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road tripped with suz this past weekend
up to toronto

why

why not

not like i wanted to catch up on sleep or anything

even though we started at 0430 on saturday we were still
late [traffic]
for the beating the sox took that afternoon
but in time to take a great deal of
shit
from people who were die hard blue jay fans
at least that day
since they won
here's a hint kids
if you're going to harangue folks that made a nine-hour trip to your city
to see their team
you ought to at least be somewhat well-informed about the sport in question

happily since i was wearing my revs jersey we could at least greet
the subset of the subset
around the ballpark with high fives and impromptu singing

also met lots of nice toronto fc fans around the city
it's telling that you can walk around town and people will ask if you're
going to the game
it's an event and people know about it
and if they aren't going they seem like they'd like to be

amusingly we ran into another group on the subway
figured we'd follow them to their stadium rather than interpret directions we got earlier
bad idea
they nearly wound up following us instead
but they were friendly and knowledgeable

bmo field is cool
not much to the stadium itself
but the view is spectacular
the moreso with the carnival rides around it
and it's full and plainly the place to be on match night
they have 28oz sippy cups of carlsberg

the revs kept the home fans relatively quiet for most of the match
but they went uniformly apeshit when they finally took advantage of
a bad five minutes and
scored

later we repaired to a pub down the street
[didn't find the supporters' pub until the drive out of the city]
and continued to take good natured shit from the locals
walked must of the long way back to the hotel
then hopped the turnstile in a deserted subway to catch the last train

i don't think we ate inside once the whole weekend

the next day was a better one for the sox
got to watch the roof of the skydome open
and a variety of players flash their occasional power for the win
didn't take any crap from toronto fans that day

the extra innings were ill-timed however
meant that at 8pm we were staring at niagara falls
pretty
but a bad sign

the little dude doesn't much care for the crappy roads of the
thruway or ontario but other than that
he's game for road trips
although mileage appears to peak somewhere short of the 75mph
i'm accustomed to

got in at 3am

photos are here

the plane was rolled back to the gate
the flight canceled shortly thereafter

trouble is i had another plane to catch this morning
it's actually in the air right now
i'm not on it

instead i called my roommate and my friend to arrange for the delivery of my passport
canceled two plane tickets and booked another
i got in a car
and drove from raleigh to orlando

i saw south of the border lit up at night
i saw a lot of things that said jesus
i saw that north carolina has as many tacky billboards as missouri

i saw some weird looking vehicles
[look on my flickr later i don't have time now]

i drank red bull
i rocked loud music thanks to a quick stop at the apple store
[this shit doesn't happen so easily without the iphone]
[he notes for the benefit of his favorite luddite]
found a 24-hour kinkos to print out his cruise ticket
confused the shit out of his credit card company

and i still beat the rest of my company to orlando

it's time for drinkins

i’m back from budapest and vienna.

work is busy, so instead of writing about it, i’ll just scan and post my chicken scratches from my little black book, and my solitary loyal reader can try to interpret them. links to pictures at the end.

pictures from the trip. some with a real camera, some with the iphone.

i’ve spent most of the past week in a car careening down the wrong side of the road across central england, on a train, walking block after block of neighborhoods from nice to scummy, in a pub, or at a soccer match. i’m exhausted. fortunately, work seems rather quiet, so i may as well tell my solitary reader about it.

• the highways in england utilize large signs with hugely impressive forks and circles and arrows to tell you exactly what the road is going to do. it’s superfluous in many places, but useful once you’re accustomed to it, in the same way that it’s nice to see on google maps not just that there’s an interchange, but what those onramps are going to do to you.

• speaking of google maps, it let us down big time, particularly on the drive to reading. near as i could tell, it omitted a whole street and a rotary, which was enough to put us way off-course.

• reading is a spectacularly good drinking town. it’s a college town, for one, but beyond that, there were numerous truly unique pubs there, some old, some ancient, serving excellent varieties of cask ales and bitters. one claimed to have had in excess of 5,000 guest ales in the past few years, and to prove it, took the placards from the front of the tap, and pasted them to the walls. and the ceilings. and basically every surface of its cozy, meandering hallways and alcoves.

• finding a pub to eat dinner at was all but impossible for us outside of london; but the lunch was practically drinking nirvana. pint after pint of ale, a yummy steak pie, a comfy wooden bench, and football highlights in the background.

• liverpool is an eerily quiet city; you can tell that a bunch of people live there, but they move about like ghosts when outside; they’re there, but there’s no commotion, no bustle. plenty of cars on the street, but a lack of real traffic. row after row of houses that are occupied, but don’t look terribly lived-in. and plenty of bombed out, boarded, or even bricked-up neighborhoods. don’t get me wrong, it’s a perfectly lovely place, with plenty of stuff to do; the pubs are mellow, and the few people we did talk to (a lot of bartenders, go figure) were fairly friendly. but in retrospect, something about it just seemed somewhat off.

