From the Mind of Trevor Stone

My "quit my job and go to Central America to eat fruit and speak Spanish" plan is tame compared to Keith Baker's(*) awesome plan. He's going to couch surf around the U.S. and the world running Dungeons & Dragons and Over the Edge games. If you know any interesting geeks in any interesting places (or you are one yourself), they too can be part of the Baker World Tour '09 and might even make it into print.


* Keith Baker, by the way, is the creator of the Gloom card game and Eberron D&D world, among other things. He's also a fine and entertaining fellow to hang out with

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to do." -- my mishearing of "Me and Bobby McGee"

(Read my previous post if you're not into the whole brevity thing and would like a long-winded backstory.)

So here I am with 20 (maybe more) paid vacation days and a summer of high temperatures and high gas prices. What should I do with them? Here's a tentative schedule. Let me know if any look fun and you'd like to come along.

Memorial Day - May 24th through 26th

There's drumming at Bob's place on Saturday night, Boulder Creek Fest, and probably other interesting activities. Or I might take the opportunity to camp at Valley View. If you're planning a Memorial Day party and would appreciate my presence, please let me know!

Apogaea - June 5th through 8th

Colorado's regional Burning Man event. Should be full of colorful weirdoes. I might meet some people and join forces for the full burn. Or maybe I'll get the burning sensation without 2000 miles of driving and a week of dust, making a full burn superfluous.

Tuatha and Kan'Nal at Mishawaka Amphitheatre - June 20th

Tuatha features some of my favorite musicians from Dragonfest. Kan'Nal is a great tribal band. Put them together for a performance by a river on Summer Solstice and it sounds like a good combination to me!

Boulder SolFest (actually near Berthoud) - June 21st and 22nd

Organized by Double Rainbow Ranch and featuring performances by Lunar Fire (the feminine side of Kan'Nal), Tzol (the masculine side of Kan'Nal), Tuatha, and some folks not performing the night before ;-) If I camp the night of the 20th along the Cache La Poudre I can have a fun solstice weekend in Larimer County. I'm not tied to this one, though, so I'm open to other interesting solstice events.

Road Trip? - June 28th through July 6th?

I'd like to visit Glacier National Park before it becomes Ironic National Park. That probably means this year or next. I realize that driving to Montana contributes to the melting of said snow, so I'd like to make this a group (or at least paired) outing. Anyone want to visit the northern parts of the eastern edge of the rockies, stopping at hot springs and mountain vistas?

Dreamtime Festival - July 17th through 20th

I've heard this festival is a lot of fun, with elements of Burning Man, music festivals, and weekend workshops. Should be full of colorful weirdoes. I might start the week by visiting Conundrum or another west slope hot spring. With any luck, Paonia should have some tasty fruit I can ravage while I'm over there.

Dragonfest - August 6th through 10th

I keep saying "By next Dragonfest, I may have moved out of state," but it hasn't happened yet. I'm going to teach an introductory I Ching workshop, visit with friends I see once a year, and dance around a few fires. Who knows, maybe I'll draw down again.

Burning Man or Democratic National Convention - August 23rd through September 2nd or August 25th through 28th

Burning Man will feature tens of thousands of colorful weirdoes in the Nevada desert celebrating the theme of The American Dream. The Democratic National Convention will feature tens of thousands of political partiers in Denver celebrating the theme of electing America's first black or female president. It'd be pretty amusing to say "I'm at Burning man because my hometown is full of chaos," but I feel like I ought to spend less time driving and more time participating in the American dream when it lands on my doorstep. And if I do the latter, I can still go camping on Labor Day weekend. I'm not sure what I'd do outside the convention. I've thought about printing some "FREE HUGS" shirts and sharing human energy without a political message. I'd be interested in participating in some public/interactive political art pieces; I should probably see who got a permit. I could also get a video camera and act as an outside observer in case "Recreate Sixty-Eight" gets taken too literally. (I'm not sure why they named their organization after an event which featured police violence and the nomination of a candidate who lost to Richard Nixon.) How I feel about the convention will probably depend on whether Obama, Clinton, or neither has been anointed in advance.

