I have spent all weekend with the college bowl team. On Friday we went to the Newseum, which is much better than the old one that was in Arlington. It’s a full-day excursion now, and I recommend seeing it all in one day because the $20 admission is a bit steep.

Friday night my wife finally got to meet two of my best friends because we went to a 4th of July party! I’ve never seen the DC fireworks in all the time I’ve lived here (basically my whole life) but my friend Geoff’s apartment building has a rooftop so we were able to view them from there. It was lots of fun! Good party.

All day Saturday was College Bowl, so many tons of questions. I was sleepy from having gotten in late the night before so I was probably not as good as I really can be. Saturday night was…packing and packing and packing. And bed.

Today we had College Bowl in the morning, then a break, then we reconvened in the afternoon. Now we are at Dave & Busters blowing off steam…needless to say we scared everyone away from the trivia game so we are sticking to other stuff! I hadn’t been to Dave and Busters before; they have a serious deficit of skeeball machines.

I still can’t find my debit card. I am using my credit card for all purchases, which doesn’t thrill me, but at least it’s available. A has given me her debit card in case I have an emergency and need cash.

I was supposed to take a picture of a geocoin at the Washington Monument. I drive past the damn thing every day, and I’ve had the coin for so long the owner asked me to please move it along. So I promised to take it to New Orleans, but…I won’t be driving past the Monument between now and then. I feel like a complete dork, so I am planning to take the coin to the top of the 6th Street garage on campus, from which you can see the Capitol dome quite well, and I’ll take its picture there. But…oops.

We had a pretty relaxing day today. We started it in the hotel swimming pool, which was cold; I counted to 5 and got in but A didn’t at first. (I can’t ever do anything on the count of 3, but I always do stuff on the count of 5.) I splashed around for a while but she stayed on the edge; just when I was ready to give up and get out, she decided to come in. We played around together but didn’t stay in much longer. We did do a front-side piggy-back ride which was a lot of fun but a maid passed by and she stared at us a little strangely!

We got out and decided what to do for the day; it was about 10:30am by this point. I decided we should go to the Parque Luís Muñoz Marín, because there was a cache there. The cache page mentioned a skyride, paddleboats, and other activities, so we figured it would be a nice place to spend the day. We were hungry by the time we got to the area, so we went into the Plaza las Américas mall and ate at the food court - I was pleasantly surprised to find a really good soy turkey sandwich! We headed into the park, and drove around checking it out. We were surprised that there wasn’t a $3 parking charge as we had been expecting, and inside the park we found out why…it was absolutely empty! I’d expect that somewhere it gets cold in the winter, but I was surprised to find that a park in the Caribbean could be empty too. We drove around until my GPSr got a lock on where the cache was, and then we parked at the nearest lot, about a quarter-mile away. It took me about 20 minutes to find it…I’m not used to searching in bamboo, so I wasn’t sure what hallmarks to look for - there were no fallen logs in the forest to hide it under! I finally got it, though. After this, we decided to go back to the bike rental place we’d seen on the way in. When we got there, we found all the bikes we’d seen earlier had been taken inside! The skyride wasn’t running and we hadn’t seen anybody at the paddleboat stand either, so we gave up and went back to the car. We tried to find another cache a couple of miles away, but the streets in that area were insane. A finally pulled over where she could and I ran back to try to find it, but without any luck. We thought about going to the Casa Bacardí factory after this, as there is a cache there too as well as a free tour that culminates with a free drink, but it was too far a drive to bother.

We came back to the hotel instead, and relaxed by the pool for several hours. A read her book while I played on the computer - the wifi reception was good there so it was easy to do. I got all riled up about a really stupid thread on a forum, and argued with a (probable) troll more than I should have, but oh well. Eventually we decided we would go to dinner at the restaurant adjoining, the hotel, Nikko, a Chinese restaurant with a sushi bar. Boy, was that a mistake! We had to wait forever for our food…A’s sushi came promptly but by the time my broccoli in garlic sauce arrived, her food was cold! So I waited until they nuked hers and brought it back before trying…the worst Chinese food I’ve had in my life. I don’t think there was any actual garlic in the sauce, it was mostly vinegar and brown sauce! I couldn’t finish it, and they offered to box up the rest, but I declined as politely as possible. I can’t believe we paid $35 for two entrees and a cup of tea! A said her unagi wasn’t very good either…only now have I discovered that nobody likes Nikko! We went to the bakery down the street to get something sweet to put the awful dinner behind us. Oh well!

We have to return the rental car tomorrow by noon, so after that we will take a bus into Old San Juan and look at the shops there. I am keeping up okay with my homework; I didn’t actually do any today, but Thursdays are my day off anyway! I tried to read my book for Deaf Studies, but it’s a book I used 10 years ago the first time I took the class, and as I read through the first couple of chapters I realized I remembered the entire thing almost verbatim from before. So I gave up on that. I handed in my lab report yesterday and my art show reaction paper, and I’m up to date on my history reading. I have some linguistics reading to do, but I will probably save that for tomorrow…Valentine’s Day is not the night to be doing homework! Oh, yikes, I just remembered - I have a test that was posted three hours ago and is due tomorrow by 1pm (my time!) - I better take a look at that too!

We have settled into our hotel in Fayetteville, North Carolina. In case I haven’t mentioned this, we’re on a road trip to Charleston, South Carolina to see my chronic urticaria doctor. After the appointment, which is 9:30am Thursday, we are going to Charlotte, North Carolina for the rest of the weekend, arriving back home on Sunday. I drove from my wife’s work in Chantilly to a little ways past Richmond, and then she drove the rest of the way to Fayetteville. We are in a Days Inn here, which we chose for its interior corridors (my wife has had bad experiences with exterior corridors) and free high-speed internet…though I’m not sure why it only gave me a 24-minute browsing session; perhaps I have to sign up again after that? Anyway, South Park is on the TV and all is well.

I did have major problems syncing the Handspring Visor I normally use for storing geocaching information, so I had my wife sync up the geocaching information to her Palm m130. Unfortunately at the dinner stop south of Richmond I realized the CacheMate software requires a registration key to hold more than 10 records - I have 547 - so I had to re-register it with her HotSync ID. It was only $8 and it’s a good program, so I didn’t mind registering it again. At least I’ll be able to go caching!

Tomorrow’s schedule is primarily driving to Charleston, but we might stop at South of the Border just for kitsch. We definitely need to pick up praline cookies, and I want to get any caches I can find, so I can add South Carolina to my map.

Getting off the ship in Seattle was reasonably painless. In fact, they were early, and we weren’t finished eating breakfast but they were trying to hustle us off the ship! We basically just walked right off - with one more trip past the hand sanitizers, I’m not sure why they care if you’re leaving! - and headed straight into the terminal. The customs officer didn’t even glance at my passport, and we went to collect our luggage and catch a cab to the hotel.

I really loved our hotel as soon as I saw it, it was called the Moore Hotel. Unfortunately we there much too early to check in - we got there around 10:00 and check-in was firm at 3:00! So my mom went to walk around, I went geocaching, and A just stayed in the hotel lobby to read. When I was done geocaching, I went back to the hotel and found A there, and we went to Pike’s Place Market to get something to eat. I had really fabulous Thai food at a little hole in the wall called Jasmine Thai - it was so great!

We went back to the hotel and found that our room was ready. We had been told that it was just an L-shaped room with no divisions, but we were pleasantly surprised to find that there was in fact a door. We’d already been promised to be moved to a different room (also with two separate rooms) for the next two nights that was cheaper, so we stuck with that plan even though the room we were in turned out to be fine.

We pulled into Skagway today at 7:00am. Our tour met at 8:00am and we hadn’t had any caffeine yet, so we were sleepy as we piled onto the White Pass railroad train. In fact, we were sleepy for a lot of the trip, especially on the way back. But the ride was just as amazing as it was the first time - I would probably do it a third time if I ever go back to Alaska. The views are just outstanding. I don’t theink there are any scenes in the continental U.S. that are so beautiful, with the possible exception of the Grand Canyon.

After we returned to downtown Skagway, we got some lunch and then split up - A went shopping and I went caching. The first one I tried for was a virtual that was easy to get, and the next one I attempted was downtown. After about an hour looking around in the cold and the rain, I gave up. I found a very likely spot but it just wasn’t there. There was another one about a mile away, but after walking a quarter-mile in the nasty weather, I gave up on that one as well.

I had a couple of hours before our afternoon tour, so I wandered through a few shops and the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park’s visitor center. There was an exhibit there about Jack London, which inspired me to go buy a $5 copy of Call of the Wild at the locally owned bookstore.

Our afternoon tour was very cute, it started wtih a show at Liarsville, where we also panned for gold - it had been planted, of course. We then went back to downtown Skagway and the Red Onion Saloon, where we had a tour of the brothel rooms upstairs. I thought the whole tour was a rather good deal at $40, but one woman said she was going to get her money back because it was overpriced and she didn’t like it. I was tempted to say “good luck with that” but I didn’t.

We spent today seeing sights around Juneau. We were a bit late getting into port, and we were delayed further by a lunch that took too long in the Summer Palace restaurant, but we made it outside in time for our tour. Our first stop was the State Museum, which really should combine forces with the nearby City Museum - it would enhance both their collections.

Our next stop was a salmon hatchery, which utterly horrified me. It might have been better if the description hadn’t been so tarted up. The guide said the sexually mature salmon go into a “dream box” where they are touched with “a DC current” that “makes them go to sleep” and “they don’t ever wake up from that sleep.” Translation: we zap ‘em dead.

