Post by The Chupster on Aug 20, 2007 14:17:02 GMT -5
[Before I begin, let me state that all images herein are courtesy of my wife's MySpace page, so if you wanna drop her a line or comment on the pics (she loves that) please visit/add her at www.myspace.com/tamzplace . Most pics taken by yours truly, but Tams did a few. You can also see all the pics we took at faulkneralbums.shutterfly.com . This is also written so I won't forget the way our vacation was, so excuse any little detail junk, lol. Okay, here we go!]
Day 0-1: Saturday Night/Sunday Morning
Okay, so we slacked a little in the packing department. Actually, we were more or less packed up, but needed tunes we could listen to in the car. But I did take the car in for maintenance to make sure everything was kosher, ended up dropping $500 into the car to be on the safe side.
Anyway, the plan was, I'd sleep most of the day Saturday so we could get a move on about 11pm. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina is about 12 hours away. That way Tams and Ben could sleep through most of the first leg of the trip and Tams could take over a lil later.
What actually HAPPENED was, I ended up going through my mp3 collection and burning disks that we wouldn't kill each other over. I like the rock, she likes the country, so the middle ground was 80's rock. (Mostly.) So Saturday I did a little light packing, a little light cleaning around the house, and then burning cds until about 8pm. Yeah, I know. Stupid.
Couldn't sleep too well, and after waking up for the second time, I decided it wasn't worth trying again, so I got up. 10:30. Let's go!
So we pile into the car and, due to a miscommunication, lock the house keys in the house. Sigh. Great start to the trip, lol.
But I'm rarin' to go, so we take off. What follows is about 9 solid hours of driving, interspersed with stops for gas, grub and potty breaks. Benjamin started off napping, but actually stayed awake most of the trip, as did Tams, who can't sleep in a car worth a damn. So we got a lot of good conversation going too. Between the music and the convo, the night sped by, until she decided to lay back.
With Ben watching movies in the backseat (thank you God for the invention of the portable DVD player), we finally hit the storm I'd seen from miles off- right as we start going through the mountains. Steep grades + blinding sheets of rain = wtf driving. It was a mess, but at the same time, it was pretty fun. I dig road trips.
Got through that, stopped somewhere and bought a nice lil pocket knife. I'm kind of an impulse buyer when on vacation. But it was cheap.
Tams takes over after about 9 hours of driving because I'm pooped and I genuinely thought we were about there. She gets us the rest of the way, and since it took another 3 hours, I guess we weren't that close. Finally get to the hotel- a Hilton.
Nice enough- and we find out check-in time isn't until 4pm.
4:00 pm. At this point it's about 11:00 am.
Tamara hasn't slept solidly in about 24 hours, I'm going on around 3 hours of sleep. She makes them take our number and we head into town, seeing what's what.
Dunno if you've ever been to Myrtle Beach, but it's a nice little place. Very quaint, but also very developed for tourism- like Panama City Beach in Florida, but with a more southern, friendly attitude. Lots of pancake houses, beach shops, souvenir joints, restaurants, and more miniature golf places than I've ever seen. We definitely should've taken more pics, but we were tired, and the second day we were busy, and the third day, well, we were getting out of town. Anyway.
We stopped at a GameStop where I marvelled at the cheap games (seriously, used games there are around $10 cheaper than elsewhere) and bought Quake 4. Moved next door to a small Japanese place called Fuji and ate- really mushy noodles, ick. We headed into town and checked out the sights, and found a small shop that was going out of business and had 50% everything in the store. Cha-CHING!
We head in and the first thing I see are replica machine guns (pellet-firing models) and swords. Whoa! Tams runs off to get all of our souvenir shopping done in one fell swoop. Ben has to have a big-ass alligator and a small squishy frog. As I'm drooling over the swords and other assorted weaponry, Tamara tells me to go ahead and get about $100 worth and that can be my birthday present from her. YES!!! Picked up the largest sword they had...
