Our Death Valley Christmas

Death Valley was a lot of fun over Christmas!

I was really surprised by two things: 1) How commercial Death Valley has become, and 2) How many people were there over the holiday. I was imagining a remote and desolate wilderness National Park. What we discovered instead was a National Park with several resorts and ranches and restaurants and even it's own airport. We also expected to be pretty much the only people in the park but were surprised when we discovered that thousands of people (many of them Japanese tourists) had the same idea that we did to spend Christmas in Death Valley.

The campgrounds were still mostly empty but in the end it didn't matter. We went to unpack the tent and discovered that the bag that was supposed to contain the tent only contained the tent poles and the rain fly. Oops. We briefly considered sleeping under the stars (Rosey more so than I) but I was concerned that we wouldn't sleep well and that it would prevent us from enjoying our hiking during the day if we were too tired.


Luckily, I was able to snatch up the last available hotel room in the Stovepipe Wells motel inside the park. In the end it worked out nicely. With overnight temperatures in the 30's, it was much nicer to come home to a warm hotel room and the end of the day.

We actually didn't have as much time as we had hoped to explore the park. The winter sun set in the valley at about 4:30 pm leaving us with very little daylight to explore the park. On our first night there, we decided to do some night hiking and explored some sand dunes near where we were staying. It was a fun and unique experience to be trudging through sand dunes when it was so dark that you couldn't see 10 feet in front of you (the moon was just a sliver in the night sky). It probably would have been a little dangerous were it not for my GPS that guaranteed that we couldn't get too lost.

The next morning we got up and drove out to the "The Racetrack". It's a dry lake bed where some rocks have left a path in the dried mud from their movement. The rocks don't really move very fast, but every year the freezing and thawing of the mud pushes them a little in one direction or another. It leaves a really eery impression that the rocks are moving on their own.


Unfortunately the only access to the racetrack is via a 27 mile long roughly graded rocky dirt road. A sign at the beginning of the road recommends that it only be traversed with a high clearance 4x4 vehicle. Although I wouldn't have thought twice about driving my Harley down this kind of road, it was causing me pain every time that I heard a rock thud on the underside of my brand new 2007 Camry. Let's face it, Camry's are just not meant to be offroad vehicles. But I knew that Rosey really wanted to see the racetrack, so we drove it anyway. I'm hoping that I didn't do any permanent damage to the car... the shocks feel like they took a pretty good beating.


In the afternoon, we pulled over to the side of the dirt road and just started hiking through an undeveloped area of the park. That's one of the things that I love about Rosey... she likes to just get out and explore. I never would have thought to stop in that spot but it ended up being pretty cool. There were a ton of Joshua trees and a bunch of other desert flora and fauna that we discovered. Our short exploration took us up to the top of a small peak (about a thousand feet of elevation gain) where we could survey the valley beneath us. We both decided that we wanted to come back to this spot at some point in the future and explore some more.


We rounded out the day by stopping at Scotty's Castle in the park. It was this huge castle/house that was built by some guy who had a ton of money and loved the desert. It was much cooler than I expected.


We cooked Christmas Eve dinner over a campfire. We didn't actually have our own campsite but we snuck into the campground and used the firepit from one of the many vacant sites. Our Christmas Eve dinner consisted of Ginger Teriyaki glazed salmon, Cheddar Broccoli rice and fresh steamed vegetables with a dessert of fresh Death Valley dates. Yum!


After dinner we opened one gift from each other in front of the fire. I had already given Rosey my "big" gift (a pair of cross country skis) so I brought along a smaller gift for her to open. She really like the new camelbak hydration pack that I got her and I loved the air hockey table that she got for me. Of course, she didn't actually bring the air hockey table with her to Death Valley. In fact, we didn't even have it back at home... it was still on order from Sears. But she brought along a computer printout of the model that she bought and that was good enough for me :)

On Christmas morning we slept in a little bit and then I cooked us breakfast in our hotel room. We had planned on camping so I had all of our food in a cooler and brought along a gas powered backpacking stove to cook with. I doubt that the hotel would have been thrilled to learn that we were cooking over an open flame in the hotel room, but it didn't stop us anyway :)

We had some time to kill on the way out of the park, so we hit a few more of the sight-seeing stops. Zabriskie point is one of the most beautiful desert sights that I've ever seen. It was especially beautiful lit up in the Christmas morning light. We descended from the point into the wash and got one last short hike in before our long drive back home to Spanish Fork.


It was definitely a Christmas to remember :)

The rest of the pictures are here.

Merry Christmas!

Rosey and I are about to head out to Death Valley for the weekend, but before we go, I just wanted to write and wish everyone a Merry Christmas!



Here we are posed with our new skis ready for our Death Valley trip :)

Celebrating the Birth of Christ in the Valley of Death

Wow, it sounds so cool just to say that :)

Rosey and I have decided to spend Christmas camping in Death Valley National Park in Nevada/California. We hope to get in a lot of hiking and exploring and start a new tradition of a Christmas campfire.

Hmm, I wonder if they have mistletoe in the desert?

Fitness Update

I can't believe that my pants have been my top blog story for so long. And yet, I have one more update to make in the saga of my pants...

Apparently, having my pants fit tight was exactly the kick in the pants that I needed to start focusing on my fitness again. I redoubled my efforts and after a little more than two weeks I've lost nearly 10 pounds and am actually below my low summer weight. Hooray for me! :)

My goal is to keep it coming off and to be at or below 200 by sometime in February. When I accomplish that goal I believe that I will actually weigh less than I did when I graduated from high school. Freaky!

Hypothesis Verified!

I guess that I can't really be sure that the reason that my pants fit me better today has anything to do with my hip flexors. But who cares? My pants no longer feel like they are cutting the circulation to the bottom half of my body. That being said, I still plan to step up the effort to get my weight back down to my summer low. The thought of even being on the verge of a problem like this scares me a little bit.

The Shrinking Pants Hypothesis

I have spent the day in a good deal of physical and mental discomfort thanks to my shrinking pants. Seriously it was all that I could think about all afternoon. When I got home I weighed myself again. 222 lbs. Exactly the same weight that I've been for the last two months. I even took a body fat measurement. I won't reveal the actual figure, but it was, to my surprise, statistically insignificant from the last measurement that I took. What could be going on here?

Just a moment ago, I was in my basement doing crunches in between sets of squats when a thought occurred to me. Not just a thought, but a new hypothesis. What I thought of was my hip flexors. I thought of them because these are muscles that normally get used while doing sit-ups, but do not get used when you do crunches... at least not if you do them properly. Hip flexors also get used a good deal while snowshoeing.

Actually your hip flexors get used all the time while walking. They are the muscles that help raise the trunk of your leg toward your torso. Snowshoeing, however, puts much more strain on these muscles for two reasons. First, because of the depth of the snow you must take more pronounced steps and raise your leg up further with each step to get above the snow. Second, the additional weight of the snowshoes as well as all of the snow that gets stuck on top of them adds quite a bit of resistance to the motion.

It then occurred to me that the first day that I remember my pants being uncomfortably tight was last week; the day after I went snowshoeing for the first time this season. I know that I stressed my hip flexors because towards the end of the hike my hips were so sore that it was difficult to lift my legs. Things seemed to be getting better by Saturday, but then on Sunday I went snowshoeing again and today I felt like my pants were cutting off my circulation. Coincidence? I hope not :)

So, officially stated, my hypothesis is this: My shrinking pants are not shrinking at all. Rather, my hip flexors are temporarily swolen as the result of overuse while snowshoeing. If my hypothesis is correct, then my pants should grow over the next couple of days until they resume fitting like normal.

What do you think? Is this a valid hypothesis or am I just making up new and creative excuses for my fatness? :)

Are My Clothes Shrinking?

Oh how I wish my clothes really were shrinking. But I'm afraid that's probably not what's happening.

Over the summer, I maintained a weight of about 215 lbs. That was down 110 lbs. from where I started a year earlier at 325 lbs. Sometime during early Fall, I noticed that my weight had gone up to the low 220's. I was concerned at first, but then decided that since my clothes still seemed to fit just fine that I was OK with picking up a little bit of winter weight... as long as it didn't get out of control.

Within the last week or two I've begun to feel the pinch of my pants growing tighter around my waist. The freaky thing is that my weight hasn't gone up any since the early Fall. My average weight is still 222. I can't figure out what's happening. What changed? I'm starting to fear that I've lost some lean weight and have replaced it with more voluminous fat weight. That's the only explanation that I can think of that would explain why I have gotten bigger but not put on any weight.

In any case, it's time to step up my effort again. I was OK with putting on a little winter weight, but not if it means buying new clothes.

