Category Archives: Vacation

Christmas 2015

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A few weeks ago, we returned home from our bi-annual Christmas trip to Nebraska. Although we took a vast number of photos, in typical fashion, we haven’t gone through them yet. For now, all we have to share is a brief video.

At some point since our last holiday trip to Norfolk, it seems that the airlines have restructured their routes so that the relatively convenient flight we used to take, which delivered us from San José to Omaha via Denver, no longer exists. Instead, we were presented with an array of unappealing options with stops in relatively out-of-the-way places like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. Ultimately, we chose a route that originated in San Francisco and stopped in Dallas. Total travel time was longer than we were accustomed to, but the kids got a kick out of seeing two new airports.

Actually, saying that they got a kick out of it might be overstating their excitement a bit. Ten minutes into the hourlong drive to SFO (and just after we passed the San José airport), Joe asked whether we were almost there. That said, both of the older kids were suitably impressed by the relatively grand scale of the terminal in San Francisco.

Dallas was fun for everyone because we got to take the train between our arrival and departure terminals, which were spread out over the approximately 1,600 square miles of the airport. William was especially excited to be able to ride the “toot–toot,” and he didn’t seem fazed by the fact that it didn’t particularly resemble Thomas the Tank Engine.

Side note: on the way home, which also took us through Dallas, it was immediately clear which state we were in when, as soon as we deplaned, we were faced with a sign that read, “Shopping is bigger in Texas,” and a information desk staffed by a white–haired gentleman in a cowboy hat.

We arrived in Omaha mid–evening and, after picking up our rented minivan, headed directly to Norfolk. We made it to Julie’s mother’s house at a relatively reasonable hour once the time change was factored in, and got the kids tucked into bed without too much fuss.

The weather was dry and the ground was clear when we arrived, and the kids had plenty of time to scope out the creek and open space behind Grandma’s house, though they were a bit disappointed that there wasn’t any snow. On Christmas Eve, however, snow started to fall, much to everyone’s excitement. The blanket of white stuff did little to deter the older kids from further exploration: Joe discovered a small retention pond a few houses down, which he insisted was a lake, and Julia somehow managed to fall into the creek three times in one day.

After Christmas, Julia and Joe were extremely eager to try their hands at sledding. To kids growing up in California with parents who, unlike the vast majority of their peers, don’t know how to snowboard or ski, the whole concept is highly novel. On what turned out to be an especially blustery afternoon, we took all three kids out to Skyview Park for a few trips down the hill, as seen in the video. We lasted longer than I expected—I thought I was going to lose a finger trying to hold the camera without my gloves—and everyone had fun, including William, who seemed to enjoy the idea of throwing snow at me as much as anything else. Apparently, all the time we spent reading Snow by P.D. Eastman and Roy McKie paid off.

In fact, Joe enjoyed it so much that he begged and pleaded for us to go again the next afternoon. Julia and William demurred, but I took Joe back to the park for a second go. This time, I elected to stay in the warm van while he played in the snow, but he did just fine on his own. True, he was in tears by the time he finished and returned to the car, crying that he was cold and wanted to go home to California, but I don’t think that in any way diminishes the fact that he enjoyed himself right up to the point where he decided he was going to freeze to death.

Christmas itself was the usual blur of presents and food. As usual, the kids were excited about their gifts: Joe received a Lego TARDIS set, which he insisted on starting right away, and Julia dove right into reading The Martian, which originally interested her because she’d heard it contained a lot of swearing—which it does—and plowed right through it in the space of a few days. As a reward, we let both kids see the considerably less profane film version this past weekend.

William was, by and large, happy and excited to be there. He’s definitely starting to get the knack of the present thing, though, and is more than happy to help unwrap others’ gifts as well as his own. He was easygoing and well–behaved more or less the entire trip, including all four flights.

Going in, we knew we were in for a bit of trouble on the way home, as our flight was scheduled to arrive around 10:30 in the evening after a late afternoon departure. It was windy and snowy the morning we left, and the forecast called for significant snow in Omaha, so we left Norfolk before noon, hoping to avoid any delays that might cause us to miss our flight.

