Ornoth

The following text was composed in my hospital room, 72 hours after my episode, and shortly before my discharge home. Be warned that you might not want to read this at night, alone, or if you're prone to existential dread. Sorree!

I had a stroke.

I can't possibly begin to communicate what those four words mean to me.

I used to have an older sister named Martha. When she was 21 years old, she was newly married and a brand new mother. One night, in the middle of the night, she had a stroke and fell into a coma. She was placed on a respirator, and her husband and my parents were in the terrible situation of making the ultimate decision.

At the time I was only nine years old, but the loss of my sister left a deep permanent impression. I can't imagine what it was like for her to wake up in the middle of the night and what she went through. Nor can I imagine what her husband went through that night. Since then, I can’t count how many nights I’ve layed awake, next to my sleeping partner, with the horror of that memory playing through my mind.

I also had a grandmother, who after her stroke was left perfectly lucid, but anytime she tried to speak, all that would come out is, "Beh beh beh beh." Stroke is sudden, unpredictable, and absolutely devastating.

Those fearsome memories come back to me very often both in the day and the dark nights when I'm awake alone. So I've always been highly sensitized about stroke: its symptoms and causes, its devastating effects, and how vanishingly quickly life can change or be entirely snuffed out at complete random.

I can't describe to you the visceral horror that stroke has been throughout my life. It has always been my biggest dread of all.

I had a stroke.

The good news -- that you all want to hear -- is that somehow, miraculously, mine was vanishingly small, and at this very early point in my recovery, it seems likely that I will regain full functionality. So in a sense, I'm okay.

That doesn't mean that I will continue to be okay, or that I can simply resume living my life as if I hadn't had a stroke at all. For the first time I will be on long-term meds: blood thinners and statins, which have unpleasant side effects. And there's going to be a whole battery of follow-up tests and procedures. Although stroke symptoms last a long time, both recovery and the risk of recurrence can last years. It will take time to see if and how I can resume all the activities that I used to do, including cycling and kyūdō. And I'm finally going to have to start eating and hydrating like an adult.

For now, although I appear mostly okay physically, I can't begin to describe the mental and emotional impact on someone who was sensitized to stroke as a child. If you've survived one stroke, you're much more prone to have subsequent ones. That has doubled the dread that I've always felt and tried to manage.

In my meditation practice and in my personal philosophy, I've often referred back to my sister's death as the thing that defined my relationship with life and death. Her passing taught me at a very young age that death is very, very real; that it will take every one of us; and it can come without any warning at any time, no matter how healthily we live. That has been the justification for my attitude of enjoying every day as much as possible, realizing how precious and ephemeral each moment of life truly is. I've always considered it a blessing to have learned that lesson so early in life.

Of course, acknowledging death is a completely different thing when it's happening to you, when the proximity of death is part of your present-moment reality. And now I somehow have to figure out how to cope with this sudden increase in dread for the rest of my days, however many or few remain. It's hard. And it's inescapable. And it’s final.

Of course I'm thankful that for now I'm recovering well. Throughout my life, in many ways I've been incredibly lucky that things always worked out well for me. And I guess I have to thank my luck as well for this dreadfully ominous warning being such a benign episode. My stroke could very, very, very easily have resulted in major disability or death. So I'm incredibly appreciative of my miraculous good fortune... at least this time.

And I have the deepest, most heartfelt gratitude for the caring presence of my life partner Inna. She is the irreplaceable foundation of my life. But I’m also concerned about what'll happen when either one of us dies, since we're so dependent on each other. So to my many friends: if I were ever to predecease her, my dearest desire would be for those of you who care about me to reach out and offer your friendship and support to Inna: the most important person in my life, and the person whose life would be most impacted by my passing.

Having said all that, I don't have much of a way to end this post on a positive note. Facing one's own mortality is grim work. It’s very easy to face toward life and be thankful, joyous, and share as much love as one possibly can. But it's also wise to see, know, and come to terms with what the ultimate future holds for all of us. And now that death has gently tapped me on the shoulder and gotten my attention, it's time to start taking my own mortality very seriously.

With a heart and mind full of love, joy, and dread.

Our move over the holidays from Pittsburgh to Austin was a long, hard road… both literally and figuratively. Here are some of the lowlights (plus a couple highlights) from the hectic, stressful, and eventful month gone by.

Final week at Hobart Street

Boxing up Hobart Street produced an unanticipated cat fortress!

Closing the book on the Hobart Street apartment

Hell is real... especially in Ohio!

Home at last, after a 1,450-mile road trip

Orny broke a couple chairs out of the moving trailer to make the wait for our movers more comfortable

We successfully moved our huge pile of mess from one place to another

The lease on our new Austin home began on December 15, but there was no way Inna and I could finish packing up our belongings that quickly, so we made arrangements with movers for December 28th.

The overwhelming sensation in December was stress. All the packing, selling, giving away, donating, or trashing all our belongings took time and the dust we kicked up caused my asthma to start acting up.

Then there was the weather. A week-long arctic blast brought record cold and wind chills below -25°F, and of course I’d prematurely sealed up the box containing my winter coat and boots. It was like the northeast -- where I’ve lived for my entire life -- was taking one final, vicious swipe at me for daring to move south.

The brutal cold snap laid bare some of our old apartment’s frailties. The window in our spare bedroom fell apart in my hands. The jerry-rigged kitchen sink plumbing gave way on Christmas Eve, and the landlord’s Christmas Day repairs only revealed further downstream blockages, presumably due to frozen pipes, so we were left with no water in the kitchen. All this trauma happened while Inna was out of town for four days, visiting family. It made me very glad we would be getting out of that death trap, if only Mother Nature would let us! But all this sure made it easier for us to leave Pittsburgh.

During the bitter cold, I had to post no-parking notices and claim four parallel parking spaces in front of our house that would be required for the 28-foot U-Pack trailer that we’d be loading into. Although it was a nerve-wracking wait for other people’s vehicles to move on, I was finally able to clear the space and the trailer was dropped off on time.

That night before loading day, Inna and I stuffed our cat Begemot into the car to go set up a temporary household in her mother’s condo a couple blocks away. But in the middle of a quick stop to pick up Indian food on busy Murray Ave, the car refused to start! This did nothing to assuage my anxiety about setting off on a 1,450-mile road trip in a 14 year old car!

After some worried fiddling, we managed to get the engine to turn over and drove our reduced household over to our temporary digs. But Begemot immediately hid himself in an inaccessible corner of the basement. And after we fished him out and confined him in our bedroom, he kept us awake the entire night while he suffered his own sneezing/asthma fits and freaked out over being in an unfamiliar place.

That was our segue into:

Week at Mom’s

After our first sleepless night at mom’s, the cold snap broke, and we went back to the apartment to meet four guys from “Zooming Moving” of Salem, Ohio who would load our belongings into the trailer. They seemed smart and fast, taking 2½ hours to load our 155-ish boxes and pieces of furniture into less space in the trailer than we believed possible. It was magical watching our place rapidly clear out, then seeing everything stuffed trash-compactor style into a tiny section of our trailer (FYI that was a clever bit of foreshadowing, there). When we asked them at the last minute, they even squeezed in four chairs that Inna had feared she’d have to give away.

Once the trailer was locked and the guys gone, Inna called and arranged to have U-Pack pick it up. I visited my oral surgeon for a previously-scheduled followup that was painless but carried disappointing news. Afterward I circled back to the old apartment and found the trailer had been hauled away, so I pulled down the parking signs and went across town to visit El Burro: a favorite burrito joint.

That was on Wednesday the 28th, but we didn’t plan to leave Pittsburgh until the following Tuesday, to avoid being on the road over the New Years holiday. So we had a week to close up the old apartment and hit up some favorite places, which included ice cream at Bruster’s, lunch at Pamela’s diner, and dinner from Thai and Noodle Outlet. For Inna in particular, it was the end of an era, having lived in that apartment for 12 years!

On one hand, it was a major relief that we could stop working like slaves; all the packing and planning was finally done and over with! We even had time to run a load of laundry! And we watched with delight as our stuff traveled to Ohio, then spent the holiday weekend in Arkansas, and arrived in Austin on Monday, eight days earlier than our promised delivery date!

On the other hand, we found ourselves with too much time and nothing to do, combined with the uncomfortably cold temperature of Inna’s mother’s condo. The waiting was especially hard on Inna, who -- having committed to the Austin move -- was eager to hit the road.

And I had time to reflect on how even the holidays had been out to get us this year. Halloween featured my oral surgery; Inna twisted her ankle during our Austin trip over Thanksgiving, and our old apartment’s electrical panel went bad the night we returned; a frigid Christmas featured frozen water pipes and hectic packing while Inna was away visiting her father; and we were spending New Years living out of a suitcase at Inna’s mother’s condo, while our new house and all our stuff was already waiting for us in Austin!

But time passed, the calendar ticked over to 2023, and our long-anticipated departure date finally arrived.

The Drive

Between our fatigue, a stressed-out cat, and our 14 year old car, we allocated three days for the 1,450-mile drive down to Austin. We’d made reservations at Red Roof Inns along the way, relying on their open policy toward pets. Setting out, we were tired and nervous, but happy that things had gone as well as they did.

We left Pittsburgh on Tuesday January 3th in steady rain that tapered off the further we went. The three of us all fared well, and after nine hours we pulled into our motel in Nashville. I downed a terrible “jalapeno cheez chicken” from the Mexican place next door and settled in. The room was garbage, with broken lights, thermostat, and faucet. Bigi’s stress-response asthma was really bad. Then at 5am a group of assholes came around screaming and pounding on doors, and took three body-slams attempting to bust our door in. It was very reminiscent of our horrifying experience at our Austin motel in November. What the fuck is it with you Southerners that you turn into raving murderous assholes when you go to a motel?

After a horrible night we set out on the middle leg of our journey. Inna did most of the driving on a sunny day, enjoying the 75 MPH speed limit through memorable towns like Bucksnort, Tennessee. In the middle of Arkansas we had our one worrying car malfunction when our tire pressure monitor signaled too high air pressure. But it reset after we pulled aside for a lengthy stop, and we proceeded more gingerly. Our motel in Texarkana was less run-down, but I was so wary about the guys hanging out in the parking lot that I couldn’t eat. Fortunately we didn’t have any more overnight visitors, but the cat’s asthma made for another rough night.

On the final day we got up and showered, then faced our shortest drive of the trip, all of which improved our moods. After seeing a bunch of beaver-bearing billboards advertising “Buc-ee’s” truck stop, Inna decided to stop and check one out. It’s kinda of like Pittsburgh’s Sheetz -- a local favorite convenience store -- only with the ridiculous size, decor, and attitude of a huge casino. We definitely weren’t in Kansas anymore! Then, as Austin came into welcome view, we reflected on how well both the car and cat had done on the road trip; the latter experiencing only one outburst in response to Inna’s singing along with her chosen tunes.

Arriving midafternoon on January 5th, our first stop was of course the new house. After discovering that the real estate agent’s promised lockbox was nowhere to be seen, we found the key literally under the doormat and let ourselves in, giving the place a quick once-over. I got our fiber internet router set up while Bigi began to to settle in; meanwhile, Inna made a grocery run and tried to track down the king-sized mattress that FedEx was supposed to deliver for us.

We’d reserved a hotel in Austin in case we got in late, and decided that was preferable to sleeping on the floor, so we bundled poor Bigi back into the car. Our room was fine, but we had another restless night and checked out early the next morning to spend the day at home, watching for our mattress.

Taking up residence

Watching for deliveries proved very fruitful, as we received not only our mattress, but also Inna’s laptop, which we’d dropped off at an Apple store in Pittsburgh for repairs, and a huge grocery bag full of useful stuff (including notably non-Heinz ketchup) from Inna’s former Pittsburgh/now Texas friend Traci.

After making my own grocery run, I was hanging around and saw a kid park his car at the end of our cul de sac and jog between our house and the neighbor’s. I shrugged it off as a local picking up something he’d forgotten. But ten minutes later Austin cops swarmed the area, took possession of the car, flagged me to tell them if I’d seen anything, and started a manhunt complete with search dogs! Day One in our new house, and there’s both criminals and police crawling around our property. I’m afraid Bigi was the only one of who was feeling secure in our new home. But hey, it was January 6 and a delightful 78°F!

