Fall migration-Bozeman-October 25th to present

For those starting to read here, STOP!  Although I have posted this all at once, chronologically you have to go to my very first blog post and work your way backwards through things until you reach this point (e.g., read from bottom to top) to get a sense of what has been happening.  This choose-your-own-adventure starts in Finland.  If you go to the right hand side of the page, find the link at the very bottom and work your way up.  It was a bit difficult for me to get used to this in blogs so I thought I would post a little warning.  You can also read backwards in time if you want, like the movie Momento.  If that works for you then go for it!

Montana...
Having finally kicked the cold I had caught upon arriving in Southern California, it was time to drive North with my mother back to Montana.  As we climbed in latitude, the temperature sank until we arrived in the mountains near Bozeman with snow swirling around us.  This is where I am now and where the blog will end until something sufficiently significant happens.  For the last several weeks, I have been cleaning 7 years of junk out of my parents basement, getting my financial life in order and meeting whatever friends are still around.  We celebrated Halloween in the traditional way by watching a horror movie and answering the door when trick-or-treaters came.  I had a great time doing an alley cat bicycle scavenger hunt organized by my old friend Reuben and his wife Alice and a crowd of good natured fanatics.  The snow has been flying recently with two big dumps of at least 6 inches each (maybe about 10 cm for those who like those units better).  With the temperature hovering around 0 F (-20 C) biking season is severely curtailed although ski season is on the verge of beginning.  Evenings, while wrapping up my cleaning work, I have contented myself to watch movies I had missed while in Germany.  It is now clear where my obsession with film came from...there isn't a lot else to do during a hard cold winter in Montana except catch up on cinema or go skiing.  My recommendations include Ink and Mary and Max for now although film consumption is through the roof for me in comparison to what I watched in Germany.

 My zombified pumpkin.

 My mother's toothy pumpkin.

 Oooh...scary!

 Mystic lake before the mountains froze over.  Attack of the enormous cold front.

 Mystic lake again.

 November weather in Bozeman.

Yeah, here comes ski season!

I'll end my travelblog here for now.  Thanks to anyone who has taken the time to read and who so patiently waited for me to write this so that you could hear anything at all from my normally silent avatar about where the heck I have been (my avatar being the part of me that chooses to be on line and put up with the cultural and business forces sloshing about in the world forcing me to waste ever more time online instead of doing real things with friends).  Thanks also to all those people who so graciously hosted me during the course of my travels in the last months both in Europe and in the States and for your great friendship.  Without you, this wouldn't have been even half as fun.  I wish everybody was much closer, although in lieu of such a luxury, your diversity and broad spread across the country made for a great little journey of connect the dots for me!

Tom

Fall migration-San Diego/La Jolla via Denver, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles-October 18th to October 25th

The next step of this journey crosses the midwest, through my old stomping grounds in Denver and Boulder and is finally coupled to a long drive starting in Salt Lake City, passing through Las Vegas and ending in La Jolla, CA.  In broad brushstrokes, I once again was surrounded by "unique" individuals abord the Amtrak train.  The combination of personalities in the seats just in front of me (a 14 year old girl, her grandmother, and two middle aged men) resulted in a conversation so utterly bizarre and pseudo-pornographic (started by the grandmother, ironically enough) that the conductor of the train had to announce to the entire train that they were trying to maintain a "family" environment on board the train and to please keep your conversations on polite topics.  Thankfully, most of the trouble was over by Denver the next morning and I had a very enjoyable ride past old mountain biking haunts (for Dave or Josh, the train passed through Rattlesnake Ridge where we used to go mountain biking...I remember watching trains enter the tunnel there and now I have ridden through it).  Bald eagles could be spotted periodically along the banks of the river.  I even spotted one standing in a shallow inlet of the river waiting for fish at one point (I didn't know that they did this kind of thing...I thought they liked to fly around and dive for fish).  Leaving the mountains and entering the plains of Utah near Moab, a spectacular sunset lit up the train.  In spite of a life-saving stash of chocolate and sandwiches from my relatives in Chicago, I reached Salt Lake City exhausted and was thankful to meet my mother at the station and get some rest before we began our journey by car together to my brother's apartment in La Jolla the next day.  Having driven this stretch of road many times in my youth on the way to Pomona, the landscape was familiar.  The desert is impressive and the landscapes vast and forbidding.  By the time we reached the Los Angeles basin, we encountered a thunderstorm and watched lightning hit a neighboring hillside in the dark, sparks flying every direction as it destroyed a tower of some sort.  With the high volume of traffic and more than 29 hours of travel behind me, my body gave in to some sort of infection as we pulled into my brothers place in La Jolla.  In spite of the flu I came down with and then passed on to my brother, we were able to walk the beach, see the Scripps Aquarium, enjoy a California style brunch and another pancake breakfast.  We caught a movie and ate at In-n-out burger and had some sushi and authentic mexican food.  Next time some surfing will be on the menu.