As it turns out, we needn’t have worried about the drive, as our flight to Dallas was delayed significantly. It could have been worse, though: we still made it out in time to catch our connection in Dallas, whereas some families were told that their flights had been canceled and that they would not be able to travel for days.

Things went from bad to worse in Dallas, however. The area, including the airport, was still recovering from a series of severe storms that had swept through over the preceding days, and our flight was delayed several times, largely (and frustratingly) without explanation. We finally arrived back in San Francisco after midnight local time, which made it past 2:00 for the kids. Julia and William napped on the plane, but Joe somehow managed to stay awake the entire time, finally passing out on the ten-minute shuttle bus ride to long term parking with Julie to pick up our car.

In the meantime, Julia and I waited with William at the curb outside the baggage claim, watching people flout the no-stopping rules and listening to an irate man who seemed to have lost a bag, forgotten to arrange for ground transportation, or otherwise failed to anticipate one of the many ways a trip can go wrong, repeatedly scream the f-word at the top of his lungs. Having just read The Martian, at least she was prepared.

Video: Christmas 2015.

Texas 2014

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We’ve fallen off the wagon a bit in terms of posting pictures—a busy work schedule combined with the usual plethora of kids’ activities has gotten in the way—but we have a decent-sized batch queued up and nearly ready to go.

Over the last fifteen years or so, we seem to have accidentally fallen into a tradition in which we get together with some of our old college friends every five years: in 2004, we went to Paul and Joanna Williams’s house near Killeen, Texas, and in 2009 we all gathered at Dave and Rebecca Hyatt’s house in The Woodlands. Considering that no fewer than ten children have been born to the various families since the 2004 get-together, invading someone’s home no longer seemed like a viable option for the 2014 shindig. Instead, we decided to rent a house on a beach somewhere, so that no family’s permanent residence was at risk of being utterly destroyed. Naturally, we have pictures.

The place we decided on was called Luck o’ the Irish—charmingly, all of these beach houses seem to have cute names—in Surfside Beach, Texas. We stayed there a full week and had a fantastic time. The house was big enough to accommodate all twenty-one of us comfortably, and there were plenty of spaces for the kids to do their own things while the adults played board games and caught up.

The beach itself was wonderful—really far nicer than we had any reason to expect a beach on the Gulf of Mexico to be given our past experiences. Apparently there was a bumper crop of seaweed in Galveston this year that left some area beaches a foul, smelly mess, but by the time of our visit, the seaweed in Surfside had pretty much dried up, leaving a broad, coarse band between the house and the ocean that was little more than a mild nuisance.

We did see a couple jellyfish drifting around one day, and there was a fierce current that would carry you halfway to Houston if you weren’t diligent, but the water was warm and the surf was vigorous enough to be fun for the kids without being overtly threatening. The kids spent hours and hours swimming in the water and playing in the sand and by extension, the parents did as well: after the first couple days, I had the worst sunburn I can remember having, and I don’t burn easily. I spent the rest of the trip bundled in a swim shirt whenever I went out to the water, with sunscreen slathered on even under the shirt.

When we weren’t down at the beach, the kids were completely content to play on iPads and show off games they’d discovered to one another—if I weren’t already bullish on tablets as a platform before this trip, I certainly would be now. Surprisingly, there wasn’t much in the way of inter-child or cross-family drama. The biggest obstacle we faced was trying to stop William from climbing up the stairs to the upper level of the house. Well, that and the fact that the tap water was more or less non-potable, so we kept making quick trips into town to buy bottled water. It wasn’t until the second-to-last day that we noticed the page in the back of the house’s informational binder that warned that Surfside’s water exceeded the federal government’s maximum safe levels of arsenic. According to the warning, it’s perfectly safe for short exposures, but if we’re all dead in six months, you know what happened.

