A few pics from the Mountain Time Zone

Enjoy.

Itinerary

Here's the loose itinerary we've been going by in case you want to follow along at home.

We've been in Denver/Boulder for a day and we'll probably head for Oregon tomorrow morning. Boulder is beautiful.

St Louis

It's night on day 2 and we're over a thousand miles in (somewhere in central Kansas.) This puts us a few hundred miles ahead of our off-the-cuff itinerary which gives me an oddly deep sense of satisfaction. Amy is amused at my apparent need for structure while on vacation. We're both looking forward to being in the Pacific Northwest as opposed to endless tracts of farmland.

We made St. Louis by early afternoon and walked around a bit. We each lost a dollar on the video slots of a riverboat casino but Amy won some kind of credit redeemable for 45 cents. We're keeping that credit in reserve for any future expenses that come up. Next we went to The Arch which was lovely (though I hear it had problems recently.)

The highlight of St. Louis was definitely the City Museum. "Museum" is a bit of a misnomer; this was a sprawling, three storey, indoor/outdoor jungle gym. Amy and I were the biggest of many kids there. It's hard to describe the endless maze of passages, ladders, and slides. A simple shadow may turn out to be the entrance to a tunnel you can only navigate by crawling on your belly. It was all very non-linear which delighted Amy and left me worrying if I was failing to maximize coverage. Yes, I'm a dork. The museum was in an old shoelace factory and much of the jungle gym was constructed of old machine parts and welded rebar. Highly recommended.

Here are some pics.

The Plan

In broad strokes, the plan is to drive out West starting on July 23, wander around the Pacific coast until the end of August, go to Burning Man and finally head back to Raleigh in early/mid September. I'll have some fellow travelers along the way. I'll pick up my friend Amy in Charlotte for the drive out and she'll be with me until flying out of Portland on August 7. My friend Natasha will be flying into San Francisco in late August and will join me at Burning Man. Here we go...

AT&T sucks!

I just spent an hour talking to a nice Indian lady about my outrageous long distance phone bill. I was being charged $1.43 per minute to talk to Windsor, Canada, which is directly across the river from Detroit, Michigan. Spread over a few calls they wanted to charge me almost $300. I was assuming maybe $0.10 instead of the usual $0.07 for calls to Canada...I've seen ads for 5 cents or less for such calls. After threatening (and meaning it) to cancel my phone service I was refunded around $200 but only if I agreed to sign up for some additional plan. Whatever. As soon as I get the credit I will cancel my long distance service and just have local. I will just use Skype or my pay-as-you-go cell phone for long distance. I only get charged $0.40 to Canada for the cell phone with absolutely no plan. AT&T will continue to charge me $0.61 to Canada even with their dumb plan.

It's looking like I won't even be home to answer my phone for 1.5-2 months. I'm leaving on Monday for a road trip out West with my friend Amy who I'll be picking up in Charlotte. She'll be flying back from Portland, OR. on the 7th but it looks like I'll be staying out there until Burning Man. Not much point in coming back to NC in between; so much to see on the West Coast. Details to follow.

Yippee ki yay

I don't normally care for action movies. Usually the plot holes and crappy dialog take me out of suspended disbelief and gets me wondering what better things I could be doing with my time. Nevertheless the new Die Hard got a good score on IMDB so I went to see it on Friday for my inaugural post-employment event. It was great! Not Oscar material but quite enjoyable and actually a bit thought provoking about terrorism and national infrastructure.

As I was walking out of the theater I saw that Transformers was starting in a few minutes. That was too good to pass up, so in true slacker form I decided to sneak in for a double header. I played with Transformers a bunch as a kid and was really excited about the prospect of a movie. My heart sank when I learned Michael Bay, the man behind the absolutely atrocious Pearl Harbor movie, was involved. Happily, despite one awful "I love you" moment it was also a really good movie.

On the other end of the spectrum, I saw The Celebration earlier in the week. A birthday party/family reunion goes completely of the rails as decades of dirty laundry are put on display for the shocked party goers. The grit and tension are superb...I highly recommend this one. It is in Danish with subtitles if that turns you off.



The planning for the first leg of my travels is starting to take shape.

Burning Man?

I might just have to go to Burning Man at the end of August.

Impending Slackerdom

I've always been an academically/professionally driven guy. Identify goal, accomplish goal, repeat. At age 31 I'm comfortably established but not particularly excited about the array of possible next goals available to me in my cozy little bubble. As much as it goes against the strong work ethic and fiscal conservatism I was raised with, I've decided to take some time off work to travel and reflect. I now have only two more days of employment before I officially become a Man of Leisure. I plan on wandering without goals and a minimum of distractions for a time so that I can stumble onto things that are worth pursuing passionately. I am very grateful for the fact that I have this luxury; at times I feel guilty about it but if I'm going to do it I might as well do it to the fullest.

On Impending Slackerdom you can expect to see posts on travel, reflection, decisions, movies, books and, if all goes well, the answer to the meaning of life.