Regular Life

Alone in my hotel room on a rainy Monday night, I set my Canon PowerShot to manual and snapped a few pictures of my view, which for some reason garbled the Bat Signal. The following Thursday my co-worker and I saw our flights canceled due to the huge snowstorm that dumped a foot of snow on parts of the Dallas metroplex.

Finished at the customer’s site, we hit the road at about 1:30 p.m. and arrived at Dallas Love Field at 6:30 (where my car was parked). Not bad, considering we drove the final 60 miles through a blizzard.

While on the road, I missed the fun back home, wherein my son and wife made snow angels, a snowman, and snow ice cream. Their creative juices flowed so easily, no doubt, because the outside temperatures hovered just above freezing all afternoon and evening. Shannon captured a few choice pics, but I’m saving them for later.

The snow came so hard and so fast, however, that it still piled up to nine inches in our yard. The thermometer dipped below freezing for just a couple of wee morning hours — just enough to cancel area schools and give me a work from home day.

My busy day kept me from frolicking in the snow with Benjamin, but neighbors invited him to play. The following sunny day we hit the 50-degree mark and all but the shadiest of spots said goodbye to the snow. I’m talking about literal shade, not some mysterious uncle’s favorite bar.

I learned on the Houston trip not to put off taking pictures of intriguing places. The result is the opening pic and the one that I snapped of the unconventional street signs found near the Galleria. Sorry, no NASA, no palm trees, no jazz bar featuring a huge blue saxophone with a Volkswagen Beetle as its bottom “u” bend.

(Note: concluded from Part Three)

Blurry due to slow shutter speed. Click to enlarge.

 
Beginning at the third floor we get good looks at various rain forest inhabitants — exotic birds, monkeys, and lizards. The monkeys are water-bound on a small island, but the birds fly freely amongst the visitors, sometimes alarmingly near faces. I almost ask one of them if they know the Fruit Loops guy.

   

Pic on right cropped a bit for composition.

 
A three-toed sloth, true to its species, sleeps while wrapped around tree branches about six feet off the ground. With no net or other barrier between it and us, its long claws make me wonder just how fast a sloth could move if it got fed up with all the passersby.

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(Note: continued from Part Two)

At first graffiti on buildings, some perhaps gang-related, is the only obvious sign that we’ve left suburbia. When the buildings begin towering above us, whether we’re atop an overpass or not, we know we have reached the city proper.

High-rises jut skyward from the concrete jungle, reflecting one another in their shimmering glass coats. I spot the buildings — Comerica Bank Tower, JPMorgan Chase Tower, Fountain Place, Reunion Tower — that give Dallas its signature skyline.

We pass by an old building called, “Dallas High School.” Boards cover its windows, dark stains streak the exterior brick, and a few cracks run through the cement. The columns still stand proudly.

I think of how many high schools have been added since that building’s heyday, and how buildings in the suburbs are so generic that they will be razed rather than added to the National Register of Historic Places.

For this man with a rural upbringing, a visit to the heart of the city brings excitement, intrigue, and just enough fear to keep alert.

Off the train now, Shannon and I consult Mapquest’s directions from the West End Station to the Dallas World Aquarium, printed on a pink sheet of paper because we were out of white. We’re only a few blocks away. Benjamin does his best Godzilla impression on a metal sculpture of downtown Dallas.

I grab Benjamin’s hand as we make our way on foot. “Why are you holding my hand, Daddy, so nobody will take me?” Benjamin says.

“Yes, son, so nobody will take you.” I try to remember where he first got that idea.

The most direct walk leads us down what looks more like an alley than a street. “Let’s not go there. Let’s walk on down to the next intersection and then turn,” I say.

We stop at a building that must be the aquarium, but it is hard to tell. Large sheets of transparent plastic extend down from the walls to cover various tropical plants and small trees growing in soil along the southwest side.

So far it looks more like a terrarium.

A spur off the sidewalk leads us through an opening in the protective cover. Now inside the plastic-wrapped jungle with a roof over our heads, we follow the zig-zag walkway toward the ticket window.

Large, colorful carp swim lazily in a stream that runs under the walkway. I call out, “Hey, come back, Benjamin, you didn’t look at these fish.”

He runs back down the walkway, fingers tapping the handrail’s metal tubing. He looks over the edge. “Cool, Daddy. Come on.” He runs up to the ticket window, apparently confident that there are bigger and better things to be seen after we have paid admission.

The ticket lady tells us to take the elevator to the third floor to begin our tour.

Waiting for the elevator, we get our first look at the… rainforest? I thought we were coming to an aquarium.

Within arm’s reach, a small group of penguins mill about in a watery habitat with low walls. They seem ebullient. Perky, even.

Behind and below them is a vast room with a four-storey ceiling. The green of the tropics dominates the scene. A waterfall as tall as the trees cascades straight down an artificial cliff face into a small body of crystal clear water. The overcast weather allows only a muted glow through the skylights.

Notice the manatee in the water, to the right of the falls.

 
(to be concluded, with many photos)

(Note: Continued from Part One)

As we settle into our seats I notice a distinct, almost unpleasant smell — one part hospital, one part hotel room attempting to mask the fact that it once allowed smoking.

Benjamin and Shannon sit together while I settle into the seat behind theirs. A few other passengers fill seats here and there. A recorded female voice announces that the train will leave in one minute.

“I hope we go underground,” Benjamin says.

“We might,” I say. “I think there’s a tunnel.”

“I want to face forward,” Shannon says. We are facing north, but the train is going to head south.

“Let’s move,” I say.

(click any image to enlarge)

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The train is scheduled to leave at 10:26. The time is 10:10.

I luck into a spot fairly close to the train station, just after dropping Shannon and Benjamin at the entrance. I pull my mobile phone from its holster and dial Shannon.

She doesn’t answer. My phone vibrates and Shannon’s picture pops up on the screen. I answer but hear nothing.

“Come on, come on,” I say to the phone and the empty van.

I dial again and the same thing happens. I decide to wait. Shannon calls again. I answer.

“So, is it cash only?” I say.

“Yes. We’re not going to make this one.”

The time is 10:12.

“Just hold on. You guys stay put while I go find a bank.”

I start the Odyssey and back out of my plum parking spot. At the parking lot’s exit I can turn either left or right to begin my search.

I choose left, and after a short distance I see a Bank of America down the next street, on the right. I head that way.

The person ahead of me pulls away just as I arrive. I stop at the ATM and insert my card, then cringe at the surcharge fee notification. I grudgingly accept the fee, snatch the cash and the receipt and make my way back to the parking lot. I luck into the same spot I had left.

The time is 10:16. I jump down from the driver’s seat and call Shannon to let her know I’m back with the money.

I walk quickly to Shannon and Benjamin and the machine that exchanges cash for train passes. Just a few feet away the train waits quietly at this, its northernmost stop. After I feed a $20 bill into the machine, we tap the touch screen in the appropriate places and then grab our passes (and change) and approach the train.

The doors are shut, but there is a black button with words above it reading, “Open.” I push the button and the doors respond.

We board with a few minutes to spare, for my first ride aboard a DART (Dallas Area Rapid Transit) train, and we’re on our way to the West End Station. Final destination: Dallas World Aquarium.

(continued in Part Two)

A photographic round-up of the Silver Dollar City Christmas train ride. (as usual, click a pic to enlarge it)
 
My mom tries to finish off a piece of fudge while the rest of our crew poses. My brother was sober, I assure you.
 

   

 
I cropped the following pictures. Hey, I get to cheat a little while I’m stuck in a train seat, right? I also turned the old storyteller black and white, because the light shining on him made him look like a Smurf.

   

The next morning, our first day in what some call “Las Vegas without the casinos,” Shannon said there was no way she could walk anywhere, much less on hilly terrain. “Maybe I’ll just stay here while you guys go,” she said.

“No, we’ll figure out something,” I said.

I called Silver Dollar City and found out that they have wheelchairs available, but no guarantee we would get one. I got on the phone to medical supply places and found one to rent, delivered to our front door.

About a half hour before we were to leave, I took Benjamin and his cousin to the local playground. Quickly bored with the equipment, they wrestled, pushing each other against the surrounding iron fence. Less than a minute after they moved a few feet away from it, Benjamin fell backward and his head clanged against the fence.

Crying ensued, as did our departure from the playground. Just inside the condo’s front door, Shannon’s chariot — the rented wheelchair — welcomed us.

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I waited to post this because the photos would have given away something Shannon preferred to keep a secret.

How many times does something recur before it is considered tradition? For the third year in a row, my folks planned a winter trip to Branson, Missouri, for fun at Silver Dollar City and other area attractions. We weren’t able to attend the first year, but, as I wrote in my ill-named “Things to Do in Branson When You’re Alive” series, in 2008 we had great fun.

Instead of using the weekend our family celebrates Christmas, this year we used the Thanksgiving break. Unlike last year, this time around we had to keep moving or tuck ourselves into rarely available corners to keep from getting trampled.

Thanksgiving morning at my parents’ house, Shannon awoke with pain in her left ankle, but after undergoing physical therapy for illiotibial band tendinitis, she was determined not to fall farther behind in training for December’s Dallas White Rock Marathon relay. She didn’t want to let down her team, she said.

She decided to walk instead of running, and while hanging out with my family I occasionally caught a glimpse of her bundled form striding valiantly past the driveway on the rural blacktop. At the appointed time, I called her mobile phone to let her know it was time for her to come in. I got no answer. A moment later she again came into view and I called again. She didn’t react.

At least she was getting good use from the second generation iPod Shuffle I bought her from Apple’s refurb department.

“Guess I’ll have to run out there and get her,” I said.

I asked her how her ankle felt. “It hurts a lot,” she said.

Visions of Shannon hobbling around steeply-graded Silver Dollar City danced in my head. Although I had never tried one, I was sure sugar plums would have been better.

We had a great time with visiting family and copious food, and then loaded up in three vehicles for the three-hour drive to Branson. Before anyone asks, we all would be going significantly divergent ways after that, so carpooling didn’t make sense.

