Archive | August, 2011

A Brief Interruption In Service

31 Aug

It’s been a waterlogged week here in Cavendish, VT.  Here are some pictures of the areas around our house, where we are on day 4 of no power or water.  We’ve managed to find internet and hot coffee at a small restaurant in Ludlow where we are currently camped out for the afternoon with everyone else who needs an internet fix.

A house and part of the street on the corner of 131 and Whitesville, Sunday afternoon.

Damage to 131 near Whitesville Rd. due to the flooding and debris. This woman's house is between this damage, and the damage on a further portion of 131, she walked to the store and had to climb down into that broken road to get home.

This is Davis Road, about 1/4 mile from our house. The road has literally been swept completely away by the water.

Near the flat rocks off Davis Road where we used to swim as children. Again, the road is completely gone.

This is about a mile from our house on Brook Road, it's usually an alternate route out to Route 131, but no more.

We got past the first chunk of damage on Brook Road on foot, and then came to this, which we couldn't cross, even on foot.

The former parking lot for the Crow's Corner Bakery, and surrounding buildings, in Proctorsville. The owners live down the road from us in one of the stretches of road that's been totally destroyed.

House next to bakery. We talked to these people who told us their insurance won't cover the damage because they don't have flood insurance. We suspect that will be the case with many people who suffered damage.

We are fortunate to not have sustained any damage to our home, but that is not the case for many thousands of others.  The Red Cross has a station set up for food and water, and we’ve seen the local firemen as well as the army (or national guard perhaps? ) delivering water and food on their 4-wheelers to people who are stranded.

We hear there is similar damage in other parts of rural New England, not to mention all the flooding along the rest of the coast, though we haven’t been able to get any real news since we’ve got no power.  We though we were too far inland to sustain any real damage from Irene, but clearly we were mistaken.

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Beating The Summer Heat In Chengde, China

26 Aug

Original Post: August 8, 2007

It was HOT HOT HOT in Beijing, so at the crack of dawn on our 6th day, we set out for the Chengde – in the mountains about 4 hours north of Beijing. The main reason for heading there was to see the Imperial Summer Resort, which is where the Imperial family would go to escape the insane summer heat of the city.

The exterior wall for the Mountain Resort

The Mountain Resort itself is gigantic, you could spend days just wandering around the whole site, which comes with its own little wall.  We had limited time so instead of hiking the perimeter we took the tram which dropped you off at a bunch of key spots and let you wander about for a bit.  There’s one section that has some Mongolian style yurts that you can stay in, which we might have considered doing had we known about it ahead of time.

Mongolian style yurts can be rented out for vacation stays within the boundaries of the Mountain Resort

Part of the Puning Temple complex

We stayed in an awesome little hotel that is housed inside the grounds of the Puning Temple.  The Puning Temple is a functioning (is that the right word?  It’s still in use, not just a historic site!) temple with monks still living there.  The hotel staff were incredibly nice and were all dressed up in costume.  There was a theater in the basement and each night they put on a show about the history of the temple.  It blew away the terrible Kung-Fu show from Beijing and had some beautiful dances, drumming and music.  It was completely in Chinese…so we walked away with a fairly minimal understanding of the whole thing, but it was still great fun.

A feast!

Chengde is a small town to begin with, the the hotel was pretty far off the beaten path so we stuck with the on-site restaurant for dinner.  Unlike in Beijing, there were no English menus to be had, and I kid you not, there seemed to be not a single staff member that spoke a word of English.  We were also the only Western people at the hotel.  This made for an amusing attempt at trying to order food.  The staff and other dining patrons were so accommodating that they took us around the restaurant to show us what other people had ordered, and we gestured and nodded and pointed a lot and they seemed to get the gist of what we were interested in.  We ended up with a giant meal (Justin had to put his hand in there to show the scale) for only the three of us, and I have only a vague sense of what most of it was, but it was great!

