all you can jet 2 - day 6 - saratoga, WY

all you can jet – day 6 – saratoga, WY

for a couple of weeks now i've been waking up, unprompted, about 06:00 – regardless of time zone.  i did it again this morning, even though i'm running the personal battery well-low, and took awhile to drop back off.

neither my brother, nor i, watch TV, but we consider it to be part and parcel of the WY fishing experience.  we watch an excellent show about the history of the US along with a side of “pickers” while intermittently making the plans for the next two days … there's a small menu  of fishing spots available to us ... and as i do with my friends, we refer to nearly all of them by nickname – so much so, in fact, that my mom (born and raised in WY) will often have no idea of places we're talking about in casual conversation.  we're spinning through the possibilities as we make side comments in the TV shows we're watching ... the new place, the red meated dams, mcclain creek, jack creek, mcclain creek II, and hey look how cool those animated buffalo look.

we're definitely going to hit the new place.  it's a spot where it's possible to catch a staggering amount of fish, and my brother believes the fish activity there is mildly different.  throughout the entire front range of the rockies, nearly all wildlife are most active in the mornings and evenings – going into a rest, that sometimes seems to border on a torpor – in the middle of the day … this goes right on down to the fish in the streams.  except my brother believes that the fish at the new place are actually more active in the middle of the day and settle down toward the end.

of course the one wild card that is never fully predictable – no matter what meteorologists say – is the weather.  we know for a fact that the weather is good right now.  the clouds are back, thank god, i have no idea what happens with two cloudless days, but it's gotta be the absolute worst of omens.  just as importantly, there's no wind right now.  it takes awhile for the wind to work up, and this is a part of the world where the wind can whip the flesh right off your bones … i've been out here this time of year when the wind was blowing so strong that my fly line wouldn't go down to the water.

we decide on the new place for tomorrow, and although i'm curious to see what the current situation is mcclain creek today (a spot that i have long, and very good, relationship with), my brother's got an itch to go back up to the snowy range.  i'm fine with that.  the WY rockies are about as far removed from airline travel as you can possibly be in the continental US … it makes a nice counterpoint to my trip.

we eat at mom's, in violation of the rule that says not to – but in saratoga you don't have a lot of options, and mom's is actually pretty good.  the proprietors, once again, do not recognize us – even though we've eaten here multiple times per year for the last 20 – which means that everything's as it should be.

we make our way back up to the snowy range, stopping to look at several watersheds along the way.  the water level is a little low, but we're here about a week later than usual, and it's been hot the last few days.  they've had a lot of snow on the front range this past winter, which can be problematic in any number of ways – but everything aquatic looks right.  bugs, plants, shoreline.  it's all the way it should be.

in the WY back country it's obscenely rude not to speak to anyone you happen to run across ... so in the parking lot of the upper set of snowy range lakes we strike up a conversation with an australian microbiologist.   he's studying microbes, DNA and their relationship to the weather pattern.  this is something b1-67er and i both know a little bit about and my brother uses the word nucleation in passing, the aussie lights up like a christmas tree and we end up talking for a couple of hours.

we'd planned to head to the upper lakes, but you don't want to get caught out after dark up here ... black body radiation absorption at this latitude and altitude is tremendous -- you can go hypothermic if you're not careful -- and we've burned a lot of time just standing here in the parking lot ... so we decide to stay lower.

my technique for this kind of water is better than my brother's, so it's not surprising that i catch two and he gets skunked.

both of us get a bit chilled, so we drive immediately to the hot springs and soak for a good half hour.

we're fully crashed before midnight.  there's a lot on the plate tomorrow.

pic of day 5 -- AYCJ2

no photoshop here -- that's my shadow during golden hour

all you can jet 2 -- day 5 -- saratoga, WY

traditionally my brother and i go fly fishing in the wyoming high plains and mountains sometime close to every labor day.  by choice, b1-67er lives in a vortex of complete insanity and for reasons i don't even want to delve couldn't make labor day this year.

but he could go now.  we nearly always spend four days together fishing, and in fact he set up four days out of his schedule before the AYCJ pass went on sale.

