[{"content":"Photo by Sammy Williams on Unsplash\nBack in 2015 I built a new payments processing backend with a small team of engineers. The new system worked very well but by 2020 it became clear to me that it needs a major overhaul to keep up with the demands of a growing business moving billions of dollars every year.\nAt the time I was working for a company that practiced promotion-oriented culture which rewards people for shipping new services and creating new features, not for fixing old systems or making them run better. This meant that it was much more beneficial for everyone with authority over the future of this system to focus on other things. Building new features, making new integrations, or creating new ancillary systems to cover up issues with the payments processor were all better for engineers’ and product managers’ careers than actually rebuilding the aging system. It didn’t matter how much I argued or tried to convince the powers that be that rebuilding the system will unlock a lot of potential and improve most of the metrics we all cared about in the long term. There always seemed to be more pressing short term needs that took precedence.\nThis situation is nothing new. It plays out in various forms in many corporations. I needed to influence the organization to do what I wanted without the authority to direct people’s work, because my role is not managerial. Influence without authority.\nThe first thing was to figure out exactly what I wanted to do. The only way I might be able to convince management to let me embark on this project was if they also got something out of it. It was too difficult and time consuming to add new external connections to new payment processors with the existing system, and creating a design that will make it easy and fast was sure to grab management’s attention.\nOne of the keys to getting the project started was having a strong team of engineers assigned to work on it. But what to do when everyone is already busy with what the planning process considers as the most important thing for them to be doing?\nThe key is using the same promotion-orientated culture against itself. For example, I knew of an engineer who had been steadily growing in his scope of work that needed a significant tech lead role to help him get promoted to the next level. I also knew his team had no appropriate projects for him to give him that opportunity, and that his manager was eagerly looking for such opportunities. I laid down the details of what I wanted to build. I was transparent about the opportunity for the engineer, but also transparent about the risks of working on an as of yet unapproved and essentially experimental project. Both the engineer and his manager were excited to join and were ready to take on the opportunity with the associated risk.\nWhat this meant was two additional people that really want the project to succeed. And because one of them is in a position of authority and can make time for his report to work on the project I was one step closer to making the project a reality.\nIn this way I slowly assembled a small team of engineers that all saw the project as a good investment of time and a worthwhile risk to be taking. I had to find the right engineering managers and product managers to get excited about the project. With every new recruit it became easier to convince the next one. Once the project was on its way it was much easier to bring it to the formal planning session and just report on its status rather than to ask for resources to get it started. It turns out that the hardest thing is to get a project started. Once it is going, it is much easier to keep it running.\nIn summary:\nAs an engineer, you sometimes need to exercise influence without authority. It is sometimes easier to keep a project running than to get it started. Use promotion-oriented culture against itself. Example: Give a leadership position in your project to an engineer that needs to demonstrate leadership to get promoted. Get their manager on board with that. ","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/influence-without-authority/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003csup\u003ePhoto by \u003ca href=\"https://unsplash.com/@sammywilliams?utm_source=unsplash\u0026amp;utm_medium=referral\u0026amp;utm_content=creditCopyText\"\u003eSammy Williams\u003c/a\u003e on \u003ca href=\"https://unsplash.com/s/photos/boss?utm_source=unsplash\u0026amp;utm_medium=referral\u0026amp;utm_content=creditCopyText\"\u003eUnsplash\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBack in 2015 I built a new payments processing backend with a small team of engineers. The new system worked very well but by 2020 it became clear to me that it needs a major overhaul to keep up with the demands of a growing business moving billions of dollars every year.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt the time I was working for a company that practiced \u003ca href=\"https://www.warp.dev/blog/problems-with-promotion-oriented-cultures\"\u003epromotion-oriented culture\u003c/a\u003e which rewards people for shipping new services and creating new features, not for fixing old systems or making them run better. This meant that it was much more beneficial for everyone with authority over the future of this system to focus on other things. Building new features, making new integrations, or creating new ancillary systems to cover up issues with the payments processor were all better for engineers’ and product managers’ careers than actually rebuilding the aging system. It didn’t matter how much I argued or tried to convince the powers that be that rebuilding the system will unlock a lot of potential and improve most of the metrics we all cared about in the long term. There always seemed to be more pressing short term needs that took precedence.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Influence Without Authority"},{"content":"Arriving in Denver after a long day of driving was a welcome change. After the endless wide open and sparsely populated great plains, being in a big metro area felt good and reassuring. Orit has a friend that lives here who arranged for us to stay at the in-law unit of her friend. That was probably the nicest unit we stayed in during our trip, and though the hosts wanted no payments, Orit suggested that we prepare brunch for everyone on Saturday morning as a token of appreciation, which ended up being a lot of fun. But this evening we still had plans - Orit’s friend invited us to join her for St Paul and the Broken Bones, with an opening act by Danielle Ponder. During the show I felt so tired that I thought I might be coming down with something. Then our friend reminded us that Denver is at altitude and instead of resting upon arrival we instead immediately went out to dinner, had a glass of wine and went to the show. I guess I’m getting old and should slow down a bit, at least when making the transition to places with lower concentration of oxygen in the air…\nThe show was pretty good, and definitely opened my ears to soul music. But the real discovery was the opening act - Danielle Ponder. She was really really good, and her rendition of Radiohead’s “Creep” was simply incredible.\n\u003e Denver has a great vibe. It feels alive and growing. There seem to be lots of young people here, all with dogs or bicycles or both. There are areas where people want to spend time together - a shopping district, a museum district, a lake with a park around it, a new urban neighborhood with bike paths along the river. It was fun to explore here. Oh, and our place was right around the corner from Maria Empanada, an amazing Argentinian cafe which we made me very happy. There is nothing better to start a day than freshly made empanads and alfajores.\nLook, more trains! Spring in Denver, near where we stayed From Denver we continued on to Estes Park, to visit Rocky Mountain National Park. As we were driving west towards the park, a storm was slowly making its way east from the west coast and was forecast to arrive in the area at night. We arrived in the afternoon and went on a hike at one of the lower altitude trail in the park, because most of the other trails were still covered in snow and require crampons or other snowy weather equipment which we didn’t have (note to self - crampons don’t take up much space but open up a lot of possibilities…). The trail was a 6 mile loop, and parts of it go through an area which was severely burned by a large fire about a year ago, but even so it is really pretty. There are nice views of the higher snow covered peaks in the park. Towards the end of the hike the storm made its appearance with little snow flurries and then with steady rain.\nOrit at the start of our hike in Rocky Mountains National Park A Moose or an Elk? Not sure. Leftover of the big fire in Rocky Mountain National Park Grazing Elk Driving around in the park we saw lots of wildlife. Especially abundant were two types of deer-like animals, and reading about them on Wikipedia it seems like they were Wapiti (also known sometimes as Elk) and Moose (which, confusingly, is called Elk in Europe). At some point when we sat down to eat an especially good smelling sandwich, a hungry bird showed up and came really close, hoping to get some crumbs, allowing me to take a really close up photo.\nA hopeful bird The next day we planned to go on another hike, and the forecast was calling for the snow to diminish during the morning hours, and for no snow accumulation to occur from the overnight snow. Ha! We woke up to a snow covered landscape, with pretty consistent snow continuing to come down. During the morning it turned to rain, but we were definitely not going to go out in this weather. Luckily our Airbnb had a hottub and good internet.\nFog in Rocky Mountain National Park Bear lake, Rocky Mountain National Park We finally left Estes Park the following day and formally began the last leg home, which would consist of several long drives to cover the roughly 1200 mile distance. The first day we drove south along the rockies to I-70, and then took it through the rockies heading west. Normally we would try to avoid the interstate, but at the end of April most other passes are closed. And we worried about the interstate unnecessarily - I-70 is a beautiful drive west of Denver. The road makes its way along the Colorado river, winding its way through the rockies. There are a number of tunnels, including one that crosses the continental divide and is the longest and highest elevation tunnel in the entire interstate system and is named after Dwight D. Eisenhower, the U.S president that created the interstate system. Eisenhower came up with the idea for the interstate system when he was the supreme commander of the allied forces and toured occupied Germany at the end of WWII, and was impressed by the autobahns.\nThe Colorado river along I-70 on the way to Fruita That night we stayed in a Airbnb tiny house in Fruita, CO - it was 198 sq. ft. / 19 m2. We enjoyed a quick hike near the Colorado - it would be our last encounter with it as it continues south and we continue west - as well as some nice pizza and good beer. The next morning we spent a long time chatting with the barista at the small coffee place where we stopped before hitting the road. It was yet another instance of things are not what they seem, she is from Missouri and went to school in Arkansas, in the Ozarks, and knew Eureka Springs very well. Turns out she had a really interesting program which included a class with a Tibetan monk, who also took the whole class on a study abroad trip to India to interview survivors of the Chinese occupation of Tibet. I never thought that combination was possible in middle America.\nThis was our longest driving day. We covered nearly the distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles, driving all the way to Baker, Nevada. Parts of the drive were flat boring desert, but a good chunk of it was in the now familiar landscape as Capitol Reef, which lies a few tens of miles to the south. Other parts were smaller mountain ranges, some of the same ones we saw on our way out as we were driving through Utah’s national parks. For a brief 20 miles or so we actually drove on the same road as when we were on our way out because we took I-70 east for a short time on the way to Moab.\nWe stopped for lunch at a small local cafe in a small town somewhere along Highway 50 in Utah. The place was clearly not a tourist place, and everyone else was local. The cashier was so bored, she seemed so done with her work. The other customers all talked about agriculture stuff, and were obviously some kind of farm workers in the middle of their day.\nU.S 50 We arrived in Baker, NV in the late afternoon, with time for a short hike in the nearby Great Basin National Park. After the hike we stopped to make coffee in a picnic area with a view, and met a Canadian couple who were traveling for for a few months in the U.S in a modified school bus that they turned into a camper van. We chatted with them for a long time and realized we visited many of the same places. The camaraderie of fellow long haul travelers is always fun, and sharing tips on where to go and where not to go is one of the best parts of it. They are also headed to California, though are going to take their time to get to SF. We exchanged contact info and hopefully will see them again when they are nearby.\nWheeler peak, Great Basin National Park Ancient bristlecone pine Baker itself is a tiny tiny little town with less than 60 inhabitants that is mostly geared towards passing travelers who primarily stop here while visiting the nearby national park. Our hotel room was probably the worst room we slept in the entire trip. It was tiny, and poorly insulated. We could hear the neighbors snoring and moving about their room. The heating was basically the inside of a water heater - a long gas powered pipe with an always on pilot light. Having an open flame inside a closed room is a huge risk of carbon monoxide poisoning, and because there was no carbon monoxide detector in the room, we slept with the window open and the heat way down. Which made the room cold… so we brought our wool camping blanket inside. Problem solved.\nA view on the Toiyabe range from Hickison Petroglyph Recreation Area, U.S 50 in Nevada The next drive was basically through the entire state of Nevada on Highway 50, all the way to Stateline, a very creatively named town right on the California / Nevada state line. U.S 50 is a beautiful road going up and down through high desert valleys and roughly following the path of the short lived and much romanticized 19th century Pony Express, one of the first reliable mail routes to California. It also follows the path of the Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental highway from 1913, the road that Eisenhower travelled as a young Army officer, an experience which also helped plant the seed for the interstate system in his mind. After an uneventful night there we continued on U.S 50 through the scars of the massive fires that burned through the Lake Tahoe area last year, with several long stops due to roadwork where crews were still dealing with the aftermath of the fire, clearing burned trees or fixing the damaged road. Some chimneys were still standing in places where houses once stood, an eerie reminder of the devastation that took place here just a few months ago. We managed to do a nice little hike in the outskirts of Desolation Wilderness, but there was too much snow on the ground for us to go very far (crampons, anyone?).\nLake Tahoe Wind over Echo Lake near South Lake Tahoe After a brief stop in Sacramento to stretch our legs we arrived back home. All told, we drove 9,017 miles, 1,800 of them electric (we have a plugin hybrid car).\nI might write another post with some summary thoughts, but for now - thank you to all of you who have followed along and have encouraged me to continue and write, it meant a lot!\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/denver-and-the-way-home/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eArriving in Denver after a long day of driving was a welcome change. After the endless wide open and sparsely populated great plains, being in a big metro area felt good and reassuring. Orit has a friend that lives here who arranged for us to stay at the in-law unit of her friend. That was probably the nicest unit we stayed in during our trip, and though the hosts wanted no payments, Orit suggested that we prepare brunch for everyone on Saturday morning as a token of appreciation, which ended up being a lot of fun. But this evening we still had plans - Orit’s friend invited us to join her for \u003ca href=\"https://open.spotify.com/artist/4fXkvh05wFhuH77MfD4m9o?autoplay=true\"\u003eSt Paul and the Broken Bones\u003c/a\u003e, with an opening act by \u003ca href=\"https://open.spotify.com/artist/5rZUNweztKBI1Xy3XhYHoJ?autoplay=true\"\u003eDanielle Ponder\u003c/a\u003e. During the show I felt so tired that I thought I might be coming down with something. Then our friend reminded us that Denver is at altitude and instead of resting upon arrival we instead immediately went out to dinner, had a glass of wine and went to the show. I guess I’m getting old and should slow down a bit, at least when making the transition to places with lower concentration of oxygen in the air…\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Denver and the way home"},{"content":"Leaving Memphis we are now in “going home” mode. We have about 2,000 miles to cover, and we intend to do it in two weeks. This is not super fast pace, but faster than the pace thus far.\nWe wanted to visit a friend in Denver which is about 1000 miles away so we were thinking of 3 stops along the way. First we wanted to explore the Ozarks a little bit. This area has a bad rap partially due to the Netflix series of the same name. Stopping at a truck stop right before leaving the interstate and starting to climb into the mountains another reason why this place gets a bad rap becomes apparent. A bunch of NRA-created stickers and t-shirts are for sale with slogans like “this girl doesn’t retreat - she reloads“. Conceal carry is allowed in these parts without any licensing or training, and a friend of a friend with property in the area once said that “… everyone is carrying so everyone is polite” of gun culture here. Ok, I will NOT wear my AOC “Green New Deal” t-shrit for the next few days.\nThe reason we are risking life and limb in going into these parts is that it is really pretty here. The Ozarks are the first real mountains we encountered since leaving New Mexico. Our path through Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee has been basically flat all the way. At some point I realized I was missing the view of mountains. In the bay area you always see some mountain in the distance somewhere. The Ozarks reminded me of areas in the Sierra Nevada where it seems like there are endless undisturbed forests stretching up and down the mountains for as long as the eye can see. At some point we stopped at a lookout and admired the canopy of this massive, dense green forest covering the range.\nWe stayed for one night at an Airbnb near a vacation town called Eureka Springs. There are hot springs here that have some minerals in them and have long had a reputation for healing all sorts of ailments. Developed since the 19th century it is considered a great example of a Victorian vacation town. It is built on the mountain side around the springs and is full of winding steep streets and staircases. We arrived here at night after a long day driving and just as the rain was starting to come down hard. So we only got a taste of the city the following day, after checking out of our Airbnb. We walked around and both of us felt like we need a bit more time to here, and just didn’t feel like we want to hop back in the car for another long day of driving. So when we walked by the old Crescent Hotel and Spa it became cleat we are going to stay there for the night. Luckily the tourism season is just getting underway and there are still rooms available on short notice.\nThat afternoon we went to a really wonderful church about 10 minutes drive from town. It was built in the woods and is designed with great awareness to its surroundings. It is made of wood and huge glass windows, and you really feel like you are outside in nature when you are in it. I can only imagine how it must feel to be there when there’s a lightning storm.\nWe were headed to get to Wichita, Kansas the next day. On the way I had to take a technical call related to some consulting I’m doing, so we stopped at a little artificial lake where I could do my call while Orit could chilled and read a book.\nThen we stopped at one last place before leaving the Ozarks - Bentonville. Its main claim to fame is as the birth place and headquarters for Walmart and a small museum now stands where the first Walmart store once was. Walmart is a really interesting company. It is often vilified for treating its employees poorly, for paying wages that are so low that some of its employees have to rely on food stamps, for intentionally choosing to locate its stores just outside municipal boundaries to avoid paying municipal taxes thus depriving small towns of badly needed income and for competing unfairly with other stores and ultimately driving them out of business, leaving communities completely dependent on Walmart for most of their shopping.\nAt the same time, Walmart is really impressive. Through their drive to reduce cost they’ve built one of the most innovative logistics operations in the world. They use many sustainable practices like reducing waste, recycling, natural lighting and highly fuel efficient trucks not necessarily because of a strong commitment to the environment but because they make business sense. They innovate in the FinTech space. They contribute to open source initiatives. This is not a purely evil enterprise as they are often portrayed. So how to reconcile these seemingly conflicting sets of evidence?\nTo me the root of the problem rests on two pillars: unbridled capitalism and lack of stakeholder accountability.