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To all out there who own a car and plan on the possibility of ever selling it: please take care of your vehicle!!!

Since I haven’t said much about the truck we bought last summer, other than that I shut my thumb in its door, this is as good a time as any. The truck has been pretty good, especially considering that it is 13 years old, though I don’t think the previous owner took the kind of care of it that he should have. I just had to add both transmission fluid and power steering fluid. Of course, I’m somewhat at fault myself since this was the first time I checked both items. The power steering reservoir was almost completely dry, no wonder it had been whining for several months. I can’t believe I never made the connection between the whine and turning the wheel. In my defense it did whine more or less constantly, but got worse when turning. After adding the fluid the whine is non-existent. Of course, that doesn’t mean the power steering won’t fail next week. The transmission wasn’t nearly as bad, thankfully, but it was a little low.

Anyway, please take good care of your car! Here are a couple pics of my truck:

and I’m not sure why. I think he comes across as trying too hard, like he is not sincere, but he is trying really hard to appear sincere. He moves too much when he’s speaking. It’s weird. I’ve always had that reaction to his movies. At the same time, though, I don’t think he is a bad actor. I watched Before Sunrise and Before Sunset this past week, with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, directed by Richard Linklater. I think both actors did a great job. The films were both very good… the kind of movies you think about for a long time afterward, though, admittedly, I don’t think I have anything in common with the two characters. I’ve never had quite the kind of discussions that they do, though I certainly have opinions on a few of the things they talked about. It’s obvious to me, however, that I share a love of Europe with the director, even though I have never been to either of the locations of the two movies, Vienna and Paris, respectively. The beginning of Before Sunrise is shot from the window of a train, just looking at the passing scenery, and the rest of the movie takes place in touristy spots and back alleys of Vienna, the kind of places you would only know about if you had spent some real time exploring the city. The sequel takes place in Paris, but doesn’t visit the Eiffel Tower, and only gets a glimpse of Notre Dame Cathedral. Instead it spends most of its time walking the streets, or on a boat on the river, the kinds of places where you can be filled with a sense of appreciation for location, but not overwhelmed by your surroundings. I could tell while watching that what happened to the characters was as much an effect of where they were as who they were. That’s true of everything in life though, isn’t it? I would not be the person I am if it weren’t for the town I grew up in and the places I have travelled to.

If you haven’t seen or heard of these two movies, they are a love story of sorts, about two people who meet by chance in Vienna in 1995, spend one night walking the streets of the city and falling in love, separate for 9 years, then meet again in Paris. I have my doubts as to whether their relationship would have worked had they succeeded in finding each other again soon after the events of the first film. They made a deep emotional and mental connection, and managed to renew it in the second movie, but that is not all it takes to stay in love. The characters really don’t have much in common with each other. Maybe a deep emotional and mental connection is enough to keep a relationship together long enough to get it based on something more permanent. I hope that the two stars and the director get back together for a third movie in another few years. I’m interested to see what happens to the characters.

It’s not very often that my disbelief gets suspended enough that I suddenly realize that, yes, I’m only watching a movie and it’ll all be ok in the end. That happened last night, in spite of the dim picture and cruddy sound in our local second run theater. We saw National Treasure. While I initially had a pretty difficult time seeing the possibility of Nichols Cage taking the reins from Harrison Ford in the role of intrepid archaeologist, it actually worked pretty well. I was sucked in. The story was a bit hokey, but the sense of national pride was great as they visited locations around Washington D.C., Philadelphia, New York and Boston. A lot of reviews I read and comments from other people cited the similarities between the movie and the plot of The Da Vinci Code. The similarities are there, but the payoff is quite a bit different. Anyway, it was a fun movie, well worth seeing.

From: aarjqjs@seclab.com
Subject: Flonase used to treat itching and sneezing due to allergy flabbergast

I thought I was being all cool by using the wireless network on my palm to send posts from far away places like “Multnomah” and “Seattle.” Course I forgot that the script I wrote to actually make the posts once I had sent them in remotely posts things as drafts so I have to come back and manually post them later. Argh. The preceding posts were written at the locations listed and at the times indicated. Next time I’ll try to remember a bit better.