BUT, jetblue doesn't fly to WY.  AND with a jet pass in your hand, you don't want to spend too much time in one place (especially if it's a place you've been before), so i cut back to three days.  sorta.  my plane will leave about 01:00 tuesday morning, which will actually cut out one of the evenings for the drive back to DIA.

i'm flying early enough that i'm up at 04:45 – a time you'd be much better off staying up until, not a clock setting you should wake up at.  i've only had three hours sleep.  the grind of not getting enough has me pretty ragged … i'm way way behind on writing here – and that'll almost certainly get worse.

of course the good news is when it's this early, everything for me is just on autopilot.  i don't feel pain.  i'm not crabby.  i just flow.

i sleep the hop to boston and walk right on my denver plane with practically no wait.

the denver flight is fairly open.  after some more sleep, a super-nice flight attendant strikes up a long conversation with me, having spotted my AYCJ pin from last year.  he thanks me profusely several times for being a jetter.

“listen man, the favor you're doing me by offering this pass is FAR bigger than the favor i'm doing you for buying it.  you guys don't have to offer this, i'm sure as hell glad you do.”

“you don't understand.  last year was the first time jetblue showed a profit for september.  it has to be because of all-you-can-jet.”

whether or not this is true, i couldn't tell you … but it doesn't completely surprise me.  aside from the raw money the sale of passes would bring, jetblue uses a stepped pricing structure.  AYCJers must get their tickets at least three days ahead of time and most of them actually plan more than a week ahead of time (planning a whole schedule, like i do, is common).  if jetters take enough seats, the prices on that flight go up.  most people flying during the shoulder season are business people and they don't give a damn how much they pay for their tickets … so … ka-ching, jetblue makes money.

toward the end of the flight, the guy across the aisle strikes up a conversation with me.  he too is a jetter – headed toward boulder – and i spew a ton of information about all the places he's going and is interested in.  i've met a lot of jetters, and aside from their collective built-in age bias (it freaks them out that the old guy travels like this), all but two of them have been really nice people. here's a binding sense of adventure, not unlike people you find on a eurail pass, and it's nice to be part of that fraternity.

on the ground my brother picks me up in his $25/day rental jeep.  (we both use tricks i won't share here for getting cheap rental cars that go well beyond priceline and hotwire – i'll give you the smallest hint … two of the rentals i'm getting on this trip i'm paying for in british pounds, and are less than 50% of what i could get using hotwire.)  this is a mistake on the rental company's part.  we come from a l-o-n-g line of men that are infamous for abusing rental cars in the wilderness.  i've driven a sedan into places that have, literally, caused ranchers to spew their coffee when they saw me.  having a two-wheel drive doesn't keep me from driving on any given road, but it does make me drive with a great deal of forethought.  with the 4WD, the technique is a little different: shove it in low and punch it.

and there's the added bonus of covering the entire vehicle with an infinitesimally fine layer of WY dust.

if i was staying for one extra day, this vehicle would never be fully functional again.  pity that it's not.

in my largest crime against humanity yet -and i'm sorry to say it's up against a fair amount of competition- i don't even do the 35 mile detour to stop by my mom's house and say hello.  i was there a little over a month ago, so as long as nothing happens between now and whenever i see her again, i'm fine.  if she kicks it in the meantime, i'll carry an anvil for the rest of my life.

but, by not stopping by, we'll get a chance to fish today and wouldn't otherwise.  unlikely lifetime anvil versus definite fishing, the choice is pretty easy.

time spent alone with my brother is very rare.  we get, maybe, 30 waking hours this way a year.  i really enjoy it, he's fiercely protective of it.

we stop at jim's burger haven for “a square meal on a round bun.”  good, huge, thin, burgers.

and push our way across to state line and talking about wildlife, engineering, his family's madness, how the hell i manage to keep going without working a day job and firecrackers,  stopping for the latter as we cross stateline.

i buy a license and a few flies in laramie and then we headed up the snowy range.  the idea is to fish on the way in to saratoga.

i've never written about fishing before and i'm not sure i want to start now – especially when you as a reader don't actually care about it.  but to be very succinct, my brother and i both use a technique that is completely antiquated called “wet” fly fishing.  the exact manner and style we use hasn't been practiced  by people in well over 50 years.

aside from fleeing from a burning building, fly fishing is probably the thing i do the best with the least amount of practice.  even so, our stopping at the timberline lakes of the snowy range is an iffy proposition as far as actually catching anything goes.  the water is pure and crystal clear – giving fish maximum visibility at preditors.  the lakes are fairly accessible, giving them a high amount of pressure.  and we're late in the season, meaning the little fishies have become beyond wary.

