It’s another instant of sharing and interesting in light of this morning’s read, “Jarod Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class“.

We wandered around looking for the market at the Plaza Francia, which our map showed east of the cemetery. Thinking that the few stalls we saw heading along a broken sidewalk toward the cemetery were just tourist baubles: leather belts, mobiles, cheap jewelry, we walked south along a busy highway and series of parks where we watched a few longboarders dececend a rare hill in BA.

As it turns out the artists market, Feria de Artesanos de Plaza Francia, was behind us and what we’d seen was just the start of a line of stalls meandering up the hill and surrounding the entrance to the Recoleta Cemetery. I can’t say there was anything particularly appealing to me at this market and that you wouldn’t find in any type of street fair the world over except the Buenos Aires labeled mate gourds or sketches of tango dancers. I’m probably still going to take home a fine belt but I wouldn’t make the trip here just to get one.

The Recoleta Cemetery is one of the key tourist destinations of Buenos Aires and the first time I have felt surrounded by tourists in this vast city. Smaller and newer than I would have imagined, it was underwhelming compared to our visit several years ago to the cemeteries in New Orelean’s French Quarter. If you’re from a country where the dead are buried under ground, then a trip into this necropolis with its row after row of mausoleums would be interesting, but if you’ve seen the dead interned in elaborate settings before, and you’re only in BA for a short time, skip this and go eat steak with the living. Unless you hire a guide.

Why get a guide? Not to take to you the Eva Peron’s grave (just follow the crowd of tourists talking about the musical), but because so many of Argentina’s presidents, artists and elite are buried here and listening in on the guides, it was obvious you’d get a crash course in Argentine history and a run down of who’s who and some framework for many of the street names you’re likely spending time on.

This isn’t to say you can’t enjoy yourself here without a guide. We did. Being among the memorialized dead is always an introspective experience. The day was sunny, the mall behind with people heading to the movies added a touch of surreality, and the living continue as they will when our turn comes to join the dead. Among the elaborately maintained tombs where family members are still being added and the internments current, it was enjoyable to take pictures of the many forgotten and neglected tombs.

I’d not head back to this on our next trip, nor would I particularly recommend it for anyone here less than a week, but if you’re here for more than a week, well, then why not? The market is on the weekends so it makes sense to combine these if possible. It’s about a twenty minute walk from the the D Line’s Pueyrredón Subte stop.

We had a very mild winter, with the snow becoming less likely with each passing day. The chickens have started laying again and this is as early as I ever recall seeing the crocus up.

I’ve always loved the entrance to Seward Park. After all these years of admiring it with its lovely Japanese lanterns, the mossy stones, a nice collection of plants, I learned by getting off my bike to take a picture that it was gift from the city of Yokohama for Seattle’s assistance in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.

Installed in 1930, it wouldn’t be much longer until the nations were at war. I am glad we can experience with peace between our two countries today.

However camper vans are expensive and old, so we were lucky to have neighbors lend us theirs to see what it might be like to actually have our own. It didn’t have much power, could use some new shocks, the lights were incredibly dim, so driving through a vicious dark squall on the dark country roads to Port Townsend was more like being in a boat than a car. I was nervous. It was strange to sit up so high surrounded by windows and not much else. The rain pouring down faster than our wimpy blades could get the windows clear. I pulled off the road and took a few deep breaths. We continued on.

When we go to Port Townsend, we drove to the marina on the tip of downtown and studied the map. The RV Camphost came out and directed us to spot between several fifth-wheelers and motorhomes. He talked about the hookups which we didn’t need as the model we borrowed was a lower-fi “Weekender” (a fold-out bed, the pop-top bed and table is about it in these). He seemed stunned we were planning on sitting there without heat and truth be told, if we get one of these, it’s going to have a heater. The whole point as far as I am concerned is to really make our long, long cool rainy season a bit easier for getting out and camping.

