Maine/Vermont Day 9-10: Being Shifty

Monday started with a 7:30 Shifting Workshop.   The women who showed up didn't want a class on theory.  They wanted to know "When do I shift the left one and when do I shift the right one?  And which way?"  The answer boiled down to 1960's Laugh-In Philosophy - "If it feels good, do it."

At breakfast we discover that Mary and Pete, our tour guides, have complementary senses of humor.  (Every VBT tour guide has at least one sense of humor - it is standard equipment.)  Pete is more rehearsed and Vaudvillean, with a deep repertoire like Henny Youngman.  Mary is more ad-lib, like Jonathan Winters.  She will carefully observe how much teasing you're willing to take, then proceed up to that line.

We also discover the group overachiever, Rob from California.  There's always one in the group.  From the start he sticks out a little, and we can't figure out how ... And then we're passing this other bike touring company at the same inn called POMG, or Peace of Mind Guaranteed.  (Amy and I immediately start calling them OMFG behind their backs).  I look at the POMG bikers - all fit and trim and ready to do 100 miles in a day.  Then I look at the VBT tour and we're all ... uh, not like that except Rob.

Rob starts grilling Pete for ways to get more miles in.  Pete says, "You can go to Canada."  Rob says, "All righty!".   It's not as crazy as it sounds, the border being only 10 miles further than the Northernmost part of the day's route.  But it becomes the talk among the group - Rob's going to Canada!  That crazy biker dude!

So we all start off north for the Isle La Motte, the largest of the Champlain islands and the oldest European settlement in Vermont.  The ride is flat, but heading over the causeway from our own Hero Island we get slammed by gusts of wind.  It's not terribly cold, but it's brisk and we feel miles beneath us.  It's beginning to feel like a real bike ride.

We stop at the Fisk Quarry, which is an exposed portion of the oldest known coral reef in the world, the Chazyan Reef.  The actual reef started in what's now Zimbabwe about umpteen-million years ago, shifted up here, and then water drained off it.  It was an actual quarry until geologists discovered fossils in it (like the one on the right) and digging halted.  It's illegal to pull fossils out of the quarry, so when tourists find one, they usually mark it with a ring of stones around its perimeter.  We saw the ancient remains of sponges, fish, crabs, and VBT bikers.

As we headed out from the quarry we noticed Rob wasn't in our group anymore ... he did go off to Canada.  But he did get back in time for lunch.  The rest of us peddled into a really nasty headwind back to the inn.

We went Kayaking in the afternoon - my first time in a Kayak.  The lake was choppy and it rained a bit, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly.   Bill, our guide, taught us a little about kayaking and a lot about rum-running.  Because this part of Lake Champlain is so close to Canada (who never suffered prohibition), it was a prime trail for the then-illegal importation of alcohol to the States.  They had nice tricks, developed over the years from experimentation.  Boats filled with barrel liquor barrels would attempt to go down Lake Champlain and get caught.  So they learned to tie boxes of rock salt to the barrels.  If they were chased by the cops, they'd push the barrels and boxes overboard.  Two or so days later when the heat was off, the rock salt would naturally dissolve and the box would float to the top, acting like a buoy.  Then you just find the boxes, pull on the rope and hoist the barrel back into your boat.   Pretty ingenious, eh?

We got back in late afternoon, and I was feeling peppy.  Or maybe competitive ... Rob brought it out in me.  So by myself, I took a 17 mile tour loop the other side of the island. The ride out was into the headwind, and I rode down on my drops all the way.   There were a couple of nut-busting hills too.  But then coming back, a nice tailwind pushed me leisurely back home.  It reminded me of my early days of cycling, 7 years ago, when I desperately needed recharging every few days or so.  I came back to a dinner, which I felt I deserved after 49 miles - that being the main difference between a bike vacation and a regular one.

The next morning, it rained.  Wait - surely we can't be biking in the rain!  This was not in the brochure.  Yet everyone got on their bikes and headed out.  Surely this is evidence of a higher power, a power greater than ourselves , greater than our tour guides, and even greater than the inner voice that says "I spent $X on this vacation and I'm gonna damn well enjoy it!" We come around a bend, the exposed beach appears and a gust of wind pretty near blew us off our bikes.  But we continued on.   We knew a hot shower was coming eventually.

Fortunately, the rain stopped and it got toasty by the time we hit the Ed Weed Fish Culture Station.  Indeed the fish here were cultured - they had an opera house, a theater, a little bistro.  We just missed their big Oscar Wilde weekend.

We grabbed a snack here, and I developed a fondness for apples smeared with Vermont Natural Peanut Butter (Vermont is known for their peanuts ... ???)  Robs talks with "the Canadians" in our group, Maureen and Beverly, about this year's Tour de France.  Maureen and Beverly are retired, avid bicylists, and everyone wants to be like them.  Maureen said the first time she "re-learned" riding a bike a few years ago, she could only go 500 feet.  Now they're smoking all of us.

There are two routes to get from the Fish Culutre Station to our next stop, Snow Farm Vinyard, for lunch.  There's a local sculptor named Harry Barber who made expensive minature garden castles for some of the locals.  Each of the routes has some castles visible from the road.  I resolve to find all of them.  I go down down one route, then backtrack and go down the other.  I ask any locals I meet up with.  One person says, "What castles?"  Another says, "Yep, there are lots of castles around here.  Yep.  A lot of them.  Good luck!"  then walks away.  I end up finding three of them.  I feel like a failure, but then I remember it's my vacation and vacation failure is impossible.

In the afternoon we head for Burlington.  Amy calls ahead to book a massage.  The trip is interesting in that there are barely any highways involved - just walking/biking trails.  We were on South Hero Island and Burlington was on the mainland.  To get there, we biked along an old train route, not wide enough for a car.  After a few miles of park riding, we hit the Colchester causeway.  Built for the railroad in 1900, there's an 1/8th of a mile gap in the middle where a Bike Ferry takes you across (I tell Rob "You can jump that!")  From the other side, you bike along 4 miles of piled slate and granite There's some good countertops in there if you could only carry one on your bike!

