OK, so April’s big trip was Bangkok, Thailand. Let’s get into it with the giant dumb bulleted list:

• As always, this trip was booked just under a month before I left. No real reason on this one other than the pricing and timing of it, and it was a new country for me. I also liked Vietnam and Cambodia, so this was a logical next step. This would be my 25th country visited.
• Had an overnight red-eye to Taipei, leaving at 12:50am on a Friday. I left for SFO at about 8 at night, after waking up for work at 4am that day. I hoped that would make me black out and get a few hours of sleep. Of course that didn’t really work out.
• I paid too much for an upgrade to premium economy for the 14-hour flight to Taiwan on EVA. Dinner was, as always, completely inedible. With a combination of four different prescription and OTC medications, I got about four hours of sleep. I woke up to my neighbor vomiting profusely from motion sickness, which she continued to do for the last half of the flight. Power outlet was also dead. I inexplicably watched Good Will Hunting. No idea why.
• The Taipei airport is weird because the gates are all themed and sponsored. So like instead of B4, the gate is a Sanrio Hello Kitty lounge. I landed at 5-something in the morning and had about two hours, but the lounges were all insanely full and there were almost no other meal choices, so my Taiwan experience was that I ate a Clif bar and brushed my teeth.
• The four-hour flight to Bangkok was no big deal, except the guy next to me was wearing a Vision Pro and waving his arms around in the air wildly.
• Bangkok immigration took forever. Lots of Russian tourists. Lots of people who waited in line for 20 minutes and then realized they were supposed to get a digital arrival card.
• I had a driver from the hotel who showed up in a new Mercedes and drove like a stunt driver, but it still took an hour in traffic to get from the airport to the hotel.
• I stayed at a Marriott executive apartment in Sukhumvit, which is a sort of trendy district with lots of shopping and nightlife, maybe 45 minutes from “old” Bangkok with the museums and palaces and such. The room was nice, a 27th-floor corner suite with a kitchen, living room, and even a washer/dryer, which was a game-changer. It was comfortable, but was also horribly generic and corporate. Fine by me, though.
• First impression was that Thailand was much more like India than Vietnam or Cambodia. Bangkok is basically Bangalore but crammed into a quarter the footprint. Walking around, the streets were chaotic, full of traffic, and sidewalks required hyper-vigilance because of random edges and trenches and whatnot. Buildings were either ancient or super-modern. In Sukhumvit, over half of buildings were either American chains or things with ironic weird English names that were all chrome and glass.
• Second impression, after giving it some thought and spending more time wandering, was that Bangkok was a total vaporwave city, a cyberpunk backdrop where the street level was gritty and confusing, but the rest of the city was either old temples or climbing towers of glass and concrete.
• I was right down the way from three gigantic malls that all sit next to each other: Emporium, EmSphere, and EmQuartier. It was Saturday night and I hadn’t eaten a proper meal since lunch Thursday, so I searched for food, and immediately got The Fear. Everything in the malls were hawker stalls and food courts with lots of people shoulder-to-shoulder and confusing menus of foods I could not figure out, way outside my wheelhouse. I finally gave up and ended up at a McDonald’s, just to get some food down before I got back to the hotel and blacked out from jetlag.
• Oh, also made one of about three dozen stops at a 7-Eleven next to my hotel to get some of the basics. Thailand’s 7-Elevens are notorious for their crazy assortment of Asian foods and skin care products. There’s very little in the way of western sodas or candies, but I was able to get enough Coke Zero to keep me going for the trip.
• Went to the National Museum and the Grand Palace as a try-out run with public transit. They have two train systems, one underground and the other elevated. They’re both excellent and probably second only to the ones in Singapore.
• The only problem with the trains, which was a consistent problem everywhere else, was the general super-cooling of full-tilt AC. Outside, it was in the mid/high-90s with a humidity of 60-80%. But go in a mall or hotel, and it’s like 64 degrees. Going back and forth between the two was disconcerting. The heat honestly wasn’t bad though, maybe because of the winds. I didn’t wear shorts the entire trip, and it felt like the heat broke quickly every night, instead of the New York or Vegas situation where triple-digit temps linger for hours and hours after the sun sets.
• The malls were absolute madness. Ten stories tall, mazes of towers and walkways and large stores; Asian food courts and American chain food and gourmet grocery stores. The second night I ended up at this mall that had a Maserati dealership on the third floor, next to a Porsche showroom and a Lamborghini gallery. The mall itself had a supercar parking lot. Some of the stores had odd English hipster-ish names, like a clothes store called SOUP. Everything was glass and chrome and spiral walkways and indoor waterfalls and manicured trees. It looked like a 24th-century city inside.
• I took two photo classes. The first was a walk through Chinatown with a Dutch photographer and another guy from Portugal. His work was absolutely amazing, and that was intimidating to me, because I’m way more timid about photography, and I’m mostly taking tourist snapshots. Super great teacher, but sometimes there’s a lot of value in learning what you don’t know, and that’s what happened. It was pretty awesome walking around the dark recesses of Chinatown, poking through tiny temples and cramped machine shops and bakeries and such.
• The second class was a night class, with an instructor and a fixer, and we wandered around Chinatown and Yaowarat, the neon-lit main thoroughfare. We used a tripod and got some great long-exposure shots of the main crowded tourist drag and the tail lights passing by with the giant neon signs overhead. We also ducked into some alleys filled with hanging paper lamps and cut through the 24-hour flower market, which looked amazing.
