Epic France Trans Alps Cycling Trip - Part I

Introduction

I did a week-long fully-supported bike trip through the French Alps with three friends. We hopscotched from one fancy hotel to another, with a full staff in vans supporting us the whole way. The trip was called the Epic France Trans Alps, and basically took us over every major Alpine mountain pass featured in the Tour de France. Not just this year’s Tour, but all of them. That’s 18 categorized climbs, half of them “Hors Categorie,” aka HC, which means “so difficult they cannot be classified.”

If you think this sounds hard, you’re right, though I’m suffering worse now that I’m on an airplane, in coach, headed back to my worldly responsibilities, and the person in the seat next to me has really bad breath. I’m about to start looking for a parachute…

This ride report will dispense with my usual formula of recounting the food and then the riding. There’s just too much to report, and I doubt you overmuch care what order we did anything in. This is just a highlights reel, and every couple thousand words I’ll cut it off and call it a post. (Readers complain I go on too long….)

Rental bike

The airlines are apparently cooler these days about not charging for bicycles, but they don’t take liability for any damage. Plus, I’m lazy, so I rented a bike. On the first day, we supplied the staff mechanic with pedals, saddles, bike computers, etc. and made sure the fit was right. We’d sent in our measurements in advance, and sure enough, the bike fit me pretty darn well. The tires looked really fat, and seemed awfully soft, but I’m told that’s the modern style. I asked three different randos if the tires felt too squishy to them, and they all said naw, it’s fine.

In case you’re a tech weenie, here’s the bike. I’m not going to geek out on the details other than to say it has a carbon frame, hella aero wheels, disc brakes, 12 cogs in the back, a compact double up front, and SRAM electronic shifting. The shifting hasn’t changed much since I first reported on it, here. Over the course of the week, I threw my chain three times, but in each case I was able to shift it back on via lever-taps, without needing to stop. (I did have to restart my heart each time.)

Wine with lunch?!

Since the first ride would just be an hour or so (to shake down the bikes), we had lunch in the hotel restaurant instead of having a picnic on the road. I’ve never done one of these supported tours before, so I kind of go with the flow and just play along like I know the drill. (I know—story of my life, right?) So when the waitress opened a bottle of wine for the table, and my pals elected to partake (“We wouldn’t want to waste it,” Ian said), I went along. I know drinking before hard exercise is absurd (even a small amount that wouldn’t affect motor skills), but I figured what the hell, I’m eating all this great bread anyway, it’ll sop it up. I was a couple sips in when we noticed waitresses rushing around removing wine bottles from the tables. “A mistake was made,” one explained to us, though she stopped short of removing our bottle since we’d started in on it. I guess the wine was only for the staff, not the riders. Oops.

When dessert arrived—crème brûlée—the others turned it down, not wanting to still be digesting as we tackled the Montée d’Avoriaz. I said screw it—I paid for this dessert, and it’s gonna be tasty. I’d muddle through the ride somehow, I figured.

Col des Égos

I knew this first ride would bring out the egos. There were two week-long tours running simultaneously, with the same staff and hotels, but different routes. The Epic one I signed up for has longer days and more climbs than the Trans group would do. Then, within each tour there was an A group and a B group. (My old scoutmaster would have called them “the kickass group and the pick-ass group,” bless his twisted, deeply suspect heart.) I was surprised that fully 15 of the Epic riders declared themselves Group A. Some of these guys looked a little old to me. Sure, they were fit and trim, but come on … it won’t be long before they’ll be offered wheelchairs at airports. I’d assumed going into this tour that I’d be bringing up the rear, hopefully not making everyone wait too long, but now I wasn’t so sure. One thing I did know: everyone was going to go super hard on this opening ride, to strut their stuff. It’s just how the male ego works. Except mine: I vowed (silently) to behave.

In the event, there was little temptation for me to hammer. My (albeit world class) stomach was working pretty hard on all that bread and crème brûlée, and surely the wine didn’t help. Meanwhile, I’d discovered that riding out of the saddle was tricky because my tires were, I now realized, severely underinflated. As I rocked the bike, there was a slight handling latency, the front tire buckling just a bit. It was like trying to sleep on a downy airbed, one of those weirdly thick ones, that when they invariably lose air start to sway a bit, like you’re onboard ship. In fact, my bike and I both felt a bit woozy in general. It was like some foggy, slow-motion dream, rider after rider rolling by me. This one guy passed me in a switchback and said, in a Mr. Rogers voice, “Coming through!” There was something so politely triumphant about it, it kind of rankled, especially since he was so damn old. He looked like he could be 40-something from the neck down, though looking at his face you’d think late sixties at least. But I wasn’t about to mount any resistance to his bold move. I just watched him pedal away and thought: enjoy yourself. Enjoy stomping me. Enjoy your $9K bike. I’ll be back here practicing my resignation skills, being the shit one once again.

As slow as I was going, continental drift was in my favor and I eventually made the summit. Here we are doing a photo op: the East Bay Velo Club 4, plus a couple of new pals, both (conveniently) named Michael. (I thought of not using any names here, but everyone is on Strava and if some serial killer wants to stalk wealthy cyclists he could easily do it without this blog.)

