Category: Places & Travel

I kept the queen waiting.

Thunderstorms had delayed my flight. By the time the plane landed, Cook Islands Queen Manarangi Tutai had been waiting at the airport for three hours.

Despite the imposition, she smiled regally, wished me “Kia orana” — “May you live long” — and draped a fragrant necklace of gardenias around my shoulders. I stumbled through an apology. I had planned to stay at her bed-and-breakfast inn on the remote South Pacific island of Aitutaki during my November trip, but I didn’t expect her to pick me up, much less grab my luggage, as she was now doing, and drive me to the B&B herself.

“Don’t worry. We’re on island time,” she said cheerily. Clearly, I had left L.A. behind. Gridlocked freeways, scowling faces and diesel-scented air faded as Queen Tutai hoisted my bag into the back of her well-worn utility truck. In the Cook Islands, I soon learned, there is no traffic, people smile at one another and the air is scented with plumeria. Plus, for $53 a night, any guest can receive a royal welcome.

— Rosemary McClure in the Los Angeles Times

Jet airliners are complex technological marvels costing tens of millions of dollars each. Why do they have such primitive public address systems?

(By primitive I mean incredibly noisy, too loud, not loud enough, hard to understand. How much could it cost to put some noise suppression on the microphones the crew uses?)

The Los Angeles Times‘ Susan Spano at Glen Canyon. She begins:

From Glen Canyon Bridge on U.S. Highway 89, you can see both sides of an argument. To the north is placid Lake Powell, a big, blue tropical cocktail in the arid no man’s land of southeastern Utah. It’s Exhibit A in the case for letting 42-year-old Glen Canyon Dam stand. To the south is the Colorado River, testily emerging from impoundment, cutting through sheer rock walls on its way to the Grand Canyon, wild and free, the way nature made it.

I stood there with my brother, John, in early February, thinking about Seldom Seen Smith, the fictional mastermind of a plot to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam in Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel, “The Monkey Wrench Gang.”

Smith, Abbey wrote, “remembered the golden river flowing to the sea … canyons called Hidden Passage and Salvation and Last Chance … strange great amphitheaters called Music Temple and Cathedral in the Desert. All these things now lay beneath the dead water of the reservoir, slowly disappearing under layers of descending silt.”

The book has achieved cult status among lovers of Utah’s slick-rock plateau and canyon country. But Abbey’s book never expected that nature, in the form of a blistering six-year drought, would toy with the fate of Lake Powell.

The last time the reservoir was full — at 3,700 feet above sea level — was in July 1999. Since then the drought has lowered the water level 144 feet, leaving the reservoir at about 33% capacity, shrinking the length of the lake from 186 miles to 145 miles and gradually re-exposing something remarkable underneath: the arches and spires of Glen Canyon. People travel halfway around the world to see the canyon of China’s Yangtze River, doomed by construction of Three Gorges Dam. So was it any wonder that John and I felt compelled to go backpacking in little side canyons on the fringes of Lake Powell, where the water is rapidly receding? It was a chance in a lifetime to see something that couldn’t be seen five years ago and may not be seen five years from now.

Bruce Percy Photography – New Zealand, 2002

Jon Knudsen, better known as Albloggerque, is heading west with MaryAnn. This means good things for us. Click to take a look at the photos as Jon and MaryAnn meander out old Route 66 from Albuquerque to Holbrook, Arizona. No interstates for them!

From Men’s Journal:

Start packing. There’s a town in the following pages for every interest — and for every budget. And this year we made great strides in how we came up with our rankings — including more data (almost 50 variables in all, from stress levels to the number of bars per capita), newer data (from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, and other official sources), and a greater emphasis on active living (we’ve weighted certain variables, such as the amount of wilderness nearby, more heavily). But a few things remain the same: The west still dominates; college towns sure rate highly; and, if you move to anyplace on this list, you’ll have no excuse for getting bored.

Number one overall: Boulder, Colorado (Flagstaff, Arizona, is second.)
Best big city: San Diego
Best adventure town: Bend, Oregon
Least stressful: Santa Fe
Healthiest: Portland, Maine
Smartest: Minneapolis

Anyone that has driven Interstate 10 between Tucson and New Mexico has passed the roadside attraction (and curio store, gas station and Dairy Queen) called The Thing? (Mile 322). Dozens of large yellow billboards advertise the place for miles and miles in both directions.

The Thing? has been there for as long as 40 years and NewMexiKen has passed it many, many times, never stopping. Recently I decided to stop, pay the $1 admission, and see what it was.

So now I’ve seen The Thing?

DesertUSA has information on desert wildflowers, including updates and photos from California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Texas.

Pointer via Ah, Wilderness!

A report from the Los Angeles Times on the good news coming out of the record wet winter in California:

The process is easy: just add water and the deserts of Southern California burst into color. During the El Niño year of 1998, for instance, a series of rainstorms transformed a 40-mile stretch of Interstate 40 between Barstow and Needles into a carpet of gold, and while this year’s flowers can still be jeopardized by heavy rains or a sudden heat wave, 2005 promises to be a phenomenal year. Already wildflower enthusiasts are making plans to follow the bloom from the lower elevations — Anza-Borrego, Joshua Tree and portions of Death Valley — in March to the higher elevations — the Mojave Preserve — in April and May.

The article continues to provide details — and many photos.

A trip in the San Juans from The Santa Fe New Mexican:

Driving the vertigo-inducing “Million-Dollar Highway” between Ouray and Silverton in southwestern Colorado, one might spot the small shrine dedicated to the modern snowplow drivers who have been swept off the highway and to their deaths. The road is often shut down for days when tons of snow rip off the high peaks above the road and thunder down into the river canyon beyond the shoulder, which has no guardrail because the slides tear it out year after year.

This is the land of Big Snow — 400 inches a year on average and close to 2 feet in a single day — and some of the most avalanche-prone terrain in the United States.

Red Mountain is just off this highway — U.S. 550 on a leg of the so-called San Juan Skyway — just north of Silverton in the heart of the rugged San Juan mountain range. The greatest concentration of 13,000- and 14,000-foot-plus peaks in North America, including 14 towering above 14,000 feet and close to 300 above 13,000 feet. Known as “The Rooftop of the Continent,” the range is the realm of beautiful, cool, rain-fed summers — and intense winters.

Link via dangerousmeta!.

A sortable listing of Social Security recipient information by Congressional district.

Link via Talking Points Memo.

The Christmas package is on a truck for delivery. I’m so excited and I’ve put my Christmas decorations back up.

Update: The package arrived this afternoon. FYI It is a wonderful framed, panoramic photograph of the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta during inflation and mass ascension. A true delight. And well-traveled.

The Carmen San Diego of Christmas shipments arrived at the FedEx facility in Phoenix today.

Dwight Perry tells me that this is the Jim Jackson of shipments. Jackson is the NBA journeyman who has played for 10 franchises in 13 years. As the The [New Orleans] Times-Picayune reports, Jackson’s “photograph and biography should serve as the face and definition of the phrase “much-traveled.”