• Took a day-long van trip up to the Ayutthaya temples and Ayothaya floating market north of town. There were six other people, plus a driver and tour guide, and I think I was the only native English speaker, although the tour was in English. We first went to Wat Yai Chai Mongkhon, and saw the reclining Buddha. Then we went to the floating market, and then to Wiharn Phra Mongkhon Bophit. These were all cool to look at, although I didn’t get a lot of historical context, and need to look things up now. At the floating market, I ate at a noodle shop and I think it cost like $1.61.
• Took a day trip up to the “death railway.” This is the railway built by the Japanese to Burma, as immortalized in The Bridge on the River Kwai, which is almost entirely fictitious, but the Burma Railway obviously wasn’t. I drove up to the Jeath war museum, along with three other people from Iowa and Wisconsin. After looking at the museum depicting the atrocities of the POWs being worked to death on the railroad, we got in a small speedboat and hit the Khwae Yai river and headed up to and under the bridge. This was a single-track iron bridge, and we went up and walked over it, which was slightly scary; OSHA is not a thing, and the railing was pretty minimal. After that, we caught a train going back for part of the way. This was a local third-class train half-filled with tourists, but half-filled with workers and students. The train had open windows, no AC, and just a few open-cage fans. The train wound into the mountains, past farms and across trestles, until we stopped in a camp on the river and ate lunch. I also got to walk on a trestle bridge on the side of the mountain and go in the Krasae cave, which has a small shrine in it. After we finished, our van was there waiting for us, and we headed back to Bangkok just in time for rush hour traffic.
• Oh, in general, when I wasn’t using the metro or on a tour, I used the Grab app, Asia’s competitor to Uber. This was key, because traffic in the city is so bad. Grab rides were quick, easy, and ridiculously cheap.
• The inevitable McDonald’s mini-review: I went the first time and just got a burger and fries, which was pretty much the standard. But I went another time and got only Thai items: a chicken bites with rice and the chicken was surprisingly spicy; some fried bread treat thing; a truffle cheese shaker thing with fries which was a neat gimmick, but any time you mess with stock McDonald’s fries, it seems wrong; and they had fried pineapple pies, which were amazing.
• Felt a bit sick after being stuck in cars with other tourists all day, so I found a wellness spa near the hotel and got a B-12 IV treatment. The clinic was a nice little hidden oasis in a commercial area, and they do an amazing amount of treatment there, including stem cell therapy, PRP, and everything else. A Myers’ cocktail cost about a third the price it would in SF, and helped knock out the start of the cold.
• The first big dinner was the Palmier at the Four Seasons. That hotel is beautiful, right on the river and landscaped and designed beautifully. The restaurant was… okay. Food was decent, but this was just a basic French bistro at a hotel, and not a big service-driven experience or anything.
• The other dinner was phenomenal. I went to Sühring, a three-Michelin-star German restaurant that was absolutely insane. The Grab took me to this neighborhood that was mostly small commercial places, like printing shops, but when I went in, it felt like I was hidden away in the hills of Munich. This was a twelve-course thing and the food was excellent, but the service was absolutely over-the-top. Like before they served the Kagoshima Wagyu, they brought out a choice of knives and explained the blade steel and handle wood of each one. Or when they brought out the absolutely perfect assortment of breads, they presented the sourdough starter for inspection. Everything was absolutely excessive and incredible.
• Every day, I would have a giant breakfast in the morning at the hotel, which was standard Western fare. Then I’d walk around in the heat and end up skipping lunch. Then dinner would, other than the above, be something dumb. Like I ate at two Gordon Ramsay chain restaurants; an IKEA; and a kind of crazy Japanese hole-in-the-wall in an alley. I did not go to Taco Bell.
• Took the metro up north to see the Royal Thai Air Force museum. It was almost empty on a Saturday, but pretty well-kept with a nice assortment of planes. I specifically wanted to go because they have two of the O-1 Bird Dog planes my dad worked on when he was in the service (although not his exact plane) but they also had more than a few F-5s there, which they still operate. Same with the F-16. The Thai Air Force went through a crazy progression of hand-me-downs from the US, Sweden, France, Germany, and others, trainers that operated as attack aircraft, or older attack aircraft used well beyond their prime. It’s an amazing motley collection of things I normally would not see. (I.e. the Rhein-Flugzugbau RFB-400 Fantrainer is a weird one that doesn’t come up much.)
• I was in Bangkok right before Songkran, the new year. If you saw White Lotus, you saw how this is celebrated: with squirt guns and crowds in the streets dumping buckets of water on each other. Sounds great when it’s 98 degrees outside; doesn’t sound as great when you’re hauling around camera gear. The first day of the New Year was the last day I was in town, so I did not witness any of this.
• Speaking of, I greatly simplified my camera haul for the trip. I only brought the Canon EOS R10 mirrorless with two lenses, an Osmo Pocket 3, and my phone. I wasn’t super happy with the R10 at times, but it was much easier to haul around.
• Trip back was through Hong Kong. I got there at 9:30 at night and had four hours, which was too short to leave and go wander, plus everything was probably closed. I think this was my sixth layover in HKG in the last 24 months, and the place is becoming far too familiar. I had an exit row but in basic economy with the most narrow seat imaginable. Also I had a bag with some Cokes in it in the overhead and a flight attendant managed to shift around the luggage and break them open, which was somehow my fault. No sleep on the way home, a very quick trip through Global Entry, and a long wait on luggage. My “day” ended about 30 hours after I woke up.

