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On the Road Again…

It’s been a year since we’ve posted anything here but we’ve fired up the blog again with another “bucket list” adventure. We’ll post periodically and hope that you’ll tag along with us on a road trip to Montana, where we’ll hike in Glacier National Park, explore part of Yellowstone, and I’ll get to live out my dream of fly fishing and herding cattle on a dude ranch. Some have described the ranch as a spa where animals happen to roam around and while that may be true, it is a working ranch. Yes, we’ve both ridden horses. Yes, we will be in chaps and jeans. I will be sporting a cowboy hat, while Bev is planning to go with the classic baseball cap, à la Billy Crystal. Yes, there will be photos and they will be AWESOME.

As we packed for the trip, I remained undecided on a “look” for my time on the ranch, but narrowed it down to a few possibilities:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I ruled out one style:

 

 

 

 

Along the way we’ll stop for bizarre road trip sights, visit with family and old friends and experience things that you only get from wandering on the road. I can’t wait to see what we encounter, although I hope it doesn’t include a grizzly bear.

On our first day on the road, from Knoxville to northern Illinois, we saw what is arguably the World’s Largest Rocking Chair in Franklin, Indiana. Several other cities make this claim but this one is called Big John and is 32 feet tall. That’s BIG!

BIG JOHN dwarfs Bev!

After measuring up Big John, we stumbled across another strange sight in Franklin, where somebody has collected old gas station signs and displayed them in a courtyard. These are the real deal and include brands that are long gone. This was a random find, driving down a small road trying to get back to the interstate. A road trip gem!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, we saw endless fields of corn. This led to a full discussion about movies that featured cornfields and how nearly every one of them are horror films (the exceptions being Field of Dreams and The Wizard of Oz). We came to the conclusion that the only things in cornfields are zombies, ghouls, aliens, the occasional dead baseball player and live, heartless scarecrows. Never go in one.

DON’T GO IN THERE!!!
I have a hereditary hearing loss and thought I’d try new ears.
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What Do You Get When…?

Some have asked about what it was like to spend seven days on the world’s tallest free standing mountain with a bunch of strangers. We were fortunate to trek with a group of amazing people without a jerk to be found among the paying customers. Sure, most people attempting an adventure like this are cut from a similar cloth, but we’ve all run across our share of rude people on the trail. In all, our team included a cop, a human resources leader, a product manager, a federal agent, a retired librarian, a Walmart associate, a chef, and a house manager. This should be the set-up for one of those “what do you get when you combine…” jokes and, of course, some say that the joke was on each of us who paid hard-earned money to sleep on the ground, eat communally in a canvas tent, and suck air through a straw with every step.

Here are a few things that I learned from this bunch on Mt. Kilimanjaro.

If you wait too long, the right time never arrives. Also, retired librarians kick ass. As the eldest member of the group, Jane scampered up rock walls like a mountain goat, putting all of us to shame. She made the trip from Colorado by herself because she “got tired of waiting” for friends and relatives to find the “right time”. Upon reaching the summit, she scattered the ashes of a hiking friend who ran out of time ten years ago.

Robin and Jane (right) – two of the toughest on the mountain

“I’m a federal agent” always sounds cool.  Mickey is a larger than life character who could have stepped right out of a Robert Ludlum novel. Over the course of the trek, we became convinced that he was really a cyborg and that one morning we’d get a glimpse of him performing minor repairs on his bionic limbs. One thing that wasn’t bionic was his huge heart. Living a “no person left behind” credo, he would give up the shirt on his back or carry every ounce of your stuff if it meant helping you get to the summit. He only LOOKED like The Terminator.

I’ll be back…

No excuses. EVER. We were all afraid of Robin, including the cop among us, who can kill with her thumbs. Robin didn’t talk much at first but she really didn’t need to. The look that said “I’ll cut you into tiny pieces and leave you for the monkeys” was plenty. Appearing at risk of being carried away by a strong wind, Robin was doubted by our American guide who questioned her ability to summit. What a foolish man. Anyone who spent ten minutes with Robin knew that she would find a way to the top. Following her Aunt’s early advice to fulfill a bucket list, she saved money from her job at an Arkansas Walmart, traveled to Africa solo and climbed to 19,340 with seven others who were certain that she might kill them in their sleep. In the span of days she went from feared serial killer to great friend.

Arkansas Tough

Not all Germans are humorless.  That’s not a joke. We met a REAL German with a REAL sense of humor. His name is Klemens the Chef. When he’s all cleaned up, he looks like Chris Noth, the actor who played Mr. Big on the TV show Sex in the City. It’s a good thing he was accompanied by his wife of 20-something years, the other half of the second most awesome couple on the trip. Otherwise, all of the single women may have forced poor Klemens to dance for dollar bills at high altitude. Unfortunately, we couldn’t cajol Klemens into putting on a chef hat and cooking a meal for us on the mountain. Apparently, the only funny German on the planet has his limits.

