For three years, Carmen was a student at Leslie University in Cambridge, MA while we still lived and worked in Orlando, FL. Every six months, Spring and Fall, she would fly to Boston, take a shuttle van to Rolling Ridge Conference Center in North Andover, and spend nine days with the professors. She would present the reading, writing and projects she had been working on in her spare time (that's a joke - the law firm worked her sixty to eighty hours a week) and then work out a plan for reading, writing and projects for the next six months. This, combined with the hodge-podge of college credits she had compiled over the preceeding twenty years, finally culminated in a Bachelor's Degree so she could go to Seminary for her Master Of Divinity.
As part of that program, in January of 2003 we flew to Albuquerque, spent one night, then drove a rented Hyundai Elantra to Abiquiu for a silent retreat at Ghost Ranch. This was when she learned that she loves New Mexico.
First we went to Old Town in Albuquerque for some excellent Mexican food and some funky shopping. Yes, she bought pottery. The memorable moment there was wandering into a shop featuring Native American merchandise. The Navajo man at the counter was looking at the newspaper while political talk radio played over the radio. Suddenly, he noticed we were there, whipped around and hit the button that changed the sound system to Native American flute music. Even so, we didn't buy anything there.
On the way back to the hotel, we saw a phenomenon that we have come to expect nowadays: The Sandia Mountains that border the east side of Albuquerque were lit up bright watermelon pink by the setting sun. This did nothing to diminish Carmen's love of New Mexico.
That evening we met some friends for dinner. Carmen had helped their mother in Orlando with paying her bills and keeping track of things. We ate at a Mexican restaurant in Old Town. One of them is a member of the church where Carmen is interning now, eight years later.
Bright and early the next morning, armed with my Rand McNally Road Atlas, we found our way up Interstate 25, through Santa Fe, and over to Abiquiu. We checked in, hauled our bags - I don't remember how many - to the room, and the silent retreat began. I was the guy who was charged with handling any situations that required speech, like buying pottery at the gift shop. I was also expedition photographer. We wandered the grounds. There were museum buildings, hiking trails, a labyrinth, a big dining hall and no TV anywhere. Perfect.
On day 2 she felt up to the challenge of hiking up to Chimney Rock. Carmen is not what one would call a physical person. Her idea of a hike is from Chico's to Avenue in the mall, so I was impressed when she decided to tackle this mountain. We found the trailhead and set out, over huge boulders and up steep slopes. About halfway up she sat down to rest. Rest turned into meditation. Meditation turned into one of those moments when one is acutely aware of all that is in the universe - a direct clear connection. The silence was nearly absolute until she became aware of the rhythmic whoosh of wings. She looked up. A raven flew directly over her head. We now knew enough about Native theology to know that Raven is the Creator - and the Trickster.
We came back down the mountain, had some lunch, she walked the labyrinth, and the day passed (mostly) in silence. That evening we called my brother in the nursing home in Denver. It was his birthday. My parents were there, and very puzzled about what the heck we were doing in New Mexico. A few months later, Carmen showed them the Ghost Ranch Silent Retreat scrapbook she'd made for presentation to Leslie U, and her grade for the term (4.0) and they understood.
Early in the morning on the third day we packed up the Elantra and headed back. Carmen hated to leave the Land Of Enchantment, but we resolved to return one day. And here we are.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Friday, January 22, 2010
Multiple Myeloma
John Emerson is dead as a doornail. This must be distinctly understood or one could think he might see this posting and kill me in my sleep. A shoe box-sized box with his ashes in it resides in my parents' attic, directly above the kitchen, where a beautiful urn containing the ashes of Charlie the cat stands in a place of honor.
My brother was one of those guys who never fit in. He was taller than most, and for most of his life he weighed over three hundred pounds. He was something of a genious about computers, which stood him well during the seventies and eighties. The pinnacle of his career was during the Skylab and early Space Shuttle preparations, when he programmed for Bendix Corp. at Goddard Space Flight Center in Beltsville, MD. But when the computer age became routine stuff, his genious became obsolete. Bendix let him go during the "downsizing" era of the eighties. He was reduced to routine programming of routine computers, and he took too long trying to make everything perfect. Being a generally abrasive kind of guy, he had trouble keeping a job.
He had been going to therapists since his teen-age years, trying to straighten his kinked-up self out. Unfortunately, he wasn't really interested in fixing himself. He shopped around until he found therapists who were willing to take his money and tell him it was all his parents' fault. Therefore, all he had to do was to be angry at our parents and he was as happy as he wanted to be.
The final blow to his fragile employability came when the company in Washington where he worked decided to close that branch and retreat to the main office in Denver. They moved John and his wife out there and within a short time, went completely out of business. His standard depression became so much worse, and his willingness to help himself became so much less, that his patient and long-suffering second wife Rachel left him. This did not improve his mood. By the time this story began, John Gilbert Emerson's soul was so shriveled that he wouldn't even talk to his evil vicious parents more than once a month, and that was as unpleasant as he could possibly make it for them. These were my parents, too, and I never knew they were evil and vicious. Still don't.
All of that was to say that when, in late October of 2002, my parents couldn't get ahold of him and he wouldn't return their calls, it was some weeks before they were alarmed about it. At last they called Rachel, and asked her if she could find him. She did. He was in the hospital in Aurora, but the staff wouldn't tell her why. I invoked my powers, and within hours was on a bus to Aurora, Colorado.
Due to the nature of this blog, I feel compelled to describe some features of the trip out. I was very surprised to find that I had to show ID and there were itinerary dates and times on my tickets. I had to give them a date and time for my return trip as well, which they assured me I could change if I needed to. There was baggage screening and ID checking at every bus change. In short, it was a far cry from my bus trips of the seventies, when my ticket would get me there no matter who I was or how long I stayed at any junction point. I went by bus to avoid this kind of treatment. But at least it took longer than flying.
I changed buses in Mobile to a bus that went northwest to Shreveport (where the restrooms were being overhauled so they had big multi-hole portable restrooms outside) and Dallas, and changed there to go north to Denver. One more bus change got me to Aurora. I rolled my big blue bag inside the bus station and found the pay phone (remember those?) where I found the phone book, which had maps in the front which told me how to find the hospital. I walked the three or so miles to the hospital, asked about John Emerson, and found his room. It was empty - even the bed was gone. I asked at the nurses' station. They directed me to the dialysis unit. I left my bag in his room and headed for Dialysis. There he was, with tubes implanted in his chest, having a dialysis. He was pretty much out of it, but he recognized me. I told him I was there to find out what was going on. He seemed peeved that his privacy was being invaded. I went downstairs to the cafeteria for some lunch. That's where Rachel found me. She filled me on on what she had learned since three days before.
Erik, as his friends had called him since the late seventies (with his long, wild, flaming red hair and wild red beard he looked like a viking,) had been going to doctors for years about severe pain in his bones. Some said to take Tylenol. Some said to take calcium supplements. A couple of weeks ago, he had been referred to an oncologist, who took a look at the x rays and other tests and said, "Get thee to the hospital, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars." That's not really what he said. Turns out he had a rare cancer called Multiple Myeloma, a blood cancer that builds pockets of plasma in your bones and splits and cracks them. In addition, it clogs up your kidneys. Add all that to his ongoing insulin-dependant diabetes, and you have one severely fucked up individual. By the time the cancer was diagnosed, it was in stage three, and the average life expectancy for his situation was two years. Hmmm.
Rachel had his keys, which she bequeathed to me, and she took me to his apartment where I could hole up during my stay. She suggested I use his car, but when I tried to start it, the horn blasted and nothing else happened, no matter what I did. We returned to the hospital and found him back in his room. He got a wild look in his eye when we told him I was going to hang out in his apartment, but he calmed down enough to tell me that the car had an anti-theft system. One merely had to flick the lights on and off to make it startable. I was glad he was lucid enough to tell me that.
I soon found out why he was so worried about me staying at his place. It was filled to the gills with porn - magazines, videos, calendars, posters, paperback books, sex toys - probably a couple thousand items of pornographic merchandise, much of it devoted to S&M. I assured him I wasn't going to tell the parents about it. And during my off hours I spent a lot of time boxing up the visible stuff out in the living room and hiding it in the bedroom. He seemed to think he would be going home soon. Everybody else in the loop knew that this was not the case.
My "on" hours were spent talking to his doctors, nurses and friends and keeping a notebook filled with all the information I learned. I informed Carmen and my parents every step of the way, but left out the porn.
The Aurora South Hospital staff seemed to think that John would be better off at Aurora North where they had a program that featured co-ordinated care of multiple problems. It sounded like a good idea. I overstayed my return ticket by one day to see him transferred and settled in at Aurora North, got my ticket changed to the new itinerary and spent two days going home by way of Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Tennessee. It made me happy to take a different route home.
My parents decided that they needed to go out there and take care of John's situation. On Thanksgiving Day they loaded up the car with their necessary items, including Charlie the cat (who was still alive) and began driving to Denver. They took the southernmost route as far as they could, trying to avoid snow and ice, then turned north through Albuquerque and Santa Fe, where they ran into a winter storm that held them up for a while. I believe it took them four days to make the trip.
It was evening rush hour when they hit Denver traffic, and they were completely lost. They pulled off the Interstate and called Rachel. She drove to where they were and led them to her house, where she cooked them a nice dinner and put them up for the night. The next morning she took them to the apartment and the hospital. They don't know what would have become of them if Rachel hadn't been there to rescue them.
They stayed until the middle of February. During that time the medical and insurance professionals decided that John needed to be in a nursing home. They relocated him to downtown Denver into a home with dialysis technology on the premises. Every day my parents drove from Aurora to downtown Denver to hang with John and monitor his care. I guess they ARE vicious and evil. Who knew?
Eventually it was decided (by the insurance professionals) that John could live on his own. The only problem: his apartment had many steps impeding wheelchair accessibility. My dad inquired about accessible apartments, but there were none vacant in the complex. He tried the next complex over. They had one. He rented it, made arrangements with a moving company, and they began packing up his stuff to move about a thousand yards west of where it was. My parents soon learned the extent of John's pornographic proclivities. My dad said to me, "I learned things about my son that I wish I didn't know."
They called at one point and told me that they had to go home soon and take care of some things in preparation for making their spring migration from Vero Beach, Florida to Blairsville, Georgia. Could I come to Colorado for a couple of weeks, just to get John set up and running in his new apartment? What could I say? On Valentine's Day I flew to Denver. I was picked up at the airport by Rachel, who took me to the new apartment and then went home. My parents were still there, car and cat loaded up and ready to depart. After a bit a van arrived with John in his wheelchair. We rolled him into his new place, with boxes piled to the ceiling everywhere, and our parents hauled ass for home. I was flabberghasted to hear my brother say, "There go the most wonderful people in the whole world." He soon forgot about that description.
If you'll remember my previous posting about lost luggage, you'll remember that my big blue rolling bag was at this time at a ski resort many miles away, in the posession of an idiot who didn't have the sense to read the claim check on my bag, which was identical to his bag. It would be almost two days before I saw my stuff again. Meanwhile, we muddled through as best we could. The worst of it was dialysis. We had to somehow get him transported from his apartment to the dialysis place about a half mile away. His little Corolla was practically useless. Getting him in and out of it was ridiculously difficult. If we called a cab company, they were as likely to send an impossible car as a van or SUV. I signed him up for the transit department program, but that would take many days to process and implement. As it turned out, on my last day of my two week stay, he was taken to the transit facility to be tested and processed. When I left on the 28th, he was all signed up to be picked up and taken to dialysis whenever he needed to go. In the meantime, Rachel traded us her Rav 4 to use on dialysis days.
There were many challenges during those two weeks. John had infections in his dialysis tube implantations, he had heart problems, we had a face-first spill out of the wheelchair onto the sidewalk. When I left, Rachel asked when I would be back to take him away. I didn't know.
The next big turn of events was the day his physical therapist came and couldn't get any answer at the door or when she called. Rachel came over and they found him on the toilet with not enough strength to get up. Within hours he was back in a nursing home, and Carmen and I were making plans to get him into a nursing home in Orlando.
In the middle of March I was back in Aurora. On Saint Patrick's Day the moving van came and hauled his stuff away. That same day I got a Notary to meet me and Rachel at the nursing home to notarize Powers Of Attorney so I could legally make arrangements for all of the medical and government stuff that needed to be cleared for him to arrive, take up residence in the Orlando nursing home, and get his dialysis. His Medicaid and Social Security Disability went straight to the nursing home and other medical entities. Carmen spent thousands of hours on the phone getting all of this set up. In April, my dad flew to Denver and shepherded John to the plane and on to Orlando. Our Colorado mess was over. Now we had the mess right there in Orlando.
I visited him pretty often. I went to his storage unit and retrieved whatever he wanted out of his huge heap of stuff. I bought whatever he needed that I couldn't find in his stuff. He made some friends in the home. Things were going well, I thought. But then, it turned out that John had withheld information about his finances. He had a "secret account" in Colorado he hadn't disclosed to the Medicaid people. They sent him a letter about it. He tried once to call the guy, but he wasn't there. Long story short, they stopped his Medicaid. Carmen was livid. After all the countless hours she spent getting it set up for him, his arrogance and laziness got it cancelled.
Luckily, he'd been courting a woman on an internet dating site. When his nursing home welcome was worn out, he moved in with her! They moved his stuff to a different storage unit, he put her name on his credit card, and made her his medical proxy. Suddenly, I was off the hook!
It was about six months later that he became so sick that he had to go into the hospital. He got gradually worse, spending a lot of the time in Intensive Care. His heart finally gave out on Thursday, August 12th, 2004, the day before Hurricane Charlie tore through Orlando, taking down 700 miles of power lines.
A year and ten months after this saga began, it was over. The internet girlfriend had possession of all of his crap and all of his debt. I went to the funeral home to collect his ashes, and that was the end of it. There were no tears and no memorial. He was just dead. He still is.
My brother was one of those guys who never fit in. He was taller than most, and for most of his life he weighed over three hundred pounds. He was something of a genious about computers, which stood him well during the seventies and eighties. The pinnacle of his career was during the Skylab and early Space Shuttle preparations, when he programmed for Bendix Corp. at Goddard Space Flight Center in Beltsville, MD. But when the computer age became routine stuff, his genious became obsolete. Bendix let him go during the "downsizing" era of the eighties. He was reduced to routine programming of routine computers, and he took too long trying to make everything perfect. Being a generally abrasive kind of guy, he had trouble keeping a job.
He had been going to therapists since his teen-age years, trying to straighten his kinked-up self out. Unfortunately, he wasn't really interested in fixing himself. He shopped around until he found therapists who were willing to take his money and tell him it was all his parents' fault. Therefore, all he had to do was to be angry at our parents and he was as happy as he wanted to be.
