Day 5


We went about 60km today. We’re still in the Netherlands, but only 11km to go until Germany. We’ve been riding north, slowly creepibg towards the border. Today, we  got to Emmen, which is tje start of my second set of maps : “The Viking Route”.  We will be raiding and pillaging along the way, or maybe just looking at Viking artifacts.

Around the northern part of the Netherlands, in the Gronigen province – where we are now – ancient people stacked up rocks intp formations. Like stonehwnge, but much more squat. We went to look at one near Emmen. It really looked like modern art actually. The arrangement of the stones was aestheticaly pleasing. Nicole describes it as, “a bunch of big honking stones.” She was very excited to go see it.

The heat has been really intense the last couple of days. I feel like i’m being baked alive in the afternoon. We’ve taken to having a late lunch and hanging out for bit afterwards. Alas, internet connections are harder to find in smaller towns and usually not offered at campsites.

“Camping” is a different concept in the Netherlands. Usually, it refers to a place where trailers of the sort found in retirement mobile home parks in the american southwest are permenently parked. Except, not just for old folks. Then, there is usually a fleet of caravans (americans call theses ‘campers’). These have tents extending from them to make them into three room houses. They have electricity and a million amenities. And finally, you have the tents. These are usually 12 person tents. Some of them have stoves in them. No campground is complete without a network of tiny canals. And a bar.

And then there exists something called ‘mini camping.’ This refers to what americans call car camping. You get a grassy spot to pitch you mega tent or park your camper, but no bar or canal network. Mini camping often offers certain luxuries, like toilet paper, hand soap, paper towells and free hot showers. Also, it’s usually cheaper. Tonight, we had to stop to ask for directions and the woman we asked was disparaging. “It’s only farmer camping,” she explained. Farmer camping with free showers and cheap pizza. What more could you ask?

Day 4


And on day 4 the rolling hills become more rolly and the downhills are less than the up. We can see germany from here and wil arrive there tomorrow or the next day, but at spot north of here.

I don’t pull xena the whole time. Sometimes, I let her off leash. Like yeaterday, we came to bike path that narrowly wove between two pastures, a canal on either side. The problem about letting her run is that she has no idea that bikes can’t stop and turn as fast as she can. She has been alost hit so many times. It really annoys other bikers, understamdably, so she only gets to run in places without cars or other bikes. She still will get right in front of me and stop, turning to look at me with her wide dog grin. This wasn’t a problem yesterday afternoon, though, as she jumped over a canal, got under an electric fence and ran into a cow-filled pasture, directly at a startled jersey cow. She then raced around the pasture, pausing only to snack on cow shit. Alarming and funny, all at the same time.

We went crazy far yesterday.  Got to the campground after 22:00 and pitched tents in the darkness. It was cool, sorta.

Today the weather was really hot. 28°  We got a late start. I was tired and sore. We only went around 50k today, but we spent more time lounging than progressing. It’s the first time that it’s felt like summer in the netherlands. Finally gets here in august. I don’t mind the cooler weather, even if the clouds get me down.

We camped really early tonight. The sun is just now setting and I’m getting very sleepy.

Day 2 and 3

Day 2

The second day out has receeded out of my memory, alas. We camped at a boat harbor.


Day 3

I was running low on batteries, so I texted yesterday’s distance to twitter. If you go to my blog, you can find twitter info in the right column. Today is sunny, so I’m better for power. Also better for biking, so far, we’re booking.

I realized that towing my dog to Denmark is nuts. Oh well.

We’re in geld-something province, having left holland and flavoland.  Holland is actually only two provinces of the netherlands. The most populated ones. Surprisingly, flavoland has rolling hills. Not totally flat. Crazy.

Stupid Maemo Tricks

I’ve been spending the last several weeks trying to figure out best way to blog from a N800 internet tablet. I now have a solution, but, alas, it’s stupid.

I signed up for a super secret gmail address. I set up the built-in mail client to use that address. I saved the email posting address for blogger and flickr in my contacts list.
I can upload to flickr by emailing pictures in. The subject is the title. The body is the description. tags go on new lines marked with “Tags:”. Not bad.
And I can email posts to blogger, but as far as I know, I get no tags.
The posts sit in the email outbox until I stumble upon an open wifi network. Then they get sent off to the appropriate places. So I can blog and do picture stuff when I’m offline.
This is really sub-optimal. There’s a nice-looking cross-platform uploader called glimmr, but I can’t build it on OS X because the configuration script is not cross-platform and I’m lazy (deadly combo). And there’s a blog client, but it crashes for me. Oh well. Better than nothing.
I’m off tomorrow.

This is Xena

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Happy Dog, originally uploaded by celesteh.

