The New Trip Pics Are Up! The New Trip Pics Are Up!

That's right, the pictures from last month's trip across the country's heartland are up already on my Picasa site.

Click HERE to see if there are any worth looking at.

Before I Forget...

Next weekend marks the start of the Most Important Sporting Competition In The Whole World, possibly excepting the World Cup: the English Premier League. Every year I predict who will finish where, and every year I forget what my prediction was. (My predictions are, apparently, eminently forgettable.) So this year, I'm writing it down. Here:

1. Arsenal
    Yes, things will finally come together for the Gunners, and things will fall apart for their main rivals.

2. Man Utd
    Close, but no cigar.

3. Chelsea
    The wife's favourite team will have more than its share of problems, and their manager's verbal antics will lose a lot of their ability to distract.

4. City
    They'll just barely squeak into the last UCL position, after another tumultuous season of melodrama on the sideline.

5. Spurs
    Sure, why not?

6. Liverpool
    My favourite team has really not inspired me to believe they can get back into Europe. Their signings, as much as their inability to retain the top people they've had (Suarez, Sterling...) reflect their diminishing status in the world of European football.

7. Saints
    And this time, they won't start off surprisingly high in the standings and then fade; they'll just putter along slightly above mid-table.

8. who cares?

Winnipeg? Winnipeg!

When the ethically-challenged governing body of soccer in the world announced that the United States team would play its first two games of the Women's World Cup in Winnipeg, my first reaction was that I would stay home and watch it on television. After all, I mean... Winnipeg? Jeez!

Then, of course, after a couple of seconds and only the whisper of a breath of a hint of serious reconsideration, I thought, Oh, well, Winnipeg. Okay. A week or so there can't be any worse than three days in Waco, which I have done, and survived (and did so without a car; at least in Winnipeg I'd have a car).

Polar bears all
over the place

Turns out, Winnipeg is a pretty good place to spend about a week. Probably could manage a second week there if there was a reason. It's actually a nice, clean, thriving city, with hints of culture both high and popular, and reasonably friendly people. If I had to live somewhere outside of Texas, Winnipeg wouldn't be too bad a choice. Plus, having booked the week through ProActive Soccer Tours, the same outfit that we used for the 2011 cup trip to Germany, ensured that we'd be in the hands of people who had actually researched the town and picked out interesting things to see & do. Kudos to them.

Of course it suffers from chronic vague post-modern guilt, and points too resolutely and too desperately at its glitzy new-age museum and purportedly francophone area as a result, but underneath it's a collection of some 800,000 souls going about their business. Like Austin, without the internalized stress.

Anyway, been there, done that, and the pictures are up on the Picasa web site. Take a look if you're interested. You can click on the bear, or here.

I Licked the Bowl.

Le Garage Café
166 Boulevard Provencher
St-Boniface, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Looking for une aventure française in St-Boniface, the French-speaking area of Winnipeg, this is the place we ended up when it turned out our first choice closes early, our second choice turned out to be Japanese, and our third (considered only briefly, and only because It Was There) was Chinese. In all honesty, there was nothing particularly French about this place, beyond some distracted obeisances on the menu, and the definite article introducing the name of the place.

Inside is a counter, and an aisle lined with a few tables leading to a larger, darker room that doubles as an intriguing live-music venue and giant-screen TV auditorium. Our server delivered three menus each, one being a drinks list. He ran down an enticing list of daily specials, brought our drinks, and took our order: the pasta of the day, and a pulled pork mac-&-cheese.

I can't exaggerate this: these were both truly delicious dishes. The pasta was penne in a wine sauce with chicken that was OHHH so good. Seasoned with basil and cooked with tomatoes and, I would say, a little cream, the chunks and shreds of chicken distributed throughout were relegated to providing texture, in a departure from meat's normal starring role. Yet the chicken performed admirably in a supporting role where the sauce is the breakout star.

And the mac and cheese. If there is a better way to prepare macaroni and cheese than to put it in a crock with cream and pulled pork with a slightly-sweet barbecue sauce, and to cover it with a slab of cheddar cheese, and heat it until the cheese infuses the dish, I can't begin to imagine it. I would not have thought a humble collection of ingredients like this could produce such awesome flavour. I confess that the headline of this post is almost literally true. I didn't actually lick the bowl; I did, though, run my finger along the inside, and then lick that. Many times. And I would do it again, since I'm in a town where nobody knows me, and I don't have to behave like a mature adult, as I do when at home.

The service was excellent, from both servers on duty.
The place is done in a simple, unaffected way, going (successfully) for a cool-place-to-hang vibe; the atmosphere was marred only by a giant television playing an NBA Championship game. (Had it been the Women's World Cup I'd be willing to overlook it.) And the prices were about what you'd expect in town, and very reasonable for what you get.

