Episode 15: From Los Cabos to Homer

Well, not in one trip. In May of 2006 I drove all the way to the southern tip of Baja California. And in May/June 2007 I drove all the way to the “end of the road” in Homer, Alaska.

Baja

Here are some Cirios trees which are often called "boojums" in reference to the tall twisted creature in Lewis Carroll's poem, "The Hunting of the Snark". And then another large cactus.



This pile of rocks is called El Pedregosos. I have no idea how they got here:
On the "road" to Cañon de Guadalupe and then my private hot tub there:

Here are a bunch of Gringos lined up to cross the border back to the States, in a town called Los Algodones, not far from Yuma. I told the border guard that this was the strangest border crossing I ever saw, and I have seen some weird ones. All these folks park their Winnebagos on the American side of the border, walk across, and get their teeth fixed, their new glasses, and get their drug prescriptions filled. And then here is a photo of one of the dentist offices, with the line-up reflected in the windows.
Camping on the beach, a sunset, and getting stuck in the sand at another beach:


A metal church by Eiffel (yes, that Eiffel of Paris tower fame) in the little town of Santa Rosalia:
The pretty town of Melugé:
The end of the journey, the southernmost point of Los Cabos:

North to Alaska

The trip through British Columbia and the Yukon to Alaska was very, very different. Here are some photos from that journey. Here is a bon voyage card from my new granddaughter, Elea.

There were three books I read or reread on this trip:

One was Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild” about the young man who walked alone into the wilderness north of Mr. McKinley to live in the wild and never came out.

The second was Theodora Stanwell-Fletcher’s “Driftwood Valley”, the firsthand experience of a woman naturalist in the northern wilderness. The thing I remembered most was that you can tell it is 55 below when hot water poured out of a window freezes solid before it reaches the ground. One interesting sidelight: after I drove off the main highway near Hazleton towards the area where they lived, I checked in with the forest service to find out about the roads in the area. I asked if the land was privately owned; the forest service guy replied that it was ”Crown” land. Being an American, I thought this was rather funny as the wilds of northern British Columbia seem like a long way from Buckingham Palace. Oh well, it is BRITISH Columbia I guess.

The third book was John McPhee’s “Coming into the Country”. Here is an interesting quote: “When you drive along an old back road in the Lower Forty-eight and come upon a yard full of manufactured debris, where auto engines hang from oak limbs over dark tarry spots on the ground and fuel drums lean up against iron bathtubs near vine-covered glassless automobiles that are rusting down into the soil, you have come upon a fragment of Alaska.” Actually, I found a lot less junk lying around that he describes. I heard there has been a significant clean up effort.

OK, here are some pictures. In northern British Columbia you can see the world's biggest fishing pole and some totem poles:
Just part of the thousands of signs at Watson Lake, Yukon Territories. This was started by GI's who worked on the Al-Can Highway during World War II.
My welcoming committee as I head back down into BC, on my way to Atlin:
The wonderful little town of Atlin, and then an isolated campground about 20 kilometers south of town at the end of the road:
Then back north to the Yukon and a short stop at Lake Labarge, made famous by Robert Service ‘s “The Cremation of Sam McGee”:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
Then a long, lonely side road to the Arctic Circle. I camped, all alone, in a campground maybe 30 kilometers north of here, as far north as I have ever been:
Looking down on Dawson City:
Then the Top of the World Highway (dirt) into Alaska - this border crossing back into the US marked my fiftieth state:
This is Denali (or Mt. McKinley):
OK, I'm not Art Wolfe, but here are some photos of wildlife, including Dall Sheep, mama Grizzly, Swan Lake, and Moose droppings:

