Part the Next: Arrival in Adelaide.

As we were landing in Adelaide, I tried cracking some jokes as we cautiously headed for the car rental office. We wondered whether they'd sent a confirmation while we were mid-flight or if they'd come up with some new way to throw us for a loop. Fortunately, we were arriving during business hours and we figured that someone would be in the rental office and thus, we'd have a better chance of getting the car we were supposed to have. The nice lady at the agency greeted us warmly and said something about it being odd that we'd reserved two cars instead of one.

We didn't need or want two rental cars, but I thought this was better than having no rental car at all like the last time. Once we sorted out the extra car, the rental process went like normal, and we found ourselves with a much cleaner car than the secondhand one we'd used last time around. We headed south, on our way to Kangaroo Island.

Kangaroo Island is named, in the honorable Australian tradition of Not Creative, for two things: 1) it's populated by a lot of kangaroos; and 2) it's an island. D explained how they name things down here and recalled a conversation with her friend Peter:

“Peter, what do they call those brown snakes?”
“Brown Snakes.”
“And those green frogs that live in trees?”

“Green Tree Frogs.”

 

So we drove south toward the ferry landing. I've ridden a LOT of ferries. Having lived on the watery side of British Columbia when I was a lad, we often rode the 3 hour ferry from the US to Canada, rode other ferries from the mainland to Vancouver Island, rode smaller ferries from Nanaimo to Gabriola Island (plus lots of other small islands up there), and throughout the rest of my life up to the present, rode all the ferries that go to the various San Juan Islands on the US side and even rode ferries between islands. And it's always the same: drive to the parking lot, buy a ticket at the ticket booth, park the car in the line and wait for the boat. The parking lot holds as many cars the ferry itself, so if there isn't room in the lot, you wait for the next boat. Very straightforward stuff.

 

When the boat arrives, drive aboard and either take a nap in the car or head to the above decks for the ride. Or stand on the car deck and watch the sea rush past. Given how well this works, it had never occurred to me that anyone would ever have reason to completely corrupt a perfect system and replace it with pure idiocy.

 

We pulled into the ferry line and noticed that there weren't very many cars. Cool. There also wasn't a ticket booth, which made no sense at all. The helpful guy who was letting the other cars onto the ferry explained that we had to go buy tickets at the lounge, a scant 100 yards away, across the flow of traffic that was getting off and on the ferry. Given that the unloading and loading didn't look too streamlined, I figured I had time to get tickets before this boat departed.

 

I'd been warned, about a thousand times, about the heat in Australia. January is what they call “summer.” And it was January. Everyone had made a big deal about how hot it was going to be. Turns out, though, that January here (at least this January) was almost exactly like January in Portland – low 40s, heavy rain, wind blowing sideways. Not knowing any better, I'd dressed for the thing we Americans call summer and was wearing a pair of shorts, flipflops and t-shirt. This was the kind of rain that had you soaked through in moments, so by the time I made it to the lounge, I'd been thoroughly rinsed 4 or 5 times. I should've brought shampoo.

 

I went inside to buy the ticket and learned that to buy a ferry ticket in Australia, you have to provide the names and ages of the passengers (this I knew off the top of my head), the license number of the car (of course, I had no idea what this might be), proof that you have travel insurance (safely tucked away in D's purse back in the car), evidence that you have accommodations arranged ahead of time (ditto that) and enough money to spend while you're on the island that you won't create some kind of fiscal burden for the locals.

 

Once you do all of that, and even after you pay, you still don't get your ticket.

 

This 'proof of everything' process allows you to buy a voucher which you can then exchange for the actual tickets. After a trip back to the car through the sideways rain, I was able to secure all of the necessary information we'd need to trade the voucher I'd just bought for the tickets we actually needed. We did manage to negotiate passage on the boat that was coming in another hour, then arranged for our return trip because that also had to be scheduled ahead of time. Otherwise, I was warned, we might find ourselves stranded on Kangaroo Island for several days while we waited for an empty slot on their apparently always full ferries. Once that was done, I asked to trade our voucher for our tickets.

 

“No. You can't get your tickets until the prior boat pulls away from the dock.”

 

I was certain I'd misunderstood, so I asked for clarification. “Are you saying that I have to wait until the boat that's here right now leaves before I can get tickets for the boat that leaves in another hour?”

 

“Yes.”

 

I was now thinking that airlines might not be the most absurd and poorly staffed excuse for transportation.

 

I was also wary, though, as D had warned me about the Aussie sense of humor. Apparently it includes a lot of bullshitting, which is designed to keep you guessing which parts of any given statement might actually be true. So if someone says "watch out for Drop Bears," they might be playing a funny joke on the tourist, and if they say "watch out for man-eating crocodiles," they might really be sincere. But the delivery is exactly the same for the thing that's a joke and the thing that might kill you instantly.

 

As soon as the wrong boat pulled away from the dock, a flood of voucher-holding passengers lined up to get their tickets. The system ensures that everyone has to crowd into the lounge and stand in line at least twice. Apparently this is better than driving up to a ticket booth while enjoying the dry comfort of your car, buying a ticket from the friendly ferry ticket person while enjoying the dry comfort of your car and waiting in line while enjoying the dry comfort of your car like we do back home. Maybe our system is different because it rains a lot in the Pacific Northwest and Kangaroo Island is in a dry part of the world. Unless we're visiting, when the whole of South Australia becomes completely soaked everywhere.

 

The extra steps are probably related to the cost, too. The ride takes about the same amount of time as a ride from the mainland in Washington State to Orcas island... but the ticket costs SIX TIMES as much. Even with the exchange rate. For that much more scratch, I'd think they'd have a really slick system in place.

We waited in the lounge until the next boat – our boat – was pulling up to the dock, then walked through the sideways rain and cold – summer, I reminded myself – and made our way back to the car. I groused about having to walk laps across the parking lot in the cold rain while all three of us were fighting the same sinus infection that Eli had picked up on the flight from Hong Kong. We kept him well hydrated but after a few days with no improvement we'd tried out the health clinic in Albany that I mentioned earlier and found that he had an infection in his throat, sinuses and one of his ears.

And though we're loath to do it, we'd started him on another round of antibiotics. His appetite came back on about the fifth day, then his humor, then his interest in things other than just sleeping or laying in Momma's arms. But on this day, as we waited for the ferry, he was still awfully fussy and uncomfortable and not well suited to hanging around outside in the stormy weather.

And of course, shortly after he'd first showed symptoms, Daria had gotten the same bug, and then I got it too. We three have been more sick in the last two months than in the last several years. Our tissues made it clear that D and I were also powering through a substantial sinus infection. Yuk. We've also exhausted the tissue supply in South Australia.

So we got into the car, got Eli into his car seat (this is a lot like trying to put socks on an octopus whose head is full of PCP) and drove up to the guy taking the tickets. He explained that passengers aren't allowed to ride in cars that are boarding the ferry. D replied:

“I have a child in the car seat.”
“He'll have to be carried.”

Having never had to do this before despite riding a hundred different ferries, I quickly realized that the Aussie system for embarking on ferries is, simply, a Crock of Shit.

I took our unhappy and still hollering son back out of the car and into the rain, pulled his now soaked fleece jacket over his also soaked long sleeved onesie, asked the guy exactly where we were supposed to wait, and headed to the gangplank he so helpfully pointed out. On the way, I passed another ferry employee and asked him also, just so I didn't make any further mistakes. He promptly reiterated what the first guy had said – that gangplank.

E and I went and stood on the gangplank with a couple other people. In the cold sideways raining summer morning. All the cars got on the boat. Then all the people who were traveling with dogs got on the boat. Foot passengers did not get on the boat. After a few minutes, D came to the side of the boat and hollered down to me, asking why I was standing outside. Apparently it wasn't obvious and must not have appeared a smart thing to be doing with a sick kid, so I explained that this is where both of the sadist ferry operators had told me to wait. She encouraged me to go inside and wait there. I wondered whether or not we'd be allowed inside, or once inside whether we'd be allowed outside.

I went inside and walked up to the voucher-not-ticket counter and asked the woman there where I could wait for the boat.

“Right outside that door, on the gangplank.” That's where we'd been when D suggested we get out of the rain moments prior.

“If I wait inside, can I be sure I don't miss the boat?”

“You can wait inside if you want.” She emphasized 'want' the way that you do when you're giving someone permission to do something that's obviously stupid and you want to make sure they realize that they're stupid even though your position prevents you from speaking in plain terms to customers. This was alright with me, as I'd abandoned any hope of being considered anything other than a complete idiot as far as anyone who'd even heard of Australia, let alone any of the actual Australians, was concerned. There's a confidence that accompanies this 'resignation to stupidness.' Maybe you've witnessed it yourself.