The final blow to his fragile employability came when the company in Washington where he worked decided to close that branch and retreat to the main office in Denver. They moved John and his wife out there and within a short time, went completely out of business. His standard depression became so much worse, and his willingness to help himself became so much less, that his patient and long-suffering second wife Rachel left him. This did not improve his mood. By the time this story began, John Gilbert Emerson's soul was so shriveled that he wouldn't even talk to his evil vicious parents more than once a month, and that was as unpleasant as he could possibly make it for them. These were my parents, too, and I never knew they were evil and vicious. Still don't.
All of that was to say that when, in late October of 2002, my parents couldn't get ahold of him and he wouldn't return their calls, it was some weeks before they were alarmed about it. At last they called Rachel, and asked her if she could find him. She did. He was in the hospital in Aurora, but the staff wouldn't tell her why. I invoked my powers, and within hours was on a bus to Aurora, Colorado.
Due to the nature of this blog, I feel compelled to describe some features of the trip out. I was very surprised to find that I had to show ID and there were itinerary dates and times on my tickets. I had to give them a date and time for my return trip as well, which they assured me I could change if I needed to. There was baggage screening and ID checking at every bus change. In short, it was a far cry from my bus trips of the seventies, when my ticket would get me there no matter who I was or how long I stayed at any junction point. I went by bus to avoid this kind of treatment. But at least it took longer than flying.
I changed buses in Mobile to a bus that went northwest to Shreveport (where the restrooms were being overhauled so they had big multi-hole portable restrooms outside) and Dallas, and changed there to go north to Denver. One more bus change got me to Aurora. I rolled my big blue bag inside the bus station and found the pay phone (remember those?) where I found the phone book, which had maps in the front which told me how to find the hospital. I walked the three or so miles to the hospital, asked about John Emerson, and found his room. It was empty - even the bed was gone. I asked at the nurses' station. They directed me to the dialysis unit. I left my bag in his room and headed for Dialysis. There he was, with tubes implanted in his chest, having a dialysis. He was pretty much out of it, but he recognized me. I told him I was there to find out what was going on. He seemed peeved that his privacy was being invaded. I went downstairs to the cafeteria for some lunch. That's where Rachel found me. She filled me on on what she had learned since three days before.
Erik, as his friends had called him since the late seventies (with his long, wild, flaming red hair and wild red beard he looked like a viking,) had been going to doctors for years about severe pain in his bones. Some said to take Tylenol. Some said to take calcium supplements. A couple of weeks ago, he had been referred to an oncologist, who took a look at the x rays and other tests and said, "Get thee to the hospital, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars." That's not really what he said. Turns out he had a rare cancer called Multiple Myeloma, a blood cancer that builds pockets of plasma in your bones and splits and cracks them. In addition, it clogs up your kidneys. Add all that to his ongoing insulin-dependant diabetes, and you have one severely fucked up individual. By the time the cancer was diagnosed, it was in stage three, and the average life expectancy for his situation was two years. Hmmm.
Rachel had his keys, which she bequeathed to me, and she took me to his apartment where I could hole up during my stay. She suggested I use his car, but when I tried to start it, the horn blasted and nothing else happened, no matter what I did. We returned to the hospital and found him back in his room. He got a wild look in his eye when we told him I was going to hang out in his apartment, but he calmed down enough to tell me that the car had an anti-theft system. One merely had to flick the lights on and off to make it startable. I was glad he was lucid enough to tell me that.
I soon found out why he was so worried about me staying at his place. It was filled to the gills with porn - magazines, videos, calendars, posters, paperback books, sex toys - probably a couple thousand items of pornographic merchandise, much of it devoted to S&M. I assured him I wasn't going to tell the parents about it. And during my off hours I spent a lot of time boxing up the visible stuff out in the living room and hiding it in the bedroom. He seemed to think he would be going home soon. Everybody else in the loop knew that this was not the case.
My "on" hours were spent talking to his doctors, nurses and friends and keeping a notebook filled with all the information I learned. I informed Carmen and my parents every step of the way, but left out the porn.
The Aurora South Hospital staff seemed to think that John would be better off at Aurora North where they had a program that featured co-ordinated care of multiple problems. It sounded like a good idea. I overstayed my return ticket by one day to see him transferred and settled in at Aurora North, got my ticket changed to the new itinerary and spent two days going home by way of Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Tennessee. It made me happy to take a different route home.
My parents decided that they needed to go out there and take care of John's situation. On Thanksgiving Day they loaded up the car with their necessary items, including Charlie the cat (who was still alive) and began driving to Denver. They took the southernmost route as far as they could, trying to avoid snow and ice, then turned north through Albuquerque and Santa Fe, where they ran into a winter storm that held them up for a while. I believe it took them four days to make the trip.
It was evening rush hour when they hit Denver traffic, and they were completely lost. They pulled off the Interstate and called Rachel. She drove to where they were and led them to her house, where she cooked them a nice dinner and put them up for the night. The next morning she took them to the apartment and the hospital. They don't know what would have become of them if Rachel hadn't been there to rescue them.
They stayed until the middle of February. During that time the medical and insurance professionals decided that John needed to be in a nursing home. They relocated him to downtown Denver into a home with dialysis technology on the premises. Every day my parents drove from Aurora to downtown Denver to hang with John and monitor his care. I guess they ARE vicious and evil. Who knew?
Eventually it was decided (by the insurance professionals) that John could live on his own. The only problem: his apartment had many steps impeding wheelchair accessibility. My dad inquired about accessible apartments, but there were none vacant in the complex. He tried the next complex over. They had one. He rented it, made arrangements with a moving company, and they began packing up his stuff to move about a thousand yards west of where it was. My parents soon learned the extent of John's pornographic proclivities. My dad said to me, "I learned things about my son that I wish I didn't know."
They called at one point and told me that they had to go home soon and take care of some things in preparation for making their spring migration from Vero Beach, Florida to Blairsville, Georgia. Could I come to Colorado for a couple of weeks, just to get John set up and running in his new apartment? What could I say? On Valentine's Day I flew to Denver. I was picked up at the airport by Rachel, who took me to the new apartment and then went home. My parents were still there, car and cat loaded up and ready to depart. After a bit a van arrived with John in his wheelchair. We rolled him into his new place, with boxes piled to the ceiling everywhere, and our parents hauled ass for home. I was flabberghasted to hear my brother say, "There go the most wonderful people in the whole world." He soon forgot about that description.
If you'll remember my previous posting about lost luggage, you'll remember that my big blue rolling bag was at this time at a ski resort many miles away, in the posession of an idiot who didn't have the sense to read the claim check on my bag, which was identical to his bag. It would be almost two days before I saw my stuff again. Meanwhile, we muddled through as best we could. The worst of it was dialysis. We had to somehow get him transported from his apartment to the dialysis place about a half mile away. His little Corolla was practically useless. Getting him in and out of it was ridiculously difficult. If we called a cab company, they were as likely to send an impossible car as a van or SUV. I signed him up for the transit department program, but that would take many days to process and implement. As it turned out, on my last day of my two week stay, he was taken to the transit facility to be tested and processed. When I left on the 28th, he was all signed up to be picked up and taken to dialysis whenever he needed to go. In the meantime, Rachel traded us her Rav 4 to use on dialysis days.
There were many challenges during those two weeks. John had infections in his dialysis tube implantations, he had heart problems, we had a face-first spill out of the wheelchair onto the sidewalk. When I left, Rachel asked when I would be back to take him away. I didn't know.
The next big turn of events was the day his physical therapist came and couldn't get any answer at the door or when she called. Rachel came over and they found him on the toilet with not enough strength to get up. Within hours he was back in a nursing home, and Carmen and I were making plans to get him into a nursing home in Orlando.
In the middle of March I was back in Aurora. On Saint Patrick's Day the moving van came and hauled his stuff away. That same day I got a Notary to meet me and Rachel at the nursing home to notarize Powers Of Attorney so I could legally make arrangements for all of the medical and government stuff that needed to be cleared for him to arrive, take up residence in the Orlando nursing home, and get his dialysis. His Medicaid and Social Security Disability went straight to the nursing home and other medical entities. Carmen spent thousands of hours on the phone getting all of this set up. In April, my dad flew to Denver and shepherded John to the plane and on to Orlando. Our Colorado mess was over. Now we had the mess right there in Orlando.
I visited him pretty often. I went to his storage unit and retrieved whatever he wanted out of his huge heap of stuff. I bought whatever he needed that I couldn't find in his stuff. He made some friends in the home. Things were going well, I thought. But then, it turned out that John had withheld information about his finances. He had a "secret account" in Colorado he hadn't disclosed to the Medicaid people. They sent him a letter about it. He tried once to call the guy, but he wasn't there. Long story short, they stopped his Medicaid. Carmen was livid. After all the countless hours she spent getting it set up for him, his arrogance and laziness got it cancelled.
Luckily, he'd been courting a woman on an internet dating site. When his nursing home welcome was worn out, he moved in with her! They moved his stuff to a different storage unit, he put her name on his credit card, and made her his medical proxy. Suddenly, I was off the hook!
It was about six months later that he became so sick that he had to go into the hospital. He got gradually worse, spending a lot of the time in Intensive Care. His heart finally gave out on Thursday, August 12th, 2004, the day before Hurricane Charlie tore through Orlando, taking down 700 miles of power lines.
A year and ten months after this saga began, it was over. The internet girlfriend had possession of all of his crap and all of his debt. I went to the funeral home to collect his ashes, and that was the end of it. There were no tears and no memorial. He was just dead. He still is.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Adventures In Hauling Luggage
Planning began in December of 2000. Carmen got a big ol' bonus from the law firm, and she wanted us to go to Alaska. She bought books, she looked up cruises and tours, and she tried to lure me into the planning process. Me? All I needed to do was to put my feet on the ground, and the forty nine continental states were mine! I did admit that it was a long way to go just for that.
She finally decided on Holland America's seven day package, including a cruise from Vancouver, stopping in Juneau for a local tour that included a visit to Mendenhall Glacier and then a wildlife cruise, then on to Skagway, where we would abandon ship. From Skagway we would take the White Pass and Yukon Route narrow gauge railway over the mountains to Yukon Territory and a bus to Whitehorse, YT. Then we would fly to Anchorage, bus to Denali National Park and take the train back to Anchorage. From there we were supposed to fly home, according to Holland America, but Carmen wanted to go to Seward. So she booked us a round trip train ride and two nights in a Bed & Breakfast in Seward. All of this was reserved and paid for in January.
Then she invited her mom and dad to go with us. They hemmed and hawed about it, but finally booked themselves on the same Holland America schedule with us, but not the Seward part.
Wednesday, August first was our departure date. Our itinerary changed planes with a one-hour layover in Denver. My brother lived in Denver. Carmen thought we should tell him we'd be there in case he wanted to come hang out with us. What the heck, it was only an hour. I acquiesced. At some point Carmen asked me what I thought the in-flight movie might be. We had just seen Shrek with a bunch of church friends. "Well, it won't be Shrek," I said matter-of-factly, "it's too new."
We left with five bags. Two weeks in Alaska requires five bags. Part of one of them was my stuff. The cab driver who drove us to the Orlando airport earned his tip. Luckily, this was August 2001 and not a month and a half later. We checked four bags and carried one on with no security issues. The movie was Shrek.
My brother did show up at Denver airport and hung out with us for about forty five minutes until we were called to board our flight to Vancouver. It was a not-too-unpleasant visit, rare in the years since the early 90s, after his company moved him from Laurel, MD to Aurora, CO and then cut him loose. More about him in my next entry from 2002, "Multiple Myeloma."
The flight to Vancouver was breathtaking, flying over the mountainous northwestern US and into British Columbia. Good thing the view out the window was so good, because the movie was Shrek. We landed in Vancouver airport and were treated to decor unlike anything we've ever seen before or since. As a scenery and exhibits guy, I was fascinated with the construction of dozens of museum-like scenes of various sorts of British Columbia dwellings and structures. I would have taken pictures, but of course I was hauling five bags toward Customs.
Customs was remarkably easy. Our passports were still good from '97, and we didn't look like anything but American tourists happy to leave a bushel of US dollars behind us in Canada. We caught a cab, and rode with a happy Vancouver transplant from the Middle East who raved about his city all the way to the hotel, which was on the waterfront within easy walking distance of the cruise ship port. We hauled our stuff up to our room, stretched out for a while, then went walking, looking for Stanley Park. We were told several times to keep following the seawall. It turned out to be a pretty long walk, but it was worth it.
We took the horse-drawn trolley tour of the beautiful park. We recommend it, especially if you've expended all of your walking energy getting there and still have to get back to the hotel. One of the two horses had been in a movie once. He seemed to feel superior to the other. Periodically we could notice that his traces were slack - he was letting the other horse pull the whole load. Our driver had to flick her whip to encourage him to pull his weight.
We saw eagles and totem poles, many dozens of Canada Geese and billions of flowers. The park is nearly surrounded by water, and Lions Gate Bridge takes you from the north end of the park over to North Vancouver. The trolley didn't go there.
We stopped in a waterfront restaurant on the way back. The food was okay, but at least the price was outrageous. Finally we got back to the hotel and tried to sleep. We didn't have much luck, especially when Sandra and Olen arrived for a visit after their delayed flight from Houston finally got them to Vancouver. We made some plans for the morning - Carmen wanted to go to the Capillano Suspension Footbridge in North Vancouver, and we wanted them to see Stanley Park. We were scheduled to arrive at the cruise dock at 11:00 in the morning, so we had time for all of this if we got an early start.
After checking out, leaving our luggage at the front desk (we had quite an impressive heap of it now!) and an early breakfast at the hotel, Olen arranged for a limousine to take us to the footbridge, wait for us and take us back to the hotel and over to the cruise ship with our luggage. "He's going to need a bigger limo," I said to Olen.
The limo ride through Stanley Park wasn't nearly as nice as the trolley tour - we mostly stayed on the main road - but we did stop at a couple of picturesque spots and took picturesque pictures. The Lions Gate Bridge was high and a little scary for us bridge-o-phobes, but the Capillano Suspension Footbridge was very cool, very high, and hardly scary at all to me. Others in our party were more nervous about it, but we all crossed over and back. Then our driver took us up to the highest point in North Vancouver with a spectacular view of the bay and the city. We could see our cruise ship parked in its berth across the bay. We guessed it was time to go.
The trunk wouldn't close. Our driver figured, and we agreed that for the short distance we were going, the steaming heap of luggage would be all right. It was.
Our first experience with the Holland America process turned out to be pretty typical: it was a long wait in a big concrete room with no entertainment other than the people coming around to try to sell extra amenities such as bottles of wine. They offered onboard massages, which Sandra and Carmen signed up for. Party by party we were called up to a table where our reservations were verified and we received our cruise package including ID cards, ship maps, event schedules and tour itineraries. After several hours we were sent on through Customs. The ship was part of the United States, since our next opportunity to exit (on dry land) would be Juneau. We had trouble with our film. The Customs and security people dusted every roll to make sure they weren't explosives. Did I mention that this was a month and a half BEFORE security was stepped way up?
