Progress

It has been over a month since I posted anything here. It has been over two months since Akiko, Maki, Hannah, Bonnie and I set out from Richmond Va. Our two month anniversary for hotel living is next week. All of this and I still haven't managed to get more than a tease or two written about the cross country trip. So, my goal today is to get something written down here about the trip.

However, before I attack that goal, here is a little update on what's going on in Orygun. In mid-September Akiko and I moved out of the tiny studio hotel room near Portland to an even tinier hotel room in Salem. I had been told many times that Salem was a shithole full of nothing, but migrant workers, meth-heads and religious right freaks. While that description isn't too far from the mark, there are some surprising advantages to living in Salem.

First, it has a ton of great Mexican food. There are little trailers on every block hocking home made Mexican dishes. Most of the current Mexicans seem to be from the state of Michoacán, at least judging by how often this word is plastered all over everything. There are six Muchas Gracia taco shops in Salem. Muchas Gracias is a Mexican food chain that was started in California by a Mexican worker who was busted by la Migra and then given amnesty. He is a true believer in the American dream and now has more than 50 store locations in CA, OR and WA. Having visited several of them, they are a far cry McDonalds. They are all unique in some way although the menu is generally the same. The food isn't fancy, but I never miss an excuse to grab one of their tacos. My Spanish is dreadful, but here is the source of my info on Muchas Gracias. Correct me if I botched any details. http://www.muchasgraciasmex.com/about.html

The second surprisingly cool thing about Salem is the number of little mom and pop stores. Fish stores, bakeries, donut shops, farmer's markets, butchers, etc. Sadly lacking are any asian super markets worth visiting. Nonetheless, in Salem you are more likely to bump into a small non-big box store than you are home-depot, Lowes or Burger king. The other refreshing aspect of all of these places is that they are not boutique -neither in appearance or attitude nor, more importantly, in price. Maybe Salem is backward and not progressive. Or maybe the people here have got it right.

The fairgrounds are number three on my list of reason why I like Salem. People who don't share or understand my bicycle affliction can skip this paragraph. The Salem fairgrounds are my new neighborhood playground. There never really was a playground near to where I lived as a kid. We either lived way the hell up in the mtns or we lived in the sub-urbs. I am fine with that, because at age 37 I have a playground in my neighborhood. The fairgrounds are a 5 minute bike ride from my hotel room. That means that I am 5 minutes away from: a BMX track, a pump track, 4 dirt jump lines and some "north-shore-style-stunts." (For those of you who don't get the bike thing and are still reading this, think: swing-sets, slides, teeter-totters, and jungle-gyms...for bikes.) Since the rain is supposedly on its way here and I will only be in this neighborhood for a week or so more, I have been playing in my personal playground at every opportunity. In three weeks of playing, I still hold the record for the oldest guy to hit the big dirt-jump line.

None of these points are why we moved to Salem. The real reason was that Akiko couldn't handle 2.5 hours a day in the car to get back and forth from work. This issue became particularly pressing as we got closer to harvest time, which is in full swing right now, although the harvest here is kids stuff compared to the German harvest.

Akiko is generally working 6-10 hours per day 5-6 days per week. The times that I was lucky enough to experience the harvest in Germany the teams were working 10-18 hours per day 6-7 days per week. (I jumped in at my leisure for a few days and it was hard work.) The big difference here in the US, is that "white people don't drive tractors." That is the nice way to say that migrant labor does all of the really hard work: picking the grapes, loading the trucks, etc. If you take the picking and the transportation out of the harvest work load, you've got easy street. While it is still a bit or work and requires know-how and experience to get the grapes from the trucks to the tanks, it is a lot easier if you don't spend 6 hours of your morning picking and schlepping grapes.

I am sure there are, in fact I KNOW there are, wine makers somewhere in Orygun or the US for that matter that actually work in the field; pruning, harvesting, spraying, etc., but I am surprised by how many do not. At the same time I am surprised by how many also claim to know "their" grapes intimately. That is tough to do without getting mud on your boots.

OK, before I say something I will regret, let me move on to my goal for the day.

