August 6, 2008
House of 1833
More pics of the House of 1833
My new favourite place in the world is a B&B called The House of 1833 in Mystic, Connecticut. Mystic is almost directly north of the eastern tip of Long Island. From New York City, you can either drive along the mainland, or go directly east until you run out of Long Island, and then catch a ferry across to Connecticut. We decided on the latter.
We left Manhattan about 11:30am on a Friday. It took us half an hour just to get from the rental agency on 31st and 7th to the midtown tunnel, and another two and a half hours to get to the far end of the Long Island. We stopped at the town of Greenport, just fifteen minutes short of the ferry terminal at Orient Point. I’d made a reservation for the 4:00pm sailing so we had plenty of time for a late lunch at a place called Claudio’s on the Greenport marina. The crossing to New London took about an hour and twenty minutes and was fueled, on our part at least, by gooey chocolate chip cookies. From there it was another twenty minutes to the House of 1833 about 3 miles north of Mystic proper.
At the B&B the next morning we talked to a couple who had left New York about the same time we had. They took the interstate along the mainland and it took them about the same amount of time it took us, mainly because of traffic. I suspect we had a more enjoyable trip.
The hosts of 1833 are Robert and Evan. Evan is a charming, talkative man who greeted us with sherry and fresh-baked cookies, then took us on a tour of the house. It is one of those B&B’s that is jam-packed with Stuff. Evan told us about much of the Stuff. I remember being entertained at the time but none of it stuck in my head, which, come to think of it, is how much of my schooling went as a child.
One thing I do remember him telling us about is the Jacuzzi in our room. “It’s the largest rectangular one they make,” he said. “And it has a two and a half horsepower motor for the jets and another one and a half horsepower motor just to keep the water at an even temperature.”
“Fantastic!” I said. “Do you mind if we take it downstairs and take it for a spin around the pool?”
“I absolutely insist,” he said. “The Jacuzzi is there to use as you wish. But you may want to try out our sea-monster instead. It’s already down there and much lighter to carry around. We’ve also got a turtle and a giant lobster.”
After we checked in we made a bee-line for the pool and, sure enough, found a sea monster, a turtle, and a giant lobster stacked in a pile. These were inflatable toys big enough for us to ride around on in the pool. Vicki and I had a couple of races. Two lengths of the pool astride the plastic sea creature of our choice. I won the first race. She won the second.
That evening we went for dinner at the Captain Daniel Packer Inn in Mystic. Robert and Evan happened to be going into town and they kindly offered to give us a ride. The car was very comfortable, perhaps because the backseat was carpeted in a thick layer of dog hair.
The restaurant had a warm friendly feel. Shortly after sitting down I was hit in the foot with a chunk of lobster shell. This served as an introduction to our neighbours at the next table. However, I don’t think this is a traditional means of breaking the ice in Mystic. Later in the evening I eavesdropped on a couple of silver-haired gentleman intent on hooking up with a table of four foxy ladies born only a decade or two later than they were. If the lobster ploy had been a common one, I feel sure they would have used it. Instead, they employed the time-honoured technique of leaning on the ladies’ table and making shouted small talk until a waiter asked them to return to their seats.
Once there, they had a few dozen more drinks and plotted their next move. One typical chat-up line they rehearsed was “Would you like to get dinked in a dingy?”
The next morning we experienced another great aspect of the House of 1833 – the breakfast. We started with peach cobbler and slices of melon followed by a choice of two quiches: a Mexican quiche and a spinach and cheese quiche served with delicious home fries. Robert made the quiches with rice flour as one of the guests was gluten-intolerant. I had a bit of both and then another bit of both and then some more home fries. It was perhaps the best B&B breakfast I’ve ever had.
What else? It had free WiFi, and there was a little mini fridge by the kitchen with complementary bottles of water and cans of pop for the guests. Monopoly and Scrabble and other games were available in the lounge. There is a tennis court. And the town of Mystic and surrounding area promised many cool attractions which we didn’t get a chance to indulge in. There is apparently a beautiful Victorian music hall in nearby East Haddam which specializes in American musicals. Both Man a la Mancha and Annie premiered here.
