Mad-keen cyclists

Apparently “mad-keen” is Australian for very enthusiastic. I learned this on a MassBike supported ride across Massachusetts with my friend Larry Reed and almost a hundred other riders. One rider came from Australia and described her parents as mad-keen cyclists. As a result of their affliction, they had lots of excellent spare parts around home, which they put together on a spiffy carbon frame and gave Courtney a fine bicycle to bring to America.

We also met a fellow named Rashah. Well, that’s not really his name. He got the nickname after a year of backpacking around Europe. When he finally settled down and got a job in England, his boss declared that he was so skinny that he looked like a rasher of bacon. That was my second foreign word of the trip. I’d read of rashers of bacon, and always thought a rasher must be some English unit of measure. However, my Merriam-Webster dictionary says it’s ”a thin slice of bacon or ham broiled or fried; also: a portion (as of bacon) consisting of several slices «eggs with a rasher of bacon».” But our guy is a New Englander, so he threw away the final r and became Rashah. He sports a wide moustache that curls up at the ends and wears stylish one-of-a-kind bicycle pants.

Since I’ve already started singling out characters from our ride, I must conclude with Erika, who went from running a vegan restaurant to opening a meat market. She’s into food, and she’s happy to prepare whatever people want to buy. She’s also a strong cyclist, an avid fund-raiser for charity, and a brilliant conversationalist.

I’m happy to describe all three of those people as mad-keen cyclists. Larry and I are pleased to describe ourselves that way too. We rode hard, ate and slept well, and repeated. We enjoyed the ride and the roads we traveled, and we had a great time chatting with the extremely diverse group of people who came together for this trip. I wasn’t sure, when I saw folks gathering, that I’d have much in common with many of them. It turns out, of course, that we found a great deal in common and the commonality went far, far beyond bicycles. I enjoy meeting new people even more than I enjoy riding my bike, which means that I couldn’t help but have a great time.

Climbing Sugarloaf

Gun violence

Here in the USA we’ve just had a couple more instances of gun violence. It seems to be a part of our culture now, and I don’t like it. I wonder how foreigners think about it. Well, actually I know how at least some foreigners think about it. My friends think it’s weird and a little scary. I wonder if this will dampen their desire to visit the USA if it keeps up.

I do have a potential solution to the tourism problem. We need to turn the concern into an advantage. Think about how Americans everywhere are “weaponing up,” buying new and better guns before good handguns and assault weapons become less accessible. If everybody here has a gun, folks unable to buy guns in their home countries will feel disadvantaged when they come to visit. What we need is gun rental kiosks at all international airports. Even if we pass new laws requiring background checks for gun owners, visitors can obtain guns without purchase and avoid the slow and inconvenient process of becoming owners.

It could really boost our tourist industry. Not only does easy availability of rental guns remove a deterrent to travel, for some visitors it will be an incentive to come. Unable to enjoy the pleasure of firing a handgun at home, gun tourists would begin traveling to America for the opportunity to carry a gun and fire it at rats, tin cans, and other appropriate targets. Hotels in remote areas would see a surge in business, and could even supplement their income by selling bullets in lobby convenience stores. And imagine the letters our new tourists will send home to their friends, building a virtuous cycle supporting a new field of travel.

I suppose the only reason we don’t have gun rental kiosks already is that nobody has solved the liability problem. If somebody rents a gun to a tourist who uses it inappropriately, perhaps the victims will try to sue him for arming a psychopath. If insurance companies can’t come up with a good way around this problem, then it’s time for new legislation. If every American is required to carry gun liability insurance, then the costs will be sufficiently diluted that it shouldn’t be a concern to gun-rental entrepreneurs. Our gun problem can be solved, and approaching it in this way is much more likely to get legislative approval than those limiting “solutions” that never go anywhere.

Tree surgery

As I passed through the Boston Public Garden this morning, I noticed a guy pruning a big tree. He had a gleaming truck with a very long double-articulated hoist which he controlled from inside his bucket. When he saw me taking pictures, he swung his bucket over to me and came down so I’d get a good picture.

The whole situation caught my attention because it differed so greatly from tree surgery in my other home town of Minsk. In Minsk, the tree-pruning teams arrive in old Soviet trucks that leak oil when parked and billow black smoke when running. According to someone in a position to know, nobody on the job, and possibly nobody in the home office, has any special training in tree surgery. And as far as I can tell from the ground, the guy doing the cutting gets positioned by a confederate sitting on the back of the truck, and he can’t position himself. The two guys drive the truck up to the tree however it’s convenient for them and then hack away until they declare themselves finished.

