Driving in Japan

We had more reservations about driving in Japan than we've had in any other country, with the possible exception of the first time we drove in London.  We're here to tell you that our fears were warrantless.  We had no idea what to expect, in terms of road signs, traffic density, or driver behaviors.  We didn't know anyone who had driven there, and in our planning stages, when we mentioned that we were renting a car, we'd often get surprised looks or comments.  Having done it, we'd wholeheartedly recommend it--we would have missed out on not just sights and areas, but an entire aspect of Japanese culture if we'd stuck to public transit.  Don't get us wrong, the public transit was awesome, and we used it extensively, but driving in Japan was also pretty incredible.

Albuquerque and Santa Fe

We spent a long weekend in New Mexico earlier this month, as an extension to David traveling there for work during the week.  He was deploying new desktops and servers to two different judges' chambers, one in Albuquerque, and one in Santa Fe.  Lana flew in to Santa Fe Friday night, and we had Monday off as a Federal holiday, leaving us with enough time to see a little of both cities.  We’d visited Santa Fe twice before, but had not yet spent much time in Albuquerque.

David had wrapped up his work in Santa Fe before lunch on Friday.  If Lana wasn’t flying in, he would have spent the afternoon in return travel.  Instead, he had about 8 hours before he needed to meet Lana at the airport .  Before leaving chambers, he’d asked the law clerks there for their suggestions of things they’d enjoyed in the area.  They had a number of great ideas, but the one that seemed perfect for the weather and season was a hike in Hyde State Park, northeast of Santa Fe.

David packed up a picnic lunch and his camera bag, and drove up Ski Basin road to the Aspen Vista trail head.  The drive itself was quite pretty—the aspen were all turning.  The trail head starts at 10,000 feet, and after 6 miles reaches the summit at 12,000.  David only hiked about 3 miles, to 11,000, which is where the aspen give way to pine.   While sitting and eating the last of his lunch at the edge of the pine forest, he noticed a dot of red.  Looking closer, he noticed a number of raspberries, and after a bit of foraging, had a nice extra snack!

The pine forest itself was pretty interesting; it was a very damp micro climate, perhaps due to the slope and location.  The trees had long tendrils of moss hanging of the branches and bark, and the undergrowth was spongy and full of interesting succulents.  Not what he expected to find just above arid Santa Fe!

The skies had been overcast as he hiked up, which worked out nicely, as he could hike as briskly as he wanted without getting to hot.  As he descended, the cloud cover broke up a bit, giving some spectacular lighting on the aspen, as well as some neat views of Santa Fe.  What looks like a river in the plain is actually highway 285 on the north side of the city.

Lana left work a little before 4:30, and her tiny plane landed just before 8.  David saw it fly directly overhead as he drove to the airport (there was only one plane due for the next four hours, so there wasn’t much question).  Outside of a dirt airstrip in Limpopo Valley, Botswana, it’s the smallest airport we’ve been through—a good thing.  It took Lana longer to walk across the tarmac than it took to walk through the building, and to the car.  Neither of us felt like a restaurant meal, so we made a simple, tasty pasta dish in the adequately appointed kitchen of our hotel room, which was a nice perk.

We spend the morning in Santa Fe, wandering the Plaza, and re-visiting the history museum in the Palace of the Governors.  They have a great, functioning print shop there with a number of different printing machines and some beautiful posters and books that were produced there.  After lunch, we drove to Albuquerque to see part of the 2015 International Balloon Fiesta, which had been running all week.

We’d planned to visit a botanical garden, but it was a zoo (actually, an aquarium and a zoo and a botanical gardens, but really it was just far too busy for the relaxed afternoon we had in mind), so we simply headed to the Balloon park early and wandered around.  The shops were interesting; a mix of what you’d see at a fair or farmer’s market, along with all manner of balloon merchandise.  Canon is one of the event sponsors, and David was curious about their tent.  Inside, they had some of their cameras on display (though nothing in the mid-range or higher, oddly).  On the side facing the field, they had about 15 different telephoto lenses, up to 800mm, mounted on tripods for people to test.  Inside, they had an interesting promotion: they would loan you a DSLR for the evening; they seemed to be getting a lot of takers.