Everyone was starving by the time we got on the ship at around 2:00. One restaurant was open and almost two thousand of us were trying to get some lunch. Luckily, more food sources opened before anybody died of starvation. After that, there was food available pretty much everywhere on the ship at pretty much any time of day or night.
We went to our rooms - on different decks - to stow our stuff before heading out to the Lido Deck for the Casting Off Party at 4:00. It started about 4:30. The fun directors were introduced, and some loud music began. We actually got underway some time after 5:00, to great fanfare. We all went to our cabins only to be called out again for lifeboat and life vest drill. After that was over it was time to eat again.
We had reservations in the fancy dining room. Sandra and Olen changed their assigned table to join us at our assigned table. Also at our table was a couple from Lethbridge, Alberta. Lethbridge had been home to a double A minor league Dodgers team during the years I did a lot of work for the Dodgers in the early eighties. They had been big fans, and he'd worked for the Dodgers in Lethbridge, so we had a lot to talk aboot. That's how they said "about." Aboot.
Early in the evening it was time for the ship's naturalist to tell us, in words and pictures, what sorts of wildlives we could expect to see on the way and in Alaska. He had no pictures of himself in a Superman costume, but only because he hadn't thought of it. His most memorable line: "Some black bears are brown, some brown bears are black. The way you can tell which is which - if a bear is chasing you and you climb a tree, a black bear will climb up after you. A brown bear will just push the tree over."
Later on there was a song and dance extravaganza on the main stage. It was moderately entertaining. After a late night snack, we all went to bed.
Friday was a long day with nearly zero scenery other than a thin strip of brown and green at the eastern edge of the ocean. I got up at 5:30 and went out in search of my first breakfast. Afterward I returned to our cabin and waited for the other three to get ready for their first, my second breakfast. We were eating by some big windows, and I could occasionally spot a fin breaking the surface for an instant while the others weren't looking. I would report this, everyone would look, and see nothing. "There it is!" I'd say. They'd look. "There it is again." None of them ever saw these Dall's Porpoise but me.
I checked the movies- they were playing "Chocolat" and..."Shrek." I went to see Chocolat again while Carmen laid out on the deck. She got a sunburn out there. Came from Florida and got a sunburn in the coastal waters of British Columbia. After the movie was over, and before Shrek could start, I went to the same auditorium where the naturalist had been and found Carmen there to watch the Tlingit story teller. She was very entertaining. Then Carmen found Sandra and they went for their massages. I went up to the upper pool deck for some lunch.
Friday evening was the fancy dress dinner, or "the penguin party" as we called it. That was one thing we were definitely not going to. The four of us ordered room service and we ate down in Sandra and Olen's room. Afterward there was another song and dance thing. I went to see it, a smear of blue jeans among the sea of penguins. The coolest part was that during the show we passed out of Canadian waters and into Alaskan. The ship made some sharp turns and a barely perceptible stop to let off the Canadian pilots and bring on the US pilots. To us in the seats it was about twenty minutes of slightly strange bumps and rolls. To the dancers on stage, it was an invisible obstacle course. It's hard to dance when you're not sure where the floor will be under your next step.
Saturday morning I had my early breakfast as usual, and waited around in our cabin for the move to second breakfast. There were two big events today. First, at 11:00 the ship was passing through prime feeding grounds for humpback whales - there was a whale-watching extravaganza hosted by Mr. Natural outside on the deck. Then, in late afternoon, we were stopping in Juneau. I was ready ready ready to get the hell off of that floating prison.
She finally decided on Holland America's seven day package, including a cruise from Vancouver, stopping in Juneau for a local tour that included a visit to Mendenhall Glacier and then a wildlife cruise, then on to Skagway, where we would abandon ship. From Skagway we would take the White Pass and Yukon Route narrow gauge railway over the mountains to Yukon Territory and a bus to Whitehorse, YT. Then we would fly to Anchorage, bus to Denali National Park and take the train back to Anchorage. From there we were supposed to fly home, according to Holland America, but Carmen wanted to go to Seward. So she booked us a round trip train ride and two nights in a Bed & Breakfast in Seward. All of this was reserved and paid for in January.
Then she invited her mom and dad to go with us. They hemmed and hawed about it, but finally booked themselves on the same Holland America schedule with us, but not the Seward part.
Wednesday, August first was our departure date. Our itinerary changed planes with a one-hour layover in Denver. My brother lived in Denver. Carmen thought we should tell him we'd be there in case he wanted to come hang out with us. What the heck, it was only an hour. I acquiesced. At some point Carmen asked me what I thought the in-flight movie might be. We had just seen Shrek with a bunch of church friends. "Well, it won't be Shrek," I said matter-of-factly, "it's too new."
We left with five bags. Two weeks in Alaska requires five bags. Part of one of them was my stuff. The cab driver who drove us to the Orlando airport earned his tip. Luckily, this was August 2001 and not a month and a half later. We checked four bags and carried one on with no security issues. The movie was Shrek.
My brother did show up at Denver airport and hung out with us for about forty five minutes until we were called to board our flight to Vancouver. It was a not-too-unpleasant visit, rare in the years since the early 90s, after his company moved him from Laurel, MD to Aurora, CO and then cut him loose. More about him in my next entry from 2002, "Multiple Myeloma."
The flight to Vancouver was breathtaking, flying over the mountainous northwestern US and into British Columbia. Good thing the view out the window was so good, because the movie was Shrek. We landed in Vancouver airport and were treated to decor unlike anything we've ever seen before or since. As a scenery and exhibits guy, I was fascinated with the construction of dozens of museum-like scenes of various sorts of British Columbia dwellings and structures. I would have taken pictures, but of course I was hauling five bags toward Customs.
Customs was remarkably easy. Our passports were still good from '97, and we didn't look like anything but American tourists happy to leave a bushel of US dollars behind us in Canada. We caught a cab, and rode with a happy Vancouver transplant from the Middle East who raved about his city all the way to the hotel, which was on the waterfront within easy walking distance of the cruise ship port. We hauled our stuff up to our room, stretched out for a while, then went walking, looking for Stanley Park. We were told several times to keep following the seawall. It turned out to be a pretty long walk, but it was worth it.
We took the horse-drawn trolley tour of the beautiful park. We recommend it, especially if you've expended all of your walking energy getting there and still have to get back to the hotel. One of the two horses had been in a movie once. He seemed to feel superior to the other. Periodically we could notice that his traces were slack - he was letting the other horse pull the whole load. Our driver had to flick her whip to encourage him to pull his weight.
We saw eagles and totem poles, many dozens of Canada Geese and billions of flowers. The park is nearly surrounded by water, and Lions Gate Bridge takes you from the north end of the park over to North Vancouver. The trolley didn't go there.
We stopped in a waterfront restaurant on the way back. The food was okay, but at least the price was outrageous. Finally we got back to the hotel and tried to sleep. We didn't have much luck, especially when Sandra and Olen arrived for a visit after their delayed flight from Houston finally got them to Vancouver. We made some plans for the morning - Carmen wanted to go to the Capillano Suspension Footbridge in North Vancouver, and we wanted them to see Stanley Park. We were scheduled to arrive at the cruise dock at 11:00 in the morning, so we had time for all of this if we got an early start.
After checking out, leaving our luggage at the front desk (we had quite an impressive heap of it now!) and an early breakfast at the hotel, Olen arranged for a limousine to take us to the footbridge, wait for us and take us back to the hotel and over to the cruise ship with our luggage. "He's going to need a bigger limo," I said to Olen.
The limo ride through Stanley Park wasn't nearly as nice as the trolley tour - we mostly stayed on the main road - but we did stop at a couple of picturesque spots and took picturesque pictures. The Lions Gate Bridge was high and a little scary for us bridge-o-phobes, but the Capillano Suspension Footbridge was very cool, very high, and hardly scary at all to me. Others in our party were more nervous about it, but we all crossed over and back. Then our driver took us up to the highest point in North Vancouver with a spectacular view of the bay and the city. We could see our cruise ship parked in its berth across the bay. We guessed it was time to go.
The trunk wouldn't close. Our driver figured, and we agreed that for the short distance we were going, the steaming heap of luggage would be all right. It was.
Our first experience with the Holland America process turned out to be pretty typical: it was a long wait in a big concrete room with no entertainment other than the people coming around to try to sell extra amenities such as bottles of wine. They offered onboard massages, which Sandra and Carmen signed up for. Party by party we were called up to a table where our reservations were verified and we received our cruise package including ID cards, ship maps, event schedules and tour itineraries. After several hours we were sent on through Customs. The ship was part of the United States, since our next opportunity to exit (on dry land) would be Juneau. We had trouble with our film. The Customs and security people dusted every roll to make sure they weren't explosives. Did I mention that this was a month and a half BEFORE security was stepped way up?
Everyone was starving by the time we got on the ship at around 2:00. One restaurant was open and almost two thousand of us were trying to get some lunch. Luckily, more food sources opened before anybody died of starvation. After that, there was food available pretty much everywhere on the ship at pretty much any time of day or night.
We went to our rooms - on different decks - to stow our stuff before heading out to the Lido Deck for the Casting Off Party at 4:00. It started about 4:30. The fun directors were introduced, and some loud music began. We actually got underway some time after 5:00, to great fanfare. We all went to our cabins only to be called out again for lifeboat and life vest drill. After that was over it was time to eat again.
We had reservations in the fancy dining room. Sandra and Olen changed their assigned table to join us at our assigned table. Also at our table was a couple from Lethbridge, Alberta. Lethbridge had been home to a double A minor league Dodgers team during the years I did a lot of work for the Dodgers in the early eighties. They had been big fans, and he'd worked for the Dodgers in Lethbridge, so we had a lot to talk aboot. That's how they said "about." Aboot.
Early in the evening it was time for the ship's naturalist to tell us, in words and pictures, what sorts of wildlives we could expect to see on the way and in Alaska. He had no pictures of himself in a Superman costume, but only because he hadn't thought of it. His most memorable line: "Some black bears are brown, some brown bears are black. The way you can tell which is which - if a bear is chasing you and you climb a tree, a black bear will climb up after you. A brown bear will just push the tree over."
Later on there was a song and dance extravaganza on the main stage. It was moderately entertaining. After a late night snack, we all went to bed.
Friday was a long day with nearly zero scenery other than a thin strip of brown and green at the eastern edge of the ocean. I got up at 5:30 and went out in search of my first breakfast. Afterward I returned to our cabin and waited for the other three to get ready for their first, my second breakfast. We were eating by some big windows, and I could occasionally spot a fin breaking the surface for an instant while the others weren't looking. I would report this, everyone would look, and see nothing. "There it is!" I'd say. They'd look. "There it is again." None of them ever saw these Dall's Porpoise but me.
I checked the movies- they were playing "Chocolat" and..."Shrek." I went to see Chocolat again while Carmen laid out on the deck. She got a sunburn out there. Came from Florida and got a sunburn in the coastal waters of British Columbia. After the movie was over, and before Shrek could start, I went to the same auditorium where the naturalist had been and found Carmen there to watch the Tlingit story teller. She was very entertaining. Then Carmen found Sandra and they went for their massages. I went up to the upper pool deck for some lunch.
Friday evening was the fancy dress dinner, or "the penguin party" as we called it. That was one thing we were definitely not going to. The four of us ordered room service and we ate down in Sandra and Olen's room. Afterward there was another song and dance thing. I went to see it, a smear of blue jeans among the sea of penguins. The coolest part was that during the show we passed out of Canadian waters and into Alaskan. The ship made some sharp turns and a barely perceptible stop to let off the Canadian pilots and bring on the US pilots. To us in the seats it was about twenty minutes of slightly strange bumps and rolls. To the dancers on stage, it was an invisible obstacle course. It's hard to dance when you're not sure where the floor will be under your next step.
Saturday morning I had my early breakfast as usual, and waited around in our cabin for the move to second breakfast. There were two big events today. First, at 11:00 the ship was passing through prime feeding grounds for humpback whales - there was a whale-watching extravaganza hosted by Mr. Natural outside on the deck. Then, in late afternoon, we were stopping in Juneau. I was ready ready ready to get the hell off of that floating prison.
The Whale Watch was very cool - and very windy going sixty knots. We saw at least thirty humpbacks. I swear I saw one killer whale off in the distance, but only once and not well. We learned when we got home that what looks like a whale tail in person can easily look like an indistinct black dot on your photographs. We did get a few good shots. Then we went inside to warm up, eat lunch and get ready for the Juneau adventure.
After two days of wide vistas of water with distant borders of land, suddenly we were cruising up a narrow waterway with colorful houses and small boats everywhere. We were told via ship's intercom to be ready to go ashore when the word was given to do so. We hung out in one of the plush lounges with big windows, watching Alaska go by. Juneau came along - a thin strip of mostly horizontal land with a vertical wall of mountain sealing it off from the rest of Alaska. There are precarious-looking steep and tall stairways cut into the mountain leading up to houses cut into the mountain.
We pulled into the dock and stopped. The word was given that we should proceed to the place where we had entered the ship on Thursday. We followed crowds toward elevators, and soon decided that the stairwells were a better deal. We almost made it to the exit when ship's employees began heading us off, telling us that the exit we were really using was two decks below. We headed back to the stairs and dashed down about halfway to the next deck before we slammed into the throng that was bottlenecked on the stairs. Carmen expressed discomfort with the crowded conditions, and we were prepared to climb back up to the deck above, but another throng was bearing down on us from above. For about a half hour we were wedged into a hot, stuffy, noisy stairwell, waiting for anything to move. Finally, slowly, the crowd loosened and began to trickle down to the proper deck and out the door to the gangway. Wow, fresh cool air. Soon after, solid ground.
We found our tour bus, which was scheduled to leave an hour or so before but wisely waited for the ship to spill its load. We rode through the brown landscape to Mendenhall Glacier where we hung out and took pictures for an hour or so, then continued on to the Wildlife Cruise dock. We boarded a boat with an enclosed central seating space, where the onboard naturalist (evidently naturalists are everywhere in and around Alaska during the summer) told us about what we were looking for. Outside there was a walkway all the way around for wildlife watching, and up the stairs was an upper deck with 360 degrees of visibility. We saw most of the items on the wildlife agenda.
There was a mother humpback with a calf. The boat crept close. Mama was not intimidated. She came up beside the boat and rolled over to give us a long look. She rolled back to vertical and exhaled. We were engulfed in an oily cloud of fishy bad breath. That'll teach us.
