Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

For several weeks we'd been planning to travel this weekend. Tomorrow is Juneteenth, which is a company holiday, and I used PTO for Friday to have a four day weekend. It'd be our first trip of the summer. Unfortunately we decided Monday to cancel it. Why? Because we're still sick.

Hawk visited the doctor on Monday and was diagnosed with bronchitis and an ear infection. I'm still getting over my cold... which may actually be/have been bronchitis, too. We hope to be better by tomorrow or Friday, but just in case we're not we made the tough decision to cancel our travel plans.

I hate missing the opportunity for a vacation, even a short one. Being sick really sucks.

My on-time flight to Phoenix yesterday was an anomaly. I thought about that as things worked so smoothly— I'd better enjoy this, because it's not the norm. (Except I forgot to pack a shirt.) Because usually this is how things go when flying Southwest:



Today it's back to normal. I got a text as early as 11:16am that my 6:30pm flight was delayed. At first it was a 2 hour delay. Then it became a 30 minute delay. Then 2 hours again. Then 1 hour. Then 90 minutes. The inbound aircraft is in the air now, so that 90 minute delay should hold steady. Thus my 26 hours in Phoenix becomes 27.5, and I won't be getting home— as in, home-home—until almost 10:30pm.

Ugh.

And I've got a full schedule tomorrow starting with a 7am meeting.

Well, at least I get to kick up my heels at PHX airport. But I wish I could kick them up at home, in bed.

Italy Travelog #24
Chia, Sardinia - Friday, 30 May 2025, 8:30am

Breakfast at the hotel in Sardinia this week has been enjoyable. Ordinarily I would tout that getting it for free is a perk of elite status. In fact being able to enjoy such a perk is one of the reasons I signed up for an expensive credit card without a big signup bonus recently. But apparently breakfast here was negotiated as part of our group rate— a group rate that also entirely forbids elite perks, depending on which front desk person I talk to.

Anyway, breakfast has been good. Good, but not great. Every day for the past few days I've eaten a mix of a few salamis, a couple pieces of sausage, and an order of French toast the cook consistently manages to burn to the point of being tough and chewy on the outside yet nearly liquid in the middle.

Then, today at breakfast, an oopsie happened. Buttoh! My chair collapsed under me. One leg snapped.  I rolled to the floor and quickly got to my feet, uninjured. But my roll must have been impressive because lots of people rushed over, including everyone in the family at the table next to us.

Before we left a man came over an introduced himself as the hotel's F&B manager. He offered to comp our dinner in the restaurant tonight as a gesture. That was way more than I was going to ask. I mean, I wasn't even going to ask anything, as I wasn't injured or even shaken. But I don't believe in arguing when someone offers me something genuinely nice, so I thanked him for his generosity. We were considering doing another picnic dinner on our patio tonight... now dinner's on the house!

Today we headed out to the Pinnacles— Pinnacles National Park— to hike. It's a day-adventure I've been looking forward to for a while, and finally today our schedules and the weather aligned. And oh, what nice weather it was. The park had a high temperature of 78° today, warm enough to feel, well, warm but not so hot that we'd regret being out in the sun. I mean, in the summer it gets really smokin' out there, like 100+. Thus a clear day in early spring is really the perfect time to visit. Like today!

We got off to a late start today. It wasn't until around 9:30 that we left the house. I'm not too proud to admit that I had some cold feet this morning about the hike, after planning it for the past week. The problem was I slept poorly last night. I considered whether I wanted to take an "easy day" today. I'd still go hiking somewhere; but somewhere shorter and easier. Intellectually I knew that I'd be happy once I got to the Pinnacles, but it took some pushing to get through the blahs.

The drive down to the Pinnacles was enjoyable. At 9:30am on Easter Sunday there wasn't a crazy amount of traffic. I mean, all 4 lanes in both directions on US-101 through San Jose were busy, just not bumper-to-bumper at 60mph like it sometimes gets.

42 miles out from home we reach the town of Gilroy. This is the southern end of what anyone could reasonably call the Bay Area or metropolitan San Jose. Though people do commute in from farther out than this. 😳 Beyond Gilroy US 101 narrows to 2 lanes in each direction and becomes a bit of a country highway as it traverses, well, countryside into Central California.

At 48 miles we reach the San Benito County line. Yes, 48 miles and we've just left the county. Where I grew up on the East Coast I could drive 48 miles and it'd involve 3 states. Welcome to the Western US! Government boundaries aside, we're happy to note as we cross the county line that the mountains around us are all still green.