Being sick, there wasn't a lot to do in the evenings except to try to keep from being destroyed by fevers and coughing.  This is where I got my second lesson on what I had missed in popular culture and on the internet during my time in Germany.  Don't ask me why I missed it.  There is very fast internet in Germany.  The most notable are a series of old spice commericals (the original http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE) (the sesame street version  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkd5dJIVjgM),  a short film about a long death (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VDvgL58h_Y), and a sort of offensive commercial for soap (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzoARPa3XGs&feature=aso).  Thank god other people have the patience to dig through mountains of internet junk looking for diamonds so that I don't have to...

 The mighty Mississippi river!

 Sunset over Iowa

 The Colorado River

 More Colorado River.

 The plains of Utah near Moab and Arches.

 La Jolla near the Scripps Aquarium

 If you leave your eyes open, a camera can steal them!

 Old Towne San Diego

 State Park in La Jolla.  Beautiful beaches.

A bird about to go body surfing.

Next stop.  Bozeman Montana.

Fall migration-Chicago-9th of October to 17th of October

Now I'm on a train heading from New Orleans to Chicago to visit  Kim, Jim, Mandy, Danny, Owen, Kyle, Harriet and Jack, all of whom I have not seen for years or, in the case of the young 'uns, have not even yet met.  It is October and everywhere in the North, the leaves are turning and it is Fall, a fact that I had lost track of as I was sitting on the Gulf of Mexico.  The train ride was mercifully peaceful and I enjoyed a beer in the panoramic viewing car and set next to relatively sedate passengers and even got a bit of sleep.  My arrival at Kim's place coincided with the Chicago Marathon which filled the downtown but  did not cause any particular problem for me and my backpack.  Taking the El to Logan Square to meet Kim, I was able to survey the fine "Hipster" landscape with alternashops and radical bookstores and coffee grinders, all situated comfortably under the noisy El in an ethnically hispanic district.  We had some tex mex and after catching up for a bit, decided to do the architectural tour of Chicago the next day.  To anyone who hasn't come to Chicago before, this comes highly recommended.  The downtown of the city is littered with history and significant buildings, all of which have stories brilliantly described by the expert tour guides.  Following a walk downtown through the Millenium park and past the Italian-American Columbus day celebration and in order to let Kim concentrate on her work and life in peace, I headed over to Mandy and Jim's place in the Highland Park suburb of Chicago.  Their house was festooned with cobwebs and tombstones in preparation for Halloween which was rapidly approaching.  Although no hapless walkers had been caught by the spider webs, the traps had at least been set.  The next several days were spent playing a novel variant of football, reading stories, picking up and dropping off kids, cooking, talking and generally enjoying the hurricane of life that three kids can make!  Like a lateral pass, I was handed off to the relative quiet of Harriet and Jack who live nearby.  We enjoyed the Chicago botanical garden, an impressive concert by the local philharmonic, a nice walk through a midwestern bog, and a quick visit to lake Geneva in Wisconsin.  I also took an afternoon on a bicycle on the des Plaines river trail in Greyslake.

During my stay here in the midwest, I had my first real pancake breakfast since returning to the U.S. (eat your heart out Patrick and Christian...pfannekuchen fruestuek!), a time-honored piece of Americana, and was impressed with the ability of the Owen and Danny to put those things away.  I also sampled my first bratwurst upon returning.  For confused Germans, Wisconsin and the midwest in general are a good place to get "authentic" German food like this due to the strong deutsche einfluss and numerous einwanderer.  Leider kommt die Bratwurst nicht von Scheboygan und schmeckt nicht genau so wie es sollte.  Schade.  I continued my cultural education and found out that I bear a passing resemblance to the star of the movie Transporter, Jason Statham (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0293662/).  I'll let you be the judge.  I learned who Thing 1 and Thing 2 are as well as that the theme song to the cartoon makes excellent flying music!  I also know that there is a dinosaur train and that I shouldn't miss it.

 The Amtrak viewing car!  Great for watching sunsets and avoiding snoring neighbors.