So E and I waited inside for about ten seconds, and then he started trying to open the door that led to the sodden gangplank, and when I wouldn't let him open the door, he started screaming, then he banged his head against the door a few times before I could grab him and flopped down on his back and writhed around in the misery known only by sick 21 month old boys who want their nurturing Mommy instead of their lousy Daddy. Then he got up and pushed his way through the door, and we calmly waited outside.

A few minutes later, we got on the boat. For whatever reason, we walked in through the entry door and into the lounge but were directed out the aft door onto the outside deck, up a flight of stairs, then walked the length of the boat along the topside deck (which really ought to be called “the roof,” as it offered zero protection from the elements) to the forward door, down two flights of stairs, along a short hallway, and then up another set of steps until we were about 30 feet from the door we'd come in through in the first place. I thought about methods of scuttling a craft such as this.

Even now, warm and dry and unbothered, I can't make sense of the process.

There wasn't a dry spot anywhere on E or myself. D changed him in the bathroom (I could tell which bathroom, as he never stopped with the loud protests), then she dried his clothes under the hand drier. When we arrived on the other side, rather than follow whatever rules for disembarking might exist, the three of us sneaked brazenly stomped our way to the car and drove off the boat.

Welcome to Kangaroo Island.

Loi-Lovre World Tour 2015, Part 2.

Really, this is part three of a series. But it's called Part 2 because it's the second installment from the year 2015. I didn't really plan that very well. Sorry.

Part Three: Arrival in Perth.

We landed, went through customs (simple), picked up our bags (simple) then got into a very long line for the security check. I think most of what they're looking for in security is related to animals and produce, and for whatever reason, they aren't all that suspicious of married couples traveling with toddlers. We got waved right through without anyone looking inside our bags.

Australia has good reason to be careful about people bringing animals and produce into the country. I know this, because one of their most popular reality shows is all about their TSA equivalents catching people trying to smuggle those things (and untaxed cigarettes) into the country. As far as the animals go, today's caution stems largely from a past event in which the colonizing Brits (is there any other kind?) thought it'd be fun to hunt (and probably eat) rabbits in Australia. So they imported rabbits. Of course, the rabbits reproduced in magnificent numbers. Partly because there weren't any predators to eat them, and partly because that's what rabbits do. They also eat all the stuff that indigenous species were eating before the rabbits' arrival, which kind off screws with the previously existing natural balance of things.

Fortunately, this infestation of rabbits and the devastation of the greenery didn't escape the keen eyed imperialists colonists. The obvious thing to do was to import some foxes. Foxes like to eat rabbits, so the rabbit problem would certainly and quickly be solved, plus Brits with horses and hounds like to hunt foxes, so in the unlikely event that the fox population got unwieldy, the proper response would be to simply expand the areas in which fox hunts are conducted by bringing the dignified hobby of fox hunting to this newly acquired bit of British real estate. Pretty much everyone wins. Except the rabbits. And the things that the rabbits squeezed out by taking the food. And the veggies that the rabbits were decimating by eating.

So the foxes came along and were delighted to find that Australia was ripe with prey, most of which was much easier to catch than a rabbit. Recall that Oz is home to the critter aptly named “sloth.” Anyway, the foxes went about eating lots of startled native species that hadn't ever had to worry about predators before and hadn't yet evolved into things that can run or dig or fly. Hunting was easy, so the foxes pretty much ignored the rabbits in the process. Before long, this led to an excess of both rabbits and foxes, and further compromised the prior status quo as far as the natural balance of things. I am unaware of how effective the pony riding Brits' hunting expeditions may have been in eradicating either the rabbits or the foxes. There are still rabbits and there are still foxes there, so I guess the success rate wasn't 100%. Weird, huh?

After getting a quick wave through security, we were finally walking to the car rental desk area of the airport. The [low budget] company we'd rented a car from doesn't have a desk in the airport, which we didn't know until we couldn't find them. D borrowed a phone from the nice guy at the Hertz desk and called the number, which connected her to one of those robots that say something about how important your call is and how sorry they are to not be available. Press 1 for this, press 2 for that, press 3 for some other thing, and finally a real person answered.

… a real person who answers the phone at the local government's “Reporting a Traffic Emergency” office hotline. They had no idea how we'd gotten through to them by dialing through the phone system at the car rental place. Though perhaps urgent, our situation didn't seem to merit a response by emergency personnel.

D hung up, called again and this time got through to another guy who told us that the car rental company we'd booked with was closed for the day. He's the guy who picks up after hours customers and takes them to their reserved cars,.When the regular office has an after hours customer, they bring the rental paperwork and the car to another location (where this guy was), and then he takes care of handing off the car and getting the proper signatures on the forms. But the problem was that the rental company hadn't left a car for any after hours customers that day. No keys, no contract, nothing.

D explained our situation. It was now after 8 pm on a Sunday, darker and colder than we'd expected for Australia, we were a 40 minute drive away from our lodging, and we were two hungry people with a very feverish sick kid. The guy said “hold on,” then after a couple minutes returned to the phone. “Some other customers left a car here a couple hours ago, and we've got a dozen or so car seats for kids, so how about I come pick you up and you can just have this car?”

YES.

So we took that car, and about a half hour down the road we realized we hadn't signed a contract, no one had copies of our licenses, and we hadn't given them a credit card number (though the rental was prepaid, you still have to provide that in case you wreck their car). I made a joke about driving a stolen car that's fitted with a GPS locator, but my beloved bride wasn't laughing. At all.

Our lodging was at a B&B which offered a converted railroad mail car for lodging. It was very quaint, very comfortable and very cute. We slept pretty well despite the kiddo being really out of sorts, and in the morning we awoke, wondering what idiot's car alarm was blaring outside. We wondered this for a few minutes and talked about how inconsiderate some people can be at such an early daylight hour. Then we noticed that our son was playing with the rental car key fob. Ahem.

We headed further south, and after we'd driven another couple hours away from Perth we got a phone call from a woman at the car rental place. I'll call her “Amateur Assertive,” as she started off pretty certain that we ought to not have the car and that we should return to their office to trade it for the proper car right away. They'd sent a confirmation email, she said, about three hours before we'd landed. D explained that three hours before we landed, we were on an airplane and she had no way to check her email mid-flight. Then we found out they'd sent the confirmation email to the agency in the US that had arranged the rental in the first place, which meant that we'd never see it anyway.

I thought it was kind of silly for a car rental place that serves an international airport to send confirmation emails to their customers during a time that their customer s would certainly still be on airplanes. We had a copy of their contract, and it clearly stated we'd be landing after hours and thus picking up the car after hours. And it was prepaid, so leaving a car for us – just in case we actually showed up – seemed reasonable to me.

D reminded me of the exchange she'd had with the car rental company when she was trying to arrange a child seat. She sent three emails, two of which had gone unanswered. The third one got a reply that said something like “for such inquiries, you'll need to contact the Perth office.” Her inquiry had been addressed to – and was answered by – perthoffice@rentalcarclowns.com.au, so we'd really been at a loss to make sense of it. She'd finally called in person during Australia's business hours so that she could talk to someone in person and get things sorted out that way.

After a short conversation with D, the car rental customer service lady was – without us asking – discounting our rate and telling us what a horrible thing it was that a car rental place would do something like this to a mother with a sick child in the dark on a Sunday. Of course it would be fine for us to keep the car. They asked us to check the oil and the tire pressures just to be sure everything was ok. I checked the oil (there was some), and the tires looked mostly round so we gave it our own stamp of approval.

We drove through very cute small towns along the way, ate an abundance of savory pies sold at an abundance of bakeries along the side of the road (these pies are far better than any description can do justice), stopped at some white sand beaches that belong on postcards and for some reason are void of humans, drove through the Australian Valley of the Giants and walked on the Skywalk thing they have there, and a few other touristy things. The scenery and the stops along the way were all really, really interesting. Beaches were just plain stunning. Plants everywhere were beautiful. All of this was eclipsed, more than we'd have liked, by the kiddo still being sick. We had as much fun as we could, but once again we were each worrying more than we admitted.

We had a couple days scheduled to spend in Albany, though we missed most of the things we'd hoped to see because we were fretting over the kiddo. By now, he'd gone a few days without food (but he was drinking lots and lots), so we called the nurse hotline; figured out where the nearest doctor's office was, visited a pediatrician, filled a prescription, and got our typically feisty little boy back on the path to good health. This was a lot less simple and fun that it might seem by that hasty description but it all went over pretty well. And health care for the uninsured tourist is far cheaper in Australia than it is for the over-insured American in America. So there's that.

