Sent from the road on Nick's flip phone.

For a moment let me turn this into a "travel blog!" Everyone loves reading about the awesome things other people are getting to do and eat and see and meet... So I'll try my hand at it too but instead of talking about the culture, food, and beautiful sites, I'll tell this all from the perspective of road trip vehicle maintenance! Sweet right?! Sort of "Rick Steves" joins hotrod's "Roadkill."

Let's do a perimeter check of Florida.

Lindsay just recently got her certificate in Geospatial Information System, (GIS) and is now looking for a job in that field. One of the places she has been considering moving to practice the dark arts of GIS is south Florida and the Keys.  Never having been there, she wanted to visit down there to if she could imagine living there.  I had some leave, and it is always a good idea to bring your mechanic on a road trip... so here we are, perimeter checking the state of Florida. Besides, driving around in Florida always makes me feel like I am in a Carl Hiaasan novel for some reason.

I was advocating the vehicle for this to be the great blue Buick.  Trusty steed now with wonderfully working fuel injection and computer controlled spark advance.  Or maybe the convertible Eldorado, with dodgy brakes and now manual operated automatic top.  All of those fine cars got vetoed in the name of working air-conditioning.  So we ended up taking her 2000 Jeep Grand Cherokee.

The first stop, was intended to be Tampa Bay.  About 3 hours into the drive, just far enough that it wasn't reasonable to turn around and get a different car, there was a thump, the engine stuttered, and then continued to run a little rough. The check engine light came on as well.  To my well trained eye, this seemed exactly like the kind of problem that should be ignored.  These modern cars do this kind of thing all the time.  Probably it will just go away.  

We stopped at a parts store anyway, just to you know... have the code read and stuff.  I mean, it isn't like the they would have a code for "valve broke free and dropped into the cylinder" right?  Also, I had my money on "Crank Shaft Sensor."  The code came back, "#2 Injector Circuit" The men at the parts store were very willing to sell me a new injector and a new connector.  

One look at the fuel rail and I knew there was no way that was going successfully replace only one fuel injector.  All the delicate tubing and fittings were rusted from decades in Michigan in just the way that one twist of the wrench and the tubes would sacrifice themselves in protection of their rusty connection to the cruddy injectors.  So I did what ever woman suspects men do when they look under the hood of a car...

I jiggled the wires on the injector.  

It was still running rough so I did the next step in the trouble shooting tree...  I poured a bottle of snake oil (Sea Foam injector cleaner) into the fuel tank.  

Then with a, “should be good now," and a slam of the hood closed, I hopped back into the car.

The check engine light was still on, and it was still a little rough but I figured as the cleaner went through it would clean the injectors and then it would all be fine.  It couldn't still be the circuit... as I had jiggled that connector.

About two hours later, the check engine light went out, and it smoothed itself nicely!  Sweet!  It worked!  This trip's major vehicle problem was already solved and it was only day one!  Perfect!

We got to Tampa Bay without incident.  

Day 2

Turns out in Tampa, there is a big cat rescue place. Not, like a big place for rescuing cats... but like large cats being rescued.  We went there... and it actually seemed really well run.  It didn't feel exploitive of the cats, and they really did seem as well cared for as a large cat could be. Probably a place worthy of your time and money.  None of the pictures turned out there... but just imagine tigers lounging about in Florida underbrush. 

Next stop was the original Hooters restaurant! (This fine franchise was started in Clearwater, Florida) I'll give this company one thing... they are consistent.  Same cruddy food the world over for the last ten years.  (I think about ten years ago they used to be better and have now gone downhill but it also could be that I have had better wings in the last ten years)

Shamefully I have no pictures of the hooters...

Anyways, as we are going down a causeway toward Clearwater, FL.  Obviously Lindsay is driving... wait let me describe her driving first... Have you ever been passed in heavy traffic by a suped up rice rocket weaving through traffic?  You probably said to yourself, "dude... were does that guy think he is going?" Well that guy is her driving. She drives like that at all time in every vehicle. I think we had just passed a van full of nuns, an old man driving himself to the hospital for his own coronary, and an F-1 driver in a rental car... all while flipping them birds and pointing at the slow lane where she thinks they should be driving so she doesn't have to pass them on the right. Basically she drives at all times like she is in a roller-derby jam. (Thank god the back windows are tinted so dark so that half her bird flipping can't be seen or in there would be bullet holes in the back of her car… Also she reserves her horn AND bird-flip combo for people she spots littering out their car windows.) 