At around 60 miles we near Prunedale. The only nice thing I have to say about Prunedale is that they finally allowed Caltrans to widen and straighten US-101 through their community so it's no longer a traffic bottleneck. Now it's a pleasure driving through the short mountain range here and dropping into the Salinas Valley on the other side.

At 67 miles we roll into the north side of Salinas. We're hungry so we stop for brunch at a couple of fast food restaurants. I eat at Carl's Jr.; Hawk gets Sonic Drive-In across the street. Then we get donuts for dessert from a nearby shop.

While in Salinas I have a... wardrobe malfunction. A seam ripped in my hiking shorts. I briefly consider a) just hiking for the day with a hole in my pants or b) just going home because I'm so pissed about it. Hawk points out we're literally right in front of a Wal-Mart, and almost certainly they have something inside I can buy and wear. I grumble about Wal-Mart fashion before, to my surprise, I find not one but three items of clothes to buy there!

South of Salinas 101 is a chill road. It's straight and level as it traverses farmland in the agricultural Salinas Valley. There's a Steinbeck museum here. He was born in Salinas and used it as inspiration for many of the settings in his books, including it being featuring literally in his classic, The Grapes of Wrath. I've read Salinas people are so pleased about it they've held book burnings in his honor.

At 97 miles we're finally in Soledad. This small town is where we turn off the highway and head up into the rugged hills of the Gabilan Mountains. You probably haven't heard of the Gabilan Mountains. But one thing interesting about them is they're so remote they're crossed than fewer roads than the Sierra Nevada range with its 14,000' peaks. And even state highway 146, which leads to the park, doesn't cross these mountains. It stops halfway across. It stops halfway across, in the park, then picks up again on the other side! The only way across Pinnacles National Park is on foot. That's how you know you're in a hard-core hiking park.

Georgia Travelog #2
Savannah, GA - Saturday, 5 Apr 2025, 7pm

We're at our hotel in Savannah, Georgia. That's the one thing that's gone right in the past few hours. Everything else....

Our flight out from California to Denver was fine. As we landed at DEN there were snow flurries with an air temperature of 26°. (Savannah was 81° at the time.) Our connecting flight was running late— though not too bad; only 40 minutes or so. The good news was that gave us extra time to eat lunch at the airport.

Our connecting flight landed late at SAV. Being 30-40 minutes late put pressure on our schedule for meeting my sister and her family for dinner. Then we got to the rental car desk next to baggage claim. O. M. G.

There were easily 30 people in line at Avis/Budget. I got to short-cut the line a bit by being an Avis Preferred member. But it was still a frustratingly long wait. Then, once I completed the contract, the agent told me to have a seat and wait for them to call my name.

"My car's not ready?"

"We'll call your name when it is."

"How long's the wait?"

"I don't know."

I went to the waiting area and saw at least 10 families already waiting for cars. I waited 5 minutes. 10 minutes. 20 minutes. 30 minutes. Not a single person's name was called for 30 minutes. If it takes at least 30 minutes per car and there are 10 people in front of me... I could be there all night waiting on a car! At that point I decided "Fuck it!" and used the app to cancel my reservation. I called the hotel and asked them to send their shuttle to meet us.

While waiting for the shuttle I checked the Avis app again. When it had offered me the option to cancel it didn't advise me what the cost, if any, would be. Well, 5 minutes later it showed me a bill. $475. For a car I never even saw. I called a phone agent (defo not gonna wait in that ridiculous line inside again!) who transferred me to Billing, who said that they could cancel my reservation with no charge. So right now I don't know what the outcome is going to be. Will they charge me $475 or nothing? If $475, will I be able to challenge it via my credit card company? If I challenge it, will I be block-listed by Avis/Budget and never able to rent from them again? IDFK. 🤬

A few months ago I found a pair of hiking shoes in our hall closet. They were unused, and I'd had them in there for I-don't-know-how-many years. I used them for a short, easy hike in January then wore them on the drive to another hike today... and found out they're already trash.



As you can see in the video, the body of the shoe has come separated from the sole. I'm guessing the glue holding the two together dried out and cracked after too many years even though the shoe was never used. Or maybe it's just a shit quality shoe. Again, I wore this shoe for a total of maybe 4 hours, and most of that time was while driving to/from the trail.

I'm glad I packed a second pair of footwear suitable for today's hike!

Panama Travelog #Whatever
Everywhere we went - The whole damn week.

Our trip to Panama in late December, which we returned from a week ago, was an exercise in joy and frustration. Exercise is an unfortunately apropos term as it often took effort to find the joy and hold onto any sense of it amidst all the setbacks.

What went wrong? Lots of things big and small. I'll group it into categories as Five Things:

• Problems started from the hour we landed. The car rental agency downgraded us to a smaller car because they didn't have the one we reserved. At first that seemed like a negligible issue because they also charged us the lower rate, but then two days later our little vehicle couldn't even drive some of the roads in El Valle.


