Playing Tourist with the Folks
I finally caught a small lull in the work action with a break in all the ships this weekend (which I’ll make up for today) so yesterday, with my parents in town, we decided to play the tourist.
Gorgeous suggested we check out the Ships of the Sea Museum since I like things nautical. And it was a good time. The most impressive thing there was all the scale ship models they had from various periods. Everything from sailing square-riggers through iron clad steamers. They had a model of the SS Savannah, the first steam powered ship to cross the Atlantic, and the NS Savannah, the first nuclear powered cargo chip ever built.
For ship buffs like me it was definitely worth the price of admission.
Then we went over to City Market so the ladies could do some shopping. Dad and I tried to entertain ourselves but found it challenging.
Since Mom really wanted to go eat at Lady & Sons, Dad and I decided we’d go get in line.
Now Paula Deen (the owner of the restaurant) is a sharp business woman and a class act all the way. Mom’s dentist had told her to be sure to check out the place. I’m guessing he heard about it on the food channel. I’ve eaten there a couple times before, when folks come to visit who specifically want to go there.
The down side of going there (and it is a big one) is that the line to get in the place is almost always all the way down the block. And in the Savannah afternoon heat standing there in the sun is no fun. But Dad and I were willing to suck it up and stand there.
Until it started raining.
The bottom line is that there are way too many great restaurants in Savannah to go through all that just to get into one. Don’t get me wrong, the food is really good at Lady & Sons. Some might even say it’s worth the wait.
So we shifted gears and went back to City Market to Belford’s and had a wonderful meal there.
But I think the highlight of the day, at least for Mom, was our stop at a place that was not at all unique to Savannah. Gorgeous found out that they’d never been to a Bass Pro Shop so we stopped of at the mall to “show them the waterfall and the fish tank.”
The ladies spent over an hour trying on clothes while Dad and I entertained ourselves looking at the boats and making cracks about how little of the clothing we could actually see. (Most of it was so well camouflaged.)
Anyway it was a good day hanging out with my folks.
But now it’s back to work.
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Excellent New Travel Blog
Anyone interested in a really cool idea of a travel blog should go check out Where is Basil?
The premise is silly – a fictitious donkey named Basil (accompanied by a Fawlty Towers DVD set – Read the explanation page for more.) is visiting different people who have signed up on The List. When Basil is visiting that person, they write about what he sees in their fair city.
They even have a cool map of all the places that he is visiting. In addition to a whole bunch of places here in the states, list includes places like
- Arncliffe, Australia
- River John, Nova Scotia, Canada
- Minsk, Belarus
- Cape Town, South Africa
- Bellingen, Belgium
Right now Basil is with Gorgeous and I in Savannah. So if you’d like to learn a few tidbits about Savannah from someone living here, check it out! I’m even throwing in lots of photos from around town!
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Travel Stories – Australian Style
Gorgeous and I went to a birthday party last night for a friend of hers she met through our local Small Business Chamber. Eventually we all got talking about travel.
It turns out Gorgeous and a couple of the other guests had all lived in Australia for a while. The evening went by quickly as they each took turns telling stories of their time there.
I was fascinated because the three of them all spent time in different parts of the country and seemed to have very different experiences.
One of the guys had lived in Perth for a couple years and said he felt very isolated there because the city is so far from anywhere else.
Of course he decided isolation was a bit relative when he heard that Gorgeous had spent a year living in Broome, which they both agreed was the “back of beyond.” Gorgeous said the locals used to talk about slipping into “Broome Time.” Apparently nothing moved quickly there.
Of course that may be changing a little since she was there, what with the increase of tourism and all. Check out this web cam on the beach in Broome and decide for yourself. (Remember they are about 12 hours out of sink with us here in the states so it will be dark there during our day time.)
The third gentleman at our party was a little older and spent some time in Sydney during the 60’s. He said that when he was there then the memory of World War II was still pretty fresh and the Australians absolutely loved Americans then.
