A Girl and her Hair

For a while now, since I’m not working and no longer have to conform to “work appropriate” hair, I’ve wanted to experiment with colors and cuts that would have shocked and offended my parents (were they still alive).

Back in Georgia (in March), I’d started the transformation from my old self to my current one, but as my hair when I first walked into the salon back then was still in it’s virgin state (aka, utterly natural, and gray), the colorist, who had only just met me and didn’t seem to quite trust that I could really wanted what I’d asked for — she knows me MUCH better now. (To her credit, let’s face it, I’m odd, and hair stylists have been sued by unhappy customers before.) At the time, I tried to explain to her how my inner soul really was not reflected by my current appearance; that I had needed to appear professional in my old jobs, but that now I was free of that and I could return to being more myself — and that I wanted my hair to reflect a truer version of me… the former art student me more so than the business school professor me.

I remember her saying things like, “if I do what your asking for you won’t be happy with the result,” and instead of what I had initially asked for she produced something that was radical by local standards (from what I’ve seen, middle aged, upper class, well educated women in Dalton, GA just don’t do this sort of thing with their hair) — driving around Dalton I found most women to have almost identical dye jobs and hair cuts, that were usually of the sort that required bi-weekly hair appointments to maintain. And while I’ll grant you that what she created was VERY pretty, it was not quite as ‘fearless’ as I was ready to go … however, that said, I really did like the end result as it was a bit like having a head of full of firey embers still burning in blackened ash — and I have a personal connection to that sort of energetic. Also, it could be argued that this dye job flattered me more than the one I ended up getting in Victoria.

Now… it was a few months later and the hair had to be redone. While walking around Victoria I spotted this dress in a shop window, and knew THIS was the color pallet I wanted to go for — only with more of the orange and red, and less of the yellow — so I snapped a shot of it, posted it to Facebook and asked the friends to chime in on what they thought about it. I decided, based on the comment of my friend who authors the blog, rover@home.com to describe it to whomever my colorist turned out to be as a “Caribbean sunset.”

Now granted, between the Georgia hair coloring and when I finally went in to a salon again (almost five months) my hair had grown out (about two inches) and faded out almost completely, from dark hair with fiery highlights, to something which was now brown with the fire faded to mostly orange… although you can still see some red in there.

As I discussed in a later post, on the distinct nature of homelessness in Canada, I had actually gotten the referral to the Aveda Beauty School from a homeless chick I ran into who had wildly colored hair. I’d been wanting to get creative with my hair for a while, and based on my experiences in Georgia, realized I’d have to find a salon that regularly did this sort of thing, or at least do it in a town where it was far more ‘normal’ to request it. The first day I drove around Victoria I knew I was finally in the right place, so it was a question of finding the best salon for it, at the cheapest price. And the Aveda Beauty School turned out to the be the right place.

I will say however, that at first they rejected my request. “We don’t do that sort of thing here” but… let’s just say I when I’ve set my mind to something I rarely take no as an answer. After a while they of negotiating they gave in, and assigned me to Jessica (the girl in the pictures) who was just a few salon hours short of graduating, and who had exhibited a real flair during her training in the use of color. She was both excited, and a bit intimidated, but we talked about it, and there was a full week between my initial consultation and when she would start the job… and she said she had gotten increasingly excited about it as she had time to mull it over in her brain. “I’ve always wanted to do a job like this one but the customers who come into aveda aren’t asking for it.”

With regard to the gray left at my sides, that was my choice. When I had the last coloring done, in Georgia, I had asked the colorist NOT to color over grey at my temples… which she did, but not as MUCH as I had wanted her to, so with Jessica I was much fiercer about it, but it turned out that again what I was asking for wasn’t as radical a notion in Victoria as in Georgia … it is in fact from what I saw it is beginning to be a THING now for older women to NOT completely cover our gray… or even try to. All over Victoria I was elderly women who had embraced their silver and only added dark highlights in creative ways to to compliment their appearance. I saw this one woman who had short curly hair, where her first two inches were kept completely gray, and only had the tips of her curls made dark… it looked amazing, emphasized her curls, and her face… think of it as older women reclaiming pride in their age.

The whole job had to be done in two steps, in large part because it was going to take 8 hours and the students only work in four hour shifts. Fist they needed to cut my hair to remove damage from the previous dye job, and because they refused to do what I wanted on very long hair (to expensive). Historian type that I am, I told her to think 1920’s inverted bob, long in the front (enough so that I can still pin it back on bad hair days, but short and layered in on the back… and then they did a base dye of a an ashy brown in order to obfuscate the transition between new natural hair and the rest of the head.

Nice, but oh so mundane…. I think I look a bit like pictures of my grandmother taken in the late 1920’s. This was done on the Tuesday.

Two days later, Thursday, I came in again, and the first step was to bleach may hair light enough to allow for the other colors…

The result was a sort of bright orange with some red highlights left in it… To be honest, I always wonder why they can’t just leave hair THIS color — which is what happens when you strip brown out of hair, because I think it’s cool, but they won’t. No colorist has ever explained to me the reason why. That and, as I was not used to seeing myself this way it was kind of a shock… still can’t decide if it’s a good color for me.

