Chilling at the end of the world! – Ushuaia, Patagonia, Argentina
Jump to the full entry & travel map Ushuaia, Patagonia, Argentina With an empasis on the CHILLING! The gear we have brought form London has no effect what so ever on the antarctic breeze but we stand our ground refusing to buy more woolly things as we only need it for about a week. Layering is the name of the game…the backpacks are empty now because we are wearing just about every item we have! Most of this leg of the trip was pre-booked at our hostel in Buenos Aires…all except the flight we had to catch because we missed a connection bus due to slow going on the previous bus becuase of ice on the roads
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Chilling at the end of the world! – Ushuaia, Patagonia, Argentina
Jump to the full entry & travel map Piedmont, California, United States So after the long and laborious task of packing, moving and unpacking my possessions, I have finally relocated my bed, and therefore my life, to Piedmont for the next three and a half days. During this period of time I will undoubtedly (*snicker*) be making all necessary arrangements for my upcoming trip to Europe with Ben (read: totally awesome) which is, of course, the entire reason this blog exists in the first place. Now I must admit that this is my first time really blogging…like ever , so do excuse any blogging faux pas that I might commit. Unfortunately by virtue of me having not even LEFT the country yet, I actually have very little toactually blog about , however I am feeling particularly narcissistic at the moment so, to occupy my time and yours, I’ll give you a brief tour of my new and improved room at home. Some of you who have visited my room in Piedmont before are in for a treat, and those who haven’t…well…you’ll get to see where the Ross-man grew up. To start off, we should address the most prominent and eye popping feature of the room: the Bed. Before I moved back here, my room housed a modest and simple twin bed. A simple bed for a simple man. However, college has changed me and the sheer girth of academic knowledge I absorbed there grew my ego to an unprecedented size. My ego is, in fact, so vast in size that I now completely and utterly require a bed that is at least twice the size of my old one. Pictured on the left is that bed. Now many of you may notice the very slight floral theme my bed has adopted since the move from Chico, however I would like to ensure everyone that this change is wholly ephemeral in nature and that the status quo should, hopefully, be restored by the end of the day. I must admit, however, the light pink, blue and yellow flowers had a very calming effect on my sleep last night, however I completely blame them for causing the turtles wielding knives in my reaccuring nightmares to become flaming turtles with knives. Next we have the foot of my bed which now houses the various posters, wires, cables and other random knick-knacks in my room that never really found a place and who, as a result, have settled into a rather nomadic routine, and I fully expect the TV and the bulliten board to be gone within the next few days, undoutebly leaving my room for find a much more lush and fertile oasis (read: the attic).
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The Calm before the storm. – Piedmont, California, United States
Jump to the full entry & travel map Point Roberts, Washington, United States Arriving in Vancouver airport at 10pm from Montreal only to find that one of my bags was missing on Air Canada. So we waited around to see if it was on the three other flights that were arriving from Toronto within the next 30 minutes or so…no such luck and I was really hopeful so that I could wear different shoes than my flip flops! It was quite cold in Vancouver compared to the hot weather we left behind in Montreal that day. We picked up our deluxe Dodge Calibur from AVIS without a problem and drove down to Point Roberts arriving at the inn at 12:30am.
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Who knew this is the US? – Point Roberts, Washington, United States
Filed under: Stores We Love Kitson’s bright ideas. Photo courtesy of Kitson Los Angeles shopping mecca Kitson just launched an assortment of rainbow-colored nail polishes ($10 each), which will likely be spotted on the digits of boutique regulars Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan any day now. Staying true to its roots, Kitson gave each color an LA-inspired name.
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Kitson Nail Polish – It Doesn’t Get Much More LA Than This!
Jump to the full entry & travel map Deadhorse, Alaska, United States The tour is necessary because of security. At least that is the reason given. Really if I were an oil company I wouldn’t want just anyone driving thru my oilfield. The tour begins at the Inn. We spent the night here in the parking lot. The bull line is the place vehicles are plugged in in winter to keep them from freezing. It is also a RV park. Just plug in.
