Vacation Debriefing
Posted on | June 8, 2008 at 10:37 pm | Comments Off
Things I learned on my Pennsylvania trip last week, that I didn’t learn from my trip last year:
Pennsylvania has strange beer laws. You can’t buy beer in grocery stores or liquor stores (!), but you can buy it at convenience stores and “beer distributors”. Also, I think you can buy six packs in bars to take home.
Buses to Atlantic City show schmaltzy movies. On the way down, we saw Martian Child. I didn’t know it was based on a book by David Gerrold, he of “The Trouble With Tribbles” fame. I didn’t totally buy John Cusack as the science fiction writer/widower who had a hankering to be a single parent and adopt a difficult child, but at least it was somewhat entertaining if predictable. Amanda Peet’s role should’ve been bigger. On the way back, we saw August Rush, which would make an especially good flick for the MST3K people to mock. N and I had our own little two-person Greek chorus commenting upon the escalating preposterousness of the plot, but we couldn’t get anyone else to join in. I realize it’s supposed to be a contemporary fantasy or something, but there’s only so much I can take. It almost has to be seen just to take in the spectacle that is Robin Williams-as-Bono-as-Fagan. And how did an 11-year old prodigy with no family and no money get into Julliard? Thankfully they didn’t even try to explain it. And there are so many coincidences in this movie, it makes your head spin.
They have some good BBQ in PA. It ain’t just in the South!
I like assigned seating on planes. I don’t want to have to try to find my own seat once I get on the plane. This was my first trip on Southwest Airlines (N’s also), and we weren’t sure how the seating worked. Because of a driving miscalculation, we got to DIA later than we would’ve liked, and ended up getting put into the final boarding group for the plane. So of course we didn’t get to sit together. But on the flight back, I got to the airport really early and got a pretty high boarding number again. The only thing I can figure is that most people did online check-in and printed out their boarding passes from home. I didn’t have that luxury, not being near the Internet (or at least the Internet and a printer). What’s the whole point of the choose-your-own-seat thing anyway? How does it save Southwest money?
I like flying into Philadelphia a whole lot better than flying into Newark. The drive to the Land of Dundler-Mifflin is a bit longer, but it’s a lot easier. The Philadelphia airport had some oddities (especially the cramped security lines), but I liked it better than Newark.
I like getting a foreign rental car. This year I got a Toyota Corolla, which was a nice change from the omnipresent Chevy Aveo. It felt more like driving my Prius.
Part of me still prefers normal books to ebooks. I took A Feast For Crows with me to read on the trip, in both paperback and ebook form. I almost exclusively read the paperback instead of the ebook, even though it’s huge (almost 1000 pages, of which I read a third on the trip). The only time I used the ebook was in low-light situations.
Gambling would be a lot more fun if there wasn’t all that money-losing involved. Atlantic City was a lot less crowded than last year – I think the economy has hit the gamblers pretty hard. Or at least the ones who go to Atlantic City.
People still don’t know how to set widescreen TVs properly. The hotel in A.C. had a huge widescreen LCD HDTV. It was not actually setup to show HDTV content (as far as I could tell), even though it was definitely receiving HD channels. The display mode was set to “stretch” for everything. There was no way to change it – the TV controls were disabled. At one point, there was 4:3 content showing on one of the network stations that had the proper bars on the side, but the rest of the time everything was off. It was very cool having that big, wide TV, but it would’ve been cooler if it had been setup properly.
Cabbies outside the A.C. casino/hotel like to loudly argue with each other all night and all day. Or maybe they were just having very spirited discussions, which also involved a lot of bodily contact that I was interpreting as “friendly shoving”.
I take a lot of things on trips that I never actually end up using. For example, I took both my Nintendo DS and my Sony PSP, but only played the PSP. And that was just for a little while. I also brought one of my iPods and didn’t use it at all. At least I did go through most of my clothes.
I don’t like heat and humidity and could never live out there. Oh wait, I already knew that one. I do like all the greenery though – I miss that in the west.
Latre.