The Great American Road Trip, Version 1

Yes, I know it's six months away - well, 5 1/2 at this point - but one does not do such trips overnight. It takes a lot of planning to hit the road and wander.

What I've settled on right now is figuring I have 6 weeks - so 6 destinations would be good, spending more time in each one and driving hard in between.

Week 1: Glacier National Park, Montana
Week 2: Minnesota/Wisconsin with relations
Week 3: New England
Week 4: Tennesee/Great Smokies
Week 5... uh, unfortunately, distances catch up with me here. Transit between Nashville and Crescent City, CA
Week 6: Redwoods/Northern California coast

It looks like I can pull it off. There's a question of timing... there's an event in St. Louis on October 23rd I'd like to make... and then I'm trying to line up with Krista's wedding. Hmm. Something always has to give...the later I go, the more potentially treacherous my northern route would be. I'm on alert for weather-related disasters at any rate... those happen year-round now.

In other news, I had a really lovely weekend. Friday night I did work - but fun work - Saturday I went with friends for a movie and pizza, the most normal of all activities, and then today I went for a walk around the neighborhood, did more work, and yanked ivy. There's something very therapeutic about beating back invasive species. I think I am also helped that the steri-strips are OFF and I look fairly normal again. Just in time for radiation. To borrow from Jill - there's a long way to climb, but I am good at climbing.

Cheers!

Welcome to Spring

Forgive my confusion... it *is* March 26th, right?

Today long about 6 p.m.... it's still coming down. I've got solid 1-2 inches at the moment, depending on how far out from under the trees you are. Ah, spring... snow?!

"the stakes couldn't be higher"

On a slightly less serious note...

My station of choice here in Seattle is the Mountain, 103.7 f.m. Their morning and afternoon DJs have both been on the air for 10ish years - same station, no less - and I've been listening at least that long, so there's way too much history there.

Their morning DJ is a guy named Marty Reimer, who has the minor historical distinction of being the DJ (not the police or the paramedics, mind you) the electrician called when he found Kurt Cobain dead. Be that as it may, he's pretty irreverant and funny. He and his new morning partner, Jodi, hatched a deal where anytime they are interviewing to someone on the air - usually politicos - and they say some variation on the "the stakes couldn't be higher" - someone wins a $25 steakhouse certificate. I swear, right after they made up this contest - first person they had on the air (which was a rep from the Clinton campaign), lo and behold she says, "the stakes couldn't be higher." Both Marty and Jodi had to work hard not to lose it.

This reminds me of something we would do in college: play professor baseball. Everyone has their stock phrases, so we would assign them as singles, doubles, triples, home runs... even outs. Your half-inning was either class, or three outs, whichever came first. Laugh if you will, but it made you pay attention far more than you normally would...and a good way to keep in touch with your friends in other classes. :) Nowadays, we could have texted scores to one another.

Ah, it's good to have some fun messing with those who think we're taking them seriously.

*Update on March 31*: today they played a clip from the Kansas coach about going to the Final Four and he said, "it's great to be playing for the highest of stakes!" Ding ding ding, you win! Brilliant.

A lot to talk about

It's a cliche - what isn't - but sometimes life comes at you in waves. Most of the people that I would share this link with already know, but in mid-January it was discovered that I had some cancerous calcifications in my breast. There was a lot of good news in the bad news: the MRI was clear, the gene test came back negative (phew) and the cancer is called "DCIS" (ductal carcinoma in situ) which means that it is trapped in the ducts and you don't have to worry about it spreading elsewhere in your body. But that all took a while to ferret out and I'm 36 and my mother was in Hawaii with my sister who had horrible high blood pressure with her pregnancy and I couldn't tell them til after the baby was born.

The baby is wonderful, Kanoa James, born February 11. He's physically healthy. He also has down's syndrome. I'm not there, and from my perspective, this is probably the easiest time: all babies eat, sleep, cry, repeat. He's no different, although he's a lot quieter than his sister Mahina (but hey, she was the opposite end of the spectrum). The fact that he IS physically healthy is a really good sign: and the rest of it we just take as it comes.

This past Monday - three days ago - I went in for the surgery to take out the calcifications. Boy, will I have a great scar from this. Honestly, it wasn't that bad, but there's still a part of you that wants to howl. (and I want to smack the lady that did the IV. Damn that hurt.) I feel fine, and never needed pain pills... not that I ever anticipated this, but I certainly didn't anticipate need to start tinkering with my body this early. It's always been so beautiful and so whole. It's definitely a mind-altering circumstance.

Which leads me to the "life is short" sermon that we all come upon at points in our life. Life is short, and you better do what you want NOW because you never know when you'll no longer have the opportunity to. My own father was probably 3 years away from retiring and doing what he wanted... and he got cancer. Work your ass off, die young. That's not the way it should work.

And it leads me to consider my work/life balance, as we're so fond of talking about at REI. Everyone is so dedicated and has so much integrity and is so pure and we (generally) buy in to the work hard/play hard concept. Don't get me wrong, I love REI, and the last thing I'd want to do at any forseeable point is leave the company. But last year was a hellish year in terms of workload, and while this year seems to be manageable, it's mainly from having had some major budget cuts. So if next year is good - what happens? I'm not really interested in being more productive. I already do a great deal more work than most people can manage in the same time period and furthermore I think I'm pretty maxed in that direction. It's not like if I do my work quicker I get to go home: I just get more work. I already feel like I'm more valuable than my pay acknowledges (though in total REI offers a great package)... I don't really need to put the scale any more in that direction.

