Greetings from Oregon!

Looking at Mount Hood from our chateau this morning...



And later today we are headed across the Columbia River into Washington State to visit Mount Saint Helens.

Will try to post some pics when I get back home :-)

Oh yeah, we saw a marijuana store in Portland yesterday! This place out-weirds even Asheville... but Oregon has still gotta be one of the most beautiful places that I've ever visited :-)

And oh yeah, here is Kristen and I at Multnomah Falls!

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Fifteen years since...

"Dear Lord, am I really doing this?!" A Few Good Men. Red eye over England. Bennie and her mom. Mayhem in the marketplace. The brothers. Lots of wine. The village countryside. The pissing statue. The dark hospital. The odd pizza. "Coke is better than beer!" The American compatriots. A prophecy fulfilled. The peculiar picnic. A strange place to celebrate the Fourth of July. The haunted ruins. The jibber-jabbering Belgian lady. Helping the three Russian students. A kiss on the hand for a real queen. "Le stupid American!" The Piano. Andre's crazy cop cousin. The towering fortress on the river. The blood of Jesus Christ. Real magic. Cows at 150 miles per hour. The Eiffel Tower. The Bosnian refugees. The dead body in the alley. The Maquisard. The hunt for the Hard Rock Cafe. The singing drunk Frenchman. The four Dutch lasses. The unicycling saxaphonist. The Canadian Richard Petty fan. The two Valley Girls. Alive with medical commentary by Bennie. The long walk straight up. Gazing toward Hamburg. "She's out there somewhere." The canal tour. The carnival. Going home. Business class. Discussing Napoleon with a fellow passenger. Home Alone 2. Seeing the World Trade Center towers for the first and last time. The missionary family. Touchdown at Raleigh-Durham. Back.

And there was more, much more, that I am still leaving out from what was my first big adventure in the great wide world, that started fifteen years ago today.

Just the first. There have been others since then. And there will no doubt be many more in the years to come.

Zavel, if by some chance you ever read this: I found Christy. It took me over ten years, but I found her and she was every bit as sweet and beautiful as you described her to be. And I passed along your message to her, too. I don't know if you will get to know that but when I think about how it was that I found her, anything is possible.

Shawn, if you ever read this, I still have the flag that you gave me, dude!

Amazing how something that happened fifteen years ago can still impact one's life.

Anyhoo, it was one of the greatest times of my entire life, and I thought it was worth making a note of here :-)

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Pictures from Texas, Part 3

I'm gonna go ahead and knock the rest of this thing out of the ballpark, 'cuz the next few days are going to be crazy busy and I've put off doing this long enough. So here's the rest of the photos from Texas (here's Part 1 and here's Part 2).

One of the things that I'd wanted to do while I was in Texas was visit my brother-in-law Jonathan, who's a seminary student at Baylor University in Waco. On Friday, the day after I went to the Alamo, Deborah and I hopped in my rented Jeep and took off for Austin, where we'd catch I-35 north.

Here's Austin as we were entering town...

Here's Deborah. The last time we'd seen each other, it was at Star Wars Celebration III in Indianapolis two and a half years earlier.

This was taken while we were on Congressional Avenue, with the Texas State Capitol in front of us...

This is me, in front of the University of Texas Tower. This is the very building from which Charles Whitman shot and killed all those people in 1966. I heard that there are still places around the building down on the street that you can see where the bullets hit concrete walls and such. Macabre history aside, the Tower is one of the things that dominate the Austin landscape, and is often lit up for holidays and whenever University of Texas wins a ballgame.

After that, Deborah and I got onto I-35 and headed north. It was about two hours later when we hit the outskirts of Waco. A short while later, and we were at Jonathan's apartment! 'Twas a really great thing to hook up with my bro-in-law so far from home.

By the time we got there, we were starving. Jonathan said that he knew of a good place to eat, and it must have been 'cuz he's mentioned this a few times already: Rosati's Pizza. That's where he took us. Here's Jonathan after we got seated...

Rosati's serves up Chicago-style deep-dish pizza. That was the first time that I'd ever had any and it was delicious! Here's the soft drink cup that I got, which I took a pic of mostly so I could point out the phone number of the place...

After lunch, Jonathan took us to the Dr. Pepper Museum. Waco is the town where Dr. Pepper was first invented, and it's practically the official drink of the state of Texas...

Here's Deborah with a spooky animatronic talking Charles Alderton, the guy who invented Dr. Pepper...

We were at the Dr. Pepper Museum for a while and then Jonathan took us on a tour of Baylor, which is one of the biggest campuses that I've ever seen: the science building itself is bigger than the entire campus of Elon University south of Haggard Avenue! Here's Baylor as we were entering the place...