• the exception to that, of course, is around goodison park, which was roaring with life on wednesday night for the everton-tottenham hotspur match. skinny entrances (every soccer stadium i’ve been to has a very narrow entry passage and turnstile, less than half the width of a normal doorway) directly upon the sidewalk and street, with the stands rising vertically, with tens of thousands crammed into an ancient structure that has the same kind of load-bearing paint that fenway park does, only it’s blue and white. the corridors are crammed with people before the match (you can’t drink beer in the stands) drinking their beer, eating their meat pies, and placing their bets. walking up the ramp into the seats is every bit as electric as you’d expect, the more so since our seats were in the second row. their side was depleted, but the everton fans gave a pretty good show, with ample singing, shouting, swearing, and a really brilliant flipping off of a spurs player readying for a corner kick.

• dmitar berbatov is amazing to watch in person.

• the night before, we’d seen fulham at bolton wanderers; it was probably a letdown, for my dad’s first premiership match. i was all in favor of trekking up to bolton to see a top-flight match rather than seeing charlton play stoke down in london, but neither of those two teams played like they really deserved or cared to escape relegation. we did have great seats, and talk to some really friendly bolton supporters, though. they’re a really nice bunch, even if they’re not terribly boisterous. one thing that was cool was to see a match wherein an american (our boy clint dempsey, whose notoriously elbow-y behavior i jokingly apologized for to our new friends) was far and away the best player on the pitch. bolton’s stadium is new and nice, but much smaller than it looks on television, and stranger still, is in the middle of what is basically a big-box store mall. on the other hand, so is gillette, now.

• interestingly, the premiership does not permit cameras into stadiums. nobody searches you, but you wouldn’t be able to hide an slr. so i didn’t try. my old casio is mostly dead, leaving me with my iphone. which actually did an okay job with some of them. amusingly enough, while using it as a camera, i got a useless voicemail from my landlord and an interesting text message. i wonder what the charge for that’ll be.

• instead of basketball courts or tennis courts, public parks have 6-on-6 soccer courts. awesome.

• we didn’t spend a lot of time in manchester, but it seemed to live up to its reputation, in that people were seen lined up outside of clubs at midnight on a tuesday, and that the residential areas outside the downtown were not terribly appealing. it was smaller than i expected, but the architecture was kinda cool.

• reading’s madjeski stadium is 2 miles outside of the city in an industrial park. it’s small, modern, and comfortable, insofar as any english soccer stadiums are comfortable (the seats appear to all be of the same manufacture, of thin, cheap plastic that i suspect wouldn’t support your stereotypical fan of american football, much less fit them); it’s a very suburban experience. we saw a bunch of american flags draped over the stands at the end of the game (some with the reading logo superimposed—the english love to write their football team across the flag, something which we don’t do so much here), saluting their longtime keeper, marcus hahnemann, who had a good match in a losing effort.

• when we arrived at craven cottage on sunday, we knew that we’d be in for a treat, given the number of aston villa supporters we saw on the way in. we were sitting near the away stand, at the end of the field. filled with probably 5000 singing, stomping, shouting villa fans in great voice. somewhere in the middle of the match came a hissing noise, as they ceased their singing and said shhhhhhhh. the stadium was strangely silent, and it was damned obvious that fulham’s support was fucking shit, at least on that day.

• second best moment of that game was when fulham’s mascot had to get shoved off the field by the referee. the english don’t stage that sort of thing, it actually happened.

• unexpectedly enough, fulham actually pulled out a win. it’s important for american soccer for them to do well, as they have five americans on their roster, and right now they’re fighting to climb out of the drop zone. they’re not a good team (and it’s the supporting cast that’s the problem, say i, quite biased), but they might survive.

• people kept trying to get us to sign up for credit cards and cell phone service everywhere, for some reason.

• i did not try prawn-flavored potato chips, but they have many other innovative flavors there that we enjoyed while watching the day’s highlights after being shooed out of the pubs at closing.

• watching the super bowl in england is weird. i can’t tell whether the english care about american football or not; goodness knows i didn’t stay up for the end of it.

• suz and i took a field trip to islington to go stop and see emirates stadium so she could pick up some arsenal stuff. after that she indulged me a trip out to floyd road to go pick up a new charlton jersey.

