In Search of the Third Reich, II

Checkpoint Charlie and other Roadside Attractions

BERLIN, Oct. 19-20--If Wilson is going to exercise his role as a One World Futbol, then in my opinion, he should see a little bit of the world. So I brought him along this week when I flew to Nuremberg to see my son and his wife. A few days ago you heard a bit about Nuremberg, and in a few days I'll have more to share. But for now I'd like to share some of the experiences we had while touring the point where East met West over the barrel of some guns. Seventy-five years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the reality of that war is still a presence in Germany, both in the form of entertainment, and in somber reflection. The  photos that follow tell only a very tiny part of the story.

One small part of the story occurred in Dresden, enroute to Berlin. Dresden was arguably the most beautiful city in Germany, until it was firebombed late in the war, and for other than military reasons. The incendiary bombs dropped on that city created firestorms that ate the civilian population alive. The three pictures below give only a hint of what was lost.

This ornate building complex reveals the beauty of the architecture of Dresden.

This is a closer look at the mural in the preceding photograph.

This photo discloses the ornate tile work of that mural, and how lovely the City of Dresden had been.

In Berlin, I, my son, Tracy, and his wife, Shira, stayed at the Angleterra Hotel, and this was the Marquee over the nearest staircase to the underground:

If you don't know what Checkpoint Charlie was, you must be very young.

France, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union shared control of Germany and of Berlin at the close of World War II, and as relationships between the allies soured, Checkpoint  Charlie was the place where America and the Russians stood eyeball-to-eyeball. But nowadays,as Tom Robbins might observe,  it's just Another Roadside Attraction:

You can learn about the neighborhood and buy some trinket at the Checkpoint Charlie museum.

Tourists stand next to actors at the re-created Checkpoint Charlie for a photo-op.

A local eatery capitalizes on name recognition.

If the sun's too bright, or it's rainy, there are plenty of hats for sale.

Things got quiet at night. The actors went home. The tourists thinned out. But there were still lights to illuminate the sign below, reminding anyone who passed by that this was a corner of historic significance:

The English and Russian carry the same message, irrelevant as it now is.

Wilson took advantage of the lighter evening foot traffic to hang around the checkpoint for a while. The sandbags are filled with concrete now; no vandal is likely to purloin one as a souvenir.

McDonald's has a location to die for, but sorry, that war's over. And it's late.

Berlin has many, many monuments, and here is a grab-bag of monument photos, in no particular order of importance, starting with the least important, and yet still evocative:

Attached to a light standard is a reminder that a 45-year-old bicyclist died here.

This large building mural depicts 19-year-old Conrad Schumann, jumping over barbed wire to freedom on Aug. 15, 1961, two days after construction began on the Berlin Wall. Sadly, his flight to freedom did not bring happiness. The secret police pressured his family to encourage him to return. He was reportedly considered a traitor by former associates. 27 years later, Conrad Schumann hanged himself following a family argument.

You can almost be swallowed up in the monoliths of the Jewish memorial.

A "quadriga" steered by Victoria, Goddess of Victory, pulls a chariot atop the Brandenburg Gate.

More than a million bricks were used to build the neo-classical Brandenburg Gate, which is 65 meters wide and 26 high. It opened for traffic in 1791. When the German Empire collapsed in 1918, soldiers of the defeated imperial army returned through the gate.  Fifteen years later, columns of Storm Troopers marched through to celebrate  the Nazi assumption of power. Artillery fire heavily damaged the gate 12 years later during the fall of Berlin, with only one horse's head left intact. It was largely rebuilt in the 1950s with the help of East Berlin specialists.

The wall

A tourist's eyeglasses captures an image of  Leonid Brezhnev smooching Erich Honecker.

Pieces of the Berlin Wall remain, covered with street art and iconic images. In the photo below, Conrad Schumann once again makes his leap for freedom; the communist leaders of the USSR and East Germany embrace in a passionless kiss, and an East German, head down, slips under the barrier bar in his Trabant, the most common vehicle in East Germany. Note the flying roof, torn off by the undisturbed bar; the Trabant was not known as an imposing vehicle.