• Meanwhile, we had room trouble at the hotel we checked into the first night. And there was trouble with the second hotel we visited. And the third. Literally everywhere we went, there was a problem. The latter two we serious enough that we would have demanded refunds and gone elsewhere if it weren't too late to find reasonable alternate accommodation.


• Oh, and it wasn't just cars and rooms we had trouble with. Some of the hikes we had on our list were falsely advertised. Like, reviews full of superlatives but nothing actually there. Or officially closed.


• Oh, and it rained every day— and this was supposed to be the dry season!


• Our phones basically stopped getting cell service halfway through the trip, requiring a three-hour troubleshooting session with tech support. Even after it was "fixed", connection remained spotty every time we weren't standing still.


• Oh, and just when we thought we were done with this star-crossed trip.... We were sick the day we traveled home. And sick for almost a week after.

Okay, so that's six things when I promised 5. Even when I group the problems by category there are still too many.

"Okay, so it wasn't perfect," you might respond. "Whenever is a trip perfect?" And haven't I congratulated myself before on planning flexibly so I can call an audible when plans need to change?

Sure, I know things don't go perfectly. That's what I plan to be ready to call an audible when necessary. But understand that calling an audible means crossing things off the list and skipping them. It's fine to do that a small number of times. After a certain number of times it's just frustrating.

What's the frustration, BTW? Aren't there other things I can do? The frustration is about money and opportunity.

Money: We spent several thousand dollars on this trip. It's a real pisser when things we aim to do are suddenly not available. Sure, there are other things to do, but when I get down to having to choose between fourth and fifth choice, is it still worth the thousands of dollars to be here? If I'd known in advance I may have chosen not to go there. ...And gone elsewhere instead. Which leads to the second issue....

Opportunity: Possibly more so than wasting money it's wasted time. I have finite opportunities for international trips like this. Recently it's been 1-2 a year. I do not have an infinite number of years of life. Fewer, even, of active, globe-trotting, get-outdoors-and-do-stuff life. This trip means using up a ticket from a very limited number of tickets in my proverbial ticket book. It infuriates me to see that I've burned one of those tickets on a trip that hits failures left, right, and center.

Panama Travelog #17
El Valle, Panama - Tue, 24 Dec 2024. 5pm.

In my last blog about climbing La Dormida (sleeping Indian girl) I shared how I kept telling myself, "We're almost there, keep going," to persevere through the worsening rain. Well, the trail was steep all the way to the top.



And the rain didn't stop. But we tried not to let that dampen our spirits too much. 🤣 I mean, it would be awesome to have an amazing view at the top. Even with the rain we should be able to see something... right?



One unexpected view was the view to the west (above), away from Anton Valley. In the Valley it's easy to focus on the valley being the world and the ridges surrounding on all sides— remember, the valley is the caldera of a volcano— as the edge of the world. But there's a whole world beyond the edge, too.



For all my talk of, "We've got to be just about there, just one more push to the top," finally it was just one more push to the top.

As far as the form of La Dormida I believe the summit area ahead of us is her head. The saddle at the right of the photo is her neck. From here it looks like she has two noses, or maybe a heavy brow ridge like a neanderthal instead of being a beautiful young woman. (Sorry, neanderthots.) What can I say? This is the back view. It looks different from the other side and 1,000'+ below.



Finally, finally, we made the top of the ridge. I was actually surprised how well this photo looking down across Anton Valley turned out  given how shitty the weather was. It was raining on us... and not just a sprinkle but steady rain. My shirt was plastered to my skin. I'd left my rain jacket down in the car as it was sunny when we started the trail. D'oh!

Oh, and moments before I took this picture we heard a thunderclap. Oh, what a time to be on the highest point around with no cover! 😱

Just before reached the top another pair of hikers passed us. We discussed briefly how we could continue along the ridge to make a loop or double back the way we came. They said they would hike the loop. Well, they turned around when they heard that thunderclap and met us as the summit. We all agreed to go back down the way we came. "The devil you know versus the devil you don't," explained one of the hikers.

The four of us became impromptu partners for the next half hour. We acted as both spotters and moral support descending the steepest, trickiest bits of the trail. The rain was now pouring, making those tricky parts even tricker.

We took shelter together in the empty ice cream stand a bit below the ridge. By then we were under cover from the trees but still getting soaked by the pouring rain. Sitting under the corrugated aluminum roof gave us a respite. I caught my breath and let my aching leg muscles rest. Both were given quite a workout even on the descent as we were moving as quickly as possible to get out of the rain and avoid being exposed on the ridge if/when lightning struck.

