travel tales

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Caribbean Star Wars Day & That Yoda Guy

It’s Star Wars Day. May the Fourth be with you.

And back in February of 2013, we had a weird and wonderful Star Wars morning on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin (or Sint Maarten).

While the idea of big ship cruising these days seems about as fantastic as starships and galaxies far, far away, eight years ago we splurged and spent seven days on one of those mega cruise ships touring a short list of tropic islands.

On one of those islands we found an unlikely science fictional cultural touchstone.

for whatever one photo is worth:

From where I stand Nick Maley, “that Yoda Guy” seems to be living the dream.

After a successful career doing special effects for over fifty movies, including co-creating the puppetry work that brought Yoda to life, he semi-retired to a tropical island and opened a museum to showcase his life’s work.

He also sells prints of his personal paintings… one of which hangs framed on the wall of my living room. A sunset over the water.

That is roughly the extent of my knowledge of Mr. Maley. Though I do seem to remember nodding a friendly greeting to him back in 2013 when, on a morning off-ship walkabout in Philipsburg, Sint Maarten a few kilometers from the docks, my wife and I stumbled upon the “that Yoda Guy” museum and exhibit in a sand-coloured mos-eisley-esque building adorned with multiple colourful signs beaconing lost Star Wars fans hither into it’s mysterious realms.

It’s not a big exhibit.

At least it wasn’t when we visited in 2013.

The website says that they expanded in 2016, and that Mr. Maley was honoured by Lucasfilm for his work that same year. The tone of the museum space was part Caribbean art shop, part Star Wars artifact collection, and part examination of the lifelong quest for the proprietor to reclaim the credit for his work for which he seemed to have been unfairly deprived. I hope he found his due, and perhaps 2016 marked a new chapter in that legitimacy he seemed to be seeking.

We brought our art back to the ship and later that day we went snorkeling and ate a big buffet meal back on the boat. That night the massive ship fled out of the Sint Maarten harbour like a rebel transport ship off to the next destination in the inky star-filled blackness of a nighttime sea.

If your nerdy self happens to dock in Sint Maarten and you need an hour break from shopping for perfume, diamonds or tacky souvenirs, you can’t go wrong embracing the sunny side of the force and paying that Yoda Guy a visit. It’s a sequel I’d like to see myself.

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Moraine Lake Canoes in Pieces

In the summer of 2018 we spent a week backpacking in the Rocky Mountains near Lake Louise, Alberta, conquering a trail known as the route to Skoki Lodge. We roughed it, camping out of whatever we lugged on our backs up the nearly-twenty kilometer hike. Dehydrated food, lightweight gear, water filtered from a mountain stream, and a couple amazing day hikes.

It was also forest fire season, so at least two days of our time in the wilderness were socked in with a thick haze of sore-throat inducing smoke that blocked out nearly all the scenery while still somehow having zero effect on the mosquito population.

About 30 colorful canoes rest at a mountain lake dock with a gorgeous scene behind.
for whatever one photo is worth:

After we descended the mountain, tired, sore, and smelly, we spent an extra day in the small town of Lake Louise to recover before the long drive home.

Lake Louise is a place of epic beauty.

Many people come to Canada to see the mountains and find themselves in Banff.

Banff is also a gorgeous mountain town, but it is relatively big and full of people. Touristy, with kitschy souvenir shops and parking lots and traffic lights. Some of the people who visit Banff have done their research and drive an hour down the road to Lake Louise for a day or two where a grand hotel sits at the edge of a glacial lake a the foot of a picturesque mountain.

A subset of those folks who find their way to Lake Louise take yet another short side trip and discover Moraine Lake.

It was still smoky and the hint of sun that broke through was itself threatening to duck behind the mountains for the evening when we found our way to the shore of Moraine. Our legs were still achy and tired from the previous day’s descent down from the Skoki valley. And we were not keen on driving back the narrow mountain road through the dark. We walked around the edge of the lake for a few minutes, and I snapped about a dozen photos including one of the colourful rental canoes tethered to the dock for the evening.

We went home the next day.

Weeks went by and we shared stories of our hike with friends and family.

Summer turned into autumn and autumn into winter.

Snow. Routine. Work.

I had stopped for coffee in the break area of my office. As the holiday approached and people were feeling the need for some festive fun, someone had set up a jigsaw puzzle at one of the lunch tables. I meandered over to look, and picked up the box to see what the picture would become.

