Oh, how ignominious: to run out of gas so close to the gas station and exactly as far as possible from the nearest road service provider… and, we had passed a couple of stations we thought less convenient to detour to than the one that proved too far, the most inconvenient of all…
Day 5 was a work day: Judy cleaned up the cabin, full of dead bugs from a year and a half of being closed up, and I cleaned up the wreckage of the greenhouse frame, salvaging usable pieces and bagging the rest. After, we loaded up Ben’s pickup and made a dump run, to the collection site conveniently located 6km west, just across the highway. Then we packed for the second leg of our trip.
Day 6: headed south with what we thought was plenty of time to make our 9:00am meeting, we got a ‘low fuel’ alarm near St. Ignatius. We planned to stop at a station between Arlee and Evaro, conveniently located on our side of the road. Unfortunately, the long hill climb out of Arlee led to fuel starvation, just short of the summit. I can’t remember the last time this happened (I do remember the time, 63 years ago, that I was with my dad when we ran out of gas and he poured a gallon of degreasing solvent from his refrigeration tool kit into the tank and got us home, despite running a bit rough) , but we’ve certainly come close often, making a practice of planning a stop after the warning light comes on.
We didn’t have any flammable solvent handy, but we could have assembled the bicycle and self-rescued, as the fuel stop was only 3km away, but then we would have a gas can we didn’t plan to use again. We have carried a roadside service plan through AARP for many years, and only used it once, when the battery failed last year while I was in “no lift” status after my surgery. So, we dialed the number (fortunately, one of our phones had service) and waited for the road service truck to arrive from Ronan, 50km behind us, where there had been plenty of fuel stops to choose from…
So, we ended up humbled and 30 minutes late to my appointment in Missoula, to meet with the consultant who took my place at the NIH lab when I didn’t renew my contract last fall. The project to release a web application I wrote 8 years ago continues to have complications, mostly due to its age–I had updated some parts over the years to new language upgrades as it migrated from old to new hardware and operating systems, but didn’t revise just for the sake of revision–and the fact I wrote it with a specific user audience and the configuration settings for a specific scientific instrument. Meanwhile, we’ve learned a lot about packaging software in various forms, and are still struggling with some issues with satisfying dependencies. Although the meeting was short, it was productive.
Grabbing a quick espresso on the way out of Missoula, we arrived at The Mill in Hamilton to find that the café there had changed hands and had a new menu and new name: The Cherry Street Cafe. I missed the caprese panini I was hoping for, but the roman crêpe was an excellent substitute. We have found yet another crêperie worth the trip (the other is in Kingston, Washington).
After another stop to drop Judy for a short visit with a friend who will have moved away by the time we return in June, I ended up at the laboratory visitor center, as a visitor this time, a bit later than planned, to find that everyone I knew to contact was away from their desks. Finally, I got someone to fetch me and spent time visiting with my former colleague, continuing the project discussion from the Missoula stop. I also found that the former owner of the Zaxan café at the Mill was running a lunch service at the lab, as well as providing her custom roasted coffee blends to local shops and eateries.
Trapper Peak. tallest in the Bitterroot range, from U.S. 93 between Darby and Conner
The too-short visit ended, and we continued south, over Lost Trail Pass, stopping for the night in Salmon, Idaho.
Home, sweet home in the woods, although slightly uninhabitable after being vacant for more than 18 months. A good sweeping and vacuuming will take care of most of the issues.
To start off our grand auto/bike tour of 2015, we collected Judy’s brother-in-law, Ben, from his niece’s in Bremerton, for the second leg of his annual northward migration to the Mission Valley in Montana. After Delia the cat was safely delivered to Just Cats Hotel for the duration, we packed the car for the 60-day excursion, then arose early on Friday for the Montana trip, a run we have made many times over the last 28 years (in different directions during our 10-year residency in Montana), but a bit more cramped than most, having three people in the car, the tandem on top, family items for “early inheritance” to the New Mexico and Texas clans, and outfitted for the long trip with clothing suitable for biking, driving, and the social events we have scheduled in Iowa and Minnesota, in various climates.
The 12-hour transit was uneventful, with good weather and light traffic, arriving before dark, but plenty stiff and tired from the long journey. Not having been to our cabin in more than a year and a half (last year, we didn’t go in because of deep snow), we decided to impose on nephew Rick’s hospitality for the first few days so we have time to clean up the cabin for our return trip in June. We also found that the storage shelter we had rigged from our greenhouse frame covered with tarps a couple of years ago had suffered from ice buildup during the harsh 2014-2015 winter and collapsed, bending many of the steel tubes, breaking the welded connectors, and damaging some of the items stored within, Rick had salvaged most of the repairable items, but we are still faced with salvaging the shelter materials that are usable. The cabin, meanwhile, had become a fly and wasp trap during last summer, so we set off insecticide bombs inside and plan to sweep up the insect carcasses and tidy up the place before moving on the southward leg of our tour in mid-week.