Over the next three days we worked to slowly make the place more livable. We didn’t have anything to sit on, but procured our new mattress, bed sheets, food, trash bags, a dish rack, and started laundering things. Bigi’s asthma receded and he became more adventurous, but – in characteristic feline style – he also managed to cover himself in ashes while exploring the fireplace.

Getting our stuff home

Meanwhile, our stuff had been sitting at a shipping warehouse for a week, and we were eager to have it delivered. Because our house is on a steep hill and a narrow dead-end street, U-Pack couldn’t drop our trailer off at the house, so we had hired another moving company -- a national chain ironically named “Two Men and a Truck” -- to transfer our belongings into a smaller truck and shuttle it from U-Pack’s depot to the house.

Since the trailer had arrived early, we got the movers to bump our job up to Monday, but when we met them at the facility, they showed up in a truck that was even bigger than the trailer! And that was the smallest truck they had. No way could they move our stuff, nor would they move it into a smaller rental truck like a U-Haul. We were completely screwed. After much wrangling, their chief agreed to use a company minivan the next day to shuttle our stuff from the top of our hill down to our house. To add one more frustration to the day, I grazed a low retaining wall trying to back out of our insanely un-navigable driveway and knocked an exhaust tip from our Accord.

The next morning – January 10th – we met up with the movers and they shuttled our stuff from the U-Pack trailer into their big truck. That was when we learned the downside of the “amazing” packing job that Zooming Moving did back in Pittsburgh: lots of damaged belongings. Three pieces of wooden furniture were broken and more than half of the 22 plastic bins we’d used had been crushed. Fortunately, not much stuff had actually spilled out, so I used plastic wrap to patch together the shattered bins. But our poor stone “Boo-boo Buddha” statue – so named because he had originally come with a chipped knee – was now fully decapitated! The only good news was that our two big glass desktops had somehow arrived intact.

After loading and the 20-minute drive to our place, I showed their driver why U-Pack hadn’t dropped our trailer in front of our house: the steep, curving descent down our street, the overhanging tree branches, the sloping narrow driveway, and the limited space in our cul de sac for turning around. While using a panel van to shuttle our stuff would suck, we thought it too dangerous to try to bring a huge moving van down that hill.

But the driver was a young Black guy fresh out of high school, and he fearlessly wanted to try it. I told him it was all on them, but he actually managed it. He parked the van at a precarious tilt and chocked the wheels.

The movers still had to carry our stuff down the driveway, but they were able to unload, saving us the extra time, expense, and damage that using the minivan would have required. It wasn’t quite as magical seeing all our stuff pile up in the living room. But despite all our pointless worrying, the entire job was done in just over four hours, leaving us shoulder-deep in a fortress of cardboard boxes, broken plastic bins, and randomly-scattered furniture.

And with that, our long-anticipated move south and the month-long moving ordeal was finally complete! Even after so much stress and all the trials thrown at us, we were now in our new place in Austin, complete with all our stuff, including Inna’s car and Bigi the cat.

Our next step was to begin digging out from the mess, but we put that on hold long enough to enjoy a well-earned celebratory dinner at Inna’s favorite: Lupe’s Mexican restaurant.

Life since then…

It’s been a week and a half since our stuff arrived, and we’ve had time to address most of the mess and begin getting comfortable in our new base of operations. In the wake of our move, there’s lots of organizing, arranging, and decorating to do, but we can thankfully say that the hard work is complete and behind us.

In addition to literally “getting our house in order”, Inna and I have made our first few expeditions afield, starting to explore all that Austin has to offer. We’re really excited to start going places, seeing people, and doing things… Finally building the new life that the two of us have dreamed about for so very long.

Stay tuned for our further adventures!

Last month Inna & I spent eight days in Austin. She was headed there for a four-day workshop, and it made sense for me to tag along and extend our trip, so that we could check it out as a possible place to relocate to.

Austin Skyline

Inna enjoying her palapa

Sparky Park

Austin Boardwalk

Craft

Couple under a palapa

Couple at Clay Pit

Couple at Lupe's Tex-Mex

Mt. Bonnell Sunset

Prologue

This was my first trip out of Pennsylvania since the Covid-19 pandemic hit; my first time sleeping anywhere other than my own bed since 2019. With the pandemic winding down, it was a nervous, awkward person who finally emerged from his cave after 2½ years of hibernation.

Leading up to the trip, I wasn’t able to muster much motivation to do the advanced research I needed to be well-prepared. I wasn’t big on the idea of living in Texas, and my previous visits to Austin (in 1994, 2003, and 2004) had left me with the impression that it was a cycling-unfriendly area. On top of that, I had some trepidation about the reasons behind Inna’s sudden enthusiasm for moving to such a scorchingly hot location.

I should also point out that I just wasn’t in a very positive place emotionally, which colored my experience of Austin and thereby this account of our travels. So please discount the “grumpy old man” factor that you’ll encounter below.

Here’s my day-by-day account, but if you’re only interested in the bottom line, you can skip ahead to the Epilogue.

Wed April 20: Travel

Arriving at the Pittsburgh airport, I dropped Inna near the terminal, drove out to long-term parking, and made the long walk back. Only to discover that Inna had forgotten to leave her winter coat in the car, so I offered to schlep it back out to the car and repeat my inbound hike. We breezed through security thanks to TSA PreCheck. Breakfast from McDonalds. Unlike ourselves, only 10% of people were masked up.

Our two-stage flight went well. I used the flight time to practice Japanese on Duolingo. At our connection in Detroit, our outbound flight to Austin was the same gate and aircraft we’d arrived in from Pittsburgh, which happily obviated the entire hectic connecting-flight dependency chain.

Grabbed our rental car from Enterprise, where they were much too friendly. Drove across town and checked into our hotel, right on the I-35 highway access road. Seeing Captain Benny’s seafood restaurant with outdoor seating and palapas right next to the hotel, Inna was delighted by the reminder of our time in the Caribbean, so we immediately had a light outdoor dinner there.

The weather – as it would be all week long – was very windy and heavy overcast that would occasionally burn off to reveal the sun. Days ranged from 20-30° and nights from 10-20°. Inna found it delightful, and it was quite an improvement over Pittsburgh, where it had snowed all day the day before we left.

Afterward, we went straight to the Atown local souvenir shop, checked out “Sparky Park” (a former electrical substation decorated with pretty and sparkly and delightful junk), and got supplies at the local H-E-B (Howard E. Butt) grocery, which included some interesting “double chocolate” Lindt truffles.

Had some challenges navigating the Texan highway access road system, Austin’s half streets (e.g. East 38½ Street), and the mystery of why anyone would name a residential street “Speedway”. Returned to the hotel very tired and spent some time catching up on stuff before turning in.

Thu April 21: Level Up Circling & Mariposa

After a breakfast of OJ and cookies, I dropped Inna off at the modest ranch house where her four-day Circle Anywhere workshop was held. My plan for Day 1 was to shower, settle in, and attend an evening meditation group at Mariposa Sangha.

My contact there had proposed meeting up beforehand, but never replied to my response, so I had dinner on my own: an idiosyncratic Panang curry at Thai Kitchen, where I got instant service, being the only customer who was dining in. Dessert was a Mexican vanilla milkshake at Amy’s Ice Cream up the street, after being asked by the staff whether I was able to fix their “waffle dough pump”.

Then to Mariposa, a small peer-led Vipassana meditation group, held in a Methodist church chapel, which was still filled with Easter lilies. Met Paul Schlaud, who was leading the evening sitting and dhamma talk, covering the Buddhist precept against misusing sexuality. I contributed during the Q&A, and chatted with Paul afterward. It seemed comparable to our sitting group in Pittsburgh: pretty small and informal, where I’d be equally welcome to teach as well as be taught.

My session ended just as Inna’s post-workshop dinner broke up, so I swung by the Italian restaurant to pick her up and drive back to the hotel.

Fri April 22: Bike Shops

After dropping Inna off, I began my cycling-focused day with a stop at TJ’s Cycle, where I got a lot of good pointers, despite them being mostly an MTB shop.

The guy there pointed me to a new shop nearby called Bicycle House ATX, where I gathered a little more info.

Then downtown, where I stopped at REI to get an independent opinion. I picked up a hardcopy Austin bike map and chatted with a couple friendly locals. Then the nearby Rapha store, which was predictably pretentious but helpful.

My final downtown stop was Mellow Johnny’s, the store founded by cycling pariah Lance Armstrong. It is a hub of the local cycling community, and had dozens of workers manning the store, but to me it seemed both tackily self-promoting and thoroughly unfriendly.

My final stop was Trek Bicycle Lamar. The former center of Austin’s cycling scene, it had been known as the Bicycle Sport Shop before a corporate buyout. I spoke briefly to an attendant who had once lived in Pittsburgh. The shop had a whole wall full of suggested rides, which I captured for future reference.

By the end of the afternoon, I had gathered way more information about the Austin cycling scene than needs to be recorded here, but my impression was that cycling was popular enough to support for several bike shops and group rides. And although I couldn’t find evidence of any centuries or major events (other than the Hill Country Randonneurs), people sounded confident in riding out beyond the city limits into Texas proper. Austin seemed to pass my cycling sniff test.

I’d planned to walk around the corner to visit Peter Pan Mini Golf, which I’d visited with my DargonZine pals in 2003, but by then I was so tired that it slipped my mind in my desire to get back to the comfort of the hotel.

After meeting up with Inna, dinner was a pound of pork ribs at Rudy’s BBQ. As we entered the building, the wind was so strong that it blew down a renovator’s ladder, which nearly fell on top of me!

For dessert I took Inna to Amy’s Ice Cream. She’d had a challenging day at her workshop, and I let her talk it out and relax in the outdoor seating. We were both beat and headed back to the hotel to crash.

Sat April 23: Kyūdō & Newspaper Quest

After taking Inna to Day 3 of her workshop, I went back to the hotel to shower, which for this one day was swarmed with dozens of college students. Then it was back into town to pick up some Excedrin and the day’s main event.

I stepped into the Rising Sun Aikido studio, where people from Austin Kyūdō were assembling for practice. When the leader introduced herself to me, I heard her name as “VHS”, which she subsequently corrected to “Beatrice” (Haven). I also met Helen Febrie, whom I’d exchanged emails with to schedule my visit.

I have two main takeaways from their practice. One is that they’re an ANKF/IKYF group, rather than the Zenko/Heki-ryu Bishu Chikurin-ha lineage of kyūdō that I studied back in Boston. That means they put less emphasis on the mental and meditative aspect of kyūdō, and like other martial arts they give formal ranks to practitioners. There are also some tiny differences in their technique, such as using the two-arrow form, not smoothing the arrow feathers, emphasis on coordinated team practice, less ritualized arrow retrieval, and permission to use bows made of materials other than bamboo. It also means they’re on good terms with American bowmaker Don Symanski, which could someday prove valuable. But I’m agnostic about which school of kyūdō I’m involved with, and find that petty rivalry to be shortsighted, given how tiny the pastime is here in the U.S..

My other takeaway is that it’s a small group with friendly, approachable members. They’re a small offshoot of the IKYF South Carolina Kyūdō Renmei based near Greenville, SC. They’re not unfriendly with the remnants of the dormant Austin Shambhala kyūdō group, as well as Zenko, and they sometime cross paths. It seemed like a nice, supportive group, although requiring an immense 1,800 KM trip to SC to get instruction and support from an experienced teacher.

I stayed for the full 2-hour indoor practice, occasionally chatting but mostly enjoying the beauty of the form and teasing out the differences in technique.

It being Saturday, I wanted to pick up a Barron’s financial newspaper, since I’d suspended my home delivery for the week. Long story short, I had no luck, despite hitting a CVS drugstore, Barnes & Noble bookstore, Kinokuniya Japanese bookstore, and 7-Eleven and Valero convenience stores all across town.

Frustrated, I went back to the hotel and spent the night eating snacks and watching soccer. I was too tired to go out, find a big meal, and fight the Saturday night crowds. Inna found her own dinner and eventually Ubered home.

