Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers

Last night we traveled to Las Vegas to see Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers. It was a great show, we were especially impressed with Woody's voice and Nicky Sander's fiddle playing. Everybody on stage was truly talented.

The question we had before going was would it be mostly a music show? It was lots of great music mixed with jokes that had the audience laughing out loud for most of the night. Steve Martin is still an incredibly funny stand up comedian.

Having seen a lot of bands performing old standards, I was happy to spend the night listening mostly to new music. Your mind gets sluggish and lazy when you listen to the same stuff all the time.

They did play a fun version of orange blossom special to end the night with Nicky showing his talent as a fiddle player. Go see this really fun show you'll enjoy every minute.

Jim




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Las Vegas

Train ride

After flying into Orange County airport in California, spent the night in nearby Costa Mesa. The next day I needed to travel to LAX as I was on call for another day. Not being in a hurry decided to take the train up to downtown Los Angeles.

I went back to SNA on the hotel van and caught a shuttle to the Santa Ana train station where I purchased a ticket for fifteen dollars. After waiting for about 15 minutes a train arrived. The upper deck had plenty of open seats that were comfortable and provided a great view of the areas that we passed through. The storage areas above the seats were a bit on the thin side so a thick or overstuffed bag wouldn't fit. No one was seated next to me so I left my bag on the floor.

The train accelerated smoothly and was very quiet. The ride was fairly soft and pleasant. It may not have been as comfortable.if the train had been full but today we had plenty of room. The station announcements were easy to understand so it would be hard to miss your station unless you were sound asleep.

The bus from Union station to LAX was seven dollars and took less than a half an hour. The trip took longer than the shuttle van would have but we didn't have to sit in rush hour traffic nor did we have to go through security as on a plane. In the past I had taken a United Express flight but no flights were available today and I don't know if the route is being flown anymore.

Diving Kauai

For our first vacation of 2010 we traveled to the Hawaiian Island of Kauai. We did our diving with Fathom Five Dive Shop in Koloa. It's very close to Poipu beach where we had rented a condo.

We did a shore dive at Koloa Landing to start as we had my cousin's teenage son who wanted to do a padi discovery dive. Our instructor James did a great job and we all had a great time. We couldn't get too deep on the discovery dive but the area was very interesting in the shallow water. We got to see a dragon moray eel, a scorpion fish and other very beautiful animals such as Hawaiian sea turtles.

We would like to do this dive again as there's much to see and Fathom Five is a great dive shop.

Sea Turtles in Hawaii

I'm amazed at how many turtles we see when snorkeling at Waikoloa on the Island of Hawaii. They are supposed to be left alone but they seem to be everywhere and will sometimes swim up to you to say hi.

At home when paddling Black Canyon from Hoover Dam the birds and land animals are the most interesting with the large herd of big horn sheep that are commonly seen.

In Hawaii being in the water is really fun at there are lots of interesting fish, turtles, and whales.

Snorkeling in Maui, came upon a leatherback sea turtle sleeping on the bottom and left it alone. I was impressed by the size sea turtle and later read that they can reach 2,000 pounds.

The above image is of a Hawaiian Green Sea Turtle.

Japanese Food in Waikiki

There are many great Japanese places to eat in Waikiki.

Today I had a great katstu-curry at Tonkatsu Ginza Bairin at 255 Beach Walk. Their phone number is 808-926-8082. I heard both English and Japanese spoken there.

Tonkatsu is a breaded deep fried pork cutlet, very popular in Japan.

The restaurant is very beautifully decorated looking like it could be in Japan. The tonkatsu was as good as the best that I've eaten at in Japan. I really love tonkatsu, when in Japan, my uncle Mamoru and I seek out the best places to have tonkatsu for lunch.

Winter Paddling near Las Vegas

The weather has turned cold in Southern Nevada, the kayak tour business, near Las Vegas and Hoover Dam, has slowed. This is actually our favorite time to paddle from Hoover Dam as the hot springs are wonderful when the air is cool.

What we consider cold isn't all that bad as it stays above freezing most of the time. The sunny days, with the temps sometimes getting into the 70's, actually feel warm, especially for someone who went to school in Nebraska.

Another great reasons for visiting Black Canyon this time of year are that there are few people on the river for a nice wilderness experience.

Desert Adventures is using this slow period to sell used tour and rental boats to make way for the new canoes and kayaks coming in the spring. These boats are a great deal as they sell for half of the retail price of a new one. The boats have had many trips down the Black Canyon of the Colorado river and on Lake Mead but have lots of life left for a private owner.