The 2nd girl is a friend of Jessica’s who came in to help. Jessica applied all the color, but this girl functioned as a 2nd set of hands, holding bits of hair out of the way, and handing Jessica things as she needed them.

Then we entered the coloring stage. Three colors were used, a purple, and orange, and yellow… and rather then applying the colors in vertical stripes, as is normally done, these were applied horizontally, in a technique now known as decoupage.

And this was the final result…

This is my hair blown out and curled with a curling iron

This is what it looks like when it’s just wash and wear

I’m sad to say that the colors only lasted a few weeks, with the purple disappearing almost immediately, so that two months later (when I’m finally writing this) the hair is mostly orange (close to the color of the hair when initially striped) and a yellow that turns almost neon in the sun… So it will soon be time to try something else.

I’ve sort of been considering the Miley Cyrus inspired haircut (Miley had it when she was in the TVshow, Two and a 1/2 men) that Jessica was sporting… but it actually requires MORE upkeep to get the hair to stay up like that, not less…. and I would need to loose a more weight, as right now my face is too fat

T&O: Happy Homeless People in Canada

Let me preface this by saying that I categorically know diddlysquat about the specific realities of homelessness in Canada, and I take it as a given that the situation is far from perfect; what follows therefore are simply my PERCEPTIONS as a well traveled individual who has had the “privilege” if you can call it that of having seen poverty in many countries over the course of my 51 years.

So let me give an example. A few years ago I was driving around Shanghai China with my dad and his girlfriend. …
Well, let me back up: At that time I had been working as a professor of Marketing in South Korea for about two years, at Kyung Hee University’s Seoul campus. (Yes my PhD was in anthropology, how I got from that to marketing is a long story.) My dad, who had been a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University (he passed away just over two years ago now) had been invited to China in order to give some lectures at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, and he had arranged for his girlfriend (a once upon a time professor of Hebrew Literature at Tel Aviv University — who had been working as a successful therapist for many years since) to also give a lecture, so that she could come along with him on the trip. This was right around the Jewish High Holidays, so my father decided that I should fly from Seoul to Shanghai so that we could all attend prayer services together.
….. After we’d been there a few days, we were driving around the town and my dad’s girlfriend started to talk about how impressed she was with the affluence of Shanghai. How all the apartments we had visited (both she and my dad had contacts in town) were so fancy, and our hotel (4 star) was so plush, and how everyone was wearing the latest styles of expensive designer clothing, and the expensive jewelry everyone wore (the Chinese love their bling).

To this I responded… “well that’s interesting, because I’m seeing something entirely different than you are. I see all of what you saw, but I also seem to be seeing things you are not.” She of course took offense, and asked me to explain, so I went on… “What I see are fancy apartment buildings that are surrounded not just by gates, but with 12 ft concrete walls that have barbed wire at the top with limited entrances and exits where there are guards that ‘actually guard’ (not just for show), which tells me not only is crime a major concern, but possibly even riots. And while I see people wearing bling and the latest in designer fashions, what I also see are jobs like garbage collection which in western countries would be done with garbage trucks, but here I see people doing them by hand, many of them elderly with hunched backs dragging behind them carts heavy with trash to the dumps, or recycling plants. What I see is a really horrible discrepancy between the rich and the poor, with many homeless, dirty, and miserable looking people sitting around looking unhappy. So while I saw everything you did, I also saw it not as this wonderful amazing thing, but as a problem … and those concrete walls with barbed wire? What they tell me is that the rich elites of this town are very much aware that they are sitting on a potential powder keg that could, if they are not very very careful, explode at any time.”

So… returning to the issue of Canada a few people have asked me what were my major observations of the differences between Canada and the USA… and while granted there are a few… for instance I used the go-along with that statement that EVERYONE seems to say about the Canadians, namely that ‘they’re the nicest people on the planet’… but having spent three months there I have now revived that to, ‘I wouldn’t say Canadians are Nice, so much as I’ve decided that the Canadians are incredibly polite — a bit like the Japanese’… but I’m not going to go into what I mean by that here… it’s too complicated.

What I want to talk about now is the inherent differences I observed on the streets between homelessness in Canada and the way it looks in the USA.

The poor and homeless in Canada just seem… happy, they seem healthy, they even seem, dare I say it… peppy…

American homeless rarely if ever look any of that, and if they do they usually haven’t been homeless very long. … again, just my perception.

At one point in Victoria, I saw a girl who looked to be in her early 20’s, pretty, but with the sort of ‘dirty’ look of someone who lives on the street, who was sitting on the side of the road in the center of Victoria’s tourist district (between the historic hotel and the bay), with her puppy on her lap, trying to collect funds. So I stopped to talk to her; she started of by telling me that she was actually from Vancouver and had come over as a passenger on the ferry to visit friends (for an adult non student fair it costs just under $18 Canadian, or around $13.50 US for walk on traffic, but I’m guessing her status may have qualified her for some sort of discount). She told me that after having been here (in Victoria) for a few days that she didn’t have enough money left to go back and was just trying to collect enough funds to take the return ferry.