Sun April 24: Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hotel Day

Day Four in Austin, and for the third day I woke up headachey and nauseous. The weather was continued overcast, which certainly was preferable to Texas heat, but weighed on my mood.

Despite fulfilling major criteria like cycling, meditation, and kyūdō, much of Austin felt like America at its worst: soulless highway car culture and chain store strip mall hell. The city has become ridiculously expensive and its overtaxed infrastructure can’t handle the explosive population growth it has experienced.

Although I’d brought all my cycling gear and hoped to enjoy some cycling around Austin – especially the Veloway and bike night at the Circuit of the Americas – logistical difficulties had made it impossible. I was disappointed and depressed.

After dropping Inna off at her final workshop session, I wanted to fetch drinks and a Barron’s, but had no luck at Circle-K, the H-E-B grocery, or Target. Then I went back to the hotel to regroup and figure out my plan for the day.

While brushing my teeth, I dropped a hotel glass in the bathroom sink, smashing it and cutting up my hands, especially my right ring finger, which began bleeding profusely. It took two hours of constant direct pressure to get the bleeding under control, and another hour before it stopped enough to be able to stick a bandage on it. The white facecloth I’d used was crimson and completely soaked with blood. Getting that under control pretty much took up my whole day. By evening, I was able to gingerly drive myself to another nearby Thai restaurant, Pad Thai, for takeout.

Meanwhile, Inna had decided to spend the evening with her workshop cohort, going wading in Barton Springs before getting a late ride back to the hotel.

From my perspective, it had been another shitty day and I just wanted nothing other than to go home.

Mon April 25: Storms & Hotel Swap

Monday wasn’t much of a day either, washed out by thunderstorms and off-and-on rain. Inna spent her first non-workshop morning recovering needed work files that her teammates had mistakenly deleted. Then we packed up and checked out of our north-of-town hotel. Although we’ve usually stayed at B&Bs, Inna had found exceptional deals at standard hotels, and changing hotels allowed us to explore different parts of the city with less travel time in the car.

With time to kill before our check-in time at the next, south-of-town hotel, we drove around town looking at houses that were for sale. They were mostly ranches, of course, and the residential neighborhoods only varied in how recently they’d been developed. Prices were high but not completely insane.

After an unenthusiastic debate, we opted for a late lunch at the Clay Pit, a downtown Indian restaurant that I had visited during the 2003 DargonZine Summit meetup, and where I’d left behind (and then fetched) a digital camera. The food was surprisingly good.

Our new hotel was located right in the middle of a massive highway interchange in a more industrial section of town. Inna was delighted that the new room — unlike the old one – had a safe, until I pointed out that it was actually a microwave oven, and she probably didn’t want to store her work computer in there!

We spent the rainy afternoon relaxing. Inna napped, and then practiced her Hebrew on Duolingo, which she’d picked up after I’d started using it over Xmas to learn Japanese. Then we went to H-E-B for supplies before calling it a day.

Tue April 26: Grumpy Goes Downtown

By Tuesday, it had all caught up with me: the gloomy weather, my headaches, bad eating, inability to do any cycling, and injuring my hand, all on top of longstanding background dissatisfaction with aging and cardiac health. First thing after waking up, Inna patiently sat through one of my rare emotional dumps.

She then equally patiently helped me shower and wash my hair, since I still couldn’t use my right hand. Afterward, I replaced the bandage for the first time, and happily noted that my fingers looked much better than they had two days earlier.

Focusing on what she could control (my diet), Inna directed us to breakfast at the Magnolia Cafe, where I demolished Eggs Zapata, which amounted to scrambled eggs on english with sausage and spicy queso.

Next stop was “Austin Art Garage”, but we arrived before opening, so killed time in a nearby Indian shoppe. Returning, we scoped out the gallery, and I was amused by their 1980s vintage Tron arcade game console.

Heading downtown, we stopped at the Austin Visitor Center, which provided a transit map and just two brochures, only one of which was Austin-specific. Worthless.

With the day turning warm and sunny, Inna directed us to the mile-long Lady Bird Lake Boardwalk that’s part of the bike trail along the south side of the Colorado River. We took up residence in some Adirondack chairs left on a riverside dock and enjoyed the sun and the skyline view for a while, and watched a couple guys fooling around on e-foils. On the walk back, Inna greeted a young black woman who had brought her cat down to the river.

The rest of the day was haphazard. Another Amy’s Ice Cream, followed by Uncommon Objects, a big antiques (junk) store with most of its wares displayed by color. I dropped Inna off to meet a friend for a food truck dinner, then went back to the hotel, where I waited until 10:30pm to hear whether she needed me for a return ride or not.

Wed April 27: Lupes & More Circling

We (well, Inna) slept in until lunchtime. After hitting CVS, we stopped to admire Casa Neverlandia, a creatively-decorated private house that reminded me of Pittsburgh’s Randyland.

Lunch was a long-anticipated stop on the 360 at Lupe’s Tex-Mex restaurant, an Inna favorite since her first business trip to Houston, having heard it reviewed by a co-worker back when she was in Kuala Lumpur. It being my first time, I was pleased with the fajitas we got. I’m not sure it lived up to the years of hype I’d heard – and it was stunningly expensive! – but it was good to finally try the place for myself.

After yet another Amy’s Ice Cream, we stopped for a brief rest at the small Govalle Neighborhood Park at the Southern Walnut Creek trailhead.

Then Inna navigated us to Craft, a big DIY crafting warehouse. After a quick tour, we settled in and gave it a try. Inna produced one of her typical paint-and-collage compositions, and I stayed true to form with a bold abstract paint-based thing. Nothing noteworthy, but it was a nice activity, and something to do as a couple other than sitting around the hotel or eating.

Although Inna’s weekend workshop was over, she wanted to go to Circle Anywhere’s regular weekly evening session, so I dropped her off and went to kill time at the Kinokunia Japanese bookstore. I browsed for 45 minutes without finding anything that jumped out at me, so I moseyed on to the Daiso Japanese housewares store next door.

Bored with that, I consulted my map to find a nearby park to hang out in for the 90 minutes until Inna’s session ended. Covert Park at Mount Bonnell was nearby and looked like it would have a view overlooking the river, so I drove there.

I’d forgotten that Mount Bonnell is a favorite semi-touristy spot to watch the sunsets from atop a high bluff over the river. I’d arrived just in time, and spent a few minutes scouting out the walking paths, looking for an unoccupied vantage point. It reminded me a lot of the “overlooks” back in Pittsburgh. I relaxed, watched the sun set, and took a couple selfies and panoramas. I also enjoyed the modern convenience of using a 5G phone connection to check Inna and I into our upcoming flights home.

Inna’s workshop session had been unsatisfying, so we chatted about it on the way back to the hotel, where we started packing up while watching another soccer game.

Thu April 28: Killing Time til We Can Go Home

Our last day in Austin began as you’d expect: packing up and checking out of our hotel.

Then we made our way to the Buzz Mill cafe, where we met up with Inna’s friend Sarah Ness, a former Pittsburgher who had founded Authentic Revolution, one of Austin’s other “circling” groups. She was pleasant and interested and energetic, and had lots of positive things to say about Austin.

When Sarah left, Inna and I went next door to a Dairy Queen, where I ordered the traditional Dilly Bar. Then we literally drove around the block before Inna proposed that we go back and hang out at the Buzz Mill until it was time to head to the airport.

The car was dropped off in seconds, our TSA PreCheck got us through security in no time, and Inna disappeared into a massage booth while I finally found a copy of Barron’s at an airport newsstand. Inna stopped at “Salvation Pizza” and spent $7.50 a slice for some greasy pizza that they stacked such that each slice was stuck to the paper plate of the one above it. Did we still eat it? Yeah, you can’t be choosy when eating in the airport.

By the time our 7pm flight was boarding, even Inna just wanted to be home. Happily, like our previous connection in Detroit, our transfer in Atlanta was also back onto the same aircraft at the same gate we arrived at, which made for the best Hartsfield experience either of us have ever had. We shared a laugh when the PA announcer sounds like he asked passengers to please make sure everyone in your party had their body parts for boarding.

Although it wasn’t objectively long, our journey home felt like it took forever. The flight, the trek to the intra-terminal shuttle, waiting at baggage claim (we’d been forced to gate-check our carry-ons), the trudge out to the car, paying for long-term parking, and the 45-minute drive home. There – despite it being 2:30am — I jumped straight into trash, recycling, and cleaning out the cat’s litterbox and put everything out for pickup later that morning. But the cat was happy to see us, and we were very glad to climb into bed shortly before the sun rose.

Epilogue

Recalling that this was my first major trip post-Covid, since late 2019, I am delighted that we made it through without either of us getting sick. We were masked and careful at the airports and during flights, but less so in Austin, where we – like everyone else – went mostly mask-free in stores and restaurants. Although we weren’t especially stringent, we didn’t have any problems at all, even though our immune systems haven’t been exercised in 2½ years.

As for the prospects for relocating, that remains a bit unclear, although after numerous false starts, Austin’s the first place that we both agree has real potential.

For me, the positive side of the ledger includes Inna’s willingness to move there, an active cycling community, the presence of a kyūdō dojo, an MLS team, and no city or state income taxes. Although I’ll repeat how disappointed I am that I wasn’t able to do any cycling during this trip, either solo or in the company of locals.

The list of Austin’s negatives includes the cost of living, the traffic, the highways, the endless expanse of character-less strip malls. Higher property and sales taxes. No casino. Poisonous snakes, spiders, fire ants, scorpions, and lots of other creepy-crawlies. And no matter how reasonable Austinites might seem, it’s a tenuous island of approximate sanity amid Texas’ vast and frightening brand of crazy.

As for mixed blessings… This trip’s weather notwithstanding, there’s the heat. Although I would certainly be leaving New England winters far behind, even a sun-worshipper like myself am intimidated at the prospect of living with Texas’ infamous heat, even if Inna is resigned to being uncomfortable no matter where we go.

And the meditation scene also counts as a mixed blessing. There aren’t any longstanding teachers, nor any retreat centers anywhere nearby. The community is small and led by a group of peer leaders. While that’s much like my situation here in Pittsburgh and would allow me to continue to develop my role as a teacher, I would have even less experienced support in my own personal practice than I already have here.

So that leaves me with mixed feelings. Austin seems to have almost all of the things I want in a home, and Inna seems willing to commit. If it wasn’t Texas, it might be an easy decision to make. But I can’t escape the fact that it is Texas, and living there would require an immense adjustment, as compared to moving somewhere a little more temperate and with a more familiar East Coast culture.

Making another scouting trip would make a lot of sense, to become more confident about our decision, whatever that winds up being. There’s just so much that we haven’t looked at, including Inna’s employer’s local office, and that dreaded summertime heat.

So that’s where I wound up. As a vacation, it wasn’t a very good trip for me; and as a relocation spot, Austin has a lot of potential, although there are lots of plusses and minuses for us still to weigh.

Mt. Bonnell Sunset Pano

Twenty-two years ago, I was just minding my own business.

At the consulting company where I worked, I had just finished developing BankBoston’s HomeLink & OfficeLink banking applications, and was about to roll onto a new project for a local startup.

I received an email from some new hire who was moving our (land-line!) telephones to the new team area. As you might expect, she ended by saying that anyone having concerns should call her at extension 1366.

Just one problem there: x1366 was my phone number!

I immediately emailed her back and discovered that she’d accidentally typed my extension (1366) by transposing the digits of her own (1633). Not an auspicious first impression for a new hire fresh out of college, whom I was going to have to work with on my next project!

And that’s how I met your mother...

Despite starting off in decidedly bizarre fashion, once I met Inna in person, I decided to cultivate a friendship. At work I orchestrated time together under the pretenses of tutoring her on web design and speaking to my coworkers individually about team morale.

I charmed her with hair down to my hips and bizarre boyish antics. I ran the team’s junk food fund—known as “SnackLand”—and wrote a web app so the team could vote on what they wanted to buy. When I ordered a new bicycle, I had it shipped to work in a box, assembled it, and rode it around the office space in my consultant’s white shirt & tie, despite bikes not being allowed inside the building. The security guards freaked out when I eventually brought it down to the ground floor to ride home!