Our store is a 1647A Nevada Highway in Boulder City, Nevada 89005. Phone number is (702)293-5026 email: info@kayaklasvegas.com.

Flying, Lake Mead, Colorado River

My friend Joe Kahl and I flew a Cessna 170B borrowed from friend Doug Mueller to Pearce Ferry today. Joe works with birds and other animals for the Bureau of Reclamation in Boulder City, Nevada. His field work takes him along the Colorado River between Lake Mead and Yuma, Arizona.

Joe also hosts an American folk music program called patchworks on Sunday afternoons with KUNV 91.5 for the university of Nevada-Las Vegas radio station.

We flew over Iceberg Canyon and ended up at Kingman for breakfast. The airport restaurant is a popular place to fly into for a meal. We met with up with Paul Gaines that owns a composite aircraft repair shop at the Kingman, Arizona airport.

Angkor Wat, Siem Reap, Cambodia

We flew into Siem Reap, Cambodia from Bangkok on an atr72, the flight was less than an hour and uneventful. We processed through immigration by getting a visa at the airport, we forgot to get a passport size photo for the visa but they took care of that for an extra $2 usd.

It's interesting that everything priced here is in U.S. dollars, they take the local currency but there's no need for it. Sometimes you get the local currency as change. We had a one hundred dollar bill, a lot of money in Cambodia that was hard to spend, so best to bring $20 bills or smaller.

We had our hotel, the viroth, arrange transportation and our car and driver was waiting for us when we were done with immigration and customs. The hotel is moderately priced, the rooms and service is very good. They don't have a tour desk so we went to the neighboring soria moria hotel. The staff there was great and we booked a full day tour of the Angkor area with them.

The next morning we had breakfast at the viroth at 7 a.m. then met our tour guide and driver, then off to the temples in a car that I think was a toyota camry. Our driver didn't seem to speak much english but the tour guide's english was outstanding as was his knowledge of the area and it's history. He reminded me of our guides at desert adventures in Las Vegas who do a great job for us day in and out.

Our driver Tony and guide Lee took us to Angkor Wat first. The temple was originally built in the 12th century as a hindu temple, it's now Buddhist with two monasteries. It took hours to go through the temple as it's very large. Our guide explained the stories that were carved into the stone walls of the temple, mostly of battles fought and folklore. One wall was about the sea of milk story of hindu creation.

Much restoration work is in progress, some of the damage was from natural causes such as water, other damage, bullet holes and artillery hits, were obviously man made. The blocks of stone are quite large and heavy so the work must be very difficult as building the place must have been in the 12th century. Holes were drilled into the blocks to insert pieces of wood so that elephants could drag them from the quarry from a quarry 40 km from the northeast. More info on the history and construction can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angkor_Wat

We visited another temple that was used for the filming of tomb raider, had lunch then visited Angkor Thom, the big city. There were once a million people living within the 3 km square area. 

The temple we visited there is called bayon. It was very beautiful with many stone buddha faces all over the building. It was later converted into a hindu temple and many of the buddha images were destroyed or converted to hindu gods. It's interesting that the large faces remained mostly intact.

We took the next morning off and spent lunchtime at the Angkor Museum. The museum was well done and worth a couple of hours to see the all the great art work and displays on the history of the area.

Diving in Thailand

We traveled to koh phangan island in the gulf of siam, thailand to do some diving. My wife Pam is a new diver, I haven't done much diving since high school in the 1970's so we were looking for an easy but interesting place to dive.

We flew United Airlines from Las Vegas to Bangkok via San Francisco and Tokyo. The new business class bed seats are pretty awesome slept well on the flights. From Bangkok to Ko Samui on Bangkok Airways then a ferry to Ko Phangan. There are two ferries that run to the island, a normal one that leaves from a dock near the airport and a faster catamaran ferry that is a little longer bus ride to the dock. We took the normal boat to the island and the catamaran back. The cat was considerably faster but the longer bus ride made the travel time to the airport about the same.

Our first dive was at Ko Tao, the island just north of Phangan. We took the normal ferry and ended up diving off the big boat as it's used as a dive boat before it's next run to the South. There were many divers and even more snorkelers but our small group of 5 including instructor Don Dunlop were able to find an area we could explore without too many divers. I was amazed that the coral in Thailand seemed darker and more intricate than the ones in Hawaii. There are also many large sea anemone with clown fish living within.

Our next three days of diving was at Sailrock. We kept going back in hopes of seeing a whale shark. There seemed to be millions of fish, so many that you couldn't see the some of the other divers in the area through them. One of the videos that Don shot of our dives is at http://www.youtube.com/user/lightwatertv#p/a/u/2/i5RFLBYXI1E

Some of the fish that we observed were groupers, lion fish, clown fish, and barracudas. One barracuda looked like it was 2 meters long, the groupers were very large as well. Don is a great instructor with photography as well as diving and I learned much about shooting pictures underwater from him.

