Category: travel

It was a whirlwind tour.

Day 1: Fly out, arrive in Austin 5pm. Proceed to parents house. Socialize. Watch excellent slide show prepared by my parents. Discover that even at 7 days I was a master face contortionist:

Which goes a long way toward explaining this infamous pic:

Then we ate a late (8pm) early (Tuesday) thanksgiving dinner with all the expected accouterments. It was delicious and incorporated a lot of good catching up with my parents. We headed out after dinner for drinks with friends at Trudy’s (a classic), and managed to rustle up most of the remaining people we knew in Austin. We stayed and talked ’til about 1, then threw in the towel.

Day 2: We woke and puttered while waiting for my mom to give us (very graciously) her car for the rest of the trip. When she did, we headed downtown. I left Les at Schlotzsky’s (also a classic; you’re sensing a trend perhaps?) and had lunch with an old friend at Ruby’s, because in Cali people’s idea of BBQ is anything that involves charcoal. Then I took Leslie down to Opal Divine’s on 6th and took myself on a self-guided tour of campus. It was weird–not the first time of done the walk-around-your-old-campus-reminiscing thing, but the last time I did it it was less than a year after I’d graduated, and I really felt sort of displaced then. I wanted to still belong, but didn’t. This time, I knew I didn’t belong, and felt like an outside observer. I went to see a few people at the place where I used to work, and chatted with an old professor, and realized that my time at UT had really passed into some former version of me, one that I’m not anymore. That was a bit sad but mostly encouraging; I want to know that I’m still not fully baked. So I stopped by the co-op (which has expanded so much that it took over the Barnes and Nobel next door) and unabashedly bought a couple of UT shirts. Now that it’s a closed chapter of my life, I can lord it over people like a real alum :).

I retreived Leslie and we hit the road. She was anxious to get on the way, and the traffic had settled down by 5 or so when we left. We made good headway, except for slowdowns in almost every town/city on the way to Dallas, and pulled in just under the wire (about 9:30) for dinner at Cisco, one of three restaurants that Les’s parents own. It was great, I got a cap and good beer, then we went home, collapsed.

Day 3: Turkey day! I slept in until 9 or so, woke up, scoffed grinch-like at the Macy’s parade, mellowed out with an excellent bloody mary courtesy of Marc, then enjoyed an absurdly good “dinner” around 1pm with Leslie’s family. After dodging all of the dishes by launching plastic leaves at each other around the table, we packed up and headed out to the ranchlet for some ping-pong, football, and bonfire. Oh, and leftovers.

Day 4: More leftovers. Climbing in the car, girding myself for some more driving (my back is calling out for some yoga at this point), we head down to Austin again. Some xmas shopping at the cool little strip that south congress has become (would you like a “keep austin weird” hat, bumper sticker, shirt, thong, or postcard? You’re in luck), chilled, exhausted, at a coffee shop on 4th that in another incarnation Leslie and I had our first date at, and finally headed down to Lisa and Eric’s place for fun with dogs and excellent alfredo. We went home, tired from our travels, and were about to hit the sack in preparation for our 6:30 flight the next morning when I got a call from a HS friend, so I headed down to a pub until about midnight, then home for a few hours of sleep.

Day 5: stumble out of bed at 4:30. Stuff happens. Home again around 9am. the end.

Be sure to check the gallery.

No, really… it was the Michigan vs. Wisconsin game. And by “13 minutes” I mean “approximately for fucking ever” since football transpires in some parallel universe where time has no meaning and the network’s idea of entertaining me is a bunch of shots of people pacing around looking pissed. I would get bored and look away, only to have my attention drawn back suddenly by shouts or wails—when I did this, I would see perhaps several consecutive seconds of activity on the field, chased by more pacing. Truly a riveting game, that.

This was the prelude to Ali’s party he was throwing at his new apartment. I’m in Ann Arbor visiting, partly in celebration of being a post-prelim individual, partly because the tickets were dirt cheap. The party was fun—in poor yet excellent taste someone brought the parts for making hurricanes, which I tried. Rum… such a strange thing, foul by itself but laid low by a splash of pineapple juice. I proceeded to get Not Very Drunk while many people around me got Quite Drunk Indeed, and I discovered that in Ann Arbor, if the party is not entertaining enough, the guests will not leave. Instead, they will seek out and ingest ever increasing amounts of alchohol until the party becomes fun. You have to admire the determination, or desperation, or whatever it is.

It’s not actually cold here at all. In fact, it’s detectably warmer than in Berkeley—I constantly delight that places like Michigan exist where it is both too hot and too cold. Suckers.

I spent Sunday rafting with Doug, Ali, and some friends from work on a river north of Sacramento. Full pictorial documentation on gallery.

After an uneventful day of travel, we’re in New York. The view from the plane as we flew in was great… right up over Manhattan. We got in a cab and told the driver where to go. “Where is that?” he asked. So, I oddly found myself looking through a street map of New York finding the place. I really didn’t expect to be giving directions to a NYC cabbie, but hey.

