Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Eight Days a Week, the Beatles sang. It was a love song. For me those words are a lament about my long work week. I worked through the weekend staffing my company's booth at a trade show. Now it's Monday and it's been... back to work as usual. Though today has been busier than usual for a Monday. And my calendar is fairly full for Tuesday through Thursday, as well. I've marked Friday as a day off; I'm taking it as a comp day for this past weekend. That'll limit my work week to just 11 days instead of 12. I'll take a second comp day later this month.

For years now, at least 10 years, and possibly longer, we've been getting mail addressed to a person who never lived here. And this isn't just the usual mis-addressed junk mail about "Buy your cemetery plot early and save 40%!" but legit, important mail that I imagine the person it's being sent to actually wants. It's quarterly statements from one of his retirement accounts.

Over the years we've tried everything reasonable to correct the problem. At first we sending the letters back with various forms of "Return to sender/Wrong address" written on the envelope. They kept coming. We ask the Post Office for help. That was like talking to a mailbox. We searched the person's name online but found nothing definitive. We even called the insurance company that manages the account, explaining the situation to an agent there. They refused to look up the account unless we also gave them the account number. The full name and address of the account holder weren't enough. That would mean opening the letter, which seemed like it could run afoul of federal laws around mail tampering, so I declined.

The letters keep coming. One day as we were listening to music in the car a classic by Elvis Presley came on, and I suggested to Hawk, "Maybe they're respond if we wrote the whole lyrics to Return to Sender on the envelope."



So she did.

Well, not the full lyrics. And also not the correct lyrics. 🤣

I added the musical notes 🎵 and signed it "Elvis" to clarify the intent.

It's time to get back to Tongariro National Park. ...No, not literally. It's 7,000+ miles away, and we already enjoyed a packed day-trip to Tongariro National Park on our trip to New Zealand last month. It's time to get back to writing about that trip!

One thing I find memorable about that day is that we called an audible around 10:30am. I've written before about calling an audible when traveling and how it's important in travel. This one's also memorable because it recalls for me a few lines from the chorus the 1972 Elton John song, Honky Cat:


I know, "Hiking in New Zealand" and "Elton John songs from 1972" seem to have little to do with one another. So let me explain.

I'd been really wanting to hike Waitonga Falls. Of the 4 hikes we scoped out in the park, it was the one I wanted to do most. But the weather had been crummy since early morning and wasn't getting any better after temporizing for an hour or two with a short hike to Mangawhero Falls and a scenic drive. In fact it started raining harder. And the heavy clouds stretched on for tens of miles (we could see them from above when we were on the flank of the summit at Turoa) so it wasn't likely to get much better for hours, if ever that day.

Hiking Waitonga Falls— and not just merely hiking it, but hiking it in weather that didn't suck— was the gold I wanted to find, the whiskey I wanted to drink. Unfortunately bad weather meant neither was available.

After several moments of fretting I accepted that I wasn't going to get what I wanted. Moreover, I accepted that when I can't get my first choice of hiking in beautiful weather, "Hike anyway but in shitty weather" is not necessarily the second choice! I decided that somewhere else the weather was probably better. In fact that view from above at Turoa made it look like the other side of the mountain wasn't so cloudy. So I decided to bail out on hiking Waitonga and drive on to the next place on our itinerary. Maybe I'd find the proverbial gold mine there.

Yesterday I wrote about how comparing things to memorable dates can make you feel old. For example, do you remember the Apple Macintosh? (I do.) Well, the Apple Macintosh launched closer to WWII than to today. 😳

That's a form of comparison I described as "X happened closer to Y than to today." Another type of comparison that can make you feel old is to consider what would happen if memorable TV shows or movies about times past were remade today.

Back to the Future, 2024 edition

For example, Back to the Future was released in 1985. If it were remade today (2024), it would feature hero Marty McFly traveling back in time to... 1994.



Marty would be like, "Hey, where can I get on the Internet?"

And he'd cringe when old-time Doc Brown says, "Oh, you mean AOL?"

Then he'd meet his parents at a high school dance listening to oldies music from Ace of Base and Salt-n-Pepa.

Okay, let's try another one.

That '00s Show

If they remade That 70s Show today it'd be That 00s Show. The teen nostalgia show that aired from 1998 to 2006 portrayed the years 1976-1979. So today it'd premier with teens living in 2002.



Teens in That 00s Show would be sitting in someone's parents' basement together after school sharing their fears about more 9-11 style attacks, lockdown drills, the war in Afghanistan, and whether the US would invade other countries, too, like Iraq.

They'd be trash-talking about which movie, Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, each of which had just been released months earlier, was better.

