I’ll Try I Swear

To my zero blog readers, I'll try to get more posts, I swear.  It's no surprise that I kind of lost interest in my blog this last year.  After posting entries since 2003 (my first journal was a home programmed database) I kind of lost my desire.  But I may make it a point to get back at it more often for my personal journal and so I have a history. This summer was actually very exciting and would have made for some great posts.  We've been busy all summer.  We went to Washington Island and Door County, ran a relay from Madison to Chicago in 36 hours, went to a bunch of Brewer games (they may make the playoffs), my cousin Jeff's wedding in Evanston (one of the best weddings I've ever been to), Summerfest, Irishfest, State Fair, Sheboygan County Fair, and many many other adventures. We'll here's hoping to get back to my old anecdotes.

He’s An Island Boy

Another wonderful vacation in a tropical paradise. This Tuesday we left for St. Thomas to spend the week. We flew out of O'Hare at seven in the morning so we woke at four to drive from Milwaukee. We flew from Chicago to Charlotte to St. Thomas. St. Thomas is two hours ahead so we ended up getting in at about four in the afternoon. Jocleyn's sister Marissa lives on the island so she came to pick us up at the airport. The airport was pretty rickety but they really know how to welcome you. In Hawaii you may get a lei but in St. Thomas you get Cruzan rum punch, what a welcome. We collected our bags and got in the car for my first death defying introduction to the roadways of the islands. They drive on the left side of the road in the VI so that is the first thing that that you need to get used to. The second is that the roads are a lane and half wide without emergency lanes. If you go off the side of the road you're pretty much going to roll down the mountain. Well, the only way I can put it is all the drivers are nuts and the roads are nuts. The inclines are somewhere in thirty plus degree range with convenient stops on the tops of these hills. Then from the stop you have to navigate the one hundred eighty degree switchbacks and ninety degree turns that are one lane wide with two cars trying to use the turn. An explanation really doesn't do it justice. It's something that you really have to experience to fully understand the craziness. After a forty-five minute roller coaster ride we made it to the Ritz where we were staying. One of the reasons that we went to St. Thomas is because we got free lodging at the Ritz thanks to Jocelyn's mom and her fiancé Craig. Not only did we get a free place to stay but the place was absolutely amazing. It was a three bedroom, four bath condo with an amazing view and great amenities. We really were extremely spoiled and can't thank Craig and Jenni enough for letting us stay with them. We weren't the only ones taking advantage of the lodging situation. Jocelyn's aunt and uncle were also on vacation and staying in the condo as well. It was cloudy when we got into St. Thomas but as soon as we sat on the balcony overlooking the bay the sun came out and two gorgeous rainbows came out. It was a sign that this would be a great vacation. We sat on the balcony, had some rum, and enjoyed the weather. Once dinner rolled around we motivated ourselves to get ready and get some food. We went to Duffy's Love Shack the first night. When they say shack, they mean shack. This bar and grill was nothing more than a garage in the middle of a parking…

Here’s The Story of The Hurricane, Aftermath

Short week for me this week. I took off Friday because this weekend I flew to Florida for my cousin's wedding. Thursday night after work Rich and Billie came down and drove us to the airport where we all caught a flight to Ft. Lauderdale. The flight was smooth and without incident. We changed planes in Atlanta and ended up getting into FtL about midnight. We took a cab to a cheapy hotel by the airport and spent the night. On our way to the hotel we saw a lot of damage from the hurricane that had rolled through the weekend before. There were tons of broken signs and a lot of dark places that still didn't have power. I was a little worried because I wasn't able to get an answer from our hotel when I called them during the week I was pleasantly surprised when we drove up to the place and it was still there. The weather was hot and humid and so was our hotel room. It smelt very musty and extremely damp. The four of us were only going to be there for a couple hours so we dealt with it. We cranked the AC and went to sleep. Friday morning we woke up early and took a cab to downtown FtL where our nice hotel was. We dropped off our luggage at our hotel and started to do some site seeing. The site seeing lasted about four blocks when we decided we were hungry and needed some breakfast. We stopped at a little diner and got some breakfast. I had some delicious huevos rancheros. The problem is my meal was huge and had lots of salsa. This would normally not be a problem but having this meal sitting in your stomach isn't very conducive to walking around all day site seeing, I was worried how this would work out. After we finished eating we walked toward the ocean. On the way we passed a bunch of intercoastal waterways. These waterways all had mansions up and down them but the amazing part is these mansions were dwarfed by their mega-yachts parked in front. These mansions and yachts continued the couple miles that we walked to the ocean. Once we got to the ocean we happened upon the international yacht show that was in town. The FtL marina had hundreds of mega-yachts tied up that you could walk around on and dream about some day being able to afford the anchor. I keep using mega to describe these yachts because they were. You haven't seen anything like these yachts on Lake Michigan, these things were huge. We looked at the yachts from a bridge for a bit and then continued on to the beach. Once at the beach we snapped some pictures and walked in the sand a bit. It wasn't all that exciting, more water and sand. Just across the street from the ocean there was an open air bar/club that we went to and…

