Coachella – day 2

This morning as the sun began to warm my tent I hoped it would reverse its course and let me sleep a little longer. Unfortunately the cool evening breeze rapdily turned into the desert blanket that topped out yesterday over 100F. Looking around at the hundreds of other tents all in their 7'x7' square per person, I could see the tired eyes of many other campers. I've never seen anything like the rows and rows and rows of multicolored domes from one person "coffin-like" bivy sac to the mutliroom family sized mansions. The proximity of the tents has yielded some interesting side effects. For example, last night we experienced the verbal equivalent of the wave that began at the end by the showers and built momentum as it rushed to our end.

Other campers are easy to spot both at the event and around town thanks to the orange armbands that delineate the herd. In the coffee shop I'm in now, several campers are soaking up the cool asleep in the lounge chairs, a few others have staked out a table, and the line has alternated consistently with locals and the tagged ones.

Hot Chip surprised us with their fast beats and enjoyable tunes. I'm definitely going to add them to my iPod the next chance I get. Unfortunately the tent they played overflowed onto the sundrenched remnants of the polo field it sits on. Not wanting to leave looking like a lobster, we opted to sit in the grass in a tent across the pathway with no view, but decent sound.

While the sunset behind the mountains behind the crowd, the Decemberists played a reduced set of the same songs from the Nashville show. The setting here is really beautiful, the palm trees in the middleground and mountains in the background create a stairstep of scale bounded by a cloudless blue sky. I always enjoy shows where the artists recognize that there's a crowd of fans and interact with them instead of playing like they're in a studio. The Decemberists' ballads lend themselves to crowd participation as they tend to tell intricate stories. Seeing a crowd of 'spirit fingers' during the part of Perfect Crime where the safe explodes changed the experience from just watching to participating. The improptu dance contest that Mr Meloy initiated helped get the whole crowd moving. The finale, the Mariner's Revenge brought the return of giant two-person whale puppet and the lamenting wails of the entire audience.

The main stage drew an enormous crowd for the headline performance, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who are still rocking after more than 20 years. Flea, the bassist, played solos like I've never heard. Instead of treating the bass like a backup instrument, he attacked it with fury. The rest of the band had excellent execution and stage presence. They even played Under the Bridge, my first music purchase, a tape single.

Water is essential in the desert and $2 per bottle adds up fast. The organizers have done something I've never seen; they’re exchanging 10 empties for a full one, which has certainly lessened the load for the garbage collectors. Matt and I have each picked up number of bottles and happily exchanged them.

Coachella – Day 1

Our first sun drenched day was a success. No sunburn, a little sleep, and a big smile. It had to be more than 100 at the hottest yesterday cooling gently as the evening went on.

Bjork closed the evening with an amazing set. All I can say is that the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. The touch screen synthesizers and mixers used by her band looked like the controls from a sci-fi spaceship excpet these actually worked.

The multilingual works of Brazillian Girls filled the air with English, French, German, and Spainish in a jampacked set.

Seeing Gillian Welch and her guitar friend again was also great. In Nashville she made a short special appearance. Here she played some great tunes; old, new, and standard. One included an ringing refrain, "I want to do right, just not right now."

Coachella + La Jolla

I've spent the last few days enjoying the cool and sunny weather in La Jolla California. Today Matt and I are headed for Indio California to see the Coachella Valley Music and Art Festival.

Ominous sky

Ominous sky

I really like how this turned out. It’s underexposed as part of a bracket set I shot.

More Pictures

I added a few more pictures from the last week in the collection On the road (part 3).

Check out updated the Series collection, which has pictures of some of the people I’ve met along the way in Chance Encounters.

"God put a smile upon your face" -Coldplay

"God put a smile upon your face" -Coldplay

So I was driving along and had to stop to take a picture of these to twin clouds after seeing twin rocks about a mile up the road. Upon further inspection, some might see a smiley.

Capitol Reef offroad

Capitol Reef dirt road

If you’ve never been out West, you should start saving now. There was an easy dirt road at the end of the pavement in the Capitol Reef National Park. Even though it was overcast and sprinkling and the signs said, flash flood warning, take caution when a storm is looming”. I decided to check out this narrow canyon.

Another 1,000 miles down

I’m over the 6,000 mile mark total, over 4,000 for this trip. It’s funny to think that the shortest distance across the US is is 2,200 miles (Jacksonville to LA on I10). With the same end points, I will have at least twice that when I get to LA. To understand this phenomenon better look at this track:
The last few days
(You can close the titles on the left by clicking the very small triangle in between the map and the list)
As you can see, I’m taking neither the fastest nor the shortest route; the extra time is totally worth it.

This thousand mile section took me from Santa Fe to the middle of Utah. These western mountain roads have been great. The scenery has been excellent and because it’s not the season, the traffic has been low. Since I left Santa Fe I’ve only ridden about 100 miles on the Interstate, the rest has been on the “scenic” routes from my atlas. Each color on the map shows a different segment of my ride (different days or gas breaks change the color). If you switch to hybrid view, you can get a small taste of some of the great formations. Look closely at the National Parks. You can even see the dirt road I rode in Capitol Reef National Park into a narrow canyon.

More great roads, UT95

The ride from Moab to Capitol Reef was like a 250-mile drive-thru geology lesson. Imagine being an ant on a football field sized diorama. The scale of the mesas, cliffs, boulders, canyons, and layers is immense. Without blowing my pictures up to billboard sized, it will be hard to grasp how large these features are. Along with the size, the colors are just as impressive. The range of rust tones is so broad that counting them would take a lifetime. I read in a brochure that it only takes a little iron in a rock to give it a reddish color, so the varying levels of iron are easy to spot.

At one point the road took a right and cut through the rusty sandstone to reveal a valley below. Driving down the man-made path led to the edge which anywhere else along the ridge would have led to a several hundred foot drop. Here, the road engineers created a long ramp in the wall that led to the valley floor. Looking back at my path I could see thousands of years of history in the sedimentary layers.

Later on I came to an erosion carved valley near Hite in the Glen Canyon Recreation area. From the viewpoint above it I was able to look down at all the layers that I’d spent the last several hours riding on and floating between. It was easy to see that some layers are tougher than others by the way they erode; some break in chuncks, others dissolve, a few crack in sheets, some get windblown, plants and ice crack others, all are changed by the water that rarely appears here.

Zax in Moab

I’m just finishing lunch with a guy named Felix. There’s a Harley out front and he has a helmet so I struck up a conversation. The first thing he said was “sorry I don’t speak english”. Seeing him use postcard stamps without the butterfly (the only natinal one in service now), I knew he was sending international post cards, so I was prepared. When I found out he was from France, I got to break out my slowly rusting French.