\nUnbridled capitalism makes us feel like it is ok to want to maximize profit and compete vigorously to make the business grow without regard to anything but the financial bottom line. In that sense, Walmart is just like Microsoft, Netflix, Google or Facebook. All those companies have fought fiercely against rivals, and in many cases either bought them or drove them out of business. Anyone remember AltaVista? Netscape? Friendster? Blockbuster? We seem to feel it is ok to just fiercely compete, and Walmart is doing just that. Because Walmart has brick and mortar stores and competition means other stores close down it feels different, but it is the same capitalist story. If a community were to intervene in favor of a mom and pop store to help it survive despite brutal competition from Walmart, that would certainly not be purely capitalist, but would it be wrong? I don’t think so. Visiting Clarksdale and seeing what a food desert it has become because the only place to shop is Walmart definitely does not feel like a good solution.\nStakeholder accountability does not exist in Walmart nor in Big Tech. All those companies are accountable to the shareholders, which are the people holding their shares, not their stakeholders, which is a broader group that includes shareholders, but also employees and the communities in which they operate. If Walmart cared about the community in which it operated, it would not want its employees to make such a low wage as to require food stamps. That only helps Walmart’s short term financial goals, but has a bigger negative long term impact on the community. The same goes for Facebook and political ads. All the seemingly high moral ground of freedom of speech is just a convenient charade to hide a hugely profitable enterprise that helps Facebook’s short term profits but has bigger long term negative effects on democracies all around the world. A model of a company that is accountable to its stakeholders already exists - in the U.S it is called a B corp, and many business are already certified B corporations. Sadly, neither Walmart nor Big Tech are.\nIn any case, the museum itself was not super interesting, and after a short and pleasant stop at a hipster cafe in Bentonville, we continued on our way to Wichita. The road became flat and incredibly boring. We arrived in Wichita in late afternoon and went for a much needed walk after the long drive. The walk along the Arkansas rive was pretty and the sunset added a dramatic flare to the views. We walked next to a children’s museum built on the banks of the river and after being really impressed with the architecture discovered (thanks Google…) that it was built by Moshe Safdie, a world famous Israeli-American-Canadian architect. Wichita turned out to be a pleasant town though by the time we were done with our walk everything had closed down so we settled for a meal at a sports bar near our hotel. Oh well.\nThe museum and sunset A spider The next day we had something exciting planned. There is a salt mine about an hour out of Wichita that you can visit. The mine is still active, but some of the older areas which are now abandoned have been turned into a visitor center and a archive. The constant temperature and perpetual stable low humidity 650 feet below ground make for a perfect place in which to archive stuff.\nThe mine is huge. It stretches underground for many miles in all directions, and all but the edge where active mining is taking place is huge flat giant rooms. Huge fans bring in fresh air. The mine is so big that once a year they do a 10k race inside it, and only in a small section of it. It was a great experience to visit the depths and learn about how salt is mined (using dynamite) and how the mine evolved over the past 100 years. Technology did indeed make a huge difference and today it takes only a handful of employees to operate.\nFrom here we drove to Goodland, KS, our last stop before Denver. We stopped here only because we didn’t want to drive long into the night - as it were we spent another 4.5 hours in the car, and from Goodland to Denver it is another 3.5 hours. It was just a quick overnight pit stop. On the way to Goodland we stopped for dinner in Oakley, KS, in a small pub where everyone else was local. It was the kind of place I saw many times in movies, and it was fascinating to be in a real life one.\nAnd though the drive to Denver felt flat and boring, the road did slowly but surely rise in altitude until we arrived at Denver which is over 5000 feet elevation. We were pretty tired from all that driving, but still had plans for the evening. More on that later.\n(previous post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/memphis-to-denver/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eLeaving Memphis we are now in “going home” mode. We have about 2,000 miles to cover, and we intend to do it in two weeks. This is not super fast pace, but faster than the pace thus far.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe wanted to visit a friend in Denver which is about 1000 miles away so we were thinking of 3 stops along the way. First we wanted to explore the Ozarks a little bit. This area has a bad rap partially due to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5071412/\"\u003eNetflix series of the same name\u003c/a\u003e. Stopping at a truck stop right before leaving the interstate and starting to climb into the mountains another reason why this place gets a bad rap becomes apparent. A bunch of NRA-created stickers and t-shirts are for sale with slogans like “this girl doesn’t retreat - she reloads“. \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Arkansas#:~:text=April%2029%2C%202021.-,Open%20and%20Concealed%20Carry,a%20%22shall%20issue%22%20basis.\"\u003eConceal carry\u003c/a\u003e is allowed in these parts without any licensing or training, and a friend of a friend with property in the area once said that “… everyone is carrying so everyone is polite” of gun culture here. Ok, I will \u003cem\u003eNOT\u003c/em\u003e wear my \u003ca href=\"https://shop.ocasiocortez.com/collections/green-new-deal/products/forest-green-new-deal-tee-unisex\"\u003eAOC “Green New Deal” t-shrit\u003c/a\u003e for the next few days.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Memphis to Denver"},{"content":"Nashville On our way to Nashville we took a few detours along small country roads and happened to pass through the tiny city of Lynchburg. We had no idea we would come here, and have not read about it. But as we drove through town and started seeing black signs with a distinctive yet familiar white font we realized we happened on the Jack Daniel’s distillery. Not having planned it, we arrived when it was just closing, but managed to get a peek inside.\nJD The hotel we stayed at in Nashville was a bit south of the SoBro and Downtown areas, and was somehow designed as a hip hotel for long term stays. It had a few nice touches, for example a proper kitchenette, washer and drier in the room, and a sitting area for relaxing and working. The most weird thing about it was that the sitting area turned into t he bedroom when you dropped the bed down from the wall. It was quite convenient. The only complaint I had was that it was right next to a very busy train track. One of the nights we slept there a train was stopped on the tracks right next to our window the entire night with its engine idling. Aside from its engine, I could hear its air compressor pump operating for a while and then the pressure switch would turn it off with big “pshhhhh”, only to start again when the pressure went down.\nTrain outside our window, and a piece of the weird multi story parking structure Nashville is well know as the country music capital of the world and everyone said we must check out Broadway St. in downtown Memphis for a taste of its music. So after checking in to our hotel we took an Uber there (we wanted to not drive again after a long day of driving and didn’t want to worry about drinking a beer or two). The ride was nice and quiet and we chatted a bit with the driver all the way to Broadway. As I opened the door to get out of the car a cacophony of incredibly loud music rushed in like hot air after a long ride with the A/C on. The noise was coming from multiple open air bars that lined the street, each with multiple stories and different bands playing at each level. Above the noise came the sounds of the lead guitar of the band playing right next to where our Uber was stopped who started playing the familiar opening tune of “Sweet Child of Mine” by Guns and Roses.\n\u003e We stood there for a moment taking in the music and chaos. Then we walked around and listened to several bands in a few different places, and also enjoyed some hot chicken (basically spicy fried chicken), a wonderfully delicious Nashville claim to fame. Most places have a cover charge of $5 or $10 which is a steal considering how expensive music shows are in the bay area. Granted, not all bands were excellent but some certainly were. And contrary to Clarksdale where crowds were slow due to the holiday, here there were tons of people everywhere. At some point a hockey game ended in the nearby stadium and throngs of fans streamed out and added to the people already in the busy street. Very cool.\nSax player The following day we went walked around and enjoyed the more quiet parts of the city, and in the evening went to an actual show that you buy tickets for at City Winery Nashville, to see Band of Other Brothers. Much like you run into techies everywhere in the bay area, you run into music industry insiders in Nashville. So it was no surprise that the guy sitting next to us is a studio recording artist who knows a lot about the band. He told us a bit of the personal histories of each member and how well known and famous they were. I could see why - they were really great.\nBand of brothers at City Winery I meant to capture it standing, but its take off timing worked out well A pedestrian bridge across the Cumberland river in Nashville A view on downtown Nashville The following day we drove down to Memphis along portions of the Natchez Trace, a beautiful road that loosely follows the path native people, conquistadors and enslaved people took on their way to Louisiana. At some point this road was a primary thoroughfare for enslaved people being marched to one of the biggest slave markets in the world, near Natchez. Today the road is a narrow, no trucks allowed road that winds its way among rolling hills with the occasional lake, hiking trail, vista point and historic landmark. After leaving the road we took other small roads to arrive at Memphis as it was getting dark.\nOrit and a waterfall on the Natchez trail Memphis Memphis is also famous for a musical genre - the blues. It is just north of the Mississippi delta, so it makes sense that it would have a strong blues influence. But unlike Clarksdale that is run down and hard to get to, Memphis is a major city with (among other things) lots of clubs playing music and welcoming large crowds.\nOn the night we arrived here we went out to Beal St - Memphis’ equivalent of Broadway in Nashville. It felt very different. There we a little less people around and the vibe was rougher. It didn’t feel as safe as it did in Nashville, and the makeup of the crows was also different somehow. It also certainly didn’t help the vibe that there were roadblocks on the ends of the street and security checks where your backpack was opened and ID verified, as well as lots of police cars and police everywhere. I guess it was meant to both make the place safer and make it feel safer, but it made it feel more dangerous at the same time. As in - there must be a reason why all these police are here. What also didn’t help is the shootout that happened right here about a week prior, which probably is the direct cause of the heightened security.\nHeightened security notwithstanding, the music was great. Orit was especially blown away by Vince Johnson and the Plantation All-Starts who were indeed really great. We listened to them in a particularly dark and cramped place and were sad to discover that they have no online recoding other than a few bootleg youtube videos. I hope they do get themselves to a recoding studio and produce something we can listen to even when we are not in Memphis.\nThe following day we had tickets to visit Graceland, Elvis Presley’s home. Orit and I both love Paul Simon’s Graceland and have been singing parts of it as we’ve been driving around in Mississippi. I figured it must be a nice big mansion because Elvis was so famous and rich. But somehow the line from the song that says “…But I’ve reason to believe / We both will be received / in Graceland” made me think that he just called ahead to arrange his visit with the caretaker, and made it seem like a small and friendly thing. Had I stopped to think about it, the fact that we had to get tickets was surely a big hint. But I was still not getting it.\nOne of many awesome Elvis costume So I was totally unprepared for the scale of the visitor empire built around Graceland or the number of people here when we pulled into the gigantic parking lot on Elvis Presley Boulevard. We walked into a campus that looks like Disneyland. Multiple ushers directed us to show our tickets here and stand in line there, we watched an introductory movie, and boarded a shuttle with lots of other people headed to the house, which is actually across the street. Elvis is still hugely popular and draws hundreds of thousands of visitors every year nearly 45 years after he died. His estate still makes lots of money from royalties from his vast repertoire of music, and from selling an endless stream of memorabilia to the millions who visit Graceland. It is one of the five most visited home tours in the United States, and is the most famous home in America after The White House.\nPool table in Graceland. Amazing. The house itself is awesome. It is made to Elvis’ taste, which is very unique. It seems like a distilled version of many things we’ve seen in the south already - over the top, colorful, playful but sometimes very formal, and very geared towards social life and hanging out, all set in the tastes, fashion and technology of the 70s. There was a huge living room that had all white carpet, white coffee table, white leather giagantic sofa and all white grand piano. Another room was done in brown and green - the furniture was brown and the shaggy carpet, on the floor and the ceiling, was dark green. I think my 70s childhood home had one wall in a similar color. There are lots of exhibitions covering his cars, motorcycles, his time in the military (he enlisted and served as a private and was stationed in Germany, though he resided off base in a hotel with many members of his entourage, so not really your typical soldier, despite the very photogenic photos of him in uniform), his airplanes. We spent hours just going through everything and admiring it all. I especially enjoyed looking at his stage costumes and discovered that I really love his extravagant, colorful, over-the-top style. Might not be a huge surprise to those who know me.\nThe Jungle Room in Graceland. Oy, 70s style… At this point it is quite well established that Elvis was addicted to drugs and was taking multiple drugs which ultimately contributed to his untimely death at the age of 42. But there is very little mention of that in any of the exhibits. It is a missed opportunity to have a meaningful discussion about drugs and drug addiction in a place where many people might be at the same time more receptive and more empathic.\nPink Cadillac Another interesting point is how hard Elvis actually worked. He came from a poor family and for the 20 or so years that he was a star he worked really hard. He made tons of records, performed countless shows, including a residency in Las Vegas where he played more than 600 shows over a year or so. I’m sure he didn’t need to work as hard for that long, but he must have had a strong desire to do it and a sense of commitment to his fans. I think he was also driven very hard by the needs of his extravagant lifestyle and perhaps even by the greed of those around him like his manager or his father. There is a sad list of rock stars like Amy Weinhouse, Curt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison that is sometimes referred to as the club of 27 that burn out in this or similar way. Though Elvis was older when he died, the pattern is broadly similar and could have made for an interesting discussion, which was completely absent.\nThe expensive and expansive Graceland estate stood in stark contrast to the place we visited the following day, the Lorraine Motel near downtown Memphis. This is where on April 4th in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. It is now civli rights museum where during the tour you can stop and take a look at the room as it was when MLK was there. It is striking how modest everything is, especially given MLK’s stature at the time. It is unimaginable today that a leader of that calibre would stay in a place like that. And some of the data uncovered after the fact leaves significant doubt about the role of law enforcement in his assassination. It seems that not only was he not protected, as an important political figure in a democratic society should be, but that on the day of his assassination his protection was mysteriously reduced. The best way to describe this and other actions by law enforcement is incompetence, the worst - direct government involvement in his killing.\nMartin Luther King Jr.’s room After one last nice walk along the Mississippi river overlooking the I-40 bridge over it, we said goodbye to it and to Tennessee, and headed west.\n(previous post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/tennessee/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"nashville\"\u003eNashville\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn our way to Nashville we took a few detours along small country roads and happened to pass through the tiny city of Lynchburg. We had no idea we would come here, and have not read about it. But as we drove through town and started seeing black signs with a distinctive yet familiar white font we realized we happened on the Jack Daniel’s distillery. Not having planned it, we arrived when it was just closing, but managed to get a peek inside.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Tennessee"},{"content":"A very big wrench Birmingham is a nice city in the northwestern part of Alabama. I knew little about it before coming here and decided to make it a stop so I could visit a friend who recently moved here with his wife and baby daughter. We drove to Birmingham via Oxford, Mississippi, where we briefly stopped for lunch and enjoyed the calm, manicured and clean little town. It was a very stark difference to the run down, neglected feel of Clarksdale. The calm surface is in contrast to a very stormy past during the civil rights era, when a black student tried to enroll in the then segregated University of Mississippi here, ultimately leading to violent race riots that got national attention.\nBirmingham turned out to be quite nice. It is always fun to spend time in a city with locals. After meeting their baby daughter and saying goodbye to her and the babysitter, we went out for a short drive around town to take a look at some of what it has to offer, and then sat down for a nice dinner together. Though we had never before gone out as two couples, the conversation was very nice and we felt very comfortable and at ease. We enjoyed a family style meal where everyone was digging into the food, where double dipping was inevitable, and it was fun. No one seemed to mind. It was fun to be in the company of other adults for a bit.\nThe city itself has an interesting history as a former southern iron production site and industrial hub. This is where it gets its name. What is left from that past today is a major train hub, which means that huge trains constantly go through town in what is referred to by the locals as a river - you have to build bridges across the tracks or be separated from the other side.\nTrain in Birmingham Train yard park Another interesting thing here is a huge shut down iron factory that used a technology called blast furnace right at the edge of town called Sloss Furnace National Historic Landmark that you can visit. From a visual standpoint there is a lot in shutdown plant that is reminiscent of Bernd and Hilla Becher, who are some of Orit’s favorite artists. From an engineering perspective this place represents the height of the harnessing of fire to create metal, which humans have been doing for ~5000 years. The process for producing the iron at Sloss involved blowing compressed air at 1400 degrees into a large chamber, igniting coal which would then extract oxygen from iron ore and turn, after a reaction with limestone to extract impurities, into iron. Getting air to 1400 degrees, pumping it into the large chamber and dealing with the resulting molten iron were all done using 19th century technology, which is kind of amazing. The Birmingham area was rich in coal, limestone and iron ore, which is why the factory was built here.\nLooking at the history of the place, you can see some common practices for large businesses at the end of the 19th century and early 20th in the US south. It used convict leasing, the loophole developed in the south after slavery became illegal whereby prisoners are leased to companies for cheap labor. The overwhelming majority of leased convicts were blacks. Later on, It created a sort of company town in the early 20th century where workers were housed with their families, and other services were provided like healthcare and school. Electricity from the plant was provided to the Sloss neighborhood. During the second world war, the factory was an important part of the war effort.\nThe blast furnace tower Orit admiring the big pipes One of the structures used to heat up the air The cooling pond, where the hot water from the plant would be cooled by spraying it into the air Steam powered wheel Birmingham is also the site of civil rights era events that got worldwide attention, and of a terrible terrorist attack against a black church that killed 4 young girls. When visited the site of the attack and the park next to it, I was struck by how similar it felt. Growing up in Israel, where so many terrorist attacks took place over the years, the memorialization of the victims and the way the event was woven into the bigger story of struggle felt familiar. The situation in Israel is very different of course, but the empathy and kinship I felt towards those 4 girls was strong regardless. Sadly, the current political atmosphere in Israel seems to be growing more racially divisive, even as the day to day of many citizens is becoming less so. It seems to me that if there is anything to be learned from the civil rights era here in the south, it is that the closer things get to being desegregated, the more desperate the racists and bigots get, the more likely to resort to violence.