Iceland 2016: Seyðisfjörður

The day began with another dirt traversal on our mini van, which was remarkably challenging, since I had to keep shifting gears to keep the car from stalling out on the steep dirt roads. The Citreon Grand Picasso has a feature that I thought was quite broken: there's no separate hand brake control. Starting the car and putting it into drive automatically turned off the hand brake, while stopping the car and putting it into the park automatically engaged the hand brake. While a nice convenience feature on flat land, it makes starting on a hill with the usual trick of "engage the hand brake, then slowly let out the clutch while providing gas and only disengage the hand brake when the car's not going to stall" impossible to utilize. I stalled the car a couple of times, but between the dirt road, the fog, and my obvious incompetence at the stick shift (the car did roll back a couple of times while I got the hang of starting off on dirt) meant that not only was my wife too nervous to take pictures, she was also to terrified to consider asking me to stop for pictures.

Once the road became paved and we started up the road to Seydisfiodur, however, the scenery became even more stunning. On a good weather day don't expect to take less than an hour to traverse the road because it's simply too pretty. We stopped at every turn out, even in some places blocking dirt roads for pictures, and when we found the hiking pull out about 500m in elevation above the town we simply had to stop.

The scenery was gorgeous. The hiking reminded me a lot of my first day on the coast to coast: soaked through with water, and a severe test of the water proofing on my Salomon XA Pro 3D trail runners (summary: they failed --- the waterproof label is pretty worthless). Staring at the trail map, it looked like you could hike all the way to town from there, and it would have been awesome to arrange a one-way taxi from town to this location so you could hike down to town, or find the corresponding location in town to hike up --- it looked very rugged, but with gorgeous scenery it's definitely not something any serious hiker should pass up.

In town, we had a supermarket lunch, and then proceeded to find more hiking spots.

We shot picture after picture, and hiked up to a waterfall. Iceland on that day definitely exceeded my expectations --- it felt just as pretty as Switzerland was, but with its own unique vegetation and terrain.

We had to drive back to Eglistadir for lodging, and reluctantly left in the mid afternoon. The drive to our AirBnB turned out to be once again over a dirt road to a bunch of newly built buildings. The furnishings were quite elegant and compact, and it had an outdoor BBQ. We made dinner and then, given the infinite amount of light we had, ambitiously went for another waterfall hike. As usual, Google maps misled us as to where the trailhead was, but we eventually found it thanks to a local runner. When we got to the trailhead, it was quite clear that the trail was under going some heavy duty renovation: huge machines were driving up and down and were clearly about to pave it.

This one wasn't nearly as gorgeous: while the waterfall was promised to be one of those that you could hike behind, when I got there with Bowen, it was very clear that this was beyond the ability of a 4 year old: you had to drop off into a dark canyon/ravine holding on to a chain. Any slip could cause a major injury. What blew my mind was that this hike was rated "easy." I was learning that Icelandic Hiking is set at a level far beyond what I was used to in other countries. In Switzerland, for instance, I learned that a 2 hour hike according to the sign would take me an hour and a half at most going at full speed. Here in Iceland, a 2 hour hike would actually take me 2 hours, and despite carrying Boen I'm still a faster hiker than most visitors I saw! If you visit Iceland for a hiking trip, bring all your gear and be prepared for the "easy" hikes to take much more than you expect. And yes, Bowen did do all the walking himself, though he wasn't fast. This is definitely a country for those hikers who like challenges.

We got back to our AirBnB in time to see the horses back in their pasture. For more than the first time, I wished that I could have known in advance to spend way more time out here on the East Coast of Iceland, but the reality was that the forecast was for more crappy weather and we probably wouldn't have gotten a chance to do more hiking anyway.

Iceland 2016: Vatnajokull National Park and Jökulsárlón

Talk to anyone in America about a trip to Iceland, and the assumption nearly everyone makes is that Iceland's a small country and it wouldn't take a day to drive around it. In reality, of course, that's impossible: like many island countries, Iceland doesn't actually have that many roads, and the ring road around the country is a 2 lane highway with a maximum speed limit of 90kph. Couple that with potentially poor weather, slow RVs sharing the road with you, and long distances between population centers, and you have a recipe for very long road trips of the type I don't enjoy at all: lots of driving between destinations with little change in scenery in between.

Google had projected a 6 hour drive for us that day, but I had 2 main destinations in mind: Vatnajokull National Park and Jokulsarlon. We arrived at Vatnajokull National Park just in time to see the sign for a ranger guided hike that would take place right after lunch.

The guided hike was informative, and took us all the way to where the glacier was 15 years ago, showing us how quickly the glacier had retreated over the years. We got close enough to see the water coming off the melting glacier, but couldn't actually touch it.

The kids fell asleep while driving to Jokulsarlon, but that's a pretty impressive lake with ice floes floating and cracking along on it. It was very exciting and a lot of fun.

Past Jokulsarlon, the road actually became fun and pretty, with tunnels and many things to see, but no place to stop to take pictures! At Djupivogur, we stopped for an early dinner before arriving at our AirBnB farm stay down a dirt road that was actually part of the ring road!

Iceland 2016: Westman Islands, Puffins

One unfortunate side effect of not planning the entire trip out was the more-or-less botched trip to the Westman Islands. We made it to the ferry on time, but at the ticket booth, were told that (1) all the car spots are taken, and (2) we had to return on the 1:00pm ferry if we went as passengers, because the later ferries were all full!