More than art was left on sections of the wall. This one became a depository for chewing gum.

The DDR museum

There is a museum for the wonders of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Products and aspirations of the people's paradise are on display, as well as an interrogation room and a prison cell, the likes of which was experienced by some 250,000 East Germans.

Visitors have an opportunity to drive a Trebant in a simulator.

Luxury products -- producded to drain off excess cash caused by the shortage of consumer goods.

Wilson peeked through a heavy door at a prison cell where enemies of the state could spend many thoughtful hours in reflection.

Wilson and I consulted each other on what crimes we might want to confess to.

A mural on a wall in what was East Berlin speaks for itself.

The Soviet Memorial

According to literature at the memorial, 22,000 Soviet soldiers died taking Berlin.

The story of the USSR's suffering and response is told in several murals at the enormous memorial.

A soldier kneels with his machine gun.

The imposing entry to the Soviet Memorial.

Memories of The War are everywhere in Berlin, And occasionally, you see an image like the one below, which was photographed stuck on a wall of a subway car. The message: Resist Nazism!

You wonder. Why is that last image still necessary?

Love,

Robert,
and Wilson.

In search of the Third Reich

SOMEWHERE IN GERMANY, Oct. 17--

Wilson, here. For the past 24 hours I've been confined in a dark, suffocating container with no light. I was stuffed into a very confining tote bag and then placed into that container, pressed from all directions without room to move.  It was like being in a cattle car, except I was alone. The last time I was aware of daylight, I was in Seattle. Then I was packed and jostled and had a sense of moving, very fast.

 
If I had ears, I think they would have popped at times. I heard a great whine, and then a constant dull roar that went on for what seemed like hours. Then there was this feelng of floating down, followed by a bump and a thud. After that, I heard voices that sounded like people speaking from the back of their throats.

  When I saw dayight again, the sky was overcast and rainy. The buildings were strange and rocky with sharp angles. Some  of them confined very narrow streets,which were quite bumpy and made lots of noise when cars drove over them. I clearly was in a city, but it is like no city I've ever  seen before. It looked very old, and it had its own castle.

They call it Nuremberg. From what I've been able to gather, it's about the size of Seattle -- 500,000 -- making it the second largest city in an area called Bavaria. And it's been around for quite a while.  According to Wikipedia, it is first mentioned in a document dating to 1050, where there was an imperial castle. Over the next 500 years it expanded and became more important because it was located on key trade routes. It has been referred to as the "unofficial" capital of the Holy Roman Empire. It's also been associated with another empire, one that was supposed to last for 1,000 years, but for many people, it only seemed like 1,000 years.

(By the way, as I draft today's message, the Deutschland seems to have cursed my blog with unwelcome popups on my Internet pages, with confusing messages in a confusing language and with links that I never created inserted directly into text. If you American readers see any strange formattin, it  is wholly the folly of some sort of Teutonic gremlins, metaphorically, the trolls under the bridge that want to make passage difficult. Sorry about them, but I haven't got any inclination to pick a fight with the European Internet. It is what it is.)

I told you there's a castle right inside the city. Here's one view of it from a street near the place I'm staying with Robert and his son and daughter-in-law:

Here's another striking building just over a waterway

And check out how the stone masons seemed to just hang some little alcoves right on the side of this building:

Take a look at that scroll-type image off to the left. Would you believe it? It's actually what they call a sun dial. The shadow cast by that metal rod over the image actually helps you figure out what time it is. There are lots of those in Nuremberg. Check out this one:

And this one looks like a big grinning mouth beneath some windows that look like smiling eyes:

That's kind of playful. Nuremberg looks like it's just full of good natured artisans.  Although some of the food can be uninteresting (a glass of beer in a brewery restaurant was nothing to write home about compared to the beers you get in Seattle), Robert was able to purchase some really fine cheeses last night. But they weren't German. I guess there are some benefits of being located on a trade route.