Alternatively, I could say nuts to both and go berryquesting with mollybzz.

That should be enough to distract me from work for a while.

If I attend Apogaea, Glacier, Dreamtime, Dragonfest, and Burning Man I'll use 17 of 20 vacation days. If I turn Dreamtime into a full week for more west-slope adventures I'll expend them all. I should probably leave a few days free in case I need to fly somewhere for a job interview. So maybe I should ask for more time off as compensation. Or maybe I should put Glacier off until next year.

What would you do if you had a month worth of vacation to spend and might be in your last summer of residence in Colorado?

"You've crossed the line, bucko. Now you're dating internationally." This is inscribed in The Book mollybzz and I maintained of quotes, by-hand boggle games, and 88 auspicious things to do in China. It accompanies a diagram like so:

                      \
                       \.--- really complicated
                       /            portion
                       \
                     In|
   Dating            te|      Not Dating
                     rn|
   *                 at|
International        io|
Date                 na|
                     l |.--- amorphous "it's
Monday               Da|     "complicated" zone
1-28                 te|     (on facebook)
9:30 am              Li|
                     ne|

Well, my four-week-long international date ended as I crossed the international date line, turning Monday night into Sunday night, which quickly became Monday morning. I got on a plane in Hong Kong around 8 on Monday morning. I spent about two hours several feet above Japan on early Monday afternoon. I left the land of ten feet above the land of the rising sun at 3 on Monday afternoon. I landed in Minneapolis (land of 10,000 ice sheets) before 11 on Monday morning. By quarter to five in the afternoon, I was having a burger and a beer at City Grille in Denver.
Time is an illusion.
Lunchtime doubly so.
Especially when you've slept like I have.
How's that?

On Saturday night I took a bus from Xiamen to Hong Kong. China has these creepy things called sleeper busses. They're half way between the stretcher busses from M*A*S*H and a regional bus. Beds are too small for big euro builds, you have to watch your stuff carefully, several dozen Chinese are coughing and smoking in the shared air space, and right when you're about to fall asleep, they stop the bus, make everyone get out, and serve a 不 好 吃 (not well eat) meal. The bus I took was nothing like that. Except the midnight meal portion. Those with money can bus overnight to Hong Kong on reclining leather seats with other folks well enough off that they can get respiratory ailments cured and smart enough to read the no smoking signs. I only remember waking up twice on the bus ride, but I got a lot of REM wakefulness with my eyes closed and song lyrics cycling through my head.

So Saturday: decent rest, but not much sleep.

At 7 AM on Sunday I passed through Chinese exit customs. Passport stamp #1. I then passed through Hong Kong customs. This is somewhat akin to going through customs when traveling from the U.S. to Puerto Rico. Except you can take a bus. Passport stamp #2.

The bus took us through the 山 of New Territories (山 is Chinese for both mountain and hill, Hong Kong's terrain fits somewhere between the two), down the Kowloon peninsula, and across to Hong Kong Island. I caught the metro to the ferry terminal and spent about an hour looking for a public toilet and following misleading signs to "Electronic Luggage Locker." Having finally found the latter (but not the former), I purchased a round-trip ferry ticket to Macau. Less than 4 hours after entering Hong Kong, I went through the exit process. Passport stamp #3. An hour later, I passed through Macau customs. This is somewhat akin to going through customs when traveling to the U.S. Virgin Islands from Puerto Rico. Except the boat takes an hour. Passport stamp #4.

For the next six hours I wandered around Macau, admiring the yellow building with wraparound balconies, windy streets, and vendors selling breadlike products. There's lots to like about Chinese cuisine, but they don't really have bread down. The ethnic minorities have some tasty bread dishes (try a Naxi banana pancake) and the Muslim Chinese (physically indistinguishable from other Han except for the headgear) know how to make good breads, but on the whole, the last month didn't feature a lot of cooked non-rice flour. Ah, but the Portuguese know bread. I ate a curry fish roll, a green onion "pancake" (more like pan-fried bread circle), a beef curry and savory salad dressing crepe, and a bunch of connected round balls cooked on a waffle iron. Oh, and a mango smoothie.