Before we went to Surfside, we stopped off at my parents’ new-ish house in Georgetown, near Austin, which Julia and Joe were very excited to see for the first time. Having spent much of the summer obsessively watching HGTV, they couldn’t stop talking about the various features of the house, though they did come to the conclusion that it was a little on the small side for us (an easy answer to arrive at, considering that it only has two bedrooms). Nevertheless, they had a great time camping out in Grandma and Grandpa’s spare room and counting golf carts on the roads within the gated community of Sun City.

We were flying out of Austin on our way home, but we had a few hours to kill between the time we had to be out of the house in Surfside and our departure. We decided to take a brief detour into Houston to visit Rice and see some of our old haunts. Thanks to a bit of lucky timing, I even managed to snap a quick picture of Joe outside the room that Joe Shidle and I shared during our senior year, twenty years ago.

They’ve done quite a bit of work on campus over the last couple decades, and naturally, as people who have a strong emotional affinity for the way things were at the time we were there, not all of it is to our liking. Most of that can likely be chalked up to ordinary, everyday antipathy toward change, but I’m genuinely saddened by some elements of the reconfiguration of Baker College, where we and most of our close friends lived. In particular, the formerly gorgeous and understated facade of the building, including the main entrance to the commons, is effectively gone, blocked from view from the inner loop by a massive new residential wing. I’m sure it seems completely natural to students who only know the Baker of today—and it’s definitely a plus if the new wing makes it unnecessary (or at least less necessary) to kick some students off campus for a year the way Joe and I were—but it’s not the way Baker looks in my dreams.

We made it back home just in time to start getting ready for school and all that entails. The kids still talk about the beach house, though, and as I was going through the photos to accompany this post, Julia mentioned that seeing them makes her feel a little bit sad, because she misses the house and her friends. By that measure, at least, the trip seems to have been a success.

Gallery: Texas 2014

Honeymoon in Italy

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You might have expected us to be ready with an update regarding a certain major event that occurred last week, and we are working on just such a post. But first, I wanted to share a set of much older photos that we’ve never posted online before; in fact, we didn’t have them in a digital format until just last year.

The pictures in question were taken on our honeymoon in Italy way back in the year 2000. We took them with a little APS film camera that we bought more or less specifically with this trip in mind, and until last year, the only copies we had were in a gorgeous album that Julie put together using the prints and a few souvenirs from the trip. We still had the original APS negatives, however, and as photographic technology advanced, it bothered me a bit that we didn’t have backups in a more durable digital form. That unease, coupled with a gradually dawning awareness of the fact that the APS format was disappearing from the planet, finally motivated me to do something last December, before we ran out of options.

We didn’t have the time to scan the prints ourselves, and I was a little concerned that taking that approach wouldn’t yield the level of quality I was hoping for anyway. Instead, I shopped around for a service that could scan the negatives directly and give us high-resolution, good quality JPEG files. Some online research turned up a couple different firms that offer mail order processing: you send them your negatives, and they scan them and post the digital copies online for you to download. These services give you very high-resolution scans at reasonably affordable prices, but they require you to send your precious negatives—by far the best representation you have of your photos—by mail to faraway places like India, and in many cases, they don’t send them back. Seeing as Julie and I aren’t in any position to take a make-up trip to Italy to recreate these photos, that made me a little uncomfortable.

With that in mind, I looked around for a local solution that might give us a bit more peace of mind. It turns out that there’s a photo processing business less than a third of a mile from us, just a five-minute walk from our house, that is very well-reviewed online. It seemed like a perfect solution to our problem, but when I called to ask about the job, the owner informed me that he did not have the equipment required to handle APS negatives—see the comment above about running out of options as the format disappears from the planet. Luckily, he was able to recommend someone else in town who is still set up to handle this kind of work.

