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Sorry for the delay, but jaun’s been cray. Poetry, people. Make it happen in your life, today!

On Wednesday, we piled into the car with Grandma and headed to Glen Rose, Texas, to see Dinosaur Valley State Park, where they have some neat exhibits and several areas where you can go and look at petrified dinosaur footprints in small creek beds. Interesting and sad fact: the footprints are gently being eroded away by the same freeze/thaw cycle that tears up roadbeds and driveways, and will be pretty much gone in a matter of decades. They survived as long as they have by being covered by mud and silt, which gets washed away, exposing the soft limestone footprints to the elements.

After that we got great food at the Storiebook Cafe in “downtown” Glen Rose. They sell gourmet sandwiches and chips, along with used books and knick-knacks, and even have a small playroom chock full of toys for the children. I bought a book on Fermat’s Last Theorem, and nerded out on that a bit. Afterwards we returned to Waco, and Grandpa and Papaw and I hit a few hardware stores in search of a trap large enough to capture a squirrel, since they keep eating all of Grandpa’s birdfeed and he hates them.

For dinner, the whole Furrer clan (Sarah’s mom’s family) descended on the house for fajitas, and then we went down to Uncle Mike and Aunt Donna’s to look at their various animals, and got some nice fresh eggs for breakfast.
On Thursday we started our voyage home; spent the morning packing up the car, and didn’t end up getting on the road until close to 11:30. Having learned from our voyage down, I packed stuff in the roof carrier that we wouldn’t really need in hotel rooms, which made nightly stops easier. We also made sure to take plenty of long stops to stretch our legs and tire out the various and sundry children.

I hoped to make Little Rock, but didn’t want to go near Dallas, so we stuck to small roads, which mostly had 70mph speed limits but had to slow down occasionally for tiny towns. We made it into Arkansas by early evening and decided we’d had enough, so we stopped in Hope, the birthplace of one William Jefferson Clinton. I was very sad to discover that Hope is in a dry county, but managed to eat horrible Pizza Hut food while William yelled at us, and went back to sleep in a hotel room that smelt strongly of mildew. The next day could only be better, I figured.

On Friday we managed to get up and out super early, well before 7, and put a hundred miles behind us before stopping for gas and McDonalds breakfast. Rolled on through Little Rock and Memphis, and then stopped at a pretty shady truck stop (literally just a grassy place to park and a horribly foul bush that had been peed on by every long hauler in America, I suspect) to change William. In the early afternoon we arrived in Nashville, where we stopped at a Ted’s Montana Grill for steaks and mashed taters. We wanted to tire the kids a bit, so we found a McDonalds with a horrible, germ-filled play area, and got some coffee. Poor timing meant that we left Nashville during Friday afternoon rush hour, but that cleared pretty quickly and we finally stopped for the night just west of Knoxville.

On Saturday we were a little late going, but still put a few dozen miles behind us before stopping for breakfast. We continued up 81, finally heading east on 64 towards Richmond, but had to stop in Charlottesville to pee and get more fuel. We arrived in Richmond in the early evening and spent a nice night with Kyle and Kristy and their daughters, and got on the road Sunday afternoon for the last leg home. After doing almost all the driving up to that point, I stepped aside and let Sarah take the wheel, which was wise because we immediately hit horrible traffic precipitated by a bad accident around Fredericksburg, VA. We made it home around 7pm and managed to get the car unloaded and cleaned out before crashing hard.

Texas and back is a long way to drive, is all I’m saying.

If you missed the first part (how could you let that happen?), it is to be found here.

