Yellowstone, January 28-31, 2011

In the fall of 2010, I read a press release, or an article, or something suggesting that Yellowstone was revising its policy on over-the-snow vehicles. Fearing that a new policy might make it more difficult to visit the Old Faithful snow lodge, I talked Dad, Ann, Hannah, and Noam in to a trip this winter for Dad's birthday. I am not a fan of snowmobiles in the Yellowstone wilderness. We were transported to the snow lodge in a snow coach, which is pretty much a rental car shuttle on tracks. Very cool. The snow coaches stay on the roads, which are not plowed but are groomed for over-the-snow travel. It seems that using snow coaches instead of snowmobiles (or "sleds" as they are strangely called in California) must result in less air pollution, less noise pollution, and fewer trips, but I acknowledge the possibility that I am a hypocrite for not wanting snowmobiles in the Yellowstone wilderness AND going to the Old Faithful snow lodge. The snow coach, at our stop at the Madison River warming hut on the way to Old Faithful:
Vocabulary word for the weekend: a young swan is a cygnet. A cygnet, on the Madison River:

A bison, patiently waiting to board the snow coach:

We met in Bozeman Friday night then drove to West Yellowstone where we dumped the car and hopped on the snow coach. We took the "regular" run (as opposed to the "express" run), which included stops at the warming hut for hot drinks and to see animals, mostly elk, bison, and birds. Hannah and Noam at Firehole Falls, on our scenic detour down Firehole Canyon Drive:

The last stop before Old Faithful was at one of the geyser basins, where we saw the cutest critter, a short-tailed weasel, also known as an ermine in his black and white winter coat. He was darting back and forth under the snow. They are apparently ferocious hunters, but also adorable:

We checked in to the lodge, then immediately headed out to watch Old Faithful:

Sunday morning, Hannah, Noam and I hiked to a higher spot to watch Old Faithful. The geyser is in the center of the picture, about 1/4 of the way from the top. The snow lodge is to the left of the geyser in the picture. The building with the steeply-pitched roof to the right of the geyser in the picture is the historical Old Faithful Inn, which is closed during the winter, presumably because it costs a fortune to heat.

Sunday afternoon, Hannah and I stayed inside while Noam and Dad went cross country skiing. Noam took this amazing shot of a field of bison poo. The bison spend a lot of time around the thermal features in the winter because (surprise!) it is warmer there. Hey bison! Leave no trace!

Hiking the board walk that winds through the thermal features near Old Faithful:

Monday morning, it was time to head home. The snow coach stopped at the Fountain Paint Pots on the way out of the park:

It was getting really cold when we left - the forecast low temperature for Monday night was 28 below - so there was a lot of other-worldly mist over the thermal areas. I loved loved loved this trip, I wish we had stayed longer. The best part was the lack of people. Years ago, I went to Yellowstone for the first time with my stepsister in July. I remember the boardwalk around Old Faithful being packed with people five or six deep all around the circle, probably over a thousand people. This trip, we watched Old Faithful erupt probably half a dozen times, and there were never more than ten other people watching with us.

Connecticut, January 13-18, 2011

I keep ending up in Connecticut in January since one can fly to New York from San Francisco for ridiculously small amounts of money at that time. New Haven was blanketed by deep, fluffy, still-clean snow. We scrapped a trip to Vermont to enjoy the winter in Hannah's backyard. I indulged in nostalgia for my childhood in the midwest by shoveling part of Hannah's driveway (she was forced to abandon the garage at the first big snow). We went to Sleeping Giant state park for some snowshoeing, followed by drinks at the Mikro Beer Bar in Hamden. Snow beast at Sleeping Giant:
We walked to this park from Hannah's house - the park was overrun with adorable deer with big, dewy, brown eyes and picturesque creeks. It was hard to take:

Costa Rica, December 27, 2010 - January 1, 2011

We spent a night in San Jose, then got on a bus that took us to the Pacuare River, where we would raft to the Pacuare Eco Lodge. On the raft:
Action shot:

We stayed at the lodge just one night. It was beautiful but it rained constantly the entire time we were there, a steady, heavy rain that let up for just a few minutes in the morning. Since everything was wet, we were asked to take off our shoes and go barefoot in the dining room, so the floor didn't get filthy from everyone's shoes. Using the restroom in the dining hall was a little weird, Jim and I both felt like we had pee foot for the rest of the night. One night turned out to be just enough, because the rain got old pretty fast. We returned to San Jose and flew to Quepos on the Pacific Ocean, where the weather promised to be better.

