Who do Hoodos? Do You do hoodoos?

This is me wandering around in a Dr. Seuss book.

Home Improvement!

Before: the problem was that this old tub spout leaked whenever i pulled the tab for the shower head.  This meant I was losing precious water pressure and precious hot water (it felt like mostly hot water was being lost through the leaking).  I bought a cheap plastic spout from Home Depot cuz that was all they had but it didn't fit this particular situation. 

During:  So i came here during my lunch break.  It was a surprisingly entertaining errand. The guys who work there are good old local guys who seem to have a lot of fun and enjoy their work.  Probably, they were all pretty stoned too.  The guy who helped me out, just by looking at the old sprout I brought in, guessed where I live almost exactly.  He was only about two blocks off.  that was amazing.  I would recommend this place to anyone.  hours suck though, 7:30am to 4:30am Monday through Friday.  It's mostly geared towards professionals or harder to find parts and supplies, but quality stuff, and great staff for sure. 

during:

after: shiny. 

Now I'm all good.  Lots of water pressure, lots of hot water, and all it took me was about 20 minutes of work. 

dinner mar 10 2014

steamed white rice, grilled white asparagus and sauteed chicken with Kashmiri curry that is totally not from a can. Totally not from a can.

I began physical therapy today.  Which I guess is another way to say I started getting old today.  It's my knee.  i blame sitting at a computer all day. 

My biological clock is ticking.  I learned on this trip that my body isn't getting any younger or stronger and if i want to do another epic around the world backpacking trip...well...the clock is ticking.

forced intimacy:  sitting on an airplane with others. sharing a hotel room with an unknown coworker.

I slept with my boss....in the same hotel room during our work conference.

I'm thinking about small town america and the prospects for an individual born and raised in one of those places places to go somewhere grander, less depressing and with a horizon... how difficult it must be.  I guess this is where student loans, not getting pregnant, good test scores, money, talent, ambition, life skills all come into play for a child wanting to leave small town America.  Good luck if your poor, god help you if your native american living on a reservation.

Some more details about Zion and driving and eating

Drove through empty highways and high desert and small towns listening to bad country music, static and christian preachers on the radio:

driving down a road with music:

i feel like driving through and seeing this side of "small town" america should better inform about the culture war and conservative mindset.  But i still dont' get it. I sort of see the need for big four wheel drive trucks to navigate the snow and ice and hills, I get the big pieces of cheap land, I get the non existent police presence (saw one cop car in my four days north of phoenix), I get the small town vibe, i get the overwhelming pervasiveness of religiosity...but...I still don't get it.

Anyway,

Here's a picture of me in front of my motel room and rental car, and the view from the parking lot of my Zion motel room.

 I think I drove over a thousand miles in those four days.

Drove a thousand miles and ate nothing but Americana:

breakfast: 

Dinner: chicken fried steak: (with guacamole as contrast of flavor and texture, so maybe it's not that americana, in the end)

Utah drinking laws.  I had two pints and was wondering why I wasn't catching a buzz before I remembered I was in Utah, so I googled utah alcohol laws on my smart phone and realized those beers could have at most 3.2% alcohol content.  what a waste of my money. what a disappointing way to cap off days of hiking and traveling. 

Zion, Bryce and GC Summary

I'm going to brag a little and talk about how awesome everything worked out for me on this trip.  I was three for three with my travel goals based off of my Feb 21st post: :

Selfie at Grand Canyon: Check.

Naked picture at the top of Angel's Landing?  Done and Done (still can't believe I pulled this one off)

Dinner at Leopolds: Check. Check plus 5 liter boots of beers with bosomy Aryans in leiderhosens.
I ordered the trout and it was delicious.  Went with James, his girlfriend and her friend Dasha. Ended up drinking at a private club till about...late...then i slept for a few hours before waking up to catch my flight home.

The trip was made better by the fact I made the right decisions around the weather. The flights I caught were great too.  First Class from Hawaii to SFO had guava mimosas.  SFO to PHX was a perfectly normal short hop.  PHX back to SFO illustrated how the little decisions we make shapes the pleasure's and pains of our lives. .. 