Aside from tasty bread products, Macau has some good churches, a 500-year-old Chinese temple (maintained and currently used), and a bunch of hotels, casinos, and boutiques. It's billed as The Las Vegas of the East, but it's got some authentic old buildings. And typhoons instead of dust storms. If you're in that part of the world and any of that appeals to you, it's worth a short visit. Know, though, that stuff is significantly less expensive in China, so if your goal is to pick up clothes and gifts on the cheap, cross into the mainland. If your goal is to blow a lot of cash, Macao and its casinos and Hong Kong with its entertainment and shopping are good bets.

At six I passed through Macau customs at the ferry terminal. Passport stamp #5. After half an hour waiting on the ferry, they announced the boat had another problem, so we all migrated to a new one. In the intervening time, the seas in the Pearl River delta had picked up, so somewhere around the halfway mark, a hundred people started vomiting in unison. Now that is entertaining cacophony. I only felt slightly queasy and all the bread in my stomach sat firm. Maybe the others had fancy casino lunches instead of saying om nom nom nom out loud while eating US$1 clumps of carbs. Suckers.

By 8 I had cleared Hong Kong customs for the second time in 13 hours. Passport stamp #3. I reclaimed my luggage and decided to follow Lonely Planet's suggestion for ethnic food in SoHo for dinner. After riding the longest escalator in the world several stops further than I'd intended and wandering around looking for an alley with good Thai, I settled on a good Vietnamese place. A combination of the $ currency symbol instead of 元 and the menu's entree prices after a month of great Chinese food for 10 to 35 yuan reminded me that I wasn't really in China any more, but Chinatown organized by the Brits.

With an early morning flight, I didn't want to spend HK$150 or more on a bed without an alarm clock, so I walked along the tip of Kowloon, photographing the Hong Kong skyline and then walked up Nathan Rd in search of a night club. Quintessential Hong Kong moment: six Asians in a rock band ended their set with a very good rendition of Play That Funky Music White Boy. Then the DJ started mixing (poorly) disco and other 70s hits. Then another band of four or five Asians (one might have been Filipino or Brazilian) took the stage and played a really bad version of Sweet Home Alabama.

The Lynyrd Skynyrd Rule: You're not allowed to play Sweet Home Alabama unless you've lived in or visited Alabama and enjoyed the experience.

The place was called All Night Long, but I didn't want to listen to bad versions of American songs of already questionable quality, so I decided to see what else was shaking in the New York of the east. At 2:30 on a Monday morning, the answer is apparently "not much." Maybe there are more all-night clubs on the Island. Or maybe they take Sunday nights easy. But the signs on sky scrapers had been turned off, the taxis were thinner, and a higher percentage of the open bars had pictures of scantily clad girls on their signs.

I found an open entrance to Kowloon Park, where my international date had begun four Mondays before. I hear New York's Central Park is a pretty dangerous place to be at 3:30 in the morning, but in Kowloon Park it's a very peaceful time to sit by a pool and reflect on a four-week date. I saw two other people walk through the gate at about the same time I did. I saw three security guards, one of whom was napping. I took a picture of some sleeping parrots. The only other folks awake were a flock of about 50 flamingos having a late night flamingathering.

So Sunday: lots of relaxation, but no sleep.

I took the 4:10 bus to Hong Kong International Airport, for some reason chiding myself for falling asleep for a few minutes and missing the quiet city scenery. You can't really check in at HKG before 6 AM, but I felt my time with the city was complete. I quickly went through security (5th of 7th airport not to notice or care about the tube of toothpaste in my carry-on bag) and Hong Kong departures. Passport stamp #7. My sleep plan worked, and I fell asleep shortly after the Pacific ocean got dark, waking up above a cloudy morning. I told three people at U.S. customs that I'm a { computer scientist, software engineer, computer programmer }, though I'm not sure how the answer would affect anything. Would they scan my bags if I said "second assistant pig-keeper?" What about "I don't work, that's why I was traveling in China, where life is cheap?" Passport stamp #8.

