Living in a Media World

Written Tuesday, 7/19/16 on an airplane between Chicago, IL and Lincoln, NE.

Flying over Chicago

I’ve allegedly been home from this long trip for four days now, but I’ve only spent two nights in my own bed. Second day off the bike and I was on my way to the airport to take care of family business back east.  And in another couple days the Dear Wife and I will be off to visit our eldest and his lovely fiance in Vancouver, BC.

Reading this, you might conclude I like to travel. And that would be true. But my family means a lot to me as well.

Many years ago my wife and I were talking about this; we came to the conclusion that I don’t want to get away, I want to go to.

I’ve always wanted to go, from the time I was a first grader and took the city bus in Denmark’s second largest city to visit my dad at his office for lunch without telling anyone what I was doing. (Hey, Mom gave me money to get a hot dog, she didn’t say it had to be from the stand half a block away…)

When I was fourteen, I rode on RAGBRAI (then known as SAGBRAI for the Second Great Bike Ride Across Iowa) without anyone along to supervise me. (To be fair, my parents had good friends who were also on the ride, but I emphatically was not riding with them…)

16 mm film from the Des Moines Register of the 1974 SAGBRAI

In college I used to hitchhike from Ames, Iowa where I was a student at Iowa State up to visit my married older sister in Minneapolis. And when my brother and I came out of the Rockies from backpacking for a week, we discovered the bus we had tickets for didn’t start running till ski season, so we had to hitchhike back across the continental divide to Denver.

A couple of years ago I had the fantastic opportunity to go to China for about 10 days as a representative of my university. Never have I had such a feeling of being someplace different than when I was walking around a city where old men write poetry on the sidewalk with water using a giant brush.

This gentleman was painting calligraphy using water on the stone walkway along the Mall of the World on a hot summer morning. Not long after he had created the characters, they were evaporating back into the air. I wish I knew what he was saying.

I come by this wanderlust honestly.

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, my Grandpa Arndt homesteaded near Williston, North Dakota from 1905-1911. He took the train from Minnesota up to near the Canadian border, bought a team of horses and a wagon, and took it out onto the unplowed buffalo grass prairie to establish a farm. (Thanks to my older sister for the description.) And my Grandpa Juul left home in Denmark at age 18 and moved to Minnesota where he got started working in the business of draining swampy fields so you could grow crops or hay on them. That eventually grew into a full fledged construction company.

Of all my adventures, the two weeks Howard and I spent riding motorcycles up through northwest Canada and up to southern Alaska has to rank up there toward the top. Riding the hundred miles or so of dirt roads was especially exciting, taking us to a whole new area of the mountains were the paved roads don’t go.

The figure-8 route Howard and I rode this summer.

It has certainly been “a trip of a lifetime,” but it was not “the trip trip of a lifetime.” I have had so many trips of a lifetime, and always hope there’s another great trip in my future .. and another great chance to come home.

I’m in Bismarck, North Dakota tonight.  Back in the United States after a fantastic trip “up north” to Canada.  One of the main goals for today was to visit the land my Grandpa Arndt homesteaded back between 1905 and 1911 in extreme northwest North Dakota.  And I achieved that goal…. mostly:

It appears to me looking at my track that Howard and I ended up several miles south of where we were supposed to be.

I wasn’t trusting the directions my GPS was producing, and so I had created a sheet of paper with directions written out.  But that fell apart quickly when a supposed road we were were to take south ended up being a couple of dirt tracks covered  with grass.  Howard, of course, thought we should go down the road – Howard always thinks we should follow the dirt “road.” But I sent us back to the highway and followed the GPS’s suspect directions.

Looking back at the track now, I can see we were definitely too far south,  But I don’t really feel too bad about it. We got to the right general area, and we still had a lot of traveling to do today.

Here I am, somewhere near where my dad’s dad’s homesteaded in the early 1900s.

Our second scheduled stop for the day was the northern unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park.  It’s a gorgeous area of badlands filled with bison, big horn sheep, and other wild critters.  After collecting our National Parks Stamp, we followed the scenic road about halfway through the park, where we stopped to take pictures.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park (North Unit)

Unfortunately, the storm clouds that had been chasing us since lunch in Williston, ND were starting to catch up, and so we decided the wisest course of action was to get back to traveling south and east – away from the storms.

This ended up being a really good call.  We kept getting short bouts of rain dropping on us, but we managed to avoid a couple of pretty serious storm cells that would have been a mess to have been in. (No, I don’t have pictures – we kept moving!)

Tomorrow, Howard and I will be collecting several more National Park Stamps and returning to Kearney.  I probably won’t have a final post for a day or two after that, but expect an epilog early next week sometime.