What was perhaps the oddest about “camping” with one of these was that we were pretty much “instantly” doing it. No trying to figure out where to put the tent. No hauling out all the gear, blowing up the pads, setting up the stove. Within five minutes of arriving, we were sitting there in our sweaters trying to decide if we’d read a bit with dinner or play cards. Leaving camp was the same way. If I had known how fast we’d be gone, I’d have turned on the car to warm up and defrost the windows. It took no time at all.

I’d tell you more about Port Townsend, a small city at the tip of the Olympic Peninsula known for its Victorian architecture, art community and beauty, but we spent very little time there as we spent most of our daylight hours at our first meditation retreat. We enjoyed the oysters and fiddling downstairs at Undertown and breakfast the following morning just steps from our parked car/camp at Hudson Point Cafe. So instead of thinking about what my untaken pictures of the town might look like, here’s a link to our pal Tara, who we unexpectedly saw sitting eating dinner with her friends.

My parents are full-timers. Meaning they live all year-round in an RV and have been doing that for almost ten years. When we go to visit them we’ve stayed in nearby cabins or hotels. So it was with Ultra-DEE-Lite that this trip featured them staying in a hotel, joining us for dinner and then taking my old man for a ride in our “rig” and inviting them to play cards at our fold-out table. They declined, but recall there was no heat!

I am not sure if a camper van is really going to be our future vehicle. We really need something that handles well in the mountains for ski season. If you’ve got experience with them, I’d love to hear it.

Over six feet tall, our late-blooming asters make a big visual statement with the last of the rudbeckia and echinacea in our fall garden. The bees love them. I always forget how much I love them.

I have no idea which asters these are, as I got them at a local plant exchange. We also grow a much more delicate foot-high Woods aster, an intensely blue crumpled aster, and a white aster that grows to about three feet called ‘Monte Cassino’.

If you have a garden and you want it to have some flowers in October, you need to plant some asters.

When we moved to our house, I knew we’d have rabbits. I wanted another Owen. It took a a year and a bit of wily behavior on my part to make that reality, but then Pops came into our life and garden. I loved Pops: he was BAD-ASSED! The truth is it has never been the same for me since. I’ve not really loved the foster rabbits we’ve had since. They weren’t handled young so it’s been much too easy to just leave them in the hutch without the type of interactions and stimulation they need. Rabbits are funny, social creatures so we went through the process of bonding a pair together, but when Charlotte just unexpectedly died, it became clear to me that it was time to send Emily to a new home.

We like to travel and having an urban farm makes this difficult. While I can leave the chickens in good conscious for a weekend, or have the neighbors drop by to check on them if we’re out longer, I never felt that way about the rabbits. I wanted someone looking at them daily, checking on the water and making sure they weren’t frightened. I wanted them out of the hutch and cuddled and set in the grass to play, which means we always needed to find a house-sitter. It added a level of complication to every single trip we took.

I would highly recommend rabbitry to anyone who likes being at home— in so many ways they are much better than chickens: quiet, less smelly, poop the best fertilizer for the garden, and a relatively inexpensive backyard meat if you were into that. But they do require attention and the more attention you give them, the happier they are.

It took about six months to finally admit it was time to say goodbye to the rabbits and sell our lovely hutch. We’ve got a big blank space there now which makes me sad when I am doing dishes and looking out into the French Garden. It’s going to look lonely all winter, but after four years of rabbit poop there, I am imagining we will have amazing peas and tomatoes there this time next year and I’ll be leaving for camping trips a little less worried about our lonely rabbits.

Oh let’s get real. We can be awful snobs living here in Seattle. What do I know about “Flyover Country”? Not much. It’s a land of gigantic people eating cheap feedlot beef, sausages, and packaged food, spending the money they make at Walmart at Target. It’s dreadfully flat, boring and there’s no real work. Everyone who can leaves. Those who can’t leave, want to. It’s about twenty years behind whatever is so awesome here. That’s a bit over-stating my preconceptions, but not much. There’s pretty much no reason I’d go visit there.

And then there was one. So we hoped on a plane and instead of passing it at 36,000 feet, actually landed to find it wasn’t so horrible and there’s plenty of things to delight in that you never see out here. We live in a huge country with lots of differences.

