Why does hotel coffee always suck? No matter where you go, it tastes like the same metallic institutional garbage. Makes my teeth hurt. I realize that they have to make it in quantity, but if I ran a hotel, I’d serve real coffee made with a french press, at least at morning room service. Then it just might come close to being worth the $8 they charge.

A year or so ago I got the idea into my head that I “needed” a car, and what’s more, needed some sort of big truck, because I have some land in Baja, and, you know, a guy needs a truck for that. A Baja rig, that sort of thing. And so when I saw a clean ‘96 F250 around the corner with a for sale sign on it, it just seemed like the right thing at the right time. Serendipity.

So I became the owner of a 1996 Ford F250 Super Cab 4×4, with the 460 V8. That’s 7.5 liters – the largest V8 made, more or less. Huge. Powerful. Heavy. Lots of fun on a sandy track in Baja, as long as you don’t run out of gas (easy to do at 10 mpg), snap an axle, or pile the thing into an arroyo. None of which I did, and the big truck made it down to Pescadero and back without a problem.

…and then mostly sat in front of my house, used for occasional grocery runs and trips to the beach or across the bridge in the rain. I drove it back and forth to the south bay for paragliding lessons, and more recently down to Waddell to go kitesurfing, and every time I got it on the road, I couldn’t help but think about how much gas it was using. And how expensive all that gas was. Last fillup I maxed out the credit card limit at the pump at $75 and still hadn’t actually filled both tanks. Yeah, two tanks.

So I started thinking about selling it and getting something more practical. I do like Audi’s, and I drove the A3 a few times and almost bought one, but I just couldn’t justify that much money for a car that I wouldn’t be driving every day. Last week I went and drove the Honda Element, and I thought, OK, this is cool, and not too expensive. So I bought one of those, put the truck on Craigslist, and sold that two days later. Now all those little things that needed to be fixed on the truck are on someone’s else’s list, and I’ve got a new car that is super fun to drive, uses way less gas, and gets lots of “hey, cool looking car” comments. True enough, it was another impulse buy (like the truck in the first place), but in general my impulses are good ones.

The big truck served well, and I will miss its rumble, but it’s time to say out with the old

and in with the new!

I don’t eat a ton of energy bars, but they are handy at the climbing gym now and then. There seems to be a new one out every week or so, but of course you have to try them to find out how they taste… These Think Thin bars are particularly nasty – I bought two and did eat them, but only to get them out of the house. Never again!

My favorites are Bumble Bar (mostly sesame seeds),

and Pro Bar,

which actually taste like real food (fruit and nuts). Quite different, but both are super tasty.

Another long day on the road… Through the Dolomites on a backroad route described in detail by the padrone di casa, avoiding all major population centers, truck routes, carabiniere checkpoints and most of the traffic to join the highway just before the Brenner pass, then north to Innsbruck and west through Austria and Switzerland past Zurich and Basel and finally north back to Strasbourg. I had emailed our car rental guy that we’d arrive at 5:45pm (his office closed at 6), and somehow we hit it just about on the dot. In the end it would have been faster and cheaper to go north from Innsbruck to Munich and the west via Stuttgart, but we only know that _now_. Tunnel tolls and windscreen _vignettes_ cost us probably €50 that day, and the going was slow for half the day as well. What we saw of Austria and Switzerland was fairly unimpressive that day; of course we didn’t see much of either country, but the view from the road wasn’t that great – going fast through Germany would have been better. What’s more, the Austrians drive like ninnies, strictly obeying all speed limits and actually attempting to _prevent_ you from passing, and the Swiss aren’t much better. We were happy to cross the final border into France and step on it.

We had another dinner a the same low-key local place where we had eaten the first night in Strasbourg and I spent the night and walked around a bit the next morning in a light rain before catching the train up to Frankfurt and then onto my plane home. I made the most of UA first classs again with a few glasses of wine and then 8 hours sleep before landing at good old SFO.

