I hate that feeling

...but I suppose I'd better get used to it. I've had it before and I'll have it again. It stings, though. Smartly.

You know that feeling you get when people you know are doing something really cool but you can't go along with them because of your job or your family and you get to watch from afar as they have the time of their lives?

Yeah, that's the one. That's what I've got right now.

A couple of my friends from Canada and the U.S. have signed up for the Mongol Rally.

Don't know what the Mongol Rally is?

I'll tell you what the Mongol Rally is.

It's this:

                                                                                                                    from The Life of Adventure

...a 6,000 mile race across Europe and Asia, hosted by the Adventurists, a Britain-based adventure club and charitable organization.

Here's the idea: you start in London, sometime in July. You buy a piece-of-crap car with a 1000-cubic-centimeter-or-less engine. You, and as many friends as you can pack into this pathetic machine, drive said pathetic machine from London to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia.

The team name is up to you. The car's paint scheme is up to you. The car itself is up to you. The equipment and supplies are up to you. The route and timing are up to you. All you have to do is acquire a conveyance and get it and yourselves to Mongolia before August is over.

The point, as you might have guessed, is the journey. Voyage of exploration, connecting with buddies, reaching deep inside yourself for survival (and mechanical) skills, challenging the raw forces of nature and all that hogwash.

Sounds lovely. Just the kind of quest I would like to undertake.

But I can't. June 2013 would be midway through my second year's contract. I could re-up in February for just a few more months, but then Miss H would have to find a new apartment. It's in my name. I would also have to go home and restart the whole finding-a-job-in-Korea-and-getting-the-requisite-documents nightmare that I've already delineated to you.

It's just not possible. I can't do it.

So off my friends go, doing this amazing thing without me.

It's not a fun feeling.

Ah well. I was never one for sour grapes. (I see what you did there, Aesop.)

Good luck, Mr. E and Mr. S. I wish you the best of luck. I hope you have the time of your lives and I'm behind you all the way. Send me some pictures and bring back some weird-ass souvenirs.

And I hope scraping up the requisite $8,000 for entry fees, charitable donations, vehicles, gas, food and airline tickets doesn't take too long.

Bah. Suddenly I feel like some cheese...and wine.

W-Week

I'm hoping my arrival in Korea won't look exactly like this.

It's W-Week, and as we count down to D-Day, H-Hour—the moment I leave for Korea, in other words—I'm beginning to think I tried to pack too much into it.

What day is it today, Tuesday?

Yeah, okay, here goes:

On Monday Miss H and I just sorta hung out. Oh, and we packed my bags. Two of them. Duffel bags crammed with shirts, pants, shorts, belts, socks, underwear, shoes, and coats. Whatever empty space remains shall be filled by decks of cards, harmonicas, shoeshine cans, grooming kits, and whatnot. They weigh 43 and 35 pounds, respectively. Maybe there's something to what Miss H says when she tells me I have more clothes than she does.

Today was jam-packed. Miss H and I went in and hung out with a friend of hers, Steve, at his apartment. (We found all sorts of interesting ways to kill Lara Croft.) Then we grabbed some fast food: Tom's Burgers, which happen to be massive, succulent, and fantastically tasty. [Insert naughty metaphor here.] We drove to Hesperia Lake Park and ate lunch under the skeletonized trees, listening to the babbling brook and the entitled honks of strident geese vying for pieces of bread from the other park-goers. Then we fed the ducks some crusts and read a chapter of our books (I'm reading Skeletons on the Zahara, and Miss H is digesting Don Quixote).

After a quick stop at the post office, we went to a used bookstore in Victorville and turned in some old volumes my parents didn't want anymore. In exchange for these, I nabbed some serious military nonfiction: The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan, Charlie Company: What Vietnam Did To Us by Peter Goldman and Terry Fuller, and Abandon Ship!: The Saga of the U.S.S. Indianapolis by Richard F. Newcomb. (Believe or not, these aren't just for fun: they're valuable research material for future novels.)

Then we went to the mall to try to find a bigger duffel bag. No joy.

Tomorrow I'm riding with Miss H's father as he delivers a load of lime to the airport in Camarillo. This'll be my first time riding in a big rig. I've always wanted to. I have a thing for heavy machinery. I occasionally cheat on airplanes with tanks, ships, bulldozers and excavators.