Our first stop was Delaware, Ohio, a small town that’s become a bedroom community of Columbus. We got there driving up Highway 23, a stop-and-go affair with strip malls and buildings made of tin interspersed with farm land for sale and ready to be paved over. Our hotel was in the parking lot of Walmart and half the storefronts in the adjoining strip mall were boarded over or empty. It seemed to be the case with everything we saw in Delaware, and grim reminder that as tough as the economy has been in Seattle, we’re still world’s away from what’s been happening in other sections of the country.

We were there for the Delaware High School graduation and the completion of my nephew’s compulsory education. I can’t recall what was said at my high-school graduation and I doubt any of the excited/bored kids sitting out there on the football field will recall much twenty years hence, but Victor and I were struck by how practical the speeches were: get along with your bosses, don’t have kids too young, you will miss us when you are gone from here.

After fulfilling the obligations and delights of family, we headed back to Columbus for “vacation”. This means a bit of exploring to me and relaxing and being based out Columbus proper instead of Delaware seemed the best way to do this. We kicked of our stay in the city with a stroll through the Arts Festival along the river trails and then walked over to look at the homes in German Village, an old working class part of town that is now on the historic register and is being preserved. I loved peaking into all the narrow garden spaces.

Perhaps it doesn’t speak well of us that after all of 18 hours there, of which half was spent sleeping, that we decided that the most interesting use of our Monday would be to leave the city and drive to Dayton, Ohio to see the Wright Brother’s Bicycling shop. But I really wanted to show Victor some of the farm landscape I was captivated by on my last visit to Ohio ten years ago, maybe have more ice cream in some small town, and see something truly unique as opposed to hunting for trendy stores or cafes.

I only wish we had more time to explore the Dayton Aviation Heritage site. With our late start and slow meandering ways on the backroads, we didn’t get to Dayton until past noon, leaving us not nearly enough time. The signs from Columbus point visitors to the National Park’s Interpretive Center at Wright Hill. The focus of the center is what happened to the Wright Brothers post-Kitty Hawk. It is located near Huffman Prairie, where the brothers actually launched the first manuervable airplane in 1905 and what become the first airport. It sits on the edge of the gigantic Wright-Patterson airfield so it was quite a vivid contrast to be standing near a recreation of the hanger in a small field that the brother flew ten, then twenty, then thirty minute circles around while gigantic cargo planes thundered off, perhaps to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Of course, as a bicyclist, I was most intrigued to see the Wright Bicycle Shop! There’s a small recreation of their shop in the actual building, which sits next to another large interpretive center in West Dayton. What was instantly apparent is that that entire district must have been the work of pork-belling Senators to try to revitalize what must have been a very blighted area. I don’t mean this negatively: there’s a place for pork-barrel politics, this is fascinating unique National history, and urban renewal costs money. But it did feel like an island of Disney, with homes made to look old that weren’t, store fronts still waiting to be filled, and abandoned buildings and empty lots all around the redevelopment that the NPS clearly played a role in.

We live in the inner-city and despite the changing demographics, still very much the heart of Seattle’s African-American neighborhood. I often bemoan the lack of services, restaurants, and sense of security that comes with living in trendier neighborhoods in the city, but after visiting Dayton certainly got a rude reminder of what living in city on the edge might actually feel like. If I feel hopeless with twenty percent vacancy in our store fronts around here, the limited availability of organic groceries with walking distance and only a handful of restaurants around me which includes Subway and Panda Express, I can not imagine how despondent I would feel living in Dayton. To have a Subway in West Dayton! Magic! The only food we found there was a candy bar in an old school pharmacy and a cooler full of coke. The scale of empty buildings, empty blocks, empty warehouses is staggering…where do you get the money to fill them up again or even just tear them down? Even if you have a good job in Dayton and a nice house (and we drove through a very small nice set of homes in the Oregon district), I don’t see how being surrounded by so much blight and reminder of past prosperity and current poverty wouldn’t tear at your soul. The work we have to do to rebuild America is vast.