What was once a 10’x20′ greenhouse frame covered with tarps is now a pile of rope, wire, shredded plastic, crushed sawhorses, and bent steel tubing, swimming in pools of water left behind from the ice blocks that brought it down.
Meanwhile, work goes on, as Judy handles last-minute coordination for weaving guild business and Larye manages updates and status on several web sites. Fortunately, high-speed Internet has reached the rural mountainside, so our trips to town for Internet access are curtailed for now.
The old saw, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Answer: “Practice, practice, practice,” is so true. All of us are impatient: we just want to “do artistic stuff” and have it turn out like the examples that inspired us in the first place. However, no matter how refined our tastes, our talents take time to develop. How long depends on how much help or critique we get along the way, plus a lot of hard work. What follows is a narrative example of and informal tutorial on making videos on a budget, with inexpensive equipment and open source software.
I’ve always wanted to learn to make video presentations. I imagined I might want to record test flights in the homebuilt airplane project that has languished, unfinished, in my cluttered and sometimes soggy workshop. Another project is documenting our bicycle travels. One obstacle was gear: quality video equipment is expensive. However, all modern digital cameras have a video mode. I started practicing several years ago, strapping my Fuji pocket camera and small tripod to the handlebars of our tandem bicycle, to document rides on the bike trails. It was pretty terrible, amplifying the bumps and roots on the trail and the clicking of the gear shift, as well as not being very well attached, with the camera flopping around from time to time.
The next year, I got a GoPro Hero 3 (Silver–the mid-range model) point-of-view sports camera, and a handlebar mount made for it, a modest investment. The GoPro web site has daily videos sent in by users, showing off amazing feats of surfing, bicycling, motorcycling, scuba diving, parachuting, wing suit plunges, and all manner of dangerous sport, seen from a camera strapped to the forehead, chest, or wrist of the participant. Some were exciting, some just plain scary, but all very professional-looking.
The Mean Green Machine on tour in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, with the GoPro mounted above the handlebars (and the headlight) in its waterproof case. While at an ideal Point of View height, the mount tends to vibrate a lot. I have a helmet mount, but my riding style involves a lot of head movement, which is distracting as well.
At first, I strapped the new camera on the handle bars of our Bike Friday Tandem Traveler “Q,” turned it on, and set off on a 35-km ride. The result was better than the first attempt with the Fuji, but still shaky, vibrating, and endless. OK, a bit of editing to show some particularly interesting parts, or at least cut out the really boring and really shaky parts. But, a lot of time sifting through gigabytes of footage. I eventually pared the hour and a half of “film” (I only recorded one way of the out-and back ride) down to 11 minutes of not-very-exciting or informative view of lake and woods drifting by at 15km/hr bicycle speed, plus a few moments of 30km/hr downhill bouncing and shaking. The sound track was a muffled one-side conversation between me and my stoker, Judy, on the tandem, plus a lot of road noise transmitted through the frame, and the frequent clicking of the shifters and hissing of the brake shoes on muddy metal rims. A really round-about way of saying “We went for a really satisfying bike ride up the south shore of the lake, and came to nice waterfalls about once an hour. Wait for it.” Fast forward two years of trial and error…
After watching a lot of other people’s videos, and the progression in skill over the years of some of my favorites, like Dutch cycle tourists and videographers Blanche and Douwe, I have possibly picked up some hints of what makes a good video presentation. I mostly publish on Vimeo.com, which offers a set of short tutorials on making videos., but I also recently viewed some good tips by Derek Muller, a science educator who makes a living filming short YouTube videos on various topics in science (Veritasium.com), and Ira Glass, host of National Public Radio’s “This American Life,” who published a series of four short talks on storytelling on YouTube. Both agree that getting good takes practice. Lots of practice. Probably not as much as Malcom Gladwell’s tale of 10,000 hours of solid practice (in “Outliers“). but a lot nevertheless.