So, like the anthropologist I am, I sat down to ‘interview’ her about being homeless in Canada. I also wanted to bounce my perceptions off of her, to see if I was right about how much happier the homeless seemed here, and my thinking that maybe in Canada dropping out and being homeless was actually a choice people sometimes made, rather than something they were forced into by adversity. She said that she thought that was probably correct, that it was something you could just choose to do and a lot of folks did. She had not been to the US side of the border, but she had heard other kids talking about how being homeless there was categorically different, and a lot scarier. She said that in Canada she gets good health care even though she has no job (and isn’t even looking for one), and that there’s no shortage of homeless shelters that feed her well, and that sleeping in those shelters feels perfectly safe to her…

Another day when I was walking around I passed a what I’m sure was a little group of three homeless girls, one of whom had really radical colored hair. So I talked to her and I asked her who she would suggest as someplace I could go to to get my hair done. She said that she and her friends would do it for themselves, using cheap stuff they got from the pharmacy. I told her I wasn’t into doing that and really wanted someone who could do it for me, and do it well. She pointed me towards the Aveda Beauty school that is only two blocks from my apartment saying one of the girls who they hang with from time to time, who was not in fact homeless would get it done there and was happy with the results… When I think of homeless youth who are doing things like experimenting with hairstyles, I tend to think England or Germany, i.e., other countries that also have a strong social security net (as Canada does)… not the US.

Finally, one day I had an “interesting” conversation with a homeless guy (complete with a shopping cart full of his stuff) who was all pissed off because apparently the night before he had given CPR to a fellow homeless guy who was over dosing on heroin, and he said the cops, rather than thanking him for saving a fellow human being brought charges against him for having done it (I had difficulty following his logic of why that was). Then he went on to talk about how he was also a heroin addict. Now, granted, the guy struck me as being part of that small percentage of folks who are homeless because of mental issues, but for a homeless heroin addict with metal issues, I have got to say he looked to be an amazingly healthy and well fed homeless heroin addict.

A Tent City in Victoria: in Pioneer Square, across the street from Christ Church Cathederal

Getting shit done

So I’m back in home in the Chicago area in order to address medical stuff (my docs and medical insurance are here), and do other things that needed doing.

Regarding the computer failure noted in my last post: with the help of a good friend who is a mac expert (he writes books about and teaches mac techs how to be mac techs) both my computers are now back up and running. For one where we decided the logic board had failed, he oh so kindly transplanted my hard drive into an old 2009 macbook he had lying around, which I’ll borrow till Apple FINALLY releases the new macbooks later this year. For the other we just swapped out the ram and that seemed to have done the trick. Am now waiting with baited breath for the new macbook to be released — according to friends in the know, Intel was late delivering the chips which set back production, but they should be out soon.

In other news:

In May I was diagnosed with liver disease (my penchant for all things fried — note the trend in the food reviews — coming back to bite my ass). The doctor said my liver looked like an alcoholics, which is ironic considering I’ve been a teetotaler (or as close to it as never-mind) for most of my life. I don’t like the taste of the stuff, and don’t enjoy being drunk… and get HORRIBLE HORRIBLE hangovers. In fact I would try to force myself to drink the occasional glass of wine with dinner after all those studies came out saying it was as bad to be a teetotaler as to be a heavy drinker, health wise…

Anyway, the doctors told me what to do, diet wise, for the liver… and I did it.

For the last three months I’ve eaten mostly seafood, and kept the diet fairly oil free, with the goal of eating LESS than the daily recommended amount of oil every day — NOT the easiest thing to pull off when you eat almost every night in restaurants … and considering I’ve been eating low-carb anyway for the last few years, and gaining weight anyways — because I was eating a LOT of cheese and fried food … well, really, you take away the oil and the carbs… what’s left for a girl to eat?

So … the good news is I lost 23 lb in three months. Was 180 lb back in May (after dad died I sort of ate my pain), and am now down to 153 lb — some of you may have noticed from my pictures that I’ve been shrinking; I’ve gone down from a 38 waist in January to almost fitting into my 32 waist pants — still a tad tight … and dropped from a 36 bra to a 32. From the health standpoint, the most recent blood test found my liver numbers have also dropped by quite a bit, so now all the doctors are very happy with me. They’re going to run one more test in a mid October (first time we could schedule it), a kind of specialized ultrasound of my liver to verify that there’s no cirrhosis (but they don’t think there will be — fingers crossed, no evil eye, etc.).

If I test clean, then pretty much all I need to do is loose another 10 lb according to the doctor — but I’d like to get back to the weight I was before heading out to South Korea 4.5 years ago, 130 lb. and able to wear my 30 waist pants again.

Next item on the agenda: the car needed its 12,000 mile test way back in July (I just purchased the thing in mid January — 12K miles in six month) but the US warranty didn’t extend to Canada. So, I had a choice, pay for it from my own pocket and hope to get reimbursed by the American warranty company after filling an insane amount of paperwork… or wait… so I waited till I got back to the US — at which point I had driven a full 14,500 miles in 8 months of ownership.