Overall, the trip was a nice break. I didn’t think of work at all, but I also did not write at all. There was no grand thesis of this, and although I saw things and learned things, there was no overwhelming catharsis like I had in Vietnam or Cambodia. I thought the trauma of the Death Railway would have some bigger effect on me, but the way it was framed or curated didn’t cause this. I shouldn’t complain. It was a great trip, but I’m struggling to fit everything together.

Still sorting out pictures, although a few have gone to Instagram. I’ll work on that, although I’m also wondering where I should be putting pictures these days. Flickr? Adobe? Anyway.

For my birthday this year, Sarah and I headed down to Mexico. This was a bit of an unusual vacation that didn’t really feel like a vacation, but in the opposite of the usual “we went to somewhere because we had to, and now need a week of vacation.” It was also noticeably different than my usual solo trips to oddball places that are more of an experience than actual rest.

So the deal: we flew in to Cancun, but actually stayed at a medical wellness spa about ten miles north, at Costa Mujeres. Flight in was delayed by three hours due to a broken plane, but it was a straight shot from SFO, maybe five hours. Got there and had a driver waiting, so we didn’t have to run the gauntlet of transportation people on the way out. We got loaded into an SUV and drove through Cancun at night, looking at the surrounding stuff on 307, but going straight to the facility.

I think the first question I kept getting was if I was worried about immigration or about the general safety, which is a bit silly. Immigration in and out was absolutely minimal. Coming back to the US, I’m pre-vetted with Global Entry and don’t even talk to a person. The immigration into Mexico was only a “how many days/where are you staying” and a stamp in the passport. As far as safety, we stayed at the facility the entire time, and it was roughly five times safer than an upscale Disney vacation. We were talking about this and I was trying to think of the most unsafe place I’ve ever been, and it would definitely be the United States. I mean, I caught RSV in Dubai, and I went to a statistically unsafe beach in Iceland because of the cold and brutal sneaker waves. But every time I’ve ever felt imminent danger, it’s been in the US. Anyway, Mexico was entirely safe.

The resort was insanely beautiful. It was a single curved row of suites, made to look like a strand of DNA from the top. Every unit had a view of the water and a private balcony, and the door opened up to a long balcony walkway that looked out over a mangrove forest. They built the place maybe two years ago, and it all looked ultra-modern and high-tech. There were infinity pools and fountains facing the water, with a white sand beach below. The entire facility was impeccable. Our room was giant, a suite with a living area, a balcony, and a bathroom roughly as big as our living room back home. It was all truly five-star.

On the first day, we started the program. We weren’t on a particular plan, but they offer different plans like for weight loss, smoking cessation, women’s health, longevity, performance training, and so on. I began with a battery of tests and evaluations, scans and measurements and blood draws, meetings with doctors, a dentist, various specialists, and a nutritionist. I got set up with a specific nutritional plan for the trip, and met with a coordinator to register for the various activities and treatments I wanted for the week. Everything’s done in an app, which keeps your schedule, shows activities available, and keeps your test results and meal menus for the week.

So there’s one dining facility you go to three times a day, and your meal times are scheduled. It’s a pretty swanky restaurant, with inside and outside seating. The food was all insanely good. I wasn’t programmed in for weight loss or for sugar detox, and was given extra protein for each meal, usually either additional tofu or tempeh, or sometimes a protein shake. The food was vaguely a Mediterranean diet, with no red meat or chicken, occasional fish, and mostly vegetable protein, but not strictly vegetarian or vegan. Portions were controlled, but no more so than any fancy restaurant that isn’t shoveling out buffet food. Everything looked and tasted incredible, and the staff were also great to work with at each meal. (Also, not on the menu, but Sarah somehow bribed someone in the kitchen, and on the night of my birthday, I got a slice of flourless chocolate cake. I don’t know if it was my general sugar depravation or not, but it was insanely good. Definitely not nutritionist-approved.)

I won’t get too into the medical stuff in a public post, but I did some physiotherapy and osteopathy on my back, and worked with a trainer to stretch more. There was a world-class gym on the top floor, and I went there every day. The bottom floor had a hydrotherapy circuit, which was fun: a walk-through pool of freezing cold water, then a Jacuzzi of boiling hot water. The main pool was warm, and had these water jet things that ranged from a pleasing massage to enough pressure to remove paint from a car. We also took a healthy cooking class, where we learned how to make various vegetable protein snacks and foods.

It’s hard to write much more about the week because it wasn’t about what did happen, but what didn’t happen. It was probably the lowest amount of stress I’ve had in my life since I was a teenager. There was no itinerary of museums and shops and landmarks I had to see. I didn’t do the usual ritual of filling dead space in the day by shoveling calories into my head. The TV never got turned on. I didn’t think of work at all. I just walked, exercised, ate long meals and talked with Sarah, and did nothing. It was incredible.