...a bladed mace, and a beautiful katana.
At this point we decided, screw it, we're getting on the beach. So we head back to the hotel and do so. Ben didn't like the ocean, but there was like a little pool of water where there was a dip in the beach, so Ben played there while Tamara dug around for shells and I hit the ocean and stayed there.
Finally got the call for the room- NOT. False alarm, they called the wrong person. We wait about another half hour (3:30) and finally our room is ready. Headed up, got set up, snapped off a few pics...
...and headed inside. Ordered a pizza- what was it, California's Best or something, I dunno, never heard of it but it was the best... pizza... ever, and then everyone crashed for a nap... that lasted until the next morning! lol
Day 2: Monday
Woke up and it was time for the timeshare presentation. We hit a pancake joint for breakfast and headed on in. For $50, we got 3 days/2 nights at the Hilton, provided we did this timeshare presentation deal. I was dreading it, but the guy was nice and, truthfully, if we had the cash, we'd do it- it was that good of a deal. Basically, we'd be set up in vacations for life and could will it to the kids. But it was pretty steep, so we said our goodbyes and got lunch- huge burgers that RULED at a place called Fuddruckers- and then hit the beach.
Basically, same as the day before- Ben buried toys in the sand and dug them up, Tamara looked for shells, I floated around in the ocean. The waves were awesome- I must've gotten thrown 10 feet in the air a good few times. That's my thing, I like to just float out in the ocean and let the waves toss me around.
I had one of those "just doesn't get much better" moments. The sky had been cloudy for a bit, and behind me a storm was going full force, way off in the distance- you could see the lightning and the rain just coming down in a solid sheet. I turned and there was this little, box-shaped hole in one of the clouds, and the sun beamed right down on me. It was awesome. Tellin' ya, I'd move there if there was any way I could.
Anyway, after several hours of soaking up salt water, we all went up and cleaned off, went out to dinner at a nice buffet called The Farmer's Daughter (if you've ever been to a buffet called The Banquet Table, it was the same thing with more seafood and a very southern theme) and drove around. There was a mall that sucked (so we just drove around it) and a shop that advertised live reptiles and a shark, but the shark was nowhere to be seen and the reptiles were small frogs you could buy in plastic cubes. Weak. Back to the hotel, where we goofed around a bit and hit the sack.
Day 3: Tuesday
Went out for more pancake breakfast goodness, then headed out of town. We wanted to stay somewhere else for one night, but we didn't want to have to repeat the 12-hour drive from before, and we'd seen signs for a Ripley's (as in Believe-It-Or-Not) Aquarium in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, so that was our next goal. Tamara had gotten us a cheap-ass hotel room the night before online in the hotel's business lab, so we knew where to go.
Drove for about 6 hours, the last hour through mountainous countryside where I kept cracking jokes about boobytraps in the road and the resulting cannibal ass-raping that we'd surely receive. Then, boom, out of nowhere we hit civilization! Ends up our hotel was up a STEEP goddamn mountain above the town.
Seriously, you could see our hotel from any point in town. It was crazy.
Anyway, we got there, asked about how to get to the aquarium, ended up there's a trolley system there where, for 50 cents, you can ride anywhere- and all trolleys stopped at the Aquarium! Rock. So we sat outside on the rocking chairs outside the door and waited for the trolley.
Hopped on, and headed into town.
Hit the aquarium. (Here's where we're gonna get picture-heavy. I'll probably also linked to a capped vid of the trip through the aquarium sometime soon.)
We went through, seeing some of the weird-ass stuff. And there was a ton of it.
Then, we went through a long under-aquarium tunnel- it said it was the world's longest, and I believe that, no probs there, lol. Lots of sharks and fish that could outweigh me easily.
Then it opened out into a kids' area, where you could pet horseshoe crabs, get close-up looks at pufferfish and other stuff.