\nA statue commemorating the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of September 15, 1963 Leaving Birmingham we took the back roads to Nashville. It was a long but beautiful drive.\nWildflowers on the way to Nashville (previous post here)\n(next post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/birmingham/","summary":"\u003cdiv align=\"center\"\u003e\u003csup\u003eA very big wrench\u003c/sup\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBirmingham is a nice city in the northwestern part of Alabama. I knew little about it before coming here and decided to make it a stop so I could visit a friend who recently moved here with his wife and baby daughter. We drove to Birmingham via Oxford, Mississippi, where we briefly stopped for lunch and enjoyed the calm, manicured and clean little town. It was a very stark difference to the run down, neglected feel of Clarksdale. The calm surface is in contrast to a very stormy past during the civil rights era, when a black student tried to enroll in the then segregated University of Mississippi here, ultimately leading to \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ole_Miss_riot_of_1962\"\u003eviolent race riots\u003c/a\u003e that got national attention.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Birmingham"},{"content":"The Mississippi delta is among the poorest parts of Mississippi, itself one of the poorest states in the US. “Thank god for Mississippi” has become a common adage in the south cynically referring to Mississippi’s low ranking on pretty much every measure of quality of life. Driving through the delta indeed reinforces this perspective. The vast empty fields, run down communities, deserted and crumbling farm houses all add to a sense of abandonment and despair. When we stopped in Cleveland, MS and encountered a functioning main street lined with cute little shops and a cafe where decent latte and croissants were being served, complete with a student reading a book by Freud (Orit excitedly pointed out that it was “Civilization and Its Discontents”), we were positively surprised. But this experience was the exception, to be sure. Later on when we stopped for gas as we approached the city Clarksdale, I had a really hard time understanding what people around me were saying with their thick accents and lots of local slang.\nFormer glory Clarksdale is considered a really important center for the Blues. It is an otherwise crumbling little town, with signs of its pre-90s glory present everywhere in torn down and falling apart buildings. There are several of blues clubs in town, including a few Juke Joints. The weird thing was that all of them look incredibly run down. It is not that they are old and showing their age. That too, that is. But the aesthetic is even more specific than that. The walls are unpainted wood. There are writings on them everywhere, apparently made by random people over time. There is a lot of pseudo-antique junk everywhere. There are some artifacts that have no discernible use but that are also not particularly artsy or seem to have been put there just to occupy an otherwise empty space. The style just feels random, not pretty or cohesive. On second thought, I might say it represent some kind of anger, some kind of attempt to yell back at the world that treated this place so badly. Whatever the case might be, the style was really unappealing to me. Shack Up Inn main hall In stark contrast to the impossibly run down surroundings, the music was amazing. Some of the musicians we’ve heard were excellent, playing authentic delta blues. At a juke joint called Red’s we saw Terry “Harmonica” Bean, and were blown away by his technique and amazing vibe. There is live music in Clarksdale, mostly blues, all the time. Even on Easter Sunday at 10 in the morning as we sat down at a cafe to eat breakfast a small band was playing. It is kind of insane.\nTerry “Harmonica” Bean at Red’s As we were entering Red\u0026rsquo;s someone offered Orit some unlabeled drink, which she declined. The drink turned out to be moonshine - hard liquor produced locally by the owner, which was very popular during the prohibition. Why still make it when liquor is so cheap? So cheap that many people we encountered here were in various stages of being totally hammered at any hour of the day and night. Being drunk is tolerated and socially accepted here, and people encourage each other to drink so that we all \u0026ldquo;have a good time\u0026rdquo;.\nA look into the bathroom at one of the shacks. Notice the spiral at the top, part of the original owner’s moonshine operation Many of the tourists who come to Clarksdale are European. Locals said it was up to two-thirds of tourist, which I found surprising. Anecdotally we did run into several European tourists, and run into them again and again in the various places in town, because we came during a quiet weekend, right before a big festival (the Juke Joint Festival) was about to take place.\nOur Airbnb hosts are two musicians turned hospitality workers that rent out several Airbnb’s from a large restored 19th century house and also work at a well known hotel right out of town, the Shack Up Inn. That hotel shares in the same run-down-and-un-renovated vibe of places in town, and is built around a cotton processing hangar. Over time, the owner acquired shacks from plantation that were going out of business in the delta and transported them to become part of the hotel. The shacks were mostly where slaves and later sharecroppers lived, in some cases until the 90s. Preserving sharecropper habitations is a cool idea, but the way they are preserved there - with bare walls full of random scribbles, with tin roofs, is very unappealing. Why not make them look a little nicer, while still preserving the rustic, simplistic original design?\nOne of the shacks at Shack Up Inn More shacks and some random stuff Of course, the inn has a stage and performance area, also full of junk and visually busy as is everything else around here. And of course we also listened to some great music by Bill Abel there. Clarksdale is amazing.\nBill Abel at the Shack Up Inn After a few days of wandering around from one music venue to another and enjoying the vibe, we got in the car and drove towards our next destination - Birmingham, Alabama.\n(previous post here)\n(next post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/the-delta/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Delta\"\u003eMississippi delta\u003c/a\u003e is among the \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lowest-income_counties_in_the_United_States\"\u003epoorest parts\u003c/a\u003e of Mississippi, itself one of the \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_poverty_rate\"\u003epoorest states\u003c/a\u003e in the US. \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_God_for_Mississippi\"\u003e“Thank god for Mississippi”\u003c/a\u003e has become a common adage in the south cynically referring to Mississippi’s low ranking on pretty much every measure of quality of life. Driving through the delta indeed reinforces this perspective. The vast empty fields, run down communities, deserted and crumbling farm houses all add to a sense of abandonment and despair. When we stopped in \u003ca href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/QwXfKD54hUYHbGMGA\"\u003eCleveland, MS\u003c/a\u003e and encountered a functioning main street lined with cute little shops and a cafe where decent latte and croissants were being served, complete with a student reading a book by Freud (Orit excitedly pointed out that it was “Civilization and Its Discontents”), we were positively surprised. But this experience was the exception, to be sure. Later on when we stopped for gas as we approached the city Clarksdale, I had a really hard time understanding what people around me were saying with their thick accents and lots of local slang.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"The Delta"},{"content":"Yesterday was Passover Eve, and this is the first time in a long time that we are not celebrating it with our family. Everyone seems to miss it more than we realized. The Passover Seder is all about telling an ancient story of slavery and redemption, and 3,000 years later, it is still remembered, still rehashed, still processed. As we travel through the U.S. south, the more recent story of slavery is unfolding in front of us and it is evident that it is not yet done. It is still an open wound, the details of the story still being fought over. I hope it doesn’t take 3,000 years to heal.\nWe made our way north from Baton Rouge, towards Jackson. We stopped for one night in Natchez and then another night in Vicksburg. It now feels like we entered the deep south for real.\nThere is of course a definition of what the deep south means geographically, and we certainly are within that region. But the people and the general vibe feels different in a noticeable way since we left Baton Rouge. For one, we met several people who talked openly about “the war” when referring to the civil war. They were all white, and all talked about it as if it happened just last week. It was also clear that they feel like they were wronged, like they were occupied by an aggressor. And about slavery they say something like “well, it happened a long time ago, but it did happen. it is part of history, so there is no point thinking about it critically because it is a fact of the past”. This was said in two different tours we got of magnificent houses built by enslaved people. Orit’s theory is that this is their way of saying “let’s not talk about slavery”, which may very well be true. Clearly the issue of slavery and the civil war are still an open wound in the minds of many here.\nOne of the tours we got was of a beautiful big mansion in Natchez. When we booked the Airbnb (which is in a room in the former enslaved people’s quarters), we had no idea it was under that big mansion. The guide was also our host, the only resident of the house, living alone in a house that has 3 stories of 15ft ceilings, a ballroom, a formal dining room, a sitting room and many bedrooms. The house was packed full of antique china, furniture and artwork, and as the tour rolled on it became clear just how big the chasm between our progressive California views and his is. He was careful - he didn’t say anything that could qualify as outright racist. But he certainly dropped many hints and made plenty of statements that made it clear where he stood. He was for secession (“I’d do it tomorrow. We just need Texas to get off their butts and do it already”), refused to talk about slavery pulling the “it’s history” line (though we didn’t ask him to) and talked about how the family fortunes took a turn for the worse after the civil war. The lowlight of the tour was when he showed us the china in his bathroom, which included a container for perfume in the shape of a black woman. The head of the woman was the cap, and it looked like a monkey’s head.\nThe town of Natchez itself is a lovely tourist stop. It sits on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi, and therefore has nice sweeping views of the river. It is a stop on the route of river boats carrying tourists from New Orleans, so it has some decent restaurants and a lovely boardwalk where you can stroll and enjoy the vistas. Its downtown is fairly well preserved thanks to a pretty active local preservation non profit.\nA gazebo. When we passed near it later that evening as it was raining Orit burst into Sixteen going on Seventeen One of the churches of Natchez From Natchez we continued on to Vicksburg. If Natchez gave me a sense of the the ever present civil war, Vicksburg practically is still fighting it. This is the site of one of the major battles of the war which included a two month long siege. The city sits on the confluence of the Mississippi and the Yazoo rivers, and had a major train line serving it. The Vicksburg National Military Park still preserves the battle fields where the union and confederate armies duked it out all those years ago. There was a minor glitch when we got to our Airbnb because we arrived a bit early and crashed a wake that was taking place in the giant hallway and one of the sitting rooms of the big house. The slightly drunk old woman that was taking a breather outside invited us to come in and enjoy the food, but we passed. When we finally came back after everyone has left, we realized we were in a house of a similar layout to the one we stayed in the previous night, except this time we got the master bedroom. This is probably where the name comes from as well…\nIt was weird to be in a huge bed in the center of a giant room with very tall ceilings. The bathroom - a later addition as there were no indoor bathrooms when the house was built, and another room had to be converted to become a bathroom - was huge too. That night a big storm passed through the area, and at some point there was risk of tornadoes. The wind was blowing like crazy, the rain came down in huge downpours and lightning came every few seconds. It was quite a show. I tried to capture some of it but realized I still have a lot to learn as a photographer. Instead I have here the tornado warning I got on my phone.\nIn Vicksburg we also toured a local museum, which had a jumble of artifacts from the city’s past. One thing I didn’t know was the Coca Cola was invented and first bottled here, and some of the very early bottles were on display\nBut the real shock came when I walked into the museum store. It was full of confederate memorabilia and flags. There are obviously people that buy those things.\nA sticker. The terrorists here are the union soldiers and all the civil rights people that came after them, of course I didn’t know there were several version of the confederate flag The next night we stayed in Jackson, in a nice Airbnb. Dinner was nice, and had a band playing bluegrass. I was excited for the next phase of our trip, where we’ll focus a bit more on music. I couldn’t help but think “Strange Fruit”, and Orit found Nina Simone’s wrenching rendering of it. As we were following the river down the highway through the cradle of the civil war, we listened to it in silence in the car.\n\u003e (previous post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/big-houses/","summary":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eYesterday was Passover Eve, and this is the first time in a long time that we are not celebrating it with our family. Everyone seems to miss it more than we realized. The Passover Seder is all about telling an ancient story of slavery and redemption, and 3,000 years later, it is still remembered, still rehashed, still processed. As we travel through the U.S. south, the more recent story of slavery is unfolding in front of us and it is evident that it is not yet done. It is still an open wound, the details of the story still being fought over. I hope it doesn’t take 3,000 years to heal.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Big Houses"},{"content":"After a few days in NOLA we started feeling more at home. We explored the French Quarter inside and out, and visited another famous neighborhood, the Garden District, where there are nice big mansions, built by NOLAs richest people in the 19th century and preserved beautifully. People also come here for shopping. There is, of course, more to NOLA than just music, shopping and nicely preserved historical neighborhoods. NOLA was the center of the slave trade in the lower south during the so-called antebellum period. Antebellum is from Latin: Ante (before) and Bellum (war), e.g. before the war, which in the south means the American civil war. Writing the term feels a little repulsive, like wearing a MAGA hat. It also feels wrong, like saying “יורד” in Hebrew to describe someone who emigrates from Israel (the word comes from the root “to go down”, as opposed to the word that is used to describe someone who emigrated from another country to Israel, where the word is “עולה”, from the root “to go up”). That is to say, I don’t like using language that serves a very specific political purpose, one that I disagree with, where the words have been so well integrated into the culture as to almost become invisible. In the same vein, a shift has been taking place in recent years, from using the word “slave” to using “enslaved person”. As Katy Waldman points out “To reduce the people involved to a nonhuman noun … reproduce(s) the violence of slavery on a linguistic level; to dispense with it amount(s) to a form of emancipation”.\nOur introduction to the period started slowly. We stopped by Louis Armstrong Park, a beautiful park not too far from the French Quarter and a walking distance from our hotel. The park was built on an area that was known as Congo Square during the 18th and 19th centuries. Back then, it was the only places where enslaved people could congregate. It was considered “the back of town”, being at the edge furthest from the river of what was then New Orleans and is now the French Quarter. Enslaved Africans congregated, socialized and traded in Congo Square, and as a byproduct, also danced and played music. Ultimately, many influences would add to the music played there to form what we know today as Jazz.\nLouis Armstrong We then met some friends, who are relatives of a friend from the Bay Area. They were very nice and hospitable, and offered to host us for one additional night in NOLA. It was so good to spend some time talking to normal people (e.g. not tourists and not people in the service industry that you meet when you travel), and even more so to people that share a lot of cultural background with us (they are from Israel, around our age). We had a non stop conversation for the entire time we spent together, and got to see some of the places locals frequent, which was very cool.\nFinally leaving NOLA, we embarked on a day of plantation tours. Plantations are the farms where enslaved people worked in the south during slavery. They were one of the first instances of industrialized agriculture, except that instead of machines they had enslaved people. The profits plantation owners made from growing massive crops of tobacco, rice, cotton, sugar cane and indigo using enslaved people’s labor were huge, and that wealth is still visible in some plantations that survive to this day. We chose to go first to the Whitney Plantation, which focuses on the perspective of enslaved people. It was very informative, and aside from good information about what happened, had a lot of artifacts from the era, including a few surviving shacks where the enslaved people lived. It is one thing to hear and learn about what happened, it is quite another to see the house where enslaved people lived with your own eyes.\nEnslaved people quarters. Notice the big house in the distance So much about this visit was shocking. For starters the numbers - around 350,000 Africans were forcefully brought to the US over the years from Africa in what became known as the Atlantic slave trade. At least 835,000 enslaved people would be brought to the south from excess supply in the northern US in the Domestic slave trade, most of them born in the US. More were born on the plantations. In the 1860 census enslaved people accounted for 12% of the US population.\nSeeing the cramped conditions in which they lived, reading about the Atlantic crossing - being shipped from Africa to the US - was very sobering. Though Slavery is very different than the Holocaust, the dehumanization of people and their treatment as animals is very similar in both cases. The pictures of terribly malnourished people, the staggering numbers of people that died because of unsanitary conditions, malnutrition or just because their oppressor decided he wanted to kill them were all strikingly similar. The walls of names, attempting to humanize and memorialize the people no one cared about, are similar. And the muted, respectful memorials, trying to convey the horrors of what took place in respectful and somber tones while avoiding hysterical or melodramatic ones, are also similar. One of the exhibits is called The Field of Angles. It is dedicated to the 2,200 enslaved children who died on the plantation. It is an outdoor statue of a young black enslaved woman holding her dead baby. I stood there and saw the rain that was with us throughout the tour dripping down her cheeks like tears. My cheeks were also wet, and not just because of the rain.\nEnslaved woman with her dead baby We spent several hours at Whitney. It was very emotional, but also thought provoking. Where when it comes to the Holocaust I am part of the oppressed group, here I was part of the oppressor. Seeing black people walking alongside me and looking at the exhibits was very strange. I know they are not holding me personally accountable - I wasn’t born then, and neither were they - but I’m sure they must feel something. After all, their oppression is still not over, and they have every right to be angry about that. Hey, I wanted to say, I feel your pain. I’m doing everything I can, and will continue to.\nWe then drove to Oak Alley, another plantation. Though there were exhibits depicting enslaved people there, the focus was much more about life for the plantation owner and their family during slavery. The plantation itself was much richer than Whitney, and the big house - the main building where they lived - was grand and well appointed. It was built at the end of a long double row of Oaks that formed an alley. Those oaks are 250 years old by now, and it is quite an impressive sight.\nThe big house through the oak alley View from the big house We ended the day in Baton Rouge, exhausted and emotional.