Tibble Fork

Rosey and I went snowshoeing in the Tibble Fork area of American Fork Canyon yesterday. The snow was a little shallow but still deep enough to snowshoe.


A couple of miles into the backcountry, we spotted this moose:

My New Piano

I bought a piano today! It's a Roland MP70 digital piano. I have been planning on buying a piano for the last couple of months, but I was originally going to hold off until mid-December. But I got an ad in the mail for a sale at the Piano Gallery that only lasted through this weekend and advertised prices up to 50% off. Now, it turns out that there wasn't really anything that I was interested in at the Piano Gallery. Even with the sale, their prices were just too high for me.


After I got my hopes up to buy a piano today, it was hard to let go of the idea and wait a couple more weeks. So, I went over to Heritage music, where I had originally planned on buying my piano. They had the exact piano that I wanted for just the right price... and they were able to deliver today. That always makes it easier to make an impulse decision when you know that you can walk out of the store with it :)

From The New World

Rosey and I went to see the Utah Symphony perform Dvorák's symphony "From the New World" last night at Abravanel Hall in Salt Lake. It was probably my first time at the symphony since I went on a class field trip when I was in elementary school in Hawaii. It's actually something that I've wanted to do for a long time but just never got around to doing. I wasn't sure whether or not it would be something that I would enjoy, but I wanted to re-evaluate the experience as an adult.

I really enjoyed the experience. I think that learning to play music myself over the last year has helped me to appreciate the experience even more. I realize how difficult it is for a single person to play a piece of music perfectly. That makes it that much more awe-inspiring when 50 or 60 people, playing different instruments, conspire to play a piece beautifully and in perfect harmony.

I was lucky to have Rosey as my Symphony date. As a teenager, she played the French horn in a number of orchestra's in Alabama. Her orchestra had the opportunity to play in Carnegie Hall in New York. She had even played the movement, "Largo" from Dvorák's New World before. So, it was really handy to have her around last night to explain all the nuances of the music and symphony experience to me.

A Gift From Marlboro

I received a gift from Marlboro in the mail last night. Yes, the cigarette company. This is really odd considering that I haven't smoked in over 6 years. But what's even more odd is the gift that they sent me.

The package was about the size of 3 DVD cases stacked on top of each other and was advertising Marlboro Menthol cigarettes. It was heavy. Really heavy. It was like it was packed full of rocks. I couldn't figure out for the life of me what Marlboro would send me that would weigh that much.

I thought for sure that it would be several packs of cigarettes and maybe some stupid promotional item. I really didn't like the idea of having cigarettes around me. It's been years since I've had any temptation to smoke but I still just didn't like the idea. I nearly threw the package out without even opening.

In the end, my curiosity got the best of me. I had to know. So, I opened it up and discovered... [insert suspenseful pause here], a leather bound box of dominoes. True it was fake leather, but it was still a pretty nice case. It even had a magnetic latch. And the dominoes were pretty nice too. Not cheap plastic ones, but 'real', heavy dominoes. The most bizarre thing of all is that neither the case nor the dominoes bore the name 'Marlboro' anywhere on them. It was almost as if they weren't even promotional material.

Could it really be that Marlboro was really just thanking me for my many years as a loyal customer? Or is this some other type of underhanded marketing ploy? I suppose that it has worked. I have spent more time thinking about cigarettes in general and Marlboro in particular in the last 24 hours than I previously had in the last 3 years. Clever tobacco industry bastards! :)

Moonlight Snowshoe

Rosey and I did a moonlight snowshoe to Stuart Falls last night after work. It was really incredible. There was probably 2 feet of fresh snow and we were the first people to lay tracks in it. I love being the first person to snowshoe a trail after fresh snow :) It was kind of cold, but we were OK as long as we kept moving. It wasn't until we got back to the car that we realized exactly how cold it was. My car reported the outside temperature as being -6 degrees F. Wow!

Bastard Coated Bastards with Bastard Filling

My favorite line from a Scrubs episode, ever:

Lady, people aren't chocolates. D'you know what they are mostly? Bastards. Bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling. But I don't find them half as annoying as I find naive bobble-headed optimists who walk around vomiting sunshine.

From "My Common Enemy", Scrubs Season 4.

God, I love this show :)

Blogger Upgrade

I've just updated my blog to use Blogger Beta. Will it make a difference? We'll see :)

Little Wild Horse Canyon

I felt like a kid again this weekend... only not necessarily in a good way. When I was young, my family liked to go to the beach frequently. I, however, detested the idea of going to the beach. It was just never what I wanted to do and I would spend hours lamenting how cruel and torturous my oppressors (i.e. family members) were for dragging me along.

But somehow, once I got to the beach I loved it. I could spend hours playing in the sand and waves. In fact, I loved it so much that when it came time to leave, I would lament how cruel and torturous my oppressors were for dragging me away from the place that I loved so much.

Well, it turns out that I'm still something of a child :)

This weekend, what Rosey really wanted to do was to hike in Little Wild Horse Canyon in the San Rafael Swell. It wasn't so much that I didn't want to go, but this was just an inconvenient weekend. It was cold and I was certain that the hiking would be miserable. Besides I was still feeling lazy from the gluttony of Thanksgiving. Wouldn't it be better to just hang around the house the weekend? Did we really need to drag our asses all the way across the state to do some hiking?

But, I could see how important it was for Rosey to get out this weekend. Admittedly, it didn't take a lot of insight. She actually said the words, "Dan this is really important to me" :) And so, we headed down to the swell; she with enthusiasm and me with reluctance.

In the true spirit of my childhood beach experiences, once we got there I was mesmerized. Little Wildhorse Canyon ranks among one of the coolest places that I've ever been to in Utah. And considering how many really cool places I've been in Utah, that's really saying something.

We hiked 9 miles (or so) through two canyons: Bell Canyon and Little Wildhorse Canyon. In some spots the canyon was so narrow that there was barely just enough room to squeeze our bodies through. I believe that these are referred to as slot canyons, since the water carves down through the rocks so sharply that it only leaves a slot behind. After 4 hours of spectacular hiking, I can't say that I was begging to stay longer, but I did have a really enjoyable day and was extremely glad that Rosey talked me into going.


The rest of the pictures are here.

The Big Three O

Happy birthday to me! I'm 30 years old today. Creepy... although not as creepy as I thought it would be. I think that it helps that I'm happy with my life right now. I have a wonderful girlfriend, a good job, a nice house, a new car, a recently repaired harley, and I'm in the best shape of my life. Things could definitely be worse :)

The Entertainer

I have been taking piano lessons for a little over 10 months now and I am one song away from completing my first level piano book. I just passed-off my second-to-last song last night, "The Entertainer". Here is an MP3 of me playing that song:

The Entertainer

Unfortunately, it's not a perfect copy. I kind of screw up at the very end, but I got most of it right and I didn't feel like re-recording :)

My last song is, "Amazing Grace". Hopefully, I will have it mastered in the next week or so.

Two Weekends in the Swell

I've been really lazy about posting about my weekend adventures to my blog lately. So, here is a post to kind of catch things up. Rosey has a more detail on her blog.

Radioactive Mountain Biking
Last weekend Rosey and I were on our way down to Moab to do some mountain biking when we saw a dirt road off of Hwy 6 that looked like it led to some cool rock formations in the distance. With hardly a moment's hesitation we scrapped our Moab plans, pulled onto the dirt road and decided to go exploring. We had hoped to be able to explore by car for a while but the previous weeks heavy rainfall had washed out the infrequently travelled dirt road and made it impassable. Good thing we had our mountain bikes.



We ended up doing about 25 miles of mountain biking in an area that was either in or just outside of the border of the San Rafael Swell. As we were riding and exploring we stumbled onto some old mines. The only thing that I had ever heard of people mining in this area was Uranium but I was surprised not to see any radioactive signs, although all of the mine pits were surrounded by 10 foot high chain link fences. It wasn't until we got a little further down the road that we discovered the sign pictured above warning about the radioactive mines.

The rest of the pictures are here.

Black Dragon Canyon (almost)
We didn't get enough of a taste of the San Rafael Swell last weekend so we decided to head back this weekend for some more. We chose a spot just off of I-70 from a book that we got about the swell. The area was called Black Dragon Canyon. Unfortunately, the mile markers had changed since the book was published and no longer matched the directions. So, we spent a good half-an-hour driving back and forth on I-70 looking for the dirt road with a swinging fence.



I'm not sure that we ever really made it into Black Dragon Canyon. We explored several really cool smaller canyons and climbed over a bunch of slick-rock, but we ran out of time before we could get into Black Dragon Canyon itself. So, I guess we'll have to come back for yet another adventure in the swell.