I enjoyed the Glacier Gardens much more than the salmon hatchery. There are no roller coasters in Alaska, but the ride up and down the mountain was pretty damn close! I really enjoyed the rain forest and the view from the top.

Our final stop was the Mendenhall Glacier. We walked out on the mud flat and took some pictures before heading back into the visitor center. Unfortunately, we were only in there for five minutes when they announced it would be closing shortly. Our driver didn’t come back for another 30 minutes, by which point everybody was waiting and we all piled onto the bus.

I asked the driver to drop me off in town because I had some errands to run; several other people got off the bus with me. My first stop was the Patsy Ann waymark, which I created after my first trip to Alaska a year and a half ago. I recorded the proper coordinates - I’d guessed wrong using a map, which resulted in running a quarter-mile the wrong way to find my own waymark! Fortunately someone in a jewelry shop got me headed the right way and I was able to take a couple of pictures and record the proper coordinates. Then I set off running for my next stop, the Alaskan Fudge Company. Time was short because our tour was so long, but I had time to buy fudge and race over to the shuttle pickup point. (We were parked at the AJ Dock, unfortunately.) But with a lot of running, I got all my errands done and made it back to the ship a full 30 minutes before all-aboard time.

Today we went geocaching using two GPS devices. The first was my new voice nav system, which is really cool. I found addresses near the caches I was planning to find, and I used my DegDeg to get between them. (Still wondering if anybody knows where I got that?) And of course I used my regular eTrex GPSr to find the actual caches. While I was looking for Panda Palace I suddenly realized I didn’t have my GPSr - it wasn’t in any pockets and I had to retrace my steps through a bamboo forest to find it. Fortunately it was right out in the open and the cache itself turned out to be right nearby. Next I found Small Park for a Big Battle which is a park that I have seen a few times before (mostly while going to Chutzpah) but never stopped to actually investigate. The last two, View from the Cheap Seats and Hot Summer Nights were both very easy finds near the main center for county government.

I had picked these caches because they were all pretty near Fair Oaks Mall, and I wanted to stop by to shop for fancy clothes. I didn’t really have anything nice to wear for Thanksgiving and I want to find something good for Xmas/New Year’s. Unfortunately the parking lot was full, and we knew it would be a zoo inside, so we just came home.

First, yes: I really do think I ruptured my eardrum while scuba diving. I haven’t had this medically confirmed because a consultation with the onboard doctor is $113, but air is moving through my ear in a most unnatural way.

Today our ship went back across the island and docked at Penno’s Wharf in St. George. We went walking with A’s parents; I quickly picked up the cache at the Deliverance, petted a stray tomcat, and watched the celebrated wench-dunking in the town square. Next we walked up to the Unfinished Church, and then came back down the hill. A took the tour of the Bermuda Perfumery with her parents while I read outside; next we did some shopping before heading back to the ship for a nap before dinner.

My hearing has been diminished all day and I’ve asked people to repeat themselves a million times. The perforation should heal up in a few days, but I will probably see a doctor when I get home anyway. The “Cruise in Review” video is already playing on flat screen TVs outside the photo gallery. We are in it, but I decided to just wait for our bit and film it on my own camera. The DVD is $35 which is just insane. I also brought home two photos. The first was $15, and the second was supposed to be $25, but…um…well, let’s say I feel two for $15 is a more realistic price to expect people to pay.

I can write normally again. I trimmed off the nails and removed the color; now I just have to fuss with the remaining adhesive.

Helpfully bolded to make it easier for you to skip stuff!
(more…)

I am back home now. I woke up this morning and it occurred to me to look for caches along the route home; as I did so I noticed this new cache so I went out and logged it. I also noticed that this cache was in the Thomas Edison rest area on the Jersey Turnpike, so we planned to switch drivers there. That was fairly soon after leaving NYC, but we needed gas anyway so we stopped there. While A waited in line for gas I went off in search of the cache, which I found quite easily - for a total of three caches in one weekend, in three different states, without my GPS receiver! I drove the rest of the way home, which is a long drive, more than 200 miles from that rest area. When we got home Toadstool was nowhere to be found; I quickly located her under our bed and in very bad shape. She gets depressed when we go away, and she had apparently stopped eating and drinking. She was extremely dehydrated, and too weak to drink even though she was interested in the water. So we used the squirt bottle (originally filled with feline dental cleanser, but washed and filled with plain water) and got some water into her; she’s doing marginally better but still in extremely bad shape. So who knows what will happen now. Oh, and and the power was out for several hours when we got home, which meant that we couldn’t do anything but lie around sweating. Just as I suggested we take a cool shower (by candlelight; there’s no window in the bathroom) the power came back on, so we had our rinse-off and that was it for the night. I did have to run over to A’s parents’ house to pick something up, and on the way back I could see the town’s fireworks over the trees, so that was fun.