• two hours after landing, i was playing soccer. had a good game, actually. perhaps i was literally full of piss and vinegar, given my diet over the previous week.

an interesting side note from the trip to d.c. over the weekend. once upon a time, i’d made that trip with some regularity, and had grown familiar with the tolls. of course, that was nearly ten years ago.

a lot of people in massachusetts like to complain about how the massachusetts turnpike should have tolls no longer, as it’s already been paid for. to that i argue, maybe, but perhaps they’re the reason that it’s generally well-maintained compared to even other toll roads, much less your typical interstates strewn with tire fragments and abandoned cars.

and moreover, the cost of the ‘pike hasn’t gone up significantly in that time. it costs a mere $3.60 to drive from newton to stockbridge, at a cost of just under 3 cents per mile. the new jersey turnpike is $6.45 from the del mem br to the gw, at 5.7 cents per mile. in maryland, from the beltway to delaware, it costs one half of $5 to go 77 miles—3.25 cents per mile. the new york thruway, for a whopper toll of $18.50, you can go from white plains to pennsylvania at 3.7 cents per mile.

which brings me to the real focus of this rant—the lovely little highway rest stop of delaware. for a mere fifteen miles of driving, it costs $4. each way. that’s more than a quarter per mile. or, if you prefer, it’s well over four times the next most expensive patch of road (bridges and tunnels excepted for obvious reasons). it’s less a state than an impediment. i mean, i don’t particularly care about the money, really (i did when i was a poor college student). it’s more the stunning lack of any kind of proportional sense, and the fact that a state with the good fortune to be situated between places that people actually want to go is able to extort what must surely be huge sums in return.

maybe i’m just pissed because i didn’t think of it first. what i need is a patch of land astride a major highway, so i can build my own toll barrier. and a roy rogers, obviously.

can’t. drank too much caffeine. how is it that an attempt to counteract the results of insufficient sleep one night just continue to exacerbate the problem?

yeah, it’s hard for me to actually od on it, but certainly possible. multiple cans of jolt. a couple large cups of coffee. multiple other sodas.

i visited two airports today. got on a plane at neither.

watching ‘top gear’. rented a chevy aveo last night and today, which they’d be as appalled by as i was, i’m sure, but they’d express their displeasure so much better. needs 5000rpms on any onramp. sad, tragic cupholders. useless armrest. stereo max volume is pathetically insufficient. thoughtfully replaced the driver-side oh shit handle with sunglass holder (doesn’t fit sunglasses). mileage is so-so. seats are wretched. brakes do not stop the vehicle as quickly as you expect them to. turning radius sucks. i put 750 miles on it, every one of which made it clear that this vehicle is not on my list of candidates.

it's a little strange going from hot summer-like days not so much more than a week ago, to early fall in denver, to late fall, saturday in breckenridge, to winter on sunday, now back to a proper autumn here.

greetings from salt lake city. one of the hazards of flying delta is frequent layovers at this blandest of airports. i’ve still got a couple hours left to kill. so, about the weekend…

• i woke up this morning to 6+” of snow, in breckenridge, colorado. the place is already gorgeous, mind you, but it was still a great surprise. of course, this meant the trip up 70 back to denver was lengthy and perilous; i had only 40 minutes before my flight. yesterday, we hiked, the better to bolster our already formidable thirst for beer. this is where i should mention that breckenridge is at an elevation of 9,600ft. yeah, so that was cool.

• we visited better than half a dozen brewpubs, most with friendly people and yummy beer. oddly, it took us until yesterday to find an oktoberfest we really liked. the strangest, by a long shot, was the one in central city, an old abandoned mining town that was redeveloped into a casino, and then, near as i can tell, re-abandoned. i’ll probably write some of them up on yelp at some point.

• red sox fans are freaking everywhere. nobody anywhere had any kind words for eric gagne. everybody thinks steve is the youk’s identical twin.

• the great american beer festival is still ridiculously fun. thousands of fun, happy, friendly drunks under one roof. and it’s such a test of endurance that by the end, you’re laughing giddily about how delicious a bag of beer-flavored potato chips are.

• and nary a hangover to show for three days of hard drinking.

for all the speed of a modern jet aircraft, it's rare as a passenger to get any sensation of it. when i rode the tgv in france, the feeling of reckless acceleration was palpable, since the train blew right past the spped with which we're accustomed to seeing things blow by on the ground, and kept going. with an aircraft, by the time you near any reference points on a familiar scale, you're already slowed to less than twice highway speed.

but when you settl ever closer to cloud cover on the way down, you're still doing 350kts. first you're close enough to perceive texture. then the puffy carpet is moving. thwn it's moving faster. and faster. soon the speed is fast enough to give you a slight thrill, even though you know the clods are as insubstantial as the air itself. and then, poof. it feels like there should be a sound, but there isn't. and everything's slow again.

on my way to denver for the great american beer festival. i like beer.