Mitt liv som Tobin

category: Adventure

• fly a small airplane across the country
• take aerobatics lessons - fly inverted
• earn a sailplane/glider rating
• drive a small car from Europe across Asia (e.g. Mongol Rally)
• visit Saline Valley hot springs (Death Valley CA)
• work at the South Pole for ~3 months
• cross the Atlantic by some means other than regularly-scheduled commercial airline flight
• do some alpine mountaineering (Cascades, Alps, or even Adirondacks)
• visit Scammon's Lagoon for the birthing of the grey whales, and go beach-combing at Malarrimo (Baja California Sur, Mexico)
• Drive the Mojave Road in a jeep (CA)

category: Near-term social

• invite my German class over to cook dinner / potluck

category: Some things to do while in Europe

• visit Tony in Sweden
• tour the Airbus factory in Hamburg!
• experience All Soul's Day in Poland or Lithuania or somewhere else that it is observed (pic)

We camped the first night at Coldwater campground, located near the end of the Lake Mary road out of Mammoth, right next to the Duck Pass trailhead.

Coldwater was typical car camping at a popular spot, with all 77 campsites filling up by nightfall, almost everyone with huge RV's, dogs, generators, etc, a scene that is at once very much familiar but also perplexing: A couple hundred people gather in a small area of land to "get away from it all," bringing as many comforts from home as possible, all having separate campfires, and trying to pretend the other campers don't exist. One can't help but think that it's a culturally significant activity. How is camping different in other countries? We were more interested in meeting other people, and I pondered the notion of a campsite pot-luck, or at least a communal campfire. Also: at $19/night, the Inyo National Forest campsites cost more to rent than my apartment!

In the morning we broke camp, ate a big breakfast/lunch, and drove up to the trailhead. Here we are:



The hike from the Coldwater trailhead up to Duck Lake is short (~5 miles) and up hill, climbing from 9000 feet to the pass at 10800 feet, then dropping down to Duck and Pika lakes at 10500 feet.

Always associated with backpacking, at least for me, has been an obsession with food, driven both by exertion and the knowledge that you'll be subsisting on rather minimal fixings for the next several days.

"Let me know when you start thinking about food. I'm already daydreaming about eating some ribs!" I told Bree.

The hiker is rewarded immediately upon departing the trailhead by the alpine lakes Arrowhead, Skelton, Red, and Barney. We were fresh, so the the thousand-foot climb to the pass went quickly. From there, looking back, we saw this:

I was thinking I would delay the public announcement until everything had fallen into place. But there is no sense in that. Here it is: Bree and I are moving to Los Angeles in December and to Louisiana in July and will remain in Louisiana for at least a year. (Briefly, and in a pun, we are moving to LA.) After Louisiana: Unknown.

To pre-emptively answer a few questions: There will be a big Going Away party. The co-op will persist. In California I will work at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, better known as Caltech. In Louisiana, the LIGO Livingston Observatory. All of this is predicated on various applications being approved and accepted that have not yet been so. Thinking two steps ahead, planning two moves.

What I need from you is a Reading List and a little networking. I need to hit the ground running. What should I read? For Los Angeles, I have City of Quartz. I have "Los Angeles Against The Mountains." I need more. I need to be culturally aware. I need the zeitgeist. I need the Weltanschauung. And Louisiana—I know nothing! Give me a reading list. Who should we know? And, where should we live? I grew up in Los Angeles's shadow, but know nothing of it.

I met with Adrian today and he presented and I agreed to the whole Louisiana Plan. I wish there were some source of informed yet impartial advice on these things, because it's so hard to know what's right, what's best. But for now I'm moving to California in January and then to Louisiana six months later and the Girl is coming too. I've always had a Plan before but this seems so much a shot in the dark. It's an adventure that leads I don't know where and the plan may yet change before it is realized, but this is how it lays before us for the time being. I talked to the Girl on the phone tonight and she was excited, as am I, about the heading out, the packing up of the car and the heading out into the world. This is how it plays.

View from the road.

I couldn't sleep one night (a consequence of a diet of chocolate and coffee), and, laying awake, I suddenly realized it was July. July! You'd think I'd have realized it from the fireworks outside. But July meant Bree's birthday, and suddenly the Adirondack trip became mandatory. Even if small matters such as how to get home again were not yet figured.