Dinner was had at an excellent, mellow sushi place near George’s. George’s place itself is outrageous. A co-opy warehouse loft that get’s rented out for yoga and whatnot with about 10 people living in a cordoned off section. Infinite points awarded. I may die never living in a place as cool as this–fundamentally because I hate sharing a kitchen.

Tomorrow we’re tentatively scheduled to wander around Brooklyn, then make our 1pm reservations at The River Cafe, the swank-ass joint that Cam and Matt gave us brunch at for xmas. We’re also going to try to get in to see a UCB theatre show in the evening, but tickets are up in the air for that.

We got into denver without incident. The airline (Frontier) was cool, in that it had little TVs in every seat, but uncool in that you had to pay $5 to watch. They also get bonus points for handing out Sun Chips as snacks and giving you the whole can of Coke with your little plastic cup of ice. I read and dozed as I always do on planes.

We met my parents in their rented Oldsmobile and drove the hour and a half out to (not Breckenridge, but) Winter Park. I guess technically we’re in a suburb of Winter Park called “Tabernash.” Monday we went out to do some cross-country skiing, which was interesting, as most new things are, but eventually just exhausting and vaguely frustrating. I’m sure people who really like hiking (ick) could get into it. I’m glad we all got to do it together as a family, though, because it had been too long since we’d done something like that.

We decided to move our plane tickets back to a return date of the 30th instead of the 1st. Doing so cost us, net, about $220 each. Yeowch. But I think the extra couple of days will benefit Les’s preperations for school greatly, and I won’t mind it either. Also it means we don’t have to be here when everyone is cleaning up the cabin to leave. Hee.

Tuesday we hit the slopes of Winter Park, for one of the most crowded skiing days of the year. Renting stuff took a while, but it was tolerable. Once we got up on the slopes, things were actually great. Practically no lift lines, not too many people in your way as you skied, my brother picking up the technique just like I did two years ago after 15 years of disuse. At the end of the day I crunched my knee, so we called it quits. Today’s doctor visit and x-rays confirm that there’s nothing really wrong with me.

Tomorrow we head back home. I’ve started to feel that longing at the end of a trip to be back in my own space again. To ignore other people, to not do things, and bury myself in my private world. This vacation seems like it’s been so long. But full.

We’ve been in Dallas a few days now, having a grand time of it. Food has been consumed, movies have been enjoyed (or not), and much slacking generally accomplished. Last night I had genuine crab legs, which if you’re not familiar are in fact the greatest substance to have been placed on earth for human consumption by the intelligent designer who has just as much of a right to play time in our science classrooms as any other alien invader. Leslie and I gave Cam an early present of World of Warcraft (the first one is always free), and as a pair of cows we’ve been gallavanting about the country side, cursing, skinning, and riddling with bullets all recalcitrant bundles of pixels we happen across.

Today, in Texas, it began to snow. At first tentative, wet and flighty. Then with confidence, big hulking chunks of uniqueness smacking you in the face and momentarily blinding you. We hopped–there exists video evidence of this will I will shortly point you to–and I can say with confidence that never has bouncing been more justified.

On the docket for the coming days is more of the same sort of blatant, selfish loafing, with an eventual sojourn to Colorado for some even colder weather and potentially some skiing. Overt has been hit with more comment spam, with over 200 interesting and informative posts about gambling online. I’m not quite miffed enough to resort to a technical solution, but when I do, so help me, I’ll make those inanimate programs wish that they’d never been set to work in the basement of a rich suburban spammer.

Just returned from “Trek to Tahoe” ’04. Fun as always. Leslie took off school on Friday and we drove up early, grilled some steaks, sat beside a crackling fire, talked. The next day we skied/snowboarded in gorgeous weather on mediocre snow. I snubbed the SSX-style high jumps and bars this time in favor of the company of others who are not as insane. We wore ourselves out by early afternoon, napped, I cooked up a pasta dinner, enlightened the 9 women I roomed with on the evils of the male psyche, played a half-assed round of King’s Cup, and then slept. Today was absorbed by the drive back, studded with fast-food sins and the smell of snicker-doodle coffee from Truckee.

What a wonderfully lazy holiday. I kicked things off on Tuesday by purchasing “World of Warcraft,” a video game I’ve been waiting on for some time and participated in the beta test of. I spent most of the rest of the day wasting time with that, and on Wednesday we headed off to Sebastopol for Thanksgiving festivities with Johanna and her family.

Wednesday night we spent with some good pizza, and then a trek out to “Old Main,” one of three bars in Sebastopol, which had approximately 2000 people stuffed into it, all of who’d just gotten in for the holidays. I met a wide array of high-school friends of Johanna, had some bad beer, and eventually retreated with Les and Peanut around 11:30 to home and bed. Thanksgiving was classic: buying food, fixing food, eating food, with all the nooks and crannies filled in with board games. Huge quantities of board games, including Lord of the Rings monopoly (Park Place / Boardwalk become Mount Doom and Barad Dur) and “Loaded Questions,” a suprisingly fun get-to-know-you game that will hopefully be converted into a drinking game for our upcoming ski trip.

Nothing was accomplished for the rest of the weekend other than slaughtering virtual wolves and human zealots with flaming bolts of death from my undead warlock (disarmingly named “Arla”) and her trusty imp Grimnar (he prances).