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Memorial Day Weekend 2007 Trave(b)logue
May 25:
Sitting at KCI, most boring big airport I've ever been to. Almost 1 PM, my flight leaves in about an hour, figured I'd blog a bit before going through security.
Left home at 9 on the dot, took US 24 the whole way. Hit Topeka at 10 as expected, took a short break to gas up ($3.09/gal, as opposed to $3.39 in Manhattan) and toy hunt. Nothing at Wal-Mart. K-Mart, unsurprisingly, had all sorts of movie TFs on the shelf pegs, but when I got to the register they were all Not For Sale Yet. Bah.
Got back on the road at 10:30, got to the 435 turn off an hour later. As usual, screwed it up, but only lost a couple minutes. Bad signage. Lunch from Arby's drive-thru at the corner of 435 and 29, pulled into the airport at noon. Minimal traffic problems, just a few idiots I passed pretty easily and a couple stretched of construction.
Check-in was smooth, did an exercise lap of the A concourse that took 15 minutes. Floor here is more of a night sky motif.
Now to go through security. Hopefully I'll be able to get wireless on the other side of it.
Back. No hassles at security (it's nice to finally have pants that'll stay up without a belt...lets me stick the belt in my bag and avoid wanding). WiFi was slow but present, so I checked my email (just spam and mailing list discussions I wasn't following) and tried to poke at LJ, but the WiFi was so crapped out I couldn't connect to much of anything, much less LJ. Gave up after about ten minutes of that. Flight doesn't seem delayed at either end. On the other hand, it's now half an hour before we're supposed to depart and the plane has yet to get to the gate....
And the other shoe drops. The incoming flight won't be here until shortly after we're supposed to be leaving (had to skirt some storms over Texas on the way in). Half hour delay at BEST. Good thing I don't need to make any connections.
Took off about 40 minutes late. Dropped a bit of the signature hot chocolate chip cookie in my lap, naturally...guess I get to put my pants in the wash tonight. Didn't plan on getting obvious brown stains in my lap, after all. :/
Got in at 3:35 with a tailwind. Of course, now I stand at the "naked" baggage carousel where my bag is supposed to come, waiting for the sign to change and tell me to which other carousel it has been shifted. At least it's a nice day out, so if I get my bag before Mom shows up it won't be unpleasant to wait where I can be seen. After all, it just struck me that I can't ID either of my parents' cars on sight anymore....
Bugged a worker and found out where to wait for my bag. I'm happy to see that Renaissance Books, a nice used book store at Mitchell Field, didn't shut down in '03 like I'd been led to believe. Will poke around there on the way back.
Okay, about to go to bed. Did the rough sorting on all my left-behind stuff, a bit of personal archaeology, already posted to LJ about it. Tomorrow I figure I'll do a more careful sorting and also do some toy hunting.
Bedtime a little after midnight.
May 26:
Planned to get up at 8 AM, but really loud birdsong at 7:30 woke me before my parents could.
Morning spent shopping. First to Pick 'n' Save with Mom, then out toy and book hunting with Dad being driver (enough stuff has moved since last I was here we decided just giving me a car and setting me loose might be a bad idea). More toy teasing, this time Wal-Mart having Robot Heroes out but not selling 'em, but I finally hit paydirt at Brookfield Square mall's KayBee. They only had one of the movie deluxes I hadn't ordered online, but that's okay, it's not like I have unlimited luggage space! Also got the kidnovel adaptation of the new TF movie, because the store didn't have the full novelization. And Hot Topic had a few TF things new to me, so I snagged those.
Part of the afternoon was spent doing some more archaeology, organizing the stuff I wanna keep and boxing up the more fragile bits. The rest was playing with new TF and reading the kidnovel.
Dinner was at Marty's, a 50-year-old local pizza place, and one of my favorites. Breakfast tomorrow will be the leftovers. Yum!
After dinner reviewed the kidnovel and typed up some notes on Wreckage. Might review the Hot Topic stuff tomorrow, but a bit too tired to do serious typing on a laptop with chiclet keys anymore tonight. This blog entry (covering everything after the first para for today) is going to be my last serious thing tonight. If you can call it serious.
May 27:
Had yummy cold Marty's pizza for breakfast. Despite closing the windows, I was waken up by chirping birds at 7 AM, but managed to get back to sleep this time and grabbed another hour.
Went walking with Dad this morning, a nicely developed Fox River Walk downtown in Waukesha. According to Dad's pedometer, we did 1.6 miles (2.56 km) in about forty minutes. Saw many ducks and geese. One mama Mallard was escorting eight or nine baaaaaby ducks. The geese we saw had some very fluffy babies barely able to swim on the river. Also saw a red-winged blackbird, one of my favorite birds to color as a little kid.
Now just waiting until I feel hungry enough to eat lunch...pizza still sticking with me over three hours later. Tomorrow I get to wake up at five, not particularly looking forward to that.
Evening now. Afternoon just sort of drifted past, chatting online and occasionally popping upstairs to do more sorting, cleaning and throwing out. Reviewed Wreckage (movie TF toy I got yesterday) and generally puttered around.
After dinner I took a quick walk around the block, given that this will probably be my last opportunity. The next time I come to visit my parents will likely be after they move up to the Green Bay area (one of the motivations for this trip, after all, was to go through my remaining stuff so they wouldn't have to do it prior to moving). Anyway, a lot had changed, but enough had stayed the same to be recognizable. "Grandma and Grandpa trees" finally died and got hauled out. When I was little, there were two trees near the top of the hillside out back that had trunks that had partly fallen over at some point before growing back upwards, resulting in thick L shaped sections that were like laps to sit on. Even the littlest of us could climb these friendly trees enough to get off the ground. But given erosion and their already tenuous grips on the hill, I'm surprised they lasted so long.
Also kinda sad has been the progressive walling off of the neighborhood. Where once you could cut through any number of yards to get out of our cul-de-sac, most now have fences. One corner property has let the trees along the sidewalk run riot into a wall reminiscent of the trees in Seuss's story with the island below sea level (was that Oobleck?). Anyway, what once was a neighborhood full of kids running every which way is now a balkanized realm of retirees and childless professionals...okay, maybe there's still kids around, just all off on vacations, but they're all stuck in their fenced-off segments.
Well, enough semi-maudlin nostalgia. Getting to bed earlier tonight, what with having to get up at 5 AM tomorrow. Gonna put the PDA on the charger one more time to make sure I've got enough juice to check email from the airport when I get back to KCI. :)
Night!
May 28:
Memorial Day! Slept very poorly, I doubt I fell asleep before midnight, bleh.
Anyway, final preps went smoothly, traffic was almost nonexistent and I was at the check-in deck by 7:15. I was offered space on an earlier flight, getting out at 8:35 instead of 9, so I took it. Checked out Renaissance Books but didn't buy anything, as my backpack's already crammed with books I'm bringing back with me. Security was fairly quick and painless, and I'm now sitting at the gate as the plane pulls up (7:50 AM). So, looks like smooth sailing from this end, at least. Radar shows a rain clump moving in on KC, but it's pretty much just green, no yellow or nastier, so I doubt there'll be a landing delay.
One side effect of getting the earlier flight, though, is that I'll need to do my blood sugar test on the plane after boarding. Hopefully my seatmate (if any, the flight's supposedly nearly empty) isn't squeamish.
She wasn't. :) Took off on time. No cookies this flight, instead trail mix bars (cranberries, feh...had one of my own granola bars instead, fewer carbs anyway). Landed 9:45, a bit early. More time for shopping, yay! Can definitely spare some time to putter around Lawrence without worrying about getting home too late. Didn't have long to wait for my luggage either, looks like most of the passengers were continuing on to San Diego, so my bag was right at the doorway of the hold and came out with alacrity. Of course, now it's taking forever for the bus to remote parking to show up. A half dozen general buses to rental cars have come and gone, plus a bunch of carrier-specific shuttles, with no sign of the Blue Bus. It finally showed up at 10:05. They must be bunching up or something. Forgot to try email in the terminal, but I doubt I got that much non-spam in the past three hours on a holiday morning. :)
Well, I rather overshot my goal, swinging about five miles farther east than I needed to, but I got to the Barry Road shopping center only a little later than an optimum path would have required. :) Overshooting is better than undershooting anyway. No luck on Alternators here, though. Store exclusives with bad distribution really suck.
TF book jackpot at Border's, though, in the kiddie section. Turns out the proper novelization has a street date of Tuesday, though, so no go. Talked to a little kid some, he had a TF picture book and I showed him where more were. Ended up getting most of the kiddiebooks.
Rolled into The Legends mall at the west edge of KCK at noon. Looks to be one of those places built to look like a rejuvenated small town downtown, a la Easton Towne Center in Columbus. There's a very large tortoise (ornate box turtle?) statue out front of the Books A Million there. They're not sticking to the street date, so I got the novel and several more kiddiebooks. Passed on a 3D puzzle.
T.rex Cafe has a nice rex skeleton replica and an animatronic Baryonyx. Not to mention a really big Argentinosaurus skeleton replica. The gift shop even had transforming dinos, but they were the same line as the Easter basket ones.
Not gonna last to Lawrence for lunch, heh. About one now, having lunch at the Planet Sub in Legends. Gonna stop at a Target I spotted after. Might not stop in Lawrence after all...finding more of interest here. And by interest I mean "crap to buy." At least I avoided temptation at T.rex.
So far no rain on me, which is good. No luck at Target, off to Topeka. The construction just west of KC was a bit more trouble today, as traffic was thicker...and there were more cars, too. A broken down car I saw on the roadside on Friday was still there, but now sans wheels. Classy.
Hit a few raindrops here and there between Lawrence and Topeka, plus signs I'd just missed some stronger stuff. Gassed up in North Topeka again...price jumped fifteen cents a gallon once I crossed the river south into the main part of Topeka. A little over 30 mpg for the Topeka to KC and back segment, woot.
Well, I'm home now. Had a few close calls in the final stretch, almost falling asleep at the wheel and drifting off the road, but I caught myself each time. Definitely glad for those “burp” strips along the shoulders on the interstate. Now to tidy this up, post it, and then decide which I want more: a nap or dinner.
Bye!
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