Next up, a randomly-placed exhibit on Mars that was one of the most boring things I've ever seen, except for the part on the impact it's had on our media and culture. (Had a cool bit about the Orson Welles broadcast of H.G. Wells's "War of the Worlds" that had the nation in a panic, that was awesome, lol)
We walked about for a bit, ate at a nice little ski-themed place that had the best (and only) bison burger I've ever had, stopped by a jerky shop to buy $30 worth of beef and other exotic jerkies (ostrich, elk, venison and alligator), and hopped on the trolley to head back to the hotel. We threw on our suits and hit the pool for a little bit, but the pool was sort of weird- it had a bottom level for kids that was too cold, a top level that was deeper that was too frickin' hot, and a hot tub. Just wasn't worth it. So we went back up, ordered a lil dessert on the room service bit (something chocolate for Tams, apple cobbler a la mode for me, yum) and everyone hit the sack. Except me, I read some comics for a little bit before crashing.
Day 4: Wednesday
Woke up, got our junk together and checked out. Had to take a pic of Ben with this little bear in the lobby though:
We hopped in the car and found another pancake joint to eat at. They seated us in a booth next to a small shop shelf with a ton of stuffed animals, which Ben just loved. And apparently, a rhinoceros is a dinosaur. Just ask him. lol
Sat on some rocking chairs outside for a pic, visited a shop next door, and hit the road.
Getting out of Gatlinburg is HELL.
So we're supposed to be getting home today. And we're a'drivin'. Stopped at a "trading post" (a.k.a. souvenir shit shop) on the way home, where Ben had to ride a horse...
...that went so damned fast that he kept yelling "WHOA! WHOA! WHOA!" over and over again. I laughed my ass off.
So we're on our way home. We hit Richmond, Kentucky- about an hour and a half from home- when white smoke starts bellowing out of the car. We pull over and pop the hood, call our insurance company. They send out a tow truck. The guy driving is a master mechanic and says it looks like the distributor cap's seal blew. Great.
He hauls us into town and lets us know that his mechanic has left for the day (they close at 5pm), so we're going to have to stick around a night. I'm cool with that, cuz hell, one more day on my vacation- rock! He takes the car to his garage. We eat at a Waffle House that's in walking distance- GOOD grub. Swim in the pool, settle in for the night, and bam- the cheapest hotel we've been in the whole trip, a Best Western, is the only one with free broadband access! Score!!!
So we hang out until we crash.
Day 5: Thursday
Wake up to a call from the mechanic. Ends up no place in the vicinity has a distributor cap for my car, he had to UPS it, it'll be there the next day. Another day on my vacation! Too ROCK!!! lol
Get up, eat, chill out till Tams and Ben get back from the pool. Let them know the situation and we get a cab to take us to the mall for some shopping and grub. Eat at a Cici's Pizza (buffet, mmmmm), buy Ben this Fisher Price Weebles Castle that he wouldn't stop playing with at KayBee Toys, head to a Hasting's Bookstore and pick up a Superman/Doomsday trade paperback that they had for $20. Tams does some clothes shopping, we get a cab and head back to the room for some relaxing and more pool time. We get out, totally beat, and decide to order a pizza that, to be honest, was overpriced and sort'a sucked ass.
Stayed up, watching some comedy documentary on a joke called "The Aristocrats" which was funny as hell; watch it if you get a chance, it's out there somewhere. Sleep.
Day 6: Friday
Wake up, car's fixed. Go get it, head home. Finally, because at this point, I've ran out of things to do in Richmond. Yes, it's that f'n boring.
Get home, find a praying mantis that stuck around until yesterday- weird lil critter, but cute, and decent-sized. Anyway, break into the house, using a brick to bust out a pane of glass in the side door, pull in all of the luggage and stuff and take off to get a new pane of glass and stuff. (I've had to do this three times now.) Get a couple more house keys made (so I don't have to do this again lol) and chill for a bit. My mom's going out of town Saturday, so I had to celebrate my birthday, which meant picking up Katie and heading over to mom's. Get over there, eat some burgers, head back home, vacation's done. And at this point, I'm tired enough that I'm glad it's done.