Another odd thing was that there weren’t many people there, and you seldom saw anyone. I think they scheduled meals in such a way that there were never crowds, and there were maybe a dozen or a dozen and a half guests there at any time. The people I saw - this was a real White Lotus situation, absurdly beautiful women and rich guys who if you asked them what they do, they would scoff and say, “Well, a little investing, and I’m on a few boards” and it turns out they’re like the COO of GE Healthcare or something. No kids, either. Overall, it was an extremely quiet situation, and everyone treated everyone else like how you act as a New Yorker when you run into someone famous. The brief head nod, ignore them otherwise.

Unfortunately, it all ended on Saturday. I had one more treatment that morning, and we had breakfast and lunch, then we said our goodbyes, paid up the tab, and a driver brought us back to the airport. It was an abrupt culture shock, as the Cancun airport is always cramped and crowded. I immediately fell off the wagon and got a Coke Zero. Flight back was pretty uneventful. I had Global Entry and got back in the country without even talking to anyone.

I immediately was back into the fray with work and house stuff. (We got the place painted while we were gone, and had to move everything back into place, which took a few days.) I am still trying to figure out exactly how this could work, how I could capture a few practices from the trip and make the other 51 weeks of the year match the pattern a bit more. Looking at my numbers, and my sleep and HRV were way better there. I didn’t gain or lose weight on the trip, but there was some non-tangible improvement in my general digestive health. Not looking for answers here, and I know some of them. It’s just a matter of building routines to support things better.

Anyway. Good stuff. I’d love to go back, or do a similar thing in another country. Maybe in the fall. First, I think there will be another dumb trip in late spring. I’ll start thinking about that in a month or two.

In the mad flurry of book release stuff and end-of-year stuff, I forgot to write down anything about the trip to the Midwest last month, so I’ll jot down a few things in case I need to remember it ten years from now.

• Total trip was a Saturday to Sunday thing, eight nights. But I took a side trip, drove to Indiana on the morning of the 24th and back the night of the 26th.
• There was a lot of stress about getting out of Oakland because it was zero visibility and flights were starting to get delayed or cancelled. We left a half-hour late, but made it up in the air. Had a very brief layover in Denver, then headed out to MKE. The flight felt insanely quick, with two segments that were just over 90 minutes each, and zero hassles on both.
• Hertz is officially on the no list forever. We landed at like 7:00 and when I went to the Hertz counter to get my car, it had closed completely at 5:00, with a phone number that said, “Sorry, closed.” Not sure why they didn’t tell me that when I rented the car. The rental thing said “your name will be on the board and you can take your car and leave.” It wasn’t. We hurried over to National and got set up there. After 20 minutes in the Hertz AI madness phone tree, I talked to a person who was going to charge me $300 for the privilege of not getting a car.
• We stayed at a Marriott Residence Inn in Wauwatosa. It’s in some weird “research park” thing built on top of a former sanitarium or something, and it’s a super-modern road with roundabouts and a bunch of empty buildings. The room was identical to the one I had in El Segundo in 2021. I think it’s the same as what I had in Denver and in Chicago in 2022. That’s always a weird experience.
• It was like 20 degrees the whole time I was there. No real snow. Insanely high winds, like Iceland-rip-your-car-door-off winds. Losing half my body fat made this rough. But the hotel had an incredible warmth to it, which always felt nice.
• There were three days of family stuff with Sarah’s family, but the out-of-town contingent wasn’t there yet, so this was mostly quiet time with her mom or dad. We went to a mall, which was busy, like almost mid-00s busy. I expected it to be quiet, given the economy. Went to Boswell Books, which was pretty packed. Always good to see people buying analog.
• I don’t know why, but any time I stay at a Marriott, anywhere in the world, any time I go to the gym, there’s an older Asian woman on the elliptical for like four hours straight. It doesn’t matter if I’m in Schaumburg or Helsinki or Nuremberg or Orlando. I think they fly them in. It’s almost refreshing in a weird way.
• The drive to South Bend was pretty uneventful, and much faster than I remember. I feel like when me and Ray drove to the Milwaukee Metalfest in 1993, it took like six or seven hours, and this was maybe three hours plus an hour of time shift.
• I stayed at this weird Hilton vacation property that’s off Main Street in Mishawaka, by the UP mall. I think it was built in 1995 and not touched since. It has all of this college football stuff in it and probably makes all of its money on home games. I told my sister it looked like a Notre Dame themed funeral home. She told her friend who works for Hilton and he thought it was hilarious.
• I didn’t pay for the hotel (thanks, Amex) and I’m glad, because it had a million little annoyances: a kitchenette that was a dorm fridge and microwave and nothing more; bad plumbing; lots of noise from the pool below; a completely unusable exercise room containing I think the Sears treadmill my mom threw out in 1997. Good location, except there’s a real Hilton just north of it, and that’s confusing when you give someone directions.
• I went to University Park mall on Christmas Eve. I managed to lose my Pocket 3 camera, which sort of soured the whole trip for me.
• Went to my sister’s twice, had Christmas there. Saw my dad for brunch the next day, then headed out.
• The trip was very odd, because I did not feel like I was in Indiana, at all. Part of this was the short amount of time I had, and I didn’t get to wander. Part of it is things have changed so much. I remember walking the mall (and recording it on video, which of course I lost) and wondering what was still there from when I used to frequent the place in the late 80s/early 90s, and the answer is absolutely nothing. I guess JC Penney still remains, but there’s been 100% turnover, plus a giant food court that’s alien to me, new carpet, new skylights, new parking lot layout, and now the Sears is dead. Most of my time in Indiana was like this, which astounds me, considering how slow-moving things are there, and I used to come back and places would have the same exact signage from when I was a kid in like 1975.
• I think a big part of this is I’ve turned a corner on the Nostalgia Problem. Looking at old journals, I used to ruminate way too much on things like Bloomington or the one weird year I spent working at IUSB or my old haunt, the Concord Mall. Now I don’t care. I don’t think about it. That strong sentimentality is gone. I have a few theories on this, and maybe I worry about it slightly, but I’m glad I have reached this point.
• Quick trip back to Milwaukee. All I will say about the trip around Chicago: you should not be able to legally call something an express lane if the speed limit is 55.
• Because I missed the 24th/25th festivities, I arrived in MKE just in time for the post-holiday wind-down, and basically had a day in which to pack and jettison trash and get ready for the flight home.
• There was something almost Scandinavian about the street at that Discovery Ignition whatever park in Wauwatosa. It reminded me of the layout in Iceland or Oslo or something. Maybe it was an odd sense memory of the temperature and wind outside, but I liked it.
• Also, there is a county park across the way that’s nothing but some slight hills covered in golden grass that’s waiting for the spring showers. I had this ASA drone test book with a picture of someone flying a sUAS standing on a hill like this, and it made me wish I had brought a drone with me, although the winds would have made it tough, plus standing outside in 20 degree weather for an hour or two isn’t ideal. I spent the first half of the trip thinking I should drive to Costco and buy a cheap Potensic Atom 2 to take a few flights there. Then I lost that stupid camera and was out $500 and realized this was a dumb idea.
• Trip back was pretty stress-free. But it’s sad to come home and not have anyone waiting for you. I really miss returning to the cats after having been gone and having both of them be total velcro for a few days.