On the way back to the dock the naturalist talked to us some more, and offered us samples of smoked salmon. This was when Olen uttered a quote that lives on: "I don't care for salmon," he said, "it tastes like fish."
The road back to downtown Juneau took us by a lagoon at low tide. About thirty bald eagles were standing around in the mud.
We did a little shopping before retreating back to the ship. Believe it or not, we found a place on the ship to get something to eat before the Westerdam backed out of its berth and headed for Skagway.
Sunday morning's first breakfast is one I'll never ever forget. I was sitting by a window watching the shoreline go by, and then we stopped opposite Skagway. Over by the bank was a young humpback whale playing. It would stretch its long fin straight up in the air, then WHAM! slap the water with it. It would poke its tail straight up in the air, then WHAM! slap the water with it. I grabbed my muffin and coffee and ran four decks down to our cabin. I woke Carmen, and together we watched this show for a half hour or so.
Those of us who were leaving the ship in Skagway had a package slid under our door overnight. It had tags for our luggage and instructions about where to put it. We were instructed to gather in a certain auditorium for further information before we exited the ship. We showered, dressed and packed our five bags, leaving four of them in the hallway for the luggage fairies.
In the auditorium we were divided up into our various tour packages. Everyone in our group of twenty or so tourists was going to Whitehorse, Anchorage and Denali, and we were under the watchful eye of our tour guide, whose name I don't recall. When we finally got the go-ahead to exit the ship, first on the agenda, of course, was shopping in Skagway. Being Alaska, I wore a jacket. Unfortunately, the sun came out and it got too warm for a jacket. We could tell this was unusual. Shop owners and employees were going outside and looking up with puzzled expressions on their faces.
The next waiting program was at the railroad station. There were several groups going on the train. After a half hour or so of waiting, our group took up residence in one car at the very end of the train. I guess our luggage was in a baggage car. The next time we saw it was in Whitehorse.
If you remember my previous posting entitled "Tyrone," you'll know why I could call the next three days "Harry!" Harry was a gregarious and boistrous young adult who was mildly mentally challenged. His mother never let us forget his name.
The White Pass And Yukon Railway crosses the high rugged mountains that divide Skagway from the Yukon Territory and the gold in them thar hills. It was our introduction to another ongoing theme for this trip, Spectacular Mountain Views everywhere you look. The weirdest thing about the train ride, however, was that, while we were crossing mile-deep crevasses and executing hairpin turns aroung the edges of steep cliffs, Carmen was on the little platform outside at the rear of the car, hanging onto the railings taking spectacular mountain pictures.
At the other end of this wild ride there was a big luxury bus waiting for us. There was a Customs official there to check identification, but he didn't go through our (six now) bags. Soon, off we went across Yukon Territory, a land filled with green foliage, and blue green glacial streams and lakes. Oh yes, and spectacular mountain views. We stopped in a couple of little towns along the way for shopping and snacks, and it was supper time when we got to Whitehorse. Our tour guide gave us our orders for tomorrow's plane trip to anchorage including when and where to put our luggage for the fairies. Supper in the hotel restaurant was included in the package, so we HAD to eat there. The tour guide highly recommended the show, "Frantic Follies," and even though we were all ready to fall over and sleep, we went to the show. As advertised, it was great!
The next morning was another waiting game - waiting for the bus to the airport took an hour, during which time I went across the street to the home improvememt store. I wasn't going to buy anything, but then I saw this cool head lamp for ten bucks Canadian. "Hmm," I said, "I may never find one of these again." I turned the package over. It came from a distribution company in... wait for it... Orlando, Florida. I didn't buy it.
Finally we were allowed to board the bus to the Whitehorse airport, where we waited for another two hours or so to board the plane. It was on this flight over Yukon Territory and Alaska to Anchorage that I finally understood the description of glaciers as "rivers of ice." Out the windows we could see long blue lines that looked like rivers winding among the spectacular mountains. Glaciers. Ice packed so deep that the weight of the ice causes the bottom layers to heat up from the pressure, the whole heap slip-sliding downhill at an imperceptible rate of speed and calving off ice bergs at the end. Now I get it!
We landed at Anchorage airport and went through Customs AGAIN with our six bags, no problem. We boarded another bus (with no air conditioning) which took us to the Alaska Native Heritage Center for a couple of hours, which was very cool and we wished we could stay longer, then on a long, hot, stuffy tour of downtown Anchorage. All we wanted was to get off the bus and get something to eat. We passed our hotel three or four times. "Can't we just get out?" we asked three or four times. One good thing was that we passed (twice) a big sign outside a restaurant with outdoor dining that offered "Alaska King Crab Leg Dinners $10.99" Olen had to have him some of that. So after we stopped at Ship Creek to watch dying salmon die for twenty minutes, we finally made it to the hotel, checked into our rooms and made a bee line for the crab legs. The waitress came over. "What can I get you?" Olen piped up: "Two orders of king crab legs. What would you like, Sandra?"
After supper there was more shopping. I bought a cap that said "Anchorage" on it to replace my Annapolis cap that I bought in...Annapolis... in 2000, which I lost on the ship. Remember this Anchorage hat. It surfaces again in 2005 in a story we're going to call "Mass. Hysteria."
I don't remember clearly, but I believe we went to bed early in preparation for our trip to Denali in the morning. Early or late, it's still daylight in the summer. But first we did what our marching orders told us to do with our luggage - leave it in the hallway for the fairies. This time it was being stored at the hotel until we came back from Denali the next night. We were to take everything we might need for an overnight trip - two bags.
I do remember that I got up at 5:00 and went in search of my first breakfast. I circled the block and three more blocks and never even found any coffee. My first and only breakfast was at the same time as everybody else's, at the restaurant in the hotel.
There was, believe it or not, a long wait to go to Denali. We were crammed into a little vestibule of the hotel for almost an hour. Then we filed onto a nice big bus and spread out for the ride. Our tour guide was supplemented by another Holland America tour guide who worked the Denali run. They had games for us to play, told silly stories, led us in songs, and communicated with the other tour bus by radio. Harry was in fine form, and I became known as "loud raucus laughter guy." It was a long ride. We stopped in a couple of little towns - Willow and Talkeetna - and the whole trip took nearly eight hours. We were scheduled for a four-hour wildlife bus tour of the National Park after we arrived. We nearly skipped it, but after checking into our cabins and resting a bit, we all four decided to go.
We saw many caribou, one moose, lots of Dall sheep, a grizzly bear, and the state bird, the willow ptarmigan. Oh, yes - and plenty of Spectacular Mountain Views! Not Denali itself, though. Mount McKinley was shrouded in clouds the whole time we were there. Harry stood up by the driver during most of the tour, his mother shrieking his name periodically. The driver even opened the door for Harry to take pictures without dirty glass in the way. All in all we were glad we went.
It was nearly nine when we got back to our cabins. We were hungry, and our tour guide recommended the pizza place within easy walking distance. Practically the whole busload of us went. The pizza was good.
The next morning we had until 9:00 to board the bus to the train station to catch the train back to Anchorage. Sandra and Olen did the helicopter ride landing on a glacier. They said it was fun, but it was a cold ride. We did some shopping and had a liesurely breakfast (my second - I found a gas station convenience store open at 5:00.) While we ate we watched another couple from our tour party having their picture taken in Gold Rush duds, sitting in a dogsled in front of a log cabin set.
We got on the bus right on time, no waiting. The waiting came in at the railroad station. It was cold and windy. Luckily there was cold weather gear for sale in the station gift shop.
The train ride back to Anchorage was kind of melancholy. The twenty or so of us that had been touring together for four days were splitting up after this ride. Harry had a route going, through the upper deck of our car, down the steps to the lower deck, which was the dining area, through that to the other set of stairs and back up for another round, stopping to talk to anyone who would talk to him. Lunch was done in shifts, taking up a large part of the four-hour trip. The views were spectacular, of course, and I even saw a black bear out the window - although nobody else did.
We didn't get any orders for luggage or anything else this evening. When we got back to the hotel and checked in, the tour was done. Everybody was going home to somewhere except for Carmen and me. We had an early morning train to Seward. We said our good byes to Sandra and Olen and went to bed.
I felt kind of crappy when I awoke Thursday morning. As we cabbed to the railroad station and waited for the train, I felt exponentially worse. I was able to enjoy the ride, with its plethora of spectacular mountain views - some with waterfalls! - bald eagles everywhere, and a moose. By the time we got to Seward, all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and die. So we checked in at our B&B, stowed our luggage - seven bags now- and went out to explore. We found the dock where our wildlife cruise would depart in the morning. We had lunch in a Chinese restaurant, then continued down the main street to the Alaska Sealife Center.
The Alaska Sealife Center is a research, rescue and educational facility funded by Exxon as part of their settlement of the Exxon Valdez oil spill debacle. It was very interesting, but the coolest thing for us was this huge octopus sulking in the corner of a big tank. We stood in front looking into those soulful octopus eyes and feeling sorry that it was reduced to cowering in a tank with boneheads like us gawking at it. Suddenly it propelled itself out of its lair and came straight at us. It spread its tentacles to their full extension - about five feet in diameter - on the glass in front of our faces. It stayed there for a few minutes in all its glory, then returned to its corner. Years later, Carmen saw a story in the news about an old octopus at the ASLC that had been introduced to a female. They produced some baby octopi before the old man died. We felt like he was an old friend.
We explored a couple of shops and museums on the way back up the street before we returned to the Bed & Breakfast. I curled up to finish dying, and Carmen went to find us something to eat. I don't remember anything after that.
The next morning Carmen went and had breakfast with the owners and the other couple in residence - visiting from Wales. I got showered and changed into my wildlife cruise duds. We mosied down to the dock, checked in at the office, and went for a cruise. This one was very different from Saturday's at Juneau. The first life we saw was one lone sea otter - one of the items on my personal agenda - floating on its back as we cruised by. Puffins were everywhere. Ice floes were everywhere, each with a seal perched on it. We went to the Northwestern Glacier, discovered by a team from Northwestern University many years ago, and watched it calve. As each chunk broke off and fell into the sea, a seal would pop up on it. The naturalist told us that there were things in the water that ate seals. We never saw them.
I felt progressively better as we cruised through the day. It was a nine-hour 150 mile round trip and very enjoyable. Then we had dinner at a waterfront restaurant and headed back to the B&B.
Saturday we packed up and left our bags in an out-of-the-way place at the B&B office while we returned to the Seward exploration project. She bought some stuff and had the shops ship it to Orlando. Generally, we were killing time until the afternoon, when the train would be ready to return us to Anchorage. And even though we were no longer connected to Holland America, we waited a long time at the train station.
The only thing I recall about the trip back to Anchorage was that I snagged my thumbnail on a piece of train hardware and broke a little chunk out of my nail. Now I was snagging on everything, and the nail clippers were somewhere in the checked luggage. It was dark when we arrived. We cabbed to our new hotel, near the airport, and went right to bed. We had an early flight out in the morning, and we were happy to be nearby.
First thing Sunday morning we cabbed to the airport and checked five of our seven bags. We kept our regular carry-on, and Carmen held onto her bag with the pottery in it. For the rest of the day, people were giving me the stinkeye because Carmen was carrying the big heavy bag of pottery. I would have been glad to carry it, but she wouldn't let go of it.
I'll make a very long story short and say that our flight was delayed twelve hours. One man standing in the line of disgruntled passengers waiting to talk to airline reps about changing connecting flight schedules keeled over after three hours. When we got up there, paralegal Carmen came away with several meal vouchers and an upgrade to First Class on our connecting flight out of Minneapolis. Once we had that behind us, we grabbed a cab back to the Alaska Native Heritage Center for a liesurely and enjoyable visit. The only bad part was that everybody there gave me the stinkeye because Carmen was carrying the big heavy bag of pottery.
When we returned to the airport, we used a meal voucher, lounged around for a bit, then went ahead through security. We staked out our spot to wait the remaining hour and a half. I went into the little gift shop by the gates and found what I was looking for: nail clippers! This was a little set with a bottle opener and a knife included in a pouch that said "Alaska" on one side and "Made In China" on the other. Good thing it wasn't a month and a half later.
The two flights home are a blur in my memory. I slept a lot A. because I was exhausted, and B. because the movie on both flights was...Shrek.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Bearing A Pall For A Pal
Early Sunday morning, November 23rd, 1997, I got a phone call from the Buinickas household. Michael John Buinickas, my best friend since 1966 and Boy Scout buddy since '65, had keeled over dead the night before at age 46. No warning, just getting ready for bed as usual, keeled over dead. Later in the day we had funeral information, round trip airline tickets to Baltimore Washington International Airport for Tuesday afternoon, a hotel room for two nights, and a rental car reserved.
Using my newly acquired technology, the internet, I printed out a map from the airport to the funeral home. I also printed a map to the hotel, which was near the airport. I was hugely impressed with myself. And that newfangled internet thang.
Monday was a blur. I was in shock. This was the first (and so far the last) time that someone I really cared about had died. I must have made arrangements to be off work Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday and Friday were Thanksgiving Holiday days at F/X Scenery And Display. I was Mister Dependability at FX, so I got the time off, no problem. They'd all heard about Michael B. for years anyway.
We flew to Maryland, arriving mid-to-late afternoon. By the time we had our rental car it was time to just go straight to the funeral home, about ten miles away in Bowie. It was getting dark as we arrived, and there was a pretty big crowd for the viewing. The family was happy to see us. Mister B. said "Ah, there's my other son!" Even Michael's Aunt Helen corralled us for a long time. Afterward we were invited to Michael and Kathy's house in Odenton for something to eat, and we were hungry. During our time there Kathy buttonholed me in the kitchen and asked me to be a pall bearer. I said I'd be honored. Always a pall bearer, never a pall. Then we made our way in the late evening all the way to Linthicum to the hotel. It was hard to find in the dark, but we got there. I didn't sleep much.
Wednesday morning we headed out to the church, and I hung out in the pall bearer marshalling area. While I waited, a troop of Boy Scouts filed by. I almost lost it. Michael's dad had been our Scoutmaster, we served three years together, the last one as cooks for the troop. Then years later Michael had taken over the Scoutmaster position. Many of our favorite stories were Boy Scout stories. My mind drifted away with the wind of time. I tried mightily to hear and remember the instructions we pall bearers were given, but it entered my brain as if Charlie Brown's teacher were saying it. I went where they pointed, carried my share of the load, then just sort of stood there at the front of the sanctuary until one of my co-bearers indicated where I should sit.
The only thing I remember about the service itself was brother Bill Buinickas telling us about Michael, and how it had long been Michael that cemented the family together. I look back on that now in light of the fact that Kathy and their kids have fallen out from the rest of the family in recent years. I've had to reconnect with Mike's sister to hear any news from that side.