But there's something about this place that makes me wonder. For instance, look at this playful fountain in the center of the neighborhood where we're staying:  I think it's supposed to tell the story of married life. This first image shows the man and wife and the lovely children:

But by the time you get around to the other side of the fountain, a different story emerges. Talk about rought sex! (Wow! Was it good for you?) And what's that amphibian with teeth all about, anyway?

There's more yet to discover about this city. For example, this piece of stark, angular art is quite a contrast from the buildings behind it. Shades of 2001, A Space Odessey!

And when you take a closer look, you see this engraving in one wall of the art. I don't read German, but there's a word that jumps out at you: deportation.

And then not very many blocks away, there's this sign: Now that's really strange. Why would they have a sign saying "Jew street," when there are almost no Jews in Nuremberg? Almost none. What happened here?

This unofficial seat of the Holy Roman Empire city hasn't always been Jew-friendly. For example, in 1298, according to Wikipedia, , the Jews of the town were accused of having desecrated the host, and 698 of them were killed in one of the many Rintfleisch Massacres. Behind the massacre of 1298 was also the desire to combine the northern and southern parts of the city, which were divided by the Pegnitz river. The Jews of the German lands suffered many massacres during the plague years. In 1349, Nuremberg's Jews were subjected to a pogrom. They were burned at the stake or expelled, and a marketplace was built over the former Jewish quarter. Killing the Jews didn't seem to do much to stop the plague, which returned in  1405, 1435, 1437, 1482, 1494, 1520 and 1534.

Apparently Jews were pretty resilient, because they were still living in Nuremberg as recently as 80 years ago. But now there are almost no Jews left in the city, according to my hosts.

This bears consideration...

Love,

Wilson

and Robert

One child smiling

 One hand clapping

Back in the day when my college friends went oooh and aaaah over silly questions that had no answer, there was this question that was tossed around: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" My reactions fell into the category of "that makes no sense," or "is there some way to do that?" But tonight, when I Googled "one hand clapping" and "images," I inadvertently realized there actually is a sound of one hand clapping.

Here are some images attempting to illustrate the idea... 

or, alternatively, to spoof it:

And strangely, this is the one I found most meaningful:

It suggests that the way to hear the sound of one hand clapping is to listen completely.

One child crying

 It's been more than 40 years ago that I truly heard this particular sound for the first, indelible time. It happened the night my wife took off with a bank robber.

It's not that she left me for him. That particular relationship started years earlier, when she was a fairly new school social worker and I was an Air Force Information Officer. We decided to sponsor Ted, an inmate at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary. We visited Ted monthly and became his bridge back to the free world when he was paroled.

On this night, it was Betty who was being paroled, after a couple of months of being tied down with a newborn. This was her night to get out of the house and leave me alone with the kiddo. So in the era when "cell" meant confinement, rather than communication, she took off for the evening with a heavyweight boxer and reformed bank robber while Tracy was asleep. She was totally unreachable.

After a while he woke up and fussed a little. I picked up the little guy and changed his diapers and rocked him a little. He was this wonderful new toy. It's not that I felt like a father. I don't know what a father is supposed to feel like. I never felt like a father. I never felt like a son, for that matter. I mean, I never spent my childhood thinking, "wow, I'm a son!" We just are. In this kind of relationship, we define ourselves not in terms of ourselves, but in terms of how we view the other. Yeah, I was his dad, but HE was my son! Here was this marvelous creature. And he was starting to cry.

The formuless formula

Must be hungry. I looked around for the formula. Where did she keep it? In the cupboard? No, here it is, in the fridge. 

In this plain package.   Without instructions.

How do you mix it? What do you do with it? I hadn't paid attention to that stuff, but I was paying attention now, because he was hungry, and he was crying, and she was nowhere around.

