Tuesday, July 28, 2009


when we arrived in oregon, we headed to portland just to see what's going on there, but at the end of a hot day traveling with the bay-bay our ability to navigate the trailer through a major metropolis waned and tensions began to mount in the cabin of the vanmobile. i gave up and parked to gain us some time for map reading and slow breathing (i parallel parked for those who are impressed by handymanly things like trailer driving) and when i looked out the passenger side window i saw a sign, a divine oracle, a burning bush, a flaming flamingo; that sign read "oregon brewers festival". our course was clear. having read once that beer can make humans happy we decided to investigate further. 200 beers were featured and nearly 2000 people were in attendance. many were the foamy moustaches and wobbly wanderers. the groove was laid back and the beer was cold. we were heavy into people watching when we noticed 4 or 5 folks snapping pictures of stella playing with our empty (i promise) beer mugs on the ground. she clearly realized that the path to happiness involves the up-ending of these curious devices and was amusing the dickens out of the locals around her.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

home at last?

I put the van in park and said "honey, we're home" as we pulled the airstream into slot number 85 at the Blue Ox RV park. We're across from the pool and laundry room and we have a tree. I can't say much for the aesthetics of the place but it's friendly, clean and we're awfully happy to just have a place to be for a week. We haven't spent more than 5 days in the same place since the beginning of May and we're a bit travel-weary after the 3,000 mile jaunt with a 13 month old. This week is devoted to figuring out our professional obligations and trying to get a feel for the area; I'm gonna go look around the ER tomorrow and work my first shift on Wednesday. We found the good grocery and the hip part of Corvallis. If Albany has a hip part, we haven't seen it yet. We're a bit on the frazzled side being this far from home and not really having a home but we're cracking ourselves up and maintaining our baseline level of belligerently naive optimism about the possibility of existing as full-time wanderers.

the good the bad and the ugly

Good: Our first day in Oregon we hiked to the top of lookout mountain where we could see from the desert to the coast, Mts Hood, Jefferson, Adams, St Helens and the three sisters from an old fire lookout. The weather was perfect, the flowers blooming and the other hikers friendly. There were a few patches of snow lingering in the sunny woods like party guests that passed out in the kitchen and forgot to go home.
Bad: Hood River Oregon. Thanks to an out of date guide book we got the impression that this town was a sardine can of hip awesomeness but apparently the place has been discovered by the decaf turtleneck crowd and is now full of "lifestyle accessory boutiques". I'm not sure what this implies exactly, but if my karma ever needs some flirty pumps to go with its little black dress I guess I'll come back. It's the sort of place that makes me wish I could fart on command.



Ugly: Sunset Inn RV park. A trash covered gravel parking lot behind a run down motel next to a hobo trail to the underpass. We've learned that on the weekend, everywhere within thirty minutes of Portland is full of folks and having a plan in advance of arrival is probably wise.

Friday, July 24, 2009

alright folks; i can't help it...we've been traveling for 2 weeks now and like the parents we are, we've taken enough pictures of stella to make a 3-D movie. the truth is, she's a damn cute baby and i just have to devote an occasional post to her her overall sweetness. if you're not a breeder or you just can't stand irrational parental doting please scroll along cuz all this is gonna be is baby pictures. (i have no idea why this is underlined or blue, the blogger site seems to want it that way and i can't figure out how to change it; you're just going to have to choose your own level of emphasis and emotional overlay)






for those mathematically inclined; if you take ultrawow, dodecahedrawow, and boombamwowza and fence them in with parentheses raised to the wow power, you'll find that the sum is eight, but an eight so bamfoozled with awesomeness that it faints euphorically and lands on it side suggesting a different answer altogether. for those of a culinary persuasion; take two pounds of lean grain-fed fantasticness and marinade it in a warm glaze of radicalized effervescence, set your oven to summer and sprinkle the pan with diced paradise. for those neither mathematical nor gastronomical i offer one last analogical lottery ticket; close your eyes and think back to a day when you were young enough to ignore thoughts of health and wealth and remember the day you laid down under a breezy june tree and let the sun shadows play on your face until you were almost asleep but woke with a clarified snap of realization that only minutes away there existed a chocolate freezer pop and a preoccupied mom. what i'm trying desperately to get at here is the all out wonder i felt at falling down a rabbit hole in idaho known as " the trail of the hiawatha". this parking lot miracle is thirteen miles of ex-railroad converted to bicycle trail. it starts with a 1.7 mile tunnel; basement-closet dark and dripping with unseen cave-splatters of aquatic acousticness. you start in montana and when you come out of the tunnel, you're in idaho and it's one hour earlier. it's not just a bike ride, it's a journey into the past. from the end of the tunnel you ride 13 miles downhill through idaho mountain forests and over improbably high and questionable railroad bridges to a park-service shuttle that takes you back to the start of the trail. cheers to my amazing daughter who sang her way through the tunnels and rutted gravel trail.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

