aerogramme

dense igran of Asfalou

2011-05-17T18:48:00.000-04:00

After eating lunch in our Asfalou language and cultural madrassa, I often walk through the fields of beans, alfalfa, & wheat to find a spot to sit and draw. This usually involves negotiating the low dirt ridges that channel the irrigation water through groves of olive trees filled with noisy birds, and finding the shade of a tall date palm to sit in, then finding room on the ground between the buzzing ant hills. I'm hoping this place burns into my head.

between the Atlas and the Sahara

2011-05-15T05:27:00.000-04:00

Home for these first months in the Maghreb has been a farming village by a small river draining from the High Atlas Mountains capped with snow in the background. A system of irrigation ditches helps maintain a narrow strip of lush fields growing wheat, alfalfa, olive and almond trees and date palms.

Above these fields about 600 people and their livestock live in low houses made of clay mud blocks or concrete. Surrounding this and other nearby villages is a barren yellow and red landscape of rocky ridges stretching to the high dunes of the Sahara.

Daytime sounds of motorcycles or trucks passing through, donkeys braying, and the lone muezzin calling out prayer times gives way at night to the silence of wind and stars.

Morocco or bust!

2011-04-07T23:51:00.004-04:00

Jma el Fna, Marrakech

A disorienting few days being quickly ushered through piles of policies and paperwork in Marrakech culminated in a long, windy road trip for more orientation and training in Ouarzazate. Going over the High Atlas Mountains was a good match for what was happening in my head. The road increasingly turned back on itself as we climbed ever higher. I had to grit my teeth to distract from the growing nausea, but the sights through the window compelled me to keep looking. The smooth, newly upholstered, gendarme-escorted bus seemed to make the the dizziness worse.

For several days after arrival in North Africa, we were semi-sequestered in calm, non-threatening hotel resorts. Instead of the immediate confrontation usually suffered upon arrival in a foreign country (which somehow leads to quickly getting one's bearings and adjusting to the new smells and sounds there), we were cared for and protected... and I kept failing to feel prepared or properly oriented.

But the excitement over the next two years, and the distant mountains and desert held my focus enough to make it through the dizzy period.

crossing the Tizi-n-Test Pass, High Atlas Mountains

arrival in the dessert

India Sketches II

2011-03-07T11:51:00.003-05:00

A few more outtakes from the journal I kept after my hard drive crashed... It slowed me down and helped me start drawing again.

a Jodhpur market, 27 Jan.

pigeons over Agra, 12 Jan.

Taj Mahal, 13 Jan.

Hanuman shrine, Orchha, 10 Jan.

Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, 31 Jan.

India Sketches

2011-03-06T19:56:00.000-05:00

A few outtakes from the journal I kept after my hard drive crashed...

chai walla, Calcutta, 27 Dec.

taxis, Calcutta, 26 Dec.

the Ganges, Varanasi, 2 Jan.

stray cow, Varanasi, 31 Dec.

shots of Nepal

2011-03-05T19:45:00.000-05:00

In liu of blogging on the go, a few photos...

Bhote Koshi valley entering Nepal, 4 Dec.

Kathmandu kids, 6 Dec.

a Janakpur market, 14 Dec.

pee stop on the highway, 15 Dec.

Nepali roadways are LOUD, 17 Dec.

Tibet sketches

2011-03-03T20:12:00.000-05:00

Some bits from the sketch journal I turned to after my hard drive crashed in China...

yaks being herded through Zoige, 8 Nov.

Langmusi, 5 Nov.

Labrang Monastery, Xiahe, 2 Nov.

central Tibetan Plateau from the Lhasa train, 27 Nov.

prayer chimney, 3 Dec.

China sketches

2011-03-02T19:55:00.000-05:00

Some bits from the sketch journal I turned to when my hard drive crashed in China...

Beijing Bell Tower, 9 Oct.

construction boom, all over China...

Outdoor tea garden, Chungdu, 24 Nov.

Beijing to Delhi overland

2011-03-01T19:38:00.000-05:00

After that last post from China my hard drive crashed and we had to go to sticky internet cafes to log on. While perhaps I should’ve been able to write in those places like Jenifer did (hereim.tumblr.com), over time I diverted that energy to an old fashioned sketch journal (and figured out how water soluble colered-pencils work along the way). We did make it to Delhi via Tibet and Nepal 19 weeks after landing in Beijing. I hadn’t expected we’d be able to stay on the ground the whole way due to the logistics of Tibet, but I’m endlessly thankful for having done so after all.

Also along the way we confirmed and finalized plans long in the works to join the Peace Corps for service in Morocco! So, over the last month we wrapped up lose ends and visited family in the States and arrived in Marrakesh via Casablanca this week. Whew, what a whirlwind!

It's hard to say how much access we'll have here over the next 27 months, but I really do intend to give this blog another try!

In the meantime, I’ll load a few of those sketches from Asia, the memories and dreamlike effects of which I’ll no doubt be digesting for the rest of my life.

Independent travel in China

2010-10-29T10:03:00.004-04:00

Independent travel in China

From a month into China...

Obviously, all of our visas came through without any more problems. Subject as they seem to be to snap changes in regulations, especially in sensitive areas of Western China, I was relieved. But it means we are skipping out on Xinjiang Province, since a required tour group is way out of our budget right now...

That said, the major challenges to traveling independently here have amounted to our massive language barrier, and the way China's tourism infrastructure is oriented to tour groups.

Stop into a tourist information center looking for public transportation out to a major sight in the countryside, and we're only information on signing up with a group tour instead. So we go off to try to figure it out for ourselves, and public transportation information is generally only written in Chinese. Buying an inter-city train ticket can mean standing in long crowd-lines until reaching the ticket agent, trying hard to communicate by phrase book while squeezed in on both shoulders by other impatient travelers, and realizing it's a heavy travel week and the next available ticket is five days from now.

Tickets become available only 3 to 10 days ahead of the travel date (depending on the route and time of year), and travel companies buy in bulk -meaning that sometimes the only way to get a seat is to go through a privately run travel agent and pay their commission charge on top of the ticket price, a source of some frustration among the Chinese.

All in all, it hasn't been too hard now that we've gotten out of Beijing and into smaller cities, figured out how to buy from the train station ticket counter, and most importantly, gotten past the major holiday week called Golden Week, known by some as "Hell Week" now that so many people here go traveling...

The photo is of Beijing Xi Zhan (West Station), the largest rail terminal in Asia

Visa adventures

2010-09-14T04:07:00.000-04:00

I'm going down to the Chinese Consulate in Manhattan in the morning to pick up our visas and passports (hopefully), and I just completed our Indian visa applications for a submittal appointment Thursday morning. I really hope it all goes smoothly since there isn't much time left for me to be sent away by a bureaucrat to come again another day...

As this isn't a very interesting or geographical post, I'll just refer back to the second one I did for this blog back on July 10, 2008, in which I said that the blog will be maintained whether or not I have anything interesting to show or tell. (I'm going to try to return to that plan, since I've missed the simple journal aspect to doing this) The only likely barriers to regular posting should be periodic lack of internet access. The other good reason to cycle back to July 2008 is that I'm back in the same place mentally -departure is coming fast, so to-do lists are clouding up my mind.

New direction, new view

2010-09-12T00:03:00.003-04:00

So, having finished an intensive summer full of design classes and a street photography course as well as final preparations for going abroad again, I feel exhausted, dizzy and excited.

Since classes began in June I see typefaces everywhere -ones that have always been there, good ones looking good and bad ones looking bad, but now my eyes are tuned in to them. Everything looks richer. As for photography, I feel like Iv'e peeled back another layer -we'll see if it shows.

At the same time, the oven buzzer has finally gone off on applications long cooking for overseas work. We're watching the crust brown as we wait for formal placement documents. Interim travel plans have ripened simultaneously, so the first bite will be a 19-hour flight over the Arctic (I think -it's the shortest route) to Beijing (via Shanghai).

move along now...

2010-07-16T14:45:00.000-04:00

A lot is going on now in life that is very exciting -especially regarding the nexus of my own geographic and visual lives- so I need to find a way to make this blog relevant again and stop seeing it as just a journal that I'm badly behind on...

