Wil Wheaton was scheduled to sign his new book at Vroman's on August 31st:
On September 23rd, I received an email saying that he would be at Vroman's on October 26th “for real this time”. I would be out of town (Houston trip). I asked if I could drop off my book ahead of time and pick it up when I returned. I had to write three times before they answered, but they said OK, and that's what I did.
Link to more photos. (View the photos individually to see the captions.)
In February 2020, I booked flights for a trip to Houston a few months later. When COVID shut things down, that was the first of five trips I had to cancel. Now it's the last of them to finally happen. Rice's "Golden Reunion" weekend, my 50-year reunion, was the obvious time to go.
The trip included family, Rice, and several Houston sights, some new to me. We stayed with cousins Joel and Joan in Fulshear, 35 miles west of Houston. Victor particularly loved taking their dogs for walks.
Because we had recently been to Hobbiton in New Zealand, we had to stop at the Hobbit Cafe.
The rest of the day was at Rice. I particularly wanted to see Duncan Hall and the Turrell Skyspace. Duncan Hall did not disappoint, but there's really not much to see at the Turrell work unless you're there at dawn or dusk, which we did not manage to do.
The next day, we started at the WaterWall. I showed Victor the Galleria, including the ice rink. The mall has expanded over the years; it is much larger than I remembered. After lunch, there was heavy rain, so I abandoned plans for other sights, and we went directly to the Rice reunion dinner location. As the rain let up, we saw large rainbows over downtown Houston.
In the weeks before the reunion, I asked several of my classmates whether they were going, and all but one said no. So I only knew a handful of the reunion attendees, but the reception and dinner were fine.
All around the region, when you tell someone that you go to Rice, the most common response is, "You go to Rice? You must be smart!" While I was attending Rice, someone made this T-shirt, which I still have, and which I brought to the reunion:
(And don't miss the link to a second album of Hobbiton photos below!)
I have long wanted to visit New Zealand. When I saw a sale price for this short tour, I signed up. Plus, I had sufficient airline miles for our round-trip flights. But in the following weeks, there were changes. Certain activities were not going to re-open before we were there, and we made substitutions. In the end, we even cut Christchurch entirely and made the already short trip a full day shorter.
I was not surprised that it rained at least a little almost every day, but it was also colder than I expected. I never wore any of the short-sleeve T-shirts I brought.
We started in Auckland. We walked around a bit, including Albert Park. Few people wore masks. Although we were in downtown, it was difficult to find a restaurant open for early breakfast. We then had a day-long tour of the city and surroundings, including Mount Victoria, both the Pacific and Tasman Sea coasts, the Waitakere Ranges Regional Park, and Arataki Centre. We walked a tiny bit of the [Edmund] Hillary Trail in the rain forest, saw giant ferns, large kauri trees, and Piha Beach with gray magnetic sand. (See the photos.)
From Auckland, we went by car to Rotorua via Hobbiton. Despite the drizzle, it was fun visiting Hobbiton. See my separate photo album there.
In Rotorua, we went on a Duck Tours ride in an amphibious WW2 "duck" landing craft able to drive on city streets and become a motor boat in water. We did both. That evening, we saw the Maori presentation and had an indigenous dinner at Tamaki Village.
From Rotorua, we flew to Queenstown on the South Island. The Rotorua Airport is a welcome throw-back: no security check, no metal detector, no ID check, and family and friends welcome at the gate. But our flight was canceled due to fog, and we were booked for a flight more than 7 hours later! We spent all day at the airport.
The next day, despite great weather in town, the morning Milford Sound flight/cruise was canceled! When I called, they set us up for a later time, and that worked. The flight was a bit bumpy, but beautiful; lots of snow-capped mountains. (See the photos, of course.) On the cruise, there was more beautiful scenery, a dolphin, and seals.
The following day, we walked a bit, including Queenstown Gardens, a bookstore, and an art gallery.
A cold front came through on the day we departed, so Victor saw snow falling for the first time, even though it was only a few flakes.
Crossing the International Date Line cost us a day when we flew from Los Angeles to New Zealand, but the return was weirder: We left NZ 8 pm one evening, and after a 12-hour flight, arrived in LA at noon the same day!
She was at Vromans, promoting her new poetry book. There was an overflow crowd, many with multiple books for her to sign.
Due to COVID, we had not been back to Mérida since Victor came to Los Angeles in May 2019. He had not seen his mother or any of the rest of his family in more than three years!
We were there for two weeks. We will probably return again this coming winter.
There was frequent rain, especially in the afternoons. I was pleasantly surprised by how many people on the street wore masks; many more than in L.A.
As always, we spent a lot of time on and waiting for buses, both to the downtown and to Progreso. Because Victor's house is now mostly unoccupied, there is no longer Internet service, so I used Internet cafes in the downtown or I used Internet at his sister's home in Progreso.
Polar bears, beluga whales, and aurora borealis!
With Victor's love of bears (see here and here and here), we certainly had to go to Churchill, Manitoba to see polar bears some day. When I found this warm weather tour, I signed up. And despite some rain in the forecast ahead of time, the weather was very good.
First, we flew to Winnipeg. I was annoyed that they booked us at a hotel away from the airport that didn't offer airport pick-up.
At breakfast the next day, we met two people going on our tour. I figured there would be a handful of people joining us, but when we first gathered together, I was surprised to find more than fifty people in our tour group!
We had a charter flight just for our group (!) from Winnipeg to Churchill — no security checks! — followed by a tour of the area.
The next day, we went on a boat tour to see beluga whales. They were easy to find.