 I noticed a strange message stenciled onto this train car.  "DO NOT HUMP".  Words to live by.

The beginning of the Chicago architectural boat tour.

Chicago architectural tour.  From what I remember, the levels on this building reflect the heights of the buildings around it.  This helps it blend harmoniously with its surroundings even though it is much higher than everything else.

 Cool reflection in the rounded building there.

In the background, the Sears Tower (now equipped with plexiglass floors very high up so you can look down and lose you lunch, just like we did at the CN tower in Toronto...they have a bridge made out of this stuff in the grand canyon too...viewing floors are all the rage and can hold many hippopotomuses worth of weight!).  In the foreground, a building that, to me is reminiscent of something Gaudi might have designed in Barcelona.

 Millenium Park in downtown Chicago.  Looks like a great place to hear a concert.  Architecture similar to the Disney center in Los Angeles.

 Mr Bean.

 Japanese Garden at the Chicago Botanical Garden.

Baha'i temple on the banks of Lake Michigan.  One of the most impressive churches I have seen in the U.S.  The religion is interesting as well.  According to their museum, they profess a frankly surprising tolerance of or desire to include all religions without modification.  Not sure if they are cool with religions espousing multiple gods.  It's a start at least.

 DUCK...s!  It is the Des Plaines river trail.

 Yes, it is Autumn along the des Plaines

 A beaver was here.

 I dont know what animal built this near the des Plaines

A Wisconsin interpretation of a Bratwurst.  While tasty, it is not the same as a real German Brat.  Sorry guys, nice try.

Nachstes haltestelle, Salt Lake City and San Diego!

Fall migration-New Orleans-7th of October to 9th of October

I've never been to New Orleans and it has long worried me that one more hurricane, one more oil spill and my chances to see this legendary city would pass forever.  As the Amtrak service from Orlando to New Orleans has been closed since Hurricane Katrina, I jumped on a plane in Florida and got off in the Big Easy.  Although I know nobody in the city, there is plenty to see.  The French Quarter of course, where Jazz music was invented and nurtured, the Audubon zoo, Tulane University, Magazine Street, Frenchman street and lots of old buildings of a particular style.  My goal was just to soak up a little bit of the funky city by wandering for a few days.  This is a carnival town, something shared with Mainz where I had lived for the last five years, and the only town I know of in the U.S. that celebrates this event (I suppose there are other towns in the south that join in).  Whereas Mainz has overabundant enthusiasm, New Orleans has a sort of soul that I never quite saw, or at least couldn't share, in Germany.  They have brass bands in Mainz once a year in carnival and periodically in the dorfer.  In New Orleans, they have funky, jazzy brass bands that play year round to big crowds and their own style of club music called "Bounce".  They have political/drunken parades in Mainz in the freezing cold that are cleaned up and dissapear in days.  In New Orleans, beads that are thrown during the drunken parades and festoon trees and power lines and balconies somehow stay up year round.  It is never really very cold down there and you can sit out side on the porch and eat red beans and jambalaya at almost any time of the year (OK, maybe a little exagerated, but for somebody from Montana where it is routinely below zero F, New Orelans seems this way).  It is like carnival never completely ends in New Orleans and, even according to locals, there are festivals practically every weekend for no real reason than to have them.  While I was there, I walked through a blues festival on Magazine street.  Another thing I liked was that everybody calls you "Baby" or "Honey" (not like the "Hun" of Baltimore) down there in the shops.  For some reason, this made everything seem more personal although I knew that everybody got called this.

Recovery in New Orleans seems to be happening, but the speed and durability of the recovery depends on who you talk to.  Through my own eyes, although many businesses are still empty and many people have moved away, there is still a solid core that remains.  Problems remain including crime, corruption, dilapidated/abandon buildings, poverty and the rest, but there is still something of the soul remaining.  Hopefully hurricanes and global warming dont destroy it.

New Orleans sky line (Financial district).  Notice the coke dispenser in the middle of nowhere and the little yellow house.  What the hell is that doing there?  What is the rent like, I wonder.

 More functioning gas lamps.  Second city, aside from Dublin, where I have seen this.  Cool stuff.

 Standing near the river.  I forget the name of the building but it is in the French Quarter.

Magazine Street at night.  This is the style of building you will see all over.  Very quaint.  Walking the French Quarter at night is a bit more hectic and is, in my own terminology, a sort of tourist ghetto.  I only got propositioned or offered drugs a few times.  I guess that is part of the lure of New Orleans for some people...loose liquor laws and lots of debauchery.  Kind of like the Amsterdam of the U.S.

