Elf Sternberg

Today, I swam in the Antarctic Sea.

We officially reached Fournier Bay, which means we had crossed the Antarctic Circle line sometime in the morning, so it was time for the (apparently) “traditional” Polar Plunge, where brave and foolish souls jump into the water just to say they have done that. I had to be one of them.

A large raft is affixed to the side of the boat, and passengers use the same routine as with the Zodiacs to get onto the raft, which has a set of steps for getting into and out of the water. A safety belt is put around your waist to make sure someone can pull you out if it turns out you don’t have the strength to pull yourself out. We’ve been assured that in all the time IAATO has been permitting this sort of shenanigans no one on any cruise has ever had a medical crisis doing this sort of thing. The bartender was ready with his hot chocolate and liquor, and the DJ was pumping out EDM into the excursion bay.

Omaha and I lined up in our bathrobes and waited with other people from our excursion group. We listened to the delighted whoops and screams of the victims who went before us. As we put aside our robes and exposed our almost naked flesh to the subzero air (centigrade), the song that had been playing played out and a new one started up.

It was perfect. When Omaha and I jumped, the music playing was the scifi convention staple “Rasputin.” Omaha shouted, “For science!” as she dove in. I shouted, “Ivan, you idiot!” as I climbed out.

So, I’ll let you in on a secret: when I jumped into water that was actually below 0℃ (because it’s some of the most salty water in the world), your brain cannot believe you just did that and absolutely refuses to process any signals about your actual condition until it starts to get confirmation that, no really, you just did something really stupid.

And despite being salty, the water is super clear. I could read the numbers on the ship’s side from three meters away. It didn’t hurt my eyes at all. I have no idea why. All this analysis is not to say that I dawdled, oh no. I was up and out after less than a minute in the water.

But less than sixty seconds in freezing water just isn’t enough to penetrate my decrepit, ancient hide. I climbed the stairs with Omaha immediately behind me. The air, the breeze, was what made me feel cold. I grabbed a towel and my bathrobe, belted the robe on, and quickly grabbed a hot chocolate laden with Irish whisky.

That afternoon, there were a few more Zodiac tours, which I did, but they were otherwise unremarkable. The best part of the afternoon was the lecture on humpback whale feeding activities. There are documented cases of new, emergent feeding patterns that no one had ever seen before. One of them is “bubble feeding,” in which a team of five or six whales will decimate an entire school of fish. Two whales will start to encircle a school of fish in a huge net of their bubbles from the whales’ massive lungs while the others use their loud voices to scare the fish into staying within the bubble net, and once the fish are sufficiently concentrated the whales will dive into the school of fish, rising quickly, their mouths open, sieving as many of them down their gullets as they possibly can.

Another activity is when a whale will just stay vertical with their mouths in the air, holding as still as possible, until a bird decides the whale is a nice place to land, at which point the whale will use its tongue and jaws and… no more bird.

Both of these are new behaviors, at least as far as we’re concerned, but the biologist said they might have been behaviors common to humpbacks before the whaling industry killed so many, it’s just that now that the population has made a comeback these alternative feeding methods are viable for the whales again.

We spent dinner with another couple, a fellow who made his fortune the same way I did, coming up in the 90s and doing something spectacularly singular that earned him the stock options necessary to secure his future, more or less. We spent the evening doing that butt-sniffing sort of sounding each other out, establishing bonafides, and nerding hard, much to our spouses’ eye-rolling.

It was a lovely day altogether, and I have a certificate saying that I’m really the sort of idiot who’s willing to jump into 0℃ water just to say that I jumped into 0℃ water. In Antarctic seas.

What surprised me, although perhaps it shouldn’t have, is how quickly this level of luxury became routine, and just how aware I was that all this luxury had a human price, because I know damn well the staff and crew of a cruise ship aren’t well-treated and put up with a lot of crap, sometimes literally, and especially often from the people who feel entitled to a little bit more “service” than custom would allow. Up around 6:30, I’d make my way to the cafe and find that the morning barista, a pleasant young fellow from the Czech Republic, pulling my coffee and setting out the water. I’d read and write for about an hour, then go get Omaha and we’d head to breakfast.