Thursday I'm running around like a madman trying to make all the arrangements for my dad's birthday (February 12), Miss H's birthday (February 13), and Valentine's Day (you-know-when). All of those dates, as you'll notice, fall after my departure on February 6, so I'd better have my act together.

Friday Miss H is coming over and helping me do the final packing, and we'll finish that blasted thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle we've been beating our heads against for ages.

Saturday is a big day: all my friends are coming over for one last cocktail party. Cheers.

On Sunday (assuming I'm not totally useless) Miss H, the folks and I will be driving down to Medieval Times for dinner (another thing I've never done), and staying in a hotel in Los Angeles (ditto, actually). This way we won't have to leave my house at the crack of dawn and drive two hours to get to the airport on Monday morning.

And on Monday morning, I leave.

I'll try to blog at least once more before I do.

Wish me luck.

Aurelia aurita

Scratch another one off the bucket list.

Have you ever heard of the Aurelia aurita?

Unless you're a native Latin speaker or a biology professor, you probably haven't.

It's also known as a "moon jelly":

And I can honestly say that I know what they feel like to touch. I indulged in some heavy petting with a moon jelly down in Long Beach last Wednesday.

My folks took Miss H and I down to the Aquarium of the Pacific as a sort of farewell thing. (We're not leaving until February, but we were originally leaving in September, and then paperwork delays pushed that back to December, and the roof fell in, so...here we are. Best to get it done before anything else happens.)

We had a ball. The aquarium was smaller than I remembered, but still chock-full of some mind-blasting exhibits. A giant sea bass the size of an armchair swam back and forth in the main gallery; sea otters broke chunks of ice into small pieces and ate them with relish; the bat rays flopped out of the water for a pat on their slimy noggins; and the moray eels poked their evil heads from their holes, like old men glaring at noisy children on the sidewalk.

And then it happened.

In the middle of the Polar Seas display room was a rectangular basin of water, about the depth of a goldfish tank, but as long as a horse trough. In this tank, pulsating to and fro, was a gaggle of pale, bulbous, semi-translucent creatures resembling nothing so much as ragged, waterlogged pieces of tissue paper. They floated about, drifting with the gentle current, expanding and contracting their mantles lazily.

As soon as I saw the aquarium staff member standing behind the tank and the Purell dispensers on the wall, I understood what was going on. 

A rare opportunity had thrown itself my way. I was going to pet a jellyfish. 

So I rolled up the sleeve of my jacket, took my place in line, stuck out two fingers, and dove in with a relish. 

My rubric for stroking aquatic creatures is not extensive. In my youth, I had handled live goldfish, and I had petted the bat rays 40 minutes earlier. This was the limit of my experience. Thus far, I had observed several commonalities between species: the firmness of the flesh, the coldness of the skin and a general pervading sliminess. The moon jelly, surprisingly, possessed all three. In touching the mantle with the first two fingers of my right hand, I expected a yielding, gelatinous substance, as tenuous as it was transparent. Though undoubtedly soft, the jellyfish was relatively rigid to the touch; I felt as though I would have to poke it much harder to make an impression in the flesh. Fortunately, I had the good sense and the biological politeness not to test this hypothesis. Keeping my hand well away from the tentacles of the onrushing herd of the moon jelly's fellows, I withdrew my hand and sanitized it.

For some reason, I was suddenly hungry.

in the Pima Air Museum

...I found my destiny.

Well, nothing that corny, really. But I did get to fondle some of my favorite airplanes.

This is the entry I've been waiting for. Cowboy shooting, Apache hideouts, and coatimundis are all well and good, but in my book, vintage warbirds take the cake. Writing about this also gives me the chance to unload a great many gorgeous pictures on you poor suckers my lovely readers, too. So here we go.

