Life

Happy October, kids!

Two important things to keep in mind: this is both Breast Cancer Awareness Month and Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Both of those are bad. Feel Your Boobies, and don’t smack around your significant other. Okay?

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Previously: A quiet evening at Grandpa Lindberg’s.

The second ‘big thing’ on Prairie’s list of places to take me was SeaWorld. Once again, we got up early, hopped in the car, and made it to the park right as the gates were starting to open. In a very kind (and successful) attempt to console me for the disturbing lack of penguins at the San Diego Zoo the day before, Prairie had mentioned that SeaWorld had a penguin or two in an exhibit that might be enough to keep me entertained. We grabbed a park map on our way through the gate, oriented ourselves, and went straight for the Penguin Encounter.

Okay, kidding aside (for a moment), that really is an impressive exhibit. What looks to be a couple hundred adélie, gentoo, macaroni, king, and emperor penguins in a huge room, hanging out on the ‘ice’ and zooming through the water, with a slow-moving conveyor belt shuffling the human viewers by and a raised stationary viewing area behind. We had a lot of fun watching all the penguins, and I took two trips along the conveyor, watching the penguins play and snapping pictures.

From there, we just started wandering around SeaWorld, checking out the many exhibits before and between hitting the four main daytime shows. I think Prairie’s favorites were the manatees and the beluga whales, while I’d probably choose the sharks as my favorite (after the penguins, of course).

Of the four shows we hit (The Shamu Show Believe, Dolphin Discovery, Sea Lions LIVE, and Pets Rule!), my pick for top marks is nearly a tie between Shamu and the dolphins…but I think for sheer “wow” spectacle, Shamu wins out. While I’ve certainly been aware that killer whales are by no means small animals, I never really had a clear real-world concept of their size. But wow, is it incredible to see one of these huge animals go rocketing up out of the water! Really impressive stuff.

We ended up spending the entire day at SeaWorld, longer even than we’d spent going through the San Diego Zoo (though being able to duck into the penguin exhibit again in the afternoon to guzzle water and soak up the air conditioning was a huge help), and we saw everything, save only the Sesame Street themed little kid’s play area and the Clydesdale horses (which just don’t make sense to me, even with Budweiser’s ownership of the parks…for some strange reason, beer and horses aren’t foremost in my mind when I think of an ocean wildlife theme park).

When planning for this trip, we’d gone back-and-forth as to whether SeaWorld or DisneyLand was going to be our big theme park for the trip…I gotta say, much as I think it’d be fun to go to DisneyLand, I’m totally a fan of SeaWorld. Definitely the right choice for us.

Once again, here’s a slideshow of my photos from SeaWorld, in semi-random order (actually ordered by whatever Flickr’s ‘interestingness’ algorithm chooses), or here’s a link to just the SeaWorld photos. Of course, you can always look at the full set of vacation photos, too!

Next: Exploring Balboa Park.

Previously: the San Diego Zoo.

This is actually quite a short little entry, but as I’m posting to match the divisions I made when sorting out my photos in Aperture, this is what I end up with.

After our day at the zoo, we came home to another nice dinner and evening with Prairie’s grandpa, and once again, Carl stopped by on his evening walk. I made a couple of attempts at getting shots of a hummingbird that was flitting around the backyard, and we said hello to a grasshopper that got curious about the inside of the house. Then, off to bed.

Next: SeaWorld!

Previously: Ashland to Carlsbad by way of Fresno. Mostly a lot of driving.

Having grown up with frequent visits to her family in this part of the country, Prairie had a few things that she knew she wanted to introduce me to while we were down here. First thing on the list, for our first full day, was the San Diego Zoo. We got up nice and early, borrowed her grandpa’s little Garmin GPS navigator (which was usually handy, occasionally frustrating, and often amusingly bad at pronouncing the Spanish streetnames of southern California), and found our way down to the zoo.