The main point of Derek and Ira’s stories is: video is storytelling. As we found, it is not enough to simply record the world as it goes by on your adventure. The result has to tell a story: why you did it, where you went, what it was like, and what you learned, in a concise way that holds the interest of the viewer. I know that most of my efforts failed, because of my viewer numbers on Vimeo. Sometimes both of my loyal viewers watch a particular video, sometimes neither of them do. Obviously something needs work. Submissions to video contests garner a couple hundred views (compared with thousands for the winning entries, and millions for the viral baby, cat, and stupid human tricks videos on YouTube and Facebook), with no idea how many viewers actually watched all the way through. So, we evolved over time, failure after failure.
First, I got rid of the “native sound,” because what the camera mic picks up isn’t what I focus on or even consciously hear while riding. Instead, I find a piece of music that I think reflects the sense of motion and emotion in the ride, or one that at least fits the length of the film, or that I can cut the film to fit without making the visual too short or too long. A fast ride needs a beat reflective of the cadence; beautiful scenery or glorious weather deserves a stirring orchestration or piano number, a matter of taste. The next step is to trim the video clips to match the phrasing of the music, if possible.
I realized that, though I find looking forward to what is around the next bend exciting while on the bike, watching endless scenery flow by on the small screen isn’t particularly engaging. Most of other people’s videos I enjoy have clips (scenes) of 7-10 seconds each. Mine ran generally 20 seconds to several minutes. Boring. Furthermore, long takes don’t necessarily advance the story line, just as important to film as to the page, unless there is some interesting progression unfolding in the clip, much as a detailed sex scene in a novel is only necessary to define a key point in the development of the relationship between the characters: mostly, it is sufficient for the characters to retreat to the privacy of the bedroom behind a line of asterisks, as a transition between scenes. A video fade on a long stretch of empty road to the next bend suffices just as well. We’re not promoting “bike porn” here: no matter how much we personally enjoyed the ride. I’m beginning to appreciate the need for story-telling that doesn’t fall into the “shaggy dog” genre, i.e., drawn-out and pointless–suspense to boredom without a satisfying punch line.
Picking music is another issue. At first, I shuffled through my library of ripped CDs (no piracy here, just a convenient way to carry your music library with you, on the hard drive of your computer instead of a case full of plastic in a hot car). However, even if the audience is small (i.e., myself and others in the same room), such usage violates the copyright on commercial recordings, especially on a public post on the ‘Net. I’ve recently started re-editing some of the early videos I made this way, substituting from my new library of royalty-free music published under a creative commons license, and downloadable from several sites on the Internet, notably www.freemusicarchive.org, where musicians leave selections of their work as a calling card or audio resume, hoping for commission work or performance gigs, or to sell physical CDs in uncompressed, high-fidelity audio instead of downloading the lower-quality MP3 lossy compression version.
This is the wave of the future in a world where digital copies are easy: whether you buy a copy or get one free, play it, listen to it, use it to enhance your art, just don’t resell it whole. That’s the idea behind creative commons. Unfortunately, much of music publishing is still in the “for personal use” only, and if the pressed recording gets scratchy, buy another one, no “backup” copies allowed, and no sharing with friends: if you want them to hear a song, invite them to your house or take your iPod over to theirs: you can’t stream it or email it or share a copy on the cloud. ASCAP blanket licensing for broadcast or use in video is still on a corporate price scale, intended for production studios and well beyond the reach of a PC user who just wants to add her favorite pop tune to a video of her and her friends having fun. So it is that Kirby Erickson’s ballad of driving up US93 through the Bitterroot as background to a bike ride up US93 through the Bitterroot is gone, so viewers who aren’t familiar with his work won’t be tempted to buy the album the song came from, because they won’t ever hear of it. Restrictive licensing actually potentially reduces sales in the Internet age. By now, you can’t even upload videos if they have copyrighted music audible in them–Facebook, for one, matches audio signatures from video against a sound library and blocks them.
Although I see some improvement in quality in my amateur videos, I still have a long way to go. For one, the handlebar mount for the GoPro camera introduces too much vibration, so the picture is hard to watch, and doesn’t reflect the experience of riding. Some damping is needed. We did get some better results with the camera mounted on our trailer, but we only use that when touring. Some sort of counterweight to produce a “steady-cam” effect might work here, as the “real thing” is expensive and a bit bulky.
The story is more interesting when it shows the participants, which, for us, means using the trailer mount or some sort of “selfie stick” to put the camera to the side or front, or, as I did in one clip, turn the camera around briefly. During my convalescence from heart surgery last summer, we did a lot of hiking, where I devised a selfie-stick approach to give the impression of the viewer being with us instead of sharing our point of view. I’m a bit happier with some of those, particularly the ones where the camera boom isn’t in the view. More practice, and experimentation. I’ve been more satisfied with ones where we’re in the shot only when necessary to tell the story (an essential point, when the story was that I was OK, and getting better), and the scenery out in front when it was the story.
