The upside of these photos is that they give me good ideas of what I should do with my house I’m maybe gonna buy in Pittsburgh. Very good ideas.

Gera (March-May 1993)

I’m not sure how using the Gera bathroom for two months did *not* kill me. And it was the nicest one I had the whole two years. The washer-dryer combo emptying into the tub is a nice touch. Sehr mode!

Dresden (January-May 1992)

That one was at the Kurt-Fischer-Hotel (which was not actually a hotel; we called it that because if someone was getting blitzed home, that missionary stayed their last night with us — I’m sure I personally inspired everyone who came through there to eventually straighten up, fly correctly). The shower fed off a two-gallon hot water tank; the desk lamp over the sink seems like an under-utilized concept. And if I could, I’d usually try and hold it till I got to Tiergartenstraße 40 in the morning.

Weimar (December 1991-January 1992).

I don’t think the bathtub actually worked here, which explains why the definitely non-functional communist Schleudermaschine is inside it. And the best part of this apartment was that we had a Nazi fork among the silverware. Should have grabbed it on my way out. Biggest regret of my mission.

Borna (August 1991-December 1991)

The toilet is through that door. The door is down the stairs from the apartment. Because it’s not a flush-toilet, that’s why it’s nowhere near the actual apartment (I figure).

Um, so yeah. Then here’s my ranking of Best Bathrooms of East German Apartments I Used to Live In That Are Not Pictured Above:

1. Döbeln – Frost on the inside window of an in-house outhouse toilet closet!
2. Halberstadt – For some reason the apartment had 12 rooms and covered 2,000 s.f., but the bathroom was contained in a cubby hole. (We had a library in that apartment, a workout room, a clothes-drying room, and a room where we threw unwanted baked goods.)
3. Hohenstein-Ernstthal – Very little recollection of this bathroom except that it was in the kitchen.
4. Hof (bei Weber) – Though technically in West Germany, Hof was East Germany in spirit. And we had a neighbor who was always begging to borrow our shower because he was tired of having to bathe in his sink. A lot of things wrong with that. (Also wish I could have scored a copy of that tape Denny and Kalama(?) made for Omi Weber — so many regrets.)
5. Mittweida (bei Jentzsch/Laube sort of) – We were living in an apartment that the Laube family was renovating while living in alongside us. Got walked in on a few times (they hadn’t gotten around to putting a doorknob on the bathroom yet).
6. Hof (the *good* Wohnung) – Utterly westernly normal.

Somit aufgenommen.

bkd

PS, Re: the headline, it’s the *apartments* that I lived in; I did not live (primarily) in the bathrooms.

Went to Balboa Park (in San Diego) ostensibly to visit the Museum of Photographic Arts there. They had some nice photos inside and, naturally, you’re not allowed to take any photographs yourself while there. Hypocrites.

I don’t think I’d ever been to Balboa Park before, though, aside from going to the zoo. Here are some pictures because I haven’t posted anything in a long time:

The top of some building + sky.

Stupid Balboa, thinks he's better than me just because he has a horse. Hate Balboa.

The Measure of a Museum of a Man -- it looks taller than that from a distance.

View of the park through a colonnade.

I noted names of a couple of photographers I want to look up some day into my Blackberry. Haven’t looked at it again since. Meh.

Then I went home.

bkd

In case you care, here’s the text of the note:

The roar and rumble you hear are made by the diesel engine of a small tender. The boat on which your announcer is riding [is heading] toward the flagship of what will be one of the largest convoys yet assembled during this or any other war. We are seeing history made tonight. Before the dawn breaks, the big hulking shadow toward which we are headed will be leading 43 vessels, loaded with men and munitions, out to sea. And beyond the now-unseen horizon the enemy will learn again a lesson on American might.

The sky is clear, but no moon tonight. By the light of the stars alone we can see now one, now two, now three huge black shadows, which are hardly recognizable as ships. Some, as we pass them, are moving slowly, carefully in the darkness, maneuvering into position as the convoy pattern forms.

There’s a rumble of engines, perhaps you hear them, and a phosphorous-specked surging of white foamy water out of the inky sea as the big tub nearby swings ponderously around. On the deck, the sound of heavy chains and the shrill note of the bos’n’s pipe indicate the eager activity aboard.

