Today, the campground hosted some sort of big Vespa meet-up — there had to be over 100 vespas here, including a ton of older two stroke models. (nothing like the smell of 2 stroke exhaust in the otherwise calm mountain wilderness..)
Being a motorcyclist (albeit one coming off of a three year NYC-induced hiatus), it was interesting to compare the scooter crowd to the biker crowd. While “serious” riders often mock the squids riding their CBSXR1400Ninja++-R in shorts and flip-flops at maximum speed, watching the scooter crowd all day left me with a certain feeling of darwinism-
Here you have a ton of people wearing street clothes, open faced helmets, no protection at all, class-M endorsements not required, riding scooters on twisty mountain roads. While there were a few people in some minimal amount of gear, they were in the minority. I saw one person crash after being unable to negotiate a speed bump (!) and another person who added *training wheels* to a Piaggio MP3 (yes, the one that already has three wheels that you don’t need to balance).
While I certainly don’t begrudge these folks the enjoyment of getting out there on two wheels, doing so in street clothes without proper training is asinine. Apparently some of these scooters can do 80mph! (to be fair, I believe those are 250cc which would require class M endorsement in the state of california..)
Anyway, can anyone explain the use case of scooters in this country? Why not just get a motorcycle? They make sense in european cities, but our cities are not configured to be scooter friendly. Even NYC is a nightmare for two wheeled vehicles.
Anyway, in other news, the truck is still broken, and my current plan is to ship it back east, rent a car, and head back to PA for some vacation time. A major repair will be easier back there anyway. I guess that means the “on the road” counter on the right side of the page has to be reset. Sad.
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head gasket. and no warranty coverage.
I give up.
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No coolant, and an oil leak. And watery oil. And stranded again.
good times.
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We appear to have a mouse. Magic is now keeping a watchful eye. But, he is too slow.
Anybody know of good humane mousetraps?
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I am now immortal. I spent an hour today with the legend, Bob Barker.
Bob is on a tour for his book, “Priceless Memories. He stopped by the office and spoke a bit about the book, and answered a ton of questions. Bob got me through a lot of sick days in my childhood, and it was surreal to actually see him in person.
I was a bit nervous to see him, actually – toward the end of his run on The Price is Right, he seemed to be getting a little frail and not quite as mentally sharp as he was, but he was completely on top of his game. He was definitely looking like an old guy, but otherwise, his voice and mind and everything else were the Bob Barker that we all know and love. He owned the room, and was really hilarious — friendly, accommodating, and a great storyteller.
While the talk was recorded (and I’ll post the link when it’s all edited and published), a few highlights:
- He recounted the story about how he got his first big break, being discovered by someone who happened to be tuning randomly and offered him a chance to be on TV. The moral of the story was basically, be the best that you can be at all times, because you never know who’s going to be paying attention that day.
- He talked about the famous Samoan women on TPIR always wanting to pick him up and throwing him all over the place
- He admitted that he was computer illiterate, hoped to die that way, and hilariously talked about how we were all “blogging” on our “web sites” and he had no idea what any of that meant
- He said his epitaph would definitely NOT say “Come on down!” — this was the funniest thing I’ve heard all month. We were practically rolling on the floor.
It was great stuff. I forgot my camera, so here are couple of phone pictures.
At the end of the hour, Bob signed off with his signature “Help control the pet population – have your pets spayed or neutered.” And all was right in the world.
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I decided that the Airstream experience would only be complete with a musical instrument. While I played drums in my youth (head snare in concert band, baby..), I was never very musical otherwise. I dabbled with a few instruments here and there, but never really got into them, and never really had enough interest to bother with private lessons.
Lately I thought, if I’m sitting outside of the Airstream, in the sand, or in the desert, what instrument is appropriate? There were really only three choices: Acoustic guitar, harmonica, and jaw harp (like from Crocodile Dundee). I figured acoustic guitar was a bit of a commitment (and takes up a lot of space in my small quarters), so I bought a harmonica – a Lee Oskar Major Diatonic in the key of C. 
