Charleston, WV

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Details to come tomorrow. Highlights:

• Stopped to see the Gateway Arch in a frigid St. Louis. Pretty cool stuff, especially from an engineering perspective.
• Didn't find a Starbucks to start the morning, which was a big disappointment.
• Took a side trip to Santa Claus, IN.
  
• Saw another State Capitol (Frankfort, KY)
• Ended up in our last State Capitol (Charleston, WV)

Day 3 route

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Day 3 Photos

Trying again with Day 3 pictures:

East of Amarillo is, supposedly, the largest cross in the Western Hemisphere. I don't have any way to validate the claim, but it does look pretty big compared to the power poles nearby.

The Oklahoma State Capitol building. That's definitely an oil rig in the foreground. The building is quite impressive.

The inside of the Capitol Dome. The dome wasn't built until 1999, and the names of the donors are inscribed on the marble inside. Like SBC and Halliburton.

An Oklahoma rest area.

Some Kansas grassland. I can't begin to capture the emptiness... Kansas wasn't nearly as flat as advertised, but it was as grassy and empty as advertised.

The Kansas State Capitol in Topeka. We didn't get to go in. There isn't a lot going on in Topeka.

Columbia, MO

We ended up in Columbia, MO today. Original plan was to stop in Kansas City, but we decided to grab our BBQ and then drive another 120 miles down the road before pulling in for the night. It was our first 4 state day, our first day over 700 miles, and our first day without a giant hole in the ground. The highlights, this time in bullet form:

• BBQ stop 1: Lunch at Earl's Rib Palace. The food was good: my ribs were really good, and the sides were great. Dad's pulled pork was also good, but he hated the slaw. Their "sweet tea" also lacked... sugar. The food would have left us with a B/B+ rating, but the history of Earl puts it to an A++. Turns out that Earl was Elvis' personal chef and confidant, and was quite proud that Elvis put on 50 pounds while under his tutelage.
• BBQ stop 2: The original Arthur Bryant's in Kansas City. Frankly, pretty mediocre. Was a little sketchy to walk into, and the ambience was such that it should have been a grade A joint. Turns out the ribs were only okay. The sauces, however, left me very confused. The "hot and spicy" sauce was pretty good, while the mild sauce tasted like Old Bay seasoning in a vinegar and tomato solution. Not very good.
  
• The Oklahoma State Capitol is almost worth a trip to Oklahoma City. It's really a gorgeous building, and the actual House Chamber is really stunning (we didn't hit the Senate side, but I assume it was the same). Plus, you can pretty much walk in and go anywhere you want in the building.
  
• Kansas is not as flat as advertised, but impressively empty, even when compared to wildly empty places like Northern Arizona and New Mexico. Its state capitol is way less impressive than Oklahoma's.
  

Photos coming later when my internet connection doesn't suck.

Amarillo

Day 2 found us driving between Flagstaff and Amarillo (660 miles, with side trips); with the exception of Albuquerque there is stunningly little in between. The high desert of Arizona slowly melds into the slightly less high mountains of western New Mexico, which themselves slowly meld into the high, flat plains of Eastern New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle. To be frank, it's stunningly boring. Here are some pictures and stories:

Just outside of Flagstaff* is Meteor Crater. It's an enormous hole in the ground, which as you probably surmised was created by a meteor tens of thousands of years ago. The picture below doesn't really give you a great sense of scale, but you see some stuff at the bottom of the crater? That's a 6 foot tall fence, which is about the same height as my dad. Meteor Crater turned out to be the second and last stop on the "Giant Hole in the Ground" part of the tour.


This is a picture looking back towards Flagstaff taken from the rim of the crater. Yeah, that's 35 miles away. Flagstaff sits about 7000 feet above sea level, and I think the higher of the two peaks here is 11,000. We crested the road between them around 8046 feet on Monday night. In general I think this is my best picture in terms of capturing the enormity of the West.


This is "70s man", just standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. If that doesn't ring a bell, think about the Eagles song "Take it Easy". One and the same. Just to the left is historic Route 66, which is arguably the most disappointing part of the trip so far. There's nothing else to note about Winslow.