The rest of the pictures are here.

Who Needs An Extended Warranty?

I never buy the extended warranty. Who needs it? With most things nowadays by the time that the basic warranty runs out, it's time to upgrade anyway. Besides, most of the time, you never encounter any serious problems that justify the warranty to begin with.

Towards the end of the summer, my Harley started making some funny noises. It sounded like things were a little loose in the engine. I didn't worry about it at first. I really wasn't riding the Harley that much anyway with all of the bicycling that I had been doing. But as fall wore on and I took the bike out for a couple of fall rides it really started to bother me. I finally got to the point where I decided it just wasn't right to ride the Harley until I had a chance to have it looked at.

The problem is that I was riding the Harley so infrequently that it seemed silly to spend a whole lot of money having it fixed. So, I just let it sit for a month or so. I had been meaning to get it in to the dealer for a while to have it looked at but just didn't get around to it until yesterday.

I told the service manager about the noise I was hearing and was fully expecting to have him tell me that there was really nothing wrong and that I was just imagining the noise. Even if there really was a problem I was expecting them to say that just because this is a place where they will bend over backwards to belittle you and make you feel like an ass.

So, I was surprised when I heard the service manager tell me that he heard what I was talking about. I was disappointed when he said it didn't sound good. I was frightened when he told me that it sounded like a piston knocking or slapping. Now fixing a knocking piston on a bike can't be as expensive as a fixing a knocking piston in a car, but still I imagine that we are talking upwards of a thousand dollars. I went home with a sinking feeling in my stomach.

Of course, I was going to pay the money to have the bike fixed. This is, after all, my baby. We've been through a lot together. But it made me sick to think that I had let things get so bad to amount to such a costly repair.

There was still some hope. The service manager had given me an off-the-cuff diagnosis and said that he would have one of his technicians look at it in the morning. Maybe, just maybe, the technician would discover that the problem wasn't as serious as the service manager had imagined.

Fast forward to today... I just got off the phone with the service manager. The problem is that serious. But it turns out that in a fit of anxiety over spending $20,000 dollars on a motorcycle that I actually, against all odds, had the foresight to purchase the extended warranty. My bike is completely covered until May of next year. I had completely forgotten that I bought the extended warranty. It seems like such a long time ago that even when I remembered that I had paid for it, I was surprised that it was still active.

So, who needs an extended warranty? I guess I do :)

Post Race Info

There were some action photographers at the race on Sunday and I finally got ahold of some of the photos that they took.

Here is one of me going it alone at about mile 6 and a half:


And here is one of Rosey and I crossing the finish line together:

They have also posted the results on the "Other Half" website. I was a little bummed to discover that I came in dead last in my gender and age group (Male 20-29). But then again, I still came in ahead of the thousands of people that didn't bother even trying to run a half marathon :)

Victory!

I did it! I survived a 13.1 mile run in Moab, UT. And I'm proud to be able to say that I didn't walk a step of it. Of course I did slow down at the water stands every two miles and I stopped once at mile 6 to use the porta-potty, but I'm not counting those as stopping :)

I really had my doubts going into the run that I was going to be able to complete it without killing myself. On Saturday, I was almost dreading the thought of running that far as unprepared as I was. But when Rosey and I got up on Sunday morning and got out to the start line surrounded by a thousand other runners amidst some of the most beautiful scenery on the planet, I knew that I was going to be able to pull it off. There's something about being surround by so many other motivated people that enhances your own motivation.

My strategy was to take it slow and steady for the whole run. I knew that if I ran too fast in the beginning that I was going to jeopardize my ability to finish. So, I set a slow and even pace. I finished the first mile in a little over 12 minutes (12:10 if I remember correctly). That's not a fast pace by any stretch of the imagination, but it was working for me.

Rosey, originally said that she wanted to run with me so that I would help pace her and so that we could enjoy the run together. We only got to about half a mile before she couldn't stand running at such a slow pace and took off on her own. I was actually glad that she did, because I would have felt bad for slowing her down all day. Rosey is a considerably faster runner than I am. She did, however, meet back up with me at mile 8 and we ran the last five miles of the race together.

Dean Karnazes (author of Ultra-Marathon Man) says that the first half of any run is in your legs and the second half is in your head. Fortunately for me, my legs carried me a little further than half-way. But from about mile 8 on, it was sheer will power that propelled me forward. I was having aches and pains that on any other day probably would have convinced me to stop running. But yesterday, I was motivated to finish no matter what the cost. I was prepared to crawl across the finish line if it came down to that :)

Fortunately, it didn't come down to that. My calves and shins were throbbing with pain by the time that we entered the last half-mile stretch into the finish line at the Sorrel River Ranch, but I was still maintaining a steady jogging pace and Rosey was right there at my side. We crossed the finish line hand-in-hand 2 hours and 47 minutes after starting. To give a little perspective, the winner of the race finished in an hour and 16 minutes (roughly).

So, there were a whole lot of people that finished ahead of us, but there were also a whole lot of people that finished behind us. Mostly, I was just proud that I finished at all. It's hard to imagine me completing a run like this even a year ago, and impossible to imagine 2 years ago. It amazes me sometimes how far I've come and yet I still feel like I have further that I could go. Maybe next year I'll be able to finish in under two hours.

Although my lack of training over the last couple of weeks didn't prevent me from finishing, it did carry it's own price. My body is so sore right now I can hardly walk. I don't think that there is a single muscle in the entire lower half of my body that doesn't scream in pain every time that I move. Oh well, it's a small price to pay :)

Unprepared

Tomorrow morning I will be running "The Other Half" half-marathon in Moab, UT and I couldn't be less prepared. My longest training run was 9 miles and that was over a month ago. I have only been running once or twice in the last two weeks since I got back from Germany. I think that I'm in good enough shape that I will be able to suffer through it, but it's not going to be pretty. Oh well, I guess it will be motivation to prepare better for next time.

It's Good To Be Home

Yesterday was an interesting day of travel. I dealt with bad software, delayed flights, beer confiscation, and then rounded it off with a really delayed flight. The whole day was just one mishap after another.

The first mishap occurred as I checked into the Munich airport. I was walking through the auto-checkin when I arrived at a screen called "Confirmation" with a list of the places that I was flying to. To the right of each destination was a button with no text on it. I assumed that the button was meant to be used as a checkbox element and that I was being presented a checklist of all the places that I was flying through that I wanted to route my bags through.

It didn't make any sense to me, but I figured I would just click through it anyway. So, I clicked on the "checkbox" next to the Frankfurt list item and was distressed to discover that it wasn't a checkbox and was actually a normal button that confirmed Frankfurt as my final destination where I would be claiming my baggage. I realized my error right away and tried to cancel the operation but there was no option to cancel. My only option was to proceed. So, I figured that I would contine through the process and then get a flight attendant to help me fix it in the computer later.

My biggest mistake was to actually place my baggage on the conveyor belt. I figured that the problem could be fixed in the computer and it wouldn't matter that the bags had already been sent packing. Little did I realize that the routing information for the bags was printed on the baggage tags and once the bags got on the conveyor belt there was nothing that could be done to change them.

I was freaking out because we had less than an hour for out connection in Frankfurt. There was no way that I could claim my bags, recheck them and then make it to my next flight on time. It wasn't very encouraging that the attendants at the check-in counter weren't very sympathetic. I couldn't understand any of the German that they were muttering under their breath, but I'm pretty sure that "Stupid American" was thrown around once or twice.

Just as I was resigned to the idea of catching a later flight out of Frankfurt, one of the attendants emerged from behind the counter and announced that, although it had been a lot of work, she managed to get someone to snag our bags and update the destination.

When we arrived at our gate we discovered that our flight was delayed by 30 minutes and then 45 minutes. It looked like it was going to be impossible to make our connection even though the baggage problem had been solved. When we arrived in Frankfurt after a short 35 minute flight, the flight crew announced that we needed to hurry to make our Chicago connection. I was surprised that it was still even waiting for us.

Greg and I ran through the airport. We took the tram to the other terminal and were just about to get to our gate when we realized that we had to go back through security. There was a huge line to get through. Luckily, we were able to talk to an attendant and get expedited through the line.

I was just about to clear security when I got a funny look from one of the security guards. "Sir, do you have 4 bottles of wine or beer in your carry-on". "Yes", I responded. "Don't you know that you're not allowed to bring any liquids with you on a flight to the U.S.?". Damnit! I had forgotten all about that. I had just spent 9 Euro buying that gift pack of beer at the Duty Free in Munich. I figured that if they sold it in the airport that I shouldn't have any problem carrying it on with me.

