Travel is Just a Bit Faster These Days...

Check out the map at right. It shows how long it took to travel from New York City to various parts of the eastern U.S. – in 1830.  Looks like about three weeks to Chicago!  But you could get anywhere in New Jersey in just a day (though why would you want to?).

This article has several such maps, for dates ranging from 1800 to 1930.  Fascinating stuff!

A Moment to Remember...

Yesterday I traveled back home to San Diego from the Richmond, Virginia airport.  As my plane in Richmond (on Delta Airlines) started to board, the gate crew started the usual drill. 

First they called “preboarding” for those people needing some extra time.  A few elderly folks slowly made their way on board, followed by one very harried-looking mom with five little ones (the oldest couldn't have been more than eight). 

Then the gate crew called for “first class” to board.  At that point, one of the passengers (a middle-aged man) walked up to the gate crew and said something I couldn't hear – and next thing I heard over the speakers was “Wait a minute – I just found out we have uniformed military traveling on this flight.  All uniformed military, please board.”

A single young soldier, dressed in camoflauge and carrying a huge seabag, walked up to the gate.  He looked tired.  The people around me all jumped up and started applauding, spontaneously.  One of the gate crew grabbed his seabag and carried it on board for him.  The young soldier didn't seem to hear the applause at first, but then suddenly turned around and looked at the people waiting at the gate – and broke into a beautiful wide grin, saluted us, and then spun around smartly and marched on board.

I shall remember that grin for a long, long time...

Some Travel Photos...

Debbie and I traveled to northern Idaho in the first week of September.  As is my want (:-), I took a few photos along the way.

First up: a bed and breakfast, just north of Grangeville, Idaho.  We stopped and talked with the proprietor and his wife for a while.  They clearly had some fun with this.  The “fire hydrant” at right is actually a functioning outhouse.  The beagle is a room you can rent – note the window just forward of his ear.  Cute.  There are several rooms like this.  We zoomed by, both of us exclaiming...then turned around to come back and check it out.  These are definitely “dog people”!

The main reason for our trip was to visit our property near Hope (which is on the north shore of Lake Pend Oreille).  We hadn't been there for over ten years, and it was high time for us to check up on it.

Our property is in a little “island” of private property inside a National Forest; we get to it from a National Forest gravel road.  Take that road a few miles further and you'll come to the Lunch Peak lookout, seen at left.  This looked much different than our memories of it, but we can't tell if that's because our memories are faulty or if the place has really changed.  Neither of us, for instance, remembered the lookout as being enclosed.  Nor did we remember it being locked and inaccessible.

On the way up and back from Lunch Peak, we stopped at a couple of places to pick huckleberries, which are prevalent in any open area.  They were just beginning to turn red for the fall color when we were there; this made it very easy to spot patches of huckleberries!  They were delicious – juicy, sweet, deep purple.  Yum!

My favorite aspect of our property is the water running through it.  As a denizen of the high desert, running water seems quite exotic – and large quantities of running water even more so.  There are three streams running through or alongside our property.  The photos below are all time exposures (20 seconds to 60 seconds) of the three.  As usual, click to enlarge.

One of the days we were there, we drove up to Bonner's Ferry (very close to Canada) to do a little sightseeing. Just south of Bonner's Ferry we ran across this barber shop, called “The Barber Ship”. You can just barely make out the sign in the photo at right.

The entire building is tilted at a rakish angle, as though the Barber Ship were cresting a wave.  However, the floor inside is level – which makes for an odd-looking room in which two of the walls appear to be dangerously tilted.  We found lots of humorous signs all over Idaho, but more in Bonner's Ferry than anywhere else.  We're not sure where this culture of commercial humor came from, but we sure enjoyed it.  We also had a great meal in Bonner's Ferry – so good we had to come back another day for a repeat.  The place was called Papa Byrd's Bistro, and it had spectacularly good soups, the best pizza I've had in years, and an equally spectacular sandwich.  If you're ever up in Bonner's Ferry, don't miss that joint!

