Some of you might remember Mark & I made our way into Maine on our big trip across America. We ate a lobster sandwich, went to sleep, and Mark woke up with a swollen eye that -- to me -- looked a little like his eye did after his big brain surgery.
We went to the self-professed best hospital in Maine, where the decidedly distracted doctors on the ER staff decided six or seven hours later that Mark had an infection -- Cellulitis.
To this day Mark calls the swelling "a mosquito bite."
Here, now, for your viewing pleasure, photos from the day we spent at The Best Hospital in Maine.
The toilet situation in Mark's room in The Best Hospital in Maine.
The eye.
Mark watches baseball in The Best Hospital in Maine
I love all the travel advice in the comments. Thank you, M&M-ers.
Despite the apparent consensus, though, we decided to continue heading east out of Oklahoma City on Interstate 40, into Arkansas and toward Memphis, at which point our plan is to turn south on I-55 and make a straight shot to New Orleans.
Other than extremely strong southerly winds throughout Oklahoma, today was a beautiful day for driving, with clear skies and surprisingly (to me) pretty country in Oklahoma and Arkansas. We're both amazed at how much the landscape changes from day to day. Yesterday we saw hour after hour of high-mesa and red-rock desert; today we drove through the gentle hills of the Texas Panhandle, the wavy grass fields and red dirt of Oklahoma and the lush woods and horse country of Arkansas. Not a mesa in sight.
We thought we'd pull up somewhere around Little Rock for the night, but Michelle had an adrenaline rush and we kept on going -- almost all the way to the Tennessee state line. I don't know how she did it; I'm exhausted, and all I did was sit there. We're now tucked into a nice little EconoLodge in West Memphis, Ark., across the river from Memphis, and we hope to visit the Stax Records museum or maybe Graceland in the morning before we shoot south.
I keep meaning to post accounts of our poker adventures, or pics of lunch with Terry at Manhattan Beach and Miriam in South Pasadena, or our bitter riff on Starbucks' bungled marketing plan, or our cool new blog feature -- an "overheard" category -- but by the time we settle in for the night it's too late. That stuff will have to wait.
Here are a couple of quick pics from today's travels:
One of the first things you see when you cross from Texas into Oklahoma on this route is a sign advertising the largest cross in the Western Hemisphere. ("Exit for a spiritual experience you'll never forget.") Well, we got lucky. You could see the cross from the freeway, no exit required. I'm not sure how long I'll remember the spiritual experience, but I do recall that the actual cross, the one in the Bible, was in the Eastern Hemisphere, for whatever that's worth.
Oklahoma City. These are the bastards who are stealing the Seattle SuperSonics basketball team, and this Ford Center, on I-40, is where they'll play. I say "bastards" because people in Seattle are all upset about the team's moving. I couldn't care less, honestly. Good luck to the team and the OKC. I'm personally fine without either of them. The Oklahoman newspaper today was promoting a sports columnist who was taking great pleasure in poking the Pacific Northwest.
You're driving through Oklahoma, surrounded by cows, you ought to have a steak, is what I say. We finally found the perfect-looking joint, Big Jake's Cattle Co., although it was actually two miles inside the Arkansas state line. Sure enough, the menu featured a vast array of beef meals. Michelle ordered The Big Jake, a center-cut steak that the menu promised to be "the best eatin' of your life." I wasn't all that hungry. In fact I was going to order the "petite steak" but since they described it as "perfect for the ladies or the little fellas" I decided to go with a top sirloin instead.
They accidentally gave me Michelle's order, and I have to say that was one pretty tasty steak. But the best eatin' of my life? I don't know. I can think of quite a bit of eatin' this good or better on this very trip: the feast at Kaye & Val's, dinner at the awesome Bellagio buffet in Las Vegas, the Pete's turkey sandwich and Trieste cappuccino and Mama Matassa's manicotti ... and that's without even getting to the best Harley Dog in Kingman, Arizona.
Kaye informs me that it was 19 years ago that she and I first drove through Flagstaff, heading out to find our fortune in LA, where Kate hubby Val had a job lined up, and I hoped to find one somehow.