\n(previous post here)\n(next post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/new-orleans--part-2/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAfter a few days in NOLA we started feeling more at home. We explored the French Quarter inside and out, and visited another famous neighborhood, the Garden District, where there are nice big mansions, built by NOLAs richest people in the 19th century and preserved beautifully. People also come here for shopping. There is, of course, more to NOLA than just music, shopping and nicely preserved historical neighborhoods. NOLA was the center of the slave trade in the lower south during the so-called \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antebellum_South\"\u003eantebellum period\u003c/a\u003e. Antebellum is from Latin: \u003cem\u003eAnte\u003c/em\u003e (before) and \u003cem\u003eBellum\u003c/em\u003e (war), e.g. before the war, which in the south means the American civil war. Writing the term feels a little repulsive, like wearing a MAGA hat. It also feels wrong, like saying “יורד” in Hebrew to describe someone who emigrates from Israel (the word comes from the root “to go down”, as opposed to the word that is used to describe someone who emigrated from another country to Israel, where the word is “עולה”, from the root “to go up”). That is to say, I don’t like using language that serves a very specific political purpose, one that I disagree with, where the words have been so well integrated into the culture as to almost become invisible. In the same vein, a \u003ca href=\"https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/eric-zorn/ct-column-slave-enslaved-language-people-first-debate-zorn-20190906-audknctayrarfijimpz6uk7hvy-story.html\"\u003eshift\u003c/a\u003e has been taking place in recent years, from using the word “slave” to using “enslaved person”. As Katy Waldman \u003ca href=\"https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/05/historians-debate-whether-to-use-the-term-slave-or-enslaved-person.html\"\u003epoints out\u003c/a\u003e “To reduce the people involved to a nonhuman noun … reproduce(s) the violence of slavery on a linguistic level; to dispense with it amount(s) to a form of emancipation”.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"New Orleans, part 2"},{"content":"When we started planning our roadtrip we chose New Orleans (or NOLA as many here call it) as the destination of our first “leg” of the trip. Neither of us has been here before, we heard so much about its unique culture, food, music and natural surroundings, and it seemed like a good starting point to the “deep south” portion of our trip. So it was very exciting to actually arrive in NOLA, at the end of a very long day of driving. It was nearly 10pm by the time we were settled in our hotel. We were so excited about being here, and have heard so much about the nightlife, that we decided to go out and explore. Our hotel is right outside the french quarter, to its northeast. We walked a short few blocks and found a bar with a band playing live jazz music. There were a few more nearby. It was great to hear live music in the middle of the week, late at night. After a while we ran into a band playing live music in the street. There apparently are not enough bars, and they just had to play in the street. Everyone was very loud, the bars with sound systems that blasted music especially loudly, and the street bands with very loud brass instruments and a big drum. Over the next few days we would see (and listen to!) several more bands in various bars and on the street. The music we listened to was very varied. It was mostly traditional Jazz but there was some blues, rock and folk music mixed in.\nI love live music. There is a special connection that sometimes gets created between the audience and an artist or a band which is unique to a live performance. Bruce Springsteen put it really well in his beautiful Tenth Avenue Freeze-out introduction, part of this amazing solo unplugged show on Broadway (a show which is worth listening to or watching on Netflix in its entirety). This recording of one particularly wonderful performance of that song, aside from being awesome, demonstrates a lot of what he is talking about. Somehow, the music we heard here in New Orleans mostly lacked that magic. I was a bit confused by that, because technically the musicians were all really good. It is clear that they were all professionals, some of them really experienced, and they knew exactly what they were doing. The music flowed, the bands worked well together, the musicians gave each other space, took the stage and supported each other according to the rules of Jazz. It was almost flawless. But it was hard to miss too. It wasn’t just one band that “didn’t feel it” on a particular evening. It was pretty consistent, across multiple bands in several clubs on different days.\nPreservation Hall, an ancient venue that was kept virtually untouched from antiquity. The performers, though equally ancient, are great Orit and I tried to wrap our heads around it. Is it that the musicians are just working too much? But we know musicians that go on intensive tours, and those are still magical. Could it be that this is their job, rather than their art? No, that doesn’t sound right. We went to shows of musicians who were upfront about it being a job, and they had it. Could it be that they just perform in the same night club day in and day out, and the routine is just crushing their souls? Not sure. Whatever the case may be, the music was great, but we couldn’t find that live show magic.\nIn NOLA we also went to a swamp tour. I always wanted to ride in one of those boats with the huge fans in the back that basically float on the surface of the water and are therefore capable of navigating even extremely shallow swamp water. The tour itself is a pretty industrial business - there are 3 or 4 departures daily, each tour is about 2 hours. Every departure consists of tens or maybe even hundreds of people. There are several sizes of boats, from small kayaks, through 8 person boats, through 20 person boats, all the way to very large boats. The people coming to the tour were a very diverse bunch, and most likely not residents of NOLA. Some came enjoy the wildlife, and they tended to go on the smaller boats. Others clearly wanted to continue what many people do in NOLA - drink. The company running the tours was clearly ready to accommodate everyone.\nDrinks for the swamp tour. Alcohol or caffeine The tour was fun. We had a very talkative local guide. He was an expert at maneuvering his boat at all speeds, and said he was a fisherman in and around the gulf for many years before switching to running those tours. He was great at finding wildlife and pointed out a few bald eagles, which I tried to capture on camera with mixed success. This time we didn’t forget the binoculars and I was able to take a good look at one of the bold eagles through it before passing it on to Orit and others on the boat to enjoy. Our guide was mostly really focused on finding alligators, which after some searching he was able to do. He insisted on doing some gimmicky things, like putting his hands in the water and feeding an alligator from his it. He then held the alligator’s head and kissed him (!). I thought to myself “What if he snatched our guide from the boat?” as I’m sure everyone on the boat did. Aside from the horrific sight of him being eaten by an alligator, how would we get back? We would be stuck in the middle of the swamp. I would have been perfectly fine taking a photo of the gator in the water, without seeing him that close. Why take that risk? I guess i’m getting old…\nAligator Our tour guide playing with an Aligator In the French Quarter we encountered many groups of young women on vacation. Over time we noticed a few more things. Most of them were dressed provocatively, though not all were. We initially though it might have been a group of work colleagues or friends that came for a weekend of fun and games, and perhaps some of them were. Some clearly were bachelorette parties - there would usually be one of them dressed up a little more than the others, and with a badge or a hat that said “bride”. Sometimes they looked totally hung over, sometimes they would all be carrying huge alcoholic drinks. Every time I saw them, it did not look fun. Why do they think that this is a good way to celebrate? Maybe it sounds good on paper, “let’s all go to New Orleans for the weekend and get hammered!”. In practice, nothing about it looked pretty.\nThere were plenty of other people walking around the French Quarter in various states of drunkenness. NOLA allows people to walk around with alcoholic drinks, and you can get alcohol practically anywhere at any point, day or night. I felt a bit out of place - everyone around was much younger. They were all drinking way more. Everyone was dressed to party. There were the occasional older folks walking around, but they stood out as much as we did.\nTypical French Quarter house The food here is very special. Cajun food is a really interesting combination of French, Spanish and American cooking, adapted for the kinds of things you find in the swamps around Louisiana. Trying Beignet, Gumbo, Crawfish and Fried Gator was great. As is appropriate for French inspired food, everything is heavy and uses thick creamy sauces. A lot of stuff is deep fried. What’s not to like?\nOrit eating some crayfish There is more to say about NOLA, stay tuned.\n(previous post here)\n(next post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/new-orleans/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWhen we started planning our roadtrip we chose New Orleans (or NOLA as many here call it) as the destination of our first “leg” of the trip. Neither of us has been here before, we heard so much about its unique culture, food, music and natural surroundings, and it seemed like a good starting point to the “deep south” portion of our trip. So it was very exciting to actually arrive in NOLA, at the end of a very long day of driving. It was nearly 10pm by the time we were settled in our hotel. We were so excited about being here, and have heard so much about the nightlife, that we decided to go out and explore. Our hotel is right outside the french quarter, to its northeast. We walked a short few blocks and found a bar with a band playing live jazz music. There were a few more nearby. It was great to hear live music in the middle of the week, late at night. After a while we ran into a band playing live music \u003cem\u003ein the street\u003c/em\u003e. There apparently are not enough bars, and they just had to play in the street. Everyone was very loud, the bars with sound systems that blasted music especially loudly, and the street bands with very loud brass instruments and a big drum. Over the next few days we would see (and listen to!) several more bands in various bars and on the street. The music we listened to was very varied. It was mostly traditional Jazz but there was some blues, rock and folk music mixed in.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"New Orleans"},{"content":"We spent the night in Cedar City, Utah, and drove the 2.5 hour drive to Capitol Reef National Park in occasional snow showers and a little bit of rain. Despite the weather, the drive was beautiful, and though it was cold and very windy, we had lunch right at the entrance to Capitol Reef.\nWe were originally planning to spend the day visiting Arches National Park, and spend the night in a campground near Moab. But we decided that braving freezing temperatures and a chance of rain overnight were not the experience we were going for, and that we should stay in a hotel or airbnb instead. Also, based on our experience of Zion being swamped with too many visitors and information on the Arches website, we decided to go for the nearby but much less well known Capitol Reef. I feel like on both counts it was a good decision.\nAn old Mormon settlement called Fruita that was inhabited until the 1940s sits at the center of the Capitol Reef park, and before enjoying the park’s trails, we visited its school house for a brief moment. It was locked so we had to peak from the outside.\nNot far from there are petroglyphs, carved more than a thousand years ago in the soft stone by native Americans that lived in the area. It was fascinating to see such detailed paintings from such a long time ago, preserved in the rock, and also sad that so little of the rich culture that produced them survives to this day.\nAt the end of our day we went on a hike in the park. I’ve gotten used to the canyons and terra cotta, and Capitol Reef definitely has plenty of those. But it also has this feel, which is hard to capture in pictures, of stepping into natures workshop. It is as if canyons. mountains and rivers are still being formed here, as if everything is still in flux. There are lots of jagged edges, deep canyons and overall a sense of being in a giant’s basement, full of partially completed work. We’re going to explore more of it tomorrow, and since the weather is supposed to improve, try to get our luck at Arches and the campground near Moab.\n(previous post here)\n(next post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/cedar-city-and-capitol-reef-national-park/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWe spent the night in Cedar City, Utah, and drove the 2.5 hour drive to Capitol Reef National Park in occasional snow showers and a little bit of rain. Despite the weather, the drive was beautiful, and though it was cold and very windy, we had lunch right at the entrance to Capitol Reef.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/a6e043213cb0045e826fdbd9a2fb5ffa.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe were originally planning to spend the day visiting Arches National Park, and spend the night in a campground near Moab. But we decided that braving freezing temperatures and a chance of rain overnight were not the experience we were going for, and that we should stay in a hotel or airbnb instead. Also, based on our experience of Zion being swamped with too many visitors and information on the Arches website, we decided to go for the nearby but much less well known Capitol Reef. I feel like on both counts it was a good decision.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Cedar City and Capitol Reef National Park"},{"content":"It was already a few days ago that we left Austin on our way to Houston, but it feels like much more time has passed!\nThe drive to Houston is a short 2.5 hours on the freeway and goes through the Texas German Belt, where lots of people still consider themselves Deutschtexaner. We spent some time going up and down between the small little towns that dot the area, and sampled some of the local specialties - some Czech inspired Kolach, some Texas BBQ in a little shack that does not look like it contains such delicious food. The scenery was also nice, with cows grazing against a backdrop of rolling green hills. It is easy to see how Germans immigrants felt at home here.\nWe stopped at a few very small towns, most of them dominated by train tracks that run along main street. The train is no longer the lifeline of these towns, but very long trains still run through them somewhat frequently. In one of those towns we went into an antique shop, and the shopkeeper told us about one of the largest outdoor antique fairs that just ended in some other nearby town. Later on that day, on some side road, we drove through several miles of mostly empty giant white tents and large empty parking spaces, with lots of trucks loading stuff everywhere. It would have been quite confusing had we not known this was the fair in the process of being dismantled.\nAbout 45 minutes before arriving at our Airbnb we started driving through the outskirts of Houston. This is to say Houston has a lot of sprawl, and though it has only about 2 million inhabitants, its metro area is very large. From where we were entering, there was one giant warehouse after another along both sides of the highway for quite some time. It is unclear what exactly is being stored and shipped from those, but there were definitely a lot of them. Perhaps it being a large port at the edge of the Texaplex, where 21 million people live, might explain it.\nArriving at our Airbnb it was clear that we are in a different climate zone. The air was hot and humid, and it had just rained. Our Airbnb had good A/C so we were comfortable, though we did bring our pillows from the car, like we started doing everywhere we go. Orit says they are our transitional objects, helping us through the many transitions of travel.\nThe next morning we went for a walk in Buffalo Bayou which runs through Houston and is close to our Airbnb. It is a really nice river side park, with people walking their dogs, jogging or biking. Despite the humidity and heat, it was pretty nice outside, and it was certainly nice to feel the occasional breeze. When we’ve walked enough and wanted to head back through the city, we crosses some major street over a pedestrian bridge full of locks (kind of like the famous bridge in Paris) and entered the neighborhood on the other side via a gate. It turned out to be a gated community, but not an upscale one. The gates seemed to be more for keeping the people that lived there inside rather than protecting them from people coming from the outside. I still don’t know the name that neighborhood or who built it and why, not do I know if there is any special criteria for living there, such as being low income ore something like that. I do know that at some point it started feeling a bit uncomfortable to be there, and though I don’t think we were in any real danger, I do admit that I was a bit nervous. We eventually found two women sitting in the shade outside their homes - drinking beer at 2 pm - that explained to us how to get out. The neighborhood next to it was nice, and was clearly gentrifying. I couldn’t help thinking that putting a bunch of low income people in a gated area without convenient ways in and our was not necessarily motivated by the best interests of those low income people. The existence of the locks gained an entirely new meaning.\nThat evening we had dinner plans with friends who moved back to Houston from the Bay Area. On the way to dinner we stopped at BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, a large and elaborate Hindu temple that welcomes members of the public to visit. The temple is designed according to plans and templates that are thousands of years old, and was built using the same techniques. Supposedly it doesn’t use modern building methods, and was built from marble excavated in Italy, shipped to India, and after being delicately carved, shipped to Houston. It is prohibited to take pictures inside, but the outside is pretty impressive too\nWe met our friends, who are immigrants form China, at a Chinese restaurant, that serves real Chinese food. We had lots of great food and enjoyed their company, it was good to catch up with old friends. We probably wouldn’t have gone out with them to dinner in the bay area, so in a way it was nice that they moved all the way to Houston!\nBecause the museums were closed on that day, we decided to visit them in the morning of the following day. The problem was that we also had a reservation in New Orleans for that same next day. So we were going to do what we had specifically decided not to do - do some activities and to a transfer in the same day. And not just any transfer - New Orleans is 350 miles away…\nSo we did it anyway. We started with the Holocaust Museum, which had good exhibition about RBG - late Supreme Court Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I am a big fan of her work and of her persona, and was already very familiar with all the information in the exhibit. But as I entered the exhibit and saw the familiar pictures of RBG and read about the familiar cases she brought to the Supreme Court before she was a Judge, I teared up. It was very emotional for me, seeing all the amazing work she has done, how she managed to get to such an influential position despite all the nearly impossible hurdles that she faced every step of the way. It was also very emotional to think of the continued assault on many of the values she held dear, which I hold dear. I can definitely say there is progress, in the sense that the situation today when it comes to civil rights is - generally speaking - better than it was 100 years ago. But I think progress never comes easily, and the numerous setbacks and assaults on civil rights in the US and against democracies in the world are very troubling.\nAs we were preparing to leave, a group of 13-14 year old girls was reading about one of the cases she litigated - having to do with sterilization - and were debating what the word meant. Orit overheard their conversation and stepped in to explain what it meant, which then lead to a brief but interesting discussion about the case, about RBGs work and about Amy Coney Barrett, the conservative mirror image of RBG who replaced her when RBG passed away in 2020. It was a nice moment. The girls were very engaged and listened very intently, and though their teacher eventually showed up, he didn’t intervene and let the teaching moment continue. Orit always enjoys teaching, and taught kids about civil rights as a student job. It was nice to see her connect with that part, even for a brief moment.\nNext we went to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, where we didn’t have much time, but we still managed to see two really nice exhibits. One was Extraordinary Realities by Shahzia Sikander. She was born in Pakistan and initially trained as an artist there, and later continued her education in the US in RISD. Her work uses combines the influences of both cultures, and I found it really captivating. For the first time I saw work that I really wanted to have in my house. Orit really liked it too!\nThe second exhibit was the portraits of Barak and Michelle Obama. The works themselves are really nice, and are groundbreaking in that they are not done as formal presidential portraits, and are done by black artists. But seeing them here, in a city that is 22% black, was very special. In the short time we were there several black women took selfies with the Michelle Obama picture. There must be hundreds, if not thousands of selfies like that taken every day. That she was the first lady for 8 years clearly is clearly very inspirational and motivational for many young black woman.