The Boston guy’s truck was parked on wheel mats which protected the lawn from his truck’s tires, and the clean truck proclaimed the presence of a certified arborist. His confederates were far away, grinding up the branches he’d removed from another tree. The Boston guy could go almost anywhere with his double-articulated lift with telescoping extension. The Minsk guys have to jockey around in their trucks to get in a convenient position for the simpler arm (like a human arm with one elbow) that lifts the woodsman.

The arborist in Boston suggests to me a difference in the relative wealth of the two cities, though it may represent simply a difference in priorities. Perhaps I wouldn’t have stopped to marvel at the gleaming truck in the Public Garden if I didn’t have a point of comparison, but today I’m impressed.

More cousins and a snake

I have a tradition with the cousins on my mom’s side to get together on Labor Day weekend. We meet in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains at the place where we played together as children. In fact, our parents spent lots of time there before us, and my cousins’ children play there too. It started out as a tiny cabin in the woods, but by now the family has spread out a bit and we still have enough space for our bigger family.

It’s a good thing we all get along, however, because we pack ourselves pretty close together. Most of us prefer to sleep outdoors, so we don’t mind the fact that there aren’t enough beds inside for all of us. We take turns in an outdoor shower, trying to save water for the next person. And we take turns in an almost-indoor toilet added onto the back of a bedroom. And, of course, we’re most comfortable eating our meals outdoors. It would be hard to fit all of us indoors at once. I love these people, and I love being with them. We walk, talk, play games, swim, goof around and treasure the opportunity to be together.

Yesterday some of us decided to hike up to “Lake George.” It’s not a real lake, but George is a real person. He was a guest many years ago, and he scrambled up Alder Creek farther than any of us had gone before, finding a beautiful place to go fishing. Unfortunately, he slipped and fell onto some rocks, breaking his ankle. It must have been extremely hard to get him out of there, because it’s plain hard to get in and out of there uninjured.

This was my second trip to Lake George, though I know the first part of the trip quite well. First we walk out the top of a big water pipe alongside the creek until we get to a remote dam. We’ve all been frequently to the dam, but it’s so hard to get above the pool enclosed by the dam that I never tried it until the previous cousins’ weekend. This time would be the first trip for little Keira. I don’t know how old she is, but somewhere between 8 and 10 years old. She may be small, but she’s fearless and capable so she’s a great companion. We let her pick the route over the rocks and boulders much of the way up, and she did an amazing job.

On the way back, Keira’s cousin Reed and I were in front, hustling down the pipe and thinking about the food waiting for us at the cabin. All of a sudden we heard a loud buzzing sound and Reed stopped immediately. I stopped behind him and followed his eyes down to a huge rattlesnake in the grass almost beside us. We backed up. The snake rattled his tail and watched us intently. We didn’t feel so much threatened as warned, and we gave him a very respectable distance. Only Janet had any kind of a camera with her, an iPhone. She took some pictures from afar and then we all walked around the snake on the other side of the pipe. I thought it was interesting that nobody spoke of hurting the snake, because that would have been the standard response when I was a kid. He wasn’t, in our minds, threatening anybody and we had ventured into his territory. So we didn’t threaten him either.

Altogether, we enjoyed a very non-threatening weekend, but here's a video of our final adventure.

Leaving Colorado

We had a really great weekend in Breckenridge, Colorado, at a family reunion with my first wife's cousins. We stayed at an inn with a big common room. Because we got some rainy weather we had to use the common room a couple of times instead of picnicking at a lake-side park. This worked out quite well, so I think we learned something for future family gatherings. The key thing was being together, and staying here made that really easy.

We also had time for exploring, shopping and riding some mountainside amusements, depending on individual tastes.

Now we are on our way to San Francisco, where we'll see more relatives. Getting to San Francisco, we chose Frontier Airlines. Apparently we got a real deal on the seats, because they won't even pour us a glass of orange juice unless we give them more money. I saw how much Frontier wanted more money when I printed out our boarding passes at the hotel this morning. I already knew that if we wanted to check any luggage it would cost us an extra $20 per bag, but I discovered that if I had not done the online check-in then they would have charged us money at the airport for our carry-on bags.

