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Unfortunately, my camera died on the first day out so we don’t have a lot of pictures I would have liked to get. Sarah had her point and shoot along, and she did take a few pics which I’ve included here.
Day 1
We set out from Redmond about 8 am, to catch the 8:45 ferry from Seattle to Bremerton. In Bremerton we topped off the gas tank and headed south and east to make swing through Shelton and on to Aberdeen, where we turned north through Humptulips to Lake Quinalt. At Lake Quinalt we took the first road we saw that looked promising, and wandered along the edge of the lake for a bit before heading back to the highway to continue north to Kalaloch.
Passing through the Kalaloch area we spotted the lodge where we’d be staying the night, but continued north intending to ride out to the Hoh Rainforest visitor center. A sign at the turnoff to the Hoh Rainforest assured us there was gas just 5 miles down the road, but either it lied or we were blind, ’cause we sure didn’t see it. Since the gas gauge was getting lower and we weren’t sure just how far it was to the visitor center, I decided to turn back and find gas.
The gps claimed that the closest gas was in Forks, so we headed there. Found the gas station and fueled up, then decided to see what there was to see in Forks. That place has gone “Twilight” crazy… there are Twilight bus tours, Twilight donuts, Twilight motels, Twilight espresso. They even have Bella’s truck parked outside the visitor center.
We did stop in at the logging museum, which was interesting. They had an early powered saw that was basically just a big cross-cut saw hooked to an engine. Although not really logging-related, I thought the neatest exhibit was a partially completed 28-foot long canoe rough-hewn from a cedar log, which a couple of loggers had found out in the woods. The canoe builders had felled a 300 year old cedar and carved the canoe from the log on the spot. The stump had a 150 year old sapling growing out of it, so the canoe was at least that old.
We were starting to get hungry and it was getting a little bit dark for heading into the rain forest, so we rode back south to the Kalaloch Lodge and got settled for the night. The lodge was pretty neat, built from wood that washed up on the beach. It was used by the Coast Guard for a while before being purchased by the National Park Service.
Dinner was excellent, though they realized they had us pretty much held captive so they charged a king’s ransom for it. We had a table right next to a window in the dining room, and were treated to a most excellent sunset.
Total miles: about 270
Day 2
After a mere 11 hours of sleep we headed back down to the dining room for breakfast, then packed up the bike and headed north again, turning off onto Upper Hoh Road to go visit the rainforest visitor center. Riding through the forest was really very cool. In most spots the trees completely enveloped the road, and there was just enough sun shining through to make the moss on the branches glow. The ride itself was a bit of a workout: there must have been quite a wind the night before, and the road was covered with branches and pine cones. In a couple places the road was almost completely blocked by pretty large branches.
At the visitor center we stopped to check out the exhibits and get our NPS passport stamped. There was a notice posted on the front door warning of aggressive elk that had been attacking hikers. We took a walk down the trail to the hall of mosses anyway, and managed to avoid being elked. Hall of mosses was right, too, the whole forest was covered in moss. And not just the forest, the moss was piled on anything that didn’t move quickly enough.
From the Hoh Rainforest we headed back out to Highway 101 and followed it north, through Forks again, and then east from Sappho past Crescent Lake. We stopped at a pull-off along the lake to stretch and grab a bottle of water from the trunk, and saw a group of scuba divers from Tacoma gearing up. Although I do miss scuba diving from time to time, it looked like those guys were going to be a lot colder than I want to be.
Re-hydrated and back on the road, we continued on east to Port Angeles. Found a gas station and fueled up, then drove all over the place trying to find food. It seemed like every third shop front was empty, even some of the gas stations were boarded up. Finally managed to find a place that had food and wasn’t a bar (Sarah didn’t want to wait outside while I ate), and fueled ourselves up.
We drove south out of Port Angeles up the Hurricane Ridge road, winding up to the Hurricane Ridge visitor center at 5,000-odd feet. As we wound around the mountain we could see (when I wasn’t watching that horrendous drop-off at the edge of the road) a whole series of glaciers and snow fields. By the time we got to the top we were even seeing snow at the side of the road.
Apparently aggressive animals are the in thing, because this visitor center had a notice posted warning about an aggressive goat that was threatening innocent hikers.
After wandering through the exhibits and enjoying the awesome view of the Olympic range, and getting half frozen, we headed back down the mountain to Port Angeles and warmer air. From Port Angeles we continued east, across the new Hood Canal bridge and on to Bainbridge Island where we stopped for a quick visit with Susan, then on the ferry to Seattle and back home.
