Vacation: Southern Gothic Tension Edition

That night, I promised Omaha's mother that I'd cook dinner for her. I made macaroni & cheese, and that was an adventure. Omaha's mother hasn't cooked since her last child moved out, so there was nothing in the house in the way of foodstuffs. She didn't have a cheese grater, either. I ended up grating the cheese with a fruit peeler-- and Winn Dixie only had Kraft brand cheddar-- so it came out thicker and closer to commercial than I'd like, but it was pretty damn good all the same. I so miss my Pike Place Market fresh cheddar.

The next morning, we went to Omaha's grandmothers' houses. The first grandmother (really a step grandmother, but all the better for it), B. was a competent woman still trying to live her life, but her husband had passed away without warning her that he'd taken a very bad reverse mortgage that amounted to little more than an equity swap, and she was in danger of losing her house. Her frustration was terrible and tragic, but she loved Kouryou-chan and Storm as a great-Grandmother should. She was lively and conversant, and while she regaled us with tales of her medical woes she never asked for pity or sorrow.

The other grandmother lived south, in Clay County, and as we drove there I noticed that Clay County is losing businesses at a terrifying rate. Fully a quarter of the restaurants and half the hotels had closed.

The sherrif has a sign that reads "DRIVING + TEXTING: A DEADLY COMBINATION." Only the icon accompanying it is the outline of a man holding a phone to his head. I don't think you can text with your ear.

Navigating was a bitch; Google's algorithm doesn't do well in rural environments at all, and we dealt with threats of being bogged in Florida sand and having to strive past closed horse gates.

When we got to the other grandmother's house, the tension there was Southern Gothic thick and did not bear looking into. A., Omaha's aunt, was stuck caring for her aging mother, and I got the impression that the arrangement was not entirely to her liking.

Although we took a photo of four generations, we were all glad to get out of there. Lunch was at a barbecue place up the street, fairly good.

We spent the afternoon at the hotel, just enjoying a final quiet day without much in the way of responsibilities. After the incessant rushing of the past few days, just being allowed to spend two hours looking through the news I'd missed, and two hours in the swimming pool, felt like a relief. At least I had the sense that the world was no longer going past me at warp speed and I was missing out on all the coolness.

Dinner was with Omaha's mother again, but now at an Indian restaurant. That was a disappointment, despite the high scores from Yelp. The goat curry was excessively bony, the Tandoori chicken spicer than anything I'd had in years. It didn't help that they had video screens distracting everyone (well, execept Omaha and her mother). The screens were of Bollywood music videos, which were fun and cute but really, really distracting.

Vacation: On the road again. St Augustine and Florida Tech.

The next morning, Omaha went out early with her mother while the girls and I finished packing our clothes and the car. We had the Radisson's continental breakfast (which, Omaha and I agree, was illegitimately lumped into the other complimentary amenities when it wasn't complimentary, unlike at the Hyatt). We caught up with Omaha and then it was time to hit the road again.

On the way out, we passed a number of interesting signs. "The Love Grove" turned out to be an elementary school, and not another gentleman's club. "Woody's Barbecue" promised us "Sloppy Woodys" and "A Taste of Woodys," neither of which appealed. And finally there was "Kemp's Chiropractic - Functional Neurology." Uh huh. If you're practicing functional neurology, the Singularity is near. Given that the shop's sign had a brain being struck by Hollywood's notion of charged atoms, comet trails and all, I suspect woo.

The Castillo San Marcos

The next place we hit was St. Augustine. It wasn't on the itinerary, but we had left early and it looked interesting. It was, actually. The oldest city (founded by Europeans) in the Americas, founded in 1569, it also has an ancient fortress, the Castillo San Marcos, that gives you a great appreciation for just how tight, small, and miserable the wilderness fortress must have been under fire. At one time 1500 Spaniards survived for months in a plot of land little bigger than the entire property of my house, while the English hovered close enough to see the whites of their eyes.

We also did a tour of the oldest civilian home in the town, an 18th century construction that had been added onto over the years. The guide was a British expatriate who mentioned that the town had been founded by the Spanish, "held for 21 glorious years by the British," then turned back to the Spanish, who later surrendered it to the Americans. He had an admitted fondness for kitchen gadgets, and showed off some 19th century innovations, such as the "brick fireplace. Which we do. Because we're British. In Florida." And a black cylinder on a metal shaft that I successfully identified as the coffee roaster.