See the Michael on the right, in the neon? We chatted with him at lunch. He’s recently retired, does a fair number of these tours, and rides an old bike with a steel frame that can be disassembled like a sniper’s rifle. He was nipping at my heels all the way up the climb. I figured him for about 60 but came to learn he’s 71 years old, and still tough as nails.

I figured if I tried to descend back to the hotel with such squishy tires I’d probably roll one, so I found the van and asked the mechanic to take a look. Each tire had just 40 PSI! Boy did I feel like an idiot. Once I got those bad boys topped up at 80, my rented Felt felt like an actual road bike, no longer like a beach cruiser. The descent was glorious. Smooth, flow-y road, amazing scenery, an expert guide with perfect lines to follow. Comparing notes, Craig and I were just giddy.

Dinner

The format of this tour makes a lot of sense, for the ride and my report: if you’re sick of cycling, either because you’re knackered from a hard day in the saddle or from reading too much tedious text on the topic, suddenly there’s this great meal in front of you. We started with this:

France has clearly not (okay, has only recently) gotten the memo about cured meats being carcinogenic. (Then again, they’ve never taken the tobacco threat seriously either.) We ate cured meats roughly three times a day throughout the week, even K who is otherwise a vegetarian. It’s just so good, you never say no to all manner of charcuterie, ham, bacon, you name it. Perhaps it’s a regional specialty. That’s what I decided, anyway; I can’t be bothered to look it up now.

Here is the entrée, some kind of amazing roast pork. I must confess I’ll probably never feel perfectly natural sitting at a table and having something like this set in front of me. That’s just not how I was raised. Don’t get me wrong, my mom is an amazing cook, but our pantry always had different stuff. When was a kid, Mom would use oatmeal to stretch a pound of ground turkey to make burgers for six. Once my patty squirted out of the back of the bun and I didn’t even notice. The only beef we ever got was liver because serving it was considered a mother’s duty back in those days. We got pretty cool cheeses from some co-op, but they were all the melting, cooking kind—not like these soft French ones. Hell, we grew up drinking powdered milk. So when I had this incredible roast pork dish on my plate there was a small part of me that feared someone would suddenly rush out from the kitchen and say, “Stop! A mistake has been made! You must give that back!”

Here’s the dessert, a little cake doodad, possibly flourless, with flawless ice cream. Since we’re on the topic, here is my recipe for flourless chocolate cake.

Breakfast

Wait, you’re thinking: this report has so far delivered only 16 miles of actual cycling action, but at least 6,000 calories of food lore, and now you’re gonna talk about breakfast? Seriously?

Well, yeah. This is kind of what travel is for. As different as the Alps are from the Sierra Nevadas and the Rockies (and don’t worry, I will eventually get into these differences), the French terrain is far more similar to the American than their food is to ours. I can only imagine that a European traveler to the U.S. would be endlessly appalled by the garbage we serve up. A grocery store baguette? Forget it, it’d go straight into the garbage. And a croissant? Spongy, insipid, indestructible, ageless. Eat an American motel breakfast pastry and you’ll end up with a gross film on the roof of your mouth. And don’t you dare eat scrambled eggs from a steam tray … they’ll be soggy or dried-out or somehow both, and won’t taste a thing like an egg, which they’re not—they’re surely poured from a carton. That’s the US hospitality industry for you. Meanwhile, I stayed at an airport Holiday Inn Express in Geneva and had an entirely serviceable continental breakfast. Sure, the croissant wasn’t brilliant, but on the balance was quite worth eating. So I’m going to spend some time on the food in these posts.

This is the croissant I had at my first official tour hotel breakfast. Light, airy, buttery, and flaky enough to make a mess on my plate.

Bread in general can be intolerable in the U.S. Anything you’d get with a so-called continental breakfast in most places would just make you want to cry. Sure, we have great one-off bakeries in the Bay Area, but the quality control if you randomly toured the country would be abysmal. In contrast, you really can’t go wrong in Europe, in my experience. I fearlessly had a pre-made sandwich at the Geneva airport and another at the Zurich airport, both on rather good bread. And it wasn’t just the bread: one of these sandwiches was a Caprese. Can you imagine ordering a Caprese sandwich at an airport in America? The tomatoes would be pink and mushy, the bread like cardboard, the basil flavorless, the fresh Mozzarella soggy and limp. You’d probably start crying. I certainly would.

On the flip side, my pals and I observed something really bizarre at every French hotel we ate at: as good as the bread was, there was never any butter. WTF? Doesn’t everybody love good butter for their great bread? (Exception: I did find one little block of Président brand butter at one breakfast, which I’d thought was cheese. Maybe the hotel did, too.) Even olive oil was never offered, and if the bread hadn’t been so good we’d surely have complained (I mean, other than to each other). At our last dinner there was one little oil/vinegar dispenser going around, but literally just one, and the absolutely world class waitstaff seemed really flummoxed: perhaps not by not having more of these dispensers, but by this one having shown up out of nowhere seeding discontent at neighboring tables.