Out of the black night before us looms our flagship in blacker silhouette. Our cox’n is throttling down already and is making his turn toward the ladder thrown over the side of the big black shadow now so close. He keeps the prop churning water though as the rise and fall of the endless swells keeps us bobbing first perilously close, then dangerously adrift of the ladder up which some are already scrambling to deck above. There’s activity up there. The growling sound of the winches and the whine of cable, the scrape of iron on iron tells us of final preparations for the hour we sail.

Up the ladder we go now. It’s catch as catch can and a quick jump, as the tender shifts close to the ship. Then on the ladder, hand-over-hand to the rail and onto the deck. There goes one, two, three men scrambling like monkeys up the side. Here we go!

Well, the crew is complete. We are all on deck now and the formalities of being welcomed onboard are taking place. May I come aboard sir? A snappy salute [is] returned by the Officer of the Deck and we are now a member of the convoy.

The ladder is being hauled aboard and below us now the tender, its prop revved up, is backing down. It is now turning to starboard and straightening away, sticking out across the bay toward shore.

Let’s move up now toward the bridge, the nerve center of the ship. In this cabin the ship’s wheel is located and the entire ship is directed from here. On this trip, the entire convoy will be directed from this deck, for as flagship we carry Commodore Beck, the man in command who will lead this convoy into the enemy camp.

There was also (apparently) a separate page attached to the letter that my grandpa had written (many years?) later:

Written aboard the USS Clinton while en route to Yokohama, where we said goodbye to the “guerilla soldados” who shipped with us and who were now denied their “hour of guts and glory”, but would now become the strength of a police action in the badly torn and crippled city of Tokyo (as was all of Japan).

It’s interesting. The thing that strikes me as particularly odd is that, according to the Navy’s record, the USS Clinton never went to Yokohama. Its travels per the Navy:

• Left San Francisco on 17 April 1945 with Marine troops and equipment, delivered these to Okinawa between 27 and 31 May.
• Transferred battle casualties (from Okinawa?) to Guam.
• Transported “ground forces of the 7th Bomber Command” to Okinawa, arriving 2 July.
• Left Okinawa on 8 July transporting “over 1,000 Okinawan and Korean prisoners of war” to internment camps in Hawaii.
• Left Honolulu 5 August carrying replacement troops to Saipan.
• Sailed to Manila to pick up Army occupation troops, who were delivered to Tsingtao, China on 11 October.
• Went to Haiphong in “French Indo-China”, arrived there 26 October and loaded Chinese troops and equipment, transporting them to Chinwangtao and Taku.
• Traveled to Mania, embarked returning US servicemen, and left 28 November heading for San Pedro, Calif., arriving 18 December.
• Salied to Norfolk, Va., arriving 2 February 1946.

Later, the Clinton was used for target practice. Of course.

Like I said, though, no mention of Yokohama. I’m guessing the ship must have transferred troops from Saipan to Yokohama — that might explain what belongs in the gap between Saipan and Manila. A couple other things I was wondering after reading the document:

• I get the impression from the first paragraph that the ship was setting out to deliver troops for combat, but the note says that’s not how the troops were deployed. Wondering if they set sail before the armistice was signed and landed after. If so — where were they deploying troops? (The battle of Okinawa ended in June.) Oh well.
• Took me a while to figure out that a “tender” in this instance was a small boat (it’s totally the right word to use).
• Wondering who the intended audience for this was. Grandpa’s trying to write it from the point of view of a tour guide — interesting choice of affect.
• Trying to figure out why Grandpa’s talking about “guerilla soldados”. Maybe he wrote the note after the family road trip to Mexico or something. There’s a fascination with Mexico in my dad’s family that I’ve never quite comprehended — we’re not from there or anything and we don’t really have any Spanish blood (Native American, yes).
• I kind of like some of the phrase turns he used.

So I guess that’s it. Here’s a picture of the letter:

Cogent. This blog post was cogent.

bkd

Biggest Question: Did the dude really think that he’d just fly up to the alien’s ship, get his hand fixed, then fly back home where everything would just be back to normal?

Too Long By: 30 minutes. The last 30 to be more precise. So conventional and disappointing after the killer set-up.