During a hard swerving deceleration, “BANG! clunk clunk clunk clunk…." Like the sound of a steam roller driving over regularly spaced running outboard motors.  At slower speeds it was a more manageable crunching of metal sound... like if you were rolling a manhole cover through a field of broken garden gnomes and empty soup cans.

The only place to pull over was the side of the causeway, where I crawled under the car again.  It wasn't completely obvious what was broken as everything looked fine.  I started grabbing things and jiggling them again... hoping that the sound of shaking it would be similar enough to what it does while driving that it be obvious what was broken.  This is another expert only technique not to be tried by noobs.  Speaking of noob moves, I touched the brake rotor and burned the shit out of my finger tips. SLOJ. Still nothing seemed to be loose at all until I grabbed the front driveshaft and shook it.  

Now if I were wishing for something to fail on a car on a road trip… first choice might be a light of some sort, second might be a belt, the AC not the alternator… and though I had never thought about it, the drive shaft really isn’t a bad one assuming it doesn’t break at the front joint and pole-vault you into the obituaries.  

Actually now that I think about it, a broken drive shaft is bad only if you don’t have four wheel drive vehicle… otherwise a drive shaft failure is fairly show stopping. This was my second of such drive shaft failures. The first one was my favorite road side fix ever… It up in Houghton in the snow with Andrew against my greatest vehicle challenger ever… Phoebe’s Ford explorer.  (That car challenged me with a seized accessory belt while outrunning hurricane Katrina, a terminally leaking transmission across the length of the UP, and a shattered u-joint in Houghton… as well as some problem in Norman, Oklahoma that finally forced us to abandon it in Kate and Joel’s driveway. I have now forgotten what exactly that problem was… electrical I think. It is the only car I can think of that I didn’t complete a trip with.)  The front U-joint of the rear driveshaft shattered and Andy and I kept that car rolling as a front wheel drive truck using a mountain dew bottle as a bearing and looped clothesline through the doors a suspension bracket.

Anyways, this week we limped the jeep to Hooters… man’s got to eat after all.  Besides, I do my best mechanicing with a few beers in me. The food was still terrible.  It is like they have some sort of subliminal trick to make me always think it is going to be good.  Remember this is a Florida road trip so The Original Hooters Restaurant is acceptable as a destination eatery. Next we limped it to the auto parts store, ordered a new CV jointed drive shaft, then waited till the next day at 11 o’clock when the delivery truck dropped it off.

Always check to make sure they sold yo the right part.

I am not above doing work on a car in the auto parts store parking lot… but a drive shaft is a little more than wipers or adding oil.  So instead of changing a driveshaft in front of the sign that says, “NO WORKING ON CARS IN PARKING LOT” we went one store over and did it behind a Chinese restaurant.  I wanted to be close enough that I could walk back to the parts store to get extra parts or tools if needed.  

Though I know the Amateur-Sophist loves to do major engine work with a crescent wrench, I only used mine as a caliper to know that I needed to buy an 8mm box wrench… the only additional tool I needed on this trip!

The drive shaft swap went without incident... though I did smash my finger when it finally became unstuck.

Day - A few days later… probably the next day.  

Since one or both of us may be leaving Florida soon, we went to the Everglades and at the southwest edge of the park did the tourist thing and took an airboat ride through mangroves. 

Holy shit!  It was like the Star Wars canyon run through the death star but instead of a jedi driving it was a big bubba Florida guy named Captain Hoss.  The hanging mangrove branches were so close to his head I thought they were going to knock the cigarette out of his mouth!  It was so fast and so close that i found myself unconsciencely sliding myself award the center of the boat.  Short story… take an airboat ride through mangroves if you get the chance!

Lindsay, Captain Hoss, and myself

The plan had always been to camp in the Everglades park. Following the logic that the big open area in the back of an SUV is very tent like and easier to set up than a tent we had planned to just put our sleeping bags in the back and sleep inside the car.  

Now, before I get into why I should have known this was a bad idea, let me reminisce for a second about growing up in the UP.  You see, sometimes you just want to get away from parents for a while. The usual teenager way was to go park overlooking the bay or somewhere that the cops won't move you along.  In the winter this works great as you can just dress warm and turn on the car every 15-20 minutes to run the heater.  In the summer, different story.  The summer presents you a dilemma… you can either sit there with the windows rolled up and sweat in the stale hot air inside the car, or you can roll down the windows for a nice breeze…  where your mosquito-raisinified corpses will be found by a family on their way to church the next morning.  