Among our final stops before returning to Perth was a visit to the city of Freemantle. Known as “Freo” to the Australians, this was the first place we'd been since departing Portland that I actually thought I might be able to live. Lots of great shops, right on the water, huge parks with playgrounds, great food. Mostly, though, it has a really good feel.

We found our B&B pretty easily with our stolen Atlas, and were both concerned and unsurprised to find that the front door was locked. We called the number on the brochure, and whoever answered the door told us the code to unlock the door and where we'd find the key to our room. Easy enough. We had a really pleasant evening walking around the neighborhood and eventually found a restaurant with outdoor seating and a menu that looked pretty good.

For those of you who know me on Facebook, this restaurant is where I took the photo of an $11 bottle [a cute little 12oz bottle] of local beer. A few days prior, I'd paid $9 for a draught pint and that had seemed excessive. For some reason, I'd overlooked that the average price for an average hamburger is $20. Welcome to Australia.

We made good use of the car and returned it when we were done with it. Nobody said anything about us having taken it without a rental contract or that we'd returned it with a road atlas from a different car rental company and a child seat from yet another different company.

Arriving back at the Perth airport, I was happy that we weren't going to fly with Emirates [I hold grudges longer than necessary] nor Scoot [this goes beyond a grudge]. Today I'd try, for the first time, Virgin Airlines. Owned by the fabulous billionaire playboy Sir David Branson, Virgin is known for being fun, staffed by people with a sense of humor, and being way cooler than the typical airline. Given what seems to pass for typical on this half of the globe (think 'Greyhound Bus Lines, 1970' and you'll make sense of it), I was looking forward to something better than the regional status quo.

We were among the very first to board (traveling with a toddler has its benefits) and I stowed our bags in the overhead bin. On every plane we've used thus far on this trip, the bins swing upward and tuck into the ceiling; and given that D (who is not exactly tall) had to stoop to move over to her seat, I went ahead and pushed the underside of the encroaching bin upward.

Except it didn't move. I wiggled it a little, pushed harder, then started looking it over, thinking there must be a safety latch or something. The line of passengers who wanted to find their seats reached from me – in row 24 – to the door at the front of the plane. I should have just moved out of the way, but I wanted to quickly snap the bin closed and be done with it.

A woman 3 or 4 people back in line asked, in perfect Australian, if I was having trouble.

 

“Well, I just want to close the bin, but it seems like it's stuck.”

 

She reached up and pulled the door downward, thus closing the bin. Everyone in the line smirked in a special Aussie way. D said something about me blushing. She said something about me blushing several more times during the flight and she also used the word “hilaaaaaaarious” a lot more than she really needed to. Apparently she and the woman and everyone in line behind me hadn't adequately made their collective point.

 

Virgin did pretty well in this old airplane that seemed like it should have had propellers instead of jet engines and we were in Adelaide pretty quickly. We deplaned, threw about $20 worth of produce (that's 2 apples and 1 banana) into the quarantine bin (which is not easy to find by any stretch of the imagination) as instructed, and picked up our bags and the stroller we'd bought in Overpriced Hong Kong for a triple what it would have cost in the US.

 

Virgin's baggage handlers bent the stroller. The canopy part. We can still use it. I'd been hoping that this flight would be the one that didn't irritate me (aside from the unnecessarily complicated overhead bins), partly because I thought we were due a perfect airline experience by now and partly because Richard Branson is plain sexy and I don't want his toy airline to taint his otherwise perfect image.

 

It finally dawned on me. Airlines, everywhere, are horrible. I love to travel, and enjoy riding in airplanes, I like looking out the window, and I still marvel at the ability to be just about anywhere on Earth within 24 hours. It's pretty close to teleportation magic, really. Despite all that, in this weak moment I instantly became fully convinced that all my future travel would be by boat.

 

And I remained thus convinced until taking a boat while vacationing in Australia.

Loi-Lovre World Tour 2015, Part 1.

In our last installment, which saw us through to the end of 2014, we discussed the relative merits of – among other things – different airline companies. I'm happy to now be an expert in this arena of international travel.

After an insane night of partying with our sleeping toddler and half pint of Ginseng Wine and pressing our faces against the hotel window so that we could see a few spritzes of fireworks in the sliver of atmosphere between the two nearby giant skyscrapers, we slept soundly until Eli realized it was daytime at the late hour of 620am. One great thing about having a kiddo is that no matter how late you stay up enjoying your fleeting adult time, you're always sure to get an early start the next day. Maybe you can sleep through an alarm, but it's unlikely that you can sleep through a 21 month old laying sideways in the bed kicking his legs as though he's riding a bicycle. On your face.

We thoroughly enjoyed Hong Kong over the next couple days, and equally enjoyed trying out their various modes of mass transit, moving beyond the tram to now include the subway system. We happily found it to be one of the easiest to understand, cleanest and most efficient either of us had ever seen. We haven't seen all of the other subways on Earth, so we based our comparison on our combined experiences underground with the subways found in Paris, London, New York, Milan, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Sydney, Tokyo and some other ones that we don't remember. Bottom line: Hong Kong's subway system is really good.

The only downside to the subway is that some of the stops are in the lower floors of shopping centers, and you may well have to walk past a bunch of shops to get to another platform to catch a connecting train. I've never seen so many high end stores together anywhere. They have Prada and Pierre Cardin and Tag Heuer and Zegna and Hugo Boss and Armani and Chanel and Luis Vitton and all kinds of other fancy places I don't frequent. Not in just one location – these shops are in big malls all over the place. Couple this with frequent sightings of Maseratis, Ferraris, Porsches, BMWs, Rovers and every other kind of European luxury car known and you'll really get an idea that Hong Kong is really not the same as China.

The majority of private cars we saw were the kind you shop for when you have more than $50K to spend on a car. Many – a quarter, it seemed - were the kind you shop for when you're looking in the $150K and higher range. I've never seen such a high concentration of expensive cars.

We also tried out the Star Ferry, which gave us both a fun experience as well as some really sweet views of the city from the water. The ferry was terrific (I do love boats!) and the views were pretty good... but one has to remember that on a sunny day visibility in Hong Kong is kind of crappy with all the smog they have there. You can see the buildings on the other side of the water, but you're looking through thick smog in all directions. Based on the continual air travel demonstrated by the planes overhead, it must not be as thick as the infamous Dubai Fog, I don't think. Or maybe they're just more accustomed to it. Way more smog than LA. Way.

The smog turns everything the air grey, so your visual input takes on a surreal black and white dominated set of tones that becomes more significant the further away you look. Close up, the world is in normal full color, while a glance across the water or down a long street shows a bustling metropolis with only slight hints at anything that resembles actual red, yellow or blue (let alone any combination of these). Though I'm not happy to know what this means in the real world, the experience of colors fading with increasing distance is really interesting. It's as though the world is highlighting only the things nearby, as if to remind you to pay attention to where you are rather than where you aren't. If you can't Be Here Now by virtue of your own spiritual growth, you can rely on the airborne urban stink to force you toward enlightenment. Lucky for me.

Like I mentioned earlier, the trams are really fun also. Probably not much fun for the people who use them to commute every day, but we enjoyed riding them up and down the streets. For one thing, many of them are really old and charming in the way that only really old machines can be. They don't go terribly fast, and the seats are pretty high up (plus they're double deckers), so if you want a perfect view of the streets and shops and human activity, the tram is a perfect and affordable way to go about it. We visited a variety of shops, walked through lots and lots of different open air markets, tried out a playground or two and spent some time in a very well attended Buddhist temple. Took zillions of photos of the graffiti and wall art (we do that a lot) and really, thoroughly enjoyed out time there.

On our last night, we stayed in a hotel that offers a walkway that takes you directly into the airport, thinking this would be a lot easier than getting up at 330am and trying to find a taxi (remember that thing about why we hire a Town Car in Portland? That's why. Also we preferred to be terrified in the afternoon rather than first thing in the morning.) The hotel thing was one of the smartest decisions so far. We awoke without alarms at 415 (I love my son!), walked to the terminal, checked in and went through security. The security checkpoint has a lane there that says “Family Lane” in English (all the signs in Hong Kong are in English) with a nice picture of a nuclear family – like ours – so we got into that line and were promptly and sternly told by the Hong Kong TSA lady to get back into the normal line with the non-nuclear passengers. Being that this was still sort of China and not wanting to get into trouble there, we got back into line with everyone else.

Eli had awoken with a pretty good fever and was more fussy than usual. We tried to not think about what kind of sickness a toddler might pick up while visiting Hong Kong. We also tried to not be kind of pissed that he'd been sick more times in the last month than he'd been in the prior year. Daria and I each pretended we weren't as worried as we really were and only fessed up after he was better. More on that later.