Back in Denver, I saw about six guys with beards as I got off the plane. It's good to be back in an environment where, on the off chance someone were to ask "Is your beard real," I can come up with a suitable comeback. I've never seen white folks yell out "¡Hola!" and then giggle whenever they see a Hispanic person walk down the street, but I'll accept bilingual public signs in my language in exchange for amusing locals with my greeting word.

I don't usually get hit by jet lag very bad. It's 10:30 PM local time and I'm fairly alert, but will probably get some good sleep soon, even though it's mid-afternoon China time. I won't go in to work until Wednesday, though, giving me a day to unpack, read mail, and loaf about in my hammock.

So Monday: perhaps 8 hours of napping, followed by a good night of sleep. But it is a 39 hour day.

The microscopic demons of Xishugangbanna invaded the gastralaowai systems and sat around in the lower bowel regions muttering things about the small bumps and numerous turns of the Yunnan Expressway First Grade Freeway. The road is something akin to driving from Golden to Glenwood Springs and then immediately driving back. Except with ten times as many tunnels. And with a sign that instructs "Elephant Passage Don't Blow." And toll booths at each city. We spent an hour going from the tool booth at the entrance of one city to the toll booth at the exit of that city. Unfortunately, the driver was in the blowing lane the whole way. But The Unmatchable Match was on the bus's VCD player. I knew it would be a good movie when it opened with a tow truck dropping a flaming police van off a cliff.

The next day we spent three hours in an Indian restaurant drinking sprite, chai, and banana lassi and eating vegetable curry and tandoori chicken in small increments whilst assessing our digestive abilities. We then walked thee stores up and spent 45 minutes listening to The Cranberries in a fruit drink shop before buying some fruit and big bowls of ramen for the next stage of our journey.

Two friends with a soft sleeper room to themselves is the most enjoyable way to travel, not just in China, but in the world. We cooked ramen, played boggle by hand, watched lovely karst scenery slip by, and slept better than the previous night's hostel while covering the distance from Kunming to Guilin in an evening, a night, and a morning, all 355 Yuan each (that is, transportation and lodging for less than US $50). I wish American rail travel was this good.

Today we met a guy who, in good English, complimented me on my beard. We proceeded to learn that he owns a tea shop, so we sampled the osmanthus (a local speciality), molihua (he claimed Guangxi produces the best in the nation) and oolong with ginseng. For the second time we spent too much on tea, but for the second time it was to nice people. He then lead us to the cheap (relative) place to buy river ticket cruises and helped translate the situation. I'm glad to get some kilometerage out of my fuzz face.

Have a happy Valentine's day and buy a red tassel for your sweetie.

If you ever find yourself in Lijiang, Yunnan, China, make sure to stay with Mama Naxi. The Chinese version of an Italian grandmother takes care of all the awesome native-and-adopted-English-speaking backpackers, feeding us family style dinners for 10 yuan (a buck and a half), banana pancakes (flatbread + banana = yum), and organizes travel tickets all over China and mini busses to Tiger Leaping Gorge. If you need a reason to be in Lijiang and Mama Naxi isn't sufficient motivation, do an image search for Tiger Leaping Gorge. Then you'll have a reason to come.

When you come to Lijiang, be sure to take a side trip to Shuhe. Like Lijiang, the streets are cobbled, and the rooves are fanciful. But Shuhe's streets are wider, their canals bubblier, their shop owners more laid back. In all, it's a more photogenic city. And it's an Oficial AAAA Chinese Tourist Site. American measurements usually only go up to AAA, but China's undergone immense growth in the last few decades, so they'va had to import some additional As from Africa.

