Henry on May 8 (the day we potted him)
Henry on May 25 (before we left Calgary)
Henry on June 4 (in San Francisco)
Henry, our travelling plant, is not well. Gregor says he’s going to meet his maker soon. I’m not ready to accept that yet. He started to show signs of illness a week ago in Monterey, after spending yet another chilly night in the van (~ 9 degrees Celcius) – first, he lost a leaf and then the top of his stem started to split. (more…)
It’s been a crazy couple of days. We left Monterey last Wednesday and drove 3 hours south to Los Osos, where we dropped off the van for a week to get a makeover at GoWesty (new engine, new cooling and exhaust system, new tentโฆ). From there, we drove a rental car back north to San Jose to visit David, an old work friend of Gregor’s. (more…)
Our first sunny day in a week. Finally. It had to be in California, of course. While working this morning in the van, we discovered that our mobile Wi-Fi device (Verizon’s MiFi 4150L) doesn’t allow voice-over-IP (VOIP) calls. This means that we can’t make low-cost phone calls using our computers. Very aggravating, since we need to be able to communicate with clients by phone, and getting a US phone plan is just not a cost-effective solution.
We drove to the nearest Verizon dealer in Redding to see if they could help us out. In the end there was not much we could do about the VOIP thing, leaving Gregor our IT hero rather defeated. So we decided to cheer ourselves up with some “food”. (more…)
We decided to listen to American radio for the first time on our trip. The first words we heard being broadcasted were: “Young women should not be allowed to have abortionsโฆ”. Quick change to the next FM station – this time it was a guy on folk guitar singing about “Sunday the Sabbath”. Next up was a Ricky Martin-esque Spanish-language cheese-pop song – we made it through one verse. A turn of the radio knob took us to the middle of a country tune: “โฆgrabbed my woman and grabbed my gunโฆ”. That’s when we turned off the radio.
We slept for free in another rest area last night – this time in Rufus, northern Oregon. We hit the road at about 8 am and drove west through the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic area, where the Columbia River has cut a deep canyon through volcanic lava and mudflows dating back 40 million years. All along the gorge are volcanic rock outcrops, cascading waterfalls, and industrial locks and dams. The famously windy region is also a windsurfing mecca.
Since it was Memorial Day long weekend, the most popular attractions on the scenic drive were crawling with people. We enjoyed the gorgeous scenery along the winding road that followed the contours of the valley walls. This road was originally built in the 40’s for recreational automobile travel, so it was really narrow and dangerously close to the edge of some ridiculously steep slopes. Thankfully, Gregor is a good driver. (more…)