The scans we ended up getting are much lower resolution than the online services provide: the lab would have charged us significantly more for high-res scans, as the owner of the shop would have to do them by hand, and he convinced me there wouldn’t be a significant benefit in terms of quality for the uses I had in mind. He was probably right, too, as many of the original photos weren’t that great to begin with. Lots of them were shot using ISO 400 film, even though they were taken outdoors in bright light: we were taking a lot of low-light shots inside churches and museums, so changing film all the time didn’t seem to make sense, and I didn’t fully understand how much more grainy this would make the resulting photos look. He ended up having to process some of the rolls by hand anyway, due to the condition of the film, and he didn’t charge us extra.

In the end, I was moderately happy with the results. Most of the scans look decent, but many of the photos came through the scanning process looking somewhat overexposed, so I had to work with them one at a time in iPhoto to bring out highlights. It’s not clear whether this was related to the state of the negatives themselves or to the challenge of quickly scanning a couple hundred photos without knowing exactly what they looked like to begin with, but we got the negatives back, so we can always send them off someplace else if we decide we want higher-quality scans at a later date. In any event, after a bit of tuning, the final results are perfectly acceptable for posting on the web.

As an aside, I’m taking the time to wrap up this project now because we’re putting many of our old photos—including the ones from Italy that Julie didn’t use in her scrapbook—into storage since we turned the office, where they had been kept, into Joe’s bedroom. Rather than dig them out later (or not, as would have probably been the case), it made sense to get the information we needed from the pictures, like the date and time they were taken, while they were still handy. Now that the project is complete, we can put aside the box of photos that’s been sitting out ever since Joe changed rooms and free up some space on our bedroom floor.

Gallery: Honeymoon

A Lonesome Baker Men Addendum

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I forgot to include one brief anecdote in the previous post regarding our visit to Texas, so I thought I’d write it up now, while it’s on my mind.

If you’ve looked at the pictures, you know that the tail end of the trip included a group bath for some of the younger kids: Julia, Joe, Laura, Kay and Kate. Joe was, obviously, the only boy in the group, a fact that went largely unnoticed and unremarked upon until Kate adorably piped up, “Joe-Joe has a tail!”

That was cute enough on its own, but Julia, never one to let a misconception slide by, responded, “No! That’s his penis!”

Fortunately, the conversation pretty much ended there.

Lonesome Baker Men 2009

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Baker

Continuing our jaunt through the distant past, we’ve posted a new set of photos. These pictures, which are almost exactly four years old today, date back to our 2009 trip to Texas to visit friends from Rice at Dave and Rebecca Hyatt’s house in The Woodlands. Joe and Erica Shidle flew in from Chicago with Laura and Kay; Mason and Kathy Hart trekked across town from their place in Houston with their son Dylan; and Paul Williams drove in from Belton, Texas with Zane and Diana—sadly, his wife Joanna couldn’t make it. That, or she wisely chose to stay far away from the potentially explosive gathering.

Four years out, a couple things about the trip stand out in my memory. First, Houston was every bit as hot as I remembered it, and perhaps even more so. Second, Dave and Rebecca have a great pool, complete with a robot that cleans it automatically overnight, and they were fantastic about opening their home to fourteen people—seven adults and seven children—most of whom stayed overnight for several days. Somewhat miraculously, the structure was still largely intact when we departed.

As you can see from the photos, we took the opportunity to visit our old stomping grounds at Rice while we were in town. The campus has grown dramatically since we all graduated, but all the same, there were many aspects that seemed nearly untouched by the intervening years. Sadly, Baker College, where we all (except Rebecca) lived was undergoing remodeling and expansion at the time, so we weren’t able to go inside. I’m told that the facade is nearly unrecognizable since the completion of construction in 2010.

Prior to this trip, the last time everyone got together was in 2004, so if we want to stick to an every-five-years cadence, we’ll have to plan something for next summer. Assuming we pull it off, you can look for the pictures sometime in 2017. Of course, at least three more kids will have been added to the mix by that time, so the choice of venue may be a significant sticking point.

In case you were wondering, the titles of this post and the associated album are a reference to an unfortunate photo and caption that appeared in the Rice Thresher during my senior year. For the record, three of the five guys pictured had girlfriends at the time of publication.