Let’s get back to the great idea of car-camping in the everglades.  Yep… that age old choice of hot stale air inside the car, or becoming rasinified corpses.  The difference is that it is reasonable to talk or watch submarine races in a hot stuffy car, it is not reasonable to try to sleep.  So with the world’s largest wetlands worth of mosquitos swarming outside waiting for us to succumb to the heat and open a window, we did not sleep.  

By morning, everyone was in a stupendous mood.

Day - 4ish

At the Shark Valley Visitor Center they give ranger led programs and talks.  The only one that worked out timing wise for us was a “Bird Walk.” I imagined this was going to be us and some kids doing their junior ranger coloring books on a casual walk with veneer level discussion about birds.  Like… “birds are neat, that is a green one… it has a beak and eats fish.”

So wrong… This was my first encounter with bird watchers. It was immediately obvious that we were not really prepared to look at birds the way the rest of the crowd was.  First of all, we didn’t have binoculars, let alone the NASA-grade optics everyone else seemed to have at the ready on single point M4 slings.  Turns out the everglades is the place where all the world’s birders come to look at the birds that were drawn by Dr Seuss.  If you have ever wanted to see old people carrying tripods and howitzer sized cameras through a swamp, the everglades is for you!  

Lindsay, myself, and a bird drawn by Dr. Seuss on the 15 mile bike path through the center of the Everglades.

Also at the Shark Valley Visor Center there is a 15 mile bike path through the deep deep deep everglades.  In this over safety conscience world, where the teeter totter is extinct and even the National Park Service puts handrails up the face of El Capitan… you still can just literally ride your bike or walk out into jurassic park with the dinosaurs.  I am talking about alligators!  There is no way, even for me, to exaggerate the number and size of the alligators out there.  There are huge ones sunning themselves on the path, there are medium sized ones casually swimming through the water, and there are baby alligators chillin-the-most on their huge mothers and in near by trees.  Everywhere! And… the sound they make when they…ummm… purr… growl maybe?

Put it this way, the sound of a big alligator growling makes your soft frail mammalian body know to the core that you are food.

When I go places, I often think... "would this be a good place to have to crash a plane or to get rid of a body?" (this falls solidly on the get rid of a body list) There is nothing like being food for large nearby predators that tunes a man to the idea that in an environment like this every living thing could be only moments from being killed and eaten by something else.

I have heard that in a foot race, alligators are faster than you for the first 15 feet…  it is a good thing they seem to be lazy.  Actually, I am still surprised that on this path we don’t loose more birders and Dutch toddlers.  

Me standing 16 feet from what turned out to be a medium sized alligator. (Probably a ten footer...)

At the end of this bike path there is an observation tower right in the middle of the park.  I’ll let the pictures talk.  Probably the most awesome place I have been in the last few years.

We drove around the park a few more hours, fed more mosquitos, then continued down to the Keys.

Again, car camping was the plan. Learning from our previous night’s mistake… We got some mosquito netting from the Key Largo Kmart. The idea was that we were going to roll down the windows and tape the netting over the open windows so we could have both breeze and get to keep our blood.  That scheme worked great!  Unfortunately, all the campgrounds through all the keys were full… Well, plan B.  

Plans B it turns out was to just park somewhere, roll down the netted windows and roll out the sleeping bags… and wake up in the Keys!

The “somewhere” I was advocating was the parking lot of a dive bar!  A cinderblock hut with a gravel parking lot that sold beer in cans.  We could go in, push it up, then walk right out to the car and right to sleep! The perfect campsite as far as I could imagine. Who would bother us there right? Very Keys I thought.

