Helicopter Flight Up the Salt River

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A video from the Flying M Air YouTube channel.

Here’s a cockpit POV view looking out the front window between me and my buddy Woody as we flew from Falcon Field (FFZ) in Mesa, AZ all the way up the Salt River to Roosevelt Lake. The cockpit intercom audio did not record [insert eye roll emoji here] so I wound up narrating it in the editing process.

I want to give a HUGE shout out to the channel members and Patreon patrons who made this flight possible — I had to rent this helicopter to do the flight and make the video.

You can see Woody in a tour of a King Air airplane in this video: https://youtu.be/1cylLFqhnzg

Going First Class

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Sometimes spending a little more on your comfort is really worth it.

I was brought up in a lower middle class family that, in my later teen years, was upgraded to middle class after my mom’s divorce and remarriage. I struggled financially to live on my own for a while after college, and then struggled a little less when I began living with my future wasband. It wasn’t until I was in my late-thirties that I began earning what I’d consider a very good living.

Living when money is tight — but not tight enough to actually cause you to miss meals, get evicted, or turn to payroll lending storefronts to meet financial obligations — teaches you frugality and comparison shopping skills. You quickly learn that if you need to buy something, you need to shop around a bit to get the best deal. You need your money to go further. This becomes a mindset, something you do naturally. Something you can’t imagine not doing.

Travel on the Cheap

Even when my personal financial situation started looking very rosy, I was stuck in that mindset. That was especially so when I traveled for business in my early years as a writer. I was a regular speaker at Macworld Expo in San Francisco, Boston, and later, New York. I even spoke twice at the event in Toronto.

Macworld did not cover my cost to travel to these events. Its only compensation was free unlimited entrance to the show, snacks and swag in the Speaker room, and a Speaker ribbon that often led to more swag at booths. (The Press ribbon, which I earned by writing for some tech magazines back then, actually worked better.) The cost of airfare and hotels was on me. This was a pretty big financial burden, especially when I traveled to expensive San Francisco from the New York Metro area.

So I shopped for airfare. And yes, I’d even stoop to taking a non-direct flight or redeye if it could save some money. And then I shopped for hotels, winding up with satisfactory lodging within walking distance from the venue.

The crazy thing about all this was that my travel related to the event was a business expense — no doubt about it — and I could write it all off on my taxes, which I did. (Contrary to what some people think, writing things off on your taxes doesn’t mean the government pays for it. It means that it reduces your taxable income. So if you spend $1000 on a trip and your tax rate is 28%, it’s like getting a 28% discount on that expense.) But I was still in that watch-every-penny mindset and even though I could afford better flights or lodging, I just couldn’t see spending more when I could spend less.

That all came to a head one year on a San Francisco trip.

Seeing the Light

Macworld Expo in San Francisco was held in January. While the weather in San Francisco in January isn’t nearly as frigid as it is where I lived in New Jersey, it could be cold. I’d booked a room at the Victorian Hotel — now the Mosser Hotel — on 4th Street, less than three blocks from Moscone. (I think the hotel was just beginning its name change process back in those days — maybe 1998? — because I remember the new name.) I’d stayed there at least once before, so I knew what to expect. (Or thought I did.) The hotel was popular with speakers because it was relatively inexpensive. But it was inexpensive for a reason: it was old and in sore need of renovation. (I hope it’s been fixed up since then.) It did have a good restaurant on the ground floor, though: Annabelle’s was the name. (Funny the things we remember.)

On that particular year, San Francisco was cold and so was my room. The heat — a radiator! — simply did not work. I called down to the desk to see if they could do anything and they sent up a bellman with five blankets. I slept under a pile of seven blankets for the next few nights and dreaded showering.

I remember thinking to myself: What the fuck is wrong with you? You can afford a better room that this! Isn’t your comfort worth it?

The answer, of course, was yes. The next few years, I stayed at the W across the street from Moscone, where I was introduced to modern rooms, feather beds, and other very nice treats.

Airline Travel

The airfare lesson took a bit longer to kick in.