Meanwhile, I cannot understand the French hotel industry’s inability to cater to Americans’ coffee tastes. Every coffee shop in America has some version of a basic house coffee. Isn’t Starbucks showcasing this globally now? Plus, the archetypal large mug of coffee is featured in countless Hollywood movies that are exported around the world. The concept is not complicated: we drink a dark brown beverage, brewed from coffee beans, in quantities of 12 to 24 ounces, and we call it, simply, “coffee.” It is not cappuccino or espresso or any other kid-size micro-beverage that you drink like it’s a shot of booze. I thought we had this coffee mismatch solved after World War II when Europeans saw our American soldiers watering down their dinky coffee-bean-freebasing drinks and took to calling this larger beverage an Americano, but nobody in the Rhône-Alpes region seems to have heard of this. The machines have all these buttons with weird names like “Café Long” which doesn’t mean anything in any language, or “Café Noisette” which sounds like it would be “noisy” but actually literally translates “hazelnut” which the ensuing beverage did not have the slightest flavor of. Over the course of the trip I tried six or eight different fancy digital coffee machines and a few humans and never did get a normal cup of coffee, not even an Americano. Most of what I drank tasted mainly like foamed milk and at no point did I manage to get the simple black coffee I was looking for. It’s like some vast conspiracy to deliberately fail to understand this simple concept of what non-fussy, non-micro, basic-ground-coffee-bean-based beverages are supposed to be. I never even saw a normal mug, except this one in my hotel room (the purpose of which was not clear, but which I liked due to the cyclist pattern):

To be continued…

Well, I see I’ve pretty much run out of room here, or more to the point you’ve run out of patience. Tune in next time when I promise to get as far as the Col de Joux Plane, the Col de la Columbière, the Col de Croix Fry, and surely another meal or two.

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Death Valley - Frequently Asked Questions

Introduction

It’s widely known that Death Valley, in California, is the third most popular vacation spot in the world (the first two being Disneyland and Paris, in that order).  What’s not always appreciated is how much misinformation there is about this tourist mecca, such as the first sentence of this very post.  Read on for answers to Frequently Asked Questions about Death Valley, based on my recent vacation there.

Q.  What is the WiFi password at Death Valley?

A.  This is, by far, the most frequently asked question.  The answer is, there generally isn’t one.  Certain businesses in Stovepipe Wells and Furnace Creek have WiFi, but most of the time you’ll be driving around enjoying nature, and you won’t even have cell phone coverage.  This is a great place to get away from the Internet, if you think your kids can handle it. Don’t forget your old-school road atlas, if you normally depend on GPS.

Q.  How many people died in Death Valley, to give it its name?

A.  One.  This was in 1849, when some miners got stuck there.  Probably more people have died since.  I think I remember hearing about somebody trying to smuggle a corpse through there but was caught, due to the corpse stinking in the heat.  Actually, now that I think about it, that was something that happened on Amtrak.

Q.  Is Death Valley really the hottest place on Earth?

A.  Yes!  For awhile it was thought that El Azizia, Libya had that honor, but in 2012, according to this article, it was determined that “the observer [there] broke a more reliable instrument and used a complicated and less reliable type of thermometer.”  Details are hazy but I think the observer used a rectal thermometer.  (You’re supposed to subtract a couple degrees with those.)  In any event, when we visited recently, the temperature was pretty much perfect.

Q.  Is Death Valley really the driest place on Earth?

A.  No, it’s not even in the top ten.  The driest place is in Antarctica, and the driest non-polar place is the Atacama Desert in Chile.  But Death Valley is the driest place in North America, which is all anybody actually cares about.  The rainiest month in Death Valley is March, when they get about a third of an inch of rain (roughly the same amount the Bay Area has been getting every day this year, I think).

Q.  Would the below catastrophe ever happen in Death Valley?

A.  You mean this?

No, never.  I snapped the above photo in Berkeley’s Tilden Park recently.  I managed to abandon the bike before it [would have] tipped me over (or I’d have probably drowned in the mud).  If you’re sick of wet weather, Death Valley is a great vacation spot.

Q.  Is Death Valley really the lowest place on Earth?

A.  No, but its lowest point, Badwater Basin, is the lowest place in the western hemisphere. 

Look at the cordoned-off area just behind us in that photo.  That’s a salt pan, which is basically salt shaped by wind into these sharp, sharp formations that are between 1,000 and 9,000 feet deep.  The largest salt pan in Death Valley is called the Devil’s Golf Course, and while I agree it would be terrible to golf there, it would be even worse to mountain bike on it.  Imagine if you crashed!

Q.  Is Death Valley too hot to be an enjoyable vacation spot?

A.  If you enjoy sitting in an air-conditioned RV, you could visit Death Valley at any time of year and enjoy yourself.  That said, it’s hard to imagine wanting to hike when it’s 136 degrees out.  One of the trailheads we saw had a sign warning not to go there after 10 a.m.  (One of my surly teenagers tried to use this to get out of the hike.  Nice try ... it was only about 85 degrees that day.)

Q.  That bit about the rectal thermometer?  You have that exactly backwards.  What gives?

A.  Yeah, I know.  Try not to over-think it.

Q.  I have a print of that iconic Ansel Adams photo of Death Valley sand dunes.  Are the dunes as impressive in person?

A.  Definitely!  In fact, as good a photographer as Adams was, it’s impossible to fully appreciate the Death Valley dunes just by looking at the photos.  At least, that’s what I have been telling myself, so I can feel better about these more humble shots:

Q.  What is a haboob?

A.  A haboob is a violent sandstorm.  I don’t know if the winds we experienced in Death Valley count, but anyway it’s fun to say “haboob.”  Right after our hike in the dunes the wind picked up and we wondered if it would strip the paint off our car.  As usual, the following photos don’t do it justice.