Well, we did want to see the Puffins, so we accepted those terms and got onto the ferry. My first choice, which was to go on a boat tour of the Westman Islands, was foiled: upon reaching the other side, the tour company recommended by our guidebook had canceled the day's tour because of weather. So we switched to our secondary goal, which was to see puffins.

The first place we went to was pretty, but any puffins were too far away to be seen.

From there, I used Skype to call a taxi to take us to the official blind. From inside the blind, the EOS M3 with the 55-250mm lens actually got us a few pictures of the Puffins:

The scenery was not bad either, but we quickly ran out of time and had to return to the ferry for transport back to the main island. If I had the trip to do all over again, I'd book a night on the island instead and arrange to bring the mini van over, as the town looked pretty and the scenery reasonably good for hiking.

On returning to the mainland, we visited the waterfall again with the good camera, and then I wanted to head over to the Eyjafjallajokull Erupts exhibit, where Bowen and I got to see a documentary of the volcano erupting in 2010, disrupting flights throughout Europe for a week.

Then we drove back to enjoy the hot tub as it started to rain quite heavily, and prepare for a long day of driving the next day.

Iceland 2016: Trip Index Page

This is the trip index page for our trip in Iceland in 2016. We drove around the island on the ring road, and visited various sights.

In the past, I used Picasa Web Albums to host and serve photos. Google has retired that in favor of Google Photos. While Google Photos provides unlimited storage (in compressed JPG format), it eliminated many of the great features that made Picasa Web Albums such a joy to use. For instance, you can no longer enable slide shows or embed albums into a blog. Photo embedding is also awkward and funky. Worse, Google seems to have defocused on the user relevant part of the app (such as sharing, embedding, slide shows) in favor of the machine-learning part of the app such as Photo Assistant. Photo Assistant, in particular, seems geared entirely towards people who have crappy cameras (such as those found on any smartphone). Those cameras have low resolution, lousy dynamic range, poor sharpness, and you need to introduce "filters" such as sepia toning, blur-addition (yes, Google photo assistant thinks it's improving your photos by making them blurry!), and other wacky monkeying with the images in order to make them viewable even on small screens like the iPhone's 4.7" display.

By contrast, I shoot on "large" sensor cameras (such as the Sony RX100, EOS M3, Canon 5DM2), take pains to aim for as sharp a picture as I can get. Note that the Canon 5DM2 is now 7 years old but yes, will still beat the top of the line smartphone cameras without breaking a sweat. I also know when to turn on fill-flash, use an ND grad filter (post-processed or not), polarizer, and frequently can even switch lenses for appropriate use. I never post any photos without processing them on Lightroom or Photo Mate R3 first. As a result, I want to show my photos in their full glory without any "value-add" by Photo Assistant but have no way to do so thanks to Google's new philosophy. I can't even embed a cover image on this blog!

I apologize for this rant. Thinking about how badly Google has screwed up on photo presentation will do that to me. Here's the photo link for my trip pictures.

Trip Report:

• Blue Lagoon
• Golden Circle
• Mt. Esja
• Seljalandfoss & Skogafoss
• Westman Islands
• Vatnajokull National Park & Jokulsarlon
• Seydisfjordur
• Dettifoss
• Siglufordur Penninsula
• Vidgelmir Cave and Grundarfjordur
• Snaefellsnes National Park
• Borgarnes
• Reykjavik
• Thoughts on Iceland

Iceland 2016: Seljalandfoss & Skogafoss

Today was our first day down the ring road around Iceland. We loaded up the mini van, and drove down first towards Stokkseyri for the Icelandic Wonders museum.  The place turned out to be a tourist trap that didn't draw either my attention or the children's attention for long, so we moved onto our AirBnB at Hvolsvollur. We unpacked, ate lunch, and then headed down to see Skogafoss, but on the way saw Seljalandfoss and discovered that it was by far the most impressive waterfall I'd seen with a "walk behind" trail.

Skogafoss also turned out to be quite pretty, but it's actually more famous for being the start of a 20km trek to Landmannalauguar.

The fall itself is impressive, but if you take the trouble to hike all the way to the top of it, don't stop there! There's a little ladder that goes over the fence (actually the start of the 20km hike), but 200m past that is another fall that's also pretty.

We took advantage of the hot tub at the AirBnB, and turned in early since we thought we'd try to make the ferry to the Westman Islands the next day.

Iceland 2016: Hiking Mt. Esja

We woke up to overcast skies, but it wasn't forecast to rain, so I thought we'd risk a hike to Mt. Esja, introduced in the guidebook as the place local residents went for hiking. Before that, we took a detour to the viking village, but went there to discover that the place was closed and had been closed for a couple of weeks. It's apparently not a year round destination, and the guidebook had neglected to tell us that.

Driving to Mt. Esja took a while, and we got confused by the Google directions, but once we got started, it was an impressive location.

The trails were not well marked, but while the scenery was not spectacular, the environment was. We traversed forest, fields of flowers, as well as fields of tall grass. The going was steep at first but flattened out though we never did find the color'd loop we were supposed to be following.

When we were done with the hike, we had some time left so we detoured through Reykjavik and saw the classic church as well as the concert hall. Bowen even found a little crevice among the rocks near the Atlantic Ocean.

Iceland 2016: Golden Circle

The famous tour in Iceland for short term visitors is the Golden Circle loop. From where we stayed, we drove towards Gullfoss. The waterfalls were impressive, though we were later going to find out that Iceland is so full of waterfalls that you'd be hard pressed to find waterfalls elsewhere that impressive after you're done.