The next major issue is I HAD all my clothes stored in the attic of a very old friend in Florida, but that was proving inconvenient. Florida is in no way central, and he is having personal issues that made it no longer viable… so… another old friend, Gina — the one who has comes to visit me during my travels, who has just finished renovating her home suggested I move it all into her newly expanded, ner I say massive (too much Shakespeare?) and utterly empty attic, here back in Chicago. Seriously the thing is so massive I could live in it… my apartment in S. Korea was way smaller.

So.. after paying to move it all down to Florida a year ago, I’m now moving it all back up here to Chicago .. wonder if my entire wardrobe is actually worth the $3,250 I’ve spent in the last two years moving it around the country. Once it’s up I have to upload most of my clothes into storage and trade them out for the smaller sized stuff I haven’t been able to wear in a few years… Leather here I come (I have a LOT of cool leather jackets)

So other than that, I’m finally catching up with old friends and old blog posts. The intent is to hit the road again after the November elections assuming the doctors allow it.

Technical difficulties

OK then, BOTH my main computer AND my backup computer have decided to break down. This has put a real kink into my updating this blog which is what I intended to do this weekend. That and spell check no longer seems to work in WordPress… which some of you may have noticed (to quote my former PhD advisor, “Rebecca, you are one of the people for whom spell check was invented, USE it!”)

The backup one is crashing. every 5 or 10 minutes, and the main just seems to take forever to do anything — I’ve taken to watching movies on my iPhone while the little ball spins. A good friend who writes ‘how to’ books for professional mac techs as a living has promised to take a look at them tomorrow, and of course TODAY Mac rumors have started to fly all over the place that NEXT MONTH mac is finally releasing an update to the macbook (like a year overdue)… but that won’t be out till October. HOPEFULLY my friend can make at least one of two macbooks stable enough to keep me going till the new ones are released (and hopefully they’ll be configured in a way that suites my needs). Good news seem to be the new ones will have a finger ID scan built into the On button which will do away with logins entirely, and increase my security immensely as I travel from Airbnb to Airbnb

Niagra Falls, Canadian Side

I know from childhood pictures that my parents had taken us here as little kids, but I had no personal memories of it, but now I do.

I’ve been spending most of August in Stratford, Ontario and I’ve purchased tickets to all 13 productions they are putting on this summer as part of their yearly Shakespeare festival. The one day Trip I really wanted to make was to Niagara Falls. Like I said, I know from old family photos that I’ve been here before, but I think was maybe four or five years old, and have no memory of it. As such, it was a bucket list event.

From Stratford to Niagara is a two hour drive each way, and I was a bit late getting started as I got reminded by an email from the family lawyer that I needed to file some paperwork ASAP, which meant I was going to have to spent the night in Toronto and get to the relevant consulate for a 12:10 appointment. (I’ve actually had to do this for months, but the consulate I needed did not have offices in any of the other places I’ve visited over the last two months, but there was one in Toronto — which is only a one hour drive from Niagra). This of course meant I had to find lodgings for the night there, so between that and printing out the documents he wanted filed, I didn’t get out of the house till noonish.

The first impression of Niagara was that it is NOT an affluent town, at least not in the sections I first drove through. Then as you approach the falls you enter an almost Los Vegas type/Orlando type atmosphere with Casinos and tourist trap attractions from hell (Ripley’s believe it or not, dinner theater, various gardens, a historic battlefield, etc) — but clearly there’s more than enough available in the area to fill three full days of intensive vacation time, and probably enough to justify I devote two full weeks to the place at some future date.

Driving along the parkway the falls were generating SO much spray that I had to keep the windshield wipers going, and then after parking whether or not you were being drenched with the water while walking on the sidewalk depended entirely on which way the wind was blowing (see picture below).

However, if the spray was coming right at you, and you were willing to get right up into it, you got to see some amazing distortions of image, rainbows… (Mind you… great lakes water is so dirty that I usually avoid swimming in it, so one really has to question ones willingness to stand in that spray without goggles.)

Parking at the falls is DisneyWorld expensive, $22, so if you’re going to drive there do so with the intention of staying a while. On the converse side, they don’t charge you anything to walk along the promenades and enjoy the view.

There’s a visitor’s center where you can shop, eat, and buy tickets to various excursions including a boat the goes to the base of the falls, a trek that goes behind and along side the falls (I seriously thought about that one, but then decided against — maybe next time), and various other things… none of which are cheap. I ate at the restaurant and was seriously unimpressed, but it did have a good view:

As I was walking along the promenade I noticed across the street was a small park area devoted to Nikola Tesla, the favorite scientist of all of my engineering friends. You’d think they’d like Edison but you’d be wrong… although bringing up the topic can result in hours of debate:

Edison never really invented much of anything, he hired other people to build things for him. What Edison was, was a CEO type, rather than an engineer. Granted he was brilliant salesman who had vision and understood what the customer really wanted with regards to technology, but he lacked the skills to build much of any of his ideas (think of him as being Steve Jobs); Tesla, on the other hand, was more like Steven Wozniak (affectionately known to geeks as “The Woz”) the guy who actually built and designed the first Apple computers (which Steve Jobs had the good sense to recognize for what it was). Tesla invented a lot of the things that made our world what it is today.