That’s the Devil’s Golf Course in the background of the second photo, by the way.

Q.  Was Mad Max – Fury Road filmed in Death Valley?

A.  No, it wasn’t, but we wondered the same thing.  There’s a deep canyon we hiked through to see this natural arch, which looked like where the movie took place.  I can just imagine where they crashed the truck to block the pursuers.  In fact, this area was so reminiscent of the film, one of my kids sprayed silver paint all over her mouth and yelled, “I am awaited in Valhalla!”  (Full disclosure:  my kids haven’t actually seen the movie.)

Q.  Are the flowers as amazing as everybody says?

A.  I think most of the year you won’t see much.  April there is known to be amazing, and maybe it was ... but it wasn’t exactly what I’d expected.  Since it’s been such a wet winter and our timing seemed perfect, I somehow had visions of being totally surrounded by flowers, like in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (you know, “cellophane flowers of yellow and green towering over your head,” etc.) but it’s not like that.  You mostly see sand and rocks.  But if you stop and look a little closer, there are all kinds of flowering things.  Look at this little dude popping up out of the stones and gravel.

And you wanna see a cactus in full bloom?  Feast your eyes on this!

This is a pretty weird plant, arguably in bloom as well:

These flowers aren’t that colorful but just look at the dead-looking plant that has produced them:

What the hell is this thing?  (That’s not a FAQ ... I’m asking you.)

This flowering plant is notable not just for growing straight out of gravel, but for being so damn small it’s like, why even bother?

I’m not sure what counts as a flower but these little puffballs are just darling.

Q.  I’m not a giant flower fan.  What else is worth looking at?

A.  There are lots of cool rocks.  Quartz, amethyst, and so forth, and also some big varicolored boulders.  Volcanic minerals (including hematite and chlorite), rich in iron, aluminum, magnesium, and titanium (but oddly no copper) provide a lot of color.  Check it:

The mountains are pretty, especially in the evening:

The roads are pretty dramatic.  Artist’s Drive twists around and has lots of ups and downs that leave your stomach behind ... it would be really fun to drive that on a Kawasaki Ninja at top speed, if you were an idiot with a death wish.  Here’s the road leading to where we stayed at Panamint Springs:

You’ll also get to see Joshua trees.  Gobs of them, forests even, and burnt ones.

Q.  Is there good stargazing?

A.  I guess for really good stargazing you’d need a new moon.  Our visit happened to coincide with a full moon.  That said, we were able to take a nice night walk before the moon rose and saw more stars than usual.  There still seemed to be a fair bit of light pollution … maybe that was the unrisen moon?  Who knows.  (What am I, an astronomer?!)

Q.  Is Death Valley a good place for Beck’sting?

A.  Heck, anyplace that allows beer is good for Beck’sting!  If you camp, you’ll just need to replenish the ice in your cooler regularly.  Also, you’ll have to settle for delayed Beck’sts since you won’t have cellular connectivity.  Here’s one of my Beck’sts from the trip.

Q.  Is there good wildlife viewing in Death Valley?

A.  I’ll start with the bad news:  we didn’t see any road runners.  That was a big letdown because the so-called resort where we stayed (canvas tent on a concrete slab) had a road runner as their logo.

That said, we did see some pretty groovy creatures.  I’ll start with the sphinx moth, which has such a giant body, and such lightning fast wings, that at first we thought they were hummingbirds.  To realize they were giant insects gave us an uncanny feeling.  Unfortunately, they fly way too briskly and erratically for me to photograph … believe me, I tried.  Click here for some great photos etc.

Then there were these birds that made an incredible screeching one morning.  Part of the point here is the amazing zoom on my camera, which proves that non-phone pocket cameras are not yet obsolete.

So what are those black birds with the yellow heads?  Why, they’re yellow-headed blackbirds!  The ones with no yellow are either females or regular blackbirds (what am I, an ornithologist?!), and I think the dark brown one is a juvenile.

Okay, on to something more exciting.  This coyote was just moseying along near the road.  We weren’t as close as it looks (again, the long zoom helped out), but we couldn’t get over how tame he seemed.

At first it was exciting to get such a good look, but then it was kind of sad.  This creature was probably the coyote equivalent of a panhandler.

Okay, now on to the most exciting wildlife of all.  I’m talking about creatures less than two inches long from tip to tail.  These are the famous pupfish of Death Valley.  We were lucky to get to see them, because in the hotter months (most of the year, I think) they dig themselves under the mud so they don’t become a giant species-wide fish fry.  I know someone who spent a month in Death Valley and never got to see the pupfish.

The great thing about these fish is that they only live a year, and much of that is underground, so during their active phase they really don’t have time for anything but fighting and sex.  Here are a couple of schematics that capture the entirety of the pupfish non-subterranean existence.

Unfortunately for the pupfish, the sex isn’t exactly amazing. The male kind of sidles up to the female, and they wriggle along together while he spews his seed everywhere. My older daughter Alexa (who is at least as knowledgeable as the Amazon Echo, particularly where science is concerned) estimates that the shallow streams of Death Valley where these pupfish congregate is at least 20% sperm. Paternity must be really difficult to establish.