Just 5 miles away from Gullfoss was the Geysir area. Apparently, the Geysir here was the prototypical one that all the others in Yellowstone, etc., are named after. One of them was extremely regular. The hot pools, etc., look very familiar if you've been to Yellowstone, but still a good reminder that you're in a geothermal region.

The surprise find of the day, however, was Laugarvatn. I was drawn to it by the faulty guidebook, which implied that the hot springs near the lake dumped warm enough water that you could swim in the lake from the thermal springs. When I got there, I discovered that all the warm baths were at Fontana. Fontana was much less of a zoo than the Blue Lagoon, and much more kid friendly besides! Most of the pools were actually shallow enough that Bowen and Boen had no problems wading in them. If you bring a family to Iceland, I'd actually recommend Fontana over the Blue Lagoon. It's also cheaper to boot. We spent several hours there before moving onto Pingvellir National Park.

Thingvellir National Park was unassuming on the Eastern Entrance, but once we got out on the ridge and looked down into the parliament area, I knew we had to hike. A short, beautiful walk into where the parliament was and then a return in the late afternoon light hammered home why Iceland was considered a photographer's dream. Instead of getting just an hour of golden light, you got 5 or 6 hours of it! Everything looked stunning.

We got back to our home base around 9:00pm, ate a late dinner, and went to bed completely unworried about jet-lag.

Iceland 2016: Blue Lagoon

On June 20th, we flew from San Francisco to Iceland for a 2-week  family trip. We'd prebooked the lodging using AirBnB, and pre-booked a Citreon Grand Piccasso as the family vehicle for the duration of the stay. Because I planned to fly onto Frankfurt to start a Tour of the Alps afterwards, I'd also packed my bike for the trip.

At San Francisco Airport, I realized I'd left the train tickets at home, but fortunately, we had guests who were staying in the house while we were vacationing. A quick phone call to them found my train tickets, and we proceeded to arrange for those tickets to be mailed to our last AirBnB stay in Iceland.

We'd arranged the trip to Iceland for several reasons: first, it was a relatively cheap direct flight, at a time where direct flights anywhere to Europe were expensive. At the time when we'd booked the flights, we didn't know how poor an air traveller Boen was, but we were doubly grateful for minimizing time on a plane when we did find out on our trip to Japan.

Wow airlines is particularly picky about weight of carry-on luggage, but fortunately, they waived the EOS M3 camera bag, which would have put us over the top. Since the car did not have space for the bike (and it would be wasteful to cart it all around Iceland anyway), I tried to find a place to leave the bike. Prior to leaving for Iceland, I'd done an internet search which noted that the Iceland airport had a left luggage office. It turned out that that was for the domestic airport, not the international airport (who would have thought Iceland had both!!)! Fortunately, someone at the airport told me that the Geysir Car Rental office would accept left luggage for a daily fee which turned out to be reasonable.

The car rental offices all turned out to be walking distance from the airport, so I left my family at the waiting area, rented the car, came back to fetch the bike box, dropped it off at Geysir, then came back to pack everyone else into the car. The whole affair took an hour, after which we left for our AirBnB in Vogar.

It took a while to find it, mostly because Google Maps isn't very reliable in Iceland, a theme we would discover during the entire summer. For some reason, Google Maps seems much less reliable in Europe than it is in North America or even Japan. One of the best things about renting a place via AirBnB is that you're nearly always guaranteed to have a kitchen, washing machine, and (in Iceland) a hot tub. We took advantage of all these, cooked dinner, but left the hot tub for the next day.

On the spur of the moment, we'd booked up the famous Blue Lagoon for 8:00pm in the evening. (It was actually hard to get reservations, but we figured this would help with jet-lag)

The place was pretty full, despite the late hour, and we went in for a good long time. Bowen even partook of the facial mask! With the 24 hour sunlight in Iceland, we weren't worried about jet-lag, though it turned out that stores do keep somewhat regular hours, so we did have to plan around that for buying groceries, etc.

Review: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

I don't remember how The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ended up on my Kindle, but my guess is that The Eagle Tree probably prompted someone to recommend me this book.

As with The Eagle Tree, the protagonist of the novel is a high-functioning autism boy who's good with math but no goods with people. The setting is England, which actually makes for a much better setting for such stories than anywhere in the U.S. In countries with readily available public transit systems, it's plausible for a non-driver to get around places if he/she was determined enough and willing to put in the time.

Christopher Boone starts off by investigating why a neighbor's dog died, but in the process uncovers details about his father, his deceased mother, and their relationships with various neighbors that he did not know before. The prose is transparent, easily readable, and moves quickly. At no point does the story bog down, and at no point do you lose interest.

As a short book, it's worth your time. I'm not sure I want to read any more books in this genre, though, so stop giving me those recommendations.

Review: Exposure Diablo Mk 6

After all these years, I've decided that bicycle lights, like bike computers, shouldn't be bought based on features, battery run-time, or even the power of lights. They should be bought on the basis of their mounts. Basically, on a bike light, how the mount attaches to the handlebars (or fork) is more important than practically every other detail of the light. No matter how powerful or bright the light is, if it falls off the bike, it's useless to you.

Judge by that respect, I will no longer purchase or recommend any light by Exposure Lights, including the Diablo Mk 6 that's reviewed here. The problem with the Exposure Lights mounting system is that it's an open C-clip. The C-clip holds on to the light fine as long as you're on a smooth road. If you ride on gravel, cobbles or descend through Italian tunnels, the light WILL bounce off.