“If your ankle hurts that much, then maybe we should go back for Mom and Dad’s wheelchair,” I said about 10 minutes into the drive. “They said we could bring it.”

“No, I don’t want to do that,” Shannon said. She was trying not to focus any more attention on her plight, and hoped that by morning her ankle would feel better.

Instead, it got much worse.

(to be continued)

Despite the myriad of choices we were given, our “sandwich artist” denied us the one that mattered. I found myself in that increasingly rare state called incredulity.

In the middle of a seven-hour drive back from a festive Thanksgiving weekend, the three of us were hungry, so we stopped at a convenience store featuring an embedded Subway sandwich shop. I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect because Benjamin never had eaten at that particular chain.

For the kid’s meal Benjamin was asked the following: What type of animal print bag would you like? Would you like a cookie, chips, or yogurt as your side (they were out of apples)? What would you like to drink? As the line of patrons behind us grew longer Benjamin explained that he would like the cheetah print bag, the yogurt, and the milk.

Before that, however, was the most important question: What meat would you like on your sandwich?

“Do you want turkey, or ham?” we asked him. It seemed simple enough to let him decide, considering that is one of Subway’s selling points.

“Both.”

I think even my spleen cringed at the word.

“He would like turkey and ham,” I told the sandwich artist.

“Sorry, sir, but you have to choose one or the other.”

I stared, agape, for about two seconds, and then had a Jack Nicholson-ordering-toast moment (from Five Easy Pieces).

“How many slices of meat go on the sandwich?” I asked.

“Two.”

“So, you can’t use one slice of turkey and one slice of ham?”

“That’s what we’re told. Hold on.” She leaned over and consulted someone else. Then, back to me. “Yes, that’s right.”

I turned to the boy. “Ben, you have to choose one: turkey or ham?”

Benjamin mumbled something, his mind having wandered to something else. I knelt down and held his face in my hands, and looked him in the eyes. “Turkey or ham, son? You can have only one type.”

“Turkey,” he blurted, and then easily decided on his remaining toppings, including black olives, just like his daddy.

Back in the van he ate every bite, without gripe or whine. The fact that he happily scarfed it down took the edge off my rant, but I felt the need to share, if not to write a letter asking Subway to explain exactly why that policy is in place, and whether it is chain-wide.

I understand that when ringing up the sandwich, the staffer probably has to punch in “turkey” or “ham,” and that this probably helps them track their use of each. Is it too much to add a way to combine meats on a sandwich?

Next time I go to Subway, I am going to ask for turkey and ham. If you eat meat, please do the same and report back.

During our New Mexico trip, after everyone else was asleep, I drove each night from our cabin to a parking lot in town to get Internet access. I huddled over my laptop and typed out the day’s events, re-sized photos for the Web, and posted all for the whole world to read.

I just couldn’t resist the immediacy. Like nothing before, it scratched my writing itch, and the blog added the rush of being published and being read. Actual feedback from real people was like one of those stiff-fingered wooden back-scratchers getting the really tough spots. Sure, I could ignore the itch, but it felt oh so good to scratch it.

Years before the blog was invented, I relished any content I could mine to put words on paper. Just like now, vacations were perfect fodder, and the technology I used to chronicle them evolved from ancient to present day.

This dates all the way back to a handwritten account of a trip my father, brother, and I took to Destin, Florida when I was 15. Awash in hormones, I hung out on the beach and got to know a beautiful Georgia girl who thought Arkansas was “somewhere up there by Montana.” I haven’t tackled typing that one yet, for fear I might actually put it out here.

After a long hiatus from trip journaling, in spring 2001 I returned to painstaking form. During a week-long trip to San Francisco and surrounding areas, I kept a spiral notebook with me everywhere we went. Each time we all piled back into the rented van, I opened up the notebook and wrote what I could remember. Back at the big house on the hill overlooking the San Francisco Bay Bridge, I borrowed a fellow traveler’s laptop and copied my scrawl into digital format. Despite that, it remains unseen by the public, languishing somewhere on a floppy disk.

Later that same year, we celebrated Christmas with a week in Key West. Only a few months after the September 11 hijacking attacks, getting there was more interesting than we had hoped. For that trip I carried around a tiny micro-cassette recorder and dictated my thoughts to it periodically, including our first time snorkeling, when a barracuda scared me back to the boat. I still have not transcribed that tape.

The following summer, prior to our 10th anniversary trip to western Wyoming, I dragged my writing into the 21st century. I created a page on Blogger and an opt-in form for those who wished to receive an e-mail each time I updated the journal (this was before most people knew about RSS feeds and other fancy blog-related features). I kept the photos separate, in an online photo album on Fotki.com. Warning: it reads more like a personal journal than a polished piece of travel writing.

Reader Simon converted one of his old trip journals to a series of blog posts covering his teen-aged trip to China. His writing at that age was much farther along than mine, in some ways rivaling the prose in my 2002 anniversary trip journal (after all, how many times in one paragraph should a writer use the word “stuff?”).

When I was a newspaper reporter/photographer, I never wanted for content. Now, I find myself considering resurrecting those old trip journals (and possibly photos) for filler between new inspirations.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.