So, I picked our day in Badlands for today's show and tell. The Badlands are an incredible visual experience, especially if one includes the approach to them. The portion of South Dakota to the east of the badlands is Microsoft Windows desktop prairie. Rolling green hills, blue skies and puffy white clouds. As much as we all tried we weren't able to get a decent shot of this landscape from the car at 70 mph. We could have stopped, if there had actually been anywhere to stop and if we hadn't been trying to make time. At the time it didn't seem worth while, but in retrospect I wish we had taken a minute to get a shot of the MS Windows prairie.

So as we approached Badlands we were looking up at the horizon looking for jagged peaks and huge bowls. All we saw were lots of small gullies in the plains from erosion. Some of the larger gullies were brutally carved out with impressive features, but where were these maze like canyons carved into mountains? The "duh moment" came as we crested a large MS Windows knoll. There below us were the Badlands carved *into* the prairie floor. Upon seeing it for the first time it was a shock. A little reflection where we were helped it make sense. Or the other way around, made it obvious that there couldn't really be a mini-rocky mountain popping up out of the South Dakota prairie.

This photo almost looks unreal. Part of that is because of the weird blur line half between infinite distance and very close. There may have been a drop of water on the lens as we did get hit by some rain clouds. One way or the other the colors and the shape were just incredible. This photo does not do the dramatic changes across the strata any justice.

This shot shows some of the other colors that were in the soil and the rock. I think we saw red, green, purple, pink, blue, black, bone white, yellow and orange rock and soil in a time frame of about three hours. All of that with a back drop of blue skies, which explains the poor contrast (brutal midday sun).

Another shot showing the beautiful blue skies and the colorful strata. Whoever took this picture must have one leg shorter than the other...I guess that's me.

Maki and Akiko. Yikes.

Akiko and I. No comment.

Not a terribly flattering view of it, but this campsite was actually very nice, clean and cheap. I think we paid $10. The photos above are only about 5 minutes from the campsite, which was flat as a pancake.

I am half drunk. Maki is freezing. We tried warming the plates to keep the food warm, it was windy and cold. The steaks and the mushrooms were great, but could have been hotter. The trouble with Maki, Akiko and I is that we all love beer, wine and food. The usual routine after a day in the car was to break out some beers to unwind. Whip up a small snack to eat with the beers, while drinking beer. Have a couple of beers with the small snack. The ladies would run off to shower while I fed the dogs and drank more beer. When the ladies were back we would start cooking dinner while finishing the beer and getting the first bottle of wine started. Generally by time we got done eating is a good ways past midnight and we were all pretty much cross eyed. Once we hit bear country we were forced to slightly modify this routine. I said, "slightly."

Akiko says I spoil the dog. It was damned cold (actually it wasn't that cold, but it had been in the 90s during the day) out under the open skies and the poor old dog was freezing. She's nothing but skin and bones these days.

We got up the next day and hit Mt. Rushmore and Crazyhorse and camped at the foot of Devil's Tower. Maybe I'll get around to posting that sometime before Christmas.

Welcome to Orygun

OK, I am still working on the pictures and random stories from the trip out to Orygun from Virginny. It has been an interesting two weeks so far and I would like to talk about my new home a little.

Traffic.

Where did all of the people come from? Where exactly are they going? Why am I sitting in a traffic jam at 2 pm on a Tuesday?

Either the infrastructure is awful in some way that I have yet to figure out or there a hell of a lot of people in the greater Portland area -all of whom who want to go somewhere in their cars. I think the cause of the problem may be infrastructure. There are two large North-South thoroughfares, the I5 and 99W. They run parallel, obviously, but there are really no roads running east to west between them. The end result is that if a person wants to go to a location somewhere between Portland and Salem (that is a long "a" in "Saylem" for you "non-locals") you either have to suffer two-lane small-town stoplight hell for an hour or you can drive all the south to Saylem (I need to type it that way so I stop saying Sahlem. Sahlem really must annoy the locals because they will go out of their way to correct you for using -to the point of butting into a conversation that they are not part of to point out your blunder.) and head North on 99W. If you need to get somewhere in the North of the Willamette Valley (the a in Willamette is a diphthong ae...not really long or short. I've been corrected on that one too.), you can go North to Portland and South on 99W.