 

An Unexpected Bonus

So we've been a few days in Colorado, visiting our peoples along the Front Range, and our daily plan goes like this: What are we going to do today? And then like this:    .

So, feeling a little restive, I decided I would strike out toward the east and visit a few of the less interesting counties in the country; specifically, two of the five counties in Colorado that I haven't already been to. And then, since I'll be out that way and already bored, I'll go up into Nebraska and travel through three of the remaining counties in the western part of that state, before stopping off in Cheyenne to visit the grave of someone who was, in life, very important to me.

My wife decided to come along. So we drive over to Yuma county and up to Sedgwick county, and into Nebraska, to Garden county. Then we turn left along the North Platte River, planning to head west to the next two counties, then to Cheyenne.

So there's a "police emergency" on the road, and we have to detour along a couple of mud roads (they've had way more rain than usual out this way lately), then up a paved road, across the railroad tracks, back to the road we were on.

What we hadn't realized was, the paved road we took at the end of that detour was the road we'd planned to turn onto going the other way. Of course, there was no sign at the mud road's end, so we didn't realize that until we came to a sign that said "Chimney Rock, 12 miles."

At that point we checked the map and learned that we were off course. But (1) travelling in this casual fashion means every intersection is an opportunity to change plans; and (B) the general rule of thumb, only recently articulated but long in effect, is that if you are close enough to see a sign like that, you're close enough to go see it. So we went to see Chimney Rock.

I've known for decades that Chimney Rock is a locally important landmark, and that it had something to do with the Pioneers. That's about it. Now I've seen it, and understand why it's an important place in our National story. Out there on the treeless plains of this continent, there are very, very few reference points; and very few Conestoga wagons were equipped with GPS. And this was all before cellphones, you know. So having a distinctive and easily visible landmark would have been very important to those folks trudging the plains alongside their oxen. And this is, certainly, distinctive.

There's nothing else out there that it might be confused with.

So that brought a little interest to this county-counting drive that I'd expected to be barely a distraction.

Then, in order to get back on course for that last county in western Nebraska, we had to go up the road a piece --- not very far --- to Gering. And there, on the far side of Gering, was Scotts Bluff. Not the town of Scott's Bluff, which I'd been to 30 years before (by accident), but the National Monument. Well. Who, in their right mind (a classification which, I like to kid myself, includes me), would pass within three miles of even the most meaningless National Monument and not at least get a stamp for the ol' National Parks Passport?

Scott's Bluff, it turns out, is big and beautiful and interesting, and all of you should go. It's actually two bluffs, separated by Mitchell Pass. There's a nice road that takes you up to the summit on the northeastern side, where you can walk the easy paved trails and soak up an appreciation of what travelling was like for those people who settled this country. Well worth the $5 car permit fee.

Mitchell Pass, between Sentinel Rock and Eagle (?) Rock

The Coming Thing? I Hope Not

Elsewhere, NY


I've heard it said that the technological advances in hand-held digital video recording will lead to a flurry of low-budget theatrical releases done in that way. Elsewhere, NY, seen last night at Houston's Worldfest International Film Festival, is, I think, an example of that method.

It results in a good movie ruined.  An interesting story of casual everyday betrayal, with superior writing by Tom Wilton, solid, well-crafted performances by the four principal actors (especially Andrew Ruth, who plays Todd --- which I probably liked best because, it turns out, he's from Austin), and of course the vibrant youth culture of 21st-Century Brooklyn combine to give this film great potential.

Wilton's script is filled with the sort of gratuitous profanity that many real-life 20-somethings mistake for sophistication. Even at three decades' remove, I can remember that feeling. What is noteworthy in the movie's use of coarse language is that it avoids reaching the point of gratuity: it is a natural, organic part of the world these people live in. It calls attention to itself, but quickly loses the power to shock or offend.

Jennifer arrives in New York; we see her first at Grand Central, expecting perhaps to be met, but finding no one there. She comes across as a small-town girl lost in the Big City, with all the prospect for disaster that such a situation evokes. (She's coming from Boston, she says, though apparently she learned little about city living there.) She must make her way to a friend's place in Brooklyn, but again, no one is there. She passes the time waiting in a bar, where she meets Todd and has an exuberant one-night stand with him before she at last meets up with her irresponsible and inconsiderate host, Christine. Jump ahead two years, and Jennifer has apparently fallen into a comfortable if not passionate relationship with Ethan. When Ethan's roommate moves out, he takes in a replacement ... who turns out to be Todd. At this point, the groundwork is well laid for the central tension of the movie.