oh yes, and in one way this is the strangest day i have ever seen in the rocky mountains.  i was born and lived in the front range for almost 30 years and for the very first time in my life, i haven't seen a single cloud – not one – in CO or WY.  all things atmospheric have heavy influence on fish and the lack of clouds definitely is not a good omen.

the front range of the rockies as seen on wide-angle from denver.
 no clouds.  all day.  completely unheard of.
(snow fence runs to the right)

we see a couple of people as we hike to the upper lakes, which for wyoming wilderness is damn crowded (but not that uncommon for this particular area), and work our way around a few lakes.  i raise two, but don't catch either.  my brother gets no response … he would have been better off trying the bathtub, at least you can take a good scrub that way afterward.

we're staying at the “sage and sand” motel in saratoga – what my brother and i call “the high plains drifter” because it's painted entirely red.  dinner is whatever we choose from the kum & go convenience store across the street (_your_joke_goes_here_).  there's a loose affiliation of multi-millionaires that occasionally hangs out in saratoga who in their self-serving grandeur, call themselves the conquistadors del cielo, which roughly translated means people who have no business being in wyoming, but act like they do.  they're in town right now.

i'm so wiped from the last several days that i don't even go to the town hot springs, instead i crash hard hard for the night.

lots of high altitude work tomorrow, i need the rest.

day 5 AM -- AYCJ 2

pic of day 5 -- AYCJ 2

all you can jet 2 - day 4 - buffalo, NY

up and out of the euro motel 6, we need to push across the border and make it to buffalo tonight … and have a couple of things to do along the way.

we stop by a local pasta place.  i get a whole wheat penne carbonara, my accomplice gets a chicken parmesan sandwich with a caesar salad; both washed with bottled soda because we can.

we're closer to the border than i realize and i actually have to scramble to get my passport.  a few surly questions from the border patrol (who is clearly not impressed, nor happy, about the fact i've driven around lake ontario – and then heading out) and i'm welcomed back to america.

i'm writing this on a jetblue flight, so i can't go back and look at my older posts, please forgive me if i've mentioned this before … one of the nice tricks we've done here is the owners manual is still in the car, so as soon as we hit canada i was able to switch all the gauges over to metric … at the same time i switched the GPS over as well, so the distances and timings have all been clock-perfect against the canadian national signs … as soon as i cross the border i switch 'em back.  fairly easy.  really nice.

even though we're driving a land shark of a car, we've managed to not burn a whole tank and roll into the nearest station on fumes.  we pay a touch over $3/gallon instead of the nearly $5 that it would have been in canuckland.

one of our reasons for circumnavigating the lake – maybe the reason – is to see the thousand islands.   but when we pull into the nearest tourist stop to do so, it's clear that things have already ramped down for the shoulder season.   the next tour doesn't launch for a few hours and we've got tons of things to do … so we skip it ... the very nature of all you can jet isn't to fret your failures -- it's to look forward to the next success ... and there's a lot left to do today.

we head into rochester, NY to see the strong museum of play.

a place that was started by a woman who was a rich kid … when she'd travel with her parents, she was allowed to fill one shopping bag with stuff, so she learned early-on to get small toys … these items became the backbone of place that's half toy museum, half exploratorium.

we played some games, looked around and burned a couple of hours.  mr. crypto would be pleased knowing that i nominated the magic 8-ball to the toy hall of fame – in his name.

there's one activity with a double-sided velcro board.  the idea is to build a design on one side and then describe it to the person on the other to have them duplicate it.

my accomplice built-and-described first …

i did my attempt in response ….

and when we compared, it was only then that we realized that our sets weren't exactly the same (one purple parallelogram is a mirror image on the two boards).

we did the experiment again.  this time i built and described …

and this is my accomplice's attempt at re-creation.

NOW YOU TELL ME WHO THE WORLD'S GREATEST EXPLAINER IS.  (and they said my math degree would never get any use … please.)

they also had a great little garden outside.  of course i'm a huge sucker for flowers, so i had to burn a few pixels.

it's late enough for food (as if it's ever too early) and we happen to be stepping into a hotbed of local dishes:

• the garbage plate.  a conglomeration with beans, potato salad and hash browns on the bottom.  a cheeseburger and hot dog slathered with mustard in the middle.  and what i think they term “sauce” on the top.
• fish fry.  this is that catholic-induced thing that some east coast cities have.  to a westie it would be indistinguishable from fish and chips.
• buffalo wings.  those crappy little things that only a godforsaken part of the world could think of to be proud of.

we're going to knock off the plate and the fry simultaneously, but our restaurant choice has been economically down-turned (as have a shocking amount of this area).