I rocked him. I held him. He bunched up like a little puppy, his hands beside his face, which was pushing into the depression beneath my collarbone. I think he was instinctively burrowing into the spot where the milk should be, but I had none to give. He whimpered, and shook, and if he had words, they would have been, "please, please, please." But he had no words. Only the whimpers and then the sobs.

The great wind

And then I heard it. It came like a great wind. It blew in from the steppes of Russia and the mountains of Tibet. It flowed from the lowlands of Bangladesh and off the plains of the Serengeti. I could see the mothers in the ghettos and the slums, rocking their children in the dark and unable to feed them because their milk had dried up or there was no food in the cupboard.

I could hear the wail of the babies and the anguish of the mothers. In my son's sobbing whimpers I could hear the whole world's children crying. And I thought, "So this is what it's like. So this is the sound of one child crying." And I swore right then that my son...would never...be hungry...again.

Pat and Dan Kinney's story

 I recently received an e-mail from Pat Kinney, a retired educator. I know her and her husband, Dan, through ballroom dance. Here's what Pat said:

Robert,

We've been following your e-mails and blog about Wilson. We think it is a great idea and have just logged on to donate for two of them. It really hit a soft spot for us, since two years ago Dan and I were in the Amazon River region in Brazil and had walked back up into the very back area of a small village, Alter do Chao.

There was a small group of kids, probably siblings or at least cousins or neighbors, all playing soccer with an old almost completely worn out ball.  The skin pieces of the cover were all flapping off and causing the ball to go in different directions.  We walked back into the town, which only had about two or three stores and found the best ball we could.   It was not a real good soccer ball but the best we could find.  We then took it back up and Dan just tossed it into the group and said, "para ustedes."    The surprise and looks of delight were amazing.   They called a mother out and she smiled big.  We then just walked off but have often thought about that day and the fact that they were playing with that very old completely worn out ball!  We hope the one we were able to find was good enough for soccer and has lasted a long time.   I'm sure it hasn't been as good as Wilson so maybe this organization will find this little village and give them some new ones.

  

I still don't know the sound of one hand clapping. But I think Pat and Dan could possibly describe the sound of one child smiling.

Thanks to them, and to others of you who have supported my project.

In a Darfur refugee camp, the feet of children and a ball of rags.

Love,

Robert,

and Wilson

 

Next post: In Search of the Third Reich

Hiking to Lena Lake

Near Hoodsport, WA--Lena Lake is situated on the Olympic Peninsula. Wilson and I got there via the Bainbridge Island ferry and an overnight in Poulsbo at the unofficial  B&B of Joyce Gorham, a ballroom dancer, kayaker, and hiking enthusiast. The overnight was very reasonable--it only cost a buffet for two at the Clearwater Casino Resort on Saturday night.

On Sunday we all reached the trailhead via the Hamma Hamma Road from Highway 101 south of Quilcene. From the trailhead, Joyce, Wilson and I hiked for six miles round trip, along a very comfortable trail, gaining an elevation of 1,300 feet, before descending to the lake. Ascending from the lake and afterward carrying my 30-pound pack from the ferry terminal to my condo added at least another 300 feet of elevation, so I counted the two-day excursion, as an 1,600-foot elevation gain. The photos below show what's in store for you if you try this hike.

The trail was mostly even, with a consistent, comfortable incline.

Wilson paused to take in the view of the lake.

There are several rustic foot bridges along the trail.

Tall trees do not diminish the feeling of openness.

Do any readers know what kind of fungi this is?

And now for the statistics:
Lena Lake hike:  6 miles
Hike to/from ferry: 2.7 miles
Combined elevation gain: 1,600 feet
Packing: 30-pound pack
Accumulation to date: 67.89 miles, 18,100-foot elevation gain.

Love,
Robert and Wilson

A Walk in the Clouds

Above the clouds of Issaquah, Robert speaks with photographer Tory Watson.(Photo by Roger Matthews)

Poo Poo Point, Tiger Mountain, Issaquah WA--It was a motley crew on the Chirico trail yesterday: Post-partum moms, fliers lugging parasails, dogs, families, Roger, Robert and a professional photographer ascended  above the clouds over Issaquah. At the 1,855-foot elevation of Poo Poo point, while Seattle lay beneath overcast, the people on top had already seen Rainier to the south and now they could spot Mount Baker to the north.