The plane:

We stayed at the Mango Moon. I love a hotel with resident animals and this one had a herd. There were two big dogs who roamed around and sprawled on the tile floor in the middle of the entry way, forcing you to walk around. There were about three cats including an insane kitten who would attack your napkin during dinner. One of the more sedate cats, who demanded to be let into our room:

A frog in Manuel Antonio National Park:

Beach!

Sara and I prepared for our zip-line, Tarzan swing, rappelling jungle canopy tour:

Sailing and snorkeling on new years eve day aboard La Perla:

Laying in provisions for new years eve:

On new years day, we headed back to San Jose, then home to San Jose:

Panama, December 24-27, 2010

We flew to LAX, then overnight to Costa Rica, and on to Panama City. Between these four places, LAX, the plane, the airport in San Jose, Costa Rica, and the airport in Panama City, which was the most awful for using the bathroom? I have not even finished asking the question and I can hear you shouting the answer - you are correct, LAX's Terminal 2 was by far the most awful. With the assistance of the iPhone and two street vendors the cabbie addressed as "General" and "Doctor," we eventually located the apartment we had rented. Just a few short hours later, we located the rental agent, who let us in. Who cares though, it was warm and sunny and a gentle trade wind was blowing - welcome to Central America. The view from our apartment, of ships waiting to enter the Panama Canal:

Before there was a canal, there was the Panama Railroad across the causeway, so it was appropriate that our geeking out over the canal started here:

The rail route was built to accommodate a crush of 49ers making their way from the eastern part of the US to California, making it a nice tie in to our gold country trip, which unfortunately ended in a puke-a-rama (see below). Construction of the rail route began in 1850 and was completed in 1855. If you could not afford the exorbitant $25 fare to ride the train, you could pay a much smaller sum and walk the 40 plus miles along the tracks through steamy, mosquito-infested jungles. Awesome. We took the train to Colon, on the Caribbean side of the canal, then hired a guy named Gibson to drive us back and take us to all the prime geeking-out spots along the way. We stopped first at the Gatun locks, the set of locks closest to the Caribbean. Here are the "mules" that move the ships through the canals. The ships are wedged in there with a few feet between the ship and the lock wall on each side and front and back, and they crank those babies through in about ten minutes. Really amazing. Mules (Tioga is cuter):

We stopped for a brief monkey interlude at the Gamboa Rainforest Resort. Capuchin monkey:

Back to geeking out. Two ships in the middle set of locks, Pedro Miguel. The locks are largely the original locks completed in 1914. They operate entirely by gravity flow - no water is pumped anywhere in the system. This works only because Panama gets about four metric shit-loads of rain every year, which fills Lake Gatun in the middle of the canal. It rained about half a metric shit-load while we were there, and that was during the dry season. Pedro Miguel:

Christmas day we got up late, enjoyed the warm breeze on our balcony, then hailed a cab for Casco Viejo, the old quarter of the city. A view of Panama's skyscrapers from Casco Viejo:

Noam and a church:

The president of Panama lives in Casco Viejo in the Palacio de las Garzas, the Heron's Palace. Herons roam the courtyard, it was weird:

On the day after Christmas, we resumed the canal geek-out with a cruise from Lake Gatun through Pedro Miguel and Miraflores locks to the Pacific Ocean. Noam and I cruising through the Culebra Cut, an artificial valley excavated through the continental divide:

A ship passing under the Centennial Bridge crossing Culebra Cut:

Waiting for our lock section to drain:

The lock wall:

Our canal pilot leaving after successfully piloting the cruise boat through the canal:

On our last day, we hired Gibson to drive us to Panama Viejo, then to the airport. Panama Viejo is the remains of a city that was destroyed in 1671 by one of the most notorious and successful privateers and creator of your favorite girly rum drinks (okay maybe not the last part), Henry Morgan. After Panama was sacked by Captain Morgan (garh!!), the city was rebuilt in Casco Viejo. Panama Viejo:

On to Costa Rica!