The balloon field is huge (78 acres, or 54 football fields), and it took a while to walk past or through the tents that lined just one side.  We were getting hot and tired, and after lingering in spots of shade, we finally sought refuge (and seating) in the tent of another even sponsor, Dos Equis.  It was really a beer garden with a small tent for the staff tending the bar, and not enough tables and shade to go around.  We shared a hard cider, found some chairs and moved them to shade, and sat and watched the crowds.  It ended up being a perfect way to while the afternoon away until the sun dropped close to the horizon, and lost much of it’s fierceness.   Two ciders and a bottle of water later, we left—it was much more crowded than we we’d arrived, both inside the beer garden, and on the field.  100,000 people were estimated to attend, and it was easy to believe.

As the sun set, the balloonists started rolling their trucks and trailers onto the field, and deploying their gear.  It was fun to be able to watch different balloons in various stages of inflation, right in front of you.  As darkness fell the Night Magic Glow began: after a 10 second countdown all the balloonists would fire up their torches to light up all the balloons at once.  It was pretty incredible.

Finally as some balloons started to deflate to call it a night, we headed back up the hill to the car.  We drove a little further into Albuquerque for dinner, and at a a place in Nob Hill that David had eaten at when he was staying in Albuquerque for work.  After dinner and some fro-yo for dessert, we headed back to Santa Fe, wiped out after a long day of being outdoors in the heat and sun and dry air.

After a good night’s sleep and a yummy Sunday brunch at The Chocolate Maven (our favorite restaurant and bakery in Santa Fe), we were kind of at a loss of what to do. We’d done as much museuming as we wanted to, and weren’t planning on leaving until the next morning.  Ultimately we decided on a little hiking, a little shopping, and a little hanging around doing nothing.  We started with the hike, a short one in the Canyon Preserve.  It was pretty, but mostly dry and scrubby.

After our hike, and a picnic lunch, we hit a fabric store (Santa Fe Quilting) where David found some fabrics for making bow ties (his latest hobby), as well as an outlet mall nearby.  Then a lazy evening winding down our trip.  On Monday, we drove back to Denver, after breakfast.  It’s a pretty drive, and passed quickly with music and good company.

Southwest Road Trip

Almost exactly 2 months after returning to the US, at the end of September, we headed out again for a much shorter trip.  We were driving towards San Diego via the Grand Canyon.  We planned about 2 weeks away from ‘home.’  Our renter was still paying our mortgage and then some, and neither of us were quite ready to settle down.  It seemed like a perfect time to get one last visit in to our close friends in California while we still had the luxury of time to spare.  We left heavy rain and flash flood warnings behind us in the plains, and headed over the Rockies, which had an early dusting of snow amongst the turning aspen. 

Road Trip Map

We created a tripline.net map for our road trip, in addition to the international leg.  Both can be found on our maps page.

Corning, New York

We drove out of our way (as much as you can say that, on an 11,000 mile road trip) to see the Corning Museum of Glass, in Corning, NY, which I have wanted to see for years.  Neither of us were disappointed.  The town is fairly small, with a vibrant, revived old town area.  Corning, Inc. is still headquartered here, and the town reflects that with an interesting mix of engineers, factory technicians, and artists.  It reminded Lana and I a little of our respective hometowns, where HP and Kodak brought a large number of newcomers into rural farming towns.

We stayed overnight, and arrived at the Museum not long after they opened; we were just in time for the first hot glass demonstration of the day, where two glassworkers were making a pumpkin.

Above, the gathered glass has already been rolled in frit or ground up pieces of colored glass, which gives the pumpkin its nice flecked appearance.  Then it is shaped by pressing it into a ridged die and is placed back in the furnace briefly before a puff of air is added and captured, so that the hot glass heats it, expanding the air, and inflating the gather into a much rounder shape.

Another glassworker has impressed ridges on a smaller, solid gather of glass, and the first glassworker is joining them together; hot glass bonds better to cooler glass, which is why the stem is red-hot.  The stem will be a vivid green when cooled.

Working quickly, the stem is stretched out, and then wrapped around a form, to create the twisted appearance of the stem.  The form is removed, and the stem is curved, and touched to the cooler pumpkin body in a few places to bond it.

