Recreation

We’re pleased to share with the wired world our favorite “mountain” bike trail ride in Camp Sherman, Oregon (it’s almost totally flat, which is the way we like our “mountain” biking, better termed off-road biking)). Since we haven’t seen this ride described elsewhere, this seems to give us the right to name it. I briefly considered something close to my heart, like Brian’s Trail, but I’d rather save my fifteen minutes of naming fame for something more dramatic, like a heretofore undiscovered chemical element (Brianhinesium, I like the sound of it.) So I’m calling this the Camp Sherman Creeks and…

Here’s a recipe for a fun time. (1) Fly to Oakland on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend starts. (2) Rent a car at the airport and get on the freeway in the middle of the afternoon, just as every single person who works in the East Bay decides to take off work a few hours early and get a head start on the holiday. (3) For maximum enjoyment, head to Petaluma, as this way you will get to fully experience, in excruciating slow vehicle motion, what happens when three lanes of holiday traffic on 580W merge into one lane…

You paid good money for a full-sized SUV or, as in our case, a station wagon. You need to make use of it! Fill it up! Learn to pack heavy for a weekend trip! Hey, gasoline is over $2 a gallon. If your rig is almost empty you’re going to burn almost as much expensive irreplaceable fossil fuel as if it were full. So why not load it up with as much stuff as possible? (click to enlarge) This is our packing philosophy, as evidenced by this photo I took just before we left for Camp Sherman yesterday afternoon. You…

Albeit with a five-day delay, for Laurel and me our migration from Maui to the Metolius river in central Oregon has been like leaping from the sultriness of a Swedish sauna into a bracing pool of cold water. Invigorating, for sure. When we woke up Monday morning it was 75 degrees outside; this morning it was 35. Driving over the Santiam pass yesterday there was quite a bit of snow on the ground, as there is on the upper reaches of Black Butte near us in Camp Sherman—quite a change from the sands of Napili Bay beach. But the cabin…

click photos to enlarge How we spent much of our time in Lahaina A professional shopper knows how to perfectly match T-shirt and cap Beautiful Maui maiden under the Lahaina banyan tree Brian waiting for waves (today, the wait never ended) Laurel and some close friends Maui sunset, our last day here (boo-hoo! but our dog soon will be freed from the kennel, hooray!)

Here’s the bad news: rain, and lots of it. click to enlarge Naturally we’re familiar with Oregon rain. Tropical rain is different. It comes in waves, like the ocean. You think the rain is over, then, swoosh, it’s back, raining harder than you thought rain could rain. Here’s the good news (for Laurel, at least): rain, and lots of it. We already were planning to go to Kihei and Wailea to shop today. The weather here in Napili caused us to leave earlier than we otherwise would have, which added an hour or two to Laurel’s shopping time. I say…

Not infrequently before we left home, when we mentioned to someone that we were about to go to Maui, they would reply in a mildly sarcastic tone of voice, “Gee, that’s too bad; what a rough life.” Well, it is. Sort of. Maybe not exactly rough, but certainly not surfboard smooth either. Consider some of what we have to put up with here on Maui: (1) At some point every day, usually while we’re lying on the beach in the afternoon, we have to decide where to go out to dinner that evening. This takes a lot of thought since…

Actually, I didn’t even know that I had a washing machine fantasy in me. But if there is any truth to the adage, “we create our own reality,” on some karmic level I must have wanted to experience life on the inside of a washing machine. I’m too large to fit into a real washing machine, so the Cosmic Wish Fulfiller substituted what I learned today is called a “barrel” wave. (I learned this by overhearing some local kids out boarding next to me say, “Man, I’ve never been thrashed in such a big barrel before.”) Most people have heard…

Today Laurel and I played out our prehistorically-determined sex roles, not in the bedroom, but in the shops of Lahaina and the waters of Napili Bay. Evolutionary psychology tells us that deeply engrained in the female and male psyche are traits accumulated over hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years of genetic experience in Homo sapiens and prior species forms. Laurel is the quintessential gatherer, finely attuned to the shapes, colors, and textures of what is hanging in the (many, many) stores we entered this evening. I tag along a humble three steps behind, well aware that I am…

Only on Maui could we see eight, count ‘em, eight, weddings on one beach, all at one time. Well, almost at one time. At least four or five, I think, were happening simultaneously, while others were on deck. It was quite a scene, like something out of a Fellini film. We had gone to snorkel at Kapalua, the next beach up from Napili Bay. Kapalua regularly makes it on “10 Best” lists of U.S.A. beautiful beaches. Picture perfect (aside from the recently built expensive condos behind the center of the beach, which used to be grass and palm trees), a…

click to enlarge It’s hard to write about waves without sounding all New Agey or surfer-spiritual: “Hey, man, waves are God’s way of saying ‘I’m here; all you need to do in tune in to me; find the right spot, catch me, and become one with me. It’s so far out!” Unfortunately, I have a feeling that this is just the way I’m about to sound. The photo shows Napili Bay this morning when the surf was kind of up. I took it from our balcony as I was trying to decide whether it was more important to meditate for…

No, not us. The couple I’m watching right now from the deck on our condo at Napili Shores Resort that faces beautiful Napili Bay. The sun has just set and the wedding, on a sandy spit facing Molokai, is winding down. Soon the sounds of a conch shell will echo over the bay from the Napili Kai Beach Club, where every evening at sunset an authentic-looking Hawaiian guy runs around with a torch and fires up the Tiki lights around the resort, pausing at the end for photos with happy tourists like us. We’ve been to Maui thirteen times, I…

Thanks to Randy Smith for sending me a link to a New York Times online story that is exactly what Laurel and I feel central Oregon doesn’t need right now: a glowing description in a widely read national newspaper of the Sisters/Camp Sherman area. We love our (shared) cabin on national forest land bordering the Metolius river in Camp Sherman. We also love going to Sisters, about fifteen miles away, whenever we visit the cabin. About the only thing we don’t love about the area is how fast central Oregon is growing. So hopefully readers of the New York Times…

Wow, it’s been a pretty exciting day here in Central Oregon! We just got back from a trip to Bend and Sunriver in which we visited a Costco store! Yes, it isn’t politically correct to admit this, since Costco is one those giant “big box” stores that squeezes out local competition, but we love Costco. It’s so full of surprises. We went in with the single-minded intention to buy some supplies for the Camp Sherman cabin, and as soon as we passed through the door we were sidetracked by the giant display of men’s and women’s winter jackets. A men’s…

I always feel guilty when a week or more goes by between HinesSight postings. So it is time for Camp Sherman catch-up, now that we’re ensconced in a quiet cabin in Central Oregon for a few days with no TV to watch. I emphasize those words to demonstrate our Thoreauian commitment to natural simplicity—though actually it is less a commitment than necessity, since television signals can’t make it through the trees and Black Butte to the cabin, and neither cable TV nor cellular service has found its way to Camp Sherman yet (for which we’re grateful, really, except on Saturday…

Yesterday we learned that an “easy” hiking trail can be decidedly not-so-easy for mountain bikers, especially when the bikers in question (namely, us) are more accurately termed “Mini-Mountain bikers.” That is, we like to ride on big-tired, rear-suspensioned, mucho-geared bicycles, but we prefer to skip the mountains that these bikes are, judging by their name, intended to be rode on by those who are less attached to life and limb than we are. However, we wish to emphasize that the Deschutes River Trail (from the Meadow Picnic Area to Dillon Falls) is beautiful and well worth traversing, by which we…