Road Trip: Day 2 (covering 9/23/07)
Sep. 23rd, 2007 07:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjDateline: Bend, Oregon; Current odometer: 199763; Miles travelled today: 155; Current location of writing: my motel be
Saturday was so warm, well into the evening, that I hadn't noticed that the heat in my cabin had to be turned on manually. So my nose was a little frosty in the morning, when the temperatures outside had dipped below freezing, although I was still warm under the covers. The room came with a coffee maker, so I made breakfast from my stash of road food out on the little veranda of the cabin. (Still freezing, but nature's there for the enjoyment.) Then it was time to head for the lake.
By the way, these pictures (with certain exceptions below) are all off the phone-camera. Yes, I brought my digital camera. I also discovered that digital camera batteries seem to have this habit of discharging completely while sitting around -- even if they haven't been put into the camera since being charged. At any rate, I had a camera and two pairs of discharged batteries. I figured that two pairs of charged batteries would last me for the trip since I'm not that much of a shutter bug, so I hadn't brought the recharger. This wasn't a particular problem for snapping pics for the journal, but it might have been nice to get some high res shots of the lake. But anyway.
There was almost nobody on the road going up to the South Gate of the park ... perhaps because it was only nine in the morning. I parked at Rim Village and wander around picking up souveniers for the folks back at the office and a few other gifts. And, hey, the gift shop sold car chargers for digital camera batteries. What they didn't sell was already-charged batteries. Oh, well, got the charger. But I made the mistake of assuming that the little red light was going to turn green when the batteries were charged, so I never did try putting them in the camera while I was there at the lake. But anyway.
I chatted with the ranger who was running the flag up for the day and he suggested that if I wanted to avoid traffic while bicycling I might want to try the eastern rim rather than the western side. My original thought had been to start out from Rim Village, but it was still way too cold for biking so I drove out counter-clockwise with a revised plan: park at the Cleetwood Cove trailhead and do my biking from there. But I get ahead of myself. Here's the lake from somewhere around the start of my circuit.
The big problem with the phone-camera is that it doesn't do color values very accurately. Here's a view of the Phantom Ship with the phone-camera:
Here's something closer to the real colors:
Aquamarine is such an essential paint color, don't you think?
By the time I'd made my way around to the Cleetwood Cove trail (the only trail down to the shore) the day was warming up nicely just enough to make the hike down and back comfortable. There are some amusingly direct signs around the park. I'm particularly fond of the one that says something like "Falling off cliffs can lead to injury and death". There are a lot of signs explaining just why it's a bad idea to feed the wildlife, but one little golden-mantled ground squirrel down in Cleetwood Cove hadn't gotten the message.
When he realized I was going to obey the rules and refuse to feed him, he went for my throat ...
Ok, not really. Have some more colors that the camera didn't pick up very well.
After coming back up from the cove, I pulled the bike out. The signs said that it was about 11 miles from there back to Rim Village, with the turnoff for North Gate about halfway along. So given that my usual lunch ride is 6 miles (on the flat), I figured that I'd aim for going to North Gate and back, but if I got there and hadn't reached "half as tired as I'm willing to be" I had plenty of time to go all the way to Rim Village and back. I was not factoring in the altitude.
There was a very short (ca. 0.5 mile) downhill starting out, then the road started to climb. Sure, no problem. I kept gearing down, and down, and down. And the road kept climbing. First gear is a very nice gear. I could actually have kept going quite a while more in first gear. It was quite a good workout. But after what seemed like quite a while going steadily uphill, I found myself facing an equally-long-looking downhill and said, "Fuck it, I'm turning around now while it's still downhill all the way back to the car." When I retraced the route in the car afterwards, I'd gone a total of 4 miles before turning around. The North Gate turnoff was just one mile further on. So if I ever want a bicycling goal, I could aim for feeling up to making the whole circuit around Crater Lake in one go. It's a nice way to see the scenery at a slow pace (although I had to work at keeping under the 35 mph speed limit on the downhills), but for recreation I'm not actually all that excited about alternating stints of gruelling first-gear work and downhills I have to worry about speed limits on.
Back to Hwy 97 and north to Bend. I thought about going further, but it was about 5pm when I got that far and since I'm not aiming to get into Seattle until after dinner tomorrow there wasn't any point in pushing it. By the way: free wi-fi at central Oregon motels? Seems to be the default. I don't know how the place yesterday didn't get the memo on it.
Saturday was so warm, well into the evening, that I hadn't noticed that the heat in my cabin had to be turned on manually. So my nose was a little frosty in the morning, when the temperatures outside had dipped below freezing, although I was still warm under the covers. The room came with a coffee maker, so I made breakfast from my stash of road food out on the little veranda of the cabin. (Still freezing, but nature's there for the enjoyment.) Then it was time to head for the lake.
