Big Island Blues, NOT

I'm having breakfast at the Coffee Shack looking down at Kealakakua Bay where Captain Cook was slain many years ago. I was pleased to see up on one of their walls they still have a "Petroglif Turtle" sand casting that I made at at Hookena Beach seven years ago.
I've been on the Big Island (Hawaii, the island, not the state) for a little over a week and I feel like I'm settling in. I starting to feel strong from swimming in the ocean a couple of times every day for longer and longer distances and also biking the Hookena access road which is only two miles long, but with almost a thousand feet of climbing.
I'm camping at Hookena on the south Kona Coast. My tent hasn't arrived (long story) so I'm sleeping out under the stars when I can see them and the clouds at the other times.
In the morning I do my yoga type stretching and drink some green tea and hope the dolphins show up, which they haven't except on Sunday when I left the beach early to go to a mountain biking clinic put on by Bike Works Kona bike shop.

The clinic was very good, I learned a lot and had fun doing it. Mountain bikers seem to be a good bunch of people. They held it part of the way up the mountain on a very generous man's property. Then they topped it off by popping open a keg from the Kona Brewing Company and serving us pizza and all sorts of other good food. All with beautiful views and sunshine. The total cost was $10; a lot less that it costs to get a decent lunch around here. I really lucked out.

Seals off Squibnocket Beach

Yesterday afternoon Marianne and I took a walk on Squibnocket Beach. It was cold, gray, and windy, but at least Squibby is somewhat in the lee when it is blowing from the NorthWest.
(a little note: YouTube supports 720p HD video and displays it as long as you put this code in at the end of the link: &fmt=22 or you can click on "watch in high quality" which is located below the video on the right hand side. It is one of those little things that are so easy to overlook. It really does make a lot of difference to see it in "high quality" though it is still not as good as the original footage.)

Happy New Year!

Here we are in another year. It sure is getting off to a cold start here on Martha's Vineyard. It was down in the single digits when the New Year blew in on 50+mph gusts of windblown snow.

Last night we were all set to go out to a couple of New Year's Eve parties. Marianne and I bundled up and took the pot luck goodies she had made out to the car. By then it was about 10 degrees and blowing so hard that there we could see snow drifts in our driveway almost a foot deep. The snow had started out wet and soggy earlier in the day so now there was a lot of ice and snow frozen solidly on the windshield. After scraping away for several minutes and not getting very far we decided that discretion was the better part of valor. So we gave up on the parties and went next door to Jen and Todd's to share some oysters, brie, and champagne. Fell asleep before midnight.

The video above is from our new Flip Video HD. It is a pretty cool gadget. A few months ago Jenny told me about the Flip and I poo pooed it. I figured it was to simple and primitive to be worthwhile. Then when I heard that they came out with a HD version and it had an action mount which you could put on your mountain bike or helmet, I was a lot more interested. Now I am pretty much hooked. It is so easy to carry around in a pocket.

I tried the Flip on my mountain bike using the flip action mount to attach it to my handlebars. The video was pretty shaky when I was on trails, especially since the Flip does not have image stabilization. On the paved roads it wasn't so bad. Where it works best is when it is on a fixed tripod.
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Having looked at how the video looks in this blog (using the preview), I am disappointed. Maybe I should try adding it to YouTube and then putting a link in here to compare how that works. I do know that the video file I uploaded to this blog looked a lot better that it does on the blog. So now I am trying to do the Flip upload to YouTube. It sure seems pretty easy to do. I will say that I have been impressed with how well the Flip makes the technology easy to use.

The clip on YouTube is bigger, but I wouldn't say it was better. The original Flip clip is quite good. Then that get shrunk down by FlipShare for emailing and sending to a website (but it is still pretty good), then when that is sent to the blog or YouTube they shrink it down further and it doesn't look so good anymore. Well, such is life, at least for now.