I admit that I stopped doing flights with connections unless there was no other option early on. (My wasband, however, did not. I remember one year when he paid for his family to come to Arizona from New York for Christmas. He bought them tickets on an airline called ATA, which was really cheap, probably because it only had like four planes. The flights had a stopover in Chicago, but not at O’Hare like a normal airline. They stopped at Midway. As anyone could expect in December in Chicago, weather moved in and the plane got suck at Midway. Then there was a mechanical issue. The delay was long and when his mom and sister finally arrived in Phoenix, they were extremely travel worn and cranky — can you blame them? The punchline: he only saved $50 per ticket over a direct flight with another airline. And yes, he could afford the $50 per person.) I’d had enough experience with the problems that arise when you have connecting flights and unnecessary stopovers. Why make a trip more difficult than it needs to be?

Of course, I usually fly out of Wenatchee these days and Horizon only operates a turboprop to Seattle, so all of my flights to anywhere other than Seattle have at least two legs. That can actually work out to benefit me, as you’ll learn in a moment.

(The only trip I occasionally do that I can’t avoid three flights is to visit my sister in St. Augustine, FL. The closest airports are Jacksonville and Daytona and the last time I went there no direct flights from Seattle. That meant flying from Wenatchee to Seattle to Atlanta to Jacksonville and then doing all that in reverse on the way home. No matter how you slice it, you’re traveling for a whole day.)

A few years back, when I was still doing frost control work in California from January and into March, I had a contract where I could stay home until called out. The call would come at 3:30 PM, which is when the hyperlocal weather forecast the grower subscribed to would be released for the evening. As I talked to him, I packed. When I hung up, I booked a flight from Wenatchee to Sacramento. As I was driving to the airport, I booked boarding for my dog, Penny, and dropped her off. As I waited at Wenatchee airport for my flight out, I booked my hotel and rental car. I’d arrive in Sacramento before 9 PM, get my car, and go to my hotel. In the morning, when I was released from standby, I’d book my return flight, check out of the hotel, and go home, picking Penny up along the way.

Every time I did this trip, I earned four legs on Alaska Air’s frequent flyer program. I did it six times in one season. That put me into MVP status. Suddenly, when I started flying Alaska Air, I’d get automatic upgrades to First Class at least 75% of the time. I enjoyed that for a year and a half — and I was doing a lot of airline travel back then. It spoiled me.

First Class is the Way to Travel

You have to understand that First Class isn’t just sitting in a bigger seat at the front of the plane — although, admittedly, that’s a real bonus. It’s free luggage check in. It’s often (depending got how you got to First Class) entry into the Alaska Lounge at SeaTac and a handful of other airports. It’s boarding first. It’s having a flight attendant take your jacket and put it on a hangar (and return it to you later while taxiing to the gate). It’s not having to shuffle down the aisle, hoping there’s space in the overhead bin for your bag. It’s having a drink — whatever you want — as everyone else boards. It’s having a warm towel to clean your hands, more drinks, a hot meal, and often a warm-from-the-oven cookie. It’s not having to worry about someone’s brat kicking the seat behind you or the jackass in front of you reclining his seat so you can count his hair follicles. It’s civilized and comfortable. It makes airline travel bearable.

Honestly, if you spend enough time on long flights — which I consider any flight over two hours — in First Class, you’ll wonder how the hell you managed to fly coach all those years.

Well, that’s how it was for me.

Good things don’t last forever and eventually my status as an Alaska Air MVP lapsed. I was back in the world of regular travel and I can’t say I was happy about it.

But what I discovered is that if I buy my ticket far enough in advance and I’m flexible about travel dates and times, I can often buy a first class ticket for just $100 to $300 more than coach. Here’s a random example for Alaska Air; in this case, if I were going to visit my brother in New Jersey, I’d be buying that First Class ticket leaving Wenatchee at 6:25 AM (keeping in mind that I’m a very early riser):

Fare Example
Would you rather spend five hours and 20 minutes in First Class or stuck in coach, rubbing elbows with some guy with body odor while a kid kicks the back of your seat? Oh, and don’t forget the ability to wait in the Alaska Lounge in Seattle for the two hours between my flight from Wenatchee to my flight out to Newark. Yes, it’s worth an extra $272 to me.

While I realize that not everyone has a few extra hundred bucks sitting around to piss away on air travel, I usually do. I don’t travel by air that much anymore and I want my experience to be as comfortable as possible. I travel alone now, so I don’t have to buy a ticket for traveling companions or worry about what they might be able to afford. I’ve come to realize that my comfort is worth the extra money.

Travel in Comfort

As I get older, I’ve come to realize that my personal comfort is important to me. If I can afford going First Class, I will.