We drove up through Palo Duro Canyon in Texas, hit the I-40, passed through the sad land of drunk Indians in Gallup, NM, crossed through the hell that is Albuquerque and then found our way into the pine treed town that is Flagstaff. The day we were here happened to be the day of the homecoming parade, and hundreds of blond and pure apple pie people rode by us in convertibles, cheered along side us, as quarterbacks and cheerleaders looked out misty eyed from their parade float perches and I guess wondered what they'll ever do in life to top this.
The air was clean and light, the town was small and charming and it seemed impossible that something so innocent was still around, untouched.
I loved Flagstaff. I was so glad to be passing back through on our trip to New Orleans this week.
I thought maybe it was my faulty memory at work again when we hit the strip malls and Taco Bells and car washes that make up most of the town now. I thought maybe my memory of the idyllic Flagstaff was selective -- I maybe just chose to remember the cool parts, and forgot the scabby strip mall side of the town.
I called Kaye to check, and she confirmed that yes, it had been 19 years. It was pure when we were here.
Mark says he doesn't regret the change that happens to this world. You lose somethings, but then you gain some too.
As evidence he points to the excellent local Starbucks, which certainly was not here 19 years ago. We did appreciate that cup of fresh brewed Verona, indeed.
At Kateco's urging, I've started a Google Map of our trip. Pretty basic so far, just the route and a few key stops. You can click below for a larger version and zoom all the way in to a street-level view.
I'll add pictures later and keep it updated as we go, so check back.
We're staying in a nice but also sort of odd place, the Embassy Suites in Anaheim, just a few long blocks down Harbor Boulevard from Disneyland.
Here's the view from our room. If you could crane your neck just a little bit to the right you could see the tops of a couple attractions at the Happiest Place on Earth. That big lot outside our window is an abandoned golf driving range. At least I think it's abandoned; I've never seen anyone using it.
Better days behind for the Harbor Greens Golf Range:
The room is comfortable as can be, and it comes with free breakfast and a complimentary evening happy hour -- I'm enjoying a free beer and pretzels right now -- but it's also overflowing with sunburned, slightly pudgy couples and their Mickey-eared and princess-gowned kids, all seemingly fueled on way too much soda.
Also just now the lobby was crammed with a bunch of teenagers wearing tuxes and silky dresses. In the elevator a 30-something guy looked at me and raised an eyebrow. "I don't know," I said, "the world's lamest prom party?"
When I told Gina where we were she broke out the all-caps: "MAN, are you going to go to disneyland? you know you want to."
Probably not this trip. We're staying here because it's centrally located to Long Beach, to friends Michelle wanted to visit at the Orange County Register and to the Commerce Casino, just up the 5 freeway.
Which reminds me, I need to jet now to meet my friend Stuart for some poker action there tonight. It ain't Disneyland, but it'll do.
More to come, including a report on last night's M&M card game, as well as my lunch today with my buddy McDermott in Manhattan Beach. Nice photos with that one.
Several mentions here recently about the big Pie in the Sky II road trip, and since the Excellent Element hits the highway a week from today I figure it's time to tell how the voyage got that name, and when and where we're going.
It all started seven years ago, actually, when Miriam rescued me from unemployment and potential bankruptcy by offering me a job at the Los Angeles Times. That story here. I was scheduled to start work in mid-October that year, 2001, so Michelle and I decided to leave a month early and take the long route from Seattle to LA ... via Chicago, Boston, New York, Washington, Louisville, Denver, the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas.
We both always had wanted to take a cross-country road trip and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. When I called Mom to tell her about the plan, though, she thought it sounded over-ambitious.
"That sounds a little pie-in-the-sky to me, Mark," she said.
Well that cracked me up, so we immediately dubbed our trip the Pie in the Sky Tour, and made concert-style t-shirts, complete with projected tour stops on the back, to commemorate the adventure. I still wear mine.
Amazingly, the day of our scheduled departure -- with the moving van showing up early that morning -- was Sept. 11. Yes, that Sept. 11: 9/11. The moving dudes knocked on our door at about 7:30 and asked if we were watching TV. No, we said, and we turned it on to see the footage of planes flying into the World Trade Center. And then the moving guys unplugged our TV to load it onto the truck and Michelle and I climbed into my old Honda Civic wagon and we started driving east.