When we got to the front of the security line, Daria put her bag into the tub at the top of the stack to ready her things to go through the x-ray machine while balancing Eli on her hip and holding him with one arm. Then she got a big dose of Nasty from a flight attendant who had come in through the 'flight crew only' entry. The attendant didn't have to stand in a line, as she was the only crewmember in the whole room, but she must have been running really late, because she started yelling at Daria and trying to take the tub from below while elbowing Daria out of the way. Apparently waiting another 4 or 5 seconds for Daria to pick up the full tub with her free hand was unbearable. She shouted into Daria's face while yanking the lower tub, and then shoved Daria out of her way. This all happened very quickly, which is a good thing...

… suddenly, yet only for a short moment, I weighed the scariness of incarceration in Hong Kong against the sudden and powerful urge to permanently harm the woman who'd sent my bride (and son) stumbling to keep her (their) balance. But she was gone so fast I didn't really have the chance to break her knees. Maybe next time. I wondered if we'd all be on the same flight. We weren't.

We found our gate and I learned that we were flying on “Scoot Airlines.” Given that I like scooters, I thought this was probably going to be pretty cool. Maybe not as cool as Emirates [cough] but probably still cool. I didn't give much thought to the fact that they don't actually announce that they're boarding and that the only way to know what's going on is to wait until all the people waiting rush the gate (especially fun when Daria and Eli are 100 meters away riding on the moving sidewalk thing) but I did think it was a little weird that on an international flight that they didn't want to see our ID and that nobody actually looked at our boarding passes. Normally there's a boarding pass scanner that does that, but their scanner wasn't working, so we just handed our boarding passes to the woman at the gate and she put them into a pile on the counter without even confirming that they matched the flight or gate numbers, or whether or not the names on the boarding passes were our names.

Once on the flight, we learned that though we'd seen several posters boasting “unlimited in flight movies” while we'd been waiting to stampede the gangway, that this service costs $20 and you have to use your own wireless device (laptop, tablet, phone) and that you can only access the movies if you've downloaded the app before you went to the airport in the first place. I think it would be smart for them to let people download the app once they were seated on the plane so that they could sell more “unlimited in flight movies” but we weren't about to pay $20 to watch 4 hours worth of movies, so this was a non-issue for us.

When the meal was to be served, the nice stewardess announced that everyone who'd ordered a meal on the Scoot Airlines website prior to boarding would soon receive their order. Those of us who hadn't would be able to purchase items from the menu. Based on what I saw the stewardesses carrying back and forth the most, it appears that Lipton's Cup-O-Noodles is the most popular item. I like noodles, but not when they're served up in a styrofoam cup and sprinkled with brown MSG powder. Also, I think Lipton stopped making those noodles twenty years ago. Is Lipton even in business anymore?

They're serving decades old surplus noodles.

We figured we could make a 4 ½ hour flight without an $8 Cup-O-Noodles nor $20 worth of second rate movies, and looked forward to a little something to drink. We figured it'd be water, unless someone at Scoot had come up with a nice wine pairing to go along with the Noodles. Water sounded just fine.

They don't give you anything to drink. No one comes by with water. You can make your way to the back of the plane and request it. Probably. Daria's pretty sure that it's an international law or at the very least an airline regulation that they have to give you water, so I guess the law or the regulation doesn't exactly state that they have to ever stop by and actually offer it to you. Maybe they just have to keep some around in case some poor dehydrated fool gets parched enough to go begging for it. Or maybe the only water they have is that meteor-hot stuff typically used to re-hydrate noodles that were boxed up prior to the Cold War. I don't want to drink any of that.

In fact, the only time anyone came by to visit us was to tell us that we weren't allowed to lift the armrest that's between the seats up and out of the way. We're married, so we don't mind sharing a seat, and Eli fits nicely across both our laps as long as there isn't an armrest bisecting his spine. Armrests down = not allowed. I thought this was a 'during takeoff' thing after the first warning, then figured it was a 'during turbulence' thing after the second, and finally gave up trying to make sense of it after the third. We're lucky they didn't turn the plane around. It occurred to me later that these were my best opportunities to ask for water, and I'd missed my chances.

We had a layover in Singapore, which has an amazing airport. Really very nice. They have a whole garden with water features and flowers that are all made of handblown glass, and there's a swimming pool on the roof, and you can get a massage. We just had time to scurry for a quick nosh, then (not wanting to be stuck with Cup-O-Noodles and nothing to drink) we bought some pastries and a bottled juice to take with us on the next plane. On arriving at the gate, we found out that we had to go through a security checkpoint – kind of like in Dubai, where we'd never left the secure area and everyone getting onto the plane had already been through security but had to go through security again. Apparently, this kind of redundancy makes for safer flying. Walking through a metal detector twice provides far greater scrutiny than walking through it only once. Duh.

We got busted. The unopened and still sealed juice we'd gotten for Eli was (gasp!) in a container that held in excess of 100ml. The one we bought a couple minutes prior, inside the airport, in the part of the airport you can't get to until after you pass through security. They didn't care where we got it and the fact that it was factory sealed with a tamper-resistant plastic band around the cap was irrelevant. We had to drink it on the spot or abandon it. I was thinking that the best thing would be to accidentally spill it on the carpet but then started wondering about prisons in Singapore and changed my mind. As Daria stood right in everyone's way and drank it down (I refused to have any, being the obstinate fellow I am) we agreed that a sign or two somewhere in the airport warning people about this might be sensible. Like maybe at the place that sells juice, or maybe before you go through the security at the gate.

Once the offending juice had been properly dispatched, we went and sat in the waiting area. We found empty seats next to a couple who'd just brought 4 full liter sized bottles of hard alcohol that they'd purchased in the duty free shop through security. I thought it was really unfair that they didn't have to drink all of that before being allowed past security. It would have been a more consistent application of the rules, and it would certainly have made the flight a lot more entertaining.

Then we opened one of the two reusable water bottles that we carry when traveling and had a drink of the unidentified liquid we'd effortlessly smuggled through the x-ray machines right before getting busted for the sealed juice container a few minutes prior. Right. Apple Juice = serious threat. More than a gallon of hooch = no problem. And two pints of mystery liquid in unmarked and unsealed containers go completely unnoticed despite being in plain view, strapped to the outside of a backpack which is handled by two security agents and viewed through an x-ray monitor by another. After long and hard consideration, I've determined that the security system that is in place in the Shanghai airport is run by clowns. Doing a crappy job twice doesn't make it a good job.

The second flight was just like the first. No food, no water. Flying Scoot makes a cooler noun than verb.

We landed in Perth and made it through immigration without incident. Then we went to pick up our rental car...

… stay tuned...

Loi-Lovre World Tour 2014

Family and Friends.

I haven't looked, but my guess is that about a third of my entries here on the ol' blog-o-rama start off with something like "when I started this blog,..." and then go on to say something about how I'm not very regular with the thing. I won't keep saying that every time. Even if it is the truth.

Every year, Daria and I lament our failure at preparing and sending a Christmas Letter. This year is no different. So instead, we're sending a narcissistic note about our jet-set-selves and our awesome international travel-on-a-whim lifestyle. Because really, that's all we do. Unless we’re lounging by the pool nibbling chocolate covered strawberries and sipping Pinot.

We departed Portland in early December last year. We took joy in the fact that, for once, it was US waking Eli up at an hour that he thought was best reserved for sleeping instead of the other way around. Unfortunately, 330am sucked just as much for us as it did for him, and once we were seated comfortably in the Town Car aka Limo that whisked us to the airport, he easily went back to sleep while we ourselves did not. I don't think of myself as a limo guy, exactly, but the last time Daria tried using a taxi to get to the airport really early, the guy never showed up. The Limo guys always show up 15 minutes early and wait outside with the heater on; then they insist on carrying all your bags; then you sit inside a giant car that has bottled water, and they play the kind of music you like while a guy wearing a suit whisks you to the airport in no time flat. And it costs about $5 more than a taxi, but you don't need to bring money because they bill your credit card. And they have car seats, which not all taxis offer. Don't get me wrong - I like taxis.

The flights to Milan were pretty uneventful, which was awesome. Daria's Mom and Uncle picked us up, which was also awesome. They were really impressed that we had only two suitcases for the three of us on a two month trip that would include winter in Italy followed by summer in Australia and also contained Christmas gifts for family.

By the time we arrived in Cremona, Eli had developed a bad cough. This was frustrating, as we'd just finished dealing with a weeks-long cough that he'd been stuck with while in the states and had given him his final dose of antibiotics the day before we left. So he was well for almost 48 hours. The day after he got sick, Daria got sick and I said something about the merits of growing up in the woods immersed in bacteria having been an awesome good thing. A few days later, they got well and both Daria's mom and I got their sickness, which we enjoyed for 3 or 4 days.

