“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” – William Blake.

Ray Manzarek, musician, radio and TV personality, and co-founder and keyboard player for the Doors, died Monday, May 20 in the town of Rosenheim, Germany, about 50 kilometers southeast of Munich, Germany.

1975 and the opening of my doors of perception.

In summer 1975 I was 15 and a child-man having experienced so many new perceptions after 18 months living around Mainz and Wiesbaden, West Germany in the Rheinland-Paltinate.

Mainz was established as a Roman fort city over 2,000 years ago.

Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain

And all the children are insane

All the children are insane

Waiting for the summer rain, yeah

The Doors – The End

Teenage Mediterranean  vacation mania

My family took a summer 1975 road trip from Mainz, Germany to Barcelona, Spain and then across the Mediterranean coastal beaches to Pisa, Italy in a used 1972 Volvo sedan my mechanic dad was always working on. And he towed a travel trailer pop-up tent behind the Volvo that two adults and two kids could comfortably sleep in. I really don’t recall how five of us squeezed into the trailer tent to sleep when my older sister came to Germany during her California summer college breaks.

At the age of 15 this trip seemed like it might be unendurable. Spring 1975 had provided months of new experiences with so many interesting people I had met, helping me open new doors to thoughts of the world around me. The thought of spending two weeks with my parents, all day and night, well…

I had gotten use to having the privacy of my own room at home. Eighteen months in Germany with my own bedroom had been the longest period in
my 15.5 year life to have a space of my own to relax and read and listen to music without my younger sister being a noisy child around me.

Two weeks on a road trip sitting in the back seat of a car would require a minimum of 1,500 pages of reading material to occupy a good three
hours a day when I could tune out and fantasize.  I packed the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy to keep me occupied on the long two-week car camping trip to France, Spain and Italy. I had read it a couple years before and I wanted a re-read to take my teenage angst thoughts into dreams far away from my high school friends.

Wiesbaden High School, a US Armed Forces school, is where some 1,500 teenagers from a large radius of communities attended high school in Wiesbaden, Germany in 1975. The girl who captivated my eyes from Day 1 of English class had finally connected with me by the end of the school year.

Hello, I love you

Won’t you tell me your name?

Hello, I love you

Let me jump in your game

The Doors – Hello, I Love You

She was Swiss American and lived in the hills north of the Rhein River, some fifty miles away from where I lived. The small Army helicopter base where I lived nearly two years was ten miles south of Mainz on the south side of the Rhein. Summertime meant a bridge too far for two 15-year olds to maintain a relationship through high school summer break.

European Vacation 1975

My parents were frequent road travelers in Europe.

Once, while living in Germany, I asked my mom,

“Everyone else I know has a house in the States. Why don’t we own a house?”

My mother responded by asking me,

“Do you know any other kids who travel around Europe as much as you do?”

I ran through my mental catalog of people I knew and I had to confess.

“No.”

She gave me back another reply saying something like,

“Would you rather we spend our money to keep a house we don’t live
in or do you want to travel?”

That was a no-brainer choice for me.

The Travel Music Bag

One of my travel bags was always filled with cassette tapes of music and I had a portable 8- inch high x 12-inch long x 3-inch wide cassette tape player. No belt strap for that piece of machinery. It was handheld or backpack material.

My 19-year-old sister, on summer vacation from University of California Santa Cruz, had brought a few dozen cassette recordings of rock albums with her to Germany. She was my conduit to music civilization. She had turned me on to early Rod Stewart, Laura Nyro, Bonnie Raitt, The Kinks, Yes, CSNY and in summer 1975, the Doors.

I think Lou Reed, an influential rock star for me at the time, is an artist I had found myself in 1975.