They also threatened to charge a fee if either of our bags exceeded their strict size limit. I suspect that Alla's bag may have failed, but nobody noticed.

We watched with amusement as the stewardess decided who got free drinks and who didn't. I could have a glass of water for free if I didn't want any ice. Ice costs extra. Somehow I decided to splurge on a Kind bar for a little more than it would have cost in a fancy grocery store. At first it looked like I couldn't have one after all because they had already sold the last one somewhere in the five rows ahead of us. Then, miraculously, they found one more at the back of the plane somewhere.

This whole revenue-scrounging plan bugs me enough that I don't expect to fly this airline ever again. I'm glad we have choices.

Iceland

We did Iceland all wrong, but we had a really great time. I know it's a good idea to have a plan, to know something about where you're going and how to do it. We didn't exactly pull that off. I just went online and booked a room at a hotel near downtown Reykjavik, choosing it because the room looked pretty nice and one of the reviewers on TripAdvisor said that the guy at the desk gave him good ideas of things to do in the area.

We got in a little after eleven p.m., having failed to talk SAS into letting us ride in empty seats on an earlier flight. Since we didn't even know for sure when we'd get in, I felt especially justified in having no advance plans. The guy at the desk would bail us out anyway. And the passenger next to us in the plane told us about the buses from the airport to downtown so we bought tickets and got onto the bus leaving on about half an hour. The bus had Wi-Fi, so I started researching our options as we rode.

Based on my research, the only way to see the stuff I wanted to see in the time available would be in a rental car, and I suspected that said rental car would not have cost much more than we had just paid for our two round-trip bus tickets. I had failed, but we were on the bus and I was too exhausted to think about alternatives. Anyway, I could look forward to getting advice at the hotel. Well, that didn't work out either. The desk clerk that night had very little to suggest, though he gestured vaguely at a lousy map and talked about taking a walk. He also confessed that breakfast at out hotel would be pretty meager and that we could eat better at another hotel around the corner. We went straight to bed.

After the recommended breakfast, I asked the clerk at the hotel around the corner what she thought we should do today. She wanted us to walk around too, but she gave us a better map, marked out a route, and told us about what she thought we should see and do. We had an outstanding time.

It wasn't raining when we set out. Apparently that's pretty special, to have dry weather in Iceland. We took an umbrella anyway, and launched ourselves to the shore, down a major commercial street, and over to the opera house. Along the way we marveled at the fact that we got into the country so easily last night, with no attention from any customs officer and no evidence that there had ever been such a thing as passport control or visas. We think they're happy to have anybody who thinks he can afford to buy food in the country.

We loved the opera house, and spent a long time there. It was raining by the time we went back outdoors, but we continued our tour, with an extended indoor break at city hall. Almost everything we wanted to do was free. The sandwiches we bought for lunch were not so close to free, but they were so delicious that we went back to buy more to eat on our way to Denver. Everything worked out great and we had an excellent time. Now we want to come back, probably rent a car, play in the hot springs and see the landscape. I'm glad we took the stopover.

Plenty of time

Leaving Belarus this time, we wanted to fly directly to Denver for a family reunion. Most of the itineraries I found online were overwhelmingly expensive, but I found a fabulously inconvenient alternative. In the name of economy, I convinced Alla that we could break up a long trip by spending a day in Reykjavik and we'd be happy about our convoluted itinerary, which even involved taking a train from Minsk to Vilnius.

Things started to fall apart immediately, as the cheap seats on the early flight to Reykjavik sold out while we discussed our plans. Momentum carried us to buy the late flight anyway, promising ourselves to stand by for the early one. Then the situation deteriorated further when Lithuanian customs changed their procedures in Vilnius and we weren't sure we could get out of the train station in time to catch our first flight.

We decided the bus might not be so bad after all, and left home at 5:15 this morning to get onto the first one of the day. Ouch, those bus seats were cramped. But we did get to the airport on time and flew comfortably to Copenhagen. Then we tried hard to stand by for empty seats on the early flight to Reykjavik, but the airline wouldn't let us play games with our super-cheap tickets. They'd rather fly with empty seats than encourage opportunists like us.

So... I hoped to be in Iceland by now but we are entertaining ourselves during an extended stopover at the Copenhagen airport. I wonder what our next-best itinerary would have looked like. It might have been better.