American in Spain

Because I carry an apparently dominant motion sickness gene, it’s really important to me that my brain be in visual range of the horizon out an airplane window. My wife, while she does not suffer from the same equilibrium problem, does suffer from being a terribly kind person, so I almost always get the window seat when traveling.

Often, the view out the window can be quite boring. I normally think, “There’s an awful lot of farm land to feed all of us,” and “There are way more trees than the environmentalists make us think there are.” On my recent flight across the continent of North America, I very much enjoyed the views, which mostly turned out to be of California and Wyoming.
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The following is a document written by my father, Paul Rasmussen, about his granddaughter Nora’s, stay at his house in December 2010.

We had a very good visit with our Spanish family in October, so we were surprised when Erik floated the idea of bringing Marga and Nora for a visit in November, and even more surprised when he asked us how we would feel about taking care of Nora for five days while he and Marga visited San Francisco.
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The first time you see snow, it really is a wonderful experience. One of the optional homework assignments we left with my parents along with Nora when we visited San Francisco recently was to teach her to say “Holy cow!” It was Marga’s idea, as she finds the expression particularly humorous; euphemisms in foreign languages often are. Sure enough, when returned, she knew how to say “Holy cow!” (her approximation sounds more like “Hota tao!”) and put her hand to her head whenever she was surprised.
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[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] We got up early at 7:00, although our neighbors had their television blaring at 6:00 (maybe that’s what the complimentary ear plugs were for?). Showers and breakfast in the local coffee shop, and we were out at the curb to be picked up by our tour bus. Actually it was the “bus to the bus” only to take us to the tour company’s offices, but when we came out of the tour office with our tickets, the same driver was waiting to take us to Muir Woods, the valley with ancient groves of redwood trees, some of the tallest and oldest trees in the world. Our tour guide was very entertaining, and spoke to us for the entire forty-minute ride over the Golden Gate Bridge, past Sausalito, and into the valley with the forest. The trees were impressive, for sure, but not as awe-inspiring as I was secretly hoping. The forest walk beneath them was magical and silent except for the babbling brook. While they are “just trees”, I highly recommend a visit if you’re not traveling with a teenager who will see them as such.
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[Part 1] [Part 2] We got up late and were clearly both aching from the day before. My feet were begging for a dose of ibuprofen and another six hours in bed, but I only gave them the former. Tuesday was “meet the Internet people” day, with lunch scheduled with a second cousin I’d never met who had found my blog a few years before, and dinner with an Internet friend of an Internet friend, a social network contact of mine.
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[Part 1] Up at 7:00 AM like the sun. After a shower, we headed down to the street for a coffee at a local shop, and then to nearby Union Square where we found the Powell-Hyde cable car line. A one way ticket is a steep $5, but a three-day passport is only $20. So as long as we could take two round trips in three days, it would be worth it to buy the passport. Boy, did we ever get our money’s worth out of that! Several times we took the cable car just to take it. We love walking through cities, but there’s a point where you’re glad someone thought to pull trains along underground cables.
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The night before our 9:40 AM flight to San Francisco, which required getting up at 6:00 AM, Nora was kind enough to remind us just why we were leaving her behind on our coast-to-coast adventure; she woke up crying at 2:00 AM and kept us up until just before 4:00 AM. By 3:10, we had ascertained that her demands were that she be in her crib – not in our bed, or up playing – with her mother – not her father – uncomfortably bent over the crib holding her hand. She’d had a fever the day before, but was only suffering from a stuffy nose at this point. We broke off negotiations and let her cry for the 45 minutes until she finally understood the futility. “Remind me of this when I get all ‘I miss my poor baby!’ in San Francisco,” Marga whispered to me.
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On Thanksgiving morning, as is tradition in my family, we piled in the minivan and headed over the proverbial river and through the proverbial woods to Grandmother’s house. Nora was relatively well behaved during the 3.5 hour car journey, which included a stop at Bojangles for a “bo berry biscuit”, which was priced at $0.89 for one or $1.00 for two…and Europeans ask why Americans overeat so much. Before leaving Bojangles, Nora managed to dump her entire cup of water down the front of her dress, which was immediately removed, thus clearing the way for getting chocolate all over her onesie later in the car ride.
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