The others went ahead of us and we left 2 minutes behind them. We never saw them again. They were about 20 years younger than us so not too surprising they were faster.

The rest of the way down was mostly a putting-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other exercise. With the rain we were focused on getting back down as quickly as possible. And getting back down as quickly as possible meant putting a lot of focus on our feet on the steep, rain-slicked trail. We did pause briefly at the waterfalls along the trail as we descended. They were little comfort when our clothes were soaked through.

Somewhere in the lower reaches of the trail the rain stopped. It was kind of hard to be sure as we were under good tree cover most of the time. And it was hard to care about the difference as we were still soaked and the trail was still so slippery.

By the time we got down to the car the sky was dry. I noticed mostly because when I peeled off my soaked shirt and dried my chest with a towel, I didn't get wet again. Being outside in the not-rain suddenly seemed like a novelty! We put on some dry clothes on (we'd packed a change in the car), changed out of our muddy boots, stowed our packs, and drove back into town.

Panama Travelog #12
El Valle, Panama - Tue, 24 Dec 2024. 11:30am.

Finally, we've done a hike in Panama. A hike on a trail that was open, accessible via our weeny rental car, and which delivered exactly what it promised (no touts or shills filling sites with fake reviews). And it only took us... 5 tries.

On the way back to town from our aborted attempt to get to Pozo Azul we stopped at Chorro Macho falls. It's part of a small eco-park, and its small parking lot was full of tourist outfitter vans. Oh, buy, just the sign we hate. Oh, and speaking of signs we hate, there was the literal sign advertising the admission fee to hike the trail. It was only a few bucks each. That's not much... but it's also a super-short trail. The cost works out to something like $25/km. Shit, a limo is way cheaper than this walk. But after the frustration with this morning's thwarted hike we said "Whatever", paid our money, and started on the hike.



I'd forgotten to bring my nice camera on the day's outing. It's sitting in a dark corner of the one closet-like shelf in our sparsely furnished hotel room. I gave thought to driving back through town to get it but at this point am so sick of wasting time not getting to hike that I decided I'll do the best I can with my iPhone camera. Which... is fairly good nowadays. The photo of Chorro Macho falls above is way better than I could have captured with my old iPhone SE 3. My new 16 Pro has a higher resolution imager, multiple lenses, and more powerful computational photography. It still doesn't achieve the richness of color than my aging Fujifilm X-T3 delivers, but it does other things well that save me time try to fix them up in post, like fixing highlights and shadows by quietly and smoothly combining multiple exposures.

I'd share more than this one picture, but it was a short hike and this falls 100m in from the trailhead was basically it. We'd definitely like to hike more today.... We'll have to go back to our plans and see what else we can pull forward to today.

Panama Travelog #7
Gamboa, Panama - Mon, 23 Dec 2024. 12:30pm.

First our hike this morning at the pipeline road was a bust. "Abundant wildlife!" gushed one recent review. Others praised the quantity and variety of wildlife we'd see. We saw none. None. It was just a walk through the rain forest on a dirt-and-gravel road.

At least we shortened the walk to 2 miles, from 4, by driving the first half of it. The first half was open to vehicles, though some weak-sauce city folks types quailed at the dirt-and-gravel road and parked near where the pavement ended. The vehicle trail was passable to almost any ordinary vehicle, including our small, fake SUV with low ground clearance and no 4x4. Heck, there were two taxis waiting at the trailhead, where the remainder of the road was gated off to foot traffic only.

We consoled ourselves after seeing nothing on the pipeline trail by looking forward to our next hike, a waterfall hike just a few miles south of town. We'd driven past the trailhead last night on our way to Gamboa, driving through Soberania National Park. So after a tasty little lunch in town— and a surprise bird sighting on the ordinary-road road— we drove out to Sendero del Charco, the trail for Charco waterfalls, in Soberania National Park. It was closed.

Closed! Who closes a hiking trail? And why, on a Monday?

Apparently it's because the national park wants to charge for the trail but doesn't have the ability to put a self-payment kiosk there. So it's closed on Monday so they can give the fee-taker in this remote area a day off.

It's not like the trail is blockaded, though. I mean, we could totally park off the side of the road across the street and walk around the gate at the trail. We physically could do that but we decided not to risk whatever wrath there may be of the authorities. Fooling around with nominally illegal activity is something I make a habit of not doing in foreign countries.

Maybe we'll be able to make a side-trip out here the day we head back to Panama City. But for today, we've got a drive in the opposite direction. We're headed out to Valle de Antón, a resort area in the caldera of a long-dormant volcano!