I've often marvelled at the ability of good scriptwriters to sketch out the parameters of relationships with a few carefully crafted scenes and a few well-honed lines of dialog. For all the sketching and crafting in this movie, only fifteen or twenty minutes are needed. This seems to me to be a mark of admirable judiciousness, as in that time the three principal characters --- Christine is but a sidelight -- become fully fleshed out. But the impressiveness of it is almost lost in the mindnumbing camera work. Faces blur and fade in and out, as though only a poorly-designed knock-off digital camera is judging distances. Images shake side to side, and up and down, as if the technician holding the camera is coughing or giggling, or maybe just zoning out. Two or three minutes of this on America's Funniest Home Videos is watchable; 88 minutes of it on the big screen is barely endurable.

Add to the mix the questionable sound-editing choices made. I admit to making the assumption that the sounds we hear result from choices, and not simply the default mode of taking whatever the microphone happened to pick up and slapping it on the DVD as a finished product. Street noise, wind noise, jet engines passing overhead; all threaten to overwhelm the dialog in the exterior scenes, while interior scenes are cluttered with background conversation, interminable snatches of music (some of it good), and what sounds like the faint thrum of chain saws in adjoining apartments.

Despite the sound and visuals, the movie is a well-conceived work that, unfortunately, comes across more as a film-school project than a theater-worthy production. If that does turnout to be the future of movie making, I will be glad to stay home and watch snippets on You-Tube.

Sweden In Pop Culture

Despite having seen the incredibly dreary television series Wallender, with Kenneth Branagh, and the movie made from the book The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (plus another television program that I don't remember the name of, but that involved typically violent sexual abuse and now-elderly Nazi sympathizers), I took up the recommendation of a good friend and read The Hypnotist, by Lars Kepler.

Based on these sources, I can confidently report that Sweden is a cold, dark country populated almost exclusively by depressed drug addicts, depressed alcoholics, depressed former drug addicts, depressed unmitigated perverts of every stripe, and depressed police officers with failed or failing marriages. This general population is divided between the honourable poor, who are depressed, and a smaller group of sleazy and thoroughly dishonourable middle-class people, who are probably depressed when not torturing their fellow Swedes with their extreme behaviour. There is, perhaps, a scattering of glitterati who spend much time abroad to avoid being depressed, returning home only to indulge in their many and varied perverse passions.

Being a Texan, I know just how accurate these sorts of generalizations about a place often are.

Old Pictures Posted

If you're interested (and why would you be?):

Over the last few months I've been puttering with my scanner, mostly digitizing old photo prints, & have posted some of the better ones to Picasa albums.

I've added some pictures, new and old, to the South Texas album












Pictures from the PCB Tour through England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria & Italy in 1984 are up

A few pictures from the 1991 trip to Mexico ...











and from the 1994 trip to Mexico

and just a few from the 1999 trip to California to see the USA win the women's World Cup











Most of the photos from our three-week tour of southern Germany are glued into a photo album, but I managed to find a few loose that I could run through the scanner. You'll find them here.

Some pictures from various trips taken in 2006 are up now.

So are a few from our first trip to Yellowstone & Grand Teton, in 2005.












There may be others; I don't really remember which ones I've posted in the last few months & which have been around a long time. Feel free to look around at all my albums.

Homer, Gone to Doggie Heaven

February 14, 2000 - October 22, 2014

Something Really Good

When I was, oh, probably 16 or 17 years old, I was faced with the prospect of a very long bus ride. It occurred to me, in that era before portable music, that I might want something to read on a trip that, I'm pretty sure, must have taken more than a day, with middle-of-the-night stops in places like Tahlequah, Oklahoma; and not having the foresight of my later years, I spent a few hurried minutes browsing through the revolving wire paperback book rack in the Kansas City bus station. From the sparse offerings, I chose something called The Scarlatti Inheritance, by a writer I had never heard of named Robert Ludlum. I chose that book, I suspect, as much because of the bright red cover and the Italian reference, as for any other reason; to that point I had never read anything more adult that Fred Gipson's Savage Sam (a very good book, by the way, for 'tweener boys).

I was enough taken with Ludlum's book that, over the course of perhaps the next two years, I read everything he had written to that point. Then I found, almost by accident, that he wasn't the only person in the world who wrote exciting spy stories; and when I discovered Frederick Forsythe, I learned that Ludlum wasn't even the great writer of the genre. Day of the Jackal and The Dogs of War had so much more texture than any good story from Ludlum that I developed a sort of snobbish disdain for Ludlum's mere works: diverting, perhaps, but nothing like literature.  And then I encountered Tom Clancy -- his early works, before he started taking on all kinds of generally less capable writing partners. (Everyone is less capable than Clancy.)