It was Friday, but on board that doesn’t mean anything. It’s easy to forget there are days of the week. It’s easy to forget there’s a world outside the ship.


Today’s trip was to Palaver Point, which involved a hike up the side of a tall hill take in a colony of Chinstrap Penguins and the view across the Palmer Sea. Omaha decided that she wasn’t up for a kilometer long walk with a 100 meter rise, so I went alone, crossing the switchbacks to reach the top.

At the top was Professor Marcel Lichtenstein, who I’d already met. He gave us a brief lecture on moraines, the dirt and rocks that glaciers pick up as they move down the terrain and calve off into the ocean. Marcel is a character, a big man with a powerful voice and a lot of charisma. “You know, I’m a biologist, not a geologist. The first time I was in Antarctica and I heard someone say ‘Look at the moraine,’ I was looking around for the beautiful woman because in Italian ‘moraina’ means ‘brunette,’ and I figured that’s what they were looking at.”

When we got back, lunch was “Australian,” which I’m not sure meant much to me, but Omaha appreciated the meat pies.

That afternoon was a Zodiac excursion; we sat in boats and were driven around to listen to more explanations of icebergs and the history of Antarctica. All of the guides have extensive stories about the Shackleton, Scott, and Amundsen. One of our guides, Sebastian, who was also the submarine pilot, had taken leave from the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy to be on an expedition to recreate Shackleton’s amazing voyage from his doomed Antarctic expedition back to civilization on nothing more than a large lifeboat. In fact, you can see Sebastian in this video at the 2:40 mark. He told an after-dinner, over-drinks, truly harrowing tale about the voyage he and his mates undertook, including how, when they finally reached the island of St. George, they were almost washed up on some rocks and killed. This being a documentary, they had a monitor boat, but the captain of that boat declined to rescue them until they were actually in distress… and somehow they made it to shore without being killed. It was hair-raising stuff.


The afternoon excursions usually ended around 5pm. The ship had so many experts there were lecture series to fill the time before dinner; history, geology, the biology of the birds that flew, the penguins (yes, birds, but a separate topic), the seals, just about anything and everything you could think of as being a part of the Antarctic experience. One thing that I did not find while in Antarctica: Pokemon. There are no Pokemon in Antarctica.

Evenings aren’t quite so busy. Usually, I just read. I ripped through a number of books during this vacation, all light reading and just generally fun. I also tended to go to bed fairly early. This isn’t a cruise with nightlife; there were only two places to “hang out” after dinner and both of them were sedate. This isn’t the sort of cruise where there are so many bars and nightclubs you can pick one from whatever spectrum of nightlife you can possibly imagine.

On our second day at sea and still in Drake’s Passage, the rough night and seasickness meant Omaha could not be roused for love or breakfast. I got up in my usual early fashion and went up to the cafe at Six Aft to have water, coffee, and a good book until she awoke. I listened to a lot of people walk up to the help desk, visible in the center, and ask for help with the “Seabourn Life Onboard” app.

She was still sleeping when the announcement came over the speakers that the Biosecurity Briefing was due to begin. I headed down to the presentation center on Deck 4.

The International Association of Arctic Tour Operators is a public-private partnership that works with the Antarctic Treaty Organization to allow tourism in a very limited number of locations in Antarctica, in exchange for which the Antarctic Treaty Organization collects permit fees to preserve and protect Antarctica.

It might seem “unfair” to talk about limits like that, but I like to remember that people will play hundreds of hours of first-person or third-person video games like Cyberpunk 2077, Horizon Zero Dawn, or Borderlands, and those all take place in settings that are, at most, forty virtual kilometers on a side. I mean, I spent about 120 hours in HZD, and another 120 in Cyberpunk 2077, and by the time this trip is through I’ll have only spent about six hours total walking across Antarctica.