But the main attraction was the warm, welcoming attitude of Evan and Robert. I truly felt they had welcomed us as friends.
Posted by YandaMan at 12:05 AM | Comments (0)
July 31, 2008
Napping in New York
I’m on holiday and a wee bit tired. The day before yesterday, I forgot my wallet at work. At the time I didn’t know where I’d forgotten it. All I knew was that it wasn’t where I expected it to be. Maybe I hadn’t forgotten it at all. Maybe I had been pick-pocketed. Admittedly, this was unlikely as I was wearing lycra, but possible.
As I was due to get on a flight to New York the next day, I hightailed it back to work to find it, which I did, which was good news. However, it meant I spent a total of four hours on the bike that day (80km), the last 2 hours of which was when I had been planning to pack etc, so this had a knock-on effect as far as getting to sleep etc.
Work was typically busy the next day. My last action before fleeing the premises for 10 days was to bang out an email which will no doubt have caused conniptions to be had and palpitations to be palpated and fans to be hit with excrement. Sometimes these things just can’t be avoided. I suspect it will all be for the greater good in the long run, and neither the timing nor the conniptions were premeditated. In fact, a bit more pre-meditation and thought on my part may have prevented any conniptions, but oh well, what’s the point of living if you don’t get folks’ blood to the boiling point every now and then.
Immediately following the conniption-spawning, I hightailed it to Heathrow’s new Terminal Five which is basically a posh shopping mall. Following my wife’s strict instructions, I had a cocktail and a snack at the new Gordon Ramsay restaurant while I waited for my gate to be announced on the board by the bar.
The flight was fine. I watched two and three quarter movies and envied the group of young trendy Italians surrounding me who managed to become best friends with the steward despite, or perhaps because of, their almost constant calls for more wine, pillows, headsets, and more wine. I might have tried to insinuate myself into their party except that I was buffered by a scary woman with a bouffant hairdo and wobbly arms who obviously disapproved of them.
My only disappointment on the journey was that we landed before I could watch the end of the great Will Ferrell epic, Semi-Pro. The Italians and the riveting cinema meant that I didn’t get much sleep on the flight.
And so, today, the first day of my great adventure in the City that Doesn’t Sleep, has been spent mostly napping.
Posted by YandaMan at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)
November 23, 2003
Geeks in Vegas
I’m back from ApacheCon in Vegas now. The dude in the star trek uniform is Ken Coar, one of the directors of the Apache Software Foundation. I noticed when I looked at his site today that he has a link to the National Rifle Association on it. It’s a bit disconcerting that he’s aiming a phaser at my head.
You know, thinking about the whole American 2nd amendment Right-to-Bear-Arms thing, maybe the reason the U.S. spends so much on its military (6 times more than any other nation on earth) is that its citizens are so well-armed. The whole point of the 2nd amendment, as I understand it, is so that U.S.citizens can take up arms against their own central government if they find themselves as oppressed as they were under the British. Naturally, if you were a central government, you’d be a bit paranoid about making sure you can protect yourself when and if the peasants storm the gates of the castle.
I can’t say I’m a big fan of Vegas. I think it’s the biggest little mini-mall in the world. I hate mini-malls. The entire place is designed to suck money out of the pockets of the foolish and gullible. It’s evil.
That said, I did manage to have some fun while I was there, probably not as much as I should have. I think I disappointed a few friends who were expecting me to lose every dime I had on the tables, get married to a showgirl, stay in Vegas and get a job as an Elvis impersonator.
There was, of course, the officially sanctioned fun. I.e. various hosted drinks at ApacheCon with the other apache geeks, some dressed as Star Trek characters, some not. I failed in my one big mission as far as these occasions were concerned. A friend from work had insisted I track down Nat Torkington and have a drink with him. Apparently he’s a hilarious foul-mouthed kiwi. Unfortunately, we only had one very brief conversation, the night of the Star Trek madness. It wasn’t enough for me to categorically identify him as a Kiwi and he used no foul language that I noticed. We made very tentative plans to go for a drink the next night but that didn’t happen. My fault mostly, I suspect. I let myself get sucked into going to the Stratosphere.