Reaching the mainland, we pedal the legendary Burlington bikeway.  Though it goes through technically-residential neighborhoods, there are very few cross streets, and the scenery is just gorgeous.  The weather has warmed up a little and lots of people are biking with us.  It's just the thing to do around here, and it was beautiful.

But it was a long biking day, and we got downtown and hoofed it over for the spa.  There's only one massage slot open, though, and Amy has her heart set on it.  As she's getting kneaded and chopped, I read my book in the waiting room, still dressed in my bike clothes ... but not smelly.  I don't think.  It's hard to tell.

I book us the perfect dinner spot - the Revolution Kitchen.  All vegetarian, which is what you expect in Burlington.  Dinner begins with Roasted Brussel's Sprouts.  They're like the best thing I've ever eaten, and not just because I'm starving.  Amy had the Noodle Pot, a kind of Faux Pho (heh heh).  I had their Grilled Sweet Potato Tacos.  Fabuolous!  As good as the Moosewood, maybe a boutch more upscale.   We end the day with a Ben and Jerry's ice cream, just blocks away from the converted gas station where Ben and Jerry started it all.  The wind was blowing much warmer and hoofed back to our B&B tired but satisfied.

Maine/Vermont, Day 7-8: Onto Biking

At The Cupboard in New Harbor, Maine Amy and I split a freshly baked cinnamon roll and a freshly baked sticky bun.  Both were light and airy as souffle, with not too much icing or sugar.  The couple at the campground said they brought some back in their car, and the yeasty smell was in their car for days.  If they could put that in an air freshener...

We spent most of Saturday driving, returning to Carie and Randy's house in Woodstock Vermont for some downtime.  After the quintessential Yankee dinner of pot roast, root vegetables, and gravy, topped off with tarts Amy and I picked up at Dartmouth, Randy showed us slides of their Alaskan Cruise.  They travel on a small boat, about 12 passengers plus crew, that was built in the 1930's.  In such a craft, you can get up close to the glaciers and coastline.   It's difficult to comprehend how enormous this all is.

The next morning, Amy and I set out on the twisty, picturesque Vermont roads for Bristol, Vermont. There are Moose Crossing signs everywhere.  I do my Bullwinkle imitation (it is just my way.)  No moose arrive, but a mother black bear and her three babies scurry across the road in front of us.

8 of the 20 members of our group met at Vermont Bike Tours headquarters in Bristol and boarded a shuttle for Lake Champlain.  It was a quiet ride.  Maybe we were sizing each other up - who was gonna blubber like a baby at the first sight of hills or wind?

We made some passing comments about the Vermont scenery - the solar panels, the houses for sale (courtesy of Hurricane Irene 3 years ago).  Electric poles have artificial osprey nests built on top, and the ospreys were coming back in full force.  Then there was Lake Champlain itself, 125 miles long and anywhere between 1/2 a mile to 40 miles wide.  Yeah, it's kinda big.  And we were gonna bike right down the islands in the middle.

Our first spot was the North Hero Inn on Hero Island.  In true VBT fashion, the Inn was ritzy.  We had our own balcony overlooking the lake with a hammock. Across the lake, four enormous wind turbines caught the considerable lake breezes.  It was ... kinetic, I think.  There was a sense that even as you were on vacation, you were in motion.  Which is Newton's First Law of motion right there.

So the twenty of us met for a trial bike ride.  VBT provides the bikes and helmets, and you bring bike clothes and gloves and your favorite other stuff.  We did seven mile trial run, which was mostly flat, but it was good practice for reading cue sheets.  We took our first "optional leg" - a four mile jog up the lakeshore and back, which Amy and I did.

The ride shook out the "social cobwebs" and we met for dinner and chatted like old buddies.  I mean, none of us knew each other beforehand (except our pardners, which came in various configurations).   So we met Alan and Judi from Omaha, close to my old stomping grounds in Lincoln.  Every year for the past few years, Alan hikes from one rim of the Grand Canyon to the other in one day without camping.  If you've ever seen it (I haven't yet), this is quite a feat, and it requires being in shape, obviously, and a bit of planning.  Alan has this cool, booming laugh that I can tell will be one of the defining sounds of this trip.

Ximena and Alvery are from Chile.  They definitely the "furthest from Vermont" award.  This is their fifth or sixth VBT tour, and it's very clear they have visited more places than I will ever go.  In the United States, even!   They speak English very well, idiomatic and formal.  Amy and I grill them about places to visit in South America, and they're pretty positive about Brazil.  Which means we have to go.  I'm a big fan of Bossa Nova and MPB (Música popular brasileira) so it doesn't take much persuading.

The forecast this week is for cold, wind and rain.  Amy asked me in private, "if it's raining, do they give you a free spa day?"  I have no idea - my only VBT trip had no rain.  You can always ride in the van - rain or no rain - but the van will hold only 10 or so people.  Someone's gotta ride.  I volunteer!

Maine/Vermont Day 5-6: Lobstah, Lobstah, Lobstah

Here we are in the Easternmost point of the U.S., the first place to get daybreak ... and we sleep through it.  Oh well.  I can't imagine it looks much different, even though it's hitting us before every American billionaire, working stiff, and President Obama.  I'll just take it on faith.  I'm on vacation.

Eventually we did get up and ate breakfast, then headed for Quoddy Head State Park.  We see our first lighthouse there.  It's giant, candy-coloured, and largely unnecessary (thanks to GPS, which largely cuts through fog).  But it's a tourist magnet.  At first I thought it was just the symbolism - when you wander through the foggy parts of life, when decisions are far from clear, you want a light that says, "Go wherever you want, but not here!"  I guess there is something inherently beautiful about a lighthouse.  Nothing in architecture is quite like it.

Amy and I hiked along the coast.  My favorite attraction was the peat bog.  It was set inland about a quarter of a mile, and so it's called a coastal plateau bog.  I didn't know much about bogs.  It's one of the four kinds of wetlands, along with swamps, marshes and fens.  Basically, a bog's water is too acidic, which makes it hard to grow things in and hard to decompose the dead stuff.  The plants just grow a little, then die, then sit on top of other dead plants, unable to melt much further.  What does survive are really weird species of carnivorous and out-of-place plants like apple-berry.  It's surreal and colorful.  It's like Dante Seventh Circle of Hell, with dead plants piled on top of one another instead of dead people.  More peaceful, though.