Now, the issue is to trim the scenes to the essential elements (who, what, where, when, why, and how). To that effect, part of the re-editing process to replace the audio tracks involves cutting the video to synchronize with the sound track phrasing, as well as reducing the length to the minimum necessary. To paraphrase E.B. White’s dictum on writing, “Omit needless frames.”
This still frame says it all: who is reflected in the window, how is the bicycle, where is “Firefly Coffeehouse” in Oregon, Wisconsin. what is “bike tour,” and why is, well, we’re having a good time.
One of the issues with being the director, cameraman, and actor all at once is to keep the bicycle safe while planning the shot and operating the camera, as well as keeping the mission (travel) moving along. We miss some good shots that way, but it is inevitable. One popular technique is to set up the camera along the route and show the bicycle or hikers approaching or receding across or into the frame, which involves stopping and staging the shoot. This is less intrusive where there are two or more cyclists, so it is a matter of setting up the shot ahead of or behind the other rider(s), but that isn’t an option with the tandem, and we’ve used it in limited fashion by propping up the monopod/selfie-stick along the trail. We do have several sizes of tripods, but they aren’t convenient to carry when the photography is incidental to the main purpose of travel. I’ve long since taken to filming short takes “on the fly” rather than just leaving the camera on to pick up everything, which involves anticipating some scenery reveals or events, and, of course, missing some. But, editing “on the fly” to limit scenes does shorten the editing process and save battery life on the camera. We work with what we have.
Recently, we entered a video contest for a short travel documentary on the Newberry National Volcanic Monument, in central Oregon, which seemed to demand some dialogue in addition to the usual soundtrack and titles, so we experimented with voice-over to add a short narration where appropriate. This also wasn’t the best, since our microphone is the headset-attached variety, suitable for making Skype phone calls and video chats, but little else. Good quality condenser microphones for the computer and lapel microphones compatible with the GoPro are simply not in the budget, along with professional video cameras with microphone jacks or built-in directional microphones. Drones are all the rage, now, but one suitable for carrying a GoPro as a payload is stretching the budget, also, and presents safety and control issues for use in our primary video subject, i.e., bicycle touring and trail riding.
Besides finding a story in a video clip sequence, getting the story to flow smoothly, and finding an appropriate sound track to evoke the mood of the piece, the skill set also involves learning to use video editing software. Microsoft Windows comes with a decent simple video editor, but we don’t use Windows. We do have iPads, which have apps for making videos, but haven’t spent a lot of time on those, which also limit one’s ability to import material from multiple sources (the apps work best with the on-board iPad camera). There are a number of contenders in the Linux Open Source tool bag, some good, some complex. We chose Open Shot, a fairly simple but feature-full non-linear video editor, which gives us the ability to load a bunch of clips, select the parts we want, and set up multiple tracks for fades and transitions and overlays of sound and titles. We also found that the Audacity audio recording and mixing software can help clean up the sound from less-than-adequate equipment. ImageMagick and the GIMP are still our go-to tools for preparing still photos to add to the video. Open Shot uses Inkscape to edit titles and Blender for animated titles.
Video is memory and CPU-intensive, so it helps to have a fair amount of RAM and a fast multi-core CPU (or several). Our main working machine, a Zareason custom Linux laptop, has 8GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce Graphics Processor Unit, and a quad-core dual-thread CPU, which looks like an 8-processor array to Linux. This is barely adequate, and often slows down glacially unless I exit from a lot of other processes. The more clips and the longer the clips, the more RAM the process uses; often the total exceeds the physical memory, so swap space comes into play. I’m usually running the Google Chrome browser, too, with 40-50 tabs open, which tends to overload the machine all by itself.
This isn’t something you could do at all on a typical low-end Walmart Windows machine meant for browsing the ‘Net and watching cat videos on Facebook and YouTube, so investing in a professional-quality workstation is a must. Since we travel a lot and I like to keep our activity reporting current, that means a powerful laptop machine, running Unix, OS/X, or Linux. Fortunately, our laptop “strata” is in that class, though only in the mid-range, a concession to the budget as well as portability. We purchased the machine when we were developing software to run on the National Institutes of Health high-performance computing clusters, and is roughly comparable to a single node in one of the handful of refrigerator-sized supercomputers in the laboratories that have several hundred CPU cores and several dedicated GPU chassis each.