We ended up eating lunch at Mr. Powdrell's in Albuquerque. My dad got the pork ribs while I got the beef ribs, figuring we were in a beefy part of the country. Not to foreshadow, but I think this trip will permanently settle the beef vs. pork ribs debate across the entire country. My meal wasn't bad: I liked the sauce, but the meat wasn't fantastic. The ribs were also fatty and stringy. On the other hand, my dad's ribs were really good: very smoky meat, nice balance of meat and fat... very good. The downside is that they were coated in a sauce that would have been better on the side. Overall a B grade for Mr. Powdrell's (ambiance was nice, except we were the only ones in the place at 1:30 pm).

Sticking with the food story line, my last tale from Day 2 deals with The Big Texan. Calling it a restaurant kind of undersells everything it has to offer: restaurant, shooting gallery, motel, stable, trading post... it really earns the name "Steak Ranch." The food was actually pretty bad, but the ambience was A+++. There were cowboys walking around singing. Tons of taxidermy. And, it has a stage where you can sit and try to eat a 72oz steak in 60 minutes. Succeed and you eat free. Fail, and you pay $72 for the steak. Our waitress says that roughly one person tries each day, and only 1 in 10 succeed. Sadly no on tried while we were there.

Day 3 takes us from Amarillo to Columbia, MO via Oklahoma City, Wichita, Topeka, and Kansas City.


* The distance that is associated with "just" can vary, but in the Southwest I think the minimum unit of "just" is 50 miles.

Flagstaff

We made it to Flagstaff today. Picked up my dad a little before 10:00 and immediately hit the road. 105 to the 605 to the 10 to the 15 to the 40 to Williams, AZ. In Williams we took a left turn and went to see the Grand Canyon. All I can say about the Grand Canyon is WOW. I'm not sure how many things in life live up to their hype, but this is one of them. Other than that, not a lot of news to report. It still amazes me how little there is in the West... it was easy to drive 60 miles today without seeing an exit from the highway, and often those exits lead to roads that didn't seem to go anywhere worth going to.

Two photos from today:


This was taken at speed somewhere on I-40 between Ludlow, CA and the California/Arizona borderd. But really it could have been taken anywhere on I-40, which has looked like this for the past 400 miles.



This, obviously, is the Grand Canyon. We got there just a few minutes before sunset, so the colors were very impressive. It was (un) surprisingly cold (you can see some of the snow on the ground). I'm not that talented a writer, so I won't try to put the GC into words. If you haven't been, it's on my highly recommended list.

Road Trip: Seattle - LA - DC

I've made the last couple of posts from my hotel in Redding, CA. I did about 620 miles today, including some "sightseeing" in Salem, OR (a pretty lame state Capitol building). The trip went really smoothly until I hit Weed, CA, when I-5 goes back up into the mountains. It snowed on me for the last 70 miles, and snow/dark/unfamiliar roads is pretty much the trifect of super-stressful driving. But I'm here. Sadly I can't post any of pictures because of my lame hotel internet access.

That said, here's what I can tell about Redding:

• There's a really cool bridge*
• The "city center" has nothing open after 8:00
• Well, it has some things open: a couple of cheap and seedy motels, and a couple of bars that looked way to tough for me.
  
• The "Hill Top" area has every chain business imaginable. It's like they just said "Screw downtown, we're just going to build an entirely new city center about two miles on the other side of the interstate.
• If it weren't night and raining I bet it would be very pretty.
  

On to LA (West Hollywood, to be specific) in the morning.


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My last days in Seattle

Here's the quick synopsis of my last week in Seattle:

Saturday: Golf at Washington National
Sunday: Basketball and sushi
Monday: Work
Tuesday: Golf at Chambers Bay
Wednesday: Lunch at Salumi, errands
Thursday: Golf at Trilogy (missed an 8 foot birdie putt for 79)
Friday: Moving, which was pedestrian, and partying (dinner and drinks with my friends in Seattle.) And in between? This:



What am I thinking leaving this?

Beer

It would be great if I could blog about the recent excellence of Duke Basketball. Coming off of a dominating win over Carolina my Duke friends and I were actually imbued with a confidence that hasn't been present since 2004 when we lost to UConn in the National Semifinal. We killed Maryland and seemed to have a legit shot at running the table in the ACC which we haven't done since the Battier years.

And then the Wake and Miami debacles happened, so I'm not going to talk about basketball.

Anyways, I watched the Wake game at a place in Seattle called Taphouse Grill. They are very proud about their selection of draft beer: over 160 regular taps plus 10 rotating seasonal taps. I decided to order a sampler of porters and stouts (winter time!). I had ordered the four beers that come in the sampler when the waiter informed me they might be out of one or two of my selections, so I should probably name some backups. I named two, and all was well.

