Vacation post #1
Dec. 23rd, 2004 04:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiperJust in case anyone was wondering, staying up all night for Longest Night and then flying three time zones across the country makes for major, and I mean major, exhaustion. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
solarbird and I pulled it off, but at the expense of keeling over for eleven hours of sleep once we finally made it to my brother's house. Here, however, is a summary of what's happened so far:
Tuesday morning really was kind of indistinct from Monday night, since we were up all night for the Solstice. We packed in small spurts just for the sake of staying awake, and managed to get everything assembled well before the airport shuttle was due to show up. The packing was a bit of an adventure by itself for me, just because I had to figure out how to pack a couple of presents for my brother's family and my clothing all together in the same bag. I wanted to bring an instrument--but that turned out to be unfeasible, since airlines have started getting anal about how much you can carry onto planes. And given a choice between my computer and my bouzouki, the computer won out. I did wind up packing a flute and my book of Irish flute tunes, just to have some kind of musical instrument with me, but other than that all I wound up packing aside from the presents for Marc's family were clothes, a few paperbacks, my laptop, and my handheld.
The shuttle showed up around 10am, and withrisu's help Dara and I staggered out to meet it with our luggage. Although the van had a "no smoking" sign up front, it stank of cigarette smoke. That part wasn't fun. But at least the driver was amiable, and chatted with us as he drove off to catch up his two other passengers: an old gentleman in Lake City, and a young woman over in Eastlake. The old fellow was going to Salt Lake City, the young woman to Boise, and we were going farthest, to Lexington.
E-ticket check-in went surprisingly easily. Neither of us were terribly pleased about being on a Northwest flight claiming to be a Continental flight, but at least we got our e-tickets printed up and our baggage checked in without difficulty. Security went quickly and without annoyance; we did have to take off our shoes, but neither of our bags were searched. The only vaguely vexing thing about the airport experience in Seattle was that Dara tried to get us a bite to eat--and as usual, we didn't have any real time to finish off what she got before we had to board.
I tried to start on one of the paperbacks on the flight: Every Secret Thing, a suspense novel by Laura Lippman. I like it so far, though I didn't make much of a dent in it. But it had one of those moments of language that I look for in a novel--a bit of a prologue from the point of view of a 13-year-old child, wherein the mother of another child holding a party is described as having a face like a difficult math problem, maybe even algebra. Most of the flight, though, was all about the sleeping. And about the Dara teasing me about my getting to have the window seat all the time. I think this must be a consequence of my being the one who orders the tickets, and I have a "window seat" preference set. Hee. Anyway, we slept for most of the flight, aside from when we woke up for the light lunch they served us.
In Detroit we had a bit of time to spare, so we didn't have to hurry from our arrival gate to our destination gate. The interesting thing about the Detroit airport was the monorail; Dara wanted to get on it, but we didn't have to go far enough to make the monorail practical. Still, it was kind of cool. While we waited to board the next flight, we ate a bit more snackage and mostly just tried to stay awake.
The flight to Lexington was more sleep. And a mostly empty flight, as it happened. The plane was smaller; again, I had a window seat, but Dara and I had a short row that time. And we got into Lexington around 10:30ish or so.
By then, the rain had already started up and we got quite damp venturing out of the terminal in search of our rental car. And unsurprisingly, the vehicle smelled like cigarette smoke. Bah.
About the only other amusing thing we noted that night was the new Kentucky license plates--the ones with a sunrise on them. From a distance, they are an attractive set of colors. Up close, however, I noticed that the rising sun had a smilie face on it--which made it look rather like a Teletubby sunrise.
Finding Marc's place was annoying. We had directions, but they were very difficult to read in the dark. And once we got out of Lexington proper, there was a lot of dark. Especially when we took Exit 95 off of I-75 and started trying to figure out where the heck to head after that. There were very few street lights and even fewer signs, so we got turned around several times before we finally figured out the right streets to follow. And we made it to Marc's house around midnight or so. Didi and Marc were awake to meet us, though the children were all well and thoroughly asleep.
We stayed up for a little longer chatting with Marc and Didi, holding out as long as we could, until we finally needed to fall into bed.
Dara and I had about eleven hours of sleep, bedding down in Charlie's room downstairs. Marc warned us that things would get noisy in the morning as they all got up to get the kids off to daycare, and Marc was right--but while that did wake us up for a while, it didn't keep us from falling right back asleep again.