Overall, it was a pretty quick and uneventful trip, but I’ll take it. I was happy to see everyone and we had some quality time in there, but it was almost strange how it went down. And miracle of miracles: I came back with no flu, no Covid, not even a cold. That’s a good start to 2026.

Spent the first week of August in Mongolia with a brief stopover for dinner in Hong Kong on the way back. I had a cold on return and didn’t have the energy to get together a trip report. I’ve got a longer actual story about the trip underway, but I’ve also been hot on Atmospheres 2 which needs to get done pronto.

Anyway, before this totally gets away from here, here’s a quick bulleted list on the trip. Also, some photos are on Flickr.

• Yes, Mongolia. It’s the giant country between Russia and China. Not to be confused with Inner Mongolia, the big chunk at the top of China. Not a former Soviet republic either, although they were obviously tight back then.
• Everyone asks “why Mongolia” and the only real answer I have is I haven’t been there, it was not terribly expensive, I didn’t need a visa, and I knew everyone would ask “why Mongolia.”
• Left at midnight after being awake since 4am. 14 hour flight to Hong Kong and I slept maybe 4 or 5 fitful hours in a premium economy exit row. Had a seven hour layover in HK where I wandered the airport at 5 in the morning in a state of delirium.
• MIAT, the flag carrier of Mongolia, has a fleet of nine threadbare Boeings. I’ve never been in a more minimalist 737; I sat down and my knees were against the seat in front of me. At least they stopped flying the secondhand Antonov turboprops they kept crashing.
• Landed and completed my longest multi-segment trip ever: 1d 1h 40m.
• Had a driver who immediately asked me if I liked metal, even though we could only communicate with each other through translator apps. He then put on some Mongolian folk metal, which was a new one for me. (Throw “The Hu” in YouTube if you’re into that sort of thing.)
• The airport is about 50km south of Ulaanbaatar. That will take you either an hour or five to drive, depending on the number of yaks crossing the highway.
• Cars drive on the right side like the US, but they’re all right-hand drive, from Japan or Korea. Almost everything is a Prius with off-road tires and a three-inch lift. Imagine being awake for 40 hours and sitting in the driver’s seat of your last car, but then you realize you don’t have controls in front of you.
• The area between the airport looked a lot like the area outside Denver: giant grass-covered plains, with mountains in the distance. I also didn’t realize we’d be at altitude - maybe 4400 feet - so it had that big sky look with giant clouds seemingly five feet above.
• Stayed at a five-star that was a Best Western. Not a bad setup, actually. No complaints except the whole room had a single outlet, and I couldn’t get a straight answer on what power or plugs they use there. Everything online says “well, whatever.”
• I had a rough time with food. I brought a case of Clif bars and a bunch of protein gel, expecting to be unable to eat. I could not parse any of the food options and there’s very little American chain food, so I couldn’t just go to a TGI Friday. I ate a lot of junk from a convenience store next to the hotel, which wasn’t good.
• Mongolia has its own language, but uses the Cyrillic alphabet for the most part. Old people know Russian, and Chinese and Korean are sort of prevalent. This is probably the lowest amount of English comprehension of any country I’ve visited. This freaks some people the fuck out when I mention it, but it’s their country, and I can deal with being in a place and not knowing the language. I know probably ten words of Mongolian and could fake the rest.
• The city looks like if Anchorage was built by the Soviets in 1961. Lots and lots of poured concrete and Khrushchevkas. Every sign on top of a building was in Cyrillic. I was across the street from a central square and a parliament that looked like it probably had a gigantic bust of Leonid Brezhnev in it until the mid-90s when it was melted down for scrap or sold to some hipster in Seattle for an art project. The city is powered by a gigantic coal plant that’s right on the edge of downtown, and the air quality is not great from that.
• Poured rain the first day and I had no rain gear, just a down jacket that immediately absorbed five gallons of water and never dried again. I went to a Chinese tower mall, found a Sports Annex-like place and bought a far too elaborate rain jacket. I could not figure out the exchange rate and had this inch-thick fist of bills from pulling 80 USD from an ATM. I gave them a credit card and said “whatever” and I think it was like a million MNT. Got home and realized I spent like $250, which means every time you see me in the next ten years, I’ll be wearing a Mongolian raincoat.
• I’ve said this before, but these communists love their malls. I mean, communism ended a bit ago, but if you want to see a high-end mall with zero vacancies and completely full shelves, go to a place that’s still got Stalin on the money. I grew up with these horror stories about almost empty communist stores where you have to pay a week of salary to get almost nothing, and it turns out that describes a Target in 2025.
• Day two, I went on a big van trip with six or eight other people, like a twelve-hour junket through the Gorkhi Terelj national park. Highlights of this included a ten-story statue of Ghengis Khan on a horse where you climbed up into his head, holding an eagle, shooting a bow and arrow, camel rides (which I did not do, I’ve broken my arm enough times), visiting a nomad and drinking fermented camel milk (once again, nope), and eating lunch in a Ger (aka a yurt.)
