Checksum Arcanius

Day 1 (Monday, December 01, 2003)

We hit the road at 7:30 am and began our route toward Salt Lake City, Utah for the evening. The conditions are rainy and completely overcast, typical for Seattle. Although this rain may possibly change to snow in the Snoqualmie I-90 Mountain pass. Near Ellensburg, Washington we encountered some snow, which continued with us along I-82.

Nearing Umatilla, the three quarters of a tank of gas that we started with is almost exhausted. It is 11:00am and we are jamming to TLC’s “Waterfalls” on the radio, a song which we haven’t heard in ages. Then the Atari’s and “Boys of Summer” comes on. We’re more than a quarter of the way there, passing over the Columbia River into Oregon. Maybe we should have gotten gas before we entered this socialist state, but hey, Marc Anthony’s “I Need To Know” is on and it’s another wonderful experience.

Fuel stop #1 11:03am $17.74 — 10.442 gallons — 227.3 miles

11:57 am — Thick fog encountered on I-84 past Umatilla while climbing around mile post 224. By noon, we haven–t seen anyone in front of us or behind us in several minutes.

Stopped for lunch around 1:00 pm, switched drivers (Scott to Ryan).

Slipped by Idaho boarder undetected even by ourselves, 1:15 pm. We must have been distracted by the great acoustics of the Mars Volta.

3:07 pm: We stopped in Boise, ID. At the AAA we obtained tons worth of maps and information. We also stopped at a photography store to get Readyload 4×5 film for Scott’s view camera so he can take pretty pictures on the trip.

4:09 pm: Departed Boise, ID, worried the boys make an onward struggle toward the great town of Salt Lake; Ryan vows to let none get in his way.

4:50 pm: We stopped to fuel up in Mountain Home, ID and were pleasantly surprised and amazed to find that our fuel economy was a whopping 37.5 mpg. On road again and it is dark. -548 miles

At some point here we changed time zones; we don–t know when exactly, but we decided to set the clocks forward an hour here.

7:00 pm — ~630 miles: Stopped to stretch and switch drivers back to Scott just after passing Twin Falls. Got out the granola with raisins and Ryan–s computer bag to hold us over.

8:15 pm — 726 miles: encountered fog at mile 8, having just entered Utah. Scott keeps seeing signs for “ogeden” (as he pronounes it), which I, Ryan, keep explaining is pronounced “Ogden”, like it is spelled. Fog is thin and hardly dampens visibility before it is gone.

8:43 pm — 761 miles: Scott sees the outlines of the Wasatch Mountains and is duly impressed: “I’ve never seen real mountains before.” “Welcome to the Rockies,” I reply, “We get to cross those tomorrow.” We are three quarters of an hour out of Salt Lake City now. Clifton won’t be getting out of class until ten so we get to burn some time in SLC until then, it looks like.

9:45 pm: Clifton is home, but we decided to stop at Temple Square to see the lights. We got kicked out around 10:00, but got some pictures before. Around 10:20, we met up with Clifton and had a nice long deep discussion, then got around to doing this blog stuff.

And now for everyone who spent so much time reading this, the reward has come! The pictures!

Ryan Driving
Scott Takes The Wheel
Sticking to Sixty
Encountering a little bit of snow near Ellensburg
Is This a Good or Bad Omen?
Passing Cement, Oregon
Scott On The Phone In Boise, ID
Temple Sqaure 1
Temple Square 2
Temple Square 3
Ryan At Cliftons

After getting back from Michigan/Ohio, I think I’ve been bit by the travel bug… Now I’m in Central Oregon, having just been to Crater Lake. I’m headed to the Redwood forests tomorrow morning, and then up the coastal highway Monday.

Its been an… “exciting” trip so far. I’m traveling with my roommate, and his car — a Dodge Intreppid — has already overheated a couple of times while driving up to Crater Lake. The problem is an apparently undersized cooling system and the failure of his cooling fans. So we took a couple of hours and we ended up hooking the fan up to the headlight circuit — it definitely seems to be helping. Then I took over driving, and almost immediately I ended up running over an aluminum ladder in the middle of I-5 at 60 mph. No joke. Luckily, we seem to have escaped with no major damage. About ten miles down the road, a doe and her two fawns were crossing an I-5 exit ramp. I barely avoided hitting the last of the fawns with an all-out stop.

We took these three occurrences together to be a sign that we should hole up in a hotel immediately, rather than press our luck and try to make it to Crescent City.

While I have been posting a few tidbits here and there , it doesn’t really give an accurate perception of what has transpired since that last real update on the trip.