It’s late, and we’ve had a long day today and a busy day ahead, so I’m going to keep this one simple with a few more pictures from a trip.

Bright yellow fields of rapeseed plants used to produce canola oil are everywhere in Alberta.

All over Alberta we’ve seen mile after mile of bright yellow fields. I got curious and did a little research on what they were.  These are fields of what used to be known as rapeseed, and they are used to press what is now known as canola oil.

The prettiest area we encountered today had fields of bright purple clover interspersed with the yellow canola fields. Sorry – wasn’t a good place to stop for a photo.

Canadian province flags at Fort Battleford.

We stopped at Fort Battleford National Historic Site in Saskatchewan today to collect a national parks stamp (more on that another day), and while we were there we saw this lovely line of Canadian province flags that had been put up a few days before for a new citizens signing in ceremony held at the site.  What a lovely place to hold the ceremony!

The boardwalk in Stewart, BC.

And finally, one last photo from our time in Stewart, BC.  This boardwalk goes out over a beautiful marsh area near the harbor for Stewart/Hyder.  It gives you a dry way to walk through a big public park that would otherwise be quite soggy.

Today was a pleasant, uneventful last day in mountain country.  We left Prince George, BC at 8 this morning, and cut back across British Columbia and Alberta, completing our northern loop.

The Spotwalla satellite track of our loop through northwest Canada and southern Alaska.

If you squint when you look at the little map, you can see that we followed a mountain valley back to Jasper, then cut across the middle of the park, and then continued on to the city of Edmonton.

Low clouds, rain showers, and a damp chill followed us much of the way, but that’s what we’ve come to expect.

Low clouds from a gas stop.

We stopped for lunch at Tim Horton’s at the town of Jasper.  We’d had dinner in Jasper on our way north last week. So nice to have a fast food place with good soup and croissants for lunch!  If only the biggest fast food chain in the US would serve that.  And honey crullers!

We saw a giant super cell thunderstorm off in the distance, and saw a big enough flash of lightening that both Howard and I remarked on it over dinner tonight.  Fortunately, though we continued to go through scattered showers, we did not have to deal with storms. Once we left Jasper and the nearby town of Hinton  (outside of which we saw both bighorn sheep and a giant elk!) we were clearly back into the central plains of North America, and I’m afraid it will be the prairie for the rest of the trip.

By the time we reached Edmonton, the skies had cleared and it was almost hot out.

Let me finish up this decidedly unphilosophical post by giving a shout-out to Howard’s sister, Susannah.  She very generously gave us Marriott points to pay for our hotels anytime we were able to find a Marriott property.  Up north, they were decidedly not available.  But tonight we are in a comfortable Courtyard hotel, and I will soon go down to take advantage of the whirlpool.

Thank you, Susannah!

The bikes are ready and waiting in the damp morning to start heading south and east toward home.

Howard and I have now completed Day One of the long haul back home to Nebraska and Texas. Today’s ride was excellent – we even saw some moose, and tomorrow’s ride takes us back through Jasper National Park. But there can be no denying that we are headed back toward the end of vacation and the return to the routine of regular life.

It’s popular to call big trips like this “bucket list” items – that is, things you want to do before you “kick the bucket.”

I hate that expression for a host of reasons:

• It implies that you have to hurry up and do lots of things before you die.
• It implies that you can do things once, check them off your list, and be done with them.  Like they are a responsibility.
• It implies that for many things, doing them once is all you need to do.

For me, I much prefer the term “mountaintop experience.” That captures the idea that something is special, maybe even unique. But not that you can’t go back there.  And it says that it is a big part of living, not a preparation for death.

This trip to the Yukon, southern Alaska, and the Canadian (and American) Rockies has been both a literal and figurative mountaintop experience. The literal part is pretty easy – we’ve been up, down, around and over mountains almost constantly for the last week. But it’s also been a metaphorical mountaintop as well. It’s been a chance to soak in the beauty of the world; to see how small so many things are when compared to things that are so big; to be able see, hear, feel and smell things at a level we don’t normally get to.  And it’s been a chance to go to places most people only dream of going because it’s just too far to go.

The most important reason for this not being a bucket list trip, however, is because this isn’t something I’m checking off.  It will be something that stays with me for a long time to come.  I still think about a backpacking trip I took with my older brother more than 35 years ago. It’s still with me. And I hope that I haven’t left these beautiful areas behind forever.  I want to come back to see the mainland of Alaska, and Canada’s Northwest Territories, and…. It’s not a check box, it’s an introduction.

So, no, this has not been a bucket list vacation for me.  But I have certainly been to the mountaintop.