Haiku Synopsis:

Alien slum raid

Helps man learn that aliens

Love their children too.

Critique of the Haiku

The haiku kind of ignores the couple thousand sentient beings that died.

Final Score

6.5/10 — At least it had that first hour.

Also

There will probably be a sequel and it will be *awful*.

Picture So the Homepage Works Out

(If anyone pictured doesn’t like having these out there, lmk and I’ll take this post private.)

Dad, Mom. I think she's putting his lieutenant bars on him, ca. 1960.

It’s weird looking at my parents like this. I mean, they just look like young, good-looking military newlyweds, right? Who knew?

My mom's family (Uncle Bill, Grandpa, Grandma, Aunt Mitzie, Mom, Uncle Jim). David was probably on his mission or something and John was probably crime-fighting on the temple grounds. Maybe.

Four generations of Dunns (great grandparents in the middle, my grandparents at bottom left and right, Uncle Bill and Aunt Kay top-right, brother Garry and cousin Jeff at bottom right).

It’s also interesting to me how close my grandparents look to how I remember them. Heck, even my older brothers:

ca. 1964?

…still kind of look sort of like this. Their faces anyway.

My dad also scanned a photo of the house they lived in in Pensacola (1960-62?):

Which I took a photo of on my roadtrip:

It was probably nicer with the trees in the front yard.

So it turns out it’s interesting to see where you come from.

bkd

I *hope* I enjoy my stay.

The decision feels a little anti-climactic or something though. I dunno. It sort of seems like an arbitrary place, probably in part due to it not being on the short list of schools I was looking at last summer (when I was still looking primarily at strategic management programs). But FWIW, I didn’t end up applying to any of those early short-list schools. I guess it’s also not really a part of the country anyone’s heard much about since 1980, so maybe for that reason.

And the school has its own organizational behavior lab!

It should be cool, though. I’ll probably buy a house and hopefully it’s a little bit of a fixer so I can do some projects on it. Maybe that’ll be the blog for this summer. So there’s that to look forward to! (For you.) (Well — and for me.) Plus I’ll be able to make cryptic references to Fallout 3 DLC at will and, while no one will know what I’m talking about, the references will, technically, be appropriate.

Weapon in hand, a newly minted PhD looks forward to her bright future.

Will probably fly out there again in maybe May and look for a place to live, then move out for real once it closes escrow or whatever. You can get a pretty decent place for not much money out there — the trick is not taking a bath when you’re trying to sell it four to five years later.

So I got that going for me.

Excelsior,

bkd

I like ghost towns and ruins. Except that sometimes the places that are called “ghost towns” are kind of disappointing. All those “buildings” in Death Valley, for instance — I mean, there’s no romance there. You can’t see anything of what used to actually go on since it’s all so dilapidated now. But at some point during the big road trip last year it occurred to me that I didn’t need to seek out “ghost towns”, because they were right in front of me. Every boarded up house in the world is a “ghost house” — there were some impressive examples in Natchez, for instance, and I remember a lot of disappearing Americana in rural Southern Oregon as well. And there was some town I drove through in Texas that looked like it had been abandoned within the last ten years. It wasn’t a wild west ghost town, but it was awesome anyway.

It’s also interesting to me that they keep these parts of the terminal open to the public. The international gates, for instance, have a door on them so they could be shut off, but the door is wide open. The moving sidewalks still move, the announcement tells you to please stand to the right and pass on the left and caution, because the moving walkway is nearing its end. But there’s no one there to hear it.

Two thirty-five.

Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing cards fluttered onto pads in a shower ofpips. Martinis manifested on an oaken bench with egg-salad sandwiches.

Music played.

But the tables were silent and the cards untouched.

Y’know part of me hopes there’s a big nuclear war some time just so I can see if any of the post-apocalyptic prognostications ended up having any validity. What’s the point of guessing at it if you never even get to see it?!

bkd

Government overreach. That was the reason. Not kidding.

And one day I’ll go somewhere with (one of) my real camera(s) again. Just that my point-and-shoot has to go back to the factory (it’s in an envelope, has been there for a week now, on my desk) and the DSLR is freakin’ huge, which matters when it comes to not checking luggage. And having to bring a parka. So: cell phone photos.