The temple itself was beautiful and had many different spaces, as temples here generally do.  In one spot as we were exploring we noticed there was a monk set up by a table with a line of people waiting to do something. You could pay him 10Y and he would tell you to pull a stick from a vase. The stick was long, narrow and smooth and had some writing on it and he would read it and tap the table next to him. The table held two crescent shaped stones and you needed to pick them up and throw them like dice onto the table. You might do this only once, or he would make you repeat the process up to three or four times. When he was satisfied with the way the sticks and stones fell he would choose a slip of paper from a box and send you on your way. Sometimes the stones would not fall favorably and he would send the person away with nothing. We decided to give this a shot and Justin and Jenny both got the paper on their first try. I got sent away with nothing 😦 We asked Mr. Shin what this meant and he said it either meant something very good or very bad but it would be difficult to say for sure.  Helpful.  As for Jenny and Justin’s fortunes, they were very cookie-like and said things like “Hard work is difficult at the beginning but will pay off in the end.”

Guanyin

This particular temple is my favorite from the whole trip. It had a very calm feeling to it and did not seem like just a huge tourist attraction. It also holds the worlds largest statue of Guanyin – the Buddhist Godess of Mercy. It is 22 meters high and has something like 42 arms.  It was one of the most impressive religious statues I’ve ever seen, akin to the gigantic reclining Buddha in Bangkok.  We were only there for 2 days to see the Mountain Resort and the Punin Temple, but you could easily spend more time there and in retrospect I wish we had.

Up next…Xian and the Terracotta Warriors!

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Biting the Bullet and Buying the Tickets

24 Aug

We finally sucked up the nerve to actually purchase our first set of multi-city, one-way tickets today! *insert cheering and clapping soundtrack here*  So, for all of those people who keep asking us if we are “really” doing this, the answer is YES.

When we started researching our options for the flights, we read a lot about RTW tickets vs. buying as you go.  We started researching flights of all varieties, and spent way too many hours crafting (or attempting to craft) itineraries and playing with the interactive RTW ticket maps.

Through our many many attempts to create a workable RTW itinerary it became very clear to us that the RTW tickets were just not going to work for us for a variety of reasons.

  1. You generally have a limit of 12 months in which to use the flights.  We have given ourselves a very open timeline and we may or may not be back in 12 months.  Heck, we might be back in 3 or 4 months, though I seriously doubt that will be the case.
  2. You need to have a relatively stable notion of where you are going.  We know we are going to start in Peru.  We know we are going to Chile and Argentina.  We know we’d like to go to Bolivia, Colombia, maybe Ecuador as well.  We’re pretty sure we are going to make India, but haven’t decided for sure.  Beyond that are a whole lot of maybe and we’ll consider it, and we’d really like to ideas, but nothing solid.
  3. There are some restrictions (they vary from ticket to ticket, so read the fine print!) on how many miles you can travel, and which directions you can go, and how many legs there can be, and how many times you can cross an ocean.  This stuff caused us more headaches than I care to mention, mostly because we couldn’t/weren’t willing to nail the itinerary down.
  4. This is the big one.  We want to be free to do what we want based on a whim, or a great flight deal, or a piece of advice picked up along the way.  Maybe we’ll be in South America for 3 months, or maybe we’ll stay for 6.  Maybe we’ll love it so much that it won’t end up being a RTW trip at all, but rather a Round-South-America trip.  Who knows!

That said, buying as you go isn’t all flowers and ice cream.  To start, it will probably be more expensive in the long run.  It also takes WAY more time and effort in terms of research.  We’ve been looking at prices for just the first few legs of our trip for months.  I generally know what a good flight price is between say, Denver and NYC.  Or NYC and anywhere in California.  Or even pretty much anywhere in the USA to almost anywhere in Europe.  Between the USA and anywhere in South America…no clue.  Within South America…no clue.  We’ve done some research, and I’ve been looking at flight costs constantly for months.  One thing we’ve done is look at different combinations of cities based on where the flights to Peru were being routed through.  We searched lots of different sites, tried to figure out what the local airlines were and looked on their sites.

We eventually found the flight we bought today, which we think has a good balance of what seems to be a decent price, and one that gets us there in a reasonable amount of time since I do not really want to spend 27 hours and 6 layovers getting to Peru.  We could have save $150 or by getting a slightly different flight, but that would have required us to spend a night partway through in an airport (or pay for a hotel near the airport in a random country we weren’t even staying in), AND it would have brought us to our destination at 3:45am, which is not so ideal.  We did, however, save a fair amount of money by getting a multi-city ticket, basically taking us from the USA to Peru, and then on to Chile.  These are the only two places that we have solid dates for so it was helpful to just buy the whole route, and it saved us $600 off the prices we were seeing for buying the tickets separately.