Avian Flu is what they’re really worried about. People can be carriers, and several flocks of penguins died before scientists figured out what was going on. We presented all of our cold-weather gear for a comprehensive examination and vacuuming, to remove any alien seeds or spores we may have been carrying into Antarctica. The staff took it all very seriously. Omaha, having no luggage other than what Seabourn brought her, had nothing to present.

After that, I went back to the cafe. Despite feeling “normal,” I still wasn’t entirely there. I must have looked… vulnerable when I was sitting the cafe, which doubles as the ship’s passenger support center where there’s always a line there of people getting help with getting their internet working. A couple approached me and sat down. There was some small chit-chat, and the woman said, “You look tired. Did you not sleep well last night?”

I made some comment about how my wife had spent hours in sickbay last night, and we were watching her closely because Dramamine and its relatives can reduce the effectiveness of anti-epileptic medications. They offered to pray for me, and I agreed, although I did tell her I was Jewish. “Oh, that’s okay, I have many, many Messianic Jews as friends, and they understand what it means to embrace Jesus.” I manfully resisted eyerolling.

They are truly American Gentry. They have three houses. The wording was “homes,” but if you have more than one home, I feel it’s unlikely you actually have “a home.” Not impossible, but unlikely. They own a trucking business somewhere in Oklahoma, plus several of the warehouses that those trucks serve. The wife is “committed to Jesus and the saving of America,” and I know exactly what that means.

I managed to extricate myself and went back to find Omaha. She was awake but not entirely there, and had ordered some very simple food for room service. There was an early excursion presentation, which amounted to “We’ve reached Deception Island, which is our first destination. The weather is picking up, so there won’t be any kayak or submersible trips, but we are going to let you onto land to look around.”


Deception Island is a long-abandoned ruin that was a 19th century whaling stop, then an early 20th century exploration center, then a WW2 redoubt for the British seeking to prevent Germans from disrupting supply ships going around the southern tips of Africa and South America, then the launch site for flyover surveys of Antarctica in the 1950s, and finally as a research station until 1970. (As far as anyone knows, the Germans never did attempt to disrupt trade through the Passage.) Clouds hung low over the sky, and the site we stood in had a curious bowl-shaped basalt formation walling it in. “That’s because you’re standing in a volcano,” said a guide.

“We are?” said one of the other guests, surprised by his lack of reading the landing material. “Is it active?”

“Go by the shore. I know, we told you not to kneel or sit or touch the ground, but go by the shore where the tide will wash it away, and stick your fingers into the sand.”

I was the only person to take her up on the offer. I knelt down just at the shoreline where the water was washing up on the beach of black sand. The first centimeter into the sand was as cold as above, but four centimeters down the sand became as warm as blood. It looked up, knowing the expression on my face. “That’s an active volcano,” she said.


I was a bit stunned. “This bay has the distinction of being the greatest series of failures in volcanic prediction in history. In there were three teams here in 1967, four in 1969, and four in 1970, all here to test their theories of predicting volcanic eruptions, and in all three cases they had to be evacuated during an eruption because none of their instruments succeeded in predicting or even detecting it. We’re better at it now; ground swell and the chemical composition of pre-eruption gasses are terrific indicators, but instruments back then weren’t sensitive enough.

“Don’t worry, though. If there’s an eruption, it’s just a two-kilometer hike to that peninsula over there–” She pointed southward to a spit of land that formed the bay– “… to the evacuation point. And as you can see, the hanger here and the buildings, while ruins, have been here since 1957 and nothing the volcano’s done has touched them yet.”

I took pictures of the wrecked buildings, fuel tanks, and the hanger from which the first from-the-air surveys of the Antarctic interior had been launched, plus what would become a common accumulation of seals, penguins, terns, and skewa, the last of which we were told was the most predatory bird on the Antarctic shore.

After a short Zodiac ride back to the ship, we were greeting with what has to be the most delightful ritual (can’t really call it a tradition, I don’t think) so far: hot chocolate whiskey and cream cocktails. Absolutely heaven. I will have to make an effort to not get used to this.