Jenny said, when she was just five years old
you know there’s nothin’ happening at all
Every time she put on the radio
there was nothin’ goin’ down at all
not at all
One fine mornin’, she puts on a New York station
and she couldn’t believe what she heard at all
She started dancin’ to that fine-fine-fine-fine music
ooohhh, her life was saved by rock ‘n’ roll
hey baby, rock ‘n’ roll

Lou Reed – Rock n’ Roll

Buying record albums or cassettes was expensive in Germany at the time and U.S. Armed Forces radio, even German radio, was virtually nonexistent for listening to rock music. That genre was not part of radio programming in 1975.

My good fortune is the Volvo had an 8-track player and my dad had a cassette tape adaptor for the 8-track player. The 8-track was already out of style in 1975 and I picked up a number of good rock albums on 8-track format in the dollar bargain bins at U.S. Army exchange stores in Germany. This was a time when regular vinyl albums were typically selling for $4 to $6.

My dad tolerated my 8-track tapes of John Lennon and Neil Young albums and gave me turns listening to my tapes when he was not listening to
musical soundtracks like Camelot and West Side Story and operas.

The summer 1975 Mediterranean vacation is most defined by my repeated listening of several Doors recordings on the beaches of Spain, France
and Italy. The Doors opened me to a new world of perception in 1975 .

Take a long holiday, let your children play

The Doors – Riders on the Storm

That trip took us to a mountain town in the French Alps where we camped surrounded by managed forest in a Heidi-like place. A week later we were on the beach in France where a baguette cost the equivalent of one U.S. penny, a liter of soda was 3 cents and a beach bonfire party across the road lasted most of the night.

This is the best part of the trip

This is the trip, the best part

I really like

What’d he say?

The Doors – The Soft Parade

The Doors’ use of words to create a dynamic fantasy with a musical soundtrack left an even deeper impression on me than reading Lord of the Rings on that trip through the French Alps and the Mediterranean beaches where we camped from Barcelona to Pisa, Italy.

Singer/poet Jim Morrison had already died four years earlier, July 3, 1971 in Paris.

My memories of 1975 sharing rainy days on Spanish beaches with the Doors is one where I was captivated by song lyrics, yet also turned on by the musical ingenuity compared to much of the rock music I had heard in the previous four years.

The second week of the 1975 European vacation was more socially engaging as a vacation experience when my sister, her boyfriend and I went to Rome without the parents.

But, that is another story.

Good-bye Ray.

Made the scene, week to week

Day to day, hour to hour

The gate is straight

Deep and wide

Break on through to the other side

The Doors – Break on Through

Ray Manzarek is the voice I personally associate with the Doors legacy. In many different cities and towns, on radios and on TVs over the intervening years since summer 1975, I caught Ray’s distinctive voice and listened to a man speak about life and music and spirituality as if he truly had a view through clean doors of perception.

Ray Manzarek’s life and his death meant something to me.

Successful hills are here to stay

Everything must be this way

Gentle streets where people play

Welcome to the soft parade

All our lives we sweat and save

Building for a shallow grave

The Doors – The Soft Parade

Can you see the real me on Loyalty Traveler?

Over the past few years a common occurrence happens when points and miles bloggers meet me. People generally tell me that I am nothing like they expected from reading my blog.

There were about 45 bloggers at the Boarding Area conference in Colorado Springs last weekend. I spent time talking with about 15 of the bloggers.

I am horrible at small talk, mingling and working a room.

Tell stories and I’ll be hanging with you for hours. Hang with me and I’ll tell you stories for hours.

Rude Awakening

I had met only a few of the BoardingArea bloggers at two events in the past. I was a presenter at FrugalTravelGuy’s 2010 conference in Chicago. I cancelled out on the October 2011 conference in February 2011 while suffering a fever in Washington, D.C. and I have never been asked to speak at any other Points & Miles events.

I do not go to MegaDo, FTU, the Freddies and all the conference gatherings. My experience with these conferences has been most of the conversation is about someone’s latest credit card acquisition and shopping miles score rather than stories of the personal travel adventures coming out of those deals. People tend to talk about places they have been without telling much about the places and the people they meet there.