On alternate mounting solution is to attach the light to your helmet. This is unsatisfactory, partly because I don't always wear a helmet while climbing in the mountains, and also because the helmet I do wear already weighs plenty, I don't need to add weight to it thank you very much. During my recent tour, I kept the light in the handlebar bag, taking it out only for tunnels and mounting it onto the clip on the handlebars. Despite that babying, the light took a fall anyway and then refused to turn on.

Upon returning home I charged the light and it worked again, but now display an annoying tendency to refuse to turn off. There's probably a loose contact in there. I'll keep running this light until it dies, but at this point, not having USB charging and a bad mounting solution means any cheap $25 light on Amazon would outperform this piece of crap.

Disappointing and not recommended.

Review: God of War Chain of Olympus

Sony's Playstation Plus gave God of War: Chain of Olympus as one of their free games prior to this summer's trip, so I loaded it on my Vita and played it to completion. It's a hack and slasher game in the same vein as the other God of War games, but does do justice to the Vita.

The problem with PSP games on the Vita is that they don't make use of the right joystick, so I was fiddling with it trying to change the camera angle early on before I realized, "oh, it's a PSP game." Despite the lack of camera control the game's quite playable (though it also makes the puzzles easy since the camera has to provide you with sufficient clues while you're traversing the maps in order to figure things out).

The lower resolution PSP game makes the game look a little grainy on the Vita, but the game play is smooth and there are no major hitches. The plot is as silly as any other God of War games, but it's fun and good entertainment as long as your left thumb can handle the punishment of fiddling that little joy pad.

Mildly Recommended, but by no means should you pay anything above $5 for it.

Trip Solicitation: BVI 2016

Now that I've gotten Bowen to learn how to swim and snorkel, he's asking for a return to the British Virgin Islands for a sailing/snorkeling trip. Arturo says he has time over the Thanksgiving week for us to execute this trip, so now my job is to fill the boat. My wife says I write trip solicitations as though I'm trying to get nobody to voluntarily go on my trips (certainly my cycling trips have a high bar so I don't want people showing up who'll get injured or be forced to drop out), so I'll use this exercise to sell you (yes, you) on this trip.

There are only 2 places on Earth where a repeated visits do not feel like a waste of time to me. The first is of course the Alps, where despite repeated visits, I still find new stuff on every trip. I rarely visit a place in the summer and not end up feeling like, "Why did I bother when I know the Alps is better in every way?"

The other place is the British Virgin Islands. I first visited in 2007, and made return visits in 2012 and 2014. It is the ideal sailing destination: the water is crystal clear, the winds are consistent, and all navigation can be done by looking at the next island. There's no fog, and the water is warm (80F). The first time I flushed a toilet on the boat in 2007, I did a double-take: was the sailboat flushing precious drinking water down the toilet? Then I went out on deck and looked down into the water. Nope, the sailboat was flushing Carribean water: it's crystal clear and you can see the anchor from the deck of the boat.

The snorkeling is similarly great. In most places, you can just float on the water and stare at the colorful fish. You can do it wearing a life jacket and still see nearly everything a diver can. Most of the diving is pretty shallow (around 60' maximum depth).

OK, so why see it on a tiny sailboat when you can join a giant cruise ship? Well, on a tiny sailboat, you set your own schedule. For instance, we arrive at The Baths at 7:30am. If you go on a cruise ship, the earliest you're going to get there at 10:00am. By 10:00am, the place is a zoo, with lines everywhere, no fun whatsoever. By 10:00am, we're having lunch on the boat and are about to leave the Baths, having had the place to ourselves all morning.

In 2014, I anchor'd off Sandy Spit. In the morning, we dinghy'd over to shore and had the island all to ourselves. I have friends who brag about renting an island all to themselves. The costs are insane, and even in those cases, they don't really have the islands to themselves, since the service staff is always there. The cruise ships can't even anchor off Sandy Spit because it's too small!

If you're literary, Norman Island in the BVI was the inspiration for Robert L Stevenson's "Treasure Island." Similarly, you'll get to see Dead Chest Island. Yes, pirates did ply the waters in the BVI. There's even a wreck (though not a pirate ship!) you can dive and explore if you like!

You might think it's a ton of work getting a sailboat to some of these locations is a lot of work, and it might be if you don't enjoy sailing. But Arturo and I both enjoy sailing, and enjoy getting up at 6:00am to move the boat. You can stay in bed until we're in place --- just don't pick a cabin next to the engine! Arturo, by the way is also an amazing dive guide and if you like diving, we can arrange to have scuba tanks on the boat and dive. You might have to help refill the air tanks, though! No problem if you don't dive, most of the dive sites are also great snorkel sites.

If you're worried about sailboats tilting and listing, that's not a concern: we're going to rent a Catamaran, which never tilts more than about 7 degrees. It'll be roomy and depending on the budget (how many people, how many days, whether I can get a special offer) we might even get a boat with AC, though in my experience around Thanksgiving season that's not an issue.

Back in my youth, I liked to think that I'd never repeat a trip if I could help it. But there are many benefits to doing a repeated trip: you know where everything is, you know what the schedule looks like for when some place goes from idyllic to being a zoo, and you even know which places looked desirable last time so you should pay a visit to it this time. Set against that is of course, you've "been there, done that." As a result, there's only a handful of places I'd be willing to do that for. The Alps, the British Coast to Coast Walk, and the BVIs are the 3 places that I'd name on that list. (Yes, the Bay Area is also an ideal cycling destination during the non-summer seasons, but that's why I live here!)

Interested? Drop me a note. We need to try to get a boat ASAP assuming we can get enough people to do the trip. And please read the trip links above to see whether it's for you. If cycling the Alps is too strenuous to consider, this is the one trip that's within reach of anyone for whom motion-sickness is a non-issue or easily managed issue.

