The Birthday Present

I know, I know, I'm a little overdue for a new post. Yes, my birthday was in April. Whatever. Sorry. Anyway, on my birthday (well, actually, it was the day after my birthday, but there were scheduling complications) the lovely and talented Ms. Geranium presented me with a round trip ticket to Denver. I looked at it and thought, why would she be giving me a ticket to Denver? The only reason I could think of was to visit our old friend, Bill. It just so happens that Bill is also one of the most respected paragliding instructors in the region. I've always wanted to learn how to paraglide, and the birthday present included paragliding lessons! Ms. Geranium had planned the whole thing, got my mother, siblings, and even our oldest daughter to chip in to help pay for the trip, and, on top of that, what with all the people involved, she still managed to keep it a secret until my birthday (well, actually, as I mentioned before, the day after my birthday.)




Wednesday, the day I left, the weather was pretty nasty. Even at 36,000 feet I could see clouds that were higher than we were, and the plane was bouncing around like, well, like something that is bouncing around quite a bit. We eventually got beyond the nasty weather (somewhere over Nebraska, I think), the sky cleared up and, aside from seeing another plane scream past us in the other direction at a distance from our plane that seemed to me to be closer than was intended, the flight was pretty uneventful.

Bill picked me up at the airport, we stopped at a park in Boulder and ate our Fraboni sandwiches. (Fraboni's is an Italian Delicatessen in Madison that makes the best sandwiches. Bill, as a former Madisonian, stipulated that the price of my paragliding lessons would include, among other things, such as signed CDs from the various bands in which I play, sandwiches from Fraboni's, so I picked some up before going to the Madison airport. I was feeling nice, so I also bought him a bottle of Fraboni's secret sub sauce.)

Me with a partially eaten Fraboni's #1 in hand.
Photo by Bill

We did a quick paraglider transplant from his car to the car of his other student (unbeknownst to me at the time, the reason for the transplant was that he needed to make room for all the gear with which we were going to fill his car) and headed to Bill's cabin in Coal Creek Canyon. Bill checked the weather forecast on his computer, which, apparently, he had been watching throughout the preceding few days, and decided that it was not looking good for paragliding on the Front Range, which meant... Road Trip! We were leaving in the morning for the Western Slope on the other side of the mountains, 275 miles from his house. Whilst getting some of my stuff out of his car, I saw some sort of creature running around in the dark. I tried to get a photo of it and went back inside.

"Hey, Bill! There's some kind of critter running around outside. It looked like kind of like a fox, but I can't imagine a fox hanging around your house."



Bill informed me that there were two or three foxes in the area that frequently came around looking for raw chicken. You might wonder why they would expect to find raw chicken at Bill's house? Hmm...

While Bill was feeding raw chicken to the foxes, I had the opportunity to get a few more pictures.




The next day, we packed Bill's car full of camping and paragliding gear and headed to the other side of the mountains. We took our time getting there, making a few stops along the way.

Bill in front of his house.

We drove past this house, made famous in the movie Sleeper.

Stopped at Loveland Pass. (Click on the photo to embiggen it so you can read the orange sign.) Climbed up those stairs in the background so we could get above 12,000 feet.



At 12,000 feet, even those few steps took the wind out of me.

Heading down the other side of the Continental Divide, the rocks changed color. Something to do with cutting through different layers. You might even think it made a case for tectonic shift. Nah! God just made it all that way 6,000 years ago to confuse the scientists.



Stopped to take a bike ride in Glenwood Canyon along the Colorado River, sometimes under and sometimes next to I-70.




The water looked a little rough, but Bill decided to take a dip anyway.



Nice t-shirt.



The Book Cliffs. I guess these guys extend all the way into eastern Utah.



Checking out a potential flying site, Bill decides it's too rocky.
Ankle and toe breaking territory.



Here's a big pile of rocks.



Another hazard for the would-be paraglider: cacti! They were all over the place. Pretty, though.



By the time we got to our campsite it was getting dark.



This is what I saw when I woke up the next morning.



Our campsite.