...Who would have thought that a little mouse click, a difference of random millimeters on the computer screen during the seat selection process of booking an airline ticket online  could work out so well.  On my flight back to SFO from PHX, the plane was completely full...except for the seat between me and a quiet self-contained businessman.  That one person I was supposed to sit next to didn't make the flight, so i had all the leg room i needed.  In contrast, in the row in front of me, in the middle seat, sat this mean crazy bitch who was all attitude coming on to the plane and she started crying and sobbing with her head between her legs the whole flight, i think she might have been puking too, although if she was, she was very discreet about it.  I think she had motion sickness or was just terrified of flying or something.   All i know is, if i had clicked on one seat instead of another when i bought my ticket over a month agao, my two hour flight would have gone much differently.  

Then, on the almost six hour flight from SFO back to HNL, the plane was mostly empty, so.... leg room for everybody!  it was fantastic.  Plus, I love Hawaiian Airlines, they are the best.  They serve free meals, the only airline that still does that, AND they ended the flight into Hawaii with a FREE  tropical rum punch!  awesome! 

Also, the fact that my original flight got cancelled made these pleasantries possible, and i realize in hindsight that it was a good thing that flight got cancelled cuz if had tried to catch the red eye, that first night's lack of sleep would have really made my life difficult for the rest of the trip.  As it was, my sleep and energy levels was quite tolerable this trip. And I doubt United would have given me free meals and booze and tons of leg room on my trip.  

AND, while waiting in SFO, i got to see this guy:

Angel's Landing

Just got to have faith that, sometimes, all will turn out beautifully.  The weather looked like this when I was expecting rain and clouds and snow:

That little peak at the top of the  mountain on the left is the top of Angel's Landing.

I totally got fooled again by travel writers.  It was presented as a kind of dangerous spur ridge trek that is anchored with metal chains to help people across, and that it was so scary there were only five foot wide paths with chains on them where you could fall to your death thousands of feet below.... but seriously, you could pirouette your way across that thing in the dark with a bottle of rum in one hand and not even blink twice.  Might be a little harder in the rain though, those sandstones can get pretty slick.

it's pretty big.

Sometimes, you got to have faith.  on my way up the trail, a giant group of frat boys caught up to me and were being themselves, loud and annoying. And i kid you not, while hiking through some of the most god-graced scenery in this great land ours, one guy was talking about some "slut" he hooked up with last week.... jesus save me.

So, I turned off and hiked a different trail for a little while because i didn't want to be stuck near them on the ridge (which is usually slow going and backed up because of the one-person at a time path). There were so many people coming and going, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to meet my goal of getting a naked picture at the top of Angel's Landing in Zion.  I walked around the West Rim Trail for awhile before going back to do Angels, I got to the peak, then this happened:

...I had the top to myself.  

Angel's Landing is amazing and fun and beautiful.  I would go back for sure.  It's just fun hike, lots of scrambling.

Lesson: never ever travel anywhere during high season, travel during cold weather is perfectly fine.  I went when I went, and it was still kind of crowded and annoying.  I can't imagine that place during high season.  I can't imagine that place in hot weather either.   Much like how I wouldn't want to go to India during the summer monsoons, I wouldn't want to go to the high desert national parks in the hot summer. 

Zion

Sometimes, I forget that you just have to have faith.   The weather today, Saturday, was fantastic.  The weather forecast was predicting rain and clouds and cold weather, it turned out perfect.  It was good that I didn't try to force Angel's landing yesterday and saved it for today and changed my plans to spend two days in Zion.

I learned that there are some things in life that are true across continents, cultures and societies, and that is: weather reports are useless.

I learned that there are some incredibly depressing "settlements" along northern arizona, that I can only assume are Indian reservation lands.  They are dilapidated homes miles apart from each other and if near each other, in clusters of no more than a handful.  I don't know who lives in these places, nor why, nor what they do.  They are in the middle of nowhere.

It doesn't surprise me that all they do on the reservations is drink and kill themselves, if these are what reservations actually are (i had no idea they looked like this).  What else are you going to do?

Update: timely article: The hard Lives and High suicide rate of Indian Children

McDonald's, I learned is more than a fast food chain, they are a part of the American infrastructure (and culture too, i assume).  They do something that the US government really doesn't do on those long lonely highways, which is to provide free restrooms (and food too if you eat McDonalds) and highway signage.

Small town America trips me out.