• Once again, I did not eat much because - well, they love horses in Mongolia, and not just riding and racing them. I absolutely did not eat any meat that wasn’t chicken on this trip. Nice people at the restaurant, but no.
• We also went to the Aryapala temple, which involved walking up many steps and was incredibly beautiful and peaceful. Also near there, we climbed this giant granite rock formation called Turtle Rock, which I did not realize involved actual climbing climbing and going through tunnels like that one where James Franco had to cut his arm off with a pen knife.
• On the drive home, some truck hit a cow or something and the road completely shut down. When this happens, people just start driving next to the road in the dirt. When that line of traffic stops, people drive next to them, etc. So at one point, there’s like six or eight lanes of traffic crawling through the mud and dirt completely randomly. Total chaos. The 40km drive home took about five hours.
• The nomadic guy - Mongolia is about the size of Alaska, but with only three million people. Maybe half of that live in Ulaanbaatar, and about half are totally nomadic. They set up their ger in a random steppe and raise their livestock, then when the grass gets low, they move to another.
• Wednesday, I had a driver who brought me to the Mini Gobi desert, just me, him, and all my camera junk in a Land Cruiser. The drive took about 14 hours round trip. Lots of mountains in the distance. Lots of livestock on the road. Stopped at what looked like the Mongolian Costco to get supplies. Also stopped at a place that looked like the Mongolian Old Country Buffet, with three dozen steam trays where you pointed and they scooped a mystery meat onto a tray with beets and rice. I had the chicken, I think.
• Mini Gobi was cool, but honestly not 14 hours of small talk cool. We’re talking about the size of Warren Dunes on Lake Michigan, but instead of hot dog stands, there were camel rides for the kids and tourists. We also went to a small temple up in the mountains which was very quaint and also beautiful, but not like a tourist place. About half of our driving was off-road, which was pretty daunting.
• I bought a cashmere scarf for S at the temple. There’s a lot of cashmere for sale there. A lot.
• Picked up a horrible cold and I had to cancel a street photography tour. I’m glad I brought NyQuil/DayQuil because I went to a drug store and the closest I could find was a jar of some stuff with a horse on the label and it may have been made from snake venom or whale penis. Google Translate was useless for this.
• I wandered the city a few times, taking some pictures. There’s the occasional brand new Chinese or Korean high-rise, a tower mall or hotel. Infrastructure in the town is fair to poor, with lots of tore-up stuff and roads that inexplicably close for no reason. Traffic is pretty horrible, and there’s no great urban planning around this. Some of the smaller side streets with shops and open markets were pretty nice though, and they do have some parks and green spaces that they’ve been very intentional about and they look beautiful.
• I’d default to wandering around the central square, which wasn’t that heavily populated, but one day I went and there were a dozen different weddings going on. Each one had dozens of people in the party, dressed in traditional clothes, with pro photographers and selfie sticks and drones weaving everywhere chaotically. I shot some video of that and it was great fun to watch.
• The last night, I went for a long walk in the city and was sort of bummed that I didn’t get to do more and that the cold basically shut down the end of the trip. Shuffled around and ended up in a vacant Burger King where I ate a junior whopper. BK is airport-quality. No McDonald’s; no Taco Bell; no 7-Eleven. There’s a KFC/Pizza Hut but it makes it apparent this isn’t a country with many fresh vegetable choices.
• On the way back, same driver. He brought me to the airport and I realized this place was smaller than the South Bend airport, but every flight out of it was international. Saw horse jerky at the duty-free and yeah, no.
• On the way back, I stopped in Hong Kong and had eight hours, so I left the airport for the first time. My luggage was checked through, so I had nothing to carry, and I didn’t need a visa as long as I didn’t go to the mainland. I took a train to Kowloon, and the whole experience was absolutely surreal. The second I landed, my iPhone asked me if I wanted to buy a virtual Octopus card, which lets you use any transit and shop at many stores and restaurants. Five minutes after leaving customs, I was on a futuristic bullet train where one could probably perform surgery on the carpeted floor without cleaning it first. I went to Kowloon and was in the bottom floor of this gigantic mega-mall of super high end stores and it took me like 45 minutes to reach the surface. It looked like a Star Wars city, with glass towers of skyscrapers and immaculately groomed greenways and paths to fancy restaurants and coffee places. Everything was in Chinese but honestly the people in Hong Kong speak English better than Americans. I grabbed a kobe beef burger at this place and then hurried back to the airport, hoping customs would not be insane.
• Customs was completely automated, no questions, no lines. Amazing.
• 13 hour flight home. It was weird because I got to the airport on Saturday, technically left on Sunday morning, flew 13 hours, then landed Saturday night. Got my luggage, caught an uber, and actually got home on Sunday morning.