This disrupted our plans to visit the Automobile Museum in Turin and to spend a day in Milan visiting Daria's Father's resting place and a stop at our favorite vegetarian restaurant and a viewing of The Last Supper.

Immediately after we got well, the rest of the family arrived from London, with our nephew having just gotten over a rather high fever. He was his normal energetic self, but his sister ended up with a sore throat and chills. About the time I was worrying that Eli might get sick yet again, I got myself a sore throat and chills. One of those sore throats that makes all your glands under your jaw hurt, and gives you an earache and hurts badly enough despite having access to Tylenol with codeine that it's not worth trying to eat anything, and to wearing thermal underwear [designed by people who summit K2 just for fun even though they have only 1% body fat] to bed and hogging all the covers plus taking the pretty quilt that's only for display purposes and using that as well in your effort to keep warm.

I was still cold. That's the sickest I've been in twenty years.

And we had Christmas, which was terrific and full of great food, then there was some family drama which will all get sorted out eventually and had the convenient side effect of reducing the number of people we had to say goodbye to as we departed Italy and headed for Dubai.

Our departure from Cremona was at 4pm. We’d arranged for DHL to pick up three suitcases to deliver back to the US, which meant we had to be at the house until DHL arrived, which was sometime between 9am and 6pm. So our last day in Italy was spent not going out for lunch, not visiting friends. We sat at home and wished the doorbell would ring. It did not.

The day after, DHL sent an email saying that they hadn’t come. Big news, this. Another day later, they said they’d come by on January 2, which is the day after the suitcases are supposed to be delivered to the US. Daria’s sister called them and used the Special Italian Magic Talking that she and Daria inherited from their mother, and the DHL truck and driver appeared within hours. Special Italian Magic Talking. I've seen it firsthand, and all I can tell you is that it’s an ally like no other and a foe without equal. The main reason I haven't learned to speak Italian is that my language illiteracy includes some measure of immunity.

We weren't really going to Dubai (which sounds sexy and awesome). We were passing through the Dubai airport on our way to Hong Kong. Lucky for us, though, the Dubai airport is a very sexy and very awesome place for a layover.

I was excited to ride in an Emirates plane, as everyone says this is the very best airline and that they do a very nice job. It's true that the stewardesses are completely attentive and professional and go well beyond what you'd find at, say, United. And they're equal opportunity employers – there was one steward on the plane to provide a gender balance with the two dozen female stewardesses. And though I barely noticed him, he probably – like his female colleagues – could easily be a supermodel and melt cast iron with his perfect smile while flirting shamelessly with, and cooing over, my son.

My son, by the way, has it made as far as the ladies go.

 

Other than that, though, Emirates wasn't what we'd expected. We'd reserved – months in advance – a bassinet for Eli. They did get us a seat behind the bulkhead (this is where the bassinets can be installed) but they handed out all the bassinets to other passengers before realizing that the only people who'd actually reserved one didn't get one. After I heard the stewardess tell this to her colleague, I then heard her tell Daria that Eli was too big for a bassinet [despite him being under two years old, which is the threshold, and despite him being in the 35th percentile for weight although they didn't ask us about that]. This would have been okay if they'd seated Daria and I together as we'd asked and reserved (and they'd promised and confirmed), but we were seated on opposite sides of the aisle, and the rows are offset, which meant that I was sitting next to the passenger that was seated directly behind Daria. Which meant that we couldn't take turns holding Eli and eating, or lift up the armrest between us and let Eli stretch out, or any other accommodating thing.

 

Our landing was delayed more than two hours because of fog. I'd never considered that fog could be an issue in Dubai, but I really don't know anything about Dubai. Now I know that they have an airport that sometimes experiences really thick fog.

 

So Daria was stuck with Eli by herself. And her little TV thing didn't work. And the people next to her were, to be blunt about it (and by her estimation moreso than my own) assholes. I wasn't too bothered by this because all the stewardesses kept coming by and doting on Eli while pretty much ignoring everyone else on the whole airplane. Even the one who was stationed upstairs came down to see him a few times.

 

Eli does a really good job of making strangers smile. Looks shouldn't make a difference. Apparently, looks do make a difference.

 

Dubai was just a quick layover (made quicker by our delayed landing) but we did enjoy walking through the airport, looking at the shops and considering whether or not to buy raffle tickets. They have raffles in the airport to raise money for charity. A noble cause, no doubt. Though we like to give to charitable causes, and despite the prizes being duty free, we didn't buy a ticket to win a brand new Porsche, Audi, Rover nor (snif) the 675 horsepower MacLaren. So we're not bringing home any $500,000 cars this time around. Nor the cheapskate $70K cheapskate consolation prize cars. There's a cap on how many tickets get sold, so your odds aren't horrible. But [ahem] the tickets aren't exactly cheap. We also, though it was sorely tempting, managed to avoid buying 24 karat gold chain sold by the meter and took a pass on the $230,000 wristwatch. If I had it to do over, though, I'd buy a ticket for the MacLaren.

 

We ran through customs and security, which I thought was odd given that we weren't exiting nor re-entering the 'secure international flight' part of the airport itself and I kept thinking “there are a lot of paranoid Americans who would not want to be here.” White people were the minority, and there were many people who were wearing clothing appropriate for their Muslim faith. If you buy into the whole “dark complexion long beard flowing robe = scary” propaganda spewed forth by the Western media, let me offer some advice: stay home. And turn off the TV.

 

Really, I think every American should have the opportunity to be in an obvious minority in a place where they don't speak the language and have Zero cultural reference. For example: go to a crowded market in Tanzania where you're the only white person among thousands of locals and you don't speak the language and don't know your way around. Have the experience that allows you to realize that you are completely at the mercy of others.

 

You will, I guarantee, find kindness out in the world.

 

The second Emirates flight saw us seated together, which was really fortunate because we were all really tired by then and really did want to be able to share the Eli Load. Either we wanted to take the load off one another, or we wanted to pass it along to one another. As had been the case in our prior flight, all the supermodel stewardesses acted like they think babies are the greatest thing ever, and even the ones assigned to other parts of the plane came by to hold his hands or pinch his cheek or give him the chocolates that only the first class passengers are supposed to have. Daria fought a migraine for the final two hours of the flight, and the landing, and the baggage claim, and the customs, and the immigration, and the taxi (which is thrilling in Hong Kong), and the check in. By the time we made it to our hotel we'd been traveling for close to 24 hours, a trip which had started a full fifteen hours after we'd gotten up in the morning. We were not at our best.

 

We slept like dead pigs and woke at 930am feeling profoundly better. Then we noshed on the hotel breakfast and laughed about how much better life is today than it was yesterday.

 

We got directions to the nearby mall so that we could pick up a few things, instantly got ourselves lost, came back to the hotel and got new directions and found the place, then found that the stores here have all the same brands as the New Seasons by our house back home but at a third the price. Eli met a little Chinese girl who was exactly his size and they had fun laughing together while we all waited in the checkout line. I about fell over when the little girl pointed at my shirt pocket and said “glasses” in perfect English. Eli replied in what sounded to me like perfect Chinese, though the little girl's parent didn't seem as impressed by his speech as I'd been by hers. Then we hopped on the tram (also an experience every American should have) and went to another part of town for some walking and sightseeing.

 

One thing that's nice about being six feet tall 5'11 5/8"is that you can see over most of the people on the street in Hong Kong. That probably sounds racist or insensitive, but I don't mean it that way at all. I just mean that it's pretty cool to be able to see three or four blocks ahead of yourself even though there's not an inch to spare in a mass of people who completely fill the space between the storefronts and the street everywhere all the time. Most of the people you can't see over are white, which means that people like me stand out like a sore thumb. Pretty cool. It's also good to try out a culture that doesn't view personal space the same way Americans do. By that, I mean “a culture that seems to have no awareness of nor concern for personal space.” If you can't stand being squeezed into a really small space with a lot of other people, Hong Kong will push some of your buttons.

 

I don't mind being surrounded by people but I sometimes get claustrophobic. Solution: sit by the window. Simple.

 

We got back onto the tram and rode it until the end of the line though we hadn't seen our stop. As we were looking at the map, the driver asked what we were looking for and we said “Hill Road.” He told us to get back in and that he'd take us. We rode all the way back to where we'd started and realized, when we came to the “Hiller Street” stop that we may have miscommunicated. We got off, waited for another tram, got back on, rode it to the same terminus, got off and looked at the sign across the intersection. Hill Road.