Klemens the Chef
Chris Noth the Actor – or is he???

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Goofy isn’t just a Disney character. When Bev and I reviewed the packing list from our guide company, we checked off every item. Graciella, a house manager who works with her comic German chef husband, read the same document and interpreted it as “a guideline”. Surely, “hot water bottle” was supposed to be on the gear list and the absence of “Depends” must have been an administrative oversight. A kind-hearted soul, she packed enough gear for the entire group but somehow managed to remain under the strict weight limit.

“Sure – I have some pizzas in here. How many do you want?

Some of the greatest adventures are a result of drinking wine and hearing someone say “I’m thinking of (fill in the blank).”  Especially when that someone is named Tom Erceg, who has completed Ironman races, trekked in the Himalayas, and ridden a bicycle across the United States. Thanks for letting us share your birthday adventure, Tom! You’re a pretty good guy for a Raiders fan.

I am ADVENTURE MAN!

Love can survive extreme conditions.  Bev and I are fans of the show “The Amazing Race”, a reality TV show with teams of two competing in a race around the world. We mock couples who audition for the show as “dating” couples testing their compatability under physical and emotional stress. Nearly all of them fail that experiment. Kilimanjaro was our mini-Amazing Race. Tent? No problem? Shared pee bottle? No problem? Limited dental hygiene? Gross, but no problem. Working as a team in high altitude? No trouble. We’ve seen worse and I wouldn’t want to go through it with anyone else.

No adventure too big for us
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Top Sports (???) Stories of 2011

I was on the gym treadmill earlier this week, stuck watching a bank of televisions that spew, well, what televisions tend to spew at 5am. Most of them were tuned to infomercials pitching products designed to make Americans even fatter. The irony of post-Christmas Nutri-System commercials interspersed throughout a “show” selling deep-friers was probably lost on the producers.

One television was tuned to a channel broadcasting a story on the Associate Press “Top Sports Stories of 2011”. Their “Top Sports Story”? The “Fall of Penn State Football”. The NBA lockout was the #2 “sports story” of 2011. I don’t follow sports like I did as a kid, when I would get the Los Angeles Times, spread it across the kitchen table, and read all of the box scores before the rest of the house was awake. However, even in the midst of a general moral decline in this country, I’m pretty certain that pedophilia and child rape aren’t recognized as “sports”. Yes, the Catholic church has Notre Dame but unless they’ve added priests to the football team’s roster, I don’t think that one counts. And in the “unclear on the concept” category, how does NOT playing a sport qualify as a “top sports story”? I think that’s called an oxymoron. In the NBA’s case, the emphasis is on MORON.

Putting a child rapist and rich NBA players street thugs (and the team owners) on any end of year “sports stories” list is an insult to Abby Wambach and the U.S. Women’s Soccer team who beat mighty Brazil in the World Cup quarterfinals (or the Japanese team who won the gold while their country recovered from a cataclysmic earthquake and tsunami). It’s an insult to the St. Louis Cardinals. who were losing by two runs and were down to their last strike in BOTH the ninth and tenth innings in Game Six of the World Series before defeating the Texas Rangers. It’s an insult to the Packers, who brought an NFL Championship back to Green Bay. It’s an insult to Derek Jeter, who became the 28th player in the history of baseball and the first Yankee to EVER reach the 3,000 career base hit milestone. It’s an insult to a 22-year old golfer named Rory McIlroy who “only” led the U.S. Open from start to finish, setting a course record along the way. Sorry. Sports stories are about athletic achievement. “News stories” about pedophiles, their co-conspirators, and millionaire NBA gangsters don’t qualify.

And don’t even get me started on the NBA player thug who recently changed his legal name to Metta World Peace (really – even I couldn’t make this up). You may know him as the former Ron Artest, the player who ran up into the stands during an NBA game a few years back and punched the crap out of a fan. He was allowed to remain in the NBA, make more millions, and now shows up in the Lakers’ box scores as “World Peace”. And the NBA wonders why it has an image problem.

I don’t know what your “top sports stories” were for 2011. Mine were all of the great moments I got to share with Bev, spent running, hiking, cycling, eating a dog at the ballpark, or yelling at the television from the comfort of our sofa. I hope that yours were just as special.

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Vegas Nights

We recently returned from a few days in Las Vegas, where I spoke at a conference and Bev enjoyed a few well-deserved vacation days. Vegas is a great people watching city, but if you don’t gamble or aren’t dazzled by all of the glitz, it’s just a weird, loud place in the middle of the desert. We’d each had our own Vegas experiences but this was our first trip there together.