\nAfter all this museum business, we were hungry. We had lunch at a nice lunch spot - albeit with two young dudes in the table next to us that talked so loudly it was hard to focus on anything else - and then hit the road. On the way to our car we walked by the Children’s Museum Houston, which was designed by Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. These are the same architects that are featured in Lessons from Las Vegas, the 99% invisible episode mentioned in the post about Las Vegas. The museum building is pastel colored, and has the word “MUSEUM” in huge bright letters on top of the entrance. There is much more about the ideas behind that design in the episode, but it certainly draws inspiration from Las Vegas.\nIt was 2 pm at that point, and even if we drove straight to New Orleans, we would have arrived at 7:30 PM. Instead, we got off I-10 at Lake Charles, and after admiring its deserted lakeshore and view of the super tall Calcasieu River Bridge, we took a small back country road through the marshlands between I-10 and the gulf, and enjoyed the view. The area is very rural, but has a lot of very nicely kept and tidy homes, unlike many other rural communities we’ve encountered along the way. Overall. it was very pastoral - literally. We stopped at the small community of Lake Arthur to snack on some yogurt and bread, and chatted with two ladies who were born in the area and lived there all their lives. They were happy to tell us everything about the town, its ups and downs, and the people that live there. It was nice to get a glimpse into a totally different world than the one we came from.\nWe eventually made it to New Orleans late at night. It was quite an exhausting day, filled with lots of excitement and drama, and we were happy to get to our quirky hotel in New Orleans, or NOLA (Near Orleans, Louisiana) as it is often called here.\n(previous post here)\n(next post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/houston/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eIt was already a few days ago that we left Austin on our way to Houston, but it feels like much more time has passed!\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe drive to Houston is a short 2.5 hours on the freeway and goes through the Texas German Belt, where lots of people still consider themselves \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Texan\"\u003eDeutschtexaner\u003c/a\u003e. We spent some time going up and down between the small little towns that dot the area, and sampled some of the local specialties - some Czech inspired \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolach\"\u003eKolach\u003c/a\u003e, some Texas BBQ in a little shack that does not look like it contains such delicious food. The scenery was also nice, with cows grazing against a backdrop of rolling green hills. It is easy to see how Germans immigrants felt at home here.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Houston"},{"content":"El Paso We enjoyed our one night stay at the Stanton House in El Paso. The hotel is nicely appointed, and though we didn’t make use of the spa, it still was a good alternative to camping in the rain. We had dinner at a great restaurant that felt so different from the bay area. It was clearly a place people came for special occasions, and the restaurant played its part, with lots of very well dressed waiters hovering over every table, a good wine list and some purely for show gestures, like bringing a mini coat rack next to every woman, so she can hang her purse on it. I can hear the eyes of every Berkeley-ite rolling at how un-woke that is. Why assume that only the woman has a purse? And with the constant “yes m’aam” and “yessir”, they are making assumptions about people’s gender preferences…\nThe following day we briefly visited El Paso Museum of History and El Paso Museum of Art. They were both free, and had interesting exhibitions. Together with the nice hotel, the excellent dinner we had the night before, it was a really nice welcome to Texas. Alas, we couldn’t stay long. We had a reservation for two nights at Marfa.\nMarfa The road from El Paso to Marfa starts out going along the Rio Grande, the natural border between Mexico and the US. After dome time it goes due east for a bit, and then again goes south east through the desert towards Marfa. At that point the road just goes straight on a mostly flat terrain. There is a stretch of about 40 miles where the highway just goes in a straight line.\nThere is almost nothing there. A small town or an occasional bump on the road are all the excitement you have in this 40 minute stretch of desert highway. But then, out of the blue, we got the first hint that we were approaching Marfa -\nA Prada storefront, in the middle of nowhere. Turns out it is called Prada Marfa and is a sculptural art installation. It even features in a recent “The Simpsons” episode. After some more uneventful highway driving we got to Marfa, and quickly familiarized ourselves with the tiny tiny town. It has an interesting history, and became known as an artistic destination in the 70s, when the artist Donald Judd acquired properties in town and started making art there. Over the years he created a foundation and a permanent collection that can be viewed….only if you come to Marfa. There are several interesting articles about it if you are curious.\nThe highlight of our visit was a tour of the Chinati foundation’s collection, which features works by Judd and other artists. The foundation is located in an old US Army cavalry base that was shut down in the 40s, and stood in disrepair until Judd bought most of it in the 70s and turned it into the foundation. Some of the art in it was created for the location itself, and the structures that house it are considered part of the work (Judd did not believe in the distinction of sculpture vs. paintings vs. other forms of art. For him it was all artwork). I think he was a purist - he wanted this art to be displayed only in the foundation in Marfa, never in Museums, and wanted viewers to focus on the art, so no one is allowed to take pictures. There are strict rules about not taking into the foundation anything that might fall like a backpack or a mug, because if it did fall and damage any of the art, it might cause irreparable damage. There is metal sculpture made of two large cone like objects that are exactly the same. If one would get dented, they would no longer be the same and would both have to be melted and re-cast, because being identical is part of the definition of that particular piece.\nThe tour was really interesting. Our guide was a bit pretentious, talked a bit too much and gave us a bit too little time to appreciate the works, but it was still quite an impressive tour. There is a major piece which is probably the center of the foundation’s collection, which consists of 100 very large aluminum boxes, arranged inside two large hangars. You can see pictures of them in this article (remember, we were not allowed to take photos). The workmanship is truly exceptional, and the aesthetics are captivating. I am not very big on conceptual art, but there was something truly mesmerizing in walking around looking at those giant silver boxes.\nThat night we came back to another installation - the base’s hospital - which is right at the edge of town. The night was dark and the sky was clear, and we stayed there for a while looking at the stars. The sky is so full of them, but you can rarely see them anymore, especially when you live in a large metro area like we do.\nOur Airbnb in Marfa was also a bit special. It was built in the space between two stores, and measures 9 by 25 feet. It is truly tiny. The shower is behind it, outside, and the inside walls are very clearly the outsides of the two stores. It was a nice gimmick for the two nights we stayed.\nThe drive from Marfa to Austin, our next stop is 6.5 hours long. It was our longest single day distance thus far. The drive is not especially noteworthy, it is mostly in high desert middle of nowhere type terrain, and only as you get closer to Austin does it start to have more frequent signs of human habitation.\nWe didn’t know this ahead of time, and if we did we might have planned thins differently, but about an hour out of Austin is Fredricksburg, which is the first in a long string of cities referred to as the Texas “German Belt”. There are wineries nearby, and a museum commemorating WWII’s Pacific front, which Fleet Admiral Nimitz commanded. He was born in Fredricksburg. President Lindon B. Johnson was also born in this area. By the time we got to this are we were tired from the long drive and just wanted to get to Austin. I guess we left some stuff tor next time.\nAustin Austin was great. After spending two nights here, I totally get why so many people are moving here. The energy of this place is great, it has a lot of young people, tons of nice restaurants, bars and nightlife, and is generally clean and really pleasant. It has a good progressive vibe (anecdotally, someone complemented me on my Green New Deal t-shirt), and is very bikeable. Everyone is doing sports of one kind of another, and they even have outdoor Yoga!!\nA friend of my daughter who is going to school here, gave us a tour of the city and we spent a good amount of time with her. It was great to see a familiar face after almost a month of traveling. We will definitely come back!\nLocomotives of a very long train that is going through the center of Austin Turtles warming up in the sun Under a bridge Wildflowers in bloom, outside Austin (previous post here)\n(next post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/texas/","summary":"\u003ch2 id=\"el-paso\"\u003eEl Paso\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe enjoyed our one night stay at the \u003ca href=\"https://stanton-house.com/\"\u003eStanton House\u003c/a\u003e in El Paso. The hotel is nicely appointed, and though we didn’t make use of the spa, it still was a good alternative to camping in the rain. We had dinner at a great restaurant that felt so different from the bay area. It was clearly a place people came for special occasions, and the restaurant played its part, with lots of very well dressed waiters hovering over every table, a good wine list and some purely for show gestures, like bringing a mini coat rack next to every woman, so she can hang her purse on it. I can hear the eyes of every Berkeley-ite rolling at how un-woke that is. Why assume that only the woman has a purse? And with the constant “yes m’aam” and “yessir”, they are making assumptions about people’s gender preferences…\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Texas!"},{"content":"We said goodbye yesterday to our Airbnb in the Nambe pueblo. It is a very cozy Airbnb, situated in an old adobe style house that is nicely renovated. We stayed here for 3 nights and it started feeling like home. It is great to be somewhat stationary for a little bit, and have a base from which to explore.\nThe apricot tree near our Airbnb just starting to flower At some point during our stay, our host stopped by to chat, and we talked for a long time. It was a really interesting conversation, though she did most of the talking. She started by telling us about the history of the place, and how she and her husband bought it several years ago and renovated the structures to create several Airbnbs, but how the vineyard, which is also part of the same property, was bough by another buyer. She is a retired white woman, but the property is inside ancestral Puebloan land, which is a bit unusual. After a few sentences she started referring to the other buyers as “the Indians”. She explained how water rights are an issue and how the ongoing drought makes the nearby creek have too little water for “the Indians” to water the vineyard. She also made some racist comments about how they prefer to not work the vineyard and instead get money from the federal government. I was worried about how the conversation might go from there. But then we moved to a different subject, and told us about how they recently hosted a family of Afghan refugees that were being resettled in the US. It is a dramatic story - the family, a dad, a mom and a few very young kids, comes from a rural area near the border with Pakistan, and they knew nothing of the ways of a western family. Everything was new to them - cooking inside the house, on a stove. Using an oven. A fridge. Supermarkets. Car seats. She had to explain stuff to them, using largely signs and gestures, as they speak no english, and there wasn’t always a translator available. She talked for a long time, telling us story after story about her experience of hosting that family, until it became clear we are probably the first people she’d told about it. When we discussed this later, Orit suggested that hosting an Afghan family might not be considered a purely good thing in those parts, that people might have objections and view this more critically, so she may be just keeping those stories to herself. The more we expressed our admiration to our host for her actions, the more she felt comfortable and the more her stories flowed. I was very moved by her stories, it is quite rare to get an opportunity to play such a role in someone’s life, and our host seemed to just do it because she could not not do it. It made me think of baby A, which Orit and I fostered during 2020. We also taught him about the world, we also communicated with him with more than just words. And for me, it also felt like I could not not do it. There was no other realistic option.\nThe rotunda inside the New Mexico capitol The next day we visited Santa Fe, but our timing was off, as most of the museums we wanted to visit were closed, and the Georgia O’Keefe museums, though open, required advanced reservation due to covid, and there were no available slots. So instead we went for a walk through the old town, and also visited the state capitol building. There is a lot of local art throughout the building, and its architecture is interesting - it is the only round capitol in the nation. Aside from enjoying the art and architecture, it was a reminder of the ideals on which this country was built. The idea that government is of the people, by the people and for the people, and that as such anyone should be able to come in and observe their government, is a really compelling idea. Though the reality is often very far from that ideal, on that day in Santa Fe I was excited to exercise my right. It was also cool to come across a pic of Janice Joplin, which I didn’t expect to find in this place, but I guess Taos was just her vibe back in the 60s.\nJanice Joplin in Taos in 1970 By the time we left our Airbnb, the apricot tree in the front garden of our Airbnb started to blossom, and gave us a flowery send off.\nBlossoming aprticot! We drove south to Albuquerque and stopped for a bit at the National Museum of Nuclear Science \u0026amp; History, to catch some of what we missed at Los Alamos. It is a pretty small space, but with lots of interesting facts and artifacts from the Manhattan Project years and beyond. It does present a pretty straightforward argument that dropping the bombs was ok because it saved lots of American lives and cut the war short. It is a common argument, but it made Orit and me have a heated discussion about the ethics of that action. I came out of it still thinking that Truman (and FDR before him who authorized the development of the bomb) did the right thing in using them. There has been so much written about that decision that I will not try to add to the arguments on either side, but I’ll just say that the deciding factor to me was not whose lives were saved - American, Japanese. All lives are equally precious. For me ending the war sooner was the deciding factor. Continuing the war would undoubtedly lead to a lot more death and suffering, and the advantage the US had at that particular moment was not guaranteed. What if the Japanese were able to develop an atomic bomb? There are lots of risks to continuing the war, and choosing the path that would end it sooner seems to me to be the right choice. It is a terrible situation, though. No matter what you decide, a lot of people are going to die as a consequence.\nReconstructions of Little Boy and Fat Man Interestingly, the museum displayed a Norden bombsight, which allowed US planes to drop bombs with greater precision than was possible at the time. Basically a maybe genius maybe crazy dutch engineer named Carl Norden designed this an analog computer, taking into account the various important factors in aiming a bomb from an airborne airplane - the bomb’s weight, the speed of the airplane, the altitude, windspeed - and calculates the trajectory. Based on that it tells the gunner where to aim. This is trivial for todays computers, but to build an analog system that did that was pretty cool. There is a really interesting podcast about it by Malcolm Gladwell called The Bomber Mafia. I believe he also wrote a book about it.\nThe Norden Bombsight, a sophisticated analog computer used to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki We really wanted to camp a little after several days in Airbnbs, so we headed to a BLM (Bureau of Land Management) called Valley of Fires. In the hierarchy of campsites, BLM campsites are considered less than National Park campsites, but they can sometimes surprise. This one was really nice and even had hot showers - definitely a winner. It is located in a lava island, a piece of land that was slightly higher than the surrounding, and thousands of years ago when lava flowed through cracks in the ground nearby for 50 or 100 years, it flowed around that piece of land. So today it looks like an island of land in the middle of huge basalt fields. The annoying part was that there was a Pacific weather system making its way through the region, and when we arrived at the campsites it was very windy, and even rained a bit. We slept well in our warm car-tent, with the wind blowing against the side of the car all night.\nThe coming storm made for nice skies Orit in her element The following morning woke up to a very cold morning. We got in the car and drove to the nearest gas station to fill up gas for the long drive ahead, only to discover that the fuel door hinge froze over night and would not open.\nOur car is a really well designed car. It is comfortable, and drives really well. It effortlessly cruises at whatever speed I want - 50 mph or 90 mph. It makes covering the distances much nicer than any other alternative. But some things about it are over engineered. Like the fuel door. It is a nice idea to make a fuel door that locks when the car is locked, it is probably helpful in preventing fuel theft. It is also nice to have the fuel door open when you unlock the car with the key fob clicker. But all those features require a little motor to move the hinge that controls the fuel door. And that motor is yet another thing that can break (or freeze). It was quite stressful at the gas station - we had some fuel and some charge in our battery (we have a plug in hybrid so we can drive for some distance on electricity). The total range was 132 miles. Google said the distance to the nearest dealership was 140 miles. So we decide to at least try and get as close as we can to the dealership, and I start driving slow - 45 mph max in a 65 mph road. There were several really annoyed trucks behind me (they eventually passed us), but I was thinking of wind resistance, which is the biggest factor a car needs to push against when it is going fast. Wind resistance goes up exponentially, with the square of the speed. The range calculations of the car assume driving at the usual speed, and if I drive slower, I will use significantly less energy, which might increase our range. Sure enough, by the time we got to the next gas station we were at 99 miles to the dealership and 100 miles range. We tried again to open to fuel door and this time it opened. I guess the sun and the warming day helped unfreeze the hinge.\nWe decided to continue with our original plan and visited White Sands National Park, still in windy and slightly rainy weather, but still managed to have a nice picnic in the gypsum dunes and take some really nice pics. That night we had another reservation for a campsite, but because the weather was still rough, we instead booked a room at a nice hotel in El Paso, Texas.\nWhite sands Picnic spots at White Sands National Park Our fueled up car (previous post here)\n(next post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/goodbye-nambe--a-little-santa-fe--white-sands-and-some-fuel-surprises/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWe said goodbye yesterday to our Airbnb in the \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namb%C3%A9_Pueblo,_New_Mexico\"\u003eNambe pueblo\u003c/a\u003e. It is a very cozy Airbnb, situated in an old adobe style house that is nicely renovated. We stayed here for 3 nights and it started feeling like home. It is great to be somewhat stationary for a little bit, and have a base from which to explore.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/07e9219673985ae897b2a54274f1aa25.