 

We returned to the hotel for the evening canapes and wine and found that – again – the people we least like to meet during international travel are Americans. Eli elicited nasty looks from all four of the people at the next table when he dared to remove one of his shoes in the presence of their Chianti and sauteed tofu. Then he walked to the other side of the room to look at the ornaments on the still standing Christmas tree, which produced obvious disgust in the faces of the couple seated on that side of the room.

 

We left the hotel and went out for dinner. As soon as we were seated, Eli threw his chopsticks on the floor, and before I could pick them up, a waiter had delivered a fresh set and collected the old ones. Then Eli leaned back in his chair and pushed the table with his feet, which tipped his stroller over. We didn't spill much tea from the table, but we were a tad embarrassed when the folded stroller fell onto another diner's leg while he was trying to eat.

 

We ordered our food to go, went for a short walk, returned to pick up our dinner, made a quick stop for some Super Ginseng Wine and Haagen Dazs and came back to the room.

 

When I finished writing this, it was 11:50 local time. We'd be watching fireworks from the 23^rd floor in a few minutes.

 

I realized, in that moment, that life just couldn't be better.

 

All the best -

Dinosaurs in the Digital Age

As you know, we like our old vehicles. I’ve been driving Volvos – old ones – since I first discovered the joys of driving a heavily battered ’65 PV544 while living in Seattle back in 1986. Between then and now, I’ve bought and sold and traded and parted out and sent to the metal recyclers between 65 and 70 of these things. I don’t brag about much, but I know these cars better than most people, including Volvo enthusiast people.

For most people who buy a car, the process is pretty simple – and usually, it’s also pretty simple for people who like old obscure cars too. But once in a while some odd thing happens and those who prefer the relics are faced with adapting our luddite personae as well as our primitive conveyances into a world fraught with digital influence and tidy record keeping. There isn’t any Carfax report on anything in our garage (except maybe the Subaru, which we think of in the same vein as the freezer or the washing machine). There’s also not a Vehicle Identification Number (popularly known as a VIN) stamped on a silver tag riveted to the A pillar just inside the windshield on any of the old Volvos. 50 and 60 year old foreign cars were, alas, often not thusly adorned.

Typically, this isn’t any problem provided the car you buy has its proper documentation and that the documentation is itself proper. The first time I had to submit one of the Volvos for a VIN inspection it was after rebuilding a Volvo 122 that had been totaled. The Department of Motor Vehicles (and, I guess, law enforcement) wanted to be sure that the car I was driving was, in fact, the same car that was represented by my title and registration. I drove to the DMV and the fellow behind the counter walked out to the car, looked at the VIN, and checked the box on some form. There wasn’t any question that the car was the car I said it was, and that it was legitimately mine. And a few weeks later I had a new title emblazoned with the word "SALVAGE" across the top. Badge of honor.

But that’s not why I’m here today.

Fast forward a few years from that 122 VIN inpsection thing to two years ago, when D and I bought another old Volvo: a 1957 PV445, also known as a Duett. We bought this car from my friend Dennis, who had owned it since 1973. Before that, it was owned by someone who worked at the University of Oregon, and before that it had been used by Sheppard Motors, which is the Volvo dealership in Eugene, Oregon. They used it to deliver parts and run errands (which is the same thing we use it for). When Dennis got the car, he drove it around a lot and after a few years decided he’d restore it and make a few upgrades. One thing he did was remove the original engine (a weak little 45 horsepower thing) with the intent of installing a stronger and more current mill in its stead. Then the project stalled and he kept it stored in his garage from 1978 until we bought it in 2011.

Nothing wrong with any of this, but as is the case with many old cars, this one had originally been titled using the engine number in place of the actual VIN. Engines have numbers, and car bodies have numbers, but neither of these is actually the Vehicle Identification Number. The VIN is a unique and distinct number that can (er.. should) be assigned only to that one specific motor vehicle. Now that the original engine wasn’t in the car, the documents for the car didn’t match any of the numbers on the car. Normally this isn’t a problem, but if someone were to steal the car and remove the license plates, we wouldn’t have any legal documents to support our claim of ownership. D and I agreed: we wanted this to be correct.

Old cars titled by their engine numbers might seem like a weird thing. But it’s common enough that there’s a whole set of instructions at the DMV on how their employees are to go about facilitating the correction of this old practice.

When we first bought the car, we took the old title to the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), explained the situation and the nice person there explained that it would be best to only transfer the title at that time, and that once we’d established ownership and had the car running, we could take it back to the DMV where they’d inspect the actual VIN, make corrections in their records, and send us a title with the right number on it. Two visits instead of one. One transaction per visit keeps the confusion to a minimum. Clearly, this is a good idea.

A few weeks ago, we got a letter that reminded us that it’s time to renew the registration and I remembered the title-doesn’t-match-the-car thing, so I went to the DMV in person to get the VIN inspection handled. A couple months ago, one of the fellows at the DMV explained the process:

– bring the car and the title to the DMV
– fill out a form
– go outside with a DMV employee and show him or her the VIN
– write a check
– be happy

So last week I went to the DMV. This is exactly what I like to do when I have a free afternoon, especially given that the only time I have a free afternoon is the same time that D can get away from work and tend to our young son. I didn’t want to subject him to the long wait that often accompanies a trip to the DMV, nor did I wish to submit all the other good people who’d be waiting in line to any potential stinky diapers or hungry fussing. And it’s not like we’d want to spend a sunny afternoon as a family together doing something silly like taking a walk in the park. Pff.

I arrived at the DMV and waited in a long line before speaking with the person who filters out all the customers who might not have all their documents in order, then waited in a cue until my number was called. As soon as he found that I had something other than a quick and easy modern-car-owner task to deal with, he was immediately exhausted. Or something. He sighed a lot. I said something about my next visit being quick and easy and he replied "I hope so. These things are a real pain."

We went outside for the VIN inspection. I opened the hood of the car and pointed out the VIN location to him. It’s visible from outside the car, but you have to know where to look. He looked around the inside of the windshield though I’d already told him it wasn’t there, then he looked at the body number, then the build plate that has codes that explain what color the car was and which engine and transmission configuration the factory had seen fit to install as it rolled down the assembly line. I mentioned again that the VIN was "this number right here."

"I can’t do this. You’ll have to talk with a supervisor."

"The number is right here. All you have to do is look at it and stamp the form, right?"

"I can’t do this."

And he walked back inside the DMV. He hadn’t waited for me, but I figured I ought to tag along, so I closed up the car and went back inside, where I found him talking to someone else.

"She’s the supervisor and she’ll help you with this. I’m late for lunch."

The supervisor was friendly and encouraging, and said "this is really simple – we just need to look at the number, then send the forms to Salem, and you’ll get a new title in a few weeks." Cool.

As she looked over the title, she then said "you know, there’s really nothing wrong with this title. This is a perfectly good document. Why do you want to change it?"

I explained the whole thing about wanting the papers to match the car and that I was really just trying to play by the rules. She replied in the same vein "you don’t have to do anything. This title is fine."

"Right, but it has the wrong number on it. I want the numbers to match."

"There are shops around that have number stamps that can put the numbers from your title on the car. I’d just do that."

"I have number punches at home. Are you saying I should stamp the car myself?"

"Well, you’d want to pick an appropriate place on the car, and I’m not sure how the shops that do that know where to stamp them."

"I really think it would be best to go through proper channels and do this the right way."

"Okay. Then you have to fill out this other form. Put the VIN you want to use (emphasis mine) in this space here and fill out that section there." It seemed odd to me that I was being allowed (instructed, really) to fill in the form that says ‘to be filled out by DMV people’ but I went with it.

She went away for a few moments and returned. "We can’t do the inspection here. You have to make an appointment with the State Police and they’ll do it. I’ve already contacted them so they’re expecting to hear from you, and I’ve flagged the title in our system." Then she put a big red stamp on the title I’d brought with me that says something like ‘referred to OSP for VIN inspection.’

I finished filling out the parts of the form as I’d been instructed, and she gave me a "go to the front of the line" pass that I could use on my next visit. She said things about trying to be helpful and wanting me to be able to avoid the long wait when I returned after taking the car to the police.

I felt like I was being sent in circles as a reward for trying to make things right.

One of the papers the nice lady at the DMV had given me had instructions on how to go about making an appointment with the police for this inspection. Not conveniently, the police station is on the outskirts of town on the very opposite end of Portland from where I live. It’s an hour away.

Inspections are only available on Thursdays between 9 and 2:30, which means I’ll likely be crossing town on the busiest streets we have during rush hour. I’m thinking maybe I should take the car out and get pulled over for speeding by a trooper and ask him to do a quick inspection after he finishes writing me a ticket. That would certainly be more convenient.