Here's a side-shot of the seminary building. Note the Bible verse that says "The night cometh". That's the seminary's ummm... official verse, or something, according to Jonathan...

A shot of inside the stained-glass windows inside the seminary's chapel...

This is Deborah and I at the sign outside the seminary. The building behind us is a parking deck, that Jonathan said the Baylor students refer to as the "Garage-Mahal". Something else about Baylor: every building on campus seems to have at least one steeple. Strange, that...

And here's me and Jonathan at the sign for the George W. Truett Theological Seminary...

After we went around Baylor, we headed back to Jonathan's place, said our goodbyes for now ('cuz it would just be a few more weeks before Jonathan and I saw each other again) and Deboran and I headed back to her house near Austin. On the return trip, we got to see a beautiful sunset, and Deborah was able to get some pics...

We made it back to her house, and then I was headed back toward downtown Austin, for this "meet and greet" for the Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9 attendees at a local chili honky-tonk. That's where, after all of these years (I was one of Ain't It Cool News's first readers, even remember the day Harry posted those pictures from Star Wars Episode IV Special Edition which kinda launched the site) I got to finally meet Harry Knowles. Here's the pic of us together...

Then I went back to Deborah's place and wound up having to call FedEx to fuss at them for not having delivered a package on time (I'd sent it on Monday for 2-day delivery to Deborah's house, and it was now Friday night). The FedEx rep - who I'm fairly sure wasn't even talking to me from anywhere in the United States - told me that it would get there "tomorrow". When tomorrow morning came, it still hadn't got there... and the next FedEx person that I talked to on the phone said that particular station wasn't even open on weekends! "I don't care how you do it," I told her, "you had better get that package here today. I don't care if they are closed are not, FedEx failed to live up to its end of a contract. You'd better make up for it immediately." Well those weren't my exact words: they actual dialogue was, shall we say, far more colorful. But this comes into play before long in our story, that's why I wanted to mention it.

Saturday was the day of Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9. That morning before I left for the event in Austin (which I wouldn't return from until the following day, it being a 24-hour long film festival), I spotted this dear outside of Deborah's kitchen window...

Not long after that, I left for Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9. There aren't any pictures from that, because cameras, cellphones and similar electronic devices weren't allowed. Here's the report on Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9 that I made a few days after I got back home, in case you're wondering what went on there (I'm still laughing at how they ran a documentary about a urethroplasty during breakfast).

Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9 ended a little after noon on Sunday. I went back to where I'd parked the Jeep, at the Hilton Hotel a few blocks away, and then very tiredly headed back "home". On the main road to Deborah's house a storm front was roaring across the landscape, and I got to get a neat pic of that...

The front brought significantly lower temperates to that part of Texas: most of the time that I was there, it was around 70-72. The high the next day was 50.

When I got back, I found out that a FedEx person had come from the shipping facility not long after I'd left the previous day, driving his own car and very apologetic about how my package had been sitting at his office for three days without any attempt to deliver. I'll give FedEx credit for trying to make up for their bungling (in addition to their offering to refund my money). Now, what was so important about that package? I'd put some presents in it for Deborah and her family, out of gratitude for their providing me with a place to stay while I was there for the film festival. Some of this stuff that I was giving them weren't the kind of things that you want to bring on a commercial airliner. Namely, this very cool railroad spike knife (the entire knife, blade and handle, is forged from a single railroad spike) that my Dad made for me to give to Deborah's father...

I also gave Deborah some Star Wars figures from my personal collection that I knew she had been looking for, and gift cards for her and her sisters.

And that's pretty much it for the Texas trip. The next morning I finished packing, bid farewell to Deborah and her family (Lord willing, Lisa and I will be going to Austin in the spring and we'll get to see Deborah again) and then I headed to the airport, stopping at a shipping place on the way to get the HD-DVD player (the one that Harry gave everyone who attended Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9) and posters from the event sent home 'cuz there wasn't room to put them in my luggage. I turned in the Jeep, checked in my luggage, hopped on the plane, and started the journey home.

Very heartfelt thanks to Deborah Wilson, her dad, her sisters, and their dogs for hosting me while I was visiting Texas!

All in all, it was a terrific trip. And after everything else that's happened over this past year, the whole thing was a wonderful way to help cap off 2007. I hope and pray that maybe, just maybe, it'll be a sign that things might bode well for 2008 :-)

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Pictures from Texas, Part 2

Here are more photos from my Texas adventure. When we left off at Part 1, I'd arrived at my friend Deborah's house in Texas. The next morning, before anyone else had woken up, I went out for a walk around her house.

Here's Deborah's backyard. As I told her when I got there, "You could throw a dead body back there and nobody would ever find it." Also fun to keep in mind that this is Travis County, which was the setting of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Just think: somewhere in those hills, Leatherface could yet be lurking with his trusty Stihl...