Home in Kemmerer

2010-07-02T12:05:00.000-04:00

Finally in Kemmerer to visit with the folks, as always it feels like home again. I've never spent more than ten days at a time there but it's all so familiar for being so far out there...

the Great American Desert

2010-06-21T01:16:00.003-04:00

Independence Rock graffiti

Independence Rock

sunrise on the Oregon Trail

on the Oregon Trail

Oregon Trail marker

On the road through central Wyoming the desert is so unbelievable. It's so easy to imagine walking along with a convoy of covered wagons and cattle, carrying all you own in the world having left everything you know to start a new life... But to start it by making your way across a wilderness unlike almost anything left on earth today is so much to fathom.

so, as I was saying...

2010-06-21T01:15:00.001-04:00

We headed west along the Oregon Trail, among others. The museum we stopped at in Casper reminded me again what fun little dioramas can be...

Out of the Emptiness and onto the Oregon Trail

2010-05-19T21:51:00.011-04:00

shade in Douglas, Wyoming

a jackalope in Douglas, Wyoming

drive-up liquor window in Douglas, Wyoming

Casper, Wyoming

We emerged from the huge emptiness of the Powder River Basin at Douglas, situated on Interstate 80. The town provided the first shade all day in the form of cottonwoods and a tall jackalope.
From there we picked up the route of a number of trails responsible for the westward expansion of the US, including the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, the Pony Express and the Santa Fe Trail...

Wyoming power!

2010-04-02T09:00:00.001-04:00

coal train

Black Thunder Coal Mine in the Powder River Basin

natural gas refinery near Glenrock, Wyoming

The Black Thunder coal mine in eastern Wyoming's coal fields is one of the largest coal mines in the world, scraping enough coal off the earth's surface to send 25 miles of full trains out around the country every day (or 8% of all the coal used in the US). This place explains how so many of the trains we saw crossing the grasslands here headed to distant power plants measured well over a mile whenever we bothered with the odometer.

Wyoming has been through so many booms and busts in its short modern history, and right now its energy extraction economy is certainly booming.

Powder River Basin, Wyoming

2010-04-01T23:00:00.002-04:00

pronghorn antelope

windy picnic

Upton, Wyoming

After passing through Upton (population 872) there were 106 miles to drive before the next town appeared. Bill (population 11) had a post office, a small motel where railroad employees mandatorily change shifts, and a tiny general store.

Looking for recreation in the coal fields of the Powder River Basin, we stopped to buy cold drinks for a picnic. I finally found the National Grasslands map I'd been looking for since before we left New York. It was pinned to the wall, yellowed and curling apart at the folds. Oh well, most of the public lands were behind us, so we picked a spot next to the highway a bit out of town and laid out our blanket, cracked open our root beers and looked through the barbed wire fence at the horizon so far away.

Thunder Basin

2010-03-31T21:49:00.003-04:00

Wyoming's Powder River Basin

WY450 in Wyoming's Powder River Basin

the closed open-range

A dead horse near the highway alludes to the powerful storm the night before.

Driving southwest out of Sundance, we entered the Powder River Basin, an immense open area in northeastern Wyoming where the grasslands began to turn to sagebrush. It is hard to cross this great steppe without goosebumps. The freedom of the open range sweeps through the imagination like an unobstructed wind. -That is, until you try to walk out into it. Huge tracts of this land are publicly owned, and leased by the government to ranchers or corporations specializing in extracting natural recourses. These leases aren't always open to the public, and a vast network of barbed wire holds the land down like a net.

Still, with a map of the Thunder Basin National Grassland, you could wander out into the great mysterious space and let the sun, the wind, or the storms of the high plains take you into another world...

Sundance, where the kid got his name...

2010-03-26T10:44:00.001-04:00

Turf Bar, Sundance, WY

rainbow over Sundance Mountain

The Turf Bar fashion generally consisted of bandanas, ponytails, and leather vests. Clutching beer bottles by their necks, several people swayed -eyes closed, faces turned to the ceiling- to heavy metal ballads playing on the juke box. The swaying was more woozy than that of a sober person by far. Unlike many biker bars where so many "bikers" seemingly dress up in weekend costumes, it was more obvious here that they work, drink, smoke and party in these clothes every day.

Jen and I were watched with curiosity until after we'd ordered beers and burgers and were finally asked where we were from. The guffaws at our "New York" answer basically sounded like, "what planet did you say?!?", so I was quick to add that we were on our way to visit my parents in Wyoming. They eased up at this, and the conversation turned to how awesome the plains are and that, yeah upstate New York isn't that bad...

Looking outside I noticed as the storm-front blew east the evening sky took a chance to brighten up before nightfall. Inside, the barmaid hung up the phone and reported that her brother's barn, sitting deep in a valley twenty miles north of town, had been vaporized by the tornado a half-hour earlier.

The wrath finally catches up...

2010-03-17T15:30:00.001-04:00

threat

mammatus clouds

end of the storm...

The power went out in the Wyoming Welcome Center before the storm hit. Nasty weather had been threatening most of the afternoon, but this time it was accompanied by a tornado warning. We found a motel (a series of what look like mobile homes cut into smaller units) to spend the night in Sundance, a small mining town in northeastern Wyoming. We turned on the T.V. in time to read in the warning scrolling across the screen that a tornado had been spotted 15 miles northwest of town -heading east.

The local bar had to be safer than our little box, but on our way there the sky turned green and opened up with 1" hail and slamming gusts of wind. A bank drive-through overhang provided the only emergency shelter we could get to until the worst of it passed.

The plains aren't so innocent...

2010-03-15T16:08:00.005-04:00

minuteman missile

peering down into a missile silo

seemingly doomed herd of cattle

The high plains apparently served as a good location for intercontinental ballistic missile silos because the ground elevation there would have saved a lot of launch energy and flight time for the missiles. Advancements in nuclear weapon technology have rendered most of the silos (constructed in the 1960s) obsolete, but the one pictured above has been converted into the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site. The tiny museum with a short film occupies a trailer, but the silo is well worth stopping to peer into.

The missile in that silo would have reached its targeted communities in 30 minutes. 30 minutes says two things: 1) the missiles are very fast, and 2) the population of families, cooks, farmers, steelworkers, students, prisoners, office workers, nurses, artists, criminals, bartenders, hairdressers, and street vendors, etc. making their livings in the areas targeted are in so many ways very close to us -just over the horizon.

Great Plains scavenger hunt item #9: missile silo

A missile silo is an underground, vertical cylindrical container for the storage and launching of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). They typically have the missile some distance under the surface, protected by a large "blast door" on top.
-Wikipedia

Superstorm

2010-03-13T15:59:00.001-05:00

advancing storm over western South Dakota

advancing storm over a gas station

advancing storm reaching for a pickup truck

The storm that loomed in from the west threatened us through much of western South Dakota. Once we got back onto the interstate toward Wyoming the speed limit let us accelerate to 80+ miles per hour. It was like leaving the dark basement as a kid: if you walk calmly, the basement doesn't scare you, but if you start to run you get goosebumps and freak out and run faster. This storm reached out its tentacles as soon as we started running.

Mammatus clouds

2010-03-13T15:33:00.002-05:00

mammatocumulus (mammary cloud)

As we left the Badlands we were headed for an approaching storm that darkened the western sky. These mammatus (mammary for obvious reasons) clouds, when appearing underneath cumulonimbus clouds as shown above, are a sign of a particularly violent (and possibly tornadic) thunderstorm. A weather professor in college once told me he refused to board a plane when he saw these outside an airport in Colorado Springs. The flight was later cancelled.

Scenic overlook

2010-03-12T20:21:00.002-05:00

approaching storm

Badlands National Park

looking east beyond "the wall"

scenic overlook

I like to imagine how the above photograph turned out. Wherever it's being displayed now, instead of showing what the badlands look like, it tells the story of that family's visit there together in the summer of 2009.

I remember growing up reliving vacations and events by looking through all the photo albums my mom put together. As I grew older my own memory of our vacations blended with the story contained in those pictures until I could no longer distinguish between them. The blurring doesn't matter -each enhances the other.