Traffic to the coast I have yet to see aside from the way it chokes up the I5 and 99W, but if it is anything like the rest of the traffic, it is probably extremely slow and incredibly dangerous. Yes, dangerous. We saw two more accidents today. That brings our tally for two weeks to 6 serious accidents. Five crashes involved roll-overs and the sixth was a Chevy Suburban towing a water-ski boat that crossed the yellow line, crossed on-coming traffic and then plowed through the guard-rail. We must have arrived minutes after the accident, because the Suburban was still dangling over the cliff. The driver should buy stock in the hitch manufacturer, because the hitch between the boat trailer and his truck probably saved his life. Straight out of a Mel Gibson movie, the truck was suspended over the edge of the road by nothing more than the boat trailer and some mangled guard rail. The cliff on the side of the road wasn't monumental, but it was a good 50-100 feet.

Five rollovers and a near cliff-dive is a lot of action for two weeks. To put it in perspective (my perspective), in the past two years I have driven from Virginny to Colotucky and back twice. I have driven from Virginny to Orygun and in 2008 I drove nearly sixty thousand miles. In all of that driving I have not seen as many serious accidents as I have in the last two weeks. It isn't like I am just seeing the hours-later aftermath either. Glass, body panels and luggage strewn all over the highway. People on stretchers. EMTs treating people in the median. I used to think the Colorado I70 corridor in winter was dangerous. Not so much anymore.

Akiko and I figured it can't be the roads. If the roads were at fault, Richmond would have been a lot worse. If two foot deep potholes in a 65 mph zone couldn't cause major carnage, the relatively benign road damage here sure shouldn't. Regarding the two deep pothole in Richmond, as I swerved around this particular pothole, I looked down into it, past the re-bar and was able to see the damned rabbit hole from Alice in Wonderland. The potholes in Richmond were also a part of the reason that I bought a pickup.

I hope that I am just seeing some sort of statistical anomaly here and that there is not some weird phenomenon that makes driving in Orygun dangerous.

Mt. Hood National Forest

So now that I have whined a little bit, I can talk about some of the fun that we are having. We have made two outings two the Mt. Hood National Forest so far; today and last Sunday. Last Sunday our plan was to drive down to Saylem, drive across to Detroit, take some Forest Service roads to Hood River and then the I84 along the Columbia river back to Portland. Somewhere between Detroit and Hood River we planned to get out of the truck and hike for a while. I really really really should have known better, but I need this type of trip every now and again to remind myself. Remind myself to be at least a little prepared. Having a Tom-Tom and a Rand McNally Atlas of the USA for navigation is prepared for driving from Virginia to Oregon. They don't help much when following Forest Service roads in the Cascades. Who would have thought?

Last Sunday we tallied nearly 100 miles driving washboarded, cliffside, narrow washed-out dirt roads. Luckily we did not have the dogs in the back of the truck, because the roads were so dry and dusty that by time we finally got home there was a quarter inch of fine sand-dust in the back of the truck...and nearly as much in the cab. Worse than Moab! It was actually a fun trip, even though we did not achieve our original goal -not by a long shot. We did get to hike an awesome trail that I am going back to ride sometime soon. We ate lots of fresh wild blue berries. We scared ourselves silly wondering when we were going to meet a bear, because the place we were hiking was lousy with bear-victuals.

We wound up driving so far, because we let Tom-Tom guide us. The trip from Detroit to Hood River is actually pretty easy: you follow FSD 46 from Detroit to Hood River. That's it. Tom-Tom decided to take us a different route. Whether it was a short-cut, the scenic route, technically the fastest or shortest, a practical joke played by the navigation-algorithm programmers or just a glitch I cannot say, but it was a navigational train wreck. Thank god it was at least fun. How often do you get to see the same road closed sign from the front and back in one trip?

The crowning Tom-Tom moment was when it insisted that we make a right down the shear cliff that the road we were on was traversing. Why the Tom-Tom "thought" there was a road there now or had ever been a road there is beyond me. This particular incident proved to be a real pain in the ass. When we ignored the order to turn right, we were told to turn around as soon as possible. We tried to tell the damned thing that we did not want take that route, but for whatever reason it insisted. We finally wound up doing an 83-point turn on the cliff side road that we were on. Then as we approached the phantom road off the cliff, which was on our left now, we told Tom Tom that there was a road block in front of us. The subsequent re-route led to yet another white-knuckle seat-swallowing-puckerfest as we did another multi-point turn on the narrow road. Why didn't we just go out the way we came in? Two reasons: 1) as stated before, Akiko and I are dangerously stubborn and 2) we were by this point hopelessly lost and completely dependent on the stupid Tom-Tom.

