Recent content by jamesdeluxe

314,000 miles, badass!

Not defending this nutcase but is there a solution to FL's insurance mess other than nixing coverage or distributing catastrophic hurricane losses across blue states?

Tony the political dodo bird: one of the last living Reagan conservatives!

The interwebz says Australia is the driest inhabited continent in the world with approximately 70% considered to be semi-arid, arid, or desert. This is what I always envision that most of it looks like (with a helpful soundtrack!).

May through September in New Mexico, I made sure that my rides were done by 9 am. No CamelBaks back then! IIRC, that was a major issue for years with a local indigenous tribe.

I said goddamn! :eusa-clap:

Yep. While living in Albuquerque, an older neighbor told me that he and many other people moved there in the 50s partially because his allergies were insane. Of course, the city and residents ended up planting trees brought in from the east, which negated that advantage. Even though I'm an avid...

My personal experience with living in desert environments is that "it's a dry heat" applies up to about 95 degrees. Above that, it doesn't matter and you get the unpleasant pizza-oven effect. Also, I generally lived in houses with swamp coolers, which are a fabulous invention -- a tenth of the...

I've mentioned before that it's always interesting to read trip reports on Alpinforum, where a) they generally use the original German place names, but b) never convey any "give Südtirol back to Austria!" sentiments. Maybe because the annexation happened 100+ years ago and is considered ancient...

I'm sure I've mentioned before that within a year of moving to CU Boulder in 1982 (where at the time almost a quarter of the student body was from California) I realised that people who lived in sunny regions often engaged in a type of group bonding/performance art -- complaining at length about...

In that 2008 article, Tony writes "While skiing is available in Australia, New Zealand and even South Africa and Lesotho, the biggest resorts and most dependable snow cover lie in South America." Interesting to see the adjective "dependable," as it seems like the Andes in general (viewed purely...

Excellent report. At what point did you pull the trigger on booking flights and where did you fly into? Innsbruck and Venice seem to be equidistant to the region, while Milan is a sizable schlep. As always, I'm fascinated by the region's WWI history and subsequent annexation by Italy.

My father lived in Florida for a more than decade, then moved to South Carolina. That's how I learned the term "halfback."

You can google the day-ticket costs but I wouldn't advise it! As mentioned in the "why to ski in Europe" discussions, over the past five years it's become virtually impossible to ski economically in the U.S. (even at independent joints) without your itinerary being dictated by one of the...

So you'll sell the Rockland County house and live between Cape Cod and Florida?