Tangentry

A funny thing happened when I walked out of my hotel room this morning. There was the H1, just where I had parked it the night before. So far so good. But what was this huge… black… puddle? It looked suspiciously like a quart or two of motor oil. Ugh. So I checked the dipstick, and there was no oil on it whatsoever. Double ugh. And, upon closer inspection, a good deal of the left side of the car was covered in a thin film of oil. Damn.
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Another great day. Within a couple of hours of leaving Thunder Bay, I drove through typical lake lowlands, some nice marsh complete with those archetypical (/ɑrtʃtɪpɪkəl/) marsh plants, marsh verging on forest, pure forest, forest with a mix of of evergreen and deciduous (naked, this time of year) trees, rocky areas, lakeside forests, and probably several other permutations of lake, marsh, forest, and rocks that I’ve neglected. All really, really beautiful. Many of them utterly spectacular.
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Today was a much, much better day than yesterday. Overnight, I received email from Vinny, the guy who I bought the H1 from. He had a tip on where to look for the heater problem, and with that help I was able to get the auxiliary heater going. The aux heater is basically a second heater core and blower between the front and back seats. And, all by itself, it is plenty capable of making the cabin very toasty in short order. Which is very nice if, say, you’re looking at driving a couple of hundred miles in the snow and the main heater is flat out refusing to work.
Read the rest of Buffalo to Seattle: Day Three »

Well, they say to be careful what you wish for.

The day started out earlier than I was expecting: I was wide awake at 6:30am, and seeing as how I was nearly 3000 miles from home, I felt like just getting on with things. So much for plans for Maid of the Mist or the Niagara wine region; I just couldn’t bear sitting around for hours waiting for that stuff to open. Leaving at 7:00am also meant I could probably catch the 1:50pm Tobermory to South Baymouth ferry rather than the 6:10pm that I had been planning on.
Read the rest of Buffalo to Seattle: Day Two »

So I flew out to Buffalo to pick up a 1996 Hummer H1. Yes, the real thing, before they got bought by GM and turned into Suburbans with Arnold-inspired bodywork. The thing is a beast, in the best possible sense. It weights four times more than the Lotus. And it drives like it weighs four times more. People do not pull out in front of you.

Here are the photos from Buffalo to Seattle: Day One. And, since I know that future generations will be desperate for more details of this mini-adventure, here’s the story so far:
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This past weekend my friend Becca hopped out from the east coast, and we headed up to Victoria, British Columbia. We spent a couple of days exploring this somewhat European city, and of course pursuing good food and wine. I’ve uploaded a Victoria by Seaplane photo set to Flickr with a few more pics than appear in this post.

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So I’m new in town. I’m used to that. Usually it means getting lost a lot and not knowing whether the airport is north or south on the freeway. But Seattle… Seattle has weird signs. Not just misspellings or funky iconography, I’m talking about weird signs. I ran across three of ‘em in just a few hours today.

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I’m just back from about two weeks in Argentina and Chile, where I did Bio Bio’s Futaleufu trip (by way of Pete and Momentum River Expeditions), with a couple of extra days in Buenos Aires. The trip was fantastic — great whitewater, great people, and great food. My Futaleufu photo set has some of pics from the trip, but no actual whitewater pics. The class III-V+ rapids were a blast, but a little wet and busy to be breaking out the camera.

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Ok, it’s not that much, but it’s a start. The Chauvet LED Shadow is one of the first LED based blacklights. It’s moderately bright, and it’s a lot more durable and reliable than traditional fluorescent blacklights. However, it’s not nearly as powerful as some of the big UV floodlights, so it looks like just one of them won’t be enough to really light the place. We’ll have to fix that.

Having cool mountain views is one thing. But this sunset was something else altogether. My crappy camera doesn’t do justice to the colors that were on display here; it was really spectacular.