But with Inna, the deal was sealed when I persuaded her to come to my place after work to meet my cat Puggle: the fluffiest longhaired creamsicle you could ever meet. From that point forward, we were an item.

Not a public one, mind you. We kept our romantic involvement strictly a secret at work for some time, only exchanging furtive kisses when we were alone in the elevator between floors. It wasn’t something we wanted people to know at first, but we’d eventually let the proverbial cat out of the bag.

In the meantime, we spent a lot of time together. I was still into Boston’s local music scene, and we went to countless live music shows.

One of our early dates will always stand out in particular. We were having dinner at Brown Sugar Cafe, a neighborhood Thai place, looking for something to do for the evening. I was lamenting that there were no good bands playing, only some stupid punk band calling themselves “The Damned”.

Little did I know, but The Damned were Inna’s teenage idol band, an aging English group whom she’d been following for more than a decade, but had never seen live. It was as if I’d waved a magic wand and made her dreams come true by turning three Fenway rats into her favorite brooding goth heartthrob singer Dave Vanian, drunk buttocks-exhibiting glam guitarist “Captain Sensible”, and (perhaps least of a transformation) a back-alley waste product drummer called “Rat Scabies”.

Needless to say, within a couple hours we were off to Axis for an evening of noise, profanity, and unsolicited exposure to middle-aged man-butt.

In those early days, neither of us made particularly desirable partners, and our relationship was very off-and-on for the next seven years, until Inna moved back to Pittsburgh. We remained best friends—with occasional benefits—for another ten years while we both matured into adults capable of tolerance, compromise, and forgiveness.

When the obscene Hell-spawned winter of 2014-2015 prompted me to leave my beloved Boston, Inna suggested I come to Pittsburgh to see if we could stand living with one another.

With four years of cohab now under our belts, we’ve settled in to a stable, lasting partnership. The future’s a bit up in the air right now due to the Corona virus, but we’re confident and comfortable facing whatever comes up together.

The long-delayed writeup of last March’s weeklong excursion to Raleigh/Durham and Charlotte, North Carolina. Added here more to complete our set of scouting reports than to provide anything of interest to readers.

Thu March 14: Travel

We left on the warmest early spring day Pittsburgh had seen thus far in 2019, although we still passed snow in the Laurel Highlands. As we drove south beyond Richmond VA, we came across dogwoods and magnolia trees in blossom, and a surprising amount of mixed forest. It was a long but bearable 8 hour drive, and traffic wasn't intolerable.

Arriving in Durham, we checked into our AirBnB before a mediocre dinner at Bull City Burger, decent ice cream at Parlour, and grocs at Food Lion.

Raleigh City Market

I&O @ Duke Gardens

Orn @ Duke Gardens

Inna @ Duke Gardens

At Duke Gardens

Fri March 15: Raleigh

After the usual preliminaries, we spent the day checking out Raleigh.

On the way into town, we visited the suburban local office of Inna's employer, which was small and focused on client-specific project work, which isn’t ideal for Inna.

We drove to Raleigh's surprisingly small downtown, checking out their visitors' bureau and a cool co-op called Artspace. We walked through City Market, picked up lunch (pizza & salad and ziti arrabiata) at Vic's Ristorante, got a toy for Begemot at a pet store called Unleashed, and chatted with Melinda, the proprietor of the Devilish Egg art studio and store and owner of Rollo the Maine Coon.

Then we drove around at random, scoping out the surrounding neighborhoods. I chatted with a guy at the Oak City Cycling Project about local events and riding conditions. On the way back to Durham, I stopped by the Raleigh storefront of Bicycle Chain (a Specialized and Cannondale dealer) and met Steve, their local road cycling guru.

After ice cream at Ben & Jerry's at NSCU, we had dinner (shrimp & grits and chicken fingers) at Tyler's Taproom in Durham's old American Tobacco factory, right across from the unavoidable Durham Bulls' baseball park.

After finding the AirBnB's antique bed painfully soft, Inna dragged out a futon and slept on that. After two days of delightful temps in the 70s, a cold front passed through overnight, and the rest of our stay would feature chillier high temps around 50°.

Sat March 16: Kyudo, Durham

Saturday morning Inna stayed home while I drove down toward Apex to visit Meishin Kyudojo, a kyudo practice facility run by Dan DeProspero, a well-known teacher and author of "Kyudo: The Essence and Practice of Japanese Archery", which remains virtually the only English-language history and instruction manual for kyudo.

Dan and his half-dozen hakama-wearing practitioners gave me a warm welcome before beginning their outdoor practice in the 40° cold. The group seemed friendly, personable, and serious about the kyudo form and taking time getting people started with it. After three years in Pittsburgh without any kyudo, it was a delight to see people practicing, and I left the dojo feeling energized.

I had hoped to drop in on a practice session by Triangle Taiko, but they hadn't replied to my earlier email. Instead, I drove toward bland, manicured suburb Cary and stopped at Cycling Spoken Here, which turned out to be the local Trek bike dealer, where another guy described the local road scene.

Returning to the house, I picked up Inna, who wanted to crash a book club Meetup to chat with random people. So we went to the New World Cafe in a strip mall off Glenwood in Raleigh, where we met a handful of people and asked them questions about how they liked the area.

Afterward, we drove around the surrounding neighborhoods, then more residential areas around Durham before lunch at Maverick's Taproom. Then window shopping around Brightleaf Square and a stop at Durham Cycles, where the guy mentioned talking earlier in the day to another couple of Pittsburghers who were also looking to move south.

After three full days of driving, walking, planning, and comparing notes, we were drained and headed home for a quiet evening.

Sun March 17: Chapel Hill & Carrboro

Sunday's plan was Chapel Hill and Carrboro. We parked right at the main square and walked down Franklin Street, the four-lane main drag filled with newish retail buildings.

Passing into Carrboro, the streetscape became more shabby, with a small-town feel. We stopped at a couple artsy shops, the Clean Machine bike shop, and caught a local cover band playing a Daft Punk cover outside a BBQ joint. On the way back to the car, we stopped at Carolina Brewery, a generic sports bar where I had an interesting potato chip “nachos" with jalapenos on top.

Then we drove through the surrounding residential neighborhoods and UNC. We hit a grocery store and got makings for supper, but returned to the Parlour in Durham for pre-dinner dessert (where I was double-charged for our ice cream).

Mon March 18: Triangle Insight & Durham

Despite fatigue, I was up before 6am Monday for a morning meditation at Triangle Insight. I walked into the Duke Episcopal Center early and had to turn on the lights and wait for the organizers to show up.

Naturally, a 7am weekday sitting only drew a handful of people, but the leader—Ron Vereen—said their evening sessions draw 40-50 people. It’s an active community with Kalyana Mitta groups and connections with the Eno River Buddhist Community and New Hope Sangha. Ron had studied with familiar teachers including CIMC's Narayan and Rodney Smith. After a hectic few days, it was nice to just sit for 45 minutes.

On the way home, I refueled the car at an unexpectedly familiar convenience store: a Western Pennsylvania-based Sheetz.

Our next outing was checking out Research Triangle Park, which was underwhelming. Most of it was inaccessible due to security, but what we saw looked like any other suburban office park.

Then we went back to the Duke campus to walk the Duke Gardens, especially their asiatic arboretum, where the sakura blossoms were out. That reminded me that a year earlier I’d been at Tokyo’s Narita airport, where the runways had been lined with blossoming cherry trees. That in turn reminded me that Dan DeProspero had established his kyudo dojo in Raleigh because it was the closest he could get in the US to Tokyo’s climate. It felt like spring, as the park’s ducks demonstrated in flagrante delicto.

In downtown Durham we checked out a couple co-working spaces, including cause célèbre WeWork. Then a brief tour of artsy Hotel 21C Museum before unpretentious food at Elmo's Diner. Then home to run a laundry and prepare for the following day.

Tue March 19: To Charlotte

Packed up, closed the AirBNB, and began the 2½-hour drive to Charlotte.

Partway there, we decided to spend some unplanned time in Greensboro to avoid a 90-minute backup on I-85. We hit a Gabe’s discount store, then a bad lunch at Friday’s.

Got back on the highway and into our small NoDa AirBNB with no delays. We checked out a couple shops on Davidson Street, then grabbed groceries and had a quiet evening settling in.

Wed March 20: Charlotte

Began the day walking to the Smelly Cat Coffee House to meet up with Daniel, a local cyclist I knew from the online community on Zwift, to pick his brain about Charlotte.

His take was that it’s a small city that’s growing quickly, absorbing transplants that cause suburban sprawl and property rates to go up, and crowding out its former eclectic quality. The financial industry are the dominant employers. He said point-blank he hated living there.

We wandered around Uptown, checking the visitors’ center and Inna’s employer’s office. Then around the residential neighborhoods, poking into artsy shops like Paper Skyscraper, where I bought the book “Mindful Thoughts for Cyclists”. A few cycling questions at Uptown Cycles, a meatball sub at Pizza Peel, and back to the house.

I left Inna and drove to a Baptist church in Myers Park to check out the Insight Meditation Community of Charlotte. I sat in on an orientation with three newcomers, led by teacher Debbie George, another former student of CIMC’s Larry Rosenberg. Then joined 50 people for a sitting and dhamma talk about wise speech and lovingkindness. Afterward, I connected with their treasurer, Adrienne Price, who had—like me—studied at the Bhavana Society, and was headed for a retreat at the nearby Southern Dharma Retreat Center. I again enjoyed connecting with people based on common friends and frames of reference.

Thu March 21: Home!

We packed and left the house at 10:30am, but made a lengthy and agreeable stop at Amelie's patisserie for macarons and a ham & gruyere croissant.

The more-inland drive from sunny North Carolina back into the March gloom of Western Pennsylvania was hillier and more scenic than our previous coastal route, with less traffic and fewer towns. We landed weary and happy to be home, catching our cat-sitting friends at the house when we arrived. Job done!

Overall Impressions

My general impression of the area was positive. So far as I could tell from a brief visit, the climate seems wonderful, and the people seemed intelligent, friendly, and enthusiastically welcoming.

Triangle Insight seemed like a well-established group, and the presence of a long-running kyudo dojo is a big plus. Although I didn’t get a feel for the local roads, there seem to be plenty of cycling organizations and events.

The job market is a big questionmark, and in such a widely-dispersed area we’d need two cars, although those are concerns anywhere we'd consider moving.

The area is booming, with lots of transplants fleeing the cold. That comes with downsides like increasing housing costs, and the towns haven’t planned or created the infrastructure to cope with such growth.

A big concern was Inna’s reaction; having mostly grown up in the northeast, she'd expected a more walkable and multicultural urban feel, rather than strip malls and suburban neighborhoods of detached single-family homes. Disappointingly, that’s pretty common in the absence of any natural constraints on sprawl.

Looking at the individual towns, Raleigh had a slightly artsy feel and enthusiastically friendly people, but a tiny central business district surrounded by nondescript residential developments. It felt more like a small town than a big city.

Durham is a reluctantly gentrifying working-class ghetto, with boarded-up buildings and a run-down, abandoned feel. While there were a couple small, funky-feeling areas that we felt comfortable in, even our AirBNB had reviews from renters who had felt unsafe in the ratty town.

Then there’s Chapel Hill, a college town that’s home to UNC. A spacious, affluent commercial drag with the usual soulless upscale chain stores, and again immediately backed up by suburban-style neighborhoods.

And separately, Charlotte, which had a more familiar urban center and funky mixed-use neighborhoods such as our temporary home in NoDa. But it seemed to lack character or much to recommend it beyond its rep as a big banking hub.

So from a scouting standpoint, we returned to Pittsburgh frustrated and disillusioned: Inna because she’d expected something very different, and me because of her feelings. It’s unfortunate and saddens me, because the area seems to meet my requirements well. But our challenge is to figure out how to maximize happiness for both of us, despite our conflicting preferences.

My second and final weekend in Southeast Asia, Inna and I flew up to Phuket, Thailand for sightseeing and tigers!

While this blogpost only covers our weekend in Thailand, you can read about the rest of my two weeks in Malaysia here, and our other weekend side-trip to Singapore here.