By the time we regained consciousness it was closing in on 1pm. And since I decided it would be best to spend the first real day in Kentucky hanging out with Marc and his family, we chose to spend the afternoon doing very little besides a basic foray out to make sure we could follow Marc's saner directions back to the interstate and to pick up a few basic essentials at the nearest grocery store (which turned out to be several minutes away on said interstate). We had some lunch at a Chick-Fil-A, mostly because I wanted one of their Icedream thingies and we both wanted some of their waffle fries, and we picked up the aforementioned necessary essentials at the Meijer's across the street. All of this was around a shopping center called Hamburg Place, which is a huge sprawling interconnected network of parking lots, stores, and restaurants, and we had a devil of a time actually making our way back out of the place.
The Weather Channel claimed Cincinnati was getting slammed by snow and that a winter storm involving freezing rain, sleet, and ice was on its way to Lexington. Accordingly we decided we'd better head back to Marc's place reasonably quickly, and by the time we headed back, around 4ish, it was indeed starting to get colder and the rain was slacking off.
We got back to the house, at which point I tried to do a tiny bit of editing. I managed about six or seven words before Marc returned with the two youngest children--Lydia and Michelle--and Didi came back with Charlie and Amanda. The noise level of the house shot up significantly with the kids on hand, and the expected slew of demands for attention from the small ones kicked in as well.
Lydia started off less than sure about Dara and me, but once we showed her we could both do various amusing games, she got a lot more cheery about our presence. I suspect that before we finally leave on the 29th, I will have to play the Find Lydia Behind the Couch Pillows a few hundred more times.
Amanda actually remembered me from our last visit--and promptly hauled me off into her room to show me the Carmen Sandiego, Word Detective game she's been playing. She proceeded to explain to me that she knew where to put her fingers on the keyboard--apparently, they are teaching her class how to type in THIRD GRADE. Times have certainly changed.
Charlie more or less immediately went to playing games on his Gameboy, and registered his presence mostly by periodically yelling at no one in particular, "BE QUIET!" It seems Charlie's got ADHD, and he finds noise incredibly distracting when he's trying to play his games.
Marc and I wandered off to Wok'n'Go to get Chinese food for dinner, chatting a bit as we went about further plans for the holiday and our presence for the rest of the vacation: whether or not to take the older kids to a movie, whether relations from Louisville were coming down to see us, that kind of thing. And we came back with Mongolian Beef and Imperial Beef for us and the children, only to eventually discover that Amanda refused to eat the onions in her chicken fried rice and Charlie wanted to follow her example. The rest of the evening pretty much went to playing with the children, interspersed with chatting with their parents.
Further alerts about the weather kept coming in over the weather channel--and we got a call from Uncle Marion in Louisville, telling us they were getting fairly heavily slammed by snow and stuff, so we may or may not get to see him and Uncle Larry and Aunt Donna. We'll have to see what happens.
And we wound up with Marc whipping out his pride and joy: his collection of family lore he's been assembling over the last several years, including huge sprawling family trees that go back several generations into the late 1700's. He's got reams and reams of data: birth and death certificates, marriage licenses and bonds, military records, old clippings, and more. I found it fascinating to go over the family tree, especially for the sake of seeing the various odd names that cropped up here and there. One that stood out for me was an older brother of my grandpa: Robert Terrill Highland. The Terrill made me blink, as it's the name of a character out of Gael Baudino's Strands of Starlight. And another name that caught my eye was "Elender", who was apparently the third wife of another of my ancestors'; we don't know if that was a first name or a surname, but Dara thinks it should be a first name just because that's more likely to have gotten recorded for women in marriages back then.
But "Elender" looks to me like it should have come straight out of Tolkien, and I must really wonder what the derivation of that name is.
Marc told us about another ancestor who died young while in military service--he was transporting munitions, apparently, and wound up getting practically cut in half by whatever it was that happened. The fun part was that he was transporting stuff in a covered wagon. And another thing that blew me away was that Marc has old pictures of our grandparents on Dad's side--Grandpa Burgoyne and Grandma Ruth--which date clear back to their younger days. And I was floored to see the picture of my grandmother at a young age, because I'd never seen her that young before. She was something of a babe. :)
But Didi eventually wandered off to bed, and so did we, even though Marc freely admitted that he'd talk our ear off as long as he had a receptive audience. I'm really charmed that he does this--though I don't quite share his passion for the lore, I have enough of an appreciation for it that I think it's really cool that he's gathering all this stuff together. As he said to us, someone will eventually want this data, and he wants to be the one that has it.
Though Dara and I were still fairly alert and on Pacific time, we knew we had to get onto Kentucky time. So off to bed we went.