There is only one organization that i have ever voluntarily paid to join and i have been a member my entire adult life. The Adventure Cycling organization began the same year I was born with the purpose of creating a nationwide network of bicycling routes and kicked off their drive with a transcontinental "transamerica" ride in 1976. Since then, they have developed an extensive collection of maps that give cyclists a way to get back and forth across the country on backroads and roads noted for their scenery. Tiffanie and I rode across the transam route about 10 years ago and were floored by the generosity of small town folks who had become accustomed to dingy bikers rolling through town looking for a place to put up a tent. (it's hard to limit my commentary about Adventure Cycling so I'm gonna try a new approach) If cycling could be compared to Christianity with all it's denominations then adventure cycling is the only place where I feel comfortable pitching pennies in the plate. When Tiffany and I realized that Missoula Montana, home of adventure cycling's headquarters, was on our route, I had to stop by and say hello. I'm not sure they were quite ready for some unshaven awestruck Kentuckian with a baby strapped to his back to wander in just for the express purpose of "being there", but they were as friendly as I expected and offered us a soda and showed us where they make the maps and their collection of bikes. These bikes weren't there because they were necessarily old or fancy but because of the places they'd been. "this bike's been from alaska to cape horn" "this bike has been 30,000 miles" "this bike has been around the world twice" and so on. Our guide (a monk in the finest abbey) gave us some maps of local bike trails and shared his enthusiasm for the place. Now the unexpected benefit to all of this is the discovery that Missoula is one the hippest towns on the planet. I'm convinced that it's just the magic of adventure cycling drifting out over the town like the smell of apple pie in a scooby-doo cartoon. A river runs through the middle of town with a bike trail along the side of it and the whole place is ringed by mountain even thought the town is pancake flat. The vibe is palpably laid back and the day we were there the entire populace appeared to headed out to go inner tubing. I've never seen such a mix of young, old, hip and sketchy all headed to the same place with the same purpose. The town also raised money for a giant carousel, built it, and runs it with volunteers. Rides are 50 cents and it's worth waking a baby up for. I realize that this is a rambling post, but I'm still in a bit of a semi-religious frenzy about the place. I'll be knocking on your door soon with some literature.
For the last ten years, Tiffany has been cutting articles out of a variety of outdoorsy magazines like "Outside", "Backpacker", and "Hoofin' it" and filing them with a 3-hole punch into a binder. At last, on this trip she has had a chance to prove wrong my assertions that she's the granola equivalent of a coupon-cutting housewife. thanks to her diligent dewey decimalism, we found out about a place in wyoming called Bighorn. For all i know, everyone else has heard of this place already but according to Tiffany's sources, it is often overlooked due to it's proximity to Yellowstone and Glacier.
(picture: if you look closely you can see the rig nestled amongst the horse trailers)


Travis, if you're out there, forgive me for this, but we drug the airstream up a 7% grade (had to pull over and vent the engine after the wiper fluid started boiling and spraying out of the wipers) and through the woods on a trail fit more for horses than trailers. Once we started we had to keep going because there sure wasn't any place to turn around. Eventually we made it to the trail head and after some deep-breathing exercises got ourselves ready for a hike up into the mountains.



The bighorn landscape varied from rugged stone outcroppings to western mountain streams and meadows. Nala frolicked appropriately. I hauled the cheese disposal up the trail and Tiff reminded me that we would have never been here if not for her binder.

From here we headed into Bozeman for some hotel pool action. Bozeman's got plenty of style and some good eating. The locals all look like they just wound down from a tough shoot for the patagonia catalog. Sasha loved the hotel and after a night of wandering downtown, Tiff and I found her so asleep on the hotel bed that she didn't realize we'd come home.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

i'm sure the badlands came by their name honestly enough. get rid of the roads, cold beer, and perfect weather and the place could be a real nightmare (especially if the beer was warm). but after a wet spring with a cool tailwind on a bicycle followed by a couple of hot blonds, the badlands are double sixes on a paradice.

this has turned out to be an incredible time to be up north; everything is grassy green and there has been enough rain to produce a bumper crop of wildflowers that are pleasantly incongruous with the harsh western scenery.

it's always a pleasure to see tiff's maternal instincts emerge. sliding down a loose trail with stella strapped to her back and playing next to the "beware of rattlers" sign shows me a new softness i'd never seen in my wife before.
the homing pigeons are racing tonight
intuition alone
shelters their flight
the shaman corks his bottles of thunder
and knows what grows
if you plow your name under
the weaver unravels the work that she'd done
then hums a hum
patient her lover will come
the doctor checks his pulse at the door
rings the bell
and dives for the floor
the gardener waters and waits
pruning his worries
and weeding his fates
the boxer swings and knocks himself out
and swears to his wife
that inside is out
the policeman's locked in the slammer
but plots his escape
with his grandfathers hammer
the sweeps and the swallows consider their fate
the students are seated
but the teacher is late
the homing pigeons are racing tonight
intuition alone
shelters their flight