Finally, the stem is cut off with heavy snips.  It’s amazing to see glass blown, twisted, stretched and cut like it’s clay.  The two glassworkers are talking to us the entire time, describing what they’re doing, and why.  Once they snipped the stem off, they snapped the pumpkin off the steel blowing pipe, and placed the pumpkin in an annealing oven to cool down at a controlled rate until the next day.  Then they turned to us, and told us that they were going to raffle off the pumpkin they’d made the day before.  Lana had a feeling she was going to win the pumpkin, but the first ticket called was not hers.  However, they were also raffling off a beautiful blue vase, and the woman who’d just been called chose the vase.  Lana and I looked at each other, still hopeful.  The next number called was one of our tickets—both of them in Lana’s hands by now.  There was never even any question as to who would get it.  She looked like she’d just been called for the Price is Right:

We couldn’t have had a bad time at the museum, but we certainly got a good start!  We spent some time in the industrial section of the museum, where there were exhibits on Gorilla Glass, bullet proof glass, fiber optics, Pyrex cookware, etc., before moving into the artistic gallery sections.  The glass gown is life size.  The original positive casting was made around a live model, and you can still see her navel in the body-shaped hollow center of the final glass casting.

The galleries contained a wide variety of glass art—some technically impressive, if not to our tastes, but most  were quite beautiful.

Some were impressive and beautiful; these fruit were two to three feet tall, and each must have weighed hundreds of pounds.

The museum also has a staggering array of glass history on display, and it’s only a fraction of the collection they have accumulated.  This glass tabletop was fashioned in the 18th century from fragments of ancient Greek and Roman glass mosaic.

While fascinating, the historic section overwhelmed us eventually.  That’s when we stumbled across the Glass Lab exhibit, which was our favorite, and that’s saying something.

The exhibit consisted of a variety of glass art pieces, designed by a variety of artists and designers, most of whom hadn’t worked with glass before, and created by several of the glass artisans from Corning (including one of the gentlemen in the demonstration we saw at the beginning of the day).  You can have an appreciation of the pieces much in the same way as the other pieces in the various other galleries, but this one had one further element which made us want to stay all day.  On a large white wall, they were projecting clips from each artists’ session with the artisans, so you could see what the artists conceived, and how the pieces were executed. It made for a very visceral, in-depth exhibit. You could watch a piece being made, and then go and find it in the gallery, get up close to it and examine the piece, now that you had the “backstory,” as it were.  They also had kiosks with touch screens where you could scroll through the entire set of artists, and watch on a small screen the clip of the creation of any particular piece by that artists.  We could have sat there for the rest of the day, watching clips and finding pieces.  

The grouping of pieces you see above were conceived by a single artist and executed by several artisans over the course of a couple of days.  Intestines, kidneys, stomach, liver, heart, lungs and brain were made, as well as several large eyeballs of varying eye colors.  We thoroughly enjoyed this exhibit, and it was a great culmination of the museum, combining the the artistic aspect with the technical aspects of glass making.

Papa’s House

We were lucky enough to meet someone very special in Traverse City, Michigan.  We previously mentioned that our friend was gracious enough to arrange for us stay at his grandfather’s house while we were there.  If the calendar on the wall is any indication, then Papa died in May of 2011.  But his presence, his spirit is alive and well in his home.  It seems as if he’s just around the corner visiting the fire station and will be back any minute.  And by looking around at all the love in that house, you wish he was.  More than that, the home feels familiar.  It’s of an age and décor that both David and I remember from our own childhood visits to our grandparents’ homes. It even smells (in a good way) like being at our grandparents’ houses.

It didn’t necessarily feel like this at the time, but we’ve since talked about how it was something like a museum. We’ve been through other museums (most recently the Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis) that capture a moment in time, and preserve history in some way.  This was an entirely more personal history, but we felt its impact just the same.

We never met Papa, but here is what we know about him, after having spent some time in his home, abiding with his memory.





He was a fireman. More than that, he was the Fire Chief. At one point he was a sheriff’s deputy, and was involved with the police department as well.  The man literally wore many hats.

















He liked to golf.  There were lots of golf mugs, and golf humor on the walls.  He collected antique fire truck toys.   And we think he played the vibraphone (there were a set of them in the basement).  He struck us as a man who was full of jokes, laughter, and love.



He loved his kids, his grandkids, and his great-grandchildren.  There were pictures of them everywhere, in every room. The photos were in places you would always see them, like above the sink in the kitchen, on the fridge, on his desk, next to his favorite recliner in the living room. 



Everywhere we found little notes of love that had been given to him by people—we assume family but they’re not signed.  Little slips of paper or post-it notes that said “Love you Papa!” and “Sending smiles your way!”









Thank you Papa, for letting us stay.  And thank you, Brian, for introducing us to Papa.