We left the Thompson Public Library some four hours after we got there. After I posted we were used the internet connection there to look up possible routes to speed the journey into New York where we hoped to recooperate Scott’s knee while staying with Maneesh, who has a place on Manhattan. We hit up a pizza place for lunch, then we were planning on heading out of town to find a place to pitch a tent on the side of the road. It began to rain and I started pushing for us to get moving in case it got worse. Right then, a man pulled up and asked us what we were up to. We told him the story and mentioned that we were looking for a place to camp. He directed us to the West Thompson Lake Recreation area, where the Army Corps of Engineers maintains a nice and inexpensive ($12/night is much nicer than $25-$35) camping place. We pulled in as it got dark and for the first time, had the joy of setting up camp in the dark. That obsticle was more than outweighed, however, by the fact that we were also staying at our first established campground of the trip, with a nearby restroom, shower, water spicket, and about 20 RVs full of nice old people.

The next morning, June 29th, we decided we’d stay another day, but we were low on food so while Scott rested the knee, I biked, unloaded, into the nearby Putnam to buy some groceries. We ate well that night, but we didn’t end up using too many of those groceries because the next day, Scott’s birthday, we decided that with the condition of Scott’s knee, we were not going to be able to keep up a worthwhile pace, and would only be doing more damage. So the focus of the trip changed from biking to ending the biking portion of the trip, and salvaging some time on Scott’s first experience of the East Coast.

On the 30th, we turned inland, taking route 40 west towards Hartford. It was by far the most greuling portion of the trip – the undulating, unending hills stretched all the way to Hartford, some 50 miles away. I tried to take as much weight as I could manage from Scott, and ended up with a bike so back-heavy that it balanced at its seat when I lifted it to test its weight. Still, Scott had the harder job of pedaling with mostly one leg as we climbed the hills and descended into the valleys again and again. I was surprised by how much Connecticut reminded me of more hilly Louisiana, with each valley hiding a swamp. And while climbs were torturous at times, the downhill portions led to some of the more exhillerating, albeit short, experiences of the trip.

It turns out that there are no cities worth mentioning directly between Thompson and Hartford until you get to Manchester about 45 miles later and just a few miles from the center of Hartford. We stayed the night at a very nice (by our standards) Super 8 motel there in Manchester, did some laundry, and planned how to finalize the trip the next day. Well, thats what we were going to, but no firm plan really emerged, so we headed out the next day thinking we’d simply go into Hartford, find a bike shop near a UPS store, walk a short distance to the train station, and head south to Washington DC, where we had arrangements to stay with some of my relatives for the 4th of July weekend.

However, it turns out that Hartford has no bike shops. In fact, they are spread quite evenly all around Hartford, among the many subburbs. So while we easily found the train station, we had to bike another 8 miles or so to a bike shop. Where we ended up, Newington Bike, turned out to be the perfect place. The staff members there were extremely helpful, giving us water, bike boxes, and helping us ship the bikes home. Afterwards, however, we were left 8 miles away from the train station without a way to make it back to Hartford, the bikes in boxes, the taxis saying we had to wait at least an hour, zero knowledge of the bus system, and the last train leaving in about an hour.

At this critical juncture, a family exited Newington Bike and struck up a conversation with us. They had, like most of the people we met along the way, gone on a bike tour in their past. They were preparing for another, now that their twin boys had reached 16. Like so many people that had been nice to us along the way, they offered us a ride to the train station. Their intervention got us there on time – and we got on the train for Washington DC at 7:20 pm.

Stay tuned for the next segment, “Adventures in DC.”

After graduation, I’m planning on having a blast this summer before I start work (wherever that is) in late August or early September. The list of possibilities is epic:

– Australia / New Zealand
– China ?
– Utah Mountain Biking (one of Scott’s ideas)
– East Coast Road Biking (ie, finishing unfinished work)
– Road trip to polish off my visited-states list

Sometimes I have been described by associates in the past as having a “bias for action” — a tendency to choose action over inaction. I find this description to be true of many parts of my life, at least when I am thinking rationally. My “whats the worst that could happen” sort of mentality combined with a life experience of nothing that bad ever happening may be responsbile. Or maybe I just like to live life to its fullest, and inaction is not well correlated with fullness. At any rate, this so-called bias for action has tended to serve me well over the years — it is largely responsbile for the outrageously successful Road Trip of 2003, for a slew of road-less-traveled honors courses both in high school and in college that have all paid dividends, for a robotics club that went to the national competition its first year, and for a few speeding tickets as well. Certainly, looking back at my life, just as in looking back at that list, the good has far outweighed the bad.

Unfortunately, this action bias often fails me in two areas. The first is associated primarily with schoolwork — I find myself procrastinating its completion far too often. The bigger the assignment, the more I put it off, only making the problem worse, leading to more procrastination. Of course, usually things eventually reach a tipping point where the rapidly increasing completion panic energy overcomes the negative potential well of procrastination, and I get to work. Unfortunately, this usually means late nights, all-nighters, and substandard product. Of course, as we have seen, my substandard is sometimes somewhat better than average. This, of course, only served to reinforce the acceptability of the process, which has repeated itself many times for many papers and assignments throughout the history of Ryan.