Prairie had told me a lot about how good the San Diego Zoo was — how big, how well-renowned, how many animals, and so on — and for the most part, I do have to agree…that’s a really impressive zoo! My only complaint was simply that we each have our favorite animals, and while Prairie was treated to not just one, but two kinds of hippos (regular and pygmy, which she’s sure is small enough to live quite happily in her bathtub, and expects hers to be delivered any day now)…well, there’s a sad and disturbing lack of penguins at this zoo! Harrumpf. Quite disappointing, I tell you.

(Well, okay…maybe not that disappointing, since there is this place called Sea World not terribly far away, which we just may have visited the next day, and which possibly has an extremely good penguin display. Perhaps. But. Still. No penguins.)

Lack of penguins aside, though, that’s quite a zoo. We spent the entire morning and a good chunk of the afternoon wandering around, starting with the hippos (for Prairie), finding the bonobos for Shelly, and then just striking out randomly to see what we could see. One of the nice things about getting there right when the doors opened was that many of the animals are more active in the cool of the morning, so we were able to see things like the grizzly bears playing in their pool and two of the zoo’s pandas exploring their area. Some of my favorite photos ended up being of the meerkats (which are just too cute not to be perfect subjects) and the silvered leaf-langurs.

All in all, quite a fun day! Here’s a slideshow of just the shots from the zoo, in semi-random order (actually ordered by whatever Flickr’s ‘interestingness’ algorithm chooses), or here’s a link to just the zoo photos. Of course, you can always look at the full set of vacation photos, too!

Next: A quiet evening visit.

Previously: Kent to Ashland, the Oregon Vortex and House of Mystery, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

The next couple days weren’t the most exciting, but in order to go from point A to point B, you’ve gotta get there somehow, so we settled in for a long two days of driving. When planning the trip out on Google Maps we’d decided that the 12+ hour day of going directly from Ashland to Carlsbad (where Prairie’s grandpa lives, just north of San Diego) didn’t sound terribly fun. We couldn’t see anything off of I-5 around the midpoint of the drive that looked like a good overnight spot, so we chose what looked to be the next-best option: a detour on Hwy 99 to overnight in Fresno.

Well, that turned out to be a very un-fun option. I’ve known for a long time that the stretch of 99 that goes through the Seattle metro area is just not a pretty road, and that certainly continued to be the case for most of these two days. Mile after mile of highway alternating between empty stretches of farmland and warehouses, all of it ugly, all of it jam-packed with semis using 99 as their main shipping corridor, and a few big slowdowns, especially through Modesto.

We finally made it to the Fresno exit, started following the directions to our hotel, and realized that we might as well still be on 99, as everything around us was just as pretty as the seedy areas of Aurora in North Seattle, or 99 in South Seattle. Things were not looking promising at all, but we eventually made it to the hotel. Thankfully, that was a Best Western, and while the world outside the hotel wasn’t very pretty, the world inside the hotel was just fine (hooray for chain hotels), especially when enhanced with a quick jaunt across the street to get a big ol’ bag of greasy comfort food from Carl’s Jr.

Not terribly anxious to spend any more time in Fresno than we had to, we were up and out the door pretty early the next morning. Once again, another long day of driving, much of it through the wasteland of 99. Surprisingly, we did find a stretch of 99 a ways south of Fresno that wasn’t too bad, going through orchards instead of warehouse districts or bare, open farmland. Since we’d left early in the morning, aside from some slowdowns getting through L.A., traffic was bearable, and we ended up heading into Carlsbad and pulling into Prairie’s grandpa’s house about 2:30 in the afternoon.

We took a couple hours to rest (Prairie reading, me napping), had dinner with Prairie’s grandpa (complete with visit by a wild bunny that stops by his backyard from time to time), and then were about to head out to find a beach for the sunset when her uncle Carl arrived on his nightly stop by his dad’s place during his walk. By the time we were done visiting with him and made it down to the beach the sun had set, so we came back to the house, took a short walk around the neighborhood, and went to bed.