In addition to Open Shot, we also sometimes use avidemux, a package that allows us to crop and resize video clips so we can shoot in HD 16:9 wide-screen format and publish in “standard” 4:3 screen format if necessary, or crop 4:3 stills and video automatically to 16:9 format to use with other HD footage. In addition to the GoPro, we now have a new FujiXP pocket camera that can shoot stills and video in 16:9 HD, and a Raspberry Pi camera unit, that is programmable (in Python), that we use for low-res timelapse and security monitoring. The programmable part means we write automated scripts that select the appropriate camera settings and frame timing and assemble a series of still photos into a timelapse movie, using the Linux ffmpeg command-line utility.
So it goes–gradually, the videos we turn out get slimmer and more to the point, if not technically better quality, something we need to work on constantly with prose as well, as an intended 500-word blog post ended up a 3000-word tutorial instead.
Note: this is an expanded version of the one-page PDF we circulate.
“Entering Utah,” on Road Trip 2014, a January venture to visit relatives in New Mexico,Texas, and California.
This year was characterized by extreme medical adventures, interspersed with the usual auto tours and some slightly different activities. The year started fairly normally, with an auto tour to New Mexico and California, and a business trip to Montana, but then took a different tack.
The Southwest Loop tour began with the Bike Friday perched on top of the Jeep, with the intent of getting in some winter riding early, while visiting with kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids in Santa Fe, Las Cruces, and El Paso. In keeping with our advancing age and reluctance to let scenery pass by in the dark, we took several days enroute, stopping in eastern Oregon and Durango, Colorado, arriving in sunny Santa Fe to -11C temps, much too cold for riding.
Las Cruces was a bit more hospitable, weatherwise, and we did get in a few rides, one in the middle of a half-marathon, where we shared the trail with many runners for 2 km. The back and chest pain Larye had experienced on early-season rides for the past several years returned, but overall the ride was pleasant.
Crossing the Sonoran Desert, headed from Las Cruces to Anaheim.
Moving west, we visited relatives in Anaheim and Thousand Oaks. After a few days, we headed north, overnighting in Carmel-by-the-Sea before settling in for a few days vacation and riding at Clear Lake. The weather was a bit cold and Larye’s discomfort was more pronounced, through we did manage a 30-km ride on a mild day. Despite the drought, we drove US 101 the rest of the way north to Oregon in sometimes heavy rain, taking time to tour the scenic drives through the redwoods. In Oregon, our way was blocked by a large tree blown down across US101, with high winds when we finally reached our evening’s destination. Our tour culminated with a stop at the chilly air museum in the blimp hanger at Tillamook, then directly home after encountering snow at the 45th parallel.
A quick inspection of the exterior of our cabin: the snow was piled deep against the front door, so we didn’t go in.
In early March, we traveled to Montana, staying with nephew Rick rather than shoveling out our cabin, which was buried in several feet of snow. A business trip to Rocky Mountain Laboratory yielded a task to flesh out a web application Larye had written years before and package it for general distribution to other users of the instrumentation with which it was designed to work.
The login screen on Larye’s web app, a custom user interface to create plate definition files for the BD Biosciences FACS cell-counting instrument, originally designed for the Research Technology Section of the Research Technology Branch of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, and soon to be released to Open Source as a Linux software package and virtual appliance, for all users of the instrument model.
At Lake Chelan, as the fruit trees were starting to bloom.
We visited with friends Gary and Char at a resort near Mt. Hood in the spring, and they stayed with us in May at McCall, Idaho. It’s always fun to share vacations. Gary was the first to note that Larye’s exercise-related pain might be something other than reflux, having been through similar symptoms himself the year before.
A few local bike rides were cut short because of Larye’s recurrent pain when starting out. We spent a week at Lake Chelan in late April, with some riding around Manson, with minor starting-out pains. Memorial Day weekend, we rode the 30km around Payette Lake, from McCall, Idaho, with frequent stops for pain to subside and pushing through the loose sand and gravel on about a quarter of the route.
Ready to begin our circumnavigation of Payette Lake, at McCall, Idaho. The 30-km loop was fraught with frequent stops to let the angina pain subside. Judy grounds Larye for the duration of the week: three weeks later, he was in ICU recovering from cardiac bypass.