Thursday was sight-seeing day with the older 2/3 of my various and sundry children. We went into town to go to Fort Mason and look it over, and ran into a nice gentleman who was working on some renovations and exhibits, and who told us a bit about it. He expressed surprise that we’d driven all the way from Delaware, and then realized that they didn’t have any Delawareans in the visitor book and became very excited to have checked that item off his bucket list. After that, we drove into the town square and visited a small museum that containing a large Kettner family tree in it, including mention of yours truly. After that we headed down to a larger museum in the old town grammar school, where we were immediately accosted by an elderly gentleman who had apparently been waiting for just this moment for decades. I think he actually brushed cobwebs off himself as he stood. I was able to use the excuse of corralling the children to escape him, but poor Sarah was trapped listening to his spiel for well over 20 minutes, long after the kids and I had gone outside to run around and burn off some energy. (There was a small playground with a large walking track, at least 1/8 of a mile, and I told Charles I’d time him running it, which was a stroke of genius.)

We had lunch at a small burger place in town and then headed back to the ranch to relax for a bit. The afternoon we spent swimming at Fred and Joan’s, and then they fed us fajitas and beer. Pretty fantastic way to spend an evening.

Sarah’s cousins Deborah and Jill, who had been in town with their kids to visit with us, needed to head back to their homes in West Texas and New Mexico, but they stopped by on Friday morning to say goodbye. After that Sarah and her mom went into town for a bit of knick-knack shopping, after which we did some more swimming and napping. That evening, Grandpa and Charles and I drove down to the Eckert James River Bat Cave to watch the millions of bats emerge and fly off into the evening sky; there are pictures below, and a totally choice video that’s kinda Zapruder-esque:

The bats emerge every evening, somewhere around sundown, from roughly May to September (when they migrate to their winter residences south of the border). If I recall correctly there are between 2 and 8 million of them, depending on time of year; the site is essentially a “maternity ward,” full of pregnant females and their pups. As the evening wears on, you start to see “scouts” come out, lone bats that appear to judge the conditions (temperature, sunlight, availability of bugs), and they’ll fly back to apparently report to the others. After a few minutes the entire roost will emerge in one long tornado stream. The vortex of the spinning stream of bats sucks air out of the cave, and along with it an unbelievable ammonia smell from the guano, which coats the floor of the cave to a depth of several inches.

On Saturday we arose fairly early to head to Fredericksburg, a nearby town that is the historic center of the large German migration to Texas in the 19th century. Sarah’s dad edited a book of his ancestor’s letters home to Germany, and he gave a short talk to some interested history nerds in the Vereins Kirche, the original town church, now a museum. After that we walked the streets of Fredericksburg a bit, and went to a spectacular Mexican restaurant named Hilda’s.

Josephine fell asleep in the car on the way back to Mason, and she was in dire need of the nap, so I dropped off the rest of the family and drove around Mason County a bit to snap some pictures, below. After that, we spent the afternoon packing and preparing to drive to Waco the next day. I did get an opportunity to fire Grandpa’s hunting rifle, and I continue to be a good shot. I’ve decided I need a hunting rifle and an opportunity to use it. We had chicken fried steak at the Walnut Creek Cafe in town, and then I had a brief chance to go wander around with my .22 rifle and hunt jackrabbits, but saw nothing but deer.

We didn’t get on the road the next day until close to noon, but did so and headed roughly northeast towards Waco. The sky grew ominous, and sure enough, after we stopped for gas and snacks, opened up with a torrential downpour that actually had us turning the blinkers on and driving about 25mph on a 70mph roadway. I couldn’t see more than 25 feet in front of me. Eventually I noticed that the sky to the north seemed lighter, so I turned off in that direction and waited for the GPS to catch up. It took us a little while to wend our way around the north side of Waco but we eventually arrived at Mamaw and Papaw’s at around 3:30pm.

We spent the rest of the evening visiting with the family, but I really want to share the recipe for a blackberry buckle that Sarah’s Aunt Donna made that consists of three ingredients:
Vanilla Cake Mix (one box)
Frozen blackberries (2 bags)
Sprite (one can)
Stir it together in a baking dish and throw it in a 350 degree oven for 45-50 minutes and then wonder why nobody ever thought of it before.

On Monday, we needed to get the crazy out of Charles and Josephine, so we decided to wander into downtown Waco and see the sights. First we stopped by Baylor University to see the bear enclosure, but the only bear was asleep inside her den and barely (bearly?) visible. We wandered through the Baylor bookstore but decided the only way we’d spend $35 on a ballcap was if we were Baylor Alumni, wealthy, and drunk.