Got back from The Pitt on Saturday night, was there for about 44 hours total, during which time it never got over 20 degrees. Everyone there apologized for the weather, but honestly it’s kind of cool to have a good reason to wear said parka for once and anyway, clear skies and 15 degrees breaks up the monotony of overcast and 65 in a welcome manner. Seriously. For me.

I’d rather have clear skies than warm temperatures anyway.

Generally.

Pittsburgh, at night, from the top of Washington Hill.

So, surprisingly, not quite enough light for the ol’ cell phone on that one. OTOH, it was a great view — you can see a few of the city’s bridges down there and the confluence of the rivers (Allegheny and Monongahela). Went to a restaurant very close to this location with the exact same view, which was pretty cool.

View from Room 615 at the Wyndham Hotel.

So you can kind of see some Pittsburgh topography in that one also. And some snow, and Forbes Street, which is a main thoroughfare in Oakland, the part of town where Pitt and Carnegie-Mellon are. The topography in Pittsburgh makes it an interesting place — hills and rivers and tunnels and bridges break up the neighborhoods so it’s not like most cities where it’s just a big old paved place with buildings on top.

Center field wall of the former Forbes Field. The business school is now located where the right field grandstand was.

The Pirates played here until Three Rivers was built. This is where they won the World Series in 1960 with the Bill Mazeroski home run against the Yankees and all that. It’s all now incorporated into Pitt’s campus.

The Cathedral of Learning on Pitt campus.

It’s the second tallest higher-education building in the world! And for some reason it’s in a neo-gothic style. And the inside looks like Hogwarts. Some sort of depression-era make-work project. Kind of seems like they could’ve come up with a better name for it. IMHO.

Installation art at the Mattress Factory museum. The faces talk to you.

That one was a little disconcerting. Installation art is odd stuff, but at least it gives the viewer something to do (e.g., “slowly walk toward the gray rectangle”, “sit in utter darkness for fifteen minutes”).

Tarmac at sunset with baggage cart.

Might’ve been good with a real camera and tripod is all.

It’s an interesting, old town. I mean, you feel how old it is everywhere you go — like the “incline” that takes you to the top of Mt. Washington is the one that steelworkers were using to get down to work on the river back in… eh, some year that was a long time ago. It’s kind of the opposite of New York where every building gets torn down and re-built every fifty years (seemingly). It also feels like an odd combination of cramped and over-built. The streets were all made for horse-drawn buggies, so parking and driving is tight — but there aren’t that many people driving, so you never feel trapped. Might have something to do with the population declines over the last three or four decades, but it’s an odd combination.

Pgh!

bkd

La Jolla Cove with waves and palm tree shadow.

My brother chooses not to look while his wife and kids decide whether or not they want to jump off the cliff.

It's your legal right to use this beach regardless of the presence of seals, no matter what the seal rights people's signs tell you..

There were also birds like this there.

And when they fly, they look like this.

Would’ve been better with my real camera. I was sort of just getting sick that day also, which — well, it’s a nice, all-encompassing fall-back excuse.

bkd

• If you want adventure, Kauai is way better.
• If you want shopping and restaurants in a tropical setting, Waikiki/O’ahu is way better.
• If you want volcanoes, the Big Island is better (I’m assuming).

But if you want B-versions of the above all in one place, well, that’s Maui I think. IMHO of course. At which point I release a big photo dump and hope for the best.

The church in Kahakuloa.

This is the place where they tell you to respect the a'ina, although they don't really explain how you do that exactly.

Some sailboat as seen from the trail that takes you to the blowhole that does not blow (when I'm there).

Olivine Pools -- you swim in 'em!

Rental car's a-comin'!

This is what my parents look like.

Waymarker on a beach near the La Perouse light station.

End of Kings Highway

Waianapanapa Beach, which has black sand.

Venus Pool, which ended up being too shallow to reasonably access from the trail that day.

The beach at the bottom of the "Sacred Pools" (that didn't seem all that sacred without much water in them).

Just FYI, if there hasn't been much rain on Maui, most of the waterfalls kind of suck. This was as good as there was anywhere on the Hana side.

The Hana Highway if you take it past Hana (note: it's not a dirt road).

The dragon's teeth. Which dragon? Difficult to say.