On returning home, Larye saw his physician and insisted on a cardiac stress test, “just to rule out any problems.” Well, the stress test lasted almost three minutes before blood pressure and pulse spiked over 200, and Larye was feeling pain down to his fingertips. This was on a Friday, and he was sent home with nitro pills and beta blockers, with a Monday cardiology appointment, which yielded an early Tuesday catheterization: the blockage was severe, and a full cardiac artery bypass graft was scheduled for the afternoon, as soon as the surgical team finished the morning surgery.
Waiting for lunch in the ICU, the morning after surgery.
So, suddenly, the summer plan turned from training for a bicycle tour in Wisconsin to slowly regaining strength by walking back and forth on the porch, gradually extending to downtown sidewalks, then city and county parks, then regional trails, and an excursion into the Olympics and salt marshes, hiking trails we hadn’t visited in 20 years or more. By the time the Portland Knit,Quilt, and Stitch came around in August, Larye was ambulatory enough to drive to the Lacey Amtrak station and we attended the conference via public transit, after getting a clean bill of health from his cardiac surgeon, and later, a release from the cardiologist: no rehab program needed, since we were hiking up to 6km on the trails by then.
Rehab: a walk across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, 6km round trip, before going in for 8-week checkup with the heart surgeon.
Labor Day weekend found us “on the road again,” with the weekend in Silverton, Oregon, touring the Oregon Gardens, with a brief tour of Silver Falls before heading east to the dry side for a week in the Bend area. The original plan had been for a bicycling holiday, but we continued to hike, visiting the Newberry Volcanic National Monument and hiking the trails around the resort, including an hour’s spin on a side-by-side one-speed tricycle just to prove we could still ride, albeit cautiously. Since then, Larye has set up his old Fuji touring bike on a wind trainer in the basement to get in some interval training without danger of crashing, something we don’t want to do: read on.
Recovery was not without setbacks, however. A couple weeks after surgery, on July 4, Larye experienced a pulmonary embolism, which prompted another hospital stay, so he is on blood thinner for a year, which involved several weeks of daily painful injections into the stomach while building up the poison levels… Then, a few days before a planned long fall vacation trip to Montana, Idaho, eastern Washington, and British Columbia, the warfarin mistook Larye for a rat and he turned up with bleeding kidneys, for a few frightening days until the warfarin level was brought down and the flow stopped, plus some unpleasant tests to rule out bladder cancer: found a kidney stone, to be addressed later. We were able to join our vacation route “in progress,” with a trip to visit Judy’s brother and sister-in-law in eastern Washington before heading for Canada’s Okanagan Lake and a visit with Larye’s cousin, Becky.
Kelowna, BC, Canada. Where we stayed was exactly 75km each direction from cousin Becky’s house, on the opposite side of the lake. The lake is 135km long, with Kelowna and its floating bridge about halfway.
We had one more trip planned this year, at least, to spend another week at Lake Chelan, finishing out this year’s timeshare obligations, sans bicycle, but with hiking shoes. It is quiet time at the resort, with only three of the 24 units in our section occupied, including ourselves.
This was the year that Larye became more or less retired for real, after electing not to renew his contract for support of the NIH, which expired in September. He has hinted to his remaining clients that nothing is forever, so they should have a Plan B.
Being an official “retired person,” Larye didn’t have any excuses to put off completing the inside storm window project this fall, spurred on by an early cold snap in mid-November.
Our fourth year as Warm Showers hosts saw an early influx of bicycle tourists, with a trio of hardy souls in January on a Seattle-to-Los Angeles trip, and a scattering of early season tourists in between our own travels in the spring. The medical issues forced us to close for the summer as well as cancel a few reservations, but we had a flurry of guests between our Bend and Kelowna trips, and a late-November tourist who needed rescued from storms and steep hills that left him cold and wet, far short of his goal by dark, 60km from us and far from other hosts. We had to turn down yet another potential guest in early December, due to our schedules. The guest count is close to 100, plus a number of cancellations and just requests for advice or assistance.
“Twilight in the Garden,” a quilted, discharged, appliqued, and bead-embellished piece from 2008, which now hangs in a classroom at the Lacey Senior Center
Judy continued as program director for the Olympia Weavers Guild, which is more or less a full-time job, if not a lifetime position, as few are willing to undertake the task. She also is now primarily a weaver, having sold her quilt fabric stash last year and, on the weekend before Larye’s surgery, her long-arm quilting machine. Fortunately, her health has been good this year. Judy also sold an art piece this year, to the Lacey Senior Center, as a result of a call for entries for art to hang in the new center at Woodland Park.
Peace — Larye and Judy (and Delia)
For more photos and videos, find us on Facebook,Vimeo, or our personal blogs. (Links to some of our videos below.)