California's Gold Country, November 27, 2010

On our way to the Sierra, Noam and I have often quickly glanced left and right while whizzing through gold country in the Sierra foothills and thought it might be a nice place to visit (sometime when we weren't in a hurry to get somewhere in the mountains). The weekend after Thanksgiving we dedicated to gold country. The plan was to start in Coulterville and to drive along highway 49 (get it? Highway 49! Like the 49ers! Who came to mine gold! Personally, I drove across it about 400 times before I made the connection) to Placerville, stopping for the night somewhere in the middle. Now that the miners are gone, it is clear that the gold country towns live and die by tourism. The main drag to Yosemite no longer runs through Coulterville and there is no ski hill nearby, so Coulterville is a sleepy place. This adobe building was the Sun Sun Wo mercantile, a chinese grocery and probably opium den that operated from 1851 to 1926 on Chinatown Main Street in Coulterville:
The Hotel Jeffery in Coulterville, with its cool stamped tin siding and second story porch, operated until recently as a hotel and restaurant:

North of Coulterville we stopped in Chinese Camp to confirm what I have long suspected from driving through it on the way to Yosemite - there is nothing there. We tried to hike around Jamestown but it was raining and miserably cold, so from Sonora we headed to Columbia State Historic Park. The town of Columbia has a history similar to that of many gold country towns: founded in 1850, swelled to accommodate people mining nearby, burned several times, then declined as the gold rush wound down. Columbia is unique in that in 1945, the state of California bought the main street and several side streets, including the remaining buildings. There are several businesses on main street including a couple of hotels, restaurants, and shops, and people dressed in period costume doing demonstrations like blacksmithing and candle making. The Columbia jail:

After Columbia we headed to the Moaning Cavern of Calaveras County. Dripping water used to cause a moaning sound at the entrance to the 410 foot deep cave. We took a walking tour of the cave down to 165 feet below ground, a depth reached by a sketchy looking spiral staircase built in 1922 and at the time, the tallest arc-welded structure. One website I found calls this type of cave feature "cave bacon":

After the cave, we went to the town of Murphys to find food. Murphys has a super cute main street that is littered with wineries. We stopped at a bookstore so I could buy a book including Mark Twain's story about the celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County, set in the town of Angel's Camp, where we would stay. At the bookstore, we asked for a restaurant recommendation and the proprietor and her friend recommended Mineral, a vegetarian restaurant across the street, or Grounds. We chose Grounds, where I ate a crab cake that nearly killed me. I spent 11:30 PM to 5:30 AM barfing every 35 minutes at the Gold Country Inn in Angel's Camp. Oh, it was horrible! Noam thinks Jesus punished us for choosing Grounds when there was a perfectly awesome haute vegetarian restaurant available. He thinks the punishment being meted out to me alone was a question of jurisdiction. I felt so awful the next day we just drove home rather than continuing our drive north, so stay tuned for Gold Country 2: Electric Boogaloo! Not sure when that will happen, because the thought of going back makes me seriously queazy, but you will be happy to know that Le Petit Bistro in Mountain View has since rehabilitated my relationship with crab cakes!