The last day we were in Idaho, we made a big loop over into Washington state, back through the National Forest to Priest Lake (in Idaho), then back to Sandpoint.  Just west of Priest Lake, we ran across the Roosevelt Grove of ancient (and giant!) cedar.  If you suffer from arborphilia (as I do), it's a place you won't want to miss.  Trees that are thousands of years old and towering over your head, with the trunks to match.  They look healthy, too (our conifers in San Diego County are suffering from years of drought and the ravages of bark beetles, though on the whole our cedars look better than anything else).

In the parking lot for Roosevelt Grove, we came across a phenomenon we've seen before: butterflies apparently attracted to the minerals on the ground.  Usually we've seen this alongside mudpuddles or on damp earth; here it was on bone-dry soil.  Later in the day we saw even more of them, for miles on the shoulders of a gravel road.  Whatever the reason, we've found you can approach these butterflies quite easily – they appear to be lost in rapture or something, not paying much attention to the large, dangerous humans stalking them with a camera!

Hotel Astoria...

...in St. Petersburg, Russia.  About 10 years ago, I stayed here on two separate business trips, visiting a software development subsidiary of the U.S. company that I worked for.

The hotel was gorgeous, and ridiculously luxurious (though this was very adequately reflected in the room rate).  I greatly enjoyed walking around the nearby parts of the city, especially the almost adjacent large park and the naval museum.  In the latter, within minutes of my arrival staff had identified me as American, had someone out to interview me, and (most surprising to me) after getting my name they quickly identified me as a former U.S. Navy member – right down to my “rate” (my job), rank, and major duty stations.

But the most vivid memory I have of these two trips where I stayed at the Astoria was is this: the disjoint between the luxury of my lodgings and the shabbiness of our subsidiary's offices.  This was only exacerbated by my discovery (through conversations with our employees there) that our workers thought of our office building as rather grand and even a bit ostentatious.  For the couple of weeks (between the two trips) that I stayed there, I found this daily context switch between the hotel and the office very strange indeed...

Light Blogging Alert...

I'm about to get on a plane for Cincinnati, Ohio to visit one of our early runbook customers.  I'll be there (tentatively) through Thursday night, and I'm not sure how much attention this blog will get. 

The place we're staying, by purest happenstance, is a mere 40 miles from my mother-in-law's (Kate's) home in Liberty, Indiana.  On Tuesday night I'm going to go visit with her and my sister-in-law Judy (who lives nearby).  Kate doesn't know I'm coming, but Judy does.  Judy and Debbie seem to think it's a good idea to surprise Kate, but I'm not so sure...

Continuous Air Fare Checking...

Interesting daemon written in Perl that continuously searches for the best fares for a particular trip.  Might be quite useful for someone in a long-distance relationship!

Theme Song...

My trip today has me thinking about this song, by Iowahawk...

On the Other Side of the Pond...

My flight to the U.K. took me first through O'Hare (Chicago), then to Heathrow (in London).  The last leg was a redeye, which normally I dread for the simple reason that I can't sleep.  This time, for reasons I'll probably never know, I actually did sleep – I got four hours or so of body-nourishing, honest-to-goodness sleep.  So when I arrived in Heathrow at 8 am, I was only about 50% dead, instead of the usual 90% dead.  A huge improvement!

After a long taxi ride to my hotel, I staggered into the lobby to get my room, where I planned to take a shower and sleep for approximately 20 hours.  This was not to be, as at 8 am the hotel doesn't actually have any rooms available.  Ack!  I had to wait until after noon before one was ready, and I had a 6 pm dinner with colleages.  Oh, well.  I got a little sleep before we all went out for a fine dinner at a Malaysian restaurant.  That was yesterday.  Today I slept in until almost 10 am, had a nice big British breakfast, and set off to do some work (I had to make the presentation I'll be giving on Thursday).  Now that's done, it's 7 pm over here, and I'm headed for bed again.