And so we returned our campsite, made some fettucini and salad, then built a nice fire from some wood we got in a stand along the way.  Amy said this was the best time of year to camp - no one hogging the showers or the laundry room. And that's cool, but it's mostly my camping experience anyway.  Out there in South Dakota, it was all solitude and I loved that.  All you could hear were the squirrels slowly dying of starvation.

The next day we broke camp, and I cured my persistent headache with a Coca Cola.  (It's like "Oh yeah.  I have a caffeine addiction.  I was so busy drinking coffee I didn't notice.")  We got a tip to go to Pemaquid Point lighthouse, because you can actually go up in it.  The view was really fantastic, as you can see here:

The surf was deafening here, the light was 150 years old and really cool.  Turns out that this was the second lighthouse built here.  The first one, in 1830, crumbled almost immediately because they used sea water in the mortar mixture.  "Pretty stupid," the museum keeper shook his head.  It sounded pretty resourceful to me!  Good thing I don't build lighthouses.

The museum in the lighthouse living quarters housed relics from the surrounding area.  A "stuffed" 22 lb lobster looked down on you from a display case.  My niece had a stuffed lobster when she was little - it wasn't nearly as scary.  In my favorite photo, a five year old girl on a dock was flanked by two lobsters that, when balanced on the tip of their tail, were as big as she was.  I'll bet she had wicked nightmares!

Our camp site in New Harbor Maine was almost deserted.  An older couple from Ohio found us wandering around, and asked us where we were from.  "Ithaca?  Home of the Moosewood?"  Their faces lit up.  They talked rapturously about their dog-eared Moosewood Cookbook and their organic garden.  Foodies ... I love them!  We asked them where to eat and they said "Shaw's Fish and Lobster Wharf for dinner, and The Cupboard for breakfast.  Best breakfast this side of New Orleans."

So we went to Shaw's, and it was all that.  Talk about fresh!  The seafood was still dripping wet from the ocean.  The menu is all "Market Price", and if they didn't have it fresh-off-the-boat, it wasn't available.  I had salmon with bbq sauce.  Best salmon I've ever bitten into - just a little cruncy, no rubberiness at all, just flaky and mild all the way.  Amy had a lobster roll - basically tuna salad with lobster instead of tuna, but on a New England hot dog roll.  Tasty!  We finished off with a couple of Maine wild blueberry desserts - cheesecake for me, pie for her.  Maine blueberries are luxurious after a steady diet of giant, watery New York and Jersey blueberries.  Outtasite!

We sunk into our camp, very satisfied, and read our Kindles by the campfire.  One of our few remaining neighbors has a 6 foot tall bonfire next to their RV, which seems pretty superfluous to me.  But hey.  Live and let live.   I'm relaxed and pondering this state of Vacationland, as they call Maine.  We'll definitely be back.  But first we have some biking to do in Vermont...

Maine/Vermont Day 3/4: Taco Night!

Camping.  I dropped it like a hot potato when I left Boy Scouts in 1985.  It's not that I hated it, but camping requires a deliberate attention to the little details of life (like where you're gonna poop) that I found increasingly foreign.  I got used to counting on certain things being there (like a bathroom) and using my time to move "forward", I suppose.

Then Amy told me about Taco Night.

Amy has been a camper all her life, never going through a long 30-year drought like I did.  And she told me stories.  When Amy and her late husband Carter and her son Terry went camping, they always designated one night as Taco Night.

And I thought, "That's what's been missing!"  Tacos are just meant for campouts: easy, tasty, yet well-balanced.  They are more forgiving than cobbler or chicken (why they pushed these difficult-to-prepare items at Scout Camp is beyond me.  Might as well do souffle!)  The only thing you can't do is bake the shells, so they quickly crack and split into messy pieces.  But that's what the ground is for.   If there's one thing you've got a lot of on a campout, it's ground!

We set out for Maine on Tuesday.  To ease ourselves into Vacationland, as it is called on the Welcome To Maine sign, we decided to do our first night at Captain Swift's Bed and Breakfast in Camden.  Ok it's not camping, but it's transitional camping.  Camden is a beautiful port town with a wavy, rugged little inset harbor.  It has a town park and a gazebo overlooking everything.  Boats of all kinds of analog and digital varieties dotted the water.

And lobstah!  We hit Cappy's Chowder House for dinner.   Amy asked the waitress whether a whole lobstah was hard-to-eat and distusbing to look at.  She replied, "I'm a vegetarian and I have no problem with it."  Then we saw one delivered to the table next to us.  It was all antenna and feelers and claws, and it was lying on its back with its belly erupting meat.  It was the movie Alien in a plastic basket.  No thanks.  Amy opted for Lobstah Tacos and I for Seafood Chowdah and a Lobstah Slidah.  (They talk funny around heah.)  Tasty!  And it's proof that lobstah is more than a butter-delivery-vehicle.

Ah but Captain Swift's had the best breakfast evah ... I mean ever.  A baked apple with cinnamony crumbly core and drizzled with a little maple syrup.  Then french toast ... but that's like calling Rhapsody in Blue "a ditty."  It was fluffy and swirled on the inside, like a cinnamon roll.  The outside was very crispy, with a struesel topping that quoted the baked apple.  It had no trace of raw egg sogginess, yet it was custardy.  Kind of like good bread pudding, but less heavy.  Three silver-dollar-sized slices of Canadian Bacon with a cube of pineapple on each flanked the dish.  Oh so good!

On Wednesday we headed further up the coast to Eastport, the most Northeastern corner of the United States, and the one the sunrise is supposed to hit first.  From the moment we hit Seaview Campground, we were the bain of the owner's existence.  In early October there were only a couple of occupied RV's left and no tent campers.  We paid for our site and looked around for it ... but with no other campers around for reference points, we couldn't find it.  We drove around for ten minutes, backed into a tree (at 5mph - no injuries!), and the owner came out and yelled "IT'S OVER THERE!" She obviously had went on her own vacation in her mind and we were ruining it.

