This time of year, I usually do a review of the various concerts I went to.
Unfortunately, this year I only made it to one concert.
Plus one celebrity speaking engagement that was being touted as a tour.
Oh, and I also wen to a city in which a concert was being held.
That last one might not seem to count, but the unattended concert cost more than my last five concerts combined, and that total includes a Ed Sheeran.
Besides, have you ever heard of a city changing it’s name for a concert?
So maybe one concert and two half concerts? You might think that adds up to two concerts, but clearly you haven’t been playing Duolingo, which seems convinced that reviewing third grade math is tantamount to learning a second language.
But that recent non-concert is probably worth a post of its own, so here we go. I’ll return with the shows I actually attended later this week.
Taylor Swift
There’s a pop star that you probably haven’t heard of. She recently finished up a concert tour. The Epochs tour? The Eons tour? Something along those lines. It hasn’t made much news.
I also heard she might be dating a football player? Can’t verify that, though. You’d think the tv coverage might, I don’t know, cut away from the game to show her once or twice? I’m surprised no one thought of that.
Anyway, yeah. My daughter decided she was in love with Taylor Swift shortly after the American portion of the Eras Tour was over. Too bad, because then we only would’ve been paying out the nose for the tickets, instead of the tickets and a myriad of other travel expenses.
We looked at going to England or Ireland when she was playing those arenas, but I wasn’t really sure how the secondary market worked across the pond. So instead we zeroed in on Vancouver, where Stubhub and Ticketmaster still run things.
That being said, I didn’t really realize that we’d be seeing the last show of the entire two-year tour. We were just looking for geographic proximity, not historic importance. Unfortunately, many other Swifties were going for other reasons, making every damn flight to and hotel in the greater Vancouver area a complete shitshow. I don’t know how many actual Vancouverites were at the three shows.
I’m starting to understnd why musicians do residencies. If the people in the city aren’t given first crack at tickets, what does it matter where you’re playing? Have the people come to you.
Then again, maybe the local people did get first crack at the tickets. And then resold them.
Our two tickets weren’t the worst seats in the house, but they certainly weren’t the best. Upper deck, a few rows back from the railing and off to the left of the stage, so not way back in centerfield. Or the endzone, since it’s a footbal stadium. Although it’s a Canadian Football League stadium, so they probably don’t call it the endzone. It’s probably the negative 55-yard line. Or the Rouge.
A few days before the concert, they released a handful of seats behind the stage. And by behind, I mean they were literally described as “No View of Stage.” You were attending for the sole purpose of watching the Jumbotron, so they only cost $16. Allegedly some of them were still flipped for $1,000.
In comparison, our “in full view of the concert” (except, Daughter infromed me afterward, of the Folklore cabin, whatever the hell that is) tickets seemed like a steal at a little northward of $1,000 each. After the various fees and premiums and Stubhub magic, the two tickets set us back about three grand. And that’s three grand American, don’t forget. None of those cheap Loonies and Twonies.
So two tickets was plenty. Daughter got to take her mother to the concert (or vice versa, really) and poor ol’ me had a night in Vancouver all to myself. Call it a win-win-win.
I reached out to a few curling clubs to see if they needed subs for their league games and, fortunately, one of them had someone going to the concert. Daughter wasn’t enamored when I suggested giving her ticket to a curler in order to ensure I could sub.
I’ve only once been to a concert where the attendees made noticeable dent in the culture and economy of the city, and that was when the Parrotheads invaded Las Vegas. However, Vegas is itself a tourist destination, and a tourist destination that caters to many of the same clandestine activities that Jimmy Buffett’s fans likely imbibe in. I doubt the Salt Lake Buffett concert had quite the same effect.
But, unlike Vancouver for Taylor Swift, Vegas didn’t shut down for Buffett. And its effect of Phoenix was probably zero.
Why do i mention Phoenix? Because it’s about as long of a drive from Vegas as Seattle is from Vancouver (when you take into account no customs agents on the Nevada-Arizona border). And let me tell you, Seattle was decimated by Taylor Swift being 130 miles away.
I thought I had an original idea for avoiding some of the costs and hassle of flying into Vancouver by flying into Seattle and driving into Canada.
While it might have been cheaper, and maybe even a little easier, it was far from “original.” Half of our flight was doing the exact same thing. And we weren’t the only ones.
I’m a Hertz Gold member. Usually that means I don’t have to stand in line or do any sort of checking in at most airports. I walk up, pick a car, and they print my contact on the way out of the parking garage.
This time, my name wasn’t listed on the big board. I thought maybe it was because my flight was delayed and they thought i was a no- show.
Nope. Turns out the Swifties had wiped the Seattle airport out of cars. Hertz literally didn’t have enough cars to do their normal “pick one of this row” and instead had to treat us specials like the plebs and send us to one specific stall where they’ve held on to one specific car for our reservation.
When I walked through the “Gold Section” that is usually awash with dozens of cars, it was like the parking lot of a bar at 8:00 am. How the hell many people need to be traveling to a concert if it wipes out the rental counter at an airport three hours away?
Technically, closer to four hours, because the border crossing was backed up, too. The Swiftie army bested the Mountie army.
Then there was the city of Vancouver itself. Here is just a small sampling of some of the “minor” ways they catered to the foreign invasion.
*The Capilano Suspension Bridge turned its usual Christmas Lights display into a Taylor Swift themed Christmas Light display.
*The donut place we stopped at in Gastown had three Swift-themed donuts.
*They turned the cruise ship terminal into an “official” merchandise store. If you’ve never been in a cruise terminal, they’re friggin ginormous. We peeked in – Wife and Daughter wanted to “pre-scout” what might be at the venue – but when we saw the line was probably an hour long, they figured they didn’t need to stand in two hour-long lines.
Most of these minor changes can be explained away as good ol’ capitalism, even if Canada is usually described as a socialist utopia. The pure mass of people at the Capilano bridge had to be worth their paying the licensing fee to pipe in some music. I would estimate 2,000 people were there. At $70 a pop.
I’ll note that the Bay Area didn’t completely shut down or reinvent itself when Taylor Swift played here. So either we’re more socialist than Vancouver or else most of the concert-goers were locals. Both are probably true.
In addition, Vancouver added a few “above and beyond” changes. They put up signs all around town featuring song titles, and also added bracelets to some of their statues.
There were long lines in front of each one, so again, maybe this can be chalked up to encouraging the Swifties to meander around town and spend money.
Check out this subtlechange to the Vancouver sign:
I’m all for bringing in tourist dollars (sorry, Tourist Loonies), but don’t go changing your name, people! That would be like New Orleans renaming itself to Mardi Gras in February.
Oh, and they also changed the hourly tune on the famous Gastown steam clock from the Westminster chimes to “Shake It Off.”
No biggie, I’m sure they do that regularly. Let’s see, the last time they changed the steam clock chimes was… never. It’s never been done before. This is a city that’s hosted the friggin’ Olympics, but clearly that pales in comparison to a pop star performing a concert.
Needless to say, we spent most of the day traversing the city for all the photo ops. People were dressed to the nines as early as nine a.m, wearing short sparkly dresses with bare legs when it’s going to be a high in the mid-forties. Sorry, it was in Canada, so… seven degrees?
Again, the Parrotheads were all dressed in their Aloha gear throughout the day in Vegas, but all they had planned for the day was drinking by the pool.
In every line, they shared war stories like my grandpa used to, replacing “Were you Pacific or Europe?” with “Last night’s concert tonight’s?” Then they traded home-made friendship bracelets instead of beers.
The strangest exchange I saw was in line for the Swiftcouver sign. A woman went down the line asking for anyone going to that night’s performance. The first few had gone the night before, but she finally found a group.
She handed them a bracelet and didn’t want anything back. All she wanted was to know that the bracelet would make it to the concert.
That’s it. She didn’t want to meet up with them the following day to get it back. Didn’t even want confirmation until the ladies who received the bracelet asked for her phone number so they could send a picture of it to her. She blinked, as if that thought hadn’t occurred to her, then happily turned over her digits.
She was almost tearing up when explaining how important it was to her. I’ve seen Catholics less emotional about rosary beads blessed by the Pope.
The religious wars of the past will be the Swifties versus, I don’t know, Ariana Grande? Sabrina Carpenter?
If Tay-Tay is the Catholic Church in this metaphor, my money is on Gracie Abrams as her Martin Luther. She opened for Taylor Swift on this portion of the Eras tour, and evidently she has all the signs of an heir apparent.
As of right now, she’s still totally into the friendship bracelets. But bear in mind, Martin Luther originally sold indulgences, too.
**Addendum: Don’t want to turn this into one of my usual travelogues, but I did have a few gripes about Google. At the border, they directed me to a faster route. When I got there, I realized it less crowded because it was the Nexus lane, which is kinda like TSA pre-check for people who cross the border often. Since I obviously didn’t have Nexus, I had to turn back around and get in an even longer line than if I’d followed the street signs instead of Google.
**Addendum Two (1.7 in Imperial Units): My second Google gripe was that as soon as we crossed the border, Google Maps switched to metric. While I understand that Canada is on the metric system, meaning the signs will be in metric. But Google should know that I don’t speak metric, so telling me there’s a right turn coming up in 1.7 kilometers means about as much as saying it’s in twenty-blevin fizzlefarts. My weather app was smart enough to continue giving me the temperature in Fahrenheit and I wasn’t even logged in.
**Addendum (Taylor’s Version): How was the concert? Couldn’t tell you, but Wife and Daughter both thought it was wonderful. I believe them. On something like that, it’s easy to succumb to antici-pointment (when you’re looking forward to something so much that even a good time is seen as disappointing), but they were absolutely ecstatic. I’m sure you can find better reviews of it elsewhere, but Daughter might have just experienced the best night of her life. Not her life so far. Her entire life. Only seventy years of downhill to come.
**Addendum Four: Forget about the concert, how did my curling match go? This American held his own on an ice sheet full of Canadians. We won the game on our final shot
I had the first week of October off as a quarter break, and my mom had always wanted to see Great Basin National Forest. I’d always wanted to drive Highway 50, the “Loneliest Road in America,” so it seemed a great time to tick both of those boxes.
I didn’t bring Daughter on this trip, since she had school and Great Basin wasn’t high on her list. This worked out better for me, since there’s no way she would’ve done Highway 50. If she were included in this trip, we would’ve flown into Salt Lake City.
So her path to 63 is still stalled out at six. If you can call it “stalled out” if she’s added four in a span of seven months. And we might or might not hit Joshua Tree when we visit SoCal for Christmas. Stay tuned…
Baker, Nevada
Although we didn’t fly into SLC, we did in fact circle through there to get to Great Basin. We hit a Boise State Football game and the Golden Spike National Monument (where the first transcontinental railroad was connected) just north of Salt Lake. The whole round trip was over 2,000 miles. Good thing I had a rental car.
So we actually started at the eastern edge of Highway 50, coming in from Utah, which was the opposite of how I always envisioned driving it. Who knew a road goes BOTH directions?
My initial thought, before even getting into Nevada, was that Highway 50 might be the loneliest for humans, but not for bugs. We went over a mountain that Google tells me is called King Top, but which at the time I could only assume was the River Styx, shortly after sundown. Holy Hell! How many plagues deep are we when the locusts kamikaze against the front of your car?
I had literally washed the windshields an hour earlier.
We stayed at a place right on the border of Utah and Nevada, calling itself a hotel and casino, with a very liberal use of both words.
And by “right on the border,” I mean it pretty much straddled it. The hotel portion of the property was in Utah, while the casino portion, obviously, was on the Nevada side. Bear in mind, Nevada and Utah are in different time zones. They told us our check out time was 10:00 am. I didn’t have the wherewithal to ask WHICH 10:00 am, considering the hotel office was in the casino portion.
This played havoc with my electronic devices not just when we were at the hotel, but the entire next day. My car believed we were in Pacific Time, while my watch thought we were in Mountain Time. My phone, which was “roaming” for the first time since the Bush administration, tried to split the difference with this beauty of a save screen:
While it seems like it’s a standard screen for traveling, I’m ninety percent sure it hadn’t been giving me the “Local/Home” split the previous day when we were in Idaho and Utah, which are firmly in the Mountain Zone instead of straddling the two zones. Plus this split times showed up the entire day we were in the Great Basin National Park, which is 100% in the Pacific Zone, but I’m guessing, being on the eastern side of a mountain, was getting all of its (roaming) cell phone signal from Utah.
The casino, meanwhile, consisted of about twenty slot machines that didn’t pay out. They didn’t even print a ticket. When you wanted to cash out, you had to go get the bartender to come zero out the machine, then go back to the bar and get some cash out of the till for you. I usually like going from slot to slot, but didn’t want to keep pulling her away from her primary job.
The hotelish/casinoish also had a restaurant. Ish. That was one of the main reasons we booked it. Unfortunately, we were informed when checking in that the restaurant is open 8:00 am to 9:00 pm, every day. Except for tomorrow.
I don’t know if the “except for tomorrow” was because it was a Sunday night. Or the last day of the month. Or because the bartender had to empty out the slot machines. All I know is that we were only staying one night. The person checking us in knew we were only staying one night. So the “except for tomorrow” information, for us, might as well have meant never. She might’ve wanted to lead with the fact that there was no breakfast for us instead of telling us the regular hours that we would never encounter.
Fortunately, we found a solid spot for breakfast in the town of Baker the following morning. I say “fortunately” because it was the only spot in town. If it had totally sucked, it was still where we were having breakfast.
But it didn’t suck.
There were only three things on the breakfast menu, along with three things on the lunch menu. I was a little skeptical when those three breakfast items were a sandwich, a burrito, and a quiche. Those all seem rife for being torn out of a plastic bag and thrown in the microwave. Damn you, Starbucks!
I was thrilled, then, when what I can only assume to be the sole proprietor spent ten minutes in the back putting some TLC into our breakfast. The sandwich featured an egg/cheese “brick” between a cheddar biscuit, both items of which were homemade. The brick didn’t sound appealing, and I’m still not entirely sure how it was made, but the texture was fine and the flavor was good. Kinda like a quiche that’s been run through a vice. And the cheddar biscuit, holy crap! This woman might be the sole reason Red Lobster went out of business.
Plus a very stripped down espresso menu. Lattes and cappuccinos plus a handful of Torani syrups if you absolutely must. I enjoy a coffee shop that caters to people who enjoy coffee instead of sugar bombs.
They didn’t have dinner on the menu, but we noticed there was a back room with a full bar, so I’m guessing when all two hundred town inhabitants get off work, they enter through the other side of the building where they see a dinner menu. Outsiders have to go to the Mexican restaurant, which was the only other dining establishment in town.
We also frequented what might’ve been the only store in town – it had everything from books and clothes to some minor groceries. All in one room.
But the most important thing we got there, the item that ended up dictating the course of the journey back home, was free. A Highway 50 stamp passport. To complete it, you have to stop at all the random little hamlets you’d normally blow past.
Challenge accepted!
Great Basin National Park
In terms of how prepared I was going into a new national park, Great Basin was down on the “I’ve vaguely heard of it” end of the spectrum. My mom was the driving factor here, so I let her do the research.
Her primary interest in Great Basin was not the lakes and mountains and shit I usually focus on, but for astronomy. Being up in the high desert with nary an electrical light in sight, this park is “certified dark sky” and known for stargazing. We had some great views of the sky the night before, especially the few times the damn bugs got out of the way.
There’s an observatory in the park. Unfortunately it’s a) primarily in use at night, and b) closed to the public. At multiple locations, we asked, just out of curiosity, where in the park the observatory was and the only response we ever got was “it’s closed to the public.” Even when we assured them we weren’t going to go bother the scientists or aliens, we just wanted to know where the heck it was, we were told “only the employees can go there.”
Sheesh, even Area 51 has fucking signs!
Great Basin also has a solar telescope, which, follow me here, is in use during the daytime. Even better, it’s accessible to the public. Because the aliens are at work during the day. Unlike the nighttime telescope, employees actually answered questions about the solar telescope and we only had to ask three or four times to learn that the it was located behind the visitor’s center.
Unfortunately, when we went there, we saw no telescope. We hiked up a trail and still no telescope. We returned to the visitor’s center and asked the same employee if we somehow missed it, she responded, “Oh, sorry, it’s only set up Thursday through Sunday.”
Clearly E.T. and the chef at the casino like to take days off together.
Another of the park’s main draws is also currently off limits, but for a different reason. The Lexington Arch, which looks spectacular, currently has a washed out road, adding a couple miles each direction to the regular trail that was already five miles. The wash-out happened in 2013. So I’m sure they’ll get around to it, you know, sometime. Unfortunately, up to this point, the only thing they’ve had a chance to do is change all the permanent maps to tell us the road is “temporarily” washed out.
Fortunately the other main draw of the park, the Lehman Caves, are fully accessible and open midweek. Only two tours with twenty tickets each, so get there early.
I actually thought we had missed the first tour, because the tour was at 10:30 and my watch said it was 10:40. I said as much to my mom, prompting someone nearby to remind me that my watch was in a different time zone. Great, we still have close to an hour!
Unfortunately, the 10:30 tour was already sold out, so we bought tickets to the 1:30 tour, which of course we were going to be an hour early for because of the Baker, NV time warp.
The caves were fun, as are most caves. The stories of Absalom Lehman, who “discovered” the caves (that had been in use by Native Americans for a thousand years), were hilarious. He built a shack over the entrance and, for a dollar, sold you a candle and let you in. He said if you weren’t back in 24 hours, he’d come looking for you.
He also, unfortunately, had a rule of “If you can break it, you can take it,” leading to a number of broken stalactites and stalagmites. Although it does give us a good barometer for how long the various columns took to form. The caves became a national monument in 1922, so we can assume the “new growth” in this photo represents about a century of progress:
Which, of course, just makes the rest of the cave all that much more impressive. So, thanks, I guess, Mr. Lehman? Your assholery destruction of nature’s majesty helps us… appreciate it more?
We took the “short tour,” which only goes into the first chamber, then returns to the entrance. There’s a longer one that was finishing shortly after ours, coming out of a different exit. I didn’t see it as an option on any of the boards, so I assume it needs to be booked ahead of time online. I’ll be checking that out before my next visit. I think it would’ve been much cooler.
The other thing on my “return list” (which is usually the purpose of these unreasearched first trips) are some hikes. The only paved road in the park, which diverts just before the Lehman Caves, is to Wheeler Peak. It kinda looks like Half Dome, and was formed the same way. Although the hike up to the peak doesn’t look nearly as precarious as its Yosemite brethren.
No, that’s not the hike I want to do next time. I don’t care that it’s a standard hike instead of cables that will kill you if you let go. It’s nine miles and a 3,000-foot elevation gain, starting at 10,000 feet. No thanks.
The hike I want to take, instead, scrambles up the snow and rocks toward the front of the mountain. Unlike the behemoth hike around the back side, this one’s “only” five miles with a 1,000-foot elevation gain. That might be doable if I was prepared, and now that I think of it, isn’t Half Dome cooler from the front than the back? Being at the base of a cliff seems more majestic than on top of it. Especially when I can already get views like this without hiking anywhere:
We almost did a shorter hike past a couple of alpine lakes, but opted not to. We only had a little water and no sunscreen, and that sun was scorching up there. It was 100 degrees in the valley that day, and when there isn’t a lot of tree cover, 10,000 feet doesn’t give you a ton of air pressure protecting you, either. As one of my college girlfriends remarked, snow should melt on the mountains “since they’re closer to the sun.”
I wasn’t dating her for her brain.
Plus, we weren’t sure how long the hike would take and we’d already spent primo bucks (8!) for a cave tour in a couple hours. So next time I hit Great Basin, I’m doing a loop that includes both lakes and the glacier on the moraine.
After the park, we hit an archeological dig that would’ve been really cool when it was being excavated. Unfortunately, that was in the early 1990s. When they were done, they filled all the dirt back in, in order to “save it for future generations.” Who will have to dig it up again.
What we were left with was one very torn-apart booklet that explained where in a wide-open desert scrubfield there were some 800-year-old adobe buildings are buried.But we just have to take the book’s word for it.
Highway 50
Finally we headed north to Ely, which I thought was pronounced Elly, but my mom thought was pronounced Eli. We were both wrong. The locals say Ee-Lee. Far be it from me to criticize from afar, but I think that is, obviously, the worst of the options.
Then again, I’ll acquiesce to their demands. They’ve got enough problems. First of which is living in Ely.
Not just because it’s a small town. There are plenty of small towns I would love to live in. Along the Mendocino Coast, maybe, where you have beaches and cliffs and forest all coming together. Maybe someplace in the foothills of Oregon or California, where it only snows two or three times a year – not enough to get sick of and it all melts away so you never have to shovel. The Big Island of Hawaii has some one or two-road towns that could be called paradise.
But high desert amongst the sagebrush? No thanks.
At least Ely had more than one street in their town. The other towns we visited didn’t have that.
Technically, most had at least one street that ran parallel to Highway 50, with some connectors that are best referred to as alleys, but Ely (a town of almost 4,000 residents!) actually had a legitimate T intersection!
Take that, Eureka!
I shouldn’t bag on Eureka. We had a breakfast there that rivaled the one we had in Baker. Same general menu, breakfast sandwiches and burritos, but the sandwich was “build your own.” I opted for a croissant with egg, ham, peppers, onions, and avocado. Solid!
Their coffee options were substantially foofier than in Baker. Options like chocolate hazelnut, cinnamon apple, and chai. While I enjoy a good cappuccino, gimme that chocolate hazelnut.
How did we find this hidden gem? When we got our passport stamped in Ely the night before, the guy at the visitor’s center told us about it. It’s his favorite spot when heading west. So I guess they don’t talk smack about Eureka’s lack of perpendicular streets. When your only claims to fame are being on the loneliest road in America, I guess you develop an affinity for each other.
Unfortunately, the stamp people in Eureka didn’t then give us a secret gem in Austin. I was hoping we’d learn a secret handshake by the end, but most of them were just “here’s your stamp, wanna buy something?”
I also noticed that most of the businesses in those smaller eastern towns sported a “Highway 50 stamp here” sign out front. It’s clearly a draw. However, as we made it farther west, into towns that consider themselves exurbs of Reno don’t give a shit. In those towns we had to go way off Highway 50 to find the Chamber of Commerce or something similar. It’s a good thing I didn’t do my first plan of driving west to east, because I wouldn’t have realized there was a passport until I was halfway done.
Austin was probably the cutest of the towns. It’s more or less smack dab in the middle. A couple houses on the outskirts have “Speed Trap” signs and, sure enough, there was a cop sitting right there on Main Street as we inched through. Part of me thinks it was a setup not to give out tickets, but to get us to slow down enough to spend some money in their town.
After all, I doubt there’s a lot of crime in this town with a population of… huh, Google gives me results ranging from a high of 167 to a low of… one? One person? Is the cop the only inhabitant? Then where the hell do all the other employees in the town live? In the abandoned castle on the outskirts of the town? It’s not like there were a ton of suburbs. Huh, maybe he really was looking to hand out tickets, because he isn’t paying his salary with resident taxes.
As for Highway 50 itself, I’ve been on far lonelier highways. A couple of them on this very trip. Interstate 84, for instance, on the way from Boise to Salt Lake City. Or, for what it’s worth, the portion of Highway 50 in western Utah. Minus the bugs.
What Highway 50 has that those other highways don’t have, though, are the far-off views. While it looks like it’s flat, you’re actually spending large portions of the journey on long, sloping valleys. This allows you to see ten or twenty miles in front of or behind you at any given time. And the road is straight as all get-out. While there might or might not be other cars in that long vision (usually there were), they were pretty damn far off, and it’ll take forever for them to reach you.
As for cars going the same direction as you, let’s just say it was pretty easy to determine when it was safe to pass them. What was a little bit harder was to determine how fast you were going. Fortunately you should be able to see a cop coming from miles away. Assuming there were more cops on Highway 50 than the “Speed Trap” guy in Arthur. I don’t recall seeing many.
According to the stamp passport, this road got its “Loneliest” designation in 1986 when Life magazine sent some reporters to do a vignette. I guess Baby Jessica hadn’t fallen in the well yet and they needed some hard-hitting picto-journalism.
Kinda makes sense since Life was known for taking grandiose pictures and Highway 50 certainly has majestic visuals. However, the story that went with it said you shouldn’t undertake the journey unless you had desert survival skills. Sheesh, I know 1980s cars weren’t known for distance or longevity, but the longest you ever go between civilization is maybe seventy miles.
Although now that I think about it, my first car was a used 1983 Chrysler LeBaron and that thing would’ve probably only overheated twice in that seventy miles. On a plus side, the hour-and-a-half it would take me to drive that distance at the federally-mandated 55 miles per hour would be almost enough to get the air conditioner to start working.
Still, you can see why they were so keen to push the toddler down the well if all they’ve got in the planning room is “Hey, how about we cover a really long, straight road?”
Nowadays, you can zip through it in a handful of hours without finishing your audiobook or ever stopping for gas.
Although you’re going to want to stop for gas early. The closer we got to Reno, the closer we were to California.
For the summer after my daughter’s fourth grade, year, we used a perk available to all fourth graders to get into national parks for free. After visiting Crater Lake and Lassen Park on consecutive days (not to mention a Treehouse Resort), we were off to Southern California for a jaunt out to the Channel Islands with my mom.
Channel Islands is one of those less-visited national parks. Shocking considering you have to book a boat long in advance, then be at the dock, which is a good hour outside of L.A., by 7:00 am..
Pretty sure they aren’t selling park-specific annual passes.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure Chanel Islands has an entry fee at all. You pay for the boat and it takes you out to an island. Perhaps the boat ride in counts as a de facto entry fee. Except the boat is operated by a private company. Do they bury some graft for the government inside the price of the boat? If so, we totally got shafted. In addition to Daughter’s fourth-grade status, my mom has a lifetime senior pass. Bogus.
If I ever make it to American Samoa, I’m going to demand that the airplane trip is free.
Since the boat ride takes an hour or more, you’re only allowed to visit one island per trip. “Fortunately” for us, a couple of the islands were closed for refurbishment or something, so we only had to decide between two islands. I don’t know how one refurbishes an island, so if you happen to check out Santa Rosa Island after it reopens in 2025 or 2026, you can let me know if it’s retrofitted for 5G or something. I sometimes still get crappy reception despite having the Covid vaccine.
My mom originally wanted to do Anacapa Island, which is the smallest island and the one closest to land, because she believed it was the basis for the book Island of the Blue Dolphins. However, we noticed on the website that people had to use a ladder and large staircase just to get from the boat to the island. That would wipe my mom, in her late 70s, out for the day, and it didn’t look like there was a ton of shade. Wouldn’t be very fun to have her sitting there baking and exhausted while Daughter and I explored the island.
In addition, Anacapa Island has a beautiful selling point of being a bird sanctuary, making it loud and smelling of bird crap. Five star accommodation all the way.
Finally, we found out that it’s actually San Nicolas Island that is of Blue Dolphin fame. It’s inaccessible to the public, which seems like a huge marketing miss.
So to sum up: Anacapa means exhaustion, sunburn, bird poop, and nary a dolphin nor a shipwrecked Native American in sight. Santa Cruz Island, you’re the winner!
There’s a ton of things to do on Santa Cruz. There’s kayaking and there’s hikes and there’s… um… swimming.
Oh, and a visitor’s center. Although don’t expect a visitor’s center like other parks, which are ten percent geology information and ninety percent store. The Santa Cruz Island visitor’s center was basically somebody’s house from a hundred years ago, in which they’d put some information about the Native Americans who once lived on the island. They did have the passport stamp, which made Daughter happy, but they didn’t have a single thing you could buy. What’s the point of visiting a national park if I can’t buy a cheesy “Go Climb a Bird Poop” t-shirt?
The boat company’s headquarters also had the passport stamp available, so Daughter managed to get two different stamps. I told her she should get an Anacapa stamp, too, but she only wants stamps that represent where she’s actually been. So while stamps from both the north and south entrance was a goal at Lassen, she’s not getting some cheap-ass reflection of a place she’s never been.
Damn, I was hoping I could just ebay the Virgin Islands.
If left to my own devices on Santa Cruz Island, I would’ve kayaked. They go into caves that look beautiful. Unfortunately, the ten-year-old and late-seventies-year-old I was with weren’t likely to be the strongest kayakers. If it was on a calm lake, I could maybe take a kayak by myself and hope that the two of them together in one kayak could get where they needed to be, but in the ocean, I assume the best case scenario would be the waves washing them back to shore. Not sure I want to envision the worst case scenarios.
So hiking it was. There were a number of different directions to go. One trail goes along the north side of the island, first to a couple of lookouts, then to another port (Prisoners Harbor) where we could have taken the boat, but which doesn’t have a visitor’s center, so why bother? The other trail goes up and over the middle of the island to a more secluded inlet (Smuggler’s Cove). That looked cool, and as an added bonus, we might be able to see the Island of the Blue Dolphins from it. But that hike was listed as strenuous, which didn’t sound appealing less than a week after I nearly died on a similar hike at Crater Lake.
Okay, fine, I didn’t really almost die. I just took a really long time to get where I was going and felt like an out-of-shape almost-fifty year-old the whole time.
So we opted for the first trail. In addition to only being “moderate,” there were a number of spots along the way where we could double back in case the going got too tough. Those roads back were a shorter distance and a smoother grade than the hike up. You might question why we would have opted for the steeper and longer distance in the first place, but that’s because the view was better, hiking along the cliffs over the ocean instead of a dirt path amongst the sagebrush.
And boy howdy, hiking at sea level! OMG, I could breathe! I kinda forgot about that whole thin vs thick air thing. But all of a sudden I could hike uphill without stopping every hundred paces. I wasn’t trying to parse out my water as if it was the last bit of moisture on earth. Daughter and I did a five-mile round trip and I was still at damn near 100%. If I had known it was going to be like that, I would’ve opted for the strenuous hike over to Smuggler’s Cove.
The hike to Prisoner’s Harbor, meanwhile, was never gonna happen. Santa Cruz Island is not as small as it first appears. We started on the northeast corner of the island and Prisoner’s Harbor was barely at the halfway mark. I figured it was maybe five miles away. But the round trip between the two is 34 miles! Kinda hard to hike that and be back in time to catch the 4:00 boat home.
My mom didn’t make the full five miles. After we saw Cavern Point, the first destination on the hike, we were faced with that first return route. She kept going back and forth about whether she wanted to press on to Potato Harbor with us or return to the harbor and wait for us. I didn’t think she should come with us but didn’t want to come across as a “go away” dickhead. At the same time, I think she also wanted to go back but didn’t want to sound like a “Screw you guys, I’m going home” asshole. What followed was the most passive aggressive debate ever.
In the end, she finally returned to port and let us venture on by ourselves. When we reconvened at the end of the day, we all agreed it was the best option. That turn-back point wasn’t even halfway to Potato Harbor and the path back wasn’t quite as pedestrian as it seemed. It was mostly level, but there were a few spots where the path was thin and steep, cut into granite that didn’t provide a lot of cushion for the pushin’ (of my feet).
Fortunately I had a walking stick.
Daughter had wondered about hiking sticks when she saw a number of people using them at Crater Lake. She asked what they help with, and unfortunately, I wasn’t much help.
In truth, I’ve wondered my whole life how much of the help people gain from hiking sticks are the placebo effect. At best, it maybe helps keep your arms in motion , stops you from getting to where you’re just dragging your knuckles behind you like a gorilla. But it’s odd that ninety percent of hiking tools are designed to lessen the weight and effort, then they top it off with a clunky, anti-aerodynamic deadweight.
But my mom had some of the lightweight collapsible poles, so I let Daughter try them out. She used them like ski poles, swinging both out in front of her, staking them on the ground, then walking through them before moving them back in front. If only this path had some flag-gates to slalom through.
Most helpful sign ever!
When we parted from my mom, she took one walking stick, we took the other. This might seem like yet another dick move by her son, taking the support away from the elderly, but again, bringing both sticks just makes more burden. Even if they’re collapsible, she was already carrying a water bottle and a backpack. Gotta keep at least one hand free.
And yeah, for the most part, I still don’t get them. They don’t seem to help with balance or momentum. Now that I’m older, they helped a little on the downhill. I put it in front of me to slow down gravity’s momentum. But I mostly see people using them on the uphills, as if their upper body strength is going to be the thing that drags them up to the upper echelons. This ain’t rock-climbing, people.
Daughter and I went on to Potato Harbor, which could either be named for being in the shape of a potato or because that’s where potatoes once grew or were delivered or washed ashore after a shipwreck. I heard multiple explanations, and everyone spoke with absolute certainty that their explanation was correct. Shocking that in a country where less than five percent of the people change their mind from one election to the next, everybody would be certain that their explanation of Potato Harbor is the correct one.
Is it a Potato? Is it a Harbor? The world may never know.
Unless you voted for Dan Quayle, in which case it’s Potatoe Harbor.
Boy, I would’ve been a hilarious blogger in 1992!
The weirdest part of the Channel Islands trip was what came after we finished our hike. It was around 2:00 and our boat back to shore was at 4:00. Not enough time to do another hike or anything. But two hours is quite a long time to occupy ourselves with only a few park benches and informational signs.
Daughter wanted to go in the ocean, so my mom and I hung out on the beach. I made it more than a couple paragraphs in my Jack Reacher book this time, which I’d failed to do when she went “swimming” in Lassen. Not that Daughter was better at occupying herself in the water here. But this time Grandma was there to take the brunt of her “Come play with me.”
As we sat there, more hikers came back. Then the kayaks all came back. A few of those kayakers didn’t seem much more adept than my mom or daughter would’ve been. Seriously, people, how hard is it to get to shore in the goddamn ocean? There are waves coming in, for pete’s sake.
The beach grew more and more crowded as everybody found themselves in a holding pattern after finishing their activities. In most national parks, you can drive out whenever you feel like it. All done for the day? Great. Leave now and grab dinner outside the park instead of whatever crap they’re serving there. Suddenly decide that hiking at sea level was easy peasy and you wanna try Smuggler’s Canyon? Go for it! So long as you’re willing to leave the park after dark.
But on the Channel Islands, you’ve already pre-booked the time at which you can leave the park. One boat leaves at 4:00 and the other at 4:30. Which means a whole lot of sitting around waiting for said boat. Most of us were lined up and rarin’ to go as soon as that bad boy appeared on the horizon.
At least there was a beach to enjoy while we wait. A rocky beach that might slice your feet up, but a beach nonetheless.
But the Channel Islands were lovely. Simple hikes, ocean breezes, and allegedly some caves you can kayak to.
I only have two complaints. One is that we didn’t get to see an Island Fox. The Channel Islands are considered the Galapagos Islands of the North because they all have their own breeds of certain animals. The main one is the Island Fox, which is a different species on each island. The websites implied they were all over the place and would be easy to see one. Not so much. Perhaps if we camped there, they’d all come out in the evening, but we searched the whole way down from Potato Harbor and couldn’t find one.
There’s an island-specific blue jay, as well. We might have seen one of those, but I couldn’t tell for sure. However, I can verify that we saw Huginn and Muninn conspiring before sending some messages back to Odin.
My other complaint is about the visitor’s center. Not the visitor’s center on the actual island. That one I understand. It’s sparse with nothing to buy because the island is pack-in/pack-out. Can’t really have the usual commerce in that environment, to say nothing of the difficulty it would require to boat your employees in and out every day. On a boat owned by a private company that is currently selling every seat.
However, there is another visitor’s center. It’s back on the dock in Ventura. As far as I can tell, it’s got all the usual shirts and knick-knacks and stickers emblazoned with the park’s logo.
I say “As far as I can tell,” because the visitor’s center is only open from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm. Our morning boat left Ventura at 8:00 am and our return boat left Channel Islands at 4:00 pm, with a travel time of a little over an hour. Which means, follow me here, people who visit the park cannot go the park’s visitor’s center. What the hell? They should name it the non-visitor’s center.
Fortunately we live in the internet age, so when I returned home, I ordered some Channel Island stickers for Daughter’s passport. Plus a little coin for myself.
But really, it feels kinda cheap to order these things online. The whole point of the passport is to get us to visit those parks. Not to get us to order shit online.
Or maybe spending money is precisely its goal. Doesn’t matter where.
And, voila!, it’s time to cross American Samoa off the list!
Ever since we took her to Rocky Mountain National Park, she’s been obsessed with visiting them all. As soon as I can figure out the road map to American Samoa and Virgin Islands, we’ll get right on that.
In the meantime, we hit some of the ones in California.
Of course, her main goal in visiting these parks is to procure stamps and stickers for a passport we bought her. Each visitor’s center usually has its own stamp, sometimes two, and it’s the only damn thing that is free there.
They also have stickers, which look like postage stamps, that aren’t free. Nor are they as cheap as postage stamps.
Since Lassen has a visitor’s center at each entrance, that dictated a lot of our plans for the day.
But if she can get the stamps and stickers while I have an excuse to see some new parks, it’s a win-win.
And as long as I can pretend she’s still in fourth grade, it’s a win-win-win.
I believe Lassen might be the closest national park to my house. Technically Yosemite might be a few miles closer geographically, but Lassen is a more direct route.
Yet somehow I’ve visited Yosemite at least forty times while going to Lassen exactly… let’s see, carry the two… zero times.
I’m not the only one. Lassen is pretty far down the list of most visited parks and it’s often described as “Yosemite without the crowds.”
Now that I’ve been there, I can confidently say it’s… not really Yosemite with some crowds. Plus some bubbling mud farts. And rednecks.
First, I’d like to clarify that I visited Lassen before it, and the entirety of Northern California, became a smoldering hellscape of smoke and ash. For most of August, the park was closed as a result of the Park Fire, which is a stupid name because all fire names are stupid, something I noted when Paradise burned down. Call this one the Lassen fire, if you must.
So yeah, Lassen was still open in mid-July when we visited, although you wouldn’t know it. Manzanita Lake was packed. The Bumpass Hell Trail was closed. Burney Falls was closed.
Technically that last one isn’t in Lassen, but it’s so close that it would be silly to make the trek to one without stopping at the other. Like people who go to Australia without checking out New Zealand.
Burney Falls, our first stop on the day, was closed because of construction. Sounds like it’s been closed for a year or so and ain’t coming back until at least next year. They’re making it, I don’t know, ADA compliant or more accessible or some other such excuse that government types use to shut things down for a while. My commute has a bridge that’s had “construction” on it for two years or so, complete with lane redirects, and as far as I can tell, this construction isn’t going to expand the bridge or add any lanes. It’ll just fuck with my commute for two solid years and tell me it was for my own fucking good. Then they’ll increase my taxes to help cover the chaffing.
Fortunately, you could still see the falls, you just couldn’t walk to the falls. That was probably the good news, because if we had spent longer there, we never would’ve made it to the second visitor’s center before it closed at 5:00.
The falls were beautiful. Half cascade, half fall. It spreads out like a mini-Victoria Falls. There are portions of it that just pop out of the rock halfway down.
In fact, the entire river that creates Burney Falls pops out of the ground only a half-mile upriver. I didn’t check it out myself, just heard it from the old man who was trying to alleviate our annoyance that we couldn’t walk down to the falls.
The price to get in, of course, hasn’t gone down from what it was when you could walk to the falls. As if that’s not a key piece of what you’re paying for. As if there wasn’t a free friggin’ parking lot on the other side of the falls that offers more or less the same view of the falls but that doesn’t offer access to the falls. So now the “State Park” gives us the exact same experience as the free parking lot, but charges $10 for it.
No wait, there’s also a store there. Where we spent more money…
The Bumpass Hell trail is usually listed as the top destination inside Lassen. It was closed not for refurbishment, but for snow. In July.
I’m not saying there wasn’t a fair amount of snow around. I’m sure we would’ve had to walk around a couple mounds. We’d had to do something similar at one of the Crater Lake lookouts. But even at 8,000 feet, it had been a pretty damn warm three to four weeks. I assume the Bumpass Hell Trail is like some of those campgrounds I’ve booked before, where it’s not open in mid-June despite the last storm having been in February. But the campsite can’t open until some bureaucrat fits it in his schedule to check that the snow didn’t damage a tree or, in the case of Bumpass, a wood plank.
I wonder if Bumpass Hell ever opened this year. It couldn’t have been there more than a week or two before the fire shut the whole place down. I guess that makes Lassen the only place in this country that can claim 2024 was a year without hell.
Before I get much farther, let me clarify: Lassen is absolutely beautiful. I don’t know that I’d compare it to Yosemite. For sure not Yosemite Valley, which is only at about 4,000 feet elevation because it’s, follow me here, a valley. Most of Lassen is double that. So the landscapes were more reminiscent of Rocky Mountain than Yosemite,
It also doesn’t feature distinct images like Half Dome and El Capitan. Maybe if I traveled there often I might be able to pick Lassen Peak out of a lineup alongside Shasta and Hood and Rainier, but on first viewing, it was just a tall mountain. Although not too tall because I think the trail up it started at 9,000 feet. No way was I attempting that the day after Crater Lake.
There looked to be some other fun hikes, too, that totally warrant a return. The Kings Creek Falls trail looked totally accessible. We almost went on it until we opted for getting home at a reasonable hour. I also noted it was one of those “the downhill comes first” trails I don’t particularly love, but it was a more gradual drop (and then rise) in elevation than Crater Lake. Maybe if we weren’t on back-to-back days, and on a time crunch, we would’ve done it.
Bumpass Hell would be nice to try, too, if I can ever make it there in the ten day period between snow season and fire season.
And maybe I could even tackle Lassen Peak. A two-thousand foot elevation gain, starting at eighty-five hundred? Easy peasey! At least the uphill comes first.
But on this particular trip, we stuck to the lakes.
First up was Manzanita Lake, which was crowded. It’s so close to the entrance that I got the feeling this was basically the closest beach for the towns of Red Bluff and Redding. Hence my rednecks comment. If you’ve never heard of Red Bluff and Redding, California, I’ve now given you all you need to know. Rednecks. And a Sundial Bridge.
I noticed that Lassen had a price for an annual pass to just that one park. I don’t think I’ve seen that elsewhere. Nobody heads up to just Yosemite for an evening. And if they do, they’re probably enough of an outdoors nut to buy the annual pass to all of the parks. But Lassen is close enough to a couple towns that don’t have a lot of beaches, and Manzanita Lake was proof of that. I assume eighty percent of the Lassen-only annual passes never venture farther than two miles from the entrance.
Daughter wanted to swim. I didn’t, especially in one of those mountain lakes where the bottom is basically slime. So, after we spent a half-hour walking to and from the bathroom at the visitor’s center to change into her swimsuit, because all the closer parking lots were full, I sat down on a log near shore to read a book while she walked into the lake.
Then promptly decided she was done and came back to shore.
Like seriously, I don’t think I finished two pages. And these weren’t Game of Thrones pages. I was reading a friggin’ Jack Reacher book. Two Jack Reacher pages probably don’t have a single word longer than two syllables. No sentences longer than five words. I made it about as far as “Reacher said nothing” before she was waving and squawking at me to bring her towel and shoes to the shore.
But she wanted clean feet, so what followed was a never-ending cycle of sit on a log, lift up a foot, get it dirty again, move to a rock, get distracted, clean the other foot, fall back in, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam. I shit you not, she probably spent less than five minutes “swimming” and more than twenty minutes getting out.
And I might never find out what Jack Reacher said.
We went through a similar process at Summit Lake. Fortunately that lake was much less crowded, because Manzanita Lake is right by the entrance while Summit Lake is, follow me here, at the summit. So she kinda had the whole lake to herself and stayed in for a good fifteen minutes until some teenagers showed up and made her feel self-conscious.
We stopped by a couple more lakes on the way out that were absolutely beautiful. Helen Lake and Emerald Lake were pristine. Technically we could’ve swam in them, but at 8,200 feet elevation, they were pretty much a degree above ice. But damn, did standing next to them feel great when the valley had been over 100 degrees for a month straight.
My favorite lake, though, wasn’t really even a lake at all. It’s called Hat Lake, and maybe there are times of the year when it’s a legitimate lake, but if my visit was any indication, the times when Hat is a Lake and Bumpass is a Trail are months apart and never the twain shall meet.
When we were at Hat Lake, it was a beautiful brook babbling through a lush, peaceful meadow. Even better, we were the only people there. I guess everyone else took one look, said, “screw that, it’s not a lake,” and raced on to see the “Closed Do Not Enter” barricade at Bumpass Hell. Me, I could’ve stayed next to the stream all day, found a comfy batch of grass to fall asleep in, and woken up in the same spot the next day, never witnessing a mud fart, and I would’ve been content.
It was Daughter’s favorite part of the park, too. Good to know she’s taking after some of my nicer qualities and not just my blood type and allergies.
Then we stopped at the mud farts. Technically it’s sulphur pools, where underground magma pockets turn the surface into boiling liquid. And magma, being sulphur, smells like hard-boiled eggs or, less charitably, farts. Ergo bubbling mud farts.
Which were impressive. But still, after a minute or so, you realize it’s just bubbling mud and you start to realize the smell ain’t going away any time soon.
Oh, and lots of friendly signs tell us what should be obvious, that you shouldn’t try to touch the molten plasma.
Not sure who looks at something that’s literally boiling granite and feels the need to touch it, but… hold on, I teach high school. I probably encounter a hundred people a day who would do that for nothing more than a dare.
And they’d use their penis.
Two parks down, one to go. Time to head off to some islands.
Did you know fourth graders get into National Parks for free?
Sure, at half of them you still need to pay a reservation fee or whatever, but once you’re at the gate, you just point to a fourth-gradish looking child and tell them to shove their entry fee right up their ass.
Then apologize to said fourth grader for the profanity.
We discovered this last summer when Daughter was between third and fourth grade. I don’t think she technically should have qualified, because the pass we got expired August 30 of that year, meaning it was probably for kids who were finishing fourth grade, not going into it. But her school starts in mid-August, so if the federal government can’t figure out how to classify a fourth grader, who am I to tell them?
We got a new one for this year and have visited five. And since fifth graders don’t have government id’s, guess who’s going to be a fourth grader again?
“She’s a fourth grader.”
“She looks eighteen.”
“She’s really dumb and has been held back a lot.”
After a few days of treehousing and riverboating and… cat-seeing… we finally headed up into the mountains to accomplish our primary goal, which was visiting some national parks whild Daughter gets in for free.
First up was Crater Lake.
I’ve technically been to Crater Lake before, but not really. I headed up there on a weekend in early May once, not realizing that pretty much the entire mountain around the lake is still caked in twenty feet of snow in early May. Hell, even when we visited in late July, there were still substantial clumps of snow.
So on my first visit, they had only plowed the road up to the visitor center (because the beauty of national parks is second only to the commerce of national parks!), from which you could walk to one specific viewpoint on the south side of the lake. Because it was 90+ degrees in the valley, I took a picture of me wearing shorts and flip-flops in the snow, then promptly drove back down to Medford, thinking Crater Lake was almost as worthless of a National Park as Kings Canyon, in which there’s pretty much only one road in and, once you’ve made it to the end, all you can really do is get out of your car, say “Wow, look at that canyon,” then turn back around and leave the park.
Fortunately, this time around, a fair amount of the ring road was open. None of it had snow, but most of the east side was closed for construction or potholes or some of the usual road-closing reasons. I imagine if they’re only snow-free for four or five months a year, ya gotta get all your constructing done at that time. It seems like every time I visit Denver, the entire downtown is torn apart. Then again, I always visit in the summer.
So I can now confirm that Crater Lake has, not only a southern view, but also a western and a northern view. Whether or not there’s an east side of the lake is still a mystery.
You can also view the lake from, wait for it, lake level!
We weren’t sure if we were going to make it down to the lake. There’s only one path down, and it’s all the way on the north side of the lake. The hike is listed as “moderate to strenuous” and it’s the worst kind, where you’re going downhill first. Meaning the return trip was going to be uphill. Even though I’m now of an age where downhills are almost as bad as uphills, I friggin hate those kinds of hikes. For me, it’s rarely about the muscle fatigue, it’s usually the breathing. Downhills don’t task my lungs.
But Daughter wanted to ride that boat, and the boat was, shockingly, only available at lake level.
We had looked up tickets beforehand, but I wasn’t sure how long it would take us to get there from the treehouse. Good thing, because originally, I was debating between the noon and the 2:00 tours. But after we added in Daughter’s 8:00 am horseriding and stopped for lunch right before entering the park, we were barely at the south side of the lake by 2:00. Still a drive around the lake and a moderate to strenuous hike away from our destination.
There wasn’t a ton of cell service around the lake, so even if I had a good gauge on what time we might finally make it to the dock, I doubt I could’ve ordered tickets. So when we finally made it there, we had pretty much given up the fight. I tried to remind Daughter that I gave her the choice that morning of riding the horse or riding the boat, but that was little consolation.
But there were two more boat rides on the day, one at 3:30 and one at 3:45. The 3:30 one was full, plus it was already pushing 3:15 when we got there. The nimrods in front of us had tickets for it and the employee told them they better fucking run to the bottom of the trail if they were hoping to get on it. They left at a brisk walk, and she yelled, “Faster than that!”
I asked if they had any more tickets available for the 3:45 boat, but she wasn’t sure. The internet was shoddy or communication was down or something. The list, a few hours old, showed a few openings, but we would have to walk to the bottom of the trail to find out for sure. I was disinclined to haul ass to the bottom, only to find out it’s full and have to come right back up. But the employee said we should totally do it and told Daughter that she could swim in the lake if the boat was full, so off we went.
I’m not sure if we passed the nimrods on the 3:30 boat, but we passed a hell of a lot of people on the way down. I’m guessing they all had secure tickets. If there was going to be a waitlist, I wanted to make sure we were at the front of it. “Oh, Frank Jones isn’t here? Yeah, I passed that guy three-quarters of a mile ago. Trust me, he ain’t making it. Gimme his spot.”
When we made it to the bottom, turns out they didn’t know if the boat was full, either. They had the same shoddy internet and the same hours-old list.
Instead, we were told to just chill out and wait until the boat was finished loading. Then and only then would they know if the boat was full or not. If not, Daughter could swim for a bit while I got annoyed that we expended energy and muscles to get down here ASAP.
After five minutes or so, they let us on the boat. Magically, the credit card machine had absolutely no connectivity issues.
Since we boarded after all the ticketed passengers, the only spots left appeared to be the jump seat in the back pf the boat. It was a weird setup – whereas all the other seats were on the left or right, with an aisle down the middle, ours was in the middle, right in front of the pilot’s dais. Daughter thought it was VIP, but all I could think was that we’d get the least amount of wind. Plus, in our haste, we hadn’t added any sunscreen and my knees were going to absolutely fry.
Fortunately for us, we had to give up the seats to a couple I’ll graciously call “The Doomed.” Because vulture candy is offensive.
The Doomed were a married couple who I will generously call “unprepared.” They appeared to be about ten years older than me and less than half as healthy. Bear in mind, I ain’t exactly Dwayne Johnson. More like Boris Johnson. Like I said, I thought long and hard about a moderate to strenuous hike at elevation. Clearly the Doomed didn’t.
In another ten years, when I’m (possibly) as old as The Doomed, I assume I’ll be even less inclined to believe I can make the circuit. Especially if, like these two, I don’t make these sojourns all that frequently. So if I was questioning whether or not I ought to be making this hike, then these two should’ve answered the query with a hard fucking no from the first inkling.
I don’t know what ship The Doomed were supposed to be on. I doubt it was ours. When they first appeared on the dock, we were already supposed to have left five minutes earlier, but because of people like me and a handful of others buying up the empty seats, we were still within shouting distance.
Doomed Dude’s shin had a ginormous gash on it. It was mostly scabbed over, but there was still a rivulet of fresh blood. So I’m guessing they had taken maybe an hour or more to hike down the path I’d done in less than twenty minutes. I assume he fell, they’d paused for long enough to it to coagulate a bit, then it had reopened when they started walking again. He also had dust and debris up and down his legs and his hair looked like the guy in Airplane! after he stops giving up sniffing glue.
As for the woman, I don’t think she was injured before approaching the boat. She seemed wobbly, but that might have initially been more a result of exhaustion than injury.
But not for long.
I don’t know where she was trying to go. There was a flat platform secured against the granite, then a long metal ramp descending down to the floating platform that the boat is attached to. On that flat platform are a few containers, kinda like giant ice chests, containing life jackets, making the platform a little crowded. When there were fifty of us heading toward the boat around the same time, some of us stepped off the flat platform, scrambling on the rocks to circumvent the congestion. I doubt that was her goal, since there were only a few employees on the platform at that time, most of them assisting her husband.
Regardless of her intent, she slipped on either a rock or dirt. With the entire boat staring at her and waiting, her upper torso seemed to lean one way while her lower torso went the opposite. Then her ankle rolled and down she went like the goddamned Titanic, rolling off the platform.
Well, shit, now the boat’s gonna be even further delayed.
Somehow all the kings horses and all the kings men were able to load them onto the boat. They asked me and Daughter to give up our jump seat, which was perfectly fine with me, and even better, somebody else moved so we could sit together. The Doomed got a couple of free waters that we had to pay exorbitant prices for.
Hilariously, when the boat finally started, the guide asked how hard we thought that hike down was on a scale of one to five. The woman put up all five fingers, but the dude, looking like something out of ground zero on 9/11, only put up two fingers.
Originally, I thought maybe The Doomed were going to be dropped off at the south end of the lake. There’s no pedestrian path over there (the spot we were at is the only public access spot), but I figured maybe there might be a way for official people to get where they needed to be. Maybe a helicopter pad or something.
But nope, they stayed on the boat for the whole two-hour tour.
The tour itself was kinda meh. Considering our last boat, less than 24 hours earlier, included multi-boat twirlies and free beer, it was always gonna be an uphill battle. I mean, what does stupid Career Lake have to offer? Unparalleled beauty of a natural masterpiece? The clearest blue water you’ll find anywhere? Big whoop! Not once did we catch air from another boat’s wake!
The tour guide left a bit to be desired. Not sure if he was running a tour for the first time or if the distracted, nervous demeanor was just his personality, but he left something to be desired in the excitement department.
He used a lot of “some people see this in the rocks, but I don’t see it.” Part of me thinks it was a shtick to get us to “find” it, but he didn’t fill me with confidence when he said that the volcanic eruption that created the Crater could be seen as far as Montana. “And even… British… Columbia? Is that right? Is that the one that’s in Canada?”
Evidently geology and geography are different practices. And we’ll ignore the fact that British Columbia is probably the same distance from southeastern Oregon as Montana is, so that revelation didn’t add anything to the wow factor. Sure, BC is in a different country, but I don’t think a volcano that blew 6,000 years ago was carrying a passport.
His knowledge of rocks was great, though. He explained how various rock structures were originally fissures inside the ginormous volcano that once stretched across the entirety of the lake. He knew so much about rocks that, when the tour ended, the captain said, “Are you going to talk about rocks some more? Let me run the tour. There’s a great fishing spot over there.”
Then again, his message clearly wasn’t getting through to everyone, since I heard another passenger confidently tell his family “It was a glacier that did it.” Dude, you’re thinking of Yosemite. How many friggin times have you heard volcano today, dumbass?
The best part of the tour was when we filled our water bottles. It’s, allegedly, the ninth cleanest lake in the world. “Allegedly” because the tour guide couldn’t tell us any of the other eight. They were probably in British Columbia.
Regardless of its place on the list, we were on the opposite end from the access point with all those peeing swimmers, so the water should’ve been totally safe to drink. At least before we stopped the boat and leaned over to submerge the bottles we’d just been putting in our mouths. So maybe now Crater Lake is the tenth cleanest in the world. Eleventh if The Doomed got his bloody gash near it.
Speaking of The Doomed, when we all piled out at the end of the trip, they were asked if they thought they could get back up under their own power. I think the answer might’ve been no even if they hadn’t both taken tumbles on the way down. Maybe the falls were all intended to get a free medical evacuation.
So as the rest of us worked our way back up the moderate to strenuous path (which felt much more on the strenuous side this time), we were passed by a number of EMT and paramedic types, one of which had a pretty cool looking gurney unicycle thing. Guessing the standard four-wheeled contraption can’t go up a rocky path of switchbacks. Of course, that meant she’d need at least two, maybe three or four, people to hold it steady as they pushed her back up the hill.
I would’ve paid money to see her rolling off it repeatedly. Especially after the East German judge only scored her first loop-de-loop a seven.
We never saw them come back up. Not because we were tearing the uphill. It was just as painstaking as I expected.
We were some of the last people going up, especially after a pit-stop at the restrooms and Daughter getting a brief swim in the lake. All the employees left around the same time we did. Our tour guide was jogging the whole way. Whatever, dude. Talk to me when you’re fifty. And know where Canada is.
My legs were fine, but my breathing and heartrate weren’t having it. Especially since my dumb ass decided to push it for the first quarter mile. And that water from the lake was now an hour old and not quite as crisp anymore.
We kept leapfrogging the captain. While we were resting, he would move ahead. Then he would rest and we would pass him. We always exchanged pleasantries. He convinced me there was no shame in going slow, even if I’ve got a ten-year old with me that could’ve probably ran the whole damn thing with the tour guide.
He might’ve been of a similar age to The Doomed, but was in substantially better health, which, again, makes me wonder if they had a shot in hell of hiking uphill, regardless of injury. After all, this uphill hike was the captain’s everyday commute. He knew which trees and rocks were best for leaning against, just like I knew which lanes have potholes. Can’t tell whose commute is more excruciating. Mine is mind-numbing, his is leg-numbing. His has a much better view than mine, no matter how creative those personalized plate are.
Eventually, we made it. Probably took about twice as long going up as down. And then, exhausted and out of breath, all I had to do was drive back to a hotel we’d booked in Weed, California. Which was still a good three hours away and, despite getting good online reviews, had soap but no shampoo in the shower and an air conditioner that I had to stand on a chair to plug in and wait another twenty minutes for it to cool down the room.
But, when given a chance, you’ve always gotta stop in Weed, amirite?
Last time I wrote about our cruis on Royal Caribbean. But occasionally we got off the boat. Those stories are below:
Nassau Atlantis
Yeah, if you’re looking for a recap of beautiful downtown Nassau, y’aint gonna find it here. Wife stayed on the boat, having done Nassau a number of times and not being particularly enamored with it. Daughter and I hightailed it straight to the Atlantis resort for waterslides.
I don’t understand why every damn boat stops in Nassau, the Ensenada of the East. In Ensenada’s defense, though, there aren’t a lot of other options within close cruising distance of Los Angeles. Nassau doesn’t have that excuse.
But in the case of Nassau, there are other places close by, I mean, Freeport and Bimini are vacation destinations, right? Maybe the richies at Bimini don’t want the cruise riffraff near their fancy resort, but isn’t it richies at Atlantis, too? I couldn’t tell you for sure, because I’ve been there three times and still have never seen Sean Connery. Technically, this trip he has a better excuse for ditching my calls, being dead and all.
Anyway, it seemed a little lackluster to pair “Hey Daughter, it’s your first time in a foreign country” with “Let’s get the fuck out of Dodge ASAP.” Or maybe that’s fitting. We had to at least walk past the pharmacy that was all of one foot off the boat. What true international travel is about: cheap Adderall and Ozempic.
Last time I was in Nassau, we found a water taxi that took us across to Atlantis Island. This time I couldn’t find it, so after we walked a few blocks. we doubled back to the port where we’d seen a bunch of fast talking cabbie guys. Yeah, father of the year here traipsing my daughter around a foreign city without any clue where we were going.
I figured there’d be a ton of haggling and that the price would double as soon as I was halfway there, but it seemed five dollars each direction was pretty standard. I got the price both directions and nobody haggled shit. That being said, they tried to pack as many random strangers into each taxi ride as possible.
It ended up not being the driver but the other customers who tried to haggle while we were already halfway there. I couldn’t quite tell what was being discussed because they were French and the driver was speaking pidgin English. I think the customers were asking either if the driver took Euros or if he would take credit card or Apple Pay or whatever. I think they were asking Euros first, and either he said no or they realized they didn’t actually have any cash, European or not.
I get it. We’re living in a cashless society. But come on, dude, you really think some random cabbie in Nassau’s gonna have a QR code? Okay, maybe the cabbie does for tip purposes, but you can’t expect the company to be on board. I almost never have cash, but I got some before the cruise for this very purpose. Not only did I not expect every business in Nassau to be up on their cashless options, but I also didn’t really want to give them access to my credit card info.
As we were going over the bridge from downtown to Atlantis Island, Euro Dude turns around and asks if I have cash. Uh, yeah dude, but not for you. I honestly couldn’t figure out if he was asking me in the hopes I’d agree with him that nobody carries cash or if he was hoping I’d cover his ride. Fortunately the cabbie dropped us off before driving the Frenchies off to their destination, where they could negotiate further.
When I gave the cabbie a $20 bill, I assumed he’d play the “I don’t have any American money for change,” but dude busted two fives straight out of his fanny pack. Daughter asked why I tipped him because “he drove really bad.” I told her I gave him the tip because a) he was honest about having change, and b) if he didn’t drive fifty mph in between bumper to bumper traffic and crossing five lanes of traffic to make a left turn, we’d still be idling at the port.
If she thought driving in Bahamas was bad, wait’ll she visits a true third-world country like Italy.
On the way back, we had a “nicer” taxi driver who took twenty minutes to drive the same stretch of land that the “bad” driver covered in five. But Daughter’s right, he was super nice. When the taxi was full up, he said one of us would have to ride in front. I volunteered and walked up to what in America would be the passenger seat. Of course, in Nassau, it’s the driver’s seat. He laughed and asked if I wanted to drive. In reality, he was probably just rolling his eyes and thinking, “Every fucking time.”
The main purpose of going to Atlantis, really the initial selling point of this cruise to Daughter in the first place, was their world-famous water slides. Last summer, while at Wild Rivers in Southern California, someone told Daughter about Leap of Faith and Daughter became singularly focused on making it there at some point in her life, preferably soon.
The Leap of Faith, if you haven’t heard of it, is one of those vertical drop water slides. I always call them “Dropout” rides because the first one I ever encountered was named that, but also because it’s an accurate description. It isn’t one of those new trapdoor rides, which technically drop you faster, but it’s where you lie down and push yourself over the edge into a more-or-less vertical drop.
The real selling point of Leap of Faith, though, is that it ends by going through a shark tank. Raging Waters ain’t got nothing that includes aquatic carnivores. Stupid American regulations!
Fortunately, there was another slide that went through the shark tank, so Daughter didn’t have to start with a vertical drop.
Unfortunately, the sharks weren’t really worth the hour in line.
You’re in a tube, and that tube isn’t exactly pristine. Very smoky, as you can imagine, and the sharks aren’t always in the best viewing spot. The only thing we could see clearly was a scuba diver scrubbing the tube like an underwater window washer. Although it must be a union job, because he didn’t seem to be keeping them very clean.
One of the things I liked the most about this waterpark was that a fair number of the innertube slides (the ones not around the shark tank) end in the lazy river. More waterpark should do this, even if it makes the innertubes scarce as hell. We stupidly let our first ones go, then spent a half-hour trying to fish out other ones. Once we had those, we made sure we rode every damn innertube ride, a couple twice, before we were willing to release them into the wild.
Although calling that thing a lazy river is a disservice. It had multiple batches of rapids, some of which were long and legit. It was a blast and we ended up going around the entire length multiple times. Near the end of the day, I made Daughter decide between going on the one slide we hadn’t been on yet or going around the rapids one more time and she opted for the latter. Atlantis Aquaventure: Come for the sharks, stay for the not-so-lazy river!
Speaking of Leap of Faith, she worked her way up and finally did it. For most of the day, it seemed like she was going to chicken out. Hell, I wanted to chicken out. I’ve been riding those damn rides since I was ten and every damn time, I sit myself down and look over the edge into the nothingness of open-air and think, “What the fuck am I doing?!?” They aren’t even fun, really, because by the time you’re able to enjoy it, the ride is over.
This time, I didn’t even have the option of chickening out, because Daughter went first. Sure, I could’ve walked back down the long way, but considering how she went down, I thought I had to get there quickly to make sure she was, you know, still alive.
Let me back up. She wasn’t the first child set to go down the slide. A couple groups in front of us was a girl around her own age who had that Nietzsche “staring into the abyss” moment and, acting like a normal human being who enjoys being alive, freaked the fuck out. Her father pulled her off to the side and let some people go in front of them. People are very accommodating at that point because a) she’s young, and b) we’re all going through it, too, we’ve just learned to swallow our existential dread.
Daughter and I tried to talk them in to doing the Challenger, which was on the same platform as Leap of Faith and was the ride we’d just finished to “work up to” this one. If Leap of Faith drops at a 70-75 degree angle (90-degrees being straight down), Challenger was maybe at a 60-percent with a “speed bump” on the way down so you can at least see the rest of the slide beneath you.
But this other girl didn’t listen and, when we were next, she was ready to try again. We let them in and she freaked out again.
We’re up.
Except now this other father wants his son to try it. “Do you mind?” he asks. “They weren’t going to let him ride it, but now they’re going to.”
Okay, fine. Let me just wallow in my anxiety for another minute.
This new kid is small. Like, if I had to guess, I’d say he was five, maybe six. The reason they “weren’t going to let him ride” was because he was barely touching that 48-inch height limit. The father had brought the kid over from the Challenger ride and said the the woman on that ride said he was big enough.
So the kid sits down and immediately backs away. If the ten-year-old girl was exhibiting fear at, say, an eight on a scale of ten, this kid was exponential. It wasn’t the typical “part of me wants to, part of me doesn’t.” More like a “Nope! The world ends a foot in front of me! Why does Dad want me to go over a cliff?”
This father, meanwhile, isn’t trying to understand or work through his kid’s terror. He then mentions (I don’t remember if this was to his kid or to us) that this was his only chance. They weren’t letting him on any other rides today. This operator was the first one allowing it.
Cue giant record-scratching sound.
Wait a second, dude, this kid hasn’t gone on ANY water slides before? You think Leap of Faith is a great starter ride? I mean, tI’m usually not on the Father of the Year nominee list, but holy hells, man! This is generational trauma type shit.
This also begs the question of why they bother having a minimum height. I can’t imagine what 49-inch tall kid is raring to go on this ride. Daughter is pretty gung-ho when it comes to rides. She did Hulk Coaster and Guardians of the Galaxy Cosmic Rewind a couple days earlier, and not a single ride at Magic Mountain put a dent in her enthusiasm. Yet she needed to work her way up to Leap of Faith, and if she hadn’t been telling herself that this was the ride she was most interested in for six months, she probably would’ve passed. And she’s 56 inches!
Anyway, by the time the freakout girl and Father of the Year had both gone up to the ride and pulled back, everyone in line was kinda getting restless. When the ride operator, exasperated, said, “Okay, are you ready?”, it came in a desperation to please get things moving again. Maybe that was good for Daughter, who didn’t have time to think about it. She just didn’t want to be the third kid in a row to go up and freak out. The green light’s been on for a couple minutes now.
So she goes up, plops herself down and, with nary a thought, pushes herself forward.
Unfortunately, she was sitting upright. Without all the tumult, she’d forgotten what we’d talked about in the line, that this ain’t a sitting up ride, cause that gravity thing can be a bitch when your center of gravity is pushing forward. If anything, she was leaning her chest forward, something that’s going to help with momentum on other rides, but will only send you ass over teakettle for a ninety-foot tumble on this one.
“Lie down!” I yelled. The others around me in line helped out by shouting or variations on “Lie down! Lean back! Oh shit!” as Daughter disappeared over the precipice.
Then came purgatory. I kept waiting for the red light to turn green, which I assumed would mean she’d made it to the bottom of the slide in one piece. Although I suppose it could also mean she’d flown completely off the slide, maybe into the shark tank, thus making the slide clear. Come to think of it, there was only one red light and one green light. Slide is clear, slide is not. What’s the “Oh, shit” light?
On the plus side, the employee didn’t seem overly concerned. Then again, he hadn’t seemed concerned when a 47.5″ kid with no experience was damn near being put into a Niagara Falls barrel by his father.
The good news is that, like her, I didn’t really have the time or option to freak out about the ride or the sudden realization that I was in my twenties and fifty or more pounds lighter the last time I did one of these things. As soon as that green light went on, I was out the chute.
She was fine. She said she heard us shouting and remembered to lay down right as she was going over. I then asked her how it was and she had the more-or-less universal reaction. Fun. Glad she did it. No desire to do it again.
My only real complaint about the Atlantis Aquaventure was that three of their slides (out of maybe nine or ten total) were closed. It was Spring Break and there were six ships in port that day, to say nothing of the hotel itself. Schedule your maintenance for January, peeps.
Private Island
Not much to say about CocoCay, Royal Caribbean’s private island. They’re all more or less the same. In fact, the Carnival private island was visible maybe a mile away. We totally coulda gone to war with them.
It was overcast, which was nice because I hadn’t done a thorough job sunscreening at Atlantis the day before.
We opted for the zipline instead of the water slides as our “shore excursion.” Aan odd misnomer, since they’re ten feet from the pier. Shore, sure. Excursion?
My thinking when we booked this in advance (along with that damn coffee card) was that we would have just done water slides in Nassau the day before, and once Daughter saw others ziplining literally over the lagoon, we’d be marching right over and not getting the 10% or 15% discount. Plus the waterslides would no doubt pale in comparison to Atlantis.
Want to know what paled in comparison to its brethren? The zipline. Sure, the length of it was cool, but it caters to first timers. Most ziplines give you a bit of control while zipping. In Maui, you can do spins and flips and lay straight on your back. First time I ever zipped was in Fiji, where you have to control your own speed by pulling down on the line behind you.
The one at CocoCay was the opposite end of the spectrum. They had us in a harness that was damn near a chair. You couldn’t lean forward, you could barely lean back to slow down. At one point the wind was blowing me sideways and I spent the whole length trying to twirl myself back forward to no avail. You couldn’t even control when you started. They strapped you in and hung you in midair until they unclasped you from behind. Then at the bottom, you again hovered in midair until they came over with a ladder to get you down. Daughter and I were going at the same time, so I always had to wait till they finished with her before they brought the ladder over to me.
The waterslides, meanwhile, looked legit. Although for the price we’d have to do nothing but ride the slides all day. No breaking for lunch!
Maybe next time we’ll skip the zipline and do the slides. Then I can do the 007 excursion in Nassau. It better feature Sean Connery’s mummified corpse!
Oh, and maybe we’ll snorkel. I didn’t realize they had it, so I didn’t prebook it. They didn’t have any spots available by the time we found them. Didn’t look like there were many fish to see, though.
Kennedy Space Center
Finally, we booked Cape Canaveral with an airport transfer afterward. Incredibly useful to not have to book another shuttle for ourselves. What was less useful was needing to book a flight after 5:00 pm. We booked a 7:00 pm flight that didn’t get back into California until after 3:00 am Eastern Time after waking up at 6:00 am. Oh, and they dropped us off around 2:00. Nothing’s more fun than spending five hours in an airport. Did you know they won’t let you check bags until the three-hour mark?
But the Kennedy Space Center was friggin’ cool. You start by taking a bus out to where the Apollo missions launched from. There are some videos of the Apollo I crash and some of its repercussions. Then they take you through some of the trials and tribulations to get from exploding on the launch pad to orbiting the moon. Then you go into a mission control room that they said was authentic, but I think was a replica, where you witness all the various lights and commands as it counts down from three minutes to liftoff. The room shakes to simulate if the rocket was actually taking off that close to us.
I made sure to inform Daughter that if you added up the computing power of every single console in that room, it wouldn’t come close to her phone. Crazy that we got to the moon with less technology than Flappy Bird.
We then returned to the main campus, where they had a space shuttle exhibit. As a 1980s kid, that’s the one I was more looking forward to. It was fine, but not as cool as the Apollo stuff. They had one of the space shuttles, Atlantis, on display and some various panels and “astronaut trainings,” but it was clear they treated as more of a “and then there was this.” Apollo I got a full video treatment. Challenger and Columbia got a little corner.
The third exhibit was even more lackluster. Its focus was current and future space flights. I thought maybe there’d be stuff about manned flights to Mars, which is allegedly something they’re working toward, but instead it was a mishmash of commercial endeavors with sci fi (someday we’ll live in Cloud City). Not surprising considering NASA has given up on going to space and is also disdainful of others doing it.
Speaking of NASA, when the shuttle driver asked if any of us knew what it stood for, I had to bite my tongue.
As any good 1980s kid can tell you, it’s “Need Another Seven Astronauts.”
Welcome back to the Spring Break recap. Last time I wrote about our pitstops at a couple of obscure Orlando locales.
But Disney and Universal were only addendums to the true purpose of our cross-country jaunt. Why drive all the way across Northern Florida for entertainment when you can just get on a boat and have said entertainment all around you?
Of course, for this comparison to work, the ship would have to be smaller than Disney World, which they aren’t anymore. Or Florida, for that matter. But the theory is still sound.
At least I’m less likely to lose my rental car while on a boat.
Wife and I have cruised a number of times, both separate and together. We love them. I know not everybody feels that way. Last time we cruised, it was with a couple trying their first cruise and they’ve had absolutely no inkling of ever returning.
So we figured nine was a good age to determine if Daughter was going to follow in our footsteps, or if we needed to put her up for adoption. I know the perfect land-locked couple!
Wife wanted to start with an Alaska cruise, but they don’t run in springtime. They also tend to be on the longer side on the off-chance Daughter decided cruises weren’t for her – a more likely conclusion when it’s thirty degrees and sleeting on the Lido Deck.
Meanwhile, I looked at a Carnival cruise to Key West and Cozumel, because I’ve never been to Key West and Daughter’s growing into a mini-parrothead. Three problems with that option: Carnival. Spring Break. Key West.
“Daddy, what’s a stripper pole?”
We finally opted for a quick four-dayer on Royal Caribbean to Nassau (the East Cost Ensenada) and the private island that pretty much every cruise line has in the Caribbean that simply is not available on my side of the country.
We chose Royal Caribbean because it’s a good middle ground between Carnival and the fancier lines. While I don’t remember which cruise lines my family took me on in my youth, as an adult, I’ve always took Carnival. They’re cheap and boozy meat markets, which was precisely what I wanted in my twenties.
But the last time I rode on Carnival (that Ensenada junket with the noobs), it felt lackluster. I’m sure part off that is my age, but I also believe that Carnival has slipped. Or the clientele has. It’s gone from a “nudge-nudge, wink-wink” booze cruise to a full-fledged “Ain’t nobody on this boat for the ambiance.”
We looked at Disney Cruises for, oh, about five seconds. I know there’s a Marvel Day at Sea, but for that price, it better include a hand job from Chris Hemsworth.
Princess and Norwegian are more expensive than Royal Caribbean, but have fewer sailing options. So Royal Caribbean is still mass market like Carnival, but just costly enough to get rid of the riff-raff. In the end, it ended up being about the speed we were looking for. Somewhere between dive bar and Ritz.
Except maybe not on Spring Break next time.
Sorry, getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with:
The Biggest Change
Even though I’ve been on cruises as an adult, this was the cruise where I noticed the most pronounced changes from Ye Olde Cruisin’ days of the 1980s. Maybe it’s because I couldn’t chalk things up to Carnival anymore or maybe it’s because, with a child along, I was not just sipping pina coladas by the pool for the entirety of the cruise.
But the biggest change I noticed was that most people aren’t just sipping pina coladas by the pool anymore.
On cruises of yesteryear, EVERYTHING happened on the Lido Deck. Nothing worth doing was anywhere south of the 8th or 9th floor. Everything below that was rooms and a couple gangplanks.
I remember boarding my first cruise with my wife. There was a cute little entry way with a small bar along with maybe the shore excursion deck and a few other general information spots. They had a library with some board games and sudoku puzzles, and I was convinced we’d spend copious amounts of time down here, reading and whatnot with maybe a snifter of brandy.
The next time I saw said library was when we were getting off the boat five days later.
The entryway to our current cruise was fucking ginormous. It was three stories tall and stretched all the way from the forward elevators to the aft. Multiple bars and eateries opened out onto a cobblestone-painted floor. And that pizzeria pushed out free slices at a pace I wouldn’t imagine possible. Seriously, there were always people in line, and yet that line never took longer than a handful of minutes.
As we walkred around on emarcation day, I was reminded of that library I never saw again. These fountains and the fancy car were totally rad, but ultimately a waste since we’d likely never come back here. Maybe, just maybe, I could remind myself to check out the Schooner Bar once before we disembark.
But cruising’s changed. Instead of pushing us up toward the pools, most of the activities pushed us back down to this promenade. These were the bars that hosted trivia, that faux-cobblestone turned into the nightly dance club. Hell, even the karaoke bar was on deck five.
There were still plenty of things to do up on the Lido Deck (although I don’t think they call it the Lido Deck anymore). Mini golf and a zip line, the buffet restaurant, and abviously the pools. Pools, plural, because there isn’t really a main pool. This boat had maybe three of four “primary” pools, none of which were bigger than, say, a 20’x20′ square. If there were more than ten people in a pool, it was crowded, and even if it was empty, nobody’s swimming laps.
But unless you were heading up there for the purposes of the mini golf or the zip line or, increasingly unlikely, the pools, there wasn’t really much of a draw to the upper parts of the ship.
In addition to the Promenade, which was in the center of the ship, there was an open-air Boardwalk area at the rear. It was made to look like a Coney Island or Santa Cruz, complete with a hot dog stand, a carousel, and an arcade (although most of the games in this arcade were broken). This was also where the climbing wall was and, let me tell you, it was legit. It went up six floors, where it gave way to the zip line.
The most impressive addition to these “inside the ship” locations was a park, located on the 8th floor, precisely above (and creating the ceiling of) the Promenade. This park was… I mean, it was a fucking park. Like, plants and winding paths and benches and shit. One of the tables had a chess board, another had backgammon, although I never figured out where to get the pieces. And like the Boardwalk, this was open air. Even though there were another eight decks above it, it actually opened to the sky. In fact, the spot directly above the park is where the ginormous pool would’ve been on earlier ships.
This layout made for an odd ship design, in that most of the balconies were on the INSIDE of the ship. Historically, most of the rooms on a cruise were porthole rooms. Most of the interior rooms went to the crew, but there were still a handful available for those looking for cheaper prices. The balconies were only on a handful of floors. Primarily because they had to be outside the ship. I never understood the purpose, because it can get damn windy on the outside a ship going twenty knots. Not exactly the place to read a book and sip a mai tai.
Most of these balconies, instead, faced inward, rising above the Boardwalk on deck six aft and the park on deck eight mid. There were still some outside of the ship, but I assume those weren’t as popular. I’d actually spend time on one of those internal balconies, and in fact I saw a few of them being used. Although I assume the ones above the boardwalk stayed loud after hours. There was a spectacular water show that ran most nights at 10:15 pm.
I assume the balconies above the park were quiet. The few times I checked it out after hours, or even during regular hours, it was filled with quiet, contented people.
If we were left to our own devices, I think both Wife and I would’ve spent the majority of our cruise in the park. It’s weird, because if you had asked me what I would like to see added to cruises, I don’t think that a park would’ve made my top twenty. Or even my top hundred because it wouldn’t have even entered my consciousness as something that was feasible or desirable. When somebody brought it up the first time, were they laughed out of the board room? Or did all the other people in the room suddenly start scratching their chin, pondering, which was my reaction when I saw the picture of a tree on the elevator.
Yet each time Wife or I had some free time (me, when she took Daughter to see Mamma Mia, her when I took Daughter to Nassau), we each spent our time reading not by the pool, but on a park bench. If only they could add a couple of chaise longues.
The Card and the App
Ships have been using the key to your room as your primary form of interaction since the beginning of time. Nowadays, they also have an app.
Of course, my dumb ass lost my room key the one time I was left alone. While Wife and Daughter were at Mamma Mia, I sidled into the Schooner Bar for some trivia and a drink, because they had this wonderful concoction called a rum old fashioned. I opined recently that I’m enjoying rum more than whiskey, but I wasn’t sure if it was the rum or the fact that too many whiskey drinks are just whiskey. Well, I discovered on this cruise that, nope, it’s the whiskey. Because the rum old fashioned only had rum with a splash of coconut simple syrup and bitters, and I loved it.
But when I sat down, I couldn’t find my card. I freaked the fuck out. The waiter, not wantign to lose a tip, says “It’s fine, we can still charge your room.” But I was concerned less about paying for my drink than about how many other people’s drinks I was paying for right now.
Kinda funny, our reactions. I’m freaking out that my identity is being stolen, while he’s rolling his eyes at something he’s probably seen happen a thousand times. Maybe I should’ve taken a hint from the guy who encounters it more often.
After checking my last two or three locations, I booked it down to customer service to get a replacement. The moment it was in my hand, before I could get out “Is the old card…” the employee assured me that activating this new card deactivates the old one. Again, guessing it’s everybody’s most pressing query.
I also noticed that they didn’t ask for my id when I got my replacement. In fact, I didn’t even have to verify my name. I gave them my room number, they asked “Are you Mr. Anthony?” Jeez, they really don’t give a shit who’s charging what to whose account!
Of course, then I remembered that we had pictures tied to our account. So chances are whoever picked up my card could only use it if they were some overweight middle-aged dude with a mostly graying goatee that he’s still trying to make look hip.
So, only like forty percent of the cruisegoers.
And fortunately, you can track all your purchases on the app, which I watched like a hawk for the next twelve hours.
So yeah, the app. Most of the time, it worked great. There were some definite coverage issues, especially on the back of the ship. Wife set up down on the Boardwalk to film Daughter riding the zip line far above. I was supposed to text her (on the app) when Daughter was next in line, but when the time came, neither I nor she could get the Wifi working to send or receive said text.
We weren’t sure how it would work with only one of us purchasing the internet option, but it’s like on airplanes where you can connect to their wi-fi without getting the internet. So al three of us could access the daily agenda and make reservations and look at our photos.
Even though the app was more convenient than the paper of yesteryears, I kind missed the daily agendas being slipped under your door in the middle of the night like from a tooth fairy.
My biggest quibble was that, until she’s thirteen, Daughter can’t have her own login for the app. We logged her into her phone as me, which was fine for everything except sending texts, because the text would come from me to me and I wouldn’t get pinged. Seems like getting messages to and from tweens would be a primary purpose of the texting feature.
One of my biggest quibbles with the app was that, until she’s thirteen, Daughter can’t have her own login for the app, meaning she has to login as me. Feels like getting messages to and from a tween would be one of the primary purposes of the texting feature.
Not that she ever separated from the two of us. Which leads me to:
Child Activities
I remember running around the cruise ships of my youth like we owned the damn place. Me and a group three or four other tweens, who I had never met before and have never seen again, were inseparable from the moment we got on the ship. We even had our own favorite bartender (shocker, I know) who made us “virgin whiskeys,” which were coke with grenadine. We might’ve even opted to stay on the ship for one of the ports in order to hang out.
In contrast, the kids area on this ship was basically a day care center. Basically, you dropped your kids off an isolated spot with “fun” things to do. Some computers and picture books of sea animals… an art room, maybe?
At least it was separated out by age. The art room and a theater were all ages, but the sequestration rooms (I’ll be nice and not call them prison cells) were designated under 2, pre-K, lower grades, etc. Daughter would’ve gone to the 9-11 room, which is where some of the computers were, but is it really a great idea to take her on a cruise in order to plunk her in front of a screen? Besides, what does one do on a computer that isn’t theirs? Play games that they can’t save progress on? Go on YouTube and continually run into whatever filters they’ve put up? As far as I could tell, there’d always be a crew member babysitting, but there didn’t appear to be any specific events planned.
Furthermore, there was a limit to how many kids could be in any room at a time, so the couple times we checked it out, the 9-11 room was full with a line about ten deep to get in. Daughter peeked at the front of the line, saw it was almost all boys and instead asked if all three of us could go to the art room.
One night, she ate at the buffet and was planning to go to the kids area while Wife and I ate. We gave her the option to check herself in or out, which is only allowed for nine and above (but, again, they can’t text us when they check themselves out). About twenty minutes later, she was back claiming not much was going on, so she just did some art by herself then left. I asked if she talked to anyone or went to the 9-11 room and she said no.
I don’t know how many kids she talked to over the four days, but it could be counted on one hand. Wife reminds me that when we were cruising as kids, the ships housed maybe one-third of the customers the current ones do, so we would regularly run into the same people over and over again. That’s how we made friends.
She may have a point, but I distinctly remember a “Coke-tail” party on the first night where you met some of the other kids. I also remember things planned around the ship, not in a centralized jail. Because then, like now, I’m not exactly a self-starter in social situations, but if you tell me when and where something fun is going to happen, I’ll be there.
One more slight funny: The ship doesn’t have a thirteenth floor. Seems a bit overzealous on the superstition front, unless one of this ship’s ports of call is Camp Crystal Lake, But whatever.
The children’s area is on the 14th floor which, follow me here, is actually the thirteenth floor. Hey, I think I finally found the day care where all that Satanic worship was going on back when cruises had child activities.
The daily agenda did at least have some teenage activities for 12-17 year olds, so in a few years we might finally be able to pawn our kid off at something more social than an empty art room. And as a bonus, she’ll be able to text us when she’s done.
Pre-Booking
Back in the old days, it was much more difficult to pre-book things. It was still possible, but most experiences, both on the ship and at the various ports, were still available when you got on the ship.
These days, you’ve damn near got to know your itinerary by t-minus three months. In February, I noticed there were some cupcake decorating classes. Sounds fun, but do you plan that for the day at sea? The first night? How long will it take us to get situated? By the time I discussed with Wife and Daughter, all the cupcake decorating was gone.
Similarly with Mamma Mia, which we booked for midday on the Day at Sea, opposite tons of other stuff. There was a very cool diving show that I didn’t know existed before I got on the boat. Most of them were opposite dinner, which is fine because inevitably there’s a night we hit the buffet instead of formal dining. But how am I supposed to know which night, especially without seeing the menus?
I still got to see the water show by standing in a walk-up line for an hour. With fifteen minutes to go, they let us take the empty seats of people who had reserved but not shown up. Probably because they booked it back in November.
One of the pre-bookings we did splurge on was the coffee card. For $30, you get fifteen stamps on a card, each one good for a shot of espresso in a drink. So that’s seven double lattes. Bargain!
Except we forgot to follow up on it until our third day. While at the Starbucks on the Promenade for the third time, Wife asked if those coffee drinks were just being comped on her keycard. But no, turns out that it’s a separate card that we need to get at customer service. They can have our Kennedy Space Center tickets for the day we disembark waiting for us in our cabin on day one, but evidently we have to hunt down our free prepaid coffee.
Even worse, the Starbucks on board won’t take the card. It’s only usable at the Cafe. Which serves… Starbucks drinks. We ended up using only half of our stamps.
Meanwhile, the Hibachi restaurant was booked, the sushi making class was booked, the ice skating (yes, they have ice skating) was usually booked. The trivias and Name-That-Tunes were overflowing by a half-hour before their start time.
Maybe it was only like this because it was Spring Break. Maybe under normal conditions the ship isn’t at 110% capacity. But they keep making the ships bigger and bigger, while the theater stays the same size.
Then again, given my luck with the coffee card and the zipline, had I bothered prebooking stuff on the ship, I probably would’ve picked the shitty option. Oh, you wanted to see the Broadway musical, Mamma Mia? No, this is just three hours of an overly dramatic Italian guy speaking with his hands.
Final Thoughts
I was going to delve into our shore excursions here, but considering the length of this post, I’ll post that one tomorrow. Instead, I’ll give you a couple miscellany.
Our waiter’s name was Boy. It was awkward:
Take my order, Boy!
Boy, could you pour me a coffee refill?
Boy! Rum! Now!
I’m just glad he was Indonesian, because if he was Dominican or Nigerian, I’m sure I would’ve been arrested when re-entering California for committing hate speech.
His busser, which they call “assistant waiter,” was Jamaican. Thankfully, her name was Eleice.
My final gripe goes not toward Royal Caribbean, but Elon Musk.
There was supposed to be a SpaceX launch at 5:00 pm the day we embarked. We were still close enough to shore to see the launch pad, so we hung out until 5:30, but saw nothing. Found out the next day that it was delayed until 8:00, when we were at dinner.
Another launch was scheduled at 1:00 the afternoon we returned. We had tickets for the Kennedy Space Center and would’ve been leaving for the airport right around 1:00. This launch was postponed till the following day.
One of the side effects of sending Daughter to a different school district than the one I work in is that our Spring Breaks rarely align. Mine comes at the end of third quarter while hs is tied to Easter. This year, a ten-week quarter and a March Easter conspired to give us, along with pretty much every student and teacher from kindergarten through graduate school, the same week off. So how about heading to Orlando for amusement parks and a cruise? Nothing says nice, relaxing family vacation like being sweaty ass to sweaty elbow with half the population of Earth.
In a random bit of serendipity, I was reading two books while there: Killers of a Certain Age, which starts out on an exploding cruise ship, and FantasticLand, about a Florida amusement park that turns into Lord of the Flies after being shut off from the world in a hurricane. Fortunately, my ship didn’t explode nor did we resort to cannibalism at Disney World, although with the amount of salt they put in their popcorn, they’re clearly hiding something.
This post will stick to the land stuff, while part two will cover the cruise.
We spent most of Friday flying east, arriving late at night using the logic of “our bodies will still be on West Coast time.” That logic always falters when the the alarm goes off the following morning on East Cost time.
On Saturday, we did two Universal parks, primarily so we could ride the Hogswarts Express between the two. On Sunday, we hit the Disney circuit, hopping between Animal Kingdom and Epcot. We skipped Magic Kingdom because it’s about 90% the same as Disneyland, which we’ve all been to countless times. As sacriligeous as it seems to fly 3000 miles and not go to Magic Kingdom, flying 3000 miles to go to a park that we can visit in an hour seems even worse.
Universal
The two Universal parks, which could really be one park but then they couldn’t charge extra for a park hopper, is an odd collection of old and new.
I might love the Simpsons as much as the next Gen Xer, but a land devoted to a show that hasn’t been hip for thirty years seems an odd choice. Fortunately for them, Jurassic Park has been either rebooted or sequelled (Kinda hard to tell where the Chris Pratt movies fit in the canon) or else two of their lands straight outta 1991. What, we couldn’t get a McGyver ride?
None of those are as bad as their Toon Land, though, which is based on newspaper comics. What 21st century kid doesn’t love following the exploits of Blondie, Heathcliff, and Marmaduke? A Popeye ride! Great! And yeah, sorry kid, I can’t even begin to explain to you who Dudley Doo-Right is.
Honestly, if it wasn’t for Harry Potter and one block of Minions, Daughter might not have had a clue about any character in the entire park.
Oh, except for Marvel.
How weird is it that a property that sold to Disney twenty years ago is still grandfathered into one of their competitor parks? I remember going to Universal Orlando once before the MCU took off and Marvel Land seemed as desolate as Marmaduke Land. Now it’s buzzing and Universal has got to be begging Disney to right that MCU ship soon. Or maybe coax Disney into making a new Popeye shared universe.
We started our day in Marvel Land, making our first ride of the day the Hulk Coaster, where we became aware of a very stringent riding policy. They don’t let you take anything on the ride. No keys, no cell phone. Nothing. You have to go through a metal detector!
While I understand the premise (there was a ride at Magic Mountain where I spent the whole ride freaking out that my phone was going to fall out of my pocket and couldn’t enjoy the ride), there’s got to be a limit, right? I mean, they let me keep my glasses on, and while I’m no physicist, I have to imagine that any ride forcing my keys out of my front pocket would long ago have thrown off my glasses.
There are “free” lockers nearby for you to put your everything in. You need your ticket to open it, and our tickets were on our phones. So how the hell am I supposed to reopen said locker? The attendant gave me a piece of paper the size of a business card with a QR code that opens a locker. Somehow that paper stayed in my pocket, whereas my wallet… wouldn’t?
The Hulk ride was great though. It’s an old-school coaster. Unfortunately, many of the rides at Universal were “cutting edge.” Which pretty much just means 4-d.
What is a 4-d ride? Not to belittle Universal any further, but think Star Tours. You’re in a stationary contraption that shimmies and shakes in order to appear to follow something happening on a screen in front of you.
Universal also likes to add occasional water sprays for emphasis. The most disgusting version of this was on the Kong ride, where the water spray simulated guts and viscera from monsters exploding via machine gun fire. Refreshing!
I understand the draw of these rides. They take up substantially less real estate than a traditional roller coaster. If all the Universal Rides took up the same amount of room as, say, their Hulk Coaster or Rock-It Coaster, they would have to expand the park.
I remember when Star Tours was new. It was groundbreaking. I couldn’t figure out how the hell they made it feel like we were gong to light speed, to say nothing of timing all the little jerks and jostles with the scene playing out “through the windshield.”
That was 1989.These days, I know that they’re just tipping the container back to simulate acceleration and forward to simulate braking.
Instead of the contained unit like Star Tours, most of the Universal rides have us in individual buggies jiggling in coordination with an Imax screen. The space in between creates a strange disconnect, as if the motion on the screen and the motion of our ride are separate entities.
It triggers Wife’s motion sickness something fierce. The only way she could ride the main Harry Potter ride was by closing her eyes the whole time. She didn’t even attempt the new Harry Potter “Escape from Gringotts” ride. We opted for the Simpsons ride instead, only to find it the same damn 4-d.
Speaking of Escape from Gringotts, I didn’t expect it to be so dang spoilery. Daughter finally started getting into Harry Potter books last year. We’re making her read the books before seeing the movies. She’s finished the first two and started number three on this vacation. While a few of the other rides might have some mild spoilers, it’s not like knowing there’s a World Cup of Quidditch will somehow make book four any less enjoyable.
I kinda assumed there was an unwritten rule that rides take a generalized approach to their characters. For instance, the Guardians of the Galaxy ride at Epcot Center takes place after the first movie, because it goes in depth about the planet they saved in it, but Groot is full-sized. Either they didn’t know he was going to age slowly over the next five movies or else they figured, hey it’s a fucking ride. It should be enjoyable even for the people who haven’t consumed every goddamn ounce of intellectual property.
But as you’re standing in line for Escape from Gringotts (so it’s not even a quick thing that can be overlooked), there are a number of Daily Prophet newspapers with headlines like “Dumbledore Dies,” “Severus Snape New Hogwarts Headmaster,” and “Harry Potter: Public Enemy #1.” And, of course, now Daughter wants to know WHEN Dumbledore dies and HOW IS IT POSSIBLE they’d give it to Snape and all I can say is, “You’ve got five more books to get through and they ain’t getting any shorter.”
Can’t wait until Disneyland opens the “Iron Man is Dead” ride.
I don’t mean to harsh on Universal. In all reality, despite my minor quibbles about the Harry Potter rides, the lands themselves are phenomenal. Fully immersive in a way that even the new Star Wars land at Disneyland, which opened afterward, fails to match. We spent hours there and didn’t even feel like we’d experienced it all. The butterbeers, the wands, almost every shop from both Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley presented the same way they were in the books and movies. While Daughter and I were in line for the Gringotts ride (because it was 4-d), Wife excitedly texted us that she’d found Knockturn Alley, the “dark wizard” portion of Diagon Alley.
It was a fun day. I grinned from ear to ear the entirety of the Hagrid’s Motorbike ride. Instant acceleration, both forward and backward!
Okay, fine, one more quibble. Our last ride of the day was the Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit, a ride with a soundtrack. Each person picks their own personal song that blares in their ears throughout the ride. You start with five or six genres and, at least when I rode it a decade ago, that genre would lead to six choices of songs. I think last time I picked an Aerosmith song.
This time, each genre only had one choice. Daughter picked pop/disco in the hopes of a Taylor Swift option, but was instead saddled with “Waterloo,” by ABBA. It’s fine. She loves that song.
My only choice in the rock/classic rock genre was, similarly, a song I love, so no harm, no foul. It was “Welcome to the Black Parade,” by My Chemical Romance. I’m sure anybody older than me might not enjoy a song from 2006 being the only option in a classic rock genre, but it’s a kick-ass, balls-to-the-wall song that anybody should be fine riding a fast roller coaster to.
Or at least the middle portion is. If you haven’t heard the song, it has a little bit of that “Bohemian Rhapsody” vibe, where it starts out a little ethereal, dramatic, and then progressively gets faster and louder. If I were to pick a random spot in the song to coincide with a fucking roller coaster, it would be right around the 1:50 spot, and about two minutes later, when the ride would be ending, there’s an instrumental key change that could transition us back into the station.
Unfortunately, they started the song at the beginning, so it was JUST getting to that rocker part at 1:45 as we were pulling back into the station. It’s like “rocking out” to “There’s a lady who knows all that glitters is gold” only to dial down your excitement level right as they’re getting to “And as we wind on down the road.”
Seriously, people, it might be hard to sync up thirty songs to a roller coaster, but if you’ve only got five, figure out how to make the soundtrack match the action.
But you know what? Universal offers to put rum in your Icee. So, in my book, they can do no wrong.
Animal Kingdom
We started our Disney day at Animal Kingdom. And while I’m not the first person to take this photo, if the photographer’s gonna put his umbrella there, I simply can’t be a grown-up.
How was the actual park? It was fine. Maybe I’m a little spoiled because the San Diego Wild Animal Park (or whatever the hell they’re calling it these days) kinda sets the standard for these open-air zoos, but Animal Kingdom is definitely worth checking out.
The major draw of the animal portion of the park was the Africa Safari. Defeinitely some cool animals there. Lions and rhinos and giraffes, oh my! Got to see some gorilla kids climbing all over their very exhausted mother. Who says they’re not related to us?
One of the coolest exhibits was a glass looking both above and below the water of a hippo exhibit. Dude was just laying there while a shit-ton of fish swam around him, including up his nose and into his ears. Gotta be some good grub forming on an animal that sits there for hours at a time. He was so stationary that people around me thought he wasn’t real, that somehow amongst acres and acres of live animals,Disney just decided to put a statue of a hippo for the fish to swarm around.
Not saying Disney wouldn’t stoop to this level if required, but considering there was no unicorn exhibit, I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt that this hippo wasn’t the same one from the Jungle Cruise.
Then again, they did have a dinosaur land. Fortunately, it was mostly a kids area made to look like a fossil dig. No velociraptors. How Disney would that be? If Universal is going to keep their Marvel land, wait’ll they see how we steal their Jurassic Park mojo.
The Asia area didn’t have a bus safari, but did have a walking one. The highlight was probably the tigers.
No, you know what was the highlight of both Asia and Africa? Aviaries. Not only did they contain colorful birds, but damn, them birds was active! All swoopin’ and cawin’ the whole dang time. Not sure why I regressed to second grade vocabulary there, but I don’t know much about birds, so you’ll just have to accept, “Dang, dey got lotta dem bright, purdy burdies.”
Unlike Africa, where the animals were the main draw, Asia contained rides. Unfortunately, we limited ourselves to one hour-long line in the hopes of utilizing our park hopper. So we skipped the water rapids ride and opted for the Everest Expedition. We originally laughed at the description, “Rush through the Himalayan mountains on a speeding train while avoiding the clutches of the mythic Abominable Snowman,” because if you replace train with bobsled, it’s pretty much the exact same description as the Matterhorn.
Except it was substantially more fun than Matterhorn. Faster, less predictable, not as bumpy. At one point, you’re going backward. Hagrid’s Motorbikes at Universal did the same thing, as did Guardians of the Galaxy in Epcot. Seems that’s the “it” things in rides these days, but as far as I know, no California parks have followed suit.
We also never made it to the Pandora because, well, if dinosaurs don’t belong in a modern “Animal Kingdom,” then for sure the make-believe blue things found in Avatar don’t belong. Seriously, who the hell decided that a park that’s based on science and nature should have a land devoted to fiction? I go to the zoo to see real raccoons, not Rocket Raccoon.
I know Disney’s got to mark its territory like a dog in heat, but sheesh, dudes, do you have to be so obvious about it? It’s not like you would confuse Norway with a Frozen land or any… I’m sorry, what do they have at Epcot? I wasn’t aware Arondale was a member of the United Nations. How’d they do in the last Olympics?
Then again, if the line for the Avatar ride was ever less than 100 minutes, I would’ve put all my opposition to Avatar Land aside.
Although if I had known what the next couple hours would contain, I would’ve just stood in the damn line… Not that my upcoming pergatory was Disney’s fault.
We left Animal Kingdom around 3:30, which was later than planned, but should have still given us a solid five hours at Epcot.
Unfortunately, we lost the damn car.
Daughter was convinced we had parked in two sections away from the park gate. I thought we were three away. Wife believed, naturally, that we were parked somewhere in the middle.
We were all wrong.
But that didn’t stop us from looking for, I shit you not, more than an hour. We went up rows. We went down rows. We went IN BETWEEN rows, because it had a bumper sticker (weird for a rental car) that we’d been using to distinguish it from the bazillion other silver mini-SUVs, but Animal Planet had double spots where the first car pulls all the way up and the next car pulls in behind them, so the bumper sticker would likely be blocked by whatever car was behind us.
I swear we must have checked every damn car in the parking lot. Multiple times. Obvioulsy we didn’t, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few cars I checked ten times or more.
You know how when you first can’t find your car, your first, absurd thought is “Oh my God, it’s stolen!” and then you calm yourself down and realize, it ain’t stolen, it’s just a row or two away. Well, we went through that process initially but, after twenty minutes or so, I was back to thinking maybe it WAS stolen. But who the hell would steal a rental Chevy Trax with 20k miles on it from a Disney parking lot?
Y’know, even though we rented it from Hertz, there was a previous rental paper in it from Dollar. Maybe one of them put an APB out on a missing car that we comehow triggered coming onto a Disney property with cameras everywhere. It wouldn’t be the first time Hertz accidentally got their cusomters arrested, right?
Although doesn’t pretty much EVERY rental car in Orlando make its way to a Disney parking lot? It’s clear I just need to walk up and down the rows again. I know it’s a Chevy, but did it have the Chevy symbol on the front, too? Ooo, Ooo, I think I see it. No, that’s just the same damn Kia I’ve already been fooled by multiple times.
I must’ve cycled through that progression a minimum of five times. We split up and looked in different directions. We come back together in that “in between” section. I kept hitting the open and close and alarm buttons on the key fob. Nothing. The damn thing was just not in this dimension.
While Wife and I are mainly incredulous, Daughter is having an existential crisis. There is no car. There has never been a car. There never will be a car and we will have to hitchhike back to our hotel. Or cut out the middle man and Uber straight to jail.
After she starts bawling, we finally cut our losses and take the shuttle to Epcot. Animal Kingdom closed at 6:00, so if we waited until, say, 8:00 and took the shuttle back, there should be a lot fewer cars for our nondescript rental to hide.
Epcot
Yeah, I can’t really give you a great rundown of Epcot. We planned on getting there by 3:00, but instead it was close to 6:00.
I was also low-key stressed the whole time. Not really worried, but going through a “What is reality” fugue state. It was going to be 9:00 when I got back to Animal Kingdom and was getting windy and I didn’t have anything warm to wear and who the hell knew how long I was going to be wandering around in the mostly empty parking lot and if it turned out Hertz or Dollar or some random criminal had removed the car from the premises, then I was going to be hanging out in the parking lot till midnight. And we skipped lunch at Animal Kingdom assuming we’d do the World Showcase at Epcot, but now it was too late to do that and I was getting friggin’ hungry and the Animal Planet parking lot might or might not have the car, but it definitely didn’t have a Chick-fil-a.
But, hey kid, Spaceship Earth! It appears to have last been updated in 2005.
Which is twenty years fresher than the Fignment ride.
We did manage to utilize our 7:00 am virtual queue for the Guardians of the Galaxy ride, which is totally different than the Guardians of the Galaxy ride in California. The latter was formerly a Twilight Zone ride (built forty years after Twilight Zone was a thing) tha drops you up and down. The Florida one is like Space Mountain except the indivudal cars detach from each other and spin independently. While it was hilariously fun, it was right up to the limits of my dizziness. Good thing I rode it this time, cause I don’t know if it’ll still be fun for me in another five years.
They also blare a loud song as you’re going through the ride. We got “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” but allegedly you can also get songs like “September” or “Disco Inferno.”
And unlike Universal, the songs actually go along with the ride.
After two days of non-stop amusement parks, we were ready to get on a boat. Check back next week for my review of the cruise.
The Car
Oh, you’re probably curious about the car. Yeah, it was where we left it.
I left Wife and Daughter at Epcot shortly after 8:00- to take the shuttle back. They don’t run as often once the destinateion park is closed. If Family hadn’t heard back from me by the time Epcot closed at 9:00, they were going to shuttle to Magic Kingdom, which was open until 11:00.
The parking lot was probably less than ten percent full and, more importantly, the remaining cars were spread out. I started walking from the park’s gate instead of taking the parking tram, because we had walked to the park in the morning, and, when I was walking back to meet them at the Epcot shuttle, about halfway there, I had that, “Wait a second, this part of the parking lot looks familiar” thought.
Yeah, instead of being in between tram stops one and two, it was actually before the first tram stop. Daughter was more right than me, but all three of us were way off.
I drove to Epcot, made damn sure I remembered where I parked this time, and then went to meet them in the park. Except I had left my tickets with them. Fine, it was almost 9:00, so they would be coming out any second. After they stopped at the Starbucks. And the gift shop. And the pin traders.
Thankfully, nobody was in the mood to attempt Magic Kingdom.
Finishing up some blogging from my recent family trip to Colorado. Last week I posted about the flatland stuff (because, no matter how many times I visit, I’m always surprised at how flat the mile-high city is). The focal point of our trip to Colorado was… Well, technically it was because my Angels were playing the Rockies. That’s what got us to the state. But once there, we decided to head up to Rocky Mountain National Park for a couple days.
Estes Park
Estes Park, the town just outside the national park entrance, was an odd little berg. You know those small vacation towns: Artists who can’t compete in a legitimate marketplace head to tourist traps where visitors spend boatloads of cash on tchotchkes to commemorate their travels. Not sure who’s shopping for Christmas shit in June, but Estes Park had at least three Christmas stores. Perhaps the pine trees put people in the mood? Not that I saw many people going into or out of them. Good news for the proprietors, though. If they can’t make it selling wreaths and ornaments, they can always open another ice cream shop.
Holy shit, there was more ice cream per capita than there was cannabis in Denver. I shit you not, there had to be at least ten of them on the three-block downtown. Salt water taffy, too. I’ve never really understood the draw of salt water taffy. I’ll have a piece or two, but they all taste the same and are a pain to eat. Can’t imagine there’s enough demand to carry an entire business, much less four on the same block. But clearly I’m wrong. Or maybe I’m not because, again, one never finds them in an actual city. In fact, prior to this trip, I always assumed they were only ubiquitous in seaside villages. You know, the whole “salt water” thing. But I guess salt can be added after the fact.
A mystery even bigger than the number of ice cream (and taffy) stores is their closing time, which for most was 8:00 pm. In a normal town of 6,000, I might expect them to roll up the sidewalks early, but this is a vacation town. The two ice cream shops that stayed open until 9:00 pm were spilling over with patrons for that last hour. I’m no economist, but it seems the extra costs borne from staying open one more hour would more than be compensated by the number of ice cream scoops sold. Hell, one of them could’ve opened until 10:00 pm and still come out ahead. The only thing waiting for us back at the hotel was the copy of Legally Blonde Daughter picked out from the DVD library. Even salt water taffy started sounding good.
At the other end of our culinary day, we found the most wonderful spot for breakfast. Well, not a full breakfast, but donuts! And not full donuts, but mini donuts.
What are mini donuts, you ask? Um… they’re donuts… but mini. Seemed a little odd at first, because the minimum order is four donuts, but they all have to be the same flavor. Wife and Daughter kept having issues with this, even on day two, trying to come up with four flavors for the four mini donuts, but if we wanted four flavors, the minimum number of donuts we’d be acquiring is sixteen. But once you get the ordering down, and once you realize that four mini donuts has about the same dough as one standard donut, it’s just a matter of picking the proper flavor.
But damn, those flavors were decadent. We went three days in a row and had everything from cinnamon sugar to Nutella to red velvet crumbles. Each donut is practically swimming in the flavor. Each is served in its own cardboard to-go container, the bottom of which is coated with the glaze or coating. After eating the cinnamon sugar donuts, Wife poured the rest of it into her latte to make her own cinnamon dolce. And to think we didn’t even make it through half of the menu.
Even better was the motif of the donut shop. It’s named Squatchy Donuts, complete with more Bigfoot paraphernalia that you can shake a stick, or point a shaky film camera, at. I never thought of Colorado as a big Bigfoot area. Always associated it more with Oregon and Washington, but I suppose he shows up wherever there are forests, mountains, and legal narcotics.
If only we could’ve had donuts and ice cream for every meal. Unfortunately, almost every other meal we had in Estes Park was the culinary equivalent of a Christmas shop in June. Our first night wasn’t terrible, as we found a pasta place with a messy baked pasta that was at least worthwhile. Daughter’s mac n’ cheese off the kid’s menu was probably the best part, as they put mini shells in an alfredo sauce and threw some mozzarella on top. She wasn’t thrilled, because it wasn’t her idea of proper mac n’ cheese, but Wife and I thought it was great.
The next two meals were lackluster burgers. On the menu, they sounded great, one with pulled pork and the other featuring bleu cheese and grilled onions. Unfortunately, the meat in both was subpar. I’d think they were frozen Costco patties except I didn’t see a Costco this side of Denver. The other problem was that both seemed to pass “medium” about an hour before they were taken off the grill. Scratch that. Neither was grilled. They were both griddled.
Wife’s options were similarly lackluster. She ordered a grilled cheese that seemed to have one slice of cheese between two pieces of white bread. The following day her nachos promised guacamole but instead had some “avocado” “puree” that again seemed like it came out of a freezer. I know, coming from California, we’re spoiled with avocado, but Colorado isn’t exactly Timbuktu. Half the damn residents were California transplants back in the 1990s and 2000s.
I know these touristy towns don’t have to worry about repeat customers. It probably behooves them to not waste effort on good food. Even if they’re the best in town, nobody’s eating there more than once. But sheesh, can we find the hockey puck store they’re all getting their meat from and shut it down?
Until we finally realized we should just dine at the only fancy place in town.
Stanley Hotel
Our last two meals in Estes Park were at its most famous locale. We went to Post Chicken and Beer, a franchise with a couple locations outside Estes Park (and with a name like Chicken & Beer, how can I go wrong?), for dinner, then returned to the hotel’s Brunch and Co the next morning.
Both times, we had to pay to park. It’s $10 to park, but you get a token that you can use for $5 off food or merchandise. Kinda like a reverse validation. Encourage people to spend money there and not, say, wander around in a certain hedge maze.
Allegedly.
The allegedly doesn’t pertain to the hedge maze, cause you’re damn right I did that, even if it isn’t quite as full in June as, say, the middle of winter when only the caretaker is there.
No, the allegedly deals with this token that might or might not take five bucks off one’s purchase. It’s not that Post Chicken or Brunch & Co didn’t take them. They probably would have. But there was no fucking way I was spending a token that looked like this:
And yeah, I went twice. Why didn’t I spend the second token at brunch? Cause I have friends who like The Shining, too.
I had always heard that the Stanley Hotel tried to distance itself from the fictional Overlook hotel that is based on it. Maybe I’m thinking of the Timberline Lodge in Oregon, which was used as the external shots in the movie. I know they’re the ones who asked room 217 to be changed to 237 in the movie because there is no 237 at the Timberline and they worried people would avoid 217. Then again, the Stanley Hotel didn’t even let the movie be filmed there, so maybe at one time I was correct and they weren’t leaning into The Shining.
Not so anymore. Holy crap, it’s like a Stephen King amusement park. In the gift shop, you can buy anything you want with the word Redrum emblazoned on it. Or ties, socks, dog leashes, you name it, in the iconic 1970s carpet that Danny keeps riding his tricycle on and off. And that hedge looks like it’s a recent addition. Maybe in a few years, it’ll be as daunting as the movie. Not the book, though, because I think it was animal hedges in the book.
Instead of worrying that customers would be hesitant to stay in room 217, they’ve renamed it the Stephen King Suite and charge twice as much for it.
Don’t believe me? Check out the menu at the brunch restaurant:
The brunch food, by the way, was decadent. I got the “Here’s Johnny.”
I also bought the 1970s carpet tie.
Rocky Mountain National Park
I’ve always been a big outdoorsy fan, and thankfully Daughter has followed in some of those footsteps. I used to camp in Yosemite and near Devil’s Postpile every year when I was young. Back in the good old days, if you stood outside a Ticketron at 6:00 in the morning, you were guaranteed a camping spot. These days, you’re put into a virtual queue with all the lazy asses who didn’t roll out of bed until five minutes before the tickets went on sale. I have yet to discover a magic touch.
We’ve taken her to Yosemite a number of times, but most of the time we have to stay outside the park. Unlike Estes Park, the towns “directly outside” Yosemite are still a good ninety minutes from the valley floor, so she’s never been to an evening ranger show or shouted “Elmer!” all night long (Do they still do that? I guess I’ll find out if I ever get to the front of the virtual queue). Still, she’s well versed in the major attractions and how fun it is to skip stones across the Merced River.
So why not branch out to National Park #2? And better the Rocky Mountains than shitholes like Joshua Tree and Death Valley, which qualify more as “Places to Speed Through en route to Vegas” than “majestic works of nature that ought to be preserved.” Seriously, was someone trying to develop Death Valley into a condominium complex? I don’t think the ghost of Teddy Roosevelt’s the only market force conspiring against that particular pipe dream.
Wasn’t really sure what to expect from RMNP, though. It appeared to only have one major road going through, and I didn’t see us backpacking with Canadian flags. So I treated it like Yosemite and looked up shorter hikes with lakes and waterfalls. That’s what national parks are for, is it not?
There’s good and bad news about those lakes and waterfalls in RMNP. Yes, there are plenty of them, and in fact many of them are close to each other with shortish walks in between. The bad news is we couldn’t get to any of them on day #1 because I’d made the wrong reservation.
Timed Entry
At Rocky Mountain National Park, you have to reserve your entry time to the park. A lot of national parks started doing this during Covid, because, you know, we don’t want to encourage people to go outdoors when there’s a disease that spreads indoors. Most of the parks have gone back to no reservations for daily use (including Yosemite, which is second guessing itself after being absolutely swarmed with people this year), but RMNP is still doing its Covid thing.
Some of the reserved entry times were released months ago, but when I checked back in May, only times after 11:00 am were available. I wasn’t opposed to waiting until lunchtime to enter, but if there are hikes and views and such, a morning entry time was more ideal. Fortunately they hold half their entry visas back until the evening before each entry date. Guessing Estes Park and Grand Lake don’t want word getting out that if you didn’t log in to recreation.gov three months ago, don’t bother coming to spend your tourist dollars here.
I was a little worried that I’d be out of cell range when 5:00 hit, but we left Denver at such a time that we would be heading through Boulder right around the prescribed time with an understanding that, if traffic wasn’t too bad and we were ahead of schedule, we’d stop off for some coffee and wifi.
However, while I hovered over the refresh button, I failed to notice there were two different entry passes. One said “Park Access Timed Entry.” Stupidly, I picked that option because, I don’t know, I wanted… park access? I didn’t realize that, for the same price right below it was “Park Access Timed Entry – Includes Bear Lake Road.” Want to guess where all the lakes and waterfalls are?
One last mention of the Timed Entry system. It’s extremely popular. As you can tell by this screenshot where it’s received over 12,000 ratings with an average of 4 stars!
What the hell are these people reviewing? It’s not the park itself, as most of the features and locations have their own listings, with much higher numbers and averages. So they are literally rating the process of making the reservation. The only other thing I can think of is using five stars or one star to show solidarity or opposition with the idea of limiting park access. I guess some people have to review everything. Maybe that’s why every minimum wage employee expects to be tipped now. The tablet’s “just going to ask me some questions,” huh? Boy that’s a nosy-ass tablet. At least now I know I can hit the skip button and just assume I’m the guy leaving a one-star review of a website selling entry times.
Regardless of the reason, I imagine that four-star rating comes from 80% of the people giving it five stars and the other 20% giving it one. Nobody is hedging their bets with a four or a three, right? Either you got your timed entry or you didn’t. Five stars or one. Unless, like me, they were stressing out about wifi availability. In fact, when we wanted to reserve our spot for day two, this time with Bear Lake Road access, we had to leave the park to be back in town for its precious 4G connectivity at the proper time. Maybe that makes it less than five stars? Better yet, how about I just get my park access and double back to the main page to tell the world about it.
Day One
Since we couldn’t go down their precious Bear Lake Road on day one, which was not only the (more or less) only road in the park besides the main road, but was also right inside the park entrance, taunting us plebs as we drove past.
There was another side road we contemplated taking which was closed during winter but which should totally have been fine because there wasn’t a ton of snow on the ground despite the elevation. But evidently it was closed to “prepare” it for the summer season. Totally fine because when we made it to the visitor center, I saw said road from the other end and holy shit, when they say it’s a dirt road, they mean a motherfucking dirt road.
The paved road was bad enough. Some white-knuckled fucking curves there. You don’t realize how tight your sphincter is until you round the bend and the sheer drop-off is now on the left side of the road, meaning a veer of an inch to the right would only result in a legal battle between my insurance company and the car rental company instead pf a legal battle between gravity and this mortal coil.
The views, though, were spectacular. I didn’t expect regular ol’ valleys and peaks to be breathtaking. Sure, the two biggest draws in Yosemite are valleys (okay, maybe Hetch Hetchy is third behind Tuolumne Meadows but I doubt Tuolumne Meadows will open this year), complete with peaks, but those peaks are distinctive. I can pick El Capitan and Half Dome out from an airplane while flying to Southern California. There’s also something to be said for driving down into that valley, skipping rocks across the river. And have I mentioned the waterfalls?
Editors note: Don’t drive down into Hetch Hetchy. Those environmentalists in San Francisco need their pure drinking water, which they can’t possibly get from anywhere other than damming up a pristine natural beauty. Oh, and you’ll probably drown, too.
The valleys and peaks in Rocky Mountain were magnificent not from their distinctiveness but from their lack thereof. Every time we faced a new direction, the myriad of points made the view different. A number of curves had pullouts, and although we didn’t stop at all of them (especially those on the left), each time we saw one, we said, “Wow, that must be the view that this road is all about. That must be what people come to the park to see. Can’t imagine anything better.” Then three miles further, we’d repeat the mantra.
I know pictures of wide-open spaces are as useless in conveying their beauty as it comes. Same goes with fireworks. But too bad, because I’m still going to sic some worthless photos on ya:
We finally came to a full stop at the highest visitor center in the United States. And not just from the drugs. Although one of the cashiers from Pennsylvania said she was having the “best time” with her summer job in Colorado, then proceeded to pontificate about George Harrison’s post-Beatles discography.
In her defense, I was wearing a Beatles t-shirt and she politely asked if I liked the Beatles first which seems an odd question for someone wearing a Beatles shirt. Then again, I can’t tell you how many of my students wear Nirvana, Anthrax, and Pantera shirts without being able to name a single goddamn song. “I didn’t know it was a band.”
No, the reason it’s the highest is elevation. Over 11,000 feet, to be… not really “exact,” but you get where I was going. I originally thought it was on the continental divide, but it was a fair amount to the east, so I didn’t get to drop some water and see which way it would flow. But there was a hike (a staircase, really) from the parking lot up to just over 12,000 feet. Wife made it about halfway, while Daughter and I mustered the courage to walk up some stairs, her with more gusto than I.
The hike isn’t hard from a usual hike-rating system, but at that elevation, everything takes on a different dimension. Some people get nausea and headaches, but fortunately those didn’t hit me. I got some dizziness and, according to my Fitbit, my heartrate rose far higher than on a normal flight of stairs, even a flight of stairs that goes on for a quarter-mile. One of the other symptoms is a lack of appetite, so with those two symptoms together, I should come here to diet.
When I made it to the top, just over 12,000 feet elevation, it was windy. It was beautiful, too. But first and foremost, it was windy.
There was a preteen girl at the top whose mom took her picture while she did a handstand. It took a few attempts before she got it. I guess she’s doing something called “Handstands Across America.” I hope it’s not as dumb as the Hands Across America we did in the 1980s. I remember months of buildup and then when it happened, it was a whole bunch of “that was it? No countdown or live satellite shot or nothing?” I think it was designed to raise money for something like homelessness, or maybe Africa, although I think Africa was saved by a rock concert and there’s been no troubles in Africa ever since. I don’t see how me touching a random stranger helped homelessness. Or Africa, for that matter.
On our way out of the park (in time to get the entry pass for the next day), we stopped by Sheep Lake. There were no sheep. There was a moose, though. We didn’t stick around long enough for the sheep to come home and be all, “Hey fuckface, can you not read what the fucking lake is called?” Then again, maybe the sheep would wisely step aside and let this big ol’ moose hang out where he pleases.
Day Two
On the second day in the park, we finally got to drive down the Hellfire Club of Rocky Mountain National Park. Still couldn’t park there, mind you. My dumb ass tried, though.
I didn’t believe the sign at the beginning of Bear Lake telling us that Bear Lake parking lot was full. It seemed like a very permanent sign and considering it was still before 9:00 in the morning, I assumed it was there to discourage people from driving on the road that they’d explicitly signed up to drive on. I’m sure there were a bunch of people who, like me, didn’t realize there were two options and accidentally bought access to this road. And the sign is designed to encourage them to make their way toward all those beautiful vistas I was relegated to yesterday.
The other option makes less sense, that they limit the entry to this road but still don’t provide enough parking for the number of cars they already know will visiting? It’s like the opposite of the standard used in suburban stretch malls, where they make a parking lot big enough to cover all the hypothetical cars that will show up on Black Friday, so most of the spots go unused 364 days out of the year. Meanwhile on Bear Lake Road, they know precisely how many cars are coming each day, yet the parking lots are all taken up before 9:00 am? Let me put on my skeptical face.
So I also blew past the “Park n’ Ride” lot halfway down the road. It said we could park there and ride a shuttle to the lake. Again, it was a permanent sign claiming every other lot was full. Plus we’d seen no shuttles and if they were anything like Yosemite, there’d be a good twenty minutes between shuttles. I’m not falling for their damn tricks.
A half-hour later, after passing at least five shuttles, we were back in the park n’ ride lot, waiting in a line that rivaled Disneyland. We’d taken the road to its bitter end only to be turned away by the parking attendant who let the car in front of us in for the “last spot.” Still, I think we only had to wait for the third shuttle, which were seven minutes apart from each other, so add that to the drive to the end of the road and back, and maybe my inability to read instructions only put us behind by an hour or so. Fortunately there weren’t any storms or scorchers due for later in the day. We’ll just call this a dress rehearsal for Death Valley, where such a minor setback might make us dehydrated mummies on the tail end.
When we finally made it to Bear Lake, it was beautiful. A simple hike takes you around the lake to view it from all vantage points that looked totally different from each other while on the hike but the pictures of are virtually indistinguishable. There were a few spots that the posted sign considered “treacherous,” which turned out to mean “about as steep as a driveway.” I think the sign’s designation was only meant for wheelchair-bound visitors, but after my disbelief of the parking lot signs, I wasn’t taking any chances. That being said, after circling the lake, I couldn’t tell you which spots were considered more or less difficult. It felt pretty steady to me.
When we returned to the shuttle spot, we had a few options. At least two other lakes seemed a short hike away. Nymph Lake, which would’ve led to all sorts of sophomoric jokes if Daughter hadn’t been with us, was only a half-mile, but it looked small on the topographic map. Dream Lake, which I assume must be pretty, was a farther jaunt, and there was another lake, Emerald Lake, beyond that. I was relatively certain we were on borrowed hiking time with the child. While I might’ve gotten a half-mile out of her, “Let’s go to lake numbers three and four” would be met with open revolt.
If there’s a waterfall at the end of said hike, though…
Alberta Falls, which an odd moniker unless we’d somehow transported to Banff, was less than a mile away. It had been my initial goal when researching Bear Lake Road the previous night. One lake, one waterfall, and I’m good. But all the stuff we read about the Alberta Falls indicated we should get off at the Glacier Gorge parking lot/shuttle stop, not Bear Lake. From Glacier Gorge, it’s less than a mile. But the trailhead at Bear Lake claimed Alberta Falls was a mile away.
I asked the ranger which route to the falls would be best. He said to start from Bear Lake, because it’s a half-mile down followed by a half-mile up, as opposed to Glacier Gulch, from whence it’s uphill the whole way. Then we can exit via the downhill, which allegedly is easier although try telling my knees that. Downhill at least leads to less Daughter whining.
Great info from that ranger. Maybe they should’ve posted one in the middle of the road at the park n’ ride.
What followed was a half-hour of “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” I might’ve made it worse by telling her “This is the waterfall we’ve been hiking to” every time we passed a trickle. “Isn’t it beautiful and totally worth the effort to get here?” Once or twice she believed me. Hilarious until I try to get her to move onward again.
Look! Alberta Falls!
The actual falls were very pretty. You come at them from the side, so they appear to be coming out of the rocks. I kept moving around trying to find a better angle, but head-on wasn’t happening. We walked a little ways on, hoping the trail might double-back to see the falls from above, but nope. Off in a totally different direction. I commented that I might scramble up those rocks because they were totally climbable. Wife reminded me that, pushing fifty with a history of gout, it isn’t the rocks but the scrambler whose limits must be taken into account. Contemplated sending Daughter up to take a picture, because she could run up them without any negative consequences, but it would be a crapshoot whether she dropped the phone onto said rock or over the falls. No way was it coming back as unscathed as her.
In the end, I settled for this vantage point.
Final thoughts
Whereas Yosemite Valley is cozy and local, RMNP is vast and grandiose. Every direction I turned could be a park of its own. We never even made it to the Continental Divide or anything else west of the visitor center, partly because we felt the need to stop every couple miles to view an entirely new vista. There’s an abandoned town up near the headwaters of the Colorado River? Wow, I can’t imagine how many extra days of exploring it would’ve taken for us to make it that far into the park.
And how many daily reservations? At some point, I wasn’t going to have coverage until 5:05 pm, and I would be giving a less-than-five-star review.
I like that so many lakes and waterfalls are that close to each other, with seemingly simple hikes between them. While we opted for only one lake and one waterfall this time, I could totally see opting for three or four lakes in one fell swoop on a repeat visit.
Except for this lake. It was visible in the distance on the day one drive. Guessing it’s inaccessible, but dammit, I want a parking lot right the fuck there right the fuck now. I’d even reserve a different road access to get there.
Finally, we spent a ton of money while there. Must’ve visited at least four, maybe five, visitor and interpretive centers, and probably bought something each time. A National Parks passport. And a journal. And a water bottle. Plus rocks and postcards and those “smash the penny” machines that somehow claim to not be a felony. Two of the visitor centers are outside the park, probably to let those unreserveds still spend money lying about actually making it inside.
It’s easy to justify the purchases, since the money goes to a good cause of preserving these pristine miracles of nature for future generations. Not that they need our money, because it’s funded through tax money regardless of whether we buy a damn thing.
So here’s my question. Shouldn’t my national park souvenir purchases be tax deductible? It’s all going to the same place. The government takes income out of my paycheck and they also get my money for their stupid tchotchkes? It’s all going into the same “Congressional Hookers & Blow” slush fund. I feel like the government would rather us give the money to them than to donate to those whiny charities anyway.
While I’m at it, I also need to renew my passport soon. Where’s my W-2 for that?
Gonna leave you with the view from the back porch/balcony from our hotel in Estes Park. Not a bad place to read a book.