Saturday, 24 March 2018

Saturday morning Inna and I were up early and caught another Grab car to KLIA. While there, we both picked up some chocolate, then got brunch at a place called Secret Recipe. I got a tasty “cheesy fire chicken wrap”.

Family Portrait

Share the Road

Main Street, Thailand

Git the Belly!

Give Skull

Motivating the Predator

Good Rubs

Eye of the Tiger

Want Some Tongue?

I Can Has Belly?

Tiger Ham

Buddhist Flags

Temple Shrines

Phuket Sunset

A Piece of Thailand

Full Thailand Photoset

Our flight on Malindo Air was quiet, with a landing that passed just feet over the Mai Khao beach before touching down. In fact, the landing strip is so close to the shore that the airport’s colored landing lights extend far out into the ocean, which we could later see shining on the horizon from our resort. We de-planed, got some Thai baht, and hit immigration to obtain more passport “cheese”.

Thailand! For me, who has derived a lot of benefit from the Thai Forest tradition of Buddhism, visiting Thailand was the fulfillment of a lifetime dream. Even though a meditation retreat wasn’t on our agenda, just setting foot in Thailand was a very big deal for me.

As a tourist haven, Phuket isn’t exactly a remote forest monastery. Instead, the island features a ton of super popular beaches, and is also the site of some of the worst devastation from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed a quarter million people. On top of that, Phuket set my new high-water mark for westward travel.

What surprised both Inna and I was the immediate and pervasive presence of Russian signage alongside Thai and English and Chinese. There were Russian signs everywhere—down to the take-out pizza menu in our hotel room!—and lots of Russian being spoken by airport visitors. Inna was most surprised that the people speaking unaccented Russian were very obviously ethnically and genetically Asian; logical, since the USSR spanned the entire width of Asia, but a surprise nonetheless!

It was a long but fascinating 75-minute cab ride from the airport to the resort. Avoiding the main highway, the driver took us along narrow back-country roads; at one point, we had to stop while a water buffalo blocked our way! Then we reached more built-up areas that match every stereotype of dumpy poverty-ridden Third World commercial blight, interspersed with stomach-turning party towns full of foreign tourists and the predatory natives who cater to them. Along the way, I tried to recall the Thai I’d learned in an adult ed course ten years ago, while Inna tried to avoid getting carsick from the twisting, bouncing ride.

I was frustrated by two odd technological limitations. First, although the Google Maps app allows you to download offline maps that you can use when not connected to the internet, maps of Thailand are not available. Fortunately, I’d been warned of this and downloaded dedicated maps. Secondly, the difficult Thai script would be the ideal use case for the Google Translate app’s ability to translate script shot using a phone’s camera, but again, that is not allowed. So the Thai government actually outscored Singapore as a visitor-unfriendly police state!

We arrived at Karon Beach and checked into our hotel—the Movenpick—which provided us with nice little lei-style flower wristlets. Our room came with a huge king-sized bed comprised of two twin mattresses side-by-side, as well as a balcony with views of both the ocean and the main pool area. Reminiscent of the strange electrically-frosted glass at the hotel back in Singapore, there were big wooden panels between the bedroom and the bathroom that you could slide aside to reveal a pass-through style opening. Strange!

Arriving around dinnertime, we walked the length of the resort’s large landscaped compound to their Brazilian restaurant. Along the way, we checked out the hotel lobby, the main and satellite pools, the spa, and the grounds overall. We also stumbled into their rec room, featuring a pool table with purple felt, and a pink foosball table! But overall, we were very pleased with the resort.

At the restaurant, I got a nice sirloin, some mediocre corn on the cob, and a new first: a Nutella milkshake! Meanwhile, Inna… Well, let’s see if I can do this justice. What does a Jewish woman born in the Ukraine, with an Israeli childhood, living in America, working on a project in Malaysia, on vacation in Thailand, who doesn’t eat beef, order for dinner? Brazilian charrusco barbecue, of course!

After dinner, since we were close to the beach, we crossed the busy main drag and checked it out. It was quiet and dark, in contrast to the loud commercial chaos along Beach Road. Some people had lit a paper lantern-balloon, and let it soar into the night sky.

Heading back to the hotel, we made our way to the room and turned in for the evening.

Sunday, 25 March 2018

Waking up early again, I let Inna sleep and got some sunrise photos from our balcony overlooking the Movenpick compound, the beach, and the Andaman Sea. Once Inna roused, we checked out Pacifica—the hotel’s breakfast buffet—which was excellent. Then we waited for a cab to take us to our morning destination.

Before my trip, Inna and I had kicked around ideas for where we might go. Langkawi? Panang? Bangkok? Angkor Wat? I considered staying in Kuala Lumpur to catch the final stage of the Tour de Langkawi bicycle race. We didn’t solidify on Phuket until Inna noticed one of her local coworker’s profile icons on Whatsapp: a young lady hugging a tiger. When Inna learned that there was a place in Phuket called Tiger Kingdom that let you pet tigers of all ages that had been raised in captivity… Well, our destination was set. So off we went!

Tiger Kingdom was absolutely amazing! You get 10-15 minutes in the enclosure with 3-5 animals, their watchful handlers, and an optional photographer. The place seemed well-run; the tigers looked healthy, the place didn’t smell, and the staff were attentive.

We spent time with tigers of three of the four age groups: smallest, small, and big cats (passing on “medium”). The smallest guys, about six months old, were utterly kittenish and adorable. Our first little guy was completely passed out, and what struck me was the immense size of his paws! Then, when another group left the enclosure, their more active tiger cub bounded over. At first, I was startled, but the keepers were okay with it, and the new kit decided to spend his time gnawing on our sleepy boy’s head. We also got to play with one girl who was teething and wanted to bite everything in sight (we were given a convenient log to proffer).

The biggest and smallest cats were most popular, so we were the only people visiting the “small” cat enclosure, and the handlers let us stay in there a good long time. Don’t let the “small” fool you, though; these were big, solid predators! We didn’t bring our photographer into this enclosure, which was too bad, because in the heat and humidity, my phone’s camera decided to act up badly.

We finished by visiting the Big Cats, and despite being huge, they were all pretty chill. In the midday heat, one was enjoying a big block of ice placed against her back, and then casually smacked Inna right in the face with the flick of a surprisingly solid tail.

Inna had been excited even before our hour-long visit, but she was downright giddy the whole time, which I found heartwarming. It’s not often she’s so unreservedly demonstrative, and I’m glad I could be there in person to share this experience with her. I was equally delighted, too, although hopefully a little less overtly. It was a stupefyingly cool experience.

To be honest, there’s no way to communicate how awesome it was to sit there, grab a great big tiger’s paw, and rub his belly. In the photos, both Inna and I are having the time of our lives, so I’ll let the photos do most of the talking. As Inna crowed, it was probably the best money we’ve ever spent.

On the return trip, our cab dropped us off on Beach Road, so we visited the beach again. The sea was blue, but not quite the turquoise of the Caribbean, because the Andaman drops off quickly once you’re away from the shoreline. We watched as a parasailer donned a life preserver and got strapped into her safety harness and took off from the beach. Just as the chute was about to be dragged into the air by the motorboat it was tethered to, her local handler, dressed only in a tee shirt and shorts, leapt up into the parachute’s lines, hanging precariously above the tourist’s head, doing the required steering.

The hot sun was too much for Inna, so we crossed back across to the resort, picking up ice creams on our way back to our room. After downloading and checking out all the tiger photos, she and I opted to go separate ways.

I grabbed my camera and hurried off toward town, interested in visiting the local Buddhist vihara: Wat Karon. It was quiet, and I didn’t see anyone other than some guys doing construction, so I just wandered around the grounds, taking lots of pictures. I left a couple dollars, some Thai baht, and some Malaysian ringgits in their donation box before taking my leave. I strolled through town before returning to the hotel room.

Meanwhile, Inna had gone to the resort’s spa for a massage (her credit card receipt says she purchased “1 ORIENTAL FOOT”), so I grabbed a towel and headed across to the beach, intent on absorbing some Thai sun on the last tanning opportunity of my Asian trip. I took a nice, relaxing swim in the Andaman, then dried off in the late-afternoon sun.

After returning to our room, I captured some excellent sunset photos from our balcony before meeting back up with Inna. On the way down to dinner, we hit the gift shop, where I picked up a nice little copper-colored Buddha painting to bring home: to be treasured as an authentic Buddhist item that I had picked up myself on a trip to Thailand!

My dinner, in the transformed Pacifica breakfast space, was a tasty Thai cashew chicken dish. Then back to our room to hang and enjoy our dwindling time in Phuket.

Monday, 26 March 2018

We had a languorous Monday morning, realizing that in less than 24 hours I’d be headed back to Pittsburgh. Inna looked and sounded happier and more relaxed than she’d been after her initial arrival in Malaysia.

We packed up and had another nice breakfast where I opted to try a taste of kimchee. Then we settled with the hotel and hopped our long van ride back to Phuket Airport. This time, the hotel’s driver took the busy, ugly commercial main highway all the way, but it was still interesting.

At immigration, we waited in a huge line full of Russians before getting our exit visa stamps. We endured some confusion due to a gate change, plus having to board a bus that drove us across the tarmac to our plane. The flight back to Kuala Lumpur was a little turbulent, but we landed, sidestepped past customs, and I got my third Malaysian entry stamp in ten days, followed by the usual cab ride home.

Leaving KLIA at 5pm, I would have less than 12 hours in Kuala Lumpur before I was back at the airport for my flight home. That evening was a blur of preparation: dinner at the hotel restaurant (Tex-Mex pizza), unpacking from Thailand and repacking everything to go home, taking a shower, ordering a 4am cab, and heading to bed.

Looking back on Thailand, what remains with me are the incredible contrasts. The most advanced Buddhist country in the world! But wow it’s a commercial dump! But the resort is really awesome! I can’t help but feel the dissonance of a reflective Buddhist culture coexisting with hedonistic beach towns of commercialized hell, massage parlors, pleasure girls, and a disturbing number of recreational shooting ranges.

All the same, between the beach and the tigers and it being Thailand and sharing all of it with Inna… it was an incredible and very memorable trip.

As you might imagine, there are a ton of amazing photos, so you should check out my full Phuket photoset. And you can get Inna’s perspective in her Phuket overview and Tiger Kingdom blogposts.

As mentioned above, you can continue reading about the rest of my trip in my Malaysia blogpost, as well as the side trip we made the previous weekend in my Singapore blogpost.

Visiting Southeast Asia has always been on my bucket list. Fanatsizing about going maybe someday was easy; but I’ve never had the courage and initiative to start making it happen. So when Inna agreed to a (minimum) six-month work assignment in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), I had to make the most of the opportunity and visit her there. And so the trip was planned.

In the end, I wound up going for two weeks in the middle of March, spending four days in Malaysia, three days in Singapore, three more days in Thailand, and the equivalent of four full days flying there and back.

This post covers those travel days and my time in Malaysia. It’s the wrapper story that surrounds followup posts about the weekends we spent in Singapore (here) and Thailand here, which warranted their own separate writeups. Doing that splits my trip report into three digestible, reader-friendly sections, and lets me organize and post more photos from each of those adventures.

But first things first: Malaysia!

Wednesday, 14 March 2018

Kicked off the trip with two Facebook status updates. Since I’d be spending all of 3-14 (aka Pi Day) flying, I made a universally underappreciated comment about spending “pi in the sky”. But I also dredged up a pertinent quotation from Led Zeppelin’s classic “Ramble On”:

Now’s the time, the time is now to sing my song.
I’m goin’ round the world—I got to find my girl.
On my way…

With Inna at Suria Mall & Petronas Towers

Selfie at Somerset Roof Pool with Petronas Tower

Petronas Tower from Somerset Ampang

Somerset Ampang Roof Pool from Petronas Tower

Petronas Towers from KLCC

Petronas Towers from KLCC

Petronas Tower 1 Top from Tower 2

Big Kuala Lumpur Panorama

Full Malaysia Photoset

The drive to Pittsburgh’s airport was uneventful other than dealing with freezing temperatures and snow showers. My flight to Chicago’s O’Hare was delayed half an hour due to a broken headset and the need for de-icing. On our final approach to O’Hare, we flew for miles next to another jet that landed seconds before us on a parallel runway. Conveniently, my flight from Chicago to Tokyo had also been delayed 40 minutes because the plane hadn’t arrived.