The Lahaina Prison -- they named a road after it (in Lahaina; it's called "Prison Road").

Worthwhile photo captions seem so last-vacation.

Also went on the Pipiwai Trail up to the big ol’ waterfalls, which were barely trickling. I’m guessing that 90-percent of the time, this hike is by far the best one on Maui. It has variation in foliage (including a bamboo forest), is relatively short, has several highlights along the way (waterfalls and pools unless there’s no water) and has a massive waterfall at the end (unless there’s no water). Anyway.

I’m tired and don’t remember much from this vacation. A shame, yes.

bkd

Me in the computer lab and distressingly clean-shaven.

The "Big XII Store" at OKC Will Rogers International Airport.

Two things:

1. From the gear available in the store, you’d think they were advocating getting rid of the other XI — sort of like USC in the Pac 1.
2. I don’t think there are any regularly scheduled international flights going through Will Rogers. They had flights to Houston, though, which may be close enough.

The trip to Oklahoma went real well. It’s a friendly town (Norman, I mean) that seemed like an easy place to be as far as that goes. And the football stadium isn’t at the *exact* center of campus — but pretty close. Surprisingly pretty campus, though, and while there I learned that there’s an architectural style called “Cherokee Gothic”. Not sure how that jives with the Cherokee Wild Potato, but certainly it must.

bkd

1. Kahului, Maui, Hawaii (Saturday, Jan. 9)
2. Tacoma, Wash.
3. Tacoma, Wash.
4. Norman, Okla.
5. Norman, Okla.
6. Tacoma, Wash.
7. Grants Pass, Ore.
8. Rancho San Diego, Calif.

It’s something like 9,000 miles or so traveled over that time via plane and automobile, fwiw. And since the new blog theme all but requires photos, here’s one I took with my cell phone while driving past Mt. Shasta yesterday:

Hopefully photography-while-driving is not against the law in California.

As far as interstate driving goes, I think the stretch from about Grant’s Pass to Redding on I-5 is about the most scenic I’ve ever driven. Can’t think of another one that’s comparable. The H3 on Oahu, I-90 across Snoqualmie, I-15 through the Virgin River Gorge in Arizona, I-89 in Vermont, and I-80 in central Pennsylvania are the first challengers that come to mind, but at the end of the day I don’t think any of them are in the same league. IMHO, I guess.

bkd

It’s cool that they close the pre-dawn gate once they’ve allowed enough cars into the park to fill the parking lots. Wind: strong. Dressed: warm. Slept in car while waiting in the parking lot: maybe half an hour. Sky started glowing: 6:10. Looked like:

This. It's Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa (the Big Island) in the distance. Well, stars also in the distance. The implied sun is also distant.

Photos taken: 450 or something like that. For the entire day, not just the sunrise. Entire photo-day: spent at Haleakala.

I’m not a connoisseur of sunrises, so I don’t really know why this one is special, or if the particular one I saw was, in fact, special. It’s interesting to note, though, that the sky starts glowing 45 minutes before the sun actually crests the horizon.

The sun, actually cresting the horizon.

To the naked eye, it was already broad daylight, though, no matter how that photo looks (I have some much darker ones taken much later — heck, I can take an under-exposed photo *any* time of day; it’s a talent I have).

The sun: exposed.

I don’t know much about sunrises, but watching it at Haleakala brought me to a stark, sudden realization: the sun is one big ol’ bright, fiery round thing. Seriously.

Should've just uploaded this one and not the previous one. Oh well.

They also have an observatory at the summit that looks like it’d be a cool place to work. And windy! I didn’t see anyone working there, though.

No one.

Once the sun got finished rising and I walked around the summit a little (there were pink clouds, and a few rocks and ridges), I headed down to the visitors’ center and the crater to go hike along the Sliding Sands trail. It’s the trail that the now too-famous Maui Revealed guidebook says is The One Trail on Maui. Like, if you only hike one trail, it should be this one.

The top part of the trail.

Silver sword plants along the trail -- none in bloom.

I hiked to that place out there where the trail ends, Ka Luu o ka Oo. I think.

The bottom of the non-crater crater.

The crater within the crater.

Scourges of the park trails.

*Swirling* Sands is more like it! (Har!)