One of my very good friends used to be the head patent attorney at Apple Computer in San Francisco, and to quote her, part of why she made the big bucks was she had a knack for getting engineers to actually do the paperwork necessary to file patents. Engineers like building things, they HATE doing the paperwork necessary to protect their inventions. Edison would come up with ideas and then hire a bunch of engineers to to invent things for him, and then would run to the patent office and file all of their work under his own name…

Tesla was just such a brilliant engineer who had started out working for Edison, and was known for inventing amazing things but never bothering to do the paperwork necessary to protect them, or at least not at first. In fact, as the story goes, early in Tesla’s career Edison offered him a huge sum, about a million dollars in today’s money, to solve the engineering problems Edison was having with the electrical generators (DC or direct current) he needed to build and install before anyone would buy a light bulb. Once Tesla had the thing working, he came to Edison to get paid, and Edison basically laughed in his face claiming the offer wasn’t a serious one (Edison knew a verbal contract is only worth the paper it’s written on) so that it was now Tesla’s word as the young engineer against that of his boss, the famous Edison. (But like I said, it’s one of the stories, hard to know if it was truth.)

So, what did Tesla Do? Firstly, he got into the habit of filing his patents, but equally important, he invented the far more efficient electrical AC system (Alternating Current), which is what the electrical station at Niagara generates. The reason in the US we hear more about Edison than Tesla is Edison played a lot of dirty pool games to discredit Tesla and convince the US government to always listen to Edison rather than to Tesla… hence why the rest of the world is mostly using AC current while the US uses the far less efficient DC variety.

In fact, Marconi, who is credited with having invented radio (and winning the Nobel prize for it) … created that system by utilizing 19 different technologies that Tesla had been the one to invent.

At some point I’d like to go back, spend the night and enjoy it a bit more leisurely; drive across Honeymoon Bridge.

Ferry: Vancouver, to Vancouver Island

You won’t see this if you fly; I have horrible motion sickness issues and I was just fine.

Towards the end of the TransCanadian Highway (route 1) there’s a ferry you can take across to Vancouver Island, and the rest of route 1. The ride took about an hour and a half, and was highly restful and pretty… although granted we had fine weather.

First you go through a tollbooth kind of thing where they give you a ticket and you pay $71.75CD for your transit ($17.20 CD for you $56.45CD for your car — not sure what the exchange rate is, but the other day I bought some stamps at the post office costing $1.75CD, gave them $10US and got back $10CD and change), and then you go stand in a very long line of cars. I think there are like three different ferries that take off from this location. According to the people in the car next to me they won’t start actually loading the ferry for another 20 minutes and then it‘s not going to leave for another 20 minutes after that. Apparently there’s a schedule for these things and I was supposed to have checked but I just randomly showed up. But it seems like it’s a good thing because there’s already a boatload of cars behind me and I think I mean this literally… . I kind of thought that I would just drive onto the ferry and it would take off I wasn’t expecting the wait. Everybody else in the line seems to be far more prepared for it then I am, with coffee, reading materials… and things

After a while you hear loud and clear (remarkably clearly — amazing sound system) announcements about various ferries, and warnings if it’s time to get back to your car. Then the line starts to move and your directed by a host of staff quickly and efficiently into loading, with instructions you can’t miss all along the way (these folks really know their jobs). You can then stay in your car, if you choose, go to the full service cafeteria, hang out in the seating area, or up on deck.

The cafeteria was kind of huge; you could buy a full freshly made and tasty breakfast (which I thought was a tad overpriced), or burgers, sandwiches, sweet potato fries (which seem popular in Canada), raspberry rhubarb pie, or of course, poutine — which seems to be the Canadian national dish.

TransCanadian: from Banff to Kamloops

I spent most of today traveling the Trans-Canada Highway from Banff National park to Kamloops, where I had booked a highly affordable night’s stay via Airbnb (and which took me a good 6 hours to drive) I passed though two national parks… Yoho National Park and Canadian end of Glacier National Park. Suffice it to say it’s a gorgeous drive.

One of the things I loved seeing along the way were the high fences along the high ways along with regular animal overpasses (bridge on the right) — we really need to start building these in the states.

There are also rest and picnic stops all along the route at scenic spots (with toilets!)

And then I passed through Roger’s Pass… which is in the heart of Canada’s half of the Glacier National Park

Banff Canadian National Park: Gondola

Even if you only have time for a quick drive through on your way to somewhere else via Canada’s Highway 1 (like I did), it is TOTALLY worth it to pitstop at Banff National Park’s Gondola for a ride up the mountain ($42 for adults, $21 for kids);

Every time I told anyone what my plans were for this summer, the one thing I heard almost everyone say was, “well of course you HAVE to stop in Banff” and now I know why. Banff is a cute, very touristy little town located in the middle of a national park, of the same name and just to the side of Canada’s Highway 1. It is, in a word, gorgeous. I was there in the last week of May, in a winter so warm and dry that Canada was having wild fires, and the mountains were still snow peaked.