Berlin, October 28 - November 3, 2010

We arrived in Berlin and took a taxi to Pankow, a nondescript residential neighborhood in former East Berlin, where we settled in to Shalev's studio. Thanks Shalev! The next morning, we had breakfast at the bakery next door, where the baker listed to our orders spoken in ratty German sounded out from the labels in front of each type of pastry, corrected our pronunciation, then insisted on hearing our corrected pronunciation before turning over the pastries. After some most excellent rhubarb pastries, we headed downtown. We heard so many horror stories about not validating one's S- or U-bahn tickets, it seemed appropriate to commemorate the act:

We took the S-bahn to the Brandenburg Gate, a former city gate and symbol of Berlin:

Pretzel and sausages, the cuisine of my people. Great shot of every single tooth in my lower jaw, no?

The real purpose of our trip to Germany:

The Reichstag, which was famously set on fire in 1933 by a Dutch communist. After the fire, Hitler persuaded President Hindenberg to sign the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended civil liberties and which the Nazis used to ban publications that were not friendly to the Nazi cause. Pretty much the beginning of the Nazi era of Germans-behaving-badly. The Reichstag was reconstructed beginning in 1990 and reopened in 1999 as the meeting place of the Bundestag, the German parliament:

Remember how one of the iconic images of the reunification of Germany after the fall of the Berlin wall was the East German Trabants driving on the Autobahn? Now you can drive them through Berlin on a Trabi-Safari. Alison, who is too young to remember the fall of the Berlin wall, could not understand why Hannah and I got all nostalgic at the site of crappy cars with blue clouds of oil smoke coming out the tail pipes. Trabi-safari:

On Friday Ronni took the train to Berlin from Cologne. We met her at the train station and went with her to Kreuzberg. (Later in the trip I went with her to this cute bar in Kreuzberg with the fox tail with binoculars:)

We stopped for pizza in Kreuzberg, where there was a picture of the funny and bossy guy behind counter with a Hitler mustache penciled in and the words "Pizza Nazi" written across the top. I didn't know you could call people "____ Nazi" in Germany, but I guess Seinfeld desensitized us all to that. Here are some helpful directions:

The River Spree:

Saturday Ronni met us in Prenzlauer Berg, where we walked around, shopped, had a cup of coffee, and tried to avoid disturbing the radishes:

Sunday I met Ronni for the exhibit at the German Historical Museum called "Hitler and the Germans." We spent a few minutes being annoyed by the exhibit, then left and cruised around museum island. This is what is known in my house as a Noamage, an homage to Noam - Noam loves him some photos that juxtapose old and new:

Sunday evening we walked through the Topography of Terror, a history of scary things Nazis did, located at the site of the Nazi security apparatus. We were relieved to note that the German treatment of this material is pretty similar to Yad Vashem's treatment (the national holocaust memorial in Israel). This is a picture from the Topography of Terror, *shudder*:

Actually the creepiest thing we saw was a picture from the 1960s of a Waffen SS reunion. Monday Alison and I headed out to Charlottenburg, home of Charlottenburg Palace, a palace built in the 17th century by the wife of Frederick I, the first king of Prussia. Charlottenburg Palace is the only royal residence in Berlin. Pretty neighborhood:

On our last day, I dragged Alison out to the suburb of Wannsee to see the Wannsee villa, where Hitler's lieutenants agreed on the final solution of the "Jewish question." The villa is on a street along the lake crammed with huge mansions. The villa was owned by the Nazi party and used by party higher ups for R and R. Disturbing to think of the premeditation, that the final solution was discussed not in a bunker but at a business meeting in this beautiful place - I can imagine some SS Gruppenfuhrer saying to his secretary "Lena, cancel my eleven o'clock, I have to schlep out to Wannsee for this meeting" (okay, maybe he didn't say schlep). The view from the Wannsee villa conference room:

I finally ate currywurst at the Wannsee train station, pretty much sausages with barbeque sauce. On our last evening, Alison and I waited in line to go inside the Reichstag. I am glad we bothered to do that, since shortly after we returned, I read that the Reichstag is now closed indefinitely to visitors due to security concerns. This is from near the top of the glass globe on the top, looking down into the chamber:

Thursday morning, we dropped the keys with the baker next door at 5 AM and took a taxi back to the airport. Bye Berlin!