18-year-old Delia runs the house, insisting on a lap near the fire, and her favorite quilt.
Appendix: Travels with Judy and Larye, a video notebook
Once past the half-marathon (2000 runners) with whom we shared the bike path, we continued on to the New Mexico State University campus, then back to our B&B on the normally busy El Paseo commercial strip, where there was no bike lane.
The Payette Lake ride was the ultimate wakeup call that no amount of diet and training was going to fix what turned out to be advanced heart disease. The lack of film footage on this ride around the beautiful high mountain lake was telling–Larye was too busy dealing with getting back to town alive to operate the camera.
One of our first long walks. We also walked around the north basin of Capital Lake later, and made a number of walks on the 3-km Huff ‘n Puff trail park in Shelton, as well as other city trails and county park trails.
Staircase is the southwest gateway to the interior of the Olympic National Park. We last hiked this in 1985 on a weekend backpacking trip with Matt, Mark, and Jason.
A train trip to the Quilt, Knit, and Stitch expo in Portland. We did a lot of walking around the Lloyd Center area, where our Montana friends
were staying, as well as downtown Portland, taking the light rail and buses around the city, along with more walking.
A trip to Bend, Oregon, led us to a hike around the east shore of West Paulina Lake, in the crater of the Newberry volcano south of Bend, in search of the hot springs at the north side of the crater.
We had intended to cycle the paths around Eagle Crest Resort and the roads and trails near Bend, but ended up hiking the trails instead, one of which led us down into the Deschutes River trail upstream from Cline Falls.
1. n. an extended period of recreation, especially one spent away from home or in traveling.
2. n. the action of leaving something one previously occupied.
The second definition just means “leaving,” without specific reference to reason or purpose… As to the first, there are many different forms of recreation, which may or may not require extended travel.
Somehow, during the early 1990s, we talked ourselves into the time share mode of vacationing. The scheme works like this: you find a place you like to visit, with activities you like to do, and you buy a small share of a condominium at a resort near that location. The purchase qualifies as a second home for tax purposes, so the interest bite isn’t quite so bad, and you own a tiny portion of [supposedly] prime real estate. And, you get to use the property at designated times of the year, commensurate with the share you own. Disregarding the purchase price, which is promoted as an “investment,” the cost of the vacation in an apartment with full kitchen, laundry, etc. and access to beach, tennis, pool, and proximity to other amenities such as golf and skiing (in season) is little more than or even less than a stay in a cramped and dark motel room nearby — provided, of course, that you use all the time allotted to you and that the property retains resale value.
Other than the fact that the amenities desirable to us, namely nice scenery and good places to ride our bicycle and hike, interesting shops, etc., make the venue less exclusive than the golfing, boating, skiing, etc., that attract most other resort guests, our activities are exploratory, not conducive to repeat visits year after year, regardless of the season.
Not long after committing to this life-long enforced vacation plan, we found ourselves in jobs that
didn’t have a lot of vacation time (as a troubleshooter and “cleaner” I tended, in the 1990s, to change jobs every year and a half, on average), and
didn’t offer time off when we could schedule vacation, i.e., when not teaching night school, which was the other reason we became interested in the floating exchange system, besides the spirit of adventure: we could possibly coordinate our calendars, provided there was a vacancy in a place we wanted to visit at the time we desired.
The first reason made it difficult to use up the backlog of vacation credits, as we also needed time off to visit relatives, of which there were too many to have them visit us at the time share, and which option was impractical for a lot of reasons, such as wrong time of year for school vacations, travel cost, etc.
But, as often happened, I had jobs where I could telecommute from home, or, as it turned out, from anywhere with a phone connection (later, Internet connection). Judy, with a more stable job, usually, had more vacation time accrued, but, due to commuting time, had little time for hobbies. Later, she was also self-employed, and vacation was a time to do her own sewing, weaving, and hand work, or portable projects for customers (we once pieced a guild raffle quilt at a time share condo, and were asked by the management to limit use of the sewing machine, as it vibrated the building).
We did have an option to get around the fixed vacation times, too: for a few hundred dollars more a year, in membership fees and “exchange” fees, we could use our vacation credit to go to other comparable resorts instead of our own, if desired. Which we did, for a number of years, a scheme that also allowed us to gain more vacation days by traveling exclusively in the “off season,” i.e., between the skiing and golfing/boating seasons, which are the best times for cycling and hiking, anyway. The operative term being “comparable,” which means that all the other resorts have boating, skiing, and golfing as primary attractions, as well.
