Mark Bartlett pianist

Today was the day to go to Disneyland, so we got up and got going earlier than we otherwise would have, considering how late things went last night. Ran across the street to the Hilton, which had a Starbucks where we could grab some breakfast, then back to the Marriott to catch the shuttle bus…

First full day of the convention for me, everybody slept in and didn’t really eat breakfast. Surprisingly, the Marriott has a coin-operated laundry, so Beth did some clothes with the kids since the dust of the Grand Canyon had limited the reusability of some items. After that they went back to Downtown Disney and used…

Today was the day I’d been dreading, having to drive 480 miles from the Grand Canyon to Anaheim for the start of this year’s Worldcon. This was not the original plan, but somewhere after making reservations for the lodge back in January, I realized the Worldcon was not its traditional Thursday to Monday dates, but…

A full day in the Grand Canyon is a serious workout, at least if you have any intention of seeing the Grand Canyon. They say the average visit to the GC lasts three hours. Considering how far off the beaten path it is, this seems hard to believe (since if 3 hours is the average,…

The kids were surprisingly smitten with Las Vegas, what with all the outdoor escalators and jumbotrons on the sides of the hotels and the circus acts and whatnot. We drove back down the strip on leaving the hotel this morning to take some pictures of the facades of some of the more spectacular casinos, got…

Today was mostly a driving day, with the ultimate goal being Las Vegas, which was really just an intermediate goal on the way to the Grand Canyon tomorrow. We were on the road by 8:30am after detouring through beautiful downtown Exeter, which was pretty empty on a Sunday morning, but features a number of murals…

Our first full day in California started at 5am thanks to a little jet lag, allowing us a decent night’s sleep, while simultaneously giving us an early start. The Best Western we’re staying at does not participate in the Great Make-Your-Own Waffle Survey that we saw so much of last year in Wyoming and South…

It wasn’t the invasion of Normandy, but it was definitely The Longest Day. In order to get to LA from Boston with free tickets, courtesy of finally cashing in a lot of those frequent flier miles that Money magazine keeps saying are nearly impossible to redeem, it requires that you make certain concessions, not the…

Tomorrow we finally leave on vacation, now that the summer is almost over. This didn’t seem like a bad idea when I was planning the trip several months ago, but now that we’ve made it through the whole summer it feels odds to be taking a vacation right at the end for some reason, I…

Over the summer we’ve been trying to get out on the weekends once in a while and do a little walking around to prep for the upcoming trip to California and Arizona. As I explained to the kids before our first trip, I don’t want to get all the way to the grandeur and majesty…