Weird. No planes in the sky and by the time we got past Spokane, a couple hundred miles east of Seattle, no solid radio signal either. We went for hours at a time without any news about what was going on.
And yet, we managed to have a great trip. We camped in Yellowstone, played cards in Deadwood, ate dinner with a bunch of flag-waving patriots in a small red-state diner someplace and then, later that same day, cruised into the liberal college town of Mankato, Minn., to find a peacenik coffee shop still open at midnight. Trippy.
Our plan had been to see ballgames in some classic parks like Wrigley Field, but the terrorist attacks suspended the baseball season. Some guy in a poker game in Shakopee, Minn., was raving about the beauty of the northern shores of the Great Lakes around that time of year, so we decided to blow off Chicago and head north instead, through Duluth and into Canada. That leg of the trip truly was as beautiful as advertised, but strange too. That's where we ran into Canadians, including the proprietor of a B&B where we stayed, who told us Americans had the attacks coming and almost seemed to hold us responsible.
Eventually we made our way through Niagara Falls and Boston and into New York, where we visited the less-than-two-week-old Ground Zero -- eerie, upsetting and unforgettable -- before moving onto happier destinations.
Some of the coolest parts of Pie in the Sky I were hooking up with friends and family, including M&M regulars Ronelle and her crew in New Jersey and Janice (below) and hers in Louisville, as well as Michelle's sister Renee and her family in Colorado. We also loved the Grand Canyon and the area around Moab, Utah (top picture). All those stops will be part of Pie in the Sky II as well.
Although we had tour dates on our t-shirts, we didn't really have a set agenda for that first trip, and that was a lot of its charm. The Canada detour was just one example of our spontaneity. We had a big Rand McNally atlas with us, and we traced our path in pen as we went -- it still hangs on our wall.
For this trip, with three times as much time on the road, our plans are even less set -- really, really, pie-in-the-sky, Mom -- except for the first two weeks, which are planned. We're leaving next Saturday, heading for Mom's place in Eugene; then to San Francisco, where Michelle has a speaking gig at the San Francisco Chronicle; to Santa Barbara, where she booked us an awesome camping spot on the beach; to Los Angeles, where she's speaking at a Cal State Fullerton writer's conference; to Las Vegas for a night; and then to New Orleans for JazzFest.
After that, wide open. We know we want to see some friends and hit some card rooms. We both kind of want to see the Florida Keys and Maine, where we've never been, and we hope to stay off the interstates and travel the smaller highways and back roads. The beauty of a long break. We'll camp and sleep in the tricked-out car when we can, grab a motel room if we absolutely need a shower.
Overly ambitious? Pie in the sky? Maybe, but something tells me we'll pull it off. With stories to tell.
One of our big early stops on the Pie in the Sky Tour of America (II) will be to attend the second weekend of the Jazz Fest in New Orleans. Here's a slide show of our last trip to New Orleans and to the Jazz Fest:
The Neville Brothers, Santana, Maze feat. Frankie Beverly, The Raconteurs, Dianne Reeves, Galactic, The Radiators, The Derek Trucks Band, Keb’ Mo’, Rebirth Brass Band, Sonny Landreth, Snooks Eaglin, John P. Kee & the New Life Community Choir, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Tribute to Mahalia Jackson feat. Irma Thomas, Marva Wright and Rachelle Richard, Vernel Bagneris: Jelly Roll & Me, Amanda Shaw & the Cute Guys, Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk, DJ Captain Charles, Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet feat. Bela Fleck, Kenny Neal, Sherman Washington & the Zion Harmonizers, Bob French & the Original Tuxedo Jazz Band, Elysian Fieldz, The New Orleans Bingo Show!, Benny Grunch & the Bunch, Goldman Thibodeaux & the Lawtell Playboys, Jonathan Batiste, Rotary Downs, George French, Chris Ardoin & Nu Step, Guitar Slim Jr., Grupo Fantasma, Lost Bayou Ramblers, Ovi-G & the Froggies, The Revealers, Pfister Sisters, Salvador Santana Band, William Smith’s Tribute to Kid Sheik, Eddie Boh Paris aka Chops, SUBR Jazz Ensemble, Chris Clifton, Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Ensemble, New Orleans Spiritualettes, Zulu Male Ensemble, The Jazz Jam, Tribute to Tuba Fats, Highsteppers Brass Band, Black Eagles, Hardhead Hunters and Apache Hunters Mardi Gras Indians, Lady Rollers and CTC Steppers SAPCs, Guyland Leday with Family & Friends Zydeco Band, Young Traditional New Orleans Brass Band, Watson Memorial Teaching Ministries, Wild Apaches, Young Magnolias and Black Feathers Mardi Gras Indians, Original Prince of Wales and the Original New Orleans Lady Buckjumpers SAPCs, Tornado Brass Band, Judy Stock, Minister Jai Reed…
Here at last are some pix of the platform I built. Yesterday I stained it a lovely mahogany, and today I'll be lacquering it, as it doesn't seem to be losing its funky raw wood smell over time. Also, we won't have to worry about spilling water on it, or about mold (I don't think) if I lacquer it.