The family at St. Augustine.

We had lunch at a burger grill along the beach where they forgot my order, but it was all good when it arrived. Gassed up at a truck stop; it was disconcerting to see a bunch of truckers watching Mad Max in the break room. Drove to Canaveral, where we passed the Vehicle Assembly Building, which must be the saddest building in the world right now.

Omaha and I giggled as we passed bars where she had worked when she was much younger, then got into Melbourne, which I barely recognized.

26 years of love started right here.

We stopped at Florida Institute of Technology, where we initally went to school. I told the guard that we were alumni from 1985-1989, and asked where we could park. "Anywhere," he said. "Nobody's here right now." The place had changed, but Omaha and I found a few familiar sights, and Kouryou-chan took this picture of us at the very seat where we first met, 26 years ago.

We found our favorite restaurant, Makoto's Hibachi Grill and Sushi, and had a fabulous meal together. They've changed the sauces and they're not as good as they used to be; the liver pate is also drier than it used to be. Pity, that. Still, the hibachi was fun and the kids enjoyed it. Kouryou-chan was especially happy to get her chef's hat.

We drove on to Orlando, passing by Bare Assets, Omaha's first bar. Saturday's, once the only gay bar in Melbourne, was gone, as was the sleazy bookstore that sat on the block east of it. The once two-lane gator road, 192, is now a full-fledged seperated two-lanes highway. But Holopaw, halfway between Melbourne and Kissimmee, is still as podunkt as ever.

We got into the hotel around 10:30pm, and just went straight to sleep.

Vacation, Day 13: Epcot Center!

Our next stop was Epcot center. We got there a little late, mostly owing to our oversleeping, having been so late in the first place. We parked and went around to the back of the car, where Omaha said, "I just need a minute," sat down on the ground and immediately had a seziure. It was a middling one, no grand mal, just a brainlock. But the staff could not help but see me dragging this poor woman by her shoulders out of the sunlight, and asked if we needed an ambulance. I said we just needed time. They let us have it. One "cast member" said that he was willing to call ahead and have FastPasses generated for us, if she would take long to come around, but I said it would only be half an hour or so, and she'd be fine.

Actually, she was back up in less than ten minutes. Not entirely coherent, but she was able to follow us to the gate. When the gatekeepers said we had to open the bag for them to examine, I had to unclip her waistpack and open it, then lead her through. Her eyes were pretty vacant. I had to give a fingerprint to get into the park, though.

We stopped at the Innoventions! hall, which was a bunch of branding for IBM to tell us how they're making the world "smarter." Red Hat had a mention among the software IBM uses, which was amusing. Other vendors having their say included Segway (lame!), T. Rowe Price (spammy!), and Underwriters Laboratory, which told us all about how they test TV tubes to make sure they don't explode. (As far as I know, there are no US manufactures of tube televisions anymore.)

Armand and Remy at Les Chef Du Paris, Epcot

We went to lunch at Le Chefs Du Paris, the restaurant in Epcot's French Quarter. All of the waiters and waitresses there are actually from France, and Sebsatian, our waiter, had an accent so thick he could barely be understood. There was also in-meal entertainment, when Remy stopped by with his handler, Armand.

But Omaha's epilepsy was still dogging her. Her hand spasmed when she went to get a drink of water and the glass shattered in her hand, sending water and shards flying. I will say the staff was amazing, materializing almost out of nowhere, clearing the table and restoring it to normalcy with maximal aplomb and minimal fuss. Omaha was dreadfully embarassed, but I pointed out their professionalism and said I was sure that, this being Disney, they were trained to deal with much worse.

Champagne & black current cordial was awesome. I recommend the salmon with extra vegetables and no potato.

She also spotted Greg Bear! The Clarion West t-shirt was a giveaway.

We did the "Imagination!" tour, which was silly. Eric Idle narrated, but I have to agree with Wendy Pini's assessment of that little dragon, Figment. I'm fond of the quote, "When inspiration finds me, it had better find me working." Nothing about actually working was anywhere in that.

1950s Pulp Architecture brought to life!

We stopped to have our picture taken, a very touristy thing to do. The family in front of us had a little girl who desperately did not want her picture taken, and fought to make sure it didn't. That'll end up on awkwardfamilyphotos.com, I'm sure.

The space simulator was awesome. The entire ride is in a centrifugal G-force simulator, and it worked, amazingly well. It was narrated by Gary Sinise, and had all the expected thrills and crises. The cryo component was creepy, as expected.