We ate at The Restaurant (that’s all it’s called) that night, an incredible steak dinner with three glasses of wine, and then we went up to the quieter lounge to listen to music and relax.

To give you an idea of the insane luxury of this cruise, let’s just say this: the wine is complimentary. The cocktails are complimentary. All covered by your ticket fee. You’re only charged if you want something exceptional: a cocktail made with 31-year-old Whisky will set you back $200, and one made with Louis XIII Cognac goes from $800. (I looked it up. Louis XIII Cognac is aged a minimum of 40 years, and it goes for $24,000 per 750ml liter bottle). But the ship’s standard collection of cocktails, like a negroni, they just mix and hand to you without asking for your name or room number or credit card.

I had one cocktail, but then we went off to bed.

Between winning a trip to Antarctica and actually being in Antarctica is the grueling story of flying to Ushuaia, Argentina, where the Pursuit was currently making port. Ushuaia, “the city at the bottom of the world, is 12,427 kilometers from my home city of Seattle. London is only 7,700 kilometers away. Tokyo is 7,600 kilometers away. Equivalent flights would be to places like Melbourne, Australia, or Johannesburg, South Africa. It’s literally on the other side of the planet.

Our flight began early Saturday morning boarding a plane to Mexico City. I was genuinely surprised at how lax customs has become. Oh, the TSA is still a pain in the arse with your belt buckle but overall the amount of security theater was much less than I’d experienced before COVID. The flight itself on an Aeromexico 787 was a little short of five hours, wasn’t too traumatic, and the food was tasty and hot in a way US flights almost never have anymore. I masked until plane was in the air, at which point it exceeds the 5CH changeover for fresh air and risks are considered minimal, especially since I had gotten my COVID booster just a month earlier.

The “Your flight safety presentation today was brought to you by Volvo” notice was a bit disconcerting.

My travel laptop is a Surface Pro 6. I had cleaned it out before leaving and hadn’t put any movies onto it, so I was down to a very short list of films that didn’t really interest me. I spent most of the trip reading, as I had my e-reader with me and about 400 books on it are still listed as “unread.” I made quite a dent in my tsundoku list.


From the air, Mexico City looks like any city embedded in an agricultural region: core, sprawl, and then lots of parceled and enclosed farmland spreading out for kilometers in every direction.

It’s been a long time since I had last flown international. Long enough that Mastercard now takes care of the exchange rate automatically and traveller’s checks are something only people my age remember. The exotic cuisine of Mexico on display at the airport consisted of a Carl’s Junior, a Krispy Kreme, a Starbucks and a 7-11. I mentioned this to someone who was also traveling on the flight and he said, “Yeah, it wasn’t like this before NAFTA. NAFTA really gave the ‘international franchises’” – his voice heavy with sarcasm – “free rein, and this is the result.”

I wouldn’t have thought it was NAFTA.

Our flight from Mexico City to Buenos Aires was much longer, almost ten hours, but it was overnight and we’d sprung for the seats that reclined fully into beds, so we slept most of that. Omaha’s CPAP worked even with the plane’s power outlets, which helped her sleep as well as one can under those circumstances. The food was, for flight food, spectacular, especially the morning omelet. Only the coffee was boring.

In Buenos Aires, the Seabourn people more or less took over our lives. It turned out that the contributor of the prize package had been the president of Seabourn itself and that he had made it very clear that Omaha and I were very VIP. While there was a knot of five Seabourn people there to take in all the arrivals, there were four specific names on a separate list that received special handling, and we were one of those names. “You’re special,” we were told. “The director said something about a charity.”

Which was good to know, because that’s when disaster struck. AeroMexico had lost Omaha’s luggage.

She had a single change of clothes in her carry-on, a few toiletries, and not enough medication to make it through the whole trip. The Seabourn people assured us that they would do everything they can to find that bag, and in the meantime they would also help us find alternatives.

