Flying West

We left on a Friday, one week after Will’s last day of school for the term and my last day of work prior to my sabbatical.

Our trip out west was on a Song aircraft, so it had the entertainment units built into each seat:

We got settled quickly after we arrived. My sister picked us up from the airport and drove us to her place. I had sent a package to her and Cass earlier that week, and the tracking info said it should arrive the very same day that we landed. When we got there, however, we discovered it was not there. The package was a box packed with many homebrews.

National History Museum

On Saturday, we had a big day out – at the museum. Kristie and Cass had gotten a zoo keeper outfit for Will when they were last at the Santa Barbara zoo, so Will wore it much of our week there. He hesitated in putting on the jacket at first – not sure why. But he wore the hat and binoculars to the museum.

There were a bunch of USC fans tailgating as the National History Museum is just outside of campus on its southern side.

The museum had two special interests that attracted us (Will): dinosaurs and spiders.

The first set of dinosaurs, aside from the display out front in the above picture, is in the main foyer. And it is quite a spectacle. It reminds me of the great room at Atlanta’s Fernbank museum – which also has a towering set of dinosaur skeletons.

Will helped Cass give a small token of appreciation to the museum. Donations are fed into the dinosaur mouth:

Our first stop, after the grand display in the foyer, was the land of spiders. Outside the main spider exhibit, they had all of the nasty, poisonous arachnids on display. Will was keen on inspecting each and every one:

The main exhibit inside was awesome. Arachnophobes need not enter. It features numerous spiders, many quite large, freely running amok in a large outdoor space. You walk under their webs, you can see them in the bushes, and you have to be careful not to walk right into some of them. No glass walls protect them from you (or you from them). I think Malin and K were a little freaked out. Cass and Will enjoyed it thoroughly. I thought it was pretty awesome, too.

Malin found the molted exoskeleton of a grasshopper among the bushes and webs:

After the spiders, we visited the halls of mammals, of which there are three at the museum.

They also had a really cool exhibit of birds, including this fellow with the ridiculously long beak:

There was a section on marine life, including some very large fish. This is a picture of an incredibly huge nautilus (> 6ft tall) that defends the entrance to that wing:

Last but not least was an exhibit about the restoration process for dinosaur bones and fossils. They had an actual restoration lab in there with windows so you could see inside and watch the people work.

On our way out, Malin noticed how cool the water fountains were. It looks like you could perform a baptism/christening in one:

On the outside, we had one last set of photos to take – of the giant tiki head, similar to the heads on Easter Island:

Olvera Street

The next day, Malin, K, and I went for a walk through an art festival in North Hollywood. It was pretty uneventful and boring, so we decided to go somewhere else. We ended up going to Olvera Street, looking at shops, and eating good Mexican food for lunch. Warning to tourists: Olvera Street restaurants are expensive. Unfortunately, Will was behaving rather poorly at lunch time, so we left in a bit of a hurry. So we weren’t able to grab a Mexican wrestler mask while there (of which there were plenty available).

The Zoo

The next day, Kristie had to work. So Cass took us to the zoo.

You can see that Will finally decided to wear the jacket that was part of his zoo keeper outfit.

One of the first animals we encountered was a meerkat, sleeping in the shade.

The zoo had all manner of animals, from alligators to lions and sea lions to ibex. Here is a quick montage. Men, try not to be too intimidated by the zebra.

Cass told us how the tallest male giraffe occasionally wanders to one side of their enclosure and does his best to feed off of a very tall tree using an amazingly prehensile tongue. While we were there, we got to see this endeavor in action.

There were also a very fair species of ungulate named Gerenuk (sound like made-up words from a viking poem, don’t they?)

What would a trip to the zoo be without apes? They had many apes, but the best photos we got were of chimpanzees:

On the way back out, the meerkat had finally woken up:

There was also a petting zoo. Before leaving, Will got to pet the goats and sheep that were there. We got one last picture – Will and Cass standing outside the petting zoo:

Unbirthday Party

The next day, Cass and I went to the UPS facility to pick up the homebrews. They had not been delivered on Monday either and were waiting for us at the facility. That evening, a friend of Cass’s came over to help us sample some of the homebrews – which was fun for me since, even though I made them all and have tasted them all before, they tasted better and new with a few months age.

