Posts Tagged ‘Travel’

I am seriously pro-food. I like to think about food, read about food, gently prod food, ferment food, garnish food, smell food, buy food, seek food and experience new food. I regale the difference between 6-month and 12-month Manchego, care whether asparagus is in season, and am honestly fond of (not just making a point of) eating sweetbreads (thymus and pancreas, usually, of calf), bone marrow, squid and fermented fish sauce. However, my upcoming trip to Iceland is making me gustatorily anxious.

Icelandic food specialties read more like grievous and fatal fraternity hazing rituals than anything that a human with extant taste buds and olfactory capability would submit to willingly. The regional recipes manage to get an F- on each of the rough trinity of food-is-yummy criteria, offending the user psychologically, aesthetically, and sensually.

I have a habit of, when I travel, absconding immediately to the nearest art museum. I neglect even the most vital tourist activities (various towers, mountain peaks, cathedrals, piazzas, antiquities, Disney parks, stadia, canals, funiculars, and botanical gardens), often at great experiential expense.

Simply put, here is a list of notable (note that I’ve excluded the Portland Art Museum and anything billed as an art collection in Las Vegas, et cetera) art museums I have visited. You will find reading a list of notable art museums I have visited interesting. You will.

And then you will tell me your favorites.

A stray inspiration from Autumn last week turned into a full-fledged planned exodus: The Pencils are going to I*eland. That is, both Iceland and Ireland (and also France (and also the UK (well, me at least (David is going back to the US earlier than I am)))).

We are going in late May. The prices on non-stop Icelandair flights out of Seattle seem too good to be true. David’s round-trip ticket was $553.67. Mine was costly enough that I’m embarrassed to disclose the total: I’m flying first class.

Photo by Cristiano Corsini

During a recent trip to central California I learned several key life lessons: Nissan Versas are staggeringly dull, things like to fall over when blown on with 60MPH winds, Hoizon’s CRJ-700s can land in essentially zero visibility, and the OLCC will let you drink awfully early at the PDX airport as long as you can cough up a boarding pass.

I’m traveling this weekend on the Central Coast of California. The weather is making a turn for the worse now, but the five-hour drive from Sacramento to Arroyo Grande in our bizarre and effete rental was not too bad. I’ve highlighted some other photos from this trip on my photos page.

Far eastern Utah, almost Colorado. How I wish the sky were always this interesting. Shot on film.

I wrote this on Friday in Vancouver.
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I am having a problem with displacement.
To leave one city and arrive in the middle of another without preface or enough time lapsed for my softened mind to come to equilibrium–this is displacement. Like a hangover it stays with me longer than I would ever want; hours, a day [...]

Where there’s not much Merlot anymore and the grapes often grow on trees.
Thursday: My mobile phone rang and it was Cloud Four’s retirement-handling investment managers, again, calling to prompt me to continue on the apparently endless task of moving our company’s SimpleIRA plan away from the horror that is ADP.
“Can’t talk,” I said, both curtly [...]

There is something like a coup in my insides, pouncing only when unexpected and I have blearily wiped it from my recollection; only when I am blithe and reporting “I feel fine now, it’s gone now” does everything in my geographical center suddenly grind to a halt and then there is squeezing almost like my [...]

Satellite views like this one are what make conspiracy folks and lovers of the mysterious have “squee” moments.
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In Oregon’s remote Christmas Valley, coming upon this military installation of debated purpose is certainly eerie. The Internetty consensus is that the establishment has something to do with Over-the-Horizon radar or some such–at least according to [...]