Stephen’s Travels

In case you didn’t know, one of the most important parts to taking a shower is drying off. Most people use a towel for this, but in my hurry to pack for Europe last summer, I forgot one. What I had to do over those two months was be creative, and look for the inner towel essence of other items.

My first shower was in Paris, several days into the trip, and pictured above is that creativity in action. Some people might see it as an international Coca-Cola Comforter, but not me, it was a towel.

My favorite towel was a pillowcase and boardshorts (swimming trunks). Pillowcases are notorious for their non-towel characteristics such as being smaller than a towel, not as absorbent, terrible drying time, and of course its being a holder for a pillow. Once I honed this technique, my shower ritual shower went something like this:

Step 1: Take a shower
Step 2: Put board shorts on, dry off hair with pillowcase
Step 3: Air-dry until satisfied

Pretty genius if you ask me.

One problem I ran across was that of mildew smelling pillowcase. This was mostly caused by my apathy to letting it dry out before balling it up and tossing it in my backpack, and also its non-towel characteristics as I mentioned above. After a while, you tend to stop caring about the scent because you will never see these people again, and chances are, they smell worse. In the end, it was a great experience, because I realized that I take towels for granted.

Currently, I have 2 wet, mildew smelling towels balled up on my floor. I’m going to use one to shower and I couldn’t care less. Also, showering is over-rated.

In the summer of 2005, I had the unique opportunity to travel throughout Germany, Poland, and Czech Republic with a tour called the “Holocaust Remembrance Tour”. Given that I had just studied the Holocaust the previous semester, the tour was a marvelous way to experience history and tragedy in a more personal and firsthand way. The tours were very draining physically and mentally, the most heavy hitting being the memorial at Lidice. Given the serious nature of this particular location, and the trip as a whole, one might expect a high level of tact, much more so than normal. This, however, was not the case on this occasion.

As I recall, we had just taken some time walking around the memorial grounds in Lidice. After a brief walk from the memorial to the temporary visitors center, we found ourselves waiting outside for several minutes in the cool mist while the previous tour group cleared out. I don’t even remember what the next comment was regarding, but one member of our group was a bit frustrated with the circumstances and compared our tour leader (Iain, bless his heart!) to Hitler. Sigh.

Perhaps I was just extra emotional that day, but I’d say that such a comment was out of line at that time or any other time. It really bummed me out.

Over the weekend I was able to make a trip up to Yosemite for some hiking with Chris (my old roommate). We set out from his house in Clovis around 7:30am and began hiking the Yosemite Falls trail at about 11:00am. Even though the hike was labeled as ‘very strenuous’, the selection of trails during winter is somewhat limited, so we decided to do it anyway.

We started off at a hare’s pace, but soon found out that speed was unnecessary. It rained most of the way up and was eventually replaced by snow, which was a real treat as Temecula doesn’t see snow. After ~2.5 hours of switchbacks we made it to the top. The view was not too great with all of the fog/clouds, but I was still able to enjoy it using a combination of the postcards from the visitor’s center and my imagination. I will most definitely be back in the summer or sometime with better weather.

Just to give an idea of the distance covered, take a look at the picture on the right. The trail began in the woods at bottom on the far left and ended at the peak on the top right. We also took a small detour at the upper falls to take in a nice view of the falls and valley. Though as mentioned above, the valley views were somewhat lacking. The total distance we hiked was 8.4 miles with an approximate 3000 foot elevation gain.

If you want to see any additional pictures, you can check them out here.