After the service we hoisted him up and carried him to the Hearse. Then we were released from duty. Carmen and I saddled up the rental car and got in line behind old old Uncle Nick and Aunt Helen, who doddered their way back through Odenton to the Episcopal church where the Boy Scouts had been meeting for many long years, where I spent Sundays and more during the first fourteen years of my life, and where my mother's best friend is buried.
After the graveside ceremony, there was a luncheon at the Elks Hall in Crofton. We got separated from the herd somehow, drove to Crofton and had to ask directions to the Elks lodge. When we got there, there were many tables nearly full of family and friends. We hardly knew any of them except the immediate family, so we found an empty corner by ourselves and prepared to have some lunch. We had no more than sat down with our plates, however, when a member of the immediate family appeared behind us. They had seen us crouching in our corner, had pity on us, and invited us to sit with them. It seemed fitting to me. I had lived with them several summers and many weekends, mowed their lawn, washed their cars, washed their dishes and shared their meals since the sixties. I had been a best man, an usher and a driver at three of their weddings. Mr. and Mrs. B asked us when our flight back to Orlando was. It was Thursday afternoon at five or so. They invited us to Thanksgiving dinner at their house, also in Odenton. I told Carmen she was in for a treat. I'd done Thanksgiving with them several times.
After the luncheon we went to Glen Burnie, where I had lived and worked from 1971-76. We saw a movie (Starship Troopers) did a little shopping, checked out the Montgomery Ward store where I'd built displays for four years, and had supper at a seafood restaurant that hadn't been there back then.
We slept in awhile at the hotel, showered dressed, packed up and checked out. Thanksgiving at Buinickas Central was everything I knew it would be: turkey, ham, golumkes, perushkis, kielbasa, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberries, stuffing, cakes, pies, ice cream, coffee, yummy yummy! But the most memorable moment came when their cat, banished from the long extended table of twenty five participants, hurled a stream of vomit directly at the center of everything. Priceless.
About three thirty we said our good byes to all the clan. It was the last time I've seen most of them. I miss Bill most of all. We were brothers for many years, until he moved to Illinois, got married and had a family of his own. I reconnected with sister Margaret on Classmates.com a year or two ago, and get my news through her. Kathy stays in touch pretty well. After all, we were best friends once removed since 1969. She came to Orlando to visit us back in 1998 or so. Carmen and I visited her in the fall of 2000, soon after Michael's first grandbaby was born. We stopped by to see Mr. and Mrs. B. at Buinickas Central for an hour or so. That's the last I've seen of them. Sometimes I get a hankering to just show up on their doorstep as in days of old, and see if my place is still set at their table.
Using my newly acquired technology, the internet, I printed out a map from the airport to the funeral home. I also printed a map to the hotel, which was near the airport. I was hugely impressed with myself. And that newfangled internet thang.
Monday was a blur. I was in shock. This was the first (and so far the last) time that someone I really cared about had died. I must have made arrangements to be off work Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday and Friday were Thanksgiving Holiday days at F/X Scenery And Display. I was Mister Dependability at FX, so I got the time off, no problem. They'd all heard about Michael B. for years anyway.
We flew to Maryland, arriving mid-to-late afternoon. By the time we had our rental car it was time to just go straight to the funeral home, about ten miles away in Bowie. It was getting dark as we arrived, and there was a pretty big crowd for the viewing. The family was happy to see us. Mister B. said "Ah, there's my other son!" Even Michael's Aunt Helen corralled us for a long time. Afterward we were invited to Michael and Kathy's house in Odenton for something to eat, and we were hungry. During our time there Kathy buttonholed me in the kitchen and asked me to be a pall bearer. I said I'd be honored. Always a pall bearer, never a pall. Then we made our way in the late evening all the way to Linthicum to the hotel. It was hard to find in the dark, but we got there. I didn't sleep much.
Wednesday morning we headed out to the church, and I hung out in the pall bearer marshalling area. While I waited, a troop of Boy Scouts filed by. I almost lost it. Michael's dad had been our Scoutmaster, we served three years together, the last one as cooks for the troop. Then years later Michael had taken over the Scoutmaster position. Many of our favorite stories were Boy Scout stories. My mind drifted away with the wind of time. I tried mightily to hear and remember the instructions we pall bearers were given, but it entered my brain as if Charlie Brown's teacher were saying it. I went where they pointed, carried my share of the load, then just sort of stood there at the front of the sanctuary until one of my co-bearers indicated where I should sit.
The only thing I remember about the service itself was brother Bill Buinickas telling us about Michael, and how it had long been Michael that cemented the family together. I look back on that now in light of the fact that Kathy and their kids have fallen out from the rest of the family in recent years. I've had to reconnect with Mike's sister to hear any news from that side.
After the service we hoisted him up and carried him to the Hearse. Then we were released from duty. Carmen and I saddled up the rental car and got in line behind old old Uncle Nick and Aunt Helen, who doddered their way back through Odenton to the Episcopal church where the Boy Scouts had been meeting for many long years, where I spent Sundays and more during the first fourteen years of my life, and where my mother's best friend is buried.
After the graveside ceremony, there was a luncheon at the Elks Hall in Crofton. We got separated from the herd somehow, drove to Crofton and had to ask directions to the Elks lodge. When we got there, there were many tables nearly full of family and friends. We hardly knew any of them except the immediate family, so we found an empty corner by ourselves and prepared to have some lunch. We had no more than sat down with our plates, however, when a member of the immediate family appeared behind us. They had seen us crouching in our corner, had pity on us, and invited us to sit with them. It seemed fitting to me. I had lived with them several summers and many weekends, mowed their lawn, washed their cars, washed their dishes and shared their meals since the sixties. I had been a best man, an usher and a driver at three of their weddings. Mr. and Mrs. B asked us when our flight back to Orlando was. It was Thursday afternoon at five or so. They invited us to Thanksgiving dinner at their house, also in Odenton. I told Carmen she was in for a treat. I'd done Thanksgiving with them several times.
After the luncheon we went to Glen Burnie, where I had lived and worked from 1971-76. We saw a movie (Starship Troopers) did a little shopping, checked out the Montgomery Ward store where I'd built displays for four years, and had supper at a seafood restaurant that hadn't been there back then.
We slept in awhile at the hotel, showered dressed, packed up and checked out. Thanksgiving at Buinickas Central was everything I knew it would be: turkey, ham, golumkes, perushkis, kielbasa, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberries, stuffing, cakes, pies, ice cream, coffee, yummy yummy! But the most memorable moment came when their cat, banished from the long extended table of twenty five participants, hurled a stream of vomit directly at the center of everything. Priceless.
About three thirty we said our good byes to all the clan. It was the last time I've seen most of them. I miss Bill most of all. We were brothers for many years, until he moved to Illinois, got married and had a family of his own. I reconnected with sister Margaret on Classmates.com a year or two ago, and get my news through her. Kathy stays in touch pretty well. After all, we were best friends once removed since 1969. She came to Orlando to visit us back in 1998 or so. Carmen and I visited her in the fall of 2000, soon after Michael's first grandbaby was born. We stopped by to see Mr. and Mrs. B. at Buinickas Central for an hour or so. That's the last I've seen of them. Sometimes I get a hankering to just show up on their doorstep as in days of old, and see if my place is still set at their table.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Triple A Times Seven
I've been thinking about this one for a while, so it had better be a good one! I like it because it includes several travel stories of widely varying length and interest. More compelling than that, however, it delves into the always insane world I've inhabited for so many years, Show Business.
I started working for F/X Scenery And Display in January of 1996. There was a Project Manager there at the time that everyone on the crew hated to work with. That meant that, as the new guy, I was next to be awarded the honor of being Mike's bitch. To tell the truth, I worked with him on ten or twelve gigs and never learned to hate it - but then, I'm rather more flexible than the average stagehand.
And so it came to pass that in December, 1996 Mike somehow cajoled Triple A into having F/X do the honors of shepherding their incredibly expensive new corporate meeting set to its many scheduled destinations. He wanted to be the one to travel with it, but he knew that some destinations were better left to his bitch, me, when he had bigger gigs to fry. So when the fancy new set debuted at Disney's Contemporary Resort, he went there to begin this new position. He took me to learn the set along with him. Two guys from the Chicago company that designed and built it were to be there to show us how it's done.
Call time at the Contemporary: Sunday at noon. I, of course, showed up at 11:15. I found the big-ass function room scheduled for Triple A. As usual, there was a function already going on in there. With a lot of luck, they would finish up by noon or a little after. HA! So Mike came along, the designer-guys came along, the trucks from Chicago backed into the loading dock. Noon came and went, one, two...pretty normal show biz crapola. The Disney people were not willing to rush their guests out of there.
Mike and the designers decided to start bringing the stuff up the freight elevator from the dock. The biggest problem with that - several of the crates were too big to fit on the elevator! By 4:00 most of the set was upstairs, and Mike was huddled with the design guys sorting pieces and laying it out on the floor in an air-walled-off section of the ballroom. We even stood up the two screen surrounds just to be busy. Mike wanted to scoot them fully assembled fifty feet to the stage and lift them three feet in the air onto the stage. All of the rest of us kind of looked at him strangely, especially since the face of the set was sculpted foam with images of space travel and astronauts and planets and satellites and such. To grip this set firmly was to crush the thin shell of paint and pop holes in the sculpture with our fingers. We convinced Mike to reconsider.
Finally, a little after 5:00 the party broke up. The Disney Events Crew charged in to clear the room. Mike zeroed in on the leader of the pack. "You guys the ones bringing in the staging?" Mike asked. "Staging?" the guy mused. He got on his radio to headquarters. Of course no-one had ordered staging. But they could do it - for a slight extra fee - on a Sunday night! So we stretched our rear-projection screens, set up projection towers, assembled logos lights and microphones to the lectern, and unloaded the turntable parts to get them organized. It was after 9:00 when the stage was ready for us. We assembled the turntable centered at the rear (upstage) and installed the set pieces on it. This told us where the two screen surrounds should be placed. We did that.
I started working for F/X Scenery And Display in January of 1996. There was a Project Manager there at the time that everyone on the crew hated to work with. That meant that, as the new guy, I was next to be awarded the honor of being Mike's bitch. To tell the truth, I worked with him on ten or twelve gigs and never learned to hate it - but then, I'm rather more flexible than the average stagehand.
And so it came to pass that in December, 1996 Mike somehow cajoled Triple A into having F/X do the honors of shepherding their incredibly expensive new corporate meeting set to its many scheduled destinations. He wanted to be the one to travel with it, but he knew that some destinations were better left to his bitch, me, when he had bigger gigs to fry. So when the fancy new set debuted at Disney's Contemporary Resort, he went there to begin this new position. He took me to learn the set along with him. Two guys from the Chicago company that designed and built it were to be there to show us how it's done.
Call time at the Contemporary: Sunday at noon. I, of course, showed up at 11:15. I found the big-ass function room scheduled for Triple A. As usual, there was a function already going on in there. With a lot of luck, they would finish up by noon or a little after. HA! So Mike came along, the designer-guys came along, the trucks from Chicago backed into the loading dock. Noon came and went, one, two...pretty normal show biz crapola. The Disney people were not willing to rush their guests out of there.
Mike and the designers decided to start bringing the stuff up the freight elevator from the dock. The biggest problem with that - several of the crates were too big to fit on the elevator! By 4:00 most of the set was upstairs, and Mike was huddled with the design guys sorting pieces and laying it out on the floor in an air-walled-off section of the ballroom. We even stood up the two screen surrounds just to be busy. Mike wanted to scoot them fully assembled fifty feet to the stage and lift them three feet in the air onto the stage. All of the rest of us kind of looked at him strangely, especially since the face of the set was sculpted foam with images of space travel and astronauts and planets and satellites and such. To grip this set firmly was to crush the thin shell of paint and pop holes in the sculpture with our fingers. We convinced Mike to reconsider.
Finally, a little after 5:00 the party broke up. The Disney Events Crew charged in to clear the room. Mike zeroed in on the leader of the pack. "You guys the ones bringing in the staging?" Mike asked. "Staging?" the guy mused. He got on his radio to headquarters. Of course no-one had ordered staging. But they could do it - for a slight extra fee - on a Sunday night! So we stretched our rear-projection screens, set up projection towers, assembled logos lights and microphones to the lectern, and unloaded the turntable parts to get them organized. It was after 9:00 when the stage was ready for us. We assembled the turntable centered at the rear (upstage) and installed the set pieces on it. This told us where the two screen surrounds should be placed. We did that.
The stuff on the turntable wobbled with the turning. We cabled the upper corners to the turntable floor to stabilize that. We washed our hands and added the pristine white flats and the very fragile Gatorfoam globe to the back side of the center section. We set in and shimmed up the triangular stage plugs on the corners of the rectangular staging pieces and velcroed up the facing pieces. We unpacked the big stage-wall AAA logos to install on the walls, and that's when Mike and the designers realized that these were the OLD logos - without the new blue orbits!
So, at about 2:30 in the morning, Mike and I headed to the shop with crude drawings of orbits to be cut out of blue PVC sheet stock. We drew them, I cut them on the band saw and we hauled ass back to Disney World. We installed orbits on all the logos and the day was saved. I went home at 5:30am. Mike stayed to meet the AAA cheeses. They walked in at 8:00, looked at the set and said, "How did those orbits get there? We don't start using the new logo until after the first of the year!"
Several days later, we were back at the Contemporary, disassembling the set, loading some parts back into the smaller crates, and busting up the way-too-big crates for disposal. Mike had talked them into letting me build wagons, one for the stage left screen surround, one for the stage right screen surround, one for the front center section, one for the white backside and fragile globe section, and one for the oddly shaped stage plugs and stage facing pieces. The intent was to have maximum flexibility from venue to venue - to be able to use whatever sections were needed to fill whatever space they were using, and to be able to load whatever wagons were needed each time. It was while I was working on this that I learned that in September this baby was going to London, England. I was pretty sure Mike would take that gig himself.
F/X ordered up a storage semi trailer dedicated to Triple A. As each wagon was finished and loaded, we rolled it into the trailer. The turntable already had a steel wagon, so it went on. I built a rolling box for the lectern. It went. When all was finished, it was apparent that a 40 foot trailer was just exactly big enough to handle the whole set. One of the guys working with me figuring out how to fit it all in there said that it was quite a puzzle - but in his Honduras accent it sounded like "quite a pus-hole." This became a buzz phrase at F/X that is still used today.