During the day on Tuesday, we had an Unbirthday Party:

Ours was held at the Travel Town Museum – a large field with old steam engines and train cars in it. Will had lots of fun wandering around the trains.

After playing in the train cars, we sat down at a picnic bench and ate lunch. After lunch was the obligatory balloon animals. It is an unbirthday party after all! Instead of animals, however, we made things like helmets, swords, and small intestines:

Before the picnic was finished, we had to have cake. It is an unbirthday party after all! Will calls it “red vulva” cake. Red Velvet is how most of us might refer to it:

After the picnic and balloon-sword fencing, we took a trip around the museum on their miniature locomotive:

When the tour rode around to the back of the park, we could see a train car with a wonderful exclamation painted on it.

Before we left, we got one last picture – this one of all five of us:

Santa Monica

On Wednesday, we decided to drive to Santa Monica. Cass had some things to do, so K accompanied us and drove us about. We first hit up some shops along with way. Among other things, we got Will some cool, new, blue shoes – his LA Shoes. Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of them when there were still new and clean, but there is what they look like today:

We went to the main pier at the Santa Monica Beach, had some ice cream, and rode on the ferris wheel.

The main point of going to the beach was for Malin to get a shot of the sunset:

Will was misbehaving on the beach, running off, not listening to us, and so forth. So he was looking pretty glum at this point.

After the beach, we went to do some more shopping and eat some dinner. We ate at a small bar/restaurant called The Library Alehouse, which served decent food and a had a nice selection of beers – from California and otherwise.

There were some cool murals on the walls in the area, too:

Sushi With Uncle Uncle

On Thursday, we went into LA to visit Little Tokyo. While there, we visited a Japanese bookstore, and we also went into a Japanese market. Will got some interesting/odd Japanese toys from the market. We also got the obligatory pack of Pocky.

That evening, continuing with the Japan theme, we had a delicious dinner at a nice sushi restaurant. Cass’s uncle came to dinner with us. Cass and K just call him “uncle”, so we figured Will could call him “uncle uncle.” So we ate dinner with uncle uncle. Will did pretty well, but eventually got quite bored. So he climbed under the bench (our table was against a bench, so half the party sat on the bench and the other half across the table in chairs) and began playing with the arrangement of rocks thereunder.

Returning to Atlanta

The next day was are trip back home. Cass and I dragged a box of stuff that wouldn’t fit into our carry-on suitcases (we never check luggage) to a shipping store to have it FedEx’ed home.

I also had a bunch of interesting and rare brews that I bought while in LA. But we didn’t have boxes and packing material on hand to safely send them on their way, so Cass offered to pack them up after we left and send them to us.

The trip home was uneventful.

Post-Trip Activities

The day after we got back was Saturday. That evening, friends of mine from college visited us: Desmond, his wife Jessica, and their one-year-old daughter Alexis. They left the next morning to the airport to go on their own sort of vacation in Florida.

The following week, we drove through the Carolinas. We spent a couple of nights with my parents in Greenville, SC. We also visited Durham, NC to see our friend Audra and her husband Jon. They had just had a newborn baby daughter named Madelyn. Finally, we had a stop in Charlotte, NC to visit with some of Malin’s relatives and to see Desmond and company yet again.

Our night at Desmond and Jessica’s house was fun. We played Rock Band 2 on their PS3, and Will had a lot of fun banging on the drums. Surprisingly, as much fun as he had at Desmond’s and again at Best Buy playing Rock Band, he has yet to ask for a copy. But we won’t be surprised when he does.

Stay tuned for the next and final chapter of the photo backlog – Halloween. It will be a much shorter post than this one, so it should go up pretty soon.

We brought a big Tonka dump truck for Will to play with in the sand. We also brought his “tools” – a plastic toy shovel and rake, made for sandbox play.

He made several trips from the house to the beach. The first afternoon we were there, shortly after arriving, Donna took him and Catrina (Audra’s and Jason’s young cousin) to the beach to play. We returned again the next morning, and again in the evening, and again the next day, etc…

During some down time before the wedding, the three of us (Malin, Will, and me) went for a stroll on the beach. Malin took many pictures of us on the beach. When we walked under the pier that was near the house, she handed me the camera and asked me to snap some in order to get herself in some pictures. The first photo up there on the right is shy Willie getting a piggyback ride from mommy. The one below shows the two of them looking for shells under the pier:

There were actually lots of seashells to find down there. Just a few feet away from where they’re standing was an alley of crushed shells that seemed to run the whole length of the beach:

Tiring of my photography skills (or lack thereof), Malin eventually reclaimed her camera to prove that I was actually at the beach with the two of them:

She also got some great shots of Will playing in the sand. This one is my favorite:

The rest of the vacation centered around the wedding and our preparation of food for ourselves and the other guests: a low-country boil on Saturday, crab cakes and fish’n'chips on Sunday.