From the town to where the Gondola is, is about a stunning 10 minute, very well marked drive (even without my GPS I would have found it. Once there, If you want to get to the top of the mountain you can of course, always hike up it, like these folks are doing….

Or you can pay what initially seems like a hefty $42/adult to take the Gondola, a choice I did not regret once I was in it — they allowed me to ride alone.

When you get to the top (which is not really handicapped accessible) there is a wooden walkway with strong railings that extends all the way to next peak (with a lot of up and down staircases along the way), which I did not take; in part because I’m a wuss, but also because I knew I had a good six hours of driving ahead of me and it would not be safe to exhaust myself (no really, it isn’t just an excuse). If you do choose to do it, you need not worry about doing it alone, I would argue that MOST of the folks opted to do the full hike.

I however choose to just hang out near the arrival building. When I was there it was under construction, but usually it contains a restaurant, bathrooms, a gift shop, etc. While we didn’t see much wildlife up there, there was some:

There was this one very ballsy chipmunk, he came right up to one woman who was sitting on a bench and sat next to her, then she saw him and freaked — then he kept approaching folks hoping for food — And then there were mountain goats who seemed to prefer to hang out under the walkway, which I assume provided them some protection from predators who didn’t like the sound and smells of all the humans.

Then, when you’re ready to go down they take a picture of you as you renter the gondola, which they then try to sell you a print of (they aren’t able sell the digital image) photoshopped really badly into a cheesy looking background.

I will say this, apparently I came at the right time, because there was no line at all, either when I bought my ticket, or decided to finally take the ride up (after a bathroom break and checking out the gift store, etc.); however, when I got to the bottom, this is what I saw:

and it kept going all the way down the hallway.

That said, I think it’s important to try to time around bus tours. When I first got there I saw three large tour busses loading up and heading away, and then I think all of these guys were dropped off while I was coming down. Don’t wait in a line like this, have a cup of coffee, troll the gift shop, and wait for it to shrink.

Glacier National Park (day 2) @West Glacier, MT

Glacier National Park is HUGE, as in you can’t really see and enjoy the whole place in one day, not even if you’re going to do the whole thing by car. It is just too big. This was my second day, when I explored the western half… and then wished I’d allowed myself a full week at the place.

Warning: If you arrive at the park early in the season (I was there at the very end of May) the “Going to the Sun” drive which connects the east and west segments and travels through the middle of the park will most likely STILL be blocked with snow. If it is you’ll be forced — as I was– to leave the park and circle around via lower altitude roads.

I learned later that the full road isn’t actually opened until LATE June or even mid July, depending on weather conditions — there is even a web page dedicated to updating tourists about how much of it the plows have opened for traffic. Apparently about Oct. 16th is when the road closes down again because of expected snow accumulation… one of these days I will go there again in September after the kids are back in school so I can drive through the highest elevation parts…

I stayed two nights at Brownies Youth Hostel and Restaurant, which is near the eastern side of the park. I had found it via Airbnb, but had then contacted them directly and made the booking by phone in order to ensure that I got the specific room I wanted (a private and across the hall from the ladies bathroom). It was the ONLY Airbnb near where I wanted to be, as close to the park as possible but not far off the highway I was going to take up to Calgary, and every hotel I found in that same area (note: I was not yet truly skilled in the ways of finding high quality mom and pop motels yet, so this price was compared to the larger hotels, etc) were asking WAY more than I wanted to pay. Here at the hostel, a bunk-bed in a shared dorm room is $22/night, and a private room with a double bed is $65 — utterly reasonable prices. I really enjoyed my stay there and met a bunch of really nice college kids who were roughing it, as well as a really nice married Indian couple who were both young professors (one taught business, the other psychology).

I will say the only unexpected (it is a hostel and not a hotel) downsides of Brownies were 1) the WiFi in my bedroom sucked to the point of useless; the modem was down the hall where the shared spaces were — kitchen and living room and was good and fast there, but the signal just didn’t really reach to my room. And, 2) while the rustic log cabin walls were cute and provided visual privacy, they resulted in small gaps between the interior and exterior walls with the result that they did not block noises from the other rooms pretty much at all. This would not really have been a problem were it not for the fact that the college dude sleeping in the bed on the other side of it had a snore like a freight train (thank the lord I ALWAYS travel with an ample supply of top of the line ear plugs). He was in a group of guys who were bicycling their way across America (raising money along the way), and we all kidded him about he’d have to do something about that snore if he ever wanted to get and stay married.

After breakfast I headed around south and then west along route 2 through the Marias Pass to the other end of the “Going to the Sun” road, which I had not been able to reach the yesterday due to snow and ice still blocking the roads at the higher elevations.

To quote Wikipedia:

“The pass traverses the Continental Divide in the Lewis Range, along the boundary between the Lewis and Clark National Forest and the Flathead National Forest. The pass forms the southern limit of the Continental Ranges….. The Great Bear Wilderness in Lewis and Clark National Forest is south of the pass and Glacier National Park is to the north. During the winter, the pass is the only way to cross the Continental Divide by road in the United States north of Montana’s Rogers Pass (to be distinguished from British Columbia’s Rogers Pass), because of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex.”