But all of this is just a precursor. This post is not about schoolwork procrastination. This is about my other action-bias failue: namely, anything involving women.

As with most of my posts, there is a recent occurence to illustrate the point particularly well. It all began in my Math 324 class (see previous post to see the Chemistry Library building where I go for this class…). The course title is “Advanced Multivariable Calculus.” Only a few majors recognize it, and fewer yet require it. So basically, you’re either a math major/minor or pretty smart if you’re taking the class. To say it like a crass Yoda, dumb people here, there are not. The point here is that any girl in this class that happens to catch my eye is not only good looking, but she is intelligent as well. Hot and smart. Is there anything better than that? I didn’t think so.

Which brings me to Marissa. After I started having attendance issues in my other “early” (11:30 am) class Math class, I stopped sitting in the front, because I was often coming in late. This put me usually on the second-to-last row, right behind her. Always carrying her decorative coffee cup and taking notes in an artist’s sketchpad, we occasionally exchanged niceties, but never really talked. We were both always late, and she must have had a class right afterwards, as she never stuck around. Until today, that is. And today, we actually talked. Briefly, it is true, but it was good. At the time, I should have been considering, more or less, the following facts:

• She is hot
• She is smart
• Today is the last day I will see her before the final
• I could really use some motivation in studying for the final
• I could really use a date to the company Christmas party

Unfortunately, I was apparently only considering the following facts:

So, as the class and conversation ended, this is what came out: “Well, good luck on the final. See you on Wednesday.” And then it was over.

I didn’t even recover enough from the blank mind to kick myself for a good ten minutes.

So now, I either rely on some sort of serendipity, find some way to talk to her before/during/after the final, or give up all hope. And considering past experience, I’m leaning towards the latter.

A bike trip is in my future. A long bike trip. A very long bike trip.

I learned this today, when Scott called me. After the usualy formalities (or, more appropriately, in our case, informalities), he proposed the idea. At the same time, a little cellphone blip caused the word “bike” to be muffled, and all I heard was “_____ trip from Maine to Florida.” Since we have previously been on a road trip, I assumed that the blank word was “road,” so I immediately proposed that we start from here, drive to Maine, and then down to Florida. Then he repeated himself, and this time, I cauhgt the word “Bike.”

Oooooooooooh. I readily agreed. East coast? Be prepared – we’re coming, summer of 2005.

I am in terrible shape. I went for a run — or rather, tried to go for a run — and it ended up being a glorified jog down and a walk back up the hill. It didn’t help that I am still a little sick (75% recovered, but not yet whole), and I was coughing by the time I got to the bottom of the hill, but still, I have a long ways to go before I get back to the condition I was in September of 2001. I think it is worth the effort, though. All the better to play ultimate with, which I will be doing a lot of when I start at the UW (hopefully on both playing and starting).

I had a plan to study for Math when I got home today. I somehow ended up getting almost none of the plan accomplished. Instead, I very efficiently wasted time until I finally started watching Donnie Darko (which is not a waste of time) for the second time in 24 hours. If language and a very mysterious plot don’t turn you off, then take some time to watch it.

This got me to talking to a friend about my early exposure to movies:
Me: I used to not like movies much
Me: I didn’t see them very often; when I did, they were generally bad experiences
Friend: serious?
Me: I once saw two movies in the same day: Bevis and Butthead Do America and Mars Attacks
Me: B&B was the superior movie
Me: which is really kind of sick
Friend: I saw Mars Attacks, thought it was really dumb
Me: yup

Which brings me back to the original topic, I’m not so good at studying, because I’m not so good at staying on task, especially when I’m around a computer (and thus the wandering of topics and the hour it takes me to write this one page.

While on the jog/walk, I took a shortcut back through the woods. While not exactly scary, since I was in Bellevue’s Lakemont area, it did get me to thinking about some of the topics covered in John Eldredge’s book “Wild at Heart,” which I have been slowly reading (thanks to Heidi for the excellent gift!). That is, part of my heart does long for danger, to prove to myself that I can overcome difficulty. My experience in this arena is limited. Hikes and camping trips touch in the area, but they have always been so controlled, so planned. The road trip was a good step in the right direction, but it was too limited also. My calculus class doesn’t look like it’ll be the one since once again I’ve found a way to not care about studying when it really counts. A midnight hike around Salt Lake’s foothills with Clifton was a good experience, as was the climb to the top of a peak as a thunderstorm approached and my brother called me off during my Spring term down at BYU. It hasn’t been enough. Of course, I should finish the book too.