Given the apparent lack of seduction, can we consider this rampant intercourse consensual?  My kids wondered about that, since at times it appeared the female was attempting to get away.  It’s hard to tell, though, because these fish are in such a damn hurry all the time, they never sit still anyway.  My wife concluded that it’s probably consensual given their short lifespan.  “It’s not like the female has time to pursue a Ph.D.,” she declared.

Here is my best snapshot of this endangered species.

And here, in living color, are videos of the two primary pupfish activities:

Q.  Any tips about the best route to and from Death Valley?

A.  Assuming you’re a Californian (because nobody really lives in Nevada, right?), the prettiest route to Death Valley would be through Yosemite.  But wait, not so fast!  If you’re visiting Death Valley in the spring, before it becomes a fricking oven, the roads through Yosemite probably won’t be open.  I think they’re usually closed until May or June.  (Who wants to drive in snow during spring break anyway?  Not me—I learned that lesson the hard way.)

So, if you’re going in the spring, you’ll need to head south to go around the Sierra Nevada mountains, and cut over at Bakersfield (slogan:  “Nice place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit”).  Now, if you’re navigating via GPS, Google Maps will direct you down Highway 58 thru Mojave and then have you take Highway 14 north.  This is not very scenic, and sends you through the little Searles Valley community of Trona, which Wikipedia says is “known for its isolation and desolation.”  The main employer is a chemical plant processing soda ash.  The Los Angeles Times describes Trona as “blight on an industrial scale.”  Its singular claim to fame is that it has the only high school football field made entirely of dirt.  Sure, you’re through Trona in under ten minutes, but it’s pretty harrowing.  The houses are all falling to ruin, the majority having been abandoned.  My kids begged my wife and me to take a different route going home.  Ever the provocateur, I said, "Actually, I’m hoping they’ll have cheap gas there.”  My wife flatly refused:  “We are not stopping in Trona.”

As we learned on the trip home, there’s a much better route that only adds about 20 minutes to your drive.  Here’s how we did our return trip (and you could obviously reverse this for the trip out):

• Head west on Highway 190, with a jackknife turn at the dried-up Owens Lake (worth looking at in and of itself)
• Make a left on Highway 395 and head south a right fur piece
• Head west on Highway 178, which will take you over Walker Pass and past Isabella Lake—neither of them all that scenic, but a pretty nice drive
• There’s a very good diner, Nelda’s, in the little town of Lake Isabella
• The stretch of Highway 178 to Bakersfield winds through a gorgeous gorge, which justifies the extra 20 minutes of driving all by itself

Q.  Is there Internet connectivity in Trona?

A.  Probably.

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Misspelling in Hawaii

Introduction

Earlier this month, my family took a vacation to Kauai.  (There, I typed “Kauai” without misspelling it.  That word, and all Hawaiian words, often trip me up, as “Hawaiian” did just now, and it’s a good thing—perhaps—that  my word processing program instantly flagged the error.)

Where was I?  Oh, right, Hawaii.  I can’t blog about how great a time I had there, because nobody wants to hear about it.  But I also can’t complain about anything, because any complaint that starts out “When I was in Hawaii” isn’t going to generate any sympathy.  And yet, this having been a terribly expensive vacation, I feel like I should somehow get some good blogging mileage out of it (as I have done with an overpriced museum visit and a pricey pair of cycling shoes).  So in this post I’m going to examine the strange sense I got that nobody in Hawaii can spell.

Not that I’m not saying Hawaiians can’t spell.  Somehow, visitors to Hawaii also can’t.

Misspelled food

My family is a foodie bunch.  (Can “foodie” be an adjective?  It can now!)  So perhaps it’s not surprising that the first misspellings we spotted were food-related.  The very first was a section on a menu called “Desert.”  I cut people slack when they (incorrectly) write “just desserts” because when the word “desert” is used as a noun but (correctly) pronounced like “dessert,” to indicate “something that is deserved,” we’re into some pretty arcane English-major territory.  But when a restaurant misses that second “s” in “dessert,” you hope they’re better at hygiene than spelling.  Still, we’d have brushed it off had not another restaurant, a day or two later, made the same error.

Later on, we saw “TACO’S” on the banner for a taqueria called Da Crack, and I decided this wasn’t a deliberate error (along the lines of “da” for “the”) but just an uneducated approach to spelling that treats apostrophes like garnish.  (Too bad Da Crack didn’t have any really good garnish, like cilantro.)

In the case of ethnic food, particularly Asian food, I’m very quick to forgive misspellings, and often count them as a sign of authenticity (along with their cousins, the weird word choices you see like “Fire Burst Stomach Trips” or “Eight Precious Rice Pudding”).  And sometimes Asian restaurant misspellings can be really funny, like “Braised pork in spicy Human sauce.” 

I’m less understanding when it comes to Western misspellings, like we found in our condo.  The hosts had left a handy list of restaurant recommendations, and it had some pretty blatant errors.  For example, a burger place was touted as “a much healthier choose than McDonald’s.”  The name of this burger place?  “Bubba’s Buger.”  This led to lots of corollary jokes (especially popular with my daughters) such as, “Anybody feel like eating boogers tonight?”  But the funniest misspelling on this list was a recommendation for a health food restaurant where we should “order the Acai bowel, full of antioxidants and pure energy.”