By the way, these pictures (with certain exceptions below) are all off the phone-camera. Yes, I brought my digital camera. I also discovered that digital camera batteries seem to have this habit of discharging completely while sitting around -- even if they haven't been put into the camera since being charged. At any rate, I had a camera and two pairs of discharged batteries. I figured that two pairs of charged batteries would last me for the trip since I'm not that much of a shutter bug, so I hadn't brought the recharger. This wasn't a particular problem for snapping pics for the journal, but it might have been nice to get some high res shots of the lake. But anyway.
There was almost nobody on the road going up to the South Gate of the park ... perhaps because it was only nine in the morning. I parked at Rim Village and wander around picking up souveniers for the folks back at the office and a few other gifts. And, hey, the gift shop sold car chargers for digital camera batteries. What they didn't sell was already-charged batteries. Oh, well, got the charger. But I made the mistake of assuming that the little red light was going to turn green when the batteries were charged, so I never did try putting them in the camera while I was there at the lake. But anyway.
I chatted with the ranger who was running the flag up for the day and he suggested that if I wanted to avoid traffic while bicycling I might want to try the eastern rim rather than the western side. My original thought had been to start out from Rim Village, but it was still way too cold for biking so I drove out counter-clockwise with a revised plan: park at the Cleetwood Cove trailhead and do my biking from there. But I get ahead of myself. Here's the lake from somewhere around the start of my circuit.
The big problem with the phone-camera is that it doesn't do color values very accurately. Here's a view of the Phantom Ship with the phone-camera:
Here's something closer to the real colors:
Aquamarine is such an essential paint color, don't you think?
By the time I'd made my way around to the Cleetwood Cove trail (the only trail down to the shore) the day was warming up nicely just enough to make the hike down and back comfortable. There are some amusingly direct signs around the park. I'm particularly fond of the one that says something like "Falling off cliffs can lead to injury and death". There are a lot of signs explaining just why it's a bad idea to feed the wildlife, but one little golden-mantled ground squirrel down in Cleetwood Cove hadn't gotten the message.
When he realized I was going to obey the rules and refuse to feed him, he went for my throat ...
Ok, not really. Have some more colors that the camera didn't pick up very well.
After coming back up from the cove, I pulled the bike out. The signs said that it was about 11 miles from there back to Rim Village, with the turnoff for North Gate about halfway along. So given that my usual lunch ride is 6 miles (on the flat), I figured that I'd aim for going to North Gate and back, but if I got there and hadn't reached "half as tired as I'm willing to be" I had plenty of time to go all the way to Rim Village and back. I was not factoring in the altitude.
There was a very short (ca. 0.5 mile) downhill starting out, then the road started to climb. Sure, no problem. I kept gearing down, and down, and down. And the road kept climbing. First gear is a very nice gear. I could actually have kept going quite a while more in first gear. It was quite a good workout. But after what seemed like quite a while going steadily uphill, I found myself facing an equally-long-looking downhill and said, "Fuck it, I'm turning around now while it's still downhill all the way back to the car." When I retraced the route in the car afterwards, I'd gone a total of 4 miles before turning around. The North Gate turnoff was just one mile further on. So if I ever want a bicycling goal, I could aim for feeling up to making the whole circuit around Crater Lake in one go. It's a nice way to see the scenery at a slow pace (although I had to work at keeping under the 35 mph speed limit on the downhills), but for recreation I'm not actually all that excited about alternating stints of gruelling first-gear work and downhills I have to worry about speed limits on.
Back to Hwy 97 and north to Bend. I thought about going further, but it was about 5pm when I got that far and since I'm not aiming to get into Seattle until after dinner tomorrow there wasn't any point in pushing it. By the way: free wi-fi at central Oregon motels? Seems to be the default. I don't know how the place yesterday didn't get the memo on it.
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no subject
Date: 2007-09-24 05:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-25 03:30 pm (UTC)on a completely different note
Date: 2007-09-25 01:44 am (UTC)Re: on a completely different note
Date: 2007-09-25 03:58 pm (UTC)Seminar/discussion (no class limit, no fees). Every act we perform or experience, we related to in multiple overlapping ways. For example, when a 12th century trouvere sang a song in 12th century French, he could be simultaneously:
* singing a song in 12th c. French
* singing a song in his native, everyday language
* singing a song in one of the traditional languages of courtly love literature
* singing a song involving topics prevalent in the pop music of the day
*singing a song involving motifs of courtly love
*singing a song that played off other songs known to his audience
and so on.
One of the conflicts we face regularly in the SCA is that when we do or experience something, we necessarily bring together a different set of overlapping relationships to that event. We can sing a song in our native language or sing a song in 12th century French. We can sing a song that plays off other songs and motifs familiar to our audience or we can sing a song involving motifs of courtly love. The ways that people resolve these contradictions lead to a number of different approaches to SCA activities.
Stealing some vocabulary and analysis methods from the field of semantics, this discussion is intended to help us find a way to talk about these underlying conflicts without resorting to judgements of "right" and "wrong" or "authentic" and "inauthentic".