You have seen this sculptor before at the Baltimore Science museum.  This was the Museum of Fine Arts in New Orleans.  Also a great exhibit on native american cultures in Chaco canyon area and Southwestern U.S.

 More scary sculpture.  This bug will fight the stainless steel beast of Toronto's Distillery!

 The shadow falling on the awning made me think of all the Christian bible thumping that goes on in this part of the world.  In this case, not a cross, but a power line casting a fortuitous shadow.

 I only saw a car this big once in Europe in seven years.

This is a view along Burbon Street in NOLA.  Den of vice and corruption and of nice little houses with pastel colors.

After an enjoyable time and a couple of good meals including red beans, jambalaya, grits, and a hot sausage Po' boy as well as a late evening out listening to classic jazz and new orleans style brass bands in the clubs of Frenchman street, it was time to move again.

Next stop, Chicago!

Fall migration-Gainesville/New Smyrna Beach/Everglades-September 28th to October 6th

My next visit was to see Gina, Paul and Debbie down in Florida.  Climbing aboard a train headed from Baltimore, Maryland to Orlando, Florida is not for the faint of heart.  To put this in perspective, for a European, a train ride is a generally pleasant experience.  Your journey, on average lasts between 1 and 8 hours and is rarely longer.  En route, you are surrounded by business people, students, a smattering of tourists and locals, with an occasional nut case or drunken posse of football fans or bachlor/bachelorette parties.  While occasionally annoying, these last categories are definitely the minority and can usually be tolerated or, if you need a drink, can be joined with little problem.  In the U.S., if you are not driving a car, you automatically become one of the crazies (one notable exception would be the urban corridor between Boston, New York City, Baltimore, Washington D.C., and Philidelphia which has enough people to make train travel an alluring prospect).  If you are going 1433 km from Baltimore to Florida by train, you are definitely in with the crazies.  To put this in perspective, this is almost the same as travelling from Frankfurt to Barcelona.  Leaving at 18 put me into Orlando at around 14 the next day.  Only 20 hours.  During the journey, I was sitting next to four of the most talkative people on the planet.   A McDonalds manager who was a "gourmet" (he and his wife dined out conspicuously at Applebees...although to be fair, he gave me a recommendation for Florida B-B-Q in Tampa called "Kojacs" which might be good).  A destitute huckster with three kids and missing front teeth who gave me a CD of his rap music, a roving passenger/bartender who was drunk or drugged and insisted on buying anybody who asked beer and bringing it personally to their seat without cost.  To round out the crew was an 80 year old New York grandmother and one guy with a bag of cookies.  Throw in cigarette breaks and nicotine fiends and I'll leave it to your imagination what the ride was like. 

In spite of the chaos, the ride was survivable and I turned up in Orlando, got my rental car, and was immediately doused with more rain than I have seen in the last five years in Mainz combined, all in the space of about 20 minutes.  Welcome to Florida.  Although crashing at Gina and Andy's place is always great, Gainesville is a somewhat mixed bag as a city.  Gina and I had some great food at a place called the ?Warehouse? and I enjoyed looking at all the living creatures running around (stray cats, opossums, Gina and Andy's fat cat, gekos, and mysterious rustlings in bushes).  Other than that, there is far too much traffic in Gainesville and Florida cities in general (I guess with the heat, nobody really wants to get out of their cars and so everyplace seems like a superhighway).  After collecting my wits for a few days in Gainesville and just hanging out, I drove out to New Smyrna beach to see Paul and Debbie.  In contrast with the cities, the beaches in Florida are wonderful.  The water is warm, the sand is white, and there are fish all over in the water.  As always, we had fun catching up and getting in a little fishing and body surfing.  I was thrilled to see the space shuttle sitting on its lauch pad (perhaps one of the last few times that it will ever fly) down by cape Canaveral.  I highly recommend a visit.  Seeing a rocket in person is, to me, very cool and utterly inspiring.  In the excitement over Paul's part in Transformers III movie, we made the mistake of renting transformers II and having our brains fried by it.  Following the weekend, work called and I decided to make my way down to the Florida Keys and the Everglades.   After a brutal drive, I was informed by park rangers that I was insane to want to camp in the Everglades and that mosquitos would likely carry my dessicated carcass away to be dropped into the water as alligator chum.  Come back in December to do the 8 day canoe trip through the wilderness.  That one is on my list for the future!  Instead, I headed for Key Largo and ended up camping near the underwater state park.  The next morning I jumped on a boat and did a snorkelling tour of the reef.  Muey bien.  Swimming in the rough waters gave me my first bout ever of sea sickness while in the water, astounding to me as I had weathered 10 m waves on the Southern Atlantic with no ill effects other than the flu.  My chumming, however, brought the fish up close and personal so I figured it was all for the best.  A extra brutal drive returning to Gainesville through Big Cypress is something I wont repeat again in a hurry and my tour ended with a flight out to New Orleans!