Where our oil comes from, the Alaska pipeline and the port of Valdez:
The only disappointment on the whole trip was, after taking a great ferry ride to the wonderful town of Cordova, and then driving 50 miles to the Childs Glacier, it did not calve. I waited over an hour and then I gave up.
There is story about what happened when I was driving toward the glacier the night before I actually got there. On the road out of Cordova I took the Algantal Slough road turnoff, about 17 miles from town. After driving quite a while I thought I saw an eagle and reached for my binoculars, which were hard to get, down on the floor of the passenger seat. I looked away from the road and drove off the bank and got stuck in the verge, at about a 45-degree angle. I was really pissed at myself for being soooo stoooopid. I decided I better walk to the main road for help since there did not seem to be anyone on this side road. I walked for about 50 minutes, so it must have been two and one-half miles or more. No car came on the side road. I reached the main road about 5:30PM and one car came after about ten minutes but was heading away from town. It was getting a little cold and I feared rain. I also had decided to take some food and water with me so I would not starve to death. Then I remembered the two very large brown bears I had seen crossing this same road about a mile back. I wondered if taking food was a good idea, so I ate it. Then I waited and nobody came for almost an hour. I was beginning to wonder what I would do if nobody came and it got cold or wet and decided that by 9:00 I would walk back to the car and sleep there. But about 6:30 a big pickup finally came, but heading away from town. I waived it down but he kept on driving - I could not believe it. I waived after him and then he turned around. It turns out he thought I was telling him that he was driving too fast. He was a young guy in his 20s with a Russian accent and beard and fancy embroidered shirt. He said he was born in Alaska and lives in Fairbanks. He was waiting for his father at the airport but the flight was delayed so he was killing time looking for places to fish (I don't get this because later he said he fishes from a boat). I said I would pay him $20 if he would take me back to a campground by the airport where I knew there was a phone and I could call AAA. We went back to the campground but there was no one there so we went to the airport. They laughed when I asked if there was AAA service in Cordova. I called the 800 number anyway and they confirmed that there was no such service but they would reimburse me. My young Russian fisherman friend wanted to pull be out himself so we asked about a rope. People referred me to a guy in a red van. This guy was older and had a big beard and Russian accent, too. After a couple of sentences they both started speaking Russian. The old guy looks under stuff in his trunk and digs out a really big rope and agrees to lend it to us. I tell him "bolshoi spaseeba". We drove back to my car and I was able to tie the rope around my under-carriage (I had experience in Baja) and the guy knew how to tie ropes so that it would be tight but easy to undo. We were able to tow me out very quickly. I was grateful and gave him a hug and $20, which he didn't want to take but I insisted. I was so wiped out that I camped right at the end of the slough road in a nice spot with lots of eagles and a nice young couple (teacher and firefighter) with a 16-month-old son from Anchorage.

At least I used a little Russian. A couple of days before I came across some Thai monks, staying in Anchorage, at the Exit Glacier by Seward. We tried to reach the nice overlook but the trail was washed out and under water. I said to them, "Mai pen rai", which means, "it can't be helped" and is a very popular Thai saying. I may not know how to drive, but I am slightly familiar with some esoteric languages.

Here is my isolated campground in Wrangell St. Elias National Park, the largest one in the country. This site is about 50 miles into the park on a dirt road:
Lake by my campground near Haines:
My type of museum, the Hammer Museum in Haines. The young woman was up from Kentucky for the summer, a decent docent:
After Haines I took the Alaska Ferry to Skagway, the gold rush town that has been turned into a Disneyland, and the only really horrible place I visited on this trip. When I got there I saw three cruise ships in the harbor. There were literally thousands of fat, white, middle-aged, tennis-shoe wearing tourists in the town. I left that place as fast as I could and even forgot to get gas before I crossed back into Canada where gas is a lot more expensive. I am not particularly proud of these feelings, but I have an almost pathological dislike of these floating hotels. I heard about the Norwalk Virus that affects these vessels and hoped that everybody comes down with some disease. I had a huge desire to “moon” these vessels and I recalled my classmate in the dorms at Cal who, during the 1964 presidential campaign, pasted a Goldwater bumper sticker on his butt which he shoved out the dorm window. He called it a “Barry Ass”.

These dorms were designed by an Architect who was friends with the Kennedy’s (John Carl Warnecke) , who designed JFK’s gravesite in Arlington, and who was mentioned in a "book on tape" I was listening to on this trip: “Assassination Vacation” by Sarah Vowel. One of the things she talked about was the parallels between the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations, about which Ann Landers devoted a column. She suggested to Google (a verb?) “Landers Eerie”. I tried it when I got home and it works.