After that we decided to go to the Cameron Park Zoo, which I highly recommend. As members of the Brandywine Zoo, they let us in free, and when we went to buy some hot dogs from a vendor towards closing time, she gave them to us for free because otherwise they’d just throw them out. We got to see a bunch of extremely awesome animals (including lions, gibbons, tigers, and elephants), and had a nice snack, for the price of two ice cream sandwiches.

On Tuesday we visited with some church friends of Mamaw and Papaw, and then we took Josephine and Charles to the Mayborn Museum on the Baylor campus, which is a great hands-on experience for kids. Lots of buttons to push, dials to spin, things to draw on, trains to operate, cars to drive, etc. It’s like the Delaware Children’s Museum, except cheaper and bigger (obviously the University helps subsidize some of the cost, and I suspect they have a substantial endowment that the DCM can’t hope to have). After that, we had dinner at a “Catfish King,” a cafeteria-style seafood joint, where I ate enough seafood to make my burps taste like mercury.

Next time: a few more days in Waco, and the trip back to La Casa.

I’ve travelled with children a number of times. There’s no easy way to do it, and more importantly, no easy age. When they’re infants, you can usually time activities and road time around naps, but you still have to stop frequently to feed and diaper them; when flying, you may find yourself changing a particularly disgusting diaper while actually holding the child in your lap and the poor fellow next to you in a cheap business suit is praying he doesn’t get peed upon. As they get older, they can fend for themselves a bit more, but they still have small bladders and unreliable tempers, so you still deal with stopping every 2 hours or trying to bribe them to stop kicking the seat of the guy in front of them who may or may not have just drunk 3 tiny bottles of Absolut and taken a Xanax and is still white-knuckling the armrests, poor devil.

This is why when I looked at prices to fly 5 people to Texas this summer, and realized it was going to cost $2000 just getting to the city at which we would then have to spend another $1500 to rent a minivan to haul us around, I said “let’s just road trip this beotch.” (That is a direct quote.) One of the driving forces behind our recent automotive purchase was making sure we had a nice set of fly wheels that could get us to Texas and back (instead of taking my 1998 Dodge Caravan with broken air conditioning). Everyone said we were crazy, but I knew if we had a nice roof storage tub and a fresh change of oil, we could easily knock out a 4,000 mile round trip road cruise with no problems, because my children are well-behaved, mild-tempered, and all-around great kids who would never dream of hitting each other with pillows in the backseat when they were supposed to be napping and if you kids don’t settle down I’m going to stop the car and beat you with an empty Pringles can, now stop antagonizing each other and watch the damn video!

The Friday before we left, we got a babysitter to come over and entertain the kids while we packed, organized, repacked, cursed a lot, and eventually opened a bottle of wine. In hindsight, we should have gotten her to come back Saturday morning, because all efforts to actually get the car fully loaded were interrupted every 3 minutes by one child or another demanding food or attention.

“Mom, where’s my baseball cap?”

“In the car, packed.”

“Can I have it, please?”

“No, you can’t have it, it’s packed!”

“Why not?”

“BECAUSE WE’RE TRYING TO LEAVE PLEASE STOP BOTHERING ME.”

2 minutes later:
“Mommy, can I have a snack?”

“Did you finish your apple?”

“No.”

“Well, where is it?”

“Where is what?”

“THE APPLE.”

“I don’t know.”

“GO FIND IT.”

2 minutes later:

“Mom, Josephine has apple in her hair!”

“OMG STOP TALKING TO ME.”

As the morning wore on, it seemed less and less likely that we’d make it to our first hotel reservation (Bristol, Virginia, about 480 miles). Finally, at around 9:30, we headed out of the driveway as I muttered “Next time we’re fricking flying.” That’s right, America, I’d gotten surly and regretful not even 15 seconds into a 3-day road trip.

