DAY TEN: Illinois

Last night I went to bed at midnight.

This morning I woke up at 4:30am so I could drive four hours to Southern Illinois for an appointment.

This has made for quite a long day. But the good news is that I saw something interesting. While driving through the town of Teutopolis, I noticed that the high school's team mascot is... "The Wooden Shoes." No, seriously, it totally is. This has to be the best school mascot I've seen since Astoria Oregon's "The Fighting Fisherman." Though I have to say if it were the "Fighting Wooden Shoes," it would be an order of magnitude higher in awesomeness.

Since I know nobody would believe me without proof, I took a picture...

My theory is that the town was founded by a bunch of crazy drunken Dutch persons.

Or perhaps one drunken DutchBitch...

DAY NINE: Chicago

I'm not supposed to be in Chicago now. I'm supposed to be at home, having driven there after landing in Seattle last night. But plans change, so here I am for a couple days of work and one day of goofing off in the city (which sounds like a fair trade-off to me!).

Of course, I almost didn't make it into Seattle last night thanks to multiple lapses in stupidity by airlines, airports, and people, so there's always that.

It started off with the inbound flight to Tulsa being late. Which meant we boarded late. Which meant we took off very late because A) There was some confusion over a gate agent letting a baby onboard with their own seat assignment, and B) We sat on the tarmac forever for no good reason anybody could figure out.

So, there we were, arriving into Minneapolis a half-hour late. You would think that the airline would have a team of people ready to handle the incoming flight so that they could get people offloaded and onwards to their connecting flights as soon as possible.

But that's not what happened, of course. Not only did they not expedite a damn thing for our flight... they didn't send somebody down to operate the jetway! This meant we had to sit on the fucking place for an additional 15-20 minutes while somebody pulled their head out of their ass and made it possible for us to leave. Maybe.

Because we arrived allllll the waaaaayyy down at GATE A-14...

   
And, now that I'm running 45 minutes late to make my 1-hour connection, can you guess where my connecting gate was? Can you? Come on... take a guess!

Give up?

Here it is!

GATE F-14. The furthest possible gate away in terms of both time and distance. And since the tram that runs the length of the airport is practically useless for getting to the F-gates in a hurry (unless you get there just as a train arrives), you're only shot is to RUN ACROSS THE ENTIRE FUCKING AIRPORT... WHICH I DID!!

And nearly died doing.

Such a joke. It was like a comedy errors at amateur hour in the airport.

But I made it (barely) just in time for them to close the doors...

...so we could then sit on the tarmac for 30 minutes.

Typical.

Anyway... after landing, I dropped by my car at the parking lot just long enough to trade a suitcase full of dirty clothes for a suitcase full of clean clothes, then headed to my hotel for a blissful six whole hours before returning to the airport this morning.

Where my flight loaded on time. Left on time. And landed on time.

Don't ask me how.

DAY EIGHT: Kansas

This morning my plan was to get up early, have a nice breakfast, gamble a little at the Hard Rock Casino Tulsa, head downtown to check out a museum or two, then walk around for a bit and have a late lunch/early dinner.

Instead I ended up in Kansas.

When looking at my map of "States I've Failed to Visit," it seemed crazy not to make a run for the Kansas border when it's just an hour away. So I made a decision to zip up I-75 to the little town of Caney, then head back. Wondering if there was anything worth seeing along the way, I consulted Roadside America and saw... THE FIRST SPACE MONKEY!?!

As anybody who has followed this blog for even a small amount of time knows, I have no small obsession with monkeys (in general) and monkeys in the space program (specifically), so this was a no-brainer. Besides, it was just 40 minutes farther than Caney in the city of Independence, Kansas!

But first I had to get out of Oklahoma alive.

I've been to a lot of places on this earth, and always considered Detroit, Michigan to be the world's most dangerous place to drive. Many people in Detroit drive very aggressively and very fast, which makes motoring anywhere near the city like a scene from Deathrace.

Tulsa has all that beat, because people here are just plain crazy drivers...

• As I was leaving the Hard Rock, I was nearly creamed by THREE cars who ran a red light.
• As I entered the highway, a car two spots ahead of me was temporarily run off the road as a car in the lane next to them tried to pass a truck... with no warning, no turn signal, and (apparently) no looking.
• I finally made my way to the left lane, which seemed a safer place to be... until the car ahead of me decided to flip a U-Turn. Keep in mind, this is ON A HIGHWAY... with a 30-FOOT GRASS DIVIDER!
• THEN, on the opposite side of the road, I saw two pickups off the highway, crashed together from opposite directions, with a streetlight knocked over and fallen across the hood of one of them. I have no idea how this could have happened but, given what I had seen so far, I wasn't surprised.

Keep in mind that all of the above happened within 30 minutes of leaving my hotel.