The kids would likely have internet access to help pass the time... but it would be slow because it'd be a dial-up connection. The warble of the modem connecting would be a regular sound effect indicating what was happening. And somebody's mom picking up the phone and breaking the connection while downloading music illegally would be a regular trope. Oh, and in later seasons the kids would discover this great new teens-focused service, MySpace. 🤣

West Virginia Travelog #2
Beckley, WV - Sat, 16 Sep 2023. 12:30pm


Those are the opening words of a famous American song John Denver released as a single in 1971. "Take Me Home, Country Roads" is famous around the English speaking world— I've read that many Brits think it's our national anthem— and it has a special meaning to me. Although I never lived in West Virginia, the two geographic features it name-checks in its opening words are places I knew and loved in Virginia when I grew up there. Today, though, we're driven those country roads to West Virginia. ...Well, okay, it was mostly Interstate 77 we drove today, but it passed through beautiful and remote country. Does that count as a country road? 😅

The driving portion of our trip started when we landed at Charlotte (North Carolina) airport this morning. It was a 3 hour 15 minute drive to Beckley, WV, where we're staying the next three nights.

Some might wonder why we flew to NC when there are airports in WV. The reason is that we were able to get a nonstop red-eye from SFO to CLT. Flying to any point in WV, or an airport nearer to the border of it, would've required connecting flights. The added time for those would've meant a longer door-to-door time than the route we chose.

Have a Slow Day!

We were rolling in our rental car by 8:30 this morning. Our first order of business once clear of the airport was to find a quick breakfast. We tried a nearby 7-Eleven... they had nothing prepared for hot food. The rollers and warmers were all totally empty. Staff just didn't care about that part of their jobs.

Fortunately there was another 7-Eleven nearby... and that one, too, had totally lackadaisical staff. There were a few hot items ready to go, filling maybe 15% of the space, but then when I went to get a soda from the soda fountain I found that half the sodas weren't working and the other half were connected wrong. Like, really, how hard is it to recognize that "Diet Coke" is not the dispenser to hook up the "Orange Crush" syrup to? I mean, even if you're functionally illiterate, you could at least try sounding out the words. Or counting the letters. Or looking at their shapes.

We tried— and walked out of— a third convenience store before we struck gold on our 4th try. Good ol' QT. Their soda fountain selection was marvelous, and they had a whole kitchen running with hot food to order via kiosk. I ordered up a personal-sized pepperoni pizza while Hawk got a hot pretzel dusted with cinnamon.

Tunnels and Tolls

With something resembling breakfast in our bellies we started making tracks northward to West Virginia. From North Carolina we crossed into Virginia. I was surprised when I-77 traversed first one, then a second, big tunnel. They're the Big Walker Mountain Tunnel and the East River Mountain Tunnel. The latter is over a mile long. The odd thing to me is that neither tunnel crosses under a particularly high or treacherous mountain. Plenty of other Interstate routes would curve around these hills, gaining the 500' or so of elevation necessary to cross them. Here, engineers were like, "Yay, an excuse to use tons of dynamite!"

The second tunnel crossed us over into West Virginia. Yay! And there I-77 becomes a toll road. Boo. And it's not like the toll is even paying for all the dynamite required to bore those tunnels or the upkeep on them. Those tunnels are in Virginia; different state, different transportation budget.

$4.25 later we arrived in Beckley.

Musician Jimmy Buffett passed away today. He was aged 76. A cause of death has not been released, though the news states that he died peacefully surrounded by family and friends.

Buffett rose to stardom in the late 1970s with a style of music that he called "Gulf and Western". It blended the easy, relatable themes of Western music with the rhythms and settings of the Caribbean. His best known song, Margaritaville, features the memorable refrain:

Wastin' away again in Margaritaville
Looking for my lost shaker of salt
Some people say that there's a woman to blame
But I know it's my own damn fault.

For the legions of Buffett fans who call themselves Parrotheads, it's a sad day in Margaritaville. Though this other lyric from the song might help them drown their sorrows:

There's booze in the blender
And soon it will render
That frozen concoction that helps me hang on

Update: Buffett's family released that the cause of death was skin cancer. I inferred from the fact he "died peacefully surrounded by family and friends" that he had a terminal illness and had chosen hospice.

A few weeks ago I watched Blade Runner: The Final Cut. My impetus was reading an article about it. I saw the original Blade Runner (1982) back in about 1989 and enjoyed it a lot at the time. The article promised that this second director's cut, released in 2007 after years of wrangling over legal rights, was the truest to filmmaker Ridley Scott's vision. It was on one of our stream services, so I gave it a watch.

