Brew Run Run One Review!

The actual route.

 

The plan:

On Saturday, Sarah and I tried out the running and drinking route which we have only experienced, thus far, by walking and bus. Worked out really well. The Iron Bridge is the key to making this journey. My GPS watch died at the last brewery (River City). I am thinking it was probably about 12 miles round trip.

Here is a pictorial round up:

 No-Li - Spin Cycle, Skyrail.

Ramblin' Road Dubbel, Saison, Grisette.

 Iron Goat -  Trashy Blonde.  Garbage Pale. Bleating Red Ale.

Budge Brothers - Hop train, Orangutan, 509, 13th Reindeer.

 SteamPlant - Jalepeno Ale.

Tracy and Max Martin caught us in the act!

River City - Imperial Pilsner and VB Stout. Oops forgot to take the picture until, burp...

The beer was all great. If you care for me to name favorites, email me and I will let you know. The only big critique was the lack of bike racks (we were also scouting to make this a bike tour too).

Most breweries have bike racks ordered and one who didn’t have racks said that patrons could bring
their bikes inside. So, I think that should not be a problem this summer when it may be too hot to run.

We had a good time running the route, but biking would open it up to more people and would be a  more social event for Spokane beer pilgrims. Perry Street Brewery will be an easy add to the beginning of the route. An extended route could include Orlison, 12 Strings and Selkirk Abbey. Probably best for biking.

So, if you want to run or bike 10 to 12 miles, and at the same time drink away a Saturday, please consider this route!

Brew Run Run Route

Click to make it readable. Will probably be at NoLi around 1230.

Brew Run Run on Saturday!

The route I would like to take is River City, NoLi, Iron Goat, Budge Brothers, Ramblin Road and end at Steam Plant. This is possible if River City opens at noon instead of their usual 3 pm. This route assures food at the end of the longest leg and at the very end (NoLi and Steam Plant), although, probably Iron Goat and RR will have food wagons.  Both Downtown breweries - River City and Steam Plant open later than any of the others. I have emails out to confirm their hours aren’t extended for the St. Patrickal doings.

Another option would be to hit NoLi (opens at 11), Ramblin Road (1), Iron Goat (2), Budge Bros (2), River City (3), Steam Plant (3). Really, there are a lot of ways to do this.

I look forward to adding Perry Street Brewing to the walking/biking/running/bus brewery tour roster. It is opening today, and I want to let the dust settle. Besides, this run will be anywhere from six to eight miles already and I want to give the plantar fasciitis a little break this weekend.

This is a test run (literally) for Sarah and me of the usual brewery line up. I will tweet our progress as long as I can and keep you posted. Aiming to hit the first brewery one-ish. Too bad The Ram or Birkebeiner isn’t still in business it would have plugged some brewery holes in the map. Maybe we’ll see you on the trail or in the breweries. And if we get thirsty in between, there are lots of watering holes!

Click the image above to make it readable. I will probably figure out the actual route tomorrow and will post that too. Probably. 

The garden is started.

So far, I've got tomatoes, eggplant, peppers and, for the first attempt ever, okra going strong in the basement. It has pushed out the brewing operation a little, but I think it will all be good.

It will be a couple of months before this stuff moves outside. Hopefully, the turkeys will have moved on to more rural and sunnier climes. I really don't want them messing with the garden!

Sunday, I finally brewed some St. Patrick's Day beer. It's bubbling away, right now. Going to keg this batch.
















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Location:Winter brewing!

Trade Winds Logo

As you probably already know, I am a big Trade Winds Motel fan. Years ago, I designed a t-shirt to celebrate the Trade Winds. At the time, it had been converted to low income housing. The pool, in the parking lot, was about 1/3 full. In the muddy water were shopping carts, garbage bags and other detritus. After I made this shirt, someone requested a concierge option and I obliged.










Next came the black velvet painting. This was my first (and only) attempt at black velvet. It turned out OK.








For Christmas, Sarah gave me this framed screen of the logo. Really cool. Great colors!








And over at the Tiki Room there is this great postcard featuring the original sign. How cool is that?







This sign was also on their matchbook covers.