Leaving Dayton inspired by the story of the Wrights but depressed by the state of the country, we took the quick road back to Columbus. There we drove to a couple other neighborhoods and through the University District. Columbus, despite being officially Ohio’s largest city, feels quite small and manageable. There were signs that they’re improving the bicycling infrastructure and everywhere we went we did see a cyclist or two. If we ever return, I’d want to rent a bicycle to explore the river paths and go for coffee somewhere. It certainly seems like a city where you could live with just a bicycle and a brave heart.

I am not sure what we truly missed in Columbus. Maybe a trip the zoo, which is highly regarded or a peak at the couple art museums in town would have been nice. It would have been sweet to really walk around Victorian Village to take pictures of doors and porches for ideas for our home. I’d have liked to drive out to the east to look at the Great Circle Mound and I always love water parks for giggles. I also wish I was better at taking pictures of urban environments instead of just snapshots.

Here’s a few things we liked in Columbus and a few we didn’t.

1. Till: this cafe sits on the north end of Victorian Village, had a small seating area outside and features real food. Mostly local, a good beer list, and interesting. My chicken wings with a blue cheese bismark were delicious as was my trout with barely stew. Prices were fair, service was good. It was the type of neighborhood restaurant I would love to be able to walk to.
2. Pistacia Vera:a very trendy bakery in German Village with a lovely outside seating area on the sidewalk, perfect to drink espresso, eat a croissant, and read a book. So delicious we went there twice, the second time having a simple breakfast of baked eggs and cheese. If we lived in Columbus, we’d be regulars.
3. North Market: So we went for breakfast and Vic wanted something more sit down and not so picnic gathering, so alas, we left without trying some of the food here. And being from Seattle, where between the Pike Place Market and all of our farmers’ markets, the North Market looks kind of tiny and underwhelming, but this is where good food starts. If it wasn’t for folks getting the Pike Street Market back in business , we wouldn’t have the food scene we do today here. I would love to go back and make meal out of all Ohio cheeses and meats and walk to the nearby Goodale Park and have a proper picnic.
4. DoubleTree Suites: Oy vey! I picked this place not really understanding how small Columbus really is and wanted to a romantic view of the river in a nice hotel. This hotel is clearly designed for business travelers and while I liked the view ok, it wasn’t sweeping as the hotel sits one block off the river and the view is blocked by buildings. No hotel lobby, poor housecleaning service (knocking on the door at 8:30 am and then not coming back), it was much more like of an over-priced motel than a downtown hotel.
5. 3rd and Hollywood: Another restaurant with a focus on local food, this one is a food factory. It’s obviously wildly popular, even on a Monday night, when so many other places were closed. While our waitress was very nice, the meal itself was underwhelming. It was the type of restaurant you might select to take your old parents too who aren’t used to eating out. As we found out later that night, it’s part of a local restaurant chain called North Star Cafe. As it turns out, the North Star Cafe was one of the only places open for breakfast in the Short North on Tuesday, so these folks got our money twice as well. Breakfast at the North Star? It was tasty. North Star: Yes.

It’s been a while, for whatever reason, that I’ve had my RSS feed chock full of comics. I did just recently pick up the first volume of Jason Lute’s Berlin…so it was with delight I spent some time today flipping through Grant’s work.

You can check it out at Incidental Comics and you’ll want to be sure to look at this interview at Illustration Concentration. Turns out Grant is studying to be an orthodontist. I can’t imagine how one keeps humor while looking into mouths all day, but his sensibility, with its quirky gentleness seems to me like type of personality that would be appealing if they were torturing you with braces (something I have not recovered from twenty five years on).

I was in Nova Scotia the first time I needed new cleats. It had never crossed my mind that these little bits of metal on the bottom of my shoe could possibly wear out. I just assumed my pedal was broken. Instead a band of incredulous bike boys sent me and my heavy bike happily on my way with new cleats and an extra set just in case. Despite their sardonic glances, I felt like a hero. Through my sheer audacity, I wore that metal down to a useless nub! A deformed lump! A under-sole grotesque! Take that, bitches! I ride so hard and long that metal wears down in my presence!