Misspelled journal entries

Perhaps you’ve stayed in a bed & breakfast or inn where there’s a nicely bound little journal in which guests can record their feelings about the place.  This journal doesn’t function like Yelp, since you’ve already paid for and occupied the place, so most guests just gush about how great a time they had and how wonderful everything is.  So there’s a lot of gloating, and perhaps some one-upmanship as well (i.e., attempts to be more thoughtful or articulate than the last guy).

Almost every entry in the little book at our Princeville condo had misspellings.  Here is a partial list, courtesy of my older daughter who read them out to me as she went along: 

• beutifil, beutifilly
• foget
• eastun (for “eastern”)
• beatifull
• evere (I had to see this one myself to make sure it wasn’t just a handwriting flourish)
• do able (for “doable”)
• awsome
• well (for “we’ll”)
• what so ever
• cando (for “condo”)
• click our heals (within a “Wizard of Oz” reference)
• use to (for “used to”)

What I found particularly strange about all this is that the people writing in the guidebook didn’t seem slapdash about it; their handwriting was neat and their sentences well-crafted.  None of the entries looked to have been penned by a sloppy t(w)een  (other than that of my own daughter); and there weren’t any LOLs or FWIWs or GR8s or other signs of Gen-Y shorthand.  And yet it costs big bucks to stay in this “cando,” so it’s not like these were uneducated people.  I was, and am, deeply perplexed.

By the way, here is my own condo journal entry, which you can scrutinize for misspellings and/or one-upmanship:

Why so much misspelling?

I suppose it would be very imperialist of me, almost Manifest-Destiny-ish you might say, to judge Hawaiians’ spelling of English words when their native language is so very, very different.  Throughout our vacation I struggled to pronounce the native Hawaiian words that frequently popped up as place names and other proper nouns.  I fared far worse than our GPS narrator when saying, for example, “Ala Kalanikaumaka Street” (though we noticed that the GPS Lady pronounced it a little differently each time).  And yet this is actually pretty straightforward compared to words like “pu’uwai”  and “ku’uipo,” with their surplus of vowels and weirdly placed apostrophes.

Still, I can’t explain away the English misspellings based on the oddities of Hawaiian spelling.  After all, plenty of people are able to master two entirely different alphabets; as a high school student I was pretty good at spelling Russian words correctly.

Could poor spelling be related to the blissful, carefree apathy that comes from drifting your life away in an island paradise?  Well, it is the case that the lovely Anini Beach had been called “Wanini Beach” until the “W” fell off the sign, and rather than fix the sign, the Hawaiians just shrugged their shoulders and let “Anini” become the new name. 

But, as you’ve already noticed, these theories don’t explain why visitors to Kauai, like those writing in the condo journal, can’t spell.  It’s not like something comes over us in the week or two we spend here.   Even my daughter’s journal entry had only one typo—a missing apostrophe—which is exactly the kind of sloppy mistake she makes at home.

And those comical misspellings in the list of restaurant recommendations provided by the condo owners?  Well, the owners don’t actually live in Hawaii.  This is their just guest home.  If memory serves, they live in Texas.

And so, after much reflection, I’ve decided that the misspellings have little to do with Hawaii, and mostly to do with technology—and the lack of it.

Huh?

Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the journal in the condo is that it’s the rare example of non-typed text.  Think about this for a second:  how often do you read something handwritten?  The non-typed text I come across generally falls into one of two categories:  1) graffiti, and 2) my kids’ schoolwork.  Do I see misspellings in these kinds of text? 

Why, yes.  Perhaps the only words I see among graffiti that are consistently spelled right are the profanities.  Everything else reflects the fecal-mindedness of the graffitist.  Meanwhile, my twelve-year-old isn’t bad at spelling, but my younger daughter, age ten, still has much room to improve.  A sonnet she wrote recently— which  had very good meter and perfect rhyme, and which was very deep, being a letter to her future teenage self, bagging on herself in advance and promoting nostalgia for a time when she wasn’t “blotet [sic] and lazy”—contained no fewer than twenty-three spelling errors.

Aside from graffiti and kids’ stuff, virtually everything I read is typed, and our modern means of typing have all kinds of built-in technology to (help) eradicate misspellings and typos.  The original tool, the spell-checker, not only identifies errors but arguably helps people learn from their mistakes.  The spell-checker is not a perfect tool—for example, it’ll catch “buger” but not “Acai bowel”—but it’s been masking poor spelling fairly effectively for about thirty years now.  (At least, when it’s turned on.  I’m going to assume that restaurant people just aren’t very good with computers.)

The problem is, the classic spell-checker is losing out to more modern tools that are less educational.  Smartphones have features that enable you to type sloppily, generating character strings that only remotely resemble words; the operating system is smart enough to make good guesses at what you’re trying to type.  I can type “t-y-p” and it suggests “type,” “types,” “typo,” and “typed” and I can touch any of these to accept that word.  This is especially handy with trickier words like “beautiful.” 

When I’m on my smartphone I use the Swype technique, aka slide-typing, where I drag my finger through the letters of a word and, amazingly, the OS recognizes these words, no matter how sloppy I get.  It’s not so good with “Acai” or “mahalo” but does great with most common English words.  If I Swype “beutifil” it seamlessly corrects it to “beautiful,” just as it discreetly turns “awsome” to “awesome.”  Typing in this way, a person could generate readable text for decades without ever learning how to spell.  This is just great, until you’re suddenly forced to use a pen and paper to compose your message.