That’s why I’m flying First Class from Los Angeles to Seattle next week. (There is no First Class on Seattle to Wenatchee legs.)

If you’re in a similar situation — older, traveling alone, money in the bank — and you’re not treating yourself to First Class travel when it’s available, why the hell not?

Eating for Health: The Mediterranean Diet

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I change the way I eat in an attempt to head off health problems.

Last week I went for my annual check up. There was nothing new to report: I still had high blood pressure (which I’ve had for at least 15 years). I did manage to shrink a bit more — no matter how tall I tried to stand against the measuring do-dad, my height came out to 5′ 7-1/4″ instead of the 5′ 8″ on my driver’s license and elsewhere. The scale reported that I was about 5 pounds heavier with my clothes on than I had been that morning at home with my clothes off. Neither number was very good.

I chatted with the nurse about weight. As I’m aging, I’m feeling the affects of having to carry around more weight than I should. I told her about my experience with Medifast, which I blogged about here, and how I was not interested in eating fake food for the rest of my life. She told me about her experience with the Mediterranean Diet and highly recommended it. A while later, the doctor did, too.

This isn’t the first time healthcare professionals have recommended the Mediterranean diet. I’d been advised to try it before. And I did get a book full of recipes to learn more about it. But, in all honesty, I didn’t think it was that different from the way I usually eat. You see, I don’t eat a lot of processed/prepared foods and I don’t have junk food snacks in my pantry. I already have a somewhat “healthy” diet.

Mediterranean Diet Pyramid
Search Google for “Mediterranean Diet Pyramid” and lots of versions will come up. This one is from an article on the America’s Test Kitchen website; check it out to see a larger version and explanation.

This time, however, I decided to take a closer look. The Mediterranean diet isn’t about weight loss as much as it’s about developing and maintaining healthy eating habits. It tries to condition you to make good food choices so you can stick to it for the rest of your life — which is exactly what I need and want. (I’m done with lose-weight-quick diets that promise you’ll lose weight if you just eat some ridiculous combination of foods that don’t make up a healthy balanced diet.) It presents a food pyramid that’s remarkably different from the one established by the FDA — it pushes lots of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains and severely limits red meats and sugary snacks and deserts. I could eat things like bread and pasta and rice (in moderation, of course) — which are verboten on so many weight loss diets. I could also eat lots of beans, fruits, and vegetables, which I actually like. The main change would be a reduction in meat and an increase in fish — and I have to admit that I’d already eat more fish if there was a decent fish market within driving distance of where I live.

Easy Mediterranean Diet Book
I might call this book “Mediterranean Diet for Morons” since it’s so damn easy to follow.

I decided to give it a try. But because my bigger problem is portion control, I thought I’d try it with a guide that included recipes and meal plans that made it easy for me to eat the right things without over eating. I wound up with The Easy Mediterranean Diet Meal Plan, which includes four weeks of meal plans with recipes and weekly shopping lists. I bought the Kindle version, which was only $6.99, so I could easily consult it anywhere on my iPad.

After reading up on the “good food” vs “bad food,” I paged ahead to the first week’s shopping list and dutifully added all the items I didn’t already have on hand to the shopping list in my phone. Although I’d planned on going food shopping this morning (Sunday), it was a good thing I had the list with me on Friday when I happened to be in town after a trip with a friend up to Twisp; I put on my mask and braved the Fred Meyer supermarket in mid afternoon to get what I needed. I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time in the produce department in my life. I wound up with a ton of veggies, many of which — like kale and fennel (anise) — are not normally part of my diet. I had trouble stuffing them all into my fridge.

Veggies
Here’s some of my haul from Friday’s trip to Fred Meyer. Kale, peppers, celery, and fennel were four veggies I seldom buy.

I spent Friday evening and all day Saturday trying to eat up the leftovers I’d accumulated during the week. (I hate throwing away food.) Then I went through my pantry and pulled out food items that I shouldn’t eat, just so they wouldn’t tempt me. I made two bags: one to store down in a box in my garage because I’d likely eat them again (in moderation) when my one-month trial was over and another to hand off to a neighbor because I was unlikely to eat them ever again. This process actually surprised me because I found that most of the stuff in my pantry was food that was okay on the Mediterranean Diet. (As I said earlier, my normal diet isn’t that different from this one.)