Thursday, July 16, 2009

this is apparently what things look like from stella's angle. this is a picture she took while playing with my phone. notice the subtle postmodern. underpinnings of the perspective contrasted with the abstracted photorealism in the composition of the piece. i would have used a different f-stop but she says she shoots what she feels.
so far so good; madison deserves the cool bike-friendly reputation it has. we were able to start far out of town in a nice park and ride paved pretty trails to the center of town for a fine meal at a brewery. the sashimi and cranberry mustard were tasty enough to make all of the "yah sure", "you betcha", and "don't you know" commentary of northerners seem sincere and welcoming. normally, being the capital city of a state makes it as cool and hip as being the president of the high school chess club, but madison has a vibrant pedestrian and bike-welcoming downtown surrounding the hilltop capital building. someone even left some pro-bike pamphlets shoved under our brake cables. (although, truth be told, there's always something unnerving about agreeable propaganda.)

after madison we finally made it across the mississippi (thank god for spell-checkers) and are officially, if only mildly, WEST. we camped 600 feet above the river on some bluffs and went for a hike this morning before heading west to sioux falls, south dakota for a walk and some food. (guacamole, olive salsa, and sangria for the foodies out there.) we've been trying to coordinate driving with stella's naptimes with a decent amount of success. her carseat in the van faces the dogs and she has learned to stick out her tongue and pant at them. this is amusing in the van, but seems disconcerting to passersby in the street when they get enthusiastically panted at by a baby.


it occurred to me today that this is the first time in my life i've gone somewhere with no real definite plan about when i'm coming back. we've been planning and working our hineys (hinies? high-knees?) off for a year to make this happen but we really don't have much in the way of plans once we get there. i'm committed to 9 shifts a month in albany but other than that we don't have much that we're obligated to. we still haven't figured out exactly where we are going to stay but i don't even know if there's a good reason to stay anywhere. we got a PO box so that the IRS could waste some paper at us, but other than that we may just go ahead and keep in wander-mode for a bit; we seem to be getting the hang of it and my brain feels a lot more active for having all of the new stimuli that the last couple of months have offered.

i'd like to add a bunch more pictures but rural south dakota has about as much band width as a mosquito leg.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009


after 2 months of goodbye parties we are as fattened and polished with well-wishing and cookouts as any sacrificial virgin that ever got flung into a volcano and at 5 pm today we put on our asbestos panties took the plunge. as i write this we are passing the jeweled luminescent lego set of Chicago's night-time skyline after suffering through the moldy pancake that is northern indiana. with forty feet of diesel burnin' land yacht and tiff at the helm we could be the poster for "squeaky and the bandit." stella finally lost a long battle with consciousness and her cheeks are jiggling like santa's ass on a corrugated tin roof. neither tiff or i have been able to sum up our feelings very well at this point. i feel like we're half-way through a health club smoothie; it tastes a little nasty but it's probably good for us and for the price we're damn well gonna finish it. we're hoping to make it to madison wisconsin tonight and head west from there on the northern route. the last time i came this way was on a cross country honeymoon bicycle trip. now 10 years later and with fourteen thousand pounds more stuff (including 20 pounds of cheese-fed baby) i'm looking for the next thing, whatever that might be. between tiff and i, i'm sure we've had several hundred conversations with friends and family about why we're leaving and i think we've managed to come up with a different answer each time.

my turn to drive...

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Movin' on up...

Bowling is a sport. If this statement seems reasonable to you, then you probably are unsurprised by the fact that RV parks are indicated on maps as "campgrounds". Living in an RV park is actually a lot like camping except for the air conditioning, refrigerator, stereo, oven, showers, laundry room, pool and high-speed internet connection. For the last few weeks Tiffany and I have both been unemployed ( Stella is still working around the clock at being a tiny little trainwreck with a pinch of tornado) and living in the trailer. We kicked off our jobless adventuring with a trip to Nashville to celebrate Dr Joe's release from prison (he was sentenced to 9 years of residency after med school for being smart enough to be a plastic surgeon). In addition to being a surgeon Joe also works part time as a rep for Bacchus, greek god of wine, women, and song. True to his style, he and his comrades took over the penthouse suite of a hotel in downtown Nashville for an evening of drinking, dancing and generalized merriment. This gave Tiffany and I a chance to recreate "The Jeffersons" in a single evening by getting ready for the party at the trailer park and heading to the hotel for some fancy high-rollin' until the sun came up.

{picture: view from the party pad}


Stella Firefly Short was born in our bathroom in Lexington one year ago. I had come home from work after a night shift as Tiff was getting out of bed and she said, "I think my water just broke but you should go ahead and get some sleep because we've got a while." This statement reinforces my belief that all pregnant women are beautiful and stark-raving mad. Obviously things went well but not without the steady calm guidance of our midwife, Linda Blue and the mellow joy of my mother. I knew that Stella would come into the world surrounded by friends and family but I didn't realize that her arrival would also blur the lines between the two. Since Stella was born, Linda has become family and Stella always puts on her best manners when she sees her. Linda is headed around the world soon, because like any superhero her path is guided by a mixture of the whimsy of fate and the needs of others. She made our weekend in Nashville possible by coming along and keeping an eye on Stella and we couldn't have done it without her.

{picture: the late night impromptu dance floor}