One of the first times that I went to Las Vegas, in 1981, I got married on Valentines Day. I did this along with hundreds (thousands?) of other adults who met the only requirement to receive a wedding license – be sober enough to sign your own name without assistance. In hindsight, this may have been the one moment when being very drunk would have been a good thing. Regretfully, I was perfectly sober. I’m pretty sure that every mother’s nightmare includes having her oldest child get married in a place called Little Chapel of Hearts on Las Vegas Boulevard. Elvis was not in the building but it was still a traumatic experience. I’m pleased to report that my mother has since forgiven me and is happy that I’m in a loving and healthy relationship. She’s also probably glad that I don’t have the bad 80’s permed hair thing going on. Bev calls it the Chia Pet Hairdo.

Bad On So Many Levels

Bev’s previous Las Vegas experiences include running the Rock N Roll Las Vegas Half Marathon with a group of girlfriends. The year that she ran it, they closed the Strip, relocated some of the drunks, and began the race on an early morning in December. The temperature never got out of the 30s. Running 13.1 miles is hard enough but doing it in the frozen desert really sucks. Because the Strip isn’t long enough to do a straight “out and back” course, the race diverts into the seedy (one might say ghetto) part of Las Vegas before returning to Las Vegas Blvd. for the last few miles. This race should be called the “Most Unappealing Race in America” (“Run For Your Life” is already taken by the Oakland Marathon). Now they start the Las Vegas race at 5:30pm and promote it as “Strip at Night”. Apparently, frostbitten runners were bad publicity. Bev may have froze, but at least she didn’t get married in a place with neon signage. One of us is smarter than the other.

Fortunately, we didn’t engage in any behavior that had to “stay in Vegas”. In fact, our time in Sin City would be considered boring by most. Sit outside, away from the casinos. Walk around. Shop a little. Lay around in a nice hotel room, reading books and watching the World Series. Order room service.  Nothing to write home about, but for one experience in the Palazzo casino.

We joined a couple of friends for dinner on our second night in town. Afterwards, one of them wanted to play the slots, so three of us sat down to play and all quickly cashed out after just a few minutes. Slot machines quit dispensing coins years ago and now print a voucher that you can redeem for cash or insert into another slot machine. Based on the value of our vouchers, Bev decided to redeem them at the Cashier window instead of using the automated voucher redeem machines. We watched as she walked off in her cute shorts with her blonde hair pulled back in a pony tail tucked through the back of a baseball cap. It took all of ten seconds for a man to approach her in the Cashier line, taking an interest in her and her three cash vouchers. He was all “how YOU doing” and asking her how she got her winnings. Did she play craps? Blackjack? This guy thought that he was going to woo-woo the pretty woman holding THREE vouchers, which were clearly so large that she didn’t want to trust them to a machine. After handling his questions with monosyllabic responses, Bev strode confidently to the window, handed over those three vouchers and watched intensely as the cashier, with a straight face,  counted aloud. 25… 50… 55… cents, sliding two quarters and a nickel across the counter. Mr. “How YOU Doing?” was gone before Bev turned around and strode toward us with our collective “winnings”. All 55 cents of them.

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Now Boarding

We boarded a plane this morning. It took forever. This is how it went.

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll begin general boarding in just a few minutes for Flight 5678 to Houston. We ask that you remain seated in the gate area until your group or row number is called.

At this time we’d like to welcome all uniformed military personnel and First Class passengers.
Platinum Elite Access members may now board at any time.

Thank you for your patience. Star Alliance Gold and Silver Elite Access members, welcome aboard.

We’ll now board Bronze Elite Access members.

Welcome, Tin and Aluminum Elite Access members.

Non-Alloy Elite Access members may now board – but only if the words “Not As Elite As You Thought!” are displayed on your boarding pass.

Travelers with small children. Out of consideration for your fellow passengers, please stow all infants in the overhead bins.

Passengers requiring extra time to get down the jetway. This includes the morbidly obese! And don’t forget about our large selection of chemically injected processed food available for purchase on today’s flight.

Continuing with pre-boarding, we’d like to welcome all passengers with one leg or one arm (and make certain you’re not seated in an emergency exit row).

Chase Bank credit card holders.

AAA Club members (get a 10% in-flight discount on a bag of peanuts that used to be free!)

Costco Club members (must show boarding pass and receipt upon exiting the plane)

Wannabe Platinum but Perpetually Stuck at Wood Level Elite Access members

Paper Mâché Elite Access members

Hair Club members

Any passengers who were dumb enough to pay us a crap load of money for “priority boarding” privileges.

Thank you again ladies and gentlemen. We are now ready to start the general boarding process for the four remaining passengers in the gate area. We will board by rows, beginning with rows 36-38. Rows 34-36. Rows 32-34…

Now boarding, everyone but you.