If I'd had more time I could have checked the beer as luggage and still gotten it to the U.S. But we were already ridiculously late for our flight. So, I had no choice but to leave the beer at Security and home that one of the security people would give it a good home. Sorry Rand, I tried :)

The flight back to the U.S. was long. I killed a good portion of the time by watching the in-flight movies. They really do make the time go by fast. I watched, "The Devil Wears Prada", "Click" (well only part of it), and "Pirates of the Carribean". The first two movies weren't great but they weren't that bad either. And I had already seen Pirates.

When we arrived in Chicago, we discovered that our bags didn't make the connection. It really wasn't a huge surprise considering how late our plane was. But no matter how ridiculous the connection you always hope that yours bags make it somehow. The frustrating thing was that their was nothing that we could do about it. The baggage people told us that we would need to file a missing baggage report when we got to Salt Lake City. It felt really strange to leave customs without our baggage and without even filing a missing baggage report.

We got our connecting flight information from one of the baggage people. We had to catch a tram to terminal 2 and then get to gate F7. As we were walking through terminal 2 it began to disturb us that our flight didn't show up on any of the signs. It was supposed to start boarding in half an hour and it wasn't even posted. Had we been sent to the wrong terminal?

It didn't take like to figure out that we were in the right terminal but our flight had been delayed by three hours. Ouch! At this point we had both been awake for like 22 hours and were starting to feel a little ragged. The thought of spending another 3 hours in an airport was almost too much to take. But we sufferred through it and did eventually make it home.

I had originally planned on working today, but it was midnight before I got home from the airport with Rosey and even later before we actually got to bed. I didn't even hear Rosey leave in the morning. I slept until nearly 11 AM. It felt great to be back in my own bed.

Oktoberfest!

There really aren't words to describe how awesome it was to finally experience Oktoberfest tonight. It was incredible. GWAVA had reserved us a whole section of tables inside of the Ochsenbraterei beer house. In this single beer house there must have been 10,000 people singing and dancing and drinking and just generally having a good time. It was just an awesome atmosphere to be in.

I ended up at a table with Dirk, Morris, Sundy, Svetlin and several German customers and Novell consultants. Surprisingly, I even remember their names (although I have no idea whether or not I'm spelling them correctly): Rieser, Sacha, Frank, Griet and Arno. It was a pretty good table to be at.

The good thing about being at a beer festival with a bunch of people from Provo is that you are bound to find a few extra drink tickets. GWAVA provided everyone with tickets for 2 free beers. I think that I ended up with about 8 free beers... although I ended up sharing the wealth with several other people. Rand may disagree with here, but I think that 8 litres of beer is just too much for any one man to drink in a single night.

I'm proud to admit that I was the first person in the GWAVA group to stand on the table and start dancing :) It became increasingly common over the course of the night and by the end pretty much everyone was doing it. It's actually a pretty natural thing to do. The benches are so crowded that to get some air you either need to climb over a bunch of people to get out or you just stand up. Of course once you are standing you have no choice but to dance.

The music was really interesting. As you might expect, they played a number of traditional Bavarian songs, but then they also played a bunch of American songs as well. Things like, "In the Jungle" (the Aweemaway song), John Denver's "West Virginia", and even some more recent music like 4 Non Blondes, "What's Going On". It was really bizarre to be sitting in a beer house in Germany surrounded by a bunch of Germans belting out John Denver while standing on the tables. You just can't put a price on an experience like that :)

So, I was frequently standing on my table and even hanging from the rafters a couple of times. This drew a little bit of attention to myself and made me the subject of quite a few peoples photos. I think that it was particularly amusing for some of the conference attendees who had been in my sessions over the last couple of days and recognized me as a Novell employee.

Unfortunately, I didn't get many pictures of my own craziness. I'll have to wait for some people to send me their pictures. Svetlin, Dirk, Morris, Mark (from GWAVA) and Danita got plenty of pictures that I'm hoping to have sent to me.

Because we started drinking at about 5 in the evening, I was feeling pretty good by about 9:30 and decided that it was time to head back to the hotel. It was a little bizarre to end the night so early but there just wasn't much more beer that I could have forced into myself without risking being sick. So, Dirk and I walked back to the hotel together in the rain.

After a short drunken call to Rosey (I'm sure that she was amused) I drifted off to sleep at about 10:30. I didn't even bother getting inside of my bed. I just passed out right on top of it. Now the funny thing is that my body has grown so accustomed to a lack of sleep that I was wide awake at 5 and a half hours later at 4 in the morning. I've been up for a couple of hours now blogging and im'ing. In a few more hours, I'll pack everything up and jump on a train to the airport to come home. This has been an incredible trip, but I definitely think that I'm ready to be home. Having this much fun can really wear a guy out :)

Beer Crisis at Oktoberfest

It's not as easy as you might imagine to get a beer at Oktoberfest. No, really I'm serious. I wouldn't have believed it myself if it hadn't happened to me tonight. In a country known for it's beer, in a city known for it's beer festival, at a beer festival known the world over for it's ridiculous consumption of beer, it took over two hours to find a place that would actually serve me and my compatriots a glass of beer. Here is my story...

On Saturday night all I wanted for dinner was to find a little wurst-stand to get some fresh german sausages. Despite scouring the city for an hour and a half, I was unable to find this Utopian sausage stand of my dreams and we ended up eating at some streetside cafe, which incidentally had excellent food but nonetheless wasn't a wurst-stand.

Fast forward to Sunday night when Dirk and I made it down to the Oktoberfest grounds for the first time... we walked through gates of Oktoberfest and were greeted by Bratwurst nirvana. A thousand, nay, a million vendors selling fresh German sausage. The only problem was that I had already eaten :( I vowed to come back the following night to fulfil my gastronomical dream.

So, tonight the goal was simple. I was going to round up the guys and head over to Oktoberfest to partake of the wurst-goodness and drink a few beers while I was at it. Now, I didn't really have plans of getting smashed tonight. I just wanted to have a few beers with dinner. I was saving up my beer-drinking stamina for tomorrow night when the whole GWAVACon conference is planning on heading over to Oktoberfest en-masse for a celebration.

Things got complicated when one of the local Novell consultants got invited along. He is from Munich and seemed to know all about Oktoberfest. He recommended that we stop by a beer garden first and then grab a bite to eat a little later in the evening. Now, I hadn't really planned on stopping by the beer gardens because I figured that they were going to be really crowded and, as mentioned before, I wasn't really in the mood to drink mass quantities of beer tonight. But, I figured that the local guy knew best so I was going to go along with his plan.

Oktoberfest was busting at the seams tonight. It only about 5 minutes to separate our group of 6 into 2 groups of 3. Dirk ended up with the two guys from Europe and Morris, Sundy and I ended up together. After about 30 seconds we gave up on trying to find the other guys and decided to just head to one of the beer gardens. Problem was that everyone that we stopped by had a group of 50 people standing outside of locked doors waiting to get in. It appeared that all of the beer gardens were already operating at maximum capacity and that we were going to have to wait to get a spot.

What made the situation even more dire is that it occurred to us as we were walking around that we hadn't seen a single person drinking a beer outside of one of the beer gardens. We also didn't see a single place to buy beer outside of the beer gardens. So, to get served beer, we had to get into the beer garden, and to get into the beer garden we had to wait.

And so we spent the next 45 minutes waiting to get inside the Hacker-Pfeltzen beer garden. Forty minutes at Oktoberfest with no beer. Seriously I thought I was in a bad dream. Why couldn't they just serve the people outside? I didn't understand. After 45 minutes, we decided to just give up. It's not so much that we got tired of waiting as it was that we were afraid that at the current rate of travel we weren't going to make it in before Oktoberfest shut down for the night. What was the current rate of travel: 0. Not a single person had been let inside in the entire time that we were waiting in line. This is Oktoberfest! Why can't we get a beer.

Of course we could have walked back into town and gotten a beer at one of thousands of pubs in the city, but damnit this was a matter of principle now. Desparate, we started walking around the perimeter of the beer garden structure. Now they were serving a number of people outside of the official building, but you had to have a seat to get served and there just wasn't an inch of space on any one of hundreds of tables that we passed by. Seriously, people were packed 12 deep at tables meant to seat 6. People were sitting on top of each other just to get served beer. It was ridiculous. Can it really be this hard to get a beer at Oktoberfest.

We left the Hacker-Pfeltzen and passed by a number of other beer gardens. Every one of them was in the same boat. With a broken spirit, I reluctantly decided to give up on the idea of having a beer that night. There was good news however. There was nothing preventing me from attaining my goal of eating bratwurst that night. Of course a bratwurst without beer is almost not a bratwurst, but I was willing to make that sacrifice to salvage at least a piece of my dream.