I don’t do well under these circumstances. Things are out of my control and I have no idea what’s going to happen next, and that’s when I start to break down. I went with Omaha to the hotel Seabourn had booked for us, the Alvear Palace. There were a lot of other people going on the cruise, but I hadn’t yet figured out how to talk to them and, under the circumstances, didn’t really want to.


The Alvear Palace hotel is a stunning place of marble, sandstone, oak, and brass. The Seabourn people whisked Omaha away to discuss the luggage and medication issue, and afterward we were free to wander the city. We found a local pizza place named El Continental, walked around the Recoleta Cemetery where Eve Peron (among many others) is buried, and visited a pop-up artisan market in Carcono Park. Artisan markets are the exactly the same the world over, with tsotchkes and such for sale that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Pike Place Market or the Seattle University District Street Fair.

I didn’t sleep well that night. I’m not even sure I slept at all. Fitbit says I got maybe seven hours of sleep, I was so anxious about the luggage and the medication. Omaha took charge and, frankly, I felt a little bullied about being hauled along by her whirlwind as she demanded I get onto the bus to the airport and the plane down to Ushuaia.

The ride to the airport included a bit of travelogue about Buenos Aries, including a massive, beautiful but broken mobile of a robotic flower, and a statue of Christopher Columbus gazing eastward while his victims slump and writhe at the base of his plinth. I like to think he’s gazing eastward toward the source of his power and approval, the kings of Spain.


I was miserable on the flight, even if the airplane did have a cute fox on the tail. I almost didn’t get onto the plane, instead thinking hard that I could just head over to the International section and book a flight home. But I just couldn’t do that, and so I ended up in Ushuaia. It’s a nice, fairly large town that does exactly two things: be the hub for the Antarctic tourist business, and support the Argentine Navy’s southernmost base of operations.

The Seabourn people let us onto the Pursuit, and told us three things: they hadn’t found the bag, they were trying to find a supply of Omaha’s medication, there was a seamstress on board who could provide her with some clothes, and when this happens the ship provides overnight laundry service.

With barely an hour until the gangplank was pulled and we would have to abandon the trip entirely, someone found us and said, “We found your medication.” A pharmacy at the north end of city had it, and it would be on board before we pulled out.

I was still wrung out. I’d gotten less than nine hours of sleep in the past 60. I don’t remember what I had for dinner, or what else happened that day. I went to bed and passed out.

Omaha and I learned that you can do everything right, especially when you do everything by the book, it can still lead to disaster.

We had headed out to go camping, and were in a campsite just a little south of the town of Darrington, WA. Darrington is a tiny little place, half logging town, half tourist attraction, a place where a number of significant long-distance mountain biking paths come together. By The Book: The Subaru Outback is old, 11 years and 105,000 miles; the tires are 60,000 milers with 55,000 miles on them, due to be replaced before the rainy season begins. But the oil is checked, the pressures are checked, the car is in pretty good shape for an 11-year-old manual with the original clutch.

Omaha and I had spent a beautiful day at Baker Lake, walking four miles into the woods to reach an obscure little place called Anderson Creek and access to the lake itself. We spent the day swimming and having a great time. On the way back, we were just outside of the town of Concrete when there was a bang, followed by the flup-flup-flup sounds of a flat tire. We pulled off.

Front tire, passenger side, totally flat. The back of the car is filled with the camping stuff we keep aside, the food and water and stuff we don’t want the bugs to get into. Omaha makes room for the damaged tire while I take it off the axle and replace it with the Subaru-supplied “temporary tire.”

Replacing the tire was routine. Not in the sense that I’ve done it often– I think the last time I had a flat was from a nail six years ago, and I had that one fixed the day after it happened. But the instructions were clear, the jack-and-frame mating easy to match up, and the tire itself isn’t too heavy. The nuts came off with a just a couple strikes on the wrench.

A quarter mile down the road, the car starts to make a frightening loud thumping sound. We stop and Omaha watches the tire as I move forward, but we can’t identify what’s happening. We decide to tough it out, make for a gas station and see if maybe the temporary tire is underinflated.

It was not underinflated.