(By the way, I think the railings designed for safety should also be designed with personal photos like this one in mind.)

What planet?

2010-03-10T14:57:00.000-05:00

badlands

Jen hiking the badlands

badlands clay

badlands

Despite Jen's injured knee, we set off for a short hike through the wilderness of baked-hard mud. Shadows and colors were almost eliminated by the high mid-afternoon sun. For all the austere beauty that the prairie holds surrounding this serrated 100-mile interruption, here it is the beauty of martian dreams.

Great Plains scavenger hunt item #8: Badlands of South Dakota

For half a million years, water and wind have sculpted fantastic rock art in southwestern South Dakota, mesmerizing visitors to Badlands National Park. Life is scarce in these stark buttes. But a surrounding ocean of grasslands includes healthy numbers of buffalo, coyotes, pronghorn, and birds of prey. Here the prairie endures.
-National Geographic

Below the badlands

2010-03-09T15:40:00.002-05:00

Badlands National Park

a prehistoric predator

...used to live here.

The badlands were a seabed in the dinosaurs’ day

Then the growing rockies poured the sea away

As it cooled and dried

the mammals grazed and died

Now we read their story under the prairie hay

O.K., sorry about that. It is a good place for fossils, though...

Entering the badlands

2010-03-08T23:45:00.001-05:00

Heading east out of Rapid City toward the Badlands, we crossed 75 miles of flat, crusty rangeland. The sun was high enough to eliminate all shadows, and the highway road crews we passed were hidden until the last moment by silver mirages. The intensity of the baked landscape was broken only once in two hours when we drove across the Cheyenne River floodplain lined with cottonwood trees. Finally, a parking lot filled with RVs and several families having lunches under small wooden shelters signaled that we had arrived in Badlands National Park.

Our disembodied presidents

2010-03-07T09:00:00.000-05:00

George Washington, carved

picturing Washington's profile

In the morning we drove by Mount Rushmore on our way out of the Black Hills. As we descended into Rapid City, we were awed at how much kitch lined the highway. If the Black Hills weren't enough for your family, here there is mini-golf, a Mystery Spot, Bear Country USA (a bear zoo), reptile gardens, a presidential wax museum, a Chuckwagon supper-show, a maze, gemstone panning, and much more!

The one place that managed to draw us in was a pull-off with three new giant presidential heads, Kennedy, Reagan and the one pictured below. They were standing there to promote and raise money for an eventual presidential "trail". All of the presidents would (as the dream goes) be spread out in the woods over a hillside, connected by a hiking trail. Can anyone guess who the mystery president is below? The chance to moon him having been fulfilled, we continued on our way.

guess who...

Our quiet campsite

2010-03-06T09:05:00.000-05:00

morning clean-up

our tiny campfire

Having pushed our luck driving through the Black Hills, and waiting too late to find a campground, we almost had to spend the night in a KOA. It looked like a smoky city packed in with buses, RVs, campers and giant wall-tents. In the center was a three-story building with floor-to-ceiling windows, through which we could see a giant chandelier. With prices to justify camping with a chandelier, we drove away prepared to sleep in the car. At the last moment before dark we found a small thickly wooded state campground with several vacancies left. We spent a beautiful dark night with a trickling stream just beyond our site.

Into the Black Hills

2010-03-06T09:00:00.001-05:00

The Needles

a bison in Wind Cave National Park

The Needles Highway

As we drove north into South Dakota and threaded our way into the Black Hills via the Needles Highway, it was like a safari as we passed prairie dog towns, hawks, bison, mule deer, antelope, and bighorn sheep.

Museum of the Fur Trade

2010-03-05T12:29:00.009-05:00

inside a trading post

traders' artifacts

museum "baidarka" model

fur traders' rifles

The Museum of the Fur Trade, a private museum outside Chadron, Nebraska, was a fun stop, though I'm sure not all the fun was the museum's intent. The displays, covering the fur trade throughout North America from the first Europeans to the multi-national Hudson's Bay Company, were pretty extensive and interesting. However, they could do without the introductory film which used historic reenactments that were shot in the 1930s and in which the Indians greeted the white men with "How!"

Agate Fossil Beds NM

2010-03-05T11:54:00.001-05:00

the Niobrara River crossing the Agate Fossil Beds National Monument

a daphoenodon pursuing a daeodon

mixed-grass prairie, Agate Fossil Beds National Monument

For a while growing up, a new book arrived in the mail once a month from a series by National Geographic. My favorite one was about the Age of Mammals. Somehow I could relate more to the bizarre looking giant boars and tiny horses on savannas than dinosaurs in jungles.

The Niobrara river valley in which the Agate Fossil Beds National Monument sits looks similar to how it did 20 million years ago. It's so easy to go outside here and, with your imagination, watch a nature show on the "plains of Africa" in in which these bone-crushing scavengers and beardogs scrambled for survival as their watering holes dried up.

Great Plains scavenger hunt item #7: Cenozoic era fossils

The Cenozoic Era is the age of new life. During the Cenozoic, mammals diverged from a few small, simple, generalized forms into a diverse collection of terrestrial, marine, and flying animals, giving this period its other name, the Age of Mammals, despite the fact that birds still outnumbered mammals two to one. The Cenozoic is just as much the age of savannas, the age of co-dependent flowering plants and insects, and the age of birds. Grass also played a very important role in this epoch, shaping the evolution of the birds and mammals that fed on it.

Across western Nebraska

2010-03-03T20:10:00.000-05:00

western Nebraska

rolling mixed-grass prairie

grain silos, Hemmingford, Nebraska

As we crossed western Nebraska, we stopped at a number of historic markers and roadside pull-offs. Most of them described the long distance cattle drives that used to cross these prairies in the brief period between when the ranchers came up from Texas and when barbed wire closed the open range -maybe 10 years.

Words like "open range" have such a capacity to stir the imagination, it's no wonder that such a long lasting culture, and a whole genre of movies and music could have come out of such a short period of time.

Stormy night at the Box Butte Reservoir

2010-03-03T18:04:00.003-05:00

our campsite in the cottonwoods

banks of the Box Butte Reservoir

Jenifer sleeping in

Box Butte Reservoir

We decided to camp out where our map showed a lonely teepee symbol which turned out to be the Box Butte Reservoir. Built mainly for the irrigation of the area’s huge wheat farms, it is also a Recreation area for local boaters and fishermen. The woman at the next campsite stopped to chat in the evening where we learned that she lives in northwestern Nebraska (like most campers who come there) and was partying in a camper with her sisters for several days. She was proud of the area and excited to see people from out of state chose to stop and see what the area looked like.

All evening enormous thunderheads were chugging in from the west. The wind whipped up violently just as Jen and I climbed into our sleeping bags, and with no rain we tried to watch the storm with the tent door open until it felt like the wind would rip it apart from inside. During pauses in this noisy chaos we could hear the camper full of women drinking and laughing, which calmed my nerves. Then all hell broke loose. The lightning was immediate and rapid. With no escape, all we could do was lay there hoping our vulnerable, shaking little shelter would hold up. That was the last thing I remember before the birds woke me up to see the sun coming over the ridge to the east.

Carhenge

2010-03-01T14:00:00.001-05:00

What is a road trip without stopping out there to see someone's strange dream realized, regardless of whether it's an intentional tourist trap or something far more sincere? The big empty parts of any map make an ideal setting for eccentric imaginations and their monuments, and the Great Plains do not disappoint.

Great Plains scavenger hunt item #6: Carhenge

Carhenge is a replica of England's Stonehenge located near the city of Alliance, Nebraska on the High Plains. Instead of being built with large standing stones, as is the case with the original Stonehenge, Carhenge is formed from vintage American automobiles, all covered with gray spray paint. Built by Jim Reinders, it was dedicated at the June 1987 summer solstice. While living in England, he studied the structure of Stonehenge, which helped him to copy the structure's shape, proportions, and size.