I also made the “cold cooked” oatmeal and quinoa dish that would be my breakfast for the next two days. (I ate it a little while ago with 2 ounces of fresh raspberries on top and it was very tasty.)

I discovered that all of the recipes in the cookbook made four servings. That meant I needed to cut them in half or fourths, depending on whether I was supposed to eat them for two or one meal. (Of course, this also meant that I bought too much food; I’m hoping some of it will last beyond the first week. If not, my chickens will get some good treats at the end of this week and I’ll shop more carefully next time.)

Food Rules
I should point out here that the Mediterranean Diet offers the same advice as Michael Pollan in his book, Food Rules. The main takeaway of that book is “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” I highly recommend the book if you’re interested in a quick, easy read that’ll help you eat healthier.

Anyway, the main challenge this first week is to keep my snacking under control between meals. I’m using my usual calorie counting app to keep track of what I eat and that’ll help keep me focused. Once I get into the swing of things, I should do fine. After all, I managed to stick to Medifast, which was quite difficult, for nearly 4 months. If I can do that, this should be a piece of cake.

(Or maybe a stick of celery, since cake isn’t on the list of “good food.”)

I’ll let you know how I do.

In the meantime, why not take a look at your own situation? Could you benefit from a better diet with healthier food? Or some of the other philosophies of a diet like the Mediterranean, which I didn’t even cover here: slowing down, taking time to prepare your food, enjoying meals at a table with your family and no screens? Be objective in your evaluation. Maybe it’s time for you to start thinking more about how what you eat and how you eat it affects your health. You never know.

The Great Loop

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I read a book about a trip I’d like to take.

Although it’s still very much winter here in North Central Washington State, my mind has been somewhat consumed with boating these days.

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you may remember the post I did some years ago about an ill-fated trip to a friend’s house out in the San Juan Islands. (It was an ill-fated post, too. The friend I wrote about seemed to take great offense at what I’d said about him and another friend apparently read between the lines and thought I was blogging about her. My response to both: Really?) In the post, I mentioned my friend’s boat, which I really liked, and how I wanted to get a similar one.

Ranger Tug R-27
Spending four winters in a row in a truck camper has really prepared me for long-term living on a boat this size. It’s basically my camper on a boat.

Over time, I discovered the 27-foot Ranger Tug that I have my eye on. This boat has all the comforts of home — well, at least all the comforts of my truck camper — in a towable package. That means I could store it in my garage between long trips out on the Columbia River, Lake Chelan, Roosevelt Lake, the San Juan Islands, and the Inside Passage. I could even take it south for the winter — imagine spending December and January on Lake Havasu in Arizona?

I also began thinking of other adventures where I could take such a boat. I immediately thought of the Intracoastal Waterway up the east coast of the US. And then maybe up the Hudson River. And the Erie Canal to the Great Lakes. And wouldn’t it be amazing if I could find some way down the Mississippi back to the Gulf of Mexico and around the Florida Keys back to my starting place?

What I had just imagined was something that actually existed and had been accomplished by many people: the Great Loop.

The Great Loop

Per the America’s Great Loop Cruiser’s Association website,

The Great Loop is a circumnavigation of the eastern U.S., and part of Canada. The route includes the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, the New York State Canals, the Canadian Canals, the Great Lakes, the inland rivers, and the Gulf of Mexico. “Loopers” take on this adventure of a lifetime aboard their own boat.

Great Loop Map
Here’s the map of the route. Note that there are two ways to get from the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, two ways to get through the Great Lakes, two ways to get from Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico, and two ways to navigate Florida. This makes it possible to do the trip a number of different ways.

The website has a wealth of information about this roughly 6,000 mile journey, including many resources for learning about the route and points of interest along the way. Honestly, the website can tell you a lot more about the Loop than I can; I’ve only begun exploring it.

A Challenge, An Adventure

If you know me well, you should know that I live for challenges. I’ve had three successful careers (so far) for a reason: I get bored easily. After an initial start in the business world as an auditor and financial analyst — what was I thinking? — my writing hobby turned into a career as a freelance writer. When that generated a bunch of fun money, I learned to fly helicopters, bought a helicopter, and turned that into a career as a helicopter pilot. These days, I’m keeping myself amused by learning jewelry skills and techniques, but I can’t really call that a new career — at least not yet. (Maybe in a few years?)