After rising early yet again, and packing up the Hummer, and returning the bedding to Uncle Bob and Aunt Barb's trailer, and bidding them a warm goodbye, we got back on I-10 and headed back west. Forty miles later we were rolling into Tuscon. Neither Dad nor I forgot that we were going to the Pima Air Museum; we just neglected to keep a sharp eye out for the sign. So we missed the exit. A long detour and quite a few expletives later, we were pulling into the museum parking lot. Though the day was warm by my standards (probably in the high 60s), a vicious wind had leaped up. Fortunately I had my brand-new Tombstone hoodie on.
Admission was steep—$15.50 per person—but as soon as we'd stepped through the next set of doors and onto the gallery floor, I knew it was worth it. You should've seen the double-take I did when I saw this baby.
Waitaminnit, by brain said, tripping over itself, yanking open file cabinets and rifling through desk drawers. A Curtiss O-52 Owl? How long have those been around? I haven't got any documentation on 'em! This is the first I've heard of it!

It was a scout plane, one of the largest reconnaissance designs ever accepted by the Army Air Corps, developed in 1939. It had a .50-caliber machine gun in the back to help ward off fighters, but that was the last resort. This thing was no dogfighter. The Owl was mainly good for droning around all innocent-like and sneaking peeks at the enemy. I knew I was in for some good stuff now. I hadn't taken ten steps into this museum and already I'd bumped into a plane whose mere existence I hadn't even begun to suspect when I woke up that morning. Bubbling with anticipation, I pushed on. Say hello to my little friend! This is the Starr Bumble Bee, the absolute ding-dang smallest airplane ever thunk up. Its wingspan is a meager six feet six inches, and its range is just 20 miles. But it did what it was intended to do: break records. This thing is down in the Guinness Book of World Records as the smallest biplane ever built. (A year or so after Mr. Starr built it, somebody went and built a monoplane that was even smaller. I'd love to know how that thing stayed up.)

We saw Learjets...
...and autogyros...
...even a Hoppicopter (behind the autogryo in the previous photo)!
Now yer talkin'. Flying boats!
I love these things. Airplanes that can land on water. How cool is that?

This one here is a Grumman Widgeon. Grumman had a thing for naming its products after animals. Its line of propeller-driven fighter planes were all named after cats: Wildcat, Hellcat, Tigercat, Bearcat, etc. Its seaplanes were all named after (what else?) waterfowl. There's the Widgeon, the Mallard, the Goose, and finally, the coolest one of them all, the almighty, one-and-only, never-to-be-outdone Albatross.

Widgeons were widely used. One of them scored the very first Coast Guard submarine kill of World War II. Another was employed by an Arab king as his personal transport. Not a bad reference list for a little plane like this, eh? (Can you read the name on the side? Petulant Porpoise? Ha!)

Or how about this big boy, a Martin Mariner?
Not as handsome as the Consolidated Catalina, and not as sleek as the Dornier 111, but this mother got the job done: submarine hunting, reconnaissance, search-and-rescue, even nocturnal ship-sinking.
I want one of these. Badly. Oh, the things I could do with it. Imagine sitting up there in the cockpit, glass panels all around, high above the water, coasting along at a ridiculous speed, the hold full of something exotic and exciting, the gigantic bulk just lifting clear of the water, sun sparkling on the spray, those huge piston engines roaring, me in my leather jacket and aviator sunglasses, with a three-day beard and a fiendish grin, happy as a pig in you-know-what.

There's only one problem with that delicious daydream. This is the only surviving Mariner. The only one. The rest of them have all been destroyed, or scrapped, or have pieces missing. There is one other complete Mariner, but it's currently upside-down at the bottom of Lake Washington. It crashed there 50 years ago and, after several unsuccessful salvage attempts, it is now used as a training site for divers. (Thanks, Wikipedia.)

I was learning fast that the Pima Air & Space Museum is a veritable treasure trove of aviation history. Some of the rarest planes were there. A lot of them can't be found anywhere else in the entire world. It was easily the largest air museum I'd ever been in. Suddenly I understood why. I mean, what other air museum has both a B-18 and an SR-71, huh? I ask you, what other museum?
And if I thought the inside was sick, I was whistlin' Dixie. The outside was even better.
Recognize this plane? If you don't, don't worry. I didn't either. Most people who aren't retired Air Force probably wouldn't. This is a Boeing YC-14. It was conceived and constructed during the 1970s, and was intended to replace the C-130 Hercules. But it never caught on. It wasn't even mass-produced. The project got shut down. Weird plane, isn't it? You can see one of the two huge engine nacelles in the photo. Instead of four ordinary-size jet engines, the YC-14 apparently had two humongous big ones. Wikipedia says they were General Electric CF6-50D turbofans, each of which developed 51,000 pounds of thrust each. Whew, that's a quite a bit of thrust. (That's what she said.)
Those big engines make sense, though. The YC-14 was developed as an STOL (Short Take-Off and Landing) aircraft. Big engines meant it could take off and land in tight quarters. Helpful thing for a cargo plane that needs to deliver its goodies and get out in a hurry. Only two of these things now remain. And I got a shot of one of them. Go me.