Tomorrow night (Chinese New Year), we fly to je ne sais pas banana pancake (Xishuangbanna), a jungle region in southern Yunnan which has warm weather, diverse people, and lots of fruits for us to devour.

My alarm goes of in two and a half hours (which is not a 90-minute multiple, unfortunately). I hope you all have a fantastic new year!

I think I'm going to China.

I bought a plane ticket two weeks ago. Round trip to Hong Kong for just under $1000 including taxes and fees. Departs January 26th, returns February 25th. I got approval from work for a month-long leave of absence. I coordinated schedules with mollybzz who, like everyone in China, has time off for the lunar new year. I got vaccines for hepatitis A, tetanus, and typhoid this afternoon. I've got money in the bank, a travel guide, and tapes to learn Mandarin.

All set, right?

I'm missing three things: travel insurance, a passport, and a visa.

U.S. citizens need a visa to enter China. I waited to apply until I knew I had approval for time off work so that I knew I'd be able to go in the 90 day window granted by a typical tourist visa. So after I bought the tickets I sent my passport and visa application via DHL to a visa agent in Washington, D.C. The visa agent, for a fairly reasonable fee, delivers an applicants documents to the Chinese embassy and retrieves them upon completion, saving the traveler a trip to a city with a consulate for the purpose of standing in line.

On December 28th, I wondered why my application status wasn't showing up on the agent's website, so I contacted customer service. They had not received my package. I checked DHL's website with my tracking number:

Estimated delivery date: 12/26/2007
2/24/2007 7:32 am Arrived at DHL facility. Rockville, MD
1:38 am Processed at DHL Location. Allentown Hub, PA
12:26 am Transit through DHL facility Allentown Hub, PA
12/23/2007 5:49 pm Depart Facility Wilmington - Clinton Field, OH
1:26 pm Processed at DHL Location. Wilmington - Clinton Field, OH
12/22/2007 7:16 pm Depart Facility Arvada, CO
12:44 pm Shipment picked up Arvada, CO

I had other stuff to take care of that weekend and figured the package might have been held up by inclement weather or something. On Monday, December 31st, I called DHL customer service who confirmed what the website said. They had someone from the Rockville facility contact me to let me know the manager would look for the package and call me on Wednesday when it was delivered. This evening I called customer service again and they informed me that the package had not been found and that I could file a loss/damage claim form.

Belgium, man, Belgium!

I rarely get mad for more than about ten minutes, but I'm still pissed over six hours later. The only thing I can think of whose shipping loss would anger me more is my hard drive.

Thanks to technology, dealing with this crap is easier than it must have been twenty years ago. I used an automated phone system to make a reservation at the Colorado Passport Agency in Aurora for Tuesday the 8th. That gives me less than three weeks to get processed by agencies for two federal governments. The passport agency is for people who are departing "in less than 14 days" or who need to get a visa in that time. Even it takes 14 days to process and send my passport, I could overnight it on the 21st, have it processed on the 22nd and 23rd, picked up on the 24th, then overnighted back to me on the 25th so I can grab my bag and head out the door on the morning of the 26th.

Dear DHL,

Your incompetence will force me to spend lots of money for your competitors' services. You suck.

Sincerely,
A Furry Ball of Fury

I wonder if it would be cheaper to pay $150 to change my flight to start in San Francisco or LAX and get a last minute flight out there, get a visa in person, and work from a friend's living room while I wait for the bureaucrats.

When I posted last week, I forgot the second half of the joke. The full exchange goes

Hello, I'd like to make a reservation. The name is Jackson. Andrew Jackson.
I'm sorry sir, we don't accept reservations.
Well that's all you'll get.