So, we stopped at one of the myriad wurst-stands and a got a metre-long bratwurst. Seriously it was awesome. This thing stuck out from the bun by 6 inches on either side. I slathered it with mustard and started chowing down. Instantly I begun to feel better.

We were on our way out of Oktoberfest when something strange caught my eye. What's that I see over there? Are there people walking around with glasses of beer in their hand? Is there really some place that is actually serving beer to the public without a waiting list??? Indeed there was! Hallelujah! For a brief moment, it occurred to me that there just might be a God out there after all. Granted they weren't serving beer in the litre mugs that Oktoberfest was renowned for, but it was still beer. And not just any beer, it was fresh, it was German and it was good :)

I still can't believe that it took so long to find this place. And I don't understand why they aren't serving beer in a hundred more stands like this. Why on earth would they be holding back? This is, after all, a beer festival, is it not? I'm desperately hoping that tomorrow will give me a different impression of Oktoberfest.

City Sights

Today began as most days have begun for me in Munich... way too early and with not enough sleep. I got up at 5:30 in the morning after only 4 hours of sleep so that I could work out and shower before a seven o'clock meeting. I've been working out in the hotel's gym for the last couple of days to help offset all of the drinking and eating that I've been doing while here. It's not a very big gym but they have a treadmill and a weight machine that I have been using.

Half awake, I drug myself down to the gym only to discover that it wasn't open yet. I was kind of upset because I really felt like I needed to work out. I inquired at the front desk and was able to convince him without any trouble at all (none really) to let me use the gym unsupervised. They usually have an attendant in the "wellness center", but I believe that it's mostly to supervise the pool and spa areas.

I finished my workout leaving just enough time to shower, shave, iron my shirt and then head back downstairs for my 7 o'clock meeting. Instead of being greeted by a room full of customers, I found only my director in a half-setup room with a puzzled look on his face. It took us a couple of minutes to figure out that the meeting was actually scheduled for 7:30 and not 7:00. You can imagine that we were both a little frustrated with the marketing guy that failed to relay this information to us considering how precious a commodity half-an-hour of sleep is on a trip like this.

When the meeting did finally start, it was actually really productive. In fact, I would say that this morning's meeting with half a dozen of our customers was the highlight of the work portion of my trip so far. We got a lot of good feedback. We have another meeting just like it tomorrow morning that I'm hoping will be equally productive.

With the meeting behind me, I was actually free to roam the city until my shift in the lab started at noon. I set sail through the streets of Munich piloting a pair of Adidas running shoes. My goal for the morning's walk was to make it to the English Gardens on the other side of the city. I really didn't have any specific directions but at I had a general bearing.


My journey began by beating a familiar path to Marien-plaza in the heart of downtown. I had stopped through the area on Saturday night and was awed by some of the architecture of the buildings downtown. Unfortunately it was dark out on Saturday night, so I vowed to come back during daylight to get pictures. And so I did :)


Now, you will probably ask of each of these buildings that I took pictures of, "What is that place? Did you go inside?". The answer on every single occasion is, "I have no idea, and 'No'". The architecture is impressive from the outside, but I've found that I'm not really drawn to the insides of buildings. I prefer to be out walking through the city streets. In my opinion, indoor activities like Museums and historical tours are best saved for rainy days.

It didn't take me long to find my way to the Engligh gardens. The 'garden' is an oasis of lush greenery and flowing rivers in the desert of concrete and stone of downtown Munich. It reminds me of Central Park in New York. Of course, I've never been to Central Park in New York, so it reminds me only in concept :) There were a number of jogging and bike paths that criss-crossed through the park and I was about to embark on one of them when I discovered that my camera was running low on batteries.

I hate not being able to take pictures of really cool places. It has already happened to me several times on this trip where I didn't have my camera available and couldn't take pictures of something that I really wanted to. I decided that rather than take my chances with the low batteries that I should delay the walk through the park until I could find some replacements. When I conceived this idea, I imagined only walking a block or two farther before discovering some convenience store or gas station in which to buy batteries.

Funny thing about Munich... I haven't seen a gas station or convenience store since I've gotten here. There are plenty of cars so I know that there must be gas stations, but they do a damned good job of hiding them. There are plenty of corner stores here, but I just so happened to walk nearly a mile before happening upon a corner with a corner store on it. Fortunately the mile that I walked followed the perimeter of the gardens and I just ended up entering the gardens in different location and walking back through the gardens instead of "there and back" like I had originally planned.


I had a nice leisurely walk through the gardens which was a nice change from the frenetic pace that I was keeping through the city streets. I only had 2 and a half hours to kill and I wanted to make sure that I got as much in as possible in that time. But, once I got to the gardens, I had arrived at the something that I wanted to "get in", and so I took it down a notch or two to enjoy it.

There was nothing really spectacular about the gardens in an exhibitionist sense of the word. There were no ornate flower arrangements or bushes trimmed to look like animals. It was just nature. There were trees and shrubbery and a quaint little river that ran through it. It was peaceful. It was relaxing. It was everything that I hoped that it would be and exactly what I needed.


I didn't really have plans after the gardens. I just knew that I needed to start working my way back to the hotel and that I had more time to kill than I had imagined. So, I peeked at a city map and headed in the direction of something else that looked interesting... two larges rivers which paralleled each other and plenty of bridges that ran over them. There was plenty more architecture to see along the way, and it ended up being just as cool as I had imagined walking alongside and then criss-crossing over these two rivers. (Dad: for bonus points, can you name this river?)


After my river adventure it was starting to get late and I was worried about making it back to the hotel in time for my shift in the lab. So, I walked a couple of blocks to the nearest Taxi station and caught a cab. It was the first time that I had ridden in a Taxi since coming to Munich and I have to admit that it scared me a little bit. You don't get a sense for how much narrower the lanes of traffic are here until you attempt to squeeze in between two lanes of cars with 6 inches of space on either side of you at 45 miles per hour (of course the driver was driving in kilometers per hour, but I'm not quick enough to do the calculation).

All in all, I would say that I made pretty good use of my 3 hours off of work today. I got to see a lot of the city, a little bit of nature and got plenty of exercise from walking around. I would guess that I walked at least 6 (if not more) miles through the city today.

Busy Sunday

Today was my busiest day of the whole trip. Things kicked off with an 8AM pre-show meeting, I worked in the lab from 9 until 1, and then gave my first presentation from 1:30 until 2:30 in the afternoon. I thought that the presentation went really well. There were a good 25 people signed up for my session today and I imagine that attendance will be similar over the next two days as well.

I had a couple of hours off after my presentation which I ended up using just relaxing in my room. It was really uncharacteristic of me to spend that time in the hotel instead of out exploring the city. But it was raining, I didn't have that much time, I didn't feel like changing into walking clothes, and maybe most importantly, I was just tired. It felt good to take a short nap before the keynote presentation.

After the keynote, I headed back down to the lab for "Meet the Experts" where I got to talk to a handful of customers, partners and even some Novell folk from Europe about various GroupWise issues. It was a really positive experience.

The work day wrapped up at about 8PM. Sorry Mom, didn't have time to catch any of the conference talks :)

After spending the whole day couped up in the hotel I was itching to get out on the streets. I didn't have anywhere in particular that I wanted to go but I just needed to stretch my legs and explore a bit. Dirk was feeling the same way and decided to join me. Although there were some snacks served at "Meet the Experts", it really wasn't enough food to constitute a meal. So, we figured that while we were out exploring we would find a place to stop for a bite of food.

Just as we were about to leave the hotel we bumped into a bunch of GWAVA guys in the lobby and were invited to dinner with them. The GWAVA guys really have been generous to us. We had a great time at dinner in the Chinese restaurant inside the hotel. Yes, we did go to a Chinese restaurant in Germany :) Over the course of dinner we got to hear a rather amusing history of the birth of GWAVA and some anecdotes from the early years of the company.

We didn't finish dinner until nearly 11PM, but I still had the itch to set out walking around the city. The thing that I really like about Dirk is that he's not afraid to just get out and explore. He's not the type of guy that needs to have a plan. So, we just started meandering through the city. We stopped at a Turkish restaurant for some Turkish Baclava which is apparently slightly different than the more common Greek baclava. I didn't much care whether or not it was Turkish or Greek, it was all just good to me :)

Our meandering incidentally led us to the Oktoberfest grounds. We hadn't really planned it that way, but by a simple twist of fate had accidentally chosen to go down a road that led to the Oktoberfest grounds. Oktoberfest was a madhouse. It was just insane to see so many people out having a good time. I was also surprised to see that it wasn't just about the drinking. There was a big carnival with rides and booths and food stands, much like a state fair.