And then, suddenly, I ran out of exciting international spy stories to read. Oh, a few people wrote some good stuff: Ken Follette was okay sometimes, not so good other times; but his historical sagas are much better entertainment. Some of Clancy's more recent collaborations are entertaining and reasonably well written. But books by Vince Flynn and David Baldacci and Daniel Silva, popular though they may be, are relatively insipid and thin; they are to spy novels what Disco was to music. Every time I hear about a writer of books of this type, I check it out, snob though I am, because I love the ripping yarns. But I'm generally disappointed. Most of the books of this genre seem to have been written on a deadline, by people who can barely write for a newspaper. They are the reason God created public libraries, where you can avoid wasting money on books that utterly fail to live up to the blurbs.

The other day, I picked up a book at the library called Dead Eye, by a writer I'd never heard of called Mark Greaney. (He may be the only published writer without a Wikipedia entry. He is, even more surprisingly, one of those "generally less capable writing partners" of Tom Clancy.) This book has turned out to be a truly exciting, engrossing story, written with great texture and sufficient detail to really satisfy the lust for (presumed) authenticity. (If he could resist the urge -- his own, or more likely his editors' -- to state the obvious in melodromatic one-sentence paragraphs, he'd be close to excellence. In any case, he offends far less often than Flynn, Baldacci or Silva.) The character development is succinct and effective; the plots are convoluted but nicely drawn, no action or turn of plot requires some character to do something out of character, and there is no hoary reliance on deus ex machina. The story is coherent, the dialogue sounds real in your head, and the action is gripping.  Greaney is a new writer of spy thrillers that I can whole-heartedly recommend. I just hope his production can keep up with my appetite.

[His other books, to this point, are The Gray Man, On Target, and Ballistic. I expect to buy and read all of them pretty soon. I'll probably even consider the three books he co-wrote with Tom Clancy.]

Leicester City 3
Manchester United 3
Man with Whistle 2

"an eccentric performance" by England's top referee.

I'm just glad he wasn't in charge of the Liverpool match.

End of the End of the Road

 (continued from previous post)

 

for maximum coherence, read all the posts from this trip in order, starting with THIS ONE.

There is a reason why they call it "The Grand Canyon":

We arrived at the North Rim on a foggy, drizzly morning, and even in those conditions it was a magnificent spectacle. It was too early to check into the lodge, so we drove up the road to the few viewpoints accessible by car: Imperial Point, Roosevelt Point, Cape Final, Vista Encantada. We stared off into the distance, as the fog rose and fell, toward hoodoos and mesas and great piles of eroded rocks, things with romantic names like Jupiter's Temple and Freya Castle, and we were amazed.

 Eventually the fog lifted, and we were amazed again. Words fail me.

The Colorado River used to run red. Since the dams built across it above the Canyon, it's now a mundane shade of greenish-brown for most of the year.

While we were there, we took a hike along the Widforss Trail, which goes west from the road along the rim of the canyon to join with another trail near an overlook at the top end of Transept Canyon.

This formation is called a "temple."

Transept Canyon

When the fog lifted

To see the rest of the pictures from the Canyon, click here.

Beginning of the End of the Road

What that means

Our last day in the condo in Birch Bay was a quiet one; I went up into the town, such as it is, to have lunch with the Church Lady and the Perfesser (Buttermilk didn't want to go). We picked a place called CJ's Beach House, with a deck overlooking the bay; we chose it just because of that deck, and because, well, there aren't a whole lot of options in the little shoreline community of Birch Bay. As it happened, the place wasn't bad. The food was good with the exception of the shrimp used to top the seafood salad; they were small, cold, limp cocktail shrimp, so if I were to ever go back I'd order something else. But the service was very good and the ambience, featuring the bay across the road (with almost no traffic), was superior.

After that, we went back and fetched Buttermilk and forced her to indulge in some ice cream from the C-Store in town, then dragged her up to the little miniature golf place for a round. (I won't mention who won; I've already taken all the bows I'm going to take.)

In the evening, the Perfesser mentioned that he wanted to try something called a "poutine," which we had seen on menus in a number of places. It was described as french fries covered with sausage gravy, and he thought, repulsive as that sounded, that we ought to at least try it. After all, we wouldn't go to Delaware and not try scrapple, would we? We recalled, perhaps incorrectly, that Bob's Burgers & Brew in Ferndale had had it on their menu, so we went to the Bob's location in Birch Bay ... which didn't have it. Not only did they not offer it, the hostess wasn't entirely sure what it was. "Is that that Canadian thing with the gravy? Yeah, we don't have that." Ah, well, so we have at least one thing in Canada to look forward to besides the 2015 Women's World Cup.

What that means

(The Birch Bay location of Bob's Burgers & Brew was nothing special: I opted for a New York steak, which was a mediocre cut served slightly overcooked and, all things considered, slightly overpriced by local standards, and, it naturally follows, grossly offensive to the sense of value honed in south Texas.)

