Travel and Travail

Hi folks, I'm back from my west coast jaunt. Actually I've been back for several days, but I had a pretty rotten sinus headache for the first 36 hours or so, and then I just kind of vegged out for the weekend, hibernating from Saturday's storm, sitting in front of the TV catching up on what my TiVo had recorded while I was away, watching the Patriots come from behind and finish the job against the Colts, and so on.

Overall it was a good trip, with excellent weather and some interesting activities and diversions. The travel itself was, to our enormous relief, largely painless. Nonstop transcontinental flights are a great thing; I have always found air travel to be especially tedious, which is a little silly considering we crossed the breadth of the continent going west in a bit over six hours, and returned in exactly five (awesome night view of Chicago from over Lake Michigan), but not having to switch flights somewhere in the middle (or worse, very close to one end or the other) makes things a good bit more tolerable.

JetBlue's planes have more legroom than any other commercial aircraft I've ever been on, and being six feet tall and long of leg, this makes it possible to actually be comfortable, and even to stretch my legs without standing up. They dish out lots of cool snacks, and they get bonus points for serving Dunkin' Donuts coffee.

We got to see most of game 3 of the World Series, thanks to the onboard satellite TV. It was a bit strange and surreal to be sitting in the quiet plane, with most people tuned to the game and everyone using headphones, but with the occasional bursts of applause at Dice-K's strikeouts and Sox hits. After we landed and got our bags, we listened to the rest of it in the car. Sunday evening found us watching game 4 in a bar in downtown Santa Cruz called 99 Bottles, which provided the obvious libations, the required large television, and some pretty good pub food as well. We were sitting upstairs, and we could hear some fellow Sox fans applauding from the downstairs bar area, which was sort of like the week before, when they were beating Cleveland and we could hear cheering coming from one of our neighbors' houses.

The only glitch in the proceedings was the health of the Mrs.' father, who hasn't been doing so great lately. He lives east of Los Angeles and made the seven-hour drive up to see the rest of the family, but he was lethargic and weak most of the time, and it quickly became clear that (a) he shouldn't have come, and (b) he was incapable of driving himself home. Plan A was for me to come back home to relieve our dog caretaker while the Mrs. drove her dad back to his home, then flew back from there. But by the day of my scheduled return he'd gotten worse, and it was necessary for him to go to a hospital. So the Mrs. postponed her return flight, stayed on while her dad was stabilized in the hospital, drove him home over the weekend, got him admitted to another hospital there, and finally flew back to San Jose and caught her return flight home early this morning. The dog and I are very happy she's back.