Except that he came back and informed me that they could only find three out of the six, and could I pick yet another beer. Surprisingly, they actually had beer #7.

I ran into this same issue when I would go to the Brickskellar in DC: their menu has hundreds, if not thousands, of beers, but their refrigerators usually only have about half what their menu promises. I understand that it is hard to keep some things in stock, but why run your business in such a way that continually disappoints your customers? Why not have a more conservative menu (in the Brickskellar's case, maybe only 400 beers) and always have them. And if there are some rarities sitting around why have your wait staff offer them up as specials? Am I missing something here?

Sometimes you can't even give it away

Craiglist provides a fantastic service: it's free, relatively easy to use, and reaches a much wider audience than many free classified ad services. The problem is that it attracts an absolutely bizarre clientele.

I've been wanting to get a new mattress, and the move provided me with a good excuse to make the switch: rather than shipping my old one back across the country I could get rid of it here and buy new once I'm back East. An 8 year old mattress isn't worth a whole lot, so I posted it on Craigslist as being free for whoever wanted to pick it up. I got a response pretty quickly, and we agreed she would come last weekend.

Nothing.

So I re-posted the ad on Monday figuring that I had just found one of the flakey people who cruise CL. On Tuesday I got an email from the girl apologizing for not checking her messages and telling me she still wanted the mattress. I responded that she needed to come on Wednesday night, and she agreed.

Until Wednesday, when I got a text message (really, her only method of communication) saying she wasn't sure if she could come by. Specifically, she said this:

Hey! I haven't checked messages yet, wast sure if u called! im at a police station now or wld call u bk! how late can I get it?

Now, I'm not an expert, but I think that being at a police station indicates something is "up". Especially when this is the followup message:

I dont know how long i am going to have to be here since i am helping a friend report something. is there any possible way that time tomorrow i cld get it?

Dicey. So I decided to donate the mattress rather than dealing with the CL flakes (probably the most connected flakey population on earth). I called the Salvation Army, and they promised to stop by on Thursday morning. Which they did, only to tell me that my mattress doesn't meet their standards. If you have ever felt ashamed by a piece of furniture try having the Salvation Army tell you that your mattress can't even be given away.

At the end of the day I had to call 1-800-GOT-JUNK, which is a pricey but good service. Unfortunately they do not have employees who understand geometry, and so coaching them on how to get my box spring into the elevator was, to say the least, a chore. At one point they decided to try and break the box spring in half rather than backing out and putting it in the way that it would fit.

After all that I got a text message from police girl asking if it was cool to get the mattress next week. Idiots.

Chambers Bay in detail

In short: sublime. I honestly may not have a better golfing experience.

The crowd sounds are going to be really cool during the Open. The entire course sits in a little bowl (it is, after all, a former gravel pit), with the highest points sitting 100-150 feet above the lowest points. The dunes provide some separation between holes, but there really isn't anything to keep sound from traveling and echoing against the pit walls. When Tiger is pouring in 30 footers on Sunday it's going to be pretty intense.

The course record is 70; I've probably never been within 16 shots of a course record, ever. I can see how the course would get to be unplayable in a hurry. The USGA could set the course up to play anywhere between -4 and +20, especially if the wind blows. I had a four putt (coming off a birdie, too), but I didn't putt into a bunker (Michael did), nor did I miss a putt by 55 yards (Stewart did). I can see pros making the exact same mistake.

I seemed to be one of the few guys with a caddy, even though it was incredibly useful. Most 2nd shots were aimed 20 yards away from where I would have aimed if left to my own devices. I really had to suspend disbelief on a couple of the shots, thinking there was no way I really wanted to hit it where he had me aimed, but sure enough, things always worked out. While I needed the caddy's advice on 18 holes, I really only had about 14 holes of conversation saved up and only 15 holes of patience for some of his advice and telling me why his advice was good. That said, I did enjoy that he thought I should be a 7-8 handicapper with my swing. He wasn't wrong (13/14 fairways, 11/18 greens), except that he hadn't seen me putt yet.