Then it was back to the condo for a last round of margaritas.

Morning comes, and off we go. On the way down to Sea-Tac, we stopped off at Burlington in response to the powerful and ineluctable call of Lafeen's Donuts. This time, it looked like hundreds of people had read and believed my previous post, as the display cases were stripped nearly bare. I could not, therefore, get an exquisitely light French cruller, nor a thick, fruity apple fritter; but had to settle, regrette rien, for a chocolate-dipped old fashioned doughnut and a blueberry fritter. (It's been almost a week and writing this makes me think of contacting them to enquire about a care package.)

Then it was down to the long-term parking where I'd stored my little convertible during the Group Tour. A quick goodbye to Church Lady and the Perfesser (because by now the rental charges on the anemic Rogue were accruing hourly), then throw our stuff in the Roller Skate, and we're off for home, the long way.

The first order of business was lunch, which we had at Las Palmas, a Salvadoran restaurant just down the street from the parking lot, where I had eaten a pretty good breakfast two Sundays before. Salvadoran food is similar in many ways to Mexican food, of course, but with a tropical twist that makes it identifiably different, certainly from the Tex-Mex variety that's so common in my home town, and from the more exotic varieties that are available in many places in south Texas. My own experience with Salvadoran restaurants back home is limited -- I can only think of two that I've been to, though I've been also to Honduran and Costa Rican restaurants, which I think are indistinguishable in any meaningful way from Salvadoran cuisine.

What that means

Our lunch wasn't quite as good as that breakfast, but it wasn't bad. I had a spinach papusa and a papusa revuelta (if memory serves): beans, beef and cheese on a thick, pillowy tortilla. Both were ordinary-good, neither was exceptional in any way. Overall the place was good enough to recommend but not good enough to recommend heartily ... except that it was cheap. And when I compare the prices I've seen around Seattle to the prices I'm used to around San Antonio, I think Las Palmas is an excellent place for lunch.

N.B.: Las Palmas appears now to be out of business (2020).

By the time we got to the freeway after lunch, we had discerned that the air-conditioning in the car wasn't working. That's not a big deal, I suppose, in Seattle, even in August, but we had six days in the desert southwest ahead of us. In fact, the drive across eastern Washington was looking like it would be hellish. But first, we decided on a stop at Snoqualmie Falls, it being a beautifully clear day, and much cooler up in the mountains.

After all the build-up to Snoqualmie Falls -- it was on the list of Things To See four years ago, and again two weekends before, and I never managed to get up there -- you would think a curmudgeon like me would have been disappointed. I wasn't. It is a beautiful waterfall, in a nice setting, with a pleasant lodge above it and not really all that many people for a magnificent summer Friday near a big city. In fact, I wish it had been another day, when I didn't have to get back in the car and head on down the road. It would've been real nice to have spent more time there.

We drove, top down, across eastern Washington. Boy, was that a mistake. Generally, my rule is this: if it's not raining, the top will be down if the temperature is more than 70 and less than 94; between 55 and 70, and between 94 and 97, it depends on other factors; but at 55 or less, and 97 or more, the top will be up. But then, I usually have air conditioning. Not this time, so I left the top down even though it got to 103, and nary a cloud in the sky. (Some smoke from the continuing wildfires, but that hardly qualifies as the silver lining in that particular cloud.)  So when we pulled into Baker City, Oregon, we were a little crispy around the edges. (After that, no matter the temperature, if the sun was up, so was the top.)

Baker City is a charming little community in eastern Oregon, once a stop on the Oregon Trail, later

Geiser Grand Hotel

(and still) a center for local agriculture. In the 1880s, it was prosperous enough to have a landmark hotel, the Geiser Grand, which was renovated about 20 years ago and returned to its former glory. I don't usually stay in such luxury, being too cheap to throw much money at a place to be unconscious; but every now and then I like to splurge, and in all honesty it wasn't really that much -- about what you'd expect to pay in a Hilton Garden Inn (which I'd never stay in, given a choice) or a Marriott. For the price we got an elegant room with a king-sized bed, a 14-foot ceiling and huge bathroom. The kind of hotel where they have embroidered bathrobes hanging there for your use. Not quite the Plaza, but beats the hell out of any Hilton Garden Inn.  Outstanding service, too, except in the bar.

twilight in Baker City

It was just coming sunset when we arrived, and it was First Friday, when this surprisingly arty little town has its monthly gallery walk. There were rumblings of distant thunder and not many people on the streets, but the several galleries in the town's Historical District around our hotel had a number of patrons in them, and enough interesting artworks visible through large windows that I would have been happy to browse among for a few hours -- but it was already pretty late and we were hot and tired and in need of a drink, so we passed on all the galleries and just strolled down to the one tall building in town, around that block to the courthouse, and back to the hotel bar. Then we retired to our room and slept the sleep of the exhausted cattle baron.