If you are in to travel then go ahead and check out Where is Basil? The blog is about the ongoing travel adventures of a fictitious donkey. The idea is there is a set of DVD’s of the old British TV show Fawlty Towers which is being mailed around to people who sign up at the blog and for the week that they have the DVD’s they describe what the Basil the donkey does while he’s there. Then they send the DVD’s off to the next person on the list an Basil heads to the next place. It is truly a global travel adventure.
I bring it up because Basil is here in Savannah and I’ll be posting some tourist type things over there for the next week or so.
I tried to explain the whole thing a while back in Adventures in Traveling. But don’t take my word for it. Check out Basil’s blog.
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When Things Go Your Way
Did you ever have one of those days when things just seem to work out just fine?
Yesterday was one of those days for me.
I got moving toward the airport a little later than I intended but wasn’t too worried about it because I was confident that I’d allowed extra time in my plan, so I expected to be OK anyway.
Then I ran smack into Chicago traffic. I had given myself about an hour for the drive to O’Hare, but I really expected it would take about 40 minutes. I had no idea there would be so much traffic at 6 AM on a Tuesday morning!
I knew I wanted to fill up the tank before I turned the car back in because I didn’t want to get soaked paying the rental company $5 a gallon for a less than full tank, or some such. Fortunately on the highway I was on had an Oasis right before the airport exit so I could take care of that issue.
I was on a toll road, and that whole thing was a bit of an experience. Periodically they had toll booths on the highway and the toll each time was the nice round figure of $0.80. I’m not sure why they chose that amount. Fortunately for us out-of-towners the toll booth operators seemed to have a sufficient reservoir of dimes and nickels to give us change back from each dollar I gave them.
The trick was the booth at the O’Hare exit. There is no operator at that exit. It is cash only, exact change required. But you have to be a bit of a detective to figure out how much the toll is because the only place it tells you is a little sign on the toll collecting machine itself. It happened to be $0.80 too.
So there I was frantically searching through my pockets to see if I had enough dimes and nickels left over to pay that one. It took me a couple moments, much to the frustration of the guy behind me leaning on his horn. Oh, and there is no way to get a receipt to turn in with the expense report.
Sometimes you just have to take one for the team.
The whole drive to the airport thing made me think that the day was going to be a challenge all the way around.
But I was totally off on that score.
Even though I totally blew my time allotment on the drive, everything else went as smooth as silk. It took me only about 30 minutes to return the rental car, get the shuttle to my terminal, check in with the airline, and make it through the security checkpoint. Sha-zam!
And my flight was about 30 minutes delayed taking off so I had plenty of time.
The connection in Charlotte was perfect. I walked of of one plane, down the same concourse about 5 gates and right onto the next plane right before they closed the doors and we were off to Savannah.
My bags were among the first out on the carousel in Savannah and Gorgeous didn’t even have to pay for parking. She timed it so she just drove around to the curb and picked me up!
There is a Proverb that says
How can we understand the road we travel? It is the LORD who directs our steps.
And it is easy to feel good about the thought of God directing our steps when things are going well like they did for me yesterday. But what about when things don’t go according to our plans? What about when things seem to be falling apart?
Check out this tidbit from Psalms
If the LORD delights in a man’s way, he makes his steps firm; though he stumble, he will not fall, for the LORD upholds him with his hand.
God’s got it under control whether we are in the middle of a raging storm or we are experiencing smooth sailing. For me that is a very comforting thought.
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Adventures in Traveling
Well I’m heading home this morning. Finally. It’s been a weird trip.
Interestingly enough it turns out I’m going to miss Basil here in Chicago by about an hour.
Who is Basil? Well he’s the Code-Writing-Party-Donkey, of course.
But that’s not the right question.
The right question is really Where is Basil?
And that will take a little bit of explanation.
You see there are a bunch of us Bloggy type folks who hang out on Tuesday nights over at Successful-Blog for Open Comments Night. It is just a time of sharing ideas. Some of us do get more than a little on the silly side, though.