We finally did go back out the way we came and headed back to Portland -actually to Tigard, which is pronounced with a long "i." For today's trip we were armed with a topo-atlas of the area and a safely turned-off and stowed Tom-Tom. Without the Tom-Tom we arrived exactly where we wanted a little ahead of schedule and completely without 100 mile detours. How boring.

The trail we walked was not boring. Last week when we finally decided to give being lost a break for a while and got out of the car for a walk, we were at a lot higher elevations. The trail we walked traversed an area that had either been logged or burnt recently. (Not sure if the Forest Service sub-contracts forest management / allows commercial logging National Forests...) The growth was dense and scrubby. Today's terrain was completely different. Old growth! I had heard about old growth, read about it and saw pictures of it, but was not ready for experiencing it first hand. It is breath taking! No forest that I have seen before compares to this. Nothing in the Appalachians, nothing in the Rockies, nothing in the Alps, nothing in the Pyrenes, nothing in Asia! I am sure there are places that compare, but nowhere that I have been. I am sure the Sequoias in California and the big Cedars in British Columbia are even more impressive, but this was my first time to see really BIG trees. I was blown away.

These are the real sky-scrapers. It was a still day, so the trees were perfectly motionless. We stared up the trunks and tried to imagine how long it would take us to run to the end (assuming the trunks weren't shooting into the sky). There were Doug firs and Cedars. The Douglas firs were more plentiful and easily two to three times the width of the Cedars at the base. The Cedars just barely made up for their lack of girth in overall height -at least as far as we could tell standing on the ground. The shape of the Cedars and the D-firs were completely different for trees that appeared to grow to the same height. Whereas the D-firs were retained their thickness to incredible heights, the Cedars tapered down very quickly, but seemed to grow on and on to a tiny needle point at the end.

It was also impressive to see the dead-falls. There were two that fell just perfectly as to form a bridge out over a depression and back. A very long and fairly high bridge. Akiko saw me looking at them and knew immediately what I was thinking. "Go on. I'll take a picture from here." I denied that she had been able to read my mind. Mostly because I hadn't been doing any stupid-person-tricks lately and was not feeling too confident, but nearly as much because the natural bridge made by the trees was pretty damned high. A mis-step would probably not be fatal, but would definitely hurt. "Go on. Are you scared? You ride your bike on stuff like that all the time." I seriously wondered for a second if she had a secret life insurance policy and was trying to off me. I have been pretty cranky lately.

She was right on both counts though. I was scared and I do ride my bike on a lot more technical "stunts" pretty regularly. There was not much more I could argue, but I tried. "Come on. It's getting late." My desperate last grasp argument seemed to work and Akiko shrugged and headed down the trail. Unfortunately, she turned around and saw me still looking at the bridge. "Oh, go on!"

In the end it wasn't worth all the drama. The bridge was high and a bit exposed, the dead-falls were probably 20 feet of the ground at the highest point, but they were also 3-4 feet in diameter. It was like walking down a sidewalk...20 feet off the ground. The first couple of steps out were hesitant. I was just planning on walking out a little, having Akiko snap a picture and then scurrying back to safety. Once on the big old boardwalk, I decided to walk to the middle. As always looking down was sobering and brought to mind thoughts like: Am I the 200 lbs straw that is going to break this camels back? What happens if the bark under my feet is loose and shears off under my weight? Looking straight ahead and focusing on walking calmly and breathing regularly pushed those thoughts away. After completing the little bridge walk I remembered why I liked adrenaline sports and also realized that I have become a total sissy. The elevated heart rate, the slow motion, the clarity and then the sheesh-that-was-easy feeling have been missing from life. Time to dust off my "man-card" and go do more stupid stuff. Probably should grab the health insurance card, for whatever its worth, too.


Me on the elevated boardwalk. That look on my face is somewhere between shit-eating-grin and get-me-outta-here.



Akiko trying not to fall in. The difference in air temperature at this little fall was impressive and welcome. It gets pretty stifling in the dense part of the forest.