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The Tour – Deadhorse, Alaska, United States
Jump to the full entry & travel map Hanoi, Vietnam I made it!!! But first came the 10 hour flight to Korea and 4 hour flight to Vietnam – not so bad given the number of movies to chose from and the yummy meals – Asiana fed me three times! Felt like all I was doing was eating! Had a quick stop in Korea. Was certain that I landed on a runway – and not a plane runway – every woman was decked out in the highest fashion cruisin the airport stores. Men had WAY better hairstyles than I did…I did fancy the free laptop/Wi Fi oasis I discovered…almost didn’t want to leave the airport… Upon arrival in Vietnam, the anxiety level slowly decreased as I easily made my way to retrieve my Visa. A number of grumpy Immigration officers looked my documents over, and stuck my Visa in my passport. Phew! Still not sure if any of them had teeth, as no one smiled…Once! Once past customs, I paced anxiously for my luggage to cruise by on the conveyor belt. Thank goodness! What would I have done…. Finally, exited baggage claim and there was my driver! Oh thank you Creator! Had horrible thoughts of being abandoned and fighting of taxi touts! Was reviewing a few kickboxing moves in my mind! My driver was a young, skinny Vietnamese boy who appeared to enjoy laying on the horn – even at times when a car wasn’t in sight…I thought, oh this could be a fun game…decided to count how many times he honked the horn before arriving a the hotel…stopped at 88, figured that was a good number (my birth year, and all…wink, wink). Amazingly, he wasn’t flipped the bird once! Most drivers lazily moved out of his way, not even turning to glare in his direction. Clearly horns serve another purpose here..
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14 hours, 88 honks and 210,000 Dong later… – Hanoi, Vietnam
Jump to the full entry & travel map Springville, California, United States Left Mark & Karla Marie on schedule Thurs 16th and rode up to Springville. Beautiful little town hidden away in a valley on the western side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, nearest sizable town is Porterville. Came to unload and could not open left side pannier, Rang the local Honda dealer in Visalia and got it fixed under the extended warrenty for a $5 tip, That was Friday morning, rested up for the afternoon and then it was down the pub for the evening. Kate had it all set up with 14 of us all together enjoying a local singer and some great backing musicians. Forgot to mention our Thurs afternoon reception committee of Scott and Kathy who live part way home to Kates. They very hospitably put on wine and biscuits and cheese which settled us into life in Springville very nicely.
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Springville & Death Valley – Springville, California, United States
Jump to the full entry & travel map San Francisco, California, United States So, with the vehicle issue settled and refurb underway, my co-worker Frank (my guardian angel and tour guide for Burning Man, also) broke the news to me that finding a vehicle was the EASY part. “You need costumes. You’ll feel like an outsider if you don’t.” Argh….I don’t even dress for Halloween and now I gotta come up with some costumes for the evening events?!?!?! “You’ve traveled a lot. Just use that stuff.” Sure, that’ll work for Joe. He’s got tons of stuff. At least I have sarongs
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It’s Square not to be Hip – San Francisco, California, United States
Jump to the full entry & travel map Ninilchik, Alaska, United States Ninilchik Village is exactly how we pictured a fishing village would look. The Russian Orthodox church is very quaint. Drove to the beach area where lots of people were camping. The Beachcomber RV, which has hookups, is right on the beach and the view is sure better than where we are staying. It’s fascinating to watch the eagles and we spent quite a while one evening taking lots of pictures; all the clam cleaning really attracts them. Watched two fighting over food and chasing one another into the hillside. The people we’re parked next to work here during the summer. They were clamming and had two full buckets. While we were talking, we were surprised to see several eagles flying above us; this area has lots of eagles around the beaches. Our neighbors saw a moose and her calf not far from the campground so we took walks but no luck seeing them. We did have a moose cross the road in front of us on one of our drives to Homer. After the rain finally stopped, the days were crisp and partly sunny. When it’s extreme low tide, people dig for the razor clams so we joined the crowd
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Ninilchik – June 24-26 – Ninilchik, Alaska, United States
Jump to the full entry & travel map Belize City, Belize District, Belize We had a hard last night at Orange Walk… I stayed at the bar to read a little, but end up talking with locals. They paid me some Rum, some local Wine, and Mangos with Salt and Pepper. (yeah that’s spicy!) We went to town and ate some local food. A little girl was working at the restaurant, and A thought it would be a good idea to drink a spoon of hot sauce to make her laugh. It was so worth it 
We went back to the hostel, where we drank with some British, until…10h at night..