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv align=\"center\"\u003e\u003csup\u003eThe apricot tree near our Airbnb just starting to flower\u003c/sup\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt some point during our stay, our host stopped by to chat, and we talked for a long time. It was a really interesting conversation, though she did most of the talking. She started by telling us about the history of the place, and how she and her husband bought it several years ago and renovated the structures to create several Airbnbs, but how the vineyard, which is also part of the same property, was bough by another buyer. She is a retired white woman, but the property is inside ancestral Puebloan land, which is a bit unusual. After a few sentences she started referring to the other buyers as “the Indians”. She explained how water rights are an issue and how the ongoing drought makes the nearby creek have too little water for “the Indians” to water the vineyard. She also made some racist comments about how they prefer to not work the vineyard and instead get money from the federal government. I was worried about how the conversation might go from there. But then we moved to a different subject, and told us about how they recently hosted a family of Afghan refugees that were being resettled in the US. It is a dramatic story - the family, a dad, a mom and a few very young kids, comes from a rural area near the border with Pakistan, and they knew nothing of the ways of a western family. Everything was new to them - cooking inside the house, on a stove. Using an oven. A fridge. Supermarkets. Car seats. She had to explain stuff to them, using largely signs and gestures, as they speak no english, and there wasn’t always a translator available. She talked for a long time, telling us story after story about her experience of hosting that family, until it became clear we are probably the first people she’d told about it. When we discussed this later, Orit suggested that hosting an Afghan family might not be considered a purely good thing in those parts, that people might have objections and view this more critically, so she may be just keeping those stories to herself. The more we expressed our admiration to our host for her actions, the more she felt comfortable and the more her stories flowed. I was very moved by her stories, it is quite rare to get an opportunity to play such a role in someone’s life, and our host seemed to just do it because she could not not do it. It made me think of baby A, which Orit and I fostered during 2020. We also taught him about the world, we also communicated with him with more than just words. And for me, it also felt like I could not not do it. There was no other realistic option.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Goodbye Nambe, a little Santa Fe, White Sands and some fuel surprises"},{"content":"The city of Los Alamos sits on a secluded mesa somewhere between Taos and Santa Fe. Back in 1943 it was a school for well to do boys called Los Alamos Ranch School, when the government bought it and turned it into a secretive weapons program called The Manhattan Project. About two and a half years later the project conducted Trinity the first large scale nuclear test, which marked the dawn of the nuclear age. The project produced Little Boy, which was dropped on Hiroshima, followed by Fat Man which was dropped on Nagasaki. Arguably, those bombs contributed to Japan’s decision to surrender, ending WWII in the Pacific theatre.\nI am fascinated by WWII. The horrific scale of human suffering and destruction is terrifying and hard to wrap my head around. Some of my great uncles and aunts perished in the Holocaust. At the same time, the technological advancements made during the war shaped the modern world in an unprecedented way. The invention or rapid development of radar, rockets, submarines, penicillin, flu shots, cryptography and jet engines all happened during the war or were motivated by it. I was therefore excited to visit Los Alamos. I knew we would not be able to visit the modern day incarnation of that project - Los Alamos National Lab, where lots of scientists still develop weapons and other secret things behind closed gates. But I thought we would at least see some historical artifacts and get some behind the scenes historical facts from the war era. Looking at the website for Manhattan Project National Historic Park revealed that it was open on Sunday, so we headed there to check it out. Turns out that the visitor center - a small room with a ranger and a volunteer - was open. But literally everything else was closed. Due to covid or budget issues, the schedule for the various places you could theoretically visit is a venn diagram that probably means the best time to visit is Tuesday morning. Oh well.\nSo what to do? The one thing that was open was a brewery. It was a little early in the day - 3 pm - for a beer, but how else to drown our sorrow? The brewery was nice. Open and airy with lots of light, a few locals sitting around, some with their dogs. The soundtrack was nice - Balkan Beatbox, Csokolom, Deluxe - so we hung out for a little bit. We then drove to Bandelier National Monument, which is about 20 minutes from town. The road goes near the national lab, so we had to pass a security checkpoint where a young soldier checked my ID and waived us through. The main attraction of Bandelier is a canyon with a few - you guessed it - cliff dwellings. It turns out that without really planning to do so, we’ve been following in the chronological footsteps of the Pueblo people, and here we found the most recent - relatively speaking - archeological site. It had Kivas, big houses, and cliff dwellings. It all looked familiar, as if visiting a new neighborhood in city I’ve been living in for a while. I could tell there were innovations - they had Kivas inside some of the cliff dwellings, which they didn’t have in any of the previous places, for example.\nA piece of external plaster with color and a pattern, preserved in transparent resin Cactus, rocks and ruins View from inside of one of the cliff dwellings. The ladder is modern The drive to Bandelier passed by many LANL buildings and facilities. I realized that many of those Marvel and DC comics that turned into superhero movies in the past 30 years are actually inspired by this drive. When you think about the history of the secret lab in the middle of the desert, then drive by fenced and heavily guarded facilities with large satellite dishes, generators and large hangars keeping unknown large machines hidden from view, all in the middle of remote high desert, it does not feel like a huge leap to get to The Avengers.\nAs we were finishing our hike we met a young woman, sitting on a bench on the side of the quiet trail. Covered in colorful tattoos, she initially seemed concerned when she first saw us, but later relaxed and asked us for directions to the parking lot. We invited her to walk with us the last half mile to the car. In a short few sentences she told us she has been separated from her partner for several hours, and that she was waiting for her at the bench. She was afraid of noises that seemed to be bears or mountain lions to her. It didn’t seem like she was there for that long, and less than a quarter of a mile later we came upon another bench where her partner was seated, waiting for her. The partner definitely did not look as worried as you’d expect from someone who has been waiting for hours…\nIt became clear that this woman likely had a bad trip. Who knows what she was on, but whatever it was. it made her have an unnatural sense of the passing of time and more than a bit paranoid. She was way more talkative than you’d expect and her imagination was working overtime. It is really sad to see someone in that state. What is it that makes some people need to put themselves in this altered state of consciousness? Why is this such a common, almost socially acceptable thing in our society? I realize it is a fine line. There are mild substances that are very acceptable and (mostly) legal - coffee, alcohol, pot. But this woman seemed to be on something a bit stronger, she somehow seemed a bit more out there. Why are the legal substances ok and whatever she was on is not? I am not sure I know the answer, but I do know it made me feel very worried for her, and also worried about my own kids, who are young adults and are probably exposed to pressures to use those substances.\n(previous post here)\n(next post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/atomic-city/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe city of Los Alamos sits on a  secluded mesa somewhere between Taos and Santa Fe. Back in 1943 it was a school for well to do boys called Los Alamos Ranch School, when the government bought it and turned it into a secretive weapons program called The Manhattan Project. About two and a half years later the project conducted \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test)\"\u003eTrinity\u003c/a\u003e the first large scale nuclear test, which marked the dawn of the nuclear age. The project produced \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy\"\u003eLittle Boy\u003c/a\u003e, which was dropped on Hiroshima, followed by \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man\"\u003eFat Man\u003c/a\u003e which was dropped on Nagasaki. Arguably, those bombs contributed to Japan’s decision to surrender, ending WWII in the Pacific theatre.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Atomic City"},{"content":"After visiting Chaco Canyon and Aztec Ruins, we drove to Taos. The drive from Aztec to Taos is gorgeous. You have to cross some part of the Rockies, and the high elevation meant there was still plenty of snow on the ground along the way. It was really really pretty. I was also excited to cross the continental divide. There is something so magical in crossing this invisible line where rain falling on one side will go to the Pacific and rain falling on the other will go to the Atlantic. There is very little to tell you that you crossed it, aside from the convenient sign. That we now know where it passes with great accuracy always makes me think about all the engineering achievements of the 20th century, and though today we look at some of them critically (Powell lake, anyone?), they are still inspiring to me. It also marks an important milestone in our trip. It is as if we are now starting to descend towards the south, though geographically speaking, this is not entirely true.\nContinental Divide! In Taos we stayed at a place Orit booked for us a long time ago called Hobbit House, one of the first Earthships ever built. It is a house designed to be vastly more sustainable than houses back in the 70s, when it was built, and is probably still more sustainable than many of today’s ordinary houses. It achieves this in several ways. First, it is partially dug into the ground (kind of like Puebloan pit-houses), so that its floor is below the frost depth, and does not get as cold as the air and ground outside. Second, its walls are made of discarded tires, tightly filled in with earth that make for a heavy thick wall that “… provide[s] thermal mass that naturally regulates the interior temperature during both cold and hot outside temperatures” (from the earthships wikipedia article). It also has a green house where plants grow in a hot and humid air, even as the temperature outside is much colder, and can warm up the house at the end of a cold day. Newer earthships also have water recycling systems, collecting rainwater and using each drop several times (to drink, clean, flush and finally grow plants). They also have solar panels and are generally self sustaining and off the grid. The kitchen, standing at the entrance to the house\nThe main bed, social area and stairs to the second bed, standing at the entrance to the house\nThe fireplace, and a nice organic main support column\nThere were a lot of things I really enjoyed about Hobbit House. The greenhouse runs along the length of the house, and the shower and bathroom are in it. Taking a shower in an open stall in the middle of a lush greenhouse was quite fun. The toilet is also in the greenhouse - it is a normal toilet, just at the edge of the greenhouse. It is quite something to walk to it through the thick vegetation. Smells are much less of an issue in this setup!\nLooking towards the bed from the kitchen. Notice the huge windows, which separate the living area from the greenhouse\nStanding at the entrance looking towards the greenhouse section, with the door closed Now with the door open, the first thing you see is the shower The greenhouse, standing in the shower area. Notice the toilet at the other end The look and feel of the house are very special and make it clear why it is called Hobbit House. I can’t say that I would like to live in a house that looks like that full time, but as a place to stay for one night it was really cool. Orit and I were both very inspired by the sustainability aspects though, and we kept dreaming of how we’ll take some of those concepts and apply them to our house in California.\nThe door to the house, and the roof above the living area A look over the living area’s roof. Notice the mound of dirt acting as a thermal mass A view from the greenhouse side, which faces south and gets tons of sun most days of the year Taos itself was not incredibly interesting. This is still off season here, and there were not that many people in the touristy part of town, and the whole place felt a bit sleepy. We lucked out and got a spot at Doc Martin’s for dinner, and enjoyed really good food. It tasted even better considering that we’ve been traveling in rural and really small places for the past several weeks.\n(previous post here)\n(next post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/continental-divide-and-hobbit-house/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAfter visiting Chaco Canyon and Aztec Ruins, we drove to Taos. The drive from Aztec to Taos is gorgeous. You have to cross some part of the Rockies, and the high elevation meant there was still plenty of snow on the ground along the way. It was really really pretty. I was also excited to cross the continental divide. There is something so magical in crossing this invisible line where rain falling on one side will go to the Pacific and rain falling on the other will go to the Atlantic. There is very little to tell you that you crossed it, aside from the convenient sign. That we now know where it passes with great accuracy always makes me think about all the engineering achievements of the 20th century, and though today we look at some of them critically (Powell lake, anyone?), they are still inspiring to me. It also marks an important milestone in our trip. It is as if we are now starting to descend towards the south, though geographically speaking, this is not entirely true.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Continental Divide and Hobbit House"},{"content":"Yesterday we drove to Chaco Culture National Historic Park, a little known park in the northwest corner of New Mexico. It preserves a canyon with several so called “big houses” built by Chaco people, which modern pueblo people see as their ancestors. It is another landmark showcasing the culture of ancestral pueblo people like Wupatki, Mesa Verde and Capitol Reef. The big houses might have been used for religious purposes, and were built around 1000 years ago. They show great architectural skill. Some of them are 4 stories high, and all sites are perfectly aligned with several celestial phenomena, such as the equinox, winter and summer solstices and certain moon phases. There are many ceremonial round structures called Kivas throughout the structures, and the scale is quite impressive. The buildings are built from stone, wood and clay, and have a sophisticated core-and-veneer construction which made their walls strong enough to hold the weight of 4 stories.\nOrit in a doorway Looking up on a wall in Casa Bonita in Chaco Canyon. Notice the wood logs that supported the ceilings and floors The site is really impressive. Thinking of the Chacoans hauling stones from all over the canyon, using stone axes to cut down massive timbers and carry them on foot for 20 or more miles, all in an area where summer temperatures are in the 120s and winters see substantial snow, is quite impressive. It is very interesting to note that their Kivas are round, but there is no evidence that they ever used a wheel for any form of transport.\nA large Kiva. Back when it was built, it had a roof and colored plaster on the inside walls Outside wall of a big house Original wooden ceiling, about 800 years old But the context in which this park exists is even more interesting. The park itself is internationally recognized as a world heritage site, but it does not have a paved access road. It is indeed located in a remote part of New Mexico, but there are plenty of other parks in remote locations with great paved access roads. The last 20 miles leading to it are a poorly maintained dirt road that became washboarded. Think rumble stripes that cause your wheels to buzz or hum loudly when you are drifting out of a lane, except much bigger, covering the entire road and creating an incredibly bumpy ride. I initially drove very slow - 5 to 10 MPH seemed like the only speed at which the bumps weren’t crazy - until someone more experienced with such roads passed me at 35 MPH, which initially seemed like craziness, but once I tried it turned out to be a better choice. At that speed the wheels just “hover” over the bumps and the ride becomes smoother. You loose a fair amount of traction of course, so I had to be extra careful with turns, stops and other sudden maneuvers.\nYou might just chalk it up to bureaucracy. The road to the park goes through land under the jurisdiction of several agencies, and it is hard to get all of them to agree and to prioritize putting up the money required to pave it. There is certainly some amount of that going on. Orit suggested an additional explanation. Could it be a continuation of the institutional discrimination against native peoples? It may not be intentional or conscious, but it is hard to ignore the stark difference between the road and accessibility of Chaco Culture National Park and Grand Canyon National Park. Another question that points in the same direction is - why is Chaco culture not considered part of the heritage of all the people of the US? Immigrants today view themselves as a continuation of US heritage, but for most people that heritage often starts in 1492 with Columbus’ discovery of America, or with the declaration of independence in 1776. Why would it not start in 850, when the first Chacoans settled in Chaco Canyon? or in 600, when the first ancestral Pueblo people settled Mesa Verde? We know those dates now, and have lots of evidence about their life and culture. But virtually no one knows about those cultures, they are hidden from most school curricula, and the sites preserving their remains are difficult to access.\nAs we approached the park entrance, we came upon a broken down minivan, stuck in the middle of the road. The washboarded road took its toll on his minivan’s suspension and without reception he couldn’t call AAA. We gave hime a ride to the visitor center, and after we were done with our visit we also gave him a ride back to his car to wait for AAA. He did recommend to us an interesting movie about Chaco Canyon, which we watched last night. 24 hours later we got a text from him that he was toed ok and his car is being fixed.\n(previous post here)\n(next post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/chaco-culture-national-historic-park/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eYesterday we drove to \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/chcu/index.htm\"\u003eChaco Culture National Historic Park\u003c/a\u003e, a little known park in the northwest corner of New Mexico. It preserves a canyon with several so called “big houses” built by Chaco people, which modern pueblo people see as their ancestors. It is another landmark showcasing the culture of ancestral pueblo people like Wupatki, Mesa Verde and Capitol Reef. The big houses might have been used for religious purposes, and were built around 1000 years ago. They show great architectural skill. Some of them are 4 stories high, and all sites are perfectly aligned with several celestial phenomena, such as the equinox, winter and summer solstices and certain moon phases. There are many ceremonial round structures called Kivas throughout the structures, and the scale is quite impressive. The buildings are built from stone, wood and clay, and have a sophisticated \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core-and-veneer\"\u003ecore-and-veneer\u003c/a\u003e construction which made their walls strong enough to hold the weight of 4 stories.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Chaco Culture National Historic Park"},{"content":"The past few days have been a whirlwind of parks, hikes, overlooks and driving. Orit and I both feel like we would like to take a few days to slow down and digest everything we’ve experienced, so we changed our plans for the coming weekend and will try to stay in one place for 3 (!) nights.\nThe day before yesterday was probably the toughest we’ve had in our trip so far. There is no external reason or constraint that caused it to be like that. In other words, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We started the day with a fairly strenuous 2.5 mile roundtrip, 1000 feet elevation gain hike in Capitol Reef National Park, to see a really nice arch. We then drove 2.5 hours in beautiful terrain to Arches National Park, and spent 3 hours exploring its various lookouts and short hikes. Though we didn’t do any strenuous hikes there, we were completely exhausted by the time we arrived at our hotel. By then we had walked more than 10 miles, some of it in rough terrain, and have been in the car for hours. Delirious, we went out for dinner, wolfed down some salad and pizza at Antica Forma, a really nice Italian style pizza restaurant, got back to the hotel, dipped in the hot tub for a bit and collapsed into bed. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.\nDelicate Arch, Arches NP Balanced Rock, Arches NP. It is 128 ft / 39 m tall The following day we tried to pace ourselves a bit more. We took our time in the morning, and walked around Moab for a bit. It is a very cool little town. There are lots of outdoor adventure shops everywhere, as well as other touristy shops selling books, hats, t-shirts, backpacks, artsy photos from the nearby parks and lots of other chachkes. We then decided to do the more user friendly part of Canyonlands National Park - Island In The Sky, with a quick stop at Dead Horse Point State Park on the way. The state park is nice and has really nice views of the Colorado river, and also some kind of mining operation that harvests potash. Sad as it may be that this is still happening inside protected land, it does produce some interesting colors against the snow capped mountains.\nPotash extraction pools, Dead Horse Point SP As we were approaching the entrance to Canyonalands, there was an unexpected slow down in the road. We were unsure about what was going on, and Orit pulled a page straight out of my playbook as a former tank commander and surveyed the landscape ahead.