Had the time of my life, though. All of us had a great time, and a couple of days off to decompress before heading back to work, too. Gotta love vacations.
Day 0-1: Saturday Night/Sunday Morning
Okay, so we slacked a little in the packing department. Actually, we were more or less packed up, but needed tunes we could listen to in the car. But I did take the car in for maintenance to make sure everything was kosher, ended up dropping $500 into the car to be on the safe side.
Anyway, the plan was, I'd sleep most of the day Saturday so we could get a move on about 11pm. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina is about 12 hours away. That way Tams and Ben could sleep through most of the first leg of the trip and Tams could take over a lil later.
What actually HAPPENED was, I ended up going through my mp3 collection and burning disks that we wouldn't kill each other over. I like the rock, she likes the country, so the middle ground was 80's rock. (Mostly.) So Saturday I did a little light packing, a little light cleaning around the house, and then burning cds until about 8pm. Yeah, I know. Stupid.
Couldn't sleep too well, and after waking up for the second time, I decided it wasn't worth trying again, so I got up. 10:30. Let's go!
So we pile into the car and, due to a miscommunication, lock the house keys in the house. Sigh. Great start to the trip, lol.
But I'm rarin' to go, so we take off. What follows is about 9 solid hours of driving, interspersed with stops for gas, grub and potty breaks. Benjamin started off napping, but actually stayed awake most of the trip, as did Tams, who can't sleep in a car worth a damn. So we got a lot of good conversation going too. Between the music and the convo, the night sped by, until she decided to lay back.
With Ben watching movies in the backseat (thank you God for the invention of the portable DVD player), we finally hit the storm I'd seen from miles off- right as we start going through the mountains. Steep grades + blinding sheets of rain = wtf driving. It was a mess, but at the same time, it was pretty fun. I dig road trips.
Got through that, stopped somewhere and bought a nice lil pocket knife. I'm kind of an impulse buyer when on vacation. But it was cheap.
Tams takes over after about 9 hours of driving because I'm pooped and I genuinely thought we were about there. She gets us the rest of the way, and since it took another 3 hours, I guess we weren't that close. Finally get to the hotel- a Hilton.
Nice enough- and we find out check-in time isn't until 4pm.
4:00 pm. At this point it's about 11:00 am.
Tamara hasn't slept solidly in about 24 hours, I'm going on around 3 hours of sleep. She makes them take our number and we head into town, seeing what's what.
Dunno if you've ever been to Myrtle Beach, but it's a nice little place. Very quaint, but also very developed for tourism- like Panama City Beach in Florida, but with a more southern, friendly attitude. Lots of pancake houses, beach shops, souvenir joints, restaurants, and more miniature golf places than I've ever seen. We definitely should've taken more pics, but we were tired, and the second day we were busy, and the third day, well, we were getting out of town. Anyway.
We stopped at a GameStop where I marvelled at the cheap games (seriously, used games there are around $10 cheaper than elsewhere) and bought Quake 4. Moved next door to a small Japanese place called Fuji and ate- really mushy noodles, ick. We headed into town and checked out the sights, and found a small shop that was going out of business and had 50% everything in the store. Cha-CHING!
We head in and the first thing I see are replica machine guns (pellet-firing models) and swords. Whoa! Tams runs off to get all of our souvenir shopping done in one fell swoop. Ben has to have a big-ass alligator and a small squishy frog. As I'm drooling over the swords and other assorted weaponry, Tamara tells me to go ahead and get about $100 worth and that can be my birthday present from her. YES!!! Picked up the largest sword they had...
...a bladed mace, and a beautiful katana.
At this point we decided, screw it, we're getting on the beach. So we head back to the hotel and do so. Ben didn't like the ocean, but there was like a little pool of water where there was a dip in the beach, so Ben played there while Tamara dug around for shells and I hit the ocean and stayed there.