Total miles: about 250
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Day 1
Saturday morning Sarah and I took the MSF Experienced Riders’ Course down. It was a good class, I learned a few things and I found some things I need to practice some more. It was definitely worth the time and the money, even if it did mean getting up at 6:00 and riding all the way down to Tacoma.
After the class we rode back home, grabbed some lunch, packed our gear on the bike and headed back out. We took the back-roads, of course, up to Monroe, then followed Hwy 2 east across Stevens Pass. Stopped in Leavenworth – our local “Bavarian” town – for bathroom and some coffee.
From Leavenworth we continued on Hwy 2 to Wenatchee. Hwy 2 is a nice ride… forests, mountains, rivers, etc. We took our time and enjoyed the scenery (which had nothing to do with being worn out from getting up at 6:00 and then doing the 5 hour riding class). We lucked out in Wenatchee and got the last room in the hotel, and from the sound of things it was one of the last rooms in Wenatchee. Took a stroll to find dinner, then called it a night. Mileage for the day: about 240 miles, not counting the range time at the riding class.
Day 2
Sunday morning we stuffed ourselves on the “free” breakfast at the hotel, gassed up the bike, and headed north on Hwy 97 Alt. “Alt” because a semi ran off the bridge between Chelan Falls and Chelan, damaging the bridge, so that route was closed. The stretch up through Entiat to Chelan was a definite change from the forests of Hwy 2, with rocky bluffs and sage brush on both sides of the road. Sarah spotted a couple bighorn sheep up in the rocks. I think Lake Chelan was pretty, but I’m not sure… there were way too many other tourists on the road in that area, so I couldn’t do much sight-seeing.
We continued along 97 up through Okanogan, Omak, and Tonasket all the way to Oroville, where we were apparently so close to Canada that AT&T couldn’t tell the difference. While we were getting lunch and gassing up the bike I received a text message from AT&T informing me that I had entered an international roaming area and super expensive data rates were in effect. Yay.
Out of habit, I gassed up the bike whenever we stopped somewhere for food or bathroom, but one thing I noticed on this trip was the huge difference between the 140 mile range of the old bike and the 300 mile range of the new bike. It was the difference between stopping at every town because there’s no telling how far the next gas station is and just riding knowing I’d need a stop long before the gas tank would. It definitely made heading off into the unknown a lot more comfortable.
From Oroville we headed east on county roads to Molson. According to our Ghost Towns of the Pacific Northwest book, “Molson is the best ghost town in central Washington.” It was actually more like two ghost towns… part of it dated from the early 1900′s, the other part looked like it died sometime in the 50′s or 60′s. There are apparently still 35 people that haven’t realized it is a ghost town, though I’m not sure exactly what they do in Molson.
Apparently Molson was quite the trading hub in the early 1900′s, serving all of north-central Washington as well as south-central BC. Once the mines petered out and the railroad left, the town died.
There’s a museum in what used to be the schoolhouse, but the down-side of traveling on a holiday weekend is that things like museums aren’t open. From the outside it looked like… an old schoolhouse.
In that last photo, notice the “shingle mill” on the left. From the size of it I think they could probably only handle one shingle at a time.
From Molson we headed east to Curlew, via Chesaw and Toroda. Right outside Molson is a sign pointing to the left that says “Chesaw - 5 miles”. What it didn’t say was that it was 5 miles of hilly gravel road. The road was actually in really good condition, as gravel roads go, but touring bikes with highway tires aren’t made for gravel roads, so it was a rather nervous 5 miles on a rather squirrely bike. Once we got past the gravel, though, the roads were awesome. Two-lane twisties, winding past farms/ranches and through the forest, and apparently nobody else in north-central Washington was driving that day.
Despite what the book says, Curlew didn’t really look like much of a ghost town. There’s a hotel that was built in 1906 (now containing a museum which was, of course, closed), but around it is what looks like pretty much any small farm town. The hotel does have pressed tin siding. Don’t know why, but the pressed tin siding always looks neat to me.
From Curlew we back-tracked a ways, which I really didn’t mind because those empty, twisty roads were so much fun! We did have to pause along the way for this very important state park:
We continued along county road number something-or-other until we hit county road number something-else, and headed south.