Unfortunately, we had to leave the beach on Monday. I can’t wait to go back… perhaps later this summer?

So as you may know, we had a long memorial day weekend on the beach at Oak Island, NC. We were there to see our good friend Audra marry her fiance (now her husband), Jon. We were also planning to bring some foodie entertainment for everyone, and Malin would be taking pictures the whole weekend.

Arrival

We left Greenville on Friday morning. The day was slow. Will watched Return to Oz for the first time, and he enjoyed it. We still need to get the original The Wizard of Oz on DVD so he can watch that one…

After about five hours of driving, we arrived at a phenomenal house. It had eight bedrooms, a small pool, a balcony with a hot tub, a deck, and an industrial kitchen packed with nice cabinets and even nicer appliances. Once we figured out in which room we would be sleeping, we hastily unpacked our car.

Several folks had already arrived – among them Audra, Jon, Jason (my long-time friend and brother of the bride), and Donna (Jason’s wife). We decided to order pizza to make dinner easy. We ordered a slew of pies, which would be slowly consumed as folks trickled in throughout the day and evening.

That evening Malin went out to the beach with Audra and Jon for an engagement photo shoot (click the pic to see a little more):

After the engagement shoot, we spent a fair amount of time hanging out in the “game room” of the rental house. For what seemed like hours, Audra and Jon busily scanned in childhood photos of one another, to be shown in a slideshow that would be displayed on a big, flat-screen TV during the wedding reception the next afternoon.

This, unlike the remaining nights at the beach, was not a late night. We retired at a reasonable hour.

The Wedding Day

When we woke up, we were treated to breakfast. Some of Audra’s and Jason’s family cooked up some scrambled eggs with hashed potatoes, biscuits, and sausage gravy:

Most of the morning, Will played video games. Maysa, Audra’s youngest sister, brought her Wii with her, along with many games that Will found to be quite fascinating. Maysa and Catrina shared with Will.

Malin and I had one key task to accomplish before the wedding: buy fresh seafood for the reception dinner. We went down the road and happened upon a wonderful fish monger. The guy that ran the place was incredibly friendly and incredibly helpful as far as what to buy. We told him we wanted to do a low-country boil with blue crabs and other shellfish and that we needed to serve as much as 20 people (there were more people at the wedding, but there would also be other food like burgers and dogs).

We went home with a big box o’ crabs. Yummy!

We returned in time to see “the cake lady” delivery the cake. It was very pretty, and they (the cake lady and her assistant) nearly toppled it over while setting it up on a table. Some of the seashells looked so real, and yet they were all made of chocolate: genius!

Speaking of chocolate shells, here is a pic of Audra’s and Jason’s youngest sister Maysa (left) and their cousin Catrina (right), packing party favors with more of the ingenious confections.

Also before the ceremony, Malin was able to sneak into the bridal suite and snap a picture of the bride and her younger sister Lauren getting ready for the big event:

The ceremony began on the beach amidst beautiful weather, surrounded by sand and ocean. It was quite nice. Unfortunately, I missed most of the ceremony due to a disagreeable three-year-old. Will insisted on walking along the beach to look at seashells. Every time I insisted that we watch, he would get upset and very loud. Not wanting a tantrum to disrupt the event, I gave in and let him walk around picking up shells. I even tried to persuade him through peer pressure: “Catrina and Maysa are watching the ceremony”, but it was to no avail. I was hoping that last bit would work since he had developed a bit of a fascination with the two girls – perhaps even a crush on Catrina.

Luckily, Malin was able to capture the beauty of the day so that I could look upon it on a computer monitor afterwards. Click the photo to see a little more.