In the future, we would like to dive the nearby national park and the areas out of Phuket.

Ko Phangan's north end is very quiet and a great place to relax, the hotels and beaches are very nice, we would like to go back again.

Tourist?

Our friend Lynda who is working with the Peace Corps in Thailand said that were "doing the tourist thing". I replied that we are tourists, so we booked an all day tour yesterday on Ko Phangan island in the Gulf of Siam.

Pam got to drive me around on an elephant. It was amazing that such a large powerful animal can be so gentle. The elephant walked up to me and I hugged his trunk as suggested by the Mahat (elephant trainer). Pam rode on the neck of our elephant, named Zoe, with me in the seat on her back. She seemed very hungry as she wanted to stop and eat quite often.

When we were done, Pam fed an elephant a basket of bananas, they were eaten very quickly.

We also rented a pair of scooters rode around and went snorkeling. It's good to be able to get away from all we have going on at home. The hotel that we stayed at was on Salad Beach called Salad Hut. It's a great place, we had a beautiful air conditioned cabin just steps from the beach. http://www.saladhut.com/

There are a number of nice hotels and restaurants up and down the beach. We had dined at most of the places over nine days and enjoyed them all. Our favorite was on the south end of the beach up the hill. Cookies Resort had the best food that we had the entire trip and a great view as well. http://cookiessaladresort.resort.phanganbungalows.com/

Japan

Pam and I got to Japan to spend a day with my uncle. We were lucky enough to get a couple of lay-flat business class seats on the united 747-400 from sfo to nrt. Almost no turbulence for the entire flight, late summer and fall is a nice time to fly.

My uncle, who is a retired electrical construction company owner, picked us up at narita baggage claim and took us to a hotel in Itaka, Japan. The hotel was the itaka hotel and on a river in a rice farming area north of narita. We rode a boat on the river and soaked at the hotel bathhouse.

The next day we toured the large standing budahh near narita and a very nice shinto shrine not too far away from the hotel.

We took the 6:30 p.m. united flight to Bangkok and checked into the queens garden hotel near the airport for the night.

San Francisco to Tokyo

We're at San Francisco airport trying to fly space available to Tokyo. As airline employees that like to travel, we sometimes get stuck at an airport when the airplane is full. After factoring in extra nights at a hotel, it's sometimes cheaper to buy a full fare ticket. An advantage of space available is that you can change your mind about where and when you want to go. On this trip we are probably returning through Hong Kong instead of Tokyo but that may change if the flights out of hkg look like they're filling up.

We took the 6 a.m. flight out of Las Vegas giving us 4 hours between flights at sfo. We chose to take the early flight as the later flights didn't have as many open seats.

This three week trip will hopefully take us to Tokyo, Bangkok, Ko Phangan (island in the gulf of siam), Siem Reap (Angkor Wat, Cambodia), and Hong Kong before returning to Boulder City, Nevada.

The above shot is of a B777 parked at sfo scheduled to fly to Beijing.

Sandy Nelson and the Sin City Termites

I've had the pleasure of getting to know our neighbor Sandy Nelson who is known for creating 'let there be drums' made popular in the 1960's. He's really fun as he has a great sense of humor and an interesting take on life.

Sandy's latest project is called Sandy Nelson and the Sin City Termites. We have posted a youtube video with the first track of his new album as the sound track.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4URuE_iSX74

Snorkeling Maui

Airline layovers are usually not long enough to allow scuba diving so it's been snorkeling on the Maui and Kona layovers. My friend Matt Ragan also of Boulder City and a pilot was vacationing on Maui with family, joined me one morning in the water near the makena boat ramp where a lot of kayak trips start.

We found a rocky cove with public access just north of the point near the boat launching area. Swam out to the five caves turtle town reefs that are popular with tourists. We only spotted one turtle but there were lots of fish, most interesting was a snowflake eel and barracuda.

I later read that if we wanted to see a shark this would be a good place. We didn't see any sharks, maybe next time.

Snorkeling in Hawaii

Hawaii is a great place to snorkel and I've been going out every chance I get. Last week near Kona we spotted a dozen or so sea turtles (honu in Hawaiian) while snorkeling. The local kayak operator wouldn't rent us kayaks due to the offshore winds so we swam out and had a great time anyway.