We got up and out of Trieste fairly early in the morning, ditched a parking ticket, and drove down to Venice. There is a lot of T.I.R. (truck) traffic on that stretch as it’s the main route coming from the south and east and heading for the Brenner Pass north into Europe. I’m not sure why they don’t take the road north through Slovenia and past Villach into Austria – maybe the grade is less via Brenner? We hit Venice about noon, parked and walked through town using my old mental map to Osteria La Zucca, just around the corner and over the bridge from where Mike G and I lived for a while in the summer of 1990. It turns out they’ve been open since 1980 – and the phone was ringing steadily with dinner reservations. I was happy to see them doing so well. Lunch and an espresso and we caught the vaporetto down to the Arsenale to see what we could of the Biennale.

The main half of the exposition (the Giardini) was closed for the day, but as Liz pointed out, we couldn’t have hoped to see the whole thing in an afternoon anyhow. As it was it was all we could do to make it through what was there. There was a good piece from Bulgaria (go figure) about the IP (intellectual property) around Kalishnikov automatic rifles, and a great series of massive visual diaries by a Brazilian artist… aside from that, a lot of the usual high-concept political stuff, not really my thing. We had hoped to see something impressive in the Turkey “pavillion” to redeem our (well, Loren’s, primarily) sense of the place, but instead there were four miniature wooden shacks with IKEA furniture and small flat-screen TV’s showing scenes of poverty and a big LED sign reading “Don’t Complain”. Now that is some *deep* shit. Wow. Give me a break. Nice to see the old shipyards there on the backside of Venice though.

We bailed out about 7pm and headed north on the new autostrada towards Belluno and the Valle di Cadore. That road wasn’t there last time I headed that way – there was only the old _statale_. The highway brought us up into the Dolomites with incredible speed – an hour after we left the parking garage in Venice we were near Belluno, surrounded by peaks and valleys and in an *entirely* different place. Amazing. Since we didn’t have a detailed map of Italy, I was sort of headed for Cadore on dead reckoning, although I knew that we didn’t actually want to go _there_ per se, since Cadore sits below Cortina and is lovely but fairly developed. Luckily we spotted a promising side valley at Longarone and took a chance with Valle di Zoldo, and found a *perfect* argiturismo just as time ran out.

We asked about our feast, and the woman who ran the agri recommended a local place somehow attached to a campground that we had passed on the way into town. We washed up and zipped down there, but they were already closing up. I was so disappointed that all I could say to the poor girl was “male” (bad). She apologized, and shut the door in my face. We settled for (likely frozen) pizza at the roadside bar with some friendly locals and the carabinieri across the road doing random stops. They made us a little nervous as we got ready to leave, having downed the usual half-liter (at least) of wine and one or two digestivi, so we waited for them to flag down someone else, and then made off quickly. Ha. Bastardi!

We decided to stay another night (our last of the trip) so that we could enjoy the mountains a bit and most of all so that we could eat at the local place that had been recommended. I took a hike up towards the peaks about the village, not quite reaching them but getting up to treeline at about 2000m with an incredible view of the valley below and all the other surrounding peaks. It was a hard walk, not a ton of distance (maybe 5 miles?) but 4000+ feet of elevation up and back down, but well worth it, and boy was I hungry. We hit the spot, and I knew from the minute they rolled out the polenta wheel we were in for it good. A slab of polenta (spiced with what, I didn’t find out), beef stew, pork burgers, and then *pork tartare*. Yes, raw pork done up more or less like beef tartare, and they just asked us how many we wanted. Fried cheese? sure, bring it on. I started talking to the folks at the next table, having guessed correctly that they were up from Venice, and got us all going on the grappas. In the end I asked for and left with the grappa paddle as a souvenier, and we went home very happy that our last meal of note had been so amazingly good.

Some of you are familiar with my hand-made closet-lab silkscreened tees (Call me Uli, Ich Kann Nicht So Arbeiten, etc).

While I love making these by hand, it wouldn’t hurt to have another take on them as well. It turns out that Threadless has a TypeTees section where you submit “slogans”, and they produce the winning designs.

So, if you want to send a little love my way, please vote for my designs on Threadless!