Now, the Trade Winds is all but abandoned. I hope that we will always have this (currently neglected) landmark. Spokane is not a very old city. In perspective, the Trade Winds has been around for a long time. It captures a time when Spokane was very young and World War Two vets hit the open road - rediscovering the country they fought for. When I am walking past it, I squint my eyes and I can almost picture the Trade Winds in its prime. While I am at it, I picture Mollie's (the old IHOP) as a cool tiki bar across the street.

run-commuting continues

Today, I had to break out the car because of time constraints, but it seems like with the streets being in such lousy condition, I probably didn't save that much time. Yesterday was a pretty cold one, with a 5.5 mile run each way with 15 pounds on my back.


Crossing 29th, at Manito Blvd has not been a lot of fun since someone (a disgruntled motorist?) stole all the homemade crossing flags. I used my orange hat as a flag to cross the other day, and almost got hit by someone who was 2 blocks out when I started to cross and was yelled at by someone in the other lane. Good times!

Ramblin' Road Brewery - Open for Business!

Ever since I tried their beer at the Inland Empire Craft Brewery Festival (previously known as the unencumbered "Oktoberfest") I have been anxious for their tap house to open. From riding my bike there and banging on ther door to emailing them, I have been saison-stalking and today, Sarah and I finally got to plunk down and drink some beer in their new tap house at 730 N Columbus @RamblinRoad.

Brian and Danielle, the brewer/owners have a great Super Bowl setting and have fine food available from Bistro Box. Their Saison is (rightfully) sold out. But their Saison d'Rye and Grisette are available and fantastic. They also have other local beers on tap. It's a great place and they are great people, so if you are looking to be someplace different for the Super Bowl or if you are looking for the latest in Spokane's awesome brewing scene, check them out!

Winter Warriortude

My days off have been pretty regimented. I am studying for a March promotional exam and I have been running, and, well, that's pretty much it. I am upping my mileage ten percent every week. This week I will be at 33 miles. The snow makes it a little more difficult, but much more interesting. Yesterday I left 12 miles of footprints in fresh snow.

My usual ride or run to work has been extended from 2.5 miles. Last shift I was up at 5 a.m. in order to run an extended loop of five miles to work. It was fun and surreal. I wear a headlamp and was spooked to see a large truck's headlights coming at me in the dark. It turned out to be two runners, likewise headlamped, running side by side toward me. Weird.

After their catastrophic failure, I tried to find some replacement x-country boots that would fit my oddball ski bindings. No luck. So I turned, as I usually do, to Gorilla Glue. We'll see, they may need to be reinforced with Gorilla Tape.

Mt. Spokane in 3D and in my face.

Ran home from work yesterday morning after a fairly busy night.  Sarah had everything packed for some cross-country skiing.

It was very sunny on top. Down below was cloudy/foggy. These are some of those cross-eyed 3D pictures. Click on one and go for it. Yes, I believe that is my finger in the shot. I should do a review of the Fuji Finepix Real 3D camera some day. It won't be pretty.


 

About two miles out, I realized one of my 25 year-old boots was coming apart.

After another two miles, both my boots started separating from their soles.  Then we made a wrong turn onto some ungroomed black diamond icy stuff. We slowly began our way around Horse Mountain and Quartz Mountain. I started falling down. Did I mention I ran home from work before this? I robbed one of my ski poles of its strap to bind up the worst of the boots and walked.  Sarah walked with me in solidarity.  We didn't see anyone else for almost 2 hours. Oh, and because I was in a hurry,  I didn't pack the usual modest survival gear, or print out a map. At least the weather and company were nice.



Popped out at the Nova Hut and then I put the skis back on for the remaining mile or so back to the parking lot. But, both had separated so badly, I resumed my falling down hills protocol and walked the last half mile back. All told about 9 miles (I think) of ski walking. And today, I had to put in a 10 mile run to stay on schedule of where I want to be this spring.

I might be ready for some new boots. Beer never tasted so good.

Eloika Lake ice fishing.

Fairly good ice fishing out at Eloika yesterday. Enough for some fish tacos with homemade tortillas for dinner. Saw more bald eagles. I wonder when these birds will cross into the pest category. Will we have eagles knocking over our garbage cans and eating our cats this time next year?

While it stayed foggy in Spokane, it was clear on the lake. The ice was about 10 inches thick. My auger is a museum piece that has the little sharpened spoon at the end instead of the more efficient corkscrew dealios of today. When you drill a hole with this thing, you sure don't want to drill another, so you tend to be a little more patient minding your own i-hole.

