Randy Wayne White books, Mocha Joe trans woes, Rochester-area bike trip, ‘History Lessons’

(posted from home)
(This post covers 3-10 June)

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Sunday, 10 June-

Today I blogged the morning away while Labashi continued with her painting in the foyer. After lunch we drove to Millersburg University to see a play. This one was a staged reading of ‘History Lessons’ by Eton Churchill and we enjoyed it very much. Afterwards we drove into Lancaster to ‘Gibraltar’, an upscale restaurant. Prices were very high and we weren’t all that hungry so we had appetizers (Labashi had foie-gras and I had the lobster ceviche) and then shared a glass of tawny port for dessert. We watched a little television that evening and I finished up my blog entry for the week.

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Saturday, 9 June –

This morning Orat and I drove over to the local airport where he’s building an airplane. He built one years ago but this one is a high-performance all-metal craft with a 180-horse Lycoming engine and a constant-speed prop. Incredible.
At the hanger we met Orat’s flying buddy who was working on a RANS-12 ultralight belonging to a friend. I loved seeing all the planes these guys have… an old Tri-pacer converted to a tail-dragger, a motorglider, an all-metal little homebuilt powered by half of a Volkswagen engine, and two Airbikes.
Afterwards we had lunch at a burger joint before I jumped on the bike for my ride home. This one turned out to be one of my best rides ever. For some reason the roads were nearly empty, the weather was perfect, and the mountains were clothed in new foliage. I’ll remember that one for a long time.

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Friday, 8 June -

Today was a very hot one in the Rochester area. My brother and I chatted for awhile and then drove over to the local library to check out an art-photography exhibit which had some photos submitted by his flying buddy. Afterwards we lunched at a gourmet pizza and sandwiches shop before he had to go off to work and I read and watched an hour of TV. That evening I went off to dinner at a very nice Italian restaurant with my sister in law, niece, the two kids and a family friend. Afterwards we returned to my niece’s apartment. The kids and I played in the Little Tykes kitchen cooking up a nice pot of water soup and frying a heapin’ helpin’ of water in the fry-pan. Both were delicious… at least in our highly-active imaginations. That night was also a good sleeper.

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Thursday, 7 June -

Today I decided to take a motorcycle ride up to my other-brother’s home in the Rochester suburbs. I called my brother (Orat) to invite myself up to visit and headed out by mid-morning. I took a break at the new Williamsport Starbucks and then headed for Hammondsport, NY and the Glenn Curtiss Museum. I greatly enjoyed my tour of the Curtiss museum’s motorcycles, classic boats, flying boats, and airplanes. But my favorite item was the Aerocar. Curtiss built one of the first RVs, an aerodynamic camping trailer. It’s a fifth-wheel-style trailer with all the amenities and looks like a train car. It has the high-mounted drop-down bunks of a train sleeper car. Here’s a good link: http://www.rvhotlinecanada.com/history/hindleys.htm.
I left the museum about 17:00 and rode up the east side of Keuka Lake and on to Seneca Lake and Geneva before turning west. I don’t normally come this way and it was a wonderful detour. The roads were almost empty and with the evening light and long lake views the ride was spectacular. I then headed west to Canandaigua and stopped for supper at the best pizza shop in the region (which my brother happens to own) for pizza and wings with the family. We then moved on to my brother’s house for an evening of kid-fun. I soon found myself tricked into an extended game of ‘let’s feed the (rocking) horsie’ by my three-year grand-niece. That went on for-EVER (but was a lot of fun). We then set up the Little Tykes indoor train for the kids to ride around and around and around, then fight a little, then ride around and around and around again. Those little guys wore me out and I slept very well that night.

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Wednesday, 6 June –

This morning we dropped off Mocha Joe for a transmission oil change before our next trip. Unfortunately, I received a call an hour later to tell me the tech had found a large amount of ‘brass’ in the oil pan and filter, a sure sign of a failing transmission. I suspected the van might have problems an oil-change wouldn’t fix but I thought it worthwhile to do the oil change and see if the shifting-into-gear problems went away. The problem only happens occasionally and only on the first shift-into-gear of the day then. But the intervals between occurrences have been getting shorter and any failure to shift into gear can’t be good. The fix will set us back $1800. I have no real choice but to go through with it. Replacing the van is out of the question (try looking for a high-top window van!) and that will be an extended process when I finally have to do it. It looks like I’ll have to do the same thing the previous owner of Mocha Joe did— have a top custom-installed. I have found a source for the ‘right’ fiberglass top and can get it drop-shipped to the installer—I just don’t have the new van or the installer! In my less-lucid moments I’ve considered trying to install it myself but so far I’ve come to my senses and decided I’d better leave that to the pros.
We received the bad news about the transmission while at the AAA picking up maps and travel books for the next trip. We then drove over to Gung Ho Bikes to test bicycle seats. I finally found a bike shop that will take the time to install whatever seats we want to try and let us ride them around the parking lot and down the street and back. We had one of our little folding bikes along and tried four seats before finding replacement seats we think will work for us. That evening I returned to Gung Ho to pick up my road bike (I had left it for service last week). I bought a new seat for it too since the old gel seat had solidified. Back home I tried out the road bike down on the creek road. Boy, it has been awhile. I’m going to have to work up to this.