***
In January parts of the set went to Sawgrass Resort near Jacksonville. This was one that Mike was happy to pass off to me. I rented a Ryder Truck, backed it up to the semi, and loaded up the chunks I needed for this abbreviated version. The system worked. I drove it over on I-4, took I-95 up to Saint Augustine, then trundled up A1A all the way to Sawgrass. I backed 'er up to the loading dock, and quickly figured out that the three twelve-foot wagons were not going to make it out onto the six-foot-deep dock. Hmmm. There was a ramp from the back parking lot up to the side of the dock. Hmmm. Would my wagons roll down the metal ramp included in the truck? I kept my baloney lips zipped, took my two local helpers and drove the truck out to the middle of the space. We set the truck ramp and slowly rolled a wagon to the edge. It turned out that I couldn't possibly have put the wheels in a better place. They had an inch of clearance all the way, which made them very stable going down the ramp. Whew! We rolled them across the lot, up the ramp to the dock, and right into the ballroom, no problem. We set up one screen and the front center with no turntable - easy stuff - and the designer-guys helped me get my rental car to drive back to Orlando and then in a couple of days to drive back to Sawgrass. I guess Triple A figured out that this was their cheapest alternative over lodgings, truck driving mileage or whatever. So in a couple days I drove back, turned in my car, disassembled the set, loaded the wagons, rolled them out to the truck and headed home again. Easy gig.
***
In February a short round went to Miami. Mike was going to take this one, but in the interim Triple A called Mack, the owner of F/X, and told him that Mike had told them that he was going out on his own and wanted to take AAA with him. Suddenly, I was the only one at FX who knew the set. When I got to Miami I learned that the design guys from Chicago had been removed from the gravy train as well. Suddenly, I was the only one in the whole world who knew the set. Now if I could only hold out until September!
Two things stick in my mind about the Miami gig. First, I had to unload and load the truck in the front driveway of the hotel, and roll the wagons through the parking garage to the ballroom entrance. Many people were very unhappy about that. Then, after spending one night in the hotel and hanging out until early afternoon, I was able to strike the show, load up, and drive to Vero Beach by early evening and hang out with Craig and Linda Bowers for a couple of hours before continuing home. Nice.
***
The first Atlanta gig was a strange one. It was for another company that had seen the new, incredibly expensive Triple A set and asked to rent it for a show in Atlanta. They wanted the whole magilla minus the turntable, lectern and stage plugs, which I could just squeeze into a 24 foot Ryder - it was quite a pus-hole! It was a rainy March day when I drove my truck north. It was a rainy March evening when I arrived around 5:30, looking for the hotel during rush hour. I found it, but there was no parking anywhere near it. I circled it a few times, and was finally able to squeeze in on a side street and leave it there long enough to talk to the guys at the loading dock. "Where can I park it?" I asked. They shrugged. I went to the front desk and asked. They shrugged. I headed out the front door, passing the Doorman. "Where can I park my truck?" I asked. "The Days Inn next door will let you park it in their lot for a fee." Cool.
While I'd been gone, a Fed Ex truck had backed in behind me and tight to the curb. His rear end was actually between my truck's rear end and the curb. When I pulled away. the left rear corner of the Ryder scraped a lens off of the right rear corner light of the Fed Ex truck. I stopped, police were called, an accident report was written. Luckily, when I rented the truck I accepted the full insurance coverage. This came in very handy when the lawyer for the Fed Ex driver began weeks later to try to make a big liability thing out of it. Dumbass.
The next morning I retrieved the truck from the Days Inn, parked in almost the same spot as the night before, and with my local labor, easily rolled all of the wagons down to the street and onto the freight elevator. We were done before noon, I parked at the Days Inn again, and grabbed MARTA to the airport. This company flew me home to Orlando for the three days of the show, then back to Atlanta for the strike. Strike started at about five in the afternoon. I was not given a room for the night. I set out driving at eleven, and didn't crap out until 3:30 in the morning in north Florida. Not too bad for a forty four year old man.
To add insult to these injuries, when I went to the airport to retrieve my vehicle, it had a parking ticket on it because it was too long for the space and poked out into the drive a little too far. I was beginning to regret being the world's leading authority on the Triple A set.
***
Atlanta Two was no driving required. Those Triple A guys had figured out that if their own guy drove the truck and I flew, it saved them money. I really don't like driving, so that worked for me. There was a huge underground loading dock and truck parking lot at this venue. I believe I set up the whole thing for this show, and they didn't bring me back for the strike. The weirdest thing, though, was that Mike the Snake was there doing the lighting for them. Hmmmm.
***
In May the abreviated set went to New Orleans. They didn't want me at all other than to pull and help them load the chunks they needed. I was sad, but also a bit relieved. A week later, the truck came back with the set in a shambles. The strike crew had just flung the pieces onto the truck. The pieces were damaged and the wagons were damaged. The Triple A guys were not happy about their incredibly expensive set. They authorized F/X to make all necessary repairs, and give it a new paint job for London. They even sent us a half-set they had been using in europe, for us to refurbish and repaint to match the big guy. Then they were taking it away from us forever. Weeks later, all spiffy and sparkly again, the full big set was loaded onto a shipping container and sent to London.
Weeks after that, AAA called to say that they had a very limited time to install in London, and could I please come and take care of the set for them? I told Mack to tell them that if I could have a private room so my wife could come, I'd do it. Otherwise, never mind. They said, "Fine, but you're only there for install, not strike." I said "Fine, but fly me back on Thursday with the rest of the crew. My wife and I want to explore for a few days." "Fine." "Fine."
And so it came to pass that we got our passports in order and Carmen booked a round trip to London on Virgin Air. This cost hundreds less than flying Delta with the AAA bunch. I was on the Delta flight with the psyched-up church choir going to England to sing at some big shindig. They were practicing all the way. I left Friday morning, nearly a week after Princess Diana was killed, and arrived, totally sleepless, on Saturday morning.
There was some hullaballoo about road boxes of gear clearing customs or whatever. My tool box came through fine, and one lighting guy and I split a cab to the Hyatt Hyde Park. We arrived at the ballroom just in time to see the first pieces of the set come off the elevator. They were unloading the wagons down at the dock. Before the job was finished, they had dropped one center sculpted foam piece and popped several finger-sized holes in it. Right in the center.
Carmen arrived and we got her squared away in my room. She got right on the phone and began making reservations for tours. She booked us a Jack The Ripper Tour for that night. By supper time, the set was pretty much done except for the tweaking. One thing was preying on my mind: those holes in the center. What could I use to fill them? The surface was a mottled and pitted texture, so anything smooth would show up like a beacon. A sponge would work, but it would need to be whitish-greyish. Hmmm.
I had a hard time staying awake on the bus with the driver telling stories and offering theories about Jack The Ripper. We visited the pubs, we visited the crime scenes, and back on the bus I fought to stay awake. When we finally got back to the hotel, I slept like a baby.
The next morning I knew that the only really big challenge remaining was to fill those holes. I was sitting in the bathroom picturing something that could be compressed into the holes and painted or Sharpied to blend in. I was wadding up toilet paper in my hand...HEY! A few minutes later I was downstairs with my roll of toilet paper. I climbed the ladder, wadded up some balls of tp and stuffed them in the holes. I climbed down, looked up - and couldn't see the holes, at all. A stroke of brilliance.
Carmen went on a bus tour to Leeds Castle, Dover and Canterbury that day. I finished up everything I knew to do and sat in the corner of the ballroom. Soon the Technical Director woke me up and told me not to sleep in a chair in front of the client who was paying me to be there. I told him to let me know if there was anything else they needed from me, and went out for a long walk. I was pleased to find that I remembered my way around quite a bit of the city from my trip here 22 years ago when I was 22. (Four Plays)
Carmen returned in the late afternoon, bubbling over with enthusiasm about Leeds, Canterbury and the White Cliffs. We were hungry, so we asked the Concierge to recommend a moderately priced Italian Restaurant. He recommended Toto's. We grabbed a cab.
My only regret about this whole trip is that I didn't go back to the Hyatt, grab the Concierge by the lapels and ask him how expensive a meal would have to be to earn the rank of HIGH priced. Our dinner came to just over 100 pounds- way over 200 dollars! They put us upstairs in the Beverley Hillbillies section, where everyone wearing jeans was put. The up side: we were by the railing and could watch the fancy people down below, including Uma Thurman.
Early Monday morning we checked out of the Hyatt, leaving our luggage at the front desk. We had a good breakfast before our tour bus picked us up and took us to Stonehenge, Salisbury Cathedral and Bath.
Stonehenge is a little like the Grand Canyon. You can see photographs and movies, and you can hear and read descriptions, but until you actually see what those wacky Druids did all those thousands of years ago, the impact pales.
Salisbury Cathedral was very cool, lots of famous dead people entombed in there, beautiful architecture. The tour group was walking, walking from the cathedral to a pub for lunch, but Carmen wanted to linger in the gift shop and such. My job was to watch which way the group went so we could catch up. I watched them through five or six turnings out of the cathedral grounds, down this street, turn onto that street. I went beyond where Carmen could see me from the grounds, watched one more turn and headed back. By the time we set out to follow the group and we attained the last turn I'd seen, there was no sign of them or any pub. We guessed the next turn to no avail. Several college-age boys came down the street, so we asked them. Believe it or not, they knew exactly where the pub was. Lunch was crappy, by the way.
Bath was very cool as well. You know, seeing signs directing you to "Historic Downtown Orlando" loses all of its charm after you spend a day looking at a five thousand year old henge, a seven hundred year old cathedral and baths where the Romans bathed.
We returned to London during rush hour. Carmen got off at the Knightsbridge Hotel on Knightsbridge Street to check us in. I continued on to the Hyatt Hyde Park, collected our luggage and took a cab back. Once we had settled in we went out for a walk to explore our new neighborhood and find some dinner. We turned down Brompton Road and passed Harrod's with its chest-high heaps of flowers and gifts from mourners of Princess Di. Dinner was pizza at a much more moderately priced Italian restaurant than Toto's.
Tuesday's tour was called "The Historic And Modern London Tour," with yet another twinge for Orlandoans. "Modern" London was anything built since the fire of 1666. We saw all the usual stuff: the Changing of the Guard between chest-high heaps of flowers and other gifts all along the fences around Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey, lunch in Covent Garden, Saint Paul's Cathedral, Parliament, all that stuff. It ended with a boat ride from the Tower of London up the Thames to meet the bus and go home.
Wednesday, our last day, was a wandering day, a shopping day (yes, she bought pottery) and we had tickets to see "The Woman In Black" at a theatre near Covent Garden. She went to the Victoria And Albert Museum and gift shop. I walked to the Harley Davidson store (they don't sell motorcycles) and bought Harley Davidson London T-shirts for the three guys back at F/X who requested them. They had a special going: buy two, get one free! Then we went to St. Martin in the Fields, Picadilly Circus and back to the hotel to dress for the theatre.
The play was pretty good, with a couple of really chilling moments. After the show we went back to the hotel to pack for our sad departure. I disappointed Carmen by just going back to the hotel instead of coming out wild and crazy and telling the driver to take us to a fun night spot to close out our best vacation ever. So far.
I missed the best part of our return trips. I checked in at Delta first, then Carmen went by herself to check in at Virgin with her way-too-heavy carry-on bag of pottery that, hell no, she wasn't going to check it! She wouldn't even let ME carry it!
***
Soon we come to the end of the Triple A saga. It all came down to Time Change Weekend, Fall, 1997. A few weeks prior, the AAA guys asked Mack if I could come to Phoenix. They'd seen the loaded shipping container in London and weren't at all confident that the set would be in very good shape when the container got to Phoenix. They sent their truck to pick up the European half-set, and F/X was almost completely done with it.
I flew to Phoenix on Friday afternoon, and in the evening we opened the container. Their fears were not in vain. One screen surround flat was completely snapped in half! "What do we do now?" they lamented. My face lit up. It just so happened that that exact piece was duplicated in the European half-set! All day Saturday I installed the whole set, turntable and all, all by myself. I used half a roll of toilet paper, gaff tape, Sharpies- everything in the arsenal, and it looked good one last time.
On Sunday morning I knew the time had changed everywhere but Arizona. I got on the standby list at Delta, left four hours earlier than scheduled, flew from Mountain Time to Eastern Time, and had absolutely no idea what time it was when I got home. There were no parking tickets on my vehicle at the airport - life was good and Triple A was over!
Friday, December 4, 2009
Holes In The West
Now we jump ahead to 1993. I may think of a fascinating trip in between someday, or not. This was probably about a year after we saw the VHS tape of the movie "Grand Canyon," which kind of motivated us, plus my mother wanted to see the grand canyon before she died. Better than that, she wanted to see it by the light of a full moon.
Their Winnebago LeSharo, with the too-small Renault engine, had proven itself to be a failure. It was really too small for two people to be comfortable for a long trip. PLUS, there were, according to my dad, two kinds of trip in that thing: "the ones where we limp home, and the ones where we are towed home." They weren't going to Arizona in the Winnebago. That's a long tow to Florida.
In fact, there was nothing about their RV ownership experience that made us want to follow in their tread tracks. They were members of an RV network, Good Sam I believe was the name. The news letters were full of people trying to unload their expensive and maintenance-intensive monstrosities at a horrendous loss, and people wanting to rent their monstrosities to strangers, just to help with the payments and maintenance costs during the 95 percent of the time that they were not using it, watching it rot in the yard. Do I paint a clear picture of the joys of RV ownership?
So they called around and found a woman who was looking to rent out her Coachman Leprechaun, a twenty-six foot long box on a truck chassis with sleeping accomodations cantilevered out over the cab, a Class C motorhome. According to the owner it was "the last of the classic Cs." We met my parents over in Titusville one Sunday morning to inspect it and get the lowdown on all of the jazzy innovations her husband had invented for it. I wish I could remember what they were.
A couple of weeks later, on a Friday late morning in early May, my dad arrived in our driveway on Wisconsin Avenue in St. Cloud (our third and final residence in St. Cloud) driving "the last of the classic Cs." We loaded up our two weeks worth of gear and had a nice liesurely lunch before setting out on our last epic journey together.
My dad drove us north on the Turnpike to I-75 to I-10. It was time to pull into a rest area and have some supper. This is a given when traveling with my parents: you don't eat in restaurants, especially if there's a refrigerator and stove in your vehicle. As darkness was descending, Carmen took over the driving. After a while, my dad decided to go to their bedroom in the back of the box to try to sleep some. My mother went back there too, as there wasn't much to do or to look at on that long long haul across the panhandle of Florida in the dark. Soon we heard my mother giggling uncontrollably. We were greatly amused by the possible goings-on back there, but were disappointed to learn that the giggles were a result of the fact that the back bedroom, which hung way out beyond the back wheels, was pitching, rolling and bouncing like an E-Ticket ride (old time Disney World patrons will remember E-Ticket rides.)
Daylight the next morning found us in Louisiana and breakfast in a rest area. Lunch was in eastern Texas, and we pulled up in front of Carmen's mom and dad's house in Crosby, Texas in early afternoon. Olen came running out to help us get electricity and water to the RV and get 'er leveled up. Then we all went inside for conversation, a nice dinner and a real bed for Carmen and me - no giggling.