compare this to May 2013

We had no specific plans for the next day, except to get to Panguitch, Utah, so as to be within striking distance of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. That didn't stop us, though, from taking time to see Shoshone Falls, in Twin Falls, Idaho. I had been there a year ago on the Western Circuit (an excellent trip that, I'm surprised to discover, I wrote nothing about; though I posted lots of pictures), and was as impressed as any yokel by the massive amount of water cascading over the cliff. That was in May, though; in August, it's not quite the same experience. Still nice, pretty, unexpected in such a desert, but not awesome.

There aren't a whole lot of towns in Utah south of Salt Lake, but Panguitch, a town I stayed in with a friend a couple of years ago, is a pleasant little town with almost all the motels in Southern Utah (it being 20 miles from Bryce Canyon and close also to Zion National Park, Cedar Breaks, Grand Staircase-Escalante, Capitol Reef, and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon). It also has at least one good restaurant, the Cowboy's Smoke House. (Don't get the brisket; it was dry two years ago and is still dry, but the sausage is very good and the pulled pork is outstanding. So is the service. The prices are reasonable but they only take cash. They're open, and packed, until 10.)

What that means

In the morning, we headed for the Grand Canyon. We had breakfast at the unexpected Bäkerei Forscher in Orderville, Utah. What is a high-quality German bakery doing out in the rural wilds of the Colorado Plateau? Well, obviously, they're doing a successful business, judging from (a) the big, clean, sparkling new building beside the highway and (b) the display cases that looked like everyone in Utah had been there that morning before us. From what was left, Buttermilk had a nice rhubarb streuseltaler, moist with a nice crunchy topping; while I had a vanileshiffen, which had a very good cream filling inside a slightly dry bread shell (which made it perfect for dunking). The prices were not as high as at similar snooty bakeries back home. The counter help, which may or may not have been German, was a little vague in replies to my enquiries about their offerings, so I gave up. (Besides, I didn't really want to know about the pastries, I wanted to eat them.)

(This is getting too long for most people to bother with reading, so I'll break it off here and continue it on another post.)

A Nice Place to Live, But I Wouldn't Want to Visit There

 for maximum coherence, read all the posts from this trip in order, starting with THIS ONE.

After a day off from touristic pursuits (to do laundry, shop and watch a soccer match on TV), we took a day trip up to Vancouver, British Columbia. We drove inland to the border crossing north of Lynden, Washington (where there was no delay to get across) and went by the set of the current television show "Bates Motel," which airs on some cable channel. (We had thought it was the set of the movie Psycho when we planned the excursion, not having carefully read the place description on line.) Then we headed into the city.

Let me pause here for a brief product review. Our anemic rented Nissan Rogue comes with a GPS Navigation system proprietary to Hertz Car Rental. I would not have thought it possible that I could be persuaded that the ancient first-gen navigator on my own convertible was anything but the most annoying and tedious piece of vintage technology. Now I know better. Hertz's "NeverLost" machine, like my ancient navigator, seems not to know about many roads built in the last 15 years. My machine has the excuse that its information comes to it on old DVDs; but Hertz's is constantly updated. (We know this because every now and then it would announce that it has been updated.) 

Hertz's NeverLost device is slow to respond to input on its touchscreen. You put in a letter (having to spell everything) and it registers, but you don't know that it registers so you put it in again, and then it responds. Twice. So you have to back up. That usually involves starting over. Sometimes you touch one character and it registers a different one; and you have to back up. Or start over. And even more irritating is that the device will not allow you to orient the map with north at the top (unless you zoom out so far as to make the map pointless); it insists on having the direction of travel at the top, so the map is always rotating and you can't tell at a glance if you're going the way you want (and many times, you aren't). Most irritating of all is that the machine won't simply show you a map of where you are; it will only show programmed routes. Given the slowness of the machine, and its failure to deal well with missed turns and changed plans, it is all but useless in tight city driving; of which there is plenty in a place like Vancouver. 

(I also get irked at the crass commerciality of the system. It takes a long time to come on every time you start the car, at least in part so that it can give you options of finding "Popular Chains" -- outlets for companies that have paid Hertz for advertising; and its "Explore" option lists only the few half-assed tourist destinations that, similarly, have paid for the privilege of being represented. If Hertz had its customers' interests anywhere in the forward part of its collective corporate mind, it would at least show the destinations clients might actually want to explore ... like Stanley Park or the Queen Elizabeth Gardens. But there's no direct money in customer satifaction, is there?)