Grand Canyon West

This Saturday was the 21st anniversary of the opening of Grand Canyon West, the Hualapai Tribe's Grand Canyon viewing area on the west rim. My wife Pam who does some work with the Hualapai Tribe was invited to celebrate with them and I was allowed to tag along. It was an honor for us to join them in this celebration of a very spectacular and popular part of the Grand Canyon.

Pam's co-workers drove a company vehicle for two and a half hours to get to Grand Canyon West, we flew the super cub. Although the cub is one of the slowest airplanes ever built, it only took 36 minutes from Boulder City. The airport is very nice with a long paved runway and a cut out in the special use airspace.

A new road to west rim is being built and should shorten the drive considerably. It's worth the drive as the view from the rim is known worldwide for being incredible. We went out on the skywalk and had pictures taken sitting on the glass. If you have a problem with heights, there's steel below the glass on either side that we noticed a number of people walking over. We were happy to walk on the glass as it's very thick and looked safe.

A number of other tribes from around the country came to celebrate with them, some of them were dancers in full traditional costumes. Some of the dancing was very athletic and we enjoyed seeing them perform.

MDA

Just finished a stint in the mda lockup, didn't make bail but got more than halfway there. I'm a bit hoarse after running a full battery down on my mobile phone.

As someone that feels less than comfortable asking people for money, my thinking changed after meeting two youngsters that have muscular dystrophy, strength was developed to start calling for donations. Both are named Josh and were very pleasant to be with.

The worst physical problem for me is some back pain, after today no more whining about it. It would be tough to be in a body that doesn't cooperate with what we want.

Got a lot of small donations that were very generous considering the current economic climate.

The following link is to the donation page:  https://joinmda.org/2009bouldercity/lasjim

Cold in Omaha

It's winter in Omaha, Nebraska I'm visiting family for the holidays before going back to work in San Francisco the 26th. It's been very cold here, well below zero F, with lots of snow. It's fun learning how to drive in the snow and ice again. It would be great to be assigned a Hawaii trip on the 26th after freezing in the midwest this week.

I've put together a video of a sailplane flight this summer that took me from Tonopah, Nevada up the Monitor Valley, to Wheeler Peak, to Mt. Jefferson, Boundary Peak, then back to Tonopah Airport. If I had thought about the Utah boundary being so near Wheeler Peak, would have flown a little farther east so that the flight would have been over three states crossing Nevada twice. The lift was awesome that day, cloud base very high, although I've had longer flights, it was one of the most fun trips of my gliding life.

Kayaking in Black Canyon, Colorado River below Hoover Dam

The first image was taken at Boy Scout Canyon, Nevada on the Colorado River a couple of miles below Hoover Dam. The second image is at a nice camping beach near mile marker 60 a few miles below Hoover Dam.

In the winter, when the gliding is not very good, we paddle our kayaks and go on camping trips often to the hot springs on the Colorado River below Hoover Dam. The hot springs are really nice in the cool winter air and not too far from Las Vegas. Although I guide trips for Desert Adventures most anytime, our personal trips into Black Canyon are in the winter.

The Colorado River is great this time of year as there are three sets of useable hot springs within a few miles below Hoover Dam. You can easily hike to two of the hot springs, Boy Scout Canyon is most easily accessed by boat. This section of the Colorado River is an easy paddle as it's mostly flat water, many new paddlers make the 11 mile trip to Willow Beach, Arizona from Hoover Dam almost everyday. It's also a popular trip with boy scouts in canoes.

Launching from Willow Beach doesn't require a permit but if you want to paddle downstream you need a permit to launch from Hoover Dam. You can get one by calling Desert Adventures at 702-510-4746, www.kayaklasvegas.com  or email at info@kayaklasvegas.com

There is a limit of 45 boats per day at the Hoover Dam launch site and Saturdays usually sell out sometimes 6 months in advance as the park service only books permits 6 month into the future. The $13 fee isn't refundable but the day can be changed if done before the trip date.

Paddling upstream is possible and regularly done, it can be a long paddle if they're letting a lot of water out of Hoover Dam. The good news is that there are numerous places to take a break and or camp and you don't have to do the 8 miles in one day.

Soaring the Great Basin ASH26E Video

I'm in Hawaii getting ready to fly to Denver, Colorado tonight. Walked the beach for a while, tried to go paddle an outrigger but after waiting for over an hour there were no other customers so returned to the hotel to get some rest before going to work. They offered to round up some friends to go paddling but I didn't want to put them through the trouble. People in Hawaii are great.

Walking in the warm air here made me think of last summer in the great basin. So here's a short video of flying the ASH26E out of Tonopah. The clouds last summer were really high as they looked well above when leveling out at 17,000 feet to cruise.