Which leads me finally to the Great American Road Trip. Six weeks: 47 days, actually (if you count the first weekend). Start with the Bike MS ride; take off from there. Six weeks is not long enough, but about as much as I can manage. Which leads to lots of trade-offs, but I think the first one is this: is it about the journey, or the destination? I've taken some cracks at where to go and what to do. I'm placing a priority on the NE and the "upper" south (tennessee) as places I haven't seen and where friends and family live I'd like to visit. I first looked at driving less on more days, and then at driving more on fewer days. Tonight I looked at Road Trip USA, and thought about roads. Do I take the slow road and make it about the journey? Do I just head out and see how far I get? Or do I try to plan it and aim for the experiences I want to have, taking as many highways as I can to get there faster?

If you read my last post, the experience was profound, and if one is going to do the Great American Road Trip, you should definitely endeavor to learn something about your fellow americans. Even before all of the above hit, I had a strong desire to spend this year domestically: weak (and getting weaker) dollar; less emissions than, say, traveling to New Zealand; less expensive to have your car and be able to leverage friends and family and campgrounds to make it affordable. And in this era of decline of so many things, how much longer will we be able to see them all? Even if we miraculously figure it all out - as I said - life is short. Who knows how much longer I'll be able to do it? It should be a long time. But one does not know that. Not to mention it has been a long time since I explored America. Most of my U.S. vacations happened when I was in my teens. Ouch!

I've been checking out a lot of wanderlust: these folks biked all over the world. I liked what she said: "50 miles a day isn't much if that's all you're doing." Which makes me think it's about the journey: which makes me think, take it as it comes and see where you get and take the slow road. Hwy 2 on the way there; down the appalachian trail; and across hwy 50 coming back. Can I do that in six weeks? I don't know. But I thinking learning something about myself as well as my country is on the agenda and I think the lack of destination would be good for me.

Thoughts/possible itineraries welcome.... even drop-in companions for a bit along the route. Great American Road Trips really should have sidekicks, you know.

Finding the friend in the stranger

I spent the weekend with 8 teenagers - 1 guy, 7 girls, and one other male adult. This was part of the Unitarian annual general meeting... I wouldn't normally go, but I was asked to help with the youth, and in the end, I'm really glad I did. The theme of the weekend was "Blessing the World". We had talked about how we could do this, and came up with a social witness activity of going out around Tacoma and meeting people we didn't know. We went out in pairs, and generally hit some of the same locations, but we did manage to stay by ourselves the whole time.

It was quite an interesting exercise, really observing how people are behaving today. Most everyone was polite and responded. It was a little harder to get beyond that into an actual conversation: sometimes we managed, sometimes we didn't. We had 3 or 4 pretty good conversations. The most interesting was with a guy who was probably early 20s, had a speech impediment, and is a comedian. He told us a joke, and it was about having a speech impediment and having to get on the short bus to school. If he can laugh at himself, so can we. He was funny.

Yet it was impressive, too, how many people really are closed off to seeing those around them. Even if we didn't talk to people - I was out with the amazing Keira from Woodinville, who did a great job - we smiled and said hi. For that, many people looked right past you or did not return the greeting, or even smile back. And then there were a lot of folks who either were busy texting or listening to music and clearly walled off from interacting. Sometimes we talked to them anyway... but it was much harder to break through there.

Something Keira did that was hilarious was at the Museum of Glass. These guys were taking a picture of their friend in front of the museum of glass. So Keira stood 30 ft. back in the background of the photo striking muscle poses. Someday, the person will look at that photo and go, "What is that girl doing?" and it will be hilarious.

This led to the youth creating a service for later that was about "finding the friend in the stranger" and ended with the youth using the line, "there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet." It was a fabulously successful service, I thought. (Yeah yeah, I helped create it.) We had people share interactions with strangers they had, both successful and unsuccessful. The funniest was a guy who talked about going on a rafting trip in Utah with several Mormons, and how after a day they started talking and realized they share a lot of the same values: "Neither of us wanted our kids to be promiscuous or do drugs! Oh wow!" We were howling. How many parents do you know who want their kids to be promiscuous or do drugs???

We did a spiral dance, too, where as people went past one another, we asked them to look people in the eye, and smile; and if they wanted to, to say something affirming to others. I was amazed at how many people failed to look me in the eye. It's a tough thing to maintain.

I realized some new things from this weekend... one, how much we all have crawled into ourselves. Two, that most people are lovely, and those who aren't, are polite. Three, that often those on the margins are the neatest people to talk to.... the guy with the speech impediment, a guy holding the sign for new homes, a woman with a walker. Two of our youth were out with a Free Hugs sign, and their favorite was a homeless guy. And finally, there's a lot of people out there I want to meet and I don't know who they are yet. It was a great restorative weekend for feeling good about people.

I work with youth not so much to stay young, but to remember what it's like to really learn and grow and to challenge my own boundaries... to stay more open to others, to know there is more to be done and challenges to tackle. And maybe, just maybe, to get a little bit of their energy rubbing off on me.