I wanted to get away from the I-95 corridor as quickly as I possibly could, so we skirted around Baltimore on I-695 and picked up I-70 towards Frederick, where we stopped and had a very fine picnic lunch. I’d like to go back someday; it’s a neat little small town, fairly hilly, lots of brick buildings. We didn’t spend much time on the main street but it seemed like it had a number of fun little shops and restaurants. Awfully nice place to spend a weekend at a B&B, I bet. But, we had promises to keep and miles to go before we’d sleep, so we continued west towards Harpers Ferry, where I thought we could kill a little time looking at Civil War history and stretching our legs, and add another state to the list of ones we visited on the trip. That’s when we hit Traffic, with a capital T. Not just “volume,” or “a mild slowdown,” but absolute dead stop. After waiting a few minutes and going no more than 15 feet, I took advantage of an emergency vehicle turnaround and headed back whence we’d come. Found a tiny road heading south, and did some meandering, eventually cutting back over to I-81 for the real haul of the trip. (We never did get into West Virginia. Oh, well.)

I-81 is a long-ass highway; 823 miles from Tennessee to Canada, and more than a third of that is in Virginia. Storms the previous day had knocked out power for much of it, making pee breaks complicated: gas stations were mostly closed, so we peed by the side of the road more than once. Shortly after we got onto I-81, at Natural Bridge, Virginia, we happened upon this amusing sight:

We hit another big traffic jam shortly after that, because someone had rolled an SUV into the ditch in the median. As we drove by, paramedics were working on some poor soul lying flat on the road nearby. Shortly after that we had to get gas, and lucked into a station that still had power. I filled it up and asked any of the kids if they had to pee, and they did not, so of course we had to stop not even 10 miles later for Charles to pee by the side of the road again. The late afternoon travel was difficult (it always was, we found as time wore on); William was very tired and irritable, and he’d drift off to sleep for a few minutes only to have Charles poke or pinch Josephine, who would scream a the top of her lungs and wake everybody up. After a few iterations of this, William simply took to crying and screaming as loudly as he could, and we had to stop to change him and get him calmed down.

We finally reached Bristol at about dinner time, and we got Chick-Fil-A (this was just prior to the whole Dan Cathy gay marriage uproar, although honestly I still felt guilty about it later because Chick-Fil-A is so delicious) and lounged by the pool for a while. We got to sleep around 10pm, but then William awoke around 11:30 and simply would not be calmed. I had to actually go and drive him around a little to get him back to sleep.

Our plan had been to try and get to the hotel as quickly as possible, stopping only as necessary along the way, but that made everyone pretty much miserable for the duration of the ride, and the extra time spent at the hotel wasn’t particularly fun either. We decided that the next day’s travel would start earlier and end later, but feature lots of long breaks. To that end, we got up around 6:30, got our free continental breakfast and some cheap coffee, and got on the road around 8:30, passing into Tennessee. By 10am, everyone in the car had to pee, so we pulled off at Gatlinburg and spent some time exploring a little visitors center. Sarah had snagged some Krispy Kreme when we got gas on the way out of Bristol, so we enjoyed those on the visitor center’s front porch, and had Charles and Josephine race each other from one end of the porch to the other. I liked the look of Gatlinburg, and really thought it might be nice to drive up into the mountains a bit and look for bears, but we didn’t really have time. I promised myself we’d try and do it on the way back, but of course we were even more rushed then and had to skip it.

Our next destination was Chattanooga. I had done a little googlin’ and discovered they had a nifty railroad museum, and knowing Josephine’s love of all things trainular we planned to get there around lunchtime and wander a bit. We didn’t announce ahead of time where we were going, so once we got there Josephine flipped out (“TRAINS! TRAINS! WHERE’S THOMAS?”). She was actually a little frightened to see exactly how big the engines and rolling stock were, and didn’t want to get very close to the enormous black steam locomotive you can see in the gallery below. She did climb up into some of the passenger cars, though. They had a functioning train on a short loop line, but we didn’t think that was the most effective use of our time, so we just went into the museum to look at a few things. Josephine, of course, was most intrigued by a pamphlet advertising Thomas the Tank Engine, who would be visiting later in the year. We managed to drag her away from there to get an awfully expensive lunch and glance through the gift shop, and then we waved goodbye to the trains and got back on the road.

