Tag: Travel

Going to Japan

I’ve been talking about wanting to go to Japan for years — Japan and Greece were my go-to bucket list destinations going as far back as when I was 11. I still haven’t visited either of those countries, 25 years later, and it’s high time I corrected that. Just booked tickets for a trip to Japan for my birthday in April! I’ll be there for 11 days (well, I’ll be gone for 11 days, but 10 days there due to timezones and transit). My plan is to bookend my trip with a few days in Tokyo on either side, then take a train down to Kyoto and Nara in between.

I tend to look for quieter spaces, and I’m fascinated by a lot of the shrines and temples, but I’m also going to try and hit some other stuff (keeping an eye on tickets for the Ghibli Museum for instance). I’ve not done much foreign travel (and basically none to non-English speaking countries), so I’m a little nervous about it, but also excited to finally do this. Do you have any tips for things to check out or stuff I should prepare for in advance?

Back in Portland

It hasn’t really sunk in that I’m back in Portland — it still feels a bit like a vacation. This will change, I imagine, as I get more settled, get unpacked, and find what will be my new routine and rhythm.

The drive north was pleasant, wandering up the coast on CA-1 and US-101. There’s been a heat wave for the past week, so it was nice to be by the coast, where the air was much cooler (I’ll take 65-70° over 90-95° nearly any day). The rest of this post is a bit of a photo dump — I hope you enjoy! Continue reading “Back in Portland”

Lac à l'Eau Claire

A few years ago, I had a dream, involving a lake that I had never been to and did not even know existed at the time. When I awoke, I went to Google Maps and zoomed in on where the lake had appeared to me in my dream. Sure enough, it totally exists, and is just as hardcore as my dream would suggest.

To borrow from the Wikipedia page:

The Lac à l’Eau Claire (the official name, in French), also called the Clearwater Lakes in English, Wiyasakami in Cree and Allait Qasigialingat by the Inuit, are a pair of circular lakes on the Canadian Shield in Quebec, Canada, near Hudson Bay.

The lakes were created by a double meteor impact roughly 290 million years ago:

The lakes fill circular depressions that are interpreted as paired impact craters (astroblemes). The eastern and western craters are 26 km (16 mi) and 36 km (22 mi) in diameter, respectively. Both craters have the same age, 290 ± 20 million years (Permian), and it is believed that they formed simultaneously. The impactors may have been gravitationally bound as a binary asteroid, a suggestion first made by Thomas Wm. Hamilton in a 1978 letter to Sky & Telescope magazine in support of the then-controversial theory that asteroids may possess moons.

There’s more information about the lakes here, though it’s worth noting, there isn’t really anything up there. Like, no one. The entire “unorganized territory” that spans that area had only 16 people, total, according to the 2006 census, in ~129,712 square kilometers. One of these days, I’d really like to charter an expedition up there, and spend some time exploring the lakes and islands. I’ve had this compulsion to head up there for five years, now. Maybe one of these days, I’ll finally manage to do it.