So, early on, we started using our resort time as a working vacation, hauling computers, sewing machines, looms, fax machines, and cell phones off to the resorts, spending part of the day working and the rest of the day exploring on foot or wheel. This, then, has been our recreational plan for over 20 years. And, the “24x7x365” work mentality has carried through even on non-resort outings, carrying on remote Internet work while traveling, from coffee shops, motels, and campgrounds, and even sometimes phone consultations pulled over at a freeway exchange or shopping center parking lot, or, on the bike, standing in the middle of a country road in the rain.
Now, in semi-retirement, with only a few clients in maintenance mode and some volunteer work, one would expect we would be free at last to have a “normal” vacation. Well, old habits are hard to break. On our most recent trip, back to the original time share condo that we actually own a piece of, we loaded the car with our computers and looms, knitting needles, and balls of yarn. This time, though, the objective was, on the fiber side, perfecting new skills and making items for relatives, and the computer efforts aimed at also learning and perfecting new skills, and working on blog items.
Judy finishes tying on the warp, ready to start weaving on the small 1930s Structo Artcraft metal loom we recently acquired.
This past week’s effort was aimed at setting up an experimental compute cluster, using the popular Raspberry Pi single-board tiny Linux computers. We have a collection of them at home, pressed into service as Internet gateway, network services, and print server, respectively, but had acquired a couple more to experiment with home automation controls and sensors. These, we wired up at the resort as a local area network, connected to the Internet via the resort WiFi, and using dnsmasq and IP forwarding to route our other computers to the Internet. Setting up a compute cluster also involves sharing storage resources, so we were busy installing packages for the services needed, such as NFS (Network File System) for disk sharing and PostgreSQL for a database server, with the intention of building a distributed software application server that is extensible by adding more low-cost nodes to the system. Fortunately, it was the slow season, with few other tenants in residence, so our bandwidth hogging went unnoticed, and the service was nearly as fast as at home.
Two Raspberry Pi computers, plus power strip, Ethernet switch, WiFi dongle, USB hub, and smart phone comprise part of a makeshift local area network. Not shown: laptop computers connected to the switch and a USB hard drive added to the USB hub later. The extra cords are chargers for two iPads that complete the complement of “necessary” electronics.
This isn’t the first time we’ve wired up a router while on vacation — some resorts still charge for Internet, and only allow one or two devices on one account, so it is convenient to connect your own router and switch and run everyone’s personal devices off one login account. In Canada, some hotels and resorts have wired Internet rather than WiFi, so having a router is the only way to share the connection among devices. Almost all systems now have two network interfaces, ethernet and WiFi, so it is easy to make one device a router and connect the rest to it, either through the wired switch from one WiFi connection or reverse the flow (where there is a wired connection) to make the router a WiFi access point.
So it goes: you can take the system administrator out of the data center, but you can’t take the data center out of the sysadmin. Because a lot of hotel WiFi systems have little or no security, we also use a web proxy server located in our home office–also on a Raspberry Pi and accessed through an encrypted “tunnel”–to browse sites that are also not secure. This also hides our location from the Internet, so we don’t get a flood of local ads. The home network gateway also provides access to a webcam to keep track of the house while we are gone.
As much as we take home with us just to have a different view out the window, the other side of time share vacationing is that we need to take time to visit relatives and time to explore and travel on our own, bicycle touring while we still can. And, as retired folks, our income has declined (and, thanks to the 21st century economy and banking practices, so has our retirement nest egg: we started out with nothing, and have very little of it left), leaving little discretionary income for unnecessary travel. So, we’ve put the “fixed base” time share condo up for sale. Never mind that it wasn’t a good investment: the current selling prices for our units are somewhat less than the real estate fees, and sales are slow, so we won’t get anything out of it, and after 20 years of declining value, our effective nightly cost has been much higher than we should be willing to pay, but we will cut the monthly maintenance fee expense.
We have a membership/owner share in another time share club that doesn’t involve ownership in a specific unit of a specific resort, but provides access to use any of their facilities, so we will still be able to enjoy condo vacationing (actually, obligated to go periodically, as the annual allocations expire within two years if not used). The old type of time sharing a fixed location doesn’t quite work for us anymore, if it ever did, and it certainly doesn’t work for our children: none of them or even their extended families want to take on the responsibility, so we are letting it go–if it will sell. We had listed it once before, for two years, unsuccessfully, prior to converting it to the floating exchange program. If it doesn’t sell this year, well,we will be back, toting bicycle, computers,looms, yarn, and whatever else we need to enjoy living at home away from home.