I didn’t post yesterday because when we finally woke up it was so late we had to quickly grab some breakfast and scoot right out of there.

On friday we went to the Pacific Science Center and saw the IMAX film Forces of Nature, then a couple of the science exhibits. The movie was excellent. It featured a segment on volcanoes including IMAX footage of one of the eruptions on Montserrat. It also had segments on tornadoes and earthquakes.

The most memorable part of the exhibit hall we saw was a “gravity hill” that was actually a recreation of an exhibit from the 1962 worlds fair. It was an uphill ramp, with the walls on either side decorated with the facades of buildings that made it appear as if you were actually traveling downhill. It gave an awfully strange feeling to have your eyes reporting that you were going downhill, but feedback from your inner ear and legs saying that you were going uphill. The best part was watching my two year old daughter try to come down the ramp. She tripped over her own feet and almost fell over. I guess her brain has not had enough experience in walking yet for it to be able to trust what is coming in from sensory organs and pick which one it is going to believe. The look of confusion on her face was priceless.

After the Science Center we boogied south to the Museum of Flight, whose initial exhibit was quite similar to other aircraft museums we’ve attended. The new Personal Courage Wing, however, was incredible. They are trying to build the most inspiring and comprehensive collection of vintage WWI and WWII aircraft anywhere, and they are doing an incredible job of displaying them. The hall is quite dimly lit, and several of the planes are displayed at angles that encourage your mind to see the vehicles dog fighting, strafing, and generally making nuisances of themselves. They also have several vintage engines on display, with some of them featuring cutaway sections so you can see the inner workings, and some featuring recordings of the engine starting up and then doing a flyby. Many of the planes are set in dioramas showing servicing areas or collections of memorabilia related to the particular vehicle featured. It was truly cool and I wish we had had a couple of hours to spend in that wing alone.

We finished our visit to the Museum of Flight with a trip across the street to the “Air Park” to visit a Concorde and Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon’s Air Force One. They allow you to walk around and through both airplanes, though the inside areas are either cordonned off or blocked off with clear plastic walls. Still, it was very cool to board and tour both of those extremely historic aircraft.

We left Seattle at about 2:30pm for the trip to Kennewick. The trip takes a bit more than 3 hours, so I figured we’d make it in plenty of time to get to the 6:00 reception. What I hadn’t counted on is that the eastern part of Washington, at least the tri-cities area, is on Mountain Time, unlike the rest of the state which is on Pacific Time, so we lost an hour while we were driving east and we ended up being incredibly rushed when we got to the hotel and found out what had happened. Luckily the young lady at the hotel desk was able to give me accurate directions to the location of the reception and it wasn’t far away.

The reception was the whole reason, or at least the excuse for, our entire trip. It was a nice reception, the bride and groom seemed happy and the hall was decorated nicely. I have to admit we were all more than a little tired by that point in the day. Once we returned to the hotel I had this odd feeling that we had driven an awfully long way (about 1700 miles) to get to that reception that we only stayed at for about 45 minutes! Erica turned on the TV in the hotel room and it was tuned to A&E, which was then showing a night of Biography episodes that all dealt with serial killers. The current one was Jeffrey Dahmer, so, given my wife’s morbid fascination with crime and all things gross we sat and watched the whole thing. That dude was sick, man. After the nastiness we went to sleep, and it’s a credit to the effects of taking a vacation to say that we all managed to sleep through the night.

Yesterday we made the 10-ish hour drive back to Orem after breakfast at “The Country Gentleman” restaurant in Kennewick, which was pretty good. I guess it is hard to badly mess up breakfast, but still, they did it well. We drove through a Wendy’s in Ontario, Oregon for lunch, then at “Hart’s 50s and 60s Diner” in Twin Falls for dinner.
Notable sights from the drive home across the farming country of southeastern Washington, northeastern Oregon and southwestern Idaho include the biggest pile of cow manure I have ever seen, lots and lots of farm irrigation technology and more sage brush than you could shake a stick at. We finally pulled into the parking lot of our apartment just after 11pm with the kids completely zonked out in the back, and Erica starting to snore in the seat next to me. I was luckily still mostly awake.
It was a good trip.