Review: Moon Travel Guide Iceland

It's tempting to get complacent with travel guides in the days of having internet access nearly everywhere. But there are still places (like Iceland) where internet access can't be taken for granted in remote areas, though good luck getting Google or other internet companies to acknowledge that. So when it came time to acquire a guide book to Iceland, I decided I'd pick up the Moon Iceland instead of my usual stalwart, Lonely Planet Iceland.

What a terrible mistake: first of all, don't do what I did, which is to check out Lonely Planet Iceland and use that to plan a trip, and then buy a different guide book to actually take to that country. You completely lose context as to why you booked lodging where you booked, and are left with having to reverse engineer decisions you made a couple of months ago.

Secondly, the Moon book simply isn't as detailed as the Lonely Planet. For instance, museums don't have opening hours listed. We were once directed to a local attraction that wasn't opened when we went, and in fact, closed 2 weeks earlier. For most activities I care about, (the outdoor stuff), this is a non issue. Even then, there's limited discussion as to which roads are dirt, and which roads are paved, which is kinda important when you're driving your family around in a mini van.

Iceland's a relatively small country. But don't let that fool you: there are many places in Iceland without internet connectivity, and buying a less than acceptable guidebook thinking that you'll fall back onto the internet is a mistake. Don't get this book. Pick up the Lonely Planet instead.

Review: The Temporary Agent

I was determined to shrink my weight budget down as much as possible for this year's Tour of the Alps, which meant that rather than preload my Kindle with books that are paid for in cash, I went for a free book knowing that the only time I was likely to get a chance to read was on a solo flight.

The Temporary Agent is a thriller. It features a former Navy Seabee, Tom Sexton, who had a honorable discharge, and rather than accept employment in private security, went for the "off-the-grid odd job man" career option. That is, until he gets a call from a friend who asks him to help find Charlie Cahill, who saved his life.

What follows is an unlikely sequence of events where Tom figures out what's happening, is betrayed and in turn puts at risk his girlfriend and friends, and the body count racks up while he tries to prevent a major terrorist incident from being enabled.

The book is compelling readable and could easily be an action movie, but like most action movies, the ending leaves you cold. There's no sense of redemption, nor is there a sense that the whole thing wasn't a meaningless struggle. Even the villain seems unlikely. I'd recommend reading any of Richard K. Morgan's novels instead.

Review: MoKo Universal Travel Charger

For years, I traveled with the Kensington travel plug adapter, and in general, I've been pretty happy with it. But it's heavy, at well over 100g, and my older version doesn't have the USB power outs in order to charge devices while keeping my CPAP machine running.

I looked for a lighter one, and the Moko Universal Travel Charger came in at the lightest, at under 70g. Here's how to get it to under 70g. The charger comes in two pieces: one piece has a US standard plug with two USB A outputs at the bottom. The other piece is the actual plug adapter piece, and contains plug adapters for Europe, UK, and various other locations. The European piece is detachable, and you can carry that independent of the other adapters. That cuts the weight down. The secondary fuse is located in the secondary adaptor piece, and given my prior experience with Kensington fuses, I carried it separately (wrapped in tissue and stuffed into a ear plug case), but I never needed it.

The fit and finish of the device is not quite there: in particular, the US plug would not stay put inside the european plug adapter if plugged in facing up (happened in a swiss dormitory), or upside down (on a WOW airline flight). The device makes a buzzing noise on occasion when the USB plugs are in use, but not once did the device fail to charge and the noise is barely noticeable.

The device is indeed physically flimsy: if you stuff it into a dry bag, there's a good chance that the prongs will bend: my solution is to wrap the device in clothing (a bike jersey or bike shorts will do). If the prongs had been made retractable that would have been a great improvement, but probably a bit much for an $11 device.

Testing the device on a tour of the Alps is probably the harshest service anyone can put it through. Given that it worked and was the lightest solution I could find, it deserves to be recommended.

Review: Pearl Izumi Elite Shorts

I have a tradition of buying the same bike clothing if I like the item, and then wearing them to death. On one of my first tours, one of my companions one day saw me hanging up my clothes, and then remarked, "Oh, you have 2 of those shirts! I thought you just wore the same thing every day." Well, in recent years, my shorts have been getting more and more worn out. The last straw came when Bowen one day stuck his finger into a hole in the back of my shorts and said, "Daddy you need new shorts!"

I hate shopping for clothing. My solution is to just go to Amazon and buy shorts and then return the ones that are the wrong size. I initially tried the Pearl Izumi Quest shorts, which fit me in the large. Those were acceptable, if a bit tight. At $28 from Amazon Warehouse deals they won't break the bank, and my experience has been that the cheaper the shorts the longer they last. Then one day, I noticed that Amazon Warehouse had a deal for the Pearl Izumi Elite shorts. I had a big tour coming up, so thought, why not. If they're not worth the price I'll send them back.

Well, they arrived and I have to say they're much more comfortable shorts than the Quest, so I bought another and will tour with them. My experience with expensive shorts is that they tend to wear pretty quick, and one tour with them will probably show up any issues they might have in the long run. In the mean time, however, they're recommended!