Mount Baker was visible through the haze. (Photo by Roger Matthews)

This will be the last hike that Roger and Robert take together this calendar year. Roger is what you humans call a "snow bird," and he will be spending the colder months in Arizona.

Oh, I should explain--Robert  decided to let me do the postings to this blog. I'm learning backup, so that if anything happens to him, the blog will go on. Since I'm virtually indestructible, not much is going to stop me. But it is kinda hard to type, since I don't have fingers, or even hands. It is what it is, when you are a blue one world futbol. But I'll do my best.

Frustrated by America's most-stolen car: The hike started out about an hour late, because of Roger's humanity. First of all, he had this thing people have to do in little booths they call "honey buckets." And when he came out, he was kind of stern looking, because he realized he had done something else people do occasionally. They put their car keys in their coats and then shut the coat in the trunk of the car while they go spend time in the honey bucket.

Roger's partner showed up a half hour later with the keys, laughing at him for not being able to get into the most stolen car in America -- a Honda accord. While the two men-folk were waiting for the woman to show up they did a little mini-hike to sort of pad the elevation gain statistics.

The hike was kind of dream like. The light that made its way through the overcast made everything seem especially green, almost like a cloud forest. Here's what I'm talking about:

Light on the path to Poo Poo Point was softened by the overcast.

It is moist enough on this trail that ferns sprout right out of the bark of the trees.

Noisemakers: A couple of ladies we met along the way were carrying noisemakers on their bellies. Their belly packs made little murmuring sounds and they wiggled a bit. They also had little pink arms sticking out from them. Robert made some sort of comment to the ladies that it wasn't so long ago that the contents of those belly packs were inside the women. Their hike had something to do with what Robert called post-partum re-conditioning, or something like that.

On the way down we also met people with really big backpacks containing flying equipment. They autographed me and then headed on up to the top. That's our photo, below:


 Janell Davidson, packing her 30-pound kit, and Steven Weltyk, packing 40 pounds.They had hiked the Chirico Trail to Poo Poo Point's parasailing launch site many times.

Finally, at the top of the trail, we came out into daylight. That's Roger in the photos, below:

Roger emerges from the forest cover onto Poo Poo point, where hang gliders launch.

Tory Watson's camera snapped  time-lapse photos of clouds skirting nearby Squak Mountain.

Issaquah peeks up through the clouds.

Robert hitched me to a cyclone fence next to a radio tower to take in the view.

And now for today's stats: Including the mini-hike while we all waited for Roger's car keys, total elevation gained was 2,020 feet from a 3.8-mile hike. That brings our totals to date to:

Thursday's Hike: 3.8 miles
Elevation gained:  2,020 feet
Packing: 13-pound backpack and 20-pound weight vest
Accumulation to date:  59.18 miles, 16,505 vertical feet

Love,
Wilson
(and Robert)

Team Wilson's first Rainier

Uh, I think Team Wilson has met a milestone of sorts. Today I, Roger, and the Indestructible climbed Tiger Mountain South, Just outside of Issaquah and North Bend, WA. In the process, we added more than 1,000 feet of vertical elevation gain to the team's accumulated total, which had been 13,498 feet. That places our accumulated elevation gain beyond Mount Rainier's 14,409-foot elevation above sea level. That qualifies Team Wilson for its first Honorary Rainier, our training metric, pictured below left.

If we acquire four more Rainiers before July 2015, we've met the goal of 70,000 vertical feet ascended prior to the team's climb of Mount Adams.

Not only that, but we have moved from one-tenth of our objective of 100 one world futbols purchased during this campaign to one-eighth. Thirteen balls have been ordered to date.

Thank you for the participation and support.