We set up camp and had half an afternoon to wander, ending up at nearby Shackford Head State Park .. a tiny one, but with a nice nature walk and great views of the bay and Canada.  My cell phone warned me every five seconds of roaming charges - though we were still in the states, the nearest cell tower was in Canada.  All of a sudden we gained an hour of Nova Scotia time which threw my internal clock off.

I tossed my cell phone into the bay.  We were wondering what the large rings in the bay were, finding out later they were Atlantic Salmon beds.  This explains the huge charges I later found on my phone bill.  Evidently they like to talk to their buddies usptream.

And then Taco Night!  It was everything I hoped for, and I devoured half a dozen of those tasty Pockets O' Joy.  At 6:30, night had descended.  We had tried to get firewood early, but the owner had long abandoned her post at the office, so no go.  We climbed into our tent and read our Kindles.  Amy's more modern one had a built-in light, but I needed an LED headlamp to read mine.  I looked like a miner on his lunch break.

We fell asleep to the sound of the foghorn.  Evidently it worked because no boats suddenly appeared in our tent.  For this we are thankful.

Maine/Vermont Days 1-2: Drippy

Is there divine justice in getting a cold before a vacation?  Like, "You can have fun, but you're gonna pay for it up front!"  Looking at it this way proves how much I need a vacation.  It's when I think I have things figured out, when life looks like a zero-sum game on a spreadsheet, and when things are too organized.

A vacation is like Godzilla romp-stomping through your neat little world-view.  You need that.

Already it was not quite as planned.  Since January, Amy and I had planning a trip to Nova Scotia, then to Vermont.  Then two days before I picked up her passport.  I wanted to see the photo - it's hot, like you'd expect.  It also expired last month.  Ooops.  It would suck trying to get back into the United States with an expired passport.  (Visions of me leaving Amy at the border with a dozen Tim Horton's and a six pack of Labatt's).

Within hours, Amy had switched everything from Nova Scotia to Maine, which is just about the same thing anyway.  Both are way, way East.   Both have camp sites and mountains.  Both have ocean spray and lobstahs.  The moral: always vacation with those-who-are-flexible.

Saturday was our last day at home, so I spent it fighting my cold agressively.  I rested, drank plenty of orange juice and watched Sesame Street in my jammies.  I vaguely remember this combination working as a kid.  I have to tell you, after 47 years, Sesame Street is still DA BOMB!  It's funny, wise, and very imaginative.  The segments are a lot longer, but I really dig both Elmo's World  and Abby's Fairy School.  They are real out-of-the-box thinkers.  They should both be hired at Internet startups.  Super Grover is awesome.  Big Bird is still kind of an idiot, but you can't hate him.  And Ernie and Bert still have the relationship to which all couples should aspire.   I mean, if they are a couple ... oh, whatever.

Anyway my aggressive therapy worked ... until I got in the car the next day.  Then I was dribbling all over the place.  There were not enough Kleenixes in the car, and maybe not enough in the state of New York.


We spent the first day driving as far as Woodstock Vermont, where Amy's in-laws Carie and Randy live.  Carie is Amy's late husband's sister, and I met them both last year in Michigan.  They're very cool!  Carie is a superb gardneer, a semi-pro entomologist, and a part-timer at a gift shop in historic Woodstock Randy is a master carpenter and a retired Mennonite minister.  In the winter Randy runs the engine room of a small Alaskan cruise boat, while Carolyn joins him for some trips.  They are considering doing the same thing on a Mexican cruise this year.  They live in a quintessential Vermont house.

When we got there, Carolyn had a cold as well.  But fortunately we planned an extra day of downtime.  So as Amy walked into town and dodged all the elderly leaf-peepers in Woodstock - this time of year is the busiest - I sat on the porch sniffling and reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables while watching the leaves change color.

Carie and I talked about daguerreotypes, which were all the rage in Hawthorne's day.  The precursor to film, daguerreotypes required a much longer exposure time - often 5 minutes or longer.  A daguerreotype selfie?  Forget it.  You couldn't hold the camera still that long.

Hawthorne wisely pointed out that everyone in a daguerreotype looked glum.  I noticed that too.  It was an odd comfort to find that people in the 1840's were really as happy as you and me ... they just didn't show it.

Dinners were fantastic.  Amy and I brought some leftover vegetables from our CSA, and Carolyn prepared Delicata Squash with maple syrup ... I am not a squash eater, but this made me a believer.  We had grilled pork one night, and a beautiful pot roast the other, with CSA turnips and potatoes as embellishments.  In other words: New England food.  Already I started to detach from my old New York life.  So what'll be next?

Pyramid

Amy says, "Write your own narrative."  Our story is our own, and how we tell it is our business.  What we choose to keep in, leave out, or "tell slant" (as Emily Dickinson says) is our business.

We've been wanting to do Gothics, one of the 46 High Peaks of the Adirondacks, for 3 years now.  According to one of our guidebooks that we cling to like the Bible, Gothics has the best view of all the 46 peaks.  Fair 'nuff.  So for Amy's birthday hike, we picked this one.

So to recap: last year we did Marcy, the highest of the High Peaks, which required an overnight camping trip.   We also have finished 4 of the 6 "Saranac Sixers" - peaks under 4000 feet, but situated around Saranac Lake and each with a pretty view.  We did Haystack last year, Baker and Ampersand the year before, and St. Regis this year.

But we climb these mountains for three main reasons: the trail sammich, the hike itself, and the view from the top.  We don't do it just to "bag a mountain."  There's no bucket list.  Some of the 46 peaks have tremendously long hikes and absolutely dreadful views, so we don't do those.

We started the weekend like we pretty much always do - at Liquids and Solids Restaurant in Lake Placid. A Brussels Sprouts appetizer always starts our meal off right - roasted with a fine mustard sauce.  Mmmm.  Amy had rabbit turnover, and I had Blue Cheese and rhubarb Ravioli with Smoked Game ragout.  These chefs are OUT THERE climbing dangerous peaks like we are.  I bought them a round of beers - they had outdone themselves.