Ben Yoskovitz is one of the folks who usually hangs with us. Ben has a tendency to show up late and even when he’s able to spell his own name right he often makes excuses about how he’s trying to keep an eye on the donkey that writes code for his web site. Well we’re a naturally curious lot so folks wanted to know more about the donkey.
And Ben is very creative and would throw in little anecdotes about the donkey and what he was up to. Ben really should have been one of the Stooges – really he’s sillier than I am, at least to my way of thinking.
Anyway we all decided we knew the donkey about well enough that he should have a name. We went round and round about it. I lobbied long and hard for Jack. I thought it was a perfect, if unimaginative, name for an… um, I mean a donkey.
Fortunately, in the interest of family friendliness, I was resoundly overruled. Somehow we were on the subject of Fawlty Towers we got talking about the characters. Basil is the name of the main character in that show played by John Cleese. Ben suggested Basil as a proper name for a code writing party donkey and it stuck.
Well in honor of a successful donkey naming Ben decided to run a contest with the prize being the DVD set of the Fawlty Towers show. His creative juices got flowing and he thought it would be really cool if the prize could be enjoyed by more folks than just the winner. A prize in perpetuity, so to speak.
Did I mention Ben is creative?
Anyway he pushed Basil out the door along with the DVD’s with the idea that they would spend a week with a winner then move on to another location to spend the next week with someone else.
I think Ben just got tired of cleaning up after the donkey.
But Ben started up a web site to track Basil’s progress. And he has invited anyone who would like to participate (and get a chance to view the Fawlty Towers DVD’s) to join the list.
Since I was there from the beginning, before Basil knew Jack so to speak, and since I like to laugh (I remember Fawlty Tower being totally hysterical) I signed up as soon as I got wind of the whole thing.
At the moment Basil is on a train from Stanford, Connecticut up here to see Liz in Chicago. They say his train should get in before my flight leaves.
It is all very silly, but it is going to be a very good time. Lot’s of laughs. And a chance to learn about new places as people report back on what Basil does when he visits them. In fact Basil is heading to Savannah to stay with us next.
Oh. I probably should let Gorgeous know that we are going to be having a quadruped houseguest in the next week or so. We’ll need to stock up on our hay and other fodder (especially carrots). It is a good thing she’s still got her Veterinary Technician certification. We may be needing it!
Anyway I’m off to the airport myself this morning. Check out Where is Basil? to keep up on his progress as he travels around the world donkey style.
Enjoy!
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Can You Smell the Irony?
How fitting that I wrote up that last post on changing plans this morning!
Just as I was about to head out the door to the office I got a call from the head of our local office here. He’s the guy that I had come up here to relieve.
“You better pack your bags. We may be sending you home today.â€
OK, I thought. The company just spent a bunch of money to change my flight, which was originally scheduled to leave yesterday, had me go get a rental car. And now they want to send me home anyway?
“So do you want me to change my flight for one today?â€
“Just call around and see what you can get out today, but don’t change your flight yet. We may need you to stick around. Call me and let me know what you can get.â€
Sure. No problem.
I called the airline. Good news: there are still a couple seats left that would get me home tonight. Called back the office and let them know.
“We still don’t know for sure. I’ll call you once I know.â€
So I wait. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Eventually he calls back. “Yep. Go on home. Thanks for all your help!â€
Cool! I call the airline back. “We’re sorry there are no available seats until tomorrow morning.â€
Oh, we totally saw that one coming.
I was explaining the whole deal to a friend of mine who said, “Flexibility — the key word of the 21st century.â€
“Semper Gumby!†that’s my motto.
I was once on a mission trip and things were getting crazy. (I’m convinced there’s no word in Brazilian Portuguese for the English “plan.â€) At one point I asked our leader if we’d moved through flexibility and on to the fluid stage.
He said, “Oh, we’re way past fluid. We’ve been gaseous for several hours now.â€
I laughed long and hard when he said that. The double entendre with our reaction to some of the local food we’d recently had was just too much.
Of course sleep deprivation also may have made me a bit giddy at the time…
Anyway I should be heading home tomorrow sometime. Of course there are still about 22 hours for that plan to change. 😉
Enjoy!