After the ceremony, the cooking began. Jason and his uncle Eric manned the grill stations, cooking up burgers and dogs for the hungry crowd:

Meanwhile, I was at the seafood station, boiling corn on the cob, pork sausage (it wasn’t Andouille, but it was still good), potatoes, four dozen blue crabs, and five pounds of shrimp. It was divine. The crabs tried to put up a fight, but they don’t fight so good when their brains are half-frozen from sleeping in an ice-filled cooler for hours:

As it would turn out, the fish monger sold us too much crab and shrimp. This was partially our fault – notably less than 20 people were hungrily partaking of the low-country boil.

So that evening several folks, including Jason, Donna, Lisa (Jason’s and Audra’s mother), and Dave (Jason’s and Audra’s father), helped to shell left-over shrimp and crabs. We decided to shell it all and save the succulent meat for more crabby goodness the following day…

Will spent most of the night watching Ian, Jon’s nephew. Ian had brought his Nintendo DS, and Will was quite entertained by watching him play video games on it.

That night was a late one. Many of us stayed up until the wee hours, talking, and sipping whiskey. I retired around 2:30am. Jason, his dad, and Bryan (Jon’s older brother) stayed up until almost 5am… A good time was had by all.

The Day After

The next day, with some assistance from Jason and Malin, I whipped the left-over, shelled, crab meat into crab cakes for brunch. This was a lot of fun, and everyone enjoyed the final product. The recipe I found (randomly happened upon it online while searching for recipes whose ingredient lists were satisfied with what we had in the kitchen) was a good one, and they turned out awesome.

After brunch, Jason, Dave, and Jon went to the big pier on Oak Island to go fishing. Will wanted to watch them fish (he actually wanted to participate, but he needed some assistance, so the real work was done by the three folks who had acquired fishing licenses).

It turned out to be a very slow, quiet afternoon fishing. Apparently there was only one bite: Jason caught a small shark.

When we returned to the big ol’ house, I had to start preparing dinner. I accompanied my dad on a fishing trip in New Orleans in early May and had brought back many delicious spoils (twenty pounds or so of red fish). Malin and I brought some of the fish with us to Oak Island, just in case we didn’t actually catch enough fish there to feed everyone.

That afternoon, I had to skin all of the boogers. They were filleted by the dockhands, but the skins – with scales in tact – remained. My dad called them “on the half shell.”

After skinning and scaling all of the fillets, Malin set about cooking them in a bath of bubbling oil, along with thick-cut potatoes. And, voila, fish and chips was served for dinner. Dinner even included a cocktail shrimp appetizer, thanks to the leftover shellfish from the previous evening. This meal turned out marvelously. Everyone was well-fed and enjoyed it, and it was a fulfilling and pleasant experience to help out with the food and have everyone like it so well… two meals in a row, no less!

That evening was another late one, though not quite as late as the previous night. Jason and I sampled some very nice spirits that were brought for the event: Patron Silver, Bushmills Original, and Johnny Walker Black Label.

The Trip Home

The next morning, we had to wake up and start packing. Checkout was at 10am, so we had to have everything out of the house before that so the keys could be returned by 10.

It was difficult saying goodbye to such a good weekend and to the friends that were there with us. We got on the road and started driving back to Greenville, SC.

Will watched Return to Oz numerous times in the car on the ride back – it was his newest addiction (which has since been replaced by Harry Potter, and more recently Indiana Jones and Batman).

As we were driving near Columbia, SC, we were hungry for lunch and decided that what we really wanted was Taco Bell. We had borrowed a GPS receiver for our laptop from my dad, and used it to find a Taco Bell.

My dad calls her “Betty.” She barks directions at you in a calm, unflinching manner as you drive. Damnable Betty supposedly drove us to two different Taco Bells in Columbia. Neither were there. Neither appeared to be locations where there ever was a Taco Bell. Curse the software and its bad database of “points of interest.”

When we got to Greenville, my mom took us to a very interesting restaurant named Saskatoon Grill. They specialize in interesting game, wild foul, and steaks – Canadian-style supposedly. The Kangaroo steak I had was quite delicious, though not particularly Canadian. We also had an appetizer that featured three sausages: one made from wild boar, another from buffalo, and the last from ostrich meat. Malin’s entrée was a sampler of meat: lamb, buffalo steak, and duck breast. Overall, it was an interesting meal and tasty to boot.

The morning after that was the Tuesday after Memorial Day. We had breakfast with my mom at IHOP and then hit the road yet again, homeward bound. This trip, we managed to find not just a Taco Bell, but a Taco Bell / Pizza Hut Express! Sometimes life shines upon you brilliantly.