We took a deep breath and try to make it to Darrington. It’s 25 miles, and as we drive the thumping gets louder, we start to smell burning, and the car is shuddering like it’s possessed. It wants to drive off to the right and leave the road, it’s damned hard to steer, the thumping is loud, it’s become our whole world and the smell of burning is getting worse and worse. The car has a strain gauge to tell you if you’re driving efficiently, and on a flat road it should be at zero, but it’s an -6, meaning something is hurting the engine badly. It’s late now, after 6pm, everything in this town, everything in every town in a 40 miles radius is closed.

But passing through Darringtown, I see a light on: “DC Garage. Subaru Specialsts.” There’s one man, mid-20s or so, working on a car in the lot. I pull in.

His name is Don and he spends a lot of time crawling around the underside of the car. There’s smoke streaming out of from the rear tire wells. “Your differential is leaking from both rear axles. It’s a manual, so it’s not the problem you get with automatics when the spare’s on. Engine well looks fine, but yeah, your differential fluid is super hot.” Discussing it together, we eliminate a variety of stupidities, Omaha and I did everything by the book. “Well, let’s put the tire back on and see if it goes away.”

While he goes to patch the tire, I start freaking out. There’s no rental out here, there’s no transport out here that I know of, how the hell are we going to get all that damn camping gear out of here and back home? We’re in a place where my usual response to a rare crisis like this, throw money at it, won’t work, or at least I don’t know how to make it work. We’ve always been frugal and keep our rainy day fund just for moments like this. Omaha calms me down, assures me there’s a way out of here.

Don comes back with the tire and a hydraulic lift. “They call it a temporary patch, but either it’ll fail immediately or it’ll last forever.” He puts it on, and there’s no hissing. It didn’t fail immediately. We take it for a test drive; it makes that thump three more times and then it’s just smooth and fine and perfect. I take it back.

Don nods. “That’s one of the things with Subarus. They don’t tolerate tires of different sizes. If your tires are old and your temporary is new, the ratio doesn’t work. Your differential was slipping over, and probably trying to tear itself apart.”

I asked him how much, and he said, “We don’t charge for tire patches.” I objected; it was after hours and deserved something for his labor. “Well, twenty bucks’ll buy me a pizza and beer.” I give it to him gladly. He saved our vacation.

But I’ve always driven on robust, if noisier, tires. I’ve always fixed flats within a day of having one.

We did everything right.

Doing everything right made our car want to tear itself apart.

Only sheer luck kept, and one kind and honest mechanic, kept that from happening.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

I had some time to kill while Omaha spent the morning with her mother. I had the girls and had promised Kouryou-chan could get her hair into a pixie cut, so that's what we did. I also picked her up some bubble gum.

The place we went was a Borders wannabe called "Millions of Books." The middle floor was arranged in a phalanx of shelves from nonfiction through fiction, with SF facing "teens," and romance all the way in the back. Around the edges were seven zones, squared off topic areas with shelves for partitions: "Science," "Bibles and Christian Studies," "Cooking," "Computers," "Politics," and "Current Nonfiction." The science section had been squeezed into a small island in the middle of its own section; the Bible and Christian Studies section had colonized its perimeter shelves. The Computer section had likewise been relegated to the island, and it's perimeter was now moldy with business books. The politics section was full, but all of the facing books were right-wing in their leanings.

That was certainly the biggest Bibles section I've ever seen outside of a Christian-specific bookstore.

In the self-help section, there was an entire bookshelf, six shelves full, labeled "human sexuality." Normally, I'd expect that section to be just one or two shelves of how-to manuals. But no, there were no how-to manuals. This was entirely erotica.

It had a coffee shop, but also a generic I'd never heard of. Still, the guy behind the counter was a friendly, fen-type who gave me the best coffee I've had yet this trip.

The next day we had lunch with the grandparents and then drove out, headed for Jacksonville. Other than a big chunk of the freeway basically not existing but for gaily colored construction equipment (who dyes their backhoes bright pink?), there wasn't much to see. We were driving through the heart of Florida. It was very gothic, lots of farmland and horses and billboards. There were fewer attorneys along this stretch, but Omaha noticed a very disturbing pattern after a while: one sign for "Join the Marines," two signs for sleazy bookstores, and then one for a retirement home.