The great thing is, there are a bunch of really easy to understand harmonica lessons online. YouTube is full of free ones, but the best by far appear to be by Adam Gussow of Satan & Adam. He has about 150 free lessons on youtube (search for “gussow”), and a bunch of pay ones on modernbluesharmonica.com. The pay ones seem to be the best, and are really reasonably priced — a starter set of about 5 lessons cost $23, and is probably enough to last at least a month of playing.
The hardest part of getting started on harmonica is being able to play single notes. This took several days to be able to do at all, to be able to do it reliably takes a lot of refinement in the technique. Moving from one single note to another is even more difficult, as it has as much to do with understanding how far you need to move left or right as it does mouth shape.
Anyway, I assume that like every other instrument I’ve picked up, I’ll end up giving up after a short time, but who knows. It’s fun for now, and a harmonica is only 30 bucks. 
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The end of my month in LA is fast approaching. While I’ll miss my friends, good eats, ridiculous cars, brunch at the Polo Lounge, staring out over the pacific, bikinis on the beach during my daily commute, a quiet office, and amazing weather, I will not miss 45 minute drives to .. well, anywhere. Malibu is far from everything, and traffic certainly doesn’t help.
LA has also been bad luck for my vehicles. The Ducati wouldn’t start and needed a battery charge, and then ended up having brake problems (goes into the shop tomorrow). The truck started hesitating and blowing black smoke, and $650 later, it’s still broken. I’m tearing the Banks programmer out tomorrow bright and early in hopes of a fix before I take it back to the shop.
My next stint will be back up to the Bay Area for awhile, and after that, who knows? Malibu’s rates are completely jacked for the summer (~2300/mo!!), and I have various other exploring to do — my only real deadline is mid-July when I head overseas for a bit.
I haven’t really done a lot of photography in LA, I guess because most of it is old news, as I’ve spent a ton of time here. Will try to make up for that over the next week..
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For those Deadliest Catch fans out there, I’m happy to say that I can see the Helly Hansen corporate offices from my current RV park. (Helly Hansen is the brand of equipment they use on the Northwestern — yes, the same Hansen as Captain Sig.)
The other thing I can see from my RV park is a lot of white box RVs jam packed into a small space. Trees are important in the p-n-dub, people!!
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You know that famous movie moment where our hero the out-of-towner walks into a local bar, the music comes to a screeching halt, and everybody stares? Yeah, I felt kinda like that tonight.
In a town of only 400 people, and one bar/restaurant/breakfast place/whatever, a new face stands out. Welcome to Dufur, Oregon.
My main business was in The Dalles (about 15 minutes north of Dufur), but there were no RV parks answering the phone there — so, off to Dufur I went. The Dalles is a fairly remote/rural place, but even the residents there were surprised to hear that I ventured out to Dufur. It’s difficult to explain the geography here — after an amazing drive east from Portland out I-84 through the Columbia Gorge (top 5 drives ever), you head south into masses of steep, rolling hills — farm country. Dufur is the first little town you come to.
The Dufur RV park is on the very southern edge of town (contrary to many of the online addresses), tucked between a laundromat, some “historic buildings,” and a sort of junk yard/abandoned farm equipment area. The park contained the original “lower area” with many permanent residents, and the newer “upper area” with pull-throughs, which is where I stayed. My overnight stay cost me $20, payable in cash to the nice older lady in trailer #1. I didn’t get her name, but we had a nice chat about Dufur with a tiny TV showing Jeopardy in the background. Not quite realizing how tiny Dufur was, I asked her where I might find a bite to eat — “the restaurant is still open.”
Yes, the restaurant — the Pastime Saloon — is the only restaurant in town. It’s a combination bar/restaurant/breakfast place, full of taxidermy and sports memorabilia. After eating my open faced turkey sandwich smothered in gravy (reminded me of my childhood), I had a few beers and talked with some of the locals. After getting over the weirdness of my existence, they seemed to accept me well enough and we had a great time for a few hours. One thing of note about the Pastime Saloon, and really, any place in Oregon: they all have *great beer*. This was the most rural, farmland bar you’ll find, yet they had amazing, fresh taps. I love Oregon.
I could go on about the locals of Dufur, but I wouldn’t do the experience justice. This was the type of thing I was looking forward to during my nomadic adventures, and it was certainly worthwhile. And now I have a free Dufur RV Park calendar hanging on the wall of the Airstream.
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