Since it seems more or less like the VeloNews.com setup, I thought I’d test-drive the free-version WordPress gallery tool with a few more shots from our Big Island getaway. Click a thumbnail and you get a larger photo with caption, plus the ability to navigate fore and aft throughout the gallery.
So in case you feel the need for a getaway from whatever’s crawling up your butt — airstrikes in Libya, dope fiends on bicycles or eejits in DeeCee — pull on your grass skirt, add a coconut brassiere and prepare to get lei’d.
Punalu’u is a black-sand beach on the southeast side of the island. We met a dingbat with a six-pack of puppies who told us that the tsunami was the government’s attempt to take our minds off 911.
Ho’okena Bay is the closest beach to our rental house. It was a tad misty post-tsunami; we went back a few days later and saw a huge pod of porpoises.
Your Humble Narrator at Pu’uhonua O Honaunau (“Place of Refuge”), mentioned in Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Curse of Lono.”
A long shot of the lava, beach and palms at Place of Refuge.
Big water and little water available at Ho’okena beach.
Herself livin’ large at Punalu’u.
Herself peeks over a fence en route to the volcano for a glimpse of the ocean.
Allegedly the southernmost point in the United States. Suck it, Texas. Stoners were leaping off its cliffs into the sea the day after the tsunami.
One of the many stellar sunsets we saw from the lanai at our rental house in Captain Cook.
I had Herself send this to various friends and relatives who heard about the tsunami and didn’t realize that we were 1,500 feet above sea level.
I don’t even want to think what you have to pay to get this view from the Sheraton. We got it for free, if you don’t count the pricey shiatsu massage.
Thank you for smoking … instead of blowing up. We got up close and personal with Kilauea a few days after Pele got cranky, walking from the steam vents to the museum and back.
Here's another Hawaii shot — of the sunset on Herself's birthday as seen from the lanai of our rental house.
Matt Goss won a pretty damn’ exciting edition of Milan-San Remo today, pipping Fabian Cancellara and Philippe Gilbert in an eight-man dash to the line.
I watched the last couple hours of the race via streaming video, courtesy of La Gazzetta dello Sport, and once again was left wondering just how much longer print-and-pix websites are going to be able to keep hold of their readers. I mean, how are you gonna keep ’em down on the old Velo-farm when a guy can watch the entire race online — attacks, counters, crashes and all?
An unimpressive bit of popular fiction I was reading during vacation contained an interesting aside about sportswriters. The author, a former journo’, had a cop-shop reporter say that the sports guys had to be pretty good writers because their readers had already seen the televised events they were describing a day late and a dollar short. It took that little something extra to hold the fans’ interest, and the sportswriters had it.
Looks like our gang is gonna have to ramp it up a notch or two. Or three. I’m too old, cantankerous and unskilled to go looking for work, especially since I don’t particularly want to find it.
• Late update: I just noticed that there were all of two Americans in today’s race — George Hincapie (22nd) and Tyler Farrar (46th). Where the hell is everybody else, racing industrial-park crits in Boulder?
• Later update: Oh, goody, another war. A day without war is like a day without sunshine. The 3rd Brigade grunts who just got back to Fort Cartoon must be delighted. A fresh desert to fight in, don’t you know.
Pu'uhonua O Honaunau ("Place of Refuge") was one of the spots that took a beating from the tsunami. Hunter S. Thompson wrote of it in "The Curse of Lono," describing another of his "Fear and Loathing" outings.
With vacation a thing of the past it’s back to business as usual in the DogHaus, and that means a fresh rant has been posted at VeloNews.com. I fear the Pulitzer committee will give it a miss, as I suffered from a touch of the old post-St. Paddy’s Day brain scramble whilst composing it. Plus it contains the word “dick,” which always makes the judges queasy.
The whole race-radio thing is taking on Wisconsinian dimensions, with Paddy McQuaid as Scott Walker and the riders as the pissed-off working stiffs, albeit without the dubious and transitory benefits of collective bargaining. When last I looked the VN homepage had four stories on the topic. And here you thought we were all about bike racing. Maybe tomorrow, when Milan-San Remo takes the stage.
McQuaid’s open letter to the riders on the UCI website is a real piece of work, a Dale Carnegie moment guaranteed to win him many friends in the peloton. He says he has plenty of pals sending him love notes from the bunch, but names no names, while basically calling the others pussies, tools and dopers. One of his BFFs will not be Jens Voigt, who would probably like to gouge out one of Paddy’s eyes, eat it, and then skull-fuck him through the empty socket.
Ah, the joys of velo-journalism. The party never stops. To give your mind a brief respite from the rancor, here’s another shot from our vacation on the Big Island, taken at Pu’uhonua O Honaunau, otherwise known as Place of Refuge. No dicks were harmed in the making of this picture, not even Paddy McQuaid.
Up the Irish, and no, not like that, ye feckin’ pervert. After 13 hours of sleep it’s time to listen to The Pogues — who are at present enjoying a farewell tour of the United States — and contemplate a pint or two or three of the black and perhaps just a wee drop of the uísque beatha on St. Patrick’s Day.
KRCC was playing “Dirty Old Town” when I arose this morning, so here it is for you and yours. Sláinte!
The view from the Sheraton, where we most assuredly did not stay. We got a nice shiatsu massage there, though, thanks to one of Herself's co-workers.
Boy, can we pick a vacation time and place or what? Herself and I celebrated her birthday this past week by jetting across the water to the Big Island just in time for Kilauea to erupt, the tsunami to strike and Hawaii to achieve the dubious honor of becoming the first state to see its gas prices top $4 per gallon, according to The Los Angeles Times. (Yeah, we had a rental car, a robin’s-egg-blue Mustang that was not exactly a fuel-sipper, and we were buying go-juice in the four-and-a-quarter range.)
Aside from that, the trip barely registered on the Suck-O-Meter®. Deep blue water, beaches in your choice of black, white or green sand, and good eats — what’s to bitch about?
Besides the friggin’ chickens, that is. Sonsabitches never button their beaks. Sunrise to sunset and all points in between it’s “Err err err err ERRRR!” Repeat until the vacationing haoles go batshit.
More words and pictures later, if I can remember where I packed my head. We’ve been up for about 30 hours straight, flying from the Big Island to San Francisco to Denver to Bibleburg. Don’t even ask where that left the needle on the Suck-O-Meter®, especially the final 15-minute leg.
But for a change the Vomit Comet was dialed down to minimal fear factor, so even that wasn’t as bad as I’ve seen it. We don’t call it the Vomit Comet for nothin’, Bubba.
• Late update: Happy trails to Owsley Stanley, who died Sunday at age 76. I never sampled his five-star product, but word on the street was that it made the shit we were eating in the late Sixties/early Seventies look like a short dog of Thunderbird in a crumpled paper bag parked next to a dusty bottle of Chateau d’Yquem 1929.
