Jul 18
With a bit of trepidation I have now booked nearly all remaining stops, including the Seattle airport hotel. The BMW car dealer near the airport was very graciously willing to accommodate the bike until Federated Motorcycle Transport would be able to fetch it for shipping to my San Jose dealer.
I say trepidation, because these bookings imply that nothing is to go wrong during the coming five days. Else I'll be calling hotels and airlines for refunds that are surely not included in my bookings. I have preemptively prepared myself for losing it all. Nothing like pessimism to keep life enjoyable. Though, other than Seattle and Alaska Air, it's all Canadian dollars. So, much less, really, somehow.
Landscape experiences tend to make for limited blog posts.
You all have seen mountains. To feel them, you need to be
amidst their peeks. What I can do is show just enough photos
to remind you of your own travels. There are plenty of images
in your heads that will be more meaningful than what I can
show here.
Though maybe I can contribute something a little bit special with
this triplet of impressions. To get the point, do enlarge.
As in the face of a temporarily ill mature adult, the emerging
facial expressions of the mountain are the grooves of coming
wrinkles.
Appreciation of a few phenomena are universal, such as the hay making of an earlier
blog entry. Here are three examples.
Water falls, such is the Numa Falls, particularly when they are fed from glaciers delight kids and adults. How many hikes have attracted you because there was a waterfall at the end?
Given my warrior outfit during rides, I was fortunate that these falls are just 100m off the road. Even better was that the beautiful sounding trail beyond them was closed. Destruction by weather. That closure spared me resisting the impulse towards a strenuous hike.
Flower filled meadows? Well, no need for justification of this inclusion in a list of universal appeal. Numerous paintings, many of them Kitsch, are my witnesses.
The universality of needing to carve hearts and lovers' names into surfaces occurred to me at the railing of the bridge over these falls. You will find the exact same iconography in analogous places of the Black Forest.
Though, my sense of comfort in this universality among human kind was clouded by a thought:
How are Marvin and Lisa doing today?
Are the two as happy as when they carved their union into this railing? Divorced? Cancer? Gambling debts? I won't dwell.
When I entered this loop through the mountains, a signed warned
that there would be no cell coverage for 105km. Sure enough, at the
Numa Falls only my iPhone SOS satellite connection offers itself up
for my salvation. No calls to friends who just have to participate
in my experience real time.
And yet, as I stand on that bridge over the Numa Falls, contemplating ephemerals of life as symbolized by the rushing water, I receive an urgent haptic notification from my watch.
Why would I possibly want to download my calendar at this moment. OK, ephemerals of life do rhyme with calendars. So maybe the watch has connected with my inner life.But. I have no internet. What is my watch doing, really? Is it taunting me with a resolution to my gloomy thoughts by offering the structure of a calendar to overlay my inner travails for comfort?
Only to jeer:
Nice try, Andreas. No internet!
Is my watch nudging me on to just leap into the raging waters to easy my pain for good?How, really, do you know that you have booked into a hotel with class?
Yes, your first check should be your room closet. If you can remove a hanger from the rod, and recognize that artifact as a clothes hanger, you are part way there already.
Lower class establishments expect you to steal their hangers.
In an effort to thwart you, your hoteliers have made their clothes hanges with a knob at the top, rather than a hook. The knob threads into a latch that is permanently attached to the rod.
No need to mention the second signal of class...the hot tub.
Obviously, hot tubs are not clothing optional, so I bought a pair of swimming trunks, and padded downstairs for a soothing, contemplative time in that tub. I don't know, rethinking my directives for cremation. Whether AI has made human strivings pointless? Anything, really.
When I arrived, a father was present with two screaming children. A girl of maybe 7, and a boy of 10. The girl's screams of delight in the reverberant pool building were of the frequency I would have hoped to have lost my hearing for by now. But, crank up amplitude, even I tremble briefly in recovery.
The father apologizes:
They were sleeping in the car all the way here.
I've done the parenting, though. And after he had witnessed my visibly falling into shock after one of his daughter's screeches, he shushed them into just yelling, which is totally fine by me.
The girl was actually delightful. A mischivious gleam in her eyes after looking at me in the tub as they were getting ready to leave.
She was just dying to commicate something about me to her brother as she was wriggling out of her bathing suit under a towel. She so wanted to tell him what she had seen on me! Her face was twitching in effort.
Her wiser brother knowingly smiled back at her, wordlessly whispering to her:
Keep it together just a moment longer. I know what you want to say. We are almost out the door. After that we'll both break down with laughter.
I never found out what so amused her about me. But I have a good guess: My old-man's breasts. I admit. They are funny. But without them, I'd be all testosterone, no estrogen. I wouldn't be writing the way I do. Got the last laugh.