Robinson: The Original and Three Covers

This is one of those posts that I write to myself for future reference. I'd been listening to Robinson (by Spitz) in the car when driving Bowen around, so he picked up on it. Then during a youtube session, we found a video performance on Youtube:

OK, so a random Japanese pop song, right? But no, Debbie Gibson (of all people) actually produced an English version cover:
That blew my mind. But my favorite cover of this song has got to be Goose House's duet, with two singers and 4 instruments. That's really worth checking out (watch the motion of the guy's right leg --- talk about multi-tasking):
If that's not to your taste you can go for the a Capella version:

S24O with a Pre-Schooler: Sunset State Beach Edition

For a variety of reasons, we never managed to schedule a camping trip this year until now. Fortunately, the kids all loved their last trip and kept asking for them, so we decided on Sunset State Beach so that we wouldn't have to keep going to New Brighton. The freeway noise at New Brighton was always audible even at night, and Sunset was quite a bit further from the freeway and probably wouldn't have the problem.

Now that I'd figured out how to get the triplet into the fit, I no longer wanted to bring the single bike and a trailer. This was also my test run to see how the bike handled with all 4 panniers. We drove to the intersection of Sunset and San Andreas, and parked in a dirt parking lot that I'd spied earlier on street view. However, a man drove up and told us it was private property! I begged and cajoled until he relented and let us park on the condition that we assumed liability and that we'd move our cars at the end of the work day to another location on his property. We happily assented, showed him our bikes, and then I assembled the triplet and we were on the way.

When I first handled the bike, it felt like it fish-tailed ridiculously with 4 panniers. The load wasn't excessive, but I was simply not used to it. Bowen's every movement seemed to amplify the shakiness. Soon, however, I settled down and the bike felt like it handled as usual (for a triplet). Unlike New Brighton State Beach, Sunset State Beach had no gated entry time, so we were able to checkin and ride in at an early hour of 2:00pm. There are two minor climbs once in the park to get to the hiker biker site, which is co-located with the group camps. We were initially dismayed to discover that the hiker biker site had zero shade! I opted to pitch the tent without a rainfly and then we could abscond to the beach where it'd be a lot cooler. The site was cleverly hidden behind a bluff that would act as a wind shelter, so other than the lack of shade it was ideal. The lack of shade probably wouldn't bother most cyclists on a Pacific Coast Tour, as most such cyclists would arrive late in the day when the sun would be low and the warmth welcomed.

The trip to the beach on foot was terribly long.It involved traversing the group campground, going up a set of steps to a bluff, and then down a steep bluff. There was an easier route but it didn't look like it would be any shorter. We got down to the beach and played for a bit, flying kites, etc. The kids promptly played in the rising tideline and got themselves all wet, whereupon we had to take them to the showers. The shower facilities were limited: one of the two coin operated showers in the men's room was broken, so there was a line. Fortunately, with coin operated showers, each shower was never too long.

When we first moved in, the others, based on their experience at New Brighton, assumed other cyclists would show up towards the evening. After my shower, I experienced an epiphany, and told them that we'd have the place to ourselves that night. The reason is that Bicycling The Pacific Coast breaks down the entire trip into 60 mile segments for the reader, and Sunset State Beach did not make it into any of the segments as an end point. Most cyclists stick to the pre-made itinerary, because it effectively guarantees you a campground with a shower every night. As a result, if you're not camping at one of the end points, you'll have the place to yourselves.

After dinner, there was a show, which started with marshmallows, then songs, a game of charades, and a slide presentation about sharks. That was pretty cool, and the kids all had a lot of fun.

The next morning was fogged over, so we woke up, ate breakfast, packed, and rode to the beach. Despite the climb back out (which would have been easier without a load), riding to the beach is recommended over walking there if you have a bike! I certainly wouldn't suggest walking there to a cyclist.

All in all, Sunset State Beach has a lot to recommend it for the cyclist/family camping: it's much quieter than New Brighton (you can park at Seascape if you don't want to risk getting turned out by a property owner or getting your car towed), you will more likely than not get the hiker biker site to yourselves even on a busy weekend. The only minus is that the beach is much less accessible, but that's of little consequence if you have a decent bike. Recommended.

Bowen learns to snorkel

A year and a half ago, for the BVI trip, I bought a mask, snorkel, and fins for Bowen. To my disappointment, while he was enthusiastic about wearing them for a trial, he wasn't excited at all about getting in the water with them. Ultimately, he'd swim in the water with a lifejacket and wetsuit, but never got to see the fishes under water until the Punta Cana trip last year.

For a while we'd take Bowen to swimming lessons. But they never really took. Either he didn't click with the teacher, or he'd treat each swim lesson as an exercise in playing. Xiaoqin got tired of spending the money and decided that we'd teach him how to swim ourselves.

I learned to swim when I was so young that I had no memory of how I learned how to swim. It was pretty frustrating for me, and I'd watch Bowen kick and flail in the water getting nowhere and getting demotivated. I then thought of these old mask, snorkel, and fins sitting unused and decided to try them out again.

Well, this time, they worked! I first gave Bowen a kickboard, his swimming goggles, and the fins. Fins amplify your kicking and the minute he got results out of kicking he was motivated to learn. It took less than 15 minutes before he could use the kickboard and maneuver wherever he wanted to in the pool.

After that, it was time to switch to mask and snorkel. He was really skeptical, but I think finally his mouth had grown wide enough to accommodate the snorkel (barely). I also asked if he wanted to stay on the boat instead of snorkeling to see the fishes, and he finally gave it a shot. With kickboard, mask, and snorkel, he could then swim 25m from one end of the pool to another. He got fast enough that he could swim a lap in the time it took for me to swim three.

Then yesterday, he finally was willing to give up the kickboard. He can now float in the water, look down, relax, and go wherever he wanted in the pool. This was huge, since it really meant that he could snorkel in calm waters under adult supervision. As soon as he could do this he never wanted to leave the pool again, swimming from one end to another continuously without needing to be cajoled. He only left the pool after he got cold, asking, "Are we going with Arturo?" I was confused until he reminded me that he wanted to go sailing in the catamaran and go snorkel off the back of the boat!