\nSurveying traffic ahead Somewhat similarly to Arches, Island In The Sky is also an area where you can mostly take the view in by driving from overlook to overlook, combined with the occasional short hike. There were some pretty incredible views, and one dirt road called The Shafter Trail that looked super cool to drive on, even if a bit scary. It will make for a fun adventure when we come back someday…\nAn arch at Island In The Sky The Shafter Trail, Canyonlands NP We then drove to Cortez, CO, located 10 miles outside of Mesa Verde National Park. We arrived in our Airbnb in the evening, and visited the park the following day. Cortez is located on a high plateau at over 6000 feet elevation, and the end of March is still very cold here. The temperatures at night ar below freezing, and it is clear and cold during the day. The park itself is on a mesa (table in Spanish), a flat area that rises above the surrounding land. The highest point is above 8000 feet, and wen we visited, it was very very windy, with gusts up to 40 mph, so it was really cold. It was very inspiring to think of the pueblo people that lived in this place until 1200 CE as we looked at the dwellings they built. The earliest are called pit houses and are dug into the ground for better insulation in the cold winter and hot summer. The latest, most advanced dwellings they built are cliff dwellings, and one of the most impressive ones in the park is the Cliff Palace. It is a kind of incredible how the ancestral Pueblo people were able to build these elaborate structures in the cliffs, and live their lives in this high plateau with its harsh winter and even harsher summer. I imagine some people lived their entire lives on the mesa without ever going down to the surrounding Colorado plateau.\nCliff Dwelling, Mesa Verde National Park In every trip we try to optimize our experience, and be prepared for whatever the day might bring. We were prepared for the cold and dressed very warmly. We had water and snacks. But our binoculars, which we had used a few times already during the trip, stayed back at the Airbnb. If there was one day where we would really have enjoyed them, it was today. I kept kicking myself for forgetting them behind. And, as if to make it even worse, as we were driving inside the park, I was stopped by a park ranger for driving 10 miles above the speed limit (I was going 45). I have been trying really hard to stay at the speed limit for the entire trip, and have mostly been successful. Clearly not fully successful though. It didn’t help that the ranger was driving behind us just as a wild horse jumped into the roadway from the forest, forcing me into an emergency maneuver to avoid it. The horse was fine, as were we, but my fate was sealed. Luckily I got away with a verbal warning to drive slower in the future.\n(previous post here)\n(next post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/arches--canyonlands--moab-and-mesa-verde/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe past few days have been a whirlwind of parks, hikes, overlooks and driving. Orit and I both feel like we would like to take a few days to slow down and digest everything we’ve experienced, so we changed our plans for the coming weekend and will try to stay in one place for 3 (!) nights.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe day before yesterday was probably the toughest we’ve had in our trip so far. There is no external reason or constraint that caused it to be like that. In other words, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We started the day with a fairly strenuous 2.5 mile roundtrip, 1000 feet elevation gain hike in Capitol Reef National Park, to see a really nice arch. We then drove 2.5 hours in beautiful terrain to Arches National Park, and spent 3 hours exploring its various lookouts and short hikes. Though we didn’t do any strenuous hikes there, we were completely exhausted by the time we arrived at our hotel. By then we had walked more than 10 miles, some of it in rough terrain, and have been in the car for hours. Delirious, we went out for dinner, wolfed down some salad and pizza at \u003ca href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/SXr4tY6p95drtb816\"\u003eAntica Forma\u003c/a\u003e, a really nice Italian style pizza restaurant, got back to the hotel, dipped in the hot tub for a bit and collapsed into bed. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Arches, Canyonlands, Moab and Mesa Verde"},{"content":"Traffic jam in Sedona (image credit: David Jolkovski/Larson Newspapers, Red Rock News) When we visited Sedona recently and got stuck several time in pretty terrible traffic jams like this, it got me thinking about the causes. I think that traffic issues are often caused by cities scaling faster than their roads do, and while Sedona is not a very big city - around 10,000 people according to the 2020 census, It does get a fare amount of visitors - 3 million visitors in 2018 according to the Sedona chamber of commerce. Most of those visitors are not a surprise to Sedona city leaders. The visitors are all coming to hotels, campgrounds or registered Airbnbs, so the city knows where they are staying, and can get data on how long, and use that for planning. So if we assume each of those guests stays for a week and that they are mostly spread around 8 busy months of the year, we get about 87K visitors in Sedona every day. So let’s call it 100K residents and visitors who are all moving around Sedona every day.\nThere are plenty of 100K sized cities in the US - according to wikipedia there are roughly 250 cities with population sizes between 100K and 300K. Anecdotally, from my experience visiting and living near some of the cities on that list, those traffic issues are not common in that size of a city.\nSo what makes Sedona suffer so badly with traffic?\nSome relevant analogies can be drawn from how very fast data networks connecting servers in a datacenter are built. The typical way to build those networks in the early 2000s was to take a rack of servers - a closet with up to 40 servers - and connect all of them to a switch - think of the servers as houses, the rack as the neighborhood and the switch as the wide street in the center of it where you have to go as you are driving from one house to another inside the neighborhood. It is common for there to be a switch powerful enough to allow any server inside the rack to communicate with any other server without having to slow down due to congestion.\nSeveral server racks side by side (image credit: Zoomdigi\\] As you add more servers though, you eventually run out of space and need to add another rack (build another neighborhood). Typically, engineers would connect the two rack switches with a cable called an inter connect or uplink. That cable would become a bottleneck, because no matter how big it was, it was not able to accommodate all the traffic between every server on one rack and every server on the other rack. So you would get congestion. This is exactly the situation when you have a main street that is the only way to get from one neighborhood to the next. And this is exactly how Sedona is built - a bunch of neighborhoods with nice small streets inside, but that don’t interconnect. To go from one to the next you have to go out to the single main road.\nWhy was this done that way? I can imagine it is great for the residents. No one wants to live near a large street, and if your street connects to the next neighborhood, it will have to be large and will have more traffic than if it was a cul-de-sac. So it would not surprise me if we discovered that the residents all pushed for no inter connects between neighborhoods.\nSo how did engineers solve the congestion on the inter connect in the data center? They did it by, among other neat tricks, creating multiple inter connects, which basically meant there was now more than one way to get from a server on one rack to a server in another rack. And because data networks can’t have loops in them (more than one way to get from point a to point b means there must be a loop somewhere), they also added a control layer that told each server which path to take in order to get to any other server on the other rack. There are lots more great details in the Jupiter Rising paper from Google if you’re curious.\nAn example of a network with multiple interconnects and loops \\[from the jupiter rising paper\\] And naturally, to do this in a city with humans making decisions would be difficult. How do you convince people that building the inter connect streets would ultimately be beneficial to everyone? Would closing down the whole city to vehicular traffic and making everyone use self driving cars which are directed by a control layer similar to the one in the data center, making sure each car takes a different route so no one street gets congested or over trafficked even work? Or perhaps only visitors would be disallowed from driving into the city with their cars, and forced to park in large park-n-ride lots outside town, and use the self driving cars, where residents continue to use their own cars? Would this be an opportunity to leap over the public transit phase (Sedona currently does not have an effective public transit system to speak of) and do an experiment of a city whose public transit is entirely self driving? The very vague plan that is currently being considered does not give me too much hope.\nI guess we’ll have to stand in terrible traffic the next time we come too.\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/sedonas-main-street-does-not-scale/","summary":"\u003cdiv align=\"center\"\u003e\u003csup\u003eTraffic jam in Sedona (image credit: David Jolkovski/Larson Newspapers, Red Rock News)\u003c/sup\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhen we visited Sedona recently and got stuck several time in pretty terrible traffic jams like this, it got me thinking about the causes. I think that traffic issues are often caused by cities scaling faster than their roads do, and while Sedona is not a very big city - around \u003ca href=\"https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/sedonacityarizona\"\u003e10,000 people\u003c/a\u003e according to the 2020 census, It does get a fare amount of visitors - \u003ca href=\"https://sedonachamber.com/our-community/\"\u003e3 million visitors in 2018\u003c/a\u003e according to the Sedona chamber of commerce. Most of those visitors are not a surprise to Sedona city leaders. The visitors are all coming to hotels, campgrounds or \u003ca href=\"https://www.sedonaaz.gov/your-government/departments/community-development/vacation-rentals/property-owner-information\"\u003eregistered\u003c/a\u003e Airbnbs, so the city knows where they are staying, and can get data on how long, and use that for planning. So if we assume each of those guests stays for a week and that they are mostly spread around 8 busy months of the year, we get about 87K visitors in Sedona every day. So let’s call it 100K residents and visitors who are all moving around Sedona every day.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Sedona's main street does not scale"},{"content":"This image above is actually still from Lake Powell. I took it to try and capture how low the water has gotten. As you might be able to see, there is a line of camper vans up on the left, and if you continue that line all the way to the right, you get the the transition area in the big white rock on the right where the color turns from white to brown. That line is where the water level used to be. So I would be 30 feet under water taking this picture. And to get to the water you actually need to go down further.\nAnother image from Lake Powell, taken right as we woke up. It rained a bit at night, and there was an active wind, so some of the rain froze on top of our tent.\nOn the way to Zion National Park we passed by a ranch that raises buffalos. It is a pretty big beast, and not too long ago herds of buffalos that numbered in the hundreds of thousands were roaming freely. It is estimated that prior to 1800 there were around 60 million buffalos in north America. By 1900 there were 300. Not 300 million, just 300 individual animals. This is a staggering 5 orders of magnitude drop, and yet another example of how uncontrolled, short sighted profit and exploitation wrecks havoc on our world.\nA different kind of mismanagement is evident in Zion National Park. It is one of the more popular national parks, with 5 million annual visitors according to the National Park Service. It is currently spring break, and many other people decided to do what we did and come enjoy this beautiful park. As you can see in the image above, it is crowded.\nZion was established as a national park in 1919, and developed in the following decades using, among others, the New Deal’s Civil Conservation Corps. The parking lots are very spacious in early 20th century terms, but today’s crowds completely overwhelm them. To deal with that, the park has a shuttle system that it operates during the most heavily visited times, but despite this week being a predictably heavy traffic week, the shuttles are not operating. The rangers say there is no budget for them, which to me seems just absurd. There are so many ways in which this is absurd, but I’ll just name a few.\nFirst, tickets alone should provide a very large budget from which to draw on. With 5 million annual visitors, assuming they pay $10 each (the fee is $35 per car, most cars have 3-4 people, and this rough calculation does not include annual passes or motorcycles, which I don’t think change the general picture all that much), you get a $50 million annual budget. Assuming they get no funding from the federal government or any other entity, and assuming the shuttle needs to run 8 months per year, you get a $6.2 million monthly budget. This comes to $200K daily, and assuming 20 busses, this would be $10K a day to run each one of them. I am not trying to argue that Zion should run this number of busses or that this is what they should budget for them, just that the ballpark revenue they get from tickets alone should be sufficient to run the shuttles whenever they are needed. And the park certainly has other sources of income, e.g. from the federal budget, gift store, donations, tour operators, etc.\nAdditionally, even if somehow the budget is not sufficient, why not charge people some extra fee to board the bus? If that enabled them to see the beauty of Zion, everyone would surely be happy to pay a modest fee, and you can make getting a waiver due to economic hardship easy, so as to not disadvantage anyone that might struggle to pay. This is not rocket science. It is done by public transit systems the world over. Why not here?\nThere is no excuse for letting people come in to the park hoping to see its sights, and then saying to them they simply can’t get there because the shuttles are not running and there is not parking. It is just silly.\nHaving said all that, Zion is indeed beautiful. Though we didn’t get to do the famous Narrows, or climb up to Angle’s Landing, it is very pretty here. We managed to get in to the coveted canyon drive late in the day when traffic was not completely crazy, just heavy (and we used our Tel Aviv parking skills to find a spot to park). It got close to freezing last night, but during the day the temperatures are nice and warm. Our campground is comfortable and we did a nice little hike this morning.\nAnd for another perspective on our trip, check out my wife Orit’s thoughts on it.\n(previous post here)\n(next post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/zion-np/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThis image above is actually still from Lake Powell. I took it to try and capture how low the water has gotten. As you might be able to see, there is a line of camper vans up on the left, and if you continue that line all the way to the right, you get the the transition area in the big white rock on the right where the color turns from white to brown. That line is where the water level used to be. So I would be 30 feet under water taking this picture. And to get to the water you actually need to go down further.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Zion NP"},{"content":"We drove out of Sedona on our way north. We stopped for a nice breakfast at a busy cafe in Flagstaff, and stocked up on some food and supplies. We then drove up back through the high desert landscape near Grand Canyon, but this time we kept going further north, towards Page, AZ.\nRight outside town there is a massive tourist attraction - Horseshoe Bend. An area where the Colorado river does a perfect horseshoe. There is of course a parking lot, an entrance fee and a 0.5 mile walk to it. The walk is short enough that everyone goes - young and old, people with disabilities, everyone.\nAnd the spot is worth it. It is really beautiful.\nAs you can see, the water level is very low. A little harder to see, but still very evident, is that the water flow is very slow. It is unclear to me how such a meek river could have created all the beauty that is the Colorado river canyon. And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t always like that - the mega-drought in the southwestern US is creating record low in all the reservoirs in the south west, and putting pressure on states to make difficult tradeoffs around who can use water, and for what.\nAs if to prove the previous point even more strongly, we drove up to Long Rock campground, which in theory is on the shorts of Lake Powell. The lake was formed when the Glen Canyon Dam was completed in the early 1960s. The campground used to provide access to the lake via sandy beaches, but due to the lake Powell is now many many tens of feet below its “full reservoir” level, and the campground is nearly a mile from the water. It makes for a sand trap where unsuspecting drivers get stuck, and a surreal landscape.\nAll this is probably an indication of a larger point - current human numbers and lifestyles depend on a certain level of abuse of nature, for example creating a huge dam for electricity and water storage, flooding large swaths of land in the process. And whenever such abuse takes place, unintended consequences follow. The basic fact likely is - the weather in many places in the southwest is not conducive to populations of the size that currently reside there, and requires a much more restrained use of water and electricity. But here we are…\n(previous post here)\n(next post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/page--az-and-drought/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWe drove out of Sedona on our way north. We stopped for a nice breakfast at a busy cafe in Flagstaff, and stocked up on some food and supplies. We then drove up back through the high desert landscape near Grand Canyon, but this time we kept going further north, towards Page, AZ.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRight outside town there is a massive tourist attraction - Horseshoe Bend. An area where the Colorado river does a perfect horseshoe. There is of course a parking lot, an entrance fee and a 0.5 mile walk to it. The walk is short enough that everyone goes - young and old, people with disabilities, everyone.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Page, AZ and Drought"},{"content":"Sedona is a beautiful place. It is set in a unique landscape of towering red rock buttes, and because it contains no tall buildings, you can see the view from practically anywhere in town. It is also a spiritual place. Something about Sedona, perhaps the beautiful surroundings, seems to have drawn to it an exceptionally large population of healers, artists and spiritual guides. There are even several vortex meditation sites (whatever that means) nearby.\nBut perhaps because it is already spring break for a lot of students, the city has been so crowded these past several days that I felt like the city is a victim of its own success. There is one main road through town, and it got so congested several times that we ended up changing our plans so we wouldn’t need to stand in traffic for an hour just to go 2 miles. Several hikes that we did try to do were so popular that there was nowhere to park, and we had to choose a different spot. And some of the overlooks the city is so known for were full of people, which kind of defeats the purpose of enjoying nature in solitude and quiet. It is of course good that a lot of people are going outdoors and enjoying hiking, but the infrastructure is just not even close to being able to handle all those people. I hope the city realizes this quickly and takes action.\nOrit pointed out another interesting thing about the city, aside from the natural beauty of its surroundings. The entrance to it as well as its central streets lack the usual functional but ugly aspects that are so common in other cities around the US. There are no car-washes, auto shops, self storage facilities, salvage yards and the like. Most of what you see are open businesses in aesthetically pleasing buildings, though to be fair, it is still in many ways a typical American town - its main street is a classic stroad, for example. But it does feel like there is a bit more oversight and organization at the city level, and like there is some control over capitalist interests. I think it looks and feels nice, and I wish more cities would do that.\nWe stayed here for a few days in a nice Airbnb. We are starting to get into the groove of the trip (we’ve been almost 10 days on the road), and allowed ourselves sometime to read, write and relax. We still managed to do several nice hikes today and yesterday.\n(previous post here)\n(next post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/sedona/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eSedona is a beautiful place. It is set in a unique landscape of towering red rock buttes, and because it contains no tall buildings, you can see the view from practically anywhere in town. It is also a spiritual place. Something about Sedona, perhaps the beautiful surroundings, seems to have drawn to it an exceptionally large population of healers, artists and spiritual guides. There are even several vortex meditation sites (whatever that means) nearby.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Sedona"},{"content":"We left Grand Canyon National Park to make the ~150 mile trip to Sedona, AZ. Along the way we got a few last looks at the Grand Canyon and the Colorado river deep inside it.