The photo above is of my room.  In the background is a very large piece of art (at least, I think that's what the hotel would assert it was) that I'm still struggling to decipher.  You can't really see it, but below that wig-looking thing is something that appears to be a glass vase.  There's also some sort of a projection near the top of the wig-looking thing that goes off out-of-picture to the left.  My current theory is that it's a picture of a rather bad wig sitting on a bracket projecting from an unseen wall to the left, and the wig just happens to be draped over a glass vase.  But I'm open for better suggestions, should you have them.

In the foreground is my Kindle DX, with one of it's “screen-saver” portraits showing (in this case, Virginia Woolf).  Thanks to my Kindle, my travel reading on this trip did not require me to carry 20 pounds of books with me (I read quickly).  Just my little Kindle, small and easy to carry, the perfect size for reading on the plane or in the terminal.  Or in the hotel, for that matter.  I love my Kindle! 

Back Home...

But only after waiting for 5 hours for my delayed flight from Phoenix to San Diego – I didn't get home until almost 11 pm.  That made for a late start this morning and some residual tiredness tonight!

I saw something at Phoenix that just made my day: when our flight was announced ready for boarding, the guy at the gate explained over the loudspeaker that there was a group of soldiers on our flight – and they would be boarding first.  I asked the woman on the gate's customer service desk if that was unusual, and she said “No, not at all.  Boarding uniformed military first is our company policy!”

I already like Southwest Airlines for other reasons, but having learned this they will now be at the top of my list every time!

On the plane, I struck up a couple of conversations with those soldiers (one man, one woman).  Both of them said that they travelled on Southwest whenever they could, because of the special treatment they got – which wasn't just boarding first: they also got two free drink coupons...

The Second Leg...

The second leg of the trip I just took was from Atlanta, Georgia to Richmond, Virgina – roughly the same distance as San Diego to San Francisco.  My expectation of such flights is that they are short and uneventful.

Not this one.

First, a little context.  My flight was on a Delta McDonnell-Douglas MD-88, a two-engine jet that seats over 150 passengers.  There was just one aisle, with three seats on the left and two on the right in the main cabin.  I was seated just two or three rows from the back, on the right hand side in the aisle seat. 

I was one of the first to board, and the entire area around me was clear as I sat down.  A short time after I sat down, a large, angry-looking black man with a shaved bald head came down the aisle toward me.  He glowered at everyone he passed, out the windows, at the empty seats, and at me.  As he approached me, he loudly proclaimed “Dat's mah seat!” in an accusing tone, redoubling the gloweryness of his glower, while pointing at the window seat beside me.

Ah, and I forgot to mention that he was holding a large paperback book in front of him, cover out, like a shield. The book was Black Theology and Black Power.

As I got up to let my new seatmate in, I began to suspect that my flight might not be as pleasant as I had anticipated...

The plane slowly filled as my seatmate settled in, opened his book, and started reading.  I breathed a silent “thank goodness!”, expecting that he'd be immersed in his book and would ignore me.  Sadly, this was not to be.  Just as I was starting to relax, my seatmate's head whipped around, his eyes bore into mine, and he shouted out “You mah oppressor!”  This was accompanied by a transformation of his face from a mask of ordinary anger into a one that was a caricature of white-hot anger.  Or maybe that's black-hot anger, though the metaphor doesn't work quite as well.  This strange behavior continued, intermittently and randomly, throughout the entire flight.

In between a couple of these anger breakouts, an Indian woman (complete with red dot on her forehead) sat in the seat immediately in front of me.  I noticed, after she sat down, a kind of shimmering in the air above her.  Quite pretty, actually, with the many cabin lights refracting through what looked like thermal effects of some kind.  Moments later, I knew the horrifying truth: I was downwind from a perfume bomb. Mercilessly and relentlessly the cabin ventilation system drove the radioactive perfume into my face.  I wanted to cry out “It burns! It burns!”  Tears ran down my face uncontrollably for the entire flight.  A sympathetic flight attendant gave me a box of tissues and a bowl to squeeze them dry into.  Miraculously the only long term effect I could detect after the flight is that my white knit shirt has turned permanently reddish.