Once we’re in Chile we’ll mainly be travelling overland by bus since it’s far cheaper and we’ll have the time to meander around more at our leisure.  Hopefully that will allow us some time to start researching the next big flight, which might be to India.  Or Bali.  Or….?

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Hiking Mt. Ascutney – The Weathersfield Trail

21 Aug

One of our goals for our time in Vermont was to hike at least 3 times per week to prepare ourselves at least a little for the massive amount of hiking we’ll be doing in South America.  Mt. Ascutney is a great mountain for our purposes because it has 4 different trails to the summit, all within a half hour drive from our house.

Not more than a few days after our arrival in Vermont we jumped right into the fray and our first hike was on the Weathersfield Trail, which was listed as “moderate” according to the Chamber of Commerce.  I hiked a fair amount growing up in Colorado, and even some here in Vermont over the years, but I was not prepared for the Weathersfield.  The trail starts out as a lovely pine-needle covered path, and while it’s certainly uphill, you get a beautiful view and a small waterfall at about a mile in.  After this point though, the trail gets more serious.

The trail

There is a significant amount of scrambling over rocks, it is consistently steep, and there are huge chunks of the trail where you have to pay close attention to the markings since there is quite literally no real path.   Justin and I were not happy hikers, but we managed to reach the summit and were rewarded with the great view.

Finally we made it above the mist!

Why was this trail so difficult for us?  Maybe it was because it was one of the hottest days of the summer.  Perhaps it was because it was the first hike we’d done in over a year.  It could have had something to do with how much beer we’d had the night before.  In any case, we were wiped out, sore, and felt defeated by what should have been a fairly straightforward 6 mile hike.

I’ve been avoiding this particular hike for the last few weeks due to the bad memory, but this week a friend was visiting and was up for a good hike, so we decided to try to tackle it again.  We started out early and were the first car in the lot.  We kept a steady pace, and while it was just as steep and scrambley as I remember, it somehow wasn’t as hard.  By the time we reached the summit we had shaved at least 30 minutes off my first ascent time.

Much happier camper the second time around!

There are a plethora of reasons this was easier than the first – it wasn’t as hot, we had gotten plenty of sleep, and I’ve been hiking and/or running an average of 18-25 miles per week, which I suspect made all the difference.

Nothing beats some Moxie after a long morning on the mountain!

At this point I’ll still call it a heft half-day trek, which is just under 6 miles with about a 2000 ft ascent.   It’s got some great views though with at least 3 excellent overlook spots and a fantastic panoramic view from the observation tower at the summit.

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Beijing: Tourist Sites, Nightlife, Shopping!

19 Aug

Original Post: August 7, 2007

Our excursion to the Great Wall took most of the morning and early afternoon, but back in Beijing we had some time to kill before dinner so we decided to take a rickshaw tour (super touristy!) of the Hutong area.  The Hutong is the old area outside of the Forbidden City and it is really run down in parts, but nicely fixed up in others – a bit of an imbalance. There’s a big lake that is surrounded with bars and at night they get all lit up with neon (surprise, surprise) and you can rent little boats and cruise around on the lake. That was super fun, so unlike anything else I’ve done while drinking…  Following the lead of some local teenagers, we loaded up on the cheapest cans of beer known to mankind at a stand just down the road from the boat rentals.  You can get a can for between 15 and 40 cents depending on the brand,  and I assume we got the Schlitz of Chinese beer because we went for 15 cent variety.  We rented our boat and set off, along with dozens of other people.  There were random vendors around the edges of the lake and you could buy fireworks and sparklers from them.  We got 10 boxes of sparklers for $1. We spent about 1 1/2 hours cruising around and watching the madness, and then headed back to shore to check out some of the land-nightlife.   There may have been karaoke, strobe lights, and John dancing on a pole…but I can’t be completely certain.

Of course, Beijing has all the traditional sights as well – The Forbidden City, Summer Palace, Temple of Heaven, Tiannamen Square, Behai Park etc.  We saw all of them, but our favorites were the Summer Palace and the Temple of Heaven. They were both set in huge parks so you could get away from the heat if you went into the trees. Did I mention it was A MILLION DEGREES?  Really, you think I’m kidding, but I’m not.  The buildings have mostly been redone and look very sparkling new – it’s amazing how much detail some of the places have. Tiannamen Sq. looks exactly like it does in the movies. We tried to go to Mao’s Mausoleum, but it’s closed at the moment, super bummer.  We did however see some sort of military marching drill that was at once fascinating and a little scary.