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We hitchhiked all the way across the Mojave today, four rides from our campsite in the Alabama Hills outside of Lone Pine to my grandparents' house in Camarillo, completing our hitchhiking tour of US-395, Bridgeport to Los Angeles.

The first car to pass us on our hike out of the hills gave us a lift. The driver, coincidentally enough, was "Rochester born and raised." The couple described themselves as "vagabonds, gypsies, or wanderers, whatever you want to call us," camps in the high desert for the summer, Yuma for the winters, gets by by selling toy binoculars and telescopes, refers to their friends by CB handles ("some because they are hiding, us just because it's fun"), dropped us off at the town library.

Thirty minutes thumbing from the sidewalk in central Lone Pine got us a ride with Lee in his old Ford Ranger XLT to Olancha, more just a highway juncture than any municipality, with a downtown consisting of exactly a Mobil station and a beef jerky stand and an icky hot spring (not visited on this trip) aptly known as "dirty sock." There on the highway with the hot wind whipping through and the traffic zipping along without so much as casting a sympathetic glance, I thought we might be there for a while. Out of the high desert, it was hot and I couldn't help but think of the crazed hitchhiker in Fear and Loathing. You have to keep the faith when hitchhiking, it will work, it's just a matter of time.

I held a sign that simply said, "LA." It wouldn't do to get halfway there, get stuck in the morass of LA that's spilled over the hills. One driver got out to take our picture; she was going North anyway, she explained. After an hour all the rides came all at once. We turned down two rides who weren't going all the way to Los Angeles, who were turning West at Tehachapi, one car a single woman who looked like she was commuting to work, the other a foreign-accented family off to Sequoia.

We waved off that car with thanks-but-no-thanks, and then there was another car waiting there as if from no where. "Burbank," the driver said when I asked where he was going in a little, I don't know, Honda Accord perhaps. This was that promised car you have to keep up the faith for, going exactly the right place and with air conditioning. "Really? Via highway 14?" "Yup." We nestled our backpacks on the back seat next to his hung-up button-down shirts and were happily on our way. We'd gotten out of Olanacha after all. The driver kept us smiling as two hundred odd miles rolled by with tales of adventure. That Yugoslav freighter he happened to be aboard during the Cuban Misile Crisis. The time he hopped freight trains across the country, Bakersfield to New Jersey on $20. The year he lived in Tangiers. The best part of hitchhiking has been the people we've met.

Tomorrow: Amtrak through Los Angeles to Orange County.

Bree, me, and my little cousin Anna. Oakdale, CA (map). June 4, 2006.

There are three main routes into Yosemite from the west: Highway 120 from Modesto, Highway 140 from Merced, and Highway 41 from Fresno. The route from Merced is usually the most convenient for train travelers, and was our originally intended entrance. Conventional travelers can even book an Amtrak ticket all the way to Yosemite Valley, with the journey from Merced to the park on a YARTS bus.

For us it looked like a good candidate for hitchhiking as well, with the bus available as a backup plan. Checking out Merced on Google Maps, it looks like the train station is near the edge of town where 140 comes out. We planned to walk from the train station, make camp in an agricultural field, then hitchhike up the highway to Yosemite. (Later, in Yosemite Valley we met two Slovenian girls who told us of a Merced Hostel which I hadn't known about, and the presense of a new University of California campus in Merced might lead to additional opportunities.)

A cheaper alternative to Amtrak for getting out to Modesto might be to take BART all the way out to Pleasanton station ($3.80 from Berkeley) and then take the Modesto Area Express (MAX) bus to Modesto and then find some local bus to Oakdale. By comparison, Amtrak from Oakland to Modesto is still a pretty good deal, about $25, and certainly grander. Tickets to Merced are a few dollars more.