Note: I passed through the Canadian Roger’s Pass a few days later while driving the TransCandian Highway

So, on the way there I passed through the Louise & Clark National forest, which is yet ANOTHER stop of the Louise & Clark trail… and get this, it’s May 28th, and it is SNOWING! (no wonder the higher elevations are still blocked with snow). Off to the side of the road there was an area with two big memorials, and one tiny one:

The obelisk is a memorial to Teddy Roosevelt, constructed in 1931

Note the Cargo Train running behind the statue

This statue is in memory of John F. Stevens (25 April 1853 – 2 June 1943), an American civil engineer who helped to build both the great Northern Railroad and the Panama Canal, [the following is according to the highly faded and barely legible sign that was standing in front of him, sad] “was charged finding a suitable rail route across the Continental Divide. In December of 1889, Stevens located and recorded the pass which had been used by area Native Americans for many centuries” i.e., what came to be known as Marias Pass.

There was also a third, very small memorial … just a big chunk of pink rock with a plaque embedded into it which I actually found kind of touching:

There’s a story (found it on the cite I linked to Morrison’s name, see below)), about how “John F. Stevens, credited by the Great Northern Railroad with the discovery of Marias Pass, spoke at the dedication of the Stevens statue at Summit. In the course of his speech, Stevens told of hardships in searching out the pass over the Continental Divide. He explained that it was December, and he had nearly perished in a blizzard at the pass. At this point, Morrison spoke up from the crowd: “Why didn’t you come over to my house? I was living right over there,” he said, pointing to his cabin.” — makes me smile

Anyway, you have to think, here’s this old guy who is apparently highly educated, who didn’t have any kids (that he knew of) to leave his land to, and knowing that they had established a huge National Park across the street (Established 1910 by President Taft, although much of it’s infrastructure was built as part of the Roosevelt’s depression era Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) .. think “New Deal”), and that realizing that a lot of tourists would be passing along that street, he probably realized that his best bet at any sort of immortality/legacy lay in donating his land for this purpose.

Again, there was a very faded sign in front of the memorial (that was even LESS legible than the last one) with more information:

“William H. “Slippery Bill” Morrison was a mountain man who had “squatters rights” on 160 acres at the Marias Pass summit. He donated a portion of his land for the site of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial monument.
Morrison was a frontier philosopher who would often expound on his favorite theories to anyone who would listen. Morrison spent most of his life as a trapper and prospector.
Slippery Bill diet in 1932 at the age of 84. According to his wishes the balance of his land was transferred to the federal government after his death.”

All of which was followed by a very faded sketch of the old guy:

As I approached the park, firstly I realized that there were way more people here than had been at the other end of the park, and second — after driving over an hour to get here — I realized I had better fill up before entering the West Glacier Park entrance, because those places almost never have gas stations inside the park boundaries. Also, it was SO FRIGGING COLD (may 28th and it was SNOWING) that I decided to try to unload my trunk and dig out the down coat, winter hat and gloves that I had buried in the compartment designed for the spare wheel.

Granted, this made them kind of inaccessible, but they were there for emergencies just like this one. My overall goal with these trips is to structure my movements so as to never need see full winter, but, that said I had had the forethought to bring them just in case. Let’s face it, even southern Florida occasionally gets a cold snap. I also lug around a big thick down blanket in the backseat of my car, for the same reason, and have had a few days when I needed it. My car actually is loaded with food (nuts, olives, etc), loads of water, and a heavy down blanket just in case the car should happen to break down in the middle of no where on a cold night. Yes, I’m a planner.

Anyway, since my massive suitcases were still in there, and I needed help in order to remove them, I spotted a guy standing off to the side with a handful of papers and called him over asking him to help me. Turned out his name was John Marshall and he was from the University of Montana and was doing a research questionnaire about tourism at the park, and in exchange for my scratching his back (answering the very long questionnaire) he helped me unload and then reload my car, and we got to talking…

As we were talking the question of the local Blackfeet population came up (I forget why), and I told him about the heavily graffiti-ed obelisk I had passed on the way to my hostel, just the day before; so, he was the one actually gave me the heads up about the confrontational history between the local tribes and Louis & Clark; and he was also the one who told me to look up Elouise Cobell, and how she had brought a case titled, Cobell v. Babbitt against the United states Department of Interior based on her own investigation of their practices (that she said “revealed mismanagement, ineptness, dishonesty, and delay of federal officials”of Indian trust assets … money owned by the government but held in trust for Native Americans… to the tune of $176 billion).

Apparently he had not long before attended her funeral, so she was active in his mind — and I got so distracted in talking to him that when I finally got into the park I realized that in all that moving, packing and talking that I had completely forgotten to actually pump any gas. So I had to leave the park after having just entered (yay for my National parks pass) to go get gas (again). At which point I realized it was already lunch time, and that I was hungry …. so I stopped at the West Glacier Restaurant and got myself an elk sausage (seriously, elk!), tomato Florentine soup and cup of a huckleberry tea (am saving room for more huckleberry pie for tonight) — it was supposed to be served in a kaiser roll type thing but I asked them to hold the carbs, and the french fries, and give me more veggies instead

And then FINALLY I got into the park!