The road trip was fabulous. I managed to avoid a coyote on the way out and fires on the way back. I soaked in a river, two hot tubs, and hot springs in Nevada and Utah. I walked through Redwood forests, along sandy, rocky, and glass beaches, up and down slickrock, and 10+ miles from the Marin Headlands to Fisherman's Wharf. I ate copious grasses, flowers, fruits, and pseudofruits native and foreign to California, tasty dishes from the kitchens of people related to mollybzz, fantastic potluck dishes, and wonderful beverages ranging from Dr Pepper (for night-driving enhancement) to "four day old" green tea to California wines to mangosteen juice to homebrew beer and cider. I even ate at Woey Loy Goey, the same Chinatown restaurant my dad's still telling stories about from a trip in the early '70s. (The location has changed and the sign has "new" before the name, but the food is still good.) I played Apples to Apples, Scrabble, Boggle, and 20 Questions, all with formidable opponents (I've never been skunked in A2A before and I've yet to beat mollybzz in a game involving letters.) The only rain in two weeks came in Nevada and I managed to get sunburned in a city famous for fog. In sum, 3500 miles of great fun.

Incidentally, if I ever move to San Francisco I may have to cut my hair and take many of my hats out of daily use. Fortunately, Silicon Valley doesn't seem to have the same blustery tendencies

Due in part to excessive personal hygene, tamheals was running quite late for her flight to Orlando this morning. When we hit traffic on I-70, I informed her that she would not arrive at DIA in time to check her luggage. After a rough decision about high heeled shoes, I consolidated her luggage down to one carry-on bag and one personal item, the latter containing her toiletries bag containing essential oils bottles, a tube of toothpaste, and small bottles of shampoo.

Speeding on Peña Blvd. didn't make up enough time, so she realized in the security line that she wouldn't catch her flight. When she got to the checkpoint, they informed her that her toothpaste and shampoo exceeded the allowed 3 oz maximum.

The purported purpose of draconian measures at airport security checkpoints is to make sure that flights are safe because nobody aboard the plane is carrying anything dangerous. However, the rule is not "Passengers may not bring dangerous items on board." Instead, there is a long list of specific items which are not allowed. I ca nunderstand not letting passengers take an ice pick on board (clearly dangerous). But they didn't say "Sorry, ma'am, you're not allowed to bring shampoo and toothpaste on the plane." They said "Sorry, ma'am, you're not allowed to bring this much shampoo and toothpaste on the plane." (I believe she even left her 2.5oz of personal lubricant at home.)

There are four possible conclusions to draw from this:

• There is a way to hijack an airplane with five ounces of shampoo and five ounces of toothpaste (and a dash of eye medicine and personal lubricant) which is not possible with three ounces of shampoo and three ounces of toothpaste.
  
• The TSA has no idea what can blow up an airplane, but some Muslims in England came up with a (well-shampooed) hair brained idea involving unknown liquids, so the TSA is throwing chemistry to the wind assuming any liquid in sufficient quantities can blow up an airplane.
  
• The TSA is well aware that you can't blow up a plane with shampoo, but wants to hassle you anyway for political purposes.
  
• The TSA doesn't trust its employees to make decisions based on the gestalt of a traveller's luggage, so they devise a spaghetti code security policy in the hopes that any terrorists get entangled in mindless rule enforcement.
  

I'll be flying to Norway, via Newark, next Wednesday. My bad timing will probably prevent me from taking a water bottle to maintain hydration during the hours upon hours in the air. But, as the register points out, it's quite hard to blow up a plane with liquids. So much for my hopes of international travel with only carry-on luggage. At least I, unlike my dad, don't have to stop over in Heathrow...

It's also interesting to note that the authorities raised the threat level when they had busted up the terrorist plot they'd been investigating for a year. Since when does arresting criminals make the streets more dangerous? Also, if they've been tracking these guys for a year, was there any danger they'd even get on a plane? Surely their purchase of an airline ticket would set off all sorts of bells.

Fun fact: the Department of Homeland Security website shows a Yellow threat level icon in the top right corner, but prominantly announces that the U.S. threat level remains at ORANGE...


Incidentally, if you wish to contact me between 8/23 and 9/6, send email to trevorstone (a) gmail.com. My usual @trevorstone.org address gets too much spam to check at a glance and I haven't bothered to set up a webmail interface yet anyay.