-Wikipedia

Desert sea of grass

2010-02-28T09:30:00.001-05:00

the Sand Hills of Nebraska

coal train running through the Sand Hills

"...a great desert of moving sand, where there is neither soil, timber or rock." -Scotsman James MacKay, 1795

"... this area may in time become as famous as the deserts of Africa." -Zebulon Pike, 1815

A forest from scratch

2010-02-28T09:15:00.002-05:00

Nebraska National Forest

One of many strange experiments carried out across the Plains of North America can be found near Halsey, Nebraska, where in 1902 Charles Bessie tried to create a forest on 20,000 acres of the Sand Hills as a national timber reserve.

The National Forest operates a tree nursery there, supplying millions of seedlings a year, but much of the older, planted forest struggles.

Sand Hills

2010-02-28T09:00:00.007-05:00

Antioch, Nebraska (ghost town)

Sand Hills

Sand Hills

At around 23,000 square miles, the Sand Hills are a unique region within the Great Plains. Almost exclusively sand dunes covered with grass, around 85% of it has never been plowed. Occasionally, blowouts occur in which the grass cover rips open by wind or truck tires, and the sand gets exposed. In order to stop a blowout from spreading, locals might throw tires in or drive an old car into one which somehow manages to stabilize the gash.

Lots of little ponds sit in the pits between the dunes, making the area good for livestock grazing but not much else, especially road building. So, one of the few state highways to cross this bizarre landscape follows the Burlington Northern Santa Fe line. We passed a few ghost towns on our way through this fascinatingly beautiful corridor.

Great Plains scavenger hunt item #6: Sand Hills

The Sand Hills is a region of mixed-grass prairie on grass-stabilized sand dunes in north-central Nebraska, covering just over one quarter of the state. Dunes in the Sand Hills may exceed 330 ft (100 m) in height.

The Broken Bow style

2010-02-27T19:55:00.002-05:00

Custer Federal Savings & Loan

Broken Bow Municipal Building

downtown Broken Bow

The aesthetic style of the plains first appeared to us in Broken Bow. It must have been a progressive looking town in the 1940's and 50's, and a lot of the design elements that really dressed it up back then have been well preserved. The fonts and bright colors on signs all over town mixed Modernism with a sense of frontier lyricism, fitting for a town with such a poetic name.

Broken Bow, Nebraska

2010-02-27T13:50:00.003-05:00

cloud waves over the Sand Hills

the Gateway Motel, Broken Bow, Nebraska

Broken Bow, Nebraska

The Tumbleweed, Broken Bow, Nebraska

Broken Bow lies in the center of Nebraska and at the eastern edge of the Sand Hills. We were excited to finally see the Sand Hills after having read a bit about them, but for the warm dry summer evening we spent in Broken Bow, we discovered a dusty, windswept and very attractive little town far from the interstate. For the first time on our trip we felt like we were in the West.

We had breakfast the next morning at the Tumbleweed, where I heard the waitress ask a man at a nearby table if he was Canadian. Looking confused he said, "Yeah, how did you know?" She said, "I could tell because you ordered a tomato with your breakfast, and all the truck drivers coming down from Canada ask for tomatoes."

Several hours along the Lincoln Highway

2010-02-26T14:59:00.002-05:00

The Lincoln Highway, eastern Nebraska

a bar on the Lincoln Highway

corn along the Lincoln Highway

rail depot on the Lincoln Highway

Dedicated in 1913, the Lincoln Highway was the first road across the country going from New York to San Francisco. We followed it for 150 miles west into Nebraska. This stretch follows the wide, muggy river bottom of the Platte River. Tiny farm communities pop up about every five to ten miles, and every one of them has a tornado siren and a rail depot where (I assume) the local farmers store their harvested corn before it's loaded onto trains.

Along the Platte River

2010-02-26T14:47:00.006-05:00

The Platte River in eastern Nebraska

railroad along the Lincoln Highway and Platte River

The Lincoln Highway, following the Platte River

Leaving Omaha, our route followed the Platte River west into Nebraska. One of the Plains' major rivers, it guided European settlement westward across the continent starting with fur traders and explorers, continuing with the main migration trails, the first road across the country and eventually, the interstate highway system. While the interstate was routed further from the river, trains, tiny farm towns and local highways still keep the Platte at arm's length.

Great Plains scavenger hunt item #5: the Platte River

The Platte River is a river in the Western United States, approximately 310 mi (500 km) long. It is a tributary of the Missouri River, which in turn is a tributary of the Mississippi River. The Platte is one of the most significant river systems in the watershed of the Missouri, draining a large portion of the central Great Plains in Nebraska and the eastern Rocky Mountains in Colorado and Wyoming. The river played an important role in the westward expansion of the United States, providing the route for several major westward trails, including the Oregon Trail and the Mormon Trail.

-Wikipedia

Through Omaha

2010-02-25T14:47:00.003-05:00

Old downtown Omaha, Nebraska

Without the time to get an advanced degree in the Great Plains, we had to prioritize a few aspects of the region above the rest. This meant overlooking its cities scattered distantly, mostly around its edges. On our way through Omaha we stopped for a couple hours to pick up tourist information and maps, and to at least get a quick impression of the city.

The newer steel and glass office buildings make it look like a relatively thriving, healthy modern place. We walked around the Old Market area where a lot of the old brick warehouses have been turned into flower shops, beauty parlors, bars and gift shops. The buildings were neat, but the area wreaked of having been designated a revitalized cultural area and felt separated from what really gives Omaha its purpose. At least we got to see the vast rail yards and cattle yards on our way out of town to reinforce my expectation of what made Omaha.

stormy weather

2010-02-24T18:12:00.003-05:00

Our little Mazda Protege5 has been perfect for trips like this. It's big enough to bring our camping gear, and just big enough for us to sleep in comfortably should we drive too late to set up the tent. After the "Trucker's Jamboree" outside Davenport, we drove another 60 miles before pulling off the highway to sleep. Some pretty severe thunderstorms woke us up the next morning, and kept coming at us as we continued to make our way toward Nebraska.

Truck stop love

2010-02-23T18:11:00.002-05:00

The world's largest truckstop, Iowa 80, has parking for 800 trucks. This means there's room for fairs of the kind we happened upon, meaning we could check off another item on our Great Plains scavenger hunt. While local fairs are held everywhere across the country, I think their importance, and therefore dynamism, is magnified in the less populated areas like the plains, where there tend to be fewer large scale social events during the year.

Scavenger hunt, item four:

Fair: 1. an exhibition, usually competitive, of farm products, livestock, etc., often combined in the U.S. with entertainment and heldannually by a county or state.

2. a periodic gathering of buyers and sellers in an appointed place.

3. an exposition in which different exhibitors participate, sometimes with the purpose of buying or selling

Fans

2010-02-22T18:09:00.002-05:00

Aaron Tippin fans

We turned into Iowa 80 truck stop for a bite to eat and instead got to see a "Trucker's Jamboree". This meant, for us, a couple hours of wandering through a fair complete with hundreds of tractor-trailers, food tents, balloons, fireworks, games, and midwesterners of all sizes. A growing crowd in one corner of the fair drew us in, where we found out the country music star Aaron Tippin was signing autographs. We'd arrived in a new land.

Westward into Iowa

2010-02-21T12:22:00.002-05:00

Interstate 80, northern Illinois

Continuing westbound on Interstate 80 through northern Illinois, we crossed over the Mississippi River into Iowa at dusk. We counted on driving well into the night in order to make Nebraska fairly early the next day. The "World's Largest Truck Stop" drew us off the highway for a quick bite to eat, but there was a Truckers Jamboree going on, giving us a chance to see a large number of Iowans and find out whether they live up to their giant corn-fed stereotypes...

Into tornado country

2010-02-21T12:15:00.000-05:00

I grew up hearing tornado sirens periodically being tested and practicing tornado drills in school and summer camp. Our arrival in tornado country last summer announced itself by this familiar siren on our way across northern Illinois...

Great Plains scavenger hunt item number three: tornado siren

A civil defense siren (also referred to as an air raid siren, tornado siren, tsunami siren, or other outdoor warning siren) is a mechanical or electronic device for generating sound to provide warning of approaching danger and sometimes to indicate when the danger has passed. Initially designed to warn of air raids in World War II, they were adapted to warn of nuclear attack and of natural phenomena such as tornadoes. In the United States, sirens are usually used to warn of impending natural disasters, as well as threats of military attacks, which in the United States are rare. Throughout the Great Plains, Midwest, and South, they are used to notify the public of a tornado warning or flash flood.