The tourist traps in Seattle open kinda late and close kinda early if you ask me. Everything seems to open at 10am and close at 5pm. I guess I am used to places like Vegas that go all the time. Anyway, we went to the top of the Space Needle yesterday after continental breakfast in the hotel. The view was pretty cool. Jonathan loved looking through the telescopes, which thankfully were free. Nice of them not to gouge you for quarters when you paid $11 to get up there in the first place. Actually, we didn’t pay that much. We bought a CityPass for the three oldest of us (Marissa is young enough to be free). CityPass gives you tickets to 6 touristy places in a little tear out book for a discount price. They were all places we were interested in going so that worked out well.

After the Space Needle (and its gift shop!), we took the monorail downtown and walked down Pine Street to the Pike Place Market. Across the street from the market we found an artisan cheese shop called Beechers. They were in the process of making a batch of cheese in huge tub in the front window of the shop so we stopped to watch that for a few minutes. They also had samples in the form of cheese curds so we tasted a bit. We walked through the north end of the market, then took the elevator down to the waterfront and the Seattle Aquarium, which, as you might imagine, was full of fish. The kids loved it. They couldn’t stop running around, poiting at the things they saw. I realized that as long as we take the kids, museums and other similar exhibit oriented places are going to be snapshot visual places. The grown ups never got a chance to read any of the explanatory plaques on any of the displays. Oh well. It was all fun to look at. The aquarium has an IMAX dome theater and since I am a major IMAX fan we had to see a movie. We saw “The Eruption of Mt. St. Helens”, which was cool, but I think that particular theater is showing its age a bit. It’s 25 years old, which is impressive, but is also a bit outdated.

After the aquarium we went back up to Beechers for lunch. We got to see a bit more of the market during this trip up. It’s a fascinating place. I wish we had moretime to go and explore. It’s a quintessential Seattle experience for most tourists, but having the kids with us made it a little hard to stop and browse. Lunch was excellent. We got a real taste of Beechers finsished cheeses this time and it convinced meto buy someto bring along, as well as a souvenir cheese board and knife. I’m a sucker for good cheeses, and I made sure they had a website so I could order more…

Next up was a harbor cruise courtesy of Argosy Cruises at pier 56. Jonathan loved being on the boat out on the water, mom got a chance to sit down, and Marissa slept. The boat made a lrge circle around the harbor and the narrator described many of the downtown buildings, the shipping yards and other sites visible from the water. It was cool.

By the time we got off the boat it wasafter 4pm. Since everything closes around 5 there was not much time to do more, but there was lots of sun left. We decided to drive to Tacoma and see if we could find Stadium High School, where one of Erica’s favorite movies was filmed. We succeeded, but the school is currently undergoing a pretty extensive restoration, so a lot of it was covered with scaffolding and we could get very close. It was cool, though, and a good little side trip.

On the way back we stopped at “The Rainforest Cafe” at the Southcenter Mall in Renton. I didn’t know there was a Rainforest here, but Erica happened on one of their brochures at the hotel. We make it a point of going to the Cafe every time we are in Vegas because the food is pretty good and it is lots of fun for the kids, so we figured we better go while we were here as well. Erica had a Barbecue Beef wrap with mango sauce and I had pasta with peppers, pesto, cream sauce and broccoli.

We got back to the hotel late aand tired so it was straight to bed. This morning we have to try to cram in the Pacific Science Center and the Museum of Flight, then it’s off to Kennewick. Woot!

I hadn’t expected yesterday tobe quite the drive it turned out to be. We left Hood River about 9am and didn’t get to our hotel in Seattle till about 8pm. We only covered about 300 miles, so the pace was pretty slow. Part of the reason it took so long was that we dawdled a bit at our stops along the way. The other part is that it rained like nobody’s business off and on all day long, including a few real downpours.

Anyway, we are here and everyone seems to be rested.

