A few weeks ago, I made a borerline-insane, 38-hour, 2100-mile drive across the country from San Francisco to Minneapolis.  But this post isn’t about the mere 90-minute sleeping stop I made in Wyoming, nor is it about the massive quantities of really horrible truck stop coffee I started consuming around Utah.  No, this is about my quest for more substantial sustinence along the way.  It’s also my way of completely burrying the lede, and a somewhat backwards approach to announcing that I have made said journey.

I generally dislike eating while on road trips, both because of the mess it tends to make in the car and because of the sleepy state it leaves me in.  Not only that, but it’s usually pretty difficult to find appealing food along the way.  What’s not appealing?  Fried, greasy, processed food.  In other words, pretty much everything one would find beside the freeway… except for Subway.

Ah,  Subway.  The bastion of vegetables along the open road.  If a truck stop happens to have a Subway attached to it when I’m hungry, it automatically wins over all neighboring gas stations.  Thanks to good luck, there happen to be a plentiful supply of such stations along most of I-80, so I had some 6″ veggie subs around Nevada and Nebraska.  The price each time? About $2.49, plus perhaps a few cents of tax.  Great.  Fast forward to today.

This afternoon, I was really craving a sandwich, but I was nowhere near home, so I stopped in at Subway for the first time since the drive.  I ordered my usual 6″ veggie sandwich (extra olives, thanks), and was more than a bit surprised to find its price to be $3.00 — about 20% more than it had been.  Making matters worse, the price was the same as many meat-filled options, such as the chicken breast, tuna, turkey, and BLT.  What a rip-off!  An irrational spark of vengence tempted me to order one of the other options — say, the chicken breast — and fling the “free” meat into the trash in front of the employee in some sort of useless protest.

Grrr.  That really irritated me, much more than perhaps it should have.  Maybe it was simply because the same scam is being run on the “$5 footlong” thing — the footlong veggie used to be less than $5, but the price was raised in a sort of subsidy of the meat-filled subs.

What to do?  Well, for the time being, I’m certainly less inclined to patronize Subway.  Now, to find a better on-the-road alternative…

In something that rates pretty high on the “didn’t expect to see that” scale, my neighbor posted this sign today:

Yup, two chickens, miles from the nearest farm.  Given the tasty nature of said birds, it’s a safe bet that they didn’t wander very far.

Part of me suspects that they were pets but became too large.  At least the owners didn’t have snakes or tigers that had crept past the cute stage.

For your reading enjoyment, I bring you three very short stories about my recent trip to Montana.  Advice, drama, awkward layouts — it’s all here!

Yes Virginia, It’s Snowy in the Mountains

“A beautiful area, but it’s under 100 inches of snow right now,” said the ranger, crushing our hopes.  The six of us had been planning to backpack in the Jewel Basin in Flathead National Forest, but we weren’t equipped to deal with so much snow.  Turns out that snow lingers in the northern Rockies well into July.  Late May was a bit early.  The solution: nearby Firefighter Mountain. No snow there; just a confusing network of unmapped forest roads and dense pine forest.  Later, that resulted in a cellphone appeal to a higher-resolution map, which led to two discoveries: Google Maps uses the WGS-84 datum instead of the NAD-27 datum, and Terraserver-USA snaps lat/long coordinates in a way that makes it nearly useless.

Take that, Planet Earth!

The glaciers in Glacier National Park are melting.  At the present rate, they will cease to exist by 2030.  It is then with some irony that I made my trip to Glacier NP by first flying from California to Minnesota and then driving from Minnesota to Montana.  Why?  The RV and my friends were in Minnesota.  The drive revealed something else: Montana is a huuuuge state, and an enormous part of it is empty grazing land.  The upside is that western Montana has plenty of beautiful mountains, and opportunities for solitude abound.  Total distance traveled on the trip: about 5400 miles.