The trail to Gothics is the same as Sawteeth, (flashback).  It's a long, extremely boring 3.5 miles through a country club and on a dirt road.  Every ten minutes the Ausable Club bus nearly runs you over ... but you can't get on it because you're not a member.  Only by their good graces are you allowed to hike on Skippy and Biff's land.  Then you get to the Ausable dam and you start into the woods, climbing up.

The first two miles were familiar ground for us - really beautiful, cushy trail stuff.  Then the path splits - one to Sawteeth, one to Gothics.  Then we started going up.  Really up!  It was reminiscent of the trail to Algonquin, also a menace.  Around every corner was a big sheet of rock that we had to get up somehow.  And we did - steadily, but surely.

And then we hit this.  The result of a rock slide from 1999, this was basically a 30 foot sheer rock face.  On the other side you can see the trees going over the edge where there's a pretty nasty cliff.  So we climbed along the left side, using the trees and roots to hoist ourselves up.  It's probably the nastiest stretch we've ever done in the Adirondacks, and it made us jittery.

About a half mile after that we reached the top of Pyramid.  4550 feet.  It would be considered a High Peak were it not for the fact that Gothics, which is 4800 feet, is less than a mile away.  We had heard that Pyramid has what some consider the best view in the Adirondacks.

They were right.  You can see the gorgeous view in the top picture - Mt. Marcy is to the far left and towering over all the other big peaks.  Basic, Saddleback and Colvin are in the foreground.  Amy and I were awestruck.  What was lovely was the variety of the landscape.  Everything that we loved about an Adirondack view was all rolled up into one.  I'll put some more pictures down below for your enjoyment.

Then we looked across the trail to Gothics - our view of it from Pyramid is pictured below.  This is where we write our own narrative.  In fact, I'm gonna write three and you can pick your favorite:

Version 1:  We were all set to hike the long road down to Gothics, but then we looked across the col.  Some hikers had run into ... omigod!  ... a 9 foot tall black bear!  They didn't have the right color container, the black bear became enraged and started tearing their backpacks to shreds!  Rather than going ahead, Amy and I unselfishly sacrified our own trip, and climbed down Pyramid to summon help.

Version 2:  Amy and I ran the 0.4 mile trail to Gothics in 5 minutes.  Then we figured, aw hell, it's only 10 more miles to Saddleback and Basin, let's just do those too.  And then we did Marcy again.  I forgot to take pictures as proof, but trust us, it was really beautiful!

Version 3:  Amy and I looked at the path going straight down, then straight back up to Gothics and we said, "Screw it.  It can't be any prettier than over here."  So we descended Pyramid, and our legs hurt so bad, we barely made it to the car.

Obviously some of these stories are more plausible than others.  But plausibility does not equal truth and ... oh whatever.

We finished the day at Lisa G's restaurant with our Adirondack-based friend Lynn.  Sipping gin and tonic and IPA's, I polished off a peanut butter ice cream sandwich.  My legs had not hurt this bad since Algonquin.  A mighty fine birthday hike indeed!

Chicago: Day 4 and 5, The Obvious Saturation Point

If you've ever been to a longer-than-two-day conference, you know how I feel about now.  Saturated.  My brain is full.  If I walked into a room full of candy bars, I'd do serious damage.

I started my day in Chicago the same ... at Jamba Juice.  I'm hooked on their steel-cut oatmeal, of which Amy affectionately says, "It looks like throw-up."  What care I?  It has brown sugar crumbly stuff on the top.

Over the loudspeaker, the radio blasts this hideous PSA: "1-8-7-7 Cars for Kids!  1-8-7-7 Cars for Kids!" They keep on singing it, over and over.  It's as if they had just figured out the "your brain needs something repeated seven times" rule from the 1950's.  You know that rule - the one that got discredited about ten minutes after it came out.  Don Draper oughta kick their ass.

The keynote of the third day was by Baratunde Thurston, the author of "How to Be Black."  Thurston was one of the editors at The Onion, and his talk was the funniest keynote EVER.  And it was scientifically proven the most funny by automated testing, since this is the only method that will convince a group of 2000 Rails programmers.  To convince yourself, you may want to hit http://cultivatedwit.com and scroll down to "Section 4".  Awesome!

As the day's workshops evolved, a larger truth occurred to me. It's true I felt out of place because I was old, collared, and PC-toting.  But I also felt out of place because I was taught computer science differently than those around me.  My brain got wired differently.  In a nutshell, I was taught:

• Learn the fundamentals, principles and laws from the experts
• Do your programming accordingly
• When you break the rules, feel incredibly guilty

But the programmers around me were taught:

• Don't learn any rules.  Dive right into programming.  Come up with something that mostly works
• Survey the wreckage
• Go back to the experts and learn any fundamentals, principles and laws.  Use them to clean up your software.

From that description, it sounds like that that I'm disparaging the new way.  I'm not.  It's a bottom-up way of looking at the world instead of a top-down.  It's a Baptist way of looking at programming, as opposed to a Catholic.  In that way, it's expected.  The Catholics came first to bring order out of chaos.  The Baptists came to wrestle chaos of order.  Fantastic!  

And if you don't think programming and religion intersect, you have not talked to any programmers.  The zeal, the passion, the struggle to convert those who don't belong in your camp.  I heard (actually more than once) that "Java is the root of all evil".  

Veganomics

I made a reservation at a Brazilian Steakhouse, then rethought it. I eat meat on occasion, and I'm lucky that my body's pretty adaptible.  But I have limits.  Yelp subscribers told me that waiters come by your table, continually brandishing trays of meat, literally BEGGING you to take some.  You leave having consumed more an entire food chain.  My digestive system would've rebelled - I mean a nuclear rebellion.

So I cancelled my reservation, and ran in the opposite direction ... to Karyn's On The Green.  All vegan.  No hope of any animal product whatsoever.  And while it didn't quite reach Two's level of intense awesomeness, it had its moments.  I've been a big fan of Brussel's Sprouts for about three years, since I learned that boiling them was the worst thing you could do.  Karyn's sprouts were carmelized, smothered in an awsome dijon mustard sauce and served on a sizzling platter.  I was in heaven, and I looked around and noticed EVERYONE was eating them.  My entree was "chicken" drumsticks on top of sweet potatoes.  The drumsticks were actually lollipop sticks but the "meat" was stringy and pretty accurate.  It wasn't salty like the frozen meatless chicken you get at the grocery.