Last week, the family vacationed in Colorado. We spent a day in Denver at the beginning and end of the trip, but spent the majority of the time exploring Estes Park and the Rocky Mountain National Park. Going to split my retelling into two, with today’s post focused on the Denver components, both at the beginning and end of the trip. The next post has the mountain stuff.
Rental car snafu
Nothing says “Welcome to Denver” like standing around waiting for a rental car you already ponied up a grand for.
I’ve got member status at a certain rental car agency. Nothing fancy or anything. I never paid for it, nor does it represent my renting from them x number of times in a y-month period. About a decade ago, I was booking online and the reservation asked if I wanted free gold status. Uh, sure. Maybe it was just a great marketing ploy, because ever since then, I’ve scarcely rented from anyone else. Instead of finding the loyal customers and conferring them a status, they conferred said status thus creating said loyal customer.
One of the perks from this status is that I usually don’t have to go through any rigmarole when getting my rental. If it’s not at an airport, they just hand me the keys. At (most) airports, I skip the line entirely and go to a members section where I have . The keys are already in the car and all I have to do is show my i.d. to the guy at the exit gate and he prints out my contract. It works great, even if I’ve sometimes taken a car that’s a level above what I paid for and get the surcharge added on. Still, the lack of hassle is a major plus.
Unfortunately, if they’re going to give fancy status to any ol’ riffraff, sometimes we’re all going to arrive on the same flight.
When we got off the shuttle, some of the noobs were standing around, gathering their stuff, waiting in line. Knowing the drill, I found my name on the board, went to my designated section, and grabbed a car. In the back of my mind, I thought there weren’t nearly enough cars to accommodate the number of people who got off the shuttle in this special section. But no matter, I got mine, the riffraff can riffraff all they want.
Although as we drove toward the exit, we wondered why we couldn’t get the brake light to go off. Kept futzing with the parking brake, which made “Park” go off and on, but “Brake” stayed illuminated the whole time.
Turns out that meant the brake fluid was low. The guy at the checkout gate gave us three options: Keep the car and hope for the best, find an employee to top off the brake fluid, or go exchange the car for another one. None of these options seemed ideal. If we were just driving into Denver for an evening or two of walking around downtown, a little missing brake fluid wasn’t likely to harm anything. But the plan was to be driving hairpin curves at 11,000 feet elevation with a few thousand of those feet three inches to the right of the hairpin. Not a great place to find out precisely how low the brake fluid was.
Find an employee wandering around the parking lot? Yeah right. They were all at the front of those thirty-deep lines of customers.
So we took the option behind door #3 and drove back to the members spot, where no cars were available. So into the long line we went. Thirty minutes later, our names are added to the list of gold members waiting for cars to be delivered from the pleb area, where the non-special renters were having no issues.
In the meantime, we’d managed to stop another couple from driving off in the brake fluid car (partly to save their lives and partly because the car was technically still checked out to me until I could get a replacement). The other couple managed to get into a new car right away despite having showing up twenty minutes after us, because first-class had descended into the Wild West. There was no rhyme or reason. See a car, grab it, and hope it’s functioning well enough to get into town.
When we finally got our replacement car, we had to wait for the rental agent to take me off the brake fluid car and on to this one, putting us a good two hours behind schedule.
Oh, and every time we turned on the new car, it told us it was overdue for service. I know sometimes those messages get a little overzealous. They might trigger at 3,000 miles when most cars are fine far beyond that. But this overdue notice was a tad more extreme. To the tune of 6200 miles and 150+ days overdue. Even by the most magnanimous reading, that’s cutting it damn close to danger territory.
Clearly brake fluid wasn’t the only thing lacking in the eternal turn-and-burn that is airport car rental.
Good thing I didn’t need oil to drive those mountain passes.
Curtis Hotel
The hotel we stayed in was a hoot and a half. It’s technically a Doubletree, but it doesn’t feel like one. But after reading this description, add in the fact that they give you one of those famous cookies when you check in.
Each floor was themed. I didn’t notice it at first, because we were on the “Floor of Champions.” Sure, it was technically sports themed, but it mainly consisted of oversized renderings of newspapers from when the Denver Broncos won back-to-back Super Bowls. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that in any Denver hotel. Hell, every spot in town was trumpeting the recent Nuggets NBA championship. If I walked out of an elevator and saw a picture of Nikola Jokic, I wouldn’t assume it to be a theme.
But the other floors had names like “Pedal to the Medal,” “Laugh Out Loud,” and “Chick Flick.” Oddly enough, they had not only a “One Hit Wonders” floor, but also floors devoted to Hair Bands and Disco. Seems the former would cover both of the latters.
Oh wait, the One Hit Wonders was actually the superhero floor. Holy shit, I hope they paid for the rights to all those Spiderman and Captain America visages, because Disney’s got good fucking lawyers. The Batman and Green Lantern stuff should be fine, though. HBO can’t even keep the shit they own on their own damn network.
They had a thirteenth floor, which many hotels don’t. To double down on this inclusion, it was the horror movie floor. Daughter gave that one a hard pass. If I ever return, I might opt for the video game floor, because I want to be able to play Pac-Man on the walls.
On our return trip to Denver, we requested the Sci-Fi floor, because you haven’t properly vacationed until you’ve exited your hotel room to a visage of Darth Vader on the commode.
The ground floor was similarly tongue-in-cheek, complete with a couch that looked like the back seat of a Cadillac. Its shop was called the five-and dime, while the restaurant (& martini bar) was called the Corner Office, and its food was top-notch. Since we were having breakfast there, I skipped the martini. I sought out their “Marco Polo Ballroom” half-expecting it to be a pool, but alas, it was simply a ballroom.
And did I mention the Doubletree cookies?
Cannabis road signs
An awful lot of the road rental signs (you know the ones, where a local business pays “for litter removal,” although I’m pretty sure it’s just socially conscious advertising) were for local cannabis companies. There was also a dispensary approximately every other business in downtown Denver. It felt a little weird, traveling from the pot desert that is California.
Oh, you thought California legalized marijuana? Well sure, technically. But California also regulated the shit out of it, making someone who wants to sell the product legally have to jump through about 10,000 legal hoops and forms and whatnot. Meanwhile, California is also trying to lower its arrest numbers, particularly for over-indexed minorities, so one’s chances for getting punished for selling it illegally aren’t that high. As a result, illegal pot is still cheaper and more readily available than legal pot and the state has had to (I shit you not!) pass subsidies for legal dispensaries.
So yeah, it’s weird to see a state that actually legalized marijuana without fucking it up. Hell, I bet Colorado even gets tax revenue FROM the cannabis companies instead of sending tax revenue TO them. Who woulda thunk?
One other humorous byproduct: the signs pointing toward the Central Business District had to spell out “Central BD.” Because CBD is bringing in a lot more tourist dollars than the CBD.
Daughter
Are we sure the pre-teens don’t start at eight? My God, if this trip was a clarion call of the next decade of my life, then I foresee lots of booze. I suggest you buy some InBev stock. Maybe liver medicine, too.
She’s discovered earbuds. In many ways, and at many times, they are a godsend. Not in the airplane, of course, like a functioning member of society. On the airplane, she yacked the whole damn way. But the second we need her to answer a question, or respond to stimuli, or, I don’t know, be marginally aware of the world around her, the earbuds are present and accounted for.
When we (finally) got into the rental car, she wanted to play navigator. Then she put her earbuds in because she “didn’t want to listen to SiriusXM, because we always listen to SiriusXM.” Of course, I didn’t notice, seeing as I was driving, so when we finished driving the nine miles that she gave on her last instructions, I asked, “Where to next?” “Hey, what are the new instructions?” “DAUGHTER, IF YOU’RE GOING TO NAVIGATE YOU’VE GOT TO NAVIGATE!”
Daughter tags out one earbud. “Huh?”
Did I mention teenager?
Although in all honesty if she were full teenager she wouldn’t want to play navigator. Instead, she’s entering that awkward Middle School Phase. I taught middle school for one (and only one!) year. It was my first year teaching full-time, and after doing all my student teaching and long-term subbing at high school, man, I struggled. An experienced teacher asked if I’d thought of putting up charts with the students’ names and then give them stars when they did what they were supposed to do. No… No, I hadn’t thought of that. That grade school shit never came up in my high school training.
So, yeah, I could barely handle one year of that “acting older in the ways that don’t count but still like a baby in the annoying ways” before. Now I’m in for another half-dozen?
Once Wife forcefully took the phone from her to take over navigating, Daughter returned to earbud la-la land. I know this because, when I excited the freeway she had no clue a deceleration was coming, meaning the open box of Cheez-Its she was mindlessly munching toppled over spilling all over the back legwell of the rental.
If you need me before, say, 2030, you know where to find me.
Baseball Game
The reason we picked this particular week for a Colorado trip was because my favorite baseball team, the Angels, were playing against the Rockies. We hoped that a team with some of the best sluggers of this generation might be exciting to watch in a ballpark known for homers. Boy, howdy!
The Angels ended up scoring 25 runs, which was the most in franchise history. The 25-1 final score was one of the top five margins of victory in the history of baseball. At first I was going to chastise Daughter, because she asked me to go get her water from the concession stand, and while I was gone the Angels hit back-to-back-to-back homers. Fortunately I didn’t miss all the action as they went on to score 16 runs that inning alone, sending 16 batters up that inning and another 11 in the following inning.
Unfortunately, blowouts get kinda boring, even when it’s your team doing the blowout. Some of the stars we came to see were taken out of the game by the fifth inning. Still, props to a number of Rockies fans who stayed till the bitter end. If this game were happening in California, the fans would’ve left as soon as Mike Trout was benched.
Turned out to be a bad game for Daughter to learn how to keep score. She refused to move onto the next column when the team batted around, opting to just draw in new diamonds for a batter’s second time on the basepaths. The result was this M.C. Escher painting:
This wasn’t my first trip to Coors Field. Back in my single days, I regularly organized travel around seeing a new stadium. At one time, I was up to 60% of the ballparks, but that number has since dropped below the 50% mark. Coors Field is probably in my top five. I love the line of purple seats in the third deck signifying where the elevation is one mile above sea level. The trees in the batter’s eye (beyond the center field wall) fit Colorado’s outdoorsy feel. And when you sit on the first base side, you have a beautiful view of the Rocky Mountains towering over the stadium in the distance.
At least you used to have that view. Now they’re constructing high-rise apartment buildings just west of the stadium, right in the way of the mountains. All that damn pot revenue. Gotta build places for the loadies to live not far from downtown.
Fuck. Might have to revisit those ballpark rankings.
The Angels, of course, followed up that record-setting offensive output with a clunker to lose the series. And the series after that. Maybe spread the offense out over several games instead of putting it all in one? Although if you’re gonna go that route, I guess it was nice of you to do it in the game I was at.
Ninety minutes to kill
After we checked out of the Denver hotel, we were supposed to meet with my cousins who moved to the area a decade ago. By the time we coordinated with them we had about ninety minutes to kill.
It’s an awkward amount of time when you’re in an unfamiliar place. If it’s thirty minutes, find a Starbucks and steal some wifi. Two hours opens up everything from movies to museums. Two of the things on our list were the zoo and an interactive museum but neither of those seem worthwhile in that time frame, especially when you factor in taking 15-20 minutes to get there.
So I did what travelers and tourists have done for centuries: googled “Denver kids.” Came back with Urban Air Park. It’s got trampolines and rock walls and shit and, even better, it’s on the way to my cousin’s house.
On the way there we passed a TopGolf, which totally pissed me if because I love me some TopGolf and I really, really, really wanted to hit it from the third deck at mile-high elevation. Might finally hit that goddamn white circle. Unfortunately Wife had already purchased Urban Air tickets, so I guess Daughter playing Spiderman trumps me playing Tiger Woods.
The Urban Air place was great, though. Daughter rode the zipline ten times in a row and probably would’ve went for two straight hours if we’d let her. Instead, we made her race the go-karts around one time before yanking her ass off to Family Fun Time, dammit!
Oh, and as it turns out we have one of these places about twenty minutes from where we live. Oops.
Zoo
When traveling, I try to avoid places I can go to at home. With a few exceptions, like the McDonald’s in Rome that’s something between a fine dining experience and a city unto itself. I’d rather eat something crappy and original than tried and true to offset the ninety percent of my existence where I go for the latter.
Not that I necessarily eat well on the road. I’m looking at you, Taco John’s. I’m open to fast food, as long as it’s fast food not available in Sacramento. Wife always thinks I’m joking when I say we need to go to a Waffle House whenever I see one. You wouldn’t find me anywhere near a Denny’s back home, but dammit, when on the road, Waffle House is great. I was happy when the Sacramento area got its first Cracker Barrel. Now I don’t have to eat there on the road. Nor at home.
Similarly, I was annoyed when I found out there was an Urban Air place back home. What a waste of ninety minutes. One might make the same argument about TopGolf, had we gone there, but I would’ve fired back with that whole hitting a golf ball at elevation isn’t the same. Either way, we didn’t go.
Not sure where the zoo fits in this spectrum. Each zoo has a different mix of animals, but at their heart, there ain’t much difference. Regardless, once Daughter heard there was a baby sloth, guess where we headed?
Unfortunately, we never saw baby sloth. We saw mama sloth, but she was way up in a tree. Whether or not she was holding her baby was hard to discern from down on the ground. Fortunately they had elephants, which we don’t have in Sacramento. But the lions and giraffes and marmosets looked the same. Two frogs were fucking, which was new, but they probably don’t provide that peep show for all the patrons.
The Denver Zoo also takes up a much larger geographic footprint than Sacramento, although Sacramento Zoo is planning on moving to a larger spot in the near future. Based on how exhausted I was at closing time (and the fact that it took half a day to make it around the zoo once), I’d like to put my vote in for it remaining in its nice cozy spot on the outskirts of downtown like it’s been for a century.
One complaint I have about the Denver Zoo is their map. The paths don’t reflect where the paths are in reality, and even the big map signs around the zoo rarely show “You are Here.” Furthermore, no animals were actually listed. Instead, they showed tiny photos of the animal’s face. Sure, some of them were easily distinguishable, like the elephants, but I scratched my head over a few of them. Is that a kangaroo or a horse? I can’t tell, and even if I could, I don’t know how to get there because the map says I’m at the hippopotamus, but that’s clearly a sheep. And the bathroom that’s supposed to be nearby is nonexistent.
The shitty map was probably by design to encourage us to download the app. The lady who gave us the map happily informed us that we could erase the app at the end of the day. Sure. And all it will take is being added to a permanent email list. How about you give us access to an online map that doesn’t require the name of my first-born child. Or, I don’t know, write out “Kangaroo” on the physical map, like zoos and amusement parks have been doing for decades.
Meow Wolf
Our final stop was… How do I describe it? It was… next to Mile High Stadium?
I don’t know what to call Meow Wolf. Art museum? Immobile stage show? Playground? It’s listed as an “interactive art exhibit,” so I guess we’ll go with that. It’s definitely not a museum, because you’re expected to touch it all. Not sure how artistic, per se, but it was definitely visionary. Perhaps they’re using artistic in the meta-sense, because I wouldn’t expect a ginormous sentient pizza at a Van Gogh exhibit:
You take the elevator (excuse me, “portal”) up to some weird alien world. Spaceships and space amoeba and… is that a space mermaid? Right next to the space unicorn with its head cut off . So I guess there’s no way to prove it was a unicorn, except by the neck tendrils. Sorry, I don’t have a picture of that one, but I was trying to avoid pointing it out for Daughter.
Once down on the ground floor, you’re in a standard sci-fi spaceport. You can call recorded messages via payphones (which Daughter had no understanding of), but they were hard to hear with all the other stuff going on. For the most part, we walked around confused for the better part of the first hour, playing some rat boxing and walking through some mirror mazes.
As you’re exploring, you go through a door (or a portal, or black drapes), and find yourself in a completely different setting. When I first did this, I thought we’d messed up and tried to double-back to “finish” section one, but by the time we finished I realized there’s lots of overlapping and crossing back and forth. The first “alternate world” we found was a post-apocalyptic street setting, where you can pose inside the broken down bus or any of the various eateries. I think this is where the sentient pizza place was, which somehow had a room with hypnotic lines:
If you pay an extra two bucks upon entry, which we did, you get a card that “collects memories” at kiosks. We found some of them, missed some of them, but eventually you start putting together a story about, I don’t know, some missing heroes or a conspiracy or something? If it wasn’t well past our bedtime on our last night in town, maybe I could’ve put things into a more logical order, although I assume it’s intentionally confusing on your first visit so you can come back other times focusing on one aspect or another. I thought we were looking for the missing heroes, but all our memories were about “The Convergence.”
This Meow Wolf (there are others in Vegas and a few other locales) is called Convergence Station. I assumed that was because of its location in Denver, near the train station, underneath the interstate, right next to the football stadium. But “Convergence Station” has to do with the storyline. These different worlds or dimensions have converged together, and the memories you’re collecting tell the story of how that convergence happened. There’s also a whistleblower trying to figure out why it happened. Or maybe trying to undo it? Not sure, because by the time we figured out what was going on, we had been there close to two hours and it was almost closing time. Maybe if we had done this on day one, when our internal clocks were still on Pacific Time, or on a day we hadn’t spent five hours walking around the zoo without a cloud in the sky, we cut our losses with only two of the four convergences unlocked.
So sorry, mermaid. I feel like there was something I was supposed to do with you through the viewfinder, but your puzzle will remain unsolved for now.
Pictures
I didn’t find too many out-of-context or wtf pictures this go around. In fact, both of the mildly humorous pics were probably intentional. The first came from the scoreboard at Coors Field during an inning break. When it’s a double-digit blowout, maybe they scrape the barrel for more entertaining factoids. Or maybe they just figured we’d all be gone by then. Regardless, props to this formerly employed person.
The other might seem more legit until I tell you I found it in the Meow Wolf bathroom. But I saw it before we had entered the “portal.” Had I seen it at the end, it would’ve been the most normal vision of the past two hours. Even now, the fact that the cell phone is on it makes it look legit. Even the rubber ducky is something one might drop into a urinal. I can’t be the only one who brings my rubber ducky out on my adventures in town, can I? But man, leave that with someone else when you’re peeing. Where they finally lost me, or grabbed my attention and necessitated the picture, is that third object. Peeing off of a moving bicycle sounds fun, but I highly doubt you’d accidentally drop it in the urinal.
That’s all I’ve got for today. The plan is to be back early next week with stories of Estes Park and the Rocky Mountain National Park.
The Writing Wombat 