Sorry I have posted almost nothing in forever. I have been busy the past two weekends building this sleeping platform into the back of the mighty Element, now christened The TripMobile:
I just finished building the platform today. We hauled the futon I got free off Craiglist in there and tested it out. Works awesome. I tested out my ice chest. Fits like a dream.
I've been too busy sawing and sanding and drilling and such, so haven't taken any pictures yet. The platform above is the one that inspired the TripMobile's mod. You can see the rest of the pictures here.
When we leave next month for our "Pie in the Sky II" road trip, part of the plan is to play poker across the country, hoping to qualify somehow for this summer's World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. If all goes well, we've thought, maybe we'll write a book about the experience.
On Sunday, in kind of a pre-trip prep run, we drove down to our favorite local cardroom, the Muckleshoot Casino in Auburn, to play in one of their monthly World Series "satellite" tournaments. You pay $170 to enter. If you're lucky or skillful enough to win, the prize is a seat in the $10,000 entry-fee World Series main event, the same tournament I played last July with help from Team Mark.
It's a long shot, but hey. Hitting the jackpot before we even hit the road would be a pretty good start.
On the 45-minute drive down to Auburn we talked tournament strategy and quizzed each other with problems from "Harrington on Hold 'Em, Vol. III." You know: You're dealt the ace and queen of clubs in late position and two players before you "limp in" to the pot (calling the blinds without raising); do you fold, call $60, raise to $240 or push all-in? Stuff like that. We had a similar conversation last summer, when Michelle gave me her pre-tourney pop quiz: If you're dealt pocket kings on the first hand and another player goes all-in do you call or fold? We disagreed about that one.
Ever the optimist, Michelle blurted out halfway to the Muck on Sunday: "OK baby, you know this is the first chapter of your book ..."
Well, I don't know about that, but I did see a pretty close approximation of Michelle's pocket-kings pop quiz. I wasn't involved in the hand, unfortunately or fortunately, but it was interesting to watch.
In the second hand of the tournament, a woman who I hadn't seen before and who didn't seem very experienced tossed a $100 chip in front of her before the flop, clearly intending to raise to $100. But the rules of tournament poker state that unless you explicitly announce the amount of your raise, any single chip bet will be assumed to be a call, not a raise. So the Seat 5 woman was forced to merely call the $50 big blind. The action folded around to Bonnie, a Muckleshoot regular and a good tournament player, who might have missed the other lady's bungled raise. Bonnie popped it to $500 and the other woman pushed all-in. Bonnie immediately called.
What disappointment and horror she must have felt when she proudly flipped over her pocket kings -- the second best hand possible before the flop -- only to find that Accidental Caller Lady had inadvertently "limped" with pocket aces. The rockets held up and Bonnie was out on the tourney's second hand.
Me, I didn't have any such close calls, or even difficult decisions. I folded hand after hand for two hours, seeing nothing even to get out of line with. I won one small pot with an offsuit 5-2 in the big blind, when no one raised and I flopped two pair. Eventually the rising blinds nicked away at my chip stack and, in the fourth round, I went out when my best starting hand of the day -- ace-king -- lost an all-in bet to a guy with pocket queens. Ah well.
