Summer Vacation!
By Mike DalyJuly 4th, 2006
So the week before last, I took my first vacation from work in a
year and a half. I will chronicle the story of this journey here so
that it will remain on the (web)pages of history forever!
Tuesday night, 11 pm I pick my brother Dave (Wesley) up from RDU. We drive from the airport strait back to Clyde, arriving at 3 am. Wednesday morning at 7 I wake, eat breakfast, and set off.
My Dad, two of my brothers an I drove a camper pulling a trailer with Jeep strait to Denver Colorado. It was a 27 hour trip in total; we didn't stop for anything but gas.
We arrived in Denver and set up our base of operations at about noon. That afternoon we checked out the world's largest brewery: the Coor's brewery in Golden, Denver. We got to sample some beer and I learned some fun facts. We also checked out the Red Rock natural amphitheater, which was cool, and saw some dinosaur tracks next the the highway.
The next morning, we went to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, which was pretty cool. I hadn't been so excited about Dinosaurs since I was like 10. I even took a picture of some dinosaurs fighting a fierce battle as well as some mammals being really passive and boring.
Shortly afterwards, Dave and I went to the airport and took off for San Francisco. From SF, we Drove to Napa (wine country apparently) and crashed.
The following day, (Saturday) we attended the wedding of Jason and Kaori Howard. I got to spend a lot of time hanging out with old friends and sitting quietly in the corner avoiding eye contact when the hosts were recruiting people to dance.
The next day we went back to San Francisco. We kind of wandered around like a dozen headless chickens for a while, but were eventually decisive enough to visit the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts. Can you guess what is inside the Palace of Fine Arts? If you guessed 'A hands-on science museum', you would have guessed correct. It is a very odd mix. Anyway to make a long story short, I applied for a job as a statue, but for some reason, they didn't hire me.
On Monday, we just basically drove all around western California trying to deliver people to whatever airports they belonged to, eventually settling down in Santa Cruz. We played a little putt-putt, then the next morning was the long trip home. I finally arrived back in Raleigh at 1 am Wednesday morning and was at work 7 hours later.
Some Stats:
Time spent: 7 days
Distance traveled: A really long way (but too lazy to figure up)
Weddings attended: 1
Pictures taken: very few, but I found some random old ones when downloading from my camera
Crazy people met on the airplane: 1
Stages of Mega Man cleared: 22
Hours of relaxation: 0
...
Making a Mastercard pun out of this list: priceless
Really, the Palace of Fine arts was way cool. Here are some other random pictures of it: 1, 2, 3, 4
THE END
Tuesday night, 11 pm I pick my brother Dave (Wesley) up from RDU. We drive from the airport strait back to Clyde, arriving at 3 am. Wednesday morning at 7 I wake, eat breakfast, and set off.
My Dad, two of my brothers an I drove a camper pulling a trailer with Jeep strait to Denver Colorado. It was a 27 hour trip in total; we didn't stop for anything but gas.
We arrived in Denver and set up our base of operations at about noon. That afternoon we checked out the world's largest brewery: the Coor's brewery in Golden, Denver. We got to sample some beer and I learned some fun facts. We also checked out the Red Rock natural amphitheater, which was cool, and saw some dinosaur tracks next the the highway.
The next morning, we went to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, which was pretty cool. I hadn't been so excited about Dinosaurs since I was like 10. I even took a picture of some dinosaurs fighting a fierce battle as well as some mammals being really passive and boring.
Shortly afterwards, Dave and I went to the airport and took off for San Francisco. From SF, we Drove to Napa (wine country apparently) and crashed.
The following day, (Saturday) we attended the wedding of Jason and Kaori Howard. I got to spend a lot of time hanging out with old friends and sitting quietly in the corner avoiding eye contact when the hosts were recruiting people to dance.
The next day we went back to San Francisco. We kind of wandered around like a dozen headless chickens for a while, but were eventually decisive enough to visit the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts. Can you guess what is inside the Palace of Fine Arts? If you guessed 'A hands-on science museum', you would have guessed correct. It is a very odd mix. Anyway to make a long story short, I applied for a job as a statue, but for some reason, they didn't hire me.
On Monday, we just basically drove all around western California trying to deliver people to whatever airports they belonged to, eventually settling down in Santa Cruz. We played a little putt-putt, then the next morning was the long trip home. I finally arrived back in Raleigh at 1 am Wednesday morning and was at work 7 hours later.
Some Stats:
Time spent: 7 days
Distance traveled: A really long way (but too lazy to figure up)
Weddings attended: 1
Pictures taken: very few, but I found some random old ones when downloading from my camera
Crazy people met on the airplane: 1
Stages of Mega Man cleared: 22
Hours of relaxation: 0
...
Making a Mastercard pun out of this list: priceless
Really, the Palace of Fine arts was way cool. Here are some other random pictures of it: 1, 2, 3, 4
THE END
Comments
Hello from Pittsburgh
ByJuly 15th, 2006
Hello everyone! It's good to see you all again. And by that I mean,
it's too bad that I am in Pittsburgh instead of Brad's pool party.
But, if I weren't in PA, I'd be in SC, so sorry Brad, but it just
wasn't meant to be. I flew in (my first commercial flight, yay!)
here Friday afternoon to do some testing for work. It hasn't been
very hard work, only 5 hours a day, but it has been hot and dirty.
No, I'm not secretly a porn star. We've been collecting samples of
mercury emissions from a power plant. The place we're at has a 1000
ft smoke stack, but we are sampling from 300 feet. I hope we can go
to the top to get some good pictures, but the guy who runs the
place is hesitant to let us go that far up because the elevator is
24 years old and often breaks down. If it were to break down while
we were up there, we'd have to lower all of our heavy equipment
down by rope, and then climb down the ladder! Nevertheless, we do
have some pretty good pictures from 300 ft that I'll try to
remember to put up. I must say that Pennsylvania has some beautiful
countryside, and Pittsburgh is not bad looking either. I have to
tell you a funny story from this little trip... There is a small
pizza joint here in town (town is a small place outside of Pitt
where we are staying) that we have been visiting quite frequently.
The food is cheap and they have a bar serving equally cheap beer.
Saturday night was dollar domestics! They were only 10oz, but $1 on
a weekend is pretty good. Anyway, this cute girl who was our
waitress before we moved over to the bar came up and told us about
the deal. When my boss asked for a Yuengling, she replied
"Yuengling isn't domestic". We tried to tell her that we were
pretty confident that it was, but she insisted on asking the
bartender, who proceeded to laugh at her and at the same time
seemed like he wanted to smack her with the spine of the Pittsburgh
phone book. For those of you who don't know, Yuengling is brewed in
PA just north of Philly. Anyway, thats my story and now I will go
to bed because I got up to work at 6:45 this morning after a decent
night of drinking (this has been the way of life for the past few
days) and I have to do both again tommorow.
Comments