The Woods

Recent fire places an eerie imprint on a forest.  Having found mixed success hiking at Flathead NF and Glacier NP, we set out backpacking in nearby Lewis and Clark NF.  Our path brought us through thick forests, muddy trails, and open meadows.  It also led us through a recently burned stand of pines.  Unlike in Glacier and Flathead, we saw no moose nor bear.  All was quiet.  The trees stood as black limbless spikes.  The undergrowth was replaced by a blanket of short green grass.  The only animal was a large owl, hunting for nonexistent prey.  After crossing Pike Creek, we were greeted with an even stranger sight: endless unburned trees, completely devoid of undergrowth and ground clutter.  In every direction, as far as one could see — nothing but dense, healthy pine trees in a carpet of green grass.  Like something from a horror film.  Spooky, yet strangely calming all the same.

I didn’t think it would be too much to ask.  All I wanted was a print of a photo I took of my sister and me last Christmas (click to enlarge):

My sister and me (Source image)

In normal situations, I would have ordered prints from Adorama in New York.  They have always produced outstanding results, but they are far away, and I didn’t feel like paying $2.95 for shipping $0.50 worth of photos.  Instead, I went local.

There are many local shops that print digital photos.  I decided to go to the Target in San Mateo due to its proximity to an ice arena.  I dropped off my images, played some ice hockey, and the picked up the prints.

Decent, except too bright and really blurry (Target in San Mateo)

At first glance, they looked OK.  It was clear that Target had brightened the image against my wishes — maybe an extra half-stop or so.

Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, the registration (the alignment of the colors) was clearly off, resulting in a blurry print:

Really poor registration (Target in San Mateo)

Everything is aligned (Source image)

Specifically, the red channel is off by almost a half-millimeter compared to the green and blue channels.

Disappointed, I went to a different store.  The next one I tried was the Long’s Drugs in Redwood City.  The result there?  Well, Long’s had also brightened the image against my wishes, but at least the result was sharp:

Holy green cast, Batman!

Wow, that’s some crap color.  There was a strong green cast, which you can see by comparing the color calibration card I had printed there against the reference:

No, it isn’t your monitor or my scanner — the print really is that green (Long’s RWC)

Reference card

Ug.  Next stop?  The Long’s Drugs in Palo Alto on University Avenue.  Let’s see how they did:

Too bright, but otherwise decent (Long’s on University in PA)

Success!  Or at least, close enough.  Like everybody else, they lightened the image against my wishes (I made sure not to select any of the image “enhancement” options while uploading my images), but at least the prints came out sharp and with good color. The blue channel is actually slightly off, but the human eye is relatively insensitive to errors in the blue channel, so that isn’t too noticeable.

For reference, here’s the color calibration print from the PA Long’s:

Good color (Longs on University in PA)

Decent.  Note how the different gamut of the photographic process produces slightly altered colors.  Compare the rendition of red, green, and blue on the Long’s PA card versus the reference card.  That’s a function of the medium, so further improvement would require one to print using a different process, such as dye sublimation.  Not worth the hassle in most cases.

What’s the moral of this story?  If you want high-quality prints from digital files, order them online from a reputable outfit.  If you absolutely must have them printed locally, be prepared to deal with highly variable image quality.

It recently occurred to me that I am now almost exactly the same age as my father was when I was born.  If I were in a similar situation, would I be prepared?  Would I be ready to finish growing up?

Coincidentally, the Atlantic just published a fascinating look at the Grant study, which followed a group of then-Harvard sophomores through their lives (and in some cases, to their deaths).   Some turned out to be men of great note (one was JFK), but others seemed to amount to little and were pained with regret in their later years.

I found a statement by the study’s current administrator in the video that accompanies the article to be particularly relevant.  Near the end, he described the ten years between the ages of 25 and 35 as one of few limitations yet great personal uncertainty.  Would they—the participants of that age worried—ever amount to “a hill of beans”?  It is reassuring, then, that most of the participants had indeed made something of themselves by the end of their fifth decade.

Seems almost like an echo of adolescence, and that turned out O.K., too.