Finally got the call for the room- NOT. False alarm, they called the wrong person. We wait about another half hour (3:30) and finally our room is ready. Headed up, got set up, snapped off a few pics...
...and headed inside. Ordered a pizza- what was it, California's Best or something, I dunno, never heard of it but it was the best... pizza... ever, and then everyone crashed for a nap... that lasted until the next morning! lol
Day 2: Monday
Woke up and it was time for the timeshare presentation. We hit a pancake joint for breakfast and headed on in. For $50, we got 3 days/2 nights at the Hilton, provided we did this timeshare presentation deal. I was dreading it, but the guy was nice and, truthfully, if we had the cash, we'd do it- it was that good of a deal. Basically, we'd be set up in vacations for life and could will it to the kids. But it was pretty steep, so we said our goodbyes and got lunch- huge burgers that RULED at a place called Fuddruckers- and then hit the beach.
Basically, same as the day before- Ben buried toys in the sand and dug them up, Tamara looked for shells, I floated around in the ocean. The waves were awesome- I must've gotten thrown 10 feet in the air a good few times. That's my thing, I like to just float out in the ocean and let the waves toss me around.
I had one of those "just doesn't get much better" moments. The sky had been cloudy for a bit, and behind me a storm was going full force, way off in the distance- you could see the lightning and the rain just coming down in a solid sheet. I turned and there was this little, box-shaped hole in one of the clouds, and the sun beamed right down on me. It was awesome. Tellin' ya, I'd move there if there was any way I could.
Anyway, after several hours of soaking up salt water, we all went up and cleaned off, went out to dinner at a nice buffet called The Farmer's Daughter (if you've ever been to a buffet called The Banquet Table, it was the same thing with more seafood and a very southern theme) and drove around. There was a mall that sucked (so we just drove around it) and a shop that advertised live reptiles and a shark, but the shark was nowhere to be seen and the reptiles were small frogs you could buy in plastic cubes. Weak. Back to the hotel, where we goofed around a bit and hit the sack.
Day 3: Tuesday
Went out for more pancake breakfast goodness, then headed out of town. We wanted to stay somewhere else for one night, but we didn't want to have to repeat the 12-hour drive from before, and we'd seen signs for a Ripley's (as in Believe-It-Or-Not) Aquarium in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, so that was our next goal. Tamara had gotten us a cheap-ass hotel room the night before online in the hotel's business lab, so we knew where to go.
Drove for about 6 hours, the last hour through mountainous countryside where I kept cracking jokes about boobytraps in the road and the resulting cannibal ass-raping that we'd surely receive. Then, boom, out of nowhere we hit civilization! Ends up our hotel was up a STEEP goddamn mountain above the town.
Seriously, you could see our hotel from any point in town. It was crazy.
Anyway, we got there, asked about how to get to the aquarium, ended up there's a trolley system there where, for 50 cents, you can ride anywhere- and all trolleys stopped at the Aquarium! Rock. So we sat outside on the rocking chairs outside the door and waited for the trolley.
Hopped on, and headed into town.
Hit the aquarium. (Here's where we're gonna get picture-heavy. I'll probably also linked to a capped vid of the trip through the aquarium sometime soon.)
We went through, seeing some of the weird-ass stuff. And there was a ton of it.
Then, we went through a long under-aquarium tunnel- it said it was the world's longest, and I believe that, no probs there, lol. Lots of sharks and fish that could outweigh me easily.
Then it opened out into a kids' area, where you could pet horseshoe crabs, get close-up looks at pufferfish and other stuff.