It’s funny how much can transpire on a 13-hour flight. I stayed awake in order to sync my sleep pattern up with Kuala Lumpur, which is exactly 12 hours off from Pittsburgh time. I kept an eye out for aurorae, which were active following a solar storm, but I saw none. Flying All-Nippon Airways (ANA), I tried the Japanese version of curried rice for the first time, and cold noodles in a light sauce. I had a brief scare when I lost my reading glasses on the floor in a fully-darkened cabin. But the highlight of the flight was getting a fabulous nighttime shot of the lights of snow- and ice-bound Nome, Alaska from 34,000 feet.

Jumping the Date Line requires a new timestamp, so:

Thursday, 15 March 2018

After doing the Date Line time warp, I arrived in Tokyo late Thursday night. It was my second time in Asia, and the first since a work assignment in Seoul in 2008. Back then, my connections were also in Tokyo, although this transfer was at Haneda, rather than Narita. I arrived to lots of Facebook Likes and a welcome exchange of messages with Inna.

It was an easy process—but a long walk—to my next gate, where I charged my devices and did a little exploring. My most noteworthy observation: to alert oblivious pedestrians that something’s behind them, instead of mechanistic beeping, the little terminal golf-carts at Haneda play the tune of Disney’s “Heigh-Ho” song from Snow White.

My third flight of the “day” took off just after midnight, which means another date stamp:

Friday, 16 March 2018

Another eight uncomfortable hours in flight.

Having gone sleepless for more than 40 hours, I was unhappy and barely functional. One highlight was flying over the Philippine island of Palawan, although I was on the wrong side of the plane to see it.

At the end of my three-day flying ordeal, we finally approached Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA). But as we were about to touch down, the pilot gunned the engines, climbed, and performed a complete go-around for another try at landing. I couldn’t make out the explanation they offered, but I think they mentioned the control tower. Kind of disconcerting.

After de-planing, the first stop was customs and immigration, where I garnered my first “cheese”: our shorthand term for the reward at the end of the long lines. One of my goals for this trip was to accrue some new passport stamps to join the lonely one from Mexico back in 2010 before my current passport expires. Happily, I received a Malaysian entry stamp, then found my luggage, bought me some Malaysian ringgits and a prepaid taxi voucher, and hopped a cab.

Obviously, Malaysia is a foreign place to me, and it’s also a Muslim country, so I was primed for things to be different. This was most apparent when I noted that every announcement over the airport PA ended with the phrase: “… and have a Happy Jenni”. I was surprised that I’d apparently landed in the middle of some kind of major holiday, whatever “Jenni” was. But eventually Inna and I figured out that it was just an odd pronunciation of what they were really saying: “Have a happy journey”!

That was followed by an hour-long taxi ride from the suburban airport to the heart of KL’s business district and Inna’s hotel: the Somerset Ampang. After leaving a snowy Pittsburgh, I reveled in the humid, tropical heat and the sight of lush hills full of palm trees. Having landed at 7am Friday morning, Inna had just begun her normal workday, so after getting into her empty suite I unpacked, tested out the roof pool on the 22nd floor, then enjoyed a long-anticipated shower. From the pool, I could see one of KL’s two Petronas Towers, knowing my baby was working right over there, on the 75th floor.

Having worked a half day, Inna came home around 4pm. It was the first time I’d seen her in two months, and it was a nice reunion, although by then I was staggering due to sleep deprivation. She kindly guided me through dinner (teriyaki chicken) at the hotel restaurant (Souled Out). After 50 hours without sleep, I finally collapsed into bed, while Inna stayed up and conscientiously booked our last-minute flights and hotel in Singapore. I’m grateful for her help, because I was in no condition to execute, and without her diligence, my trip would have been a lot less eventful and memorable.

The next morning, less than 24 hours after I landed, I was back at KLIA where Inna and I hopped another flight to Singapore. We explored the town on Sunday and returned to KL Monday night. We had an amazing time, but the events of that side trip will all be related in a separate blog post devoted to that weekend in Singapore.

Tuesday, 20 March 2018

Having returned to Kuala Lumpur Monday night from our long weekend in Singapore, Tuesday morning Inna returned to work at her office in the Petronas Towers. While she engaged in a regular work week, I had the rest of the weekdays to myself.

After spending two days flying to Asia, followed by the weekend’s side trip, I was still exhausted. My Tuesday plan was to relax all morning, catch up on my email and web reading, and hit a grocery to get some foodstuffs.

In what would become my daily ritual, I went up to the roof pool around 10am for a leisurely swim and some early sunbeams, then came back down to shower. Although on Tuesday I tried out Inna’s window-side jumbo-size tub, which I mostly fit into. In the afternoon, I scampered across a major intersection to the nearest grocery-esque store and stocked up on fluids and snack foods, including a knockoff-brand Pringles potato chip in “green curry” flavor… not recommended!

After work, Inna took me to Pavilion, one of KL’s many malls, to have dinner at Wild Honey, her favorite breakfast place (yup, pancakes and sausages for dinner), then ice cream at Baskin Robbins, and an interesting dollar store called Daiso Japan. While I enjoyed the shopping, that part of KL is all huge malls populated with international luxury brands, and I’d hoped for something with more local flavor.

We were back home and in bed before the equinox hit at 15 minutes past midnight.

Wednesday, 21 March 2018

Wednesday was accidentally another rest day. After seeing Inna off, I had my swim and did more catching up online. While I was enjoying 90-degree Equatorial warmth, Pittsburgh had received ten inches of snow, with temperatures in the 20s and 30s: far below climate normals for late March. So sad!

I planned to hop a 2pm shuttle, do some more shopping, and then visit Inna at work, but she let me know that she was going to be working in a locked room, isolated and without communication, until at least 5:30pm, so at the last minute I decided to punt. In the end, I just hung around the hotel, relaxing.

Although I’d originally hoped to catch the Tour de Langkawi—a professional bike race—the following weekend, Inna counter-proposed flying to Thailand and playing with tigers, something she’d discovered from a coworker. It was ridiculous how stoked she was about playing with big cats, and I definitely wanted to share that experience with her. So later that evening Inna booked our tickets for Phuket. We were both very excited.

Thursday, 22 March 2018

The next morning, in addition to my obligatory morning swim and sun, I did a load of laundry. It was my first time using a combined washer-dryer unit, and it was fine, other than the inconvenient 5-hour cycle time.

Hoping to execute my aborted plan from the day before, I grabbed my dSLR and walked through the KLCC Park that stood between our hotel and the Petronas Towers. I took my time, finding ample places to compose photos of the iconic buildings.

Of course, there’s a mall (called Suriya) at the foot of the towers, so I made my way to my shopping target: a Japanese bookstore called Kinokuniya. I browsed the cycling and extensive manga collections, but in the end I gravitated toward the section on Buddhism. I found many familiar books on vipassana by authors that included my teacher Larry Rosenberg, Gil Fronsdal, Ajahn Brahm, Goenka-ji, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach, Sylvia Boorstein, Sharon Salzberg, Ajahn Sumedo, and others. In the end, I picked up three titles: “Bear Awareness: Questions and Answers on Taming Your Wild Mind” by favorite teacher Ajahn Brahm; “Vipassana Meditation as Taught by S. N. Goenka” by his student William Hart, and “Buddhist Ethics” by Hammalawa Saddhatissa.

After finding nothing else of interest in the mall, I met up with Inna, who got me free visitor access to the tower and took me up to her working space on the 75th floor (of 88). There I met several of her coworkers and clients, took a few panoramic photos of the KL skyline, and hung around until Inna was ready to leave.

From there, we had dinner at Ben’s, a restaurant in the Suriya mall, where I had yet another pasta carbonara. Despite Southeast Asia’s reputation as a culinary destination, I didn’t find anything special to recommend it. But the couch was comfy, and we had a nice view of the evening light show in the fountain between the towers and the park.

Inna’s coworkers pinged about going out for drinks, but, already eating, we demurred. However, on our way out of the mall, she spied a couple friends on the escalator. After we lost them on their descent, one of them (Freddy) tracked us down. He graciously took a couple photos of Inna and I in front of the fountain lights, and the three of us hung out for one round of drinks before he ambled off toward Jalan Petaling, one of KL’s Chinatowns, while Inna and I caught a quick cab home.

Friday, 23 March 2018

With more air travel scheduled for Saturday, I declared Friday another rest day. After my swim, I had lunch at the hotel restaurant, got a few hotel errands done, and tried to nap.

Inna went out with her coworkers after work, so I just hung out. When she finally came home, she stayed up late booking her flights for a May trip home, which will be followed by a family reunion in Florence, and then back to KL.

The next day we would hop a plane to continue our adventure with a long weekend in Phuket, again returning Monday evening. You can read about that side trip in my Thailand blogpost.

Tuesday, 27 March 2018

I had a mere 12 hours between returning to KL Monday night from our long weekend in Phuket, Thailand, and my departure flight back home the next morning.

I roused myself at 4am Tuesday to say goodbye to Inna, then slipped out into a rainy morning. After a long, characteristically pensive cab ride to KLIA, I quickly got through customs, acquired my third Malaysian exit visa stamp, hopped the Pittsburgh-like train between the landside and airside terminal buildings, and waited for my flight to Tokyo.

On board, I couldn’t sleep, and instead composed an email to Inna with thoughts about our visit. Seven hours later, landing this time at Narita airport, I was pleasantly surprised to see the runway lined with sakura: cherry trees in blossom, a favorite symbol of Japan. While waiting for my next flight, the Japanese televisions showed news reports about the progress of the cherry blossoms, rightfully a matter of national import.

Two hours later, while boarding my flight to O’Hare, my seatmates asked me if I would move to another row so they could co-parent their screaming progeny. Citing a 36-hour journey, I outright refused, unless they could provide me a window seat with a bulkhead I could lean against to sleep. Even for Buddhists, compassion for others is no more important than self-compassion. They eventually found someone who would switch; that person took only the aisle seat in my row, which left the middle seat unoccupied! What a blessing on a 12-hour flight!

I’d need every possible chance for sleep, because their breeding experiment wailed like an ambulance, accompanied by coughing fits from a handful of passengers who sounded 87 percent dead from tuberculosis. Unable to sleep, my fortitude was down to zero when we finally reached O’Hare.

In Chicago, I had to go through immigration and customs, re-check my bag, take a train between terminals, and pass through another security checkpoint. Fortunately, I had a three-hour layover, and managed it easily. I found myself dangerously wobbly and close to passing out, even after downing a small pizza. After more than 24 hours without sleep, I was back in the sleep deprivation zone, and desperately needed to get myself home and in bed.

Happily, the flight from Chicago to Pittsburgh was short and quiet, and my checked luggage was spat out onto the conveyor just as I approached the carousel. I dragged my bags out to the car, loaded myself up, and drove home to an enthusiastic reception from a very lonely—but something short of tiger-sized—cat.

Malaysia wasn’t quite what I expected. Before I left, my biggest concern was that Malaysia, as a strongly Muslim nation, complete with calls to prayer broadcast over loudspeakers, would feel extremely alien. But what I found was a surprisingly diverse, cosmopolitan society.

English might not be the primary language amongst Malays, but it’s present. They use the English alphabet, so (unlike Thailand) you can eventually learn Malay words by reading them. But if you rely on English, be aware that their spelling is idiosyncratic if not downright creative. You might figure out how to get to the universiti or a katedral or the sentral rail station. Or you can catch a bas or a teksi to the konvensyen center or the muzium of tekstil. Or relax at the rekreasi park or the golf kelab, which is in another seksyen of town. And make sure you ask for extra sos for your food.

Having found itself awash with oil money, Malaysia shows the inefficiencies of rapid growth, with a melange of modern high-rises displacing dilapidated and uninspired neighborhoods that had themselves only recently overtaken outright jungle. It’s an ethnically and economically segregated society, and what I saw of it—mostly downtown malls—lacked any connection to its history or locality.

To be fair though, I did a poor job exploring KL, lacking the time or motivation to venture beyond the bland, characterless malls and the immediate temptation of our hotel roof pool.