O’ Canada

VACATION! I had a full week of vacation last week and to say I had been looking forward to it would have been an understatement. After work on Friday we drove to Chicago to spend the night at Jocelyn's mom's house so we could get going in the early morning. Friday night we had some Chicago stuffed crust pizza and the cheesy deliciousness was a great way to start my vacation. We went to bed pretty early so we could get up early and head to Canada. We woke up at about three on Saturday morning. We had already packed the car so all we had to do was wake up and drag ourselves to the car. Marissa and Chad (Jocelyn's sister and her boyfriend), Arianne (the other sister), J, me and Jocelyn's mom slept walked to the car and started our journey. Jocelyn's mom took the first shift and we were off. The first part of the trip was fairly uneventful. I have a problem sleeping in cars so while everyone was snoozing I was taking in the night scenery in such beautiful places as Gary, IN and Kalamazoo, MI. The ride from Chicago to the Canadian border seemed very short and before I knew it we were in Canada. From there we cruised by Toronto and headed straight North to Port Loring which is by North Bay. On our way we stopped at a McDonald's for breakfast and a roadside hamburger stand for some delicious burgers. One thing that is different in Canada is the way they eat French fries. They put brown gravy and vinegar on their fries. The hamburger stand was my first exposure to the gravy fries which are called poutine. They were pretty good but my burger was delicious. After that we finished our trip and we made it to the Port Loring in about fourteen hours for the whole trip. As soon as we got into town we stopped at a little grocery store to pick up some food and a liquor store to pick up large amounts of vital Canadian lager. We had to drive the last miles down a gravel road in a car that was now packed tighter than a sardine can. At the end of the gravel road was a boat that we took to our final destination, Little Pine Isle. It took two trips to get us and our equipment and groceries over to the island. We immediately started up a fire, turned on the music and started unpacking. Once we got unpacked we some dinner. After dinner we decided to go into town for the big corn roast. I felt very at home at the corn roast. It could have been any of the summer picnics or brat frys in the Sheboygan area. The only thing that made this different is that the money we used to buy our beer was multicolored. The beer cooler behind the sawhorse bar was actually a canoe that was filled with…

Mountaineering Is Not As Fun As Spelunking

This weekend actually involved some travel. Friday night we didn't do anything because on Saturday morning we caught a flight to Tucson for Jocelyn's grandmother's eightieth birthday. Our flight Saturday morning was delayed an hour due to the fact that our fresh water supply on the plane had frozen. They were unable to fix the problem so our flight wasn't able to server hot coffee or tea and there was no water in the bathroom. Before we took off we also had to stop or a fifteen minute deicing, thank heavens we were going to AZ to escape this miserable cold. We flew Frontier airlines and it was pretty sweet because each seat gets their own LCD screen with twenty-six channels of DirectTV. This was very cool and made the flight go fast. We switched planes at Denver and literally sprinted to our connecting flight and made the flight with less than thirty seconds to spare. It was amazing that something actually worked out while traveling. The second flight was smooth and we arrived at about eleven to the 85 degrees of Tucson goodness. J's mom was there to pick us up and drive us to her grandparents' house. We stopped at Subway on the way and also at a grocery store to pick up some delicious Fat Tire Ale (great beer which you can only seem to find in the West). From there we arrived at the house and I greeted all the relatives and inhaled my sandwich. Our plan for the day was to meet Jeff DeBruin and his lady Kelly and go to a Brewers' spring training game. So I called J&K, who were already on their way, with the directions to where we were. They picked us up and we drove to the Rockies' training facility. It took us a little longer to get there than we wanted but we found a place to park and went to the game. On our way in I heard a "heads up" and looked up to see a ball. The ball was bouncing in the parking lot and I ran to pick it up. This was actually turning out to be a great day. The day really was perfect. I got to see a spring game where Brewers killed the Rockies, tickets were $2, we talked to some folk from WI who were sitting in front of us, had a couple Fat Tires from the tap at the game, I got to hang with my boy Jeff, and we enjoyed the high 80 heat. We couldn't stay the whole game and had to leave in the fifth inning to go back to the hotel to change for dinner. J&K dropped us off and headed back to Phoenix. It was great to see them and I'm very glad they came down to see us. That night we went to dinner at a Mexican place. Before dinner we had a pitcher of strawberry margaritas and some fresh table made guacamole, the…