Unfortunately, we arrived just as things were shutting down, and I didn't have the chance to drink any Oktoberfest beer. I know, it's kind of sad :( I may try to head back down there tomorrow night if I get the chance otherwise, we have plans to go for sure on Tuesday.

Earning My Trip

Playtime is over (or at least on hold) and work started tonight. We met with the GWAVA folks for a quick coordination meeting this afternoon and then began setup of the main exhibit hall. Unfortunately, we started setting up before the hotel crew had a chance to setup everything that they needed. So, we pretty much had to pull all of our stuff down or out of the way and wait for a couple of hours while they got their part of the setup done.

We took our 2 hour setup hiatus as an opportunity to go roaming through the streets of Munich in search of a place to eat. In the process, I discovered three things: I have seen very little of the city so far, Munich is a really cool city, and I haven't yet been to Oktoberfest. I had previously been downtown and assumed that I was at Oktoberfest because everyone was drinking beer and singing. But it turns out that the main part of Oktoberfest isn't downtown but is somewhere else in the city where they have a bunch of beer tents setup. So, I may not actually make it to Oktoberfest until Tuesday night when all of the conference attendees are scheduled to go there to close out the conference.

We found a neat little sidewalk bistro called Lamms and got a bite to eat and a bit to drink before coming back to the hotel to finish the setup. There really wasn't that much setup to do, but due to complications we were having with the rental laptops that we brought along, we were working on things until quarter after midnight. I am once again in a position where I am probably going to get way less sleep than I should. I'm planning on getting up at 6AM so that I can workout in the hotel fitness center before grabbing breakfast and going to my 8AM meeting. My first presentation isn't until 1:30 in the afternoon but tomorrow is going to be a long and busy day anyway. I think that I am essentially scheduled for something or other from 8 in the morning until 10 at night.

So, on that note: Good night from Munich.

N euschwanstein Castle

The conference doesn't start until tomorrow, so we basically had all day today to do some sightseeing. We decided as a group to go and visit Neuschwanstein Castle. It's about 2 hours from Munich by Train. The castle is built right at the base of the Alps. The scenery, including the castle itself, was absolutely gorgeous. It looked like something out of a fairytale.



On the train ride through the country there were these incredible rustic roads that made me really wish that I was on a bike instead of a train. Which bike? It doesn't really matter. I would love to ride either the Harley or the road bicycle through the German countryside. When we got to Fussen, it didn't help that we passed a bike rental shop and saw a bunch of people actually riding up to the castle. I had to keep reminding myself: "This trip is for business... it wouldn't be cool to ditch the group to rent a bicycle". I finally just resolved that I would have to come back again sometime to do it the "right way".

The castle was a half hour hike (walk) up a hilll from where the Bus dropped us off. It actually felt good to stretch out my legs for a little bit after spending a couple of hours on the train. We stopped for lunch at restaurant just a couple of minutes from castle. It was pretty cool to eat lunch outside on the porch with one of the castle spires looming above us. The food was really good too. I had real German Bratwurst and Apple Streussel. Mmmm...

I actually had a chance to get a short jog in before eating lunch. A couple people in our group didn't realize that we had stopped at the restaurant and kept walking up the hill towards the castle. Before anyone realized that they were missing they were out of sight and earshot up the hill. While someone fumbled for a phone to try and get ahold of them, I handed my stuff to Dirk and just broke into a jog up the hill. It only took me a minute to catch up to them. I actually beat the phone call :) It amuses me that a couple of months ago I couldn't run for more than a couple of minutes without stopping and now I am able to run up a pretty steep incline without batting an eye.

So, about the castle... It was built by King Ludwig in 1864. Actually it was started in 1864 and was never completed before he died. King Ludwig was named king at 18 and never really accepted the responsibility of the position. Instead he nearly drove the country broke by building all of these ornate fairytale castles all over the country. This particular castle was built as a dedication to the music of Richard Wagner. Various rooms in the castle were painted with characters from Wagner's various operas and there was a "singing room" where performances of Wagner's music were given for the king.

Some of the marble fixtures inside the castle were really impressive but overall I thought that most of the inside of the castle was rather gaudy. The paintings were in bright colors and there was a lot of gold paint and fake looking jewels. The most impressive part of the castle in my opinion was the view that you got of the surrounding countryside when you looked out the windows. It was for this reason that I wasn't upset to discover that they didn't allow photos of the inside of the castle. Apparently they want you to buy post cards in the gift shop. They were pretty strict about it too. A couple of people in our group almost got kicked off the tour for taking photos inside.

One of the most interesting rooms in the castle was the cave room. King Ludwig had built a special room to look like the inside of a cave. It came complete with fake stalagmites and stalactites. It was really kind of bizarre.



The only thing that I didn't like about the whole castle experience was that it was so rushed. We had a meeting back at the hotel at 5PM and the train ride took a 4 hour chunk out of the day. So, we really didn't get to spend that much time at the castle. I was particularly disappointed that we didn't get to do any hiking in the mountains surrounding the castle. There were several trails that went to waterfalls and a gorge. It literally caused me physical pain to have to leave without doing any hiking. Again, I had to remind myself that this trip was being paid for by one of our partners so it wouldn't be cool to skip their meeting to go hiking in the Alps. I consider myself lucky just to have seen the scenery that I got to see today. I'm glad that I got the opportunity to go even if I didn't get to stay as long as I would have liked to.

Eine Mass Bitte

"One Litre (of Beer), Please"



I headed back downtown last night to have dinner with the a bunch of Novell and GWAVA guys at the Augustiner Bierhalle. The place was packed. The beer came in huge liter sized steins. I probably could have stopped at one litre, but I wasn't going to let a couple of guys from the Netherlands outdrink me :) The food was pretty good too.

After dinner we headed back to the hotel and broke into two groups. One group sissied out and went to bed and another group congregated in the lobby just outside the bar and continue drinking into the wee hours of the morning. Can you guess which group I ended up with? I had way more jagermeister than I probably should have, but it was kind of fun to cut loose. I don't really drink to get drunk very often but on the rare occasion that I do, I go all out.



I stumbled back up to my room at about 1:30 in the morning. I was dead tired after basically not sleeping since leaving Utah at 3:30 on Thursday morning. I gave Rosey a quick call on Skype, although I'm not entirely sure that she understood anything that I said considering that I was slurring and hiccuping uncontrollably.

After hanging up with her I had the daunting task of figuring out how to get a 7AM wakeup call when the phone buttons and menu were all in German. You would think that you could always dial 0 to get the front desk, but that apparently doesn't work at this hotel.

Unfortunately, I never did meet back up with the two guys that I met on the train. They stopped by the hotel like they promised, before heading downtown but I figured that it was more important for me to hang out with work people considering that they are paying for me to be here. So, I had to cancel my plans with them. I felt bad because they had been really friendly to me and I was hoping to at least have the opportunity to buy them a round of beers to repay them.

Planes, Trains and... Well, just Planes and Trains.

My flight from Chicago left forty minutes late. I was sleeping at the time so I didn't figure out until later that it was because one of the plane tugs had accidentally smacked the plane and they need to make sure that it was still safe to fly. Considering that we only had a 50 minute layover in Frankfurt, being forty minutes late pretty much guaranteed that we were going to miss our flight to Munich. And we did.

Not only did we miss it, but we were disappointed to discover that we hadn't been rebooked for a new flight like the rest of the passengers. Upon asking we were told that we needed to talk to the Lufthansa people to get a new flight. But the Lufthansa people told us that all the flights to Munich were full because of Oktoberfest, so we would need to talk to the United people (who were the ones responsible for making us late).

The United people told us we basically had two options: we could spend the day on the waiting list for one of the flights to Munich or we could just catch a train. I thought the train sounded fun and the idea of spending the day in the airport just to repeatedly hear that we didn't make the waiting list for the next flight sounded grueling. So, we decided to hop on a train to Munich.

Unfortunately, we needed to claim our luggage first. When the told us about the train option, I figured that we would grab our bags and be on the next train in 20 minutes. What they didn't tell us was that it was going to take the next 2 hours to track down our luggage and send it down to us in the baggage claim. They also didn't tell us that the baggage claim was in the the bowels of the airport.



By the time that we got our baggage and got on the train it was 10:30 in the morning... 3 hours after the time that we were supposed to be in Munich. I think that we were all excited to be taking the train and seeing the countryside but it really sucked that we had spent so much time waiting for our baggage and then waiting for the train.

The train must have been packed with additional Oktoberfest passengers because when we first got on there weren't any seats in our car. We were concerned that we were going to have to stand for the entire 4 hour train ride to Munich. Fortunately, Morris and Sundy found seats within a couple of minutes and I was able to get a seat at our next stop which was only fifteen minutes away.