Today's hike started at a parking lot adjacent to Highway 18 and ended at the summit of Tiger Mountain South, which apparently is an equestrian destination. Much of the trek involved logging roads, but the final ascent took us along a narrow path in which the ground was stirred up by horses that passed through thin brushland to the summit. Fortunately, the horses left nothing for us to step in.

Horse hitching log at heavily-logged summit of Tiger Mountain South.

At the top there were hitching rails, and horseshoes nailed down for the tethering of horses. The horseshoes also helped to tether Wilson, to keep him from wandering and getting lost.

Wilson, in his new tether, rests atop a stump, hitched to a horseshoe.

Here are today's stats:

Distance: 5.98 miles
Duration:   3 hours, 10 minutes.
Starting elevation: 1,449 feet;
Summit: 2,082 feet 
Elevation gained: 1,097
Note: There were places where the trail descended and re-ascended, and those two additional elevation gains amounted to 227 and 237 feet, adding a total of 464 feet to the 633 feet gained at the summit over the starting point.

I should add that in my last blog I challenged the statistics of the Map My Hike phone application because it disagreed with some other sources for elevation gains. However, in examining the image below, I realize that the application is using Google topographical maps, with clearly delineated elevation lines, and these seems to agree with the figures provided by Map My Hike.

Topographical map shows elevation gains for Map My Hike application.

 So until I have reason to believe otherwise, I'm using these figures. But I am also adjusting my elevation gain 10 percent downward from 1,097 to 987 feet gained, for a total elevation gain to date of 14,485 feet.

By the way, if anyone wants to hike with us, Team Wilson operates on the open enrollment principal.

Love,
Robert,
and Wilson

Time, distance, cadence, altitude, dance, a butterfly, Romans, prayers and the 20-minute mile

NORTH BEND, WA, Oct. 1--Until this week,  my record for climbing Little Si from the trailhead to the top was an hour and 15 minutes. After trying to beat this record, I'm reminded of Mark Twain's observation that there are three types of lies:  lies, damn lies, and statistics. Today, I'm having problems with the statistics.


I'm thinking about this because of a phone app I've been relying on to chart my progress to climb 70,000 feet over a 10-month period while I train to climb Mount Adams for my 70th birthday--and raise money for the One World Futbol Project.

Mount Si as seen from Torguson Park. Little Si is tucked against Mount Si on the far left.

 The app is called Map My Hike, and it's supposed to track the distance, time and elevation gained when I'm hiking, and then record that on a Web site. It also estimates calories burned. Now you would think this would be rather straightforward. According to the app, I started at an elevation of 531 feet and ended up at an elevation of 1,423 feet, for a total elevaton gain of 892 feet.

However, Washington Trails Association (WTA) says Little Si is actually 1,550 feet tall, and the elevation gain in the hike is supposed to be 1,300 feet.  But according to Wikipedia, North Bend has an elevation of 440 feet. So if you subtract 440 from 1550, you get 1,110 feet elevation gain. And if you trust Map My Hike's 531 starting elevation,  you end up with only 1019 elevation gain.  So who do you trust?


Oh, and WTA says the hike is 4.7 miles long, while Map My Hike says I hiked only 3.81 miles. This makes my head hurt.

Why 5,280 feet?
 By the way, You can thank the Romans army for the length of a mile.

The Roman's were an organized bunch. They marched in cadence to move fast and stay organized in a tight formation. And they kept count of how many paces they marched. A pace is two steps, and each step was about 2.5 feet. So a pace--two steps--was about five feet. I've tried this; it's pretty accurate.

When the legions had marched 1,000 paces they had covered "mille paccum." That word, "mille", is where we get our word for mile. It's from that same Latin word that we derive the term, "mil," which you probably are familiar with if you pay property taxes. A mil is  the amount of tax per thousand currency units of property value.

A landslide from Mount Si covered part of the Little Si trail.