The most awesome dish was vegan creme brulee!  And before you say "no way!"  I have to tell you, it was pretty faithful, even without the 10,000 egg yolks that normally go into it.  It was crisp, crackly, and smoky on the top, creamy and vanilla-y underneath. A quick survey on the web suggests they probably used vanilla soymilk and cashew butter.  Whatever. If you know me, I'm fussy about my creme brulee, and this really fit the bill.  

Hitting The Wall

On the last day, a young man tapped me on the shoulder.  

He said, "Hey!  I slept next to you on the train!"  

I looked at him and I said, "Whoa!  You're right!"   

I had not spoke to him on the train, so I had no idea.  He was from New York City, had done Rails programming longer than I had, and was really enjoying the conference.  But in the crowd of 2000 people, we had not bumped into each other until four days had passed.  

And I thought, wshew!  Good thing I didn't spoon him!  That would've been awkward.

The conference ended on a high keynote.  The speaker, Aaron Patterson, was well-known in the Rails community as a core "committer".  Lemme go back a step.  Rails is a kind of software known as open source.  It's free for people to use, but more importantly, any programmer can look at the code for it, find and fix bugs, and even make additions to it.  It's software written by the community.  But Rails is not a total free-for-all. Some programmers have a higher status than others. If you're a core committer like Aaron, you can make direct changes to the software without approval.  If you or I suggested changes, they would come in a "pull request" which would be reviewed by members of the core Rails group, then accepted or rejected.

So Aaron's talk was half standup comedy and half technical.  His comedy act including roasting DHH (the speaker on the first day), and pooh-poohing his idea that programmers are writers.  This is unlike anything I've EVER seen at a conference.  Nobody comments on anybody else's work, especially in a keynote.  And yet, it was all done with a weird kind of respect.  In this community, the only insult is to be ignored.

In the other half of the talk, Aaron discussed a project he had been working on for three years.  There was a portion of Rails that he thought could be faster and better.  So he did some experiments, wrote some code, tested it thoroughly, honestly weighed the benefits and cons.  He kept his code in a "branch" which is separate from the rest of Rails.  After presenting his findings he asked the audience, "Would you like this in Rails?"  The audience yelled its approval.  Aaron hooked his computer to the projector, typed a few commands, and said, "Done!"

Unbelievable!  I don't know how many software demos you've seen, but I'll bet they showed software before or after a release.  In this demo, the software changed it's character right in the middle.  It's as if Steve Jobs had shown an iPhone, asked the audience, "Would you like two buttons to control the volume?" and he pulls them out of his pocket, sticks them on the iPhone and said, "It's done!"  Freaky!

And with that, we went our separate ways.  I climbed aboard the Lakeshore Limited, sat behind a squadron of Amish (for the record, they do not snore when sleeping), and made off for home ... a little simpler, and little bit more complicated.  

Chicago Day 3: Choices

Ego Depletion

I walked past this two story head to get from my hotel to the conference every day.  Not sure what the color chart is for.

So the big thing in the morning keynote was on Ego Depletion, or Cognitive Depletion.  Here's the deal.  When faced with a bunch of choices, you spend a little bit of brain power actually making that choice.  Even if the choice is a seeminingly trivial one (like what kind of cookies to buy in a store), you spend valuable mental resources making it.

It explains some stuff in American society that doesn't make sense otherwise.  For example,  Americans usually have an "opt-in" policy for organ donations on driver's licenses.  You have to actually check a box to do it.  But it's usually at the end of a form, so after having your brain depleted by a bunch of questions, you're asked another question.  Americans usually don't check the box.  Europeans, howver, have an opt-out policy - it's the same box on the same sort of form, but you have to check it NOT to donate your organs.  Guess who has the higher oragan donation rate?  In Europe, it reaches virtually 100%.

They've done psychological studies, giving one group 7 things to memorize and another 2 things.  Then they set them loose in a room with cookies in them.  The people with 7 things to memorize tend to grab the cookies.  They know that cookies are bad for them, but they lack the willpower (which also depletes bran energy) to choose.

This relates to my dinner last night.  Perhaps, I enjoyed it more because there were less choices.  I had more brain power to pay attention to my food because I didn't spend oodles of time picking it.  (Plus, it tasted so damn good.)  Americans think it's their god-given right to have lots and lots of choices because "I am a unique snowflake". But it's probably true that we're more alike than we're willing to admit.  Infinite choice is just really tiring.

At the conference, the "Programmers as Writers" them dotted the landscape.  In one workshop, they actually advanced the idea of reading code as if it were novels.  She organized a Code Club.  It functions like a book group - people read code bases, then discuss and critique.  An awesome idea!  And unlike real book clubs, there wasn't the drama and excessive wine drinking.

I feel somewhat of a fish-out-of-water at his conference.  I'm like most participants in that I'm a white male who loves to write software in Rails.  But I'm unlike them because:

1. I wear collared shirts
2. I have a PC, not a Mac
3. I'm old.  And as of yesterday, that's even more true.  

Still, I have a sense that this crowd is more into holistic do-good-in-the-world stuff, so I probably have all the bonding I actually need.  A man named Matz, the creator of Ruby (the language underneath Rails) is its spiritual guide, and the saying goes "Matz is nice, so we are nice."    Indeed.

Macho Salad

I went to Bandera's for dinner.  Some one on Yelp advised "get the Macho Salad.  It's like a party in your mouth."

I loved the ambiance.  Chicago's lawyers and business folks in power suits - discussing the cubs game.  Couples.  A few tourists, but not too many.  A piano jazz trio playing "Desafinado" (which endeared me to them immediately.)  A beautiful sight.  

And my Yelp advisor was quite right.  The Macho Salad was a cornucopia of flavors - figs, goat cheese, a little tomato, chicken, fish, avacado, corn, nuts, and a spicy dressing over it.  The best part was the croutons - little fried bits of corn bread.  There was nothing dislikable about it, individually or collectively.