My only regret is that I played the white tees (6000 yards) rather than the Sand tees (6400). Honestly, my score probably would have been the same. I had one six-iron into the green, but I was hitting driver/wedge most of the day, and there were four holes where I didn't even need driver. In general, I drove the ball like a fiend... made some really aggressive carry shots, and I was in the greenside traps on two of the par 5s (took 3 to get out of the first), and birdied the other. I really should have birdied 15... had 8 feet and one of the Scottsman drilled his putt on the exact line.

Everyone should have a chance to be paired with two Scottish guys from Canada. Hilarious, full of good stories. Thought I would split my pants laughing when one of them said "That's crap!" like Mike Myers in So I Married an Axe Murderer. They also had the best name I've heard for a 9: "Fraulein's Rejection" (or Nein, as it were). Also fun to see how they comfortable are putting from anywhere, including 50 yards off the green in swales 50 feet below the green. They had no fear of keeping the ball on the ground the entire way.

Chambers Bay

I'll post my thoughts on Chambers Bay this evening, but here's the short story: There are probably fewer than 5 golf courses in the world that I can expect to play that will be more impressive than Chambers. I shot 86, including a birdie and a four-putt, and I played with two Scottish guys from Vancouver, which should be mandatory at a course like this, just like using a caddy.

I managed to take a bunch of pictures, which can be found here.

How to double the miles on your car in 8 days

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I'll probably trip 5000 miles before I leave town on Saturday. When I roll into DC a week later I should be comfortably over 9000 miles.

Fore!

I get to play this tomorrow.

Part of me is excited like a kid on Christmas Eve. And part of me wonders if I own enough golf balls. And part of me hopes I don't four-jack a green with a caddy looking on.

Not so live blog: Caucus day

Well, the one thing about the iPhone is that it is very conspicuous, so my plans to sit and casually blog about the goings on of my precinct caucus while in my precinct caucus didn't work out so well. I did manage to make a couple of notes:

• There was a huge line to get in. Since no one ever goes to caucuses no one know what district they are in. And since districts are literally the size of one city block pretty much everyone who showed up needed to be directed to the right place. I count myself as one of those people.
• When I finally found the right building there was a long line there too.
• As I was standing in line I wondered: Is it a valid reason to support the candidate who's volunteers are cuter?
• I don't understand the whole "suspended" thing. There were signs everywhere telling people that Edwards' campaign was suspended rather than over. Is there really a difference? I don't know anyone who voted for Edwards, but I know that "Uncommitted" won at least one delegate. Wouldn't it suck to lose to Uncommitted?
• It turned out that we didn't really have a precinct chair. Which, in a caucus, is a ridiculously important job. Primaries are simple: you show up, you vote, you leave. There's a whole process to caucuses that no one understands. Our precinct's solution: find the last person who walked into the room and make them be the chair. The chair's first job: find someone to be the secretary, and then find at least 12 people willing to be our precinct's actual delegates for the county and state nominating conventions.
• My precinct was mostly women, and it kind of struck me that the caucus was turning out to be a fantastic place to find a date: politically like-minded people, cute girls, passionate arguments, etc.
• Sadly, it later turned out that most of these women had brought along boyfriends.
• Our precinct chair also claimed to be some sort of radio host, and interviewed me briefly. I think my insightful, witty comment was something like "No one has any idea what is supposed to happen here today."
• My precinct's initial vote was 50 to 13 to 4 (Obama, Clinton, Uncommitted). Something happened to two of the uncommitteds, and we never saw them again. People then had to move around and stand with their fellow supporters. Each side was given 5 minutes to make their case for their candidate. It was astonishingly like listening to meet Meet the Press: Obama didn't vote for the war, Hillary has more experience, Obama brings in new voters to the fold, yada yada yada. The idea of "caucusing" is a good one, but at the end of the day no one was particularly persuaded by the arguments of the other side.
• The two uncommitteds who we could find both ended up going to the Obama side.
• Perhaps the most bizarre portion of the event was after the voting was done. In what seemed to be a ploy to get people riled up and start donating money willy-nilly the Chair told us that we were supposed to go around the room and discuss what we didn't like about the current administration. This is like asking people to strike matches in a room full of gasoline. Our precinct voted to save time and skip this, since we all generally agreed there weren't any secret Bush supporters who had infiltrated our caucus.

So that's pretty much it. Frankly, I still prefer easy democracy to hard democracy, and the total events of the day took nearly three hours to complete. And I didn't even get a date out of it.