Next came polar bears! We did get good views of swimming polar bears and more distant views of them on land. Here's a 13-second video of one coming ashore and shaking off water:
We saw aurora borealis briefly one night (see the photos). On a tundra tour the next morning, we saw a distant caribou, one even more distant pair of polar bears, and birds including a golden eagle.We left Churchill on another charter flight to Winnipeg, this time staying at an airport hotel. But the next day, our first flight to return home left too early to use the included breakfast.
Link to more photos. View the photos individually to see the captions, several of which have more information than usual.
I have had my eye on this tour for years. In the Spring of 2019, even with the tour running almost every day during the summer, all dates were sold out. Then COVID hit, and the tour didn't run in 2020 or 2021. I was on the wait list. When it became available, I grabbed the earliest 2022 date.
Despite rain when we arrived in Rapid City, some intermittent light rain on the first full tour day, and excessive heat on the last, the weather was mostly good, and the trip went very well. We had a great time and visited many wonderful sites.
Our initial day of travel had some problems. Flying to Rapid City, we had a connection in Las Vegas. First, we sat on the tarmac for 45 minutes in L.A. because Las Vegas was too busy. Then we left Las Vegas more than an hour late because we had a change of gate and plane. Once in Rapid City, I almost got lost trying to drive in the rain at night in a strange city.
After I saw this article, I knew I wanted to go a day early just to see the Dignity statue:
The first tour day was Mt. Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial. The next day, we had breakfast in South Dakota, lunch in Wyoming, and dinner in Montana. We stopped at Devils Tower (the first U.S. National Monument), at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West (five museums) in Cody, and at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Somewhere along the way, I saw a variable speed limit sign (showing 75 mph) for the first time. I didn't get a photo, but here's one from the internet:
We spent the next two days in Yellowstone National Park, the world's first national park. I had visited in 2012, and was eager to return. The photos show the highlights, including a 16-second video of Old Faithful erupting (but other than that, my Yellowstone photos from 2012 are even better). The only real disappointment was that we didn't see very many animals. In 2012, I had seen large herds of bison and quite a few other animals. This time, only a handful of bison and little else. But one, walking right down the road, did cause a bison jam of scores of cars (not on our side of the road, happily). See the photos.
Leaving Yellowstone, we cruised through Grand Teton National Park and then had lunch in Jackson, Wyoming. After a night in Pocatello, Idaho, the tour ended in Salt Lake City, including a stop at This Is the Place Heritage Park.
Link to more photos. (View the photos individually to see the captions.)
When I did this trip in 2016, I wrote that I should have brought Victor. Now I did. He loved it. As before, we were lucky to have mild temperatures and no rain.
The itinerary had changed a little. With COVID complications for US border crossings, they had opted to omit Glacier National Park and instead added a few new sights near Waterton. (The border COVID rules eased just days before the trip, but the itinerary didn't change.) New stops were Red Rock Canyon and Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. I had never heard of bison jumps; the film there was very instructive. Peyto Lake was even more impossibly blue than I remembered (see the photos).
In addition to deer, we saw mountain goats, big-horned sheep and black bears (see the photos). The scenery was spectacular, although there were many trees that had burned and many that were damaged by mountain pine beetles.
Walking on Athabasca Glacier was fine, but Victor noted that we walked farther and did more on Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina in 2009.
On my 2016 trip, no one told me about the triple continental divide at Snow Dome above Athabasca Glacier, where some water flows to the Atlantic, some to the Pacific, and some to the Arctic Ocean.
Link to more photos. View the photos individually to see the captions.
This tour took us to all four national parks in Texas and New Mexico and a few additional stops. The temperature was frequently above 100, and we used four different buses, which required adjusting the itinerary for lost time. But despite the heat and the bus issues, the trip was a success.
Our first stop was McDonald Observatory. When I drove between Los Angeles and San Antonio, I always saw the turn-off for the observatory, but because it is more than 30 miles off of the interstate highway, I had never visited. We had an excellent tour guide.
We continued to Big Bend National Park, another Texas attraction I had never visited, mainly because it is so remote. On the first night there, I lucked upon a spectacular sunset photo (above).
The next day's highlight was Santa Elena Canyon and the Rio Grande, sadly nearly completely dry (see photos). The lowlight: A road construction crew had one piece of equipment sticking out too far, and it damaged several panels of our bus! Investigating and reporting the accident involved federal officers and much time. Since the nearest replacement bus was many hours away from Big Bend, we were happy that our bus remained drivable.
The next day, we changed to a new bus as we left the park. We had lunch in Marfa and stopped at the famous Prada art installation there.
We made a brief stop at Guadalupe Mountains National Park, but saw nothing that really interested me.
The next morning, our bus driver noticed a leak under the bus, and we waited several hours for a replacement bus. It was older and from a different company, so we were told we would get yet another bus the next day!
We stopped at the Living Desert Zoo and then proceeded to Carlsbad Caverns National Park. I had visited Carlsbad Caverns when I was maybe twelve; Victor, of course, had never been there.
The next day, with our fourth and final bus, we went to White Sands National Park. I was at a different portion of the park on a 2013 tour of New Mexico's "Space Trail".
The next morning, after a short stop at Old Mesilla, we returned to El Paso for our flight home.
After a two-year pandemic absence, The LATimes Festival of Books returned yesterday. I managed to hear at least parts of five panels, and I bought two books. I have enjoyed much of Solnit's work. I would have preferred getting her to sign some of her other books, but this was the only one available at the event.
P.S. In January 2023, a Facebook friend asked what I thought of the book, and I wrote this note.
