Spent the day in Breckinridge skiing for the first time in 10 years.
We stayed the night on a whim at a slope side lodge. Matt talked them down from $350 to $129 for the night. It’s amazing what he can do.
This is the end of the year for us living in the West, so I suppose I should do a recap. It’s been 2066 in Nepal for a while now, I already celebrated Thai New Years in Thailand, and China still has some time to kill in whatever year they are still in. I started this year clean cut, working with hedge funds, wearing khakis and button down shirts. Now I’m bearded with long hair, biking and working on odd projects in coffee houses to pass the time, and wearing jeans and button down western shirts - a return to my days before New York.
When I turned 29 at the end of last year I told myself I needed to do some things that I had always talked about doing before I turned 30. My main goal was the Himalayas, I couldn’t relax until I had seen them. Mid-February I put in my two weeks. Mid-March I did a quick trip to Paris and London, two of my favorite cities in the world, as a celebration. A week later I was in Tokyo. Now I’m a day into my 30s, and living globally feels more like a potential way of life than something to get out of my system before turning into a responsible adult.
I already blogged the whole trip on this site, so I won’t go over all the details again, just a quick list of highlights from the end of March to the end of July:
Am I bragging about my travels? Yeah, probably, but I had a pretty fun year. The hard part of the year was the return. Regular life is suddenly duller than before: taxis aren’t speeding through crowds of men and cows, street signs are in English, and I don’t have to boil my water. There were great moments in the second half of the year, most notably all the beautiful weddings: good friends (Anil, Nathanael) and my sister (Emily). Now the challenge is making life less regular with what I do with it back home.
Photos:
In Newport, Oregon, my Grandpa talks about how life in the Navy would take him away from his family for over a year at a time. The waiter interrupts me with some devastating news.
Finally got to dance to this song while in New York. Will I ever get sick of it?
I was someone who couldn’t wait for Apple’s Tablet or Microsoft’s Surface until I saw this. This turns your hand into a cellphone keypad. It turns a newspaper into the newspaper’s website. It turns the floor of a subway into a video game screen.
Watch this full thing to see the future. Around 6:30 is where it becomes truly mind blowing. It’s odd, it seems to me like a future we never anticipated in science fiction or any other projections of what’s to come.
Another video of driving while listening to Neko Case. There is nothing better than beautiful scenery, a car, and Neko Case all together.
Dawn in the canyonlands of Eastern Utah.
My sister and I drove for 24 hours from Portland to Denver. It’s normally an 18 hour drive, but we took our time to enjoy the scenery and stop off at better places to eat than what the highway signs advertised. I love driving through the night, it’s a time when the world feels special and rare. My sister drove most the night while I slept to gear up for the late night/early morning shift.
I normally listen to AM Coast to Coast with George Nori during drives like these, but I just listened to music this time. AM Coast to Coast is about mystical phenomena, aliens coming to earth, special mental powers, and so forth. One of my favorite moments from the show was late at night as I drove through the Ozarks in Missouri. That part of the country is a bizarre place, full of strange people, and you can sense it from the highway. As I drove, a caller from the Ozarks got on the radio to describe a beast he just caught while it ran across the road. The caller described it as a short, gray, furry animal on two legs. It had yellow eyes and large fangs. George identified it instantly as a Chupacabra. At 3 am, after driving for hours in the dark, with the nonstop hum of an old Toyota Carolla going 70 mph invading your mind, it’s a lot easier to believe. The fear of the Chupacabra kept me awake for the rest of the night.