After we took off and were about halfway through the flight, my seatmate decided to engage me in a debate about reparations for slavery.  More specifically, a debate about the exact amount of reparations that was appropriate (because, at least in his own mind, the question of whether they should be paid at all had already been settled).  The remarkable thing about this debate is that there was only one voice (his).  I refused to participate.  This didn't slow down my seatmate at all – he just imagined what my answer would be, and debated that.  The debate hadn't gone on long before it became clear that my seatmate had a specific number in mind: $2.65 million per black man, woman, and child in the U.S., adjusted according to the percentage of your ancestry that was black, and payable to anyone who was more than 1/16th black.  How he came up with precise numbers remains a mystery, as he simply declared them to be correct (that was his answer to every imaginary question I raised in the debate). 

Shortly after the debate ended, I noticed a rather large, mainly spherical white woman talking with an animated woman, obviously a friend, in the aisle.  The seated woman first caught my eye because she seemed to be made up from a collection of spheres: her head was round, her neck was round, her body was round...you get the idea.  There was a certain symmetry to her that was interesting.  She was seated across the aisle from me, one seat row in front of me, so I had a good view.

Seated right next to the round lady was a very thin black man.  He had a conservative haircut, wore a white shirt and tie, and looked to be about 35 years old.  It's possible he wasn't actually as thin as he appeared to be, but was rather simply crushed between the round lady and the guy in the window seat.

Anyway, the round lady was talking in an animated way with the woman in the aisle, who was slowly walking toward the restroom in the back.  The round lady had a glass of red wine in her left hand, and as she was talking and gesticulating with her friend, moving slowly backward...she spilled her glass of red wine right onto the head of the skinny black guy.  The whole glass.   Every drop. 

That poor guy went into shock.  He was spluttering and wiping his eyes, probably trying to figure out just what the hell had happened to him.  He had red wine streaming from all sides of his head, down onto his white shirt and tie.  Round lady, in a juvenile way, loudly proclaimed that the fault was his (the black guy), saying that he'd struck her arm – but several of us (including me) had seen the entire thing unfold and knew that simply wasn't so.  After a while, the black guy just looked resigned and laughed it off.  I heard a flight attendant later telling him that the airline would replace his shirt and tie (decent of them).

“You mah oppressor!” said my seatmate.  Several more times.

Richmond looked quite inviting as we approached the runway...

The Trip Home...

Our route home yesterday included the segment of U.S. 395 that stretches from the town of John Day to the Oregon/California border. All of these photos were taken along that stretch, which includes some tremendously varied flora, fauna, and geology. As always, click on a thumbnail to get a larger version. Counting from left-to-right and top-to-bottom, here are a few comments on the photos:

1. Between John Day and Burns, storm clouds over fields of grass...

2, 3, 4. Between John Day and Burns, white birch in their fall colors...

5. Stretch of U.S. 395 south of Burns, looking south down the rift-made steppes and into the storm...

6. South of Burns, looking north along U.S. 395, with a shadowed rift escarpment visible under the brooding storm clouds...

7. Lake Abert, a mineral-laden alkalai lake under the Abert Rift escarpment. The lake is home to many migratory and resident birds, including geese, phalaropes, and avocets. The plains are home to prong-horn antelope, deer, and elk. The escarpment is home to a large population of bighorn sheep. There is much more life here than one might imagine when zipping by this high desert community of sage, pinyon pine, and desert cedar...

8. Prong-horn antelope, grazing without apparent concern in a farmer's field...

9, 10. Migratory cranes, which gathered by the hundreds in many different places along our route...

Home Briefly...