After a short time we entered Alabama, the first state on our trip that I’d never been through before. My original hope was that we’d get as far as Tuscaloosa, where’d we stop for the night before pushing on towards New Orleans the next day. We realized that a detour to New Orleans would pretty much add an entire 4th day to our travels, so we decided against that, but still managed to reach Tuscaloosa fairly early in the evening because of the time change entering Alabama. We stopped at a Buffalo Wild Wings for dinner, and decided we’d head on towards Meridian, Mississippi, where we once again spent the night at a La Quinta (reward points, y’all!).

The next day we arose early but found that the breakfast was very picked-over and still full of travellers, so we hit up a McD’s on the way out of town and headed west. We stopped in Vicksburg, on the Mississippi River, where we played a bit at a small park and took pictures of neat things at the waterfront (including a big flood levee with marks on it indicating where recent floods had crested). We continued west, but only got to Monroe, Louisiana, before William got antsy, so we stopped in another McDonalds to get a hearty lunch. After that we continued to Shreveport, where we made a gas and potty stop, and Sarah nearly murdered everyone in the gas station because they had no changing tables in either bathroom and she had to change William next to the sink. I have a motto: if a place is so backward that they don’t have a changing table in the men’s room, I do it out in the middle of the establishment in view of as many people as possible, the message being, “Hey, if you don’t like seeing baby dicks, then maybe splurge the few hundo and get a fold-out changing table in the bathroom, idiots.” I keep hoping that a restaurant manager will say something to me about it, but in 6+ years of changing diapers everybody’s pretty much kept mum. Perhaps they know I’ll fling a diaper at them.

Eventually we got into Texas, to the great glee of the younger passengers, who of course didn’t understand why weren’t at Grandma and Grandpa’s yet. (Josephine developed the amusing habit of constantly saying “This is TEXAS?” for nearly two weeks; she couldn’t imagine how we could leave a place, drive for 2-3 hours, reach another place, and not have left the state. That’s a born and raised Delawarean, right there.) I myself experienced great glee when I realized that even the small two-lane roads (I deliberately avoided the interstates because they suck) had 70mph speed limits, aside from the occasional small town. A fully-loaded Mazda CX-9 can still pass slower traffic very effectively, it turns out. Around dinner time, we found ourselves in Crockett, Texas, where we stopped in at a “Whataburger” and had a pretty solid meal and some fine southern hospitality. The hotel options in town consisted of 3-4 really shady trucker motels, and a Holiday Inn Express, which had no vacancy. I don’t know what attracted people to Crockett, TX, on a Sunday in early July, but it apparently was a popular town that weekend. After a few calls I determined that another hotel in Centerville, about an hour west, had space. We went to a Sonic to use their playground and got two cups of truly horrible “coffee” (it was so bad that Sarah actually refused to drink hers…more for me!), and then continued on our way.

We reached Centerville at about 9pm, by which time all the kids were asleep. I pointed out that we were only 2.5-3 hours from Mason; why go to the trouble and expense of staying the night in a hotel when we could just push on while everyone slept and get to our destination around midnight? Sarah agreed, with reservations, so we continued. William, of course, spent the next 90 minutes alternately sleeping and screaming. I stopped on the side of the road near Eddy to pee, and then found myself on I-35 heading south with 75mph speed limits and enough caffeine in my system to give a horse a coronary. I felt like I was steering an X-wing down a canyon on the first Death Star. I’m pretty sure some of the cars behind me were shooting lasers, but I managed to dodge them and keep rolling. Just north of Austin, I continued west, but had to lessen my speed a bit because I kept seeing (or hallucinating) deer on the side of the road. We reached Mason at 11:57pm, at which point of course everyone woke back up and we didn’t get to sleep until after 2am.