While my feelings are not as strong as my feelings about cruise ships, I guess I also have a case of reverse snobbishness towards RVs. Why is the bigger the RV, the smaller the dog that is housed in these vehicles? And why do these gas-guzzlers always have to have lawn chairs attached to the outside? Isn’t there enough room inside? I am not sure why I think that I am more worthy, sleeping in my little cubbyhole in the back of my truck, like those Japanese businessmen in those pod-hotels. Just because I have to piss in a bottle in the middle of the night, does it make me more virtuous?

One place where I ran across many of these RVers was at Mukluk Annie’s, near Teslin, Yukon. I had stopped there for their famous salmon bake on the way to Alaska. With such a lunch one gets a free ride on a houseboat on Lake Teslin. But the lake was still frozen on my way north. So I saved my receipt so I could take the ride on my way home. I camped nearby on the way back and showed up for the nightly houseboat ride. This was quite an experience. Mukluk Annie’s is actually an RV park as well as a great restaurant, and most of the patrons were of such ilk. And I think I significantly lowered the average age of the passengers on the trip. The captain was a born again Christian, the place’s owner, Mukluk Chuck. He used to own the Bunny Patch Bar in St. Paul, but then Jesus hit him on the head and he got religion. There was a sign above the captain’s wheel that said “Know Jesus and Go to Heaven; No Jesus and Go to Hell”. Anyway, he piloted the boat across the lake to feed the gulls, and told corny stories on the way. Then we had a guest performer, one of the RV crowd staying at Mukluk Annie’s, on vacation from Minnesota. He played the accordion. I thought, Oh God, I am stuck on a houseboat ride from Hell with Garrison Keeler. The accordion player also told corny Minnesota jokes, about Lawrence Welk, etc, and started out by playing “Roll Out the Barrel”. I felt like asking, Do you know how to play Far, Far, Away? I will say that his playing of Johnny Horton’s “North to Alaska” seemed appropriate. I don’t know what possessed me to take this ride. But I carried the free ticket all the way to the Arctic Circle, Dawson, Fairbanks, Anchorage, Denali, Homer, Cordova, Haines, etc. Maybe this was punishment for my bad thoughts about cruise ships.

Truly the end of the road in Homer:
Back in BC the devastation caused by the Pine Beetle. Ten warm winters in a row have allowed this insect to thrive.
And my last campground, by the CN tracks along the Frasier River in southern BC:
My present for Elea (aka, Eagle Star Girl):

Some other final random thoughts that occurred to me on this trip.

Why are the people who work at border crossings such creeps? This applies to both American and Canadians. Do the immigration services put ads in papers saying “only shitheads need apply"?

As my windshield came into on-going contact with mosquitoes and other bugs I wondered what Jains would do. They are a religious group in India that don’t eat any vegetables that are grown in the ground since removing such veggies might cause death to certain bugs or worms. And sometimes they wear masks over their mouths and noses so they don’t inhale any insects and, thus, kill them. I do think their reverence for all living creatures is somewhat admirable. I am not proud of the fact that on this trip I had a Caribou burger. I also ran over a Marmot, which made me feel terrible.

Almost home, near my favorite BC community of Spuzzum, there were a series of tunnels with signs ordering drivers to take off sun glasses, not to stop under any circumstances, to turn on lights, etc. Talk about being bossy!

I’ll end this with some quotes from the Blues Brothers. I actually saw this on a car on my US Road Trip:
Elwood: It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of
cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses.
Jake: Hit it.

EPISODE 14: SPAIN


In March 2006 I spent some time in Spain. Here is short story from that trip.