Well, Lindsay’s counter “somewhere” was the dark back lot behind a Starbucks.  The advantages being they open early with bathrooms and coffee, and probably have free wifi from the parking lot. Not selling cheap beer till two AM was not one of her criteria apparently…

We were not the only ones with this great plan.  Also in the dark behind the Starbucks was a complete creeper conversion van and a chevy suburban.  Not as dark and quite as we had expected! It was like there was a tractor trailer truck meet back there ALL NIGHT! About every hour a truck would come in, park right in the middle of all of us, then rev their engine for half an hour to run its lift gate.  I guess it makes sense that all the trucking deliveries out to the keys would have to be done at night or they would never make it through the traffic. About the time the deliveries stopped, the garbage trucks started coming.  Apparently this was a nice out of the way place for them to run their compactor without bothering taxpayers.  They would go out, collect a load of trash, then come back to this back lot, rev their engine up to about 3k RPM, and run the compactor for ten minutes.  After that they would co out collect more, then repeat… 

At this point, not sleeping was starting to be funny to me.  Each truck would pull up a few feet from our now wide OPEN window, rev it’s engine to decibel level “Roar,” then profanity would slowly start oozing out from under the blanket next to me.

How can’t you laugh! And no sleeping was had by anyone… again.

Day - Number enough that the drive shaft seemed like another life.

Speaking of classic odd couple journeys and steam engines… I present you, The African Queen!  Draw any parallels you want on your own…

Me and Humphrey Bogart aboard The African Queen

Turns out the boat is still putting along.  Now no longer in Africa, but around the canals of Key Largo.  I have come to the conclusion I need to get more into steam powered machines.  What I found interesting was that the smell of the engine, reminded me of the smell inside some of my dad’s coast guard ships from when I was a kid. I’ll have to ask if any were steam… I can’t imagine… Maybe.

 

Why is the Gin always gone!?!?

Not long after the African Queen, we arrived in Key West.  There is a Naval Air Station about six blocks north of downtown Key West. They have put up a bunch of mobile homes right across the road from the old sea plane hangers.  So, for the same price as staying on base at the Cannon Inn in BFE New Mexico, you can stay in down Key West in a two bedroom, living room, kitchen equipped mobil home!  Not a bad deal!  Mattresses and no trucks!  Some good sleep is no doubt only a sunset away!

On a completely unrelated note, Key West is a rooster sanctuary! Seriously… a cockadoodledoooing type rooster sanctuary.  The story goes that cock fighting was getting really big down there in the eighties, so the city passed an ordinance that it was against the law to have a rooster in a cage.  Naturally everyone just released their roosters out of the cages.  There are now wild warrior chickens everywhere…. though mostly roosters.  It seems like most of the hens still live in back yards and make eggs for the man… but the roosters get to have one cock parades all over town all the time.

Hey!  Here is a rooster in a window!

As a real observation of chicken culture, the older and bigger roosters really do have better and longer calls with more notes and doodle doos. You could see a big proud rooster and know it had a good call, and if you heard a good call you knew it was coming from a bad ass bird! Basically what I am saying is that you could judge a cock by it’s size…

And one in a tree!

Luckily I speak chicken!  This is the transcript I recorded one morning at about 04:15 am.

Rooster #1 “Rooper doo” (Hey fellas, who wants to practice our pick up lines?”)

Rooster #4“ROOOPER ROOPER ROOPER DOO!!!” (Listen noobs, I got that shit covered the chicks are mine.)

Rooster #1 “Rooper DOO!” (Hey Fellas!  I think I am getting better!)

Rooster #4 “ROOOPER ROOPER ROOPER DOO!!!” (Do you not hear the throaty roar of my doodle do? Your practice is futile!!!)

Rooster #2 “Rooper DOoOo” (Ned, you’re such an asshole…)

Rooster #3 “Dododdododo Roper DO!” (Hey fellas… come on over to this open window, it seems like a good place to learn some new doodle doos notes for the ladies)

Rooster #4 “ROOOPER ROOPER ROOPER DOO!!!” (I am king of this island! Keep practicing you wannabe chicken fuckers, I am gong to go walk back and fourth in an intersection and make a traffic jam.)

How many roosters can you spot here?

This rooster don't take shit from no dog!

And so it goes… circle of life and stuff.

Speaking of loud annoying sounds of Key West, sea shells can be made into musical horns!  Even better than that fact, I still have enough chops left from college and high school that I can honk a conch with no problem at all! I tested out a few and picked out the best sounding one that I could find with the reasonable plans to practice more during the eight hour drive up the coast to St Augustine.

Besides talking to chickens, there are many great things to do in Key West.  I honestly recommend the butterfly conservancy. A thousand butterflies floating around you is kind of magical.  Also, if you like cats… go see Hemingway’s old house too.  The house is neat and the cats are resigned to being petted by all the visiting cat lady Hemingway fans.

Butterfly house.  If it had it's wings open it would be iridescent blue.

So would this one... 

