filed under: Canada

How cool is this???

filed under: Alaska, Canada, road tripping

It's 1am. My friend and marathon driving companion Ben and I have been on the road for 15 hours when we pull into Whitehorse, BC, Canada - the smallest big town in these here parts - when suddenly we start to smell a burning smell from my hood. We're 946 miles into our 3,300 mad dash to San Francisco from Homer, AK, and weren't exactly excited about stopping for an emergency roadside oil change.

Earlier this week I realized that my current reservoir of oil has been sliding around my engine since my truck was in Chico, CA - in late April. Since then it's bounced around over 17,000 miles of roadside. For some reason it just didn't occur to me that my lovely friends who drove my lil' truck 10k miles from Cali to Alaska wouldn't bother to change the oil, and I really should have done it when I took repossession of it upon arrival, but it just didn't happen. Ben bought the stuff to do it before we left but that didn't happen either. It obviously was meant to do it in a hurry on the roadside in Canada late at night.

So why am I typing right now and how is this even possible? Both good questions, of course, and I wouldn't think of glossing over them for several reasons. First, I have to wait. The oil is hot and changing it now will just make a hot, sticky, and incomplete mess before it has a chance to settle into the bottom of the truck. Next, we're parked conveniently outside of a hotel that surprisingly has free wireless internet access and owing to my junky-like web addiction I would of course know that within minutes of realizing I have time to kill that doesn't involve me getting sleepier.

So what's the plan? It's simple: drive until we can't drive anymore. We left Anchorage at 9:45am (really, we consider that a fairly early start) with the mission of hitting Vancouver, BC, as soon as possible, each driving in 6 hour shifts. So far we've listened to three lectures from the Harvard Business Review (it's 'energy' management, not 'time' management!), an episode of This American Life (trained monkeys did not make that tissue box holder, kid), 2.5 comedy albums (Ben loves my taste in Lewis Black and Mitch Hedberg but, even with so many references to his hometown Atlanta, he surprisingly isn't into the almighty David Cross?!?), and an assortment of music largely made on our destination of the US west coast. 15 hours have somehow both flown by and barely piddled away.

Why the hurry? It's simple. Burning Man awaits us next week and stopping for a few days in San Francisco is absolutely imperative. Would you not fill up on gas before going on a road trip? Of course not. Would you not stop at the grocery store before going on a picnic? Hell no! So SF here we come!

Ok, it's been 20 minutes. Time to jump under my truck and make the (somewhat environmentally unfriendly/irresponsible) magic happen....

filed under:

This just in from here...

I swear it wasn't me! :)

Tokyo police arrested a 20-year-old man on Monday for mugging two men last month with three teenage boys while they were dressed as Winnie the Pooh and other characters.

"It seemed like the thing to do at the time," Kita-ku resident Masayuki Ishikawa told police. He was arrested for robbery and injury.

According to police, Ishikawa picked a fight with two people including a 27-year-old man on a street near his house and dragged them to a nearby park, where he robbed them of about 18,000 yen in cash. The 27-year-old man suffered a cut lip, which is expected to take about two weeks to heal.

Ishikawa and his accomplices obtained the outfits from the home of a 16-year-old high school boy. Police say they plan to report Ishikawa's three accomplices to local prosecutors in the near future.

--Thanks to Daniel for sharing!

filed under: Alaska, Homer

It's my last few days in Homer, AK, and I'm getting a heavy dose of pre-nostalgia coming on. While I'm truly no fan of goodbyes I enjoy the last days in a place more wholly than most of the others before them. I stare off of our cliff several more times a day (and night, now that it actually gets dark for a bit), I sit by the window more when I'm working (like now, even though this isn't exactly 'working'), I take my friends far less for granted. Every moment really does count, each and every day, but the last days in a place really hit that home for me.

All summer I've been driving out on the Homer Spit and passing this amazing set of tide pools that form just perfectly a few times a day. I've always meant to take a picture of it but always putting it off to a more convenient time. If there is one lesson that I feel like is being impressed upon me over and over again this last year or two it's been to not put things off. The best thing about now is that *gasp* it's right now! When ever is there a better time to do the things that make you happy?

Yesterday I finally took that picture. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Here's what the same view looks like with more sky...

<-- Hide it again

filed under: Alaska

Last weekend I spent three awesome days with my great friends Casey (from Anchorage), Weston (Mexico), and Eline (Netherlands) where we explored an abandoned gold mine and a massively active glacier (it moves another foot every day!) in Alaska. It was sooooooo FUN! Here are the pics...

glacier tripping with weston, casey, and eline

filed under: pictures!

My friend Susy commented about how many pictures I seem to have of "me and a pretty girl" where I'm the one taking the picture of the both of us, so I went through and found all of the ones that included me and at least one other where I still get the photographer credits. Here they are: