Category: Travel

A few quick notes as I begin my brief vacation:

• I normally fly Delta, or United when absolutely necessary. But if I had not flown American today I would never have known that there’s an enormous Robert Rauschenberg piece hanging in Terminal C at SeaTac.
• You know you’re in Seattle when the line at the Terminal C Starbucks is longer than the line for the security checkpoint. I was especially impressed with their demand management system, though: one barista came out pushing a cart full of different sized cups, took everyone’s order, noted the order on the cups, then went back and had the order made by the time we got to the front of the line.
• The WiFi in Terminal C is good. Thanks to the really large Intel Centrino signs everywhere, it’s easier to find a strong hot spot than a power outlet. Go, go, Wayport membership…
• Finally, the irony of traveling to the recently blacked out East Coast to attend a celebration of steam power has not escaped me.

Onward…

On this, the last full day of vacation (since I spend almost all of tomorrow in a plane; I love east coast/west coast trips), I thought I’d end up eating more sensibly and exercising more. I was half right.

Breakfast was simpler this morning, by which I mean fewer vegetables (my dad and I weren’t cooking). Scrambled eggs with ramps and onions, country ham, biscuits, and grits. Surprisingly I wasn’t stuffed, having been pretty selective in how much I ate, and Mom and I went for a short walk after breakfast to settle everything in.

Man, if yesterday was the worst of late spring South Carolina weather, today was the best. Though the high was almost where yesterday’s was, the morning was much cooler and the humidity was almost nonexistent all day, and while the sky had threatened and oppressed on Sunday, today it was clear blue with only a few wispy clouds.

Which, I suppose, is how I got the idea that racquet sports would be a good idea. I dragged Mom over to the badminton court first, knowing full well that it was too windy and that we would end up at tennis. To get the full humor of this, you have to know that PE was the only high school class I ever got a C in, and the last time Mom played tennis was almost 40 years ago. Thankfully, between lots of extra tennis balls, perseverance, and the lack of jeering spectators, we managed to avoid making complete fools of ourselves.

That was probably the high point of the day. The rest: a snack, sleep, swimming, fish fry (with hush puppies), Alka Seltzer (to settle the fried fish and hush puppies), Whose Line is it Anyway?, and bed.

Tomorrow’s blog forecast: clear tomorrow with a 15% chance of early morning bloggage, clear in the afternoon across the whole country from Charleston to Dallas to the Pacific Northwest, and a likely late-evening blog flurry coming in from Seattle.

End of the first full day here in South Carolina. It was not as hot as threatened—the thermometer only made it to about 85° F—but with humidity well in excess of 80%, I felt enervated and listless all day. Guess I’ve turned into a bit of a hothouse flower living in the Seattle suburbs, where 85° is generally the hottest it gets and the dew point rarely climbs above 50° F (meaning the humidity is generally too low to be noticed).

Dad and I cooked breakfast this morning. Unlike my uncle’s festive breakfasts, which tend to center around lots of cured, fried pork products, today’s was poached eggs on corned beef hash, asparagus, fresh tomatoes, grits, homemade applesauce, and English muffins—with mimosas to start for Mother’s Day. We were stoking up, anticipating not eating another meal until the barbecue showed up around dinner time.

A note about the pig-pickin’—in years past my uncle had taken a reasonably hands-on role in mixing the barbecue sauce and generally cootering around with his buddies cooking the pig, but this time (given the long cooking time needed for 140 pounds of dressed pig), he left it in the hands of a professional.

Which meant that by the time we washed the breakfast dishes and walked down past the tennis court to the cookshed where the long trailer with the barbecue smoker sat, our chef had already pulled half the pig off the fire, where it had slow cooked since midnight the previous night, and cut it up for leftovers. But the other half was still there for photographing, and as soon as I get a cable to connect the camera to the computer I’ll post some shots.

After that, the day was pretty slow: a tour of the facility in the bed of my uncle’s pickup (during which I picked up a mean sunburn), a quick swim in the afternoon, and, eventually, the barbecue.

This was my first experience with the South Carolina version of barbecue, which is a more tomato-based sauce than what I’ve had before, and features some different accompaniments, including rice and something called “Low Country hash,” which contains, among other things, ground pork meat and liver in a tomato-based sauce and has the consistency of a well-cooked lentil dish. (It was actually much tastier than I’ve just made it sound.)

After that my mom trounced me at Scrabble. And so to bed.

Postscript: For the original reference for the woeful pun that titles this post, see my current listening (or click here), song 5.

I did get at least dialup access from the place we’re staying and was able to post the two items I wrote on the airplane yesterday (thanks, Brent, for draft posts in NetNewsWire). I also noted that Esta is jealous that she’s not here (for good reason: she has to work today). Cheer up, dear. So far we’ve just had breakfast. Granted, it was a dad and me special, but otherwise you didn’t miss much. Except the mimosas.

I’m on an 8:30 am flight tomorrow, so probably won’t get a chance to blog until I get back home Tuesday night. Enjoy the silence.

No big, painful spills to report. Just a good couple of days on the slopes of Whistler. And some really good food and wine at the Bearfoot Bistro.

The trip up was a little tricky though. It was “wintry mix” when we left Seattle, meaning mostly rain with some hard bits, but by the time we got up past Vancouver and up the “Sea and Sky” Highway, it was real snow. It took an extra hour to get up to the village, and then about forty minutes to find the hotel. And then collapse.

Today we’re recapitulating that in reverse. It took much less time to get down the mountain, which left more time for the “collapse” part.

Skiing is feeling more natural. I did notice a tendency to quote Ryan from Bobbins, though: “I’m a love ninja… on skis! Fwssssh!”

Updated to fix the link, which now actually points to a love ninja on skis reference. Damned copy and paste.

I had a blog entry written but lost it, so I’m reconstructing the weekend from memory. We had about a four-and-a-half hour drive up on Friday, including an hour in the line at the border and another hour in a five way merge going up to Vancouver. It turns out that 99, which I-5 turns into at the Canadian border, is not really a highway in the American sense. It turns into a regular old city street going up through the city of Richmond. I should have taken note, but at that point I was too tired. We also struck out for dinner, having failed to phone ahead for Valentine’s Day dinner reservations, and ate a quiet room service meal before collapsing at approximately 5. (Kidding. It was around 9:30.) (Oh, and it turns out that broadband doesn’t mean broadband in a hotel—at least not when five out of every eight packets get dropped.)

Saturday we got up early in the morning and drove up to Whistler. Slowly. It was supposed to be about sixty miles up 99, which I assumed would be pretty straightforward. But remember that note about 99 not being a highway? It holds true going north out of Vancouver as well. And it winds around a cliffside overlooking the water before it heads up the mountain—one lane either way. Suffice it to say it was a slow trip up. We got there too late for a morning ski lesson, but managed to get our gear (naturally, no lockers left for our shoes. If Vancouver is serious about this Olympic bid, they better put in some extra lockers for the skiiers. Tromping back to the car, four lots away, in ski boots to return our shoes to the car isn’t my idea of fun) and got up the mountain for our first ski.

Did I say mountain? I meant mountain. My God. Words fail me… Suffice it to say that an Olympic class mountain is really really different from Snoqualmie, or “Snow-crummy” as someone on the mountain who was familiar with the resort knew it. (Note: It’s still better than my first experience skiing in Virginia.) After an initial trip down the mountain, without a map or guide, we got our afternoon lesson. Excellent instructor. By 3 pm, I was making parallel turns. It seems a lot of skiing is about physics—the edge of the ski vs. the flat of the ski—and learning to shift the weight to take the skis where you want to go. And I wasn’t quite as sore as the last time.

Which was good, because it was another two hours down from the mountain back to the hotel. But we had reservations, at Le Crocodile. Which lived up to its reputation. Tomato and gin soup followed by duck breast with fois gras for Lisa, cream of wild mushroom soup with trufffle oil and pan-seared sweetbreads in a Calvados and tarragon sauce for me. A little rich, perhaps, but that was kind of the point, to get the heck out of town and have a nice quiet evening. And it worked really really well. We’ll be returning to Whistler, I think.

I got in a few hours ago. It was a decent flight, except that one of the bottles of wine (red, of course) that I purchased for Lisa broke in my suitcase, staining my clothes and my hardback copy of The Secret History. Quite jetlagged. I think I’ll be going home…

The wedding was a ton of fun. Apparently I missed the most fun of all, the bridal party night out, which happened the day before I got to Maine (I will pay good money to anyone involved for footage of my wife dancing with Kelley’s sister in law to an Eminem tune).

We had a good time at the rehearsal dinner. During the long wait for food (familiar to anyone who’s had a rehearsal dinner for 30 people at a restaurant not used to serving that many at once), we got a little creative with the nametags Kelley’s friend Dan had gotten. He apparently couldn’t find proper nametags at the grocery store (there being no close office supply store at the Maine/Canada border), so picked up a stack of the store’s special pricing stickers. We all tried to figure out what kind of “special pricing” the bride and groom were under, with the result that their nametags were emblazoned with the legends “Low mileage,” “Original woodwork intact,” “Available for a limited time only!”, and “Make best offer.”

The wedding itself was smooth, with two exceptions. The flower girls had been told to get rid of all their flower petals, resulting in a much lengthier than expected trip down the aisle and a lot of banging on the bottom of their flower baskets to dislodge the remaining petals. And the bride dropped the groom’s ring. While picking it back up, she said, “All you folks with video cameras can use your fancy digital rigs to edit that out!” Not a chance, Kelley. The highlight of the reception was probably the minister returning in full Elvis regalia, though the bride dancing with her father to a recording of his college group singing a song he had arranged many years before was a close second, as was the ten-year-old cousin who kept telling Lisa she had to come dance with him when the DJ played the Britney Spears song.

After a really long flight (Seattle to Atlanta to Boston to Bangor, Maine), I got in to find that Lisa was delayed in construction. I looked around for something to do and was surprised (well, astonished, really) to find Bangor International Airport’s first Internet café.

Well, to be fair, it’s really an Internet kiosk plus cell phone dealership. But it is absolutely the last thing I expected to see, and it’s $3 for 15 minutes. And as the likelihood of WiFi in this part of Maine is pretty remote, it’ll do just fine.

Almost as unexpected as flying into Atlanta at 5:30 this morning (Terminal A), bracing myself to find an awful bagel or something, and finding a place that did really excellent scrambled eggs, bacon and biscuit. I could have had grits and gravy if I wanted it. There was even wireless from Laptop Lane–unfortunately, they weren’t savvy enough to provide web-based self service sign ups, so it refused to serve me an IP address and was therefore pretty useless. On the whole I prefer the Internet access in Bangor.
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In case I don’t get a chance to update later: I’m off to join Lisa in Calais, Maine for Kelley’s wedding. Have a good weekend.

Craig points to this judgment from an Irish judge saying that you should assume slow drivers who hold up traffic are idiots. The article concludes, “Judge Harnett said that either slow drivers enjoyed holding up other people or else they were incompetent or their cars were in poor condition.”

Having driven on Irish roads myself, I would include another alternative: the driver was afraid that at any minute an enormous cow would pop out of the hedges and wreck their car. Nevertheless, it cheers me that this judge is standing up for common sense and the rights of the leadfooted like myself.
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…like myself. From a professional truck driver, rules of the road to remember when driving around truckers. Some of them apply to all driving situations, such as “you are not as good a driver as you think you are,” “SUVs are not suits of armor,” and my favorite, “If you’ve been cruising blithely along in the left (or center, on a three-lane highway) lane for a half-hour or so, please consider moving the fuck over, you selfish ass-pirate.” (I almost spewed soda all over my monitor when I read that one.)

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Came in late last night, and Lisa’s luggage didn’t make it yet. Hope to have a little more information posted later…

Sorry—no update today as I overslept and have been travelling. But I’ve been a little productive. I land in Boston late tonight, but I’m looking forward to seeing the crowd in Boston.