I'm no sculpture expert, but it would seem this guy didn't quite think the whole thing through - no? You'd think he might have stopped for a second and thought "Let's see, Mt. Rushmore took 16 years to build, and I'm trying to building something 10 times as big and a lot more complicated -- that probably makes it a 200-year-long project at best -- maybe there's something more productive that could be done with 200 years worth of time and energy. Maybe I can build them a nice little fountain or something, and then devote my life to actually bettering the situation of the Native American people."

Oh well. Maybe he just really wanted to blow up a mountain a whole bunch of times.

I leave you with my favorite "Kathy is a Ham" picture so far, from downtown Rapid City, South Dakota:

Thermopolis, Baby!

So, yesterday marked the first time we diverged from our preplanned route, with fairly awesome results. The previous two days we had spent in Grand Teton National Park, and we previously planned to just spend yesterday driving across Wyoming. But then we decided to change our plans and take a route through Yellowstone National Park to see the one sight that we never saw when we were there three years ago -- Old Faithful Geyser.

(Don't ask me why we went to Yellowstone and not to Old Faithful -- in retrospect, I'm not quite sure why. I know it's kind of like visiting San Francisco and not seeing the Golden Gate Bridge or like visiting South Dakota and not visiting, er, the Corn Palace.)

For the record, Old Faithful is pretty cool. Thumbs up.


To be truthful, Kathy mostly got interested in this new route because it took us right through a town called "Thermopolis". The name itself is quite intriguing, you have to admit. But then Kathy looked at the AAA book description and was completely sold.

Thermopolis is a town in Nowhere, Wyoming that is home to the "World's Largest Mineral Hot Springs". Or so says the chalk writing on the mountain in town:


They've basically built the town into almost an amusement park, with a couple thermal "water parks" that have steam rooms, water slides, multiple pools and spas, with cheesy '80s music blasting over the speakers. Oh, and a dinosaur museum. How could we resist?

Kathy was insanely excited. Much more excited than about seeing Old Faithful. As we got closer and closer, the anticipation grew to epic proportions. Every 20 minutes or so, she would randomly exclaim "Dude, Thermopolis!" or "Aww yeah, Thermopolis!" or "Thermopolis, Baby!" I think it's more excited than she's been on the whole trip.

And in the end, Thermopolis did not disappoint. We got to soak in mineral water until we smelled nice and hydrogen-sulfidey, we got to ride some water slides, we got to eat dinner in a restaurant filled with stuffed bears, moose, and sheep. Oh, and we got to see some dinosaur bones in front of cheesy backdrops. That's a pretty unbeatable combination, don'tcha think?

Stupid Blogger Ate My Post

Damn you, Blogger. Damn you to hell.

Greetings from Casper, Wyoming. I'll rewrite my brilliant post in the next day or so, hopefully. In the meantime, here are five titles I suggested for Kathy's last post ("Moose and Squirrel") and she ruthlessly rejected:

1. "Time to Va-Moose!"
2. "Moose-ic to Our Ears"
3. "Magical Moose-tery Tour"
4. "A-Moose-Ment Park"
5. "Grand Teton is Quite A-Moose-ing"

Somebody please comment and let Kathy know that many of these titles are far superior to "Moose and Squirrel". Maybe that will help ease the pain of Blogger eating my post. Thank you and good night.

Scenes from the Road

I would now like to reenact a scene from yesterday about 5:15 pm Pacific time.

Dave: Ok if I stop in the visitor's center to pee before we go back on the road?
Kathy: Okay, I'm going to go too.
K: It's closed.
D: Are you sure? It's supposed to be open until 6.
K: It's closed.
D: Doh.
D: Those bastards. They closed an HOUR early!

[1 hour later]

K: It's really getting dark earlier now.
D: It's not that dark.
K: No, look, right now it's only 6:15 and it's pretty dark.
D: Hm. That's weird. Yesterday it didn't get dark until 7:15. It gets dark an HOUR earlier in Idaho than in Oregon.

[30 seconds of puzzled silence]

D: [light bulb goes on]
K: [light bulb goes on]
D/K: Oh.

And scene.

Moral of the story: Idaho is in the Mountain Time Zone.

Boo-urns

Hey, everybody! We're in Burns, Oregon, or as it is also known, someplace in the middle of nowhere where we stopped because there's no other town within 150 miles of here.

We've had a pretty great couple a days, stopping in Ashland, Oregon for the Shakespeare Festival yesterday, then driving up to Crater Lake National Park today and going on a 3-mile hike, then driving to Bend, Oregon and having a really nice dinner right on the Deschutes River. Then after dinner we decided to drive east for awhile and basically drove for about two and a half hours through the desert and over the course of 150 miles saw the following:

• One nice sunset
• Two cool flashes of lightning
• One deer rushing across the highway, causing Kathy to slam on the brakes most ungracefully
• One rest area that Kathy drove right past even though I REALLY needed to pee
• Two houses
• Zero hotels
• Zero restaurants
• Zero open gas stations
• Zero signs of civilization

We had intended to drive another hundred or so miles past Burns and just try to find a hotel somewhere, but when we actually got to Burns, we were just so glad to see signs of humanity that we praised the lord and got a room here at the "America's Best Inn". Apparently, it only costs $55 a night to stay at America's best inn. I had no idea.

While we were still in Bend, we took the road trip's first official "Kathy is a Ham" picture:


I leave with you a picture of Crater Lake, which was pretty awesome, I have to say:

We're Outta Here

Okay, we're all packed (uh, I think), and we take off tomorrow morning. Talk to you all from the road!