There are a million rickshaws waiting to take you around the Hutong area
Fuzzy, but the best that could be done at the time. The lake in the Hutong is lined with bars and clubs, all attempting to lure you in with their amazing display of neon lighting.
Everyone, seriously, EVERYONE is out on a boat at night. There was some serious traffic trying to get under the bridge.
The Forbidden City. Notice the smog…
The Forbidden City from a nearby park. Again, the smog obscures the photo.
Lotus ponds at the Summer Palace
Summer Palace from the lake
Summer Palace
Temple of Heaven

You can’t take me to a city without taking me to the shopping, and Beijing was no exception.  We spent a whole afternoon at the largest outdoor market I’ve ever seen.  On the evening of our last day we went to go see a Kung Fu show. It was probably one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen – totally made for Western tourists, but super funny all the same. There were some good Kung Fu actions, but the story (about a young monk named Kong Kong who works hard to become a Kung Fu master) was absurd and the acting/dancing/costumes/effect were terrible. I am glad we went as we have some amusing photos, but overall a bit of a waste of $$ despite how much the guidebooks hype it up.

We spent 5 full days inBeijing plus a day at the Great Wall and that seemed like a good amount of time. We encountered a few local English speakers, but for the most part we got by with our minimal phrases, a lot of charades, and loads of smiling.

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Beijing: Getting There & The Great Wall

12 Aug

Original Post: August 7, 2007

The Great Wall

Before we left someone told me that a lot of people don’t like Beijing, that it’s ‘too Chinese’ whatever that means.  People said, “It’s big it’s dirty, it’s old, a lot of people don’t speak English.”  Lots of places are old.  Beijing is a huge city, it’s going to be dirty, I mean, have you ever seen a truly clean city? The only clean-ish big cities I’ve ever seen were in Germany and Holland, and I’m sure there were dirty parts I just didn’t notice at the time. As for the not many people speaking English…um… it’s China, why would that be surprising?

After spending a mere 5 days there, I decided that I really liked Beijing as a city.  In fact, it is my favorite huge city in China thus far. Shanghai is fine, but it’s very modern and huge and hard to get around. Shanghai looks a bit like New York. I want to see OLD China reflected in at least some parts of an ancient city, and you do get that in many parts of Beijing. There are of course many modern buildings, especially with the preparations for the Olympics, but it still retains a feel of the old world.

We took an overnight train to Beijing from Shanghai, which I highly recommend.  We splurged and got the fancy sleeper car, still only about $50 per person.  I have always loved to travel by trains and this was no exception.  The car was comfortable and came with an electric tea pot and some nice little slippers.  It was a restful journey and we were totally refreshed upon arrival in Beijing.

We arranged for a driver to come and meet us at the train station in the morning and he drove us right out to the Great Wall.  We went to one of the sections that’s a little further out so it wouldn’t be so crowded. It’s pretty incredible, looks just like you would expect it to. Unfortunately, it was hazy so we couldn’t see for miles and miles like you imagine you will be able to.

A hazy day at the Wall

We hiked along the wall for about 4 hours though, even on some sections that seemed to be totally overgrown and forgotten.  The Wall is set on the tops of the peaks and then dips down with the hills, which means it’s basically a million stairs, and they are steep and uneven.

Big f-ing steps.

They have a marathon you can run on the Wall and it’s apparently one of the most difficult marathons in the world, which is not surprising AT ALL. Perhaps the most amusing part of this little escapade is that since the wall is way up on the mountain you can either hike up to it and then back down, or you can take a chair lift up and an alpine slide back down. We opted for the alpine slide considering the crazy heat. It was definitively cheesy, and I thought for sure there was a huge risk of catapulting off the tracks, but it was very much worth it.

Scary!

Up Next…major tourist sites, nightlife, and shopping!

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Buttermilk Falls – A “Hole” Lot of Fun

10 Aug

We recently stopped by the Ludlow Chamber of Commerce to get some information about area hiking trails and events that might peak our interest.  Being that it was a warm, sunny day we asked the woman at the counter if there were any local quarries or swimming holes that would be worth visiting.  She told us about a swimming hole called Buttermilk Falls which happened to be just down the road from downtown Ludlow.  We drove down to check it out and to Ashley’s surprise it was one of the spots that she and her family had come to when she was a little girl.  It definitely was a swim that I wanted to take.