\nLooking east from Lipan Point, Grand Canyon Looking west from Lipan Point, Grand Canyon We then continued east to highway 89 and stopped at the Wupatki National Monument, where you can see the remains of a communal living space built by Native Americans around 500 AD and inhabited for about 700 years. It has 100 rooms, in its final years benefited from a layer of ash deposited by the eruption of the nearby sunset volcano that made the soil more fertile.\nRuins of the pueblo at Wupatki National Monument A very interesting part of Wupatki is a blowhole, which was blowing out air strongly and consistently when we visited (notice the yellow hat full of air in the image blow). It is essentially a very large underground cave that is only accessible via a small hole on the surface. During the way, when the outside air is warm and rises, causing lower pressure at the surface, the air from inside the cave rushes out through the hole. When it is cold outside, the direction reverses.\nBlowhole blowing out air, Wupatki National Monument The final stop along the way was at the nearby Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument, to look at the aftermath of the eruption of a very young (geologically speaking) volcano that took place about a thousand years ago.\nThe volcano Lava flow Lava flow We then headed to our Airbnb in Sedona, Arizona.\n(previous post here)\n(next post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/on-the-road-to-sedona/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWe left Grand Canyon National Park to make the ~150 mile trip to Sedona, AZ. Along the way we got a few last looks at the Grand Canyon and the Colorado river deep inside it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/2c03ccc6ca12e52f2dcd07096eca65a4.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv align=\"center\"\u003e\u003csup\u003eLooking east from Lipan Point, Grand Canyon\u003c/sup\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" src=\"/images/41f9e8a29d1bdf9eba0a1be95caa0a70.jpg\"\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv align=\"center\"\u003e\u003csup\u003eLooking west from Lipan Point, Grand Canyon\u003c/sup\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe then continued east to highway 89 and stopped at the \u003ca href=\"https://goo.gl/maps/5nGHAsaP56oiZv5T7\"\u003eWupatki National Monument\u003c/a\u003e, where you can see the remains of a communal living space built by Native Americans around 500 AD and inhabited for about 700 years. It has 100 rooms, in its final years benefited from a layer of ash deposited by the eruption of the nearby sunset volcano that made the soil more fertile.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"On the road to Sedona"},{"content":"Sunrise over the Grand Canyon Grand Canyon was beautiful. We did the drive up to it at the end of the day and got to our hotel, the El Tovar Hotel right on the rim of the canyon after dark. When we walked around looking for something to eat, we came across three grazing Elk, chewing calmly right in front of us, completely oblivious to our presence. Later on, we ordered room service because all the restaurants were fully booked, and woke up really early the following morning. We were able to appreciate a beautiful sunrise over the canyon, followed by a nice hike along the rim. We did another good hike in the evening while we were waiting for a table at the hotel restaurant - the wait was an hour and 40 minutes…\nAside from the serene beauty of Grand Canyon, there were lots of interesting things that came up while we were there.\nEl Tovar Hotel Englishman in New York (actually, in Grand Canyon) I love Sting’s “Englishman in New York”. It highlights some well known differences between people from England and people from the US, and as an immigrant to this country from a different culture, I can relate. On evening at the El Tovar, a fellow hotel guest and his wife, both from England, were trying to book a table at the hotel restaurant. The restaurant is always booked days in advance, so naturally there were no tables. That surprised the guest - he apparently was expecting to be able to dine at the restaurant of the hotel he was staying at. Shouldn’t he get priority? He then tried to get on the wait list for a table, in case one became available later in the evening. But when asked for his phone number so he could be sent a text when his table is ready, his response was “00 44 ….”, which the hotel’s system rejected (he probably needed to say “+44…”, to indicate an international number), and causing the waiter to say “I’m sorry sir, but I can’t put you on the waitlist without a phone number”. At that point the guest, already tired from a long day of travel, lost it. He demanded to see the manager, and was quite vocal in his criticism of the hotel’s handling of the whole situation.\nThis was a great example of how the two cultures clashed. From the British point of view, the restaurant is part of the hotel. When you pay for the hotel, you are buying access to exclusive services, which include a hotel near the rim of the canyon and a table at its restaurant. Guests should get priority at that restaurant, and if there is extra room, non-guests could be allowed. Additionally, sending a text to let one know that their table is ready is overly complex, when a simple solution - calling one’s room - is available. Why on earth should that not be the default‽ From an American point of view, the hotel and the restaurant are public assets, being inside of a national park. They are to be used by everyone, and only by necessity - there is a limited number of rooms and tables - there is a limit, and a requirement to make a reservation. It therefore makes sense that one is disconnected from the other, and that you could make a reservation to the restaurant independently of your reservation to the hotel. It actually is better that you can reserve a table at the restaurant in case you were unable to reserve a room, so you can at least enjoy part of the experience.\nBut what was the most striking was the incompetence of the hotel staff. The waiter didn’t have a clue about how to handle non-US numbers in the system. He didn’t know how to set it up so it calls the room instead of a mobile phone number. He presented a dead end in front of a hotel guest instead of finding a way to make things work. Others around him stood awkwardly, waiting to see what happened rather than intervene and try to help. No one took the angry guest aside and tried to see if there was a way to figure this out without making a scene in front of a bunch of other waiting restaurant patrons. It was shocking to see how badly the hotel handled the whole situation. The reason might be that the staff is new to the job. You’d think that a prestigious hotel like El Tovar is run by a well trained, highly functional team that has been in place for years and know everything about it. In fact the staff were mostly new, some of them working at the hotel for less than 3 months. It is not entirely clear why that is, and whether it has anything to do with The Great Resignation, but it is clear that the hotel is being run by a group of people that, while being very nice human beings and well intentioned, are still learning the ins and outs of their jobs.\n(previous post here)\n(next post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/grand-canyon/","summary":"\u003cdiv align=\"center\"\u003e\u003csup\u003eSunrise over the Grand Canyon\u003c/sup\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGrand Canyon was beautiful. We did the drive up to it at the end of the day and got to our hotel, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.grandcanyonlodges.com/lodging/el-tovar-hotel/\"\u003eEl Tovar Hotel\u003c/a\u003e right on the rim of the canyon after dark. When we walked around looking for something to eat, we came across three grazing Elk, chewing calmly right in front of us, completely oblivious to our presence. Later on, we ordered room service because all the restaurants were fully booked, and woke up really early the following morning. We were able to appreciate a beautiful sunrise over the canyon, followed by a nice hike along the rim. We did another good hike in the evening while we were waiting for a table at the hotel restaurant - the wait was an hour and 40 minutes…\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Grand Canyon"},{"content":"We left Death Valley in a rush. All night long, a strong wind was blowing, sometimes gusting up to 50 mph. Our tent rattled and shook all night long, making for a restless sleep. In the morning, we packed up our stuff in a hurry stuff, hoping to drive away from the wind storm to a place where we can get organized and calmly put ourselves and the car back together. As we drove, we got to death valley junction, a tiny city with a hotel and an opera house with a very interesting story. Unfortunately we missed the guided tour of the operate house, so we only got this one picture of its outside.\nAmargosa Opera House, Death Valley Junction, CA As we looked for a quiet spot we tried to stop at Red Rock State Park. Despite the strong wind we took a moment to organize the car and our bags, and took a quick drive through the scenic road. It was very pretty, but we were ready to get to a hotel with a warm shower after two nights in death valley and a restless wind swept night, so we didn’t linger.\nRed Rock State Park, NV After Red Rock, we arrived at our hotel, the Luxor on the edge of the Las Vegas strip. It is a really weird hotel built during Las Vegas’ “Disneyland” era. During that time casinos were built that resembled giant theme parks, and this particular one was Egyptian themed. It looks like a pyramid, and used to have way more Egyptian paraphernalia that it does today. I was especially impressed with the elevators, that move diagonally along the outer axis of the pyramid. You might miss the slight side jerk as the elevator starts and stops if you are not paying attention. There is an excellent 99 percent invisible episode about Las Vegas’ history if you want to hear more (thank you Amir for the tip!).\nInside the Paris casino in Las Vegas Vegas is known for having many loss leader deals, designed to lure you into the money making vices of shopping, gambling, drinking, and “adult content”, as the corporate term goes. I think they lost money on us.\nWe did find a nice hipster cafe in a normal people’s neighborhood outside the strip called PublicUs, which was really really nice. We enjoyed a good breakfast and professionally made lattes in a familiar hipster setting, and felt for a brief moment like we never left the bay area. Their shakshooka dish was not necessarily the original Israeli variety, but was an interesting interpretation of it.\nAfter less than 24 hours we left Las Vegas and headed towards Grand Canyon National Park. We did most of drive in one go, and stopped as the sun was starting to set in a little side park about an hour away to have a quick snack of leftovers, and to organize our car.\nRice and hot dogs warming up on the portable stove I’ll write more about our adventures at the El Tovar Hotel, where we are staying tonight later on, but I had to include here the Elk we just saw as we went for a night walk along the south rim.\nElk (previous post here)\n(next post here)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/quick-stop-in-vegas--and-on-to-grand-canyon/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eWe left Death Valley in a rush. All night long, a strong wind was blowing, sometimes gusting up to 50 mph. Our tent rattled and shook all night long, making for a restless sleep. In the morning, we packed up our stuff in a hurry stuff, hoping to drive away from the wind storm to a place where we can get organized and calmly put ourselves and the car back together. As we drove, we got to death valley junction, a tiny city with a hotel and an \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amargosa_Opera_House_and_Hotel\"\u003eopera house\u003c/a\u003e with a very interesting story. Unfortunately we missed the guided tour of the operate house, so we only got this one picture of its outside.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Quick stop in Vegas, and on to Grand Canyon"},{"content":"The drive to Death Valley from Bakersfield was long and meandering. It mad its way through canyons up and down a range of mountains, and finally gave way to more open land, only to again climb up and back down into the park. Along the way. we stopped for a quick lunch in Ridgecrest, the last major city before the park. It was very obvious that the little place we stopped at was geared towards a very different crowd than places we frequent in the bay area. The setting was plain, with no decoration or detail on the walls. The space looks like it was a small factory that was made into a restaurant with minimal renovation. Some parts of the space still had an old and dirty drop ceiling, there were very few windows and the light came from artificial light, cold and white. Why does a place like that even exist? Obviously, people find it useful in some way, otherwise it would go out of business. The food was decent and the owner seemed nice and welcoming. But the thought that the world would be a better place if this place was just a little more aesthetically pleasing, if it was put together with a bit more attention to the look and feel, was inescapable.\nAt death valley we spent our first night this trip sleeping in our car-tent. The bed is inside the car, but the car is extended with a tent that attaches to the open tail gate, giving us a bit more space. The night was cold, but we felt comfortable and warm inside, and our new 4 inch foam mattress made the bed feel very comfortable.\nOn Wednesday morning we went for a few short hikes along bad water road - Bad Water, Artist\u0026rsquo;s Pallet, Devil\u0026rsquo;s Golf Course and Gold Canyon.As we were walking and admiring the scenery, some fighter jets from the nearby Naval proving grounds streaked across the sky. We couldn\u0026rsquo;t actually see them, they may have been obstructed from view by the mountains, but we could certainly hear the roar of their jet engines. The sound felt so weirdly familiar and reassuring, bringing me back to my elementary school days. I grew up near an air force base, and the sound of fighter jets taking off with their engines at full throttle was common. It would come at any time, and when it happened during class, the teacher would just stop for a few seconds while the airplanes were taking off, and everything would just be waiting, waiting, waiting. Sometimes it would take a while as two or three or sometimes more planes would take off, extending the noise for long seconds. Eventually, quiet would return and class would continue.\n\\n\nFor lunch we stopped at the cafe near the golf coarse here in Death Valley. Why is there a golf coarse here? This place is so hot and dry, it certainly doesn\u0026rsquo;t have enough water to sustain anything other than the hardiest, most water efficient plant, let alone grass. I suppose it was put here in a previous time, when this kind of excess seemed ok. It wasn\u0026rsquo;t easy finding the cafe - there aren\u0026rsquo;t any signs to speak of pointing to it, and we had to wander around a bit until we eventually found it. And when we did, it became clear why there are so few signs - it is not intended for \u0026ldquo;the plebs\u0026rdquo;. The masses can eat at the buffet on the other side of furnace creek, or at the ice cream parlor near the buffet. But the cafe near the golf course - it is more exclusive, intended for a more refined crowd. But a national park can\u0026rsquo;t overtly say that, so instead they quietly make it happen - if you are in the know (or are a bit more stubborn\u0026hellip;), you get to the cafe. Most people don\u0026rsquo;t.\n(this is post #2 of our trip. See previous post here)\n(Las Vegas and the road to Grand Canyon are in the next post)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/death-valley/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eThe drive to Death Valley from Bakersfield was long and meandering. It mad its way through canyons up and down a range of mountains, and finally gave way to more open land, only to again climb up and back down into the park. Along the way. we stopped for a quick lunch in Ridgecrest, the last major city before the park. It was very obvious that the little place we stopped at was geared towards a very different crowd than places we frequent in the bay area. The setting was plain, with no decoration or detail on the walls. The space looks like it was a small factory that was made into a restaurant with minimal renovation. Some parts of the space still had an old and dirty drop ceiling, there were very few windows and the light came from artificial light, cold and white. Why does a place like that even exist? Obviously, people find it useful in some way, otherwise it would go out of business. The food was decent and the owner seemed nice and welcoming. But the thought that the world would be a better place if this place was just a little more aesthetically pleasing, if it was put together with a bit more attention to the look and feel, was inescapable.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Death Valley"},{"content":"My wife and I finally hit the road today on our big trip. It was a long time coming. We drove to Pinnacles National Park, and did a nice hike there, and we are spending the night in Bakersfield.\nAs we were driving out of the bay area, we passed by a hotel in Milpitas where, a little more than 20 years ago while on a business trip, I was awoken by a frantic call from my wife telling me to open the TV and see what was unfolding in the twin towers in New York City. A little more than a year after that day, we immigrated to this country along with our two young kids, and ended up staying at the same hotel while searching for a home to rent. It was interesting to reflect on the years that have gone by and how much has change in the world and in our personal lives. We’ve established ourselves in this country and put down roots, our kids have grown up here and are now taking their first steps as adults in the world, and we are embarking on a road trip in the south west and southern US that we’ve been planning for a long time.\nBut some things seem to have stayed the same. Much like on 9/11 and the weeks following it, the world is changing as a result of a violent act of unprovoked aggression on a very large scale. The war in Ukraine is still unfolding and my heart goes out to all the people of Ukraine who are suffering in it. I hope it comes to a quick end.\n(Next up - Death Valley)\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/on-our-way/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eMy wife and I finally hit the road today on our big trip. It was a long time coming. We drove to \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/pinn/index.htm\"\u003ePinnacles National Park\u003c/a\u003e, and did a nice hike there, and we are spending the night in Bakersfield.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs we were driving out of the bay area, we passed by a hotel in Milpitas where, a little more than 20 years ago while on a business trip, I was awoken by a frantic call from my wife telling me to open the TV and see what was unfolding in the twin towers in New York City. A little more than a year after that day, we immigrated to this country along with our two young kids, and ended up staying at the same hotel while searching for a home to rent. It was interesting to reflect on the years that have gone by and how much has change in the world and in our personal lives. We’ve established ourselves in this country and put down roots, our kids have grown up here and are now taking their first steps as adults in the world, and we are embarking on a road trip in the south west and southern US that we’ve been planning for a long time.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"On our way!"},{"content":"After 7.5 years, I said goodbye to Airbnb today. This end of a chapter also marks the start of a new and exciting one, but brings with it many emotions. I am sad to leave so many friends behind, and though I am sure some will stay in touch, it is certainly going to be different, without the cadence of work to bring us together. I am sad to leave, knowing I will not be part of this smart and passionate group of people who are building the future of Airbnb. I am also proud of the part I played in building the payments system at Airbnb, and improving the engineering culture here. I am happy to have been a strong advocate for diversity, and to know that others will continue on that path. And I’m excited to be taking a long break to do what I’ve wanted to do for a very long time - travel.\nIn the coming weeks and months, I also want to experiment with writing. I want to reflect on stuff I encounter along the way, but also share some thoughts about software engineering and tech in general, from my perspective as a 20 year silicon valley veteran. I’ve never done this kind of writing before, and I’m not sure how it’s going to go. You are welcome to subscribe if you want to come along for the ride, and if you do, I’d appreciate any feedback you have.\n","permalink":"https://blog.weksler.org/posts/goodbye-airbnb/","summary":"\u003cp\u003eAfter 7.5 years, I said goodbye to Airbnb today. This end of a chapter also marks the start of a new and exciting one, but brings with it many emotions. I am sad to leave so many friends behind, and though I am sure some will stay in touch, it is certainly going to be different, without the cadence of work to bring us together. I am sad to leave, knowing I will not be part of this smart and passionate group of people who are building the future of Airbnb. I am also proud of the part I played in building the payments system at Airbnb, and improving the engineering culture here. I am happy to have been a strong advocate for diversity, and to know that others will continue on that path. And I’m excited to be taking a long break to do what I’ve wanted to do for a very long time - travel.\u003c/p\u003e","title":"Thank you, Airbnb, from the bottom of my heart. It has been an absolute blast."}]