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When Plans Fall Apart
Some days simply refuse to go according to plan. And yesterday was one of those days.
The plan was elegant in its simplicity. There was a church I wanted to check out in the morning. It wasn’t located exactly near my hotel room. But hey, for the first time on this trip I had a day with no work scheduled so why not? Then I was going to head back “home†to the hotel, goof off in the room, write an email to my sister, get some more groceries for my extended stay, do some laundry and catch some dinner.
And the day started off well too. I slept in, drove up to see the church. It took a bit longer than I’d planned. No problem. I planned for that possibility. They have an early afternoon service. So I went to find a coffee shop to hang out and read.
But no plan ever survives first contact with the enemy, eh?
I didn’t even get out of my car at the coffee shop when the phone rang and I got called into work stuff.
So instead of the leisurely day of goofing off I had planned my day ended up involving lots of driving and a trip to the airport to get a rental car.
Ah, well. At least I still managed to get the laundry done and find some groceries (sorry Sis! 😳 )
And then at the end of the day I actually connected with Liz Strauss finally! She made it back to town. She scored me an invite to a party at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Thursday night before I fly out on Friday morning. Talk about a nice way to cap off an otherwise frustrating day!
It got me thinking about how much control we really don’t have in our lives. I mean we can plan for all sorts of eventualities but in the end we just plain aren’t in charge of how things work out.
I wonder what kind of thoughts were going through Paul’s mind the day the ship he was a prisoner on sunk around him, he got washed up onto shore and bitten by a poisonous snake. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the way he planned for that trip to work out! (You can read about it here in Acts 27:27 – 28:6)
There is a Proverb that says
We can make our plans, but the LORD determines our steps.
And often it works out much better than we anticipated in the end if we only make the effort to look at it through the lens of the long view.
So I’m interested to see what today will bring.
Enjoy!
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Sears Tower Tourist
Yesterday I finally had a chance to play a bit of the tourist after being here in the Chicago area for over a week. I worked most of Friday night (after a normal work day on Friday) and was able to get some sleep around 9AM.
When I got up yesterday afternoon I decided to make good on my plan to see the Sears Tower so I headed that way.
My hotel is about an hour South of downtown Chicago. With no traffic. If I don’t get lost. Fortunately I studied my Mapquest pretty thoroughly (I don’t have anyway to print here in the hotel room) and I drove straight to the parking garage by the tower. It still took a bit over an hour. There was more traffic late on a Saturday afternoon than what I’d experience in all but rush hour during the week.
One of the first things I noticed on my drive is that as I got closer to downtown the ratio of imported cars increased. The areas I have been tooling around south of the city here are overwhelmingly dominated by American made cars. Compared to the mix of autos I am used to seeing on the road it has seemed downright weird. I’m not sure why it is, either.
I do know that there is a Ford plant that I drive by several times a day most days. Apparently they are in the middle of a shutdown right now. I’ve yet to see any activity there.
But that doesn’t really explain the different car mix for me.
Sears Tower makes going up to their Skydeck a whole tourist experience. I am used to the times I’ve gone up in big buildings in NYC. There you buy a ticket, stand in a bit of a line for the elevator and you are up. Here you have to stand in a serpentine line to go through a security checkpoint. A nod to 9-11, I’m sure.
After the security checkpoint they take your picture under the guise of a tourist thingy to take your money on the back side. I’m sure it is really a security thing as they made everyone get their photo taken even after they protested that they didn’t want a photo.
Then you stand in another line to get your ticket, which is nearly 12 bucks. Mine said it was transaction number 216,538 and I know there is no way there could have been that many people there yesterday, but I don’t know what time period it was measuring.
Next you get to stand around some more while you wait to go into a theater to watch a 10-15 minute video about the Tower excerpted from a History Channel show. Then you get to wait in line for the elevator.
It is a bit of a bummer for me to spend all that time standing in line by myself. I’m not much of one to make small talk with strangers, being a bit of an introvert and all. Besides there were a lot of languages around me that I don’t speak. Most of the ones that weren’t English, actually. And there were a lot of those.