Epilogue

Having been through the details in this and subsequent blogposts, let’s take a step back and review the big picture.

I’m particularly challenged by international travel, or more properly not knowing the local language. That wasn’t a major factor, as there was plenty of English in use.

Despite that trepidation, I’m delighted to have added nine new pieces of “cheese” to my passport: three pairs of Malaysia entry and exit visas, another pair from Thailand, and an entry stamp (only) for Singapore. Plus two connections on the ground in Tokyo, as well. Great success!

Beyond that, I set new records for the farthest I’ve traveled south and west. I somehow survived ten flights totaling 22,000 miles and 50 hours in the air, plus uncounted hours of the usual airport runarounds. And despite all that travel, I happily didn’t contract any illnesses.

On the other hand, because I couldn’t sleep, each transcontinental flight amounted to staying awake for two consecutive all-nighters. Doing that twice in two weeks would be a major trial, even for someone half my age! Although I was nearly delirious due to sleep deprivation, not sleeping did make it easier to deal with jet lag, despite the 12-hour difference meaning daytime was suddenly night and nighttime suddenly was day.

Contrary to the warnings I was given, I found it much easier traveling east, because I got home in the evening and could immediately collapse in bed, whereas on my outbound trip, I had arrived at 7am and had a whole day ahead of me before I could (or should) go to sleep.

With only four days in KL, and three each in Singapore and Phuket, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t have the chance to do any biking, or visit more than one Buddhist vihara, and little local food or shopping. I’ve been spoiled by my trips to Scotland and St. Thomas, where I had weeks—if not months—to explore and get to know my destination, which I vastly prefer. With Inna based in KL, I should have devoted more than two weeks, but I’d been a little apprehensive, and didn’t want to distract her from work, either.

Of course, that was all balanced by the wonders we did experience, such as Singapore’s Gardens By The Bay, Phuket’s Tiger Kingdom, and swimming in the Andaman Sea. I have some amazing photos and memories that I’ll always treasure.

And I enjoyed swimming in the hotel roof pools each morning. Though I felt a little awkward doing so, the epitome of the idle rich white man. After all, I had nothing better to do than travel from snowy Pittsburgh to Southeast Asia to lie around all day and absorb the equatorial sun while everyone else was working their mundane day jobs. Coming from middle-class roots, I’m just not comfortable with the idea of such conspicuous self-indulgence.

Beyond the passport stamps, the tropical sun, and the exotic sights, the main reason behind my trip was spending time with Inna, seeing how she was making out, and doing what I could to relieve some of the familiar stress that comes with working abroad.

Fortunately, over the weeks and months, Inna has gotten comfortable with her clients and confident in her role and what’s expected of her. So many elements of her project remind me of my half-year deployment in St. Thomas, which was strenuous, amazing, and absolutely off-the-charts ridiculous. The day she left Pittsburgh, I wrote that “I’m incredibly proud of her career progress”, and three months later, that sense of pride has only increased. She’s been kicking ass, and it’s awesome to see.

I’m surprised that despite the equatorial heat, Inna has taken to Kuala Lumpur, to the extent that she might be open to extending her stay. I will, of course, be very interested in how that question resolves itself in coming months.

Continuing the topic of stress, this trip was a test for Inna and I, and our ability to work together under challenging conditions. We made it harder for ourselves by not discussing our plans for our two weekends until the absolute last minute. I’m particularly thankful for her willingness to handle the arrangements for Singapore and Phuket while I was comatose in bed trying to catch up on sleep.

As with any partnership, we each had our moments of difficulty and irritability to work through, but in the end we made a great team, helped one another out, achieved most of what we wanted to do, and built an immense pile of memories together that we can share and cherish.

I don’t like her living on the opposite side of the planet, but it did afford me the opportunity and the impetus for a once in a lifetime trip: one I’d dreamed about for years. I’m glad to have taken that rare opportunity, and to have shared such a memorable experience with the woman I love.

Having read this through, if you’re interested, here are links to more images and text about my trip.

• My full Malaysia photoset
• My Singapore weekend blogpost
• My full Singapore weekend photoset
• Inna’s Singapore Day 1 and Day 2 blogposts
• My Phuket weekend blogpost
• My full Phuket weekend photoset
• Inna’s Phuket overview and Tiger Kingdom blogposts
• My trip videos

Inna wanted to go to the 2017 Meetin national celebration in Seattle in September, and it made sense to piggyback that with a detour up to Victoria BC to visit my brother, since—after my mother’s death—he’s unlikely to be coming east any longer.

The logistics were enough of a nightmare that we actually needed a travel agent’s services. Inna and her mother flew direct to SFO to visit family for a few days. Then Inna flew OAK (not SFO) to SEA while I simultaneously got from PIT to SEA via IAD. After the Meetin gathering, we’d take the ferry to Victoria BC, then eventually get home flying Air Canada together from YYJ to YYZ to PIT. Meanwhile, Inna’s mother returned on a direct flight from SFO. Yeah. Glad to have an agent handle all that.

Seattle Skyline & Rainier

Danger Man

Self-Portrait in Steel

Inna's on the Ball

The Sky's the Limit

Family @ Observatory Hill

Sunken Garden

Japanese Garden

Full Seattle photoset Full Victoria photoset

Tuesday, the day before I left, was memorable for two reasons.

First, having just gotten over a three-week long summer cold, I woke up with another sore throat, heralding another ugly illness spanning the duration of the trip.

Second, that evening I had a ticket to go see “Walk With Me”, a movie centered around Buddhist icon Thich Nhat Hanh’s meditative community at Plum Village. Between this and other previous films, I’ve become convinced that the medium of film really isn’t a good vehicle for introducing Buddhist philosophy to the masses. But that’s really not a topic for this blogpost…

After I returned home, my sore throat left me with a sleepless night before an early Wednesday morning walk to the bus stop, then a two-bus expedition out to the Pittsburgh airport. Having lived without owning a car for more than twenty years, I hadn’t even thought about driving!

My first flight—from Pittsburgh to DC—was delayed 30 minutes by a maintenance issue, causing me to skip my planned combined breakfast and lunch as I loped through Dulles seeking my connecting flight.

After five hours with absolutely zero legroom in a United cattle car, I touched down at SeaTac hungry, tired, and sick. I ignored the seventeen text messages from our catsitting friend and hoofed it to the Uber lot to meet up with Inna, who had flown in separately from Oakland CA.

Although I’ve made half a dozen trips to the PNW, I’d never been to Seattle, so everything here was new to me.

After a lengthy drive into downtown Seattle, we tried to check into our hotel—the Inn at the WAC—only to discover that our room wasn’t ready. We had only planned to drop our bags before heading out for dinner anyways, so we simply got a recommendation from the desk clerk and headed straight to the nearby Tap House Grill. I had a French dip sandwich and ice cream, while Inna ordered shrimp and tiramisu ice cream, which wound up being her favorite meal of the trip.

We returned to the hotel to find a tray with hot tea, cocoa, a chocolate bar, and a handwritten note—to Mr. and Mrs. Nirenburg—waiting in our room, since the staff had overheard Inna mentioning my illness. Inna tracked down Sheela and Monika, our Pittsburgh friends who were also attending the Meetin gathering, and the four of us chatted briefly in our room. After a long day of travel for me, we opted to skip arrival-day festivities in favor of rest and a quiet evening in bed.

Thursday morning we were up early to join a small group of Meetin people exploring Pike Place Market. Along the way, I snagged a cinnamon bun for breakfast. We observed the market’s outdated manual daily stall-assignment ceremony, then took a brief guided tour with still more Meetin peeps. With tired legs, Inna and I wandered off for some overpriced ice cream. Then I spied a stall selling roasted corn on the cob, but balked at the ludicrous $5 price tag. We both eyed the beautiful ristra hot pepper arrangements—each for different reasons—but realized they would be impossible to transport back to Pittsburgh.

We joined another big Meetin group for lunch at the Pike Brewing Company, but left before ordering when Inna realized she wasn’t sure if she had forgotten her medications in San Francisco. That led to an afternoon of phone tag with doctors and chasing around drugstores before we returned to the hotel, where she found them hidden in the bottom of her bag.

But along the way, Inna picked up some dahlias for our room, and I ducked into Metsker Maps, where a postcard with a bicycle and the phrase “Conquer the Hill” called out to me in anticipation of my upcoming Dirty Dozen ride.

Tired after so much walking, we were content to rest in the hotel until the evening event: a meet-and-greet at the top of Smith Tower. On the way, we experienced elevator malfunctions in both our hotel and our destination. Smith Tower is a lot like Boston’s Custom House Tower. Both are about 35 stories and 490 feet tall, with an open-air skywalk observation deck at the top. We took a few pictures of the view, then went in to chat with other Meetin folks. Those included Mary McDaid (Portland OR), event organizers Anita Christensen (Portland) and Helene Pincus (Las Vegas), and I had to interrogate Deanna Cochener, whose cellphone case loudly announced that she was a Portland Timbers supporter.

Afterward we wandered around with Monika, stopping to admire the Seattle Public Library. The steep hills in downtown Seattle were vaguely reminiscent of Pittsburgh, and we shared an uncomfortable laugh when one woman apologized to us as her dog’s feces literally rolled and bounced down the steep sidewalk into our path. In Westlake Park plaza we found a giant-sized Connect Four game, and I promptly destroyed Inna twice running, despite never having played before. The girls stopped in a mall for Pike Place Chowder, while I brought a theoretically fast Mod Pizza back to the room.

Friday was really the main Meetin day. After Uber failed us—and charged us anyways—we got ourselves invited to share a Lyft summoned by New Yorkers Ricky Evans & Zhenya Brisker. That dropped us at the morning’s activity: a duck tour. While waiting, Inna & I chatted with Laurelee Langan, who was there representing Boston. Despite my having been through at least two dozen duck tours, the tour itself was fine, featuring Amazon’s HQ, the Fremont Troll, houseboats and floatplanes on Lake Union, and lots more. Near the Belltown Apartments, the tour guide indicated we were passing through a quiet zone, which I happily observed, having lived for ten years on the Boston duck tour route myself.

Afterward, rather than spending $33 each to get into the Museum of Pop Culture, we opted to visit a local food court with Sheela and Portlanders Bijana & Ankesh Kadakia. Still illin’, nothing appealed to me but fries.

After lunch, the “Meeps” gathered up again to go through the Chihuly Garden and Glass museum. The exhibit was short but breathtaking. In the middle of the tour, I remembered to show people that the abstract background image on my cellphone has for many years been a close-up of a green-and-yellow work of Chihuly glass that I took back at the 2000 Dargon Summit at Pittsburgh’s Phipps Conservatory, which you can see here.

After that, Inna and I returned briefly to the food court before walking down to the Olympic Sculpture Park and rejoining the larger group. We wandered around, enjoying another warm, sunny afternoon. While resting at one point, a kid ran up to Inna asking in an incredulous voice, “Hey lady, is that your belly?!?” She was taken aback but about to respond affirmatively when the kid’s caretaker came up to explain that the kid wasn’t actually referring to her stomach, but the rumbling sound of a nearby passing train!

I walked down to the harborside, having a nice conversation with Bijana, before the group split again, with most people headed predictably toward a bar. Meanwhile, Cha Cha Chen (DC) and I collected Inna and ambled off to meet Anita and the main group of Meeps for a ride up the Space Needle.

The Space Needle was a lot like Boston’s Customs House Tower and the Smith Tower from the day before: a reception room and elevators surrounded by a narrow exterior observation deck. The main difference is that the Needle was crowded to absolute capacity. But it did provide the requisite view of the city, the bay, and the mountains in the distance.

Inna & I were among the first to punt and make our way to the Belltown Pub, the first stop in the group’s planned bar crawl. I had a chicken sandwich and a cookie while we chatted with Helene and Ricky. Eventually we’d skip the bar crawl and drag Helene, Ricky, Zhenya, Sheela, and Monika back to the hotel’s common room for an evening of games: specifically Cheating Moth and Coup.

Saturday that same group got together for breakfast, having been lured away from the Meetin brunch by the promise of Quaffles—waffles made out of croissant dough and cinnamon—at Anchorhead Coffee. On the way there, we posed beneath a huge flower pot and watering can sculpture, and got unexpectedly sprayed with water. The Quaffles made up for it, as probably the best food we had during the entire trip.