Ellen's Energy Adventure was narrated by Ellen DeGeneris and Bill Nye, with Jamie Lee Curtis and Alex Trabek in supporting roles. It was dreadfully unenlightening. First, it was poorly married to a decrepit dinosaur ride, and second, it glossed over the controversy of deep ocean drilling, tar-sand extraction and natural-gas fracking, while redlining the controversy over fission, bought into the whole clean-carbon myth, avoided any mention of birdkills and windpower, and glossed past fusion so fast if you blinked you missed it. And Ellen, "just Ellen," isn't all that funny.

Plus, the entire facility is plastered in photovoltaic cells! A nice gesture, but a better gesture would have been a sign somewhere telling you how successful they were, and whether or not they supplied a significant fraction of the buildings power.

Note to self: Disney has signs everywhere with warnings about different medical needs. There are no signs warning about strobe lights, which the Energy Adventure has. Send them a letter.

General Motors's "Test Track," a pseudo-roller-coaster where GM sang its praises, was also fun, although Omaha and I did the math and decided a Volt would not be economically viable for us at this time.

As we walked out, the fountain in the middle of Tomorrow World was doing all kinds of interesting things with water jets to an electronic soundtrack. Omaha and I identified the music as Yanni's. How much geek cred do I lose for admitting that I knew that?

We finally made it to Planet Earth, where Siemens tried to impress us with "the world of tomorrow!" Unfortunately, tomorrow is here, it's just not evenly distributed. They tried to wow us with the promise of being able to take clean, electrically powered mass transit (we do that already), to use WiFi on said mass transit (we do that already), and to be able to continue working with voice and video conferencing from the beach (we do that already). Basically, the future is already present to those who know where to find it.

We enjoyed the Norway Adventure, courtesy of Norwegian Cruise Lines. As we exited through the gift shop, I held up a Norwegian-made sweater and cap, and Omaha said, "It makes the Norwegian in you come out. It looks like it belongs on you." I didn't see it. We didn't buy the ensemble.

Kouryou-chan's name in phonetic Arabic.

We went to the Marrakesh restaurant for dinner. That was good; the lamb on couscous was very tasty, there were lots of veggies, and the waiter was as friendly as any member of the Disney Cast is imagined to be. He was also from northeast Africa, and wrote Kouryou-chan's real name in Arabic writing on the tabletop. That was very cool.

Dessert was layers of pastry mixed with a vanilla cream and almond sauce. Absolutely delicious.

It was time to go home. We'd even missed the fireworks, but that was no big deal. It was late, and we'd had a good time.

Vacation Day 14: Disney's Blizzard Beach Water Park

Breakfast was the continental at the Hyatt. The omelet was more of an egg pie with cheese and sliced ham dunked on top, but at least it was protein this time. After a long drive through the park, we reached Blizzard Beach.

Blizzard Beach is a recent edition to the Disney theme park collection. It's a water park, and its conceit is that it was a ski resort mysteriously transported to central Florida. So it's chalets and restaurants with names like "The Warming Hut," skis and sleds and slalom courses, all desperately converted into water rides. There's even a ski lift to take you to the top of the three longest rides, called The Summit Plummet, the Slush Gusher, and the Teamboat Springs. The first two are straight down chutes, the first of which claims to accelerate you to almost 50MPH with nothing but your swimsuit before you reach the bottom. I suspect that it did, because I did the speedster's trick of resting only on my ankles and shoulderblades, and my back took a flogging. So did Storm's. We all went down the Teamboat, an up-to six-person raft down a very wide water chute.

We had a long ride in the circulating "river" that circumnavigates the park, and did other water rides: tubing rides, water carpet racing.

It downpoured at 3pm, right on time for Florida, and we walked through the rain, deprived of the rides until the lightning passed. They also close most of the concession stands.

Blizzard Beach is also a perv's paradise. From the absolutely stunning, almost absurdly classic redheaded girl with the Irish accent to the beautiful African beach man wearing shorts so low on his hips it was almost filthy, from the London-accented man with the incredible ass to the unstoppable myriads of beautiful woman in bikinis, it was a fun time while we waited for the rain to pass. So many pretty accents.

Lunch was disappointing, though. It didn't help that a cast member directed us to a line with only one family in front of us, a family that took nearly fifteen minutes to pick a meal from a menu of eight choices.