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Belize City – Belize City, Belize District, Belize
Jump to the full entry & travel map Hanoi, Vietnam Hanoi, “the city in a bend of a river,” was once named Thang Long (yup, just like the yummy restaurant in the avenues), or “The City of Soaring Dragons.” Found this interesting, as I’ve encountered images of soaring dragons quite recently – but those were in Clear Lake… Woke to an array of sounds this morning that seemed to crescendo by the minute…shopkeepers sweeping the remnants of the previous evening, motorbikes honking and zooming their way down the street and the loudspeaker chanting the national anthem and other daily rituals… Tackled all the hot spots in Hanoi today.
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Hangin’ in Hanoi – Hanoi, Vietnam
Jump to the full entry & travel map San Francisco, California, United States Seriously, preparing for Burning Man is tougher than any international travel I’ve planned so far…and I’ve done an 11-day rafting trip where we were flown into the middle of nowhere in Canada and left with our gear and rafts and that’s about it. Apparently, we need to know about Evaporation Ponds. Despite the Black Rock Desert being a barren desert, they don’t allow you to dump anything but clean fresh water on it to keep the dust down. (Well, not that fresh….they use non-potable water in those big trucks that come around to water the ‘streets’.) I was advised not to use the shower in our motorhome because it would get plugged up with dust. No problem, we have a sun shower we can use….but we have to rig something to catch the water and then either encourage it to evaporate or haul it back out with us. I figure we can dump some of the less muddy water in the RV system, but the more we evap, the less we have to deal with. Thank goodness I’m carrying an engineer on this trip: Joe says he has a plan. Today, I bought 2 playa bikes. I’d been scouring Craigslist for cheap bikes. Oddly, you can search for ‘burning man bikes’ and come up with one or two in the bay area. Impressive. So, I found a nearby Burner, Renata, who was selling her 2 playa bikes for $25 total. When I went to pick them up I saw why she wasn’t attending….she’s 8.5 months pregnant and has a 3 yr old. She says they’ve been in denial about how soon they’d return to Burning Man and finally decided they needed the room in the garage. They still have a storage box with costumes, capes, etc…for their eventual return….though Renata admits trepidation over taking the kids after they’re a certain age.
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Acquiring additional transportation – San Francisco, California, United States
Jump to the full entry & travel map Deadhorse, Alaska, United States The story of this blog is the trip up the Dalton Highway. It was supposed to be mostly dirt road but a lot more is paved than the internet sites I looked at indicated. It is a lot better road than the interstates in Iowa. I finally found someone to ask about the flowers I had been seeing for two thousand miles. In Alaska they are called fireweed because they grow in abundance after a forest fire. There are so many of them the color the hillsides
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400 Miles up a dirt road – Deadhorse, Alaska, United States
Unlike most of my pieces, which are typically composed and begun in a matter of hours or days, the paintings in the series of Last Meals take much longer (no pun i ntended) to execute….While I photograph the leftovers immediately following the meal, it is often several weeks before I gain sufficient distance to formalize the composition and actually b egin painting…. More here: New Last Meal Painting Finally on the Easel
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New Last Meal Painting Finally on the Easel
Jump to the full entry & travel map Bo Ngoen, Pathum Thani, Thailand Yesterday’s pathogen attack has persisted into the morning, and though the Pepto has kept it at bay I don’t care to spend the better part of my vacation preoccupied with hong nahm activities. So I’m relenting and taking the first of the five Levaquin antibiotic pills the travel clinic doctor prescribed as a precaution before I left Los Angeles.
