Gecko Bloggle

We’re here, and it’s late (for here), and so this’ll be short.

We were only “those people” with “those children” for about 15 minutes during the first (and longest leg) of our journey, so all in all, it went really well. Ripley looked out the window at stuff, and Tate was just cute and sleepy most of the time, and there was a moment where were were a little row of three nerds, playing Mario Kart on a fire-engine red Nintendo DS (Ripley), Sudoku on a sexy blue/black Nintendo DS SLIM from Japan three months before they were available in North America (Arwen) and Burnout Legends on a funky PSP (Me). Sometimes, it’s good to work where I do.

DORKS!

Look at us: We hardly look insane at all!

Okay, maybe a little.

Three hours in the back row of a 757’ll do that to a person.

Multiply that time by three for each child under 6 you’re traveling with, and we were in the air for about… nine days.

Mostly though, things went great, and here’s some pics to prove we were in the AIR!

See that? Mt Baker looking all majestic and stuff, instead of that sorta grimey look it gets when looking at it from my patio on the 19th floor at work (through the smog of 90 gatrillion commuters-worth of cars). It was beautiful up there.

After the trip to Cincinati, we ate at the Outback, and Arwen and I had to actually pull out my Blackberry to find out what STATE we were in. So much for making fun of Americans for not knowing anything about Canadian geography, I was totally lost.

…and I sorta enjoyed that feeling.

After a 2.5 hr stopover, and some time where Ripley could play with his multitude of rubber snakes, lizards and spiders, we were back on a much smaller Delta Connections flight, with Ripley having a seat to himself, and Arwen and I on the other side of the isle. Watching the sun go down when you’re *just* above the clouds is beautiful – something I haven’t remembered seeing since my trip to New York when I was about 12.

When we were landed, and taxying (sp?) into the gate, I spotted fireflies, and when Ripley saw them out HIS side, he got so excited he started yelling (his ears hadn’t popped yet, and hey, he’s four) about “I’ve never seen flier fies before ever!” then we were off and standing on the ground…

Another one-hour car trip along the various highways of Indiana (why do I always feel like I’m driving West when there’s no Ocean, Sun, or Mountains for a BC boy to navigate by?), and we arrived at Grampa Virgil’s house in Goshen. He mentioned as we were pulling up that he paid $11,000 for the place 60+ years ago, and figured it’s be worth maaaybe $80G now…

This house, my friends, would pull an easy $800,000 in Vancouver’s market right now… Guh.

After much conversation about airflow, and new paint, and putting fans in the windows upstairs while opening the windows downstairs, we’re all in bed now.

So I’ll sign off now with this little bit of highway wisdom: When you hit a firefly on the highway, the little glow bit gets left on the windshield.

and this little bit of airplane wisdom:

People who fly have a different view of the world than those who spend their lives on the ground. A very wise man once wrote a poem while he was flying, and he called this poem “The God’s Eye View,” and he said that this view was entirely different than the view he always had on the ground, which he called “The Bug’s Eye View.”

Out there, somewhere, in the air we fly through, exists an old Persian legend much like this poem about a bug who spent his entire life in the world’s most beautifully designed Persian rug. All the bug ever saw in his lifetime were his problems. They stood up all around him. He couldn’t see over the top of them, and he had to fight his way through these tufts of wool in the rug to find the crumbs that people had spilled on the rug. And the tragedy of the story of the bug in the rug was this: that he lived and he died in the world’s most beautifully designed rug, but he never once knew that he spent his life inside something which had a pattern. Even if he, this bug, had even once gotten above the rug so that he could have seen all of it, he would have discovered something – that the very things he called his problems were a part of the pattern.

Have you ever felt like that bug in the rug? That you are so surrounded by your problems that you can’t see any pattern to the world in which you live? Have you heard anybody say lately that the world is a total mess? That, my friends, is the Bug’s Eye View, and seeing only a little of the world, we might be inclined to think that this is true.

Edit: Oh, and if anybody was wondering: “linksys” in Goshen is an unsecured WAP. Thank you, whoever you are, and I promise not to do anything alarming on your node.

So, on the first night of our adventure, we stayed in Kent, at the quiet and reasonably-priced Best Western “On the Green,” which means every room (that’s not overlooking the parking lot) is overlooking the uh… golfers. Actually, it was mostly overlooking the ducks, and the occasional golfcart. I had visions of Rip and I sneaking out in the middle of the night and recreating scenes from CaddyShack, but then decided against it due to my hurt back (managed to mangle something in my lowerback during a particularly rousing round of “Laundry Bucket Street: Overload Extreme 360,” which Arwen tends to perform using a stroller, but I like to do bareback, ’cause that’s how I roll).

So anyhoo, we get everything into the room, and since we’re all starvin’ like Marvin, we decide to wander into the wild streets of Kent’s golfing district, and see what there is to eat.

Ripley saw the chinese food place next door, which I won’t name, lest Google unleash its daemons on the place, and start associating it with terms like “suck” and “gross” and “unintentionally comedic,” but here’s a picture.

(Note the single vehicle parked out front – should’ve been our first hint).

We walk in, and were seated as far away as possible from the only other occupied table, probably a bad sign, and we should’ve kept going to… oh, anywhere. The sports bar next door sounded pretty good after this place, I’m serious.

So we order a combo plate thing, at $12/person, ’cause it’s got Beef & Brocolli, which is my personal fave, and sweet & sour pork, which is Rip’s fave. I don’t know if there was anything Arwen wanted in there or not. We were all in for a real… buncha plates of food…

First comes the wonton soup, which was very very MSG-y, and contained ONE! ENTIRE! WONTON! per bowl. Okay, so maybe that’s not their forte, or something. It’ll get better, we keep telling ourselves. Rip liked it (salt AND sugar? where do I sign up?). Next arrived the sweet and sour shrimp, which was from the EAST combo, not the SOUTH combo that we ordered, so we sent that back. Not a problem, just a little mixup. While that’s being fixed, a plate of deep fried and heavily glazed something (I think I was supposed to be ginger chicken, but who knows, really?) arrived, along with a plate of sauces…

So what do we have here? There’s the plate of ginger something at the top left there, and then the sweet & sour sauce, which came with the spring rolls (to be fair, those were edible, if very greasy), but that little trifecta plate there on the right? Know what was in that?

Sesame seeds. Ketchup. And of course, that cornerstone of Asian Cousine: Dijon freakin’ Mustard.

These things arrived with the warning that they were very very hot, and when I said “Hot – spicy?” the guy went into this elaborate hand-gestured thing about how it was so spicy, that if Ripley were to touch it with his fingertips, it would probably burn the skin.

So I start thinking “okay… now we’re talking. HOT stuff. Like chillis and stuff. Things that’ll blow the top of my head clean off…”

No, he meant heat-hot, not spice hot.

When I tried the ginger chicken, risking the blazing hoop of doom, Arwen asked me if it was “that spicy,” and I responded “I could probably put this in my eye without it being annoying.”

The sweet and (not-at-all) sour pork finally arrived, and we ate (some of) that.

But oh good lord, it was bad.

We scuttled back to our hotel room, and Arwen and I thought we’d wash down all that salt & sugar with some coffee. How can we go wrong?

It tasted fine, dear readers, even if the little grounds & filter thing looked like something that should come with a DustBuster (I fully expected to see the words “HEPA Filter” on the bag somewhere).

It was good though, (Note to self: Next time I find some, I gotta buy & try some Coke Black, which is Coke with Coffee in it – no, seriously).

So we drank that, and watched Ice Age II, during which I had a shower that had enough water pressure to blow my eyebrows off.