Prairie pothole

2010-02-20T13:00:00.000-05:00

Great Plains scavenger hunt item number two: prairie pothole

Prairie potholes are depressional wetlands (primarily freshwater marshes) found most often in the Upper Midwest, especially North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. This formerly glaciated landscape is pockmarked with an immense number of potholes, which fill with snowmelt and rain in the spring. Some prairie pothole marshes are temporary, while others may be essentially permanent. Here a pattern of rough concentric circles develops. Submerged and floating aquatic plants take over the deeper water in the middle of the pothole while bulrushes and cattails grow closer to shore. Wet, sedgy marshes lie next to the upland.

The Upper Midwest, because of its numerous shallow lakes and marshes, rich soils, and warm summers, is described as being one of the most important wetland regions in the world. The area is home to more than 50 percent of North American migratory waterfowl, with many species dependent on the potholes for breeding and feeding.

-U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Illinois tallgrass

2010-02-20T12:39:00.006-05:00

The parking lot was empty when we pulled into Goose Lake Prairie State Natural Area in northern Illinois late in the afternoon. As soon as we entered the park headquarters, the ranger jumped at his opportunity for live conversation. He asked what we'd like to know about the prairie, and when we responded with question marks on our faces he said "Meet me out by the flagpole". The flagpole was surrounded by many examples of native flowers, where he gave us a guided tour of each. We followed his introduction with a hike through the surprisingly varied grasses, some over 8 feet tall. This was the first of many times on our trip where we learned that despite appearances, the prairie ecosystem is one of the most diverse in the world.

For our trip across the Great Plains, Jen and I listed as many "things" as we could think of that were associated with this region. Our list served as sort of a scavenger hunt and included both physical and cultural features. As I try to recall them in the next batch of blog posts about our trip, I'll list each item we saw or experienced in the form of a brief dictionary entry. Thus, the first item on our hunt was the tallgrass prairie.

The tallgrass prairie is an ecosystem native to central North America, with fire as its primary periodic disturbance. In the past, tallgrass prairies covered a large portion of the American Midwest, just east of the Great Plains, and portions of the Canadian Prairies. They flourished in areas with rich loess soils and moderate rainfall of around 30 to 35 inches (760 to 890 mm) per year.

-Wikipedia

Illinois prairie

2010-02-20T00:49:00.012-05:00

Goose Lake Prairie State Natural Area

One of the last large untouched patches of prairie left in Illinois is preserved as a state park about 50 miles southwest of Chicago. Goose Lake Prairie State Natural Area contains a patchwork of old-growth tallgrass prairie (it was always too poorly drained to be useful to farmers or other development). As a result it's a refuge for rare prairie plants, moths, butterflies and other insects, and a great place for birding.

Situated in the wide Illinois River bottomland and surrounded mostly by quiet, muggy farmland, we are reminded of our proximity to Chicago by the huge network of power lines emanating from a nuclear power plant looming on the horizon.

Firmly into a lower gear; time to travel on...

2010-02-19T12:57:00.006-05:00

Empire Beach, Lake Michigan

Michigan's biting flies, buzzing lawn mowers, sand in toes, ice cream, fireworks, tourists, river-soaked shoes... this is how we knew our summer had begun. After down-shifting in Michigan for a week, it was time to get back on the highway again in order to see the Great Plains we'd set out to.

Our onward travel was delayed a day when Jenifer's knee buckled over the wrong way bringing us reluctantly to the emergency room. This meant we had find room in the car for crutches and adjust some of our later plans for hiking and backpacking, but with a couple couch pillows to elevate her leg on the long ride ahead, we drove down the eastern shore of Lake Michigan for Illinois and points west.

Michelle, Jenifer, Jeff (mother, daughter, father) looking out over Empire, the dunes, the lake and all that

Thanks Jeff, Michelle, Hayley and everybody up there for a great time!

Under the Milky Way

2010-02-18T13:17:00.002-05:00

The skies in northern Michigan are so far from city lights that even staring into a backyard fire for a couple of hours does not erase the brilliant Milky Way over head. One of my favorite things about traveling up there is the way our galaxy reveals itself beyond the usual smudge across the sky. Looking sideways into our galaxy's disc, there appears to be wisps of cotton floating above and below the whirling plane. The night we built this fire was chilly, so to boost the fire's effectiveness we opened the bottle of whiskey we'd bought at the duty free shop on our way through Canada.

Slow paddle on the Crystal River

2010-02-17T12:29:00.003-05:00

The Crystal River empties Glen Lake into Lake Michigan just over a mile away. But, because of the slow, meandering course the river takes, there are about 15 miles of paddling via canoe or kayak to get to the village of Glen Arbor on Lake Michigan. A map of the river looks like the chart a seismograph makes in an earthquake, but the land surrounding the river is mostly flat, sandy cedar swamp that occasionally opens up for lush reed fields -apparently good habitat for huge snappers and strange bitterns.

The stream itself is very shallow and clear with a sandy bottom. This apparently allows one's companions to feel brave about smacking water toward fellow paddlers, and getting faces full of water in return. Right, Jen?

What would it sound like...

2010-02-16T12:12:00.005-05:00

paying for something convenient, Empire, Michigan

What would it sound like if all of the labels, words, images and colors used to get our attention were making noise instead?

Steeped in culture on the 4th of July

2010-02-15T22:38:00.007-05:00

What better way to bury oneself in the smells and flavors of the United States on July 4th than at a classic car show in Michigan? In many ways the car show culture is as foreign to me as is being anywhere else in the world, so while I don't know anything about cars, the shapes, forms and colors of their fans were rich and fascinating! Especially fun to watch was the pride of the owners as they sat back taking in the appreciations of the wandering crowds. Oh yeah -the cars were interesting too.

Who's made it to this year's Polka Fest?

2010-02-14T19:45:00.004-05:00

Checking in on the Polka Fest, Cedar, Michigan

evening walk, Cedar, Michigan

Of all the tiny towns sprinkled around the Leelanau Peninsula, Cedar has one of the bigger local festivals every summer in their Polka Fest. The way many rural areas lose a large portion of their kids after high school or college, it seems like some of these festivals serve as nothing more than a reunion for all those who've left home.

Lake Michigan's bearish dunes

2010-02-13T09:36:00.000-05:00

Sleeping Bear Dunes, Empire, Michigan

The prevailing winds off of Lake Michigan pile sand dunes up on top of already high glacial moraines making the dunes reach heights of over 400 feet straight out of the lake. This means many familiar beach functions like water gazing and sunbathing take place far removed from the lapping waves. It also means, for anyone running down to the water, a long, steep, very soft, thigh-burning, waterless hike back up. It's not unusual for the rangers to have to rescue people from below using jet skis.

Cottonwood stands of Michigan and points west

2010-02-12T21:17:00.000-05:00

All the way across the Great Plains and into the high country of Wyoming and Colorado, stands of cottonwood trees stretch along thousands of miles of river bottomlands. Seeing them, often camping out in their shade, and hearing their always-rustling leaves became one of the more consistent details of our trip last summer, and it began in Michigan, on the sand dunes in the wind coming off the big lake. There are occasional cottonwoods in the east, including the large lightning-scarred one in Margaret's yard outside the kitchen window. But there is something sturdy and comforting about being among the large western patches of them and as we headed back east, it was one thing I knew I'd miss.

Empire beach, Lake Michigan

2010-02-11T09:10:00.000-05:00

Empire beach, Lake Michigan

Empire beach, Lake Michigan

Just about everything anyone loves about beaches can be found in the upper Great Lakes: smooth soft sand, vast horizons, clear blue water, tiny strange sand bugs, gull footprints, the bubbling sand after a wave recedes. One thing not usually idolized however is the freezing-cold water of the lakes. It can make swimming something you have to "get over with" in order to lay out on the beach. For many locals however, the icy temperatures they grew up with translate to cleanliness. It means they get turned off by warmer southern waters since it feels "dirty". I think it's just a way to identify themselves with the land they're from...