I didn't notice the YC-14 at first, though. The real reason I turned in its direction was that this little honey was parked across from it.
This is a Fairchild C-119 Boxcar. The paint job's a bit faded and the plane's a bit beat-up, but you still might recognize it. One of these was used in the recent remake of the Jimmy Stewart film, Flight of the Phoenix. (The only reason I went to see that movie—and later bought it—was because it had a C-119 in it. The movie turned out to be marginally good, though.)

I like these things even more than Mariners, if possible. There are still lots of 'em around, for one thing. Many are doing duty for small airlines and businesses, I hear. They're even (now imagine how this excites my fancy) being used to ship goods into the Alaskan bush, according to rumor. Long story short, my fantasy of owning one (and using it to pursue my international cargo business idea) isn't a pipe dream. Wouldn't say no to a C-123 Provider, either. One of these was used in the film Con Air.
Now, this next one really threw me for a loop. I hadn't realized, as I stood in the museum, that I was looking at the last intact Martin Mariner on the planet. The placard in front of the YC-14 told me that there were only two left. But I didn't need any help to know that to actually see an Avro Shackleton in the flesh was a very rare thing indeed.
 A postwar British maritime patrol bomber, the Shackleton was unique in having engines with two propellers each. (You can sort of see that in the photo I took, above, or in this next photo, borrowed from Wikimedia Commons. Those are two 20-millimeter cannons poking out of the nose, by the way.)
Each engine's propellers rotated in different directions, which helped to eliminate torque, but put aircrews at risk for high-tone deafness, or so I've read. 'Twas a rather awesome airplane to see in person or in photographs, I thought. Recognize this picture?
It's just like the one I used to have up at the top of this blog. It's a different airplane, but the same make and model, and taken from the same angle. Those are the engines of a Lockheed Constellation. And here's the Connie itself.
Beautiful plane, isn't it? With that graceful convex fuselage, it reminds me of a great silver swan. These Constellations (under the designation C-69) were used in World War II as heavy transports. General MacArthur used a C-121, named Bataan, as his personal aerial command vehicle during the Korean War...check it out.
After the war many found service in airlines, like this one, formerly of TWA. By the bye, these Constellations are a lot bigger than they look. They're so slender that they belie their true size. My head didn't even come up to the belly of the plane, and wouldn't have even if I had stood on tip-toe beneath it.

We wandered on, past the delightfully evil-looking WWII-Vietnam attack plane, the Douglas B-26 Invader... ...the surprisingly skinny Grumman F7F Tigercat...
...and the perfectly wacky heavy lifter, the Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane.
If you haven't guessed by now, the outdoor portion of this museum was massive. Acre after acre we traversed, never seeming to find the end of the maze. Entire squadrons of airplanes were parked in the dust, reflecting the sun in their faded glory. If I'd had some mechanics and a few good pirates with me, I could've started a war. I was wandering down one wide lane, idly snapping some pictures of a C-82 Packet, when on a whim I glanced right.

And then I saw it. My guts promptly evaporated. My eyeballs froze. My heart stumbled like a man treading on marbles. It was an Albatross. A Grumman Albatross. My very favorite airplane of any kind, ever. Right there. Parked not 100 yards from me. Before my very eyes.
As though in a trance, I waded over to the big silver bird. Lord, it was beautiful.
I'd never seen one in person, let alone this close. I didn't even touch it at first, but simply devoured it with my eyes. It was better than I could've ever dreamed: big, but not awkwardly so; chunky, but not fat or ungainly-looking; out of commission, but still proud. Oh, how I wanted one. With that plane alone, I thought, I could do great things. Hell, I could die a happy man only having had the satisfaction of flying it, even just once. If I ever actually acquired one, and rigged it out with a cargo hold, and weather radar, and secret smuggling compartments, and gun cabinets, and a wet bar, and a concealed missile launcher in the tail...well, I think I might die of happiness.
Needless to say, this was one of the very few aircraft I chose to get a picture with. I didn't want to bother Dad too much. He'd had a bad toothache all day. He was even quieter than normal, but heroically trooped about the dusty grounds with me, observing machines and making pertinent commentary.