The Stratosphere is a 1000 foot tower that resembles the Seattle Space needle or Calgary’s Husky tower. What’s special about it is that there are amusement rides at the top. We went on two of them. The X-Scream which is scary, but not particularly fun; it just dangles you off the edge of the tower and jerks you around a bit – nice view though. And the Big Shot which is one of those rides that shoots you straight up a tower, stops suddenly and plunges so you get kind of a free-fall effect. That one was fun and also a bit scary. You can’t really see the tower beneath you on this ride so it feels like you’ve just shot up the side of the tower and the ride has broken away and you’re falling towards the IHOP a thousand feet below. Very cool.
Afterwards we went to a bar for a couple of drinks and some abuse by a hairy bartender. I bailed early due to residual jet-lag.
I did spot the mysterious Torkington the next night but I sensed some kind of weird Alpha-male tension between us and couldn’t bring myself to approach him. I suppose at heart I’ll always be the pathetic shy loser I was in high school.
I felt a little uncomfortable the whole trip, to be honest. If only I had managed to befriend someone who knew the town early on in the week. I noticed a billboard for Shania Twain by the MGM Grand. I should have given her a call. I figure we’d have an instant bond. After all, we both planted trees roughly the same time in roughly the same area (near Timmons, Ontario). It’s possible we were on the same crew. Hell, I bet we’d actually had long conversations around the campfire late at night. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that we actually slept together and I just can’t remember it now. Surely such a virtual past would be good enough for a bit of a tour around Vegas and a couple of backstage passes.
Oh well, next time, perhaps. Now I feel guilty that I didn’t even go to her show.
Mark and I did make it to one Vegas show: Mystere which is one of three shows Cirque du Soleil had in Vegas. The one I really wanted to see, O, was sold out. The other was an intriguing kinky adults only show called Zumanity but I talked to some people who had seen all three and they didn’t like it much.
It was the first time I’d seen a Cirque du Soleil show. It was fantastic. I love acrobatic performance stuff. It’s probably one of the reasons I’m a dance groupie. I’d been meaning to see a Cirque show for years. There was a guy on one of my treeplanting crews who was going to train with them back then (early nineties, I think). His name was Alvin Tan. I recall that he planted with his shirt off a lot. Man, he was fit. I remember I had a female foreman who seemed to spend a lot of time delivering trees to him and checking his land. He was a great guy. I wonder what happened to him. My wife still has a caricature he drew of me back then.
I checked the credits to see if he was in Mystere but no luck. He might be in one of the other shows. If I ever have to go back to Vegas, I’ll have to check it out.
Posted by YandaMan at 6:37 PM | Comments (1)
November 17, 2003
First pics from Vegas
Nick's posted some pics from the first couple of days. Hate to say it, Nick, but they're kind of crap so far. I'm sure they'll get better once we get Mark drunk.
Okay. He's posted some more pics now and there are a few good ones.
Posted by YandaMan at 8:01 PM | Comments (0)
Vegas, Baby!
Hee! Hee! I'm in Las Vegas. And it all counts as work. I'm here for ApacheCon. I've just finished a marathon session learning all about mod_perl 2.0 from the Stas-meister himself. I'd heard he tends to get a bit overenthusiastic about these things and today supported the legend. The tutorial was supposed to run from 1pm 'til 4. It finished at quarter to six. That's dedication, not to mention value for money.
I certainly learned a lot. This whole conference is looking just too damn useful. Not much of an excuse to duck out and sit mindlessly in front of a slot machine or whatever it is you're supposed to do here.
I'm not going to go on too much about the techy stuff here. So far, this blog has been about almost nothing involving work or anything particularly useful. No point in starting now. It's a place for rants and stories of debauchery. Discussions of PerlPostConfig handlers have no place here.
Unfortunately, that means I don't have much to say right now as that is pretty much all Vegas has meant to me so far: a big in-depth discussion of PerlPostConfig handlers and the like.
I and three of my colleagues did wander up and down the Strip for an hour or so last night, but we were so jet-lagged we just kind of staggered in slack-jawed wonder at all the pretty lights.
The fountains in front of the Bellagio were pretty cool. That's about all I can tell you about the place so far.
Posted by YandaMan at 3:44 AM