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EppsNet Archive: Travel
Family Reunion
My family is back from Thailand . . . At 6:30 this morning, I’m awakened by the dog pawing on my bedroom door. I get up to see what’s going on and find my son — who is never up at 6:30 in the morning but is still operating on Thailand time — playing a video game in the family room. “Rise and shine, parental!” he says. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready for work?” “I was up till 1 a.m. getting you home from the airport so I was planning to sleep until 7.” Meanwhile, the dog is trying to get someone’s attention by jumping around next to his food bowl. “Why is he jumping around like that?” I ask. “I don’t know,” the boy says. “Has he eaten?” “No.” “Mystery solved, Encyclopedia Brown. I’m going back to bed.” A few minutes later, the boy inexplicably shows up in… Read more →
Some Things I Did This Weekend
Experimented with the Hockneyizer. Added FancyZoom to the 99 Most Interesting Photos of Orange County. Read more →
Two More Reasons I Won’t Go on a Cruise
Captured by pirates, you are given a choice between walking the plank or joining the crew. The crew are all Yankees fans. When your luxury cruise ship, featuring Las Vegas–style live entertainment, sinks in midocean, you find yourself adrift in a lifeboat with a tiger, a chimp, and an Herbalife salesman. On the second day, the tiger and the chimp commit suicide. — Susan Schorn, “Worse Things Happen at Sea” Read more →
Another Reason I Like to Just Stay Home
ROME – Italian railway police say an American tourist was hit and killed by a train at a Rome station as he was walking on the tracks in a daze after being drugged and robbed. Police official Giovanni Piccolantonio said Monday that 74-year-old Frank Phel from California died early Friday at the suburban Tiburtina station. — Associated Press Arrivederci Roma! Read more →
EppsNet Hotel Review: Santa Maria Resort, Fort Myers, FL
I recently spent a week in Florida with my son for a roller hockey tournament. We stayed at the Santa Maria Resort on Fort Myers Beach. The place was great, like a furnished 2-bedroom apartment with a fully appointed kitchen: oven, stove, microwave, fridge, freezer, plates, bowls, pots, pans, silverware, etc. We went to the local Publix grocery the first day and stocked the place up with food and beverages. We got all this for about $50 a night less than we would have paid for a room at, say, the Embassy Suites. And when I say “room,” I mean that usually when I travel with the boy, the hotel room is in fact a room and we’re both in it together. That’s a problem because he likes to watch TV in hotel rooms and I’d rather read a book. But with the 2-bedroom setup — each bedroom on opposite… Read more →
The Claw is Our Master
Stoney’s Sports Cafe in Estero, Florida, has an interesting variation on the crane game. Instead of the usual collection of stuffed toys, the machine is filled with water and live lobsters. If you manage to catch one (at $2 a chance), they’ll cook it up and serve it to you. Live by the claw, die by the claw. Read more →
Free Ride
One thing I learned on my recent vacation is that Florida, unlike California, doesn’t have a helmet law for motorcycles. If you’re wondering what percentage of riders will wear a helmet for safety reasons if they’re not required to by law, the answer appears to be zero, although more than half the riders I observed did take the precautionary measure of wearing a shirt. Read more →
Hat Trick
My son’s hockey team didn’t do so well at NARCh this time around. They got knocked out in the round-robin portion of the tournament. That left us with some extra time on our hands, some of which we used to drive up to Tampa to watch the Angels get worked by the ordinarily hapless Devil Rays, 7-2. We got good seats though! — right behind home plate about 10 rows up. Completing the hat trick of futility, I arrived back in California to find that the mortgage bank I worked for had laid off 400 people, including me. The good news is that I did get a severance package, unlike the last time I got laid off (from a dot-com company), when all I got was a handshake and an escort to the parking lot. Oh, and I’ve got more time to read the last Harry Potter book. I’m really… Read more →
Off to Florida
We’re off to NARCh for a week. I hope there won’t be thunderstorms every day like the last time we were there. Let’s have a look at the 5-day . . . Read more →
Casey Goes to Washington
Pictures from my son’s 8th grade trip to Washington, DC. Read more →
The Geometry of Politics
On the heels of my kid’s discovery that his tour group will not be break dancing their way across our nation’s capital, comes another disappointment — his tyrannical math teacher has been added to the list of chaperones. “She’ll probably say, ‘Oh, Casey, I’m glad you’re here. Why don’t you calculate the volume of the White House?’” Read more →
I Have a Dream 2007
My son’s going to Washington, DC, next week with a group from his junior high school. Once there, they’ll hook up with a group from Martin Luther King High School for a 5 day, 4 night Discover DC educational tour. Despite the name, MLK High School is not a predominantly black school, a big disappointment to my kid, who was looking forward to his travel companions “breaking out the cardboard mats and spinning on their heads.” I Have a Dream, indeed! Read more →
The Next Best Thing to Being There
My wife is talking about the possibility of a Christmastime family trip to Thailand. She’s from Thailand, lived there through college, and still has relatives there. I’ve never been to Thailand — I hate to travel, for one thing — but our son has been over there with her on a few occasions. Here’s his reaction, punctuated with frantic screaming: “AHHHHH! It’s people who can’t speak English in 170-degree heat!” I don’t think this boy has a future as a travel agent. “They haven’t seen you in a long time,” my wife tells him. “Can’t we do a video conference?” Read more →
ALOHA!
A friend is leaving tomorrow for a wedding in Hawaii. She asks me if I have any souvenir requests. Yes! If you can get a picture of the entire bridal party mooning the camera with ALOHA written across their asses in tropical colors — you don’t have to write the O, just AL HA and bend over — that would be great! If not, I don’t want anything . . . Read more →
How Big Was That Elk?
One morning at the Grand Canyon, my son and I were walking to the Canyon Cafe for breakfast when we saw a big elk near Yavapai Lodge. “How big was it?” my wife asked later, when the boy was telling her the story. “Big enough to CHOMP MY HEAD OFF!” he said. “If he wasn’t an herbivore.” Read more →
Route 66 Road Trip
We stayed on Route 66 as much as we could on a recent family drive to Arizona. The Mother Road has long since been bypassed by the interstate highway system, but long stretches of it are still driveable, including hundreds of miles in California and Arizona. Read more →
The Grandeur of the American Southwest
We just got back from a family drive to the Grand Canyon . . . Have you ever tried to introduce family members to things that have made a deep impression on you personally? It’s often disheartening, isn’t it? For example, here’s what my son got out of the sea of sage and grasslands that make up the Kaibab Plateau: “I’d put an amusement park over here,” he said, pointing to the right. “And over here,” — pointing to the left now — “a shopping center and a sports arena.” “Look at the mountains,” I said to my wife, indicating with a sweep of my hand the silent, austere beauty of the East Mojave, where desert mountains rise dramatically from the sloping terrain. “I’ve been looking at them for five hours,” she said. “You know,” I said, “you guys just don’t appreciate the grandeur –” “HEY, LOOK!” my son yells.… Read more →
I Hate Travel
A lot of people seem to love travel . . . I hate travel. I start out thinking I’d be happy if I could just be somewhere else but when I get there, I’m the same person with the same problems, and now I’ve spent all this time and money in another failed attempt to get away from myself . . . Read more →
Driving the Plane
My son is listening to his iPod as we take off from Tampa, heading back to Orange County. We’ve been cautioned to turn off electronic devices during takeoff. Read more →