William was up early the next morning, which awoke Charles and Sarah; I got up shortly thereafter in time to see Grandpa’s brother, Uncle Fred, come by with Aunt Joan and a whole crew of cousins and dogs and four-wheelers and pickup trucks. Charles hopped on the back of a four-wheeler with his cousin Jacob, and headed off to fish. Josephine slept in for quite some time, which was a blessing to all. Sarah and her mom went into Mason to do Zumba; they returned at the same time as the fishing crew, and I went off with all of them to admire a very large tree that somehow I managed to get no pictures of at all. We had lunch, and then Sarah and her mom went grocery shopping in town. After that we went to Fred and Joan’s to use their lovely swimming pool and eat their watermelon, and then came back to Grandpa’s house for spaghetti dinner and bed.

On Wednesday we started the day with pancakes and sausage (my plan to stick to my Intermittent Fasting diet had been pretty much discarded on day 2 of our trip), and then Charles and I went to do some fishing with a rod and reel that Uncle Fred left for us. The only bait we had on hand were small frogs jumping around by the pond; Uncle Fred caught them by hitting them with his hat, so I did the same, which left annoying mud stains on my bright red Phillies cap. Once stunned, a small frog will not resist much as you stick a hook through it. Oddly, I was not grossed out by this. Charles’s casting skills left much to be desired; within a few minutes he’d managed to catch the hook in my pinky, which didn’t do much damage but which did break the line. I, because I’m an idiot, compounded the problem by trying to pry the lead weight off the broken line with a pocket knife and slicing my left forefinger open at the top. I went back up to get a band-aid and was handed a small mason jar of live katydids by my father-in-law, who advised us to use them as bait, and here I have to admit: I was too much of a wuss. They’re just big grasshoppers, but I couldn’t tell if the big thing on the back was a stinger, or how you could manage to grab just one out of the jar without the rest getting away, so I stuck to frogs, which might pee on you but which didn’t normally bite or sting. We caught no fish.

In the late morning we took the kids back to Fred and Joan’s for a swim, and then went back home for lunch and naps. I was able to go out with the .22LR rifle that Grandpa’d given me for my birthday last winter and demonstrate my excellent sharpshooting skeelz (see evidence below). In the evening, we went to Grandpa’s cousin Joan’s house (a different Joan than his sister-in-law, obviously, but I thought I’d make sure you weren’t confused), where she and her husband Richard had put together a fantastic barbecue meal. Richard takes his BBQ seriously; he has a few of his own smokers, and when he and Joan shoot deer in the fall he makes some of the venison into fantastic smoked sausage, which I ate entirely too much of. They also had nice brisket, and some potato salad, and some of the best dill pickles I’ve ever had. After dinner we enjoyed looking at the stars, and the kids ran around and played with glow sticks.

Next time (hopefully not 3 weeks hence): we visit forts and bat caves, and head to Waco to look for bears and dinosaur tracks.

Sarah and I went to Baltimore last weekend. Short version? Hella fun. Long version? Here we go:

We got up with Charles on Saturday morning at his usual time, aka 0-dark-30. We played with him a good bit, he jumped on my belly, I almost threw up, just laughs galore. Meanwhile, Sarah got all packed up and ready to go, and then dropped Charles off with her parents whilst I showered, did a little ironing, and packed.

She got back, we both used the bathroom like responsible adults, and got on the road. We were in East Baltimore in just over an hour, which was pretty remarkable, both the speed of the drive as well as East Baltimore itself. The place goes very suddenly from “horrifically seedy” to “heck of yuppie” in approximately a block, something we were to discover later in our walking travels.

We found reasonable parking ($20 for 24 hours) near our hotel, got checked in, and decided our best option for fun and frolic was to go to Fell’s Point. We had in fact selected our hotel in the belief that it was reasonably near Fell’s Point, but it was technically closest to the Inner Harbor. Either way, everything was pretty much in walking distance. So we hoofed it into Fell’s.