It was a party and it was fun.  But. It wasn't a love affair.  It wasn't a religious experience.  It didn't change me.  It felt too processed, too familiar, too easy.  It was ground I had already covered.

Chicago Day 2: Birthday Vegetables

It's my second day here, my first day at the conference ... and it's my 49th birthday.  It is one of the few birthdays in my life that's a perfect square (the others being 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, and 36).  Such geekoid fact is totally appropriate at this conference.  Amy sent me some beautiful flowers with my favorite colors: yellow and purple.

Amy's like my birthday present every day!

Programming and Writing

I'll talk about the first keynote at the Rails Conference, but I won't get too technical on you.  It was by David Heinemeier Hannson (affectionately known as DHH), the creator of Rails.

The F-word density was greater than any keynote I've ever heard.  But that was only part of its greatness!

Just a little bit of background, though.  Rails is this programming tool you use to create web programs - sites that actually do interesting stuff, like Twitter, LinkedIn, etc..  What's beautiful about is it's very productive - you can build sites very rapidly in very little code.  And the resulting code is understandable by other programmers, who inevitably have to fix and improve your stuff.

So DHH is not a computer scientist, not an engineer, and kind of despises that whole theoretical side of the fence.  He says that programmers are more Software Writers than Software Engineers.  Their job is to be concise and clear in their writing, just like English writers are supposed to be.  They should not be burdened by metrics, which are of very little practical use.  You don't tell whether an article is good by the number of words in it.  Or even the grade level of the words.  And finally both software and regular writing have guidelines that, when artfully broken, can lead to startling beauty and insight.

As a CompSci and English dude, this makes perfect sense to me.  And it's not a new idea.  Donald Knuth, who's one of the Founders of CompSci, dubbed it "literate programming".  The programmer writes for two audiences: the computer and (more importantly) the programmers who follow.  And you learn that art by both writing lots of code and reading lots of code ... not by following platitudes.  Which is why there is no more "formulaic programming" than there is "formulaic writing."  If there were, Time Warner would be making computers compose novels.

Once that idea came up, I began to see it pop up all over.

One other theme I'm noticing is people are interested in Programming for the Greater Good.  There was one talk by a George Mason University researcher who used his programming skills to further bee research (a very hot topic these days).

Although I didn't know it , this was the kind of inspiration I desperately needed.  Volunteerism was something I had left behind a long time ago - mostly when Kathy got sick and there wasn't any free time to do anything.   I didn't know how much I missed it.   A long time ago, I did computer work for the Lincoln Food Bank.  It took only 4 hours a week to help streamline their operation. Since then, with the internet and Open Source software, it's even easier to apply programming skills to people who need it.  Now I'm getting psyched...

Two

That night, I capped it off with the most intense meal of my life.  Maybe not the best - it's hard to top Les Olividades in Paris.  But the most intense.

It was at a restaurant called Two.  Yes, I "made a reservation for one at Two" - a confusing email followed. It took me about an hour to walk there since Google Maps can sometimes be a horrible mistress (Jon - don't take that personally. Or do.  Maybe it was your fault!)  But there it was, right across from the Tesla dealership - very symbolic, I think.  The elite new guard.    The lighting was low and there were two huge communal tables.  One side was to the wall with pillows in back.     

These are people obsessive about the FLAVOR of the ingredients. Not complexity so much as intensity.  Lettuce should taste like lettuce.  And if you're like me, you're thinking "lettuce has a taste?"  It turns out it does ... if it's grown on a farm that's close by, grown by obsessives (Two actually owns a share of the farm), and therefore incredibly fresh.  

I started dinner with a Three Sheeps Pale Ale from Wisconsin, with bubbles like whipped cream and a very unbitter hoppy taste.  Almost flowery.  And then there was the best salad EVER.  It was topped with homemade bacon, which the waiter encourage I taste by itself before digging in.  The cucumbers were so thin you could see through them, but they BURST with cucumberness.  Little strips of apples criss-crossed the top.  And on the side were four marble-sized, deep fried bits of homemade ricotta.  (Ricotta has flavor?  Again, yes!)  I bit into one, and the cheese oozed out, not too hot, not too cold.  The salad was not perfect in the traditonal sense - there was a little bit of brown on some of the leaves - but pure genius always makes you questions whether mistakes are really mistakes. It was a ten dollar salad and worth ever penny.

For dinner, I had Ramp Risotto and Roasted Broccoli with Cauliflower.  I asked about ramps, which are a part spinach/part onion vegetable.  They boil them all day into a puree.  It's everything you like about onion flavor without the hotness or bad breath afterwards.  It's hard to believe they were once considered weeds.  I shoved my face into the steam coming off the risotto and lingered there for a few minutes.

But for me, the most amazing dish was the Broccoli and Cauliflower.  They were smothered with a fondue cheese sauce that had a little kick to it.  But the actual flavor of the actual Broccoli and Cauliflower was so intense, it was like eating five of the the same food at the same time.  The texture of both was just a bit crunchy, but the warmth went all the way to center of the vegetable, which is different than a regular stir fry.  (Stir fry is crunchy, but the outside is hot and the inside cold).  It was astounding!  I think there was a little citrus in the middle.  But whatever it was, I could still taste it hours after seating.

Words fail me.  These are humble vegetables.  I don't know how to describe them, except they were just MORE SO.

Dessert was donut a la mode.  Well, that's a literal reading, anyway.   The donut tasted more like the wheat inside it than sugar, and the ice cream (also homemade) balanced the sweetness of maple syrup across the top.  And they gave me an after-dinner aperatif (bubbly red wine with a rose aroma) for my birthday.

Sometimes I believe that restriction, not freedom, is the true source of creativity.  Before you color outside the lines, you have to have lines.  So.  If you let nature draw your boundaries for you, you can be creative in ways that unbounded processing and shipping cannot.

Mind, consider yourself blown.  A nice thing for your 49th birthday, eh?

Chicago: Day 1

I'm going to Chicago for a Ruby and Rails conference.  Thrown into the best city in America with a bunch of other introverts.  What could possibly go wrong?