A couple weeks ago on my ride down from Vancouver I started noticing the tell-tale signs which often include clicking in and not being able to unclip. Obviously, a terrifying problem and one of the main reason folks avoid the “clipless” pedals. It’s taken a couple weeks to actually do anything about it, including putting the wrong set of cleats on my shoes out of a pure hopefulness that they just might work. They didn’t and so today, I am $20 dollars lighter, but in and out of my pedals in a way I’ve not been in over a month.

Right! Check the cleats…

For those of you who might be curious: I switched to Crank Brothers eggbeaters two years ago on my new bike in an effort to reduce the amount of time I have hot foot or the feeling of bloody toes. The idea is that the egg beaters might have more “float”. I still get hot foot now and again, but not like I used to. I won’t say it is because of these pedals, but I do like them. I don’t fuss with them like I needed to with my Shimano SPDs.

Why I am using mountain bike pedals on what is essentially a road bike? Because I have always biked in mountain bike shoes as I need a shoe I can get off my bike and walk across a cobbled square in France while the pigeons coo and the cutest fellows wave me over to join them for apéritifs! Or more typically, hobbling into a mini-mart with a wet floor to get some chocolate milk and some peanuts without killing myself. I need tread on my shoes— and all that helpful shoe traction that a tourist like me loves means that the flat road pedals aren’t an option.

I certainly did like third grade, but it is hard to imagine thanking someone for sending me to school. Cookies and stuff after school, sure THANKS! But for sending me there? Are you kidding? I was a doofus from a very young age!

I hope we’re reading sea shanties next to that rockin’ lamp. For some reason, I think my Mom painted it and my Dad wired it. I think it was a kit you could buy in the 70′s. My mother looks awesome in purple! I look ready for Aspen.

Ah Mother! “You are nice.”

I love watching the garden, once again, burst with exuberance. After last year’s record cold spring, the pleasant string of weekends has our garden insanely full of flowers, bees, and birds looking to make nests.

We love oysters, so the plan was born: we’d camp if the weather was nice, make a day trip if the weather was less than ideal. At ten dollars a ticket, it would also be an easy thing to forgo if the day was truly vile. We’ve been having an amazingly gentle spring with all the best weather happening over the weekends, so I found myself driving Victor and Mieko on a promising day past Olympia and onto the Hood Canal.

Our first stop was a very busy Potlatch State Park for a quick walk on the beach, some fresh air, and chats with several folks out on the last weekend of spring clamming. It appears that it was a good day for most, as everyone we talked to had their limits for razor clams, cockles, manila clams and oysters.

Following the coastline north, we arrived at Hama Hama after a sudden rain shower. Most folks had on rubber boots and looked rugged and ready to gather up some oysters. It was with some head-turning delight then to be with our trendy pal Mieko in her olive green patent leather knee high buckle boots, proving that you can certainly keep your feet dry but look like a superhero doing it. While the line to the baked oysters was long, there wasn’t a soul in line for the good stuff: raw oysters!

The Hama Hama oysters are some of my favorite. They’re briny, but still sweet and they’ve got some tooth— firm and round, pretty much perfect as raw oysters, which is my favorite way to eat them, and unlike the gigantic Willapa Bay oysters which I preferred grilled or the tiny kumamotos, which are so dainty that I only really want to eat them if someone is shucking!

We seemed to hit the festival in-between events and lectures, so after making the rounds of the different food options, including fried oysters and baked oysters, we decided to get back in the car and keep heading north, leaving the Hood Canal behind and heading toward Fort Worden, which once guarded the eastern end the Straight of Juan de Fuca. The nicest thing about “camping” at Ft. Worden is that you’re just a couple miles from Port Townsend, so it’s easy to have a good meal in town or coffee in the morning, which I think is acceptable behavior when one is car camping.

I don’t think I’d make a point to go back to another Oyster Rama. It was a long drive and they do truck these oysters over every weekend. If I was over on the Hood Canal, I’d be content to make a stop at the Hama Hama store and eat some oysters in their parking lot. However, it did spur us to get our tent out and take a drive to a part of Washington I’ve not been to that often.