August 29
Saw this at the news stand at penn station baltimore… I love this city
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 »