As far as I can tell, in this farm country, if you don't join the Marines, your alternative is to stay and there ain't many women, so they've got a big supply of wank. If you live long enough, you might get to play golf if your artifical hip will let you.

There are no helmet laws in Florida, and there are dozens of old guys (i.e. my age) riding around with long hair and wrap-around goggles and no helmets. It's kinda weird looking. Also saw two twenty-something couples go buy on two bikes, and only one girl was wearing a helmet. Nobody wears road armor; hard to blame them when the afternoons are 98F (37C).

Passed a sign for "Jack's Junk Food Joint." Yeaaaahhh... I'd want to eat there.

They must be desperate for sysadmins here. I passed a huge billboard with a cartoon alligator. "DO YOU KNOW LINUX? WE'RE HIRING!" It was for HostGator. It felt surreal. Well, if I ever move back, at least I know I'll have a job.

We got into Jacksonville late, found the hotel. It's a Radisson, and we are most displeased. First, the WIFI sucked. We complained. It got better. I am under the impression they said, "Oh, family of four. They don't need WIFI. If they do, the second-floor nodes, where all the business people are, will be enough." It wasn't. Apparently, "Family of four with nine WIFI-enabled devices" (2 laptops, 3 Nooks, 1 iPod, 1 iPhone, 1 iPad, and a Palm T|X) is still pretty weird around here.

I stayed up late and finished, for the first time, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Wednesday morning, we packed up our things, packed into the rental car, and headed up to Mom's apartment. It was her two-day weekend and she was glad to be able to see us without having Paul around to confuse things.

We all swam in the apartment complex's pool. I'd forgotten that she lives next to a massive golf course. I'd also forgotten that she had strong opinions about how "blacks" had moved into the neighborhood, but then some equilibrium had been acheived and the local ethnography wasn't changing much anymore.

We had lunch together at a local deli. I'm really happy that I was able to cook for her the other day, and I'm really getting sick of dining out.

We hit the road, crossing the Everglades through Alligator Alley, stopping once at the Miccosukee Reservation gas station. Despite being the only gas for a hundred miles in either direction, the gas prices were not unreasonable. The bathrooms, however, were positively Lovecraftian.

We stopped at a place called "Ralph's Reef" for dinner, where I had more fish. I'm drinking way too much soda pop this trip; gonna have to go back to a serious diet when I get home, I suspect. Ralph's is the kind of place that has TV on all the time, and FOX news on all the time. "Woman missing in Aruba!" was the headline of the moment, and I turned to Omaha and said, "Watch, she's young, white, and pretty." And so she was; Hell, she was even blonde.

Then we turned North and headed up the coast to Clearwater, Omaha's old home town. Every billboard between Naples and Tampa was for a personal injury attorney or lawfirm. Every last damned one of them. It was eye-opening.

We reached Omaha's father's house, and he led us to his brother's condominium on the beach, which we had borrowed for a few days. It was a beautiful space, and we even got decent wi-fi. But after seven hours on the road, we all just went to bed.

I've just had one of the most depressing and terrifying steak dinners in my entire life. And I learned that my mother lives in hell.

After we woke up, we all went over to my mother's boyfriend's condominium. It's a beautiful place, centerpiece apartment on the ninteenth floor of a gorgeous high-security apartment in the heart of downtown Fort Lauderdale's moneied district, with an ubstructed south-easterly view of the Atlantic Ocean, including the Everglades Port Authority, and across the street from a major yachting canal.

"Oh, you're L's son!" he said as I walked in the door. "You have two beautiful daughters! Such beautiful dimples on both of them." He was gregarious in a high-speed way, but it was, to me at least, a familiar high-speed way. I grew up around Paul , and men like him. They're very geeky about what they do, be it medicine or law, which are the only real professions, according to all their mothers, and mine too-- although engineer and filmmaker are acceptable too "as long as you're happy." This is code for "have enough money to retire someday."