So, if you think the spelling is bad now in handwritten messages, just you wait.  We’re seeing the mere lack of spell-checker now; in another couple decades, when Gen-Y starts making enough money to rent “candos,” they’ll be even less well equipped to work out tricky words like “bowl” and “awesome” on their own.

Epilogue:  voice recognition

Do people also use voice recognition software to compose messages?  I don’t know.  I suspect that this technology is mainly used for giving instructions to your phone, and that the modern generation prefers the silence of typing and Swyping.  That said, it’s hard to really tell.  When you see a guy walking down the sidewalk yakking on his smartphone, he could either a) be having an old-fashioned voice conversation, b) be dictating a message to his e-mail program, or c) be a crazy person talking loudly to nobody or nothing at all, with the phone held up as a prop.

As it happens, I did investigate the efficacy of voice-recognition for large bodies of text:  because I find Swype typing tedious (and didn’t have a laptop with me on vacation), I dictated a restaurant review to my phone.  Needless to say, I’ll be making that review available on albertnet:  maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

From the Archives - Asilomar Resort

Introduction

Before I begin, don’t forget that Saturday, March 31 is Earth Hour.  At 8:30 p.m. local time, shut off all your lights and electronics.  An hour later, when everything is back on, look to these pages for a full (well, my full) report.

I was reading a science article in “New Yorker” recently and came across this:  “In 1975, when biologists met at Asilomar, California, to discuss....”  Right away I could picture the Asilomar Conference Center, having vacationed there before.  In fact, I thought, didn’t I write a little essay about that?  I did, a couple decades ago, and here it is.

Asilomar resort – July 30, 1995

We had a vacation.  I’d have been satisfied just sitting motionless on the sofa like a lizard on a rock for two days.  Instead we went all-out and, with the in-laws, went down the coast to a resort called Asilomar, near Carmel. 

I should point out that I did nothing to help plan this weekend,  which is actually my preferred way of vacationing.  If I’d gotten more involved, I would have realized that Asilomar is located in a place I’ve been to at least a dozen times to visit relatives.  The Asilomar resort is about the closest lodging you can get to the ocean without actually owning property in the prestigious 17-Mile Drive community of Pebble Beach.  It’s a mere 150 feet or so from the boardwalk, a wooden sidewalk that meanders through a bunch of sand dunes covered with all kinds of interesting indigenous flowers.  The boardwalk ends at a two-lane road that connects Monterey, Pacific Grove, and Pebble Beach. 

In all my trips to this beach I’d never noticed the resort.  I think this speaks well for the place.  The official name of the resort is “Asilomar Conference Center,” and most of the people there are attending some formal conference.  I guess they get a certain number of chance visitors like ourselves, but that didn’t make me feel any less uneasy that I didn’t have a name tag.  I felt that a couple of people looked at me warily, as though I must have had a name tag, but was choosing not to wear it as some kind of rebellion.

The resort itself is a huge compound of brown shingle lodges that look like apartment buildings.  Each one bears a wooden plaque announcing its name:  “The View Crescent,” “Whitecaps,” “The North Woods,” “Willow” (where we stayed), and “Curlew,” to name a few.  They’re outfitted with magnificently seventies furniture (brown-orange vinyl) and each room has at least one deer painting.

I should emphasize the undeniably pleasurable amenities of the place:  the surf is beautiful, and the air a wonderfully crisp blend of ocean-smell and pine.  There are indeed deer hanging around, and the rock formations on the beach have perfect little tide pools filled with hermit crabs and snails and whatnot.  We even saw a sea otter out among the waves, diving to avoid the waves and drifting on his back eating. 

Beyond that, I felt the place was strange, almost like an enchanted fairy tale.  After driving through a grand arched gate bearing the Asilomar name,  we suddenly had to be careful not to run anybody over.  People wandered around right in the middle of the street, looking at us in surprise as though we were driving on the sidewalk.  An old guy in a tattered, faded “Asilomar” polo shirt (clearly a repeat visitor) seemed to eye me with suspicion.  There was no signage.  After driving around awhile looking for Willow, we felt lost—and in fact, we were.  The roads make about as much sense as those of 17-Mile Drive (i.e., they twist all around like a plate of pasta).

After checking into our room, I felt as though we conspicuously lacked official business on the grounds, and we spent most of the evening at the beach straying too far out into the water and soaking our shoes and the cuffs of our pants.  Then, we went down to the lodge and learned that we had missed dinner.  We alone didn’t know dinner was served only from 6:00 until 7:00.  We showed up at 7:30 and had missed the whole thing, from the fruit cup all the way past the steak, the potatoes, and even the pudding.  After eating at a restaurant in Monterey, we returned to the lodge to sleep, and the next morning we didn’t fail to make it to breakfast on time.

When we arrived at breakfast, I noticed right away that our meal tickets were not the same color as everybody else’s.  Not only that, but we weren’t seated in the large dining area with everybody else, but were taken down a hallway to a much smaller room, where we were seated at a table with a couple of strangers.  Not having any common ground with them, we talked about the fruit, the yogurt (why Nutrasweet?) and other things of no importance.  Lack of participation in any conference was a matter of quiet shame, I felt, for all of the outcasts in the auxiliary dining hall.