More in the next post!
solarbird and I pulled it off, but at the expense of keeling over for eleven hours of sleep once we finally made it to my brother's house. Here, however, is a summary of what's happened so far:Tuesday morning really was kind of indistinct from Monday night, since we were up all night for the Solstice. We packed in small spurts just for the sake of staying awake, and managed to get everything assembled well before the airport shuttle was due to show up. The packing was a bit of an adventure by itself for me, just because I had to figure out how to pack a couple of presents for my brother's family and my clothing all together in the same bag. I wanted to bring an instrument--but that turned out to be unfeasible, since airlines have started getting anal about how much you can carry onto planes. And given a choice between my computer and my bouzouki, the computer won out. I did wind up packing a flute and my book of Irish flute tunes, just to have some kind of musical instrument with me, but other than that all I wound up packing aside from the presents for Marc's family were clothes, a few paperbacks, my laptop, and my handheld.
The shuttle showed up around 10am, and with
risu's help Dara and I staggered out to meet it with our luggage. Although the van had a "no smoking" sign up front, it stank of cigarette smoke. That part wasn't fun. But at least the driver was amiable, and chatted with us as he drove off to catch up his two other passengers: an old gentleman in Lake City, and a young woman over in Eastlake. The old fellow was going to Salt Lake City, the young woman to Boise, and we were going farthest, to Lexington.E-ticket check-in went surprisingly easily. Neither of us were terribly pleased about being on a Northwest flight claiming to be a Continental flight, but at least we got our e-tickets printed up and our baggage checked in without difficulty. Security went quickly and without annoyance; we did have to take off our shoes, but neither of our bags were searched. The only vaguely vexing thing about the airport experience in Seattle was that Dara tried to get us a bite to eat--and as usual, we didn't have any real time to finish off what she got before we had to board.
I tried to start on one of the paperbacks on the flight: Every Secret Thing, a suspense novel by Laura Lippman. I like it so far, though I didn't make much of a dent in it. But it had one of those moments of language that I look for in a novel--a bit of a prologue from the point of view of a 13-year-old child, wherein the mother of another child holding a party is described as having a face like a difficult math problem, maybe even algebra. Most of the flight, though, was all about the sleeping. And about the Dara teasing me about my getting to have the window seat all the time. I think this must be a consequence of my being the one who orders the tickets, and I have a "window seat" preference set. Hee. Anyway, we slept for most of the flight, aside from when we woke up for the light lunch they served us.
In Detroit we had a bit of time to spare, so we didn't have to hurry from our arrival gate to our destination gate. The interesting thing about the Detroit airport was the monorail; Dara wanted to get on it, but we didn't have to go far enough to make the monorail practical. Still, it was kind of cool. While we waited to board the next flight, we ate a bit more snackage and mostly just tried to stay awake.
The flight to Lexington was more sleep. And a mostly empty flight, as it happened. The plane was smaller; again, I had a window seat, but Dara and I had a short row that time. And we got into Lexington around 10:30ish or so.
By then, the rain had already started up and we got quite damp venturing out of the terminal in search of our rental car. And unsurprisingly, the vehicle smelled like cigarette smoke. Bah.
About the only other amusing thing we noted that night was the new Kentucky license plates--the ones with a sunrise on them. From a distance, they are an attractive set of colors. Up close, however, I noticed that the rising sun had a smilie face on it--which made it look rather like a Teletubby sunrise.
Finding Marc's place was annoying. We had directions, but they were very difficult to read in the dark. And once we got out of Lexington proper, there was a lot of dark. Especially when we took Exit 95 off of I-75 and started trying to figure out where the heck to head after that. There were very few street lights and even fewer signs, so we got turned around several times before we finally figured out the right streets to follow. And we made it to Marc's house around midnight or so. Didi and Marc were awake to meet us, though the children were all well and thoroughly asleep.
We stayed up for a little longer chatting with Marc and Didi, holding out as long as we could, until we finally needed to fall into bed.
Dara and I had about eleven hours of sleep, bedding down in Charlie's room downstairs. Marc warned us that things would get noisy in the morning as they all got up to get the kids off to daycare, and Marc was right--but while that did wake us up for a while, it didn't keep us from falling right back asleep again.