We were propelled up and out of the Bay Area and into the central valley with the conductor coloring each station stop with homemade alliterative concoctions. "Marvellous Martinez, Home of the Martini," "Scintillating STOCKTON, Pearl of the Delta." Our trip was one of serendipity, and, time after time, it seemed that the right decisions just played themselves out in front of us. En-route to merced, we heard that Highway 140 had been closed by a huge rockslide, and is likely to be closed for months, maybe even a year! Fortunately Modesto is on the same train line and we could just step off the train a few stops earlier. I called up my aunt and uncle in Modesto and asked if we could spend the night—thankfully my relatives have come to tolerate, possibly even appreciate, my surprise visits, and, though surprised, they sounded eager to have us. The train came to Modesto (announced as a "Monument to Modernity"!) (map) and we stepped off to find my waiting uncle and cousins.

My relatives were all very antsy about our determination to hitchhike, with everyone describing Modesto as either the serial killer capital of the U.S. or the methamphetamine capital of California, and multiple offers to pay for a rental car. But we were, of course, determined, and tried to be nonchalant about concerns and confident in our plan. In the morning we enjoyed San Joaquin hospitality in the form of a lazy and delicious corn pancake breakfast, then my uncle drove us out to Oakdale on the fringe of the metropolitan area.

Highway 120 is the main street for downtown Oakdale. We fastened our packs and walked to the end of town, then down to the highway just far enough to a good place for hitchhiking: plenty of space for the driver to pull over, plenty of visibility for oncoming drivers, and a slow speed limit. It was a Sunday and campers were pouring out of the mountains, one gigantic RV after another, huge SUV's pulling boats, and smaller passenger cars stuffed with gear. This was heartening: Yosemite campgrounds fill up very quickly, and most require reservations; I hoped that getting into the park just after the weekend would make finding a campsite easier. There was also plenty of traffic into the mountains. We set ourselves by it, thrust out our thumbs, and began our first experiment in American hitchhiking.

Palouse Canyon. May 28, 2006.

A novelty of working nights was the opportunity to go off on hiking trips from 08:00 AM (end of work) to noon (bedtime!). At Powells Books in Portland with wealhtheow a few days earlier, I'd picked up a book* of hikes in the eastern Washington desert. It mentioned a place called Palouse Falls... so I was off, down the Pasco-Kahlotus highway in search of this alleged 100 foot waterfall. Eastern Washington has a subtle beauty and good highways. Paulouse Falls did not disappoint. Recommended.

It would not be proper to mention Eastern Washington and not include the Missoula Floods, the mind-bogglingly tremendous ice-age floods that carved out that half of that state. But I am not qualified, so read Wikipedia.

* subsequently donated to the library at LIGO Hanford Observatory

Trojan Nuclear Project. Evening prior to demolition.

You can really hit the ground running when you're flying West on the earliest flight of the day.

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Ryan (four) in a subway station. April 16, 2006.

We went to New York this weekend. My first trip since I moved to this state to that eponymous metropolis.

I've been to New York before. On a school trip in 1997 (note hilarious contemporary website; also, the most high-brow travel with which I've ever been associated). Then passing through on my Grand Public Transportation Adventure of 2001. On that trip I came home from school one day and realized it was the beginning of spring break. I called Continental Airlines and left a couple hours later, leaving a few vague voicemails with long-unseen friends alluding to (threatening?) my impending arrival. That was a good trip, my first forray into what I suppose is called "independent travel." The extent of my stay in NYC proper, though, was to walk from Penn Station to Grand Central. I read Catcher In The Rye and visited all my friends in fancy colleges. Another time in transit between Chinatown busses.

This trip was to visit Chris. There were four of us, me and Bree and Lisa and Ryah. We wandered lazy Brooklyn streets. We drank beer at sidewalk cafes, examined free things on sidewalks. Ate delicious Mexican food at a twenty-four hour diner. Bree spoke a lot of Spanish. We slept on the hardwood floor of Chris's little apartment, made cozy by our bundles of blankets and pillows. It was a hot night. Sat on the fire escape. Attended a show in a hipster cave, Cloyne Court co-opers playing at Cakeshop. Walked across the Brooklyn bridge. Chris's apartment is littered with the remnants of our old apartment, lending a strange familiarity to the scene.

On Saturday before Easter it rained cherry blossoms upon us, hand-in-hand, in Central Park (okay, I'm told they are crab apple blossoms, but that's just not quite so poetic) and Bree and I walked a bit of the Met in exchange for our token $1 contribution, but the grandeur of the weekend was the lazy times in Brooklyn.