Seriously: if you could get a big river flowing off of that ledge? Dang near perfect. Alas.

Evidence that I was there.

• It’s like walking on Mars (I imagine).
• Except with oxygen and reasonable temperatures.
• It’s also sort of like being at Death Valley.
• Only it’s in Hawaii.
• It’s kind of a tourist hike, although the more of a tourist you are, the sooner you turn around.
• I also wish there were a rain forest at the bottom of the crater. I’m hoping to get final edit on all future terraforming activities.

Pretty scenery, so long as you like rocks (and sand). I ended up hiking maybe five or six miles total. Thing about the hike is: the best views are at the top. So the further down the crater you go, the more repetitive it becomes and the more you’re going to have to hike back up. It was pretty and, especially for what I’m used to seeing in Hawaii, unusual. But it seemed like the more effort you exerted, the less you got back from it. Diminishing returns is what they call that.

Done typing,

bkd

Biggest Question: Which laws of nature actually applied to this movie? (It was hard to think any of the main characters were ever going to be in jeopardy when it was revealed two-thirds of the way through the movie that dogs could fly planes. Also sort of cheapened all the emotional parts — I mean, Karl was certainly not operating in the *real* world, so how valid was anything he experienced?)

Too Long By: 15 minutes (the movie needed to get out of town and into the Amazon sooner).

Haiku Synopsis:

A widowed old man

Gets over losing his wife

By doing nothing.

Grade: 6/10. I mean, the moral is that doing nothing productive *is* adventurous, so go ahead and enjoy sitting on the curb for the rest of your life. Ugh. I blame organized Buddhism.

(Just so the homepage has an image to pull:)

]]> http://www.bkdunn.com/blog/2010/01/movie-review-up/feed/ 0 http://www.bkdunn.com/blog/2010/01/waihee-ridge-hike/?&owa_from=feed&owa_sid= http://www.bkdunn.com/blog/2010/01/waihee-ridge-hike/#comments Thu, 07 Jan 2010 04:50:23 +0000 bkdunn http://www.bkdunn.com/blog/?p=572 About five miles IIRC, 1,500 feet in elevation, out-and-back, all-up then all-down. It’s about as typical a Hawaii hike as there is, where “typical” means “average”. Some nice views, distant waterfalls, a lot of green stuff, but nothing that makes you gouge your eyes out when you get to the bottom in order to ensure that no future images will crowd out the unremitting wonder of the sights you just beheld.

I’m wondering if the Valley hike is prettier. I hear it’s easier. And I can’t quite figure out if the “13 crossings” hike is just the valley hike. Probably won’t do either.

(It’s not, I checked. But for some reason it’s hard to find information on “13 crossings”, only random people saying how great it is. It turns out it’s another “great Maui hike” that’s sort of inaccessible because it’s all on private land or some nonsense. And how can anyone in good conscience close off prime hiking trails, insist that you can only access them through a certain company, and then allow people to be charged $125pp just to go on a dumb hike?)

Most of the trail looks like this. And you don't ever make it to the top of the ridge in the distance.

It also mostly looks like this.

They have trees like this there. Think they're "cook pines".

This waterfall was in the distance -- it might be where you go if you pay $125 or trespass or whatever it is you do with the 13 thing.

The view from (near) the top.

With jade,

bkd

The Naval Undersea Museum is a museum located in Keyport, Wash., which is pretty close to the big ol’ Navy base in Bremerton as well as the unknown-sized Navy submarine base in Bangor. Even though the website says they’re closed every Tuesday during the winter months, it turns out they’re open the Tuesday between Christmas and New Year’s. Or at least they were in 2009. YMMV, but it seems improbable that anyone who reads this blog will ever test it out in future years to see if the policy was a one-off or, like, a real policy.

The periscope actually works! You can scan the entire parking lot from inside the building!

I didn't really get into BioShock. Maybe I'll like 2 better.

Imperial Japan's most effective naval weapon: the man-guided suicide torpedo.

