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#astronomy #calvin and hobbes #contemplation

kamloops - wells gray provincial park (and back)

13-16th/06/12 distance: 360km (180 each way) terrain: partly flat/partly mountainous roadkill: a few birds tunes: hayden, uncle tupelo (most of the trip), wilco, vic chesnutt

day 1 | kamloops to clearwater distance: 125km

fully loaded with waterproof panniers (they came in super handy as you will find out). light showers as i headed out

just a barn

took the mcclure ferry across the n thompson. it's a type of ferry called a "reactionary" cable ferry because it travels completely by the current. yay for zero emissions travel i guess. oh yeah and it was free.

eerie remnants left by a fire (2003?). almost completely like this for 15 or so km from mcclure to barriere

the engine blazes, the elevation raises / and the dynamite walls contain us

there's snow up there! this was taken between barriere and clearwater somewhere. the rain let up here and blue sky began to emerge. we had loads of rain this june and the north thompson river is close to overflowing... the landscape was swampy marshland on either side of the road for much of the way but the mountains in the backdrop kept growing larger and larger.

set up camp. debated on drinking straight from the clearwater river but thought better of it; not sure whoever named it can be trusted. instead i used my handy filter and filled up my bottles. treated myself to some pb&j sams and a large banana cream pie blizzard from dq day 2 | clearwater to pyramid mountain (wells gray) distance: 60km

spahats, first of the many waterfalls in wells gray. right after i took this shot my iphone battery ran out. the thing said like 20% full a few minutes before this... damn you apple. absolutely poured rain all day and there were low clouds everywhere in the park, would've made for some interesting shots. definitely the best scenery of the whole trip.

helmecken falls, camera was dead so not my picture but it's pretty spectacular. set up camp in the pouring rain and treated myself to some more pb&j day 3 | pyramid mountain to barriere distance: 110km

where the heck did all the germans come from? more german visitors than france, 1940. but the best part of the trip was the flower meadow bakery & cafe at the base of the park. massive cinnamon buns! was sure to make two trips there. refueled, the long road back had already begun and it wasn't super interesting other than fighting headwinds and having a sore knee. stayed at a campground in barriere where a huge group of tree planters set up camp. one girl, the cook, invited me to eat breakfast in the morning.

day 4 | barriere to kamloops distance: 65km

a combination of oversleeping and waiting for the rain to die down to break camp caused me to miss breakfast with the treeplanters. rained part of the way home then was just cloudy. bleh. mcclure ferry was closed due to high water levels which sucks because i was planning stop by a golf course and pick up my dad some golf balls for father's day. had to go into town on via the highway, which when entering kamloops can also be headwind central (it was).

#barriere #clearwater #cycling #kamloops #mcclure #wells gray

As far as they were concerned, gunfire was nothing but noise. That's why wars can keep going. Even the people who make them, who fight in them, don't really get the picture. Even with a bullet in their gut, they'd go on picking up old shoes that "might come in handy." The way a sheep, lying on its side in a meadow, will keep on grazing with its dying breath. Most people don't die until the last moment; others start twenty years in advance, sometimes more. Those are the unfortunates.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

#Journey to the End of the Night #Literature #Louis-Ferdinand Céline #War

moresoulthanasockwithahole

The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which every thing, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death. The world came into being with the signing of the contract. A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A poet says, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age.” This is what we know. The rest is gravy.

Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock—more than a maple—a universe.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

#annie dillard #pilgrim at tinker creek #literature

"I couldn’t have put words to it as a boy, but later I understood what seized my imagination that day. How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared… For all those years when Loonie and I surfed together, having caught the bug that first morning at the Point, we never spoke about the business of beauty. We were mates but there were places our conversation simply couldn't go. We talked about skill and courage and luck—we shared all that, and in time we surfed to fool with death—but for me there was still the outlaw feeling of doing something graceful, as if dancing on water was the best and bravest thing a man could do."

Tim Winton, Breath

#tim winton #breath #literature

"This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. This music was her—the real plain her... This music did not take a long time or a short time. It did not have anything to do with time going by at all. She sat with her arms around her legs, biting her salty knee very hard. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen... Now that it was over there was only her heart beating like a rabbit and this terrible hurt."