Sunday was Mother's Day. We both got to spend time with our (and each other's) mother. After a grand lunch and some more conversation, we loaded up and headed out. It was getting dark when we motored through San Antonio. The group agreed to pull off the interstate and drive by The Alamo. Nothing could have prepared me for it. It was like an old, oddly shaped storefront packed into a street lined with storefronts.
Since I brought up "the group," I should explain a few things about decision-making on this trip. We evolved a system during this adventure that has worked well for the four of us for all the years since. Each member of the group, when asked what they want to do, would answer, "Whatever the group wants." We figured out as time and mileage progressed, that my mother had three votes, Carmen had two votes, I had one vote, and my dad had no vote. In the event of a tie, Carmen and my mother would try to acquiesce to the other for a spell, until they (or my dad and I) got tired of it and swung the vote one way or the other.
My dad and I were ready for a shower, so we walked down to the bathrooms only to find that the showers were coin-operated, four quarters for five minutes. He went back to the RV, and I went to the trading post, both of us seeking quarters. By the time I returned, he was done with his shower and back in the RV.
After resting awhile and eating our supper we cast off lines (electric and water) and went back to the rim. We found ourselves places to sit on the rocks, and watched the sun set and the full moon rise over the canyon. Very beautiful.
Carmen and I wanted to go to the Ranger Talk that evening, so we were dropped off at the Visitors' Center on the way back to the campsite. We were early, so we did some shopping at the trading post before following the trail to the outdoor theater. The ranger had a slide presentation about the history, geology and wonderfulness of the canyon. Two aspects of this presentation struck us as odd: his visual aid for the layered geology of the region was a Milky Way candy bar; and his segues into arial views of the canyon were pictures of him dressed as Superman! Silly boy.
Thursday morning we packed 'er up for the return trip, which now included the Meteor Crater as well as a short visit to West Helena to introduce the parents to Carmen's grandmother. So we took our sweet time leaving, driving up to Desert View, across the Painted Desert, through the Petrified Forest with several stops to check out petroglyphs and such, and then backtracked on the Interstate to the Meteor Crater. It was definitely the smallest hole we saw on this trip, but pretty cool nonetheless. If you saw the movie "Starman," you got a pretty good look at it.
It was getting late by the time we finished our tour of the crater, so my mother was searching her campground guide for a place to spend the night. She found a place north of Holbrook, AZ called Buzzard's Gulch. The guide gave it a 4 out of 5 points for scenic beauty. When we arrived, we could easily see why. There was brown dirt stretching to the horizon in all directions save one: the dumpsters and air conditioning units on the back side of a shopping center. Carmen and I walked over to the shopping center and bought me a pair of cheap sneakers, some socks and some moisturizer to try to repair my cracked and bleeding heels. We plugged in the cable to the TV and watched the news. The weather report told us that the humidity was a crackling fifteen percent.
Friday morning we had a liesurely breakfast, unhooked ourselves and set out. By the time we made our way to New Mexico, we were thinking about lunch. We began seeing signs for Red Rock Park. We exited the Interstate near Gallup and followed the signs north to the park and The Red Rock Museum. Large in the landscape was an enormous red rock, hundreds of feet tall and hundreds of feet wide. When we arrived at the museum parking lot, there were no other vehicles anywhere in sight. I got out and walked up to the glass museum doors. They were locked, but I could see in. The doors on the far side were also glass, and just a few feet beyond them was the enormous red rock. Good thing there was a museum there to showcase that rock. But it was closed. We ate our lunch and moved on.
We crossed the rest of New Mexico stopping only for gas and one misbegotten dinner at a diner on Historic Route 66. We drove all night through the Texas panhandle. I was driving through Amarillo. The gas tank was getting low and I was thinking about stopping, but didn't. A long long stretch of nothing but nothing went by, and we made a critical decision to turn around when we had just enough gas to get us back to Amarillo. Good thing, too, because the next gas station east was at Shamrock, about a hundred miles away.
It was mid-morning Saturday when we pulled off the Interstate about fifty miles into Oklahoma. We spent two nights at Foss State Park on Foss Lake, watching the Mississippi kites soar the skies and the scissor-tail flycatchers dart after flies. All this time we had been on the lookout for roadrunners, but had seen none. Oklahoma was no exception.
Monday afternoon, after the long drive across Oklahoma, we camped for the night at Horsehead Lake in the White Rock Wildlife Management Area at the southern end of the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. It was a gorgeous, lush place, especially after the dry brownness of Arizona and New Mexico. I went for a long walk - my heels felt much better. We saw goldfinches, a scarlet tanager and a bluebird. That evening, Carmen found a luna moth on the floor in the restroom. She enticed it onto her finger and carried it around for a while. Eventually it gathered the strength to fly. It fluttered about ten feet away before a blue jay streaked out of a tree and nailed it.
Tuesday morning we cast off again, making a side trip to Devil's Den State Park. As we were driving down the access road to the park, a roadrunner came running up onto a log and on up to the top of a branch sticking up. It posed there for a moment as we roared by. At last, a roadrunner - in Arkansas?
Tuesday evening, after the three hundred mile trip across Arkansas, we pulled up in front of Mum Mum's house. Olen came running out to help us get electricity and water to the RV and get 'er leveled up. "Didn't we just see you in Texas?" my dad asked. Yes, we did. Hmmmm.
We visited with Mum Mum, had dinner at the Golden Corral (Where Carmen had worked as a "Steerette" in her youth) and went to visit Evil Sister Tammie and her daughter Nikki at their house nestled in the woods a few miles away. Nikki did a fancy dance routine for us in her cowboy boots. Back at Mum Mum's Carmen and I had a shower and a real bed to sleep in before the push for home.
Of course, the push for home included one more stop. There was a CCC park in southern Alabama, Frank Jackson State Park, that the parents wanted to check out. My dad's brother Bob had worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression, and my dad has a soft spot for CCC parks. And it was a very nice park and very nice campground. The big thing I remember was on the way there, on Interstate 65 south of Montgomery, the truck in front of us had one of his tires disintegrate, shooting rubber projectiles all over the front of The Last Of The Classic Cs.
I don't remember anything about the trip from Jackson State Park to St. Cloud, other than our last dinner in a rest area east of Tallahassee, for which I drained the macaroni and the lid came off the pasta pot and dumped macaroni into the RV sink. I believe we pulled in late on Friday night, reacquainted ourselves with our kitties Harvie and Ms. Mouse, and went to bed in our own bed.
On Saturday morning we washed down the Leprechaun, had a last lunch together, and my parents drove away to Titusville to trade the RV for their car, and went home.
Their Winnebago LeSharo, with the too-small Renault engine, had proven itself to be a failure. It was really too small for two people to be comfortable for a long trip. PLUS, there were, according to my dad, two kinds of trip in that thing: "the ones where we limp home, and the ones where we are towed home." They weren't going to Arizona in the Winnebago. That's a long tow to Florida.
In fact, there was nothing about their RV ownership experience that made us want to follow in their tread tracks. They were members of an RV network, Good Sam I believe was the name. The news letters were full of people trying to unload their expensive and maintenance-intensive monstrosities at a horrendous loss, and people wanting to rent their monstrosities to strangers, just to help with the payments and maintenance costs during the 95 percent of the time that they were not using it, watching it rot in the yard. Do I paint a clear picture of the joys of RV ownership?
So they called around and found a woman who was looking to rent out her Coachman Leprechaun, a twenty-six foot long box on a truck chassis with sleeping accomodations cantilevered out over the cab, a Class C motorhome. According to the owner it was "the last of the classic Cs." We met my parents over in Titusville one Sunday morning to inspect it and get the lowdown on all of the jazzy innovations her husband had invented for it. I wish I could remember what they were.
A couple of weeks later, on a Friday late morning in early May, my dad arrived in our driveway on Wisconsin Avenue in St. Cloud (our third and final residence in St. Cloud) driving "the last of the classic Cs." We loaded up our two weeks worth of gear and had a nice liesurely lunch before setting out on our last epic journey together.
My dad drove us north on the Turnpike to I-75 to I-10. It was time to pull into a rest area and have some supper. This is a given when traveling with my parents: you don't eat in restaurants, especially if there's a refrigerator and stove in your vehicle. As darkness was descending, Carmen took over the driving. After a while, my dad decided to go to their bedroom in the back of the box to try to sleep some. My mother went back there too, as there wasn't much to do or to look at on that long long haul across the panhandle of Florida in the dark. Soon we heard my mother giggling uncontrollably. We were greatly amused by the possible goings-on back there, but were disappointed to learn that the giggles were a result of the fact that the back bedroom, which hung way out beyond the back wheels, was pitching, rolling and bouncing like an E-Ticket ride (old time Disney World patrons will remember E-Ticket rides.)
Daylight the next morning found us in Louisiana and breakfast in a rest area. Lunch was in eastern Texas, and we pulled up in front of Carmen's mom and dad's house in Crosby, Texas in early afternoon. Olen came running out to help us get electricity and water to the RV and get 'er leveled up. Then we all went inside for conversation, a nice dinner and a real bed for Carmen and me - no giggling.
Sunday was Mother's Day. We both got to spend time with our (and each other's) mother. After a grand lunch and some more conversation, we loaded up and headed out. It was getting dark when we motored through San Antonio. The group agreed to pull off the interstate and drive by The Alamo. Nothing could have prepared me for it. It was like an old, oddly shaped storefront packed into a street lined with storefronts.
Since I brought up "the group," I should explain a few things about decision-making on this trip. We evolved a system during this adventure that has worked well for the four of us for all the years since. Each member of the group, when asked what they want to do, would answer, "Whatever the group wants." We figured out as time and mileage progressed, that my mother had three votes, Carmen had two votes, I had one vote, and my dad had no vote. In the event of a tie, Carmen and my mother would try to acquiesce to the other for a spell, until they (or my dad and I) got tired of it and swung the vote one way or the other.
Part of the plan all along was for the second stop to be Carlsbad Caverns. So we exited Interstate 10 at Fort Stockton early Monday morning and followed US 285 northwest into southeastern New Mexico, arriving in time for lunch. We secured our parking space in the campground, then followed the signs up a 600 foot tall hill and parked near the entrance to the 600 foot deep caverns. "We could have stayed down at the bottom of the hill and walked straight in!" I observed. We took the elevator down to ground level, and bought lunch at the concession stand deep inside the hill. So we did the caverns, which were very interesting. They had narration headphone thingies to tell the story of the caverns over many thousands of years, including the time a mere century or so ago when some entreprenurial humans busted into the side of the hill and extracted bat guano for sale as fertilizer. "See?" I said.
It was miserably hot when we came back up and drove back down. We hooked up to the electricity and ran the air conditioner full blast, barely making a dent in the stiffling interior heat. We blew the breaker on the panel three times. But as a wise and wonderful person once said to me, "When the sun goes down, it cools off." In the early evening Carmen and I walked down to the gift shops over by the road. When we returned to the campsite, there was a mule deer wandering the grounds. We roused my dad to come see it, but it wasn't near enough to see in the dark. Later, when we walked down to the bathrooms, there were several mule deer licking the floors in the showers. I guess you get your water where you can in an arid environment.
Tuesday morning after breakfast we packed the Leprechaun for the final push to the canyon. We mosied on up 285 to Roswell, where we saw no aliens that we knew were aliens, and turned left onto US 380. It was getting close to lunch time when we saw signs for the Valley Of Fires National Recreation Area. We turned off the highway and drove into a strange and beautiful place. The Valley is as green and lush as any place I've seen in New Mexico, but with ridges of black volcanic rock poking out of the green, looking like plowed furrows in the landscape. So we ate lunch without taking any pictures of this magical place, and moved on. Hey, I live in New Mexico now. I could nip down there any time I want. It's only about a hundred fifty miles from Albuquerque.
We crossed the Continental Divide at about 8:00 Tuesday night. Not long after, we pulled off for gas. We entered the Parking Lot of Potholes leading to a truck stop. I was driving, trying my best to avoid the big, deep holes, but there were just too many. The front right wheel went down, and the Leprechaun pitched hard to the right, popping open the cabinets on the left side. It straightened up in time for the left side to go down, popping open the cabinets on the right. While I pumped the gas, the others were busy picking up all the crap that had come flying out of the cabinets.
We were all getting pretty sleepy in the wee hours of the morning. We pulled into the rest area near the Meteor Crater and grabbed some shuteye. The next morning, on the way to the restrooms, Carmen spotted a tiny bunny in the huge rock arrangement by the building. It was very cute, and it just sat there. I guess it was accustomed to gawking tourists. The other thing that happened there was that we decided to go to the meteor crater on the way back east. Tonight was the full moon, so we didn't want to dally.
We reached the campground at the village of Grand Canyon around mid-morning. We secured our space, then drove to the nearest parking lot at the rim of the canyon. I could spend all day describing the grandeur of this massive hole in the ground, but until you are there you can't begin to get a sense of its awe-inspiring size and beauty. So go.
The only shoes I brought for this adventure were my flip flops. Walking the trail along the rim of the canyon is not a task best done in flip flops. By the time we returned to the campground, my feet had canyons of their own cracking open in my heels.My dad and I were ready for a shower, so we walked down to the bathrooms only to find that the showers were coin-operated, four quarters for five minutes. He went back to the RV, and I went to the trading post, both of us seeking quarters. By the time I returned, he was done with his shower and back in the RV.
After resting awhile and eating our supper we cast off lines (electric and water) and went back to the rim. We found ourselves places to sit on the rocks, and watched the sun set and the full moon rise over the canyon. Very beautiful.
Carmen and I wanted to go to the Ranger Talk that evening, so we were dropped off at the Visitors' Center on the way back to the campsite. We were early, so we did some shopping at the trading post before following the trail to the outdoor theater. The ranger had a slide presentation about the history, geology and wonderfulness of the canyon. Two aspects of this presentation struck us as odd: his visual aid for the layered geology of the region was a Milky Way candy bar; and his segues into arial views of the canyon were pictures of him dressed as Superman! Silly boy.
Thursday morning we packed 'er up for the return trip, which now included the Meteor Crater as well as a short visit to West Helena to introduce the parents to Carmen's grandmother. So we took our sweet time leaving, driving up to Desert View, across the Painted Desert, through the Petrified Forest with several stops to check out petroglyphs and such, and then backtracked on the Interstate to the Meteor Crater. It was definitely the smallest hole we saw on this trip, but pretty cool nonetheless. If you saw the movie "Starman," you got a pretty good look at it.