My blog is where most people meet me and apparently that is not a sufficiently revealing source of information to provide a picture of who I am and where I came from.

These comments or something very similar were said to me over the three BAcon days:

• You know how you imagine someone will be and when you meet them you realize they are completely different. (I’m not sure if that was a positive or negative reaction. I think it was positive at BAcon, although at other conferences I think it was meant negatively.)
• From your blog I thought you were much older; like 75 or something. (I am 53).
• You have a much more interesting personality than comes through on your blog. You should share more of your stories.
• You  should share more of your personal stories on your blog. (I know I just said this in the previous bullet, however, this was told to me by several people.)
• You are an odd duck among the BoardingArea bloggers.
• You really are a hippie. (Not really. I tried to be, and I lived around many hippies, but I have always been more of a solitary soul than a communal participant. That is why I am so happy living life as Loyalty Traveler blogger these days.)
• What’s up with that creepy hot tub photo on your blog?  (This sentiment was expressed by several bloggers.  That is why I addressed the hot tub photo issue in its own post this week.)

Oral Fixations

I like to hear travel stories. I like to tell travel stories.

The question I ask myself frequently as I write Loyalty Traveler blog posts is “How much of my personal history should I share in my posts?”

It is hard to know when a story from my past 53 years is relevant and interesting to readers or if it comes off as a narcissistic distraction.

So I am thinking of trying something like “Story Friday” on Loyalty Traveler where I share a travel story from my past. Since I am not good at following routines, the story will likely appear any day of the week.

To start I think I should give readers three broad spectrum posts to share my parent-guided travel years (1-15), my self-guided travel years (16-34) and my domestic and international travel years (34-48) up to the time I started writing Loyalty Traveler.

The Story Inside

My family are storytellers. We grew up in an oral tradition and much of that was due to frequent moving during the years when my father was in the army.

Can you see the real me?

I have lived in Monterey for the past ten years and I was born about seven miles from where I currently live. I met my wife Kelley at the Monterey Peninsula Junior College in a room about ten minutes walk from where we live. Until 2001, I never lived in the same place for more than four years.

Growing up I changed schools 12 times in 11 years from kindergarten to my last year of high school. I stayed at Seaside High for less than one year before leaving home during my junior year on a cross-country Greyhound bus to see the U.S. My parents were not the problem I was fleeing. I had wanderlust and school was too depressing a place to be hanging out for another year.

For the next few years I blew like a tumbleweed or dandelion from place to place living on the beaches of Oahu and Kauai, deserts of Nevada and the woods of Vermont. Some days I ‘d simply walk out to the road and put my thumb out to see where I would end up at the end of the day. I love the outdoors and I quickly tire of cities and crowds of people.

Rock and roll music gave me life. I am not a musician, just a listener. Before starting Loyalty Traveler my favorite job was nine months I worked in a record store when I was 19. I am a bit of a musicologist and most of the live concerts I have seen in my life were the result of winning rock trivia contests. If you want to talk Classic Rock, I am a good resource. Readers might notice I often use rock lyrics in my blog posts.

This post is not a travel story. This is just an opener.

Until another Story Friday.

Update May 18, 2013: Yesterday was a day spent in Yosemite where I had to tell myself for 90 minutes to put the camera down and get laser focused on driving home before dark. While making the 4-hour drive from Yosemite Valley to Monterey, I realized I forgot to add that the BAcon conference was the best travel-blogging-as-a-business conference I have attended yet. This post made that major omission and likely left some readers with the wrong impression of BAcon.

There were 45 bloggers at BAcon and many memorable travel stories to hear from bloggers who travel for business and leisure. I know I’ll be reading more travel bloggers regularly after last weekend.

Randy Petersen and the team excelled at the conference organization.

Greetings from Utah. Wow. The desert scenery is captivating. My eyes kept repeating to my head yesterday one simple impression – Wow!