Next: the San Diego Zoo!

This year’s summer vacation was so big, and resulted in so many photos (somewhere over 4,500), that rather than waiting until I have all the photos sorted, tagged, edited, and processed to upload them and make a post about the trip, I’ve decided to break the trip into several chunks. This, then, is chunk number one: Ashland.

Up bright and early at the crack o’ dawn on the day we left, we packed everything into the car, made couple quick stops for breakfast (Burger King), ice for the cooler, and gas for the car, and were on I-5 by about 7 in the morning. Aside from the occasional rest stop, this was pretty much a straight shot down I-5 to Ashland, where we set up camp at the Glenyan RV Park and Campground. While we weren’t entirely thrilled with the campground — it was a little shabbier than we had hoped, the showers flooded and were unusable, and I picked up about two packs worth of cigarette butts from our campsite — it wasn’t really that bad, giving us everything we needed (a campsite and restrooms) plus some extras (a pool and WiFi).

Since we were kind of tired from the drive (though it went well, with no major delays or traffic jams), we made a short run into Ashland, found a cute little local pizza joint, and brought a large pizza back to camp for dinner. We spent the evening relaxing with books, and once the sun went down, I took advantage of being far enough away from the light pollution of big cities to make a couple attempts at photographing the night sky before we crashed out for good.

(Click to view larger on a black background.)

The next day, we decided to head out to one of the local roadside tourist attractions, which Prairie had visited on a trip a number of years earlier: the Oregon Vortex and House of Mystery! In the words of the website…

The Oregon Vortex is a glimpse of a strange world where the improbable is the commonplace and everyday physical facts are reversed. It is an area of naturally occurring visual and perceptual phenomena, which can be captured on film. No matter your education or profession you will find a challenge to all your accepted theories.

This was a lot of fun. Totally silly and goofy, as we watched people appear to grow and shrink depending on where they stood, brooms stood on end, golf balls rolled uphill, and lots of questionable ‘science’ was spouted. I’m definitely a skeptic, chalking all the “mystery” up to a combination of optical illusion, perspective shifts, and simple human suggestibility, but that didn’t make the day any less enjoyable!

After our trip through the Vortex, we headed into Ashland to explore the town and spent a few hours just wandering around. It’s a cute little town (though, for some reason, there’s a definite Shakespearean theme to the business names), but as is often the case when traveling to new places, be very cautious about drinking the water!

For the evening, we had tickets to Much Ado About Nothing, which was playing in the gorgeous Elizabethan Stage. As is traditional, the setting of the play had been updated, this time to post-World War II Italy, with the action taking place in and around an Italian villa, complete with decorative pond at center stage. Or not so decorative, as upon Benedick’s frantic attempts to hide from Don Pedro, Claudio, and Leonato, he leaps into the pond, soaking himself and giving a good splash to the first couple rows of the audience! He then spent his monologue talking himself into wooing Beatrice splashing around, in, and out of the pool, adding a delightful bit of physical slapstick to an already amusing scene.

Also amusing (for us, at least, as we have an admitted tendency to be somewhat elitist) was how easy it was to identify the sections of the audience who only knew Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation as opposed to the sections who were able to follow the entire play, based on who laughed at which jokes. Everyone enjoyed the bits that were in the film, but there was a definite subset of the audience (of which we were part) who laughed at the jokes and wordplay in the sections that didn’t make it into Branagh’s script.

Once the play was done, we went back to camp, I made another couple attempts at shooting the sky, and we crawled back into our tent.

Here’s the photoset of the trip. Not much there yet, but it will grow as I continue to work my way through the photos.

Next: we continue down California to Carlsbad, just north of San Diego, by way of Fresno.

I don’t know how soon he’ll see this, as he and Mom are off on a big, five-month trip around the Lower 48, but today’s my dad’s birthday — I hope it’s a good one!