Portland or Bust

Everyone has made it to Portland alive. It was truly touch and go for Hannah Dog for a few days, but she soldiered through the trip and is doing great now. She is 14 and does not do well in heat or cold. She does, however, like to jump off of things like pickup tailgates and river-banks. When she is not jumping of them, she tends to fall of them. She is deaf, dumb, stubborn and somewhat addled -the perfect companion, but more about her later.

Between our starting point in Richmond VA and our destination of Portland OR we conquered 13 States, dozens of different "local" beers, a handful of mom and pop diners, the greatest local supermarket ever and a few National Parks. In my Toyota Pickemup, which I once thought was HUGE, we fit three people, two dogs, a thyme plant, a sage plant, a shiso plant, a rhubarb plant, an oregano plant, a jade plant from a clipping of my cousin Timmy's plant, a chive plant, two little green caterpillars that ate most of the shiso plant, and enough gear to supply a platoon.

Why we dragged the plants and all their soil completely across the entire country is now a mystery to me. When we left, it seemed not only logical, but like a great idea. They nearly got planted a couple of times at rest stops along the way, but my lack of a shovel saved them in the beginning. As the trip went on it became more stubbornness that stopped me from abandoning them and anyone who knows either Akiko or me can confirm that one of us can usually out-stubborn the other.

I have tons of photos and even more stupid anecdotes that I intend to post here. I will try to keep it from becoming one of those dreaded "hey look at my slide show from our summer vacation." I do not intend to post things in order nor to post everything nor to post regularly. I will post stuff up as the fancy strikes me. Normally, I would be worried that my awful memory would not let me drag things out, but I actually took notes during the trip! Look out world.

Akiko and I right before leaving (yes the truck was a little full):

The Beginning

I first met Akiko in 1995 in Tokyo Japan...at the bar where she was working. Cerveza -Japanese originality at its finest there- offered 100s of different types of beer from all over the world. At the time Akiko did not drink beer. She liked cocktails. I don't even know what kind of cocktails, because as is typical of a person whose head is lined with stone I just stopped listening and started explaining to her why beer was so wonderful. She was crazy not to drink beer.

While my delivery was less than stellar, let's face it - I was right. Most importantly, Akiko agrees with me that beer is great even after completing her engineering degree in Wine Making at the FH Geisenheim in Germany. By the way, any winemaker who doesn't agree that beer is a wonderful beverage probably spends too much time in the office and not enough time in the cellar or vineyard.

Three years ago work brought me back to the USA. I had been living in Germany since 2000 working first as a scientist then as an overtitled traveling salesman. When Akiko finished her degree we had to decide whether she was going to come to the USA or I was going to go back to Germany. I had a decent job in the US and I thought my being a citizen might make life a little easier for us. So, we decided on the US as our home and got married here in VA on April 29 2009. Sadly, there aren't too many days that go by where at least one of us doesn't regret that decision...the decision to choose the US that is!

Don't get me wrong! The USA is a gorgeous country. Some of the finest natural landscapes in the world are here. Americans are great people, if incredibly myopic. My family is here and many of my closest friends are here too -even the ones who will give me hell for my comments here. These are the things that have so far kept us from starting the trip back to Europe. It isn't the "land of the free" that keeps us here, because, man, there is nothing in America that's free. It isn't the home of the brave, because American soceity is scared of it's own shadow these days. It sure as hell isn't because the US is the land of opportunity that we stick around. What opportunities are available to my wife- a foreigner stuck in limbo as she waits for the government to make a decision on her legal status?

As a foreigner in this country without a social security number, you have the opportunity to stay at home and do nothing. You want health insurance? Sorry. You want a driver's license? Nope. You want a bank account? Hell, you aren't even allowed to work here. What do you need a bank account for?

As you can guess, right now we are going through a teensy bit of an adjustment period. I suspect we aren't going to convince American bureaucracy, society or culture to adapt to us. So, this blog shall document our (re)adjustment to Life in America. The bad will also come with plenty of good. Highlights over the next few months will be our trip across the US from VA to OR via Chicago, the Badlands and Yellowstone to name a couple of way points. There should be lots of fun episodes when Akiko starts work this fall at the winery in Oregon. The 2009 Harvest will be one to remember.

There will also be accounts of our trips to DMV, dealings with the USCIS and insurance company antics -my personal favorite- to round out the content a little. I will also see if I can get Ms. Akiko to weblog every now and then to keep me honest.