Walking the grounds on the way back to the beach, I noticed how friendly and full of joy everybody was.  It was like a weird “Star Trek” episode from the ‘60s.  Grown men rubbed each others’ backs.  Everybody beamed.  Name tags were prominently displayed.  People had a skip in their steps.  I witnessed countless displays of people inquiring into each others’ health, comfort, and happiness.  The only exception to universal bliss was a member of our own party who complained that there had been no shampoo in the shower.  Beyond that, everything was Leave It to Beaver. 

In fact, I couldn’t help but feeling—and perhaps this is merely the projection of a wicked soul on an innocent utopia—that there was some kind of shiny veneer over everybody; that their joie-de-vivre was perhaps slightly forced, that the universal spirit of goodwill was a trompe l’oeil, like the splinter-free fake wood of the card tables.

Why couldn’t people admit that this was simply a decadent weekend getaway?  Why not confess that a weekend at this paradise was a simple exercise in unrestrained hedonism?  Why the moral imperative of using this opportunity to be noble and good and true to some cause?  Returning to our room, I found a little card that management left for us:

~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-

To Our Guests:

We came across an ancient prayer, updated it slightly and offer it to you with our heartfelt thanks to you for coming to Asilomar.

                                The Stranger Within Our Gates

Because this conference center is a human institution to serve people, we hope that you will be granted peace and rest while you are under our roof.

May this room and conference center be your “second” home.  May those you love be near you in thought and dreams.  Even though we may not get to know you, we hope that you will be comfortable and happy, as if you were in your own home.

May the business that brought you our way prosper.  May every contact you make and every message you receive add to your joy.  When you leave, may your journey be safe.

We are all travelers.  From “birth till death” we travel between the eternities.  May these days be pleasant for you, profitable for society, helpful for those you meet and a joy to those who know and love you best.

                                Asilomar’s Staff

~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-

A prayer, no less!  And yet, it has those few very un-prayer-like phrases:  “may every contact you make...” and  “may the business ... prosper.”  And the bit about making this our “‘second’ home” sounded a lot like an ad (“y’all come back now, ya hear?”) for the resort itself.  (And those quotation marks around “second” ... was that in deference to those who actually do have second, even third, homes?)

But perhaps I wouldn’t have been moved to comment at all if it weren’t for the tourist guide supplied in our room.  In addition to the normal promotional “articles” about local restaurants, it had a section describing the character of each of the nearby communities.  The suggestions of apotheosis continued:

“Even though the years alter the face of Pebble Beach, its charm remains.  It is this essence of place that radiates like a halo to embrace every moment in its magic.”

Can’t you just see the unicorns? the rainbows?  And yet, incongruously, this soft-focus statement appears in an article boldly titled “Pebble Beach:  The Elite Address.”  The natural landscape is commemorated briefly, but the real thrust of the article beings, “In 1915, Samuel Finley Brown Morse, manager of Pacific Improvement Company, forced a grand rethinking of the coastline acreage.”  What follows is the moving tale of how this unimportant community became the host of the prestigious Pebble Beach golf course.  Names of pro golfers are dropped like ticker tape.  The merits of the golfing in Pebble Beach are expounded at length.  Wealth and prestige are championed.  I wish I had some more juicy quotes, but I wasn’t allowed to remove the book from the room.

As I leafed through the fashion (i.e., advertising) section of the book, I came upon material that could (and should) make any tourism board blush.  Decadence, and the “magic” that expensive gifts can bring, are celebrated shamelessly throughout the fashion section.  One photo is of a good looking couple posing on a golf cart, both attired lavishly, the woman’s hat graced by a bunch of fake grapes.  The couple’s eyes twinkle.  The caption, in large italic letters and surrounded by quotes, reads, “He wants you to learn to play golf.  You’re not so sure, but you’d do anything to make him happy....”  That’s the spirit.  We wouldn’t want the magnificent expense of a world-class golf course to deter the complete novice....

The next page has a woman dressed in a lavish sequined evening gown.  The caption reads, “He said to wear something elegant....”  The woman reader automatically completes the sentence:  “... but I haven’t got a thing to wear!”  After all, who packs such a sequined gown for a weekend getaway?  Suddenly I found myself thinking warm thoughts about the humble sweats and warm-up suits warn by the Asilomar guests. 

The next page shows the elegant woman reclining on a bench overlooking a scenic vista, staring out into the distance while her man caresses her lovingly; the caption reads, “You’ve never been so happy together....”  I was beginning to get ill.  Then I turned to a picture of a tastefully dressed man gazing thoughtfully at his wife, she clad only in a fluffy white bathrobe, with the caption, “It’s been a wonderful getaway, and tonight you’re really going to spoil him....”

It dawned on me that perhaps there are really only a couple of possible ways that tourist bureaus are likely to represent such a choice vacation spot.  They can celebrate the wealth and prestige itself, reminding the tourists how élite they are, like the fashion section of the guidebook did.  Or, they can encourage visitors to appreciate the wonderful local amenities, but only while reminding them that the physical trappings are incidental and secondary to  the resort’s rich tradition and spirit of community.  Given the alternatives, I guess I appreciate the effort made by the Asilomar folks, even their message didn’t ring entirely true.  I wish the region could just exist, without anybody trying to convey to me its “essence of place.”

 dana albert blog