The park re-opened at 4pm, and we spent the last three hours doing more rides. We headed back to the car, and had dinner at a cheap steakhouse.

Vacation Day 15: Flying Home.

Another breakfast at the hotel. Hey, at least the coffee was free.

We were out of there early, so we went to the Pirate's Cove Minature Golf course, where we played a round of golf, the headed to the airport. They really nickle-and-dime you on the drive, with a toll plaza every few miles. Ridiculous!

Omaha had done everything necessary so we immediately got onto the plane and were soon flying home.

Poor Kouryou-chan had a seriously upset stomach during the second half of the flight, from Denver to Seattle, but the stewardess brought her ginger ale and she felt much better after that. Ginger really is one of those important discoveries.

I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, got far enough into the Warhammer 40K novel Blood Reaver to realize I didn't care what happened to the characters, and worked my way through Nicholson Baker's new novel, House of Holes, which is a yeoman's attempt to take the porn film script and turn it into literature. It doesn't quite work because the visuals aren't there (it's a book, after all) and in literary form the women of the pornoverse really aren't all that human. They don't come across as people.

We reached Seattle a half hour early, and quickly cabbed it home. It was late. We quickly went to bed.

Bosco is missing.

Bosco

One of the things we had to deal with when we got home was the news that Bosco has gone missing. With both the family gone and her maintaining a much different feeding schedule due to her staying up late and waking much later than the cats are used to, he must have wandered off.

I don't know where he is and I'm heartbroken by this. Necco's a nice cat and all, but Bosco was Dad's cat, by popular agreement, and even he seemed to appreciate my attention above everyone else's. He's been gone for over a week now. We've put up signs, and he is chipped, but so far, nothing.

There was a small black cat dead in the road at other end of the subdivision yesterday morning. I keep worrying something like that happened to him, or that damned raccoon, or he got into some poison someone set out for the raccoon or the rats or whatever. I imagine the worst.

Damn.

The risks of travel: getting ill

Instructions on washing your hands.

Damn. I seem to have caught a mild headcold from our time down in Florida. Well, subjecting myself multiple times to massive crowds from around the world at three different theme parks, not to mention entire different segmented populations from five different geographical regions, the risk is high, no matter how often I followed the explicit instructions of the bathroom sponsors at Walt Disney World.

Fortunately, it does appear to be a very mild headcold, manifest mostly in a persistently annoying stuffiness and a general low energy.

2010 Mercury Mariner from Avis

The car we rented on the trip was a Mercury Mariner. It was a fairly nice SUV, with all the usual SUVish luxuries. It was also about as big as our Forester back home, but with an automatic transmission and a smart cruise control. It lacked the iPod interface, but we had the old FM-based interface from the Escort with us and that worked fine.

I liked the car. Not enough to give up the Forestor, mind you, or manual transmissions, but it was still a comfortable ride. The transmission was very smooth and reasonably responsive, so kudos to the developers for that.

I did like some of the ambient knowledge features, like the way the parking lights didn't dim until you locked the doors, thus using the familiar habit of "did I turn off the lights?" to cue the driver that the doors were unlocked. I didn't like the way it chose to lock the doors for you when you drove above 10MPH. The fuel gauge includes a "miles until empty" measure that the Forester doesn't have, but the trip reset button was difficult to find.

The interior dimmer was even harder to find. It was hidden way under the steering wheel. Like all such controls, it didn't dim the highbeams indicator. Equally hard to puzzle out was the rear window wiper controls. And the electronics and comfort control panel was a maze of buttons, most of which Omaha and I still don't know what they do.

There was a button that allowed you to light up the space under your feet, so you could see what was in the footwell. That was smart, but I fail to understand why the designer felt it necessary that the light control button wasn't just on/off, but cycled through eight different colors of light before reaching "off."

The woman at Avis tried to upsell us everything, and she worded her questions negatively. "So, you don't want this?" As if I should feel guilty, or something was wrong, by my not buying extra insurance above the coverage I already had. "This car is really small," she insisted, "A family of four should have a bigger car. Please sign here to decline this upgrade." It was very frustrating, and I'm sure she hates having to do it as much as Avis loves being able to sucker people into using the various features.

Reminds me of this quote:

"Damned if I know. And that's the last fucking time I ever hire a car from Avis." — Herbie "French Connection" Sperling, when asked about the two pistols and a bloodied axe used in three murders being found in the trunk of his rented car.