The main reason that my 20 year old cousin, Sarah, from Kentucky via North Carolina, was visiting Seattle was for the 2007 Comic Convention. She is a really good artist and had a table in the artist gallery with her old boss. She is really talented. Here is one of her pieces called The Murder:

Sasha & I plus a good group of our friends decided to attend the comicon in support of Sarah and to get our geek on. We were not disappointed. It was a veritable nerd fest with people dressed up as comic book characters wandering around; Star Wars was a favored theme.

The real guy who plays Chewbacca was there, Peter Mayhew:

There was a costume contest. My favorite was Hellboy, but he did not win:

There was so much cool stuff to look at: comics, graphic novels, toy replicas and original art. The highlight was seeing Tim Sale, who does the Comic artwork for the TV show Heroes and seeing his original sketches for the show:

After comicon was over, Sarah & I decided to start our road trip adventure and head off to Vancouver, BC. It started off with a BANG!!!

I did not get my car towed this time; even better, I got us on the local news.

Not even 30 minutes into our trip, I was pulled over for speeding for the first time in my life. And it was not just an ordinary speeding ticket; the cop was accompanied by a news team doing a special story on people speeding on this particular stretch of freeway. Not only was I getting a $122.00 ticket, but the whole Pacific Northwest region was going to know about it. They got some pretty good sound bites and slapped our faces, my full name and my license plate number at the top of the newscast. Sarah managed to capture the event on her own camera:

We laughed our heads off the rest of the way to the border about it.

It actually was snowing for most of our drive. By the time we got to the border, there were a few inches on the ground and it was really coming down. This is when I realized I forgot my coat. Who travels up North without a coat?

We stayed in an art hotel in the center of town and began our quest to find a sculpture I wanted to see of an upside down house. When we saw this bizarre car sculpture, we knew we were headed in the right direction:

We walked for miles in the cold air, but were lucky it was not snowing here or even raining. It was actually quite beautiful:

Finally we stumbled upon the sculpture, quest realized:

It is actually an upside down church and it is titled: A DEVICE TO ROOT OUT EVIL

We spent the night in a pretty cool art hotel. The next day we headed to Stanley Park and walked along the beach. There were many rock towers people made:

This one looked like a bunny, just in time for Easter:

Sarah tried her hand at making them:

After spending more time at the farmers market on Granville Island we decided to head it home, getting stuck in the late afternoon traffic. A highlight was while we were stopped dead in a thick car pile, we rolled down the windows and cranked a remix version of the Enya song, "Orinoco Flow" that came on the radio, banged our heads heavy metal style and hung devil horns out the window.

And just to end the trip on a high note, when it was looking like the U.S. border crossing was going to be uneventful, I decided to tell the border cop that Sarah just put drugs up her butt.

Space Holder. - February 12, 2012

BEAUTIFUL BOY - August 26, 2011

COUNTDOWN - July 13, 2011

SEXAY - June 16, 2011

BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS - May 30, 2011