Michelle, at an adjacent table, lasted about half an hour longer than I did. She said later she didn't get many good cards either. Sometimes it goes like that.
Further evidence of poker's whims: When I busted out I went to join my friend David in a live game. In the first three hands I was dealt I saw better cards than in my entire two hours of the tournament. I cashed out a $180 winner -- enough to cover my tourney entry and buy my standard Muck lunch, seafood fried rice.
Amid all the fun of recovering from last night's drunken poker session and preparing for tomorrow's awesome flight to Europe, I need to take just one minute to mark Surgeversary II -- the first anniversary of my second brain surgery, which was a year ago today.
I've written here before about the first surgery, in November, boasting about how I was Mr. Cool even in the prep room before going under. The second time, not so much.
The docs had determined I needed a second surgery because, two months after the needle biopsy and the seizures that prompted it, they still hadn't been able to determine what was causing the problems ... even whether the masses showing up in MRI scans were in fact tumors. So the plan was to operate in the same area -- cutting along the existing scar on my scalp, in fact -- only this time instead of pushing a needle through a small "burr hole," they would saw through and lift out a triangle of cranium, do another biopsy and, assuming it appeared cancerous, remove as much of the tumor as possible.
As chill and optimistic as I try to be, this didn't sound good to me. I don't know whether it was the reading I had been doing about brain operations, or the not-so-fun experience of recovering from the first one, or just dumb superstition, but I had a bad feeling about the upcoming surgery. That's not like me. Michelle even said just the other day it was the only time she's ever seen me seem superstitious. But I really didn't like my chances all that much.
When we got to Swedish Hospital at the ungodly hour of 4:30 or 5 a.m., whatever it was, we were placed in a small, curtained surgery-prep waiting area, along with a bunch of other people including, I remember, a guy who had been in some kind of horrific logging accident.
While we were waiting, an ancient nun (this was a Catholic hospital) came in and asked if she could pray with me. She was dressed in white, with a deep-wrinkled face and knobby little hands; she looked like she might have been Mother Teresa's mom. I remembered her name for a long time but can't recall it now ... something that fit her looks, like Sister Carlotta. I know a lot of people would take comfort from this. It had the opposite effect on me. I'm already freaked out enough, I thought, without Mother Teresa giving me my last rites.
The good thing about the surgery was that my doctor, Marc Mayberg, inspired much more confidence than the University of Washington dude who did the first one. They determined that the mass was in fact cancerous -- oligodendroglioma -- and removed a large chunk, about the size of a Ping Pong ball, I think, from my right frontal lobe. (I can now testify, firsthand, that the old joke is true: I would rather have a bottle in front of me.) A second, larger tumor in my left temporal lobe -- about the size of a lemon -- was deemed to be inoperable, and that's what we're treating now with chemotherapy.
So, a year ago today at about this time I was out of surgery and in intensive care. The recovery was hard. Although I was pretty out of it, I remember one horrible, painful night in the hospital when I threw up on Michelle (sorry, baby) and really wasn't sure I was going to make it. (The above photo was taken at home, a few days later.)
All of which gruesome details serve, for me, to inspire appreciation for the long way that I've come in the last year and, as I've said before, the incredible love and support of so many people, notably the readers of this dumb blog.
It's hard to believe that exactly a year after my low point of fear and pain I'm packing my bag, along with the amazing partner of a lifetime, for a high point of joy and pleasure.
A couple of weeks ago I was looking all over the place for a map that would let me map out a road trip, but nothing I found was quite right. Now, it's like Mapquest read my mind. They've launched a beta that lets you map out a trip. Unfortunately it only lets you map 10 stops. I guess you have to make a bunch of maps and string them all together. I started our an early stab at some of the stops we might take on our Poker Tour of America.
My quick review of Michelle's new Element as a road trip car: excellent.
Plenty of room, as we knew, but it was also quite comfortable riding in it for several hours at a time. You sit slightly above the traffic, but it still feels more like a car than a truck. The ride felt smooth, and there was enough power to get up a hill or around a slow truck. Michelle did all the driving, so it's easy for me to say, but I was able to put the seat back and take a couple of nice long naps.
