Too much shooting, not enough blogging

Hi again! Apologies for kind of abandoning you patient few readers of our humble travelblog. We barely had enough time to cover the enormous ground we set out to cover, take photos, sleep, and eat. Blogging and uploading images simply fell by the wayside. I actually did write a post Sunday night, and I though it was sent, but it looks like it never made it. Oops!

Anyway, we are back in Seattle now, having arrived home from our whirlwind excursion around 2 AM today, PST. After Ashland, we headed down I-5 with brief stops in Clearlake, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Reno, Mount Shasta, and points in between. We’re just now becoming reacquainted with our kith and kin as well as getting used to staying in one place for longer than 15 minutes at a time. Photos and audio will be reviewed, compiled, flickred, flashed, and distributed widely over the next couple of days.

Thanks for staying tuned!

Update: As soon as I posted this in my sleep-deprived haze, I realized my Sunday evening post was saved in draft form. So I posted it just now. Hooray for smart blogging services!

Can’t talk – shooting, driving, and searching for vegan food

It’s a glorious morning magic hour in the heart of San Francisco!

Apologies for the sparse posting. We’ve been a wee bit busy driving, making photos, and hunting for vegan-approved food in some solidly animal-eating towns for comrade Ben. To give you a taste, we stopped for gas and sundries somewhere between Weed (tee hee), CA and Redding, and the gent behind the counter was wearing a PETA t-shirt: People for the Eating of Tasty Animals. The estab also featured a collection of NRA-approved bumper stickers with slogans like “Guns Cause Crime Like Spoons Mad Rosie O’Donnell Fat.” Nice!

Sunday, we spent some time hunting for coffee and shooting in Yreka and Weed (tee hee), a couple hours around the Shasta Lake & Dam area, and caught evening dusk just east of Clearlake before beelining it through Sonoma and Marin crossing the Golden Gate Bridge and winding our way into the city. We grabbed a late meal at a 24 hour diner (Sparky’s, for the curious) that catered equally to eaters of every stripe.

Today, we are rising early and heading to the ocean – here in SF, then down to Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz. It gets a little murky after that, but we’ll try to keep you in the loop.

Hopefully soon we’ll attach some visuals to these words, but it’s been such a whirlwind, it’s been hard to make the time. Most of our shots will have to be shown after we return home.

Ciao bellas!

Makin’ time

We 3 fired fotoids have landed safely in literary Ashland, OR at the lavish Hotel de Super 8. We’re punchy, giggly, and ready to snore away a few hours before resurfacing at dawn’s crack to capture some morning magic hour light.

Today was mostly about hauling asses southwards on the I-5 free way.  But we did manage to connect with a lovely young lady headed up from Reno to Olympia. She was playing toss-the-water-bottle with her clever young mongrel doggy in the field next to the Shell station in Winlock, WA. (photos coming soon)

Our next diversion was a techno-pitstop at the Portland Fry’s where we bought extra compact flash cards and the one and only package of blank audio cassettes in the entire massive store. I’m not sure if I’m more surprised that they are so hard to find now, or that you can still buy them at all.

As sunset fell, we pulled into Eugene, borrowed some wi-fi from a nearby motel for some googly research, and ended up enjoying vegan Chinese eats at the Lotus Garden. I recommend the Kung Pao Brown Slices. Spicetastical!

From there, it was a straight shot through the dark of night to Ashland. We passed the miles with deep conversations about supervolcanoes, some 70′s glam rock music, free-association name games, and a few filthy jokes.

Pictures and audio will be start arriving come morning. Til then, Zzzzzzzzzzz.

Off we go!

Once upon a time, there was an Internet startup company full of ambitious young folk who toiled mightily from dawn to dusk, built some cool stuff, made some customers happy, and generally basked in the delight of each other’s company each working day.

Then one fine day, as all us little dot-comsters were diligently dot-comstering away, a vintage 1965 Chevrolet Caprice pulled up to the tastefully appointed, bayfront headquarters of this unsuspecting little company-that-could. The driver’s door opened, and to the shock of us all, out emerged the undead zombie that was once 18th century Scottish economist Adam Smith.

Faces went ashen as the banshee pioneer of capitalist philosophy roared a mighty Highland battle cry, lifted his right arm, and revealed a mallet large enough to bludgeon at least 60 seasoned high tech professionals in one swipe. Shock turned to horror when the shivering throng realized that though the mallet was poised on the end of a rotting arm, the hand that held it could not be seen. We all knew then that the weapon in Smith’s Invisible Hand of the Market would squash forever our dreams of elegant web 2.0 solutions, well-exercised stock options, killer 360-degree views of Elliott Bay, and summertime barbecues on the deck overlooking the new Seattle Art Museum Sculpture Garden.

Kinda sucked.

But life goes on. Energies are rechanneled. Creativity refuses to be bottled up.

Which brings us to this humble space.

We are 3 newly-laid-offsters. We also happen to be 3 photographers. We have at least 3 cameras. And we have 3 days to spare. Add a 2004 sunset orange Honda Element, a couple of wi-fi enabled laptops, and a lo-fi audio cassette recorder to the mix, and we’ve got ourselves a whirlwind documentable roadtrip on our hands.

This is where we will be writing our real-time stories as they unfold. We’re not entirely sure where we are going, or what we will see, or how long it will take before we are at each other’s throats, but if you tune into our RSS feed, you may see something interesting. Or it could be deathly dull. Who knows? Our only constraint is we have to be back in Seattle by Tuesday afternoon.

We hit the road in less than an hour! See you back here again soon!