The sky in that photo was a little brighter, and the canoes were arranged a little differently, but I recognized the scene immediately: Moraine Lake …in five hundred tiny pieces.

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Wanderlust

There was a moment in time, however brief, when this blog was almost called “the Wander Guy” wherein I wrote about wandering through the world and between those adventures got distracted by taking pictures, cooking great food and other things… rather than, y’know, the other way around.

wawn - derr - luhst

The yearning and all-consuming desire to walk and travel about, see the world, and explore the universe.

There are many languages from which we English-speakers borrow concepts. Many of the ones I am familiar with are derived from German origins.

When I was about twenty years younger I took some German language courses to fill my evenings. One root of my family tree traces back a couple hundred years and multiple generations to some soil in that particular area of Europe. I was one of those guys who, in his twenties, started digging around those roots and trying to find some cultural branches through which I could climb and explore. This all resulted in an opportunity to travel about through Germany for a few weeks while those lessons were still fresh in my head. I have some very distinct memories of time spent wandering through Berlin, Munich, and other various small towns, learning and immersing, seeking some connection and grounding… but mostly eating currywurst and drinking lots of beer.

Words like wanderlust are among those perfectly distilled concept words derived from another language that we haven’t bothered to replace it with something other.

I’m glad for that.

Being struck by a lingering case of wanderlust that has gripped around my heart for now most of my life, and finding some vague-and-fuzzy connection to a fragile root of my own personal history, I feel like I can slot this word into my own vocabulary in a purposeful way.

There is a bit of me that often aspires to be more of a “wander guy” and nurture the wanderlust that lurks behind that. To travel. To explore. To put on a trusty hat and good shoes. To find a trail, sidewalk, cobbled road, or dusty route. To wander away from home, far and wide, and cure the longing behind that.

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Travel Eats: Smoked Fish and Bagpipes

In the summer of 2019 we spent two weeks in Scotland.

My wife and daughter are competitive Highland Dancers with a dance school here in Canada, and every four years or so the school makes the trip overseas with a busload of dancers, parents, and teachers to participate in an authentic Scottish Highland Games.

They all get to stress about dance. I get to wander around, take photos, and eat interesting foods.

for whatever one photo is worth:

In early August 2019 I found myself on a rain-soaked morning meandering around the muddy grass of Strathallan Games Park in Bridge of Allan, UK, where the annual Bridge of Allan Highland Games are held in the shadow of the Wallace Monument towering in the misty, rolling hills a few kilometers away.

The games themselves are wrapped around a race track. Running and cycling field events that happen on the track itself are more modern additions to the more familiar caber tossing and hammer throws that take place midfield. The dancers huddle around a stage at one end of the inside field, the bagpipe bands set up at the far opposite end (though their warmup hum can be heard forever away.) Scattered in the empty spaces between food and craft vendors find customers like me wandering through the games action.

The column of smoke can be seen from nearly everywhere, and I found myself organically attracted to the action to see what was cooking at its base.

From an article on the website itself this is what I found:

Arbroath Smokies are famed throughout Britain and beyond for their wonderful flavour and smooth, flaky texture. For those new to this particular delicacy, smokies are smoked haddock, prepared according to highly traditional methods by a number of producers in and around the wee North East fishing community of Arbroath.

I stood at the back of a very long line and when I reached the front I ordered two.

Delicious. Amazing. Perfect food for a perfect morning.

If (or when) we return for another Highland Games in a couple years, I’ll be saving some room for a second round.

I’m a huge fan of smoked fish… which is a difficult kind of fan to be when you live in a city on the land-locked Canadian prairies. I’ve been thinking a lot about cooking (and maybe even smoking) fish over an open fire. In an upcoming sequel and follow-up post to my Suburban Fire Craft (Part One), I recently purchased a new movable fire pit for my backyard. I’ll be doing some cooking on it (so long as the weather cooperates) this coming weekend and writing about it here. It probably will not be fish. I’ll save that for when I’ve practiced a bit more. It will be backyard cooking over an open fire, though, and that’s almost as exciting as a day of Highland Games.

Almost.

Now, obviously, my new fire bowl isn’t an old whiskey barrel, nor is it the foundation for a multi-generational history of smoking famous fish. But my neighbours might soon be wondering what cooking at the base of a column of smoke from my backyard. I’ll save the bagpipes for another year.