One of the things that confused me about the whole train experience was that some seats were reserved and others were open for anyone with a general train ticket to use. But I didn't understand which was which. I eventually figured it out in Nuremburg when I was kicked out of my seat by a family of four.

Just as I thought that I was going to be stuck standing again a couple of guys invited me to sit with them. They had planned on travelling in a group of 3 but one of them wasn't able to make it so they had an extra seat reserved. However, shortly after introducing themselves they disappeared to the bistro car to get a couple of beers. At least they left me their ticket so I could prove to people that the seat I was sitting in (as well as there two seats) were indeed reserved.

The two guys were gone for a really long time and I was started to feel bad for riding opposite of two empty seats... there were still people standing in the back of the train including Morris and Sundy. But it's not like I could give these guy's seats away after they had been so nice to me.

Eventually the two guys came back carrying with them as much beer as they could hold collectively in their four hands. I thought it really nice of them to offer me one of the beers. We spent the remainder of the train ride talking about Germany and America and the differences in language, culture and education (I think it's interesting that Germans are required to learn English starting at age 9).

When we got off in Munich, Andre and Frank, offerred to take me out for a few more beers before turning in. It was really incredible of them considering that they had just met me. They actually escorted me to my hotel so that I could drop off my bags and then we headed into the heart of downtown Munich (and Oktoberfest) to have a few beers and a bite to eat.



The place that we ate at was called Spaten Hof (I think). We had a couple of beers and I tried a traditional bavarian dish of leberkas and german potato salad. The lieberkas was something like a bologne meatloaf while the german potato salad was not that spectacular. Surprisingly the lieberkas was not all that bad with a little bit of mustard.

So, after all of that I am just now finally getting back to my hotel at 5PM. What a day. I think that it's been nearly 30 hours since I have last slept (really slept, the airplane doesn't count). I'll probably head back out to Oktoberfest for a while tonight before turning in. I'm tempted to get some sleep now, but I'd kind of like to force myself to stay up to get accustomed to the schedule here.

Here are some of my first impressions of Germany:
1. Everyone smokes here. People smoked in the airport, on the train and just generally everywhere in public. Not to mention there were cigarette ads everywhere. Big tobacco may be dying in America but it's still going strong in Germany.

2. The airport was really run down. It was probably just because it was under construction but it felt like we were in a third world country. There were walls torn down and wires hanging everywhere. It felt a little like a war zone.

3. Everybody speaks English here. The language just hasn't been a problem. It almost makes me embarrassed to be a stupid American that only speaks a single language (2 years of Latin in High School don't count).

4. The countryside is really beautiful. I loved taking the train to Munich. We got to see a lot of the country that we wouldn't have otherwise have gotten to see. I wouldn't say that we got into any real mountains but there were plenty of rolling hills and lush greenery.

Ten Things I Love About You (Rosey)

10. I love that you are so intelligent. I am inspired that you are always reading. In particular I love that you don't just blaze through books but you take the time to really understand them. You make notes in the margins and really mull things over.

9. I love that you are determined to meet your goals. I think that it's incredible that you have made so much progress on your fitness and weight goals since moving to Utah despite adjusting to a completely new life.

8. I love that you are active. I love that you are not the type of person that is satisfied to just waste your life away sitting in front of the TV or at the bar.

7. I like that you are adventurous. I love that you are the type of person that would agree to hike 11 miles to the bottom of a huge canyon on a whim, or hike 4 mountains in a summer, or explore caves, rivers, national parks, mountains, etc.

6. I love that you are independant. I love that you take your work seriously and are good at what you do.

5. I love that you can take care of yourself. When we were hiking Timpanogos we passed a woman who was totally freaking out about crossing a small section of snow. It took her husband and both of her kids to get her to cross a 10 foot section of snow. I remember thinking to myself. Thank God, Rosey isn't like that. I know this sounds silly, but I have thought this on several occasions. I like that you are not the type of girl that needs a guy to help get her through the "hard parts". You live for the "hard parts".

4. I love that you have taken over my house as your own. I love that you planted a little flower bed. I love that I haven't had to do the dishes once since you moved in. I love that you have taken over the yard.

3. I love that you have a good sense of humor. I love that you watch Scrubs and South Park and that even though you are capable of speaking about philosophy and religion that you are also able to laught at Cartman and Stan.

2. I love that you had the courage to pick up your life and move across the country just to be with me.

1. I love that you have shown me what it feels like to be in a loving relationship.

...

0. Oh yeah, and you're great in bed :)

My Deodorant is a Threat to National Security

I am sitting in Chicago right now, killing a little bit of time before I hop on the next leg of my flight to Frankfurt Germany. The Wi-Fi access isn't cheap but it sure beats using my laptop to do something resembling work. I am surrounded by a terminal full of German speaking teenagers and it's finally starting to set in that I am about to be in a different country. It's kind of a surreal feeling. This morning, I was in Spanish Fork, Utah and tomorrow I will be in Munich Germany. Yes, the fact that I'm so amused by this betrays the fact that I'm still a pretty novice world traveller :)

So, about the title of the post... I had heard about all of the new restrictions about bringing liquids on planes. But, to be honest, I didn't even think of it as I was packing last night. So, I packed my deodorant and my toothpaste without even thinking whether or not they would be OK. I mean it's deodorant and toothpaste... what kind of a threat could they possibly be?

Well, when asked to declare all of my "liquids" as I passed through security. I whipped out my Deodorant and asked whether or not it would be OK for me to take. The security guy grabs it out of my hands and inspects it like he had never seen deodorant before. Despite the fact that the deodorant was in a clear plastic container and you could clearly see that there was a gel inside, he pops off the cap to get a closer look before finally pronouncing, "Yep, that's a gel, you're going to need to declare that".

He was just about to hand it back to me when he noticed the label. "4 ounces. I'm sorry sir, you're not going to be able to bring this on the plane".

"Why not?"

"Sir, you are only allowed to have 3 ounces of deodorant with you on the plane. Those are the rules."

"But it's only half full. There can't be more than 1.8 ounces left in that container."

"I'm sorry sir, the rules are based on the size of the container and not the amount of actual deodorant. You can't bring this on the plane with you."

And then he turns around and flings my 1.8 oz of deodorant (in a 4 oz container) into a garbage bin behind him. Oh well, i bought a new travel size deodorant on the other side of security. I'm sure that the airport is making a killing on travel size personal hygiene items right now.

Motorcycle Wreck (Not Me)

I saw a guy wreck on his motorcycle on the way into work today. It kind of freaked me out. I was coming down Hwy 6 and this guy on a Suzuki Intruder came flying by me. I remember thinking that he seemed to be riding awfully agressive. This was all just before the intersection where the McDonalds, KMart and Blockbuster are. Well the light at the intersection changed and I was a little surprised to see that he slowed down like he was trying to stop only it didn't look to me like he had enough time to stop.

In the meantime, the cars turning left from the other direction saw that he was slowing down and tried to turn before the light changed. The first car made it through just fine. But then after that it was like the guy on the motorcycle realized that he couldn't stop all the way so he was going to just run the intersection. Unfortunately, by then a second left-turning car decided to go and ended up pulling out right in front of the motorcycle. The guy on the motorcycle locked up his rear wheel and the bike slid out from under him and went careening into the left-turning car. He ended up tumbling on the ground for a couple of feet. Traffic stopped and people came swarming from their cars to check if he was alright. I don't think that he died, but I'm willing to bet that he broke a whole bunch of bones.

The sad thing was that the guy looked like a twenty-something who probably had a young wife and kids at home. Even sadder is that I think that the accident could have been prevented in half-a-dozen different ways. First of all, if he really had control of his bike it shouldn't have been a problem to stop at that intersection. Second, if he had just decided to run the intersection instead of slowing down he would have made it through just fine and the cars would have waited for him to pass before turning left. Third, if instead of locking up his rear brake and turning he were just to apply pressure to both brakes he probably could have stopped without hitting the car. Fourth, had he just steered around the car instead of locking up his rear brakes it would have been trivial from him to avoid the car.

I've spent the last 30 minutes being mortified by the whole experience. But the more that I think about it, the more that it just pisses me off. It was really irresponsible for this guy to be riding like that without the proper experience. It's just so frustrating to think that this was a very avoidable accident.

I do my share of screwing around and riding agressively on my motorcycle. But I would like to believe that I have the experience necessary to avoid pointless accidents like this one. Who knows, maybe I don't. I hope that I never have to find out. I think that any time that you get on a motorcycle you're risking your life plain and simple. I don't have any delusions about that and I have come to terms with that. But if my time comes while riding a motorcycle I hope that it's the result of a situation that is completely and totally out of my control and not something that I could have avoided by not riding like a jackass.