The best way to get around Key West by far is bicycle!  You can get everywhere as fast as a car or scooter but with no parking problems. In keeping with the vehicle maintenance theme, the gremlins some how got to my rear bike tire.  One day it holds 90 psi no problem, the next day flat with a hole in the tube.  How did that happen…? I got to use a crescent wrench for one of its few other correct purpose which was turning it around and using the round handle to flip the tire bead over the rim without snagging or cutting the tube. 

Also, if you stay on base you will have to either bring a helmet or walk your bike back and forth from the gate.  Don’t bother writing that down though, the base cops will be happy to remind you.

Day 8

The day of departure from Key West was mostly a day in the car. Conch blowing practice as it turns out is not authorized in the car…  though there seemed to be a lot of motorcycles on the road. Anyways, the plan was to drive up the Atlantic coast through Daytona Beach to spend the evening in old town St. Augustine and…

“Damn there seems to be a lot of motorcycles on the road.”

Anyways, we got to the motel.  A legit regular motel type establishment with an Indian lady running it and everything.  Lot of motorcycles in the parking lot though…

As we went into the room, the unmistakeable sound of live music being performed in a bar intruded it’s way in from behind the back wall. The back wall of the motel butted up against the back of a biker bar…

“Oh hell no! I am going to need you to go over there and tell them they need to keep it down!”

(I decided I liked mediocre rock covers instead.)

Ah… well, that explains it.  We had stumbled accidentally into Daytona Beach Bike Week! 

Luckily we are ready for bike week! 

I just like cannons!

And forts.

Someday I plan to come back to Daytona Beach Bike Week with a flying motorcycle of my own design, but as for that night… well, you can trust that the cinderblock walls and motel issue blackout curtains muffled the sound of Harley straight pipes adequately for everyone involved.

That’s all folks.  Back to work tomorrow.

She has been wet now!

The day started off with putting the boat on a little cart and rolling it out of my building.  

But it doesn't take long while pushing a 22 foot long boat down the sidewalk to start drawing a crowd.  I am pushing it to the far side of that red building in the distance on the right side of the road. There is a hole in the fence and a sort of ramp down to the beach.  Seem a lot closer when you aren't making such a spectacle. The cart was working fine at this point so it was pretty easy.

 It is hard to tell from this photograph, but there is about a 15 foot hill that the boat is rolling down.  Getting it down was no problem... and getting it back up is future Nick's problem... So really no problem at all! By this point the crowd had grown to seven.

Good thing too, because it was kind of a pain dragging it over the sand.  First lesson learned, put big sand bubble tires on the cart.  Also, deceptively from this distance the waves look tiny.  

I don't have a picture of the first time it touches the water, but this is pretty close.  Second lesson was learned almost immediately.  The smooth shinny varnished bottom of the boat that I tried so hard to make shiny and smooth... when wet is actually the mythical frictionless surface from high school physics classes!  I pulled the boat into the water, jumped in, and BAMN!  Immediately slipped and fell on my ass in the crumple in the bottom.

Turns out the waves were bigger than I had initially thought. Also, third lesson of the day, I need foot braces to press against to get any power into a stroke.  Nothing like sitting on a frictionless bench, over a frictionless floor, trying to pull through the surf.

We rowed out past the breakers, then admired the view for a moment.  Checked the stability. then rowed right back to shore.  As far as stable, I am pretty sure you cold stand on the side and fly fish in a hurricane and it would be fine.  Very stable.  Also water tight, which is nice too.

Back in, pulling it over closer to where the ramp is.

So a lot of the crowd stayed with us for the walk home. 

Ah shit...

"I'll tell you what you got there... you got there a problem."

Yea, so the cart is going to need some work.  This problem was solved with feats of strength and team work from strangers. 

 Who all came over to talk about partner style card games.  

Sea Trials

Sea Trials start tomorrow... Inshallah

Human Magnetoreception experiment: Call me bird brain!

So, follow my logic...

Homing Pigeon

Fact 1. There are animals that have the ability to sense magnetic fields.  Many of which have a protein in their retina called cryptochrome.

Fact 2. One such animal that we don't mind doing experiments on because they aren't that cute is fruit flies.  Turns out, humans and fruit flies have very similar magnetic field sensing protein in our retinas.