That's pretty cool. I rarely identify with people who say they're proud of their kids. I still don't: taking credit for your children's achievements feels kinda iffy. But I'm really glad (and pleasantly surprised) that all that equipment actually ended up being used.

Review: My Neighbor Totoro Picture Book

After returning from Japan, Bowen asked for the My Neighbor Totoro Picture Book. Since I hadn't gotten to do long form reading for him in years, I agreed. The book took a while to ship, but when it arrived, he had me read it from beginning to end, at this point probably 20 times.

The book's quality is pretty good, with pictures that are formed from stills from the movie. The translation seems kind of iffy, and of course is not in congruence with the movie, so I occasionally get Bowen correcting me. The book includes a map of the village as well as several still pictures not in the movie.

I can't say I didn't get value out of the book, as it's become the most read book in Bowen's library. I'm getting a little sick of reading it to him at this point, but it's still a great little story no matter how often I read it. Recommended.

Excellent Customer Service: 2 Great Examples

Most of the time whenever I interact with customer service, I have my expectations set relatively low. From the "high call volume" phone waiting queue to the "I'm sorry but that's not our policy" scripted lines, I'm frequently frustrated, left on hold, and have calls dropped. In fact, one reason why I prefer using a Bluetooth headset to make phone calls is because at least I can have my hands free to do other stuff while listening to "please hold for our next available representative." As such, when I do get great customer service, I have to call out the great companies that provide it.

My first example is Wealthfront. They have what I consider to be an excellent product. Recently, they had a screw up with a contribution. This in itself was unusual, what really was excellent was that they proactively called us to tell us about the screw up. This is how you handle a screw up with a customer: "we screwed up, it's our fault, we take full responsibility for it, and we want to make it right." That in itself is unusual. What followed next was that they offered to give us a lifetime fee waiver. Now we already have a lifetime fee waiver, and upon telling the customer rep that, they were surprised, but treated it as a challenge rather than an obnoxious obstacle. My wife and I were pleased by their resolution of the matter and now we're not just customers but also shareholders in the company. If you're using a human financial advisor, unless it's Vanguard, I highly recommend that you consider switching.

My second example today is Garmin. Garmin has an undeservedly bad reputation amongst loud-mouthed internet forum posters. Part of it is justified: if you're the kind of person who buys the latest gadget, Garmin's new products almost always have teething problems. But if you're a mid to late adopter, buying products even as early as 3 months after introduction, their products outperform the competition and now I'll add customer service to the list of their advantages. Recently, my vivoactive stopped charging. I noted that I was out of warranty, but called them anyway. The customer service rep noted that I was out of warranty, but immediately said, "It's only been by a couple of months, so we're going to extend your warranty." We established that it really wasn't charging, and she offered to exchange the unit. I noted that it was equally likely (if not more likely) to be the charging cable that was faulty, and she immediately sent out a new charging cable. When both the charging cable and new unit arrived, it clearly was the charging cable, so in the future if this happens again (I'll admit to having abused the old charging cable quite a bit, so it's unlikely this will happen to you), I'll just buy a new charging cable.

When I encounter particularly poor customer service, I don't hesitate to call it out, but both Wealthfront and Garmin deserve to be called out for excellence in customer service. Only Amazon regularly exceeds my expectations this way. In this age of machine learning and automated phone responses, the human touch may turn out to be the only way to delight customers and stand out.

Review: Origins of the Human Mind

Origins of the Human Mind is a Great Courses lecture series about the evolution and development of the human mind. The topic is complex and interesting, and made more so by the fact that it's very much an area of open-ended research, with many unresolved problems and issues we still do not understand.

Stephen P. Hinshaw's lecturing tone and cadence reminds me very much of the William Hurt character in Dark City: he pauses, takes a breath, says a phrase, and then pauses again. I wonder if William Hurt used Hinshaw as the model for his performance in that movie. I mention this because if you hated that cadence of speech you may not enjoy this lecture series, even though the content is very good.

Hinshaw covers first the easier, developmental side. How does the human mind develop, and what are the stages it goes through. When does theory of mind first develop, and what are the vulnerabilities and critical periods a child goes through. This is great stuff. He debunks "nature vs. nurture", noting that very often it is the interaction of genes and the environment that creates a problem (or future mental capability or condition), and that the more we know about how genes interact with each other and the environment, the more easily we can intervene in order to head off issues right from the beginning. For instance, people with certain kinds of genes cannot be exposed to certain kinds of foods or it could damage brain development, and we're just in the opening phases of this class of research. He also does a very good job of explicating the difference between boys and girls' development, noting the particular vulnerabilities each gender has.

The evolutionary side is more challenging. As Hinshaw notes, behavioral changes leave no fossils. But there are several major mysteries that he posits solutions to:

• Why is mental illness so prevalent? Schizophrenia is as high as 1% of the population, and other conditions such as ADHD, autism, and bipolar disorder are also dismayingly common. The potential answer here is that some of the genes that confer properties like ADHD actually provided advantages in the past (and in fact, without the existence of mandatory schooling, ADHD might not actually exist as a disorder as children would never be forced to sit still for such a long time). In particular, families of many people with bipolar disorder turn out to be very successful in business and the arts, which indicates that many of the properties taken to the extreme in that condition are properties that actually aid in reproductive success.
• Why are humans prone to prejudice (racial or otherwise). Here the deep rooted treatment of other tribes as non-human seems to be deeply embedded in human's psyche, and might have been selected for in order to tightly bind tribes of humans.
• Why are humans so susceptible to religion? Religion here appears to have been used as a binding force to secure cooperation in groups exceeding Dunbar's number. Over time, the groups that succeeded in securing such cooperation out-competed the groups that did not do so.

