February 03
im really trying to decide if I start up a blog again.
Geekpunk is our little communinty, some of this is about bikes, some of it is about tech, some of it is about punk,
some of it is about knitting, some of it is about city life. All of it is about us
im really trying to decide if I start up a blog again.
Sent from my iPhone
Saw this at the news stand at penn station baltimore… I love this city
so last night I did my first alleycat race. Here’s a play by play if you’re interested.
got to DC a little earlier than I anticipated (I expected more traffic) so I rolled out to Adams Morgan and the pharmacy bar to see my old friend Mike D. He looked good, we chatted a bit, I left.
I decided to race on my surly. this was a good idea because it was a single speed freewheel so it would give me a chance to rest. I also tend to ride faster on a freewheel than fixed. this was a bad idea because it is geared really low for cross racing. I thought this would be a good training ride to get me used to spinning my ass off.
around 7:20, there were people mulling around dupont circle getting ready for the race. tim showed up on the hottest looking cruiser I have ever seen. A schwinn panther (I think) rad. He was there to take pics. Got the manifest and my number and then we all left at about 8pm. It’s a good thing that I was following the crowd because I would have gone a much longer way to the first checkpoint if I were just doing it solo. Everyone went the wrong way down a one way except for one guy, he made a right. I followed him because I figured he knew something the others didn’t, he was going pretty fast. In the end, it was a good move because we ended cutting some people off.
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in writing this, I will spare you all the history lessons. we learned a lot there, but explaining everything will make this a lot more like a boring lesson from me.
the flight was on Lan, it was hands down the most comfortable plane I have ever been on. they had the fancy tv monitors in the back of each seat and everything. when we landed it was raining like crazy. monsoon crazy.
there was a short break in the rain and we hoofed it along the coast and ran into our first three moai on the way to the museum. the museum was small but really informative and we spent a lot of time there trying to get a feel for the island. on the way back the rain hit hard and we got soaked.
the next day the rain cleared and we started our quest to see the island purely on human power. we took a pretty long hike up to the orongo ceremonial village. it was cool, but all petroglyphs and no moai. 
using the map, we had planned to get to orongo and then walk along the rocky coast to ahu vinapu. we realized that this impossible and started walking along a dirt road. we picked up a buddy along the way (chilean stray dogs are incredibly friendly). i had the fantastic idea of taking a shortcut through the woods. jen and our buddy followed. about ninety minutes later, we realized that I am an idiot. we almost got lost on our way back but luckily our buddy remembered the way better than we did. when we started to take the wrong fork in the trail, he took the right one, stopped and looked at us until we switched. then he told us that timmy was in a well.
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jen pointed out that this has felt more like consecutive vacations than one huge trip because we are going back and forth between such diverse places. I never really caught up the blog with San Pedro so I´ll wrap that up and then finish up with easter island. This was two weeks ago so details are already becoming spotty.
we spent the morning after the drive to chuquicamata exploring the town. chuqui is the largest open mouth copper mine in the world. you can´t even really grasp how big it is, imagine a mountain. now imagine that the mountain is made entirely out of the stuff that has been pulled from the ground that isn´t copper. chuqui is also a mining town, the kind that was built by the mine to provide a place to live for its workers. unfortunately the giant slag pile is unstable and encroaching on the town and the air is full of all sorts of bad things so it is now an unsuitable place for people to live. the town is about ninety percetn evacuated. Rodrigo´s parents have to move out by august. it´s a total ghost town not entirely unlike humberstone but frozen in the present time instead of the fifties. 
this graffiti says ¨that the Oclay family lived there from 1968 to 2007¨.
this was inside an abandoned garage. 
. it was very hard to fight the urge to enter all the abandoned homes, but we didn´t.
we got a ride to calama. calama is the town where everyone from chuqui is moving. it is also the place most people stop at in transit to go to san pedro although now it is possible to get buses direct to san pedro. Read the rest of this entry »
we left Santiago on a rainy friday morning. got on the twenty four hour bus to iquique. this sounds pretty horrible but it is actually not as bad as you would think. the seats are called semi cama which means they fold at a forty five degree angle and there are also leg and footrests. not so bad. we sat through about a million movies. some of which were good, and some of which were horrible. -the marine- starring a wwf wrestler is pretty bad but much more entertaining than the art house flick -perfume-which allegedly is a decent book, but as a movie…well pessimo
we arrived in iquique the next day and Carol had prepared a gigantic almuerzo. it was great to see her again, but it was weird because eight years ago she was in college and living at home and now she´s married and making these fantastic lunches. Her husband is a great guy and they are really cute together. we napped a bit after eating and took off strolling through iquique. Iquique is full of really old colonial wooden buildings. things have changed a bit since I was there last. They built up the beach a bit to make it more tourist friendly and they closed the main colonial street to car traffic and put a lot of salt sculptures up.
this is the view from Carol and Rodrigo´s apt.
the next day we woke up early and left for La Tirana. It´s a town of about eight hundred people, but once a year, they have a huge religious festival and roughly two hundred thousand people pass through over a course of about two weeks.
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we´re going to easter island!!!!!
before we left, we looked into tickets and they were a lot. They´re still a lot if you buy them here but significantly cheaper. we have to make some weird adjustments to our travel plans to pull it off, but it seems worth it. we´re still trying to figure some things out. Here´s what we got so far.
leave tomorrow on a 26 hour bus for iquique. then go to the festival de la tirana. google it. it looks crazy. spend some time with Carolina and her husband (Fernando´s sister, another old friend). overnight bus to calama / a couple days in San Pedro de Atacama. total desert. 5 hours of electricity per day. my favorite place in the world.
return on a plane.
then hop on a plane to easter island on july 24. look at moai, ride mountain bikes, chill on the beach (78 degrees, water is comparable, not the greatest but much warmer than what we got going on here). return on the 30th. and then spend the remaining time split between santiago, vina del mar, and valparaiso.
we´re going to bag a visit to la serena which was supposed to be on the way back from calama but really that´s a small price to pay.
if you are too lazy to check the flickr page. here are some pics from buenos aires and a few from here.
cementerio recoleta
madonna´s grave. well not madonna but the lady she played in that movie Evita.
in a japanese garden in buenos aires
in front of the casa rosada -president´s house (still buenos aires)
La Boca
last one from argentina (until I upload everything at home). an orquestra de tango. they were really good. I bought a cd from them. it´s awesome.
the view from Fernando and Sergio´s fancy apt. this is taken from the window of the guest room.
the hilton santiago…just kidding. it´s their apt!
Ipod vending at oakland air port… What no iphone in a3.
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