By the time we regained consciousness it was closing in on 1pm. And since I decided it would be best to spend the first real day in Kentucky hanging out with Marc and his family, we chose to spend the afternoon doing very little besides a basic foray out to make sure we could follow Marc's saner directions back to the interstate and to pick up a few basic essentials at the nearest grocery store (which turned out to be several minutes away on said interstate). We had some lunch at a Chick-Fil-A, mostly because I wanted one of their Icedream thingies and we both wanted some of their waffle fries, and we picked up the aforementioned necessary essentials at the Meijer's across the street. All of this was around a shopping center called Hamburg Place, which is a huge sprawling interconnected network of parking lots, stores, and restaurants, and we had a devil of a time actually making our way back out of the place.
The Weather Channel claimed Cincinnati was getting slammed by snow and that a winter storm involving freezing rain, sleet, and ice was on its way to Lexington. Accordingly we decided we'd better head back to Marc's place reasonably quickly, and by the time we headed back, around 4ish, it was indeed starting to get colder and the rain was slacking off.
We got back to the house, at which point I tried to do a tiny bit of editing. I managed about six or seven words before Marc returned with the two youngest children--Lydia and Michelle--and Didi came back with Charlie and Amanda. The noise level of the house shot up significantly with the kids on hand, and the expected slew of demands for attention from the small ones kicked in as well.
Lydia started off less than sure about Dara and me, but once we showed her we could both do various amusing games, she got a lot more cheery about our presence. I suspect that before we finally leave on the 29th, I will have to play the Find Lydia Behind the Couch Pillows a few hundred more times.
Amanda actually remembered me from our last visit--and promptly hauled me off into her room to show me the Carmen Sandiego, Word Detective game she's been playing. She proceeded to explain to me that she knew where to put her fingers on the keyboard--apparently, they are teaching her class how to type in THIRD GRADE. Times have certainly changed.
Charlie more or less immediately went to playing games on his Gameboy, and registered his presence mostly by periodically yelling at no one in particular, "BE QUIET!" It seems Charlie's got ADHD, and he finds noise incredibly distracting when he's trying to play his games.
Marc and I wandered off to Wok'n'Go to get Chinese food for dinner, chatting a bit as we went about further plans for the holiday and our presence for the rest of the vacation: whether or not to take the older kids to a movie, whether relations from Louisville were coming down to see us, that kind of thing. And we came back with Mongolian Beef and Imperial Beef for us and the children, only to eventually discover that Amanda refused to eat the onions in her chicken fried rice and Charlie wanted to follow her example. The rest of the evening pretty much went to playing with the children, interspersed with chatting with their parents.
Further alerts about the weather kept coming in over the weather channel--and we got a call from Uncle Marion in Louisville, telling us they were getting fairly heavily slammed by snow and stuff, so we may or may not get to see him and Uncle Larry and Aunt Donna. We'll have to see what happens.
And we wound up with Marc whipping out his pride and joy: his collection of family lore he's been assembling over the last several years, including huge sprawling family trees that go back several generations into the late 1700's. He's got reams and reams of data: birth and death certificates, marriage licenses and bonds, military records, old clippings, and more. I found it fascinating to go over the family tree, especially for the sake of seeing the various odd names that cropped up here and there. One that stood out for me was an older brother of my grandpa: Robert Terrill Highland. The Terrill made me blink, as it's the name of a character out of Gael Baudino's Strands of Starlight. And another name that caught my eye was "Elender", who was apparently the third wife of another of my ancestors'; we don't know if that was a first name or a surname, but Dara thinks it should be a first name just because that's more likely to have gotten recorded for women in marriages back then.
But "Elender" looks to me like it should have come straight out of Tolkien, and I must really wonder what the derivation of that name is.
Marc told us about another ancestor who died young while in military service--he was transporting munitions, apparently, and wound up getting practically cut in half by whatever it was that happened. The fun part was that he was transporting stuff in a covered wagon. And another thing that blew me away was that Marc has old pictures of our grandparents on Dad's side--Grandpa Burgoyne and Grandma Ruth--which date clear back to their younger days. And I was floored to see the picture of my grandmother at a young age, because I'd never seen her that young before. She was something of a babe. :)
But Didi eventually wandered off to bed, and so did we, even though Marc freely admitted that he'd talk our ear off as long as he had a receptive audience. I'm really charmed that he does this--though I don't quite share his passion for the lore, I have enough of an appreciation for it that I think it's really cool that he's gathering all this stuff together. As he said to us, someone will eventually want this data, and he wants to be the one that has it.
Though Dara and I were still fairly alert and on Pacific time, we knew we had to get onto Kentucky time. So off to bed we went.
More in the next post!
no subject
Date: 2005-01-04 05:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-04 05:46 am (UTC)