Fact 3. If you take a fruit fly that for some non-sinister reason genetically doesn't make it's own protein it doesn't seem to sense magnetic fields.  Now, if you take that same fly without it's own magnetic sensing protein, and substitute the human protein... it can sense magnetic fields again and navigate normally using the human version of this protein instead of it's own.

(I know... the fact that that statement can be made means there are scientists out there that are literally making human-insect hybrids, though probably very mild ones... It seems we are only percentage points away from that Spanish poem where the insect goes for a hike on his human girlfriend and lover. Pablo Neruda's "Insecto")

Fact 4. The human magnetic sensing protein placed in other animals that know how to use it gives the ability to sense magnetic fields and use them for navigation.

Thinking about all this, it should naturally follow that:

Hypothesis 1. Humans have the biological mechanisms in place to use magnetic fields for navigation.

The above picture about animal magnetoreception was stolen from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champlain's website.  What it is showing is how magnetic fields might be seen or sensed using cryptochrome by a bird as it looked around the landscape.  I am not sure that I agree with a lot of their discussion... especially when it gets to electron pairs and spin direction.  I feel like we don't need to get quantum physics involved in a phenomenon that can basically be replicated by a magnatized sewing needle stuck a bobbing cork... but they are the scientists and they have really convincing graphics.

Now... given all those facts and experiments done by other diligent biologists as stated above, it seems there is a pretty strong argument to at least start some experiments or attempt to tap into this possible latent ability for humans to navigate through direct sensing of the earth's magnetic fields. But Wait There's MORE!

Here is where it gets even more awesome!

Supposedly the Guugu Yimithirr Language and Sambal Language don't have words for "in front of" or "behind"... or even "right" or "left of"...  etc.  They only use the cardinal direction words like north, south, etc.  So for example if you were going to tell someone where they lost their screw driver, you would say, "Your screw driver is north of your east hand."  Supposedly that is how they describe all directions whether it is small directions around the room or larger ones around the whole area.

I know what you are thinking!  Nick, isn't the Sambal Language a language of island people?  Where if they grew up on an island and knew the landscape very well of each island, that it might just be easy to give directions that way because nobody ever goes anywhere new? Well maybe.  But also the second language Guugu Yimithirr is from northern Australia where one could imagine that the speakers could walk around a lot farther than the folks on the islands and still they use the cardinal direction words instead of some sort of local orientation like right or left or behind...

So all this has me sort of simmering in the back of my mind...  I am thinking a pacific island people and some northern Australian people whose description of themselves is "of the salt water" use cardinal directions in their language.  That area of the world was the kind of place that ancient Polynesian mariners used to cross the huge pacific with no compass or other known modern navigation tools. Maybe these languages are actually artifacts of the ancient mariner's ability to sense the magnetic fields of the earth... and that those people still have that ability.  Pile that on top of the biology that strongly indicates that we should be able to sense magnetic fields! ...then crown it with this:

I read an article or maybe heard a news story about an anthropologist the that went to study one of the languages mentioned above. At first she said that it was difficult to only use the cardinal directions for everything because she had no mental orientation to describe things.  Like she was some sort of terribly handicapped person in that culture.... then most interestingly after a few weeks of speaking the language all the time, she described how a sort of mental map manifested itself in her head.  It seems it just sort of appeared there.  Then after that, she was able to tell the cardinal directions all the time with no problem at all.  Unfortunately she left a few weeks after that and I haven't heard of any other experiments done along these lines... but the implications are tantalizing!

Unfortunately it isn't in the budget this year to go to the south pacific and ask the tribesmen to wear DeGaussing hats to see if they can still talk.  So I am going to have to do the next best thing, I am going to have to some how reignite or sharpen this sense of magnetic detection in myself.  Assuming it is a magnetic sense, I have started wearing a little magnetic compass around all the time.

You can see the little compass pinned to my shirt in the northern edge of this picture. My stove is at the south edge of my kitchen and I am making pasta in the northwest burner of the stove. I have only been doing this for a few days now, and have no solid conclusions yet but I will say that I have become already much more conscience of when my orientation is changing.  As in, roads that I always just thought of as straight I now am acutely aware of when they make subtle curves.  Mostly I just now have a good excuse to wear a little compass on my shirt all the time.

My plan is that after I feel like I am reliably able to orient myself N. S. E. W., I'll do some control tests on myself to see if that really is the case.  Remind me to update about this if I don't mention it on here later.