I'm Soooo Jealous!

I'm So Jealous
Those were the words that Master Fob got to hear from me over and over again this weekend. I loved Seattle. It kind of made me wish that I was moving to Seattle too. Seattle just has a neat aura about it. It's a beautiful city, minutes from the mountains and ocean. It's green, as evidenced by their bike friendly streets, abundance of recycling bins and lack of diesel powered monster pickup trucks. It's also politically liberal, as evidenced by a number of anti-bush bumper stickers, including one that read, "The Only Bush that I Trust is My Own". Indeed, my friend. Indeed.

Endurance Driving
The drive out was a little grueling. It took Master Fob a little longer than he expected to pick up the truck on Friday morning so we got a late start packing. We didn't get on the road until quarter after eleven. One of the points of me coming along was so that Master Fob and I could split the fourteen plus hours of driving between Salt Lake and Seattle. I took the first shift driving while Master Fob ate a little breakfast that my sister had packed for him.

At the end of my first shift of driving, I was still feeling pretty alert and decided to go ahead and take the second shift as well. Driving has a soothing affect on me and besides, I get really bored just sitting in the passenger seat.

5 hours later, after 10 hours of driving, we stopped in La Grande, Oregon to refuel and grab a quick bite to eat at a Subway. At this point, it occurred to me that we were only one tank a gas away from Seattle. I wasn't all that thrilled about driving at night and I was starting to tire a little, but was seduced by the lure of being able to say that I drove the entire distance to Seattle. You know me, I'm all about the endurance activities :)

So, I double fisted two twenty ounce cups of cappucino (I am Cornholio, I need TP for my bung-hole) and tackled the remaining distance to Seattle. The last leg of the journey proved to be the most daunting. We were driving through some pretty hairy mountain passes in the pitch black of night in a 14 foot Uhaul towing a Chevy Cavalier behind. A couple of times, I considered pulling over and surrendering the helm to Master Fob, but the closer we got to Seattle the more determined I was to finish the drive.

Bright Lights, Big City
We arrived in Seattle at 1:30 in the morning pacific time; fifteen hours after we had left Orem, Utah. We were greeted by Seattle's rather impressive downtown skyline. It was awesome. I had been through Seattle a couple of times before but never at night when the city was all lit up. Master Fob kept saying, "This is so cool. I can't believe that I actually live here now".

It didn't take too long to get through the city and to find the hotel where Master Fob will be residing for the next couple of days. We took a couple of minutes to unhitch the car and lock up the Uhaul and then headed up to our room where we passed out almost immediately. I was dead tired. It was really quite amazing that I fell asleep so quickly considering that I still had several thousand milligrams of caffeine coursing through my veins.

Our Saturday Adventure
We woke up six hours later on Saturday morning. I probably could have slept a little longer, but once I noticed that it was light outside I couldn't help but get up. I think that both Master Fob and I were excited to go out and explore the city. I was a little disappointed to discover that the weather was very overcast and it was kind of drizzling. Hey, I guess that just life in Seattle.

Master Fob didn't seem deterred by the rain and was still excited about our plans to explore the city by bike. I was really impressed by that. So, we jumped in the car, and after running a few errands, made our way to Gregg's Cycle in Green Lake. We found a bike for me to rent right away, but Master Fob wasn't finding a bike that he wanted to buy. Bikes in a bike store tend to be much higher quality, but they also tend to have a much higher price.

I was anxious to get out on the bike, and was concerned that I might not be able to get a rental if I stopped back later in the day. So, I rented a Trek road bike and decided to follow Master Fob around the city on the bike while he shopped a little more. I have become so accustomed to riding with clipless pedals that it was a little awkward for me to ride a bike without them. As I pulled away from my first stop light, I tried to use an upward motion to help drive the pedal and nearly ended up with my knee in my chest since my foot wasn't actually attached to the pedal.

Riding through the city was way cool. There is an official bike lane on a lot of streets and even when there wasn't an official lane, there was plenty of room. I never felt threatened by riding in traffic. Me riding while Ben drove proved to be an interesting experiment. As we headed through the city to a used bike store I was actually able to get ahead of Master Fob on the bike proving that a bike can actually be a more efficient means of transportation in the city. Although in this particular case it only resulted in me missing a turn and Master Fob needing to chase me down to correct my route.

In the end, Master Fob ended up buying a bike from a Fred Meyer. It was a little painful to see my brother buy a bike that cheap, but I understood that price was a serious factor that he needed to juggle. Besides, he was mostly using the bike to commute several miles a day. It's not like he was going to be riding hundreds of miles a week like I do :)

Once Master Fob had his bike we rode the Burke Gilman trail together for several miles. The trail goes right past the University and his house so he wanted to check things out. After riding together for a short period, I needed to stretch out my legs a bit. I pulled ahead and rode the entire 12 miles of the trail and then met back up with Master Fob a little later. The trail was gorgeous. It was a paved trail that rode beneath a canopy of trees and was lined with fern and wild berries. The views of Lake Washington were incredible.

After meeting back up we rode past Master Fob's apartment, and then checked out the library on the University campus where he will be working. The campus is really neat. It almost made me want to go back to school :) Almost, but not really.

Sending Out Props
I really admired a lot of things about my brother this weekend. I admired that my brother is the type of person to move across the country to chase a dream. I particularly admired that he did this even when he didn't have all of the details worked out for the plan. Sometimes, you just need to jump and then work out the details later. His plans have been a little rocky, but he's rolled with the punches and everything seems to be turning out OK.

I also discovered that my brother is very much an explorer just like I am. We spent the weekend driving and biking around the city. We rarely ended up taking the most direct route, but we got to see a lot of the city that we wouldn't have if we had printed out maps to everywhere and just taken the interstate. I love that.

The Other Half Training Progress

My training for the half-marathon that I am running at the end of October has been slow but steady. I feel like the limiting factor is not my athletic ability but my body's ability to recover from the physical stress that jogging places on it. In particular, my shins have given me some trouble and I've had to take it really easy. For the last couple of weeks, I have only been able to run one day a week. Of course, it probably doesn't help that I do so many other things besides running. I'm still biking between 40 and 120 miles per week and I'm climbing mountains on the weekends. My body would probably recover a lot quicker for jogging if it were the only thing that I was doing.

I did achieve a new personal best with my training run this morning. I haven't verified the exact distance yet with my GPS, but judging from the map it looks like I jogged about 7.5 miles this morning. My previous best was about 6.3 miles. The funny thing is that I almost did it on accident. I was out running with Rosey this morning on our normal 6.3 loop. As I was approaching the final leg of our run (a good couple of hundred yards behind Rosey), I decided that I was feeling good and wanted to push myself a little harder this morning.

I figured that I would just jog up the road a little further and then come back before turning onto that final stretch. Of course, the further I got, the further I wanted to go. I knew that there was an intersection further up the road and thought that maybe I could turn down it and just make a slightly bigger loop. What I didn't realize was that the intersection was more than just a "little" further up the road. Before I knew it, I had run all the way out to the Krishna temple nearly into Payson. I was beginning to think that maybe I could just keep running. I dreamt of "accidentally" doing a full half-marathon as a training run.

Unfortunately, my dreams were bigger than my energy. I got up to the intersection of Hwy 164 and Spanish Fork Main before I just couldn't run anymore. Now the problem was that I was still 4 miles from home and it was already 7:30 in the morning. At the rate that I was walking, it would probably be about 9 in the morning before I finally made it back to the house. I was kind of starting to freak out, but then it occurred to me that Rosey hadn't left for work yet and that I might be able to coax her into coming to pick me up. My friendly neighborhood CarQuest auto parts store let me use their phone and shortly thereafter Rosey showed up to rescue me. Crisis averted. Next time, I think that I will plan my route a little more thoroughly.

The encouraging thing about my run this morning (besides the fact that I hit a new distance record) is that I don't feel nearly as much stress in my shins and knees as I have on previous runs. My calves, quads and butt are plenty sore, but those are just muscles. I can deal with muscle fatigue. The lack of soreness in my shins and knees may be an indication that my body is finally acclimating to the stress of jogging.

Reaping the Fruit

I discovered earlier this summer that I have a peach tree in my back yard. The tree has always been there, but this is the first year that I've actually seen fruit on it (thus identifying it as a peach tree). Rosey and I have had to wait all summer for the peaches to ripen but we have finally been able to harvest some of the fruit over the past week or so. Wow! Those peaches are incredible. They are some of the sweetest peaches that I've ever had. I've been cutting them up and eating them with some Breyer's Natural Vanilla ice cream. Who knew that something that good could grow right in my back yard?