ben country 2.0 was a blast. the geared karate monkey carried me a full 40 miles out into the sticks, and i brought two new toys along with me: a pair of homemade bucket panniers and my new hennessy hammock. gave me the best night’s sleep camping i’ve ever had, except for how my sleeping bag kept overheating me. i even managed to semi-drunkenly wake up in the middle of the night to micturate without breaking myself.

fire, food, friends, hiking, biking, and great weather? yeah i’m super excited to to a ton more s24o-type rides this summer.

i even almost made it all the way there and back without any kind of mechanical failure. almost.

i’ve been sick. i’ve been to portland. i’m sick again. meanwhile, boy on a stick and slither says it better than i probably could:

apparently google maps has recently updated it’s satellite data set for the portland metropolitan area, so for the first time ever i’m finally able to take my childhood understanding of spatial relationships and put them in front of you with some actual visualization. or, to put it more succicntly, here’s arial imagery of where i grew up, though somewhat changed in the last fifteen years:

my house, with my grandparent’s property adjacent to the west. of course you can’t tell the slope but that thing is on a steady hill down to the creek at right. still there was alot of woods to explore.

my other grandparent’s farm, complete with the red barn and massive tree (oak? chestnut?) where i stacked haybales and at one point owned a cow. if you go a little bit northwest of there, you can also see camas’ very own castle.

moving on to uptown camas, you can see a bunch of things: crown park with the public outdoor swimming pool, james david zellerbach elementary (nee middle) school, liberty middle school (nee chs), doc harris stadium (go papermakers!), and st. thomas aquinas church.

downtown, well, you’ve got the mill?

that’s pretty much what there is of camas, at least that which is interesting from the air. i guess if you are ever there with a hot air balloon and internet access you could use my maps to say, find the best pizza place in camas or great fries and milkshakes, but that seems a little unlikely.

anyhow, everybody knows that the best milkshakes are at the fair.