I did manage to strike up a little conversation with a local couple while we were waiting in the last line for the elevator. We got on the 9-11 / big building subject somehow. Probably because it is heavy on my mind for some reason. They’d been to NYC but only post 9-11 and I haven’t been there since years before it.
The view from the top is spectacular, as expected. There was a thunder shower off to the Southwest that gave us a spectacular lightning show. The sun was stetting off beyond O’Hare airport. I pointed out to the guy next to me that at nearly 1500 feet we were at the same altitude as the jets approaching the airport. He thought that was pretty cool. And there were lots of them. The jets were staggered in alternating pairs for the parallel westerly runways back across Lake Michigan as far as I could see.
I still love airplanes.
The background music loop had a rendition of Sweet Home Chicago in it that made me whish I had my Blues Brothers CD in the iPod. But it really belongs to Gorgeous so I haven’t wanted to fill it up too much with my music.
Apparently Sears Tower might be destined to not be the tallest building in America much longer. There are plans afoot to build a bigger tower here in Chicago. Could be interesting for sure.
This morning I am off to Naperville which is also about an hour from my hotel. There is a church up there that I want to check out, Christian Community Church. Their head pastor spoke at a conference hosted by our church a couple months back so I thought it would be cool to check them out since I am in the area.
Anyway it has been nice to have a little down time. I needed it. I was originally supposed to be on a plane right now to get home to Gorgeous. But I was informed late last week that my services would be required here for another week. Ugh! So I changed my flight to Friday. We’ll see how much more of Chicago I get to check out.
Oh, and I bought the photos from Sears Tower. Go figure.
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A Tourist to Remember
Whew! It’s been a busy week so far. Lot’s of stuff to do. But looking at what we’ve got for the rest of the week, it looks like I might actually get a little down time. Gorgeous suggested I make sure I get some authentic Chicago style pizza while I’m up here. We definitely like our food, us Cree’s.
Another friend suggested I take in the Sears Tower. My first thought was that I’ve seen lots of tall buildings in the four years I lived in New York City.
Growing up an only child and then going to a military school in the Bronx, I used to enjoy the solitude of heading down to the financial district on the weekends, especially on Sunday mornings. Sometimes I’d go walking down by City Hall or over to the Brooklyn Bridge. I remember there was a book store down there that was often the only thing open in the mornings and was a good spot to get a cup of coffee. It always seemed peaceful to me to be in the heart of a giant city like that with so few people around.
Of course, as I got to thinking about those times I remembered that two of my favorite buildings in NYC are no longer there. The World Trade Center just seemed to me to be a strong place. I remember just being in awe at how massive the twin towers were. Sometimes I would walk right up next to the outside of one of them, lean back looking up. They seemed to curve back over my head, they were so tall and straight.
Going up in them to the observation area on a windy day you could feel the building sway in the wind. It was always cool to look down on the helicopters that were scurrying around the city.
They were a beacon of the NYC skyline as far as I was concerned. I knew the air was clear when I could see the towers from our campus on the other end of the Bronx.
I remember flying up that way one time when I was in the Navy. The view out the cockpit was nothing but a solid cloud layer below us all the way from our base in Florida. Then, there in the distance when the layer ended was the NYC skyline with those two towers standing majestically on watch.
It was my day off work that day when they came crashing down in a pile of concrete, steel, and dust. I watched the whole thing live from my living room in Florida. The next few days were eerie with no contrails in the sky because all flights were grounded.
I’m not here to comment on the state of world affairs, but do think that it is important that we remember some of these events from time to time to keep our perspective on where we stand.
We humans are naturally a forgetful people, especially where our history is concerned. That has been true since ancient times. The word remember occurs in the Bible over 150 times. The first time is when God gives Noah the rainbow as a symbol of hope.
I’m glad I got to see so much of those buildings in their relatively short lives. Those are good memories.
So maybe I will go see the Sears Tower while I’m up here after all.
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