{oh god, i'm listening to XM on my jetblue flight and they're playing stevie wonder covering “blowin' in the wind.”   i have a lot of time and respect for stevie wonder – i even met him once – but this song is beyond terrible.  fortunately i'm able to wash it down with an extended version of the brothers johnson “get the funk outta ma face."}

by sheer chance we drove past nick tahou's the place that invented the garbage plate – so we'll just go to the rich man's first place choice.  when we pull up, the place is desolate, weird and rust-industrial enough that i leave the keys with my accomplice in the car and lock it as i exit.  i want to make sure that: A) this is the right place and B) i come out alive.  for anyone who doesn't know me, i'm not a guy who scares easily, if at all, so that should give you an idea of how gnarly i perceive this place to be.  my last words, “if you don't see me in three minutes, drive away from here immediately.  then call 911.”

but i take a step in and can see that it's the right place.  and it's still scary.  like blues brothers scary.  my accomplice nailed it and i would just steal the phrase, but it's so good i can't without attribution:

bus station scary

and even though the woman working the place looks like she was a fight-extra for “coal miner's daughter,” she's super-nice.  “we're here for a garbage plate.  we've never had one.  tell us what we want.”

“oh, darlin', you want a combo plate.”  i ask for macaroni salad instead of potato salad and no beans.  she fussed none and was so upset that she couldn't conjure a cook that she stepped back into the kitchen (actually crossed the magic line separating the register from everything else) and made us the plate herself.

it's a gigantic amount of food.  splitting this is easily enough food for two people.  the “sauce” on the top tastes strikingly close to the “chili” used in the ohio joints.

i go back to the bad-bad-greyhound quality bathroom and notice that the lottery vending machine at the end of the room still has two credits on it.

hell ya.  gimme two quick picks and ten million bucks.  i move so quickly and naturally by the machine that i'm certain no one in the joint even saw me do anything there.

back at the table the food is weird.  i know this is going to sound like an insult, but it's the only way i think i can describe the taste accurately.  now, before you read this, you have to remember that i was a guy who ate only one food at a time on my plate until i was about 25 … so the idea of mix/match in the food world is not my native taste environment.  remember that as you read this (and my accomplice has never heard me say this before, so this will be news):

it tasted like vomit.

but in a good way, or i guess in the best possible vomit way.  no stomach acid and nothing in there that was poisoning you.  so tasty vomit.  think about the last time you threw up after eating anything that had potatoes in it.  okay, now think about how that would taste coming back up if it was really good – like the best possible vomit.  it tasted like that.

i got a re-fill on ice tea.

“how do you like it?” the proprietess/mine worker asks.

me: “it's a full-on assault.”

she nods in complete understanding.  “i know.  it is good.”

i tip her a dollar.  it's really really important to reinforce behavior you like from the rest of humanity.  if you do it often enough, eventually the entire world does what you want.

we finish the garbage plate, but we're not done with eating for the night.  we track down our third choice for fish fry and get a piece of unbelievably crappy haddock and yet more macaroni salad.

if there's anything living in the bay area for 20 years did to me, it was make me fussy about the fish i eat – but even as an eight year old kid in denver, i would have considered this far less than half assed.

it's getting late, as we roll into buffalo.  the anchor bar isn't the best place to get wings, but it is the place that invented them, so we go there.

even at 22:00 they're jammed, but there's first-come space open near the bar.

in the name of not weighing more than 200 pounds due to eating nothing more than crap, i make the smallest order possible – six wings (which in buffalo, apparently means “seven”), medium hot.

the wings are actually really good.  best thing of the unholy food trinity this evening -- but let's be honest, the competition hasn't been that stiff.

we go cross town and check into the millenium.  they've got a gym (which is actually a bunch of barely functional equipment) and sex-segregated saunas (which are probably actually murder sites) buried in the corner of every-swingers-room-looks-out-on-the-jungle set-up.  for $40 for a night, and spitting distance from the airport, it's just fine.

i sweat by force, then sweat by choice, and crash.  denver tomorrow.  early.

goddamn early.


miscellaneous pix of the day

whoa -- canadian prison

surprisingly, these aren't bull testicles

time lapse video image

my hand and camera on sesame street

shooting an air blaster across the room -- damn hard to get the impact photo -- this is a touch early

day 4 AM -- AYCJ 2

i can't even begin to tell you how many times in my life i've been the last car in a motel parking lot.