Having no interest in the Meetin group activities planned for that day, Inna and I shooed the others away and walked aimlessly around the city, winding up at a Russian bakery called Piroshky Piroshky that Inna had sought out. She sampled their pelmeni (little dumplings), piroshki (potato and cabbage dumplings), and Napoleon cake, but pronounced them all mediocre. Then back to Pioneer Square, where I dragged Inna into Magic Mouse Toys and picked up perennial favorite Fluxx, while waiting for our underground tour.

In brief, Seattle used to have problematic above-ground sewage pipes. Then, after Seattle’s big fire, they decided to put them underground… Not by digging trenches, but by running them down the middle of the street, then filling them over and putting an elevated street over the top. Meanwhile, as buildings were being rebuilt, owners were required to build their primary entrances on the second floor, rather than the first. Wooden planks allowed people to get from the elevated street to the elevated second-floor entrances, spanning the open pits that was the old sidewalks, since they were still at the former street level. The old sidewalks were never filled in, just eventually roofed over, leaving downtown Seattle a maze of underground sidewalks connecting the basements (former first floors) of the surrounding buildings. Much of this work was financed by the mistress of several houses of ill repute. It was an interesting tour.

After that, we wandered around town some more, checking out Seattle’s K&L Gates building, the “Pittsburgh” Lunch, and so forth. Then hopped an Uber to take us to the suburban Seattle Meowtropolitan cat cafe, where we enjoyed some time with a few blasé felines. After an Uber back, I picked up a very yummy dinner from Mae Phim Thai. I spent the evening resting in the hotel room while Inna rejoined the Meetin crew for karaoke.

It felt odd to me, because the Meetin event was nominally a weekend thing, but we’d spent the entire day Saturday on our own. It felt like the social element of the trip had petered out, doubly so because our ferry to Victoria prohibited us from attending the farewell brunch on Sunday.

So the next morning we slept in a little, had a decent breakfast in the hotel, ran into Ricky and Zhenya in the lobby, and made our way to the ferry.

Looking back on Seattle, it seemed an okay town, but throughout its history it seems to have been very poorly slapped together, whether you’re thinking about their former sewage problems or the current explosive growth accompanying Microsoft and Amazon. We did have absolutely gorgeous, sunny weather up until the day we departed, but it’s probably a lot less fun in the rain. The accommodations were really great, except for the horrible elevators. My cold was mostly manageable, but I did wish I’d had the strength to bring my SLR camera along. And the Meetin group were generally enjoyable, although predictably more party- and drinking-oriented than Inna and I.

But overall, I really enjoyed my time in Seattle and could have stayed longer.

At the dock, our Victoria Clipper ferry bobbed and weaved in the wind-blown rain and heavy seas, and Inna didn’t have a particularly pleasant 90 minutes crossing over to Victoria. And as expected, we didn’t get passport stamps for our entry into Canada; cheap bastards.

However, by the time we docked, the seas had calmed and the sun was out, and we walked through downtown and past the Empress Hotel on the way to our lodgings at the Hotel Rialto. After nearly a year, it was really, really enjoyable to be outside the authority of the Trump Presidency. Tired from our journey, we had Indian at nearby Sizzling Tandoor before going back to the hotel and crashing.

Monday I let Inna sleep late, then we hoofed it through Chinatown to pick up our rental car, where we wound up with a RAV4 rather than a VW because the Hertz dealer somehow lost the keys when he got out of the vehicle after driving it up. We’d hoped to drive along the coastline of Vancouver Island up to my brother’s home, but had to settle for the inland highway because they were pressed for time.

We had Thai food for lunch and a nice visit with my brother, plus my sister-in-law, whom I haven’t seen in several years. We took separate cars and met up at the top of Observatory Hill for a brisk but breathtaking panoramic view of the island. Then they headed home while I took Inna up to Victoria’s famous Butchart Gardens.

The gardens were predictably amazing, and predictably crowded. What didn’t run according to plan was the weather, as the predicted day-long rain held off completely. Inna bought me some gelato in the Italian garden, and we took our time enjoying the scenery.

Tired from the walking we’d done all week, we gave up on dinner and just got some basics at 7-Eleven, including some products that you’d have to find in imported food shops at home.

Tuesday morning we wandered around downtown a bit. We looked into the John Fluevog shoe store, chatted with the proprietor of North48 Bicycles, perused the surprisingly well-stocked MEC sporting goods co-op (c.f. REI), and discovered Baggins Shoes, who will print any custom design you want onto a pair of Chuck Taylors or Vans. Then we had brunch with my brother at Willy’s, a diner in town. Sadly, my sister-in-law’s back trouble prevented her from tagging along.

After saying farewell to my brother, Inna and I moseyed down to Craigdarroch Castle—a Victorian mansion rather than a medieval castle, of course—which was cute but not particularly engaging, though Inna found some interest in the stained glass and examples of actual filled-out “dance cards”. By the time we dragged ourselves back to the hotel, we were both completely done with the walking and tourist thing and ready to go home. We had dinner at the hotel—a cube of mac and cheese, topped with tandoori chicken!—before showering, checking into our homeward flights, and turning in.

Wednesday we were up and out, with a quick drive up to Victoria’s leetle jetport. Our Air Canada flight to Toronto was long but uneventful. YYZ was a nightmare of maze-like corridors, eventually leading to a mid-corridor dungeon of a waiting area, with a tileless suspended ceiling and bare light fixtures dangling from their wires. Impatient to get home, we took an Uber from the airport rather than wait for the bus, and were very happy to arrive.

Inna enjoyed Victoria and would have liked to have spent more time there. Like Seattle, we were very fortunate to enjoy unseasonable and atypically good weather. It was especially nice to see my sister-in-law, since her health hasn’t permitted her to travel for some time.

Between the two cities, it was a pretty successful trip, though as always it was really nice to get back home again.

When I go back to Maine, it’s usually a quick trip that doesn’t involve anything more than visiting family and doing a few basic chores for them. After a long trip to get there, and facing an equally tiring trip back, the last thing I usually want to do is sightseeing or a lot of driving around.

However, I recently brought Inna along on her first visit to Maine in decades, while my brother and niece were in also town. Because of that, we spent a lot of our time doing touristy stuff and taking photos, which makes the trip worth writing about and sharing.

We attempted to leave Pittsburgh Tuesday afternoon, but were thwarted at the gate when our first flight was delayed beyond our connection’s departure time. Worse yet, our fallback was a 6am flight the next morning, which meant we had to get out of bed at 3am!

After a pizza and way too little sleep, we drove back to the airport, to discover a longer security line than I’ve ever encountered in Pittsburgh. But we got through it, flew to Dulles, and happily made our connection to Portland. The only redeeming part of the early morning flights was the view as we flew directly above Boston.

Landing in Portland a little early, we grabbed our rental car and I took Inna on a quick tour of infinitely-famous Portland Head Light and the Eastern Prom before driving up to Augusta. Inna met the family, and we spent the afternoon swimming at Three Cornered Pond, which (as an ocean swimmer) was a new experience for Inna. After demolishing a roast turkey breast, we checked into our hotel and passed out.

Thursday Inna and I went off on our own and explored the coast. We drove up Mt. Battie, which provided an awesome view of Camden and the islands peeking above a thick sea fog. We also explored the wooded, rocky shoreline along Camden Hills State Park, which was interesting and new to me. Then came the inevitable tourist shopping crawl through Camden. After grabbing lunch, we were off down the coast to Popham Beach, where we hiked across the huge expanse of sand and dipped our feet in the frigid Atlantic Ocean.

Then it was time to head back to Augusta to meet the family for Thai food (or in Inna’s case, sushi). Although we covered a lot of territory, Inna and I hadn’t pushed ourselves beyond our already-exhausted state, and wound up having a really nice day together.

Friday was a whole-family expedition back down to the coast for a traditional lobster dinner at Shaw’s Wharf in New Harbor. Then we went on to Pemaquid Point, where Inna and I crawled around on the rocks for a few minutes. I was a little disappointed that the rest of the family wanted to turn homeward after visiting the gift shop, rather than spending any time enjoying the surf crashing on the rugged rocks. But even I was tired from eating and so much gallivanting around, and the responsible parties had to be home in time for a cable serviceman to hook up my mother’s new tv. So we headed home.

Inna and I said our goodbyes before going to the hotel, since we had to be up at 5am the next day (again!) to catch our 8am return flight. We hopped through Newark (our original layover location), where we had plenty of time to hang out before our afternoon flight back to Pittsburgh.

We were both dragging and eager to get home when we took the airport shuttle back to our car, only to discover that the battery was dead, putting up one final roadblock between us and getting home. That was corrected after an hour of sitting in a hot parking lot. We eventually pulled into our driveway and received a loud welcome from a our cat peering from the open bedroom window.

It was a very nice trip, and Inna and I both really enjoyed seeing the sights along the coast. It was unfortunate that we lost a day in Maine due to the travel mess. And all the early-morning travel thoroughly exhausted us, so we were both ecstatic when we finally got back home.

Oh yeah, and for the whole photo album, click here.

Because they only last 45 minutes, summers in New England can get pretty busy. Take the past couple weeks, for example. Here’s a day-by-day account of the past 14 days…

17 Wed

After a regular day at work, I received a call from someone interested in buying my condo unrenovated. That was about an hour before my contractor arrived to sign the contract for my bathroom renovation, which I then put off until I had a chance to speak to my real estate agent. And an hour after that, my best friend Inna arrived from Pittsburgh to begin a two-day visit.

18 Thu

Spent the day with Inna, but also met with the real estate agent to determine whether to proceed with my renovations or not.

19 Fri

Spent the morning with Inna before seeing her off on a flight to Germany. Spent the remains of the day packing for the next day’s bike ride.

20 Sat

Spent about nine hours in the saddle, biking 130 miles from Boston to Provincetown in my annual Outriders ride (writeup). Kicked around Provincetown until my late-night ferry back to Boston.

21 Sun

One precious day of rest, which was badly needed, since I seemed to be developing a sore throat.

22 Mon

After a regular work day, ran home to change into fancy clothes for an evening cruise of Boston Harbor to celebrate my employer’s 10,000th client. Very tired from too much socializing, biking, and lack of sleep!

23 Tue

You might call this a day of rest, except that it included work, laundry, a grocery run, and packing for another bike ride. And my sore throat was getting worse…

24 Wed

I biked in to work, and after work biked out to Waltham to pick up my registration packet for the weekend’s MS Ride.

25 Thu

Led a contingent of co-workers on a 70-mile bike ride up to Ipswitch and back for Buildium’s beach day summer event (writeup). More energy-sapping socializing! Kinda scraped myself up playing beach soccer.

26 Fri

A regular work day, but it included a free, private ice cream truck as a reward for being nominated in Boston’s best places to work survey!

27 Sat

Woke up at 4am to ride down to UMass Boston, and then another 100 miles to Bourne with friends from Buildium for the Cape Cod Getaway MS Ride (writeup). Stayed overnight in a Mass Maritime Academy dorm. (Note that I said “stayed overnight”, not “slept”.)

28 Sun

Sunday’s 75-mile MS Ride to Provincetown was cancelled due to weather: 55 mph winds, record cold, and record rainfall. We got soaked to the bone just getting from the cafeteria to the bus outside that would bring us back to Boston, and I got completely and utterly drenched after riding 4 wind-blown miles from UMass back to my condo. Yes, I still had my cold, too.

29 Mon

After working half a day despite illness, Inna flew back into town for another quick visit on her return trip from Europe.

30 Tue

Took half a day to see Inna back to the airport and on a flight home, and then enjoyed a surprise four and a half hour planning meeting due to shifting priorities at work that promise to make the next few months extremely challenging.

Knowing how insane June was going to be, I intentionally left this Fourth of July holiday weekend COMPLETELY open. So now I’m enjoying napping throughout the day, recovering from my cold, being completely anti-social, and writing up some blog entries to share what’s been going on.

It was nice to have interesting things to do in June, but I’m very happy to have this brief, quiet respite at the moment.