Anyway, I called the phone number on the form and got a voicemail message that said "this number is no longer used for VIN inspections. If you need to make an appointment for a VIN inspection, call this other number and then dial 0 for an operator." After muttering something about the DMV having outdated forms, I called the number and dialed 0 and found myself speaking to someone employed by the Oregon State Police. Maybe she’s an officer herself, maybe she’s not. But whatever she is, she’s definitely the most competent and helpful person I’ve talked to thus far.

I told her the whole story and she was very interested in knowing which DMV had recommended having the VIN ‘added’ to the car. She asked if I knew the name of the employee (I didn’t – they don’t wear name tags. Probably for good reason.) Then she confirmed that I had the proper forms and asked me to make sure that the people at the DMV had filled in the sections properly. If the form isn’t perfect, she explained, the OSP can’t do the inspection in the first place and I’d have made the trip to the State Police only to be turned away and sent back to the DMV, where the forms could be corrected before going back to the OSP and then returning – again – to the DMV to have the forms processed. I’d think either of them could mail the forms to the office in Salem (of that I could do that part myself) but that’s now how the system [ahem] works.

I explained that the same woman at the DMV who had encouraged me to commit a federal crime had later had me fill out the form myself. The officer called my attention to the section in the middle of the page, which has to be filled out by the DMV employee before the OSP can do their thing. Mine was blank. The DMV employee who had ‘helped’ me had neglected to fill in this critical section of the form.

After thinking about better things over the weekend, on Monday I got the kiddo fed and changed, and piled him into the car so that we could both spend some quality time in the DMV office. The officer had encouraged me to pay a visit to a different DMV location, as she understood that I was less than pleased with how things had gone in my recent visit at the office nearest my home, but I was determined to return to the very same DMV. And so we (my son and I) marched on in. I showed my ‘go to the front of the line’ pass to the guy at the filter-out-the-unfortunate-customer desk, and he announced over the loudspeaker that I was to step in front of the fellow who was already at the very front of the line. Bambino in one hand, diaper bag and documents in the other, I sailed past the 50 or 60 commoners to my place up front, where I made eye contact with everyone nearby and apologized loudly enough that they might think I might not be a big jerk.

A young woman who explained that she was still in training called me up to the counter; I showed her the form and said the police had sent me over to get it filled out. She’d never seen this form and wasn’t sure what to do, so I suggested that she call the police right then and there. The officer I’d spoken with earlier said she’d be available all day long and would be happy to speak to whichever DMV employee might need instruction on how to fill the thing out. Some other employee came over to help, and then the two of them went to speak with another one, then they all came back to explain to me what I’d failed to do. "Oh, no, you’re not allowed to fill this out. We have to do that. You’re not even supposed to have this. I’m going to take this to the supervisor and have her fix it for you."

I noticed, then, that the supervisor that was going to correct my gross error was the same supervisor who had encouraged me to stamp my own VIN into the car, had refused to perform the VIN inspection, had flagged my records with the state, had stamped my title with heavy red ink, and had thoroughly damaged my faith in humanity just a few days ago. I mentioned to the three people that it was she who had counseled me in favore of committing a federal crime. The new employee looked shocked. The other two just kind of looked away, as though they weren’t at all surprised.

While one of them stood next to the supervisor as she was filling in the blanks, the other one said there were notes on file. That the problem was that the VIN is under the car and can’t be seen without getting underneath. I mentioned that this isn’t the case and that the guy who did go outside could see the number without even bending over but opted to cease assistance, and that the supervisor now filling out the form had initially stated that she’d do the inspection before changing her mind and becoming really unhelpful.

The supervisor went ahead and filled in the form for me, which I’m sure will be a very helpful thing. After it was returned to me, I happily noticed that it not only bears an official looking stamp as well as the DMV location that provided this excellent service, but it also bears her name and signature. I’m looking forward to taking this form to the Oregon State Police in order that they can fill in the remaining blanks and get me well on my way to correcting the paperwork on this old car.

The new employee who really did her best to be helpful apologized and gave me another ‘go to the front of the line’ pass for my next visit. Really looking forward to it.

Life, Punctuated

I’m no longer in charge. E is in charge. This gets tricky, because he’s not in control. So our household dynamic finds us in the situation in which those in control aren’t in charge while the one in charge isn’t in control. As is likely the case with all parents, our task is now to balance E’s demands with our own abilities to maintain and provide. Like a couple stagecoach riders propelled by a dozen horses that a moment ago stomped on a nest full of angry hornets and are now hell bent for leather on outrunning bees that can fly at a hundred miles an hour.

Lousy analogy demonstrates complete lack of flow from mind to keyboard. Obviously, it’s time to swap laundry from washer to drier. Not only have I lost what little control I thought I once had but I’ve abandoned use of definite articles.

Actually, he can control some things. He can control which way he points his eyes, thereby controlling what he sees. And he can control his little mouth by trying to keep it closed while I’m trying to make it open as I force medication between what will someday be his little pearly white chompers.

… assuming he gets his teeth genes from his Mama and not his Poppi. The maternal side of his genetic conglomeration is populated by pearly white chompers. The paternal offers little more than discolored things prone to both traumatic injury and decay.

Orally medicating a baby isn’t as hard as it might sound, really. E loves to be naked – a characteristic that we’re not sure comes from the maternal or the paternal side. So when we’re having fun changing diapers, between making urine fountains on the one end and spitting up milk on the other, Daddy finds the perfect opportunity to take advantage of this bambino’s cheerful disposition and gets the application of medicinal goop quickly accomplished.

We, his parents, are more freaked by control – or lack of same – than we are control freaks. At least that’s my assertion – I already know some of you reading this will disagree; and because I’ve sensibly predicted this disagreement and have stated such, there’s no need for anyone to be sending me emails about how wrong I am in this regard. Thanks anyway.

Another dynamic a new kiddo brings: punctuation. So if you’re right in the middle of something – anything – and there’s a bambino around, you’ll learn to live in such a way that you can instantly drop whatever you’re doing and attend to He Who Is In Charge. The flow of life radically changes faster than you can offer a fond adieu to the Old Ways. The ways that saw you working in the garden for hours on end while taking advantage of your ability to skip a meal or postpone some other typically typical activity that’s part of a reasonably reasonable daily routine. Or the ways that allowed you to, say, swap out a brake master cylinder on an old car. You can drop the wrenches easily enough, but it’ll take a good 5 minutes before you can get yourself clean enough to handle anyone else. Especially babies.

The necessity of living in a state that requires you be so suddenly available is the difference between delicious poached eggs on perfectly buttered warm toast and boiled eggs wobbling around atop something closer to old soggy cardboard. It means a fundamental change to your ability to enjoy any reliable frequency of the underappreciated and unimportant (but pleasant) activity we call bathing. Not since I was a Wildlands Firefighter have I been aware that three or four days without a shower could be so easily (and so completely without intent) achieved. Back then, we didn’t have access to a shower. Now I recognize it as the unused end of the bathroom as I gaze wistfully toward the shelf laden with the frequently unattainable cleansing elixirs.

Should anyone marketing deodorant need proof that continually adding more layers of the anti-stench stuff over successive bouts of sweat gland activation fails to provide a pleasant olfactory experience for anyone in the subject's proximity; I submit my simple existence as irrefutable evidence of exactly that. I don’t really know what happens when you mix Roquefort with Lysol but I might be getting the idea that it isn’t really anything you’d want to have inside your house. Or your garage. And it's a slurry you especially wouldn’t want attached to yourself such that escape or relief remains impossible. Given that I stink anyway, I would just keep wearing the same shirt between showers, but E spits up unexpectedly and frequently enough that I’m swapping t-shirts out at the rate of two or three a day. Without him, my hygiene would undoubtedly suffer further.

If you aspire to write and spend time doing just that, you’ll find that the notion of getting into a groove – or being on a roll – vanishes. Once that train of thought departs Grey Matter Station and begins picking up steam, the child’s built-in alarm system calls a halt to the rest of the world and you find yourself again consumed with taking care of the basic needs of the most important person in the world. Which is exactly what you really do want to be doing. A couple of times I’ve wished that E’s timing could be tweaked a little so that I’d know once in a while that I had (for example) a full hour to spend on some task. It’d be something like twenty minutes for a thorough shower, twenty minutes to take the Lambretta for a ride and twenty minutes to catch up that sleep thing that everyone in the house that isn’t E has been wanting of late. Though I miss the shower and the time watching eyelid theater, what I’ve learned is that there’s something really calming about not having the luxury of time that would facilitate such activities. It shifts one’s entire focus. All the things that were important – including whether or not you might have lunch sometime between ten in the morning and three in the afternoon – are now secondary. It’s probably exactly like meditating amidst the discharge of live ammunition. I should be so enlightened.