Hinshaw ends the lecture series with a very personal story about his own father's bipolar disorder and psychotic breaks. That lecture ties together his themes very neatly: while the study of the human mind is ultimately a scientific endeavor, to attempt to do that endeavor without understanding and using the power of story telling that's deeply rooted in humanity's origins would be a mistake and leave much of the richness of such study behind.

All in all, I really enjoyed this lecture series, and would highly recommend it.

Review: The Game Theorist's Guide to Parenting

Parenting books are a dime a dozen, most of them written badly and verbosely. Compared to the usual dreck, The Game Theorist's Guide To Parenting is a breath of fresh air. It's short, to the point, and of course, uses math. The math seems all correct as far as I can tell.

The disappointing thing for me is that I already knew most of what this book covered, including the various auction systems. While they're interesting, the use cases for the various auction technologies available for parenting are really limited, and the examples they provide are really contrived.

Where the book pays for itself are the chapters on strategic voting and how voting systems can be gamed. My own kids aren't old enough to play those games yet, but I'm sure that'll happen sooner or later.

The book's big problem is that most of the examples are either contrived or would yield to simpler solutions. There's an example of two kids fighting over who gets to play a new video game system first. The answer seems pretty obvious: make them bid with time (i.e., whoever plays first would play for less time), but the book ignores that and uses this example to go into Solomon's adjudication of the two mothers claiming the same baby.

Similarly, later on there's an example about a boy who persuades his parents to get a cat, but of course ends up leaving the cat care and training to his parents within a short period of time. The solution should be obvious: getting a cat is an ongoing contract, so extracting a promise up front is useless. You have to design systems where by cat care is incentivized through ongoing penalties. The authors ignore that and get into the Nash equilibrium without ever coming up with a good solution.

Having said that, the book is so short that it's still worth a read and who knows, maybe the ideas presented will eventually be useful. Mildly recommended.

Review: Velo Orange Saddlebag Loops

I've used Brooks B-17 saddles for years, and they come with saddlebag loops. But my last B-17 died quite a while back, and my current B-17N isn't as comfortable as the B-17 standard. It's also a pain to keep it covered in the rain (remember: water can splash up from the wheels, not just come down from the sky), and as I get older I have less tolerance for heavy equipment. I've been using Ritchey WCS for ages, and it's been fine, much lighter, and less maintenance (I also got it on a closeout from Nashbar for about $25). On my triplet, I have a Brooks C17 Cambium: it's essentially a B-17 made out of non-leather materials. For whatever reason, however, the C17 doesn't feel as comfortable to my sit bones as the B-17 did, or I can't keep my butt acclimated to both the Ritchey WCS and the C17 at the same time.

For my tour this year, I wanted to see if I could use the Ritchey instead of swapping back to a heavy saddle. Enter the VO saddlebag loops. The pictures and descriptions look iffy, but $15 isn't an obscene price for a half pound of weight savings, so I jumped on it.

The installation is fairly self-evident, but I managed to install it wrong until I added the bagman, whereupon the wrong-ness of the install was evident, so I reversed the loops. That made things a lot better, though not as nice as the brooks saddle with integrated saddlebag loops.

In combination with the saddlebag support, the saddlebag's kept off my thighs and the tire, with plenty of room under the bag for a fender.

If you're tall enough to not need the saddlebag support or can use a smaller saddlebag, the best solution is still the Brooks C17 with integrated loops and not bag support. But since I need to tote a CPAP machine up and down the alps anyway, this is probably the lightest setup I can find.

Recommended.

Cycling is ridiculously fashion driven

For the last 10 years or so, my preferred rim is the Velocity Aerohead rim. It's a very light rim for its strength, at 425g. It builds up very nicely and is very straight. In fact, it's so straight that my "tell" for knowing when I'm done truing a wheel is that the seam in the rim is what's touching the truing stand probe.

The corresponding rear rim is the Aerohead OC (420g) with an off center spoke bed that lets you build wheels with nearly equal spoke lengths, reducing the number of lengths of spokes you have to carry while on tour. Unfortunately, the Aerohead OC is no longer being produced, and in fact is being blown out by Velocity's on-line store at half price.

This immediately put me in a bind. The 36h rims are hard to find as it is, and with the Aerohead OC going out of production, I pretty much will have to stock a life time supply if I want to keep using the wheels I have. Since the double-butted wheelsmith spokes I have are also no longer in production (fortunately I had quite a number of spares left over from building my current wheels), I've now been officially orphaned. By the way, in case you're wondering, the cheapest and easiest to use tool for measuring rim wear is the Iwanson Dental Gauge Caliper. It sells for $5.70 on Amazon, and is perfectly shaped for going around the hook bead and measuring the inner and outer wall of the braking surface.

I asked around as to why the rim was no longer produced. The answer is that in recent years cyclists have gone to wider and wider tires. The replacement A23 rims are not just more expensive, but also have a wider distance between the hooks. This leads to increased weight (25g more). If I were building wheels today there's no question that I'd go with a rim that's going to be in production for a while, but it just goes to show how fashion driven cycling is. There's no reason you can't mount a 28mm tire on the Aerohead/Aerohead OC. It's just change for the sake of change, but it sure sells!