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8. Adventures in Pathum Thani – Bo Ngoen, Pathum Thani, Thailand
Jump to the full entry & travel map Gulf of Alaska, Alaska, United States So the flight is scheduled for eighteen hours and change total, fifteen from LAX to Taipei (TPE) and another three and a half from TPE to Bangkok (BKK) after a two-hour plane change and layover. Two hours is likely too short to be looking for the kind of “stinky tofu” that bested Andrew Zimmern in his Bizarre Foods episode on Taiwan, but we’ll see
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2. South Side of the Sky – Gulf of Alaska, Alaska, United States
Jump to the full entry & travel map Ayutthaya, Thailand Tohn and his wife Naya have been giving us the grand tour of Thailand and we’re fortunate and grateful to be so guided – especially when we see all the people loaded onto those huge, gaudily-colored tour buses and packed into the occasional open-air jitneys. The semi-forced sleep deprivation of yesterday handily dispatched any and all jet lag, and having had a solid, earplug-insured night’s sleep we’ve emerged from zombie status to the land of the living and are ready for some serious adventure. Today we’ve been promised a genuine Lara Croft-Tomb Raider type ancient temple or two, and despite the fact that the Ayutthaya municipality turns out to be one of the busiest (read: tourist-thick) destinations we’ve yet seen, the crowds are actually not too bad, the area is huge, and traveling with people who know the area as second nature means finding things we never would have on our own
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4. Seeking Lara Croft; Finding See-Saw-Ou – Ayutthaya, Thailand
Jump to the full entry & travel map Malvern, England, United Kingdom Yep, you wouldn’t believe it, we found some Morris dancers. Now I’m going to be a bit politically incorrect here, so apologies and hope I don’t offend anyone, but we in NZ know that the British can be a little eccentric. Having said that, they wear their eccentricity with great pride, or perhaps they just don’t realise that they are LOL. So the epitome of eccentricity has to be Morris dancers, and as luck would have it, there seemed to be a Morris Dancing Convention in Malvern. We actually went to walk to the top of a hill called the North Beacon, which we did – a nice pretty gentle climb up a sealed pathway to the top. No cafe at the top, although Ray tells me there was once!!! Height at the top 1395 feet, around 425 metres, so not high. The gradient would not be as hard as the Centre of New Zealand walk in Nelson, but would be further in distance. However, on returning to the town of Great Malvern, we were looking for a place to have some lunch when we saw strangely-attired people wandering around the streets. Where we stopped for lunch there were a whole bunch of them, and they kindly agreed to let me take their photo. But wait, there’s more! We followed them down into the town and found them giving a display at the library, with more Morris Dancers from around the country. I just couldn’t stop laughing, it was just so funny that we had found them. I got some good shots of them doing their stuff, if anyone would like to have a look, and hopefully I can include a video of them also. I could just visualise BBB (aka Paul Beswick) giving this a go, maybe it could become an alternative pastime for those guys at Waimak Club who are getting fed up with all the new rules in agility, they could do this instead LOL. On our way home we passed through a beautiful little village called Ombersley, check out the photos of the half-timbered houses, and the sign in one of the pubs – if you can’t read it on the photo it says something along the lines of: “We welcome dogs and children. Please keep your owners on a lead”
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Malvern and the Morris Dancers – Malvern, England, United Kingdom
Jump to the full entry & travel map Bloomingdale, New Jersey, United States Ok…we are all packed up. These are some sweet backpacks that were purchased from Campmore back in 2003. They fit a tons of stuff. It’s nice, we have matching bags, same color and everything..aww how cute. We were able to cram all of our stuff into them with hardly any room to spare. Sadly enough, I think Denise’s backback has less stuff in it than mine. I just keep telling myself its because she gave me a bunch of crap to carry. Our cat Mookie is in his travel kennel, he’s staying with my parents for the three week’s that we’ll be gone. He wasn’t happy and refused to go in, but Denise worked her magic touch and stuffed him in there. Gave him a few treats and he should be good to go. Our flight takes off at 6:30 this evening and arrives in London at 6:30 am…give or take an hour. So basically we hit the London scene at 1:30am New Jersey time. I’ll snap a few photos of our tired ass faces for your enjoyment.
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Starting Point – Bloomingdale, New Jersey, United States
Jump to the full entry & travel map Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa Some of you have been asking for pictures of the Clinic/Jubilee. I am planning on bringing my camera to church tomorrow so that I can document that experience for you all. I haven’t been extremely comfortable taking pictures at the clinic yet, as it isn’t an exhibit, and I’m not the patients’ “friend” per say. But I hope to capture some photos this week–I am getting familiar with some of the patients, and I think the community is becomming used to the fact that a few American girls are serving in their clinic and waiting on their corners for the minibus each day. I cannot wait to share this huge part of my life here with you all! Stay tuned–later this week I hope to post some beauties. Thanks to all of your prayers—my body is on the mend for sure! I’m feeling much better and having a fabulous weekend. On Friday, I woke up without a fever (woo hoo!).
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Happy Birthday, Teresa and Nelson Mandela – Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa