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Category: On Travels and Adventures

  • Four days in the Finger Lakes

    Floor inlay map, Finger Lakes Welcome Center, Geneva, NY

    I’ve been in love with New York’s Finger Lakes region pretty much ever since we moved to New York in 1981. My first sight of any of those lakes came that first summer. We moved here in June, I think–pretty quickly after I completed fourth grade in Hillsboro, OR–and when we got here my mother had to do a bit of coursework to fulfill the requirements for her new teaching job in this state. This meant trekking from Allegany to Geneseo, NY, mostly every day for the summer. Sometimes my sister and I would stay home, other times we’d go along; and while Mom was in class, Dad and I would go off exploring.

    Nowadays, whenever The Wife and I drive eastward into the Finger Lakes region, when we arrive in Geneseo via US 20A, I always consider that little college town to be the western “gateway” to the Finger Lakes region. Just east of Geneseo lies Conesus Lake, the westernmost of the eleven Finger Lakes. It’s also one of the smallest, but that was the first one I saw, way back when. Nearby are undeveloped Hemlock and Canadice Lakes, left undisturbed because they are sources of drinking water for the Rochester urban area 30 miles north. Then there is Honeoye (pronounced “Honey Eye”), which is another very small and highly developed lake with cottages and whatnot all around. Then you’re into the central Finger Lakes, where the big ones lie: Canandaigua (near the shores of which is the 4H Camp that housed the summer music camp I attended several years and then worked at several more as a counselor), Keuka (with its unique Y-shape), and the two biggies, Seneca and Cayuga (biggest and second-biggest, respectively).

    The central lakes are big enough that they famously create their own microclimate in their long, narrow valleys, a microclimate that is ideal for the growing of wine grapes: hence New York’s excellent wine production. At the southern end of Cayuga Lake is my beloved dream hometown of Ithaca, while at the northern end of Seneca lies another town we love, Geneva. Around these lakes lie many other wonderful places: Watkins Glen, Seneca Falls, Aurora, Trumansville, Taughannock Falls, and more.

    The Finger Lakes were a no-brainer for a location when I was thinking about booking a getaway for The Wife and I on our 25th anniversary (now several weeks back).

    After doing some searching, I booked a cottage in Watkins Glen, directly overlooking the lake itself, and then while there, we used that cottage as a base for some exploring. We went to Ithaca for a day to see things that we usually don’t see because we always go to Ithaca in the fall for the Apple Harvest Festival, and then the next day we drove south to Corning to visit the Museum of Glass, a world-class attraction that I have spent the better part of the last 41 years within a two or three hour drive and yet never been. And also, we ate pretty damned well, too.

    I have an entire album on Flickr of pictures I took from that trip (though I haven’t gone through yet and captioned many), but I’ll run some favorites below.

    Seneca Lake from Fulkerson Winery
    Wine tasting. We bought six bottles here at the start of our trip. We came home with two.
    Seneca Lake, looking north from the dock at our cottage property.
    To get to the dock you have to walk across a street, down a flight of wooden stairs, then across these tracks (which are still in use as there is a literal salt mine a mile up the lake). Not an impediment in any way! In fact, this made the place feel even more old-school and rustic, in a way.

    A pretentious pose. If I ever do an acoustic indie-rock album (and I will not, mind you) this might be my cover art. OR, this could be the photo that accompanies a news magazine profile of the grizzled guy who watches the time go by from the shores of his beloved lake….
    I love when you can see far enough and it’s just cloudy enough that you can see sunny patches on the distant hills.
    Looking toward the village of Watkins Glen. It was still too early for there to be a lot of boats out yet; I imagine that starts up in earnest on Memorial Day Weekend. Note the passing rain clouds in the valleys to the south. I had issues, growing up in New York’s Southern Tier, but those forested hills are really something special.
    Morning reading, before The Wife got up.
    There is a LOT of public art in Ithaca.
    The Chanticleer in Ithaca. I love their sign and I photograph it anew almost every time we’re there. Never been inside (it’s a bar).
    Chicken and waffles at Waffle Frolic. We ADORE this place. We tried going last fall, but we missed them by half an hour, not having realized that their pandemic hours had them closing at 1pm! We were NOT going to fail THIS time. The orange sauce is their maple hot sauce; the other one is maple syrup. And YES, you use BOTH. I could eat this weekly.
    The Odyssey Bookstore is one of Ithaca’s newest bookstores, having opened in 2020, just as the pandemic was starting up. Ouch, that timing…but they appear to be going strong! It’s a lovely little place in the basement of an old house, just beautiful for browsing. We only stopped in one bookstore this trip. I had to control myself SOMEHOW.
    My book haul from Odyssey. Yes, for me this is “self-control”.
    The “waterfront” at the Ithaca Farmers Market. We’d never been to this market, and it was wonderful! Everything a farmers market SHOULD be. (Among other things? Multiple people wearing overalls! I always feel like I’m amongst my people when I’m in Ithaca.)
    Cayuga Lake, looking north from the top floor of the Herbert F. Johnson Art Museum in Ithaca (at Cornell). Wonderful views from up there. (And great art! Check the Flickr album for some of that.)

    Ithaca, from the top floor of the Herbert F. Johnson Art Museum (Cornell). What a beautiful city Ithaca is. I could move there TOMORROW. (Well, next week. I’d need time to pack.) I only recall going to Ithaca a few times as a kid…with all the road-tripping we did, I wonder why Ithaca wasn’t a destination more often….

     

    On Day Three we had breakfast at this butcher shop-and-eatery in Corning. Fantastic. We’d been planning to pick up something to grill (our cottage came with a grill) at the local grocery store in Corning, but we ended up buying two thick pork chops from here instead. Loved it.

    Several items from the Corning Museum of Glass. More in the Flickr album. (MANY more. I took a LOT of photos that day. This museum is fantastic. We spent hours there and didn’t even see everything!)
    Apparently in 1972 the Chemung River flooded BADLY in Corning and environs, resulting in considerable damage to the Museum of Glass. The Museum is only about a thousand feet from the river. This must have been devastating.
    Another sun-dappled hill.
    This fascinated me. It’s across the side-street from the ice cream place we visited in Watkins Glen. I wondered about that steep garage-door ramp thing. It turns out that this is the access entrance for cars to be driven up into, and out of, the upstairs showroom of the REALLY old-school car dealership which is in downtown Watkins Glen. The building still is a car dealership, though the upstairs showroom isn’t in use for that purpose anymore. Watkins Glen’s long automotive history is still apparent!

    Two views from our last night there.
    A stop on the way home at the Rasta Ranch Winery, a favorite of ours. The place is 60s-themed, very Woodstock. More wine bought here. (We were unable to stop during our wine tour back in February.)
    From the Rasta Ranch (on the east shore of Seneca Lake) we could see the rain clouds approaching from the west. The day ended up being pretty much of a washout. We’d planned on a slow sight-seeing kind of drive home; that didn’t happen, sadly. Alas! A lovely weekend, though.
    Pouring rain at Geneva. This is the northern shore of Seneca Lake, looking south; usually you can see for quite a distance. Not so THAT day. We’ll be back, though!

    The whole Finger Lakes region isn’t just beautiful, with forests and high hills and deep valleys and waterfalls and streams and wineries and those gorgeous lakes, but it’s also by its very rugged nature something of a land that time forgot. The very geography and geology team up to make the entire region pretty much impervious to that enemy of all such onetime resort meccas, the four-lane highway. You can pretty much speed past the entire region to the north (via I-90) or the south (via I-86) in about 90 minutes, or you can get off the infernal expressways and take the twisting two-lane roads that run along high ridges before plunging into lake-filled valleys. You’ll drive past old places that were once bustling stops along the railroads that aren’t so bustling anymore, but the places endure, somehow.

    I can’t wait to go back.

     

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  • Tony and Patsy

    Two giants of my early eating and drinking life, Tony Marra and Patsy Collins, died in 2021.

    Patsy ran a bar. Tony ran a restaurant.

    Patsy’s bar was called The Burton Hotel, or The Burton for short. It’s located on a street corner in Allegany, NY, and it was one of my parents’ favorite watering holes for much of the time they lived down there. I spent quite a lot of time sitting in The Burton with my parents as they quaffed beers and I quaffed grapefruit soda right along with them (at least until I turned 21).

    I suppose The Burton was what you would call a “dive bar”, though I confess that I used to think describing a bar as a “dive” meant something disparaging: it indicated a place that was kind of dingy and crappy, dirty and dark and not a very nice place to be.

    Not so, obviously. A dive bar is an unpretentious bar, and might be quite a few years–or decades–old. A dive bar is the place frequented by locals, and often you can tell where a dive bar is less by the bar’s sign than by the neon (or, nowadays, LED) beer signs decorating the outside. The clientele of a dive bar tends to be the locals; it’s the kind of place where, well–where everybody knows your name, if you go there with any frequency. It’s not the kind of place where you’ll get the best drinks ever, or where you’ll find cutting-edge mixology where bartenders experiment with smoke and a dozen kinds of bitters and CO2 canisters–but it is the kind of place where the beer is always cold, where there are packages of Beer Nuts for sale, where the game (or a game) is always on teevee.

    The Burton is apparently well-known for its burgers–very well-known, as in, “often cited on Best Burger lists” well-known–though I never had one when we were going there. Apparently back then their kitchen was not open very often. Nights at The Burton would often go longer than expected, and there were more than a few educational conversations directed at me on the way home after such nights. It’s a dark underbelly of such places that…well, sometimes bar talk in places that are fairly rural, completely white, and generally conservative can veer into unpleasant areas. I’ll just leave it at that.

    But things changed as St Bonaventure University, the local college, stared developing a reputation as a party school. The Burton was–and maybe still is!–the bar closest to campus, and as such at some point it started filling up with college students. Patsy Collins had been running a successful bar up until then, but after that he was running a local institution. The Burton was, first and foremost, a beautiful bar. I mean, look at this bar!

    It was hard to find photos of the entire bar, but these give an idea. It’s changed a bit since I was going there with my parents, but…not really a whole lot. I don’t recall any signage listing available beers at the time, when the bar was frequented by locals who knew what they wanted to drink.

    And here’s a better look at the Art Deco lights that flank the main body of the bar:

    Like all such lights, they’re more effective at night, in the dimmer light of the bar itself, but how bad can a bar be if it has Art Deco tasteful nudes as part of its decor? Not bad at all, that’s how.

    The Burton is still chugging along, keeping synapses of the Southern Tier well-lubricated. Patsy Collins’s legacy lives on.

    Patsy Collins himself was a kind man who laughed a lot–I remember well his rich baritone laugh, there was always lots of laughter in that bar!–and who by the time we knew him was tending bar less; his son Chuck had taken over the majority of those duties. But Patsy was there a lot, holding forth on various items of interest from one of the stools in his low voice. He did not have a long commute: he lived on the opposite side of the same street, a few doors down. His house was quite lovely, and his wife did a great job of converting it to a virtual “gingerbread house” each Christmas. (If I can find a picture of that online, I’ll post it.)

    When Patsy Collins retired, he gave over the Burton to son Chuck and his daughter Crisanne. Just last year (or maybe the year before) Chuck and Crisanne decided it was time for them to get out of the bar game, so they sold The Burton to a couple of investors who are St. Bona alumni. From all reports, they are still running the place true to what it always was.

    And I’m still wondering about those burgers.

    Then there was Tony Marra, who along with his wife Marilyn ran for many years a bar and restaurant on the same street as The Burton, just a few blocks down. Their place was called The Bird Cage. In retrospect, maybe it was a dive bar too–though it did have a beautiful dining room. We didn’t go in the dining room much, but it was a lovely place, decorated with all manner of avian bric-a-brac in keeping with the place’s name. Marilyn served and ran the bar; Tony did most, if not all, of the cooking.

    We ate there pretty much once a week, every week, while we lived in the Southern Tier. We went on Thursday night most weeks, because The Bird Cage ran a special on chicken wings on Thursdays. I don’t remember what the prices were, but we’d get both breaded and Buffalo wings, along with some other deep-fried delight–Tony made “Irish Wings”, which were steak fries tossed in Buffalo wing sauce–and wash it all down with, well, more beer than we probably should have been consuming. (Our beer at the time was an ale called Red Wolf, which was discontinued a few years later, sadly enough. This may have been a good thing, though. Red Wolf certainly wasn’t a great beer, but it was smooth and very drinkable, especially in large quantities with deep-fried bar foods.)

    Until we moved away from Allegany in fall 2000, we were weekly (or more than weekly) regulars at The Bird Cage. How regular? Well…The Daughter was born not long after midnight on a Saturday. The very next Thursday? We were at The Bird Cage, with our five-day-old kid along for the ride. This worked out pretty well, as there were plenty of folks among the bar crowd who were willing to hold a baby for a bit.

    Before Tony and his wife, Marilyn, opened The Bird Cage, they worked for a restaurant down the way called Antonio’s. Antonio’s was a nice place that I remember fondly, especially its cocktail lounge section with plush leather chairs, low tables, and a sunken bar. Here’s what Antonio’s looked like:

    It’s hard to tell in the photo, but those shelves are a massive collection of liquor bottles. I’m a bit fuzzy on the ownership of Antonio’s; I don’t think that Tony Marra actually owned it, but I may be wrong. Eventually Antonio’s changed ownership completely, becoming a place called Pasta Luigi, and Tony and Marilyn took ownership of a bar once called The Village Inn. This became The Bird Cage. The Marra family was once a major family in the Olean region’s restaurant community, but that dwindled until Tony and Marilyn were the last ones running a restaurant. All eras end, sadly.

    As for Antonio’s/Pasta Luigi: the latter restaurant eventually closed too, and the building was demolished. Now, from what I can tell, a beverage-redemption place stands on that spot [that’s a store where you can buy beer and redeem all your cans and bottles for $.05 each, thanks to New York’s bottle law]. About a half mile up the road used to stand Olean’s once-beloved Castle Inn, which is also now but a memory.

    I know that The Bird Cage actually moved some years after we left the region, shifting into a location across the street, and finally the place had to close entirely when Tony was diagnosed with cancer. This article, from Olean’s newspaper, indicates that Tony and Marilyn were holding out hopes of returning to their restaurant when Tony returned to health, but…it wasn’t to be.

    Since we left the Southern Tier more than twenty years ago, we’ve never found a bar/restaurant to fill the same role in our lives that The Bird Cage or The Burton once did. That’s for various reasons: finances, family stuff, and later on, The Wife’s celiac disease. We’re just not “bar people” anymore. But I have a lot of great memories, some sharp and some that are admittedly pretty hazy (remind me not to write about “Pig Roast Weekend” at The Bird Cage any time soon, because let’s just say that if we didn’t manage to convince Annheuser-Busch to keep Red Wolf Ale in production after those three nights of consumption, nobody was going to do so), of the handful of years when we were bar people. Tony and Marilyn Marra also helped send The Wife and I off in the first place: Who else would we have trusted to cater our wedding?

    I think that in 2022, though, I’m going to at least try to figure out how to make Irish Wings. I think that would make Tony happy. 

    (Oh! And Tony was a Seattle Seahawks fan! At least he got to see his team win a Super Bowl!)

    Photo credits: The photos of The Burton are from here and here. I found the photo of Antonio’s on a Facebook group called “Olean Memories Back In Time”, which is exactly what it says: a group dedicated to nostalgic remembrances of a once vibrant small city in a region that the world has mostly left behind. I wasn’t able to find any photos online of The Bird Cage in its original incarnation, the one I knew so well before we moved.

     

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  • Rainbows, Moonbows, Sunsets, and the Stars: Adventures beneath the Hawaiian sky

    So much of one’s time in Hawaii is spent looking up, or out. Up to the sky, or out to where the sky meets the sea.

    And there’s a rainbow almost every day.

    In Buffalo, I might get to see a rainbow three or four times a year. In Hawaii, there were rainbows almost every day. I’d get up, make coffee, go to the balcony to greet the morning, look to the right (west) to the rain clouds descending (and breaking up) from the mountains, and…rainbows.

    And then there were the sunsets, and the lingering light once the sun was down:

    On this trip, the planets got into the act. Here, from top to bottom, are Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus:

    One morning I was awake quite early, so I got up at 6:00am…just in time to see Orion setting. Orion is a winter constellation, which I associate with the colder times of year…which of course this is, even in Hawaii, though it doesn’t seem like it.

    The most magical skyward sight of all, though, was something I’d never seen before, something I don’t even think I knew was possible until late one night, on a drizzly evening, The Wife and I both saw it at the same time: a moonbow. Though we didn’t see much of the moon on our trip, because we were mostly facing south so its path through the Hawaiian sky was mostly behind us and out of view from our south-facing balcony, there was a full moon while we were there, and on that night its light was bright enough to shine through the water droplets in the air. The result was this:

    Hawaii is quite a place for those of us who find magic in the sky….

     

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  • “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right”: A MAGNUM geek visits Paradise

    Longtime readers may remember that I was a big fan of the show Magnum PI back in the day. That is, the original show, the one that ran in the 1980s, and not the new reboot show that is running, well, now. (Nothing against the current incarnation, which I’ve watched a couple of times; it seems like a perfectly acceptable procedural show, but it’s never going to replace the original for me.) Being in Hawaii, where Magnum was set, gave me a chance to see some familiar locations from the show up close.

    The biggest draw for an old Magnum fan would almost certainly have been the old estate that on the show doubled as “Robin’s Nest”, the Hawaii estate of the famed novelist Robin Masters, for whom Thomas Magnum and the estate’s major domo, Jonathan Quayle Higgins, worked. This estate was on the eastern shore of Oahu, and we did drive past where it was…but note the past tense there. Sadly, the location–in real life, the Anderson Estate–was demolished a couple of years ago after a long period of neglect. However, we did stop at a beach park a mile or so down the road from where the Anderson Estate once stood, and I took this photo of Manana Island, which is now a bird sanctuary:

    You could often see that island in the distance when Magnum was swimming in Mr. Masters’s tidal pool.

    Along the same shore, to the south (we drove by this first, actually), we stopped at an overlook with a stunning view. (Overlooks with stunning views are rather a thing in Hawaii!) Here’s a bit of that view, isolated:

     

    That little island with the building on it, connected by bridge to Oahu, is the Makai Research Pier, belonging to Makai Ocean Engineering, a company that works on oceanic tech like sea cables and that sort of thing. That pier doubled, on Magnum PI, as the headquarters for Island Hoppers, the helicopter excursion business run by Magnum’s buddy, Theodore Calvin (TC).

    I didn’t realize this at the time, but the lookout where I took that photo, Makapu’u Lookout, is on the same cliffs that become Makapu’u Point, a bit farther to the east. We briefly stopped there but realized that the hiking trail was much longer and more strenuous than we really felt up to that day, so we didn’t go…but it ends at Makapu’u Lighthouse:

    Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrew_wertheimer/32922164913/

    Fans of Magnum will remember this lighthouse for one of the series’s most surprising, and unnerving, episode endings. In the episode “Faith and Beggorah”, there’s a subplot where Magnum is supposed to be investigating if a boxer’s wife is cheating on him. In the episode’s final scene, Rick and TC are watching from a distance as the wife and her putative boyfriend-on-the-side are at this lighthouse–but they are arguing constantly. We can’t hear what they’re saying, but Rick is bored because they can’t prove that she’s cheating on the husband if all they ever see her doing is yelling at the boyfriend. Rick is watching through a telescopic camera lens, while TC is lazily dozing off to the side. TC says “Oh, just keep watching, maybe something interesting will happen”…and at that moment, the boyfriend picks the woman up and tosses her off the lighthouse and down the cliffs. Yikes!

    Anyway.

    Then there’s this place, the War Memorial Natatorium in Waikiki. This was right down the street from our resort, and yet, I never walked down to get a closer look, alas! Next time, I swear! (Unless it gets torn down, which is apparently a possibility as this location has been an ongoing preservation struggle for a while.)

     

    Built to honor the veterans and fallen of World War I, the Natatorium is not unlike all the various “War Memorial Stadiums” built across America, except that this one is a salt-water swimming pool. It has been closed for decades and is, as noted, an ongoing subject of debate between preservation and demolition. On Magnum, it featured prominently during the climax of an episode titled “Death and Taxes”, where a serial killer forms a fixation on Magnum, for some reason that the episode leaves unstated (to creepy effect).

    Some places I did not get pictures of include the Iolani Palace, used often on the show as the location for various government agencies (such as when Magnum had dealings with the local PD)–

    Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/aa4on/14396166855

    Also Honolulu’s Chinatown, which we passed through twice, once by car and once on the bus. This area served as location for when Magnum PI did stories set in the “seedier” part of town, such as the show’s fictional Vietnamese neighborhood, “Little Saigon”.

    Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/81454274@N07/14058078021

    There’s something exciting about seeing places you only know through movies and television, isn’t there? This is not a Magnum location, but it is one of the most famous locations in movie history, thanks to a very steamy scene between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity:

    And I didn’t get into any places where Elvis Presley filmed at all, I’m sorry to say. We did go to Pearl Harbor, though, and Elvis Presley was a major contributor that fundraising for the Arizona Memorial back in 1961.

    It’s also always interesting to note how much poetic and cinematic license play into how movie and teevee locations work! There’s a Magnum PI episode from late in the show’s run where everyone is after a literal buried treasure, and after some tromping through the wilderness they all end up jumping off a cliff into a pool with a waterfall in order to grab some of the money that has ended up floating there. (I don’t remember the particulars.) I looked this up, figuring it to be located someplace deep in the island’s mountainous interior, but…not so! It turns out that if you stand on that exact spot, in no direction are you more than a couple hundred feet from a parking lot or a four-lane highway.

    Anyway, folks, be careful when arranging your vacations, because if the place you’re going is where filming took place for a movie or show a member of your party is a big fan of, you’re going to hear about it. A lot.

    Even if the place that person sees has nothing to do with the movie or show being mentioned, like this revolving restaurant in Waikiki. Doesn’t it look a bit like Piz Gloria, the mountaintop lair of Blofeld in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service???

     

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  • Hawaiian adventures

    Sigh….

    Our trip to Hawaii was…amazing. Just amazing. In fact, it was quite nearly perfect.

    My mother dreamed all her life of going to Hawaii, and at some point after she had safely seen her two children off to lives of their own, she put her foot down, announcing to my father that they were going. This was sometime in the 1990s. Since then, she has gone to Hawaii something like a dozen times. For this last visit, she treated my family and I to going along with her, as part of her celebration for having turned 80 this past August.

    If I count this Hawaii trip as a gift, and I do, it might well be the greatest gift I’ve ever received. This would probably blow the mind of my second-grade self (that’s the year I got an electric train), but seriously, this trip was a gift that to be surpassed would probably have to be along the lines of someone giving me their kidney.

    For various reasons, I’d never really thought about going to Hawaii myself. It was a place that I knew about, but didn’t really hold out a great deal of hope for visiting personally. Now, all I can think about is going back.

    I’m not going to wax poetic at length here about that trip (though I will have a few more posts about it, focusing on a couple of specific things), but if you’re curious, you can see a lot of what we saw via my Flickr albums. I’ve organized just about every picture I took in Hawaii into these albums. I haven’t gone through and captioned every photo, but I’ve done a lot of them.

    1. Hawaii 2021: This album was going to be my “All the Hawaii” photos album, but then I realized that I needed to split them up more, so this one ended up incomplete. (I put all of the selfies and photos of The Wife and I in this album, though!)
    2. Hawaii 2021, Food and Drink: Self-explanatory. I have never eaten so well on a trip as I did on this trip. I have also not imbibed so well as I did on this trip, which is quite a thing given that we live near one of the United States’s great wine regions. (Food will probably be a post of its own, but meantime, here are pics.)
    3. At the Byodo-In Temple: I took a bunch of pictures in this one place, so it gets its own album.
    4. Pearl Harbor: Another location-specific album. We did not get to go to the USS Arizona Memorial, due to damage to the docks (Oahu was hit by a big storm the week before we got there), but Pearl Harbor is still a deeply moving place to visit.
    5. Sunsets and Rainbows: Self-explanatory. See this post for meditation on a theme.
    6. Candids and Streetscapes: Photos of people and places. I love people-watching, and Waikiki is a fantastic place to do so.
    7. Landscapes, Seascapes, and all the rest: This is the biggest album, encapsulating just about all of my “Oh WOW LOOK AT THAT!!!” moments throughout the trip. Even my crappy photos looked good!

    Enjoy!

     

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  • “And I’m so worried about the baggage retrieval system they’ve got at Heathrow”

    UPDATED and CLARIFIED below!

    So, the trip home from Hawaii was supposed to go like this:

    1. December 23: Board plane at HNL, about 12:30pm.
    2. Arrive LAX, around 8:00pm.
    3. Depart LAX for DTW (Detroit), around 12:00am.
    4. Arrive DTW, around 6:00am.
    5. Depart DTW for BUF, around 12:00pm.
    6. Pick up luggage and come home, December 24.

    The trip home from Hawaii actually went like this:

    1. December 23: Boarded plane at HML, around noon or so.
    2. After circling LAX a time or two because of bad weather and enduring twenty minutes of nothing but turbulence, landed at LAX around 9:30pm.
    3. Took phone off Airplane Mode to check next flight for DTW. Learn that DTW flight is delayed seven hours to 7:00am.
    4. Attempt to rebook, but after two hours in the help line, no dice. Somehow we managed to get food before everything closed at LAX terminal, whereupon we settled in for an overnight stay right there.
    5. Tried sleeping on floor. This was not successful, due to comfort (it was the floor!) and ambient noise: floor-cleaner machines, a guy vacuuming the carpet around us, deliveries of pallets of food for shops and airport restaurants, constant announcements (“DO NOT ACCEPT ITEMS FROM UNKNOWN PERSONS”, “IT IS ILLEGAL TO SMOKE IN THE AIRPORT”).
    6. At 6:00am, proceed to gate to hopefully board 7:00am flight to DTW.
    7. 7:00am flight to DTW is canceled.
    8. Much vexation, annoyance, and panicked texting with my travel genius sister who is at home in Buffalo awaiting us. Somehow she gets us rebooked onto 7:15am flight from LAX to JFK, and then a 4:00pm flight from JFK to BUF.
    9. We learn that Delta is cancelling hundreds of flights on Christmas Eve due to staffing, Omicron, and other frustrations. We board flight, depart for JFK. (A shout-out here to the Delta reps at LAX as all of this was unfolding. They were really put on the spot, dealing with a lot of shit from a lot of people, and at least for my party, they were genuinely helpful as we worked in a very tight timeframe to ensure that we were all going to be able to get home. One poor Delta worker didn’t even get to take her heavy winter coat off before she was plunged into trying to get a boarding pass printed for my mother. I don’t have an informed opinion of Delta’s mass of flight cancellations, but I honestly cannot complain about how their reps on the ground dealt with what has to be the worst timing for such things.)
    10. I eat a breakfast sandwich we bought at LAX before departing, then I briefly consider watching one of the dozen movies I loaded onto my tablet before I crash and proceed to spend probably eighty percent of that 4.5 hour flight sleeping.
    11. Arrive JFK, with no issues. This flight was actually comfortable, and I got to move to the three-seat row where The Wife was sitting, and the middle seat was unoccupied, so we had room. Zzzzzzz.
    12. Now, it’s 3:00pm and we have an hour until our BUF flight leaves. As we land I consult the World Clock on my phone, where I had a clock on Hawaii time and one on NY time; at this time I determine that twenty-four hours have elapsed since our departure from our hotel room, thus starting our journey home. We have to move our asses from something like Gate 25 to Gate 55. We literally had to walk thirty gates. Moving walkways cut this by maybe, a minute or two. We arrive at the gate just as the flight to BUF is to start boarding.
    13. We board. At this point we know it’s a total crapshoot as to whether our luggage is gonna make it to BUF with us.
    14. JFK to BUF flight is uneventful and short. I have a ton of legroom because I’m in the row with the emergency door, which I have already promised the flight attendant that I can handle opening if necessary.
    15. Arrive BUF around 6:00pm. We’ve now been traveling twenty-seven hours. My brain is barely flickering. You know what’s not flickering? Any hope of…
    16. …our luggage having arrived. It does not. We note the empty bag carousel, we glance at the Delta Airlines Baggage Office, which is closed and dark. A sign on the door reads “If we’re closed, go talk to a ticketing agent.” But it’s late in the day, and as there are no more departing Delta flights from BUF that night, ticketing agents are gone. We decide to go home and live to fight another day as far as the luggage goes. There’s nothing we can’t live without in any of our bags, though a number of Christmas gifts are in them so those will be gifted late.
    17. Now it’s Christmas Day. I tweet at Delta to ask about how tracking down delayed baggage works: their system requires a “File Reference Number” which they say to get from a rep at the airport, and I’m thinking, “I gotta go to the airport just to talk to someone about maybe getting my bags?!” Luckily, a Delta social media person sees my tweet and IMs me. We chat back and forth for a bit, the Delta folks give me the File Reference Number and take my info so they can deliver our luggage to our home once it’s back in BUF, and they’re generally very helpful about it. I can’t complain about this at all.
    18. Now it’s the 26th, and I check the tracking on our luggage. Each bag is “Rebooked for Rush Priority” for delivery today, being routed from JFK-DTW-BUF. I’m sure this schedule makes sense in Airline World (maybe that itenerary gets our bags home earliest, maybe the earliest JFK-BUF direct flight has no room for four bags, maybe maybe maybe.
    19. I’m scheduling this post for Monday morning and will update or change it as events regarding our luggage warrant. (UPDATE: roughly 10:30am this morning, a courier from Delta delivered our luggage. Huzzah! So ends our trip. We have now unpacked and verified that nothing is broken, nothing is lost, and that all’s well.)

    I’ll have more posts to come about our Hawaiian adventure, because it was an absolute delight with only two minor hiccups during the trip. For now, I’m still trying to get my brain back in the right time zone…and as this is posting, I’m back to work. Sigh. (You really do get to a point where vacation is less a refreshing for work and more a tantalizing taste of a retirement that is too far away….)

    Here’s New York City (mainly Manhattan) from the air.

    I love NY!

    Oh, and if you’re wondering where the title of this post comes from, here you go.

     

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  • Cloudy Days in Paradise

    Blue, green, or gray, the sea is still the sea

    Only two days remain in our Hawaiian adventure. This morning we woke up for the first time to cloudy skies. Since gray skies tend to be the norm for Buffalo in winter–a season that I find beautiful in many ways, in ways that incorporate the gray skies, even though I have to admit that the gray gets to be too much at times–this almost feels like Hawaii is trying to prepare us for our return home.

    Nice try, Paradise, but I’m not ready. Nine full days here will turn out to be many things, almost all of them wonderful, but they will not be ‘enough’.

    I’m already thinking of how to return….

     

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  • Writing (and a cheeseburger) in Paradise

    To justify the Jimmy Buffet reference, here’s the cheeseburger I had the other night.

    Thanks, Maui Brewing Company! To paraphrase Mr. Samuel L. Jackson, “Mmmm! This WAS a tasty burger!”

    And here I am, writing.

    It turns out that Hawaii is not a cure for RBF, sadly….

    Both of these things happened in Paradise.

    Some writers are insistent about doing their work in their preferred environments–their home offices or libraries–but I’ve always been able to write just about anywhere I can plunk down with my computer for a while. I actually like having a bit of hubbub around me, and when I write at home I don’t like it to be too quiet: I’ll almost always have music going, and nowadays there is the wonderful world of soundscape videos on YouTube where you can actually pick some ambient sound to play in the background while you do stuff.

    Of course, for ambient writing noise you can’t really beat the cries of sea birds, the lapping of the waves, and the voices of happy people on Hawaiian holiday.

    I didn’t bring my laptop on this vacation because I just didn’t want to be that encumbered, which means a forced two-week break from drafting Forgotten Stars V: Spacecapades (not the actual title). I draft the new novels in Scrivener, and the laptop is the only device I have that can run Scrivener (until they come up with an Android version, that is), so for now, that book is out. I suppose I could write new material for that book in Google Docs and import it after the fact, but the formatting would be all screwed up and I don’t have the book in Google Docs to begin with. Plus, it’s my experience that at the lengths of book I tend to write, Google Docs tends to bog down.

    So, what am I working on? I’m making a pass through an older manuscript that I haven’t looked at in a while: the supernatural thriller about a haunted kayaking expedition, that I had once dubbed Deliverance, eh? (Deliverance being an obvious reference to a canoe trip gone bad, and the eh? because the story takes place in Canada.) As part of my “Release a book every year” plan for as long as I can manage to pull that level of production off, this one’s set to be my 2022 release.

    This book is definitely on the short side, for me: it tips the scales at roughly 85,000 words. Even so I can tell that this length makes Google Docs a bit sluggish. But the good part is that I don’t need my laptop for this! Using Google Docs for shorter work is a big reason why, last time I was in the market for a new tablet, I bought one with a Bluetooth keyboard:

    Obligatory “pie in the face” wallpaper!

    It is a challenge scaling one’s position to a smaller keyboard, and at times I miss the keypad, and I have to remind myself that mouse functionality isn’t there. As always, overalls are the best uniform for writing.

    (Those are older pics, by the way.)

    I’m enjoying using this tablet a great deal! It’s a Samsung Galaxy Tab A, which I bought about a year and a half ago. Samsung devices do have their quirks, but I like the ecosystem and the easy connectivity of devices, and I love the cameras on their phones, so a Samsung fan I remain. (In fact, my next laptop will likely be a Samsung too! This after what will likely have been fifteen years as a Dell user.) Typing with the Blluetooth keyboard is a breeze, and blogging-on-the-go is very easy. I do have the WordPress app installed, but I prefer to use the actual site in my browser; a while back WordPress updated to a new content-management system that uses something called “blocks”, and I find it generally confusing to use so I’ve got a plug-in installed on the main WordPress site that lets me use the old interface. I can use the app, and I do on occasion, but I prefer this way of doing things.

    Oddly, when I was still on Byzantium’s Shores, I had to use the Blogger site in the browser too, as opposed to the Blogger app, for a completely different reason: for whatever rationale the engineers chose, the Blogger app will only render in portrait mode, which makes blogging on the app while using the keyboard (and therefore landscape orientation) nearly impossible. This is likely under the assumption that the Blogger app would be used more on phones than tablets, but even so! Bluetooth keyboards are not that uncommon a tool, and and design choice that makes use more difficult is a bad choice indeed. I believe there are workarounds–maybe third-party apps that force reorientation–but I don’t want or need more stuff cluttering up my gizmos just so I can do the work I want to do. Of course, it’s not even an issue anymore since I’ve left Blogger behind, but still!

    I know that the tech gods really want to get to a point where full-sized laptops are a thing of the past, but I wonder if they’re not slowly giving up on that dream and are instead blurring the line more and more between old-school laptop and tablet, with touchscreens that fold all the way around and the like. I’ll probably get to experience that myself with my next laptop (which will likely come sometime next year), but for now I don’t mind having multiple devices for different tasks. This tablet suits me nicely for smaller needs, and also for travel. And who knows? Now that I’m being bitten by the travel bug….

    And as always, one doesn’t even need a nifty electronic device to get some work done! I may not be directly drafting Forgotten Stars V while on this trip, but I am getting some plotting done the old-fashioned way:

    Pen and paper will never die!

    Oh, and the actual title of Deliverance, eh? is–tentatively–The Jaws of Cerberus. The more you know!

    And now, I wrap this up because as I write this I have to catch a bus to make a boat ride. It’s a tough life, I tell you!

    I’m not saying this is my ideal writing set-up, but it is, as the kids say, “In the conversation”.

     

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  • The sea and the sky above it

    “It’s hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.” –Haruki Murakami

    I wrote the other day about the somewhat overwhelming nature of the sea here in Hawaii. Over the days since, I have come to realize that the sky is every bit as overwhelming here.

    And like the sea, the sky is astonishing here no matter what time of day. This city gleams with brilliant light, but as you stand on the street in front of our hotel at night, you see the brilliant light on one side…and the ink-black dome of the sky on the other. Occasionally in the dark will be broken by the flashing lights of an airplane or helicopter. The moon’s path does not bring it into view from our balcony–a shame that, as there is a full moon very soon–and I haven’t been able to make out many stars.

    But the other morning I was up at 5am–sleep comes easier, but my body still thought it was mid-morning–and I went out on the balcony to read and to write and to think and listen to the waves and the birds in the banyan tree and the occasional cars. I looked eastward–southeast, actually–and spotted a couple of stars, and then a few more. And then I knew.

    The Hunter.

    Orion the Hunter was setting, and the bright star off to the left was Sirius, brightest star in our sky, at home in its own constellation, Canus Major.

    Orion has always been my favorite constellation, for many reasons. It’s a big part of why I love the winter sky more than the summer one, and to see it for the first time this winter, while here on this journey, was an unexpected gift.

    Orion the Hunter, over Honolulu and the South Pacific.

    You’re looking good, Orion! Soon I’ll see you in your normal setting soon…but not too soon. I’m not quite done here.

    As for the sky at other times, well…oh, this place.

    “I want you to live forever, underneath a sky so blue….” (“Live Forever”, Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors)

    Words fail me….

    For a bigger resolution of that last one, go here. I’m slowly getting a lot of my photos from here organized on Flickr, but bear with me as content management isn’t exactly high on my priority list on this vacation!

    More later!

     

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  • “I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams”

    It is, Red. It is.

    Surfers by dawn.

    I didn’t want to blog about this until we were at the very least on the plane (I felt like I was jinxing it by even pre-scheduling a Daily Dose of Christmas post obliquely referring to it!) but…we are in Hawaii.

    Specifically, Oahu. More specifically, Waikiki.

    Strange thing about Hawaii…it’s never been a place I’ve really even dreamed about visiting, because for many years it just didn’t even feel like a possibility. And even this trip owes everything to someone else’s good graces (Thanks, Mom!). But…well, it’s just a place, isn’t it? It’s a place where people live and work and do stuff. They just do it in the shadows of lushly green mountains and by the side of a wide blue sea.

    Just a place.

    But what a place!

    I mean…come on now.

    Waikiki by night

    And then there’s the sea.

    Have you ever wondered why the word sea is so much more packed with poetry and romance than the word ocean? Maybe it’s because the sea is a much more primal concept, a more basic one. I know that mariners think of the Great Lakes as seas in their own right. Oceans are specific things. But on this particular morning, I find myself remembering one of my favorite quotes (which I should probably track down at some point in its actual context):

    The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea. (Isak Dinesen)

    Well, like many others, I’ve had sweat and tears in damned good measure. Let’s give the sea a try, shall we?

    For someone who loves water, who can’t fathom the idea of living in a place where water is a scarcity (Phoenix? Vegas? Never!), there’s still something about the sea that overwhelms my brain on a primal level. My whole life has been spent near water, but I think of streams in a wood, waterfalls, bubbling small pools, swimming holes, rivers, lakes, ponds, whitewater rapids. The sea, though, is something else. You come to the sea and you realize that eventually, on this world of ours, eventually all the water comes back to the sea.

    The deep blue sea

    Anyway, those are my somewhat jet-lagged and under-caffeinated thoughts on this, the first morning I’ve awoken to pink clouds over a darkened sea where people are already surfing. Now, we’re gonna try to find some coffee and get our rental car and see what a Hawaiian grocery store is like. As one does.

    Further dispatches as events warrant!

    (And the Daily Dose of Christmas is prescheduled for every day until the 25th, so we have that going for us, at least!)

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