We expected to see a bunch of fun little shops and restaurants, and while there were a few of the former and a bunch of the latter, what there was more than anything else was bars. Sadly, few of them were my speed (quiet, probably expensive, full of dapper gentlemen in ascots and expensive sports coats and plasticine blondes with large white teeth), but we ventured into one that we had a coupon for from our hotel package, mostly because Sarah had to pee. It was named Max’s Taproom, and it was unpleasant. Loud, filled with post-graduate D-bags, and featuring skanky waitresses attempting to cash in on Hooters-style garb.

Hooters sounds like a great idea on paper; decent food, particularly good wings, and hot waitresses wandering around in tight clothing delivering the grub. Unfortunately, in practice, you leave the place unsatisfied. I’ve never been served by a waitress at a Hooters that had, you know, Hooters. They try and synthesize them by wearing brassieres that would be tight on a Chinese gymnast, but meh. Plus they wear enough makeup that you really have no idea what their facial features look like. Is that a mole, or a goiter? Who can say? And Max’s had nothing but Hooters cast-offs. It was depressing.

HW drained her urine tank and we scuttled out of there without having purchased a drink, for which I felt guilty a bit, until I had to scrape my feet on the sidewalk a few times to remove nasty beer stickum. We went across the street to the Greene Turtle to cool our heels, as we had more discount coupons for that. Went inside, saw a waitress who invited us to sit wherever, we said we’d be outside at a table that just opened up, and she said she’d be right out. So we sat outside for ten minutes until she finally poked her out of a nearby door and said, “Has anybody helped you?”

“No, not since you said you’d be right out,” I didn’t say.

“Not yet!” I actually said, cheerily, because I find in life that there is absolutely no sense in irritating someone who could spit herpes simplex-laden saliva into your drink if she senses her tip will be anything less than 25%.

The coupons specified that we could get a two-for-one drink deal if we ordered identical drinks, and this is where the complexity began: I have decided, as a result of tipping the scales north of 250 pounds, to go back on the low-carb diet. The only booze you can have (and they don’t recommend you have any) is straight stuff, because theoretically all the carbs in it have been turned to alcohol, which I guess doesn’t count as carbs for whatever reason despite the fact that it’s still pure calories. Whatever. Sarah agreed to drink whatever I planned to order, so I got us two vodka martinis. Then I drank hers, because she thought it tasted like brake fluid. I think she then ordered a beer. Might have been a rum-and-Coke. I honestly do not recall vividly, because if you’re keeping score I’d had most of two vodka martinis to this point.

I had a third, while we enjoyed some wings, and then asked for the bill. We had to do a bit of haggling with the check; the first time she brought it to us, none of our discounts had been added. The second time, the discounts had been applied to the wrong drink (costing us $3, but hey man, that’s three double cheeseburgers), but the third time, all was well, so I threw some cash at the bill and we went a-wandering yet again.

We tried to find some shops and things to look at, but aside from a gallery of photographs that were retouched to look like paintings (which I guess qualifies as art, in the same way that Photoshop-filtered puppy pictures are art) and a jewelry store where HW bought me a nice silver ring, there wasn’t much. Just bar after bar filled with drunks. Not that I’m much complaining; I’d had three martinis, after all, after not having had a drink in about a week, and was walking on air, or would have been had I not been so fat that the air was unwilling to support my heft.

We wandered north up Broadway a bit, and were bemused to discover that the quality of shops went from “10% off summer Silver” to “25% off all Hemp wear!” to “75% of weavs” in about a block. North of that, there be monsters. We came about smartly and headed back south.

After walking some more blisters into our feet, we decided to find a place to eat, and here was where the brilliant luck occurred: we had another coupon from our hotel good for $50 off of any one of three restaurants, and so we selected “Kali’s Garden,” which sadly has no website other than a few google links that seem to think it’s a Middle Eastern restaurant, which it is most definitely not.