One last note... a few people that I have discussed this experiment with have brought up the fact that when we are flying, we have to be totally conscience of our orientation with respect to cardinal direction, so shouldn't have these hours and hours of being tuned into the cardinal direction in the air have developed magnetoreception already?  Well, to be honest, no.  The first thing I do when I get in an aircraft is stick my head in between two huge magnets in the speakers in my helmet... then shortly after, I turn on a million radios and computers... then top it off with a giant radar right in front of my nuts.  I don't feel like the cockpit is a magnetically quiet enough to develop this sense. Kind of like trying to learn perfect pitch while working on an auto assembly line.

If any of you folks can think of a better way to attempt to develop this magnetoreceptive conscienceness, please make comments below.  Or better yet, do your own experiments and let us know what happens.

Thanks! 

Epic! But, like Homeric epic, not like normal epic.

What's that sound?!? Hark! I think it is the Victory at Sea theme song! (Should be playing in the background as you read this.)

Is it my imagination or the bow of marine grade plywood battle ship?

Yes to all that!

Some of you know about my crazy plans to quit the Air Force and go canoeing... the real plan is the build a boat, and toss it in the head waters of the Missouri River, then float, row, sail the 2300 miles all the way to St Louis. And then if I am feeling froggy (have no job to get to) turn north for Chicago or maybe South to New Orleans...  As of right now, I have convinced my dad to go at least the first month of the trip through Montana with me. After that, after that I am open to whomever can and wants to take vacation time to pull on oars and get buff as fuck Ben-Hur galley slave style.

(Hmmm... galley slave seems to mean a lot of things to the internet... should have seen that coming before I searched for that picture.)

Anyways, I have been building my boat over the last few months between deployments and these are the first public pictures of it, though obviously it is still under construction.

I know what you are thinking, "Nick!  That isn't so much a boat as a pointy ended book shelf!"  Well I agree to a point.  I have built quite a few book shelves, and if something works why change it, but there is good reason that it has the pointy ended book shelf look. The Missouri is a very shallow wide river.  I don't know if it was Mark Twain that said the Missouri River was "A mile wide and an inch deep" but It sounds right even if he didn't say it, so I guess he said it now.   He might have said "To thin to plow to thick to drink." Either way... it is a shallow muddy river. 

As much as I would love to row a classic white oak Whitehall for 2300 miles, it really isn't the right kind of boat to deal with a shallow muddy river with occasional rocks and small rapids. I started researching all sorts of boat that might be good for this trip.  I looked at old Viking boats, canoes, rowboats, small sailing skiffs, Mackenzie river drift boats... etc.  What I came conclude is that no normal boat is really the right boat for this and I would have to invent and build my own.  This is the result.  

The flat bottom is to keep it as shallow a draft as possible.  The full length keel is so that when rowing it tracks straight.  The width is so that even under sail, (soon to be schooner rigged) it will be relatively stable without a big heavy keel.

The slight rocker (curve of the bottom) is roughly meant to be shaped like a big paddle board.  This should keep it easily rowed through the water as well as if the wind comes up enough, let it plane like it is surfing. 

It has three rowing stations, and one coxswain seat. So, on slightly less epic trips, a lot more folks can drink bear and look for alligators in the swamps around here.

Anyways, there it is. I know you guys would prefer to more posts about old rusty Buick modifications, but for the time being expect more boat updates than Buick updates. 

It was on the way anyways.

Suddenly!

There I was in front of the colosseum and a block away from the literal belly button of western civilization. (The Roman Forum)

Surprised?  So was I!  How did this happen?  Well, it all started during a briefing a few weeks ago.

"So there I was:" kind of day dreaming and not really paying attention to the weather update briefing...  (here is the thing about weather briefings.  Either the weather is good enough to fly, or you have already been thinking and studying the weather for two hours before you even show up at work.  Given that I didn't know what the weather was, it was obviously good enough to fly.)

"bla blah bla blah Noreus blah bla blah..."

What!?

I shoot a look over at my lead flight engineer.  I can tell it caught him off guard as well because he pauses from growing his mustache and sharpening his knife to look surprised back at me.

As far as I can tell, they just read a list of names of guys going home.  That doesn't make any sense!  I confirm at the end... "that was the list of guys staying here right?"

Wrong.  Pack up bub, you're going home. One moment you are thinking about how to spend your next week fighting the evil-doers... then the next moment you are considering how to get all your military bags of junk back to the other side of the planet as easily as possible.