Michigan, July 2009

2010-02-10T23:44:00.000-05:00

I'll begin the photo-blog style flash-back to last summer's road trip where I left off previously -in Michigan, before we set out onto the midwestern prairies. Staying in northern Michigan for a week visiting Jenifer's family allowed us to shift gears and sink right into so many wonderful clichés of summer including beaches, classic car shows, local festivals, canoeing & kayaking, sun-baked sand dunes, cool starry nights with distant coyotes howling, and -not least- ice cream...

Left to right: summer job at an ice cream shop, black cherry ice cream

One of many reasons to love winter...

2010-01-31T22:08:00.004-05:00

There are so many reasons to love winter in the northern hemisphere. One of them is that there are so many cloudy days which push our minds inward so we can reflect on the past and digest it a little further ...like a cow bringing up cud from one of its stomachs in order to chew and extract more nutritional value out of a meal from the recent past.

In this light I'm going to try to go back to last summer here and finish recounting our July ramble out west across the Great Plains.

Thinking, or trying not to, during the dark months

2010-01-09T23:29:00.007-05:00

Ice flowing down the Hudson River past Poughkeepsie, New York

The new year usually makes us compare where we are to where we thought we'd be from a year or decade ago. So, I'm not where I thought I'd be, but in the long run probably much better off.

I guess it's important to have plans and goals and work toward them. I guess it's important to be open to whatever comes and react to everything as a new opportunity.

...Now, how to live both ways at the same time? I think the answer is in that part of our brains where our minds aren't, like in an athlete who fails when he thinks too hard about what he's doing. It's probably as simple as thinking about and working on the future and being content in the present. If one side overwhelms the other, I suppose you're thinking too hard and need to lose your mind a bit.

Too much caution sometimes piles up and throws off that balance. From the wisdom of the Butthole Surfers, "It's better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven't done."

Cheers to a New Year

2010-01-01T23:38:00.002-05:00

Sometimes I bother myself by looking at the past year from too narrow a focus and let myself get disappointed that I'm not studying Arabic in Damascus right now or something like that. Instead, I look back and see that I started the year in Budapest, and landed up back in New York where I've been for so long...

When I look at it from a better perspective, I see that in the end I got the ball rolling on several big long-held dreams for my life. Besides, I did a lot of traveling this year after all. After landing back in the States I visited Texas, Michigan (multiple times), Georgia, a wide swath of the Great Plains via Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas and Missouri, and saw more of the Northeast that I hadn't seen in my previous nine years here. And along the way Jen and I spent a great many days with people we love but don't get to see very often. Also, we got to know Margaret (who we live with) and her big, dynamic family.

Scenes from Margaret's house, New Year's Eve, 2009

In the meantime, landing back here has given me a breather needed to start working on several tracks which will hopefully pay off for a long time to come. Cheers to a new year, new opportunities to follow long-held dreams, and for the immediate-term, finally getting back to regularly updating this blog!!

A pretty blank slate.

2009-09-16T15:30:00.009-04:00

What is it about water, by itself, that can draw people just to look at it? It's obvious why human geography has largely organized along the coast lines and major water courses of the world, and it's beyond obvious why it's so precious to us as living bodies. But why are we drawn to it as a place to stare off into? Perhaps a more interesting question: when there's a crowd of people staring off at the horizon from an overlook built expressly for the purpose of staring out over an empty sea, what is going on inside each person's mind?

If one lets it, it can be restoring to watch the open water for a long time, just as it can to watch a fireplace. It's refreshing whether you catch up with and order all the jumbled thoughts that pile up in our heads, or whether you go someplace new in your head. I guess I wonder if this is what people are mostly doing, and if so, whether they are aware of it.

Almost an island

2009-09-14T12:49:00.006-04:00

I've always been curious and befuddled by Michigan, though I've never been able to articulate why. I remain perplexed despite having previously lived there for over eight years.

It's in the middle of a large continent, but it's surrounded by huge inland seas. It's culturally conservatively midwestern, yet also very coastal. Perhaps some of the trouble lies in that having grown up in the US, we're conditioned to stereotype coastal culture as liberal, stylish and worldly compared to an insulated, provincial continental interior.

So, life there is steeped in visuals of vast sand beaches, wooden ship steering wheels and lighthouses as home decor, sport boats, fishing vessels, giant ore tankers, gulls, huge sand dunes covered with beach grass and covering ghost forests, and ever-present horizons of open sea. Now add to that a deep-running fondness for cozy pastel sweatshirts and flannel, fleece slippers, an ingrained deer-hunting culture revolving around bait piles, big, square, American-made minivans and trucks, and a decent peppering of conservative religiosity, and you have a unique culture I've only ever seen in Michigan. Occasional whiffs of preppy looks or aspirations remind me of New England, though perhaps only a movie version of New England... Of course stereotypes never hold up upon any kind of examination, but for that matter neither do most people's dearly held self-identity.

On the surface, none of the above geographic or cultural elements should seem to be at odds with another (and likely match quite perfectly in the mind of any given reader); nevertheless, every time I go back I have to adjust my mental map. I can't shake my surprise that there are all those huge seas all around me there.

Saginaw, Michigan

2009-08-14T12:03:00.002-04:00

We spent the first evening of our trip crossing Upstate New York, bridging the Niagara River at midnight. After an over-night across Southern Ontario, we entered southeast Michigan at sunrise. Trading the steering wheel back and forth and long naps prevented the marathon from becoming a chore. In the morning we made our way north through Michigan, stopping for a while in Saginaw.

45 years ago Lefty Frizzell sang a song called "Saginaw, Michigan". He may have only picked this town because of the rhythm it makes when singing its name, but hearing it on local radio when I lived in northern Michigan ten years ago put a version of the city into my imagination. We pulled off the freeway to finally see the place, and found what looked like a mass abandonment. I think a whole boom and bust cycle occurred here in the half-century since that song was written.

Whole blocks of houses were boarded up. Strip malls were largely hollow and wildlife has started to reclaim the sprawling parking lots. Scattered around the city were what looked like small bands of survivors waiting at bus stops. Although it was late morning on Thursday, the downtown was as quiet as a Sunday afternoon.

We stopped for breakfast at a diner, and in response to the "Hi, how are you?" greetings, the waitress said she was "blessed". Given the context of her city, I couldn't help but hear it as a reference to the fact that she was working.

Eh hem...

2009-08-05T15:25:00.008-04:00

Back in the muggy, leafy East...

While I anticipated more wifi access on our trip, I suppose those moments we did have access (with photos) were either too fleeting, or too much of a break to muster any worthwhile blogging. Also, couple weeks of the trip were spent prepping for a big interview, which in the end, I think, went very well.

But, whatever the excuse for the inactivity here, the best one for me for now is that it's Summertime. And thanks to absolutely everyone with whom we visited and who hosted us during our travels this July -this summer so far has exceeded any ideal.

Open-Road Trip

2009-07-08T23:18:00.004-04:00

I write this at the beginning of a road trip around the country to visit family -and soak in the landscapes between. We're lucky to have family living in so many interesting places: the rural shores of the Upper Great Lakes in Northern Michigan, the Open Range/High Plains of Western Wyoming, up against the Rocky Mountains of Colorado's Front Range, the rolling prairies of Eastern Kansas, and the musty old river town at the boundary of the East and the West, St. Louis, Missouri.

Every time I mention a drive across the plains someone groans with sympathy, but it's always been one of my favorite regions in the world to explore! The geography there is so rich; and made all the more so because it is so overlooked. I have goose bumps for the big sky ahead...

aerogramme outlook

2009-07-04T23:42:00.002-04:00

Although these past several months that the blog was asleep have seen Jen and I make a transition back to the United States, I refuse to take my foot out of the doorway! For now we're living in a beautiful old house in an interesting part of Poughkeepsie, New York. The neighborhood, the city, and the Hudson Valley offer a lot of rich opportunities for geographic exploration. We're back on familiar territory, but now there's an opportunity to see it and describe it all as a traveller.