Bill and I spent the next morning scoping out the various flying sites he has used in the area. Actually, Bill did the scoping. I mostly followed him around and took lots of pictures. We met Bill's other student, Amanda, and spent most of that day and the next training on the ground. It was Amanda's birthday, too! Happy birthday, Amanda.

This is Amanda. Hi, Amanda!

Amanda was an excellent camping and flying companion. She was further along then I was in the paragliding certification program, so I was able to watch and learn from her. She seemed to have no fear. She's a very fun and nice young woman. Bill told me he thinks she is going to be an excellent pilot.



This is Amanda's colorful food.



This is Bill sampling some of Amanda's colorful food.



Bill and Amanda climbing in the Big Ol' Cottonwood tree in our campsite. They found some ticks in the tree. They got out of the tree rather quickly. Smart tree.



The Colorado Beer Bottle Bush. Its flowers look enough like beer bottles that yahoos will pollinate it running from bush to bush looking for beer. Or, maybe, beer actually grows on trees.... er.... bushes in Colorado.



The Car Commercial™.
"The 1988 Suzuki Sidekick. It takes you where you need to go. (Standard Equipment: two out of four electric windows actually functional.)"



The horny toad.



The wind sock. Sometimes it was nice to us.



This town ain't big enough for the two of us.



Amanda training on the ground.


Amanda demonstrating takeoff position.



There she goes!



Bill actually got one photo of me all decked out in paragliding gear, waiting for the wind to cooperate.

On the way back to Bill's house we made a stop and hiked up to Hanging Lake, elevation 7,200 feet.

So, I did get to fly, despite the brevity of my trip. It was more fun than a barrel of monkeys. (Why do people say that? Would a barrel of monkeys actually be fun? I sort of doubt it.) Okay, whatever, it was lots of fun. I want to do it again. I still can't believe Ms. Geranium did all that for me. It was a truly inspired birthday gift. Thanks to Ms. Geranium, the rest of my family and Bill! You're the best!

Coming soon: Ed Goes Paragliding, the movie.

Debriefing

Well, we got back from our vacation a couple of days ago, but I haven't been able to muster up the energy to write anything until now. I know, "bummer" say you, dear reader.

So, as I mentioned in the last post before we left, I had to play a gig in the late afternoon before we could head up nort'. It was hot and sunny. As a bassist, that means my strings get all loose and floppy, which makes it difficult to play, particularly if I need to play anything fast; the strings just don't snap back as quickly when they're hot. Still, everything was going pretty well until the middle of the second-to-last song, when Pam's guitar amp abruptly stopped amping. We played the rest of that song and the entirety of the last song without guitar. It sounded just plain weird, if you ask me (but who asked me? I'm just a lowly bass player, after all.) Here we are in all our middle-aged rock 'n' roll glory. Not the best photo in the world, but at least you can see all four of us; it's a rare photo that includes the whole band.



After the gig, we headed north pretty quickly, thanks in large part to the efforts of Ms. Geranium. We managed to catch the second-to-last ferry to Rock Island on Sunday, carried all our stuff to our campsite and, Bob's-your-uncle, it was time to get down to the work of relaxing. And hard work it was, as you can see from the following photos.

Ms. Geranium (Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters in her lap) and Molly hard at work.

Sparkly Seacow and Violet hard at work.
Is it just me, or does something happen when kids get to a certain age that causes them to forget how chairs work?

Rock Island was, of course, originally settled by Native Americans. More recently (1800s) it was settled by European-americans who built a fishing village on the island. It was the first european settlement on the Door peninsula. The village was deserted in the latter part of the 1800s when the villagers resettled on neighboring Washington Island. The entire island was purchased in 1910 by an Icelandic immigrant and Chicago resident named Chester Thordarson, who had made a fortune in the U.S. as an inventor. (Incidentally, Thordarson spent some of his childhood in Windsor, WI, which is only a few miles from where I live.) Thordarson used the island as a private summer resort until his death in 1945. In 1965 the State of Wisconsin purchased the island from Thordarson's heirs and it is now a state park. Wake up! (I think all that history stuff is interesting. Sorry)

Anyway, Thordarson must have eaten a few too many of these.