The drive on I-15 from Las Vegas to St. George, Utah has some mountain landscapes to admire, but the 40 miles or so through Arizona and the Virgin River Canyon Gorge was the only place that stood out along that stretch of road.

Virgin River Canyon Recreation Area, Arizona.

Cactus flower.

There are places to park an RV or car and about two dozen covered areas for a picnic.

The Virgin River Canyon area was wonderful in the 75 degree warmth. July would be a different story here when virtually every day is assured to be 90 to 115 degrees in mid-day sun.

Welcome to Utah

St. George, Utah

Zion National Park is about 40 miles past St. George on Route 9. I only stopped in St. George for gas. The setting of the city is gorgeous with expansive views of desert mesa rocks and Signal Peak at 10,365 ft.

Pine Valley Mountains seen from Hurricane.

Hurricane, almost a suburb of St. George, is the last town with major services before the Zion park district area. There is a WalMart in Hurricane for last minute supplies and the few hotels looked fine for someone wanting to be a few miles closer to Zion than St. George.

Springdale, Utah is at the south entrance to Zion. This is a quaint little town with hotels, B&Bs, restaurants and stores and a resort-style lodge Best Western.

Best Western Zion Park Inn.

A quick walk around the Best Western had me wondering if there are rooms without fantastic views. Rates here rival the rates at the Zion Lodge a few miles into the National Park at about $180 to $200. Both the Best Western and the Zion National Park lodge had walk-up vacancy.

View from the back porch of the Best Western Zion Park Inn.

The Hampton Inn is almost ready to open right next door to the Best Western. The building already  displays signage. 

Zion National Park

I checked National Park visitor statistics last week. Zion National Park is the most visited of the five National Parks in Utah by a factor of two over Bryce Canyon and Arches and 4x to 6x more visitors than Capitol Reef or Canyonlands. Zion gets about 3 million visitors a year and makes the Top Ten most visited National Parks in the USA.

It is recommended to catch the free shuttle in Springdale to the Visitor Center about a mile or two from the town. The Zion National Park parking lot is usually full by early morning in peak season. I arrived around noon on a Tuesday in May and the place was already crowded. In summer the park averages more than 10,000 visitors a day.

The heavy traffic means Zion Canyon road is closed to private vehicles most of the year and visitors must take a shuttle bus from the Park Visitor Center to stops at locations on the one road into the canyon. Shuttle busses continually move up and down the Zion Canyon road and pass by in both directions about every 6 to 10 minutes.

Zion Canyon free shuttle for visitors can also carry bikes.

European Utah

Riding over a dozen different shuttle busses as I stopped at each place and photographed the scenery in between the bouts of rain revealed that the majority of visitors in the park yesterday were Europeans.

I felt like I was back in Berlin hearing more German yesterday than English. French and Italian visitors were common. I don’t recall hearing anyone speaking Spanish.

Zion Canyon National Park view from Weeping Rock.

I hiked alongside the Virgin River at the last stop up in Zion Canyon. In good weather this hike goes miles into the canyon by hiking through the shallow Virgin River into gorges where the canyon walls are as narrow as 30 feet across and 2,000 feet high.

Yesterday was not the kind of day for the river hike. About ten minutes out on the paved portion of the trail a torrential downpour of rain and hail hit and a hundred people on the river walk trail sought shelter from the storm under any available tree foliage.

90% of us did not have adequate covering to be coated with a layer of ice.

I had a waterproof vest, but I was wearing shorts in the 70 degree temperature that quickly plummeted.  Even taking the shuttle to go directly back to my car would have taken 40 minutes. Many of the visitors committed to heading back to the visitor center to get dry clothing.

Fortunately the temperature climbed back up to the upper 60s and the chill wore off as I continued to hike around the different stops.

Be prepared for the weather changes on days when storms are a potential threat.