As I collected a lot of details and photos those last few months in Budapest while this blog drifted off, I still have a few things to share. Over the months ahead I'll look for ways of incorporating those things into whatever's going on at present. I hope to sprinkle the blog with little items picked up this Spring in New York, Texas, and Michigan as well. Since arriving in New York in March I've learned a little about contrasting priorities regarding quality of life. We loved Budapest and our own lives there so much that I have little doubt the eight months we lived there wont be our last.

As Jen and I plan our future and continue to look for ways to break travel out of its two-weeks-a-year confinement -blending it permanently into our everyday lives- I hope to continue sharing it all here.

Wake Up...

2009-06-22T16:28:00.002-04:00

sarajevo pastiche #3

2009-03-02T18:53:00.000-05:00

Sarajevo pastiche #2

2009-02-05T22:37:00.003-05:00

Sarajevo pastiche #1

2009-02-04T22:07:00.005-05:00

Warm welcome to Sarajevo

2009-01-31T23:24:00.013-05:00

Bewildered in our arrival to a new city with new smells, sights and sounds all around, we took the first and easiest opportunity to get a room to drop our bags and catch our bearings. Owned by a hostel service, it was a room with six beds, but we'd have it to ourselves for the price of a regular private double. Immediately we were following a man up the steep cobbled residential streets surrounding the old city center. Passing a mixture of tumble-down shacks and fixed-up Ottoman-style buildings, we finally turned left at a particularly rugged former house, and to our surprise, entered it.

Finally alone in the shade and quiet of the room we turned the light on (a single dim overhead bulb) to locate the outlet to recharge our electronics (none), tried the beds (saggy as hammocks), and waded through the stagnant water on the bathroom floor to use the toilet. We've always prided ourselves in being good budget travelers, and we realized this is a relatively poor country, but the price here didn't seem fair at 25 Euros. Nevertheless we decided to spend one night, which allowed us more leisure that day in locating a better place for the remainder of our stay in town.

We returned that night well after dark and when I flicked on the light Jen looked startled and said "Oh my god." I followed the dotted lines coming out of her eyes over to a bed across the room. There, squinting in the light, was a curled up young cat. She stretched and got up to greet us as I realized I'd opened the window earlier to air the room out. She demonstrated his ability to win a room for the night as she intensely mauled us with affection for over an hour. After spending the night curled up in my neck, she left in time for us to grab our bags and go. Outside in the yard we saw that she was the smart one of several identical siblings.

Here's to a fresh start...

2009-01-11T23:03:00.009-05:00

Happy New Year (albeit 11 days in)... So, I've let myself get quite behind on the blog, and the sights and impressions that I'd like share from Budapest have piled up, but I do want to start the new year with a well-wish. I always used to think that while any given year may be good or bad for any given person, that on balance there aren’t really any differences in years for the world as a whole. An individual looks at their year through from their own perspective, but given the amount of individual perspectives there are out there, the quality of a year lived collectively by the world balances out, or neutralizes. To the extent I'm questioning this notion in light of an accumulation of destructive current events in the world, I wish everyone reading this a better year ahead.

Before I share the scraps recently gathered in Budapest, I’m going to return to where I left off on the blog before Christmas, and attempt to give an impression of Sarajevo. Honestly, I think I've been intimidated about how to approach descriptions of that place because we were so touched by it, and I've been concerned about adequately conveying what a special place it is using its own merits and without glorifying anything. Beginning with my next post I'll give it a try.

Before I go back to that trip from November, however, here’s an impression of the New Year's celebration in our part of Budapest. Andrássy út, closed to traffic and filled with people in party hats and carrying champagne bottles were kissing, hollering and dodging firecrackers. The fireworks were being launched from all directions and, as some of them landed among openings in the crowds, red and blue sparkles bounced in all directions causing thrilled shrieks all around.

Scenes from Budapest at Christmas

2008-12-28T08:01:00.004-05:00

Budapest has emerged from an ideally quiet Christmas. Almost all of the shops were closed and the streets were mostly deserted. After a month of crowded Christmas fairs, hot spiced wine and stores filled with beigli and candy, everyone seemed to go home for a few days.

This contrast with the gaudy sales-pitch I've been getting used to in recent years highlighted for me how distorted the holiday is becoming from the sentimentality everyone has for it in their imaginations. Some of my favorite parts of the holiday were always in the brief silent moments when I'd be outside walking in the boring grey afternoons before dinner, or after the feast when everyone is full, tired, satisfied and together.

We spent the few quiet days here walking through the overcast city with our hands shoved into our coat pockets and scarves pulled up around our faces, seeing only an occasional family carrying packages down the street. Even our neighborhood homeless man was gone from his usual door vestibule Christmas night.

Neretva Gorge by Rail

2008-12-13T12:06:00.023-05:00

As much as Bosnia and Herzegovina are still off the main tourist track, the train from Mostar to Sarajevo(the full length of which originates in Ploce, Croatia on the Adriatic Sea) could still be called a hidden gem. I understand that while the train's two rail cars were largely vacant only a few years ago, they are now full of local passengers and tourists in the summer. In most places I've been, a ride through terrain like that would be marketed as a special tourist day trip. Here it was simply transportation, but over the course of the two-and-a-half hour trip I could hardly look down at my book for fear I'd miss more scenery.

The portion we rode leaves Mostar through a wide plain along the Neretva River. Heading north, it quickly winds into the deep Neretva River Gorge against the high rock walls that enclose the river. As the tracks climb higher into the gorge, they pass a dam behind which the river takes on a bright blue-green color. Towering jagged rock formations crown the gorge much of the way, revealing a new world around each bend. I didn't realize the Dinaric Alps were so dramatic.

After a lot of switch-backs, the route leaves the river and continues on to Sarajevo high over numerous valleys, passing through over a hundred tunnels along the way. Many of the valleys contain towns, and as we passed over and around them it felt like we were in an airplane preparing for landing.

Mostar on the mend

2008-12-12T20:56:00.010-05:00

Echos of the wars in the 90’s are seen in the burned-out shells of buildings still standing 15 years later, and in the extra-height church tower and cross on the Christian side of the city competing with the minarets on the Muslim side. But past the broken glass and EU police occasionally seen still on patrol, Mostar is also a shockingly pretty city.

Of course there is beauty in its namesake, the bright stone Stari Most, or Old Bridge, re-built several years ago in an identical form to its 400+ year-old original that was destroyed in 1993. There are also clusters of medieval stone buildings huddled on both sides of the bridge, and polished, multi-colored river stones making up the walking streets in these neighborhoods. There is the striking blue-green color of the Neretva River flowing through town, as well as high, rocky mountains rising on both sides of providing a wild, beautiful backdrop to the city in all directions.

The ottoman-style buildings and mosques sprinkled everywhere, the call to prayer occasionally echoing over the city from so many minarets pricking the sky, and the ever present smell of wood smoke and grilled meats, are reminders that the Turks were a little more successful here once upon a time than in much of Europe. Many Bosnians converted to Islam over several generations under the Ottoman empire, and as the easternmost remaining remnant of that culture, give the region a frontier feeling.

The busy sidewalks and cafes we saw on a warm early November evening were an indication of how far Mostar has resuscitated from its recent past. Having fallen for the place so quickly, it was hard to return to our hotel room knowing our train left so early the next morning.

Mostar after the shock

2008-12-11T08:04:00.009-05:00

After the easy and rich surroundings on the coast in Dubrovnik, arriving at the desolate bus and train stations in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina was a bit of a confrontation. Sheets of opaque plastic covered missing panes of glass and the concrete walls were covered with pits left from bullets. Outside paced a scruffy man and two young dreadlocked daughters eating ice cream. It's safe to assume the dreads were not the family's effort to romanticize themselves as hippies, since we saw the father starting their campfire behind partial building remains early the next morning.

There isn't a block throughout the city that doesn't have a blunt reminder of the war that took place there in the 90's, from bullet-pitted walls, shell-scars in the sidewalk pavement, and entire burned-out buildings, to graveyards filled with gravestones all sharing the same years. As our senses acclimated over our 24 hours in town, this sad backdrop gave way to thriving street life and we realized a day wasn't going to be enough time to spend in this surprisingly beautiful city.