Vancouver skyline

After a long (and unnecessary) wander through city streets (thanks to the NeverLost Navigator's inexplicable routings), we finally gave up on technology and just went to the freeway into Vancouver. Our first stop was Queen Elizabeth Gardens, which occupy the highest point in Vancouver and have both beautiful landscaping and excellent views over the city. We spent the better part of an hour up there, then drove into the heart of the city. (Using printed maps for navigation, we got where we wanted to go with only the normal traffic troubles.) By this time we all wanted lunch, so we parked on a sidestreet near a corner where we were offered the choices of Greek, Thai, Vietnamese and Irish-Pub cuisines. We did not choose wisely. The first three were all storefronts, mom-and-pop places; the Irish Pub, Cieli's, was large and a little upscale, just to the point of being flashy. We chose the Irish Pub, part (it turns out) of a chain of such places.

The bartender greeted us cheerfully, and then was never seen again. It being another gorgeous day, we wanted to sit outside, but they only had two-tops there, so we pulled up to a high table just inside the wide open doors. Naturally there were televisions all over the place, so we couldn't entirely avoid watching; but at least they were showing British sports, such as you might have to see in an Irish prison: darts on one screen, golf on the other. (Darts, it seems, is as abstruse as cricket. Scores seem to go up and down at random, and we couldn't tell just by watching whether a throw was good, or otherwise.) Our waitress brought menus and drinks quickly. So far, so good.

The menu includes such overpriced traditional Irish fare as sliders, flatbreads and nachos. These are the things we ordered. (As Hispanics have moved farther and farther north, I have more or less rescinded my rule against eating Mexican food north of Round Rock, but then, this wasn't really Mexican food. Let's call it cucina-inspired.) Church Lady and the Perfesser both went for the pulled-pork sliders. They report that the little burgers had good flavour but not a particularly good texture, neither moist nor dry, just vaguely unsatisfying: too little meat, too little slaw, too much bread.  "Disappointing" was the word used twice.

Buttermilk's flatbread was better. It had a topping of pulled pork with pineapple salsa and jalapeños on a crispy layer of bread. The topping was adequate in quantity, though more meat would have been unobjectionable, and the crust maintained its integrity throughout the meal.

My nachos were interesting. They were made from a number of small tortillas, cut in half and fried, then stacked in a jumble on a plate. Toppings of meat (pulled pork again), corn, onions, peppers and jalapeños were scattered across it, then dosed with a drizzle of sour cream. The menu referred to "lots of cheese" on the dish. There was, arguably, the promised amount of cheese, but it was mostly in one part of the plate, as though the arm doing the scattering of ingredients had tired towards the end and just abandoned the effort. Because of the interlacing of the nacho chips, the dish was a little hard to eat, but that produced the rare yet desireable result of allowing me to finish lunch after the Perfesser, who is reknowned for his deliberate approach to meals.

What does that mean?

We almost didn't learn any of this about the food at Cielli's, because the service was so very bad. (I was reminded of a rude comment of a friend, years ago in Mexico, who told a waiter that we had received lo mas pinche servicio. It would have applied here, but we were all too polite to express ourselves except through the gratuity.) We did not get our food before we had reached the point of calculating how much we should leave for the drinks if we walked out. It was easily a half hour between ordering and serving, during which time we learned nothing about darts scoring either. It would have helped our mood, to say nothing of the tip, if our waitress had come by to check on us during that long wait, or to let us know there would be a delay. Instead, she studiously avoided so much as looking in our direction; she devoted herself to the farther sides of the room, the exterior tables, and the areas behind the kitchen door. She was not a good waitress.

pretty building, not much inside

After lunch came another disappointment: we went to the MacMillan Space Center. At ten bucks a head (the senior rate) for the admission, plus $5.75 a head for the planetarium show, we were expecting significantly more. But then, we're all grown-ups, and this place is clearly aimed at ten-year-olds with a reasonable vocabulary; a fact we think should have been mentioned in the descriptions on line and in our guidebooks. The exhibit halls, which are not extensive, contain some photographs and video recordings relating to space flight, along with a number of hands-on exhibits that have suffered much from having too many hands on. 

The planetarium show was just okay. The people behind it seem to be too enthralled with their new equipment to consider in any depth what people, especially grown people such as their audience, might like to see; and the gradeschool questions thrown out for the audience ("What do you know about Mars?") were tired and uninteresting, as well as being largely ignored by the sparse crowd. (I finally started responding just to get the show moving.) 