And so we meandered on, past a menagerie of ever-increasing wonderfulness and rarity. A B-50 Superfortress, modified for air tanker duty...
...a Guppy heavy-lifter, formerly in the employ of NASA...
...and even this, the jewel of the museum's collection, a Convair B-36 Peacemaker!

It was the largest bomber of any type or nationality ever built. The thing was ginormous.

Everything about it was awe-inspiring, even the power plant. Here, take a look at the wing:

You're seeing that correctly: six rearward-facing propeller engines and two jet engines. And that's just one wing. That's enough to make my little 150-horsepower Cessna froth at the mouth with engine envy.
The Peacemaker was 162 feet long, with a 230-foot wingspan. Designed specifically to carry nukes, they were part of America's insurance plan against Russian aggression. They sent a subtle message to the Reds, something to the tune of "Hey man, don't you mess with us, or we'll send a gigantic-ass airplane with six propellers and four jet engines over there and nuke your shit." And the Peacemaker worked darn well in that capacity. We haven't had a nuclear war yet, have we?

One quick stroll down a long aisle of fighter jets, back through the museum doors, and we'd met Mom and Harlan in the gift shop. (They weren't interested in standing outside in the wind and dust looking at derelict air superiority, unfortunately for them.) We pored over the whimsical gewgaws and knick-knacks, everything from airplane models to museum T-shirts to toddlers' bomber jackets to space food. Harlan got a freeze-dried ice cream sandwich and crunched noisily on it as we left the museum. I cradled my deck of warbird playing cards to my chest and thanked Mom heartily for stumping up.

Back into the Hummer we went, and spent the next six hours on the road for home, being treated to sights like these:
We passed acre after acre loaded with the infamous "jumping cholla" cacti. Dad just shook his head as we drove by. Dad loves cacti, but hates jumping chollas. In his own words, "they're the only cacti who actually come after you instead of staying put." And they do, too. A cholla's limbs can snap off very easily, leaving the ground near them littered with spiky booby-traps. And no matter how wide a berth you give a jumping cholla, it always seems to reach out and grab you nonetheless. The spines are hooked, making them difficult and painful to remove. They're just an all-around nasty specimen.

We pulled into the Coachella Valley just as the last blue-green glow drained from the evening sky. The lights of Indio, Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, and La Quinta (plus the outlying districts, which Dad lumped together under the name of "East Jesus") were all on and glowing.

We got home about an hour and a half later, unloaded the car, had a snack, and went to bed, our minds whirling and our hearts content.

I sez "Chiricahua"

