travelblog

Family Rocky Mountain Trip

· July 15, 2023 · Musings · , , , , , , , , · One Comment

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.

Family Denver Trip

· July 6, 2023 · Musings · , , , , , · One Comment

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.

Great Wolf Bacchanal

· July 25, 2022 · Musings · , , , , , , · No Comments

I recently posted about my family trip to New York, then Boston. I glossed over the middle part, where we spent two nights, and a very full day in between, at the Great Wolf Lodge in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. There are many Great Wolf Lodges throughout this country, but this was the first one we ventured into. I assume many of them are similar. Once you find a business model where parents shovel money toward a bottomless pit for ten minutes worth of child engagement at a time, why bother switching it up? Just ask Disney.

The Great Wolf Lodges combine water slides and a ropes course, with an arcade and a scavenger hunt. Throw in a buffet and a Build-a-Bear with exclusive content, and it’s like a childhood Mardi Gras. You’re just as likely to send you home with rashes in uncomfortable spots. 

Water Slides

The thing they’re probably most known for is the ginormous water park smack dab in the middle of the hotel. Daughter’s finally to the point where we feel she can exit the pool after finishing a water slide. Still not sure I’d be comfortable with the types where they plunge her into the pool at the end, but if the slide comes out at the same level as the pool, such that her momentum is already heading toward the exit, she’ll be fine. Fortunately, a park that caters to five-to-ten-year-olds isn’t gonna have much of the former. In fact, the only slides that ended in anything other than a splash pad were tube rides. 

Not that getting out of an innertube is easy at my age. But the park ain’t catering to me. The only part of the parents’ bodies they give a shit about are our wallets.

While the wave pool and lazy river (more of a stream) are more meh than wow, the slides are legit. Two of them drop the entire four stories of the hotel. As a bonus, you don’t even have to lug the tube up to the top. They have a conveyor belt elevator for that. 

Unfortunately, you still gotta get your own ass up there. No conveyor belt for the humans. The look of pain and exhaustion on the adults at the top of this torture device spoke volumes. We all needed a breather and maybe a calf massage. 

Even worse, I wasn’t wearing my Fitbit. I must’ve missed out on fifty floors that day.

And now my kid wants to plummet all the way down and then hike right the fuck back up. Forget the massage, how about a margarita bar up here? They’ve got lifeguards down there who can get her out of the family tube that probably flipped over on her fifty pounds, and I’ll be waiting for her when she gets back up here. With a salt rim.  

Unfortunately, the booze is at the bottom, so I might as well ride down with her. 

I just gotta grab my gas mask first.

The chlorine level in the air is, after all, enough to kill any random waterborne or airborne pathogen. Or any stray boche soldiers out in No Man’s Land. 

Holy crap! 

Fortunately the waterslide area is closed off from the rest of the lodge, cause man, it hits you as soon as you open the door to the water park. The air is THICK with chemicals. But at least down by the chaise lounges, it’s technically indoors and climate controlled. The tubes, on the other hand, go outside, where you’re now ensconced in a thick plastic tube that’s baking in the sun, heating the chlorine inside into a substance that’s been banned since the Treaty of Versailles. 

Chemical weapons aren’t the only war crimes being committed in the water park. Their drink policy is also a Geneva Code violation. 

For lunch on Water Slide Day, we opted for the food stand instead of returning to Lodge Proper for a wedge salad. The “burgers” were meh, but the cheese curds were good. Then again, I’m not from Wisconsin, so I probably wouldn’t know the difference between a good or bad cheese curd. Are there really gradations of deep-fried dairy?

We also bought a round of drinks, each of which was a maybe 10 oz. cup to access one of those “add your own flavor” Coke machines are growing ubiquitous. Heck, we even have a movie theater nearby that uses them, which is saying a lot, because movie theaters usually don’t let you pour your own drinks lest you break their golden ratio of nine parts ice to one part soda. I usually love these machines, because Coke Zero tastes a hell of a lot better with a bit o’ raspberry and lime, something I never would’ve guessed four years ago.

This particular drink machine seemed defective at first. It kept telling us we were using the wrong cup, which I wouldn’t think is something a non-sentient machine can determine. The employee exchanged our cups and then it worked fine. Although it still oddly had different fruit flavors available or unavailable for different drinks. For instance, raspberry ginger ale was shadowed as “temporarily out,” but raspberry Coke Zero was available. Isn’t it the same flavored syrup being added to either drink?

But that was nothing compared to what happened when I went up for a refill. I got maybe two ounces in the bottom of the cup before I got a similar error message about the wrong cup. But this message was slightly different, in that it acknowledged the cup was correct but it had already been used. Holy shit! They’re tracking refills now? And even worse, they’re not giving you ANY! Because what was in the bottom of my cup was pretty much what was missing from the top of the last one after you account for bubbles subsiding. 

Then there’s the unsettling addendum to this thought: my first cup had already been used. By someone else. Not sure if there’s enough chlorine to wash that taste out of my brain. Good thing I can go to the bar. At least I know ahead of time I’ll have to pay for my second glass of beer. And, again, it’s a glass that’s SUPPOSED to be reusable.

I ended up having that wedge salad for dinner. It was pretty disappointing for a wedge salad. They chopped up the wedge. It’s supposed to be a ginormous wedge. Hence the name. And if I had to guess, they used ranch over bleu cheese crumbles instead of actual bleu cheese dressing. And that was in the “restaurant” portion, not the snack bar or buffet portion. We had buffet for breakfast the next morning, finishing the hat trick of disappointment. 

Not overly surprising for a place that caters to kids. In keeping with that theme, the Dunkin’ Donuts was meh. I’ve tried Dunkin’ on many occasions, and I don’t think I can ever get more than a meh out of it. Not really sure the appeal. I’ll take Starbucks any day over bitter coffee and mediocre donuts.

MagiQuest and the Rest

Food aside, the Great Wolf Lodge experience was solid. Daughter wants to climb any and everything she comes across these days. It must be a thing for kids her age, because the Lodge was prepared with both a rock climbing wall and ropes course. I figured she’d only want to do the rock climbing wall once, so I was going to buy her an unlimited on the ropes with one or two runs on the rock wall, when they told me that if I bought unlimited on both, it was only an extra four dollars. Why the hell not? I wonder if it’s always four dollars more than whatever it is you’re about to buy.

Hey, give me a beer for $10. 

How about a beer with unlimited rock climbs for $14?

Sold!

Those courses were nice because I didn’t have to follow her around. And, legitimately, there’s a beer barn and tables right there. I can look up into the air and give Daughter a thumbs up that she thinks is because she made it across the rope bridge, but in reality is my signal for one more blueberry ale. 

Unfortunately, the game that occupied most of her time required a tad more movement from the parentage. In a direction away from the beer. At least at first.

Magiquest is a scavenger hunt of the entire property. Kids are given a laser tag magic wand that, when aimed at various places around the resort, causes them to light up or animate or say something. Treasure chests that open up, paintings on the wall that change when activated, random stars in the ceiling that you don’t even notice until they light up. At first it’s unnerving when you’re just walking around the resort only to hear random sparkling with an ethereal, “You’ve already completed this task.”

There are maybe thirty total targets throughout the resort. Some of them give you virtual gold pieces, many are used in different quests as the player “levels up.” The first quests were for the fairy princess, then the goblin king, and finally the dragon. While the princess missions only required Daughter to pick up three “items” (at completely opposite ends of the resort), by the time she was constructing her weapons to defeat the dragon, each quest took six or seven steps. And to defeat the dragon, you have to make four or five of these weapons. But by then, Daughter knew precisely where to go. The “portal” (basically a mounted Android tablet) showed her a crown and a rose and a star, and she’s off running around the hotel because she knows precisely where the crown, rose, and star are. All on opposite ends of the place. 

Even better, Wife and I could just sit there as she ran back and forth, checking in with us to excitedly tell us how close she was to the dragon. 

Did I mention there was a brewery? I call that a win. 

I’ll even overlook the whole war crimes thing.

But not the one drink policy.

New York with Family, the Personal Stuff

· July 12, 2022 · Musings · , , , , , , · One Comment

A few weeks ago, we took my eight-year-old daughter to New York for a trip originally planned before the pandemic. In my last post, I wrote about the touristy stuff we did, like Statue of Liberty and Coney Island. This post will delve more into the personal things, the people and oddities we encountered that you won’t exactly be able to book through a travel agent.

Concert Upgrade

While in New York and Boston, we did two concerts and a Broadway show. The show was Aladdin, which was neither great nor terrible. There isn’t much chance for surprise from a show that follows a 30-year-old movie beat by beat. Unlike the Frozen musical, which adds a song, “Hygge,” that might be better than any in the original movie, the only songs worth knowing in Aladdin are all from the movie. The magic carpet ride, however, was pretty fucking cool. Daughter was mostly “meh” throughout the first act, but when everything went dark and the carpet took off, she couldn’t lean forward enough.

The second concert we went to was Lake Street Dive in Boston. I’ll review it in my normal year-end post. Normal as in “every year up until 2019.” Pretty sure that’s the dictionary definition now. Normal (adj): occurring regularly prior to 2020.” We also spent a few days at the Great Wolf Lodge, an experience which will get its own addendum after I post these two New York writings, because I’ve got a LOT to say about that juvenile bacchanal. 

But the first concert we saw was Billy Joel, performing his 80th “straight” show in his Madison Square Garde “residency.” I don’t know how it qualifies as a residency if it’s only one show a month. I also question the designation of “80 straight,” for which they raised a banner to the rafters next to those of the Knicks and Rangers. After all, we originally had tickets for a Billy Joel concert at the Garden in June, 2020 that didn’t happen. Perhaps “residency with 80 straight concerts” is just a fancy way for Billy Joel to say, “I ain’t coming to your town, you’ve got to come to mine.”Not that I’m knocking it. If I could just roll out of bed once a month for my job, sign me up. On second thought, Billy Joel is over 70. I sure as shit hope I’m not still teaching then, even if it’s only once a month.

Billy Joel is known for giving away his front row seats. He got tired of looking into the audience and only seeing super richies who didn’t give a shit about the concert. Next time you watch a baseball game, check out how many people behind home plate aren’t watching the game. So Billy Joel sends his band members and/or security out into the crowds before the concert starts and hands out front row upgrades. That way, not only does he get a “real fan” who was willing to see him from a half-mile away, but he also gets a real fan who is super excited to no longer be seeing him from a half-mile away.

Evidently, now that it’s a well known practice, many fans go to the shows looking for the undercover ticket people. Then they loudly talk about how excited they are to have these Row ZZZ tickets to see their FAVORITE artist of ALL TIME. With signs to boot.

I was not one of those people. I was just a dumbass tourist trying to figure out how to get up to the nosebleeds of an arena I’d never been in before. We were supposed to be on the fourth floor (which, oddly, is beneath the third floor) behind the stage. The fourth floor, or I suppose I should call it the 400s section, only exists in one area of the arena, only accessible by one set of stairs. It isn’t by any arena entrance and isn’t referenced on many of the signs showing people where to go to find their more plentiful sections. 

“I think we’re up here,” I said to my family when we found a random staircase in the general section of the arena where I thought our seats were. I’m still not entirely sure the staircase was marked with the sections it led to.

I’m not entirely sure what the guy in the suit first said as Daughter barreled past him. It was something along the lines of “Why are you going up there?” Although it might’ve been more directed, like “You don’t wanna go up there” or “That’s the wrong direction.”

Still completely obtuse, I responded something like, “We’re in section 413,” showing him my phone.

“No, you don’t want those seats. Do you want to sit somewhere closer? “

At this point, I’m thinking the guy is trying to swindle us. Been to far too many ballgames where the “I need tickets” guy is 50 yards away from the “I’ve got tickets” guy. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I slowly realized that, wait a second, we’re already inside the arena. Not the smartest place to engage in ticket scalping when all your customers already have tickets. Like the T-Rex at the Natural History Museum waking up from a nap in the tar pits,  I remember we are at a Billy Joel concert, and Billy Joel is famous for…

Fortunately, Wife was much quicker in the uptake. “We’d love better seats. We came all the way from California and it’s her-,” puts hands on Daughter’s head,  “first concert. She loves Billy Joel.”

(Never mind that Daughter’s way more excited about Lake Street Dive in a couple of days and, while she does know most of his songs, is mainly just tagging along for this leg of the journey.)

“Are you okay with her being in the floor?” the guy asks. 

Are you fucking kidding me? Of fucking course she’s fine sitting on the fucking floor and if she isn’t, then she best be shutting the fuck up about it right the fuck now. We paid $100 for these tickets and were about to be sitting in $1000 seats. 

Remember that whole thing about wanting excited fans in the front row? I think my last comment is what he’s going for. 

Of course, once we had the tickets, we had no fucking clue where to go. We returned to the spot at the bottom of the stairs to ask the guy, but he was gone. They’ve got to keep moving. As soon as attendees see other random attendees being handed tickets, the swarm is on. After our exchange, we heard other people muttering, “No, it’s usually a lady, but this time it’s a guy in a suit. Look for a guy in a black suit.”

Eventually, three elevators and four or five confused ushers (“Those are floor seats. What are you doing up here in the nose bleeds?”), we finally made our way to the floor. The last usher knew the score. “Hey, you’ve been upgraded!” 

So anyway, on the left is a picture of where our original seats were. Third row, right above the Bud Light sign. The picture on the right is the view from our actual seats. Not bad for $110 on the secondary market, huh?

In the past, Billy Joel was criticized for having hot women in the front row. He explained that he gave the tickets to his band members and roadies to hand out to whoever they thought would be good for the front row and, well, guess who they want looking back at them? Not a couple approaching their fifties with an eight-year-old who kinda sorta knows some of the songs. 

I assume Billy Joel has adjusted who gets to hand out tickets, and presumably now that he’s playing the same spot every month, he’s switching up who hands out the goods. That’s why the other fans expected a woman. And clearly the guy who gave us the tickets wasn’t going to be staring into our bosoms for the whole concert. Billy Joel now has a daughter close to my daughter’s age, so maybe there are general instructions to find families with kids. Or maybe it’s just to look for the numbnuts who clearly have no idea what they’re doing. That fit us to a T. 

Either way, Daughter’s has a lifetime of concert disappointment in front of her after getting front row at Madison Square Garden for her first.

Hotel Bathroom

I’ve got to save a few column inches to discuss the bathroom at our hotel. Not that I have any clue what the fuck was going on in said bathroom. I assume it had something to do with New York being visited by many Europeans, so maybe it’s what happens when you translate bathroom into metric? I know it fucked up the Hubble Telescope. And I might’ve been able to see alien galaxies with the contraptions in there, if only I could figure out how to use them.

First up was Toilet 2.0. What’s that? You didn’t think toilets could grow sentient? 

Of course, it had a bidet. That’s to be expected if you cater to foreigners. I’ve dealt with them before, and by “dealt with them,” I mean I’ve largely ignored them because, thankfully I’ve never used a toilet that was bidet only, like many bathrooms give you no paper towel option, only air dryers. How did Covid not do away with those germ spreaders? Every person leaving a dryer-only bathroom is still shaking water from their hands. 

While I didn’t use this bidet, I did at least take note of it. It’s got your normal settings for back wash and front wash. The person requesting the front wash looks suspiciously female, which would seem to be a no-no these days. There’s also an option for soft or hard, which makes sense on the back end. Some visits require more aftermath, if you know what I mean. Although I don’t know how a bidet user knows which visit is which. I usually need to check the damage on the TP to know how the rest of the visit will go.

What strikes me most about this bidet is that you can program in two user profiles. What is there to do beyond front or back, hard or soft? I’m trying to think of the person who has a specific bidet method that requires a complex procession and progression through the four options, such that they must save the profile. Add to that the fact that this is a hotel, so you’re really only using this bidet for a few days. And he’s probably still wiping when he’s out and about. Oh, and he’s got someone else in this very hotel room that needs their own super secret, super special progression of H2O up the Wazoo.

More unusual than the programmable bidet, however, was that it appeared to be a self-cleaning toilet. Not in the manner of a self-cleaning oven or coffee maker, where you can set it to a cycle. More like a Hal-9000, Terminator gaining sentience style of self-cleaning. Every time one of us walked in the room, we would hear the water running. Not like a full flush or anything, but a trickle of water, a sprinkling, like a pre-lubrication of the bowl. 

At first we worried that it would run all night, but it seemed tied to movement. It ran even if we kept the light off. So now my toilet is taking notes of how often I’m visiting. Should I expect an introductory email from my friendly neighborhood proctologist by the time I return home? 

Oh yeah, and the seat was warm. At first I thought I was imaging it, but Wife and Daughter confirmed. It was like the car seat warmers, except that those can be turned on and off. The toilet seat was on ALL the time. Sometimes when I’m back from walking Central Park on a muggy June day in New York, I might want to deposit funds in the porcelain bank without scalding my sack.

Considering the damn thing had AI and enough energy to power a nuclear power plant, it isn’t surprising that this toilet came with an extensive list of rules and regulations, a standard list of dos and don’ts to avoid liability when it leaves the hotel room to kill Sarah Connor. 

The list took up the entire inside of the lid, and while I didn’t read all the terms and conditions before accepting (I had to pee, after all), I noted the first warning, which was “Don’t get water inside.” Um… it’s s toilet. Do… do they not know how toilets work? It takes some water to help alleviate the skid marks. Because even after an overnight of self cleaning, they were still noticeable. 

Next to the toilet was a shower that had not two, nor three, but FOUR shower heads. None of which were a standard shower head.  First up was a hand held wand, like an old game show microphone with the water coming out the sides. Then you had the overhead waterfall spigot. We’ve got one in our house and I don’t fucking get it. Who the hell wants the water to be dumping down on them from above? Such that,  if any of your skin gets merely a splash of water,  your entire body is also drenched. How does one lather up or apply shampoo?

The final two shower heads were in the wall, one about chest height and the other at my thigh. They were adjustable to a point, but their sprays were still only able to make it up to my chin and waist, respectively. The spray also maxed out maybe two feet from the wall, with a force equivalent to a water fountain. Not enough to rinse off my armpits or undercarriage, two spots I also couldn’t hit from the overhead. And the microphone came out with too much force for the giblets. 

There was only one handle to control all four spigots. Turn it a little bit and you’ll have both microphone and wall. Go too far and you’ll cycle back around to the waterfall. Another handle controlled the temperature, but it didn’t matter, because all four started out frigid. 

By day three I figured out how to conduct a masterpiece like I was a few blocks over at Carnegie Hall. Use the wall to get wet, use the microphone to rinse off. Try not to teabag the wall. Turn the microphone on to wet the hair, then off while I shampoo, then back on to rinse. Avoid the third rail of the waterfall faucet at all costs. 

Do I get a doctorate at Columbia for figuring all that out? 

Random Thoughts

1. Daughter doesn’t know what cigarettes are. Not sure if this is a sign that we’ve parented well or poorly. Maybe it says more about the times. She thinks she knows what cigarettes are, but what she’s actually smelling is marijuana. She doesn’t like the smell, and she doesn’t encounter it often, but now that I think of it, she probably encounters it a hell of a lot more often than cigarettes. I mean, who smokes tobacco anymore? Anyway, whenever she smelled weed (and trust me, it’s all over the place in New York, and that’s coming from a California guy), she’d plug her nose and whine, “Ugh, really? Why do people have to smoke cigarettes here, too?” I’ll be curious to see what she calls it if she ever smells a legitimate cigarette.

2. On our first day in New York, after checking into the 44th floor of our hotel, Daughter looked out the window at the 57th Street abomination. Not sure if you’ve seen it, but it looks like a damn pole. It only takes up maybe 100 feet by 100 feet of real estate, but then shoots up 90-odd floors. The top floors aren’t finished yet and are currently on the market for $180 million. What a bargain. Anyway, when she saw it, she asked, “Is that a skyscraper? I’ve heard of them, but I’ve never seen one.” Bear in mind she’s visited her aunt in San Francisco no fewer than twenty times. And did I mention we were on the 44th floor of our own hotel? Not sure what them kids are calling skyscrapers these days. 

3. She ended up being fine with the subway, but her only complaint was that it should be more like Disneyland. Shouldn’t everything? But what she was specifically looking for was the part of the Disneyland train where you go through the dinosaurs and Native American lands. I mean, what good is an underground train system that transports you miles closer to where you need to go for three dollars if it doesn’t also have some racist animatronics?

4. In my whole trip, three people jumped out at me that I needed to note. First was the lady wearing her Miller High Life t-shirt to see Aladdin. Look, I know it’s a show for kids and all, but it is a Broadway theater. She couldn’t upgraded to her nice MGD shirt? Second was the dude wearing a “Don’t California My Texas” t-shirt. At the Statue of Liberty. In New York, which is neither Texas nor California and probably doesn’t want us apply either of the latter two locations to their former. 

Third was the guitar dude at the Imagine mosaic in Central Park near the Dakota building where Lennon lived and was shot. Seems it used to be a quiet, contemplative spot, but the last two times I’ve been, it’s a spot for selfies and self-important douchebags who bust out their accoustics for poor renditions of Beatles songs that nobody requested, as if two of them being dead wasn’t bad enough. Anyway, when we walked by this time, Dude was playing “Get Back,” which… um… is a Paul McCartney song? Under normal circumstances I might not critique a guy for not knowing that John had nothing to do with the writing or performance of that song, but Peter Jackson just made a nine-hour documentary, that anybody with the audacity to think they deserve to play their own instrument at a John Lennon memorial ought to have seen, which showed “Get Back” being created from scratch while John was still sleeping off a heroin hangover. 

5. Last time I was in New York, I made sure to have pizza from Lombardi’s, the first pizzeria in America. This time I added a few more iconic food items: cheesecake from Junior’s and a hot dog from Nathan’s. I mistakenly thought Junior’s was the cheesecake referenced in Guys and Dolls, but apparently that’s Lindy’s, which has closed. Good thing, too, because the cheesecake was just kinda meh. It wasn’t bad, per se, but it didn’t have much flavor to it. It was sweeter than I expected, more cream than cheese. I’ve had plenty of better cheesecakes in my life.

The Nathan’s, on the other hand, was solid. I’ve had a ton of Nathan’s dogs at various establishments, but the ones at the original location are different. They grill the buns, which the ones in the mall don’t. They also seem longer and thinner than the ones you find in the store, and the griddling (not boiling or grilling) is uniform and thorough. My only regret was standing in the long line with the people who wanted burgers or who knew they served clams, before I realized there was a hot dog express lane where I could’ve got my dog and fries twenty minutes earlier.

6. I don’t mean to criticize these photo op guys in Times Square, but…
*Hulk needs to work out a bit. You wouldn’t like me when I get a beer belly.
*Spiderman, a secret identity does no good if you stand around with your mask off the whole time.
*Grodd is a DC property, not a Marvel property. Shouldn’t be hanging out with Avengers. Oh wait, is that supposed to be King Kong? Dude, he doesn’t even HAVE a comic book title.

7. I only found one sign to add to my collection. If you’ve followed my other travelbolg posts, you know I love signs that are a little too cutesy or on-the-nose. The sign on this particular trip that amused me was neither of those. In fact, the only thing I enjoyed about it was a missing letter. 

Sure, I know it’s really just a room. But am I alone in thinking a luggage storage ‘roo would be much better? I mean, it already has a pouch. And then when I’m finally able to get in my room, it can just hop them up there for me instead of making me do the schlepping my own shit after hours of walking around Central Park after minimal sleep on a red-eye. Imagine my disappointment when it was only a closet manned by a human being. I guess I’ll swap the tip for a smaller bill.

I probably need to visit Sydney to find an actual Luggage Storage ‘Roo.

New York with Family, Touristy Edition

· July 9, 2022 · Musings · , , , , · One Comment

Back in February of 2020, we had a summer trip booked to New York with Daughter. She was really into Billy Joel Radio at the time, and it seemed like all the good movies and video games take place there. Heck, she was playing (or trying to play) Marvel Lego Super Heroes, where Magneto literally makes the Statue of Liberty walk off her pedestal and attack the Lego heroes. Not sure how that works with said statue having no actual legs. But other that that minor squabble, the physics of a Lego video game are entirely spot on.

Somehow that vacation fell apart. Can’t put my finger on it. Did anything major happen in March or 2020?

Regardless, we finally decided that two years was long enough a wait. Billy Joel wasn’t getting any younger, there was a new favorite band playing the same weekend as him, and the time share was going to keep charging us “maintenance” fees whether we used the room or not. 

So in June of 2022, we finally made our 2020 trip to New York. I’ll break this into a couple of posts, one about the generic New York kinda touristy stuff, and then a second one about some of the experiences more personal to us. 

Masks

No true Travelblog this decade is complete without an update on when and where, and under which conditions, we must mask and/or show proof of vaccination and/or bend over and have a random stranger shove something up our ass. 

Wait, that last one isn’t a Covid precaution? Damn, I want my money back from that dude in the trench coat.

Most of New York is mask-free these days, with some notable exceptions. JFK Airport required masks, even though the planes didn’t anymore, so as we landed, the flight attendants told us to put our masks on before leaving the plane. Would’ve been a nice thing for them to tell us before we checked our baggage.  Fortunately I had one in my carry-on because we connected through Seattle, which I figured was second on the list of places most likely to still impose masks. Turns out we only needed the mask to get off the plane. Once in the terminal, many people weren’t wearing masks and nobody bothered to enforce it. And I’m not talking pulled down in chin diaper fashion, I mean no sign of cloth anywhere near their face. The situation was similar in the subways. Masks are required, but only about fifty percent complied and nobody gave a shit. 

Where we had to mask the longest was the American Museum of Natural History. We went there on our first day, before we were even able to check into our hotel and shower. So the other people in the museum were probably happy to be wearing masks. The museum was one of the first places on our go-to list because we’d made Daughter watch the Night at the Museum movies as prep, so she was jazzed to go. Her favorite movie was the sequel, which took place at the Smithsonian, but she still couldn’t wait to see the statue of President Robin Williams. Unfortunately, the one on horseback has been removed because it had Native Americans in it. I was also worried she wouldn’t be able to find Sacajawea, who features prominently in the movies., but we finally found her tucked away in the back of the fourth floor. Unfortunately, no Egyptian pharaoh or magical tablet that brings them all to life. Daughter was pissed.

We also had to wear a mask en route to the Statue of Liberty, but only for the one airport-style security room. Then the masks came back off. I think we had to wear them in the Statue of Liberty museum, as well. Because, you know, liberty! Ironically, the one other place where we were harangued about wearing a mask was the Hamilton store. Similar to the Statue, Hamilton is an endearing symbol of standing up to an arbitrary, overreaching government…

After New York, we went on to Boston, where masks were less mandated but more prominent. Imagine that, people wearing masks only out of concern for their fellow humans. Almost as if, with freedom and liberty ought to also come respect and responsibility. Ha ha, jk. This is ‘Murica, where freedom means I don’t gotta do shit while everybody else needs to kowtow to whatever made up offense I’m feigning this week.

Taxi in from Airport

Last time in New York, when it was just we adults, we took the subway in from JFK. Easy enough. But arriving after a red-eye from the west coast during morning commute, with an eight-year-old not accustomed to mass transit, we figured we’d splurge for a taxi. It was the first of many “We haven’t vacayed in three years” splurges over the next six days.

In retrospect, maybe not the best decision from a timing perspective. Holy crap, that morning commute is brutal. I thought nobody drove in New York? Those streets and freeways (sorry, “turnpikes,” cause they ain’t free) were bumper to bumper! It took us well over an hour to get to midtown from JFK. It was a half hour before we realized that the tiny windows on the side of the minivan/prison-transport hybrid could open. That was a blessing, because it’d been 24 hours since we showered and the Plexiglass partition was making the environment moist.

At first I thought a $52 fixed fare seemed a bit steep, but it ended up a blessing. If we paid normal taxi “idling time” surcharges, it would’ve been in the triple digits. A few days later, I checked Uber to Coney Island, which is a little bit farther than the airport, and it would’ve been $80. Plus that wasn’t during morning commute, which I’m guessing would’ve been prime surge time. So yeah, $52 was a screaming deal. 

We did get two “congestion charges” of $2.50 each, added at the thirty and sixty minute marks. Plus a six dollar charge going through one of the tunnels. But how often do you ride in a taxi for over an hour and add less than $10 to the fare?

I kinda felt bad for the driver. Sure, we tipped him 20%, but that still only came out to $16, which might not even be minimum wage in New York City. Hopefully he hung around Manhattan and picked up a bunch of $20 fares in rapid succession. 

Next time I’ll splurge the $3 for a subway ride and all those commuters can just deal with my luggage. 

Statue of Liberty

When I went to New York with Wife in 2018, we intentionally skipped some of the more kid-friendly attractions, like Coney Island and the Statue of Liberty, in favor of stuff like the 9/11 Memorial and Avenue Q, figuring we’d be bringing Daughter back with us at some point. So this time we did all the stuff that she’ll roll her eyes at when she’s a teenager. 

I did the Statue once on my first trip to New York in the 1990s. Back then you could go up into the crown, which I did. When my mom first visited in the 1950s, you could still go up to the torch. Now you can’t do either. Turns out the Statue of Liberty is a great metaphor for the lives and restrictions of Boomers vs. Gen X vs. Gen Z, or whatever the hell they’ll call Daughter’s generation. Can’t wait to have my grandkids on my knee some day, while looking at the Statue from the boat, the closest we’re able to get by that time, regaling them with stories about lawn darts.

Allegedly they’re going to bring back crown access at some point, but I can’t find reasoning for shutting down in the first place. It doesn’t seem to be a Covid restriction, since you’re still allowed in the pedestal which necessitates many people in small confines. I don’t think it’s a remnant of 9/11, per se, but I think since then, they’re looking for any and every excuse to shut it down. They’re doing some construction refurbishment on the former military fort under the pedestal. Maybe that’s their excuse. Although, again, pedestal access would be just as damage to the base as going to the crown. Then again, they’re also drastically limiting pedestal access – it was sold out for all three days we were there. That’s what happens when it only costs thirty cents more than regular ol’ island access.

At least we took the correct ferry. We almost got duped into the “Liberty Cruise” from one of those hop-on/hop-off busses. The wording is very questionable, claiming to be the only bus tour with “close up” views of the Statue. Complete with a “live audio tour.” And a “Statue Selfie Spot.” Good thing yours truly considers himself well versed in the English language. I became skeptical that the boat tour started over near the Brooklyn Bridge, not Battery Park, and if you look closely at the map, it doesn’t actually dock at the island. Once I saw how the dock is actually run, there’s no way they could have more than one operating companies. We were on the bus when a whole bunch of excited people got off to go “see the Statue.” Totally wish I could’ve been on the bus that collects a bunch of pissed off patrons afterward.

If we wanted a “close up” look, we also could’ve taken a helicopter. Not that I saw any advertisements for that. They don’t cater to the TKTS crowd. But I saw a heck of a lot of them flying around. Many of them were black, a detail I might not have noticed with my vision topping out at about ten yards. But Daughter noticed. “Look, it’s another black helicopter. There sure are a lot of black helicopters flying around the Statue.” 

Of course there are. The real question is: government? Or aliens?

Turns out there’s an even better way to get up close. Walking around the island is kinda groovy. 

The Statue is, who woulda guessed it, majestic and beautiful. I don’t think I bothered to look up in awe much back when my primary goal was to climb upher insides. Probably a metaphor for a lot of my twenties. But when you’re staring out from the crown, all you’re see is Manhattan, a view you can find from many locations. Including a “Liberty Cruise.” But this shot can only be found in one spot:

The audio tour has some great info, too. Sure, a lot of it I already knew because I’ve taught U.S. History many times. So I only yawned while Wife and Daughter were fascinated about Pulitzer’s fundraising drive and Gustave Eiffel building the superstructure ten years before he repeated the process with a minor tower in Paris you’ve probably never heard of.

But all the scientific and construction stuff was news to me. Turns out the outer “skin” of copper is only the thickness of two pennies. The individual sheets could be bent to conform to Eiffel’s structure. If you look close enough, you can see the seams between one plate and the next. Impressive, to be sure, but all I could think is that’s an awful lot of coaxial cable. I mean, aren’t people stealing catalytic converters for a couple ounces of copper? Liberty’s got 62,000 pounds!

I’m envisioning a heist story. Kinda like Die Hard, the assumption will be that the criminals are storming the Statue for terrorism reasons, but the twist will be that they’re just trying to take off her dress. And face.

I think I just figured out why they won’t let us in the crown anymore. Bring a file and you can buy your own Liberty Cruise.

Coney Island

The other child-friendly locale we skipped last time was Coney Island. Or I guess we didn’t “skip” it, so much as didn’t give it much of a thought. We “skipped” the Empire State Building, meaning we went past it, discussed going in, but decided to move on. If you aren’t partaking in Coney Island, being an hour-plus trip on the subway, it’s easier to just ignore it.

I assumed Coney Island would be kinda sleepy, kinda sleazy. And yeah… As long as you’re expectation is a bastardized love-child of a Six Flags and a county fair, you’ll be fine. Honestly, the midway was fun. The rides were fine. The only thing that this SoCal-raised guy found truly beneath me was what they passed off as a beach. So maybe they should just move it to the Upper East Side.

The rides were expensive, but that’s to be expected when it isn’t one-ticket-for-all access. Most of the rides worth riding were in the eight to ten dollar range, depending on what bulk you bought the tickets. Considering the rides last, on average, a quarter to a third of the time a Disneyland ride lasts, it doesn’t take long for the trip to cost in the Disneyland range. I think Daughter and I rode six rides each, so that’s over $100.

It was only supposed to be five rides each, but we got duped into the “Liberty Cruise” scam of Coney Island. There are two companies that run the amusement parks, but they own random lots that aren’t always adjacent. So you’re in Luna Park, but to get to another Luna ride, you have to walk through Deno’s, where you’ll have to buy a different ticket card. Overall. we did a pretty good job of purchasing tickets a la carte (a.k.a. more expensively), for specific rides we could see nearby, to make sure we didn’t waste money. 

Until we didn’t.

One of the biggest rides, viewable from blocks away and one of the first you see when exiting the subway, is called the Thunderbolt. It goes straight up, then straight down. Sign me up. It’s a Luna Park property, although there’s nothing on the ride that designates it as such. Nor was it referenced at the other Luna Park a few blocks away, where we rode a painful ride that lays you down flat and then cracks your back more than a chiropractor, but not as therapeutic. Reminds me of the signs I saw at a water slide. Don’t go on if you have back or neck problems. What do you mean? I’m using this water slide to FIX my back and neck problems.

Deno’s also has a ride called the Thunderbolt. Not that I rode it. I don’t even know if I saw it. I only know they have a Thunderbolt because the sign with ticket prices, in plain view of the legit Thunderbolt, said that the I could buy ten tickets to ride the Thunderbolt. A block away, when the Thunderbolt employee told me my tickets wouldn’t work, I explained where I bought them and they said, “Yeah, that happens a lot.” Kinda weird in a city renowned for an overly aggressive government that likes to regulate what size soda you can get. 

We didn’t go to the Freak Show. I didn’t even notice it until we were on our way back to the subway. That’s another thing I’m surprised is still allowed in twenty-first century NYC. You can’t call her a bearded woman anymore, she’s a bearded birthing human. Unless she can’t give birth. And to be fair, the sign didn’t specify bearded women, it only listed “Weird Women,” which is kinda worse. I mean, I’m far from uber-woke, but who the fuck are the proprietors to designate what is weird and, by extension, what is normal. They run a business at Coney Island, for chrissakes. I don’t think I saw a normal person the entire time I was there, present company included. 

The one Coney Island attraction we didn’t partake was the only fucking one I wanted to do in the first place, which was the Cyclone. It’s the original wooden roller coaster that’s been there for almost one hundred years. It’s a Luna Park property, but we actually had the correct tickets that time. The problem came down to weights and measures. The ticket lady didn’t want to let us get in line until after she’d measured Daughter to ensure she was 54 inches. She failed.

I’m not saying, for sure, that Daughter is at the magical height. Its damn close, but I feel like she hit 54 at all the other measuring spots. But the measuring stick they used here wasn’t a permanent fixture, but a pole they lugged out of the ticket booth and held up next to the child being measured. From my vantage point, it appeared the sidewalk was on an uphill slant. Well, not really uphill, more 95-year-old heaving pavement. They put the stick on the uphill side of her and she ended up being just under it. It was close. Kinda like the when the NFL brings the chains out to measure first down, despite having not placed the ball at the correct forward progress. And I couldn’t ask for video replay to confirm the stick wasn’t on level ground.

I was about to point this out, but figured the most likely result would be they take my money and still not let her on when the numbnut at the front of the line was just at inept at measuring children as the one at the end of the line. So I guess I have to wait until next time to ride the Cyclone. Not sure if there’ll ever be a next time I visit Coney Island, but whatever. It’s been there for ninety-five years, so maybe when I have grandkids. Not that they’ll be tall enough to ride.

Come back next week to hear about our hotel bathroom, marijuana, the most awesome thing that can happen at a Billy Joel concert.

Maui Trip, Part 3

· April 15, 2022 · Musings · , , , · No Comments

Wrapping up my quick jaunt to Maui. This was my third trip to the islands, but first time to Maui. I posted earlier about things like luaus and booze and Covid restrictions. Read on for more thoughts, like ziplines, pancakes, and airport bathrooms.

Businesses: Might as well make this a true TravelBlog and highlight a few businesses you should frequent if you’re there. No, you don’t get a discount. Nor do I get any kickbacks. I don’t know if it makes these more or less legitimate. Whatever. I liked them and I’d like them to still be in business should I ever make it back.

*Camp Maui Zipline: There are a few zipline companies in Maui. The one we did was at Camp Maui, just outside of the town of Haiku. Haiku, a small town. Barely even on a map. Old school Hawaii. (See what I did there?)

The zipline company is on an old World War II base, and they claim to have a “museum” of stuff unearthed while digging out the course. Don’t go out of your way for it, though, as it’s really just a couple planes and jeeps in a tent. Then again, the stupid Pearl Harbor exhibit is just a couple stupid ships that you’re not even allowed to walk on because they’re under water. Who the hell puts ships under water? I want my money back.

This is kinda cool, hanging on the walls of the museum, although clearly ripped off from the Pearl Harbor museum. Still, props to FDR for changing “world history” to “infamy.” Not even the first result on thesaurus.com. After the past two presidents, I kinda forgot we used to elect leaders who didn’t fumble through the English language.

To add to the lackluster “museum,” the ziplines are pretty much run of the mill, some barely dropping enough altitude to let gravity do its work. They had to throw Daughter like a damn fastball or else she would’ve come to rest smack dab in the middle. I guess I’m not doing a great job of selling it, but once she asked, they put enough spin on her to make it into a curveball.

That’s because the staff, at least the ones we encountered, made it fun as hell. They were consummate professionals, despite exuding full hang-loose loadie personas. In a weird way, they made the safety elements cool. When listing all the dos and don’ts, a guy who told us to call him Loki started with “Don’t trust your farts.” Then, when reviewing, he asked the most important rule. Safety first? Have fun? “I mean, those are all important,” he said, “but I think I said don’t trust your farts first.” He turns to his co-guide. “Did I forget to tell them that?”

At one point, when they had to scooch past us on a platform (because they had us all go up the ladder first, then they had to get past us to the zipline), they actually snapped their safeties onto each of us as they passed. I was already attached to the line, so if they slipped and fell as they passed me, we both would’ve gone plummeting off the platform, but we’d only go as far as my rope allowed. Guessing it would be easy to half-ass that part on a course they’ve been on thousands of times. I wouldn’t have noticed that they were unattached for the three steps it took to get past us, but I noticed (in a good way) that they clipped onto me. Daughter might’ve worried that made them look like the “only stupid instructor at the zipline.” 

But once everything was secure and on the actual zipline, they encouraged hands free, spinning, leaning back. Loki (turns out his real name was Danny, but he didn’t reveal that until the end. Even when you know, you don’t call Superman “Clark”) even did a forward flip off the platform one time, resulting in a barrel roll for the first half of the zip. I’m sure they would’ve preferred having a non-stop line of fit twenty-somethings, but they were totally at ease around a bunch of kids. I doubt either of the guys have children of their own, but their repertoire of dad jokes put this dad to shame. But then you see them working the brakes and coming halfway back up the zipline to collect the lightweight who didn’t quite make it, and they’re back to being caring professionals. 

My favorite was one of those difficult stretches where one guide threw my daughter extra hard to get her across. Right after the kid before her only made it partway and Loki had to yank himself uphill to retrieve him. Unlike the other kid, Daughter made it all the way across, but she was totally out of gas. Loki caught her, snapped one of his lines to her then “pretended” to forget about her and turn around when she wasn’t on her feet yet. All of our eyes grew wide as she started to go back up the zipline, thinking he was going to have to go out and get her anyway, when the line caught her after only a foot or two. Then he plays the “Oh, there you are!” and pulls on the line to bring her closer. 

Great time, indeed. If you find yourself there, ask for Loki.

*Surfing Goat Dairy: Another jaunt up into the hinterlands, this time to look at goats. And eat cheese. The goats were for Daughter, the cheese was for us. 

To be honest, the tour was kinda meh. You get to feed some goats. A ton of female goats plus a handful of males who, in typical dude fashion, try to muscle in with an “Are you gonna eat that?” At first I found the sex disparity odd, but then I remembered that guys don’t lactate. Best we’d get from male goats is some From’Undah Cheese. You’d think that, being a man, that bit of biology wouldn’t escape my notice so readily.

The males are only there to make the ladies pregnant to get the milk, and let me tell ya, they were gettin’ it DONE! Holy crap, the whole damn farm was pregnant. One of them looked either ready to burst, or else she was having quadruplets. The only ones not pregnant were those who recently birthed. There were six baby goats who had been born within the past week, including a baby just born that morning. Four hours old and she could already walk. I’m belatedly disappointed in Daughter for taking a year to figure it out. So much for humanity being the echelon of evolution. Then again, Daughter can now add two triple-digit numbers together while the adult goat peed on his beard to improve his sexual attractiveness. 

The cheese was decadent, so clearly Pee-Beard is doing something right. They had hard cheese and soft cheese. “Ping Pong Balls” swimming in garlic oil, a creamy Tahitian lime blend. And I don’t know which goat mixed some horseradish into her teat, but I appreciate the effort.

-Slappy Cakes: You won’t find this one advertised in your hotel lobby. No Viator busses shipping hundreds of blue-hairs to a catamaran to enjoy the local breakfast place. There was still a line out the door.

Once upon a time, on an obscure corner heading into the city of Lahaina, stood a Korean BBQ. One of those restaurants where you cook your own food on a hot plate in the center of your table, a mixture of Japanese teppanyaki and fondue. Unfortunately for that Korean place, the location isn’t overly convenient and, well, who the hell wants to cook for themselves when they go out? Your kitchen is a hell of a lot cheaper. 

Fortunately, someone took over the spot and, instead of gutting and revamping the whole thing, pondered if there was something else customers might enjoy cooking on a hot griddle. 

Sure, I can make pancakes back at home, too, but the batter doesn’t come in a snazzy squeeze bottle. And, oh yeah, I’m not at home and the hotel doesn’t have a stove top. 

So yeah, Slappy Cakes for the win. They’ve got three flavors of pancake batter, but I think one of them is gluten free, so that doesn’t really count. We ordered one tube of buttermilk and one of chocolate. I really wanted to try the red velvet batter that was on the daily special menu, but thought that would be too much pancake. At the time, I believed we’d make another sojourn to the Slappy Cakes. Unfortunately, we never made it back, so the red velvet remains a mystery.

The tubes come with a tapered spout. You have to squeeze a fair amount to get it out, not because the batter’s thick, but because the nozzle’s pretty small. This caters to a bit of an artistic flair. Even moreso when you get two flavors with different colors. Instead of a mon-colored Mickey Mouse, you can make the ears and chin in chocolate, but fill in the eyes with buttermilk. If only I had a little deep red, I don’t know, velvety color to throw in for accent.

You also get toppings. We opted for five, but probably could’ve gone with three, because they fill those dishes up. Fortunately, some of our toppings were crumbled bacon, macadamia nuts, and blueberries, so we could just eat them sans pancake. Next time, I’ll order fewer toppings and get that red velvet batter. I know it was listed as a “daily special,” but the frayed sheet of paper implied this wasn’t its first go-around. I also won’t get the shredded coconut next time, as they provide a coconut syrup free of charge, which was far more scrumptious than the shredded coconut.

They specify that the toppings are only supposed to go on AFTER the pancakes have cooked. Uh huh, sure. I know how insurance works. But bacon cooked into the pancake is a heck of a lot better than on top. You don’t get chocolate chips on top of your ice cream, do you?

The good news is Slappy Cakes doesn’t appear likely to follow the path of its Korean forebear. We got there at 6:55 am (five minutes before they open, because we went on our first morning, when our bodies were still on West Coast time), and the line was already ten deep. It was even longer when we left around 8:00. 

The price was affordable, too. Other than having to fly to Maui. Maybe they’ll franchise on the mainland some day, where West Coast time is behind everybody else, not ahead.

Signs, Signs, Everywhere There’s Signs

If you’ve followed some of my other trips, you know I can’t resist a good sign. Only a couple jumped out on this trip, but they’re doozies.

This guy’s got more problems than a minor traffic infraction. I can’t tell if he’s prisoner number 08 or if he blew a .08. I highly doubt either of those are accurate statements. Sure, Hawaii’s gotta be mostly peaceful, but I think they’ve had more than eight prisoners. Shit, before France even had forensics, they made it all they way up to 2460… ooooooooone. (How does one phonetically write out a long lead into the number 1? Wwwwwoooooon? But that’s a different word.)

As for the .08, oh hell no. The baggy eyes, the frazzled hair, the polo that hasn’t seen a laundry room in a week. That guy’s been on a weekend-long bender, at least. Maybe he’s on day 08 of ingesting all his calories through alcohol.

More importantly, why is he allowed to keep his beer with him when he goes to jail? Hey Hawaii, if you have a problem with drinking and driving, maybe you need to take away part of the incentive. Even if it’s empty, as it might be based on the fact that he’s partially crushing it, that’s still a level of dependency the public safety system shouldn’t be encouraging. He’s snuggling that empty can like my daughter with a stuffed animal at night. 

Furthermore, how long did it take them to book him? That’s got to be some flat beer. Unless it’s sugar, because on further glance, that doesn’t really look like any alcohol container I’ve ever seen. It could be a pull tab, but that means this guy’s got a time machine, and if movies have taught us anything, it’s that you don’t throw the time traveler in jail because he’s probably here to save all of humanity. And back in his day, .08 wasn’t considered “drunk,” it was considered “breakfast.”

No, I’m back to it being a sugar shaker. This guy’s got more problems than we can possibly imagine. Shame on the state of Hawaii for throwing him into the drunk tank. They’ll only have themselves to blame when he fails to prevent the forthcoming time-pocalypse.

Then we have this beaut, a bathroom, or maybe a conference room, next to the doozy of a TSA checkpoint line. I’m sure a lot of people fly out of Maui, but shouldn’t that give them more experience at ushering us through? Vegas seems to have things dialed, except maybe on a Sunday evening. We were flying out on a Friday morning, when most people should be flying into Hawaii, not out.

We’d heard horror stories about the agricultural checkpoint, but that was a well-oiled machine compared to TSA. I don’t understand their fear of taking agriculture out of the state. I’d think the worry would be bringing in foreign pests would supersede an errant pineapple boarding an airplane.

At least the long line gave me time to contemplate what’s going on inside this bathroom.

Fonzie’s office was, as we all know, inside the men’s bathroom at Arnold’s. But most of his office meetings didn’t take longer than a quick palaver about who does, and does not, deserve to “sit on it.” Nary a breakout session in sight.

Do the meetings inside this particular “conference room” provide continental breakfast or am I supposed to dine before I arrive? I’m a little worried at the placement of that coffee urn. I’ve never encountered asparagus-flavored creamer before. Anything like hazelnut?

I know the sign clearly says it’s for conference room use ONLY, but is it okay if I use it as a bathroom? Or do I have to go to a nearby room, with maybe some folding chairs and an accordion wall, to take a dump? Because I’ve got a keynote address brewing, ready to trumpet out among the attendees. I don’t even need a microphone.

But I am going to need to scan your badge.

Okay, enough with the fun and frivolity. I’m sure the sign means the bathroom is only to be used by people attending a conference in a nearby conference room. It’s not for us plebs doing the pee-pee dance as the TSA cycle through travelers with a pace even the DMV finds offensive. Hopefully the “no liquids” rule doesn’t apply to my bladder. High grade explosives, indeed.

Even the official story doesn’t make sense, however. Who has a meeting at the airport? The hotel next to the airport, sure, but the last thing I want while I’m discussing the application of the newest technology on the whatsit and the best contemporary practices of whosit, is to watch a steady stream of of grumpy erstwhile vacationers being anally probed by government bureaucrats. Most conference attendees already feel that way, they don’t need the metaphor to be acted out. 

Then again, that sunburnt guy in the TSA line might pass out if he’s touched. Let’s go to the bathroom and watch the shitshow.

Final Thoughts:

I’ve been to the Big Island twice, once as a child and once as an adult. I’ve done Oahu, but it was literally back in the Reagan Administration. The luau had a kissing line, where everybody lined up to be groped by random strangers. Can’t imagine why they stopped that sexual harassment waiting to happen.

This was my first trip to Maui. My main takeaway is that Maui is very touristy. The world of the resorts isn’t really tied to any sense of reality, much less the island. I’m sure Oahu is the same way, but at least in Oahu (from what I remember), there’s more of an urban environment. The resorts might be on the beach, but they’re still tied into the city. In Maui, the cities are separate.

The Big Island, to me, feels more like “Hawaii.” Lots of different things to see there. You can visit a macadamia nut farm or a coffee plantation, find a waterfall hike, or head into cities, from tiny to middling, each with certain personalities. Allegedly you can do similar things on the “Road to Hana,” which I didn’t do, but on the Big Island, those experiences aren’t isolated on the other damn side of the island, requiring a full day to get to. We didn’t do the Road because we have a seven-year-old and all anyone ever says about it are “Beautiful, but long.” I could never even figure out if there was anything to DO in Hana once you get there, or if you end up driving four hours in heavy traffic for the sole purpose of turning around and driving back. Like the Line Ride in that Simpsons episode.

When I went to the Big Island a few years ago, I had lots of things to say about the Hawaiian language and its lack of consonants. It’s not like people are walking around conversing in Hawaiian, but there’s a conscious attempt to keep it alive. On Maui, I never heard or saw the language much, aside from city names and an occasional “In Hawaiian, ona means drunk, and we hope you get very ona tonight.” At fifteen bucks a drink.

I’m told Maui is “not what it used to be,” that it “used to be a quaint little something or other.” I’m also told that, after shutting themselves off from the rest of the world for 18 months, Maui is now interested in diversifying their economy away from 90% tourism. Maybe they should’ve thought of that before they dug up all the pineapple plants and sugar cane, but meh. We saw a fair number of fruit trees, especially citrus, growing where the sugar cane used to be, but the trees were still tiny. By the time they’ve grown, they’ll be replacing them all with marijuana.

My father-in-law, who has been going to the same time share since he bought it in the 1980s (when it was the “only one in Kaanapali”) insists that the Big Island is now where Maui was thirty years ago. I often say the same thing about Amador County wineries vis-a-vis Napa. If that’s the case, then yuck. I guess I better enjoy the Big Island while I can, then get my ass a timeshare on Kawai before it turns into Vegas.

Maui Trip, Part 2

· April 9, 2022 · Musings · , , , , , , , , , · One Comment

Welcome back. Part Two of my Maui trip is more about me and my family than the actual island, then I’ll wrap it up next week with some business reviews and final thoughts.

Alcohol

Most of my Maui tweets tweets involved the various alcohol policies at our hotel. Rules and regulations, pricing, what have you. But mainly the pricing. Take some resort lifestyle and runaway inflation, add in the fact that I’m not quite the bar hopper I once was, but damn!, those prices.

I love me some pina colada, but in ninety percent of social circumstances, I’m not likely to order one. Call it toxic masculinity, call it not wanting to be the asshole who orders a blended drink. Regardless, when I’m on a cruise ship or somewhere tropical, give me an umbrella drink, stat! But holy crap, fourteen dollars? They literally grow pineapples and coconuts right here on the damn island, or at least they used to, so it should be cheaper. I wanted to throw out the Pulp Fiction line about putting bourbon in it, but at at this point, I’d sell a testicle to get a $5 milkshake. 

Of course, they don’t use those pineapples and coconuts that should be in abundance on the island. Nor do they make a proper pina colada with coconut liquor. It’s just that Island Oasis pre-mix, that probably costs less than $14 for an entire carton of at Costco, and pour in some rum. Not that this stopped me from buying it. It just increased my bitching.

Last time I was in Hawaii, I gravitated toward those lava flow drinks, which are pina coladas with strawberry puree. At the same price, why wouldn’t I buy the one with the extra yummy? Except my hotel made a couple faux pas to lessen the lava flow desirability. 

First, they put banana in it. Blech. Banana is such a bullshit bully when it comes to smoothies. It deadens all the other flavors, making everything a banana* (with special guest star, raspberry) smoothie. I’ll never understand why Jamba Juice puts it in ninety percent of their drinks. One place we went, either Hula Grill or Cheeseburger in Paradise because those are the only places Daughter allowed meals to occur) threw in a mango instead of a banana. I probably coulda gotten on board with that. Unfortunately, wherever it was, I couldn’t just charge it to the room, so I opted for beer. 

The other Lava Flow misstep was not with the lava flow itself, but with the pina colada, which came with a floater of dark rum. I always thought of floaters as superfluous. Great if you want to light your Dr. Pepper on fire, but why not just throw an extra shot in the actual drink? Like separating the yolk from the white, even though they’re all going into the waffles anyway. This aversion is alleviated in a frozen drink, however, because the floater actually stays as a floater. And my first response when sipping from this pina colada was, damn, it doesn’t have a lot of pina colada taste to it. Tons of rum, though. The second half of the drink, after the two lifeforms had merged,  tasted more like a strong pina colada, which makes papa happy. In later incarnations, I drove the straw deep for the first suck, getting full pineapple and coconut, before heading back to the rum.

Both these drinks, mind you, cost the same fourteen dollars. So for the same price, I can either add either a banana and strawberry, or an extra shot of booze, to my pina colada. That banana bully has graduated to stealing my lunch money. If it was a nine dollar drink, it might be a tossup, but if I’m paying double digits, I’m milking every ounce of booze I can.

The beer, on the other hand, only cost seven dollars for a 12-ounce pour. That seems amazingly moderate, commensurate with what I pay on the mainland. In Sacramento, we have a minor league baseball park that charges more than ten bucks. Am I just out of the loop? Has inflation hit mixed drinks harder than beer? Is there so much microbrew competition now that you can’t charge too much? As opposed to Island Oasis, which has a monopoly.

The beer prices were so reasonable that I refused to order it during happy hour, which was two dollars off each drink. A $12 pina colada becomes marginally approachable. A $5 draft beer seems like overkill.

Said happy hour happened twice each day, both seemingly tied to the pool. The first one happened right when the bar opened, at 10:00 am. I applaud a place that encourages you to get your drink on as early as possible. As a bonus, you can model your business on people making poor decisions. How else to explain all the people spending money for those enclosures on the beach, then promptly falling asleep in them? Sure, it’s a lanai while you’re looking at Lanai, but once you’re there, you’re trapped. Play on the beach or in the water and you’re wasting your money. So instead they nap, spending a hell of a lot of money to do what the homeless people in San Diego do for free. Those people need a couple mai tais at 10 am. For twelve dollars instead of the normal fourteen.

It’s a lanai… looking out at Lanai

Ten o’clock was also the time the water slide opened. At first I thought this was to encourage people to behave badly. But after riding the water slide a couple times, I realized it wasn’t made for anyone in the 200-pound range. I damn near got stuck twice on a ten foot slide. So maybe they both start at the same time to give so we can shuffle our kids off while we go get a damn drink.

The second happy hour was the more standard one, from 4:00 to 5:00, coinciding with the closing of the water slide. It was a great breakaway for those of us who just spent hours feigning excitement over our children’s umpteenth slide down. What’s that sweetie? Did I see the slight change in your body position? Of course I did. That made all the difference, didn’t it?

The problem is that once the water slide is closed, we’re back to parenting again. Not to mention showers and dinner plans. Throw in the fact that for most of us it’s anywhere from 7:00-10:00 on the internal clock (those people in the lanai are snoring away for different reasons now), and it wasn’t surprising that the second happy hour had less partakers. Like a real happy hour.

The pool bar closed at 7:00 pm. And I mean CLOSED. I was grilling hot dogs nearby and wondered if I should get a drink (a beer, since it was not happy hour) to drink while grilling or to take back to my room with the hot dogs to consume with dinner? I chose poorly, because when I swung by the bar on the way back to my room, the bartender informed me they closed at 7:00. I checked my watch and it was, I shit you not, 7:02.

Daughter. 

Sometimes I forget that my daughter isn’t four years old anymore. Other times I have to remind myself she’s not a teenager yet. Occasionally, she loses track of these factoids, too.

Things she used to be afraid of, she’s now fine with. Things that were once of no concern now inspire existential dread. Her food palate seems to be going in all directions. In some instances, she’s more interested in new flavors, while at other times she’s regressing from loving broccoli to tolerating it. Last trip to Maui, she allegedly fell in love with fish & chips. That lasted for all of a month or so before she started hating it, so it was back to the usual mac & cheese/chicken strip restaurant fare. Nothing worse than paying ten bucks for the same box of Kraft dinner we can cook at home for ninety cents. 

This trip, she was on a cheeseburger kick, despite being iffy on them back home. For the first half of the week, she devoured those things. On our first trip to Cheeseburger in Paradise, which she was upset to discover wasn’t associated with Jimmy Buffett (yeah, I’ve got THAT kid), and she mauled that entire burger and some of her fries. Against our wishes, we returned a couple days later. She ordered the same thing, this time with avocado on top, and a side of fruit in lieu of the fries. She proceeded to eat the avocado, the bun, and the strawberries, but not the pineapple. Never touched the meat and/or cheese. All things considered, I shouldn’t criticize a kid who eats avocado and strawberry, but seriously kid, there were other things on the menu. You didn’t bother looking. And I don’t know where this new aversion to pineapple came from. She always loved it before. Perhaps she associates it with coconut, which she’s never liked. 

Then again, if she doesn’t drink pina coladas, would she associate the two? 

She loves putting the “Do Not Disturb” sign on our door, but she only wants to do it when we’re away from the room. That way, people won’t be knocking forever, wondering why we aren’t coming to the door. But while we’re in the room, then everybody’s welcome. I don’t know who she expects to come by. Probably a kidnapper. And we wouldn’t want him to waste his time. Since housekeeping during one’s stay is quickly becoming a thing of the past, it wasn’t much of an issue. Not that they’ve had the “Request Maid Service” sign for years. It kinda feels like now’s a good time to bring that one back, only to be used as necessary.

This trip was the first time I saw the beginnings of that persnickety social bullshit that is undoubtedly coming in shit-tons over the next decade. She has become aware that other people might notice and have opinions about her. Even worse, it happened at the pool and the beach, so my next Maui trip will include her lying around on a chaise like my sister used to do for her entire teenage existence. 

While we no longer fear Daughter sinking to the bottom each time she swims, she’s not exactly Michael Phelps. Even a normal jaunt into the pool requires a parent on hand. If for our sanity if not entirely for her safety. She can make it to the side of the pool on her own, but doesn’t exactly know when it’s a good idea to head in that direction. With the amount of excess energy she expends over each ounce of water, if one of us were not with her, she’d swallow half the pool by the time she made it there. Even when she’s “treading water,” (or sinking then bouncing back up) she doesn’t realize the purpose is to keep the water out of her mouth. Close your fucking mouth, kid!

So when it came to swimming in the ocean, we mandated some stricter guidelines on the off chance a current separates us or a wave changes the depth quickly. Wife wanted her to take an inflatable floatie out, but I said life preserver. While I don’t think either of us intended to combine the two, in Daughter’s mind this morphed into quite the hypothetical visual. Aside from the fact that it might be physically impossible, I can kinda see where she might have a problem with fitting the life jacket into the hole of the inflatable duck. Traipsing out amongst beachgoers with seventy-five layers of protection sounds very 1980s sitcom. Should we throw some colored zinc on her nose, too? Are glasses and headgear out of the question? 

It took me a while to come up with the word “headgear.” Don’t see those around much anymore. Technology might be destroying our planet and plotting humanity’s demise, but at least we improved the teeth straightening.

She never directly said dork or geek, I don’t think she ever even enunciated the phrase “embarassing,” but you could tell that’s where she was going. Her exact worry was not being, “the only stupid kid on the beach.” Ugh. Since when did she start noticing how other people perceive her? Are the mean girls already mean girling? Is Daughter on the sending or receiving end? And is it too late to return to distance learning?

Of course, we parents didn’t help matters by noting that none of these people knew her, to which she responded that made it even worse. First impressions, and all that. I guess it takes until middle school when you learn that strangers are a far safer commodity than people who see you every day and will remind you of said embarrassment every fucking chance they get.

Come Back for Part Three

One more batch coming up early next week. Find out my thoughts on ziplining, pancakes, and goats. Just what you’ve always hoped for!

Maui Trip, Part 1

· April 6, 2022 · Musings · , , , , , · No Comments

I kept going back and forth about blogging my Maui trip. I doubted there’d be much more to add to my Poo-litzer level,  Michneresque 5- entry polemnic from when i visited the big island four years ago (turns out there are still more vowels than consonants in the Hawaiian language, not that you encounter the Hawaiian language much on Maui), plus I’d be reacting to a few things in the waning days of Covid restrictions that would be obsolete by the time I posted (even more obsolete than most of my pop culture references). 

I tried live tweeting a couple things instead. I wish I could do that more, get quicker digs, more buy-in to and from the zeitgeist. That’s me, right on the cusp of the technological frontier, contemplating the key social media conduits of 2001 and 2011. Come back in twnety years to see my TikToks.

Unfortunately, my vicious salvos of truth often need some percolatin’. Who woulda guessed this shit is actually edited? And I never wouldve assumed I’d get 5,000 words out of sipping pina coladas at the pool, but I did, so I guess I’ll break it up into parts. So, meh, here are some thoughts:

The Covid Stuff

We were in Maui the last week of mask mandates. As happened in California, the last gasp of Covid restrictions is an odd in-between times. Either they’re necessary and useful or they’re not. Nobody believes that they are necessary right now, but we can already predict the date at which they will lose their utility. Kinda like the last two weeks of school, when no teacher assigns anything meaningful, the moment you announce that masks will no longer be required on a specific date in the future, it becomes a charade. 

Worse than California, ninety percent of the places in Hawaii where masks were required are outside. Including the damn airport, which isn’t even on the verge of lifting the mandate. I know, I know. “Following the science,” right? The science that outdoors is the safest place you can be. While I’ve poo-pooed many of the Covid restrictions (particularly those more performative than purposeful), but I’m all for masking up in airports, where drastically different populations comingling increases the likelihood of mutations and variants. But what do you do with an airport that’s mostly outside? Science works best when nobody asks questions.

The restaurants in Hawaii also tend to be outdoors. Nothing seems more foolish than putting on a mask to walk past a bunch of people sitting at tables in a sand pit, just to get to your sand pit, where you can take off your mask. All in a state that says masks will no longer be worthwhile the day after tomorrow. 

The biggest victim of Covid policies was our luau. At least I think. Or we could’ve just been at a shitty luau. Hard to tell.

One of the joys of a luau is the all-you-can-eat factor. I mean, sure, they dance fancy and ooo, ahhh, fire! And long tables to converse with strangers. But unlimited mai tais? Sign me up. 

Unfortunately, that whole “let everyone scoop their own food at the buffet” is frowned upon these days. Maybe. Instead, they brought plates of all the delicacies to our table. In their defense, they brought out eight appetizers, one scoop each, four to a plate, from which we could spoon from those plates onto our own. If it was buffet style, I might’ve doubled up on the noodles and macaroni salad, skipped the kimchi. Or maybe I would’ve tried a bite of kimchi, offset by an extra macaroni salad. When it’s delivered to us without ordering, all with the same-sized scoop, that’s not an option. Meaning, to be a good dad, I had to stock up on the taro root and leave Daughter the pasta types.

The dinner followed suit. One plate came with pork and fried rice, another with chicken and veggies, while a third had fish with veggies. There was plenty to go around for the three of us. I was able to eat two fish, one chicken, and some pork and there was still enough for the rest of the family. But scooping things from one plate to another doesn’t have the same feel as “What is that new exotic dish? Only one way to find out.” 

Not to mention, when you keep sending the poor waiter back to give you more free mai tais, as opposed to grabbing another one off the free-for-all table, it feels more co-dependent than festive. There was also substantially less variety of drink. At the last luau, random new drinks came out, just as fun to sample as food. This one had mai tai or a Blue Curacao lemonade concoction. I only had two, which doesn’t factor into the price of the luau quite as nicely as six. In fact, they stop feeling like “free” mai tais.

The next morning, we went to breakfast at a different hotel and, wouldn’t you know it, they had a buffet! No restrictions. The Indian place back home requires me to put on a goddamn HazMat suit to get some goddamn butter chicken these days, in a state that ended its Covid restrictions a month ago. Meanwhile, I can hack a lung over that vat of Hawaiian scrambled eggs till my heart’s content. 

So maybe they aren’t illegal during Covid? In which case, bad luau. And bad resort for blaming Covid (or making us assume to blame Covid), when you just didn’t want to bother putting out a pina colada fountain. 

Maui Geography

While this was my first trip to Maui, Wife’s been there a good twenty times because her parents have owned a timeshare for decades. Shit, Daughter already visited once before I made it out, because we didn’t have to worry about coordinating Spring Breaks when she was four. As such, I never understood people’s descriptions of where things are on Maui. Now, I understand a bit more, but still have a general sense of “Have you ever looked at a map?”

First and foremost, up vs. down. Every other spot on Earth, up means north, down means south. We might have a reasonable discussion on the effects of white privelege, but until the world decides otherwise, it’s how maps are made. In Maui, “up” appears to be toward the airport, or maybe up one of the mountains (Haleakala), but not the other (Pu’u Kikui). Any way you define it so that the resorts in Kaanapali are “down.” The Ritz Carlton up (north) in Napili is as far “down” as you can get. Now that I’ve been there, I kinda get it. It’s one long road, seemingly straight but actually curved, to get from the airport to the resorts. The road starts out going south. Maybe that’s where it comes from? It can’t be an elevation thing, because the runway is damn near on the water. I thought there was no fucking way we were going to land before the asphalt ran out.

Our zipline was upcountry, but also on the north side of the volcano,  so as a bonus, I can say we went “up” to the zipline and be correct either way. 

The most direct route from the airport to Napili and Kaanapali appears to be around the “top” of the island. But evidently that’s a shitty one lane road, like the “Back Road to Hana,” so you’ve got to go the long way. Even though they’ll complain about the traffic on the two main roads, they won’t throw some asphalt on the alternate routes.

Speaking of which, Wife often talks about the “Other side of the island.” Based on what I’d heard, I assumed that meant Hana. But no, nobody ever goes to Hana, other than to take the Road to Hana. The “other side of the island” from Kaanapali is Kihei. Down south. Facing west. Kind of like how Los Angeles and Seattle are on… different sides of the country?

Again, I kinda get it now, in that when leaving the airport, after driving south, you take a left to go to Kihei and a right to Kaanapali. But… but… They’re still on the same sides of the island. 

Resort Land

We were staying at Kaanapali. As were probably ninety percent of the tourists. It’s a minimum of ten gargantuan resorts, stretching along what would otherwise be a desolate coast. When you’re walking along the path late at night, there’s a really good chance the property you’re turning into is the wrong one. And you can’t even ask people for directions to the Marriott property, because I think Marriott owns half of them.

My wife and daughter kept gushing about Hula Grill, where they went before when staying at the grandparents’ time share. I assumed we wouldn’t be going there, seeing as we’re staying at a completely different property. Nope. Hula Grill’s in the middle of the sprawl, so every place feeds into it. As the hour and a half wait indicated. But we still slogged through it, (on our first night, approaching 11:00 pm according to my stomach), and it was, in fact, wonderful food. We went two more times before the vacation was out. With a mask while outside. Even more comical, the waiter asked if we needed our parking validated. Doesn’t everybody walk there? Although I totally wanted to Uber back to the hotel, because it was dark and windy and I knew for a fact I was about to walk into the wrong damn Marriott.

It’s not quite as removed from the local populace as some of those Mexican or Caribbean resorts. Unlike in Montego Bay, there are no warnings about being kidnapped if you leave the property. But it still feels like a segregated party town. On the drive in from the airport, it’s nonstop beaches and small towns, then wham! Hey honey, I don’t think I need the navigation app anymore.

Alright, that’s a good enough place to leave it. Read on for odd juxtaposition about the price of alcohol and my daughter having the audacity to grow up.

Outdoor Curling, Off-Ice

· February 9, 2020 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , , , , · 3 Comments

I originally intended for this post to be a two-parter.One for preparation, one for the Sawtooth Outdoor Bonspiel. But one of our games turned into an epic, inspiring poems retold for centuries to come. So now it’s a threesome of posts. No, wait a second. Is there another word for a group of three? Perhaps a double-team? You’re currently reading the meat of this curling-post sandwich.

Read on to find out what the beautiful town of Stanley was like and how I managed to snap my wrist! Then you can find the on-ice stuff here.

Okay, so the good news is that the weather was way warmer than expected. I spent the last three months expecting zero degrees Farenheit, and in the end I got zero degrees Celsius (and y’all thought I didn’t know metric.)

Heck, we didn’t even need the beards and goggles. But when you deck yourself out this sexy, there’s no turning back on account of weather.

The bad news is that it’s really, really difficult to curl when the ambient temperature is the freezing point of water. Because, you see, we need the water to be actually frozen. If it’s melting, the stone can’t glide across it, as it’s supposed to. We went to a hockey game and a water polo match broke out. Not that I’d trust horses on either surface.

As an example, we time our deliveries in curling, in order to give the sweepers an idea of when to sweep and to give the shooter an idea of how the ice is working. We only time the beginning of the delivery. Under normal conditions, a delivery of 3.5 or 3.6 or 3.7 seconds means the rock will end on the button (the middle of the “bullseye”) at the other end, about 25 seconds later. And if I’m timing the lead on my team and discover it’s 3.7 to button versus 3.5, then that tells me I need to slide out a little slower than usual.

At the beginning of our first game, it was 2.6 seconds to button. As far as we could tell. At those speeds, it’s hard to get an accurate reading, as the sweepers are chasing after a 20 MPH bullet. So yeah, for the first two ends, we were pretty much throwing as hard as we could and hoping for the best.

The game was scheduled to start at 5:00, but they pushed it back to 5:30 to accommodate for the weather. They should’ve pushed it back to 6:00. Because by the third end, the ice was closer to normal. Okay, maybe it was 3.3 to button instead of the usual 3.6, but that’s something we can work with.

Not that we could work with it. We scored one in the first end and then got shutout for the next five. There were a few times we’d get a little something going, but then the other team would make a perfect draw and we’d end up with squa-doosh. I was ready to throw in the towel on the second-to-last end when we were down 8-1. But then we were looking at three points before I took my final two shots. We all agreed: if we score less than five, we’ll shake hands and concede the game. Because if we score, the other team gets the hammer (final shot). And it’s really, really hard to score more than two if the other team has the final shot. But if we scored five, we’d be down by two. And then….

We scored five. Game’s now 8-6. Other team wants to shake hands, but we went dick-mode and made them play the final end. It didn’t matter. My final shot curled a foot too far, pushing our own stone back instead of their stone, as intended, so they didn’t even need to take their final shot.

The weight actually normalized a bit when the sun started to set. Although human beings might not like the temperature in the twenties, curling rocks do. That’s one of the ways we were able to mount that comeback. Once the ice behaved in a marginally normal way, we were able to make some stuff happen. The lines were still wonky. If you moved the broom six inches to the left, the rock might end up six feet to the left. But that actually worked in our favor because the other team kept missing their hits. A team can’t really score five points in an end unless the other team messes up.

Then again, you gotta be ready to pounce on the opponent’s mistakes.

After the game, we headed to one of two restaurants in Stanley. There’s usually a pizza place, too, but it was closed for renovation. We were worried that, in a town of 67, the restaurant might not be open past 8:00. Heck, I live in a city of 60,000 and it’s sometimes hard to find anyplace open that late.

Turns out we didn’t need to worry. They stayed open for us, and were still open when the next draw ended. Makes sense. Sixteen teams, four curlers apiece. We just doubled the size of their population. I guess when you live in a remote town, anytime there’s outside money coming in, you gotta accommodate them. Otherwise you’re just taking money from Henry at the hardware store, whom you’ll be giving it back to next week when you need some more propane.

Word in the restaurant was that the late draw worked the opposite of us. The speed of the ice was normal for the first couple of ends, and then the fog rolled in, which pushed people back up to 2.6-second draws. I never thought about the effects of fog on curling rocks (not something we encounter too much indoors), but it makes sense. The air’s going to get heavier and there’s going to be more moisture. Neither of those are great for speeding up a 42-pound rock sliding across a frozen pond.

Unfortunately, because we lost game one, we were stuck in the early draw the next morning. 7:00 AM, an hour and change before sunrise. A wonderful time to enjoy the comfort and extravagance of a mountain retreat. It was pitch black when the game started. Check this out:

You can almost see where you’re aiming, huh? It changed how I held the target broom. Usually I try to make the target as small as possible. I stand directly behind my broom, tuck one foot behind the other. The head on my broom is usually a neon green or garish orange that really pops against the black of my pants and shoes. Don’t want to confuse my team with where the target is. Some skips stand with their legs a foot or two wide and the next thing you know, you’re accidentally sighting in on their left foot or the open air in between instead of the broom.

I started this game doing just that. Then one of my teammates told me to spread my legs. After the commensurate and anatomically errant “That’s what she said,” I opened them up wide. When finished, I saw why they were asking. My body had been blocking the spotlights. They couldn’t really see the orange target. But if I widened my stance like a GOP Senator in a Minnesota airport, they could see the giant stick between my legs.

And there was a broom there, too. Hey-Oh!

I was told by a guy who had come in previous years to be on the lookout for the sunrise. It’s beautiful, he said, and it will, however temporarily, help you stop the nagging doubt building in your gut as to why you signed up and paid for the “privilege” of frostbitten testicles. Then again, he was there on one of those negative-five days, not a twenty-degrees-at-sunrise type of day that I got to experience.

But he wasn’t wrong about the sunrise:

These photos are brought to you by a couple of stones that I didn’t bother watching. I probably could’ve swept them to better positions, helped my team win their fucking game. But really, how can I let that sunrise go by? I didn’t come here to win games. I came to freeze my testicles!

I decided to throw on an extra layer of clothing this time. Despite months of planning, the previous night had been a bit chilly. My legs were fine. My toes, despite two layers of socks and two layers of rubber, felt the ice whenever I stood still. But the worst part was my chest and arms. One layer of thermal, then a t-shirt, then a onesie was not enough. And that had been at thirty degrees. This time the thermometer read a crisp eighteen when we left our hotel. What had been a wee bit uncomfortable last night would be a tad more hard-core today.

It was fine, though. I brought the flannel shirt I usually take camping. It’s thick. Add that to some thermals underneath and my super fancy onesie on top and I should be nice and cozy, right? Well, it was better but still not ideal.

I did finally get my chest to a happy medium, though. After our second game, we were supposed to return to the ice rink to help them out with some stuff around midday. This time I went old school. I have some of those old-fashioned wool long-john style underwear that I’ve had since I was a teenager. I don’t want to say we’ve regressed as a society, but the ugly-ass shit from World War II works a hell of a lot better than the sleek black Audi shit of today. We’ve become more concerned with looking good than, I don’t know, surviving the elements. At least the rescuers will find a very sexy corpse-sicle.

Fortunately it stretches, cause my gut ain’t what it once was. Or rather, it’s a lot more than it once was. Unfortunately it doesn’t stretch THAT much, so the downward-slope of my undergut was feeling a bit drafty. But whatever, it kept the rest of me warm. I actually just wore a t-shirt over it. No onesie! Besides, it was the low-thirties once again, so I didn’t need to ward off frostbite.

By our third game, I had perfected it. Sleek black thermal, wool longjohn, flannel shirt, onesie. Four layers! I was downright toasty.

Except for my feet. Cause no matter how protected my chest and arms were, my toes were still permanently aware of the fact that they were walking on ice. One layer of cotton sock, one layer of thermal sock, shoe rubber and gripper rubber be damned.

I tried some of those iron-oxide foot warmers, but they didn’t seem to do much. I put them outside the thermal socks, thinking the closer to the ice, the better. Maybe I should’ve put them in between my two socks. If I ever return, I’ll test that out.

Oh, and I fell on the ice when I helped during the day. You see, when the sun is out and it’s 34 degrees, it makes the ice super slippery. It’s a bad time to curl and evidently it’s a bad time to walk. I was in the act of kicking an errant rock over to the edge. The ice was in the act of kicking my ass to the ground.

The good news is that years of curling has taught me how to fall on ice. Always fall forward, never backward. Backward is where blackouts and cracked skulls happen. And trips to the emergency room with the commensurate ambulance bill. Unfortunately, when your ass gets above your teakettle, you can get a concussion on the front-end, too. Did you know it’s possible to land temple first?

The good news is that my on-ice instinct must be honed very well. The bad news is that I got my wrist underneath me at the last minute before my face planted. Or maybe it’s the good news. Because a sprained wrist is better than being knocked unconscious and whisked off to the nearest hospital, which was over an hour away. But unfortunately, a sprained wrist is substantially worse than an unsprained wrist. It looks gnarly, too.

That’ll teach me to help out.

Disneyland, Part II

· May 10, 2019 · Musings · , , , , · 2 Comments

Thanks for coming back. Earlier this week, I wrote about my child’s first trip to Disneyland, which, oddly enough, coincides with my first Disneyland trip as a parent. Not sure if there’s any correlation between those two facts. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.

Anyway, last time I hit on some of the big ticket items. It was a great polemic about Mountains of the Space and Thunder and Splash varieties, complete with heroic and doleful tales of Fastpasses and the various sizes of worlds and whether or not any of those worlds contain mermaids.

Seriously, it was a great little blog post. You should read it. And those of you who did read it, shhh, don’t tell the others that I’m full of shit when I said it was a great post. We’ll just keep that between us.

Part Two will be a little bit more disheveled. More random occurrences than deep dives. Some lingering questions. And more of a focus on the two coffee shops in Downtown Disney.

Turnstiles They still use turnstiles in their ride lines. I don’t know why I find that so odd, but I do.

The turnstiles are used to determine the popularity of rides. It counts each person that goes through. You used to be able to see the counters on most of them. On a few you still can, but most only keep it internally. Or probably digitally.

And really, I think that’s why I find their continued presence surprising. How have they not come up with a more convenient, more efficient way of counting how popular a particular ride is? They always seem to know how long it will take me to get to the front of the line. I never knew precisely how they did that, but on this particular trip, I ended up being the test run three or four times. Some employee hands you a random placard when you enter the line and then you’re supposed to hand it to the people that put you on the ride. It’s a standard “drug mule in the airport” operation. I could’ve been delivering nuclear spongecake or whatever the hell that word is that I’m not supposed to Google unless I want the TSA to delve extra deep on their next body cavity search. But I’ll just assume there was nothing nefarious in this particular handoff.

As for the turnstiles, you pretty much have to have the app downloaded on your phone to navigate the park these days. It knows where you are at any given moment. Mine kept telling me when food was nearby and asking if I wanted to mobile order. So one would think that, at any moment, they could see how many people are in line for any given ride. And sure, some rando grandma who doesn’t have the app on her phone might skew the numbers, but we could still assume that the same number of grandmas are in the line for each ride. Okay, maybe assume there are a few more grandmas in the Alice in Wonderland ride than the Matterhorn, but still. Statisticians can figure it out. That’s how they do political polling, right?

Or, I don’t know, you know that every inch of that park under video surveillance from multiple angles, right? Make a computer that can count the number of people in a screenshot at any given time.  Or just use that wait time as the primary barometer. It’s updated on my app, so I know it’s codified and digitized somewhere. If your statisticians aren’t holding on to the data and analyzing it for relative ride popularity, that’s on you, Disney, not me. Don’t make me continually run my junk into metal bars just because you’re lazy.

And while we’re talking about relative ride popularity, can we please get a fucking Fastpass on Alice in Wonderland? What is it with that ride that makes it the longest wait time, all day, every day? We showed up right when the park opened and it was already a 45-minute wait. Speaking of which…

Magic Hour. One of the two parks is open an hour early each day for people who are staying at the hotels or have paid for some extra perks. Basically, give Disney a shit-ton more money than the shit-ton you’re already giving them, and you can go in an hour early. We were staying at a Disney property, so we were capable of getting in early. We were never able to make it. What with a four year-old who’s staying up past her bedtime each night. Or parents who are staying up past their bedtimes. Or the security line that might be more popular than Alice in Wonderland. Or the seventy-mile trek through Downtown Disney, complete with not one, but TWO, Starbucks to distract you en route. I think we made it into California Adventure a whopping seven minutes before we might have otherwise. With Disneyland, we boarded the Monorail at five till.

But we did learn a vital lesson about Magic Hour. And that is, if you are going to the park right when it opens, don’t go to the one with the Magic Hour. We pretty much got to the park at the same time each day. On Sunday, we hit Disneyland right when the park opened and we could walk right onto rides for the better part of an hour. I think we had ridden Haunted Mansion and Big Thunder and Casey Junior and Peter Pan and Small World within the first hour. By contrast, when we got there at the same time on Tuesday, the day of a Magic Hour, Alice in Wonderland had a 45-minute wait, Big Thunder a half-hour, Haunted Mansion 15 minutes, and so on, because people had already been in the park for an hour. Had we instead gone to California Adventure that day, we probably could’ve ridden Radiator Springs and Soaring and the Toy Story ride in the same time it would’ve taken us to ride Alice in Wonderland.

Again, what the fuck is with the demand for Alice in Wonderland?

Toon Town. Speaking of things that need to be updated. The last time I went into Toon Town, the only time I’ve ever been in Toon Town, was when it first opened way back in, I’m going to guess, 1990 or so? I was already in high school by then. So I think we checked it out once for shits and giggles, but knew we were way too old for it. Now that I have a four year-old, it’s prime Toon Town Time. Or so I thought. But really, since Toon Town hasn’t been updated since it started, it isn’t really aligned with current cartoons. Roger Rabbit? Really? What child from this century has ever even heard of Roger Rabbit, much less seen the totally inappropriate-as-fuck-for-children movie?

But that’s not the only Straight Outta 1989 reference in Toon Town. When you visit the houses of both Minnie and Mickey Mouse, their television sets look archaic. The refrigerator doesn’t even have an ice/water dispenser in the door. Ditto with their washing machine and their dishwasher and their answering machine. Answering machine? Yes, answering machine! The answering machine is a focal point of each of their houses. You can push play on the fake audio cassette tapes and hear their outgoing message as well as messages that have been left by their friends. Needless to say, my daughter had no clue of what they were going for.

Oh, and while you’re in Toon Town, after going through their houses, you can see and get your picture taken with Mickey and Minnie. The line to see Minnie was about twenty minutes long. The line to see Mickey? I don’t know. We gave up once we made it around a corner and saw all the switchbacks in the next room. I’m guessing it would’ve ended up being around an hour. And while I was then about to go off on a rant about misogyny as present in the wait times to see mouses of different genders, we then hoofed it over to Donald Duck’s boathouse. There were, like, three people ahead of us to see Donald. And there was no official Disney photographer there. Take your own photos. Poor, poor Donald…

Food. For lunch, we went to the Golden Shower. No, I’m sorry, it’s called the Golden Horseshoe. But it’s easy to get the two confused. They both shove things into your mouth and then entertain and appall you with a show as debauched as it is offensive. The main difference is that a Golden Shower is less expensive. And at the Golden Horseshoe, they don’t secretly videotape you and hold that evidence in order to manipulate you into doing their bidding once you become President of the United States.

I enjoyed the fact that you can purchase beer inside California Adventure. And you know what? It’s not that badly priced. Sure, $9.50 for a 12-ounce pour is extreme, but they’re microbrews. It would probably cost $6 or $7 at a restaurant. At the minor league ballpark in Sacramento, a microbrew will set you back $11. So if Disneyland’s only going to charge $9.50, that’s a bargain. It’s pretty much the same price for a churro, and from an economic opportunity-cost perspective, I will get much more enjoyment out of the beer. At one point, I was happy to find myself at the Karl Strauss stand. I really wanted a Red Trolley. It’s one of my favorite beers. But I thought that would be way too pedestrian. Why should I pay $9.50 for something I could buy a six-pack of back home for cheaper? Especially when this cart has four or five other flavors of Karl Strauss, and if they make such a good red, maybe I should try one of their other varietals. I got the pale ale. I shoulda had a Red Trolley.

Other food adventures: Jack Jack’s Nom Noms makes wonderful cookies. You get them straight out of the oven.

Downtown Disney has not one, but two Starbucks. Starbuckses? Starbi? They are super fast and if you mobile order while you’re in line at security, your order will be ready by the time you’re passing by. But even better than the instant gratification, I got to tick something off my bucket list that I didn’t even know was on it. On the first morning, Wife mobile ordered at what turned out to be the far Starbucks. When I went into the first Starbucks we came to, the order wasn’t there. I thought maybe it wasn’t ready yet, but Wife’s app said otherwise. See what you can use an app for, Disney? So we had to go to the next Starbucks, but we weren’t exactly sure where it was. So what did I do? I walked back into Starbucks Number One and asked them where the nearest Starbucks is. The barista didn’t even bat an eye. “About a quarter-mile up ahead on your right.”

We ended up eating twice at the Red Rose Tavern twice, not because we had heard anything about it nor that it was particularly good the first time. But without being able to go through the castle, you have to circle around Disneyland, so we usually found ourselves around Fantasyland when we were hungry. Plus they have mobile ordering. The main reason I reference the Tavern, however, is because of this sign:

IMG_20190310_095721_539

I can only presume that this means that, after 11:00 am, they continue to serve breakfast, but it’s rather ashamedly.

Quick Hits. At one point, the Monorail honked. What the hell was it honking at? Was there another monorail on the track? Did the driver see some cute mouseketeer and was trying to get her digits? There shouldn’t be any reason that the only vehicle on a track that is suspended thirty feet in the air should ever need to honk.

When we were driving on Autopia, a duck crossed the road. We all had to come to a stop. Boy, back when I was a kid, everybody would’ve been slamming into the stopped car in front of them. But nope. Here everyone just voluntarily slowed down to match the car’s speed in front of them. I’d say this is representative of my aging and maturing, but there were kids behind me who also stopped. Maybe it’s just that the ride is so boring compared to the rest of the park now, that the only kids who ride it want to treat it like a true experience instead of a thrill. Or maybe this is just the result of the suspicious disappearance of bumper cars from American society.

Speaking of the old rides, remember when the submarine ride was the most boring ride in the park? Then they added some Disney characters and now it’s an hour-long line. Because before it was about science and now it’s about Disney characters. Just like Small World. But you know what? I didn’t like it before and I still don’t like it. I’m not normally prone to claustrophobia, but man, you get me on that ride and I become imminently aware that I’m under water. I caught myself holding my breath for long periods of time, subconsciously thinking I needed to preserve my scant remaining oxygen. Give me a ride where you plummet from deathly heights any day. But there is nothing appealing or enjoyable about being under water.

A word of advice: If you decide to go to Disneyland by yourself and you’re looking to take advantage of their “single rider” program, go for it. It’s super convenient. It cuts the wait time substantially for a number of rides. I’ve known groups who all go in as single riders to get through the lines quicker. But if you are going the single-rider rout, a family of three like mine is your bread and butter. So do me a favor. Even if it’s a little bit overcast, which I know is a daunting, precarious situation for you SoCal’ers who make up the majority of single riders, what with your access to affordable season passes and whatnot. But please, Single Riders, please don’t wear an ankle- length tab trenchcoat for your wondrous daytrip to Disneyland. It makes us family of three people a little bit nervous when you’re put in the compartment with us.

I saw quite a few t- shirts that said “most expensive.” A play on the old “best <birthday/vacation/anniversary> ever” shirts, only now they admit the reality that their cost is way more remarkable than any fleeting joy. And these shirts appeared to be officially-licensed Disney apparel. I don’t know whether I should be appreciative of Disney getting in on the joke or aghast at the utter don’t-give-a-shittiness of it.  I mean, they’re actually charging people to wear something that acknowledges how they’ll grab every last penny out of your still-bearing heart. But the best pairing of this particular trope was a couple I saw walking side by side. Her shirt said “best anniversary ever. ” Wanna guess what his said?

There was a yacht rock cover band playing in front of Pixar Pier at California Adventure. We didn’t stay to listen to them for long. In fact, we were really just buying a soda or a churro or some similar product within earshot. They finished up one song and started another. It was “Africa,” by Toto.  Of course it was. My daughter’s response? “Hey, Alexa plays this song at home. ” One of the sides of this parent-child dynamic is in for a ride awakening when she goes to kindergarten and all of her friends were raised on Justin Bieber and Katy Perry.

Finally, the app needs to show bathroom wait times, too. Just saying. It usually rivals that odd the most popular rides and unlike the Matterhorn,  the consequences of a mistiming goes fast beyond a drained telephone battery.

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