Anyway, I made it to the Kansas border without incident and was zipping past the town of Caney when I saw signs for... Little House on the Prairie? How could I not check out the actual place that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about for that crappy TV show? (No, seriously, don't skip that link... read this crap!) Turns out it's for real, with a reconstructed "little house" and everything...

To be honest, it was kind of a shithole (and filled with bees!). It wasn't really "Little House on the Prairie"... it's more like "Teeny-Tiny House on the Prairie." I have no idea how five people lived there. But, then again, it's not like I could build a house, so kudos to Pa Ingalls for his ingenuity.

Then, at long last, it was time for the Ralph Mitchell Zoo at Riverside Park in Independence, Kansas!

Right at the entrance of the park is "Monkey Island" which is where "Miss Able"... America's first Space Monkey to return to earth alive... was born. It kind of makes "Little House on the Prairie" look like a dream-house, but I'm guessing the monkeys don't mind it, since they were crawling all over the place...

And that was pretty much it. I wandered around for a while, then headed back to Oklahoma to catch my flight. The zoo itself is nice, though all the small cramped cages makes the place look downright barbaric compared to the San Diego Zoo I was at just five days ago. But it did have peacocks...

But the best news? My map now has another state filled in! Heaven only knows when those final three will be checked-off, but I'm making progress...

Annnnnnd Tulsa's airport makes you PAY for internet, so I guess this will have to post tomorrow when I get to Seattle. You know... SEATTLE... where airport internet is FREE just like God intended...

DAY SEVEN: Tulsa

Whee! I'm in Oklahoma!

In my effort to keep up with any new US & Canada Hard Rock properties as they open, I'm here to visit the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Tulsa on my way back to Seattle. It's pretty much a raging disappointment, but that's probably my own fault for hanging on to Hard Rock memories of yesteryear instead of the reality of Hard Rock today.

All in all, a pretty crappy day to be me...

• A direct flight to Tulsa from Atlanta was outrageously expensive. So I connected through Salt Lake City and ended up flying three times the distance in four times the duration at one-fifth the cost. I give up on the math that makes all that work.
• Ended up sitting on the Atlanta tarmac for 40 minutes while they decided if our plane was safe to fly in the face of "mechanical difficulties." Apparently it was, so we did, and ended up landing only 10 minutes late. That would have been a good thing, except it caused a backlog with the luggage and it took forever to get my suitcase.
• I was the first to leave the plane and arrive to a closed door. Nobody was outside, no sign on the door said not to open it, so I walked through... and had an alarm go off. The gate agent was infuriated and yelled "AAAAAAGGGGHHHH!" at me, then slammed the door while calling it in as a false alarm. Like it's my fault that he didn't do his job and open the door for an arriving flight. Well fuck you. Fuck you sideways. Helpful customer service tip... when you fuck up, APOLOGIZE to your customer and be mad at yourself, not them, for YOUR screw-up.
• I went to pick up my rental car and was told that I had been "upgraded" to a full-size vehicle. Well, here's the scoop... if I had wanted a full-size vehicle, I would have reserved one. So when you give me anything other than what I requested, it IS NOT A FUCKING UPGRADE! Of course, they didn't "upgrade" me because they like me, they did it because they ran out of compact cars. Fortunately, begging at the returns counter got me the car size I had wanted all along.
• Karma being what it is, the cigarette lighter doesn't work, so I can't charge my iPhone while I drive. Shit.
• The highways here are being upgraded and/or repaired. I missed the exit I needed because the temporary sign naming it could be seen ONLY after you passed the exit. It's a flavor of stupid that I can't quite wrap my head around.
• Now that I've finally made it to the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Tulsa, all I want to do is leave.

   
Time to update my travel map for this trip...

Ooh! Look at that! I've filled in a State I've never been to before! Just four more to go!

For anybody interested in my thoughts on the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Tulsa and the state of the Hard Rock chain in general, I've put that in an extended entry. For everybody else, good night!

→ Click here to continue reading "DAY SEVEN: Tulsa"...

DAY SIX: Deer

When captured by the enemy, soldiers are advised to sleep and eat whenever they can because they never know when either (or both) might be denied them.

While I would never compare my job to being a prisoner of war, the above advice has come in handy from time to time with my work (See? Graphic designers have it rough, people!). Well, not the food part, but definitely the sleep deprivation. I don't sleep that much to begin with, but when you're on-call for 31 hours straight and are guaranteed to be called to the job site several times... well, even a little sleep is hard to come by. So I grab an hour here and 20 minutes there, and try to be sane and somewhat comprehensible when reporting for duty.

But the real trick is getting rested enough that you feel comfortable driving. It's one thing to be sleep-walking on the job... it's quite another to be sleep-driving in a car.

Especially when you're in rural Georgia where wild deer love prancing around the roadways.

Last night on the way to Waffle House for a midnight dinner, a deer was standing in the middle of a dark country road with a 55 MPH speed limit. Even though I was driving just under 50 MPH because it was so dark, this still necessitated my slamming on the brakes to avoid getting a venison hood ornament. The deer, however, wasn't impressed and wandered off at a leisurely pace (Darwinism takes a vacation!).

On the way back, I had slowed to 45 MPH "just in case" and nearly hit TWO deer crossing that same road. Quick braking and a hard swerve avoided tragedy, but left me with an adrenaline rush which made getting any kind of sleep impossible for the next several hours.

But don't worry. When my job finally ended this afternoon, I managed to get three whole hours sleep before hacking together this blog entry, so I guess I'm back to normal again. Or as normal as a person can be who is an insomniac that craves human blood.

I should totally be a vampire.

Or, more appropriately, a zombie vampire!

A zombie vampire that eats deer who stand in the road!

Guess I should pack my suitcase now, seeing as how I'm leaving early tomorrow morning and all...

Bullet Sunday 193

Here I am in the Peach State of Georgia, where it's time once again for Bullet Sunday. Apparently I'm now in an area which is not included in the "97% of Americans" that AT&T's cellular network professes to cover, so Bullet Sunday is about all I got! Thank heavens for WiFi.

   
• Weather! Hot with a chance of hot humidity and hot thunderstorms? Well, let's just say I don't plan on spending a lot of time outdoors while I'm here...

   
• Wheaton! While at Comic-Con, I posted a photo of Wil Wheaton to my Flickr stream. After responding to @Whall making a Stand By Me joke about it, I mentioned that I had met Wil Wheaton twice, and wasn't going to stand in line for two hours to meet him again. For this, I got called "bullshit" on by some random stranger, and was told that "Standing in line at a Star Trek convention for a two second autograph doesn't count as 'meeting Wil Wheaton'."

Well, whatever... while I do have an autographed photo of Wesley Crusher that I was happy to stand in line for, that's not what I was talking about. Where I "met" Wil Wheaton was while he was an evangelist touring with NewTek, and it was hardly a "two second autograph." In fact, all I did was talk to him, I didn't even get an autograph at all. Or a photo. Though Wheaton did appear in the background of one of the photos I took of Kiki Stockhammer...

Bazinga! I'd mention that I stood in the airport security line out of San Diego with Paul Sr. of West Coast Choppers (from the TV show American Chopper) yesterday, but you probably wouldn't believe that either. Apparently I have nothing better to do than sit around and invent stories of chance encounters with famous people.

   
• Waffles! There is not a single Waffle House in all of Washington State (the closest is in COLORADO!), which means the only time I get to eat at one is when I'm traveling. This sucks, but at least I have something to look forward to...

The food is (relatively) inexpensive, tastes good, and available 24 hours. What more could you ask for?

   
• Wobble! When I was at the San Diego Zoo the other day, I was wandering through the new Elephant exhibit and came across an elephant dancing to some music that was playing nearby (you can barely hear it in the background there, as my iPhone doesn't have the best microphone)...

Rock on, Tantor! Though a part of me is kind of sad at the idea that he might be wobbling around because he's bored in his cage and doesn't have anything better to do. San Diego Zoo is better than most at providing nice habitats for their animals to live in, but it's still a cage at the end of the day.

   
• Watch! They keep adding cool bits to the TRON: Legacy trailer, which only makes me want to see the film more than ever. December is so far away...

They've youthed Jeff Bridges! And did a really good job of it! I hope the movie lives up to even a fraction of the hype that's building around it.

   
• Web! I hope that Flash videos in my previous two bullets didn't crash on you! For anybody who says that Mac users who whine about Flash are stuck in the past, and Flash has been much improved and runs perfectly on the Mac, I beg to differ. It's still the bug-ridden pile of bloated FAIL! it's always been, and still crashes all the time, as I can testify to because it happened again just today...

Flash just can't die fast enough.

   
And now... I guess I really should get back to work.

DAY FOUR: Atlanta

Bleh.

When I arrived in Atlanta this morning after my redeye flight I was pretty dead. By the time I made it to my hotel I was mostly dead. The only part of me that wasn't dead was the part that was allergic to something in my room. Finally, after tossing in bed for a half-hour being all miserable with a sore throat and runny nose, I decided to take a bunch of antihistamines and see if I could catch up on some sleep.

I woke up five hours later at 2:00.

And by "wake up" I actually mean "sleepwalked," because it took at least an hour before I was able to function again.

After slapping myself into consciousness for a while, it was time for dinner with Muskrat, Whipstitch, and Val, where I drank too many of these...

It's a delicious "Watermelon Wheat" beer that was a special at The 5 Seasons. A fantastic way to take the edge off a hot Atlanta day!

And now, since I have to be up early for work tomorrow morning, I must bid you adieu.

My travel map for this trip now looks like this...