Now that the new year is here I feel that I had better start doing some serious thinking about what I am going to do this winter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZCLbZFwrAM
this should be regular

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZCLbZFwrAM&&fmt=22
this should be higher definition

So let's put in the link in the Compose window:


guess I have to put this in here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZCLbZFwrAM

---------------------------
&ap=%2526fmt%3D22

OK now I see the little blue "Preview" in the upper right corner of the Compose window.
Now we can try a 640 by 480 size picture.
This was taken November 14, on a foggy ride through the Peaked Hill Land Bank property. I believe the rock in the distance (my mountain bike leaning up against it will give you an idea of it's size) is called Moshup's pillow.

It is funny how the picture isn't any larger. I like to look at larger pictures.

OK that seems to work. So now I should see how easy it is to put in a photo and see how it looks.

Well that is a photo from my phone taken at Great Rock Bight at 320x240 and put on the blog using the defaults - which is the medium size.

So now let's put in the same size pic using large entry

(That didn't work out very well! It put the new picture all the way at the top left.)

I seem to have trouble starting with a blank. There are so many different options and ways to go. To commit to any one seems to preclude all the rest; so it is easier to do nothing at all.
The problem is that doing nothing is a much of a choise as any of the others, it just doesn't leave much of a paper trail.

Well, I feel like I just have to get going with this blog. So let's get the whining over with and just post this so I no longer have the problem of where to start.

Moab Slick Rock Mountain Bike Trail April 6, 2007

Moab Slick Rock Mountain Bike Trail April 6, 2007

Yesterday I rode the whole Moab Slick Rock Trail.

Google Earth View of the ride. You can get all the details of the ride on MotionBased.com by clicking on the image above (or here). You can then play with it in Google Earth by clickingon "Dashboard" in MotionBased and the clicking on "Google Earth" located under the map
A few days ago I started this ride, but after getting to the start of the big loop I realized it was too much for me that day. Not only was I feeling stiff and sore, but the wide open vistas, endless dropoffs, steep decents, and seemingly verticle climbs intimidated me. As you can see from the photos it is a whole different world out there. I had never thought about having agoraphobia (fear of wide open spaces) until I was out on the ridges of the trail with everything dropping off all around me. There are a lot of very steep climbs and drops, and they look a lot steeper when you are at the top, quite often, because of the roundness of the rock formations, the trail just disappears out of sight and you have no idea how steep it gets or where it goes next. I have decided to ride within my "comfort zone": when I see something that scares me and makes me feel too uncomfortable I get off my bike and walk the tough stretches. Slowly as I get used to the new conditions and more comfortable with the trail conditions I find myself attempting more and more of the difficult and scary stuff.


Here I am out on the trail. You wouldn't know it looking at the picture, but the Abyss Canyon which comes in from the lower right is several hundred feet deep, and the trail just drops away towards it. The first time I was here a couple of days ago I walked down this stretch, even though it wasn't very steep. It just scared me too much heading into the unknown with an unknown drop off ahead. This time I knew what was ahead so I took it very slow, but on the bike.


Some fellow riders I met on the trail.


The mighty Colorado River way down below, looking upstream.

The first and only flower I saw on the whole ride. I do like red.



You can see how the steep the canyon walls can get. I feel totally justified in my fear of heights up here. It is strange because usually a fear of heights is associated with being high above the ground in a tower, building, sailboat mast, or whatever. Out here you can be on solid flat ground (and what could be more solid than this expanse of slickrock), but then the ground drops away from you.



After a long, hard, hot ride with over 2,800 feet up climbing I was pretty beat. But feeling good, I had even thrown in doing the practice loop on the way back, and happy to have done it, especially since I had bailed out of doing the whole ride a few days before. A large part of this trip has turned out to be dealing with my fears. Not a bad way to prepare for getting back into creating sculpture.
Less than two weeks left. I'm going to have to start planning out how to finish the trip.
PS I wrote this article while having a very long breakfast at The Red Rock Bakery & Net Cafe located at 74 South Main St. Moab, Utah. Good food and coffee - free refills too!

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