Buttermilk Falls is a popular swimming hole near Ludlow, VT

It was a particularly warm week in Vermont, so a few days later we decided to pack up a lunch and head to the Falls. We arrived just before noon and there were only a few other people there.  I can’t recall the last time that I actually took a swim in a spring-fed pool, and this looked truly inviting.  It was a good-sized swimming area and near the center of the pool the depth reached about eight feet.  The nicest part about it was that the falls dropped directly into this swimming area.  Picturesque.

I had to build up to taking the plunge

The water was a bit chilly, but the sun was beaming and after five minutes of dipping my toes in the water I took the full plunge.  The only word I can use to describe how it felt was refreshing.  Living in New York City for the past ten years I’d only swum a handful of times and this immediately reminded me of how relaxing it can be.  I felt as if I were being cleansed from the stress of a decade in New York.

Ashley floats at the foot of the falls

Ashley and I swam for a couple of hours and had lunch on the rocks with only a handful of people coming and going.  It was a perfect day and we will definitely be returning to this sweet spot very soon.

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The Time We Attempted To Eat Locally In Shanghai.

5 Aug

Original Post: July 26, 2007

Yesterday, Justin and I took a taxi into somewhere downtown Shanghai (I mean really, it’s like there are 9 or 10 areas that could be classified as downtown, so we just picked an area and went) to try to find some food. We stumbled upon a restaurant that hadsome pictures and a little bit of English on the menu. We ordered what we thought would be a reasonable amount of food for the two of us, so we were pretty suprised when they brought out gigantic dishes piled with enough to feed at least 4 or 5.  Our waiter was highly amused by our mistake, but in all it only cost us $15, so it was a hell of a deal 🙂 We had chicken (without the head and feet this time) a beef with bamboo dish, some kind of dumpling soup, and fried rice.

It would have helped to understand the menu headings for "large" or "small" portions...

The true highlight of the meal had nothing to do with food.  On our table there sat this funny little chicken thing and if you aligned an arrow dial with your astrological sign and put a coin in its mouth is would spit out your fortune in a little pill capsule. We each got one but as they are in Chinese we have no idea what they are saying…

Tonight we are taking the overnight train toBeijing and will be going to the wall first thing Friday morning! We will be updating from the road, hopefully with some regularity.

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Harpoon Brewery BBQ Tasting

2 Aug

Ashley and I were driving around listening to a local radio station when there was an announcement for the 11th Annual Harpoon Championships of New England Barbecue the following weekend at the Harpoon Brewery in Windsor, VT.

Forty teams competed for prize money and trophies with a select few selling their award-winning barbecue to the public.  There were great Harpoon varieties on tap for our tasting pleasure, a live band (minus the vocals, which was nice) playing some good music and a sunny, blue sky.  What more could we ask for?  This was exactly what we needed in our first week of transition from New York City.

We strolled around the grounds and had a small sampling which included beans, ribs, pulled pork sliders/sandwich, wings and, of course, chocolate-covered bacon.  I’ll venture to guess that Ashley enjoyed the chocolate-covered bacon the most.  I’m going with the pulled-pork sandwich from, none other than, the Bastey Boys booth.  This booth had a number of different sauces to taste with the sandwich and we sampled as many as we could until the pulled pork ran out.  All in all, we enjoyed everything we sampled.

This was the booth to beat!

Mmmmm....sweet and savory!

Of course, the best part of the day was the tasty brew.  We’ve only been to Harpoon Brewery a couple of times because we usually go to Long Trail Brewery (Bridgewater Corners, VT) instead.  I do have to admit that Harpoon is slowly growing on me.  I tried the Belgian Pale Ale which had a tangy aftertaste (not too bad).  However, I really enjoyed the India Pale Ale and its hopped-up, cheek-puckering aftertaste.  There’s nothing like an hoppy brew!  I am definitely willing to visit Harpoon, again, to give it another shot.

After strolling around for a couple of hours we found a picnic table in the shade.  We sat listening to the live band play some instrumental, classic rock tunes and enjoyed the surroundings.  Sunshine (and shade), tasty beer and easy-going people.  I could get used to this.

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