Viva la Huelga

On the Thursday of my one-week Spanish course in Madrid I decided to skip a cultural lecture and go to the train station to get tickets for the weekend. My plans were to go to Segovia on Saturday, stay the night, then head to Tarragona on Sunday. The tourist information office said that the ticket office at the station stays open to 11:00PM so when I got there at 7:00PM I figured I had a lot of time. The problem was that there are two parts to the Puerta de Atocha train station: one for local trains and one for long-distance trains. But I did not really realize that at first. Further complicating the situation is that the train to Segovia is a local train, and the one to Tarragona is not – one has to purchase these tickets in a different place and I just got confused. I started off in the local train section and couldn’t figure out how one was supposed to gain access to the queue. And then people told me to go to the other part of the station, which I did. Then the information person in that part of the station told me to go back to the local part of the station where they told me I could not get a ticket. Long story short – it turns out that the ticket offices actually close at 9:00PM and when I found that out at 8:55 I still had not purchased my tickets. Someone told me I could do it over the phone. I tried that, but it was hopeless. I could not get my phone card to work. So I gave up and decided to just go home and try again tomorrow. On the way out I recalled that this was the station where the terrorists had bombed the metro-line a while back and wondered if they were really interested in Jihad or were just pissed-off at failing to purchase long-distance train tickets.

The next day I had planned to go to the train station, again, right after classes ended at 2:00, then go to the El Escorial after I got the tickets. At the station my first stop was at the Customer Service Office where a nice woman explained to me that I needed to get tickets for Tarragona in the long distance train sales room and she showed me how to get there. It is right off the long-distance part of the station’s main hall, which is huge and verdant with foliage, like an indoor jungle. I leave this bucolic setting for the main sales room which is very large, crowded, and chaotic. There is a line of windows along the back wall with people behind the counter to issue tickets, a lot of electronic signs telling what numbers are currently being served, several machines that issue chits with numbers on them like the little machines you find in bakeries and butcher shops. There are dozens of people milling around, standing up in one part of this large room, and in other part people are camped out on chairs for what appears to be a long wait.

I get a chit with a number on it and start my wait. I wait 40 minutes and I am only about 5 numbers closer to being called, so I go back to talk to the Customer Service Office again. They say that the system has not been working well but they are going to fix it. I go back to the sales room and wait some more. Now a total of two hours has passed and the grand progress has only been about ten numbers: from 44 to 54 and I have number 148.

It now looks like I am going to have a hard time getting to El Escorial today, and to pass the time I walk back to the other part of station (for local trains) to see about getting a ticket for Segovia for Saturday and find out that reservations are not required. Then I go back to the big room where long distance train tickets are sold, or at least are being waited for. Now the system has broken down completely. What’s more, I notice a sign that says that there will be a “Huelga” (strike) at 6:00PM. But here is the good news: it will only last to 8:00PM.

I go back to the Customer Service Office again. Up to now I have been doing all this in Spanish. But now I say in English: “OK, I give up, what would you suggest I do?” They suggest that I make a reservation on-line (there is a different numbering system for people who already have made reservations on-line) and then come back to the station at 7:30PM before the Huelga is over. I take the metro to the bus station for El Escorial but decide it is too late to go there, especially since people have told me different closing times for that tourist venue and I don’t want to risk a trip for nothing. So I go back to my language school to use their computer and I am amazed that after only three tries I am able to log on to the Spanish Train Website, register and get a password, and actually make reservations for my Sunday train journey from Segovia-Madrid-Tarragona. Now all I need to do is purchase the ticket.

So now, as instructed, I return to the station at 7:30 and get in line to get my number. At about 7:50 they open the doors and I get a new number, now for Internet people only; my number is 763, which seems rather hopeless. At 8:00, right on time, the huelga is over. They post the first set of numbers on the big board and I see number 763. I freak. I can’t believe it, but I get right in line. (The next day I realized that at this point I must have dropped my Spanish notebook and lost it in my surprise and haste to get in line.) I ask the man behind the counter: why the huelga, dinero o condiciones? (money or conditions?). He answers, “condiciones” and gestures for me to look around at the crowded mayhem. I said that I agree completely and asked him if he remembered César Chavez? He replied, “Si”. And I said, as Cesar often did, “Viva la huelga.” On the way out, with a big smile on my face, I show the nice woman in the Customer Service Office that I actually got the ticket. What a victory.

Here is a picture of a nurses huelga.
And mi favoritio, a pueblo blanco.