Ice fishing is the best. If you go by yourself, it is a great time to think and chill (really). If you go with others, it's a really fun social event and your beer always stays cold.

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More birds!!!

Upper left - click to make sure the sound is on. I wish I could understand their wondrous words. I think I made out something about the Seahawks or a sale at Rite-Aid. Not sure.

Bald Eagles - Lovable Clowns of the Sky

Sarah and I went out to Lake Coeur d'Alene last weekend to check out the eagles. There were plenty. They all looked the same. There wasn't a sad eagle in the bunch.

There were a lot of photographers out there too. So many had the gigantic telephoto lenses. I would say most photographers did. There was one guy who didn't even get out of the car, but had his Iphone up to the windshield trying to take a picture. Maybe he was playing Angry Birds in an ironic fashion. I had a zoom lens, so I was in the middle of the spectrum.

Then there were some people who looked like they were looking for a keeper. Suspect the smoker or crockpot at home was dusted off and waiting, ready to accept piebald goodness.

I want to get some better pictures. Sarah has agreed to let me photograph her holding a fish in an alluring fashion, as an eagle lands on her arm to accept the fish. We have some pretty good gloves for her to wear. Just holding a fish outstretched for a couple of hours should be a pretty good workout.

My eagle calling is not what it used to be, and I will be brushing up on that too.

It's pretty neat. Coeur d'Alene has bald eagles and Spokane has Dick's seagulls. Something for everyone.

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Walked downtown to pick up our Whitestone wine. What a beautiful day!

Location:Sunny day

Millennium Laxative is finally available!

I wrote this novel back in 1998. I was working in Campus Ministry at Gonzaga University, and freelance ad writing to help pay the bills.

The Left Behind series of books was just taking off. I never read any of them, but I read about them. The Religious Right’s usual gang of antiChrist suspects featured prominently in this mega-money-making literary enterprise. It looks like I wrote Millennium Laxative as a response - portraying the Religious Right and their ilk as the villains in the “end times.”. I can’t remember if that was the point.
I must admit that, now, religion matters less than it did to me when I wrote this. It was my job, after all. Today, I find solace that religion (all across the political and faith spectrum) has been pretty much defanged. Alleluia. It does make the premise of this book a little less urgent, and hard to swallow, though.

In 1998, the Internet was pretty basic. I sent a synopsis of the novel and the first three chapters to literary agents all over the United States. I went through a lot of stamps. The first reply I received was very positive. They were very interested and wanted the whole enchilada mailed to them. I then started to receive nothing but rejection notices. But, I wasn’t worried. I had someone interested with my very first mailing. Then, I received their rejection notice, as well. “Sorry, this book is too ‘over the top’ for today’s conservative book market.” Darn those conservatives!

I eventually moved onto other projects and other jobs. About 10 years ago, I found the 3-1/2-inch floppy disks with drafts two and three on them. Sadly, I had written the book using WordPerfect - the king back then, and now just another defunct word processing program. I found some translation software and converted the files into Word. A few months ago, I started cleaning up those files. There were a lot of problems - continuity, story deviations between drafts, etc. I finally resorted to scanning the 210 pages of my bound draft (hopefully that was the final version) and then running an OCR program to convert the PDF images into editable digital text.

Optical Character Recognition is not foolproof by any means. So, there was a lot of cleaning up to do to get to a passable draft. I couldn’t find the original artwork either, so I reconstructed it to the best of my memory, as well.

Now, here it is, published as an e-book, thanks to Amazon. For some reason, italics don’t work, so my apologies to all the literary and motion picture references that go unitalicized. In my heart, your text shall always tilt.

Like I said, I don’t care about religion as much as I did. If you read this and want to argue some point with me or commiserate, I am probably a little too rusty, a lot less passionate and certainly more happy to make it worth your while. I know you can read that last part two ways. 

The Immortal Augustus Gladstone

Watched this last night. The Immortal Augustus Gladstone is a movie that is set in Portland but most of the scenes were shot here in Spokane. Prominently featured is Donut Parade and the Otis Hotel. Great Downtown shots of Spokane too. It's a nice story made by local Robyn Miller of Myst and Riven fame. We really enjoyed it. So, if you need a fix of some Spokane cinema, download the movie here.

On another note, if you are a Bruce Dern fan, don't miss Nebraska. It was like I was on a 70s family vacation to visit relatives there all over again!

Between these two films, I am feeling pretty inspired for a Monday morning.