Some road I found, that goes... Lord knows where.

Here's a shot of Deborah's house from the backyard. That's Deborah's sister's dog Sophie who's bouncing across the grass...

Here's the scene from Deborah's front porch...

And some of her front yard (the pics can't do any justice to how vast this place really is)...

The first cactus that I've ever seen growing in the wild...

And here's a yucca plant...

And here's a... actually I forget what kind of plant that Deborah told me this is.

A close-up of Sophie as I was going back inside...

Around 1:30 that afternoon (Thursday), I left Deborah's house and soon was on Highway 281, tearing across the Texas landscape, headed south...

And two hours or so later, I was in San Antonio, en route to the Alamo...

Finally, after wanting to visit the place for over a quarter-century, here I was, at the Alamo!

Here's some more stuff around the Alamo: barracks, Spanish cannon, etc...

Being into knifemaking (along with Dad), the Alamo has a special place in my heart because this is where Jim Bowie died. Althoug these are not Bowie's personal knives (or maybe they are, who knows?), the Alamo has a number of Bowie knives on display...

I was at the Alamo for about an hour or so, and then left. On the way out I spotted Bowie Street, which I thought was a cool name for a road...

I got a sandwich at a Quizno's on the way back, and about an hour later or so I drove through the town of Blanco. I tried getting some pics of the Christmas lights that the town was decorated with...

I think that's probably enough photos for this installment. I'm going to try to get the rest up later this evening in Part 3, which'll cover the following day's trip to Waco and some other stuff.

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Pictures from Texas, Part 1

Here they are finally: photos from the trip to Texas that I made earlier this month. Took awhile to get around to posting these 'cuz there were so many (over 380) across a six-day period, and I've been extremely busy since getting back. Obviously this isn't all of the pics, but they'll give you a gist of what went down there (except for during Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9 itself because cameras weren't allowed in there). And because there are so many (and also 'cuz it's a bit late) I'm going to break these down into two parts. The second installment of pics, I'm gonna try to have up later on Saturday night. Anyhoo, here's the first batch of photos from my odyssey to Texas!

I flew out of Raleigh-Durham on the morning of December 5th, en route to Orlando and then the plane would go on to Houston. On the south-bound flight I got to see Charleston, South Carolina from the air...

And after leaving Orlando, it wasn't long before I got my first-ever look at the Gulf of Mexico...

Here's something I didn't expect to see: New Orleans. The pilot didn't announce it, but I immediately recognized the causeway across Lake Pontchartrain. Even from the air, I couldn't help but think that New Orleans looked... a bit messy. Is that still damage from Katrina? I'd never seen New Orleans before, so I don't know. But compared to other cities that I've seen from the air, New Orleans seemed dingy...

Here's an un-resized (read as: very very big) image of New Orleans, if you want to see some more detail...

And here's a pic I took of what I call "Voodoo Country"...

Around the time that New Orleans came into view, I saw something else that I'd never seen before in my life: offshore oil rigs. And there were a lot more than I ever thought were out there. Not only that but they were also fairly close to shore and spaced relatively close by to each other: I saw one cluster of them that I'm pretty sure I could swim from one to the other, they were in such a small area. Here's one of the better pics that I was able to get...

As we were approaching Houston, I spotted this fighter jet off the starboard side of the plane. It was flying at a speed and trajectory that put it almost synchronous with our airliner, so I was able to snap this cool pic...

Here's the Johnson Space Center as we were approaching the airport...

And here's downtown Houston, along with the Astrodome...

As we were landing in Houston, the dude sitting behind me told me "Welcome to Texas!" His name was Terry, and I thought that was worth mentioning here too 'cuz that was the first time ever that someone welcomed me to Texas...

I got to Houston, waited at the airport for an hour and a half and then took off for Austin (I flew Southwest Airlines by the way, an outfit that really impressed me with a lot of things, including their innovative way of how they board the planes). When I got to Austin and retrieved my luggage, I went to rent a vehicle. The nice girl at the desk recognized me from my appearance on The Soup on E! several weeks ago. The car rental folks said they didn't have too much at the moment. "Give me the most Texas-ish thing you got," I told them. "The Jeep," one girl said: "You want the big white Jeep." Here's what I wound up tearing across the Texas landscape in for my trip: a 2008 Jeep...

I took off and got to Deborah's house about a half-hour later. It wasn't long afterward that Deborah's dad got home from work, and we went to a real honest-to-goodness Tex-Mex restaurant for dinner (a place that had the spiciest salsa that I've ever had in a restaurant). Then we went back home and I turned in for the night.

And that's a great stopping-point for this edition of "Pictures from Texas". Will have the next bunch up real soon :-)

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