A 1980s Vision of the Future

The thing I enjoyed most about the original Blade Runner was its vision of the future. The movie imagines a world where technology is more advanced but society is still gritty. There are flying cars and interstellar space ships, yet the big city of Los Angeles on Earth is crowded, disorganized with people speaking multiple different languages, and still has poverty and homelessness.

The filmmakers' choice to imagine the future that way was a fresh break from the predominant trope in SF through the 1970s and into the early 1980s that technological progress would create a gleaming future of material abundance. Blade Runner clearly had dystopian elements... but without going full-on dystopia. Especially as I watched it in 1989, toward the end of a decade that had seen real-world cities become increasingly plagued with drugs and crime, it struck me as the most realistic extrapolation of what the future 20 years out might look like.

The Final Cut keeps all of the atmosphere of the original theatrical release. Possibly it even goes longer on it, telling the story at a slower pace than I seem to remember from 34 years ago. I didn't re-watch the original back-to-back with this version so I can't say for sure.

How that Vision Looks Today

Watching it today, of course, the movies' vision of the future is laughably quaint. "Los Angeles - November 2019" reads the subtitle over the opening scenes. That's now 3½ years ago, and we don't have flying cars, let alone interstellar space travel. Oh, and why is it constantly raining in Los Angeles? I've lived in LA. It gets, like, two rainfalls a year, and everyone loses their minds when it happens.

Here are several more things I chuckled about as terrible guesses from the 1980s of what 2019 would look like:

• Billboards for Pan Am airlines. Oops, they went bankrupt in 1991.


• At least the billboards for Coca-Cola aren't obsolete. Though the movie does predate the whole New Coke fiasco of 1985.


• The head of Tyrel Corp. is making a replicant that's "more human than human" but hasn't invented Lasik to get rid of his need for Coke bottle-bottom trifocal glasses? (Probs because Coke is an ad placement; see above. 🤣)


• Soundtrack by Vangelis.... Wow, there's a name— and a body of music— I haven't heard since about 1993!


• 37 years in the future and they imagine everyone still using crappy little picture-tube TVs?


• In the club scene everyone's smoking. Haha, we (California) fixed that futuristic problem in 1998!

Original Theatrical Release vs. The Final Cut

The main difference between the versions is that 2007's Final Cut tells a more cerebral story. In particular, it strongly implies that Deckard (Harrison Ford), the blade runner himself, is a replicant. A few key scenes that I think were not included in 1982's theatrical version show him doubting himself.

Of course, "Is he or isn't he?" is a hotly debated topic. I've read stories that Harrison Ford outright demanded to know, Is Deckard a replicant? to portray him accurately. The same stories indicate that Ridley Scott initially wanted the answer to be Yes but was pushed to No by the producers. The Final Cut changes the calculus.

In making the story more cerebral it seems to get more ponderous. I was surprised that there was basically no action until halfway through the movie's full run time. Again, I haven't re-watched the original so I can't say for sure, but I feel like the original had more action earlier on. Either way, The Final Cut is definitely a slow boiler. But at least it doesn't suffer the bloating problem of most director's cuts stretching toward 3 hours (or more). It clocks in at a trim 1 hour 57 minutes.

Folsom, California. A suburb of Sacramento. It's where you go if you've shot a man in Reno, according to a famous Johnny Cash song... or, in our case, when we're staying halfway between hither and yon on a Friday night.



Yon this trip is Bassi Falls, where we decided a few days ago we'd like to hike tomorrow. The drive is almost 4 hours best case, though, plus extra time for stops. Could we do that, there and back, all on Saturday? ...Yes, but it'd be a tough day. We'd want to be up by 6 and rolling by 7, only to start the hike a noon and then still have to drive home 5 hours (including a stop for dinner) afterward. We wouldn't have time/energy to double- or triple- up with other short hikes in the area, and we'd still get home exhausted anyway.

Enter Friday Night Halfway. Instead of spending 5 hours on the road tomorrow morning we knock out 3 or 3.5 tonight (including stops) and have a gentle 1 hour 15 minutes tomorrow. We start the hike earlier and with more energy, we have more time and energy to tack on an additional short hike or two in the area, and we get home not as wrecked. Oh, and we don't have to get up at 0600.

Who's Got the Folsom Blues? Not Us!

We made good time getting out of the house this afternoon. Hawk worked from home, which made things easier. We started packing at about 5:15 and were rolling at ten of six. We stopped for dinner along the way and checked in to our hotel in Folsom at 9:30.