It was getting late by the time we finished our tour of the crater, so my mother was searching her campground guide for a place to spend the night. She found a place north of Holbrook, AZ called Buzzard's Gulch. The guide gave it a 4 out of 5 points for scenic beauty. When we arrived, we could easily see why. There was brown dirt stretching to the horizon in all directions save one: the dumpsters and air conditioning units on the back side of a shopping center. Carmen and I walked over to the shopping center and bought me a pair of cheap sneakers, some socks and some moisturizer to try to repair my cracked and bleeding heels. We plugged in the cable to the TV and watched the news. The weather report told us that the humidity was a crackling fifteen percent.
Friday morning we had a liesurely breakfast, unhooked ourselves and set out. By the time we made our way to New Mexico, we were thinking about lunch. We began seeing signs for Red Rock Park. We exited the Interstate near Gallup and followed the signs north to the park and The Red Rock Museum. Large in the landscape was an enormous red rock, hundreds of feet tall and hundreds of feet wide. When we arrived at the museum parking lot, there were no other vehicles anywhere in sight. I got out and walked up to the glass museum doors. They were locked, but I could see in. The doors on the far side were also glass, and just a few feet beyond them was the enormous red rock. Good thing there was a museum there to showcase that rock. But it was closed. We ate our lunch and moved on.
We crossed the rest of New Mexico stopping only for gas and one misbegotten dinner at a diner on Historic Route 66. We drove all night through the Texas panhandle. I was driving through Amarillo. The gas tank was getting low and I was thinking about stopping, but didn't. A long long stretch of nothing but nothing went by, and we made a critical decision to turn around when we had just enough gas to get us back to Amarillo. Good thing, too, because the next gas station east was at Shamrock, about a hundred miles away.
It was mid-morning Saturday when we pulled off the Interstate about fifty miles into Oklahoma. We spent two nights at Foss State Park on Foss Lake, watching the Mississippi kites soar the skies and the scissor-tail flycatchers dart after flies. All this time we had been on the lookout for roadrunners, but had seen none. Oklahoma was no exception.
Monday afternoon, after the long drive across Oklahoma, we camped for the night at Horsehead Lake in the White Rock Wildlife Management Area at the southern end of the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. It was a gorgeous, lush place, especially after the dry brownness of Arizona and New Mexico. I went for a long walk - my heels felt much better. We saw goldfinches, a scarlet tanager and a bluebird. That evening, Carmen found a luna moth on the floor in the restroom. She enticed it onto her finger and carried it around for a while. Eventually it gathered the strength to fly. It fluttered about ten feet away before a blue jay streaked out of a tree and nailed it.
Tuesday morning we cast off again, making a side trip to Devil's Den State Park. As we were driving down the access road to the park, a roadrunner came running up onto a log and on up to the top of a branch sticking up. It posed there for a moment as we roared by. At last, a roadrunner - in Arkansas?
Tuesday evening, after the three hundred mile trip across Arkansas, we pulled up in front of Mum Mum's house. Olen came running out to help us get electricity and water to the RV and get 'er leveled up. "Didn't we just see you in Texas?" my dad asked. Yes, we did. Hmmmm.
We visited with Mum Mum, had dinner at the Golden Corral (Where Carmen had worked as a "Steerette" in her youth) and went to visit Evil Sister Tammie and her daughter Nikki at their house nestled in the woods a few miles away. Nikki did a fancy dance routine for us in her cowboy boots. Back at Mum Mum's Carmen and I had a shower and a real bed to sleep in before the push for home.
Of course, the push for home included one more stop. There was a CCC park in southern Alabama, Frank Jackson State Park, that the parents wanted to check out. My dad's brother Bob had worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression, and my dad has a soft spot for CCC parks. And it was a very nice park and very nice campground. The big thing I remember was on the way there, on Interstate 65 south of Montgomery, the truck in front of us had one of his tires disintegrate, shooting rubber projectiles all over the front of The Last Of The Classic Cs.
I don't remember anything about the trip from Jackson State Park to St. Cloud, other than our last dinner in a rest area east of Tallahassee, for which I drained the macaroni and the lid came off the pasta pot and dumped macaroni into the RV sink. I believe we pulled in late on Friday night, reacquainted ourselves with our kitties Harvie and Ms. Mouse, and went to bed in our own bed.
On Saturday morning we washed down the Leprechaun, had a last lunch together, and my parents drove away to Titusville to trade the RV for their car, and went home.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Too Much Vacation
This is a long one, which is why I've been putting it off. It was the summer of 1989, when we lived in "Green Acres," a tumble-down old wood and palmetto bug house on 9th Street in St. Cloud, our second residence in Central Florida and the first place we bought. We actually bought it while I was still at the plant nursery. It was the subject of a closing Carmen was working up at Land Title And Survey, and the deal fell through. The price was 27,000. She couldn't pass it up. John Geip was aghast that one of his lowly grunts would be so uppity as to own "proppity."
Anyway, despite many stories I could tell about this house, I'll get on with the story at hand. My parents had bought a used RV, a Winnebago LeSharo (kind of a long van with a wide body and a too-small Renault engine) and were itching to take it out for a long trip. Their little red dog Maggie was itching to go as well.
I was still suffering under the delusion that I was going to write a Civil War Blockade Runner story, so I wanted to see Wilmington, NC and Fort Fisher, near there. I also wanted to see Charleston, SC. We also wanted to visit the same friends as always, the Shetrones and the Buinickases in Maryland. Carmen wanted to visit her grandmother in Arkansas again. So this trip would cover ten states in sixteen days. My parents wouldn't go all the way to Arkansas, so they would go straight home to Vero Beach from Maryland.
We packed our little Corrolla full of camping gear and clothes, put a rack on the back for two bicycles (Carmen's and Brandon's) and lit out in the early afternoon, leading the way. Our first night was in Savannah, and we three decided not to pitch a tent that night. We stayed in a motel while the parents and Maggie hooked up in an RV campground.
Day two we stopped off to take a boat tour of Charleston Harbor while the parents plowed ahead to the Wilmington area. This was years before any of us got cellular phones, so when we finally got to Wilmington, we were flabberghasted to find that the campground we were all going to stay in was closed. How were we ever going to find each other now? We turned around and headed back to a little shopping center we had passed to use the bathroom and buy some snacks. As we were getting ready to pull out of the parking lot, the Winnebago went by, headed back to the closed campground looking for us. We chased them down and we all pulled off the road. They had checked in at another campground nearby and reserved an adjacent space for our first night in the tent. Whew!
Day three: the parents and Brandon went on to the Cedar Island campground while Carmen and I explored Wilmington, visited the museum, and went to the overgrown site of Fort Fisher. This was all very exciting for me to actually be there in the presence of so much of the history of the Blockade. Carmen tolerated it pretty well. We mosied on to Cedar Island and set up the tent again. This was right on the ocean and Pamlico Sound- very nice, breezy, quiet. We liked it.
Day four my parents declared that our next stop needed to be at least two nights. We took the ferry over to Cape Hatteras, drove some, ferried a few more times and stopped up near Kitty Hawk for two nights. We went to the Wright Brothers Museum on day five, and the bicyclists and Maggie got a good workout that day.
Day six saw us go through Virginia up US 17 to US 301, across that one dollar Eisenhower Bridge (see "A New Adventure Every Day" at the beginning of this blog) and on up through Maryland where we all (except Carmen, Brandon and Maggie) had spent so much of our lives. As it turned out, this almost worked against us. We were confident going into familiar territory, but it had changed so much in twenty one years that we were totally disoriented.
I don't remember how long we stayed at the Shetrone house. On Saturday Sharyn and Don loaded their kids, Brandon and me into their van and we went on one of their standard day trips to Rocks State Park in the mountains. (It's funny now to sit here in Albuquerque and remember the "mountains" of Maryland) There are trails up to the "King and Queen Seat" at the top of a mountain, and it was on our way up there that Brandon uttered the famous line, "Follow me! I know where I'm going!" when he had never been there before in his life. A couple of days were spent by my dad and Don trying to fix the generator in the RV. Anyway, it was several days before we parted company with Mother, Dad and Maggie and set out for Arkansas.
We went around Washington to Interstate 66 over to I 81 and spent the night in Bristol, Virginia. We asked at the front desk if there was a Walmart nearby. "It's in Tennessee," she replied. We were crestfallen. "Across the street." Bristol, Tennessee is across the main street from Bristol, Virginia. I guess the locals love to catch up tourists with that stuff.
The next day was the long slog across the length of Tennessee, turn left at Memphis, sixty miles south to Lula, Mississippi and across the bridge to Helena, Arkansas. Except the long, high bridge was being repaired, so instead of two lanes, it was down to one. There was a signal light to tell us it was the westbound turn to go. It told us to go. We went. Luckily there was nobody behind us, because over the top came an eastbound semi straight at us at a high rate of fuel consumption. After we screamed and panicked, we backed back down the east side and let the semi keep going.
The big news in the twin cities of Helena and West Helena, was that there was now a Taco Bell, pronounced TOCKobell. Everybody we encountered announced proudly, "We got a TOCKobell." It rivaled the time, in Carmen's high school years, when they got a MACKdonalds.
So we visited Carmen's Mum Mum and evil sister Tammie and pre-evil niece, Nikki for a few days, then high-tailed it home through Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. We came close to making it in one shot, but in White Springs, Florida, Carmen pooped out. It was nearing midnight, and about three hours from home. We had her father's Union 76 credit card for gas, and there in White Springs was a Union 76 Motor Lodge. We spent the night.
The last day was Brandon, bored, tired and missing his mom, singing a little song all the way down I 75 and the Florida Turnpike. It went, "Going up a big hill, going up a big hill, going up a big hill, top of a big hill, going down a big hill, going down a big hill, going on a flat part, going on a flat part..." you get the picture. All the way home.
We finally drove up to the entrance to our driveway, to be faced with a pile of rubble. "What's that in our carport?" asked Carmen. "Oh, crap, it IS our carport!" We sold the house a couple of months later.
Anyway, despite many stories I could tell about this house, I'll get on with the story at hand. My parents had bought a used RV, a Winnebago LeSharo (kind of a long van with a wide body and a too-small Renault engine) and were itching to take it out for a long trip. Their little red dog Maggie was itching to go as well.
I was still suffering under the delusion that I was going to write a Civil War Blockade Runner story, so I wanted to see Wilmington, NC and Fort Fisher, near there. I also wanted to see Charleston, SC. We also wanted to visit the same friends as always, the Shetrones and the Buinickases in Maryland. Carmen wanted to visit her grandmother in Arkansas again. So this trip would cover ten states in sixteen days. My parents wouldn't go all the way to Arkansas, so they would go straight home to Vero Beach from Maryland.
We packed our little Corrolla full of camping gear and clothes, put a rack on the back for two bicycles (Carmen's and Brandon's) and lit out in the early afternoon, leading the way. Our first night was in Savannah, and we three decided not to pitch a tent that night. We stayed in a motel while the parents and Maggie hooked up in an RV campground.
Day two we stopped off to take a boat tour of Charleston Harbor while the parents plowed ahead to the Wilmington area. This was years before any of us got cellular phones, so when we finally got to Wilmington, we were flabberghasted to find that the campground we were all going to stay in was closed. How were we ever going to find each other now? We turned around and headed back to a little shopping center we had passed to use the bathroom and buy some snacks. As we were getting ready to pull out of the parking lot, the Winnebago went by, headed back to the closed campground looking for us. We chased them down and we all pulled off the road. They had checked in at another campground nearby and reserved an adjacent space for our first night in the tent. Whew!
Day three: the parents and Brandon went on to the Cedar Island campground while Carmen and I explored Wilmington, visited the museum, and went to the overgrown site of Fort Fisher. This was all very exciting for me to actually be there in the presence of so much of the history of the Blockade. Carmen tolerated it pretty well. We mosied on to Cedar Island and set up the tent again. This was right on the ocean and Pamlico Sound- very nice, breezy, quiet. We liked it.
Day four my parents declared that our next stop needed to be at least two nights. We took the ferry over to Cape Hatteras, drove some, ferried a few more times and stopped up near Kitty Hawk for two nights. We went to the Wright Brothers Museum on day five, and the bicyclists and Maggie got a good workout that day.
Day six saw us go through Virginia up US 17 to US 301, across that one dollar Eisenhower Bridge (see "A New Adventure Every Day" at the beginning of this blog) and on up through Maryland where we all (except Carmen, Brandon and Maggie) had spent so much of our lives. As it turned out, this almost worked against us. We were confident going into familiar territory, but it had changed so much in twenty one years that we were totally disoriented.
I don't remember how long we stayed at the Shetrone house. On Saturday Sharyn and Don loaded their kids, Brandon and me into their van and we went on one of their standard day trips to Rocks State Park in the mountains. (It's funny now to sit here in Albuquerque and remember the "mountains" of Maryland) There are trails up to the "King and Queen Seat" at the top of a mountain, and it was on our way up there that Brandon uttered the famous line, "Follow me! I know where I'm going!" when he had never been there before in his life. A couple of days were spent by my dad and Don trying to fix the generator in the RV. Anyway, it was several days before we parted company with Mother, Dad and Maggie and set out for Arkansas.
We went around Washington to Interstate 66 over to I 81 and spent the night in Bristol, Virginia. We asked at the front desk if there was a Walmart nearby. "It's in Tennessee," she replied. We were crestfallen. "Across the street." Bristol, Tennessee is across the main street from Bristol, Virginia. I guess the locals love to catch up tourists with that stuff.
The next day was the long slog across the length of Tennessee, turn left at Memphis, sixty miles south to Lula, Mississippi and across the bridge to Helena, Arkansas. Except the long, high bridge was being repaired, so instead of two lanes, it was down to one. There was a signal light to tell us it was the westbound turn to go. It told us to go. We went. Luckily there was nobody behind us, because over the top came an eastbound semi straight at us at a high rate of fuel consumption. After we screamed and panicked, we backed back down the east side and let the semi keep going.
The big news in the twin cities of Helena and West Helena, was that there was now a Taco Bell, pronounced TOCKobell. Everybody we encountered announced proudly, "We got a TOCKobell." It rivaled the time, in Carmen's high school years, when they got a MACKdonalds.
So we visited Carmen's Mum Mum and evil sister Tammie and pre-evil niece, Nikki for a few days, then high-tailed it home through Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. We came close to making it in one shot, but in White Springs, Florida, Carmen pooped out. It was nearing midnight, and about three hours from home. We had her father's Union 76 credit card for gas, and there in White Springs was a Union 76 Motor Lodge. We spent the night.
The last day was Brandon, bored, tired and missing his mom, singing a little song all the way down I 75 and the Florida Turnpike. It went, "Going up a big hill, going up a big hill, going up a big hill, top of a big hill, going down a big hill, going down a big hill, going on a flat part, going on a flat part..." you get the picture. All the way home.
We finally drove up to the entrance to our driveway, to be faced with a pile of rubble. "What's that in our carport?" asked Carmen. "Oh, crap, it IS our carport!" We sold the house a couple of months later.
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