Fun stuff. I’ve still got to deal with pictures and videos, but I wasn’t terribly happy with anything I captured. There’s a lot for context, but few real bangers. Still, a very interesting trip. That’s four new countries this year for a total of 24 now. Probably no more international travel this year, but I’m already thinking about the next birthday trip.

I took a quick trip to Cleveland this weekend, to see a few old friends and headline a book reading. The trip was over before it started, it felt like. Anyway, let me rush through the usual summary.

Reason one for the visit was that my company gives us Juneteenth off, which was a Thursday. So I added the 20th and made it a nice four-day weekend. I feel some need to take more short trips like this between my longer journeys, so this looked like a good spot to do it.

The big reason for the trip was John Sheppard moved to Ohio recently, and just bought a house and got settled in near where he spent his childhood. I haven’t seen him since he retired, and wanted to check out his new place. The other big reason was that I haven’t seen Michael Stutz in a long time, and I wanted to see his record store and his house. Also, I twisted his arm a bit and the three of us set up a book reading at the store.

The trip out was easy enough. I booked a direct flight from SFO to CLE, and left at 9 in the morning. It was a bit clogged getting to the airport at rush hour, and I had to jump over to terminal 2 to get through security fast, then jog back to terminal 3. Not a major problem, though. It was about four and a half hours in the air, which I mostly spent messing around on my laptop. It was raining and thundering heavily in Cleveland all day, and while en route, there was argument over if we’d be coming in early or late, but we landed a bit early. John picked me up and we headed over to his place.

I haven’t spent time in Ohio probably since 1999. I stayed in Berea a few days on my moving trip east from Seattle to New York, at Michael’s old place. Also had a funeral later that same year in Cincinnati, and maybe an airport layover here or there. But I’ve met a lot of people in Ohio online since then. I didn’t really have a strong feel for what it would be like, especially because Ohio has become a bit of a punchline in recent years, but has also been going through a lot of upheaval. I wanted some face time with a few people, but I also just wanted to see what things were like these days.

Me and John stopped at his place to drop off luggage, and he’s got a nice setup, a 3br/1ba on a quiet cul-de-sac, basement, yard, detached garage in the back. He just moved in, so the furniture is minimal and he’s just started settling into the place. It’s got a big upstairs with a low ceiling that’s completely empty, but will make an excellent writing cave in the future. He set me up in the Ohio Room, this monument to Ohio sports teams that’s borderline disturbing and hilarious, with a neon OHIO sign on the wall, bright red Ohio State bedding, and hanging flags for the Tribe, the Browns, and the Cavs.

We headed out to Angelo’s in Lakewood to split a pizza, then drove out to Edgewater Park to see the lake and take the requisite picture in front of the big Cleveland sign. Also stopped at a giant grocery to get some supplies, and wandered around a bit before heading back to the house for a few hours of talk that evening.

Friday morning, we got up and running, then headed over to see Bailey and son over in Lakewood. It’s always interesting to meet up with someone who’s been a friend online for like a decade who I’ve never seen face-to-face. Social media’s created this odd parallel universe where you can talk to people every day but not really “know” them - or do you? Anyway, it was cool to chat for a few hours and see the neighborhood where she now lives, and the weather on Friday morning was not bad at all for hanging out outside.

For lunch, we headed over to Canary’s, which was a family restaurant. John was sure the place used to be a Pizza Hut way back when, stripped down to the studs and redone as a diner. It was the type of place with the paper mats advertising local businesses in Comic Sans, cleaning agencies and painting services and cash-for-gold shops. Lots of old folks in the booths, and we got giant menus with 167 items in them. I got pierogis, and when I asked if it came with a vegetable, the waitress said “it has onions on it.” Good food, but a bowl of cheese soup and a dozen cheese pierogis was a bit much. John got an open-faced meatloaf sandwich that looked absolutely crippling. It reminded me of the many places I’d either end up in after a church service as a kid or during a late night with two or three other juvenile delinquents.

We spent the afternoon driving between malls. I don’t give a shit about mall stuff anymore, but it seemed like we had to check out one or two while I was in Ohio. We first went to Great Northern, which looked large but beaten and half-empty. We then went to SouthPark Mall, which is much larger and seemed to have more higher-end stores open. Neither mall was particularly busy on a Friday afternoon. I didn’t pay much attention to the exact layout or details, because I had bigger things to worry about that night.