County road number something-else was supposed to run right past Bodie, according to the ghost towns book. It actually runs right through Bodie, and going through Bodie takes so little time that we missed it and had to turn around and go back. Bodie is a proper ghost town, in that there aren’t any silly living people hanging on and pretending to live there. Bodie was founded in 1896 on Bodie Creek, then picked up and moved a mile north to where gold was found. Several mines were worked in the area until about 1940, then the mines, and the town, died. Random factoid: one of the mines was owned by the Wrigley brothers of chewing gum fame.
From Bodie we continued south through Wauconda, still enjoying the blue skies, warm sun, and totally deserted twisties. Until we got about halfway between Wauconda and Tonasket, when the skies suddenly turned black, lighting started flashing all around us, the wind came up and started blowing us around, and the rain started pouring. We made it to Tonasket and took shelter in the first gas station we saw, along with a couple other bikers. They had just come east through Winthrop, and assured us that the weather there was absolutely horrible and that the town was full of tourists and none of the motels had vacancies.
Hah! Once the rain stopped, we headed on west to Winthrop, where the weather was beautiful and the first motel we stopped at had a room for us. And there was a great pizza joint just a short walk down the road.
Total mileage for the day: about 360
Day 3
The “free” continental breakfast in the lobby looked like it was worth about what they were charging, so we decided to head out and find breakfast along the way. There was a little more traffic on the road, but not too bad, and it was still beautiful scenery and very, very nice twisty roads. Well… except for a couple stretches of fresh chip seal. But the rest of the road made up for those. The passes along the road were appropriately named… when we went over Washington Pass we determined that we were, in fact, in Washington, and when we hit Rainy Pass it was definitely raining.
We followed Hwy 20 to Rockport, then down 530 to Arlington, then Hwy 9 to Hwy 522 to Hwy 202 to home.
Total mileage for the day: about 190 miles.
‘Twas a good ride. Forests, lakes, waterfalls, high desert, farm land, and lots and lots of twisties.
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This is Tasha, a 2004 Yamaha V-Star 1100 Silverado. She has treated me well over the past 5 years, and she’s definitely good-looking, but… my poor old back is starting to complain too much for me to be on a cruiser anymore, plus the kid has started riding with me and the passenger seat on Tasha leaves a lot to be desired.
So today I took her down to Ride West and traded her in on something a bit more comfortable. Meet Amelie, a 2009 BMW R1200RT.
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A friend emailed me yesterday asking for a book recommendation so he can learn to write a webpart he needs for work. My immediate thought was that there really isn’t much to writing a basic webpart (which is all he needs), the complexity is more in getting it packaged up and deployed correctly.
Especially when one goes beyond a simple webpart and starts building custom site definitions or complex features with supporting files, for example, there is quite a bit one has to know about packaging and deployment to get one’s work onto the servers and functioning. Yes, there are some good walk-thrus, and tools such as WSP Builder and STSDEV, and yes, there are custom Visual Studio templates that will automatically create the various folders for the 12 hive. As with most things computerish, however, these are tools to help one deal with the complexity, not tools that eliminate the complexity.
As a developer, I certainly need to understand the SharePoint object model in order to write code for SharePoint. I shouldn’t, however, need to think about the 12 hive and its various folders, or deal with feature files, or editing ONET.xml, or any of the raw details of how SharePoint manages the various resources. My computer shouldn’t help me tackle complexity, it should eliminate the need for me to deal with the complexity at all.
A SharePoint list is a good example. If you’ve poked around in the databases at all, you know that a given list is pulled together on the fly from a bunch of individual bits of data that describe the list and its fields and the attributes of the fields and the event handlers that are attached to the list and the ACLs on the list, etc., etc. But as a user of the list, I don’t need to know any of that, I don’t have to deal with any of that, I could, in fact, have a completely wrong idea of how the list actually works, and I could still go to the settings page and do pretty much everything I need to do to create a custom list, change fields, modify views, etc. The SharePoint interface shields me completely from the complexity of the underlying system so that I can concentrate on doing *my* task rather than all the supporting tasks that the system requires.
Obviously writing software is more complex than creating a list, and has more moving parts, but still… I think we *expect* some things to be complex and because we expect it we don’t bother doing anything to tackle the complexity.
When I want to check the weather on my iPhone, I tap the weather icon and a screen opens up showing me the weather forecast for the next several days. I don’t have to know that my phone is connecting to the Internet and opening an http connection with some web site to get the weather data. I don’t have to know where it is getting the data from. And I don’t *want* to think about those things. All I want is to know the weather forecast, and the app gives it to me without making me deal with any of the underlying complexity.