I am not very optimistic these days, so I'm hoping to get some sort of jolt of ... well, something.   And I want to leave a small carbon footprint doing it.  So I'm taking the train, which Cornell likes because they're very environmentally conscious.  Plus cheap.  Just because their Ivy League doesn't mean they have mad money.

Besides, riding on a plane is depressingly trivial, and everything is done for you.  A train requires more finesse, and while that's easily acquirable, it requires a folk wisdom that isn't around much these days.  Lady Gaga is not Woody Guthrie - she ain't gonna tell you how to ride the rails.

But I will!

How to Sleep on Amtrak

If you're gonna do train travel, the odds are pretty good you'll be travelling at night.  You could reserve a sleeping car for $300, but to me that's bordering on insanity.  I did a sleeping car once, in France, and it was not very comfortable ... and I don't expect the Americans to improve on it very much.  

For God's sake, sleep in your seat!  This used to be a little easier when Amtrak provided free pillows and blankets.  But no more - maybe someone got some bedbugs or something, I dunno.  You can buy a travel kit from the conductor, but then that's one more expensive thing to take home.  Here's the right way:

1. Get yo'self a nice very thin blanket.  That'll fold up and be OK to carry in your carry-on (I do a spacious backpack).
2. Get a travel pillow.  A regular pillow can also work, but they're more bulky.  Don't expect too much from your travel pillow.  You might be one of those people who can slip it around your neck and sleep sitting up.  That's not me, and it's probably not you.  But you will make do anyway.
3. On the train, when you get your seat make sure the "recliner" footrest actually works (not the one on the chair in front, but the one that's attached to the seat).  On this particular trip, mine wasn't working and I regretted it.  Oh ... and aisle or window seat doesn't matter, although window seat has the advantage of a nice cold surface to lay on.  I like the aisle because I can dangle my feet out there for people to trip over.
4. To go to sleep, put your pillow on the arm rest (if you have an aisle seat) or the wall (if you have the window seat).  Put the recliner seat up.  Put the foot rest down.  Put the chair back.
5. Throw the blanket over you and sleep on your side with your feet on the foot rest and your body sprawled out over the recliner leg rest.  DO NOT under any circumstances face your neighbor.  There's nothing worse than waking up to a face full of .... uhh, your neighbor's bad breath.  Or vice versa.  
6. No spooning.  Need I even mention that?  
7. Don't worry about sleeping for more than an hour or two at a time.  The more you worry, the less sleep you'll get.  Just expect that you'll wake up and turn every once in awhile, and you'll be OK.

Simple as pie.  And if you're in central New York like I am, you can basically sleep through an entire trip to Chicago.  It's like teleporting.

The Land of Big Buildings

The train was an hour late, but the skyline from it is quite a sight.  I like the Chicago skyline anyway, but this is a different vantage point from the stop-and-go traffic of I-94.  It's a little less intimidating.  I decided to walk from Union station to the hotel, which is only 2 and a half miles.  I had totally forgot that Chicago miles are actually longer than the standard mile by ... well, however many feet it takes you to get totally tired.

Starving, I got lunch at the hotel.  That pretty much reminded me that "there isn't a bad meal in Chicago".  (Although later I'd hear of some conference goers getting bad beef brisket.  Yikes).  I had a grilled vegetable panini and some fries - fantastic fare.  And lots of water. 

And then, since it was my free day and a day before my birthday, I went out to Dusty Grooves record store in the near North end.  It was like going to Mecca!   They're a record store in the best sense - not big like Tower Records used to be - but everything they have, you will want.  I got a lot of music that I can't get on the Internet.   Chicago blues. Tropicalia.  African Psychedelic Rock.  You know, the usual stuff.  I went to the counter with a teetering stack of CD's, and they checked me out calmly as if this sort of thing happened every day.  Which I'm sure it does.  

I made it downtown with a Santa-sized backpack of CD's, then went to go see the Aqua building.  It's probably my favorite building in the world next to Fallingwater.  It was not quite finished the last time I looked at it in October, 2014.  Now all the glass was in, and it stands majestically like an ocean tilted upwards.  The grey parts are balconies jut out in various shapes and widths (I'm sure you pay more for the "juttier" ones).  The blue are windows, which are reflections of Lake Michigan or the river.  Absolutely gorgeous.  And designed by a woman architect (no surprise there.)

I then met up with my niece, Ramona Joan for dinner.  I've seen her twice in the past year, the other being at my parent's 50th anniversary bash in the Smokey Mountains.  She's a hoot!  Having finished her bachelor's at Oberlin, she took a volunteerish position with an Episcopal Refugee center in Chicago.  It's a year-long gig, sorta my like stint with Vista back in the 1990's.   You gotta hand it to her sacrifice though.  It's tough being a poor in a town like Utica, like I was.  But it must be terrible being in a town like Chicago that requires lots of money, and tempts you all the time with opulent stuff.  

Anyway, we ended up at the vegetarian place Kathryn's Cooked.  (As opposed to Kathryn's Raw, which is another restaurant Kathryn runs).  Ramona had the grilled vegetable sandwich and coleslaw ... and she amazed herself by eating every bit of the coleslaw.  I had some cream of corn soup which is a little underwhelming, but then a taco salad which made up for it twice over.  Unlike other places, they didn't attempt to make the meat look like meat.  It was just tasty seitan/soy stuff in a spicy sauce that was the total bomb!  Pop that on a bed of nice greens.  And finish with coconut pie that wasn't overly sweet, just like warm (not melted) ice cream in a pie with just a hint of coconut flavor.  Awesome!  Every bit as good as the Moosewood, and that takes a lot for an Ithacan to admit.

We talked about women's studies and movies and books.  All sorts of stuff.  Like all English majors, she's a Renaissance Woman and can discuss any subject.  Since I will be waist deep in computer scientists the next 4 days (who will be loathe to discuss anything that doesn't have an iPhone App), I was glad to spend some time with her.

I finished the day at the Knickerbocker Martini Bar.  Pour me a sidecar, my friend, it's gonna be a long week.