Live blog: caucus day

Whoever invented the robo dialer should be thrown in jail. My phone has been ringing off the hook since before 9:00 this morning. I've only picked up the phone once, and it was a Huckabee call.

In other news the moving company that stood me up yesterday seems to be standing me up again. Needless to say their quote will need to be approximately free if they want to earn my business.

A caucusing we will go

I like democracy. I'm not so sure that we need to start wars to promote democracy in other places, but it seems to work pretty well here. One of the nice things about democracy is that it's relatively easy: I go somewhere, I vote, someone counts it, done. Sometimes I can mail my ballot in, meaning I don't even have to go somewhere.

But not now.

I got a ballot for the Washington state primary in the mail last week. After the relatively even Super Tuesday results I became excited that my vote would actually count. I filled out my ballot and mailed it in.

And then I found that it would count for exactly nothing.

Turns out that Washington state has both a caucus and a primary. And the primary doesn't count, at least not for the Democrats. And it only kind of counts for the Republicans. So rather than being able to choose my parties candidate from the comfort of my own home I now have to spend some time (one hour? three? ten?) on a Saturday to go stand around and caucus.

I haven't yet decided on a caucus strategy. I'm probably just going to stand around and hope that no one bothers me. But I may also decide to pledge my vote to someone stupid, like Mike Gravel, and start yelling at people who think that Hillary or Obama are the better candidate. Gravel: any man who throws a rock into a pond on YouTube can be my president. Or, I may choose to just walk around and scream "Ca-CAW!" like Gob on Arrested Development. You know, caucus. Ca-CAW! That's comedic genius.

Oh yeah

Some of you may have heard through the grapevine, but it's finally official:

I'm leaving Seattle. Got a cool job at a startup company in DC. Will be moving back East in a couple of weeks. Details to follow.

The iPhone

It's here. I hesitated after it first came out, thinking that there might be bugs or glitches or new features that would be added. But the yearning and desire? It never went away. I need the iPhone. And so today?

I bought it.

It's gorgeous. It must be so easy to use that Apple doesn't even bother putting instructions in the box. Just the phone, a dock, a charger, and some headphones. Lovely.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to use the phone yet, despite having owned it for nearly 10 hours now. It would seem the activation process doesn't quite work. I first ran into problems when I tried to transfer my number. It would seem that I can't transfer my 703 number to a Seattle billing address. So I had to set up my billing address as my parents. First hurdle cleared.

I continued through the process and got to the final screen. No dice. It would seem that there was an issue on my credit report. This isn't a surprise: I put a bunch of fraud blocks on my credit reports after I got robbed. This makes it impossible for anyone to pull my credit without my explicit permission. Well, the iPhone activation process doesn't take this into account, so I had to drive back down to the AT&T store to get approved in person. Sweet. Way to improve the AT&T experience.

After getting the necessary codes I took a six hour break to watch the Super Bowl and have some fried turkey. Got home expecting to finish up the activation and start playing with my phone.

No dice.

Despite have the right credit activation code, and all the other information, I got forced into a manual queue. And so now I wait. I've got nothing. The iPhone just stares at me, wanting to do something cool. It mocks. It laughs at me. The hours pass by. The hole in my heart gets bigger.

Come to me iPhone. Please.

My favorite Christmas present

It's tough to rank Christmas presents, because they are all wonderful in their own way. But I would say the best thing I got this year is my laser rangefinder. Ostensibly it is for the golf course (it's actually called "The Pinseeker"), but since it's been too cold to play golf this year I've had to find alternative uses. Which means "stand out on my balcony and measure the distance to things." Here's what I've discovered:



The boat's mast is 576 yards away. Even down hill it's a 3-shot par five. The edge of the water on the left side of the photo is 408 yards.

The red brick apartment in the dead center of the photo is 266 yards. The yellow apartment to the left of center is 607 yards. The apartment building in the foreground is 62 yards. The Space Needle? I thought that would be just a touch out of range... but it's just at the edge. 1332 yards. Just over 3/4 miles away.

More blogs on the way

Here at West Roy headquarters we had a pretty significant technology upgrade in the past couple of days. I managed to install some new RAM and a new hard drive in my laptop. Amazingly nothing broke, although I did need to take the machine apart an extra time because only about 1/3 of my keyboard worked after the first reassembly.

Anyways, with that out of the way I should be able to get back on the blog train. There will certainly be some interesting things to write about in the coming days.