Sure, that’s an overly simple example, but it is a lot closer to what I think my systems should do than what they actually do. My computer insists that I give things names, that I tell it where to put things, even that I put things where it wants them to be. It expects me to understand what it needs in order to accomplish a task and to satisfy those needs, instead of just doing what I ask and not bothering me about the underlying details.
One of the Natal videos has a bit where the user draws a picture on a piece of paper and shows it (literally) to the system. The system immediately has a copy of the drawing that it can interact with and react to. No need for the user to figure out which application to use for drawings or what image format the image recognition system requires or any of the details at all. Just “here’s a picture, work with it.”
That’s the way a lot more of our systems should work. My computer should be working for me, not me working for it.
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If you haven’t looked at Wolfram|Alpha yet, you should. It isn’t the answer to life, the universe, and everything, of course, but there are plenty of times that I just want an answer, not a list of places to find the answer, just the answer, and Wolfram|Alpha has the potential to meet that need. My complaint, if I’m allowed to complain (and I am), is that the times I’m most likely to want an answer instead of a list of sources is when I’m out and about and in the middle of a conversation (or eavesdropping on an interesting one). Sure, I can pull out the iPhone, but what I really want is to be able to subvocalize my question, have that voice query go to Wolfram|Alpha, and have the answer projected on the inside of my sunglasses. Manfred Macx had it, I want it too.
Now, as long as we’ve got the subvocal mic, the voice recognition, and the magic sunglasses, I want to apply them to Google Wave as well. I’m not convinced that all collaboration fits into that paradigm, but I do think that it will work well for some types of collaboration. But I don’t want to leave it there. I should be able to include the results of my on-the-go Wolfram|Alpha queries, the audio and/or transcript of my face-to-face conversations, ditto with phone conversations. And I should be able to access all of it from my laptop, my iPhone, and my sunglasses. Furthermore, the collected knowledge across all the “waves” I’m involved in should be available as an input to my Wolfram|Alpha queries.
That’s all.
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You know, Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is a pain. You might even say it is… sad. I never really consciously notice it, though, until the sun comes out and my mood starts to lift and then I realize how much the winter weather had been affecting me. The past couple weeks I’ve had more energy and more cheeriness than I had all winter total. I’m hoping the good weather holds for a bit. (It won’t though… this IS Seattle, after all.)
Some of the cheer is from having my friend Susan back in town, of course. Email and blog postings can keep you somewhat up to date on what someone is doing, but it isn’t the same as a hug and face-to-face conversation. Hoping work doesn’t keep me from spending some more time with her while she’s here. And hoping she keeps up the cooking she’s been doing!
The SharePoint team posted a notice on their blog last week that a bug in Service Pack 2 is causing SharePoint installations to be set to evaluation mode (as in, the license expires after 180 days). Oops. Fortunately, the fix is easy.
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MVC isn’t a model I’ve really worked with – I’ve been stuck working in the paradigms imposed by the systems I work on – but I thought I should see what this ASP.net MVC hoohah is, so I worked through Scott Guthrie‘s NerdDinner tutorial. Scott did a great job on the tutorial, and I can see why there’s a lot of buzz around this. Not the answer to everything, of course, as with any tool, but definitely one that will be useful to have in my toolbelt.
This past week I attended the monthly meeting of the Puget Sound SharePoint Users’ Group. I was a little surprised how many people were there. I don’t really know why I was expecting a smaller group, but I was. And I enjoyed a good presentation and discussion of search optimization / tuning / etc.
Aside from learning some new things like ASP.net MVC and some SharePoint nitty-gritties, working in technology is still frustrating me. I really don’t understand why people will pay to bring in a technologist or technical team because they are the experts, then dismiss everything the techies say and believe they know better. It is like going to the doctor, and on hearing that you have cancer and need chemotherapy you respond, “oh, that chemotherapy stuff is kind of expensive and a bit of overkill, I think we should just go with extra aspirin and maybe some red rice yeast.”
Of course, I may find it even more frustrating to not have a job. Only 5 weeks to go at formerly-known-as-WaMu. The lottery commission hasn’t come through for me yet, so it is looking like I’ll actually have to find another job. Sigh.
In the meantime, however, things aren’t all bad. One of my bestest friends is staying with us for a few weeks, it is sunny and beautiful outside, and we had a nice relaxing stroll on the beach (Alki) today, and some other friends are coming over for drinks and political arguments later on. All in all a good day.
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