If you’ve got kids, you already know all of this. Nothing is more important. And it’s actually really cool to have something that’s so completely more important than anything that feeds your own desire, appetite, or ego. The transition into parenthood brings newfound purpose and worth.

I won’t add “meaning” to that list. I believe that meaning is internally manufactured by individuals and exists entirely independent of outside forces or influence. Meaning is a chosen response generated by the audience. But that’s a whole different topic that’s so convoluted and abstract that we’ll have to save it for some other day. Which is probably never.

As a new Daddy (and according to a couple friends, as a Libra) I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how this is going and how things could be better. I don’t spend much time thinking about how they might be worse (what’s the benefit of that?). As a wannabe writer coupled with the aspiration of becoming a “good” father, some amount of time has gone into researching what other parents are up to and how they’ve gone about securing their status among the Good Parents. That’s the list I’d like to join. At least I thought it was.

So here on the blog-o-rama, in the midst of my conversations with friends and family, and across that wide arena that is the internet itself, I find myself at the center of What Everyone Else Thinks. A vortex of influences clamoring for legitimacy. And these influences are, in fact, completely legit, which is unrelated to whether or not they each meet with my rather biased approval. The challenge they face is where they might rank within my own weak minded assessment as to their relative value of what Good Parenting might include.

I’ve mentioned some of the medical things we’ve addressed with E and I’ve credited the good medical folks who have helped us through some challenging moments. And the truth really is that E remains among the living thanks to their efforts – this became the case before he was born and was reinforced days later. Nothing I can do will demonstrate how completely grateful D and I are for what the medical peeps have done for us and for our son.

Fortunately, I guess, the medical peeps are satisfied to accept checks in exchange for their awesomeness. This is both simple and challenging.

The most recent round of medical stuff isn’t at all life threatening and hasn’t called for late night highway Subaru rocketeering from deep SW Portland to the Children’s Hospital in NE. And that’s a good thing – the Subaru transmission hasn’t been the same since. But we’ve come up with a new medical thing to deal with that led us to call the pediatrician’s office during their off hours. We got a prescription over the phone, got a concise list of instructions that would be easy to follow, got the scrip filled at the local pharmacy by a pharmacist who gave us more instructions that would also be easy to follow, and we went about our typically attentive approach to ensuring that we followed all of everyone’s instructions to the letter. We’re trying to do this parenting thing well and we’re still under the impression that the people who make metric tons of money ensuring that little baby boys like ours remain healthy possess an expertise on which we’re smart to rely.

Therein, as they say, lies the rub.

Our first medical challenge from several weeks ago found us doing exactly as we were told and coming up short in a really scary way.

Our second challenge that happened shortly after the first found us doing exactly as we were told and coming up short in a less scary but still significant way.

Our third challenge, which we’re still in the middle of sorting out, finds me walking a thin line between acceptance that not only am I not in charge but I’m also not in control (and trying to make peace with my stubborn and impatient self about this) and frustration or irritation or sometimes a little bit of disgust with the very industry I owe my deepest thanks. Here we are again but in this instance with a thankfully simple thing to deal with. Here we are again with a specific set of instructions we’ve followed precisely. And after a few days without any improvement, here I was again on the phone asking that same “Given our lack of results thus far, what’s the next step?” question I’ve rehearsed so many times in the last 7 ½ weeks.

Through this most recent inquiry, the answer we’d liked to have had at the start was finally bestowed upon my apparently only marginally qualified self after the whole thing should have been effectively resolved rather than having become progressively worse. Which is, quite precisely, the case. Everything we’d been told to do is really only about half of what we needed to do. The sole reason we didn’t do the other half of everything we needed to do is because we’d never heard anything about that other half. Because when we asked the very specific (I thought) question, “Exactly what do we need to do to ensure that this gets better as quickly as possible?” whoever was answering apparently heard something more along the lines of “I’d like to demonstrate that I’m really a half-assed parent and set myself up – again – for failure in the eyes of others, so please ensure that you tell me only enough of how to deal with this that I can spend the next several days causing my baby boy to cry his eyes out four times a day as I engage in this medicinal thing even though it’s not going to help in the slightest.”

Now that I’m thinking about it, I realize that sometimes I’m more than a little frustrated.

Due to my interest in what other dads are up to and what they might have to say about the challenges of being parents, I’ve checked out a number of dad blogs, articles written by dads, organizations that include dads who share my aspiration of getting a clue about parenting. All that kind of stuff. My friends who are parents have, generally, expressed some margin of understanding and an ability to relate their own experiences with mine. Certainly, there must be more people with questions and concerns like mine out there in the rest of this big world. And because we’re not among the first on this path, there must be an enormous resource base on which we might draw.

What I will never do is consult the television. Every time I see a news teaser, it says “coming up at six, blah blah blah, and what you need to know to keep your family safe.” Or it says “blah blah blah and why you should be afraid.” Screw those guys.

One of the blogs I checked out is written by a pastor who has kids. I figured that because he had something like nine hundred comments for one of his entries that he was probably really smart and that I’d learn something from the insight he readily shares. Conveniently, I forgot that agreement doesn’t equal truth – so I fell right into that trap. Everyone agrees, thus it must be truth. Insert analogy of ill-informed political parties making absurd assertions here.

Then I read about how this pastor is sure he’s not the only parent who’s had the thought of holding their kid underwater, just for a minute or two, because of how frustrating parenthood can be. He continues, talking about how parents shouldn’t feel guilty if they give their kids Chicken McNuggets once in a while, and that forgiving yourself for screwing up is important. I can accept the McNuggets thing and I can agree with the forgiving yourself bit. But that “pretending to drown your own children” thing strikes me as really plain awful. And there’s a long list of accolades from other parents, thanking this pastor guy for being the one to speak the words that all these other parents were previously afraid to admit had wandered through their own minds. Hundreds of parents, thanking this guy for his courage to admit what they also felt.

I was floored. I told my terrific wife about it and then we were both floored. This was a blog recommended to me, not one that I’d found by surfing the net. This man is plain sick between his ears.

Anyway, I won’t be visiting that pastor’s church unless I’m looking for a doorway in which to expunge the results of poorly prepared and undercooked shellfish and an overfull bladder. My stubborn self is now quite certain that this man has absolutely nothing of value to offer me.

Realizing that every abstract thing on the internet can be found on facebook in a much neater package, I looked for some dad blog stuff there and found Dad Bloggers. Perfect! I have peers, and they’re right here on facebook!

Er. Wait a second. Most of the stuff on their page includes links to Iron Man action figures, Star Wars stuff, comic book giveaways, something about angry birds and a blurb on the Superman Blue Ray thing. Interspersed among these commercial seeming entries are links to other dads’ blogs, some jokes, and references to things that seem like they might actually be interesting and useful. But what’s with all these posts that look like ads for toys? It’s like television without moving pictures. Not for me. I get enough advertisements on the regular Facebook thing that I don’t need to go looking for more.

All the time leading up to E’s birth I was wondering how I’d handle dealing with the challenges that E himself presented. And now that he’s crying and fussing and cooing and smiling and eating and sleeping and barfing (and finally laughing!) his way through each day I find myself surprised that the challenges of child rearing have more to do with the continual input regarding all the ways I ought to be doing this thing differently. I have only myself to blame. If I hadn’t taken the initiative to seek out the expertise of my peers, I wouldn’t have learned that pastors who blog about their wives regaining their pre-baby figure and that they think it’s okay to daydream of waterboarding their own children are, according to the internet, speaking on behalf of parents around the country.

I want no part of this alleged norm.

I wonder if the medicos who continue to not disclose critical bits of information that directly affects E’s well-being are lumping us in with parents who confuse McDonalds with actual food or if there’s something about us that indicates that we’re too stupid to follow directions more than three lines long. I’d like to say that I want no part of this apparent norm, too, but the truth is that we’re kind of over a barrel. We’re going to need doctor types again. I guess our task is to figure out how to present ourselves as the kind of parents who actually intend to follow through.

We’re the parents who, when we say “We will do whatever is necessary to ensure a positive result,” we actually know what we’re saying. And we actually mean it.

I’m disappointed to realize that our use of diplomacy and kindness seems to have been mistaken for weakness and a lack of resolve. I’m bothered to realize that I’m now having trouble coming up with an approach that won’t include posturing and loud voices and acting like a lunatic to get my simple point across.

Our next appointment is in less than a half hour. Which means I don’t have time for a shower.

This should be good.

All best,

Cameron