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Tuesday, 5 June -

This morning I rode the Concours up to the dentist’s office for the first of two appointments for a new crown to repair a broken tooth. The break had extended below the gum line so I had to have a ‘crown extension’ process done by my periodontist. I’m one of his favorite customers. That afternoon I mowed the lawn in the day’s heat and took a good ole-fashioned sweat-bath.

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Monday, 4 June –

Today Labashi started painting the foyer walls. My part in this little adventure is ladder placement (which is a lot more complicated than it sounds!). Between the challenges and terrors of ladder placement, I finally got around to cleaning out and organizing my bedside shelving and my two-year-old ‘temporary’ storage around my reading chair. Ahh— MUCH better!

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Sunday, 3 June –

This morning I wrote my blog update while Labashi painted the living room and dining room ceilings. We then drove in to the Olive Garden for a mid-afternoon late-lunch/early supper. We like to get a table with the comfortable rolling chairs (rather than a booth) and some wine and then stretch out the meal for most of the afternoon. Today we tried the smoked-cheese fonduta appetizer and loved it. On the way home we stopped at Borders. I picked up three more Randy Wayne White books (‘Sanibel Flats’, ‘Ten Thousand Islands’, and ‘The Man Who Invented Florida’). Since our return from Florida in April I’ve read ‘Everglades’, ‘Dark Light’, ‘Twelve Mile Limit’, ‘Shark River’, and ‘The Mangrove Coast’. I can’t get enough of these books. They remind me a lot of the classic Travis McGee series written by John D. MacDonald and are of the same ‘classy trash’ genre (I prefer to call them ‘guilty pleasures’). See http://home.earthlink.net/~rufener/ for an intro to McGee if you aren’t already a fan).
Randy Wayne White is an interesting guy. I first read his non-fiction work years ago in Outside Magazine and liked his style. Silly me, I didn’t even know he was writing fiction until I came upon ‘Dark Light’ in a grocery store. When I mentioned it to my St. Pete friend, I found he is a big RWW fan. He lent me four books to take along home and I’ve been hooked ever since. Here’s more info: http://rwwhite.com/.
If I were Doc Ford (the protagonist of the series), my logical mind would try to understand why I like these guilty pleasures. A factor that’s way up there for me is the recognition of Florida places and history. Shortly after returning home from a month and a half bumming around the Everglades I read ‘Everglades’ and could vividly see in my mind’s eye every little detail of sight, sound, smell, and feeling of the locale. Secondly, I like the mixing in of the unconventional or unexpected. Doc Ford uses wrestling concepts (not the ‘pro’ fake-wrestling crap, we’re talking here about the real thing) when he inevitably finds himself in an up-close-and-personal confrontation with the bad guys. And he and Meyer, err, I mean Tomlinson are, of all things, amateur baseball players (Tomlinson is the foil to Doc Ford as Meyer was to Travis McGee).
I’m also fascinated by the craft of Mr. White’s work. I like to see the changes in character, the development of ideas. I’m also intrigued by the mistakes in the book. In ‘Ten Thousand Islands’ Doc Ford’s flats-skiff ‘dropped down off plain’ as it approached Ronrico Key. Obviously it dropped down off plane (as in ‘planing’ atop the water). In ‘Sanibel Flats’ one woman is ‘sole-eyed’ which I’m sure is supposed to be ‘sloe-eyed’, a term he uses in (I think) ‘Ten Thousand Islands’ (and ‘sole-eyed’ makes no sense). I didn’t collect examples from the other novels I’ve read but I’ve noticed many more mistakes than I’m used to. What’s happening here? Are the editors at Putnam’s and Penguin Group becoming too dependent on spell-checkers? Mistakes like ‘sole’ versus ‘sloe’ are typos but not ‘plain’ versus ‘plane’. The editor who okayed that shouldn’t be editing books with boating terms in them. But how did that mistake get started?
The more I think about the mistakes, though, the more I like them. They somehow make the books more the labor of one (occasionally-flawed) person than a product of the well-polished machine of a big publishing house.