So to sum up incase that rambly few paragraphs above don't make sense... I was deployed to fight the evil-doers when suddenly I was told I was being sent home for bureaucratically logical reasons.

Damn it! Now I am going to have to do my own laundry.

So the next thing that happens when a group of guys in the military get told to do something, everyone plays a quick game of shoulder poker to figure out who is in-charge (or culpable incase it goes wrong.)  For a group of guys traveling together the position is known as "Troop Commander."  Though not really a sought after job, it is usually not a terrible job.  In military travel it mostly just includes counting everyone up 82 times each day till you get where you are going.  Count everyone onto the bus, count them off the bus, count everyone into the airplane, count everyone at the next bus... if the number changes, find the missing guy so the number stays the same.  It is just a mater of keeping everyone informed of what they need to do, and making sure everyone follows the plan... usually.  Especially when you are traveling uninteresting places where there is nothing to do but sit in tents, go to the chow halls, and read old Clive Cussler novels you find laying around.

Like I said... as long as you are traveling uninteresting places it is easy enough to be troop commander.

Just after we figured out that I was in charge of this tent-to-bus-to-tent odyssey of boredom and endurance that is redeployment, we found out we will be spending the night in Rome on our way home.

Rome is probably one of the best cities I can imagine to spend a night in randomly.  Technically, I have never actually been to Rome... but as I would soon bore my compatriots with, "I was almost a Classical Archaeology Minor."  So, oddly enough I spent about a year and a half of my life studying Romans and their pot shards.

So... taking a bunch of dudes that haven't drank or been out in public for months through Rome for a night.  What could go wrong?!?!!?!

Being an "almost Classical Archaeology Minor," my obvious plan was to take these guys who only want to eat decent food and drink some Italian wine for a long walking tour in the dark past a bunch of old broken rock walls and toppled columns.  I figured they guys would really like it in the end! What I have found is that the higher rank I have gotten, the better everyone thinks my ideas are... and my jokes seem to be getting funnier too!

Like I said, it was a tour in the dark of a bunch of old stuff, but everyone seemed to be interested enough.  Honestly interested I think... and, really, with me doing that, no one else had to navigate... for those of you that haven't experienced it, being the navigator for a bunch of aircrew on the ground has to be one of the worst jobs ever.  One mistake and you have lost all credibility as a human being in every aspect.  No one wants to be in charge of navigation on the ground for aircrew.

Armed with a cartoon tourist map of Rome and 15 year old knowledge from college, I took these poor guys for a miles long walking tour of Rome with just the promise that we are on our way to food and booze, and almost there!  It's a little thing in the Air Force we like to call, "Leadership!"  I am pretty sure that was an approved Carl von Clausewitz method.

There were a lot of moments like, "Holy shit!  I think that is Tragan's column!"

Which indeed it was.  I had forgotten about it till I just sort of walked into it.  It seems Rome is the kind of place that you just sort of walk into famously hugely historical places in an alley... because you are looking for a pizza place.  Yes... we got street pizza in Rome.

Shortly after bumping into Tragan's column, we found this huge and very impressive place.

When I was of course asked by the guys, "what is this place?"

To which I had to respond, "I have no damned idea!"  Which is impressive in its ignorance because it is literally right next to the Roman Forum and across the street from Tragan's column... and as huge as fifty motherfucks, but honestly I don't remember anything about this thing.  It looks new and all I could do was point out that it had many classic imperial Roman architectural elements... but I didn't know anything past, "maybe that is Mussolini on that horse or something..."

Well I looked it up... turns out archaeologist and art historians HATE this building, and it turns out it isn't Mussolini, it's some Vito from the 1800's (Vittorio Emmanuell II, First King of united Italy)

This Art History blog puts it best with the article, "Il Vittoriano, Exercise in Hubris." Basically it is a building too blingy and showy even for the pink backpacked, gold chain wearing, track suited Italian types.  Also, they tore down a preserved medieval neighborhood and an old pope's palace/fortress to build it. I guess it makes sense that it didn't come up in archaeology or art history classes. The professors are still mad about it. Still for pure impressiveness, there is no building I can think of as its peer. One hell of a stack of marble!

Also, ran into this too... Arch of Constantine

 And this was just a cool stair case I went down...

And finally, believe it or not, this is the view I ate breakfast with the morning we left.  I guess if you are going to not eat MRE's in a tent in the rain, this is the place to do it!