Ialready mentioned Multnomah Falls yesterday. After that we went west along the Columbia to Astoria, Or, then across the river to Ilwaco, Wa, and Cape Disappointment. The Cape turned out to be faithful to its name in a certain sense. We had planned to walk out to the light house and eat our lunch there, but when we arrived it was raining. I checked with one of the volunteers at the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center and he said we probably shouldn’t go on the light house hike. It’s only 3/4 of a mile, but he said it has several steep ups and downs and the downest of the downs would be pretty muddy. There’s no shelter at the light house itself, so a picnic would have been pretty miserable. We ended up eating in the car then walking through the interpretive cener, which includes several Lewis and Clark artifacts, such as fabric samples showing what it might have been like to live in clothing of their day, and exhibits allowing you to learn about the action of their flintlock rifles and learn how to use a compass for orienteering. There were also murals depicting the quest of the Corps of Discovery and life size replicas of their canoes, etc.

We had hoped to see Mt. St. Helens on the way between the cape and Seattle, but it was raining cats and dogs andwe didn’t even have the time to get of the road and hit the visitors center.

Once we finally arrived in Seattle we immediately got a taste of the city’s famous traffic. It took about 30 minutes to get off the freeway amid hundreds of other cars headed for the Space Needle area. We also got a little taste of the city’s traffic problems as we tried to get to our dinner reservation. It took us three tries to back onto the freeway in such a way as to make it possible to take the exit we needed. Part of that may have been mapquest’s directions fault.

We ate at Cucina! Cucina! in Kirkland.The food was great and the setting, on the shore of Lake Washington, was very cool. The kids got a lump of pizza dough to play with while we waited for our food, then they shared a little pepperoni pizza for dinner. Erica and I started with breaded mozzarella with marina sauce and Lentil and Sausage soup, then she had a Chicken Souvlaki Wrap and I had Chicken Linguine with Goat Cheese and Broccoli. Yum!

Getting back to our hotel was almost as adventurous as getting to the restaurant. We made it onto and off he freeway without incident, but in the street our hotel is on crosses a street with a large concrete divider in the middle. The street runs uphill for a mile or two, then finally gives you directions on a street sign about how to make a u-turn. It was pretty nutty. Needless to say, I am going to avoid driving as much as posible today. I’ve had enough of it.

Awesome. Just awesome. That is all l need to say.

Yesterday’s driving went about as well as can be expected. We left home at 5:30 am and headed north. By about 8:30 we were at Twin Falls, Idaho, where we stopped for breakfast and gas. We like to eat at as many small local places as possible, so we hit “Norm’s Family Dining.” I have to say, it was really pretty good,,, nice thick bacon and fluffy pancakes and the waitress who served us was friendly. Even the kids loved the place, Jonathan unabashedly kept asking for more bacon whenever the waitress would come by our table to check on us. Erica noticed a photo of an ice sculpture on the wall depicting a NYC fireman mourning his fallen comrades and holding an American Flag.

We spent far too long at the diner, but eventually we got back on the road. Yesterday was Marissa’s birthday, so we gave her a present or two along the way. Surprisingly, she was the one who had the hardest time with being cooped up in the car all day. I expected Jonathan to fuss, but every time we stopped, Marissa wanted to get out and run around and then screamed when we tried to put her back in the car.

The weather in Idaho yesterday was very nice, but Oregon greeted us with several little squalls of rain and even a little hail. By the time we got to Hood River, though, it had calmed down.

It took us about 13 hours total to complete the fisr leg of the trip, which isn’t bad since the mapping sites all said about 11.25. I wish we had more time to explore this charming little river town. Our hotel is right on the river next to the Hood River toll bridge,and last night we walked along a little asphalt path down to the hotel’s small beach, where Jonathan and Marissa through rocks into the river while I wrote an email to my parents in New York. We ate dinner in downtown Hood River at a place called Pietro’s Pizza and Game Parlor. The pizza was quite good but the game parlor was a bit lacking. Th city center reminds me quite a bit of Park City, Utah, except of couse for the enormous river in the background on one side, and Mt. Hood towering in the background on the other.

Today it’s off to Cape Disappointment by way of Multnomah Falls and Portland. I’ll be writing once in a while along the way, but I’m not sure I’ll have Internet access so the posts may not show up till a few days from now. Anyway, we are having a good time so far!