jon d wilke's blog

American Airlines Has Earned My Respect

Delta Airlines, take note.  Continental, listen up.  American Airlines has earned my respect.

This troubled air carrier may not be on time – like all the rest – but they support our troops.  While traveling home for the Christmas season, I noticed American Airlines staff honoring our "nation's finest" with gratitude and dignity.  On Flight 324 from Dallas to Nashville, the San Francisco Bay crew went beyond the call of duty to treat our troops with respect and professionalism.

To read more, click here.

 

Fall Colors

During my recent and rare weekend off, my wife and I drove north to Santa Fe, N.M., to see the aspen trees in their fall colors.  Click here to view the photo album.

Fall is much different in New Mexico than "back East."  Because the vegetation varies, the color varies.  In Kentucky, maple and oak trees turn from green to yellow to orange and then sometimes red before browning and falling to the ground.  Here, a smaller type of maple turns yellow then falls.  Some smaller trees have become a deep purple before losing their leaves, but these are rare.

Here, yellow is the dominant fall color.  Aspens grow at altitude, and small meadows along the Sandia Mountain range can be spotted from a distance.  Bright yellow cottonwood trees can be found along the rivers' edges.  My western fall season is enjoyably different, and I appreciate the many differences this landscape offers, but overall, the beauty of a rolling hill blanketed in oranges, yellows, reds and greens is deeply missed.

New Mexican Expectations

Editor's Note: This post is in response to the common question, "How do you like Albuquerque?"
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Sometimes adults become numb to setting high expectations in life, maybe because of a bad Christmas, a broken heart, a lousy prom date, etc.  Rarely have I found my expectations trumped or surpassed.  Yet, Albuquerque has all that I expected and much more!

In the short time I've been here, I've immersed myself in the "touristy" things, i.e. driven Route 66, eaten green chile, shopped in Old Town, taken the Tram to the top of the Sandias, explored the Rio Grande, hiked and ran some trails, cheered at an Isotopes game and occasionally taken a wrong turn for the fun of it.  Unlike the myriad of other places I've visited, I have yet to scratch the surface on the culture, the food, the fun, the adventure and the opportunity here. 

This place is so much better than I expected. 

• The weather is more enjoyable. 
• The food is more delicious.
• The culture is more rich.
• The scenery is more spectacular. 
• The people are more colorful. 
• And even the traffic is more tolerable.

Leaving from rural Kentucky, I expected more tumble weeds, sand storms, heat, noon-day shootouts and public hangings.  My expectations for "the West" were framed by Hollywood and other pop culture meccas, and I knew it.  I expected to be in shock over a few things, just not so many.  Culture shock is not a new status for me, but rather a familiar friend whom I warmly embrace.

Click here for a photo album.

The View

The view from my front door is amazing.  I did not anticipate having a front-row seat to this daily nature show.

Never did I expect the Sandia Mountains in New Mexico to be so massive, so beautiful or so close.  Click the picture for a larger version.

Monsoon Season

"How's the weather in Albuquerque?" I asked.

"We're having monsoon season right now," my friend Adam confessed. 

"What the heck is Monsoon Season?"

"Well, it rains real hard for about 10 to 20 minutes everyday," he said. 

"So, it's kinda like Florida without the beach," I replied.

Monsoons are no joking matter.  You can see these storms coming.  Early in the day, large, dark clouds begin to form over the Sandia Mountains in the East.  Then around 5 or 6 p.m., the weather lets loose with huge drops of cold rain, driving gusts of wind (up to 40 mph) and lightning displays that rival any Midwestern thunderstorm.  Some weather experts claim this year's storms are lasting longer and dumping more rain than ever.

Download monsoon.jpg

What's makes this dangerous is that Albuquerque sits in a massive valley.  From east to west, the mountains rise, then the land steeply slopes down until leveling out near the Rio Grande river.  Continuing westward from the river the land rises into the high plains, meaning anytime it rains, all the precipitation flows toward the middle, flash-flooding arroyos, swamping streets, soaking the city and swelling the Rio Grande.  Then after the rain, the temperature drops to about 70 degrees, the storm passes and the sun shines until it sets.

In fact, the weather is the talk of town here; everyone is gabbing about it.  In just two days, I've heard the apartment manager, the retiree, the cable installer, the painter and the maintenance man all mentioned the monsoon season.  On top of that, every local newscast I've watched has begun with an extreme weather update.  All this talk is driving me crazy, because in Kentucky we called this weather summertime.

Never would I have associated "Monsoon Season" and "Albuquerque, N.M.," no matter how poor my mental condition.  I've been in South America and Central Africa during their "rainy seasons" with downpours, washouts, mudslides, etc.  I've even experienced a month in Germany with constant cloud cover where I only saw my shadow for about 10 minutes, but I was not expecting this type of weather in Albuquerque.  Where are the 95 degree days with little to no humidity?  What happened to the "310 days of sunshine" the brochure promised?

