Three Week Old Travel Stories

Because you didn't demand it! Because it's the story that didn't have to be told! Because I don't not have better things to do!

That's right! It's the travelogue!

So, what's to say about a trip I took three weeks ago? I can tell you one thing, United Airlines sucks ass. I bought a bargain basement flight from Dulles to Denver to Salt Lake City with United since I had a credit from the big SNAFU last Christmas. The first bargain basement flight they tried to sell me would have cost exactly $1000.00 after the Christmas credit. I said to the United rep on the phone, I said, "You've got to be kidding me." You know what he said? Nothing. So I says to him, I says, "Are you serious?" I think he sensed an attitude change on my end of the line, he responded apologetically that it was the lowest rate he could get on the days I had. I finagled the days and times a little bit and brought my bill down to $350.00 after the credit. Things had not started auspiciously.

When checking into my flight at the kiosk at the airport, I was offered the option to "upgrade" to economy plus for an additional $45. I figured that there was no way it was worth an extra $45 just to add the word "plus" onto the end of my assignment. As it was, I didn't get a seat, just a message telling me to check in at the gate. Turned out I got an economy plus seat for free since they had sold out of their economy seats. Meh, I figured it couldn't be that big of a deal.

On the flight I noticed that I did have considerably more leg room than was usual in economy. It was nice, but I didn't figure it was worth $45. I was sooooo wrong. My flight out of Denver was delayed by three hours, but I had plenty to do at the airport. I was reading Neil Gaiman's Stardust, both at Jon's recommendation and to prepare for the movie. They also have a huge Crocs booth at the airport, presumably since Crocs are based out of Colorado. When I finally boarded my flight, I made my way to the baaaaaack row. Very back, right in front of the lavatory. I didn't care, it was just for a couple of hours. I didn't care, that is, until I sat down. Turns out that the extra leg room in economy plus wasn't taken from first class (yeah, right) nope, it was taken from economy. I couldn't even lower my tray table after my seat was in the reclined position.

United has found another way to squeeze blood from a stone. It was so uncomfortable that on the trip back, I footed the bill for the economy plus seats and did not regret it. Well, that's not entirely true. I regretted flying United and having to pay extra for what I should have with the base price of a ticket. Stacy and I have resolved to avoid United in all but the most dire circumstances. If Jet Blue or Frontier flies to where we're going from Dulles or Reagan, we're going with them. United sucks ass.

As for the actual visit, that went swimmingly. The first night out, Stacy and I spent the night at a themed bed and breakfast called the Anniversary Inn. We've spent quite a few anniversaries there, but this was the first time we stayed in the Egyptian-themed Mysteries of Egypt room. It was pretty damn sweet.

Who doesn't like ram/sphinx guardians where they sleep?

The face staring at us as we watched The Aviator was kinda creepy

Yes, that's a friggin' spitting cobra as a shower head over the two-person whirlpool tub. Stacy had a little bit of a problem with the giant snake, so she faced out, I thought it was pretty wicked.

Probably the least-used room, the little study was still cool to look at.

We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves with a night out on the town and an evening in the highly stylized interior of a pyramid. If you ever find yourself with a romantic partner in Utah, I highly recommend a visit to The Anniversary Inn.

The next day Stacy and her dad had a joint birthday party so I got to see all of her side of the family. That was fun, even though I'm still not very comfortable with 90% of them. I still feel very much an outsider with her dad's extended family. Good thing I get along great with Stacy's grandparents and siblings.

We hosted a barbecue/pool party/Wii session at my in-law's residential club house for my side of the family the next day. It was a blast seeing all of them there. I didn't get enough time to visit with everyone one-on-one, but my time there was short. Only my dad and his son could make it up from Southern Utah from his family, but it was nice meeting with them.

The rest of the time was spent either at Stacy's dad's place or my brother's house, the de facto hang out for my side of the family. We even got to help out with my youngest niece's sixth birthday party there. She was born shortly after Vicki.

It was a good time, well worth the traveling hassle. Most importantly, I got to see my wife and children for the first time in three weeks. I had to make the visit last for another three weeks as well. Thankfully, the long six weeks are ending tomorrow. I will be picking up my beautiful Stacy and wonderful girls at Reagan National Airport and filling my house back up. It's been entirely too quiet with just Blue and I around.