As you can see, my dog is very cute. Check out how her back legs are sprawled out, frog-like. This is how she normally sits, when she sits. It means she can’t spring up too quickly. Which is ok, as she rarely springs up. A more typical portrait would have her lying down asleep.
(maybe I should get her thyroid checked, actually.)
Not that she doesn’t run around when appropriate. When this picture was taken, she had just finished chasing a ball around in the woods. So fun! So cute! But indoors, she’s more sleepy. And very quiet. She only barks when a stranger is trying to come inside by themselves. (Useful) Or if she’s tied up outside a grocery store.
If you look very closely at this photo, you will fail to find evidence of fleas or ticks. Not only because the resolution isn’t anywhere near good enough, but because she gets a treatment every month which rids her of pests and protects her against heart worm.
So, if you, in Edgbaston, East Midlands, England, who has a free room in your flat, were to rent to me, you would have a very cute pet around and a bit of additional security, but with no responsibility. You could get all the belly rubs you wanted, or let her sleep (she’s not pushy at all) and never have to pick up after her. Really, it’s perfect for you.
Did I mention that she’s small?
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Posing on Pagoda, originally uploaded by celesteh.

Lake Woebegone

I just started getting the podcast to the American radio show “A Prarie Home Companion”. It’s patriotic Americana for the left wing. Or rather, the slightly less right wing. People who theoretically favor rights for gay people and women and immigrants, but want to dream of the midwestern heartland, populated by lonely Norweigan farmers and their foibles and aren’t we all struggling in this together, all of us straight, white, christian liberals?

I remember listening to a christmas episode and they were talking about the town Christmas pageant and the kids dressed as Mary and Joseph and the lights and the feeling of community and it made me feel terribly lonely. Because this community was not for me. I didn’t know the word “heteronormative” yet then, but I knew this imperfect paradise of essentialist americanism was not for me.
And my patience for it and longing for it has since been replaced by annoyance. What makes white, heterosxual christians more american than black people or gay people or atheists or costal people or queer, atheist costal black people?
I’m really tired of Americannes being defined regionally such that minority populations are more likely to be excluded. If we stop and think for a moment, we know that Lake Woebegone is not only inhabitted by white, straight christians. People migrate within the US. Even people born to Christian families drop the ID. 10% of the kids will be queer. But the continuing refernces to Norweigan farmers implicitly excludes atheists and queers and explicitly excludes jews, latinos, black people etc. Garrison Keeler’s America is not so different than Rush Limbaugh’s America. Except in Rush’s America, the enemies are at the gate. In Keeler’s, the same people Rush calls enemies just don’t exist at all.
And this is the choice for us in America. We can be normative and blend in, we can be invisible or we can be reviled. This kind of “choice” eats into you (and by “you” I mean “me”) even if you try to reject it. Square peg, round hole. Trying to make your identity fit into the grid provided for it. Being a queer alone is suxxor, because you just don’t exist. You have no mirror to reflect your existance. Affinity groups are essential for maintaining sanity, imo. Also, NPR sucks. Can we stop calling essentialist erasism “liberal?” Because it’s not, and I’m tired of it.

Book Review (relatively spoiler free)

So I just finished the latest novel, Harry Potter and the Title that Gives Away a Major Plot Point. Um, what can I say? That book is powered by hype. It was hype that made me go to a book store at 12:20 at night so that I could be among the first to purchase it. It was hype that made me sit and read it all at once. It was hype that first got me into the series.

Let’s face it, the writing is not all that great and the plots are all pretty predictable, although I’ll admit once in a while she throws in a good twist. That said, this book is much tighter written than some of the previous ones in the series. It’s a reasonable length and extraneous bits were mostly left out. There were no quiddich matches, for instance. Returning characters appeared without any backstory, which has it’s good points, but I found it kind of confusing when a red shirt not heard of except in passing for many books suddenly appears. The book makes most sense when the other books are fresh.
After sprawling across six previous books, some of them far too long, there are a lot of characters in the Harry Potter universe. Who could keep track of all of them? The teacher of Muggle Studies? Has she even been mentioned since an aside when the kids got old enough to take electives? So when the red shirts start dropping left and right, with no re-introduction, well, wait, who just got killed?
Anyway, off to a promising start with a focused plot, the book eventually gets . . . melodramatic. I won’t quote any words from it, but the writing gets to be completely over-wrought. Unsupportably so.
In a book about magic, it’s silly to complain about a deus-ex-machina, because, well . . .. Anyway, you’ve probably already made up your mind about whether or not you’re going to read it. Perhaps, like me, it’s already too late for you. But I will give a your of caution: just skip the epilogue.
What’s with the British tacking these stupid epilogues on to things? It’s just like the last chapter of Clockwork Orange. Why do they think we can’t handle just letting the damn thing end? No, several years in the future when the pain of all the dead red shirts had subsided, the surviving characters maintained the friendships that they had built and went on to breed. “All was well.” Yeah, it actually ends with “all was well.” Gah, what bullshit. All that melodrama with an inane epilogue . . . the combinations is too much. The book has a promising beginning but doesn’t pay off in the end.
Or maybe I’m grumpy because I stayed up until 6 AM reading and then woke up a few hours later and finished it. I need a nap.