In each case, it was the challenge that drove me, even if I didn’t realize it. I always want to learn and do new things. I want to get good at them. When I can actually earn a living doing them, I’m rewarded and motivated to do and learn more.

Taking a boat on a 6,000 mile trip on rivers, oceans, canals, and lakes — now that’s a challenge.

I’ve always been a bit of an explorer. I bought a Jeep to explore the desert on the ground. I’ve used helicopters to explore the desert, mountains, canyons, lakes, rivers, coasts — you name it — from the air. In the past, I’d done boating trips with a focus on exploration: a rafting trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, a house boating trip on Lake Powell, small boat trips on the Hudson, East, Harlem, Colorado, and Columbia Rivers, a 12-day cruise up the inside passage on a small boat. Imagine how much I could explore on a Great Loop trip!

Of course, there are hurdles to jump. Getting the boat and learning to pilot it safely and effectively is the first big challenge. Learning what I need to know to plan and execute a long boat trip is another. This isn’t something I would do without proper preparation. But as I research the things I need to know, I realize that it’s definitely doable. A real goal for my post-retirement years.

Reading First Person Acounts

I started my research about six months ago, before I went south for the winter. I searched for books about the Great Loop. There are a lot of them. It seems that many people who do this journey like to write books about it.

There are different ways to do the trip and a lot of them depend on the size and style of the boat you’re doing it with. I wanted to read books written by people kind of like me — not super rich, motoring in a smallish boat. (Yes, 27 feet is considered small for this trip.) A lot of the books out there were by couples in giant yachts and I didn’t want to read those. Chances are, I’d have a budget for the trip, which meant I wouldn’t be able to spend every single night along the way at a full-service marina. I’d have to boondock (the RVing word) or lie at anchor (the boating phrase) for at least half the nights. So I wanted to read books by people who had similar experiences to what I might have.

I sampled a few books in Kindle format and wasn’t very impressed. One of the drawbacks of this age of self-publishing is that anyone can do it — even if they can’t write. One book sample read like an infomercial for the book, with lots of repetition and apparently no editing. Another was similarly uninteresting to me, although I can’t remember why. But a third…well, I thought that had promise. I bought it and read it yesterday.

A Book Review

Crossing The Wake
Here’s the book I read first about motoring the Great Loop.

Crossing the Wake: One Woman’s Great Loop Adventure by Tanya Binford is almost the kind of book you might expect. The subtitle tells you that the book is about a woman’s trip doing the Great Loop and hints that she’s doing it alone (which she mostly did). I tend to shy away from women’s books because I have trouble identifying with the themes they usually include: the trials of motherhood, dealing with sexual discrimination, and fighting male dominance. This book, fortunately, didn’t have much of that — although it certain had more than enough for me. Unfortunately, as I discovered while turning page after virtual page, it didn’t really have what I wanted to read, either.

You see, although the author wrote this book about her journey, it read more like a catalog of fears, challenges, and social activities than a travelog. With virtually no boating experience, she decided she wanted to do the trip. To prepare, she moved from the Arizona desert to the coast of South (I think) Carolina and bought her young adult son a boat. Over and over again, she tells the reader how little confidence she had in her skills while she let her son do the piloting. She shares many anecdotes about needing the help of a man to do one thing or another. Yet she buys one boat after another to learn what she needs to know and build her skills. That’s admirable, but I don’t believe she had the skills she needed when she finally started the trip.

The first part of the book explains what she was doing for a living — she was a psychiatric registered nurse who was able to meet with patients through video calls (this was before the pandemic) — with side stories about some of her patients, co-workers, and bosses. It also covers some of her preparations, with lots of details of the (mostly) men who helped her and the (mostly) women who worried about her doing the trip on her own.

The second, longer part of the book was about the actual trip. Here’s where the definition of “solo” gets hazy. You see, although she was alone on her boat for most of the trip, she also traveled among other “Loopers” who she would see, on and off, throughout her trip. The book is one story after another about meeting this couple/boat here and that couple/boat there and having “docktails” and dinner and shore trips with all these people. It was a social report. There were very few details, especially in the first part of the trip, about navigation, points of interest, or the traveling itself. When she did try to give details, she fell short or used incorrect names. (It’s New York Harbor, not Hudson Bay (which is in Canada); the New York Thruway, not the New York Expressway and the Tappan Zee Bridge, not the Tappen Zee Bridge. These are the things I caught because I know them; how many other mistakes did she make?)