Links
The 10-day forecast
New Albuquerque weather chief story

Travel Tip Websites

The travel season is almost over, but the holiday season will be here soon.  To beat the summertime blues, begin making your travel arrangements now.  Schedule your Christmas vacation, book your flight, practice your "take this job and shove it" speech, plan your walkout.

Also, check out this recently posted link here for some interesting travel websites.  One will help you predict you airfare, another will help you with pet accommodations and others will help you plan the right seat or wi-fi hotel. 

I especially like using Google Earth to revisit places I've been, i.e. Cooper's Landing, Alaska.  If you zoom in all the way and rotate around, you feel like Julie Andrews in the Austrian Alps, sort of.

The New Seven Wonders of the World

The votes are tallied; the global community has spoken. The winners, in what some call "The World's First Global Election," have been chosen. The New Seven Wonders of the World have finally been selected, click here to watch a slide show.

This "contest" threw the world into a tizzy.  Brazil, for example, spent lots of time and money to get Rio's Christ the Redeemer on the list, urging their citizens to vote, running TV ads and implementing a blitz of other publicity-generating tactics.  The ramifications of getting on this list could be, pardon the pun, monumental.  For many travelers, the New Seven Wonders list may become their "Places to Visit Before I Die List."

According to an online news source,

"Popularity contest or not, Mexican officials say the prestige of having one of the Seven Wonders of the World would attract hundreds of thousands of new visitors each year. And that would translate into jobs, health care and houses for Mexico's impoverished people."

Read more here for the Mexican perspective, or here for a Jordanian viewpoint.

Modern-day Hemingway

Timothy Egan of the NY Times writes a descriptive piece about time well-spent in the forgotten parts of Idaho.  Sounds like an amazing place to see and experience, and it is written in the slow, descriptive-rich manner of "Papa" himself.

Pain On, Apply Directly All Over

Unknown number of bicycle crashes.
Four years of aggressive skateboarding. 
Four years U.S. Marine Corps.
Three years U.S. Army.
Two Summers of dirt-bike riding.
Three Summers of two-man beach volleyball.
Sixty-miles of road running per week.
Forty-pound packs on 25-mile marches.
North Carolina SCUBA dives, Swiss Alps ski lifts, Germany guard duty.
Eight trips across the Atlantic Ocean.  Two via U.S. Navy warship.
And one year of a crappy cubicle job.  'Nuff said.

What does all this equal? 

• Right foot aches and pains.
• Scraped left big toe.
• Right knee aches and pains.
• Bursitis in the right shoulder.
• Tendinitis in the right wrist.
• Poison ivy on my left ankle, right calf and bottom lip.

Still I make plans to hike lots, ski more, kayak some and run less.

Do the makers of Head On make something for me?

Summertime

Summer is here!!  Memorial Day is over, and that means the public pools are open, vacations are underway, and national parks across the nation now have extended hours. 

What plans do you have for the summer of 2007?  Disneyland, Yosemite, Pensacola?  My plans are different this year, which will be without a real vacation; this year's will consist of packing and moving to Albuquerque, N.M. 

I have set some short-term goals to enjoy this summer...

1) Spend time with my family, especially my dad.
2) Hike the Land Between the Lakes' North-South Trail, which is only 65 miles of woods, hills, meadows and creeks, along the second largest man-made lake in the States.
3) Go swimming as often as I can.

The romanticism of swimming still appeals to me as an adult.  I still get giddy when I get to splash unsuspecting adults, hold my breath for two minutes, and compete in underwater shouting contests with my nephews and nieces.  I even enjoy the day-after retinal burn which reminds me of yesterday's fun.

Growing up, we only took one vacation -- when I was barely four years old -- so, every summer consisted of staying around the house, staying in trouble around the house, riding bicycles around the house, and occasionally driving one hour north to my well-to-do aunt's house to go swimming in her pool. 

Swimming was the highlight of my childhood.  Going to my aunt's topped the list, then came Dogwood Lake, a man-made recreation area with RV campgrounds, go-cart tracks, an aqua-blue water slide, and a five-acre lake, complete with fake sand and stock fish.  Next, came the "stripper pits," which were filled-in coal mining pits that could be hundreds of feet deep.  These places dotted the Western Kentucky landscape and could be found every other mile, like the lakes in Minnesota, only much smaller.  Last came Lake Malone, my least favorite place in the area.

Even as a teenager, swimming never lost its luster.  We would skip school and drive the two hours to Kentucky Lake to swim and party or go to random stipper pits to jump off the 60-foot rock walls and leap from the tire swings.

Years later, as a young Marine, we lived near the beaches in North Carolina.  After playing "2-man in the sand" volleyball my friends and would go cool down in the waves off Atlantic Beach.  Later, I began SCUBA diving the coastal wrecks and sunken Civil War sites common along the Outer Banks.  Now as an adult I still enjoy spending a whole day watching my hands turn into pale prune-like appendages in my sister's or uncle's backyard pools or in nearby Kentucky Lake.

My greatest childhood memories are submerged like a submarine, resurfacing each time this 30s-something man plunges into another summer of swimming. 

Whatever you do for fun this summer, just ensure that it makes you feel like a kid again.