Why else would he have thought that building this was a good idea for keeping deer out of his garden?

It didn't work, and the deer on the island ate every single one of the 6,000 apple trees he planted. He planted 1,000 in one year and none of them survived until the next year. (Okay, he also built a 10-foot high barbed-wire fence, but the deer jumped over it.)


Speaking of his garden, Thordarson was an afficionado of Japanese gardens and planted many Japanese plants, but, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he bulldozed them all. I'll bet you didn't know we have Chester Thordarson to thank for the U.S. victory in the Pacific arena of WWII. If he hadn't bulldozed that garden, we'd all be speaking Japanese right now.


He also planted some native Icelandic plants. Here is a patch of the Icelandic thyme that is still plentiful on Rock Island.



Looking to the southwest, you see Washington Island about two miles away and it doesn't feel all that exposed to the elements.


But, look in any other direction and you realize that you are way out there in the middle of one of the Great Lakes (kind of like the ocean, but without the salt.) It makes you feel, well, small.




When you're on "The Rock", as many people refer to it, the weather can get kind of intense. We were pretty lucky last week, but we did have some stormy weather. One day, after an afternoon of overcast skies and high winds, at the end of the day the sky was clearing in the west and the sun managed to illuminate the island as it set, shining underneath the cloud cover. I love the way it looks when the landscape is lit up against a dark sky.




Returning home is an odd experience. From the primitive conditions on Rock Island, (pit toilets, hauling water from the only pump, no cell-phone reception, even the single telephone on the island wasn't working while we were there) you head across on the ferry and Washington Island sort of eases you back into civilization.
Washington Island is only accessible from the mainland by ferry or light plane, but there are roads, cars and, of course, tourists. But, thanks in part to that ferry across what they call "Death's Door", it's a slightly different class of tourists. Take the ferry from Washington Island to the mainland and, WHAM!, instant tourist hell. You know the type. Polo shirts and deck shoes. Loud. Big honkin' boats. Entirely too many Illinois license plates (up here in Wisconsin we have a name for people from Illinois with their big honkin' boats who think of Wisconsin as their playground, but it's not very nice, so I don't think I'll say any more.) The rest of the trip home is a little less of a shock after that.


There are cool and awesome places all around the country and the world, but I'm partial to the combination of the North Woods and Maritime feel you get at places like Rock Island. The light is different. The air smells different. The air feels different. I had a similar reaction when we took a trip to New Brunswick and the Bay of Fundy. It's about as good as it gets for me.

First we rock, then we go to the Rock

Ms. Geranium, Sparkly Seacow, SS's friend Violet, Molly (the Official Spokesdog of the Impeachment Movement™) and I will be heading up nort' to Rock Island State Park for a week of no cars, no television (oh, wait, we don't watch television, so that won't be any different) no telephones, internets or electricity. There will be plenty of other good stuff though - hiking, lying on the beach, swimming, fighting over the one hammock, napping, reading, playing guitar, that sort of thing.

But first, tomorrow (Saturday) afternoon at 4:15 pm The Motor Primitives will be playing at the Atwood Summerfest. A fun outdoor festival about 4 blocks from our house. I will be using someone else's bass speakers for this gig, thanks to the bass player from The Deadstring Brothers, who will be playing after us, so I won't need to load my rig into the car. All I'll need to bring will be my bass, amplifier and a bag of cables and stuff. This will make it possible for me to pack for our trip beforehand, walk or bike to the gig, and I'll have an easy load-out when we're done. I must be crazy, because....

...play the gig, hurry home and zoom up to Green Bay, where we will stay overnight at my sister's house. Sunday morning we need to get going early enough to make the last ferry to Rock Island. It doesn't look very far on the map, but it's slow driving through Door County and it's necessary to take a car ferry from the tip of Door Co. to Washington Island, drive to the other end of Washington Island, then leave your car and get all your stuff onto the next ferry. Once on the Rock, you have to lug all your gear to your campsite on foot. It's a lot of work getting up there. That's why we stay for a week.

I won't be blogging or reading any blogs for about a week or so. I know you'll all really miss me. All seven of you. But I will miss you.