 Something you wont find in Europe.  Damn good though...thanks Gina!

 Beach time.  Love the waves and sand.

 You can park your car here and just throw your lawn chair down.  Nice way to do a picnic.

 Never saw a sign like this in Europe.

 Our ocean going vessel.  Although we didn't bring back the crabs and fish we wanted for dinner, we had fun dropping chicken necks into the water, looking at enormous spiders, unhooking numerous catfish, watching the dolphins playing around in the water 100 meters from our boat, and watching the bald eagles circling.  Blissful.

In the distance you can see one of the launch pads for the space shuttle.  If you look closely, I think you can see the shuttle on the right hand side of the pad.  Having seen two launches and this, I somehow still never get tired of it.  Space exploration is cool!

Sorry, but no pictures of the underwater park.  It was underwater where I couldn't go with the camera and the Everglades was mostly driving.  I'll attempt to go back to do the canoe trip someday and take lots of pictures then.

Next stop, New Orleans!

Fall migration-Baltimore-September 25th to 27th

Just 45 minutes away is Baltimore where I went to visit Sanchita, Anand, and Karun and hang out for a day or two.  Baltimore's nickname is "Charm City", a somewhat ironic moniker, depending on which neighborhood you are hanging out in.  On the other hand, underneath a gritty exterior is a pretty dynamic city.  We visited a cool art museum at Johns Hopkins U and I walked "The Avenue" (apparently an old hang out of John Waters of somewhat dubious Pink Flamingos fame) and had an adventure riding public transportation.  In a single afternoon of bus riding I was panhandled for bus fare, witnessed a fight between a hapless youth and a bum who called him a girl, and watched another guy get kicked off the bus for having pants that sagged too low (the bus driver would have none of it).  During the day, I made it out to Fort McHenry to see where the star spangled banner was written.  It is a bit shocking at the end of watching a little historical movie in the visitors center to be expected to stand and put your hand over your heart.  It brings back memories of having to say the pledge of allegiance every morning and wondering how anybody can take that sort of propaganda seriously.  I will, however, admit that the marine corps (or navy?) choir version of the song was very well sung in its own right as it blasted over the speakers.  Other highlights of Baltimore were a really funky museum downtown, a book fair and some fun little anarchist bookshops (Red Betty's and Atomic Books).  Although I unintentionally caused Karun some stress this visit, next time I will come dressed as an "Alhambra dump truck" and everything should go smoothly : )

 Downtown Baltimore book fair.

What the hell did they do to my car?!  Oh, this is the new Nissan Leaf with added environmental coloration to blend in to the background.

 This is the building where Sanchita's museum will be.  Bin gespannt zu sehen.

Row houses.  These are typical of Baltimore which I am told was an old mill town.  I like the way people have taken what is normally a bit drab and dull and spiced it up.  Little bits of spirit like this show up throughout town.

Cool sculpture at the science museum downtown.  Remember how this looks, you will see another piece by this artist at the museum in New Orleans later.

Overlooking the harbor district in Baltimore.  Pretty nice "revitalized" area of town.

Damn it, the hooligans did it again!  My yellow school bus (for you Europeans, this is a very typical thing to find in the United States that you will never find in Europe...I mean the bus, not the mosaic job on it : )...Pretty sweet mosaic job though.  I want one.).

 Blurring the fine line between humor, art, and commemoration.  Very Baltimore.

 I just like this sculpture.  I hope the eggs hatch and more nesting sites appear on nearby buildings.

 The star spangled banner.  Yup.  The real deal (actually the real deal is in a museum but this is a replica with the strange number of stars).

 Americans don't like guns.

More Baltimore row houses with typical Baltimore brick styling (I forget the name for that, sorry).

Apparently, crossing the bridge headed towards Johns Hopkins doesn't actually take you closer to Baltimore.  Nice bit of graffiti!

After a great time visiting in Baltimore, I hopped a train and headed for my next stop...Florida!