Along the way, she confirmed, over and over, that she was in way over her head on this trip, lacking either confidence or skills that she really should have had. And if that wasn’t bad enough, halfway through the book/trip she admits that the autopilot and radar don’t work properly. (I cannot, for a minute, imagine taking a boat on a 6,000-mile solo trip without an autopilot, let alone drive a boat in unfamiliar water in fog without radar yet the author did both.) Yes, she survived the trip, but I felt that she struggled with her own shortcomings to do so.

What did I want from the book? I guess I just wanted more details about the trip itself. More about navigation, overnight stops (other than to name them), unusual boating/navigation rules/situations. She did provide some of this, but not nearly as much as I wanted. Instead, I was treated to her stories about her bullying her mom on part of the trip, men who made passes at her, and her emotional turmoil when another boater she’d had a fling with found another non-boating woman and married her.

And frankly, I found her side story about a patient who had killed herself when she (the author) left her job to start the trip disturbing and unwelcome.

If the author happens upon this blog post and reads it, I’m sorry to be so brutal. But I’ve filed this book with most of the other “women’s books” I’ve come across. I probably should not have read it.

Did I get anything out of the book at all? Yes. I learned that a woman with very little experience driving a boat slight smaller but similar in style to what I want to buy completed the trip by herself.

If she could do it, so could I.

Making Plans

So I’ve set this up as a new goal for myself: motor the great loop before I turn 65. I have just over 5 years to:

  • Get back in shape. I’ve let myself go a bit and that’s causing aches and pains that I simply should not have at my age. Time to slim back down, get more exercise, and prep for being able to walk a very narrow gunwale.
  • Buy a suitable boat. That Ranger Tug is looking good, but I do have a friend trying to talk me into something else, so I’m not 100% sold on it yet.
  • Spend a lot of time on the boat to become an expert on handling it. This might sound weird, but to me, flying a helicopter in most conditions is like driving a car. I’d like to get like that behind the wheel of a boat. Practice — especially practice in challenging conditions like wind, currents, and rough water — makes perfect.
  • Spend some time with a boat mechanic. The goal is to learn the basics of what might break and how I can fix it — or at least enable to limp to a marina for a real fix.
  • Learn everything I need to know about navigation on the Great Loop’s waterways. There’s a lot to learn — including navigation on Canadian waterways.
  • Prepare the boat for a very long trip. That includes a last-minute tuneup of the engine and other systems and packing the gear I’ll need (and leaving behind the gear I won’t).
  • Get the boat to a starting point, launch it, and get under way. Whether I do this alone or with a travel companion depends on what’s going on in my life when the time comes to start.

Chapman Piloting & Seamanship
Chapman Piloting and Seamanship is the bible for learning about boating in the United States. I’ve got this book in print and in Kindle format and have been reading various chapters to immerse myself in boating information.

A lot of this actually ties in nicely with a related goal: getting my boat captain’s license. I’d like very much to be able to make a bit of income with this boat since it’ll cost so much to acquire and operate. (But still not as much as a helicopter.) Even if I make enough to cover my personal boating costs, I’ll be very happy. But to legally do that, I need the proper boat captain’s license, which requires experience on the water, training, and passing scores on a test. I’m already beginning to study for all that.

But whether I become a boat captain or not, motoring the Great Loop is a set goal. Let’s see if I can do it.

Reality TV: British Baking vs. Blown Glass

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I compare two contest style reality TV shows.

I don’t watch regular TV. I don’t have cable or satellite, although both are available where I live. Instead, I have a smart TV and subscribe to a handful of services: Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney Plus. (I also watch YouTube on my TV but I haven’t yet sprung for a subscription to get rid of the increasingly annoying ads. I don’t think YouTube should cost more than Netflix.) Because I absolutely abhor commercial breaks while watching TV, I pretty much ignore the extra channels my TV offers for “free.” (My time is worth more than what I’d spend watching those commercials.) I don’t channel surf; once I start a show, I’ll either watch it all the way through or turn off the TV and do something else.

What I watch is pretty much limited to what I find on the services I get. (This means that if you try to start a conversation with me about the latest hit on CBS, you will not succeed.) When I feel like watching TV and I don’t have something specific in mind, I’ll browse to find something new. I’m big on binge watching when I want entertainment, so that occasionally has me trying new multi-episode series to see what resonates with me enough to watch.