Three minutes later, "You have beautiful daughters, such lovely dimples!"

And three minutes later, "You have such beautiful daughters, such lovely dimples."

Paul, it turns out, has middle-stage Alzheimers. We had been warned about this, so it wasn't a surprise. I just wasn't told how exhausting it could be. Every conversation has to be worded as if you're interested. If Paul starts to think you're ignoring him, or acting as if you've heard it all before, he starts to notice something is wrong, but he doesn't know what, and he gets anxious. Anxiety meds help, and there are drugs that slow the progression of the disease, but I've never met an Alzheimer's patient in his condition before. I didn't know what it was like.

Paul has no memory buffer. He can't remember anything more than a few minutes prior. It never goes into long-term memory; that channel has long since been destroyed. He also can't plan; whatever the cutoff for his memory was, he wasn't in a planning mode when it happened, so he has no capacity to form goals beyond "I'm hungry" and "I need to use the bathroom," and "Oh, there are people here. I should talk to them."

And Paul can talk. At one point, I engaged him in a lengthy conversation about his career. He'd had one hell of a career. He was an entertainment lawyer representing actors and other stars, and his career was bookended by Tommy Dorsey and Rocky Marciano at one end, and Burt Reynolds and Dustin Hoffman at the other. Apparently, stars hire lawyers to look after their needs during filming, and Paul was Reynold's acting attorney during the filming of Smokey and the Bandit. His walls were covered with photos of him and stars from the 1950s through the 1970s. It was amazing.

We sat down. The television absorbed his attention. Three minutes later, I could have done it all again, and Paul would have had exactly the same energy level as before.

It was scary. There's a vast repository of human experience and knowledge in that man. From the day before the disease took hold, all the way to the start of his education, Paul can remember everything, if you know what to ask for. But from that day after... nothing. And for every day into the future, for every human hope and precious striving... nothing. There's a brilliant man there, trapped in time. When I wrote A Place In History, about a condemned criminal with artificially induced Alzheimers on a 24-hour cycle, I thought I was being cute. No, really, that is a living hell.

I made dinner. Mom asked me to. It was pretty easy; she'd bought some chicken pieces, so I doused them in good salt, good olive oil, a handful of dipping spices I'd found in a cabinet (no, really, they were garlic and pepper based, and they worked out fabulously), and cut in some onions and garlic and covered the dish in foil. I steamed broccoli and carrots with more oil and garlic and a little red pepper. We also seared some very thick steak slabs for Paul and myself. It was amazing stuff. Paul even said so. "Your son can cook!" he said to Mom, at least five times.

It turns out Paul and Mom were dating when the disease hit, so he thinks they're still dating. But no, she's been employed by his family to be his watcher now. It's exhausting work. He loves television, which must be a blessing to Mom. Paul is one illness away from serious problems: if he develops an illness that requires more than mere daily medication, if he has to do self-maintenance, he can't. He cannot learn. At all. She does all the learning, all the anticipating, all the planning, for him five days a week, and two members of the family take over the other two days.

We said our good-byes and went back to the hotel, only to discover that the "free wi-fi" in at the Fort Lauderdale Hyatt was worthless, with absolutely no bandwidth to speak off; that there were Caribbean Crazy Ants infesting the walls near the sink, and that something upstairs was making a persistent low rhythmic thrum-thrum-thruming through the floor. But we had no food so the ants weren't that much of a problem, and we were all to jetlagged and exhausted to care much anyway.

Omaha made the comment that, when I come to Florida my accent comes out, my speech patterns speed up appreciably, and I speak in a kind of rapid-fire shorthand that she can barely follow. "You were doing it with Paul. It must be a Jewish thing. It's not a Florida thing, nobody on the west coast [of Florida - elf] talks that way." I had to agree; I did see the speech pattern she was describing, and it did only emerge around my father's family and friends, which were mostly, you know, lawyers and doctors whose names end in "zelle," "stein," and "berg."