People used to be easily amused. A ride on a painted horse in a circle could’ve been a high point of some Midwestern kid’s year. The sights, the sounds, the smells of carnival rides became the cherished memories people carried through their lives. Even I remember when a carousel ride wasn’t lame, but, of course, I am much older than my physical age.
I am not a fan of baseball, it’s a seemingly never-ending boring game, interrupted only by an occasional bloody action in the stands or a non-lethal hot-dog drive-by. Baseball promoters tried to combat the dreadfulness of the game by creating sources of distraction, like bringing a herd of sheep for the 1963 Kansas City Athletics – Yankees home opener which was played on April 8th and lost 8-3 by the Kansas City team.
The following book excerpt talks about the 1963 season (scroll up and down inside the window):
This is how you get 83% approval rating, someone tell President Obama to get on a horse.
In this Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010 photo Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin rides a horse in the foothills of Karatash, near Abakan, the capital of the Khakassia region in Siberia.
The ladies are waiting with bated breath for the summer to see more of this:
Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin rides a horse in southern Siberia’s Tuva region August 3, 2009. Putin, a judo black belt who has flown in a fighter aircraft and shot a Siberian tiger in the wild, plunged into the depths of Lake Baikal aboard a mini-submersible on Saturday in a mission that added a new dimension to his macho image. Picture taken August 3, 2009.
Every time I visit my friends and relatives on the East Coast the question I am being asked the most is “when will you finally move here”. I have to admit that it’s a pretty tempting idea that ocasionally visits me since I moved to Kansas City almost 16 years ago.
Hundreds of thousands of people with better cameras and better photography skills vacation at the same places as me.
Hundreds of thousands of people are better at travel writing than I am, better at writing in general, and are clearly better than me at speaking English.
Go read their damn blogs….
I love to travel. It helps me to relax; feel in charge when I am planning my next trip, buying tickets and making reservations; learn new things; change the scenery; feel better (or worse) about my hometown. Most importantly, it helps me not to raise a moron. This year we traveled to the Pacific Northwest, a place that until now remained a blank spot on my travel map. We visited Seattle, took an Amtrak train to San Francisco and drove 450 miles along the Pacific Coast on Highways 1 and 101, stopping for a night in Monterey. The trip turned out to be even better than I imagined.
The next several posts will be about these places illustrated with tons of photos (I brought back 1,214, which would probably weigh tons if I was using film).
Face:
If there was a god, the Pacific Northwest would have been his reward to the people who didn’t quit going West in the middle of Kansas, and, instead of making “Ad Astra Per Aspera” their motto and giving up, continued to endure and persevere for months and years, slowly consuming their mates on the way. When these people, exhausted and with little hope remaining, saw the water in front of them (after the rain stopped and the fog cleared 6 months later), they knew it was all worth it, and everyone they ate on the way would have wanted it that way. Over time they proceeded to cut and kill most of the things so abundant in the area, swindle the Indians, build depressing slums and fill the void with homeless people, Mexican radio stations, French-speaking tourists and a special breed of people who ride the Ducks.
Over time, people had an epiphany, and after multiple fires and earthquakes, the Pacific Northwest and Northern California (I have no idea if these are considered one geographical region) are an American jewel, a place where the nature, weather and landscape combined with the architecture, city planning, atmosphere and a number of Asian restaurants approaching infinity make one understand why people are willing to pay mind-blowing prices to live there.
If I had to summarize Seattle in one photo, it would probably be this shot of a redheaded, bearded guy in a cap, wearing sandals and smoking a pipe.