Kali’s Garden is gourmet American cuisine done right. A good dose of seafood, of course; I had raw oysters that were YUMMMMMM, and bouillabaisse that was disappointing, although I don’t think that was the restaurant’s fault as much as me realizing that I don’t much care for bouillabaisse. Sarah had a filet that was like butter, although filet is rather hard to screw up. Even my incompetent hands can cook tenderloin to a state of scrumptiousness.

The service was, as you might expect at a place charging upwards of $32 for a basic entree, spectacular and friendly. Sarah closed the meal with crème brûlée that was quite fantastic, although again it’s difficult to screw up, while I polished off my 7th martini of the day and a free glass of champagne. Then we stumbled back to the hotel.

It was early yet, only about 7:30pm; we were tired of walking, but still too ramped up to sleep. So we wandered the Inner Harbor, did a spate of shopping (we bought a little wind-up crab for Charles, which he inexplicably hates because once it’s wound up, it can’t be turned off), and decided the sensible thing to do was go back to the hotel and get more drinks.

The hotel featured three on-site establishments: a Ruth’s Chris franchise, something called “McCormick and Schmicks” or something like that (it seemed profoundly shady, and we avoided it) and a small bistro called “My Panini.” We figured our best shot at cheap fare was at My Panini, particularly since we discovered it had a functioning bar. We wandered in and sat, and a nice gentleman handed us two menus. We decided what we wanted to snack on and drink, and waited for service.

And waited.

And waited a weeeee bit longer.

Finally a breathless young man came over, apologized profusely, took our drink and food orders, and then sprinted back to the bar and disappeared. We watched the bartender, not 15 feet from us, pour our drinks and sit them on the edge of the bar to get nice and warm, and waited for our waiter, who finally came back and delivered my salad (disappointing) and the drinks. We drank those and chatted, and he came back after a bit to get a further order, which we gave him, and he disappeared, such that we finally tired of waiting and simply got up to the bar to get our own drinks and place our own orders. On the plus side, we didn’t get charged for something like 3 of the 5 drinks we had, so I didn’t undertip too harshly.

We headed back upstairs and passed out like a hurricane.

The next morning, we planned to go see the Maryland Science Center, so we chugged some tylenol against our staggering hangovers and went downstairs to My Panini (where we were eligible for free breakfast) to fortify ourselves. We were told upon entrance that our coupons were good for a free cold breakfast, which amounted to cereal and fruit (neither of which I could eat), or $5 off of the hot breakfast, bringing the price down to $6.99 per person, plus drinks, which were exorbitant: $2.19 for a cup of coffee that tasted of seawater? What is this insanity?

My Panini, I’ll say this once, and you should listen: suck it. Your prices are ridiculous, the food is disappointing, and your service is an abomination before the Lord.

After this disheartening experience, we decided that the Maryland Science Center was too great a task for the day, so we decided to wander the Inner Harbor in daylight, do some more shopping, take some pictures of various ocean-going vessels, and partake of as many tasty snacks as we could. It was a limited success; there were certainly plenty of people wandering around, though many of them were bums hassling the tourists for “spare” change. We did get to “enjoy” a “juggler” who did a minimum of juggling and a maximum of insulting his audience in a way that was 10% funny and 90% awkward. I’m glad he spent the first 5 minutes of his act reminding everyone that he’d appeared on Jay Leno and David Letterman and yet had time to come down and do his routine for the moron tourists of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. That really made us want to open our wallets. I don’t think the guy made 50 cents all day, which is definitely not nearly as good as when the Y-chromes went to Baltimore my senior year and did an impromptu five-song concert in the middle of the…campus? whatever it is- and netted a small fortune, enough to keep us pretty much hammered the rest of the day, which was a spectacular idea since we had a concert that evening and I ended up throwing up on a frat couch at the after-party and got everybody kicked out.

But that is another story for another time.

Once we got our fill of wandering, we tried to find a nice little bistro for snacks, but unfortunately there’s nothing in the Inner Harbor but chain restaurants, so we settled for a Houlihan’s where we had Diet Cokes and mediocre spinach dip.

And then we drove home.