Next up, a randomly-placed exhibit on Mars that was one of the most boring things I've ever seen, except for the part on the impact it's had on our media and culture. (Had a cool bit about the Orson Welles broadcast of H.G. Wells's "War of the Worlds" that had the nation in a panic, that was awesome, lol)
We walked about for a bit, ate at a nice little ski-themed place that had the best (and only) bison burger I've ever had, stopped by a jerky shop to buy $30 worth of beef and other exotic jerkies (ostrich, elk, venison and alligator), and hopped on the trolley to head back to the hotel. We threw on our suits and hit the pool for a little bit, but the pool was sort of weird- it had a bottom level for kids that was too cold, a top level that was deeper that was too frickin' hot, and a hot tub. Just wasn't worth it. So we went back up, ordered a lil dessert on the room service bit (something chocolate for Tams, apple cobbler a la mode for me, yum) and everyone hit the sack. Except me, I read some comics for a little bit before crashing.
Day 4: Wednesday
Woke up, got our junk together and checked out. Had to take a pic of Ben with this little bear in the lobby though:
We hopped in the car and found another pancake joint to eat at. They seated us in a booth next to a small shop shelf with a ton of stuffed animals, which Ben just loved. And apparently, a rhinoceros is a dinosaur. Just ask him. lol
Sat on some rocking chairs outside for a pic, visited a shop next door, and hit the road.
Getting out of Gatlinburg is HELL.
So we're supposed to be getting home today. And we're a'drivin'. Stopped at a "trading post" (a.k.a. souvenir shit shop) on the way home, where Ben had to ride a horse...
...that went so damned fast that he kept yelling "WHOA! WHOA! WHOA!" over and over again. I laughed my ass off.
So we're on our way home. We hit Richmond, Kentucky- about an hour and a half from home- when white smoke starts bellowing out of the car. We pull over and pop the hood, call our insurance company. They send out a tow truck. The guy driving is a master mechanic and says it looks like the distributor cap's seal blew. Great.
He hauls us into town and lets us know that his mechanic has left for the day (they close at 5pm), so we're going to have to stick around a night. I'm cool with that, cuz hell, one more day on my vacation- rock! He takes the car to his garage. We eat at a Waffle House that's in walking distance- GOOD grub. Swim in the pool, settle in for the night, and bam- the cheapest hotel we've been in the whole trip, a Best Western, is the only one with free broadband access! Score!!!
So we hang out until we crash.
Day 5: Thursday
Wake up to a call from the mechanic. Ends up no place in the vicinity has a distributor cap for my car, he had to UPS it, it'll be there the next day. Another day on my vacation! Too ROCK!!! lol
Get up, eat, chill out till Tams and Ben get back from the pool. Let them know the situation and we get a cab to take us to the mall for some shopping and grub. Eat at a Cici's Pizza (buffet, mmmmm), buy Ben this Fisher Price Weebles Castle that he wouldn't stop playing with at KayBee Toys, head to a Hasting's Bookstore and pick up a Superman/Doomsday trade paperback that they had for $20. Tams does some clothes shopping, we get a cab and head back to the room for some relaxing and more pool time. We get out, totally beat, and decide to order a pizza that, to be honest, was overpriced and sort'a sucked ass.
Stayed up, watching some comedy documentary on a joke called "The Aristocrats" which was funny as hell; watch it if you get a chance, it's out there somewhere. Sleep.
Day 6: Friday
Wake up, car's fixed. Go get it, head home. Finally, because at this point, I've ran out of things to do in Richmond. Yes, it's that f'n boring.
Get home, find a praying mantis that stuck around until yesterday- weird lil critter, but cute, and decent-sized. Anyway, break into the house, using a brick to bust out a pane of glass in the side door, pull in all of the luggage and stuff and take off to get a new pane of glass and stuff. (I've had to do this three times now.) Get a couple more house keys made (so I don't have to do this again lol) and chill for a bit. My mom's going out of town Saturday, so I had to celebrate my birthday, which meant picking up Katie and heading over to mom's. Get over there, eat some burgers, head back home, vacation's done. And at this point, I'm tired enough that I'm glad it's done.
Had the time of my life, though. All of us had a great time, and a couple of days off to decompress before heading back to work, too. Gotta love vacations.