Also, the car came with a three-month trial of XM Radio, which I thought was cool. Two hundred and some channels and still nothing on, we kept joking, but actually the variety was nice, and it ws a good clear signal except driving through the thick forest near Otis.
One of the highlights of our trip to the Oregon Coast last weekend was a breakfast at this tiny little place in the middle of nowhere, the Otis Cafe. Wonderful.
We first noticed the place Friday night on our way to Lincoln City. It was dark out, we were on a mission at that point to get all the way to the coast and to have some famous clam chowder at Mo's before checking into our hotel, so we just blew by. But we both remarked on the big neon Otis Cafe sign above this shack at the side of the road, and the gravel parking lot full of pickups and cars and the giant crowd inside the small, bright restaurant. We both said it looked like a place worth checking out sometime.
Friday night, Saturday, Saturday night all come and go. Walks on the beach. Meals at Mo's. Long, profitable poker sessions at Spirit Mountain and Chinook Winds casinos. A couple of times we drove by Otis Cafe, which is four miles east of Lincoln City on the road between our hotel and Spirit Mountain, and it always was packed. So on Sunday morning, when we were getting ready to leave town and head back to Seattle, we decided to stop there for breakfast.
There are only five or six tables in the restaurant, and another five or six stools at a counter, so we had to wait. Michelle walked next door to a little "antique"/junk store, and I talked to a local couple waiting with me on the wooden bench out front. They said they eat there all the time and it's always packed and always great, and that we were lucky there weren't a half dozen parties ahead of us, especially on a Sunday morning. This place is famous, the said.
"Famous," I was sure, was an overstatement. But sure enough, when we got inside the menus had reprints of fawning reviews from the New York Times and USA Today. And Michelle picked up a couple of guest books for us to leaf through while we were waiting for our food; the reviews from past diners were incredible. One couple had traveled all the way from Australia just to eat there again, they wrote. Someone else had come from Hawaii on the recommendation of her parents. Several couples signed the book on a wedding anniversary and said a trip to Otis was part of an annual celebration.
When the food arrived I understood the devotion. Everything was made from scratch -- including locally raised eggs, meat and other ingredients -- and it was delicious. Michelle had eggs, hashed browns and two kinds of toast from homemade bread, including a brown molasses bread that was really good. I had two buttermilk pancakes the size of a plate, along with bacon and eggs and grapefruit juice. De-lish.
To get to the restroom at this place you have to walk through the kitchen. We both noticed rows of fresh pies cooling on racks, and when it was time to leave Michelle asked if whole pies were for sale. Our waitress went off to fetch one.
"I'm giving that to your sister," she said.
"Mich? Why? What the hell," I said. Mr. Thoughtful. "We're getting one for us then, too."
So we came home with a Marionberry and a strawberry rhubarb. I can't vouch for Mich's, but our Marionberry pie is pretty darn yum.
All of which is to say, if you're anywhere near the northern Oregon Coast, take a short detour up Highway 18 and stop in. We'll be back for sure. Highly recommended. 4 gliomas.
(The above photo is from flickr. Michelle has her own pics that I'm hoping she'll upload.)
As my cool cousin suggested, this weird anniversary is a good excuse to get out and celebrate somehow. Also Michelle has a brand new car itching to hit the road. So she's taking today off and we're going to drive down to the Oregon Coast for a long weekend.
Kind of a last-minute plan, but it seems just right. Beautiful weather too. We'll walk on the beach, have some luscious clam chowder at Mo's and probably play some cards at a favorite room, the nearby Spirit Mountain Casino.
Michelle even made an exception last night to her strict I'm-not-riding-with-no-damn-epileptic policy and let me drive the Element around the block. Nice. Sure glad I didn't seize out and crash.
That was Michelle's text message on my phone just now, which I take to mean she pulled the trigger on the new Honda Element she was going to check out after work.
Smart girl that she is, she did all her negotiating by e-mail, playing half a dozen dealers off each other, so it's no wonder to me that she wrapped this all up as fast as she did, and I'll bet she got a good deal too.
I'm sure when she gets home we'll all hear more about it.
The toilet situation in Mark's room in The Best Hospital in Maine. 