Carson McCullers, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

#carson mccullers #the heart is a lonely hunter #literature

someonepleasestoptheworld iv

#someone please stop the world

uenostation54-deactivated201209

David Bowie with painting of Yukio Mishima

i look at the tall houses, i look at the thousands of windows, i look at the distant church steeple. so this is the earth. so this is the home of the humans.

--sigbjørn obstfelder (1866–1900)

#sigbjørn obstfelder #edvard munch #peter watkins

We're all dying, aren't we? All the husbands and all the wives. Every minute. And we're not teaching each other what we really know, are we?

Marilyn Monroe (The Misfits, 1961)

#marilyn monroe #john huston #the misfits #clark gable #montgomery clift #eli wallach #thelma ritter #arthur miller

wipeout !!

#cycling #wipeout

KAMLOOPS - CACHE CREEK (ROUNDTRIP) 11/11/11, 12/11/11

distance: 180km (90 each way) terrain: hilly roadkill: none highlights: descents/soul music/junk food tunes: curtis mayfield, otis redding, william bell, mayer hawthorne, lee moses, jackson 5, isaac hayes

cache creek used to be a fairly active hub along the trans-canada highway as a waypoint from the interior into vancouver. that is, until highway 5 was built as a shorter route. nowadays cache creek is pretty much just a big strip of shady motels and restaurants for truckers it seems. apparently highway 5 was closed down due to a snowstorm so i was faced with loads of traffic coming from van.

this is the hilliest ride i’ve done so far, so i was kind of afraid going into it. thankfully, due to hundreds of years of oppression, the hills were a lot of fun. soul music is essential to climbing, it seems. racial inequality, social injustice: both motivating factors just to keep on pushing. a few mountains never kept a brother down. each hill summited, the man overthrown, and left with an exhilarating descent… it’s hard not so sing along.

most of the motels i saw were advertised for around $40 a night but for some reason the one i checked into cost $70!! i was too tired to decline and find another one so i forked over the cash. can’t wait till summer so i can camp for free. wandering around town in the dark, a huge wind/rainstorm came into town and lasted all night. it blew my scarf off and i couldn’t find it afterward.

but the best thing about cycling is that life is an all you can eat buffet. at herbie’s drive-in diner i had a huge greasy herbie burger, poutine and hot chocolate. later in the night a large banana cream pie blizzard, reese peanut butter cups, crunchie bar, mr big, two snickers, and licorice. well deserved!

on the way back it snowed most of the way but didn’t stick much (except to me -__-)

#cycling #cache creek

KAMLOOPS - McCLURE (LOOP) 01/11/11

distance: 90km terrain: partly hilly/partly flat roadkill: none tunes: ride, timber timbre highlights: ferry across north thompson river/girl in cafe

the town of mcclure was almost completely burned down in a forest fire about a decade ago (it’s been that long already????) …it’s sort of a ghost town (even more-so than it was previous to the fire)

so my waitress at the mcclure restaurant was SPOOKY, but super hot. i guess sorta like an anorexic shelley duvall but spookier and sexier, hot damn! she was way out of my league but i was wearing well matched layers and a nice scarf so i was looking sufficiently art-school (not my words) but i was literally afraid to look into her eyes for fear of being lured into some 70s cult horror movie. oddly, the restaurant serves breakfast till 4:00pm and there’s no lunch menu (WTF???), so i had bacon, eggs, and toast at 2:00pm. don’t know what she’s doing in such a dead end place; she should either be a model or a vampiric serial killer. eerily, my ipod died shortly after this encounter, so she may have put a curse on me. luckily the lack of tunes actually led me to find solace in the sound of the wind and the rhythm of my breathing. the way back was on a highway so drafting off huge semi-trucks was lots of fun. there’s a 5km or so detour up to a restaurant in mcclure that isn’t shown on the map, thus the discrepancy in distance.

#cycling #mcClure

kamloops - scotch creek (roundtrip)

14/09/11, 15/09/11

distance: 200km (100 each way) terrain: mostly flat roadkill: raccoon, deer tunes: james carr, tallest man in the world, the supremes highlights: first solo cycling/camping trip

#cycling #scotch creek #shuswap

the machine

#cycling #eloise #cannondale t2

ii (by pleasestoptheworld)

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