I returned home late last night from a three day trip to Boise, Idaho. Monday I take off again, this time to Wheeling, West Virginia. The city of Boise is a customer of the company I work for. The IT team works in an annex to the City Hall, and as I arrived on Wednesday, at right is what I saw as I approached. The annex is attached to the City Hall, directly behind it and out of sight in this photo.

I had a enjoyable time in Boise – the people were very pleasant to deal with; everybody always seems to be cheerful there. They were delighted with our product, which of course made it all the more fun for me. Outside of the work, there were several memorable things about the trip.

Each evening I was there, I had my dinner at Emilio's, a restaurant located in the hotel (The Grove) I was staying in. All of the meals were good, but Wednesday night's feast was nothing short of spectacular. The entree was sea scallops and jumbo shrimp (both perfectly cooked), covered with a mound of chopped vegetables and oyster scallops in an absolutely heavenly sauce. The portion was huge, and my first reaction was that I'd never be able to finish it – but it was so good, that I forced every last morsel down. And the last morsel tasted just as wonderful as the first!

For lunch on Friday, I went to a little cafe that's actually inside the annex (but it is privately run). I ordered the special: two fish tacos for $6. When I got back to the office with my tacos and opened them up, I could scarcely believe it – these folks (obviously not from California, and probably never visited there) had done just about everything wrong. The tacos were cheap grocery-store flour tacos. The fish was (horrors!) ordinary fish sticks. The sauce was a sweet, heavy tomato-based salsa, awful on its own and even worse on the fish. There was a heavy dose of shredded fake cheddar on top. Oh, those tacos were hideous! I took one bite, quickly determined that they were even worse than they looked, and into the trash they went. Ugh!

My taxi driver back to the airport was a very talkative fellow; he appeared to be about 60 or so. He was tall and thin, with a grizzled, leathery face and several evident scars (on his face, one ear, and both hands and forearms). Very friendly, he was – invited me to sit up front with him, and we chatted amiably all the way to the airport. At one point I asked him how he got the scars, and that launched him into a series of stories. I can't tell how many of them were tall tales, or whether they were all real – but he was a convincing raconteur.

The most interesting story was one of several about his years in the Special Forces. He was an Army Ranger, an enlisted EOD (Explosive Ordinance Disposal) technician. Just prior to the famous Blackhawk Down incident in Mogodishu, Somalia, he was assigned to a team there. He told the story of one mission in which they had to traverse part of the city that was controlled by the gangs. He was carrying a satellite phone, and right in the middle of a firefight the phone rang. It was his girlfriend, worried about him because she'd seen news reports of the increasing tensions and violence there. Just as he said hello, the building they were in came under fierce attack – and he just dropped the phone and started shooting. His girlfriend hit the record button on a tape recorder she kept attached to the phone, and listened to about ten minutes of intense firefight. Soldiers on both sides yelled out in pain when they were hit, bullets were smacking and ricocheting; his girlfriend was terrified for him. Then the bad guys succeeded in entering the building, and my driver and his comrades beat a hasty retreat – leaving the satellite phone on the ground. His girlfriend heard a bit of foriegn language and then a short crunch, and then no more. Apparently one of the bad guys crushed the phone under his heel. My taxi driver said that the tape ended up being played on Fox news, and I can easily imagine that would have made for some dramatic television. I searched for the file on line, but in vain – that was quite a few years ago, long before the ubiquitous posting of news on the web that we have today.

Then there was one more memorable event, this time in the airport. Like any airport, Boise's has a P.A. system for announcements. Unlike most, Boise's airport has a decent quality system – all the announcers voices were easy to hear over the normal din of the airport. There were many announcements, but one series of them really stood out. It started with a sweet-voiced female announcer saying "Mr. John Delfs, please pick up any courtesy phone for a message." This was repeated several times, with increasing urgency in the announcer's tone. Then came this announcement: "John Delfs, get off your butt and pick up a courtesy phone! Your wife will never speak to you again unless you do!" One could hear lots of chuckles around the terminal over that message. A minute or so later, a new message: a laconic "Thank you, John." That brought the house down, so to speak!