The 20-minute mile.
On a good day, I can walk the mile to the downtown library in 20 minutes. Since 20 minutes is one third of a mile, I'm walking three miles an hour, which by some authorities, was the universal speed limit until the invention of the internal combustion engine. The Roman soldiers and Napoleon's troops all marched at the same rate, the story goes.

Of course, it depends on who's keeping time.  The British cadence was a little slower, but Napoleon trained his troops to march 120 beats a minute, about the speed of a slow Viennese waltz, for you ballroom dancers. A fast Viennese can be 180 beats a minute, but I don't think anyone wants to do that while they're carrying a musket and provisions.

Napoleon and John Philip Sousa
Anyway, Napoleon's method of moving troops helps explain why Stars and Stripes Forever is performed at 120 beats a minute. The French played an important role in the American revolution and John Philip Sousa, the composer of great American march music, was of German and Portuguese extraction.

"Be kind to your web-footed friends..."
With that in mind, I tried to surpass my record on Little Si by humming Stars and Stripes Forever as I tramped through the woodland, around the boulders and up the inclines of Little Si. Instead of the more familiar parody lyrics for the song, I created my own: ("Oh, be kind to your blue-skinned fut- bol, 'cause he may be somebody's play thing...") As you might guess, I ran out of lyrics pretty quickly.

Wilson makes a fruitless effort to befriend a nervous Zoey Papillon, who greeted us at a switchback.

The hairy butterfly
But my momentum was pretty good, until Wilson spotted Zoey, a furry little  pure-bred Continental Toy Spaniel who greeted us at a switchback. This breed is also called "Papillon." which is French, for butterfly. The  name derives from the long and fringed hair on the breed's ears.  Wilson tried to make friends with Zoey while his mistress held him, but Zoey wanted nothing to do with the Blue Indestructible. He just wanted down.

About that time a couple with a golden retriever came along. The retriever got excited and wanted to play with Wilson, but the trail was steep, and setting Wilson down probably would have resulted in a mad down-slope scramble to get Wilson back. (I've since acquired a tether to keep Wilson from taking off.)

However, the dog's owners decided right away that having an indestructible ball for their pooch to play with was a grand idea, and they said they would be purchasing one. Afterward, I noticed that one more futbol has been purchased in the last couple days, so maybe that retriever is going to have an Indestructible for his own personal amusement.

So I may have made a sale, but I lost my momentum, and fell two minutes behind my former Little Si record.

The One World Futbol takes a break to read some Tibetan Prayer Flags left at the Little Si summit.

At the top of Little Si, I helped Wilson read a set of Tibetan prayer flags someone had strung up between a couple of trees. With each flap of the breeze, the flags apparently send off a prayer somewhere or other. Since The Indestructible is the One World Futbol, I thought a little familiarity with a foreign language might be useful.

The day's outcome: 
According to Map My Hike, my average time was only 1.7 miles per hour, far shorter than the universal pre-industrial revolution speed limit. Of course, if I actually hiked 4.7 miles (WTA statistic), then I was hiking just slightly more than two miles per hour.


However, if I had maintained Napoleonic speed of 120 beats a minute, that would be 60 paces a minute. At five feet per pace and 60 minutes in the hour, I would be traveling 18,000 feet an hour or a blistering 3.4 mph. So I should have done the entire hike in just a little more than an hour. Well, more damn lies and statistics.

Map from my personal page at http://www.mapmyhike.com

I think I'm going to be conservative and claim  I hiked 3.8 miles and gained 1,000 feet in elevation on Wednesday. So, here are my current statistics:

Wednesday's Hike: 3.8 miles
Time: 3 hours
Today's elevation gain: 1,000 feet
Packing: 13-pound backpack
Accumulation to date:  49.4 miles, 13,498 vertical feet

Wow! 13,498 feet. One more good hike and I will have  done a Rainier. (I'll explain what that's about after my next hike.)

If anyone wants to join me on any of these hikes, don't be bashful. E-mail me at dancingpotter@gmail.com.



Love,
Robert,
and Wilson