Still to come (maybe) My Exciting Experience With The Incredibly Expensive Coaster or, My Hard Drive, My Destiny. AND! Some thoughts on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows or, The Most Timely Post Since Three Week Old Travel Stories! AND! My Narrow Escape From Death Hurtling Twenty Stories After Being Set On Fire By An Angry Grizzly Bear or, This Never Actually Happened, Sorry To Get Your Hopes Up!

Yeah, I'm Still Here, So What? You Wanna Fight About It?

It's been weeks since my last post. If asked, I don't think I could come up with a satisfactory answer to the question why. Perhaps it's because my trip to see my wife and girls in Utah was harder on me than I thought it would be. It did signal the half-way point in my quasi-bachelorhood, but coming home also meant it would still be another 3 weeks before I saw my family again. Since then, I've had plenty of time to blog, but no inclination. I expect I will get a couple of entries in some time this week. I've been to see The Simpsons and Bourne Supremacy so I'll have a couple of entries about those. I've had some major computer problems, so I've got a bit to write about that. Then there's the trip to Utah itself. I'll see what I can get up here on all of that within the next few days.

Quasi-Bachelorhood Strikes Again!

I just realized that I did not mention in the past few days that Stacy and the girls are on vacation. I put them on the plane back on July 3rd, just before my first viewing of Transformers and a day before my visit to Jamie and Casey's for a barbeque and Wii playing to celebrate the 4th. The girls are visiting our families out in Utah for the next six weeks. I'll be playing quasi-bachelor again here at home until mid-July when I fly out for a few days to visit and come back to work.

I miss my family, but it is important to Stacy and I to reconnect with extended family at least yearly. This way our kids know who their uncles, aunts, cousins, and most importantly, grandparents, are.

I'll be filling my time with a mixture of work, school, video games, and probably more than a few movies. Also, my blog will more than likely be a bit more active as I have much more free time on my hands without the girls at home. Enjoy my prolificity (it is so a word, spell checker!) while you can, suckers!

Gem Mountain? More Like Porcelain Valley!

The following travelogue is by no means entertaining. It is dry and boring, much like me (Gotta use more moisturizer!) You’ve been warned.

Stacy and I decided to go on a mini vacation this week. We had seen a bit on the Travel Channel about a place in North Carolina called Gem Mountain where they give you a bucket of rough minerals and a flume to find semi-precious stones. We thought the girls would enjoy it and the host made off with more value in the found gemstones than she paid in the cost of the bucket. We booked a night in a local inn last week and planned for the eight-hour drive down to NC.
Little did we know, dark forces were conspiring against us. I am currently enrolled in a database class in school. This class requires Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Developer edition for assignments. The software isn’t expensive, only $50 a pop, but it performed a whammy on my laptop after I installed it. My system performance went down the tube. I eventually reached the point uninstalling it in frustration and completing my assignment in MySQL, which I already had installed with no trouble. It turns out my instructor won’t accept MySQL, even though the class is just on SQL and not teaching a specific software.

Whatever.

So I decide to break out my software and reinstall MS SQL. Only I don’t have the software anymore. I have the empty box, but no CDs anywhere. I searched for hours with no success. By that time, it was the night before our trip and the assignment was due the next day. See where this is going?

Fine, I think, I’ll just download a cracked version. I bought the licensed version anyway, Microsoft got my money. Only, I couldn’t find an English cracked version on Usenet. I did find a Korean version, though. I decided to bite the bullet and try BitTorrent and Peer to Peer. The only ones I could find that way were transferring at 4kbps or less. The estimated download time? 8 hours. By then I was falling asleep at the keyboard so I set the computer down and let it download through the night.

By the next morning the download time was readjusted to 14 hours – left. I knew there was a reason I didn’t screw with that P2P crap. Stacy and I resolved to find a copy at a local Office Depot or the like. I downloaded the Korean version, just in case. After a fruitless search at four different local stores, we gave up and started the drive south. Either I would make do with the Korean version or I’d turn in my assignment with MySQL and suffer the lower grade.

I am not a big fan of traveling long distances by car. The varying landscape cannot make up for the cramped quarters, limited activity, and general uncomfortableness of driving for hours at a time. Stacy drove first so I could install the Korean MS SQL. Through the sheer accident of clicking the right options, I made it through the half-Korean, half-garbled install process and got it on the laptop. Even though the software is in Korean, the command line interface, all that I needed for class, still accepted English. The errors and feedback from running commands was all in Korean, though. I figured I’d muddle through.

By that time we were approaching Tenessee and the halfway mark of our trip, so I took over driving from Stacy. The girls were amazingly well-behaved, although Vicki complained of pains in her stomach a couple of times.

It wasn’t until we got into the winding hills of the North Carolina “mountains” that the real trouble began. Vicki let out a warning, “I feel like throwing up!” and Stacy dived into the back seat with a plastic bag in the nick of time. And so it began.

I didn’t think much of it at the time. I figured Vicki just got carsick, poor kid. Understandable considering the up and down, side to side motion of the car over the mountain roads.
A few hours later and only one wrong turn, we made it to Spruce Pine, NC, home of Gem Mountain and the Spruce Pine Inn, a converted schoolhouse. The Inn was easy enough to find and the staff was pleasant. The room was one of the more spacious double-occupancy rooms I’ve been in, including “vaulted schoolroom ceilings” as the historical pamphlet told me. We headed out to the town for some dinner and ended up eating at an all-you-can-eat buffet. The food was passable, but Scarlett was done sitting down by that point. Thankfully, she’s adorable, so she just charmed all the surrounding diners as she staggered between tables like a miniature drunken sailor. Stacy and I took turns chasing her while the other ate and kept track of the older girls.

When we returned to the inn, I got to work on my homework after we put the girls to bed. It took a while for them to get to sleep with the unfamiliar surroundings, and by then I wasn’t feeling too good. My stomach was starting to feel upset. I suspected I had eaten some bad food, not a stretch of the imagination even at the cleanest of buffets. A few hours later, my suspicions were confirmed after repeated trips to the bathroom. I won’t bore you with those details (just the rest of these, I can’t believe you’re still reading this. Do you have some rare form of OCD that makes you finish everything you read? I can’t imagine any other reason to continue to subject yourself to my account. Just think of all the productive things you could be doing online right now, like browsing through Myspace pages or reading blogs – oh, right.) It was between one of these trips that I heard the tell-tale sounds of baby vomit coming from the travel crib. Scarlett was sick, too. The poor kid was up all night, either breast feeding with Stacy or voiding her stomach. I couldn’t figure out what we had in common at the buffet besides a drink I shared with her, but I couldn’t think of what else would cause her to get sick.

The next morning Stacy and I were exhausted. We toyed with the notion of buying the bucket of rocks from Gem Mountain and just driving back home, but I threw that idea out. We had come all this way for our girls to go to Gem Mountain, and by gum, we were going to Gem Mountain! The five minute car ride was enough to finally put Scarlett to sleep. She had still been up from the night before. My stomach was still rocky, so I opted to stay in the van while Stacy took Vicki and Zoe into Gem Mountain.

It sounded like fun, with the flume mining where they’d put the rocks in a screened box, rinse through flowing water and reveal sparkling gems, but I was just happy to rest in the van. I snoozed for a while during their visit, thankfully Scarlett slept the entire time. When they came back, the girls had four small backs practically bursting with uncut gemstones, some bigger than Vicki’s fist. Very impressive.

We browsed their gift shop after Scarlett woke up and I found that I was feeling a bit better. I still wasn’t up to driving by the time we left, but armed with some Immodium and Dramamine from the gift shop, I hoped to make it home leaking a minimum of bodily fluids (I know, ewwww.)

And make it home we did. Not before Scarlett made a fine mess of her carseat at least three times, but we did make it home otherwise unscathed. I felt much better that evening, but I still hadn’t eaten anything since dinner at the buffet. I wasn’t quite there yet. Getting home signaled the last piece of the obvious puzzle to drop.

Stacy got sick.

I put the pieces together like a master detective who has been shown the clues in sequence and had the mystery patiently explained to him multiple times. First, Vicki complains of stomach pains on the way down, then throws up in the car. Car sickness? I think not. Then, Scarlett and I get sick at almost the same time after sharing practically nothing that could have been contaminated. Food poisoning? I think not. Finally, Stacy gets sick a full 24 hours after Scarlett and I. Coincidence? I think not.

I don’t know what we had, but it knocked Stacy out flat the next day. I had to call into work that morning and tell them I wasn’t coming in so I could stay home and nurse her back to health while I kept the girls out of trouble. Fun stuff.

Thankfully, Stacy felt better by that evening and we had a nice night watching NBC’s Thursday night comedy featuring The Office, but that’s for another post.

See, now don’t you feel silly for reading the entire entry? No payoff or anything. Did you learn a lesson from all this? I hope so, because otherwise it was a complete waste of your time. (Insert Nelson laugh here.)