Speaking of weather. I am at Bryce Canyon and the skies have turned blue with the storm clouds to the north and Bryce Canyon to the south. The temperature is in the mid-30s here at 7,000 ft. elevation. Forecast for Bryce Canyon is 40s and intermittent storms today and snow tonight.

Time to get moving and see more of Utah’s natural wonders.

And today I will carry the gear to keep me dry and warm, whatever the conditions.

Rock climbing is popular in Zion National Park.

The tunnels on Highway 12 at Red Canyon on the way to Bryce Canyon National Park.

Time to get rolling after wasting a weekend doing house chores and watching the San Francisco Giants sweep the LA Dodgers. Storm clouds are moving into the California deserts and the forecast is the rain and lightning will follow me across California, Nevada and Utah.

The weather forecast that predicted two days ago southern Utah would be in the 70s and 80s for my travel this week is now saying there may be flash floods and snow with the temperature in the 40s and 50s across the deserts and canyons of Utah.

Over the weekend I made two nights of reservations for Utah and my plan is to stick with my chosen route – unless the road gets washed out along the way.

I got new tires for my car last Friday. At the price they charge for my premium car tires required for a Hyundai Sonata, these treads should be able to navigate rivers. Not that I’ll test their capabilities beyond normal road driving. I am a safe driver. I know not to drive across moving water on the roadways. 

New Girl in the Air wrote a piece today about how she plans out and researches trips all the time. I am leaving in 60 minutes and I have not even packed anything yet. I have a plan of where I will spend the next three nights, but weather conditions might alter my route.

I have to pack rain gear, snow gear, hot sun gear and tech gear.

I need to stop by AAA and pick up maps.

The funny thing is everyone around me is freaking out that I canceled my cell phone two weeks ago. I did not own a cellphone for 5 of the 7 trips I made across Utah in the 1980s and 1990s. These days not having a cellphone on a desert roadtrip seems to be considered as comparably dangerous as hitchhiking.

This is the 21st century and not pioneer days. I can find a Costco in five cities along the way. I can even reactivate my old phone with the press of a button and a credit card.

The joy of air travel is being coddled and shuttled through safe spaces from airport to airplane to lounge to ground transportation and repeat. Even if sometimes there are delays in the stages of air travel.

I think I will arrive at BAcon just a little dirtier than most of the other bloggers after a thousand miles crossing the western deserts.

The plan is Las Vegas today and visiting a Utah National Park tomorrow.

Time to get going.

Las Vegas, Nevada.

My 18 year old nephew was excitedly talking the other night about how he wants to travel everywhere and experience everything. The conversation is one I wanted to take deeper, but that just wasn’t rationally going to happen after I had spent the previous 15 hours in sensory bombardment in the Disneyland and California Adventure parks and used my last bit of concentration driving SoCal freeways.

My main piece of advice is slow down. Take it easy.

Several different insights over the course of the past two weeks has me thinking about where a person is and where they want to be as it relates to travel.

Little boy’s dream.

‘Measuring Up’ at Radiator Springs Racers in Disney’s California Adventure Park.

The wisdom of age is realizing that you can’t be everywhere and you can’t see it all.

Read More…

“You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline – it helps if you have some kind of football team, or some nuclear weapons, but in the very least you need a beer.”  – Frank Zappa

Beer is culture in Europe. There are regions where wine dominates, yet locally brewed beer is a prevalent industry in all regions of Europe.

My ten days in Europe placed me in drinking range of beer from seven different countries.

One aspect of rapid travel across Europe was quickly seeing the economics of beer in different countries.

Zurich, Switzerland Read More…

Backtracking to The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was one of the last excursions I made in Berlin after six days in the city.

This memorial pulled me in like a magnet. I gravitated to the slabs for their aesthetic structure and feel.

60 hours earlier I tripped-out Night walking through Berlin blocks.

Revisiting Berlin’s stelae in daylight and white; another view of life in the cracks.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

Embassy of the United States is building on right and glass dome of German Reichstag in center.

This field of slabs is also commonly referred to as The Holocaust Memorial.

The Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a German government foundation created on June 25, 1999. Read More…

Outside the Ostbahnhof, East train station in Berlin, is the East Side Gallery, a 1.3 km stretch of the Berlin Wall covered in 106 murals and thousands of pieces of graffiti on top of the murals. I read East Side Gallery is the second most visited tourist site in Berlin.

Tourists at the East Side Gallery, Berlin Wall – March 9, 2013.

Brandenburg Gate is the city symbol for Berlin and the number one tourist  destination visited.

Brandenburg Gate, Berlin

East Side Gallery was a collaborative project of international artists who painted over 100 murals on this remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall in 1990.

I visited the Berlin Wall once before in July 2000. Seeing the wall was the first task I planned on my trip to Berlin on that earlier trip. At that time many of the murals were flaking and chipping paint and graffiti had been added over many of the pieces. Read More…

A field of concrete slabs rise up from the ground.

An orderly array of stones in straight lines.

Space to walk between them.

Entering the array, the concrete slabs are low to the ground.

Distant light from surrounding streets illuminates Berlin blocks at night.

This field of blocks appears empty of people.

Who would venture into Berlin’s shadowy spaces on a freezing cold night in March?

Night walking  along the cobbled paths,

deeper into the field of concrete slabs,

the ground undulates,

Berlin dips and rises.

Concrete slabs rise higher and higher until Berlin blocks are far taller than human eyes.

Tall slabs in the interior create walls

of darkness.

Peripheral vision limited to perpendicular straight lines.

Walled in, yet open spaces to move,

left or right,

forward or backward. 

Light from outside this field of stones  channels within.

Deep within  Berlin blocks is a warmth not felt outside these walls of stone.  

Sudden realization  others are within this field of Berlin blocks.

Sense of foreboding.

Night walking alone, cornered by stone slabs, feels risky late into a Friday night.

I am in a dark space,

narrow corridors,

deep in a field of concrete slabs,

trapped.

Around the next corner will there be an attack?

No savior.

Sound of footsteps in the distance,

moving quickly,

faster,

running,

rushing,

a woman screams.

Compelled I walk toward her sounds.

Am I a savior?  

Her screams cease.

I shudder.

Laughter.

Several women laughing.

Relief.

A change of direction.

Out of the darkness and into the light.

To my left, the opposite side of the field from where I entered, a silhouette in the channel is visible in a backdrop of light about 80 meters away.

Another soul night walking through this array of Berlin blocks.

My eyes rise above the height of concrete  slabs surrounding me.  

Once again Berlin’s blocks are visible in more directions than two straight channeled lines.

In the open air, wind chills my body.

The array of Berlin’s blocks in night light warms my mind.

Two policemen patrol nearby on the sidewalk across the street.

A cold slab of concrete, one of 2,711 slabs in the memorial park, is the perfect height to sit and reflect,

about a journey into the dark interior of Berlin’s blocks and out again into the light.

**********  

‘Night Walking through Berlin Blocks’ is a description of my walk through The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe March 8, 2013 on a dry and windy winter night when the temperature was slightly below freezing as I journeyed alone in Berlin from Potsdamer Platz to Alexanderplatz .

I saw the future in 1974 when I visited a market in Luzern, Switzerland. At least I think it was Luzern, regardless it was Switzerland. At the time my father was a US Army helicopter mechanic stationed outside of Mainz, Germany and we made a road trip to Switzerland. Having lived in Los Angeles in 1973 prior to moving to Germany, I think I had been exposed to some of the most modern technological innovations in the USA, but I had never seen anything like Switzerland shopping. We were in an underground pedestrian walkway and we passed a market that was fully automated. Products were displayed in the window and you could purchase items like a super-size vending machine.

The technological concept blew my mind.

Now we have online shopping from home and credit cards and smart phones. Anything you want to buy is a click away if you have the credit.

Comparative shopping in a global sense. Read More…