Leading off of the lake and up into the mountains is this river, which is full of a lot of picturesque twists and turns, and rapids, etc… which the “Road to the Sun” follows alongside of, heading up into the mountains… or at least at this time of year up until the road conditions become unsafe….

and multiple times along the river you come to narrow bridges you can often drive across, but at the other side you usually find some limited parking and hiking trails (of course with my painful hips, knees, and plantar fasciitis — feet — this was not something I was going to do, that and I didn’t have proper hiking boots, just a pair of Crocs, because of the plantar fasciitis).

As I traveled around the park I kept running into this film crew who said they worked for a German TV station, they had this big red van and sometimes sometimes would prop the cameraman and his rig up over the top of at… the last time I saw them was when I was about to leave, and a park cop and pulled them over, lights and all, which made me think that maybe they didn’t have the proper permits… either that or he wasn’t pleased to see the cameraman perched on their hood

At one point I came to this place, where there were all sorts of cars parked to one side, only there was no parking for me, so I parked as far off the road as I could on the side where there was no designated parking (hoping it wouldn’t earn me a ticket.

When I initially parked here I was the only car not on the side with designated parking spot, but instead on the wrong side of the road pulled off to the side as much as possible… I came back five minutes later seven cars (two not visible) had already followed my lead

I kept driving up as far as I could, but about 45 minutes in, as the elevation started to rise, snow and sleet started to come down, I had started to approach, but hadn’t gotten anywhere near the area called

At this point the weather was definitively nasty (I actually ran into one of my fellow youth Hostel guests up there), and there was a massive road block… so there was no choice but to return the way I had come… only this time I took one of the many side roads that led back around the lake to the other side

After driving around a while I came to a section of the park that was all shops and restaurants, and a hotel complex within the park for visitors. In one of the shops I found this, and … well…. my new car is in dire need of some new bumper stickers:

I am the proud owner of a new bumper sticker!

Finally, I headed home and after stopping off for dinner, where I got myself that piece of Huckleberry pie, I headed back to the Hostel, at which point I realized that it was 10 pm and it is still light out… WTF?! How far North am I?

Glacier National Park, MT (St. Mary lake & Many glaciers)

Glacier National Park, US or Canada should be on everyone’s bucket list, it’s AWE inspiring. That said, consider your dates of arrival carefully because if you come too early (and that means June) the roads at the higher elevations will still be snowed in.

After a very long day of driving from Grand rapids, I found myself driving towards the gradure of the Rocky Mountains, and arrived at my Youth Hostel which is right next door to the parks, but not in them. I had found the place a few days before via Airbnb, who said they had room, and I was able to find their phone number via Google — because Airbnb won’t give you that info before you’ve booked via them (they don’t want you going around their system). The woman who answered said there was a private room right next to the bathroom, but she couldn’t figure out how to log into the system to see availability, so they called me back the next day while I was already on road towards them to verify.

I had found it on Airbnb but called them to make sure I got the sort of room I wanted (private and across the hall from a bathroom), Brownies, and checked in. The ground floor has a restaurant coffee shop that serves up pizza, sandwiches, soup etc and the whole place looks very Berkeley amenable. Nothing on their menu really worked for me so…

Next I grabbed a meal next door at Luna’s cafe, a bison Brat — was tasty, and got to taste for the first time the joys of a Huckleberry Pie — (I was assured the Luna’s makes a very good one). In my attempt at maintaining my diet I ate the filling, but skipped the crust… it was more tart than sweet, but very good.

After that I headed north to see the park, since I was assured it would stay open till sunset which was not for a few more hours.

When I finally entered the park… no really, the pics above were all take on the way TO it… There is no WiFi in the park, for obvious reasons, but some notes. Firstly I saved $30 on my park entrance because I had the National Parks pass, and all told I think in about two months I’ve already earned back the price of its purchase (like $85?) for this year.

Notes to self: 1) when road-tripping for a week, dirty hair on a windy day can make me look a bit like medusa; and 2) Huckleberry Pie while VERY tasty, turns your whole mouth blue for a few hours after eating, so brushing is advised.

It’s been raining on and off the last couple of days, and even though Montana is usually dry by now that isn’t the case this year.

At the Far end of this view are some Glaciers, they are the solid white high in the mountains

As a result of all the recent rains (or snow in the higher elevations) the “going to the Sun” Road which is supposed to be absolutely amazing was blocked most of the way through the center of the park (when you’re in the Rockies) so I could only enter a park-entrance go as far as I could till the roads were blocked, and then back out– go to different park entrance, rinse repeat, etc… so unless I was willing to hike (which I wasn’t) I wasn’t able to get up close and personal with the glaciers and had to just enjoy them from a distance.

I am particularly proud of this picture, note the waterfall off to the left; so nice I posted it twice (so that it would grace the header)… but this is where I took it

This is a very expensive hotel inside the park

It’s begun sleeting really badly, which is not particularly pleasant. I’ve reached Jackson glacier viewpoint, but the road is closed past here and the mist and fog and sleet are so thick that I wasn’t able to get any decent photos… I will have to come back some other year.