Yeah, there was traffic along the way. It cost us about 45 minutes vs. best case conditions. But we were able to be more mellow about it because we knew we'd still get there at a completely reasonable hour (versus, say, having to drive until midnight+).

Once we got to our room we faced a choice. We could slip out to the hot tub for a soak before it closed at 10pm... or ice cream. There's a fantastic home-made ice cream shop two blocks from the hotel, and it's open 'til midnight. Hmm, hot tub or ice cream, hot tub or ice cream? Ice cream. It was hardly even a question. 😅🍦🤤

Now we're back at our hotel room for the night. We're winding down though we may also stay up a bit late. It's not like we have to get up at 0600! And when we do get up, we've got a full kitchen in our hotel suite so we could cook a big breakfast if we really wanted. But instead we'll settle for some meat, cheese, crackers, and bread we packed from home in a cold bag.

The last several weekends have been tough for enjoying the outdoors. We've had a lot of rain... and cooler than normal temperatures, too. This weekend looked like it was going to be more of the same. The 10-day forecast at the start of the week showed rain all weekend. We monitored the forecast during the week to see how it developed, and by late yesterday it was showing a halfway decent morning for today. We set our alarm clocks early and headed up into the hills to Sierra Vista.



Sierra Vista is part of the Open Space Authority of Santa Clara Valley. That's one of two open space districts in our area dedicated to conservation and low-impact recreation. And those two are in addition to countless city and county parks in the region.

One cool thing about both of the open space districts is that their parks are free. Another cool thing about Sierra Vista, in particular, is that stunning views start right at the parking lot. You can see an example of that in the photo above.

The downside to free + beautiful is that it equals crowded. One time we tried visiting this park in the early afternoon on a nice weekend day, the small parking lot was full and we were turned away by rangers vigorously patrolling it.

We've found that it works to get here early in the morning to beat the crowds. Plus the morning light makes the views extra special. Thus we got an early-ish move on things today. We left home at 7:45am. I was still eating my breakfast of a protein bar and a bottle of Coke Zero as I drove. We arrived at the ridge above San Jose by 8:15am. The parking lot was already half full.



We laced up our boots— well, I laced up my boots; Hawk went in sandals because the trail looked fairly free of mud— and headed down the ridge on the Kestrel Trail. I don't know why they call it the Kestrel Trail; we've never seen a kestrel on it. Though today we did see a northern harrier swooping high over the grassy ridges in addition to a few of the usual turkey vultures.

Inapt name or no, the Kestrel Trail has a zig-zagging drop before intersects another trail and levels out. We've hiked that trail in toward the mountains the last few visits here. Today we decided to hike it out toward San Jose.



This branch of the trail is always fun because of the great perspective views lurking around every bend. Does anyone remember that old song Do You Know the Way to San Jose (YouTube recording of Dionne Warwick singing, in case you don't. Or in case you do.) Well, on this branch of the trail it's like, "Duh! It's right there!" 🤣

Update: It's a two-fer! We hiked another trail at Sierra Vista.

5 Days in the Desert travelog #13
Kelso, CA - Sun, 25 Dec 2022, 2pm

In the middle of the Mojave National Preserve, in the middle of the desert, is a beautiful train station. It was built in 1924 in a Spanish Revival style. ...So it looks like a certain building memorialized in a classic, classic rock song. Trains still pass by on the active rails, but the station hasn't seen a passenger in probably more than 50 years.



A big depot was built out here back in the 1920s as part of the infrastructure for steam locomotives. The Cima Grade to the east has a rise of 2.2% over 19 miles. That's too steep for steam locomotives pulling a full train to ascend. The depot was built as a base of operations for "helper engines", locomotives that would join the train to help pull it up the grade.

Servicing these helper engines required significant staff: not just pilots but also boiler-makers, mechanics, hostlers, and water tenders. Oh, and there was a water pipeline several miles long to bring lots of water down from springs up in the Providence Mountains. And once you have hundreds of workers in all these various trades housed in the middle of nowhere you also need cooks, housekeepers, plumbers, carpenters, accountants, constables, etc. Plus there was a mine nearby.

The depot saw its heyday during WWII. Not only was the mine running at peak operation to support the war effort and trains busy moving cargo east and west, but passenger trains carrying draftees to ports on the West Coast for deployment to the Pacific theater passed through.

Not long after WWII the depot shut down. ...Not because trains stopped running on the tracks, but because diesel engines replaced steam engines. A diesel locomotive individually isn't as powerful as a steam locomotive (that's what I learned when I visited the California State Railroad Museum, anyway) but diesel engines are much easier to synchronize to run in tandem. Watch any train passing through this area nowadays and you'll see they usually have 3 or even 4 engines.