Hiiumaa House

Hiiumaa is the second-largest of the many islands off the coast of Estonia, in the Baltic Sea. Of the islands I have visited, Hiiumaa is my favorite. It’s still relatively undeveloped (despite the land boom from moneyed Finns), I suspect because of the relatively long ferry ride to get there. The only ferry currently servicing Hiiumaa leaves from Rohuküla, on the west coast of mainland Estonia and over an hour’s drive from Tallinn (the main city and port of entry to Estonia).

Estonia has hundreds of islands, but only four major ones, of which Hiiumaa is the second-largest, at about 300 square miles. At its highest point, Hiiumaa rises only 200 feet out of the Baltic sea; like the rest of Estonia, it is essentially low and flat. It’s located in the far west of the country, about 15 miles off the coast of the Estonian mainland. The western reaches of Estonia, including Hiiumaa and Saaremaa, are on an area of the earth’s crust that is rising at the rate of about 1/8 inch per year. Hiiumaa emerged from the Baltic sea about 8500 years ago (rising as the weight of the retreating glaciers came off), and has been occupied by humans for about 7000 years. The island is basically composed of limestone, with a large number of erratic boulders (mainly granite) deposited by the melting and retreating glaciers.

On this particular trip, after the 90 minute ferry voyage that deposited me in Heltermaa, I headed first toward Kärdla, the largest town on the island. I took the main road at first, then diverted toward Hellamaa to get off the main track a bit. The countryside is very pretty everywhere on the island, with small farms and forests dominating the landscape. Near Kuri I spotted this particularly nice farmhouse, built mainly of granite blocks from erratic boulders. Many of the farmhouses incorporate some erratic boulders, and I’ve seen others that were entirely built of them (like this one), but none quite so fine as this.

These erratic boulders fascinate me, as they look so out of place compared to the rest of the geology of Estonia. You can see a fine picture of a large erratic boulder here, but most of them that I’ve seen are much smaller. They are mainly granitic rock, almost all of them a reddish or pinkish color — very attractive. On my many hikes around Estonia, I’ve run into them just about everywhere — even in the bottom of meteorite craters (another interesting phenomenon of Estonia geology that I’ll write about on another day).

The history of these erratic boulders is really quite simple, once you discover the mechanism. The granite outcroppings occur naturally far to the north, in what is today Finland. During the ice age, when great sheets of thick, heavy ice pushed southward, they scraped chunks of this Finnish granite off. As the glaciers ground their way southward, the chunks were abraded and crushed, forming the rounded boulders we see today. Some of them worked their way up from the bottom of the glacier as the ice itself was crushed and melted as it moved. Eventually those boulders made it to modern-day Estonia, and considerably further south. But when the ice age ended and the glaciers melted, those boulders in or below the ice sheet in Estonia found themselves on dry land there — and untold numbers of them, of all sizes, then littered the landscape.

I’ve read that the distribution of size versus number is exactly the kind of exponential curve you’d expect: there are an extremely large number of small “boulders” (potato size and smaller), and a quite small number of really large boulders (say, a cubic meter or so, or larger). The larger ones in Estonia have all been named; most are in parks or protected areas, and have well-marked trails leading to them. The excellent maps available in Estonia mark the locations of these “erratic boulders", and I’ve visited many of them. Only on rare occasions have I met anyone at one of these boulders (I once surprised a pair of lovers who, I think, never knew I was there <smile>!). But it’s clear from the well-walked trails that they are nonetheless often visited — I’ve never found one that was neglected.

The farmers on Hiimuaa knew a good building material when they saw it, as this handsome house attests. Thankfully there are plenty more boulders in situ, with the largest and most interesting actively protected.

As usual, click on the photo for a larger view…