Can you say it? Geronimo could. So could Cochise, Geronimo's subaltern. Chiricahua was his hideout. The Chiricahua National Monument sits just southeast of Willcox, Arizona, on the other side of the Dragoon Mountains from Benson. Oh, and before we go any farther, I should tell you that it's pronounced "chee-ree-CAH-wha." Once the stronghold of the last belligerent remnant of the Apache tribe, it is now a park, loaded to the brim with mountains, fir trees, trails, and assorted wicked-cool wildlife. We set out at about 9:30. I volunteered to ride with Uncle Bob and Aunt Barb, in their minivan. It was a comfortable ride, with the added bonus of guidance. Barb, a veteran snowbird, was up-to-date on all relevant historical and geographical information. I sat in the backseat and took copious notes as we passed power plants, and dairy farms, and mountains, and ranches, and all manner of unlikely landmarks (including a herd of mule deer). After an hour and a half of scenic Arizona, we were pulling up to the monument gates. The ticket booth was closed—there was a sign that read PAY WHEN YOU LEAVE instead—so we drove on through and up into the mountains. It was a disorienting sensation to see yucca plants poking out of the rocky ground beneath fir trees and a scanty blanket of week-old snow. We ducked into the visitor's center, grabbed a map, and then drove a few miles (and a few thousand feet) up into the mountains to Massai Lookout, 6800 feet above sea level. Man, you could see everything from up there. And by "everything" I mean the remains of the volcanic caldera which formed the mountains in the first place (background)... ..."Cochise Head," a gigantic rock outcrop that eerily resembled an upturned face... ...the San Simon Valley and the distant Dragoon Mountains... ...and bunches and bunches of rhyolite pillars. (And you could see ME.) We hiked a strenuous quarter-mile to the observation station and learned a little about Chiricahua's rich historical and geological tradition. Massai Point, it seemed, had been named after an Apache tribesman, "Big Foot" Massai. He stole a horse from a nearby farmhouse way back in the 1880s. He was pursued to the present-day lookout point, whereupon he vanished. He escaped completely. They never caught him. The settlers must've named the area after him out of sheer admiration. We paused for a snack at the parking lot below Sugarloaf... ...pausing to take a few opportunistic snapshots... ("We've got to show the folks back in Ohio that there's snow in Arizona," Barb said in wonder.) Then we piled back into the cars and headed for town. The only regret I had upon leaving was that I hadn't seen so much as one coatimundi. But I did see this on the way out, almost as good: Uncle Bob spent 10 minutes at the exit gate, trying to pay for both his car and our Hummer behind. He had to buy two senior National Park Service passes (for $20 each) to do it. And he had to dig his driver's license out of his back pocket, which was a laugh and a half. But he managed it. Then we were rolling down Arizona State Highway 181, angling for the town of Sunsites, wherein lay a mighty good café that Bob and Barb recommended. Along the way, Barb spotted a bobcat lurking by the road, which promptly darted back into the scrub as the minivan approached. Dang, I wish I had seen that. Bobcats! In Arizona! In January! In the wild! This is another reason I love Arizona. I dig these long, straight patches of highway. They're intoxicating. They truly are. There's nothing like driving for miles and miles along a perfectly straight road, through some of the prettiest desert you've ever seen. The deserted, dilapidated quality of that road is an added bonus. After a long-yet-short drive, we got to Sunsites (pronounced just like it's spelled). Barb's Postulate proved correct: the popularity of an Arizona diner is directly proportional to the number of pickup trucks parked outside. Feast your eyes upon the Sunsites Country Café. The inside was plainly decorated (a gas-station tile floor and some lovely watercolor prints on the walls), but the food was undeniably savory. I had a bomber sandwich: roast beef, red onions, pepper jack cheese, and Cajun mayonnaise. Lip-smackin' good. On the way back, we made a quick stop by the Triple T Ranch (just off I-10), where the desert rocks have gotten to be a tad invasive. The ranch contained such oddities as a bar with a rock in the middle... ...and a rock with a tree growing around it. Weird. We witnessed these wonders thanks to the lone caretaker-lady who thoughtfully unlocked the bar and ushered us around back to look at the aforementioned mutant tree. Thanks, whoever you were. Anyway, we finally saddled up again and headed back to Benson. But not before we'd had a look at the airport. Uncle Bob and Aunt Barb are mighty pleased with my flying ambitions, it seems; for they insisted on taking me to this airport, letting me take a gander, and hobnobbing with the fellow in charge of the FBO. I chatted with him a while, during which I learned that it was possible to get from Benson to Los Angeles on one tank of gas (in a Cessna 172). I also learned that the fellow at the FBO (who spoke with a British accent) had once flown a Robinson R-22 helicopter all the way from Bend, Oregon to L.A. Whew, what a flight that must've been. He told me that they got stuck on the top of Mount Shasta one night during some bad weather and slept in some kind-hearted folks' cabin before flying out the next morning. Whoa, cool. Not much was going on. The Benson airfield was quiet. They didn't get much traffic, I gathered. Still, I liked the place. It was small, quiet, and unassuming, and smack dab in the middle of some kick-ass scenery. What more could you want out of an airport? We hit up the Apple Farm Country Restaurant for dinner (speaking of lip-smacking good). I had a difficult conversation with Uncle Bob; difficult because the restaurant was noisy, and Uncle Bob speaks quietly and without aspirating his consonants. Then the company adjourned back to the trailers for a lazy evening and a restful night's sleep. For on the morrow, we would depart.