Travels With Charley Day 14

Steinbeck moves into the Dakotas and finds himself feeling nostalgic.  As he drives through the country roads he finds himself thinking about how the hustle and bustle of the city is so daunting compared to the open aired rural country.  He also focuses on food and its freshness.  He says that our country has gotten so concerned about cleanliness that we have sacrificed taste.  This is a sad notion indeed.  Steinbeck definitely prefers the country to the city I believe.

Travels With Charley Day 13

Steinbeck travels through Illinois and Chicago,  but doesn't write about it because he feels it wound not mesh with his previous writings.  He enters Wisconsin and describes it in very flattering light.  He is impressed with the crisp clear air and the variations of landscapes.  He later tries to see the twin cities of Minnesota, but he is unable due to the influx of traffic.  It is in Minneapolis that he writes his analogy to being a weakening swimmer with all the humongous trucks.  I remember reading that in class.  He gets back on highway 10 and stops at a diner where a very rude waitress and cook give him directions to Sioux Centre.

Travels With Chaley Day 12

Steinbeck travels to a hotel.  He asks for a room but none are available at the moment.  He haggles with the man at the front desk and is eventually allowed to use a room that was rented to a man who left early that morning to catch a plane.  The room hasn't been cleaned so when Steinbeck enters the room he is met with a certain degree of filth.  Steinbeck gets Sherlock Holmesesque and makes all these deductions about the man that used the room before him.  His deductions are rather impressive.

Travels With Chaley Day 11

Steinbeck continues his journey through the midwest.  He meets a couple more people who are minor and unimportant characters.  Not too much happened plot-wise.  Steinbeck likes the midwest and thinks the people there are some of the most genuine in the country.  I have to agree with that.

Travels With Charley Day 10

Steinbeck makes his way into the midwest in this installment.  He stops by a seemingly vacant lot in Michigan and is immediately confronted by a man trying to chase him off the property.  Steinbeck manages to bribe the man with a cup of coffee and ends up becoming friends with him.  The next day they go fishing together.  Midwesterners, at first encounter may seem irritable, but are actually quite nice and thoughtful people.

Travels With Charley Day 9

Steinbeck leaves Maine and travels west.  He visits Niagara Falls.  He tries to cut through Canada at one point to save himself a bit of driving, but he is stopped by immigration agents at the border.  The agents tell him that he may bring Charlie into Canada but the U.S. officials will not let him bring Charley back into the U.S.  Steinbeck proceeds to turn around and head back into the U.S. but not before being harassed my U.S. officials.  Steinbeck associates himself with truck drivers here and compares them to sailors.  He discovers that the truck drivers know little of the country other then their stops on their paths.

Travels With Charley Day 8

Steinbeck has made it to New York State by the end of my reading today.  However, instead of writing in detail about the land he passed, he wrote about people and historical figures.  He also commented on the aggression of states through the use of their street signs.  The thing I liked most was how he described the differences in a city between morning, afternoon, and night.  You get a completely different view of a city depending on when you go out and with whom.  He comments on how he was in Prauge with a man that travels for a living at the same.  The two were in the same city at the same time, but on the plane ride home they described two very different cities.  Neither of them was lying, they just had different experiences with different people.

Travels With Charley Day 7

Steinbeck continues his journey through Maine and runs into an interesting group of people.  He meets some Canadian Canucks in northern Maine during the harvesting season.  Steinbeck concludes that americans are too lazy or too proud to bend down to the earth and gather what we need to survive.  He says that one day we will run out of people humble enough to do these tasks and then what will we do for food and whatnot?  I completely agree with this statement.  I don't know anyone who wants to become a farmer or harvester.  Everyone wants to do tedious mental work and nothing physical.  Steinbeck begins to head west.

Travels With Charley Day 6

Steinbeck continues his journey through Maine after his stay at Deer Isle.  He leaves Deer Isle and is reminded how large and how far north America goes up into Canada in Maine.  He is now traveling during the hunting season and is constantly reminded how dangerous it is.  Charley, who looks like a doe or buck, is outfitted with red tissue on his tail to keep from being shot at, to no avail.  Steinbeck is exaggerating quite a bit when talking about hunting because I went hunting with my grandpa once and everyone was very careful.  No one shot at anything they couldn't kill and they weren't sure was a deer.

Travels With Charley Day 5

Steinbeck and Charley continue their voyage north toward Maine.  On the way they encounter a woman with a troublesome Pomeranian who bites Steinbeck.  Steinbeck has also constructed a genius way to clean his clothes that requires little to no effort.  He stops for a night at a motel-type place and begins talking with the waitress.  the waitress is pessimistic to say the least.  Steinbeck says that a sad soul will kill weeks before any gem could.  Despite getting lost several times and a less than stellar encounter with a Maine state trooper, Steinbeck makes it to Deer Isle where he meets George.

Travels With Chaley Day 4

As I continue to read Steinbeck I notice that he is very in tune with his surroundings.  He is conscious of what is happening around him and how things happen around him.  He compensates for how the native people live their lives and on their schedule.  He wakes up early in the mornings now just so he can go to diners to get breakfast with a bunch of men who barely acknowledge him.  I feel like in American society today we have little to no regard for how other people live.  It has become socially acceptable to be late.  Punctuality used to mean something.  What happened?

Travels with Charley Day 3

Today I began Part Two of Steinbeck's Travels with Carley.  It starts out by describing how the narrator is having doubts about his trip and is looking for a reason not to go.  Then he realizes what he is doing, and decides to man-up and go on the trip.  He says that he'd rather sacrifice yardage than violence, meaning he wants to live how he wants instead of how doctors want, just so he can live a little longer.  I completely agree with what he is saying here.  I believe that there is no point in living longer if you are not living your life.  Do what you want to while you still can and enjoy it.  He begins his journey heading north and meets several people.  The general feeling he encounters is discontent.  Almost everyone he encounters has a desire to move, and they don't care where to.  They just want to leave where they are.

Travels with Charley Day 2

On the second day I reached the end of part one.  Part one ends with a climactic sequence of events.  A hurricane strikes Sag Harbor and the residents attempt to prepare.  The narrator expertly ties down his boat, the Fayre Eleyne, in the middle of the harbor.  However, two other boats are tied together near his boat.  He attempts to protest this action, but the owners don't hear or don't care.  The eye of the storm makes its way over Sag Harbor and after that the havoc ensues.  The two boats he was worried about are on a crash course with a neighboring pier and drag the Fayre Eleyne with them.  The narrator heroically rushes in the midst of the storm to save his boat.  He frees his boat and returns it to open water.  He then makes it back to shore to marvel at the remainder of the storm and his recent heroic deeds.

Travels with Carley Day 1

Today I started to read Steinbeck's Travels with Charley.  The basic plot for today was saying that a writer, a little after middle aged, gets the feeling he doesn't know his subject.  His subject being America.  To remedy this, he decides to plan a road trip to travel around the country.  He plans to do so in a modified pick-up truck he calls Rocinante.  He plans to bring his large poodle with him (Charley).  I get the feeling that this man has reached a point in his life where he has become bored and is searching for excitement and adventure.  He is from New England (Sag Harbor) and is equipping himself for quite the journey.  He says he brought three times as much stuff as he needed.  He will be setting out on his trek after labor day.

10 technologies that will change the future.

Really interesting.



http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-07-2011/110718-world-changing-technologies.html