Inland to Mostar by bus

2008-11-30T21:00:00.005-05:00

The few people around us on the bus slept through most of our early morning ride to Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. I wasn't sure how they could. Heading north out of Dubrovnik, the road quickly zig-zagged up the steep coastal ridge until we were high up over the Adriatic Sea. From our point of view on the inland side of the bus, there was nothing between us and the distant Croatian islands but the clouds and the birds.

A narrow strip of Bosnian land cuts through Croatia to the coast there, so we crossed the border three times that morning before entering Bosnia and Herzegovina for good. The third time he was

tapped awake on the bus by a border guard, the man across from me muttered under his breath in English, "Jesus, pick a country!"

Once our bus turned inland toward Mostar, the

landscape changed dramatically. It was a rainy morning, so the silvery sage covered hills all around reminded me of the arid high-plains of Wyoming at its greenest.

The spine of Šipan

2008-11-30T08:42:00.004-05:00

Leaving the village of Sudurad for our hike back to Sipanska Luka, we wandered between quiet stone houses with their wooden shutters closed. A lone white pair of panties hung on a clothesline outside waving in the breeze (a signal to someone?). As our road climbed the hill outside of town past the remains of several stone villas, decaying since the renaissance, it became closed in by rosemary bushes and olive trees.

After a picnic on a hillside tiered with olive groves we continued up the pathway, surprising a few people lost in quiet conversations while they picked the olives. Our road, now a rocky mule trail, climbed the ridge that formed the island's spine until we could see the Adriatic in all directions. A narrow sweep of farm fields filled the valley below us and a tiny church sat on top of another of the island's distant peaks.

A rudimentary map posted at the dock that I'd taken a picture of that morning showed our lane looping back down to the main road in the middle of the island's valley, but as we pushed further the thick brush closed in. Finally stopped by an alert, tense dog next to a stone house, we gave up on our route and found our way through overgrown orchards back to the valley floor, and the main road to Sipanska Luka.

Approaching the town in time for the evening ferry, we passed graveyards that had been bare that morning. Now they overflowed with fresh flowers and many of the same people from the morning's ride over. Back at the waterfront, among those waiting for the ferry back to Dubrovnik were chatting locals and cats roaming the piles of fish nets. Amidst the hustle that surrounded the ferry's arrival, a young island girl stopped her cat from boarding by grabbing it awkwardly under her arm. Without protest, the cat fell limp.

Šipan Island changes gears

2008-11-29T18:28:00.001-05:00

There were a few families loaded with bags of gushing flower bouquets on the 45-minute ferry to Sipan Island. It was the eve of All Saint's Day, so apparently there are a lot of ancestors buried there. I'd read that the Elaphiti Islands are the least developed of the islands along the Croatian coast. We chose Sipan for a day trip based on the relative frequency of the ferry this time of year (two trips per day). The flowers and passengers unloaded quickly in Sipanska Luka, one of two small villages on the island, before the ferry departed for the day. A few empty boats bobbed in the sun as the ferry passengers dispersed. The shops around the bay had all closed for the season except for a small store selling ice cream, fishing tackle, and some bottles of wine.

While we waited for the hourly bus to Sudurad on the other end of the island, the end of a movie played out across a gravel parking lot. One by one the main characters, four women in their twenties, dragged a summer's worth of suitcases and duffel bags from a hotel with its curtains and wooden shutters closed. Soon the local heartthrob pulled up on a moped, and they were joined by the wise father figure -a squat hotel manager, who helped them load a car until it sank. They all turned to each other for a long round of farewell hugs and kisses. With the hotel now shut for winter it was easy to see that its staff was now departing after a long summer together. A couple of group photos later and their car scooted off, followed by the moped. Our bus pulled into Sudurad in time to see them all embracing again before one girl dragged her bags onto the waiting ferry there, bound for points further up the coast.

While some locals milled around the dock saying good-byes to the few others getting on the ferry, we found the only open bar/cafe to sit down and catch up with our journals over cappuccinos. Over the next couple of hours, the only activity in Sudurad seemed to be the group of men gossiping in front of the only other store, our waitress who'd get up to change songs on the jukebox, and a busy little cat. This adolescent size-cat went through cycles of climbing onto our laps to take a nap, pushing its nose onto our table, running off to chase something, and clawing its way back onto our laps again to crash.

All Saints Day in Croatia

2008-11-24T06:55:00.008-05:00

I admired how much the people in Dubrovnik must love flowers since we passed so many flower markets and they were always so busy. On buses and sidewalks across the city people were carrying bouquets, sometimes two or three at a time. Then, as Hallowe'en approached, I remembered the part about it being a contraction and that many parts of the world celebrate All Hallows day more than the eve. In fact, shops, restaurants, and even bars closed a little early on October 31st. Anywhere we went on the 1st it seemed like people were dressed up and carrying masses of flowers. The numbers of large family gatherings reminded me of Thanksgiving in the U.S.

Croatia in our mouths

2008-11-24T06:54:00.002-05:00

Over the course of our several days in the country, we tried to touch all the main bases of coastal Croatian cuisine. Besides the countless small bakeries selling various bread loaves, pizzas, and small snacks such as the dense roll (pictured) containing marmalade or chocolate, we found a number of salty, semi-hard cheeses and all kinds of prsut. Although prsut is primarily made from pork, we also tried some dry-cured beef, and all of it here was shaved in rather thick slabs and was wonderfully dense -both in flavor and texture.

I wasn't expecting much from the cheap fried calamari I ordered at a dumpy looking spot across from the ferry landing, but these little bundles of tentacles and rings poofed away in my mouth like delicate clouds. It probably shouldn't have surprised me how great the seafood was here across the board; I guess I've just grown accustomed to what's on offer too far inland all my life. Other ubiquitous dishes here are all kinds of seafood risottos, especially those made with squids and cuttlefish cooked in their own ink.

One of the more fascinating treats in the region is the proliferation of amaro, or bitters. Some were similar to Campari, while others were less sweet and more complex. Most were varying shades of darker brown like cola. All reflected wonderfully some facet of the rosemary herbal-scented and salty air all around us.

Dubrovnik #10

2008-11-23T07:31:00.009-05:00

Our guidebook suggested that walking the perimeter of Dubrovnik's Old Town along the high walls which enclose it would take around an hour, or longer if a cruise ship is in port and the crowds are heavy. We found it could easily take a lot longer with very few people up there with us to interrupt the imagination.

The cliff-top walls reach as high as 25 meters. At one point in its history, all the city's capable citizens were made to reinforce the walls and build an additional exterior fortress based on rumors of a coming war between the Ottomans and western powers. What must it have been like to live in such a highly civilized merchant city surrounded by the ever-present threat to its existence that made such walls necessary?

Much more recently (16 years ago), what was it like when the city's fortifications protected it's citizens once again during the siege by the former Yugoslav Army when a steady rain of shells fell for half a year? The variations in roof tile colors seen today hint at the experience. Somehow even more moving than this sight is that of the cable car towers running up the mountainside above the city. While Dubrovnik is becoming quite popular with tourists once again, the empty poles are all that remain of this once popular overlook ride.

Dubrovnik #9

2008-11-23T07:21:00.005-05:00

One day, walking along with the Placa Stradun where there were a lot of pigeons chasing bits of food and young kids chasing pigeons, we sat down on a bench to catch up with our map or something. Not long after we stopped, we noticed that our stillness seemed to be attracting the pigeons. Quite a number of them eventually wandered over by us to sit down, fluff up their feathers and go to sleep.

Dubrovnik #8

2008-11-23T07:14:00.007-05:00

One day, on a whim we entered the apothecary museum inside a Franciscan monastery without really knowing what was inside. We'd read that it was the oldest continuously operating pharmacy in Europe, a fact that wasn't overly compelling on its own, but what the heck...

Inside we were surprised by the absorbing collection of medieval religious paintings and reliquaries on display. We later had to look up what a reliquary is, because what we saw were elaborate gothic finger and head-shaped metal containers labled things like "The finger reliquary of Saint ____". It turns out that apparently they really do contain bone or skull fragments of the saints.