We went from there out to Stanley Park. Let me tell you, Vancouver is not a city with a happy relationship with cars. At 3:00 on a weekday, you expect a certain amount of traffic in the center of any large city, but Vancouver has given itself over entirely to pedestrians and bicycles, to the point where lines of cars waiting to turn right -- right, mind you -- stretch back for blocks, because only one car can get through the throng of the crosswalks on each signal's cycle. They seem also to randomly select streets to serve as pedestrian malls. In the end it took us about 45 minutes to go the 4 1/2 kilometers (2 1/2 miles) from the space place to Stanley Park. 

Stanley Park is huge, and popular with locals. For tourists, it's not so great. It's so big that you can't walk from one part to another without repeatedly paying the typical exorbitant parking rates. It's so poorly marked that we didn't find the many sites we had wanted to see there, settling in the end for the wildlife of the Lost Lagoon (which we found right off; I guess it's only lost because nobody's looking for it, and I understand why), consisting of lots of racoons and ducks, a few other birds, a squirrel and -- surprisingly -- a coyote; all of whom seemed to want to be fed (except, thankfully, the coyote, which was happy to just chew on himself); and the waterfront view of the Lions Gate Bridge, mainly of interest for the forest of kelp floating along the shore. On our way out of the park, we passed Sunset Beach, which we had intended to visit later on because our guidebook called it "a less populated beach." That must mean it is less crowded than Times Square on New Year's Eve, because it was packed four hours before sunset. We quietly dropped that plan and headed on to Canada Place, which was mildly interesting and slightly informative with its postings on Canadian history; and we drove by the Gastown Steam Clock --- it was too congested to stop, but we got a good long look and a decent picture out the car window while waiting for crosstraffic; we had a stop sign, they didn't.

From there we headed up to Lynn Canyon, a public park on the far side of the Burrard Inlet, in North Vancouver. We spent a happy couple of hours traipsing up and down the trails and across the suspension bridge rigged over the creek.

By then it was time for dinner. I had located -- on Roadtrippers.com, a trip-planning website that I heartily recommend -- a strip of local shops, clubs and restaurants on Commercial Drive, and we headed down there, parked, and explored the area on foot. It is, as described, a collection of funky bars and clubs, many with live music; ethnic restaurants; and shops featuring all manner of oddities. As the neighbourhood evolved from Italian to ethno-mix, big chains have made some unwelcome inroads; there's a Starbucks and a Tim Horton's, and more necessary installations like banks and pharmacies. But it still maintains a unique localist vibe that we enjoyed experiencing, even so briefly. We chose an Italian restaurant called Arriva, which had a sort of faded-glory feel overall. The service was on the Little-Italy-New-Yawk model: cadre-style, professional and just a little sassy. It was good for the most part, but one of the three servers seemed to have acquired the knack of appearing to give good service while not actually doing anything. When we asked for another basket of bread his response was, "Absolutely, but it'll be just a moment." It never came, until we asked another server for the same thing. (His response was, "Absolutely. Immediately." And he brought it.) The food came quickly enough to please us (especially after the godawful service we'd had at lunch; see above) and we tucked into spinach tortellini, sole florentine, and ravioli. 

What does that mean?

I didn't try the ravioli, so I can only say that it reportedly was very good. I did try the tortellini alla panna and can confirm that it was excellently made, robust and excellently seasoned with a rich cream sauce. I had the sole florentine, one of the day's specials: a filet of sole cooked in white wine until just the slightest crispiness began to form along the edge, then topped with spinach wilted with sautéed garlic in a white wine reduction. It was nicely presented with roasted potato quarters and crunchy-crisp sautéed vegetables. A glass of house white wine was an excellent accompaniment. Really, the only thing about the food that was the least bit below standard was that bread, a reasonably fresh focaccia with a lightly oiled texture on top but just the slightest dryness overall. Hardly worth mentioning, but I can't resist grousing about something. Not entirely.

What's that mean?

We followed this up with a stop for gelati at Caffe Calabria, which calls itself the oldest Italian cafe in Vancouver. Who knows? Who cares. What I know is it has a tremendous display of Italian deli items, gelati, and baked goods. Oh, the baked goods! How hard was it to resist those! But I did, and settled for a double-scoop of the gelato tornado, which the counter clerk thought of as being like cotton candy. Other than being very sweet, it was nothing like cotton candy. It was indescribable. It was fabulous. It was rich, and luscious; it was the Jennifer Lawrence of gelato. (The Tiger Tiger, an orange and licorice flavour, was also very good, and that from someone who doesn't like licorice.) The gelati at Caffe Calabria have the additional distinction of being just about the only thing we found in all of Vancouver that we didn't consider overpriced.

In the end, our day in Vancouver was nice, putting aside the delay getting back across the border at Blaine. But the high prices, the heavy traffic congestion, the difficulty in getting around in the central part of town make me confident that I'm unlikely to ever return. The border-crossing issues all but ensures that.