I should mention here that, as a rule, I don’t watch reality TV. My personal reality is entertaining enough for me — I don’t need to watch some onscreen reality, manipulated by directors and creative editing to add drama. I’ve never seen Survivor or The Great Race or The Bachelor. I don’t even know the names of other shows that countless Americans waste their time watching — probably because they have time to waste. I prefer spending my free time enhancing my own reality.

Great British Baking Show Promo
The promo photo on Netflix for the Great British Baking Show.

That said, I rather enjoy The Great British Baking Show, which I believe — and you can correct me if I’m wrong — falls into the reality TV genre. It’s kind of fun and very heartwarming (at times) to see the contestants help each other out. There’s very little (if any) friction between the folks vying for the prize of top chef. I watch people struggle (or not) to bake amazing things. They succeed (or fail miserably). The hosts provide just the right amount of comedy while the judges keep things grounded. Along the way, I learn a bit about baking techniques and how people’s backgrounds influence the kinds of foods they make. There’s no fake drama — at least none that I can see. I think that’s what explains why it’s such a hit with many of my friends, although we don’t usually gab about it the way other folks seem to gab about The Bachelor. (For Pete’s sake, even one of the late night TV guys — one of the Jimmys — includes a recap of each Bachelor episode in his monologue. Who cares?)

Blown Away Promo Photo
The promo shot for Blown Away on Netflix.

Recently, while looking for something new to watch, Netflix suggested Blown Away, a contest-style reality TV show featuring glass blowers. This seemed like a good fit for me. I love the look of blown glass and sort of expected the show to enlighten me about glass art techniques, much the way British Baking gives me insight into making custard or layering cakes. I figured I’d give season 1 a try and tuned in for a few episodes.

I was disappointed. Although the show offered many clips of what the glass artists were doing, there was very little in the way of educating viewers about it.

Well, that’s not exactly fair. I remember seeing some onscreen captioning that did explain certain terms and techniques briefly, but all of those seemed to disappear by the middle of the first season’s run of episodes. Other than that, the only time artists or judges explained what was going on was to enhance the drama. “That’s a very risky procedure so-and-so is attempting.” Or “If I don’t do this just right, the whole piece can shatter.” In most cases, these insights were actually the foreshadowing of breaking glass or ruined pieces.

I know that the place must have been full of cameras because of the amount of footage they edited in that set up rivalries between contestants. One contestant leaves the annealer door open too long; cut to another one yelling, “close the door!” Another contestant is yelling at her assistants; cut to the other contestants complaining about the yelling. And don’t even get me started on the way they edited in facial expressions from competitors that were obviously not responses to things that were said in the edited video. In the final episodes, half the scenes consist of one contestant comparing his/her work to the others and saying how much better (or worse) it was or declaring that he/she should win (or should get eliminated).

Four episodes from the end, I already knew who the final face-off would be between: a particularly outspoken and prima donna-ish woman who claimed to be making art that always seemed to be gender related and a no-nonsense man who definitely had superior skills but a similarly unattractive attitude. The editors had been developing the rivalry between them for nearly the entire run of episodes; how could they possibly eliminate either one? I got the feeling the outcome was established long before the show was edited and the scenes they included were edited in to support that outcome. The trouble for me was that I didn’t like either of those last two contestants. And when it came down to the final winner, I preferred the other one to win. (I actually wanted the guy eliminated just before the final round to win; he had the skill and the humility to take his art to the next level with the prize.)

When the series was over — I watched the 10 half-hour episodes over three nights — I was left feeling disappointed. I’d learned next to nothing and felt manipulated. I’d grown to hate the host of the show and the person who won. I felt too much pity for the contestants I thought should have stayed in the running but had obviously been eliminated because they were too much like British Baking contestants and not enough like other reality show contestants who would do anything to win.

I had just started watching the first episode of season 2 — perhaps thinking it would get better? — when I realized that this was probably like most reality competition shows. Fake. Contrived drama. Judging designed to maintain the rivalry between competitors. Little, if anything, to be learned. Why would I waste my time with more of this?

I turned it off.

I spent some time thinking about how this show stacked up against a reality competition that I actually liked: The Great British Baking Show. I wanted to understand why I liked one show and disliked the other. This blog post is the result of those thoughts.

What do you think? Have you seen either show? Can you recommend something you think I might like?