After chilling out for a bit at home, we headed over to The Current Year, Michael’s record store. It’s in the same building in Parma as Rudy’s, a Polish bakery. The store is a great little space that’s crammed with a large variety of heavily curated albums, from rare records to yacht rock to psychedelic to mood music. There are lots of books (including mine) and collectibles and rarities all over the place. It’s the kind of place that simultaneously makes me wish I collected vinyl and had a turntable, and made me glad I didn’t, because I’d spend way too much money there and quickly form A Bad Habit.

Anyway, it was great catching up with Michael and his wife Marie. He has a small room for readings or bands, and two other themed side rooms for different music collections, plus several warehouse rooms filled to the brim with music and movies and things to be sold. I got all the gear set up and we ate some good Lebanese food Marie ordered, then got ready to roll.

Oh, gear for this trip: the Canon R10 for stills, with a Sigma 18-50; the DJI Pocket 3 for video; two DJI Mic2 wireless mics; and those were fed to a Zoom H5. The store also had a PA system with mic, and both me and Michael were recording on phones.

We only had a couple people show for the reading, but that was expected. This was mostly about recording and hanging out. Michael opened and read some haiku, a bit from Circuits of the Wind, and some of a newer thing he’s working on about Treasure Island. John then read the first chapter from Small Town Punk. And then I read.

I don’t do readings. I don’t like public speaking, and I don’t exactly write the kind of zingers you can rattle off to an audience. The last time I read was in 2005, in Boston, and that was an event where I co-headlined and only read a single non-fiction story from my old book Dealer Wins.  So headlining an event was a bit much. I wasn’t sure what to read, and didn’t know what the audience would be like. I don’t know how I did, and of course feel like I didn’t do well at all. But I think I survived. I read a chapter from my next book, Atmospheres 2, and the last chapter of Decision Paralysis. I also did a story from Vol. 13, plus some short bits from Book of Dreams and Ranch: the Musical. I think my total was about 45 minutes, which is probably 35 minutes longer than my longest reading ever.

Anyway, we hung out a bit more and I signed stuff, then we went outside in the night. It was strange to feel the cool air and look up at the Rudy’s sign with RUMORED TO EXIST on it. There’s something about the midwestern night in the summer that’s an immediate time machine for me, and being out after the reading in the darkness reminded me of that.

Saturday: me and John went downtown, which was almost empty, and started at the Science Center. My main goal was to see the Apollo capsule they had there, which is the one from Skylab 3. We also hung out and took a guided tour of the Mather, a 600-some foot long century-old freighter. And we wandered around the area by the stadium and the Hard Rock. Later we went further downtown to see the Arcade, a totally empty and Shining-looking shopping center, and Tower City Center and Terminal Tower. We also poked in the library downtown.

I think my general feel for Cleveland was that it reminded me of Milwaukee with the Wisconsin removed, or maybe the suburbs of Chicago without the Chicago. I liked that, the way it had lots of varying food and good infrastructure, without a lot of traffic. There were the pockets of rust belt abandonment, but there were also some pretty well-restored areas downtown, and clean suburbs that seemed pretty walkable.

But… we picked a bad weekend for walking, because it was insanely hot out, maybe the mid-90s and humid as hell. We got home and I tried to take a quick 20-minute nap before dinner. The second I passed out, the power went, taking the AC with it. That rolling blackout/brownout thing kept going as more and more people put their air on high. I’ve been to some fairly hot countries in recent years, but the sweltering midwest summers are definitely a flashback for me, back to the days when you searched the subdivision for a buddy with a pool.

We went over to Michael and Marie’s place for dinner, and they grilled hamburgers on the patio as we talked forever. Michael gave us a full tour of the upstairs of the house, which is amazing. I can’t do justice to it with a full explanation, but this was a heavy early-60s vibe, a ranch belonging to a former NASA scientist, and it’s carefully laid out from stem to stern with a collection of furniture, appliances, and collectibles that perfectly encapsulate the space age.

After dinner, Michael was ready to give us the full tour of Sunken Studios, his basement lair which is a tribute to several Tiki bars and beaches from the past. This was absolutely mind-blowing. Michael and Marie have spent decades collecting things from Tiki bars, visiting them across the country, documenting and researching and planning, then spent the last dozen years meticulously recreating it underneath his house. I really can’t do justice for the thing Michael has created, but I felt like I’d been stuck in the center of his brain, completely entangled in this world of beaches and Polynesian memories and relics. Absolutely amazing.

Sunday was pretty sedate, and a travel day. Me and John wandered around a bit, and went to another family restaurant called Gene’s Place. It was in a strip mall, and after we headed to a boutique donut place called Peace, Love, and Little Donuts. John bought a dozen of the mini-donuts, and even though I can’t really do donuts anymore, I tried one and they were great.

Most of my luggage on the way out was books I left for Michael, so it was easy to pack up everything and head out. Trip back was a bit of a pain because of a bunch of dumb little things: someone taking up half my seat, charged twice for Wi-Fi that didn’t work, videos didn’t work in my seatback thing. Got back late and exhausted, and had to turn it around and get to work early Monday. But it was a good weekend, a good break, and I’ll have to get out there again soon. Not next, though. Big trip in August, and it’s definitely not Ohio. Stay tuned.