Some bullet-pointed thoughts:

• I learned that I don’t know very much about torpedoes or mines.
• About half the museum is about torpedoes and mines.
• It seems like a rich field — but narrow.
• The museum is free.
• They have a submarine there, the Trieste II iirc, that dove to 22,000 feet — which isn’t a record. The record is 35,000 feet that was set using a similar submarine.
• But they don’t call it a “submarine”, they call it a “bathyscaphe”.
• For some reason the museum merely glosses over the involvement of US submarines in World War II, even though they’re already probably pretty under-heralded.

Interesting enough museum, worth the price of admission. Heck, it’s probably even worth the toll to get back over that stupid new bridge.

And in Bremerton, they had four reserve fleet aircraft carriers each at some stage in the dilapidation process. Hard to get a good photo, plus it’s cloudy all the time there, but anyway:

They're getting parted out.

Two of the four there were Ranger and Kitty Hawk. You could probably look up the names of the other two if you need to.

Endut.

bkd

It’s inside Olympic National Park, in the Elwha Valley area-thing.

Here’s the picture that I’ve decided I want to have show up at the top of the homepage (until I post another article at which point it will be replaced by that article’s picture):

You can almost *smell* the goblin!

Right, so that’s the Goblins Gate. Or Goblin Gate or Goblin’s Gate. I’m guessing the Parks Service doesn’t really know either, so I’m not gonna worry about it. Point being, it’s the best part of the hike and the only real Sehenswürdigkeit there. IMHO. Basically there’s this river and then it makes a sudden right turn and immediately after making this right turn, it has to go through this narrow part where the goblin is. But about half the river misses the turn altogether and has to seethe in fury, churning anti-clockwise in desperate agony just because it ended up in the wrong lane a half-mile back and there weren’t any signs saying that it was going to have to make a right turn eventually.

It’s like driving on the east coast.

Here’s a picture of the seething. It may not look angry, but, trust me, if you could *see* the undercurrents here…

It's like trying to get out of the Qualcomm Stadium parking lot.

So the part on the top of the photo is the raging vortex.The main river is coming from the left. That little stream pouring into the vortex is just a little stream that pours into the vortex. It’s not a good photo.

Here’s another picture of the gate, which I liked, and in particular a rock that makes up the gate, which I liked.

Already pictured.

Other than that, though, the hike was like a well-written eulogy: gloomy but coherent.

There are trees and moss and clouds. It’s dark. In most places, yes, I’d call it a tree prison. Here are some trees with moss.

But mostly the hike's not this pretty.

Just didn’t want you to get the wrong impression there. Mostly there are trees on either side of you and nothing to see but trees. When you’re down on the river, all there is is a river and then some mountains covered in clouds.

I suppose it might look different with better weather.

When I got off this trail, I decided to go down the nearby Mills Lake access trail. The lake will disappear soon as it was created by a dam that’s getting busted in the near future, though probably not by Lancaster bombers. The parks service isn’t that cool. The hike down to the lake was short but strenuous (read: steep). At the bottom, you mostly saw a river (the lake is further down as it turns out) and mountains covered in clouds.

There’s also this little fellow:

It's 15 feet tall!

IMHO: the only remarkable thing about this waterfall is that you have to walk through a knee-deep creek to get to it. The water there is cold in the winter. It had probably been snow a couple hours before I stood in it. I probably should have taken a photo of me standing in it. Battery was low though. Barely even got this shot off. And now you get all the benefit of being there without the hassle of having to later chip ice off your boots just so you can get your feet out.

And then I left there and ate at Wendys in Port Angeles on the way home. Am still amazed that you have to pay $4 to get over the stupid new Narrows bridge. Man. Seems like renting a private helicopter to airlift you over the Sound would be about the same price and, if you scheduled it in advance, potentially more convenient.

Nice to get outside though.

bkd

Here’s a picture of me, in the room, nailing down my plans for the next eight days:

Me operating a computer via telekinesis.

I feel like I have to put a photo in every post now what with this new “magazine-style” theme I’m rocking.

