Muss My Hair » travel

Glowing Dino Coin

Squidocto — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 17:38:56 +0000

Yes, I will accept this as legal tender when it is released.

It is, after all, the first Canadian glow-in-the-dark dinosaur quarter.

Canada, I love you.

(Via Blag Hag.)

Mountain Graffiti

Crushinator — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:59:41 +0000

Woke up this morning remembering a sentence neatly spray-painted on a rock years ago on a mountain in NW Wales:

“You English are welcome to visit but don’t come to live here.”

It was just below a resting point on the scramble up Y Garn.

SciFiSlavia

Squidocto — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:32:55 +0000

A fantastic gallery of sci-fi (ish) illustrations by Nikolai Lutohin in the former Yugoslavia.

Memories of mispent youth

Crushinator — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 17:39:25 +0000

Whoa! Yes, zoom in. Inscrutable to some, dusty neuron firing for others.

Via this article on Tor.com

See also David Williams fine articles on Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and Gamma World.

Bus bathroom sign

Crushinator — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 18:32:29 +0000

From a Pine Hill Trailways bus bathroom. What this sign really means is “men, please sit down when peeing;” what it appears to mean is “no two chubby guys with hats.”

Radiation vs thingything vs pat-down

Crushinator — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 01:51:06 +0000

Here’s an apparently-regularly updated list of airports that lack the irradiation option, in case you don’t feel like being x-rayed by potentially unsafe machines.

Fire festival in Jackson, Wyoming

Crushinator — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 02:33:58 +0000

Fire festival consists of daiko drumming (drummers from Winnipeg), Japanese food (fried or grilled), and a team of locals in robes carrying a stump carved in the likeness of the Grand Teton. Later they light some pyres on fire. But not, so far as I could tell, the wooden mountain.

La Pine, Crack in the Ground

Crushinator — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:35:05 +0000

Deschutes river in sun, breakfast at the diner in La Pine, Crack in the Ground

On the road again

Crushinator — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 21:48:09 +0000

After staying up far too late packing too much stuff, we awoke to heavy and unceasing rain. Ridiculous amount of rain. Rain! After a use-up-things-in-fridge omelette, packed the car in the rain, wrestled things into place in the trunk and backseat, and rolled off to the chain drugstore two blocks away where we had to wait what seemed like hours in line while each person in front of us presented some sort of manager-override-requiring quandry (swimsuit without price tag? Mislabelled bagel?)

Anyhow headed out through yet more rain and stopped for lunch at the Zigzag Cafe in the town of Zigzag, around the south side of Mt Hood. Good simple sandwiches in a nice dining room overlooking a rushing creek. On from there into Warm
Springs reservation where the blue began appearing in the sky and the fields were carpeted in blooming balsamroot. We wended on south to Pringle’s Falls campground, where we were surrounded by huge old ponderosas, but failed to find a waterfall (though we didn’t try too hard to find them.

Below, the Zigzag dining room and their toilet paper holder.

Ghostmart

Crushinator — Tue, 25 May 2010 18:01:46 +0000

When passing through Bruneau, Idaho, why not stop by the Bruneau One Stop?

Frugal Travel

Crushinator — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:45:17 +0000

An article after my own (cheap) heart.

Ranger Station for Sale

Crushinator — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:01:05 +0000

The Packwood Administrative Site is located in downtown Packwood, Washington on U.S. Highway 12. The property is approxiamtely 20.50 acres and contains 2 individual tax lots with 22 buildings.

No bids yet, but minimum is $250K, auction closes 3/3/2010.

link fixed.

The Golden Snail

Squidocto — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:53:41 +0000

The Keong Mas is the only IMAX theater in Indonesia. It looks like a golden snail, after the famous Indonesian legend.

Two Moments From The San Diego Zoo

Squidocto — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:06:48 +0000

Overheard After We had Landed and were Taxiing to the Gate

Squidocto — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:20:49 +0000

Well dressed twenty-something pulls out her phone the second they say we can and starts making calls. The call that begins “hi daddy” continues:

Yeah
(pause)
Yeah the flight was okay.
(pause)
Well it’s just so cramped, you know it’s been a long time since I’ve been on a public airplane.

Seat Guru

Crushinator — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:36:16 +0000

If you’re like me (not if you like me, which of course you must), you wanna pick your seats on an airplane with some sense of where the bathrooms and bulkheads and, most important, where the view-obscuring wing is. Seat Guru let’s you look at the layouts of tons of airlines and comment on the best and worst seats, along with why. I’ll report back how accurate it is about the wing placement.

Froggenfreude

Crushinator — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:10:31 +0000

The little car that took us cross-country with nary a complaint.

Hail to you, froggenfreude.

Roll On, Columbia

Crushinator — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 05:08:46 +0000

Approaching Portland from the east, near Biggs along the Columbia River. We have arriveded.

The Border

Crushinator — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 17:55:36 +0000

We just crossed the Snake River into Oregon at Ontario, OR.

Idaho

Crushinator — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 15:14:17 +0000

Drove up from Moab through the desert and up into the mountains at Price and Helper, UT. Then down the winding US 6 through the Wasatch mts to Provo, up through the sprawl of Provo/Salt Lake City/Ogden (and some pretty aggressive/bad drivers), then onto 84 west into Idaho. The landscape changes here into the Columbia Basin geology that you find in northeastern Oregon and eastern Washington: rolling hills of yellow grass, some wheat, sagebrush, cattle, and little tumbled piles of old lava on the hillsides below the occasional basalt cliff. I read that this all due to the Yellowstone Hotspot bubbling through the North American plate as the plate drifts west.

We pushed on to Twin Falls and checked into a perfectly fine Super8. This morning we hit the free breakfast and met a couple from Alabama headed to Vancouver, WA for a funeral; they were taking a southern route across country and stopping to explore Old West towns. They recommended Lincoln, NM as a perfectly preserved old town with Billy the Kid connections and a museum in a limestone cave.

Now we’re headed northwest along the Snake River and the Oregon Trail to where the streets are paved with gold, stumptown, PDX, the city of roses and overcast skies….