1/1 (Friday)
Arrive
Check In
Go to Wal-Mart (or similar)
Walk Around

1/2 (Saturday)
Waihee Ridge Hike
Iao Needle?
Relocate to Snazzier Accommodations

1/3 (Sunday)
Sliding Sands Hike (Haleakala NP)

1/4 (Monday)
Drive around the Western Lobe (Honolua, Nakalele Blowhole, the 40-mi. marker view; Olivine Pools)
Try Not to Do Too Much

1/5 (Tuesday)
La Perouse Coves Hike and Snorkel

1/6 (Wednesday)
MTB Down Skyline Rd. (on Haleakala)

1/7 (Thursday)
Na’ili’ili-Haele Falls Hike

1/8 (Friday)
Hana Highway

1/9 (Saturday)
Lahaina Pali Hike
Depart

That’s it. I should probably include days/meals for the three or four restaurants that were recommended to me by my insider. Next draft.

bkd

Titan II: Launcher of Gemini, Defender of the Free World

That probably begs a discussion on the meaning of the word “important” in this context and on the criteria and criteria weighting required to determine said importance. Or just: the Titan II may be the most important thing in the museum. It’s not the most famous thing there, though. This is:

The Spruce Goose: Launcher of Howard Hughes, Defender of the Inside of the Museum

Which begs a discussion on the meaning of the word “launch”. Meh: life is imperfect. BTW, the important (or merely famous?) part of that photo is the big ol’ plane, not the two engines in front of it. And I’m sure the two guys in the picture are very important to their respective mothers. I tried to take a bunch of artistic shots of the plane, but they all basically look like a gigantic airplane with a bunch of other little planes around it. See above.

The Evergreen Air and Space Museum is “actually” two museums, meaning that it’s housed in two buildings (three if you count the IMAX theater) and they charge admission separately unless you buy admission for both together. Pretty museum, solid collection of stuff, and they have the Spruce Goose. They also have one of these:

An illegally-parked MiG 29!

I dunno, I suppose the ominousness of the MiG 29 is probably lost on the current generation that didn’t grow up back before the West realized that the Soviets weren’t actually competent at stuff. But still, in its heyday, this airframe was the symbol of black-hat aeronautical engineering.

I also like how the ol’ Herc is watching the MiG through the glass. One false move and Herc leaps through the glass and eats the MiG. (Not really. That will never happen.)

The museum is in McMinnville, Ore. and was sort of founded and is/was bankrolled by Evergreen International Aviation, which I think might do some cargo operations as well as, like, water-bombing stuff for (against) forest fires maybe. And maybe some contracting with internationally recognized clandestine service organizations — who’s to say? Wikipedia is vague in these matters. I skipped the IMAX theater. I should probably go to one again some day, but I established a precedent of not going to them during the road trip and I’d like to maintain some part of that road trip magic for a while longer, thank you.

Bullet-point list:

• They have a missile launch simulator which takes five-plus minutes. The Titan II missile behind you does not launch when the countdown gets to zero.
• McMinnville is not that easy to get to considering how reasonably close to Portland and Salem it is.
• Don’t remember much else. Been a couple weeks.

Here’s an interior shot of a Ford Tri-Motor for some reason:

An interior shot of a Ford Tri-Motor.

They also had one of these at the museum:

A P-40 Warhawk with Fighting Tigers livery and a handy drip-pan (which may have been made in China).

P-40s mostly flew for the British and Soviets. But the drip pan adds a lot to the composition. IMHO.

Out.

bkd

Redwoods, for instance — well mostly you just never know if you’re in the park or not. Many of the most “important” trees are in state parks that adjoin the national park for some reason. I dunno. There’s a reason: people got worried about the ability to protect redwood forests, some of which were already part of state parks, and so lobbied a then-friendly federal government into buying up a bunch of random plots of land (so ungefähr).

Plus it’s just trees.

No redwoods are actually included in this picture.

These trees' souls have now been stolen.

"Avenue of the Giants", which I don't think ever passes into land that's technically part of the national park.

They don’t charge to enter the national park, either, which on the one hand seems appropriate since I’m not sure anyone ever *does* enter the park, but on the other hand they charge for all the parks in Washington state, which is where the *correct* national parks are located. Or something.

It's sort of easier to appreciate how tall the trees are when they're lying down.

Up to 300 feet is how tall they are, tallest living things in the world. They’re not the biggest in volume, though (the sequoias are). ‘Course, they’re a little more normal-looking than the sequoias. Not that there’s anything not-wrong with that.

Oh, and:

In case you didn’t quite catch that, that’s $35 that the State of California is trying to charge for a night of camping. Surprisingly, the campground was empty.

bkd